Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 34

What Germans Are Reading

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series looking at the books, authors, and ideas capturing the zeitgeist in various countries this summer. Coming soon: dispatches from Brazil, France, and the United Kingdom.

Germany is a country of readers. But, like much of the world, they are reading less—and much less than they think. In fact, according to Culture Score Index of the UK-based market research firm NOP World, Germany is tied for 22nd with the United States for the amount of time spent reading per week, just 5.42 hours. Since 2013, the German book market has shed some 6.3 million readers, most of them between the ages of 20 and 50. 

But according to a June 2019 report by the German trade association Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, the worst may be over. The number of book buyers rose during the first half of 2019 for the first time since 2012 by roughly 300,000 people. Today, some 29.9 million Germans over the age of ten (in a population of 82.7 million) buy at least one book per year. And Germans spend 1.6 percent of their total income on books, second in the European Union only to Slovenia. 

So, what are Germans reading? The land of Goethe is fond of fiction, of course, which makes up 31.9 percent of total book sales. Within this genre, they prefer suspense novels and thrillers. Children’s and young adult literature come in second, followed by self-help books, a genre the Börsenverein suggests is in an uptick. General nonfiction rounds out these numbers, but it is also the category, importantly, that generates the most conversation. The manner in which key nonfiction-book topics translate into robust discussions on national television talkshows, newspapers, and magazines illustrates just how earnestly nonfiction is treated in Germany.

According to the Spiegel bestseller list—the equivalent of the New York Times bestseller list—the top half-dozen nonfiction books for July 2019 were, in order: Der Ernährungskompass, by science journalist Ben Kast, a thoroughgoing overview of what you should be eating to stay healthy; Stephen Hawking’s posthumous Brief Answers to the Big Questions, published in German in July by Klett-Cotta as Kurze Antworten auf Grosse Fragen; child psychologist Michael Winterhoff’s Deutschland Verdummt, a jeremiad about the failure of the German school system to properly educate the country’s youth; Michelle Obama’s much-beloved autobiography, Becoming; journalist Mieke Winnemuth’s book Bin im Garten, about the challenges of successful gardening; and finally, former German president Joachim Gauck’s Toleranz: Einfach Schwer, about the Enlightenment value of tolerance—where it originated, why it is so important, why we need it, and what threatens it today. Of these titles, two have generated significant debate, primarily because they offer critique of the German national character, which Germans—trust me, I have lived here for 15 years—take very seriously.

Michael Winterhoff’s Deutschland Verdummt claims that German children today “have no tolerance for frustration, and they avoid all exertion.” By the time they graduate, half of them still “have the psyche of a small child.” The author of eight previous books on childhood development, Winterhoff’s primary concern is that children today have become “tyrants.” They don’t know proper boundaries; they have not been taught how to submit to parental and social authority. And this, Winterhoff says, is entirely the fault of parents themselves. Beginning in the 1990s, they have treated their children like friends and partners instead of acting like authority figures and moral guides, preferring to allow children the freedom to develop and move at their own pace instead of submitting to the adult order of things. 

Deutschland Verdummt recapitulates Winterhoff’s perennial angst, but this time—since the hope of parents changing “is as good as lost”—moves the fight into schools. Preschool instructors, kindergarten teachers, administrators, and educational policy itself have failed kids as much as their parents have. This is attributed to a number of factors: class size, budget cuts, EU-wide educational standards, federalism, and digitalization, among other influences—all of which have contributed to the Niedergang (demise) of education in Germany. Winterhoff foremost laments “the ideology of open instruction,” which encourages children to decide what they want to do in class instead of being told what to do by teachers. He cites a number of interviewees who attest to this dour state of affairs. 

A critique of the book by business journalist Martin Spiewak, on the online version of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit, asks of Winterhoff’s thesis:

In how many schools have grades and homework been completely abolished? And where exactly is ‘open instruction’ the standard way of doing things? If one chooses to believe the results of actual empirical educational research and the reports of state school-inspectors, the opposite is the case: the traditional mode of teaching (particularly after grade school) continues to structure the school day. 

Rather than referring to national statistical research by the federal department of education, says Spiewak, Winterhoff has stitched together his assessment from a smattering of cherrypicked “newspaper articles, opinion polls, and teacher interviews.” But, as witnessed in book sales and public resonance, Winterhoff’s diatribe has touched a nerve, evidencing a worried undercurrent in how children are being raised in Germany—as well as the financial straits that prevent some parents from being able to dedicate more time to their upbringing.

The other book that’s stirred controversy is Joachim Gauck’s Toleranz: Einfach Schwer. Gauck is a venerated former German President (2012-17) who brought much needed moral authority to the office following the disgraced resignation of Christian Wulff, who became embroiled in a housing-loan scandal and then tried to put the kibosh on negative media coverage by threatening journalists. Gauck, an ordained pastor who served at the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Mecklenburg, was raised in East Germany and suffered constant surveillance by the Stasi, which considered the young theologian “an incorrigible anticommunist.” He went on to become a warrior in the fight to bring down the Iron Curtain, organizing protests as part of the democratic opposition movement New Forum, and then as an elected official to the GDR People’s Chamber, representing Alliance 90, a mishmash of pro-democracy and human-rights associations. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 he became head of the Stasi archive.

In Toleranz: Einfach Schwer Gauck offers a bold argument in favor of tolerance. For a nation coming to terms with the rise of the rightist party AfD, the Alternative für Deutschland, this is widely seen as a welcome call. Gauck traces the history of tolerance as a liberal virtue, traversing the varied thought of Voltaire, Mill, Kant, and Goethe, showing how tolerance broadly conceived incorporates qualities such as patience, coexistence, respect, and love—and how the political efficacy of tolerance helped put an end to the religious wars of the 17th century. 

But Gauck also notes that tolerance has limits. He leans on his own past to address the GDR’s intolerable intolerance for nonconformity to state doctrine and the nightmarish repression of political dissidents. In the present, he suggests not only the need for increasing tolerance for immigrants and alternate lifestyles, but also for a rather obvious limit to tolerance: When extreme political movements or religious fanatics degrade human dignity and deny others their freedom, we are morally obligated to be intolerant, to question and confront illiberalism in all its forms. (He also warns of the dangerously individualizing ethos of identity politics, which he believes leads to people neglecting a broader view of shared social life.) This practice of tolerance is particularly important in Germany now, Gauck notes, as the country becomes increasingly multicultural, multiethnic, and multireligious—in a word, more American. This plea is not especially original, but it nevertheless remains key to maintaining a healthy liberal democracy in a globalized world: We must accept differences while uniformly upholding the rule of law, universal suffrage, and human rights.

Germany has been undergoing dramatic social change since the fall of the Berlin Wall, which occurred 30 years ago this November. Since then, the entire eastern half of the country has been brought into the fold of Western liberal capitalism—but not entirely successfully. Unemployment is still higher in the east, and brain drain to the west remains common. It is in these eastern Länder—particularly Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt—where the AfD has gained the most ground. Fear-mongering arguments against immigration and an Islamic takeover continue to attract scores of German citizens whose future economic prospects are less than rosy. Regardless, one cannot help but detect the political vestiges of an old GDR intolerance in its novel political manifestations. Let us hope that Gauck’s wise counsel can sway this worrying trend.

The post What Germans Are Reading appeared first on The American Interest.

The Populist Parable of A Face in the Crowd

A Face in the Crowd

Directed by Elia Kazan

1957, Criterion Collection, Blu-ray, $39.95

By the summer of 1957, Elia Kazan found himself in an unenviable situation, both professionally and personally. Joe McCarthy had recently died in disgrace, an alcoholic and morphine addict, but he and his supporters had already put the director through a very public hell. History had come knocking in the form of the Red Scare’s inquisitions, and Kazan had ended up naming names before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Although he had become disillusioned with the Communist Party (for good reason) and the names he gave to HUAC were already known, some of his closest friends in Hollywood never looked at him in the same way again. Rightly or wrongly, there will always be a little mud on his name.

But this did not mean that Kazan swung hard in the opposite direction, politically speaking. Kazan knew the dangers of demagoguery since he’d been on the receiving end of McCarthy’s interrogations, and as a gifted director of both theater and film, he knew something about the power of the media to magnify and reproduce whatever fills our screens. Still considering himself a man of the Left in his sympathy for the hardships of working stiffs, Kazan had already made On the Waterfront as a way, in his words, to “tell the world where I stood and my critics to go f–k themselves.” These issues were no doubt very much on his mind when he received Budd Schulberg’s crackling script for his film A Face in the Crowd, recently reissued by the Criterion Collection. Kazan understood demagoguery and populism well enough, but what really interested him was the toxic cocktail that resulted when they mixed with popular culture.

The plot is simple. Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes is a boozy roustabout who washes up in an Arkansas drunk tank only to be discovered by an idealistic radio journalist named Marcia Jefferies. Rhodes instantly becomes a huge radio hit for his guitar-twanging, whiskey-swilling, just-plain-folksy ways and as his star steadily rises, aided by mass communication, he becomes something of a folk hero to the thousands who tune in everyday to hear his homespun country aphorisms and hillbilly songs. The trouble, as we know from the start and Rhodes’ audience doesn’t figure out until it’s too late, is that behind the bushy hair and toothy grin lies a red-blooded all-American megalomaniac.

None other than Andy Griffith plays Rhodes, in his film debut. This is years before he would develop the eponymous character of The Andy Griffith Show as the epitome of wise, good-natured American manhood. Griffith is a revelation as the mercurial Rhodes, playing the diametric opposite of the persona that would later make him famous. He brings a demonic intensity to Rhodes’s all-enveloping charisma. He sings, he struts, he bounces off the walls, with one snappy wisecrack after another and a seductive boyishness that that gets him out of every jam. The character was inspired by Roy Rodgers’s son’s once confiding to Schulberg that his father’s everyman singing cowboy persona was just an act.

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Courtesy of the Criterion Collection

In a certain sense, it’s obvious why Rhodes becomes a pop sensation—it’s hard to take your eyes off of him. He fills the screen at every turn and easily carries the film on his shoulders while chewing the scenery. Rhodes has no real ideology of any kind and is driven almost entirely by his appetites. He’s a gangly, long-legged id, swigging liquor and eying the many women who flock to his appearances like it’s Beatlemania. The closest analogue to Rhodes at the time would clearly be Elvis—he can’t sing a lick like the King, but his hip-shaking vitality and barbaric yawp whips crowds into a lather.

There’s also a crucial element of rage and spite in Rhodes’s character, which Griffith also conveys quite effectively. In the booklet essay that accompanies the film, April Wolfe notes that part of what got Griffith sufficiently riled up on set everyday (aside from liberal swigs of strong liquor) was Kazan’s Method insistence in getting under his actor’s skins by probing his psychological wounds. Griffith had a hardscrabble upbringing in rural North Carolina, and was called white trash; Kazan helped stoke him to Rhodes’s level of fury by intentionally needling him to this effect at swanky New York cocktail parties. Griffith’s intensity in this role is due in part to his acting out a measure of his unconscious class anger. He explains in an interview segment in the bonus features that playing Rhodes put him in a very dark place for months, and that he was completely exhausted by playing a monster all day.

As some critics have pointed out, there’s a whiff of cultural condescension in Kazan and Schulberg’s portrait of Rhodes as bumpkin hero. I don’t think it’s elitism, ultimately, that drives their characterization so much as a weary acknowledgement of what it’s like to be the much-vaunted Common Man in American democracy. Rhodes likes most of the same stuff that any average guy does; he’s just louder and more brazen about it. To say that there are Lonesome Rhodes types hanging out in every diner, gas station, bar, and indeed drunk tank in America isn’t necessarily an insult. It’s just reality.

Usually, those kinds of people are far too narcissistic or incompetent to do anything other than to be legends in their own minds. A Face in the Crowd is concerned with what happens when That Guy starts to get ahold of some power and recognition, aided and abetted by a growing crowd of That Guys. And thanks to the newfound power of mass communication, courtesy of radio, and the new popularity of television, popular culture was beginning to become the place where the otherwise unremarkable can get their chance to bask in the spotlight. As Rhodes’s star rises, the steroids of money and fame pump up his already manic desires to a fever pitch. Reality television was only a generation away.

There is something a little snobbish about Kazan’s wariness over TV’s gradual domination of culture. Television screens don’t kill brain cells; the people who sit in front of them for hours do. But as a man of the theatre, Kazan was entitled to be cynical about a medium that offers all surface all the time. Looking back now in our image-saturated age, when quite a few actors and even a former reality TV star have used their celebrity status to gain prominent positions in government, it seems obvious that as worried as he was about the dangers of television magnifying our worst impulses, Kazan hadn’t seen anything yet.

