Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 120

What Is Populism?

Recent years have seen the rise of new forms of populist nationalism, which today constitute the chief threat to the liberal international order that has been the foundation for global peace and prosperity since 1945. Liberal democracy had been continuously threatened by authoritarian regimes over the past century, with the exception of the period from 1991-2008 when American power was largely hegemonic. Today, a different kind of threat has emerged, with established democracies themselves succumbing to illiberal political forces driven by popular passions. The term “populism” has been used very loosely, however, to describe a wide range of phenomena that don’t necessarily go together. We need, therefore, to put some boundaries around the term.

There is no firm consensus among political scientists as to the definition of populism, but there are at least three characteristics that in my view have been typically associated with it. The first is a regime that pursues policies that are popular in the short run but unsustainable in the long run, usually in the realm of social policies. Examples would be price subsidies, generous pension benefits, or free medical clinics.

A second has to do with the definition of the “people” that are the basis for legitimacy: many populist regimes do not include the whole population, but rather a certain ethnic or racial group that are said to be the “true” people. Thus Viktor Orban in Hungary has defined Hungarian national identity as based on Hungarian ethnicity, something that would exclude non-Hungarians living in Hungary, and include the many Hungarians living in surrounding countries like Slovakia or Romania. Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India has similarly been trying to shift the definition of Indian national identity from the inclusive liberal one established by Gandhi and Nehru to one based on Hinduism. The Polish Law and Justice Party has emphasized traditional Polish values and Catholicism, and has stimulated the rise of more overtly racist groups, like the one calling for a “white Europe” in November 2017.

A third definition of populism has to do with the style of leadership. Populist leaders tend to develop a cult of personality around themselves, claiming the mantle of charismatic authority that exists independently of institutions like political parties. They try to develop a direct and unmediated relationship with the “people” they claim to represent, channeling the latter’s hopes and fears into immediate action. It is typically coupled with a denunciation of the entire existing elite, the latter of which is of course invested in existing institutions.

This personalistic approach to leadership is what makes populists such a threat to democratic institutions. Modern liberal democracies are built around power-sharing institutions like courts, federalism, legislatures, and a free media that serve as checks on executive power. All of these institutions are potential roadblocks to the populist leader’s ability to achieve his or her goals, and therefore become direct targets of attack. The personalistic nature of populism thus makes it a threat to liberal institutions.

These three definitions then allow us to distinguish between the different movements that have been given the label “populist” in the past. Latin American populists like Hugo Chavez or Nestor and Cristina Kirchner emphasized popular but unsustainable social programs, and tried to create personality cults around themselves. The Argentine pair portrayed themselves as re-embodiments of the classic populist power couple, Juan and Eva Peron. They did not, on the other hand, entertain a restrictive definition of national identity. The same could be said of Thaksin Shinawatra and his sister Yingluck, the former Prime Minister, in Thailand: they promoted redistribution programs for poorer rural Thais but did not have the same restrictive view of Thai identity as their yellow shirt opponents.

Leaders of the Brexit movement, by contrast, did not stress an expansive economic program, nor did they have a single charismatic leader. But they did appeal to anti-immigrant cultural fears and traditional British identity, as well as to unhappiness about economic dislocation. Viktor Orban fits all three definitions: he has tried to protect Hungarian savers from “predatory” European banks; he has a restrictive definition of “the people”; and he would certainly like to be considered a charismatic leader. It is not clear whether Vladimir Putin fits any but the last of the three definitions: he has been cautious on expansive social programs; while he has stressed Russian identity and traditions, that tradition is not necessarily restrictive in ethnic terms. Putin has certainly built a cult of personality around himself, though it is hard to argue that he is an outsider seeking to overthrow the entire elite, having come up through the ranks of the KGB and then the Russian FSB. The same can be said about India’s Narendra Modi and even China’s Xi Jingping: they have both become popular by attacking the existing elite, though they themselves are very much part of that elite.

It should be noted that Donald Trump fits all three definitions. During his campaign, he stressed economic populism, withdrawing from the Trans Pacific Partnership and threatening to tear up the North American Free Trade Agreement once in office. He promised to protect entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security—though since becoming President, he has governed more like a traditional conservative Republican, seeking for example to cut social benefits by repealing Obama’s Affordable Care Act. And while Trump has never explicitly endorsed white nationalism, he has been happy to accept support from those who do, and went out of his way to not single out neo-Nazis and overt racists during their rally in Charlottesville. He has had a very problematic relationship with African-Americans, Hispanics, and other minorities; black sports stars and performers have been frequent targets of his Twitter posts. And he has acted like a classic charismatic at rallies with his core supporters: when accepting the Republican nomination in 2016, he said the “I alone understand your problems,” and that “I alone know how to fix them.”

Thus, within the realm of movements labeled populist, we can distinguish between at least two broad categories. In Latin America and in Southern Europe, populists have tended to be on the Left, having a constituency among the poor and advocating redistributionist social programs that seek to remedy economic inequality. They do not however emphasize ethnic identity or take a strong stance against immigration. This group would include Chavez’s Bolarivarian movement and Kircherismo in Argentina, as well as Spain’s Podemos and Greece’s Syriza.

In northern Europe, however, populists are based less on the poor than on a declining middle or working class, and takes a more right-wing ethnic and anti-immigrant turn. They want to protect existing welfare states but do not emphasize rapid expansion of social services or subsidies. Groups in this category would include Brexiteers, France’s National Front, Holland’s Party of Freedom, the Danish Peoples’ Party, and in the United States, many of Donald Trump’s hardcore working class supporters.

Then there are groups or movements that don’t really fit either category. Italy’s Five Star movement like other populist movements is resolutely anti-establishment and denounces the Italian elite as a whole. But is differs from both is Northern and Southern European counterparts by being both urban and middle- or even upper middle-class, rather than being based in a declining working class.

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Arrested Development

Models of alternative service delivery arise any time non-state actors perform services that are typically part of the government’s domain. This phenomenon can result in relatively benign, and even innovative, public-private partnerships—a corporation assuming responsibility for building a toll highway, for example. Of course, it can also be less innocent, for example, Hezbollah delivering social services in southern Lebanon because the central government is too weak to do so.

Soon foreign aid may also be increasingly provided by non-state actors. Since the end of World War II, Western governments—and the United States in particular— dominated this function. But now massive cuts to U.S. overseas aid (and the country’s diplomatic presence) are on the horizon, so we are likely to see alternative service delivery models for aid. As a result, the United States will seem weaker, less credible, and less influential to key stakeholders in the developing world.

The international development landscape is no longer simply made up of Western governments dispensing Official Development Assistance (“ODA,” the OECD-blessed term for foreign aid). The rise of globalization and individual hyper-wealth in the United States (and other wealthy countries) has encouraged many non-state actors to take roles on the world’s stage. Multinational corporations like Unilever and Coca-Cola are noted players in sustainable development. The Gates Foundation’s global health programming already rivals that of the U.S. government—and in some areas likely exceeds it. Individual and corporate donors with named foundations aren’t the only stateside actors currently influencing international development. Private donations to the ten largest internationally-focused non-governmental organizations (NGOs) outweighed USAID’s entire budget in 2016.

Most corporations, private foundations, and NGOs are vigilant in signaling their independence from the U.S. government. However, for audiences in poor countries, that separation is not so obvious. Beneficiaries know where Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Clinton, World Vision International, and ExxonMobil call home.

A balanced public-private sector approach toward international development offers an opportunity for immense good. For example, major private foundations have the ability to support critical contemporary issues in international development—like protecting the environment and vulnerable populations—even if these issues are occasionally at odds with the priorities of the ruling party in the country receiving the philanthropy. It is reasonable to assume that the private sector will continue operating in these spaces regardless of political calculations in the public sphere.

However, optimism for unbridled private sector-led international development should be cautious at best. We identify below three key likely consequences of its expansion.

Fragmented Influence: If the U.S. government’s “seat at the head of the table” is instead occupied by many non-state development providers, its agenda-setting and messaging will be inconsistent, as will the extent of our country’s influence abroad. In the face of ambitious rising powers focused on using foreign assistance as a diplomatic tool, such a retreat brings American soft power under threat.

A fragmented American foreign assistance front, primarily led by a diverse group of private sector actors, increases opportunities for challengers to Western foreign policy leadership. Many experts have tapped China as the most likely candidate to fill such a void. Bloomberg recently reported on a CIA brief warning that the Chinese government was “working to undermine the U.S. alliance network and the global promotion of American values.”

U.S. cuts to foreign assistance and public diplomacy align with a broader Chinese narrative of a declining West and a new era of non-Western donors, led by China but including India, Brazil, and others. The philanthropy of the American private sector—with its widely varying agendas—is insufficient to counteract the perception that the United States has abdicated its leadership position.

Calculating the exact extent of China’s aid portfolio and resulting influence is difficult. The Chinese government focuses on infrastructure projects, supporting its investments both directly and through multilateral institutions like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (launched by China in 2015).

Infrastructure funding often blurs the lines between what is considered aid and what is intended for the eventual profit of the home country. For the moment China still lags behind the United States in terms of its official financing of other countries, and it delivers these funds differently: from 2000 through 2014 the United States devoted almost all (93 percent) of its spending to ODA, whereas China provided only about one-fourth (23 percent) of its financial support in this manner.

The true scale of Chinese development financing is also unknown in part because China has opted out of international reporting regimes like the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee, which sets precise definitions for what counts as aid and tracks such financial flows systematically. Regardless, the available data suggests that China is investing heavily in foreign assistance as a means of strengthening its soft power (and trade) in Asia and around the globe.

Much of China’s assistance is for brick-and-mortar ventures, like the “One Belt, One Road” mega-project, that are commercially based and profit-motivated. Such projects are also grand gestures, immense changes to the physical landscape, and potential winners of hearts and minds. They are public diplomacy gold mines (alongside a good number of actual gold mines providing resources directly to China).

Threatened Sustainability: In addition to fragmenting Western influence, free-market international development that outguns the public sector will also lead to the provision of aid according to private priorities. The motives of private foundations—while often noble—are determined by their self-appointed leaders, without public accountability or scrutiny.

A key question is whether the private sector can respond to critical development issues, support for which is soon to be scaled back by the U.S. government. Many of these sectors are not donor or PR darlings—think budget support, good governance, democratic reform. The U.S. government is historically the primary source of support for such essential services in many of the world’s poorest countries, whether channeled through bilateral aid agencies, non-profit U.S. development firms, or multilateral bodies like the World Bank.

It is difficult to imagine independent philanthropists providing heavy subsidies to the domestic budgets of developing countries as the U.S. government has done for years. Such infusions of cash are unfortunate, but necessary to maintaining stability in the world’s most fragile and impoverished regions. The U.S. government has the tax dollars and the consolidated influence that such actions require. Private philanthropists, multinational corporations, and international NGOs do not.

Consider a country like Liberia, almost entirely reliant on ODA. In FY2015/2016 Liberia was projected to receive $899.2 million in overseas assistance; by contrast, its entire national budget for the same fiscal year was $622.7 million. The Liberian government is largely incapable of delivering services like K-12 education without international support.

Perhaps even more importantly, Liberia relies on sustained international and U.S. governmental support to avoid becoming a failed state. The U.S. government committed itself to supporting Liberia both via direct spending and through organizations like the United Nations Mission in Liberia—by contrast, funding for Liberia from the charitable sector has waxed and waned.

Equally detrimental to the American- and European-dominated aid order (and to U.S. credibility among its allies) is the planned reduction of U.S. funding for UNESCO and the UN Population Fund. The elimination of support or steep cuts—relatively small in absolute dollar terms to be sure—will signal an American retreat from the foreign-assistance playing field. Twenty years ago, Ted Turner made a memorable $1 billion pledge to establish the UN Foundation, in large part because the United States was behind on its dues to the international body. Turner’s pledge comes to an end this year, and should be regarded an exception as billionaires don’t typically relish the idea of providing operational support, even to the UN.

