Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 20

Prostrate with Gratitude: On Clive James

When a great writer dies, we turn to our bookshelves not only for a reminder of what has been lost but also of what will endure: the words, phrases, and sentences that made up a life. Yet what strikes me now about Clive James, who passed away on November 24 at the age of 80, is not the presence of his books on my shelves (long a familiar sight) but the presence of those books I have read and discovered through him: New and Selected Poems by Samuel Menashe, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender by Dubruvka Ugrešić, the several volumes of Cultural History of the Modern Age by the Austrian critic Egon Friedell, and many others. If one way of measuring the worth of a literary critic is to count the writers whose work they’ve helped us discover, then James seems to me to be among the most valuable. Certainly he was one of the most eclectic: He wrote with admiration and insight of Nora Ephron and Edmund Wilson; Anna Akhmatova and Albert Camus; Olivia Manning and Miles Davis. Ever a student at heart, he gave the impression that literary criticism at its core was an enlightened process of discovery and recommendation. Thus, in recent years, he often used his website to recommend the work of writers much younger than he, including Alice Gregory, Meghan O’Rourke, and the poet Olivia Cole.

I’m too young to be familiar with James’s long and storied career in television, and I’ve never bothered to read his Unreliable Memoirs, but I still fervently believe that he will be best remembered for his essays and criticism. He liked to say that he was most himself when writing about others. I’d go further and say he was never a better writer than when close reading, say, the poetry of Philip Larkin, the prose of Golo Mann, or the essays of Randall Jarrell. This may be because the tendency toward theatricality in his prose—a hangover from his youthful days in 1970s London competing with friends like Martin Amis and Ian Hamilton—is more subdued when he is writing in the service of literature. James admitted as much himself: “[To] serve literature entails self-denial,” he wrote in the introduction to his 1979 essay collection At the Pillars of Hercules. “Self-display can only go so far.”

And yet, without that self-display a Clive James essay wouldn’t be a Clive James essay. He is a presence on the page, most signally in his inimitable turns of phrase and comic hyperbole. On Randall Jarrell’s criticism: “Randall Jarrell was against knowingness, and he possessed the antidote: knowledge.” On Norman Mailer’s biography of Marilyn Monroe: “Mailer planes forward on the myth of her enormous talent like a drunken surfer.” And this withering remark from an essay on Jean-Paul Sartre: “In Sartre’s style of argument, German metaphysics met French sophistry in a kind of European Coal and Steel Community producing nothing but rhetorical gas.”

I’ve always thought of his presence on the page as being almost physical. He was there next to you when you read his essays on W. H. Auden or Philip Larkin, an intimacy he achieved by remarking on where he’d first bought a given writer’s book, or by suddenly interjecting that a galley proof of so-and-so’s poem is folded into his copy of that book. The life of a literary critic, in James’s world, is just that: a life, something to be lived, experienced, day after day. In his famous essay on Edmund Wilson, “The Metropolitan Critic,” James wrote, “We need to decide whether critical work which has plainly done so much to influence its time vanishes with its time or continues. To continue, it must have done something beyond maintaining standards or correcting taste, important as those functions are: it must have embodied, not just recommended, a permanent literary value.”

At least one of the literary values embodied by James’s criticism is the elevation of literary criticism to a way of life, a way of being open to and curious about the world, of observing and engaging and arguing with it. The testament to this value was published in 2007: Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts, an expansive, aphoristic A-Z collection of essays about historical figures (Hitler, Mao, Margaret Thatcher), personal heroes (Camus, Mann, Aron), and musical artists (Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis), among others. I read it when it was first published, after I had recently decamped from Denmark to the United States to pursue my undergraduate degree. Cultural Amnesia soon became an indispensable supplement to my university education, if not an entirely separate education in itself. I can trace my intellectual development in its pages, seeing where I once agreed with James and where I came back years later to quibble with him about some point or other (on Walter Benjamin, for instance). There in the margins are my notes of approval and disapproval, questions and exclamations, illegible comments or pretentious objections. And then there are the lists: lists of books and authors to remember to look up, lists of which Louis Armstrong recordings to listen to first, and lists of words or phrases to employ in my own writing.

In addition to the many volumes of essays, Cultural Amnesia seems to me the crowning achievement of James’s writing life. Like Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination, it is a book partly forged on the bloody crossroads where art and politics meet, and many of its finest essays are reflections on artists who lived through some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century: Paul Celan, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Stefan Zweig. “Ours was an age of extermination, an epoch of the abattoir,” James writes in the introduction (he was born in 1939, the year the Second World War began). “But the accumulated destruction yielded one constructive effect, salutary even if solitary. It made us think hard about the way we thought.”

As an immersion into much of the thought of the previous century, Cultural Amnesia is a resolutely and courageously anti-ideological book, even if it is not always free of its author’s own blind spots and biases (how could it be otherwise?). James’s trenchant appraisals of the many writers who paid lip service to totalitarian regimes of both the right and the left remains bracingly instructive. Similarly, his reflections on those individuals who dared to break with friends and challenge cultural conformity make for gripping reading. (See, for instance, the wonderful entry on the French sociologist Raymond Aron.) As only the best critics can, James made intellectual argument both exciting and necessary.

Roughly a decade ago, while still firmly under the spell of Cultural Amnesia’s riches, I had the strange and improbable experience of running into Clive James at the Strand bookstore in New York while clutching an old copy of his essay collection First Reactions. He was as amused by this as I was stupefied, and very kindly consented to spend a little time browsing the shelves with me and recommending (that word again) countless writers I’d never heard of. (He bought me a copy of Van Wyck Brooks’s The Times of Melville and Whitman, which, ungratefully, I have yet to read). Years later I wrote about our little encounter in an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books. About a month or so after the piece had published, I sat down at my desk at the academic publishing company I was working for at the time when an email from James pinged in. The subject line read: “Clive James prostrate with gratitude.” He’d written simply to thank me, to let me know he’d read the piece, and then proceeded to tell me about a poem he’d just written, some book cases his daughter Claerwen had recently designed for him, and a new collection of essays about binge-watching television that he was about to publish. Then, in closing, he returned to the Strand:

The Strand non-fiction stacks: if I think hard and press my finger to the bridge of my nose, I’ll suddenly be there, picking out another copy of that little book of essays by Nora Ephron. Hold the ladder for a bit, would you? Thanks. Gotta lie down again. Until next time; and for now, thanks again. Clive.

That email, like our meeting at the Strand, was both unexpected but hardly surprising. Of course I would one day stumble upon Clive James in a dusty bookstore somewhere, and of course he’d take the time to send an email to a young, wide-eyed admirer. On and off the page, he was simply that generous. I’ll always wish there’d been a next time.

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Announcing the Zero Corruption Conference

The American Interest is pleased to announce its co-sponsorship of the Zero Corruption Conference: an international forum linking corruption and money laundering with global security, environmental, energy, and public health issues.

Organized by the Anticorruption Action Centre in Ukraine, the conference will take place from April 25-27, 2020, in Kyiv and Chornobyl. Its goal is to shape a new agenda aimed at reaching a future with zero corruption. And its advisory board includes several of TAI’s finest—including TAI Chairman Francis Fukuyama, and Oliver Bullough, a TAI contributor and bestselling author of Moneyland.

Watch this space for more details about this exciting new venture, and be sure to subscribe to the Anticorruption Action Centre’s mailing list for updates.

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The Strategic Case for Supporting Ukraine

The parade of public servants testifying at Rep. Adam Schiff’s impeachment inquiry has unleashed a shower of praise from pundits (or at least from Establishment pundits). The New York Times columnist David Brooks, perhaps the uber-indicator of such things, found himself “impressed by the quality, professionalism and basic goodness” of these quiet men and women, who “inspired a lot more confidence than the elected officials” taking their testimony.

​Indeed, William Taylor, George Kent, Marie Yovanovitch, and Fiona Hill exuded the selfless dignity and expertise of those who spend their careers staffing our diplomatic corps and national security apparatus. The motto of the original German general staff was “always be more than you appear to be,” and the witnesses demonstrated that this ethos remains alive, even as it invites attack from partisans of all flavors.

​One thing these subject-matter experts did not do well, however, was offer a coherent strategic rationale for the Ukraine policy they represented and sought to defend. Rather, they both reified “Ukraine policy” and treated it as though it was self-evident. Thus, and oddly, in defending their actions and preserving their reputations, they exposed what they were trying most to protect to great risk.

​In addition to the ad hominem attacks on the witnesses as unelected and unaccountable Deep State Swamp Things, the spotlight on Ukraine provided yet another opportunity for doctrinaire “Realists” to define U.S. national security interests narrowly and downward, not simply scoffing at efforts to promulgate American political principles but ceding substantial “spheres of influence” to China, Iran and, especially, Russia—the 21st-century version of Metternich’s “Holy Alliance” against democracy, secularism, and individual liberties. Where the personal assaults were blunted, the policy attack gained ground.

​To be sure, the rise of Realism of this sort is due to the fact that it provides a veneer of theory for Trump supporters. They may be most concerned with preserving the President’s political power, but the Realist argument is a handy tool to that end. For Trump, the language of selfish deal-making and complaints about “endless wars” and free-riding allies tend to flow smoothly together.

​Realists have been down on Ukraine more or less since the end of the Cold War. They have warned incessantly that the eastward expansion of NATO would be provocative to Moscow. Among the first out of the starting gate was Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute, and he’s still riding the same horse. In an I-told-you-so piece in The American Conservative a year ago, Carpenter lovingly and extensively quoted the memoir of former Defense Secretary Bob Gates, who “believed the relationship with Russia had been badly mismanaged after [George H.W.] Bush left office in 1993.” That Bush 41 had managed to get the Russians to swallow the unification of Germany within the Atlantic Alliance was acceptable,

But moving so quickly after the collapse of the Soviet Union to incorporate so many of its formerly subjugated states into NATO was a mistake. . . .[A]greements with the Romanian and Bulgarian governments to rotate troops through bases in those countries was a needless provocation. . . .[T]he Russians had long historical ties with Serbia, which we largely ignored. . . .[And] trying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was truly overreaching.

​The underlying assumption of this line of argument is that the West stops at central Europe. What lies eastward is not a geopolitical borderland, but a legitimate Russian buffer zone. Gates and Carpenter accuse the Clinton Administration, in particular, of doing “a poor job of seeing the world from [Russia’s] point of view.”

​Russia’s invasion and annexation of the Crimea in February 2014—in the wake of the removal of its Ukrainian proxy, President Viktor Yanukovich—and the August invasion of the industrial precincts of the country along the east bank of the Don River confirmed the Realists in their analysis. In a February 8, 2015 op-ed in the New York Times, University of Chicago professor John J. Mearsheimer declared the “Ukraine crisis is almost a year old and Russia is winning.” The contest, he said, was a military mismatch, concluding that “the balance of power decisively favors Moscow.” Any aid to the outgunned Ukrainian military would not only be a waste but a strategic folly that would compel Russian escalation, possibly to include nuclear threats. He foresaw that the fighting would “be sure to intensify but it could also spread to other areas.” It was too much to ask the United States to “project power into [Russia’s] neighborhood, much less attempt to make a country on their border an ally.”

​Subsequent history has not been kind to Mearsheimer’s analysis or his predictions. As we have been so recently reminded, the United States belatedly has given very limited military aid to Ukraine, and there is a military stalemate in the Donbass. This is mostly due to the willingness of Ukrainians to fight even though they are under-armed. But Donbass’ Russian “separatists” turned out to be a rag-tag bunch of militias and Moscow has had to increase its support while keeping it within its true means. Even under Russian occupation, public opinion in the area—with a populace that may largely speak Russian but is ethnically Ukrainian—does not favor either independence from Kyiv or absorption by Moscow; the majority of the people consider themselves Ukrainian. While it’s probably still true that, as Mearsheimer claimed, the Ukrainian army “will not be able to defeat a determined attack by the Russian army,” the likelihood of such an all-out assault is low and diminishing. Vladimir Putin, in his burning desire to reestablish Russia as a geopolitical force, may have played a weak hand boldly, but it remains a weak hand and he’s playing lots of them simultaneously. And his grip on domestic power could well be past its peak.

​Nor has Mearsheimer’s recommendation of a purely diplomatic resolution to the standoff worked out, despite its backing by German Chancellor Angela Merkel. As the military situation in the Donbass has stabilized, the prospects for her pet “Minsk Protocols”—the 2014 cessation-of-hostilities agreement between Russia, Ukraine, and the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe (the nearly toothless pan-European body)—have diminished to dormancy. As Anne Applebaum has observed:

It is ironic that the Russian invasion, originally intended to punish Ukraine’s Western-oriented government, has pushed the country in a dramatically different direction. It’s also a reminder that the supposed strategic gifts of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, are in fact very limited. His interference in Ukraine has made a once-friendly neighboring country into an enemy. His efforts to unite “Russian-speaking peoples” into a Eurasian bloc persuaded thousands of people to stop speaking Russian.

Realists are fond of warning about the unintended consequences of military action. “Pushing a nuclear-armed Russia into a corner would be playing with fire,” cautioned Mearsheimer. Thus far, it would appear that it’s Putin’s fingers that have been singed. And the Minsk mess also reveals the inadequacies of Germany as a European leader; for all its wealth, it remains utterly unprepared to secure the post-Soviet order to its east.

​We would, perhaps, better understand Ukraine if we turned our current maps on their side, approaching the country, southeastern Europe, and indeed all of Eastern Europe as a north-south, Baltic-to-Black-Sea geopolitical proposition rather than just an east-west one. Ukraine in particular was first defined by its great southward-flowing river, the Dneiper, which runs more than 1400 miles from near Smolensk to the Black Sea, from whence invaders and occupiers often came, from classical Greece and Christian Constantinople as well as Ottoman Istanbul. Its drainage basin extends northward almost to the Baltic states and westward into Poland. Thus its original European orientation, long before Muscovite influence was felt, was as a part of the Duchy of Lithuania and then the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; the Ukrainian Cossack “Hetman” traditionally commanded the Commonwealth cavalry. Taken along with the other great and parallel Black Sea rivers—the Don, the Dneister and the Danube—the Dneiper helps define a coherent geographical “lowland” region that links the Black Sea basin to the open plains of Poland and to the doorstep of Germany and skirts both sides of the Carpathian Mountains and Transylvannian Alps. Armies, cultures, confessions, languages, and polities have flowed both upstream and downstream.

​To be sure, these north-south lines of communication and routes of military movement have long been contested. Russians can be considered relative latecomers to the game; the lines of communication did not easily connect to Moscow. Thus there has never been anything “natural” or inevitable about Russian influence in Kyiv or elsewhere in Ukraine. In the 17th century, chafing at the “Polonization” program of the Commonwealth being pushed by the Polish nobility, the Zaporozhian Cossacks turned to the Romanovs to preserve their security and autonomy if not their sovereign independence. Subsequent programs of “Russification” and even colonization were hardly more successful than the Polonization efforts of the Commonwealth, as the current situation in the Donbass suggests. Ukrainian nationalism could take many shapes—indeed, Ukraine is more naturally a multiethnic construct than a blood-and-soil tribalism—while remaining remarkably durable, something often materially and politically weak but emotionally, almost spiritually, strong.

