Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 141
August 23, 2017
Why Libertarians Go Alt-Right
In the Daily Beast, Matt Lewis asks an important and topical question: What is the connection between libertarianism and the alt-right? On paper, the two movements are diametrically opposed. Libertarians advocate (a version of) maximum personal freedom, while alt-rightists advocate authoritarianism and group-based discrimination. And yet, many prominent figures on the alt-right are associated with libertarianism in one way or another:
Milo Yiannopoulos has billed himself (and has been billed by others) as libertarian. About a year ago, he came clean about that. According to Business Insider, the alt-right troll Tim Gionet (aka “Baked Alaska”) formerly “identified as a carefree, easygoing libertarian” who “supported Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s bid for the White House, firmly opposed the war on drugs, and championed the cause of Black Lives Matter…”
Gavin McInnes bills himself as a libertarian, but he founded the Proud Boys―a men’s rights group that is considered part of the alt-right. Augustus Invictus, a Florida attorney who literally drank goat’s blood as part of an animal sacrifice, ran for senate in the 2016 Libertarian Party primary and spoke at Liberty Fest. Recently popular among college libertarians, Stefan Molyneux evolved into a pro-Trump alt-righter. And Richard Spencer was thrown out of the International Students for Liberty conference this year after crashing the event.
Lewis points to a number of plausible explanations—perhaps people drawn to one fringe movement are more easily seduced by another; perhaps closet alt-rightists took advantage of libertarian free speech absolutism “as a shield for expressing a lot of disturbing viewpoints”; perhaps the convergence “has as much to do with attitude as it has to do with ideology.”
Here’s another explanation, which in no way excludes Lewis’: Dogmatic right-wing politics has always been oriented around the idea of decline—the sense that everything good is slipping away, and that the slide must be arrested before it’s too late.
Both the libertarian right and the alt-right offer particularly vivid images of what this decline might look like. The libertarian version of decline—dominant on the Right after the recession, including among party elders like Paul Ryan—centered around the idea of dependency. America would soon become a nation of takers. Once a critical mass of Americans were on the dole, or not paying income taxes, the nation’s work ethic would be sapped. We were nearing a tipping point; the expansion of the welfare state needed to be stopped before we went over the edge.
The alt-right offered a different version of decline once the recession abated and the debt crisis worries faded. This version of decline centered around diversity. Once America became majority nonwhite, the Republican Party, if not the country, would be finished for good. Once again, we were nearing a tipping point; unless drastic action was taken, including halting immigration and oppressing minorities in the United States, the great American experiment would be lost.
Of course, this is a crude incomplete accounting of both libertarian and alt-right arguments over the last 10 years. But it does get at certain grievances that were influential in each camp.
There are many principled libertarians who would never think of going to the racist right, and, indeed, who have been among its strongest critics. But it’s worth considering the possibility that both movements attracted people—perhaps socially isolated and disconnected from mediating institutions—who were utterly convinced that the country was going to hell, and that the window of time to save it was closing. Libertarianism provided one vocabulary for this concern; today, the alt-right provides another.
The post Why Libertarians Go Alt-Right appeared first on The American Interest.
Take Them All Away
It’s a pity that sometimes the best solution to a political conflict is simply not practical. There is such a solution to the Confederates monuments conflict, but there is zero chance of its being agreed to and implemented. What is this best but impossible solution? It’s simple: Take down all the Civil War military monuments in public spaces. That’s right, all of them—Grant and Sherman as well as Lee and Forrest—and move them, if we must, to teachable-moments museum or parks settings. That’ll never happen, but it should—and here is why.
As Thomas Friedman had the courage to say a few weeks ago, just because Donald Trump says something doesn’t mean it’s wrong. It’s a rare event, true, but it’s happened again—even amid a lot of other things Trump said after Charlottesville that were very wrong. What he said, or tried to say, that was not wrong is that the two-dimensional contemporary depiction of the historical background to the Confederate monuments controversy—namely the Civil War—is much too clearer-than-the-truth. And yes, there is behind this two-dimensional narrative an effort, now many decades old, by some on the radical fringe of the American adversary culture to demonize the American Founding itself.
Now, very few of those who find the Confederate military statues distasteful share this objective, but they are useful to those antifa activists who mostly do avow this objective. The same is true on the other side of the argument: Few of those who take offense at the caricaturing of the contemporary South are neo-Nazis or white supremacists, but neo-Nazis and white supremacists find these offended souls useful. In short, we have a dialectic of polarization playing out before us, where radical groups aim to politically weaponize larger numbers of more-or-less normal patriotic Americans into unwittingly serving a radical cause. This sort of thing can easily get out of hand, especially at a time when the President cares only about nurturing his personal base and not a fig for what is best for the nation.
Thanks to this ballooning dialectic, in recent weeks we have been witness to the primetime revival of arguments we’ve not heard so much of in many decades. So we have the President’s lawyer defending Robert E. Lee, claiming he’s no different from fellow slaveholding Virginians George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, as a way to defend President Trump’s slippery slope argument that there’s no logical stopping point to the politically correct Left’s desire to rescind the honor of many of America’s Founders. Trump didn’t mention it, but do anti-Confederate activists aspire to destroy the chapel at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, where Lee is buried? (It’s quite a sight, if you’ve never been there.) I suspect that, yes, they do.
And then, in response, we have a series of rebuttals—from Jon Meachem, Max Boot, and others—claiming that Lee and the Confederates were actually the opposites of Washington, Jefferson, George Mason and others because they violated their oaths and sought to destroy, not preserve, the Union.
Alas, both arguments are, as already suggested, clearer than the truth, as Acheson once put it. There is some truth in both arguments, but that’s not so much the point. The point is that it’s dangerous to be having this argument at all right now. Before long, if this continues, we’ll have dug even deeper into a still-infested historical pit, resurrecting points of view that were extreme in their time before 1860 about the Constitutional right to secession, Abolitionist justification of domestic terrorism in the name of emancipation (read: John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry), and more besides.
We should not want to go there. One Civil War was enough. But go there we may, because the veneer is wearing away from the exceptionalist narrative that managed to interpret the disaster of the Civil War in a manner that Americans could live with in the long aftermath. We see that veneer wearing thin in the fact that both the sitting and previous President, though elected from different constituencies within the electoral whole, do not endorse sincerely the exceptionalist narrative as did all their predecessors. And if raw truth makes its way out of its mythic sepulcher, it will show the scabs that remain—reminding enough people of the blood that once flowed, and showing them that the end of the war was not the same as the end of the bitterness.
