Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 19

The Quiet American Novel

William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life

Steve Almond

Ig Publishing, 2019, 168 pp., $14.95

John Williams’s third novel Stoner was first published in 1965 and, perhaps fittingly for its famously mild-mannered protagonist, received scant attention before sinking almost completely out of sight. One review, eight years after its release, began by plaintively asking “why isn’t this book famous?” Stoner’s reputation steadily revived decades later, with several reissues and the passionate word-of-mouth evangelism of its fans, eventually selling in the millions in Europe and later in America. Stoner’s rescue from oblivion provides another example of how underrated products of American culture sometimes must migrate across the pond to get their due. Stoner is now widely considered a beloved modern classic and a movie version is now in the works, which could be either luminously beautiful or an utter disaster.

Why a painstakingly unsentimental tale of a midwestern farmer’s son turned academic is so moving is the subject of William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life, a new book-length study by the essayist and short story writer Steve Almond. Stoner is the kind of book that makes instant fanatics of its readers; Almond approvingly references the old saying about The Velvet Underground’s first record—only a few people bought it when it came out, but everyone who did started a band. There’s no doubt that Stoner, a novel preoccupied with the pursuit of literature for its own sake, converted plenty of its readers into writers. Part of the pleasure of reading Almond’s deeply personal approach to investigating Stoner’s subtle power is how nakedly honest he is about the ways in which the book speaks to his own ambitions, flaws, and fears as a writer and man.

Almond admits that he has lost count of the number of times he’s reread Stoner after first encountering it as an MFA student and pouring through it in one ecstatic night’s reading, where he “wept a good deal, inexplicably though not unhappily.” Ever since, Stoner has been a consistent source of wisdom and insight throughout the cycle of his life, as a professional teacher and writer, husband, father, a son mourning the death of his beloved mother, and as a middle-aged man pondering mortality. Kafka once said that we should read only the books that take an axe to the frozen seas inside of us, and Almond’s sometimes anguished account of his perpetual rereading Stoner is in keeping with this sage advice. “The central reason I keep circling back to Stoner isn’t aesthetic or moral,” he writes. “What I’m after is personal reckoning. Each time I’ve read the book, it has illuminated some new aspect of my own inner life.”

To its credit, Stoner isn’t the kind of book that plays many formal or linguistic games. It doesn’t play any games at all. The bleakness of the narrative provides much of its honesty and also its spare beauty. We follow the naturalistically told story of the rather plain and unassuming life of William Stoner, a son of the Missouri soil who is suddenly converted to the life of the mind by a classroom epiphany with one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Stoner eventually becomes a Medievalist scholar and assistant professor at a small Missouri university. He marries badly, suffers a generally dismal home life because of it, has a brief and doomed affair, deals with a colleague’s attempted career sabotage, and dies. That’s about it.

And yet, of course, even within that ordinary life there are multitudes. Part of Stoner’s ability to move countless readers lies in how the minutiae of this nondescript man’s life is so delicately and surely rendered that it is alchemized into art. You feel for poor Bill Stoner, bask in the quiet pathos of his humdrum existence and poor life choices, and yet as years pass Stoner’s devotion to his calling as a professor starts to feel heroic both because of and despite the innumerable existential odds stacked against him. It helps you to see that there are plenty of Stoner types around, plugging away at their humble passions while time and chance take their inexorable toll.

Almond’s willingness to look afresh at this subtle tale illuminates some of the character’s easily overlooked motivations. For example, Stoner’s wealthy, beautiful, and coldly cruel wife Edith initially seems like little more than a tyrant who relentlessly tramples on Stoner’s emotions during their dreary marriage. Critics of Williams’s work have made this case: that his novels are misogynistic, that Edith is a “vindictive monster.” But Almond’s wife, a novelist herself, insightfully pointed out to him that the horror of Edith’s gilded upbringing is hidden in plain sight. As the narrator of Stoner puts it: “her moral training both at the schools she attended and at home, was negative in nature, prohibitive in intent, and almost entirely sexual.”

Something awful must have happened to Edith in her youth that caused her to be entirely unmoved at her own father’s funeral and to smash up her childhood collection of porcelain dolls and flush them down the toilet shortly thereafter. It’s far too easy, especially for male readers, to simply assume the worst when female characters act out; at the same time, it’s far too easy for critics of Williams to write off his characterization as mere misogyny. Almond argues convincingly that there’s an interesting novel waiting to be written “examining the world from [Edith’s] perspective, as a woman passed ruthlessly from one man to another and made ruthless in the process.”

Almond also finds a social critique in Stoner. He usefully points out that Stoner lives through immense social upheaval in his time: growing up poor during the Depression, seeing men beg door to door for the bread that will only allow them to keep begging. Class anxiety runs rampant; the fact that Stoner comes from stoic farming stock is a source of crippling self-doubt throughout his life, especially given a career choice that alienates him from both his disappointed family and his uncomprehending peers. His small group of college buddies is ravaged by conscription into World War I, and the personal toll he suffers speaks eloquently against wartime jingoism. Sometimes Almond’s extrapolations get a little carried away. The 2016 election seems to be lodged like a splinter in too many people’s minds, and it does cause Almond to veer into political rant mode at times.

Genre-wise, Stoner is a campus novel, which is to say it offers an implicit critique of academia. But the depiction of academia in Stoner is less interested in exposing frauds and snobs, as with other campus novels, and more about exploring what it means to pursue knowledge for its own sake. Stoner’s work as a professor isn’t described in depth, but his monkish devotion to his calling as a reader and scholar shines through. Williams wrote to his agent that part of the point of the novel is that “Stoner will be some kind of saint.” Almond approves of Stoner’s undergraduate advisor’s encouragement of his bookish ambition: “don’t you see? It’s love!”

In some ways, Stoner’s biggest problem isn’t just his unassertiveness; it’s his vulnerability to the cutthroat vagaries of the academic life. Stoner suffers this with a conniving colleague, Lomax, who tries to abuse his position in order to promote his own agenda, lifting up a mediocre student capable of memorizing platitudes but not independent thought. Stoner’s great moment of self-assertion comes when he refuses to buckle to Lomax’s pressure to pass his protégé. Stoner argues that the university should be devoted to the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, like a medieval monastery, offering a contemplative respite from the heedless bustle of the outside world. It’s a fine sentiment, but it’s not enough to ward off the mendacity of his colleague, who proceeds to punish Stoner for adhering to academic principle.

For his part, Almond’s certainly got the love, but he offers an amusingly self-deprecating account of his own frustrating years as an adjunct, referring to himself as “a Professor of Bitterness” hustling from one gig to another in a beat-up car while trying and failing to model the love of literature to his largely indifferent students. Almond knows what it takes to be a good teacher, and that it’s not always in one’s control. He explains, with an endearingly self-deprecating candor, the jealousy and competitiveness inherent in the writing life and the Sisyphean task of trying to survive in the academic world. At one point, Almond confesses, rather endearingly, that when a former student who had gone on to tremendous success sent a note of thanks to her former teacher, he was “proud beyond measure while also wanting to hang myself.”

Ultimately, though, Almond knows that all the hassle is worthwhile. The passionate pursuits that might seem like madness or folly to the outside world are precisely the most necessary ones. The book ends with a pair of emotionally complex and analytically heartfelt meditations on family—the first about Almond as a father struggling to be the man his wife and children need him to be; the second, a moving account of the death of his beloved, talented, and overworked mother. Almond is able to convey these deeply honest, and at times embarrassing, accounts of navigating such fraught emotional terrain because of his engagement with Stoner’s own struggles.

Stoner wins hearts and minds worldwide because it quietly makes a virtue, sentence by carefully modulated sentence, of the lost art of paying attention. Almond explains that he loves Stoner because “to focus on the inner life today—to read books, to think deeply, to imagine with no ulterior agenda, to reflect on painful or confusing experiences—is to defy the clamoring edicts of our age, the buy messages, the ingrained habits of passive consumption and complaint.” Giving one’s time and attention over to a quiet, subtly observed tale like Stoner might be more attractive than ever nowadays.

Criticism—particularly literary criticism—at its best ought to be seasoned with a robust element of the personal, of the inescapably human, or else it runs the risk of drying up completely and becoming brittle with polemic. We should read in order to live more fully, to engage with the complexities of the human condition more deeply. Criticism like Almond’s that passionately responds to texts with both a judicious eye and a beating heart honors that sacred imperative. And the heartening number of readers who are still moved by Stoner in our ADD-afflicted age offers proof that the passionate study of literature, the kind that Stoner dedicates his otherwise unremarkable life to, is not dead.

The post The Quiet American Novel appeared first on The American Interest.

Joker and Our Leaderless Future

The award-winning film Joker has captivated and outraged audiences and critics around the world. Apart from the mesmerizing performance by Joaquin Phoenix and bravura direction by Todd Philips, one of the most memorable things about the film is its treatment of what Hannah Arendt famously termed the banality of evil. As the film begins, we might expect to be thrust into  a cartoonish superhero universe, where villainy exudes some sense of sophistication—think a brilliant Bond villain grasping for power. In Joker, however, both the violent rioters and the man who is supposed to be their leader are unremarkable specimens. The mob is made up of the furious everyman, destroying the city as a protest against inequality and plutocracy. And the main villain, Arthur Fleck, is not a criminal mastermind, but rather suffers from mental illness and is carried along by events.

Fleck is not a leader in any conventional sense. As one of the weakest and most unfit members of society, Fleck ends up as a powerful symbol of protest around which the masses organize, yet he himself does not strive to lead. His face in clown make-up—Fleck barely holds down a day job as a clown—becomes emblematic of the movement, with protesters donning clown masks as they rampage through the city. The movement itself is headless, yet powerful and destructive. If Putin in Russia developed the so-called power vertical, the Joker’s movement is horizontal.

The film elicited a strong response among the French, who saw the protest movement depicted in the movie as a stand-in for their own Gilet Jaunes—an ongoing, spontaneous, leaderless protest movement fueled by social anger. If you Google “Joker Gilet Jaunes” you will see many doctored pictures of the Joker wearing a yellow vest, and dozens of articles analyzing the movie in terms of the current political situation in France. And yet here in the United States, a different comparison comes to mind given our political realities: Donald Trump strikes me as the Joker of our times.

The movie is not written to be an allegory about Trump, so one should not expect exact parallels. There are resonances, however. Fleck getting away with several murders in broad daylight echoes Trump famously boasting that he could shoot a person on Fifth Avenue and still get elected. Or the climactic scene where the Joker murders a television host live on the air reminds one of the various violent anti-media fantasies Trump and his supporters have indulged in through the years (the most recent being a grotesque edit of a scene from the film Kingsman: The Secret Service that featured Trump massacring journalists and other political opponents).

Even more interesting is what the movie suggests about modern “leadership,” such as it is. Fleck is patently unfit to lead anything; Donald Trump has been called a highly unfit—if not the most unfit—President in modern history, with a little bit less than half the country supporting his immediate removal from office. But that assessment of “fitness” is tied to a different, perhaps outdated, conception of politics. Trump goes out of his way to downplay anything that might set him apart from regular people. He does not hide his wealth—oftentimes he brandishes it as a sign of his supposed competence—but at the same time, he shows that he is just a regular guy eating McDonald’s. President Trump, just like candidate Trump and TV personality Trump, has never tried to put himself above others—not in the way he speaks, nor in the way he writes letters to foreign leaders, nor in the way he uses his cellphone and social media. He even calls in to Fox News as an ordinary viewer. His voters don’t see him as part of an elite that stands above the crowd. And while other presidents might have not been fully qualified coming into the job either, none have so consciously tried to lower the office once in it.

The other intriguing element is the seeming randomness and unpredictability of the leader’s rise. Had Arthur Fleck not been beaten up by street bullies in the beginning of the movie, he would not have been given a gun by his colleague. Had he not been later harrassed by drunken investment bankers in the subway, he would not have used that gun to commit a murder that became a rallying cry for the oppressed. And without being empowered by his success there, he wouldn’t have proceeded to commit a murder on live television, cementing his role in the uprising. Trump, too, was an unlikely winner—though unlike Fleck, who finds himself a leader to his own surprise, Trump worked to capture the highest office in the land. But had the Republican field been smaller, he may not have made it; had FBI director James Comey not announced an investigation into Hillary Clinton, his momentum may not have built; and had Clinton taken Trump’s appeal to working-class voters more seriously and campaigned harder in vulnerable states, he probably would have lost.