As Rhodes goes from being a radio and TV star to a corporate marketing advisor—what we would now call an “influencer” if he were on social media—it’s his “authenticity” that the bigwigs need to get their fad products and shiny placebos to sell better. Rhodes becomes the pitchman for Vitajax, a dubious pill supplement that anticipates Viagra by several decades. Rhodes makes commercials where he gobbles the pills by the handful, yodeling with enthusiasm for how it gets him going, with a bevy of bikini-clad ladies swaying and grinning behind him. The gag goes on a little too long but shows how Rhodes seamlessly transitions from an entertainer to an advertiser, which offers two pithy insights about the way populism works in the age of mass media. The audience is treated as little more than a potential consumer base, and a part of what makes this marketability possible is that the rowdy energy of the heroes—who tend to be preening, hyper-masculine men of one kind or another—is rooted below the belt.

Rhodes is in many ways a blank slate onto which the audience’s emotions are projected. Since he lacks any real conviction or ideology to speak of, he can represent the homespun wisdom of the common man, which he warbles about endlessly on his TV shows, or he can stand for the devil within us all who longs to identify with someone more brazen than we dare to be. This unconscious desire to live vicariously through celebrities has always existed, but the film shows how dangerous this becomes when the stakes start to get higher. Rhodes is happy to be whatever the person who signs his checks needs him to be, but his dashingly hedonistic persona is anything but criticized by the good God-fearing folks of middle America. If anything, his overt masculinity is celebrated, as the nubile high school baton twirlers come out en masse to audition for a spot on his show, with their parents’ enthusiastic approval.

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Courtesy of the Criterion Collection

With his southern roots, fondness for country and rock and roll, and generally randy behavior, Rhodes is reminiscent of some of our ex-presidents and quite a few of our recent political leaders. When Rhodes ends up advising a presidential hopeful on how to appeal to the average voter, the Bermuda Triangle between entertainment, advertising, and politics has converged. There is no doubt—if anything, the film falls all over itself to underline the point—that Rhodes is used as a means to achieve bigger and more nefarious ends. Rhodes doesn’t seem to question the ethics or morality of using his image to make boatloads of money for the big shots he claims to despise so long as he makes truckloads of it for himself—a very American mentality. He can’t be called a sellout because selling is all there is, as far as he’s concerned, since that is all that the world he lives in has taught him. After all, if you brand yourself a populist, it helps to be popular.

But Marcia does worry, and as the moral conscience of the film she falls for Rhodes’s schtick both in and outside the limelight. Her helplessness in the face of Rhodes’s wily charms is intended to be tragic but comes off nowadays as a bit sentimental. Given the recent ways in which we have seen large sections of the public willingly give themselves over to their heroes, there’s less pathos in Marcia’s eventual seduction. Enter Walter Matthau’s Mel Miller, a sardonic writer of serious fiction who took to writing Rhodes’s TV scripts strictly for the money. Miller is the bespectacled, one-man Greek chorus of rationality and worldly skepticism. Rhodes, naturally, despises him, but Miller is streetwise enough to know that if he waits long enough, Rhodes’s luck will run out eventually.

Of course, run out it does, once Rhodes is caught on a hot mic talking trash about all the little suckers and fools out there in TV land who will believe anything he says. Rhodes has known all along that he’s been running a long con on the public, and he isn’t even slick enough in his showmanship to keep his big mouth shut about it. Once word gets out about his disdain for the public, Rhodes is ruined. The circuit of adulation and propaganda that has electrified him throughout the film is well and truly broken, and Rhodes is left with nothing but an empty room and an applause machine roaring on an endless loop. Rhodes’s phony fanfare for the common man has dissolved into a crackle of TV static.

Miller’s rumination at the end of Rhodes’s meteoric career provides the film’s moral: “we get wise to them, that’s our strength. We get wise to them.” This sentiment is a hopefully populist notion, since it assumes that the average person’s ability to call out frauds and hucksters is in itself a bulwark against their rise to power. I hate to say it, but today this sounds almost naively optimistic. Perhaps Lincoln was right that you can’t fool all of the people all of the time, but we can never be sure that the unfooled will be in the majority. And numbers are what matter.

What’s most disturbing about today’s crop of media-hyped demagogues isn’t that they are adored despite their faults—such as vulgarity, spite, ignorance, egomania, and greed—but precisely because of them. Embracing one’s mendacity is what passes for authenticity to many nowadays, as much as class signifiers like a twangy country accent and wearing denim used to do for the Rhodes types of yesteryear. Plenty of people in the public eye nowadays are just as venal as Rhodes is, but many no longer feel the need to even bother to disguise it.

A film like A Face in the Crowd is intended to be the antidote to this kind of demagoguery and media manipulation, and its searing ironies might open some eyes. But the key variable with satire isn’t always the artist—it’s the audience. No matter how keen the wit or jaundiced the eye, there’s simply no telling how many people will bother to pay attention long enough to hear the alarm bell that the satirist is ringing. The fact that the movie flopped when it came out in the summer of 1957 might have something to do with Kazan’s reputation at the time, but it doesn’t bode well for the prescription that it tries to offer to the body politic. If anything, with the benefit of hindsight, A Face in the Crowd seems more like a desperate prophecy than anything else, as its trenchant message goes unheeded even as it becomes freshly relevant with every election cycle.

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The Democrats vs. Trump’s Electoral Strategy

Next summer, a group of political scientists will release their quadrennial Presidential election forecasts. The assumption behind this exercise is that U.S. Presidential contests are heavily shaped by background factors even before the fall campaign begins. Needless to say, this claim rankles those who cover and work on political campaigns for a living since it implies that what they do is not as important as many believe.  

Pre-campaign forecasts can do surprisingly well in predicting the popular vote. In 2016, they were exceptionally accurate. The final 2016 result was 51.1 percent for Clinton versus 48.9 for Trump. The median forecast of the ten most prominent forecasting models was also 51.1, with 7 out of 10 predictions missing by one point or less. The Clinton emails and associated drama may have accounted for a small drop in her support at the end of the campaign, but it was not enough to cause her to lose the popular vote.

One reason it is possible to make pretty good popular vote predictions months before the ballots are cast is that most voters make up their minds well before the fall campaign even starts. A panel study of voters in 2016 by Dan Hopkins for the website 538 revealed that only 2 percent of those who supported either party’s nominee in January switched their support by October, and only 9 percent were undecided at the start of the campaign and ended up supporting either Clinton or Trump at the end.  

Why is the electorate so stable? Partly, it is due to the inertia of long-standing party commitments. Even independent voters mostly lean toward one party or the other. In addition, election fundamentals such as the state of the economy, involvement in an unpopular war, or fatigue with an incumbent party essentially set the table before the autumn election contest kicks fully into gear. 

However, the fatal shortcoming in these forecasts, or even the average polling numbers of Real Clear Politics the day before the election, is that they do not predict the Electoral College vote. This flaw could be critical in 2020, because, as I argued in a 2017 column, the President has formulated an entire strategy around winning the Electoral College and losing the popular vote, something that no other incumbent Democratic or Republican Presidential candidate has ever aimed for so early in a re-election cycle.

Given his circumstances, Trump’s strategy is understandable. Most candidates aim to win the Electoral College by winning the popular vote. But Donald Trump has a hard ceiling on his Presidential job approval, so far not yet exceeding 46%. Indeed, the gap between Trump’s highest and lowest job approval rating (approximately 11 points) is the smallest of any President from FDR on. 

A hard ceiling below 50 percent would be bad news for most Presidential aspirants, but maybe not for President Trump. His victory in 2016 and projections by various experts like Sam Wang suggest that he does not need to win the popular vote to earn a second Presidential term, especially if he plays his Electoral College cards the right way and the Democrats don’t.

Trump revealed his base rallying strategy long ago, picking fights with nonwhite athletes and politicians throughout his term in office in order to stoke his core support. He also delivered just enough of a conservative agenda on tax cuts, regulatory relief, and federal court appointments to keep mainstream Republican voters from defecting. However badly Trump behaves, and whatever future reputational cost he has saddled the Republican Party with, a Trump re-election in 2020 serves Republican short-term interests more than a Democratic Presidency would.  

But will the Democrats adjust to Trump’s Electoral College strategy? In 2018, the Democrats won the House with a big tent approach while President Trump won the Senate by stoking white male resentment. Trump has set his course for 2020 and will not change. The Democrats, on the other hand, are still determining their path.  

A complicating factor for Democrats is that while it might be possible to win additional support by offering a more transformational progressive agenda, those votes might not be in the right places.  More votes in solidly blue states will not get the job done. The Democrats need to compete for votes in swing states to counter Trump’s Electoral College strategy. That means a Democratic candidate who appeals across a wide enough ideological spectrum.  

Could the Democrats win with a democratic socialist candidate? Maybe, if the economy crashes or the President mires us in an unpopular war. But at the moment, the underlying conditions seem to favor the Republicans: positive GDP growth, low unemployment, and a bull stock market. Plus, President Trump has not started any new unpopular wars yet and has only been in office 2 years. In other words, background factors tilt in a Republican direction. 

Common sense favors applying Nancy Pelosi’s 2018 pragmatic platform over a “Green New Deal” approach. That of course is easier said than done. Ideological primary voters and small donors put a lot of pressure on Democrats to be policy pure just as similar primary pressures have empowered the tea party and conservative activists in the Republican ranks. Navigating the divergent pressures of the primary and general election stages of the American Presidential election process is no easy matter. Swing too far in one direction in the primary and you incur problems in the general election, and vice versa. This election raises difficult choices for the Democrats. It’s not all about Trump.

Throughout the 20th century, winning the popular vote meant winning the Electoral College vote as well. Three Presidential elections into the new century, no one should assume that. Many Democrats in 2016 could not imagine that a man so unpopular and unsuited to be President of the United States could be elected nonetheless. There is no excuse for making the same miscalculation again. 

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How to Jump-Start America—and Why

Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream

Jonathan Gruber and Simon Johnson

Public Affairs Books, 2019, $28.00, 368 pp.

Moore’s Law, which posits that the number of transistors on a microchip will double every two years, is not, strictly speaking, a scientific law at all. It is not immutable. It is reliant on intellectual capital. And as, Jonathan Gruber and Simon Johnson show in their new book Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream, it is reliant above all on the financing and underwriting of that capital—which the U.S. government used to do in a substantial and serious way, and which the authors argue it must do again.

Gruber and Johnson, both MIT professors, argue that Federal government funding of research and development (R&D) is essential to America’s future. Such investment can lead to new technologies and invigorate the American economy with millions of new jobs.

Many of America’s opinion-makers are skeptical of such “industrial policy” schemes.  They believe that private industry and the free market can and must lead innovation. But Gruber and Johnson cite key reasons that limit the willingness of private companies to invest in basic research. Free-rider concerns discourage research at the private level. The loss of proprietary information causes corporations to hoard such information, leading to duplications of effort. Even the development side of R&D is often hard to justify to shareholders demanding quick returns. Take Big Pharma, for instance: intensive clinical drug trials take years, during which time patents expire, leaving companies little to capitalize on. What about venture capitalist firms? Why can’t they take up the slack? They can, but only a little. Gruber and Johnson point out that the research-to-retail journey often involves a lengthy “valley of death,” during which no profit is shown. For many investments with long-term value even the biggest and bravest VC firms can’t, or won’t, make the voyage.

Indeed, for all the techno-prowess of Silicon Valley and for all the entrepreneurial brilliance of the Big Tech and FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google) companies, their reach over the American economy is not as extensive as one might think. They still only employ a small percentage of the American work force. And despite FAANG talk of flying cars and Mars colonies, they still invest, according to Gruber and Johnson in “new products, but not in basic science.” And they are predictable in where they will go to set up shop—to wealthy, elite coastal states, not to flyover, Hillbilly Elegy terrain.

What is needed, say Gruber and Johnson, is public R&D investment throughout the United States that will jump-start the American economy. The Federal government should adopt something like a “technological hub index system” and select underserved metropolitan areas that have sufficient populations, educational institutions, and quality-of-life approval ratings to warrant the placement of the hubs. And not just Cambridge or Palo Alto: the authors choose places ranging from Rochester, New York (ranked first), to Dayton, Ohio (19th); from “Lawrence/Manhattan/Topeka, Kansas” (40th) to Fargo, North Dakota (70th); from Eugene, Oregon (78th) to Atlantic City/Hammonton, New Jersey (102nd). With a commitment of “$100 billion a year,” such R&D would likely be enough to “propel us back to our world leadership position.”

One could argue with all this. One could counter that their proposals, especially on how the funding gets determined in Congress (as a multiyear, rather than single-year, appropriation) and on who or what determines what techno-hub goes where (a bipartisan commission, similar to the Base Realignment and Closure process) are either unrealistic or too lightly argued to be convincing. But Gruber and Johnson have not written an academic treatise. While not quite a manifesto, Jump-Starting America is a clarion call that seeks to draw public attention to real, pressing issues. Their proposals are not grand enough to fully restore American pre-eminence, but they would be a serious start. And the authors make their case in a style that is engaging, accessible, and generally free of partisan rancor.

