Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 13

Renewing America’s Social Contract

They tell a story about the late Bob Strauss, a Texas lawyer with a folksy drawl who wielded Texas-sized influence in American national politics for more than 50 years at the end of the 20th century. One day Strauss was standing in a conference room at his Washington law firm, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, watching a complicated multi-party transaction inch upstream towards its closing against masses of objections by fractious lawyers. Somebody asked Strauss, “Which party do you represent?” Strauss was ready. “I,” he said, “represent the deal.”

We can think of the American Deal as a set of political ideas that have persisted in this country over the past couple of centuries and, most of the time, have kept our political arrangements from falling apart. (There have been lapses. We had a Civil War, after all; and there were certainly other times when it looked like we were coming close.) What with the perpetual frictions among the country’s contending political opinions and interests, the Deal always needs representing.

Right now, the need is acute. It was triggered by the 2016 presidential election.

For liberals, the significance of the event was bracingly simple. In their view, the inauguration of President Donald Trump constituted an attack on the country. It followed that the only proportional response was what Trump’s critics call resistance and Trump’s supporters label presidential harassment. Among Democrats, this verdict hasn’t much changed. Their debate mainly involves tactics, about which their positions range from far Left to not-quite-so-far Left.

In contrast, American conservatives’ ambivalence about the President runs deep—and in contradictory directions. Christopher DeMuth of the Hudson Institute has provided a succinct, on-the-money summary of the crosscurrents:

Some conservatives were America Firsters to begin with, others have become converts, and others began and remain Never Trumpers who loathe the man and his policies. Some love his judicial appointments but are aghast at his protectionism. Some admire his nerve, media bashing, and political incorrectness but wish these were a bit more modulated. Some regard his nationalism as an overdue reassertion of American sovereignty and foreign-policy realism, while others see a destabilizing retreat from global leadership.

This intellectual turmoil seems to cry out for expression; thus, since the Trump inauguration we’ve seen a virtual tsunami of writing about the meaning of his presidency. Understandably, recent conservative writing about President Trump focuses not on the painful topics of his character and governance style but on particular administration policies and—even more—the American political fault lines into which Trump has driven his rhetorical and electoral wedges.

Along the shore of one of those fault lines lies national conservatism. Its current varieties share a sense that liberalism—or neoliberalism, if the speaker aims to tear away the doctrine’s idealistic veil and expose the rigid free-market scaffolding underneath—glorifies a barren individualism that has impoverished large swaths of America’s population economically, socially, or spiritually. It follows from this diagnosis that some type of collective non-market power— derived from civil society or government—needs to be applied to check neoliberalism’s underlying assumptions and the laws and institutions that embody them.

Beyond those general features, though, there’s no brief or easy way to summarize the varieties of current national conservatism. Perhaps the best-known articulation of the idea comes from political theorist Yoram Hazony, who contrasts nationalism—the theory that nations should be “able to chart their own independent course, cultivating their own traditions and pursuing their own interests without interference”—with “imperialism, which seeks to bring peace and prosperity to the world by uniting mankind, as much as possible, under a single political regime.” What “cannot be done without obfuscation,” Hazony states, “is to avoid choosing between the two positions.”

Other versions, like David Goodhart’s “somewheres” and “anywheres,” cited by DeMuth, strongly echo Robert Merton’s classic distinction between “locals” and “cosmopolitans,” from his landmark Social Theory and Social Structure. Though Goodhart’s analysis isn’t exactly neutral—“the people from Anywhere,” he judges, have “too often failed to distinguish their own sectional interests from the general interest”—even Merton was hard on cosmopolitans. “[T]he cosmopolitan influential,” he opined, “has a following because he knows, the local influential because he understands.”

Other flavors of national conservatism are less polite. “We made a political choice,” J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, put it acerbically at a recent conference, “that freedom to consume pornography was more important than public goods like marriage, freedom, and happiness.”

Then there’s the inevitable pushback. In this magazine, Gabriel Schoenfeld has noted some of the outrages perpetrated in the name of nationalism and confessed that he finds “astonishing” not just “the contention that liberalism promotes ‘vicious hatred’ while nationalism tends to be benign” but the fact that this argument has gained “currency in some quarters of the Right.” Adding more strands to the tangle, the 2020 presidential campaign has given exposure to a liberal populist nationalism—Elizabeth Warren comes to mind—that mirrors the arguments of its conservative counterparts. And, in a sign that the discussion has legs, it has spawned a sub-population of taxonomic review articles. Aaron Sibarium’s “guide for the perplexed” in The American Interest offers these categories: “rhetorical nationalists,” whose “reasons may have changed, but” whose “views . . . [have] not; “statist conservatives,” who insist on the need “for government to promote the good at some cost to individual freedom;” and “national conservatives,” who focus on an American people united by a common culture—something like the “mystic chords of memory” that President Abraham Lincoln offered in his first inaugural address. (Lincoln’s speech actually waxed mystical only in its concluding sentence, after pages of considerably more lawyerly argument. But you take your mystic chords where you can get them.)

This is a bare sampling of what’s going on. The Trump presidency is so deliciously awful, and so generous in the opportunities it offers to trade in consequential ideas, that it sometimes seems like a political intellectual’s relief act. You truly can’t tell the players without a program.

Still, even without the Trump embroidery, the Deal has always been confusing and contradictory. It is no accident that the quintessential American defense of internal contradiction—“I am large, I contain multitudes”—comes from Walt Whitman, the quintessential American poet. Little more than five years after Whitman first wrote that line, the then-American deal shattered from the weight of the country’s contradictory multitudes. If we now venerate Lincoln, it is in no small part because he, like a sublimely elevated Bob Strauss, tried to represent the deal.

But some of us who are advanced in age are impatient for the country to recover a sense of its center before the debates are over. So, here is a preliminary attempt at a shortcut. William Galston recently offered “Twelve Theses on Nationalism” in these pages. Following Galston, here are twelve theses about the terms of the present American Deal. To a certain extent they contradict one another. The Deal is large. It contains multitudes.

The Deal, Part One

The Deal has two parts, with six rules each. The first part reminds people who want to change the system why they shouldn’t expand their horizons too broadly or hold their fellow Americans in contempt. These first six provisions of the Deal tend to take care of themselves. The chief danger is that they’ll blow up in the faces of those who don’t give them enough respect.

Rule One: The Deal is federalism. Please, for now, shelve the complaints about federalism having degenerated into a mere ghost of its former self, a corpse on life support, done in by the bunch of German professors who spawned the administrative state. For better or worse, we’ve got plenty of federalism left. (I ride the New York City subways. Don’t get me started.)

The Federalists had the advantage of not having to write on a clean slate. The country they surveyed had pre-existing natural advantages like space, resources, and a relative, though by no means complete, absence of conflicts with geographic neighbors.

Still, the arrangements that the Federalists devised, with state powers divided among jurisdictions, branches, and levels of government specifically designed to block, impede, and generally torment one another, lie at the core of the Deal. This is a federalist republic, not a majoritarian one. In particular, it gives, as it was designed to give, an advantage to the type of diversity that arises from geography. Voters in New York and California will perennially get a raw deal. Government paralysis is in general a feature, not a bug.

In other words, though you can tinker at the edges, you can’t alter the system more profoundly without creating an essentially different arrangement with radically different and substantially unknown dangers and inconveniences. It would be a whole other deal.

We might as well live with what we’ve got.

Rule Two: The Deal is Tocqueville’s America.  After Alexis de Tocqueville’s nine-month tour of the new American democracy in 1831, meant to study the country’s prison system, he gave birth in 1835 to Democracy in America. It explained that a country in which substantial equality is a birthright is profoundly different from a country that has achieved equality only by violently destroying the regime that came before it.

Tocqueville found many American characteristics that follow from this distinction. Among them, Tocqueville noted the tendency of our egalitarian individualism to provide both powerful incentives for cooperation, on the one hand, and, on the other, pressures towards conformity and threats to liberty. Both these characteristics, though they often pull in antagonistic directions, are foundational parts of the Deal. (It is large, it contains multitudes.)

Tocqueville also thought that lawyers were the closest America came to an aristocratic class. That is not part of the Deal. Letter to follow.

Rule Three: The Deal is that most Americans are, when push comes to shove, locals. Yes, yes, you think we’re getting homogenized. We’ve been getting homogenized at least since the building of the first north-south railroads. (Neil Harris of the University of Chicago noted that the railroads may have hastened the coming of the Civil War by bringing Northerners and Southerners face-to-face with the fact that they didn’t like one another very much. In much the same way, the modern equivalents have probably heightened the animus that MAGA supporters feel towards the country’s elites). Still, most Americans’ primary attachments are to their families, friends, occupations, affinity groups, and local communities. Look in the obituary section of any U.S. city newspaper if you have any doubts.

This is the pattern of attachments that has kept the population of a vast country, even in the age of social media, from becoming an undifferentiated mass ripe for tyranny.

True, some citizens have different sets of attachments—to universal principles, for instance, or affinity groups that span the globe. The same people often have more developed skills and resources than the locals, as well as superior arguments to justify their positions. These “anywheres,” as Goodhart calls them, can override local preferences—until they find out they can’t. That’s the Deal.

Rule Four: The Deal is that most Americans are religious, more or less. Today, lots of people are more inclined to call it “spiritual;” certainly large numbers of citizens have drifted away from organized religious denominations. As a result, we’re surprised when we get seemingly anomalous news, like the story of female religious orders that are growing once more because millennials are interested in becoming nuns.

Moreover, numbers aren’t the sole measure of the influence; there’s nothing like religion to remind us of the salience of intensity. Sometimes the story is that religious influence has prompted a state legislature to ban abortion after a term of eight weeks; sometimes the news is about Muslim, Jewish, and Christian clergy joining together to guard a sanctuary after a hate crime.

Almost nothing is embedded more deeply than religion in the American fabric. Other elements of the Bill of Rights may have equal respect, and at least one item—the Second Amendment—periodically explodes in importance, as it’s exploding now. But none of them matches religion, unruly and unpredictable, as an ineradicable part of the Deal.

Rule Five: The Deal is that Americans generally don’t express a desire to take other people’s property outright. The country has shown that it’s fully capable of regulating private property stringently—almost, some would say, to extinction. But the word “socialist” has long been anathema because, surprisingly, most people understand the term in its proper sense, meaning collective ownership of the means of production.

We will see whether the balance shifts, as figures like Bernie Sanders seek to reclaim “socialism” for a new era. But, as of now, this particular sort of wholesale appropriation is not a part of the Deal.

Rule Six: The Deal doesn’t generally include a hatred of the rich. As Tocqueville would have predicted, Americans have shown a distinct reluctance to storm the castles, or the equivalent Malibu beach houses, with scythes and pitchforks. There are perennial predictions, often in the context of political campaigns, that this reluctance is nearing its end. So far, the predictions haven’t come to pass.

The Deal, Part Two

Then, there is the second part of the Deal, the one reminding us that we’re Americans, not Hungarians or Poles. None of the elements of the second part of the Deal has unqualified or even natural support. Every one of them periodically disappears under one populist wave or another. To date, these elements have managed to re-emerge—but there are no guarantees.

Rule Seven: The Deal is liberalism. The old political saw—that John Locke is king of America—is right. The country has no genuinely ancient traditions or an honest-to-God feudal past, let alone communities of people as tied as medieval serfs to their plots of land.

This fact has placed distinct limits on the capacity to mount genuinely reactionary movements in America. The closest we came was the Confederacy’s defense of its 250-year tradition of slavery. This was the original campaign to make America great again, an effort that took five almost inconceivably bloody years to extirpate.

In contrast, when Abraham Lincoln invoked the “mystic chords of memory,” he did so in support of the liberal tradition in America. That’s our kind of mystic.

Rule Eight: The Deal is republican restraint on the display of wealth. The degree of restraint varies from place to place and year to year; but in comparison with counterparts in the rest of the world, the very rich in America tend to distinguish themselves through understatement, real or faux. Some of us remember Jacqueline Kennedy saying, when a reporter asked her about rumors that she spent $30,000 a year on clothes, “I couldn’t spend that much even if I wore sable underwear.” True or not, that remark is an iconic sign of respect to the mystic chords of American memory.

Like other elements of Part Two, this one has a perennially uncertain fate. American television used to romanticize, and to a substantial extent still does, what was once called the common man. The classic example of the genre was Roseanne, until tweets by Roseanne herself revealed that she was perhaps too much of a common man. Her show was replaced by The Conners, featuring a similarly lumpen theme. The new show has done well enough to be renewed for a second season.

True, times have changed. In this age of streaming, TV shows about ordinary folk vie for popularity with exotica like Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead, or high-minded fare like Succession. Indeed, there are moments, like one’s first look at the President’s Trump Tower apartment or the sight of a Kardashian, or even actually seeing Trump and a Kardashian together in the same room, when it’s hard to believe that there’s even a shred of republican restraint left. Still, provisionally, the norm persists.

Rule Nine: The Deal is a set of limits on inequality. This one has been severely tested in recent years. There are substantial arguments for the proposition that income and wealth inequality, as opposed to economic growth, should not be the touchstones of economic policy. But the rhetorical power of these arguments is hard to sustain once the numbers documenting the degree of inequality get big enough. Yes, it’s a matter of perception and partisanship; but these days the numbers do seem to be getting big enough. If that’s the case, the Deal counsels that it’s prudent to act. It’s certainly done so in the recent past, leaving Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid in its wake.

But—see Rule Five, above—the Deal has put limits on redistributionist policies, limits that would and do seem outlandish to denizens of European welfare states. This is one reason why we’ve twisted ourselves into a national pretzel trying to deal with health insurance. That’s the legacy of the Deal.

Rule Ten: The Deal is immigration. The country’s direction on this issue hasn’t been consistent; but it was set at the beginning of the republic, at a time when most Americans still thought of themselves as aggrieved citizens of Britain. In 1776 Thomas Paine, in Common Sense, argued that in fact America was not British but something new: the “asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe.” Congress’s first law on the subject, the Naturalization Act of 1790, made U.S. citizenship available to any “free white person of good character” who had lived in the United States for two years.

