Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 28

Will Hong Kong Rain on Xi’s Parade?

Nationalism takes many forms and can mean different things. To be sure, there are benign varieties. But the nationalism on display in Beijing for China’s National Day celebrations is an aggressive assertion of ethnic and cultural superiority—the product of a mission to dominate and exploit lesser nations of the world by a regime in the grip of a personality cult and backed by military and economic might.

While the people of Hong Kong protest against the prospect of being included in this project at the cost of losing their cherished civil freedoms, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has deftly deflected the protestors’ moral challenge to serve its nationalist purposes. The Communist Party exerts overwhelming control over media content inside China, and it is now using that control as a cudgel in an information war over the protests convulsing Hong Kong. Ever since the protests began, the CCP has been stoking mainland popular opinion against the Hong Kongers in order to serve its nationalist goals and thus strengthen its political grip.

The CCP’s efforts to control the Hong Kong narrative have focused on three distinct propaganda tactics: calling the Hong Kong protests “violent riots;” claiming that their goal is independence from the People’s Republic; and asserting that the protests have been orchestrated by the United States and other hostile foreign forces, with the assistance of agitators, including one of the authors of this article (Jianli Yang) and his organization.

These efforts have met with a degree of success in influencing the perceptions of the mainland population, as well as overseas students from the mainland. They have created an alternate, false version of what, seen from Hong Kong, is clearly a popular movement aimed at preserving democracy and the rule of law. In China’s version, a small, violent gang of protesters, unsupported by residents and provoked by foreign agents, is running rampant, calling for Hong Kong’s independence and tearing China apart. Beijing will no doubt spin the recent news and video of Hong Kong police shooting an 18-year-old protestor to fit this narrative.

When the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre ripped the revolutionary façade off of the CCP, the Party was forced to rely exclusively on two sources of legitimacy to maintain power and momentum: high-speed economic development and nationalism. After Xi came to power, China’s economic growth ran up against structural bottlenecks, evidenced by the near collapse of its stock market in 2015. As the country’s declining growth gradually became apparent, Xi Jinping floundered on economic issues, even as he excelled when it came to internal political power struggles. He sought an ideological revival to maintain his power and engineered a political retreat toward Maoism. This has resulted in political repression with echoes of the Cultural Revolution and, in economic terms, a statist program that has come at the expense of private markets. China’s trade war with the United States has left the country’s economic outlook even bleaker.

More than ever, Xi must rely on nationalism to ensure political stability and the legitimacy of the regime. He sees conflicts that incite patriotic fervor as a necessary tool to maintain the common perception that the regime is making the dream of a strong, rejuvenated, and wealthy nation come true. These conflicts are both external and internal; China not only rattles its saber against the United States but also persecutes and demonizes minorities within the People’s Republic—Uighurs and Tibetans, among others. While the demands for freedom and democracy from Hong Kong have threatened to damage the image of a powerful China and Communist Party at a critical moment, they have also presented Xi with an opportunity: stoking anger at the people of Hong Kong, so as to strengthen nationalist sentiment and Communist Party rule.

Two Forms of Chinese Nationalism

The nationalism evident in the October 1 celebrations embodies the transformation of China’s self-understanding and posture toward the world. There are now two distinct forms of modern Chinese nationalism: victimhood and revanchism.

Exploitation by colonial powers in the 19th century, the ruthless conquest of large parts of the country by the Japanese in the 20th, and the Chinese Civil War, an intermittent conflict lasting 22 years and claiming more than three million casualties, left massive scars on the Chinese psyche and a profound sense of victimhood. The Chinese nation had been repeatedly injured and humiliated by others. China was the “sick man of Asia”—a country without national agency, whose fate and destiny appeared beyond control of its own people. Mao also burdened China with atrocities that dwarfed any inflicted by foreign powers, but Chinese nationalism drew from the sense that these were still somehow driven by past injuries, that these atrocities were historically necessary to right the wrongs of capitalist contamination from abroad. What bound the Chinese together and furnished their national identity was their common suffering at the hands of others.

Chinese nationalism has undergone a critical transformation in the past 30 years as China has risen to become the world’s second-largest economy. With this remarkable transformation, the Chinese sense of victimhood has morphed into one of a prideful, arrogant revanchism, built on top of the old feelings of injury and powerlessness. Historically, aggressive nationalism has grown beneath the scars of physical and spiritual wounds; Isaiah Berlin observed that “a wounded Volksgeist is like a bent twig, forced down so severely that when released, it lashes back with fury.”

Under the CCP, and following Deng Xiaoping’s reforms beginning in 1978, China experienced a rapid increase in domestic prosperity, enlarged capacities for international influence, and a resulting renewed sense of national pride. These feelings merged with and energized a desire to punish enemies, both within the country and abroad, for past injuries. China became an international bully, with its diplomats in Brussels, Geneva, and elsewhere often menacing their counterparts with threats or clumsy bribes, even thuggishly disrupting briefings and harassing dissidents abroad, often with impunity.

The Character of China’s Revanchist Nationalism

Clashes around the world between pro-government and pro-Hong Kong demonstrators have opened a window onto the character of the new Chinese nationalism. In Australia, for example, there have been videos of protests at the University of South Australia in Adelaide showing pro-government students chanting “Cao ni ma bi,” or “F*** your mother’s c***” to Hong Kong protesters. In Melbourne, pro-government activists have threatened those supporting Hong Kong with violence, forcing police to form a line separating the groups.

On July 29, pro-Hong Kong demonstrator Serena Lee was pushed to the ground in an on-campus brawl with pro-Beijing students at the University of Auckland. A video showing her fall made media headlines. At the beginning of the video, two mainland Chinese students threatened her on camera, saying: “You cannot win either a physical or a verbal fight, why do you bother to protest?” On August 16, when a demonstrator called out “Hong Kong stay strong,” her slogan was greeted by a large group of mainland Chinese students shouting obscenities in perfect synchronization.

On August 18, a large, diverse group of pro-Hong Kong protesters demonstrated in Boston. The group included local Chinese, Uighurs, Tibetans, Taiwanese, and even mainland Chinese. Local organizer Frances Hui recounted facing threats from mainland Chinese for identifying herself as a Hong Konger, rather than Chinese. One pro-Beijing angrily informed her: “Whoever opposes my greatest China, no matter how far away they are, must be executed.” After the rally, Hui’s car tire was punctured, and the address of the church she attends was posted on WeChat. Another WeChat post showed people praying for pro-Hong Kong activists to be struck dead by lightning on the day of the demonstration, a classic way to curse people in Chinese tradition.

Social media posts on government-approved websites are becoming more aggressive, as well, especially on the subject of the Hong Kong protests. People posting on Weibo, a Chinese social media service similar to Twitter, increasingly call on Beijing to use force. “Beating them to a pulp is not enough,” one person recently said about the protesters, echoing a common sentiment on Weibo. “They must be beaten to death. Just send a few tanks over to clean them up.”

Beijing’s propaganda campaign against Hong Kong intensified after July 21, when protesters surrounded the Chinese government’s main office in Hong Kong and threw black ink on a government emblem; the campaign kicked up another notch on August 3 when a Chinese flag was thrown into Victoria Harbor. The online reaction in mainland China—stirred up by the state media—reached fever pitch. “The five-star flag has 1.4 billion guardians,” China’s state-controlled CCTV posted to its official Weibo account. “Repost! ‘I am a guardian of the flag!’” More than ten million people, including Jackie Chan, the Hong Kong martial arts film star, reposted the message. On Twitter, which is blocked in mainland China, the official account of the People’s Daily later reposted CCTV’s original post, spreading it to international audiences.

Some pro-government demonstrations abroad have mixed ostentatious displays of wealth with threats and profanities. While their comrades in Australia and New Zealand used curses and punches against Hong Kong youth, in August mainland Chinese students in Canada formed convoys of luxury automobiles, displaying Chinese flags and honking their horns in parades in Vancouver and Toronto to confront groups supporting Hong Kong. According to some accounts of pro-Hong Kong marchers, riders in four Lamborghinis held Chinese flags out of windows, yelling, “You poor c**ts, protest? Having no money, how dare you protest?”

The behavior of pro-government protesters in Hong Kong and around the world has sparked calls for greater scrutiny of Chinese influence at universities, including through the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, a Beijing-funded organization that purports to help students adjust to life abroad and has about 150 branches on campuses worldwide. Media in Canada and the United States have published reports that mainland students belonging to the association have coordinated with Chinese consular officials to counter “anti-China” activity abroad. In Australia, after the campus chaos at the University of Queensland, the Chinese consulate in Brisbane issued a statement praising the “spontaneous patriotic behavior of Chinese students.” The message drew a warning from Foreign Minister Marise Payne, who said that foreign diplomats in Australia should not interfere with the right to free speech, even on contentious issues.

Beijing has been successful in exploiting public anger and anxiety in ways that bolster its authority. For years now, the state has been redirecting youth anger in ways that serve the interests of the party. In autumn 2014, Xi Jinping awarded national recognition to a 33-year-old blogger, Zhou Xiaoping, for his “positive energy.” Writing under the moniker “Comrade Zhou Xiaoping,” with half a million followers on Weibo, Zhou has sought to stoke national pride by comparing a rising China to a declining West. Zhang Xiaowu, a 30-year-old novelist who self-identifies as an angry youth who asserts that “China is rising now,” has written that the country needs people like Zhou “to express national self-confidence.”

According to Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency, today’s parade in Beijing was bigger than those that commemorated the 50th and 60th anniversaries of the People’s Republic of China, as well as the military parade in 2015 that commemorated the 70th anniversary of the Allied defeat of imperial Japan in 1945. The festivities involved 15,000 soldiers and sailors, 160 fighter jets, bombers, and other aircraft, and 580 tanks and other weapons systems, some of which have never before been seen in public, including the Dongfeng-41, a mobile intercontinental ballistic missile that can allegedly strike multiple targets in the United States in half an hour. The authorities have taken great pains to choreograph the pomp and pageantry so as to demonstrate, first and foremost, that Xi Jinping is the undisputed leader in China, in firm control of the military, in contrast to recent speculation that his position has been weakened by the Hong Kong protests, the U.S.-China trade war, and an economy that is slowing under the weight of centralized control and global forces.

But another important purpose of the parade is to showcase the overwhelmingly positive attitude that ordinary Chinese people have for it. For them the parade symbolizes China’s transition from weakness and victimization into one of the major powers of the world—a state capable of forcing its will on the very foreign powers that pushed it around in the past. The days of “national humiliation” are long gone, and China is finally gaining back the glory it enjoyed hundreds of years ago. Notwithstanding the official posturing that China will lead a new era of international peace and cooperation, the Chinese leadership envisages a world order based on submission to China’s power. And the message of today’s celebrations is that the power that is most readily understood by others is not China’s soft, cultural power, but rather its hard power. The military power on display in Beijing should serve as a stark warning about the dangers of China’s revanchist nationalism, both for the international community and for China’s own people.

The post Will Hong Kong Rain on Xi’s Parade? appeared first on The American Interest.

Singapore the Improbable: A Primer for Innocents at Home and Abroad

The little essay you see before you is intended as the first in a series on Singapore and Southeast Asia. It is written principally for Americans who may have heard of Singapore and who perhaps have even visited briefly, but who have not lived here. 

I know the difference already after only two months as a resident, complete with official government work-visa status and non-hotel digs, since my two earlier trips here lasted but a few days each—and oh, what marvelous hotels they were. During those earlier trips I had but modest incentive to learn deeply about Singapore and the region; it’s different when you expect to stay for an entire year or more, as I do, and when you conceive your professional responsibilities in terms of being a metaphorical corpus callosum, in this case one composed of my charge as a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the S. Rajanatham School of International Studies at the Nanyang Technological University to explain America and Americans to Singaporeans and, as a TAI columnist, Singapore and Singaporeans to Americans.

We learn much about a place just from being in it and managing to stay awake. I’m not kidding about the staying awake part. Jet lag wears off, of course, although jet lag of the twelve-hours-removed-from-home type is no joke, at least for someone in his 69th year of age. But it’s the weather here, and the location, that are unusually suited to lethargy. 

As to weather, contrary to what you may have heard, Singapore does have four seasons: hot and humid; hotter and more humid; hottest and most humid; and holy crap it’s hot and humid here. The winter monsoon that I and my wife expect soon to experience, unless we figure a way to arrange timely travel beyond its drenching reach, qualifies as merely hot and humid. During the rains the temperature moderates some and the breeze picks up a bit; but the rise in humidity from outrageous to unthinkable compensates for the few degrees of faux coolness. 

The main creature-comfort benefit of rain here is otherwise that it temporarily banishes the haze. What haze?

Well, it seems that many Indonesians, notably in Sumatra and Kalimantan, have developed a hobby that involves burning their country down. We will return to this later, but suffice it to say for now that demand for palm oil and other crops led rural people in Sumatra in particular to slash-burn the rainforest and crop out the land, on which opportunistic and often desperate farmers squatted and rarely if ever owned. That was fine with the farmers because the land is so poor that one crop is about all the soil will support much of the time. So they moved on, slashed and burned again, and so on. The lingering problem is that the fires, once started, don’t always stay out. They slowly burn down into the massive layers of accumulated peat, forming hot spots that flare up with some regularity year after year, sending huge plumes of smoke into the air to be blown hither and yon by the winds coming off the South China Sea. No one knows how to put the fires permanently out. 

So Singaporeans understand better than most people the interconnectedness of the global environmental commons. They also understand what it means to be small and helpless in the face of poverty-driven irresponsibility elsewhere. They have gotten used to consulting the daily haze index, since they have no alternative. When Scilla and I were here in October 2016 at the invitation of the Foreign Ministry, the haze was so bad that elementary schools had to close. People who needed to go outside for extended periods for one reason or another wore Niosh N95 masks to protect their lungs from damage from the particulates. It has not been that bad here lately, but pretty bad all the same. The masks were out last week. Some rain since then has eased the situation a bit.

