Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 176

Brussels Browbeats the East over Refugees

The European Commission announced today that it would sanction the usual Central European suspects—Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary—for refusing to participate in its ill-fated migrant relocation scheme. Financial Times explains: 

The EU introduced a plan to “relocate” up to 160,000 asylum seekers living in Italy and Greece to other countries in the bloc. But so far only 20,000 have moved, with none going to the trio of central and eastern European countries.

On Tuesday, the European Commission launched infringement proceedings, a long-winded process that could lead to fines, against Prague, Warsaw and Budapest.

Dimitris Avramopoulos, the commissioner in charge of migration, said: “Relocation is not a choice. It is a moral commitment. It is a legal decision, with legal obligations agreed collectively, which has to be carried out collectively, without exceptions.”

It is little surprise that Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary would be singled out here, since they have long led the charge in opposing Brussels’s migrant policy and this relocation scheme in particular. Still, the EU’s attempts to blame those three countries for the policy’s failures is both misleading and misguided.

In truth, most EU countries are dragging their feet on fulfilling their relocation quotas. Official data shows that Bulgaria, for instance, has relocated 47 asylum seekers from Italy and Greece out of a pledged 1,302; Slovakia, meanwhile, has relocated 16 out of a promised 902. Even the heavy lifters like France and Germany are nowhere near implementing their full quotas.

Meanwhile, the process itself remains hampered by technical troubles and bureaucratic woes. The Commission’s latest report, for instance, takes Italy to task for failing to have a centralized procedure for relocating migrants. “The current practice, whereby migrants eligible for relocation are spread all over the Italian territory,” states the report, “is complicating the relocation process and creating logistical problems… particularly with regard to ensuring proper health checks before the transfer takes place.” That assessment hardly inspires confidence that Rome is holding up its end of the bargain, and it only adds to the picture of mismanagement of a process that has been plagued by inadequate staffing and interminable delays.

Seen in this light, Brussels’ sanctimonious scapegoating looks even worse. To be sure, Prague, Warsaw, and Budapest are hardly acting as cooperative partners in resolving the migrant crisis. But stern lectures and sanctions are unlikely to change their calculus, given their deep-seated opposition to the policy and the EU’s own incompetence in implementing it. And the decision to sue the trio will only deepen the bloc’s East-West divide, setting the stage for a protracted legal battle between Brussels and three Central European capitals.

At a moment when elections in France and the UK have spurred new hope for the EU, then, here is a timely reminder that the bloc still remains quite dysfunctional. As it stands now, the EU lacks both the political will and the practical capacity to cope with its current share of migrants—let alone another wave that could well come in the future.

Even as It “Cuts”, OPEC’s Production Grows

So much for those much ballyhooed production cuts: After sixth month of the course OPEC and a group of outside petrostates charted to constrain their collective output to prop up oil prices, the cartel is seeing its own overall output numbers… increase! As the FT reports, Nigeria and Libya are to blame:

Libya and Nigeria contributed to a rise in Opec’s total production to 32.1m b/d from the prior month’s 31.8m b/d, according to the group’s monthly oil market report. […]

Although output in both Nigeria and Libya remains volatile due to political instability and violence, their combined production increased by more than 350,000 b/d last month, according to data from consultants and analysts submitted to Opec’s research arm. That amount is equal to more than a quarter of the supply curbs Opec has implemented in 2017 as part of a push to bring down excess stockpiles that have kept pressure on prices. […]

Both Nigeria and Libya have been exempt from the supply cut deal among global producer countries that came into effect in January and which ministers agreed in May to extend for another nine months.

Both OPEC members are currently producing well below peak volumes due to intra-country fighting and instability, and as such they’ve been exempted from the output constraints that are currently holding back the rest of the cartel’s countries.

But knowing the reasoning behind these exemptions and acceding that it makes a certain amount of sense doesn’t change the fact that, fresh off an agreement to extend these production cuts another nine months just a few weeks back, the oil cartel’s production has risen 300,000 barrels per day. This is hardly the sort of signal OPEC wants to send to the market—just the opposite, in fact. And as a result, oil prices have predictably stayed below $49 per barrel.