What is most interesting and noteworthy about the book is the intellectual ballast of their argument, which is based not in reams of economic data but in history. They argue that “the post 1945 years, with tweaks to reflect modern realities show how [publicly driven R&D] can be done.” This is an essential lesson for our times. The massive publicly funded research of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and other organizations in the 1950s and 1960s developed the new technologies that laid the base for both winning the Cold War and America’s leadership of the IT revolution. But few today know this story or appreciate the magnitude of what followed.

Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are proud of their innovation records, but many have forgotten (or never understood) the base of public research on which they built. For example, Bill Gates said in 1998: “The PC industry is leading our nation’s economy into the 21st century… There isn’t an industry in America that is more creative, more alive and more competitive. And the amazing thing is all this happened without any government involvement.” But Linda Weiss, in her own excellent book on the role of public research in American innovation, America, Inc., points out how wrong this view is. As she puts it:

From the GPS to the cell phone, from the mouse to the Siri voice-activated personal assistant application on the new iPhone or to Google Earth, Google Translate and indeed Google’s search engine—all have one thing in common. They, like the internet and the IT revolution that preceded it, emerged from patient federal investment in high-risk innovation, focused in the main on national security objectives.

Gruber and Johnson do a good job of telling the story of government investment in science and research, which they personalize by focusing on the contributions of Vannevar Bush, the Raytheon founder and former MIT Engineering Dean who promoted government investments in World War II and in the Cold War push after Sputnik. Bush was an old-school New England Republican who despised FDR’s New Deal, but, like other internationalist Republicans whom FDR relied upon, he saw the Axis threat as existential. It was Bush who established the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), a “breakthrough” solution, as the authors put it, to bureaucratic blockage. The NDRC brought together, under governmental supervision, U.S. private sector innovation from all corners. And Bush created the postwar public/private innovation model: government provided the funding and private entities did the research in universities and company labs (like Bell Labs). Gruber and Johnson thus challenge the modern idea that “nothing government does works.” As they point out, these government investments not only worked, but produced some of the highest long-term pay-offs of any investments ever. The Bush program was the economic equivalent of Acheson’s “present at the creation” in politics.

But Gruber and Johnson downplay a critical element of these governmental initiatives: they were motivated first and foremost by national security. The first wave of government investments in science came in World War II, when security was obviously the driver. The next wave came after 1957, when Sputnik caused Americans to be seized with fears of Soviet technological advantage. Ike was not a big fan of military spending, but the public and expert reaction to Sputnik was so powerful that he started major public investments in science and technology that would eventually rise to 2 percent of GDP in 1964.

National security concerns were not a side issue; they were the main driver. Without them, America would never have made the sustained commitments of the nation’s treasure that ended up transforming the American economy. Gruber and Johnson acknowledge that security motivations played a role—they say that the postwar economy was “helped greatly by inventions that emerged from the simplest non-commercial motivation: patriotism and fear of a smart enemy, hell-bent on new applications of scientific knowledge.” But this understates the role of national security—it didn’t just “help greatly;” it was the sine qua non.

The critical role of national security in technology investment started in World War II. According to Gruber and Johnson, the military had no interest in science before the war, but the pressure of wartime competition broke down the barriers. The process was led by Vannevar Bush. Scientific contributions in World War II were more engineering than basic science. Sputnik changed all that.

Three things about the post-Sputnik period stand out. First, the government was willing to take a long-term view. It wanted national security pay-offs, but it knew that the way to get them was to invest in basic science. Second, DARPA and other organizations were risk takers. As one DARPA official quoted in the book puts it, “If half the people don’t respond to a publicly announced challenge saying it’s impossible, we haven’t set the bar high enough.” Third, the government had no guarantee that its investments would pay off. They ended up having transformative effects on the U.S. economy, but this would not become evident for another ten to 20 years. In a sense, America discovered the transformative potential of science and technology by experiment—it made the investments for national security reasons and later discovered that they could transform the economy.

Of course nothing lasts forever. Eventually the postwar government/private-sector R&D symbiosis wound down. Gruber and Johnson posit a variety of socio-cultural reasons: the Vietnam War, the loss of faith in science’s ability to solve the world’s problems, the growing environmental movement, and the fear of thermonuclear destruction by weapons (“Einstein’s monsters”). But the final, decisive decline of governmental investments in science came with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ending of the Cold War—which removed the external threat that had gotten the movement started in the first place.

While Gruber and Johnson downplay the role of national security in driving public investment in science, they at least address the issue. Often academics have tended to shy away from the link between national security and innovation—perhaps for fear of being branded Cold Warriors. But the idea of external security threats motivating national innovation pushes has been around for a long time. Scholars have argued that Meiji Japan embraced modernization and because of fears of being colonized, that South Korea industrialized in response to threats from the north, that Taiwan industrialized to secure its independence from China, and that Deng Xiaoping launched China’s reform push because he saw China being surpassed by other countries in the region.

Political scientist Mark Zachary Taylor’s book The Politics of Innovation (2016) examines and puts the external threat argument in a broader political context. According to his theory of “creative insecurity,” internal domestic rivalries and differences among interest groups normally make it difficult or impossible for governments to launch state-supported innovation pushes. Such pushes only happen when external developments are seen to be so threatening in military or economic terms that they allow or force national leaders to embrace innovation in order to defend the nation. External security threats are critical, but it is the balance between external pressures and internal factions that determines whether governments act.

Taylor provides plenty of empirical data and detailed case studies to support his thesis, which seems to have considerable explanatory power. However, Taylor is wary of taking his arguments too far. Perhaps he doesn’t want to be perceived as advocating that nations conjure up external threats to motivate innovation pushes. To avoid this, he argues that the notion of external threats should be modified in the contemporary world to refer to challenges that are less military or security-focused—challenges such as nuclear proliferation, climate change, disease, and aging.

But his argument is not especially persuasive. None of these other challenges carry the weight of a threat to survival or national independence, which is historically what has normally been required for governments to act. Taylor himself gives the reasons why external pressures have to be substantial—in order to overcome domestic obstacles. His model (without his amendments) seems to fit the historical U.S. experiences described by Gruber and Johnson quite well.

Unfortunately, in making their case for a new public push on science and technology, Gruber and Johnson make the same kind of mistake Taylor does. While nodding to the economic and security threat from China, Gruber and Johnson mainly base their case for public science on domestic economic challenges such as slowing growth, growing disparities in wealth and income, and the division of the United States into high and low-growth areas. They not only want to increase national investment in science, but also tailor it to cities and regions that have fallen behind.

This is a noble vision and may make sense from the point of view of promoting U.S. prosperity and economic inclusion. But it is miles from the kind of external security threat that motivated American investments after Sputnik. Taylor’s theory suggests that major security or economic threats are required and America’s own experiences in World War II and the Cold War point to the same conclusion. It would be nice if domestic economic problems could motivate a national science push, but in practice this doesn’t seem likely to happen.

That does not mean that Gruber and Johnson’s proposal to jump-start America is ill-advised. It just means they need to give it a stronger, more convincing rationale. If the Soviet threat motivated America’s earlier science push, today we need to look especially at the economic and security threat posed by China.

Yes, there are many differences from the 1950s. China’s leaders have not said they will bury us. We are not in a Cold War with China. And there has been no Sputnik moment. But unlike the Soviet Union, China has a strong and fast-growing economy. The U.S. National Defense Strategy is now mainly focused on great power competition with China. The Trump Administration is in a trade conflict with the Chinese, and Americans are angry at Beijing’s theft of U.S. technology.

The last 20 years have seen a major shift of manufacturing from America to China, as American and other multinational companies outsourced low-wage phases of production. This has been a major boon to China’s growth, but has imposed costs on the American economy and on less-skilled workers (productivity has slowed and wages have fallen). Some of this has happened by natural market forces, but China has also used predatory practices to increase its access to Western technology (IP theft, forced technology transfers, and purchases of Western companies).

Moreover, the economic threat from China is growing. As Dennis Blair and Robert Atkinson noted in a 2018 article in this magazine, President Xi Jinping has stated his intention to make China the “master of its own technologies”—to build national champions in a wide array of high-tech sectors and to compete with Western companies in global markets through the “Made in China 2025” plan. As Blair and Atkinson rightly point out, the U.S. response to all this has been slow, confused, and somewhat incoherent. And while China may find it difficult to achieve global dominance, especially in IT and cutting-edge technology, its low costs, cheap capital, and export subsidies will make it a stronger competitor over time.

China probably does not intend to challenge the U.S. militarily any time soon. Its strategy is to build its economic and technological power and overtake the United States in whole-of-nation strength, which it may then use for geopolitical ends. America is not badly positioned for economic and technology competition with China, but we are punching below our weight because many companies are not investing for the future and public investment in R&D, infrastructure, and workforce skills is way below where it should be.

These shortcomings could be addressed by a more ambitious version of the policy proposals that Gruber and Johnson have put forward. Rather than investing only in science in disadvantaged regions, the U.S. could enact a comprehensive program for strengthening growth and jobs—involving elements such as tax incentives for companies to invest in disruptive technologies and worker training; public investments in quantum, artificial intelligence, and cyber technologies; restoration and updating of infrastructure; and attracting high-tech workers from other countries.

Gruber and Johnson make some good points: America does need a stronger public/private innovation ecosystem, the Sputnik era does suggest some ways to get there, and a new push on science and technology should be non-partisan. But to compete with China we need larger and more open-ended investments. History suggests that the only way to convince the American people to accept those costs is to link the investments to national security. That is not war-mongering; it is realism.

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 appeared first on The American Interest.

The Neo-Paganism of Jordan Peterson

One of the strangest cultural phenomena to arise out of the 2016 election and its aftermath is the growing popularity, in far-Right circles, of a purportedly chiseled Twitter provocateur named Bronze Age Pervert. A self-proclaimed “Aspiring Nudist Bodybuilder. Free speech and anti-xenoestrogen activist” with about 20,000 Twitter followers to date, BAP (as he’s known)  has managed to become an unlikely symbolic figurehead for powerful corners of the far-Right Internet. Back in 2017, for example, Curtis Yarvin, aka the Neo-reactionary philosopher Mencius Moldbug, used BAP’s name as part of an elaborate troll: telling The Atlantic’s Rosie Gray that BAP was, in fact, Moldbug’s point of contact for the White House.

“Apparently there’s a big underground movement of right-wing bodybuilders — thousands,” Yarvin told Gray. “Their plan is to surface spectacularly this April, in a choreographed flash demo on the Mall. They’ll be totally nude, but wearing MAGA hats. Goal is to intimidate Congress with pure masculine show of youth.”

Yarvin was almost certainly joking. Bronze Age Pervert’s account tends not towards the political but the aesthetic: #HandsomeThursdays consisting of images of sweat-glistening athletic young men of Nordic or Slavic extraction, or else promotions for BAP’s 2018 self-help book, Bronze Age Mindset, a Nietzschean paean to primordiality, written entirely in Internet patois. (“This is not a book of philosophy,” an early paragraph reads. “It is exhortation. . . . In [Heraclitus’s] day many gods, clove-footed satyr, and other things showed themselves to men in dreams. [Now] Spiritually your insides are all wet, and there’s a huge hole through where monstrous powers are fucking your brain, letting loose all your life and power of focus.”)

But Yarvin was on to something. His hat-tip to BAP worked as a joke precisely because, despite the high camp of his trolling persona, BAP, and the brand of mythic atavism he claims to represent, is a symbolically resonant figurehead for the reactionary, post-Nietzchean nostalgia that has come to define so much of anti-progressive culture. For a loosely affiliated coterie of men in particular, this kind of mythic atavism—a blend of Nietzschean strength-fetishization, pagan imagery, anti-civilizational superstition, and biological materialism—has become a new defining creed.

The fascination itself isn’t new, of course. From Nietzsche onwards, fetishizing an imagined, unspecified, agrarian past has been an integral part of reactionary discourse. Masculine human nature—the fundamentally heroic telos of the warrior—has been suppressed by the feminizing force of a “sclerotic” civilization: at once bloodless and suspiciously, femininely fecund. For Nietzsche, that offending force was Christianity, with its “slave morality” and subversive, unnatural valorization of weakness. Christianity was a religion of disingenuity, one in which “impotence which doesn’t retaliate is being turned into ‘goodness’; timid baseness is being turned into ‘humility’; submission to people one hates is being turned into ‘obedience.’”

So too the Italian modernist-occultist writer Julius Evola, whose 1934 Revolt Against the Modern World doubles as the Ur-text of this trend. For both men, the abandonment of a fundamental, biologically determined caste system—seen as the hallmark of these “modern” religions—led inexorably to moral and spiritual decay. “The West has lost the sense of command and obedience,” bemoaned Evola in an earlier work, Pagan Imperialism. “It has lost the sense of Action and of Contemplation. It has lost the sense of hierarchy, of spiritual power, of man-Gods. It no longer knows nature. It is no longer, for Western man, a living body made of symbols, of Gods and ritual gestures.” 

