Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 36

Why Iran Will Never Give Up on Nuclear Weapons

It all started with our good friend, the Shah, who installed a small U.S.-supplied research reactor in 1967. Seven years later, he ordered four power reactors from Germany’s Siemens/AEG. He then proceeded to put together a complete fuel cycle from gaseous diffusion of uranium to enrichment, plus plutonium reprocessing (which is the other way to the Bomb). It was all for electricity generation, of course—in a country that was awash in oil.

In 1974, Reza Pahlavi confided to Le Monde: “Sooner than is believed,” Iran will have “a nuclear bomb.”1 U.S. watchdogs concurred. The gargantuan power program of 23 gigawatts would be capable of churning out enough bomb-grade material for up to 700 warheads per year—a wild-eyed prediction, but grim enough to concentrate minds.

Megalomania played a role, yes. Like Persia’s ancient kings, the “Shah of Shahs” would thrust Iran to the “gates of the great civilizations.” Add almost unlimited funds from oil, the price of which had soared twelve-fold in the seventies. But also count the threats all-round: Iraq, an arch enemy, lurked next door; the Soviet Union cast its shadow southward; in the East, India had exploded its first nuclear device in 1974, and Pakistan would surely follow.

The point of this brief tale is that geography beats ideology in the state system. So after the Shah fell and the Khomeinists took over, revolutionary fervor merely compounded the logic of Reza Pahlavi’s realpolitik. It is bruited about that Ayatollah Khomeini had issued a fatwa against all things nuclear after toppling the Shah’s regime in 1979. If so, the injunction had a very short shelf-life. Iraq attacked Iran in 1980, launching the longest war in the modern Middle East, a war that may have caused a million deaths by its end in 1988.

Fatwa or not, this was the point where the servants of Allah smoothly resumed the path laid out by the godless U.S. “lackey” Reza Pahlavi. Nukes were to deter Saddam Hussein once and for all. Saddam, according to the Duelfer Report in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion in 2003, had gone for a mirror strategy, reaching for nukes to cow the Shah and then the Ayatollah. Iran was the target, not Israel.

With Saddam gone, the Khomeinists found an even better reason to accelerate their nuclear arms program. Now the purpose was to deter the Great Satan. Throwing its weight around after the demise of the Soviet Union, the United States had invaded Iraq in 1990 and Afghanistan after 9/11. To boot, Iranian nukes would intimidate the Little Satan, Israel. And as a geopolitical bonus, the nukes would also extend an umbrella over Iran’s revolutionary expansionism. First, Iran would sink roots in Iraq, a bulwark the U.S. had conveniently leveled. Then, in a pincer movement, it would supply Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza to encircle Israel. Thus Tehran would buy itself a border on the Mediterranean. After 2011, the Revolutionary Guards completed the land bridge to the Levant by digging in in Syria.

Nukes deliver not only existential deterrence, but also indirect benefits for the offense. You want to expel us from the Levant, Syria and Yemen by attacking us conventionally? Or you want to topple our regime? Think again. If driven to desperation, if we have nothing to lose, we can at least inflict cosmic damage on you. And even far short of such an apocalypse, Iranian nukes will at least overawe local adversaries like Israel or Saudi Arabia.

The point is that nuclear weapons are useful. What the Shah began, Allah’s revolutionaries have been assiduously perfecting. So why ever give up such a valuable asset—one that provides both life insurance and an umbrella for domination, while also yielding a status bonus on the side?

If Donald Trump wants to make true on his warning that Iran will “never have a nuclear weapon,” he will have to go to war. Sanctions will not work, even though Iranian oil exports have dwindled to 400,000 barrels per day, as opposed to the historical average of 3 million. Iran is being cut off from the international financial system. Inflation, unemployment and shortages are soaring. Yet recall that economic warfare immiserates the people, not the regime or the military. The regime will stay on top, having eliminated every opposition group since 1979. Nazi Germany suffered the worst sanctions ever: the obliteration of its cities and industries, yet an effective revolt did not ensue. It took the Red Army conquering every square foot of Berlin before Hitler committed suicide.

Tehran suspended its nuclear program only briefly in response to pressure. After “Mission Accomplished” in April 2003, the regime must have felt truly shaken, given America’s victorious war machine next door. But soon enough, Iran’s rulers realized how vulnerable George Bush’s army was, especially once the insurgency started in November. Since then, they have learned that Obama’s and Trump’s America were almost all bark and little bite. Indeed, Trump is more likely to stop tweeting than to start a real war in the Middle East.

But a real war would be necessary in order to defang a nuclearizing Iran. Symbolically dropping a few bombs would not be enough. First, you would need to destroy the country’s air defense network and its command-and-control nodes. Second, you would have to obliterate the Iranian air and missile forces. Finally, you would have to flatten coastal batteries and sink the naval forces that threaten tanker traffic in the Gulf. And before hostilities even begin, you would want to position plenty of men and hardware to deter or defeat “asymmetric warfare,” against, say, Saudi-Arabia or Israel. (Hezbollah might rain thousands of missiles on the Jewish state.)

With all this accomplished, on to the nuclear sites—about 50 of them. Iran has acted according to the principle “hide, harden, and hoard.” Some targets the planners simply don’t know. Others, like in Fordo, are protected by 200 feet of rock. Yet others are located in Tehran or Isfahan, in large population centers implying vast civilian casualties and thus deterring attack. Finally, the target list is swelled by multiple redundancies. The task would be a hundred times more difficult than the Israeli in-and-out forays against Iraq’s Osirak reactor 1982 and Syria’s Al Kibar installation in 2007.