As to the location, the Red Dot—one of Singapore’s nicknames—is roughly one degree north of the equator. That means that the sun rises and sets at pretty much the same time every day, all year, every year. Light and darkness are evenly divided, always. The fact that the island is about 31 miles across and 17 miles north to south changes this not one iota. 

The island is not flat. There is topography, smaller islands to the north, east and south of the main island, and there is about 120 miles of coastline all tolled. For a densely populated area—5.8 million people plus assorted expat workers and hangers on—there is plenty of greenery and nature preserves. But a great deal of natural diversity, no. It is not unpretty from a naturalist point of view, not at all. If you are partial to tropical flora and fauna you will never be bored here. But compared to the East Coast of the United States, at least, it is monotonous enough to qualify as sleep-inducing if you stay long enough—and even two months qualifies as long enough. 

So you see it is true after all, as Woody Allen once quipped, that “eighty percent of success is just showing up.” But we would all like to think that we can learn more if we try. I certainly need to, and so let me conclude this introductory section of the planned series with a caveat in two parts.

I do know a little something about the Near East and its environs. I had read many books about the Great Game and even the marvelous King Amanullah before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Day 1979. I could recite dialogues between the Emir of Najran and his vizier from 1934 four decades before the current war in Yemen began. OK, so I am bit odd—what of it, bub? The point is that I have witnessed in my life many drive-by journalists return from brief sojourns in the telegenic Near East and pose as experts that they decidedly were not. 

Now, there is nothing very wrong with the one-eyed leading the blind, except when the one-eyed are leading the blind over a cliff—are, in other words, misleading them. I have witnessed not the good, the bad, and the ugly in this regard, but rather the ugly, the uglier, and the ugliest—a little like Singaporean weather, now that I think about it. I have therefore sworn on an odiferous harvest of durian that I would never pose as an expert on Southeast Asia, or even on Singapore. At best I am a one-eyed guide leading you, the blind, not over a cliff—there are none here anyway—but rather toward a toothsome hawkers paradise like the one you saw in Crazy Rich Asians. I have zero intention of claiming more than that, and zero intention of learning Malay, Tamil, or the main Chinese dialects here that include Hakka, Hokkien, Teochew, Hainanese, and Cantonese. So, upfront disclaimer: I am not and never will be a true expert on Singapore. 

The second aspect of my caveat concerns method. Whenever I find myself in a place I know little about, I resort to a combination of history and anthropology to get my bearings. I want to know what has been, and I want to know about culture and social structure that still are. So I ask, for example, about what parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles tell their precious children at bedtime. Do they read stories to them from outside their culture, or do they tell stories to them from deep within their hearts and souls? It’s a big difference, defined largely by eye contact, between reading and telling stories to children. If the latter especially, what are they? Tell me the stories, please. 

It turns out that the latter is more the case here among Chinese, Malays, and Tamils alike, and I am looking forward to collecting many stories. I am also eager to understand the variable senses of humor here. They exist, but they are different from ours and from each other. To that purpose I quickly made tracks to visit my old acquaintance Wang Gungwu, whose office is just off the stunning orchid-laden Botanical Gardens here, and as always he enlightened me. 

So if you are interested in the surface layers of Singaporean politics—for example the prospects of the new party just formed by the 79-year old Tan Cheng Bock, who has invited the membership of the disgruntled brother of the current Prime Minister, both of them sons of the late Lee Kwan Yew—yes, I can tell you all about that. It’s impossible to miss it. If you want to know about how the Port of Singapore Authority works, and how it managed to get the contract to work the port of Antwerp, sure, I can handle that, too. I toured the facility last Thursday along with a small interested party of three from the Oppenheimer Generation in South Africa. Want to know if Singapore is a democracy or a police state? That’s next up.

But in this, the bicentennial of Stamford Raffles coming to Singapore, those are not things I much care about. They are too easy. Singapore does not contain the same multitudes as does Walt Whitman’s America; it contains multitudes of its own, and they are remarkably capacious for such a small place whose modern history does not antedate that of America. You, innocent at home, likely have no idea because you know not the deep meaning of fish-head curry at Mustafas, or of how to eat otak-otak, or why a Taoist temple and a Buddhist temple is usually the same temple. But patience please: Bye and bye, I will give you an idea. I will convey the multitudes.

The post Singapore the Improbable: A Primer for Innocents at Home and Abroad appeared first on The American Interest.

Viktor Orbán, Fidesz, and Me

Thirty years ago, on June 16, I stood on the steps of the Museum of Fine Arts on Heroes’ Square in Budapest, guarding the coffin of Imre Nagy, the martyred Prime Minister of Hungary. I felt intensely moved as I listened to my fellow youth activist, Viktor Orbán, give a speech listing our political demands to the Communist leadership and to the huge crowd that we knew was on our side. I was deeply and genuinely convinced that we represented Hungary’s future. A few days earlier, when we discussed that speech, we knew that June 16, 1989, would be an historic day, because Nagy and his fellow martyrs of the 1956 revolution would finally receive in death the honors they had earned in life. This was why we rejected the organizing team’s request to give a mere commemorative speech on behalf of the young people. We opted for a courageous and radical political speech, and we entrusted Orbán to deliver it and represent all of us in the Federation of Young Democrats, Fidesz.

I was a third-year university student from an anti-communist family with a legacy stretching back to the 1956 uprising, so I had not hesitated in joining Fidesz when it had been established a year earlier, in March 1988, by three dozen college students. Within weeks, Fidesz had several hundred members and became the voice of a new generation that was no longer afraid to speak up for a more democratic country.

My generation became politically aware in the 1980s. We were the first cohort in the Communist bloc to be able to tour Western Europe with student Interrail tickets and to witness at an early age how the free world operated. The big difference between us and other political circles of the time was our fearless radicalism. In 1988, we were the first political group to demand multiparty elections and the departure of Soviet troops. Fidesz was energetic, ambitious, and inspiring. The winds of change were in the air, even if we still had no idea that the entire Communist system would collapse within a single year.

Under mounting public pressure, the ruling Communist party in 1989 recognized rights of free speech, assembly, and strike. On March 15, the various opposition groups organized a joint demonstration to celebrate the 1848 civic revolution and declare their political demands, creating an opportunity for thousands of people to march with the famous Hungarian tricolor, which had been banned for decades. The ruling party’s agreement to reinter the martyred leaders of the 1956 anti-Communist revolution was a demonstration of opening and reform from them at a time when Eastern Europe was still held tightly in the grip of the Communist parties. The ceremony on June 16, 1989, was a compromise between the emerging opposition and the still-ruling Communist elite and was to be designed as a purely commemorative event. However, Fidesz did not want to compromise with the Communists at an event that would attract 300,000 people to Heroes’ Square and eventually become the cathartic moment of the Hungarian transition.

Orbán’s radical speech contrasted with the tone of political compromise that reigned; it was a source of political inspiration but also of irritation for the many who had bought into a step-by-step process of democratization. Political negotiations between the ruling party and the opposition groups about a democratic constitution had only just begun in those days, and peaceful accord was the main guiding light for the participants. These negotiations concluded in September 1989, paving the way for free, democratic elections. Fidesz and the Alliance of Free Democrats, however, rejected this historic compromise, sensing that more could be achieved.

Fidesz’s choice for a radical début on June 16 was vindicated soon after. The value of Hungary’s negotiated agreement was quickly annulled by the fall of the Berlin Wall. November 1989 demonstrated that there was no need to carefully negotiate with the Communists, and peaceful, democratic transition was possible without any compromise. History was unstoppable.

Did Fidesz see the future more clearly than any of their political peers? Definitely not. We were simply ready to take more political risks at turbulent time. Risk-taking political action put the young Fidesz party on the political map, and when elections were finally held in April 1990, we successfully entered Parliament with a 22-member political group, all aged under 35. I was 24 years old. This was how we grew up in a miraculous, historic period.

In Parliament from 1990, we continued our radical and witty criticism of everything that seemed anti-democratic and autocratic to us. We personified Hungarians’ desire for a liberal state with a strong commitment to the rule of law and human rights, and we demanded reasonable historic justice without witch hunts. We nurtured the various ways of expressing personal and collective autonomy, all of which were so glaringly absent under Communist rule.

The generational approach we presented in the political arena offered a fascinating frame for representing our future in a free Hungary. Fidesz had a resolutely centrist identity and focused only on the future, while other democratic parties sought their political role models in historic Hungarian parties from the pre-war period. We were proud of sharing the best of the legacies of both the rural nationalists and the urban liberal political elite, overcoming a poisonous schism that had contributed to Hungary’s historical calamities in that century. We called ourselves the “children of divorced parents” and built our politics on a healthy national identity with an open, cosmopolitan worldview. We felt motivated to build a free, liberal, and capitalist Hungary, and to develop a new culture of democracy, one that Hungarians had never enjoyed. We believed that everyone benefited from the fresh air of freedom as we did. The sky was the limit. 

Burdensome Transition

If 1989 restored democratic sovereignty, political rights, and constitutionalism to Hungary, the years that followed brought bewilderment. Many problems facing Hungary today are rooted in the challenges and mistakes of those early years.

While rapid, large-scale privatization ensured macroeconomic stability, rising inequality fed political resentment. Large segments of Hungary became impoverished and unable to keep up with the pace the transition required.

Meanwhile Hungary’s constitution—the result of negotiations with the Communist Party in early 1989—contained serious flaws. The election law, for example, made it too easy for a single party to achieve an absolute majority, resulting in the withering of the smaller parties in the absence of an opportunity to compete proportionally in the political arena. This system is the main concern underlying the struggles of today’s fragmented opposition. The party finance law enabled parties to run murky businesses. These flaws have never been corrected.

A major deficit of the Hungarian transition was that, uniquely in the region, political elites were not ready to make a law on lustration to keep former secret service informants out of the corridors of power. To this day there is no definitive answer as to why this did not happen. A miasma of mistrust contributed to the rapid loss of legitimacy for democratic governments.

The political elite became highly ideological at a very early stage, and the main forces for regime change, the conservatives and the liberals, did not form a grand coalition in order to jointly lead the complex political, economic, and social institution-building. This early divide between the formerly anti-Communist parties has become one of the most virulent diseases of Hungarian politics ever since. No surprise, then, that the early Fidesz party expressed its centrist position at the outset.

The First Ruptures in Fidesz

Fidesz in this period represented a strong liberal voice for the rule of law and transparency amongst the often disorderly processes. Orbán’s strong appetite for risk-taking was balanced with more moderate considerations in our political group. However, we quickly learned that behind normative values there were power struggles, deals, and compromises. We were all interested in the success of the party, but fighting for positions cost friendships and trust.

Orbán, whom we elected first as faction leader and party chairman in 1993, efficiently took control of the party’s resources and became the unquestioned leader of Fidesz. He built a circle of loyal cronies. By 1993, the party had deep internal divisions on the use of resources, on liberal values, and on political attitudes, as Orbán always pushed the group into radical political fights, with every issue being framed as a matter of life or death. The final rupture occurred when we learned that the party’s chairman and treasurer had used party money in an illegal way, including by running a luxury car rental company to multiply funds, and that the money was being channeled through their cronies’ businesses.

In 1994, the liberal wing of Fidesz, including myself, left the party. At my last Fidesz faction meeting, I said that I couldn’t agree with the party’s “ends justify means” approach. I left because my personal autonomy, integrity, and political beliefs would be continually challenged if I stayed in the party of Viktor Orbán. In 1995, Fidesz formalized the party leader’s authority, and since then Orbán’s leadership and political will has been growing systematically and unquestionably.

In the late 1990s, Fidesz rebranded itself as a right-wing, conservative party, convinced that such an orientation provided better prospects for achieving power. Fidesz gave up its historic mission to overcome the deep urban/rural cultural-political chasm that had plagued Hungary for a century. Fidesz lowered the ceiling for itself and gave up on an ambition that had proved to be more difficult to achieve than anticipated.

The Golden Decade of Transition

In 1994, the post-communist Socialist Party won an absolute majority in the elections. Hungarian society, I bitterly acknowledge, was facing more troubles than anticipated and was not so keen on coping with the burdens of regime change, and so a nostalgia for the certainties of the Communist period emerged. Apparently, it was distressing to see such a rapid return of the Socialist party to power, blurring the moral boundaries between the old and new systems and enabling the post-socialist elite to participate in the privatization process in those early years of capitalism.

The returning Socialists and their Liberal coalition partner, however, followed a disciplined democratic politics, deepening Hungary’s integration into the Transatlantic system and speeding up economic and social reforms. The painful austerity measures they pursued resulted in the restoration of economic balance and institutional stability by the end of the 1990s, paving the way for accession negotiations with the European Union. The prospect of EU membership represented an overarching ambition for the entire political elite, covering over the ideological differences, political divisions, and difficulties that Hungarian society was enduring.

The deeply divided Fidesz party initially suffered a major defeat but then won the elections in 1998, elevating Viktor Orbán to the position of Prime Minister at the age of 35. Orbán understood that the centralized constitution and the majoritarian election system together provided him with the opportunity to be a powerful Prime Minister. He no longer had any interest in balancing the political system.

Fidesz was successful in government. After years of extreme volatility, Hungary’s macroeconomic position stabilized and democratic institutions became fully operational, albeit imperfectly. Negotiations for European Union accession were accelerating, and the future of Hungary was bright.

Still, there were worrying signs of Orbán’s ambition to strengthen the government at the expense of other branches of power. Fidesz reduced the length of parliamentary sessions, curtailing the significance of public debate and parliamentarianism. The party also concentrated its influence over public media.

I remember talking to a Fidesz parliamentarian, a former colleague of mine, who explained in 1999 that, after the Communists, they were finally “entitled to take their own share away.” During the transition, ruling party elites felt that they had special rights to dip into public resources. It was disappointing to see how Fidesz craftily perfected existing corrupt practices, laying the groundwork for even larger-scale wrongdoing after EU transfers began to flow to Hungary in 2004.