Still, if OPEC seems to have become vestigial recently, it isn’t because its own membership can’t keep the lid on production. (After all, that is a problem that the cartel has always had to contend with). No, the big difference these days is the surge in supplies coming from outside of OPEC, a major rise driven predominantly by U.S. shale producers, but one that can trace its roots all around the world.

We exist now in a new oil reality, one in which the efforts of regimes predicated on conventional crude production are finding their ability to exert control on the global market sharply diminished. This new reality is also one marked by cheaper crude, and in today’s market suppliers need to pay much closer attention to costs if they want to stay competitive. U.S. shale producers have proven themselves capable of adapting, and in the process they’re laying waste to the best laid plans of OPEC and its ilk.

Even as it “Cuts”, OPEC’s Production Grows

So much for those much ballyhooed production cuts: After sixth month of the course OPEC and a group of outside petrostates charted to constrain their collective output to prop up oil prices, the cartel is seeing its own overall output numbers… increase! As the FT reports, Nigeria and Libya are to blame:

Libya and Nigeria contributed to a rise in Opec’s total production to 32.1m b/d from the prior month’s 31.8m b/d, according to the group’s monthly oil market report. […]

Although output in both Nigeria and Libya remains volatile due to political instability and violence, their combined production increased by more than 350,000 b/d last month, according to data from consultants and analysts submitted to Opec’s research arm. That amount is equal to more than a quarter of the supply curbs Opec has implemented in 2017 as part of a push to bring down excess stockpiles that have kept pressure on prices. […]

Both Nigeria and Libya have been exempt from the supply cut deal among global producer countries that came into effect in January and which ministers agreed in May to extend for another nine months.

Both OPEC members are currently producing well below peak volumes due to intra-country fighting and instability, and as such they’ve been exempted from the output constraints that are currently holding back the rest of the cartel’s countries.

But knowing the reasoning behind these exemptions and acceding that it makes a certain amount of sense doesn’t change the fact that, fresh off an agreement to extend these production cuts another nine months just a few weeks back, the oil cartel’s production has risen 300,000 barrels per day. This is hardly the sort of signal OPEC wants to send to the market—just the opposite, in fact. And as a result, oil prices have predictably stayed below $49 per barrel.

Still, if OPEC seems to have become vestigial recently, it isn’t because its own membership can’t keep the lid on production. (After all, that is a problem that the cartel has always had to contend with). No, the big difference these days is the surge in supplies coming from outside of OPEC, a major rise driven predominantly by U.S. shale producers, but one that can trace its roots all around the world.

We exist now in a new oil reality, one in which the efforts of regimes predicated on conventional crude production are finding their ability to exert control on the global market sharply diminished. This new reality is also one marked by cheaper crude, and in today’s market suppliers need to pay much closer attention to costs if they want to stay competitive. U.S. shale producers have proven themselves capable of adapting, and in the process they’re laying waste to the best laid plans of OPEC and its ilk.

Scientists Know the Value of ARPA-E

President Trump’s draft budget proposes axing a lot of government programs, but perhaps none are more valuable than the Advanced Research Project Agency-Energy, also known as ARPA-E. George W. Bush created the agency in 2007 to help fund “moonshot” energy projects—the sorts of technologies that could shift paradigms and solve problems that today seem insurmountable, or even problems we don’t know of yet. It was a forward looking strategy that has since won bipartisan support in Congress, and was one that Barack Obama also backed.

Donald Trump is charting a different course, though, and as the NYT reports, scientists are concerned:

[A] panel of experts convened by the National Academy of Sciences said it had “found no signs that ARPA-E is failing.”

To the contrary, the panel said in its evaluation that the agency had made vital progress in nudging forward research on projects like advanced carbon capture and grid-scale battery storage. And the report’s authors suggested that much of this research was in high-risk areas that would not have otherwise been pursued by the private sector, echoing the conclusions of a 2012 investigation by the Government Accountability Office.