Having promised “no more war” in the Middle East, Trump is not likely to launch the kind of campaign needed to annihilate Iran’s vast nuclear network. Neither would Israel, despite its fearsome rhetoric. The U.S. can, but won’t; Israel, for all its clout, would want to, but can’t.

And alas, the Iranians know it.

What upside, hinted at above, can there possibly be to all of this?

What follows is speculation, though rooted in history. Recall that the Iranian program has been the longest-running of all time. It has stretched over many decades without actually producing a bomb, whereas the secret programs in Israel, India and Pakistan granted these states nuclear status in relatively short order. So for all the benefits nuclear weapons have for Tehran, there is the paradox of caution. Maybe the regime has been calculating that it’s better to have an almost-bomb than the real thing. To have everything in place delivers many of the benefits of an actual force without turning Iran into a global pariah, if not a target of destruction.

If this is the case (a big if), an argument in favor of negotiations and pressures, sanctions and incentives might follow. If these time-honored techniques fail, then take another traditional tack: alliances and containment, elements already present in the Middle East. Behold the strategic realignment that has pushed Israel and the Sunni states into an unwritten coalition. Finally, add to the old some very new methods, like the type of offensive cyberwar practiced by the U.S. and Israel. The best-known in a large bag of tricks is the “Stuxnet” virus that disabled thousands of Iranian centrifuges.

But just to trumpet “no nukes, never” in the style of Donald Trump—that will not work. Short of massive war, the best hope rests in an array of policies like those just limned that will persuade the Iranians not to cross the threshold from an almost-nuclear power to a real one.

To disarm them requires the kind of war Trump will not unleash—not now, not in his next term.

1. As quoted by Abbas Milani, “The Shah’s Atomic Dreams,” Foreign Policy Online,  28 December 2010

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“Such a System is Chemically Incompatible with Democracy”

Boris Akunin is the pen name of Grigori Chkhartishvili, Russia’s best-known writer of detective and historical fiction. Akunin is an expert on Japanese literature (he’s editor-in-chief of the 20-volume Anthology of Japanese Literature). He is also a critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Akunin spoke out in 2014 against the annexation of Crimea, and has lived in self-imposed exile since. The 63-year-old writer resides today in France. He recently spoke with TAI editor-in-chief Jeffrey Gedmin and Le Figaro correspondent Laure Mandeville.

Laure Mandeville and Jeff Gedmin for TAI: You are known as Russia’s finest crime fiction writer. Your roots are Georgian and Jewish, and while you lived in Moscow from 1958 to 2014, you have lived abroad the past five years. What led you to leave Russia? With so much talk these days about identity, how do you see and understand yourself? Are you Russian?

Boris Akunin: I left Russia in 2014, when things started moving toward dictatorship for life for Vladimir Putin. This was a nauseating process to watch, and even more so to live inside of. I haven’t been in my country for five years and I won’t go there until things start to change. Am I Russian? I am me. I cannot describe myself in a more exact and adequate manner. I am definitely a part of Russian culture—or rather Russian culture is a part of me. Like most people who grew up in a vast multi-ethnic megalopolis, I do not have an ethnic feeling. A Muscovite is like a Londoner, a Parisian, a New Yorker. We are all children of asphalt, of human multitudes, and of noise.

TAI: You became an expert on Japanese language and culture, and Japanese theater and literature have been major influences for you. Why Japan? How did this interest come about?

BA: I owe a lot to Japan. It taught me two important things, and at the right age, when I was a student. First, that “how” means more than “what for.” And second, that real beauty often hides in simple things.

TAI: You’re a writer, but also a political creature. You condemned Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Why exactly? Was this a political awakening for you? At what point did you see Russia moving in the wrong direction?

BA: Oh, I never fell asleep and I never hid from the public what I thought of Putin’s regime. But the general post-imperial hysteria in 2014 was too much for me. I got up and left.

TAI: Could you actually live in Russia again? Has it become a dangerous place for you personally?

BA: Dangerous? No. Just depressing. I cannot write books when I am depressed. That’s possibly the main reason for my expatriation.

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Boris Akunin (Wikimedia Commons)

TAI: Today’s Russia is not the Soviet Union. It is an arguably freer place. What challenges do writers, intellectuals, and artists face today? Is there censorship? Self-censorship?

BA: Depends on what you do. Writers are more or less free. Thank God, Putin doesn’t read books and doesn’t think that literature has any importance. So in publishing there is no censorship. Press, especially television, is different. The internet too has been under increasing pressure. And any creative activity that needs financing—film, theatre, big-scale arts—is very much dependent on the state. People have to censor themselves; otherwise they cannot work. And of course many artists turn into conformists. I am lucky to be a writer. All I need is paper and pen—sorry, computer and cartridge!

TAI: Vladimir Putin seems to be popular. Or is he? How do ordinary Russians see Putin today? How do intellectuals and writers think about Putin?

BA: Everybody I know personally hates him and mocks him. It’s more or less how all the Americans I know see Trump. But the majority of Russians look at Putin differently. Some genuinely love him, but those are not numerous. The majority just tolerates him. If the man disappeared today there wouldn’t be many tears shed, and soon he’d be forgotten.

TAI: How would you define Putin’s Russia? What kind of political animal is it?

BA: I think that Putin’s Russia is conservative and scared of change. That’s the principal feature. Putin’s popular support is based on this fear. Life under Putin ain’t great, people think, but who knows, maybe it will become worse without him. All the resources of the state propaganda machine work for this purpose. Is modern Russia so much different from its earlier incarnations? I don’t think so. It still is a hyper-centralized system where all important decisions are made at the center. Such a system is chemically incompatible with democracy. The new element is that capitalism works, a lot of people have learned to provide for themselves, and now we have a considerable middle class.