Thus the crack-up of the Romanov regime led immediately to a Ukrainian break-away; the Kyiv Uprising, which chased Russian forces from the capital, followed the 1917 October Revolution by one month. In its struggle to get free, the Kyiv government turned again westward, though, alas, to Germany and Austria-Hungary, an alliance that could not survive their defeat in World War I. At the end of the war, the Allies held Odessa and other positions on the Black Sea, and Poland was granted the western provinces of Galicia and Volhynia, sparking violent unrest; Romania and the rump Austria-Hungary also gained traditionally Ukrainian areas. Ukraine felt the consequences of continued conflict against the Poles, then war with the Poles against the Soviets, then the brutalities of both White and Red forces in the Russian civil war. On November 17, 1921, Bolshevik cavalry surrounded and destroyed the last remnants of the Ukrainian army, and a new Soviet Socialist Republic was subsequently created.

The Ukrainian desire for independence was also critical to the break-up of the Soviet Union and the failure of Mikhail Gorbachev’s “Commonwealth of Independent States,” an attempt to keep the empire together through a kind of federalism. Kyiv refused to sign the “Statute of the Commonwealth” and other proposals for collective security; it wanted, at last, to have its sovereignty back, undiluted. It formed its own armed forces and, slowly, negotiated with Moscow for a part of the Black Sea Fleet. The divorce, however, was extremely economically painful. Relief only arrived in the form of privatization-by-oligarchy, and one of the leading oligarchs, Leonid Kuchma, became president between 1994 and 2004. Kuchma’s term encapsulated the contradictions of newly independent Ukraine. He was a former “red director” of state owned enterprises and a beneficiary of the corruption—and criminality—of the privatization process.

But he also authored a popular tract, Ukraine is Not Russia, that gave a powerful voice to Ukrainian nationalism. Kuchma’s corruption eventually caught up with him but his reformist successor, Victor Yuschchenko, continued the move away from Moscow and made apparent Ukraine’s Western and European orientation by working hard to join the European Union. Yushchenko’s election was itself a remarkable testament to the strength of Ukraine’s desire for independence and democracy. Indeed, he only came to office in a second election after it was shown that his opponent, the Moscow-backed Viktor Yanukovich, had rigged the original plebiscite. This second election was the result of mass peaceful protests, the so-called “Orange Revolution” of 2004; the Western yearning of Ukraine was powerfully demonstrated and vividly televised, clear even to European and American skeptics. Yushchenko’s term, and his long-shot hopes of EU accession, fell victim to the global recession of 2008, which hit Ukraine especially hard. Yanukovich emerged from the wreckage as a strong-man president, not only indicting his political opponents but making off with an estimated $70 billion in state assets while cozying up to Moscow.

The fact that this would-be dictator was chosen by ballot has long been a talking point of Realists arguing the case against strategic support for Ukraine. But if Yanukovich is beloved by Russophiles in America, he again became loathed by Ukrainians of all sorts very quickly. In November 2013, under pressure from Vladimir Putin, Yanukovich backed out at the last moment on an “association agreement” with the EU, a kind of halfway-house treaty that also reflected German and French obstructionism. As in 2004, protestors took to Kyiv’s Independence Square—the “Maidan”—motivated this time not by economic woes or internal corruption but by the frustration of its European ambitions and fears of Russian revanche. Also different this time was Yanukovich’s violent reaction. Protestors remained peaceful, but were attacked by police and shot down by snipers; later investigations revealed that Russian intelligence officers are likely to have been in the Maidan prior to the shootings. Putin applied a combination of carrots and sticks to try to save his partner in Kyiv, making a $15 billion loan but extracting an extension of the lease on the Russian naval base at Sebastopol. These moves could not save Yanukovich, removed from office by the Ukrainian parliament on February 22, 2014. Russian clandestine and special forces moved into Crimea four days later, and the Donbass operations kicked off in April.

​The balance of power in Europe has been America’s central strategic concern from the days of the first English colonies, and it remains a principal one today. Americans have fought and died to turn back French, German, and Russian bids for continental hegemony, and over time, the frontier has moved ever-eastward, from the Rhine to the Elbe to the Oder to the Vistula, creating ever-greater strategic depth.

​Yet since the end of the Cold War, the United States and its allies have eschewed a fundamental military maxim: to consolidate on the objective, to occupy and prepare to defend the ground won. Even as the Atlantic Alliance has grown, Western military posture has not kept pace. Only after 2014 did the Obama Administration gingerly begin to rotate units, temporarily, from the United States to Poland and to a lesser degree Romania and Bulgaria, while pressuring other NATO members to circulate troops into the Baltic states.

​Ukraine—and Georgia—have been left in limbo, in a strategic no-man’s-land that has proved to be a constant temptation to Vladimir Putin’s dream of restoring the empire of the Tsars and commissars. Yet as the historical hopscotch above makes plain enough, the Baltic-to-Black-Sea belt is more naturally aligned and oriented to the south, west, and north than to the east. The lines of communication that link the Black Sea region to northern and western Europe run athwart Moscow’s projection of power and influence, not in Moscow’s favor. For the rest of Europe and the United States, these are natural lines of defense, deterrence, and containment; the rivers of southern Europe should serve as do those of northeaster Europe. To consolidate eastward is a task well within the means of NATO, if it can but summon the will. The course of the Donbass war is a not a measure of Russian invincibility but of the limits of its power, and the resulting strategic depth would bring greater security and stability. It would also renew the prospects for expanded liberty. The former Soviet “captive nations” were once the most enthusiastically liberal states of Europe. In their strategic anxiety, assaulted by Russian cyber attacks, propaganda, and political warfare, they have turned inward, to an increasingly dark brand of populist nationalism.

​In these conditions, the case for American support—especially military support—for Ukraine is compelling; indeed, without it, our strategy for Europe is all but self-defeating. And it was Robert Gates’ idolized boss, George H.W. Bush, who in 1989 forwarded the vision of Europe “whole and free;” that vision is intentionally obscured by his alleged acolytes—or, as the impeachment process revealed, at least kept in secret among its remaining priesthood. Now is the time to open the ark and reexamine what is written on the scrolls, not simply to recite but to relearn, reform, and reanimate Americans’ faith in their longest-held strategic interest, and natural moral ambition.

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John le Carré’s Lessons on Populism

Agent Running in the Field

John le Carré

Viking, 2019, 288 pp., $29.00

 

A Legacy of Spies

John le Carré

Viking, 2017, 272 pp., $28.00

It is cheap praise to compliment the espionage author John le Carré as a Cold War icon who has found the ability to remain relevant after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Over the past 30 years, le Carré has consistently demonstrated his ability to depict the moral ambiguities, sacrifices, and collateral damage of power exercised at high and low levels. With skillful characterization and pointed prose, he has exposed the moral compromises at the heart of the Global War on Terror, Western engagement in the developing world, and the corporatization of crime. In Agent Running in the Field, le Carré’s 25th novel, he takes on Brexit and the election of President Trump. Surprisingly, what emerges is not fatalism and a story of helplessness in the face of power, as he has so often depicted in the past, but his own admiration of naive and stubborn optimists.

Agent Running in the Field is narrated by Nat, a middle-aged British intelligence operative, posted for his final tour to a quiet station in London that carries out counterintelligence against Russia and its loosely aligned oligarchs throughout the city. Nat is passionate about his work but ambivalent about the pitiful internal politics of his service, which are depicted, as ever in le Carré’s novels, as working against British national security. Aside from his occupation, Nat is an everyman whose mundane personal concerns, such as a recuperating marriage and a rebellious daughter, make him the picture of middle-class British sensibility. While his resentments for an unnamed “pig-ignorant foreign secretary” of the UK are clear (the book takes place in 2018, in case there is any doubt who the comment refers to), his views and actions are moderate compared to other characters, such as his wife or the novel’s other lead, Ed.

Ed is Nat’s millennial badminton partner, and he spends most of the narrative as a semi-amiable blowhard, prone to rants about Trump, Brexit, and Putin. Liberated by speaking through a young, drunken member of “the resistance,” le Carré gives voice to his own well-publicized anger at the current state of politics in the West. Comparisons between Trump supporters and Nazis, digressions on the small-mindedness of Brexit, and fatalism about the ability of the United States or United Kingdom to recover any moral legitimacy abound. Despite le Carré’s inferred sympathy for Ed’s frequent rants, though, the character’s passion is not depicted positively. Ed is the rampaging id of an activist who gives little thought to how to drive the change he desires. As in most of le Carré’s novels, this ideological naivety guarantees that Ed is doomed to ensnarement—which Nat conveniently discovers in his professional capacity.

Nat’s actions following his discovery of Ed’s predicament is when le Carré diverges from his record of condemning idealists to loss, surrender, stalemate, or empty moral victories. Ed’s predicament calls to mind Liz Gold, the naive British Communist Party member in le Carré’s breakthrough novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Her idealism is manipulated by spymasters on both sides of the Berlin Wall—including le Carré’s most famous creation, George Smiley—to reinforce the status quo and entrench a brutal ally of the West in a position of power in East Germany. Ultimately, Liz and the novel’s protagonist, Alec Leamas, are collateral damage despite her sincerity and his hard-earned commitment to service.

In the 56 years between The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Agent Running in the Field, le Carré has progressively awarded his idealistic characters more dignity. Spies exit espionage on their own terms, narrowly survive brutal ordeals, or in the case of his tale of pharmaceutical and government corruption in Africa, The Constant Gardener, pencil-pushing bureaucrats gain a spine and a martyr complex. Brexit, however, has motivated le Carré to write novels in which adrift idealists begin to push back and win more than just moral victory.

Agent Running in the Field is le Carré’s second book focusing on Brexit and our current political moment. The first, A Legacy of Spies, came out in 2017; le Carré dubbed it his “case for Europe” in response to the 2016 Brexit referendum. As in Agent Running in the Field, the novel centers on an older spy confronting the anger of a younger generation. Peter Guillam, the right-hand man of George Smiley from some of le Carré’s most popular Cold War novels, is drawn out of retirement and into conflict with Christoph, the previously unknown son of Alec Leamas. Christoph, a mercenary figure, stands in contrast to Ed’s more idealistic anger. He pursues a lawsuit against the British Intelligence Service for its past betrayal of his father, not out of moral outrage but because he hopes for a financial windfall. Christoph functions as a microcosm for any number of current populist leaders who leverage the past mistakes of a ruling elite for their own nakedly craven gain, dressed up in faux idealism.

Christoph’s greed is ultimately his undoing. Toward the novel’s end, Guillam finds justification for his and Smiley’s morally compromised past actions not in British nationalism nor a universal notion of world peace but a smaller objective: a Europe more predisposed to peace than it had been in the past.

In Agent Running in the Field, Nat and Ed’s respective affinities for Europe are tied to their identities as children of the continent. Nat is the son of a Russian emigré; Ed, a former student in Germany. They find unity across generations and temperaments in the ideal of a united Europe. Cold Warriors like Guillam and Smiley, le Carré suggests, made moral compromises so that their successors like Nat and Ed would have a Europe they could actually defend—a task more urgent than ever in the face of the Trumps, Johnsons, and Christophs of the world.

A second millennial in Nat’s life, his deputy Florence, plays an equally powerful role inspiring his decisions. She is depicted as an ambitious talent who is unafraid to challenge intelligence bureaucracy roadblocks in the pursuit of her idea of justice, in contrast to Nat, who is content to coast on his pension. In this sense, she presents as the prototype of a hyper-ambitious millennial.

Eventually, she is united with Ed in anger at the British government. Nat turns from observer of both youths’ frustrations to fellow traveler after an entertaining interlude when he meets with a former Russian source turned oligarch. In a profanity-filled diatribe, the former source lays bare the inextricable ties between Putin, Brexiteers, and Trump, united not so much by a direct conspiracy as by greed and an absence of values. In such a world, he reasons, it’s only natural that the wealthy head of a mafia-state would command obedience.

While le Carré has suggested that literary fame has granted him access to firsthand sources, he was by his own admission a middling, low-level spy, with no particular acumen for intelligence work. He does not rely on a privileged view behind the curtain of current political events, but rather an empathetic ability to enter the minds of people caught in these events, no matter the year. His explanation for our current political moment does not entail any grand subterfuge. Without oversight, le Carré suggests in Legacy and Agent, the self-appointed guardians of a country’s values are liable to destructive overreach, no matter their intent. Greedy men will do self-interested things and seize advantage of any opportunity they see. While this explanation for Trump and Brexit can be frustratingly simple coming from such a master storyteller, it does reflect reality by positing the nature of individuals, not the turning of an intricate plot, as the main reason for the political chaos we are living through on both sides of the Atlantic.

Le Carré does have guidance for how we push back against craven populists: action and atonement. Guillam and Smiley, as chronological contemporaries of le Carré, are two of the clearest stand-ins for the author. Their regrets give voice to his regrets, much as Ed and Florence’s anger give voice to his anger. The main recourse left to Guillam and Smiley, so long after the Cold War’s end, is to transparently explain their actions and look forward. Nat, the man in between generations, is the hinge upon which the most radical action of the two novels occurs. His complacent character, in comparison to the Cold Warriors and the millennials, can only be redeemed by picking a side. He turns away from the cynicism of his Russian contemporary and invests his hope in a rebellious act on behalf of the millennial idealists.

Nat, Peter Guillam, and George Smiley can only atone for their mistakes in creating today’s world by stepping aside for a younger, albeit sometimes misguided or naive, generation to defend their shared ideals and the world that they fought to create. This is an encouraging message coming from an 88-year-old man who began his career by writing off one of his purest characters, Gold, as a useful idiot. Now, le Carré seems to believe that the youth act with the most moral clarity, are the least disenchanted, and will persist because they have the most to lose. Their incessant, often rebellious optimism, suggests the world-weary spy writer, is the best hope for a world hijacked by cynical opportunists.

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Black Friday and American Soft Power

Germans, once America’s best friends in Europe, don’t like their big brother from across the sea anymore, a 2019 Pew poll reveals. Nearly two-thirds view the relationship as “bad,” while barely one-third defines it as “good” (up from 24 percent last year). On the other side of the Atlantic, though, affection abounds. Three-quarters of Americans cherish the relationship, and not even two out of ten think it is “bad.”

The gap is striking, but so is the paradox. If the Germans find the Yankees so unlovable, why do they gobble up everything American? Germany is probably the most Americanized place in Europe. The latest proof came on the day after Thanksgiving, when Black Friday dawned. This ur-American shop-till-you drop orgy has suddenly descended on the Fatherland. “BLACK FRIDAY!,” screamed the tabloid ad pages (in English), and so did the TV commercials. Some stores even did the Americans one worse by hyping “Black Thursday” and even “Black Week.” Roaming the streets, the American Santa Claus in red and white has driven out the good old deutsche Weihnachtsmann.

German cultural history knows neither Thanksgiving, nor Black Friday, nor the Pilgrims, nor the Philadelphia police, who, according to legend, coined “Black Friday” in the early 1950s. They dreaded the masses invading downtown, clogging traffic, and forcing the city’s finest into endless overtime. Another legend says that merchants, suffering from meager November turnover, were suddenly “in the black” as sales soared on post-turkey Friday.

Never mind that Black Friday has absolutely no roots in the land of Kant and knockwurst. America is one huge “demonstration effect,” as sociologists who want to avoid normative terms like “model” call it. Germans, and other Western countries, just lap up everything the United States has to offer, even as France’s Emmanuel Macron goes mano-a-mano with Donald Trump over NATO and tariffs. Historians of culture scratch their heads, mumbling about “imitation without affection.”

Germans and their European brethren eat, drink, listen, dance, watch, and dress American. They wolf down burgers and chew on bagels. They gulp Coke and smoothies. They listen to pop and rap, and they dance to rock, as their elders once gyrated to boogie and swing. They watch Netflix and the latest “blockbuster,” a term that has burrowed into the German vernacular along with thousands of others. They drop three-figure sums on U.S. designer jeans while the hoi polloi sport turned-back baseball caps and hoodies.