“ARPA-E has made significant contributions to energy R & D that likely would not take place absent the agency’s activities,” Pradeep Khosla, chairman of the panel that wrote the report and chancellor of the University of California, San Diego, said in a statement.

That last part is critical, because it gets to the heart of Trump’s argument that the kind of research being conducted under the ARPA-E umbrella could be better employed by the private sector. Experts—and the researchers actually undertaking these sorts of projects—disagree, though, and this new panel confirms what we already knew: ARPA-E is playing a vital role in the research and development of promising energy technologies, a role that would go unfulfilled without it.

For more, read William Bonvillian’s expert commentary on the matter. However you look at it, axing ARPA-E would be a major mistake. This is one budget cut the nation can’t afford.

A New Test for China’s Crackdown on Finance

China’s recent efforts to curb speculation in its property market have brought scores of angry homebuyers onto the streets of Shanghai, the Wall Street Journal reports:

In response to skyrocketing home prices, governments in China’s big cities have set limits on the buying of multiple homes and higher down-payment ratios, which has left many unable to sell their homes and others worried they won’t be able to buy in before prices rise further.

Protests over the new rules started in early May. In the latest and largest breakout, hundreds of people marched down a busy Shanghai shopping street this weekend. […]

Shanghai’s government had no official response to Saturday’s protest. In ​a statement released​ late​ Monday, ​a local housing bureau​ ​suggested a softening of policies applied to developers and buyers, though it stopped short of explicitly saying commercially-zoned units could be permitted for use as residences.

Middle-class homeowners marching in the streets is never a good thing. Now, in an attempt to cool the outcry, the Shanghai city government is blaming property developers for “distorting the policy” while making a limited concession to allow buyers of dual-use homes to move in. Whether that half measure will suffice to placate the protesters remains to be seen.

The Shanghai situation illustrates a familiar Chinese pattern: every time China tries to curb the asset bubbles in its economy, the political pushback dulls the reform push. When resistance to fiscal reforms arises, China responds by kicking the can down the road, softening reform measures or easing credit controls. But this just incentivizes more resistance while the overall health of the economy suffers.

It is far from clear what the outcome of all this will be, or when the bill will come due. But so long as Beijing is torn between implementing painful reforms and upholding a risky status quo, the government will be preoccupied by serious internal stresses.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

All across Russia, thousands of citizens protested against Putin and his corrupt regime yesterday. In Moscow, the opposition came to protest in the center of the city, to an area from which they were banned by the Mayor’s office.

Yesterday, June 12, was “Russia Day”, a holiday marking the country’s independence from the USSR. Various municipalities across the country had organized outdoor events to mark the occasion. Opposition leader Alexey Navalny—the man who had pulled together the large street protests against corruption that had roiled Russia in late April—seized the opportunity and directed his followers into the streets. They were told to patriotically raise their voices about the direction the country is taking under Putin. Many protesters took Russian flags.

Navalny himself got detained as he was leaving his house in the morning; he was charged with organizing illegal protests, and arrested for thirty days. There were a lot of students among the protesters, including those from top Russian universities. Asked if they were not scared of being arrested, the refrain seemed to be, “It’s better to spend fifteen days in jail, than another twenty years in poverty.” As many as one thousand people got arrested across the country.

As you might imagine, Moscow’s downtown ended up being a jumble of indifferent citizens, Putin supporters, protesters—and a lot of National Guard security forces. A group of young independent filmmakers (Sota Vision) captured a moment that perfectly sums up not just what it was like yesterday in Moscow, but also what it’s like living in Russia these days. This is the reward you get for going out of your way to praise a dictator.

Faithfully Civil

American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present

Philip Gorski

Princeton University Press, 2017, 320 pp., $35

Authors, especially academic ones, live in constant fear that some other scholar is working on the same subject and scheduled for nearly simultaneous publication. In such cases one’s own book may be preempted or at best compete for the attention of the targeted audience. That may seem to have happened with Yale Professor Philip Gorski’s survey of American civil religion, given that my own latest book, The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How American Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest, appeared just a few months before (and from Gorski’s own university press).

