Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 15

Universal Lessons from the Battles Over Ukraine’s Identity

In the drama of impeachment Ukraine is both a central and passive protagonist. It is the character onto which others project their hopes and fantasies: there’s Trump’s nutty theory that it was actually Ukraine that hacked the DNC and then pinned it on Russia, and his belief that Ukraine is where a story could be found, or at least concocted, that makes his Presidential rival look corrupt. Then for the Democrats there’s the hope that Ukraine is the place where Trump’s corruption can be proven—a belief based on facts, to be sure, but one that still feeds the fantasy that he will ever be removed via impeachment. 

Ukraine has always been a receptacle for others’ stories. A colony of various great powers over many centuries (Polish and Austro-Hungarian, Russian, German and Soviet), the expanse of steppe above the Black Sea has always been a space into which outsiders project their fantasies, a narratological colonization that tends to go hand in hand with territorial subjugation. The Russian tsars saw Kiev as their connection to Byzantium, and declared Kiev the “mother of all Russian cities.” Hitler fantasized that Ukraine’s ultra-fertile “black soil” would be the bread basket for his Reich, and concentrated his invasion of the USSR to the south. Stalin, meanwhile, tried to stuff Ukraine into a Marxist-Leninist idea of historical progress as class warfare, and when landowning Ukrainian peasants resisted, some 4 million of them were murdered through enforced starvation in what is now known as the Holodomor. Today, Russian propaganda simultaneously describes the country as a fascist state and a puppet of globalist forces. Inside Russia, it is often characterized as a prostitute: If Kiev refuses to be Moscow’s mother, pace the tsars, then it must be castigated as a whore. 

A more high-minded way of objectifying Ukraine comes from policy experts—from both Russia and the thing once known as “the West”—who describe Ukraine as a “buffer,” a “bridge,” a “cushion,” a “grey zone” between Russia and the rest. “Is it logical to call the second biggest country in Europe a buffer zone?” asks the security analyst Hanna Shelest. Describing Ukraine as a “buffer” is a narrative sleight of hand that leads to stripping the country of the right to decide its own destiny: Cushions don’t get to choose.

Shelest is a contributor to a new volume—Ukraine in Histories and Stories: Essays by Ukrainian Intellectuals—which includes everyone from internationally renowned academics like Harvard’s Serhii Plokhiy to never-before-translated poets, that seeks to articulate Ukraine to the wider world. (I had the honour of writing a brief preface.) The book gives Ukrainians a chance to articulate their country themselves, and the Ukraine that emerges is uncannily relevant at a time when so many countries are undergoing identity crises—not least the United States.  

Ukraine doesn’t only have narratives about who and what it is imposed from abroad; some have been generated domestically in order to resist colonialism—though they still tend to be communicated top-down. One pervasive Ukrainian origin-myth traces the country’s roots to the Cossacks, the militarized nomadic groups who have roamed the steppe since the middle ages. It’s a trope present in the 19th-century, romantic verse of the national poet Shevchenko, who was imprisoned by the Russian tsar for his insistence on writing in the Ukrainian language, and is alluded to in the Ukrainian anthem. But, as Serhii Plokhy explains, almost as soon as the Cossack-as-true-Ukrainians myth emerged in the 19th century, important Ukrainian thinkers, including the country’s premier historian and first head of state, criticized the Cossacks as a marauding elite who oppressed the common people. Ukraine is a culture that deconstructs its own myths even as it creates them. “In second half of 19th century, [there were] attempts to build a new Ukrainian unity through the idea of Ukrainian autonimism, liberalism, socialism and anarchism . . . [the] belief in educating the people in [the] idea of enlightenment progress. . . . [E]ach attempt to create it would lead to another catastrophe,” writes the novelist and translator Andriy Bondar. “We have never seen development. We have only formed and been deformed chaotically.”

Every powerful political and intellectual group tries to impose their own version of right history, of correct identity, which buckles and breaks when it collides with messy, multifaceted Ukrainian reality. Ukraine can be seen as a sort of graveyard for existing concepts of identity. It is too multilingual and too multi-faith to fit with a Herderian concept of nationality as defined by language and religion, as the last President Petro Poroshenko found when his electoral slogan of “Language, Army, Faith” was destroyed at the polls—hardly a surprising outcome, when only 55 percent of the population speak Ukrainian at home. But neither can one ignore the fact that the flame of national emancipation was kept flickering over centuries of colonialism through a self-sacrificing devotion to the Ukrainian language, and that this devotion helped resist subjugation to Russian, Polish, and then Soviet power. 

But simply basing identity on resistance to imperial projects misses how people were caught up inside them. “This is like having a bipolar disorder, an illness that we all seem to suffer from” writes the lawyer and novelist Larysa Denysenko. 

Suddenly an executor during Stalin’s enforced famine or World War II who was a completely Soviet person became a Ukrainian . . . on the other hand a Ukrainian hero from Ukraine’s resistance movement was killing Soviet people who were ethnic Ukrainians—so how can we say he or she is a hero? 

People were destroyed and humiliated, dissidents crippled their lungs in the pine forests of Siberia attempting to keep freedom in their minds. But righteous people and great martyrs live hand in hand with executioners, accomplices, traitors, and those who remain indifferent. All this hides a terrible trauma that we are not ready to discuss because almost every one of us is fighting a silent, internal war. 

The word “trauma” echoes throughout the volume. We hear at one point about the “trauma” of growing up in a country (the USSR) which one despises, and that Ukraine was “born of violence and trauma.” “Where is that place on the maps of our psychology, geography and traumatology, at which we begin?” asks Bondar. Denysenko’s use of “trauma,” meanwhile, sometimes seems to align with the Yale sociologist Jeffrey Alexander’s description of cultural trauma—distressing collective experiences that a culture hasn’t found ways to articulate or assign responsibility for.  Ukraine’s “silence,” argues Denysenko, is “why the Holodomor has not been recognized as genocide, and Ukrainians are more easily associated with collaborators in World War II than with the Righteous Among The Nations. We are reminded of pogroms, massacres, xenophobic sentiments.”

So those who aim to tell Ukraine’s real histories and stories seem to be in a bind. On the one hand, there is the fear that if one were to start articulating the “silent, internal war” of people’s experiences, it would render existing projects to forge a common Ukrainian identity meaningless; on the other, this lack of articulation means Ukraine is vulnerable to objectification by others. 

But could one think about the process of confronting traumas in a different way? After all, it is the very prevalence of such experiences that all Ukrainians have in common. Denysenko gives the example of language, a subject that is so often used to try to divide Ukrainians: one of the “reasons” Russia gave for its recent invasion of Ukraine was to defend Russian speakers. “I think all of us have, in one way or another, a language trauma . . . both those who speak Ukrainian and Russian,” she writes. Ukrainian language has been suppressed for centuries. Under the tsars it was illegal to print Ukrainian language books or, at certain times, to even speak the language. During the Soviet period, a carefully controlled amount of state-sanctioned printing and education was permitted, but any Ukrainian writers or intellectuals deemed too desirous of emancipation were shot or jailed, while Ukrainian was looked down on as a second-tier language. One had to speak Russian in order to succeed. Meanwhile those parts of Ukraine that were under Polish control in the early 20th century saw the language intermittently outlawed and dismissed as a mere set of regional micro-dialects. It is this legacy that explains why Ukrainian speakers (those who primarily speak Ukrainian in a bilingual culture) still feel that they are a threatened minority, even though Ukrainian is now the country’s official language and the language of the majority.

But Denysenko understands that “Russian speaking people also have their traumas. We were all trained to think that the language of a Soviet person was Russian. . . . [W]hen the same legislative norms were introduced in Ukrainian, it was difficult for people to switch over. You were suddenly deprived of this majority status, and it became very painful.”

Both experiences need to be articulated, and the very trauma that both involved is a potential way into a common conversation. Until that happens, Russian propaganda will keep nibbling away at the language-identity dialectic.

In some ways, Ukrainians already find flexible ways to negotiate language and status. The political scientists Olga Onuch, Henry Hale, and Volodymyr Kulyk have all shown how Ukrainian people increasingly identify themselves as Ukrainian speakers in surveys, even if they then proceed to answer questions in Russian or speak Russian at home. When people define themselves as Ukrainian speakers they may be signifying their allegiance to the Ukrainian project of national emancipation, recognizing the important role language has played in it, and showing they support that project irrespective of whether they are more comfortable speaking Russian. It seems to me an ingenuous way of recognizing the uniqueness of a culture’s history while practicing multiculturalism, a balancing act between patriotism and tolerance many countries would benefit from mastering.

Indeed, the closer one looks at Ukraine, the less polarizing the issue of language seems to be. Russian was a common language among those who took part in the revolution of dignity that opposed Kremlin domination over Ukraine in 2014, and has been the working language for many soldiers fighting in the war against Russia ever since. The election of 2018 saw the East Ukrainian, primarily Russian-speaking comedian Volodomyr Zelensky triumph on both sides of the supposedly essential East-West divide. Even in Donetsk, the region occupied by Moscow-run insurgents who claim to be defending Russian language rights, the actual situation was less polarized than the propaganda suggests. ‘There was never any abyss between them, between these two languages” remembers the novelist and poet Volodymyr Rafeenko, “because Russian spoken in Donbas differs significantly from the language spoken in Russia, while Ukrainian, in this Donbas time and space, was transformed under the influence of Russian into its Eastern dialect. In a certain sense, this was one Eastern-Ukrainian language that had two wings: as wild steppe birds, abundant in the suburb where I grew up.”

But while language is a surmountable cleavage, mass murder can be more difficult—especially when it comes to recognizing one’s own culpability. The 1943 Volyn massacre, in which Ukrainian nationalists slaughtered countless Poles, is a familiar theme in Russian propaganda, used to incite divisions between Ukraine and Poland, its closest current ally. 

In Histories and Stories, the Polish-Ukrainian academic Olha Hnatiuk argues the lack of honest, public conversation about Volyn in both Ukraine and Poland has made it a cause of contention, with scholars unable to agree on the basic facts:

Historians now behave as if they were crouched in the trenches. More and more pointed accusations are being voiced from one and the other side. While one (Polish) side calls the developments in Volyn in 1943 genocide, the other side calls them the Polish-Ukrainian war. On the other (Polish) side for killings of the Ukrainian population, a euphemism is used: “retaliatory actions”. It means: “evil was done to us, so there were retaliations from our side”. But those retaliatory actions killed women, elderly people, newborn infants, everyone. And this was done only on the basis of their ethnic origin.

Polish and Ukrainian historians, Hnatiuk continues, need to “get out of their trenches. Just like for the Ukrainians, it is hard for the Poles to admit they were not only victims but killers as well. And this martyr mentality in both nations has played a bad trick on us.”

In the case of Volyn we see how identity constructions get in the way of exploring facts, taking responsibility, and ultimately reconciling. “Who is not with us is against us” is a phrase attributed to Lenin, and it’s the sort of thinking that cripples a country like Ukraine, with its history of ever-shifting, multiple perspectives. But the spectre of binary thinking haunts Ukrainian public discourse: One is either pro-Russian or pro-European; a Soviet-era conformist or a dissident; a Nazi collaborator or a partisan; pro-Soviet or pro-Ukrainian. 

Volodomyr Yermolenko, the philosopher and editor of Ukraine in Histories and Stories, sees the tension of such binaries as a Ukrainian constant: between the nomads of the steppe, such as the Turcic peoples and the Cossacks, and those who worked the land; between different Empires; between Catholicism, Byzantine, and Russian Orthodox Christianity. But Ukraine is also the place where these binaries break down, where conflict is dissolved into cohabitation, and where that dissolution is essential for survival.

Oh destiny of Ukraine—perhaps not so different from your own.

The post Universal Lessons from the Battles Over Ukraine’s Identity appeared first on The American Interest.

Universal Lessons from Ukraine’s Identity Crisis

In the drama of impeachment Ukraine is both a central and passive protagonist. It is the character onto which others project their hopes and fantasies: there’s Trump’s nutty theory that it was actually Ukraine that hacked the DNC and then pinned it on Russia, and his belief that Ukraine is where a story could be found, or at least concocted, that makes his Presidential rival look corrupt. Then for the Democrats there’s the hope that Ukraine is the place where Trump’s corruption can be proven—a belief based on facts, to be sure, but one that still feeds the fantasy that he will ever be removed via impeachment. 

Ukraine has always been a receptacle for others’ stories. A colony of various great powers over many centuries (Polish and Austro-Hungarian, Russian, German and Soviet), the expanse of steppe above the Black Sea has always been a space into which outsiders project their fantasies, a narratological colonization that tends to go hand in hand with territorial subjugation. The Russian tsars saw Kiev as their connection to Byzantium, and declared Kiev the “mother of all Russian cities.” Hitler fantasized that Ukraine’s ultra-fertile “black soil” would be the bread basket for his Reich, and concentrated his invasion of the USSR to the south. Stalin, meanwhile, tried to stuff Ukraine into a Marxist-Leninist idea of historical progress as class warfare, and when landowning Ukrainian peasants resisted, some 4 million of them were murdered through enforced starvation in what is now known as the Holodomor. Today, Russian propaganda simultaneously describes the country as a fascist state and a puppet of globalist forces. Inside Russia, it is often characterized as a prostitute: If Kiev refuses to be Moscow’s mother, pace the tsars, then it must be castigated as a whore. 

A more high-minded way of objectifying Ukraine comes from policy experts—from both Russia and the thing once known as “the West”—who describe Ukraine as a “buffer,” a “bridge,” a “cushion,” a “grey zone” between Russia and the rest. “Is it logical to call the second biggest country in Europe a buffer zone?” asks the security analyst Hanna Shelest. Describing Ukraine as a “buffer” is a narrative sleight of hand that leads to stripping the country of the right to decide its own destiny: Cushions don’t get to choose.

Shelest is a contributor to a new volume—Ukraine in Histories and Stories: Essays by Ukrainian Intellectuals—which includes everyone from internationally renowned academics like Harvard’s Serhii Plokhiy to never-before-translated poets, that seeks to articulate Ukraine to the wider world. (I had the honour of writing a brief preface.) The book gives Ukrainians a chance to articulate their country themselves, and the Ukraine that emerges is uncannily relevant at a time when so many countries are undergoing identity crises—not least the United States.  