Both the leveling and the unpredictability are arguably just expressions of populism, and are perhaps extra resonant in what is broadly now seen as a populist era. But modern populism as depicted in Joker gestures at something more, an end-point of populism taken to its logical extremes: a rejection not just of elites, but of leadership itself. The film gives us a faceless “leader”—just one clown in a crowd of clowns. And what makes the movie resonate is that perhaps for the first time in history, this fantasy is possible today, mainly due to technology.

Today, leaderless protests have sprung up all across the world. Take, for example, the mass protests that have been roiling Barcelona. They were orchestrated completely online. The group that organized them is called Tsunami Democratic, and apart from the name, the general public and most of the protesters know nothing else about it. It operates through Twitter, anonymous Telegram channels, and an innovative coordination app the group itself has written using peer-to-peer technology. In other words, Tsunami Democratic is itself leaderless, at least in any traditional sense of the word. And that has been no impediment to its success.

Similarly, in Hong Kong, up to a million people have taken to the streets without any visible leader. The same goes for the Gilets Jaunes in France, as well as anti-government movements in Iran, Lebanon, Chile, Sudan, and Georgia. Leaderless protests have even occurred in my native Russia, the most censored country in today’s Europe. And while many protest movements start up spontaneously and are later harnessed by a leader, it’s notable how often this has not been the case of late.

Caution is warranted. For example, what seemed like a popular movement to oust Evo Morales from Bolivia is now being depicted by many on the left as an orchestrated coup. And for its part, Spain is investigating Russia’s involvement in the Catalonia events. But whether any of these protest movements are “authentic” or not, what is new and significant is the means of quickly making connections between people. It points to a new kind of social reality, where people are comfortable transacting freely with one another without any reliance on centralized authority. Only now is this beginning to find full expression in politics.

The so-called peer-to-peer revolution has long roots. It is the latest twist in the information revolution, a phenomenon that has been accelerating since the 1990s. Email and the world wide web made access to information theoretically available to all, though its initial impact was felt more in business than in everyday life. Search engines took these innovations to the broad mainstream, and politics were soon affected. Political blogs and news sites, in some cases active since the mid-1990s, gained new prominence in the mid-to-late 2000s as a result of Google’s triumph. But it was smartphones, which made sure we were always connected to the internet, that enabled the peer-to-peer phenomenon—both as a business model and as a social habit.

The way we gather, consume, and distribute information has had a profound leveling effect on our societies. We are already used to AirBnb and Uber, although we may not yet be attuned to how profoundly these technologies are changing our democratic politics. The new paradigm is becoming more and more horizontal as opposed to vertical—a honeycomb, except with no queen bee. Or as the political scientist Niall Ferguson described it in these pages, it’s the triumph of networks over hierarchies.

The proliferation of leaderless movements suggests that vertical structures of power—the basis on which states have organized themselves for hundreds of years—are an increasingly poor fit for our reality. And similarly, it could be that “unfit” populist leaders like Donald Trump are embodying a growing if subconscious demand for a flattening of relationships in politics. It’s not just that Trump never intended to govern “responsibly” or “technocratically.” It’s not even that his personal shortcomings—lack of organization or discipline—have prevented him from doing so. The Trump presidency is arguably a reflection of the growing revolt against politics writ large. While racism, resentment, inequality, and Russia’s interference all certainly played a role, Trump might simply be a leader for our times.

Among Trump’s followers, at least, there seems to be little demand for traditional modes of governing. And while Trump may well lose in 2020, and Trumpism as a set of political beliefs may fade from memory, it feels unlikely that the kind of democratic politics that made Trump possible will ever disappear.

This might look like we are headed for a period of perpetual revolution and unrest. Niall Ferguson was pessimistic in his aforementioned 2014 essay as he assessed the politics of the day. He already saw an increase in online-fueled activism, but didn’t think it meant an increase in citizen involvement:

Not that the man in the street is actually in the street. Far more likely, he is the man slumped on his sofa, his attention skipping fitfully from television to laptop to tablet to smartphone and back to television. And what gets his attention? The end of history? The clash of civilizations? The answer turns out to be the narcissism of small differences.

But there is space for optimism, too. First of all, just because most of today’s populists thrive on social media, it doesn’t necessarily stand to reason that social media breeds populism, or that populism must be destructive. Barack Obama pioneered targeting voters in a political campaign using social media, and broke ground in using social media to communicate with the country once in office. It’s a useful thought experiment to imagine how Candidate Obama would approach politics in the 2020 race. It’s hard to imagine him as an unruly populist.

Secondly, the laziness Ferguson is talking about might simply be a sign of indifference toward an already outdated mode of interaction with politicians. Yes, it might be that a shallow “swipe-right/swipe-left” culture, conditioned by apps such as Tinder and Grindr, has rewarded superficial, signaling politicians like Trump. But it also might be the case that just as users of dating apps are looking for a more meaningful connection than the hook-ups on offer by the peer-to-peer revolution, voters are still open to a serious leaders, albeit ones who know how to engage them using peer-to-peer methods.

There are already fully interactive TV series where viewers make decisions for the main character by choosing options on screen. What if such technology were applied for politicians? What if instead of voting them in and out of office once every two or four years, voters could make decisions in real time? Perhaps in such a world, politicians become a technical detail in realizing voters’ preferred outcomes. In short, the future of high-tech democracy may not end up being anything like what we can imagine today, in the shadow of three chaotic years of Trump’s turbocharged populist rule.

Still, it’s hard to deny that we find ourselves at a time of profound change. And change can be disturbing. The best we can do at this point is to hope that it’s darkest before dawn, while never forgetting the late Senator John McCain’s warning—that sometimes it’s darkest before it’s totally black.

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Taking the Fight to the Kleptocrats

To say that Western democracies have been put on the defensive in the past decade is an understatement. To future historians, it may seem shocking to what extent the terms of political debates in the world’s wealthiest, most powerful countries are being dictated by their much weaker adversaries. 

The Russia- and Iran-led war in Syria unleashed a refugee wave that almost unraveled the European Union and certainly contributed to the result of the 2016 Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom. The crisis was brought to an end partly through the EU’s commitment to bribe the strongman in Ankara, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, into keeping Syrian asylum-seekers in Turkey. On this side of the Atlantic, the United States is mired in a conversation about whether the duly elected president is a Russian asset. And a “beautiful” letter from North Korea’s leader is all it takes to reverse decades of U.S. government policy on North Korea’s nuclear program.

The degree of leverage exercised by nominally weaker actors reflects a striking lack of self-confidence—and imagination—among Western leaders and defenders of the post-war international order. True, our form of government and U.S.-led alliances have their flaws. Overall, however, they continue to function far better than their alternatives. Moreover, they make the West significantly more powerful than its adversaries. 

The only path out of the current cycle of self-defeat in which “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,” is through a positive agenda that would bring the fight to our enemies. Autocracies in all their forms are built around political patronage and by extension around channeling public resources away from legitimate uses, and into the pockets of the governing oligarchy and its cronies. In a world with mobile capital, Western democracies have no easy way of extricating themselves from such kleptocracy—stolen money finds its way into real estate markets in London and Miami, and eventually into our politics as well. 

We are not talking peanuts. Since 1994, Russia has experienced net capital outflows of $750 billion. The money has flown to specific sectors, such as real estate, because of policies enacted in the West, such as the “17-year-long ‘temporary’ exemption from PATRIOT Act responsibilities gifted to realtors,” as my former AEI colleague Clay Fuller writes.

The result is partly the empowerment of kleptocrats at home—being able to hide their loot in the safety of Western financial centers makes their job much easier. But, worse yet, thanks to the globalization of finance, post-Soviet corruption is quickly becoming a problem of our own. 

The reality of democratic politics in Western Europe and the United States—with mysterious loans to extremist parties and figures such as Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman—is starting to look eerily similar to intrigues endemic to the countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. “The politics that Ukraine has suffered through as a result of its conflict with Russia have become our politics as well,” observed Mitchell Orenstein.

It is time to strike back. As Fuller puts it, “transnational kleptocracy is the adversary, and America has non-violent, asymmetrical weapons it can use in the growing clash between democracy and authoritarianism.” 

Already, federal orders in the United States require title companies in lucrative markets, such as New York City or Miami, to trace the ultimate owners of real estate worth over $300 thousand. But it would be far more effective to introduce common standards for everyone. Thanks to the Kleptocracy Initiative at the Hudson Institute, and to individuals of diverse intellectual and ideological backgrounds, there are some grounds for optimism about the future of anti-kleptocracy policies.

In the Senate, the bipartisan Illicit Cash Act has been introduced to modernize existing legislation around money laundering and the financing of terrorism, in part by strengthening the disclosure requirements for beneficial ownership—an area in which the United States lags far behind other developed economies. The current framework for fighting money laundering is grounded in legislation that can be traced back to the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, adopted in an era of capital controls and relatively simple technologies for financial transacting. The Illicit Cash Act would create feedback mechanisms through which law enforcement could keep financial institutions and regulators updated about the type of information that is helpful in identifying illicit financial flows. It would also create legal avenues for information sharing between financial institutions themselves in order to better detect suspicious activities, including through the use of artificial intelligence.

In the House, there are a number of more modest yet nonetheless meaningful pieces of legislation with broad bipartisan backing. Resources for democracy and rule of law promotion are often tied up in multi-annual programs, which makes it difficult for policymakers to respond quickly to events like the downfall of Yanukovych’s regime in Ukraine. The Countering Russian and Other Kleptocracy (CROOK) Act would create a rapid-response fund from part of the fines collected from U.S. businesses under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977. The Foreign Extortion Prevention Act would criminalize bribery demands by foreign officials, as opposed to just penalizing U.S. companies, and the Kleptocrat Exposure Act would create a public database of individuals who have been denied a U.S. visa on suspicion of corruption or human rights abuses; the Protecting United States Business Interests Abroad Act would provide a new legal basis for visa bans against foreign persons who attempted to extort U.S. companies. Finally, the Justice for Victims of Kleptocracy Act would create a consolidated database of assets currently frozen by the U.S. government, presented as money “stolen from the people of country X—and recovered by the United States.”

It is striking—and encouraging—that these pieces of anti-kleptocracy legislation defy traditional partisan divides. If the current momentum is sustained and built on, fighting kleptocracy could be a new rallying point for the myriad of currently disconnected programs aimed at promoting democracy and the rule of law, many of them on intellectual and political autopilot since the mid-2000s. 

“Graft and corruption are bad” is an effective, uncontroversial slogan that cuts across ideological divides. Reasonable people may disagree about how the problem should be tackled, but most would agree that there is a great deal of low-hanging fruit that would command support in both center-left and center-right circles—especially in the United States. What is more, an anti-kleptocracy agenda can help strengthen transatlantic cooperation at a time when finding common interests has been distinctly challenging.

With a new version of the Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Directive in place, policies in the European Union might seem significantly more advanced than in the United States. The fifth iteration of the Directive requires countries to set up consolidated databases of beneficial owners, thus cracking down on non-transparent shell companies commonly used in organized crime. 

Due to the EU’s decentralized nature, its policies necessarily suffer from a degree of fragmentation, as the Hudson Institute’s and The American Interest’s own Ben Judah argued recently in Le Monde. In particular, the implementation and enforcement of anti-kleptocracy measures such as the AML Directive remain in the hands of member states. New anti-graft measures often interfere with national bank privacy regimes—and member states such as Luxemburg and Malta have not complied for years with the previous iterations of the Directive. 

Both the arrival of a new European Commission and the policy conversations prompted by the ongoing impeachment of President Trump should be seized as opportunities. Not as opportunities for further partisan bickering and a deepening of political polarization, but for strengthening our democracies and hitting our adversaries where it hurts them the most—in their pocketbooks.

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Hong Kong’s Long View

The mass protests in Hong Kong ignited by the Extradition Law Amendment Bill (ELAB) have been raging for half a year and are evolving into a broad-based democracy movement, a movement that has become a classic example of pursuing democracy with broad support and participation, nimble tactics, and indomitable spirit.  

