Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 199

Trump Fast Tracks Saudi Arms Sales

The Trump administration is about to make the Saudis—and the American military-industrial complex—very happy, according to Reuters:

Washington is working to push through contracts for tens of billions of dollars in arms sales to Saudi Arabia, some new, others in the pipeline, ahead of U.S. President Donald Trump’s trip to the kingdom this month, people familiar with the talks told Reuters this week.

Saudi Arabia is Trump’s first stop on his maiden international trip, a sign of his intent to reinforce ties with a top regional ally. […]

One of the people with knowledge of the sales said that as planning for Trump’s trip to Saudi Arabia intensified in recent weeks, the arms negotiations also accelerated. Two U.S. officials said a U.S.-Saudi working group met at the White House Monday and Tuesday to negotiate the trip, as well as financing for military equipment sales and stopping terrorist financing.

Some of the reported arms packages are new, like a deal to deploy the THAAD missile defense system in Saudi Arabia; others look to be fulfillments of contracts that were stalled or suspended under the Obama administration. But the particulars of the deals are less significant than the symbolism.

Trump’s first foreign trip as president will be to Saudi Arabia, before he heads on to Israel. By expediting these sales ahead of the Saudi summit, the administration is making a clear statement of its priorities in the Middle East—and sending a signal to Iran. After years of estrangement from the Obama administration, Secretary Mattis has been looking for early ways to shore up lost credibility with our Gulf allies. This is a high-profile way to do just that, and the message will not be lost in Tehran.

Pumphrett and the Promulgation of Piffle

“I’ve cooled on Steve,” confided Pumphrett, my old friend and fellow Choate “Wild Boar” as we sipped our lattes on the bottom step of the Lincoln Memorial. I had been glad when he suggested meeting on this spot, thinking he might take inspiration—as I always do—from the words inscribed on the marble walls flanking our greatest President: “With malice toward none. With charity for all.” Perhaps my friend would return to the current occupant of the White House with news that he had gotten this admonition precisely backwards. But it transpired that Pumphrett had suggested this meeting place because the bustle of tourists made intercepting our conversation difficult, “even for the Russians.”

That he had transferred his loyalty from White House chief strategist Steven K. Bannon—who, bare weeks before, had commanded Pumphrett’s total, and it seemed to me unwholesome, affections—was hardly surprising. Frailty, thy name had often been Pumphrett at Choate, where he would invariably attach himself to a “tough of the week” only to have a sideways glance and a whiff of musk lure him elsewhere. But I sensed his disenchantment this time had deeper roots, and so gingerly inquired what had caused his change of heart.

In answer, he related the following tale: It seems that Bannon had asked Pumphrett to accompany him as notetaker to a meeting with the new President in his private White House rooms. “It was late,” Pumphrett related. “The place was deserted, the only sound the distant snoring of a Secret Service agent. Our knock was met with the sliding of bolts and rattling of chains, then the door was flung open and a presidential arm waved us inside.”

“Why the secrecy?”

“Bannon wanted the President alone. He confided to me that the “others,” as he called them, were spreading stories about him.”

“What sort of stories?”

“Well, basically, that Bannon is a florid-faced screw up. (The phrase they’re actually using is more alliterative than that, Cushy, but manners forefend). They’re saying, if I may paraphrase, that he’s an inept, ideologically addled bungler who’s constantly treading on his…well, on his man parts; and if the President doesn’t show him the door, he’s going to bring the whole rickety tent show cum goat rope crashing around our ears. Or words to that affect.”

“And Bannon wanted to counter these accusations?”

“Not exactly. He was on the attack. He wanted to lay out our strategy to convince the President that despite appearances we actually know our fundament from our lateral epicondyle, if you get my drift. (Right there, Cushy, I sensed the atmosphere growing frigid. Even I know there’s no “we” in Trump).

“Anyway, Bannon prattled on for twenty minutes until Trump cut him off, saying it was the best strategy any President had ever had, absolutely the best, and he would give it a lot of thought, but right then ‘Fox news was coming on’ so if we didn’t mind—and with that he jerked a thumb at the door. We got up to leave. But as we were headed for the egress, Trump beckoned me back with a little finger.”

“He cocked his little finger at you?”

“Actually it was his index finger, but they’re all extraordinarily small, you know. In any case, Bannon shot me a look, huffed out the door and I was alone with the President. It was the first time I’ve seen him close to.”

“What was your impression?”

“I admit I was flustered. All I remember is the cantilevered plumage, that pouty mouth, and a great mass of subcutaneous tissue. He asked my name, and I told him Pumphrett. Then he started out on how great a strategist Bannon was, certainly the best strategist of any Administration, and that all his appointments were the best, and so on. This went on for some time, and I had begun to wonder why he had kept me behind. But then he pulled his chair a little closer to the couch where I was sitting and laid a small hand on my shoulder.”

“’Pomfrites’, he said, ‘you work for Bannon, right? Tell me: What the hell does the deconstruction of the administrative state mean?’ Well, Cushy, that knocked me back on my haunches. I was all confusion, but Trump bore in. ‘And while we’re on the subject’, he continued, ‘what was this about the Fourth Turning and our core being more important than our fringe? And why does Bannon keep saying Winter is Coming?’—which, he didn’t mind telling me, was getting on his nerves.

I was overwhelmed. I stuttered and stammered and, finally, the only thing I could think to say was the truth.”

“Oh, no, Pumphrett! You didn’t.”

“I’m afraid I did. ‘It’s all piffle,’ I blurted. ‘Purest piffle.’

The President seemed startled. But I was committed at this point, Cushy, so I didn’t hold back. It was gobbledygook, I told him, so much pseudo-intellectual bunkum. I sensed his eyebrows rising under that mono-bang he affects, but that didn’t deter me. It was, I concluded with a flourish, in the common parlance, complete horse……,” but he interrupted before I could finish the phrase. This, I admit, spared my blushes. As you know, normally I abhor the vulgar, but I had raised a full head of steam.

“What was his reaction?”

“He seemed to muse thoughtfully—or as thoughtfully as he ever muses—and then he said it was a coincidence because that was exactly what Jared had called it. I was gratified at this. But was it a trap? I decided to test the waters. So, I ventured, ‘Jared said it was piffle? And Gobbledygook?’”

“No,” he said. “He called it horse…”, but, just at that moment, Ivanka broke through the door with news that Bannon was downstairs shouting about resigning. She was surprised to find me there, but the President told her I was Pomfrites and I was just leaving so I scuttled out the door. The next day Spicer was in the briefing room telling the press that everything was fine with Bannon, which is the worst sign of all, of course.”

(Now you, dear reader, may be surprised that as timorous a man as Pumphrett would have blurted out so condemnatory a description of the elevated sort of flummery that had transformed Steve Bannon from a wolf of Wall Street into a swivel-eyed crank. There is, however, a simple explanation. You see, piffle had been the chief object of Pumphrett’s studies at Choate, where he had not only majored in political science, but in his spare time read the great pifflemeisters: Gentile, Derrida, and even Heidegger, whose Nazi sympathies had not erased his name from Choate reading list—quite the contrary. By our fourth year, Pumphrett had taken to quoting indecipherable excerpts on inappropriate occasions until finally beaten into silence by the less tolerant of our classmates. That trauma had lasting effects, so that now, as a hunting dog whines in the presence of game, so Pumphrett reacts to obscurantist twaddle. This trait is counter-indicative in the present political climate, but, as he’s often confessed under oath, it’s one of many personal quirks beyond his control.)

We two sat in silence beneath Lincoln’s stony gaze for a moment, sipping. Off to the side, a booth selling black-and-white flag-like remembrances of nonexistent POWs in imaginary Asian jungle confinement was doing a brisk business. As long-time readers will know, I fancy myself a mentor to Pumphrett, and have, in fact, several times testified to that effect in court. My protective instincts were now aroused again.

“Pumphrett,” I counseled, “If you stay at the White House, you have to be prepared to deal not only with piffle, but with hokum, hogwash, and hooey, not to mention idiocy, gibberish, claptrap, and sudden, inexplicable nocturnal emissions.”

“You mean trumpery, Cushy?” he asked, meekly, the barest, tattered remnant of hope lingering in his tone. It had to be crushed!

“I’m afraid so, Pumphrett, old cheese,” I retorted, handing him a “Free the POWs” button. “Most of all with trumpery.”

Japan Strikes It Rich (Again) with Offshore Gas

Japan announced this week that it’s successfully tapping so-called “fire ice” for the second time. It’s been a few years since we’ve heard anything about the country’s quest to find and extract natural gas from methane hydrates along the sea floor, but that lack of news hasn’t been for lack of trying, and we’re now learning that a gas is flowing from a second exploratory well off Japan’s coast. The FT reports:

The Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation said it was flaring gas from the drillship Chikyu after methane began to flow from its test well in the Nankai Trough, off the coast of Mie prefecture in central Japan.

It marks Japan’s first experiment with methane hydrates since its initial, partially successful test sent a tremor through the global energy industry in 2013.

