Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 24

A Blinkered Case for Nationalism

The Case for Nationalism: How It Made Us Powerful, United, and Free

Rich Lowry

Broadside Books, 2019, 288 pp., $26.99

If we are fortunate, one way or another, through impeachment or the ballot box, the Trump era will soon draw to an end. What will fill the enormous void left by the departure of the mega-miscreant Donald Trump? Unsurprisingly, a sick body politic is vulnerable to yet more disease.

Lately, on the political right there has been an outbreak of nationalism, which typically presents in one of two conditions: benign and malign. A prime specimen of the latter is Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism, which I dissected at length in these pages. Now, from Rich Lowry, longtime editor of the flagship conservative publication National Review, we have another sample ready for laboratory analysis, The Case for Nationalism: How It Made Us Powerful, United, and Free. The “Us” in the subtitle refers to the United States, and in his book Lowry unabashedly proclaims that “I’m an American nationalist.” In which category does Lowry’s strain of nationalism fall, healthy or cancerous?

Some dark suspicions that it is of the diseased sort are immediately aroused by Lowry’s opening acknowledgment that he owes his own awakening as a nationalist to the person of Donald Trump. It was Trump, Lowry writes, who had the genius to “put the debate over nationalism at the top of the national agenda.” What is more, “[w]hen abstracted from his combative rhetorical style and more idiosyncratic policy enthusiasms (e.g. taking Iraq’s oil), the rudiments of Trump’s nationalism should be hard to oppose—or would be in a more rational time than the one we live in.”

Nationalism, of course, is not without its severe critics, and Lowry is at pains to debunk the widespread notion that nationalism is a “dirty word.” He thus seeks to answer various “anti-nationalists” who regard nationalism as nothing more than tribalism or equate it with white supremacy. To all such voices, Lowry says, essentially, relax, calm down, nationalism is a healthy force, synonymous with nothing other than patriotism.

After answering critics, Lowry also offers a positive case that revolves around the proposition that American nationalism “in particular is not to be feared.” Whatever ills have in the past infected Europe, America is inoculated by its heritage, the Anglo-American tradition and the Scottish Enlightenment, which brought us “profound respect for the individual and the rule of law and is woven into the fabric of our country.” Far from shunning nationalism, Republicans and Democrats alike would do well to embrace it.

Promoting nationalism, for Lowry, entails advancing a number of specific policies. Important among them is limiting immigration: “it is in the nation’s interest to have fewer and better-skilled immigrants coming here. Such a change would promote the economic prospects of Americans and the assimilation of immigrants, both important goals for national health.”

Lowry would also step in to the educational arena to combat what he sees as the fissiparous ideology of identity politics, which not only divides Americans instead of uniting us, but also embraces “a hostility to the American nation as such, to its cultural supports, its traditions, and its history.”

Above all, Lowry would advance what he calls “cultural nationalism,” which entails promoting all of the things that bring us together as one people, from the English language to our national holidays to our reverence for our Constitution and flag to our civic rites and common traditions and history.

What are we to make of Lowry’s case?

As a columnist, Lowry had established himself as a conservative realist, an analyst of current affairs who strives to see things as they are, with vision unclouded by passions of the moment or any measure of ideological glaucoma. During the 2016 presidential primaries, he was an ardent NeverTrumper who gave over an entire issue of National Review to a collection of withering essays on Trump’s unfitness for public office.

With Trump’s election, however, Lowry has had a change of heart and has become, if not a fervent Trumpist, at least a NeverNeverTrumper, someone on the lookout for silver linings in Trump’s unusual presidency, an occasional apologist for some of Trump’s behavior, and a consistent if relatively gentle scourge of the President’s #NeverTrump critics. Though his book for the most part eschews the politics of the moment, it is nonetheless to some degree of a piece with this recent pro-Trump tilt. It is also an irksome muddle.

Thus, on the one hand, at one juncture in his book Lowry tells us that nationalism is not connected to aggression, racism, and fascism, which arise not from any one specific ideological outlook but are simply “endemic to the human condition.” Underpinning most critiques of nationalism, he writes, “is the mistaken assumption that the rumble of Prussian jackboots can be heard underneath it, leading inexorably to fascism and Nazi Germany.” Following Hazony, Lowry excludes Nazism from the nationalist ambit. Nazism may have “exploited nationalist tropes,” he writes, “but [it] was also something completely different—a totalitarian ideology based on biological racism.” We must reject the “smear” which holds that nationalism is the “inevitable progenitor of war and anti-Semitism.” Pointing to Nazism, Lowry states point blank that “the idea that this cracked worldview had anything important in common with run-of-the-mill nationalism . . . is frankly absurd” (emphasis added).

But at the same time, at another juncture in his book, Lowry rotates 180 degrees and writes that “extreme” nationalism or nationalism based upon “unquenchable grievance” is positively “dangerous.” He also tells us that the nationalisms of the first half of the 20th century were tainted with “malign influences,” and the immediate cause of World War I was “Serb nationalism.” At yet another juncture, he writes that it is impossible “to deny the role of nationalism and the nation-state in the modern era’s conflagrations.” In the final analysis, he concedes that “nationalism has more and less desirable forms,” and that some of those forms “deserve all the obloquy heaped on them.”

The contradictions here are blatant. From Lowry’s own words we see that nationalism is not always synonymous with patriotism; rather, in a number of cases that he himself cites, nationalism and despotism often coincide. This tangle cannot be resolved by creating a category called “run-of-the-mill” nationalism and then excluding from it every bit of nationalism’s terrible past.

That said, the argument for nationalism should not necessarily rise or fall on that terrible past. Although Lowry does not seem to recognize it, erasing chapters of nationalism’s history via redefinition is wholly unnecessary to the case for a distinctively American and liberal brand of nationalism. Lowry makes precisely that case and it is the strongest part of his book.

Here, Lowry is arguing a nationalism that is “inclusive.” We should not believe, he writes, “the lie perpetrated by white nationalists that our culture is in any meaningful sense ‘white’ or the countervailing lie perpetrated by black nationalists that blacks are anything other than fully American.” Never mind that black nationalists of the sort Lowry is invoking in this parallel are a rarity these days, while white nationalism has become a vibrant force. Lowry is on target in defending an American nationalism that is based upon a “capacious and merciful self-understanding.”

In this Lowry is advocating for a nationalism that “isn’t based on hatred, [but] instead on love: our affection for home and our own people. It is caught up in culture, in the language, manners, and rituals that set off any given country from another.” This kind of benign or even salutary nationalism, Lowry demonstrates, has been under assault by elites, primarily on the Left, who have been engaged in the relentless deconstruction of the idea of American unity and the American nation. Here Lowry has in mind a variety of figures, preeminent among them the late and hugely influential left-wing historian Howard Zinn, who presented our country’s past as “an unremitting tale of greed and oppression, a monstrous scam perpetrated on the masses by a parasitical and self-interested ruling class.”

But even as he effectively attacks the left, Lowry is not blind to the dark side of American nationalism’s history. He both recognizes and applauds the fact that our self-image has changed over time, noting that we have come to reject a blinkered, racially one-sided vision of America led by an ascendant Anglo-Protestant elite. In its stead is a “cosmopolitanism” that has “contributed to a more open and just society.” That shift was “healthy,” Lowry maintains, even though it gave way “to something more extreme, namely, to an opposition to the unity of the American people as such and the very basis of the American nation.”

If Lowry’s defense of American nationalism, properly conceived, is the strongest, most persuasive, part of his book, the weakest is his treatment of Donald Trump.

The essence of Trump’s nationalist campaign themes, in Lowry’s summation, consisted of a number of “amazingly simple” propositions: immigration and trade policies need to be conceived “with our own interests foremost in mind”; foreign threats need to be guarded against with the “utmost vigilance,” hence the Muslim ban and the pledge, in Trump’s words,  to “bomb the shit” out of ISIS; secure borders are a sine qua non of sovereignty, which demands the erection of “a big beautiful wall”; and finally, the most important element of all to Lowry: “our country, not any other nation or international body or alliance, should always come first.”

But whether any of these positions, apart from the erection of a border wall, is distinctively nationalistic in any meaningful way is questionable.

The fact of the matter is that almost all presidents at all times have sought to guard against foreign threats with the “utmost vigilance.” And almost all presidents at all times have attempted to put the national interest first. How they have defined the national interest is where significant differences among them have arisen. What is more, instead of being a nationalist in this respect, Trump might be an exception to the general rule: He is a President who, far from seeking to promote the national interest, has often sought to put his own political and personal interests ahead of those of the nation. Witness his machinations in Ukraine; witness the self-enriching selection (now aborted) of his own resort in Florida to hold the G-7 conference; witness the unprecedented nepotism in his White House.

Lowry criticizes Trump for “wild presidential tweets, extreme boastfulness, excoriating attacks on the media [and] the browbeating of allies.” But, curiously, apart from calling Trump’s handling of Charlottesville a low point in his presidency, he says not another word about Trump’s contribution to the ugly nationalism of racism and xenophobia that the President has promoted.

An immigration policy such as Trump’s that is based upon the demonization of immigrants and refugees, that labels Mexicans rapists and murderers, that vilifies Somali refugees, that would ban adherents of an entire faith from entering the country, has nothing in common with the assimilation-promoting policy that Lowry says he has in mind. Far from contributing to the restoration of a healthy American nationalism or uniting the country, Trump has further poisoned the concept, divided us into warring tribes, and brought shame on the nation that Lowry, rightfully, would have us laud. In hailing Trump for having “eloquently expressed nationalism,” Lowry the aspiring realist commits a cardinal intellectual sin: he willfully and (I suspect) disingenuously shuts his eyes to the malignancy that is directly in front of us all.

The post A Blinkered Case for Nationalism appeared first on The American Interest.

Nationalism: Handle With Care

Nationalism, until lately, has not been a subject for enlightened conversation. And even lately, it often still isn’t. Donald Trump and his fellow travelers elsewhere may have brought it decisively out of history’s closet, but others just as vehemently would cram it back in.

The central reason for this is well-known and widely assented-to. Nationalism, multiple generations in the West have been educated to believe, has a lot to answer for. It caused the “senseless” bloodletting of the First World War, which in turn caused the Second, which made the First look mild by comparison. Never mind that what seems “senseless” to us made sense aplenty to many at the time. Nationalism, according to the authorized version, makes for war; war is the worst fate that can befall us; and only by blunting its instruments—nation-states and their handmaid, armaments—can we escape a repeat of civilizational catastrophe.

Signs abounded, well before the rise of Trump and company, that nationalism was not slain but sleeping. After the Wall fell, the old Balkan tinderbox flared anew with old nationalisms. The rage for regional devolution, from Scotland to Catalonia to Kurdistan, looked like nationalism under another name. Before that, the closing-down of European empire and the decolonization process went forward across Africa and Asia under the banner of Wilsonian self-determination. Today, nationalist governments hold power in Poland, Hungary, Turkey, India, arguably in Italy, until recently in Austria, to say nothing of nationalists-in-chief Russia and China and the nationalist-accented populism roiling much of the Western world.

When future historians look back on our present frenzies, they might take a cue from one of the greatest students of the American past. Half a century ago, David M. Potter considered the subject of nationalism in an essay that deserves a much wider readership. Potter was a historian’s historian, with a bibliography that was not huge but was uniformly heavy-caliber. His Yale dissertation became his first book, Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis (1942). People of Plenty (1954) tackled the theme of economic abundance and the American national character, at a time when America was still deemed to have such a thing. The South and the Sectional Conflict (1968) explored the tensions of sectionalism, nationalism and equalitarianism, while The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (1976) posthumously won him the Pulitzer. Potter taught at Yale and Stanford with stops in Chicago and Oxford and wrote old-order consensus history, which argued that deep continuity more than conflict best described the American past. He wrote before fixations of race, class, gender, and data deluged his profession. He was a white man born in Georgia in 1910, with short-cropped hair and usually sporting a bow tie. And his work on nationalism provides a cautionary guide to our present situation.

“The Historian’s Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa” first appeared in the American Historical Review, the house organ of American academic historians, in 1962. It was a long and subtle piece of work, dissecting what Potter understood as the basic bifurcation in historians’ understanding of the idea of nationalism, and then illustrating what he meant from his own field: the American South and the coming of the Civil War.

Potter wrote long before the age of identity politics and so began, easily enough, with the proposition that historians most often consider human beings in terms of national groups. This did not automatically mean that the national group coincided with a political entity. It did mean that the rise of national consciousness and political nationalism had been a central theme in the story of the modern West, where national identity had progressively come to transcend, if not crowd out, other orders of collective identity. It was why, he thought, it made sense to talk in terms of “the American people, the Russian people, the Japanese people” and so on, and why, when we ascribe distinctive characteristics to such groups, “we do not conceive of them merely in political terms as bodies who happen to be subject to a common political jurisdiction, but rather as aggregations whose common nationality imparts or reflects an integral identity.” While this admittedly made some historians even then uncomfortable, the divvying-up into national units still, Potter maintained, “is one of the dominating presuppositions of our time.” This had broad implications for how historians interpreted the past to the rest of us.

Two ways of thinking about nationalism need to be distinguished. One was largely descriptive and heavily psychological, focused on discerning the character of a group as it understood itself. As cited by Potter, historian of nationalism Hans Kohn summarized it: “Nationalism is first and foremost a state of mind, an act of consciousness.” By this theory, any group of people that claimed to believe passionately enough that they partook of common qualities might claim to be a nation. In practice, such a subjective psychological sense of national identity usually derived from certain well-known prerequisites: a common language, a common religion, a common territory that constituted some sort of defensible natural unit, a common culture, and common mores. Further, it implied a level of group loyalty, though not exclusive loyalty. National allegiance ran concurrent with similar feelings about family, church, school, region. Such national feeling in individuals thus was relative, as in shared, and as Potter put it, “modified by contingencies.” The question being addressed was how people came to feel themselves a nation, not how they behaved functionally as a nation-state.

