Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 35

Trump, Russia, and the Democrats’ Golden Opportunity

“Putin has won.” This intercepted message to Kirill Dmitriev, a Kremlin crony and CEO of the state-sponsored Russian Direct Investment Fund, sent on the night Donald Trump won the presidency slipped through the heavy redactions on page 149 of Robert Mueller’s report. What lies beneath the black ink surrounding this declaration—including the identity of the sender—remains a mystery. But these three words encapsulate an almost unfathomable truth.

While the full import of the President’s cryptic ties to Vladimir Putin is not yet known, publicly available information confirms he welcomed, benefitted from, and then denied Russian interference in the U.S. election. In office, Trump continues to show Putin exceptional deference.

Some observers—and not only partisan Republicans—believe that Trump’s Russia connections are overblown. Historian Stephen Kotkin argues in Foreign Affairs that the interactions between Trump’s people and Putin’s operatives were too disorganized to be effective. As a result Russia, Kotkin claims, had if anything only a “marginal” impact on the 2016 election.

A chorus of journalists and experts who have investigated the same story paint a different picture. In his report, Mueller found that “the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.” Journalists Luke Harding and Seth Hettena depict an elaborate, multilayered Kremlin campaign. Michael Isikoff, David Corn, and Max Boot conclude that the Russian intervention was decisive. James Clapper, former Director of U. S. National Intelligence, agrees. In a new report for the Pentagon, more than two dozen security experts determine that the scope and sophistication of Putin’s “grand strategy” for global dominance is a serious threat to national security. It is one thing to argue whether Putin elected Trump. It is by now an established fact, however, that Russia actively interfered in an American election. The President’s own Director of National Intelligence, former Republican Senator Dan Coats, attests to the fact.

If most Republicans, blinded by partisanship, have lost their way in defending American interests and ideals, then Democrats must step forward. But where have they been?

The boundaries of the Democrats’ political comfort zone have barely shifted since the 2016 election, with health care eclipsing foreign policy, national security, and all other matters. For the past two years, the Democratic leadership has been content to leave Trump/Russia to Mueller. When Attorney General William Barr mischaracterized Mueller’s findings and exonerated Trump, then produced a richly redacted report, the Democrats were left issuing subpoenas and fecklessly protesting while Trump’s claims of vindication dominated the airwaves.

Trump’s base may be in lockstep with the President, but a majority of Americans are alarmed by Trump’s relationship with Putin and believe Trump is guilty of obstruction and other crimes. Yet a majority also opposes impeachment, an unnerving prospect for a Democratic Party that already fears impeachment may be its only option. The Democrats are flummoxed.

But the Trump/Russia affair poses opportunities that have nothing to do with impeachment or short-term tactical goals. Seizing these opportunities is key to confronting challenges to our national security and democracy that are bigger than Trump and will almost certainly persist beyond his tenure. It is time for Democrats to find ways to align their domestic agenda to a national one, fused to American ideals and purpose. They can do this while tackling voter suppression, big-donor control over elected officials, and foreign interference in elections.

Leading thinkers such as Jill Lepore, Yael Tamir, Robert Kagan, Francis Fukuyama, and Yascha Mounk are urging liberals and centrists to recognize the power of nationalism and get back to decent, honest, and robust patriotism. But few spell out how they can reclaim the flag to fight illiberal nationalism and ethnonational demagoguery.

Democracy’s Attrition

The assault on democracy in the West—especially in the United States—may become the defining political story of our time. Aspects of the attack on democracy, such as presidential infringement of the law and demonization of critical media, have not yet cracked democracy’s foundations, to be sure. Trump and many of his associates are under investigation and the media retain their independence.

In three respects, however, democracy has already been eroding.

First, one of our two major parties relies increasingly on blocking access to the ballot. In 2018, severe voter suppression occurred in many states. Second, the influence of campaign donations on officeholders’ behavior is acute and growing, affording a wealthy minority undue sway over governance. This affects both Republicans and Democrats. Third, elections have been deeply penetrated by foreign actors, undermining the sovereignty of self-government. No one should believe this stops with Trump. We have every reason to conclude that the Kremlin’s larger strategic goal is to increase political polarization across the West and to undermine the integrity of democratic institutions and processes.

In this context it is appalling that the White House is refusing to comply with congressional requests and is ordering federal employees to ignore subpoenas. Barr has been given free rein to access and declassify intelligence information so that he can investigate the FBI for “spying” on the Trump campaign. Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani is asserting: “There’s nothing wrong with taking information from Russians.” Trump is even pressuring Ukraine to launch an investigation to damage Joe Biden, a leading 2020 rival.

Democrats should not view threats to democracy and national security as mere partisan matters. These must be American concerns. But doing the right thing can have an electoral benefit as well.

Reclaiming America’s National-Democratic Narrative

“It’s hard to see how any party could appeal or govern these days without a strong national story,” argues columnist David Brooks. He says that the illiberal movement that brought Trump to power has one: “Their central story is that the good, decent people of the heartland are being threatened by immigrants, foreigners and other outsiders while corrupt elites do nothing.” But, he contends: “What is the Democratic national story? A void.”

Brooks is right. Today’s Democrats lack a story, and without one they will struggle to appeal and to govern. But Trump/Russia offers fresh opportunities to bolster progressive reforms by connecting them to the American saga. What is America’s story, and how does Trumpism dishonor it?

American national identity rests on the twin pillars of democratic governance and demographic dynamism. Democracy, of course, is not uniquely American, but America is uniquely democratic—a country that was founded to ensure self-government. In the 20th century, World War II and the Cold War taught Americans that freedom and security cannot be sustained in a fortress. On this, Ronald Reagan, the icon of modern conservative democracy, and Barack Obama, the champion of progressive democracy, agreed.

The vast majority of Americans abhor the betrayal of democracy at home and abroad. Over two-thirds say that “everything possible should be done to make it easy to vote,” and large majorities are alarmed by Russia’s intervention in American elections. Nearly four-fifths support NATO and reject Trump’s equivocations about defending all NATO allies.

The second pillar of American identity is its demographic openness. No nation’s composition and competitive success are as tightly tethered to infusions of human capital from around the globe. This is a truth that our presidents once recognized:

We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people—our strength—from every country and every corner of the world. . . . Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier . . . . If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.

That was Ronald Reagan, in his parting speech to the nation in January 1989. In his 2015 speech in Selma on the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, Obama espoused his nation’s demographic creed and greatness in similar terms. And Americans agree. In 2018, three-quarters said that “immigration is a good thing for the country.” A majority favors either increasing legal immigration (38 percent) or holding it unchanged (32 percent).

To be sure, the American story includes all manner of inhumanity—but it also offers the possibility for redemption. From their origins as a nation half-founded on slavery, Americans elected a young black president; from a land they strafed with munitions made in Japan, they brought forth the Vietnam-born , now Commanding General for the section of the U.S. Army that protects Japan from neighboring dictatorships. Such is the story of America’s democratic and demographic destiny, and its redemptive power.

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, America in many ways grew more fully into its story. National politics included titanic struggles between rival governing philosophies embedded in a common national-democratic framework, including the 2008 presidential race between Obama and John McCain. The proportion of women in Congress rose from low single-digits to one-quarter between 1990 and 2017. Immigrants as a proportion of the population increased from a historic low of 4.7 percent in 1970 to 13.7 percent in 2017. The nation’s cultural complexion deepened as India and China became the leading countries of origin.

Yet the nation also deviated from the values embodied in its narrative. Ethnonational demagoguery persisted and violations of democratic norms proliferated. Partisan gerrymandering grew flagrant by both parties and the dollar’s sway over politicians swelled. Lying by high officials seemed to grow more egregious. Neither major party had a monopoly on democracy-damaging behavior, but after the ascent of Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, the GOP led the way in manipulating bigotry, infringing democratic norms, championing big-donor dominance, and pursuing reckless foreign adventures.

With Trump’s rise, the Republicans became more fully estranged from the American story. The Trump/Russia affair represents a full break. It also illuminates the dependence of America’s security on its fidelity to democracy. In the United States, unelected national security officials are highly constrained. They can issue anguished warnings, such as former DOJ counterintelligence chief David Laufman’s statement that the President is “a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States,” and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats’s Congressional testimony that Russian cyber activities are the greatest threat the United States faces. But without decisive action by elected officials, Russia will continue attempts to worm its way into America’s voting rolls, social media networks, and power grid.

Putin intuits the American narrative, albeit from the perspective of an envious autocrat. He sees that a truly democratic America, full of demographic dynamism and intent on guarding fellow free societies from his encroachments, poses an insurmountable obstacle to his dictatorship at home and authority abroad. It follows that corrupting American democracy and undermining its security is his passion project. Trump and his party furnish the perfect vehicle.

The Trumpian tale—“the good, decent people of the heartland are being threatened by immigrants, foreigners, and other outsiders while corrupt elites do nothing”—warps the country’s national-democratic story. By aiding the man who tells it, Putin aims to bury the narrative that poses the single greatest ideological hurdle to autocracy’s global ascendency.

The vacuum that has resulted is now clear, and so is the Democratic riposte that should follow: The American nation is being sold out by an unpatriotic President who betrays our democracy, identity, and security while corrupt elite enablers do nothing. How can the Democrats reclaim this story and turn national turmoil into national renewal?

Targeting Ethnonationalism in the Fight for Voting Rights and Responsible Refugee and Immigration Policies

First, the Democrats can open a new front in the fight against color-coded nativism and its main political manifestations: voter suppression and restrictive immigration. Democrats armed with a forceful national-democratic narrative can show how voter suppression and bigotry betray the American story.

House Republicans such as Representative Jim Jordan not only ally with Trump on purging voters and demonizing immigrants; they also spearhead Republicans’ efforts to obscure Russian intervention. Even after Trump’s own Director of National Intelligence warned that “the digital infrastructure that serves this country is literally under attack” by Putin’s agents, Republicans continue to vote down new funding to protect elections from cyberattacks. “I know what we need for safe and secure elections,” Jordan asserted, “and that’s voter ID.” Not safeguards against Russian interference, but instead “voter ID,” which in practice reduces voting by citizens of color.

Putin could hardly hope for more eager collaborators. In 2016, Russia directed extensive social media campaigns to incite racial strife and spur voter suppression on Trump’s behalf. Over the past decade his trolls and bogus-news planters honed their skills in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Sweden and other democracies with large populations of recent migrants.

The dark irony is that Putin regards Trump and his allies on the populist right in Europe as useful idiots, not ideological brethren. Contrary to widespread perceptions, Putin crushes expressions of Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and anti-immigrant intolerance at home. He treats ethnically inclusive nationalism as vital to ensuring the patriotic devotion of all citizens. Russia has its equivalents of the Charlottesville marchers, but rather than meet with presidential sympathy they come under FSB watch.

Putin’s support of nativist demagogues is reserved for countries he seeks to cripple. Ethnonationalism, like Novichok, is a poison he saves for his enemies. Trump’s eager acceptance of Putin’s aid exposes the fraudulence of Trumpian pseudo-patriotism—and allows Democrats to reveal Trump’s dual betrayal of America’s demography to ethnonationalists, and America’s democracy to Putin.

Reforming Campaign Finance and Transparency Laws to Protect Sovereignty, Security and Prestige

Liberals typically focus on how unrestricted campaign donations and corruption distort equality of representation. Putin’s attacks reveal yet another way they imperil democracy, and another instance where Democrats must awaken from their slumber.

Putin has weaponized corruption as a tool of foreign policy. Consider the money trail. Aleksandr Torshin is under investigation for possibly funneling $30 million to Trump’s campaign through the NRA. Dmitry Rybolovlev, whose jet and yacht had a habit of crossing paths with Trump’s campaign during the 2016 election, pumped $50 million into Trump’s pockets by buying his McMansion in Palm Beach for more than double its market value. A firm connected to Viktor Vekselberg paid a million dollars to Trump confidante Michael Cohen. Oleg Deripaska paid Paul Manafort $60 million—after which Manafort approached Trump and graciously offered to manage his campaign for free. Len Blavatnik contributed $2.5 million to Mitch McConnell’s GOP Senate Leadership Fund as well as $4 million to GOP presidential candidates, including $1.1 million for Scott Walker and $800,000 for Lindsey Graham. These are but a smidgen of what is already publicly known.

In December 2018, Trump announced that he was lifting sanctions on an aluminum company owned by Deripaska, who is especially close to Putin and a key player in his attack on the United States. While Republicans defied Trump the year before to uphold sanctions on Russia, they now supported him and voted down the Democrats’ attempt to keep the Deripaska sanctions in place. McConnell led the Republican effort. Shortly thereafter, Trump transition team member Christopher Burnham was given a position on the board of Deripaska’s company—and Deripaska announced that he is investing $200 million in a mill in McConnell’s state.

Against this backdrop, Trump has advanced Russia’s most cherished goals. In addition to sanctions relief, he has threatened to withdraw from NATO, a move that the organization’s former supreme allied commander, retired Admiral James G. Stavridis, called “the gift of the century for Putin.” Trump has disclosed classified intelligence to Russian officials and regularly pushed Russian talking points on matters ranging from NATO membership for Montenegro to the war in Afghanistan. Trump has also gone to extraordinary lengths to keep his conversations with Putin secret even from his top advisors.

Russian hackers have targeted America’s most sensitive infrastructure, laying the groundwork for future attacks on financial, energy, nuclear, water, and aviation facilities. Trump’s response to Putin’s burgeoning cyberthreats has been to deny their existence, and moves that would have provoked bipartisan outrage prior to Trump now elicit anemic—if any—pushback from Republican leaders.

The sight of Republicans tripping over themselves to smear the Justice Department and the FBI on Trump’s behalf is surely a special source of satisfaction for Putin. The spectacle has elicited snickers of disbelief in Russia. As one incredulous official told me in Moscow, “We knew that Trump is ours, but who knew that Congress is as well!” Republican Senators’ vote to support lifting sanctions on Deripaska produced a burst of mirth in Russian media. Tracking Trump’s simpering loyalty to Putin has become a spectator sport in Russia.

To date, however, Democratic leaders have done little to expose the link between America’s incontinent campaign finance laws and Putin’s attacks. Instead, their critique of electoral corruption typically stays on hoary message, focusing on “greed”—grasping officials, tax windfalls for the wealthy, and excessive corporate profits. But this message has never produced a winning coalition for the overhaul of campaign finance. By grounding their case in national as well as class interests, liberals could appeal to centrists and traditional conservatives who might be less alarmed by Big Pharma’s profits than by Putin’s easy violations of national sovereignty and security.

Nor, for that matter, have the Democrats taken advantage of their opponents’ patriotic implosion to burnish their foreign policy and national security credentials. Some 2020 presidential hopefuls have made encouraging statements in speeches and on the debate stage, but Trumpism’s poisonous effect on American security and international prestige still does not figure prominently in the Democrats’ messaging.

Democrats would be foolish to allow foreign and security policy to be seen as the Republicans’ business—especially when the Republicans are no longer taking care of it. Rather than heeding calls to leave Trump/Russia to the lawyers, the Democrats should follow Senator Tim Kaine’s advice. “We can’t defeat Trump on domestic policy alone,” Kaine rightly noted after the midterms. “Democrats had a great night on Nov. 6… But these successes can obscure an important warning for Democrats in Virginia and nationally: Our party is struggling with voters on national security and the economy.” His call to action has yet to be picked up by party leaders.