Two things have been clear from the beginning: First, neither the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) nor the Hong Kong government would respond positively to the protests and the protestors would experience increasingly harsh suppression. Second, it would be impossible for CCP and the local authorities to completely silence the protestors. This portends that in the near future, the tug-of-war between the Hong Kong government and the protestors will remain a stalemate with no clear winner.

The crisis has often appeared to have reached a tragic denouement. Most recently, Hong Kong police violence against protesters escalated to horrific levels, and included the use of live ammunition. But in the following days, pro-democracy candidates scored a landslide victory in the District Council elections, and the United States government enacted the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019 (HKHRDA). A December 8th demonstration called for by Civil Human Rights Front (CHRF) gained approval by the authorities and inspired the participation of over 800 thousand Hong Kongers according to CHRF. These events suggest a prolonged stalemate and a war of attrition. Violent crackdowns by the police have failed to weaken the commitment and ardor of the protestors. Yet even more massive demonstrations are unlikely to induce any positive response from the Hong Kong government.

So how much longer will the stalemate last, and on which side will it break? Whose side is time on?

The Hong Kong protests are unique. At their peak, over 2 million out of the city’s 7 million residents showed up in a single demonstration, proportionally the largest in modern times. In other places, mass protests on such a scale would have almost certainly caused tectonic political shifts, but until now there have been virtually no changes in Hong Kong’s political landscape. Even Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s Chief Executive, who now enjoys virtually no popular confidence or respect, is shamelessly holding on; no blunder or humiliation, it appears, can make her resign.

The lack of change is not related to the size or intensity of the protests, but to the fact that the real opponent of Hong Kong people seeking freedom and democracy is not the Hong Kong administration, but the dictatorship ruling over China as a whole. Today, the CCP is the most powerful authoritarian regime in the world. For the past thirty years, the regime has been highly effective in crushing any tendency toward domestic dissent. But Hong Kong has broken China’s record of repression. The former colony continues to cherish its tradition of individual liberty and rule of law; more importantly, the political principles espoused by the people of Hong Kong represent the antithesis of the CCP’s ideology. Civil society in Hong Kong is thriving, and most means of domestic political control employed by CCP, such as dividing and conquering, information blockades, and threats and buy-offs, have had little effect on most of its people. There is no recognized leader of the Hong Kong protests, but they are structured by organizations existing across different social strata. Since it is impossible to eradicate these highly fluid organizations and quasi-organizations, or to produce a chilling effect by bloodshed using its “absolutely superior power,” the crackdown by the CCP and the Hong Kong police has only aggravated the confrontation between the people and the Hong Kong government as well as its CCP master. 

Hong Kong is also unique with respect to its economic role. From the time the CCP came to power until the era of China’s economic reform, and into present times, Hong Kong has served as an outpost for international trade, connecting China to the rest of the world. As a highly important international economic and financial center, upheavals in Hong Kong inevitably affect the entire Chinese state, a factor that warrants careful and complex calculations on the part of the CPP in contemplating the use of its military for a large-scale crackdown. 

In addition to being an economic hub, Hong Kong plays another important role that has become more pronounced recently: It serves as a conduit for the exchange of information and for exchanges about values, principles, and beliefs between China and the rest of the world. When the Anti-ELAB protests started, there were limited reactions from democratic countries despite worldwide attention. Two concerns seem to have been responsible for this underwhelming response: First, some democracies have adopted a prudent and “conservative“ posture in international affairs out of consideration for their own domestic problems. Second, given the CCP’s intolerance of criticism, countries wanted to avoid angering the world’s second largest economy. As a result, it took some time to build international support for the protests. Nevertheless, the fact that the United States enacted HKHRDA shows that support for a people seeking respect for their inherent freedom can still be more compelling than immediate economic benefits.

After President Trump signed HKHRDA into law, none of the senior Hong Kong officials who had opposed the protests played along to the sharply critical tune adopted by the CCP. Hong Kong is a highly international city and its residents are much more connected to the rest of the world than their fellow countrymen on the mainland. HKHRDA serves as a strong deterrent to the CCP’s allies in Hong Kong and makes local authorities think twice about the repressive tactics, which also produces a ripple effect on the mainland.

Hong Kong is different from other Chinese communities outside mainland China in that many of its residents do take ownership of their Chinese identity, a fact that helps to explain the annual candlelight vigil at Victoria Park in memory of the victims of “the Tiananmen Massacre” for the past thirty years. When Hong Kong officially reverted to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, events there became more important to the mainland, not to mention the interconnectedness facilitated by easy transportation and large numbers of visitors.

But Hong Kong’s influence runs in both directions, both supporting China’s economy and also weakening the hegemony of the ruling ideology and party. As time passes, it is inevitable that the role of Hong Kong as a conduit of information to the mainland will become more important, and will eventually undermine the CCP’s information blockade, its disinformation, and its nationalist propaganda. During the recent protest in Maoming City, Guangdong province, for instance, slogans used by the protestors exhibited an unmistakable “Hong Kong flavor”. Even on “the Great China LAN,” one observes frequently witty remarks mimicking catch phrases used in Hong Kong protests.

From the very beginning, the CCP’s propaganda apparatus defined the Hong Kong protests as “Hong Kong Independence” activities, misleading people on the mainland and arousing their national pride. As time passes and information about HKHRDA and similar developments spreads, people on the mainland will eventually learn the truth about what has happened in Hong Kong and their views will change. Meanwhile, as more and more people are exposed to “negative” information, the stigmatization of the democracy movement in distorted “reports” from the government will find a less receptive audience, a trend that is bound to favor the protestors.

The Chinese economy has experienced substantial growth in the past forty years. As the government controls an increasingly large amount of resources, the current rulers of China have convinced themselves that China enjoys “a superior political system.” As a result, they use their newly-gained economic power to attempt to undermine Western political approaches. It is true that the world’s democracies do not always give priority to their own central principles when facing practical challenges, but by no means have foundational principles been abandoned. Dictators will ultimately pay a price when they try to challenge human rights, democracy, and the rule of law on the level of principles. Hong Kong forms an integral link in the human liberty chain, and democratic societies have an unavoidable moral duty to safeguard it. While President Trump’s “transactional” approach to international relations has focused mainly on economic considerations, and did not, in the beginning, address China’s violent repression, even undermining traditional alliances with other democracies, most have still reached a consensus on the issue of Hong Kong. HKHRDA was not only a nearly unanimous act of Congress, but also a bill that reflected a deep consensus in public opinion in the country. Moreover, its effect has reverberated throughout the Western world, with several other countries currently considering similar legislation.

The expectation that Western countries will not watch Hong Kong’s situation with folded arms is not wishful thinking. In the past thirty years, the West has not made promoting human rights in China a priority, relegating the issue to secondary status. Hong Kong, however, is different in that close attention to and serious warning against human rights violations by Western countries are serving as a deterrent. This will not only encourage pro-democracy activists elsewhere, but could usher in a new era in which human rights violations anywhere in China will be sanctioned by the international community.

Taking advantage of their city’s unique position, the people of Hong Kong have built powerful international support from initially tepid reactions. Moreover, they have built a beachhead for projecting democratic ideas and the ideal of freedom to the mainland, challenging the CCP’s increasingly harsh social control and increasing the risks to the CCP for willfully abrogating human rights. Despite being a small “city state,” Hong Kong has the potential to spark unified actions by the international community against the aggressive behavior of the CCP, potential that would have had no chance to materialize but for the unwavering fight waged by the Hong Kong people.

Mainland China can come under this influence because of its internal weaknesses. The CCP’s intensified social control in recent years has masqueraded and suppressed many social conflicts. Meanwhile, China’s economic growth has been exhibiting signs of fatigue. The CCP will presumably continue to stigmatize Hong Kong’s protests through official media, while covering up serious human rights violations and deepening social conflicts, but in the end truth will prevail. Hong Kong is a small place, and yet the long-lasting protests have introduced an unpredictable variable into the mainland’s unstable vertical power balance. Although the full impact of the protests will take time to materialize, Hong Kong is definitely not Beijing in 1989, where protests lasted only 56 days. The CCP does not have a monopoly on the “long view.” Persistence is power.

By ensuring a prolonged fight at minimum cost, the Honk Kong people have not only gained time for themselves, but also set a hopeful example for mainland China: put up a fight and you may not necessarily lose! Taking advantage of Hong Kong’s unique position, the protestors have mobilized support from all parts of the world; at the same time, their fight has helped more and more Chinese people see the bright torch at the southern tip of their country and understand what is really taking place. The Hong Kong people are not afraid of not winning in the short term, but the CCP is afraid that the Hong Kong people are not losing. A strategy of minimizing costs and upholding ethical principles holds the best promise for greater understanding and support. As time passes, changes will come—both in Hong Kong and in Beijing.

The post Hong Kong’s Long View appeared first on The American Interest.

The UK Election, Blow-By-Blow

Midnight EST

What a night it has been. With around a hundred seats left to declare, Boris Johnson and the Conservative party are on target for a majority of about 70 seats–the party’s best result since Margaret Thatcher in 1987. Their vote share will be around 45 per cent—its best since the 1970s.

Labour in contrast looks as if it will suffer its worst result since the 1930s. Expect an internicine war to follow.

The Scottish Nationalists have swept Scotland. One of their scalps has been Jo Swinson, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, who has had a terrible night both nationally and locally. The DUP in Northern Ireland also lost its parliamentary leader, Nigel Dodds.

Interpretations will flow thick and fast now. Two thoughts.

First, the much (and wrongly) derided British political system has reasserted itself tonight with the people delivering a clear result to move beyond an era of hung parliaments and wafer thin majorities.

Second, and counterintuitively, tonight has seen a return to old fashioned British pragmatism. Labour, the Lib Dems, the DUP—all in different ways took extreme views that alienated even their core vote. The SNP in contrast played to its base and also reached beyond it. And Boris Johnson found a winning offer by promising to get on with Brexit and pivoting to the center ground on social issues. That broke the Labour “red wall,” taking advantage of the extraordinary unpopularity of Jeremy Corbyn, and decimating labour in its heartlands in the north of England, where it took working class voters for granted.

There will be more analysis of the election on The American Interest website in the coming days.

But that’s it from me on the night Boris Johnson was returned as the UK prime minister.

Goodnight!

11:35 PM EST

Here’s the state of play so far:

RESULT: National result for #BBCElection #GE2019.
Full results: https://t.co/tFoMAGcFsq pic.twitter.com/Dh4jxaZkvJ

— BBC Election (@bbcelection) December 13, 2019

11:20 PM EST

Caroline Lucas, the Green Party’s only MP, is reelected for Brighton Pavilion [district]. .

11:15 PM EST

President Trump reacts to the UK election result.

Looking like a big win for Boris in the U.K.!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 13, 2019

11:10 PM EST

SNP Leader Nicola Sturgeon.

Nicola Sturgeon caught by Sky when she learned about Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson losing her seat. pic.twitter.com/y0O4vQRIf5

— Jim Waterson (@jimwaterson) December 13, 2019

11:00 PM EST

Jeremy Corbyn has likely led the Labour Party to its worst defeat since the 1930s. So surely the party will pivot back to the center ground from where it won three massive victories under Tony Blair?

Not so fast. Jeremy Corbyn not only leads the parliamentary party, he has taken control of all the levers of the party—the “long march” through Labour’s institutions. Momentum, the campaign group that is the vanguard of Corbynism, remains unmoved by the result tonight.

But here’s Ed Balls, the former Labour cabinet minister in Gordon Brown’s government, taking Momentum’s Jon Lansman to task. We’ll be seeing a lot more of this kind bitter exchange in the coming days and weeks.

Watch this extraordinary exchange between former Labour minister @edballs and Momentum founder @jonlansman as they argue over what has gone wrong for the Labour Party at the #GE2019 https://t.co/cLnCAxZ38f pic.twitter.com/D4G6NyahUb

— ITV News (@itvnews) December 13, 2019

10:45 PM EST

Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson loses her seat to the Scottish Nationalist Party by 149 votes. It caps a disastrous campaign for the party and for Swinson personally. Her decision to fight the election on the hardline policy of ignoring the Brexit referendum result has proved calamitous.

