Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 127

Disinformation and the Decay of Nations

Discord is a niche social media platform used by the video gaming community to organize strategies for competing in massive multiplayer online worlds.  It has also been used by the extreme Right to plan international revolution. Extremist discussions on Discord are hard to penetrate. During September’s German election, for example, anyone wanting to join the Infokrieg or Reconquista Germanica groups was vetted through several layers of interviews and social media background checks to weed out spies from true believers. Researchers from the counter-extremism NGO Institute for Strategic Dialogue managed to infiltrate the sites however, and, as their report (which is to be released next week) details, they discovered an impressive, international psy-ops operation aimed at helping the right-wing Alternative Fūr Deutschland (AfD) make it into the Bundestag for the first time.

The 5,000 members of Reconquista Germanica, for example, were split into military-style groups, with dedicated chat-rooms managing the “radar station”,  “daily orders” and “meme workshops.”  There is even a chat-room to prepare for “Day X”, the full breakdown of public order. Tactics were swapped between European and U.S. actors, with lessons passed on from every election in the United States, France, and Holland. Members use special bots to spam the feeds of centrist or leftist politicians. They are given instructions on how to create fake accounts and tweet from multiple places simultaneously to hijack hashtags, and how to create parody accounts to confuse their opponents. Daily briefings used sophisticated Twitter analytics to measure success and instruct how to attack mainstream parties. Ultimately groups like Reconquista Germanica helped the AfD dominate social media discussion. On September 9, for example, seven of the hashtags defined by Reconquista reached the top 20 trending hashtags in Germany. The party eventually made it into Bundestag with an unprecedented 13% of the vote.

What is so striking about this, and other far-right operations, argue the ISD authors, is how social media has rebooted the far Right by allowing previously atomized groups to come together across borders. A significant player in this new Nationalist Internationale is Russia. As a monitoring project at the London School of Economics, Arena Programme, showed, German-language Kremlin media house Sputnik was strongly biased towards the AfD in the run-up to the election. In July and August, Sputnik featured the AfD more than any other party, the only German political group to be treated positively. This material was then retweeted by scores of pro-AfD accounts.

Meanwhile, on alternative social media platforms like Gab.ai, far-right memes, conspiracy theories and Kremlin sources form a (mis)information ecology cut off from the rest of society. The significance of the relationship is less about how big the Kremlin media audience is (compared to mainstream media it is tiny), but how deeply it is embedded in a mutually beneficial relationship with the new Right. This symbiosis in turn allows the Kremlin to push its own agendas in this increasingly influential community. In the process of reporting on and unmasking a bot network based in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod spreading the sort of supposedly amusing AfD memes developed in groups like Reconquista Germanica, Buzfeed interviewed its owner; he said that the AfD did not need to pay for his network’s services, as it was for “mutual benefit.”

Rather than a game of puppeteers and marionettes, the relationship between the Russian regime and the far Right is closer to a dance—what Anton Shekhovtsov calls a “Tango Noir” in his impressive and important recent book-length study of the subject. Shekhovtsov traces the relationship back to the 1930s, when the Kremlin cooperated with the more socialist end of the National Socialists. There were contacts during the Cold War too, with the Soviets aiding and abetting neo-Nazi groups in West Germany so it could point and accuse the country of being the inheritors of Hiter’s Germany. The dance quickened after the end of the Cold War, when a whole range of Russian actors competed to bring the far Right into its networks. Shekhovtsov elegantly lays out the modus operandi of the relationship. The far Right offers the Kremlin its services as “election monitors” whenever Moscow needs an illegal referendum to legitimize its imperial adventures; in return the far Right get the occasional bit of funding and a regular supply of Kremlin media support.

What’s clear from Shekhovtsov’s study is that for the Kremlin, this relationship is less about ideological closeness and more about usefulness. At the same time as it works with the far Right, it also builds relationships with the far Left and international financial elites—the far Right’s sworn enemies. Moscow’s domestic politics, which stress the multi-ethnic, multi-religious nature of Russia, and where Islamist politicians are among Putin’s closest allies, would be an anathema to the Western far Right. Russian media regulary boast of defeating fascism in Ukraine in order to gin up support for their invasion with a domestic audience—all while supporting actual fascists in the West.

This multi-faced policy is enhanced by the fractured nature of digital and social media: the Kremlin can target different audiences with different messages. On a smaller scale, the leaders of the new Nationalist Internationale are doing the same to unite their own fractured movement. Think of a set of kaleidoscopic fractals opening up into another set of fractals as you approach it. When the ISD authors took a microscope to the planning behind the recent “Unite the Right” riots in Charlottesville, they found the organizers used different messages to reach out to different groups, a disparate bunch which included, inter alia, anti-Marxists, anti-Islamic bigots, ethnic nationalists, and disgruntled cranky culture warriors.

As one thinks about strategies to counter this threat, it’s important to keep these cleavages in mind. There are many divisions to explore. U.S. alt-right activists indulge in anti-Semitism, which Austrian identitarians are still worried to touch; the misogyny of the younger alt-right is unpopular among the older extreme Right; cultural racists disagree with biological racists; and nationalist libertarians are unlikely to agree with national socialists for long.

The Kremlin, as we have noted, is ideologically pantheistic. And therein lies its weakness. In order to exploit it, policy-makers, media and civil society will have to work across borders. In Germany, for instance, countering the AfD will mean not merely thinking about the local context which enabled them, but also understanding and undermining the emerging Nationalist Internationale which supports them. Extreme nationalists have thus far used the transnational potential of online networks more effectively than the “global elites” they attack.

This in turn reveals another paradox: the cohesion of nations as we know them has thus far depended on a limited amount of media which contribute towards an often quarrelsome but at the end of the day mutual public space. The new digital ultra-nationalists, however, capitalize on the sprawl of new media echo chambers, which spread like digital pinmold across the decaying fruit of nations, decomposing the wholeness of the very national entities they claim to champion. In dealing with the Nationalist Internationale, therefore, we are going to have to reimagine how we engage with each other in a modern media space where concepts we have previously taken for granted, such as “truth” and “authority”, are increasingly difficult to agree upon. The fight against “disinformation” is also a fight to ensure that deliberative democracy can continue to thrive into the twenty-first century. The first step is to tap into the data tools which the extreme nationalists are using so effectively: given the knowledge data can give us about what drives and motivates publics, how can we use it to rebuild public space rather than inspire hatred?

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0-for-October

“You’ll get over it,” they say. “It’s just a game, after all,” they console. “There’s always next year; we’ll get ’em next year,” they ebulliate. It’s all been said to Twins’, Rockies’, Red Sox’, Indians’, Diamondbacks’, and Washington Nationals fans during this Major League baseball playoff season, and it will be said to the fans of three more teams before it’s all over in just a few weeks’ time. These kinds of shocks are not the end of the world, to be sure. They’re not like 9/11 or Donald Trump becoming President of the United States. But they’re not the quotidian cuticle annoyance either.

Losses in big games are usually presumed to be hardest on younger fans—kids in that age zone after toy superheroes but before puberty. Maybe so, the reasoning being that sports hero worship has yet to be displaced, or joined, in such young souls by weightier concerns; and, for some, dreams of working into high-level competition, even the Majors, have yet to be quashed. But I’ll tell you straight-up: It’s just as hard on some of us older fans, especially us long-suffering types who have waited for baseball autumn glory to match that of the stunning foliage we are gifted with each season by the Author of all things.

So in recent times the misery scuttlebutt has invariably come ’round to those most frustrated of franchises. It focused until last season on the Chicago Cubs, and all true baseball fans felt their pain. Some of us had memorized the late Steve Goodman’s brilliant and hilarious ode, “A Dying Cubs Fan’s Last Request,” particularly those of us with relatives or good friends in Chicago. We all remembered that hapless fan who reached out over the left-field seats at Wrigley, just past third base, to foil a valiant Cubs left-fielder’s effort to bring victory to the Windy City. (He’s since been forgiven; the Cubs even showed a touch of class by awarding him a 2016 World Series ring.)