Ukraine doesn’t only have narratives about who and what it is imposed from abroad; some have been generated domestically in order to resist colonialism—though they still tend to be communicated top-down. One pervasive Ukrainian origin-myth traces the country’s roots to the Cossacks, the militarized nomadic groups who have roamed the steppe since the middle ages. It’s a trope present in the 19th-century, romantic verse of the national poet Shevchenko, who was imprisoned by the Russian tsar for his insistence on writing in the Ukrainian language, and is alluded to in the Ukrainian anthem. But, as Serhii Plokhy explains, almost as soon as the Cossack-as-true-Ukrainians myth emerged in the 19th century, important Ukrainian thinkers, including the country’s premier historian and first head of state, criticized the Cossacks as a marauding elite who oppressed the common people. Ukraine is a culture that deconstructs its own myths even as it creates them. “In second half of 19th century, [there were] attempts to build a new Ukrainian unity through the idea of Ukrainian autonimism, liberalism, socialism and anarchism . . . [the] belief in educating the people in [the] idea of enlightenment progress. . . . [E]ach attempt to create it would lead to another catastrophe,” writes the novelist and translator Andriy Bondar. “We have never seen development. We have only formed and been deformed chaotically.”

Every powerful political and intellectual group tries to impose their own version of right history, of correct identity, which buckles and breaks when it collides with messy, multifaceted Ukrainian reality. Ukraine can be seen as a sort of graveyard for existing concepts of identity. It is too multilingual and too multi-faith to fit with a Herderian concept of nationality as defined by language and religion, as the last President Petro Poroshenko found when his electoral slogan of “Language, Army, Faith” was destroyed at the polls—hardly a surprising outcome, when only 55 percent of the population speak Ukrainian at home. But neither can one ignore the fact that the flame of national emancipation was kept flickering over centuries of colonialism through a self-sacrificing devotion to the Ukrainian language, and that this devotion helped resist subjugation to Russian, Polish, and then Soviet power. 

But simply basing identity on resistance to imperial projects misses how people were caught up inside them. “This is like having a bipolar disorder, an illness that we all seem to suffer from” writes the lawyer and novelist Larysa Denysenko. 

Suddenly an executor during Stalin’s enforced famine or World War II who was a completely Soviet person became a Ukrainian . . . on the other hand a Ukrainian hero from Ukraine’s resistance movement was killing Soviet people who were ethnic Ukrainians—so how can we say he or she is a hero? 

People were destroyed and humiliated, dissidents crippled their lungs in the pine forests of Siberia attempting to keep freedom in their minds. But righteous people and great martyrs live hand in hand with executioners, accomplices, traitors, and those who remain indifferent. All this hides a terrible trauma that we are not ready to discuss because almost every one of us is fighting a silent, internal war. 

The word “trauma” echoes throughout the volume. We hear at one point about the “trauma” of growing up in a country (the USSR) which one despises, and that Ukraine was “born of violence and trauma.” “Where is that place on the maps of our psychology, geography and traumatology, at which we begin?” asks Bondar. Denysenko’s use of “trauma,” meanwhile, sometimes seems to align with the Yale sociologist Jeffrey Alexander’s description of cultural trauma—distressing collective experiences that a culture hasn’t found ways to articulate or assign responsibility for.  Ukraine’s “silence,” argues Davydenko, is “why the Holodomor has not been recognized as genocide, and Ukrainians are more easily associated with collaborators in World War II than with the Righteous Among The Nations. We are reminded of pogroms, massacres, xenophobic sentiments.”

So those who aim to tell Ukraine’s real histories and stories seem to be in a bind. On the one hand, there is the fear that if one were to start articulating the “silent, internal war” of people’s experiences, it would render existing projects to forge a common Ukrainian identity meaningless; on the other, this lack of articulation means Ukraine is vulnerable to objectification by others. 

But could one think about the process of confronting traumas in a different way? After all, it is the very prevalence of such experiences that all Ukrainians have in common. Denysenko gives the example of language, a subject that is so often used to try to divide Ukrainians: one of the “reasons” Russia gave for its recent invasion of Ukraine was to defend Russian speakers. “I think all of us have, in one way or another, a language trauma . . . both those who speak Ukrainian and Russian,” she writes. Ukrainian language has been suppressed for centuries. Under the tsars it was illegal to print Ukrainian language books or, at certain times, to even speak the language. During the Soviet period, a carefully controlled amount of state-sanctioned printing and education was permitted, but any Ukrainian writers or intellectuals deemed too desirous of emancipation were shot or jailed, while Ukrainian was looked down on as a second-tier language. One had to speak Russian in order to succeed. Meanwhile those parts of Ukraine that were under Polish control in the early 20th century saw the language intermittently outlawed and dismissed as a mere set of regional micro-dialects. It is this legacy that explains why Ukrainian speakers (those who primarily speak Ukrainian in a bilingual culture) still feel that they are a threatened minority, even though Ukrainian is now the country’s official language and the language of the majority.

But Denysenko understands that “Russian speaking people also have their traumas. We were all trained to think that the language of a Soviet person was Russian. . . . [W]hen the same legislative norms were introduced in Ukrainian, it was difficult for people to switch over. You were suddenly deprived of this majority status, and it became very painful.”

Both experiences need to be articulated, and the very trauma that both involved is a potential way into a common conversation. Until that happens, Russian propaganda will keep nibbling away at the language-identity dialectic.

In some ways, Ukrainians already find flexible ways to negotiate language and status. The political scientists Olga Onuch, Henry Hale, and Volodymyr Kulyk have all shown how Ukrainian people increasingly identify themselves as Ukrainian speakers in surveys, even if they then proceed to answer questions in Russian or speak Russian at home. When people define themselves as Ukrainian speakers they may be signifying their allegiance to the Ukrainian project of national emancipation, recognizing the important role language has played in it, and showing they support that project irrespective of whether they are more comfortable speaking Russian. It seems to me an ingenuous way of recognizing the uniqueness of a culture’s history while practicing multiculturalism, a balancing act between patriotism and tolerance many countries would benefit from mastering.

Indeed, the closer one looks at Ukraine, the less polarizing the issue of language seems to be. Russian was a common language among those who took part in the revolution of dignity that opposed Kremlin domination over Ukraine in 2014, and has been the working language for many soldiers fighting in the war against Russia ever since. The election of 2018 saw the East Ukrainian, primarily Russian-speaking comedian Volodomyr Zelensky triumph on both sides of the supposedly essential East-West divide. Even in Donetsk, the region occupied by Moscow-run insurgents who claim to be defending Russian language rights, the actual situation was less polarized than the propaganda suggests. ‘There was never any abyss between them, between these two languages” remembers the novelist and poet Volodymyr Rafeenko, “because Russian spoken in Donbas differs significantly from the language spoken in Russia, while Ukrainian, in this Donbas time and space, was transformed under the influence of Russian into its Eastern dialect. In a certain sense, this was one Eastern-Ukrainian language that had two wings: as wild steppe birds, abundant in the suburb where I grew up.”

But while language is a surmountable cleavage, mass murder can be more difficult—especially when it comes to recognizing one’s own culpability. The 1943 Volyn massacre, in which Ukrainian nationalists slaughtered countless Poles, is a familiar theme in Russian propaganda, used to incite divisions between Ukraine and Poland, its closest current ally. 

In Histories and Stories, the Polish-Ukrainian academic Olha Hnatiuk argues the lack of honest, public conversation about Volyn in both Ukraine and Poland has made it a cause of contention, with scholars unable to agree on the basic facts:

Historians now behave as if they were crouched in the trenches. More and more pointed accusations are being voiced from one and the other side. While one (Polish) side calls the developments in Volyn in 1943 genocide, the other side calls them the Polish-Ukrainian war. On the other (Polish) side for killings of the Ukrainian population, a euphemism is used: “retaliatory actions”. It means: “evil was done to us, so there were retaliations from our side”. But those retaliatory actions killed women, elderly people, newborn infants, everyone. And this was done only on the basis of their ethnic origin.

Polish and Ukrainian historians, Hnatiuk continues, need to “get out of their trenches. Just like for the Ukrainians, it is hard for the Poles to admit they were not only victims but killers as well. And this martyr mentality in both nations has played a bad trick on us.”

In the case of Volyn we see how identity constructions get in the way of exploring facts, taking responsibility, and ultimately reconciling. “Who is not with us is against us” is a phrase attributed to Lenin, and it’s the sort of thinking that cripples a country like Ukraine, with its history of ever-shifting, multiple perspectives. But the spectre of binary thinking haunts Ukrainian public discourse: One is either pro-Russian or pro-European; a Soviet-era conformist or a dissident; a Nazi collaborator or a partisan; pro-Soviet or pro-Ukrainian. 

Volodomyr Yermolenko, the philosopher and editor of Ukraine in Histories and Stories, sees the tension of such binaries as a Ukrainian constant: between the nomads of the steppe, such as the Turcic peoples and the Cossacks, and those who worked the land; between different Empires; between Catholicism, Byzantine, and Russian Orthodox Christianity. But Ukraine is also the place where these binaries break down, where conflict is dissolved into cohabitation, and where that dissolution is essential for survival.

Oh destiny of Ukraine—perhaps not so different from your own.

The post Universal Lessons from Ukraine’s Identity Crisis appeared first on The American Interest.

Zelensky Walks the Knife’s Edge

After nearly six years of conflict with Russia, there is in Ukraine today a somewhat fluid spectrum of public opinion that breaks down broadly into two camps. These are not the camps into which Kremlin propaganda usually—and erroneously—divides Ukrainians: a party of peace and a party of war. Instead, they are divided between those who believe in the near-term possibility of negotiating a peace agreement with Russia that safeguards Ukrainian sovereignty, and those who do not. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has placed himself unequivocally in the first camp. Along with his pledge to battle corruption, Zelensky’s peace-through-negotiation approach, juxtaposed to incumbent President Petro Poroshenko’s sovereignty-by-resistance policy, secured his landslide electoral victory.

Unfortunately for Zelensky, events have conspired to create an inauspicious set of circumstances under which to pursue his chosen path—a situation that could both destabilize his government domestically and undermine Ukraine with respect to its great northern antagonist. By all accounts, Zelensky acquitted himself well in his first major test at the Normandy Format Summit on December 9, but the underlying state of affairs will remain disproportionately fraught for both Ukraine and Zelensky.

The essential problem is that the Russo-Ukrainian conflict is fundamentally asymmetrical, and most of the asymmetries—but, perhaps crucially, not all—work in Russia’s favor.

The issue is not just that Russia is bigger, more populous, stronger, and richer than Ukraine. The struggle is an existential one for Ukraine, but not for Russia. The fighting is taking place on Ukrainian soil, is destroying Ukrainian housing stock, infrastructure, and industrial plant, and is killing Ukrainians on an almost daily basis. The conflict therefore looms darkly over just about every aspect of Ukrainian life. In contrast, the war is a distant one for most Russians, scarcely intruding into their daily lives. Since 2015, the diminished scale of the fighting and of direct Russian military involvement ensures that Russian casualties are few and can be easily disguised as victims of military training accidents. Western sanctions and the cost of maintaining the Kremlin’s clients in the Donbas certainly sap the vitality of the Russian economy, but this burden is bearable in the medium-run.

Moreover, Russia’s economic and geographic preeminence in the post-Soviet space enables it to maximize disruption to Ukraine. Most importantly, Putin’s meticulous pipeline policy since 2005 is on the cusp of cutting Ukraine entirely out of the loop. The fact that Russia relies economically on hydrocarbon exports to Europe, with pipeline infrastructure transiting Ukraine, has heretofore severely limited Moscow’s freedom of action against its antagonist. Any disruption to gas transit through Ukraine would entail losses to Gazprom’s lucrative European markets, and any broad Russian military action against Ukraine would therefore entail immediate and disastrous financial consequences for Moscow. It was Putin’s great misfortune that the moment of Ukraine’s maximum vulnerability occurred in 2014, before Russia had consummated its pipeline-bypass strategy. If the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is completed in 2020 as expected, Moscow could take full advantage of the situation should some future confluence of events favor a decisive Russian blow against its fraternal-yet-repugnant neighbor.

The recent U.S. sanctions on Nord Stream 2, by all accounts, have come too late to prevent the project’s completion. Moscow’s need to keep gas flowing to Europe in the meantime led to a compromise transit agreement, signed December 31, that commits Russia to continue significant, if reduced, transit of gas through Ukraine for five years. Lest Ukrainians congratulate themselves too fulsomely on their negotiating prowess with respect to Moscow, they should ponder the ominous track record of Russian pipeline infrastructure experiencing catastrophic maintenance problems, and even unexplained explosions, when it has served the Kremlin’s interests to cut off oil or gas to uncooperative neighbors. It should therefore come as no surprise to anyone if, shortly after the completion of Nord Stream 2 and Turkish Stream, the gas pipeline through Ukraine should experience some calamitous malfunction on Russian territory that defies both explanation and expeditious remedy, giving Russia dubious “technical” grounds to ignore its contractual obligations regarding gas transit through Ukraine.

The Kremlin also has far more leeway when it comes to bestowing favors on, or withholding them from, its adversary: the free movement of goods and people; the exchange of prisoners (one of Zelensky’s priorities); a durable ceasefire from the Russian-controlled side of the line of contact; some relief from intense Russification for the dwindling number of Donbas residents intent on maintaining a Ukrainian identity. Putin giveth, and Putin taketh away. The possibilities for the Kremlin to torment Kyiv are vast and multifaceted, and there is not a whole lot that Zelensky can do about it—either to preempt Russian actions, to parry Moscow’s moves, or to retaliate in kind.

With little ability to deflect painful blows from Moscow or to ratchet up the corresponding pain to Russia, Ukrainians who advocate sovereignty through resistance face the daunting prospect of a protracted struggle, with lengthy periods of political and economic maneuvering punctuated by occasional open warfare—basically, a 21st-century version of the Hundred Years’ War. No wonder so many Ukrainians incline toward the idea of a negotiated settlement.

Facing less pressure than Kyiv, and with a greater variety of implements in its toolbox, Moscow is negotiating from a position of relative strength and can afford to play the long game. But what exactly is Moscow’s long game? Russia’s war aims in Ukraine have been the subject of the most varied conjecturewhich is not surprising, since I doubt whether Putin himself could articulate Russia’s minimum demands with any precision, or specify the point at which Russia would be prepared to compromise and forego its more far-reaching desiderata with regard to Ukraine.