If the test well meets its goal and keeps the gas flowing for four weeks, it would be a big step towards the technical viability of extracting giant reservoirs of gas trapped in ice crystals below permafrost at the bottom of the world’s oceans.

There’s a lot of gas trapped in those “ice cages” of the methane hydrates, enough to equal at least 10 years of the country’s current domestic gas production. That’s great news for Japan, which has to rely on imports for most of its energy needs, a fact that is as unwanted for geopolitical reasons as it is for economic ones.

There’s another interesting twist to this story. Methane hydrates are one of the most feared unknowns in climate science. Methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas (though it dissipates more quickly than CO2), and there is concern that as surface temperatures rise and oceans warm, the ice lattice structures trapping all of that methane on our planet’s sea floors will melt, eventually leading to a large spike in atmospheric methane (and more warming). If we’re able to extract that methane first, though, we’ll not only be accessing new reserves of the most climate friendly fossil fuel around, we could also be staving off a grim positive feedback loop.

Japan’s experience will be watched closely here in the United States not only because of our interest in our ally’s energy security, but also because large reserves of these underwater gas deposits can be found off America’s Atlantic coast. The 21st century can already be characterized as a time of energy abundance (thank you shale), but this “fire ice” could keep the good times going.

Japan Strikes it Rich (Again) With Offshore Gas

Japan announced this week that it’s successfully tapping so-called “fire ice” for the second time. It’s been a few years since we’ve heard anything about the country’s quest to find and extract natural gas from methane hydrates along the sea floor, but that lack of news hasn’t been for lack of trying, and we’re now learning that a gas is flowing from a second exploratory well off Japan’s coast. The FT reports:

The Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation said it was flaring gas from the drillship Chikyu after methane began to flow from its test well in the Nankai Trough, off the coast of Mie prefecture in central Japan.

It marks Japan’s first experiment with methane hydrates since its initial, partially successful test sent a tremor through the global energy industry in 2013.

If the test well meets its goal and keeps the gas flowing for four weeks, it would be a big step towards the technical viability of extracting giant reservoirs of gas trapped in ice crystals below permafrost at the bottom of the world’s oceans.

There’s a lot of gas trapped in those “ice cages” of the methane hydrates, enough to equal at least 10 years of the country’s current domestic gas production. That’s great news for Japan, which has to rely on imports for most of its energy needs, a fact that is as unwanted for geopolitical reasons as it is for economic ones.

There’s another interesting twist to this story. Methane hydrates are one of the most feared unknowns in climate science. Methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas (though it dissipates more quickly than CO2), and there is concern that as surface temperatures rise and oceans warm, the ice lattice structures trapping all of that methane on our planet’s sea floors will melt, eventually leading to a large spike in atmospheric methane (and more warming). If we’re able to extract that methane first, though, we’ll not only be accessing new reserves of the most climate friendly fossil fuel around, we could also be staving off a grim positive feedback loop.

Japan’s experience will be watched closely here in the United States not only because of our interest in our ally’s energy security, but also because large reserves of these underwater gas deposits can be found off America’s Atlantic coast. The 21st century can already be characterized as a time of energy abundance (thank you shale), but this “fire ice” could keep the good times going.

Election Eve

The presidential run-off takes place on Sunday, and nearly everyone in France is sick of both candidates. Wednesday’s debate didn’t help: Marine spent two-and-a-half solid hours shrieking like a fishwife addled by menopause. Macron faced the obvious political problem. No matter how unprepared and hysterical she sounded, there’s no way a young, successful, good-looking man can tell a middle-aged woman that she’s crazy and confused and come across to his audience as a gentleman.

Marine simply made no sense. She melted down before millions of French viewers in a miasma of contradictions. She was aiming for a tone of righteous outrage, but she managed instead to spit as she spoke. Macron tried but failed to contain not only his revulsion with her disorganized mind, but with her saliva, which threatened to land on his nice suit. You could see him wrestling against his impulses but settling repeatedly for, “Vous dites des bêtises.” The cartoon thought bubbles seemed to float over his head: If I keep saying the obvious about how dumb she sounds, I’ll sound patronizing, but I can’t just let her keep shrieking like that, can I? He landed on strategies like this: “So we’re going to trade with Italy, who will pay us in euros, and we will pay our workers in Francs. Oo là là.” She replied with a series of smirks and throaty chortles, insinuating that a well-formed formula is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

All Macron had to do to win was avoid appearing to condescend to her, but how could anyone respond without condescension to such nonsense? “The French have a right not to be taken for imbeciles,” he tried. “Either they pay more to retire or they retire later. You can’t do both.” He strove for a tone to express his contempt without sounding contemptuous. “Bad news,” he offered. “Eighty percent of our medications are manufactured abroad. Since you propose tariffs on imports, that will raise prices.”

He was genuinely in a fix: If he said anything economically literate, it would only reinforce her charge that he’s a banker. (Marine constantly grasps the word “banker” in her jaws and shakes it violently, like a modern twist on “capitalist running-dog.”) She accused Macron of “lacking firmness,” and being “indulgent of Islamic terrorism.” Unlike him, she announced, swelling grandly, she would re-establish border controls to fight terrorism. “I have news for you,” Macron replied, either calmly or with a misogynistic fixation on trivia, depending whose side you were on, “Since November 2015, we’ve re-established border controls to fight terrorism.”

He next sent the simultaneous translators into spasms by describing her security proposals as “la poudre de perlimpinpin.” I had to look it up. As the lexicographer Joseph-Philibert Le Roux informs us in his 1750 Dictionnaire comique, satyrique, critique, burlesque, libre et proverbial,

it is also known as oribus powder, and used to mock powders to which charlatans attribute marvellous virtues, as if they were gold, or from which gold could be made. It is used to describe things that have no virtue.

‘Twas le mot juste. (“Snake oil” is the translation I’d use in a hurry.)

Of course, every word out of his mouth did come across as misogynistic and arrogant, but he was trapped. If he refrained from saying, “That’s idiotic” to everything idiotic she said, he’d seem to acquiesce to lunacy, but if he said, “That’s idiotic” over and over, he’d come across as the snotty know-it-all she claims he is. Overall, the impression she gave of idiocy was more powerful than his of snottiness. “In light of the evening,” remarked the military analyst Jean-Dominique Merchet, “Macron is ready calmly to face every lunatic on the planet. Reassuring for the country.” (This pretty much sums it up.)

Monkey Eyeballs

Macron will win, probably in a landslide as political science textbooks define the term: that is, by at least 15 percentage points. If those who believe we’re in for a Brexit- or Trump-like surprise were drawing the appropriate analogy, we’d see at least one credible poll by now showing her victory within the margin of error. The popular theory that abstention could somehow push her over the edge presumes a level of abstention that’s neither predicted by the polls nor rational for any other reason to presume. French pollsters called the first round dead-to-rights, so their models, clearly, are not fatally methodologically flawed. Polls since the debate have universally shown Macron improving his lead to about 62-38.

So the remaining drama has to do with Macron’s margin of victory. The answer will depend on turnout and the way voters whose candidates lost in the first round reassign their votes. The risk is that Le Pen will do well enough to curse France with the National Front for another five years. Thus “victory” in this election need be redefined as “victory sufficient to demoralize and destroy the National Front, get her and her insane family out of French politics forever, discredit everyone in Europe tempted to emulate her, then salt the earth.” And “defeat” will occur if the Front does well enough to become, as the pundits put it, “normalized”—entrenched in French political life for good.

Only if she’s humiliatingly defeated will France be able to return to the two-round election system around which its constitution is designed. By making it to the second round, the Front confronts French voters with a choice not between two candidates with different, but respectable and defensible, views of France’s future, but with a choice between sanity and the abyss. Like passengers on a long-haul flight, colicky infants on either side, they find themselves trapped with a flight attendant cheerfully offering them the chicken or the plate of raw monkey eyeballs dipped in Ebola. No one can properly debate the future of France, because everyone’s too busy shrieking, “Monkey eyeballs? Ebola? No monkey eyeballs!”

Under more normal circumstances, we wouldn’t worry. Her defeat, like her father’s by Jacques Chirac in 2002, would be decisive enough to get the job done. But these aren’t normal circumstances. The reason she might not be defeated badly enough is twofold: First the Horseshoe—the place where the far-left and far-right merge—and second the Vice, or the squeezing of France from all sides by forces with a keen interest in its destabilization.

You, Madame, Are No Margaret Thatcher

Le Pen is commonly called a “far-right” politician, but the term is misleading, especially to Americans who are not on familiar and intimate terms with her party, its analogues in Europe, or their ideological forebears. She favors elements of a command economy and the end of “the dogma of free competition,” proposing import quotas and tariffs, the re-nationalization of strategic industries and banks, and strong state intervention in agricultural production. Profits will be transferred from large corporations to the state to establish a “special reserve for re-industrialization.” Her party will enlarge welfare spending, raise the retirement age, hand out cash to low-paid workers, and fix prices for gas, electricity and public transportation.