So it’s not just that needy teams lose big games; it’s how they lose big games that matters, ways that stick in the craw all the way to the next spring training, and often long after. Just think of the 2011 Texas Rangers, twice a single strike away from victory—and, somehow, they still lost. That sort of thing leaves a mark. No, more like a wound that only a championship will heal.

The misery beacon has focused some on the Indians, too, since the Indians have not won a World Series since 1954. So the 2016 World Series was a no-lose proposition in that regard: Somebody had to win, and one kind of drought or another was going to end. It did, for the Cubs. Goodman smiled from the great Beyond. But the 2017 Indians managed to pull off an amazing 22-game win streak, gulling their fans into thinking they had peaked at just the right time. The purpose of that, it is now clear, was to make the pain of losing to the odious wild-card Yankees that much more unbearable.

Before the Cubs (and Indians) we focused some years back on long-suffering Red Sox fans, thought to have been afflicted by Babe Ruth’s curse. Yes, mysticism has its place in baseball and so, for that matter, does sex: Who can forget Susan Sarandon’s role in Bull Durham as rector of the Baseball Church of God? But that focus has diffused since the Red Sox came up big a few years ago, redeeming decades of misery by humiliating their archenemy, the same New York Yankees, before going on to win it all in four.

Personally I bathed in that wonderment, not because I ever was a Red Sox fan, but because I hate and have always hated the New York Yankees—of which more below. The Red Sox have been too good since to feel bad for, and worse, their string of successes has turned a lot of their fans into “entitled” types, people who haughtily expect success and who turn on their heroes and their managers with vinegar and tobacco spit juice if they don’t deliver. They have become nearly as repugnant as Yankees fans, such that the next season they crap out will be occasion for mild joy in my schadenfreudian heart.

Bad teams do not always summon sympathy, any more than bad weather is cause for surprise or excitement. Take the Philadelphia Phillies, the baseball franchise that has lost more games than any other. The Phillies have been good in fairly recent years; they even won a World Series in 2008 (and in 1980). They also lost one in spectacular fashion in 1993. So they’ve done the cycle of losing, winning, and then losing again, such that this year’s last place finish actually restores one’s faith in the predictability of at least something. These days that can count for a lot.

The problem is that in this retinue of storied misery almost no one mentions the heart-stabbing, soul-searing, brain-lobotomizing Washington Nationals. And the reason, in part, is that misery is reckoned by franchises rather than by cities. This is not right, although the reason for the error is obvious: The two most often go together. So it flosses my frontal cortex every time I heard someone moan and groan about those poor Cleveland Indians.

Since 1954—OK, that’s a long time ago. Eisenhower was President; Bob Feller was great; the cars were very cool, not least since you could tell them apart. But what about Washington?

Yes, the original franchise Washington Senators (they had earlier on been called the Washington Nationals) left town after the 1960 season to become the Minnesota Twins, and that has been an admirable and successful franchise by and large despite the disadvantage of its being stuck in a small media market with small revenues. That same year a new “expansion” franchise came to Washington, called by the same name—the Senators—which is a source of much confusion for minor-league quality fans. That franchise won nothing and left in 1971 to become the Texas Rangers.

There then began an excruciating period of 34 years during which there was no Major League team in the nation’s capital. The blame for this outrage falls in no small part on a single man: Peter Angelos, the owner of the Baltimore Orioles, who figured that keeping a team out of Washington would help his nearby Orioles financially. Despite this Snidely Whiplash-quality plot, lots of Washington baseball fans turned into Orioles fans, since driving up to Camden Yards was the closest way to a Major League stadium. I’m sorry: These people can never be forgiven.

The current Nationals team came to Washington via Montreal, in time for the 2005 season. When you watch games you can hear the announcers talk about records with the Expos being the historical referent. This bothers me. Who here in Washington ever gave a flapping fart about the Montreal Expos? No one I ever met.

So, since 1954? Suck it up, Cleveland: There hasn’t been a World Series champion in Washington since 1924! Coolidge was President; Walter Johnson was better than Bob Feller; and the cars all pretty much looked alike then as they do now, but for very different reasons.

And this Cleveland-plus-thirty-years drought is very personal. I was born in Washington. Both my parents were born in Washington, in 1905 and 1907, respectively. All nine of my father’s siblings and all six of my mother’s siblings were born in Washington, and they were all Washington Senators fans. Griffith Stadium was a second home to my Uncle Myron, and why not? His actual home was almost as crowded. Myron even kept vigil outside the hospital where the great Big Train lay dying of cancer on December 10, 1946. Afterwards, he used to go to Rock Creek Cemetery, where Johnson and his wife Hazel are buried, and put messages in the cracks of the tombstone as if it were the Wailing Wall.

I have to admit I’ve gone there several times on the yahrzeit, too. I left messages; others left old mitts with letters stuffed inside, and old baseballs with messages written between the stitches. One time I went the day after a windstorm had sent a tree limb crashing down onto the tombstone, knocking it askew. I immediately got in touch with the family to let them know.

My father was 19 when the Senators won the 1924 World Series. You think I did not hear about this when I was a kid? I loved going to Griffith Stadium with my dad when I was a boy. I can still remember the intoxicating smell of the bread baking at the Bond Bread factory nearby. All those years when I was coming up in the 1950s the Yankees used to beat the living tar out of the Senators, and it hurt my boyish feelings. It also built character, I think; I guess that remains to be seen. When the White Sox knocked off the Yankees in 1959, I was in diamond delirium.

That was about when I first saw the film Damn Yankees, with Tab Hunter as Joe Hardy, Gwen Verdon as Lola, and Ray Walston (yes, later our favorite Martian) as Applegate (a.k.a. the Devil in this brilliant Faustian rip-off). To say that, at age eight, I could identify with the emotional charge in the film is perhaps the understatement of post-Mesozoic time.

Yes, the Nats dropped that last game to the Cubs 9-8, and it was a pretty interesting game. Arguably the best pitcher, and certainly one of the best, in baseball messed up in relief. One the better defensive catchers in the game made three stunning mistakes in that straight-from-hell fourth inning: a passed ball right between the feet on a strikeout that would have ended the inning with no damage; a wild throw on retrieving the passed ball that never should have been thrown at all; and a catcher’s interference call that turned into a run that made the different—but in a one-run game lots of things can be said post hoc to have made the difference. The left fielder lost a ball in the lights that led to a run—another made-the-difference datum. And yes, the team’s great one, its first baseman, struck out not once or twice, but three times, with two outs and runners in scoring position.

But real fans, by which I mean people who know the game from having seriously played the game, saw something else, too. In that calamitous inning the big blow was a double grounded hard between the third-base line and the third baseman that scored two Cub runs. Credit to the hitter is due for squaring up a good pitch. But if you look closely at the film, something I noticed at the time but the announcers did not remark upon, you’ll see the Nats’ third baseman standing straight up, his knees not bent and his body not in proper crouch position, just as the pitcher let loose with the pitch. Had this third baseman been in proper defensive position, as all infielders are trained to be, he very likely would have been able to at least knock the ball down diving to his right, preventing it from rolling into and rattling around in the dark dungeon of the left field corner.

Cosmic payback justice, perhaps? In the deciding seventh game of the 1924 Series, the Senators won because not one, but two, fairly routine grounders to third hit a pebble and bounced past New York Giants third baseman Freddy Lindstrom. Bucky Harris hit the first grounder, which scored two to tie the game in the bottom of the ninth inning. Earl McNeely hit the second one, which won the game in the bottom of the 13th.

Third base could be the navel of the universe. Baseball can make you believe in the Devil, if not also in God.

Baseball is a lot like history, too. Things happen. Things fail to happen. There are counterfactuals. You cannot really go back and untangle reality into discrete causes. You can learn a lot about logic from baseball, and also a lot about pain.

The Senators, my beloved Senators, left Washington after the 1960 season ended in early September of that year, and my beloved mother left this life in October, a victim of breast cancer. I was nine years old, and an only-child. Ever since the pain of these two close-rolling and close-roiling events has mingled in strange and maddening ways in my soul. The result is that when the Nats continue their 0-for-October streak, as they did most recently on October 13, now for the fourth time, it precedes by only a few days my mother’s yahrzeit. One thing has nothing to do with the other, of course. Except that, for me, it does.