That issue, Potter explained, brought us to the second way to think about nationalism. It centered on “the validity of a given group’s exercising autonomous powers.” Sanction to exercise such power, whether over individuals or groups of individuals (as in minorities), rested upon the validity of the community to which such groups or individuals subscribed. Of all human groupings, the nation here stood out, for “it is the one to which the power of regulation, control, coercion, punitive action, and so on, is especially assigned.” Much depended therefore on whether or not two potentially contending bodies of people belonged, in fact, to a single community or nation. If they did, the exercise of power by one over the other was valid; if they did not, it was not. Nationalism thus understood becomes something not merely descriptive, relativistic and subject to psychological analysis but objectively evaluative. “National loyalty may vary enormously, or in subtle degrees,” Potter stressed, “but national citizenship does not vary at all—a man is a citizen or he is an alien.” Potter saw this second approach as formalistic and institutional. Nations act in history as institutional things, and history would seem to show that without institutions, not all the felt-psychological unity of a people counts for much in operative terms. The power of the political state tends to co-opt the purely psychological understanding of nationalism with which it is often but not always congruent. What had been relative and shifting in the first instance becomes institutional and categorical in the second: The writ of national law either has jurisdiction in a particular place or it doesn’t; this piece of territory lies within the national boundary or it doesn’t. “None of these matters is partial, any more than sovereignty itself is partial—and sovereignty,” Potter reminded us, “is like virginity in that it cannot be surrendered in part.”

Both approaches to nationalism were true and useful. In modern democratic thought and practice, however, we can observe just how interdependent the two understandings could be. Democracies perforce vest ultimate authority in the will of the people, manifest in majority rule. This means that acceptance of that association that makes the “people” an autonomous nation is as potent as the mystical allegiance once ascribed to the divine right of kings. Here Potter, then writing at a time of remarkable national political consensus, exposed a difficulty at the interface between democracy and nationalism that fairly glares at us today:

For the major premise of democracy, that the majority shall rule, is predicated upon the assumption that there is a body of people forming a single whole of such clearly determinate number that more than half of the number may be recognized as forming a majority. Unless the minority really is identified with and part of such a whole, then decisions of the majority lack any democratic sanction.

Potter added that, powerful as it was, the valuative, institutionalized nationalism of the second sort should not be permitted to blind historians to what he saw as the generic likeness between national and other forms of loyalty. Using the 1850s run-up to the Civil War as his example, he emphasized how sectional and national loyalties can both be at work at the same time and not necessarily as “polar or antithetical forces.” National loyalty of the second sort, he believed, was most efficacious not when it smothered other loyalties but when it subsumed them to itself, creating something worth more than the sum of the parts. With a doctorate from Old Eli, Potter knew of what he spoke. Back then anyway, the phrase ran “for God, for Country, and for Yale”—not “for God, or for Country, or for Yale.”

Potter warned about historians’ strong predilection to equate nationality with culture and to see cultural identity as the central underpinning for nationalism in its second, institutional sense. Identity was not nationalism’s only source. Interest mattered too. He cited Voltaire, from the earliest days of modern nationalism, who had defined patrie as community of interest. Later, Hans Kohn referenced how nationalism derived strength from being seen as “a source of economic well-being.” Karl Deutsch, another historian summoned by Potter, observed how people typically sought practical gain in return for participation. Potter emphasized how, throughout history, political allegiance was something bestowed reciprocally, in expectation of some combination of security and welfare.

Interest, as the second pillar of nationalism, lined up with the argument that modern nationalism and democracy had advanced in tandem. Democracy gave people something of their own to protect, which, as Kohn held, had never existed, en masse anyway, before the French Revolution. With the infant United States of America for his subject, St. John de Crèvecoeur in Letters from an American Farmer (1782) made much the same point, observing how loyalty to their new American home among those who came from afar was instant and universal—and how concrete benefits of life in the new world blew past any sense of traditional community they might have felt in the old: “What attachment can a poor European emigrant have for a country where he had nothing? The knowledge of a language, the love of a few kindred as poor as himself, were the only cords that tied him: his country is now that which gives him land, bread, protection and consequence. Ubi panis, ibi patria is the motto of all emigrants.”

Potter’s analysis especially shone when testing these propositions—chiefly that the “superstructure of nationality,” as he called it, required both common culture and common interest to sustain it—on the specific historical situation he knew best, the crisis leading to the Civil War. He believed that this was the point in American history where the question of nationalism was the “most critical and complex.” In our own time, when the question of nationalism is again out in the open, his is a lesson worth heeding.

Potter focused on sectionalism and how, in a country of vast geographical extent like the United States, conflicting sectional interests expressed themselves and were mediated through the political system. In most instances of sectional rivalry, he made clear up front, nationalism never even came up. Moreover, sections themselves were hardly unitary: there were both urban/industrial areas of the North as well as provincial/rural ones. Some of the South was dominated by the plantation culture and economy, but a great deal of it was backwoods. It was because America’s “regional differentiations extended beyond a mere dualism” that, with just one exception, sectional tensions and loyalties had “not called into question the Union which they share . . . and the loyalties which they give to their own have not impinged directly upon their national loyalty to the Union.” Even during the fevered Populist Revolt of the 1890s culminating in the pivotal election of 1896, rivals sought to impose their respective visions of American society “upon one another within the Union, not to sever their ties with one another by disrupting the Union.”

The single exception, of course, was the era between 1848 and 1861. Since we know who won the Civil War, it has been tempting to interpret what happened then as northern nationalism triumphing over southern sectionalism. The South’s cause simply could not, in this reasoning (which relied on the purely institutional understanding of nationalism), have been based on nationalism because the Confederacy did not prevail and no southern nation resulted. (Potter thought apt the old riddle: “Why is treason never successful? Answer: because if it is successful it is not treason.”) Another factor, beyond hindsight, buttressed this line of thought. It was hard for most historians, then and surely now, to grant the sanction of nationalism and thus the right to autonomy and self-determination that went with it, to a cause, in this case the defense of slavery, of which historians themselves morally disapproved.

Such a dualistic view obscured what Potter saw more finely as profound sectional impulses and behavior within both the North and the South. In the antebellum years, the two sections repeatedly faced off in Congress on sectional issues like the tariff and internal improvements (infrastructure in today’s terms). So why was the North’s support of such policies, and their adoption by sectional majorities, any less sectional than the South’s resistance to them? The North wanted the proposed transcontinental railroad to have for its eastern terminus Chicago; the South wanted New Orleans. Were not both equally sectional desires? Likewise with what became the cause célèbre of the 1850s: the question of whether to permit or to prohibit extension of slavery into the western territories. “Northern determination to keep Negroes out of the territories,” Potter wrote, “was no less sectional than Southern determination to carry them there.” And so to the election of 1860 itself, which precipitated secession: it is hard to argue that the northern vote for Abraham Lincoln was not every bit as sectional as it was national, given that Lincoln “did not so much as run in most of the slave states.” Nevertheless, the North, not the South, succeeded in claiming for itself a nationalism that embraced “the people as a whole,” so masking its own sectional interests.

There was reason for this. The North was becoming the majority player, the South the minority. As such, the majority North did not have to choose between nation and section. To defend its interests, the minority South did have to choose: “If the proslavery elements seemed less nationalistic than the antislavery elements, it was not because one more than the other put peace or national harmony above the question of slavery—for neither of them did—but because the antislavery elements could expect, with the majority status, to apply the national authority to their purposes, while the proslavery forces could not.” Sectional and national loyalties suffused both sections alike. They differed only because one of them (the majority North) could keep its loyalties, in Potter’s words, “coordinated and therefore undivided.” As the 1850s wore on, the minority South could manage no such a feat.

On the other hand, a psychological rather than institutional understanding of nationalism leads to the idea that the South behaved as it did because it viewed itself as a distinct civilization, irrespective of its immediate political and economic interests. This was true to a point: conservatism, orthodox religion, social hierarchy, the cult of chivalry, hostility to commercial values, in Potter’s fine phrase “the unmachined civilization,” all made the South distinct. But did they make it wholly separate? Potter thought not—right up to 1860 wealthy southerners packed their sons off to northern colleges and universities—and warned against equating nationalism with culture alone, which risked falling into the same simplistic dualism displayed by those who recoiled from ascribing southern nationalism its due of autonomy and self-determination just because it defended slavery. Looking back, one and only one dualism—the South/North antithesis as lands of slavery and freedom—appears incontrovertible, as legally it was. But even here, the distinction between North and South was not exactly pure, at least by later standards. Freedom was one thing, equality quite another, as Lincoln and most other northern leaders understood. As the issue stood at that time, it was “less a question of whether the Negro should have status as an equal than a dispute over what form his inferior status [slavery or non-slavery] should take. For the Negro in America, chattel servitude was sectional, but caste inferiority was still national.”

In studying the coming of the Civil War, it was a too-frequent mistake to see mutual exclusiveness where instead complex overlapping historical processes were at work, and to equate dissimilarity with antagonism and turn sectional distinctiveness into “an index of deviation.” It was false history that loyalty to section presupposed disloyalty to the nation. Potter warned about the dangerous habit of “equating diversity with dissension, and of using the word ‘difference’ to mean both at the same time.” Regional identity need not subvert national unity. Catholic French Canada, he thought, contrasted culturally with Protestant Ontario more than the North and the South ever did—“yet there was no ‘irrepressible conflict’ in Canada.” And the fallacy of mutual exclusiveness was no help at all in explaining the South’s rapid return to the Union after the Civil War and Reconstruction were over. Its pursuit (however frustrated) of economic progress on the American model, and its startlingly high participation in the nation’s wars from the Spanish-American War onward both attest to what Potter deemed “the swift restoration of American nationalism” throughout the South.

To explain this required something other than a single, grand factor constant over a long period (like cultural divergence). Rather, it demanded a factor or factors more immediate and capable of prompting “bitter disagreement even among people who have much basic homogeneity.” Potter listed a series of factors that served thus to dis-equilibrate nationalism and sectionalism in 1850s America and that thus caused the Civil War. A “prolonged series of interest conflicts . . . crystallized along sectional lines” progressively alienated the minority section and convinced it that the majority section was sacrificing its economic welfare through the tariff and policies of western expansion, and indeed threatening it existentially through, in the South’s view, “condoning the activities of men [abolitionists] who would loose a slave insurrection upon them and expose them to possible butchery.” Cultural factors and interest factors of course were related, and they were in this instance. Conflicts of interest arise within the most integrated homogeneous cultures, while strong communities of interest can develop between the most diverse cultures. History, thought Potter, favored the state that both united those with natural affinity but also guarded essential interests not necessarily held in common by the larger society. History offers “extensive evidence that if a state protects the interests—either real or fancied—of culturally disparate groups in its population, it can command the nationalistic loyalty of such groups without reducing them to a homogeneous body of citizens, and that if it systematically disregards the interests of a group it alienates the group and makes cultural affinities with the majority seem irrelevant.”

But for the fact of growth—if the republic’s population and territory had remained static—Lincoln’s alleged “house divided” might have stood for considerably more time yet, just as it had stood for seven decades after the Founding. However, unstoppable and unevenly distributed growth upset the balance of interests between the sections. In that event, the “minority section lost its ability to exercise a joint control in the federal government, and with this control went the power of coordinating national with sectional objectives and thus of maintaining the image of the federal government as the guardian of the essential interest and values of Southern society.” When that happened, the South felt it had no choice but to secede.

Politics today, no less than in the run-up to the Civil War, is fraught with dualism and division. The return of nationalism to the agenda appears destined only to aggravate things. Policymakers and the citizens to whom they are responsible might learn a thing or two from David Potter’s carefulness, as he tried to unravel an earlier era when nationalism moved, or failed to move, the nation. I would like to think that if Potter were writing today (he died in 1971), he would bid those in power or seeking it—both those advancing a new American nationalism and those who recoil at the very thought of such, who in their mutual contempt are not so different from the northern abolitionists and southern fire-eaters of the 1850s—to freshen their minds with some historical reading on the subject. History has no predictive value, but it can uncover patterns and habits that continue through time and that are wise to know about. From the work of David Potter that we do have, we can at least heed the warning about how easy, and how perilous, it can be to fall into false readings of events, both at the moment and in retrospect. His efforts to correct some of those errors long ago admonish us to take equal care now.

The post Nationalism: Handle With Care appeared first on The American Interest.

Ghosting Time

In our age where recency bias is so rampant that it seems that all we care about is that which comes next, there can be great, soul-saving value in reinstating dimensionality to time. Some works of art and entertainment help us to do this, giving us perspective on past, present, and future, and letting each time-vector shape our understanding of the others.

Which is why I’ve been thinking lately about a radio program that dealt with all of themes when it came out 70 years ago. It’s a work of highly entertaining, modern terror, one that deals in ideas of past, present, and future while showing us the folly of chanting, “next next next.” It also happens to be damn good scary fun.

H. Russell Wakefield is a name known to ghost story aficionados, albeit less known than contemporaries like M.R. James, E.F. Benson, or Algernon Blackwood. Like them, he was English. His ghost stories came out over a four-decade period, from the late 1920s until the early 1960s, which is also when he died. If you’ve read anything by him, it’s likely the tales “He Cometh and He Passeth By!” and “The Red Lodge,” as those are the two most regularly scooped into anthologies. A rarely spotted Wakefield story, “Ghost Hunt,” from 1938, caught the fancy of Walter Newman in the late 1940s, prompting this second writer—he wrote for radio—to adapt the work for the popular program Suspense.

Suspense was a humdinger in the radio world. It ran from 1942 to 1962, and it featured just about everybody in Hollywood: Orson Welles, Cary Grant, Gene Kelly, Lucille Ball, Alan Ladd, Agnes Moorehead, Kirk Douglas, Gregory Peck, Susan Hayward, Burt Lancaster, Jimmy Stewart, and Judy Garland all put in appearances. If you were an A-lister, or a redoubtable character actor, you wanted to be on this show.

The production values were top-drawer, and the show cast against type. So, if you were stuck playing comedic roles on the big screen, the producers of Suspense would insert you into a harrowing drama that probed the edges of human endurance, or visited unique night terrors upon your character. The shows were introduced by the so-called Man in Black, a mysterious emcee of sorts, who warned you what you’d be in for. The first episodes of the series piggybacked atop another radio program and were directed by none other than Alfred Hitchcock, newly come to Hollywood from England.