Why the Russia Reluctance?

Russia is not a natural issue for 21st-century liberals. Running on social justice while ceding defense and the flag to the Republicans is ingrained in the Democrats’ post-LBJ muscle memory. Countering Russian aggression and assailing their opponents’ appeasement is particularly unfamiliar territory. The Russian threat faded at the end of the Cold War, Democrats widely believed. “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back,” quipped Barack Obama to Mitt Romney in 2012, “because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”

Since Vietnam, liberals have also lost their taste for running on love of country. Some progressives now identify the flag with imperialism, blustering, and bigotry. Many regard the United States as more blameworthy than venerable. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s recent assertion that “America was never that great” captures the mentality.

Among liberals, Trump/Russia does not evoke the instinctive loathing that racial or class injustice do. The work of Jonathan Haidt and colleagues provides insight. They outline five “moral foundations of politics,” defined as care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Only the first two (care and fairness) strongly resonate with contemporary liberals. Their moral foundations are more universal. Conservatives’ affinity for loyalty, authority, and sanctity inclines them toward particularistic allegiances, including nationalism.

The Trump/Russia story is less obviously about care and fairness than it is about betrayal, subversion, and degradation. Liberals abhor the Koch brothers’ sway because it robs ordinary folks of political clout on behalf of the rich. Yet Putin’s influence, which robs America of political power on behalf of Russia, does not elicit the same reflexive revulsion.

The Democrats have lost even the vocabulary needed to attack the Republicans on Russia. The terms betrayal and disloyalty come hard to them, even as Trump grovels before a hostile dictator who helped elect him. They refrain from the patois of national interests, toughness, and honor in favor of appeals to compassion and justice. If their foes’ actions are cowardly rather than callous, or treasonous rather than barbarous, Democratic leaders have a harder time assailing them.

If Trump Republicans are Jacksonian, Democrats Should Follow JFK

Forceful truth-telling about the Russians and the Republicans would come naturally to America’s mid-20th-century liberal patriots. Democratic presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson used muscular language that simultaneously confronted despots, embraced humanitarian values, and defended a robust democratic ideology. They tied every liberal cause to a jaunty, competitive—and patriotic—vision of national mission.

Kennedy habitually linked foreign and domestic threats, often in the same sentence. In his inaugural address he spoke of “tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself” as “the common enemy of man.” In office, his bold addresses on civil rights appealed to national pride as well as benevolence. On the campaign trail he inveighed against “the spread of Communist influence, until it festers 90 miles off the coast of Florida; the humiliating treatment of our president and vice president by those who no longer respect our power; the hungry children I saw in West Virginia, the old people who cannot pay their doctor bills, the families forced to give up their farms—an America with too many slums, too few schools, and too late to the moon and outer space.”

Defeating the tyranny of poverty and the tyranny of communism went hand in hand. In touting his program of aid for Latin America, Kennedy pledged “to assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty” while he cautioned “hostile powers” that the United States would “oppose aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas.”

Khrushchev drew Kennedy’s warning by merely threatening to subvert the election of free governments in Latin America. Russia has already subverted the election of a free government in the United States and continues to try to do so. With Trump and his Congressional abettors parroting Putin’s denials and showing no interest in stopping future attacks, Kennedy would expect his party to lead the charge. But current-day Democrats have mostly stayed mum, preferring to bring up the rear behind Mueller’s band of investigators.

Nor did Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, neglect to build his case for progressive causes on patriotic foundations. He attacked color-coded immigration policy as “un-American in the highest sense” as he abolished it with the 1965 Immigration Act. One can only imagine what Johnson, who pushed through the Voting Rights Act in a time of race riots and white alarm, would do with the likes of Trump.

Lacking an instinct for national security and honor, mistrustful of moral absolutes, and bereft of the language of loyalty/betrayal, post-Vietnam liberals fail to link the sellout of Americans to color-coded nativism and the sellout of America to Putin. Today’s liberals play rhetorical defense even on voting rights, accusing opponents of “cruelty” and “unfairness.” But Martin Luther King, the moral conscience of the mid-century liberal patriots, called “denial of this sacred right” what it was: “betrayal.”

Yet neither the denial of voting rights nor the aggression in Vietnam meant that America “was never that great.” King’s love of country always shone through: “[M]y beloved nation…America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in the [the] revolution of values” that he said was vital to overcoming “deadly Western arrogance.” He urged progressives to build a post-imperial vision of American exceptionalism into the national narrative. By missing his cue, post-Vietnam liberals left the flag with leaders who carried it into another disastrous foreign adventure, this time in the Middle East—and ultimately, handed it to Trump.

Do Patriotism and National Security Still Matter?

Love of country and devotion to its security still constitute essential commitments in American politics—no less than in Kennedy’s time.

Research in social psychology suggests the factors that make us feel patriotic are genetically rooted. As Adam Piore writes, patriotism is “part of a deep subconscious drive toward group formation and allegiance. . . . That’s why politicians so often invoke patriotism to demonize the other side, subtly implying that those who aren’t with us are against us.” Indeed, research has shown that conservatives are less likely to support Trump if arguments against him are presented in terms of his lack of patriotism (i.e. “he has repeatedly behaved disloyally towards our country”) rather than fairness (i.e. “his unfair statements are a breeding ground for prejudice”).

The Republicans have grasped that post-patriotism is a politically costly liberal conceit and that security against external threats always looms large in popular political calculations. Their advantage on public perceptions of patriotic devotion and its conjoined twin, toughness on national security, has buoyed them at the polls for decades.

In a 2014 study, Daniel Cox and colleagues found that the Republicans enjoyed a nine-point edge on “keeping America safe.” That advantage may have undergirded Trump’s 2016 shocker. While the Democrats led on healthcare and Social Security, voters said that terrorism and foreign policy were more important. Still, true to partisan habit, even a foreign policy and defense maestro like Hillary Clinton mostly stuck with health insurance and social justice, leaving the flag waving and tough talk on foreign threats to a candidate with no record of service to country at all.

In June 2018, even as top intelligence hands warned that the Republican President was acting like a controlled asset for Russian intelligence, Trump’s party maintained a ten-point lead on patriotism. The persistence of the gap shows how little the party of FDR and JFK has done to maintain its patriotism-and-national-security bona fides.

Patriotism and fortitude on the international stage matter most to those who vote the most. While Democrats stake their fortunes with seniors on a pledge of allegiance to Medicare, Americans 65 and over, 71 percent of whom vote, rate being “strong and decisive,” “patriotic,” and “able to command respect from other countries” as the traits they value most in a leader.

Vast majorities are alarmed by Russia’s electoral interventions and Trump’s relationship with Putin. Ten times more Americans regard Russia as an adversary than an ally, and twelve times more see Putin unfavorably than favorably. With a majority of voters believing that Trump “has weakened the United States’ position as leader of the free world,” a Democratic Party in command of the Trump/Russia story could aspire to recover support among the demographic that carried Trump over the top in Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan.

Neither Americans’ values nor the challenge of resisting “tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself” has changed fundamentally since Kennedy’s day. But the parties have. One is effectively in cahoots with the tyrants while the other has lost its taste for confronting them. Putin has taken advantage of both transformations to discredit democracy and degrade American leadership in the world.

Reclaiming the Nation’s Story

America’s national-democratic narrative has faced many challenges, but the story has persisted and can still bind the country together around common values and aspirations.

Cloaked in a mantle of pseudo-conservativism, a portion of the Republican Party developed a counternarrative that treats democratic institutions and demographic dynamism as obstacles to be overcome. In 2016, this climaxed in the party’s takeover by an unpatriotic ethnonational demagogue who is selling out American democracy, identity, and security, with the enablement and apparent approval of his own party.

The Democrats, meanwhile, have largely remained loyal to the nation’s story, but have neglected to tell it. Trump’s overt devotion to Putin can now help the Democrats to take back the flag for all Americans and aspirants to citizenship.

The Trump/Russia affair reveals the interdependence of democracy, demography, and security in America—and the dependence of all three on adherence to the values expressed in the national-democratic narrative. It invites—and obligates—American democrats to reclaim and renew the national story. It also paves the way for the Democratic Party to get back in the national security business.

If the Democratic Party fails to leverage our Trump-Putin problem to discredit color-coded nativism, the denomination of political influence in dollars, and violations of American sovereignty, these central drivers of democracy’s erosion will continue to do their work. We must box out ethnonationalism and halt the drift toward plutocracy. If the prospects for an international system governed by law and shaped by concern for comity and human dignity dim, the planet will become a truly unstable and dangerous place.

The mid-20th-century liberal patriots who crafted Social Security, NATO, the race to space, civil rights, and Medicare—victors in seven of nine presidential elections between 1932 and 1964—show how to navigate the challenge. Let’s hope today’s Democrats are listening.

The post Trump, Russia, and the Democrats’ Golden Opportunity appeared first on The American Interest.

“A Catholic Reactionary and a Black Feminist Walk into a Bar…”

The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free SocietiesRyszard Legutko

Encounter Books, 2016, 200 pp., $23.99

Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her SuperpowerBrittney Cooper

St. Martin’s Press, 2018, 288 pp., $25.99

Ryszard Legutko, an EU parliamentarian who once called gender studies the “original sin” of academia, would probably not get along with Brittney Cooper, who insists that “however dope fellatio may be, fellating the patriarchy is no way to win.”

Yet each has a written a book the other should read: The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, wherein Legutko chronicles the putative resemblances between Soviet-style communism and post-60s liberalism; and Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, Cooper’s memoir-cum-manifesto in defense of progressive woke-ism. Both provide evidence (some strong, some weak) that liberal democracy tends to decay under the weight of its own contradictions, with Legutko supplying the theory and Cooper the example. Both fret our current order isn’t living up to its professed values (it’s not particularly liberal or democratic), both call for resistance against a hegemonic power (white supremacy in Cooper’s case, the European Union in Legutko’s), and both use charged, charged language when attacking their targets: Legutko compares moderate Catholics to “cheerleaders with funny pompoms” and college students to the Stasi, while Cooper tells us her picket signs “are as likely to say FUCK THE POLICE as they are to say FUCK THE PATRIARCHY”—quite likely, in other words.

The books reflect the zeitgeist of what might be termed our post-liberal era, in which left- and right-wing radicals alike are gaining steam. Such radicals were relatively marginal until just a few years ago, contained by an effective cordon sanitaire. Now, however, the fringe is becoming mainstream, as more and more people (well, more and more pundits and professors) glom on to ideas and ideologies long considered heretical: protectionism, socialism, distributism, nationalism, even full-fledged anti-liberalism. For this reason, it’s worth examining both authors to get a sense of what’s driving today’s post-liberal crusade—and of whether the movement has legs.

As it turns out, each book usefully illustrates the limits of the other’s project. Legutko helps us see that classical and progressive liberalism are not unrelated or even antithetical; on the contrary, their relationship is why Cooper ends up constrained and confused by the very system she’s critiquing. Cooper, in turn, helps elucidate a tension at the heart of Legutko’s argument: Though he scorns liberal democracy for “blurring [the] differences between people,” he himself ignores how different people have adapted liberalism to different contexts and for different ends—how Habermas differs from Locke, say, or how Constant differs from Cooper. This tension doesn’t negate the book, but it does highlight an error to which modern-day critics of liberalism (left and right) often fall prey: conflating what is contingent with what is essential, such that everything bad about the present can be explained by ideas or institutions in the past. To note the essentialist fallacy is not to dismiss either author out of hand; it is merely to preempt the hysteria—and derangement—which their essentialism breeds.

On June 8, 1978, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn delivered a famous commencement address at Harvard University. It was famous, in part, because it was so unexpected. After noting that Western systems of government are “in theory . . . the best and in practice the most attractive,” the Nobel Prize-winning dissident began issuing wave after wave of pointed denunciations—only they weren’t aimed at the Soviet Union. 

“The Western world,” he said, “has lost its civil courage,” especially “among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite.” These groups “show depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in theoretical reflections to explain how realistic, reasonable . . . and even morally worn it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice.”

Indeed, Western liberalism had become so libertine it was in danger of imploding:

Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. . . . Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.

And the media wasn’t helping. Even without censorship, “fashionable trends of thought . . . are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges.” This, in turn, “gives birth to strong mass prejudices” that serve as a kind of “petrified armor around” the mind, making it immune to reasoned criticism.

No kidding.

In many ways, Legutko is Solzhenitsyn redivivus. Communism is gone (mostly), but the anomie of liberalism remains, and if anything has gotten worse. Once upon a time, Legutko belonged to the Solidarity trade union, a key font of anti-communist organizing; today, he is a member of Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice Party, having lived through (and lamented) the post-Soviet transition. These experiences don’t place Legutko beyond critique, of course—I’ll offer several of those in a bit—but they at least entitle him to a hearing. Among his more striking observations are as follows:

Liberalism, like communism, has millenarian tendencies. It “immanentizes the eschaton,” to use Bill Buckley’s famous phrase, and so can grow hostile to the eschaton’s less immanent depictions—those proffered by Christianity, say, and especially by Catholicism. Like communism, liberalism has a progressive concept of history and a utopian sense of its role therein; like communism, it smears dissent as ideology while worshipping its own “ideological gods,” the holy triad of race, class, and gender. 

And despite claiming to transcend politics, liberalism and communism have both “induced politicization on a scale unknown in previous history,” with schools and businesses and media all pressured to conform to the same staid pieties, the same stale narrative. Under communism, Legutko notes, “the proletariat” was an ideological mystification that lacked any concrete referent; it existed only insofar as it “fulfilled the political criteria” of the revolution, not as a real, tangible grouping. Likewise, “women” is an abstract concept that “does not denote any actual existing community, but only an imagined collective” of feminist worship, or so it is claimed. “Women, homosexuals, [and] Muslims” thus become “quasi-political parties,”1 “organized from above” and “possessing [no] other characteristics than those resulting from the struggle for power against other groups.”

Throughout all this, Legutko is careful to emphasize that whereas communism rested on terror, liberal democracy does not, a difference “only an insane person would deny.” Still, one obvious riposte is that Legutko isn’t describing liberalism per se, but rather a deranged form of progressivism. The great and the good, the whig and the woke have forgotten what true liberalism looks like, the objection goes—so, far from impugning liberal democracy, these parallels just show how much ground has been ceded to illiberalism in recent years, and how bad the recession has been. In that case, maybe what we need today is more liberalism, not less.

Maybe. But then why have these “progressive” trends emerged with such striking uniformity across the Western world? Why is it that political correctness is affecting policy in the United States and Canada and the EU? Why is it that invasive and unaccountable government has cropped up in just those places that style themselves liberal democracies, and why don’t liberals seem terribly troubled by this fact? A similar query could be posed to the defender of communism: Why is it that everywhere it’s been tried, from Venezuela to Cuba to Russia, central planning has evolved the exact same characteristic defects over time? To dismiss those defects as not “true” communism is to beg the question, and to ignore an awfully big coincidence. Mutatis mutandis, liberal democracy: If liberalism has devolved into progressivism everywhere it’s been tried—big “if”—then perhaps progressivism is a feature of the system rather than a bug.2

That ultimately is what Legutko is arguing. For him, the parallels between liberal democracy and communism are not incidental but systemic, and arise out of a common intellectual heritage. It’s difficult to fully evaluate this claim without diving deep into the weeds of Enlightenment exegesis, but the basic argument rests on three points.