Globally, the U.S. government provides massive amounts of essential humanitarian aid, delivered in the wake of natural disasters, conflict, and famine. The vast majority of foundations, wealthy individuals, domestic NGOs, and corporations do not have the logistical capabilities, infrastructure, or eyes and ears on the ground to be able to pull this off. The reduction of U.S. foreign assistance spending will leave a void. If the U.S. government makes significant spending cuts to development and diplomacy while increasing its defense budgets, other states will perceive U.S. foreign policy as all-in on hard power.

Weakened Accountability: Unlike government agencies, private and corporate philanthropists lack accountability and transparency. U.S. foreign assistance efforts are overseen by the Executive Branch, Congress, and the GAO, not to mention internal Inspectors-General. Data is made public through various portals pursuant to the Open Government Initiative. Aid agencies conduct rigorous evaluations to measure the performance of the projects they fund, and are pressured to make these evaluations public. Foundations and corporations are under no such obligations and are subject to less stringent oversight.

When foreign assistance originates from a philanthropic foundation, the American public has no way of knowing how appropriately the assistance is apportioned, or any way to independently measure its impact. This opens the door for initiatives of dubious value, including ones driven by a profit motive. In early 2017, Congress passed legislation rescinding requirements for U.S. natural resources firms to disclose payments from foreign governments. There is a similar lack of mandated transparency for corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities and contributions overseas.

Additionally, U.S.-based foundations with presences in authoritarian countries tend to shy away from criticizing the policies and actions of their hosts. While prepared to implement programs and advocate health or educational reforms, for example, they rarely attempt to reform the host country’s political system. Take China for example. Foundations and NGOs operating in the country tend to tread carefully and are reluctant to endorse organizations critical of the government, for fear that their own offices in the country will be disbanded or their registration applications denied. By contrast, the U.S. government possesses the diplomatic clout necessary to make independent and open criticisms of regimes like Beijing’s. This, too, however, may be changing as China grows in power relative to the United States.

The sun may indeed be setting on U.S. governmental leadership of the international order. If the retreat becomes extreme enough, the growing influence of “free market” development initiatives could open the door to an increasing array of less benevolent private sector actors with their own agendas. How will we respond to pharmaceutical companies building clinics in poor countries in the name of public health, while secretly testing drugs on people under clinical trial rules that are less stringent than in the United States? Or what happens if a mining firm decides to help ease fiscal woes in Venezuela in exchange for drastically reduced labor and environmental regulations? Who will step in when profit incentives begin to outweigh social gains in private sector-led development?

Even if the worst-case scenarios never occur, unrestrained private sector influence in international development could undermine a global agenda that includes economic growth, social empowerment, environmental protection. To be sure, in dollar terms, we are a long way from a single billionaire replacing the official U.S. presence overseas. The U.S. government provides roughly $30 billion annually in foreign aid (not including security assistance). By comparison, the Rockefeller Foundation makes grants totaling under $200 million annually; in 2015, Coca-Cola and the Coca-Cola Foundation gave roughly $117 million to organizations around the world. Even the Gates Foundation, the largest private foundation in the world, disbursed “just” $4.2 billion in 2015.

But rising inequality at home, coupled with a tax regime friendly to the rich, may mean that American philanthropists have more money to spend in the next few years. Along with a booming market, these factors will incentivize lightly regulated corporations to invest more in CSR. As in the markets themselves, the uncertainty of this new delivery model in foreign assistance is both a risk and, if managed properly, an opportunity.

Corporate and philanthropic aid groups will continue to pursue their missions as the size of their endowments or budgets permit, regardless of the scale of U.S. foreign assistance, presidential tweets, or congressional pushback. The question remains one of strategy. Does the U.S. government want to continue projecting its influence and core values overseas? If the answer is yes, it must continue to invest globally.

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The Tech Giants Must Be Reined In

The internet, or “Information Superhighway,” transformed the world by connecting people and information quickly. Unfortunately, that storied road is now littered with dangerous drivers, hazards, and highwaymen ready to pounce on unwitting travelers—and police are few and far between. The 2016 U.S. election, the Brexit vote, or French election, have all revealed the increasing hazards that exist online.

This fall, Facebook, Google and Twitter executives were hauled before a Congressional committee after being asked to investigate allegations of Russian meddling. Facebook admitted that 126 million of their users may have seen content produced and circulated anonymously by Russian operatives. Twitter admitted to working with 2,752 Russian accounts, and that 36,000 Russian bots tweeted 1.4 million times during the election. Google testified that 1,108 videos with 43 hours of content related to the Russian effort were uploaded on YouTube, and that Russians placed $4,700 worth of search and display ads on its network.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the kind of meddling the social media giants tolerated. And getting a grip on how to address these issues will be no small feat. The social media business model itself is flawed and unethical; the tech giants have usurped the role of traditional news media—without assuming any historic social responsibilities.

For years, Facebook and the others have lobbied effectively to keep costly regulations and laws at bay with a false narrative that maintains they are not media companies but are merely “platforms.” This is akin to the “Uber defense,” designed to bypass licensing, insurance or inspection requirements to enhance profits and to unfairly compete. But if Uber is not a taxi service and Facebook is not a media company, then I am a bot.

Newspapers and broadcasters are, after all, platforms too—platforms that both create and curate content from third parties. At the very minimum, they cannot print or beam defamatory statements, nor incite violence. If they do, they are subject to punishment, litigation or both.

But beyond that, journalistic institutions have always felt themselves bound to faithfully relay a version of reality to its customers. Not so the tech giants. “At our heart, we’re a tech company; we hire engineers. We don’t hire reporters, no one’s a journalist, we don’t cover the news,” says Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.

But the facts suggest otherwise. Social media companies offer users content around which they sell ads and commercials. They have become the country’s biggest news sources. In September, new data released by the Pew Research Center said 67 percent of Americans “get at least some of their news on social media.” They are also broadcasters. Google owns YouTube and Facebook transmits and commissions videos for its broadcast arm called Facebook Live.

These social media empires are based on a “Freemium” business model: users get free services if they sign an agreement giving these companies permission to collect and utilize all their personal, professional, health, financial, relationship, search, and shopping information. In his 2013 book called Who Owns the Future, Jaron Lanier suggested this should be illegal. He predicted a looming disaster if the public became dependent on these “free” social media companies, unaware that these empires are “private spy agencies crossed with ad agencies, which are licensed by us to spy on all of us all the time in order to accumulate billions of dollars by manipulating what’s put in front of us over supposedly open and public networks.”

An egregious example of the kind of behavior these companies’ business models encourage surfaced this summer when an internal Facebook sales pitch to advertisers was leaked to an Australian newspaper. Facebook stated it had pinpointed an audience of thousands of young teenagers who felt “insecure,” “defeated,” “nervous,” “failures,” “worthless,” and “needed a confidence boost.” These diagnoses were based on a psychoanalysis of private Facebook information: what users posted, what they liked, how they appeared in photos, who their friends and how depressed were they as well as their search and shopping histories, visits to mental illness sites or hotlines and so forth.

Profiling anyone, especially emotionally vulnerable minors, is morally questionable at best, and European governments are looking at curbs. Spain’s privacy regulator has imposed fines on Facebook for collecting private user data without “clearly informing the user about the use and purpose.” The European Union is formulating similar restrictions. But if anything, these curbs will fall far short of meaningfully limiting the political impact of social media technologies on our democracies.

As long as detailed user data is available to the highest bidder and no disclosure requirements are imposed on platforms hosting political advertising, our system will remain vulnerable to manipulation. Case in point: the technique known as “behavioral micro-targeting,” most famously championed by Cambridge Analytica, a data-harvesting firm employed by the Trump campaign in last year’s elections. Strategists for the Trump team used this technique, supercharged with reams of personal data from various social networks, to locate strategically important “undecided” voters across the country, and especially in three swing states—Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—where Democrats were only narrowly ahead. These “undecideds,” in certain zip codes, were then bombarded with Trump messages anonymously.

“Twitter is how [Trump] talked to the people, Facebook was going to be how he won,” Trump’s digital guru Brad Parscale said in a 60 Minutes interview last month.

The fact that Team Trump seized on this tool to win is not in and of itself the issue. After all, the strategy was open to the Clinton campaign as well, and they failed to capitalize on it. The issue is that the messaging to the undecideds was not identified as political in nature. Even explicitly political robo-calls need to identify themselves as such. These small-scale political messages were not identified as paid advertisements because Facebook, Google, and others successfully lobbied the Federal Elections Commission in 2011 to get an exemption. That decision now really needs to be scrutinized—and the exemption overturned.

The vast troves of information harvested by internet companies can also wreak havoc when they are stolen. Earlier this month, for example, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman alleged that hundreds of thousands of American social media users had their digital identities hijacked in order to corrupt the Federal Communication Commission’s public comment process about an important policy issue: the “net neutrality” debate. Obviously, lobbyists caught impersonating citizens should face the stiffest penalties. But as custodians of personal information, internet companies should also be held strictly liable for any broad data breaches.

Europeans have been upset about America’s social media companies for years, and are increasingly taking action. In September, Germany passed a law requiring social media to remove hate speech or images immediately or face fines of up to €50 million. Britain told Facebook and the others that they must censor terrorist information. Spain intends to make Google and other social media to pay royalties to traditional media for republication of their content. Courts in Australia and Canada have ruled that Google must scrub statements that are defamatory globally or face official repercussions.

Such broad measures stand little chance of success in the United States, where the First Amendment provides a broad umbrella for almost any manifestation of “speech.” But as evidence and outrage mounts, America should stop accepting Silicon Valley’s false narrative that it’s just an agnostic platform that serves the public good by enhancing freedom of expression. While all agree that freedom of expression remains sacrosanct, the proviso is that it ought not damage individuals, society, or democracy.

After a meteoric rise on an un-level playing field, America’s social media sector is a global problem that must be solved. It must be supervised. Rigorously.

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The Logic of Zero Tolerance

Every generation has a grudge against the previous one—often for good reason. A generation ago, powerful men such as Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey got away with not just sexual harassment, but also assault. The eagerness of today’s media to expose Weinstein and Spacey signals an important change. Accusations of sexual harassment once had an erratic quality about them, as they were often dealt with selectively. Democrats like President Clinton got a pass, while Republicans did not; the rich and powerful got a pass, the middle-class and poor did not. Now that progressive Hollywood is a target, charging sexual harassment is no longer a weapon to be used by some, but a constituent element of the general culture. It is the way we live now.

The problem is that we have yet to adapt this new element to everyday life. Below Weinstein and Spacey are millions of men who say or do stupid things every day, not assault or gross indecency, but things that nonetheless irritate women and can lead to prosecution, job loss, and public humiliation for men. These men are not criminals; they are only jerks of varying degrees.

What behavior separates the criminal, including the sexual harasser, from the jerk? The criminal physically assaults someone, or gropes someone, or exposes himself, or abuses his position at work to get sex, or seriously pressures a person to have sex, or continues to behave boorishly despite being told the behavior is unwanted. The jerk is in a lower league. He bombastically makes dirty jokes in mixed company, but stops and looks shamefaced when told he’s not funny. He sneaks leering glances at women as they walk away, but behaves properly to them when they approach. He tells a woman with admiration, “I love your new hairstyle; it makes you look so hot!” then scratches his head when told his compliments seem unwelcome. He “mansplains” unintentionally. He creates a list of the best-looking women in his department. To get sex, he whines or begs, or tells a woman he loves her when he doesn’t, then backs off when his stratagems fail.

There is a difference between the criminal and the jerk. The distinction is important, because the question of how to handle jerks goes beyond the issue of sexual harassment, and even men. For example, Hayley Geftman-Gold, a CBS attorney, recently mocked the victims of the Las Vegas massacre online, noting that country music fans “often are Republican.” Melissa Click, a communications professor, was caught asking for “some muscle” to silence a student reporter during campus unrest. Michael Isaacson, a criminal justice professor, tweeted about teaching “future dead cops,” seemingly with pleasure. These people are jerks.