And why? 

Christianity is at the root of the evil that has corrupted the West…in its frenetic subversion of every hierarchy, in its exaltation of the weak, the disinherited, those without lineage and without tradition; in its call to “love,” to “believe,” and to yield; in its rancor toward everything that is force, self-sufficiency, knowledge, and aristocracy; in its intolerant and proselytizing fanaticism, Christianity poisoned the greatness of the Roman Empire. Enemy of itself and of the world, this dark and barbarous wave remains the principal cause of the West’s decline.

For Evola and Nietzsche alike, the absence of violence—and specifically hierarchical violence—could not end in anything other than nihilism. An enchanted world was necessarily a world of bloodlust.

Today, however, it is not Christianity, or “Christian civilization,” that fuels accusations of degeneration, but rather one of its most frequent opponents: social justice activism. Modern atavists claim that the slippery slope of feminism, political correctness, moral relativism, “woke” culture, and offense obsession that have led to a kind of “slave morality”—or “cuck morality,” to use a favorite alt-right slur. Nevertheless, the conclusion is the same: Modern men are bereft of the warrior identity that both biological determinism and Jungian archetype have laid out for them. Only through a re-appropriation of that primal strength can men re-enchant a desiccated, secular, bourgeois world of office jobs and “wage cuckery.” 

In his Bronze Age Mindset, for example, BAP derides the specters of progressivism, using language and imagery that echoes Nietzsche and Evola’s critiques of Christianity. “Of all the things that you blame for the decrepit times we live in, feminism and the ‘liberation’ of women is both the proximate and the ultimate cause. Nothing so ridiculous as the liberation of women has ever been attempted in the history of mankind.” He has even stronger words for social justice: a “disgusting parasitism, dressed up in rags of words so worn-out and pee-stained even their defenders are sick of the smell. . . . they say it half-mouthed and pleading: just look at them during the Occupy rallies, hoping to siphon off respect.” Those in sympathy with modern society’s liberal goals are mere, flaccid “bugmen.”

BAP may be mythic atavism’s most obvious mouthpiece, but he’s hardly the only one. Examples of this neo-Nietzscheanism can be found more broadly in extreme corners of the Internet Right—among the men’s rights activists and r/Redpilled set, with their twinned obsession with weight lifting, paleo diets, and masculine phrenology—as well as in relatively mainstream figures like Jordan Peterson, the closest thing reactionary atavism has to a guru, who preach the gospel of evolutionary masculinity as a corrective to political correctness.

And it is a gospel. At its core, contemporary reactionary atavism is a religious crisis: a search for foundational meaning in a world its adherents decry as postmodern, relativist, and under the yoke of PC doublespeak, a world where not even pronouns can be relied upon. It is an attempt to find, in the primordial and often heavily gendered myths of conflict, war, order and chaos, heroes and damsels, something immutable about the human condition. Our animal nature—that which “civilization” decries (or, as the case may be, cancels)—is the closest thing we have to an immortal soul. Civilization may have made milksops of us all, this new good news tells us, but we can be animals.

This shared gospel of atavism may not have a God per se, but it blends the tropes of pagan myth with biological materialism, such that chaos and Nature become one. “Chaos, the eternal feminine, is also the crushing force of sexual selection,” writes Peterson in one telling paragraph in his self-help book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. “It is Woman as Nature who looks at half of all men and says, ‘No!’ For the men, that’s a direct encounter with chaos.”

Temporal longevity and teleology are thus conflated. Something that is old—encoded into our DNA—becomes, implicitly, good. “The longer a feature has existed,” Peterson writes in 12 Rules, “the more time it has had to be selected—and to shape life. It does not matter whether that feature is physical and biological or social and cultural. All that matters, from a Darwinian perspective, is permanence. . . . The dominance hierarchy is not capitalism. It’s not communism. . . . It’s not the military-industrial complex. It’s not the patriarchy. . . . it’s not even a human creation. . . . it is instead a near-eternal aspect of the environment.”

Peterson’s materialism is, itself, quasi-religious: a search for something at once authentic and ontologically reliable. Civilizations may come and go; language (and those pesky gender pronouns) may shift, but fundamentally there is a Big Something that underpins the meaningfulness and coherence of existence. That human beings share in the dominance hierarchies that define Peterson’s favorite example, the lobster, isn’t just a lucky fact of nature but a theological etiology: an origin story that gives us an identity that can transcend the kaleidoscopic uncertainty of a postmodern age. 

The battle for survival—the story of animal evolution, of dominance hierarchies, of female sexual selection, of a brutal Darwinian world—becomes our new Genesis: In Peterson’s world, we are all iterations of the Babylonian king-God Marduk (whom Peterson regularly cites in his lectures), defeating the watery powers of the nature-goddess Tiamat. It’s telling that this kind of atavism has taken hold most strongly among young, libertarian or right-leaning atheists. While Jordan Peterson has vaguely hinted at a Christian affiliation, and individual members of the manosphere, such as Return of Kings’ Roosh V (Daryush Valizadeh), have embraced Neo-traditionalist Christianity, the contours of the reactionary internet tend toward the secular—or at least, the spiritual-but-not-religious.

It’s true that atavism has even been absorbed into many Trumpist evangelical circles as a syncretic blend of Nietzscheanism and muscular Christianity; Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, has tweeted that “Conservatives & Christians need to stop electing ‘nice guys,’” because although “they might make great Christian leaders. . . . the US needs street fighters like @realDonaldTrump at every level of government b/c the liberal fascists Dems are playing for keeps & many Repub leaders are a bunch of wimps!” At its core, however, atavism is symbolically pagan: a veneration both of pure, brutish power and of a chthonic Nature that rewards blood sacrifice. 

Here we see an uncanny mirror image of the rise of progressive occultism. Modern (explicit) neo-pagan practice—itself among the fastest-growing religious movements in America—has become increasingly intertwined with progressive values. Those who actually worship, say, the Greco-Roman gods are more likely to be found at an abortion rally than in Bronze Age Pervert’s Twitter mentions. (Hell, even the self-proclaimed religion-cum-performance-art-group Satanic Temple was rocked by internet dissent because—among other reasons—members were concerned about the lack of representation of women and people of color in leadership). Contemporary “self-care” culture—with its essential oils, its tarot cards, and its sage cleansing—often serves as the spiritualized branch of the social justice movement. (Ironically, many of these movements see within Christianity the very same dominance hierarchies and patriarchies of which Nietzsche and Evola were so fond. )

Reactionary atavism, by contrast, appeals mostly to men who feel alienated both by the dictates of traditional organized religion and by progressive spirituality. It’s the paleo answer to Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop empire. 

The comparison isn’t just metaphorical, either: the paleo supplements sold as “Super Male Vitality” by, for example, the radio personality and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones of InfoWars, are all but chemically identical to the “Sex Dust” sold by Amanda Chantal Bacon through Goop.

In his recent book Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac, Steven Smith identifies the fundamental tension of Western culture as being a battle between the “pagans”—the inheritors of Classical ideas about Nature being inherently sacred—and Christians, who look for a transcendent Good outside the world. 

But today, for the first time, the coming culture wars may not be fought between Christians and pagans. As more and more Americans on both sides of the political aisle leave organized religion, we may see the next culture war skirmish fought between two different kinds of pagan, each of whom believes that it is the heroic underdog: the destroyer of a civilization that is either too masculine, or too feminine, for its own good.

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Putinist Rule Minus Putin?

Editor’s Note: This is the third essay in a multi-author series on “Getting Russia Right.” Read the first installment by Karina Orlova here, and the second by Carla Anne Robbins here.

The Russian tradition of top-down rule has a long history, but Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was not condemned to follow it over the past couple of decades. It was Putin who made the crucial decision to reinforce it further on his return to the Kremlin in 2012 by choosing repression over the cautious economic reforms that had been mooted in the Medvedev presidential interlude. He it was who seized Crimea in 2014 and invaded eastern Ukraine. He has overseen the decline in the Russian economy since 2008 and the continuing rise in corruption that has gone along with it. He is responsible for the servility of the Duma and the courts to the diktat of the executive branch, and for the predatory conduct of Russia’s various enforcement agencies.

The questions for Russia now are how, and whether, present political structures can in due course cope without Putin. “Putinism” is a convenient shorthand for describing the way Russia is ruled, but that is the result of a personalized process intended to enforce the unity of the Russian state and the obligation of its citizens to obey its requirements, not a construct defined in detail from the start. Its principal achievement has been that it has both protected and enhanced the role of the center. Putin’s re-election as President in 2018 confirmed authoritarianism as a process in continuing advance, its overriding purpose being to retain power in the interests of those already wielding it, and bound by loyalty to its central figure, at present Putin.

Putin does not of course literally rule alone. He cannot in the nature of things decide everything in Russia by himself. He could not, even if he wished it, prevent those holding some degree of power at any level from using it to their cumulative advantage without regard to the law, or to what most outsiders would see as common decency, for that matter. He is most immediately dependent on the support of a narrowing set of long-term collaborators, whether political-, security-, or business-related, whose interests are also dependent on the present disorder of things, together with the mutual and complicit trust among those collaborators essential to its preservation. Putin is the linchpin that holds them together. Hang together or hang separately is the English language proverb. There is no doubt a Russian one.

Stability?

Putin’s present term ends in May 2024. He cannot under Russia’s Constitution stand again that year. But the personalized and repressive logic of Putinism implies that a way to allow him to remain in command must nevertheless be found. As Grigory Yavlinsky rightly put it in his updated and newly translated study of what he calls peripheral authoritarianism, in Russia and in other states similarly governed:

signs have become more pronounced that Russia’s autocracy is developing along the lines of long-term usurpation of power by a very close circle of people that see politics in terms of highly personal power play rather than as a mechanism to ensure the long-term survival of Russian statehood.

Yavlinsky concludes that the spectrum of remaining opportunities for change has narrowed, at least for the next decade. If that proves to be so, preserving a lasting claim to continuing legitimacy without addressing Russia’s external or internal problems would in effect, if it succeeded, be to freeze those problems in place.

The shadow of unknown and so far unpredictable change in 2024 has now fed into a shift in public attitudes since Putin’s re-election in 2018. Putin himself has become somewhat tarnished, losing in the process his image of being beyond politics, and of being Russia’s necessary savior. Putin is now held personally responsible for domestic problems that he could once deflect onto his Prime Minister’s shoulders. The argument that the Kremlin is the defender of “traditional values” on behalf of the Russian people has lost some of its force. The perception that Russia’s leaders are concerned for their own interests and those of their privileged dependents, rather than those of Russia’s ordinary citizens, is becoming the norm. Polls show that about 27-30 percent of the population are now ready, or at least say they are ready, to take part in street protests. These are becoming more common, not least outside Moscow, provoked for the most part by local issues and the misdeeds of local or regional office holders. But they all nevertheless reflect to some degree or another on the standing of the Kremlin.

None of this is to suggest that widespread public disturbance is imminent. What triggers that in any society is always unpredictable. There are, moreover, neither widely accepted ideas for better government nor public figures of sufficient standing to articulate them in Russia, for now at least, around whom such disturbances might crystallize on a nation-wide scale. But the existing and potentially developing shift in public attitudes does indicate that, if Putin chooses to stay in effective power after 2024, then continuity in the Kremlin will be dependent on popular resignation rather than enthusiasm. Russia’s economic prospects up to and beyond 2024 are poor, and neither Putin nor his authoritarian minded supporters have serious proposals for improving them. The “National Projects” he has put forward are similar in principle to others that have been tried in vain before. Assertions that innovative investment in the defense sector will pay off in promoting diversity across the economy as a whole have proved false. Per capita income has declined over the past five years and may not easily recover. Putin and his colleagues can no longer rely, as the Kremlin did ten or more years ago, on growing income from natural resources, however ill-managed, to bolster its popular appeal and to pay off its political allies. Around three-quarters of Russia’s GDP is by now state owned, meaning run by Putin sanctioned beneficiaries.

Significant capital flight has continued and is a clear marker of distrust of the authorities. So too is the less widely noted emigration of well educated and enterprising Russians to the Western democracies since 2000, whose rate rose significantly after Putin’s return to the Kremlin in 2012. The total over the past 19 years is estimated to be 1.6–2 million.

The Internal Backstop

Economic difficulties, a sense that Putinism has exhausted its political capital and resentment at the enforcement of top down control may perhaps make a further Putin term after 2024 troublesome to implement without some sort of domestic or foreign event to make it seem necessary. There are however significant numbers of Russians able to benefit from the complexities of the present state of affairs, or unsettled enough at the thought of Putin going without a clear and reasonably trusted successor in prospect to make Putin’s continuance in effective control seem by 2023 both inevitable and acceptable. Continued stagnation from 2024 on and uncertain relations with the outside world would, on the other hand, seem likely to fuel more and more discontent.

