Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 16

A Stunner in Taiwan

It was only a year ago that Taiwan’s incumbent President, Tsai Ing-wen, was down in the polls by double-digit margins to the prospective Kuomintang (KMT) candidate, Han Kuo-yu, the recently elected Mayor of the southern port city Kaohsiung. Even as late as May, she was behind by 15 points. Yet, on Saturday night, President Tsai was re-elected in a landslide, totaling up a record presidential vote count of more than eight million and with a margin of nearly 20 points over Han. It was an unprecedented swing.

Arriving Friday morning from an overnight flight from the United States, I was taken aback by how nervous friends in Taiwan were about the election itself. Tsai, after all, was ahead in the polls, and by a good margin in most cases. Even on the streets, the KMT’s final rally in Taipei on Thursday evening drew at most 300,000, while the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) rally on Friday evening was probably closer to half a million.

Yet the uncertainty was palpable: How successful had Chinese interference in the electoral process been? What would the turnout be? So much of Tsai’s popularity in the polls appeared to rest on the support of younger Taiwanese—an age group notoriously noisy and active, but less likely to vote. Confusing things further, Han had told his supporters to stop answering their phones and the pollsters’ questions in the weeks headed into the election. How accurate, then, were the late polls showing Tsai with her double-digit lead? Would there be, as many expected, the normal closing of the gap as Election Day neared? And how would you know whether that was actually happening given Han’s directive?

Given the actual result, one might be inclined to dismiss the worries as just “ghosts in the closet.” But that would be a bit unfair. For one, Chinese interference was real. And from a historical point of view, it would be rare for an incumbent whose policy track record was not seen as wildly popular to sweep to reelection, let alone keep the existing majority in the Legislative Yuan (LY), Taiwan’s national assembly. But the real and underlying reason for the nervousness had less to do with everyday politics and more to do what the majority of Taiwan’s citizens saw as the real issue at hand: preserving Taiwan’s democracy and effective independence from the People’s Republic.

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© Gary Schmitt

The KMT, of course, wants to argue that its loss was due to its candidate’s poor performance and ineffective messaging, rather than its position on cross-Strait relations. But after events in Hong Kong, Xi’s less than subtle bullying of Taiwan, and a greater appreciation for the overt and covert efforts by the mainland to influence political opinion and races on the island, most Taiwanese were not willing to take the chance that a candidate of a party still mouthing versions of “one China” would be given the land’s highest office. These concerns were also broadly reflected in various polls on Taiwanese identity and cross-Strait relations. Over the past year, there had been a jump in the percentage of the island’s citizens who identified as “Taiwanese,” as opposed to the steady decline in the number who see themselves as “Chinese.” And there had been an increase in the percentage of those who, while still temporarily in favor of the “status quo” when it comes to cross-Strait relations, in the long term would like the future end state to be the island’s “independence.”

In retrospect, given these trends and factors, perhaps Tsai’s victory should not have come as a surprise. But the size of victory was nevertheless impressive: She took 57 percent of the vote to Han’s 38 percent, with perennial candidate James Soong left with just over 4 percent. And not only was Tsai’s margin large, it rested on a turnout of over 74 percent of eligible voters, a jump of some 8 percent from 2016. As one can see from pictures and videos, the intensity of support for Tsai, who is far from the most charismatic of politicians, was high.

Two other thoughts come to mind as the reality of the election results settle in here in Taipei.

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© Gary Schmitt

First, Tsai’s margin of victory probably was a decisive factor in the DPP keeping a majority in the Legislative Yuan. But that sweeping victory did not keep the DPP from losing seats, dropping from 68 to 61. Moreover, in the party balloting (where Taiwanese vote a party list in addition to their vote for President and their district representative) the percentage that went to the DPP was 33.9 percent—only slightly more than the 33.3 percent that voted for the KMT, with the rest of the votes going to minor parties. For both the KMT and the DPP, this percentage is only a bit higher than what recent polls show party identification to be.

This suggests a not insubstantial number of voters split their ballots, perhaps hedging about what they would like to see more of in day-to-day politics. If the presidential race was one about Taiwan’s fundamental future, then, arguably, the lower vote for the DPP in party ballots might suggest the DPP should worry about being seen as better in actual governing these next four years while the KMT has room to recapture a majority if it can turn itself into a truly “Taiwanese” party whose loyalties and focus is on the island rather than cross-Strait ties. There is a significant portion of the Taiwanese electorate that is independent and would probably welcome a choice between two major parties in which the political disputes are more about taxes, energy, social welfare, and the like, rather than unification or independence.

Second, not to be overlooked is the remarkable note of congratulations issued by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on both Tsai’s reelection and Taiwan’s “once again demonstrating the strength of its robust democratic system.” Taiwan, according to the Secretary, is “a model for the Indo-Pacific region and a force for good in the world.” He also said, “The American people and the people on Taiwan are not just partners—we are members of the same community of democracies, bonded by our shared political, economic and international values.” Applauding President Tsai for “her commitment to cross-Strait stability in the face of unrelenting pressure,” Secretary Pompeo came as close to recognizing the country of Taiwan as a diplomatic and political ally as any in recent memory.

Given Taiwan’s growth as a democracy, it’s a recognition well deserved. Given Taiwan’s strategic importance in the geo-strategic competition with China, it’s also in America’s interest to see it as such.

The post A Stunner in Taiwan appeared first on The American Interest.

Victor Klemperer and the Decay of Political Language

Victor Klemperer did not set out to become Germany’s foremost chronicler of extremist discourse. The talented philologist, born to Orthodox Jewish parents in 1881 in a small town in present-day Poland, first pursued an academic career. He studied in Berlin, Geneva, and Paris, earned a Ph.D. in German literature, got a teaching post in Naples, completed a Habilitation (the requisite advanced German post-doc degree) about Montesquieu and eventually, in 1930, received a professorship at the Technical University in Dresden. By middle age, Klemperer had taken full advantage of the opportunities that early 20th-century Europe offered talented members of its intelligentsia and upper classes.

In 1933, however, at the age of 52, Klemperer lost his post. He was not disliked—far from it—but as the Nazis began to implement their policies, one of their first steps was to remove Jews from Germany’s civil service. Klemperer’s conversion to Protestantism years before carried no weight, nor did his outstanding record as an academic, of course. Being a Jew, Klemperer had to go.

Thus began Klemperer’s second life: as a resident of Nazi Germany living—surviving—under increasing persecution. Klemperer could have emigrated in 1933 and for some time after. Like many German Jews, however, he felt fully German—patriotically so. He had fought in World War I and was proud of his service. Why would he leave his country? Many other Jews felt similarly, accepting the increasing restrictions placed on them—including the ban on company ownership, the mandatory display of the Star of David on one’s clothes—in the belief that it couldn’t get any worse, that a turn for the better was just around the corner. This mindset is masterfully described in Art Spiegelman’s famous graphic novel Maus.

So many things seem obvious after the fact, but we live in snapshots, without a full view of where the plot is leading us. How to distinguish between alarmism and well-considered vigilance? What is a slippery slope? Erik Larson’s 2011 book In the Garden of Beasts chronicles the life of the American Ambassador in Berlin in the early Hitler years. Protagonist William E. Dodd, an intelligent, even-keeled professor from Chicago, struggled to grasp the full meaning of political change in Germany in those days

So it was, too, with Victor Klemperer. The erudite German patriot stayed put. His marriage to his beloved wife Eva, an Aryan German, afforded him a small degree of protection: The Nazis categorized German Jews married to Aryans as “privileged.” Indeed they were, although this did not preclude risk, cruelties, and humiliation. The Klemperers were compelled to sell their car, fire their housekeeper, and put their family cat down when laws restricting the property rights of Jews were introduced.

As his own role in society plunged from celebrated professor to conscripted factory worker in a brigade of “privileged” Jews, Klemperer—unfailingly supported by Eva—kept diaries describing his daily life. Until 1987, they collected dust in a Dresden library. That year, however, a young East German journalist named Uwe Nösner published excerpts from the diaries, which he had painstakingly transcribed from some 16,000 pages of Klemperer’s handwriting, occasionally aided by Klemperer’s widow. The book gained attention, followed by worldwide fame for a new version of the wartime diaries published in German in 1995, and subsequently in English under the titles I Shall Bear Witness and To the Bitter End.

Klemperer wrote another valuable book which endeavored to take stock of his time: Lingua Tertii Imperii—Notizbuch eines Philologen (The Language of the Third Reich). Published in 1947, it is based on notes Klemperer kept during the war years. In it, Klemperer describes his life as a German Jew under the Nazis—but especially the Nazis’ use of language.

The language of the Third Reich was thorough and pedestrian at the same time. Jews had a “J” stamped on their documents and ration cards, and in interactions with authorities they lost even more of their personal identity. Records Klemperer:

In official interactions I’m referred to as ‘the Jew Klemperer’; when I have to present myself at the Gestapo office there are repercussions if I don’t announce quickly enough: ‘Here’s the Jew Klemperer.’

Why was it that a regime with immense power would bother with menial rules like forcing Jews to always announce themselves as “the Jew”? As Klemperer put it: Hitler “knows that he can only expect loyalty from those who exist in the same state of primitivity as he, and the easiest and surest way to keep them there is the nurture and legitimization and, so to say, glorification of the hatred of Jews.”

In Hitler’s Germany linguistic habits shaped attitude and culture, and eventually acquiescence to a system of segregation and dehumanization. The language of the Third Reich was corrosive, and contagious. Forced to repeat “the Jew Klemperer” enough times, one thinks of that person not as Victor Klemperer but as “The Jew.” The Jews were in effect deprived of their name, and in turn of their humanity.

At the “Jew house” in Dresden where the Klemperers lived, the Jews labelled themselves according to the “privileges” the government granted them. Some had the right to use public transport; they called themselves “travel Jews.” Others lacked the right to use public transport and had to walk; they became known as “walking Jews.” Klemperer reports that when a fellow Jew from Dresden had been brought to a concentration camp, a notice would appear on his door: “The Jew [name] lived here.” That meant, Klemperer explains, that the postman didn’t have to bother locating the person’s new address. The post office instead returned the letter to the addressee with a stamp saying “addressee has migrated.”

For Hitler Jews had a function, of course. They served as part of a larger aim to control and dominate. “If the Führer had succeeded in the intended destruction of all Jews,” wrote Klemperer, “he would have had to invent new ones.” The Aryans needed an opposite pole to rally against, on their path to unmatched German greatness.

Demagogues and authoritarians need enemies. They use language to distort, manipulate, and corrupt discourse; to direct, control, and oppress. Stalin, the Kims in North Korea, Mao, East Germany’s Communists—the dehumanization of opponents and designation of dissidents as “enemies of the people” is a common dominator. Autocrats rule by secret police and by controlling politics and courts. Yet they also believe in the power of language, education, and inculcation.

In Germany today, Björn Höcke of the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) draws condemnation when he talks about the Federal Republic finding itself at an existential crossroads. To some ears this sounds like Hitler, who proclaimed in early days that the German nation faced extinction if it failed to act.

Is it alarmism or vigilance to worry in the United States today about political operatives who announce America’s “Flight 93 moment,” a situation so dire that we must rush the cockpit and risk death or reconcile ourselves to certain demise? Michael Anton calls for action against “alien cultures,” “spiritual sickness,” and “existential despair.” This does not sound like the language of democracy, of compromise and tolerance. President Trump, meanwhile, often calls media “the enemy of the people” and has dubbed critics, including the FBI, “scum.” On the other side, Democrats call Trump a dictator, scream treason, and label individuals “traitors” who deign to switch political parties.