Nowadays this time of the year also marks the thickest overlay between the end of the baseball season and the long-since-begun professional football season. Here is another irritation: Baseball, the most sublime and philosophical of games, infinite in time and space, has been vanquished as the national past-time by the gladitorial brutalities of football, a game modeled after turf warfare. It’s certainly a sign of the times, and not a good sign. A colleague wrote a book some years back bemoaning the militarization of American society, and at the time I thought the book a fairly vast exaggeration. I still think it’s an exaggeration, but maybe less vast a one.

Baseball’s core philosophy is a deeply comforting one: “Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains.” Football, meanwhile, as some wag (probably George Will) said, combines two of the worst propensities of American culture: violence and committee meetings. There is no “Football Church of God,” and there cannot be.

What else is there to say? Here in Washington we’re at 93 years and counting.

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The Key to Kurz’s Victory

The European Union is turning into something of a political science laboratory these days, with each country offering varying experiments and test cases in how to handle a resurgence of populism. The average citizen might be worried, but it’s a gold mine for the analyst.

Consider Austria. After winning the parliamentary elections on Sunday, Sebastian Kurz has become, at 31, the youngest head of government in the world. His rise is astonishing. A young conservative activist elected to parliament at 27, he was then appointed Foreign Affairs and Social Integration Minister before taking over the ÖVP and leading it to electoral victory. He did so in part through a personal rebranding effort: renaming the People’s Party as the “Sebastian Kurz List” for the election, changing the party’s colors, and claiming the mantle of a “New People’s Party.” At a time of global backlash against incumbent elites, his fresh face and promise of renewal were a large part of his appeal.

There’s more to Kurz, however, than his youth and novelty alone. The key to his success has been his ability to capture some of the themes of the far Right without, so far, stooping to toxic nativism or anti-European rhetoric.

At first glance, this claim may surprise, given the prevailing narrative about Austria’s new leader. Kurz is well known for his tough rhetoric on immigration, his authorship of Austria’s 2015 Islam law and his support for banning the niqab. Moreover, he is poised to put an end to a tradition of Grand Coalitions between the ÖVP and the center-left SPÖ, instead forming a coalition with the far-right FPÖ, which finished a close third on Sunday with 26% of the vote. FPÖ was founded by a former SS officer and has a history of toxic nationalism. As Alina Polyakova has noted, it is openly pro-Putin and even signed a cooperation agreement with his party, United Russia.

But labeling Kurz himself as far-right or a populist is not only wrong; it misses the point. As minister and as a candidate, Kurz has successfully stolen votes from FPÖ by offering tough language but pragmatic solutions to some of the far Right’s key issues, especially immigration. And he seems to have better instincts for navigating this political terrain than more seasoned politicos.

Much like Emmanuel Macron in France, Kurz came of age politically as the rise of populism became the defining challenge for mainstream parties. Both leaders have seen their share of populist scares: in 2014, a few months before Macron was appointed France’s economics minister, the National Front won the European Parliament election, its first electoral triumph at a national level. And in Austria’s re-run election last December, FPÖ’s Norbert Hofer garnered 46% in the second round of the presidential election. In both cases, the European Union’s myriad crises and failures (especially on migration) allowed the far Right’s rhetoric on Islam, immigration and the EU to take hold among a much larger audience than usual.

How should other parties react? The trade-offs are well-known: if mainstream parties ignore or deny voter concerns over identity and immigration, they risk leaving a monopoly to populists. Chasing after populists, on the other hand, can let extremists shape the agenda, tainting mainstream parties with nativism. Both strategies are self-defeating. As Jean-Marie Le Pen often said to mock center-right efforts to co-opt his message, voters will always end up preferring the original to the copy.

Macron, who unlike Kurz is not a conservative, chose to explicitly shape his political narrative as a direct liberal and pro-EU alternative to the National Front. As he indicated in a recent Der Spiegel interview, Macron’s approach was “to say, these people are my true enemies and to engage them in battle.” But such an approach is not without risk. By bringing the center-left and center-right together, it leaves the extremes as the only true opposition.

Kurz has chosen a different tack, seeking to address the far Right’s concerns while steering clear of overt Euroskepticism or racism. So far, it seems to be a winning formula: surveys have shown the FPÖ would have had a stronger showing with another ÖVP candidate. Kurz’s approach may yet prove another model for other European center-right politicians who want to defeat extremists.

This is not to say that his path forward will be an easy one. Unlike Macron, whose political persona rests on the advocacy of an “open” France over a “closed” one, Kurz is a conservative, operating within a traditional right-left divide. In that context, he will have to fight both the Left’s multicultural discourse (which has cost it dearly with voters) and the far Right’s simplistic rhetoric. The incumbent chancellor, Christian Kern, has been unable, and unwilling, to tackle the migration issue, leaving a wide space to the right.

So far, Kurz has been able to thread the needle, emerging as a strong voice against the EU’s refugee policy while offering proposals that are a far cry from hardline demands to revert back to national borders and abandon the Schengen Area. Despite being accused (often rightly) of copying the FPÖ’s rhetoric, Kurz advocates European solutions, and has called for the creation of EU “battle groups” to secure the EU’s external borders. He has also been a strong advocate of closing down the Balkan route. In both of these policies, Kurz seems to grasp an important political reality: if mainstream conservatives want to rally voters behind the European Union’s internal open borders, they need to prove the EU can at least secure its external borders. Kurz likewise recognizes that national governments must do their part in creating a viable assimilation strategy; hence, his 50-point plan to ensure the integration of asylum seekers, with a special emphasis on language and education.

Kurz was also the inspiration behind the 2015 reform to Austria’s 1912 “Islam law” regulating Muslim worship. The reform is often dubbed “controversial”, yet it was also praised as a potential example to emulate by Institut Montaigne, a French centrist free-market think tank that is close to Macron, in its 2016 report “A French Islam is Possible.”  The report argues that the 2015 law—the product of years of debates and working groups—effectively balances strong legal protections for Muslims with the promotion of a strictly endogenous practice. Hence, the law forbids foreign funding to mosques, creates a theological training center at the University of Vienna to ensure imams speak German, and provides a strict framework to ensure the primacy of Austrian law over religious requirements. At the same time, the law officially recognizes Muslims’ right to worship, protects religious holidays, provides legal status to religious cemeteries, and calls for the respect of halal dietary prescriptions in public institutions. The objective was to promote and secure the status of Austrian Muslims while rolling back extremism and foreign influence.

The same can be said of Kurz’s support for a ban on the niqab and burka. Kurz justified the proposed ban by saying “a full body veil is hindering integration”, adding the burka was “not a religious symbol but a symbol for a counter-society.” Such a ban would not fit with American mores, but Austria is hardly the first country to pass such a measure, which is broadly supported by European public opinion. France, Bulgaria, and Belgium already forbid the niqab; other countries such as the Netherlands and Switzerland have passed restrictive measures in certain contexts. Angela Merkel has supported a partial burka ban in Germany. To be sure, such measures are supported by extremists uncomfortable with any expression of Islam in European societies. But the bans also receive support from progressives and feminists who are understandably troubled by the requirement that women should hide in public spaces. Only a small minority of women are affected by such measures, which aim to discourage fringe practices while allowing the majority to practice peacefully. Contrary to the far Right, Kurz doesn’t seem to deny the evolution of his society, but wants to find a balance with the concerns of the population at large.

Populists are forcing mainstream parties to grapple with themes of borders, identity, and security that they have too conveniently ignored for decades. Technical disputes over the management of the welfare state can no longer be the prime concern of European debate; politics are back with a vengeance on a continent that thought it could transcend them. And though strategies to address this challenge will vary, moral grandstanding or denial won’t cut it.

Austria’s young chancellor walks a fine line. European conservatives like David Cameron know the risks of trying to seize some of the populist agenda. The former British Prime Minister was right to think that the promise of a referendum on EU membership would help rein in UKIP and his own party’s Euroskeptics at the 2015 general election. He won re-election handily. A year later, he was out of office after losing the said referendum. By co-opting some populist ideas in an attempt to tame the beast, he instead let it take over.

