Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 33

Twelve Theses on Nationalism

Editor’s Note: This is the first essay in a multi-author series on “Our Nationalist Moment.” Coming later this week: Aaron Sibarium.

By the end of World War Two, nationalism had been thoroughly discredited. Critics charged that national self-interest had prevented democratic governments from cooperating to end the Great Depression, and that nationalist passions had led not just to war, but also to some of the worst crimes groups of human beings had ever perpetrated on others. The construction of international institutions and norms—in economics, politics, and human rights—as antidotes to nationalist excesses dominated Western diplomacy for decades after 1945, and the global struggle between liberal democracy and communism muted the expression of nationalist sentiments on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The peace and economic growth that characterized this period built public support for this strategy.

As decades passed and new generations emerged, memories of the Great Depression and World War Two lost their hold on the Western imagination. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the postwar era began giving way to new forces. The European Union, its boosters convinced that their enlightened post-national project represented the future of politics for mankind, sought to move from economic integration to political integration. But public opposition swelled in many member-states. The “captive nations” of eastern and central Europe reemerged as independent actors, and long-submerged nationalist feelings resurfaced. But the feelings were not limited to the east: Growing regional inequalities within countries drove a wedge between left-behind populations and the international elites many citizens held responsible for their plight. The Great Recession of 2008 undermined public confidence in expert managers of the economy, and in the internationalist outlook that had long dominated their thinking. In Europe, concerns over immigration grew as people from lower-wage countries in the EU moved freely to wealthy member-states. These concerns exploded in 2015 after German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to admit more than 1 million refugees from Syria and other countries wracked by conflict and economic stagnation.

All these trends, and others, were at work in the United States. The consequences of China’s entry into the WTO, especially for U.S. manufacturing, stoked concerns about international trade. Five decades of robust immigration transformed America’s demography, a shift celebrated by some but deplored by others. In the wake of the Great Recession and the Iraq war, the costs of America’s global leadership became increasingly controversial, and the belief that other nations were taking advantage of the United States intensified. Postwar internationalism became a new front in the decades-old culture war. In retrospect, it was only a matter of time until someone mounted a frontal challenge to the consensus of elites in both major political parties. When it did, “America First” hit the established order with the force and subtlety of a wrecking-ball.

The growth of nationalism as a political phenomenon encouraged the emergence of nationalist theoreticians and ideologues. In the United States, a July 2019 conference on “National Conservatism” brought together thinkers who argued—in direct opposition to the leaders of the postwar era—that nationalism offers a more secure and morally preferable basis for both domestic and international policy. Similar convenings have occurred in Europe. Critics of the new nationalism have been quick to weigh in. 

As the battle has been joined, the ratio of heat to light has been high. And yet so are the stakes. Our democratic future depends on whether publics come to see nationalism as the solution, the problem, or something in-between. As a contribution to clarifying the debate, I offer twelve theses on nationalism.

Thesis One: Nationalism and patriotism are not the same. Patriotism is love of country—as George Orwell puts it, “devotion to a particular place and way of life.” Nationalism means giving pride of place, culturally and politically, to a distinctive ensemble of individuals—the nation.

Thesis Two: A nation is a community, united by sentiments of loyalty and mutual concern, that shares a cultural heritage and belief in a common destiny. Some nations additionally invoke common descent, which in nearly all cases is mythical, as it was when John Jay posited it for the nascent United States in Federalist 2. As political theorist Bernard Yack observes in Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community, not all nationalist claims are based on ethnicity. Ethno-nations are distinct, he observes, in that they make descent from previous members “a necessary, rather than merely sufficient, condition of membership.”

Thesis Three: An individual need not be born into a cultural heritage to (come to) share it. Entrants into the national community commit themselves not only to learn their nation’s history and customs but also to take on their benefits and burdens as their own, as Ruth did when she pledged to Naomi that “Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.”

Thesis Four: Nationalism and patriotism can yield conflicting imperatives. Many Zionists felt patriotic connections to the states in which they lived, even as they labored to create a nation-state of their own. Although many of today’s Kurds in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey harbor patriotic sentiments, their primary loyalty is to the Kurdish nation, and their ultimate aim is national self-determination in their own state.

Thesis Five: Nationalism poses a challenge to the modern state system. The familiar term “nation-state” implicitly assumes that the geographical locations of distinct nations coincide with state boundaries. Occasionally this is true (Japan comes close), but mostly it isn’t. Nations can be spread across multiple states (as the Kurds are), and states can contain multiple nations (as Spain does). What some regard as the ideal arrangement—a sovereign state for each nation and only this nation—is still exceedingly rare despite the convulsions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and still could not be realized without further massive, bloody disruptions of existing arrangements. Hitler’s determination to unify all ethno-cultural Germans into a single nation would have been a disaster, even if he had harbored no further ambitions. Today’s Hungarians have grounds for objecting to the Treaty of Trianon, which left millions of their co-nationals outside the borders of their shrunken state. Nevertheless, any effort to reunite them under a single flag would mean war in the heart of Europe. 

Today’s state system includes international organizations, which many nationalists oppose as abrogating their states’ sovereignty. This stance rests on a failure to distinguish between revocable agreements, which are compatible with maintaining sovereignty, and irrevocable agreements, which are not. In leaving the European Union, Britain is exercising its sovereign rights, which it did not surrender when it entered the EU. By contrast, the states that banded together into the United States of America agreed to replace their several sovereignties into a single sovereign power, with no legal right under the Constitution to reverse this decision. When the southern states tried to secede, a civil war ensued, and its outcome ratified the permanent nature of the Union.  

Thesis Six: It is possible to be a nationalist without believing that every nation has a right to political independence, but it isn’t easy. The U.S. Declaration of Independence speaks of “the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.” Similarly, Israel’s Declaration of Independence invokes the “self-evident right of the Jewish people to be a nation, as all other nations, in its own sovereign state.” 

There are often practical reasons to deny some nations political self-determination (see Thesis Five). But doing so in principle rests on the belief that some nations are superior to others and deserve to rule over them. The claimed superiority can be cultural, hence mutable and temporary, or ethno-racial, essentialist, and immutable. The former often includes the responsibility of dominant nations to prepare subordinated nations for independence, as John Stuart Mill’s defense of tutelary colonialism did. The latter implies that subordinate nations are at best means to the well-being of dominant nations; at worst, lesser forms of humanity who exist at the sufferance of superior nations. 

There is no logical connection between the undeniable premise that each nation is distinctive and the conclusion that mine is better than yours. But the psychology of pride in one’s nation can lead even decent, well-meaning people from the former to the latter.  

Some contemporary defenders of nationalism claim that it is inherently opposed to imperialism. Nation-states want only to be left alone, they say, to govern themselves in accordance with their own traditions. As Rebecca West once put it, there is not “the smallest reason for confounding nationalism, which is the desire of a people to be itself, with imperialism, which is the desire of a people to prevent other peoples from being themselves.” 

She would be right if all nationalism were inwardly focused and guided by the maxim of live and let live. But the history of the 20th century shows that some forms of nationalism are compatible with imperialism and worse. It depends on what a nation thinks that “being itself” entails. The proposition that nationalism and imperialism always stand opposed rests not on historical evidence, but rather on a definition of nationalism at odds with its real-world manifestations.

Thesis Seven: It is possible to be a nationalist without believing that the interests of one’s nation always trump competing considerations. Writing in the shadow of World War Two, George Orwell declared that nationalism was “the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.” Although this is an unmatched description of Nazism, it conflates an extreme instance of nationalism with the totality. 

In fact, nationalism is compatible with a wide range of ideologies and political programs. It motivated not only Nazi Germany but also Britain’s heroic resistance to fascism. (Churchill’s wartime speeches rallied his countrymen with stirring invocations of British nationalism against its foe.) And because the nation need not be understood as the supreme good, “liberal nationalism” is not an oxymoron.

Giving priority to the interests of one’s nation does not mean ignoring the interests of others, any more than caring most about one’s own children implies indifference to the fate of others’ children. Nations are sometimes called upon to risk their blood and treasure to respond to or prevent harm in other nations. At some point, the imbalance between modest costs to one’s nation and grievous damage to others should compel action. Even though some Americans would have risked their lives to prevent the Rwandan genocide, America’s failure to intervene was a mistake, a proposition that nationalists can accept without contradicting their beliefs.  

Thesis Eight: It is a mistake to finger nationalism as the principal source of oppression and aggression in modern politics. As we have seen repeatedly, creedal and religion-based states and movements can be just as brutal, and they can pose, in their own way, equally fundamental challenges to the state system. The Reformation triggered a full century of astonishingly bloody strife. More recently, for those who took class identity to be more fundamental than civic identity, “socialist internationalism” became the organizing principle of politics, and similarly if membership in the Muslim umma is thought to erase the significance of state boundaries. Those outside the favored class or creed became enemies with whom no permanent peace is possible, and the consequences are as negative for decent politics as any of the evils perpetrated in the name of nationalism.

Thesis Nine: As a key source of social solidarity, nationalism can support higher-order political goods such as democracy and the welfare state. Democracy rests on mutual trust, without which the peaceful transfer of power comes to be regarded as risky. The welfare state rests on sympathy and concern for others who are vulnerable, whether or not the more fortunate members of the community see themselves as equally vulnerable. Shared nationality promotes these sentiments, while in the short-to-medium term (at least), increasing national diversity within states weakens them. 

This helps explain why many nationalists who are not driven by racial or ethnic bias nonetheless are ambivalent about high numbers of immigrants and refugees. It also points to the most important domestic challenge contemporary nationalists face—reconciling their attachment to their co-nationals with fair treatment for other groups with whom they share a common civic space. 

Thesis Ten: Although we typically think of nations as driving the creation of nation-states, the reverse is also possible. A generation ago, Eugen Weber showed how, over the decades before World War One, the French state deployed a program of linguistic, cultural, and educational unification to turn “peasants into Frenchmen.” During the past half-century, post-colonial governments have sought, with varying degrees of success, to weaken tribal and sectarian ties in favor of overarching national attachments. 

Many historians have discerned similar processes at work in the United States. Prior to the Civil War, lexicographers such as Noah Webster crystallized a non-regional American English, distinct from British English, while historians such as George Bancroft told the story of America’s creation and growth as a narrative that all could share. After the Civil War, as flows of immigrants from Central and Southern Europe accelerated, programs of civic education proliferated—with the aim, one might say, of turning peasants into Americans. Because it was no longer possible to say, as John Jay did in 1787, that Americans were “descended from the same ancestors,” let alone “professing the same religion,” it became all the more important to create a common cultural heritage into which millions of new immigrants could be initiated. The process may have been rough and ready, even coercive, but in the main it succeeded. And today, after a half century of cultural strife and large flows of immigrants from an unprecedented diversity of countries, it may be necessary to recommit ourselves to this task, albeit in less favorable circumstances.

Thesis Eleven: Although scholars distinguish between creedal nationalism and ethnic or cultural nationalism as ideal types, there are no examples of purely creedal nations. In the United States, abstract principles and concrete identities have been braided together since the Founding. Our greatest President, who famously described the United States as a nation dedicated to a proposition, also invoked (unsuccessfully) the “mystic chords of memory” and our “bonds of affection” as antidotes for civil strife and advocated transmuting our Constitution and laws into objects of reverence—a “political religion.”

Thesis Twelve: Although nationalism is a distinctively modern ideology, national identity has pervaded much of human history and is unlikely to disappear as a prominent feature of politics. As Bernard Yack has persuasively argued, nationalism is unthinkable without the emergence of the principle of popular sovereignty as the source of legitimate political power. Because this theory characterizes the “people” who constitute the sovereign in abstract terms, it does not answer the key practical question: Who or what is the people?