TAI: If Putin were to vanish, would the roots of Putinism disappear? Is there by now a system in place that would post-date Putin’s rule?

BA: It’s not Putinism. It’s a 500-year-old state system which relies on the monopoly of executive power and on hyper-centralism. I tend to think that any new leader or a new political force, even initially democratic, would after a while recreate the same matrix—unless the system is changed at the very foundation.

TAI: You recently gave a talk at the Tocqueville Conversations conference in Normandy on the importance of the Tatar-Mongolian tradition in understanding the historical trap in which Russia seems to find itself. Can you explain exactly what you have in mind? Is Russia condemned to autocracy?

BA: I am writing a multi-volume “History of the Russian State.” I decided to go the very roots of my country to perhaps find answers why every attempt at building a freer society has always ended in more unfreedom. And I think that I found the answer. When the great ruler Ivan III (1462–1505), the founder of the Russian state, was laying down the foundation of the future he used the best historical template he knew—that of the great Ghengisian empire. The amazing expansion of medieval Mongolia could be achieved because that system was amazingly effective. There were four main pillars on which that vast state stood, and Ivan faithfully recreated them: hyper-centralization; sacredness of the monarch; the submission of laws to the monarch’s will; and the supremacy of state interest over private interest. It was, probably the only state model that could hold together an empire stretching through half of Europe and half of Asia. This structure outlived its usefulness at least 200 years ago, but no real effort at changing the “four pillars” has ever been made. They’ve tried again and again, but when any of the pillars weakened, the country immediately started to fall apart: in 1905, in 1917, in 1991. So each time those “eternal” pillars had to be reconstructed. Now, in the 21st century, we again have the Great Khan who is sacred, who makes all the decisions by himself, who is above the law and who says now that liberalism is dead.

What Russia needs to do in order to break from this vicious circle is to decentralize, to became a real federation or maybe even a confederation. But this is a long conversation. I wrote a novel, a utopia about the federalized Russia of the future. It’s called Happy Russia. Sounds like an oxymoron today.

TAI: In an attempt to assert a “special path” for Russia, the current authorities have encouraged a massive reinterpretation and rewriting of Russian and Soviet history, enhancing Stalin’s “positive role,” rehabilitating events like the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Are you worried by this trend?

BA: Absolutely not. In Soviet times history books were even worse. We students were bored by them and did not believe a word. The same will happen again.

TAI: How can Europe and the United States influence developments inside Russia, if we want to see Russia strong, pluralistic, and more democratic in spirit? 

BA: Leave Russia to its own destiny. It is a country which needs to grow up, to make some difficult choices by itself. What the West can do and, I think, should do is to help Ukraine, a new country, a young democracy, still unstable and very vulnerable. If democracy in Ukraine wins, it would be a huge boost to the democratic movement in Russia. For us Ukraine is a sort of alternative Russia—only without the burden of imperialist nostalgia and free to elect its leaders. But it is a poor and disorganized country. Russians look at this and tell themselves: democracy is no good. To put it very simply: if Ukrainians under democracy start to live better than Russians, Russia will turn in that direction too. So help us by helping them.

TAI: There is a constant debate in the West about how we “lost” Russia and were not up to the challenge of helping the country out of the shambles of communism. What do you think of this debate? What were and are our mistakes, in respect to Russia?

BA: I do not look at it that way. I did not expect anything from the West. You don’t owe us anything. All the mistakes made were ours. We are paying for them and will pay more. I believe that the blame lies with my generation, with the intelligentsia. In the 1990s, instead of shunning politics, because it’s dirty and kitsch, instead of being immersed in our personal success stories, we should have been defending democracy. By the time we woke up it was too late. So, what am I now? A writer who made it to the bestseller list, and then lost his country.

TAI: The supporters of Putin constantly accuse those who criticize the current political regime of being Russophobes. What do you say?

BA: I think that the main engine of Russophobia in today’s world is Putin. Due to his actions Russia has become ostracized, ridiculed, despised.

TAI: What does the West represent for Russia? Are we a compass or an anti-compass? Or both?

BA: Of course you are a compass. What else can we look to? The East? No one wants to live like in China.

TAI: There is a crisis across the West today. There is doubt about elites, about mainstream parties, and in some circles basic questions about the health of democratic institutions and culture. How do you see all this? What do you see as the roots of the problem?

BA: I think that democracy has reached a certain level and cannot go further. Like a giraffe who grew up and reached the ceiling with its head. Now is the time to break into the next stage. New forms and new words have to be discovered. The main threat to Western democracy today, I think, is the inability of the intellectual elite to communicate adequately with the electorate. Mass media, public intellectuals, liberal politicians have become too arrogant, too stuck within their own milieu. They speak and write a lot, but Trump with his Twitter, or Erdogan with his speeches, or Putin with his patriotic blah-blah-blah, or irresponsible loudmouthed populists in France and the UK, in Poland and Hungary, they sell their merchandise to the public in a much more effective way. So we wake up one morning and gasp: “What?! Brexit? How is that even possible?! Didn’t we persuade each other that this is absurd and will never happen? Who is the president? Trump !? Am I dreaming?” We must become better salesmen of human dignity, of freedom of choice, of tolerance, of social and international empathy.

TAI: Vladimir Putin has been creating strong connections with ultra-right and traditional Right parties, pushing the idea that liberalism is a “dead ideology” and the West a disqualified concept. What is his goal?