Those terms don’t look especially liberal from the vantage point of the 21st century, but they were a down payment on Paine’s determination that we should be a country of immigrants.

Of course, that wasn’t exactly a definitive verdict. We’ve had periodic immigration crises since at least 1819, when Congress passed the Steerage Act to try to bring some order to the flood of immigrants that overwhelmed the major ports of entry after the War of 1812. As Peter Schuck points out in The New York Times, we are well overdue for a revision to the Deal, one that is concrete and reasoned enough to reduce the oppressive salience of the issue in U.S. politics. It’s going to be a heavy lift, but that’s what the Deal requires.

Rule Eleven: The Deal is world leadership. This is a recent accretion to the Deal. Historians may detect a precursor of the idea as far back as John Winthrop’s “City Upon a Hill” speech, but the prospect became concrete only with the disproportionate hard power that the United States accumulated and has largely maintained since the Second World War. Shorn of arguments about America’s moral superiority, the justification for elevating “world leadership” to an element of the Deal is that we’re watching in real time, as they say, what starts to happen in the world when the country abandons its decision to lead.

The dimensions of the leadership that’s required are open to debate, but not the need for the leadership. It has become part of the Deal.

Rule Twelve: The Deal is tragedy. There is no avoiding it: The “slavery in this country” that John Adams saw “hanging over it like a black cloud for half a century” has rained on us for 300 years. Nor is it the only such tragedy. The list includes—without limitation, as the lawyers say—slavery’s aftermath; the U.S. government’s slaughter and grinding down of American Indians, of which Tocqueville gave one of the most indelible accounts; internment, exclusions, and murders. This is not a litany of national sins or a serial expansion of the social justice agenda that should weigh on us. It is a reminder that, just as Part One of the Deal will exact a price from those who don’t respect it, Part Two of the Deal is capable of exacting its price as well. You can pretend that such issues don’t deserve inclusion on the list of public imperatives, but the Deal will insure that sooner or later you’ll have to come to grips with them.

The Deal, in other words, has given us work to do. But let no one say on that account that it doesn’t exist or isn’t worth defending.

The post Renewing America’s Social Contract appeared first on The American Interest.

Collapsing the Russian Tripod

Political warfare is back. The West is waking up to the realization that authoritarian states are seeking not only to weaken it, but also to intimidate, undermine, and coerce individuals, businesses, and institutions that obstruct or threaten their interests. Scholars have followed Christopher Walker and Jessica Ludwig’s work in describing China’s and Russia’s efforts to wield “sharp power” against their adversaries. What bears closer examination is just how much these efforts are guided by the countries’ intelligence and security services.

Moscow and Beijing have weaponized previously benign activities like diplomacy, investment flows, infrastructure development, foreign asset purchases, and media. University campuses have become battlegrounds of covert influence and interference. These activities complement more aggressive forms of political warfare operations, such as espionage, cyber-attacks, and intellectual property theft. For its part, the West at large gave up on political warfare operations after the end of the Cold War, complacently believing that the ideology that birthed them—communist authoritarianism—had been consigned to the “dustbin of history.”

Deterring, combatting, and defeating political warfare campaigns is critically important for the West. Failing to do so risks a further hollowing-out of what is left of the rules-based international order, a weakening of the West’s alliances and partnerships, and an emboldening of authoritarian regimes to undertake new and more dangerous campaigns. Yet one of the main difficulties of combatting political warfare efforts is willful ignorance compounding genuine ignorance.

Russia’s efforts are a case in point. Moscow’s campaign is often viewed as a matter solely of “online disinformation” and “fake news,” and studying and countering these phenomena have become a cottage industry for academics, NGOs, and think tanks. But like icebergs, which are mostly submerged, Russia’s strategy remains mostly out of popular view.

Operations in the information sphere represent just one of three legs of a “tripod” that supports Russia’s political warfare campaigns. These legs are:

Disinformation and cyber: This leg of the tripod covers activities originating in (but not confined to) the digital realm. These include the seeding and propagation of disinformation intended to obscure, confuse, and demoralize, as well as hacking, doxing, and other offensive information operations.
Financial: Large-scale international political influence operations require substantial financial resources. Since these activities are by their nature covert and to varying degrees deniable, the origin of the financing must be obscured. This is political money laundering.
Human: This leg is the closest to traditional espionage, comprising the spotting, recruitment, and running of human agents. As will be explained below, the scope and definition of this activity has expanded considerably in recent decades, in ways that make counter intelligence challenging.

Disinformation and cyber

The first leg is the most novel, since it relies partly on technologies that did not exist 20 years ago. It is also the most accessible to study, because instances of disinformation can be identified and tracked. If there is a handy guide to this leg, it is the Mueller Report, which sets out how disinformation, abuse of personal data, botnets, hacking, and deniable distribution are used in combination.

It is important, however, to bear in mind that the modus operandi is likely to evolve. For example, in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, operations may shift from offshore (for example, the St Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency) to onshore (for example, within America’s borders). Counterintuitively, this may make it harder to identify and combat these efforts, as many of the perpetrators (some of them exploiting the First Amendment) will be U.S. citizens. The Trump Administration’s veto of democracy defense legislation, as well as Attorney General William Barr’s obsession with alleged improper Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) applications, can only embolden such adversaries.

Financial

Whereas conventional money laundering uses a series of layers to conceal a link to a predicate crime, the political variant employs similar layers to hide the link to a hostile state. Since money laundering laws target criminals, and since electoral legislation in most democracies is decades out of date, defenses against political money laundering are practically nonexistent. The UK’s Intelligence and Security Committee Report on Russia, which was suppressed before the recent General Election by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, is rumored to contain detailed information on how small and online donations were exploited by Russia.

Similarly, the lax control of small donations under the reporting threshold ($200 in the United States) potentially allows in tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in funds from cashless cards and cryptocurrency, which is subsequently diced into small sums by automated systems. Diamonds and other hard-to-trace commodities are also favorite conduits for illicit funding, while Political Action Committees (PACs, which are organizations that pool campaign donations) and PAC-like structures allow dark money to be deployed in media spending and other forms of support.

Anecdotal reports indicate that these funds often originate in a sort of tithe or zakat extracted from Russian businesses. When a Russian oligarch or business seeks to send large sums outside of the country, they must seek informal permission from the highest levels. If permission is granted, there is often a condition: that a certain percentage of the money must be set aside for “patriotic purposes.”

In a notional scenario, a Russian oil company might pay $1 billion for speculative oil blocks in West Africa. The vendor company would then distribute the proceeds back to the buyers via shell companies. But some of the funds—perhaps $100 million—would be used to finance campaigns, suborn individuals and set up front operations. This again shows the interpenetration of Russian business, crime and intelligence activities, and how almost every vector of contact with the West has been weaponized.

Human

Like the financial leg, the human element is as old as espionage itself, although geopolitical, social, and technological changes in recent decades have opened up new opportunities. The end of the Cold War and the disappearance of the ideological divide is of limited relevance, contrary to popular belief: Russia still has the ambition of recruiting agents in the West, while the social, political, and moral barriers to accepting their blandishments have lowered.

One generation of Russian agents is still in play from the early 1990s. Some are citizens of the countries of the former Soviet Union and some are citizens of target countries. Other promising people have been recruited over decades. At lower levels, stooge-like citizens of target countries are recruited as couriers, fronts, launderers, access agents, and dogs-bodies. Typically such people are more endowed with vanity and ambition than with intellect, and the Mueller Report describes several of them. They are recruited by flattery, financial inducement, and sex. Behind such people, but far less visible, is usually a “kingpin” figure. These individuals are usually much more intelligent and experienced, and they are often dual citizens or have some demonstrable link to Russia.

Separately, it appears that there are also far more sophisticated networks of long-term influence agents. These individuals are often opinion formers: academics, political campaigners, and journalists. The locus of recruitment is first-division universities. While this is reminiscent of the so-called Cambridge Five, it differs in that the aim is not to penetrate intelligence organizations, but to shift public and elite sentiment.

We have been mostly talking about Russia, but Chinese intelligence has learned much from Moscow’s example. Beijing’s approach is distinct but not completely different, although its aims are less aggressive. (Whereas Moscow seeks to wreck Western democracies, Chinese objectives are more traditional ones of stealing information and technology, and understanding leadership intentions.) And just as our adversaries learn from each other, so should we.

The West needs to recognize, understand, and articulate the challenge it is facing. Many in Western capitals have not seriously thought about political warfare since the 1980s, and the people in these countries that did the thinking back in the day are retired or approaching retirement. Given these handicaps, we lack the intellectual framework both to perceive and to respond to political warfare operations. And we have limited capacity to grasp the strategy of our authoritarian adversaries as they probe the boundaries of acceptable peacetime behavior.

To collapse the “tripod” of Russia’s political warfare campaigns, all three legs must be dealt with. This will require new legislation that recognizes the nature of the threat and its modus operandi. Counterintelligence assumptions should be cleared of anachronisms (a trained and active foreign intelligence officer may never be identified in a specific case, and an intelligence operation is not defined by an attempt to recruit security officials or steal classified material) and domestic counterintelligence resources should be bolstered.

We need to re-establish or develop expertise in political warfare. This needs to occur at strategic, operational, and tactical levels across the civil and military wings of government. This requires increased depth in the range of professional experience across government, given the breadth of skills required for the identification and disruption of political subversives. This shift must be driven by political leadership—formalized in policy documents, given democratic oversight, codified in law, and appropriately resourced.

There is no need to re-invent the wheel—or at least, not yet. In a sense, we have been here before. It’s just high time we realize that fact.

The post Collapsing the Russian Tripod appeared first on The American Interest.

Taiwan’s Disinformation Solution

“Dong suan,” get elected, chanted enthusiastic DPP supporters ecstatically on Saturday, January 11, when we mingled with crowds of visibly proud and determined voters in the Taiwanese presidential and parliamentary elections. And the crowd’s wish came true. Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen won a convincing election victory with more than eight million votes, the highest number ever in a Taiwanese presidential election. She was not only up against her main opponent, Han Guo-yu; Tsai also overcame relentless Chinese bullying tactics and organized disinformation campaigns.

Taiwan is a country under constant and increasing pressure. The People’s Republic of China is willing to use all means to secure Taiwan in its orbit. Increasingly, it has encroached on Taiwan’s mainstream and social media landscape to shape the narrative in its favor and to discredit the Tsai Administration, which it views as insufficiently deferential to Communist Party directives based on “One country, two systems”—a prospect that has never looked less appealing to the Taiwanese following events in Hong Kong. Though precise attribution is often difficult, many suspect the direct or indirect influence of Chinese disinformation campaigns aimed at sowing distrust in institutions and politicians. To these should be added malicious rumors that President Tsai had faked her Ph.D.degree from LSE, and that she is a lesbian, to name just a few. Other campaigns have targeted the Taiwanese economy with stories affecting crop prices.

Under such pressure, moral panic often results in knee-jerk legislation that may harm the very democratic values those laws are supposed to protect, including free speech. The list of democracies that have compromised free speech in the fight against harmful content online includes Germany with its NetzDG Act, France, which has adopted laws against both online hatred and fake news, and the UK, which is likely to adopt an online harms bill in 2020. These measures are built on “intermediary liability,” where governments force tech platforms to police the content shared by users or risk fines. However, the ongoing European crackdown on online speech is not only difficult to reconcile with international human rights norms but has also been watched—and copied—by authoritarian governments eager to curb political dissent under the guise of legitimacy. Since the adoption of the German NetzDG at least 13 countries have adopted or proposed similar laws, often with direct reference to the German precedent. These countries include Russia, Belarus, Venezuela, and Singapore, all of which severely limit free expression.

While Taiwan has so far rejected a similar approach, the country has not been entirely immune to these impulses. The enactment of an anti-infiltration bill and the “digital updating” of existing laws against specific forms of intentionally harmful disinformation have raised concern and heightened division. But given the scope of disinformation campaigns and the existential threat that mainland China poses to Taiwan’s small and open democracy, these measures are surprisingly mild, even if they could represent a future encroachment on freedom of expression. Taiwan’s lighter-touch approach stands in contrast to more heavy-handed regulation against fake news in Asian countries such as Vietnam and Singapore, where take-downs and censorship ares the first lines of defense—the latter among the countries explicitly inspired by Germany’s NetzDG legislation.

Arguably the most critical Taiwanese response to disinformation has been civic tech initiatives that harness the digital power of the people. We met with Digital Minister Audrey Tang, who is the poster wizard for this approach of “Radical Transparency,” as she calls it. Tang was part of the Sunflower movement, which occupied Parliament in 2014 and left notes in legislators’ desks about how they could renew their democratic thinking. Tang—a serial entrepreneur—also has roots in the fertile ground of Taipei’s civic tech community where ingenious and creative initiatives against disinformation are cultivated. According to Tang, immunizing democracies against disinformation from below requires trusting citizens and civil society rather than viewing them as a fickle mob ready to believe whatever outrageous rumors are being spread by the enemies of democracy. In short, when it comes to countering disinformation, citizens of democracies should be treated as a resource, not a liability.

Inside government, Tang’s approach has helped cut response time on disinformation down to two hours or less. Moreover, cooperation with civil society organizations such as g0v (pronounced “gov-zero”) has allowed Tang’s Anti-Troll Army to collect and analyze reams of data and carefully target its response in order to optimize efficiency and reach. One innovative tool is the collaborative Cofacts initiative, which allows users of Line, the most popular messaging app in Taiwan, to install a chat-bot. Whenever users have doubts about information they can submit a link to the chatbot which forwards it to a group of fact-checkers who can verify or debunk the story. This can help stop the spread of disinformation in the otherwise fertile ground of end-to-end encrypted messaging services, but without resorting to surveillance, censorship, or draconian measures such as Internet shut downs. But Tang has also emphasized the need to understand and reverse engineer the preferred methods of troll-armies and rumor mongers by fighting memes with memes and YouTube with YouTube  instead of a classical government press release that never reaches its targeted audience.

This, Tang argues, is a way to counter China’s authoritarian propaganda with radical openness and democracy. As an example, all her meetings were on the record and open, including ours (all yours to retrieve, dear reader).