Whereas her father’s National Front embraced liberal economic dogmas (in the classical sense), her views represent a sharp break; her decision to fish for economic inspiration in the waters of France’s traditional left is one reason for her popularity in the former Communist Party strongholds of the north. She proposes to make up for budget shortfalls with some kind of poudre de perlimpinpin, one that to the extent it makes sense at all sounds like a recipe for another massive financial crisis and Europe-wide economic meltdown. The business-friendly French think tank La Fondation Concorde notes the similarities between her proposals and those that led to the “crushing failure” of Argentina in 2001. In this sense, she is a socialist. Thus she is a nationalist and a socialist, or, in other words, a national socialist.

Often, at this point, some well-meaning reader will object that it’s slanderous to call a woman a national socialist because she’s a conservative. This would be true if it were true, but Le Pen is not a conservative—at least not in the sense that Margaret Thatcher was. “Far right” does not mean “very conservative”; it means “national socialist” and is thus simply descriptive, even if normative implications follow from it, as they should.

As I have stressed elsewhere, the National Front is not a normal political party in any way. Ranking members of normal French parties in the 21st century do not say things like this: “I consider that from a technical standpoint it is impossible—and I stress, impossible—to use it [Zyklon B] in mass exterminations.” Thus said Jean-François Jalkh, who was appointed interim party president only weeks ago, and almost as quickly forced to stand down when a journalist at La Croix republished these and related remarks. He’d offered them, apparently totally unprompted, to a doctoral student who kept both the notes and the audio recording of the interview.

The party is rotten with this kind of sentiment. As the election nears, multiple stories like this confirm that Le Pen’s campaign to soften the party’s image has been just that: an effort to soften its image. Consider Frédéric Chatillon and Axel Loustau, for example, “ubiquitous” members of her inner circle; they have been among her closest friends since she was a student. The “de-demonization” of the party didn’t go so far as to boot them (notable, because it did go so far as to boot Marine Le Pen’s own father). As Marine Le Pen’s former advisor, Aymeric Chauprade—who has fallen out with the party for “moral and political” reasons—put it to the New York Times:

They are anti-Semites, nostalgic for the Third Reich, violently anticapitalist, with a hatred for democracy…. People think they’re marginal. But in fact, I discovered, she protects them. She supports them. They are at the heart of everything.

This is borne out in court documents; it has been captured on hidden cameras, and interview after interview substantiates it. They don’t even try all that hard to hide it.

The article in the NYT ran with a photo of the young Chatillon at a rally for the Groupe Union Défense (Or GUD: hence its members are gudards):

Note the Iron Cross: That’s what Nazis use nowadays in Europe, because the Swastika is illegal.

Court affidavits from former gudards affirm that Chatillon himself organized these rallies, notable for all the usual Nazi accoutrements—Sieg Heils, Nazi salutes, the rest. According to an unrelated court affidavit, Chatillon held dinner feasts on Hitler’s birthday to pay homage to “the great man,” and treasured his portrait, which he kissed. In an affidavit delivered to the court on February 3, 2014, former gudard Denis Le Moal describes Chatillon’s “morbid hatred of Jews,” and stresses, “These were not mere youthful errors. He has never renounced his relationship with French and European neo-Nazi circles.”

Like many of Marine’s intimates, Chatillon is on unusually good personal and financial terms with the Assad regime. According to Le Moal, Manaf Tlass presented him with a “magnificent” copy of Mein Kampf, in Arabic; he was particularly proud of it, even if it earned him a swift detention and debriefing by the French security services the moment his flight touched down. Frédéric Haziza, author of One Flew Over the Fascists’ Nest, attest that Chatillon and the former head of the GUD, Philippe Péninque, control the National Front’s finances. “The only debatable point in the use of the term ‘neo-Nazi,’” Le Moal’s affidavit asserts, “is the wrongful qualifier ‘neo.’”

Péninque, described as Marine’s éminence grise, is no improvement. Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala, inventor of the quenelle, forms half of the anti-Semitic conspiracy-theory political funambulist act that unites the far-right with black supremacists from the Nation of Islam in a party called Réconciliation Nationale. Dieudonné’s opposite number is Alain Soral, a former rank-and-file communist who became an adviser to Jean-Marie Le Pen. (Make a note: This will come up again when we get to the Horseshoe). The precursor to the Soral-Dieudonné romance, in 2007, was Egalité et Réconciliation, which was founded by Soral and Péninque. Péninque drew up the charter. It describes itself as “left nationalist,” which means socialist nationalist, which means national socialist. One wouldn’t wish to simplify the vastly subtle and sophisticated system of thought represented by these parties, but both have had a vision, an inspiration, about the key to achieving equality and reconciliation in France: It revolves around the idea of a Zionist plot. Yet somehow Marine Le Pen, whose éminence grise is a Jew-hating fruitcake like Péninque, has managed to sell herself to not only to some Americans, but to some American Jews, as a politician they should embrace. (Again, make note: The Vice.)

French journalists have joined gatherings of the Front’s luminaries incognito, with hidden cameras, and filmed them au naturale: “Everybody hates the Arabs. Today we dare not talk about extermination, so we say remigration! Enough already, Stalin’s methods weren’t so bad!” As usual the defense is that they were just joking, but they’re punctuating these jokes with Nazi salutes. Can you imagine how that sounds to a French citizen of Arab origin? Would you truly feel secure they’d never dream of trying to exterminate you?

The UK’s Conservative Party, by contrast, is a normal party. Even the Trump “movement,” as opposed to what has become of the Republican Party, is normal compared to the National Front. If you’re not a conservative, you won’t vote for the Tories, but it’s unthinkable that prominent Tories would carry on this way. This is one (among many) differences between “conservatives” and “the far right.”

Emmanuel Macron avers that he believes the economy works best when it’s given the freedom to do so. He wants to ease regulations on business, reduce public spending, raise defense spending, freeze or abolish the confiscatory housing tax, stay in NATO, and maintain a close relationship with the United States. He was the only candidate—along with the luckless Benoît Hamon—to insist that sanctions against Russia remain in place “until the Minsk accords are respected.”

Le Pen wants to end those sanctions and pull France out of NATO. (And if you think France has problems integrating immigrants now, just wait until Le Pen fulfils her promise to create a new [second] class of citizenship for them, and makes it impossible for employers to hire them.)

The Horseshoe

I was surprised recently to learn from the philosopher Justin Erik Halldór Smith (who also lives in Paris) that, “It is considered the height of naïveté to defend what is often called the ‘horseshoe’ view of political ideology, the idea that at its extremes the left and the right ends of the political spectrum begin to approach one another.” If that’s naïve, count me in, and I welcome Smith to the club of naïfs:

But honestly, how else are we supposed to make sense of the far-left memes revelling in ironic beheadings, ironic Soviet tanks, ironic gulags, as anything other than the mirror image of the alt-right’s Pepe-with-swastika-armband? How else are we to make sense of the situation in which a tweet from Trump himself perfectly sums up what our friends on the antiliberal left are saying?

The question is rhetorical. The answer is that this is the only rational way to make sense of it.

Now consider the French left. The 65-year-old Jean-Luc Mélenchon of La France insoumise, or Indomitable France, which includes the Communist Party, is somehow always in everyone’s photos of any given political protest or demonstration; it’s kind of anti-miracle that he’s always in front and center no matter who took the photo or from what angle. His diet, he says, is largely based on quinoa.

Mélenchon has refused clearly to say that his supporters—who are communists, mind —should vote for Macron as opposed to the woman who is, in principle, everything to which a communist is opposed—a National Socialist—and who would certainly line up the communists first to be shot. This is as classic as the horseshoe gets.

The Vice

Halldór Smith is appalled by the National Front’s success so far, and is tired of being told that Putin’s role in this is overstated:

I’m sitting in France right now, and in my face are reports of the National Front’s increasingly plausible rise to power, and also reports of Russia’s keen interest in helping this happen. … The Putin regime plainly is interested in destabilising Western European electoral politics, and this interest looks remarkably continuous with the destabilisation that has already occurred in the United States.

Putin supports the National Front. The party took a € 9 million loan from a Moscow-based bank in 2014, and Le Pen just visited Russia again. She’s actively seeking new sources of funding, presumably the point of the visit. Le Pen has in turn said she admires Putin and called for lifting the European Union’s economic sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Crimea and Ukraine. The European Union, the U.S. government and the UN hold the March 2014 referendum in Crimea to be illegitimate. Le Pen calls its legitimacy “indisputable.”

This is just what the naked eye can see. We won’t know for some time the full extent of Russia’s support Le Pen, for Chekists don’t play by Marquess of Queensberry rules. Now, as Donald Trump and many on the Left would horseshoe up to interject: We’re no angels. Yes, the U.S. government has interfered in foreign elections, but it used to do this, at least, in the service of U.S. interests. Russia’s interests are not our interests; they’re the opposite. Second, for a host of reasons, we no longer seem any good at it. Russia is.