There is at present no sign of an aging Putin or his collaborators having anything fresh to offer on his home front, either before or after 2024. But he has a telling reserve of force at his disposal for the purpose of ensuring the survival of the regime in case of domestic violence. The National Guard is comparable in numbers to the Russian Armed Forces. Its declared purpose is to ensure public order, meaning in practice keeping Russian citizens in order by force, however violent. There are other internal agencies with similar powers. The extent of the network expresses ruthlessness but is also a mark of fear within the regime as to the committed loyalty of the Russian people in general. The same is true of the persistent effort made by Kremlin supporters to confine public discussion to their approved agenda of how Russia should develop, politically, economically or with regard to the rest of the world.

The effect is that Russia at present exists in a state of limbo, with its governing authorities incapable of addressing the issues of most importance to its citizens, its domestic concerns. The large share of the Russian budget devoted to domestic and international security gets in the way, along with the interest of privileged state contractors in using every opportunity to pursue and price projects designed to fill their pockets rather than benefit the public as a whole.

Great Power?

Stephen Kotkin records in his magisterial history of the Stalin years that, by 1937, “Perceived security imperatives and a need for absolute unity once again turned the quest in Russia to build a strong state into personal rule.” Stalin has of course been restored to eminent repute in Russia under Putin, and Putin has been influenced by Stalin’s train of thought, as well as borrowing his language from time to time. But I do not quote Kotkin to show that Putin is a Stalin clone, merely to point to the fact that Putin’s aim from the beginning has been, like Stalin’s and others’ before him, to build a strong state in Russia by means of a “vertical of power,” and that the end result is, once again, personal rule. Security imperatives, as Putin would see them, have been a driving force, with the need for absolute unity in meeting them as the inescapable corollary. Like Stalin before him, Putin does not draw a distinction between what he sees as threatening at home or abroad. The two shade into one another.

The tragedy of Beslan in September 2004, for instance, was by any normal criteria an internal affair, with the school seized by Chechen terrorists and the threat resolved with brutal slaughter by Russian forces. For Putin, it was also an attempt by unspecified foreign forces to seize a “juicy piece” of Russian territory, and a reason to abolish the autonomous standing of Russia’s Governors. He and his colleagues saw the 2004-05 Orange Revolution in Ukraine not as an internal crisis in that state, but as the result of foreign interference directed at Russia. He responded at home with increasingly stringent measures against non-governmental organizations in Russia, starting with any that had any form of external financial aid and the introduction and extension of measures directed against “extremism.” He argued that the street protests of 2011-12 were provoked and planned by Hillary Clinton. And so on, to the need to protect Fortress Russia today from internal Fifth Columnists and from hostile foreign powers determined to destroy it.

There are of course complexities in this process of hardening attitudes in official Russia as to its relationship with its own people, with its ex-Soviet neighbors, with former members of the Warsaw Pact, and with the West in general over the Putin years, but one strain is constant: Nothing is ever Russia’s fault. Moscow is always sinned against. Putin’s historic mission is to restore his country’s status as a great power, with the right to establish and protect its hegemony over its neighbors. Those neighbors have no right to object, let alone to look to outside powers to support their independence. Putin and his colleagues have public support in Russia for such a stance, as did their tsarist predecessors in analogous circumstances. But the Russian public would at the same time by now prefer there to be a less fraught relationship with the rest of Europe, and the United States too. The euphoria provoked by the Kremlin’s bloodless seizure of Crimea in 2014 has faded. The idea that their country has a special mission to defend itself, and that this has to be done by cowing its neighbors into effective submission, is still there as a general assumption, but not as an immediate aspiration.

It would be troubling in any country for its leader or leaders to see military might as the defining factor in its power and influence. It is particularly the case when its leader knows that its conventional forces are not sufficient to conquer and hold significant stretches of external and disputed territory. The reforms forced upon Russia’s Armed Forces under the now disgraced and, in the Ministry of Defense, much hated Anatoliy Serdyukov (Minister of Defense, 2007-12) were effective but not completed. What is therefore needed, in Putin’s mind as well as those of Russia’s Generals, is a substantial nuclear arsenal and a willingness to use it, so as to make Russia in some sense equal to the United States. The Armed Forces and the Ministry of Defense have a special place in the governing hierarchy of Putin’s Russia, and an in-grown cast of mind to go with it. The degree of military influence over the country’s policymaking may increase as Putin’s leading role in Moscow lasts up to or perhaps beyond 2024.

There are those in the West who see what Russia’s improved Armed Forces have enabled Putin to achieve in relation to China, the Middle East, and even Ukraine as successes. (Angela Stent’s recent published Russia Against the West and with the Rest provides an informed discussion of this argument.) Others wonder what they will have achieved for the people of Russia themselves over the longer term. No one doubts that Russia under Putin will continue its pursuit of glory, at the expense of the United States as occasion offers. The present Chief of Russia’s General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, has said, after all, that “we are already at war.” His definition of war is of course particular and wide-ranging. If Western countries were at war with Russia, we would among other things impound the capital exported to the West for safe keeping, very much including to the UK and United States. That wealth is a pillar of the Putin version of rule. We treat it kindly—arguably too kindly.

Outside powers have to take Russian militarism seriously, including its potential future development. Precautionary measures taken by outside powers, however necessary, in turn feed the Kremlin’s conviction of its right and need to build up its security, whether domestic or international. It is nonetheless not at all obvious how or when the Kremlin might judge itself secure, or how it might be satisfied that it had achieved some adequate recognition of its status as a Great Power. Putin himself spoke at the opening of the 70th UN General Assembly on September 28, 2015, of the Yalta system as having saved the world from large scale upheavals, an ahistorical, emotionally charged assertion. There are those who see the Kremlin’s stress on a history of Russian military victories, and the obsessive celebration of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in 1945, as essential to the Putinist system’s survival. It is however easier to see the emotional forces behind Russia’s aggressive pursuit of regional dominance and its antagonism towards the West in general and the United States in particular than it is to see what practical, constructive, and sustainable ends the Kremlin may seek.

Putinism Minus Putin

Yeltsin’s replacement by Putin in 2000 was comparatively simple to arrange. The search in Russia today for a plausible mechanism to prolong Putin’s rule after 2024 points to problems at the heart of governing Russia today. It is hard for any authoritarian leader definitively to leave with an easy confidence in his future. Those closest to Putin are beholden to him for their wealth and power. They are also of advancing age and therefore have their own succession problems to think about. Russia’s real governing system is based on “understandings” upheld by shared corruption and predation. None of those at the top can know what would happen to them personally if Putin were to be replaced. Better to stick with him while you can, and then run to the next one, if there is one, when you have to.

Finding a way to live on with Putin beyond 2024 will, in the absence of changes in policy, only make the problems inherent in replacing him still more troubling—“dangerous” might be the better word. Whoever or whatever succeeds Putin will have to make its own mark on the Russia of the future, whatever that Russia might prove to be. That may not be at all easy if Putinism as we know it remains the system in power. The chances are that Putin will in the meantime stick to tight control over any form of relaxation, however guarded. The bias towards repression—internal or external, publicly organized and implemented or covert and deniable—ensures its weight in the Putinist dialectic.

Repression, and the hostility toward the West that accompanies it, also ensure the ultimate sterility of Putinism. Avoiding that repression could in principle incline an eventual successor or group of successors to consider whether more accommodating policies toward the West, and toward Russia’s European neighbors in particular, might be wise, and even whether the same would apply to the relationship between the rulers and the ruled in Russia. Any preparatory shifts in that sort of direction would at present, however, run across the interests and well-entrenched beliefs of Putin’s immediate circles within both the “vertical of power” and the big state enterprises. It is also an open question, in fact as well as in Putinist minds, how far any such shifts might be contained or controlled. Arranging a better relationship with the rest of Europe might be one thing; there would probably be costs to Russian pride and to the Kremlin’s ability to protect its stake in persuading Russians of its inherent right to represent them, but revisiting the realities of governance in Russia as they have merged under Putinism would be quite another. The personalized authoritarian system that now exists in Russia could not now be eased apart in manageable units without compromising its central objective – ensuring its hold on power.

If Russia is to break free of the minimal economic growth and societal impoverishment that is its present likely fate, a whole range of intertwined issues must be addressed. That might well be harder to achieve after 2024 than it already is. An illustrative and quite familiar list would include: the rule of clearly expressed and accepted law ensured by independent judicial structures; public accountability assured by free elections and free media; commercial competition, not monopolies and cartels; established and protected property rights; and so on. None of these could readily be approached gradually and without social as well as political conflict. Market competition would for example entail the collapse of considerable numbers of enterprises. Creative destruction is intellectually compelling, but tough on those caught up in it.

Anders Åslund’s judgement in the conclusion to his latest book, Russia’s Crony Capitalism, is apt: Putin’s system “is so petrified that it is more likely to collapse than reform.” He may or may not have meant petrified in the sense of scared stiff as well as frozen in stone, but both seem appropriate to me.

Russia on a Short Lease?

Russia’s problem is basic: It is chronically ill-governed. Russia is not, yet at any rate, a fully formed state with an effective constitution. There are those who argue that authoritarian rulers are just as effective, if not more, than those of liberal democracies on the grounds, as I understand it, that they can take quick action. They can also take mistaken ones fast. And there is a process at play in Russia, as there has been in countries similarly governed, whereby the structures that are intended to enforce top-down rule by a small self-appointed elite rot from within. It is no coincidence that the threat of “color revolutions,” wherever they may occur, is the one that haunts the Kremlin today.

There is no way to judge at present to what extent, if at all, current signs of dissatisfaction with Putinist rule will develop into a coherent opposition movement before or after 2024. One can be sure, however, that if such a tendency emerges the Kremlin will pin the blame on Western intrigue. But in truth not even the United States, Russia’s favorite bogeyman, has either the will or the capability to pursue regime change in Russia. And extending Russia’s frontiers would be no answer to Moscow’s home-grown difficulties.

It is proposed from time to time that Western countries, whether individually or together, should “reset” their relations with Russia. That ambition may be well meaning, but it is not clear why it might succeed in the absence of any changing disposition on the part of Putin’s Moscow. We have to manage the relationship as best we may in accordance with the way that Russia itself evolves, meaning both its rulers and its peoples. Putinism has imprisoned itself in its existing carapace. Perhaps the Russian people will find better fortune when Putin goes, and a peaceable evolution toward better government will emerge. Perhaps, on the other hand, Russia’s people will accept that they are the Kremlin’s servants, and not insist that Russia is theirs to control. But the rigidity of Putinism suggests that the “nightmare” of a color revolution may one day come to Russia itself.

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It Ought to Be Gothick

In 1681, the great Christopher Wren was called upon to add a bell tower (today known as Tom Tower) to the unfinished gatehouse of the Great Quadrangle of Christ Church in Oxford. The college had been built by Cardinal Thomas Wolsey 150 years earlier in the castellated Late Gothic style that was then popular. By 1681, such architecture was definitely out of fashion and Wren, who was Britain’s leading architect and an active proponent of Renaissance classicism, might have been expected to add a classical tower to Christ Church. Instead, he chose to fit in rather than stand out. As he succinctly explained, the tower “ought to be Gothick to agree with the Founder’s worke.”

I was reminded of Wren during the events that followed the calamitous four-hour fire that destroyed the roof and spire of Notre-Dame de Paris this April. A few days after the fire, the government of Emmanuel Macron announced that it intended to hold an international architectural competition to rebuild the cathedral. The Prime Minister, Édouard Philippe, emphasized that the spire should be restored in a manner “suited to the techniques and challenges of our time.” President Macron himself promised that Notre-Dame would be rebuilt within five years (in time for the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris), and that it would be an “inventive reconstruction,” a “contemporary architectural gesture” that would leave the cathedral “more beautiful than before.”

The architectural community, reading between the lines, saw an opportunity. Soon, dozens of proposals flooded the internet. Many unknown architects—and a few well-known figures such as Norman Foster—had a go. Since glass is the material du jour, many of the ambulance-chasers proposed putting a glass roof over the nave. Maybe it would be a greenhouse, maybe a viewing platform, whatever. Predictably, the replacement spires tended to be glass shards or steel spikes, although a pair of Italian architects proposed a Baccarat crystal.

The rest of the world looked on in growing disbelief—and concern. The official architect of the cathedral, who had been supervising a painstaking renovation over the past six years, pointed out that a five-year schedule was unrealistic. Le Figaro published a protest letter calling for a more measured response, not an “architectural gesture.” The more than one thousand signatories included a former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the two chief curators of the Louvre, and a number of prominent French preservationists.