Ruling with FPÖ will likewise be a challenge. It is unclear if Kurz will have the ideological spine or the political agility to avoid letting extremists shape his agenda, on issues like the EU or relations with Russia.  Does he represent a new generation of European conservatives, bridging the gap between political leaders and their publics? Or will he end up just another electoral opportunist running after the far Right? Time will tell—and the rest of Europe will be watching.

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A New Start for Austria?

The October 15 parliamentary elections in Austria have produced a remarkable outcome. After 15 years the conservative People’s Party (ÖVP) returned to number one with 31.6 percent of the vote (62 seats). The Social Democrats came in second, with some 27 percent (52 seats), just barely outpolling the right-wing populist Freedom Party (FPÖ), which won 26 percent (51 seats). Meanwhile, the Green Party electorate followed the advice of their socialist friends, voting for the Social Democrats instead in order to block an ÖVP-Freedom Party coalition. They failed in that goal and in the process committed political suicide: The Green Party will not be represented in the Austrian Parliament—only a tiny green splinter group that broke ranks with the party leadership just before the elections. And the business oriented “Neos” once again achieved more than the 4 percent minimum required for entering Parliament.

That, in a nutshell, is what happened according to the votes and the numbers. But what really happened beyond the numbers, and what will happen next?

After a very dirty campaign, for which the Social Democrats bear the main responsibility, the young and charismatic leader of the ÖVP, Sebastian Kurz, prevailed. He is the clear winner of the elections, in particular if one remembers that some two years ago his party polled less than 20 percent of the vote. According to Austrian tradition, Kurz will receive the mandate from the Federal President to form a new government, and it is fairly obvious what he will do with that mandate. After the rows during the election campaign, and in view of the stalemate within the previous government formed by the two parties, there will be no new “Great Coalition” with the Social Democrats, but instead most likely an ÖVP-FPÖ coalition.

That is no surprise. What is at least a bit surprising, however, is that Kurz managed to portray himself as a challenger against a government in which he himself served as Foreign Minister. In a sense, he pulled a Macron: a young party insider who transforms himself through smoke and spin into a virtual outsider. Kurz did not jump totally outside his party as Macron did, but he transformed the ÖVP into a movement accented heavily by his own personality. He concentrated the campaign on himself as a young and outspoken leader, and at 31 years of age he will soon be the youngest head of government in Europe. For that he secured the approval of the various old hands of his party who grudgingly accepted their loss of influence (at least so far), because they realized that without a dramatic change their party would soon be out of business—a fate that has befallen many other establishment conservative parties in Europe. He also appealed to the many non-voters of the previous election, and to those of his party who had voted for the Freedom Party last time around.

The Social Democrats, who had feared finishing third behind the Freedom Party, succeeded in a last-ditch mobilizing effort that prevented disaster. At the end of the day, they did not lose votes despite the scandals connected to their dirty campaigning and the serious infighting between the left and right wings of the party, leading to the resignation of their Secretary General just two weeks before the elections.

The Freedom Party improved their score (by 5.5 percent), although not as much as they hoped, and not quite enough to gain second place. And the reason is that Kurz coopted the Freedom Party’s plank, but without their xenophobic rhetoric, increasing its take by 7.6 percent over the time before. In short, Kurz was able to do what fellow conservative Angela Merkel failed to do in Germany some weeks earlier; the Chancellor lost some 7.5 percent of the CDU’s support, yet still managed to remain at the head of the leading party.

Like Merkel, Kurz realized that the main concern of his fellow citizens was immigration: Austria had accepted some 90,000 immigrants in 2015, more than 1 percent of its population. For the United States this would amount proportionally to some four million immigrants in a single year. In Germany the “socialdemocratization” of the CDU/CSU under Merkel, which could not be reversed enough or fast enough before the election, left space that the right-wing AfD eagerly filled. Kurz managed to position his middle-of-the-road party farther to the right (and did it more quickly), appealing to many of the voters that the party had lost to the FPÖ in the past. That difference in right-leaning flexibility explains the ÖVP’s success in Austria (as well as that of Mark Rutte’s People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy [VVD] in the Netherlands back in mid-March) compared to the CDU’s poorer showing in Germany.

What will happen now?

The most probable outcome by far is a coalition of the Conservatives with the Freedom Party. However, a Social Democrat/Freedom Party coalition cannot be totally excluded. After all, Christian Kern, the current Social-Democratic leader, had broken the long-standing rule that his party would never form a coalition with the Freedom Party. On a regional level this had already been the case. If Kern actually enters a coalition with the FPÖ in order to stay in power, a split among the Social Democrats will be inevitable.

Another possibility that might dilute the impact of the Freedom Party in a possible coalition would be to include the pro-business Neos. This could apply to both options: a Social Democrat/Freedom Party coalition or the more likely Conservative/Freedom Party coalition. That would also reduce the dilemma that the Freedom Party faces: They lack enough qualified personnel capable of leading government agencies (already proven in 2000 in a similar coalition under Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel).

The new government, however it is composed, follows a coalition that has been unable to get much done. There is widespread support for action on long overdue reforms of Austria’s economic and social system, of its pension arrangements, its education system, and more. But there is no firm consensus on what the reforms should be. The new government therefore faces major tasks in its five-year tenure, and it will be judged by its results.

Whatever the outcome of the forthcoming coalition negotiations, no major change in Austria’s foreign policy or position with respect to the European Union is in store. Not even the Freedom Party wants to leave the Union; it only wishes to be free to scrutinize it, so it claims.

Austria will continue to abide by the moral and legal standards of the European Union. Kurz is also on record as showing zero tolerance for any form of anti-Semitism, and he appears to be utterly sincere in this. If the Freedom Party tests his meddle here too boldly, it could put an ÖVP-FPÖ coalition at risk. At the same time, Austrian President Alexander van der Bellen has committed himself to keeping a close eye on candidates for ministerial posts, and he has the constitutional power to refuse a candidate who does not espouse European values.

Sunday’s elections might well be a starting point for overdue reforms in Austria, and a higher Austrian profile within the European Union. If the government under Sebastian Kurz succeeds in calming communitarian concerns over immigration, he may set the high-water mark of Austria’s less benign political traditions. That would be all to the good.

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Checks and Balances

Since the beginning of the presidency of Donald J. Trump, Americans have been undergoing a worrisome experiment in constitutional government.

The Founding Fathers designed the American Constitution precisely to deal with the possibility of someone like Donald Trump becoming President. They were deeply versed in the history of the Roman Republic and its fall, and were skeptical that democratic publics would always elect wise and qualified leaders. The complex system of checks and balances that constitute our system was designed to prevent Caesarism, that is, the excessive concentration of power in any one part of the government. Julius Caesar, we should remember, undermined the Republic precisely because he was popular and charismatic—the general who had conquered Gaul. The U.S. system of shared powers would guard against tyranny, even if it slowed down and reduced the chances of concerted action.

Donald Trump came into office having little sense of how the American system was supposed to work. He appears to have believed that he could run the U.S. government as he ran his own family business, that is, through a series of executive orders implemented by a small circle of trusted family advisers. Trump did not understand the primacy given to Congress by the Constitution, and the need to cultivate Congress if he was to get anything done. His understanding of the rule of law was limited to knowledge of how to use the law to promote his own interests, for example by forcing contractors to sue him if they were to receive the payment they were due. But the idea that the executive itself should be under the law was foreign to him. Hence his firing of the FBI’s James Comey for pursuing the investigation into his campaign’s ties with Russia, and his apparent belief that Attorney General Jeff Sessions should work to shield him from legal proceedings.

Like all of the new populist nationalists who have appeared around the world in recent years, Trump has sought to use his democratic legitimacy, such as it was, to discredit any institution that stood in the way of his personal power. This included the entire U.S. intelligence community (for not exonerating either Russia or himself of wrongdoing), the entire mainstream media (who he said were “enemies of the American people”), judges who stayed his immigration orders, and most recently members of his own Republican Party who had failed to implement his agenda. We sometimes speak of a “dictator’s handbook” that would-be authoritarian leaders follow. There is no handbook: individual leaders don’t start out wanting to be authoritarian; they simply want to accumulate personal power and be perceived as successful, and it comes naturally to them to attack those institutions that get in their way.