What is that raw truth—the stuff you were never taught in civic class—and what is the mythic solution (that you were more or less fed in civics class) that saved postbellum Americans from having to see and suffer from it?
To summarize excruciatingly, the raw truth is that antebellum America came to have two intertwined but distinct political economies, the one in the South based on plantation agriculture. That is why and how the southern colonies were set up via land grants from the British crown—they were companies created by the British government for the economic benefit of the government and its supporters, not very different from the motivation behind the East India Company, the Hudson Bay Company, and several others.
That economic enterprise in the South was not viable without slave labor, no less than British, French, and Dutch sugar/rum plantations in the Caribbean were believed unviable without slave labor. The rapid development of the industrial revolution transformed the political economy of the northern states sooner than it began to affect the South, though it did generate the side-effect of increasing northern demand for southern raw materials, like indigo and cotton. Hence, the distinct economic models were intertwined, to the point that northern commerce benefitted handsomely from the southern plantation system. (Didn’t you ever wonder how a college at Yale came to be named for John C. Calhoun in the first place?)
This asymmetrical development, plus shifting congressional mathematics as the frontier was pushed west and new states joined the Union, led to trade tariff and other policies that Southerners feared were turning their states into colonies of the northern elite. It also led to a series of famous deals, like the Missouri Compromise, that tried to maintain a balance in the political system between two economic models that were becoming increasingly asymmetrical. These deals put off the day of reckoning, but they did not obviate it.
Over time, economic perceptions between North and South diverged along with the reality, this despite the fact that racial prejudice did not differ all that much between northern and southern American society before the Civil War. There were plenty of rabid racists in the North just as there were deeply conflicted slaveholders in the South, as the examples of Washington, Jefferson, Mason, Clay, and many others attest. But of course the role of Negro slaves in the political economies of the two regions was dramatically different. Northerners paid no price for basking in moralizing unction; southerners faced different constraints.
This is the reason that old lines of talk contending that the Civil War wasn’t “really” about slavery are neither right nor wrong, but simply make no sense. Economic and racial factors were so intertwined from the start in colonial days that trying to separate the causal strands as time played out is like trying to unweave a corn tassel. Can’t be done. It was about race and it was not about race simultaneously.
So northern politicians mouthing the Abolitionist insistence on emancipation struck most southerners as far more than a purported moral issue; it struck them as an existential economic issue that, many believed, masked an intention by more economically advanced northerners to dominate and exploit them. Since Abolitionist sentiment was clearly a radical minority view in the North, many southerners came to think that northern elites were deploying Abolitionist rhetoric insincerely for selfish reasons.
And look what happened after the war: Not much “magnanimity in victory” (to retrofit Churchill’s sage advice), but instead many years of military occupation, carpet-bagging, exploitation, humiliation, and political exclusion from the Federal realm. This experience reaffirmed the antebellum southern view of the real motives of northern elites. Why would it not have?
And then there was the fairly relaxed northern acceptance of Jim Crow for nearly an entire century after the end of the war: Why would truly sincere Abolitionists, supposedly running the victorious Federal/Union government, allow that? Why, indeed, would northerners all but propose it as part of the dark deal that put Rutherford Hayes in the White House over Samuel J. Tilden—the notorious Compromise of 1877?
Note too that before 1860—when “the United States” was universally conjugated as a plural noun, not a singular one—the idea that sovereign states had a right of secession was not at all far-fetched, and indeed seemed to inhere in the opening lines of the Declaration. And yes, Lee took an oath as a U.S. Army officer to the United States, but he also took, and took seriously, an oath to the Commonwealth of Virginia. The “Union” back then was an instrument that redeemed the failed Articles of Confederation, not a talisman or anything untouchably sacred. That sense of the Union as a holy vessel only came about after the Civil War, as a means to justify the carnage. Looking back from 2017, at a time when the Federal government is in fact sovereign and the states really are not, it’s easy to miss this mid-19th century American reality, but a reality it was.
How did all this raw truth about American antebellum political realities get cooked, devoured, and buried in the course of civil war and aftermath? A then-evolving exceptionalist narrative was deployed to mystify and mythify it. You get the essence by attending to one of Julia Ward Howe’s lyrics for the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”: “As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, His truth is marching on.”
Get it? Slavery was America’s original sin (although it actually wasn’t—ask any Cherokee or Mohawk), and the bloodletting of the war was America’s necessary crucifixion, enabling the expiation of that sin. Lincoln was Jesus, and so had to suffer and be martyred. After Emancipation, America was “born again.” We live in a very theotropic society still, but 150 years ago we had yet to disguise that fact in a secularized mask, to the point that this interpretation of the war seemed inescapably true to most northerners.
Booting the entire bloodbath, with all its unspeakable savagery, into the transcendent tense is the characteristic way that the American civil religion version of Anglo-Protestantism likes to deal with all of its major failures and unpleasantries. In the mid-1860s that was the only way it could be credibly claimed that one side actually won, that the gruesome bloodletting achieved some higher purpose, when the truth was that everybody lost.
This unfulfilled pseudo-religious fantasy about the Civil War has worked pretty well for a long time. Indeed, the exceptionalist narrative shell that expanded and hardened as a result of the Civil War was further encrusted in more recent times by the transcendentalizing of the “good war,” World War II, and then of the Cold War portrayed, more or less, as a passion play. This piling on over the years makes it easy for the common-folk heirs of military victory in April 1865 to portray the Confederacy and the southern society that supported it in two-dimensional comic book terms. As I’ve tried to suggest, however, things were not so simple; they pretty much never are.
Wiser northern heads in years past understood this, and so implicitly agreed to let the South retain some of its cultural dignity, so long as it was folded beneath the main themes of American life in a subordinate, niche domain—sort of like a regional theme park. The gesture was in every sense a consolation prize. So Joel Chandler Harris could write and thrive, and “Gone with the Wind” could go from being a mediocre novel into a less mediocre film. Southerners could wave their small Stars and Bars banners at the annual Jefferson-Jackson Dinner and even sing “Dixie” if they had a mind and a voice to. No one took it too seriously. It was a reasonable way, evolved over time with mutual gracious nods to fiction, to ameliorate a great tragedy that ought never to have happened.
Indeed, I do not hesitate to say that it would have been better for everyone, including African-Americans, if the war had been somehow prevented, and the problem of slavery dealt with in a more consensual and gradual way—as Henry Clay hoped and had for years worked toward in vain. But that did not happen, so the blood flowed, the scabs formed, and partly as a result racial enmity hardened to become the emotional lightning rod for all subsequent American social conflicts. Maybe that was inevitable in any event; I’m not so sure, but since there’s no way to transform a counterfactual ghost into an empirical object, we’ll never know.