German dictionaries keep adding hundreds of American expressions to their latest editions. Phrases are appropriated wholesale. Teens ask each other: “Bist du okay?” (“are you okay?”) or “Wie geht’s deiner Mom” (“how is your mother?”). Body language, taken straight out of U.S. movies, has been Americanized as well. When the kids want to ironize something, they use both hands to draw quotation marks into the air. They want to be cool, hip, and happy. “To chill” has turned into chillen. On the Net, they liken stuff and posten their Selfies. A thumb drive is ein Stick.

Grown-ups throw around Hype, Work-Life Balance, Fake News, or Low-Carb, the only concession to German orthography being the capitalization of such nouns. The language police, the German Language Association, is horrified. But why would anybody drop “laptop” in favor of the recommended, clumsy Klapprechner, literally: portable hinged computer?

Appropriation, alas, does not make for affection, stirring subliminal if not open resentment. And why wouldn’t it? Once, Germany could take pride in its global cultural sway (as could the French, who now proscribe Americanisms by law). Think Kant and Hegel, Göttingen and Heidelberg, Bach and Bauhaus, Nobel laureates like Max Planck and Albert Einstein. The latter, though, absconded to Princeton, along with thousands of first-rate minds who fled Hitler.

Today, Americans haul in the most Nobel Prizes. In global rankings American universities capture 16 places in the top 20. Ambitious German parents would just love to see their offspring at Harvard or Stanford. So, these backward and boorish Yankees occupy the heights of lowbrow as well as high culture, Europe’s treasured patrimony.

Unearthing the roots of resentment sharpens the paradox. Why take umbrage and still swallow American ways wholesale? Is it America’s sheer military and material power that feeds cultural domination? Not quite. Previous giants had similar clout. But note a unique difference. The sway of Rome, the Habsburgs, Britain, and Soviet Russia always ended at their military borders. Yet the United States needs no gun to travel. Nobody is forced at gunpoint to gorge on Big Macs or shell out $25 for admission to New York’s MoMA. They want to go there.

The former French foreign minister Hubert Védrine offers an explanation. He attributed to America “this certain psychological power . . . this ability to shape the dreams and desires of others.” But whence this “psychological power?” Two reasons come to mind.

One: America is the steamroller of modernity. Unencumbered by the strictures of the Old World—church, monarchy, nobility, guilds, and unyielding tradition—America was indeed a Novus ordo seclorum, something new under the sun. Those ex-Europeans were free to try the new and shed the old. If they hated their landlords, they moved on into the vast reaches of the country. If they did not like their priests, they founded new congregations. Failure spelled not doom, but a second chance. A permissive market bred an inventive entrepreneurial culture that gave us both the Mafia and Thomas Edison, the huckster “Elmer Gantry” and Jonas Salk, who eradicated polio. Above all, Americans invented convenience. Air conditioning, fast food, and power steering would soon sweep the rest of the world.

Two: Founded by WASPS, America evolved into the first universal nation, peopled by nationalities from around the globe that bring new perspectives to settled ways. Lacking networks and support systems, newcomers not only have to work harder. They also have to come up with new ideas and products to make it. A Bavarian Jew created Levi’s, a piece of apparel that conquered the world. His Swabian co-religionist Carl Laemmle founded Hollywood, which along with other immigrants like Sam Goldwyn, a peddler, spread the celluloid version of the American Dream across the planet. Sergey Brin, the son of Russian immigrants, thought up Google, the universal search engine.

Untethered from the Old World, this universal nation could create images, icons, and ways of life that matched modernity’s progress across both oceans. This may explain why the world looks through Windows and YouTube while glued to their iPhones 24/7, why it takes to fast food as mothers abscond to the workplace, why it bypasses libraries in favor of Google, why it prefers the egalitarian habits of American social life to the stern rules of custom and tradition. The universal nation has turned into the universal trend-setter—even in Iran, where the United States is branded as the Great Satan.

Such a wondrous career poses a vexing problem. America, this continental-sized magnet and “demonstration effect,” also bestrides the world as the Great Seducer. She offers what the world wants; the temptress is a supply-side siren. Yet this has a price. As people succumb, they hate the seducer for beguiling them, and we despise those, including ourselves, who yield to the lure as something we want, but should not. So, in the American case, repellence goes hand in glove with boundless attraction.

Here is an amusing example. When Shrek 2 was shown at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, hundreds of protesters converged on the movie house to denounce America’s war in Iraq. The police dispersed them, but as they withdrew, they noticed large bags of green Shrek ears along the Croisette, the fabled avenue along the beach. So many of them reached in to put on the free goodies. “They were attracted,” noted the reporter of the New York Times, “by the ears’ goofiness and sheer recognizability.” So forget the angry condemnation of the Iraq war. Though a PR gag, those iconic Shrek ears were simply irresistible.

The polls show again and again that Germans do not cherish the Americans they once loved as friendly occupiers and protectors. But they keep copycatting them. Nor have George W. Bush and Donald Trump been the only targets. Soon, the early enthusiasm for Barack Obama waned. The problem is not this or that president, but an America that is both overwhelming and beguiling. Imitation is the flipside of resentment. Why else this bizarre celebration of Black Friday in Germany? It is as “German” as Halloween, which was largely ignored when labeled All Saints. Today, it is a nationwide party for German kids, complete with zombie and vampire outfits taken from U.S. series. “Hi” has gestated into a universal greeting, and “High-Fives” into a gesture of brotherly triumph.

The lowly bagel nicely illustrates the irresistible march of the American Way. Bagels were originally blanched and baked in 16th-century Poland, then wandered with Jewish emigrants into Germany and thence to the Lower East Side. Now, they have returned to the Old Country as echt American food.

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Nationalism Is Not (Always) The Enemy of Liberalism

Imagine a time of globalization and modernization, of decadence and alienation. Imagine living in a country where the mother tongue is devalued at the university, where elites pride themselves on declaring stronger loyalty to foreigners than to socially inferior compatriots, where the universalisms of the elites most of all benefit themselves. Envision, if you can, a young man who longs to be part of the new elite, who travels to the metropolis, ready to be refined, civilized, reconstructed. And imagine that the young man discovers that contact with a foreign culture can not only breed familiarity, but also disgust.

The year was 1770, and the 26-year-old son of an organist, Johan Gottfried Herder, who came from a sand heap located in what is now Poland, had found his calling. He had served as a Lutheran pastor among the German congregation in Riga and had studied philosophy under Immanuel Kant in Königsberg. But though he had studied under Kant, Johann Georg Hamann, Kant’s friend and colleague, was obviously a more important influence. A biographer writes:

Kant made reason the rule of his life and the source of his philosophy; Hamann found the source of both in his heart. While Kant dreaded enthusiasm in religion, and suspected in it superstition and fanaticism, Hamann revelled in enthusiasm; and he believed in revelation, miracles, and worship, differing also in these points from the philosopher.

Hamann believed that humans are motivated more by what we believe than by what we know. Hamann advised young Herder to “think less and live more.”

On his way from Paris to Germany, Herder met the young Goethe in Strasbourg, a meeting of historical significance if there ever were one. For this meeting was by some accounts the birth of Sturm und Drang—“struggle and longing”—the epitome of a revolution of the mind that would help destroy aristocratic Europe and prepare the ground for the nation-states of the bourgeoisie. Goethe credited Herder for his stopping writing “dehydrated classicism” and becoming a populist in a poetic sense—by writing for the commoners in their own language.

Herder saw the contours of a modernity that fragments human communities. Michel Houellebecq has built an authorship on this insight. In his writings from Paris, we meet a Herder who feels personally affronted by snobbish French intellectualism purporting to tell people how to live their lives. Herder was skeptical of building societies on the abstract and “universal” truths that, upon closer inspection, were neither one nor the other. Instead, he found the answer in culture.

Herder encouraged the Germans to throw up the “slime from the Seine.” A proverb from the time says that one speaks Latin with God, French with women, English with men, and German with your horse. Herder thought Germans should aspire to be more than second rate Frenchmen. He believed that everyone thinks most clearly in their mother tongue. For Herder, language is the essence of a people. “The very first words we garble,” he declared, “are the cornerstones of our knowledge.” Therefore, he fought to stop the colonization of German universities. He saw the dominance of the French tongue as reducing Europe to a “graveyard of cultures.”

Sturm und Drang’s emphasis on the subjective inspired students, who, with their long hair, hipster fashion, and experimentation with sex and drugs, became the countercultural icons of the late 1700s. The young nationalists cultivated subjective experience over strict rationality—rough Germanity over French sophistication.

Herder brought a new focus on cultural differences. Charles Darwin famously divided the academy into “lumpers” and “splitters:” Lumpers like to group things into ever larger categories, while splitters divide things into smaller groupings. Lumpers look for what unites, splitters on what sets apart. Herder was keen on what makes different cultures distinct. Partly because he viewed man as a herd animal, where the tribe is the framework for the individual to attain his potential in the Aristotelian sense. He thus broke with French philosophers such as Racine and Corneille, who declared fellowship with all and sundry based on supposed shared identities.

Isaiah Berlin called understanding what it means to belong to a group “Herder’s populism.” Herder saw society as an organism, a living whole. But he was, according to Berlin, strongly influenced by the natural sciences. Herder believed in progress, but he did not share the notion that humanity is progressing on a broad front, driven by rationality and knowledge. 

Herder loved the nation, but not the state. “Nature creates nations, not states,” he wrote. His German nation was divided into some 300 principalities. His native Prussia was characterized by faded autocracy and habitual militarism, perhaps an example of what he called the state’s “dehumanizing potential.” He loved organic communities that grow from below, not the ones imposed from the top down. He raged against imperialism—when a society wipes out another’s culture, even if done in the name of progress. He was certain that those who force their way of life on others guarantee that their victims will rise up against them and use their own slogans, methods, and ideals against themselves one day. The idea is that ideals and institutions that are progressive—good in the context in which they emerged—can be poison if they are transplanted into a foreign body. In his essay “The West and the Rest,” historian Arnold Toynbee pointed to communism as an example of a Western idea that first poisoned the Russian empire and then transformed into an anti-Western project. 

Herder is a thinker of our time. Francis Fukuyama thinks Herder “is not sufficiently read in the English-speaking world” and rightly concludes that the discrediting of Herder by anti-nationalists today is grossly unreasonable. Herder shared the Enlightenment view of humanity as one of a human dignity that dwells in equal measure in all human beings. This basic humanism made Herder an early opponent of slavery. He also believed that the quality of a culture could be assessed according to how women are treated. All experts seem to agree that Herder’s starting point is that of a Kantian—cosmopolitan and pacifist.

Johan Gottlieb Fichte also studied under Immanuel Kant in Königsberg. Both he and Herder internalized Kant’s philosophical universe, but, unlike Herder, Fichte experienced the Prussian defeat at Jena in 1806. Herder did not live to see the revolution overthrowing the German patchwork of statelets and French civilization being offered at the end of a bayonet. For Fichte, this left a mark.

In 1791, 29-year-old Fichte travelled from Saxony, through Silesia, to Warsaw, hoping to take up a teaching position. “I walked a lot of the way on foot,” writes young Fichte. The diary is useful, not least since Fichte’s philosophical works are almost unreadable. Young Fichte’s diary charts the transitions of cultures. Poland does not start at the border. Fichte is fascinated by how German culture changes and yet remains the same. The walk from Dresden to Warsaw gave Fichte the chance to reflect on the myriad of little things that conspire to give the feeling of being near or far from home. He noted the small differences between the refined Saxony and the rougher Prussian Silesia, and how the German and Polish influences appeared in changing mixtures until he had one day come to Ponnichowo, a village where the last remnant of German culture was gone. He was in Poland.

Higher education is often a handicap when it comes to instinctive insights. In his Addresses to the German Nation, Fichte pointed out an historical fact: that national identity and patriotism are a strong and positive force, stronger than political ideology—and stronger than religion, one might add. Although it is common to pretend that all peoples are very similar, anyone who has travelled knows that there are great differences between nations—differences in perspective. What is perceived as good, healthy, right, and important varies from country to country.

Culture binds us to those who have gone before us, to our fellow human beings, and to the generations to come. The significance of the small differences is that the fragments are not just fragments. They are distinctive fragments. Fichte finds his Germany in the “eagle, whose powerful body rises to the heavens and hovers on strong and able wings.”

The 1968 icon Wolf Biermann would later use the same image of Germany in the song about the eagle, the “Prussian Ikaros.” He saw Prussia reborn in the GDR. Historian Fritz Fischer would develop the thesis as the German Sonderweg—the distinctive path that set Germany on a course towards two world wars. Fischer drew this path from Luther and the Reformation, but it could be argued that this theory finds its most convincing zero-hour in the French occupation that necessitated a German nation-state, legitimized Prussian militarism, and ultimately unified Germany under its most authoritarian constituent state.

The nation-state was a natural consequence of nationalism. The meeting between the nation and the state created the nation-state, and the nation-states created the international system. Democracy was born along with patriotism, both by tying power to the people and by proclaiming a fundamental equality between individuals. And out of this order springs a national culture that has the capacity to unite a mass of people who do not know each other, and to inspire loyalty among them. In the 19th century, nationalists were the standard-bearers of liberalism. They were seen as democratic heroes, the embodiment of everything that was progressive and fair. This is no longer the case. 

Herder’s nationalism is something quite different from the identitarianism of today, which arguably owes more to Fichte’s reaction to the conquests of Napoleon. The anti-nationalism that characterizes liberals today is a source of strength in an interconnected plural world, but also a political weakness. For many—arguably most Europeans—the nation is more meaningful and more valuable than any gleaming promises that a post-national world might hold. 

Herder’s diagnosis of alienation as the companion of modernity made him an intellectual superstar of his time. Herder realized, well before Marx, that a feeling of being separate from the world—from one’s job and from one’s own self—is a black mark against Western modernity. Many nationalists who followed often sought to overcome this sense of alienation by focusing on enemies, foreign and domestic, but it is unreasonable to put this at Herder’s door. After all, few in the 18th century could imagine the cavalcade of events that would climax in the wars at the end of Fritz Fischer’s Sonderweg. And in his defense, Herder’s nationalism is not reactionary. It is tolerant, a celebration of what unites us in the largest groups capable of creating a genuine sense of “we”—which is the nation.

Today’s anti-nationalists conveniently forget that they live in a world created by nationalism and that, on balance, nationalism has given more than it has taken. Especially outside of the American context, nationalism has given us government of and by the people, the welfare state, the rule of law, and civil rights. Even Americans forget at their peril that individual rights are tender shoots that wilt and die in the harsh light of the state of nature. Without the protection of the nation-state, rights tends to become a luxury for the few.

The upsurge in identitarianism we see across the West today has roots in circumstances similar to those that birthed a more toxic kind of nationalism in earlier times. This identitarianism seeks to provide an answer to universal liberalism’s erroneous assumptions and predictions about the future, about human nature, and about happiness. For man is not merely rational. We have a heritage that anchors us, which makes sense to us and helps us make sense of the world. The postmodernist sensibility that structures the worldview of our educated elites may pay eloquent lip service to abstract ideals, but for many individuals the world they have created has proved to be a barren, alienating place. 

For his part, Herder saw that those who want to liberate us from traditions—from culture and history—often only succeed in freeing themselves from their duties towards actual compatriots in favor of a universal “humanity” that does not exist apart from those who claim to speak on behalf of it. Just look at the culture this postmodernity produces in Europe. Look at the public artworks. Listen to the hit songs. Look at the architecture. It is as if we had lost some war and are currently occupied by a rival civilization that detests us and is eager to rub our collective noses in what they think of us. 