The ties between Russia’s state security apparatus and the world’s most sophisticated cybercriminals are well-known. Two days after the first round of the French presidential election on April 23, a cybersecurity firm based in Japan reported that Russian hackers had targeted Macron’s campaign in the run-up to the vote. Trend Micro found decoy internet addresses pretending to belong to Macron’s campaign that actually belonged to good old Fancy Bear. His staff has complained of unrelenting and sophisticated phishing attacks throughout the race. (At least they knew, thanks to the Blumenthal fiasco, to be on the alert to it.) Sputnik’s French-language site keeps calling him gay, which few in France really care about, but also keeps calling him a banker. Everyone’s been worried that before the election they’d leak evidence that he’d engaged in banking activities and out him. So absolutely no one was surprised when late last night nine gigabytes of data, purportedly containing hacked internal e-mails from Macron’s campaign, were dumped onto Pastebin, a site used to share documents anonymously.

On Friday at midnight, by law, a blackout on campaigning, polling, and media coverage aimed at swaying the election begins. So the dump was precisely timed to ensure rumors would fly untethered on social media all weekend, even as Macron was unable respond. His campaign confirmed it had indeed been the target of a “massive” hack. The electoral commission has urged French media and citizens “not to relay” the contents of the leaked documents “in order not to alter the sincerity of the vote.” And thus I won’t.

The Champs-Elysées and the Pattons of Our Basements

Now recall that ISIS, too, has a dog in this fight. On April 21, with only two days to go before the first round of the election, a terrorist opened fire on the Champs-Elysées, killing a police officer and wounding three others. The security forces quickly shot him dead.

ISIS claimed credit for the attack unusually quickly. The New York Times’ Rukmini Callimachi’s unsurpassed reporting on ISIS has earned her many sad honors, among them is that hers is the first Twitter account anyone checks after a suspected ISIS attack. As she wrote,

They claimed this attack in circa 2.5 hours. As far as attacks in West, this may be a record. Only 1 that comes close is Brussels airport. As far as attacks in West, this may be a record. Only 1 that comes close is Brussels airport. Despite popular perception, ISIS does *not* claim everything & they typically take up to 12 hrs.

The timing of the attack obviously wasn’t random, and they claimed it quickly, it seems, to be sure their name would be in the news for as many hours as possible before all campaigning was to cease as per the electoral law. ISIS wants Marine Le Pen to win. They explain patiently and repeatedly that they seek to eliminate what they call the grey zone. They believe Le Pen will make life miserable for ordinary Muslims in France and so prove to those living in the grey zone that they have no future here. This, they believe, will inspire them to join the Caliphate’s (diminishing) ranks and spark civil war on French soil, which they hope to broaden to Europe at large.

Meanwhile, no one yet knows what U.S. foreign policy under Trump really is. But we do know that Steve Bannon adores the Le Pen family. Who knows how much influence Bannon still has over Trump, but he doubtless still has some. So for all anyone can be sure, the U.S. government, or some shard of it, might also be interfering in this election, but not necessarily in a useful way. “Useful” would be helping French authorities defend the integrity of their elections against the Kremlin’s interference. Perhaps some U.S. authorities are doing that, too; we don’t know.

But we do know that that some private American citizens are interfering in this election in the most moronic ways imaginable. Buzzfeed News has surprised me of late by hiring skilled journalists to do old-fashioned gumshoe reporting; in January, as the first round of the French primaries got underway, they published an fascinating article describing a chatroom, to which they were given access, called ‘The Great Liberation of France.’”

And what is this? The effort seems to be based in America, where many young, motivated, useful idiots have been industriously creating fake Facebook and Twitter accounts to manipulate French social media users. Who knows how many of these kids are out there—the article didn’t say. But I find it astonishing that any child in the United States could be inspired, in the words of the chatroom’s administrators, “to create as much chaos on social media as possible to make right-wing candidate Marine Le Pen and her supporters in the National Front (FN) seem like the most legitimate voice in French politics.” I don’t get it: I had to crack the whip over my students just to get them to remember where France was on a map—hexagon, Aiden, remember the hexagon?—yet somehow a number of American kids that’s greater than zero have chosen to do something like this for fun?

The chatroom’s admins have instructed users to make fake Facebook accounts that are “ideally young, cute girl, gay, Jew, basically anyone who isn’t supposed to be pro-[FN].” Users are then instructed to lock down these dummy accounts so no one can tell they’re fake. Once they have their fake Facebook profiles, they’re told to infiltrate the comment sections of large French Facebook pages and post pro-FN memes and jokes about François Fillon, France’s current frontrunner for the presidency. And they’re doing something similar on Twitter, creating dozens of French-appearing sock puppet accounts. They then collect all of them on lists and organize campaigns to make things trend in French.

Buzzfeed viewed a Google Document that “includes instructions for how users can help teach fellow right-wing trolls how to make memes that would be believable in their country.” According to the instructions, “You have to provide reconnaissance for us. WE DON’T KNOW SHIT about your internet segment.” (Or about anything, it seems.)

The user who initially invited BuzzFeed News to The Great Liberation of France wished to remain anonymous and said he believes the Discord group is mostly made up of 4chan users. … The anonymous user said he also suspected that it wasn’t just Americans and French people in the Discord group. “Right now there is this loose sort of alliance between Russian neo-fascists like Alexander Dugin and the international alt-right,” he said. Which appears to be true — there have been several recent 4chan threads where users with American IP addresses are asking to learn about Alexander Dugin, a prominent fascist Russian political scientist.

The existence of a weird chatroom doesn’t prove anything in itself. We can’t tell from this how many of these psychopathic little shits are really out there, or what it means that they’re eager to know more about Alexander Dugin. Even if there were an army of them, I doubt they’ll have much luck “liberating France.” If that were so easy to do, Patton and the Third Army could have saved themselves a lot of trouble. But this story suggests we’ve got a problem. At the least, it says we’re raising a passel of bored, nihilistic teenagers who don’t grasp that it was their own grandparents who saved Europe from fascism and communism and resurrected it from the ashes, and that Le Pen represents the forces their grandparents defeated. We’ve got kids who are dumb enough to think it would be a fun game to try to reverse America’s greatest historic accomplishments — and who are also dumb enough to be enthralled by a ninth-rate, stringy-haired demented Russian neo-pagan who—when he’s not busy babbling on about the holy caste-kingdom of the steppe-people and the planetary conspiracy of land against the sea, earth against water—is actually quite clear about his goals: “An important aspect of the Eurasian worldview is an absolute denial of Western civilization.”

These kids aren’t getting it from nowhere. Where are their elders? Why has Congressman Steve King of Iowa endorsed Marine Le Pen? What was this column doing in the New York Times? “To begin with, nobody seriously doubts Le Pen’s competence, her command of policy, her ability to serve as president without turning the office into a reality-TV thunderdome. … Nor is there much evidence that Le Pen herself draws any personal inspiration from the Vichy right.”

Vocativ used network analysis tools such as NodeXL and Gephi to chart a wave of American social media users who have been using the hashtags #JeVoteMarine, #IVoteMarine, and include such accounts as @TEN_GOP, the “unofficial Twitter of Tennessee Republicans.” The American accounts, they report, “were found to be even more influential than Le Pen’s own official account, @MLP_Officiel, and the official Wikileaks Twitter account @Wikileaks, which has been fervently tweeting in favor of Le Pen.”

Seriously? On a trip to Moscow, last October, Marine told the Russian daily Kommersant, “The economic crisis gives us the opportunity to turn our back on the United States and turn to Russia.” What do these Americans think they’re doing? Our eagerness not only to acquiesce to Le Pen’s project but assist it suggests to me what certain Romans sensed when they saw the vultures take flight.

May Day

Less than a week before the final run-off, it felt inevitable that May Day here would be violent, but from which direction it would come from we did not know. You probably saw the photo, which quickly circumnavigated the globe, of a policeman engulfed in flames. The revolting cruelty of the attack was accompanied by tabloid headlines such as this one in the Mirror: “Chaos in Paris as annual May Day march turns into mass riot in protest against Marine Le Pen.”

This was not quite accurate. According to the police, a march organized by some—but not all—of France’s old, established trade unions began at 2:30 p.m., at the Place de la République. Traditionally, all of France’s unions participate in this march, but the fractured French Left could not agree on a common stance ahead of the vote. The veteran unionist Jeanne Bolon, who represents the CFDT, has accused the CGT of cowardice for refusing to endorse Macron. The CGT’s leadership, she says, fears upsetting members tempted by Le Pen. “At the CFDT we also criticize [Macron’s] neo-liberal policies, in a constructive way,” she told France24. “The point is, with Macron we can talk, whereas with Le Pen we won’t ever again.” So the CFDT was forced to surrender the rally at the Place de la République to the CGT. Instead, it held a parallel rally—at the Jaurès metro station.