In any event, now the Monuments controversy has become the new vanguard issue of a postmodern Left that aims to repossess the consolation prize, and the reaction to that effort we can all now see—and which truly odious radicals are trying to take to the bank—is really not that hard to understand. But the result is that we face a situation in which the Confederate statues have been sharply politicized with explicit new meaning, and since there’s no erasing that new meaning now they have to go.
Yes, the Reconstruction era ones, the KKK-inspired ones erected in the mid-1920s, and the ones put up in response to the Warren Court’s pressure against segregation—they all need to be moved if they are in a public space. But unless the statues beloved of the Union mystifiers go with them, we invite the return of a very old rawness, and the possible re-militarization of our politics with it.
We need to mitigate the looming repolarization of race and racial politics in America after more than half a century of incomplete but hardly trivial progress, not feed it. This may require some deliberate loss of memory. Alas, there are some conflicts so bitter than the only way to deal with their insolubility is to forget about them. Forgetfulness is an underrated human capability; we could use some of it about now.
Alas, my sense is that this, too, is impossible.
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Mexico’s Most Promising Shale Region Is Open for Business
Don’t look now, but Mexico is hoping that its recent energy reforms will turn the shale boom from a uniquely American phenomenon into a uniquely North American one. This summer, Mexico opened up onshore blocks of its Burgos basin region, just south of Texas.
To date, the country’s state-owned oil company Pemex has been unable to successfully start commercial production in the basin, in part due to geology but certainly also the result of the company’s lack of expertise in shale. Now that Mexico’s oil and gas reserves are being opened up to private (and foreign) companies, there’s an opportunity for firms with the personnel, the experience, the equipment, and the culture necessary to get the country’s shale production up off (or maybe more accurately out of) the ground.
Prior to Mexico’s market reforms, Pemex was in a tailspin. The company was running the Red Queen’s race, spending more money and hiring more personnel while seeing production fall precipitously as fields matured. President Enrique Peña Nieto pushed through unpopular reforms to open Mexico’s struggling oil and gas industry up to competition, and after some fits and starts he’s seen that effort rewarded: on one day in July, there was a “world-class” oil discovery in the Gulf of Mexico by a group of private companies, a major increase in the estimated potential of another offshore field, and the successful sale of 21 out of 24 other offshore blocks on auction. In other words, there’s a lot of momentum building up in Mexico’s offshore hydrocarbon industry.
Onshore, progress has been slower, but Mexican shale—especially in the Burgos basin—looks to be a winner. America’s own highly productive Eagle Ford shale formation is part of that same basin, so there are hopes that Mexico might be able to replicate that success in their own shale fields.
But a burgeoning Burgos is only going to happen with private investment. As the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) reports, Pemex is going to spend 91 percent less in Burgos this year than it did in 2012 “[in] response to decreasing natural gas prices over the past five years and energy reforms introduced in 2014 that gave priority to oil development.” For drillers north of the border, this should be seen as an opportunity, and thanks to Mexico’s reforms, it’s one they’re finally able to pursue.
Low natural gas prices in the U.S. will make Burgos development more difficult. We’re rapidly building out gas pipeline networks across the Mexican border in order to send our surfeit of shale gas south, which could threaten the viability of these new ventures. But unlike so many other countries with significant shale holdings around the world, Mexico has many things in common with the United States: proven geology, a low population density, and as of this summer, access to a variety of companies that know how to frack.
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Trump Denies Aid to Egypt
On the eve of Jared Kushner’s visit to Egypt, President Trump delivered an unpleasant surprise to one of his friendliest allies in the Middle East. The New York Times reports:
The Trump administration on Tuesday denied Egypt $96 million in aid and delayed $195 million in military funding because of concerns over Egypt’s human rights record and its cozy relationship with North Korea.
[…]
Asked if Egypt’s robust relationship with North Korea played a role in Tuesday’s action, a State Department official would say only that issues of concern have been raised with Cairo, but refused to provide details about the talks.
On the face of it, the decision to withhold aid from Egypt is a striking departure from the Trump Administration’s pattern of behavior. For one, Trump has always enjoyed a chummy relationship with Sisi, who was one of the first foreign leaders to take him seriously as a candidate (they met in New York last September), and whom Trump has showered with praise and promises of support. Until now, Trump has demonstrated no unease about Sisi’s sorry human rights record, nor shown any interest in prioritizing humanitarian concerns in his dealings with allies. In fact, his Administration has established a clear pattern of fast-tracking weapons transfers or aid deliveries that Obama had temporarily suspended 0ver humanitarian concerns (just ask the Saudis and Thais.)
Has Trump suddenly acquired a conscience about human rights and a newfound concern over Cairo’s repressive treatment of NGOs? That scenario is unlikely—and the Times’ theory that this is really about North Korea deserves further scrutiny.
Egypt has long had a dubious record when it comes to North Korea. The two countries have a history of exchanges of arms and expertise going back to the 1970s, when Cairo began selling Pyongyang missiles and North Korean pilots helped train their Egyptian counterparts. By some accounts, a version of that cozy relationship continues covertly today. A troubling UN investigation earlier this year uncovered “hitherto unreported” trade between Pyongyang and countries in the Middle East and North Africa, with sensitive exchanges including air defense systems and satellite-guided missiles. In several cases, Egyptian companies were implicated in those transactions—a finding consistent with the claim of a former DPRK official that Egypt is the “hub” of Pyongyang’s Middle Eastern arms trade.
Those findings may help explain why, in a July phone call, President Trump raised the North Korean issue with Sisi. According to the White House readout, Trump “stressed the need for all countries to fully implement U.N. Security Council resolutions on North Korea, stop hosting North Korean guest workers, and stop providing economic or military benefits to North Korea.” That is a message that the Administration has been delivering to all countries it suspects of noncompliance with the North Korean sanctions regime: from heavy hitters like China and Russia to minor enablers like the ASEAN countries.
And if Trump wanted to punish Cairo for failing to enforce sanctions, withholding aid must have looked like a tempting method. The money in question had already been held up by the Obama Administration, so declining to release it is a less antagonistic move than actively levying sanctions on Egypt. And by publicly conditioning the release of that money on human rights progress, Trump has already earned some early plaudits from some of his staunchest critics, including Senator John McCain, who has been an outspoken opponent of Sisi’s authoritarianism and the new NGO law.