We now find ourselves in a standoff between what amount to cultural classes across the West. Each sees an authoritarian tendency in the other, and neither recognizes it in themselves. The so-called “national conservative“ wave that is currently permeating the conservative movement in both the United States and in Europe is generating enthusiasm, but also concern. Traditional conservatives are issuing starker warnings against the dangers of this national conservatism than they ever did when our urbane elites set out to spread the gospel of democracy by way of military occupation, or when they opened European borders for uncontrolled immigration, or when they support a vision of the European Union that is a dagger aimed squarely at the heart of the nation-state.

But when smaller languages (like my native Norwegian) are increasingly marginalized at our own universities, when national parliaments hand over power to Brussels to the point that they become almost provincial assemblies, when immigration outstrips a society’s capacity to integrate new members, when our intellectuals agree that our culture is both toxic and at the same time does not exist—then it is tempting to smile wryly at the dire warnings of the supposed perils of national conservatism. The way things are going is unsustainable.

And yet those warning are timely, and conservatives are wise to “Draw Rein; Draw Breath.” National conservatism indeed has a problematic legacy, and though history never repeats itself, it is worth pondering the fact that the standard-bearer of national conservatism today is Russia. Like the French aristocrat Astolphe de Custine, who, embittered by the events of 1789, travelled to Imperial Russia to experience its authentic autocracy (and came away horrified), so our modern critics of liberalism need to experience applied Putinism first hand.

But beyond that, it’s important to not be categorical in one’s thinking about these matters, and to keep in mind that the difference between Herder and Fichte is small, but critical: There exist both tolerant and intolerant forms of nationalism. The difference between the two forms can perhaps be compared to the differences between social democratic and communist versions of socialism. Nationalism is malleable; it can be both liberal and illiberal. Now that we again find ourselves in an age of nationalism, conservatives must return to the sources, beginning with two students of Kant.

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Driven to the Edge

Why have millions of Americans overthrown their instinctive prudence and embraced radical ideologies on the left and the right? Cultural observers say they have rejected capitalism, and there is truth in this. Among young people today, more than half prefer socialism to capitalism. Voters in both political parties despise the donor class. Income inequality is a big issue. Many Americans feel capitalism fails to satisfy their material interests. It violates their sense of security and justice. It threatens the social and physical quality of their lives.

But to the degree that Americans reject capitalism, we overlook an important psychological dimension to their resentment. The psychology of the American worker is different from what it was 50 years ago, or in the 19th century, because life changed as capitalist production evolved. The laws of supply and demand did not change; the need for food, energy, and housing did not change; but how Americans organize their days, socialize, raise children, and meet their basic psychological needs did change—and in some ways for the worse. This is a major source of people’s insecurity, and it involves more than just income inequality. Millions of Americans today feel a unique sense of threat in their private, and sometimes inner, lives. More than class envy, this has led them to seek some vision of salvation in extremist ideologies far away from the political center.

Karl Marx would have understood. His criticism of religion, which I do not share, applies to all utopian visions. Unlike other socialists who laughed at religion and called it an “illusion,” Marx looked deeper and asked why people needed such an illusion in the first place. The problem was not the religious nature of people’s utopia, he argued, but the economic conditions that drove people to imagine all utopias. Their suffering inevitably found expression in other ideologies, he said, which he compared to looking at society through the wrong end of a telescope. The political visions were distorted; they mangled reality. And yet people cleaved to them to satisfy some deep inner lack growing out of capitalism’s conditions.

I believe in capitalism. No other system generates such wealth or so dramatically improves people’s standard of living. I am also by nature a centrist. I do not like extremes at either end. But if the donor class wants the great mass of Americans to move back toward the political center, it must recognize the nightmare that capitalism has become for many people—psychologically—and why it has driven them to embrace radical ideologies at both ends of the spectrum.

No one can stop the wind or reverse the tides. Capitalism will go on like a juggernaut. We have no alternative, as a command economy impoverishes society and a tradition-based economy makes no sense in the modern era. But as capitalism forges ahead, we can at least control for the psychological wreckage it leaves in its wake, thereby keeping the great mass of Americans within shouting distance of the political center.

Six politically significant currents of thought, extreme in their outlook, are shared by large numbers of Americans today: Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), extreme feminists, Black Lives Matter, white supremacists, extreme environmentalists, and social justice warriors. That a short, concise, and recognizable slogan serves as the name of each current already suggests the workings of ideology, as the slogan symbolizes a larger and more complex political outlook. The louder and oftener one hears such a slogan, the more certain one can be that it indicates the workings of a significant ideology. In each case (we will start with the MGTOWs) the ideology propagates a worldview that captures people’s hopes and fears but is nevertheless an illusion, simplistic as it is disturbing, emerging out of the very capitalist structure that defines our political center.

What Has Advanced Capitalism Wrought?

One realm of illusion is the Internet “manopshere.” Its hundreds of thousands of members can be divided into three groups: the Men’s Rights Movement (MRM), men working on what they call “game,” and Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW).

The MRM fights what it perceives to be unfair bias against men. Although more reasonable than the other groups, it is the smallest. In the second group, average-looking men work on “game” to attract and bed pretty women. Referred to as “beta-males,” these men envy the naturally muscular and attractive “alpha-males,” called “Chads,” who get plenty of sex.

The largest group is the MGTOWs, who, unlike the MRM, no longer want to fight women. On the contrary, they want nothing to do with women. They want to be left alone. MGTOWs willingly cede power to what they call the “gynocentric state,” which they believe is hopelessly rigged against men. They believe women get all the sex they want in their twenties (with alpha-males), and then, just before hitting the so-called “Wall” at age 30, glom onto beta-males through marriage, have kids, and then, years later, with the help of the courts, take both the kids and the man’s money. Some MGTOWs avoid women altogether except at work; others have sex with women but never marry them. All are unified in their distrust of women and in their belief that a man can only preserve his individuality apart from a woman.

Curiously, many MGTOWs dislike both women and corporate capitalism. They allege a conspiracy between the “gynocentric state” and corporate behemoths such as YouTube and PayPal to de-platform leading manosphere speakers. Yet their suspicion runs deeper. Many MGTOWs dislike their jobs. A “soldier in the corporate army” is how one MGTOW described himself. Other MGTOWs fear retribution at work for being MGTOW. Many MGTOWs save their money in the hope of winning their freedom from corporate life. Along the way, they fear female co-workers will sue them on a false charge of sexual harassment, robbing them of their job and their earnings. They fear a wife will take their money through a divorce, or force them to pay child support if she has a child by another man. Only a frank, selfish, and brutal outlook on life, they argue, lets a man escape dependence on either a corporate job or a woman.

MGTOWs are neither hedonists nor nihilists. They want to live meaningful lives. They’re just not sure how. All they know is that they cannot do so through work life in a corporation or through family life that involves a marital relationship with a woman.

That women are man’s greatest enemy is an illusion, but one that fits Marx’s paradigm, as MGTOWs suffer from what he called alienation.

Marx described several kinds of alienation. In alienation from one’s labor, people work in boring jobs that stifle their natural urge to be creative producers. In alienation from other people, people see co-workers as competitors, even enemies. In alienation from one’s human identity, people feel stifled in their natural urge to satisfy a higher life purpose. MGTOW ideology grew out of all three forms of alienation. Yet the intensity of that alienation, arising from changes in capitalism over the last half century, would have shocked even Marx. It is the basis for all extremist ideologies in American politics today, and not just MGTOW.

In the past, alienation from one’s labor, as experienced on the assembly line, affected only a small fraction of Americans. Few Americans historically have been exposed to the monotony Marx described, such as putting rivets in train doors 12 hours a day, every day. As farming declined, most people escaped into the service and, later, information economies, where they wore nice clothes rather than overalls and imagined themselves living a middle-class, even hip, lifestyle. But over time, capitalism’s method of organization, once reserved for factories, penetrated the safe haven of non-factory work. Even professional work is now divided into specialized tasks performed by several people. In my own field of medicine, for example, one doctor fixes the patient’s arteries, another fixes the veins, another tinkers with the patient’s ventilator, another adjusts the drugs entering the patient’s bloodstream—and not one of them can really say, “I care for a patient,” because no one person does take care of a whole patient.

It is increasingly hard for non-factory workers to escape this. For generations, most Americans worked for small businesses with fewer than 100 employees. Many Americans were self-employed. Today, few are self-employed. Large and very large companies employ more Americans than do small or medium-sized companies. Companies with tens of thousands of employees now employ 36 percent of American workers. These numbers permit white-collar activities to be broken down into discrete tasks that mimic those of an assembly line. Many MGTOWs, often college-educated and with good incomes, dislike their jobs for this reason. In response, they have created an ideology of disciplined egoism and extreme paranoia toward women to free themselves.

In Marx’s time, alienation from other people meant men competing against other men for jobs and salaries. Home was the refuge, the haven in the heartless world. But alienation also entered the home. Men and women are naturally egoists. They compete with one another and would prefer to settle things on their own terms. This is true in love as well as business. Yet men and women must surrender some of their ego to satisfy other natural urges. This is the purpose of marriage as an institution: The sexual and maternal instincts are brought into conflict with the instinct toward egoism, thereby keeping egoism down and making human society possible.

Over time, capitalism upset this fine balance. After the sexual revolution, when sex became a plentiful consumption good, men could satisfy their sexual urge outside of marriage. For women it was more complicated. They, too, could satisfy their sexual urge outside of marriage, but women also have maternal urges, which are best satisfied within marriage. During this same period, capitalism drew women into the workforce, increased the labor supply, paid everyone less as a result, and compelled families to earn two incomes instead of one to raise children. Just when men were finding less reason to marry, women were finding more. Today, the imbalance inflames MGTOW suspicions, as when MGTOWs accuse women of marrying men for “scarce resources” or to “have the baby.”

Advanced capitalism takes alienation a step further. It has stripped men and women of their “otherness.” Men and women once had a sense of mystery about them—a gender specific nature—causing each to remain slightly inaccessible to the other, while at the same time stoking admiration in the other’s eyes. This disappeared when advanced capitalism pushed gender-neutrality to wring more profit from exchangeable bodies working in space. With male and female nature denied, men and women became consumers with needs; gender itself became a consumption good. The new state of affairs heightens MGTOW suspicions about women, as the charm of “otherness,” rooted in nature and designed to foster sympathy and understanding between the two sexes, is eclipsed by a paranoid fear that women scheme to meet their needs—which of course men themselves do much of the time. Even on a first date, when a man should be building enchanted memories, a MGTOW is focused more on how the woman might ruin him.

It gets worse. The lack of “otherness” detracts from sexual excitement, as people lose their allure in each other’s eyes. As a woman’s mind and nature cease to be any different from a man’s, only her body stimulates some men. Unfortunately, not all women have perfect bodies. Advanced capitalism solves the MGTOW dilemma through high-definition porn, sex dolls, and the promise of sex robots. MGTOWs cease to be governed by the laws of the actual world and escape into an imaginary one. Some MGTOWs rate sex with a doll as a “7 out of 10,” when compared with the real thing, so perfect is a doll’s body.

In all this, the number of men living alone has more than doubled since the 1970s. Real sex has declined among young men. MGTOW ideology encourages men to avoid women altogether—called “going monk”—or to use women for sex if they are lucky enough to be “Chads” or have “game,” but mostly to rely on advanced capitalism’s sex products. Gone for MGTOWs and the “gamers” is one of the few adventures in life once thought worth having: a great love.

Alienation from one’s human identity means lacking in purpose. In the past, people found purpose in religion. They found it in friends, family, or children. They found it in work (if they could avoid the factory assembly line). They found it in their towns. They found it in an avocation pursued seriously. Advanced capitalism has killed all these sources of identity.

Even as late as the 1970s, educated workers wanted not just a job but a career, even a calling—in other words, meaningful work. This itself signaled a change in American thinking from the 19th century, when all jobs had an air of resemblance about them, and work provided nothing more than income. Looking for meaning through work was a new concept. Today, dependent employees of large companies assigned to super-specialized tasks feel themselves thwarted on this front.

Another source of purpose, family life, is not an option for MGTOWs, since women are not an option. Children are problematic, since MGTOWs see them as future pawns in a divorce, and perhaps increasingly even as competitors in their own right, transformed by advanced capitalism into consumers who, when dissatisfied with their parental service, may sue them.

Another trend in advanced capitalism makes purpose in life hard to find: Government has become the partner of business. It sustains the nonprofit economy, polices entrance into some fields, and awards monopolies in others. With higher education so expensive as a result, children cost a lot—another reason not to have them. It is also hard to find purpose through volunteering, since volunteer work has been absorbed into the economy, where it demands a credential and comes with a salary. An example would be the field of social work, which put great emphasis on the volunteer in settlement houses and orphanages at the turn of the 20th century but now demands professional training. The old avocations—such as amateur athlete, amateur historian, or amateur artist—are also no longer available, having become professions in their own right, demanding full-time commitment, with pay, if one wishes to be taken seriously.

The tripling of the religiously unaffiliated since 1990, from 8 percent to 24 percent of the population, suggests religion has also been lost as a source of purpose. Religion allowed itself, perhaps unwittingly, to enter capitalism’s system of exchange, so now it meets “needs” in the consumer economy, like any other business. Clergymen, like bankers and plumbers, render “service.” The church performance itself is called a “service.” Some Bibles have been adapted for business people whose time is limited. Having become practical and convenient, and adopted the ways of the world, religion for many people has ceased to offer a special source of purpose in life.

MGTOW Is Just the Beginning

Other extremist ideologies in American politics follow the MGTOW pattern of alienation. Like MGTOWs, extreme feminists are alienated from their labor. Many women with college degrees resent the intense occupational specialization and routine that has crept into white-collar work. But they have no choice. Advanced capitalism compels them to work, as life in America is now structured so that both men and women must be ready at all times to go it alone. Family formation is difficult; relationships are tenuous.

Many women find themselves in a tight situation. With the sexual instinct in men no longer opposed to male egoism (through marriage) but actually congruent with it, many women have suffered through an explosion of sexual harassment. At the same time, the sexual revolution and capitalism’s promise of meaningful work have tempted some women with a plan for life that requires perfect timing and cooperation to be executed: A woman, too, will satisfy her sexual urge during her twenties and egotistically pursue her career, just like men. Then, when the maternal instinct kicks in, she will find the right man whose ego will not be threatened by all the men she has slept with, who will marry her and give her children, while also supporting her in her career. The plan is untenable, as women find themselves at loggerheads with MGTOW ideology. For example, many men now avoid women at work to avoid a charge of sexual harassment, and so even getting to the dating stage is hard. Today, 45 percent of Americans are single, the highest percentage in history.

In the meantime, the old sources of purpose in life have dried up for extreme feminists, just as they have for MGTOWs. Work is out, which infuriates many women, as capitalism promised that work would be more interesting than home life, but often failed to deliver. Raising children as a single working mother is also hard. The cost of putting children through college only adds to the pain. This blocks procreation as a source of purpose for many women. For extreme feminists, their own college education turns religion into a cartoon, so religion is not an option as a source for meaning. Volunteer work is also out for reasons described above.