These initiatives are also a conscious effort to avoid more heavy-handed legal responses, such as the NetzDG model, which Tang fears will result in a “chilling effect, because the large platforms will tend to over-censor.” Having said that, Tang—a self-styled “Conservative Anarchist”—does not entirely rule out the possibility of more drastic measures if her open-source fire wall is breached. She is adamant that the continued success of the radical transparency model depends on cooperation between the government, civic tech, and not least social media platforms and messaging apps like Facebook and Line. And cooperation has been forthcoming. On election eve, we visited Facebook’s War Room in Taipei where a team monitored developments in real-time and coordinated with third party fact-checkers, governments institutions, and Facebook teams outside Taiwan.

The abject failure of Chinese disinformation to seriously affect Taiwan’s presidential election is a promising sign that even small democracies can challenge a huge and tech-savvy dictatorship when it comes to information warfare. But this requires empowering governments, civil society, and media platforms through smart and creative tech strategies built on trust, transparency, participation, and inclusiveness. Moreover, the recent election was only the first battle of what will surely be a much longer war. Mainland China is unlikely to take its defeat on the chin and will undoubtedly seek to upgrade its offensive digital capabilities in order to hack and breach Taiwan’s faith in tech-optimism and civic trust. Should it succeed, the Taiwanese public and political establishment may not be willing to continue gambling on radical transparency to ensure election integrity. This mood is already prevalent among influential parts of Taiwanese society. The executive director of a prominent think-tank and expert on security policy told us of the need to update the understanding of “privacy” and “freedom of expression” for the digital age, by which he meant providing the government with more intrusive powers than those already on the books.

But if the current beta-version proves sufficiently resilient, the Taiwanese government’s efforts to inoculate society against harmful disinformation seems more promising than attempts to widen vague and contested laws against disinformation and infiltration. Not only is an emphasis on censorship and restrictions likely to undermine the very freedoms that form such a startling contrast between the public sphere in Taiwan and mainland China; heavy-handed top-down legislation is also perfectly suited to play into the hands of trolls who can pose as martyrs and victims of repression (however disingenuously) and portray the Taiwanese government as insincere and hypocritical about the Island’s hard-won democratic freedoms.

Sustained success for radical transparency may also help persuade other democracies, including the member states of the European Union grappling with the threat of Russian disinformation, that there are real alternatives to increasing government and corporate control of news and information. After all, democracy is much more likely to inspire and appeal when tackling its problems with means that reflect rather than reject democratic ideals.

Crucially, civic mobilization is also much less prone to abuse by authoritarian states. While countries like Russia, Singapore, and Venezuela have copied and expanded Germany’s NetzDG, few dictators or one-party states are likely to find Tang’s recipe of radical transparency appealing. Accordingly the stakes are high, and for Audrey Tang’s model to last and spread, Taiwan will have to continue to punch above its own weight when taking on China in cyber-space.

The post Taiwan’s Disinformation Solution appeared first on The American Interest.

We Need a Corrective to Old Catechisms on Peace. Trump’s Plan Isn’t It

This past May, after hosting a nationally televised conversation with White House Senior Advisor Jared Kushner, I warned in these pages that the Middle East peace plan being devised by the White House stood little chance of success and that it would be irresponsible for the Trump Administration to release it. I offered a long list of reasons:

that tabling a “bridging offer” for a final resolution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians only makes sense when the parties are within a certain zone of potential agreement, not when—as is currently the case—the chasm is so wide that no conceivable Solomonic solution exists;
that the “real estate” approach adopted by the President’s son-in-law, based on making a lowball offer to the Palestinians to soften them up for a deal, failed to account for the Ramallah leadership’s time-honored tradition of celebrating defiance and rejection;
that a proposal based on the idea that economic incentives can substitute for common-sense attributes of sovereignty like control over land, borders, and internal security misreads a century of Palestinian history;
that a plan that doesn’t begin with the premise that the two sides have a rocky but resilient 26-year experience of cohabitation under the Oslo framework risks jettisoning the benefits of that relationship with no certainty of a better one emerging;
that the pursuit of what will universally be viewed as a zero-sum-game outcome—even if successful in the short-run—is a myopic approach to peacemaking because the parties are fated to live cheek-by-jowl forever. While this does not mean Israel has to meekly assent to everything Palestinians want to achieve, I wrote, “it does mean the conflict will never truly end unless each side believes the other has made a good-faith effort to reconcile its needs to the desires of the other side.”

On top of all these reasons, I was particularly worried about the Trump peace plan for another, somewhat counterintuitive reason—namely, that its failure would delegitimize its best ideas. Yes, I imagined, the plan was likely to include some very laudable concepts that could serve as a useful corrective to the tired catechism of so many useless international resolutions and foreign ministry declarations over the years. But, I feared, the near-certainty of failure would not, as the plan’s authors and advocates might argue, leave the proposal as the new reference point for future negotiations but rather would make even the best ideas in the plan radioactive for future peacemaking efforts.

Let me focus here on this last list of fears. The plan issued by the President included four excellent ideas, principles that deserve to be a fixture of all U.S. efforts to resolve this conflict. They are:

An affirmation that the ultimate path to peace lies in the concept of separation, what an earlier generation of diplomatic cartographers called “partition” and what we now call the “two-state solution.” This position is a powerful repudiation of the misnomer called a “one-state solution,” different versions of which are advocated by irredentist anti-Zionists and maximalist uber-Zionists, neither of which would lead to anything resembling peace. This is a big shift for the Administration: there was a time when President Trump refused to endorse the “two-state” idea and Kushner, in our public conversation last May, declined to say the word “state” at all.
A recognition that the Jordan Valley, not some arbitrary “Green Line” boundary left over from the fluke of battlefield deployments in 1949, should be recognized as Israel’s natural security border.
A reflection of the demographic reality that peace cannot be premised on the forced repatriation of hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers from communities in the West Bank back inside pre-1967 Israel.
A clear statement that the solution of the Palestinian refugee problem lies in return of refugees to the new state of Palestine, not in keeping alive fantasies about the refugees’ alleged “right of return” to Israel.

For including these four principles within the plan, the Trump initiative actually deserves great credit. But it will get very little, because on each count, the plan stretches the laudable principles beyond recognition, denuding them of much practical value and undermining the benefits of including them in the first place. Specifically:

The “two-state” solution offered by the Trump plan requires the Palestinians to forgo most generally recognized aspects of sovereignty. It goes far beyond the creation of a “demilitarized” state to deny them, in perpetuity, such rights as control over entry and exit and internal security. It even grants Israel the right to reclaim powers and authorities given to Palestine at any point in the future. While numerous independent states voluntarily repudiate pieces of sovereignty in their constitutions, one would be hard-pressed to find many born with their sovereignty so circumscribed and so reversible.
While it is a major step forward to recognize the Jordan Valley as vital for Israel’s security, it is a huge leap to allot the entire area to Israel as sovereign territory. Very few Israelis live in the Valley; security issues could have been addressed instead by giving Israel some creative combination of unfettered access, military deployments, and a veto-wielding role in the management of border crossings. However, the plan makes no effort to seek a reasonable compromise that accounts both for Israeli security needs and Palestinian political interests and instead makes the Jordan Valley a total win for Israel and total loss for Palestine.
Demographic realism is welcome, but ruling out the removal of hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers is a far cry from ruling out the removal of even one, as the plan calls for. It would have been an historic step if the Trump plan endorsed Israel annexing the settlements west of the West Bank security barrier, containing 77 percent of all settlers. But the Trump plan makes as sovereign Israeli territory every Israeli settlement, including 62 settlements—with more than 100,000 Israelis—east of the barrier, some in the middle of Palestinian population centers. Far more than demographic realism, this is a recipe for perpetual friction and interminable conflict.
As for refugees, one should applaud a proposal that rules out return to Israel and envisions a solution solely in terms of potential return to the new state of Palestine, some other agreeable state, or receiving financial compensation. But even the plan’s details circumscribe the practical value of these principles. According to its terms, Israel will control both the overall number of refugees that can return to Palestine and prevent the entry of individual refugees. Moreover, the plan offers only the vaguest reference to compensation, suggesting that the real financial benefits to refugees will come in the overall implementation of the economic investment section of the plan, which itself comes with no details of financing or a roadmap for implementation.

Predictably enough, it took less than a week for Arab and Muslim states—including the Trump Administration’s closest partners in the Middle East—to reject the plan in the clearest and most vociferous terms. In so doing, the White House actually succeeded in retarding a positive trend—growing regional indifference to the Palestinian cause—and replacing it with across-the-board Arab and Muslim support for the most rejectionist sentiments of a tired, increasingly illegitimate Palestinian leadership. Things started well for the White House, which convinced three Arab Ambassadors to attend Trump’s ceremony with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu marking the release of the plan, including one—the envoy from the United Arab Emirates—who praised the proposal as a “serious initiative” and an “important starting point” for a return to negotiations. But within days, old patterns reemerged, as the Arab League meeting in Cairo and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation meeting in Jeddah issued stinging rejections of the plan and strong endorsements of the traditional Palestinian position. While none of this is likely to affect the important business Washington has with Arab and Muslim governments—fighting terror, confronting Iran—such negativity to the Trump plan bursts the bubble of those who suggested that the Palestinians were so isolated that they would be forced to accept the less-than-half-loaf on offer. To call the rollout strategy, if one existed, less than a stunning success is an understatement.

In the meantime, many Israelis may enjoy the sugar-high of President Trump’s warm embrace, but they don’t seem prepared for the inevitable let-down to come. In so doing they mistake the ebb and flow of U.S. recognition of their desiderata with actual peace with the Palestinians. It is one thing for the President to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, a bilateral U.S.-Israel decision I supported as a long-overdue remedy for an historic wrong of U.S. policy. It is something else for the President to be the mediator in someone else’s dispute and offer detailed views on its resolution that tilt heavily to the views of one side, even if that side is a strong and close ally.

In a 2004 exchange of letters, President George W. Bush affirmed to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that the U.S. government recognized that a substantial portion of Israeli settlers would be allowed to stay in their homes and communities, annexed to Israel, in any future peace agreement: “In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers,” wrote Bush, “it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.” It was an historic recognition of reality and, in my view, a major step toward building a practical peace. However, five years later, when Barack Obama became President, he decided he wasn’t bound by his predecessor’s written commitment and essentially ripped up the letter and started from scratch. The absence of any progress toward peace since then is at least partly a legacy of that decision.

If that is what happened when a new President inherited a fairly mild policy declaration he believed tied his hands, there should be no doubt what is going to happen when a future President of a different party inherits the more unabashedly “pro-Israel” positions proposed by the Trump peace plan. He or she will almost surely renounce what Trump proposed and face a decision as to whether to issue his/her own peace plan or to return to the role played by every President since Ronald Reagan, that of honest broker helping the parties work out their differences in direct negotiations. If we are lucky, the old ways will win out, because the alternative is likely to be a plan based on principles less rational and reasoned than the kernels of sanity that ended up stretched beyond recognition in the Trump plan. And the sugar-high will be a distant memory.

It remains to be said: After a century of conflict, one must admit the possibility that the Venn diagram of Israeli-Palestinian peace may not exist. That is, there may be no overlap between what Palestinians will accept and what Israelis will offer. Traditionally, the main reason for the absence of peace has been Palestinian rejectionism, their refusal of every partition plan since 1937. That has not changed, though the Trump plan is not really a fair test. More recently, Israel hardened its own position, thanks both to the lessons learned from the stab-in-the-back it suffered during the second intifada and the giddiness released by the President’s indulgence of the most triumphalist tendencies in Israeli politics. The result is that the gap between the two sides has become a chasm.

Perhaps, a day will come when the centers of gravity of Israeli and Palestinian politics move closer to each other and an American mediator—one who is surely sympathetic to Israel but who also projects understanding of Palestinian concerns—can help them span the remaining divide. Until then, the goal of U.S. policy should be clear—to continue the historic march of shrinking the conflict from a meta-contest between Arabs and Israelis to a managed dispute between two peoples uneasily sharing the same tiny sliver of land on the eastern Mediterranean.

The post We Need a Corrective to Old Catechisms on Peace. Trump’s Plan Isn’t It appeared first on The American Interest.

Lessons from Impeachment

As President Trump’s impeachment trial comes to its predictable conclusion, are there any new institutional or political lessons that can be gleaned from this experience? Yes: Thanks to the President’s brazenness, we are more aware of a few important vulnerabilities that should be fixed or at least clarified. But mostly, this latest impeachment effort reinforces what we should have known from the past.

The first is that the judicial trappings of the impeachment process continue to fool some folks into thinking that it is not a purely political exercise. It is naive to believe that elected officials can be transformed into impartial jurors by swearing an oath. The reason real trials include a voir dire process for determining who is qualified to be a juror is that we know that people can be too deeply conflicted to be impartial. Members of Congress at a minimum are deeply conflicted by their party loyalties, and some of them, such as Rep. Devin Nunes and Sen. Lindsay Graham, may have been a party to Trump’s controversial actions.

It is hard to say who was actually “fooled” by the legal trappings and who was doing the “fooling.” Certainly, some voters, legal commentators, and members of the press fall into the former category. But when a savvy politician such as Senator Chuck Schumer complains that “this trial was not a real trial. It had no witnesses, no documents . . . it is a tragedy on a very large scale,” count me as skeptical as to whether he actually believed for even a moment that it could be a “real trial.” Rather, the trial frame serves as a useful rhetorical device for highlighting the craven Republican effort to cover up a damaging political scandal.

The truth is that the U.S. impeachment process is a legislative action akin to a no confidence vote in a parliamentary system. It may or may not have been originally designed as something different from a legislative vote of confidence, but that is what it is now. If it was truly intended as a hybrid between legislative and judicial functions, it was a design flaw in retrospect given the subsequent evolution of partisanship and the powerful political motivation of full-time professional politicians to stay in office. America’s hybrid political institutions—elected judges on partisan ballots, Fanny Mae/Freddie Mac, public utilities that are meant to serve the public and private stockholders simultaneously—are sources of continuous confusion and trouble.