I don’t know if the significance was intentional; there is almost no site in Paris to hold a rally that would not evoke some aspect of French history seemingly relevant to this election. But the station is named after Jean Jaurès, the legendary antimilitarist, one of the great luminaries of the French Left. Along with Émile Zola, Jaurès was one of Alfred Dreyfus’s most passionate defenders. Jaurès saw clearly the imminent catastrophe of the Great War. He tried desperately to stave it off. Like Rosa Luxemburg, he imagined the key to this was solidarity among French and German workers; he too tried, without issue, to organize general strikes in France and Germany to force both governments to back down and negotiate.

Jaurès, representing the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière, was elected for the Tarn in 1906. Six years later, Raymond Poincaré became Prime Minister. Russia, we now know, covertly subsidized Poincaré’s election campaign. These things have happened before, which is why they’re so spooky to see again now. Seeking to obstruct Imperial Germany’s determination to become a world power, Poincaré embarked upon a program to strengthen Franco-Russian ties, which had been severely undermined during the 1908-9 Bosnian crisis.

In July of 1914, Poincaré led a secret mission to St. Petersburg to reinforce the Triple Entente. Jaurès, outraged by Russia’s influence over French foreign policy, condemned the visit as dangerously provocative. Addressing the Chamber of Deputies, he accused Poincaré of being “more Russian than Russia.” He asked, “Are we going to start a world war?”

He did not live to find out. On July 31, Jaurès was murdered by the fanatical nationalist Raoul Villain, who saw in Jaurès an obstacle on the path toward noble war against Germany, one that would erase the disgrace of the 1870 loss to Bismarck’s Prussia and reclaim the Alsace-Lorraine—the recovery of which, it was said, a true Frenchman must not speak, but must never cease to think: “Y penser toujours, n’en parler jamais.” To Villain, Jaurès was a threat to France’s sacred unity.

Jaurès was what these days we’d call a globalist. He did not lack patriotism. He ardently believed the French Republic was worth defending. But he saw internationalism as a key element in its defense. His death destabilized the French government and severed the last links among those opposed to general mobilization in France and Germany. On the day after his death, posters went up throughout France announcing that mobilization. Three days later, the World War began.

The videotaped footage of Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand walking, hand in hand, across the battlefields of Verdun, is justly famous. Shot in 1984, it represents the vindication of Jaurès. That argument, at least, every sane person once thought, had been settled. Le Pen did get off one genuinely funny line on Wednesday when she said, “France will be led by a woman, either me or Mrs. Merkel.” But the context was creepy: Macron, she insisted, would allow France to be crushed by Germany and would “lie prostrate” before the powers of Berlin.

In any event, according to the police communiqué, some 30,000 people participated in the CGT-led rally. This is normal for a May Day march in Paris. But neither normal nor traditional were the 800 people who inserted themselves at the head of the march, of whom 150 were masked. This group committed “dégradations,” as the communiqué put it, that at first were “rapidly contained by law enforcement officers.” Then, at the Boulevard Diderot, in the 12th arrondissement, the masked men began throwing Molotov cocktails at the police, injuring three officers, one seriously. The injured officer suffered burns to his face and hands. They broke windows, vandalized a bus station, and damaged a city bike rental depot. The police responded with tear gas.

After this, the procession continued without incident. There was, in other words, no real chaos (by French standards), as the Mirror’s headline intimated, though there surely was a premediated, professional, and brutal assault on the forces of law. Nor is clear, at least not yet, that the violence was “a protest against Marine Le Pen.” The CFDT’s rally was by far the smaller one. There was a consensus at that rally that the Left must absolutely vote for Macron to shut out the far-right. I wasn’t there. I was at the other rally. But France24, for example, reported that attendees of the Jaurès rally were vivid with contempt for those unions and politicians (or to be precise, one politician: Jean-Luc Mélenchon) who’ve failed to take a sufficiently firm stance against the National Front.

I have no idea who perpetrated the attack on the police on May Day. But an impression of “chaos” is exactly what quite some number of evil actors in this story had reason to want, so a thorough investigation is warranted.

The Knife

When one Léopold Lambert posted this article on Twitter the other day, it deserved the 15 minutes of fame it received: “The Testimony of an Object: Le Pen and the French History of Violence.” Perhaps Lambert’s approach might work where others have failed, because, as he puts it, “the visceral sometimes has to take over the intellectual presentation of arguments.” Hence the knife. “I am writing this text,” he begins,

exactly twenty-two years after the murder of Brahim Bouarram, a young Moroccan drowned by a group of FN sympathizers in the Seine river in Paris. This reminds us also of the massacre of October 17, 1961 when a few hundred Algerian men were thrown into the river by French police under the orders of the infamous Paris Prefect, Maurice Papon.

He’ll convert no one new by telling them that, I fear. Grotesquely, it seems there are even Americans who have by now been convinced that Europe has been overrun by “hordes,” making this sort of thing just unpleasantly necessary.

“Many analyses,” he continues, “can be written about the nationalist and racist ideology developed by [Jean Marie] Le Pen (in its most explicit forms) and [Marine] Le Pen (in slightly more disguised forms).” But he’s noticed that this just bores people. “This is therefore the story of an object.” And he leaves it thus:

As we learn from reading a 2012-text written by journalist Florence Beaugé, it is a knife found by twelve-year-old Mohamed Cherif Moulay on March 3, 1957, in a dark corner of his house in Algiers’ Casbah. The night before, a group of French paratroopers had entered his family house and tortured his 42-year-old dad, Ahmed Moulay, in front of his wife and his six children, with water, electricity and, at least one knife, before killing him. The knife was forgotten by one of the soldiers and later found and hidden by Mohamed Moulay, 12 years old. It is only in 2003 that the knife will exit the Moulays’ house, when the Algiers correspondent to French newspaper Le Monde brings it back to France to be used as an evidence in the trial for defamation that Jean-Marie Le Pen’s attempted against Le Monde. 5 centimeters long and 2.5 centimeters wide, it is the same kind of knife that was used by the Hitler Youth. It was fabricated by German knife makers in the Ruhr according to the investigation made by journalist Sorj Chalandon. The blade bears the name of J.A. Henckels, manufacturer in Solinger.

On the sheath, one can read J.M. Le Pen, 1er REP.

 

Carter Gets a D

The text of this student essay is taken from “New Slaves, Global Edition: Russia, Iran and the Segregation of the World Economy,” written by Carter Page and published in the February 10, 2015 issue of Global Policy.

Carter, I don’t normally write such extensive comments on a student paper, but this essay raises serious concerns about your ability to use sources, reason logically, and craft a coherent argument. It might be helpful to spend some time with a remedial tutor. Please see me after class. Grade: D

 

Essay on Global Injustice

Carter Page

Professor Bayles’s Class

Slave: Pronunciation: /slāv/ 1.2 – A person who is excessively dependent upon or controlled by something.—Oxford Dictionaries

No serious essay begins with a dictionary definition. If you don’t already have a good grasp of a term, you probably shouldn’t be writing an essay about it.

In October 2014, rapper Kanye West visited with President Barack Obama in the White House. Although the follow-up from the meeting did not lead to the outcome either participant had hoped for in domestic politics, …

What political outcome? This would seem an important point, since Presidents and entertainment celebrities don’t often meet for such purposes. Were they planning a two-man video along the lines of “Otis”?

… the artist’s creative work offers valuable ideas that could fundamentally improve the direction of U.S. foreign policy and world affairs.

Really? Kanye West is a multitalented hip-hop artist who has on occasion steered the music industry away from its worst instincts regarding black America. But on what basis do you say he has “valuable ideas” about “U.S. foreign policy and world affairs”?

Kanye West released a song in 2013 entitled “New Slaves.” The lyrics start with a description of the 1950s in America: “My momma was raised in the era when, clean water was only served to the fairer skin.”

This line is bizarre, even for KW. Black Americans in 1950s drank the same tap water as everyone else (albeit from different public fountains).

After explaining various racial biases that West has experienced throughout his own life …

When exactly did KW suffer this terrible racial bias? In Atlanta, where his mother was an English professor at Clark Atlanta University? In China, where she taught at Nanjing University? Or in Chicago, where she chaired the English Department at Chicago State and sent him to the Polaris School in Oak Lawn?

… the song refers to his direct response: “I’m about to wild the f*** out, I’m going Bobby Boucher.” It is a reference to the 1998 movie The Waterboy in which Adam Sandler’s character channels his frustration from injustices in life into extraordinary performance on the football field.

This allusion to The Waterboy was lame when KW used it. But at least he had a reason—to sell music to middle-class white kids. I am not sure what your reason is.

Closely analogous situations and responses may be found in today’s international arena.

If this is “closely analogous” to “situations and responses in today’s international arena,” please tell me what isn’t?

But in the current drama of world affairs, it is not just one fictional student like Boucher that has begun to take action against the forces of perceived injustice and harassment. Instead, Russia, Iran, China and a range of emerging powers …

Do these “emerging powers” include Kazakhstan, whose ruler President Nursultan Nazarbayev presides over a deadly gulag worthy of Stalinist Russia? If KW is against slavery and oppression, why did he accept €2.7 million to perform there in 2013?