A number of analysts have posited Finlandization—a neutral Ukraine abjuring NATO or EU membership—as a reasonable concession in return for Russia returning the Donbas. (Crimea is generally seen as “a bridge too far” in these hypothetical settlement scenarios.) It is indicative that the Finlandization option seems to appeal solely to Westerners, not Russians—because it would be perceived by most Russians not as a compromise or a draw, but as a loss.

The fundamental driving force behind Putin’s approach to Ukraine is not alarm over possible NATO enlargement, but the conviction that Ukraine, in whole or at least in large part, is a portion of Russia’s own patrimony wrongfully separated from the motherland. The Kremlin’s primary motivation is not fear, but irredentist umbrage. It is a point repeatedly underscored by Putin’s own pronouncements, most recently in his annual year-end news conference on December 19. In it he alleged that the lands north of the Black Sea (that is, the southern third of Ukraine) were “ancestral Russian territories that had never had anything to do with Ukraine,” but which Lenin, by “a somewhat bizarre decision,” had awarded to the newly created Ukrainian SSR.

In fact, the bulk of the northern Black Sea littoral came under Moscow’s rule for the first time in history only in 1783, so these lands hardly constitute “ancestral Russian territories.” Moreover, censuses in 1897 and 1926 factually establish that ethnic Ukrainians comprised the preponderant element of the population in these districts when Lenin made his supposedly bizarre decision to include them in Ukraine. Putin’s astonishing assertion reflects the mindset I first heard more than 20 years ago from a Russian diplomat, to the effect that three oblasts of western Ukraine, collectively known as Halychyna or Galicia, constitute the only “genuinely” Ukrainian lands. Moreover, it is no coincidence that the same southern regions of Ukraine mentioned by Putin were the target of the abortive Russian attempt in 2014 to create an entity dubbed “Novorossiya” that would separate from Ukraine and join Russia.

Unfortunately, Putin’s fresh ruminations on the theme of “ancestral Russian territories” north of the Black Sea do not suggest a man prepared to compromise what he regards as Russia’s sacred birthright, but a man ideologically inclined to resurrect the bogus Novorossiya project at the first available opportunity. And when it comes to the creation of a Russian World—the linchpin of Putin’s strategy to establish Russia as an independent power center in a multipolar world—Ukraine remains the grand prize, the indispensable element for success.

As a result, domestically, Zelensky faces the peril of any politician in any country who over-promises and under-delivers. Indications of his willingness to negotiate on Putin’s terms (for example, acceptance of the Steinmeier Formula) have already excited opposition from people who do not believe Moscow is prepared to accept Ukrainian sovereignty. However, a toughening of Zelensky’s approach—essentially, a full or partial adoption of the sovereignty-by-resistance policy of his unpopular predecessor—risks draining his support among a war-weary electorate led to believe that a near-term settlement is eminently possible. Squaring this circle will not be easy, with the attendant risk of domestic destabilization that Moscow could exploit.

The potential for near-term, self-inflicted discord in Ukraine is not the only factor working in Russia’s favor. Angela Merkel, Putin’s German nemesis, is withdrawing from the geopolitical stage—but not before rendering an invaluable assist to Putin’s longtime goal of a pipeline network bypassing Ukraine. Berlin might believe it has extracted a concession in terms of continuing transit of Russian gas through Ukraine, but, as I have suggested, it would not be difficult to render this concession inoperative. Once Nord Stream 2 becomes operational, does anyone imagine that Germany would shut it down if Russia reneged on gas transit through Ukraine?

Moreover, Emmanuel Macron is undergoing a startling transformation from being the French presidential candidate toughest on Russia to being Europe’s preeminent Putinversteher—or Putin-understander, as the Germans say—and NATO-pessimist. Macron’s grand vision of binding Russia to Europe (or would it be Europe to Russia?) would probably consign Ukrainian interests to little more than an afterthought. Regarding European military capabilities, it is too bad that commentary on Macron’s Economist interview has focused almost exclusively on his characterization of NATO as “brain-dead,” obscuring his candid and salutary admission of Europe’s own culpability for its military feebleness. Frankly, if you want to equate NATO dysfunctionality with a terminal medical condition, the appropriate analogy is not brain death but muscular dystrophy. Macron’s notion of a more robust, independent European military might or might not ameliorate the problem, but it is an improvement over the regnant combination of complacency and wishful thinking that Trump’s departure from the White House will somehow restore Transatlantic comity by papering over Europe’s military debility.

As for the United States, the role of Ukraine in the Trump impeachment drama has had surprisingly little blowback for Kyiv. As for the wider American commitment to European security, a Biden victory in 2020 would ease Transatlantic tensions but would probably provide only a temporary respite from domestic pressure to scale back U.S. commitments overseas. Moreover, the election of a democratic socialist, either in 2020 or thereafter, would herald a massive budgetary reorientation away from defense/security toward social programs and the Green New Deal. The result would be a United States that mirrors Europe—enthusiastically committed to a principled multilateralism but lacking the military means to uphold European security in practice. Transatlantic comity would ostensibly be restored, but at what price?

If Russians imagine that “historic Ukraine” is limited to the Halychyna region, only a tenth of present-day Ukraine; if they sincerely believe, based on a highly selective and idiosyncratic understanding of history, that most of Ukraine’s territory has been stolen from Russia; and if they have ample reason to anticipate a weaker, more chaotic Ukraine and a flagging of Western interest and resolve in the medium-term, then why might Putin be prepared to yield on positions of deepest principle regarding Russia’s perceived patrimony, accept the territorial integrity of a sovereign Ukraine, or return the Donbas to Ukraine in any form other than a Trojan Horse? Yet such an improbable scenario is the premise on which any hope for a near-term negotiated settlement of the Donbas conflict must be predicated.

Nevertheless, if the deck is stacked against Kyiv, it is not so thoroughly stacked that its failure is a foregone conclusion. For Ukraine, victory is measured simply in terms of survival. A Russian victory, however, requires a far more complex and nuanced outcome. The goal is not to reduce Ukraine to a smoldering ruin, but to secure the country more or less intact for incorporation into the Russian World. The Kremlin’s approach will inevitably include a military component, but Moscow must somehow subvert Ukraine without utterly destroying it. The desired scenario is Crimea in 2014, not the Donbas. Therefore, Russian recourse to armed force must be excruciatingly limited and laser-focused. Success relies primarily on convincing a critical mass of Ukrainians that their language and national identity are aberrations, and that—to paraphrase the name of a 1990s political party—“their home is Russia.” Yet it seems unlikely that any combination of pressure, blandishments, and Ukrainian war-weariness, even over a lengthy period of time, could produce such an outcome. While Russia’s massive advantages can make life very difficult for its opponent, the prospect of achieving Moscow’s maximal aims appears poor. The asymmetry of the conflict, in a curious way, cuts in both directions.

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The Worst Is Yet to Come

In July 1970, Future Shock by Alvin and Heidi Toffler was published before the personal computer was even a twinkle in Steve Jobs’ eye. The book was astonishingly prescient in asserting that “future shock,” defined as the “disease of change,” would profoundly afflict the world. Today, the disease’s symptoms have not only spread, but have metastasized into a pandemic that is leveling everything from values to societies, organizations, and political structures. Given that there is little sign of the pace of change slowing down, the Tofflers’ book still provides a frightening diagnosis as to what could happen in the next 50 years.

In broad-brush terms, humanity falls into two categories. There are those who still live medieval existences that are nasty, brutish, and short. And there are those who live in a world of plenty and economic progress.  The Tofflers warned that this second group of people will be bombarded by new products, people, policies, professions, organizations, movements, and values delivered at warp speed. This bombardment would require them to adopt new and multiple roles in order to navigate through unprecedented choices about everything from lifestyles to allegiances to values. “Future shock,” the authors posited, marked the “death of permanence,” a fact that is both exhilarating and threatening.

Fifty years later, technologies have redrawn the world’s economies and societies. Facebook, Tinder, and the mobile phone have redefined relationships while the internet has reconfigured work, fame, entertainment, business, organizations, opportunities, and politics. Technological advances have enabled some poor countries to overtake rich countries economically. But rich or poor, millions of citizens in all countries have succumbed to some form of future shock. Unable to cope, they descend into maladaptive behavior, depression, denialism, nihilism, revisionism, dogmatism, or extremism.

To me, as a journalist and activist, the biggest unrecognized casualty today is the assault of change on civil society itself. The world, nation-states, regions, tribes, and families are being atomized into warring factions, ideologies, new religions, movements, cults, cabals, allegiances, websites, or social media factions. In this respect, the disease of change has also destroyed consensus and social cohesion. The result is that division and extreme polarization are plaguing societies and democracies.

The process the Tofflers identified clearly contributed to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the future economic growth in the Asia-Pacific region. And while many of these outcomes have clearly benefited humanity, it’s impossible to ignore the increase in general social dissension that has accompanied these changes. With the rise of smartphone technology and the proliferation of internet tracking, the practice of micro-advertising and targeted news feeds have splintered civil societies into millions of “filter bubbles” where people are fed information based on their unique set of biases. Unchecked, the social and geopolitical fragmentation that has in part driven the political transformations since the end of the Cold War will likely continue to destabilize the European Union, the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, NATO—and even the United States itself.

Economically, the effects have likewise been profound. Although one ought not minimize the positive effects that the interconnectedness of the internet has had on people’s everyday lives in terms of sheer convenience, the attendant economic churn has been breathtaking. Unemployment and under-employment grows as those thrown out of work are unable to adapt or keep pace. The opioid crisis is one symptom of this churn. The creation of a ready and growing audience for conspiracy theories peddled by polarizing ideological entrepreneurs is another.

In the next 50 years, advances in computing, genetics, and robotics will likely revolutionize human life further. The revolutionary effect smartphones have had on how we interact with our environment is but a glimpse into what brain interfaces will do to our lived experience. Genetic engineering in the womb could create more “perfect” human beings, albeit only for those with the means to access the technology. And androids, AIs on two legs with personalities, will lead to the further mutation of the human experience, blurring the ethical lines of what constitutes life at all.

In 1945, two nuclear bombs destroyed cities in Japan. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who ran the Manhattan Project that created the atomic bomb, realized that the spread of such weapons of mass destruction would destroy the world. He and others spent years lobbying world leaders and formulated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, signed in 1968 by dozens of nuclear and non-nuclear powers. Since 1970, the treaty has provided a framework of oversight and, thus far, has helped save mankind from limited or all-out nuclear war.

Likewise, the proliferation of artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, synthetic biology, and other technologies needs some kind of basic oversight framework to help us grapple with their impact. The United Nations is working on getting its nation-state members to agree to a ban on autonomous weapons, or “killer robots”, and hundreds of scientists and technologists have signed on to moral, ethical, and security frameworks for artificial intelligence and biotechnologies. But the piecemeal effort is likely falling far short of what is required. Coordinated action at the highest state levels will be required.

Given the difficulties of coming to a workable binding interstate approach to climate change—a much more readily apparent threat—the prognosis is not good. But that does not mean that it should not be tried. Brakes and backstops must be devised to mitigate damage; institutions that can monitor and intervene must be created; remedies must be found.

Future Shock remains one of the most important books of the 20th century and remains an important roadmap to understanding what lies ahead as the “disease of change” gathers speed. Its warnings must not be ignored. Mankind must heed.

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Civil Rights and Wrongs

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

Christopher Caldwell

Simon & Schuster, 2020, 352 pp., $28.00

One of the problems of the book market post-2016 is that there are now only two kinds of books: books about Donald Trump, and books that pretend not to be about Donald Trump, but still are. Prestige fiction is about Trump. Poetry is about Trump. Children’s books are about Trump. If you are writing a book, try as you might, it will probably be about Trump.

A sub-genre of the Trump book phenomenon is the “how you got Trump” book, the careful (or not so careful) investigation of what drove the American electorate to make a fast-talking real estate developer from Queens the 45th President. The worst of these books makes the error of treating Trump as an aberration, a momentary lapse of judgement soon to be corrected by the triumph of one of the eight or nine hundred people seeking the Democratic nomination. The best, by contrast, have the wherewithal to imagine that Trump did not emerge out of the ether, but rather that his election is an expression of far deeper cultural and political forces.

It is perhaps odd to place The Age of Entitlement, the latest from erstwhile Weekly Standard writer and now Claremont Review of Books contributor Christopher Caldwell, in this latter category. This is not because the book merits derisive assignment to the bad “how you got Trump” sub-genre, but because Caldwell goes out of his way never to say the T-word at all. Trump’s presence is made apparent only by omission, his sweep into the White House reserved as the conclusion of a 50-year narrative. That said, make no mistake: The Age of Entitlement is the story of the polarization and discontent that has characterized the past half-decade.

As promised by its subtitle, The Age of Entitlement is a history of “America since the sixties.” More precisely, it is a history of the birth and subsequent rise to power of the social and political arrangement ushered in by the “long 1960s,” and in particular the ideas and legal structures which emerged out of the civil rights movement. The sum effect of these entities is, in Caldwell’s view, enough to label civil rights not merely a change to the preexisting order, but altogether a reconstitution. “The changes of the 1960s, with civil rights at their core, were not just a major new element in the Constitution,” he writes. “They were a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible.” 

This transformation was a product of the unique socioeconomic conditions begat by America’s status as global hegemon post-World War II. “A moment of deceptively permanent-looking prosperity”—rising GDP, stable jobs, strong unions, exploding families—gave politicians the social leeway “to reform the United States along lines more just and humane,” because Americans (particularly white Americans, particularly men) had the socioeconomic wherewithal not to feel threatened by social upheaval.

The reconstitution began with the Civil Rights Act of 1965, which extended the principles of non-discrimination from the public into the private sphere, with the goal of restoring the dignity denied by “separate but equal” arrangements at the school, the hotel, and the lunch counter. That transformation, Caldwell argues, necessarily entailed an upsetting of the pre-civil rights order because “rights cannot simply be ‘added’ to a social contract without changing it.” Actively preventing non-discrimination required an imposition on preexisting liberties, he argues, in particular freedom of association and freedom of property. After all, the freedom to associate implies the freedom not to associate, and the freedom to do as one pleases with one’s property implies the freedom not to let others use one’s property, including, in both cases, on the basis of racist preferences.