Better to frame impeachment as our version of the option other democracies provide—the ability of a legislative majority or supermajority to remove a President when it chooses to. Viewed that way, the end result of the Trump impeachment was not abnormal. Votes of no confidence are quite rare in parliamentary democracies and usually involve multiparty governments. They typically succeed at removing leaders when coalitions of parties split from one another, not because a majority party splinters and then removes itself from office unilaterally. American political parties are no longer the widely heterogenous coalitions they once were, which means the odds of defections from their ranks are much lower than they used to be.

As a legal argument intended to persuade a judge, the Republican strategy of moving the goal posts for the impeachment rationale (e.g. he did not do it, he did do it but it is not a crime, it might be a crime but it is not serious enough to warrant removal) seems risibly inconsistent; as a matter of political strategy, it is simply standard operating procedure when you know you have the votes you need in hand. Pretextual arguments (e.g. the President was worried about corruption generally, not Biden specifically) can be disproved in court by a preponderance of evidence to the contrary; in a political setting, they provide “plausible deniability” and justification for those who have already made up their minds.

From a purely legal point of view, the President was exonerated. From a political perspective, the verdict is more mixed. President Trump was in effect censured. That, of course, is not technically true, as there was no formal censure vote, but he was impeached by the House. President Trump, like Bill Clinton, is now stuck with the “permanent asterisk” of impeachment, and both will go down in history as personally flawed leaders. While this is a one-party judgment, it has a broader legitimacy because it accords with the public’s consensus that President Trump inappropriately used his political power for political gain.

This latest impeachment episode has also highlighted the critical role that the unfinished malapportionment revolution continues to play in the Trump Presidency. The Supreme Court’s decisions after Baker v. Carr established the principle of “one person, one vote” at all levels of U.S. representation except the Electoral College and the Senate. The influence that the Electoral College has had on the President’s political strategy has been apparent for some time. But the Senate malapportionment casts the Republican vote against hearing witnesses in a colder light and explains why the Senate decision does not reflect majority public opinion on the matter.

Most importantly, the latest impeachment effort has uncovered a host of issues that are not sufficiently clarified in the U.S. Constitution or by the Senate impeachment rules that originated in the 19th century. Can the President withhold evidence and prevent witnesses from appearing before Congress when being investigated by the House for possible impeachment? And when witnesses do show up, can he block relevant testimony under the doctrines of executive privilege and protecting national security? What about the circular logic that Justice Department doctrine holds that a President cannot be indicted for crimes while in office, but impeachment requires criminal activity? And what exactly is abuse of power if it is not extorting other countries to give false witness on a political opponent? Apparently, the answer to all of the above questions as it stands now is that it depends on what a particular Senate “majority” decides.

I can live with the political uncertainty about many of these questions except the one about withholding evidence and ignoring subpoenas. They strike at the core of checks and balances. I would have preferred it if the Democrats had taken these issues up through the court system rather than rushing to a Senate trial. Apparently for internal political reasons, the Democratic leaders felt that they had to move forward even though they must have known that the odds were overwhelmingly against them prevailing.

The rise in partisan polarization has impacted our checks and balances in a bifurcated way. It solidified the loyalty of the President’s party and the opposition of the other party. It made government controlled by one party more unified than ever and divided government more contentious than ever. Combined with the malapportionment problems, the Democrats have a steeper path to power than seems fair under majoritarian principles, but that is the hand that has been dealt to them by our Constitution and recent demographic trends. This situation will not change in the foreseeable future, let alone in time for the upcoming Presidential election. That may be the most important political lesson from this latest impeachment experience.

The post Lessons from Impeachment appeared first on The American Interest.

Arch Puddington: “There’s No Such Thing as Illiberal Democracy”

Arch Puddington is a senior scholar at Freedom House, where he has worked for more than two decades. Before that, he worked as a journalist at Radio Free Europe during the final years of the Cold War. As Freedom House readies its annual “Freedom in the World” report for publication next month, TAI editor-in-chief Jeffrey Gedmin and associate editor Sean Keeley spoke with Arch to discuss his lifelong career advancing democracy and human rights. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

TAI: You’ve had a career dedicated to the support of democracy and human rights. Could you tell us how this all began? What influences—personal, intellectual, or political—put you on this path?

Arch Puddington: I spent my first few adult years working as a newspaper reporter. I subsequently became involved with a political movement called Social Democrats, USA. Its history extends back to Trotskyism and the American Socialist Party, the party of Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas. The Social Democrats attracted a group of young political activists, for example Penn Kemble and Joshua Muravchik. We shared a commitment to domestic reforms along traditional social democratic lines and an international perspective focused on the spread of democracy. We were strongly anti-communist, and we rejected the proposition that economic development in the Third World required statism and autocracy.

My involvement with the Social Democrats led to my working for Bayard Rustin, who was a leading black civil rights leader. He was the head of an organization called the A. Philip Randolph Institute, which sought to strengthen black worker involvement in the American labor movement. Bayard had been a key aide to Dr. King. But at the time I was with him he was increasingly involved in international human rights causes. He campaigned to alert the United States to the genocide in Cambodia, was a strong supporter of the Soviet refusenik movement, and was involved in various human rights struggles in Africa, which at the time was totally dominated by dictatorships of various stripes.

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Arch Puddington (Freedom House)

TAI: Your studies began with a bachelor’s degree in English Literature, is that right?

AP: Yes, an undergraduate degree in literature from the University of Missouri. Today, I would be disqualified from employment at Freedom House without an advanced degree in international relations or history. Back when I joined Freedom House, advanced degrees were less important than your involvement in political struggles.

TAI: Before working at Freedom House, you also did a stint with Radio Free Europe, and you wrote a book about the organization. Could you share some thoughts about that part of your career?

AP: I joined RFE-RL in 1985. I was there for nine years, during the end of the Cold War, including the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. But the most dramatic event was the Chernobyl disaster. Here was a free press in action, alerting the Soviet people and those bordering the USSR to an unfolding catastrophe, and doing so without resorting to tabloid tactics or scare mongering. Chernobyl was a key event, perhaps the key event, in the unraveling of the Soviet system. And Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty played a critical role in telling the story to a crucial audience.

TAI: It’s been 30 years since the collapse of communism, and there have been some bumps in the road on the path toward democratization. How do you evaluate the development of Eastern Europe over the past three decades?

AP: It’s fair to say that many of us, myself included, were overly optimistic. When I joined Freedom House in 1994 the analysis staff was focused on two looming elections in the former Communist sphere. In Hungary, a populist named Istvan Csurka, a nationalist and writer, was running on a xenophobic and anti-Semitic platform. There was considerable fretting at Radio Free Europe, Freedom House, and among Hungarian liberals that Csurka would command support and stymie the march toward full democracy. In fact, his party did quite badly, and I believe wound up with no representation in parliament.

The other case was Vladimir Meciar. He was the Prime Minister of Slovakia, a thuggish former boxer, and no friend of liberal democracy. He had won the previous election, and many of those who were involved in democratization efforts in the region worried that he would win again. In the event, he was defeated. At that point, there was a universal sigh of gratification and a sense that things would now be moving smoothly towards free societies in the former Soviet orbit. Today, of course, we have much greater challenges than Meciar or Csurka.

TAI: How do you explain this countervailing trend today? Some speak of a rise of “neo-authoritarianism,” others talk about “democratic back-sliding.” How do you see it?

AP: Back then, we anticipated an embrace of liberal democracy throughout the world. We understood there would be exceptions—China, for instance. But even in a dictatorship like Egypt we saw glimmers of optimism in the development of a dissident community under Mubarak. Instead, we have witnessed a return to normal politics in many countries with weak histories of representative government. This is especially true in Central Europe. Instead of a straightforward march toward freedom and liberal reform, we’re experiencing the usual sort of party politics, with its ugliness and polarization.

Post-communist countries have weak histories of democratic government. Either they were incorporated in imperial monarchies or partitioned among larger neighbors. They exist in neighborhoods that have been fought over by Turkey, Germany, and Russia through the centuries. So if you take the long view, their troubles in developing liberal institutions is not that surprising. Personally, I’m uncomfortable with the long view, so I’m deeply concerned and more than a bit disappointed about the direction politics has taken.

TAI: Tell us about Viktor Orbán and his so-called “illiberal democracy” in Hungary. How do you describe the situation? Is this low-functioning democracy? Soft authoritarianism? What is your level of concern?

AP: There are two things about Viktor Orbán’s ascension to power that I would emphasize. First, the Socialist Party left office in disgrace, with the country’s economy a shambles. You recall the famous recording where the Socialist Prime Minister cynically boasted about having repeatedly lied about the economy. The result was that Orbán not only won, but won with a two-thirds majority. And he used his supermajority to turn Hungarian politics upside-down across the board. He created a political system that, among other things, throws up serious obstacles to the defeat of the dominant party. To achieve this, he used gerrymandering, a partisan takeover of the election mechanisms, and other measures that, taken together, have elevated Fidesz into a dominant position in what is coming dangerously close to a one-party system.

The second thing that happened is not just the opposition’s defeat, but its collapse. This is a phenomenon that is not limited to Hungary. In country after country, we’ve seen once powerful parties simply disappear as relevant political forces. In European countries populists have gained as social democrats have eroded. In Venezuela, centrist parties that had governed the country for decades faded away after Hugo Chavez took over, with terrible consequences for democracy. There is a crucial lesson here as we face the rise of populism, illiberalism, and other anti-democratic currents.

In Hungary, you have an opposition that is still trying to recover from a dramatic setback and a ruling party that is governing along a pattern established by big city Democratic Party machines in the United States. Orbán has built, on a national basis, a machine like the old Chicago Daley organization that has integrated the business class into the Fidesz political structure, with business providing the funds to support the party’s election campaigns. It’s corrupt, but very successful in enabling the dominant party to retain power.

TAI: Washington pundits often conflate current-day circumstances in Hungary and Poland. Could you tell us how they’re comparable and how they’re different? What is your assessment of the situation in Poland?

AP: Some of the goals of the Law and Justice Party (PiS) are disturbing. The government has already taken important steps towards the transformation of the judiciary into a pliant politicized institution that will rubber stamp the government’s actions. Likewise, PiS has turned state media into an all-out propaganda machine. I’m also concerned with PiS’s drive to impose a state interpretation of national history that would encompass art, the teaching of history, and museum presentations. The politicization of culture is the sort of thing we expect from Russia and China, not from leading democracies.

But Poland is different from Hungary. In Poland, the opposition has not dematerialized in the same way. The Law and Justice government has only been able to make significant changes in the judiciary and in the state media. Poland still enjoys political pluralism and especially media pluralism.

Also, Viktor Orbán has set himself up as the de facto leader of opposition politics in Europe. He hatched this idea of “illiberal democracy,” has moved his country close to Russia, and continuously criticizes EU values. The Russia relationship is crucial. Hungary is step-by-step moving to a position of semi-neutrality between Russia and the democracies. In Poland, concern about Russia is strong. I think that the Russia factor will prevent Poland from moving as far as Hungary has.

TAI: How do you view the question of nationalism in Hungary and Poland? There’s a common assumption that the nationalist rhetoric we hear there is fundamentally illiberal and unhealthy. But is there a possibility for a kind of enlightened nationalism in these countries? One thinks of figures like Josef Pilsudski or Jan Masaryk, who once pioneered a kind of robust liberal nationalism in the region.

AP: In Central Europe, leaders like Pilsudski and Masaryk were capable of embracing liberalism and patriotic nationalism. But I wonder how successful they were in bringing Jews, Slovaks, Germans, and other minorities into the equation. And, of course, things are different today. While Hungary and Poland are unusually homogenous societies, other parts of Europe have opened their doors to immigrants from the Middle East and Africa. The refugee crisis was, for many, a frightening episode. And then you must remember that the divisions in a country like Poland are not really over race or nationality, but over Polish culture: divisions between traditionalists and the provinces on one side and urbanites and secularists on the other.

The populist right has been growing in Europe for more than three decades. Parties like Austria’s Freedom Party and the National Rally in France have had representation in parliament for years, and they have been flogging the immigration issue for years. But we may be coming to a period where immigration loses some of its bite and other, more mundane but quite significant problems of society and the economy come to the fore. How will Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders thrive?

TAI: Leaving Europe for a moment, another big case study for democracy promotion is the so-called Arab Spring. In 2011, many had high hopes for democratization in the Middle East. What was your thinking at the time? Did we have the wrong expectations?

AP: We may have had unrealistic expectations. The people who gathered at Tahrir Square had no experience in building democracy, and the result was a military coup and General al-Sisi. In the Middle East, democratic forces have been suppressed by a malign coalition of the military and strongman politicians. They have decades of experience at monopolizing power and using the levers of repression.

The United States accepted the Egypt coup, and under Trump we treat al-Sisi as a friend. But the coup was unjustified. Morsi was not attempting to gain monopoly power, and the Muslim Brotherhood was not poised to seize power. The Morsi government was likely to fall of its own incompetence within a few months, and then someone else would have been elected. In any event, the coup has ushered in the worst police state conditions that Egypt has experienced in decades, and perhaps in its entire existence as an independent nation-state. Conditions are much worse than under Mubarak; the regime now holds thousands of political prisoners, has executed hundreds, and has imposed new controls on universities and the press. Sisi’s policies will come back to bite the leadership, and at some point you will have another revolution, but it might not be as democratic as in 2011.

TAI: We’ve talked a lot about failed democratization, or erstwhile success stories that are now trending the wrong way. What are some examples of the opposite trend—bright spots that are now making real strides toward democracy?

AP: I would start with Ukraine. When I joined Freedom House in the 1990s, Ukraine was a state run by corrupt oligarchs with close ties to Russia. It was not exactly a Russia satellite, but certainly Moscow had outsized influence. Now Ukraine is building an independent state with a national identity and democratic institutions. It is no longer a junior vassal of Russia. That’s a very positive thing. Aside from Ukraine, there have been positive if fragile gains in a few countries, like Malaysia, Armenia, Ecuador, Gambia, North Macedonia, possibly Ethiopia. And, of course, most of the countries that embraced democracy at the Cold War’s end have not slid back into some form of autocracy. They remain democracies—that’s important to keep in mind.