However, it turns out that the two books do not clash at all; indeed, they complement each other in an elegant fashion. For Gorski (his subtitle notwithstanding) is a sociologist, not an historian, and American Covenant is devoted exclusively to the American civil religion as a domestic phenomenon whereas Tragedy is devoted exclusively to foreign affairs. Nevertheless, both books were inspired by sociologist Robert Bellah, who first noticed and described “American Civil Religion” in the 1967 edition of the journal Daedalus, and both tell a story of strife and declension among rival civil theologies.

Have you ever heard of Deep Springs College, surely one the strangest institutions of higher learning in the United States? It is located on a ranch in an otherwise empty valley in California’s High Sierra. The nearest town, about 25 miles away, is Dyer, Nevada, population 250. The admissions process is highly selective and college enrollment tiny, just 25 to 30 students. The curriculum rests upon the three pillars of academics, self-government, and work, because every student devotes at least twenty hours per week as cowboys or ranch hands. After two years the students transfer, invariably to the University of California, Stanford, or the Ivy League. Gorski is an alumnus of that remote secular monastery where, he attests, the works of Hannah Arendt and Alexis de Tocqueville are passed around like sacred texts. He then graduated from Harvard, took a Ph.D. at Berkeley, where Bellah was his mentor, and taught at the University of Wisconsin before being named co-director of comparative research at Yale. In previous books he has studied the impact of Calvinism, the Protestant ethic, and state-building on early modern Europe, an excellent objective vantage point from which to observe the mystical, magical, shape-shifting American civil religion (ACR).

Gorski labels its dominant strain “prophetic republicanism,” which he describes as a more nuanced version of what Bellah called civic republicanism or covenantal religion back in the 1970s. More nuanced because the loudest voices today no longer emanate from the  “vital center” of ACR, but rather from two of its extremes. The first trumpets religious nationalism, a toxic brew of apocalyptic zeal, which idolizes the United States as a uniquely virtuous Christian nation endowed by Almighty God with a mission to battle falsehood and evil until the end times. The other trumpets radical secularism, a toxic blend of cultural elitism and militant atheism, which damns the United States as a deeply flawed nation that progressive politics can fix only if atavistic religion is driven from the public square. The upshot, Gorski contends, has been a polarizing culture war that has tormented Americans at least since the 1990s. In other words, the author does not see ACR declining so much as evolving, but also drifting ever further into polarized and polarizing heterodoxy.

American Covenant is not strictly narrative and has little to say about power and institutions. Its methodology is to examine the intellectual biographies of representative figures from each historical era and describe their understandings of the American project. That method is liable to invite specialists to question Gorski’s choices in a debate that can degenerate into a parlor game. For instance, one may ask why he omits Orestes Brownson, a 19th-century Yankee Unitarian who was the most prolific political philosopher in U.S. history, an adult convert to the Catholic Church, and a lifelong devotee of ACR. But the figures he does select are all good exemplars of his three major strains of civil theology. He makes his own strong preference explicit by praising prophetic republicanism and critiquing religious nationalism and radical secularism, both of which fail the test of healthy civil religion because they tend to violate their own American values, provide no plausible interpretation of the American past, and offer no feasible vision of the American future. He calls his methodology “critical hermeneutics,” by which he means situating influential people in their historical contexts and criticizing those whose ideas reflect a “one-sided reading of the civil religious tradition.” The result is didactic, not exactly an historian’s style, but quite compatible with good sociology.

American Covenant is peppered with lists, categories, and ideal types carefully defined and distinguished. For instance, people with an apocalyptic worldview read biblical texts in four dangerous ways: predictively, literally, premillenially, and vindictively. Prophetic republicans are distinguished from secular liberals insofar as they resist being literal or figurative slaves to their own passions, and assume the role of active citizens. Radical individualists draw on three sorts of philosophy—social atomism, libertine libertarianism, and common-sense utilitarianism—and so on. However, the necessary jargon does not occlude Gorski’s elegant, indeed quotable, writing style.