Despite all predictions to the contrary, Fidesz lost the election by a small margin in 2002. But under Orbán’s radical leadership, it never moved off of offense. In a memorable speech that year, Viktor Orbán rallied his followers and telegraphed his nationalistic, hegemonic aspirations by stating: “We can’t be in opposition, as the nation cannot be in opposition.” Orbán built on the deep frustration of his followers and used this fury to mobilize them to organize a new, more radical movement. The so-called “civic circles” acted in collaboration with hundreds of patriotic, church-bound, cultural, and local-level political organizations and many small-scale private businesses, which, whether on the grounds of material interest or ideological sympathy or both, aligned with the right.

After successive electoral defeats, Viktor Orbán’s party took to the streets as an anti-establishment movement, questioning the election results. But by moving the political stage literally and symbolically to the streets, Fidesz had given up on another one of its founding commitments—namely, the commitment to parliamentarianism.

Win Once, Win Big

Since 1989, Hungary has diligently followed Europe’s lead in order to catch up with the West, but it has still not arrived at the promised land of parity. As it did in the early 2000s, public pressure for higher wages has pushed the government into indebtedness. The appearance of a radical right, anti-establishment party, Jobbik, showed that Hungarian society’s aspirations to be a part of liberal Europe had begun to wane. Finally, capitalizing on a major government scandal and the 2008 financial crisis, which pushed Hungary to the brink, Orbán secured a landslide electoral victory, something that had not happened in Europe since World War II. The Fidesz Party received a two-thirds constitutional majority on its own.

In 2010, Viktor Orbán gained the legitimacy and power necessary to reconstruct the country. Many people hoped that he would exercise this exceptional power as an “enlightened autocrat” to implement all the necessary reforms and further integrate Hungary into the European Union. Instead, Orbán went another way. He claimed that the 20 years of transition had been no more than a troubled quest, and that the real regime change had only just begun in 2010 by regaining sovereignty and self-rule. The remark he made in a private discussion in the election campaign in 2010, “We need to win only once, but we need to win big,” revealed his true intentions.

The Fidesz party moved quickly to change the Hungarian Constitution, strengthening executive power and weakening institutional checks and balances. Orbán nominated his loyal cronies to the position of the Constitutional Court and each and every state institution. There is no discernible difference between the institutional identity of the leading party, the Government, the Parliament, and the President; the lines separating powers in government have become blurred. We can see the state’s influence on the judiciary in how corruption cases are handled. For example, the Chief Prosecutor has failed to follow through on government-related corruption cases, even ones unveiled by the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF). Fidesz officials also openly question the rule of law. In a recent speech, Orbán’s closest ally, Speaker of Parliament László Kövér, stated: “150 years ago the question was whether the Hungarian state wanted to guarantee the independence of the judges. In the future, the question is whether the Hungarian judges want to guarantee the independence of the state.”

Nor are churches free from state influence. After dramatically increasing state funding to major Hungarian churches in recent years, the government now expects them to participate in its campaigns—for example, in anti-migrant propaganda drives. Churches have also been pressured to openly campaign for the “Christian” Fidesz party at election time.

By creating a system of personalized legislation, Fidesz has also nurtured a loyal oligarchic business coalition and suppressed entrepreneurs who do not align themselves with the party’s interests. Orbán’s cronies achieved spectacular concentrations of wealth. Lőrinc Meszaros, Orbán’s neighbor, gained 93 percent of his business income from EU transfers, and István Tiborcz, Orbán’s 32-year-old son-in-law, joined the ranks of the richest people in Hungary within three years.

Fidesz has also changed the Media Law, guaranteeing the governing party’s dominant presence in public media. Moreover, by November 2018 an unprecedented 476 private media outlets were owned by the aforementioned Meszaros, bringing them under centralized editorial control and allowing them to run highly efficient propaganda campaigns. In the first three months of 2019, the government spent €48 million to flood the country with negative ads in the run-up to the European Union elections.

Election law was also changed in 2013 in ways designed to ensure a two-thirds majority for Fidesz in subsequent elections. The OSCE election monitor report concluded in 2018 that, even though the technical administration of the elections was professional, the non-transparent legal conditions and the adverse climate of the campaign had hindered voters’ ability to make fully informed choices.

The Fidesz government has radically redistributed state funding in the education and cultural sectors, subjugating the universities, the Hungarian Scientific Academy, and cultural institutions. It has also rewritten the entire national curriculum for public schools. The government’s open aim is to indoctrinate society, even if its ideology is at times inconsistent.

Fidesz’s majoritarian agenda offers only the fleeting illusion of democracy. Hungarian government officials often argue that the legal mechanisms they have used can also be found in one Western democracy or another, in one form or another. In some cases this might even be true. But taken together, these smartly crafted individual policies have created a systemic impact on every segment of life in Hungary. The scope of freedom of information is narrowing; individual choices are diminishing; a broad range of state and non-state institutions are coming under direct government control; companies have been compelled to finance sports clubs owned by Orbán cronies in exchange for receiving EU development funds; and critics and political rivals must withstand a constant barrage of moral humiliations and acts of intimidation.

Why Don’t More Hungarians Turn Against Fidesz?

I returned to Hungarian politics in opposition to Fidesz in 2012. During the political struggles, I identified three factors that explain why Fidesz’s concentrations of power and rampant patronage politics hadn’t hurt them at the polls.

First, much has been said about the fragmentation of the opposition and its difficulty in developing a strong alternative to Orbán’s narrative. There is some truth to this, but it is also true that the huge gap between Fidesz’s financial resources and those of other parties has compounded this problem. Furthermore, public employees and business people have expressed fears of retribution when approached by members of my party. As a result of all this control and the highly distorted election system, the incapacitated institutions of checks and balances, and extraordinary media dominance, Fidesz had an easier path to sustain its parliamentary supermajority in 2014 (when I ran for office) with 44 percent of the vote, and then again in 2018, with 49 percent of the vote.

Second, Orbán’s nationalism is deeply rooted in widespread resentment about the post-World War I Trianon Peace Treaty, after which Hungary lost most of its territory and population. Trianon deeply wounded Hungarians’ identity and dignity, but it remained a taboo topic for 70 years. After 1989, European accession was the main concept around which the largely Socialist-led governments tried to organize national identity, but this effort failed. When Orbán promotes Hungarian sovereignty, he is presenting himself as an heir of the proud, pre-Trianon Hungary, working to protect Hungarians from future existential threats. This is how Orbán’s ethnic nationalism is closely linked to his anti-migrant stance and anti-European campaign in the time of globalization.

Third, notwithstanding Orbán’s nationalist rhetoric, the stability of EU funding (which accounts for more than 4 percent of Hungary’s GDP) props up the country’s economy, enabling Fidesz to increase wages, cut public-utility fees, and provide large family-allocation packages. Orbán takes credit for this financial stability, on the one hand, while stirring Hungarians up with fear-mongering and paternalistic social politics, all aimed at convincing people that Hungary needs a stronger chief more than it needs stronger support for democratic institutions, or even the rule of law.

My generation of Fidesz politicians—the generation whose original political identity was built on the basis of fighting against authoritarianism and the one-party Communist state—finds itself 30 years later having created a new party-state that dominates state positions, controls 70 percent of all media, and maintains a tightening grip on the judiciary. The ideals of 1989 are long gone.

Alliance of the National Populists

In Orbán’s telling, the 2008 financial crisis proved that the Western-led liberal world couldn’t address the economic needs of the broad mass of Hungarians, and the 2015 migration crisis demonstrated that Europe couldn’t protect the cultural identity of the Hungarian people. He has maintained that the only way to do these things in Hungary was to build a strongman-led order focused on a national community representing higher moral values than those of a liberal society dedicated to human dignity. In 2014 he applied the label “illiberal democracy” to this political project.

Orbán understood early on that a citizenry that is losing its social status and self-confidence is an easy target for a culture war targeting the fundamental structures of European democracy, the rule of law, and human rights. Hungarian democracy was the first target of this campaign, but it took the 2015 migration crisis, Brexit, and Trump’s election to bestir complacent European elites to recognize that the nationalist-populist trend could challenge the integrity of the West’s institutional arrangements and paralyze the European Union.

Finding common ground on anti-immigrant sentiment, Orbán successfully rallied the Central European countries in 2015 and revitalized the lackluster Visegrad group. The new Visegrad group was meant to demonstrate to the “old West” that the East European countries would no longer merely seek to emulate the West, that they would now “demand mutual respect.” The other three countries followed Orbán’s grievance-based agenda but were not able to demonstrate their value to the West, other than in terms of their markets. The new Visegrad also adopted a troublemaking style, mirroring Orbán’s temperament.

The Waning Idealism of 1989

Orbán is a talented political opportunist, to be sure, but his strength is as much a consequence of Europe’s exhausted politics as it is of anything he has done. Over his long political career, he has correctly noted how European politics has become cartelized, and has learned how to use radical and anti-liberal ideas to maneuver in this environment. Neither European institutions nor the European political elite have found an effective response to Orbán’s full-bore push. Indeed, the European status quo has nurtured Orbán’s takeover in Hungary and influence in the region. In the past three years, he has demonstrated an ability to ally with national populist forces across Europe and the United States.

There is no longer a shared, Europe-wide consensus on the ultimate political question—namely, of how we want to live together in the future. The question moving forward is whether the European Union will accept the idea that some of its member countries want to be governed by a different set of rules. It is an open question whether the European Union can continue to function, or even exist, if its members do not share the same principles limiting the exercise of power.

The nationalist-populist forces did not breakthrough in the latest European Parliamentary elections, as Orbán had hoped, so perhaps they have reached their limit in Europe. Still, Orbán’s obsession with demonstrating that only a strongman can govern successfully has not disappeared.

It is striking how silent Hungary has been this year, while much of Europe is celebrating the democratic revolutions of 1989. Beyond a short propaganda film and a few well-framed comments in Orbán’s notorious annual summer speech about how his generation had to fight to strengthen Hungarian identity, there were few commemorative activities organized by the government. In his yearly grand speech in Tusványfürdő, Orbán spoke instead about the struggles to which Hungarians must look forward in the future: protecting Hungary’s Christian identity against threats from liberal internationalists.

The world has fundamentally changed since 1989, and Europe is facing staggering problems. But the biggest threat Europeans face is the prospect of losing the freedoms they gained in 1989. If there is one way in which my generation failed, it is in our confidence that liberal democracy was a self-sustaining arrangement. Hungary is proof that in turbulent times, the hunger for a strongman, for nationalism, and for moralistic ideology over and above the rule of law can overwhelm liberal values. If these values are left unchallenged by both liberal and conservative European political elites, not only will Orbán extend his power in Hungary, but Europe will also become more fragmented and irreversibly weaker. Europe must not fall into this trap.

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The Conservative Case for Globalism

In Defense of Globalism

Dalibor Rohac

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2019, 170 pp., $29.00

Globalism and globalists are major bugbears of the nationalists and populists now ascendant in political life around the world. Thanks to them, and in response to globalism’s supposed depredations, we have such phenomena as Brexit in the United Kingdom and the tariffs and trade wars of Donald Trump. Indeed, in the United States, in every direction one turns, one finds international agreements and institutions under assault.

On the third day of his presidency, Trump signed an executive order scrapping the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the multilateral agreement to lower tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade across Asia. Shortly to follow on the scrap-heap was the Paris Climate Accord. Trump has blasted the World Trade Organization, saying if “they don’t shape up, I would withdraw.” Similarly, and even more consequentially, on multiple occasions Trump has dismissed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, declaring the alliance “obsolete” and a rip-off, and threatening to pull out. Even such seemingly technical institutions, like the Universal Postal Union, the global system for coordinating postal policies, have come under assault, with the Trump administration warning it might be heading for the exit door.

Conservative intellectuals in the Trump camp, tailoring their positions and pronouncements to fit with the president’s America First agenda, have been piling on. Instead of, as in former times, support for free markets for free peoples, we now find manifestos demanding opposition to “free trade on every front,” and bemoaning a worn-out conservative movement that undermines “the independence of nations.”

Dalibor Rohac’s In Defense of Globalism could not, therefore, have arrived at a more opportune moment. The book, as Rohac writes, is a personal one. In 1998 in his native Slovakia, he witnessed his country dispatch an autocrat and then reap the benefits from acceding to such “globalist” institutions as the European Union and NATO. An economist by training, Rohac is today a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and one of the most thought-provoking and well-informed voices writing about European political economy today.

Drawing on a variety of disciplines with which he is conversant—not only economics, but history, political philosophy, and even game theory—Rohac offers a tour of current debates and discontents. The fundamental divide, as he sees it, is between those who see “nation-states as somehow natural forms of governance and those who see value in international pooling of decision-making.” As he notes, a host of problems, from terrorism to climate change to nuclear proliferation to ocean pollution cross borders and are only amenable to international solutions. Those who rail against multilateral institutions in the name of national sovereignty, Rohac finds, “are either silent or revert to magical thinking about how such ‘global commons’ could be governed by individual governments acting in isolation.”

Though full of strong assertions, In Defense of Globalism is not at all a polemic. Quite the contrary, Rohac readily acknowledges that the critics of international cooperation are raising questions that “are not inherently illegitimate.” Indeed, he accepts some elements of their critique.

Migration, for example, he writes, has been “a challenge both to poorer countries experiencing brain drain and to societies in the West, which are not always in a position to integrate and assimilate large immigrant populations and where political elites have long been in denial about the true views of their electorates concerning the subject.” The root problem or contradiction here is that the free flow of labor—migration—has brought substantial economic benefits, but it has also set in motion countervailing political forces—too often energized by enterprising demagogues—that political systems have not properly reckoned with.