Does any of this matter? Is it all harmless rhetoric, and just show? A real dictator is able to harness media and courts and school textbooks, to mandate (and outlaw) utterances to define his reality. But Klemperer’s work warns us to take any form of linguistic degradation seriously. A minimal level of social trust, nurtured by daily habits and informed by responsible rhetoric, is necessary to sustain any democracy. Liberal democracies descending to organized name-calling present a perilous state of affairs.

Toward the end of the war, when it was clear that Germany was losing, one of Klemperer’s fellow “Jew house” residents—a former fur merchant—knocked on the door of the apartment that the Klemperers shared with several other families. “Do I have permission to enter?” the guest asked. “Since when are you so polite?” one of the flat’s residents responded. “Now that the end [of the war] is approaching I will have to get used to speaking with my customers again, so I’ll start immediately with you,” the guest responded. With the Nazis’ demise in sight, people could return to civilized discourse. They first had to want to, of course.

As for Klemperer, having survived the Third Reich, he and Eva opted to remain in Dresden as it became part of the Soviet Occupation Zone and subsequently the German Democratic Republic. Klemperer joined East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party (the SED). Until his death in 1960, Klemperer remained a loyal, idealistic, and hopeful citizen of communist East Germany. If this involved some contradiction and cognitive dissonance, Klemperer held fast to his principles in other ways. In 1955, he published an essay with the title “Verantwortung für die Sprache,” (“Responsibility for the Language,”) where he criticized SED leaders’ use of “linguistic Nazism” in their speeches.

Klemperer once reflected:

For my own part I have never been able to understand how he [Hitler] was capable, with his unmelodious and raucous voice, with his crude, often un-Germanically constructed sentences, and with a conspicuous rhetoric entirely at odds with the character of the German language, of winning over the masses with his speeches, of holding their attention and subjugating them for such appalling lengths of time.

How to see the fuller picture and take measure of these trends in the moment? Sometimes change is sudden and dramatic. Not infrequently, though, it’s gradual, incremental, and difficult to assess fairly. Klemperer’s life and work ought to remind us that responsibility for the language is a duty that applies to everyone, that to worry is hardly a sin—while complacency, at least in some circumstances, can lead to very dark places indeed.

The post Victor Klemperer and the Decay of Political Language appeared first on The American Interest.

James Wood and the Art of Criticism

Serious Noticing: Selected Essays, 1997-2019

James Wood

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020, 528 pp., $30

Critics, especially literary critics, tend to get the worst of both worlds when it comes to the writing life. Whatever insights the critic may bring to bear on a new book, most of the average reader’s curiosity will be tied to the pragmatic question of whether or not it’s worth their time—and there’s never enough time to read everything. Therefore the literary critic is often caught in the unenviable position of advocating for books that most readers won’t ever read; even if they do, the critic’s writing will often pale in the reader’s mind in comparison to the book itself. To make matters worse, if a critic is at all passionate about the books he covers, there can be a Salieri-esque ache to seeing it done better than you can do it yourself—with the added chagrin of understanding precisely how an author works his magic on the page. 

A few critics, however, have the ability to approach criticism as an art form in and of itself, employing an artist’s sensitivity to nuance and depth of vision. Academic approaches tend to miss the mark entirely. Rather than surgically eviscerating a text, like a body splayed on an operating table, or diagnosing its hidden power relations, criticism at its best should have the same visionary sensibility as a novel or a poem. This aesthetic approach has a long and illustrious tradition, though there are precious few keeping it alive these days. 

One of those few critics is James Wood. Serious Noticing is a new collection culled from more than 20 years of essays by the New Yorker critic, who previously worked at the Guardian and the New Republic. It contains both his canonical and lesser-known works, and covers a wide variety of subjects. There’s a sprinkling of personal essays about family, one about the mad genius of the Who drummer Keith Moon, and a popular investigation of why he’s never returned to his native England after decades in Boston.

The title alone explains a lot about Wood’s critical perspective. What Wood admires most in literature is the capacity for authors to notice deeply, to have reverence for the minute but telling details that make their stories. To see how a bird “flinches” its way up a tree, or how a baby’s legs look as if they are wrapped in twine, is to engage with the very stuff of life. Explaining Anton Chekhov’s revolutionary understanding about life, Wood reminds us that “our inner lives run at their own speed. They are laxly calendared. They live in their own gentle almanac, and in his stories the free inner life bumps against the outer life like two different time-systems.” 

This is prescient. After all, we don’t always talk about “the plot” in our day-to-day conversations, nor do our lives adhere to some kind of prearranged dramatic arc. Wood doesn’t quote it, but Samuel Butler’s wise aphorism that “life is like trying to learn to play the violin and give concerts at the same time” is true not only about the human condition but about the world of fiction as well.  

Wood’s rigorous attentiveness to detail is a secular form of reverence for the real, a monkish devotion to le mot juste. There’s more to writing well than just finding the right word. As Wood explains, “When I talk about free indirect style I am really talking about point of view, and when I talk about point of view I am really talking about the perception of detail, and when I talk about detail I’m really talking about character, and when I talk about character I am really talking about the real, which is at the bottom of my inquiries.” All of these classic literary devices aren’t just there to be dutifully noted by scholars and students; they are each woven together with the almost invisible thread of the writer’s vision to create a theatre of the real. Wood is refreshingly free of dogmatism; he never ignores the influence of history and politics on a particular writer’s imagination, but he isn’t awarding brownie points for correct opinions.  

Wood is an atheist, but his atheism is richly informed by his early exposure to religion, having grown up in an evangelical Anglican household of stoic Northern English stock. This means that he comes by his secularism honestly, since he has already seen piety up close. Even if he’s chosen to reject it, he’s aware of how it has molded his thinking. Instead of callously dismissing the mystical obsessions of God-haunted types like Melville, Dostoevsky, and Woolf as much ado about nothingness, he empathizes with the tremendous torment they subject themselves to in order to peer into various metaphysical black holes and come back with stories to tell. “Poor Melville, lucky Melville!” Wood murmurs at the end of a magisterial essay on Moby Dick. There’s often a subtly redemptive comic approach to Wood’s philosophical inquiries. Approaching the genius of Saul Bellow through his brisk, antic, often comic narrative skills is a great way of entering his fictional world. Don Quixote is a knight of faith in his own eccentric way, but Wood also appreciates the knight’s hilariously Monty Pythonesque pratfalls during his mad quest. 

Most American readers probably don’t know the work of Jenny Erpenbeck, Ismail Kadare, and Bohumil Hrabal, three writers described as major figures in the new collection. I confess that I’ll probably never get the chance to read them myself. But after reading Wood’s essays I feel almost as if I’ve met them, that I’ve taken a brief guided tour through their works and lives, overhearing some of the tall tales told in one of Hrabal’s Prague beerhalls that are brewed into his many works. Wood’s essays are often more like prose portraits, life studies drawn from deep reading, going deeper than dry scholarly pedantry can fathom.  

And in his personal essays, which are underrepresented here, Wood shows a novelist’s eye for character; he can capture a person’s life in a couple of sentences or a telling image. Consider this ironic description of a priest: “The funereal uniform, supposed to obliterate the self in a shroud of colorlessness, also draws enormous attention to the self; humility seems to be made out of the same cloth as pride.” There’s a whole personality unfolding in the way he describes his father slumping into the couch after lunch “tired and entitled—but sweetly, not triumphantly” and listing the names of favorite classical performances. A hidden, private world of experience is contained in how he sketches his late father-in-law’s life: “what interested him were societies, tribes, roots, exiles, journeys, languages. . . . he floated on top of American life, fortunate, wounded, unmoored.” The receptiveness to an individual voice shines through in Wood’s appreciation of literary characters. He prefers to treat them as their own autonomous creations, deserving of attention and respect in their own right, rather than just empty puppets to be knocked around at their creator’s whim.

Wood always objected to such heedlessness, which is one of the reasons he caused a stir by criticizing a generation of postmodern writers for whom he invented the category of “hysterical realism.” Wood defined this new genre as fiction that “pursues vitality at all costs,” denouncing the kind of sprawling, overwrought novels that “know a thousand things but do not know a single human being.” His critique isn’t intended to defame, and accurately describes the tone and texture of novels by the likes of Zadie Smith and David Foster Wallace. But here I think Wood is mistaken: In many ways a figure like Wallace can be understood as a realist, even if his books are indeed filled with crazy plot twists, outrageous caricatures, and volumes of sheer information. Realism changes; it can’t help doing so. Wood cites Dickens’s endless catalogues of minor characters and labyrinthine plot twists as one of hysterical realism’s forebears, and that’s probably correct. But though Dickens is still applicable to the world we now live in, Wallace and his contemporaries are too. It goes without saying that the average person’s experience of modernity has mutated into something that would be almost unimaginable 200 years ago; the density of information present in Wallace’s fiction, and the ambient anxiety that comes with it, is omnipresent in our lived experience. 

Agree or disagree with any particular judgment, Wood’s criticism is always made in good faith and with an open mind. His nuanced and sensitive approach to the form graciously affirms his credo that “literature teaches us to notice.” Henry James once advised an up-and-comer “to be one of those on whom nothing is lost.” It’s a tall order and probably impossible to truly live up to. But reading Wood on literature can help. At his best, Wood not only enhances our understanding of the books themselves but helps lift our line of vision a little higher—in order to see what others see, to notice what they notice, and to keep noticing more deeply and more seriously. In the end, it’s in those details that life really lies.

The post James Wood and the Art of Criticism appeared first on The American Interest.

Historians Defeat Resolutions Denouncing Israel

On January 5, 2020, an estimated 25,000 people marched from lower Manhattan across the Brooklyn Bridge to raise their voices against anti-Semtism and hatred. We did so in the aftermath of the surge of violent attacks on Jews in and near New York City in recent weeks. On the same day, uptown at its annual meetings, members of the American Historical Association gathered, as they had in 2015 and again in 2016, to defeat by decisive margins resolutions denouncing Israel.

The same group that had proposed the previous resolutions in 2015 and 2016 again received enough member signatures to place it on the agenda of the AHA’s Business Meeting. But yet again the members present defeated two resolutions denouncing Israel’s policies regarding travel restrictions and the state of academic freedom. The vote against the resolutions was 81-40 against, with one abstention, on the travel issue, and 61-36 against, with three abstentions, on the academic freedom resolution.

This is the third time that the AHA Business Meeting has voted on resolutions denouncing Israel. In a fourth effort, similar resolutions did not come up for a vote at the Business Meeting. On all four occasions, the resolutions denouncing Israel were introduced by a group calling itself “Historians Against War” (HAW), which in 2014 supported an academic boycott of Israel, and which renamed itself “Historians for Peace and Democracy” (HPAD). This year the opposition to these resolutions was led by a group entitled Alliance for Academic Freedom (AAF), which defines itself as representing members who are “progressive scholars and academics who reject the notion that one has to be either pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian.”

In the discussion of this year’s resolutions, there were no new arguments or assertions of fact that had not been presented in previous discussions. One important difference, however, was that the resolutions denouncing Israel were refuted even more thoroughly than on past occasions. Two members of the AAF, Professor David Greenberg of the history department at Rutgers University and Professor Sharon Musher of Stockton University played a decisive role in distributing carefully prepared factual rebuttals to the accusations made in the resolutions. Professor Alice Kessler-Harris of Columbia University, also an AAF member, did so as well. These impressive, well-researched texts included one offering a detailed rebuttal of “Two Flawed Resolutions,” a second  on “Academic Freedom Worldwide,” and a third summarizing the arguments why the AHA should not adopt the resolutions. Cary Nelson’s valuable study, Israel Denial: Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the Faculty Campaign Against the Jewish State, also contributed to the detailed and careful rebuttal of claims common to such resolutions. Though not a member of AAF, I joined those urging colleagues to attend the meeting and to oppose the resolutions. We were among those who used a two-minute time limit to make the case for or against the resolutions. Two prominent historians spoke in favor of the resolutions denouncing Israel: Professor Joan Scott, now emerita from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton; and Professor Barbara Weinstein, member of the New York University department of history, who is a past president of the AHA.