Swinson talks of “dread and dismay” at the “wave of nationalism sweeping both sides of the border.”

10:40 PM EST

Boris Johnson holds his seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip.

“I don’t want to tempt fate, but it does look as if this one nation conservative government has been given a powerful mandate … This has turned out to be historic election.”

10:25 PM EST

Jeremy Corbyn in his constituency:

“A very disappointing night for the Labour Party … I will not lead the party in any future election.”

Says he will lead party through a period of reflection and transition to new leader.

10:20 PM EST

Results coming in fast now. In Richmond, Zac Goldsmith loses his seat to Lib Dem Sarah Olney. Goldsmith heavily defeated in a strong “Remain” seat—one of the wealthiest districts in the UK.

It’s the first ray of sunshine on bleak night so far for the Lib Dems.

10:10 PM EST

High profile MP Chuka Umunna, who defected from Labour to the Liberal Democrats (via the failed party Change UK) loses in the Cities of London and Westminster. Labour and the Lib Dems split the “remain” vote, allowing the Conservative through the middle.

Cities Of London & Westminster: CON HOLD #BBCElection #GE2019.
Full results: https://t.co/HiCap72POA pic.twitter.com/6buSWIGq5F

— BBC Election (@bbcelection) December 13, 2019

10:00 PM EST

Results so far in England. Many of these Conservative gains have come in parts of the country where voting Labour for generations had been a way of life. Labour has lost four elections in a row and is now collapsing even in its heartlands.

RESULT: National result for #BBCElection #GE2019.
Full results: https://t.co/kz8qYj82xp pic.twitter.com/tuDN7PiQ2f

— BBC Election (@bbcelection) December 13, 2019

9:35 PM EST

North Belfast, Northern Ireland. Pro-Brexit DUP set to lose its parliamentary leader Nigel Dodds.

DUP and Sinn Fein sources both telling @SkyNews that the DUP’s Westminster leader Nigel Dodds has lost his seat in North Belfast. #GE2019

— David Blevins (@skydavidblevins) December 13, 2019

9:25 PM EST

Jeremy Corbyn arrives at the count in his own constituency [district] of Islington “smiling like a Cheshire Cat.”

"A beaming Jeremy Corbyn arrives at his count… smiling like a Cheshire Cat"https://t.co/YMVJP13SGk #GE2017 pic.twitter.com/OeQxnsIT3q

— BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) June 9, 2017

9:15 PM

Alistair Campbell, former spin doctor for Tony Blair: “Fundamental truths have to be faced, otherwise Labour faces oblivion.” The Corbynistas are “delusional.”

9:10 PM EST

North Down, Northern Ireland. The centrist, non-sectarian Alliance party win this seat [district], pushing the [Protestant] pro-Brexit Democratic Unionist Party  into second place.

8:55 PM EST

I’ve live-blogged two UK general elections and the Brexit referendum for The American Interest, and they’ve all been dramatic ones minute-by-minute. This one is a a different kind of experience. Tonight the drama was done within seconds of the polls closing. Politicians and commentators moved quickly from “What’s happening” to “Why it happened.”

At the front of my mind is what this result says about the resilience of British democracy. For the last couple of years, analysis in the United States and the EU has often been the “Britain has become a laughing stock” variety. As it turns out, the British people have had the last laugh.

When Theresa May went to the country in 2017, the British electorate delivered a “hung parliament,” saying in effect —we told you what we wanted in the Brexit referendum, now you, the House of Commons, work out a sensible compromise that delivers on a relatively close 48%-52% Brexit referendum result.

After Parliament showed itself incapable of resolving the issue, the people tonight have said, OK, we’ll show you what to do. Get Brexit Done (to coin Boris Johnson’s election slogan).

British Representative Democracy: “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

8:25 PM EST

Workington result: Conservative gain. This was always signaled as the pivotal working class seat of the election if the Conservatives were going to remain in power.

Would “Workington Man” be prepared to vote Conservative?

Yes he would.

7:45 PM EST

Props to John Gray and to Andrew Sullivan, who from very different perspectives wrote about the trends that pointed towards tonight’s result, and did it before the election. (That rare thing: Wise before the event.)

A magisterial state of the nation essay:
Conservatism and the art of war – by John Gray https://t.co/kcEdQXp4Z7

— Jason Cowley (@JasonCowleyNS) October 23, 2019

This is a landslide. This is why: https://t.co/OBIZ1vt6SC via @intelligencer

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) December 12, 2019

 

7:20 PM EST

Alan Johnson, former minister in the Blair government and someone who grew up in poverty, doesn’t mince his words in attacking the Corbynistas in Labour for destroying the party and betraying the working classes.

Telly moment of the night was Alan Johnson laying into Jon Lansman pic.twitter.com/mWZLhBP8lJ

— brendan makes videos (@brenkjm) December 13, 2019

7:00 PM EST

First thoughts while we wait for more results.

Looked at from the United States, it would be easy for observers to see the Conservative victory tonight as a win for the hard right. That would be a mistake. Boris Johnson is an old fashioned “One Nation” conservative in the tradition of Disraeli, Churchill, and Harold Macmillan. The extremes in this election have been elsewhere: the hard left Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, who smashed apart Tony Blair’s successful center-left coalition; the Liberal Democrats, who wanted to ignore (not even rerun) the 2016 Brexit referendum; and Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, which wanted a scorched earth exit from the European Union. In contrast, Johnson pivoted to the center on social issues while listening to and reflecting public sentiment on Brexit. It looks as if voters, especially in England, decided this was the common sense option.

Tonight is a triumph for Johnson, but it is also a reaffirmation of the resilience of the British electoral system. The Brexit referendum put parliament and the people in conflict. The issue was put back to the people, who have now delivered a clear directive.

That’s constitutional politics working, folks.

6:40 PM EST

First results: Labour holds Newcastle Central and Sunderland. No surprises there. But in Blyth Valley, also in the north-east, the CONSERVATIVES have taken the seat. An extraordinary result. This is a former mining constituency, where the Conservatives traditionally have been—there is no other word for it—hated.

This is a symbolic moment in the night. Boris Johnson’s bid to create a new kind of conservatism to appeal to working class voters is already paying off. The new Conservative MP Ian Levy pays direct tribute to him in his victory speech.

6:15 PM EST

It’s been 80 minutes since the polls closed. Normally we would have had the first result by now. It always comes from seats in the north-east of England where they may as well weigh the Labour vote as count it. The fact that the results are still not in gives an indication of what a night it is going to be. The Conservatives are breaking down the so-called “Red Wall”—the parts of England that have been Labour for generations and where the Conservatives have been toxic. Now those seats are too close to call.

There’s always a danger of hyperbole on these occasions, but let’s be clear: The tectonic plates of British politics are shifting tonight.

6:05 PM EST

Brit-in-New York commentator Andrew Sullivan (who was at Oxford with Boris Johnson in the 1980s) points out some transatlantic implications of the collapse of the Labour vote.

One lesson from the UK: if the Democrats don't stop their hard-left slide, they'll suffer the same fate as Labour. If they don't move off their support for mass immigration, they're toast. Ditto the wokeness. Left Twitter is not reality.

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) December 12, 2019

5:55 PM EST

Two different perspectives on the likely result. “Rejoice!” says the right of center Daily Mail. “Nightmare Before Christmas!” says the left of center Daily Mirror.

Friday’s Daily MAIL: “Rejoice! Boris Set For Thumping Win” #BBCPapers #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/tRR4WMM5uG

— Allie Hodgkins-Brown (@AllieHBNews) December 12, 2019

Friday’s Daily MIRROR: “Nightmare Before Xmas” #BBCPapers #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/fujs7oJY2i

— Allie Hodgkins-Brown (@AllieHBNews) December 12, 2019

5:45 PM EST

Sometime TAI contributor Shadi Hamid taking a position on the election

So it looks like both Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are on track to be two of the most consequential heads of government of recent decades, where their predecessors (Obama & Cameron/May) are fading as ineffectual, if tragic figures

— Shadi Hamid (@shadihamid) December 12, 2019

5:35 PM EST

Now the wait begins. The constituencies [districts] in the north east of England always race to be first to declare a result, but the pace of results won’t pick up for a few hours yet.

The Exit Poll is only a forecast, but if it’s anywhere close to being right, then obviously the result is a massive win for Boris Johnson. He gambled on calling the election. Now he’s delivered the best result for the Conservative party since Margaret Thatcher in 1987.

For Labour, the election is a disaster. They’re set to lose seats [districts] in the north of England and the Midlands that they’ve held for generations. Expect the internal war for the future of the Left to start immediately. Jeremy Corbyn and his brand of hard-left politics was unacceptable to traditional Labour voters. Anti-semitism in the party disgusted even loyal supporters. It’s all a long way from Tony Blair’s historic landslide in 1997.

In Scotland, the SNP looks likely to increase it hold, which means there’s a confrontation coming over Scottish independence.

And Brexit, of course. The issue has obsessed the country since 2016. This election means that Britain will be leaving the European Union.

 

5:10 PM EST

Here’s the full exit poll forecast

Exit Poll Forecast: Conservative Majority #BBCelection #GE2019 pic.twitter.com/epJYYpRo2y

— BBC Election (@bbcelection) December 12, 2019

5:00 PM EST

The BBC/ITV/SKY Exit Poll is in.

Here’s the prediction: CONSERVATIVE MAJORITY

Boris Johnson is on target for a majority of 80+

Labour looks set for its worst election in modern times.

4:55 PM EST

Welcome to TAI’s coverage of the UK General Election!

The polls close in 5 minutes. Will Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s gamble of calling an election pay off, or is Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn heading to 10 Downing Street?

We’ll get the first indication in the Exit Poll at 5 pm.

Political Pic of the Day…

Our Flawed Impeachment Process

Increasingly, the Trump Presidency feels like a prolonged visit to a malevolent dentist’s office. Donald Trump continues to expose and prod our institutional cavities, such as an Electoral College system that enables the loser of the popular vote to become President or an impeachment process that puts a judicial façade on an inherently political process. If there is any redeeming value in this stressful period of American history, we can only hope that it will force us to think more seriously about reforming problems in our initial constitutional design.

This is the third significant effort at removing a President through impeachment since World War II. We have known for a long time that the impeachment rules are both under-specified and vulnerable to manipulation. Past efforts aimed to improve the impeachment process by fixing side issues such as the role of independent investigators. But Trump has gleefully exposed a deeper problem: If impeachment is determined by elected officials, then it inevitably becomes an exercise in political judgment and power, especially in an era of partisan polarization. And if that is the case, then why should he or members of his team bother to treat it differently than other Congressional skirmishes? 

The impeachment process has judicial features, but it is not an impartial court proceeding. A President can be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, but not all crimes are high enough to be impeachable and some argue that not all impeachable abuses of power are actual crimes. By comparison, the grounds for recalling officials at the state and local level are typically set out explicitly in their constitutions and charters. Except for the references to treason and bribery, that is not the case in the U.S. Constitution. 

The one constitutionally specified crime that may apply to President Trump, bribery, has a problematic history with respect to political reform. The simplest and most intuitive bribery definition is accepting something of material value (like money in a brown paper bag) in exchange for performing a public action or duty. But even in that seemingly clear-cut case, there are still several difficult elements of proof required for a conviction. When the “something of value” being exchanged is a political favor, endorsement, or campaign contribution, the legal grounds get murkier. It often depends upon the subtlety of the “ask.” The sad reality of democracy is that politicians are always extorting or bribing one another as a means of building consensus. That is the price we pay for allowing for little or no autocratic power in our democracy.

That does not mean that what Trump did is excusable or unproblematic. It is disturbing on many counts. He invited foreign interference into American elections. His actions could have induced false information from a country anxious to give the President what he wanted in return for desperately needed military aid. And Trump temporarily impounded money that was duly appropriated by Congress for a specific purpose and was in effect using taxpayer money to purchase in-kind campaign assistance. But the ambiguity of the U.S. constitution concerning an impeachable offence leaves a hole big enough to cover some pretty ridiculous pro-Trump arguments, at least in the minds of those who are predisposed by partisanship and ideology to look the other way. 