BA: To make himself more important internationally. He wants to be someone who has to be reckoned with. He wants to be respected. If not respected, then feared. Don’t look for any sophisticated goals here.

TAI: You have preferred historical settings throughout your writing career. Why is that?

BA: Because all the witnesses have died. I can fictionalize as much as I like. Besides, I have a historical education and all my life I have read mostly books on history.

TAI: Is fiction entertainment? Is history a hobby? Can we learn something from these things, something that can be relevant to our lives today?

BA: It depends on the fiction. A great novel that is read at the right moment in your life can transform you. And reading fiction is the only opportunity a human has of getting into the skin of another person, of becoming someone else. Neither cinema nor theatre makes this possible. As for history—well, knowing it well is a must for any normal person. I honestly do not understand how one can live without caring about all the generations who were here previously, about their mistakes, their victories, about who left us with this civilization, so awful and so beautiful.

TAI: You must have younger people asking you how one becomes a writer. What advice do you offer?

BA: Nowadays I usually say: “Start writing literary texts on your blog or on Facebook. See if people want to read it or not. When and if you have at least 1,000 followers, come and ask me again.”

The post “Such a System is Chemically Incompatible with Democracy” appeared first on The American Interest.

Why Big Business Loves Gender Neutrality

In 1793, eager to destroy every last vestige of the old order, French revolutionaries created two new systems of time and measurement. The first, called decimal time, divided the day into ten hours and the months into three ten-day weeks. It proved so unpopular that Napoleon abolished it a decade later. But the decimal system for measuring weights and distances lived on as the metric system.

Why one failed and the other succeeded haunts the current debate over gender. A new vision of gender as something fluid and existing apart from a person’s biological sex is challenging the old binary model that links gender to sex. People wonder if this new vision—what critics call “transgender ideology,” but which for all intents and purposes is “gender neutrality”—will succeed like the metric system or fail like decimal time.

Critics think they have nature on their side. They think gender is like time—or music. In the latter case, late 19th– and early 20th-century composers experimented with atonal music, just as painters had begun to show a preference for abstract art over representational art. Yet nature arguably re-asserted itself in the musical case; the human ear, said atonality’s detractors, proved to have a narrower range for what it could appreciate than the human eye did. In nature’s name, people rejected discordant notes just as they had rejected decimal time—and will reject general neutrality, the critics contend.

Yet gender neutrality may be the exception here, not because the traditional binary model lacks roots in human nature, but because a mighty force opposes it.

French business hated decimal time. It wreaked havoc on the timepiece industry, which was the 18th century’s version of high tech. It retarded international commerce, since other countries kept to the old time. It antagonized labor, since workers had to go ten days before getting a day off rather than seven. Business tipped the balance against decimal time.

An analogous situation is at work today, except the new vision—gender neutrality—has business on its side.

Why Capitalism Wants Gender Neutrality

To maximize profit, capitalism requires efficient workers to create what Karl Marx called “surplus value.” Surplus value means the value beyond that which the employer must pay to keep a worker alive and reproduce. For example, if an employer pays a living wage for eight hours of work but can get the worker to produce in five hours what normally takes eight, then the employer extracts the surplus value (three hours’ worth of production) as profit to re-invest. The quest for surplus value is what drives capitalism, Marx said, and culture along with it.

In the first half of the 19th century, surplus value was largely irrelevant in the United States, as the majority of working Americans were self-employed independent farmers. But within the small manufacturing sector, capitalism relied on traditional notions of gender inequality to maximize surplus value. Manufacturers needed well-fed men with maximal upper body strength to labor efficiently, which meant women cooking for them and darning their socks at home. Traditional norms of masculinity and femininity prevailed.

But American capitalism and gender inequality were only convenient allies during this period. When men preferred to stay on the farm, cotton mill owners, for example, had no compunction about employing women to work on the looms, first drawing from the population of local farm girls and later from among newly arrived Irish immigrants. When more male laborers became available through immigration, the scheme ended, but it was a portent of things to come. Profit first, culture second.

New technology came online to make the extraction of surplus value more efficient. As Marx predicted, it also enabled employers to factor out the differences between men and women, including men’s greater upper body strength, thereby allowing women to work at the same jobs as men. Women also found positions in the emerging service economy, where upper body strength was unnecessary. Both innovations made women a new and attractive source of surplus value. Gender inequality soon gave way to gender equality.

Gender equality increased surplus value during the 20th century. A man supporting a wife and children needed a certain wage to keep his family alive. When gender equality drew more women into the workforce, both husband and wife could support the family, which meant each could be paid somewhat less, as their total wage added up to something more. In Marxist terms, employers were able to extract more surplus value from each worker. It was even better for the employer if the couple was childless, as the living wage needed by the family fell further, freeing up more surplus value. In fact, this happened, as the birth rate in the United States (and other Western countries) fell.

With strong business support, a new culture of gender equality arose, declaring men and women to be distinct life forms yet deserving equal economic opportunity. Notions of masculinity and femininity persisted and remained connected to biological sex, but they ceased to be grounded to the same extent in economic reality, for now men and women were more likely to work at the same tasks. Instead they became psychological norms—states of mind, so to speak—that people cultivated through fashion, behaviors, and products purchased on the new consumer market.

For example, while upper body strength declined in economic relevance, many men began lifting weights because people found the pumped-up look “manly.” The male body craze tracked the rise of the new consumer culture, with pumping up in the 1950s moving on to the surgically-altered chins, pectoral implants, grafted hair, and fat-injected penises of the 1990s. For similar reasons, some men adopted a military style and wore flight jackets, along with a stern countenance, despite having never served in the military. Other men wore football jerseys with the names of their favorite players printed on the back.