As in 2015 and 2016, AHA members, including a past president and several other former officers of the organization, stressed that, as the AHA is a scholarly, not political, organization, it does not and should not have a foreign policy. These speakers pointed out that there are numerous other organizations in which members of the AHA are free to participate as citizens to express their views about Israel. Several speakers rejected what they saw as an effort to attempt to misuse the professional prestige of this organization for political purposes. As this was the fourth time that the HAW/HPAD had brought up resolutions denouncing Israel, those of us opposed to the resolutions saw their repeated introduction as part of the larger BDS campaign, the goal of which was not only to criticize specific Israeli policies but to do so as part of an effort to undermine the legitimacy of the state of Israel in order to bring about its demise.

In view of the HAW/HPAD determination to bring these resolutions to a vote despite the compelling evidence brought against them previously, three points concerning historical context, facts and evidence, and the question of anti-Semitism are particularly important.

When one reads BDS material and HAW/HPAD documents, one would have no idea that Israel has any security problems at all. These texts read as if, for reasons having to do presumably with the original sin of its founding, Israel inexplicably violates human rights, arbitrarily restricts student travel in Gaza, and willfully violates the academic freedom of Palestinians. In 2015 and 2016, in both written and oral statements, AHA members offered evidence that educational institutions had dramatically expanded on the West Bank since 1967, that a significant percentage of students at Israeli universities were Arabs, and that travel restrictions affecting students in Hamas-controlled Gaza have to do with security concerns regarding terrorism—concerns that are shared by the government of Egypt. In 2020, “Two Flawed Resolutions” introduced evidence that Hamas itself severely restricted travel by students from Gaza and, for the first time, offered documents examining attacks on academic freedom by Palestinian and Hamas representatives at universities in Gaza and in the West Bank. Whether AHA members had time to read and ponder this evidence before the vote is uncertain.

One of the most peculiar aspects of the BDS phenomenon and the attacks on Israel is that they come overwhelmingly from academics who regard themselves as leftists. This is an irony I pointed out in the pages of this magazine in 2014: the refusal to denounce the fascist and blatantly anti-Semitic essence of Hamas, as contained in its founding and still-relevant Charter of 1988. In the course of AHA debates in 2015 and 2016, I mentioned the nature of Hamas and pointed out that its infamous Charter has been available on the internet for many years, perhaps as long as two decades or more. AHA members with a few mouse clicks could see that the wars that Hamas has started against Israel flow directly from the unambiguous Jew-hatred of its charter. For Hamas there is no distinction at all between hatred of Judaism as a religion, Jews as a people, and the state of Israel—that is, there is no distinction between its anti-Semitism and its anti-Zionism and openly declared intent to destroy the state of Israel by force of arms.

It is a fact, evident both in the resolutions they adopt and their historical scholarship, that the HAW/HPAD members regard themselves as leftists. Yet they are part of a very strange “left,” one that repeats the factual assertions and interpretations of deeply reactionary organizations such as Hamas. While criticizing Israel, the resolutions are silent about the openly racist nature of the Hamas Charter, its repetition of the conspiracy theories of 20th-century European anti-Semitism, its imposition of dictatorship within Gaza, and its rocket attacks on southern Israel. Unbalanced denunciations of Israel that neglect to mention Palestinian terrorism have been common in world politics and at the United Nations. Yet members of the American Historical Association, whether they are experts in the history of the Middle East or not, know that the context of these events includes the agency of Arab states, the government of Iran, and organizations seeking the destruction of Israel such as Hezbollah and Hamas. Clearly, some members of the AHA have also read the Hamas Charter and know that Israel is not the only acting subject in the politics of the Middle East.

Equally bizarre in the HAW/HPAD resolutions and statements is the absence of any agency attributed to Palestinian and Islamist organizations. The texts fail to mention any actions taken by Hamas or the Palestinian Authority, not to mention Hezbollah and the government of Iran, that would cause concern for the government of Israel. Theirs is a Middle East conflict in which there is no Arab terrorism, no suicide bombers, no rocket attacks on schools and farms, and no knife attacks in Jerusalem.

The HAW/HPAD resolutions reintroduce factual assertions that were demonstrated in 2015 and 2016 to be false. In 2020, as before, they denounce Israel’s bombing of buildings on the campus of the Islamic University in Gaza. To reintroduce this criticism is to ignore the widely documented fact that Israel launched the attack because Hamas used these buildings to construct, test, and possibly launch weapons aimed at Israel. The AAF submitted documents reminding AHA members of this reality of war and of Hamas’s violation of the rules of war in placing weapons in such places. I cannot speak for others, but I think many of my fellow historians must have found it very irritating that historians would reintroduce assertions that had been so widely discredited. Especially at a time when the phrase “post-truth” has entered into common English usage, the dismissal of facts and evidence by the HAW/HPAD leftists was a regrettable display of the kind of ideological politics we are accustomed to seeing from the opposite end of the political spectrum.

The AAF statements focused on refuting the factual inaccuracies of BDS-type resolutions and demonstrating their inappropriateness for a professional organization. The fact that many of those supporting the resolutions are themselves Jewish, and that the Israeli government’s policies are sources of great contention within Israel itself, has meant that the issue of anti-Semitism has not played a major role in the AHA debates. Yet, as a historian who has written extensively about that subject in the history of both Germany and Germany’s interaction with the Middle East, I have concluded that, given the centrality of Hamas in the events related to these resolutions, it is a subject that should be addressed. Here are notes I prepared before I spoke at the meeting:

“No one who opposes these resolutions has suggested that criticism of various Israeli policies is necessarily an example of anti-Semitism. On the other hand, everyone here knows that, since 2016, the policies of the governments of China, Russia, Iran, Syria, Turkey, Poland, and Hungary, among others, all raise doubts about the AHA’s concerns about threats to academic freedom. AHA officers have commented on issues of concern in some of these countries, but Israel is the only country that has been the object of efforts to have members vote on resolutions of condemnation. However—especially in view of the approximately 370,000 or more people killed and several million made refugees by the Assad regime in Syria since 2011—the obsession with Israel and the silence about sins of others raises suspicions that something else is at work.

“These resolutions, and their repeated reintroduction, are part of a political campaign to undermine the legitimacy of the Jewish state. Their focus on policies concerning access to academia obscures this fundamentally destructive purpose. This political campaign aims not at ending the occupation of the West Bank but, as leaders of the BDS campaign have made clear, at terminating “the occupation” of what is now the state of Israel. To seek the destruction of the state of Israel is an example of anti-Semitism. It could not be brought about without a massive amount of violence inflicted on the citizens of Israel.

“One task that historians have adopted at times is to place the present in historical context. For centuries, first in religious and then in secular language, anti-Semites have imagined Jews as uniquely powerful and evil. The Jew as Christ killer, murderer of the prophets, and then director of an international global conspiracy was central to the view of powerful malevolence of “the Jew.” With the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the powerful and evil Jew of the paranoid Western imagination appeared to become reality as the Jews, for the first time in many centuries won the elements of sovereignty and power—arms, control of borders, a judicial system, and diplomatic advocates. This Jewish entry into the normality of the world of nation- states has proven difficult if not impossible for the anti-Semitic imagination to accept, as it appears to be a nightmare that has become reality. It is my view that the remnants of these age-old ideas about Jewish power and evil contribute to these resolutions. They draw energy from animus to the powerful and evil Jew of old and transfer it to the allegedly evil racist and imperialist Zionist.

“That tradition fuels these attacks on the very small and vulnerable Jewish state and the simultaneous silence about the sins of other, far larger, non-Jewish states and the terrorist organizations that reside on Israel’s borders. No matter how indignantly the supporters of these resolutions deny it, the spirit of anti-Semitism present in the vision of the powerful and murderous Jew reappears as the racist and imperialist Zionist. Historians, and not only cultural and intellectual historians, more than any other group of scholars or professionals, understand that especially when we believe we are most free from past traditions, these traditions, to quote Karl Marx, “weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” They continue to influence our thinking and our passions in ways that we sometimes only dimly understand.

“If the AHA passes these resolutions, especially on the same day that thousands are marching against anti-Semitism in this city, the damage to this organization will be considerable. The simultaneity of a massive protest of tens of thousands against anti-Semitism with a vote by professional historians denouncing Israel would associate the AHA with anti-Semitism. I would not be surprised if young Jews who are thinking of pursuing careers as historians will now think long and hard about doing so. Young Jews already in the profession, or others who may have a good word to say for Israel, will be likely to suppress their views in order not to offend. The resolutions could reintroduce an era of open discrimination against Jews, made all the more difficult to counter as it would drape itself in the language of human rights, intersectionality, and anti-racism. Conversely, we have the opportunity, as we did in 2015 and 2016, to defeat these resolutions. Doing so will also make a clear statement that the AHA rejects the anti-Semitism that has accompanied recent campaigns to attack the Jewish state. I urge this body to make that statement.”

The resolutions were defeated but by smaller numbers than in 2015 and 2016. Of the 12,000 members of the AHA, about 3,000 to 4,000 attend the annual convention, and even fewer participate in the Business Meeting. Most members come to meet with their fellow historians and discuss historical scholarship, not to debate the politics of Israel and the Palestinians. In this context, the logic of collective action gives an advantage to a determined minority that refuses to be convinced to change its views when faced by compelling facts and evidence. In response, many other AHA members have had to spend a considerable amount of time and money to oppose these flawed resolutions. HAW/HPAD promised that they would “be back” next year to introduce similar resolutions. Their repeated efforts to use a scholarly organization for political purposes reflect a vision of a totally politicized society, one at odds with the principles on which a scholarly and professional organization such as the AHA rests. The historians of HAW/HPAD have ignored evidence, dismissed context, and refused to see how their views echo very old hatreds of the Jews. While these arguments will not likely change the minds of the militant minority that has repeatedly introduced them, I hope that they continue to strike a nerve among most of the members of the AHA. Perhaps in the coming year, irritation with those who continue to take up the organization’s time and energy with this issue will grow. The AHA and other professional and scholarly organizations should consider preventing the reintroduction of political resolutions on the same subject for a period of at least a year if not several years. For now, however, this country’s oldest and most important organization of historians has once more defeated efforts to hijack it for political purposes.

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The Tragic Rationality of Europe’s Iran Policy

After the American drone assault on Qasem Soleimani, Tehran’s de facto No. 2, EU Council chief Charles Michel predictably tweeted that the “vicious circle of force, provocation, and retaliation. . . .must stop.” Resist escalation, whose flames would engulf the entire Middle East, ran the counsel. In short: Count us out.

Germany’s Foreign Minister, Heiko Maas, pledged to wield “all levers” to squelch escalation. Berlin would talk to everybody, “including Iran.” He pressed the United States to respect the Iraqi parliament that demanded the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the country, calling Donald Trump’s threats against Iran “not very helpful.” To get out of harm’s way, Germany will “thin out” and redeploy its mighty force in Iraq, all 120 of them—instructors, not combatants.

Though Britain, according to its Foreign Secretary, was “on the same page” as the Americans, Prime Minister Boris Johnson would work with the EU to urge de-escalation. French President Emmanuel Macron called for “restraint” on all sides. Trump’s European friends, the Poles, also sought to “defuse tensions.” NATO head Jens Stoltenberg, normally ready to flex the Alliance’s muscles, reiterated the European party line: “The important thing now is to de-escalate.”