One can argue with Gorski’s conventional account of the ACR’s etiology, which he traces back to the Puritans. Accordingly, John Winthrop, Thomas Morton, Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, Samuel Nowell, and Cotton Mather all pass in review, while the Quakers of the Delaware Valley, the Cavalier planters in the Chesapeake, and the Scots-Irish frontiersmen—those other three cradle cultures described in David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed—are all absent. But Gorski is correct to suggest that New England’s culture played an outsized role in the American founding and later exerted dominance, if not hegemony, over the nation as a whole. He alludes to J.G.A. Pocock’s “Machiavellian moment” and attributes to Hebraic republicanism Americans’ belief in themselves as a new Chosen People in a new Promised Land.

Did the American Revolution and Founding give birth to a Christian nation, as religious nationalists claim, or to a secular republic, as progressive liberals claim? Gorski says the “correct answer” is neither, and he is correct. The Founders established a society and government inspired both by republicanism ancient and modern and by biblical principles, though their religious spectrum ranged widely from Baptist to Deist (hence their commitment to the free exercise of religion). Such Hebraic republicanism derived from the 17th-century Dutch and English revolts against monarchy and its exponents came to include Jonathan Edwards, Jonathan Mayhew, Benjamin Rush, and Timothy Dwight. Their Calvinist creed that blessed charity, community, self-government, and ordered liberty became explicit in the words “covenant” and “commonwealth.” That original, healthy ACR is what stands in judgment upon religious nationalists who tend to fuse sectarian religion and the state, radical secularists who forcibly fence off the state from religion, and libertarians who worship liberty in separation from, even rejection of, equality and community.

The Civil War cut many new channels through which all the civil religious currents spilled. Everyone associates the main channel with Abraham Lincoln, whom Gorski pairs with Frederick Douglass, the brilliant fugitive from slavery. They led the vanguard that transformed sacred history into a “progressive spiral.” That is, mainstream Americans (outside the South) now understood their nation’s teleology to be neither a return to some golden age nor a leap to some heaven on earth, but the pilgrimage of an “almost chosen people” toward the realization of America’s founding principles. But the Civil War era also perversely strengthened religious nationalism (especially in the South), plus radical secularism of a progressive or conservative ilk.  Gorski’s illustrative progressive is Robert Ingersoll, the celebrated orator who popularized the agnosticism of English Darwinist Thomas Huxley. His illustrative conservative is William Graham Sumner, the erstwhile pastor turned Yale professor, who popularized the laissez faire economics of English Social Darwinist Herbert Spencer. But both applied natural selection to human society, celebrated science and technology, and prepared the intellectual ground for the Progressive Era.

The chapter on that era unfortunately tries to cover too much ground. (My own chapters covering 1898 to 1941 were vexing to organize and much longer than planned, so I understand the dilemma.) Still, Gorski sticks to his guns by limiting the treatment of that frenetic era to a representative sample that includes John Dewey, W.E.B. DuBois, Reinhold Niebuhr, H.L. Mencken, and Aimee Semple McPherson. As always, he passes judgment on his figures depending on whether they remained near the ACR’s vital center or wandered into hyper- or anti-religious heresy. Curiously, none of the era’s dramatic political events—think Spanish-American War, U.S. imperialism, the reforms of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the Great War, women’s suffrage, and Prohibition—appears in the book except in passing as a backdrop to intellectual trends. But that’s all right, because my own book covers them all. 

An early crescendo comes in the chapter on the post-World War II era, whose healthy trends are personified by Hannah Arendt, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Courtney Murray, the patriotic Catholic who figuratively baptized the ACR. But the Cold War also “fanned the flames of sacrificial apocalypticism” and made the unhealthy strain of religious nationalism a durable fact of American life. The principal reasons accounting for that were nuclear weapons, the demonization of communism, the sacralization of the U.S. military, and the rapid spread of premillennial dispensationalism (the belief that the second coming of Christ will be preceded by terrible wars and calamities known as the tribulation). Gorski ends that chapter with an obiter dictum to the effect that the youth movements of the 1960s might really have constituted a revolt against “the technocratic and therapeutic liberalism of the mid-twentieth century.” Almost exactly the same thing occurred to me while composing Tragedy, inspired in turn by Adam Garfinkle’s 1995 book Telltale Hearts.