Rohac is thus avowedly “not Panglossian,” and he explicitly does not wish to be read as offering “an unqualified endorsement of all existing structures of international cooperation.” Nor does he believe that multilateralism is “intrinsically valuable”; it is instead just another “institutional form that can be put to good or bad uses.” His aim, therefore, is not to defend every aspect of current global arrangements, some of which have become dysfunctional, but to offer a new perspective on international cooperation that is “congruent with ideas of self-government and individual autonomy that have long defined the political right.”

This is an effort that requires demolishing a lot of conservative sophistry about the menace of world government. The idea of “’supra-nationalism’, in the sense of irrevocably transferring decision-making authority from national government to international bodies, is largely a bogeyman.” International institutions like NATO and the European Union are radically different in kind from, say, the Warsaw Pact; the core fact about their nature is that they allow for exit at any time. Far from being forms of despotism as some would have it—most prominently the Israeli political thinker Yoram Hazony—such multilateral institutions are the “responses of free societies to common challenges.” Indeed, their emergence on the world stage “has coincided,” writes Rohac, “with an unprecedented expansion of individual freedom, economic openness, and prosperity around the world.”

But that is all now being placed at risk. Resolving cross-border issues, particularly those involving security, requires international cooperation. At stake is nothing less than the continuation of one of the longest period of peace in history. But the world, Rohac warns,

finds itself today in a situation that dangerously resembles the 1930s. Across Western democracies, populist leaders claiming to speak on behalf of the people and denouncing the supposedly out-of-touch elites seek to upend the existing international order by scaling back international commitments. The repatriation of political control away from complex international organizations back to national capitals will have unintended consequences, not least the re-emergence of economic and political conflicts among governments.

Though cautioning against overplaying historical parallels, Rohac finds that our current predicament may be “even more dangerous that the dynamics of the interwar period.” More than seven decades have elapsed since the close of World War II, and collective memory of the effects of nationalism, protectionism, and war has faded away. It has become “natural, especially for younger generations, to see the world’s prosperity, openness, and relative peace as primitive, invariable facts of life.”

Prosperity, openness, and peace are not invariable facts of life. As In Defense of Globalism makes plain, at a moment when global institutions are under assault, they require nurturing and the sustained attention of an informed public. Rohac has made an important contribution toward that end.

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The Jacques Chirac I Knew

Autumn 1969. The future president is France’s budget chief. An emerging political star. The newspapers describe him as one of “Pompidou’s musketeers.” I’ve come to interview him for an investigation I’m doing at Sciences Po on the recent devaluation of the franc. His generosity that day! His availability and ebullience! His way of embracing my topic as if it were his own, coming up with a plan that was a little too academic, too tame—but divided into two parts! “Mind you, man! It’s very important that it have two parts! Because you’re no longer at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Mr. Lévy!” And in that sensitive face, still almost adolescent, a fleeting but unmistakable trace, yes, of the musketeer, but more of Alexandre Dumas’ Athos than of his d’Artagnan, a wistful, secretive Athos behind dashing d’Artagnan’s mask.

Ten years later. He is now a member of the European parliament. We’re side by side, squeezed in, his legs, like mine, jammed against the seatbacks on an Air Inter plane from Strasbourg that is stacked up over Orly. Which gives us time for a conversation. About the leftism from which I’m emerging; the Gaullism that he’s continuing; his dislike for Raymond Barre, Giscard d’Estaing’s prime minister; Giscard’s love affairs, which fascinate him; whether I knew that Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, was a cocaine addict. I find my seatmate intensely likeable. I’m shocked to realize that we agree on nearly everything. Upon arrival, because I had felt bound, every three sentences, to accompany my expressions of agreement with a cautious and somewhat silly “despite everything that divides us,” he doubles back from the exit, through which his driver is already carrying his bag, to rejoin me at the baggage carrousel and ask, sheepishly, his awkwardness accentuated by a recently acquired limp, the most simple, ordinary question, but one to which I find I am completely unable to respond: “Tell me, Mr. Lévy, what is it, exactly, that divides us?”

Ten more years go by. He is mayor of Paris. We’re in the Hôtel de Ville, Paris’s city hall, lunching with Jacques Friedmann, Air France’s chairman; François Pinault, the business titan and the mayor’s lifelong friend; and André Lévy, my father, whom the mayor had reconciled with Pinault two years earlier. He is among friends and can be himself: Balzac in his appetite, Stendhal in his taste for happiness, and Malraux in his longing for greatness (I never gave credence to his reputed lack of sophistication!). At one point, however, the conversation turns to Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the far-right National Front party. His voice hardens. “Never—do you hear me, never, under any circumstances—will the Gaullists enter into an arrangement with that lot. Why? Because in so doing we would lose everything. Our honor, of course. But also the election.” Now you know: that saying, often attributed to others, came from the mouth of Jacques Chirac.

Another decade, nearly. The site is the Vel’ d’Hiv, the Paris cycling stadium where, in July 1942, over 13,000 Jews were rounded up to be sent off to concentration camps. Newly elected president, Chirac delivers the historic speech that recognizes France’s role in the deportation of Jews. He doesn’t say Vichy, which would have been an attempt to evade responsibility. No, he says France. And, speaking as he does, he knows full well that he is setting off an earthquake in France’s deepest collective consciousness. Why does he do it? Why does he take the risk of breaking not only with the doctrine of outgoing President François Mitterrand, but also with the Gaullist legend of France as a nation of resisters? It has to be very important to him, to make it one of his first speeches, a cornerstone of his term! The key, of course, is courage. A sense of history, which he wants future generations to recognize in him no less than in others. And the conviction (I heard it from his lips) that a people is greater for releasing its ghosts and confronting them.

Same era. Sarajevo. When still mayor, he had received President Alija Izetbegovic of Bosnia at the Hôtel de Ville. In his guest’s presence he lamented the appeasing stance of President Mitterrand and his prime minister. But now it is he who occupies the Elysée Palace. And the image of French soldiers chained to the guardrails of Verbanya bridge by a gang of Serbian thugs arouses in him the spirit of the officer who volunteered for service in Algeria and is still stirred by military ideals. I recounted the story in my war journal, Le Lys et la Cendre (The Lily and the Ash): I am absolutely certain that it was he, not President Bill Clinton, who made the difference by insisting, from that very day: “Enough is enough; the time has come to break with infamy.” Everyone gives him credit, rightly, for rejecting the war in Iraq. Why not also praise him for his role in the just war in Bosnia?

2002. Jacques Chirac is still president. His other lifelong friend, Paul Guilbert, chief political editor for Le Figaro, is dying a slow death. Hardly a day goes by without Chirac checking for news of his friend. At the end, as Guilbert loses the last of his strength, the president continues his conversation, silently now, with the man with whom he has talked and laughed so much. His presence at the funeral in Saint-Germain des Prés is almost anonymous: His sorrowful meditation. His religion of friendship.

January 2002. The previous summer, the president had agreed to meet with Afghan rebel leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was to travel to France from Dushanbe in François Pinault’s plane. But Prime Minister Lionel Jospin convinced him to call off the meeting on the grounds that the ruling Taliban might take revenge on French NGOs operating in Kabul. Soon after, Massoud was assassinated, an act that, in retrospect, appears to have been a prelude to September 11. So instead the weary president is meeting with me. His tall frame has grown stouter—Athos, the musketeer, has become another, Porthos. He receives me in his office in the Elysée, where visitors are now few and far between. “What kind of trick did the prime minister play on me?” he wonders out loud. “And where does that leave us? How do you make up for such an affront to the man who embodied enlightened Islam?” Thus was born the idea of sending a writer off on a months-long mission to the Afghanistan that the president loved and wanted France to help rebuild. To have accomplished that, to have served, until the eve of his election to a second term, a man who attached as much value to the revival of a reclining Buddha as to the reconstitution of an Afghan army in disarray, remains one of the proudest achievements of my life.

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The Miracle of Canticle

“Miraculous” seems like the most fitting word to describe the publication, 60 years ago, of Walter M. Miller Jr.’s 1959 post-apocalyptic science fiction classic, A Canticle for Leibowitz. Stitched together from three novellas originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Canticle traces the history of a Catholic monastery located in the American desert Southwest over three time periods beginning 600 years after a mid-20th-century nuclear war. The book’s three sections describe a span of about 1,200 years, roughly mirroring our own Dark Ages, Renaissance, and present day.

The novel’s miraculous nature comes to us despite what we might call its maculate conception. For starters, it sprang forth, if not quite ex nihilo, then from what literary highbrows thought of as the backwater of pulp science fiction magazines. From there it went on to garner praise not only from genre fans, winning the 1961 Hugo Award, but also, slowly but steadily, mainstream praise and popularity, remaining in print continuously and selling millions of copies over the years. Catholics, too, have sung its praises for its thoughtful meditation on Original Sin and the fallenness of man—this despite the fact that its author, a self-professed “on-again, off-again” Catholic who in his later years drifted toward Eastern religion and philosophy, had probably left the Church behind for good by the time he wrote it.

The most miraculous thing about this book, however, is that it offers a profound critique of the extremists at either end of our so-called crisis of liberalism and serves as a stark reminder that these debates are nowhere near as new as some think. But to see how this is so, it helps to understand a few things about the book and how Miller came to write it.

Over the years a kind of hagiographic myth has grown up about the genesis of the book. As a tail gunner and radio operator on a B-25 Mitchell bomber, Miller participated in the destruction of the Abbey of Monte Cassino, one of the oldest monasteries in Western Europe and birthplace of the Benedictine Order, whose monks preserved many great works of Western civilization through the Dark Ages. As it happens, there were no German troops in the monastery proper when the allies targeted it for destruction in February 1944—only a handful of monks and more than a hundred civilians from the nearby town. The standard story is that reflecting on the tragic civilian deaths and pointless destruction of one of the cultural treasures of Western civilization inspired Miller to convert to Catholicism and then to write the novellas that gave rise to Canticle, as a way of expiating his guilt and proposing religion as the antidote to the civilizational malaise of which the threat of nuclear Armageddon was a symptom.

The truth, as usual, is much more complicated, when it comes to his war guilt, his conversion to Catholicism, and his diagnosis of the maladies of the Western world.

As for his war guilt, Miller claimed not to have had any moral compunction about the destruction of the abbey at the time, and even reported carrying into war a number of romantic notions about combat, describing the general experience of shooting and getting shot at as “grim, ungodly fun . . . like driving hot-rods or playing Russian roulette or gang-brawling.” At some point afterward, to be sure, the stress of those experiences began to take their toll, and the moral weight of his actions began to burden his conscience. These thoughts frequently emerged in several of the short stories he wrote for pulp science fiction magazines. Miller’s 1953 story “Wolf Pack,” for instance, tells of a B-25 pilot who begins to have eerily realistic dreams and visions of “La Femme,” an Italian woman with whom he talks and eventually falls in love, but who calls him a murderer and accuses him of indifference toward the innocent lives his bombs have destroyed. But as for Canticle itself, Miller claimed he didn’t consciously connect the Abbey of St. Leibowitz with the Abbey at Monte Cassino until the very end:

It never occurred to me that Canticle was my own personal response to the war until I was writing the first version of the scene where Zerchi lies half buried in the rubble. Then a lightbulb came on over my head: ‘Good God, is this the abbey at Monte Cassino? This rubble looks like south Italy, not [the] Southwest desert. What have I been writing?’

As for his conversion to Catholicism, Miller acknowledged that it was “probably true” that empathy with the Italian civilians who lost their lives as a result of his bomber sorties played a role, but he rejected any straight-line causation as “a silly superstition.” While it’s tough to construct a satisfying narrative of Miller’s conversion, given the relative paucity of biographical material available, it’s safe to say that his relationship to the Church was rocky not long after his baptism in 1947. In 1951, his wife underwent a tubal ligation, and “that was it as far as the Church was concerned,” he said. In 1953, he and his wife separated and then divorced, and he lived for several months with fellow science fiction writer Judith Merrill. Later, after reuniting with his wife and while writing Canticle, he reported that he:

. . . inevitably maneuvered my head back into the Church. It was an on-again, off-again thing. Finally, I suppose, I tried to define myself in that area by writing Leibowitz. So then I went back into the Church for a while, but it never really took, I guess.

Miller’s issues with Catholicism weren’t merely—and maybe not even mostly—about adherence to Catholic teachings about marriage and family life. In later decades he expressed, on at least one occasion, some distaste for the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council. More importantly, he also developed fundamental doubts about aspects of Catholic theology and indeed Western Christian civilization in general. These doubts appeared unmistakably in the decades after he wrote Canticle, but if you read that novel closely, you can see them beginning to bubble up to the surface.

The monastery at the focal point of Canticle’s three sections belongs to the Albertian Order of Leibowitz, a religious community founded in the aftermath of the “Flame Deluge,” as survivors of the nuclear war call it. Isaac Edward Leibowitz, a Jewish electrical engineer who converted to Catholicism after the war, founded the order and dedicated it to preserving and protecting books, and especially works of science and technology, in hopes of an eventual revival of civilization. The order’s conservationist mission is especially vital because of the “Simplification,” a millenarian movement in which rampaging mobs of “Simpletons” blamed the nuclear war on the arrogance of, first, scientists and, then, the merely literate.

The plot of the first part of Canticle, titled “Fiat Homo” (Latin for “Let there be man”), focuses on young Brother Francis Gerard and his chance discovery of an ante-diluvian fallout shelter containing a treasure trove of books, scraps of notes, technical diagrams, and artifacts that may or may not have belonged to Leibowitz himself.

The Leibowitzian monks have at best a dim understanding of these artifacts and the other technical documents they protect and duplicate. Yet they have a naive reverence for the “ancients” and a wistful longing for their mastery over the forces of nature, which Miller frequently mines for humor in the first part. Brother Francis is perplexed, for example, by a diagram of a squirrel cage rotor, wondering how on earth it could hold a squirrel, or how one could see it once it was inside. Ah well, he muses:

The ancients were often subtle; perhaps one needed a special set of mirrors to see the squirrel. He painstakingly redrew it anyhow.