Almost 1,000 episodes of Suspense were aired. Around 900 still exist. What will strike you now if you listen to just about any of them is their modernity. There are certain works from the past that age in terms of their language and their feel. We have to adjust to their modes of expression, their forms of conveyance. That’s not Suspense, and it certainly was not the episode from 1949 that Wakefield’s story ultimately became.

It, too, was titled “Ghost Hunt,” and it’s one of the scariest pieces of fiction, audible or otherwise, to have ever graced American culture. It’s meta, it’s clever enough for Beckett, frightening enough for mid-1970s Spielberg, and unlike a Jordan Peele venture, it’s actually scary, not just Woke and therefore “important.” If we lionize it—as I am about to—it’s not because it merely fits a prescribed narrative conveniently, or meshes with a political platform. No, the “Ghost Hunt” episode of Suspense is legitimate art, legitimately germane to us right now.

The program starts with a DJ, Smiley Smith—played by Ralph Edwards—closing out his program by spinning a side from Louis Armstrong. This is before Armstrong became essentially a musical ambassador who barnstormed around the country, touching off technically perfect trumpet solos but rarely innovating. At this time, he still had his Modernist swagger. Smiley’s is a progressive radio program, by some measure; it’s not for the dolt-ishly inclined. There are brains behind this operation.

Ralph Edwards was a radio host in real life, but he was hardly a cutting-edge type. He was avuncular, reliable, not flashy. But as Smiley Smith the DJ, he has a much more amped-up presence than Edwards himself. He sounds like he’s overcompensating to a degree—not ostentatiously, but discernibly—and you sense this persona fills a kind of void for him, just as we often play parts in our modern world. We all know the type who hops on Facebook to extol how grand their existence is, how they’re finally living their “best life,” when in reality they’re all but hanging on by a thread. You wonder if Smith might relate.

But now is when we start plumbing time’s dimensionality. We are in the present. Then Smith informs us that tomorrow night he’ll be heading out on one of his weekly field trips, a staple of the show which involve a peek into a corner of life typically unseen, aided by Smith’s trusty portable recording device. (Last week, Smith tells us with a giggle, he stuck it inside of a woman’s Turkish bath.) What he is going to do at this juncture is spend a night in an alleged haunted house, where four people in the recent past have committed suicide. He’ll be joined by a Doctor Reed—a World War I veteran and current paranormal investigator—at the bequest of the owner of the property, who wants to unload it after proving that it’s not haunted, and a real estate agent.

Suddenly, we are in another timeline, hearing that property owner and real estate agent returning to the house the morning after Smith and Reed’s sojourn there. What they find—and don’t find—in the house shocks them, causing them to play back the left-behind tape recorder for clues. We are losing time’s dimensionality, as if past, present, future, were all involved in a three-way crack-up on the motorway.

As the playback begins, Smiley and Doctor Reed stand on the lawn, waiting to go into the house (known by locals as “the death trap”). We’re informed by the soon-to-be-departing owner that the last suicide ran straight off the cliff, with its 100-foot drop into the Pacific, just a few paces behind the house. Dr. Reed sputters and coughs, saying that he was gassed in WWI; Smiley let’s out a “yep,” then segues into the next line of his set-up for his radio listeners, who are not listening live, but will hear the tapes the next evening. He’s not noting what is occurring in his present, being so fixated on “the next.” Ah, the titillating lure of the next and our displaced focus that we are, God forbid, missing out on something.

The owner leaves, Smiley and Dr. Reed go into the house, the latter working his way up the stairs, communicating via Walkie-talkie with Smiley, who remains in the house’s expansive front room. He has his wire-haired terrier with him, and when he cracks open the French windows to let in some air, sending a bat flying, the dog leaps from the house, vanishing. Eventually Smiley hears rats in the walls—shades of Lovecraft—as the doctor provides blow-by-blow commentary from upstairs. Doctor Reed has hit a cold spot, his pulse is tachycardiac, he feels like he’s been punched in the solar plexus, he’s depressed. Smiley tries to crack a few jokes, but they aren’t landing, and he knows it. He mentions how lonely he feels, then, in what is one of the great moments of raw candor in all of American radio, he takes the soliloquy further, talking about his loneliness as a child. He adds that he doesn’t know why he said that, but keeps at his theme nonetheless, describing his alienation as a young man, all of the hours alone, his fears, the fight of how hard it was just to continue on as anything, let alone someone pursuing a radio dream, every day.

This is bracing stuff, because it is a form of pure present. The past is informing cognition in the present, but there is no fixation on the immediate next. Smiley is realizing that it took this setting, and being coerced into a situation he could not have engineered on his own, to deal squarely with issues that we sensed right from the opening of his broadcast a couple hours prior, when the strains of Louis Armstrong tickled our ears. He’s alone.

Not wishing to be, desperate to be anything but, he decides to look for Dr. Reed upstairs, now that an enormous stain has begun spreading across the ceiling, and has even dripped liquid onto Smiley’s hands. He enters a kind of dressing room—which Dr. Reed had first thought was a closet, before finding it far roomier—from which he had last heard from his fellow ghost hunter. There are four people there: two men, two women. They are the suicides. Smiley wants to pass. They offer him companionship. All he has to do is accompany them, down the stairs, out the front door, and then to run, run towards the cliff at the back of the house. “I don’t want to be alone anymore!” he cries out as he follows their lead.

The owner and the real estate agent come to collect Smiley and Dr. Reed in the morning. They find the former’s recording device, but no Smiley. Dr. Reed is in a pool of blood, but still alive. When he awakes later in the hospital, thinking Smiley is with the other two men, he believes that he has “merely” hemorrhaged; an occasional result, presumably, of his World War I gassing. He makes no reference to having encountered anything unusual, or reported anything unusual to Smiley.

Two people, exploring the same space at the same time, formulate antithetical narratives from that space: each one embracing “my truth,” as it were. We do not know if Smiley alone has been visited and acted upon by wraiths, or if the demons emerged from within, as one tends to think, given the highly personalized remarks that have emanated from his lips. He has lost control of an ability to impose narrative upon reality. This is his undoing, because it is all he has come to know and is reliant upon.

Smiley’s fate is literal death, but not before reminding us that there are worse, more active forms of dying, before anyone has need of undertaker or autopsy report. The psychological bottom-line is the idea that all of this played out within the mind of a person who has lost all of time’s perspective. For Smiley, the knowledge that comes from experience is choked off, as if at the midpoint of an artery, not getting to where it needs to go. He cannot grapple with his past, nor reckon with the present. His blind leap into the foreground sends Smiley Smith, once-lonely—and still lonely—flying headlong over a cliff, to his demise.

We are often no different, as this culturally relevant episode of Suspense reminds us. Only, we do not literally die when we do our version of what Smiley does here; we die in subtler ways. Is that better? I don’t know. Harangue the radio gods to fish out Smiley’s ghost and ask him. Or ask yours.

The post Ghosting Time appeared first on The American Interest.

The Death of Al-Baghdadi—and the Birth of a Tragedy

We can all agree that the disappearance of the number one of the Islamic State is good news.

We are unanimous in our admiration for the bravery and effectiveness of the commandos who carried out the mission, soldiers who are, as Senator Lindsey Graham declared soon after the assault, the pride of the United States.

No one would dream of denying the President credit for having ordered the operation.

But we might also be in accord in adding to this picture of a nation celebrating the noblest side of its military culture three not insignificant nuances.

First, that the elimination of a leader so non-operational that he had long been known only as “the phantom” will not greatly reduce the lethality of an organization that, after its defeats in Mosul and Raqqa, had promptly returned to its prior rootlessness.

Second, that because the operation was, by Donald Trump’s own admission, the culmination of a months-long hunt made possible by close cooperation with local allies on the ground, notably by the Syrian Kurds, who provided the intelligence without which no commando operation would have been possible, this success serves to emphasize how much the United States owes to its allies and how much, following its withdrawal, their support will be missed.

And, finally, that the eight Chinook helicopters had not taken off from nearby Turkey, a nation in principle allied with the United States but in fact gangrenous with a strain of radical Islam not unlike the one espoused by Al-Baghdadi. No one missed the fact that the Delta commandos had had to set up their base several hundred kilometers farther away in Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Kurds again—back to the Kurds. Back to that alliance with the Kurdish brothers in arms, without whom nothing would have been or will be possible for the United States in Iraq or in Syria. And so we may sense the bitter irony that the United States was breaking the alliance at the very moment that it had proved its necessity.

In his surreal Sunday press conference, Donald Trump saw fit to thank the Turks for having been good enough not to interfere with the American forces. How much more fitting it would have been to ask why they had allowed the leader of the Islamic State and his wives and children to live undisturbed for so many months in the same province of Idlib, in northwest Syria, where, since their taking of Afrin in March 2018, they had maintained forward posts that allowed them to observe pretty much everything that went on.

Trump thanked the Russians, to whom nothing was owed and who did not refrain from reminding him, in a fine gesture of diplomatic cruelty, that the Russian Ministry of Defense was unaware of having lent the presumed assistance with the passage through the area of American aircraft. Not to mention their repeated statements in the same timeframe and through the end of the weekend in which they sowed doubt about the very reality of the operation and about the neutralization of the Islamist leader. If they had gone any further, they would have called Trump a liar. The death of Al-Baghdadi was fake news, they averred. The whole thing was just a storyboard for a Netflix series.

Trump even thanked the Syrians, who permitted themselves the luxury of humiliating him by observing that his belated decision to leave a few hundred troops behind to “secure the oilfields” was a violation of their sovereignty and of international law. We’re still waiting to hear how the selectively legalistic tribunes of Damascus intend to ensure that this flouted international law will be enforced. All kidding aside, I could not have hoped to express any better the idea that, in international relations, the fear one inspires cannot be separated from the respect one enjoys, and that, in this region of the world, where one’s word is sacred and counts for at least as much as one’s firepower, the United States no longer scares anybody.

The only thing Mr. Trump neglected to say is that by withdrawing U.S. protection from the Kurds and thereby consenting to have on his hands and conscience the blood of his country’s friends, as well as that of its enemies, he broke America’s promise, turned his back on its credo, and offered the zone up on a platter to its most redoubtable enemies. For those reasons, history will remember him less as the one who brought down Al-Baghdadi than as the author of one of the most stupendous strategic errors ever committed by the President of a superpower.

The post The Death of Al-Baghdadi—and the Birth of a Tragedy appeared first on The American Interest.

How Do America’s Elites Stack Up?

The American elite has many worries—maintaining geopolitical stability, reducing inequality, ending discrimination, and the like. But what if the greatest threat to the United States is not these things, but rather elites themselves—in particular their unwillingness to accept responsibility as stewards of society and their disengagement from the rest of the population? This “pulling away” by elites compromises the country’s ability to address the various challenges it faces. Compounding this threat, American elites’ hubristic confidence that they are on “the right side of history” limits what they might otherwise learn from the rise and fall of other societies.

The great Arab historian and sociologist Ibn Khaldūn studied the “science of society” (‘ilm al-‘umran), emphasizing the importance of aṣabiyyah—social cohesion or group solidarity—as crucial to understanding the rise and fall of any state. The British historian Arnold Toynbee, who examined 26 world civilizations in his 12-volume A Study of History, saw civilizational decay as resulting from the deterioration of the creative minority—composed of elite leaders—that drives progress. The elite degenerates, growing prideful and dominant even as it loses the ability to innovate and address societal challenges. Instead of leading with a confident sense of virtue and purpose, it turns parasitic and “succumbs to the sickness of ‘proletarianization.’” Others have theorized that countries weaken due to a decline in civic virtue (Edward Gibbon), cultural dynamism (Oswald Spengler), familism (Carle Zimmerman), productive forces (Karl Marx), and political institutions (Samuel Huntington).

Though these scholars emphasize different things, for the most part they consistently point to the importance of elites and social cohesion for the success of any polity—and see these two as being connected. Elites—groups with outsized power and influence over the major institutions in any society—were historically comprised of at most 2 percent of any people. Depending on how broadly one defines the term, “elites” comprise anywhere from 10 percent to 20 percent of the American population today.

If a society is to prosper, elites must not only creatively address critical challenges, they must also avoid becoming disconnected from society and acting in ways that undermine its dynamism and loyalty. Although correctly anticipating and responding to challenges the U.S. faces may seem to depend on rational decision-making by merit-based actors, history shows that this is incorrect: Deep ties to society are necessary for the right intelligence, a tradition of self-sacrifice is necessary to inspire collective action, and longstanding habits of virtue are necessary to ensure the societal response is energetic.

The Science of Society

Comparative analyses of how underlying societal and institutional dynamics shape the destiny of countries across centuries are far less popular today than in the past. This is partly due to specialization, the dominance of economics, the rise of gender and other identity studies, and a clear preference for quantitative models. There is a broad intellectual consensus in academia and officialdom that policy choices (which can be rationally deduced) and leadership (which should be selected on merit) matter more than anything else. According to this consensus, as societies evolve in only one, ever more positive, direction, the study of their broader dynamics, norms, and cycles is not vital. This is unfortunate. As the U.S. experiences an unprecedented decline in social cohesion, it is precisely such knowledge that is increasingly important.

Ibn Khaldūn’s Muqaddimah, completed in 1378, is one of the earliest treatises on the science of human social organization. His goal was to ascertain the underlying causes and effects of historical change and the probability that events from history happened as reported. As Charles Issawi and Oliver Leaman describe in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Ibn Khaldūn proposed that

society is an organism that obeys its own inner laws. These laws can be discovered by applying human reason to data either culled from historical records or obtained by direct observation. . . . These laws are explicable sociologically, and are not a mere reflection of biological impulses or physical factors. To be sure, facts such as climate and food are important, but . . . purely social factors as cohesion, occupation and wealth [have greater influence].