Caldwell spends a lot of time talking about these freedoms, but it is hard to see limits on them as a decisive break with the past. “Freedom of association” and “freedom of property” have never in American history been absolute. State and even Federal laws have at various times constrained them in the name of the public interest, and civil rights are, at least as originally constructed, almost definitionally in the public interest.

Where Caldwell is on stronger footing is in emphasizing the way that the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act, and much of the judge-made law that came after them, necessarily constrained local and state-level democracy. Federal civil rights enforcement operated under the assumption that if the southern states were allowed to govern themselves, racial injustice would continue indefinitely. They thus necessarily presumed the southern states incompetent to carry out the process of self-government, a state of affairs which had, with the exception of Reconstruction, never reigned in the country. (Caldwell’s invocation of C. Vann Woodward’s description of civil rights as a “second Reconstruction” is therefore apt.) America’s democratic self-determination, historically sacrosanct, came under presumed suspicion—a dynamic that would extend from the southern states to, eventually, much of the nation.

If we take Caldwell at his word that the Civil Rights Act inaugurated a new constitutional order, then the real tension between it and the “old” arrangement is less about laissez faire versus intrusion—the right to deny service versus the dignity of having service provided—and more about self-rule versus the guarantee of dignity, or what we might think about as means-oriented versus ends-oriented “justice.” The old Constitution upholds a political arrangement (a federation of sovereign states) agnostic to the outcomes of that governance. The “new” Constitution is concerned with guaranteeing certain just outcomes—equity along racial, gendered, and other lines—and is largely agnostic to the methods by which those outcomes are attained. In point of fact, Federal power is an obvious hammer to ensure dignity, assuming one sets aside state and local self-determination.

Top-down, ends-oriented government became the dominant paradigm within the narrow constraints of racial equity. But it brought with it a suite of political tools and metaphors that could be generalized beyond the particular struggles of black Americans. This, Caldwell argues, is more or less what begat the character of civil rights more broadly, leading to its extension from the narrow problem of securing rights for black Americans to the interests of women, immigrants, and eventually the whole “intersectional” coalition. 

The changes pushed for in the interest of what would eventually be labeled “diversity” were, Caldwell argues throughout the book, rarely popular. For a time, that unpopularity was suppressed by continuing socioeconomic stability, financed by Reagan-era ballooning Federal debt. But that era also ushered in an elite whose power was premised as much on their display of diversity shibboleths as on government-backed prosperity. 

When the Reagan “truce” finally ended in the 1990s and early 2000s, these same people continued to rake in the profits of globalization while looking down their noses at the—mostly white, often male—Americans who were culturally and economically left behind. The dogma of civil rights, Caldwell contends, became all-encompassing, and increasingly top-down in its enforcement. The work of modern bureaucrats and “nudge” theorists systematized the idea that impolite views render individuals incompetent to govern themselves: “the voice of the people is sovereign, once it has been cleared of the suspicion of bias.“

As a work of history, the foregoing is at the very least an incomplete picture of the past half-century. That is sort of necessary—fitting 60 years into 300 pages requires sacrificing some resolution. Doubtless, readers who have already decided to dislike the book will find inconsistencies and inaccuracies and descend upon them like vultures. 

Such a reading would be as intellectually filling as the analogous carrion. A more useful approach is to understand The Age of Entitlement as the “how you got Trump” book Caldwell tacitly acknowledges it is. Within the terms of his means-ends dialectic, the 2016 election is an expression of bare democratic power, of a group of people largely excluded from or derided by the “new” constitutional order expressing their still-existing power under the “old” Constitution. There is little reason to believe this basic tension has gone away in the years since.

Faced with this tension, there are three responses. The first is the one likely to be taken by the bevy of critics who will, inevitably, dismiss Caldwell as a racist crank out of step with the times. To do so, they will more or less rehearse the arguments for the civil rights system against which Caldwell sets himself: America has a long history of bigotry, civil rights were and continue to be a necessary corrective to that history, and anyone who disagrees with that does not deserve to have his voice heard anyway. In other words, they will insist that the democracy half of the tension is not a problem, because democracy is only good insofar as it produces equity. This is the same sentiment that inspires think pieces arguing that voting for Trump is racist enough to violate the Constitution. The people can rule, but only once they are cleared of the suspicion of bias.

If The Age of Entitlement is anything, it is an argument that this attitude is precisely how you get Trump. Large majorities of Americans do not like political correctness, or being told that their voices only matter insofar as they assent to its mores. If Trump is the definitive breaker of polite rules, then his election is a signal that Americans do not like being told to be polite. 

The second response to The Age of Entitlement is to insist that the civil rights revolution has largely been a charade, a farce designed to arrogate power to a select few in the name of “justice.” One suspects (although he does not explicitly say it) that this is the view Caldwell takes when he insists that Americans must choose between the old and new orders.

The problem with this view, to put it bluntly, is the history of America before the 1960s. The limiting of democratic self-determination was a direct response to centuries of racialized oppression, violence, and terror. It is similarly hard to conclude that other groups who have benefited from the civil rights revolution—women, LGBT people, immigrants—did not face particular hardships under the pre-1960s regime. When one remembers the substantive injustice that civil rights structures arose to counteract, it is hard to simply dismiss them as worthless.

This brings us to the third response to The Age of Entitlement, which is to take away from it the reality of the tension that Caldwell highlights, understanding the book as a diagnosis rather than a prescription. Notwithstanding past reconstitutions, America does seem to have made a definitive choice to address past substantive injustices, even at the expense of procedural freedoms. We suppressed that contradiction through free spending and debt, but that approach seems, at least for now, at the wayside. 

The basic question The Age of Entitlement should leave the reader with, then, is: can we have both equity and self-rule, particularly in a post-industrial world? Can we have both liberalism and democracy? To the extent that our answer is “no,” Caldwell makes a compelling case that we will never be able to extract ourselves from our present political quagmire, that our polarization and tensions will only get worse. At the same time, to the extent our answer is “yes,” Caldwell’s dialectic offers valuable insight into resolving that political challenge.

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Re-Encountering Allan Bloom

Looking for another book not long ago, I stumbled upon Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. In 1987, it was a national sensation, a trigger-point for debate over the legacy of the sixties and its “counter-culture.”

Subtitled “How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students,” Bloom’s salvo attacked from the right. It was less a polemic than a closely reasoned argument, fortified with lofty philosophic learning and grounded classroom experience. A New York Times reviewer wrote that “it commands one’s attention and concentrates one’s mind more effectively than any other book I can think of in the past five years.” The Chicago Tribune said “it may be the most important work of its kind by an American since World War II.” Saul Bellow, in a gripping introduction, summarized: “It makes an important statement and deserves careful study. What it provides, whether or not one agrees with its conclusions, is an indispensable guide for discussion . . . a completely articulated, historically accurate summary, a trustworthy resume of the development of the higher mental life in the democratic U.S.A.”

My copy of The Closing of the American Mind is a paperback with scant evidence of close scrutiny. Some three dozen pages are heavily marked with dismissive marginalia. Bloom took aim at my own generation (I was born in 1948), and its political complexion was anathema.

But times have changed and so have I. Re-opening The Closing of the American Mind, I discovered that Allan Bloom was prophetic. Even Bellow’s introduction reads as if it were written yesterday: “The heat of dispute between Left and Right has grown so fierce in the last decade that the habits of civilized discourse have suffered a scorching. Antagonists seem no longer to listen to one another.”

Taking aim at “cultural relativism,” Bloom attacked what we now call identity politics and a linked discourse stigmatizing “cultural appropriation”—a discourse that, to many my age, seems more impoverishing than nourishing for the “souls of today’s students.” For Bloom, a mounting failure to appreciate Western traditions of culture and thought was eviscerating the academy. He deplored a tendency to ecumenically equalize all cultural endeavors, old and new, East and West. In effect, he foresaw today’s all-purpose denunciations of the “misappropriation” of victimized cultures. As for “identity politics,” the term isn’t there, but the concept is, extrapolated from an exaggerated regard for the “other” and otherness—for Bloom, a force fracturing democratic community.

Bloom’s ultimate claim was that a generation out of touch with great music, great literature, and great traditions of philosophic thought—all unabashedly Western—is a generation diminished personally and emotionally. He linked this estrangement to diminished character and moral force, to a shallower sense of self and shallower personal relationships. Whatever one makes of his notoriously presumptuous disparagement of rock music (“it artificially induces the exaltation naturally attached to the completion of the greatest endeavors”) and of students addicted to drugs (“their energy has been sapped and they do not expect their life’s activity to produce anything but a living”), the “closed minds” and “impoverished souls” Bloom reported may in fact have become a double American malaise.

Re-reading Bloom, I am thunderstruck, because my inclination is to blame it all on social media and attendant technologies favoring vicarious experience. But Bloom’s 1987 narrative establishes an earlier start. He distinguishes my sixties’ generation from his eighties’ students, in whom tendencies that we initiated yielded a dead end. It may in effect be read as a tale of unwanted, unanticipated consequences.

What happened first? Thinking back to my own collegiate education, I discover one answer of sorts. Whether my answer has national relevance I cannot say. But I know that Swarthmore College, as I encountered it in 1966, was—notwithstanding its reputation as the nation’s pre-eminent liberal arts institution—languishing in a state of advanced obsolescence. And at Swarthmore, at least, that obsolescence triggered the seismic upheaval that Bloom decried.

I graduated in 1970 Phi Beta Kappa with Highest Honors. I also graduated vowing that I would never again submit to learning in a classroom environment. My Swarthmore class of 1970 set some kind of record for the lowest percentage of graduates moving on to graduate school. We felt we had been schooled quite enough.

In four years, I did not have a single teacher who was not a white male. Though I majored in American History, there was no mention of Frederick Douglass or W. E. B. DuBois or Crazy Horse. Though my interests were broad, no interdisciplinary majors were permitted. Though I minored in Music, played the piano, and sang in the chorus, no academic credit was allowed for creative pursuits. In fact, the campus did not have a concert hall or theater of consequence.

At Swarthmore, in 1966, neither the Political Science nor the Philosophy Department offered any courses in Hegel or Marx, and the Frankfurt School was unheard of. The Department of Sociology and Anthropology was brand new, staffed by fresh hires certain not to rock the boat. Physical Education was mandatory for freshmen and sophomores.

So far as I could ascertain, the college’s major asset was its student body, culled by an Admissions Director who favored assertive Jewish types from New York City and its environs. The big personalities on campus were not the professors. When in 1970 Swarthmore students went on strike—an act of revulsion toward Nixon and Vietnam—the faculty response exacerbated the fracture. At a mass meeting in Clothier Hall, our sociologist-in-chief urged everyone to return to class and resume learning. He did not notice that we were in the midst of an institutional revolution crammed with pedagogical content. The senior member of the Economics Department told students they were “transient parasites” peripheral to the institution’s ongoing identity. And yet for many of us our profoundest, most charismatic teachers were our peers. I was myself delegated to inquire whether the Political Science Department would consider adding a course in Marx. I was informed by a sneering Associate Professor that a mini-course for one-quarter credit might be considered—and expanded if there was anything left over to teach.

All of this occurred a year after the Swarthmore African-American Students Society (SASS) occupied the admissions office and demanded that the college enroll more black students (there were 47 out of a student body numbering 1,150), black teachers (there was one), and black administrators (there weren’t any). Days later Swarthmore’s President, Courtney Smith, died of a heart attack.

After I graduated, I felt impelled to investigate what had happened over the course of two years of institutional chaos. I wrote a 9,000-word account based on personal experience and follow-up interviews: “When Laos Was Invaded, Nobody Budged.” My topic was the chill that had descended upon the campus, such that the Nixon/Kissinger incursion into Laos, in 1971, was a tragedy unnoticed a mere year after Vietnam had torn the place apart. My findings were published in Change Magazine (Summer 1971)—a journal, funded by the Ford Foundation, mounting “a national voice for campus reform.”

After re-encountering The Closing of the American Mind, I re-read my own counter-account of “how higher education has failed democracy.” I was unsurprised to discover that it utterly lacked Bloom’s gravitas and learning. But it proved exceptionally informative nevertheless, both for my detailed reportage and a self-report on my state of mind post-Swarthmore.

I was reminded that the college had in fact shown an incipient awareness of its obsolescence. In 1966, President Smith convened a Commission on Educational Policy (C.E.P.) with a mandate to recommend specific proposals for change. It swiftly proved too little too late. I remember my own brief involvement, being questioned by a distinguished literary historian, a pillar of the humanities faculty (at a time when the humanities defined the public face of Swarthmore and kindred top-tier colleges), about the “intellectual content” of playing a musical instrument. My answer was a fumbling attempt to articulate precisely that. In retrospect, I should have pointed out that this was the wrong question, that—as Bloom would write—the arts contribute invaluably to character and personality, to emotional and psychological well-being.

But Swarthmore’s criterion was inflexibly cerebral. The C.E.P. report wound up devoting 16 pages to “The Creative Arts.” It was determined that “artistic activity is intelligent activity” and that “creative work in the arts should be given a place in the college curriculum.” As I reported in Change:

But the stress was at least as much on “improving and expanding” the arts program for “amateurs” as for granting course credit for those students who “will have the desire and the talent to pursue their artistic work more deeply . . . than will be possible in spare time alone.” And it was proposed that work in the creative arts be limited to a maximum of a mere four credits (out of a four-year total of 32). This meant that no autonomous creative arts departments in any field would be set up, which meant that there would be no major in any field of creative art. Furthermore, only some of the creative arts were deemed sufficiently intellectual as to warrant credit; specifically, writing, theater, “visual arts” and music were okayed for credit, and dance, pottery, and film weren’t.

The C.E.P. proposals have since been adopted. Swarthmore’s fledgling community of creative artists has greeted these innovations with expressions of ingratitude ranging from fatalistic shrugs to bitterly sarcastic sermons. A group of students who formed a committee to work towards more credit for the arts has given up. . .

Superseding the C.E.P. was a radical faculty/student initiative. Two new hires in philosophy—one a Marxist, the other a Socratic Hegelian—proved intent on transforming the learning environment. They fundamentally rejected the Anglo-American empiricist tradition, including behaviorism in the social sciences. Their orientation, wholly new to the curriculum, was Germanic and holistic. Their acolytes read Hegel, not Marx. A new philosophy course, “Methods of Inquiry,” became a magnet for a small group of dissident teachers. Its overt purpose was to change Swarthmore College, if not the world.