The humor of the first part is light-hearted, not bitter, and for the monks of this time period and the Church more broadly, it is a time of renewal and hope. The world is in darkness and wretchedness, to be sure, filled with suffering. Malformed mutants and cannibals prowl the blighted landscape, preying upon the unwary traveler. But there is light and joy amidst the darkness, and purpose to the monks’ suffering and labors: to protect and preserve the technological wisdom of the “ancients”—to save humanity from itself.

The second section, “Fiat Lux,” or “Let There Be Light,” flips the calendar forward 600 years, against the backdrop of a revival of scientific learning and the rise of new and powerful city-states. The monks of this time still hew to their mission of safeguarding knowledge but are forced to defend its relevance in the face of a two-pronged secular assault—from the State, in the form of Hannegan II, the Henry VIII-like ruler of the rising power of Texarkana, and from Science, represented by the renowned Texarkanan scholar (or “Thon”), Taddeo Pfardentrott—a Galileo- or Isaac Newton-like figure. Hannegan II sits atop an expansionist state that sees security as an end in itself, sufficient justification for any action, and Thon Taddeo, though he calls himself a man of peace, sees service to his princely patron as an acceptable cost to achieve his goal: the relief of man’s estate by means of scientific and technological progress.

Absolute security and an end to suffering: Who could be against these things? And yet the Abbot of this time period, Dom Paulo, has grave, if vague, misgivings about where Thon Taddeo’s project is heading. He understands it’s too late to stop the train of progress now, but he struggles to put his finger on where it all went wrong. This is an implicit invitation to the reader, too, to ponder the question of where history went off the rails—and Miller gives us a range of possible answers to consider.

The third and final part of Canticle, “Fiat Voluntas Tua” (“Let Thy Will Be Done”) moves the calendar forward several centuries more, opening on a space-faring civilization that seems to have achieved Thon Taddeo’s vision. But this world is also once again on the verge of a nuclear Armageddon between two new superpowers—the Atlantic Confederacy and the Asian Coalition. In hopes of preserving at least something of human civilization from a second, even more destructive war, New Rome has ordered Zerchi, the Abbot of this time, to carry out a plan to send the Memorabilia and a group of bishops, monks, and children to an off-world colony in hopes of ensuring the survival of the Church and as much of humanity’s stock of knowledge as possible.

A medical triage and Euthanasia specialist, Dr. Cors, stands in as the intellectual and moral heir of Thon Taddeo in the latter days of “Fiat Lux.” He represents the end product of the modern project: a human rationally devoted to achieving perfect security and an end to suffering. Dr. Cors (he’s all heart) asks Abbot Zerchi for permission to use the monastery to set up a mobile facility to treat refugees from Texarkana, which the Asian Coalition, in an escalating conflict, has just hit with a retaliatory nuclear strike. The abbot reluctantly allows him to do so, but only after getting him to promise not to encourage hopeless radiation cases to report to a nearby government-run euthanasia facility. Dr. Cors agrees but soon after breaks his promise, telling the Abbot he has done so because the only evil he believes in is suffering.

Abbot Zerchi later addresses the doctor’s arguments—and in essence Thon Taddeo’s—in an inner monologue:

Really, Doctor Cors, the evil to which even you should have referred was not suffering, but the unreasoning fear of suffering. . . . Take it together with its positive equivalent, the craving for worldly security, for Eden, and you might have your ‘root of evil’ . . .

Zerchi’s point is not that security and the relief of suffering are somehow misguided goals in and of themselves. Indeed, he goes on:

To minimize suffering and maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law—a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security.

In other words, it’s the idolatry, the divinization of the mundane, that Zerchi rejects—the attempt to fill the God-shaped emptiness of fallen human nature with the things of the world, to the exclusion of all else. Miller later has Zerchi call to mind Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Mit brennender sorge (“With burning urgency”).

‘Whoever exalts a race or a State or a particular form of State or the depositories of power . . . whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God. . . .’ (emphasis mine)

Papal encyclicals are almost always written in Latin; this one was written in German and read aloud from pulpits in Churches throughout Nazi Germany on Palm Sunday in 1937, so read in its own time the words were unmistakably aimed at the Nazis and their anti-Semitism and racism. Yet papal documents like this are written not only to speak to a particular time and place but also to speak Truth to Power in all times and places. In this case Miller, through Zerchi, ingeniously notes how we might also apply the words of the encyclical to condemn the divinization of any “particular form of State”—Nazi, fascist, communist, even liberal democracy—insofar as any form of state is organized around security and the relief of suffering as the only possible legitimate public values.

It’s at this point that those in the “crisis of liberalism” camp might be tempted to take heart in Miller’s warnings, which dovetail neatly with some of the jeremiads against the perceived excesses of the Enlightenment project. But Miller hints at a critique that goes deeper and might also be applied to aspects of the Western philosophical and religious tradition that gave rise to the Enlightenment.

It’s easy to miss where Miller lays out that critique, even after multiple readings, since it appears in the novel’s first few pages, amidst the hope and humor of “Fiat Homo.” As the novel begins, Brother Gerard, as a teenaged novitiate, is in the midst of a solitary Lenten vigil of “Penance, Prayer, and Silence,” attempting to discern whether God is calling him to become a full-fledged member of the order. But Francis isn’t engaged in prayer when we first meet him. Rather, he has been picking out stones to build a roof over the trench in which he is sleeping. At first, he’s merely seeking better protection from the wolves that have been prowling about his shelter at night, but his structure increasingly takes on the orderly shape of a dome, lacking all but a final “keystone” to fit into the top.

A mysterious Jewish stranger then arrives, helping Francis find his keystone. He marks the stone with two Hebrew letters, לצ, “lamedh” and “sadhe” (as read right-to-left), and leaves it Francis to use the stone or not. Francis removes the marked stone, whereupon the ground beneath him collapses, revealing an old fallout shelter containing the Leibowitz memorabilia.

For the order’s leader, Abbot Arkos, the accidental archaeological find is potentially explosive. The Church is in the midst of investigating the cause of sainthood for Leibowitz, and the abbot understands that any “miraculous” discoveries by members of the order will be viewed with extreme suspicion by officials in New Rome. Not helping matters is the fact that the “lamedh-sadhe”, some of the monks say, could be read as producing a “lets” sound, almost as if it were shorthand for “Leibowitz.” Brother Francis’s fellow monks begin spreading rumors that the old Jewish pilgrim was a miraculous apparition of Blessed Leibowitz himself. Abbot Arkos thus orders the shelter sealed off, awaiting a papal investigation, and swears Francis to silence about the encounter.

Here the Jewish stranger may be playing a joke on Brother Francis and the other monks—and in turn Miller may be playing a joke on all of us. But it’s a joke containing a vital clue to understanding Miller’s sense of “where it all went wrong.” Miller was no expert in Hebrew, and neither are the monks, but the letters the Jewish stranger writes on the stone could be interpreted to mean “mocker” or as the King James Bible often has it “scorner,” as in Proverbs 13:1 (“A wise son heareth his father’s instruction: But a scorner heareth not rebuke”). A scorner, in other words, is the kind of person who doesn’t heed warnings. Francis and his fellow monks, likewise, are failing to learn from the mistakes of the “ancients” in their worshipful preservation of the knowledge and ways of thinking that led to mankind’s self-destruction once before. Nor are we likely to heed the rebukes contained in this novel.

So is Miller saying that the divinization of unaided human reason—tracing back not just to the Enlightenment but to the Western Christian civilization that gave birth to it—is the “original sin” that sets history rolling inexorably toward apocalypse? Are the monks escaping Earth with the Memorabilia doomed to repeat the same tragedy on another world? Perhaps. In his later years, at least, Miller drifted further toward that conclusion. In a 1985 anthology of post-apocalyptic science fiction that he co-edited, Miller’s introduction blames the “West’s idolatry of Logos,” now spread to the four corners of the world, for subjecting humanity to the permanent threat of nuclear destruction: “If Megawar comes, it will come because human reason has finally and permanently prevailed over human compassion on a global scale.”

But Canticle’s almost miraculous strength as a book owes to its ability to dance on the sharp edge of such cutting questions, avoiding excesses of both pietism and pessimism, forcing us to confront them without giving us the false assurance that it has all the answers, or that we do. This is a warning to which today’s scorners—liberalism’s maximalist critics as well as its maximalist defenders—ought to take heed.

Thanks to Adam Garfinkle for Hebrew advice. All errors in translation and interpretation are my own.

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What I Learned from Listening to Americans Deliberate

We don’t need a new crisis over presidential abuse of power to reveal how badly polarized and degraded our politics have become. Before Watergate, majorities of the American public trusted the federal government “to do what is right,” and as recently as the early 2000s, you could find at least four in ten Americans expressing that confidence. Over the last decade, that number has hovered at or below 20 percent. A Pew international survey last year found only four in ten Americans satisfied with the way democracy is working here (compared to about 60 percent in Canada and Australia). Even two years before the polarizing election of 2016, 27 percent of Democrats and 36 percent of Republicans had come to see members of the rival party as a “threat to the nation’s well-being.” Ordinary Americans have not separated into warring partisan tribes as thoroughly as the Congress has, but it’s gotten pretty bad. As anyone brave enough to venture into political discussions on social media knows, it’s becoming harder and harder to have a civil discussion about our political differences.

For the last few decades, my Stanford University colleague James Fishkin has been developing and testing a simple theory: That civil discussion about politics can happen—and opinions on important issues can change quite a bit—under “good” conditions. People need to become better informed about the issues and the policy options. That requires balanced briefing papers that provide the background to an issue and arguments for and against specific policy proposals. People need to have the chance to question policy experts and political leaders with different views on the issues. That requires plenary sessions where people can hear and weigh alternative arguments. And people need to feel safe and respected to express their views. That requires neutral moderators, trained to elicit diverse views and ensure mutual respect and inclusive participation through small group discussion. This is the formula for democratic deliberation—a process for thinking about public choices that weighs evidence and competing arguments, rather than mobilizing prejudice and passions.  

If all the citizens of a city or country could gather together in one room (and then in lots of smaller groups), they could—the theory suggests—come to more broadly representative (and thus perhaps legitimate and sustainable) decisions on the issues. But even ancient Athens couldn’t fit all its citizens in one room. And so they used random sampling. As Fishkin argues in his latest book, Democracy When the People are Thinking, if we select a random, representative sample and have them deliberate in the above way, we can determine what conclusions the people would come to if they could somehow all gather together and weigh the evidence and arguments “under good conditions.” If we poll them on the issues before and after deliberation, we can learn not only what the people might decide under better conditions, but also how, after reasoned deliberation, they might change their views on the issues, and why.

This is the method of Deliberative Polling that Fishkin and his collaborators at Stanford’s Center for Deliberative Democracy have used over 100 times from the United States and the European Union to Ghana and Mongolia, to help societies arrive at decisions that are “both representative and thoughtful.” If it could help guide debate about constitutional reform in California and Mongolia, we thought maybe it could help clarify the American public’s thinking about the issues before the country in the 2020 presidential campaign.

Working with the problem-solving institution Helena, the independent research organization NORC at the University of Chicago, and By the People Productions (a democratic dialogue initiative), we brought 526 registered voters to Dallas last weekend to deliberate on the five issues that polling has identified as of greatest concern to the public: the economy, healthcare, the environment, immigration, and foreign policy. We called the event “America in One Room.” Many in the sample were initially wary of the whole idea, wondering what kind of timeshare scheme would be pushed on them when they arrived for the “deliberation.” Some people had to be contacted four and five times before they were finally persuaded—through NORC’s patience and persistence—that we simply wanted to know their opinions through a process we thought would be deeper and more meaningful than a one-off opinion survey. In this way, we were able to obtain a sample that is remarkably representative of the electorate’s diversity with respect to gender, age, education, ethnicity, sexual orientation, party, and ideology.

Our plan had been to invite the presidential candidates to come and answer the people’s questions on these five big issues. As people filed into the Texas-sized halls of the Gaylord Hotel and Convention Center last Thursday, many delegates wanted to know which presidential candidates they would hear from. In the end, all three Republican challengers (Weld, Walsh, and Sanford) but not President Trump and only two of the remaining 17 Democratic candidates (Bennet and Castro) appeared to answer the people’s questions (all by video).

If there was any initial disappointment with this showing, it quickly faded. People soon discovered that it was the issues—and their fellow citizens—that riveted their attention. One woman from Albuquerque, New Mexico, told me as she was leaving: “Our politics is so toxic. But here, I found that by focusing on issues rather than personalities, we could have respectful conversations.”

Next week we will begin to make public our statistical findings, showing how this sample of America’s registered voters viewed the issues—and changed their views on the issues—after they got a chance to deliberate “under good conditions.” But here are some things I learned during those four days that can’t be fully captured by the numbers.