Groups with greater aṣabiyyah (loosely translated as social cohesion or group solidarity) are more likely to defeat those with less even if they are comparatively smaller, poorer, and less technologically advanced. This aṣabiyyah is built from a combination of kinship ties, common religion that builds a shared orientation, and economic gains from trade, pillage, or conquest. The legitimacy of leaders—and the institutions that support authority—are products of the three. But Ibn Khaldūn noted that aṣabiyyah declines with success. It is eroded either by the indolence that development and luxury bring or by the social divisions that necessarily result from the concentration of wealth and the development of hierarchy in society. (Hierarchy becomes necessary to manage a larger, more sophisticated entity.)

In the West, building off the work of Greco-Roman authors, the comparative history of societies emerged as an important field of study in the 18th century. The Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, for example, tried to accomplish something similar to Ibn Khaldūn in his book The New Science, published in 1725. In it, he espoused a cyclical pattern of human history, with each society passing through three recurring ages: the divine, the heroic, and the human. The initial leadership of elite patriarchs that “united wisdom, priesthood, and kinship” evolves into a competitive and crude egalitarianism.

For Vico, each age has distinct attributes that affect everything from the nature of government to the civil order to language. As societies develop, they create new structures and constraints that shape culture. Primitivism grows into idealism and then rationalism, but the latter fails to reach the perfection it seeks. Instead, it yields cynicism, “barbarism,” and “civil disease,” which corrupt the body politic from within. Responding to Descartes, Vico warned that too much emphasis on individualism and the rational development of distinct ideas undermines the tenets of religion—tenets that are essential to holding society together. In this last stage of rationalism, the people, “like so many beasts, have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached the extreme delicacy, or better of pride, in which like wild animals they bristle and lash out at the slightest displeasure.”

Montesquieu, Voltaire, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber, and Oswald Spengler were among the many other scholars who studied the comparative history of societies. Tocqueville, for example, analyzed the nature of American political and civil society—and contrasted it with France—to understand why democracy had succeeded in America but failed in so many other places. Adam Smith analyzed the nature of the market society in crafting The Wealth of Nations; he is best understood not as an economist but, in the words of Encyclopaedia Britannica, as “a social philosopher whose economic writings constitute only the capstone to an overarching view of political and social evolution.” Indeed, he saw his most famous work as a study of “the general principles of law and government, and of the different revolutions they have undergone in the different ages and periods of society.” Weber emphasized both the importance of sociocultural dynamics—and the influence of Protestantism in particular—to understanding the rise of the West and the importance of elite behavior in understanding how any particular country would evolve.

Émile Durkheim helped establish the field of modern sociology as a science of “social facts”—phenomena that structure individual behavior and seemingly autonomous or even chaotic decisions within a larger pattern. Although he was not specifically interested in the broad arc of how societies rise and fall, Durkheim’s work concerned what holds society together and how it might break down. He differentiated between mechanical solidarity arising from similar values, work, and life experiences in traditional societies and organic solidarity arising through interdependence and complex social interactions in dense modern settings. The latter brings more freedom, but secularism, the division of labor, and individualism risk producing anomie and disintegration. Rapid change in the values and standards a society professes produces a disconnect with what is achievable in reality, yielding alienation, purposelessness, and, eventually, “derangement” from the “the malady of the infinite” (desire that cannot be fulfilled) and a rise in suicide. Nationalism that bound people together through common purpose and solidarity—reducing moral isolation in the process—was essential to counter these dangers, especially in highly individualistic modern societies.

In the years since World War I, Toynbee’s magisterial series (published 1934-61), which defined his career, is arguably the most ambitious and important development for understanding the dynamics of societies over time. He focused on how cultures or civilizations arise from primitive societies as a response to difficult challenges, then grow and decay. Like Ibn Khaldūn, Toynbee believed that the proper study of history required more than examining a particular series of events from one place or time period; one must look for patterns that repeat across societies and time. In contrast to Ibn Khaldūn (and many of his predecessors), however, he did not believe that societies inevitably die. On the contrary, civilizations could adapt in ways that allow them to achieve ever greater growth.

Toynbee observed “Creative Minorities” playing crucial roles at every stage of a society’s rise and fall. Initially their very presence makes the rise possible. When confronted by a series of difficulties, members of a creative minority respond in ways that solve the problem, yielding a progressive and cumulative development of the civilization’s capacity, values, institutions, and techniques. But this creative minority does not dominate. On the contrary, it inspires and is freely imitated and followed, ensuring an essential unity and preventing major social cleavages.

Decay is not caused by an external assault or a decline in technology. In Toynbee’s formulation in A Study of History, “. . . the nature of the breakdowns of civilizations can be summed up in three points: a failure of creative power in the minority, an answering withdrawal of mimesis on the part of the majority, and a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole.” In this latter stage, the “Creative Minority degenerates into a mere Dominant Minority which attempts to retain by force a position which it has ceased to merit.” Its mores decay and it declines into “truancy” and “promiscuity,” becoming self-serving rather than self-sacrificing. It worships the great achievements of its “former self,” becoming overly prideful in the process, and unable to effectively address the next set of challenges that a society faces. The decay may occur over centuries before dissolution finally ensues.

A number of late 20th-century comparative political scientists, including Samuel Huntington, Seymour Martin Lipset, Charles Tilly, Barrington Moore, and Ernest Gellner, explored the importance of social dynamics to political outcomes in their work and have thus some overlap with social analyses. Huntington, for example, looked at political development and decay in writings such as Political Order in Changing Societies (published 1968). He was particularly interested in the “conflict between mobilization and institutionalization.” Where political structures are weak, mass political participation can break the elite consensus that holds society together and undermine the political institutions that they use to govern society—risking instability, corruption, decline, or even collapse. Moreover, rapid change challenges existing values and behaviors, often breeding corruption in the process. He thus critiques the general “underlying commitment to the theory of progress” in academia that leads to a belief that societies only progress in one direction. “Little or no provision is made for their reversibility. . . . National disintegration is a phenomenon as much as national integration.”

More recently, Jared Diamond examined why societies fail in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005). He argues that societies end when they fail to adequately respond to their greatest challenges, which he considers to be climate change, hostile neighbors, a worsening environment, and the breakdown of trade. Elites need to make the right decisions at critical junctures, and this depends on being actively engaged with and not insulated from the general population. A lack of knowledge, affinity, or interest can preclude effective action. Long-term planning and a willingness to rethink core values are essential to responding in time.

The Importance of Elites

Despite examining significantly different epochs and geographies, similar themes appear among observers like Vico, Toynbee, and Diamond. In particular, they believe elites play a crucial role in determining the development of a given society. Not only must they be creative and able to think long term when facing critical challenges, they must remain deeply embedded in their populations in order to understand needs, act in ways that retain loyalty, and build capacity to inspire action when needed. Elites that become too enamored of their past successes or detached from their populations are more likely to be unprepared for the challenges their societies face, act in ways that alienate others, and be compelled to use force to extend their writ. Taking a disproportionate share of the spoils from trade, war, and other forms of wealth creation can yield this detachment.

Elite behavior thus both sets the tone for society as a whole and determines the nature of the relationships that define that society—and thus has enormous influence on how cohesive it is. And social cohesion—aṣabiyyah, unity, or some form of social or elite consensus—is critical for collective action, creativity, and aspirations. On the other hand, social divisions are a common source of societal decay. These divisions could stem from too much individualism, materialism, and elites’ focus on private interests. Social disintegration is the greatest risk; this could result from some sort of cleavage among elites or between elites and the population, an increase in the corruption of institutions or morals, or a growing disaggregation of the population.

Only elites—Toynbee’s “creative minority”—are able to shepherd a society through the series of challenges that it will inevitably face. Such challenges can catalyze the creative development of new technologies and institutions that spur the advancement of the society and, in time, increase its power and influence. As Toynbee notes, “Man achieves civilization, not as a result of superior biological endowment or geographical environment, but as a response to a challenge in a situation of special difficulty which rouses him to make a hitherto unprecedented effort.”

But these tests can also spell the demise of a society if not handled well. In such cases, the result will be more due to elite failings—in a process akin to suicide or murder (using Toynbee’s metaphor)—than from what any outsider does.

Meeting challenges of “special difficulty”—which can be physical (swamps, rising sea waters, environmental change), social (internal divisions, growing mobilization), economic (decline of trade), military (hostile neighbor), or institutional (need for reform)—requires some spiritual dynamic that goes well beyond just rational decision-making and engenders broad, sometimes fervent, action across society.

As such, many scholars identify religion as being crucial to helping communities jell, cultivating elite virtue, promoting vigorous values among the population, and inspiring heroic acts. But they also warn that as societies evolve, faith’s influence typically diminishes, contributing to a society’s decline. Rationalism and materialism come to the fore, weakening the common affinities that bound elites to their populations and the values and beliefs that fueled the society’s rise to prominence. The risk of social maladies and disintegration grows.

Table 1 summarizes the differences between responsible elites that steward their countries and irresponsible elites who neglect to do so. They are ideal-types of course. Most societies will have a mixture of elements or fall in between the two extremes.

Table 1: Comparison of Elites

 
Responsible Elites
Irresponsible Elites


Connection to society
Embedded
Disconnected


Decision-making
Includes concern for non-rational aims (e.g. glory, faith)
Based on rationalism and materialism


Mores
Disciplined, self-sacrificing, ethical, chaste
Self-interested, corrupt, promiscuous


Structure
Acts egalitarian even if position elevated
Works to separate oneself from the masses


Spoils
Shared
Concentrated in elites


Unity
Maintains as highest value
Often acts in ways that undermine it


Purpose of education
Build character as well as impart knowledge
Acquire merit points for self-advancement


Material aspirations
Restrained
Decadent


Organized religion/religious organizations
Recognizes importance; deferential
Seen as instrumental but imposing few obligations

Elites in American Society

Who are the American elite? The term “elite” can be contentious. For our purposes it includes the senior echelon of professionals in government, academia, business, media, entertainment, and the nonprofit world, all of whom work to produce and manipulate information. Debates about “the one percent” in politics and social movements such as Occupy Wall Street focus mostly on the disproportionate amount of wealth and power elites have. Protestors are concerned primarily about fairness and inequality. But some of the elite may not be particularly wealthy, and there is little consideration of how elites’ advantages bring greater obligations to society and how contemporary elites are failing to fulfill them. There is more concern for whether elites signal their support for particular causes than for whether they personally enmesh themselves within society and act in ways that contribute to its strength.

The values and standards of those driving such debates—which, ironically, include many who are arguably part of the elite or at least the semi-privileged class just below—have so changed that even admitting society has a set of elites that might play a constructive role stewarding the country forward is considered a taboo subject. Elites are rarely considered to be an essential pillar—a public good—of society, with outsized obligations, as scholars such as Ibn Khaldūn, Toynbee, and Weber argue.

It is difficult to discuss the subject in non-pejorative terms given the prevailing egalitarian ideology. Some elite theory scholars argue that this ideology is more an illusion than anything else, preventing a more serious discussion of a crucial topic and contributing to our current political and even social problems. As G. Lowell Field and John Higley argue in Elitism, “A general failure to consider the complementarity of elitist and liberal principles has been at the heart of a serious doctrinal degeneration within liberalism.” And, as Peter Berger writes in The Public Interest, “The paradox of modernization is that egalitarian regimes become progressively less feasible [as countries develop], while egalitarian ideologies are rampant.” The latter forces elites to create a “smokescreen of egalitarian rhetoric.” But this makes them less secure in their positions, and thus less able to be an effective steward of society.

Elites habitually highlight their willingness to “check their privilege” and help the marginalized, while purposely eschewing the responsibilities that their privilege ought to bring. As Anand Giridharadas argues, “American elites generally seek to maintain the system . . . our winners-take-all economy, which siphons the gains from progress upward” even while working hard to alleviate suffering and improve lives—what he calls “fake change.” They may give money or promote good causes but rarely act on a personal level in a way that strengthens society. They, for example, rarely move to third-tier cities, compromise their career prospects, or put their children in underperforming urban schools. On the contrary, as Richard Reeves writes, elites hoard opportunity for themselves, creating a class system encompassing differences in wealth, education, security, family structure, and health that functions “more ruthlessly than the British one.” They rarely support policies that would constrain their choices or limit their gains (for example, restrictions on trade, business monopolies, and tax avoidance). And while they may act (relatively) virtuously in their personal life, they regularly attack as a negative sign of privilege any attempt to promote the virtuous traditional values and mores that were once accepted as essential to personal success in the broader society (for example, get married before you have children and then stay married; work hard, don’t be idle; be a patriot; save and invest for the future).

American elites are also separated from their less-mobile neighbors. As Christopher Lasch writes, “There has always been a privileged class, even in America, but it has never been so dangerously isolated from its surroundings” as it is now. Whereas elites were once tied to a given place, where they settled for several generations, and understood that wealth carries various obligations, such allegiances are much attenuated today. The new elites are “far more cosmopolitan,” following the “siren call of opportunity wherever it leads.” Success is now closely associated with mobility, promoting the best and the brightest of non-elites into the ruling class and ending what was once the country’s democratic ideal of “rough equality of condition.”

As such, elites no longer have a desire to gain the esteem that once came from fulfilling the obligations of their positions. The growing divergence of skills and experience between them and everyone else mean, as Paul Collier argues, that they gain greater esteem (and deeper meaning) from their work and thus feel greater allegiance to their career, colleagues, and social group than they do to their locale. “This helps explain why social elites so often actively disparage their own country—they are esteem-seeking.” They are signaling that their national identity is no longer salient, that their loyalties and obligations have shifted. The result is that they are, as Lasch argues, “less interested in leadership than in escaping from the common lot.”

This cosmopolitism undermines any sense of loyalty to and need to invest in a particular place. The need to signal you are a good neighbor has triumphed over the need to act as one. All of this, as a reader of Rod Dreher’s blog wrote, “represents a terrible lowering-of-sights—from the idea that economic elites should actively help people practically unable to help themselves to the idea that they should passively chat about (‘raise awareness’) the plight of middle-class people somewhat lacking in self-belief.”