Just as alienation under advanced capitalism perverts male nature to produce MGTOW ideology, so does it pervert female nature to produce extreme feminist ideology. For centuries, women have dreamed of presenting a united front against men—until a particular man is involved, in which case the united front breaks down. The absence of men in their lives, men’s refusal to cooperate with an impossible life plan, the nuisance or even threat that some men have become in the wake of the sexual revolution—all joined to a lack of purpose in life more generally—have led extreme feminists to worship a vision of salvation in which a united front of women does indeed aspire to smash all men. They become alienated from men; they dislike and even hate them, as one extreme feminist admitted in public. They call men trash. At the #MeToo extreme, they believe all women in sexual assault cases, and that all men are guilty, even without witnesses or corroborating evidence.

At the extreme, feminist ideology is an illusion, a sweeping, simple generalization, in the same way MGTOW ideology is, for just as all women are not the enemy of men, neither are all men the enemy of women.

The new alienation fuels the extremism of Black Lives Matter, too. Take, for example, a young black woman who attends an expensive college on affirmative action, but who is educationally unprepared. Advanced capitalism’s donor class hypocritically supports diversity to soothe its conscience, but once minority students arrive and flounder, that’s no longer the donor class’s concern. The young woman sees before her the same “alienation from one’s labor” in non-factory work as others see, yet low grades may keep her from getting even one of those jobs. She foresees floundering in the “gig” economy, and with a large tuition debt, thanks to government colluding with higher education to raise costs.

She feels isolated. She wants to call home, but she has no home, as advanced capitalism destroyed her two-parent family and neighborhood long ago, when the jobs that sustained her city were offshored. She is angry. Extreme feminism teaches her to blame men, but her “alienation from other people” takes a different turn. Her instinct toward group loyalty trumps her instinct toward gender loyalty; it is through that aspect of human nature that her alienation is refracted. She blames even white women. She listens for micro-aggressions; she analyzes white people inside and out, to their very core. Where others hesitate to look, she looks. White people become specimens in her eyes, and even good-hearted acquaintances are objects for scrutiny. Every minute, every second in a white person’s life is magnified a thousand-fold; there is no looking at the years, the whole, and so there is hatred.

Much of this is an illusion. Most white people are not the enemy of black people. They do not feel ill will toward them. On the contrary, they feel themselves to be in the same boat, struggling under advanced capitalism. But the black woman will not listen. In her illusion, the white person has changed into something else.

With the other sources of purpose in life having dried up under advanced capitalism, as they have for MGTOWs and extreme feminists, Black Lives Matter gives the woman a sense of purpose. After graduation she becomes a community activist, which not only provides meaning, but also a non-factory job that avoids occupational specialization and employment in a large company.

A young white male with little education experiences the same alienation as MGTOWs, extreme feminists, and Black Lives Matter. He can’t find a job that pays a middle-class wage, which means he can’t even suffer the alienation of those fortunate enough to work for a gigantic corporation. He lives at home. His precarious economic situation makes finding purpose in raising a family impossible. He had once dreamed of coaching his kids on a sports team, but advanced capitalism increasingly demands certification for such activity—for example, there is now a Little League University. This blocks coaching as a source of purpose in life, even if he had children.

With many manufacturing jobs long ago offshored, he must compete against immigrants for scraps, putting downward pressure on wages. He complains. Advanced capitalism’s donor class hypocritically poses as lovers of humanity, and so calls for open borders, but in reality it just wants more cheap labor. The man cries out that his forefathers helped to build America. Yet the donor class calls him a nativist and a “deplorable” when he does. Thus, even national identity as a source of meaning in life is blocked.

Resentment arises from the disparity between his dreams and the reality before him. As with the young black woman, his alienation is refracted through his instinct toward group loyalty rather than gender loyalty. It is the alienation of white Americans against immigrant people of color, stoked by the donor class’s refusal to take the man’s complaints seriously, and by the pre-existing animosity in identity politics of people of color toward white people. The man’s mind becomes narrowed and bounded to one exact spot of knowledge—the immigrant’s skin color and “foreignness”—which yields a crop of prejudices. Feeling himself above others in this one little area, he grows eminent in his own eyes and looks down on others. Having all his sympathies cultivated in one way, they die out in every other way. He becomes an ill-humored, close-minded bigot.

Much of this is an illusion. People of color immigrating to America are not evil. They only want to work, as he does. Nor are they hopelessly un-American. In fact, they are more likely to believe in God and democracy than many Americans today do. But the man refuses to listen. He sees through the same spectacles continually. His mind stiffens into one position, as it does for the other extremists.

The ideology of extreme environmentalism follows the path of MGTOWs, extreme feminists, Black Lives Matter, and white supremacists. Take a college-educated woman working as an executive for a large company. She is successful by advanced capitalism’s standards, but the day comes when she is forced to ask herself what all this is for. The question presents itself timidly at first, but over time reaches full force, with predictably demoralizing effects. Her creative impulses having stalled, she feels fed up and depressed, yet her mind cannot turn to family, as she has no family. With men in general floundering under advanced capitalism, and MGTOW ideology gaining traction, few eligible suitors appear. Studies have confirmed the lack of eligible men as a reason why many women today do not marry.

She lacks purpose in her life. Her alienation is refracted through the human instinct to religion. People are born to believe, to imagine a focus around which all the world gravitates, to approach life from the loftiest viewpoint, even if it is to condemn the human race. Indeed, religions that condemn the human race have great staying power. The woman’s “alienation from others” morphs into an “alienation from humanity.” People are evil. In extreme environmentalism, the needs of obscure birds or fish or other wildlife take precedence over human needs, including, for example, the worries of farmers and miners trying to earn a living.

She throws herself into work, but now she has left her job for an environmentalist nonprofit. The nonprofit sector, which barely existed in the early 1970s, has grown five times faster than the for-profit sector in the past ten years. It now employs ten percent of the workforce. It is where many college-educated people now go to find meaning in work that they can no longer find in the for-profit sector. Here, the woman feels alive. With the climate at risk, she has that nightmarish feeling that everything is collapsing, the ground sliding away under her feet; yet she is feverishly excited that everything still lies ahead, and might still be realized.

Much of this is an illusion. People who eat, who drive, or who work in mines are not evil. They just want to live, as she does. And while climate change is real, answering the question of how the climate will change over the next century remains an open one worthy of scientific discussion. But the woman is amazed and indignant that her positions are open to doubt. She speaks as if everything about the issue is predetermined. She refuses to hear any scientific evidence from climate models that suggest things may not be as dire as they seem. She destroys anyone who dissents.

Social justice warriors (SJWs) follow in the path of MGTOWs, extreme feminists, Black Lives Matter, white supremacists, and extreme environmentalists, having experienced the same alienation. The “alienation from other people” takes a perverse turn here, as SJWs often hate other people anonymously, on social media; they also love other people anonymously, on social media. Like many lonely Americans living under advanced capitalism, where male-female relations are frayed, family formation is difficult, and children are expensive, many SJWs live in a virtual world online where things pass in front of their eyes in isolated patches, without any connection to the physical world in which they live. A desire to destroy the capitalist system becomes the offspring of all their nervous tension, which makes their ideology the most dangerous of all.

What drives SJWs is not poverty but alienation, which is refracted through the human ego itself—the dream of making a clean sweep of everything and imposing the mold of one’s mind on an entire nation. In Antifa rallies, among the unmasked, and in post-arrest mug shots, the faces are primarily white, while the clothes and manners suggest they are college educated. Portland, the seat of Antifa, is predominantly white and college educated. This is not a movement of low-income people of color angry about their pay. These are people wounded psychologically and thwarted in life in a different way. In their belief in direct action, Antifa SJWs imagine themselves to be fighters, soldiers, executioners, murderers, and bastards, as they howl and beat their fists against their breasts. The feeling of being among like-minded people who know what they are doing and why, and doing it all in physical space and not just online, vindicates their life when other paths to meaning have been blocked.

Meanwhile, in corporate boardrooms, nonviolent, middle-aged SJWs think they can still achieve something meaningful through work, and not simply by joining a non-profit. Rather than escape from corporate capitalism, SJWs seek to reshape it. They have pushed the Business Roundtable into redefining the corporation’s purpose. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Accountable Capitalism Act threatens to change the purpose of business from profit to social justice. The possibility of utopia inflames these people’s imaginations unlike anything else in life. Leaders of advanced capitalism once encouraged the social justice movement as a kind of wonderful adornment to the mundane task of making money. Now the beautiful ivy wraps around too tight and threatens to suffocate them.

SJW ideology is an illusion—and a dangerous one. There is not enough money to pay for all the SJW programs; there will be even less money once capitalism is destroyed. The SJW mode of direct action, which includes public shaming, violence, and censorship, is totalitarian. But the SJWs will not listen. Life has determined their consciousness. To change their consciousness, as Marx observed, their lives must change.

Finding the Center

Intense alienation refracted through some aspect of human nature has radicalized millions of Americans. No new ideology marketed from above will lure them back to the political center. Patriotism, for example, does not arise in people because they hear a speech about patriotism, but because they believe their country offers everyone a good deal, including themselves, and so they feel affection for it. Right now, many Americans do not think their country offers them a good deal. Encouraging bourgeois virtues also makes no sense in a global economy in which middle-class prudence is completely baffled. When the means of foreseeing are gone, and the traditional paths to finding purpose in life are blocked, it is useless to be prudent. A general redistribution of income is also useless. The problem is alienation, not income inequality.

At the same time, advanced capitalism cannot be reversed. Gender neutrality is inevitable. The alienation between men and women will persist, even as it continues to be glossed over. Nor can we eliminate the corporation, which makes possible the accumulation of capital and the advances in output that raise our standard of living. For these reasons today’s political center cannot be what it was in Tocqueville’s America, with the latter’s strong two-parent families, small businesses, robust local communities, and widespread religious belief. That center belongs to another age.

The goal in our secular, corporate-dependent, hyper-individualistic, single-parent, and somewhat lonely society should be to help as many people as possible escape alienation and to re-open some of the paths to a meaningful life now blocked. This may diminish people’s urge to replace the creative act with almost anything they can, including extreme ideologies, and lure them back toward the center.

The current system is rigged against those who do not want to be dependent employees of large companies. Health insurance is tax-deductible when working for a company but not when self-employed. Employees of large companies can put more money toward a pension than people with individual IRAs can. Government often forgives student loans for people entering public service or the nonprofit sector, but not for those starting a business. Entrepreneurs starting out must pay both the employer and employee portion of Social Security. To help at least some people escape “the alienation of one’s labor,” these things must change. In Social Security, for example, the employer portion might be waived for ten years for young entrepreneurs. They will get fewer benefits decades later, but they will be relieved of a crushing burden as they try to strike out on their own early on.

Corporate employees need free speech rights. The First Amendment protects against government suppression of speech, which sufficed when people had more opportunities to work for themselves or in small businesses. Today, most people have no choice but to work for large companies. These companies scrutinize the social media postings of their employees and work in tandem with government to control speech in the name of preventing a “hostile work environment.” Many employees resent their supervisors telling them what they can and cannot say, much as medieval serfs hated being subject not to the rule of law, but to the will of a man.

Children give life purpose. It must become cheaper to raise them. High college costs not only block procreation as a creative outlet but also, in the form of debt, keep people from aspiring to independent employment after graduation. We must help people go around college, or through college. To go around college, some kind of National Baccalaureate Exam might obviate the need for a four-year college degree. To reduce college costs, a rule once applied to health insurance companies, barring payments from the state if those companies put more than 5 percent of their premiums toward administration, might be used to force colleges to eliminate administrative bloat. Even one-time, partial student loan forgiveness on the Federal level would be a price worth paying to secure legislation that permanently reduced college costs.

Social Security might be adjusted over the coming decades, such that, instead of people getting large monthly sums starting in their late 60s, they would get smaller monthly sums starting in their 20s. This would make raising children, often by single parents, more feasible.

Corporate capitalism’s reach must be re-evaluated. In the 20th century, the rise of non-factory occupations defused the revolutionary potential inherent in factory life. Corporate capitalism’s continued penetration into non-factory life, especially into labor–intensive fields (for example, medicine, law, counseling, and mental health) where economies of scale do not really come into play, and where fixed machine costs are generally not an issue, has drawn millions of Americans into the vortex of large-scale capitalism, perhaps needlessly, rendering small business and self-employment in these sectors difficult. Non-factory occupations are providing less of a vent for revolutionary potential than they once did. Along with dependent employment in gigantic companies have come overzealous credentialing and other barriers to entry that keep people from breaking into non-factory occupations on their own. These barriers also keep volunteers from doing anything in these fields other than the most boring tasks. Corporate capitalism’s takeover of the entire range of human services, not just hospitality and retail, is not only keeping America from remaining a “middle class” nation, but also turning America into a nation of resentful semi-skilled laborers. This drives people to ideological extremes.

Policymakers with a purely economic approach to today’s radicalism may object to what seems to be soft psychology—that is, to the notion of alienation. They may insist that straightforward economics plays the bigger role in rebuilding the political center. They may prefer to speak about the structural requisites of economic growth or the need for more income re-distribution. It is true that economic data are a powerful, compelling reality. GDP growth and tax rates will pretty much dictate how millions of workers live. But in a crisis people sometimes respond in ways that established economic models cannot predict. Many Americans today have embraced illusions and joined protest movements with goals that are not just economic, but also psychological, even exclusively psychological, adding to the sense of unpredictability. The excitement these illusions produce in people’s hearts is palpable. If we want to bring some of them back toward the political center, thereby making American politics once again a game fought between the 40-yard lines, these psychological issues must be addressed.

The post Driven to the Edge appeared first on The American Interest.

It’s Not Us—It’s Him

Washington is a partisan and notoriously navel-gazing place. Diplomats, academics, and intellectuals often blame foreign policy failures on Presidents of the opposite party rather than on deliberate decisions by American adversaries. As hundreds of thousands of Kurds fled Turkish forces moving into Syria, and Trump’s domestic critics moved swiftly to blame him for the development, the President and some of his most vocal supporters blamed the Obama Administration’s naivety for laying the groundwork for the inevitable Turkish reaction. “Trump inherited from Obama a dysfunctional strategy for countering ISIS [the Islamic State],” Hudson Institute scholar Michael Doran wrote in the New York Post. “Trump is not betraying the YPG [the main Syrian Kurdish militia]. He is seeking to restore balance to American foreign policy.”

The problem with Turkey, however, is neither Trump nor Obama. Rather, it is Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Love him or hate him, he is the most consequential Turkish leader since Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and he has the second-longest tenure after Atatürk’s successor, İsmet İnönü. Erdoğan shook electoral politics in November 2002, when his party not only entered parliament but, through an electoral fluke, came to dominate it.

Over the ensuing 16 years, Erdoğan has used his position to remake Turkey fundamentally. As he consolidated power, he became more forthright about his goals. “We want to raise a religious generation,” he told parliament in February 2012. U.S. officials continue to comfort themselves in the belief that Turkey will revert to its previous character after Erdoğan dies or is defeated. This is a dangerous self-delusion. Consider education: More than 32 million Turks have received their education under Erdoğan’s leadership. During this period, the Turkish curriculum and broader education system have changed to promote Erdoğan’s religious and foreign policy agendas. In 2005, Erdoğan changed Turkey’s EU negotiating position to withdraw a commitment to secularism in education. He privileged graduates of Imam Hatip schools—Turkey’s system of madrasas—as they sought to enter the state bureaucracy. Within ordinary schools, he forced Sunni theological studies upon non-Sunnis.

Erdoğan has likewise transformed the Turkish military. Every Turkish officer from the rank of lieutenant colonel and below has served the entirety of their career under Erdoğan. Erdoğan used a series of coup conspiracies—Ergenekon in 2008, Balyoz in 2010, and the 2016 abortive coup—to purge top brass and those deemed too connected with NATO and the West. Whereas the Turkish army once stood as the constitutional guardian of secularism, today it is a driver for Islamism.