…  have suffered from the same kind of condescending mistreatment that football team bullies once delivered to Boucher and have begun to respond in kind.

Not Adam Sandler again! The reference rings so false in the present context, I can’t help but wonder: Are these your own ideas, or was this written by the propaganda machine of a hostile foreign country? (Just kidding.)

[…]

Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “You know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression. There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November. There comes a time.”

Mr. West was correct to point out in his 2013 song that when people are humiliated and trampled, there eventually comes a time when they will wild out.

Carter, you have got this so wrong, I don’t know where to begin. Dr. King’s movement was not a case of “wilding out.” It was a highly disciplined, religiously based protest based on the nonviolent tradition of Mahatma Gandhi and Leo Tolstoy. Check your sources!

Drawing upon the lessons from the civil rights movement, now applying the United States’ earlier course correction toward greater respect and justice in the foreign policy arena would help avoid a persistent long slog along the current lethal path.

Stop a moment and read that sentence.

A Wall Street Journal editorial has suggested: “For the Pentagon, Mr. Obama’s budget of $612 billion represents a 4.5% increase over 2015. This boost is overdue in a world of proliferating national-security threats from the Islamic State to Vladimir Putin to China.” But as often seen in the original Cold War, returning to the piercing chill of an alpine November through continued militarist instigation would prove far more costly and completely unnecessary for all parties.

[…]

The concurrence of targeted discrimination and interventionist policies is by no means a new phenomenon. Despite other accomplishments by U.S. President Harry Truman, his counterproductive Truman Doctrine which helped initiate and institutionalize the Cold War echoed the same condescending tone in an infamous letter he once wrote to his wife, “I think one man is as good as another so long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman.”

Score one for political correctness. Truman did say that, in a private correspondence. But is that a reason to ignore the Soviet Union’s role in starting the Cold War?

In his 2003 article “We Can Learn a Lot from Truman the Bigot” which touches on these themes, Peter Kuznick suggests, “We should question whether his was the kind of presidential vision our own troubled times demand. And we should consider the dangers of placing unlimited power in the hands of extremely limited political leaders.”

Kuznick is not a historian but a conspiracy theorist, just as his idol Oliver Stone is not an artist but a conspiracy theorist. There are better sources out there.

Obama himself is an individual with tremendous talents. But various legacy staff members and ill-advised advisors in the U.S. foreign policy apparatus have directly reflected the dangers of placing vast power in the hands of the extremely limited political leaders that his Administration has appointed.

So it’s not Obama’s fault but the fault of all those sneaky white folks working for him? Are you aware of how condescending, dare I say racist, this sounds?

California’s Reactionary Housing Policy Burns Millennials

The Golden State’s soaring home prices—exacerbated by NIMBY zoning restrictions, development plans that prioritize “density,” and arbitrary environmental rules—are exacting a catastrophic social and economic toll on the rising generation of young people looking to start families and lay down roots. So argues a bracing recent report from Joel Kotkin’s Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University. An excerpt:

Often cast as ‘progressive’, California’s land use policy is anything but reflective of historically liberal values, which traditionally favored the dispersion of property ownership. President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “A nation of homeowners, of people who own a real share in their land, is unconquerable.”75 Homeownership is not only critical to the economy, it provides key elements to our fraying civic society. Homeowners tend to vote more than renters, volunteer more, and as Habitat for Humanity suggests, provide a better environment for raising children.

Today’s assault on single-family housing essentially dooms much of the California middle class.

Kotkin and his colleagues note the high number of California millennials who are “failing to launch” due to prohibitive housing costs. While older California residents own homes at average rates, millennials own homes at lower rates than their peers in any other states except New York and Hawaii. More than half live with parents or other relatives. If home prices in California continue to rise at several times the rate of those in the rest of the country, “failure to launch” could turn into “crash and burn,” as an entire generation is denied the California dream their parents enjoyed.

This isn’t just an ordinary public policy dilemma; it is a crisis that cuts to the heart of the bargain that holds communities together. The absence exodus of young people, especially those who are working and middle class, has caused inequality to soar, making inland areas virtually unrecognizable compared to wealthy areas along the Pacific Coast. Because most people want to own a home before they start a family, the population of children in the state is shrinking, “with the lowest crude birth rate since 1907 occurring in 2016.” And as the authors suggest, the concentration of property ownership within a shrinking portion of the state’s ultra-talented elite threatens the ideal of democracy itself.

California is so firmly in the grips of cosmopolitan progressive ideology that it may be difficult to roll back the housing policies that are turning the state into Brazil. (Land-use policies reinforce this ideology by driving out more populist-minded voters). But in order to prevent these destructive dynamics to spread to the rest of the country, state policymakers and the federal government should prioritize that keep middle-class homeownership affordable and accessible. Building regulations should be rolled back, at the state and local level; city planning policies should favor suburbanization, rather than density; and the public funds should be allocated to build new infrastructure stretching further outside of city centers to facilitate a Third Ring of Suburbs.

If American society is going to hold together for a new generation already deeply divided and facing unusual economic strain, we need to get this issue right. Broadly-shared property ownership is a key to America’s social and economic success. Millennials need, as we’ve said before, need “a seat at the table and a slice of the pie.”

Unmuzzling the Pastors

In early February, President Donald Trump delivered remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast, an annual event organized by a well-connected Christian group, The Fellowship. Much of the speech was devoted to pleasant generalities about religion in public life—“America will thrive as long as we continue to have faith in each other and faith in God,” that kind of thing. Cable news coverage of the speech focused on Trump’s cheeky prayer request for the ratings of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Celebrity Apprentice” show.

The speech’s one concrete policy proposal stood out among these superficialities. As part of his commitment to religious liberty, Trump said he would “get rid of, and totally destroy, the Johnson Amendment,” a provision of the tax code that prohibits 501(c)3 organizations, including churches, from engaging in partisan politics. Ending the Johnson Amendment, Trump said, would “allow our representatives of faith to speak freely and without fear of retribution.”

This turned out to be a familiar refrain for Trump. During his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Trump thanked “the evangelical and religious community” for their support, and lamented the fact that “our laws prevent you from speaking your minds from your own pulpits.” Trump mentioned the provision again when he announced Mike Pence as his running mate, claiming that “you are just absolutely shunned if you’re evangelical; if you want to talk religion, you lose your tax-exempt status.” He spoke candidly about the issue during the Value Voters Summit in September, saying he decided to “knock out” the Johnson Amendment after learning that it prevented sympathetic religious leaders from endorsing him for President. And on Thursday, Trump signed an Executive Order directing the Treasury Department to refrain from penalizing religious groups for speaking “about moral or political issues from a religious perspective”—not exactly destroying the Johnson Amendment, but defanging it for the duration of his presidency.

The Republican Party has since embraced the policy stance of its standard-bearer. For the first time, the 2016 party platform “urge[d] the repeal of the Johnson Amendment.” The same day Trump spoke to the National Prayer Breakfast, legislation to tweak the amendment was introduced by Senator James Lankford (R-Oklahoma), Representative Steve Scalise (R-Louisiana), and Representative Jody Hice (R-Georgia), who was once a Baptist preacher. One month later, Chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means Kevin Brady (R-Texas) told a crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference that the Republican tax reform bill would repeal the Johnson Amendment.

As Trump himself has admitted, his sustained attack on the Johnson Amendment is motivated largely by politics. Four out of five white Evangelicals voted for Trump. According to a Morning Consult/Politico poll, Evangelicals are more supportive than other religious groups of allowing tax-exempt organizations to engage in political activity. Additionally, Evangelicals and populist conservatives, the overlapping groups that compose Trump’s base, feel persecuted by powerful forces in society hostile to their values; no institution embodies this hostility more in their minds than the Internal Revenue Service, which targeted Tea Party groups in the run-up to the 2012 election. Trump’s political calculation is apparent in light of these facts. Pledging to end the Johnson Amendment is a way for him to reward loyal constituents and assure them that he shares their concerns.

What kind of reward the Johnson Amendment repeal would be is the subject of debate. According to proponents of repeal, it would be a defensive action on behalf of religious communities, protecting churches from government inquisitors with the power to bankrupt them for the content of a sermon. According to critics, repeal would be an offensive action that would increase the power of conservative Christians and allow them to abuse privileges like tax exemption and donor anonymity for partisan ends.

Reformers and defenders both have valid concerns. The Johnson Amendment is a vague and inconsistently enforced provision that discourages non-profits, including churches, from speaking about topics that are important to their missions. However, fully repealing the provision would be perilous, opening the door to campaign-finance abuse and over-politicization in the non-profit sector that could weaken public trust at a time when civil society is already hemorrhaging social capital by the bucket.

Would-be reformers should keep these facts in mind and anticipate the consequences of allowing non-profits to engage in partisan politics. If they are willing to proceed calmly and carefully, a compromise may be possible to assuage the concerns of most stakeholders.