The U.S. Declaration of Independence exemplifies this hiatus. Before we reach its much-quoted second paragraph on the rights of individuals, we encounter the assertion that Americans constitute “one people” asserting its right to “dissolve the political bands that have connected them with another.” Americans are one people, the British another. The governing class of Great Britain had a different view: Americans were subjects of the king, just as residents of the British Isles were, distinguished from them only by location. Even to assert their Lockean right of revolution, of which George III was no great fan, Americans had to make the case that they were a separate and distinct people. It turns out that in the case of the United States and many that followed, national identity offered the most plausible way to meet this challenge, which is why John Jay resorted to it. 19th century nationalists had richer intellectual resources on which to draw, including Herder’s account of distinct cultures, but their strategy was much the same.

In short, national identity is transmuted into nationalism through its encounter with the doctrine of popular sovereignty. When the people are understood as the nation, popular sovereignty becomes national sovereignty. 

Because pre-modern politics lacked the theory of popular sovereignty, it could not develop a doctrine of nationalism. Nonetheless, national identity has pervaded human history, for the simple reason that we are finite beings shaped by unchosen contingencies. Although we are social, cultural, and political beings, we are born helpless and unformed. We are formed first by the ministration of parents and kin or their equivalents, then by the experiences of neighborhood and local community, and eventually by the wider circle of those with whom we share a cultural heritage. To be sure, the encounter with those whose formative influences were different will not leave us untouched. No matter how much our horizons are broadened, we never set aside our origin. We may leave home, but home never quite leaves us, a reality reflected in our language. “Mother tongue,” “fatherland”—the age-old metaphor of our place of origin as nurturing, shaping parent will never lose its power.

National identity is an aspect of human experience that no measure of education should seek to expunge—nor could it if it tried. But as we have seen, the modern political expression of national identity is multi-valent. Nationalism can be a force for great evil or great good. It can motivate collective nobility and collective brutality. It can bring us together and drive us apart.

In the face of these realities, the way forward is clear, at least in principle. Acknowledging the permanence of nationalism and its capacity for good, we must do our best to mitigate its negative effects. Nationalism need not mean that a country’s cultural majority oppresses others with whom it shares a state; putting one’s country first need not mean ignoring the interests and concerns of others. On the contrary: To adapt a Tocquevillian locution, nationalism rightly understood means that no nation is an island, that in the long run the wellbeing of one’s nation cannot be decoupled from the fate of others. The American leaders who rebuilt Europe understood that theirs was not an act of charity but rather a means to the long-time best interest of their country. The leaders of the civil rights movement knew that they promoted not only the cause of justice, but also the strength of their country, at home and abroad.  

The details may have changed since the days of George Marshall and Martin Luther King, Jr., but the essentials remain the same.

The post Twelve Theses on Nationalism appeared first on The American Interest.

Can a 1920s Painting Help Us Today?

Georg Groß altered the spelling of his name. Repulsed by German nationalism, the artist changed Georg to George, and his last name to Grosz. That was in 1916, the year Germany’s government banned foreign films, at a time when the 23-year-old Berliner was engaged in his furious expressionism. Grosz drew men drunk, men vomiting, men disfigured. It was the time of war.

In 1921, his satirical collection of lithographs, “Gott mit uns”—“God with us” having been a Prussian expression adopted by the German military—resulted in a fine for insulting the army. In 1928, Grosz was prosecuted for blasphemy after publishing anticlerical drawings, one depicting Christ coerced into military service. These were the days of Weimar democracy.

I’ve come to New York to Ronald Lauder’s Neue Galerie to see Grosz’s most famous painting, Eclipse of the Sun, an example of New Objectivity. The 1926 canvas is on loan from the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, New York, and serves as the centerpiece of an exhibit of art from Weimar Germany. On a warm, humid Saturday in late July the museum—a mansion at 86th and 5th Avenue known as the William Starr Miller House—is well attended. A line waits outside.

Eclipse of the Sun is a hot mess. The backdrop is a city in flames. The central figure is the walrus-mustached German President, Paul von Hindenburg. Portly, elderly, and adorned in war medals, von Hindenburg—focused on a funerary cross and bloodied sword on a table—is surrounded by four headless financiers. A man wearing a top hat, with weapons tucked under his arm, whispers into von Hindenburg’s ear. There’s a dark sun in the background illuminated with a dollar sign. A donkey, wearing blinders emblazoned with the German eagle, stands on a platform atop the table, and is tethered to a skeleton on the floor.

To step into this period is to be reminded of the late historian Tony Judt’s quip about the never-ending conceit we seem to have, of thinking that our human struggles are forever unique and new.

Neither Left nor Right today are able to secure a sure footing. Creedal passions stir. Polarization worsens. Perspective is in short supply.

In the current issue, Gabriel Schoenfeld and Richard Thompson Ford weigh in. While Schoenfeld works to identify dangers in national conservative agendas, Ford argues that mainstream politicians are ignoring the roots of the new socialism. Neo-socialists have filled a vacuum, he contends, leading on the challenges new technology creates for human welfare. There is lure in this for younger voters especially. And opportunity for all of us—including for capitalism itself, says Ford—if only extreme positions can be moderated.

In a review of two books, TAI colleague Aaron Sibarium says Polish Catholic conservative Ryszard Legutko and Rutgers black feminist Brittney Cooper ought to read each other. There are parallels in rage, Sibarium suggests—and troubling implications, as the fringe enters the mainstream. Strange bedfellows, these. The geometric absurdity of expressionism comes to mind.

For perspective, TAI associate editor Sean Keeley traveled to Dresden recently to explore the Saxon art scene, and found this part of Mitteleuropa relitigating its past, battling culture wars of its own. Again.

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September/October 2019 issue

In 1933, George Grosz left Germany for the United States, where he eventually made his home as a naturalized citizen in Bayside, New York, a part of Queens. He drew for The New Yorker. He painted Cape Cod landscapes.

Grosz’s roots stayed with him. In his 1946 autobiography, A Little Yes and a Big No, he writes that “I feel . . . that I am heir to an old German tradition which always makes me see two sides—life and death—and has stopped me shouting blithely: Life! Life!” Even in nature or on vacation in America Grosz recounts “the asparagus-like stench” of a dead skunk on the road, food gone mysteriously bad, bloated horseflies.

In May 1959, the 65-year-old Grosz moved back to a Germany divided, this time torn between communist east and democratic west. It was in West Berlin in July that summer, after a night of hard drinking and a spill down the stairs, that Grosz met death.

Perhaps history (and art) can get us to ease, and sober, up.

* * *

A Special Invitation…

[image error]The American Interest invites you to visit the Eclipse of the Sun exhibit at Neue Galerie in New York City, open until September 2, 2019.

We’d like to offer the readers who subscribe to the print edition before September 2:

25% off your subscription to The American Interest, which includes digital access. Click below and your discount will be automatically applied.
Exclusives invitations to all TAI fall events, including TAI Debates, a film series co-hosted with Stanford in Washington, and our Salon Discussion series, and more!
The first five readers to subscribe before August 23 will also receive two complimentary tickets to the Eclipse of the Sun exhibit at Neue Galerie.

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The post Can a 1920s Painting Help Us Today? appeared first on The American Interest.

The Elite Blind Spots on Immigration

Nextdoor is a remarkably successful social media platform that enables neighborhood communities to converse, plan, and exchange views (and stuff) online. I heard Sarah Frier, Nextdoor’s chief executive officer, talk about the site’s social-capital boosting potential at an Aspen Institute “weave” program back in March, and doubtless she is correct. But like any such site, Nextdoor inevitably absorbs and radiates human social nature, some of which is gloriously benign, and some of which isn’t. So at a certain point, for example, concerns arose that Nextdoor was being used in some communities for the purpose of racial profiling, mainly concerning real estate “issues.” Local law enforcement personnel, too, quickly saw Nextdoor as a potentially useful way to engage with local residents, but that only stigmatized Nextdoor in the eyes of some as a tool of the local “police state.”

What do neighbors “talk” about on Nextdoor? Everything, it seems, and that includes local politics. (Tip O’Neill is smiling from his heavenly abode no doubt, because his famous aphorism, “all politics is local,” has yet again been proven right.) But these days talking about politics typically runs into the same misanthropies that our partisan-drenched polarized circumstances naturally produce. Nextdoor tends to be employed more in upscale communities than in poorer ones, and the ambient fear that stalks the land, sometimes tinged with class and race paranoia, often oozes through. That makes Nextdoor, whatever else it’s good for, a rich source material for those trying to get a handle on what’s really going on in American society at the ground level.

Case in point: In Montgomery County, Maryland, where I live, a local politician named Hans Reimer—a transplant from Oakland, California—introduced in January a resolution that would loosen the requirements for building additional dwelling units, or ADUs, on or next to existing private housing stock. When Reimer’s proposal became known, it touched off a firestorm of conversation, mostly opposition, on local Nextdoor sites. The relatively few people who have supported the idea argued that property owners ought to be able to do whatever they want with their property, so long as they do it within reasonable zoning rules. Some argued that it was great that homeowners could build apartments for elderly parents or in-laws. Some argued, too, that more ADUs would increase the stock of affordable housing.

The majority of those who opposed the proposal have referred to it as a formula for the further densification of the county. Many have argued that allowing more ADUs would add to street and parking congestion, would increase noise and litter, and lead to more crime—and so would set off a decline in property values, and hence lowering the tax base to fund schools just as they begin to become overcrowded as a result of densification. Many have argued that densification is also a safety issue; for example, illegal parking that blocks fire hydrants and obscures vision for pedestrians and drivers alike is rarely penalized.

Several commentators have also noted that, for the most part, poorer sections of Montgomery County, already struggling with a range of social problems, would be most affected by a change in the law. And several others demanded to know what the county intended to do about all the illegal ADUs that would potentially be grandfathered into the new law—which doesn’t mention these illegal units at all. Nearly all opponents were astonished that the county had undertaken no impact studies of what the new law would produce, and the County Council had run the proposal by the Planning, Housing, and Economic Development Committee for review and recommendation.

A few interesting side conversations spun off from the main one. One Nextdoor participant chided an opponent of the proposed new law, saying that she should have bought her house in a neighborhood with a homeowner association (HOA). The opponent responded that she had bought her house before HOAs existed and now lacked the resources to move into one. The chider had an Hispanic surname, and the opponent did not—hold those facts in mind for a moment, please.

A few were bold enough to raise what is really the core issue that dare not speak its name: the existence of large numbers of undeclared and illegal ADUs in the county, some built on owner-occupied properties as required by law, but most the result of unscrupulous landlords trying to maximize their rent intake mainly at the expense of new immigrants. Quite aside from proliferating group houses of immigrants in violation of county ordinances, where individuals falsely claim to be cousins or otherwise related if asked (which they very rarely are), the proliferation of illegal, undeclared, and unregistered ADUs has dramatically changed the character of many county neighborhoods over the past few decades, and it has introduced its own safety issues—for example, illegal utility hookups that risk fires and other hazards.

The county has way too few inspectors to have kept up with the changes, and a large number of old-time residents have either moved away or, as illustrated by the Nextdoor chatter, are mad as hell. Several Nextdoor chatterati note that reporting ADU violations to the county rarely elicits any response, aside from hostility between neighbors if the identity of the complainant is discovered.

Most of the people who express themselves on Nextdoor are far too polite and decent to actually name the problem for what it is. But everyone knows what it is, so the conversation proceeds using coded language. The problem is the rapid proliferation of immigrant communities, mostly Hispanic but also Asian and African, and particularly in the case of Hispanic migrants a fairly large but unknown percentage who live in certain parts of the county without legal residency rights. The neighborhoods in which such people are concentrated tend to be poorer, and it’s easy to tell them by the litter on the ground and kinds of vehicles parked on the street. Aside from being numerous, the vehicles are often banged up panel trucks and other work-related rigs, some of them seemingly permanently parked on the street, in driveways, and up on the grass (which is also not legal).