Ordinary Americans do not want to be as bitterly divided as their parties, political campaigns, and media are driving them to be. They are pained to the point of being traumatized by the current level of partisan polarization, and they are begging for relief. Reaching across all kinds of divides in Dallas—and not just in the group issue discussions but in deeply personal exchanges over dinner and drinks as well—they found some common ground. And they wanted to know why their politicians can’t do so as well. A heavily tattooed older man from Colorado with a gray beard, long gray hair, and a tall cowboy hat, asked, “If 500 people can get together—from different ages, races, geographic regions, with conflicting opinions—why can’t. . . .our Congress do that?”
Good conditions really do matter. Most of the small groups (which were about the size of a jury) spanned across America’s partisan, ideological, racial, and other identity divides. But when they were able to sit together in a room and talk about issues as individuals, rather than as warring red and blue tribes, something changed. At least they came to understand where their fellow Americans were coming from. A retired schoolteacher from Mariposa County, California, told me: “It’s become dangerous to express your view. But if you get people out of their places, with moderators and parameters. . . .[it’s different.]” Said a middle-aged man from Wisconsin: “I didn’t know who was a Democrat, who was a Republican, and who an independent. People just shared their views. That made it much easier to listen and have a respectful exchange.”
Americans are fed up with the politics of personal destruction. Pretty soon into the experiment, it was clear to all of us that they just didn’t want to hear it any more. The one time that a delegate went negative in the plenary—by alluding to Governor Mark Sanford’s alibi of a hike on the Appalachian Trail to cover up his extramarital affair—his fellow delegates made their displeasure loudly known. “We’ve really liked the fact,” said a woman from Ohio, that (save for that Sanford moment) “this hasn’t focused on the personalities; its been about the issues. That breaks the norm.”
Americans welcome a spirit of civility and bipartisanship. Over and over, people remarked to me about how refreshing it was to hear contending policy experts from different parties or ideological orientations discuss the issues in a friendly and mutually respectful way, without feeling compelled to always disagree, disparage, or destroy the other side. In fact, delegates were disarmed by the spirit of good will (and even occasional humor) that leavened the policy debate on taxes and the economy between Jared Bernstein (former economic policy advisor to Vice-President Biden) and Douglas Holtz-Eakin (former chief economic advisor to Senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign), and by the significant common ground on foreign policy issues between former Obama White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough and former George W. Bush national security staffer Kori Schake.
Ordinary people want to understand the issues better, and they appreciate balanced and accessible means to do so. Joyce, from Torrance, California, told me, “I’m leaving a changed person. I thought I was reasonably informed, but I wasn’t. I heave learned so much about the issues that I didn’t know. I will now follow them more closely.”
People are ready to re-think their views in the face of fresh evidence. A young African American woman told me she had gravitated toward a more nuanced and gradual stance on the proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $15. “When I took the first survey,” she said, “I thought it was a great idea. But you learn it could really hurt small business.”
Americans have not given up on their democracy, and their faith in it can be restored. As they were leaving last Sunday, many said they were honored to have been chosen for the exercise, and that it had restored their faith and pride in American democracy. One was Jackie, an elementary school teacher from Tennessee. “I’m coming away much more informed, energized, and proud to be part of this country,” she said. “This made me realize, we all want the same things, to be safe and valued, to have this be a great country.”
Everybody wants to be treated with respect. And this ethic—constantly nurtured and reinforced from beginning to end in Dallas—was vital to the success of America in One Room. Heather, from University City, Missouri, told me, “I have had the first civil conversation about politics that I have had in a very long time. Because on Facebook, they just call me names.” Reggie, an African-American from the San Diego area, said of his small group, “We all listened to one another and respected their viewpoints. In the end, that’s all anybody wants, to be heard and understood.”

For many delegates, the final small group sessions on Sunday were poignant and even tearful. For the first time, many people had had serious policy discussions, and even formed friendships, across the great political, cultural, and racial chasms of American life. In one final session, an older white woman became flustered when she couldn’t find her mobile phone. “Oh I have your cell phone number,” said a young Hispanic woman. “Let me try it.” And sure enough, the older woman’s phone started buzzing from a recess of her handbag.

Not everything went quite as smoothly as we had planned. A few of the moderators we had recruited to facilitate and umpire the small group discussions didn’t make it to Dallas. A few others fell out during the daylong training in advance of the event. Fortunately, some remarkable volunteers came forward to replace them. These were Stanford undergraduates who had come to observe the proceedings and provide logistical support. They had just taken our class on democratic deliberation, and had done mock deliberations on each of the five issues. In the process, they had mastered our 55-page briefing book on the issues and had learned how to deliberate respectfully across divides. They had also just gone through the moderator training the day before. Hence, they proved skillful and fair-minded facilitators of the small group discussions.

One of our student moderators was an Asian American whose parents had emigrated to the United States. He was needled by some of the 13 participants in his racially diverse group, which included some quite conservative views on issues like immigration. Several participants wanted to reduce the number of refugees and the total number of immigrants admitted to the U.S. And they wondered: Who was this young moderator? What were his views? One elderly white participant probed, “Are you a Russian spy?” At one point they asked—maybe half-jokingly—to see his passport or driver’s license. Instead of taking the bait or becoming unnerved, he simply kept moving the conversations along impartially.

In order not to bias the deliberations, our moderators had been strictly instructed not to reveal anything about themselves until their sessions were finished and the participants had completed the final survey. At that point, our student moderator told them his family story. “My grandparents escaped communist Chinese rule in Tibet in the early 1960s. My parents were born in refugee settlements in India in the 1960s and moved to America in the 1990s. My parents have two children born in the United States. Their youngest son is a junior in the most racially diverse high school in Oregon, and is on track to being the valedictorian. Their oldest son graduated as valedictorian and is now a sophomore at Stanford University. My name is Tenzin Kartsang and I have been your moderator.” They all applauded.

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Who Killed Musa Sadr?

The Iran-born Lebanese Musa Sadr is well-known today for transforming the Lebanese Shi‘a from an oppressed, marginal group into an influential community that gave rise to the Shi‘a protest movement Harakat al-Mahroumin (Movement of the Dispossessed) and its militia, the Amal Movement. But the other thing Sadr is well-known for today is his mysterious disappearance in Libya in 1978, after which the Islamic Republic of Iran, using the roots of the movement Sadr started in Lebanon, would eventually form Hezbollah. Questions to this day remain: Who killed Musa Sadr? To what end? And what might have been if he had not disappeared?

To put together a fuller picture of his disappearance and death, we must first step back in time and look at Sadr’s relations with the Shah of Iran. This forms the first piece of our puzzle. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi had set his intelligence and security organization, the SAVAK, to the task of monitoring Sadr. The SAVAK tracked him from his studies in the religious seminaries of Qom, Iran, in the late 1950s to his arrival in Lebanon to replace Abd al-Hussein Sharaf al-Din, who had died in late 1957, and finally to his disappearance in Libya in 1978. After the Islamic Revolution, three thick volumes of documents detailing the SAVAK’s surveillance of Sadr were published in Iran. From these volumes a fuller picture of the story of Sadr’s life has emerged, including his complex relations with the Shah and his revolutionary opponents who, in the 1970s, took refuge in Lebanon and used it to stage their revolt in Iran.

The SAVAK documents form the basis for the recent book by Arash Reisinezhad, The Shah of Iran, the Iraqi Kurds, and the Lebanese Shia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Reisinezhad masterfully traces the course of Sadr’s life through the prism of secret SAVAK reports, some of which were published in Reisinezhad’s book for the first time, as well as memoirs, articles, and interviews of Iranians who were active in Lebanon before the revolution. In many regards, the SAVAK documents on Musa Sadr fill in the gaps of Fouad Ajami’s excellent biography The Vanished Imam: Musa al Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon (Cornell University Press, 1987).

Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s policy in Lebanon was focused on counteracting the pan-Arab aspirations of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Shah saw the Lebanese Shiite community as the cornerstone of Iran’s non-state foreign policy, including joint anti-Egyptian activity with the Lebanese Maronite Christian community. The Shah delegated the practical responsibility for this policy to the SAVAK, not to the Iranian Foreign Ministry. The complexity and sensitivity of the issue required nondiplomatic tools, and the SAVAK was the go-to group on matters concerning political and other forms of subversion outside Iran’s borders.

As the secret documents show, the SAVAK clearly saw Imam Sadr as a leading political figure in Lebanon. In 1966, when he established the Supreme Islamic Shiite Council, the first religious-political organization of the Shiite community in Lebanon, a SAVAK report (quoted in Reisinezhad’s book) noted his importance:

Seyyed Mousa Sadr is a Shia clergy with a “strange” position in Lebanon as such that he has become the “Heart of Beirut.” No Lebanese [politician] dares to disobey his commands. Whenever he leaves or enters Lebanon for his short trips, all Beirut elites should welcome him. He is far more powerful than [the] Lebanese President. One can easily find his images in all Lebanese newspapers and magazines as well as Beirut bazaars. . . . Sadr has established various foundations in Beirut. He is the head of the Shia council and was entitled Imam by his followers. [There was a rumor that] the Leban[ese] President feared his power. All military generals are Sadr’s Fedayeen. It would be unbelievable if any political actor disobeys his orders. . . . There is no power beyond Sadr’s power in Beirut and whenever he intends, he travels to any part of the world with a special ceremony. . . . In short, Sadr means Lebanon and Lebanon means Sadr.

To bolster his position amidst the political elite in Beirut, Sadr needed a strong ally from outside Lebanon that wielded great power within it. That led him naturally to consider neighboring Syria, where President Hafez al-Assad faced a political crisis centered on the constitution’s stipulation that the President of Syria had to be a Muslim. A violent unrest in Syria in 1973 also heightened President Assad’s need for religious legitimacy. Assad’s Alawite origins did not mesh well with the Syrian constitution’s religious test, because the Alawites at that point were not recognized as Muslims by other Muslims.

It was here that Sadr stepped in and volunteered to help President Assad. Making use of his role as chairman of the Supreme Islamic Shiite Council, Sadr appointed Sheikh Ali Mansur, a local Alawite cleric, to the post of Ja‘fari Mufti of the city of Tripoli and northern Lebanon. By doing so, Sadr effectively determined—importantly, by means of an administrative/political decision rather than theological one, and not by issuing a fatwa, (religious ruling) because he lacked sufficiently senior religious status to do so—that the Alawites were Ja‘fari Shi‘a, and therefore Muslim. Later, at the beginning of 1975, Sadr took an additional step toward recognizing the Alawites as Shi‘a when he held a burial ceremony at the grave of the oldest brother of President Assad, Ahmed bin Ali bin Suleiman, in Latakia.

Reisinezhad rightly focuses on the role of General Mansur Qadr, the Shah’s senior representative in Lebanon, with respect to Sadr. In August 1973, Qadr was appointed Iran’s Ambassador to Lebanon in addition to his role as head of the SAVAK station in Beirut—a position of great power and influence in the country that the Shah saw as supremely important in the Middle East. Qadr wanted to recruit Sadr as an agent, but Sadr refused; he was only prepared to pledge his loyalty to Iran and to the Shah. There is no evidence for the claim by Sadr’s opponents that Sadr had already been recruited by the SAVAK in Iran before coming to Lebanon. Sadr was called upon to replace Abd al-Hussein Sharaf al-Din, who had died and left the Shi‘a of Tyre and southern Lebanon without religious leadership. The son of Sharaf al-Din, J’aafar Sharaf al-Din, lacked aptitude for the position, and according to one testimony he himself asked Musa Sadr’s older brother, Reza Sadr, to convince Musa to lead the Shi‘a of Tyre. The senior Shi‘a clerics Ayatollah Abu al-Qasim Khoei and Ayatollah Muhsin al-Hakim in Najaf, Iraq, and Ayatollah Sayyed Hossein Borujerdi in Iran were also involved in the task of bringing Sadr to Lebanon. The young and ambitious Sadr saw Lebanon as a new arena of activity in which he could both free himself from the limitations under which clerics operated in Iran and fulfill his goal of engaging in politics. These were the circumstances that had brought Sadr to Tyre in 1959.

Reports do show that the SAVAK was well aware that Sadr had been sent to Lebanon. General Teymur Bakhtair, the founder and head of the SAVAK from 1956 to 1961, met with Sadr, was favorably impressed with him, and gave him his blessing, without which it would have been difficult for Sadr to operate in the new country. Sadr thus became part of Iran’s non-state foreign policy in Lebanon, but was by no means a SAVAK agent.

In his book The Fall of Heaven, Andrew S. Cooper noted that in 1973 Sadr made use of his Iranian friend Ali Kani, who was part of the political establishment in Tehran and close to the Shah, and with whom Sadr would meet frequently in Beirut. Sadr gave Kani a 20-page booklet that was written in Arabic and contained a concise version of Ruhollah Khomeini’s thoughts: a bound version of the Grand Ayatollah’s lectures calling for an overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of an Islamic government. Sadr warned Kani that “this [Khomeini’s booklet] is the juice of a sick mind” and requested that the work be brought to the attention of the Shah. “The Shah read it and he loved it,” Kani reported to Sadr; the monarch, in other words, saw that he could make use of the booklet. Two hundred thousand copies of the booklet were printed and disseminated in Iranian universities so that the intellectuals would be able to read Khomeini’s words and learn who he really was.

Sadr’s relations with Khomeini were complex. Sadr was not an enthusiastic supporter of him; he did not recognize Khomeini as Marja‘ Taqlid (the highest religious authority in the Shiite world) and opposed the most important element of Khomeini’s doctrine, Velayat-e Faqih (Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist, according to which only clerics could lead the Islamic state). When Sadr entered his office in the Supreme Islamic Shiite Council in Beirut in May 1969, he hung on the wall a picture of Ayatollah Muhsin al-Hakim, who was based in Najaf, Iraq, and whom he saw as the supreme religious authority of Lebanese Shiites. Khomeini’s associates were baffled by Sadr’s disregard.

Sadr had known Khomeini while he was still living in Iran. Reisinezhad notes that Sadr also played a key role in saving Khomeini from execution in the wake of the bloody riots against the Shah that Khomeini’s supporters organized in Iran in June 1963.

A short time after Khomeini was exiled to Bursa in Turkey, and thence to Najaf, Sadr helped him get an initial interview with a foreign newspaper. Lucien George, a reporter for Le Monde who converted to Islam through Sadr, interviewed Khomeini in Najaf. Khomeini acknowledged Sadr’s assistance. Reisinezhad quotes the SAVAK documents to the effect that Khomeini had good relations with Sadr, respected him, and was even considering him as his replacement in case of his death. But the SAVAK’s observations here appear to have been exaggerated—part of its attempts to cast Sadr in negative light in the Shah’s eyes. Other reports pointed to tensions between him and Khomeini, or even described their relations as poor. Hajj Mostafa, Khomeini’s son who managed his affairs in Najaf, bore a deep grudge against Sadr, among other things because he believed Sadr did not respect Khomeini’s religious authority, and because of Sadr’s close relations with the major Shiite sources of authority who opposed Khomeini.