Perhaps more significant is the increasing willingness of people living under autocracy to protest and resist. People today are less prone to accept repression, corruption, foreign domination, or indifference to popular needs. People don’t necessarily have the ability to overthrow their oppressors, but they are more inclined to make the effort. They sometimes rely on opposition parties. More often they look to civil society movements to take the lead, and they still look to the United States for moral and diplomatic support. Today we see this in Lebanon, Sudan, Algeria, even Iran. I think you’d see it in China if the regime there didn’t devote billions in resources to not just suppressing protest movements but in whiting out the very idea of a society where ordinary people could challenge the state.

Those who live under oppression still look to the United States. Right now we have a divided government, with a President who is oblivious to oppression abroad and hostile to injecting values into foreign policy, and a government which continues to support human rights and democracy. And then add to that a civil society—journalists, NGOs, humanitarian organizations, religious believers—who would very much like to see the United States reassert itself as the beacon of freedom. The role of civil society is likely to be magnified as long as Trump is President.

TAI: How do you evaluate the situation in Hong Kong? And do you think movements for democracy on China’s periphery can have ripple effects on the mainland?

AP: Hong Kong is a very hard issue for an American. To see free people anywhere threatened by this neo-totalitarian system that Xi Jinping has built is to look into the abyss. Freedom House is in solidarity with Joshua Wong, Martin Lee, and the other leaders of the Hong Kong Democracy Movement. And we must remind the world about the full dimension of the China system, with its frenzied censorship, its high-tech police state apparatus, its absence of the rule of law, and its influence operations and bullying outside its borders. This is crucial, because Beijing does care about its global reputation.

Taiwan does not have China breathing down its neck in the same way that Hong Kong does. Taiwan just had yet another election that reinforced the insistence of its people that it not come under the ministrations of Beijing. Taiwanese don’t want a system that censors social media, jails political dissidents, erases inconvenient episodes from the history texts, and practices thought control in reeducation camps. Our first obligation is to remind the world that the people who know China the best—that is, the people of Hong Kong and Taiwan—want nothing to do with Xi Jinping’s China Dream.

TAI: Where do you place India on the spectrum of democracies? It has many of the procedural hallmarks of democracy, but there are real questions about culture—as seen now with this proposed citizenship law that would privilege India’s Hindu identity. Is democracy in tension with pluralism in India?

AP: India is currently a major disappointment for Freedom House. One of the things we’ve been talking about here today, albeit indirectly, is the threat to minority rights all over the world. You’re seeing it in these anti-Muslim laws and policies in India, and you’re seeing it in concentration camps in Xinjiang. You’re seeing it in the truly ugly rhetoric of Viktor Orbán and Jaroslaw Kaczynski when they describe Muslim refugees from Syria. You’re seeing it in the United States when Trump calls Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists. This is a distressing trend, especially because the world has seen such an explosion of immigration and population movements. People of different races and cultures live among each other all across the world, and this is not likely to change.

The demonization of minorities poses a huge obstacle to the success of democracy. There’s no simple answer here, but the United States has a special role to play. We are the country where the movements for minority rights got underway during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. We have dealt with these issues through the process of democratic debate. We’ve had debates about how you integrate schools. We’ve had debates about how you build strong pillars of entrepreneurial activity in the black community. We’ve had debates about affirmative action. The United States has managed to confront this problem through the normal process of political debate so that race relations, although testy and polarized, has not deteriorated to zero-sum confrontation. Other societies have to learn how to do this, and we have to make sure that we don’t forget how to do it.

TAI: Let’s turn to some criticisms of democracy promotion. In their new book The Light That Failed, Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes suggest that the democracy promotion strategies of the 1990s in Eastern Europe were built around “imitation” of the West, and that the imperative to copy Western models was bound to produce a backlash. What do you make of this critique?

AP: Krastev and Holmes have made an important contribution to the debate over Central Europe’s fate. But I am apprehensive about theories that seem to cover all the bases and encompass everything. Likewise, I’m not impressed by the proposition that others have advanced that there are “many paths to democracy.” There are clearly different routes to freedom. But to achieve real democracy requires a set of strong institutions that are common throughout the democratic world. Honest elections, a diverse media, an independent judiciary, property rights, a state that tolerates a critical press and an independent civil society, minority protections. If these institutions are lacking, then you don’t have democracy; you have something else. And there is no such thing as “illiberal democracy” or “democracy with Chinese characteristics.”

TAI: What do you make of the broader argument that the democracy promotion community has focused too much on procedures and institutions, and not enough on cultivating the cultural values necessary to sustain democracy? Is there a way we can credibly encourage the latter?

AP: First, let’s be clear about democratic processes. Autocrats like Putin and Hugo Chavez have undertaken something new in political life. They have used democratic means to promote autocratic ends. Having triumphed initially through the normal election process, they then weakened, warped, and manipulated all these so-called petty democratic processes and institutions and achieved something akin to a quiet, bloodless coup. The totalitarians and the dictators of the 20th century sneered at democracy and elections. They held power through cults of personality, terror, and often a dogma—German nationalism for Hitler; dictatorship of the proletariat for Stalin and Mao. Today’s autocrats do not commit mass murder, they don’t jail thousands of dissidents, they even tolerate a carefully rationed amount of opposition media and badly hobbled opposition parties.

As for culture, it is clear by now that democracy can thrive in all kinds of environments. Just look at Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, East Asian societies with successful democracies that exist in the shadow of the dragon. And yes, recent trends suggest that we should be more cautious in promoting the kind of rigid secularism that clashes with cultures where faith and national identity are intertwined. But we should be cautious here as well. The Modi government is invoking the Hindu faith in justifying a frightening series of measures aimed directly at India’s quite sizable Muslim minority. The BJP has embarked on a course that is dangerous from every perspective—ethical, spiritual, geopolitical, and internal security.

TAI: Another critique of democracy promotion, often made from the right, holds that advocating minority rights tends to expand into a left-wing agenda, pushing things like LGBT rights on other countries. Secretary Pompeo has recently put together a “Commission on Unalienable Rights,” which suggests that human rights have become too broadly defined and that we need to narrow the scope of what we advocate abroad. What do you make of that effort?

AP: Freedom House testified before this commission. I took a look at its mission and some of the statements that Secretary Pompeo had made. They’re notable for their vagueness. Given this lack of clarity, I would not want to pass judgment about its findings, whatever they might be. When governments get involved in passing judgments on combustible issues like the nature of human rights, it often doesn’t end well.

I say that because while there is a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a global document with broad credibility, in real life human rights are driven by popular movements. You will not see anything about LGBT rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted in the 1940s. You didn’t hear much about LGBT rights when Martin Luther King, Jr. was marching and Bayard Rustin, who was gay, was one of his advisors. LGBT people themselves started a movement for equality. That movement took decades but eventually, in much of the world, LGBT people did achieve something like legal equality. They are engaged in a movement to expand the geographical boundaries of their rights and that will continue. It will continue whatever this Commission says or doesn’t say.

TAI: Let’s turn to democracy at home. One group is very concerned about Trump, his rhetoric, and his verbal assaults on institutions. Another group says, “Well, our institutions are holding and democracy is actually fairly resilient.” What’s your assessment?

AP: In our Freedom in the World report, the United States has declined more than any other established democracy over the past ten years. The decline started before Trump, so let’s get that out of the way. For example, the voter suppression laws in states like Georgia, Ohio, and North Carolina were instituted before Trump. But the decline has accelerated during the Trump Administration.

At Freedom House, we’re very concerned about the state of democracy in America. We still believe in the United States as a great democracy that has a natural role as the leader of global freedom. So it’s a huge issue if American democracy is in decline. It’s an even bigger problem if the President of the United States actually resents that mission, has tried to abandon America’s role as global democracy leader, and has identified himself with autocrats like Putin, Sisi, Kim Jong-un, and Xi Jinping.

I’m not a pessimist because American democracy has proved itself historically to be capable of revival. But right now, it’s moving in the wrong direction, in a way that is very disturbing.

TAI: If you look back at what we Americans have done to promote democracy abroad in the past 40 years, what have we learned and what could we do better? If you were setting up the democracy promotion infrastructure from scratch today, what would it look like?

AP: I’ve always felt that the democracy movement was extremely important. But I also felt that the model of American democracy itself was our most important contribution. Our democracy has experienced some dark moments in my lifetime, including Vietnam, for example. But overall, the United States built an economic powerhouse out of free market principles and it built a strong multinational democracy, probably the first in the world. When the wall came down, when people in Eastern Europe talked about the various things that had influenced them, it was the American and European models that inspired them.

What would I have done differently? That’s hard to say. I think I would have made it clear from the very beginning that a society’s initial embrace of democracy is not enough. I once had lunch with John O’Sullivan, when he was at National Review and I was still working at Radio Free Europe. He said, “When do you think Radio Free Europe should go out of existence?” I said, “Well, when these countries have free media.” That was a premature judgment, because while the countries in Eastern Europe developed free and independent media almost immediately upon the collapse of communism, today the media in every one of these countries is either captured by the state or the ruling party, as in Hungary, or heavily dominated by oligarchs with their own particular missions.

We should have understood that building democracy in this part of the world was going to take a long time. These societies have had little experience with the messiness of democracy.

TAI: In your working life, what is the biggest success story for democracy promotion and what’s the most striking failure?

AP: The greatest achievement is the collapse of communism. America contributed to communism’s demise at one level through projects like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and at a more basic level by strengthening democracy at home, through prudent economic policies and through the democracy promotion efforts that we embarked on in the 1950s, and then later on in the 1980s through organizations like NED.

The greatest failure? Russia, no question. We fought the Cold War to counter Russian imperialism. Keep in mind what that meant: the domination of all the republics in Russia’s neighborhood, plus the Baltics, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. Then add Central Europe and the other parts of the world where the Soviets were supporting totalitarian or autocratic forces.

The actions and policies that ultimately shaped Russia after the Cold War, the actions and decisions that have enshrined Putin as Russia’s leader, were Russian decisions. But it’s unfortunate that America didn’t realize how important Russia’s ultimate direction would be for the world, and for democracy. How important it would have been for America to go the extra mile to help Russia build a system that moved towards democracy and that eased the burdens of economic transition. Even a country with poorly formed democratic institutions, a country which Freedom House ranked as Partly Free instead as among the most repressive, would have been a major step forward. I also think it was a major mistake for the United States to adopt a passive stance when Putin made clear his hostility to democracy and especially to America. Especially under Obama, we just stood by while Putin engineered his campaign against democracy—in Europe, Ukraine, and eventually the United States.

The post Arch Puddington: “There’s No Such Thing as Illiberal Democracy” appeared first on The American Interest.

Blocking Bolton’s Book

Donald Trump’s impeachment trial is drawing to an ignominious end without hearing from any first-hand witnesses. Preeminent among those not heard is John Bolton, Trump’s former National Security Advisor, who had indicated a willingness to testify under oath if subpoenaed. Bolton has also written a memoir of his tenure in office, provocatively titled The Room Where It Happened, and scheduled to go on sale on March 17. 

If New York Times reporting is to be trusted—and I trust it—the book makes a number of explosive claims. First, Bolton heard directly from Trump about his plan to withhold military assistance in order to extort political favors. Second, and even more sensationally, the illicit pressure campaign began months earlier than had been known and a bigger circle of players was in on it. In early May 2019, Trump had a conversation in the Oval Office in which the plot was discussed in a meeting attended by Bolton, the president’s personal lawyer, Rudi Giuliani, the acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone.

In a statement, Trump has flatly denied Bolton’s claims. Giuliani has taken to Twitter to say, “The meeting the Times describes is a lie. If Bolton is the source and he believed this was so bad, why didn’t he quit? How much integrity and honor will a man sacrifice for greed and revenge?” Mulvaney, more circumspectly, says he has no recollection of the meeting. Cipollone, who led the President’s defense team in the Senate while also evidently a fact witness—a glaring conflict of interest—has thus far said nothing. Whatever their individual roles, with the trial coming to an end, the question now is whether the public will at least get a chance to learn the facts as Bolton lays them out in his book.

The matter is in some doubt. In late December, Bolton submitted the manuscript to the White House for a mandatory pre-publication security scrubbing, asking for it to be completed within 30 days. But the White House appears to be trying to kill the book, or at least neuter it. It sent a letter to Bolton’s attorney declaring that the memoir

appears to contain significant amounts of classified information. It also appears that some of this information is at the TOP SECRET level, which is defined by Executive Order 13526 as “information that reasonably could be expected to cause exceptionally grave harm to the national security” of the United States if disclosed without authorization. Under federal law and the nondisclosure agreement your client signed as a condition for gaining access to classified information, the manuscript may not be published or otherwise disclosed without the deletion of the classified material.

The White House is demanding “significant” excisions. 

It beggars belief that Bolton included any classified information in his manuscript, let alone significant amounts, including Top Secret material. When it comes to national security secrecy, Bolton is a consummate professional with long years of experience as a ranking national security official. As National Security Advisor, he held the power to both classify and declassify information. He is the author of a previous memoir of a stint in government, making him intimately familiar with the pre-publication review process. And, whatever one thinks of his foreign policy views, he has a well-deserved reputation for integrity. In a reply to the White House, Bolton’s attorney has already stated: “We do not believe that any of the information could reasonably be considered classified.”

It is almost a certainty that White House claims to the contrary are being made in bad faith. A corollary: It is almost a certainty that the portions the White House wants excised are those revealing the misconduct of Donald Trump. The pre-publication review process is being scandalously perverted for political ends.

In the face of such a cover-up, what can, what should, Bolton do?

Two landmark cases involving the CIA lay out some of the issues. 