Most opponents of the Montgomery County resolution on ADUs are not anti-Hispanic, and many cherish diversity. But a resident can be outraged about the safety issues all the same, and even more outraged by the de facto double standards that apply. Montgomery County police have been told, in effect, to apply one legal standard to Bethesda, Chevy Chase, and Silver Spring’s nicer areas, and another to Wheaton, Connecticut Avenue Estates, and Aspen Hill, where there are far larger percentages of Hispanics—legal and otherwise. So you can drive your work vehicle home and park it on the street in Aspen Hill, but not in Bethesda. You can crowd into a group house and leave garbage for rats to feed on in Wheaton and no county official will bother you, but that doesn’t happen in Chevy Chase. Neighborhoods are penned in for safety reasons near major thoroughfares by hideous high metal fences and cables in Wheaton, but not in most of Silver Spring.

Why would people in Wheaton, Connecticut Avenue Estates, and Aspen Hill not feel like second-class citizens when they are treated differently by officialdom from other neighborhoods in the same county? James Q. Wilson’s “broken windows” insight applies in spades: The more problematic neighborhoods get worse, and the less problematic ones don’t. So in due course the quality-of-living gap widens—within the same county.

Time for a few numbers: About 33 percent of registered and known Montgomery County residents are foreign-born, and nearly 41 percent speak a language other than English as their native tongue. That compares to about 14-15 percent foreign-born for Maryland as a whole and for the United States. If we include reasonable estimates for undocumented Hispanics, which actually includes significant numbers of indigenous Central American immigrants whose first language is not Spanish, Montgomery County’s percentage of foreign born is probably not double but three times or more the state and national average. And in the neighborhoods already noted above, they are near or beyond the majority.

In my experience, in what is a middle-class Wheaton neighborhood as measured by average real estate prices, our Hispanic (or Latino, pick your adjective) residents are mostly very good neighbors. They work hard and long at their trades, take care of their kids, pets, and properties, and are as responsible and friendly as anyone else. The percentage who rent rather than own their own homes is somewhat higher, and sometimes the houses are occupied, for a time at least, by more than one family. But it’s not much strain on the prior status quo.

In the county’s poorer neighborhoods, however—where the majority of new ADUs will almost certainly be built—the percentage of rentals is much higher, residential densities are much greater, and aesthetic conditions leave a lot to be desired. Worse, according to court statistics young Hispanic males from the poorer neighborhoods where they are most concentrated are involved in significantly disproportional incidents of breaking various laws and getting arrested. Some of that—drug-related and violent incidents, in particular—is gang related, but most of it isn’t. A fair bit of it, anecdotally at least, seems to flow from the fact that no one has told these folks that the age of consent is 18 in the state of Maryland. (Let’s please just leave it at that; it’s anthropologically complicated).

And finally on this point, there are more cases of identity theft and attempted identity theft in the county in rough proportion to the higher percentage of foreign-born residents. That is because those lacking legal residency rights tend to live with relatives or friends who are legal residents, and no one needs to borrow or steal a legal identity more than someone who doesn’t have one. Probably most identity theft victims in the area are citizens or green card holders with Hispanic surnames, for obvious reasons. But not all.

As a nation of immigrants, we should have learned by now that immigrants and first-generation Americans raised by immigrants require time to adapt to the norms of their communities and the broader society. Recently arrived (or born) Hispanics in Montgomery County are not the first group of people in American history to start out relatively poor by American standards, to crowd the dwellings they live in, and to exhibit cultural traits that differ from those of long-time residents and that sometimes rub them the wrong way.

That does not make recent immigrants any more immune to upward mobility than previous ones were. And it does not make all or even most long-time residents who experience problems during the adaptation period racists or bigots. As I wrote in November 2016:

Being able to count on certain reciprocal standards of ordinary behavior . . . has wider cognitive/psychic implications than one might think. . . . Public displays of emotion-driven behavior, behavior seen to be sexually unseemly or threatening, and behavior that subconsciously suggests a subversion of social orderliness, are not mere. Over time all of this adds up for many people . . . to a serious source of anxiety.

But while it doesn’t make them bigots, it may predispose many of them to become political reactionaries. To continue from my November 2016 piece: “This is partly why a lot of people actually believed Trump’s wild and irresponsible exaggerations about hordes of murderous Mexican immigrants roaming north of the Rio Grande.”

Now read the extract below—nasty as it is, sorry to the faint of soul among you—and see if you can fill in the proper nouns I have redacted:

The sense of this quality was already strong in my drive . . . from a comparatively conventional neighborhood; it was the sense of a great swarming . . . that had begun to thicken, infinitely, as soon as we had crossed to the **** side and long before we had got to **** Street. There is no swarming like that of **** when once **** has got a start. . . . The children swarmed above . . . and the very old persons being in equal vague occupation of the doorstep, pavement, curbstone, gutter, roadway, and every one alike using the street for overflow. . . . There are small strange animals, known to natural history, snakes or worms, I believe, who, when cut into pieces, wriggle away contentedly and live in the snippet as completely as in the whole. So the denizens of ****. . . . [and] . . . the appearance to which they often most conduce is that of the spaciously organized cage for the nimbler class of animals in some great zoological garden. . . . [I]n each district, a little world of bars and perches and swings for human squirrels and monkeys. The very name of architecture perishes, for the fire-escapes look like abashed afterthoughts, staircases and communications forgotten in the construction; but the inhabitants lead, like the squirrels and monkeys, all the merrier life.

As some readers will know, this is not a contemporary Montgomery County resident ranting about Hispanic interlopers on Nextdoor. It’s from Henry James’s 1907 book The American Scene, and he’s writing about Jews in the Lower East Side. But were its language adjusted to sound more 21st century-ish and made to suit detached suburban housing rather than multi-story city tenement buildings, it could have been taken from Nextdoor, if the material from there were not couched in the aforementioned coded language. Just because people are more verbally guarded today than the logorrheic Henry James was in 1907 doesn’t mean that the better angels of their natures haven’t taken a long hike.

Most tragic are the many decent residents who are not at all anti-Hispanic bigots, but who know that the county’s de facto welcoming attitude toward illegal immigration has harmed them. The crowding that produces the safety issues, the second-class treatment of some neighborhoods, the crashing property values and the deteriorating schools have been caused overwhelmingly by relatively rapid and large-scale immigration—again, legal and otherwise—over the past several decades. There’s no way around the facts, and another fact is that not a single member of the Montgomery County Council lives in the aforementioned most-affected neighborhood. Saintly are those wise enough to blame county politicians and not the immigrants for the messes their neighborhoods have become. But those saints are still shit out of luck: On July 23 the ADU resolution passed the Montgomery County Council unanimously.

What does all this mean? Well, Montgomery County, Maryland, may be more of a poster child for immigration-fueled angst than most counties in the United States because of the numbers noted above, but it’s hardly alone. The same arguments and angers course though much of the country. Zoning and other residency regulations are relentlessly political, and these are the local politics that most Americans know and feel most strongly about, along with those having to do with education and the courts.

As the sentiments related above suggest, there is nothing simple about any of this. Reasoning is perforce complex, feelings are nuanced, and people are torn most of the time. Even people who disagree with the county’s lax attitude toward illegal immigration feel terrible when they hear about women being raped in group houses but not reporting it for fear of deportation. This is politics as real life, and real life as politics. Like real life, it is all very granular.

Yet the mainstream media are reliably oblivious to all of this, and to its cumulative political implications. Is it any wonder that for-profit polling businesses that orient themselves to and around the media have gotten so much wrong in recent years? Tens of thousands of micro-political engagements like that of the controversy over the ADU resolution add up to a powerful undercurrent of national politics. But the privileged elites of America’s political classes, which include mainstream media elites, are spared such concerns, making these undercurrents all but invisible to them. Opponents of the ADU resolution made a good faith effort to get the Washington Post, Fox 5, and other local media affiliates to cover the story—and failed. And the fact that so many local newspapers have lately gone out of business as the tech giants continue to strip-mine journalism doesn’t make it any easier to discern the granularities of such trends. Maybe would-be serious journalists should spend more time monitoring Nextdoor conversations.

Immigration angst isn’t the only politically salient subject that doesn’t get covered. Note how many years it took for the opioid crisis to become front-page news. And right now we have a still mostly unrecognized crisis on dairy farms throughout the country.

If you live in rural Wisconsin or in western New York State, you know what I’m referring to, but if you’re a typical resident of a bicoastal urban area, you very likely don’t. The Federal government, through the Department of Agriculture, in line with the latest farm bill, has set the price of milk too low for a situation in which Trumpian tariffs have undermined cheese exports to Mexico and elsewhere, and undocumented laborers are too scared to show up for work. A lot of small and mid-scale family dairy farmers have come under pressure to sell out cheap to agribusiness conglomerates, which is not a good thing for a whole host of reasons. Alas, the rural/urban divide has many dimensions, and the urban-based mainstream media seem unable to report usefully on any of them. Maybe when the price of dairy products goes way up and their quality goes way down the media will notice. And maybe not.

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Closing Today’s Illicit Finance Loopholes

The United States has developed a reputation as the country with the toughest anti-money laundering regime and the most aggressive policies to combat illicit finance in the world. Large fines against banks act as a deterrent and spur investments in compliance. Strong criminal law enforcement efforts result in investigation and prosecution of money launderers. Americans would need to look back a decade to the exploitation of HSBC’s U.S. and Mexico operations by drug cartels, or even earlier to the infiltration of the Bank of New York by Russian money launderers in the 1990s, to identify a truly massive money laundering scandal.  The strict treatment of banks in violation of anti-money laundering policies has established deterrence and keeps everyone invested in a culture of compliance.

But this narrative is incomplete. If the banks are the well-guarded front door to the U.S. financial system, electronic payments companies, private investment funds, and, to a lesser extent, securities firms are the back door left open—and the opening grows wider as these business models grow in importance. Electronic payments companies, while still relatively small, seem likely to dominate e-commerce and potentially all payments one day, as Facebook’s announcement of Libra coin may presage. Hedge funds, private equity, and venture capital have gone from a niche segment to a colossus. And securities firms, while long-established players, continue to be subject to less vigilant oversight than deposit-taking banks. This back door is a tempting entry point for illicit actors such as organized criminals, corrupt officials, or foreign governments attempting to interfere in the American political process.

Electronic payments companies, whether using dollars or virtual currencies, will only continue to grow in importance in coming years. Facebook’s proposed Libra coin may or may not take off, but the trend is unmistakable. As the Treasury Department has made clear, these companies have money laundering obligations. The problem is that such firms are classified as “money transmitters,” and instead of being subjected to oversight by one federal supervisor, they are primarily licensed and overseen by regulators in all 50 states—creating both legal confusion and limitations on the government’s visibility.

Meanwhile, U.S. hedge funds, venture capital, and private equity firms manage a collective $13 trillion but remain exempt from money laundering requirements. The European Union closed this loophole over a decade ago. Congress called for Treasury to establish money laundering requirements for these funds in 2001, and Treasury proposed a rule to do just that in 2015. Yet the rule has yet to be finalized. In the meantime, these private funds have no obligation to check the sources of their clients’ money or even determine who the clients are. And when private funds are customers of a bank, they are carved out of Treasury’s rule requiring banks and securities firms to identify the underlying owners of an entity that opens a new account.

When it comes to securities firms, which are far more established players, take a look at recent enforcement actions against the American operations of three major securities institutions: UBS, Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch. UBS moved $83 billion through non-resident accounts over two years without properly screening the transactions, including $9 billion involving high-risk jurisdictions. Morgan Stanley failed to properly monitor $55 billion in transactions over five years, including $3 billion involving high-risk jurisdictions. And Merrill Lynch for many years did not apply software screening at all to certain types of accounts. In a three-year period, this resulted in over $100 billion in transactions going unmonitored.

For these infractions, UBS, Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch were fined between $10 and $26 million by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (an industry body known as a self-regulatory organization). Compare this with U.S. Bank, a traditional depository institution, which was fined over $600 million by bank regulators and the Justice Department for similar lapses.

Capitol Hill’s illicit finance focus has rightly been on banning anonymous companies. The ability to form a company anonymously, without reporting its owners to the government, is indeed the most glaring problem the U.S. faces—in stark contrast with nearly every other major economy—and one amenable to a straightforward solution, as bipartisan bills in both the House and Senate attest. But policymakers would be mistaken to assume that ending anonymous companies solves America’s illicit finance problem. 