The United States today shows striking parallels with the latter stages of societal evolution as articulated by scientists of society. There is growing secularization, social disintegration, and anomie. There is a marked rise in “barbarism” and a concomitant decline in the norms and values that were once thought essential to ensuring the vigor of society, suggesting that society is inflicted with the “civil disease” Vico warned of. Individualism, materialism, and “private interests” triumph over self-sacrifice, thriftiness, communitarianism, faith, and the public interest. Elites are increasingly psychologically and financially detached from the general population, making choices that benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else, and stirring resentment and backlash.

Recovering a Responsible Elite

As Max Weber argued, mass democracy always yields elite rule in large, complex societies. Mass democracy centralizes power, grows to rely on executive bureaucratic “machines” of government, and encourages the emergence of charismatic leaders who can generate mass appeal. These, in turn, concentrate influence in “ruling minorities” while strengthening the state. It is thus not surprising that the United States is ruled by such an elite. Given this reality, how might the United States produce better, more responsible elites?

The most obvious catalyst would be a national challenge that brought people together, prompted elite commitment to the country, yielded a rethink of values, and inspired a new patriotism. The threat from a rising China could potentially accomplish this if it were utilized by the right leader. A highly charismatic politician who built a coalition government and rallied people around a transformative agenda that emphasized self-sacrifice for the common good would hold the best chance, but even if such a coalition introduced many changes, it would likely be difficult to sustain the necessary energy over the long term unless the threat was ongoing and severe (as in Israel). Even 9/11 did not modify behavior for any length of time, and the threat was highly palpable.

Although it is sometimes disparaged or misused, nationalism remains an essential tool here. It strengthens social bonds and develops the generosity, honesty, concern for the common good, respect for others, and other constructive social norms essential to the functioning of a modern society. Similarly, a revival of faith and traditional mores could contribute to building the sense of responsibility for others among elites as well as restoring their commitment to the virtues with which society once flourished—including family, thrift, and civic engagement. As Tocqueville noted, only religion can reach into the “habits of the heart” as well as the “whole range of ideas that shape habits of mind.”

Technological advance and globalization threaten to aggravate the problems outlined above—and make reform more difficult. However, there are three important ways elite behavior could be shaped in a positive direction, rebuilding social sources of national strength in the process.

As a start, the institutions that select and groom elites need to prepare them for stewardship, as Weber argued. The overemphasis on merit and achievement (and wealth) has reduced the importance of character and virtue among elites, undermining the values and norms that once predominated across society, with a clear impact on everything from the political arena to the financial markets to the dating scene. This requires transforming how young adults are trained and evaluated. Schools should bolster civic education and character-building programs (for example, the Boy Scouts, at least in its original form), and evaluate students on moral behavior as well as through test scores.

Universities and graduate schools should prioritize personal character in applicants. Essay questions today probe for volunteerism and a commitment to helping society, but schools interpret these as another form of achievement. Curriculum should encourage cooperating with stakeholders, responding to the public good, and being invested in a particular place instead of pursuing individual ambition alone. For example, MBA students are often taught that profitmaking is the primary—or only—objective of a business in the United States; in other countries (such as Germany, Japan), education, culture, and government policy make the needs of employees, the location of operation, and the broader society just as important. (American politicians who bully companies, such as President Trump, have a point, even if their method is crude and comes late in the game.) Student and business leaders need a renewed focus on the moral sentiments—what we owe others—that Adam Smith saw as the essential underpinning to capitalism.

How do we better understand our duties to others? A national service program would give elites experiential knowledge and greater connectivity with other Americans. Higher incentives for living, working, and opening social capital building organizations in less well-off neighborhoods might encourage more people not just to signal their concern but actually to make a personal sacrifice for the benefit of the country. Encouraging elite undergraduate and graduate schools to instill a code of conduct and to mandate or at least strongly encourage service in an impoverished area, similar to Teach for America, would help change values. Instead of just promoting semesters abroad, they could also promote semesters of service at home. Tuition could even be reduced or forgiven for commitments to serve in a rural or inner urban city job for a minimum of five years.

This service initiative points to a second way to shape elite behavior. Government, elite grooming institutions, the media, and so forth should make a much more concerted effort to embed elites in local communities. This would make them more knowledgeable, more responsible, and better incentivized to address the challenges that the country and its common people face. (Warren Buffet’s success may have more to do with his humble lifestyle and local embeddedness than is generally appreciated.) The closer the social ties, the more personal the information, relationship, and sense of obligation, the greater the noblesse oblige. Today, elite compassion is often depersonalized—there is more of it for abstract victims and distant people than there is for those up the road. This requires creative thinking to prevent the upper crust of society from gaining disproportionately from the financialization and globalization of the economy and then living protected from the churn and dislocation these factors cause. It also requires creating the mechanisms and incentives to ensure that different classes either live in the same broad areas or intermix on more than a perfunctory level.

On the policy side, a much more concerted effort should be undertaken to limit the ability of people to gain from stashing their wealth overseas, avoiding American taxes, enriching themselves off the backs of their employees, or living only off of the dividends of one’s forebears. Incentives could be introduced to encourage investment in the country, especially in impoverished regions (something the latest tax reform attempts).

The media might highlight more individuals—especially among the elites—who returned to their communities after school, took up leadership posts in underserved communities, sacrificed potentially profitable careers for a commitment to working locally, and took on obligations to others (spouse, neighbor, town, church) at a personal cost to themselves. This would inspire others to do the same. (This strategy has been effective for highlighting personal sacrifices made for the environment.) For example, current Senator Cory Booker got his hands dirty by investing eight years in turning around one of the country’s most troubled cities—Newark, New Jersey.

Of course, the more elites reflect the racial and gender balance in the country, the easier it will be to embed them—and the greater legitimacy elites will have across all groups. A renewed emphasis on elites does not simply mean accepting the racial and gender inequalities that once excluded large parts of the country from such positions. Indeed, the strongest elite groups are open to new infusions of talent, stand upon societies with ample social mobility, and work to spread the best of civilization to all parts of their country. They are not afraid of competition; they gain from it. The key is to make entry into the elite class more accessible while not diluting the professional ethos and sense of responsibility that long defined it.

Lastly, the country’s social, economic, and political leaders, as well as elite-shaping institutions, need to instill a much greater sense of humility towards the fragility of society. Cultivating humility requires greater awareness of the history of other great civilizations and the likelihood that social decay will repeat itself. Although there are widespread concerns about America’s position in the world, the environment, inequality, and the dangers from artificial intelligence, there is little concern about social disintegration, the decline in constructive social mores, and the growing physical and psychological separation of elites from the rest of the population. A change of heart requires major changes to education—especially of elites.

More knowledge about the rise and fall of other societies and civilizations—and the lessons that can be learned from them—should be a part of every high school and college curriculum. Toynbee’s observations should be studied alongside the historical events he was describing. More material on social decay (for example, the negative outcomes from family breakup and the weakening of communal ties) should also become a part of the curriculum in schools—especially in journalism schools, economics programs, and public policy programs.

Self-Sacrifice and the Common Good

The idea that society could somehow decay or fail from internal flaws seems hard for the majority of American elites—leaders, scholars, and policymakers—to fathom. Instead, they unconsciously hold, as Huntington argued, an “underlying commitment to the theory of progress”—a Whig interpretation of history. As former President Obama liked to say (quoting Martin Luther King, Jr., who had paraphrased Theodore Parker), “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Obama employed this quote to support a progressive determinism that makes many elites believe the United States is immune to the challenges that every other major civilization in history has faced in some form. There is little reflection on the downsides the current trajectory might bring.

But elites are not without feelings. Most want to believe that they are doing good, that they are contributing in some way to their societies. The problem is how the culture currently frames this contribution. What is valued is not what is needed.

Wealth and power used to be understood as bringing responsibility and obligations—often to a particular place and group—that were developed on a personal level and requiring a personal response. Elites today who search for greater meaning in their lives will find that the best way to achieve this is in service to and communion with others to whom one is tied through a web of intimate bonds and interdependence. Embedding oneself into a community—a community that needs stewardship and that involves diverse classes, professions, and political persuasions—requires many sacrifices, even discomforts. It also promises a greater personal transformation than any quest for self-fulfillment. Only when elites are invested in the concerns of the rest of the population, humble about the “right side of history” narrative, and open to stewarding their privilege rather than “checking” it will they be able to strengthen American society.

The post How Do America’s Elites Stack Up? appeared first on The American Interest.

“The Roots of Trumpism Will Not Disappear So Easily”

Last week, TAI contributing editor Laure Mandeville interviewed TAI editor-in-chief Jeffrey Gedmin for Le Figaro on long-term threats to American democracy, beyond the “danger” of Trump. Scroll down to read the full interview in English. Click here for the original French.

Laure Mandeville: Once again, America seems to have plunged into one of those profound crises that have characterized Trump’s presidency from the beginning. The impeachment inquiry is moving forward, Trump’s choice to move out of Northern Syria and allow Turkey to move in is being hotly debated. The battle with the Democrats has reached a peak. His adversaries mock a President totally out of control and a White House mired in chaos. Nancy Pelosi talks about a “meltdown.” How do you judge the current state of affairs in Washington and in the country?

Jeffrey Gedmin: I confess that I was appalled by the election of Donald Trump. I still see him as a problem and an embarrassment. But I’ve come to see a wider context. The situation is indeed fluid and volatile. Many concentrate on the person of Donald J. Trump. His lack of experience in foreign policy, and in governing, turns out to be a significant liability. His lack of discipline and impulsivity make him, as Commander-in-Chief, a danger in my view. National security is not a real estate deal. Managing alliances is not a protection racket.

But let’s look deeper too. Trump is as much symptom as cause of the current turmoil. Voters’ ties to our two establishment parties have been loosening. Trust in elites has been eroding. Why? Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis, the dizzying and disorienting effects of technology and globalization—it’s a confluence of factors that have gotten us into our current predicament. And while our problems are home-grown, we still have adversaries in this world. Russia, for example, has become exceptionally skillful in dropping poison in our wounds.

LM: Trump is seen by his adversaries as a madman, a fool, a puppet of Russia who is putting American democracy in jeopardy and betraying his allies. But his supporters still see in him the “outsider” and the patriot, who has many shortcomings, but is strong enough to put America’s national interests first and redefine globalization, fight political correctness, and defend the American worker and the small man against Washington’s elites. How do you see him?

JG: Trump arrived at just the right time. He’s a demagogue who smelled grievance. A part of the country was fed up—with Washington and Wall Street, with experts and coastal elites. They felt neglected and condescended to. Talk radio plus Fox News plus social media created an atmosphere of rebellion. Enter Donald Trump. He had a nose for the problems. He will bring none of the solutions, to be sure. He’s a wrecking ball. When he disappoints them—and he will in the end—where will Trump voters turn? There is still danger for democracy ahead.

LM: Can Donald Trump be re-elected if voters feel the Democrats are trying to deprive them of a real political battle?

JG: This way or that, Donald Trump may well go down. But the roots of Trumpism will not disappear so easily. If voters feel that Trump is driven from office unfairly, expect a severe backlash from a part of the electorate. We are in need of a broad political realignment. This will take time.

LM: After a long career in foreign policy, you have become the editor-in-chief of The American Interest, one of the most interesting journals of political thought in Washington. In this time of ideological tensions and deep political crisis, you are also getting into the ring. Your ambition, recently expressed in a very interesting statement of purpose, is to recreate a “political center” and to fight the acute polarization that has enveloped the country. Can you explain why this is so necessary and how this polarization is different from the divides of the past?

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By Fabien Clairefond for Le Figaro

JG: We need healthy, constructive partisanship. Political competition, in policy, in ideas. That’s democracy! But polarization becomes dangerous. Democracy depends on trust and compromise.

Anger breeds contempt. In some cases, families and friends have a hard time speaking to each other. I, myself, have some friends who think Trump is a threat to democracy, while others are convinced he is a savior, fighting for ordinary citizens against arrogant and out-of-touch elites. None of this is unique to the United States. A woman recently stood outside Parliament in London with a sign, “The Day Democracy Died.” Was she for or against Brexit?

In a democracy, you defeat your opponent. You do not destroy him or her. We witness in the United States—and in many places across the West—a challenge to our institutions, but also to the culture of democracy, to democracy’s habits, values, and behaviors. We must look for ways to restore the broad center. Only by doing this can we push the fringes back to the extremes.

We have two main parties in the United States, and they must absolutely reconnect with voters and regain trust. When their support declines, vacuums are created. That’s what Trump saw. He emerged to fill a void. Imagine that the trend continues. We cannot exclude the possibility, in the future, of more gifted demagogues than the current President. Trump is a narcissistic tactician. Beware of the visionary strategist!

LM: But what is the main cause of these vacuums? Has the “anywhere” elite that British writer David Goodhart describes forgotten that most people are “somewhere” individuals, attached to their roots and national cultures? What has Trump understood that the elites don’t?

JG: There are different divides in play. David Goodhart gives us a useful handle. “Anywheres,” he says, are cosmopolitans who travel, who speak foreign languages, who know technology, and who feel generally at ease with rapid social and economic change. “Somewheres,” on the other hand, tend to be more locally rooted, traditionalist, old-fashioned patriotic, perhaps more religious in some instances. This is the group Trump is speaking to when he rails against immigration, attacks tech giants, and mocks transgender bathroom use.

LM: Is it possible to go back to “normal” after Trump?

JG: I fear the present is the new normal. In this sense, it does not matter who is elected in 2020. We now all have deep structural and cultural changes to contend with. We are riding waves, looking for dry land.

LM: It is striking to see that on the Left of the political spectrum a political uprising led by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others is gaining strength, somehow reminiscent of Trump’s anti-establishment game.

JG: Right! What is destabilizing, on the Right as well as the Left, is the anti-elite mood. It’s not going to disappear. The Democrats may well be headed toward their own version of Trumpism. Less vulgar, perhaps, yet populist, protectionist, isolationist. We would need statesmen to navigate, to balance, to build coalitions. To assure voters.

LM: Trump’s choices in Syria have once more triggered a big debate about the purpose of American foreign policy. The Democrats criticize Trump’s attempt to withdraw from the Middle East and limit America’s involvement abroad. But they don’t seem very clear on what they would do in his place. Is the path open for China’s and Russia’s influence?