Victor Marchetti was a CIA operative who quit the agency in 1969 and went on to write a book (coauthored with John Marks) titled The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. It laid bare many of the secrets with which he had become acquainted over the course of his 15-year CIA career. The manuscript detailed operations and activities of the agency in locations ranging from Indochina to Angola, with portions touching on the very thing that the CIA held most dear: intelligence sources and methods. Like Bolton, Marchetti had signed a document pledging not to “divulge, publish, or reveal” classified information unless authorized to do so. Unlike Bolton, Marchetti did not submit the manuscript to the agency for a mandatory review.

Learning of Marchetti’s publishing plans, the CIA first contemplated recommending his prosecution under the espionage statutes. But to avoid the likelihood that a trial would cause even more secrets to spill out, it decided on another course. It obtained a temporary restraining order and sent Federal marshals to Marchetti’s door to notify him that he was forbidden to show his manuscript to anyone, including his publisher.

Marchetti challenged the injunction in court and lost. While agreeing that Marchetti had a First Amendment right to express himself, the court found that the CIA could nonetheless impose secrecy constraints on its employees; it was only precluded from barring them from discussing unclassified or previously disclosed materials. Active secrets were something else. Citizens like Marchetti, wrote the court, “have the right to criticize the conduct of our foreign affairs.” But at the same time, the government has a “right to secrecy.” Indeed, it has a “duty to strive for internal secrecy about the conduct of governmental affairs in areas in which disclosure may reasonably be thought to be inconsistent with the national interest.”

What this meant in practice was that the government had to act expeditiously to approve or disapprove any material that Marchetti presented for clearance, and he would be entitled to have a judge review the agency’s decisions. In the end, the CIA found 339 passages they wanted to excise, amounting to between 15 and 20 percent of the book. After further court battles over this censorship, the published version of the book emerged with only 168 elisions, which Knopf, the publisher, indicated by displaying blank lines where the CIA had been successful in suppressing information and bold text to indicate where the agency had retreated. The entire process lasted approximately a year—so much for expeditiousness.

Not long thereafter an even more celebrated case made its way to the Supreme Court. Frank W. Snepp III was a rising star at the CIA. During his eight year stint at the agency, most of them spent in Vietnam, he worked as a debriefer of agents, an interrogator of captured Viet Cong guerrillas, and a top analyst of North Vietnamese strategy. Passionately engaged in the effort to salvage the American and South Vietnamese position, Snepp was in Saigon through the war’s final days. He was among the last CIA officers to depart the American Embassy roof via helicopter when Saigon fell on April 29, 1975, and was horrified by the failure, as the United States rushed to evacuate its own personnel, to rescue its many Vietnamese friends, who were certain to pay a stiff price for their cooperation with our war effort once the South fell into Communist hands. Among those forsaken and left behind was Snepp’s own Vietnamese lover, who then took her own life along with that of their infant son.

The disastrous final chapter of the war was the subject of Snepp’s scathing portrait of America’s betrayal in Decent Interval, published by Random House in 1977 to wide acclaim. Like Marchetti, he had signed a promise not to publish any information drawn from his CIA employment “without specific prior approval by the Agency.” Unlike Marchetti, he broke his word. Even while telling his former supervisors in the agency that he would be submitting the manuscript to them for review, he was planning, secretly, to do otherwise. 

Snepp’s clandestine approach did not succeed in keeping the CIA in the dark. As it did with Marchetti, and as the Justice Department had done with Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, the agency pressed to impose a prior restraint on Snepp, complete with an order to seize all copies of Decent Interval. But the Justice Department, now staffed by more liberal Carter Administration appointees, declined to take a step certain to excite the wrath of First Amendment advocates. Instead, they sought to impose sanctions on Snepp for violating his agreement.

This would have been an ordinary breach of contract suit: Snepp had signed a secrecy agreement and was breaking it. But what made it remarkable was the government’s contention, ultimately taken up by the Supreme Court, that even if no classified information was revealed, publication of the book still had “caused the United States irreparable harm and loss.” The CIA’s position was that a former intelligence agent’s publication of unreviewed material was detrimental simply because it was known to be unreviewed. The problem was not the information itself, which the government stipulated was unclassified, but the demonstration to friendly foreign countries and individuals that a process vital to their own security had disintegrated.

This argument held sway, and the court found that Snepp had “willfully, deliberately, and surreptitiously breached his position of trust with the CIA.” The potential damage from such conduct was clear:

When a former agent relies on his own judgment about what information is detrimental, he may reveal information that the CIA—with its broader understanding of what may expose classified information and confidential sources—could have identified as harmful. In addition to receiving intelligence from domestically based or controlled sources, the CIA obtains information from the intelligence services of friendly nations and from agents operating in foreign countries. The continued availability of these foreign sources depends upon the CIA’s ability to guarantee the security of information that might compromise them and even endanger the personal safety of foreign agents.

In the face of Snepp’s intentional transgression, the court imposed the remedy sought by the government: Snepp was forced to “disgorge the benefits of his faithlessness.” He had to surrender to the government his $120,000 advance and all subsequent royalties from his book. The Supreme Court upheld this judgment. 

Bolton is not exactly situated like either Marchetti or Snepp. To begin with, Bolton was not a midlevel operative at the CIA but a ranking official in the White House itself. As such he possessed and possesses the “broader understanding” of the equities involved in secrecy decisions that low-ranking officials are said to lack. For another thing, unlike Snepp, Bolton has never planned to launch his book in secret, bypassing the pre-publication process. He has made a good faith effort to abide by the rules. It is the government that appears to be acting in bad faith. 

For yet another thing, unlike Marchetti, Bolton has already provided his manuscript to his publisher. The unreviewed volume has thus been seen by individuals who lack clearances, such as his editors at Simon & Schuster and his literary agent, and the manuscript is already housed on numerous computers that lack the security features which classified information demands. Bolton is already in violation of his secrecy agreement, although that particular type of pre-publication violation has become commonplace.

Whatever the differences, the choices before Bolton are unattractive in the extreme. He could battle the government in court, a process that could tie up the book for months if not years, possibly severely crimping sales and depriving the public in a timely fashion—before the November elections—of the valuable information his memoir contains. Or Bolton could roll the dice and violate the secrecy agreement, proceed with publication, let the government sue him as it did Snepp, and hope to prevail in court. If he opts to challenge a government that is abusing its secrecy powers for political aims, the prescient words of Justice Stevens’ dissent in Snepp could be taken as encouragement: 

[T]he Court seems unaware of the fact that its drastic new remedy has been fashioned to enforce a species of prior restraint on a citizen’s right to criticize his government. Inherent in this prior restraint is the risk that the reviewing agency will misuse its authority to delay the publication of a critical work or to persuade an author to modify the contents of his work beyond the demands of secrecy. The character of the covenant as a prior restraint on free speech surely imposes an especially heavy burden on the censor to justify the remedy it seeks.

Be that as it may, if Bolton were to defy the White House, he would face the additional theoretical risk of prosecution under the espionage statutes, which criminally punish anyone who without authorization “willfully communicates, delivers, [or] transmits” national defense information. Given the almost certain falsity of the White House contention that the manuscript is replete with sensitive secrets, such a criminal prosecution would be highly unlikely, and a successful conviction even less so. But enduring prosecution would be an ordeal and, under the Trump-Barr Justice Department, extraordinary happenings cannot be ruled out.

Whatever Bolton decides to do, the public interest in the outcome is clear. It lies in protecting legitimate secrets, ensuring that the classification system is not misused to shield embarrassment or criminality, and revealing presidential malfeasance in a timely manner. The Trump White House appears determined, yet again, to trample on the public interest. Of course, Bolton has had the opportunity to tell his story to the media at any time. For reasons that have invited a lot of dark speculation, he has declined to do so.  Whatever one’s guess about Bolton’s motives (I am not alone in being deeply troubled by his silence), the future of his memoir is a matter that concerns us all.

The post Blocking Bolton’s Book appeared first on The American Interest.

The Meaning of the Super Bowl

This Sunday, February 2, a major American cultural event will take place. The 54th Super Bowl game will be played in Miami. To decide the championship of American professional football, the San Francisco 49ers will play the Kansas City Chiefs.

As in the past, this year the game will hold the attention of much of the nation, commanding a television audience larger than for any other event in 2020. The five most-watched American television programs in history have all been Super Bowl broadcasts. For that reason, commercial time for this telecast will cost more than for any other: around $5.6 million for 30 seconds of airtime. Advertisers lavish effort and resources on producing these brief messages, and surveys have shown that a small but significant fraction of the Super Bowl’s huge viewership tunes in principally to see the commercials.

Tens of thousands of parties will convene across the country to watch the game. Americans consume more food on the day of the Super Bowl than on any other day of the year except Thanksgiving, including an estimated 28 million pounds of potato chips, 1.25 billion chicken wings, and eight million pounds of guacamole. In addition to commerce and conviviality, Sunday will be a landmark day for another American obsession: gambling. In the United States, more money is bet on the Super Bowl than on any other event.

The first of them, on January 15, 1967, was a far more modest affair. It was not, in fact, the first championship game of the National Football League (NFL), which had been operating since 1920. In 1960 a rival group of teams, the American Football League, came into existence, the two leagues merged in 1966, and the 1967 contest marked the first meeting of their respective champions. While all the seats for next Sunday’s game have long been sold, the venue for the first game, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, was only two-thirds full. Tickets to that game cost $12; now the average resale value for one approaches $8,000. Indeed, that initial game was not called the Super Bowl: that honorific was only added for the third one, in 1969.

Thus, what was, more than half a century ago, an interesting but hardly earth-shaking addition to the American sports calendar has become something akin to a national holiday—“Super Bowl Sunday.” How and why did this happen, and what does the event’s cultural significance tell us about the country in which it is celebrated?

The Super Bowl’s timing, occurring as it does on the first Sunday in February, is propitious. It comes in the middle of winter, when alternative outdoor activities are sparse. It takes place over three and a half hours beginning shortly after 6 p.m. Eastern time, ending early enough for adults to go comfortably to work and children to school the next day. It is a single, decisive, and therefore maximally dramatic event. By contrast, to become the champion of the other major American professional sports—baseball, basketball, and ice hockey—a team has to win four games (of a possible seven), so single contests rarely carry the same weight as the Super Bowl.

Moreover, it is easy to take part in this particular national ritual: all that is required is a television set. Indeed, the Super Bowl is unimaginable without television: only a tiny fraction of the total audience witnesses it in person. The event therefore testifies to the importance of television in American life. And while television is often said to have a fragmenting, atomizing impact on society, directing the individual’s attention to the screen rather than to other people, the Super Bowl has the opposite effect: It not only provides an occasion for social gatherings, it supplies one of the most widely shared experiences in American life, the subject of countless conversations in homes, workplaces, and elsewhere, among people of all ages, occupations, and educational backgrounds.

The Super Bowl began at a time when the influence of television in American life had reached its zenith. Virtually every household had at least one set, and those offering transmission in color were just beginning to replace the black-and-white models. American viewers’ choice of programming was restricted: Three major networks (two of which, NBC and CBS, televised the 1967 game) dominated the airwaves, which gave them far greater influence than any single network enjoys today. Fifty years later, cable has created a world with hundreds of channels, and television has to compete for Americans’ attention with the internet and social media. Audiences for all television programs have shrunk—except in the case of the Super Bowl, where the other media reinforce rather than compete with it. What is it, then, about this particular annual television program that has made it so massively popular?

What is being televised is a game, and Americans, perhaps the most competitive people since the ancient Greeks, with a penchant for turning everything from architecture to eating into a contest, are inordinately fond of games. They are fond of playing them and they are just as fond of watching them: Games—sports—are a form of mass entertainment. They differ from the other principal form of mass entertainment, scripted drama, in three ways that help to account for their appeal. They are spontaneous. Unlike in films and theatrical productions, the outcome is not known in advance: No one bets on the outcome of a play or movie. They are authentic. Unlike film stars, athletes really are doing what audiences see them doing. And games are coherent. Unlike so much of life they have a beginning, middle, and end, with a plot line and a conclusion that can be easily understood.

A certain development in football over the past 54 years has added to its appeal: There is now more scoring, in large part through changes in the rules that make advancing the ball through the forward pass easier. An old adage has it that while defense—preventing scoring—wins championships, offense puts people in the seats. So it has been with football; but so it has been, as well, with the other American sports, which have also changed their rules for this purpose. The Super Bowl is America’s most popular televised event because football has become, over the last half century, America’s most popular sport. Why is that?

Football differs from the country’s other major team sports in that it has violence at its heart. The game’s basic activities are blocking (trying forcibly to move an opposing player or impeding his progress) and tackling (knocking to the ground the player in possession of the ball). Football’s violence is organized, indeed choreographed, rather than random or purely individual. It therefore resembles a very old form of organized violence: war. Football is a small-scale, restrained, relatively (but not entirely) safe version of warfare. The tens of millions of people who will watch the 49ers play the Chiefs are the very distant descendants of the Americans who, in 1861, brought picnic baskets to northern Virginia to watch the First Battle of Bull Run.

From a distance, a football game resembles a pre-modern battle: two groups of men in uniforms, wearing protective gear, crash into each other. Like most military battles, football is a contest for territory, with each team trying to advance the ball to the opposing side’s goal. In football, as in war, older men draw up plans for younger, more vigorous men to carry out: The sport’s coaches are its generals, the players its troops. Football teams mirror the tripartite organization of classical armies: the beefy linemen correspond to the infantry; the smaller, lighter players who actually carry the ball are the equivalent of cavalry; and the quarterback who advances the ball by throwing it through the air and the receivers who catch it are the sport’s version of an army’s artillery.

Football borrows some of its vocabulary from the terminology of war. A forward pass far down the field is a “long bomb.” The large men arrayed against each other along the line of scrimmage, where each football play begins, are said, like the soldiers on the western front in World War I, to be skirmishing “in the trenches.” An all-out assault on a quarterback attempting to pass is a “blitz,” taking its name from a comparable German tactic in World War II—the blitzkrieg, or lightning war.

War was once considered a normal, natural, and even, under some circumstances, an admirable part of social and political life. That is no longer the case, which perhaps helps to account to football’s popularity: The game is the one remaining socially acceptable form of organized violence.