The backlash—a virtual Thermidor—was piloted by the Political Science department. The faculty dissidents disappeared. Both the Director of Admissions and the Provost were Swarthmore political scientists; the latter, Charles Gilbert, had headed the CEP. Re-reading my article for Change, I am reminded that he regarded the college’s rigid departmental structure as a safeguard against “letting intellectual standards slide.” Rejecting American Studies as a proposed major, he said “there’s not really any kind of intellectual discipline there.” Swarthmore engaged a Columbia University Professor of Higher Education, Max Wise, to examine “college governance.” The Wise Report recommended open faculty meetings and governance responsibilities for students. It was tabled.

Robert Cross, who succeeded Courtney Smith as President in 1969, was a historian with a long view that proved paralyzing. In 1971 he was replaced with the aptly named Theodore Friend. I was one of the many recent Swarthmore graduates who mobbed the living room of Clark Kerr (Swarthmore ’32) when President Friend visited Berkeley to introduce himself to West Coast alumni. I was surprised to discover, from his smiling remarks, that the college had suffered a kind of head injury inflicted by hooligans—from which it would now speedily recover as from a bad memory. It seemed to have occurred to President Friend that in Berkeley, of all places, the hooligans would be in the room.

That was half a century ago. Swarthmore today has an African-American president and an African-American provost, both of whom are women. The campus has long enjoyed superior performing arts facilities. A 1986 Informal History of the college, by Richard Walton, painstakingly revisits the 1969 crisis, with the SASS students agents of necessary change. Walton writes: “It is generally agreed that Swarthmore had not conducted a vigorous campaign to obtain more black applicants, had not done enough to raise scholarship funds for them, and had not been sufficiently willing to accept ‘risk’ students.”

Swarthmore’s current Program of Study, on its website, invites students to “Design Your Own Major.” Dance, Theater, and Film & Media Studies are all new since the crisis years. Allan Bloom, I am sure, would not have approved of “Gender and Sexuality Studies” or “Peace and Conflict Studies,” social justice majors that in his view would “confuse learning with doing.” Re-encountering my 1971 self in Change Magazine, I find that I, too, was all about tearing down the Ivory Tower, impatient with disinterested inquiry, upset by Vietnam and the college’s failure to “take a stand.” In retrospect, our contempt for Nixon was justified (it wasn’t about the draft). Though some senior faculty members denounced us as naïve and intolerant (I remember being compared to the adherents of Adolf Hitler), the college’s intellectual stasis was itself naïve.

The resulting dynamics of campus change, nation-wide, were dialectical—Hegelian. And today’s culture of political rectitude is a fated over-reaction: a fulfillment of Allan Bloom’s prophecies. The Closing of the American Mind may have been aloof to the sources of campus discontent whose outcomes he decried. But I greatly fear that he got the outcomes right.

While I am long out of touch with the affairs of my alma mater, I have for four decades devoted my professional life to studying and writing about the history of classical music in the United States. As a concert producer, I frequently have occasion to partner with colleges, universities, and conservatories. I also teach as a visiting professor. I have discovered that it has become impossible to pursue historical inquiry without encountering new and confounding obstacles.

American classical music is today a scholarly minefield. The question “What is America?” is central. So is the topic of race. The American music that most matters, nationally and internationally, is black. But classical music in the United States has mainly rejected this influence, which is one reason it has remained impossibly Eurocentric. As the visiting Czech composer Antonin Dvorak emphasized in 1893, two obvious sources for an “American” concert idiom are the sorrow songs of the slave, and the songs and rituals of Native America. Issues of appropriation are front and center. It is a perfect storm.

Dvorak directed New York City’s National Conservatory of Music from 1892 to 1895, a period of peak promise and high achievement for American classical music. It speaks volumes that he chose as his personal assistant a young African-American baritone who had eloquently acquired the sorrow songs from his grandfather, a former slave. This was Harry Burleigh, who after Dvorak died turned spirituals into concert songs with electrifying success. (If you’ve ever heard Marian Anderson or Paul Robeson sing “Deep River,” that’s Burleigh.) During the Harlem Renaissance, Burleigh’s arrangements were reconsidered by Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, both of whom detected a “flight from blackness” to the white concert stage. Today, Burleigh’s “appropriation” of the black vernacular is newly controversial. That he was inspired by a white composer of genius becomes an uncomfortable fact. An alternative reading, based not on fact but on theory, is that racist Americans impelled him to “whiten” black roots. Burleigh emerges a victim, his agency diminished.

Compounding this confusion is another prophet: W E. B. Du Bois, who like Dvorak foresaw a genre of black American classical music to come. The pertinent lineage from Dvorak to Burleigh includes the ragtime king Scott Joplin (who considered himself a concert composer) and the once famous black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, urged by Du Bois, Burleigh, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar to take up Dvorak’s prophecy. After Coleridge-Taylor came notable black symphonists of the 1930s and 1940s: William Grant Still, William Dawson, and Florence Price, all of them today being belatedly and deservedly rediscovered. But the same lineage leads to George Gershwin and Porgy and Bess: a further source of discomfort. I have even been advised, at an American university, to omit Gershwin’s name from a two-day Coleridge-Taylor celebration. But Coleridge-Taylor’s failure to fulfill Dvorak’s prophecy—he was too decorous, too Victorian—cannot be contextualized without exploring the ways and reasons that Gershwin did it better. As for Gershwin’s opera: Even though Porgy is a hero, a moral paragon, it today seems virtually impossible to deflect accusations of derogatory “stereotyping.” The mere fact that he is a physical cripple, ambulating on a goat-cart, frightens producers and directors into minimizing Porgy’s physical debility. But a Porgy who can stand is paradoxically diminished: the trajectory of his triumphant odyssey—of a “cripple made whole”—is truncated.

Gershwin discomfort is mild compared to the consternation Arthur Farwell (1872-1952) invites. He, too, embraced Dvorak’s prophecy. As the leading composer in an “Indianist” movement lasting into the 1930s, Farwell believed it was a democratic obligation of Americans of European descent to try to understand the indigenous Americans they displaced and oppressed—to preserve something of their civilization; to find a path toward reconciliation. His Indianist compositions attempt to mediate between Native American ritual and the Western concert tradition. Like Bela Bartok in Transylvania, like Igor Stravinsky in rural Russia, he endeavored to fashion a concert idiom that would paradoxically project the integrity of unvarnished vernacular dance and song. He aspired to capture specific musical characteristics, but also something ineffable and elemental, “religious and legendary.” He called it—a phrase anachronistic today—“race spirit.”

As a young man, Farwell visited with Indians on Lake Superior. He hunted with Indian guides. He had out of body experiences. Later, in the Southwest, he collaborated with the charismatic Charles Lummis, a pioneer ethnographer. For Lummis, Farwell transcribed hundreds of Indian and Hispanic melodies, using either a phonograph or local singers. If he was subject to criticism during his lifetime, it was for being naïve and irrelevant, not disrespectful or false. The music historian Beth Levy—a rare contemporary student of the Indianists movement in music—pithily summarizes that Farwell embodies a state of tension intermingling “a scientific emphasis on anthropological fact” with “a subjective identification bordering on rapture.” Considered purely as music, his best Indianist compositions are memorably original—and so, to my ears, is their ecstasy.

These days, one of the challenges of presenting Farwell in concert is enlisting Native American participants. For a recent festival in Washington, DC—“Native American Inspirations,” surveying 125 years of music—I unsuccessfully attempted to engage Native American scholars and musicians from as far away as Texas, New Mexico, and California. My greatest disappointment was the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, which declined to partner. A staff member explained that Farwell lacked “authenticity.” But Farwell’s most ambitious Indianist composition—the Hako String Quartet (1922), a centerpiece of our festival—claims no authenticity. Though its inspiration is a Great Plains ritual celebrating a symbolic union of Father and Son, though it incorporates passages evoking a processional, or an owl, or a lighting storm, it does not chart a programmatic narrative. Rather, it is a 20-minute sonata-form that documents the composer’s enthralled subjective response to a gripping Native American ceremony.

A hostile newspaper review of “Native American Inspirations” ignited a torrent of tweets condemning Farwell for cultural appropriation. This crusade, mounted by cultural arbiters who have never heard a note of Farwell’s music, was moral, not aesthetic. It projected a chilling war cry. If Farwell is today off limits, it is partly because of fear—of castigation by a neighbor. I know because I have seen it.

Arthur Farwell is an essential component of the American musical odyssey. So is Harry Burleigh. So are the blackface minstrel shows Burleigh abhorred—they were a seedbed for ragtime and what came after. Even alongside the fullest possible acknowledgement of odious minstrel caricatures, a more nuanced reading of this most popular American entertainment genre is generally unwelcome. It is, for instance, not widely known that antebellum minstrelsy was an instrument of political dissent from below. Blackface minstrelsy was not invariably racist.

Charles Ives’s Second Symphony is one of the supreme American achievements in symphonic music. Its Civil War finale quotes Stephen Foster’s “Old Black Joe” by way of expressing sympathy for the slave. When there are students in the classroom who cannot get past that, the outcome is Bloomsian: closed minds.

Bloom wrote in The Closing of the American Mind:

Classical music is now a special taste, like Greek language or pre-Columbia archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand. Thirty years ago . . .  university students usually had some early emotive association with Beethoven, Chopin and Brahms, which was a permanent part of their makeup and to which they were likely to respond throughout their lives. . . . [But] music was not all that important for the generation of students preceding the current one.

Well, no and yes. At Swarthmore, in 1970, classical music was not yet a “special taste.” But my guess is that it must be by now. My two children acquired an “emotional association with Beethoven, Chopin, and Brahms” through early exposure and parental enthusiasm, but their peers show no such affinity.

Maggie, now 23, was home-schooled after grade eight because she trained to become a ballerina. Then she changed course and decided to go to college. Touring prospective campuses with her was an informative experience. Whatever else it did or did not impart, ballet taught discipline and concentration. She had not set foot in an academic classroom for some five years.

At a college with an eminent arts program, Maggie met with the head of Dance Department—and emerged ready to leave. She had been assured that “anyone can dance.” The next day we visited an Ivy League university and were greeted by a phalanx of tour guides who competed with one another, comparing the range and number of their extracurricular activities. Our guide was a member of six clubs. She had recently left the Ballet Cub, but was thinking of rejoining. At Swarthmore in 1970, there were no clubs.

Maggie spent a semester in Budapest with a cheerful cohort of 40 American college students, who frequently travelled on weekends. When Maggie announced that they would be flying to Munich for Oktoberfest, I suggested that she attend Verdi’s Otello at Munich’s Bavarian State Opera—Kirill Petrenko was conducting with Jonas Kaufman in the title role. None of her friends would want to do that, she protested. And besides, the remaining tickets were too expensive: 210 euros. Hours later, she texted from the opera house that she had been moved to tears.

When Maggie had a ten-day break in October, she agreed to meet me in Greece. I brought along a favorite book: H. D. F. Kitto’s The Greeks (1951), once a ubiquitous guide but unread today because Kitto was no more a relativist than Allan Bloom. But he was a master of passionate, precise approbation. We spent the last day at Delphi, awed by the magnitude of the Greek achievement and setting aside for another day how the Greeks regarded women and slaves.

On the way back to Athens, I asked Maggie what her friends might have made of Otello had they joined her. They wouldn’t have liked it at all, she said. But what could be easier to grasp? A tale of love and jealousy. The warmth and immediacy of the human voice. You just don’t get it, she said. The opera barrier was insuperable.

I invited Maggie to ponder how such experiences as Otello might impact her character, her emotional vocabulary, her prospects for intense human intimacy. Five decades after Swarthmore College fractured, retreated, and regrouped, I had turned into Allan Bloom.

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Bipolarity Is Back

We are 30 years out since the end of the Cold War, almost 20 years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the United States, 12 years since the Russian invasion of Georgia, and six years since Russia’s seizure of Crimea. During this time period, we have seen significant changes in the overall power distribution in Europe, Eurasia, the Indo-Pacific, and globally—changes that have been captured in the 2017 U.S. National Security Strategy and 2018 National Defense Strategy. The United States and its NATO allies are now gearing up for an era of “great power competition,” with Russia and China, identified as the principal powers seeking, respectively, to revise and replace the existing global power distribution dominated by the United States.

A new bipolarity is fast emerging from the political wreckage of the post-Cold War decades, one that will likely prove more enduring and intractable than its Cold War predecessor. We are tracking for a world of two all-encompassing systems where ideological and cultural polarization between the West and the East will drive the confrontation even more than the rapidly shifting economic and military balances. This nascent systemic bipolarity could end up being more enduring than its Cold War predecessor, for its ideological underpinning will be embedded in a foundational civilizational difference. The immediate drivers are at their core ideological, two mutually exclusive visions of how to organize society: on the one hand, an increasingly disaggregated liberal democracy and, on the other, an increasingly consolidated Chinese brand of commercial communism, both steeped in historically incompatible cultures.

As Washington (and to some extent Europe) awakens to the threat posed by China and Russia, the conversation about great power competition still largely evolves around economics and hard military security issues. What is missing from the global realignment is a clear articulation of ends—what we envision as the outcome in this context, and what vision our adversaries bring to the table. In contrast to the Cold War, most of the current analysis has treated the ideological and cultural underpinnings of the current round of state-on-state competition as muted, if not altogether absent. It is as if, especially in the case of China, we have been unwilling to articulate the fundamentals of what we are up against. This is even more striking given the growing consensus that China’s threat to the United States is urgent. As a colleague recently quipped, while Russia’s actions in the global system are comparable to that of a sudden storm, the challenge posed by China is more akin to climate change, insofar as Beijing has the potential to remake the very fundamentals of the international system.

How we see ourselves is not how our adversaries see us, and perhaps more importantly, how we see them is not how they see themselves. When it comes to Russia and China, we have been laboring under a core misconception: that economic modernization would lead to a greater demand for political participation of the kind we find familiar; and that this, in turn, would yield a kind of universal global culture that at its most basic would be at least recognizably “quasi-Western.” The key theory that underpins this worldview, simply put, is that institutions ultimately trump culture. The bold post-Cold War liberal claims—that history had been conquered by economics and institutions, and that culture, in turn, adapts—stand some comparison to the ideological certitude of Marxist revolutionaries of the early 20th century who believed they had unlocked the inner workings of human progress.