It is worth briefly retelling the Johnson Amendment’s origin story to get a sense of what the non-profit sector was like before it. (For a more in-depth treatment of the subject, read Oliver Houck’s excellent paper on non-profits and politics.) As it turns out, Lyndon Johnson’s creation of the rule was no less politically motivated than Trump’s current desire to “destroy” it.

In 1954, the Texas Senator was challenged in the Democratic primary by oilman Dudley Dougherty, who was running to Johnson’s right as a fierce anti-communist. Dougherty’s campaign had the support of wealthy far-Right donors, including fellow oilman H.L. Hunt (who inspired the character J.R. in Dallas) and New York publisher Frank Gannett. Tax-exempt organizations affiliated with those donors circulated mailers attacking Johnson and promoting Dougherty. Gannett’s Committee for Constitutional Government distributed an article that attacked Johnson as a “Boss Tweed” figure who won his Senate seat by 87 votes in 1948 after “strange doings in Jim Wells County.” The article went on to assert that Johnson was a socialist who sought the abolition of the United States by promoting the New Deal and international entanglements like the United Nations and “NATO, the military phantasm.” “Nationalist-minded Texans…are down on Johnson for being too friendly to the internationalists,” the article stated in an interesting foreshadowing of today’s right-wing populism.

Johnson, incensed that his enemies were spending tax-free dollars to defeat him, asked his lawyers to find a way to “lash back,” according to aide George Reedy. They struck upon a solution that had been considered once before in the past: banning partisan campaign activity by non-profit organizations. Senators had considered taking that step in 1934 to curb the influence of partisan “educational” organizations, but decided against it because they were unwilling to bar all non-profits from participating in politics—they only wanted to bar non-profits that were pursuing objectives contrary to the public good, a difficult thing to adjudge in a pluralistic society. Those early reformers settled for banning non-profits from devoting a “substantial part” of their activities to lobbying, while allowing them to continue in partisan politics. In a fit of pique, Johnson decided to finish what his predecessors started; his amendment to section 501(c)(3) of the tax code was gaveled through with no debate and little fanfare.

There are at least two important takeaways from this history, aside from the general observation that the whole affair casts light on the stunning complications of separating church from state as the Founders’ meaning of the concept changed over time into a version they would not even have recognized. The first takeaway is that, in mid-century America, some private parties used 501(c)3 non-profits for political activities only tenuously related to the public interest. Full repeal of the Johnson Amendment would open that door again. The second is that the Johnson Amendment was championed by a lawmaker in a fit of pique, despite the misgivings of a previous generation of lawmakers. That helps to explain some of the problems that have emerged with the Johnson Amendment in the decades since it passed; it should also caution reformers to do their homework before committing to a major change in the law.

To fully understand the Johnson Amendment, it is also important to understand the non-profit sector it regulates. The government affords certain tax privileges to organizations whose mission is something other than turning a profit. These organizations can register for exemption from some Federal taxes under Section 501 of the tax code. Within that section are a multitude of tax-exempt options, ranging from 501(c)4 status, for “social welfare organizations” that often advocate for partisan political causes, to the rarely used 501(d) status, for “religious or apostolic organizations” whose members live communally and hold property in common (think the Shakers).

The most generous tax-exempt status is reserved for 501(c)3 organizations, which are devoted to religious, charitable, and educational activities that the government does not want to minimize through taxation. Most charities and churches in the United States, plus some private foundations, fall into this category. Like other tax-exempt groups, 501(c)3s are exempt from income tax; in addition to this standard benefit, contributions to 501(c)3s can be deducted by donors. These benefits—tax-exemption and deductible contributions—are important to the very survival of many churches and charities. The basic deal here is clear to see: The government will provide you financial advantages on the condition that you stay within the guardrails of your civic vocation. Government is thereby not abridging the free speech of individuals who may wish to express political convictions out of a religious framework, but it cannot subsidize the free speech of religious institutions as such.

The Johnson Amendment thus stipulates that in order for non-profits to keep 501(c)3 status, they must not engage in electoral politics in basically any form. The one-sentence-long rule requires non-profits not to “participate in, or intervene in…any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.” What constitutes political campaign participation or intervention? Obvious examples include donations, fundraising, and endorsements; certain forms of election work are permitted so long as they do not suggest institutional support for one candidate or another, like voter registration and “souls-to-the-polls” initiatives. Non-profits also can support or oppose ballot initiatives, since they involve issues, not parties or candidates.

Beyond those guidelines, a fog obscures the issue. “The line between what is prohibited and what is permitted can sometimes be difficult to discern,” the Congressional Research Service wrote. Attempts by the IRS to clarify the rules have sometimes muddied them further. Take, for instance, the agency’s official answer to whether non-profits can take sides on issues that divide candidates in an election: “Section 501(c)(3) organizations may take positions on public policy issues, including issues that divide candidates in an election for public office,” it stated. “However, section 501(c)(3) organizations must avoid any issue advocacy that functions as political campaign intervention.” The vagueness of this passage cannot have comforted pastors who thought about speaking to their congregants about, say, immigration this past fall.

The Johnson Amendment’s vagueness is troubling especially when its punishments are called to mind: A single violation can result in excise taxes or loss of tax-exempt status. The unusual severity of this penalty was noted by a Senate-created commission on the Johnson Amendment: “No other provision of federal tax law has the potential to invoke the ‘nuclear’ penalty of loss of exempt status for what one organization’s leader may say in one or a few instances.”

Due to recognition that the issue is politically sensitive and unusual, the IRS has been careful in its enforcement of the Johnson Amendment. It has revoked the tax-exempt status of only a few non-profits in egregious cases over many, many years. One notable example was Branch Ministries v. Rossotti, regarding an Evangelical ministry that took out full-page newspaper advertisements advocating the defeat of Bill Clinton, titled “Christians Beware.” At the bottom of the ads, the ministry stated “Tax-deductible donations for this advertisement gladly accepted.”

The IRS has acted with notable restraint in cases involving sermons, which would open the agency to the charge that it was hassling pastors for their religion; so far, it has not taken the bait when Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative public interest law firm, has encouraged self-reported violations of the provision to trigger litigation on First Amendment grounds. Enforcement was slowed further by a 2009 court case that determined that Johnson Amendment investigations against churches were not being approved by a sufficiently high-ranking Treasury Department official, as required by law. Trump’s Executive Order will halt enforcement entirely, although it can be reversed by his successors in the presidency.

For critics, it is not a great comfort that the IRS rarely enforces the Johnson Amendment—if anything, they find the seeming randomness of the agency’s enforcement decisions troubling in its own right. Because of its vague language and draconian penalties, the provision hangs ominously over cautious non-profit leaders. “[L]oss of exempt income and deductible contributions constitute, for most nonprofits, the loss of life,” writes Houck. “Prospects such as these radiate a broad chill. Only the most secure organizations, or the most reckless, will dare speak at or even near the margin.”

These troubling aspects of the Johnson Amendment are felt most acutely by churches, which is one reason why debate over the provision centers on religious institutions. Most public charities that wish to engage in politics create a separate arm—usually registered as 501(c)4 social welfare organizations, which are not subject to the Johnson Amendment—to talk about partisan politics or candidates. In effect, they safeguard their tax-exempt status by creating a mirror organization that engages in political activity, funded by a (supposedly) separate stream of contributions. It is much more difficult for churches to do this, since most want only to make occasional statements about politics, not maintain a constant political apparatus. Additionally, churches’ political involvement typically occurs in Sunday sermons that cannot easily be paid for with a separate funding stream.

So for a mere one-sentence provision in the law, the Johnson Amendment turns out to be quite complicated, in no small part because it regiments the behavior of over 1.2 million 501(c)3 organizations. As defenders of the Johnson Amendment argue, “destroying” the provision would unleash all those groups to engage in partisan politics, including spending tax-exempt dollars.

The most sensational of these defenders argue that repeal would be a powerful weapon for the religious Right, whose operatives could turn offering plates into dark-money coffers and pulpits into bullhorns for the Republican Party. “Why does Trump want to change [the amendment]?” asked MSNBC’s Steve Benen. “Basically because the religious right told him to. But why does the religious right want this? Because some on the right still dream of creating a church-based political machine.”

Arguments like this seem to assume that because elements of the religious Right support changes to the Johnson Amendment, the changes would automatically redound to their partisan advantage. A closer look at the non-profit landscape calls this assumption into question. Repeal would alter the rules not only for conservative Evangelical churches—the backbone of the religious Right—but for every other house of worship that organizes as a 501(c)3. That list includes black churches, mainline Protestant churches, Reform Jewish synagogues, and mosques, whose congregants are mostly left-of-center; the former two groups already devote a great deal of energy and resources to political organizing, including activities that are dubious from the point of view of the Johnson Amendment. Those congregations are just as likely as Trump-friendly churches to put on the armor of God and wade into the political arena.