Calming the waters, of course, is what diplomats do; it’s in their DNA. But as evenhanded go-betweens, the Europeans are out of their depth, which is “no accident, comrades,” as the Soviets used to say. Unless they want to be ignored or outflanked by the principals, arbitrators must be equipped to weigh in with power. To succeed, peacemakers should be able to threaten spiteful antagonists with dire consequences or at least with the denial of support. Lacking such clout, the Europeans plead, warn, and cajole.

Mr. Trump is not impressed, and neither is Ali Khamenei, the Religious Leader. He did not go for a merely a symbolic strike against U.S. forces in Iraq in order to please the Europeans. Whatever happens next will also unfold in the context of American escalation dominance.  The United States has allies throughout the region; Iran has only tiny Qatar. The United States has bases all around; Iran does not even have one in Cuba.

Caught in the middle, the EU is no dwarf who would be reduced to empty-handed posturing between the two antagonists—at least not on paper. Start with friendless Iran. Its economy is tottering, so the EU could threaten severe sanctions to save whatever is left of the nuclear deal (JCPOA). Tehran now wants to shred it, by going for uranium enrichment toward weapons-grade levels. Europe wags its finger only softly. Angst edges out resolve because punitive sanctions, as the catechism has it, would actually accelerate Iran’s march to the Bomb.

The EU might also field a credible fleet to deter Iran from sinking tankers in the Gulf. But with one French ship and two UK vessels? Britain had some 250 major surface combat vessels in World War II; now it is down to 20. Germany has 14—not a blue water navy, but one configured for the Baltic and the North Sea. Berlin has already bowed out of the Gulf flotilla; thank you for the invitation, Mr. Trump. Their well-considered interests would urge the Europeans to secure the energy lifeline passing through the Gulf. Yet the lack of naval strength undercuts strategic logic. Add sheer fear, given that Iran can hit back asymmetrically with a terror campaign in Europe.

Now turn to Donald Trump. How would Europe keep him in line? The EU will not inflict sanctions on the globe’s mightiest economy. Would the Europeans deny the United States basing and overflight rights and so separate itself from the superpower that still guarantees their security? There is no love lost between Macron, Merkel et al., and Trump; indeed, alienation courses ever more strongly through the Alliance, the world’s oldest. Still, fear and loathing will not cut through the dependence that chains Europe to its patron from across the sea.

Let’s set aside the frayed friendship and invoke hard-nosed realpolitik. It might counsel the Europeans to embrace Trump in order to leash him, to hold him close to keep him from running off the cliff. Add the commonality of interests toward Iran, such as stopping its expansion across the Middle East, its nuclear ambitions, and the deployment of surrogates against Western allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia. Alas, siding with Trump is a fool’s errand even for America’s best friends. 

The President does not reward loyalty. Instead, he breaks commitments with the abandon of a small child who has not yet learned the virtue of promise-keeping, let alone the value of reciprocity. Nobody in his right mind would get in bed with a man who will reverse himself in the space of two tweets. Take Iran as a case in point. 

Trump did not move after Iran’s attack on Saudi oil fields last year, leaving his best Arab ally in the lurch. He did not retaliate against the downing of a U.S. drone. And suddenly, out of the blue, he kills Soleimani. True, the general was the mastermind behind Tehran’s expansion all the way to the Mediterranean. Yet he has been in American sights for years while racking up deadly hits on U.S. troops by his stand-ins. Great powers should not abruptly switch from pussycat to tiger instead of serving a long-term strategic design. That’s exactly what Trump did, though, stunning friends and foes alike. 

How about a summit with Ali Khamenei? Trump has done it before; recall the Kim Jong-un caper. Or beefing up U.S. troops as prelude to a pull-out to end America’s “endless wars” in the world’s oldest arena of great power rivalry? Lest we forget, this is a familiar American habit, as both George W. Bush and Barack Obama zigzagged between “surges” and draw-downs, never mind those who had joined their fates to the United States. The pattern transcends the antics of Donald Trump. A remake on his part would leave America’s allies, who have committed forces to the region, with nothing to chew on but the bitter fruits of their gullibility. 

America, thy name is capriciousness; but this is only one reason why even its best friends hang back from Trump’s mano-a-mano with the Khameinists. The fundamental fault line is drawn by Europe’s impotence. To crib from Thucydides, the strong do because they can, and the weak don’t do what they should. Theoretically, the Europeans should join the United States in the containment of Iran. The West and the Sunni states are facing a revolutionary, not just revisionist, power. Revisionists merely want to increase their pile of chips; they can be swayed by give-and-take in the European way. On a mission from God, Iran’s revolutionaries want to overturn the table and demolish the casino. In the end, they must be defanged by superior force, as was Napoleon, or by awe-inspiring deterrent strength, as was the Soviet Union. 

In their hearts, EU leaders know the difference between a revisionist and a revolutionary power. Yet in spite of their fabulous assets, they will not rekindle their great power vocation. Why would they, when two world wars have ended their imperial careers while America gifted them security at a steep discount? 

So, in the latest U.S.-Iran clash, the EU has acted rationally. Wisely, this rich and risk-averse “civilian power” has distanced itself from the hit-and-run man in the White House who will betray partners in a day’s tweets. Burned so often by American hauteur, a strategic lightweight like the EU cannot but resort to suasion, mediation, and de-escalation to evade entrapment in a conflict it cannot control. “Honi soit qui mal y pense,” runs a famous French phrase: Shame on those who think evil of it. Don’t blame the weak for choosing discretion over valor when they cannot stand up to the bullies of this world.

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5G and the Fallacies of Techno-Optimism

The 5G story is everywhere in the American press these days, and not just the American press. You can barely turn around to scratch some needy body part without encountering another article about the wireless telecommunications technology. But the stovepiping in this coverage—the narrowing of the questions asked or answered—is acute.

Some tell a technology story, intended either to minister to the anointed guild of Silicon Valley wizards, or to self-consciously unworthy techno-naifs (like me), answering questions like: What exactly is 5G? What’s it for? And how will it change anything significant on the macrosocial or personal level?

Others tell a corporate and economic story: How much money is to be made? Who’s liable to make it? And with what lateral impact for national economies, globalized businesses and their share prices, and certain international hubs (like Singapore) that thrive by collecting pass-through rents?

Others tell a security story: How does the Chinese lead in 5G and even early research into 6G foreshadow the future of Sino-American competition in intelligence and military domains?

Still others tell a wider geopolitical story: What does the current 5G race portend for the future of the Sino-American strategic competition? How might it affect relative soft power, and the appeal of great power economic links to extant and potential allies? What does it say about broader structural questions in comparative politics and geoeconomics, like the merits of having a national industrial policy or, lacking that, an old-fashioned semi-coherent Federal research and development program? Will the winner of this race be able to shape the world not just geopolitically, but also culturally and morally?

Almost no one, as usual, tells a story—or even asks trenchant questions—about the social and cultural effects of 5G implementation and the on-ramp it portends for future IT and AI innovation. How will the recombinant social DNA effects loop back into the political and cultural foundations of our nation? And they surely will, because state-change-scale technological innovation always feeds back into fundamentals.

Above all, very nearly nobody tries to tell just one integrated story combining all of these factors, and so devise a template to guide decision-makers. Why? Because it’s hard, requires cross-disciplinary talents and experience, cannot be done in vogue short-form, and won’t attract enough sagacious readers for any sponsor or publisher to make money from it.

Just Two Observations

I’ve no intention of mounting such an effort here. I want only to make two brief observations, and to end with what may be the real question at issue.

First observation: Here in Southeast Asia, the prospect of what everyone calls “decoupling” between U.S. and Chinese trade and technological systems, with 5G standing as a connective symbol touching both points, is a cause of well-exercised consternation. Koreans refer to Korea as a shrimp among whales. Well, if we extend that metaphor, most Southeast Asian countries would be plankton squeezed between a powerful but far-off America and a China waxing strong and much closer by.

All ASEAN country leaderships therefore prefer to hedge, and they have lots of practice at it, but decoupling threatens to shrink their maneuvering space. Decoupling in terms of trade they take to mean likely diminished velocity and volume, meaning less overwash benefits for themselves. Decoupling in terms of global-reach communications and critical infrastructure management systems means choosing one system of systems to align with, to the exclusion of the other.

Faced with choices most governments do not wish to make, it’s already clear which way most are leaning: toward China. Just incidentally, this is why suggestions that the U.S. government enable American companies to license/lease Huawei technology do not address the deeper geopolitical issue posed by 5G. That might solve some problems, but it might also reify perceptions of U.S. decline and dependency, and not just in Asia.

The reasons for regional elites choosing China are simple at one level: Near-term economic stakes have vastly more political salience in contemporary Southeast Asia than longer-term security stakes. Moreover, overall U.S. technological prowess is perceived, accurately or not, as being in relative decline, dovetailing with a perception of a general U.S. retreat from its alliance obligations.

It dovetails as well with perceptions that are softer, less simple, and less obvious, but not less powerful. A rising China that is optimistic, hopeful, and future-postured reflects closely and justifiably (as far as the basic numbers go) the buoyant mood in the region; an America beset by hemorrhaging self-confidence and social trust, and mired in a “dirty white” shade of MAGA nostalgia, does not. “Dirty white” is not a popular shade in this part of the world, a place where enough people remember the relevant history even if Americans don’t. Note that Japanese and Indian elites know this too, and it must affect the characteristic provisional thinking that inhabits the backs of their minds. What happens in Southeast Asia doesn’t all stay in Southeast Asia.

Second observation: A certain amount of cognitive dissonance mists the air here. Some claim that 5G anxiety is hyped; it’s not critical, not a can’t-go-back tipping point. It helps that some of those downplaying the matter know little about the technology and its likeliest applications. They are perhaps fooling themselves, but they needn’t fool us.

5G is indeed a big deal. Note just two of several bare bones aspects. First, 5G is not just about speed but also computing power in one of those cases where differences of degree add up to a difference in kind. The 5G network concept amounts to an engine that can drive many sorts of vehicles. We don’t even know the names and functions of all those vehicles yet, but the existence of a motor liberates potential heretofore locked in a prison of improbability. A different kind of open-endedness pervades 5G that cannot be inferred from the experience of the internet.

Second, prospective 5G networks are new infrastructural elements dependent on the internet but separate from it at the same time. A 5G network has physical characteristics that require placing material assets in finite space, even as it doesn’t need to be physically connected to whatever devices it is computing with and for. This means that novel physical security issues abound for both companies and governments in ways they have not for the internet.

Finally on this second observation, just as 5G embodies open-ended functional capabilities, so new capabilities will likely goad even more powerful network capacities into existence. So we likely stand now at a future path dependency point: Whoever dominates 5G and profits from it will be in a better position to get to 6G and 7G fastest—although the possibility of a radical flip to a completely different concept to achieve similar ends cannot be ruled out. Since no U.S. company is even in the 5G running, itself a shocking and revelatory fact, the security implications are huge. Let’s parse just one of them.

From the start of the IT age, U.S. technology has dominated the global field. The National Security Agency has therefore held a significant advantage over competitors at doing the two things, and the only two things, its mandate describes: keeping proprietary U.S. information safe; and making sure that others’ information is not safe from U.S. monitoring. (Call the latter whatever you like.) If the basic technology in future is not Made-in-USA, then others may do for themselves and to us what we have been accustomed to doing to them.

If we have to choose our technological betters, we would prefer partners in places like Finland, Sweden, Germany, Japan, and South Korea—not China, whose interests and values as relates to IT/AI technology and its uses are anathema to us. That, in turn, is just one more reason why it is so unwise to alienate one’s closest allies. If the President had a clue about how to really protect and advance U.S. competitiveness in the longer run, he would not be dissing the Germans, French, Japanese, and so on.