In the wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East, the goal of “state-building”—which involved laying the institutional foundations for representative democratic government—has been seen as a self-evidently desirable strategic end state. That these projects have foundered has been acknowledged among more introspective analysts, but even among them, the goal itself has rarely come into question. From a wider perspective, our misadventures in state-building have been costly but ultimately affordable blunders and distractions. But our certainty in the inevitable triumph of liberalism has cost us dearly in our dealings with China, and to a certain extent Russia as well. Since the end of the Cold War, the Chinese have benefitted from decades of unfettered access to American technology and research, while Russia has leveraged America’s preoccupation with counterterrorism to reclaim its sphere of privileged interest along its periphery. Until recently neither was questioned on strategic grounds, since the direction of history was properly understood.

But the ideology was more than just strategically harmful. It provided a set of palatable self-delusions that have hurt us much more profoundly. “Globalization” was a tidy way to explain away concessions on technology and knowledge transfer made to Beijing for the sake of the balance sheet. Short-horizon money-making was given a patina of virtue since it was thought to be fueling systemic modernization. Corporate greed was allowed to masquerade as a respectable ideology. We are now reaping the rewards of this self-delusion. The de-industrialization of America, with the attendant breakdown of our traditional societal bonds, is but the most glaring and politically salient example. Unlike the not insignificant costs surrounding failed state-building, however, these cannot simply be written off. We have been significantly weakened as a society.

The unity of the West is under stress and at risk of dissolving not just because of competing economic interests when it comes China and Russia—whether this concerns technology, manufacturing, or energy—but also because our elites are increasingly bereft of the ideological conviction that Western heritage and our future are in need of defending, especially now, when the beliefs of our adversaries are challenging them directly. The current round of great power competition lacks the fundamental “why?” beyond the most obvious economic and military power considerations. A generation ago, we would not have had trouble answering such a question.

Yes, some of the fracturing of the Western consensus is due to increasingly divergent views about what our adversaries represent: The United States looks at China and Russia through a security lens, while Europe sees predominantly an economic opportunity in China and an attenuated and manageable threat in Russia. Bringing these two views into alignment will be a short-term challenge for the Transatlantic community. But this task pales next to the imperative to restore a larger commitment to our shared cultural patrimony and the values that have emerged from it.

What gives China and Russia the staying power to compete against the West is their own confident historicity—something Europe has lacked for decades, and something that the United States began to shed at the beginning of the century, in part due to the failed interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in part due to the blow of the global financial crisis. Putin’s Russia sees its revisionist reassertion of great power claims in Eurasia to be quintessentially compensatory—a vengeful empire “robbed” by the West of its place in the sun. China’s ideological fervor is manifest in its nationalism as a fundamental corrective aimed at adjusting its historical trajectory.

The Chinese communists’ claimed prerogative to be the “people’s savior” is particularly instructive. It offers China a path to national redemption which the West’s diffident postmodern elites dare not entertain. The belief in the West—that cross border connectivity made possible by the digital age would homogenize and universalize not just economies, but also the most deeply held assumptions about what constitutes national pride, national culture, and national interest—is coming up empty. Meanwhile, the communists’ insular cultural claim to legitimacy soldiers on.

As the dust from the globalist era begins to settle, the resilience of Western societies is not a given. Confronted with angry Russian great power revisionism and confident Chinese economic, military, and cultural imperialism, will the United States and Europe find enough common ground and residual self-confidence to pull together yet again in defense of the values we claim to share? The fundamental shift in the coming years has to be one of setting aside the relativized institutionalism of the post-Cold War era and anchoring our policy choices in the clearly identified cultural value set that differentiates the West from its adversaries.

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The Demagogic Personality

What is the nature of the hold that demagogues and destructive charismatic personalities have on the masses? The question is of perennial interest and has been examined by historians, political scientists, social psychologists, and students of cults. No one answer can ever explain any complex social phenomenon, but in thinking about this question today it is perhaps fruitful to look at demagogic leaders from the past and take note of some of their distinguishing qualities.

One of the most extraordinary attempts in this realm was performed by Walter C. Langer during World War II. Langer was a Harvard professor and practitioner of psychoanalysis who in 1943 was commissioned by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime intelligence body and CIA predecessor organization, to create a psychological portrait of Adolf Hitler. Reporting directly to General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the OSS chief, Langer set up what was called a Psychoanalytic Field Unit and hired three psychoanalytically trained research assistants to staff it. They were assigned to pore through the New York Public Library for relevant German language sources, while Langer himself, as he was later to recount, “scoured the United States and Canada in search of persons who had had more than a passing contact with Hitler at some period of his life.” Some of those he came to interview were Germans interned in American detention camps because of earlier Nazi affiliation.

All told, Langer and his assistants accumulated more than 1,100 single-spaced typewritten pages of quotations and condensations from their sources. It was from this material that Langer constructed his psychoanalytic profile, which was classified for national security reasons until 1972. Completed as a crash program in eight months, it remains an important document, even if some of its findings have been superseded by subsequent historical research. I have presented excerpts below, with editorial interpolations where needed to maintain the textual flow. Quite a number of Hitler’s features bear notice today.

To begin with, there was his megalomania: “Hitler believes himself to be the greatest of all German architects. . . . In spite of the fact that he failed to pass the examination to the Art School he believes himself to be the only competent judge in this field. A few years ago he appointed a committee of three to act as final judges on all matters of art, but their verdicts did not please him. He dismissed them and assumed their duties himself. It makes little difference whether the field be economics, education, foreign affairs, propaganda, movies, music or women’s dress. In each and every field he believes himself to be an unquestioned authority.”

According to one of Langer’s sources, Hitler’s “faith in his own genius, in his instinct, or, as one might say, in his star, is boundless. Those who surround him are the first to admit that he now thinks of himself as infallible and invincible. That explains why he can no longer bear either criticism or contradiction. To contradict him is in his eyes a crime of ‘les majeste’; opposition to his plans, from whatever side it may come, is a definite sacrilege, to which the only reply is an immediate and striking display of his omnipotence.” Speaking to one of his associates, Hitler reportedly said: “Do you realize you are in the presence of the greatest German of all time.”

“Hitler’s outstanding defense mechanism,” according to Langer, “is one commonly called projection. It is a technique by which the ego of an individual defends itself against unpleasant impulses, tendencies, or characteristics by denying their existence in himself while he attributes them to others. Innumerable examples of this mechanism could be cited in Hitler’s case, but a few will suffice for purposes of illustration:

In the last six years I had to stand intolerable things from states like Poland.


It must be possible that the German nation can live its life . . . without being constantly molested.


For this peace proposal of mine I was abused and personally insulted. Mr. Chamberlain in fact spat upon me before the eyes of the world. . . .


It was in keeping with our own harmlessness that England took the liberty of some day meeting our peaceful activity with the brutality of the violent egoist.


The outstanding features of Polish character were cruelty and lack of moral restraint.

As an orator, as is well known, Hitler had some striking qualities. “He was a tireless speaker and before he came to power would sometimes give as many as three or four speeches on the same day, often in different cities.” What was it that made him in the eyes of many, including his opponents, “the greatest orator Germany has ever known”? It was not his voice, the qualities of which, Langer observed, “are far from pleasant—many, in fact, find it distinctly unpleasant. It has a rasping quality which often breaks into a shrill falsetto.” Nor was it Hitler’s diction, which especially in his early days “was particularly bad.” Nor, Langer continues, “was it the structure of his speeches,” which on the whole “were sinfully long, badly structured, and very repetitious. Some of them are positively painful to read but nevertheless, when he delivered them they had an extraordinary effect on his audiences.”

“Even in the early days,” observes the Langer study, “Hitler was a showman with a great sense for the dramatic. Not only did he schedule his speeches late in the evening when his audience would be tired and their resistance lowered through natural causes, but he would always send an assistant ahead of time to make a short speech and warm the audience up. . . . At the psychological moment, Hitler would appear in the door at the back of the hall,” and then would stride toward the podium with his entourage trailing behind him.

“His meetings were always crowded, and by the time he got through speaking he had completely numbed the critical faculties of his listeners to the point where they were willing to believe almost anything he said. He flattered them and cajoled them. He hurled accusations at them one moment and amused them the next by building up straw men which he promptly knocked down. . . . [S]omehow he always managed to say what the majority of the audience were already secretly thinking but could not verbalize. When the audience began to respond, it affected him in return. Before long due to this reciprocal relationship, he and his audience became intoxicated with the emotional appeal of his oratory.”

Hitler possessed a “keen appreciation of the value of slogans, catchwords, dramatic phrases, and happy epigrams in penetrating the deeper level of the psyche.”

It was one of his primary rules to “never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”

According to one of his contemporaries cited by Langer, Hitler “has a passion for the latest news and for photographs of himself. If . . . the official Party photographer happens to appear or someone happens to enter his office with a newspaper he will interrupt the most important meeting in order to scan through it. Very frequently he becomes so absorbed in the news or in his own photographs that he completely forgets the topic under discussion.”

Langer records that “a very fundamental trait in Hitler’s character structure [is that he]  does not think things out in a logical and consistent fashion, gathering all available informtion pertinent to the problem, mapping out alternative courses of action, and then weighing the evidence pro and con for each of them before reaching a decision. His mental processes operate in reverse. Instead of studying the problem as an intellectual would do he avoids it and occupies himself with other things until unconscious processes furnish him with a solution. Having the solution he then begins to look for facts which prove that it is correct. In this procedure he is very clever and by the time he presents it to his associates, it has the appearance of a rational judgment. Nevertheless, his thought processes proceed from the emotional to the factual instead of starting with the facts as an intellectual normally does. It is this characteristic of his thinking process which makes it difficult for ordinary people to understand Hitler or to predict his future actions.” In this connection, it is notable that Hitler scoffed at formal education: “Of secondary importance is the training of mental abilities,” and “over-educated people [are] stuffed with knowledge and intellect, but bare of any sound instincts.”

Though Hitler presented himself as having a ferocious work ethic consisting of 16 to 18 hours a day of continuous toil, the reality was something else: According to one of his associates, “He does not know how to work steadily. Indeed, he is incapable of working.” Continues Langer, “[h]e dislikes desk work and seldom glances at the piles of reports which are placed on his desk daily. No matter how important these may be or how much his adjutants might urge him to attend to a particular matter, he refuses to take them seriously unless they deal with military or naval affairs or political matters. He seldom sits in a cabinet meeting because they bore him. On several occasions when sufficient pressure was brought to bear he did attend but got up abruptly during the session and left without apology. Later it was discovered that he had gone to his private theater and had the operator show some film that he liked particularly.”

Hitler was prone to fits of anger. He “shows an utter lack of emotional control. In the worst rages he undoubtedly acts like a spoiled child who cannot have his own way and bangs his fist on the tables and walls. He scolds and shouts and stammers and on some occasions foaming saliva gathers in the corners of his mouth.” As one close contemporary described Hitler in such a state: “He was an alarming sight, his hair disheveled, his eyes fixed, and his face distorted and purple. I feared that he would collapse or have a stroke.” Langer continues, “It must not be supposed, however, that these rages occur only when he is crossed on major issues. On the contrary, very insignificant matters might call out this reaction. In general they are brought on whenever anyone contradicts him, when there is unpleasant news for which he might feel responsible, when there is any skepticism concerning his judgment or when a situation arises in which his infallibility might be challenged or belittled.” According to one close observer, among his staff there was an understanding: “‘For God’s sake don’t excite the Fuehrer’—which means do not tell him bad news—do not mention things which are not as he conceives them to be.”

Hitler “has the ‘never-say-die’ spirit. After some of his severest setbacks he has been able to get his immediate associates together and begin making plans for a ‘come-back.’ Events which would crush most individuals, at least temporarily, seem to act as stimulants to greater efforts in Hitler.”

Among Hitler’s peculiarities, one “which drives people and particularly his associates to distraction is his capacity for forgetting. . . . We all know how he can say something one day and a few days later say the opposite, completely oblivious of his earlier statement. He does not only do this in connection with international affairs but also with his closest associates. When they show their dismay and call his attention to the inconsistency he flies off into a rage and demands to know if the other person thinks he is a liar.”

Another of Hitler’s pronounced characteristics is humorlessness. “Although Hitler almost invariably introduces a few humorous elements into his speeches and gives the impression of considerable wit, he seems to lack any real sense of humor.” According to one contemporary cited by Langer, “He is unable to purify his gloomy self with self-irony and humor.” According to another contemporary, “he is extremely sensitive to ridicule.” And according to yet another contemporary, “He takes himself seriously and will flare up in a temperamental rage at the least impingement by act or attitude on the dignity and holiness of state and Fuehrer.”

Langer records that “Hitler likes to be surrounded with pretty women and usually requests the moving-picture companies to send over a number of actresses whenever there is a party in the Chancellery. He seems to get an extraordinary delight in fascinating these girls with stories about what he is going to do in the future or the same old stories about his past life. He also likes to impress them with his power by ordering the studios to provide them with better roles, or promising that he will see to it that they are starred in some forthcoming picture. Most of his associations with women are of this type, and their number is legion, but does not go beyond this point as far as we have been able to discover.”

In sum, though Hitler is a uniquely evil figure, not every aspect of Hitler’s personality is unique. Indeed, some aspects appear quite familiar. To be sure, with only a handful of quotations selected from a 186-page study, I have by no means conveyed in full the substance of Langer’s portrait. For reasons that readers can themselves deduce, I have omitted passages describing such qualities as his courage as a soldier on the battlefield (disputed by some contemporary historians despite Hitler’s two Iron Crosses), his conspicuous and intended-to-be-conspicuous displays of affection for children and animals, especially dogs, his unwavering and successful effort to keep his personal and sexual life hidden from the public, and most crucially, of course, his adherence to a set of unvarying convictions that amounted to an entire ideological system.

1The original document is available in the CIA electronic reading room here. After the study was declassified, it was published as a book under the title, The Mind of Adolf Hitler: The Secret Wartime Study, which includes a preface in which Langer tells the story of the report’s creation.

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Andrew Yang’s War on Meritocracy

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

Andrew Yang

Hachette Books, 2018, 304 pp., $28.00

It’s hard not to root for Andrew Yang, whose lack of pretention and sincerity set him apart in the contest for the 2020 Democratic nomination. While other candidates parade their righteous fury, fume at each other, and compete to see who can denounce the President most forcefully and contemptuously, Yang calmly sets forth a political vision that is, at least on its own terms, quite compelling.