At this point, nine months into his presidency, the system of checks and balances appears to be working quite well: The courts continue resist the slapdash immigration orders drafted by the White House; the intelligence community’s views of Russia are largely accepted, even by the Republicans in Congress who have voted to constrain the President on this issue; and the “failing” mainstream media is doing better than ever by providing a counterweight to the Trump Administration. The big items on Trump’s agenda—repealing the Affordable Care Act, building a border wall, tax reform, and a huge infrastructure package—have not materialized due to Trump’s inability to bridge the deep divisions within the Republican majorities in both houses of Congress.

The biggest constraint on the Trump presidency has been, however, Trump’s own lack of experience and, frankly, psychological neediness. Institutional checks in a political system are not, after all, like physical barriers to action. They work only to the extent that the people who constitute the system agree to abide by them, and this in turn is a function of politics. Trump could have scored some big early successes if he were sufficiently popular. Had he started his presidency with a concerted effort to broaden his political base, for example by starting with a large infrastructure initiative, this might have happened. Ronald Reagan became a transformative President precisely because he was able to cut into the Democrats’ base, working with Democratic House leader Tip O’Neil to pass his tax cut agenda.

Instead, Trump did just the opposite. Rather than trying to win over some of those among the majority of Americans who did not vote for him, he retreated into strident rallies in red states which appealed only to the converted. The early months of his presidency saw him largely abandoning his populist agenda and embracing the Tea Party wing of his own party. Rather than starting with infrastructure, his first big legislative initiative was the repeal of Obamacare, something that threatened to take benefits away from those very working-class voters who were key supporters last November. As a result, his first-year popularity sank dramatically in the early months of his presidency to the lowest of any President in recent memory.

The reasons for this self-defeating behavior would appear to lie in the President’s own temperament and personality. Speaking to crowds of adoring supporters seems to fulfill a deep psychological need, even as it impedes his long-term agenda. If he is criticized, Trump’s first instinct is to punch back as hard as he can, regardless of whether this serves his long-term interests. The country was on the verge of forgetting about his ties to Russia when he fired James Comey last May; as a result, he saddled himself with a full-blown special prosecutor.

At the end of his first summer, Trump appears to have finally realized the dead end he was in. He has made a stunning pivot to cooperate with Democratic Party leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi on a short-term agreement to lift the debt ceiling, and on a possible bipartisan approach to congressional action on DACA (the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, which would defer prosecution of children brought illegally to the United States). This bipartisanship threatened to break the logjam that crippled Obama’s ability to act after 2010, even as it has dismayed his conservative base.

It remains to be seen, however, how committed Trump is to such cooperation over the longer run, and how the Democrats will react. No sooner had he made this pivot that he returned to his old bad habits, attacking the NFL and undercutting his own Secretary of State. He has retreated from bipartisanship by loading any DACA legislation with conditions to satisfy his anti-immigrant base, like funding for the border wall. With so much  behavior offensive to the Democrats under his belt, it is not clear he will be able to overcome the gulf of distrust he has created.

The effects of a longer-term Trumpian turn towards bipartisanship would have an important impact on the political system as a whole. I characterized the American system as a vetocracy, meaning, government by veto, where well-organized and richly endowed interest groups could block initiatives they didn’t like. I was happy enough that these veto points existed once Trump was elected and sought to implement his conservative agenda. But the spectacle of a country that cannot act even when a single party is in control of all the major branches of government is not a happy one. Persistent government paralysis is what breeds demands for a strongman leader, and played a major part in support for Trump himself as someone who could “drain the swamp.”

An example of this dysfunction is DACA itself. For the past two decades, a centrist coalition has existed that potentially would support comprehensive immigration reform. The basis of a compromise is straightforward: In return for stronger efforts to enforce existing immigration laws (with perhaps some tweaks to levels and qualifications for entry into the country), the 11 million undocumented aliens already in the country—and not just their children, as under DACA—would have to be given a path to citizenship. Such an outcome would be both just and realistic. But on both sides of this question, there are committed groups that cannot abide either “amnesty” or serious enforcement efforts like employer sanctions. As a result, the large mass of undocumented aliens remains in a limbo, fearful of deportation but aware that the country is unlikely to force all of them out.

DACA should have been the easiest part of this package to pass through Congress, since all but a few extremely hard-line anti-immigration advocates really want to eject children who did not come voluntarily and have grown up in the United States. But Congress has been unable to act on this due to vetocracy, and as a result President Obama sought to make DACA law through an executive order. The constitutionality of this move is highly questionable: prosecutorial discretion was never meant to apply to a class of people numbering in the many hundreds of thousands. If ever there was a question that should have been resolved by Congress, DACA was it; but Congress has been paralyzed on this and countless other issues. As in many Latin American presidential systems, deadlock in the legislature drove Obama to resort to unilateral executive action. So Trump was actually right both to support the substance of DACA while enjoining Congress to actually act on it.

The normal functioning of our check-and-balance system has been dependent on some degree of cooperation between the parties. It has seized up in recent years as the parties have become more polarized and ideological. There may be institutional remedies for this, like moving to an alternative vote or some other electoral system more friendly to third parties as Lee Drutman and Larry Diamond have been advocating. But in the absence of such large structural reforms, the only way to make the government work is to fashion a centrist coalition that cuts across party lines. If Donald Trump could accomplish this, he would lay the groundwork for an important presidency. Whether he is temperamentally capable of such a turn and savvy enough to see the opportunity in front of him is another question.

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A Relaunch

The American Interest first published on September 1, 2005 amidst the crisis triggered by the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the controversy over the subsequent war it provoked. It was clear that there was a huge gulf of misunderstanding between Americans and their counterparts in other democratic countries, to the point that many non-Americans felt they did not recognize the country they had worked with and counted on for many decades. The same could be said for many Americans looking at the world beyond their shores. Our magazine sought to explain America to the world, and the world to Americans.

We face another such watershed today, after the 2016 Brexit votes and the election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States. The entire framework within which the United States operated since 1945—the “liberal international order” enjoining economic openness and political solidarity among the world’s liberal democracies—has been questioned. These challenges come not just from authoritarian powers like China and Russia, but from within established democracies themselves, including the United States. What attacks the liberal order abroad challenges it at home, as well. American society itself is polarized as never before, with the axis of confrontation shifting from the ideological poles of the 20th century to new ones defined increasingly by identity, nation, and religion.

In light of these changes, the original mission of the magazine in its print and online editions remains as vital as ever: to analyze America in the world, not just its politics but, as our original statement of purpose noted, “the society from which those politics arise—including America’s literature, music and art, as well as its values, public beliefs and his historical imagination.” But we are re-launching The American Interest, both as a magazine and a web site, as American society changes before our eyes, along with technology, demographics, globalization, and ideas.

The American Interest was never conceived as simply a foreign policy journal, and in its re-launch we hope to pay even closer attention to American politics and society. In the coming weeks and months we will be adding a series of new columnists and writers as regular contributors.

In recent years, media success has centered on staking out a unique niche, usually on the basis of taking a more extreme or shriller position than the existing voices. But we remain resolutely committed to evidence-based arguments and open contestation over values. Viable democracies require deliberation and disagreement. It is our hope that re-establishing a vital center will reconnect America with itself, and America with the world as we confronts similar challenges.

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The Fall of Kirkuk: Made in Iran

Iraqi forces took Kirkuk city from the Kurds this week with hardly a shot fired. Twenty-two Kurdish fighters were killed in the sporadic and disorganized resistance, while seven Iraqi soldiers also lost their lives. It is a remarkable setback for the Kurds, who just a few weeks ago held an independence referendum. The loss of Kirkuk especially, given the city’s vast oil resources, lessens the likelihood that an independent state will emerge from the Kurdish Regional Government area in northern Iraq.