First, liberal democracy and communism both value equality, albeit in different ways. The communists sought to “equalize” men by pauperizing them—materially, yes, but also socially, via the wholesale destruction of civic life. The mechanism in liberal democracy is more subtle (and more humane), but, Legutko suggests, perhaps more insidious as well: Democractic politics requires a presumption of equality that tends to metastasize across the culture, breeding distrust of traditional associations and attachments insofar as they embody non-egalitarian traits. The social scape of liberal democracy thus comes to resemble (he says) the barrenness of communism, except this barrenness does not result from state suppression or control; it’s instead generated spontaneously, within the liberal order, due to voluntary choices made by individual agents. 

And “because egalitarianism weakens communities and thus deprives men of an identity-giving habitat, it creates a vacuum” that ideology is only too happy to fill. “Feminism makes all women sisters . . . all environmentalists become a part of an international green movement.” The cause is “similarly vulgar” in each case, and the mind “equally dogmatic, unperturbed by any testimony from outside”—Solzhenitsyn’s psychic armor in action.

Second, liberalism and communism both begin with what Legutko calls “anthropological minimalism”—the view that man lacks an intrinsic “good” or “end” toward which human life should be ordered. Absent such directives, the communist sees no real reason to constrain his brutality (where would that constraint come from?), while the liberal recognizes no obligation to anything other than his own desires, thereby compounding the atomism produced under an egalitarian ethos.

Third, liberal democracy and communism both aim to maximize personal freedom. This seemingly counterintuitive claim actually makes a good deal of sense when one considers the Marxian account of the end of history. “As soon as the distribution of labour comes into being,” Marx wrote, “each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape.” But in a communist society:

Nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, [because] society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

Legutko’s core insight is that liberal democracy understands freedom in exactly these terms—the right, as Anthony Kennedy put it, “to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life” without interference, not just from government but from nature itself.

Yet “if man reaches fulfillment by increasing his decision-making power,” why think “this desire will vanish in some future system that allows the . . . free expression of human nature?” It won’t—which means liberalism, like Marxism, “is primarily a doctrine of power, both self-regarding and other-regarding:” in order to prevent private agents from dominating their countrymen, it must grant “enormous prerogatives for itself.” Hence the expansion of central authority, the proliferation of rules and regulators, in liberal-democratic life. There is an inverse relationship between freedom’s conceptual purport, on the one hand, and its concrete manifestation on the other, to wit:

If abortion means freedom, then we should . . . force doctors to support this freedom and silence priests so they do not interfere with it. If same-sex marriage means freedom, we should then compel its opponents to accept it and silence fools who may have doubts about it. 

As a result, “those who write and speak not only face more limitations than they used to, but all the institutions and communities that traditionally stood in the way of this ‘coercion to freedom’ are being dismantled.” Examples of such freedom-coercing measures include demographic quotas, hate speech laws, campus speech codes, and—Legutko reminds us almost every other page—the EU, whose supranational diktats “ignore the rules followed in nation-states.” Dissent, meanwhile, is “considered a blasphemous assault on the very idea of the European Union and the noble principles that constitute it, just as in socialism every dissent was an incomprehensible act of treason that did not deserve to be left unpunished.”3

Liberalism as communism-lite is a provocative frame to say the least, and more than one critic has dismissed it as little more than trollish clickbait. You can reject that framing, though, without rejecting the substantive account of how liberal democracy currently operates—how the culture, courts, and corporate media form a system that’s less free or open or democratic than the official Narrative suggests, and which homogenizes citizens into isolated, lonely units. 

Still, one problem with the book is that Legutko spends so much time outlining his theory he never actually gets around to proving it. Almost every mechanism he identifies acts through “social practices, mores,” and “attitudes,” all things that admit of anthropological (not just armchair) analysis. Yet scant analysis takes place. Legutko simply lists off properties of liberal-democratic life—loneliness, conformism, secularism—then tells an elaborate just-so story to explain them. Yes, this story has deep roots in political philosophy; yes, Legutko cites Rawls and Nozick and Tocquevillle; yes, establishing causation is difficult. But if your entire causal theory rests on particular “mores” and “attitudes,” you should probably provide some evidence that those attitudes (a) exist, and (b) are what’s driving liberalism’s turn toward progressivism. 

Moreover, you would want to show that the turn isn’t merely philosophical but practical,4 that liberal-democratic values motivate ordinary people to become woke (or at least anti-anti-woke) until society resembles one big college campus—until Brussels becomes Brown, Washington Wesleyan. You’d want to find left-wing critics of liberalism who presuppose the very value system they’re critiquing—”crypto-liberalists,” as it were—and you’d also want such people to appear atomized and troubled, because that would make Polish-style illiberalism seem more like a kindness than an imposition, more like a cure than a disease. 

In short, you’d want someone like Brittney Cooper.

A columnist at Cosmopolitan and a tweeter at “@ProfessorCrunk,” Cooper is not the sort one generally associates with Big Ideas, let alone with prickly Poles. I had never heard of her until my book club decided to read Eloquent Rage and Demon in Democracy in tandem, which many of us assumed was a joke. (It wasn’t.)

Cooper teaches Women’s Studies at Rutgers University, but her best known work isn’t really academic, nor does it try to be. Rather, Eloquent Rage is somewhere between a memoir and a manifesto, blending personal experience with political reflection in colloquial, often caustic prose—I counted 33 uses of “fuck” and 47 of “shit.”

It’s also informed by the “woke analysis feminism has bequeathed” the author “about the perils of getting in bed at any level with the logics of patriarchy and militarism.” But, as we learn soon enough, Cooper didn’t grow up around such language (she’s from a small Southern town), or around her father (he was shot dead when she was nine), and for the most part enjoyed little of the privilege that many academics (the lefties especially) tend to inhabit. Though she does name-drop here and there, her “feminist muse” is Beyonce, not Beauvoir—a poet, not a philosopher.

All this makes Eloquent Rage a good test of Legutko’s thesis: If liberal-democratic values help shape the awokening Cooper describes, it might mean Legutko is on to something when he says liberalism and progressivism are linked in practice as well as in theory. Whereas if those values don’t play a role—if her rage has other, more salient sources—then maybe what Legutko attributes to liberal democracy is really attributable to something else, extrinsic to our current order and therefore not an indictment of it. 

At first glance, the thesis holds up quite well. There are times when Cooper joins liberalism to progressivism so explicitly she almost seems like a plant, deployed by Jacobite handlers in order to discredit the liberal project. She presents identity politics as a “language of liberation” and “self-possession”, evolved out of a “healthy love for ourselves,” and intersectionality as the idea that “systems of power interact in Black women’s lives to . . . hinder us from moving unencumbered through the social sphere.” Each concept is defined and defended in classically liberal terms—the Lockean meme of self-ownership, the Millian meme of laissez-faire—as is power itself, which Cooper conceives as “the ability to create better options” for one’s life. And each rests on a liberal notion of freedom, ”the ability to travel unencumbered to the places where you need to go,” to not be “limited by script and convention.”

It is this notion that Legutko thinks has undermined traditional sources of meaning and community. And sure enough, it’s what motivates Cooper’s splenetic jabs at organized religion. Most Christian theology is “infantiliz[ing],” she says, because it makes us think “God only ever sees us as children,” rather than as self-sufficient, autonomous beings. A better church would be one in which “Black women had the right to dissent from theologies that didn’t serve them well”—those that put limits on “their finances, their bodies, the number of children they bore, and the kind of sex they wanted to have”. Don’t abandon Jesus if he’s “important to you,” Cooper enjoins, in language behooving a self-help manual. But conservative Christian theology or (God forbid) sexual ethics? “That shit is just absurd.” 

Absurd, and presumably unequal. The problem with God’s “favor”, as Cooper puts it, is that “favor isn’t fair. So we should have . . . a healthy skepticism of the institutions and opportunities that would make of us exceptions.” Here, she echoes almost verbatim the democratic disdain for religion described by Legutko: “Salvation, like anything that is not . . . distributed equally” will appear “ideologically suspect” to those with an egalitarian temperament, the ultimate form of favoritism and unfairness. Given how central this concept is to Christianity, it would not be a stretch to say that Cooper’s worldview effectively precludes participation in authentic Christian life—that it “deprives her”, in Legutko’s words, “of an identity-giving habitat” in which meaning can flourish. 

And absent such a habitat, she displays many of the properties Legutko assigns the liberal subject. Cooper, one senses right away, is a lonely person. She recalls staying in “toxic” friendships with women out of a “fear of being alone,” and notes that she “came up in an era when Black girls loudly proclaimed that they didn’t have friends. They had associates”—a strikingly cold, contractual term. This attitude “has always rung false” to Cooper, “maybe because [she] had absolutely no interest in spending sustained time fake-grinning at people with whom [she] couldn’t be [her] whole self,” or maybe because consent is necessary but not sufficient for friendship, which requires the sort of thick ties that liberalism tends to corrode. 

An example of that corrosion comes in Chapter 4, where Cooper offers a poignant critique of her father. People would always comment on “his empathy and kindness to others,” Cooper recalls, especially the “starving children in Africa.” But therein lies “the conundrum of American empathy:” Cooper’s father “cared more for these Black children abroad than he cared for his own children, whom he never financially or emotionally supported.” Put another way, he cared more for abstractions—Starving Children in Africa, the Universal Brotherhood of Man—than he did for tangible relationships, to the point that Cooper only remembers him as a “weekend bringer of chaos and destruction.” The paradox of American empathy, then, is really the paradox of liberal empathy: Care too much for The World, and pretty soon you’ll care nothing for the people within it, including your own flesh and blood. “Patriarchy and toxic masculinity . . . turned my father into a violent man,” Cooper tells us. Perhaps that’s true. But so, by her account, did liberalism, to the extent it strained the relational ties that might have made his life—and his daughter’s—better.

Whatever’s at fault, the fact remains that Cooper grew up profoundly alienated from faith, friends, and family. This should make her profoundly susceptible to identity politics on Legutko’s view; the “vacuum” must be filled somehow. And indeed, Cooper explicitly links her embrace of feminism to her desire for belonging:

Many of us who couldn’t access pretty privilege, those of us who weren’t popular or cool, those of us nerdy girls who stayed to ourselves, wrote stories and dreamed of lives as writers, grew up and found a home in feminism, a place where we were seen, a place where others were as mad about injustice as we were. 

From liberalism to loneliness, from loneliness to progressivism—that is Legutko’s argument, and Cooper’s story. 

Alas, both have a predictable ending. Legutko thinks liberalism will politicize every aspect of human life—language and love, friendship and sex—until there’s no escaping the panopticon. For her part, Cooper welcomes this process. “I’m tired of the lie that relationships and love are not political,” she declares at one point. “We need to pursue intimate solidarity with one another,” because “solidarity and allyship matter as much in the bedroom as they matter in the revolution.” Any “healthy or just version . . . of Black relationships” will therefore be “rooted in the concept of being allies and coconspirators”—of being part of a common struggle—against racism and patriarchy and xenophobia. Cooper thus understands politics in much the same way as Carl Schmitt, who wrote that “the specific political distinction . . . is that between friend and enemy.” So if friendship and love are political, they must ultimately be premised on antagonism rather than affection—on conflict rather than intimacy. 

And because this distinction is essentially public, to assert that “the personal is political” is really just to abolish the personal—the very sphere in which meaningful attachments are formed. Eloquent Rage thus takes on a tragic, almost Sisyphean character: Cooper copes with loneliness by politicizing precisely those things that shouldn’t be political, which just ensures her atomization will continue. “I worry about a world in which” black girls only have “associates,” she remarks in chapter 2, because that word implies an attitude of “distrust”. Yet by chapter 10, she’s encouraging black girls to think of themselves as coconspirators without the slightest hint of irony. Per Legutko, it seems liberalism “has turned into an independent agent of such a coercive power that it force[s] people” like Cooper to say and do things that, by their own lights, “they should not be doing”—to self-destruct out of some misbegotten sense of enlightenment, their “pure love for the idea.” 

Dig a little deeper, though, and this Legutkian schema begins to break down. For one thing, Cooper sounds like a communitarian at least as often as she sounds like a liberal. “Individual transformation is neither a substitute for nor a harbinger of structural transformation” she writes, “but the collective, orchestrated fury of Black women can move the whole world.” To that end, Cooper actually acknowledges the black church as “one of the historic structuring institutions for the social life of black people.” True, “churches have an exceedingly long way to go in combating . . . homophobia and sexism.” True, they’ve often abdicated their role “in ending white supremacy.” But even so, “it was at church that I learned to have a healthy relationship with my fears, anxieties, and fantasies.” 

If Eloquent Rage is ambivalent about religion, it’s downright confused about theology. “Christian invocations of favor” are bad when they make us into “exceptions,” but good when they “are used as a resource to fight against routine injustices.” Or maybe that’s also bad, Cooper goes on, because “this approach to currying favor with God is individual” and thus offers no coherent critique of “the system.” She can’t make up her mind. 

These passages complicate the straightforward reading of Cooper as a radical liberal democrat. It would be more correct to say that Eloquent Rage imbricates liberalism alongside many other traditions and ideologies, not all of which fit neatly into Legutko’s thesis. They do not fit, in part, because they lack any European analogue. As Legutko concedes, America has proven curiously resistant to the secularization that’s taken place across the Atlantic, having preserved a “strong presence of religion in the public square.” This presence helps explain why American social justice movements have historically been less secular than their European counterparts (just look at MLK), and why even at her most rageful Cooper can’t quite bring herself to disown the church, opting instead for a harsh yet indecisive sort of criticism. 

Indeed, the whole emphasis on “rage” is somewhat specific to the American context. “When it comes to Black women”, Cooper writes, “sass is simply a more palatable form of rage. Americans adore sassy Black women. You know . . . women like Tyler Perry’s Madea, Mammy in Gone with the Wind, or Nell from that old eighties sitcom Gimme a Break! These kinds of Black women put white folks at ease.” The role of rage in black culture no doubt influenced its role in black feminism, which has long extolled what Audre Lorde called “the uses of anger”—its ability to mobilize and empower women “in the direction of our good,” as bell hooks put it. To the extent this tradition can be described as “liberal,” it is a much more passionate liberalism than the bloodless technocracy at play in the EU, where Habermas, not hooks, remains the court philosopher. 

And those are just two examples. Liberalism has always emerged in response to—and been shaped by—particular exigencies at particular moments. As Sam Moyn notes in The Washington Post, “liberalism’s critics . . . often gesture nostalgically, and unspecifically, to the supposedly more rooted social order of the Middle Ages. Yet liberalism arose from that social order because illiberalism itself failed badly.” Figures like Hobbes and Locke had no interest in the sort of deracinated individualism with which they are now associated; their main goal was to prevent a repeat of the religious wars that rocked Europe from the 16th to early 17th century.