War has not disappeared, of course, but in the United States it has changed in yet another way, which also contributes to the appeal of football. In traditional warfare individuals confronted each other directly and did battle with their personal weapons. Today the American military has become a high-tech organization that does some of its fighting impersonally and at very long range. The controller sitting in a shed maneuvering by remote control a drone thousands of miles away has partly replaced the warrior armed with his sword or battle-ax or bayonet. The result of a conflict waged in this new way depends not only on the bravery of a nation’s soldiers, but also on the ingenuity of its engineers.

Football, however, preserves some of the features of war before the advent of sensors and lasers. It is, as war was in the past (and sometimes still is), a test of will and skill. The traditional martial virtues, which societies admired and individuals sought to emulate—persistence, discipline, grace under pressure and, above all, courage—still matter in football. In this way Super Bowl Sunday, like other American holidays such as the Fourth of July or the birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, honors the past by celebrating, implicitly, human qualities that appear, in 2020, to have been more common in the past than they are in the present. Football players, like those who will take part in Super Bowl LIV, become heroes for some of the same reasons that Alvin York and Audie Murphy, highly decorated American soldiers in World Wars I and II, respectively, were regarded as heroic.

Football players do not face death on their field of conflict, but the sport does share, up to a point, war’s dark side. Their common feature gives reason to wonder whether the Super Bowl  will have the same cachet 50 years from now.

Like war, football is a dangerous activity. The multiple collisions between large, powerful men take a toll. Fractured and broken arms and legs and torn ligaments are occupational hazards for football players. Many of the participants in Sunday’s game, who will, by the time their careers end, have played for a decade or more—in high school and college before joining the professional ranks—will ultimately suffer from chronic arthritis.

In recent years, moreover, a far worse kind of injury has come to be associated with the game: brain damage. Examinations of the brains of deceased players, many of whom displayed signs of mental illness when alive and some of whom committed suicide, have shown evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) a degenerative disease that leads to memory loss, aggression, confusion, and depression.

A number of retired players sued the NFL on the grounds that it had not adequately warned them of the risks of the game it employed them to play. The suit was settled out of court, with the League not conceding any liability but making payments to the players. The settlement will surely not prevent future suits.

Moreover, if further research confirms the suspected link between the game and CTE, football may meet the same fate as boxing or smoking—once popular activities that remain legal but are now strongly discouraged and take place on a far smaller scale than in the past. The more persuasive the evidence connecting football with brain damage becomes, the more reluctant parents will be to allow their sons to play the game, which will restrict, perhaps dramatically, the pool from which professional teams draw their players. That pool will be severely restricted, as well, if the school districts that sponsor high school football and the universities whose teams play each other at the collegiate level are forced to take out expensive insurance policies against the claims that players or their families may make against them. In an era of straitened finances local school boards and the state legislatures that fund most football-playing universities may simply refuse to pay the premiums. In that case, while football may not die out completely, it will surely wither.

The proprietors of football at all levels will try—indeed, are trying today—to make the game safer for the players. If they do not succeed, however, Super Bowl 104, in 2070, will be a much-reduced version of the spectacle that will unfold this Sunday—that is, if the 104th Super Bowl takes place at all.

A version of this essay was first published in these pages in 2016.

The post The Meaning of the Super Bowl appeared first on The American Interest.

Three Colors and the Fracturing of Europe

Three Colors Trilogy

Directed by Krzsztof Kieślowski

1993-1994, Criterion Collection, Blu-ray, $79.95

“Do people really want liberty, equality, fraternity? Is it not some manner of speaking?”

— Krzysztof Kieślowski

If the cinematic year of 1994 is remembered for anything, it is for the mainstreaming of Quentin Tarantino. That year saw the release of his Pulp Fiction within a few months of the ultraviolent, Tarantino-inspired Natural Born Killers. This mainstreaming was not just of a single cineaste, but of an entire sensibility—one that would dominate much American filmmaking for the remainder of the decade.

But 1994 also saw, more quietly, the release of the latter two films in Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors trilogy. The concluding film, Red, premiered at the same Cannes Film Festival as did Pulp Fiction; among its many admirers was Tarantino himself. “That’s the best movie of this year and it’s going to win the Palme d’Or,” Tarantino reportedly confided to Harvey Weinstein after seeing the film. (In the event, it was Pulp Fiction that won the top prize.)

Red was not just the conclusion of an acclaimed film trilogy—it also brought to a close one of the most remarkable careers in the history of world cinema. Kieślowski was just 52 when he announced, at that year’s Cannes Film Festival, his imminent retirement—a move Roger Ebert would compare to Prospero throwing his books into the sea. Two years later, he was dead.

And 25 years later, Kieslowski has few self-conscious imitators. It’s not that his influence is non-existent: Tom Tykwer has explicitly acknowledged a debt, and his Run Lola Run plays like Kieslowski on ketamine, an adrenal rush through ideas of fate, chance, and connectedness that play out in more languid form in Kieslowski’s films. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, released five years after Red, offers a more melodramatic and on-the-nose statement of the latter’s theme of coincidence. Even the Gwyneth Paltrow-starring romantic comedy Sliding Doors is generally taken to be an Americanized version of Kieslowski’s early film, Blind Chance, right down to the significance of missed subway trains.

These imitators aside, though, what remains foreign about Kieslowski’s sensibility is the ethos that pervades the trilogy—wise, skeptical, and humane; compassionate without veering into sentimentality. It was a sensibility more admired than awarded, in its time no less than ours. (In a classically revealing move, the Academy Awards electorate nominated Kieślowski for “Best Director” before ultimately awarding the Oscar to Robert Zemeckis for Forrest Gump.)

Yet a quarter century has not dimmed the trilogy’s luster. Looking back on these three films now, it is possible to see more fully than in their time how they functioned as a subtle yet powerful political commentary on modern Europe. Released at a time of enormous hope for the continent, the films have much to tell us now that so many of those hopes are withering.

But what are they about?

The plot of each film is deceptively simple, featuring a series of seemingly unrelated characters. In Blue, Julie, the young Parisian wife of a famous composer, loses her husband and child in a car accident and spends the rest of the film wrestling with overwhelming grief and solitude. In the end, she tentatively begins a professional and potentially romantic relationship with Olivier, a former collaborator of her husband’s.

In White, Karol, a Polish hairdresser living in Paris, is left divorced and impoverished by his younger French wife, Dominique, on the grounds that he cannot perform sexually (indeed, he was unable to consummate their marriage). He returns to Warsaw and spends the remainder of the film seeking to avenge his humiliation, only to realize upon the successful execution of an elaborate plot of vengeance that he remains in love with her.

In Red, Valentine, a young model living in Geneva, finds her largely solitary life interrupted when she accidentally hits a dog with her car. This brings her into contact with the animal’s owner, a cynical, retired judge, with whom she forms a friendship. Meanwhile, Auguste, a young law student who lives nearby, discovers his lover’s infidelity in a turn of events that mirrors the judge’s own personal history decades prior. The film and the trilogy conclude with a terrible disaster—a ferry has sunk in the English Channel, leaving seven survivors, six of whom are major characters from the three films: Julie and Olivier, Karol and Dominique, Valentine and Auguste.

As with his earlier Dekalog, a series of films based thematically around the Ten Commandments, Kieslowski makes no bones about the motif of the Colors trilogy. The title of each film corresponds to one of three banded colors on the French flag, and to the concepts they symbolize: blue for liberté, white for égalité, and red for fraternité. The very stock of each film is suffused with the hues of its respective color; the experience of viewing them is as much sensual as it is intellectual.

The tricolor heralded the beginning of political modernity in Europe, and not only there. This modern age was characterized by the elevation of abstract ideas—later branded ideologies—over concrete political practices and relationships. Taken together, liberty, equality, and fraternity were the anchoring concepts of the nascent nation-state. Taken apart, they branched into the overarching political systems of atomistic liberalism, communism, and nationalism, culminating in the short and terrible 20th century, what Eric Hobsbawm would label the age of extremes.

The Three Colors trilogy, meanwhile, was shot at the close of that short 20th century. These films’ productions were presaged by the peaceful conclusion of the Cold War, the reunification of Germany, and the formal establishment of the European Union under the Maastricht Treaty. More broadly, this period was characterized by a cautious sense of hope for Europe’s future defined by peace and unity, free of the great ideological clashes that had come before.

Kieslowski himself was reticent about working from a schematic program in the trilogy (and his collaborators attest to his willingness to rely upon happy accidents). Moreover, he denied a political valence to his films. Indeed, he repeatedly disdained politics, lamenting that he had ever allowed political concerns to intrude on his earlier films. “Everything is important except politics,” he once said:

Loneliness is important. So is love, and the lack of it. Hopelessness, everything. Politics is not, because it isn’t there. It only emerges in absurd and insignificant situations. That’s hardly politics, but rather the consequence of political ineptitude. There’s no water, elevators don’t work. The basic things of life become problems. Life is organized in a bad and stupid way.

In a sense, he rigorously adhered to this position: His films function as neither endorsements nor critiques of political programs or parties. And yet, to paraphrase Trotsky, politics was interested in him. Kieslowski’s late-career flourishing was only made possible by larger political changes that allowed him to move and work in the West. Moreover, the remarkable subtlety of Kieslowski’s work can be attributed to his generation’s political experience of filmmaking under communist censorship. As he remarked: “Communication with the audience above the level of the censor created possibilities which colleagues in the West never had.”

Of course, political films are often in bad odor. The reasons are not obscure: They date themselves, they tend toward propaganda, they are often boring and didactically so. Film is an inherently tyrannical medium, so an oblique treatment of politics is wanted; a too-direct approach triggers the viewer’s defenses.

But to refuse to make political films is not the same as to refuse to have anything to say about political things and their relation to human life. As it happens, Kieslowski had much to say about both. As no less an authority than Stanley Kubrick observed of his films, “They do this with such dazzling skill, you never see the ideas coming and don’t realize until much later how profoundly they have reached your heart.”

Blue, as becomes clear from even a single viewing, is about the impossibility of true liberty. Julie is, on the surface, a perfectly liberated woman: at once self-sufficiently wealthy and free of any personal encumbrances or responsibilities, thanks to the car accident that took the lives of her family at the start of the film.

As the critic Nick James remarks in an insightful essay, Julie’s liberty functions as a kind of horrific parody of a feminist ideal: She is financially independent and free of the burdens of patriarchal dominion and motherhood. Following her recovery from the accident, Julie liquidates all her possessions and leaves her rooted estate in the country for Paris; she is urbanized capital incarnate.

Her only remaining burdens are her crippling memories, which the audience claustrophobically experiences with her as the shot fades in and out at moments of particularly intense grief. Julie’s grief finally seems to plateau midway through the film, when we see her meet a woman even freer than she: Her mother, stricken with Alzheimer’s, is indeed liberated of the memories that are Julie’s last remaining fetter.

Yet, this being Kieslowski, Blue does not simply and unequivocally treat liberty in the negative. As we see when she finally encounters her husband’s pregnant mistress (whose existence was previously unknown to Julie), she has freed herself from certain illusions that her formerly happy life required. Cold comfort, perhaps, but this in turn allows Julie to perform acts of remarkable grace.

And there is another sense in which her happy domestic life required false discretion. As revealed by her working with Olivier on her husband’s uncompleted opus, it seems that Julie was in fact her famous husband’s silent professional collaborator (and perhaps more). But in the end, whatever qualified happiness Julie regains has required her to abandon the liberty of modern atomism and re-establish the ordinary bonds of human need and affection.

It is wholly characteristic of Kieslowski to treat liberty with such ambiguity. His remarks on post-Soviet liberalization in Poland were scathing: “[T]hings have changed for the worse. That’s why former eastern bloc countries are electing communists again. We are missing them and longing for the times we cursed before.” This was not the complaint of a fellow traveler but of a thinker who was well aware of the impact of political structures on personal relations. He adds: “I hated the communists and still hate them. But I do long for various friendships and ties that used to exist and don’t anymore. The camaraderie of old times has gone.”

That Kieslowski might understand the freedom granted by the collapse of communism ambivalently would surprise no one who has seen White. His touch remains light, and the quick editing and musical cues read like farce, such that only in retrospect might the viewer realize he has been watching a merciless satire of post-shock therapy capitalism. As with Blue, the personal and the political are hopelessly intertwined.

Though the source of Karol’s humiliation—impotence—might seem an intensely private matter, it is immediately spilled into the public by way of the judicial divorce proceedings that begin the film, during which is Karol is doubly humiliated for being unable to enter into the language of the proceedings against him.

There we learn that he was evidently able to satisfy his Dominique when they first met in Poland (and he was on more equal ground). It is only in haughty France that he is rendered impotent: a humble easterner with the homely name of Karol Karol, subservient to his wife, Dominique Vidal—as perfectly French a name as can be imagined—all impossibly cool Gallic sophistication and style. (It doesn’t hurt that she’s played by a young Julie Delpy.) When Karol later begs her to return with him to Poland, she sneers, “I’ll never go to Poland.” Karol’s now-unrequited desire for her is a synecdoche for the desire of the East for the West (think of Tolstoy’s francophone St. Petersburgers preferring the language of their invaders).

Karol demands to the court: “Where is the equality?” But it is nowhere to be found for him in France. The divorce is finalized, the bank account he shared with his wife is immediately frozen, and then Dominique torches the salon they owned together and threatens to call the police on him. It is as though all the institutions of the modern French world have turned against him. Even the pay phone steals his change.

His predicament rapidly gains political salience as the very borders are barred to him; having lost his passport along with his other possessions, he cannot legally return to Poland, and arranges to arrive in a suitcase carried by a fellow Polish émigré. But this is the new Poland, with petty criminality rampant, and the suitcase he sends himself in is stolen at the airport, and the enraged thieves beat him and throw into a garbage heap.

But it is through this same world of almost nihilistic capitalism that Karol achieves his reversal of fortune. In a wonderful bit of irony, he plans to achieve equality by mastering the tools of the West, embarking on a scheme that would have been impossible under the communist regime. He acquires startup capital by outwitting some low-level gangsters and refashions himself as a successful importer/exporter (the ambiguous legality of Karol’s business dealings, too, exemplifies the ex-Soviet bloc version of capitalism in the early 1990s). In the end, he turns the tables on Dominique as well, trapping her in Poland where she is now at the mercy of laws she doesn’t understand, and where newly corrupt institutions are easily subverted by a man of his means.