This is not to say that the decision to squeeze Egypt is necessarily wise or risk-free. The move may have already cost Trump some goodwill with Sisi: after news of the decision came out, the Foreign Ministry initially canceled a meeting with Kushner in an apparent snub. The Egyptians eventually allowed Kushner a sit-down with Sisi, but they are clearly not happy: the foreign ministry said the decision “[reflected] poor judgment of the strategic relationship that ties the two countries” and could have “negative implications” on cooperation going forward.
Among other things, that could be a reference to Egypt’s help on the Israel-Paliestine dispute, the very issue that Kushner was in Egypt to discuss. Cairo is reportedly on the cusp of negotiating a deal that would reopen the border with Gaza, allow much-needed humanitarian aid to pass through, and (in all likelihood) empower Mohammed Dahlan, a Palestinian leader more conducive to U.S. and Israeli interests than the lame duck Mahmoud Abbas. Given Egypt’s crucial role in mediating these talks, alienating Cairo is a risky proposition.
But that only strengthens the argument that the Trump Administration would not have jeopardized that relationship over human rights alone. Concerns about Sisi’s repression may well have influenced the aid decision on the margins, but they were more likely convenient justifications disguising Trump’s primary motive for punishing Egypt. After all, the North Korean crisis has been Trump’s top foreign policy priority, an issue that has consumed much of his Administration’s diplomatic energy as it seeks to increase the economic pressure on the regime. And just as Trump invoked humanitarian reasons to justify his airstrike on Syria (a move that was also about sending North Korea a message), he may now be doing the same to pressure Pyongyang via Cairo.
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Charlottesville and the Threshold of Extremism
Charlottesville may go down in history as a Father Coughlin-type phenomenon: a troubling but ephemeral episode that shakes the core of our pluralistic society, but passes like a bad storm causing only minor erosion of our civilization. Or it may be remembered as the first expression of a new dystopian America, one that slowly but methodically jettisons the values upon which this country was founded, and which have sustained it over the past two hundred years and counting.
But what will determine its legacy? The key is the process by which seemingly radical, fringe ideas infiltrate the mainstream, in America or in any other social setting. Once we have some understanding of that process, we can address a second question of the moment: What makes President Trump’s behavior so disturbing, given that he doesn’t explicitly endorse such ideas but merely fails to condemn them? Is our intuition correct that his behavior is indeed very disturbing, or are we exaggerating its danger?
Whether Charlottesville is an aberration or the start of a trend will depend largely on the receptivity of American culture to nativism and racism, within families, communities, and polities. Obviously, this receptivity or lack thereof has deep historical and social-psychological roots, but plenty of demons lurk in every culture and only some ever emerge, or re-emerge, to hound us. What makes the difference?
The Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter, in a 2004 paper entitled “Threshold Models of Collective Behavior,” posits a theory that collective behavior emerges from situations where actors have two choices before them, and the decision to act depends on the numbers of other actors who have already made a choice. Drawing on his well-known earlier work on the “strength of weak ties,” he posits a social “threshold” where a person will look to the number of others exhibiting a certain behavior and then do an intuitive cost-benefit analysis as to whether it is worth joining their ranks.
The premise here is that human beings are social animals and do not act in splendid isolation from social cues, whether that pertains to economic choices or choices of other kinds. Solomon Asch’s famous conformity experiments from the 1950s were pioneering efforts to establish what has since become known as the social embeddedness of individual behavior. And of course we have a famous, if dark, literary expression of a kindred concept in William Golding’s 1954 book Lord of the Flies, which features a series of social behavior cascades that flow out from the initiatives of individual leaders.
The classic examples most relevant to Granovetter’s research pertain to behavior during riots and looting. Several studies have shown that the first Molotov cocktail throwers and looters are usually people with criminal and violent backgrounds. But how to account for the second, third, or fourth waves of rioters, who have never run afoul of the law before participating in this anti-social behavior?
According to Threshold Theory, the initial wave of violence and anarchy is perpetrated by actors with a threshold of one. The second wave has a threshold of two, and so on and so forth. The 20th wave of looters, for example, isn’t comfortable making the decision to cross the Rubicon of criminality until there are 19 waves preceding it. Their threshold is 19.
The bigots who marched in Charlottesville two weeks ago are the first wave of filth. They did not need to look left and right at their peers before engaging in misanthropic behavior. Our society may be slightly damaged by these loathsome figures, but it will survive and heal provided that such behavior is condemned by leaders—familial, religious, community, and political—in such a way that the costs of such behavior are made clear.
It is precisely for this reason that President Trump is playing with fire in his cynical ploy to stir racial unrest in order to strengthen his base of support. By providing a patina of social acceptability to the first wave of hatred, he has given permission for the next wave of actors, with a threshold of two, to join the ranks at the next display of hatred. You don’t need to be a social scientist to see how dark the clouds can get, and how quickly.
We are blessed to live in a country with strong institutions and a moral compass that has directed us along an arc of slow but steady moral progress. Those institutions, however, are predicated on leadership that follows that moral compass and uses its bully pulpits constantly to reinforce the values that have made America great. President Trump has failed this test, and our country may never be the same as a result.
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Will the Nazi Purge Work?
Silicon Valley tech companies have responded to the terror in Charlottesville with an unprecedented purge of Nazi and white nationalist web sites. It’s not just the big companies that you interact with every day, like Facebook, Google and PayPal, but lesser-known platforms like GoDaddy and Cloudflare—which support the critical infrastructure of the internet—that have joined a gloves-off campaign to sanction and suppress the online sewers of the far Right.
The premises of John Stuart Mill’s brand of liberalism—that the truth will eventually win out in a free and fair fight; that we should counter bad ideas with good ideas; that if we don’t hear the bad ideas we’ll forget why we opposed them in the first place—tell us that this is a bad idea. Sure, it’s permissible under the First Amendment as these are private companies, not government actors. But in a society where certain technology platforms have near-monopoly control of the flow of political opinion, this defense is too pat.
And according to the classically liberal school, it is better for the filth exist so that it can be mocked and repudiated than for it to be stamped out altogether. There is arguably some positive value, for example, even in the Daily Stormer’s piece on “kike ‘journalist’ (((Jason Willick)))”, in that it led me to visit a part of the internet I’m not frequently exposed to and see just how vile and frankly pathetic much of this material is. Perhaps scrubbing such sites will counterproductively further the alt-right’s persecution narrative and strengthen hate movements even as it hides them from view.