The other major impeachment flaw is that the “jurors” are politicians, not citizens subjected to a voir dire examination or judges who are sworn to be impartial. It is not wrong to argue that Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, or other key Democratic figures are conflicted by political motives. But so are all the Republicans. And when the shoe was on the other foot during the Clinton impeachment, the Republicans did not complain about the sham pretense of impartiality in their impeachment efforts. It is ever that way in politics: What seems fair when you are in power seems unfair when you are out of it, and vice versa. If any Democrats or Republicans break party ranks on the House impeachment or Senate conviction votes, it will be at least partly determined by how they think that vote will play out for them in their districts in 2020. 

It puzzles many Democrats that Republicans remain publicly loyal to the President on impeachment when so many express their disapproval of him in private. During the Clinton impeachment, however, Democrats defended a President who had oral sex with an intern and lied about it. Both would get you fired in a company or university these days, but the economy was doing well then and lying to protect your marriage did not seem to Democrats at the time to be an impeachable offense—in other words, Democrats in the 90s pretty much wrote the script for Republicans today. 

Why? Because Clinton had stitched together a heterogenous coalition of white southern Democrats and coastal liberals to lead the party out of the political wilderness of the Reagan-Bush years. Similarly, Trump solved his party’s Romney problem (i.e. a white, big business party competing in an increasingly diverse electorate) by appealing to white voters who had previously sat on the sidelines or voted for the Democrats with his racialized and “America First” appeals. It is not clear that Pence could do the same, which means that a vote for impeachment is quite plausibly the equivalent of asking Republican politicians to vote themselves out of power. That is a lot to ask of a politician and those who benefit from Republican policies. 

Given all this—and given the likelihood that the Senate will not vote to convict—does it make sense politically for the Democrats to move forward with impeachment before Christmas and a trial in January? Usually, savvy political leaders do not knowingly push forward with a vote that they are highly likely to lose. Indeed, that was why Nancy Pelosi initially balked at the idea. The political prospects of doing so now are unclear. No doubt the Democratic base demands it, and the Republican base will likely rally loyally against impeachment the way they did for Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation before the 2018 midterms. Even so, there are risks for both parties in terms of alienating independent voters and complicating the reelection prospects of their most vulnerable incumbents. Who wins politically is unclear at the moment.

But for me, the most important issue is refuting some of the subversive claims that have been made about Presidential power, positions that both parties may rue someday. At the top of my list is the assertion that congressional subpoenas can be ignored and relevant information withheld because top people in the Administration enjoy absolute testimonial immunity. The District Court found no basis in precedent for this claim. If this claim is not clearly rejected at the highest level, it will undermine the ability of Congress to investigate the Executive Branch and weaken the system of checks and balances. If that means slowing down the pace of the impeachment until the Supreme Court weighs in, it would be worth the wait.

President Trump has unwittingly served to remind us that we adopted the peculiarly fractured form of government that we have in order to prevent the concentration of power in the hands of “wannabe” autocrats. To date, the courts and the states have done a good job of preventing arbitrary executive rule on the domestic front, but Presidents have far fewer checks on them in the realm of foreign policy. Letting members of the Administration hide information or refuse to appear before Congress eviscerates the logic of our political system at a time when social media, foreign meddling, and populist fervor make the concerns of the Founding Fathers about autocracy more real than ever.

The post Our Flawed Impeachment Process appeared first on The American Interest.

A Season of Caesars

One of the most striking features of the current authoritarian trend in the world is its lack of a common ideological rationale. When liberal democracy gave way in the 1920s and 30s, two rival systems of belief—communism and fascism—posed compelling, if repugnant, alternatives. During the post-colonial era of democratic breakdowns in the 1950s and 60s, authoritarian challengers continued to mobilize around communist or at least state socialist banners overtly hostile to market forces and private property. Or they made use of vague socialist and anti-imperial rationales to justify their aggrandizement of the state and quashing of political opposition, or pursued a counter-revolutionary agenda of suppressing trade unions and other popular forces in order to achieve the political stability they said was necessary to attract investment and generate rapid economic development. 

Ideologically, today’s autocrats are a more motley and pragmatic crew. They generally claim to be market friendly, but mainly they are crony capitalists, who, like Putin in Russia, Orban in Hungary, and Erdogan in Turkey, are first concerned with enriching themselves, their families, and their parties and support networks. Increasingly, they raise a common flag of cultural conservatism, denouncing the moral license and weakness of the “the liberal West” while advancing a virulent antiliberal agenda based on nationalism and religion. But nationalism is by definition specific to each nation, and when they mobilize religion against liberalism, today’s authoritarian challengers exploit a variety of faiths, from Orthodox Christianity in Russia to Catholicism in Poland, Islam in Turkey, Buddhism in Sri Lanka and Myanmar, Hinduism in India, evangelical Christianity in Africa and the Americas, and even (on the far right in Israel) Judaism. 

Certain common normative themes do resonate across many of these political movements, pushing back against the progressive liberal quest for tolerance, openness, inclusion, and equality across racial, religious, gender, and other identity divides. As Marc F. Plattner has explained in the case of Viktor Orban, they propound an illiberal model of “Christian democracy” (or whatever other religious form) that gives pride of place to religious values, social traditions, the family, and the nation, while suppressing individual rights, cultural and religious minorities, and, of course, immigrants. Some of these political leaders, like Erdogan, have long histories of religious conservatism and personal piety. For others, religion (like nationalism) is simply a political cudgel. In either case, identity ties are fervently activated to demonize the opposition as cosmopolitan weaklings, and thereby to whip up political support while polarizing the body politic. Unfortunately, as evidenced just this year in the landslide reelection victory of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in May, the reelection victory of the Law and Justice party in Poland in October, and the political comeback of the Sinhalese ethnic champion Gotabaya Rajapaksa in Sri Lanka’s presidential election last month, the strategy often works.

In 1978, the UC Berkeley political scientist Jyotirindra Das Gupta gave the term “A Season of Caesars” to the wave of authoritarian emergency regimes that were sprouting up in Asia (including, briefly, in India). The current season risks being longer and more global, as it is starting to buffet liberal democracy even in the West. Moreover, it makes no pretense of being temporary or even “developmental”. Above all, what autocrats of this current season share are two things as old as politics itself: a lust for power as an end in itself, and an instinct for demagoguery as means to acquire and retain it. The former impels them to eviscerate civic and institutional checks on their power once in office. The latter propels them toward populism as an electoral and governing strategy. Hence they draw visceral, polarizing distinctions, and they keep driving the wedge deeper and deeper. On the one hand are the good deserving majority of the people—those who share their religion (or ethnicity) and traditional values. On the other hand are the ruling elites who have cheated and betrayed “the people”, the security professionals who have failed to protect the people from immigrants and terrorists, and of course the immigrants themselves and all the other “outsiders” who are threatening to overwhelm them, to take their jobs, demean their values, marry their daughters, and destroy their nation. What this strategy needs to succeed is a stark narrative with vivid stories (however distorted or untrue), a compelling messenger, and one or more triggering developments: the corruption scandals and ruling elite exhaustion that helped sweep into power Orban in 2010, Modi in 2014, and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro in 2018; the surge of Syrian and other Middle Eastern and African refugees into Europe beginning in 2015; the increase in drug-related criminal violence before Rodgrigo Duterte’s 2016 election victory; the February terrorist attacks in Kashmir that seemed to validate Modi’s fearmongering about Muslims (who make up15 percent of India); and the ISIS-inspired Easter bombings in Sri Lanka that boosted the Rajapaksa campaign’s hardline platform on security. The trick is to drive the sharp wedge of identity division into the body politic at a point that will leave a majority (or at least winning plurality) of the electorate thinking they are the good deserving people that the illiberal populist is trying to save.

Once in power, illiberal populists behave in remarkably similar ways. In particular, they pursue what I have called in my book, Ill Winds, the Autocrats’ Twelve-Step Program. While the style and sequence may vary from country to country, it looks something like this:

Demonize the political opposition as illegitimate and unpatriotic, part of the discredited or disloyal establishment, hopelessly out of touch with the real people; stir feverish, polarizing animosity toward constitutionally loyal opposition leaders.
Undermine the independence of the courts—especially the constitutional court—by impugning their integrity and impartiality; then purge independent judges and replace them with political loyalists, or restructure the judiciary altogether so it can be packed and placed under partisan control.
Attack the independence of the media, by denouncing them as “fake news” and “enemies of the people;” mobilize public outrage against critical publications and broadcasters, starve them of advertising revenue, and punish their owners with tax investigations and bans on government contracts; then finally take over their ownership through politically loyal businesses and party-linked crony capitalists.
Gain control of any public broadcasting, politicize it, and make it an instrument of ruling-party propaganda.
Impose government control of the internet, in the name of “fairness”, morality, security, or counterterrorism, thus further chilling free speech and the freedom to organize.
Subdue other elements of civil society—civic associations, universities, and especially anti-corruption and human rights groups—by painting them as part of the arrogant, effete, selfish elite that have betrayed the people and the country. Make university professors afraid to criticize the government in their writings and classrooms. Render student groups liable to prosecution for peaceful protest. Create new, fake civic organizations that will be faithful to the populist leader and party.
Intimidate the business community into ending its support for political opposition. Threaten to unleash tax and regulatory retribution on businesses that fund opposition parties and candidates—and then bankrupt them if they do.
Enrich a new class of crony capitalists by steering state contracts, credit flows, licenses, and other lucre to the family, friends, and allies of the ruler and his clique.
Assert partisan control over the civil service and the security apparatus. Start referring to professional civil servants and military officers faithful to the constitution as members of a conspiratorial “deep state.” Politicize the national police and intelligence services by demanding personal and partisan loyalty. Purge these instruments of law enforcement and national security and then employ them as weapons against the enfeebled opposition.
Gerrymander districts and rig the electoral rules to disenfranchise opposition voters and make it nearly impossible for opposition parties to win the next election. Ensure that the ruling party can retain its grip on power even if it fails to win a majority of the vote.
Gain control over electoral administration, to further tilt the electoral playing field and institutionalize de facto authoritarian rule.
Repeat steps 1 to 11, ever more vigorously, deepening citizens’ fear of opposing or criticizing the new political order and muting all forms of resistance.

As I have traveled around the United States and the world the past two years speaking about global authoritarian trends, I’ve been struck by the number of people in democracies (even liberal democracies like the United States) who recognize many of these steps in the behavior of their own elected leaders and ruling parties. A crucial lesson of the creeping authoritarianism of the past decade is that this type of rhetoric and behavior must be called out and condemned early on, before it gains momentum and a kind of pseudo-legitimacy. But resistance to creeping authoritarianism should not morally condemn supporters of the incipient populist autocrat, for that only strengthens the populist by deepening polarization. It is important to bear in mind that most people who back illiberal populist campaigns do so for instrumental reasons—they want different government policies and programs, and in the face of polarizing political alternatives, they are willing to tolerate or excuse creeping authoritarianism to achieve them. Defenders of democracy can win over a portion of this constituency by exposing the fraudulent elements of the populist agenda and offering more appealing programs that do not compromise core liberal principles. But to do so, they must not allow illiberal populists to hijack traditional unifying values—which express pride in and devotion to the nation, family, and community.

To a degree that was hardly foreseen just a few short years ago, these are lessons and warning signs that Americans must bear in mind as we enter what will be one of the most important election years in our history.

The post A Season of Caesars appeared first on The American Interest.

Why Mongolian Democracy Is Worth Defending

China’s challenge to the United States has, at last, led American officials to change the way they view the PRC. Addressing the Hudson Institute at its New York gala in October, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo rejected decades of U.S. policy that “accommodated and encouraged China’s rise . . . even when that rise was at the expense of American values, Western democracy, and security, and good common sense.” For their part, Chinese leaders took advantage of that approach, avoiding confrontation with Washington while building up economic and military power.

Now, however, China’s ambitions are on full display, particularly around its borders where, according to the Pentagon, it is engaged in “military modernization, influence operations, and predatory economics to coerce neighboring countries to reorder the Indo-Pacific region to their advantage.”