Erdoğan’s assault on the free press completed his strategy for national indoctrination. Punitive and politicized audits led most television and newspaper owners either to amplify Erdoğan’s positions or to sell their media outlets to him or his immediate family members. Those who did not take the hint found themselves bankrupt, imprisoned, exiled, or dead. Today, the only independent Turkish media is online—and published abroad. Turkey has become like Russia, where the constant bombardment of propaganda and conspiracies and the de-platforming of those espousing alternative views creates a bubble of belief in dissonance with reality, even among the educated classes.

With power consolidated in his person, purse, and immediate family, Erdoğan shed the pragmatism which he publicly embraced prior to his initial election and began undertaking a program to change fundamentally Turkish society and foreign policy. At home, he undertook a mosque-building campaign and then banned alcohol sales within 100 meters of mosques, forcing many bars and nightclubs to close. According to the Turkish government’s own statistics, the murder rate of women increased 1,400 percent in the first seven years of Erdoğan’s reign, largely because police now ignore honor crimes. Child marriage is also on the upswing. Furthermore, women in government have paid the price for Erdoğan’s efforts to infuse the bureaucracy with religious conservatives. Whereas Turkey was one of the first majority Muslim states to have a female leader, today the numbers of women in the top three levels of the national and provincial bureaucracies have plummeted to near zero. To Erdoğan, women’s priorities should be family rather than career. Indeed, he has chided women to have at least three children before pursuing professional careers.

Erdoğan’s foreign policy agenda has been as transformative as his domestic program. Turkish diplomats have emphasized continuity, for example, with regard to Turkey’s continued commitment to the European Union accession process. However, Turkey’s motivations, if not its general goals, changed. Erdoğan embraced the European Union, yes, but only in order to give diplomatic force to his efforts to extract the military from civilian politics. While the Turkish military had launched two coups and forced two other governments to resign over the course of Turkish history, it acted within its broad role as the guarantor of the constitution. What Erdoğan effectively did was to use the EU process to undo constitutional checks and balances in order to enable greater power consolidation and the promotion of Islamism. Once he achieved those goals, he turned his back on Brussels.

While Atatürk sought to use his dictatorial power to reorient Turkey toward the West, Erdoğan has done the opposite. He initially promoted neo-Ottomanism, but this failed to gain traction regionally as the peoples historically subjugated by Turks did not share the same fond remembrance of the Ottoman era. Turkey’s neighbors also resented Erdoğan’s Ottoman-inspired revanchism, with Turkish politicians and newspapers openly suggesting that Turkey annex territory along its borders. Erdoğan then turned more directly toward seeking leadership of the Islamic world. He bid unsuccessfully on the 2020 Olympics, arguing that the games should go to an Islamic country. He invested heavily in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, eventually succeeding in installing a Turk as president of the group.

More broadly, Erdoğan diverted tremendous resources—some Turkish in origin and some acquired from his partnership with the gas-rich emirate Qatar—to promote not only Islam generally, but also a Muslim Brotherhood worldview. It was this theological approach that has continued to sow divisions within Turkey. Censuses are notoriously inaccurate across the Middle East, and doubly so in Turkey, given the country’s ethnic and sectarian diversity. At least 20 percent of Turks are Alevi, however, an offshoot of Shi‘i Islam to which Erdoğan and his followers have long been hostile. Previous Turkish administrations embraced, integrated, and promoted Turkey’s Alevi community; Erdoğan has discriminated against it, forcing Sunni religious education upon Alevi students in public schools and tearing down Alevi prayer halls. This is consistent with Muslim Brotherhood intolerance, which sees only its own strict version of Sunni Islam as legitimate, treating all other forms as deviant.

Such attitudes also explain, in part, the hostility Erdoğan harbors toward one-time ally Fethullah Gülen, a Turkish theologian in self-imposed Pennsylvania exile. The two worked closely together in the first decade of Erdoğan’s rule, when secularism was a common adversary. But as Erdoğan triumphed over his Kemalist opponents, he turned his sites on Gülen, whose followers adhere more to a moderate, Anatolian Sufism than a strict Muslim Brotherhood line.

Erdoğan’s desire to lead the Islamic world has also motivated his rivalry with Saudi Arabia. While the Saudi murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi was reprehensible, Erdoğan’s championing of the case is deeply cynical. Reporters Without Borders has, for seven years, labeled Turkey as “the world’s biggest prison for journalists,” and Erdoğan cares little for the journalists he and his supporters have fired, imprisoned, or killed. Rather, Erdoğan seeks to use the case to delegitimize the Saudi regime. The Saudi monarchy’s legitimacy rests upon its role as custodian of the two holy mosques in Mecca and Medina. If Ankara can paint Riyadh as an unworthy custodian—much as Tehran tries to do—then the next step is to demand the internationalization of Mecca, Medina, and the Haj via a body such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

Erdoğan’s efforts to promote Islamism and, with it, anti-Western sentiment go further. In recent years, he has shifted Turkey’s foreign policy focus to Africa. Turkish writing and diplomatic statements about Africa often contrast the image of a generous, benevolent Turkey with the damage wrought by centuries of exploitive Western policies and colonialism. Turkish Airlines grew in the matter of just a few years to be one of the continent’s top carriers. Erdoğan consolidated schools and properties seized from Gülen into the Maarif Foundation, an organization founded by his political party to promote a more radical interpretation of Islam. He also created a network of Yunus Emre Institutes to enable African students to study in Turkish religious schools. While Turkey promotes its base in Somalia as a sign of its commitment to fight extremism, SADAT, a private, Islamist paramilitary founded by Erdoğan’s chief military adviser, trains African recruits in Mogadishu with considerably less transparency.

Turkish officials often say Turkey is an ally in the war against terrorism. Standing alongside President Trump during his most recent visit to the White House, Erdoğan said, “We’re just fighting terrorists, period. . . . Terrorists don’t have an ethnicity, they don’t have a nationality, they don’t have a flag. If they’re terrorists, that is a terrorist.” But much depends on Erdoğan’s definition of terrorism. In 2012, as al-Qaeda rampaged across northern Mali, Ahmet Kavaş, an Erdoğan appointee, defended the group against French intervention. “Al-Qaeda is very different from terror,” he said, adding, “The word ‘terror’ is a French invention. Not the work of Muslims.” Two years later, a tape recording surfaced of a phone call between a Turkish Airlines representative and Erdoğan’s office suggesting that Turkish intelligence had used the state carrier to smuggle weaponry to Boko Haram.

Turkey has used the same wordplay to justify its overt support for Hamas and to gloss over questions about its more covert assistance for both al-Qaeda affiliates in Iraq as well as the Islamic State, the vast majority of whose foreign fighters traversed Turkish territory to enter Syria. Indeed, Erdoğan’s rhetoric in Turkish often stands in sharp contrast to his more conciliatory language in English. When Turkish proxy forces poured across the border last month to attack the largely secular Kurdish-controlled administration in northeastern Syria, Erdoğan blessed “the Army of Muhammad.” That the Turkish-backed force included several dozen veterans of the Islamic State underscored the fact that Erdoğan’s definition of terrorism is in complete dissonance with the West’s.

Erdoğan’s antagonism toward the West runs deeper than just religion. While American diplomats like Trump’s Syria Special Envoy James Jeffery and some foreign policy thinkers—most notably the Hudson Institute’s Michael Doran—argue that Turkey is too important for the United States to turn away from, the real wedge between the United States and Turkey comes out of Ankara. According to the Pew Global Attitudes surveys, Turkey is among the most anti-American countries on earth. This is not a coincidence, but rather the result of more than a decade of anti-American incitement in Turkey’s state-controlled media.

Turkey’s recent turn toward Russia is a reflection of Erdoğan’s animosity toward America. To suggest Erdoğan pragmatically seeks to get the best deal for his country by forcing Washington and Moscow to bid for Turkey’s affection misses the point. First, the idea of NATO is collective defense in times of crisis, not an opportunity for members to launch bidding wars for cash, concessions, or contracts. Second, to apologize for Erdoğan’s tilt toward Russia ignores his embrace or promotion of pro-Russian aides and allies like military counselor Adnan Tanrıverdi or politician and activist Doğu Perinçek, a paramount influence among Turkey’s top brass, an unabashed critic of NATO, and a supporter of both Russia and a Eurasian alliance.

After Israel intercepted the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish-owned ship seeking to run Israel’s blockade and support Hamas, killing nine Turks in the process, Erdoğan threatened to use every international forum to undercut Israel. Erdoğan now uses the same tactics against the United States and NATO: Rather than simply withdraw from an alliance that he appears to despise, Erdoğan seeks to cripple it from within. NATO is a consensus driven organization, so Turkey and its Russian backer gain more leverage from filibustering its processes than by simply leaving the alliance. That there is no mechanism within NATO to expel a member only strengthens Turkey’s leverage.

Turkey may remain a member of NATO, but its strategic pivot toward Russia shifts the balance toward Moscow across the entire Black Sea region, allowing Russia to further solidify its strategic encroachment on Georgia and Ukraine.

Historians will debate how and when the West lost Turkey for many years to come, but one factor that contributed to its loss is plain enough to us now: wishful thinking. There is an unfortunate but pervasive tendency among top American officials to calibrate policy to how they wish countries were rather than how they are. For decades, such a tendency led Americans to turn a blind eye toward China’s challenge to the United States. So it is with Turkey: Not only Trump, but also Presidents Obama and George W. Bush before him refused to recognize Erdoğan’s transformation of Turkey from a reliable Western partner to a regional if not global adversary.

There is increasingly little foreign policy consensus in Washington, DC, but both Democrats and Republicans largely agree that the threats facing the United States are grave and growing. China increasingly shreds international norms. Iran has used proxy militias to undermine not only Iraq and Lebanon, but Syria and Yemen as well. Socialist, anti-American forces continue to find fertile ground in Latin America, North Korea threatens to attack the United States and its allies with nuclear weapons, and Russia challenges the United States and its NATO allies in both Europe and the Middle East. As Democrats choose their candidate to challenge Trump in 2020, it is crucial that Turkey be a component of the foreign policy debate.

Trump may consider Turkey an ally against threats facing the United States, but national security requires us to recognize that Turkey is more part of the problem than part of the solution. Erdoğan increasingly positions Turkey to be to the 21st century what Saudi Arabia was to the 20th—an engine of religious radicalism with global reach. It is easy to self-flagellate and accept as legitimate Turkish grievances about American policy, but indulging Turkey—whether on the Kurds, Cyprus, Syria, or any other issue—only encourages Erdoğan to demand more.

It may be impossible to expel Turkey from NATO, but that is no reason not to quarantine it within the organization, excluding it from meetings whenever possible and adjusting document classification to prevent Turkish officers from accessing its paper flows.

Nor should the Pentagon allow the U.S. military presence at Incirlik to excuse Turkish actions. Not only should the United States remove its nuclear weapons from Turkish soil, it should also consider evacuating Incirlik altogether, especially as it now has alternative base access in Romania and Jordan, as well as a more frequent carrier presence in the Eastern Mediterranean. Democrats should also commit to continue recent moves to encourage further trilateral U.S., Greek, and Cypriot military cooperation. The United States should stand firmly on Cyprus’s side to end Turkey’s 45-year military occupation, and should provide Cyprus with the means to prevent Turkish theft of its maritime resources. There is no longer any reason why deference to Turkey should lead the United States to whitewash history with regard to the Armenian genocide.

In hyperpolarized Washington, Turkey might also be a topic that brings Democrats and Republicans together in the service of common American interests. At a minimum, Congress should hold Turkey to account for its actions. Sanctions under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act should be applied, and Congress should use the power of the purse to compel the White House to conform to the law if necessary. The State Department might also invoke its powers under the Global Magnitsky Act to sanction those individuals within Turkey who have participated in or financially benefited from assaults on media freedom. Against the backdrop of Turkey’s ethnic cleansing of Syrian Kurds, Congress might also invite Kurdish leaders to address top committees or even a joint session.

Trump and Turkey’s supporters are correct to point to Turkey’s legacy as a Cold War ally. Americans should always appreciate Turkey’s sacrifices. But the generation that stood with America is now gone, imprisoned, or retired. Demography changes countries, incitement transforms them, and dictatorial abuses matter. Diplomats might have diagnosed Turkey’s cancer at the beginning of Erdoğan’s term, but they deluded themselves into thinking that bilateral relations were entering a temporary down phase. Today, the truth is all too clear: Any possibility of a Western-leaning Turkey is gone. It is long past time that not only Trump but also his would-be Democratic successors accept and address Turkey’s new strategic reality.

The post It’s Not Us—It’s Him appeared first on The American Interest.

How the BDS Movement Harms Arab Interests

The modern boycott of Israel and its people has evolved over time. It arguably began in the mid-20th century, when Arab elites enacted discriminatory and exclusionary policies against 900,000 Jews indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, culminating in their mass dispossession and forced migration. The boycott then developed into an Arab intergovernmental effort to target the young country to which most of these Jews fled—the state of Israel—through political, cultural, and economic isolation aimed at uprooting them and their European Jewish brethren from the area.

This second incarnation began to wane as some Arab states reached mutually beneficial accommodations with Israel, over the period between the signing of the Camp David accords in 1979 and peace between Israel and Jordan in 1994. But other elements in the region—both governmental and non-governmental—arose to supplant it: The third iteration of the boycott was a ban on all forms of civil engagement with Israelis, even and especially in countries where a peace between governments was flourishing.

This boycott, too, has since begun to fade, as a rising tide of Arab youth seek to engage their Israeli neighbors. But now a fourth iteration of the boycott has emerged, this time driven largely by foreigners. The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement brings together Islamist, far-left, and hardline Palestinian elites—primarily in Europe and the Americas—in a campaign to drive a cultural and economic wedge between Israelis and their global partners.

The history of boycotts against Israel is marked by several consistent patterns. First, boycotts have not only failed to defeat Israel and its people; they have actually spurred innovation, invigorating Israeli economy and society. At the same time, boycotts have harmed Arab societies and economies, and the techniques used in these boycotts have spread to other conflicts within Arab societies, hardening sectarian attitudes and increasing intra-communal divisions, thereby contributed to the disintegration of fractured nation-states including Yemen, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Furthermore, the boycotts have effectively isolated Palestinians within the West Bank and Gaza from the region: While hardline “resistance” factions have enjoyed support from numerous external powers, the Palestinians working to build institutions for a future state could hardly find Arab partners. Nor could they work hand in hand with Israelis in engaging the region—a role which would have empowered them economically. 

To rebuild and revitalize the region, we must break with this tragic history: We must overcome the boycott, for the benefit of all, moving from a mindset of segregation to a policy of integration. The following study traces the impact of all four phases of the boycott on Israelis and on Arabs. It then outlines a project to transition to a “post-boycott region,” in which the benefits of partnership overcome the folly of exclusion.

Phase One: Disgorging a Piece of Our Collective Soul

The disappearance of 900,000 Jews indigenous to Arab countries occurred over 25 years, from 1947 to 1972—in an historical blink of an eye. Some of the reasons these Jews left stemmed from discriminatory practices dating back centuries, while others were a product of the 20th century: the local embrace of anti-Jewish ideologies from the West and the desire to collectively punish Jews for the birth of Israel. The Arab world effectively disgorged a piece of its soul: its oldest community, a professional class, an intellectual juggernaut, a force for civil society and progress. And what the Arab world lost, Israel gained: nearly a million talented and resourceful people who, together with their offspring, now make up the majority of the country’s Jewish population.