How should we handle jerks? Our policy lately has been to destroy them along with the criminals. Humiliate them. Fire them. Make it so no one will hire them, at least not at their previous level, thereby depriving them of a livelihood. We proclaim zero tolerance for the jerk, even if a good deal of common sense still creeps in as a matter of actual practice. In fact, schools and corporations call their policy toward unwanted behavior “zero tolerance.”

Behind the zero tolerance tilt is another question that has been debated for two millennia. Are human beings naturally prone to utter inanities, behave stupidly (although not criminally), and do lewd things—in other words, to be jerks? In late antiquity, Saint Augustine said they were, that people were inherently sinful, and that jerkiness lives in all of us. He did not say that faith or education was useless as a means to improve behavior, but that there were limits to what could be accomplished. For example, he preached against lust, but privately admitted that if a man lusted only after his wife and was respectful to her in the process, that was good enough. From Augustine’s perspective, a jerk needed to be be scolded but also forgiven, since we all live on the same inclined plane toward jerkiness.

The monk Pelagius argued the opposite, that being a jerk is completely within our control and a matter of choice. He compared jerkiness to a light coat of rust on pure iron: we can scrape off the bad stuff and leave the person underneath clean. The modern project built on Pelagian ideas. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Marx all argued that human beings had few, if any, innate qualities, and jerkiness was not one of them. Machiavelli argued that educational institutions could erase undesirable behavior and produce the desired human product. All of them to one degree or another imagined human beings in ideal form, which inevitably led them to create some version of utopia.

Today’s zero-tolerance perspective shares in this utopianism. Perfection, or a world without jerks, is proclaimed to be within our grasp. By funding more counseling sessions and sensitivity workshops, utopians believe people can ultimately be purified, if not in this generation then in the next. That jerkiness persists invites not a re-evaluation of their premise, but the conviction that some enemy must be responsible. This is why jerks are lumped in with criminals for serious punishment. Forgiveness and redemption flow out of acceptance of people’s flaws and recognition that some rules of behavior cannot be followed perfectly. Utopians disagree; they think certain rules of behavior must be followed fully, and not just in part, because they believe they can be followed fully. If people surrender themselves 99 percent to a cause but show in their behavior that they have been hiding 1 percent of their souls, they become worth destroying in order to destroy the vestigial 1 percent.

Ironically, to enforce their anti-jerk agenda, today’s utopians rely on character flaws that make people jerks in the first place: lust and vanity. When destroying a jerk, utopians know people have a side to them that loves to ruin and condemn. Destroying the enemy satisfies. It titillates. It makes people feel better about themselves when they learn that although they’re not perfect, others are even worse.

Indeed, average people often feel themselves to be little people, and that nobody has any use for them, but when utopians tell the victims of jerkiness that their problems are not of their own making, that “the system” is also at fault, and that enemies surround them and even occupy high positions, average people begin respecting themselves more. If jerks are everywhere, tied in with Hollywood, government, and the big banks, for example, threatening their lives, then that means their lives must have colossal value. Many average people see jerks everywhere, causing their self-esteem to rise as they gaze outward.

This is the problem with the zero tolerance policy toward jerks: It fails to take into account human frailties, weaknesses, and errors. Education to improve things is worth the effort, but education to perfection is impossible. We hope to discover in others a perfect virtue that we ourselves do not possess. When people fail to live up to the models in books, we make jerkiness a crime in the first degree and enjoy watching jerks being destroyed. We do not offer forgiveness or redemption because we assume everyone has sworn the equivalent of a military oath not to be jerky, and therefore the jerk is a kind of traitor.

We also lack a language with which to question the victims of jerkiness. Even in cases of actual sexual harassment, any effort to probe a victim’s complicity (For example: Was alcohol involved?) is rejected as an assault on the victim. This deficiency in language has found its way into other areas of life. As an anesthesiologist, for example, I am generally forbidden from second-guessing a patient’s pain. If a patient says he or she has pain, I am obligated to treat it, even though there may be no physical evidence of pain and the patient looks fairly comfortable. Analogously, in sexual harassment, the accuser has been harassed if the accuser feels harassment has taken place. Like pain, the feeling of harassment is a subjective experience.

An irresistible force meets an unmovable object. Our culture says jerkiness can be eliminated through education—hence it sees no moral hazard in putting young men and women in a room with a beer keg. Jerkiness, in the form of lewd jokes or unwanted hugging, and its far more sinister counterpart, bona fide sexual harassment, are presumed not to be a problem while the keg sits there, since young people have sworn an oath to virtue. We have no language to even suggest that a moral hazard might exist, for such language would imply that the victim, if one arises, might be at least partly at fault. And yet people do seem to have a propensity toward jerkiness that education can ameliorate but not completely erase.

People of common sense and goodwill have tried to point out people’s limits and to resurrect a language that re-establishes a balance between accuser and accused. They have failed. Indeed, from the utopians’ perspective, these people seem sinister in their refusal to board the train to utopia.

Therefore, rather than fight against the utopians, I will follow the utopian dream to its logical dystopian conclusion. If we do not put a brake on the utopians, we will live in a world where women are harassed constantly, since the utopians refuse to warn women than many men have an innate tendency toward jerkiness that can sometimes spill over into outright harassment, and that therefore requires women to take appropriate precautions. We will live in a world where non-jerky men live in dread of being falsely accused of harassment, or worse—for example, the Rolling Stone/UVA rape story. Women can be jerks too. It will be a world where good men crumble, since utopians refuse to tell them that sensitivity training might not be enough to keep them from behaving badly, or from crossing the line into harassment when tested in real life, and that they should avoid situations that could bring out the worst in them. It will be a world that grows steadily more bizarre and misanthropic, with technology accelerating the trend.

Single-sex education

Visiting the United States in the 1860s, writer Anthony Trollope observed that American women had a strong awareness of their privileges in the new democracy. American men, in turn, found a solution to the problem of dealing with women possessed of such knowledge (and the law): according to Trollope, they “kept their distance.” This led to different spheres of life for American men and women.

Such a division is no longer desirable or even feasible in most areas of life. But people will increasingly demand it wherever possible—for example, in higher education—if we continue on our path.

Young women rightly worry about sexual harassment in college. The study that showed one in five American college women to be the victims of sexual assault was flawed; the true number is closer to one in 40. But that is still a high number. Young men, in turn, rightly worry about being falsely accused of sexual harassment in college. Civil case criteria (the preponderance of evidence measure) are used to adjudicate alleged violations, but then criminal-case-style punishments are in effect applied, as the accused risk losing the ability to make a living for the rest of their lives.

Utopians create a moral hazard for young men and women when they invite them into institutions with little more than a few lectures on virtue, and where moral hazards abound. For example, rather than strongly advise against hook-up culture, or crack down on fraternities, sororities, and the ubiquity of alcohol, which leads to much of the sexual harassment on campuses, the utopians hold workshops and dispense information, as if this were all that were needed to keep young people safe from one another. In turn, administrators hesitate to diminish their college’s brand or take the “fun” out of college by cracking down on fraternities, sororities, and alcohol. Young men and women fall between the cracks. As this begins to dawn on them, they will clamor for single-sex college education to keep their distance from one another.

Interest in single-sex education is already on the rise in the K-12 level. In 2004, only 34 single-sex public schools existed in the United States. That number increased 25-fold in ten years: In 2014, 850 such schools existed. One big change associated with single-sex education was a decline in disciplinary infractions and bullying.

Surveys show that only 2 percent of American women are interested in single-sex education, so the 37 female colleges now in existence probably meet the demand—for now. But only four male colleges exist, and while surveys of male interest in single-sex education are not readily available, the demand will likely grow.

Technology will carry the trend to the next level. The rise of online courses has been discussed for its potential cost savings, but such courses also allow young people to study without having to come into close proximity with one another, thereby eliminating the moral hazard. Campus sexual harassment and false accusations of harassment decline when there is no campus. Students in the future will read books about brotherhood; they will be taught to believe in the affinity of humankind; they will be encouraged not to close their hearts, not to build walls, and not to resign themselves to evil; they will be asked to donate their time and love to community service—all from the safety of their personal computers, online. In reality, they will keep as far apart from one another as they can.

Chaperones

When I began medical practice in 1989, I never used a chaperone when taking care of a female patient. In the early 1990s, a male surgeon at a university hospital got into trouble for examining a female patient’s pelvic area for enlarged lymph nodes without getting explicit consent beforehand. After that, I had a chaperone whenever I performed a procedure on a female patient, or examined her. Starting in the 2000s, as conversation alone became a basis for sexual harassment, I had a chaperone whenever I spoke with a female patient, unless it was in the very public pre-operative holding area.

Many doctors behave similarly. While the American Medical Association only recommends chaperones, and does not require them, both statute and legal counsel have pushed to make them mandatory. Seven states now require their presence during physical exams. Lawyers argue that chaperones should be mandatory in health care for all genders, and at all times. The notion that only male doctors can harass female patients they call sexist.

Women’s fear of sexual harassment and men’s fear of being falsely accused of sexual harassment have altered behavior in other areas of my life. Increasingly, male college professors meet with female students only in public spaces, such as a Starbucks, rather than in their offices. More chaperones will be needed here, too.

More to the point, chaperones will one day be needed everywhere. In the 19th century, when Trollope wrote, men and women could keep their distance from one another. This is no longer possible in a gender-integrated economy. Indeed, for men, the last remaining public space available exclusively to them is the locker rooms at private clubs. The clubs often furnish these rooms with living room furniture, replete with food service, aware that male patrons will stay in them for hours.

Chaperones were once quite common, especially in Europe, to protect young men and women at their few contact points. That culture recognized people’s limitations. It knew that education only went so far in preventing bad behavior. Young women had to be protected against young men trying to seduce them. Young men had to be protected against young women who might falsely accuse a man of having “made an offer” (a marriage proposal). Both scenarios fill novels of the era. The culture policed the few contact points between young people at little expense, as middle-aged women typically volunteered to be chaperones.

Our era is different. Men and women come into contact everywhere. And with zero tolerance the risk arising from that contact is higher than ever. Therefore chaperones will be needed everywhere. This will be expensive. Within health care, for example, there is already debate over whether insurance companies should pay for chaperones or chaperones should be part of the doctor’s “overhead.” There are not simply enough middle-aged women (and now middle-aged men) to volunteer to be chaperones at all the contact points.

Again, technology will lead the way. Many police officers now wear body cameras to protect citizens against police abuse, and to protect police officers against false accusations—whether the cameras work as intended is open to debate. In the future, people will wear similar body cameras when approaching sensitive contact points, to protect against the moral hazard our culture has placed them in. The result will be an absurd form of cognitive dissonance. People will walk around believing the ideology that human beings are perfectible. They will believe in people’s moral rectitude and incorruptibility, made possible through education and sensitivity workshops.

But the other sides of their brains will house a fear that each individual is a total jerk, and would bother a woman if he were a man, or falsely accuse a man if she were a woman. One moment, they will read somewhere that a person who has undergone sensitivity training has committed bad behavior. They will immediately write an angry refutation to the editors.1 They will call it a libelous defamation of our social reality. They will say that people once educated do not commit such behavior, and that the author of such malicious fabrications should be punished. The next moment, they will put their body cameras on whenever venturing into risky terrain, and think people will act like jerks if the opportunity arises.

The Workplace

Every December, the nation’s corporations hold office Christmas parties. Male and female employees are thrust together. Alcohol is everywhere. People get frisky. The corporations naively assume sexual harassment and sensitivity training seminars have sanitized their employees of jerkiness. They are wrong. Sexual harassment claims inevitably follow. One survey showed that forty percent of employees at such parties had either engaged in inappropriate behavior or knew people who had. Eleven percent of the group questioned reported that they or someone they knew had been terminated as a result of this misbehavior. Indeed, plaintiffs’ attorneys count on office parties as a source of business.