Besides which we probably won’t get to choose. Chinese technology, and all it implies about information security, military command-and control functions, and surveillance in its broadest applications, might come to shape the world—and shape it in ways most Americans do not like but might feel compelled to follow anyway. Presently non-negotiable aspects of our political culture itself may thus be put at risk if the gap between others’ IT/AI capabilities and U.S. capabilities widens. State-change quality technological innovation always doubles back to affect social and political fundamentals, remember? Here is a plausible example to chew on.

Technological Determinism and the Absence of Its Discontents

Most of us can remember the technological optimism of a quarter century ago. Burgeoning information technology innovation would liberate us, improve community and democracy, and make everyone wealthier and happier. Those who warned of downsides were dismissed as Luddites. So where are we now?

Whatever benefits individuals, companies, and even arguably in some cases societies as a whole may have reaped from the IT tsunami, we Americans are also demonstrably more disengaged socially, lonelier, less civil, more alienated from each other and our traditional civic and cultural values, more polarized, and more fearful. IT tech immersion may not be responsible for all of this, but it would be strange if it were not involved in most of it. I’d bet on the proposition that we are in the midst of another episode of Harold Innis’s insight that “sudden extensions of communication are reflected in cultural disturbances” (The Bias of Communication, 1951).

We are terrible at off-the-cuff technological forecasting, at least when it comes to the social and social-psychological effects of step-change-scale innovation. We have always been bad at it, invariably exaggerating the up sides and discounting the rest. That’s been true whether the innovation to hand has been the internal combustion engine, the interstate highway system, the birth control pill, or mapping the human genome—just to name a few obvious examples. Anyone who claims that the IT/AI prospectus now upon us is an exception begs the burden of proof.

Since few sentient observers will argue against the evidence, it is striking how avidly we are forging ahead into the brave new world of an IT/AI future with barely the bat of an eyelash. For all our experience, our default-mode optimism has not much dimmed. Some now suggest, just to take one example, that an AI world can be more selectively moral than a human world, because humans—say, soldiers in a combat zone—will act immorally (or at least amorally) under pressure, whereas a machine can (supposedly) be programmed to do as an ideally moral person would do every time. Is it wise to delegate human moral agency to a machine under some circumstances in order to protect us from our least noble selves? Which circumstances? Who gets to choose, and how? Not simple questions. The commercial media blobosphere doesn’t feature many essays on them.

Technological optimism isn’t always easy to distinguish from technological determinism, and figuring out how the two interact is tougher still. The latter often comes down to technological fatalism if we’re honest about it, and it isn’t new. “You can’t stop progress” has long been an American mantra. That new ticky-tacky shopping center being put up for the purpose of selling mostly made-to-break junk, where beautiful rolling hills of living forests, farms, and gardens used to be? That’s just how it goes.

Note, however, that the ungainly amalgam of technological optimism/fatalism has been buttressed over the decades not just by the momentum of a too lightly regulated capitalism, but also by a series of intellectual regressions on the part of supposedly intelligent people. One set of high priests told us way back when that we have no significant free will thanks to our location with respect to the means of production (Marxists). Another set told us we have no significant free will because of our subconscious (Freudians). Still other sets have more recently told us we have no significant free will because of our genes and our circumstances of birth. Hey, some have claimed: We don’t even exist as coherent individuals: Our “narrator” is a fantasy masking our objective sectionality within.

Not everyone believes these sirens, but the better educated among us tend to believe them more than do typical Americans. So why is anyone surprised by the depth of technological fatalism, since elites have vastly more capacity to mold the national mindset than the sum of American gothics? The high achievers among us behold only technical issues when something goes wrong and seek technical answers to what are not at root technical questions. The rest suffer in confusion what they must, their intuitions drowned in pools of condescension provided courtesy of their betters.

All this goes on at a time when radical forms of individualism—the one-two punch of market fundamentalism from the right, expressive individualism from the left—have hollowed out our sense of national (and more local) community. So here is the rub: How do we square the pervasiveness of technological fatalism, embodied by the near-total absence of serious debate about 5G, with the free-will premise that inheres in radical individualism?

We’re not talking about H.G. Wells’s Time Machine Eloi here circa 1895, after all. The combination conjures a vision of tens of millions of “free” Americans pretending to forms of creative self-realization that can’t logically coexist with levels of technological fatalism as high as they have been and still are. This vision, or rather this specter, in turn raises the question: Are we, as a society, sane?

The question needs be raised, because here we go again: 5G is inevitable, then 6G and onward, and we assume it will all end up being on balance good as well as inevitable: It will make things better, easier, more convenient; we’ll be more affluent and happier, and our politics will heal and face forward again as soon as we get rid of the atavism currently blocking the door. There is no justification for such optimism in the face of the failed technology predictions of the still-recent past.

Yes, looking out, 5G bears important technological, economic, business, security, and larger geopolitical implications. As with earlier generative innovation surges, not all the news will be bad, and we might get a better feel for the mix to come if we ever manage to see the elements of a 5G reality united in a coherent picture. But while we’re at it, can we perhaps spare just a moment to look in, as well?

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The Foreign Policy Debate We Need

The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

Samantha Power

Dey Street Books, 2019, 592 pp., $29.99
The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal

William J. Burns

Random House, 2019, 512 pp., $32.00

This past December, the U.S. Senate joined the House of Representatives in recognizing as genocide the Ottoman Empire’s killing of some one and a half million Armenians in 1915. Former President Barack Obama’s Ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, penned a column for the New York Times, congratulating the U.S. Congress for doing, at long last, the right thing. There had for decades been a historical consensus that the destruction of the Armenian community in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire constituted genocide, and Power was right to affirm it. She was further justified in declaring the Congressional vote a personal victory. 

As she describes in her recent memoir, The Education of an Idealist, Power worked overtime expending moral suasion to convince Obama’s White House to press for this recognition. She documents her efforts to have Obama declare his support during a state visit to Turkey. She was unable to overcome the President’s unwillingness then. But is she right to believe that her idealpolitik has triumphed today?

Congress’s recognition last month of the genocide was hardly the result of some moral catharsis. Rather, it was the decision of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to purchase the Russian missile complex S-400, and his military offensive against the Kurds in Northern Syria, that impelled and (at last) incentivized Congress to act: Idealpolitik was expressed after all, but for reasons of realpolitik. The question to pose is whether America’s recognition of the Armenian genocide was a sign of America’s high-mindedness or of Washington’s hypocrisy. Was the vote in Congress in actuality a victory, or a defeat of Power’s vision of foreign policy as a moral choice?

Fulminations against the hypocrisy of the West, and liberalism more generally, can be heard today in all corners of the globe. Plaintiffs charge that the West, the United States in particular, is guilty of imposing its social and political model as a universal norm, deploying the language of liberal values to paper over its hegemonic power ambitions, and selectively impugning illiberalism depending on its own economic and military interests. This obsession with hypocrisy is a common trait among very different ideological actors. Political subjects as different as the radical left and right in the EU, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, jihadists in the Middle East and anti-imperialists in Latin America, all share a worldview that the final act of the West’s morality play is embodied in its double standards. A global war on liberalism has taken the form of a war on hypocrisy.

In this context, the fate of idealpolitik in an age of state-sponsored cynicism merits closer examination. How is one to balance the desire to be on the right side of history with the obligation to do no harm and to promote effectively a nation’s interests? This has been a central question in foreign policy from Hans Morgenthau to George Kennan, and it will quite likely find its apotheosis in a post-Trump America, whenever that time arrives, by an anti-Trump generation mistrustful of American power but inclined to view political questions as moral ones. It is because of this that Samantha Power’s memoir should be of particular interest for those seeking to ascertain the future of American foreign policy.

Samantha Power’s reflections can be profitably read in conjunction with another recent memoir, by career diplomat and former Deputy Secretary of State William Burns. Burns’s The Back Channel and Power’s The Education of an Idealist are, in our view, the two most important books by Obama’s senior foreign policy officials, and neatly demarcate the choices America’s foreign policy will face in the next decade. These choices, always contingent on the state of geopolitics, will now be further constrained by Trump’s dismal legacy in foreign affairs, namely the loss of America’s global authority. (The United States, of course, had already lost its hegemonic role before Trump took office.)

Samantha Power is a gifted writer. Her style is personal and sculpted with passion. She knows implicitly that penning a memoir requires a form very much the opposite of preparing remarks for a hearing in the Senate. If upon her confirmation to become Barack Obama’s ambassador to the UN she followed the advice of Kevin Costner’s character in Bull Durham—“You’re gonna have to learn your clichés…they are your friends”—in writing her memoirs she has jettisoned those clichés. Power emerges from the book to be ambitious, talented, yet somehow vulnerable. 

Power is the poster child of the human rights decade—the 1990s—when America was so strong that the world’s problems were debated as moral questions in Washington. But the fall of the Berlin Wall, arguably the watershed moment for 1990s Pax Americana policymaking, was not the event that sparked Power’s interest in politics. It was instead the tragedy at Tiananmen. 

Power’s political sensibility was informed by a belief that America is in the end responsible for all of the great wrongs that transpire in the world, and that it has not only the strength but the obligation to prevent them. She cut her teeth as a war reporter in the Balkans who dreamt of being a prosecutor bringing ethnic cleansers and genocidaires to justice. Indeed, she wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on genocide, in which the bystander (in her moral universe) carries the same share of blame as the perpetrator for many of the 20th century’s catastrophes. Her enduring faith is in American exceptionalism: America’s exceptional strength and responsibility to do what’s just. Yet it is Samantha Power’s—and her generation’s—desire to be on the right side of history that helps to explain some of the cardinal missteps of Obama’s foreign policy and the consequent geopolitical world in which we live.

In his famous lecture “Politics as a Vocation,” Max Weber described an “ethic of conviction”—a quasi-religious drive to do what is thought to be right at all costs. It’s a concept that looms large today for those appalled by the amorality of transactional politics. Power’s aspiration is to be a diplomat-activist that partly makes her a darling to a new generation of Democratic Party foreign policy hands (even as her belief that American strength—particularly America’s military might—can be a force for good separates her from this same generation). But Weber contrasted the “ethic of conviction” with an “ethic of responsibility”—the idea that politicians should be judged not on the motives that pushed them to undertake certain actions but on the consequences of their actions. This concept holds the key to the major—if inadvertent—lesson of Power’s book: Idealism is effective only when it understands how power operates—particularly when it recognizes the limits of American power. Power’s desire to effect normative change around the globe seems genuine, but her grasp of politics is problematic. It is never clear whether her judgments are analytical arguments or normative propositions. Was her conviction, for example, that Assad “must go” a conclusion made after assessing the constellation of powers in Syria, or was it based on the normative assumption that people like Assad should not be allowed to govern?

The Arab Spring of 2011-12, Power contends, was the most influential geopolitical development of Obama’s two terms. The uprisings were also the moment when Obama’s younger advisers, including Power, were confident that they had studiously learned the lessons of 1989 and of Bosnia, and sought to prove that idealism, rather than cool geopolitical calculation, would be the force that wins the day. Such good intentions, we know, came up terribly short, and the world we today face is the result not only of George W. Bush’s calamitous war in Iraq, but also a consequence of Barack Obama’s foreign policy—a foreign policy fissured by the idealistic drive of his advisers and the circumspect instincts of their boss. This also helps explain why swaths of the American public were ready to accept Trump’s foolish claim that the United States is the biggest loser of the post-Cold War liberal order, and that American exceptionalism’s conceit of being on the right side of history (whatever that may ultimately mean) is not America’s strength but its vulnerability.