Many women, in turn, bought exotic lingerie from Victoria Secret to preserve the mystery of the “other.” The cosmetics industry barely existed in the United States as late as the first decade of the 20th century, with make-up largely reserved for prostitutes and cabaret actresses. It also suddenly became a mass market starting in the 1920s, pioneered by Max Factor and Elizabeth Arden. During this same period, again in tandem with the rising consumer culture, some women got plastic surgery on their faces; then, starting in the 1960s, moved on to other body parts, such as breast implants, believing these procedures enhanced femininity. Today, we spend more money on fitness and cosmetics than on education or social services. On cosmetic surgery alone, Americans spent $16.5 billion in 2018, with breast augmentation and liposuction being the most popular procedures. Once unmoored from economic reality, the norms of masculinity and femininity were not easily fixed, and they sometimes rushed unrestrained beyond the range of common sense.

When gender equality yielded diminishing amounts of surplus value, gender neutrality, or the lack of any differentiation between the sexes, became the logical new source.

For example, men on average wait 40 seconds to use the toilet, while women wait two minutes and 20 seconds. By making stalls gender-neutral, the average wait becomes one minute, which is a 20 second increase for men but a one minute and 20 second decrease for women. Assuming, as gender neutrality does, that men and women are interchangeable economic units, the net total decrease in wait time means more time for workers to spend at their desks or on the factory line. This translates into more surplus value.

Making business letters and emails gender-neutral works off the same principle. Workers don’t need to waste time trying to figure out if the person being addressed is male or female. The resultant time saving yields more surplus value. Adopting a company-wide gender-neutral pronoun such as “they, them, and theirs” also saves time. Using gender-neutral language in job postings has already been shown to decrease the time to hire—by 14 days, according to one study. The sooner a worker gets started, the faster surplus value can be extracted.

On the wage side, gender-neutral fashions and cosmetics are often cheaper because of economies of scale, which means workers can be paid less to look fashionable. Indeed, women’s personal care products typically have a 13 percent mark-up relative to men’s. For fashion designers, gender neutrality also makes clothing production more efficient. One leader in the field said that “designers, by showing men’s and women’s looks in tandem, are saving time and money.”

Finally, gender neutrality decreases sexual tension in the workplace, at least in theory. Thirty years ago, the American corporate workplace was like a cruise ship, adapting comforts to the needs of people who for a certain time are entirely cut off from the world. Many large companies built cafeterias, nap spaces, meditation rooms, and gyms, while also permitting romance to flourish. Yet more time at work meant more opportunities for human interaction, including flirtations that distracted from work, or worse, flirtations gone awry. Since segregating the genders is no longer an option, gender neutrality has become the preferred solution. Male-female relationships at work are encouraged to take on a professional, indifferent, uninterested tone; a flat tone that one associates with other common things. They grow rationalized and standardized, as in the production of cars and computers, and even acquire a hygienic quality. The result is fewer company payouts for sexual harassment claims. In addition, undistracted workers yield more surplus value.

Industry itself is sometimes only dimly aware of gender neutrality’s benefits, describing and praising them in economic terms but doing so in piecemeal fashion. There is no official “gender neutrality school” within business. Corporate America will probably best appreciate gender neutrality in hindsight, through profit margin graphs.

Nor will gender neutrality yield as much surplus value as gender equality did. Gender equality dramatically doubled the labor pool, while gender neutrality works on the margins—for example, through increased time-savings or by applying modest brakes to wage increases. But this is consistent with how corporations have boosted profit margins over the past few decades, Companies have relied on an array of small advantages—for example, the fall in labor’s bargaining power, a decline in corporate taxes, globalization, declining interest rates, declining anti-trust enforcement, technology allowing for greater scale and lower marginal costs, and low tariffs. Each advantage alone is modestly important, but when taken together the advantages are enormously important. They have helped to boost the extraction of surplus value and enabled U.S. equities to be 40 percent higher than they otherwise would. Gender neutrality is one more advantage, but also one that will likely increase in importance as the traditional advantages are threatened.

A gender-neutral culture is emerging to complement the new method of extracting surplus value. Ideals of masculinity and femininity, long ago disconnected from economic reality, and primarily images cultivated through consumer goods and activities, are being filed down or even swapped. Because commodities rather than any particular tasks make the man or the woman today, it should not surprise that they have become mutually interchangeable. Today, a woman can be masculine; a man can be feminine; people can be both, either, or neither. It all depends on how the person feels at any particular moment, and what consumer goods or activities the person feels like buying or engaging in.

When thinking about gender fluidity, people today tend to focus on the transgendered because they generate most of the news—for example, biological males entering female locker rooms. But the plight of the transgendered is only a sideshow in a larger historical process that Marx called “the werewolf hunger for surplus value.” Capitalism needs surplus value to survive. Only a small percentage of people are transgendered, yet capitalism has adopted their cause as a symbolic event to help it lay the foundation for a new human being more generally. That new human being—gender neutral—is neither man nor woman according to nature’s so-called ideal, but rather man or woman with two arms, two legs, two dots for eyes, and a gash for a mouth, with everything else to be added later, and made by nature in a rush. After all, in capitalism, time is money.

What Comes After Gender Neutrality?

Gender neutrality is not the end of history. We already can foresee history’s next stage and how ideology will be used to defend it. Again, Marx is useful here.