Now the Iraqi forces are rolling into other areas conquered by the Kurdish Regional Government in the course of the war against ISIS, including Sinjar city, close to the border with Syria. Meanwhile, an exodus of Kurdish civilians is streaming in the direction of Erbil and Suleymaniya cities. Kurdish forces are withdrawing from the areas of Makhmur and Khanaqin as well. Yezidi civilians, who bore the brunt of the ISIS assault in the summer of 2014, are again uncertain of their fates as they wait for the arrival of Iraqi forces.

The capture of Kirkuk recalls other swift and decisive assertions of control that the Middle East has witnessed in recent years. Perhaps the closest parallel might be the Hezbollah takeover of west Beirut in May-June 2008. Then, too, a pro-Western element (the March 14 movement) sought to assert its sovereignty and independent decision-making capabilities. It had many friends in the West who overestimated its strength and capacity to resist pressure. And in the Lebanese case as well, a sudden, forceful move by an Iranian client swiftly (and, it seems, permanently) reset the balance of power, demonstrating to the pro-Western element that it was subordinate and that further resistance would be fruitless.

There is, of course, a further reason to note the similarity between Kirkuk in October 2017 and Beirut in 2008. Namely that in both cases, the faction that drove its point home through the judicious use of political maneuvering and the sudden application of force was a client of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. In Lebanon, the client was Hezbollah, the prototype of the IRGC-sponsored political-military organizations that Iran is now using to exert its influence across a huge swathe of the Middle East. In Iraq, the equivalent force is the PMU (Popular Mobilization Units) or Hashd al-Shaabi. These fighters spearheaded the entry into Kirkuk, working in close coordination with the Iraqi army’s 9th Armored Division, the Emergency Response Unit of the Federal Police, and the U.S.-trained counterterrorism service.

The Shi‘a militias of the PMU were raised in June 2014, following a fatwa from renowned Iraqi Shi‘a cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. At that time, ISIS was heading for Baghdad, hence the need for the rapid mobilization of auxiliary fighters. The PMU’s forces now consist of about120,000 fighters in total. And while dozens of militias are associated with it, a handful of larger formations form its central pillars. The three most important groups are all pro-Iranian and directly connected to the Revolutionary Guards. These are Ktaeb Hizballah, headed by Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis; Asaib Ahl al-Haq, headed by Qais al-Khazali; and the Badr Organization, commanded by Hadi al-Ameri. All three of these leaders are closely linked to Qods Force Commander General Qassem Suleimani. They are, as one region-based diplomat put it, “Iran’s proconsuls” in Iraq.

Al-Ameri, al-Muhandis, and Suleimani himself were all present in Kirkuk on October 15 and16, laying the groundwork for the takeover of the city. Badr and Ahl al-Haq fighters also played a prominent role in the incursion into the city. However, they were not the only Iran-linked element in Kirkuk. The Kurdish retreat appears to have been the product of a deal between the Iraqi central government and the Kurdish party that dominates in Kirkuk, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. According to eyewitness reports, the PUK’s peshmerga forces abandoned their positions, rendering a coherent defense of the city impossible.

The PUK-Iran relationship dates back 25 years, to the days when both were engaged against the Saddam Hussein regime in Baghdad. Due to this alliance, the PUK only reluctantly supported the Kurdish independence referendum of September 25. Indeed, the fractured nature of Kurdish politics, the absence of a single, united military force, and the differing international alliances and orientations of the two main parties in the KRG—namely the Kurdish Democratic Party of President Masoud Barzani and the PUK—have long constituted a central vulnerability of the Kurdish system in northern Iraq. We appear to have witnessed a masterful exploitation of this vulnerability, a sudden and decisive turning of the screw.

Details have emerged in the Kurdish media of a supposed agreement reached between Bafel Talabani, eldest son of former PUK leader and Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, and Hadi al-Ameri of the PMU. (Some sources claim that it was al-Muhandis, not al-Ameri, who represented the PMU.) The deal would establish a new authority in the Halabja-Sulaymaniyah-Kirkuk area, to be jointly administered by the Iraqi government and the “Kurds” (or rather, the PUK) for an undefined period. The federal government would manage the oil wells of Kirkuk and other strategic locations in the city, while also overseeing the public-sector payroll.

The establishment of such a client or puppet authority would put paid to any hopes for Kurdish self-determination in the near future. The deal was intended to split Iraqi Kurdish politics in two, and make impossible any further moves toward secession. The latter cause is vehemently opposed by Iran, which wants to control Iraq from Baghdad and maintain its unfettered access to the Levant and the Mediterranean Sea.

This deal was only feasible because of smart investments that Iran made in the politics of both Iraqi Shi‘a Arabs and Iraqi Kurds during previous decades, plus the judicious mixing of political and military force, an art in which the Iranians excel. Indeed, Iran’s influence in Iraq, both political and military, goes beyond the PMU and the PUK. The Federal Police, another of the forces involved in the march on Kirkuk, is controlled by the Interior Ministry. The Interior Minister, meanwhile, is one Qasim al-Araji—a representative of the Badr Organization, Hadi-Al Ameri’s group, which sits in the government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.  And of course, Abadi’s own party, Dawa, is a Shi‘a Islamist outfit with strong ties to Iran.

So the long-developed, mostly unseen influence that Iran exerts on both Iraqi and Kurdish political and military life is powerful indeed. All we are seeing this week is its abrupt activation.

As Andrew Bernard noted in a TAI article earlier this week, President Trump’s response on the clashes was to assert that the United States was “not taking sides, but we don’t like the fact that they’re clashing.” This is in effect to accede to the Iranian ascendancy in Iran, given the discrepancy in power between the sides and the deep Iranian and IRGC involvement with Baghdad. Such a stance does not, to put it mildly, tally with the President’s condemnation in his speech this past week of Iran’s “continuing aggression in the Middle East.” It remains to be seen if anything of real consequence in policy terms will emerge from the President’s stated views.  For the moment, at least, the gap between word and deed seems glaring.

Meanwhile, the advance of the Shi‘a militias and their Iraqi allies is continuing. The demoralized KRG has abandoned positions further west. In Sinjar, Khanaqin, Makhmur, Gwer and other sites on the Ninawah Plain, the Iraqis are pushing forward. The intention appears to be to take back the entirety of the Plain, where the peshmerga of the ruling KDP, not the PUK, were dominant. Yet they too have so far retreated without resistance. It is not clear at present how far the PMU and the Iraqis intend to go, or at what point the peshmerga will make a stand.

It is a black day for the Kurds, from every point of view. The fall of Kirkuk confirms the extent to which Iraq today is an Iranian-controlled satrapy. And it vividly demonstrates the currently unrivaled efficacy of the Iranian methods of revolutionary and political warfare, as practiced by IRGC throughout the Arab world.

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To Whom Respect Is Due

The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

By Matthew B. Crawford

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015

For those of us working in the world of political ideas, Matthew B. Crawford can be a somewhat intimidating writer to engage with. That’s because Crawford once inhabited our world only to consciously reject it as corrupt, since which time he has run a motorcycle repair shop and, on the side, written two thought-provoking philosophical books, the best-selling Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009) and The World Beyond Your Head (2015).

Both works argue for the value of working with things, of going out into the world and manipulating matter in the quest of making something worthy. While the work lives of white-collar workers (and those in the ideas business most of all) are awash in meaningless words, the world of things possesses a solid honesty Crawford says we all yearn for: either you have made the motorcycle run again, or you haven’t. Verbal acrobatics won’t get the job done where real mastery of a craft is instead required. Acquiring that takes practice, and, Crawford argues in his most recent book, the discipline to submit to a master whose skill is greater than your own.

Crawford isn’t shy about mixing it up with the giants of Western political theory; in The World Beyond Your Head, he picks fights with Hobbes and Kant, among others. But he styles the book as lying outside of contemporary political debates. Many pages are given over to the finer points of video poker game design, motorcycle-riding technique, and pipe organ making, each cross-pollinated with philosophical discussion—to mixed, but mostly good, effect. Still, it is worth trying to connect some of Crawford’s discussions to our contemporary political scene.