This is the moral hazard that arises when zero tolerance ideology at work collides with the innate jerkiness of human beings. One would hope that human resources departments would counsel common sense in the face of all this. Often they do. But the people in these departments also feel pressure to implement zero tolerance. Ominously, compliance training sessions on sexual harassment these days focus less on obvious issues, such as “don’t grope” or “don’t squeeze”—they assume employees already know this—and more on the small things, such as how to compliment another person, how to criticize another person’s work, or how to greet another person. This is not the stuff of sexual harassment; it is the stuff of jerkiness. Utopians are already forcing human resource specialists to punish people for infractions in this area. “Mansplaining” can now get a person fired.

There is no retreat from the gender-integrated workplace. Men and women cannot keep their distance from one another at work, although it has been reported that some men aspire to do so by talking casually only among themselves at the office, then falling silent when a woman comes by. This angers women, who fear they may be shut out important business talk. Instead, utopians will compel businesses to keep social contact between men and women at a bare minimum. This will include a shutdown of unnecessary social events, including office parties.

This is cruel, since American families work more hours now than ever before in the country’s history. People need to have some fun. In addition, many Americans experience social life through work. Indeed, in the 1990s, over-worked employees were known to have “work spouses,” meaning people of the opposite sex whom they confided in, since they had so little time to see their real spouses. Yet the moral hazard our utopians have created will inevitably force this change. Indeed, corporations may become liable for exposing their employees to this hazard.

Employers will also have to ban their employees from using social media, since online activity comes with the possibility of behaving like a jerk, for which there is zero tolerance. Again, this may seem cruel. Surveys have estimated that more than half of Americans today are lonely, since they have no one (or at most one person) to talk to about their everyday life problems. Social media gives people an opportunity to talk to others, if just to strangers. Yet social media also poses a risk that people will say stupid things and get themselves into trouble. Companies will have no choice.

Again, technology will be used to cut down on the number of contact points between people at work. Working from home and “virtual meetings” have been advertised as a way of giving employees flexibility at work. It also has the benefit of keeping people apart from one another. When utopians realize that the perfect society resembles the unattainable horizon that merely recedes as you advance toward it, they will grow angry, and drag not just enemies but also accomplices into the dock. Someone must be blamed. This guilt by association will poison human relationships even more. After all, your friend at work could be everything but tomorrow he could be nothing, and you could become nothing with him.

A New Inferno

The new device coming onto market—sexbots, or robots to have sex with—captures the awful, almost sick society that the utopians are leading us toward. The demand for sexbots is high. Almost half of American men express an interest in having sex with a robot, as do a fifth of American women. Many orders come from MGTOWs, or Men Going Their Own Way, a mass movement of men who fear that contact with women will somehow lead them into trouble. These men sense the moral hazard that arises when zero tolerance ideology collides with human reality.

Sexbots will join body cameras, Skype, online learning, and other technologies to help men and women deal with the moral hazard they increasingly feel in their lives. This should not surprise. Karl Marx once observed that capitalism had a way of creating new technologies to manage needs arising out of its own contradictions. Today, capitalism supports zero tolerance policies. Zero tolerance molds workers into a single human type: the gender-neutral, humor-averse, self-policing knowledge worker who obeys sanitized rules and procedures of human intercourse. An army of such workers makes work more efficient. That people have a tendency toward jerkiness throws a monkey wrench into the plan—hence, the contradiction. Therefore, as Marx predicted, new technologies will re-divide men and women. It will police their behavior to protect them against harassment (or the false charge of harassment). In the case of sexbots, it will substitute a machine for a person’s need for human contact.

What will life be like under such a regime? Marx wrote about the life of the French industrial worker under 19th-century capitalism. That worker labored ten hours a day chained to his machine, doing the same task repeatedly. He sent his wife out to prostitute to earn extra money. He saw other people as competitors for his job and distrusted his fellow man. He ate, he slept, and he labored. It was a veritable Dante’s Inferno.

The prospective life of the American worker who uses technology to escape today’s contradictions in capitalism will be no less horrific. The worker will get a college degree online, studying alone, to avoid people. After graduation, the worker will live in a 28 square-foot pod apartment because housing is so expensive. The worker will labor at a job for ten hours, or even longer, since cell phones and the internet will follow him or her home. All the while, he or she will avoid co-workers to reduce the risk of saying something stupid to them, or of being injured by someone else’s stupid talk, or of being falsely accused of doing something stupid. The worker will have little time to develop a social life, therefore he or she will message co-workers through social media, or message strangers he or she has never met, but will do so anxiously, furtively, since social media exposes him or her to great risk. Otherwise, the worker will be alone.

Occasionally, the worker will stay inside his or her pod apartment to work, using Skype or virtual imaging. He or she will see no one in the actual physical world. Sometimes the worker will walk outside but then will wear a body camera to protect herself against sexual harassment, or to protect himself from a false accusation of sexual harassment. When the worker feels romantic urges, he or she will have sex with a robot in the tiny bed that fits inside the apartment, thereby avoiding interaction with a real person.

This is a perverse way to live. It may be productive. It may produce wealth. It may be efficient. But it is perverse. True, ideology has a way of putting a good face on matters. Some people will call this life cutting edge, even hip, especially when lived in a city. But in reality it is another circle in hell.

And it will be the way we live. Defenders of the jerkless society say the theory is good but the practice is bad. The utopians have devised it correctly but our technicians have applied it wrongly. We still have some kinks to work out, they say. But what is so good about a theory if it can never be confirmed in practice, anywhere, under any conditions? On the contrary, the dystopia of the future will be the end result of its practice.

We are at crossroads. We must do what we can to stop sexual harassment, and we have tarried too long before the task. But if in the process we prosecute mere jerks as if they’re criminals in the name of some unattainable higher end, we will undermine the entire effort. Rather than condemn, demonize and shun them, it would be better for everyone to regard them with a little sympathetic understanding, reproach them, let them repent, and then make that the end of the matter. As Wallace Stevens once said, “our paradise is the imperfect.” We must learn to live with that insight.

1Note, just in passing, Jena McGregor, “Why Training Doesn’t Stop Sexual Harassment,” Washington Post, November 19, 2007.

The post The Logic of Zero Tolerance appeared first on The American Interest.

The Seoul-Tokyo Split

Earlier this month, U.S. President Donald Trump made high-profile visits to both Japan and South Korea as the first stops on his marathon twelve-day, five-country tour of East Asia. During his time in both Tokyo and Seoul, Trump largely stayed on script, stressing Washington’s longstanding commitment to the defense of both allies and his administration’s focus on building up robust deterrence and pressure to dissuade further provocations from North Korea, which has been rapidly enhancing its missile and nuclear capabilities over the past year. The promotion of trilateral security cooperation between Seoul, Washington, and Tokyo is hardly a new development, and has been prioritized by successive administrations over the past two decades.

One of the most vexing stumbling blocks to meaningful trilateral cooperation, however, has been the fraught relationship between South Korea and Japan, who remain at odds over a number of historical issues. Recent years provided some reason for cautious optimism and hopes for a thaw, thanks to a 2015 deal on the contentious issue of so-called “comfort women.” Buoyed by a tepid improvement on the political side, Japan and South Korea have also been moving forward on enhancing their bilateral defense and security cooperation. Key examples of this include the completion of a bilateral general security of military information (GSOMIA) agreement last year, and the agreement to establish a hotline between both defense ministers.

There have also been positive strides trilaterally, with a series of high-level meetings between diplomats and senior officials and a greater focus on synergizing efforts to deter North Korea. In addition, the two countries have demonstrated positive cooperation in the United Nations Security Council and elsewhere on imposing and implementing new sanctions against the Kim regime in North Korea. Seoul, Tokyo and Washington also have enhanced their trilateral intelligence sharing on Pyongyang’s weapons programs through the Trilateral Information Sharing Agreement, and they have noticeably stepped up the frequency of jointly planned exercises. Still, this military cooperation continues to be restrained due to Seoul’s concerns about Japan’s inclusion, as evidenced by the Blue House’s denial of Washington’s request to include Tokyo in a proposed trilateral exercise this month.

Despite the common strategic drivers to propel cooperation—both bilaterally and trilaterally with the United States—ties between Tokyo and Seoul remain uninspiring. No clearer example of this can be found than Trump’s recent visit to South Korea, when Moon invited him for a palatial state dinner to discuss the importance of the Washington-Seoul relationship. While the dinner should have provided an opportune occasion to reinforce the alliance, show solidarity in the face of growing aggression from North Korea, and indicate unity with Japan’s security, it instead turned into a sideshow given Moon’s decision to invite one of the remaining living “comfort women” to attend the ceremony. The political pettiness was magnified by the childish decision to serve “Dokdo shrimp,” allegedly from the waters surrounding the disputed Liancourt Rocks (claimed by both South Korea and Japan) in the Sea of Japan. South Korea administers the islets and refers to them as Dokdo, while Japan calls the rocks Takeshima and claims they belong to its Shimane prefecture.

Why would Moon make such a provocative move? First, South Korea constantly pushes for greater attention to the history issue from the United States, which has traditionally—and understandably—been reluctant to take sides between its two East Asian allies. Moon’s thinly veiled symbolism at the dinner, however, was not aimed at impressing Trump or impacting Washington’s position on the lingering historical disputes between Tokyo and Seoul. Rather, the driver was domestic politics, and Moon’s desire for an easy win by taking digs at Japan. Such moves are usually welcome among the South Korean public, which is largely critical of Tokyo and the conservative Abe Administration, especially on issues related to Dokdo/Takeshima and the “comfort women.”

Moon’s position on Japan also continues to raise eyebrows in Tokyo. There could be rocky times ahead on a number of key bilateral issues, including the maintenance of the 2015 comfort women deal, which Moon has publicly derided as insufficient. In response to this, Abe thus far appears to be cautiously waiting out Moon and will look to focus initial talks and cooperation on the one area where there is a semblance of agreement—preventing new provocations from North Korea.

Another key factor for Tokyo and Seoul’s ties is the trajectory of U.S.-South Korea relations. Analysts are cautious and uncertain about the future of the Moon-Trump relationship, which is now under stress over plans to renegotiate the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement. There is also concern about how Washington’s “Maximum Pressure and Engagement” strategy dovetails with Moon’s desire to retro-fit Seoul’s hardened approach to the North. In some sense, at least, there could be common ground between the two: both have signaled engagement is a possibility, including even meeting with leadership in Pyongyang.

That said, there are also glaring divergences apparent in the U.S.-South Korea relationship, which could sour ties in the near future. Moon seems disenchanted with the “deterrence plus” approach of turning the screws on North Korea, and will likely resist calls for talks on more robust trilateral security cooperation with Japan. Moon is also likely to brush off recommendations of enhanced regional missile defense. He has previously bristled at the now-installed Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense battery and the Japan-South Korea GSOMIA intelligence-sharing pact.

Initial indications have stoked skepticism in Tokyo on how Moon may look to engage with Japan. Adding to these complexities is the thaw between China and South Korea, who recently agreed to downplay their public feud over the deployment of THAAD on the Korean peninsula. Beijing will no doubt use this renewed political space with South Korea to pry away at the U.S.-Japan-South Korea trilateral relationship, a long-held goal for China.

Despite these ominous signs, though, it is important to recognize that Moon was not elected on foreign policy issues—or his policy on Japan more specifically—but rather on his economic policies and his seizure of the electoral space in the wake of Park Geun-hye’s impeachment. Second, Moon is likely to be hemmed in, to some extent, on his new designs for foreign policy by the opposition parties in the National Assembly and also by regional provocations from the North. These structural factors will hopefully push Moon to pragmatism in ties with Tokyo over the coming months.