In April 1968, Sadr visited Khomeini in Najaf, and Khomeini’s son Akhmad visited Beirut several times, meeting with Sadr as an emissary of his father. Reisinezhad notes that when the Ba‘ath regime’s pressure on the Shiite clerics in Najaf intensified, Sadr invited Khomeini to move from Najaf to Lebanon. This invitation, Reisinezhad says, was respectfully rejected. I have found no evidence that Sadr invited Khomeini to Lebanon. The source that the author cites, the memoirs of Mansur Qadr, do not mention at all that, in a letter sent from Sadr to Khomeini and seized by a SAVAK agent, Sadr invited the imam to Lebanon. Mohammad Hassan al-Amin, one of the leading Shiite clerics in Lebanon, says in his memoirs that Yasser Arafat proposed inviting Khomeini from Najaf to Lebanon and arranging a place for him to live in the Beqaa Valley.

Mohammad Hassan al-Amin himself, who met with Khomeini in Najaf and invited him to move to Lebanon, does not mention Sadr at all in this context. Al-Amin promised Khomeini that the Palestinian leadership would take care of his security and other needs in Lebanon. Khomeini replied that he would think about it. After a short time, Ali Akbar Mohtashami, Khomeini’s close adviser and his emissary to the Palestinian leadership, brought Khomeini’s response to Arafat. Al-Amin was present at the meeting between Mohtashami and Arafat, which was positive. Following that meeting, the practical preparations began for bringing Khomeini to the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon. The sensitive question was what position Syrian President Hafez al-Assad would adopt. Without him it was impossible to do anything in Lebanon—and particularly in the Beqaa Valley, which was controlled by the Syrian army.

Assad refused to allow Khomeini to move to Lebanon. Al-Amin noted in his memoirs that Assad’s refusal was based on his conviction that the Shah, with American and Western help, would succeed in quashing the revolution. Assad, al-Amin noted, also feared the Shah’s retaliation against Syria if Khomeini were to come to the Beqaa Valley. As al-Amin recounted: “I received a letter from Arafat and I met with Khomeini in Najaf. I had a written message and an oral message. In the meeting I learned that Khomeini was thinking of another alternative to Lebanon, but he did not talk about it, and it turned out that he left Najaf for France.”

Opponents of the Shah who were active in Lebanon from the beginning of the 1970s were divided into two main groups. These groups competed with one another over the nature of the revolution in Iran, how to achieve it, and positions of power in its leadership. Their dispute in Lebanon revolved around two main issues: the attitude toward the Palestinians in Lebanon and the attitude of the Lebanese Shi‘a community toward Khomeini’s Guardianship doctrine.

The Iranian revolutionaries received military aid, primarily in the form of weapons training, from Arafat’s Fatah organization, and to a lesser extent in the camps of the radical Palestinian organizations. When Musa Sadr established the Amal Movement in 1974, he put the militia organizations under the command of Mostafa Chamran, who admired Sadr and saw him as “the successor of the Imam Hussein.”

Chamran had an unorthodox background for a military commander. He had earned a doctorate in electrical engineering and plasma physics in the United States and so was invited to direct Sadr’s technical school in Burj al-Shemali near Tyre. Chamran was connected to: Ayatollah Mahmoud Taleghani, a senior Shiite cleric; Mehdi Bazargan, an Iranian scholar and politician who was the country’s first Prime Minister after the 1979 revolution; and the Liberation Movement of Iran. Chamran was eventually appointed the first Defense Minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Iranian revolutionaries came to Lebanon through Syria and directly from Europe, trained with weapons, and prepared themselves for the revolution. The claim by Hani al-Hassan, the first Palestinian Ambassador in Tehran after the revolution, that about 10,000 Iranians trained in Lebanon is exaggerated. Mostafa Chamran posited a more realistic number of a few dozen Iranians in the 1970s. The ideological dispute between the two Iranian groups created rivalries between them, sometimes bitter. This decisively affected the attitude of the radical Islamist groups that opposed Chamran, Sadr, and others from the Liberation Movement of Iran. The prominent figures in this group were Mohammad Montazeri, Jalal al-Din Farsi, Ali Akbar Mohtashami, and Akhmad Nafri, who were joined by Mohammad Salah Husseini, who arrived from Iraq and became the leading figure in the relationship between the Iranian revolutionaries and Fatah. Sadr’s recognition of Ayatollah Muhsin al-Hakim, and, after his death, of Ayatollah Abu al-Qasim Khoei as the highest religious authority (Marja‘ Taqlid), while ignoring Khomeini as a source of authority, prompted antagonism and anger among Khomeini’s supporters in Najaf and Lebanon, whom Ali Akbar Mohtashami incited. Sadr’s opponents also knew that he did not support the Guardianship doctrine. The important piece of information—that it was Sadr himself who, through a common friend, conveyed to the Shah Khomeini’s book expounding on Guardianship doctrine as a form of governance—remained a secret.

The issue of how to regard the Palestinians inflamed the dispute between the Iranian groups in Lebanon. The opponents of Sadr, particularly Mohtashami and Farsi, observed with concern the sometimes violent struggle between Sadr and Chamran, on the one hand, and the Palestinians in Lebanon, on the other. At one of the low points of this dynamic, which followed the fall of the Shiite quarter of Nab‘aah in Beirut to the Christian militias, Chamran wrote a letter from Lebanon to the pro-democracy activist Mehdi Bazargan in Tehran. In the letter, which was written in 1977 and ran to 42 pages, the Iranian revolutionary harshly criticized the Palestinian movement for its ideological impoverishment and its moral failure. He also accused the Palestinian leadership, including Arafat himself, of being unable to control his organization and his subordinates. This leadership, he wrote, had inflicted harm on the Shiite population.

Mohtashami described in his memoirs the tribulations caused to the Shiite population, but what particularly concerned him were Sadr’s statements against the Palestinians in a Friday sermon in Tyre:

I felt that the statements, which until then were spoken in whispers and in secrecy among the clerics and the preachers in southern Lebanon, implied that the supposed reason for the Israeli attack was the presence of the Palestinians and the bases they had set up in the area. And if the Palestinians leave and therefore do not attack Israel, it will not attack southern Lebanon. Statements in that vein worried me and I sensed a danger to the Palestinians’ future. Because statements in that vein influence public opinion among the residents of the south against the Palestinians and create an atmosphere that will prevent them from continuing to attack Israel. Therefore I decided to return immediately to Iraq [to Najaf] and report to the imam [Khomeini] and explain to him the different aspects of this danger.

Mohtashami reported to Khomeini in detail about what was happening in southern Lebanon, and clearly he raged against Sadr. The “fear,” Mohtashami told Khomeini, was that “the propaganda and the rumors that the gentlemen [Sadr and Chamran] have voiced against the Palestinian refugees and fighters could provoke clashes between the Shiites and the Palestinians. The imam heard my report and was very perturbed. I will not forget the consternation and the sorrow that were evident on his face. . . . All the disasters since the beginning of Islam were caused by these gentlemen.” Mohtashami summed up by saying that he “felt despair over the political path and the antirevolutionary attitude of Mr. Sadr.”

The results of Israel’s Litani Operation in March 1978 aggravated the enmity between the Shi‘a and Palestinians in southern Lebanon. The rift between Sadr and the radical Iranian faction, both in Lebanon and outside it, could no longer be bridged. As they saw it, Sadr had gone too far. The radical group—Jalal al-Din Farsi, Ali Akbar Mohtashami, Mohammad Montazeri, Mohammad Beheshti, and Mohammad Salah Husseini—sealed Sadr’s fate. He was judged guilty on two counts.

First, Sadr had compromised the Palestinian revolution and the Palestinians’ ability to act against Israel from Lebanon. Farsi, Mohtashami, Montazeri, and Husseini also feared an ongoing clash between the Palestinians and the Shi‘a that would weaken the Palestinian military presence in Lebanon and the legitimacy of the struggle against Israel. Montazeri saw the leaders of Amal Movement as “Maronite agents” and the special connections of the Lebanese Shi‘a movement as constricting Iran’s freedom of action in developing its ties with Libya and the Palestinians, whom he regarded as the spearhead of the Islamic jihad against Israel. “We,” Montazeri attested, “those who uphold the line of the imam [Khomeini], have taken practical steps toward forming an Iran-Palestine-Libya axis while the heads of the Liberation Movement have striven shamelessly to distance us from Palestine and from Libya.” In March 1979, Montazeri was Qaddafi’s honored guest in the celebrations for British Evacuation Day (the anniversary of the evacuation of British military forces from Libya in 1970), and at the end of 1979 he was active in recruiting thousands of Iranian volunteers and bringing them to Lebanon to defend its southern region.

Second, Sadr failed to recognize both Khomeini’s supreme religious authority as Marja‘ Taqlid and his Guardianship doctrine (Velayat-e Faqih). His opponents saw this as heresy linked to Sadr’s support for the Shah. Years later, when Khomeini died and Khamenei was appointed to replace him, the Lebanese Ayatollah Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah also refused to recognize the Guardianship doctrine and was almost killed by his former longtime bodyguard, Imad Mughniyeh, who in the 1990s became the leader of Hezbollah’s security apparatus and military wing. Some, such as Mohammad Beheshti, were concerned about the future and saw Sadr not only as a rival and an opponent of the revolutionary path but also as a future competitor in the event of Khomeini’s death. Beheshti was aware of the great admiration Sadr had earned among the supporters of the Liberation Movement of Iran and also among some of the senior clerics who had not recognized Khomeini’s religious authority.

Kai Bird’s The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, was the first to link Beheshti to Sadr’s death. Ames, a CIA officer who died in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, maintained close ties with Ali Hassan Salameh, then-head of intelligence for the Palestine Liberation Organization. At Ames’ request, Salameh gave him a detailed account of Sadr’s fate:

Qadafi had agreed to host a meeting between Musa Sadr and one of his theological rivals, the Imam, Mohammed Beheshti . . . a close political ally of Ayatollah Khomeini. . . . The Libyan dictator wanted the two men to set aside their theological disputes and cooperate on a common, anti-western political agenda. . . . Musa Sadr and Beheshti were supposed to meet in Tripoli. . . . Beheshti told Qadafi—over the phone—to detain Musa Sadr by all means necessary. Beheshti assured Qadafi that Imam Sadr was a western agent. . . . Qadafi called Beheshti who told him Musa Sadr was a threat to Khomeini. . . . Musa Sadr and his . . . companions had been summarily executed and buried. . . .

Sadr’s son-in-law, Mehdi Firozan, claimed that Jalal al-Din Farsi, who was close to Qaddafi, was responsible for the imam’s death and hinted that the motivation was to eliminate any possibility that Sadr would succeed Khomeini.

Sadeq Tabatabaei, one of the prominent figures among the Iranian revolutionaries who were active in Lebanon and a relative of Sadr, wrote in his memoirs that Farsi wasted no opportunity to undermine Sadr. Tabatabaei accused Farsi of distorting the facts by claiming that Sadr strove to get some of the Iranian revolutionaries, including Farsi himself, expelled from Lebanon; indeed the reverse was true. He noted that Farsi regularly gave false reports to Khomeini in Najaf in order to incite him against Sadr. Farsi conveyed similar false information to the heads of the Liberation Movement of Iran who lived outside of Iran in order to harm Sadr. He portrayed Sadr as a supporter of the Shah and as acting against the Palestinians. Sadr’s right-hand man, Chamran, complained that Farsi and Mohammad Salah Husseini were spreading rumors and lies “against us everywhere . . . and portraying us as lowly spies.”

Farsi also influenced senior clerics who were living in Iran. One of them, Hajj Manian, who was indoctrinated by Farsi, had been convinced that Amal was cooperating with the Phalangist militia against the Palestinians. So he was invited to come and see for himself how Shi‘a from the Amal Movement were fighting Christians. Manian, wrote Tabatabaei in his memoirs, “saw with his own eyes how young Amal members were fighting in the front line against the Christians and only behind them were Fatah forces. . . . He truly trembled when he saw the facts. I am in despair over the campaign of slanders against us. . . . The result of all the propaganda against us is that all our friends in Iran suspect our intentions.”

Khomeini was already elderly when he came to power, and it can be assumed that his associates discussed the issue of his successor. Some of them supported Ayatollah Ali Montazeri, the father of Mohammad Montazeri; another group supported Mohammad Beheshti; and there were some who favored Sadr. Even if this possibility was a remote outlier, Sadr’s adversaries wanted to eliminate it altogether. Four decades after Sadr’s killing, Farsi expressed his view of the Lebanese imam: “When I was in Lebanon the revolutionaries surrounded me and not him. He [Sadr] had good ties with the Shah. He would say that our clerics should go to churches and the priests should pray in our mosques. . . . It was necessary to rebel, to revolt; to oppose, to object to, to protest against him. It was necessary to kill him for these things. We saw that there was no value [in killing him] because Muammar Qaddafi killed him.”

Even since the fall of the Qaddafi regime, no remains have been found of the vanished imam in Libya. His opponents took power in the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the full story of Sadr’s execution is not known and will probably remain so. Some—Mohammad Montazeri, Mohammad Beheshti, and Mohammad Salah Husseini—took the secret to their graves, and some—Jalal al-Din Farsi and Ali Akbar Mohtashami—are alive but not talking. The great irony is that the torchbearers of the path of Farsi, Mohtashami, and their fellow opponents of Sadr now support the new movement that Iran established in Lebanon: Hezbollah, which is now embracing Sadr’s legacy. In Hezbollah’s new telling, Sadr has become one of the movement’s founding fathers, and Hassan Nasrallah praises him each year in special superlatives reserved for the heroes of Islam who are immortalized in Hezbollah pantheon.