Samantha Power’s worldview consists of only three requisite actors: the American public, the American government, and the bad guys. What Power saw as her main responsibility both as a journalist and as a diplomat was to make public opinion and the government concur that America must do the right thing. Any reasonable claim of foreign policy complexity is, for her, a pretext for inaction. But it is this crusade for moral clarity that became the biggest weakness of the young idealists. America’s policy towards Libya is the best example. In search of a righteous policy move, Power and her allies failed to realize what the effect of Qaddafi’s removal would be on the non-proliferation regime, and neglected to understand that by removing him, they decided the fate not only of the Libyan strongman, but also of Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev, the world leader who Obama had called a dear friend at the end of his first term.

 In this context, reading Burns’s Back Channel alongside Power may be a salutary exercise for any aspiring American policymaker. Burns is a good writer on his own terms. Unlike Power’s memoir, which reads like a novel, his own reflections read like a diplomatic cable—but one penned with lucidity, deep understanding, and elegance. Power’s world is populated by activists, villains, and bystanders; Burns’s by adversaries that should be turned into partners and allies that should be kept as allies.

Burns’s “realism with a moral face” is a necessary corrective to a foreign policy predicated on conviction and moral rectitude. Unlike Power, Burns received his political education in the last years of the Cold War, and a quiet determination to apprehend the constraints of others is the focus of his diplomacy. Burns admires George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of State, James Baker, for his capacity to resist triumphalism at the Cold War’s end, and to recognize that less powerful nations always have legitimate interests. In Burns’s world, diplomacy seldom resolves problems, but it could be instrumental in managing them. Strewn throughout his memoir are the interests of states and the interests with which America contends. For Burns, getting the other side right is no less important than the noble drive to be on the right side of history. His realism is the antipode of cynicism or inaction.

In an unintended echo of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a new DC-based think tank, Burns makes abundantly clear that “the militarization of diplomacy is a trap.” He also declaims against the idealism inherent in the hubris of “nation-building” activities. “It sometimes seemed,” Burns avers, “as if we were trying to replicate the role of the nineteenth-century British Colonial Service.” He bristles at the notion of “American indispensability,” an assumption that Power accepts, and has myriad pages in his index dedicated to Israel/Palestine, compared with no mention at all in Power’s, an absence as distressing as it is unfathomable.

How to marry Samantha Power’s understanding that to govern is to capture the imagination of the public with Burns’s view that the task of diplomacy is not simply winning but facilitating an order accepted by others? This, in our estimation, is the debate that must happen for the future of American foreign policy, in a world in which America is less trusted than before, less feared than before, no less hated than before—but, because of all this, more needed than before.

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Is China About to Lose Taiwan for Good?

On January 11, the citizens of Taiwan will go to the polls to elect a President. If the current projections are right, the incumbent President, Tsai Ing-wen, will be elected for a second term. This will be the sixth national election since the turn of the century, four of which have been won by a Democratic Progressive Party candidate—the party that historically has had little interest in close ties with the Chinese mainland and absolutely no interest in unification.

Indeed, President Tsai’s victory in 2016 came in the aftermath of nationwide protests by Taiwanese who thought the administration of the then-President Ma Ying-jeou had negotiated too many agreements tying the island’s economy to that of the People’s Republic. Given the enormous difference in the size of the two economies, the various agreements Ma was signing were viewed as undermining Taiwan’s de facto independence. Ma’s party, the China-leaning Kuomintang (KMT), was swept out of office, losing not only the presidency but also its majority in Taiwan’s legislature.

After the elections for Mayors and local magistrates in November 2018 produced resounding and, in some instances, surprising victories for KMT candidates, Tsai’s prospects for re-election seemed dim. Never a populist-style candidate, Tsai’s government had tackled a number of highly contentious issues and did so in ways that many believed hurt their pocketbooks. It appeared that Taiwan’s politics were becoming normalized in the sense that one party wins, its popularity wanes for all kinds of reasons, and the other major party reasserts itself.

However, the ground shifted once again in the wake of the mass demonstrations that began in Hong Kong after the attempt to pass a law allowing Hong Kongers to be extradited to the PRC. The protests in Hong Kong, and Beijing’s harsh reaction to them, has put a nail in the coffin of the idea that Beijing was serious about maintaining the model of “one country, two systems” for the city. Promises of democracy had been put aside, and China was increasingly squeezing Hong Kong’s civic life into a narrower and narrower alley. Since the idea of “one country, two systems” was first bruited about by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping specifically for Taiwan as a way of bridging the gap between the two under “one China,” it was inevitable that events in Hong Kong would have an impact on Taiwanese public opinion. And they did. Although most Taiwanese are not looking for a fight with the mainland, the majority have reacted to events in Hong Kong by dramatically boosting Tsai, as the leader of the party seen as most reliable in guarding the island’s democracy. 

This shift was fueled in turn by the KMT nominating Han Kuo-yu, the Mayor of the port city Kaohsiung, whose campaign for Mayor appeared to be aided by Taiwan media (whose owners had large business interests on the mainland), and by reports that PRC operatives had assisted in Han’s own social media efforts. The fact that Han was slow to respond to what was going on in Hong Kong and, most recently, refused even to concede that China might be a threat to the island has only reinforced worries about how serious he would be in sustaining the country’s independence.

In short, whatever the complaints about Tsai’s government and its policies, the election had moved to new, more fundamental grounds.

None of this should come as a surprise. Poll after poll in recent years has shown that a declining number of the island’s residents identify themselves as Chinese—consistently well below 10 percent. Most see themselves as ethnically Chinese but Taiwanese citizens, or simply Taiwanese. Self-rule in Taiwan has only deepened the island’s sense of itself as a distinct nation.

This trend is running headlong into President Xi Jinping’s goal to bring the island into the mainland’s fold, which in turn is bumping into the Trump Administration’s policy agenda of a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific.” Xi’s imperial ambitions for China cannot coexist with a U.S. national security policy that defines China as a revisionist power determined to overturn the American regional security order. Something has to give. The status quo in which the United States engages with China and Taiwan under the “one China” principle, with Washington’s only red line being a “peaceful” resolution of Taiwan Strait relations, is unraveling before our eyes.

It’s unraveling in good measure because Xi’s ambitions have coincided with the steady and substantial modernization of the Chinese military. The balance of military power in the Strait has flipped from 20 years ago. And while the Trump team should be credited with expediting arms sales to Taiwan, the question is whether the arms being bought are sufficient or the right ones. Nor has it helped that the Trump Administration has not taken up in a more substantive way Congress’s push to have closer military-to-military ties with the Taiwanese. 

Taiwan’s location—situated between the two treaty-allied states of Japan and the Philippines, with waterways north and south of the island through which China could reach into the broader Pacific, and just north of the South China Sea—is undoubtedly of strategic interest to the United States. It is foolish to think that, should a conflict arise in the region, operational cooperation between the American and Taiwanese militaries would not be mutually beneficial and perhaps necessary.  

As with other countries in the region, China’s economic rise led to a deeper dependence on the mainland market and the mainland as a manufacturing base for Taiwanese businesses. That has begun to change somewhat as China’s growth slows and other countries provide cheaper labor. However, given Taiwan’s central position in the global technology supply chain, it is in the United States’s strategic interest to help reduce that dependence by negotiating a free trade agreement with Taipei, over and above whatever economic gain there might be. A re-elected President Tsai ought to be politically freer to make a deal that overcomes local Taiwanese concerns about such an agreement. 

Neither recommendation—closer military ties or a free trade agreement—requires recognizing Taiwan diplomatically. It does, however, require recognizing that U.S. policy on Cross Strait relations remains largely stuck in the diplomatic mud of the 1970s and 1980s, and that a new strategic era should result in new policies.

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A Root Cause of Illiberalism?

The Light That Failed: Why the West Is Losing the Fight for Democracy

Ivan Krastev & Stephen Holmes

Pegasus Books, 2020, 256 pp., $26.95

In the sweep of American history, Donald Trump appears to be an anomaly, a freak of political nature, who ascended to the American presidency in a perfect storm of contingent events: a splintered Republican field, a subpar Democratic nominee, a dollop of Russian assistance, and a mass media feasting on Trump’s celebrity ratings.

But the Trump presidency, anomalous though it may be, cannot readily be dismissed as a historical accident. A tide of illiberalism has been sweeping the globe. Trump is but one of the creatures it has brought to the fore. If one looks from Hungary to Brazil to the Philippines to Russia and China, it is plain that the post-Cold War democratic wave is receding and dark forces are taking its place. With democracy hanging in the balance, the odor of the 1930s hangs in the air.

Conventional wisdom traces this state of affairs to a series of shocks that have badly shaken the Western world. The attacks of 9/11 demonstrated the vulnerability of a superpower to the depredations of a tiny band of plotters. The Iraq War, and the misbegotten idea that democracy could be imposed at gunpoint, led to a loss of confidence in liberal elites. The Great Recession of 2008 exposed the frayed seams of the liberal world economic order, and—more significantly—created a class of genuine victims across the globe. Under these circumstances, a revolt against the institutions of the democratic West became almost an inevitability.

But were there even deeper causes? In their coauthored book, The Light That Failed: Why the West is Losing the Fight for Democracy, Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes dismiss as “superficial” any account relying on destabilizing events alone. The authors are leading intellectuals. Krastev, a Bulgarian by birth, is a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, and the author of such warmly received works as After Europe, his 2017 study of the crisis of European integration. Holmes is a professor at the NYU School of Law and an eminent student of political philosophy whose Anatomy of Anti-Liberalism is a classic text. They open with the confession that, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, their optimism was misplaced: “The illusion that the end of the Cold War was the beginning of an Age of Liberalism and Democracy was our illusion too.”

What went wrong? The authors’ starting place is Francis Fukuyama’s thesis in his famous 1989 essay, “The End of History”—that the collapse of the Soviet experiment signaled “the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.” Here was a proposition, they argue, that not only appealed to “American self-love,” but was taken as “self-evident to dissidents and reformers living behind the Iron Curtain.” But this was hubristic—“liberalism abandoning pluralism for hegemony,” as Krastev and Holmes put it. And this hubris forms their central claim:

This absence of alternatives, we submit, even more than the gravitational pull of an authoritarian past or historically ingrained hostility to liberalism, best explains the anti-Western ethos dominating post-Communist societies today. . . . The lack of a plausible alternative to liberal democracy became a stimulus to revolt because, at some elementary level, “human beings need choice, even just the illusion of it.”

They further maintain that “resentment at liberal democracy’s canonical status and the politics of imitation in general has . . . played a decisive role” in the authoritarian-populist turn, and not only in formerly Communist Europe, but in Russia and the United States as well.

A “decisive role”? This is an ambitious assertion. What is the evidence for it, and how well does it hold up?

According to Krastev and Holmes, as the post-communist era dawned, both East European and Western elites saw “copycat Westernization” as the natural and shortest path out of the failed Marxist-Leninist mire. Imitation became the name of the game. But it was a concept riddled with flaws. The haughtiness of Western advisers bred resentment. Many of them had little knowledge of or regard for local realities, a deficit that enabled “aspiring populists to claim exclusive ownership of national traditions and national identity.”

What is more, the Western model was itself flawed, as was dramatically driven home by the economic crisis of 2008. Liberalism’s reputation, they write, never recovered. The economic collapse

greatly weakened the case, pressed by a handful of Western-trained economists, for continuing to imitate Western style capitalism. Confidence that the political economy of the West was a model for the future of mankind had been linked to the belief that Western elites knew what they were doing. Suddenly it was obvious that they didn’t. This is why 2008 had such a shattering ideological, not merely economic, effect both regionally and worldwide.

If imitation of the West proved to be a perilous disappointment for Eastern Europe, in Russia a different dynamic prevailed. Here elites sought less to imitate the West as the shortest path to liberation from Communist tyranny, than to “simulate” the West. A Potemkin-village form of liberal democracy was erected over the ruins of the USSR.