French liberalism, by contrast, was more about defending the achievements of the French Revolution against its critics. This effort consciously emphasized duty, virtue, and self-sacrifice, as Helena Rosenblatt has shown, both as goods in themselves and as essential prerequisites for freedom. The desire to conserve a revolution also shaped the liberalism of the American Founders, who had no problem speaking in terms of a common good, or in terms of “justice,” or in terms of our “Posterity” as distinct from theirs. Freedom was merely part of that good, and meant something quite different to Madison and Washington than what it means today.

Such particularities don’t disprove the claim that liberalism tends to decay over time, of course. But “tends” is the operative word. And once you appreciate how different liberalism can look in different contexts—how it can be both religious and secular, communal and libertarian—you begin to wonder whether we really had to end up here as Legutko suggests, or whether what ails us is more contingent, more subject to change than Demon in Democracy would have it.

I think the bulk of the evidence points toward option two, including the evidence Legutko cites. At times, he seems almost as confused as Cooper about just how essentialist he wants to be. Hyper-politicization had deep “roots in the past,” one sentence begins, but the most “direct impact came from what happened throughout the Western world in the 1960s.” Was that happening the inevitable result of liberal democracy? Perhaps, Legutko ventures, insofar as the “paramount status of equality clearly favored the Left” more than the Right. Yet on the very same page, he notes three decade-specific factors that “substantially changed the mood of the public: the European powers’ stormy process of decolonization, America’s entanglement in the Vietnam war, and [the] political awakening of the black population.” It’s quite possible that liberalism was a necessary condition for what happened next; but absent these paroxysms it would hardly have been sufficient.

Legutko falls into a similar trap when discussing the sexual revolution, that “existential vacuum” of “despair and senselessness.” For more than 300 years, from 17th-century Britain to 20th-century America, “the family, while not particularly respected by philosophers of liberal and democratic persuasions, was not an object of systemic attack. Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau certainly did not fight against it.” But then came the counterculture, which

repeated the old communist plan to overthrow the repressive power structures, including marriage and family. This time, however—and that was what made it different from previous revolutions—its slogans of sexual liberation mobilized millions of people and it had at its disposal previously unheard-of instruments of ideological warfare, notably mass culture and mass media . . . . The message that reached the millions was that human sexual impulses had been so far suppressed, that this suppression had been deleterious, and that once sex was liberated, life would be immeasurably nicer. [Emphasis added]

One way of interpreting this is that liberalism’s “inner dialectic” finally reached its denouement with the liberalization of sex, regulated for so long by “social practices” and “precepts.” But here’s another: Slogans of sexual liberation had existed for more than a hundred years before they caught on with the general public—and even then, it took “previously unheard-of instruments” of mass media (never mind the pill) to ensure that the change would be permanent. Libertinism doesn’t appear to be the liberal default, in other words; it required a very particular mix of socio-scientific conditions, as well as a very long time-horizon, to come about. 

By contrast, communism registered its characteristic defects almost immediately. The Soviet Union experienced its first major famine in 1921, while it was still in the process of being established; in 1934 the purges began, and by 1937 Stalin had achieved total political control, buttressed by a febrile cult of personality. One decade later, the Romanian monarchy became the People’s Republic of Romania under Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej; economic and political turmoil soon followed, culminating in Nicolae Ceaușescu’s infamous regime. 

If liberalism tends to produce sybarites, then, communism has a much stronger tendency to produce dictators, so much so that “essence” seems like a more appropriate term. And even if you accept the comparison between communist Newspeak and liberal “language rituals,” those rituals did not develop until rather late in liberalism’s lifespan; communism, on the other hand, had Newspeak from the beginning and displayed relatively less variance in its internal operations. Whatever affinity exists between the two today, it is probably not solely or even primarily the fault of their shared intellectual structure. At least as important were Fortuna, accident, luck, forces that play a larger role in liberal democracy than communism precisely because they are allowed to. Perhaps Legutko would say that “real” liberalism did not exist before 1960, just as “real” communism did not exist before 1917; if so, he’d be distorting language on a scale commensurate with the Politburo, which would in turn undermine the very premise that makes his book interesting, if at times quite frustrating.

Most frustrating of all is the way Legutko will make a good or even brilliant point, only to stretch it beyond the bounds of decency and common sense. Hate speech laws are “dangerous,” he warns, because they allow for “drastic intervention by the government and the courts in family life, the media, public institutions, and schools.” An entirely reasonable view, consonant with his claims about “coerced” liberty. But then comes the rub: For Legutko, “domestic violence” laws are also an “Orwellian” measure, “making people believe that freedom is slavery and slavery is freedom.” He does not see (or does not indicate he sees) any moral difference between policing thought and policing rape, provided both take place at home; it’s all part of liberalism’s inner logic, and for that reason must be opposed.

I’m sure Cooper would take this passage as proof that the only thing conservatives want to conserve is patriarchy. So, I suspect, would many centrists who might otherwise entertain Legutko’s argument. And that’s what’s so maddening about today’s post-liberal craze: Its leaders are every bit as blinkered by abstraction as the Potemkin liberalism they decry. The result is a kind of essentialist death-spiral in which the straw-men of the Right feed the straw-men of Left and vice versa, until neither side can find anything to admire about our current order—it’s hedonism or white nationalism all the way down. Maybe liberal democracy will collapse, maybe it won’t. All I know is I don’t want Cooper or Legutko picking up the pieces if it does.

1It’s important to note that none of those groups are especially powerful in Poland. Nor are Jews, as evidenced by a now-repealed law that would have made it illegal to discuss Poland’s complicity in the Holocaust. By contrast, Legutko’s anti-immigrant, socially conservative Law and Justice party controls over half the Polish Parliament.

2Lest I be misunderstood: Even if progressivism were an essential feature of liberalism, it would not follow that liberalism and communism are morally equivalent. They aren’t. My point is simply that reactionary critics of liberalism are making the same kind of argument as liberal critics of communism, which is why it is question-begging to invoke “true” liberalism as some sort of trump card. Put another way, you won’t persuade post-liberals unless you address their argument on its own terms. As a liberal myself, I think this is worth doing. 

3Curiously, the Brave Dissident Legutko has been given every opportunity to express himself, such as when he accused Angela Merkel of being “hijacked” by the Left on the floor of the European Parliament.

4That Legutko himself fails to show this is odd considering how much of his career has been spent in politics. Though he does indeed teach philosophy at Jagiellonian University, he has also served as a Polish Senator and Secretary of State. You’d think those experiences would translate into an impressive grasp of the relation between theory and praxis, but, alas, they do not.

The post “A Catholic Reactionary and a Black Feminist Walk into a Bar…” appeared first on The American Interest.

The Brexit Nightmare

“History,” Stephen Dedalus says in James Joyce’s Ulysses, “is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.” The people of Great Britain may be forgiven for feeling the same way about their country’s political-issue-turned-national-melodrama known as Brexit. On June 23, 2016, they voted by a margin of 51.89 to 48.11 percent in a national referendum to leave the European Union—although without any indication of when, how, or on what terms the departure could or should take place. The British government has spent the intervening three years unsuccessfully attempting to leave. The process has had a devastating impact on British public life. It has paralyzed the government, polarized the society, and pulverized the major political parties—and all with no end in sight.

The Prime Minister who staged the referendum on the assumption that voters would opt to remain in the EU, David Cameron, resigned immediately afterward and his fellow Conservative, Theresa May, succeeded him. She designated March 29, 2019, as the date by which Britain would depart from the EU and proceeded to negotiate terms of departure with Brussels. The British Parliament, in which her party enjoyed a working majority, rejected the agreement she reached three times. Having secured an extension of the deadline until October 31 of this year, she proposed to submit her plan for a fourth vote, but the Conservative Party told her that the time had come for her to step aside, and she duly resigned.

The Conservatives have now selected a new leader, who will replace Mrs. May as Prime Minister. Boris Johnson, a former journalist and mayor of London, is someone whom his friends would describe as “colorful” and “flexible” and his critics—of whom there are many, including within his own party—would call “mercurial” and “unprincipled.” He, along with the Parliament and the country, face four options for Brexit, none of them appealing.

One is not so much unappealing as unlikely: a renegotiation of the existing agreement to make it palatable to both the British Parliament and the EU. Johnson has said he will go to Brussels and secure a new, better deal. The EU has declared that it will not renegotiate. It is conceivable that the EU will have grown sufficiently weary of the issue, and Johnson will become so frightened of the alternatives, that the two sides will make some symbolic changes in the agreement that Mrs. May negotiated and declare themselves satisfied—Johnson that he has obtained alterations favorable to Britain and the EU that it has conceded nothing. In that case the British will leave on essentially the terms that Parliament has rejected three times—provided, that is, that the House of Commons accepts them.

Johnson, who led the 2016 campaign to leave and resigned as foreign secretary in protest against Mrs. May’s deal, does seem capable of the cynicism and hypocrisy necessary for such an outcome; but it is not clear that his fellow Conservatives, especially those who supported his candidacy for the office he has won precisely because he convinced them that he would never accept such a deal, would go along with it even in the event that the EU were to make it available.

Johnson has declared that if the EU doesn’t offer something better Britain will leave its ranks by October 31 with no deal at all. The EU may refuse to extend the deadline even if Johnson requests one. In that case, Great Britain would jump, or be pushed, out of the EU without a life raft. Such an event would sever, suddenly and without immediate replacements, all the ties—economic, financial, and political—with the other 27 countries in the EU that come with EU membership and that, in the British case, have accumulated over 46 years. The cost to the other 27 of such a development, and the inevitably far higher cost to Britain cannot be precisely known in advance but would not be negligible. By one British government forecast such a scenario would reduce the British GDP over the next 15 years by as much as 9.3 percent. Martin Wolf, the economics commentator for the Financial Times, has written that “No deal is either lunatic or a confidence trick. It is not a policy any sane or decent politician could even consider.”

Moreover, the only position concerning Brexit that has commanded a parliamentary majority over the last three years is opposition to a no-deal exit. Should Johnson attempt it the Parliament would almost surely vote against it. Since Great Britain has no written constitution, just what would follow in that case is unclear, which means that Brexit could metamorphose from a political into a constitutional crisis. In those circumstances a third option, new parliamentary elections, would become a distinct possibility, and the EU might in fact decline to extend the deadline without one.

Polls suggest that national elections this year could well produce a fragmented Parliament in which a multi-party governing coalition would have to be formed—something without precedent in British political history. New elections could also, however, yield a government headed by the Labour Party, with its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, as Prime Minister, which could administer a political shock to the country even more powerful and disruptive than Brexit. Corbyn is committed to bringing his brand of socialism to Great Britain, which would mean a massive redistribution of wealth and government control of large parts of the British economy. At the very least, this would trigger large-scale capital flight from the British Isles.

The Corbyn foreign policy has a single, simple guiding principle: hostility to the United States, which he regards as the root of all the world’s troubles. Following this principle, he has expressed sympathy for or solidarity with virtually every government or group opposed to one or another American foreign policy, including Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, and the Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah. He would be, one observer noted, the most anti-American British Prime Minister since Lord Liverpool, who held the office when his red-coated countrymen burned Washington, DC in 1814. Intelligence-sharing between the United States and Great Britain would certainly not survive a Corbyn Prime Ministership, which could even result in Britain, a founding member of the Atlantic alliance, becoming the first county to leave or be ejected from NATO.

Nor would Corbyn’s arrival at 10 Downing Street necessarily resolve Britain’s relationship with the EU. Throughout his political career he has expressed skepticism of, if not downright hostility to, the organization, regarding it as a capitalist cabal standing in the way of the socialist paradise he plans to create in Britain. His party is divided on the issue. A number of working-class Labour constituencies in the north of England voted to leave in 2016, but the majority of Labour voters wish to remain in the EU and want a repeat of the 2016 referendum—they call it a “people’s vote”—in the hope of reversing the verdict of three years ago. Recently Corbyn has, grudgingly, more or less endorsed the idea of another referendum and said—more or less—that if one is held Labour will support the “remain” position. Even Prime Minister Boris Johnson might opt for a second vote if he should come to see this as the least bad of his options.

The partisans of Brexit vehemently oppose such a development, and a second referendum might not be free from violence. Polls now show that the initial verdict would be reversed in a revote, but the polls have been wrong before: they showed the “remain” side prevailing in advance of the 2016 referendum. A reversal would surely embitter the Brexiteers, who would continue agitating to quit the EU. Even if a second vote confirmed the first, this would not necessarily settle the issue: the British public was promised by the “leave” camp three years ago that Brexit would bring immediate and major economic benefits to the country. Since it will do no such thing, the outcome for which they initially voted will disappoint and disillusion many of them. Nor would a second referendum that confirmed the result of the first decide the terms on which Britain will leave.

In sum, none of the four paths open to Boris Johnson and Great Britain promises a happy ending. Indeed, none promises any ending at all, for if Britain does leave the EU it will immediately face the certainly protracted and probably bitter task of negotiating a new economic relationship with the selfsame organization, to whose members it now sends fully 44 percent of its exports; and those new arrangements, whenever concluded, would almost surely not give British businesses the advantages they now enjoy.

Finally, whether the process of leaving drags on indefinitely or Britain does ultimately manage to leave, Brexit has the distinction of being that rare political issue that makes losers of all parties connected with it—with the exception, as the distinguished former diplomat and cabinet minister George Walden has noted, of Russian president Vladimir Putin, to the achievement of whose goal of weakening the Western democracies Brexit is already contributing. If it drags on it will continue to preoccupy and paralyze Britain, and to a lesser extent the EU. If the British do cut themselves off from Europe’s major international organization they will become poorer and will count for less beyond their borders. Their departure will deprive the EU of its strongest voice in favor of the political direction it ought to be taking—toward bureaucratic decentralization.

Even the United States, contrary to the sentiments expressed by President Trump, will lose from Brexit. Among all the countries in the world, Britain’s global outlook (leaving aside Jeremy Corbyn) is most similar to America’s. It is in the American interest, therefore, for Britain to have as much global influence as possible. If there is going to be an EU—and there is—the United States benefits from British membership in it.

The proponents of Brexit regularly note that the decision to leave was an impeccably democratic one. While referenda are alien to the British tradition, in which representative rather than direct democracy and the supremacy of Parliament have been the rule for centuries, the referendum did replicate, on a vastly larger scale, the original democracy of ancient Athens that decided public issues by the vote of all Athenian citizens. Looking back on that 2016 decision the British people may come to agree with a remark by the American comedian of the first half of the twentieth century, W.C. Fields. In one of his comedic routines he plays a man who arrives, thirsty, in a frontier town in the Old West and asks for directions to the nearest saloon, only to be informed that all the town’s saloons are closed. Upon asking why, he is told that it is election day and saloons always close on election day, to which he replies, “That’s carrying democracy too far.”

The post The Brexit Nightmare appeared first on The American Interest.

“Neocon” as a Slur

I have been identified as a neoconservative ever since I started to work for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan on the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1981, and subsequently for my similar work in the Reagan White House. Being the executive director of the infamous “neocon inspired” Project for the New American Century cemented that label. It’s not a label I object to. And contrary to some of the more conspiratorial accounts, it doesn’t come with a membership—secret or not—in Israel’s Likud. I am a crib to coffin Catholic.