JG: First comes vision, then strategy, then tactics. We have lost any sense of vision. What should the region look like in five and 15 years? How do we define our interests? And those of our allies? Do we have priorities? We’ve lost our way. Exit strategy has become our vision. We are short-term, tactical, and reactive. The Russians and Iranians have a vision. They get power and influence, they play a longer game.

LM: You spent several years as the President of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty in Prague. You belong to a generation that saw Europe as home and key to America’s security. Has this approach shifted with the Obama and Trump presidencies? Will America let down Europe, or vice versa?

JG: Times change, we unlearn history. It’s painful, and dangerous. Just do the thought experiment. Imagine the world in 2030—with America turned inward, Europe fragmented and dysfunctional. God help us.

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The Age of the Whistleblower

Whistleblowing has been much in the news of late.

The term originated in the nineteenth century, deriving from policemen’s habit of blowing a whistle to alert the people within earshot that a crime had been committed and a criminal was at large. It has evolved to denote someone who calls attention to wrongdoing within an organization—public or private—in which he or she works, usually by going outside the organization. 

The word became familiar in the second half of the twentieth century, and a number of statutes have been enacted in the United States to encourage and protect whistleblowers, but it is safe to say that it has never before enjoyed the prominence it has reached in recent weeks as the result of a complaint filed by a member of the intelligence community against President Donald Trump, which has triggered Congressional proceedings to impeach the nation’s 45th chief executive.

The whistleblower in the Trump case resembles, in one important way, those portrayed in Tom Mueller’s wide-ranging, detailed, compelling, and often alarming new book Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud. He, like they, discovered what he considered to be serious wrongdoing and sought to call attention to it. His complaint, however, has received far more attention than any of theirs ever did. Because the accused wrongdoer is the most famous and powerful person in the world, the Trump whistleblower has the advantage, which those Mueller depicts lacked, of having one of the country’s two major political parties promoting his accusation and the nation’s press giving it saturation coverage. The charges of the most celebrated (albeit still anonymous) whistleblower of all time feed into one of the most toxic features of American life—the sharp polarization of its politics. The whistleblowing that Mueller portrays has its roots in a different, but no less problematic, aspect of the country’s public life, one that preceded this presidency and will outlive it.

Crisis of Conscience is largely devoted to portraits of individual whistleblowers. Among them are Allen Jones, who sought to call attention to the misuse of prescription drugs in the Pennsylvania state health system; Ernest Fitzgerald and Franz Gayl, who protested dysfunctional policies in the Department of Defense; Elin Bakhlid-Kunz, who uncovered abuses in a hospital in Florida; Walt Tamosaitis, who blew the whistle on safety hazards in the Hanford, Washington nuclear facility; Bill Binney, who battled against the misuse of billions of dollars by the National Security Agency; and, in a long chapter about the financial industry, in which the author worked for a time in the early 1990s, Michael Bowen, Bill Black, and Gary Aguirre, who discovered serious fraud in the financial institutions in which they worked.

Mueller’s purpose is to present these people as members of an honor roll of civic-minded Americans. Each of them first used the established channels within an organization to report what he or she had discovered, but got nowhere. All then went outside these channels, and suffered assaults on their reputations and their livelihoods that their organizations launched in retaliation for what they had done. While most of them finally achieved some vindication, all emerged bruised and shaken from the ordeals their efforts to stop abuses brought upon them.

Their stories, as Mueller recounts them, are morality tales, conflicts between right and wrong. The large organizations cover up their misdeeds in order to protect themselves and their economic gains; the whistleblowers seek to reveal the truth to the wider public and thereby protect those whom the institutions’ misdeeds are harming. The narratives are also variations on the story of David and Goliath, with powerful forces mustering their resources against far weaker individuals who have at best only a few allies, usually lawyers who specialize in assisting whistleblowers. In the cases the book describes David sometimes achieves some of his goals but, unlike in the original, Biblical version, Goliath always survives.

Mueller depicts his whistleblowers as heroes. Like soldiers in battle defending their homeland, they take major risks for the sake of the larger good, motivated by a sense of duty, a strong ethical orientation, religious faith, or all of these. The author supplies enough detail to make his portrayals credible.

Greed, corruption, and malfeasance, which activated these whistleblowers, have been present in human affairs from time immemorial; but whistleblowing as a tactic to oppose them has become more frequent, the book suggests, in the last 50 and especially the last 30 years. What accounts for this?

Mueller raises the possibility that American society as a whole has become less honest. This may be so. Culture, after all, is not static; values and patterns of behavior do change over time. Perhaps the baby-boom generation and its successors lack the moral anchors their parents acquired living through the Great Depression and World War II, in an era when organized religion had a more important place in the national life than it does today. The author also believes that secrecy within large organizations has become more widespread and common than used to be the case. Yet another possible cause of the increase in whistleblowing, to which he alludes indirectly, is the long-term evolution of the American economy and the American government.

The founders of the United States feared big government. They believed it to be the spawning ground of corruption of all kinds as well as the greatest threat to the political value the thirteen colonies had escaped the British Empire to protect: liberty. They designed a constitution that separated power, trusting the legislative branch to oversee, and check when necessary, the executive. What became the dominant political tradition in the first half of the nineteenth century, the one associated with Thomas Jefferson and his political descendant Andrew Jackson, had at its core the determination to resist the growth of government.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, while the government remained small, the Industrial Revolution produced large, powerful enterprises in new industries—railroads, steel, and oil being the most prominent. The founders’ suspicion of bigness and its pathologies remained, and practices and policies emerged to tame these new giants. Journalists known as muckrakers exposed their excesses: In a series of magazine articles Ida Tarbell built a case against Standard Oil, and Upton Sinclair wrote a sensational book, The Jungle, revealing the cavalier attitude toward food safety of the meat-packing industry. At the same time, the federal government employed antitrust laws to break up the largest industrial concerns and created agencies charged with regulating industrial activity, such as the Food and Drug Administration, which was established in 1908, two years after the publication of Sinclair’s book.

In the 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal began another trend that has continued into the present: the growth of government itself, including government expenditure, on a massive scale, for a variety of purposes, notably defense and health care. The federal government has grown in scope far beyond anything the founders could have imagined, which has created the circumstances in which whistleblowing has steadily increased.

The availability of money always brings with it the temptation for theft, self-dealing, and fraud; and money supplied by the taxpayers is no exception. The check on such abuses that the founders envisioned, Congressional oversight, when applied to the Leviathan that the federal government has become, can have only a very limited impact. In the 21st century, the amounts of money involved have become too large, the federal bureaucracy too vast, and the operations of its departments and agencies too complicated for the 535 members of the House and the Senate, even with their large staffs, to keep track of them. 

Even the federal agencies created for this purpose falter in the face of the scale and complexity of the activities they are charged with regulating. Moreover, they often develop mutually supportive relations with those they are supposed to be monitoring, a pattern known as regulatory capture. As Mueller notes, officials charged with regulating the defense and financial industries routinely move from the government to much higher-paying positions within these industries. This “revolving door” syndrome gives the officials every incentive to refrain from pursuing, in energetic and determined fashion, waste, fraud, and abuse in the companies they hope will provide them with lucrative sinecures when they leave office. Under these circumstances, when the established channels of control work poorly, the small number of people willing to risk circumventing those channels to try to stop abuses become increasingly important. That is why we live in the age of the whistleblower.

If big government lies at the root of the kinds of problems that inspire a few brave souls to blow the whistle on them, the obvious solution is to reduce government’s size. Despite two generations of rhetorical hostility to it on the part of politicians, however, the federal government has continued its steady expansion. When it comes to the size of their government, Americans are, it turns out, rhetorically conservative but operationally liberal. They abhor big government in theory but find it acceptable in practice. Even when the political party ostensibly committed to small government, the Republicans, has controlled the presidency and the Congress, the growth of the government has proceeded apace.

Moreover, in the complicated post-industrial society of nearly 330 million people that the United States has become, it may simply not be possible to downsize the government radically without causing serious economic and social damage. So the federal government will keep spending hundreds of billions of dollars annually. The opportunities for abuse will consequently persist and the mechanisms in place for preventing, uncovering, and punishing it will continue to be inadequate. In these circumstances, as Crisis of Conscience makes clear, whatever happens to Donald Trump, the future for whistleblowing looks uncomfortably bright.

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The End of Brazilian History?

Brazil Apart: 1964-2019

Perry Anderson

Verso, 2019, 256 pp., $26.95

English Marxism is, or was, a happy marriage of temperaments. Marxists can sometimes lack a sense of humor, and the English, the courage of their convictions. The one supplies the deficiency of the other.

The historical accomplishments of the English Marxist historians are well known. Earlier this year the publication of a biography of Eric Hobsbawm, their greatest champion, was closely attended by American intellectuals. Even our journalists, not invariably candidates for reading history books (especially about countries other than the United States), can be relied upon to own a copy of The Age of Revolution. 

Perry Anderson is the last of this type. Since the closing days of the Cold War, his contemporaries have either died or abandoned Marxism, the field of academic history has moved in other directions, and Anderson’s own zeal has waned with the eclipse of revolutionary socialism as a real possibility. Yet he remains a towering figure on the Left, as we have been lately reminded, in the form of his bombardment of the work of economic historian Adam Tooze. English readers are by now accustomed to the periodic pleasure of reading a hefty Anderson essay on Brazil in the pages of the London Review, on subjects ranging from macroeconomics to political intrigue to Brazilian letters and back again with consummate erudition and a famously extensive back-catalogue of allusions and ten-dollar words.

His latest book, Brazil Apart, collects five essays on Brazil spanning the last 25 years, and appends a new segment that brings the narrative forward another few months, from January to July 2019. The intention was to collect and translate the essays for publication in Brazil, where Anderson’s work has not yet garnered much attention from intellectuals. 

The results will be interesting to watch. His wary conviction in the potential of the Brazilian Left, paired with his almost unblinking enumeration of its failures, may earn him enemies among both the diehard Workers’ Party (PT) Left and the party’s critics on the center and Right. With the book coming out in Portuguese, it seemed a waste not to have it come out in English, too. 

The essays have largely been left as they were published. Anderson says his decision to leave in predictions and characterizations that held up badly was made in an effort to preserve the record. It does seem that little of value could have been lost in removing the periodic reintroductions of facts, characters, and institutions, which, if convenient in the original venue, are of no use to the reader of this book. 

That is not to say that leaving each installment intact was not the right determination. In the traditional history book, both the author and the reader know the ending in advance; while in this book, the reader knows the ending, but the author does not—thus generating a more visceral sense of the abrupt changes of fortune that characterize the last 30 years in Brazil. A unitary work on the period, if composed now, would almost inevitably straighten the tortuous path of recent history for the sake of argument and present a false sense of continuity or prolepsis.

It is generally believed the Greek historian Thucydides composed his famous history in stages as the Peloponnesian War wore on. The figure of the contemporary historian—men who wrote on their own times but with historical acumen, dedicating their work to posterity rather than the applause of the moment—was a constant presence in antiquity: Xenophon, Polybius, Sallust, Ammianus Marcellinus. Today their work has been divided up between journalists and academics. Neither profession requires the combination of ambition and rigor that contemporary history once did.

Anderson’s broad scope, high stature, and wide reading habits have allowed him to write essays on Brazil that are neither journalistic nor academic. They touch on contemporary subjects, but they do not break news; they react to an extensive academic literature, but they do not proffer contributions to it per se. They remain above the ruck, but below the ivory tower, and they never fall into the gimmick and windbaggery that often characterizes writing that splits this difference.

The contemporary historians always promised neutrality between the sides of the conflict they described. Anderson may not be said to be precisely neutral—the animating force behind his interest in Brazil being, he says as much, the promise of the Brazilian Left—but neither could Thucydides be said to be precisely neutral, say, between Pericles and his successors. Like that solemn Athenian, Anderson records even the most brutal reverses dispassionately, and gives us plenty of material to disagree with. Thucydides is often thought of as a conservative, and he is, but then again who was his Pericles but a more eloquent Lula, and Bolsonaro but a kind of Cleon?

Brazil Apart represents a chance to evaluate the powers of prediction of the Anglophone world’s premier chronicler of Brazilian politics. By leaving each call as he made it, he seems to invite this kind of scrutiny. Under it he fares well, offering early warnings on, inter alia, how thoroughly Lula’s program depended on high commodity prices and how the Lava Jato corruption investigation might leave as mixed a legacy as its inspiration, Italy’s Mani Pulite. As early as 2002 he suggested an economic crisis in the developed world might give middle-income countries a bit of room to maneuver. There are some notable exceptions, of course, and the most dramatic comes chronologically first: Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

The Brazilian FDR Who Wasn’t

Anderson’s first essay marks Cardoso’s 1994 ascent to the presidency, after a number of false starts to Brazilian democracy at the end of a period of military rule that had begun in 1964. Tancredo Neves, the consensus choice to lead the transition, died in 1985 before he could take office; Fernando Collor de Mello, the first directly elected president, was impeached in 1992 for spectacular corruption in his home state. The Cold War was over, the so-called third wave of democratization had swept Latin America, but Brazil could not seem to finish the job—until Cardoso, having vanquished hyperinflation, stormed to power.

The 1994 essay reads at points as a paean to Cardoso. Anderson reminds his readers of Cardoso’s pedigree as a consummate intellectual and a thoroughgoing man of the Left. In describing the intellectual fecundity of Marxist circles at the University of São Paulo in the mid-sixties—a formative influence, he says, on Cardoso—we even get a rare autobiographical touch: a reference to the novelty of meeting, as a visiting student there during this period, with women “emancipated by maids.” It was another time!

But just how closely Cardoso was to hew to his early Marxist influences would prove a bitter disappointment to Anderson. An early deal with northeastern oligarchs causes him to raise an eyebrow and mention, not for the last time, the Italian concept of trasformismo, whereby radical forces are seduced and finally domesticated by the regnant conservative forces. Anderson nonetheless concludes his first essay on Cardoso by comparing him to Franklin Roosevelt and asserting he will be “the best president Brazil has ever had.”