Finally, Gorski describes the civil faiths of Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, both of whom were controversial, misunderstood pastors of the ACR. Reagan eschewed the prophetic tradition, seemed to deny original sin, and encouraged “shining city on a hill” national pride and materialist self-indulgence. But contrary to left-wing critiques, Reagan was not a religious nationalist and his theology had little in common with that of the Moral Majority. Obama’s mentors included zealous Old Testament-like prophets such as Jeremiah Wright and civil religious saints such as Douglass, DuBois, King, and Niebuhr. But contrary to right-wing critiques, Obama was not a radical secularist. In fact, he explicitly confessed his faith in the ACR and stood near its vital center.

In his last chapter Gorski proposes four reforms meant to combat the corruptions that have eroded the ACR and restore a prophetic republic in which compassion, self-discipline, and balance between liberty and equality might again reign supreme. First, drive big money out of the political process in order to give free speech among ordinary citizens enough air to breathe. Second, make celebrations like Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Thanksgiving into civil holidays again by enforcing blue laws and banning sporting events. Third, restore genuine civics courses to school curricula. Fourth, enact compulsory national service for both sexes. None of those common-sense reforms should be controversial, but in truth, all of them would generate angry resistance from one or more wings of one or both political parties, since both parties are strewn with heterodox ACR extremists who have hollowed out its vital center.

These few eloquent sentences pretty much say it all:

If the preceding chapters have shown anything, is that the roots of our culture wars are very, very deep. The religious national script was not penned by Jerry Falwell in the 1970s; it was written by Cotton Mather in the 1700s. The radical secularist script was not dreamed up by Jane Fonda in the 1960s; it was put together by Robert Ingersoll after the Civil War. This, alas, is the price of historical amnesia; being an old actor in an old scene and thinking it’s opening night.

The deep truth Gorski expresses amounts to a confession that no nation can ever return to a golden age that never existed. The ACR was indeed contested from its very inception. What is more, history happens, and history moves only in one direction, which is forward in time. So it would appear (though I may be mistaken) that Gorski is now where I myself was in 1997, when in an earlier book I urged post-Cold War America to kick the habit of playing Crusader State and recover the habit of being a Promised Land. I have since surrendered that hope and suspect Gorski, twenty years on, may also despair. But for the moment he has written a tightly reasoned, passionate book urging Americans to restore civility, rebuild the center, and remember to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God.

Taxing Times in India

Months after his party swept state elections, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is preparing to roll out the cornerstone of his economic agenda: a sweeping reform to unify the country’s disparate tax regimes. The Wall Street Journal reports:  

The initiative, set to kick off on July 1, aims to streamline India’s cumbersome network of state and federal levies and ease commerce across state borders.

It is a big part of a larger effort, including the cancellation of large-denominated currencies last year, to improve tax collection from companies that make up India’s huge informal economy. Some estimate the new system will add nearly 1 percentage point to India’s GDP growth within a few years.

But the risks could drag on short-term economic growth, experts say. Among the hurdles are getting millions of companies to register, educating them on how to file online, poor internet connections and widespread tax avoidance. The design of the new nationwide Goods and Services Tax—which replaces a value-added tax and other levies—also is more complex than many expected. […]

“This is one of the biggest changes we have undertaken since independence,” said Neelkanth Mishra, India equity analyst at Credit Suisse.

Wrestling the tax reform through India’s political system has already been a years-long battle for Modi, forcing him to take on entrenched state interests to push through a constitutional amendment allowing the measure. Over the course of that process, a relatively simple proposal has been subject to various carve-outs and concessions that have either complicated or diluted its original intent.

Now, as Modi prepares to roll out the reform by July 1, some businesses are calling for a delay in its implementation or expressing confusion over the complex five-tier tax system that it puts in place for varying types of goods. Fearing a wave of opposition, the government has lately been indulging in a series of carefully targeted tax cuts to preemptively placate critics. It’s clear the government is anticipating a backlash even before the reform is put in practice.