When feudalism collapsed, the capitalist idea of freedom, meaning the freedom to build a business, coincided with Marx’s idea of freedom, which was the liberation of human creativity. This is why Marx thought capitalism was progress over feudalism. At least men could escape the control of the guilds, build businesses, and fulfill their dreams. But the two freedoms would not be in sync for long, Marx explained: The capitalist idea of freedom would eventually turn men into a proletariat. In addition, capitalism would build machines that could be operated as easily by women as by men, making many men economically redundant. The age of gender inequality would give way to the age of gender equality, and capitalism would throw men under the bus.

In the next phase of history, during the 20th century, gender equality represented progress over gender inequality, as now women could build businesses and work at jobs once denied to them. Capitalism’s understanding of freedom and feminism’s understanding of freedom were in sync. But they would not be in sync for long, just as they were not in sync for long for the men. Many women became proletarians themselves, like the men. Instead of having careers, they found themselves in boring jobs. At the same time, women lost their chivalric protections. From capitalism’s perspective, these protections constituted an irrational throwback to an earlier era. Corporate America was glad to be rid of them. Feminists played right into capitalism’s hands by encouraging their demise.

In the new era of gender neutrality, capitalism has launched another attack on women. Having already attacked traditional social arrangements to get more women into the workforce, it now attacks the feeling among biological women that they form a group with special characteristics. It attacks binary notions of “femininity” (and “masculinity”) as relics of a hated feudal past, viewing them the way it has traditionally viewed militarism and nationalism: something dark and primordial; a source of aggression, instability, and violence; an irrational way of life that the perfect workings of capitalism will one day do away with.

We see this drama play out as Twitter bans a white feminist for saying that differences between men and women exist. Other activists have piled on, calling the woman a “TERF”—a pejorative term that stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. Political analysts note how feminists such as former tennis star Martina Navratilova oppose letting transgendered women compete in women’s sports, and how this pits feminists against other progressives. But they ignore the more important fact that Twitter, a major capitalist enterprise and therefore typically cautious, along with other major capitalist enterprises such as Facebook and Google side with the transgender movement against traditional feminists.

Capitalism is throwing women under the bus, just as it did men decades before. This shocks feminists, who are used to corporate America’s support. Gender neutrality threatens the carve-outs, set-asides, and special programs for women that have helped them gain entrance to business’s top ranks. But the amount of surplus value that capitalism can extract from women as women is diminishing.

The next stage of history belongs to the transgendered and the gender neutral. Gender neutrality will become the norm; business will get the culture it wants. In the name of “freedom” and “justice,” capitalism will support the new culture just as it once supported feminism, and before that rugged masculine individualism.

But this stage, too, will end, and capitalism will throw the transgendered and the gender neutral under the bus. Decades from now, perhaps, when artificially intelligent beings come on line, capitalism will discover a brand-new source of surplus value—indeed, a tireless one, since robots can work 24 hours a day. The entire human species will get thrown under the bus, including traditional men and women, transgendered men and women, and the gender neutral. Humans will protest, but capitalism, experienced in the persuasive arts of ideology, will defend the new robots in the name of “freedom,” “justice,” and “empowerment,” just as it defends transgendered and gender neutral people now, defended women earlier, and defended men even earlier still. Assuming no civilizational conflagration intercedes, and that humanity can somehow be bought off or silenced, the transgendered and the gender neutral will join the ranks of the spurned.

All this seems impossible, unthinkable, and unnatural. But nature long ago revealed itself—and revealed itself to be unnatural. Western civilization is built on a modern philosophy that says there is nothing natural about human beings other than their selfishness and vanity, and that human beings are capable of being molded into any product so long as society has strong enough educational institutions to do so. Men can be taught to go to work or to stay at home and raise children; women can be taught to stay at home and raise children or to go to work; men and women can be taught to believe in the traditional binary gender model or to see themselves as men or women independent of their biological sex. Economic progress demands this malleability, and capitalism has been the mighty accelerator of this process, yet modern philosophy laid the groundwork. In each generation, a way of life once thought to be frightful is accommodated, and people come to think of it as a matter of course. Today, gender neutrality is being accommodated. The notion that artificially intelligent beings deserve the same rights as human beings will follow.

Can We Stop the March of History?

Gender neutrality will likely remain a Western phenomenon and Marx’s paradigm explains why. In China, for example, many young people, like their counterparts in the West, are beginning to see gender norms as intrinsically fluid. But unlike in the West, China lacks the conditions for this view to take deep root.

First, Chinese industries are further away from maxing out the amount of surplus value they can extract through a culture of gender equality. With profits threatened, they simply force their men and women to work harder. For example, China’s technology companies are adopting the “9-9-6” rule, which means working nine a.m. to nine p.m., six days a week. Ironically, it is communist China and not capitalist America that manifests what Marx called “an impulse to suck labor dry,” or the “vampire thirst for the living blood of labor.” For political reasons, “9-9-6” is not an option in the U.S.

Second, government plays a larger role in the Chinese economy than it does in Western economies, and while the extraction of surplus value may be capitalism’s organizing principle, it is not government’s. According to Marx, the “greed for surplus labor” drives hard work and efficiency in the private sector. In the public sector, however, there is no extraction of surplus value for purposes of re-investment, by definition. This is why it makes no sense for a government worker to try to create in four hours what normally takes eight. By Marx’s own reasoning, efficiency and speed are almost irrational in government work. The large Chinese state has no reason to push for gender neutrality to maximize surplus value.