Mongolia is on the front line. The most sparsely populated sovereign state in the world, it shares China’s longest border. (Its only other border is with Russia.) Mongolia receives little attention in the United States, overshadowed by America’s longstanding alliances with Japan and South Korea. But ever since America’s relationship with Mongolia began in the late 1980s, the United States has stressed the importance of Mongolia’s sovereignty and democracy to a free and open world order. Today, its democracy, Tibetan Buddhism, and history under the Qing empire, not to mention its proximity and vast natural resources, make it an inexorable target of the PRC’s agenda to restore its dominance in Asia and challenge American leadership in the region. As the competition between the PRC and the United States in Asia plays out in Mongolia over the coming years, America’s other partners and allies will draw lessons from how Mongolia fares, and what Washington does.

It is often said that the Mongols have ruled and been ruled by China. The reality is more complicated. China was part of the Mongol empire from 1271-1368. Later both Inner and Outer Mongolia came under the Manchu Qing dynasty, the non-Han dynasty that ruled China from 1644 to its collapse in 1911. Sovereign, democratic Mongolia is the former “Outer Mongolia” north of the Gobi Desert. (The distinction between Inner and Outer Mongolia, writes Morris Rossabi, “was due partly to the different times the Qing brought them under its control and partly due to the Gobi Desert separating the two.”) When the Qing dynasty collapsed in 1911, Outer Mongolia declared independence under a theocratic government led by the patriarch of the Mongolia’s branch of Tibetan Buddhism, a reincarnate lama known as the Bogd Khan. The Mongols had adopted Buddhism, specifically the Gelug school of the Dalai Lamas, from Tibet in the 16th century, establishing close bonds that continue to this day, much to Beijing’s displeasure. After a tumultuous decade, a communist faction took control, and the country fell under Soviet sway for nearly seven decades.

Despite Soviet domination, Chinese leaders continued to claim Mongolia. Chiang Kai-shek was persuaded to relinquish his claim by President Roosevelt, who used it as an inducement to Stalin to enter the war against Japan. After the communist victory in 1949, and especially after Stalin’s death, Mao continued to press Chinese claims with the Soviets. Toward Mongolia’s leaders, Mao took a different tack, according to documents translated and analyzed by the historian Sergey Radchenko. In 1956, purporting to be “ashamed” of the paltriness of Chinese aid to Mongolia, Mao framed offers of assistance as compensation for Qing exploitation of Mongolians and other minorities. In this respect, writes Sergey Radchenko, “Mongolia was hardly different in Mao’s view from the peoples of Tibet and Xinjiang.” Of course, by then the PRC had already invaded and occupied these two former imperial regions. Today they are the subject of intense repression under communist rule, and serve as laboratories for perfecting methods of surveillance and control. Chinese leaders no longer speak of acquiring Mongolia’s territory. They do, however, appear determined to achieve their objectives through other, primarily economic means.

America’s relationship with Mongolia was forged as it emerged from Soviet domination. Gorbachev had loosened control, withdrawn troops, and mended ties with the PRC, beginning in 1987. In 1990, a youthful democracy movement staged protests and hunger strikes in Ulaanbaatar’s central square, leading to multiparty elections. Visiting Mongolia in 1991, Secretary of State James A. Baker described the country as “at the crossroads of a new order for Asia and the world—an order based on democratic values and free markets.” By then, autocracies had given way to democratic transitions in South Korea and the Philippines, and later in Taiwan and Indonesia. U.S. officials expected that the wave of democracy then spreading through Asia would continue. They based their approach to China on the belief that engagement, trade, and investment would lead Chinese leaders to integrate the PRC country into the U.S.-led world order.

Baker coined the phrase that has defined U.S.-Mongolia relations ever since, calling America Mongolia’s “third neighbor.” The phrase conveyed America’s desire to compensate for Mongolia’s difficult geographic position—landlocked between China and Russia. Mongolians embraced the “third neighbor” concept, making it a guiding principle of a foreign policy that seeks close ties with other democracies in Asia and Europe and membership in multilateral bodies led by them. In particular, Mongolia has distinguished itself as a NATO partner, sending its armed forces to participate in NATO missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Although America’s approach to Mongolia has remained constant, if also a bit neglectful, the geopolitical situation in the region has not. China, with the economic and military power it has amassed over decades, is shaping its periphery, projecting influence around its borders as part of its effort to dislodge the United States. Today, the PRC carries out development, cooptation, and coercion strategies to advance interests such as subversion of Tibetan Buddhism, regional influence in Nepal, and access to the Indian Ocean in Burma. The PRC’s Central Asian neighbors formed the nucleus of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), whose mission, initially defensive, was to shore up security and serve as a kind of dictators’ support group to rebuff Western criticism. However, more recently it has become influential, writes Thomas D. Ambrosio, to achieve a “‘democratic’ international system in which no one political standard or perspective dominates.” This notion is at the core of Xi’s presentation of the PRC’s political model as a “new option for other countries and nations who want to speed up their development while preserving their independence” outside of global democratic norms and immune to Western censure. A successful democracy on its longest border constitutes a threat. “Even as it grows stronger and, in certain respects, more self-confident,” Aaron Friedberg writes, “the Communist Party continues to dread ideological contamination. . . . Pliant, like-minded states along its borders are far more likely to help Beijing deal with this danger than flourishing liberal democracies with strong ties to the West.”

In one sense, Mongolia might seem well equipped to withstand pressure on its political system from its neighbor. Democracy has become part of Mongolian national identity. According to the Bertelsmann Foundation, “public opinion surveys confirm that 85-90 percent of Mongolians regard democracy as the best form of government.” However, pervasive corruption has created political instability and is chipping away at public confidence in political institutions. Elective office is seen as a vehicle to achieve wealth, rather than a public trust. Citizens have coined a pun on the Mongol word for fog, manan, from the initials of the two leading political parties, to express the perception that a cross-party clique operates to benefit politicians rather than the public. The institutions charged with checking and preventing corruption are viewed as corrupt themselves. In 2018, the Bertelsmann Foundation noted the popular perception that the anti-corruption agency “has become a tool for political retribution and is largely controlled by political interests who do not themselves want to face corruption charges.”

Mongolia’s economic dependence on China complicates its situation even further. More than 85 percent of Mongolia’s exports, mostly commodities, go to China. Dependent on natural resources, Mongolia is vulnerable to cycles of boom and bust. In 2011, Mongolia had the world’s fastest-growing economy. By 2017, the global economic downturn, the decline in demand for commodities, and irresponsible fiscal policies forced Mongolia to seek a bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), but that too carries a risk. A Chinese-funded 2.2 billion “swap line”—effectively a currency loan—constitutes an unusually large part of the $5.5 billion IMF Mongolia rescue package. Beijing, writes Daniel McDowell, can “broker liquidity” or deny it to achieve particular objectives in a debtor country, including, especially, undermining U.S. influence. That swap line expires in 2020, raising concerns about what costs Beijing might exact to extend it. Meanwhile, Mongolia has been identified by the Center for Global Development as one of eight countries participating in the PRC’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) that is at “particular risk of debt distress.”

Elsewhere, the nexus between debt and Beijing’s geostrategic objectives has become clear. For example, Sri Lanka was forced to enter into a long-term lease with a PRC state-owned port management company when it was unable to make payments on a loan for the Hambantota port negotiated with a PRC state-owned bank. This development not only jeopardizes Sri Lanka’s sovereignty, but also threatens freedom of navigation in nearby sea lanes. In Malaysia, which offers access to both the Indian Ocean and South China Sea, China reportedly offered to rescue the scandal-ridden 1MDB sovereign wealth fund in exchange for Chinese stakes in railway and pipeline projects.

Beijing complements its economic influence in Mongolia with information and propaganda efforts: television and radio broadcasts, three Confucius Institutes, and a cultural center. The number of Chinese-language teachers in Mongolia now exceeds the number of volunteers for the Peace Corps, which has operated in Mongolia since 1991. Particularly effective, according to AidData, a research lab of William and Mary, is China’s prowess at “elite to elite” diplomacy that creates “sympathy for and alignment” with China’s “policies, priorities, and values.”

A cause-and-effect relationship is difficult to prove, but a perceptible shift toward China took place under the presidential administration of Tsakhia Elbegdorj, who left office in 2017. According to Jeffrey Reeves, Elbegdorj entered into agreements with Beijing that indicated a willingness to accept “far greater Chinese involvement in the Mongolian economy than in the past.” In the realm of foreign relations and security, Reeves notes that there is now “greater political integration . . . [and] unprecedented levels of cooperation between Mongolia and China’s elite,” including, for the first time, joint military exercises and “deeper ties with China’s PLA for communication, strategic trust, and training purposes.”

Landlocked Mongolia does not offer access to sea lanes. Nor does it offer a particularly desirable overland route to Europe. Nonetheless, Mongolia is strategically important to Beijing as a place where its quest to recover imperial domains and its quest to acquire influence over Tibetan Buddhism, and especially reincarnation, converge. Under the Qing dynasty, Emperors relied on Mongolia’s ecclesiastical rulers to maintain order. As Qing rule created unrest, the patriarch became associated with the difficulties Qing rulers faced in maintaining the empire. In an effort to diminish the power of the clergy, the Emperor created a ritual to interpose himself in the process of identifying reincarnations in both Tibet and Mongolia. Acting on his behalf, imperial representatives drew lots from an urn designated for the purpose. This ritual was also conducted for the Dalai Lama. “The use of urns for divination rituals was not new to Tibetans,” write Michael Van Walt and Miek Boltjes, “but the role of the Manchu Emperor in the selection of the Dalai Lama was.” Indeed, Tibetans did not accept the ritual, and the current Dalai Lama, the 14th, has rejected it.

In 1995, to associate itself with the imperial past and lay the groundwork for its selection of an impostor Dalai Lama, Beijing revived the urn ritual to install an impostor as the Panchen Lama, the second-most prominent figure in Tibetan Buddhism. That impostor, rejected by Tibetans as “the Chinese” or “fake” Panchen Lama, now a young man, is being groomed to play a larger role in the Party’s Tibetan Buddhist agenda. In May 2019, he made his first trip abroad, to Thailand. (The whereabouts of the authentic Panchen Lama are unknown.)

Beijing actively cultivates Buddhists in China’s periphery, rebuilding and appropriating historic Buddhist sites, and coopting monks in order to sever bonds of loyalty to the Dalai Lama. In Mongolia, it has gone even further. When Ulaanbaatar welcomed the Dalai Lama for a visit in 2016—despite China’s warnings—Beijing shut down border trade at great cost to the Mongolian economy. While in Ulaanbaatar, the Dalia Lama is said to have acknowledged the reincarnation of the Tenth Patriarch, head of Mongolia’s branch of Tibetan Buddhism—an exercise of the spiritual authority that infuriated Beijing. To ease the economic pressure, Mongolia’s Foreign Minister pledged that “under this current government, the Dalai Lama will not be invited to Mongolia, even for religious reasons,” and repeated Beijing’s position that Tibet is an inseparable part of China. It was an unmistakable signal to other governments about how far Beijing might go to achieve their acquiescence on the matter of the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation.

Some have wondered whether the rhetorically pleasing Third Neighbor policy might prove to be anachronistic, well-intended but unsustainable in a dramatically different geopolitical situation. It seems that the Trump Administration is determined to prove otherwise. In July 2019, Mongolian President Khaltmaa Battulga called on President Donald J. Trump in the White House. Most media coverage emphasized Battulga’s background as a wrestling champion, and his traditional gift of a horse. However, the visit capped a year of accelerating pace of diplomacy and culminated in a strategic partnership.

America recognized Mongolia’s importance when the spread of freedom and democracy in Asia seemed assured. Mongolia is even more important now that they are not. Mongolia’s national identity, rooted in its religion, history, and democracy, makes it a target of Beijing’s regional power projection. Mongolia’s survival as a democratic, sovereign nation, long an objective of American policy toward Asia, now constitutes a vital element of America’s revised policy toward China.

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The Coolidge Proposition

What do Calvin Coolidge, a wittily twisted Navy Seals motto, and the Jewish diaspora experience have in common? Notwithstanding whatever answer you came up with, I have mine: They all remind me of Singapore the improbable.