The stakes are high for Modi’s legacy; the Prime Minister has been touting tax reform for years as a way to modernize India’s economy, create a true single market for goods, and boost growth significantly. If that does not happen—if the new tax gets bogged down in implementation woes or fails to deliver growth that is worth the disruption—it could tarnish Modi’s reputation and impede his ability to deliver further reform.

Telework Sweet Spot Is Tough to Find

Automattic is the web company that’s responsible for WordPress, the software running the site at which you currently find yourself, along with many, many others across the web. WordPress is one of the key technologies that allows TAI‘s employees to write remotely when necessary,  helping sever the link between work and the office. So it seems almost fitting that its parent company is now ditching the office entirely after realizing that its employees weren’t making the commute to its trendy San Francisco digs often enough to justify the rent. Quartz reports:

The office at 140 Hawthorne went on the market after CEO Matt Mullenweg came to the realization not enough employees used it. As he explained on the Stack Overflow podcast earlier this year, “We got an office there about six or seven years ago, pretty good lease, but nobody goes in it. Five people go in it and it’s 15,000 square feet. They get like 3,000 square feet each. … There are as many gaming tables as there are people.”

Automattic has always given its 550 employees the choice of working remotely; the San Francisco space was an optional co-working space, spokesman Mark Armstrong said. The company maintains similar offices in Cape Town, South Africa, and outside Portland, Maine, and gives employees a $250-a-month stipend if they want to use commercial co-working offices elsewhere. And if they’d rather work at Starbucks, Automattic will pay for their coffee.

For some workers, the loss of a central meeting place might not rise to the level of inconvenience. In the information economy, productivity is becoming divorced from co-location, and some studies suggest that workers can increase their effectiveness by working remotely.

That said, there are still benefits—both tangible and intangible—to schlepping in to an office and working alongside one’s coworkers. So-called “water cooler interactions” can foster innovative new ideas that might not arise via emails or a chat window. Moreover, working in an office is a social task that can help build camaraderie; conversely, working remotely can erode that sense of being a part of a team. Studies have shown that too much telework can be alienating for employees.

There’s a balance to be struck here, somewhere between 100 percent office-time and 100 percent telework. That sweet spot will obviously vary industry to industry and company to company, but one study ballparks the optimal amount of remote work somewhere in the region of 2.5 days a week. Different firms will make their own adjustments to that formula, but it would stand to reason that the Goldilocks point lies somewhere in between the two extremes.

Silicon Valley is struggling to find that point, recently. Automattic is now swinging to one extreme, while IBM and Yahoo have swung to the other by nixing remote work entirely. As we progress in the transition away from an economy based on the manipulation of “stuff” and into one based on the manipulation of ideas, data, and information, finding this balance is going to be more and more important. Clearly, that’s easier said than done.

The Secrets of His Success

A few months ago, Emmanuel Macron’s political opponents warned that voting for him would create an inevitable political crisis. He could become President, they said, but would obviously never garner an absolute majority in parliament with his new party, En Marche, created just a year ago, and a set of relatively unknown candidates, more than half of whom have never held any elected office. Yesterday, the talking points swiftly changed: the same people who had warned of a hung parliament were railing against the risks inherent in “single party” rule. How quickly we have swung, from anarchy to autocracy!

France’s constitution gives ample powers to its President, provided his party wins a majority at the National Assembly. If he doesn’t, he loses control of his cabinet and is basically reduced to tending after foreign policy. The stakes were thus quite high for Macron, who ran a wildly successful outsider campaign for the Presidency on the premise of getting things done at home. In yesterday’s first round of the parliamentary elections, La Republique En Marche (REM) gathered 32 percent of the vote, ahead of the center-right Les Republicains’s 21.2 percent and Marine Le Pen’s National Front’s 13.9 percent. If that doesn’t sound like an overwhelming landslide, France’s majoritarian system should net Macron more than 400 seats out of a total of 577 in next weekend’s second round of voting. Les Republicains will muddle through as the main opposition party, but they won’t avoid a deep identity crisis. The Socialists, however, are all but decimated: They will have gone from a majority party commanding 284 seats to a shadow of its former self struggling to keep more than twenty. Prominent Socialist politicians, like party chairman Jean-Christophe Cambadelis or the presidential candidate Benoit Hamon, have not even made it to the second round.