Russians, argue Krastev and Holmes, “might have been willing to view the defeat of communism as a victory for themselves, even though they had not, like the Poles and others, been liberated from foreign rule.” But this was not to be. The rigors of post-communist transformation brought about a precipitous decline in living standards at the very moment that the borders of the Russian empire dramatically shrunk. Enter the politics of humiliation: “Russians were shocked to see their once mighty state turned into a geographically and demographically diminished international beggar, depending for its survival on the goodwill of the West.”

Reaction inevitably set in. Russia moved from simulating Western-style liberal democracy to what Krastev and Holmes call “parodying America’s international adventurism” in Iran and Afghanistan. Putin’s aggressive policies with respect to Georgia, Ukraine, and Syria have been part of a broader “retaliatory form of imitation . . . meant to discredit the West’s over-praised model and make Western societies doubt the superiority of their own norms and institutions.”

In this, and with enormous help from Donald Trump, the Russians have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Trump may be, as Krastev and Holmes maintain, “anti-intellectual to the point of illiteracy,” but he nonetheless possesses a worldview, one that is “intuitive rather than ideological and philosophical.” He must be understood, they argue, “in the context of a contemporaneous worldwide revolt against liberal democracy and liberal internationalism.” The changes he has wrought will be difficult to reverse “because they are rooted not in one individual’s sleazy and lawbreaking behavior but in a global revolt against what is widely perceived to be a liberal Imitation Imperative of which he is merely one gaudy expression among others.”

Trump and Trumpism, in this view, is less an expression of white nationalism—which they acknowledge has “contributed to his appeal”—and more a popular reaction to America’s historic role as an “exemplar nation.” In this, Trump has been fortified by what Krastev and Holmes call America’s “irrational” response to 9/11, by which they mean “America’s unsuccessful wars,” along with the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, all of which combined to cause America to lose “the moral high ground.” The sum total of these developments contributed to the “the most exceptional thing about [Trump’s] exceptional presidency,” namely, “his rejection of the myth of American exceptionalism.”

Trump, they write, has

accomplished something which would previously have been thought impossible. He has reconciled America’s most jingoistic citizens to the idea that America can be “great” without being an international leader, without being morally superior, without being especially innocent, and without having any right to lecture other countries.

In short, Trump and his followers, in Krastev and Holmes’ framework, are anti-imitation. They do not wish to hold America out as a shining city on a hill.

The Light That Failed has its brilliant flashes of insight. The authors are exceedingly well informed and draw upon a capacious command of recent history, economics, demography and culture to advance their argument. Along the way, they make any number of informative observations, like the fact that when the Berlin Wall came down there were only 16 border fences in the world; today, 65 are either completed or under construction. Throughout, Krastev and Holmes are also provocative, exposing shibboleths and cutting through conventional wisdom. But for all their strengths, one puts down their book wondering: Are they right?

The “politics of imitation” is a phrase that recurs innumerable times in their book. We are in a “thirty-year Age of Imitation,” we are told at one juncture. There was a “post-1989 Imitation Imperative,” we are told at another. The “Strains of Imitation” is one chapter subhead. “Imitation as Infiltration” is another. “Imitation as Dispossession” is yet another. The repetitive drumbeat only provokes one to dig in and inquire: how fruitful really is mimesis as an analytic lens?

Certainly, any examination of the trajectory of post-communist Eastern Europe and Russia must take note of the fact that aspirations to copy—i.e., to imitate—the success of Western liberal democracies have, in too many places, been dashed. But was this a consequence of the weight of history, the backwardness and gross distortions of economic, social, and political life caused by decades under communist rule, or is it the consequence, as Krastev and Holmes would have it, of “resentment at liberalism’s canonical status” and the absence of choice?

The first thing to observe in evaluating the authors’ claims is the most obvious: Krastev and Holmes are propounding a thesis that is both an abstraction and based upon a psychological dynamic. Demonstrating its truth or falsity is inherently problematic. And the second thing to note is that, like the very analyses which they reject as “superficial,” Krastev and Holmes at numerous junctures in their book point to developments like the economic collapse of 2008, the quagmire of the second Gulf War, and the refugee crisis set off by the Syrian civil war to explain the course of events. It is not altogether clear that, for all the emphasis they place on the politics of mimicry, they are saying something that “completely transforms our understanding of the crisis of liberalism,” the immodest promise offered on the book’s dust jacket.

Third, is it really true that liberal hubris and the “absence of alternatives” to the liberal path “best explains the anti-Western ethos dominating post-communist societies today”? Implicit in this point is the assumption that in Eastern Europe and Russia there was some sort of third way, some untried alternative to market economics and the institutions of freedom, that would have yielded a more salubrious outcome.

To be fair, their argument is that the attempt to democratize formerly communist countries aimed “at a kind of cultural conversion to values, habits and attitudes considered ‘normal’ in the West” and that political and economic shock therapy “put inherited identity at risk.” Those promoting change in the liberal democratic direction came to be seen as “cultural imposters,” who in turn “excited politically exploitable longings for a lost authenticity.”

No doubt, as a description of what has transpired, and enabled demagogues like Hungary’s Victor Orbán to rise to and wield power, this is both an accurate and useful way of putting things. But what alternative paths out of the communist mire would have avoided such an outcome? An answer to that question is not at all clear. For all the emphasis they place on the “decisive” importance of an absence of alternatives in building resentments, Krastev and Holmes never sketch the contours of a plausible third way. Was their one? What were its outlines? Which mistakes in the great transformation were avoidable, and not merely evident with the clarity of hindsight? Given their disapproving contention that liberalism abandoned “pluralism for hegemony,” failure to grapple with such questions is a conspicuous gap in their analysis.

Remarkably, when Krastev and Holmes turn to Trumpism, they focus almost entirely on Trump’s America First foreign policy. In this telling, the key to Trump’s appeal has been his success in painting America as “an abused victim of its admirers and imitators.” Without a doubt, this captures part of the picture. Trump’s continually repeated claim that we are being “ripped off” by our democratic allies certainly seems to have resonated with his base. But then again, all of Trump’s pronouncements, no matter how contradictory or absurd, resonate with his base. As is the case with any personality cult, substance is often far less important than the style of the cult’s progenitor.

Krastev and Holmes do not slight this aspect of their subject. Some of the must trenchant observations in the book attempt to explain Trump’s easy way with the truth. Just like Putin, they observe, Trump regularly tells lies that can be easily exposed for what they are. Krastev and Holmes explain this as follows:

The purpose of their lying, given that much of their intended audience has access to alternative sources of information, cannot be to deceive. One aim, at least, is to show that leaders can prevaricate without suffering untoward consequences. Paying no price for telling easily exposable untruths is an effective way to display one’s power and impunity.

In this, Trump operates in a reciprocal relationship with his followers:

Trump’s most zealous fans are wholly indifferent to revelations that his statements are very often inaccurate because they believe that these statements are sincere, and thus “true” in a deeper sense. Trump is constantly telling demonstrable lies. But he has been totally candid about one thing. Everything he does, including telling lies, is meant to help him “win.” He says this clearly. So when his supporters hear him lie, they know he is doing so to gain a strategic advantage, because that is exactly what he said he would do. Since his lies presumably serve this honestly stated purpose, they are basically truthful in an indirect sense.

For suggestive observations like this, with which it is replete, The Light That Failed is well worth the price of admission. But on inspection it also turns out that the “politics of imitation” at the book’s analytical center is an overly elastic category. This conceptual difficulty is not without importance. If, as the book’s subtitle asserts, “the West is losing the fight for democracy”—and it is losing it because of a worldwide revolt against something called the Imitation Imperative—then what on God’s earth is the remedy?

Paragons of intellectual integrity, Krastev and Holmes acknowledge the drawbacks and limitations of their framework, noting that no single factor can explain the global resurgence of authoritarianism, and that they are proceeding with “all due awareness” of their thesis’s “one-sidedness, incompleteness and empirical vulnerabilities.” With these exceptionally broad caveats duly entered, they can fairly claim their argument a success. The trouble is: with such exceptionally broad caveats duly entered, almost any thesis can pass muster.

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Hyman Bloom and the Art of Dying Well

Hyman Bloom: Matters of Life and Death

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Through February 23, 2020

Looking could be painful in 1945—those flickering, ghostly newsreels kept snaking their way into comfy postwar theaters where Americans had gathered to take in innocent diversions. The images hissed on their reels: mountains of Jewish humans gassed, dismembered, shot, starved, and burned into ashes. Bodies piled and wheelbarrowed with dangling limbs, or still standing dazed, all but dead, touching chain link fences and staring feebly from hunger-sunken eyes. Innocent people. And Germany—Kantian, Goethean, Beethovian Germany, hope of the Enlightenment—whirring like a sick, slick meat grinder. Who could want to look?

America was eager to move along to shinier things, and so it did: chrome and fins, new appliances, limb-sprawling highways to the suburbs. It was not a tragic time, not a time to sit with our thoughts, size up our mortality, feel the sickness of loss until the sickness ran its course.

More importantly, America was not a tragic country. This untragic gene—the knee-jerk urge to obscure, to change the subject, to whiten the teeth, lift the wrinkled face taut and dream about death-defeating innovation—is part of our world-conquering, pioneer restlessness. In our short existence, America’s simple, stubborn optimism has sometimes served as a useful tonic for older parts of the world. But optimism can be a weakness, too, and hope should be rooted in candor. How are we supposed to know the proper mix when we see it? Who can survey the terrain of our lives and tell us where to look? Who, in short, can teach us the art of hoping well?

We don’t have many such teachers at the moment. But if you can make your way to Boston between now and February 23, for the price of a museum ticket, you can get an elevating, stomach-twisting masterclass in looking at reality with honest, humane hope. The Museum of Fine Arts is playing host to a small, devastating exhibition of Hyman Bloom, the 20th-century Jewish-American painter, leading light of the “Boston Expressionists” and fearless, searching, wide-eyed looker. The show is titled “Hyman Bloom: Matters of Life and Death,” and Bloom announces himself there, from beyond the grave, as one of the greatest American artists of the 20th century and just the kind of seer we need.

The opening wall label of the show announces a guiding mystery, which only deepens as the paintings and drawings make their successive, searing impact on the viewer: “Prolific, admired in his day, and active at the center of the American art world in the 1940s and ’50s, Bloom has since been overlooked. This is the first exhibition at the MFA to highlight this important Boston painter.” It’s no small oversight, no clerical misfiling. The fickle fashions of the art world can be silly and shallow, but in this case, more than mere caprice was at work. The postwar overlooking of Hyman Bloom was an act of evasion by a young country too dynamic, busy, ambitious, and insecure to embrace a hope that can thrive in the sight of death.

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Hyman Bloom (Wikimedia Commons)

Hyman Bloom was born in Latvia in 1913 and emigrated to Boston with his family at the age of seven. He grew up in the scrappy West End and never much cared to adjust himself to the genteel climes of nearby Beacon Hill. He found a series of WASPY patrons and champions who recognized his genius and helped him make a way in the Boston art world. Bloom’s artistic sensibility was mystical, old-world, gritty, Jewish—not a natural fit for the Boston of John Singer Sargent and John Singleton Copley, whose own excellent painterly visions bear the scent of Western European salons. Bloom was never so polite. The art critic Hilton Kramer, himself a Jew, famously wrote that Bloom’s paintings of rabbis and synagogue chandeliers “stimulate the same surprise and dismay one feels on finding gefilte fish at a fashionable cocktail party.”

The strongest work on display in “Hyman Bloom: Matters of Life and Death” clusters around the postwar period, which is also when his art world fate was decided. In 1943, Bloom began visiting morgues, following his muse into an exploration of fleshly disintegration. In his uncommonly virtuosic hands, carcasses and corpses come to shimmer; unspooling intestines and rotting tissue sing. Bloom’s work embodies a visceral joy and fascination at flesh, in whatever state, that suggests that it is possible to love our bodily world at every stage of its formation and disintegration, and that we ought to do so, in the manner he models.