I do object, however, to how readily the term “neocon” is used by writers, commentators, and politicians (both here and abroad) to describe anyone on the right they find objectionable when it comes to foreign and defense issues. Two relatively recent examples come to mind.

In late June, Presidential hopeful Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat representing Hawaii in the House of Representatives, appeared on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” There, she asserted that “The neocons in the Trump Administration,” along with the Saudis and Israel Prime Minister Bibi Netanyhu “have created a situation where it is going to be very difficult for President Trump to avoid a war with Iran.”

Gabbard didn’t bother to name who those neocons were. And there is a reason she didn’t. Unless there are secret White House employees, there are in fact no neocons working there in sufficiently senior positions to create the situation the Congresswoman is complaining about. Indeed, the vast majority of noteworthy neocons signed “Never Trump” statements prior to his election to the Oval Office in 2016. Moreover, as best one can tell, the White House is still not hiring anyone who signed one of those missives.

Shortly after Donald Trump pulled back from striking Iran during the latest round of escalations, Tucker Carlson himself took to the air to praise the President and excoriate those pushing him to war.

Donald Trump was elected President precisely to keep us out of disasters like war with Iran. So how did we get so close to starting one? Simple. The neocons still wield enormous power in Washington. They don’t care what the cost of war with Iran is. They certainly don’t care what the effect on Trump’s political fortunes might be. They despise Donald Trump.

Now, one of their key allies is the National Security adviser of the United States. John Bolton is an old friend of Bill Kristol’s. Together they helped plan the Iraq War.

Here’s the thing, though: Bolton is no neocon. Just ask him. A friend and former colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, John is a rather traditional national security conservative, who sees American security concerns through the lens of very concrete interests. Pushing democracy abroad has never been on his agenda.

And pace Carlson, being in favor of the Iraq War is hardly what it means to be a foreign policy neoconservative. If it was, one would have to count as being neo-cons any number of major Democrat politicians and officials, as well as “national interest” Republicans like Donald Rumsfeld. National security hawks and neocons may overlap at times in the complex Venn diagram of American foreign policy schools, but they are not the same.

A second example of the tendency to toss the term “neocon” around is found in the Financial Times’s recent review of the documentary “The Brink.” There, FT movie critic Nigel Andrews writes that the film is “a documentary about the U.S.’s most swashbuckling and ill-shaven neocon,” Steve Bannon. Again, I’m sure it would be a surprise to Mr. Bannon to be so described. A nativist “American First” program is not easily reconciled with such neoconservative concerns as support for liberal regimes and human rights abroad. Unlike Mr. Bannon, neoconservatives are not ringing the bell for Orban’s Hungary, France’s Marine Le Pen, or any of Europe’s populists. Perhaps what a British film critic has to say about American politics doesn’t matter, but it’s a good example of just how prevalent the use of the word “neocon” has become for anybody the center-Left or Left finds objectionable. That an editor wouldn’t think twice about letting the descriptor into the paper’s pages suggests both how accepted that practice has become and why some push-back is called for.

Admittedly, since there is no formal club or membership card to be handed out, defining what neo-conservatism is in the arena of foreign affairs will inevitably be open to dispute. (Even in domestic affairs, full clarity about neo-conservatism’s content is open to question, which is one reason why the Irving Kristol, the godfather of neo-conservatives, preferred calling it “a persuasion.”) Nevertheless, one provisional way to tackle this problem is to look at three of the high-water marks of neo-conservatism as capturing more or less its meaning.

Undoubtedly, the first of these is Jeane Kirkpatrick’s 1979 Commentary essay, “Dictatorships and Double Standards.” She drew a distinction between liberal democracies, traditional autocratic regimes, and totalitarian states, and warned that while the U.S. might encourage liberalization where it could, it should be quite cautious about turning out “friendly” autocrats when one was uncertain about what might follow. Then presidential candidate Ronald Reagan thought so much of the essay that he appointed Kirkpatrick to be his ambassador to the UN once in office.

Reagan, of course, was fully on board, judging the main enemy to be the Soviet Union—the “Evil Empire.” And the Reagan Doctrine has been defined as his support for counter-communist insurgencies in Central America, Africa, and Afghanistan. In that respect, he and Kirkpatrick were in accord in seeing the main threat to the United States as the USSR and its communist proxies around the world. Yet the Reagan Doctrine was not simply about pushing back against communism.

Where he eventually broke with Kirkpatrick, the second high-water mark, was his greater willingness to put the promotion of liberal democracy on his list of foreign policy priorities. As he put it in his 1982 Westminster Speech, “democracy is not a fragile flower. Still it needs cultivating. If the rest of this century is to witness the gradual growth of freedom and democratic ideals, we must take actions to assist the campaign for democracy.” In practice, this meant the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy and its sister organizations, the International Republican Institute, National Democratic Institute, the American Center for International Labor Solidarity, and the Center for International Private Enterprise. It also meant a policy of siding with democrats in South Korea, Chile, and the Philippines when those forces wanted to topple their respective existing autocratic rulers. The policy wasn’t a passive one, being a “light to the world; a city on the hill,” where example and success might lead others to follow; rather, Reagan’s was an active statecraft designed to challenge where possible both totalitarian and autocratic regimes.

Arguably, the third chapter in neo-conservatism was initiated by William Kristol and Robert Kagan in their 1996 Foreign Affairs article, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy.” Their pitch was for Americans to put aside the soft and hard versions of what they dubbed the “pinched nationalism” of leading Republicans of the time. As they argued, America had “achieved its present position of strength not by practicing a foreign policy of live and let live, nor by passively waiting for threats to arise, but by actively promoting American principles of governance abroad—democracy, free markets, respect for liberty.”

What these three moments in neo-conservatism share is an underlying view that there is ultimately no moral equivalence between types of regimes. Not all countries are “exceptional,” as President Obama once seemed to suggest. Nor, as President Trump has said, in response to the idea that Russian President Putin was a killer: “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent?”

Rather, what matters most is a country’s system of governance. Most often, a state’s foreign policy behavior will be decisively connected to its domestic practices. An autocrat’s interest in staying in power at home will almost certainly inform his actions with neighbors and the larger world. Moreover, there is plenty of fact-based scholarship that shows liberal democracies are more peaceful toward each other, more likely to be better trade partners, and less likely to adopt policies that create the internal distortions that lead to civil wars, coups, and mass migrations. The benefits of having democratic allies far outweighs in the long run whatever problems they present in the short run. For neocons, there are real strategic reasons to push for liberal democracy abroad.

This is not to say that geography, commercial interests, and particular personalities don’t matter in the conduct of statecraft; they do. Yet none of these factors, from a neo-conservative point of view, can be the lodestar guiding national security.

However, as indicated by the distance between the general policy recommended by Jeane Kirkpatrick in her Commentary piece and the actual policy Ronald Reagan undertook, there is room for debate and disagreement over what specifically is to be done in any given situation. That requires an assessment of relative strength, military and diplomatic capacities, and what partners one has to work with. But while prudence might dictate that these necessities and limitations be taken account of when putting forward a policy or strategy, the principle of “It’s the regime, stupid” remains the most pertinent fact for understanding national behavior and guiding strategy.

Although President Trump’s own national security strategy implicitly makes this point, the President himself speaks far more often than not about simply protecting American sovereignty, seemingly denuded of any larger feature than the fact it is our own. Certainly his constant ambivalence about our democratic allies, and his willingness to see personal diplomacy as more essential than a clear-eyed account of the state he’s dealing with, are far from how a neoconservative “infested” administration would behave or talk. So, for all the Gabbards, Andrews, and others who loosely toss around the term neo-con, find some other moniker for individuals and policies you don’t like. It’s not just lazy. It’s flat out wrong.

The post “Neocon” as a Slur appeared first on The American Interest.

“Neocon” As A Slur

I have been identified as a neoconservative ever since I started to work for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan on the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1981, and subsequently for my similar work in the Reagan White House. Being the executive director of the infamous “neocon inspired” Project for the New American Century cemented that label. It’s not a label I object to. And contrary to some of the more conspiratorial accounts, it doesn’t come with a membership—secret or not—in Israel’s Likud. I am a crib to coffin Catholic.

I do object, however, to how readily the term “neocon” is used by writers, commentators, and politicians (both here and abroad) to describe anyone on the right they find objectionable when it comes to foreign and defense issues. Two relatively recent examples come to mind.

In late June, Presidential hopeful Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat representing Hawaii in the House of Representatives, appeared on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” There, she asserted that “The neocons in the Trump Administration,” along with the Saudis and Israel Prime Minister Bibi Netanyhu “have created a situation where it is going to be very difficult for President Trump to avoid a war with Iran.”

Gabbard didn’t bother to name who those neocons were. And there is a reason she didn’t. Unless there are secret White House employees, there are in fact no neocons working there in sufficiently senior positions to create the situation the Congresswoman is complaining about. Indeed, the vast majority of noteworthy neocons signed “Never Trump” statements prior to his election to the Oval Office in 2016. Moreover, as best one can tell, the White House is still not hiring anyone who signed one of those missives.

Shortly after Donald Trump pulled back from striking Iran during the latest round of escalations, Tucker Carlson himself took to the air to praise the President and excoriate those pushing him to war.

Donald Trump was elected President precisely to keep us out of disasters like war with Iran. So how did we get so close to starting one? Simple. The neocons still wield enormous power in Washington. They don’t care what the cost of war with Iran is. They certainly don’t care what the effect on Trump’s political fortunes might be. They despise Donald Trump.

Now, one of their key allies is the National Security adviser of the United States. John Bolton is an old friend of Bill Kristol’s. Together they helped plan the Iraq War.

Here’s the thing, though: Bolton is no neocon. Just ask him. A friend and former colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, John is a rather traditional national security conservative, who sees American security concerns through the lens of very concrete interests. Pushing democracy abroad has never been on his agenda.

And pace Carlson, being in favor of the Iraq War is hardly what it means to be a foreign policy neoconservative. If it was, one would have to count as being neo-cons any number of major Democrat politicians and officials, as well as “national interest” Republicans like Donald Rumsfeld. National security hawks and neocons may overlap at times in the complex Venn diagram of American foreign policy schools, but they are not the same.

A second example of the tendency to toss the term “neocon” around is found in the Financial Times’s recent review of the documentary “The Brink.” There, FT movie critic Nigel Andrews writes that the film is “a documentary about the U.S.’s most swashbuckling and ill-shaven neocon,” Steve Bannon. Again, I’m sure it would be a surprise to Mr. Bannon to be so described. A nativist “American First” program is not easily reconciled with such neoconservative concerns as support for liberal regimes and human rights abroad. Unlike Mr. Bannon, neoconservatives are not ringing the bell for Orban’s Hungary, France’s Marine Le Pen, or any of Europe’s populists. Perhaps what a British film critic has to say about American politics doesn’t matter, but it’s a good example of just how prevalent the use of the word “neocon” has become for anybody the center-Left or Left finds objectionable. That an editor wouldn’t think twice about letting the descriptor into the paper’s pages suggests both how accepted that practice has become and why some push-back is called for.

Admittedly, since there is no formal club or membership card to be handed out, defining what neo-conservatism is in the arena of foreign affairs will inevitably be open to dispute. (Even in domestic affairs, full clarity about neo-conservatism’s content is open to question, which is one reason why the Irving Kristol, the godfather of neo-conservatives, preferred calling it “a persuasion.”) Nevertheless, one provisional way to tackle this problem is to look at three of the high-water marks of neo-conservatism as capturing more or less its meaning.

Undoubtedly, the first of these is Jeane Kirkpatrick’s 1979 Commentary essay, “Dictatorships and Double Standards.” She drew a distinction between liberal democracies, traditional autocratic regimes, and totalitarian states, and warned that while the U.S. might encourage liberalization where it could, it should be quite cautious about turning out “friendly” autocrats when one was uncertain about what might follow. Then presidential candidate Ronald Reagan thought so much of the essay that he appointed Kirkpatrick to be his ambassador to the UN once in office.

Reagan, of course, was fully on board, judging the main enemy to be the Soviet Union—the “Evil Empire.” And the Reagan Doctrine has been defined as his support for counter-communist insurgencies in Central America, Africa, and Afghanistan. In that respect, he and Kirkpatrick were in accord in seeing the main threat to the United States as the USSR and its communist proxies around the world. Yet the Reagan Doctrine was not simply about pushing back against communism.

Where he eventually broke with Kirkpatrick, the second high-water mark, was his greater willingness to put the promotion of liberal democracy on his list of foreign policy priorities. As he put it in his 1982 Westminster Speech, “democracy is not a fragile flower. Still it needs cultivating. If the rest of this century is to witness the gradual growth of freedom and democratic ideals, we must take actions to assist the campaign for democracy.” In practice, this meant the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy and its sister organizations, the International Republican Institute, National Democratic Institute, the American Center for International Labor Solidarity, and the Center for International Private Enterprise. It also meant a policy of siding with democrats in South Korea, Chile, and the Philippines when those forces wanted to topple their respective existing autocratic rulers. The policy wasn’t a passive one, being a “light to the world; a city on the hill,” where example and success might lead others to follow; rather, Reagan’s was an active statecraft designed to challenge where possible both totalitarian and autocratic regimes.

Arguably, the third chapter in neo-conservatism was initiated by William Kristol and Robert Kagan in their 1996 Foreign Affairs article, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy.” Their pitch was for Americans to put aside the soft and hard versions of what they dubbed the “pinched nationalism” of leading Republicans of the time. As they argued, America had “achieved its present position of strength not by practicing a foreign policy of live and let live, nor by passively waiting for threats to arise, but by actively promoting American principles of governance abroad—democracy, free markets, respect for liberty.”

What these three moments in neo-conservatism share is an underlying view that there is ultimately no moral equivalence between types of regimes. Not all countries are “exceptional,” as President Obama once seemed to suggest. Nor, as President Trump has said, in response to the idea that Russian President Putin was a killer: “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent?”

Rather, what matters most is a country’s system of governance. Most often, a state’s foreign policy behavior will be decisively connected to its domestic practices. An autocrat’s interest in staying in power at home will almost certainly inform his actions with neighbors and the larger world. Moreover, there is plenty of fact-based scholarship that shows liberal democracies are more peaceful toward each other, more likely to be better trade partners, and less likely to adopt policies that create the internal distortions that lead to civil wars, coups, and mass migrations. The benefits of having democratic allies far outweighs in the long run whatever problems they present in the short run. For neocons, there are real strategic reasons to push for liberal democracy abroad.

This is not to say that geography, commercial interests, and particular personalities don’t matter in the conduct of statecraft; they do. Yet none of these factors, from a neo-conservative point of view, can be the lodestar guiding national security.

However, as indicated by the distance between the general policy recommended by Jeane Kirkpatrick in her Commentary piece and the actual policy Ronald Reagan undertook, there is room for debate and disagreement over what specifically is to be done in any given situation. That requires an assessment of relative strength, military and diplomatic capacities, and what partners one has to work with. But while prudence might dictate that these necessities and limitations be taken account of when putting forward a policy or strategy, the principle of “It’s the regime, stupid” remains the most pertinent fact for understanding national behavior and guiding strategy.