On May 28, the French Senate, the country’s prime legislative body, passed a resolution stipulating that any rebuilding must abide by existing planning, environmental, and heritage regulations—in other words, no rush. Moreover, the result should be faithful to Notre-Dame’s “last known visual state”—no steel spikes. Before it became law, the resolution had to be approved by the National Assembly. The debate there was lively, much of it centering on the difference between rebuilding and restoring. “I don’t want it to be more beautiful than before,” proclaimed one deputy, “I want it to be identical!” Finally, on July 16, after the Senate and the National Assembly failed to reach agreement on a common text, the National Assembly, where Macron’s centrist party has a majority, passed a reconstruction bill. The legislation does not address the actual architectural form of the rebuilding, one way or the other.

A few days after the fire, Slate posted a rather silly article titled “Let’s Not Rebuild Notre-Dame.” The gist of the article was that any reconstruction of the medieval building would be inauthentic, so it would be best to leave it alone. “Just like we visit ruined castles, let’s visit Notre-Dame and be conscious that with it, a part of our civilization has gone up in smoke,” wrote the author, a Parisian translator named Bérengère Viennot, “that we must accept it, with its scars and its losses, because that’s what’s left.”

Viennot’s article reflects the common view that great buildings are like inviolable works of art; if an arm breaks off the Venus de Milo you don’t stick on a new one. But architecture is a peculiar art. As soon as a building is finished, it begins to change. Practical considerations intrude, people move things around. Unlike paintings, buildings are left out in the rain (as Frank Lloyd Wright used to say), they weather, things break or wear out and are repaired or replaced. And it’s not just the users and the elements—buildings are subject to natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and fires, as well as manmade destruction such as military bombardment, vandalism, and insensitive alteration. The last is hardly the least dangerous. An owner’s desire to remain up-to-date, no less than a fire, is always a potential threat to an old building.

Buildings last for centuries, and are routinely altered to accommodate changing functions. The Great Mosque of Córdoba, for example, was enlarged three times between 784 and 987 to accommodate the growing population of the city. There was no master plan, but over two centuries successive generations of builders and craftsmen copied what was there, even as they rebuilt the minaret and introduced domes and lanterns. The result, like so many great buildings, is a palimpsest; layers of history—including lots of reused Roman columns— and all the more compelling for it.

The corner stone of Notre-Dame de Paris was laid in 1163. As was common practice, construction began with the choir and proceeded westward—that way mass could be said in the unfinished church. The construction, which proceeded in several bouts, took a hundred years. When the nave was complete the clerics concluded that the altar area was too dark and a transept was added. In the mid-13th century the transept was enlarged and remodeled with lacier stonework and dazzling rose windows. By then the towers of the west facade were complete. They are not identical, although not as different as those of Chartres Cathedral, one of which is Romanesque, the other Gothic. Over the years, Notre-Dame has suffered many slings and arrows: Huguenot rioters sacked the church in the 16th century; in the 17th, Louis XIV rebuilt the rood screen, opened up the choir, added a new high altar, and replaced many of the stained-glass windows with clear glass; during the French Revolution the church was looted and its west front was damaged—the sans-culottes decapitated the statues of the Kings of Judah believing them to represent French monarchs. Napoleon had himself crowned in the cathedral, reinstating the building as a national symbol, although he didn’t repair it, just slapped on a coat of whitewash.

The old church was not in great shape, and in the mid-19th century it underwent a major rehabilitation. The work was overseen by the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, in many ways the inventor of the modern practice of historic preservation. He removed the neoclassical features added in the 17th century, restored much of the stained glass (that work was only completed in the 1960s), and replaced looted statuary. He also built a 300-foot flèche, or spire, over the crossing, the original having been removed in 1786 and never replaced. “To restore a building is not to preserve it, to repair, or rebuild it,” he once famously wrote, “it is to reinstate it in a condition of completeness which could never have existed at any given time.” This somewhat cryptic statement underlines the paradox of restoration, which is that “completeness” is not a natural condition of architecture, and that a restored building represents something new as well as something old. Viollet-le-Duc’s work on Notre-Dame was sometimes creative, such as the famous roof gargoyles that were not a part of the original medieval fabric. But whatever he did was carried out in the Gothic spirit; “What would a medieval master builder have done?” was his ruling principle.

So why is there even a question of how Notre-Dame should be rebuilt? To understand, one has to go back to the early 1900s and the emergence of architectural modernism, one of whose founding principles was that every age requires its own unique architecture. As the field of historic preservation developed it adopted the same doctrine: When old buildings were added to, or substantially altered, the new work should be distinct from the old—“of its time” was the phrase often used. That is what Macron meant by “inventive reconstruction.”

The idea that an old building becomes inauthentic if it is seamlessly restored is a credo that has been repeated so often it’s easy to forget that this was not the way that buildings were repaired in the past. It was the custom among the ancient Chinese, when an important building was damaged or destroyed by earthquake or fire, to simply rebuild as if nothing had happened. For example, the largest building in Beijing’s Forbidden City, the Hall of Supreme Harmony, was originally built in 1406. Over the years it was destroyed by fire (usually caused by lightning strikes) no fewer than seven times. Each time it was faithfully rebuilt, the most recent reconstruction dating from the end of the 17th century. Thus the building that is there today is slightly more than 300 years old, although the design is 300 years older than that. No one has ever called it a fake.

Europeans, while not as dogmatically wedded to tradition as the ancient Chinese, were similarly conservative. When the Doge’s Palace in Venice suffered a major fire in 1577, the architect Andrea Palladio proposed a major makeover. Why not replace the old-fashioned facade, built in the 15th century, with something new, something modern, he argued? In Palladio’s case, something modern meant all’antica, in the style of the ancients. But the Venetians liked their quirky Gothic building with its squat pointed arches and colorfully patterned walls, and that is what they rebuilt. Saint Mark’s Campanille, the bell tower that stands in front of the Doge’s Palace was completed in 1511. In the following four centuries the 400-foot tower survived fires and several lightning strikes until 1902 when, for unexplained reasons, it suddenly collapsed. The collapse was total—contemporary photographs show a mound of debris in the Piazza San Marco. What did the Venetians do? It took them less than a day to decide to rebuild it exactly as it had been before (adding only structural reinforcement and an elevator). Today’s architecture critics would call it Disneyfication, but to the Venetians it just seemed like good sense.

Modern warfare, with its artillery bombardment and aerial bombing, has been the scourge of architecture. During the First World War, Ypres in Belgium was the site of five separate battles and suffered inestimable damage—by the end of the war the entire city was reduced to rubble. The old market square included a 13th-century cathedral and the medieval Cloth Hall, one of the largest secular Gothic buildings in Europe—both now lay in ruins. Both buildings were subsequently meticulously rebuilt according to their original design, a project that took 40 years. The modern-day visitor would be forgiven for believing that the immense Cloth Hall with its tall central belfry is a survivor of the 14th century, and in a way it is—even though it was built in the 20th.

In the past, when a beloved old building suffered misfortune, the common practice was to rebuild what was there before. This is what the citizens of Ypres did in their town center, just as after the Second World War Poles would rebuild the medieval Old Town in Warsaw, Germans would rebuild the historical center of Dresden, and the British would restore the bomb-damaged House of Commons in London. Nostalgia was certainly involved, but also a spirit of defiance: History is not destiny, it can be reversed, things can be put right.

The best way to rebuild Notre-Dame de Paris would be to restore what was there, as if the fire never happened; there is no need to commemorate a senseless accident. The structural damage will have to be repaired first. Gothic cathedrals were built with belt-and-suspenders: the nave was spanned by a ribbed stone vault, but the actual weight of the roof with its heavy lead covering, was carried on an independent wooden structure of rafters, braces, and tie-beams. The Notre-Dame fire, which started in the attic of the north transept, totally destroyed this structure. A recent report in the New York Times suggested that had the fire not been prevented from spreading to the wooden structure that supports the eight giant bells of the north tower, the damage might have been much, much worse. But it was bad enough. The roof is gone, the spire is gone, and three large portions of the thin stone vault collapsed under the weight of the falling 750-ton spire. Establishing the integrity of the surviving vault is the most pressing question. The 21 flying buttresses of the choir have been temporarily reinforced and work is currently underway to ascertain what damage the heat of the fire—and the massive quantities of water—may have caused to the stone. Replacing and repairing the vault will be a challenging task.

Whether it is necessary to replicate the heavy oak framing of the roof itself is debatable. Wouldn’t a fireproofed steel structure—lighter and more fire-resistant—be a better option? The lead roofing of the nave and the spire could be replaced by something environmentally safer (the melted lead roofing has caused serious levels of toxic contamination in the area surrounding the cathedral). The design of a new flèche will undoubtedly be the subject of much debate. Viollet-le-Duc built a distinctive and beautiful two-story wooden spire that was taller and more ornate than the medieval original. This has led some to describe it as superfluous. But the 19th-century spire, like Viollet-le-Duc himself, has become a part of the history of the cathedral, no less than the iconic gargoyles, and it deserves to be replaced. And whatever its exact design, it ought to be Gothic. Efforts to “improve” Notre-Dame should be resisted. There is a place for steel spikes and Baccarat crystal, just not here.

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Playing with Fire on Election Security

Imagine we are four years in the future and the following things had happened to our democratic process in the United States. China’s Communist Party leadership, angry with President Donald Trump for his trade war and his efforts to contain China’s technology theft and geopolitical rise, intervened massively in the 2020 elections to tilt the outcome to the Democrats, knocking huge swaths of suburban Republican voters off the voter rolls in key swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, and Arizona.  There is convincing evidence that the Democratic nominee knew China was trying to intervene to help her win the presidency, and that she welcomed it. Studying carefully the American electoral landscape, the Chinese Communist Party’s digital assault on the 2020 election wreaked havoc on the U.S. Senate elections as well, strategically purging rural voters from the voter registration databases and defeating incumbent Republican Senators in Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Montana, North Carolina, and—most shockingly—Kentucky, where the incumbent Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell went down to defeat. As a result, despite vehement Republican denunciations of foreign interference in our electoral process, Democrats not only won the White House and held the House, but took control of the Senate as well.

Now it is 2023. Republicans are demanding federal government action to support technically besieged electoral administrations at the state and county levels. A bill is proposed in the U.S. Senate, with bipartisan support, to provide urgent assistance to state and local electoral administrations, and to require election campaigns to report to the FBI any evidence of foreign tampering with the electoral processes. But Senator Chuck Schumer, affecting the “What, me worry?” posture of Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman, sits on the bill, suggesting it isn’t needed. Privately, many Democrats think, well, foreign interference worked out okay for us last time. . .and the Republicans had it coming. All is fair in love and politics.

Now, ask yourself this question: How long would it be before outraged militant partisans of the defeated Republican Party would be out in the streets threatening a rain of fire and brimstone if the election security bill didn’t pass? Come to think of it, what kind of furious and possibly even violent protests would have followed the controversy over the manipulated 2020 election results?  

If you change China to Russia and Democrats to Republicans, you have a pretty accurate and frightening depiction of the gathering threat to electoral democracy in the United States—and a baffling puzzle as to why Democrats are not more enraged by the foot-dragging of the Trump Administration and its congressional allies over election security.

As the report of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and many other accounts have shown, not only did Russia wage a relentless and far-reaching digital campaign to sow discord in American politics and try to swing the election to Donald Trump, but Trump and his campaign encouraged the interference. In fact, to quote former U.S. attorney Barbara L. McQuade, Mueller’s testimony to Congress on Wednesday showed “that Russia committed crimes to help elect Trump, that Trump welcomed the help and that he then lied about it.”

Even before the November 2016 election, James Comey testified that Russian hackers had sought entry into the voter registration databases of roughly half the states. Now, in its own report on the 2016 election interference, released yesterday, the Senate Intelligence Committee found that the early reports vastly underestimated the scope of Russian efforts. In fact, the Committee finds, Russian hackers probably tried to access the election systems in all 50 states. And it reaffirms what election security experts have been saying for years: Our system of electoral administration, dependent as it is on the poorly coordinated efforts of numerous state and local authorities, and often on outmoded technology as well, is vulnerable to subversion. In 2016, it appears, Russia was engaged in a reconnaissance mission to map the complex infrastructure of election administration in the United States, and to look for vulnerabilities. As Mueller warned in his testimony on Wednesday—and as FBI Director Christopher Wray has been warning repeatedly, as recently as Tuesday—Russian intelligence and hacking operations to interfere with our elections are continuing without pause. In 2020, it is unlikely they will be entering these systems merely to have a look around.  

Given the urgency and breadth with which law enforcement and intelligence officials have been warning about the threat of Russian hacking of the 2020 election infrastructure, it is difficult to summon a benign interpretation of Republican obstruction. On Wednesday, Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith blocked consideration of two bills so modest and simple that you just have to shake your head in asking about the zero-sum nature of partisan combat on Capitol Hill, “Has it come to this?” One bill, sponsored by Senate Intelligence Committee Vice-Chair, Mark Warner, would require campaigns to alert the FBI and the Federal Election Commission when foreign actors offer them financial or other assistance; the other—co-sponsored by Democrat Ron Wyden and Republican Tom Cotton (a prominent Trump ally)— would allow the Senate Sergeant at Arms to offer voluntary assistance to senators and staff to improve the security of their digital devices. If this obstruction is not Congressional fiddling while Rome is waiting to burn, it is hard to imagine what that would look like.