As he tells it, we are in the beginning stages of an earthshaking crisis—what he calls The Great Displacement—in which huge swaths of American workers will lose their livelihoods to machines whose capabilities will exceed their own. A minority will help steer these developments and become fabulously wealthy, a larger class of service professionals will make good livings working for them, and some others may find enough breadcrumbs to make their way. But most people will be out of luck, with no honest way to make a decent living. “Efficiency doesn’t love normal people,” he drolly tells his readers. The poor souls who are not extraordinary will need a lot of help—indeed, they already do. 

The stakes are existential; in his book, The War on Normal People, Yang says that “without dramatic change, the best-case scenario is a hyper-stratified society like something out of The Hunger Games or Guatemala with an occasional mass shooting. The worst case is widespread despair, violence, and the utter collapse of our society and economy.” 

Yang offers himself as an emissary of a different future, in which Americans have rediscovered their common humanity and honored it through egalitarian redistribution in the form of a basic income. We may feel trapped in our merciless meritocracy, in which the smart people work overtime to make the normal people superfluous, but we can use the immense wealth that our technological intrepidity has yielded to relieve our common estate, thereby bringing forth a new birth of freedom.

Bracing as all this may be, we don’t actually live in the world that Yang describes. Our technological progress is more like a trickle than a raging river, our meritocracy isn’t half as meritorious as he believes, and the people who have a basic income’s worth of extra cash don’t generally act as if they’ve been unleashed to do great things. The prestigious parts of our world are shabbier than Yang appreciates, and his solutions are dubious.

In spite of all these shortcomings—or perhaps because of them—Yang’s book still has something to offer to contemporary American politics. He has the temerity to think that we could argue about different things, that we could structure our society around something other than paid jobs, and that we could renew a sense of mutual obligation. That sense of imagination hardly suits him to be President, but it makes him one of the more intriguing characters to break through on the national political stage in recent years. 

The War on Normal People is a better read than a typical campaign volume. Yang lays out his personal saga as a child of immigrants with affecting candor, recalling the racist slights he endured as an adolescent in upstate New York and the self-doubt they engendered. He adapted by becoming a champion of underdogs everywhere, going so far as to root for the Mets. As he tells it, his affinity for the little guy is what guided his professional progression from test-prep executive to founder of Venture For America, a non-profit that helps entrepreneurs start companies in downtrodden parts of the country as well as placing promising young graduates in their employ.

Rather than just congratulate himself on his resume, as a regular politician might, Yang confesses that it was a return of his self-doubt that propelled his unlikely turn to politics. In 2016 he started to worry that his success was hollow. As he frequented the cities in which his sponsored entrepreneurs were working, like Cleveland and Detroit, he felt overwhelmed by the widespread hopelessness. He felt disturbed by the disconnect between his increasingly cossetted life and the scale of the problem; he worried that he had gone “from the guy who wanted to fix the machine into an add-on to the machine.” 

Looking out at the current state of the nation, Yang recites the litany of American carnage in the key of a center-left technocrat: appalling inequality, including racial inequality, even more in wealth than in income; Deaton and Case’s deaths of despair; David Autor’s work showing that manufacturing decline stunted household formation and marriage; Erik Hurst on young men detached from the labor force playing video games. In sum, Americans have responded to shrinking opportunities by “becoming less and less functional.”

What makes Yang distinctive is his zealous conviction that we are on the brink of artificial intelligence rendering huge portions of the American workforce superfluous—that the lack of work opportunities that contributed to social ills in the 2010s is but a foreshadowing of the cataclysm awaiting in the 2020s and 30s. When Silicon Valley entrepreneurs tell Yang about the revolutionary disruptions right around the corner, he glories in their ingenuity but frets for the poor schlubs who will be laid off any day now. 

Take call center workers, for example. “The AI experience is about to improve to a point where we’re not going to be able to tell the difference” between machines and humans, he asserts, rendering the latter obsolete. Taken literally, this is a prediction that we are about to become awash in machines that can pass the Turing test and be reproduced at commercial scale—a scenario that seems far from imminent. Yang has extrapolated from a familiar fact—automatic directories are displacing some call center jobs, and will keep doing so—to a truly far-fetched scenario in which machines can understand irregular concerns as readily as human operators. Likewise, Yang predicts truck and taxi drivers will find themselves expendable within ten years, or maybe even five. 

Nor is it just low-level or blue collar workers who need to worry. Yang is sure that many white collar workers’ time is running out, including journalists, radiologists, doctors, lawyers, accountants, wealth advisers, and others whose jobs include significant routine components. In the end, he worries that “humans as workers” are just not that good, given our many frailties and needs. (“We need to rest . . . We get bored . . . We sleep . . . We sometimes talk to reporters.”) Our distinctive advantages as workers are passed by without comment, in spite of the important role that people’s preference for dealing with other people is likely to play in preserving jobs for humans. 

In short, Yang is unconcerned with Peter Thiel’s critique that we have progressed in the world of bits, but not in the world of atoms. In his estimation, with the digital revolution alone, our labor market has bit off more than it can chew. 

Yang’s perspective resembles that of the fictional, nameless author in Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958), who reports on the social forces that have transformed English society by the time of his writing in 2034. Of late, Young’s book has become oft-cited but little read, which is a shame, as it is both brief and thoroughly entertaining. Its sociologist narrator presents his tale in the form of a scholarly essay, and the trick of the book is that its argument is at once plausible, forceful, arrogant, and almost entirely devoid of self-knowledge—it is written by a brilliant idiot.

Yang rather ham-handedly tips his hat to Young, writing: “The meritocracy was never intended to be a real thing—it started out as a parody in a British satire in 1958 by Michael Young.” Anyone who has read The Rise of the Meritocracy should instantly reject that description, though, given how much historical evidence from the real world up to 1958 is marshaled there, alongside fabricated (but plausible) evidence from the then-imagined-future. Young is especially interested in the advances made by standardized testing and job placement in postwar Britain, and he envisions a world in which “intelligence has been redistributed between the classes” through enhanced mobility. 

“Today,” he goes on, “thanks to assortative mating in a handful of cities, intellect, attractiveness, education, and wealth are all converging in the same families and neighborhoods.” Whoops, that’s not Young, it’s Yang, describing America in 2018! We may grant him education and wealth, but intellect and attractiveness? Young envisions his upper class as the product of generations of sustained eugenics, gently imposed from above, but our own upper classes are as likely to practice bottom-up dysgenics through ever-later childbearing. 

Put that aside, though. There are other features of the world of Meritocracy 2034 that diverge even more obviously from our own world, but which Yang seems to imagine apply. In Young’s world, the narrator can lament the paltry three percent productivity growth of 1945-1975 as subpar; in our own world, a return to such numbers would be cause for celebration, as recent years have given us less than one percent growth in output per hour worked. In Young’s world, the smart and well-educated (which are, by then, the same group) have overhauled their society entirely, including its educational and political systems, to make the most of scarce talent, wherever it might emerge. The reliability of this system is so great as to have induced a rise in fertility, as people put their hopes in their children’s ascents. The elites have cleverly arrested the system’s natural tendencies toward gerontocracy. And they have so thoroughly reduced social conflict as to allow merit-selected civil servants to take “a more active part in politics to make up for the devitalization of the two-party system.” It would take some kind of funhouse mirror for that to seem like a reflection of contemporary American society. 

Even in this heady future, where the meritocrats really are that great and consciously engaged in largely successful social engineering, efforts to maintain social cohesion through the egalitarian distribution of wealth are doomed to failure—the final footnote of The Rise of the Meritocracy reveals that the treatise’s author was killed in a revolutionary uprising by the lower, cared-for class. But Yang thinks highly enough of the smarties in our own day and age to think that they can hold things together by simply sharing the wealth. 

Yang’s political brand is based mostly on his “Freedom Dividend”—a basic income of $1,000 per month for every American aged 18-64, indexed for inflation, and (in some unspecified way) protected against reduction except by “constitutional supermajority.” As Yang points out, basic income has entered the American political lexicon before, being proposed at various moments by Thomas Paine, Martin Luther King, Jr., Richard Nixon, and Milton Friedman (who sought it as a negative income tax). Today, it has an eclectic (if Bay Area-centric) following.

According to Yang, an extra $12,000 a year would work wonders. People won’t quit their jobs, but the basic income would nevertheless “be perhaps the greatest catalyst to human creativity we have ever seen,” and supercharge entrepreneurship amongst young people. Displaced workers would have the needed financial security to make retraining possible. With the extra money in circulation, the consumer economy could weather the “automation wave.”

Notwithstanding the tensions between some of these claims, one of the biggest questions that must be confronted is whether Yang’s basic income would introduce any extra money at all. In one of the book’s more remarkable passages, he explicitly claims it won’t: 

UBI doesn’t actually grow the government. […] It is less an expenditure and more a transfer to citizens so they can use it to improve their lives, pay each other, patronize local businesses, and support the consumer economy. […] By definition, none of the money would be wasted because it goes to citizens. It’s analogous to a company giving dividends or moneys to its shareholders. No one regards that as a waste of money, because the shareholders theoretically are the owners of the company. Are we not, as the citizens of the United States, the owners of this country?

But will the money for this “transfer to citizens” appear like manna, or will it also be a transfer from citizens? 

Yang is pretty clear about his preference. He wants to see a roughly 10 percent federal Value Added Tax (VAT) instituted, and he wants to repurpose most of the money currently spent on means-tested welfare programs to support the basic income. As he tells it, only those people wealthy enough to spend more than $120,000 per year would be net losers from this combination.

Many of basic income’s staunchest supporters are incensed by Yang’s choices here. His willingness to replace rather than add onto existing social spending programs means that he may effectively be advocating a redistribution away from the poor. Others point out that, whatever his “MATH” (Make America Think Harder) slogan might make you think, his numbers simply don’t add up. He projects the economic effects of the Freedom Dividend based on the assumption that it will be completely deficit-financed, but then his actual proposal is to mostly pay for it with a combination of taxes and spending reductions that would necessarily retard growth. 

One suspects that his heart is really with the deficit spenders, even if his posture as a responsible sort-of-centrist technocrat doesn’t let him embrace them openly. He says “inflation has been low for years, in part because technology and globalization have been reducing the costs of many things”—even though such recalibration of relative prices has nothing at all to do with inflation. Regardless, he assures that “Not only would a UBI not cause inflation, but putting purchasing power in the hands of Americans would help address the worst circumstances of where prices have gone up.” Huh? 

But Yang isn’t done; he has another kind of monetary magic in store quite apart from basic income. He also advocates the creation of a parallel currency called Digital Social Credits (DSCs). Inspired by communities like Brattleboro, Vermont, which use a time banking system to facilitate a trade in neighborly favors, Yang wants the Federal government to get into the reward point business in a major way. “If you tell me I’m getting $2 to do something, I may ignore it. But if it’s 200 points, I’ll find it strangely compelling,” Yang muses, and then goes on to propose that the Federal government could regulate a system in which “Nonprofits and NGOs would generate DSCs based on how much good they do and then distribute it back to volunteers and employees.” He says nothing about who will assign point values to different socially valuable activities or how, which seems like more than a minor detail.

The silliness only piles up from there. He says people with high lifetime DSC earnings could be rewarded by meetings with “their state’s most civic-minded athlete or celebrity,” and that companies could buy DSCs but “these DSCs would appear as a different color and be clearly purchased, not earned.” Yang is hoping this color-changing form of scrip will instantly boost regular economic activity, too, and do it on the cheap. Remarkably, Yang feels no need to consider the far less sunny example provided by the nascent social credit system in China, which is shaping up as a potent tool for repressing political dissent. Yang’s near silence about DSCs on the campaign trail suggests that he may have realized some of the idea’s downsides since publishing his book.

Some of Yang’s ideas are so bad as to make one wonder if he is on the level. To respond to disintegrating families, he would turn to “an AI life coach with the voice of Morgan Freeman trying to help people manage their differences.” He would like to see the Federal government create a “Department of the Attention Economy” to oversee how everyone is spending their time on the internet. And he would like the President to be able to “claw back the assets” of any corporate leader whose company is assessed a large fine or is “bailed out”—while also having such executives thrown in jail.

If both Yang’s diagnosis and his prescriptions are so flawed, what is there to like besides an appealing demeanor? 

Yang is driven by a sense that some kind of human flourishing is being systematically neglected by the shape of American society and politics today. He realizes the inanity of pretending that we can thrive as a society by making our education system so good that everyone can be college-educated and get a high-paying job, and he wishes that we would instead educate every “citizen to live a good, positive, socially productive life independent of work.” He is willing to consider that even some of the people who have “good jobs” are driven by fear of failure more than any sense of what is good in the world, and that it is a problem worthy of political attention if people feel trapped by a system that wants to use them up rather than allow them to thrive as full human beings. 

To put it a bit dramatically: Yang is a politician willing to grapple openly with the meaning of life, and with the moral failures of our current dispensation. He wants to reconfigure our society so as to “make clear that we value people intrinsically, independent of any qualities or qualifications.” It isn’t easy to figure out how we can get from here to there. But at least Yang is throwing himself into the effort of moral revival, albeit with a regrettably TED-talk-ified vocabulary. His Venture for America cohorts are asked to affirm that “There is no courage without risk,” and his own willingness to risk absurdity in pursuit of a better world ought to be appreciated as genuinely courageous. 

In the end, Yang has a great deal in common with the elliptically described revolutionaries who ultimately bring down Young’s meritocracy of the future. They yearn for a world in which equality of opportunity is restored, not in the sense of allowing all people to rise socially, but in the sense of giving all people the chance “to develop the virtues and talents with which they are endowed, all their capacities for appreciating the beauty and depth of human experience, all their potential for living to the full.” For all of the ways our world differs from Young’s, this yearning is revolutionary in our own time as well. Let us hope we can figure out how to address it before our own 2034 comes calling.

The post Andrew Yang’s War on Meritocracy appeared first on The American Interest.

Russia’s Australian Well-Wishers

What, one wonders, goes through the head of a Russian diplomat assigned an ambassadorial posting to Australia, the country the Russians inexplicably call the “green continent”? He would know that it’s not a sought-after position: Canberra registers only faintly on the radar screen of Russia’s priorities. He would recall immediately that Australia is part of zapad, “the West,” and moreover, is in a military alliance with the country presented by the Russian state-controlled media as Russia’s main enemy. That could be a plus, because it means that the Russian military and security agencies do take an interest.