How did Macron pull off such an upset? Part of the answer lies in the French political system itself. The 1999 decision, to hold the parliamentary elections a month after the presidential one, was made precisely so that voters would be allowed to follow up on their presidential choice, and thus avoid a political stalemate. Even voters who did not support Macron in April now appear to want to give him the authority to push his reform agenda—and especially to tackle the rigidities of the labor market. REM’s candidates ran using posters with Macron’s face photoshopped next to theirs; being political unknowns, they owe him their victory, and will repay their debt by guaranteeing smooth sailing for his agenda in Parliament. (“The street” will be another story.)

Beyond these systemic reasons, Macron’s raw political talent has been a huge asset to him. For one, he surprised most observers by assembling a cabinet tilting to the Right, with his Prime Minister, Economic Minister and Budget Minister poached from the Republicains. And his first foray into international relations, bookended by the Trump handshake and the Putin presser, was well received. In just his first month, Macron was thus able to dispatch two key talking points brandished against him during the campaign: that he would just provide a facelift for the Socialists (rather than destroying them), and that he would be out of his depth on the international stage.

Something deeper is going on, too. Not since 1958, when de Gaulle founded the Fifth Republic during the Algerian war, has France witnessed such a profound reshuffling of its political class. The two parties that have structured French political life along the Left-Right divide for decades have been swept away, with dozens of prominent incumbents losing by margins as high as 30 percent at the hands of virtual unknowns. Districts that have always voted for the Right, like in the West of Paris (Neuilly, Paris’ 16th arrondissement) seem poised to vote in a Macron MP. All this demonstrates not just the disdain that French voters have built up for their current political elite, but also the general fluidity of their political allegiances—something that many experts, especially in the United States, tend to miss. As is often the case, voters tend to be less risk-averse than observers heavily invested in the system.

The historically low turnout, at 49 percent, bears this out: While Macron’s party won almost as many votes as he did in the first round of the presidential election, turnout for his rivals’ parties collapsed. What’s the incentive for showing up to cast your vote for dying parties that have, in the eyes of voters, proven unable to renew themselves and adapt to the challenges of globalization? As in the United States and the UK, the two establishment parties were internally tearing themselves asunder over key issues like the European Union, and were proving unable to offer a coherent alternative to the vision offered by a resurgent National Front. With a party created from scratch, and thus unburdened by the past, Macron had not trouble doing so.

But why is a centrist, liberal and pro-European message resonating in France at a time when “populists” seem to be on the rise almost everywhere else? The answer lies in a category error. Most talk of populism usually conflates two seemingly related but not necessarily linked phenomena: extremist political ideologies from both the Left and the Right on the one hand, and anti-establishment anger on the other. Since liberal elites are often associated with the part of the population that has most benefited from globalization, it would seem obvious to observers that their rejection must be accompanied by an embrace of illiberalism.

Macron’s success gives the lie to this simplistic assumption. He has been able to capture some of this anti-establishment, populist feeling in a way that Hillary Clinton, the quintessential establishment political figure, never could. And make no mistake: Macron is as much a member of the country’s elites as anyone, having attended the most exclusive schools before joining the Rothschild investment bank, and finally landing on Francois Hollande’s staff. But the French haven’t been conned. Macron did bring a new generation of politicians along with him. And he never distanced himself from voters—and would never deign to characterize National Front supporters as “deplorables”. The broader lesson is clear: If liberals want to respond to the rising challenge of illiberal ideology, they need to capture that populist energy with a narrative of change.

Macron would do well to keep his own meteoric rise firmly in mind as a lesson to himself going forward. He has proven that many political institutions, up until now assumed to be immovably solid, are in fact very fragile and up for grabs. With a clear majority, an opposition in shambles, and high favorability ratings, there are high expectations that this President will get things done. If he fails to confront France’s broken system, voters will be as unforgiving with him as they were to his predecessors.