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How the Framers Thought About Impeachment

With House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s announcement that she asked the relevant House committees to begin an impeachment inquiry of the President comes the need for a short primer on how to think about the impeachment of a president as a constitutional matter. This is not to dive into the details about what the current president may or may not have done. Rather, it’s a reminder in outline about how the Constitution, first through the text of Article II and second the process as laid out in Article I, intends to shape House members’ thinking about such an inquiry.

In Section 1 of Article II, the text explains that the “powers and duties” of presidency will “devolve on the Vice President” when, for whatever reason, a president is removed from office. This signals that, when examining Article II, we should be looking not only for the President’s authorities but also his official obligations.

In that regard, Article II begins by vesting “the executive power” in the person of the president—a power that was defined by the political theorists of the day as involving a broad obligation to administer the laws of the land, command the nation’s military forces, and conduct the nation’s foreign affairs. What concludes Section 1, Article II, is the presidential oath to “faithfully execute the office of President. . . .and. . . .to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Thus Section 1, which lays out the fundamental features of the office, begins with the defining power and concludes with a sweeping obligation to not only carry out the office properly, but to do so with the health of the larger constitutional order in mind.

Sections 2 and 3 of Article II appear as an odd lot, sharing neither the same length nor an obvious coherence. As Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson once put it, the text is “almost as enigmatic as the dreams Joseph was called upon to interpret for Pharaoh.” But is it? Would the Constitution’s drafters have been so slipshod when it came to such an important matter as setting out presidential authorities?

Upon closer inspection, Section 2’s authorities appear to be spelled out because each of the executive powers named has been modified in some way. For example, while the president as the chief executive directs the nation’s diplomacy, in concluding a treaty he must get the consent of two-thirds of the Senate—a concession to the federal and republican character of the country. As the individual inhabiting the office vested with the executive power, the president is commander-in-chief over the nation’s armed forces but also the state militias when called into service—an authority intended to fix a problem that bedeviled George Washington as commander-in-chief during the Revolutionary War, when he could only request the cooperation of the militias when planning campaigns.

As for Section 3, the language is one of oughts: The president “shall” do this and that, such as seeing to it that the laws are “faithfully executed.” Taken as a whole, the section essentially calls on the inherent energy of the unitary executive to give direction to the nation’s policy agenda and keep the basic functions of government up and running. There is certainly discretion in how a president carries out these mandates, but they are mandates.

In brief, Section 2 is about powers, while Section 3 is about presidential duties. In that respect, Sections 2 and 3 are structurally an echo of Section 1.

The final section of Article II, Section 4, lays out the grounds for impeaching the President and removing him from office if convicted of treason, bribery, or high crimes and misdemeanors. Treason is straightforward; it’s clearly a violation of the president’s oath. Bribery is likewise a clear violation of his oath and obligation to faithfully execute the laws. But what constitutes “high crime and misdemeanors?”

At the time of the Constitutional Convention, the phrase—borrowed from British legal practice and the ongoing impeachment proceedings against the former British governor of India, Warren Hastings—was intended to address the problem of when an executive exercises legitimate authority but does so in a manner, as Alexander Hamilton put it, in “violation of some public trust.” A president, for example, has virtual plenary power to grant pardons, but if he exercises that authority so as to hide a crime, at a minimum he has violated his duty to faithfully (that is, in good faith) execute the laws.

Again, at the time of the Convention, a key problem the Framers wanted to address was the absence of an independent executive under the Articles of Confederation. They succeeded in establishing an office that could act with energy, decision, dispatch, and, if necessary, secrecy. The circle they had to square was providing for removal in the case where a president abused his broad discretion, without giving Congress the power to control presidential behavior by making removal from office too easy. Poor policy choices, ineffective administration, boorish behavior would be too low a bar for such removal. But an abuse of office—either obvious in the case of treason or bribery or less so in instances in which a president breaks the constitutional norms he is sworn to uphold—had to be on the docket if the newly crafted and powerful chief executive was to gain popular acceptance and the office not be amended by the state ratifying conventions.

Obviously, in comparison with treason and bribery, deciding whether a president has committed a high crime and misdemeanor will always be more of a judgment call. Hence, those calling for impeachment on these grounds will not readily escape the charge they are acting politically. Indeed, because impeachment only requires a simple majority vote in the House, it appears that the Constitution makes it relatively easy to impeach. However, the Constitution likewise makes it difficult to remove a president from office, requiring a two-thirds majority in the Senate for a conviction.

In sum, the Constitution’s structure frames the question of impeachment and removal around its textual insistence that with great executive power comes great responsibility. And because the Constitution seems to have created a relatively open door when it comes impeachment, a plausible assumption is that impeachment, qua impeachment, was never meant to be such an exceptional oversight mechanism. Just as it is plausible to argue that removal would be rare.

There is no question that a more routine use of impeachment inquiries might be disruptive to the presidency. On the other hand, the threat of it being employed more often might just put some ballast back into our constitutional system in the face of the expansive sway of the modern presidency. It might temper just a bit presidents who think that, once popularly elected, they have a mandate to govern as they wish and ignore the constitutional fact that they have both powers and duties.

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Putin the Not-So-Omnipotent

In August, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin marked 20 years since he was appointed Prime Minister by Boris Yeltsin. Those 20 years have been a slow-motion demonstration of power consolidation, giving rise to the myth of Putin as omnipotent strongman. For two decades, whatever happened in Russia, good or bad—whether it was a war, a terror attack, the Sochi Olympics, or the annexation of a neighboring country’s territory—the credit or blame lay with Vladimir Putin.

As of this summer, that sense of Putin’s omnipotence has been badly damaged.

In July and August, Moscow citizens took to the streets in massive numbers over rigged elections for the Moscow City legislature, the largest unauthorized protests since 2011-2012. The National Guard, a branch of the security services established in April 2016 especially for the repression of domestic unrest, was dispatched to Moscow to beat and arrest thousands of young women and men, all protesting peacefully.

Police brutality made international headlines, as did the immediate trials and sentences for the participants in the protests. Six people have so far been sentenced to up to six years in prison for supposedly assaulting the police, for rioting, and even for tweeting. A teen with cerebral palsy was hauled away. A graphic designer went out jogging, and National Guard troops grabbed him and broke his leg. The man was fined $150. Another Muscovite was sentenced to four years in prison for taking part in multiple unauthorized protests—no violence is alleged. Moscow actor Pavel Ustinov was grabbed and beaten by five police officers while standing near a Metro station. A judge sentenced him to three and a half years in prison for assaulting a police officer and allegedly twisting his shoulder. (Video of the incident tells a different story: the policeman appears to have injured himself in trying to get his blows in.)

Police brutality is nothing new in Russia, even if this time it was particularly egregious. Nor is miscarriage of justice surprising, even though the speed at which it was miscarried this time around is notable. What is new is that the figure of the singular strongman responsible for everything has been replaced in the Russian popular understanding with a vision of a regime run by a whole slew of siloviki—strongmen with ties to the security services.

As he usually does during a crisis, Putin had disappeared from Moscow—a self-serving trick he has honed for decades. While the first round of protests was getting going, Putin bobbed to the surface of the Gulf of Finland in his mini-submarine. A week later, he was seen riding a motorcycle with a sidecar in Crimea alongside his favorite right-wing biker gang, the “Night Wolves.”

Russian political experts, journalists, and think tankers obsessed over the chain of command surrounding the brutality. On whose orders was the head of the National Guard Viktor Zolotov acting? Was it the head of the Security Council Nikolai Patrushev and his friends in the FSB that were in charge of operations in Moscow? Among more connected figures, the speculation was that Patrushev’s faction had taken too much authority for itself.

Putin’s former spin-master Gleb Pavlovsky joked that Putin was perhaps in Crimea against his own will—a reference to the 1991 coup against Gorbachev. But while Pavlovsky is no longer close to power, a comment from a daughter of Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov raised eyebrows around town. “Perhaps all this absurd injustice and the outrageous behavior of the siloviki amounts to an attempt to commit something like a coup,” Liza Peskova wrote in her blog on the Echo of Moscow website, which was later deleted.

Of course, there was no coup, and Putin was (and is) still very much in charge. But the tone of the speculation pointed to a realization broadly permeating Russia these days—that Putin’s days are finite, even if his exit may not be imminent. This realization seems to have triggered a kind of grappling with the reality of just what kind of political system almost 20 years of Putinism has left in its wake.

There was notable dissent to the government violence at some surprisingly high levels. The most prominent critic was Sergei Chemezov, a pal of Putin’s from their time together in Dresden in the 1980s and currently the head of Rostec, the (sanctioned) gigantic state conglomerate that services the Russian defense industry. As the protests were raging, he weighed in against the regime’s heavy-handedness. “Having a sane opposition benefits any representative body and ultimately the entire country. There ought to be an alternative force that points things out and sends out signals to the other side,” the usually politically reticent Chemezov said. “If we think everything is always going well, we can slip into a period of stagnation—and we’ve been there before,” he added, presumably referring to the Brezhnev period.

A long-time insider, the Editor-in-Chief of Echo of Moscow radio Alexey Venediktov, explained it as a split between the hardliners and the status quo types—between people like Patrushev, the head of Rosneft Igor Sechin, and the speaker of the Duma Vyacheslav Volodin on the one side, and Chemezov, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, and Sberbank CEO German Gref on the other. Factional squabbles under Putin are not a new feature of Russian politics. But the contours of this split this time around are more visceral—between predator and prey—and extend beyond just the elites.

In the early 2010s, there used to be a relatively clear ideological division in the Kremlin between “conservatives” and “liberals.” The former group stood behind Putin, then the Prime Minister, while the latter were on then-President Dmitry Medvedev’s side. At home, the liberals favored market reforms. In foreign policy, they managed the “reset” with President Obama and cooperated with the United States on Libya at the United Nations. These were the people who the Muscovite creative class and some business executives saw as the future of Russia.

But Putin came back in 2012 and reversed many of the trends that had started under Medvedev. Instead of reforming the economy, he turned more statist. And abroad, he ended up annexing Crimea and breaking decisively with the West. Putin’s return meant the liberals were sidelined, silenced, or simply forced to change sides. The hardliners that had gathered around Putin—gray specters with backgrounds in the security services like Sechin and Patrushev—suddenly became the only game left in town.

But enthusiasm over the Crimea annexation, as well as solidarity over the hardship imposed by Western sanctions and low oil prices, started to break down. Although wealth was no longer being imported into Russia, appetites did not shrink. There was too little to go around for too many grasping hands. Fights over the remaining assets picked up in intensity, especially after 2015. The siloviki, who in the early 2000s were merely the means of shaking down opponents, became independent players themselves, arresting, attacking, and imprisoning with impunity. Their victims were both ordinary Russians and high-level elites: billionaires, bankers, federal ministers, federal senators, governors, businessmen, a theater director—you name it.

The rapacious appetites of the siloviki caused Putin to break the social compact he had made with Russians in the early 2000s: in exchange for his largely unchecked power, he promised them stability and at least a modicum of prosperity (financed by record-high oil prices). The beneficiaries were both average Russians who enjoyed a trickle-down effect, and connected elites who got Putin’s protection and profited from state largesse. This breach of contract, and the shift of power to the siloviki, helps define the new split. The fault line runs along economic class lines, between a corrupt elite and the common man. But it also separates the siloviki clans from their victims, some of who are indeed quite well off. As the case of the Magomedov brothers proves, even financing Vladimir Putin’s Night Hockey League doesn’t keep one safe from the FSB and out of prison.

While the siloviki had been looting, Putin was legitimating his rule by leveraging mythic concepts: he promised a strong Russia, Russia-as-a-Great-Power, Russia as a nuclear-armed empire, a Russia that is taking back lands that belong to it. The only concept he retained largely unchanged from the 2000s is that of himself as a strong leader. But after 20 years in power, mythology without results is wearing thin. The younger generation is increasingly lost to him. Russia’s Generation Z, born in the late 1990s and early 2000s, doesn’t remember the oil-­fueled “good times” of the late 2000s. They do, however, remember Black Tuesday in December 2014, when the Russian ruble lost half of its value as a result of sanctions and cratering oil prices. To them, Crimea is not a triumphant revival of Russian greatness, but rather the reason their lives got worse.

Even millennials—those who were the driving force of the 2011-2012 protests, and whose life circumstances have not measurably improved unless they chose to work for the government—have also once again started to express their discontent and anger over what’s going on in Russia. The above-mentioned sentencing of Ustinov has prompted a major public campaign among celebrities and television personalities, even those usually loyal to the government given that they work for state media, with many making viral videos demanding the release not only of Ustinov but all political prisoners. Hundreds of celebrities picketed before the Presidential Administration offices last week. And Moscow school teachers and medical workers, both jobs that are paid by the state, wrote, separately, two open letters calling for justice.

And the discontent may be wider than just the younger, working generation. The Russian Orthodox Church, one of the least independent institutions of the Putin era, promised to study whether the rights of the Moscow case defendants were violated, after more than 50 priests wrote an open letter protesting the harsh sentences being meted out.

It’s perhaps most telling that people in Putin’s own inner circle now freely discuss Putin’s political future. The above-mentioned Sergey Chemezov, in the very same interview cited above, suggested that Putin would retire in 2024 because the Constitution doesn’t allow him to get re-elected. It’s not that Chemezov is preparing a revolution or a coup, but it’s just that it has always been up to Putin alone to decide what to do and how, especially when it comes to his own fate. Usually, the elites are silent while the Great Leader issues cryptic statements on the matter. 

Vladimir Putin is only a third of the way through his fourth term, but he already has his hands full. The protests in 2011-2012 may have been bigger, but they were narrower: back then, it was mostly Moscow’s creative class out in the streets, people whose basic needs were mostly being met but who wanted more political freedom. Today, oil is trading at almost half the price it was then, and sanctions are in place. As a result, the discontent is felt all over the country. They are protesting in Shiyes over landfills, in Buryatia over rigged local elections, and in Ekaterinburg over the building of a church. And everywhere, authorities are dispatching National Guard troops to crack down on protesters.

Needless to say, there are no carrots left—only sticks.

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