While strong supervision and enforcement have set an impressive standard for the banks, leaving the rest of the financial system comparatively unguarded could prove to have grave consequences. We do not want to go through what Europe has been dealing with in recent years, namely an outbreak of multi-billion dollar money laundering scandals across the continent, frequently involving money originating in Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States. The challenge for the United States is to raise money laundering enforcement and compliance across the financial system to the high bar set by the banks and their regulators. 

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The Quintessence of Trumpism

The scene was recorded and disseminated by the White House press office. Of many accounts, Roger Cohen’s in the New York Times is the most arresting. We are in the Oval Office on July 17. In a carefully staged communications operation presumably intended to illustrate the humanity of the 45th president of the United States, Trump is receiving survivors of contemporary religious persecutions. Among them is young Nadia Murad, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and symbol of the suffering of the Yezidi people of Iraq, who were one of the Islamic State’s targets during its caliphate. 

“What’s this Yezidi business”, the President seems to be wondering in the strange images we see of him seated at his desk, pouting disdainfully, his face a mask of torpid boredom, as he struggles to listen to the young woman standing with other survivors around him. Sensing the need for a bluff, he assumes the tone of a promoter describing the site of an upcoming real estate operation: “I know the area very well,” he boasts, once it dawns on him that the area in question was the theater of one of the rare massacres for which the United Nations reserves the terrible label of genocide.

Plainly losing patience and fighting to pay attention as the young woman, on the verge of tears, evokes the memory of her mother and six brothers who were exterminated by ISIS before being pushed with tens of thousands of others into one of the mass graves that mark the area that he says he knows so well, he asks, “Where are they now?” “And they gave [the Nobel Prize] to you for what reason?” he interrupts a moment later, seeming doubtful, almost suspicious, but, for the first time, mildly interested. Are you telling me that they gave you the Nobel Prize for that, he seems to be saying, as she tries to explain that her mission has been to travel Europe and now the United States to raise awareness of this unpunished slaughter.

And when the young woman then undertakes to recount her experience as a sex slave who fled Mosul to bear witness to the ongoing ordeal of her people, he poses this last question in which one detects at once bewildered incomprehension, childish spite, and the same strain of stubborn scorn with which he reproached John McCain for having been “captured” and then trying to pass as a hero: “So you escaped?” They gave you the Nobel Peace Prize because you escaped, is that it? At which point, looking disgusted, he makes a gesture with his hand that seems to say, “Next!” And that is where the clip ends. 

Having seen it, it scarcely matters whether one is pro- or anti-Trump.

One can argue endlessly about the pros and cons of the deal of the century in the Middle East, about the diplomacy of taking the first step in North Korea, or about whether history will prove the Europeans or the Americans right in Iran. One can tout the advantages or the disadvantages of a weak dollar, of the Federal Reserve’s lowering of the interest rate, or of Trump’s attacks on the liberal economy. 

That clip is worth a thousand words.

It preempts discussions of how and why the world’s greatest democracy came to elect this person. In a few seconds, it reveals the truth about a man, his reflexes, and his deepest thoughts. It is a confession, conclusive evidence, a surprise look at the DNA of the most powerful head of state on the planet, one whose character has been laid bare by slips of the tongue. 

And like Lenin’s too-resounding voice in Nabokov’s telling; like Malaparte’s dictators, whose evil minds are most clearly revealed in their posturing and their ticks; like with Putin posing in the icy waters of Seliger Lake north of Moscow; like the images of Qaddafi as medal-bedecked assassin or the grotesque uniforms of Idi Amin in Barbet Schroeder’s film—like all the other clichés in which the bully seems all the more fearsome in a clown suit, the moment captured in this clip suddenly says more than the thousand pages of the Mueller report. 

Trump, however much he pines for the America First of the 1930s, is neither a fascist nor a dictator, strictly speaking. Even if he were tempted to become one, there would remain in American society, and even in his entourage and his party, enough antibodies to dissuade him from acting on that temptation. 

For what it is worth, I disagree with Nadia Murad’s implication, expressed on this and other occasions, that the Kurds bear equal responsibility with other Iraqi groups for the Yezidis’ plight. Still, in this scene—where the grotesque vies with the indecent, the pathetic with the terrifying, and situation comedy with the ghastly sense of witnessing a misunderstanding of potentially tragic consequence—we are exposed to a face that resembles no other and that is utterly chilling. The blend of vanity, stupidity, and indifference to others, the air of the big baby, the deep and defiant ignorance accompanied by what appears to be pathological inhumanity—that, perhaps, is the essence of Trumpism.

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Xi’s Hong Kong Options—and Ours

On August 5, a day of unprecedented strikes and demonstrations, thousands of mostly young Hong Kongers gathered around the offices of the Legislative Council, near Admiralty station on Hong Kong Island. The event, constituting the main body of protestors in Hong Kong on that day, looked nothing like the images of violent clashes one typically finds in international media reports, or in the derisive characterizations made by rulers in Hong Kong and Beijing.

Virtually all the protestors surrounding the Legislative Council wore black T-shirts as an expression of their unity of purpose. Finding places to sit on the ground, they chatted and laughed quietly together, as if on a holiday excursion. They were not there as representatives of a single political or ideological group. Rather, they were there for each other, and for their community, standing up for its spirit and ethos—for the very idea of Hong Kong. For every aggressive protestor one sees on television, pelting police stations with rocks and enduring tear gas and rubber bullets from security forces, there are thousands of peaceful residents of Hong Kong, eager to show their determination to hold on to their most cherished political values in the face of the incremental subordination of their home to the Chinese Communist Party. They belong to a movement that is largely without hierarchical structures, and they do not idolize or defer to leaders. With no clear representation, the amorphous, inclusive mass of protesting citizens can’t negotiate, make demands, or compromise; nor have they been deterred by arrest or the threat of ten-year prison terms for “rioting.” They are the most resilient kind of political movement: a broad, diverse movement animated by deeply shared bonds and common values.

What are those values? Hong Kongers cherish above all the Rule of Law and the basic human rights and freedoms that are the legacy of British common law under colonial rule. What they want more than anything, according to Professor Joseph Cheng, a veteran pro-democracy activist, “is to be left alone.” Hong Kong society is utilitarian and practical in orientation. In recent years, living standards have diminished; housing prices are astronomical, and wages are low and stagnant. One can assume that most of the young people who sat peacefully together on Monday live in cramped quarters with their parents. Nevertheless, they are clearly unmoved by Beijing-backed Chief Executive Carrie Lam’s efforts to divert their attention with dubious promises of improved economic circumstances in return for submission to Beijing’s will. Instead, the dominant sentiment expressed by the demonstrators against Lam is that she “betrayed” Hong Kong—that she sold Hong Kong down the river.

That morning, at her news conference, Lam budged not an inch on any of the demands and concerns the demonstrators have raised—not even on modest steps like an independent investigation into police violence, or the complete withdrawal, rather than suspension, of the extradition bill that sparked the protest movement. Pro-democracy leader Nathan Law, strolling among the assembled young Hong Kongers, dismissed Lam’s remarks as nothing but “the same denials and threats.” She spoke about preserving “order,” but the loss of order is precisely what the people of Hong Kong are protesting about. Order means confidence in the result of one’s actions, and in the reliability of civic institutions. The Rule of Law produces predictable outcomes based on processes governed by transparent principles. By contrast, the mainland legal system is designed to instill fear, not confidence; obedience, not consensus. Politicized and corrupt, its outcomes are arbitrary, aimed at preserving not justice but power. This is the disorder that threatens Hong Kong.

Observing the intense solidarity among the demonstrators on Monday, one of us (Aaron Rhodes) found it easy to understand why emigration is not a popular option. Hong Kongers want to stay together. We have heard directly from activists in Hong Kong, and it has been reported by news media, that some young protesters are so determined that they have written their wills and are prepared to die “for the movement.” With the shelving of the extradition bill, they have tasted a partial victory, and they are ready to go all the way to avoid coming under the yoke of Chinese Communist Party dictatorship.

But on August 5 and 6, both Lam and mainland authorities reinforced their intransigence, closing the door on any possibility of even acknowledging the legitimacy of the people’s concerns. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Hong Kong Garrison released a promotional video depicting security forces opening fire on civilians. The threats have had no impact. A local journalist told us that, despite holding a passport from a Western country, she would never leave Hong Kong. “We will fight until the end.”

Hong Kong’s struggle for a future in freedom has clearly entered a new phase, one where both restraint and resolve are crucial. The protests will continue, and tensions will escalate despite the looming specter of police and military violence.

The movement, too, is merging with growing labor unrest. Cracks are emerging in Hong Kong’s civil service. Upward of 1,000 state employees took part in a demonstration on August 2 after the South China Morning Post reported that more than 600 civil servants from 44 departments had filed a petition protesting the government’s handling of the protests and its unwillingness to establish an independent commission to investigate police responses. Civil servants have threatened to escalate their protest action to work stoppages and strikes by mid-August if the government fails to address their concerns. These grievances not only highlight the divisions within Hong Kong’s government but also threaten to disrupt government services. And depending on the severity of those disruptions, such a development could compel a response from Beijing. The more pillars of Hong Kong’s establishment fall, the more likely that scenario becomes.

Increasing violence will alienate the general population, yet no one can control the most aggressive members of the movement, given that it has no articulated strategy and no means for implementing one. Nevertheless, its millions of supporters share a philosophical approach toward conflict, one that finds expression in an aphorism attributed to martial arts legend Bruce Lee, an iconic figure in Hong Kong. The protests will “be like water finding its way through cracks.” They will not be assertive, but they will find a way, perhaps even flowing into Beijing’s own leadership fissures.

Challenging Xi’s “Kingship”

A major factor driving the massive protests in early June was the fact that the extradition bill would have subjected not just Hong Kongers but also mainland elites living in the province to a judicial system that is openly subordinate to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Both groups had good reason to fear and loathe the legislation. Indeed, the mainland elites would have the most to lose; they have obtained residency in Hong Kong largely for protection from this potential threat. As such, Carrie Lam’s abortive initiative met resistance from just about every quarter of society: ordinary Hong Kongers, members of the Hong Kong establishment, and members of the mainland elite in Hong Kong—none of whom trust the CCP’s politicized and corrupt judiciary.

With the extradition bill now being for all practical purposes dead, and with the protests moving on to other goals, a new dynamic is now at play. The top elite in Hong Kong, no longer seeing continued protests as necessarily consistent with their own interests, are taking a wait-and-see approach, while those in Beijing have made their own calculations.

Wu Qian, spokesman for China’s Defense Ministry, stated clearly in the last week of July that the PLA could legally intervene to help Hong Kong “maintain social order” if requested to do so by the territory’s government. The statement was a transparent effort to frighten protestors into backing down, and to soften their support abroad. The PLA’s counterterrorism drills in Zhenjiang, Guangdong province, which began on July 23, may have been intended as a display of readiness on the part of mainland forces to intervene in Hong Kong.

At the same time, an alternative to political coercion and military repression has emerged out of Beijing, one with broad implications for our assessment of the stability of the vertically oriented, autocratic Xi regime. On July 29, soon after Wu Qian’s threats, the civilian State Council held a press conference on the Hong Kong issue that laid out five principles: resolute support for Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam; a stand against violence and support for Hong Kong police; a call to Hong Kongers to put the disputes behind them and focus on quality of life and economic development; support for the “One Country, Two Systems” principle; and condemnation of foreign interference.

These principles differ from the PLA’s message in important ways. The State Council offered no hints of a takeover of Hong Kong, by either peaceful or violent means, and in fact avoided any talk of violent crackdowns or forceful intervention by Beijing. It is highly likely that this policy is in fact one forged by Premier Li Keqiang, and one that may potentially clash with that of Xi Jinping. Exiled political scientist Professor Yan Jiaqi believes that Li Keqiang, knowing and even wishing that the Hong Kong unrest will eventually bring Xi down, is “striking first to gain the initiative,” preempting a later possible showdown with Xi Jinping on Hong Kong.