This claim, from the present perspective, is not absurd, but by the end of Cardoso’s second term Anderson’s tone is different. Cardoso’s administration is designated “neoliberalism ‘lite,’” and Cardoso himself a sort of Third Way Lepidus to Clinton’s Caesar and Blair’s Antony. The comparisons to FDR are transferred to Lula. Still later, with Cardoso’s reemergence as a minor plotter during the downfall of Dilma Rousseff in 2016, publicly blessing her ouster, the narration displays a certain bitterness towards the apostate.

The Rise and Fall of the Worker’s Party

During Lula’s presidency there was plenty to distract from this disappointment. Anderson chronicles the Workers’ Party-era combination of the fortuna of the commodity boom and the virtù of Lula’s social programs, without hesitating to spell out the iniquities of his lieutenants Palocci and Dirceu and his frustration with the PT’s indifference towards the intellectuals that had fueled its rise.

Things began to unravel under Lula’s successor Dilma, impeached in 2016 for a fiscal peccadillo as millions demonstrated against her. The essay on Bolsonaro contains a wonderful exposition of the half-baked plots of her political opponents, in a byzantine political game in which they finally triumphed, only to be swept away in a Bolsonarian tide. In the new frontmatter, however, Anderson has a different tone, dubbing the matter a “parliamentary coup”—a common phrase, of course, though one of somewhat uncertain meaning.

The biggest influence on Anderson’s treatment of the fall of the Workers’ Party is the work of André Singer, a professor at the University of São Paulo who served under Lula during his first term before rebranding himself a theorist of “lulismo,” the political and economic thought associated with the administration. Long sections of the Bolsonaro essay especially are written as a summary of Singer’s work. Anderson often inhabits the arguments of the authors whose work he is discussing, offering only a paucity of markers to designate whether the views he sets out are his own or his subject’s. 

While Anderson offers fulsome praise to Singer, comparing his latest work to Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, he seems to dispute a key premise of Singer’s notion of the economic logic of lulismo: a Manichean distinction between “productive” and “rentier” elements of the Brazilian economy. If only things were so simple! Later, Anderson seems to look askance at Singer’s claim about the fall of Dilma: that her unbending republicanism prevented her from temporizing, like Lula did, when matters demanded it. With a cabinet stocked with figures tarnished by corruption under Lula, could she really be said to be so pure? Republican or not, the scene surrounding her impeachment—a heady mix of indictment, swirling intrigue, mass demonstration, and rhetorical excess—was exactly as the Machiavelli of the Discourses would have liked it.

Brazil’s Overweight Constitution

Many of Anderson’s grudges, which come increasingly to the fore as the narrative approaches the present, concern the Brazilian constitution. Framed in 1988 at the end of a frustrating transition period to democracy, the document is elephantine and represents what one expert has called an “overlapping consensus,” where every group except for conservatives and the military got its way.

One unusual feature of the document is the degree to which it mandates spending on social services—an attempt to hinder future attempts to implement austerity measures. The idea that some 90 percent of government spending could be not only mandated by law but enshrined in the constitution would make American fiscal hawks’ heads explode. From the center-Right leftwards, most in Brazil are now reluctant to relitigate the charter, which Anderson calls “unwieldy and incoherent.”

The other two vices of the system, for Anderson, are presidentialism and the country’s distorted Supreme Court. The presidency, more so “than Coca-Cola or the Marines,” is the most vitiating American export to Latin America, especially combined, as it generally is, with a fractured, European-style proportionally elected legislature neither able properly to resist nor to obey whatever petty Caesar occupies the presidential chair at a given moment. The option to alter the system in Brazil to a parliamentary one in 1993 was not taken. It is tempting to regret this and imagine that the hapless Dilma, having totally alienated Congress, might have been removed from the executive in a less constitutionally acrimonious way under a parliamentary system. 

Because the Brazilian constitution is so extensive, the Supreme Court has final say on an almost universal range of issues. It is thus arguably more powerful than its American counterpart, but—Anderson says—without similar discipline. He describes how lawyers “wine and dine” judges, one of whom, the late Eros Grau, once penned a “fifth-rate pornographic novel” (really more of a novella). The Court’s president Dias Toffoli attracts particular ire: as a turncoat PT “errand boy,” he is dubbed “arguably the most despicable single figure in today’s political landscape.” Partisanship would be a vast improvement on the Court’s far less organized backstabbing, sliminess, and all-around grandstanding for news cameras: “Daumier,” says Anderson in sum, “would have been hard pressed to describe it.” 

Oscar Vilhena, a scholar of the Brazilian constitution, has a more optimistic view of the document. A “battle of the powers” between the Supreme Court, the legislature, and the executive inflicted superficial damage to constitutional stability but did not result in a bona fide crisis. Episodes of political violence, outside the stabbing of Bolsonaro on the campaign trail and episodic murders of human rights activists, are rare. Instead the inefficient, awkward solidity of the 1988 document was affirmed. Even with the election of a government staffed by military men and conservatives—the only two groups with no stake in preserving it—there was little question of its suspension or even serious modification outside a long-anticipated pension reform.

The drama of 2016 and Dilma’s impeachment thus heralded the arrival of a sort of parliamentarism by proxy in Brazil. A president who lost the support of Congress would be impeached regardless of any actual criminality, after the fashion of a vote of confidence. In this view it is not the presidency but the vice presidency which becomes the source of instability, as the subordinate of each president (often of a different party) contemplates the possibility of betrayal and succession to the throne—a possibility Dilma’s running mate, Michel Temer, successfully pursued, and one that Bolsonaro’s Vice President Hamilton Mourão is clearly considering. Anderson ends his closing reflection by predicting Mourão’s accession to the presidency. This is a possibility which will likely wax and wane between now and the (scheduled) end of Bolsonaro’s first term in 2023, but which currently seems on the wane after the recent passage of a significant pension reform occasioned expressions of cautious optimism in the international financial press.

Left and Right in the Age of Bolsonaro

The rise of Bolsonaro remains a challenge for a divided Brazilian Left. Endless second-guessing about the viability of Lula’s “limited reformism” and an all-consuming fixation on the fate of Lula himself preclude much serious discussion about the nature of the current administration, the extent of its popular appeal, and how it is best opposed. Epithets like “fascist” and “neoliberal” take the place of this sort of inquiry. Though clear-eyed about Bolsonaro’s long rhetorical record of casual cruelty, Anderson notes that calling him a fascist, just like the habit of doing so to Trump, is nothing more than “lazy invective,” considering there is no mass movement associated with either. 

Neoliberalism, only slightly less than fascism, is a woefully insufficient framework for understanding the current administration in Brazil. This tendency coexists uneasily in Bolsonaro’s government with other, often hostile forces associated with the Armed Forces, evangelical Protestantism, and conservatives who are not so persuaded of the supremacy of the market. Anderson begins to explore the first two of these factors, noting Bolsonaro’s connections to networks of evangelicals in Rio, and, in his new epilogue, delivering a savage send-up of the much-eulogized UN mission to Haiti that was a formative influence on many of the generals in Bolsonaro’s government.

Even when the neoliberal shoe fits, matters are not always clear-cut. Bolsonaro’s marquee legislative effort, for example, a pension reform toward which he himself was lukewarm, has been a frequent target for such accusations, but the grossly unequal nature of Brazil’s social security ancien régime put its defenders on the Left in an awkward position. Tellingly, the two figures who could best be said to be incarnations of neoliberalism—Kim Kataguiri on the Right and Tabata Amaral on the Left—have found themselves marooned in the current atmosphere.

The one stone left mostly unturned here is a fourth force in the Bolsonaro government: the otherwise much-discussed “ideological wing” of self-styled conservative intellectuals attached to Bolsonaro from early in his campaign. These characters, tinfoil-hat types as they may be, are hard to ignore in the recent annals of Brazil’s political life. Though they constantly feature in national headlines, they appear with almost vanishing rarity in Anderson’s tale. Olavo de Carvalho, an ex-Trotskyist astrologer turned polemicist who helped Bolsonaro’s campaign gain traction and appointed several ministers, is mentioned only long enough for Anderson to call him “the Brazilian version of a seer of the Black Hundreds.” 

Ernesto Araújo, the foreign minister, infamous for his intermittently researched polemics on cultural history, appears not once. Anderson absolves himself—we can hardly blame him—of the task of having to read these individuals’ writing by claiming, not without reason, that the military men in the cabinet represent the chief and overwhelming influence on the current government. Proclaiming ignorance of Carvalho’s writing and dismissing his influence on the government is common among observers of Brazil from the center-right to the Left, a habit that is as readily understandable as it is risky.

As a luminous 1992 essay on conservative thinkers of the 20th century demonstrates, Anderson is willing in principle to undertake such analyses. Of course, it hardly needs to be said there is no figure on the Brazilian Right who approximates the level of an Oakeshott or a Strauss. The absence of a conservative presence in Brazil’s best universities, where the bulk of the professoriate is not liberal as in America but rather genuinely left-wing and in many cases Marxist, has given the new wave of Brazilian conservative intellectuals a rebellious spiritedness, but to a greater extent than in America it has stunted their erudition and made them prone to amateurishness and philistinism—now reflected in brutal cuts to federal university spending by Bolsonaro’s education minister, not incidentally a disciple of Carvalho.

Even a Marxist analysis of these individuals could yield interesting results—Carvalho might be revealed to be dreaming not of the productive relations of neoliberal capitalism but rather feudal ones, his occasional recourse to Austrian economists notwithstanding. Even Araújo, who ought to be a more straightforward fusionist conservative, is required in this climate to filter his economic liberalism through a medievalizing rhetoric of “Western civilization.” References to the Crusades and early modern Portuguese kings offers a final suggestion that there may be something altogether more antediluvian at work here than the ghost of Milton Friedman.

If the generals are truly calling the shots, on the other hand, one wonders why they permitted Olavo de Carvalho to slander them in the vilest language for months, his scatological vituperations reprinted in every major newspaper, before they, or someone, finally succeeded in muzzling him. It cannot but have hurt their pride—and yet they knew they owed their power to him. Has there been a defeat of the so-called ideological faction in the government and a triumph of the military one, or has there been a synthesis? Considering the Brazilian tendency towards ideological flexibility and pragmatism—a constant theme in Anderson’s text—it is hard to imagine the ideologues have not had some effect on the trajectory of the administration, even if its nature is not yet discernible and its extent easy to exaggerate.

The Sorry End of Brazilian History?

In his introduction, Anderson leads with a melancholy and unusually schematic claim: Brazilian history since 1964 has the shape of a parabola. The curve rises from military rule, up toward the promise of social democracy, first under Cardoso, who quickly disappointed, and then under Lula, who did not. It falls, in proportion with the global commodity prices that had financed Lula’s social policies, down from Dilma through Temer to Bolsonaro, who brought with him the return of the military to the helm of the Brazilian polity, and seems to herald the end of the hope that motivated Anderson’s study in the first place. The implied prediction for Brazil’s future is bleak.

One could take issue with how this argument asks us not to discriminate between the different ways military men have come to power—in 1964, as leaders of a coup; in 2018, as ministers, serving at the whim of the civilian President, of a government that won by a ten-point margin at the polls and has left the constitution intact. The response would presumably be to say that Bolsonaro in fact cannot not fire his generals without risking his command of legitimacy and order. 

There are other players on the scene, too: the Supreme Court’s current deliberations over the fate of Lula, and more generally whether the hard-charging Lava Jato anti-corruption investigation overstepped the bounds of law, will give it plenty more opportunities to defy the wishes of the military high command, should it feel so inclined.

The last few years have seen the sudden appearance, and almost simultaneous rise to power, of what appears to be a genuine Brazilian Right, distinct for the first time from the inclinations of the military, northeastern oligarchs, and liberal economists. While just several years ago “conservative” was an epithet individuals and parties contrived to avoid, now the PSL (Bolsonaro’s party) and the PSDB (Cardoso’s) assert rival claims to “true” conservatism.

This has not, as yet, meant the political independence of this new Right from these other, traditional “conservative” forces; nor does it mean, necessarily, that such an independence would be good for the country. But it is one way in which the history of Brazil since 1964 is not merely symmetrical. And to the extent that it is symmetrical, it may not simply be the defeat of the Left that is to blame, but also the vices and the prematurity of a nascent Right.

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Hong Kong, Beijing, and the US-China Policy Shift

Sitting down to breakfast with me in Washington, DC, early Wednesday morning, two leaders of Hong Kong’s democracy movement had just seen news from Hong Kong, 12 hours ahead, of developments—one confirmed, another reported—that would appear to be concessions from Beijing, but are more likely intended to divide the protest movement.

Martin Lee is a barrister, a former chairman of the Hong Kong Democratic Party and a democratically elected member of the legislative council—an important distinction as half the members are not. Jimmy Lai, who owns the Apple Daily newspaper and other media, is highly unusual in that he is a wealthy Hong Kong businessman who publicly supports democracy. As a result, his newspaper is the target of ad boycotts, while he personally has been a target of harassment and physical attacks. According to China’s Communist Party, Lee and Lai are “black hands,” or subversives.

Lee, at 81, looks every bit the barrister in his dark suit. Lai, 70, rarely in business attire, wore a necktie, as well as a not-completely-alarming violet cashmere blazer for their Washington meetings.

On Wednesday, Hong Kong’s government at last formally withdrew the extradition bill that kicked off months of protests. The legislation, according to Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam, was allegedly necessary to enable extradition to Taiwan of a man who confessed to murdering his girlfriend there before fleeing to Hong Kong. Instead, say Lai and Lee, the murder case was a pretext for extending Beijing’s official reach into Hong Kong’s judicial system. Beijing has already snatched people extrajudicially: four of five Hong Kong men affiliated with a bookstore selling books banned by the Communist Party, and a mainland billionaire who had fallen out of favor with Beijing. Adding the veneer of legality to such kidnappings was a step too far for Hong Kong people, who prize the rule of law and expect Beijing to honor the one country, two systems arrangement they were promised.