But Mill’s most powerful argument for the free exchange of ideas is that people should be less certain of their own rightness and more open to correction. So those of us with classically liberal instincts should also consider the possibility that our position needs to be revised—that marketplaces of ideas on social media are failing and that some command-and-control by the gatekeepers is actually a better approach if we want a free society to survive and thrive.
The best argument for what the web companies are doing would begin with the premise that this type of soft suppression is not new. In the 1950s and 1960s, when the American political system was more stable and prosperous than it is now, and elites more secure of their status, the flow of political opinion was tightly controlled—not by the government, but by a small handful of New York-based TV news networks and magazines, which mostly hewed to the same set of establishmentarian opinions. First Amendment rights were protected even as the media and political class asserted its privilege in sketching out an Overton Window, forcing people to work much harder than they would need to today to access radical ideas. That system was gradually weakened by cable TV and FCC deregulation, but the internet created a radically new challenge, threatening to dismantle hierarchies and flatten the flow of information altogether. Starting in the 1990s, anyone could set up a website or a blog. The rise of social media took this process a step further, granting anyone and everyone access to a highly efficient and receptive online forum with billions of listeners.
The web pioneers facilitating this shift saw themselves as hippie-style disrupters who would challenge governments and bring about a utopian democratic world. (Recall the brief tech euphoria around the so-called “Twitter revolutions” across the Middle East). But like all revolutionaries who actually win power, technology companies realized that things weren’t quite so simple. Silicon Valley rushed the commanding heights of American media, seizing power from the centrist TV anchors of yore. Without realizing quite what they were doing, computer nerds became the de facto gatekeepers of ideas for the American political system. And they soon realized that the fight-the-power attitude that animated their founding could no longer obtain. We are now seeing these companies make their first moves to set basic boundaries on elite-sanctioned political debate—a task not unlike the one that American media elites performed confidently a half-century ago.
After all, as Jonathan Rauch argued in Kindly Inquisitors, his brilliant 1993 defense of freedom of thought, liberal debate doesn’t mean that all claims are given equal weight. We depend on various kinds of elites and experts outside of government to filter the flow of knowledge. That’s why, for example, science classes don’t teach creationism, and respectable journals don’t publish it. The more consolidated media world that existed before the internet really did make less room for radicalism, and America was just as free.
The problem with the route Silicon Valley is taking isn’t that it’s bad, in principle, for elites to disfavor extremist and incorrect ideas. This is part of the job description of any elite. Rather, it’s that Silicon Valley corporate executives aren’t up to the task. The elite gatekeepers of the pre-internet age (partly because of their gatekeeping) were presiding over a much less polarized society. They believed they had a responsibility to wield their power in the public interest. And people like Walter Cronkite commanded the trust of the vital center of the vast media-consuming public.
Contrast with Silicon Valley’s attempt to play referee in 2017. First, Silicon Valley has done nothing to win the trust of the moderate and Right-leaning segments of the American political spectrum. In 2014, Mozilla fired its CEO, Brendan Eich, for his previous contributions in support of California’s anti-same sex marriage campaign. In 2016, Facebook came under scrutiny for allegedly disfavoring Right-leaning news items in its algorithms and boosting Left-leaning ones. This year, Google summarily fired an engineer for an internal memo criticizing company’s diversity policies. After the white supremacist murder in Charlottesville, many companies blacklisted the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer, which seems all well and good—but Apple’s Tim Cook also chose to fight hate by publicly donating a million dollars to the Southern Poverty Law Center, an increasingly partisan organization that labels some legitimate political activists like Ayaan Hirsi Ali as “extremists.” These decisions are certainly defensible, but they reflect the actions of an industry that is seeking to act as an arm of liberal progressivism, not a neutral gatekeeper that Americans of all political stripes can trust to filter political content.
Moreover, unlike the media wise men of the mid-20th century, technology executives are obviously deeply uneasy with the gatekeeping role they are increasingly undertaking. As John Herrman wrote in the New York Times Magazine, technology companies have always self-consciously conceived of themselves as democratic spaces. “In the process of building private communities,” he argues, “these companies had put on the costumes of liberal democracies.” They “tend to refer to their customers in euphemistic, almost democratic terms: as ‘users’ or ‘members of a community’… They borrowed the language of rights to legitimize arbitrary rules.” Most companies have appealed to legalistic-sounding user policies in scrubbing hate groups from their sites. The CEO of Cloudflare was uncharacteristically honest when he said he “woke up one morning and decided that [Storm Front] shouldn’t be on the internet. No one should have that power.” If Silicon Valley doesn’t really believe in its own legitimacy to serve as a political gatekeeper, then why should the public?
The age of consolidated media wasn’t perfect—it was stifling and homogeneous and suppressed worthy causes. But it was able to productively suppress extremist views and sometimes serve the public interest because the people who controlled it did so confidently, with a sense of duty, and an awareness of the need to maintain the trust of a wide audience. The elites at the top of the new information hierarchy are, for now, utterly unprepared for such responsibilities. They are walled off politically from the rest of the country; they are more concerned with profit and image than with a public mission; and they have so internalized a crude small-d democratic vision of what the web should be that they are struggling to even explain why they should be able to wield this fearsome new authority.
The new media landscape will ultimately need to develop ways to filter knowledge and opinions in the public interest while respecting the First Amendment prohibition of government censorship. But so long as tech is what it is, a more anarchist web is probably better than a dictatorship-by-Mountain View.
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August 22, 2017
The “New” Afghanistan Strategy
For a thirty minute prime-time address to the nation, President Trump’s Afghanistan speech last night actually told us very little about the Administration’s new strategy. It was heavy on rhetoric about victory and re-orienting American objectives, but light on how we might measure victory in a war that has been relentlessly consuming American blood and treasure for the better part of 16 years.
Presumably, these metrics were defined internally. Secretary of State James Mattis, who reportedly already had the authority to send additional troops into theater, admirably refused to do so without a proper strategic review of just what the mission hoped to achieve. Just ahead of Trump’s announcement, he signaled that he was “satisfied” with the “sufficiently rigorous” process. If we think Mattis is a serious and competent person—and we here at TAI do—we can assume that a working strategy, with a rigorous definition of “victory,” exists somewhere in the White House.
The President pointedly refused to divulge what it is, claiming as he has in the past that he does not wish to tip his hand to the enemy. What he laid out instead were themes. Taking those themes at face value, we can try to discern what kind of fight he envisions—and how it might turn out to be different from past Administrations’ approaches.