It is to be expected that Xi Jinping’s aspirations for absolute rule would not be met with universal acquiescence. In recent years, Xi has tried to refashion China’s politics such that all questions are to be resolved by a single authority (定于一尊), that is, himself, and to make himself a “king,” as President Trump called him once, to Xi’s delight.

To that end, he has purged some of his comrades and over time coerced others, dictating that there can be “no discussing the central committee’s policies in an open manner” (不许妄议中央), thus ensuring that he retains all political initiative. Xi cannot abide by any opposition from within the Party. The result has been the predictable instability of vertical power: Prohibiting open opposition means that anyone, in the final analysis, could be his enemy. To be sure, there is no viable opposition; Xi would do anything to prevent such an opposition from coalescing. But while he has taken control of everything, he alone now owns everything. Problems such as China’s economic downturn, the ongoing trade wars with the United States, a looming financial crisis, and the inefficiency of the Belt and Road Initiatives now all fall on his shoulders. This may encourage his foes to rally around common opportunities. The more difficult and seemingly obdurate the Hong Kong protests become, the more likely they are to become the issue that unites the anti-Xi forces.

Of course no one can say that this will definitely happen, but logic and the reality of Beijing politics strongly suggest that, sooner or later, such a unifying crisis will emerge. Xi himself presumably understands just as well as those who would like to see him ousted. Premier Li is hardly the only actor hoping the crisis in Hong Kong will spell doom for Xi. It is plausible that some might want to entice him to send troops to Hong Kong and even conduct another Tiananmen-style massacre there, a moral and political trap. In any event, the Hong Kong movement has been the first open political setback for Xi Jinping, and it will have far-reaching political reverberations. Although Xi Jinping has so far distanced himself from the Hong Kong situation, the results of the protests will ultimately be laid at his feet; his legacy, what he values above all else, is at stake.

Xi’s Hong Kong Options

October 1, 2019, the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic, is a critical event for Xi Jinping. Will it find China coasting forward on a wave of successes, or mired in conflict and disorder? The next two years will be decisive for Xi’s political future and his aspirations to name himself, in effect, President for Life. He will likely need to face down challengers on multiple fronts. Xi cannot afford for Hong Kong to become an issue around which opposition against him can coalesce. His watchful eyes will focus not only on the Hong Kong democrats but, more importantly, the Hong Kong elite and the outreach that his “comrades” in Beijing have extended in Hong Kong.

Given the persistence of the Hong Kong challenge and its failure to dissipate in the face of Carrie Lam’s rigid policy of denial and increasingly brutal police tactics, we can infer that Xi is desperate. There are no viable scenarios for the outcome of the protests and the emergence of a new political equilibrium in Hong Kong that bode well for Xi.

Attempts to peacefully assuage the concerns of the people of Hong Kong would hand them moral victories and embolden them to press for more political rights. It would perhaps also encourage people on mainland China to follow suit. On the international level, Hong Kong could easily become the front line of the “new cold war” between the free world and China, and could erode Xi’s carefully crafted image as a successful autocrat among his supplicants around the world. Inspiring intrigues from many sides, it is hardly a situation supportive of his quest for life-long rule in China and for leadership of the new world order to come after the “liberal” world order crumbles.

A second option, the imposition of long-term, non-lethal coercion—one form of “peaceful ending” to the crisis—could postpone bloodshed by suffocating Hong Kong. But under such circumstances violence could erupt at any time, denying Communist China the ability to claim that it is the guarantor of rational stability. Hong Kong would continue to plague Beijing’s internal politics. It would be a powder keg, the focus of endless speculation and intrigue, and thus a symbol of the failure of Xi’s power.

A third option is brutal military suppression, but this would inevitably be a public relations catastrophe for Xi, leaving him isolated internationally and unable to proclaim a new, China-led global order. Xi could perhaps adopt the vaunted “long view” of history and decide to ride out the horrified international reactions that would follow a crackdown, but given crucial approaching domestic political tests, his focus will likely remain more short-term. And all signs point to the growth of an apocalyptic mindset among the people of Hong Kong that would be resistant to even the most brutal military suppression.

Facing these bleak alternatives, and the prospect that his domestic foes would use them to forge coalitions to attack him, what are Xi’s strategic options?

First, Xi could allow the protests but continue to orchestrate, with the cooperation of thugs in Hong Kong, violent clashes aimed at peeling away popular support for the protesters, who would suffer from fatigue and frustration. Many protestors would be incarcerated, and others would stay home for fear of a similar fate. Over time, the protests would die down by themselves, as they did during the Umbrella Movement in 2014. This is the best-case scenario for Beijing.

If the movement does not die down, Beijing may try to radicalize it so that it will become increasingly violent. Indeed we have already seen this tactic in action: Hong Kong police have encouraged violence, either by ignoring threats (when they allowed demonstrators to trash the Legislative Council offices), or by instrumentalizing criminal thugs to commit violent provocations. Intensely orchestrated violent incidents would plunge Hong Kong into such chaos that Beijing could declare it to be in a state of emergency and “ineffective governance” (a term recently coined by the Director of the Liaison Office of the Central People’s Government in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region). This would give Beijing grounds to enact Articles 14 and 18 of the Hong Kong Basic Law: The Hong Kong Garrison would help keep order, and Beijing would promulgate temporary laws to restrict freedoms of press and assembly.

If it deems terror tactics insufficient to halt the advances made by Hong Kongers, the Chinese state will declare a state of emergency and send in armed police to violently crack down on the protesters and “liberate” Hong Kong. This option would be a last resort for Beijing, but it is nonetheless a viable one. There have been several signs that Beijing is preparing for this scenario. About 160,000 members of the police forces staged a large exercise in Guangdong province on July 30. The exercises were reportedly part of summer training in preparation for events surrounding the 70th anniversary of the founding. Heavy equipment such as armored vehicles and helicopters have been observed participating in the exercises. Chinese police forces do not often stage exercises of this size. Their location and scale suggest that they could be linked to the worsening security situation in Hong Kong. The police exercises, coupled with PLA counterterrorism drills in Zhenjiang, Guangdong province, as mentioned above, could be intended as a display of readiness on the part of mainland forces to intervene in Hong Kong.

If either of the last two of these strategies were deployed in order to keep a lid on unrest for the 70th anniversary celebrations on October 1, Beijing would need to undertake huge efforts to restore the economy of Hong Kong, much as they did following the Tiananmen Square massacre.

A violent crackdown by the PLA would be the most dangerous option of all for Xi, both domestically and internationally. Some opponents may egg him on toward this folly in order to topple him, manipulating his vanity. But by and large, few major leaders want to be associated with “massacres.” Among the two generations of retired leaders in China, last week only Jiang Zemin came to the funeral of Li Peng, the “Butcher of Beijing” who ordered the slaughter at Tiananmen. At a time when the entire world is asking whether Tiananmen will be repeated in Hong Kong, the absence of so many august figures at Li’s funeral shows, if not a moral rejection of state violence, a pragmatic one.

We believe an analogy with the events in Prague in 1968 is useful for understanding the hazards of violent suppression in Hong Kong. While the “one country, two systems” model is in fact rapidly moving toward one of “one country, one system,” Hong Kong today, as a “Special Administrative Region” (SAR) of China, has a governance model in which its leaders have more in common with the vassals of pre-revolution China than they do with the party officials who rule other parts of the country. Their sense of achievement, honor, and position in history is ultimately reckoned with in different terms, prompting them to assume a more paternalistic orientation toward Hong Kong citizens. Before the CCP took power, China’s politics were “feudal.” Governors of a province or a county were called “parent officers” and the people “subjects” and “children.” The primary responsibility of a parent officer was to take care of the interest of his subjects and children. Violence against one’s subjects on the part of central authorities was something to be opposed. If Xi sent troops to Hong Kong, Carrie Lam and her colleagues would react differently than did Chen Xitong, the Mayor of Beijing in 1989, when Deng Xiaoping sent tanks onto the Beijing streets .

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Photo from “CIA Analysis of the Warsaw Pact Forces: The Importance of Clandestine Reporting,” via Wikimedia Commons

This can be compared to the situation in 1968, when the Soviet Union sent tanks into Prague in response to the Prague Spring. Although they were unable to stop it, even the hardliners in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia did not wholeheartedly support the move. While the reforms initiated by Alexander Dubcek were repealed and he was expelled, as dictated by the Kremlin, an underlying movement for reform was in fact strengthened by the invasion. The moderate factions that had followed Dubcek’s lead were, at heart, Czech and Slovak nationalists who sought autonomy. Their disapproval of Soviet power tactics put them more on the side of the nascent Soviet dissidents. Subsequently, they adopted a more flexible stance regarding economic reform and dissident activity. This helped lay the foundation for the Velvet Revolution.

It is highly likely that Hong Kong’s rulers adhere to a paternalistic model of leadership that gives them a sense of responsibility for the welfare of their “subjects.” How would they react to the brutal imposition of Communist Party military rule in Hong Kong? The lack of a clear answer to this question raises the stakes for Xi.

Our Hong Kong Options

In this precarious moment, Hong Kongers should consolidate their gains by claiming victory and continuing to demonstrate for political freedoms and against Communist Party rule. But they must do everything in their power to prevent these protests from becoming violent, and to avoid playing into the hands of those seeking justification to enact Articles 14 and 18 of the Basic Law. They should participate in September’s upcoming elections for District Legislators, and in the March 2020 elections for the Legislative Council. Several visionary protestors have been calling on young people participating in the protests to register as new voters. The Hong Kong election authorities announced on August 1 that 385,985 have become new registered voters this year, a 47 percent increase from the 2015 election year.

Members of the protest movement must also expand their advocacy in international institutions, national governments, and civil society. They must make the point that their struggle will have consequences of the highest order, not only for the future of Hong Kong and China, but for democracy and human rights globally.

The U.S. government must push back against the hackneyed Communist Party claim that America is the force behind these homegrown protests for freedom, and it should also firmly defend the rights of Hong Kongers to freedom of expression and assembly on the basis of international standards and the principles of universal, individual political rights.

American leaders must join together in common cause against violent suppression of the protests by either Hong Kong or mainland security forces; at the same time they should firmly express opposition to violence by demonstrators. Chinese leaders who discourage state violence against Hong Kong protestors should be praised. Participation in upcoming elections should be encouraged. Hong Kong leaders working peacefully for freedom and democracy need to be embraced. Finally, if violent crackdowns occur, Congress needs to pass the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act and implement the Magnitsky Act to punish those responsible, in both Hong Kong and Beijing.

The evolving crisis in Hong Kong is one that will affect us all. As such, it is one that deserves our attention, our solidarity, and our concrete efforts to assist those seeking the same freedoms we enjoy.

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Anti-Trust in the Age of Facebook

In 1904, Rockefeller’s oil giant Standard Oil controlled 91 percent of oil production and 85 percent of final sales in the United States. Its domination allowed it to abuse competitors, workers, suppliers, consumers, and the public. Regulatory action was pursued for years but Rockefeller and his partners kept incorporating new entities in new state jurisdictions to frustrate regulators. Finally, by 1911, public outrage reached the boiling point and the U.S. Justice Department sued the group under federal anti-trust law and mighty Standard Oil was ordered to divide itself into 34 companies for sale to independent entities. The Supreme Court upheld the ruling against Standard “on the ground that it is a combination in unreasonable restraint of inter-State commerce.”

These regulations, the first in the world, represent America’s most profound economic innovation by outlawing any contract, scheme, deal, or conspiracy that restrained trade. Such reforms were not attacks on success per se, but only on those who prevented others from competing. Markets dominated by gigantic players are destructive, like hockey games without referees where the goons on the ice sideline smaller, more innovative players. Without anti-trust laws, the United States would likely have ended up with impoverished populations, moribund economies, and political systems owned by oligarchs.