The alternative path, which remains a possibility, would be an increasingly nationalist and uncompromising approach from the Moon Administration with regard to its bilateral relations with Japan. This road would all but ensure that Japan and South Korea continue to be mired in an antagonistic cycle of action and reaction, making no real attempt to mitigate risks to the relationship. In this scenario, tensions would become semi-permanent and all-encompassing rather than intermittent and manageable through adept diplomacy. The Trump Administration should pay attention to these developments and be sensitive to these tensions while pushing for reconciliation and deeper political exchanges, especially on issues beyond North Korea.

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Beyond a “Marshall Plan for Ukraine”

The fifth Eastern Partnership summit is kicking off today in Brussels, as leaders of the EU member states meet with leaders from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, the Republic of Moldova, and Ukraine. One of the items on the agenda: an initiative nicknamed the “Marshall Plan for Ukraine”—a proposal originally put forward by two Lithuanian MPs, both the country’s former Prime Ministers, Mr. An­d­rius Kubi­­lis and Mr. Gediminas Kirkilas. Supported by the current Lithuanian leadership and praised by the vast majority of Ukrainian policymakers, the plan envisions an additional, massive wave of eco­no­mic support to Kyiv valued up to $50 billion, doled out over a period of ten years.

The initiative has been widely discussed in both the Ukrainian and the East European press. And the European Parliament, noting the importance of “keeping in place collective pressure on Russia,” proposed to establish a trust fund for Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova, and mooted creating a model for “Eastern Partnership Plus” for those nations who already signed the Association Agreements with the EU. And even though officials in Brussels these days try not to use the exact phrase for describing their efforts, it seems that some additional financial help for Kyiv (if not the full $50 billion) might be on its way.

I originally coined the term “Marshall Plan for Ukraine” along with the late Russian MP and opposition politician Valery Zubov. In our article in the Russian newspaper Vedomosti, published on Feb. 24, 2014—the same day President Yanukovych was evacuated from the Cri­mea by the Rus­sians—we suggested that the West ought to consider spending somewhere between $100 to $120 billion into helping transform Ukraine into a kind of bridge between the EU and Russia, allowing Ukraine to deepen its economic ties with Europe while allaying some of Russia’s fears of Kyiv’s immediate incorporation into Atlantic institutions. Of course we did not predict that Russian soldiers would soon be killing Ukrainian servicemen on the battlefields of Ilovaysk and Debaltsevo, nor could we imagine that Ukraine would eventually start to revert back to the corrupt practices rampant in the Yanukovych era.

Since we wrote our piece, Ukrainian society has consoli­dated like never before in its history, due in no small part to Russia’s political and military aggression. Ukraine’s political elites, however, have not mirrored society. President Poroshenko in particular has been a huge disappointment. He has managed to squeeze out the entire “reformist” team that had coalesced after the Maidan in the corridors of power in Kyiv; everyone from the Minister for Economics and Trade Aivaras Abromavičius, to Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko, to the Governor of Odessa (and former Georgian President) President Mikheil Sa­akashvili has been pushed out. This purge occurred while Poroshenko’s inner circle continued to take steps to faci­litate the smuggling of Ukrainian goods into Russia despite official trade embargoes, and while Poroshenko himself steadfastly refused to aban­don his confectionary factory in Lipetsk, Russia, which is owned by his company Roshen. The ongoing war, which is presented to the Ukrainian public as a struggle for European values against the Muscovite Horde, is cynically used as a means of distracting attention from the continued misuse of state funds and virtually-stalled economic reforms.

I have been a staunch supporter of Ukraine for years, and I am dismayed by the priorities being chosen by Ukraine’s leadership. Economic growth for 2017 will be less than 2 percent, after a 9.9 percent decline in 2015 and a 6.5 percent decline in 2014. Meanwhile, external debt has risen from $38.8b in early 2015 to $49.9b today, with the country left with little to show for it. Poroshenko has been dragging his feet on setting up a credible anti-corruption court (something the country badly needs), making concessions with one hand while putting in place provisions that would seriously undermine the court’s powers with the other. A crucial land reform package has also stalled, with President Poroshenko declaring recently that he will not continue to push for it in Ukraine’s parliament. And I am not alone in my dismay. Even the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are becoming more and more cautious about Uk­rai­ne’s trajectory.

Those in Ukraine and in Europe now calling for a new “Marshall Plan” are neglecting several elements of the original U.S. undertaking, announced by Secretary of State George Marshall in 1947 and enacted by the U.S. Congress by 1948. One of the fundamental features of that plan was a demand that the recepient nations rid themselves of Communists in their cabinets, decreasing their over­all influence on the domestic policies. With Ukrainian politics becoming more and more corrupt by the day, something analogous should be considered for today’s initiative: a theoretical $50 billion grant to Ukraine ought to be negotiated only if the country is put under a kind of external managenent executed by its creditors. Furthermore, the entire disbursement provided under the original Marshall Plan amounted to $135 billion in current dollars, and was aimed at war-wrecked countries with a combined po­pulation of over 250 million people. $50 billion to Ukraine alone, population 42 million, is an invitation to waste and mismanagement, even if administered by foreign powers.

None of this means that Ukraine should be left without help, or be for­ced to “surrender” to the Russians. On the contrary, Ukraine must be integrated into the European Union’s sphere as soon as possible—and it should happen under conditions that stand to help both Ukraine and Europe going forward. Perhaps paradoxically, the fact of Brexit suggests a path. Europe is slowly becoming a kind of two-spe­ed, opt-in affair, with some nations (like Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and now presu­mably also the UK) officially standing outside the EU but enjoying many benefits in ex­change for substantial payments for access to the common market. Ukraine ought to be offered something similar right away. It would have no vote within the EU, but its compliance with the acquis communautaire and its acceptance of EU laws and rulings by the ECJ would encourage private investors from all over the world to put money into the country. It would also force the Ukrainian government to pro­mote a more responsible fiscal policy, as it would need to convert the heightened economic activity into tax revenue from which the fees to the EU would be paid. Finally, such a move might ease European opposition to Ukraine’s eventual full accession as voters realize that Ukraine has more concrete things to offer to the common project beyond mere declarations of sha­red values and aspirations.

The truth is, there is little chance that a “Marshall Plan for Ukraine” will be adopted this weekend. Its failure should not breed frustration, but rather should get policymakers to think creatively. The West needs to take decisive action to help the ailing Ukrainians, and the sooner it considers some other ideas beyond doling out more money to Kyiv, the better. There is a bright future for a European Ukraine. We just need to figure out how to get there from here.

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Agnès Varda, In Search of Lost Time

Faces Places

 

Directed by Agnès Varda and JR

 

Cohen Media Group (2017), 89 minutes

Like many films about an unlikely on-screen duo, Faces Places begins with a Meet Cute. The couple in this case is not a romantic couple but an artistic one: Agnès Varda, the 89-year-old stalwart of the French New Wave, and her co-director JR, a 34-year-old street artist commonly known as the “French Banksy.” Seen side by side, the two present a comical, almost cartoonish, study in contrasts: Varda, a plump and matronly figure with her trademark red-and-white bowl cut, and JR, the lanky hipster sporting a signature fedora and sunglasses. As if to highlight the incongruity, the film begins by telling us how they did not meet: not on a road (cut to the two artists passing each other by on a country lane); not on the dance floor (cut to the sprightly Varda busting moves at a nightclub); not at a bus stop or a bakery. Rather, JR tells us, he sought out Varda to share his appreciation for her life’s work—and to explore a collaboration.

The film that follows is at once the result of and the depiction of that collaborative process. It sends Varda and JR on a road trip across France, in a photo-booth truck that can spit out massive prints of its subjects like oversized Polaroids. Stopping at various villages throughout the French countryside, the filmmakers create photographic portraits of the ordinary French citizens they encounter, and then blow up the photos to create large-format street murals and public art in the places where they live.

For fans of Varda, the mode is a familiar one: like her celebrated documentaries The Gleaners and I and The Beaches of Agnès, the new film features Varda prominently as both artist and subject, musing on her personal life and artistic legacy at the twilight of her career. And like those films, too, Faces Places is much more playful and less esoteric than it might sound. For all her high-art credentials and penchant for experimentation, Varda has never been a ponderous filmmaker, and her later films in particular are marked by a disarming and deceptively breezy tone.

Faces Places is no exception. Part buddy comedy, part road trip movie, and part art documentary, Varda’s latest (and likely last) film moves along briskly and goes down easily, full of visual charms, amusing sight gags and likable personalities. Yet its surface pleasures also point to more profound depths. Coming from a New Wave filmmaker approaching 90 years of age, Faces Places plays like a capstone to Varda’s career, a testament to her artistic spirit, and a symbolic passing of the torch to the next generation.

Agnès Varda has long occupied a complex position in the French New Wave, the iconoclastic film movement that propelled a new generation of auteurs to the forefront of French cinema beginning in the late 1950s. Though sometimes called the Godmother of the New Wave, Varda was also in important respects an outlier. First, there is the obvious fact of her gender: in a movement and profession largely dominated by men, Varda was the rare woman to find both critical acclaim and lasting success, and her films often feature feminist subjects and themes.

Nor did Varda arrive at her career through the usual route. A photographer by training, she never wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma, the polemical film journal whose pages launched the careers of Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer, who were all film critics before they picked up a camera. Varda had a broader interest in the art world than many of her movie-mad counterparts, associating with the “Left Bank” group of filmmakers who also ran in Parisian literary circles. Yet even as she stood somewhat outside of the New Wave, Varda was also ahead of it. Her first feature film, 1955’s La Pointe Courte, predated Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Godard’s Breathless by a full four years, while pointing the way to a new mode of shoestring-budget filmmaking that those directors would later embrace.

One need not know any of this history to appreciate Faces Places, but Varda’s artistic legacy is very much a subject of the new film. Early on, we see clips from her earlier work as JR recalls the indelible images of films like Cleo from 5 to 7 (Varda’s existentialist 1962 drama about a singer awaiting a cancer diagnosis) and Mur Murs (her 1978 documentary about street murals in Los Angeles). Varda, for her part, seems to see JR as a kindred spirit, praising his 2014 installation at the Pantheon and even comparing him to the young Jean-Luc Godard, with whom he shares a passing resemblance. It is a typically generous judgment on Varda’s part, speaking to her openness to finding new artistic collaborators like her former contemporaries in the New Wave.

Indeed, for a member of a film movement that famously celebrated the director as singular auteur, Varda here places a premium on collaboration, and not just with her official co-director. Faces Places is in many ways a work of collective art, with its subjects participating in the artistic process at every turn. It even begins with a lengthy, animated title scroll celebrating the film’s crowd-sourced funders: a kind of democratic gesture, placing the audience on an equal collaborative level as the artists.

When the film proper gets underway, this collaborative impulse becomes ever more clear. Wherever they stop, Varda and JR treat their subjects as equal partners, depicting them according to the concerns and circumstances of their own daily lives. In one early segment, the filmmakers visit Bruay-la-Buissière, a run-down coal town in the north of France, where they meet Jeanine, an elderly coal miner’s daughter who is the only soul still living in old workers’ housing that has been slated for destruction. As Varda interviews Jeanine and the town’s other residents—who share nostalgic anecdotes of its bygone industrial heyday, and melancholy memories of the scars their fathers brought home from work each day—JR prepares a larger-than-life tribute to Jeanine, imprinting a mural of her face on the outside of her home. It is a touching gesture, bringing grateful tears to the eyes of the woman whom Varda dubs “la Résistante” for her stubborn devotion to her hometown.

(Cohen Media Group)

Like so much of the film, though, the scene also conveys a sense of loss and impermanence. Varda and JR’s artistic project—to create tangible, tactile representations of their subjects in the places they inhabit—is not just a crowd-pleasing or feel-good exercise. It is also an attempt to pay tribute to lives and lifestyles that are rapidly receding into the past. Faces Places is thus a work of ethnography as much as iconography—a cinematic travelogue that seeks to preserve, however fleetingly, the remembrance of things past.