Third, China is state-dominated, and the state, observed Marx, is dangerous because it continuously introduces noneconomic drives into society, such as religion and nationalism, and builds up structures of power that subvert the free forces of the economy. Traditional notions of masculinity and femininity fall under this category of noneconomic drives. True to form, the Chinese state has recently denounced gender neutrality and called it “pathological.” It declares traditional masculinity the bedrock of national strength, thus tying the old noneconomic idea of gender with the old noneconomic idea of nationhood. The Chinese state has both the power and inclination to resist capitalism’s logic and ban gender neutrality.

The United States, on the other hand, has done nothing to interrupt gender neutrality’s ascendance. Masculinity and femininity are already taking on more of a subconscious existence in America, like an underground river that only comes to the surface here and there, expressing itself in sudden bursts and then sinking again to flow on underneath everyday conscious life. Still, even progressives should fear the era to follow, when artificially intelligent beings come online. Can nothing check the inevitable historical process?

There is one way, and it comes with a precedent. In the United States and England, reformers over a century ago sought to shield children from the capitalist dynamic. In the United States, where capitalism reached its most concentrated and characteristic form, success came late. Legislation finally passed in 1916, only to be overturned by the Supreme Court several times. Child labor protections finally became law in 1938, yet business fought them to the end in the name of “freedom,” calling them restrictions on interstate commerce. Even then, the law carved out agricultural labor, which is why to this day 500,000 children, some of them as young as six years old, harvest almost a quarter of the food grown in the United States.

In England, true to form, industrial capitalists, although technically more “liberal” than aristocratic Whigs or traditionalist Tories, were the biggest opponents of child labor protections. Yet protections passed during the Disraeli administration, which represented a popular conservatism, aspired to wall off a small portion of the world from capitalism’s influence.

A similar approach might help today—not to protect children but to protect men and women, including transgendered men and women, and not just against the troubles of today but against those of the future as well. To insist that men and women are somehow different, just as reformers once insisted that children and adults are different, is to confound the view that all human life is merely capital, which is how Marx characterized capitalism’s view of humanity. This will make it harder for capitalism to toss humanity aside on the day that surplus value demands it. For if men and women are different in ways that non-human beings cannot share in, then humanity itself remains distinctive and different, and perhaps worth protecting, or at least worth taking a second look at.

Capitalists will likely protest, as they did when the child labor laws were passed. In the name of “freedom” and “progress” they will demand that men and women be considered interchangeable, just as they demanded that adults and children be considered interchangeable. And they will be right in a way, for there is something romantic, even feudal, in the notion that men and women differ. But that notion may also save humanity when the time comes. It may take the form a vague remembrance of that early life when men and women were profoundly different. I dare not call that difference “natural.” Men and women will no longer be beautiful flowers. But they can live near the flowers, and have some of the odor of traditional gendered life about them to protect them from forces that would toss them away when they no longer yield surplus value.

Robert Heilbroner, The Economic Transformation of America (Harcourt Brace, 1984), p. 107-9.

Elizabeth Haiken, “The Making of the Modern Face: Cosmetic Surgery,” Social Research (March 2000).

Lynne Luciano quoted at Salon.com for her book, Looking Good: Male Body Image in Modern America.

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Breaking the Polarization Spiral

Across the world—from the United States to the United Kingdom, from Europe to South Asia and Latin America—politics and media are stuck in a spiral that incentivizes divisive rhetoric, hyper-partisanship, and disinformation. The main beneficiaries of this spiral are a generation of politicians, often labeled “populist.” What connects them is not their policies, but their ability to capture attention. They use intentionally inflammatory language and controversial ideas in order to focus attention on themselves and to divide electorates into crude wars of “us” versus “them.” Sometimes they are supported by online squadrons of social media militias, as well as intensely biased publications with low editorial standards, that help push their messages. Traditional, quality media that aspire to accuracy and balance find themselves caught in a catch-22: A failure to report on these politicians will result in accusations of censorship, but challenging them risks accusations of “fake news” by the politicians themselves.

Invariably, “quality” media end up reporting on these politicians, reinforcing their agendas and language. But the way they report is also shaped by the peculiar financial incentives of the current moment. As traditional media, especially print publications, struggle to survive, they find themselves operating in an online advertising market that favors “clickable” stories—namely, the scandalous, personality-driven, polarizing content that this new breed of politicians provide. The ad-tech market in which they operate is deeply opaque. It does not distinguish between publications that have a public service-spirited mission and editorial standards on the one hand, and partisan or deliberately misleading websites and social media pages on the other. The ad-tech market is in turn powered by the algorithmic architecture of the internet and social media, which is skewed toward highly emotive, hyper-partisan material that appeals to existing confirmation biases and feeds more “shares” and “likes.” The very architecture of the internet fosters an environment where it is profitable for news organizations and individual users to take ever more extreme and polarizing positions1—an algorithmic logic that in turn encourages the populist politicians. They, in their turn, create content that mainstream media feels they are obliged to describe…and so the spiral spins on.

This spiral can be clearly seen in action in Italy, where politicians like the Minister of Interior, Matteo Salvini, have learned to dominate the information space. Salvini’s central agenda is his attack on refugees and immigration, an agenda he follows regardless of how these issues are playing out in real life. Our research—conducted by the LSE Arena Project, Venice University, and the Italian newspaper of record, Corriere della Sera—clearly shows that even as the numbers of refugees fell by over 80 percent in 2018, the number of articles on the subject rose sharply, spiking when Salvini became minister in June. Salvini himself was responsible for this rise, both because of his comments and because he engineered events that seemed to sharpen the crisis. In August 2018, for example, Salvini blocked a ship full of refugees, the Dicciotti, from docking in Italy. When the Italian courts investigated Salvini, he took to Facebook to insist his cause was right. The Facebook post garnered millions of views. When Corriere della Sera wrote about Salvini’s Facebook post, it was the most engaged with article on the newspaper’s social media pages. At the same time, our research in the Italian Twitter-sphere shows that Salvini-supporting internet publications nevertheless accused “mainstream” media of bias, splitting the media environment into two polarized blocks—not Left and Right, but “establishment” media and “alternative” sources.