But America’s anti-trust infrastructure is long overdue for a “refresh.” The country’s technology mega-giants have grown exponentially in little more than a decade, thanks to business models that are incomprehensible to most and often abusive, unethical, or illegal. As such, Silicon Valley’s biggest players have evolved into latter-day Robber Barons in hoodies.

Ironically, the Europeans have cracked down first. For instance, between 2005 and 2018 the five biggest (Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft) spent $582 million lobbying Congress. These efforts—plus untold billions earmarked for political donations to parties and PACs—have muted critics and kept rules at bay.

But in the European Union, Margrethe Vestager, a Danish politician, has been Commissioner for Competition Policy since 2014 and taken tough remedial action against a growing list of tech firms. To date, the Europeans have fined Apple $15 billion for egregious tax evasions; Google $9.3 billion for competitions violations; and Qualcomm $1.2 billion for predatory pricing and other market abuses. This year, Vestager is taking aim at Amazon. Vestager said e-commerce has boosted choice for consumers and reduced prices, but “we need to ensure that large online platforms don’t eliminate these benefits through anti-competitive behavior.”

European laws are also more punishing than their American counterparts. Amazon could face a potential fine of up to 10 percent of its annual global sales which, in Amazon’s case, could net a maximum penalty of $23 billion based on 2018 revenue. By contrast, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook $5 billion for ignoring privacy guidelines the company had agreed to uphold since 2011. The penalty was equivalent to Facebook’s profit for one month and like handing out a speeding ticket to a hit-and-run driver following years of dangerous driving.

Facebook’s misdeeds have been egregious and should have netted it a much larger fine. The company failed to protect user privacy; it sold millions of names to third parties such as Cambridge Analytica, now defunct for questionable election practices; Facebook sold political ads to Russian operatives in contravention of election laws; and it published and broadcasted arguably inciting content on its sites for millions to read or watch.

The scandal surrounding Facebook’s role in last year’s elections, taken alongside Europe’s own crackdowns, has resulted in probes by Congress, the Trade Commission, and the Department of Justice spinning up. And as election season gets going, candidates are finding that investigating the titans makes for good politics. “Today’s big tech companies have too much power—too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy,” Democratic presidential candidate and Senator Elizabeth Warren warned.“They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else. And in the process, they have hurt small businesses and stifled innovation.”

Warren in particular has made anti-trust a key part of her pitch to voters. She proposes to unwind mergers, designed to eliminate competition, such as Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods, Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp, and Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick, Nest, and Waze. Her reasoning is that these buyouts have created enormous and monopolistic platforms that also own their service providers, not unlike what AT&T did for decades, eventually owning all the local telephone companies it served, thus allowing it to price fix and drive out competitors. AT&T, of course, had its wings clipped famously in 1982, when it was forced to abandon its “Baby Bells” and focus solely on providing long-distance service.

This summer, no less a figure than Rupert Murdoch, the owner of the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, The Times of London, and Fox, weighed in. This summer, his News Corp. asked Australia’s Competition and Consumer Commission to force Google’s parent, Alphabet, to sell off its search business. The U.S. tech giant wields “overwhelming market power” as the “gateway to the Internet and advertising,” Murdoch’s submission read. “Google leverages its market power in both general search services and ad tech services to the detriment of consumers, advertisers and news publishers.”

The statistics against Big Tech clearly demonstrate inordinate concentration of market power overall and in certain segments. In the United States, Google nets 75 percent of all search revenues. 56 percent of mobile device sales, 24 percent of smart speaker sales, and 36 percent of all digital advertising. Amazon’s domination is also massive. Amazon says it only represents 1 percent of the $25 trillion global retail market, and less than 4 percent of retail in the U.S. However, its U.S. online market share is about 38 percent and growing. The next largest competitor is eBay, with only 6 percent.

Besides anti-trust issues, tax avoidance strategies must also be curtailed—notably Big Tech’s “jurisdiction shopping,” or the practice of establishing many “corporate headquarters” in low- or no-tax countries. The strategy enhances growth, making these companies larger than most nation-states, while depriving countries of tax revenue and making it difficult for smaller businesses without recourse to armies of tax attorneys to compete. France is the first to impose a “fair digital tax” of 3 percent on the global revenues of tech companies, and a European-wide revenue tax appears set to soon follow.

The White House is, of course, threatening retaliation against the Europeans’ move. But the validity of upholding the principles of competition is compelling and was best articulated by investigative journalist Ida Tarbell. Over many years, her father and brother—along with countless independent oil producers and businesses—were ruined by Standard Oil’s schemes to gain control of the entire industry. She became Rockefeller’s nemesis, and in her book All in a Day’sWork about Standard Oil, she observed simply that “they had never played fair, and that ruined their greatness for me.”

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The “Deep State” Debate We Deserve (and Probably Won’t Get)

When candidate Donald Trump vowed to wage war on official Washington, his expected targets were EPA scientists, Civil Rights Division attorneys, and career diplomats. There were few signs that Trump, a devotee of waterboarding, watch lists, and surveilling mosques, would also declare war on the U.S. intelligence community (IC)—that is, until he decided the IC had declared war on him with its findings that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.

After the Department of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) warned, in October 2016, that “Russia’s senior-most officials” were behind the DNC hack, Trump scoffed, “they always blame Russia. . . . because they think they’re trying to tarnish me with Russia.” By early December, Trump’s transition team was dismissing reports that the CIA had concluded Moscow was trying to help get him elected, declaring: “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” Since then Trump has accused the IC of “McCarthyism,” after claiming that “Obama had my ‘wires tapped’” (he would also push the idea that British intelligence was in on the conspiracy), and denounced the FBI’s investigation into his campaign as “treason.” When his now outgoing DNI, Dan Coats, and his CIA Director, Gina Haspel, told Congress this year that North Korea was unlikely to give up its nuclear weapons and Iran was not cheating on the nuclear deal, he furiously tweeted: “Perhaps Intelligence should go back to school!”

Trump’s attempt to replace Coats with a chorister of “deep state” conspiracies was frustrated last week after even GOP Senators objected to Rep. John Ratcliffe’s lack of experience and reports that he’d hyped his resume. (Trump said he wanted someone who could “really rein” in “intelligence agencies [that] have run amok”). The betting is that the President will now choose a more conventional candidate, but the bullying won’t stop.

The intelligence agencies are no fragile flowers, and have their own history of excesses, so it is tempting to dismiss Trump’s attacks as his usual mind games. But the President has gotten badly played by Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un because he refused to listen to his intel and foreign policy advisers, and in a fast-moving military crisis that unschooled arrogance could be disastrous.

There is also a serious danger that Trump’s relentless bullying could end up muzzling or politicizing all serious intelligence analysis, while undermining the credibility of the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement communities at home and abroad. Trump promised this week to give the FBI “whatever they need” to combat domestic terrorism, but his repeated claims of an FBI conspiracy against his presidency risk feeding even more extremism. And at this point, if the CIA were to find evidence Iran is actively building a nuclear weapon, would even our closest allies believe it?

Steve Slick, a former member of the CIA’s clandestine service and special assistant to President George W. Bush who directs the Intelligence Studies Project at the University of Texas at Austin, told me the United States is already paying for Trump’s declared war on the intelligence community. “Our key foreign intelligence partners,” he says, “are recalculating the risks and benefits of intelligence cooperation with U.S. agencies that are viewed by the President as incompetent, threatening, or—going forward under new leadership­—potential political tools.”

Things will likely get worse, as Attorney General William Barr follows Trump’s demands to “investigate the investigators”: probing alleged misdeeds in the early days of the FBI investigation and looking for biases and other weaknesses in the IC’s analysis on Russian interference. (There are three overlapping Trump-ordered investigations being run out of Justice, including one into Hillary Clinton’s many alleged sins, but this appears to be the main event.) Announcing his decision in late May to give Barr far-reaching powers to declassify intelligence, including the power to overrule objections from the intelligence chiefs, Trump made clear the finding he’s expecting: “It was an attempted coup or an attempted takedown of the president of the United States.” Barr, who has repeatedly described the FBI’s actions as “spying,” appears eager to comply.

Mueller fatigue notwithstanding, there are important questions that still need to be addressed about Russia’s assault on America’s democratic institutions–questions that Trump and Barr show no interest in investigating. For starters: Why did it take the U.S. intelligence agencies so long to raise the alarm about Russia’s hacking and disinformation campaign? (Neither Republicans nor Democrats have called for oversight hearings on that intelligence failure.) What more needs to be done to push back against disinformation, foreign and homegrown, without chilling free speech? And what more will it take to harden the U.S. voting infrastructure—and do states’ rights really trump the security of our electoral system? Last month, on the same day the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a bipartisan finding that the Russians targeted voting systems in all 50 states, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked two election security bills, including one that would have required candidates and campaigns to inform the FBI of any offers of help from foreign governments.

Even a narrower look at the origins and conduct of the FBI investigation could do a real service­–if it didn’t start out with a presumption of guilt and were conducted honestly. (The one small reason for hope is that Barr has chosen a respected U.S. attorney, John Durham of Connecticut, to do the actual investigating.) Trump may have been the perfect tool, but the Russians aren’t going to stop with him. The U.S. law enforcement and intelligence communities need to figure out how to conduct an investigation into candidates and campaigns suspected of accepting foreign help without feeding more wild conspiracies of government overreach and persecution.

Can asking the right questions for the wrong reasons lead to anything good? Probably not. Still, for the sake of political comity and the credibility of our national security institutions, here are some of the issues that we can hope will be seriously addressed.

The Origins of the FBI Investigation

Here’s what we know: the FBI launched a counter-intelligence investigation in late July 2016, after hearing from the Australians that a Trump campaign adviser,­ George Papadopoulos, had told one of its diplomats that the Russians had damaging information about Hillary Clinton that could help the campaign. The Australians only told the Americans after the first WikiLeaks dump of DNC emails. Once the investigation began, the FBI sent an informant, a UK-based American professor, and an investigator posing as a research assistant, to try to figure out what Papadopoulos really knew. After the Mueller report, Congressional reports, and countless news reports, all of this should be beyond dispute.

However, if you follow the President’s Twitter feed, surf Fox News, or listened to House Republicans question Robert Mueller you get a different story– of a hoax wrapped in an FBI-CIA-Hillary Clinton directed conspiracy designed to bring down the President. In this telling, the investigation was really triggered by a DNC/Clinton campaign-financed opposition research memo, the undeniably flawed “Steele dossier,” filled with disinformation on Trump. And the FBI, CIA, several foreign governments and shadowy figures in the pay of the U.S. government all conspired to entrap Papadopoulos and discredit the Trump campaign by offering up dirt on Hillary, cash, or sex. Never mind that the Steele memos only made it to the investigators seven weeks after the FBI began investigating.

Barr will surely re-up the cringe-inducing anti-Trump texts written by Peter Strzok, the now fired senior FBI counter-intelligence agent, who helped oversee both the Clinton email investigation and the early Trump campaign investigation. And Barr will certainly bore further into the provenance and weaknesses of the Steele memos (remember the pee tape?) and ask why the FBI was so willing to listen to a spook-on-hire to Trump’s opponents, even one who used to work for MI6 and had successfully collaborated with the Bureau in the past.

There are undoubtedly other questions and critiques to be raised. But the Attorney General’s greatest service for the country would be to debunk the grand conspiracy and confirm what is already known: The FBI investigation–if flawed–was launched because of credible concerns about Russian interference in an American presidential campaign. Not to investigate would have been irresponsible.

Surveillance Abuse

In this related Trumpian narrative, the FBI and Department of Justice are accused of tricking the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court­ into approving a wiretap so it could “spy” on a former Trump campaign aide, using disinformation in the Steele memos and hiding the work’s partisan origins. Carter Page has not been charged with a crime, which has added to claims that his rights were abused. We know very little about how the secret Court works. A serious investigation, which honestly weighed both national security concerns and the public’s need to know, could set the stage for a more informed and bipartisan discussion about privacy issues and surveillance reform—a topic that dominated after the Snowden revelations, but has all but disappeared since the Russia scandal took over.