Although President Trump’s own national security strategy implicitly makes this point, the President himself speaks far more often than not about simply protecting American sovereignty, seemingly denuded of any larger feature than the fact it is our own. Certainly his constant ambivalence about our democratic allies, and his willingness to see personal diplomacy as more essential than a clear-eyed account of the state he’s dealing with, are far from how a neoconservative “infested” administration would behave or talk. So, for all the Gabbards, Andrews, and others who loosely toss around the term neo-con, find some other moniker for individuals and policies you don’t like. It’s not just lazy. It’s flat out wrong.

The post “Neocon” As A Slur appeared first on The American Interest.

Can Two Populist Leaders End the Unpopular War in Afghanistan?

When U.S. President Donald Trump meets with Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan in Washington on July 22, they are likely to spend most of the time talking about a war in a third country. Afghanistan is the top agenda item between Washington and Islamabad, and pundits will be keenly watching whether the two populist leaders can turn around an acrimonious relationship to end one of the world’s most intractable wars.

After 18 years of war and dashed hopes, that prospect may seem unlikely. But Islamabad is hoping that Trump and Khan will prioritize building a personal relationship that will restore cooperation between their countries. In practice, this means giving Pakistan’s powerful military a central part in rolling back the Taliban’s quarter-century-old war machine, which it has helped create and sustain.

Optimism in Islamabad is high that a U.S. administration keen on optics might buy into Pakistan’s presumed influence over the Taliban and once again commit to a transactional relationship that will help Islamabad’s fledgling economy and stave off international pressure over terrorism concerns. “Pakistan has welcomed President Trump’s farsighted decision to pursue a political solution in Afghanistan, which in fact was an endorsement of our own position espoused for a long time,” Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi told a seminar in Islamabad this week. “The convergence in Pakistan and U.S. polices on Afghanistan has rekindled hope for resolution of the protracted Afghan conflict that has only brought misery and despondency to the region.”

In Washington, the Trump Administration seems keen to push for a deal that can be claimed as a foreign policy success for concluding America’s longest war ahead of Trump’s 2020 re-election bid. In June, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that clinching a deal before September 1 was “certainly our mission set.” In less than a year, Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. envoy for peace in Afghanistan, has conducted seven rounds of peace talks with the Taliban, who now see it is as a “historic opportunity.” “History tells us that wars don’t end with more fighting,” a recent statement by the group noted. “Instead, war ends with talks and agreements.”

Islamabad, or more precisely its praetorian military, has presumably played a role in bringing the Taliban to this point. “Pakistan can play an important role in facilitating peace in Afghanistan,” the State Department recently reiterated, joining Beijing and Moscow in acknowledging Islamabad’s influence. The July 12 statement said that the United States, Pakistan, China, and Russia have “encouraged all parties to take steps to reduce violence leading to a comprehensive and permanent ceasefire that starts with intra-Afghan negotiations.”

Even though the Taliban have long resisted this kind of diplomatic pressure, finding new ways to achieve a lasting armistice is the key. A permanent ceasefire could create the conditions for making the Afghan imbroglio a win-win for all parties. But getting there will first require the Trump Administration to craft a smart deal that goes beyond its narrow political interests. It should see such a pact not as a one-time agreement but rather a process toward a lasting Afghan settlement that would address Afghanistan’s domestic political complications, turn its meddling neighbors into economic partners and stakeholders in its peace, and ensure that great power interests don’t make the country revert to a battlefield.

This is a heavy lift, but the fact that Pakistan’s powerful military chief, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, is accompanying Khan to Washington means that his organization is desperate to patch things up with the United States. The Pakistani military lost considerable funding and aid in recent years after relations between Islamabad and Washington nosedived following Trump’s August 2017 warning that “We can no longer be silent about Pakistan’s safe havens” and that Islamabad “has much to lose by continuing to harbor terrorists.” Trump’s January 2018 complaint that Pakistan has “given us nothing but lies and deceit” was perhaps the most blatant articulation of U.S. leadership frustration through various administrations since 9/11.

It is no coincidence that ties between Beijing and Islamabad have cooled since Khan assumed office last year. His administration has attempted to redefine the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a flagship project of President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road strategy. Beijing hopes that investing hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure and energy will turn China into a permanent nucleus of trade and stability in Eurasia. Washington views the ambitious plan as “debt-trap diplomacy,” ultimately aimed at determining the destiny of poor nations. Unlike North Korea, Pakistan doesn’t want to have China as its only ally and instead wants to move back into the Western fold. Earlier this month, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) approved a $6 billion, three-year loan to support its fledgling economy. During the past year the pro-Western Arab monarchies in the Gulf extended economic “lifelines” to Pakistan.

This gives Washington an opportunity to reshape its relations with Islamabad in a direction that will ultimately end the Afghan war. Now that ties between Washington and Islamabad are on the mend, the two countries can seek cooperation “to bring peace, stability, and economic prosperity to a region that has seen far too much conflict,” as a recent White House statement put it. But transforming these aspirations into a tangible, on-the-ground process demands specific asks of Pakistan that would set in motion a course that will not rock the boat in Afghanistan.

Washington can press Pakistan’s military to help convince the Taliban to agree to a lasting ceasefire in return for a clear roadmap for a U.S. military pullout. The absence of violence will in turn create the confidence and conditions for Afghans to debate, bargain, and possibly agree on a future political system. Kabul will be reluctant to give Islamabad a prominent role in the peace process but has been pushing for its cooperation in reducing violence. Currently, this is a main stumbling block in the peace process, and vague assurances of reducing violence levels will ultimately backfire. For nearly two decades, most of the Taliban’s senior leadership and their insurgency have been dependent on sanctuaries inside Pakistan. For the first time, Islamabad can use its influence over the insurgents to turn off the taps of violence in Kabul.

The move can be linked to Pakistan’s obligations under the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to avoid a possible blacklisting in November and a new resolve to implement its domestic counterterrorism effort, formally called the National Action Plan. The FATF blacklisting would cripple Pakistan’s struggling economy. Like Iran and North Korea, the two countries currently blacklisted, it would downgrade Islamabad’s credit rating and narrow its chances of accessing international loans and development assistance.

Still, fear of the blacklisting may not be enough to make Pakistan lead a serious and good-faith crackdown on terrorists. So far, Islamabad appears to be up to its old tricks—utilizing the terrorism issue to milk concessions from Washington. 

On July 17, authorities in the eastern Pakistani province of Punjab arrested Hafiz Saeed, the radical Islamist leader accused of masterminding the November 2008 attacks in India’s commercial hub Mumbai, which killed 166 people. Washington designated Saeed a terrorist and offered a $10 million bounty for his capture years ago. Hours after his arrest, Trump tweeted that “after a ten year search, the so-called ‘mastermind’ of the Mumbai Terror attacks has been arrested in Pakistan. Great pressure has been exerted over the last two years to find him.” But within hours his tweet attracted a barrage of criticism, reminding him that Saeed has been living openly for years and even addressed large public gatherings—and that he has been arrested, and released, by Pakistani officials eight times before.

Washington should not be fooled by such public spectacles. It needs to ensure that Islamabad finds no financial or political incentives in covertly supporting violent extremist groups. One part of this arrangement requires brokering a lasting agreement between Pakistan and Afghanistan to cease all support and sanctuary for groups fighting the neighboring country. For years President Ashraf Ghani’s government has argued that “undeclared hostilities” between Kabul and Islamabad have been at the heart of the war in Afghanistan.

Numerous diplomatic and security mechanisms including leadership summits for the three countries have attempted to cultivate this cooperation, but failed because there were no shared economic benefits. Given Pakistan’s economic crisis, Washington can make a convincing case for increased economic and trade cooperation that will give Islamabad major stakes in partnering with Afghanistan on reciprocal access to the Central Asian and South Asian markets. Granting Afghanistan access to India via Pakistani road networks could be a promising start, and the two neighbors made some progress on the issue during Ghani’s visit to Islamabad last month.

Plugging Afghanistan’s economy into the surrounding region would ultimately enable it to sustain a state capable of providing for and protecting its population and territory. It would gradually end the need for Western taxpayers to sustain the Afghan state. Washington could possibly ease up on its military sales to the Pakistani military, but denying it cash grants and “reimbursement” for military offensives will push it to define a new economic future for the country, one not dependent on being a frontline ally of Washington in a new round of the Afghan war.

Washington’s new understanding with Islamabad should focus on weaning it away from destructive past practices. In Afghanistan’s context, this will mean giving up on its obsession with molding the Afghan state to its liking by supporting extremist Islamist groups. The Pakistani military and civilian leadership will be in a better place if they ditch the paranoias they have clung to for so long. Changing such deeply ingrained habits of thought in the Pakistani bureaucracy is no small task, of course, especially for an outside power like the United States. But Washington can at least offer the right carrots and sticks, at a time of economic crisis in Pakistan, to steer Islamabad toward a more productive course.

As to future negotiations with the Taliban, the key to success will lie in recognizing Pakistan’s limited political control and in unpacking the hardline Islamist movement’s ultimate political objectives. It is a small encouragement that in a recent meeting with delegates representing Afghan society the Taliban agreed to assure Afghan women that their fundamental rights will be protected in “political, social, economic, educational, [and] cultural affairs . . . . in accordance with the values of Islam.”

But as the Taliban join complex talks about the country’s future, it is important to remember that the movement has not given up on transforming Afghanistan into what its leaders envision as a purely Islamic state and society. Somewhat cleverly, their official pronouncements refrain from emphasizing the Islamic Emirate—the formal name of the Taliban. Washington will be better off recognizing that Islamabad has spoiler power but not the ability to dictate political terms to the Taliban. Islamabad’s role should be to help sustain a lasting ceasefire; this will give Afghans a stake in peace and help shape a political bargain that they can then own and fine-tune.

Despite a few superficial similarities, Trump and Khan have followed very different paths to power, have very different outlooks and objectives, and head executive branches of government with vastly different roles, resources, and powers. Their meeting in Washington can create an opportunity for the bureaucracies in the two countries to shut down a war their predecessors shaped during the past four decades in the same corridors of power. Both leaders have a unique opportunity to break new ground in a grand way, with benefits for the region and—perhaps most significantly for these two populist leaders—for their own political fortunes at home.

The post Can Two Populist Leaders End the Unpopular War in Afghanistan? appeared first on The American Interest.

Neo-Socialism and the Rise of the Machines

Socialism hasn’t been as popular as it is today since the late 19th and early 20th century, when the Wobblies were a force to be reckoned with and public figures such as George Orwell, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Bertrand Russell identified as socialists. Today, a self-described socialist is currently a serious contender for President of the United States and more Americans under age 30 view have a positive view of socialism than they do of capitalism. Some see the popularity of socialism as a threat to classical liberal values (the legacy of thinkers such as John Locke and Thomas Paine) similar to that posed by the resurgence of ethno-nationalism. But the greatest threat to classical liberalism comes from neither nationalism or socialism—in many respects both are symptoms of the economic inequality and social alienation that accompany rapid technological change. Moreover, unlike ethno-nationalism, today’s socialism is not illiberal. Although in some ways it echoes the dogmatic socialism of the past, today’s socialism represents something new—a realignment of political allegiances prompted by a rapidly changing world. As commentators as ideologically diverse as Paul Krugman and George Will have pointed out, this is not your grandfather’s socialism: Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez do not favor state control of the means of production. While socialism in the early 20th century, with the Soviet Union as its inspiration, represented a stark alternative to Western liberalism, today’s emergent socialism—we might call it neo-socialism—is, at its core, a defense of liberal values and ideals against the upheavals caused by new technology.

Neo-socialism resonates with the socialism of the past because the current moment shares much with the last era in which socialism was popular in America, the Gilded Age. At the turn of the century, industrialization transformed the nation’s economy, just as the high tech revolution is doing today. The Gilded Age economy was lopsided and dysfunctional, producing untenable extremes of vulgar opulence and abject poverty; the typical laborer was exploited and alienated. The doctrinaire classical liberalism of the 19th century condemned organized labor as interference with freedom of contract and prevented the regulation of predatory monopolists as beyond the authority of the state. Given this, the socialist critique of liberal capitalism was apt even if its predictions of revolution proved to be mistaken. The dogmatic form of liberalism had to adjust to an economy dominated by large, capital-intensive industries, wage labor, rapid communication, and an integrated continental marketplace, adopting the social safety net of the New Deal and allowing for the techniques of bureaucratic administration.

Today we are facing an economic and social conditions reminiscent of the 19th century. Then, the famous “Big Four” industrialists dominated San Francisco’s Nob Hill; today, the high-tech burghers of Laidley Heights build palaces overlooking legions of homeless people living as postmodern hobos in 21st century Hoovervilles. Perhaps it’s fitting that the most famous of 19th-century California’s robber barons, Leland Stanford, founded the university at the epicenter of today’s digital plutocracy. Neo-socialism is a protest ideology for the gig economy and a rallying cry against stock-option fueled gentrification. Nineteenth century socialists argued that the inhuman logic of the assembly line machine displaced authentic human social relationships based in meaningful labor. For Karl Marx himself—if not for many of his less subtle disciples—the alienation of human beings from each other and from their humanity was a more serious evil than the resulting unequal distribution of wealth.

Neo-socialism emerges in a society that is much more completely controlled by machines than that of the 19th century. Our economy is controlled by machine-generated algorithms that even their human authors do not fully understand: bot trading of financial instruments that takes place in fractions of a second can create global recessions, destroy national economies and bankrupt millions of people for reasons no human can fathom. The algorithms of social media platforms have infiltrated our social life, shaping how we present ourselves and how we apprehend others and causing an increase in anxiety and depression. Democracy itself has been undermined by machines: social media algorithms encourage extremism in order to keep us glued to the portable screen and bots spread lies and malicious propaganda, stimulating the basest of human motivations. Most menacing of all, machines directly threaten to displace humans in a growing number of occupations, threatening not only meaningful work but even basic survival: following the ruthless social logic of the machine, obsolete people, like obsolete machines, are tossed onto the scrap heap of society, left to rot in dying towns and cities marked by abandoned factories and a decaying social fabric.

These dramatic developments demand a bold policy response. So far, mainstream politicians have not exactly risen to the challenge. Instead, like aging generals, they continually refight the culture wars of the 1960s and pander to voters clinging to obsolete industries and antique prejudices, while struggling to grasp the basics of the information economy. The Republican Party—now effectively rebranded as the ethno-nationalist Party of Trump—peddles the misconception that regulation and immigration are job killers, largely ignoring the real threat of automation: for example, revitalization of the coal industry, which Trump has so loudly promoted, would do little for employment in coal country because it has already been largely automated. As for the Democrats, it should tell you all you need to know about their grasp of the profound challenges of the future that the most lively exchange in the recent debates of presidential hopefuls involved the merits of busing in the 1970s.