The grand architect of this obstruction, Senate Majority Leader McConnell, has offered multiple excuses for the foot-dragging:  

States have already been allocated funds and don’t need any more. Yes, the Congress appropriated $380 million last year to help states upgrade their voter registration systems, voting machines, and procedures for post-election audits, but this was only about 10 percent of what the Congress appropriated to upgrade systems in 2002, and well below the current estimated need. As Wendy Weiser and Alicia Bannon reported in a study by the Brennan Center for Justice last year, “41 states will use systems that are at least a decade old this November [2018], and officials in 33 say they must replace their machines by 2020.”
All these bills are just partisan grandstanding. In fact, many of them have bipartisan support, but McConnell is nevertheless blocking all of them. For example, the DETER Act, co-sponsored by Donald Trump’s new senatorial best friend, Lindsay Graham, and Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, would allow federal officials to deport any foreigner found to be involved in election interference. And the new (heavily redacted) first volume of the report of the Senate Intelligence Committee is a bipartisan document, issued by two sober congressional leaders, Senator Warner and Committee Chair Richard Burr, who have modeled bipartisan cooperation.
Electoral administration is a state and local responsibility and should not be “federalized.”  But we are talking here about support and technical assistance and advice, not federal administration of elections (which would, in any case, be a vast improvement over the current mishmash, and would bring the United States into line with the best practices of other advanced democracies). 

The simple truth is we cannot continue to creep by with the current antiquated patchwork of infrastructure and standards, and a laissez-faire attitude of complacency that things are bound to be okay simply because we are such a great democracy. Precisely because of its decentralization and inadequate coordination, and because of chronic under-investment and technical neglect, our electoral infrastructure has certain vulnerabilities that many other advanced democracies do not. States need greater federal technical assistance and financial support. And the Department of Homeland Security needs a signal of urgency and all-out mission from the Administration that it has not gotten (instead, something closer to the inverse prevails).  

As I stress in my new book, Ill Winds, much more needs to be done to secure American elections against Russian—and other foreign—interference, and to safeguard the integrity and reliability of our voting systems. A report last month of Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies recommended (among other things) a much more robust federal government role to assist and train state and local government officials in cybersecurity and to “signal a clear and credible commitment to respond to election interference.” And it echoed previous studies in urging that all elections have a verifiable paper trail and risk-limiting audits (as a group of Democratic senators proposed legislation to require last year). These principles underlie many of the Congressional initiatives that are now bottled up in the Senate.

In the short run, President Trump and his party may benefit from this cynical posture of calculated complacency. In 2020 the Russians may once again be the only or at least the main foreign actor interfering in American elections. And there can be do no doubt that they will do so in an effort to help re-elect President Donald Trump. But if one foreign power continues to shred, on an ever-more daring basis, the integrity and inviolability of our electoral process, other foreign powers will draw lessons and follow. And they won’t all be pitching in on the Republican side.  Mitch McConnell is playing with fire. And the future of our democracy is at stake.

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Dresden and the Invention of the Future

“When does the future begin?” asks the opening text of an installation at Dresden’s baroque Japanese Palace. It’s a quizzical start to “The Invention of the Future,” an exhibition housed in one of the most storied buildings of Dresden’s past. Built in 1715 to accommodate its occupant’s collection of Japanese porcelain, its pillars shaped like hulking Oriental strongmen, the Palace is a maximalist setting for an exhibit that tends toward chic minimalism. “The Invention of the Future” juxtaposes the words of young Saxons, drawn from an opinion survey of 15 to 35 year olds, with treasured pieces from across the Dresden State Art Collections. In one room, old golden timepieces are set against teens’ worries about not living up to their parents’ timelines; in another, modernist paintings depict the horrors of 20th-century warfare as respondents fret about its resurgence in the 21st. In yet another, a young Saxon argues that the categorical imperative is the best basis for a moral life, while a pair of Immanuel Kant’s well-worn shoes are preserved in glass below.

Surveying the youths’ responses, one finds that two fears loom largest: war and climate change. This is hardly a surprise; one week before my trip to Dresden, young voters helped Germany’s Green Party surge to second place in the EU parliamentary elections, its best ever showing. The thoughts I read in the Japanese Palace—denunciations of corporate greed and nationalism, appeals to world peace and unity—betray the semi-pacifist sensibility that lies at the heart of the Greens’ political appeal. This is a worldview present in more dilute forms across Germany’s political spectrum, and it’s either admirably idealistic or dangerously naive, depending on whom you ask. For me on this day, walking the streets of a city that was famously reduced to rubble by firebombing, it is at least understandable.

I am in Dresden for a mere two days, taking in the riches of its world-class art collections and trying to understand something of its history. I have meetings with leaders in the art world, a rendezvous with a local politician, and a few scattered hours to explore Dresden’s streets on my own. But even in my brief jaunt through the city, trained like a tourist on the treasures of Dresden’s past, I keep returning to this question of its future.

The exhibition tells one story, and in a way it’s comforting. The myriad survey responses coalesce into a familiar portrait: a Germany that is thoroughly penitent for its past, but secure and prosperous enough to enjoy the luxury of privileging soft power over hard power, and environmental worries over existential ones. Earnest Greens might object that climate change is an existential risk, that a return to large-scale war, too, can never be ruled out. But the very expression of these anxieties suggests that these lessons have been internalized, that the demons have been put away. Activists hankering for sustainability, young people repudiating the horrors of the past: these are the telltale signs of a healthy postwar Germany, a place where history is settled and all the right lessons have been learned. The kids will be alright.

Except that this is not the only story on offer in Dresden—and the more I explore, the more I see cracks in the surface.

“Everyone here is getting nuts about the climate issue,” Antje Hermenau tells me over drinks that same night on Dresden’s historic town square. She would know: a native of nearby Leipzig and longtime resident of Dresden, Hermenau was a Bundestag member for the Greens soon after reunification. But she has since broken with the national party, to great public controversy, seeing the Greens as disconnected from the fundamental concerns of average Saxons. Her complaints can sound familiar. Today’s Greens are urbane bohemians who look down on rural residents, she says, intent on regulating the diesel cars that sustain their livelihoods out of existence. In Bundestag hearings they grandstand about the necessity of installing unisex toilets in Berlin while ignoring the economic plight of their countrymen.

Yet there’s a Saxon variant to her familiar critique of overreaching liberal elites, one that implies a particular reading of local history. Top-down diktats from Berlin are anathema to this part of Germany, Hermenau tells me, with its traditions of strong provincial electors and locally rooted kings. For her, Saxony—a state at Germany’s eastern frontier, bordering the Czech Republic and Poland—is a unique Central European success story. Saxony became the backbone of German productivity beginning in the 11th century, she says, as German-speaking migrants came from Bavaria and Hesse to this land that had been the domain of the Slavic Sorbs. The region’s wealth was forged through honest labor, the Protestant work ethic, and the Mittelstand model of locally rooted businesses. From this soil sprang great leaders—like Martin Luther, who translated the Bible into the local dialect in the 16th century, and Augustus the Strong, the Elector of Saxony, who became Dresden’s royal benefactor at the turn of the 18th—and competition with neighboring states only made Saxony stronger. Until, that is, this natural order was disrupted by the horrors of the 20th century and the globalizing delusions of the 21st.

I have my doubts about this pat narrative of Saxon exceptionalism, with its convenient elisions and nostalgic implications. To smooth the rough edges of Saxon history, as Hermenau does, requires glossing over some ugly episodes—bloody wars of religion and empire, bruising defeats like the 1760 burning of Dresden by Frederick the Great—and occasionally entering into fantasy. At one point, Hermenau even likens her Saxon kinsfolk to the sturdy dwarves of Tolkien’s Middle Earth.

Yet I’m struck by how effectively she sells this populist narrative, with a cheery conviction that is disarming enough to make you overlook its import. Hermenau wants to reclaim pride in certain elements of Saxon history while repudiating the worst of it. In practice, that entails a quarrel with key pillars of the postwar narrative that has bound not just Saxony but Germany as a whole.

For Hermenau, Germany’s 20th century was the disruption, not culmination, of 900 years of history. The Nazi era was one of discontinuity, compounded by the discontinuity of the communist regime that followed. And the experience of both regimes in succession has led to profound cultural dislocation—in the former East Germany, yes, but even more so in the West.

Hermenau has no nostalgia for the communist era. She sees the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as an illegitimate regime that was brutally imposed upon a traditionally conservative populace; she herself was on the front lines opposing it in 1989. But when she talks about the Cold War legacy, she inverts the usual formula: It was the West, not the East, whose development went off track. Even under communist subjugation, she tells me, East Germans knew who they were: 1989 was a “Christian and conservative revolt,” she says, “not a leftist one.” But West Germans, by virtue of their Cold War alliance with the West, came to embrace an identity that was not their own. No longer identifying with Mitteleuropa, they rebranded themselves as Westerners, full stop—and became cut off from their roots and their kinsmen.

She may have a point, if recent election results are any indicator. While the Greens surged to new national prominence this year, Saxony remains a stronghold of Alternative for Germany (AfD), the right-wing populist party that rails against migration, multiculturalism, and out-of-touch elites in Berlin. In this year’s EU elections, AfD was the top vote-getter in Saxony, earning 25.3 percent of the vote. Hermenau’s sympathetic outreach to AfD voters—partly through her volunteer work with the unassociated Freie Wahler (Free Voters)—has earned her the ire of many former Green colleagues.

Hermenau is neither a member of AfD nor a simple apologist for the party. She admits the existence of genuine racists and neo-Nazis within its ranks. But she also believes the party is doing its best to purge them, and that its members have legitimate grievances. At times, the party leadership has used Hermenau’s arguments to buttress their own. On the floor of the Bundestag last year, AfD co-chairman Alexander Gauland delivered a harangue against violence by refugees in Germany and paused to approvingly cite Hermenau’s own words about the injustice of migrants receiving benefits without working. For many of her critics, that kind of common cause is enough to dismiss Hermenau as an AfD stooge.

Chatting with Hermenau for two hours, as she relays earnest anecdotes about finding common ground with disaffected voters, I find it hard to take that guilt-by-association impulse seriously. There is nothing malicious about her. Yet I do wonder about the common thread that binds the two figures. Gauland infamously said that the Nazi regime was just a “speck of bird shit” in a thousand years of “successful German history.” Hermenau argues, in her own way, that the Nazi and Soviet periods were a sudden rupture with the natural, healthy order of Saxon life. Is Gauland’s view a through-the-looking-glass version of Hermenau’s? The question for Germany is whether some kind of benign recovery of German historical pride is possible in the 21st century, or whether, as many fear, all roads lead to Hitlerism.

There’s another historical narrative on offer in Dresden, which combines a resentment of the dominance of Westerners with a soft form of Ostalgie. In the eyes of some former East Germans, reunification brought a form of carpetbagging cultural imperialism, as Wessis flocked to the East to take over its highest institutions of culture while neglecting the contributions of the locals.

This is a debate that has lately played out in dramatic fashion in Dresden’s art world. On my first day in Dresden, I meet with Dirk Burghardt, the managing director of the Dresden State Art Collections, which oversees 15 museums spread across the city. Sitting in his office in Dresden Castle, with a view onto the Zwinger Palace, he tells me of grand ambitions and coming attractions. On offer this season: a classic Vermeer now restored to include a Cupid element overpainted after the artist’s death, a major exhibition called “Rembrandt’s Mark” that looks at the Dutch master’s printmaking, and a re-opening of Dresden’s royal state apartments timed for their 300th anniversary. More modern tastes are accommodated, too. Pulling art books off his shelves, Burghardt tells me proudly of the museum’s Archive of the Avant Garde, a vast research repository of 1.5 million items, and of the museum’s relationship with Gerhard Richter, the East German master whose life was recently fictionalized in the Oscar-nominated Never Look Away.

Burghardt is passionate about art, and brimming with ideas about restoring Dresden’s reputation as the “Florence on the Elbe.” But, like many on the museum’s staff, he is also a native of West Germany—which is enough to make him suspect in the eyes of some locals.

One such local is Paul Kaiser, an art historian who has launched a fiery public campaign against Dresden’s museums. Kaiser, the author of a book called Bohemia in the GDR, penned a blistering op-ed in 2017 denouncing the Albertinum Museum for neglecting the work of East German artists. According to Kaiser, Dresden’s museums are gripped by a “colonial” mindset, dominated by business-minded West Germans intent on erasing the contributions of GDR artists.