What we do know right now is that a redacted version of the FISA application suggests that the FBI, which had been monitoring Page’s dealings with the Russians for several years, relied on information from Steele and other evidence to argue, “Page has been the subject of targeted recruitment by the Russian government.” The President’s camp sees dark doings in the fact that the surveillance application, consistent with Court practice, refers to Steele only as Source #1 and doesn’t name the DNC and the Clinton campaign as the ones footing the bill for his work. It does say that Source #1’s employers were “likely looking for information that could be used to discredit Candidate #1’s campaign,” while also attesting to Source #1’s credibility based on “previous reporting history with the FBI.”

Again, there are legitimate questions Barr could raise about this process. How much of the information in the Steele dossier did the FBI turn over to the Court? If it held back portions that might have weakened the work’s credibility, who made that decision and why? Did the Bureau oversell Steele’s credentials, especially knowing that he was now a spook-for-hire? Should there be different identification rules in the midst of a high-stakes political campaign?

Brown University’s Timothy Edgar, who served as the DNI’s deputy for civil liberties during the George W. Bush Administration and director of privacy and civil liberties for the Obama NSC, sees no small irony in Republicans crying foul against the FISA Court after opposing or watering down post-Snowden reforms. Congress did approve a Special Advocate in 2015 to argue the case for privacy at the FISC, but only if the Court decides there is a “novel” or “significant” legal question presented. We don’t know if the Court even considered the issue of whether to grant a surveillance order for a former presidential campaign aide to be “novel” or “significant” enough to potentially merit the presence of a special advocate. “But if Republicans believe the FISA process was abused for Carter Page it should follow that they will now want a stronger amicus provision,” Edgar argues. Edgar would also like to know “how much did [the Court] consider the First Amendment rights of Trump and the people in the Trump campaign to hold dissenting views” on Russia? That, he says, has relevance for investigation targets with dissenting views across the political spectrum.

Barr can do real good if he debunks what certainly appear to be baseless charges that the FBI lied to the FISA Court about its sources and opened a more serious conversation about how the Court does its work and whether the current system is protecting individual liberties for everyone. Privacy is not just for Trump and his advisors.

Intelligence Failure

Barr’s investigation also plans to assess the intelligence community’s findings on Russian interference in the election, Putin’s role, and his preference for Trump. The unclassified version of the IC’s January 2017 finding is thin, but a lot has come out since. And according to Politico, former CIA director and now Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—another Trump true believer—conducted his own review of the CIA’s findings, “grilling analysts on their conclusions,” and came away persuaded that there was no bias or political pressure to skew their work.  It is hard to see a Barr reassessment as anything but an attempt to airbrush the picture, and absolve Trump (and possibly Putin) of any culpability.

Mark Lowenthal, a former Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Analysis and a former staff director of the House Intelligence Committee, warns that putting the Attorney General in charge of reviewing the CIA’s analysis, as if it were a criminal investigation, is especially “political and frightening. You don’t want your analysts thinking that if I write something that the President–not just this President––doesn’t like you’ll get hauled up before the Justice Department. “

The pressing question that needs to be addressed—by Congress—is why the intelligence community didn’t see the Russians coming in time for the country to defend itself. Moscow began perfecting its hack-and-hype techniques in 2008 in Georgia, and they were on full display in Ukraine in 2014. Russian generals were writing publicly available treatises on information warfare. But from what we know, it wasn’t until early August 2016—five months after the Clinton campaign hacks and six weeks after the first internet dump of DNC documents—that the CIA warned President Obama that Putin was directing a full-on cyber campaign to disrupt the U.S. elections, damage Hillary Clinton, and help elect Donald Trump. Even then, it doesn’t seem like the CIA grasped what was happening on Facebook and Twitter.

In normal times, this would be branded a major intelligence failure and Congress would have demanded a public accounting. But in the Upside Down that is Trump’s Washington, the Republicans haven’t engaged for fear of further implicating (and infuriating) Trump. And the Democrats have been bore-sighted on the Mueller investigation, in their hope that it would bring down Trump—showing no desire to raise questions that might also embarrass President Obama or the Obama-era intelligence chiefs now fighting their own cage match with Trump.

There are a variety of explanations for why the intelligence community discounted or ignored Putin’s ability to wreak havoc in the United States. One is arrogance: Yes, we saw what the Russians did in Georgia, the Baltics, and Ukraine, but our democracy was thought too mature, our citizens too sophisticated, our media too diverse and skeptical to be manipulated that way. Or perhaps the Russian campaign was too low-tech, too low-cost, or too public for the high-tech, secrecy-obsessed IC to take seriously. The CIA is not allowed to monitor what happens inside the United States, and Internet trolling was never high on its strategic threat list. The FBI, which is responsible for counter-intelligence inside the country, focuses on making cases and isn’t known for its analytic or strategic imagination.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has discussed these issues behind closed doors with intelligence community leaders.  But with the President insisting that Russia’s assault on American democracy is a hoax, and the IC’s belated findings an assault on his presidency, I’m skeptical that even robust closed-door discussions will be enough to ensure the needed changes in priorities, budgets, personnel or tasking. Remember how former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen couldn’t get a cabinet-level meeting on tightening security for 2020 because the President couldn’t tolerate even a whisper of doubt about his 2016 victory?

One of the biggest mysteries in Washington is why William Barr, once a respected institutionalist, has sold his soul to enable Donald Trump. Even Jeff Sessions deflected Trump’s demands for a Hillary Clinton Special Counsel, assigning a no-deadline investigation back in November 2017 that looks like it may never produce a finding. Barr could go that route and hope the President forgets–he won’t­–or hope the President is satisfied with a pending report from the Justice Department’s Inspector General, which may whack some of his favorite targets (like James Comey) but is unlikely to wreak the sweeping vengeance Trump is looking for. Or Barr could do the right thing: Put an end to the conspiracy mongering, ask the real questions for the right reasons, and give the country the honest answers it deserves.

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Of Killers and Conspiracies

Two mass shootings have occurred within 24 hours, setting a macabre new record. The first, in El Paso, Texas, took the lives of 22 people and injured 26. The second, in Dayton, Ohio, took nine lives and also injured 26. The shooter in El Paso posted a manifesto online moments before he began his rampage. Titled “The Inconvenient Truth,” it declared that “this attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.” It warned that white people were being replaced by foreigners. The motives of the shooter in Dayton have, as of this writing, not yet been ascertained. 

What, if anything, do these terrible events have to do with the Claremont Institute in California, a venerable center of conservative thought devoted to “restor[ing] the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life”?

The ideas propelling these murderers have not materialized out of thin air. As it happens, just days before these latest episodes an intelligence bulletin prepared by the FBI’s Phoenix field office leaked to Yahoo News. Dated May 30, 2019, it describes “conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists” as a growing threat. According to the document, the FBI has determined that “fringe political conspiracy theories very likely motivate some domestic extremists, wholly or in part, to engage in criminal or violent activity.” 

Some of the incidents detailed in the FBI report stem from the so-called “Pizzagate” conspiracy. According to this theory, the hacked emails of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager, John Podesta, contained coded messages linking Clinton and other Democratic party officials to a child sex ring operated out of several restaurants, including the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington DC.

In December 2018, a California man was arrested for building bombs with which he intended to blow up a “satanic temple monument” in the Illinois capitol rotunda with the goal of making Americans aware of Pizzagate. Before that, in December 2016, a North Carolina man, Edgar Maddison Welch, traveled to Washington to “rescue” the children from the supposed pedophiles. Armed with an AR-15-style rifle, he entered the pizzeria and fired shots at a locked closet door. No one was injured before he surrendered to police.

Which brings us back to the Claremont Institute. It recently announced its new Lincoln Fellows. These are scholars, journalists, and public figures who are given the opportunity to immerse themselves in the question of how “the statesmanship and political thought of the Founders and Lincoln should guide policymakers today.” Among this year’s crop of honorees is Jack Posobiec, a journalist at the rightwing One America News television network. One of Posobiec’s claims to fame is having carried a sign reading “Rape Melania” at an anti-Trump rally with the intention of discrediting the protestors. Another is his participation in spreading the Seth Rich/Democratic National Committee email conspiracy. But Posobiec’s most notable accomplishment has been intense promotion on social media of Pizzagate. Among other things, Posobiec went to Comet Ping Pong and live-streamed his “investigation” of the on-going crime on Periscope, a broadcast that went viral in the precincts of the alt-right. Welch entered the pizzeria with his gun just one month after Posobiec’s broadcast.

Conspiracism has lately entered the mainstream. The Claremont appointment of Posobiec as a Lincoln Fellow is one dot that connects to a larger picture.  In periods of stress and rapid economic and social change, irrational currents tend to flow and the appetite among the public for extraordinary explanations of events begins to swell. Conspiracy theories begin to proliferate, and also to migrate from the margins to the center.  

In the 19th century, in the midst of heavy Irish and German Catholic immigration to the United States, tales circulated of horrific events inside Catholic institutions. Long forgotten today, the Ursuline Convent riots of 1834 in Boston were triggered by reports that a mysterious woman was being held inside the convent against her wishes. A Protestant mob burned the convent to the ground. Two years later came the publication of the Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk as Exhibited in a Narrative of Her Sufferings,  which detailed sexual liaisons between priests and nuns, with the resulting offspring being strangled and interred in a lime pit in another convent’s basement. The salacious book sold wildly and gave rise to official investigations. They turned up nothing.

In the early 20th century came the turn of the Jews. In the aftermath of World War I, the industrialist Henry Ford used the newspaper he owned, the Dearborn Independent, to peddle one anti-Semitic tale after the next, which were then compiled into a collection. Ford’s The International Jew, published in four serialized volumes beginning in 1920, featured chapters like: “Does a Definite Jewish World Program Exist?” “The Historic Basis of Jewish Imperialism,” “An Introduction to the ‘Jewish Protocols,’” “Did the Jews Foresee the World War?” “Jewish Testimony in Favor of Bolshevism,” “How Jews in the U.S. Conceal Their Strength,” “The Scope of Jewish Dictatorship in the U.S.,” “Jewish Control of the American Theater,” “Jewish Supremacy in Motion Picture World,” and “Jewish Degradation of American Baseball.” Through the late 1930s, variations on these themes, with the supplement of overt support for Hitler’s anti-Semitic program, were propounded to an audience in the tens of millions by the Roman Catholic radio priest, Father Charles Coughlin. 

In the 1950s and early 60s, Communism came in for phantasmagorical treatment. Although Soviet espionage was a genuine national security danger, Senator Joseph McCarthy blew it up into a “a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.” Even after McCarthy passed from the stage in disgrace, belief in a vast conspiracy did not fade. If anything, it grew.

Indeed, the John Birch Society, founded and financed by the candy manufacturer Robert Welch, promoted a brand of anti-Communism that makes Joe McCarthy seem soft. Among other things, the organization fielded a “board of experts” to rate the “present degree of Communist influence and control over the economic and political affairs” over the countries of the world. In 1958, the experts deemed the United States to be 20-40 percent under Communist control. By 1960, the degree of Communist control had reached 40-60 percent. “For many reasons and after a lot of study,” Welch wrote to society members, “I personally believe [Secretary of State John Foster] Dulles to be a Communist agent.” Dulles’ brother Allen, then serving as director of the CIA, was to Welch “the most protected and untouchable supporter of Communism, next to Eisenhower himself.” As for President Eisenhower, according to Welch, “here is only one possible word to describe his purpose and actions. That word is treason.”

If our current troubles with virulent conspiracy theories are part of an old story in American life, today it contains significant new wrinkles. 

One of them, of course, is the wide availability of lethal instruments, including weapons of war, in the hands of anyone who wants to obtain them. Impressionable minds and the mentally ill, primed to believe something as farfetched as Pizzagate and armed with a semi-automatic rifle, are a combustible mix. In this connection, the ignorance, the naivete and the low intelligence of the Pizzagate shooter, on display in the various proceedings following his arrest, tell us something important about the nature of the audience in which fringe ideas circulate.