Since its start, the war in Afghanistan has comprised three components: A counter-terrorism mission to prevent al-Qaeda and now ISIS from gaining a safe haven, a counter-insurgency strategy aimed at the Taliban, and a nation-building component to form something resembling a liberal democratic society in Afghanistan.
Trump’s war in Afghanistan is almost completely focused on the counter-terrorism component, with a nod to counter-insurgency only as a means to ensuring success in denying safe havens to globally-minded radicals. From the President’s remarks last night:
From now on, victory will have a clear definition. Attacking our enemies, obliterating ISIS, crushing Al Qaeda, preventing the Taliban from taking over Afghanistan and stopping mass terror attacks against America before they emerge.
As for nation-building, that mission is now officially over for the United States:
America will continue its support for the Afghan government and the Afghan military as they confront the Taliban in the field. Ultimately, it is up to the people of Afghanistan to take ownership of their future, to govern their society and to achieve an everlasting peace. We are a partner and a friend, but we will not dictate to the Afghan people how to live or how to govern their own complex society. We are not nation-building again. We are killing terrorists.
If the President has decided to end America’s efforts to rebuild Afghanistan “in our own image,” as he put it, it probably won’t change much on the ground. NGOs and America’s NATO allies will almost certainly be willing to pick up the slack in trying to build schools and train judges, as long as the overall security situation can be stabilized. And insofar as the Afghan government relies on U.S. foreign aid for a substantial part of its budget, it remains to be seen exactly to what degree the U.S. will actually turn off the taps.
Furthermore, focusing on counter-terrorism is not a bad move. The counter-terrorism mission in Afghanistan has arguably been the most successful part of America’s efforts in that country. It’s also the simplest to carry out and has the fewest strategic requirements. All the United States needs to deny safe havens to terrorists in Afghanistan as effectively as in countries like Somalia and Syria is some stability of governance in the capital (and preferably a few of the largest cities) and a base to launch airstrikes from. Bagram will do just fine, though the base does not ultimately have to be inside the country.
Still, counter-insurgency (COIN) remains critical, despite the President’s rather desultory attitude toward it. The speech itself offers little insight as to what is to be done about the Taliban beyond bombing them more in hopes of a breakthrough. The truth is that the vast majority of American troops in Afghanistan are there to advise and train the Afghan army. The conflict has been effectively “Afghanized,” with Afghan troops bearing the brunt of the fight and suffering enormous casualties as a result. The problem is that the rate at which they are fighting and dying is unsustainable, especially given that they are also losing territory at the same time. Some number of American troops would be able to reverse that grim trend. But for how long?
The time component has always been the part that makes the COIN component so difficult. If they know you’re leaving, the thinking goes, they’ll just wait you out. Advocates like Senator John McCain have consistently argued for virtually open-ended commitments to these sorts of fights—in Iraq, in Syria, and yes, in Afghanistan. As Donald Trump knows well, however, there is vanishingly little appetite for these kinds of endless wars, especially among his base, but also well beyond it. Of course, unlike Obama, whose handling of the war in Afghanistan Trump views with utmost scorn, Trump refused to put a definite end date to the COIN efforts in Afghanistan. But at the same time, he didn’t give the McCains of the world what they wanted either. A date was not specified, but Trump went out of his way to stress that “our patience is not unlimited.”
Senator McCain in particular may not like the analogy, but it’s all redolent of another interminable war in America’s living memory: Vietnam. President Trump’s use of the Nixonian formulation that the U.S. seeks “an honorable and enduring outcome” for Afghanistan suggests that all the U.S. may be seeking is a “decent interval” after it withdraws before the Taliban take over running things. Trump gestured at the possibility of a political settlement, but didn’t appear too sanguine about its prospects. And indeed, perhaps it need not come to pass. As we’ve noted above, a pure counter-terror approach to Afghanistan can be prosecuted over the long term with a pretty light special forces footprint in-country, and little care about the final political outcome for Afghanistan as a country. Call it the Yemenization of Afghanistan approach.
Trump’s speech went far beyond Afghanistan itself. The President’s national security team, he noted, produced nothing less than a “a comprehensive review of all strategic options in Afghanistan and South Asia.” The result was the most full-throated rebuke of Pakistan that we’ve ever heard from an American President:
…Pakistan has also sheltered the same organizations that try every single day to kill our people. We have been paying Pakistan billions and billions of dollars at the same time they are housing the very terrorists that we are fighting.
But that will have to change. And that will change immediately. No partnership can survive a country’s harboring of militants and terrorists who target U.S. service members and officials. It is time for Pakistan to demonstrate its commitment to civilization, order and to peace.
The message is unambiguous: get with the program, or else! But will new threats, boldly stated, have any effect? Almost certainly not. Regular readers know that Pakistan’s stance on Islamic terrorism is not merely born of stubbornness, but is in fact a strategy carefully considered on many levels—a balancing act between ensuring its own internal security and keeping radicals at the ready to be used against its arch-rival India. No amount of American anger is likely to alter that calculus.
What can Trump actually do, apart from cutting aid and fulminating? U.S. airstrikes in Pakistan have dropped to virtually zero in recent years. Most of the strikes that have occurred were either cleared with Pakistan or were covered by a standing agreement. The Trump Administration may well be tempted to throw this trend into reverse, hard, as it pursues its counter-terrorism goals aggressively. And it could do so without bothering to ask the Paks for permission, if it wants to be particularly disrespectful.
The President also called on India to do more in Afghanistan—albeit by way of his own peculiarly mercantilist worldview:
We appreciate India’s important contributions to stability in Afghanistan, but India makes billions of dollars in trade with the United States, and we want them to help us more with Afghanistan, especially in the area of economic assistance and development.
This, too, is a neuralgic point for the Paks, who are terrified of India using Afghanistan to encircle them. This, too, will annoy them.
But none of this is actually news to Islamabad. Frustrations ran high even in George W. Bush’s time, relations were at a low point by the time President Obama left the Oval Office, and the Trump Administration has been telegraphing its extreme displeasure for months, going so far as to praise India’s involvement in Afghanistan last June. Pakistan has as a result already been casting ever more amorous glances at China for years now, and that dynamic is only likely to intensify.
On the one hand, an argument can be made that Trump’s decision to antagonize is exacerbating a dangerous nuclear standoff in the region is reckless. On the other, Trump’s defenders would doubtless reply, the situation is already fraught, and we are not doing anyone any favors by pretending that achieving our goals in Afghanistan is compatible with cordial relations with Pakistan. Maybe the added antagonism just doesn’t matter, one way or the other.