Not all of the film’s subjects are elderly, nor do they all express nostalgia for some bygone era. But the film’s choice of locations speaks to Varda’s appreciation of small-town French life, while hinting at the dislocations that globalization has brought to such communities. After the trip to coal country, the filmmakers take us to Chérence, a tiny country town where one farmer with a computerized tractor does work that once employed dozens. “I consider myself a passenger in the tractor,” he says as he climbs into the machine, presses a few buttons on a touch screen and watches it roam up and down his vast agricultural holdings. Marx might have had something to say about the alienation of this particular worker; Varda, for her part, muses in voiceover about the loneliness of his job.

The film has too light a touch to dwell ponderously on these sociopolitical insights; it is emphatically not some kind of ideological tract about left-behind workers in a globalized economy. (The aforementioned farmer, for his part, seems happy enough that technology makes his job easier.) But the film’s many faces and places do provide occasion to ponder the changing world of work in present-day France. In one small village, Varda interviews a mailman who fondly recalls the days when he made his rounds by bicycle rather than truck, stopping to socialize with neighbors along the way. In the southeastern town of Chateau-Arnoux-Saint-Auban, a grizzled factory worker happily tells the camera of his impending retirement after a long company career. In the northern port of Le Havre, Varda speaks with three dockworkers who proudly profess their membership in France’s leftist CGT union, long the scourge of aspiring labor market reformers. And the early segment in France’s northern rust belt earns much of its poignancy from Jeanine’s defiant devotion to a livelihood that is no longer sustainable. (It is little wonder that the province where she lives, Pas-de-Calais, is one of the two that went decisively for Marine Le Pen in the second round of this year’s presidential election.)

Underlying all these encounters is Varda’s abiding interest in France’s working classes and a certain nostalgia for the postwar economic model that sustained their way of life. The art that she and JR create pays tribute to these workers, emphasizing the individuality of each subject with idiosyncratic representations at their otherwise anonymous workplaces. The farmer gets a gigantic mural of himself on the face of his barn, looming over his fields like a Colossus. The day-shift and night-shift workers of a chemical plant are depicted on the factory walls, each group reaching out to the other in a gesture of solidarity. At the port of Le Havre, Varda and JR pay tribute to the dockworkers’ wives, imprinting their portraits on a tall stack of shipping containers.

These murals are undoubtedly impressive spectacles, and the filmmakers make full use of their widescreen canvas to convey their immensity. Whether they constitute serious art in their own right is another question, one that this good-natured film is not eager to ask. To the jaded viewer, Faces Places may at times verge on the cutesy, relying heavily on its likable personalities and the novelty of seeing a grande dame of world cinema snapping selfies and trading jokes with a hipster street artist. Those hoping for a critical examination of the world of graffiti and street art should look elsewhere; they could do worse than Banksy’s 2010 film Exit Through the Gift Shop, which offers a self-aware look at how ostensibly “transgressive” art can so easily be copied and commodified.

However one feels about the merits of JR’s art, though, Varda’s presence give this material a certain gravitas that it would otherwise lack. Varda’s mortality casts a shadow over the film’s surface cheeriness, rendering the project a swan song for a filmmaker bidding farewell to the faces and places that have shaped her own career. Along their journey, Varda and JR stop at the grave of Henri-Cartier Bresson, where Varda reminisces about the great photographer’s influence on her early career. She also revisits pictures she had taken in the 1950s of Guy Bourdin, another French master and former Varda collaborator. In one moving passage, Varda selects an old black-and-white photograph of Bourdin for JR to plaster on an old stone bunker on a Normandy beach. Returning the next day, she discovers that the waves have already washed the image off the stone—an accidental reminder from nature of the transience of art.

Perhaps the film’s most touching gesture comes near the end. Throughout Faces Places, Varda repeatedly references her failing vision, and at one point we see her receive eye surgery. As the film nears its conclusion, JR sits Varda down in his studio for a close-up photo shoot focusing on her eyes, before turning to her feet. The purpose becomes clear soon enough when we see that JR has blown up those images to imprint them on a cargo train — her eyes staring out from the surface of one cargo car, her toes wrapped around another. One of the onlookers at the station is bemused by the whole thing (“Why put toes on trains?”), but the sight provides one of the film’s loveliest images. “This train will go places you’ve never been,” JR tells Varda, as we watch her old, tired eyes and wrinkled feet recede into the distance, heading off to destination unknown.

There is one more train journey to be made before the film is over: to Rolle, Switzerland, where Varda and JR have arranged a rendezvous with Jean-Luc Godard. At 86 years old, Godard is, along with Varda, one of the last living filmmakers who made his name during the French New Wave. And if Varda is that movement’s lovable grandmother, Godard is its aloof elder statesman: a brilliant and innovative artist, but also a famously prickly and mercurial presence, a semi-recluse who eschews publicity even while continuing to release films well into his 80s.

As Varda chats with JR on the train en route to see Godard, she speaks of him like a long-lost friend, fondly recalling their work together while regretting that they have fallen out of touch. She also admits of both his virtues and eccentricities: “He is unpredictable…he is a solitary philosopher,” she tells JR, as if pre-emptively apologizing in the case that Godard does not show up. It is clear that Varda has a great deal emotionally invested in this encounter, perhaps the last chance to see an old friend and to introduce him to a new one. The film itself is rife with references to Godard. Varda compares the 1960s-era Godard to JR today, she shows the younger artist a clip of one of her earliest short films featuring Godard, and she re-creates a famous scene from his Band of Outsiders, in which a trio of youngsters make a mad dash through the halls of the Louvre. (In Varda’s tribute, it is JR pushing the sprightly Varda on a wheelchair through the museum.)

For all Varda’s obvious admiration for Godard and her eagerness to re-connect, alas, he does not show up. When Varda and JR arrive at his house, they find the doors locked and no one at home, with a cryptic note scrawled on the glass, referencing days of old when Godard used to dine with Varda and her late husband, the filmmaker Jacques Demy. Varda is visibly stung by the gesture, seeing Godard’s no-show as an insulting rebuke and his note as a deliberate attempt to inflict emotional pain. There is a real sadness to this ending, a sense that Godard is mocking Varda and denying her entry to his esteemed company. Varda trudges off, tears in her eyes, cursing Godard like an estranged sibling (“I still like you, you dirty rat.”)

Yet there is another way to read this ending: not so much the thoughtless gesture of an old crank as the deliberate, coded message of a withdrawn artist who prefers to communicate through cinema. JR seizes on this interpretation in the final scene, asking Varda: “Was he challenging the narrative structure of your film?” It may seem a stretch, but for the fact that Godard frequently converses with fellow filmmakers in just this sort of way. At its peak, the New Wave was a movement of directors commenting on and critiquing each other’s work in their own films; the Godard biographer Richard Brody, for instance, has written of the “tacit dialogue” that Godard kept up with his colleague François Truffaut in film after the former friends were no longer on speaking terms. The press-shy Godard likewise released a short, cryptic video tribute to the late Eric Rohmer when he died in 2010, belying Godard’s supposed estrangement from his New Wave contemporaries. Seen in that light, Godard’s conspicuous absence from the end of Faces Places may count not so much as as a slight against Varda as a pained confessional statement about his own inability to participate in her nostalgic project.

Whatever his intention, Godard’s snub does cast the film’s final moments in a melancholy light. He seems to deliberately reject Varda’s fondness for their past together, leaving her to commiserate with JR as they look out from the shores of Lake Geneva. Ironically, though, if Godard meant by his absence to challenge Varda’s film, he does so in a way that simultaneously reinforces its message and spirit. Yearning for her past but unable to return to it, Varda has no choice but to look forward alongside a new collaborator, in search of new faces and places to see.

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The Diplomat vs. the Lobbyist

One would think Paul Manafort’s current legal troubles would serve as a cautionary tale for Washington lobbyists about the perils of seeking to burnish the reputations of authoritarian political leaders from other lands. And yet these lobbyists persist, even to the point of working for sketchy Ukrainian politico-oligarchic interests with ties to Moscow. Still.

The latest example of this comes courtesy of former Florida Congressman Connie Mack IV, who recently organized a mock hearing in the Capitol, which was broadcast on NewsOne as if it was a real hearing of an imaginary “Congressional Committee on Financial Issues.” NewsOne is a Ukrainian television channel with links to RT, the propaganda outlet that was recently obliged to register as a foreign agent of the Russian government. NewsOne is owned entirely by one young, pro-Russian member of Ukraine’s legislature, who asserts to this day that there are no Russians in eastern Ukraine, and that Americans are fomenting the violence there. According to the only American journalist present at the fake hearing, J.P. Carroll of The Weekly Standard, its purpose was apparently to flog a year-old report produced by Sergiy Taruta, a Ukrainian billionaire engaged in a sustained campaign against the National Bank of Ukraine for supposed corruption under a head of the bank who resigned last April.

Mr. Mack’s client of record for this curious project is Interconnection Commerce S.A., although as Politico points out, it is “unclear who Interconnection Commerce S.A. represents. The firm lists an address in the British Virgin Islands and shows up in the Panama Papers leaks, but otherwise has no online presence.”

The things a former Congressperson has to do to earn a living! A mysterious client, visible only via the Panama Papers. A phony hearing broadcast on a Ukrainian TV channel with ties to Russians. Lordy!

For another foreign client fond of Putin and Russia, Mr. Mack is denouncing the excellent public diplomacy of a respected American diplomat. In an occasional newsletter to Congressional offices entitled “Hungary Insights,” Mr. Mack last week complained about David Kostelancik, the chargé d’affaires at the U.S. embassy in Budapest, “who unfairly criticized the Hungarian Government without fact.” Mack went on to say that “Kostelancik’s comments are just one more example of our State Department interfering in the internal affairs of an ally and fellow NATO member.”

The actual “fact” of the matter is the ongoing and widely documented crackdown on independent voices in Hungary by the increasingly authoritarian government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—who, like Vladimir Putin, is preparing the ground for an election in 2018 that will extend his rule. Part of that preparation is to silence critical voices in the media and civil society, and in the community of diplomats residing in Budapest.

Kostelancik, who stepped into the role of de facto ambassador on Inauguration Day last January, is following in the footsteps of a previous chargé in Budapest, André Goodfriend, who during his eighteen months as acting ambassador in 2013-2015 was comparably straightforward in pointing out the downward trajectory of Orbán’s misrule—and was widely seen as a hero by democratic-minded Hungarians.

But Connie Mack IV, great-grandson and namesake of the baseball manager famous for his integrity, doesn’t see it this way. Mr. Mack’s client here is Mr. Orbán himself, and in this case he is straightforward about it, noting on his newsletter that he is distributing his ‘insights’ on behalf of “the government of Hungary.” His contract (on file with the Department of Justice Foreign Agents Registration Office), is directly with the chief of staff to the prime minister, Janos Lazar, himself a frequent critic of American officials who have raised concerns in recent years about the steady elimination of checks and balances in the Hungarian political system.

Full disclosure: I was one of those officials raising concerns during my tenure at the State Department from 2010 to 2015. As a “political” appointee of President Obama (technically, we were termed “non-career” diplomats), I came to know and admire a great many of the professional diplomats who serve our country worldwide with skill and tact and, not infrequently, grace under fire. Kostelancik is such a one, and he is currently under some rhetorical fire from the government to whom he is accredited and its political allies—and its hired help in Washington.

Kostelancik’s measured and diplomatic remarks were delivered in a speech to Hungary’s National Association of Journalists in mid-October, where he said:

Men and women everywhere who cherish liberty know they must protect the freedom of the press. For this reason, I am not the first American official, and will not be the last, to speak in defense of a free press. It is fundamental to our foreign policy interests. […]

There are still independent and opposition media outlets here that are able to practice journalism with broad editorial freedom. This is a good thing. However, their numbers are dwindling, and they face challenges in the advertising market that the pro-government outlets do not. They face pressure and intimidation. As a result, fewer and fewer Hungarians are exposed to the robust debate and discussion that is so important – in fact fundamental – to a representative democracy.