When Crawford looks over modern Western societies, the dominant trends he detects are atomization, “flattening” homogenization, and a desire to eradicate the particular from all things in favor of universal and nominally equality-promoting knowledge. A paradigmatic example he offers is the “Muzak” piped into public spaces by the directive of unseen corporate overlords, which seeks to fill space with a bland inoffensiveness rather than allow some present person’s choices to risk offending others’ tastes. Institutions pursuing universality thus end up propagating a certain kind of inhumanity.

This kind of worry resonates deeply with the work of conservative theorists like Roger Scruton (or, in an earlier generation, James Burnham). Whereas Crawford’s focus is mostly on work and home life, Scruton’s work draws attention to the potential for universalist rhetoric to dissolve the ties that bind politically. Contemporary liberal elites are so preoccupied by the dangers of xenophobia that they come to indulge in the opposite irrational fear, oikophobia, the reflexive repudiation of one’s home and inheritance. In doing so, they make it impossible to ground politics in any real lived experience; it must be all grand philosophy, all the time.

In both cases, what modernity has missed is the importance of face-to-face contact as a transmission mechanism; one is even tempted to say the “laying on of hands.” Whether it is how-to knowledge of a craft, or the kind of in-this-thing-together trust on which politics must run, Crawford and Scruton both insist on the importance of real encounters between people. They cringe at the idea that our civilization can sustain itself through book learning alone, and see our lives as becoming perilously over-mediated through formulaic and impersonal means.

Crawford and Scruton are both decidedly of the Right, but it is worth noting that analogous concerns have also grown up on the Left. Even as we have accumulated material goods, thick ties have eroded and been replaced with superficial electronic ones. The place of the skilled worker (and his genuine representative, the old-fashioned union boss) has shrunk, while the manipulators of words and symbols are ascendant. And so the tech industry is seen as a depersonalizing, job-killing monster, and we get endless online angst about the financialization of everything, or the rise of windbag management consultants who don’t really know anything.

The emphasis on face-to-face contact casts an interesting light onto the two groups that have best managed to retain trust in our suspicious age: hard scientists and the military. Crawford thinks the natural sciences have surreptitiously avoided the very universalization that the official scientific method seems to prescribe. Following Karl Polanyi, he is impressed with the way that the real practice of science is shot through with personal trust and the authority of creative masters, rather than any antiseptic obedience to a formula for generating knowledge. That leaves him contemptuous of the idea that “To be rational is to think for oneself.” That is a nice democratic ideal, Crawford recognizes, but in practice it blinds us to the ways that authority is central to real accomplishment, and the ways that the real practice of science continues to honor this truth.

The military, meanwhile, relies on relations of strict authority more than any other modern institution. Every participant, up and down the chain of command, is put in a face-to-face relationship with someone unambiguously designated as their superior. Although the military has fallen in love with PowerPoints just as much as management consultants have, the nature of its work and its organizational structure nevertheless ground it in reality.

The question that this raises—one that Crawford only hints at obliquely—is how far this kind of thinking can take us if we think about reforming the structure of the modern world. On an interpersonal level, might we really see a mass rejection of intermediation-by-Facebook in favor of direct interpersonal reaction? It would take a kind of modern cultural temperance movement, but stranger things have happened. Politically, the question is what kind of face-to-face relations we might cultivate in order to make people feel more trusting in and less alienated from their own governments. Ironically, advocates of increased political participation today tend to be deeply infatuated with social media employed on behalf of government; if there is one political implication to be drawn from The World Beyond Your Head, it is that these are not the stuff that real trust or real accomplishment are made of.

But figuring out what political mediation ought to look like with this lesson in mind remains a riddle.  Who, exactly, could work as connectors? Many elites seem to wish to sidestep the question by simply empowering technocrats, thereby drawing on trust where it still exists—but in practice they end up assuming far more trust over a far wider range of issues than is actually present. The 19th century had its answers, which fit into its social structure: urban political machines, close-knit communities of legal elites (in England, the Inns of Court). It’s hard to see how those answers could be transplantable to the present. Emulating the military’s strict lines of hierarchy likewise seems clearly impossible to harmonize with our egalitarian instincts.

Crawford’s book offers genuinely fresh ways to think about these problems. If he comes up with any convincing answers, let’s hope he whole-heartedly reembraces the world of political ideas.

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Trump’s Re-Election Strategy

Given the unusually high noise-to-signal ratio in the President’s voluminous tweets and erratic actions, it is often hard to determine with any certainty whether Donald Trump is on a random walk through history or actually has some plan in mind.   Even those who perceive method in Trump’s chaos believe that his goals are largely tactical, not strategic. Trump, they assure us, is really just trying to keep the press off guard and to distract people from dwelling too much on Republican legislative failures to date.

There is another possibility. Trump is acting in manner that suggests that he hopes to repeat his 2016 feat of winning the Electoral College but not the popular vote.  What he has said and done to date is consistent with that strategic premise. The key elements of Trump’s agenda: stoke the populist base, split white from nonwhite Democrats and Independents, and take advantage of a favorable political geography.  Since the President’s popularity hovers at or just under 40 percent, a purely Electoral College strategy may at this point be his only option.

Electoral College victories are all about political geography. Today, Democrats tend to be highly concentrated in urban areas where disadvantaged nonwhites can find affordable housing and the liberal educated class can find Uber, new economy jobs, and nice coffee shops. Affluent Republicans are more efficiently distributed across suburban and rural areas.  Consequently, running up Democratic vote margins in outraged liberal enclaves like New York and California may drive up the total vote, but it will not necessarily result in an Electoral College victory for the next Democratic presidential candidate. No matter the vote margin in California, the state will still only have 55 electors to give.

The other part of Trump’s strategy, to which he is well suited by temperament, is to divide and conquer potential opponents. Step one: arouse the loyal white base by taking on NFL athletes over whether they kneel or stand during the national anthem, or by pursuing tough policies on immigration and trade.  Keep the reluctant establishment Republicans in line with promises of tax reform, regulatory relief, and more Gorsuchs in their future. Meanwhile, divide the Democrats by inflaming the far Left and shifting public attention away from the indefensible (for example, a neo-Nazi march) and toward issues that might peel a few voters from their ranks (for example, the destruction of public monuments honoring controversial past leaders).

Political scientists have been tracking the various distortions of the Electoral College for some time.  We know, for instance, that swing states get more visits by Presidential candidates and more campaign activity generally than the rest of the country.  We know that Presidential candidates ignore loyal red or blue states except when they need to hold fundraising events. There is even evidence that swing states get more policy benefits from their pivotal positions.

In the past, however, Presidents believed they needed to win the popular vote as well. The odds of getting to the White House by losing the popular vote and winning the Electoral College seemed long. But now two Republicans have accomplished this feat in the past 16 years.

Moreover, Sam Wang of Princeton University has recently estimated that under current conditions, there is a one-in-three chance of an Electoral College victory by the loser of the popular vote, so long as the margin is less than 5 percent. The odds are even better as the popular-vote tally approaches a tie. And since the odds of winning this way favor Republican over Democratic candidates, they have no small advantage in highly competitive races.

All of this highlights what we have known for some time: the Electoral College is a serious problem for American democracy.  It seemed like a harmless legacy for most of the 20th century, as memories of the minority presidencies of the 19th century dimmed. But with two occurrences in 16 years, and the hold it has taken on President Trump’s political worldview, the harm to democracy is neither remote nor small.

Putting the person who lost the popular vote in the most powerful elected office in the country undermines the legitimacy of and trust in the presidency.  The problem is worse when one party is more likely than the other to benefit from this anti-democratic feature.  It is far worse when it favors one racial group over the others.

In the immediate post-World War II period, race, ideology, and party affiliation did not perfectly align.  The Democratic party maintained a heterogeneous coalition of Northern liberal whites and nonwhites, and conservative Southern Democrats. The Republicans had a substantial contingent of moderates.  As the result of coalition shifts due to the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement, the racial, ideological, and party divisions came into closer alignment, creating greater polarization.