Meanwhile, the seemingly interminable controversy surrounding health care—a proxy war over social entitlements generally—already feels like an argument about the regulation of phone booths. A health care system based on employer-provided benefits is quickly becoming anachronistic as the rapidly growing gig economy of Uber drivers, TaskRabbit contractors, and AirBNB hosts generates a lot of work but no employees and hence no employee benefits. The gig economy doesn’t account for a big share of income now, but don’t bet on it staying small: some economists predict the “end of employment” within a few decades. (If you’re skeptical, ask yourself whether, back in 2004, you thought Facebook would swing a presidential election twelve years later.) In the short term, universal health care would support the gig economy, relieving the pressure to redefine gig workers as employees; in a post-employment future it would be a necessity.

More dramatically, how should government respond if automation eliminates 55-65 percent of current jobs in the next two decades, as some analysts predict? Futurist Aaron Bastani insists that automation will require a complete decoupling of labor from the distribution of resources: he argues for Fully Automated Luxury Communism, a “post-work” society with “full automation of everything and common ownership of that which is automated.” By comparison, universal basic income looks pretty tame, which is why a growing number of Silicon Valley capitalists endorse it.

Trumpian ethno-nationalism is a misguided reaction to technologically driven dislocation, displacing a valid frustration with shrinking opportunity and social alienation onto a dark-skinned scapegoat (in a more enlightened and less bigoted populism, the chant “you will not replace us” would refer to robots rather than immigrants and Jews.) Neo-socialism offers those disenchanted with the status quo and frightened about the future an alternative to such blood and soil hysterics. As such, neo-socialism is less an attack on liberalism than it is a wake-up call to mainstream politicians sleeping through the tech revolution. Neo-socialism echoes Western European social democracy, not Soviet socialism; its ideal economic arrangement is the B-corp, not the dictatorship of the proletariat. In terms of policy, American neo-socialism amounts to familiar New Deal and Great Society social welfarism with a multiculturalist or green twist: universal health care, higher minimum wages, financial regulation, immigration liberalization, environmental protection, occasionally, strong trade unionism and even more rarely, universal basic income. This largely familiar progressive policy agenda is a threat to liberalism only in the fevered imagination of dogmatic libertarians. Those of its proponents who identify as “socialists” do so largely as branding, in order to tap into a widespread alienation from today’s tech-dominated society, not in order to advance an illiberal political agenda.

Neo-socialism, like the socialism of the past, is strong as critique and relatively weak as prescription. The neo-socialists’ specific proposals often raise troubling questions. Universal health care based on a European model that allows a regulated private market to supplement public care deserves serious consideration, but proposals to eliminate private health insurance under “Medicare for All” are politically infeasible and practically unworkable. Our current immigration policy is unworkable and inhumane, in need of comprehensive reform, but proposals to effectively decriminalize border control are misguided. Indeed, they are in conflict with neo-socialist ambitions to dramatically expand social programs: Dramatically increased immigration will overtax the resources available for the social programs and dilute the sense of national community that must underlay public support for them. Tellingly, this very tension has led otherwise progressive European nations—the models for neo-socialist domestic policy—to adopt immigration measures that rival Trump’s in their harshness.

Still, for better or for worse, the neo-socialists are now leading the way in addressing the challenges new technology poses for human welfare. This makes neo-socialism especially attractive to young people who understand the promise and menace of new technology better than their elders do and who will have to live their adult lives in the world new technology is bringing into existence. Mainstream politicians would do well to learn from the neo-socialists in this respect, while refining and moderating their more extreme ideas. Ultimately, neo-socialism may be among liberal capitalism’s greatest allies. In last century’s Gilded Age, free market conservatives condemned the New Deal as a dire threat to individual liberty but today it’s conventional wisdom that, by humanizing the industrial economy, early 20th-century progressives saved American liberal capitalism from a crisis of legitimacy. By offering a focused critique of the inhumane extremes of our current machine-driven economy, the neo-socialists may inspire the reforms that can save capitalism from itself.

The post Neo-Socialism and the Rise of the Machines appeared first on The American Interest.

Could Jeremy Corbyn Destroy the Special Relationship?

The resignation last week of Britain’s ambassador to the United States was a reminder of the sorry state of the special relationship—as if one were needed. The strains on the allegiance that, with a healthy dollop of self-flattery, we Brits think is essential for the United Kingdom, the United States, and even the rest of the world, are numerous.

There’s Donald Trump himself, whose isolationist instincts and contempt for protocol make his presidency heavy on headaches and light on opportunities for British officials. There’s Brexit, which was supposed to be an opportunity to strengthen Britain’s ties beyond Europe but has become an undignified distraction that leaves the United Kingdom diminished in the eyes of just about everyone. And there’s the ongoing row over Huawei and whether the British government should, against the wishes of the U.S. government, involve the Chinese in domestic 5G infrastructure.

But there is a far bigger threat to the special relationship that receives far less attention. It comes in the unlikely form of a scruffy septuagenarian socialist who also happens to be the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition.

Jeremy Corbyn’s ascent from far-Left backbencher to leader of the Labour Party in 2015 was one of the most astonishing surprises in recent British political history (and there have been quite a few). Two years later, he exceeded expectations once again with a surprisingly strong showing in the general election. Today, he is bogged down in two internal rows that might yet topple him: one over his stance on Brexit, the other over Labour’s stomach-churning anti-Semitism problem.

And yet he could still end up in Downing Street. British politics has become an unpredictable, unprecedented four-horse race, and the Conservatives’ own internal strife and vanishingly small Parliamentary majority means an election might well be around the corner, which could easily end with a Labour government.

Why, you might be wondering, would that be such a disaster from an American perspective? After all, this Conservative administration is hardly a model of good governance, and the special relationship has survived periods when the two governments don’t see eye to eye.

But what it may not be able to survive is a Prime Minister whose fundamental orientation is so anti-American that vital U.S.-UK intelligence sharing could be suspended under his rule. Intelligence cooperation between London and Washington has formed the bedrock of the Five Eyes alliance since the 1940s, enabling unprecedentedly close ties among the main Anglophone countries and underpinning the U.S.-UK special relationship even at its most fractious. Corbyn’s election could change all that, jeopardizing cooperation on counterterrorism, counterespionage, and a host of other security priorities.

For Jeremy Corbyn is not just another Labour leader. Corbyn’s long history of controversial statements, dubious associations, and anti-Western apologetics has been well documented since his rise to leadership in 2015. Yet it’s still worth digging deeper, beyond the soundbites that have emerged piecemeal over the past four years, to take a closer look at the ideas Corbyn has been marinating in for decades.

These are ideas that no previous Prime Minister has taken remotely seriously, and they go far beyond Corbyn’s personal animus toward Donald Trump. They are a set of views that could cause the whole U.S. government to question whether the United Kingdom is a country it can safely continue doing business with.

Corbyn’s electoral appeal might be domestic, but his preoccupation has always been foreign policy. And if Corbynism has a single guiding principle, it is that the actions of the United States and its allies are everywhere and always to be opposed.

It was hardly surprising that Jeremy Corbyn turned down his invitation to the state dinner with Donald Trump on his recent visit to London. The Labour leader isn’t alone in thinking the U.S. President beyond the pale, and making that clear won’t have cost him many votes.

But you get a clue as to his worldview from who he is willing to associate with—and what he chooses to say and do. He was happy to take money from the Iranian regime to host a show on their propaganda channel Press TV. He invited convicted IRA terrorists to Parliament shortly after the organization had murdered five people with a bomb at the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton in 1984. He called Hamas and Hezbollah his friends, describing the latter as “an organisation that is dedicated towards the good of the Palestinian people and bringing about long-term peace and social justice.” He blamed the Russian invasion of Ukraine on NATO provocation. He called Hugo Chavez an “inspiration to us all.” He put his name to a motion that congratulated left-wing journalist John Pilger “on his exposé of the fraudulent justifications for intervening in a ‘genocide’ that never really existed in Kosovo.”

From 2011 to 2015 Corbyn chaired an organization called Stop the War. That is a misnomer, for it only ever opposes military action undertaken by the West. Sometimes, in fact, it supports violence, as in 2005, when it backed “the legitimacy of the struggle of Iraqis, by whatever means they find necessary” to secure the withdrawal of coalition troops from the country. And though Stop the War helped to organize the mainstream protests against the Iraq War in London in 2003, the coalition has long been run by fringe left-wing parties, the Socialist Workers Party and Communist Party of Britain (CPB) among them.

Corbyn was preceded as Stop the War chair by an aristocratic Scottish Stalinist called Andrew Murray. As recently as 2016, he was a member of the CPB. In 2003, he expressed his support for North Korea when he wrote: “Our party has already made its basic position of solidarity with People’s Korea clear.” Today he is employed as an adviser to Jeremy Corbyn within the Labour Party.

Astonishingly there is room for more than one Stalinist in Corbyn’s top team. Seumas Milne, a co-conspirator of Andrew Murray and former Guardian columnist, is the Labour Party’s Head of Communications and Strategy—and arguably Corbyn’s most powerful adviser. As a young man Milne wrote for Straight Left, a publication that backed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

No wonder the CPB didn’t put forward any candidates in the 2017 general election, instead advising its supporters to back Labour. Jeremy Corbyn, it seems, was close enough to the real deal. After all, for years Corbyn wrote a column for the Morning Star, the newspaper published by the CPB which the Labour leader has called “the most precious and only voice we have in the daily media.”

Like Corbyn, Milne has a suspicion of NATO that makes Trump look like a dedicated Atlanticist. In 2014, he wrote, “Western aggression and lawless killing is on another scale entirely from anything Russia appears to have contemplated, let alone carried out—removing any credible basis for the US and its allies to rail against Russian transgressions.” For Milne, “Russia’s subsequent challenge to western expansion and intervention in Georgia, Syria and Ukraine” helped to provide a “check to unbridled US power.” In 2007, he used his Guardian column to stick up for communism as follows: “For all its brutalities and failures, communism in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialization, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality.”

Milne’s responses on the pages of the Guardian to the terrorist attacks of the early 2000s are as sickening as they are predictable. America was “reaping a dragons’ teeth harvest they themselves sowed,” he wrote after 9/11. The London bombings were “driven by worldwide anger at US-led domination and occupation of Muslim countries.” For Milne, “The only surprise was that the attacks were so long coming.” Echoing Stop the War, he described the anti-coalition insurgency in Iraq as the country’s “real war of liberation.”

If you think it unfair to pin Corbyn for the words of his advisers, consider the clumsily expressed views of the man himself. In a foreword to a 2011 edition of Imperialism by J.A. Hobson, the Labour leader—then an obscure backbencher—explained his view of modern history:

Since World War Two, the big imperial force has been the United States on behalf of global capitalism and the biggest, mostly US-based corporations. The propaganda for this has presented itself as a voice for ‘freedom’ and carefully and consciously conflated it with market economics.

The 1949 Congress for Cultural Freedom in Amsterdam was the European opening to accompany the military re-occupation under the guise of NATO. Thus, the Cold War was followed by American media and cultural values to create an empire of the mind. The hard power of their weaponry, the malign influence of the CIA, and its creation of pliant and friendly governments actively suppressed and subjugated peoples in the poorest countries of the world.

Compare this with Corbyn’s characterization of the other side of the Cold War:

The influence of the Soviet Union around the world was huge, but tempered by an inadequate industrial base in comparison to the United States and the ruinously expensive arms race that hastened its decline, and eventual collapse in 1990. But the Soviet influence was always different, and its allies often acted quite independently.

The contrast is typical of the way Corbyn and his coterie see things. The assumption that barely needs stating is the wickedness of America, capitalism, and imperialism. The other side of any conflict is to be sided with. And the crimes of anyone—from Stalin to Hamas—brave enough to stand up to American tyranny are to be excused, explained or simply ignored.

Elsewhere in Corbyn’s foreword we are treated to the claim that the War on Terror had “as much to do with economic interests as any notion of ‘security’” (those scare quotes reveal as much as the words themselves), and the idea that the political appeal of capitalism is fading thanks to “a combination of Islamic opposition and the radical popular movements of landless and poor peoples in many poor countries.”

It is tempting to dismiss all of this as naive nonsense. Indeed, that is what much of it is. But sadly the provenance—the Leader of the Opposition and his senior advisers—means it must be taken seriously, including by Britain’s closest ally. And when they do so, U.S. officials might reconsider even the most essential forms of cooperation—counter-terrorism, national security and intelligence sharing.

If the special relationship means anything at all, it isn’t bromides delivered at joint press conferences. It’s close collaboration on these especially sensitive areas. But such collaboration cannot be taken for granted. American leaks caused the UK to briefly stop sharing intelligence after the Manchester bombing in 2017. A Corbyn government would likely mean a more serious deterioration.

Ironically, such a move would confirm the Corbynistas’ worst conspiratorial suspicions about America’s security services, while Donald Trump’s unpopularity in the United Kingdom means British voters aren’t quite as worried about upsetting the American government as they might have been a few years ago.

But who could blame Washington for downgrading its relationship with Britain were Corbyn to win an election? He and his acolytes weren’t simply principled opponents of the Iraq War; they were cheering on the resistance. They weren’t opposed to a particularly U.S. strategy during the Cold War; they wanted the other side to win. To them, America is the problem, not the solution.

And so a potentially fatal blow to the special relationship would be one of the more inevitable tragedies of a Corbyn government. The more immediate problem is that the shabby track record that would likely cause the U.S. government to run a mile from Prime Minister Corbyn does not appear to have the same effect on British voters.

The post Could Jeremy Corbyn Destroy the Special Relationship? appeared first on The American Interest.

Putin Tests the EU’s Mettle

As Europe is sweating out yet another hot summer, energy executives and policymakers are working out how their fellow citizens will survive the next winter. The urgency of their task is underscored by the current Ukrainian gas transit contract, which will expire on January 1, 2020. Unless this state of affairs is remedied, the gas flowing through the Ukrainian Brotherhood pipeline, the single largest stream of Russian gas entering the European Union, amounting to nearly all the gas consumed by Germany annually, will stop. Since July 2018, the European Union has mediated negotiations between Russia and Ukraine  without success. Thus Europe faces the prospect of its third gas crisis (following the previous two in 2006 and 2009) in the past two decades. The second crisis, in 2009, which lasted a mere two weeks, saddled Europe not only with surging prices continent-wide but also physical supply shortages in some states. This time around there is a very real risk that the supply interruption will last considerably longer.

From a commercial perspective, the impasse makes no sense. The Russian energy company, Gazprom, ought to being doing everything in its power to ensure that the gas supply to Europe is not interrupted, since its commercial reputation is on the line. But for the Russian state, and thus for the state-controlled Gazprom as well, commercial interests are not necessarily decisive. For the new European Commission, which comes into office on November 1, it will be a real test of its mettle. Does the Commission, alongside the EU member states, panic and buckle as supply shortages appear and prices surge? Or do they hold the line, find temporary solutions from fuel switching to deploying reverse flows, and refuse to bow down to Russian energy blackmail?

Often neglected in much of the commercial and technical energy analysis as to whether another supply crisis may occur is the current relationship between Russia and Ukraine. The Russian Federation has annexed Crimea and is currently running part of eastern Ukraine with the assistance of military forces it funds and controls. So far 14,000 Ukrainians have been killed in the conflict and more than a million Ukrainians have been displaced by the conflict. Over the course of the conflict, Ukraine has expanded its army to more than 300,000 troops, most of whom are stationed near the occupied areas of the country. These forces continually exchange fire across the line of contact with the Russian-controlled forces, which include regular Russian army units.