There’s no doubt that the government of Viktor Orbán is engaged in a process that is systematically undercutting the country’s independent media outlets, all but a few of which have been shuttered or acquired by government-aligned actors in recent years and forced to censor their reporting, as Kostelancik duly noted in his speech. His remarks were also prompted by the fact that on September 5, 2017, the pro-government Hungarian internet portal “888.hu” and other government-aligned media sources published a list of eight journalists working for international media outlets—respected organizations that included Reuters, Bloomberg, and Politico. But these journalists were described as “foreign propagandists,” and said to be working for George Soros, the Hungarian-born American philanthropist against whom the Orbán government has launched a bizarre taxpayer-funded vilification campaign, which has included plastering the country with posters of Soros reminiscent of anti-Semitic tropes of the 1930s. Among the eight journalists named as enemies seeking to “discredit” Hungary was an American citizen resident in Hungary, who subsequently began to receive death threats.

As Kostelancik put it, “in a recent alarming development, some media outlets closely linked to the government published the names of individual journalists they characterized as threats to Hungary. This is dangerous to the individuals, and also, to the principles of a free, independent media.” This is what so enraged the government of Viktor Orbán, and activated his emissaries.

To recap: on behalf of Viktor Orbán, his registered foreign agent in Washington—a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives—has denounced a respected American diplomat for speaking up for professional journalism and against threats to the physical safety of an American citizen resident in Hungary.

But there is more. Two current Members of the House of Representatives have circulated to colleagues this month a draft letter to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson echoing the same complaint about Mr. Kostelancik. Representatives Andy Harris of Maryland and Dennis A. Ross of Florida are asking other legislators to join in their call that Kostelancik be reined in from what they describe as “unsubstantiated criticism of the Government of Hungary concerning ‘negative trends’ in the Orbán Administration’s dealing with the media.”

They also write: “We do not believe the comments made by Mr. Kostelancik are in line with our diplomatic objectives,” and then, a bit bizarrely, “We urge the State Department’s support for the sovereignty of the Hungarian Government.”

Consistent with Orbán’s pledge to turn Hungary into an “illiberal state,” his government has all but eliminated the judiciary as an independent, co-equal branch of government. It has serially harassed non-governmental organizations, recently enacting a law that targets civic organizations modeled on the infamous Russian ‘foreign agents’ legislation to discredit civic watchdog organizations. It has also descended into state-sponsored anti-Semitism, including an effort to rehabilitate fascist-aligned World War II-era figures, including the man responsible for the laws that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz.

It is the job of our diplomats to speak out about these things and to object to them, so that the wider public, in Hungary and other countries, knows that the United States can tell right from wrong, and that our society prefers governments that respect their own citizens and abide by the rule of law. Over the past few decades, it has become second nature for American diplomats to advocate routinely for democracy and human rights, and in defense of the most vulnerable communities and individuals. This is what gives the United States much of its influence and respect worldwide—the reputation we have developed as a country that cares about the principles we espouse for ourselves and others.

After most of a year during which the President has consistently denigrated the State Department, our diplomats and diplomacy itself (“I’m the only one that matters,” he told Laura Ingraham this month), a year in which the Secretary of State has appeared more concerned with org charts than foreign policy, it is time to celebrate the patriotic Americans who are serving on the front lines abroad—people like Dave Kostelancik, who speak for our nation’s values and interests, not for dollars and cents.

I believe the diplomat; not the lobbyist.

The post The Diplomat vs. the Lobbyist appeared first on The American Interest.

Finding the Founding Fathers

Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson

Gordon S. Wood

Penguin Press, 2017, 512pp., $35

Richard Aldous: Hello and welcome. My guest this week on The American Interest Podcast is Gordon Wood, professor of history at Brown and author of a new book, Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Gordon, welcome to the show.

Gordon Wood: Delighted to be here.

RA: Congratulations on the new book. Why Adams and Jefferson?

GW: Well, I had just finished editing three volumes of writings of John Adams for the Library of America. I was going to write something on Adams, because he fascinates me, but my editor said, “Well, why don’t you compare him to Jefferson?” The idea struck me as wise, and I’m glad I followed his advice, because I think by pitting the two men against each other you understand each of them much better.

RA: It does seem that in many ways the clue is in the title. These two were great friends, nevertheless, the arguments and the division between them in some ways cut right to the chase of what the American Revolution and the early Republic was actually about.

GW: Right. Well, they favored the Revolution, they were both radicals, but they divide on almost every other issue you can think of—on human nature, on the nature of society, on religion, on the conception of American exceptionalism. They differ on every single major issue, but they were friends. The only thing that united them was their deep and abiding hatred of Alexander Hamilton, which gave them something in common.

RA: I was very struck that, when you’re setting the scene at the beginning of the book, those differences extended even to the personal circumstances surrounding them. For example, you talk about how Jefferson sets himself up at Monticello, that he’s separate, that he’s reserved; whereas Adams you describe on his farmstead, living snugly in the community.

GW: Adams’s Massachusetts was a fairly egalitarian society, as compared to Virginia, which was a slave society of very rich planters with 40 percent of the population enslaved. The two societies are very, very different, and that’s borne out in the two men themselves. Adams’s background was middling, whereas Jefferson was born into wealth—his father left him many slaves and land, and his father-in-law left him more land and more slaves, so by the early 1770s he’s one of the wealthiest Virginians. That’s not Adams, whose wealth came mostly from his law practice. He was very successful, but he was certainly not one of the richest people in Massachusetts.

RA: That does seem to have longstanding consequences. Jefferson always had about him this kind of effortless ease that suggests his background; whereas Adams was a scrapper, and very often that leads to him having to make enemies in order to get on.

GW: That’s right, and there was this paradox where, in Virginia at the time, the leadership of the Republican party—which was the popular party and the ancestor of the present-day Democratic party—was led by slave-holding planters who never lost an election in their lives. They had no fear of democracy, because democracy had always been good to them. Whereas in Massachusetts, which was relatively egalitarian, the Federalist party had its base, and the Federalists were hierarchical and fearing of democracy. There’s something of a paradox in that, but I think it’s explicable given the circumstances of each of the different societies.

RA: Is that one of the reasons why Adams seems so much more of a visceral kind of a character? You talk about even their differences in the outset of the Revolution. That for Jefferson, the Revolution and any hatred of Great Britain was not really personal, it was primarily intellectual; but that for Adams it was very personal, as symbolized by the governor Thomas Hutchinson.

GW: That’s exactly right. Jefferson knew his enemies personally, and actually was close friends with the governor of Virginia. He played violin with him and had dinner parties with him. He had none of this sense of personal animosity that Adams had towards the British establishment.

RA: What about the early part of the relationship? Later on, Jefferson described himself as being in every way Adams’s junior, so there did seem to have been this quasi-disciple sort of a relationship early on during the Revolutionary years.

GW: I think that’s true. Jefferson came late to the Continental Congress. He missed the first Continental Congress in 1774, and he came in the fall of ’75 to the second Continental Congress. He was eight years younger than Adams. Adams had already been taking the lead in pushing for independence, and so when Jefferson arrived I think he saw himself as Adams’s protégé. He really deferred to Adams, which Adams loved, and in fact this was one of the reasons Adams took to him. There was an eight year difference, but I think it was more than that—Jefferson really did respect Adams for his leadership in pushing for the Revolution, and that continued. Jefferson continued to defer to him, even when they go abroad to Europe, and that, I think, gave Adams confidence in dealing with Jefferson. Adams respected Jefferson, but he also felt that he was his senior in some way, although eight years doesn’t seem a lot to scholars looking back.

RA: It seems that in those early years, the seeds of later resentments were sown: Adams did a lot of the grunt work during the lead-up to Declaration of Independence, and then in swanned Jefferson with his wonderful sense of style who took all the glory.

GW: That’s right. Adams was on about 24 committees, and he was chair of many of them, and so he probably was happy that Jefferson, this young squirt who just arrived, was assigned the task of writing the Declaration, of drafting it. Of course, neither of them had any idea in 1776 of how important the authorship of the Declaration would become. Later, Adams was deeply jealous of the acclaim that Jefferson received and the celebration of him as the author. If Adams had known that—if he could have foreseen that—he would’ve drafted it himself, but he simply passed what seemed to be a mundane task on to this junior man who wrote very well. Jefferson had a reputation for graceful prose and so it seemed natural, but in retrospect this was a terrible mistake for Adams. He rued the day that he did that.

RA: We think of Jefferson as the great stylist but one of the things that you bring out very nicely in the book is that Adams was, in his own way, a wonderful writer. His pen portraits in particular were very witty and colorful, and he really did give us a sense of events and circumstances.

GW: Right. What he entered into his diary—his observations and letters to intimate friends—could be really colorful. But when he came to write for the public—his defense of the Constitutions and his theoretical works—his writings were really turgid and heavy. He was much better when he was talking to himself in his diary or writing to a very close friend. Then, he could be facetious and humorous and colorful, but he didn’t have a great pen when it comes to public documents. They were too heavy and he just simply was unable to have that charm that he had in a private letter.

RA: You mentioned the time when they were both abroad representing America. The two families really were incredibly close, there. You talk about how, for example, they were sometimes looking after each other’s children. In many ways this seemed to be the happiest time for the two men, when they were still on the crest of a wave and their intellectual differences had yet to emerge.

GW: That’s right. Jefferson was, of course, a widower. He had his daughters there, but he became a member of the Adams family. As you say, he would take John Quincy, Adams’s eldest son, to a symphony, or to a museum. He became a member of the family, and I think he experienced family life in a way that he couldn’t have if he had been alone just with his daughters. It wouldn’t have been the same. He actually flirted with Abigail—he bought her presents. When she went off to London with her husband to be minister to England, he corresponded with her and flirted with her. He said at one point, “I was going to buy a little a little statue of Venus for your dining room, but I realized that two Venuses in the dining room would be too much.” I think it was a sign of how intimate their relationship was, which makes the break all the sadder.

RA: Although the break would go on to be political—both sectional and party-political—it was also, at a fundamental level, intellectual. You bring out how this divide was in particular about the nature of the people, the character of the people, and what representation should and could be.

GW: Right, Adams was cynical, and had a sour view of human nature. Jefferson was the inveterate optimist. He was an 18th century liberal, which in those days meant minimal government. The fear of government is what drove liberals like Thomas Paine or William Godwin. They were fearful of government, and were very different from, in American terms, the modern liberal. Of course, the big issue they differed on was the French Revolution. Adams, from the beginning, took Edmund Burke’s stand and condemned Paine, and felt that this French revolution was disaster—that it would go nowhere.

Jefferson was the true believer, and a true radical. At one point during the terror in France his successor as minister and protégé wrote to him and said, “Mr. Jefferson, many of your former aristocratic friends are losing their heads in the guillotine, by the thousands.” Jefferson passed it off, and said, “Well, that’s what you have to expect from a revolution. If only an Adam and Eve were left alive and left free, it would be worth it.” That kind of statement is what lead Conor Cruise O’Brien—the Irish historian and journalist who studied and wrote a book in about Jefferson—to say he’s the Pol Pot of the 18th century (Pol Pot being of course the Cambodian leader who killed millions of people on behalf of the communist cause). Now, Jefferson would never have implemented that, but he believed that. That’s how he thought about the Republican cause.

Adams, of course, would have none of it. Adams did not believe America had any special character or quality. In his mind, Americans were just as vicious, just as sinful, and just as corrupt as other people. Adams took on almost every American myth, and every American dream, including the notion that all men are created equal. Jefferson articulated that notion, and it’s widely accepted. I still think that is the basis for the American creed, and it means that all the differences that occur come from experience. For Jefferson, it’s all nurture, not nature, but for Adams it’s all nature, not nurture. Adams says to Jefferson, “I went to a foundling home in France and I saw babies four days old, and they were all unequal. Some were smart, some were dumb, some were beautiful, and some were ugly. It’s right there from birth and you can’t do anything about it.” That’s taking on the American dream, and the American myth.