President Trump’s first instincts, as he said, were to withdraw, and his national security team convinced him otherwise. Perhaps they convinced him it was necessary to stay the course by highlighting the threat of terrorism, and the President has now attempted to do the same for the benefit of his skeptical base. “Stay the course” repackaged as “kill ISIS,” with a symbolic whack at Pakistan thrown in for good measure—boilerplate establishment foreign policy made palatable for the anti-establishment set. If that’s in fact what happened, the policy may not last the first term.
Judging by the speech alone, Trump seems to favor a relatively hard-nosed approach to the war that really only focuses on counter-terrorism. At the same time, he’s also likely to delegate maximum responsibility to the generals and only check in when the news compels him to do so. The result could easily be mission creep, and the attendant continuation of the quagmire that Obama himself handed down to his successor. And then Trump may find himself, just like Obama, estranged from the generals that boxed him in.
And where American foreign policy goes from there is anyone’s guess.
The post The “New” Afghanistan Strategy appeared first on The American Interest.
Trump Puts A New Sanctions Squeeze On China and Russia
The U.S. sanctions list on North Korea just grew a little longer, as the Treasury Department turns up the heat on Pyongyang’s enablers in China and Russia. From The Associated Press:
The Trump administration on Tuesday imposed sanctions on 16 mainly Chinese and Russian companies and people for assisting North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs and helping the North make money to support those programs. […]
The penalties are intended to complement new U.N. Security Council sanctions and further isolate North Korea … the Treasury Department said in a statement. […]
Among those sanctioned are six Chinese companies, including three coal companies; two Singapore-based companies that sell oil to North Korea and three Russians that work with them; a Russian company that deals in North Korean metals and its Russian director; a construction company based in Namibia; a second Namibia-based company, and its North Korean director, that supplies North Korean workers to build statues overseas to generate income for the North.
The new sanctions on Chinese firms are sure to irk Beijing, since China has so far enforced this month’s new UN sanctions more strictly than usual. But the new penalties serve as a reminder that Beijing is still not truly cooperative in complying with sanctions—and as a warning that the Trump administration will crack down on any companies that continue to exploit loopholes.
The move also comes as the administration turns its attention to Russia’s role in enabling North Korea. Moscow’s trade with Pyongyang increased by 73% in the first two months of 2017 alone, even as China has curbed key imports. That dynamic has sparked concern in the administration that Russia is effectively “making up” for the lost trade with China, in the words of State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert. In truth, Russia’s trade with North Korea is too small for Moscow to realistically replace Beijing as the regime’s main economic lifeline. But that doesn’t mean that Russian firms won’t skirt sanctions when they can, and opportunistically exploit openings with North Korea through whatever shady avenues they have at their disposal.
Among the Russian firms sanctioned is Gefest-M, an obscure firm whose director Ruben Kirakosyan is charged with procuring metals for a North Korean company involved in the WMD program. (Kirakosyan has swiftly denied those allegations to Russian media, while admitting contact with the North Korean government over five years ago.) The new penalties also suggest that Russian businessmen—including two based in the far-eastern port of Vladivostok—have sold oil to North Korea while covering their tracks through Singaporean front companies. Similarly, Treasury charges Chinese firms with using subsidiaries in Namibia to do an end run around sanctions.
If nothing else, the new sanctions show that the Trump administration is serious about exposing and closing the tortuous financial paths exploited by China and Russia to prop up Pyongyang. Holding both countries’ feet to the fire in order to isolate North Korea is a certainly a worthy cause. Whether these moves will actually change the stubborn behavior of the regime in Pyongyang, alas, is far from certain.
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Elvis as Thespian
With August 16 marking the 40th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death, any of a number of the old Elvisian saws come trotting out, for a week or two, for our latest appraisal. This time there is, yet again, the notion that Elvis pilfered black culture, and is thus an all-around bad dude, a rockabilly version of an anti-diversity bro. We also we have late-career plump, eyes-glazed-over Elvis, which is all some Millennials know about him. That goes as well for those who are lazy clods invested only in what is put in front of their face, and that Elvis iteration has been satirized so much that it’s bound to be in front of many faces.
Others will remember the bad soundtracks. Insomniacs are probably well versed in the Elvis filmography itself, since it’s scarcely a challenge to catch Elvis doing something on a beach with assorted bikini babes on your flat screen at three in the morning. Truth be told, Elvis movies can be pretty dire, but they usually have some element of redeeming charm, like an episode of The Brady Bunch, say, with that sense of perma-nostalgia even for those of us who weren’t around when they came out. They’re quaint, you can kill a couple hours with one of them as you do something else, and anyway quaint is better than gory violent.
Still, these old Elvis saws also seem to exist for the purpose of being corrected. We’ll leave the business about Elvis being a purloiner of black culture for another time, but early Elvis could be a downright modernist master of a strand of the blues that bounced like the blues never bounced before. That music will last as long as the music of Schubert, Duke Ellington, and the Beatles, provided we don’t succeed in killing off culture itself, as we seem hell-bent on doing.
But here’s another fun one: Elvis wasn’t a great actor. Olivier’s turn as Hamlet is under no competitive threat from Presley in the champion thespian department. But he did perform skillfully in what I’m going to call the first great rock-and-roll film, and a great film unto itself.
Michael Curtiz was in his mid-sixties when he came to direct Elvis in 1958’s King Creole. This was a man with a formidable roll call of masterpieces and assorted works of downright Hollywood bullion: We’re talking Casablanca, Yankee Doodle Dandy, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Angels with Dirty Faces, and more. He was a studio director with an auteur’s stylistic flair. In a Curtiz film, the camera would be kept moving, fluidity was paramount, light and shadow played in the fashion of virtuosic noir directors like John Alton and Nicholas Musuraca. He blended populist appeal with arty suavity.
The climax of his glory run came in the 1940s, so King Creole was akin to an 11th-hour victory afterparty. At this point, the noir era was over, and the likes of rock-and-roll films were these sock-hop-type extravaganzas without much in terms of plot. You know the clichés: the girls plotting some misadventures for down at the malt shop later, the tough guys who look like they’d have to be excused from gym class in real life peacocking around, and then everyone bopping to the sound of their favorite bands. There was lots of bopping, little story, and even less character development. Rock-and-roll was considered the worm food of society, not anything you’d take seriously, not anything worthy of a film that adults could find thoughtful.