Let’s take, in turn, Coolidge in this installment of our series, the Navy Seals motto in the next, and the Jewish diaspora experience in the one after that. We’ll then see what larger unified idea we come up with.1

Calvin Coolidge is popularly known these days for two things: his taciturnity (which in turn enabled one of Dorothy Parker’s greatest barbs); and Silent Cal’s famous statement, when once he did open his mouth to do something other than eat or yawn: “The business of America is business.”

What Coolidge actually said to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington, D.C. on January 17, 1925, is, “. . . . the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world.” In other words, the American people are Calvinists, and Coolidge, of all people, should have known: Aside from the first name he bore, he was a Congregationalist.

Singaporeans may not be Calvinists—although there is a significant Presbyterian presence here, with seven functioning congregations—but at various levels according to their circumstances they are indeed “profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world.” No ethnic Chinese, Malay, or Tamil citizen here could have said it any better.

Singaporeans are well aware of their focus on business, and some are aware of the social implications and costs of that focus. Many observers have realized what Singapore is by way of actual function as opposed to formal identity. By way of formal identity it is a country (a place) with a people (in Singapore’s case a multi-ethnic, multicultural, and multi-sectarian people, and so not a “nation” as properly defined) ruled by a state that is one of the 193 members of the United Nations. But in functional fact it more closely resembles a diversified corporation with a global reach.

The government has created two formidable sovereign wealth appendages, Temasek (named after the pre-modern mythic name for Singapore) and the GIC (Government of Singapore Investment Corporation). The GIC, formed in 1981, is wholly owned by the Finance Ministry, its function being to manage Singapore’s financial reserves, mainly the surpluses built up over the years. How much money does it manage? Presumably the government knows the answer, but it chooses not to publish precise figures so as to reduce incentives for currency speculation and exchange-rate spikes in turbulent times. (Independent sources guess around $400 billion.) In this role it shares responsibility with the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), what passes for a central bank, in managing Singapore’s foreign currency reserves. If you have the GIC, you see, you don’t need a conventional central bank in such a small, managed city-state.

Temasek, established in 1974, is described by the government as an investment holding company, but that description doesn’t quite do justice to its actual function. Temasek owns the assets it manages, valued at about $235 billion. Some are in Singapore, others are spread throughout the world. Those outside Singapore may not be wholly owned by Temasek; those within Singapore usually are. Several dozen Singapore-based assets, commercial companies (and banks) for the most part, encompass every critical aspect of the economy: housing and infrastructure construction; ports; transportation; telecommunications; financial services; media; science and agribusiness; real estate; energy; education; and medicine. Each corporate asset must succeed on its own merit, and pay taxes to the Singapore government like any other business operating here. But Temasek has only one shareholder: the Finance Ministry. So revenue accrues to the government not only from taxes but also from dividends.

One might conclude from this bare description that Temasek is the institutional embodiment of Singapore’s industrial policy. That is not an unfair description if one starts from the premise that Singapore is a country, with a people, ruled by a state. But if one starts from the premise that Singapore is a global corporation, then one could fairly say that Singapore does not have an industrial policy but rather that it is an industrial policy.

The population, the people, can then be viewed as the corporation’s employees. They do pretty well as labor pools go, because the corporation is set on maximum feasible full employment: That way it can maximize the value of available human capital. It pays living wages, extending benefits via subsidies for housing, transportation, and even groceries, as well as through cash payments, that are generous by global standards. It also takes care of people who fall between the cracks for one reason or another, and contributes to the welfare of the young and elderly.

The corporation, in this case through its Ministry of Manpower, manages all this in coordination with the NTUC—the National Trade Union Congress, which encompasses 59 separate unions.

Americans of a certain age and education should have no trouble conceptualizing the Singaporean system. John Kenneth Galbraith famously wrote in The New Industrial State of the “iron triangle” in which government coordinated big business with big labor in the burgeoning postwar U.S. economy. It was a managed affair conducted by elites that gave all sectors their respective pounds of flesh as the cattle yard kept expanding. That captures much of the essence of the Singaporean model, but not quite all.

Americans these days typically believe that the United States does not have an industrial policy because it would contradict its devotion to reliance on “the market” and even smack of socialism. The truth beyond the myth is that in the postwar period the “iron triangle” was a de facto industrial policy, partly driven by the exigencies of defense investment during the Cold War. It was also, compared to today, a high-tax arrangement that did not inhibit consistently robust growth rates. Even today a kind of industrial policy operates by the advent of other means, although no one calls it that and it is less robust and broad-reaching than it might be. What other means?

Have you noticed how mostly state governments—not all but many—subsidize major research universities with a mind to their giving birth to new cutting-edge industry that doubles back to benefit both the state and the universities? Think Austin, the University of Texas, and Dell; the Berkeley/CIT/Silicon Valley juggernaut; the Raleigh-Durham Research Triangle that draws from UNC-Chapel Hill, Duke, and NC State; and Pittsburgh, Carnegie-Mellon, and the city’s new robotics industry, to name a prominent few.

Well, a synthesis of the old and new types of U.S. industrial policy approximates how Singapore works. Thus, for example, flowing from the old type, there are virtually no strikes here. They are not illegal, but they are constrained by law and, more important, the system strives to pre-empt or remove grievances that might give rise to motives to strike. In other words, there are no strikes for the same reason no one stuffs ballot boxes here: Outcomes are prefigured without recourse to such crudities.

Meanwhile, flowing from the new type, investment in industry is planned through the relevant ministries and Temasek, with the research and development function deeply engaging the companies with the major government-funded universities here: the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the newer, more science-and-technology oriented Nanyang Technological University (NTU). Wander around NTU and you will see several dozen corporate-focussed centers, not all of them associated with Temasek-managed operations but most. There is the Centre for Augmented and Virtual Reality, the Rolls-Royce@NTU Corporate Lab, the Singtel Cognitive and Artificial Intelligence Lab, the Delta-NTU Lab for Cyber-Physical Systems, and many others. A few centers, associated with the government’s intelligence gathering and analysis function, do not have names on or near their office doors.

Singapore’s is a global industrial policy, too, so encompassing of opportunity that the fact of the Red Dot itself is almost incidental. Gary Trudeau, the cartoonist who draws “Doonesbury,” adjured members of the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences commencement audience in 1979 to “try to perfect a lifestyle that does not require your presence.” It was an amusing remark at the time, because the tools to do such a thing mostly did not yet exist. Many now do, so that even countries can follow the advice. East Germany did it under duress one way in 1991, Singapore is today doing so by choice another way. If any country is the opposite of autarkic by design—the major exception being Singapore’s determination to be self-sufficient in fresh water—this is it. Singapore is so radically non-autarkic that a great deal of what it does happens somewhere else.

Consider, for example, that the PSA—the Port of Singapore Authority—aside from being the largest transhipment port in the world—won the tender to manage the port of Antwerp. Yes, that’s right, the Antwerp that is in Belgium.

Consider, too, that when it dawned on the international shipping industry that an ice-free Arctic route, a beneficial side-effect of the global warming trend, would cut the travel time of large container ships from North America to East Asia by eleven days—and make it unnecessary to go anywhere near the Strait of Malacca—the folks here did not cry in their laksa. They reasoned that Singapore could emerge a big winner from this development thanks to its high levels of trained human capital, high level of incorruptible corporate social capital, and excellent marketing skills. And that is what Singapore’s highest echelon of corporate managers—a.k.a. the government—intends to do.

Consider also the spatial spillover of Singapore, Inc.. Across the causeways from here into southern Malaysia, in Johor Bahru, the economy is significantly integrated into Singapore’s. From the Woodlands and Tuas Link in Singapore one can look across the water and see copses of skyscrapers one rarely sees in such profusion elsewhere in Malaysia save for Kuala Lumpur, Penang, and a few other places plugged into the global economy.

The economic integration involves labor as well as capital: Somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 Malaysian citizens commute daily into Singapore to work, and others work for Singaporean capital on platforms on Malaysian soil. The same is true, if to a lesser extent, for Batam Island and other parts of Indonesia. From a functional perspective, all this territory composes a perforated if not a single economic zone magnetically pulled together by Singapore’s corporate gravity. All three countries benefit from it, if not necessarily equally.

The functional economic net spreads even wider than that. As is well known, two major kinds of non-Singaporean labor are present on the island at any given time. High-flying expats bring corporate best-practice to Singapore, and there are low-skilled laborers—from the Philippines, Bangladesh, India, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, and elsewhere—who do jobs that Singaporeans either don’t want to do or are in too short supply to do. Non-citizens are divided into two groups: permanent residents (about 530,000) and non-residents (about 1.68 million). Non-residents are in turn divided into employment-pass holders and their dependents, foreign domestic workers, “s-pass” holders for mid-level skills, and students. The total non-citizen population weighs in at about 38 percent of the total, all of them save dependents having some economic function that contributes to the whole.

Some of the expat input is institutional, not individual or private-corporate. There is a branch of Duke University Medical School here, for example, and the staff engages in clinical research as well as medical education. There is a branch of Yale University here, too. One could go on.

The point, without getting into the details here and now—some of them controversial as regards the circumstances of Singapore’s low-skilled imported labor—is that the physical size of the country is vastly too small for the functionality of its economy.

All of this affects statistics. From the foregoing description you will not be surprised to hear that external trade, whether transshipping or standard importing, as a percentage of Singapore GNP is very high. You will also not be surprised, exactly, to learn that Singapore is the largest contributor of FDI to China because you will reason fairly quickly that most of that flow is not Singaporean money, but money flowing through Singapore from other places. Want a breakdown of where the money comes from on its way to China? Statistics won’t help you here, because such data isn’t published.

But you can guess at how it flows, if not how much. If you walk down by the iconic Marina Bay Sands and look across the water back toward the city, you will see many tall buildings each with the name of a large bank emblazoned in neon near the top: Citibank, HSBC, Bank of China, DSB, Maybank, and so on. Multinational corporations like to site their Asian operations in Singapore, and use these mostly multinational banks, because the place is both literally and politically safe, the workforce is well-educated, disciplined, and hard-working, and there is virtually no “friction,” a euphemism for corruption. The point? Not only does Singapore, via Temasek and other means, go forth into the world, but the world, the more affluent parts of it anyway, comes hence to Singapore.

It’s no simple task to manage all of this going out and coming in and mixing around. So note, just to put a last dab of color on the picture, that Singapore’s managerial/governmental elite are compensated at levels that track roughly with those of multinational corporate executives, not government leaders. And why shouldn’t they be, since their day jobs actually consist of running a major successful global business?

Somehow I think that, were he still with us today, Calvin Coolidge would understand all this fairly well. Of course he’d have little to say about it.

1. A note to Singaporeans: I know some of you care deeply, a few of you obsessively perhaps, about what outsiders think of the Red Dot. But as I said at the outset of this series, I do not claim expert status on Singapore and know I cannot achieve it in a mere single year of residency. So this series is for mostly clueless outsiders, wherein I, a striving one-eyed, seek to lead the purblind.

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Russia’s Fictional Narratives: A Double-Edged Sword

Fiona Hill’s warning to Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee not to repeat the “fictional narrative” that Ukraine interfered with the American election in 2016 calls for some historical perspective. Senator Angus King, independent of Maine and a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, offered a bit of it recently when he said the following of Putin and the Russian intelligence services: “These people are pros at this. . . . The Soviet Union used disinformation for 70 years. This is nothing new. Vladimir Putin is a former KGB agent. He is trained in deception. This is his stock in trade, and he is doing it well.”

From the period of time before World War II up to the end of the Cold War, the primary targets of Soviet disinformation campaigns, those who were called at the time “useful idiots,” were either convinced Communists or left-liberals who agreed in part with the Soviet Union’s ideological attacks on the policies of Western governments. The historically novel and unprecedented aspect of the current Russian disinformation campaign is that, on the whole, the primary “useful idiots,” those who repeat the falsehoods for their own interests, are on the American right, including not just conservative media outlets, but also the President of the United States and Republican politicians.