While Arabic-speaking Jews eventually rebuilt their lives in Israel, the impact of the exodus on these Arab countries was dramatic, calamitous, and long-lasting. These Jews had made inestimable contributions to the economy, culture, and civic ethos of their Arab homelands. Egyptian Jews, for example, were disproportionately represented in the country’s banks, professional guilds, and particularly education and medicine. Before World War II the population of Baghdad was 40 percent Jewish—and included, for example, the first and most successful Finance Minister of the Iraqi state, and nearly all of the players in Iraq’s national orchestra. Somewhat similar stories could be told  about Jewish communities in, for example, Aleppo, Damascus, Beirut, Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli.

After Arab elites expelled this valuable human capital, rapid population increases in nearly every Arab country demanded a surge in medical and educational services to keep up. Instead, the loss of so many teachers and professionals put many Arab countries at a severe disadvantage. Economies gradually weakened. Civil society deteriorated. Poorer Arab states lacked the resources to train new teachers fast enough to meet rising demand. Standards and achievement levels continued to decline just as globalization was opening labor markets among economies. This left these countries falling behind in an increasingly competitive and more affluent world, which only further widened the income gap between them and, for example, the emerging economies of East Asia.

Phase Two: Boycotts Led by Governments

After the dust of the first Arab-Israeli war settled in late 1949, Arab states commenced their policy of boycotting Israel politically, culturally, and economically in hopes of uprooting it from the region. They established a Boycott Office under the auspices of the Arab League in 1951, with its headquarters in Cairo. 

The boycott was augmented by an aggressive and widespread campaign of demonizing Israel, its people, and Jews generally, through all public platforms of education, exhortation, and entertainment. Within Israel, where the incendiary rhetoric was widely heard, it stoked a well-founded sense of siege and peril, only confirming the need for a strong national homeland capable of defending itself. Meanwhile, the same rhetoric, consumed by Arabs en masse, acculturated Arab populations to a dark, conspiracy-laden view of the world. Rather than equip them with the tools to build a vibrant, cohesive society, it introduced tools of division and incitement which would later be trained on new targets.

As noted in phase one, the period of state-led boycotting coincided with the sharp deterioration of Arab economies and civil society. Eventually, the boycott itself collapsed as a unified pan-Arab phenomenon. Two Arab states signed peace treaties with Israel—Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994—and their success at recovering territory and gaining security and other benefits came not from boycotting Israel but rather from engaging it. These relationships, for all their enduring challenges and limits, have stood the test of significant time. Meanwhile, several other Arab states have built informal relations with Israel, a trend that began in earnest for most with the September 1991 Madrid Summit and that grows more pronounced every year. Here too, achievements and benefits have been scored through engagement, not boycott.

Economically, the magnitude of the original boycott’s failure to damage Israel is, if anything, even more striking. The Israeli economy has grown around the Arab boycott. Israel’s GDP has grown at a rate exceeding that of all Arab countries, save for a few of the oil-rich nations.

Phase Three: Boycotts Led by Non-State Actors

The governmental manifestation of the Arab boycott dimmed over time, and was dealt a blow by the direct engagement first of Egypt, then of Jordan and the PLO. But the growth of Islamist cultural influence over the period of 1978-1994 in effect transferred the mantle of the Arab boycott from Arab governments to civil society. This migration took place not just in Arab countries lacking formal diplomatic contact with Israel but also—and even more actively so—in Egyptian, Jordanian, and Palestinian societies.

These civic manifestations of the boycott managed to dash hopes all around, especially in Israel, that peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan would in time translate into a peace between peoples, rather than merely signaling relations among governments and a handful of elites.

Led by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Islamic Action Front in Jordan, and Hamas in the Palestinian territories, the boycott of Israel gathered new momentum—albeit not many new accomplishments. By forswearing the opportunity to engage in civil relations with Israel, the two Arab countries that now recognized it were deprived of the benefits of engagement with an economic and technological powerhouse. Israel might have found ways to partner with Egypt and Jordan in the field of cybernetics, but instead it was forced to look farther afield for partners. Major prospective infrastructure investments, too, such as a Red Sea-Dead Sea or Red Sea-Mediterranean canal, never attracted the necessary international funding, in part because of the pall cast over Israel by the Arabs’ shunning of it. Given Israel’s subsequent success at engaging with partners outside the region, the greater loss of boycotts by far has been to Arab economies.

Macroeconomic data reflect this process at work. As of 2016, trade with Europe accounts for roughly one third of total Israeli exports. The U.S. market accounts for nearly 24 percent, and China and other East Asian nations account for 21 percent. By contrast, no Arab nation accounts for more than 0.5 percent of Israeli exports; Jordan and Egypt, despite their peace treaties, combined account for no more than 0.31 percent of total Israeli commerce. 

The meager levels of Arab-Israeli commerce inspired Jordanian writer Ibrahim Gharabieh to quip that the current level of trade between Israel and Jordan amounted to “less than the compensation package of one senior director at Google.” Similarly, when assessing the state of the Arab League Boycott, the U.S. Congressional Research Service concluded in 2017 that, “since intra-regional trade is small, and the secondary and tertiary boycotts are not aggressively enforced, the boycott may not currently have an extensive effect on the Israeli economy.”

Meanwhile, while the societal boycott exacted non-trivial economic costs from the Arab states, its political costs proved in some respects even greater. This is because the original boycott of Israel became the template for a program of exclusion and marginalization that has since spread to many conflicts within the Arab world, and even within individual Arab countries. This phenomenon exacerbated inter-communal divisions, hardened sectarian attitudes, and generally undermined the social fabric.  

In Bahrain, for example, the conflict beginning in 2011 between the monarchy and Shi‘a Islamist parties moved inexorably from the political realm into the social and economic spheres. One of the first tool partisans turned to was a boycott. Ali Fakhro, a former Education Minister who sought to construct a national dialogue between the government and elements of the opposition, observed the effects as early as 2013: “People started boycotting restaurants … School children are not getting along. For the first time, they identify themselves as Shi‘a or Sunni.” As Fakhro noted, the effects reached both sides of the sectarian divide, with both Sunni and Shi‘a businesses hurt by the internecine economic warfare, forcing many stores and restaurants to close.

Nor has the damage been contained within the strictly economic realm. Indeed, the culture of boycotts has spread to the religious realm as well. In one example, Libya’s most prominent cleric, Grand Mufti Sadiq al-Ghariani, called upon all Muslims to boycott the hajj due to his staunch opposition to Saudi-backed LNA commander Khalifa Haftar. In taking such an audacious step, Ghariani proclaimed that any Muslim who went on additional hajj beyond the mandatory first, or on the optional Umrah pilgrimage, would be committing “an act of sin rather than a good deed.” He declared that any money paid to Saudi Arabia in order to go on either pilgrimage would “help Saudi Arabian rulers to carry out crimes against our fellow Muslims.”

Sadly, this was not the first time an advocate of boycott culture attempted to reduce the hajj to a pawn in the political arena. In 2018, furious over the conflict between Qatar and most of the GCC, Qatar-backed Brotherhood leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi issued a fatwa banning the pilgrimage outright. He stated that  “Allah has no need for the hajj,” and that “seeing Muslims feeding the hungry, treating the sick, and sheltering the homeless are better viewed by Allah than spending money on the hajj.”

In Egypt, coexistence between majority Sunni Muslims and minority Copts has often been marred by strife. Lately the boycott mentality has only made things worse. Pro-Muslim Brotherhood activist Ayat Oraby made headlines by explicitly calling for Muslims to boycott the Christians of Egypt over their support for Abdel Fatah El-Sisi. 

Some observers might suppose these episodes to be no more than the fits of a passing moment, mere sectarian impulses attributable to the extraordinary circumstances of the so-called Arab Spring and its aftermath. But even before the outbreak of the Arab Spring, clear signs of a metastasizing boycott culture poised to exploit and worsen sectarian cleavages already existed in Egypt. For example, in 2010, Salafi activists began an intensive campaign calling for economic boycott of Coptic Christians, claiming improbably that “the state has become a lackey of the Church in all things, and the Church has embarked on a plan to convert Muslim Egypt by applying the ‘Spanish model’ during the war on Islam in Andalusia.” The following year, this campaign spread from the internet to the street. In the Upper Egyptian city of Qena, Salafi groups distributed pamphlets outside the al-Nour and al-Wihdah mosques calling on Egyptian Muslims to boycott Coptic doctors and Coptic-owned businesses. 

In a similar vein, the rising current of Salafi jihadism, which has afflicted most Arab countries to one extent or another and many majority-Muslim societies beyond, has grown increasingly bold in inciting its followers to employ economic boycotts against any who do not share their interpretation of religion. As one fatwa put it, “If it is known that this money or part of it will be paid to the Shi‘a, they must be boycotted,” and “we must all boycott these institutions, companies, and factories, and if any of us know of a factory that supports even partially the war on Islam, we must boycott it, whether it is Christian, Shi‘i, Hindu or anything else.”

Phase IV: Boycotts Led by Foreigners

One might think that given such a track record compiled over more than half a century, the illogic of boycotting Israel would have become clear. Not so. While a rising tide of Arab elites and youth have come to reject the boycott and call for direct civil relations with Israel, a new, predominantly foreign coalition of far-left activists, Islamists, and hardline Palestinian factions have consolidated the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction (BDS) movement.

The original boycott did not actively seek the support of governments or organizations outside the Arab and Muslim worlds, and before the 1980s international social democratic sentiment lay strongly with Israel. The BDS movement, unable to marshal unified Arab state support for its programs, has put a premium on trying to attract international governmental and NGO support, predominantly from leftwing quarters. The original boycott was explicit about its aim of extirpating Israel as a Jewish state; the BDS movement on the whole maintains the same aim, but obscures it by referring only to the “right of return” for Palestinian refugees, apparently in order to appeal more effectively to global audiences. 

The BDS movement invests most of its energy on cultural endeavors, avidly seeking academic and entertainment industry endorsement. It does so because an economic emphasis, despite BDS rhetoric, is essentially not feasible. BDS organizers may sometimes manage to persuade private sector figures to make statements that do not involve an actual cost, but getting corporations to divest valuable equities for non-economic reasons is something else altogether.

And indeed, while the BDS campaign has indeed won some symbolic victories in the aforementioned cultural zone, the economic damage inflicted on Israel by the BDS movement has been negligible. The thrust of the BDS economic effort has been to migrate the waning Arab economic boycott to the West. This goal has not succeeded, largely because of the specific nature of Israeli-Western economic exchanges. Unlike many of its Arab neighbors, whose economies are dominated by commodities that can be easily substituted from alternate suppliers, nearly 60 percent of Israeli exports are what economists classify as “differentiated goods,” meaning they cannot easily be substituted for by consumers. This is particularly the case in the technology sector. As one report by the Brookings Institution noted, “View a video of a BDS rally, and there’s a fair chance the footage was taken on a device that utilizes Israeli technology: The boycott is broken before it begins.”

Moreover, according to the same report, roughly 40 percent of Israeli exports are intermediate goods, meaning they are used in the production process of other goods produced elsewhere. In other words, Israeli products are deeply embedded in global value and supply chains, rendering them difficult to target in boycotts. And although boycott activists are fond of citing South Africa as a precedent, the Israeli economy of 2019 is structurally much less vulnerable than its South African counterpart of the 1980s. South African exports in the 1980s and 1990s were “high substitutable, unlike Israel’s today,” with more than 60 percent of South Africa’s export basket consisting of such commoditized goods as minerals and metals, as opposed to roughly 40 percent of Israeli exports. 

While the BDS effort has had but negligible economic effects on Israel, it has inflicted substantial costs on the Arab world—particularly on those who can least afford it. Advocates of perpetuating the boycott among its Palestinian organizers and their leftwing, mostly European, allies often make exaggerated claims about its damage to the Israeli economy. But they rarely if ever tally the costs it imposes on the Arab world generally, and the Palestinians in particular. That price is paid in the form of opportunity cost in trade barred from realization, projects blocked from completion, and trade routes warped out of alignment. 

It is difficult to calculate any individual nation’s BDS tote sheet, but several examples offer clues as to the scale of the ongoing loss. For instance, after Morocco legalized tourism from Israel, it began to receive an annual influx of 50,000 tourists, generating millions in additional revenue. In gross terms, the BDS boycott costs Arab states on balance at least $4 billion annually in terms of forfeited oil exports and tourism revenue. 

Additionally, several major commercial and industrial projects have been left unrealized or capped at well beneath their economic potential by the lingering influence of the boycott, and the reluctance of some Arab states to defy it. One such example is the Peace Pipeline initiative. That initiative, which is projected to carry oil from Port Said to Gaza, Tel Aviv, and Beirut, is estimated to be worth some $1-2 billion per year to Egypt alone. But due to the lingering shadow of the boycott, it may never come to fruition.

In the fraught case of SodaStream, an Israeli company targeted by BDS activists was forced to shutter a factory in the West Bank, costing more than 500 Palestinians their jobs. As one Palestinian employee commented, ‎”the global BDS campaign has done the Palestinians more harm ‎than good … Thousands of people were harmed because the ‎factory in Ma’alei Adumim was shut down.”

Though relatively minor compared to trade with Western and Far Eastern markets, some Arab-Israeli commerce has been underway for years. For example, Israeli exports to the GCC have been estimated at nearly $1 billion per year. All of this trade is indirect, however, carried out through third-party countries—primarily through European Union member states, and to a lesser extent via Jordan and Turkey. Its size is masked in official statistics as exports to their intermediate destinations as opposed to their final port of call. Regional integration, more likely in the absence of the boycott mentality, would minimize the need for and costs of these wasteful side-transactions. That is a goal that the BDS movement is doing everything it can to prevent.

One particularly perverse consequence of the BDS campaign has been to inhibit trade between Palestinians and Arab nations. From 2000 to 2010, trade with Arab nations accounted for less than 10 percent of total Palestinian trade. According to one study, increased access to GCC markets that would accompany an end of the boycott has the potential to increase Palestinian exports to those markets by over 50 percent. 

As suggested earlier, economic harm to the Palestinians by the BDS movement is but a recent addition to a decades-long historical trajectory. For decades, while Palestinian terrorists found steadfast support from various wealthy regional actors, the much larger number of Palestinians who yearned to build their own institutions of civil society — that is, the foundations of a future state — have been as isolated from the region as their Israeli neighbors, if not more so. 

A Campaign to Roll Back the Damage

In sum, for too long, too many Arabs—and more recently non-Arabs—have pursued an antiquated boycott policy and looked away as its failures have continued to mount. Let us agree that the boycott concept has done enough damage already. It has prevented Arab countries from gaining the benefits of partnership with Israelis. It has impeded Arab civil society from exercising a positive influence on Israelis and Palestinians alike by way of friendship. It has inspired new intra-Arab boycotts—such as mutual boycotts between rival sects inhabiting the same urban space—which exacerbated cleavages within Arab societies. The practice of marginalizing “the Other” has spread into Arab national and communal homes, weakening the social fabric at just the moment in history when we could least afford it.

The cause of rebuilding and revitalizing the region demands a break with this tragic history. We must work to overcome the boycott, moving from a mindset of segregation to a policy of integration. 