Including secular non-profits in the analysis further weakens the notion that the religious Right would be the main beneficiary of the Johnson Amendment repeal. Of the roughly 1.2 million 501(c)3 organizations registered in the United States, only 300,000 are religious congregations, so the vast majority of groups affected by changes to the Johnson Amendment would not be churches. Looking at the heavy hitters in the secular non-profit world—for example, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the American Civil Liberties Union—leaves little doubt about which party would benefit if the sector became involved in politics.

Setting aside the question of who benefits in strictly political terms, reformers should consider whether non-profits as a whole would benefit from changes to the Johnson Amendment. Many defenders of the provision are concerned about what reform would do to the credibility of non-profit institutions. Even if most non-profits do not change their behavior in response to changes in the law, some undoubtedly will embrace politics later if not sooner, and some of those will embrace politics in ways that seem untoward to many Americans. The rotten actions of these non-profit apples, it is argued, will sour the public’s perception of the non-profit barrel as a whole. Lower levels of public trust in non-profits would in turn reduce charitable giving, volunteerism, and community involvement. In the apocalyptic version of this scenario, the public’s perception that non-profits are little better than other, explicitly political organizations would lead to the elimination of tax-exempt status entirely.

The National Council of Non-Profits made this argument eloquently in a position paper opposing changes to the Johnson Amendment:

In our hyper-politicized society, the nonprofit community is, and should remain, the safe, neutral place where citizens can give, volunteer, and experience the services and missions free from ulterior motives. The fact that charitable nonprofits do not engage in partisan electioneering is a key defense of the sector and a critical factor in public support of tax-exempt organizations….

Those concerned about community life in America should take this warning seriously, as the politicization of charities and churches could balkanize already-divided communities. The lone Republican in a Reform Jewish synagogue or the lone Democrat in a Mormon temple could be estranged from their co-religionists by more explicit invocations of partisan politics. If they dropped out of their congregations, society would be further divided along red-blue lines, and civic life, in terms of volunteer hours, donations, and interpersonal connections, would thereby suffer.

Back in February, President Trump spoke in his typically bombastic style about destroying the Johnson Amendment; on Thursday he took a tiny step toward that goal by directing the Treasury Department not to enforce the provision. If he is serious about proceeding with reform through the legislative branch, then he needs to consider all the ramifications. As the President correctly senses, many religious and charitable leaders feel threatened by the provision, which could ensnare them in costly litigation because of a few careless words. On the other hand, many non-profit leaders fear that full repeal of the Johnson Amendment will weaken their organizations on account of the irresponsible actions of other groups.

A carefully tailored reform of the Johnson Amendment could satisfy Trump’s core constituents without unduly threatening other non-profit leaders. The Free Speech Fairness Act, the legislation introduced by Lankford, Hice, and Scalise, offers such a reform. The bill would permit 501(c)3 organizations to make political statements so long as they are made “in the ordinary course” of their “regular and customary activities” and cost a negligible (“de minimis”) amount of money. This tweak would carve out an exception for speech from the pulpit—the main concern of religious leaders, and a sphere most Americans consider inviolable—without threatening to open the floodgates to political activity by 501(c)3s.

The proposal is still not without its risks. It could prove harmful to civic life in America if too many pastors or charitable leaders avail themselves of the opportunity to talk about partisan politics during election time, and it is reasonable to assume the number of political sermons will increase somewhat if this reform is implemented. But it is unlikely that the increase would be intolerable. Some 90 percent of Protestant pastors—including 86 percent of Evangelical pastors—believe it is inappropriate to endorse candidates from the pulpit, according to a 2012 poll by the Southern Baptist organization LifeWay. They are unlikely to change their tune about the propriety of politics from the pulpit just because it is permitted, at least anytime soon. “[P]astors believe the government has no place in determining what is and is not said from their pulpits regarding candidates,” according to LifeWay Research Director Scott McConnell, “Yet most pastors don’t believe endorsement of candidates should be made from the pulpit.”

In an important sense, this reform would bring the law into harmony with how religious organizations actually operate. Polling from August 2016 shows that 14 percent of recent churchgoers heard their pastors speak for or against Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump at church, in clear violation of the Johnson Amendment as currently written. That figure encompasses 29 percent of black Protestants, 6 percent of Catholics, 4 percent of white Evangelicals, and 2 percent of white mainline Protestants. The IRS does not have the resources or the appetite to pursue these cases, and for good reason. Congress should remove its statutory commitment to do so. In any event, generally speaking, as none other than Albert Einstein once said, “Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced.”

Donald Trump made repeal of the Johnson Amendment the centerpiece of his platform on religious liberty, and the reasons are easy enough to see. The Johnson Amendment is a source of at least mild concern for many non-profits, especially churches. Better yet, this obscure tax provision can be presented theatrically as an issue that pits government inquisitors against Trump’s base of culturally conservative and religious voters.

Despite these advantages, one of the amazing things about this saga is how Trump has elevated an issue of secondary or even tertiary importance to the center of his religious liberty agenda. The Johnson Amendment was a peripheral issue for social conservatives for many years—the Republican Party only thought to add it to its platform once Trump won the nomination.

Indeed, conservative policy experts and religious leaders have noted with frustration and anger that the Johnson Amendment is one of the few religious liberty items Trump has focused on, to the exclusion of reforms they consider more important in a hostile culture. These observers reacted with bitter disappointment to Trump’s Executive Order on religious liberty, which tinkered with the Johnson Amendment and the contraceptive mandate but omitted important reforms that had been included in earlier drafts. Reforming or repealing the Johnson Amendment will generate goodwill from religious leaders only if it is followed by substantive—and no doubt more controversial—reforms in other areas. If Trump fails to do that, all his talk about protecting religious communities will seem like a ploy to mollify an important constituency before the 2016 election—which is almost certainly all that it ever was. In this case, the richly ironic end result of Trump’s quest to “destroy” the Johnson Amendment would be granting religious leaders the ability to hold him accountable from the pulpit.

The Greece-Turkey Rift Widens

Turkey is none too pleased about Greece’s refusal to extradite two Turkish soldiers involved in last year’s coup, warning that the dispute will poison relations elsewhere. From Hurriyet Daily: 

[T]he Turkish Foreign Ministry stated on May 4 that the country was once again disappointed by a decision that it said was taken with “political motives.”

“We cannot see the support and cooperation we should be provided with by our allies in the anti-terror and anti-crime struggle,” the ministry said, adding that the ruling amounted to “protecting the coup soldiers.”

It also noted that the ruling would “inevitably affect bilateral relations,” as well as common work on regional issues.

The explosive Greek-Turkish relationship has always been a major source of stress in NATO. Ever since the U.S. proclaimed the Truman Doctrine as a way of protecting both countries from the Soviet Union, keeping the peace between these two NATO allies has been one of the toughest task American diplomats faced. The uneasy alliance has been punctuated by periodic flare-ups: in 1955 a pogrom against Greeks in Istanbul led to a mass exodus of ethnic Greeks from Turkey, in 1974 a Greek attempt to annex Cyprus was foiled by a Turkish invasion of the island, and as recently as 1996 the two sides almost came to an armed standoff over disputed islets in the Aegean Sea.

These days, with both Greece and Turkey alienated from the EU, and Russia once again playing a major role in the eastern Mediterranean, the old volcano is starting to smoke again. It helps both Ankara and Athens to posture and pose: the Greeks need some inspiring nationalist theater as they stagger under a load of debt and bad governance, and Erdogan is always looking for ways to stand up for Turkey against foreign rivals.

The dispute probably won’t escalate too badly; neither country benefits from a full-scale crisis over the fate of a few fugitive soldiers. But it is one more sign that the rift between Turkey and Europe is getting deeper and wider—and that is hardly good news for the West.

Russia, Turkey, and Iran Agree to Ban U.S. Planes in “De-Escalation Zones”

Russia, Turkey, and Iran reached a deal on Thursday establishing “de-escalation zones” in several parts of Syria. While details of the plan remain sketchy, the Russians have announced today that the deal includes a wide ranging no-fly zone that will be imposed on U.S. and allied coalition planes. As the New York Times reports:

The diplomat, Aleksandr Lavrentiev, also suggested that Russian and Turkish warplanes would be prohibited from flying in four designated “de-escalation zones,” where Syrian government and rebel forces are supposed to stop fighting each other.

But Mr. Lavrentiev seemed to sketch out a broader geographical no-fly zone for American and coalition military planes. He said they would be allowed to fly only in eastern Syria over Islamic State-held areas, apparently excluding the entire western spine of the country.

The details of the plan remain incredibly vague. A no-fly zone isn’t mentioned in the text, which itself says that these de-escalation zones won’t be defined and mapped until June, and which has limited support from rebel groups. While Russian President Putin and President Trump discussed the de-escalation zones earlier this week, earlier reports of their discussion didn’t include a no-fly zone directed against the U.S.

Regardless of what these no-fly zones end up looking like, it’s nonetheless unusual to see Turkey, a NATO ally, endorsing a deal that the Russians and Iranians seems to believe would give them permission to shoot down U.S. and allied planes. The difference in the strategic interests of the U.S. and Turkey in Syria seems to grow wider by the day.