Kaiser’s polemic kicked off a minor kerfuffle in Dresden, with AfD parliamentarians subsequently launching an official inquiry into the number of East German artworks on permanent display in the Albertinum. Hilke Wagner, the director of the museum, patiently explained that 70 artworks from the GDR were on display at the time, while others were on loan elsewhere; she soon followed up with an exhibition and lecture series specifically dedicated to East German art. Yet still the hate mail came: “I was shocked by the number of letters and by the tone,” she said. “The vehemence of the debate surprised us all.”

For Kaiser, the debate reflected a longstanding hobbyhorse; his academic scholarship on East German art rejects the distinction between state-approved socialist realism and “countercultural” art as a false dichotomy, which tends to exclude worthwhile artists. But for others who latched on to the controversy, it was about something bigger than art history: namely, the perceived and quite unwelcome power of Westerners in the East since reunification. Whatever the merits of his academic arguments, Kaiser dabbles in such ressentiment, too; at his own Dresden Institute for Cultural Studies, a recent conference was provocatively titled “Colony East? Aspects of Colonization in East Germany Since 1990.” This season, he tells me via e-mail, he is co-curating an exhibit in Leipzig called “Point of No Return,” which addresses the artistic legacy of 1989 and takes sharp issue with the way that East German art has been neglected since the fall. (The exhibition is already attracting international attention.)

Kaiser is not alone in such complaints. On the other side of the Elbe River, I meet with Rudolf Fischer of the Avant Garde Archive, who tells me proudly of a recent exhibition he helped curate on Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Lissitizky, which sought to highlight Dresden’s lost history as a hub of modernist experimentation in the Weimar era. Yet the exhibition was received coolly by locals, he said, who prefer to glory in familiar treasures—the bygone splendor of Augustus the Strong—when they are not grousing about the oversights of the GDR period.

Arcane art-world controversies do not a culture war make. But I sense in these stories a common thread I pick up elsewhere in Dresden: an attempt to relitigate the recent past, while celebrating a sanitized version of the long-ago past. This is nothing so serious as rehabilitating Hitler, but it does entail some strategic loss of memory, a tacit suggestion that the communist era was not so bad, and the implication that in any case, an outsider just can’t understand our history.

Next February marks the 75th anniversary of the firebombing of Dresden. This somber occasion, no doubt, will provide ample fodder for historical revisionists. For most Dresdeners, the bombing is remembered simply as a human tragedy, not as an occasion for historical score-settling. But on past anniversaries, the city has witnessed fringe skinhead marches set to Wagner music, along with perennial debates over the death toll. In 2008, an independent historical commission estimated that 25,000 died in the attacks—a massive loss of human life, but a far cry from the grossly inflated estimates (200,000+) promoted by the Nazis in the aftermath and still held to by Holocaust deniers. Even outside the slim ranks of legitimate neo-Nazis, a popular image persists of wartime Dresden as an innocent city of no military significance, far removed from the Reich’s war machine. This narrative has been convincingly debunked by serious historians, but it still exerts a pull in Dresden. During the Cold War, it was even encouraged by the East German authorities as a way to poison local sentiment against the nefarious, warmongering West.

Such revisionist narratives seem to be getting a bigger hearing in Dresden these days. Official memory still scorns the GDR; in the Loschwitz district, the Stasi’s old regional headquarters and remand prison are preserved as a memorial, a vivid testament of the regime’s repressions. Just across the street, on leafy Angelika Strasse, stands the former KGB headquarters where a young Vladimir Putin cut his teeth—and supposedly stood down a crowd of protesters in 1989, threatening to use force if the crowd did not disperse.

These events are not ancient history. And yet the further they recede into memory, the more they seem to be either minimized or else used as a cudgel in today’s politics. Dovishness toward Russia and a certain admiration for Putin are staples of the political discourse here, and not just in AfD. (“I hope he comes to visit us soon,” said the CDU Governor of Saxony about Putin this month, while calling for sanctions on Russia to be lifted.) Meanwhile, Susanne Dagen, a local bookseller who has been boycotted for associating with the anti-Islam PEGIDA movement, compares the climate in today’s Germany to the censorious East Germany she grew up in. Two years ago, she circulated a manifesto provocatively titled Charta 2017—a riff on the Charta 77 document penned by dissidents in communist Czechoslovakia—and signed by dozens of other literati, complaining that freedom of expression was eroding across Germany and that “our society is no longer far from a dictatorship.”

All this suggests to me that the consensus about Germany’s past is cracking. Perhaps it was never a real consensus to begin with.

And perhaps what follows will be healthy enough—a normal political pushback against overreach, a benign recovery of localism and historical tradition in places like Saxony that feel “left behind” by Berlin. The east-west divide still needs bridging, and national shame cannot be the only sentiment that binds Germany in perpetuity.

Yet if the future of Dresden does not look like Hermenau’s vision, it may look darker. Two years ago, AfD lawmaker Björn Höcke demagogued in Dresden about the “mentality of a totally vanquished people” in Germany, complaining of Berlin’s Holocaust memorial that Germans were “the only people in the world to plant a monument of shame in the heart of its capital.” Today, AfD is the fastest-growing party in Dresden—and Björn Höcke leads the party in neighboring Thuringia. Elections this fall in both states will be closely watched for signs of AfD’s staying power. AfD could become the most popular party in Saxony, and leaders of the CDU are already entertaining a potential coalition at the regional level. Would this be the co-option of a legitimate minor party or capitulation to an extremist one? The answer depends, in part, on which elements of AfD would be elevated into power.

Pondering all this as I leave the city behind, it occurs to me that the future has already begun in places like Dresden. We’ve just been slow to notice.

Hanging over Dresden’s reconstructed center, amid its lovely cobblestone streets and restored palaces, one can still see burnt-out figures along the roofline of the Catholic Hofkirche: icons of saints and dignitaries, still blackened and charred as if the bombing happened yesterday. For me, they are ominous: a sign of history looming large, as a city moves into the future with no settled narrative about its past.

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Rebuild American Patriotism

The American nation, arguably the most unique experiment in the history of modern nation-states whose foundational ideals have been passed from one generation to the next for over two centuries, is fracturing, with stress fissures more visible each day. The once-accepted view of America as one nation, with the attendant sense of pride rooted in the belief in its exceptionalism, has been steadily losing ground over the last three decades, while secondary drivers of group identity, such as race and ethnicity, claim ever-greater prominence in our public discourse.

A byproduct of the post-Cold War globalist ideology, the deconstruction of the American nation has been aided by the spread of a broad form of neo-Marxist progressivism now dominant at our colleges and universities and our major media outlets, and has been reinforced by a failed immigration policy that no longer demands the acculturation of newcomers. The American national idea is being “deconstructed” into tribal narratives, with the attendant loss of self-confidence that historically imbued Americans with a shared national identity and dedication to individual freedom. Consequently, our historical and cultural DNA is no longer being passed onto subsequent generations. Rather, our elites, especially the youngest among them, are increasingly intent on replacing the traditional American national narrative of the “melting pot” with what Samuel Huntington aptly called a multicultural “salad bowl” of different cultures and ethnic groups, living side by side but retaining their distinct values and identity markers. The same goes for basic knowledge of the “what” and “how” of our republican form of government. We have essentially stopped teaching civics in American schools,1 and as a result it is not uncommon today to encounter a college freshman with only a vague notion of our national history and the workings of our government.

The progressive politicization of American academia, especially in the humanities, has all but reduced the complex and rich civilizational heritage of modern America to group narratives built around the tone of one’s skin or gender identity. This reductive recompilation of American national identity is exemplified by the opaque term “people of color,” hurled with abandon against the equally broad but vacuous category of “whites” amidst incessant charges of racism and discrimination. In our quotidian existence in which we transact business, engage with government, consume media and pursue education, we are presented today with a system in which bureaucratically mandated racial, ethnic and gender categories impact access to jobs, education and other public benefits—this in a country whose “greatest generation” went to war to eradicate two totalitarian regimes committed to the belief that a person’s racial identity should define his or her place in the social order.

As America as a cohesive, binding concept loses definition, so too does support for it. In a poll conducted last year by Gallup, only 47 percent of all Americans declared themselves “extremely proud” of their nationality—the first time in the 18 years in which the poll has been conducted that fewer than half of the respondents expressed those levels of national pride. Only fifteen years ago, less than one generation, this number stood at 70 percent. According to the poll, decline in national pride was especially manifest among self-declared Democrats (32 percent, down from 43 percent in 2017, and 56 percent in 2013), and less than half of independents (42 percent, down from 48 percent in 2017 and 50 percent in 2013). By contrast, over twice the number of respondents self-identifying as Republican answered affirmatively when asked if they were extremely proud of their nationality, at 74 percent in 2018, with a two percent increase relative to the year before, and a three percent increase compared to 2013.  The lowest level of national pride was found among the youngest American cohort, aged 18-29 (33 percent—a drop from 55 percent in 2013); those groups among whom a majority expressed extreme pride were the two oldest, ages 50-64 and 65 and older, with 56 and 58 percent respectively. Perhaps most strikingly, college graduates were significantly less proud of being American (only 39 percent), compared to the majority of those without a college education at 52 percent.

The current fracturing of the American nation into warring tribes augurs poorly for our future. A sense of national cohesion and the attendant mutuality of obligations remain essential to national security, for without it we will lack the resilience that only a cohesive nation can bring, whether to a crisis or to the state-on-state competition with China and Russia that is looming over the horizon. A people riven by internal discord and increasingly bereft of a sense of pride in its own nation is vulnerable to external meddling in its national affairs, and, ultimately may lack the requisite resilience to come together in a national crisis or war. As the assault on American exceptionalism in our public sphere gathers speed, a tired citizenry, offered an ever-more restrictive menu of choices when it comes to which events from the collective national memory it is allowed to preserve and which it must censure, feels the bonds of mutual loyalty and obligation fray at the seams.

But to speak of a nation in the 21st century is not to engage in ethno-nationalism or to build nativist theories; rather, the American nation needs to restore and pass forward the idea of an “extended kinship” which allows each citizen to experience a sense of communion and solidarity with his/her people. Progressives brought up on a steady diet of postmodernist ideology have for decades pushed forth the notion that nationalism is by definition a negative sentiment to be suppressed, conflating patriotic national pride with the worst totalitarian excesses of fascism and Nazism. In reality, national pride is the sine qua non of a modern working polity, for this sense of “extended kinship” embodied in a shared language and values, as well as the maintenance of a broad consensus on a people’s historic narrative, are the necessary glue that fosters the sense of mutuality of obligation critical to a properly functioning civic culture as its make compromise in politics a shared public good. We even have a word to distinguish this feeling from the kind of ethno-nationalism more prevalent in Europe: Patriotism.

For Teddy Roosevelt, patriotism was simply Americanism, the “spirit and purpose” of American citizenship. Speaking on a campaign trail in Milwaukee in 1912 (soon after he was shot), TR defined Americanism as entailing a patriotic commitment to the nation, with one’s dedication to the country as the overarching value of the citizen. TR recognized that without that special inherent “quality” of American citizenship, the national ideal of equality under the law would become politicized, and ultimately transmogrify into relativism and tribalism. In his 1919 letter to the American Defense Society, TR was even blunter about the imperative of patriotism as the core American virtue: “There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all.”

To start reversing the deconstruction of Americanism, we need a concerted counter-revolution, one in which traditional American common sense is elevated above grievance-mongering and tribalist point-scoring. We should start with the schools. Congress ought to take a hard look at how government funds are spent by our college and university administrators. The pressure could be even more effective if alumni donors and parents start to demand accountability from the academic institutions they endow. The one-sided indoctrination of our future generation must stop now. Furthermore, Congress needs to bring back the idea of mandatory national service, be that in military form or through some kind of mandatory community work, so that Americans from all socio-economic backgrounds can discover their fellow citizens“out there”—so that they can put a real face and name to the broader nation to which they all owe allegiance.

The media, of course, bears a great deal of responsibility for the coarsening of our public discourse and the overall decline of public morals, for the race for ratings has become an all-out race to the bottom—what Senator Moynihan once called “defining deviancy down,” whereby what used to be unacceptable is now mainstream and what was once decent has disappeared from our public agora. Nowhere is this problem more urgent than in the new digital space, with the largest social media platforms nearly unusable, with insults, verbal jousting and offensive images intended to shock standing in for reasoned argument. But the digital media space, while certainly bringing out the worst in us, is more of a mirror of what we have become. Fixing it starts by fixing us first.

The American people are at an inflection point, with the binary being increasingly that of a “North American Balkans” or a return to “E Pluribus Unum.” To stop and reverse the deconstruction of what the Framers intended to be a decent society of free individuals, connected by shared American values and democratic ideals that transcend one’s creed or national origin, will require an all-out effort. In the final analysis, this is fundamentally a question of preserving as opposed to abandoning the values and principles that for over two centuries have underpinned this great nation.

1. Jeffrey Mirel, “The Decline of Civic Education,” Daedalus, vol. 131, no. 3.  2002.

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