This means that the democratic costs of a minority party standing a better chance of gaining the presidency despite losing the popular vote are compounded by the racial injustice of a white minority maintaining its power at the expense of racial and ethnic minorities. This starts to look like the situation in Rhodesia and South Africa in the post-colonial period. President Bush at least defused the racial divide with his genuine concern and admiration for Mexico.  President Trump inflames the racial divide as a tactic of political survival.

It is clearer than ever before that the Electoral College should be replaced with the popular vote, but that is perhaps harder than ever to do.  According to Gallup, support for amending the Constitution to fix this problem hovered around 60 percent between 2002 and 2012, and then dropped to 49 percent in 2016. It should surprise no one that a change of heart among Republicans and Trump supporters explains this shift. This illustrates a fundamental political axiom: people in power favor the rules that keep them in power.

But even if mainstream Republicans come to their senses as they watch President Trump wreak havoc on their party, the road to a constitutional amendment is incredibly difficult. It requires supermajority votes at the state and Federal level, a prospect that seems highly unlikely given the level of political polarization in the United States.

There are, however, potentially easier paths. One is for all states to abandon the winner-take-all allocation of electors to the winners of the states’ presidential votes.  This does not guarantee that the popular vote winner will become President. In fact, Trump would have prevailed by a narrow margin in 2016.  But it does decrease the odds while leaving the basic process in place—possibly an easier political lift.

Because this option requires every state to take separate action, there are severe first-mover problems. The Democrats count on receiving all the electors from blue states like California and New York. Giving the Republicans a share of those electors without a firm assurance that the red states will do the same is akin to unilateral disarmament.

Another alternative, the “National Popular Vote,” solves this problem via a compact in which states pledge to give all their electors to the winner of the popular vote. It only works if enough states join in—their combined votes must number 270 in total. States that participate are forbidden to back out after a certain deadline during election season, though we should never underestimate the willingness of political actors to game the system when the stakes are high. Still, the NPV is the best option on the table.

At the moment, ten states have signed on, amounting to 165 electors. Appeals to the democratic principles persuade some, but not enough. It would no doubt help if the Republicans were to lose a presidential election while winning the popular vote. But perhaps by shamelessly pursuing the Electoral College strategy, Trump will unintentionally make the most convincing case for change. If so, maybe we will salvage some permanent good from this contemporary nightmare.

The post Trump’s Re-Election Strategy appeared first on The American Interest.

Austria Swings Right

In a year of surprise elections in Europe and the United States, Austria’s vote on Sunday did not disappoint. But the surprises didn’t come in the form of upsets. Overall, the polls leading up to the election proved to be accurate. As predicted, the center-right People’s Party (ÖVP) led by the baby-faced foreign minister Sebastian Kurz, was the clear winner with 31.5 percent of the vote. And as predicted, the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) beat out the center-left social democrats (SPÖ) to come in second with 27.1 percent. Perhaps the only surprise was that the SPÖ did not follow its fellow center-left parties toward a complete collapse and managed to make the FPÖ compete in a tight race, eventually ending up in third place with 26.8 percent. Compared with recent electoral failures of the Socialists in France, the Social Democrats in Germany and the Labor Party in the Netherlands—all of which delivered their worst results in decades—the Austrian center-left’s third place finish could be considered a success. As the outgoing SPÖ Chancellor, Christian Kern, said as the votes were counted, “We are not pleased with the result, but we can live with it.”

Whereas the far-right surge seems to have been contained in Germany, where the Christian Democrats (CDU) have ruled out any notion of a coalition with the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), and in France, where Marine Le Pen lost the presidential elections handily to Emmanuel Macron, Austria may yet prove to be a template for how politics will increasingly work across Europe: A center-left party comes in third and considers it a success; A formerly fringe far-right party comes in second, barely failing to win, and no one bats an eye; And the center-right coopts significant parts of the far Right’s platform in order to ensure victory.

Austria has a long history with its far-right party, the FPÖ. The FPÖ, unlike its newest German cousin (the AfD, which was founded in 2013), is the oldest far-right party in Europe. Founded in 1956 by a former SS officer, it predates the more famous French National Front by almost twenty years. The party remained relatively obscure for many decades, until its charismatic leader Jörg Haider successfully pivoted it toward a more populist anti-immigrant Euroskepticism in the 1990s. But back then, immigration was not a major political issue in European politics: the European Union was expanding, economic growth was taken for granted, and head scarf controversies and minaret bans seemed inconceivable.

In identifying immigration as a key mobilizing issue, the FPÖ was ahead of the curve. Armed with a new slogan, “Austria First!” the FPÖ made large gains in every election cycle in the 1990s, eventually winning 27 percent of the vote in 1999 and becoming a coalition partner with the center-right ÖVP.

Fast forward eighteen years to 2017, and the FPÖ looks likely to become the coalition partner to the ÖVP once again. But 2017 is no repeat. Almost twenty years ago, having a far-right party in government was deemed so unsavory by the mainstream that Haider, who could have been appointed Chancellor, was denied that position, and a ministerial post as well. Other EU countries, repulsed by the idea of working with a far-right coalition government, informally boycotted Austria, blocking its participation in formal EU meetings, decreasing diplomatic relations, and imposing a non-cooperation agreement. After its five-year stint in the ruling coalition and Haider’s sudden death in 2008, the FPÖ seemed to be on its way out. Sunday’s elections proved that not only were the obituaries premature, in some important ways Haider’s main preoccupations gained traction across Europe.

What was once fringe is now mainstream, and what was once abhorrent is now business as usual. Kurz, who is likely to become the youngest head of state in Europe, ran an unabashedly anti-immigrant campaign, lending his young looks and nice smile to legitimize the platform of the far Right. In the lead-up to the elections, Kurz proudly touted his support for closing off Austria’s borders in 2016, at the peak of the refugee crisis. Not to be outdone by his FPÖ opponent, Heinz-Christian Strache, Kurz advocated for passage of the so-called burqa ban. The law, which came into force this month, prohibits any face-covering in public spaces, and has been strictly enforced by Austrian police (with some comical consequences: a citation was issued to a man dressed in a shark suit as part of a marketing campaign). As head of government, Kurz promised to cut off social benefits to non-Austrians, even if they are EU citizens living or working in the country.

The refugee crisis certainly helped fuel the far Right’s agenda. In 2015, 90,000 applied for asylum in Austria—a 200 percent increase from the year before—primarily from Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. And while only 40 percent have been granted asylum thus far, and the number of asylum seekers fell to 42,000 in 2016, the Austrian government has opted to cap the number of refugees it is willing to accept at 37,500. Earlier this year, Austria also won the right to deport some asylum seekers in the European Court of Justice.

If the FPÖ enters the coalition with the ÖVP, as it is very likely to do, Austria’s hardline government will resemble that of Hungary more so than that of Germany or France.  Important ministerial positions will likely go to the far Right; with the ÖVP mostly on board with the FPÖ’s agenda, there will be no denying them the spoils of victory. Norbert Hofer, the FPÖ candidate who narrowly lost the presidential election to the Green candidate, is rumored to be the next Foreign Minister. And while an “Auxit” is highly unlikely, as the majority of Austrians do not support leaving the EU, with Hofer (or another FPÖ politician) as head diplomat, Austria may become the weak link in the EU’s ability to implement a united foreign policy, particularly vis-à-vis Russia.

The FPÖ, like most far-right parties in Europe, is openly pro-Kremlin, but it stands out even among its fellow travelers in its close links with Russia. The FPÖ signed a formal cooperation agreement with Putin’s United Russia party in 2016. Strache, the FPÖ’s leader, is a frequent visitor in Moscow, has repeatedly advocated for the removal of sanctions against Russia, and has called for closer relations between Russia and Europe. Members of the FPÖ, including Vienna’s deputy mayor, Johann Gudenus, traveled to Crimea as an “election observer” during the unlawful annexation referendum in March 2014, which he certified as free and fair against EU policy. The FPÖ’s accession will give Russia an important ally in Western Europe and could thus have far reaching implications for EU-U.S. relations as well.

Austria’s decided turn to the right may be what the future holds for countries still “safe” from the far Right in the next round of elections: an acquiescent center-right, the reinstitution of borders, and a foreign policy more in line with Russian rather than U.S. interests.

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