RA: You talk at the end of the book about how Jefferson himself actually began to have doubts about these ideas—about the essential sociability of man and that idea society will sustain itself. As the Republic develops, particularly in the midst of Jacksonian democracy, Jefferson himself did start to wonder whether perhaps some of his ideas were flawed.

GW: Right, I think because of Jefferson’s fear about what’s happening with slavery—the Missouri crisis of 1819-20 was terrifying to him—he became very defensive about the South. Some of his language was indistinguishable from the southern fire-eaters of the 1840s and ’50s. He was really frightened about what the federal government might do about slavery. This was a sad moment for him. Everything seemed to be going awry, and he lost some of his confidence that he had earlier on. Of course, all of these founders who lived into the early 19th century died disillusioned with what they had wrought. The politics of the early republic were much too democratic, much too wild, much too corrupt.

Adams was, personally, happy. Though he had some problems with his children, he got to see his son John Quincy become president of the United States in 1824, two years before he died. On the slavery issue, which they both realize is the threat to the union, I think Adams felt that he was, as we say, on the right side of history. He could see that it was doomed—that sooner or later it would disappear—and that gave him a feeling of confidence that he hadn’t had earlier. So there was a kind of reversal of status, in a way, although Adams always realizes that he’s never going to be in Jefferson’s celebrity league.

At one point Adams asked Jefferson how many letters he got in a year. Jefferson responded “Oh, 2,000 and something.” Adams was taken aback, because only received 200 and something, so he knew that he was never going to be in Jefferson’s league. Jefferson was an intellectual superstar, and an enlightenment superstar. He was corresponding with the czar of Russia, with Alexander Humboldt, with world figures. Adams was much more parochial in his correspondence.

RA: That’s one of the things that Lin-Manuel Miranda got so right in the musical Hamilton: this sense that Jefferson was something of a rock star, not just in America but literally around the world.

GW: That’s right. It seems platonic, as you had an intellectual who’s president of the United States. That really made Adams jealous. He just knew that he wasn’t in that league.

RA: Do you think that the mood about Jefferson is changing today? There are debates about slavery, and the recent conversation about the misuse of power and sexual harassment, and so on—do those affect our view of him? For example, one of the moments that really brought me up short that I didn’t know about was his attitude towards Haiti and Toussaint Louverture, and specifically the moment when, as president, he sided with France to reinstate slavery and wouldn’t recognize the new Republic of Haiti.

GW: Jefferson is in for a bad time now. If you judge him as a man, he was deeply flawed because he was on the wrong side of the issue of slavery. As a young man, he took a very courageous stand, because very few people in Virginia were calling for the end of slavery. He did, as a young man, take that kind of stand. But by the time he was an old man he threw up his hands and said it would have to be left to the future somehow, but he himself was unwilling to do anything. That will hurt him with historians. I think his words, however, transcend his personality and his actions. “All men are created equal.” Even though he didn’t believe it, in terms of black Africans, those words have resonated and been picked up by subsequent people, including Abraham Lincoln, and have been used quite effectively to drive almost every progressive movement in American history. Jefferson’s words transcend him, and somehow that gives him something, although he himself was deeply flawed.

RA: As I got towards the end of the book, I felt that much of what Adams was saying seemed very much to speak to our time. For example, his very famous saying about facts being stubborn things, and his famous constitutional contribution about never grant power without a check. These seem to be things that are very relevant to 21st century America.

GW: I think that’s true. He made important contributions to American constitutionalism. Separation of powers was really his creation. But his view of human nature was so cynical and so sour that it’s hard to have him be a spokesman for the nation, so to speak, in the way Jefferson is. Adams was just too realistic, if you will. But I find that people that I talk with like Adams, even though he was saying things that really run counter to the American myth, or to the American creed. So maybe that says something about where America is right now, and where it’s going.

RA: It’s difficult to think of another American president who effectively said exceptionalism was nonsense.

GW: That’s right. I know of no other American president who would’ve dared say that, or has dared say it. He was, in that respect, unique. He took it on right at the outset—there is no special providence for the United States, we’re not a special people. At one point President Obama tried to say that, “well, every nation’s special.” But by the time he was into his second term, he had fallen into the usual notion that we have a special responsibility and that we are exceptional—and not exceptional in the way other nations are. He really fell into line with other presidents, indistinguishable from Ronald Reagan in that respect. But Adams was different, and never admitted that we had a special role to play.

That’s what has given Jefferson the importance in our history, through Lincoln, of course, who said “all honor to Jefferson.” He made Jefferson a central figure in the founding.

RA: Here in the United States, the founding fathers are revered, and this is an important point, isn’t it? Because, as Tocqueville says, the success of democracy does actually depend in part on the quality of the people who get elected. When you read the correspondence between Jefferson and Adams, particularly at the end of their life, you see that they really were an astonishing pair, weren’t they?

GW: Oh yes, yes. I mean, very learned. They knew Latin and Greek and read in Latin and Greek. They were extraordinarily intellectual, and were deep readers. We have not had presidents like that ever since, really. Nobody has had quite the intellectual equipment that they had.

RA: And it’s clear that there is this cynicism with Adams, but at the heart of everything, he was effectively a realist.

GW: Yes, oh yes. I suppose cynicism and realism may go together. Maybe that says something about me, but I do think that’s true. When we talk about “all men are created equal”—Jefferson didn’t know about DNA or genes, but I think we’re going to find more and more evidence that we’re not created equal, we’re created unequal. But it’s very important for Americans to believe that everyone is created equal and that the differences are due to experience. Therefore, education becomes very, very compelling for Americans. Adams came to doubt that, saying something along the lines of “well, education’s important, but it’s not really going to make much difference.” That’s too realistic for most Americans. We cling to this belief that education is crucial. I think that’s wise, because education is important, but Adams was really calling it as it is in a way that’s kind of terrifying.

RA: Finally, I wonder about lessons for today. Many people have drawn comparisons between our times and the age of Jackson, so I wonder what do Jefferson and Adams have to say to us today?

GW: Well I think that that’s a good point, because people were deeply disillusioned back then. Both Adams and Jefferson felt that the world was going to hell in a hand basket by the 1820s. Of course, they were frightened of the break up of the union, with good reason, but they were also frightened by democracy—it was much too populist. They were worried about all these banks issuing paper money. It was a wild time in the economy, both in the north and in the south, and it was scary to many people. Then someone like Martin Van Buren came along, who was the first president who got elected who hadn’t done anything. He had never made a great speech, he hadn’t won any battles, he hadn’t done anything, but he was a superb politician. And he said, “well, these old men, these founders, were aristocrats. They didn’t like democracy.” There was a moment there where the founders weren’t all that keen.

And it was Lincoln who came in and said, “no, no, they founders were important.” He was the one who reversed that. Through the antebellum period, when people referred to the founders, they meant the people who settled in the 17th century—John Smith, William Bradford, and William Penn, those were the founders. It was Lincoln who turned things around and made the Revolutionary leaders the founding fathers, so that’s how we think of them now.

Still, there was a period there where the founders really weren’t in line with the democracy that had developed. It was a wild democratic period. Some of the people getting elected—they weren’t like Donald Trump, for example, but they were not the first class intellects that they had in the Revolutionary era. You had many people who were just plain politicians.

RA: The book is Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. It’s written by my guest, Gordon Wood, and published by Penguin Press. It really is such a delight to read, and could hardly be more timely. But for now, Gordon, congratulations again, and thanks for joining us on The American Interest Podcast.

GW: Thank you, my pleasure.

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The Bottomless Cynicism of Saudi Diplomacy

A Middle Eastern country unleashes a powerful aerial assault on a neighboring territory held by Islamists, and imposes a total blockade in response to missile fire directed toward its cities, creating the world’s largest open-air prison.

Israel and the Gaza Strip? No, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

The Saudi-led coalition tightened its blockade of Yemen after Iranian-backed Houthi rebels fired a ballistic missile toward Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport on November 4, 2017; they had fired rockets at the Kingdom before, and not all were intercepted. (Saudi Arabia has just announced, three weeks on, that it will reopen Sanaa airport to humanitarian flights.) The Saudi offensive against the Houthis, who overran much of Yemen in 2015, has to date killed more than 10,000 people—Saudi-led air strikes, according to the UN, being the “leading cause.” The war has also facilitated the world’s largest cholera epidemic in many decades, infecting more than 900,000 people. The lives of 17 million Yemenis now depend on humanitarian aid.

This is the context in which the Saudi-led war coalition has closed all land, sea, and air ports in Yemen, including to international assistance. The World Health Organization warns that seven million people, including two million severely malnourished children, are on the brink of famine. Indeed, the UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs warned recently that Yemen would suffer “the largest famine the world has seen for many decades, with millions of victims” if the blockade is not lifted immediately.

The tragedy in Yemen has starkly exposed the bottomless cynicism of Saudi statecraft, which claims the mantle of humanitarianism at international institutions to advance anti-humanitarian policies.

Note first that during the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict Saudi authorities dismissed Israel’s arguments of self-defense against Hamas rocket fire, accusing it of “shameful war crimes” in the Gaza Strip. “Don’t be fooled when Israel says that it is defending itself against rocket attacks being launched by Palestinians against it,” Saudi Arabia’s UN envoy told the Security Council. “The reality is that Israel has a defense system against these rockets and has efficiently repelled most of the rockets directed at it.”

Fast-forward to 2017: Saudi Arabian leaders escalated the war against the Houthi rebels despite possessing a missile-defense system that efficiently repelled the attack on its airport. Its earlier arguments that missile-defense capacities mitigate the right of self-defence did not seem to have troubled its conscience.

For an even starker demonstration of Saudi Arabia’s duplicity, consider the latest UN General Assembly resolution it sponsored and introduced condemning the Assad regime in Syria. The country that cites the Quran as its constitution calls for a political transition for Syria toward a “democratic and pluralistic state”; the country that is only now planning to allow women to drive urges the “full and effective participation of women” in the Syrian leadership; and the country whose military coalition was blacklisted by the UN Secretariat for wartime violations against children expresses its “profound indignation” at the deaths of children in Syria. Riyadh is leveraging key norms of the Western international order to advance geopolitical interests in its backyard while subverting those selfsame values.

Saudi Arabia, indeed, has a track record of working through institutions of the liberal world order to advance its own highly illiberal interests. This past year, Riyadh compel the UN Secretariat—allegedly by threatening to cut off funding—to remove the Saudi-led coalition from the Children and Armed Conflict report blacklist. As Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon accused Riyadh of exerting “unacceptable” pressure, describing the omission as “one of the most painful and difficult decisions” he had ever made. Two years ago, Saudi pressure killed off plans for an independent commission of inquiry into human rights abuses in Yemen. That idea is back on the agenda, but Riyadh is warning nations that opposing an alternative Saudi resolution “would not be considered a friendly gesture.”

It is unsurprising that Saudi Arabia, while systematically flouting the norms of international institutions, uses those institutions to advance its national interests. What is perhaps surprising is that well-meaning people, aware that that unsavory regimes use moral authority of the United Nations to advance unsavory interests, do not allow that fact to dent the moral esteem with which they hold the United Nations.

The UN is an international body, not a supranational one. It is a creature of the member-states that make it up, and its rhetorical output vividly reflects the fact that a significant majority of those states are not law-governed democracies. To the extent the UN reaches decisions owing to diplomatic pressure from states that do not practice what they preach, the moral authority of that body should never be taken for granted. A sober look at the hypocrisy of states that claim to speak for certain values should encourage skepticism when it comes to ceding the benefit of the doubt to UN’s word for anything. If the example of Saudi diplomacy doesn’t underscore the point even for the relatively dull-witted, it may be that nothing can.

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