With an eye to some solutions, let us begin with an operationally-minded distillation of the problem, by reviewing the boycott’s depth and expanse, the means of its spread, and the state of efforts to roll it back. With respect to the depth and expanse, a movement launched long ago by Arab elites proceeded to take root in Arab societies, then spread beyond our region to the broader Islamic and developing world and ultimately the West. With respect to the mechanics of the movement’s spread, it has been largely an exercise in mass communication and political pressure, implemented by a shifting coalition of Arab establishments followed by non-state actors. Regarding the state of current efforts to challenge the boycott, it appears that on the one hand, opponents of the boycott have managed to block specific initiatives, and Israel has thoroughly circumvented the boycott’s impositions. On the other hand, hardly any work has been done to challenge the discourse of the boycott in Arab societies. The culture of the boycott remains powerful in Arab lands—and neither Western nor Arab publics are adequately aware of its damage to Arab interests.

These observations invite the following operational conclusions:

Since the boycott developed through mass communication and political pressure, first in Arabic and then in other languages, it must also be confronted through a campaign of corrective communications and public outreach—in all of the same languages, beginning with Arabic. 
Since the culture of the boycott swelled from the Arab region to much of the world, the Arab response must be similarly global.
Even as Islamists, the far left, and hardline Palestinian factions have congealed into a coalition, Arabs for integration can build our own coalition from constituencies that are larger and potentially stronger: Arab and Muslim proponents of tolerance and coexistence, mainstream political voices in the West, and Palestinians who favor both a two-state solution and a mindset of institution-building in their territory. 
Given that present-day efforts to challenge the boycott lack the capacity to reach Arab societies and are all but silent about the boycott’s toll on Arabs, we must fill these gaps.

The premises would serve to inform a new campaign for a post-boycott region. By engaging allies and volunteers in Arab and non-Arab capitals, the campaign would undertake the following:

Conduct Arab media outreach: Within the Middle East and North Africa, launch a communications campaign involving TV documentaries, panels, and publications that explain the human and economic toll of the boycott on Arabs generally. A vibrant digital platform will meanwhile build on this attention to directly engage a growing following.
Conduct Western media outreach: At the same time, convey a special message to international audiences: While BDS activists strive to move the region backward toward segregation, a rising tide of progressive Arab youth want to move forward toward integration. Inform these publics that the struggle against the boycott is an Arab cause first and foremost—and its success is a necessary condition for Arab human development.
Model a post-boycott region: Drawing inspiration from the peaceful civil rights campaigns against segregation in the mid-twentieth century American South, organize public activities that actually breach the boycott. These would include, for example, Arab and Israeli academic exchange in their respective universities’ conferences; cultural collaborations, such as joint Arab-Israeli film productions; and bold new private sector partnerships, occurring in the light of day.
Challenge segregationist laws: In several Arab countries, draconian legislation prescribes years in prison for merely meeting an Israeli citizen, and countless professional guilds maintain bylaws to ostracize any members who do the same. Meanwhile, in some Western countries, BDS elements have attempted to use the democratic process to force governments and businesses to comply with the boycott, in some cases as a matter of criminal law as well. In response, organize a multi-pronged project of testimony and advocacy for integration—in Arab and Western legislatures, professional guilds, and the halls of decision-making, sector by sector.
Pursue teachable moments at public assemblies: Though BDS demonstrators advocate an agenda harmful to Arab interests, the presence of some Arabs among them creates the false impression that it is a “pro-Arab” movement. We must challenge this distortion by making our own voices heard, and expressing the simple and obvious truth that Arabs are the boycott’s first—and only—victims.

The post How the BDS Movement Harms Arab Interests appeared first on The American Interest.

Susan Sontag: Race, Class, and the Limits of Style

In her autobiography, Gwendolyn Brooks recalls meeting Susan Sontag during a tour of Russia in 1994, and Sontag’s outrage at being passed over by international reporters as an expert on race in America:

Susan is screaming. My outrageous fancy that I know more about Being Black than she knows has pushed her to a wild-eyed frenzy…. Finally, she utters an unforgettable sentence–which I can report exactly, because I wrote it down immediately: ‘I TURN MY BACK UPON YOU.’ And she does. She carries out this awesome threat. She turns her Back upon me, with a gr-r-eat shake of her bottom to appall me. I am ass-uredly impressed.

In the 25 years since that piqued volte-face, in the 15 years since her death, after the posthumous publication of her journals, and now on the occasion of the arrival of Benjamin Moser’s 800-page biography, Sontag: Her Life—what is Sontag’s interest to us, now? More to the point, 60 years after the Civil Rights movement, how do we assess Sontag’s theories about the arts and her racial politics?

Sontag’s criticism was marked by a formalist aversion to content. Sontag spelled out this critical program in her 1964 essay, “Against Interpretation,” which now appears in the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism in its most recent third edition—the sure sign of her domestication by American humanities. Interpretation often “amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone” and is “largely reactionary, stifling.” Instead, Sontag argues that works of art should be “experienced” in the ineffable intensity of their formal features, calling for “an erotics of art” in place of a hermeneutics.

As exciting as that sounds, in fact, Sontag’s criticism was stodgy and conventional, even for its time. As Simon During has noted, her critical program consists largely of T.S. Eliot’s theorizing circa 1919. Irving Howe called Sontag “a publicist able to make brilliant quilts from grandmother’s patches.” Sontag herself cited the influence of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. At the University of Chicago, Sontag seems to have internalized Leo Strauss’s observation that ruling elites pretend to believe in values that they know are hollow, for the benefit of their social inferiors. Sontag did not follow Eliot’s or Strauss’s rightward drift but wedded their critical stance with leftist politics and social criticism, up to a point.

For someone who figures so centrally in 20th-century American intellectual history, there is an odd scarcity of discussion of race or minority literature or culture in her work. This isn’t simply an effect of her dedication to the European avant-garde. Rather, even when directly commenting on American politics and culture, blackness and black people are eerily absent. Not a single black person or artwork appears in her famous essay, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” in 1964—a year that would see the signing of the Civil Rights Act, the March on Washington, and the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Martin Luther King, Jr. Considering how central race has been to American melodrama and the persistence of minstrelsy in America until alarmingly recently, Sontag’s inattention during her most productive and publicly engaged years of activity should raise eyebrows.

To be sure, for all her self-stylization, Sontag was typical of her segment of the American intellectual class, in treating issues of race briefly, in passing, and a little awkwardly. It’s worth focusing on Sontag’s handling of race—and in turn, class.

Sontag’s short essay, “What’s Happening in America?” (1966), written in response to a questionnaire from Partisan Review about current affairs and longer-term social and political trends in American life, demonstrates the limits of her politics. It has remained in print in Sontag’s second major collection of essays, Styles of Radical Will.

With a very few tweaks, Sontag’s essay could be a set-piece of left-liberal blustering pessimism during the Reagan, W. Bush or Trump Administrations: denunciations of America’s “barbarism” under the leadership of “yahoos”; mediations on the aesthetic repulsiveness of the American-built environment and the distracting, mind-numbing cacophony of media-saturated life; a certain suspicion that most Americans are satisfied, or at best, complicit with, our national sins; a call for “rehauling Western ‘masculinity’”; and unfavorable contrasts to Europe. But most of all: an account of race that posits racial violence as ontologically built into American life and therefore inescapable.

Sontag begins with “three facts about this country”: first, that “America was founded on genocide” by white Europeans, and second, that America had “the most brutal system of slavery in modern times [with] a judicial system . . . which did not, in a single respect, recognize slaves as persons.”

To pause here, Sontag’s position is quite remarkable for 1966. She declares: “The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.” In answer to the question, “Is white America committed to granting equality to the American Negro?”, Sontag gives scant credit to “only a minority of white Americans, mostly educated and affluent, few of whom have had any prolonged social contact with Negroes. This is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.” Yet Sontag speaks unapologetically from the community she indicts. It’s inverted snobbery, or pessimism with a perk: America is racist and cosmopolitan liberal whites are ineffectual, but at least they’re (read: we’re) the best of a bad lot.

Sontag shows this condescension even when—or especially when—reviewing art about race. It is hard not to cringe reading Sontag’s 1964 review of James Baldwin’s Blues for Mr. Charlie and Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman (in the Partisan Review issue prior to the one featuring “Notes on ‘Camp’”). Sontag is typically indifferent to political questions of experience or equality:

Once a grotesque, a figure of folly—childlike, lawless, lascivious—“the Negro” is fast becoming the American theatre’s leading mask of virtue….for sheer pain and victimage, the Negro is far ahead of any other contender in America. In just a few short years, the old liberalism, whose archetypal figure was the Jew, has been challenged by the new militancy, whose hero is the Negro. But while the temper which gives rise to the new militancy—and to “the Negro” as hero—may indeed scorn the ideas of liberalism, one feature of the liberal sensibility hangs one. We still tend to choose our images of virtue from among our victims.

Who is this “we”? Deeming both plays hysterical fantasies about sex, Sontag glosses over the racism that Baraka and Baldwin are writing about and against, arguing that “the racial situation has become a kind of code, or metaphor for sexual conflict.” Sontag suggests that writers like Baldwin and Baraka use racial dilemmas as occasions for exercising libidinal desires and resentments.

Which brings us to Sontag’s third “fact” about America: that it was “created mainly by the surplus poor of Europe” with a resentful view of “culture” and an expedient understanding of “nature.” America “was filled up by new generations of the poor and built up according to the tawdry fantasy of the good life that culturally deprived, uprooted people might have at the beginning of the industrial era. And the country looks it.” Such an unapologetically patrician, condescending, uncomprehending grasp of the class character of American immigration (let alone ignoring of the slave trade) is hard to find on the American Left, even in 1966. One must stop and make sure Partisan Review isn’t, in a moment of levity, printing a parody of Ivy League WASPishness, lamenting just how much America seems to be designed to please the poor. (Poor people might be surprised to learn this.)

Boston University hosts the archive of Partisan Review, which is available online. To readers curious about the strangeness of Sontag’s vision, other responses to PR’s questionnaire suggest that hers is not the one most worth keeping in print today. Consider Michael Harrington’s take on race in the late 1960s:

White America is certainly not going to “grant” equality to the Negroes. Civil rights is now an issue which challenges the economic and social premises of the nation in areas like employment, housing, and education; it is not longer a confrontation with the sectional prejudices of the Old Confederacy… Thus, a frontlash unity will be created when the black and white poor and the organized and unorganized workers realize that their immediate self-interest can only be guaranteed through a somewhat idealistic coalition (as, for instance, the hostile national and religious blocs within the industrial working class learned out of necessity to join together in the CIO during the thirties).

Harrington’s vision is hopeful, but grounded in material reality. By contrast, Sontag’s is both pessimistic and abstruse at the same time. Furthermore, several of Sontag’s fellow New York intellectuals directly engaged with civil rights: Hannah Arendt weighed on the topic of school desegregation, fumblingly if importantly, with “Reflections on Little Rock,” in 1959. In 1963 and 1964, Irving Howe debated Ralph Ellison in the pages of literary magazines on the subject of race, art, and protest. There were plenty of models for engagement.

But for Sontag, class, wealth, and poverty are not aspects of American political order. Rather, just as racial conflict is a form of sexual shadow-boxing, poverty is the perpetrator of American tackiness. America is not a place where social groups contend for dominance and prestige. American power is not the institutionalization of particular Americans’ interests. Indeed, for Sontag in her most ardent mode, America is not even a place with people in it, but a persona itself.

In this tendency, Sontag hewed to the example set a generation earlier by literary critic Lionel Trilling, maintaining devotion to high culture, synthesizing both modernist irony and a yearning for sincerity. Both seemed oblivious to the salient facts of American social life, while claiming to pronounce on the American cultural scene. (One can read Trilling’s 1950 The Liberal Imagination and not know that there once was slavery in America, let alone that racial segregation was still the law of the land.) Sontag cared about the page more than the street; she embodied the sort of left bohemian Howe defined as “sedate, subversive, and transcendental all at once.” Even when pronouncing on social reality, what matters is the figurative, not the real.

A 1969 essay appearing in Ramparts but unfortunately not anthologized, “Some Thoughts on the Right Way (for us) to Love the Cuban Revolution,” typifies this “style” of Sontag’s “radical will.” Sontag assumes an explicitly pedagogical stance, explaining Cuban society and politics to American leftists, but the essay is just as much about the American Left (the “us”). Her account of the Cuban Revolution is generous, even indulgent, but more striking is her analytical method, both here and in “What’s Happening”: charting the blockages, discharges, and vicissitudes of a nation’s “energy”—a primordial force at work in everything from military conquests to dance fads. In this glib, unreflective vitalism—borrowed in debased form from the psychological theories of the New Left culture from which she claims to take a critical distance—ideas are presumed to matter less than impulses. The formal experience of political commitment (whatever its scale) precedes any particular interpretation of this or that group’s political interests.

In examining Sontag’s work from this period, it’s hard not to fault her in part for the cartoonish, patronizing tropes of “The Sixties” which persist in our culture today. Sontag is too smart to use the word “hippie,” but her account of youth culture and politics is often just as much of a caricature. So, too, do her attempts at political mapping often devolve into farce: in this corner, the Old Left, made of stodgy Marxists whose greatest desires are for state bureaucracies; and in this corner (exclusively a college campus), the New Left, whose fixation on experience and personality preclude any attempt at institutional justice.

What is missing in this typology? The civil rights and anti-war movements themselves, made up of people of all ages, many of them total squares, with a variety of motivations and strategies for synthesizing the personal and the political. By over-investing in the Old/New Left typology and exalting its most particular aspects into their essences, Sontag erases political movements themselves, which often have a messy, ambivalent relationship to the work of intellectuals.

In short, Sontag’s commitment to a formalist view of American life leads her to 1) an account of race which is easy because it’s so world-weary and austere and therefore feels so devastating, and 2) a stunning obtuseness about class. Unfortunately, this is a leftist posture which has grown familiar in a certain kind of affluent, culturally sophisticated wokeness, so eager to signal its tortured conscience and aesthetic sensitivity—the very “minority of white Americans” she pointed to in 1966. At other times, she seems simply careless, such as in “Aesthetics of Silence” (1967), where in noting Rimbaud’s turn from poetry to the slave trade she is concerned only with the loss for poetry.

Her later political writings were more conventionally liberal, and may well age better, in part because events conspired to place her in a less powerful position. In “Illness as Metaphor” (1978), written when she was undergoing breast cancer treatments, and in “AIDS as Metaphor” (1989), she critiqued the impulse to metaphorize illness and showed how it tends to ignore the humanity of those who live, suffer, and die—especially those on the margins of society. In journalism and interviews, and in travel requiring real bravery and resourcefulness, Sontag did her part and more to raise the alarm about the genocide in former Yugoslavia. With her international commentary after 9/11, Sontag told uncomfortable truths. In a brief New Yorker statement two weeks after, she passed over the opportunity to express sympathy for the victims and survivors, and instead opted for swift, uncompromising scrutiny of the attack’s historical context and political exploitation. Her stance seemed callous to many at the time, even if her criticism arguably seems more prescient in hindsight. In any case, her essay on the photos of prisoner abuse from Abu Ghraib, “Regarding the Torture of Others,” is an object lesson in how a sophisticated grasp of a medium can help explain its moral significance.

In these interventions, Sontag was not unique, nor especially erudite, or even that radical. Rather, what these later concerns share is a broadly humanist outrage against injustice—an outrage which has become, thankfully, more mainstream in our culture since Sontag’s death in 2004.

What, then, to make of Sontag now? There is no ignoring her intensity and flashes of insight. But these flashes came out of an erudition less adept at understanding how people really live and what they want. One can’t help but feel less than ass-uredly impressed.

The post Susan Sontag: Race, Class, and the Limits of Style appeared first on The American Interest.