As he prepared for his new post the Ambassador would soon learn that he would spend a lot of time flying over water, as the embassy in Canberra is accredited to an array of South Pacific island states. These suddenly acquired outsized importance in Russia’s eyes after the Russo-Georgian war in 2008, as Moscow energetically sought UN member states’ recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as “independent states.” Offered inducements, mainly money, some complied (today, only Nauru remains as one of four states that still does). Most important of these South Pacific states is Fiji, with which Russia now has military-to-military ties.

The Ambassador-designate would recall that ties with his host country are thin and strained: Apart from an unhealthy dependence on raw materials exports and the problem of how to deal with a newly powerful China, Russia and Australia have little in common. Commercial links are weak, with each country so far down the list of the other’s trade and investment partners that there’s no friendly business lobby to speak of.

Worse, intractable disagreements beset relations: over the annexation of Crimea, the war in eastern Ukraine, the downing of Flight MH17, the serial assassinations of regime critics, and Russia’s policy of subverting democratic politics. The designate would also learn that for most of the seven decades of relations since 1942, espionage scandals have regularly strained them—in 1954, for instance, the defection of Soviet spy Vladimir Petrov to Australia ruptured ties for five years.

More recently, in a 2019 New Year’s address, former Ambassador Grigory Logvinov appealed to Russophone Australians in the following terms:

Never before in its recent history . . . has Russia been subjected to such a coordinated, aggressive campaign of vilification, abuse and slander . . . on various anti-Russian themes, be it the MH17 disaster, the so-called Skripal Affair or the use of chemicals (weapons) in Syria. . . . we in the Embassy would be most grateful for any support, moral and political, that our compatriots can give, within, of course, the bounds permitted under Australian legislation.

The charge of vilification, that Russia is a victim of information warfare waged by “the West,” is a leitmotif that runs throughout Russian official history. But the salience of this theme in the official narrative has been much enhanced over the past decade or so, as Russian military strategists, analyzing such disparate events as the Gulf Wars, the “Arab Spring,” and “color revolutions” in former Soviet states, have recast the Russian understanding of interstate conflict. General Andrei Kartapolov, one of the most incisive of these strategists, has summed up the new view, arguing that if conflicts were once 80 percent violence and 20 percent propaganda, today they consist of 80-90 percent propaganda and 10-20 percent violence.

Senior Russian military or intelligence figures tend to couch the victimhood theme in apocalyptic terms. In a wide-ranging interview in September 2019, Sergei Shoygu, Putin’s Minister of Defence since 2012, said “the West has set itself the task of destroying and enslaving our country.” Such bellicose statements suggest a paranoia of pathological dimensions, which would obviously make Western governments nervous about dealing with their authors. Any Russian Ambassador in Australia, then, would face a daunting task in seeking to persuade an Australian government that his political masters are sincere in seeking closer cooperation. 

But he’s not alone. Among the 85,000 Australians who claim Russian origins, some would doubtless wish to help the Motherland—for instance, by posting helpful comments on social media; supporting Embassy-sponsored functions; carrying Russian and Soviet flags in ANZAC Day marches; reminding Australians that the two countries were wartime allies (and implying that they should be again); and taking any opportunity to persuade other Australians that their government’s policies towards Russia are ill-informed and misconceived.

Some Russians or dual citizens employed to teach in Australian universities believe that to publicly support official Russian stances is in the best interests of both countries. In a democratic society, they should enjoy that right. And some non-Russian Australians are also well disposed to Russia, and may be positioned to influence public attitudes. These “well-wishers,” as the Russian media sometimes dub them, tend to be of two types.

Some Australian Russophiles passionately identify with the grandeur of Russia’s history and culture. For them Russia is a transcendent entity, “the righteous land,” in Maxim Gorky’s memorable phrase. They endorse the Russian official narrative of victimhood and proclaim themselves Russia’s allies. For this group, all Russian policies in dealings with the West are defensive responses to aggression, while the destruction of MH17, for instance, was an anti-Russian conspiracy.

Another type of well-wisher appears to have been swayed by the theories of John Mearsheimer: They designate themselves “realists,” arguing that Australia must seek common ground with Russia simply because it is increasingly powerful. Morality and values have nothing to do with it. Consider the following key quotes, drawn from a selection of many such commentaries (emphasis mine):

“Establishing a defence dialogue could be the next step forward. Russia is the only major military power with which Australia has no formal or informal defence-to-defence contacts.” (February 2018)

“Russia is a permanent feature of Australia’s neighbourhood, and its footprint is only going to increase. This reality merits a rethink, a recalculation, of Canberra’s Russian policy toolbox.” (October 2019)

“An area of mutual interest, ripe for further bilateral cooperation, is the Indo-Pacific. Russia and Australia will find a convergence of interests here. . . .” (May 2019)

“As a relevant Asia-Pacific power, Canberra must be capable of dealing with Moscow in our region. But this will require dialogue.” (November 2018)

The key word here is “dialogue,” and the key message is that there is none. Noteworthy, too, is the fact that the onus is allegedly on Australia to identify common ground, whereas for the Russian side it’s enough simply to profess to want dialogue, which is seen as a good thing in and of itself.

Of course, given that both countries have Ambassadors in their respective capitals and are co-members of innumerable multilateral forums, there’s actually quite a lot of dialogue. But for the Russian side, there’s never enough of it, or it’s of the wrong type: “Bewildered” Australian governments, as one commentator put it, fail to recognize a strategic congruence with Russia that should prompt a reversal of their policy of limited engagement. That policy was recently summarized in the government’s latest Foreign Policy White Paper:

We will deal carefully with Russia to advance our interests where we see scope. Equally, Australia will work with partners to resist Russia’s conduct when it is inimical to global security. Australia remains particularly concerned by the downing of flight MH17 and Russia’s annexation of Crimea and intervention in eastern Ukraine.

For the authoritative Russian commentator Ivan Krivushin, this passage demonstrates that Australian policy towards Russia is “quite pragmatic.” The Russian Embassy would presumably disagree.

In any case, the realists’ assertion that Russia’s regional involvement is rising is valid only from a low base: It’s well down the list of patrons in the region, and its prospects of being more than another source of paper-bag money and weapons are dubious. That said, following its success in inducing Nauru, Vanuatu, and Tuvalu to recognize Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states, Russia has devoted much more effort to cultivating what it calls “small island states in the southern Pacific Ocean”: especially Fiji, but also Kiribati, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Vanuatu, and the Marshall Islands. Officials from some of those are studying at the Russian Diplomatic Academy in Moscow, presumably with all costs being met by the hosts. After Foreign Minister Lavrov’s visit early in 2012, Fijian officers have trained at the Frunze Military Academy in Moscow under a bilateral agreement on military cooperation. Lavrov now holds an annual meeting with the representatives of the South Pacific island states at the UN.

Moreover, Russia has staged two demonstrations of military power in the region. To coincide with a G20 summit in Brisbane in October 2014, a small flotilla of naval vessels, including the formidably armed missile-cruiser Varyag, was deployed to the Coral Sea. According to Krivushin and other Russian sources, this was a riposte to then-Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s “undiplomatic comments about Vladimir Putin,” specifically, Abbott’s assertion that he intended to “shirtfront” Putin at the G20 (a rugby term, meaning to forcefully confront an opponent, which at first had official interpreters baffled).

The second was more significant: In December 2017, two nuclear-capable Tupolev-95MS strategic bombers, staging out of Biak airbase in Indonesia and supported by about 100 Russian personnel, flew a sortie through the Torres Strait. This was the same type of aircraft used to launch cruise missile strikes against targets in Syria a year before. In other words, Indonesia provided a base and logistical support for a flight clearly designed to intimidate Australia. Six months later a Russian navy training vessel made a port call to Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, Australia’s nearest neighbor, the first such visit in history. Russia has recently opened a “Russian Office” in Port Moresby and has invited the Papua-New Guinea Prime Minister to visit Moscow.

In their sustained effort to get Australia to “rethink” its policy towards Russia, well-wisher commentators coyly tend to avoid a key question: the economic sanctions applied in response to the annexation of Crimea, the de facto seizure of 10 percent of Ukraine in Donbas, the destruction of MH17, and the assassination of opponents abroad. This glossing over is natural, as to initiate new forms of dialogue now would, as Russian journalist Aleksander Golts put it, “work to legitimize Russian behavior.”

Lifting sanctions is a priority of Russian policy. The Russians reckon that the current U.S. Congress will not do away with sanctions, but the EU, divided over the policy, is a more promising quarry. The prisoner exchanges with Ukraine, initiated by Russia, are clearly designed to show that Putin is now seeking compromise with Ukraine and so should be rewarded with an easing of sanctions.

Some Australians have warmed to the idea. At least one well-wisher has claimed, without evidence, that the sanctions have hurt Australia: “Tit-for-tat sanctions since 2014 have dealt a blow to Australia’s agricultural export industry. It is fair to say Canberra has felt the sting of bilateral sanctions more acutely than Moscow has.” In fact, with a few exceptions, Australian agricultural producers gave up trying to export to Russia long before the sanctions, because of Russian agricultural regulators’ ceaseless resort to phyto-sanitary pretexts for protectionist and self-interested ends. The Russian economist Krivushin has calculated that the cost of its sanctions to Australia has been modest: “export losses . . . amounted to only about 0.4 percent of (the value of) total sales. . . . Because of its very modest engagement in commercial exchanges with Russia, Australia was incomparably less sensitive to Moscow’s (counter) sanctions.”

There’s a broader debate about the impact of sanctions on the Russian economy. Aleksei Kudrin, a leading liberal economist who is connected to Putin and currently Chairman of the Accounts Chamber, has calculated they are taking 0.5 percent per annum off GDP. Other estimates have been higher—about 1 percent to 1.5 percent per annum in 2015 and 2016. There’s general agreement that the main effects have been to reduce access to and increase the cost of capital, along with a sharp decrease in foreign direct investment.

But the major barrier to foreign investment in or exports to Russia isn’t sanctions but comprehensive corruption and crime. Its legal system has a record of jailing investors rather than protecting their rights; its businesses are plagued by the threat of state-backed expropriation, often facilitated by business competitors, Kremlin-friendly Chechens, the FSB, and organized crime. Those Russian economists and businessmen who wish to see the country embrace reforms know this and have long made representations to Putin to do something about it.

Whatever the impact of sanctions, it’s not serious enough to cause Russia to grant major concessions to end them. And to argue about the economic costs of sanctions misses the main point, which is their political optics. The prime reason for sanctions is not to chasten the Russians, but to make a statement about unacceptable behavior. Had the countries that applied sanctions wanted to cripple Russia economically, they could have implemented far more comprehensive industrial and financial-sector sanctions.

In any case, the burden is on critics of the sanctions to offer a viable alternative. As David J. Kramer has put it:

The question [critics] never seem to answer is what they would do in place of [sanctions]. They criticize sanctions for either being ineffective, for rallying Russians around Putin, or causing hardship for Western businesses. But they also don’t seem to have alternatives to offer, and doing nothing as Russia invades Ukraine is not a serious option.

The burden is on the well-wishers, too, to explain why closer engagement and cooperation with Russia is an imperative even as Russian state media continue relentlessly to depict Australia as a cynical, undemocratic hireling of the United States. A recent Russian TV documentary about Australia was hosted by Anna Chapman, a shapely officer of the Russian external intelligence service (SVR) who was deported from the United States in 2010 along with a group of long-term sleeper agents. The documentary accuses Australia of supporting terrorist organizations, including ISIS; and purports to explain Australia’s role in an Anglo-Saxon conspiracy to foment war in Syria, inundate Europe with migrants and terrorists, and force wealthy Europeans to shift their wealth to Anglo-Saxon countries, such as Australia.

A common charge made by well-wishers is that Australian decision-makers just don’t “understand” Russia. In fact, Australia has a core of officials who are well versed in Russia: The last five Ambassadors to Moscow have been Russian speakers, either with a previous posting in Russia or tertiary study of Russia’s history and culture behind them, or both. Their job includes seeking common ground for dialogue with the Russians; if this has been hard to do, it’s not because of ignorance and prejudice. Like the well-wishers, they have trouble coming up with something concrete and of clear benefit to Australia’s national interest.

Of course, dealing effectively with Russia requires an understanding of the Russian frame of reference. Like most countries, but more insistently than some, the Russians demand respect, for their cultural and martial achievements especially. Like other peoples, they respond to empathy—a genuine, disinterested curiosity about their past and present. And experience suggests that they value candor and firmness, as long as these are applied consistently, and couched in terms of the national interest.

The problem is that much of what Russia now does earns it respect nowhere other than at home. Moreover, too often when the Russians demand respect, they appear to mean that we should defer to their wishes. True, unlike the Chinese, the Russians do not claim that when we disagree with them we “hurt the feelings of the Russian people.” But some of the well-wishers assert that only Russophobia can explain Australia’s policies. Thus, to seek to claim the moral high ground is usually a waste of breath; for them, that higher ground is already occupied—by the Russians. But any special pleading that Russia is owed a unique debt of gratitude and exceptional treatment, and that it has a right to tutor smaller states, should always be rebuffed.

Obviously, Australia needs to talk with Russia, regularly. It does so via its embassy and in numerous multilateral settings, including regional ones (like APEC and the East Asia Forum). Recent additions are two UN-sponsored groups formed to consider “responsible state behaviour in cyberspace.” But were Australia to invest the relationship with significant new substance in the form of a “strategic dialogue” or formal military relations, such steps would be tantamount to ignoring the issues that prompted sanctions. They would signal that Australia had decided to accept Russia’s annexation of Crimea, overlook its aggression in eastern Ukraine, and set aside the matters of MH17, the policy of assassinating Russians abroad, and an imposing record of striving to undermine social cohesion in other countries.

It’s not said by the well-wishers, but in return for new dialogues the Russian side would presumably expect at a minimum the end of sanctions, without any concessions on the issues that brought them about. One can reasonably ask whether the well-wishers would see giving up sanctions as part of the “dialogue,” whether they believe we should end sanctions on this basis, and what benefit to Australia—beyond dialogue for the sake of dialogue—they would see in doing so.

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