A second wrinkle is technological change. The FBI notes that “the advent of the Internet and social media has enabled promoters of conspiracy theories to produce and share greater volumes of material via online platforms that larger audiences of consumers can quickly and easily access.” The mass audiences enable the conspiracies to assume a dynamic quality. The Internet, writes the FBI, “has enabled a ‘crowd-sourcing’ effect wherein conspiracy theory followers themselves shape a given theory by presenting information that supplements, expands, or localizes its narrative.”

But other factors are also in play: Driving the conspiracy theorizing and the threat of violence, according to the FBI, are “the uncovering of real conspiracies or coverups involving illegal, harmful, or unconstitutional activities by government officials or leading political figures” (emphasis added). Coming from our nation’s premier law-enforcement agency, this astonishing proposition has garnered almost no attention. Who exactly are these government officials and leading political figures engaging in “real” conspiracies? Are disaffected FBI analysts, by any chance, pointing here to Donald Trump and his campaign officials, many of whom have already pleaded guilty to or been convicted of “illegal, harmful, or unconstitutional activities”? The report does not say.

But we are not forced to guess. Throughout our history, conspiratorialism has typically been confined to the fringes of political life. But it has not always been so. The conspiratorial tradition has on various occasions intersected with the respectable world. Henry Ford, after all, was one of America’s leading industrialists. Joe McCarthy enjoyed a measure of support from leading rightwing intellectuals of the era.  The John Birch Society, though today just a small band of cranks, managed at its peak in the early 1960s to attract some 60,000 dues-paying members, many of them, as one study has noted, “highly substantial figures in local communities—physicians, stockbrokers, retired military officers, lawyers, [and] businessmen (particularly small and middle-sized manufacturers in the Midwest and the South).” McCarthyism is the closest conspiratorialism has come to one of America’s core institutions: the United States Senate. The closest, that is, up until now.

Here is Alex Jones, proprietor of the conspiracy website, InfoWars: “When I think about all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped, I have zero fear standing up against her. Yeah, you heard me right. Hillary Clinton has personally murdered children. I just can’t hold back the truth anymore. Hillary Clinton is one of the most vicious serial killers the planet’s ever seen.” This is the same Alex Jones who has declared that “Pizzagate is real.” This is the same Alex Jones whom America’s president has befriended and praised for his “amazing reputation.” 

As is well-known, Trump launched his political career with the baseless contention that Barack Obama was not born in the United States and therefore not eligible to be President. The world is familiar with his false assertion that hundreds of Muslims celebrated on rooftops in New Jersey as the World Trade Center towers came down on 9/11. But there are many more conspiracy theories in his repertoire.

They include the claim

that Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy: “His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being — you know, shot. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous.”
that Vincent Foster, an aide to President Bill Clinton did not in fact commit suicide but was murdered: “I don’t bring [Foster’s death] up because I don’t know enough to really discuss it. I will say there are people who continue to bring it up because they think it was absolutely a murder. I don’t do that because I don’t think it’s fair.”
that childhood vaccines cause autism: “We had so many instances, people that work for me, just the other day, 2 years old, a beautiful child, went to have the vaccine and came back and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic.”
that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered. “It’s a horrible topic, but they’re saying they found the pillow on his face, which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow.… I can’t give you an answer. It’s just starting to come out now.”

One must also include the sprawling QAnon conspiracy movement, analyzed in the FBI report. As the FBI describes it, QAnon followers adhere to the belief that “an anonymous government official known as ‘Q’ posts classified information online to reveal a covert effort, led by President Trump, to dismantle a conspiracy involving ‘deep state’ actors and global elites allegedly engaged in an international child sex trafficking ring.” QAnon has already been linked to numerous violent incidents, some of which are detailed by the FBI.

One must leave it to social psychologists to offer explanations for why the theme of sexual crimes, particularly those involving children, crops up regularly from the Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk to Pizzagate to QAnon. But however bizarre the content, it is clear is that the Trump administration and Trump himself have done nothing to disassociate themselves from the QAnon movement. QAnon supporters flock to Trump rallies and, as we learn from the legal affairs website JustSecurity, clusters of them wearing QAnon paraphernalia regularly appear in the frame as the rallies are broadcast. Trump has also retweeted QAnon followers on dozens of occasions, leaving them, as the Washington Post has reported, “overjoyed . . . believing it’s evidence he supports their movement.”

If conspiracism has once again gone mainstream, if institutions like Claremont are inducting the the dangerous purveyors of paranoia into their hallowed halls, if the FBI is warning about the potentially lethal consequences of fantastical yarns, explanations are not hard to find. One of them has a great deal to do with the fact that our commander in chief is conspiracy-monger number one. From Charlottesville to the Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue to the white supremacist terror attacks of the present moment, we are well into the stage in which innocent blood is being shed.

“This American carnage stops right here and stops right now” is the promise Trump offered in his inaugural address. As he uses the pulpit of the Presidency to spread incendiary tales about an “invasion” of criminals from the south, the promise has not aged well.

The post Of Killers and Conspiracies appeared first on The American Interest.

Between A Rock and A Hard Brexit

Brexit was always a bad idea. The UK’s withdrawal from the EU will be costly to both sides and the damage would be only compounded by the absence of a withdrawal agreement. Besides economic costs, it will diminish the UK’s stature in the world and give new force to secessionist movements in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Contrary to the optimism of some, the potential upside for Britain in the form of economic and trade liberalization is modest. Conversely, for the EU Brexit means losing the most significant contributor to common European defense and possibly tipping the continent into a recession.

Yet, in a situation in which an unstoppable force meets an immovable object it is difficult to see any other outcome than a hard Brexit.

Killing Brexit by political fiat or a second referendum is unlikely. True, a political leader could simply stand up and say that Brexit is a dumb idea that needs to be abandoned (which is substantively true). But with Liberal Democrats in disarray and Labour captured by the extreme Left, it is hard to see where such leadership could come from. Brexit has already redrawn the political map in the UK, continues to destroy both leading political parties from the inside, and will continue to crowd out every other issue until it is somehow put to rest.

Denmark had a second referendum on the Maastricht Treaty after being granted a number of opt-outs and Ireland held a second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. But those had nowhere near the same level of salience as membership, especially in a country notorious for its lukewarm attitude to the European project. There is, furthermore, no indication of buyer’s remorse on the part of the Brexiteers—if anything, their attitudes have hardened. A second referendum would thus either confirm the result of the 2016 plebiscite, or create a myth of a stab in the back, poisoning British politics for generations.

While Theresa May made a valiant attempt at compromise, after three failed votes in Parliament, the negotiated Withdrawal Agreement is effectively dead. Recently, as many as sixty Conservative MPs pledged to oppose the deal even if the contentious Irish Backstop is dropped, signaling that Ms. May’s effort to strike a bargain with British Euroscepticism was doomed to fail. What remains is a game of chicken between Brussels and Westminster which leads ultimately to a hard Brexit, either through a failure of the current Parliament to stop it or, more likely, through a snap election fought explicitly over the issue of a hard Brexit.

Boris Johnson is counting both on his prowess as a campaigner and on the fact that the short-term damage inflicted by a hard Brexit is going to be limited, contrary to the predictions of imminent doom. Will Brexit be disruptive and costly? Of course it will. However, if it is expected and planned for, the disruption will not take the form of unmitigated chaos on October 31. Planes will continue to fly, there will be food on the shelves of supermarkets, and the Eurostar will not come to a standstill halfway between Dover and Calais. In the short term, even the businesses operating across the border will mostly bite the bullet of increased compliance costs and tariffs.

The bulk of the economic damage in the form of decreased productivity and job losses will come from longer-term business and investment decisions made to get around the new trade barriers. Those will take years to unfold and will simply cause the UK’s economy to grow at a slower rate than if it had unhindered access to the single market. Voters may or may not notice these effects, depending on other policies accompanying Brexit.

In one sense, the potential for unpleasant and politically salient surprises is greater on the continental side. For the British, Brexit looms as the Central Issue of Our Time. For the EU it appears now as a mild annoyance. Yet, the European economy, already on the brink of a downturn, will suffer too from the disruption of existing value chains, and reforms improving Europe’s long-standing competitiveness problem should therefore be high on the agenda of the next European Commission.

No longer having any sway over Brussels, the UK’s role in the world can hardly increase. More likely, the need to access new markets around the world will mean abandoning any pretenses of a values-based foreign policy and may entail cozying up to China. To be sure, given the UK’s stature as one of the few European military powers, Brexit is bad news for the EU-27’s standing in the world as well.

If the entire enterprise is a negative-sum game why can’t the two sides agree on a compromise to soften the blow, especially if the main point of contention is as esoteric and technical as the Irish backstop? The dirty secret is that Brexiteers are probably right that technically feasible alternatives exist that could keep the Irish border open without locking the UK in the customs union with the EU. Checks could take place away from the border. For instance, the United States, Canada, and Mexico operate the so-called FAST program, under which verified commercial carriers undergo expedited customs procedures.

The main reason why the EU cannot, should not, and will not consider such alternatives and revisit the negotiated Withdrawal Agreement has little to with its obstinacy or with an effort to spite or punish the UK. It has everything to do with geopolitics. The current era of great-power competition requires the EU, especially if weakened by Brexit, to build credibility and a reputation for a certain degree of ruthlessness for being able to make decisions and stick with them even when it is temporarily inconvenient. This is not something optional but rather a core European interest. If Europeans allow themselves to be pushed around by the likes of Boris Johnson, there is zero chance the EU will be ever able to throw its weight around when engaging the United States or China. In other words, if they want to break the perceptions epitomized by Kissinger’s “whom do I call” and Kagan’s “Europeans are from Venus” quote, Europeans have to learn to be a bit mean, including towards their close partners. That means, among other things, retaliating forcefully against Donald Trump’s eventual car tariffs and not giving away anything for free to an ex-member of the EU.

One may deplore the situation, but it is simply a fact that a large part of the British debate has accepted the notion that anything short of a hard Brexit would be a betrayal of the mandate created by the 2016 referendum. On substantive grounds, of course, that is a crazy view. Sooner or later, the UK will have to conclude some form of agreement with the EU over trade and political and security cooperation. Leaving now without a withdrawal agreement only means there will be more things to negotiate in the future, possibly with even less goodwill on the EU’s part—especially if the UK fails to honor its existing financial obligations.

Yet politics is not primarily about policy and its substantive merits. For the UK bridge the current era of political dysfunction and extremism, it may need to have a taste of crude majoritarianism, not tempered by the better judgment of those who understand the intricacies issues at hand. As H.L. Mencken quipped, democracy was founded on the idea “that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

There is also something cathartic about starting on a blank slate. To borrow an example from my part of the world, there was no substantive, policy-based case for Slovakia’s independence in the early 1990s.  Neither did the issue command majority support in the country; instead most Slovaks simply capitulated to the well-organized, loud minority of nationalists. What followed the break-up in Slovakia were some difficult years, made even worse by the demagoguery and mafia capitalism that spread under Vladimír Mečiar’s watch. Yet, today both countries are prosperous, democratic members of the EU and NATO and the cultural ties between their populations are as close as ever. In retrospect it is hard to see a realistic, politically sustainable counterfactual to the break-up.

Like it or not, a hard Brexit is probably going to happen and on both sides of the English Channel, the goal has to be to make the best out of it. It has taken iterations of various crises for a European foreign policy outlook to emerge. Few could imagine that the EU could sustain an effective regime of sanctions against Russia—until it did. Likewise, the refugee crisis made it strike a cynical but effective deal with Turkey, and the Brexit referendum has led so far to a flurry of free trade agreements that few thought the bloc was capable of concluding. If we are lucky, Brexit may seem in a decade or two like the break-up of Czechoslovakia: an unpleasant crisis situation which was nonetheless bound to happen and which ultimately forced everyone involved to get their act together.

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