Also, on Wednesday, the Financial Times reported that Beijing was considering replacing Lam. With the bill withdrawn and Lam gone, two of the protesters five demands would be met. However, the Hong Kong people, said Lai, would continue to insist on the other three items: an independent commission to investigate the conduct of the Hong Kong police, democratic election of the Chief Executive, and pardons for protesters.

As for the extreme tactics of some protesters, Lai said the vast majority of Hong Kong people “definitely does not want this kind of violence” and suggested that the removal of Lam, if it happens, might reflect an effort to divide the population. “The challenge for Hong Kong people . . . will be to continue their determination and persistence,” says Lai. On the matter of a replacement for Lam, Lee, whom Beijing expelled from the mainland committee drafting the Basic Law that now applies in Hong Kong, noted that any interim Chief Executive could only serve six months, after which an election would be required. But that “election,” which the Basic Law assigns to a committee of 1,200 dominated by Beijing proxies, would likely stir up more opposition. Beijing’s refusal to allow democratic election of the top official in Hong Kong was the spark for the Umbrella movement that shut down the business district for ten weeks in 2014.

Both men visited Washington earlier this year. In a remarkable show of support, Lee was received by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Lai by Vice President Mike Pence. Yet U.S. policy is not coherent. This week, Vice President Pence called out China for its interference in Hong Kong through “actions to curtail the rights and liberties of its people—rights and liberties that were guaranteed through a binding international agreement of ‘one country, two systems.’” Pence’s assessment contradicts President Trump, who recently said China has made “great progress” in Hong Kong. Two days later, Xi Jinping warned that “anyone who attempts to split any region from China will be crushed with shattered body and bones;” China’s own state media interpreted the remarks as being aimed at Hong Kong’s protesters.

The Administration is emphasizing that Hong Kong is a factor—but not a decisive one—in trade negotiations with China. If a trade deal is struck, it is hard to see how the United States would hold any lasting leverage over Beijing’s behavior in Hong Kong. The job of maintaining that leverage will fall to Congress. Historically, Congress has played an indispensable role in American support for democracy and human rights by passing legislation that the Executive Branch has opposed, including the 1974 Jackson-Vanik amendment and the 2012 Magnitsky Act. Both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi have been deeply involved in supporting Hong Kong’s autonomy. McConnell is the author of the U.S.-Hong Kong Policy Act of 1992. That was at a time, before the 1997 handover, when American officials thought Beijing could be encouraged live up to its promises on Hong Kong, and generally integrate into the U.S.-led world order.

Says Lai, “America is waking up” to the challenge China poses. “America is becoming more critical about China than before, when they closed their eyes to China and hoped it would become part of the world community. . . . That was an excuse, or rationale, for some who wanted to make money.” Lee and Lai welcome the efforts of the Congress to put pressure on mainland and Hong Kong officials directly responsible for rights violations and undermining the city’s autonomy. The House has passed, and the Senate is considering, the Hong Kong Democracy and Human Rights Bill that would, among other things, provide sanctions for those responsible for undermining Hong Kong people’s rights and freedoms. “Anyone who has a hand in it should be punished,” says Lai.

Congress is also working to ensure that U.S. companies don’t supply the Hong Kong police force with tear gas and crowd control equipment. Of violent police tactics, Lai says, “The police all of a sudden turn out to be a different kind of police than we are used to. . . . However, if you consider the background, the change is not dramatic because senior police have been sent to China for training and acculturation—‘brainwashing,’ so to speak.”

Lee and Lai expect the people of Hong Kong will keep fighting for their freedom.  They have confidence in the younger generation to keep the torch burning. “The police might not object” to Beijing’s indoctrination, says Lai, “but the kids will protest.”

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A Playhouse Divided, on God and Trump

Heroes of the Fourth Turning

Written by Will Arbery, Directed by Danya Taymor

Playwrights Horizon Theatre, New York, NY, through November 17

Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning, now extended through November 17 at New York’s Playwrights Horizons Theatre, has been hailed as a glimpse of the world of Catholic conservatives. Perhaps even a successor to J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy—a template for decrypting Why Trump Won. Like Vance, who sought to explain his Rust Belt upbringing to outsiders, Arbery is writing from experience: He was one of eight children raised by his Catholic parents who both teach at Wyoming Catholic College. While Vance was recently received into the Catholic Church, Arbery’s relationship with his family’s faith is strained.

Both authors’ works are love letters to the communities they were raised in, and both their compassion and their corrections may catch their audiences by surprise. In Turning, the initial indication that the four young Catholics may not be what the audience expects comes in the first serious tête-a-tête between the twenty-something characters.

Kevin, in the middle of a prolonged burnout, and Teresa, a rising political provocateur in the Bannonite mold, are lingering outside a party, held in honor of the new president of the Catholic college they both attended. Kevin, yearning for “something true,” pleads with Teresa to have “a big conversation” with him, like they used to do. And he’s got something good, he promises: “It’s so messed up. It’ll lead to a four-hour conversation: Why the heck do we have to love the Virgin Mary?”

Once Teresa takes the bait, she quickly shifts into the language she’s most comfortable in—the political. The show is set just one week after Heather Heyer’s murder in Charlottesville, but Teresa is still focused on November 2016. She reminds Kevin that “We almost had a President who was the opposite of the Virgin Mary in every sense.”

So far, so inflammatory. But Teresa’s complaint against Clinton isn’t her policies, her feminism, or any of her particular faults. It’s her carefully cultivated blandness. Teresa castigates Clinton for having “scrubbed her image clean of any particularity, any humanity, any grace. A woman who was at the forefront of the effort to neuter all particularity.”

In contrast, the Virgin Mary is an example of “the scandal of the particular.” Or, as Paul puts it in his first letter to the Corinthians, “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God.”

But most of the characters of Fourth Turning, Teresa especially, are anxious not to be or appear weak. In the intermissionless play, the four main characters cycle through the backyard, prying at each other’s fears and hopes.

Teresa (Zoë Winters) is longing for a war, listening to Steve Bannon and hoping to be one of the titular “Heroes of the Fourth Turning” who save civilization when all appears lost.

Justin (Jeb Kreager) wants to endure, trusting that if he is faithful in small things, he, and his faith, and the people who share it will persist through a time of tribulation.

Emily (Julia McDermott) wants to give herself up, possibly through offering the excruciating pain she endures from a long-lasting, slightly suspect illness (implied to be Lyme) for the redemption of the whole world.

Kevin (John Zdrojeski) wants a girlfriend. Or maybe to be a priest. Or just to be free of his addiction to pornography. Or simply not to have already drunk so very much before the play has begun.

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Zoë Winters, Jeb Kreager, and Julia McDermott (Photo by Joan Marcus via Playwrights Horizons Theatre)

In Arbery’s introduction to the play, he draws the reader’s attention to the two definitions of fugue. First, it is a meditation on a theme that layers and juxtaposes different voices. Second, it is “a state or period of loss of awareness of one’s identity.” The final resolution of a musical fugue never comes. Arbery chooses to avoid ending the dialogue by giving the show over to interruptions from another, diabolical voice. One of the characters erupts, speaking in a voice that is heavily implied to be the result of possession, and the show ends shortly thereafter, without resolution. Unfortunately, this attempt to end the show with a bang shortchanges the characters and the audience.

It feels like a lack of faith in the viewers of the play, or in the strengths of the early movements of the script. Teresa may have pledged her faith that “sometimes the moments that are the most grotesque are the closest to transcendent grace,” but the play grounds its grotesqueries in sudden, surreal revelations. It loses sight of the way that God is able to make much out of little.

The characters of Turning are often in agreement. None of them like Trump, though several of them voted for him. Even Teresa, who would be willing to work for him, describes him as an instrument (“a golem molded from the clay of mass media”) rather than a potential hero. They all have rosaries close to hand when one character asks to pray a decade together. And they all agree that abortion is a grave evil. They can agree on the truth without agreement on how to live it out in a world that disagrees with them.

Teresa and Emily clash about the limits of love. Emily admits to being friends with an abortion clinic worker, Olivia, and even admiring her. Emily and Theresa don’t disagree about the moral stakes of Olivia’s work, but Emily wants to convince Teresa that she can love the ways Olivia is generous, the ways she is selfless, even if it’s in the service of a bad cause.

Emily has worked for a crisis pregnancy center, Olivia for an abortion clinic, but both, Emily insists, are motivated by the love of women in need. Neither is a better person than the other, and it’s sheer bad luck they’re on opposite sides. Emily seems to live in hope of a Christmas Day truce, where soldiers poke their heads out of the trenches and sing together, embrace each other, because they’re more alike than they knew.

Teresa pushes back, first with sharp words, analogizing Olivia to a Nazi and saying there’s a point where being on the wrong side isn’t chance but a choice. But, when Emily challenges Teresa to imagine what it’s like to be Olivia, Teresa replies by imagining Olivia’s own empathy, and its limits:

She’s thinking: “hi, okay, I’m Olivia, I’m such a good person for helping all these women, I’m so great, and you’re about to get an abortion and you’re so great, and we’re all so great, and now let’s go into this room and do this thing and your doctor is so great, and oh btw if you start to wonder if there’s another presence here, someone small and silent with us, someone who could be just as great as us but will never have the chance, push that down, push it away, don’t think about it, we’re the great ones, here and now, because we say so.”

In answering Emily, Teresa stands condemned by the words she used to describe Olivia’s sin. Teresa has no patience with the small and silent. She pushes Kevin away when he asks for her help. He calls her out, saying if she’s so concerned with the particular, why doesn’t she care about his particularity, his grotesqueries. And she answers, “Because you’re weak. And it disgusts me.”

Teresa strives for strength as though in an arms race—everything that repulses her about her opponents she grafts onto herself, since it seems to be working for them and she needs it to work for her. When Gina (Michele Pawk), the college president they’ve been waiting to congratulate, finally makes it to the party, she describes Teresa’s error briefly and sharply: “Look at you, you’re worldly, you’re crude, and you’re weak.” Shortly afterwards, Gina mirrors all these faults herself. Gina may be the oldest character, having taught all the main characters except her daughter Emily, but age is not proof against pride and other weaknesses.

Arbery is especially suspicious of one particular way of seeking strength. He writes in his program notes, “My characters often want to disappear into someone else, or merge with the entire world. I find this impulse tragic, because not only is it impossible, but the attempt is very dangerous. You can’t fuse with other people. If you try, you—and everything that makes you you you—might disappear.”

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John Zdrojeski, Jeb Kreager, and Zoë Winters (Photo by Joan Marcus via Playwrights Horizons Theatre)

Teresa (and Gina, in her Goldwater girl days), seek fusion politically. As they clash, they start tracking each other’s use of the word “we,” calling each other out for falling back on collectivism over character. But the volleyed “we’s” are a foreshadowing for a more apocalyptic ending, when one of the four main characters lets out a wild monologue, laded with we’s that aren’t the language of political coalition, but of Legion. For at least one of the characters, dissolving oneself into others, whether as political coalition or attempt at solidarity, has left an emptiness that invites haunting by the kinds of demons who aren’t metaphors.

Throughout the show, Justin, who is hosting the party, keeps trying to find private moments to clean his porch. He shot a deer, and some of the blood is still lingering where he dressed it. Something about the moment felt off, he admits, and his hand was shaking as he held the knife. There’s something wrong feeling about his whole house, he thinks, but the blood is the part of the problem he thinks he knows how to deal with.

Justin is the most tempted to handle the turmoil by hunkering down, focusing on what he can fix, but the disorder of the world finds him anyway. “Your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground,” the Lord tells Cain in Genesis.

The situation here seems parallel, but whose blood is it? Heather Heyer’s? The children from Olivia’s clinic? The closer, quieter wounds of Justin’s friends?

The praise for the show has frequently taken Teresa’s world-historical perspective—the show is remarkable because these people, in miniature, show us something about the important parts of the world. The ending Arbery wrote is a scaling up, favoring the whirlwind, the earthquake, the fire, rather than the still small voice in which the Lord is present to Elijah in the book of Kings.

If the show is looking for tragedy, it has a subtler and sadder moment that comes before the final conflagration. Teresa has lingered at the party with the galleys for her new book, a collection of vituperative columns, in her bag, hoping to get Gina’s blurb, and, more importantly, her blessing. By the time she pulls it out, we know she’ll be rebuffed. But she has one more thing to offer—she wants her old teacher, who instilled in her a love of George Washington, to know that she lives near where he fought the Battle of Brooklyn. But Teresa stumbles, trying to put her love into words, and Gina brushes her off. The moment for mending is lost.

But if Teresa, or any of the others, will be healed, that healing will come from small moments of redemptive joy. Without her love of her neighborhood, how will Teresa learn to love her neighbors?

When Gina best rebuts Teresa, her case isn’t political but personal. She isn’t afraid of missing out on the power dangled by Bannon and his sleazy ilk, Gina says, because it’s obvious their promises are empty. “I just don’t trust any of these men,” Gina says, “They’re all on their third wives.”

Or, as Christ put it in His parable of the unjust steward as recounted in Luke, “Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much. So if you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches?”

The ultimate question is, what have these characters been entrusted with? Teresa seems, in her own way, to have been entrusted with Brooklyn—challenged to live in a city (and perhaps even a country) she believes is actively hostile to her beliefs. Kevin has been entrusted with himself, but constantly seeks to avoid taking responsibility to act rightly as long as he can stall with more big conversations. Emily has been entrusted with her own disease and suffering, and struggles when she tries to take on the suffering allotted to others. And Justin seems most likely to have been a good and faithful servant in his small way—the one who, at the close of the play, is most prepared to take on more.

And when the audience leaves the theater, turns their phones back on, and scrolls through their newsfeeds to observe the mess of our present politics and the failings of our politicians, they would do well to remember Gina’s warning. The dissolutions on our national stage began years ago, perhaps on quiet, personal nights like the one Arbery depicts, when (long before we chose to reward them for doing it) the people presently in power pushed away what was entrusted to them and grabbed for something else. Each audience member may be fortunate enough to not have their own failings played out for a national audience, or even an off-Broadway sized one. But each betrayal of what is given is no less weighty for not being played to the back of the house.

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