It seems, though, that it is not really equality he seeks, but mastery, a condition he achieves through an ingeniously plotted revenge. Or, as Kieslowski himself put it, referring to a Communist-era Polish expression: “I don’t think anybody really wants to be equal. Everybody wants to be more equal.” The haughty West is finally humbled by the savvy East, grown wiser under the former’s cruel tutelage. But the final shot of the film is not celebratory but tragic: rather than revel in his cleverly orchestrated victory over his faithless ex-wife, Karol weeps silently as he gazes up at her luminous face. Like Julie with liberty, he finds formal equality unachievable and gains a superiority that he doesn’t want.

What do we want then? For that we must turn to Red, a film about fraternity and transcendent connection, ingeniously set in neutral Switzerland. As Kieslowski noted of his design to shoot there: “Switzerland leans towards isolation. It’s an island in the middle of Europe. And Red is a story of isolation.”

Red has been called an anti-romance (as Blue is an anti-tragedy, and White an anti-comedy). This is conceptually clever but sensually misleading; the experience of watching Red is almost overwhelmingly romantic, each frame bathed in lush crimsons, rubies, and scarlets—all grounded by Valentine’s (get it?) palpable longing. What she longs for is less an individual man but love itself. And so, we are moved to cheer her ultimate pairing with Auguste, a man of whom we know so little except that he has been betrayed by love.

In keeping with the film’s literal theme, the romance we do actually witness onscreen is not erotic but fraternal. It is not longing that draws her to the embittered judge, but empathy. And what blossoms between them is not romance but friendship, albeit a friendship that may prepare her for real love. There is great poignancy in their meeting now, 40 years too late. The happy ending, if it is a happy ending, is brought about by Kiewslowski, playing Prospero, who creates the coincidence of Valentine meeting the man who must be the judge’s cosmic twin, 40 years removed. The past can be corrected, if only in art.

Of the films, Red reveals the strongest elements of the fantastical in other ways as well. The same elderly lady appears across all three films, attempting with varying success to deposit trash in a high-placed public receptacle. Yet in the first two films we find her in Paris, and in the final film in Geneva, lending her the appearance of a mythical figure.

The thematic primacy of the final film is countersigned by dozens of other small moments throughout the entire series, in which hidden connections are made vivid on repeated viewings. The divorce proceedings on which Julie accidentally intrudes in Blue are in fact those of Karol and Dominique. We are meant to suppose that the theft of Valentine’s absent boyfriend’s possessions in Poland was perpetrated by the same criminals who assault Karol. And finally, of course, the protagonists of all three films jointly appear in Red’s climax.

Moreover, there are numerous scenes emphasizing our essential connectedness throughout all three films, especially through music, which Kieslowski often spoke of as a medium of universal connection. In Blue, Julie’s attempts to freeze out memories of her old life are interrupted by a street musician playing a version of one of her dead husband’s melodies. In White, Karol’s fortunes begin to turn when a fellow Pole recognizes him as a compatriot after hearing him playing an old Polish folk tune for money in a Parisian subway. In Red, Valentine and Auguste can be seen unknowingly listening to the same music in a record store through headphones, isolated yet linked.

It is not incidental that the name of the symphony that Julie and Olivier complete is titled “Song for the Unification of Europe.” As we are informed through exposition, it was commissioned by the European Council to be played simultaneously in cities across the continent. Yet the punchline comes with the lyrics: not political slogans, but Paul’s letter to the Corinthians in Koine Greek—the mystic celebration of love. Appropriately, Olivier agrees to finish the work not out of some abstract ideological loyalty to the idea of Europe, but because he imagines it will restore Julie to him.

Fraternity’s primacy for Kieslowski is not a politico-philosophical statement but a deep truth of human existence. Crucially, the connections revealed and formed between the characters are not the result of politics but of art. His screenplay makes possible and his camera shows us certain bonds that no institutions of the state could form.

We want fraternity, it seems, but Kieslowski gives us none of its obvious political associations: tribalism, nationalism, the violent brotherhood of terrorist cells. (It is difficult to forget, in light of Kieslowski’s schema, that Napoleon offered the first vision of pan-European unity, on the back of his grande armee wielding the tricolor.) Its vision is closer to the universal fraternity promised by Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” with its great promise: Alle Menschen werden Brüder. But Kieslowski’s humanism is cooler, more ironic than Schiller’s, tempered perhaps by knowledge of the intervening two centuries. If we are all bound together, it is not by an emotional experience of superabundant joy, but by something more elusive and perhaps more terrible.

I have no idea how to see the sinking of the ferry at the conclusion of Red, with its shocking loss of life, other than as a kind of stand-in for the cataclysmic events of modern European history—which, under Kieslowski’s scheme, began with the Reign of Terror and the wars of revolution and extends through two World Wars, the Shoah, the Holodomor, and the political cleavage of the continent in two. Indeed, looking back from the end of the Cold War, late modernity as a whole looks like a cataclysm for Europe. (Incidentally, it is notable that the sinking occurs in the English Channel; perhaps we are to think of its survivors, landing in Dover, as having escaped the nightmare of continental European history.)

This ending has been criticized for elevating the fortunes of our several protagonists over the lives of over 1,400 unnamed individuals, harvesting meaning for the few from the meaningless deaths of so many. But here one might recall the Dekalog’s establishing shot, as it scans over Krakow’s skyline of drab and faceless Brutalist apartment buildings before zooming into one complex to reveal the teeming life within. Kieslowski seems to be saying: These stories happen everywhere.

It may be, then, that our protagonists have not been selected to survive by some improbable turn of fortune. It may be the reverse: that, working backward, the remarkable stories we have watched are merely the stories of those who happened to survive. In the sinking of the ferry, then, the personal and the political are intertwined through another of Kieslowski’s great themes: the vicissitudes of fate. Some find love, for others it will be too late. Some survived the geopolitical catastrophes of the 20th century; many did not.

Though much about the conclusion seems to consciously defy interpretation—how did Dominique escape from prison? Are Julie and Olivier now romantic as well as creative partners? Do Valentine and Auguste understand who they are? Who is the seventh survivor?—however enigmatic and troubling the ending, its extraordinary final shot, ranking with those of The Searchers and The Third Man among the greatest in cinema, is one of hope: that where there is life, we might still correct the mistakes of the past. And where Red’s opening shot only results in a missed telephone connection, here the Judge watches, wide-eyed, as Valentine’s face fills his television screen.

And he sees—and we see through his eyes—that her once-cold profile now burns with life.

These films have been called anti-tragedy, anti-comedy, and anti-romance, but what they really are is anti-ideological. One has the sense that they were created during that brief window in which history had ended but the end of history had not. This was marked by a kind of simultaneous exhaustion with grand ideological movements and optimism about what might replace them.

Perhaps more than anything else, fraternity was the watchword of the then-new phase of the European project. Liberty had already spread through the collapse of the Berlin Wall and, more significantly, the collapse of the regimes sustained by the Warsaw Pact. Equality—formal equality at least—would be secured by the entrée of the Eastern European countries into NATO and the nascent European Union.

But the relationship of this project to fraternity was more complex. It represented the transcendence of fraternal nationalism in pursuit of notionally loftier goals of European integration. But at the same time, this endeavor could only be interpreted as a kind of higher fraternity: the substitution of European identity and European institutions for parochial, national ones.

The fraternal promise of pan-European unity is now at its lowest ebb perhaps since the Second World War, certainly since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is not surprising that fraternity, too, is proving the wheel upon which the European project may yet break. As the Three Colors trilogy shows, it speaks to our longing, on both personal and political levels, as nothing else quite does.

In their own ways, competing visions of fraternity are now at the heart of Europe’s troubles. The dream of Europeanism has come up against an even wider commitment of universal solidarity, in which European fraternity gives way to moral obligations to refugees from North Africa and the Near East, and perhaps elsewhere. But it has also come up against the local and national forms of particularism that have proven resistant to the bureaucratic administration of the Europe Union, not to say the more cosmopolitan demands of Angela Merkel, Jeremy Corbyn, et al. Arrivistes like Boris Johnson and Matteo Salvini have, meanwhile, posited a renewal of national unity against the Eurocrats, but their visions are vague and warped by personal ambition.

And here Europe stands, awaiting some version of political fraternity that is neither insipid nor horrific. Put not your faith in princes. Kieslowski would have understood.

The Three Colors Trilogy is available on DVD and Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection and on streaming at The Criterion Channel.

The post Three Colors and the Fracturing of Europe appeared first on The American Interest.

State Capture in the Caucasus

The country of Georgia once distinguished itself as a poster child of successful democratization and modernization. Its reform efforts, its modern approach to governance, and its eager participation in international collective peace and security efforts made it a case study in how things could go very right after a decade of stagnation, strife, and mismanagement in the 1990s. Despite destabilizing Russian aggression and an ongoing illegal occupation of 20 percent of its territory, the Georgian people have insisted that their country stay on a free and democratic path that it has decisively chosen.

Today, however, besides the Russian occupation, which remains a threat, Georgians are facing a different kind of creeping existential crisis: Their state has been captured in what amounts to a soft coup orchestrated by the billionaire and former Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili, a man who has largely made his fortune in Russia. State capture in Georgia has progressed over the past seven years in accordance with a distinctly Putinesque playbook. Important judiciary reforms have been stalled and the judiciary itself has been brought to heel through Ivanishvili’s party packing the courts with cronies. Free media and political opponents have been aggressively hounded by the government. Businesses and investors have been bullied and threatened. And state propaganda efforts—government-operated media outlets and troll factories, and so-called GONGOs (Governmental NGOs)—have all been streamlined into a viciously effective attack machine against political opponents and general pro-Western sentiment among the population.

Ivanishvili founded the Georgian Dream party in April 2012 and won the subsequent elections, becoming Prime Minister in October of the same year. He resigned his post a year later, claiming to retire to the private sector, but still continued running the country from behind the scenes. Currently, Ivanishvili does not hold any governmental position that would make him in any way accountable to Georgian citizens. The last few years of Georgian Dream rule, during which Ivanishvili has become the ultimate arbiter and decision-maker in the country, informally ruling as his party’s chairman (like some throwback to communist times), have been marked by a radical polarization of society, an increase in violence against protestors, political coercion and manipulation, increased corruption, eroded trust in public institutions, and a stagnating economy.

An unexpected blow to the regime landed in June. During a state visit, a Georgian Dream parliamentarian offered to have a visiting Russian Duma member, Sergei Gavrilov, sit in the official seat of the Chairman of Parliament. Pandemonium ensued in the chamber. The symbolism of the moment—a craven politician kowtowing to a member of the government of a country that currently occupies Georgian territory—crystallized the frustrations of many throughout Georgian society, and a youthful protest movement soon burst onto the streets.

The government reacted brutally against the protesters, shooting rubber bullets at point-blank into the crowd, blinding two and injuring more than 200. In the wake of the initial crackdown, Ivanishvili, as the head of Georgian Dream, chose to elevate Giorgi Gakharia, the Interior Minister in charge in June and a man who had Russian citizenship through 2013, to the office of Prime Minister. As a sop to demonstrators, he also promised electoral reforms that the opposition had been demanding, moving the country to a more proportional representation-based system.

For a while this autumn, it looked like a final, peaceful, democratic reckoning would come in the upcoming parliamentary elections, slated for October 2020. Then, on November 14 of last year, in a move that genuinely shocked most observers, including Georgia’s international partners, Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream Party sabotaged the reforms by simulating the defection of enough of its own members to undermine a final vote on the proposal.

The protesters viewed this transparent ploy as an ultimate act of betrayal. People who had been beaten bloody in the summer’s demonstrations once again poured into the streets of Tbilisi. Various forces among the political opposition that are often at odds with each other stood united. True to autocratic form, Ivanishvili’s governing party once again unleashed violence against the protestors, jailing activists, politicians, and their supporters.

With the arrival of the new year and colder weather, public demonstrations have died down, at least for the moment. The Parliament building in the center of downtown Tbilisi, the site of most of the protests, has had permanent barricades erected in front of it. But unhappiness still runs high. Polling results released by the International Republican Institute in November and National Democratic Institute polls released in early January of this year showed deep discontent among Georgian voters with the status quo, and with many Georgian Dream politicians in particular.

Ivanishvili had dismissed the poll results out of hand, claiming that opposition parties had colluded with the pollsters to produce false negative numbers for his side. Such rhetoric is toxic for public trust in democracy in any country, and especially so in a country that has experienced such institutionalized backsliding in recent years. Demonizing opponents in this way, and thereby justifying backtracking on necessary electoral reforms, can only lead to political outcomes—instability, more violence—that would make Vladimir Putin very happy.

Georgia’s good friends in Congress—both in the House and in the Senate—have noticed what is going on and have spoken out forcefully against Georgian Dream’s recent behavior. But more can be done. At the heart of the problem is the fact that Ivanishvili and his party have consolidated power through state capture. Imposing vigorous scrutiny of the financial operations of Ivanishvili and his allies would spread a powerful message throughout the corridors of power in Tbilisi.

The rise of autocracy is an unhappy global trend, and it is especially sad for us to see that Georgia is suffering from it as well, turning our country into a weak state and one of the less-resilient soft spots in Russia’s hybrid war against the democratic world. Engagement by the United States, however, has had a positive and sobering effect wherever it has been tried. The Georgian people have shown that they are willing to fight back, and both the United States and the West remain wildly popular among voters. Direct and targeted engagement would limit the space for Georgian Dream’s manipulation of state institutions and the electoral process. It would encourage pro-Western political actors to continue the struggle, and it would ultimately open up the necessary space for a genuine democratic political dialogue in a country that has been badly polarized by malign politicians.

Georgia is not lost; far from it. But it needs help from its friends at this critical juncture. Engaging now in a meaningful way, fully in the spirit that has guided the U.S.-Georgian strategic partnership through the years, would help turn the tide.

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