During the Cold War, the West’s soft spot at which Soviet intelligence services took aim was the West’s intellectuals on the left, in journalism, in the universities, and in politics. Especially during and after the war in Vietnam, denunciations of “American imperialism” were likely to be echoed in whole or in part by the Western left. In the era of Putinism and Trump’s “America First,” however, the nature of those likely to repeat Russian propaganda has changed significantly. In the New York Times, Julian Barnes and Matthew Rosenberg write that Russian intelligence officers spread the false story about Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. election “to prominent Russians and Ukrainians who then used a range of intermediaries, like oligarchs, businessmen, and their associates, to pass the material to American political figures and even some journalists, who were likely unaware of its origin”—that is, to a group interested in making money first and foremost, but babes in the woods regarding the history of Soviet-era intelligence services. Eventually the narrative was picked up and amplified by the biggest figure on the right: Donald J. Trump.

In the era of Putin and Putinism, the Russians have switched from targeting left-leaning intellectuals to aiming at Western businessmen like Trump, who are convinced that they have some special insight into the “real” world of international politics because they have made a lot of money. The Russians realize that in Trump they have a genuine “useful idiot,” one who, beyond their wildest dreams, uses the power of the presidency to repeat the kinds of narratives that the Reagan- or Bush-era Republican Party would have denounced as conspiracy theories and lies stemming from Leninist efforts to use democracy to undermine democracy.

As with Putin’s latest narratives about Ukraine, Soviet-era fictions were intended to accomplish two goals: to deflect from Soviet actions, and to place blame on others. Let’s look at two of these narratives. The first was the idea, spread by Soviet diplomats at the United Nations in the late 1940s and then repeated by communist parties and leftist activists around the world, that the state of Israel was a creation of “American imperialism.” In fact, as I’ve found in my research for a work in progress on the responses to the establishment of Israel in the United States and Europe, it was the Soviet Union that offered crucial diplomatic support and, via its ally and satellite Czechoslovakia, crucial weapons deliveries, first, to the Jewish Agency led by David Ben Gurion in Palestine, and then, after May 15, 1948, to the new, still fragile state of Israel. Soviet bloc diplomatic and military assistance to the Zionists took place at the same time that the United States supported and helped to enforce a United Nations embargo on sending arms to the Arab states, to the Jews in Palestine, and to Israel. The embargo harmed the Jews, who did not have a state before May 1948, more than it did the Arabs.

One of the Soviet Union’s most successful disinformation campaigns of the Cold War sought to repress from international memory these two crucial years of Soviet Zionism and to foster the equally false narrative that the United States was the primary driving force behind Israel’s creation. President Truman’s support for recognition of Israel was vital, to be sure, but the United States did not deliver weapons in any serious dimension until after the Six Day War of 1967. Indeed, officials in Washington tried to overturn the UN Partition Plan of November 29, 1947, out of fear that the Jewish state in Palestine would antagonize Arab opinion so greatly that Western access to oil would be endangered and Soviet prospects would be enhanced in the Middle East. Yet Soviet intelligence services and diplomats succeeded in deflecting “blame” for Israel’s establishment from the Soviet Union and the global left of 1947-48 onto the “imperialists,” and many on the left continue to perpetuate the myth linking “U.S. imperialism” to Zionism.

A second Soviet-era fictional narrative brings us back to the biography of Vladimir Putin and efforts of the Soviet Union to split the United States from its NATO allies in what observers call “the second Cold War” in Europe. It began in the mid-1970s with a Soviet military build-up that included intermediate-range SS-20 ballistic missiles, which were able to reach Western Europe but not the United States and were equipped with nuclear warheads. The growth of this arsenal followed the American defeat in Vietnam and the persistence of the policy of détente under Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. As I pointed out in my 1991 book War by Other Means: Soviet Power, West German Resistance and the Battle of the Euromissiles, the first Western leader to raise the alarm about the Soviet build-up was West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, not President Carter. Schmidt worried that the growth of the Soviet arsenal called into question the credibility of the U.S. commitment to retaliate should the Soviet Union attack non-nuclear West Germany. West German strategists worried that the growth of the Soviet intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) would enhance the Soviet Union’s ability to credibly threaten a nuclear war limited to Central and Western Europe.

In December 1979, the United States and its West European allies took the “double-track decision” to deploy Pershing ballistic missiles and subsonic cruise missiles in West European countries but also to enter negotiations with the Soviet Union in the hopes of reducing INF on both sides. In November 1981, President Reagan changed the American proposal to one of a “zero-zero option”—that is, to do away completely with NATO INF deployments if the Soviet Union would dismantle its SS-20 and other INF missiles. The purpose of the NATO decision was to enhance deterrence by convincing the Soviet leadership that the United States remained committed to extending nuclear deterrence to Western Europe and that therefore the chances were very high that, if the Soviet Union attacked Western Europe, it would immediately be at war with the United States and would face likely conventional and possibly nuclear retaliation on its own territory.

The NATO double-track decision called for deployment of new weapons in order to sustain—not change—the American policy of extended nuclear deterrence that had been in place since NATOs origins. It was a mix of reassurance to our NATO allies that the United States remained true to its past commitments combined with a message of deterrence to the Soviet leadership. It made war limited to Europe less likely, not more, and was intended to convince Soviet leaders that war in Europe was irrational, suicidal, and thus not an option that any sane leader would adopt. American policy makers assumed that the Communist leaders were rational people who had no desire for martyrdom and glory in a next world. Reagan and others believed  that eventually the Soviet leadership would realize the absurdity of the arms build-up it had begun and agree, as they did in 1987, to the essence of the “zero-option” of 1981 embodied in the INF treaty that withdrew the NATO missiles deployed in 1983 and dismantled weapons that the Soviet Union had not needed in the first place.

The signal accomplishment of the Soviet Union’s fictional narrative of 1979-83 was to reverse the meaning of the NATO double-track decision into one decided on by the United States in order to victimize Europe. In response to that decision, the Soviet Union launched one of the most important and successful disinformation campaigns of the entire Cold War. It made the claim, which became increasingly absurd as the numbers of SS-20s grew rapidly before any NATO deployments had taken place, that its deployments did not upset the balance of military forces. This claim of continuing military balance, despite its prima facie absurdity, was repeated by some journalists and politicians on the left in Western Europe. The Soviet leaders claimed that the impetus for NATO’s decision did not begin with expressions of concern by leaders in Western Europe, but with “hawks” and “cold warriors” in the United States. While the NATO double-track decision was intended to reinforce the “coupling” of the defense of Western Europe to American nuclear deterrence, Soviet leaders argued that the United States was doing just the opposite—that is, it was making plans to deploy “first-strike weapons” in order fight and win a nuclear war limited to Europe. Soviet propaganda called the NATO deployments plans for a “nuclear Auschwitz.” That claim struck a deep chord in West Germany and was repeated in books and reports across the media. The Soviet Union, which had initiated the crisis with its own deployments, presented itself as the innocent victim in the situation.

If these claims had come only from the neo-Stalinists in the Kremlin, they would have found a very small audience in Western Europe. What made them politically and strategically significant was that, in the wake of harsh rhetoric from the Reagan Administration that unsettled even the moderate left in Western Europe, they were repeated in various forms, first, by small communist organizations and their front groups, then by a “peace” and “anti-nuclear” movement that evolved into the new Green Party in West Germany. Journalists at some major papers and magazines repeated that interpretation, thus lending it legitimacy in their various countries. Most importantly, the denunciation of the NATO decision did not come only from the leftist Greens but increasingly from the moderate left, especially the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in West Germany. As one West German strategist put it, during the battle of the Euromissiles Helmut Schmidt’s party, the SPD, had evolved from a left of center bulwark against communist arguments into a lever that the Soviet leadership could pull to exert influence over Western foreign and military policy. Not only did tens of thousands of demonstrators pour into the streets of West Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands to denounce the United States or, at best, “both superpowers” for threatening Europe with a “nuclear holocaust;” West Germany’s leading left of center party, along with Britain’s Labor Party, both historically committed to the Atlantic Alliance, also exerted pressure on the United States to accept versions of Soviet positions in the negotiations taking place in Geneva that would leave the SS-20s in place without any new NATO deployments.

Because the Soviet Union and the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe were all dictatorships and did not allow their publics to protest Soviet policies, the universal and rational fear of nuclear war shared by their own citizens could have no impact on the policy of the Soviet government. Because NATO members were democracies, this same universal and rational fear did exert pressure, but only on the policies of the Western Alliance. The public protests did not and could not exert pressure on the Soviet Union to dismantle its SS-20 arsenal. The battle of the Euromissiles was an example of what I have called “asymmetric strategic interaction,” in which the virtues of democracy became, in the short term, strategic vulnerabilities. France’s Socialist President François Mitterrand captured the asymmetry in his quip that “the Soviets deploy missiles and we deploy pacifists.” Others worried about whether democracy’s virtues would contribute to its collapse. Soviet strategy sought to use the divisions within Western Europe to its own advantage.

There were politicians in Western Europe, such as France’s President Mitterand and Italy’s Prime Minister Bettino Craxi—as well as journalists of the center-left—who supported the NATO double-track decision. They, too, presented the rationale of extended nuclear deterrence, recalled its origins in decisions by West German Social Democrat Helmut Schmidt and the American Democratic President Jimmy Carter, and pointed out the absence of demonstrations in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Yet by 1983, the Soviet hard line had helped to bring political leaders of the right to power: Helmut Kohl in West Germany, Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain, and Ronald Reagan in the United States supported implementation of the deployments in the face of the Soviet disinformation campaign about the impending “nuclear Auschwitz” or “nuclear holocaust.”

By 1983, however, that fictional narrative had ceased to persuade electoral majorities in Western Europe. The Soviet Union’s hard line backfired as electorates concluded that Reagan’s zero-option was preferable to a continent facing the SS-20 arsenal with no new NATO deployments. That outcome did not, however, come about by itself. It required the determination of leaders in Washington, Bonn, Brussels, London, Rome, and Paris to make the case that what the Soviet leadership was proffering was, in Fiona Hill’s terms, a fictional narrative; that it was the Soviet Union, not the United States, that was deploying weapons that could carry out a war limited to Central and Western Europe; and that the United States was promising to continue, not abandon, the policy of extended nuclear deterrence that had contributed to four decades of peace in Europe.

In the United States, the Reagan Administration and the Republican Party recognized the Soviet disinformation campaign for what it was and rejected it. The Republican Party of that time was proud of its skepticism about such narratives and contemptuous of the left’s credulity. In a sense, the Republican Party in its current Trumpist incarnation is a result of the success of the Western victory in the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the communist states of Eastern Europe. The end of the Soviet threat deprived many Republicans of their key reason for sustaining a U.S. role in world affairs. Large parts of the party that fought and helped win the Cold War have now reverted to the mentalities, moods, and hatreds of the isolationist, nationalist, and xenophobic Republican Party of the 1930s, when Charles Lindbergh, among others, offered the first incarnation of an ideology of “America First” in opposing U.S. intervention against Hitler in Europe.

The point of this excursion into the not-so-distant past is to remind today’s Republican Party of two points. First, as the story of these two Soviet fictional narratives indicates, when it served its interests the Soviet Union was willing and able to spread disinformation that benefitted the Western left and undermined the Western right. Putin’s Russia, which seethes with resentment about American power, could certainly find reasons in the near future to support leftists eager to dismantle Western defenses and pursue a leftist version of “America First” that would, for example, oppose “endless regime-change wars.”

Second, this historical excursion underscores the point made by Senator King—namely, the endurance and continuing relevance of the Soviet legacy in Putin’s Russia. Historians know that societies and polities change very slowly, even when dramatic events such as regime-change occur. The weight of the past is heavy. Traditions sink deep roots, especially when, as in the Soviet Union, which collapsed a mere 28 years ago, those roots had been in place for 70 years. As Putin’s long tenure in power, his authoritarian rule, and the murders and arrests of political opponents and dissenting journalists make clear, the traditions, habits of mind, tactics, strategy, institutions, and personnel of the Soviet era are alive and well in Russia today. Russia is no longer communist, but the skills needed to spread deception and deflect blame onto others, honed for decades by the Soviet intelligence services, are very much at work in Russia’s current attacks on our democracy.

In the final decades of the Cold War, the Republican Party fought the good fight against the disinformation campaigns of the Soviet Union. Today, that same party, led by the President, seem all too eager to prove themselves Vladimir Putin’s useful idiots.

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