Galleries reacted squeamishly, because their patrons were squeamish. Some of the starker death-concerned work was relegated to secret back rooms, available for viewing only on request. A number of contemporary critics found the work morbid and unhealthy, but a few, like Joseph Gibbs, got it: “After a moment of repugnance,” he wrote, “one becomes aware that within the artist’s seeming absorption in death and decay is contained the resurrection—the relative unimportance of fugitive flesh as opposed to the indestructibility of the spirit.” Fellow artists could see how original and brilliant Bloom was—Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning famously considered him the “first abstract expressionist,” and for a short time he was fêted alongside them. He never became anything like a household name, though, and his prices never vaguely approached those of his famous admirers. But stand in front of his work: It easily equals theirs in terms of power, virtuosity, and originality.

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Hyman Bloom, “Self-Portrait” (1948)

The early pioneer of abstraction Paul Klee wrote during the first World War, “The more horrible this world (as today, for instance), the more abstract our art, whereas a happy world brings forth an art of the here and now.” Abstraction, he wrote, was a realm “where total affirmation is possible” because messy, ambivalent things like history can be excluded. The postwar coronation of Abstract Expressionism (which transformed the figurative school of Boston Expressionism into a provincial footnote) was no isolated accident. First-rate Abstract Expressionists like Willem de Kooning and Joan Mitchell produced genuine masterpieces, works of deep spiritual resonance and raw aesthetic power, but they were works of inward flight, of withdrawal from the world. They mined the inner life of the painter in urgent, arresting color, but they largely did so while eschewing any examination of our “outer,” physical existence with all its limits, liabilities, and pains.

While Bloom’s work can match their introspective depth, it does so while explicitly searching some of the harder, universal facets of our bodily existence, including, most crucially, the transitory stages between being and non-being. The fate of every thing that comes together is to come apart; matter and energy are endlessly cycling through processes of integration and disintegration. The particles composing your body have belonged to untold numbers of organisms in the past, and will belong to many more. You love yourself, of course, and your friends and family, and so you have a stake in this or that particular assemblage of those recycled pieces. This much is natural and good.

What Bloom found so fascinating, and what he makes so vibrant and terrifying in these pieces, is the moment when one organism begins to yield its pieces back up to the ecosystem and new forms of life begin to claim and employ them. He found that moment beautiful and showed it via dazzling chiaroscuro, which calls to mind the explosive luminosity of Carravaggio or Rembrandt. If we’re going to look and make our peace with the cycles that will disperse and reassemble the parts of ourselves and our loved ones, then this kind of art is an invaluable teacher. Bloom’s work is a memento mori that opens into a posture of amazement and mature delight. He is an artist who can train you to see things differently, to comprehend and love things you formerly missed or avoided. When the public decided to follow his New York contemporaries into the world of abstraction, we decided that what he was trying to show us was, for whatever complex of reasons, not something we wanted to see.

In the years that have followed, our avoidance of coming-apart flesh has only gotten more pronounced and puritanical. The refusal to look at death—let’s call it thanatophobia—has had wide, corrosive consequences, some of which are not obvious at first glance. It isn’t just Auschwitz we don’t want to see. We live in flesh insofar as we live, so to obscure its end we will have to employ powerful, civilization-scale modes of avoidance. And so we have; in the past few decades there have been marvelous advances in the cultural and physical technologies of evasion. Our sweet, innocent eyes see less and less of the ways that our bodies end, and the upshot is a growing atmosphere of contempt and alienation—toward ourselves and each other.

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“Butchered Animal,” Hyman Bloom (Wikimedia Commons)

It’s important to see how novel this is, and how dangerous. Communal mourning songs are ubiquitous across human civilizations; some ethnomusicologists speculate that the very earliest human music arose as a way to process death as a group. These works of art embody a restorative beauty; they organize disparate sounds into harmony, smoothing out the ragged, torn fabric of our community, allowing us to externalize our interior grief and share it, putting the lie to sensations of isolation. Kept in, guarded and hidden, these interior griefs will manifest as longer lasting maladies like anxiety and depression. Let go into public, they act as glue to bond individuals into community.

In a study recently published in the journal Emotion, UC Berkley researchers Daniel Stancato and Dacher Keltner found that awe, the perception of one’s own smallness, led to “reduced dogmatism and increased perceptions of social cohesion.” After being shown images of the night sky, participants found themselves less certain of their own indomitable rightness, and less interested in establishing separation between themselves and their political opponents. It makes tremendous sense. In the face of cosmic or oceanic vastness, or of the common mortality it highlights, our knowledge, power, and the seemingly massive differences and enmities that exist between political opponents shrink to realistic size. Without that shrinking, an almost unlimited metastasis is possible, building every disagreement into a break, every break into an urgent, titanic clash between good and evil, with decreasing attention paid to the concrete realities and actors at play.

In the spring of 2019, the nation was transfixed by video of a brief, tense, ambiguous encounter between a teenage boy in a red MAGA hat, visiting Washington, DC with a group from his private Kentucky high school, and an elderly native American activist playing a traditional drum on the national mall. Nothing much happened between them; the boy was possibly smirking in the older man’s face, or possibly he was smiling uncomfortably. The man was possibly engaged in innocent celebration of his heritage, or possibly antagonizing a naive white kid on school vacation.

We don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. It was one of the least consequential confrontations one could imagine, and yet it dominated cable news and social media for weeks. In the feverish minds of our commentariat, this man and boy absolutely, unquestionably embodied vast, black-and-white moral realities—racism, power, harassment, privilege, innocence, persecution, the Good people vs. the Bad. The simple, finite actors, most likely confused and somewhat ambivalent, melted almost instantly and completely into the richer stew of rights and wrongs, enemies and friends that define our politics in the digital, thanatophobic age.

This fearsome turn to stark, polarizing symbols, this flight from messy, complicated reality to a world of simple good and evil, is bad enough on its own. But in this particular example, it was framed by a perfect chiaroscuric contrast. As the Covington furor burned bright, a small news item slipped by virtually unnoticed: the striking down in March of 2019 of an Executive Order requiring our government to issue “an unclassified summary of the number of strikes undertaken by the United States Government against terrorist targets outside areas of active hostilities, as well as assessments of combatant and non-combatant deaths resulting from those strikes, among other information.” Our leaders had been required, in other words, to tell us how many people, innocent or guilty, our military had incinerated. We know, for instance, that Barack Obama’s Administration dropped more than 26,000 bombs in the final year of his presidency (presumably a record for Nobel Peace Prize laureates), but we do not know how many the Trump Administration dropped in 2019, or how many it will drop in 2020, because he laid waste to the modest suggestion that we at least publicly register the deaths we cause. They remain, to us, comfortably hidden and unremarked upon. Almost no one protested this decision at the time. If anything, it was a relief to be so shielded, liberated to focus our common energies on the parsing of world-historical smirk/smiles and identity symbols. It takes a truly national tragedy like September 11 to quiet the interpretive din, even for a moment.

Self-conscious, death-destined beings like us need to negotiate and renegotiate our relationships with our own bodies, and the bodies of those around us. Living in a material world is not so simple for us. In a moment when death is the destiny we dare not contemplate, these negotiations take on a sick, frantic character. Customs of corporeal candor have changed a great deal in the years since Bloom’s work faded from the national scene. Pornography—footage of the most extreme enjoyments and exploitations of flesh—is now ubiquitous. Porn would have been popular at any time and place; we’re fascinated and attracted for reasons pre-cultural. But now, in our thanatophobic moment, the attraction becomes more intense, the horizon of our body-awareness almost fully occupied by images of nubile flesh.

This is not the flesh of Auschwitz, Hyman Bloom’s paintings, or even your own body. Bodies presented erotically are presented in a very particular light—their life-making and pleasure-giving capacities are highlighted, their full reality obscured. Death looks dodgeable forever through the lens of a pornographer; a sexed-up image or video is one in which the wrinkles, flaws, and textures of aging have been airbrushed away. As we draw further into this fantasy, we draw further away from each other, and the scope of beauty we can see becomes narrower and narrower. There is, it is almost now true, no human beauty for us but young beauty. That our bodies might be good and beautiful as they display their passage towards disintegration doesn’t begin to register. The idea that your grandmother might be beautiful (sans transformative surgery) rings like treacly Hallmark tripe.

In a thanatophobic culture, those of us who aren’t young and sexy just aren’t the beautiful, good kinds of persons. Women have it worse than men in this regard, but men are making steady gains in both eating and body image disorders. So what should we do if we haven’t won the genetic or financial lottery, or if we’re pushing past our reproductive prime? We can give up and despair, or do our best to assimilate via spin class, scalpel, implant, and injection. Or we can indulge in the recent innovation of body positivity, demanding that we be found sexually attractive, however unattractive we may actually be, judged in the harsh light of reproductive fitness. If sexual allure is the only form of beauty available, then of course there will be a feverish competition for it. Of course there will be Instagram filters, fad diets, a ballooning cosmetic surgery industry, widespread self-loathing, shame, self-seclusion, and damaged romantic relationships. It’s a cruel, unnecessary arrangement; there are many ways to be good and beautiful without looking like a Jenner or Hadid.

The dynamics of social cohesion are intricate, and many millennia in the making—it’s hard enough to love oneself or another person, never mind a nation. The dynamics that aid us in this venture were developed within tribes of fragile, mortal, interdependent creatures, who dealt with death as a community. We ought not treat these dynamics as if they were unbreakable, or infinitely mutable. So our imperative is simple enough, initially—we need to stop hiding ourselves, looking away, tucking our elderly in “homes” to languish away their final days alone. We need to have the courage to look directly at what we are, what we do, what is done in our name. We need to make room for sadness and tragedy, become more patient, attentive lookers.

But it’s even more complicated than this. The physician and Columbia University bioethicist Lydia Dugdale writes movingly of the rootlessness that patients, doctors, and families feel as death approaches. No one seems to know what to make of it. For more and more people, there are no lessons or preparations, no narratives or poetry or scriptures to ease the passage from life to death, to make us able to look. Each person goes it alone, even if they are lucky enough to die surrounded by a throng of numb, sad loved ones who are each also privately processing the proceedings. It was not always the case. Dugdale points to a medieval text called the Ars moriendi, or Art of dying, which coached all the involved about what it takes to make a beautiful death. She writes that we need an Ars moreiendi of our own: “The deathbed must again become a place of community, a place for the dying to forgive and to receive forgiveness, to bless and to receive blessing, and a place for the attendants to anticipate and prepare for their own deaths.”

It’s a wonderful situation she describes, and may it come soon. But Dugdale acknowledges that there are myriad forces arrayed against its realization, most crucially the decline of religion. It’s one thing to pray for a good death, a soft and noble waypoint on your sojourn to beatitude, and quite another to relish the total, forever annihilation of one’s self or loved one. Could Bloom have made death so lovely without the mystical strains in his thought, without a transcendent spiritual vision of what life and death are? It’s fair to suspect not. Can death be beautiful without some even gauzy sense that annihilation might not be the final word?

Perhaps, and it could certainly be better than it currently is. But in regards to Dugdale’s truly good deaths, we can say one more thing: The causality likely runs more than one direction. If our existential posture impacts our experience of death, our experience of death likely impacts our existential posture. Deaths, funerals, and illnesses are cardinal moments for examining in all honesty what we are—just being there for them slices open a raft of questions that we’ve become too adept at considering closed. History isn’t over, as we are now often reminded. If we look closer, we could discover that there’s more in heaven and earth than was dreamt of in the sick, restless aftermath of Auschwitz. Hyman Bloom’s artwork—in all its grotesque beauty—can help us develop eyes to see.

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