By providing more Russian natural gas to Europe than any other route network, the Brotherhood pipeline creates two major problems for the Kremlin. First, it makes it more difficult to enlarge military operations in Ukraine without potentially threatening the movement of profitable Russian gas into Europe. Second, the gas transited across Ukraine generated, in 2018, transit payments to Ukraine of $3 billion. Three billion dollars is approximately the size of Ukraine’s defense budget.

Russia is also growing extremely frustrated with the European Union over the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which would allow Moscow to substantially bypass the Brotherhood pipeline. An EU law that came into force in May extended the application of the bloc’s energy law to import pipelines, including the Gazprom-owned Nord Stream 2. EU energy law imposes a series of conditions, including the need for a non-EU pipeline owner to obtain security of supply certification, from EU and member-state authorities. Given its previous record of cutting off gas supplies to Central and East European EU states, Gazprom will likely have trouble obtaining this certification. Furthermore, the necessary permits are not yet in place to begin laying all of Nord Stream 2’s pipes (about 60 percent have been laid so far). So far Denmark has not granted any route permits for the pipeline, and currently the Danish Energy Agency and Gazprom are locked in litigation over the best route for the line. The Danish component of the pipeline, however, amounts to only 140 kilometers of Nord Stream 2’s 1,440 kilometer route. That final bit of pipeline could be laid in approximately one month.

The outlines of a Russian strategy are clear here: 1) Build all the pipeline, save the final bit in Danish waters; 2) Let the Ukrainian contract expire on January 1; 3) Sit back and wait. Moscow can then indicate that it is perfectly happy to provide more natural gas to Europe—but only via Nord Stream 2. To be sure, the Danish government will have to speedily permit the remainder of the pipeline, which will still not be in compliance with EU energy law. But what, in a chilly late January or early February, will the European Union do?

There is a final factor involved here, too: Moscow’s fury at the Stockholm Court of Arbitration, which awarded Ukraine’s state-owned energy company, Naftogaz, $2.8 billion (including interest) in its dispute with Gazprom. In the trilateral negotiations between the European Commission, Gazprom, and Naftogaz, Gazprom has made it clear that it wants the award to be set aside before any transit deal is put in place. Neither Naftogaz nor the Ukrainian government can accept such a condition for a transit deal, on either commercial or political terms.

Fear of a prolonged gas cut-off has resulted in much higher than usual Russian gas flows into European storage this summer. Energy executives, regulators, and policymakers are also seeking alternative supply sources for the coming winter. And the European Union’s own energy integration policy, adopted after the second cut-off in 2009, will make any cut-off, at least in the short term, less severe. Even so, any cut-off lasting more than a few days will create supply problems in Bulgaria and some of the other Balkan states and trigger a price surge across the EU gas market. If the cut-off lasts even longer, then Italy, which is significantly dependent on Russian gas, would also begin to face supply problems. At that point, Gazprom would have to invoke force majeure in reneging on its delivery contracts to a range of European countries, including France, Austria, Hungary, and Slovakia.

There are some alternatives available. In Western Europe, the United Kingdom has a massive capacity (51 billion cubic meters annually) to accept overseas deliveries of liquefied natural gas (LNG). It also has a significant reverse-flow capacity under the English Channel of 30 billion cubic meters, so LNG, probably from the United States, could be pumped from British terminals into continental Europe. Italy has three LNG terminals with low utilization rates and some spare pipeline capacity connecting it with Algerian natural gas reserves. However, in Central and Eastern Europe there is only one major terminal accessible to most of the market: Swinoujscie on the Polish Baltic coast, with a capacity of 4.5 billion cubic meters. (There is also a five billion cubic meter LNG terminal in Attica in Greece that could provide gas to some parts of the CEE market). Thus the Central and East European countries are likely to suffer most from physical shortages and price increases.

The Ukrainians themselves face a particularly acute long-term threat. Since 2015, Ukraine has taken no directly contracted gas from Gazprom; rather it has bought surplus gas from Gazprom’s customers that flowed through Ukrainian territory. This reverse-flow gas has not only proved cheaper than the gas it used to directly contract from Russia; it has also reduced Russian influence in Ukraine. But when the transit contract expires on January 1, 2020, that source of gas will dry up. As a result Ukraine has been stockpiling natural gas in its own storage facilities, with the aim of storing up at least one year’s worth of imports. Ukraine is also looking at boosting domestic production, investing in energy efficiency, and working with allies such as Poland to obtain alternative sources of supply.

Clearly, if Gazprom lets the existing contract expire, it would suffer significant long-term damage to both its reputation and its commercial bottom line. There are two factors that are likely to make the commercial damage worse. First, the United States is currently ramping up its LNG production—almost on time for the latest Russian gas crisis. In addition, even the Central and East European states may be able to access some of America’s LNG by means of leasing of ships that carry re-gasification technology on board. These re-gas ships are cheap. For example, Lithuania has one in Klaipeda harbor that costs only $127 million and has a capacity of four billion cubic meters. A prolonged gas cut-off would likely result in several Central and East European states commissioning such re-gas ships. Second, a gas crisis would make renewables, whose prices have collapsed over the past five years, a much more competitive option relative to Russian gas.

But again, with the Russian state-owned Gazprom, commercial concerns are not necessarily at the forefront. Thus it is quite possible that Moscow will let the Ukrainian transit agreement expire, allowing prices to surge and chaos to ensue for a couple of weeks, in hopes that the initial supply shock will provide Russia with enough leverage to force a more favorable deal with Ukraine and the European Union and to ensure rapid completion of Nord Stream 2. President Putin can then step in to “solve” the crisis, aided by a massive disinformation campaign to put the blame firmly on Ukraine and the European Union.

However, for such a plan to work, Russia would need the Europeans to panic and buckle in the face of supply shortages and surging prices. The problem for Moscow is that it is far from clear that such a “squeezing” strategy will work. The Europeans might not buckle. In a game of European gas chicken, it may end up being Moscow who chickens out first. To be sure, the longer the conflict drags on, the more states will be affected. However, the longer it drags on, the easier it will also become to fix many of the supply problems. The European Union can take rapid emergency measures to reverse pipeline flows, build small interconnector pipelines, and install re-gas ships. These “emergency measures” could end up becoming permanent and would have the effect of excluding Gazprom from a significant part of the EU market. And with exclusion comes both a loss of revenue and a loss of influence. Moscow must therefore carefully weigh the advantages of a short “shock and awe” cut-off in January tied in with a formidable disinformation campaign and a longer supply cut-off which might deprive Russia of key European political and corporate allies, while also undermining Russian revenues, power, and influence.

This analysis therefore suggests that Moscow is more likely to seek a shorter termination in the hope that the Europeans panic and fold. The thinking in the Kremlin is likely to be that, although a two- or three-week cut-off will not be that bad for the European Union in practice, Moscow can ramp up the panic in the hope of getting Brussels to fold. If however, the Europeans do not fold, President Putin will then step in to “solve” the problem by doing a deal to end the crisis, while of course blaming everyone else for causing it in the first place.

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A Pyrrhic Victory for Central Europe

What is the state of the European Union after a month of haggling over its top jobs? Not great, not terrible, as the oft-quoted line from an excellent recent TV show goes.

Some in Central Europe see the outcome as a triumph. By staying united, the Visegrád Group of Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia managed to derail the candidacies for President of the European Commission (EC) offered by the Spitzenkandidaten (lead candidates) of the two largest political parties in the European Parliament. Those candidates were Manfred Weber and Frans Timmermans, respectively, of the European People’s Party (EPP) and the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D). Their sins? Weber suspended the membership of Victor Orbán’s Fidesz party in the EPP before the election and Timmermans, the current Vice President of the European Commission, led its inquiries into rule of law questions in Poland and Hungary.

On Twitter, Hungary’s government spokesman, Zoltán Kovács, shared a caricature in which a defiant Mr. Orbán is carrying three dogs with the heads of Timmermans, Weber, and of the Commission’s outgoing president Jean-Claude Juncker out of a tent marked “EC.” Meanwhile, in a lengthy Facebook post, the Czech Republic’s Prime Minister Andrej Babiš congratulated himself on “speaking at least 15 times during the Council’s meeting” and claimed that “the Czech Republic never played as much of an active role in key EU negotiations as now.”

Yet the idea of Visegrád’s victory does not hold water. While guaranteed to burn many bridges, the vendetta against Weber and Timmermans does little to materially advance Central Europe’s interests, other than by de facto ending the Spitzenkandidaten system (more on that in a minute).

Notwithstanding her conservative bona fides, the current nominee to lead the Commission, von Der Leyen, is no friend of Viktor Orbán. A close ally of Angela Merkel and a self-professed European “federalist,” she lambasted the Hungarian government for failing to act with respect for “human dignity and human rights” in its treatment of migrants and asylum seekers in 2015. Nor is the incoming President of the European Council and the interim Prime Minister of Belgium, Charles Michel, terribly fond of Visegrád. Last year, he called for the four countries to be expelled from the Schengen area over their unwillingness to observe common asylum and border protection rules.

Visegrád invested heavily into the appearance of unity throughout the negotiations. But to claim that the outcome is somehow a victory for the region requires one to gloss over the fact that nobody from Central Europe came even close to being considered for one of the top jobs, as Babiš himself admitted. Instead, the result looks eerily like a traditional Franco-German bargain with a handful of sweeteners thrown in for the Mediterranean periphery. Together with the EU’s Northern, pro-market “Hanseatic” countries, it is Central Europe that is getting the short end of the stick.

The failure to secure top jobs for Central and Eastern Europeans is not a reflection of a lack of talent—just think of Lithuania’s outgoing President Dalia Grybauskaitė, or of the European Commission’s former Vice President, Kristalina Georgieva of Bulgaria. Instead, it is a reflection of the misguided priorities of Visegrád’s leaders. Donald Tusk, for instance, has proven to be an apt president of the European Council, yet Poland’s Law and Justice Party could never bring itself to back a previous domestic political opponent.

One example of the abdication of the new Europe on defending its core interests is the nomination of Josep Borrell, the Spanish Foreign Minister, for the Union’s top diplomatic job. The EU’s common foreign and defense policy is in disarray after years of hapless leadership by the current High Representative, Federica Mogherini. The election was an opportunity to reboot the EU’s foreign policy agenda for an era of great power competition. Whether they recognize it or not, being able to rely on a strong European foreign policy is disproportionately more important to small and potentially vulnerable countries on the EU’s Eastern periphery than it is to large, established European democracies. And while Borrell is an experienced figure, his strategic outlook is far too infused with the pieties of Western Europe’s Left to be able to bring the EU’s foreign policy to the next level.

Most serious among those is Borrell’s equivocation over Russia. In November last year, for instance, he announced with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, the creation of a joint cyber-security working group to address disinformation—an initiative that would be laughable if it had not been meant earnestly. And while Spain has not joined China’s Belt and Road initiative yet, it is not clear that Mr. Borrell appreciates the character of the Chinese regime. According to him, the initiative itself “is proof that China is no longer considering itself a net receiver and starts considering itself a contributor to the world, and this is something Spain welcomes.”

For Orbán, who has not hidden his sympathies for Eastern autocracies, that may not be a bad thing. But Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Poland, which have sought to avoid any doubts about their pro-Western geopolitical allegiances, might soon experience buyers’ remorse for having expended much of their political capital on killing Weber’s and Timmermans’s presidency.

If Visegrád diehards achieved anything remotely useful, it is the end of the Spitzenkandidaten system. The informal scheme, first introduced ahead of the 2014 election, meant that European political groups announced their candidates for the Commission’s presidency before the European election with the expectation that the Spitzenkandidat of the winning group would be later nominated to the role. For some, giving up on this system risks exacerbating the bloc’s democratic deficit. Over two hundred million Europeans voted in the May election, the argument goes, yet the decision over the key leadership positions was struck by 28 politicians in a closed-door meeting. That is just wrong—or is it?

The Treaty on the European Union says nothing about Spitzenkandidaten in its discussion of how the Commission’s president is appointed (Article 17(7)). The bargaining that we saw last month was perfectly in line with the intermediating role assigned to the European Council in selecting the head of the Commission. The European Union is not and cannot be a simple one-person-one-vote democracy. That would make it a rather uncomfortable place for countries such as Estonia (with a population of 1.3 million) or Malta (with a population of 460,000). The EU was not created as a simple parliamentary democracy with the head of the executive (EC) accountable to the legislature. For one, the EC combines executive and legislative roles, as well as the function of Europe’s apolitical civil services. The European Parliament (EP), in turn, is not a conventional legislative chamber: It cannot hold the Commission to account in the same way as national parliaments can to governments in parliamentary democracies—the EP, after all, cannot even set its own legislative agenda.

There are legitimate questions about the EU’s current set-up. Yet much of the real or perceived “democratic deficit” is a feature, not a bug. The Commission’s non-political activities and its role in areas such as competition policy, trade, or regulation provide reasons for removing it from day-to-day political pressures. Still, if one thinks that the European Union ought to be “democratized,” the way to do it is through institutional reforms: separating the EC’s political and non-political functions, turning the EP into a real parliament, and transforming the Council into a European senate.

The Spitzenkandidaten system sought to reduce the “democratic deficit” while avoiding any changes that would require treaty revisions. With the benefit of hindsight, one can perhaps see it as a worthy and useful experiment that simply failed in creating a truly European public square. The high turnout at this year’s European election is a result of the growing salience of European questions, both for the EU’s defenders and its detractors, and not of the personalities of Weber and Timmermans, or of Margrethe Vestager, the Spitzenkandidat of Renew Europe (formerly known as ALDE). In reality, their names were a matter of indifference to an overwhelming majority of European voters.

Less charitably, the Spitzenkandidaten scheme can be seen as a cargo cult, rooted in the belief that emulating certain superficial attributes of national democracies can bring about genuine democratic accountability at the European level. Let parties nominate common candidates for the Commission’s presidency, some hoped, and the sedate European elections will turn into the equivalent of presidential races in America. Alas, that has not happened and unless one is truly committed to the bizarre idea that Weber’s presidency would somehow command a substantially stronger political mandate than Germany’s Defense Minister Ursula von Der Leyen (or whoever else ends up being elected to the role by the European Parliament) it is time to admit that the idea was a failure and to move on, either by pushing for a reform of the EU’s treaties or by accepting the imperfections inherent in the current set of rules.

Alas, the end of the Spitzenkandidaten system comes at too high a cost for Central Europe. For many in the West, Visegrád is no longer worth engaging with. That impression can lead to a further fragmentation of the European Union into blocs of countries sharing only a veneer of common European institutions. To some extent a “multi-speed” Europe is already a reality, but entrenching it further would most harm the Central European countries that see themselves as a part of the EU’s future integration core, and risk them being relegated to the bloc’s periphery. That may be something for Central European leaders to consider before they start dancing again to Orbán’s tune in the future.

The post A Pyrrhic Victory for Central Europe appeared first on The American Interest.