King Creole changed that. Elvis’s military deployment was pushed back sixty days so that he could make the film, in which he plays Danny Fisher, a 19-year-old high school student (he must have been held back on account of the concomitant delinquency that comes with rocking and rolling). Danny’s mom has died, his dad has lost his job, and the family has moved to New Orleans, where they don’t have much money. A girl at school is being super aggressively hit on, so Danny clocks the hitter, ends up partnering up with the girl, gets reamed out by the principle, and drops out of school. He’s briefly involved with a gang, distracting a store owner with his singing while his confederates rob the place; he then switches over to a job at a nightclub where, you guessed it, it’s eventually discovered that, hey, this boy can sing.
Danny’s father gets a job at a pharmacy, which involves him being belittled in front of his son. There are all kinds of emotional pushes and pulls, and various twists on loyalty, in what becomes a gritty little film in the form of rock noir. The music is brassy, even strutty you might say, and yeah, the plot is a little James Dean-ish. But Elvis is damn good at projecting the kind of confliction I think we all feel at least from time to time. So, for example, you want to do right by a given person because you should, you want to do right by another person, too, because if you don’t that might make you a bad person, but how in the midst of all of these social equations do you do right by yourself? And if you do, are you that much more cut off from everyone else than you were before you put yourself out there? Do you have to make yourself lonely when you conduct yourself honorably?
King Creole raises precisely such questions, so it is possible to respect it even if you don’t care a jot about rock-and-roll. Elvis did not create this effect by himself; Curtiz evoked a very serviceable performance from him, and he seems to have done it by keeping the clichéd watch-how-coolly-I-can-sneer-because-I’m-a-sexy-rebel mannerism well in check. Elvis playing Danny Fisher becomes a kid you can feel for, and when you feel for a kid, you connect with a kid. And if you connect with a film on that account, then the film has done its job and has achieved more than most films do. It’s a film worth caring about because the film gives the impression of caring about you.
The best art always creates a synergy between the art itself and that member of an audience who has come to spend some time with it. Six years later, Richard Lester would round up four Liverpudlian lads to make A Hard Day’s Night, which also does not require you to have any interest in rock-and-roll to thrill to it emotionally, intellectually, and physically. It was fun, it was arty, and it was even introspection-friendly—especially if you saw it mid-puberty.
As it happens, Richard Lester and the Beatles had seen King Creole. It’s hard to know if anyone had thought beforehand that you could make a rock-and-roll picture that was also just a picture, no need for the qualifying adjectival label. That makes King Creole a genre progenitor, as well as a movie for your brain to dance to.
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America’s Next Eclipse Is a Threat to National Security
If you’re reading this, congratulations! You didn’t go blind staring at one of nature’s great spectacles, the solar eclipse. That phenomenon dazzled millions of Americans and brought small towns across America a windfall of tourist dollars, but in the process it also threw a small but growing industry into sharp relief. Let’s take the opportunity to examine solar power with the same scrutiny we looked to the eclipse.
Back in March, solar power hit a major milestone here in the United States, generating for the first time 2 percent of our overall electricity. Last year, solar provided 0.9 percent of American power, but that share is increasing rapidly. It varies seasonally for obvious reasons—more daylight hours during summer months mean more operating time for solar panels—but even accounting for that, the clean energy source is having a dazzling 2017. According to the EIA, solar production year to date in 2017 is more than 50 percent higher than 2016. That’s real progress, seasonal variation aside.
But variation can’t be left aside for long when you’re discussing solar power. Like its renewable cousin wind power, solar is by its very nature intermittent. Solar panels (or solar thermal facilities) can only supply the grid when the sun is shining. That’s currently not a major problem in the U.S., thanks to the relatively small market share of solar and wind (which together produced just under 7 percent of American power last year). But given the growth we’re seeing in renewables lately—growth driven in large part by falling production costs—that intermittency is looming large as a major problem on the horizon.
In fact, we can already see the issues coming our way, should renewables gain a larger market share. Germany gets roughly one third of its power from wind and solar, and at times has heralded especially windy and sunny days, when it produced 100 percent of its power from renewables, as major triumphs. But this excess of power is as problematic as those cloudy and windless days by dint of the fact that it wreaks havoc on power grids. Germany’s neighbors have had to spend millions on grid upgrades to handle the rise in power supply volatility that has accompanied Berlin’s energiewende, while traders have had to rely more heavily on algorithms to deal with the rapid fluctuations in power prices that have now become the norm in the northern European nation. Electricity needs to be abundant, cheap, but above all reliable in order for society to function, but renewables’ rise is undermining that facet of energy security that so many facets of our modern life have come to depend on.
The eclipse didn’t devastate American solar power production, and even if it did, that wouldn’t by itself be cause to ring the alarm. These are, after all, once-or-twice-in-a-lifetime events, and unlike other varieties of natural threats to energy sources, they can be predicted well in advance. But on April 8, 2024—the next time the U.S. sees a total solar eclipse—this event will be a much larger threat to our energy production, should solar power continue its impressive growth.
So how will we cope in 2024? In part, by relying on fossil fuels. When panels can’t produce power, backups need to be switched on, and that means continuing to invest in options that can be relied on for 24/7 baseload power. Natural gas is an ideal complement to variable renewables not just because it emits roughly half as much CO2 as its chief competitor, coal, but also because the capital costs for constructing a natural gas-fired power plant are significantly lower than a coal-fired one, which lessens the economic need to run the facility all the time in order to recoup that investment. Thanks to shale, we have plenty of cheap gas in the U.S., and it will have a vital role to play in our shift to a less carbon intensive energy mix.
So too will nuclear energy. The American nuclear industry has been losing steam of late, and the recent cancellation of the last active nuclear power construction project in the U.S. drove home the point that we’re not reinvesting in an energy source that must form the foundation of any future sustainable power mix. Nuclear power is, after all, the only source of zero-emissions power that we can consistently count on (other than hydroelectricity). It’s stagnation is one of the biggest energy problems we’re going to need to solve in the coming years.
Energy storage would solve solar’s intermittency issue overnight, but as of now we lack any commercially viable, scalable storage options. On that front, ARPA-E has an important role to play for our future energy security. Continuing to invest in moonshot energy programs—especially ones focused on storage—could be the key to solar’s future flourishing. The Trump Administration wants to axe that agency; Congress needs to stand firm in support of it.
Seven years from now, Americans will once again look upwards towards the sun, agog as it’s briefly eclipsed by the moon. By then, solar power will play a much bigger role in our power mix than it does now, so it’s vital that we take its intermittency weakness as a threat to our energy and national security.
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