In this research project we also asked whether it was possible to report on migration in ways that that didn’t play into this spiral of scandal and polarization. Over the course of a year, Corriere produced different types of content about migration, using different media (video and multimedia, text, and infographics) and different techniques (fact-checking, human interest, and constructive news, among others). Corriere created more than a hundred pieces of content, while the LSE and Venice analyzed engagement with them on Corriere’s Facebook page. We wanted to go beyond the usual commercial metrics of “likes” and “shares,” and looked for what we called “public service spirited” metrics of engagement that could help us understand what sort of content fostered a more civil debate, smoothed polarization, and enhanced trust toward accurate content. We found, for example, that data-driven content and fact-checking actually escalated criticism of Corriere della Sera. At the same time, old-fashioned, objective reporting enhanced trust. We saw that constructive news (stories that try to introduce practical policy solutions) inspired a lot of debate, and a lot of criticism, but also fostered a more civil conversation than more strident editorial pieces. We noticed that video and multimedia content is more trusted than infographics and plain text, which was perhaps to be expected as visual evidence is more compelling than dry stats. However we were more surprised to see that human interest stories, a genre many editors turn to when they want to humanize a complex story, received vociferous criticism and some of the lowest trust—perhaps (and we can only speculate) because audiences feel they are being manipulated by highly emotional tales.

Our research is not meant to be final, and our sample size was limited. Our aim was to encourage thinking and conversation about an editorial framework that avoids the polarizing games of so-called “populist” politicians. Instead, we ask whether it is possible to create content that is at once popular,  accurate, and encouraging of constructive, thoughtful engagement. This is hard enough at the best of times, but to do so in the context of the malign spiral we have described is nearly impossible. There is little incentive to produce public-service-spirited content for a publication that has to compete in the current ad-tech market and internet architecture, especially, as in Italy, where subscription models have not caught on. In order to avoid playing into the media strategies of populist politicians, and for a new public sphere to emerge, the whole negative spiral has to be dismantled.

How can this be done? Breaking the polarization spiral will require, first and foremost, greater public oversight of the algorithms and social media models that currently encourage extremism. Such regulation is already well on its way in Europe, and public pressure is growing in the United States. It is important that any regulation is focused not on censorship and content “take-downs,” but on encouraging accurate content, high editorial standards, and providing people with a balanced diet of content instead of encasing them in “echo chambers.”

Breaking the polarization spiral will also mean reforming the ad-tech system. As a new white paper by the Global Disinformation Index elaborates, this will require both automated analysis that looks at the metadata of news domains to see whether they show telltale signs of being created in nontransparent ways, as well as a qualitative review of the content and editorial practices of news sites to determine which ones follow journalistic standards around accuracy, transparency, corrections, and reliability. Defining “quality” news sites is fraught with complications, so such decision-making needs to be done in the open, by non-profit organizations. Non-profit organizations can then apply pressure on companies and advertising brokers to direct advertising away from “junk” news sites, and to put financial incentives in place to create content that fosters a public sphere that encourages a more deliberative democracy.

But whose job is it to create such content? Most journalists justifiably argue that their mission is merely to hold politicians to account. Public service broadcasters have a clearer mission to be a crucible for a more balanced discourse, but, apart from the unique and perhaps non-replicable case of the BBC, public service broadcasters tend to be marginal players in many markets, and in countries such as Hungary and Poland they have been captured by the regime. Perhaps it is time for new actors to emerge: organizations that specialize in creating content but also constantly analyze and engage with audiences to foster a 21st-century public information sphere, which will in turn encourage the creation of a politics that revolves less around populist personalities, disinformation, and polarization.

1The notion that our current media model creates a demand for disinformation has also been extensively explored by Walter Quattrociocci of the University of Venice. In one study, Quattrociocchi analyzed 54 million comments over four years in various Facebook groups and found that the “cognitive patterns in echo chambers tend towards polarization.”

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The Hollow Center

In 2010, as David Cameron formed a government in the United Kingdom, Angela Merkel reportedly advised him, “You’ll be fine, but your coalition partner will be destroyed.” Merkel was projecting her own experience: Over the previous five years, she had established the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) as the undisputed center of German politics. Merkel’s moment in the sun, so her comment to Cameron implied, had cast a deep shadow over her coalition partners, the Social Democratic Party (SPD).

A decade later, the collapse of the proud, 150-year old SPD is the political event gripping Berlin. From its glory days as the CDU’s principal challenger for the chancellery, the SPD has sunk all the way to 15.8 percent in last month’s European parliamentary elections, the worst result in its history. The desperation is palpable. As polls show the party sliding even further, not a day goes by without panicked SPD officials musing over the party’s fate—and the possibility of its total implosion. Since the European Union (EU) election disaster pushed party leader Andrea Nahles out the door, SPD grandees are even discussing selecting Kevin Kühnert, the head of the SPD’s youth-group, to take her place. At 29 years old, Kühnert may make Pete Buttigieg seem like an experienced graybeard, but he possesses a certain attraction: More than any other SPD leader, he argued passionately against the coalition with Merkel’s CDU.

The story of the SPD’s collapse appears straightforward, then—the inevitable decline of a party relegated to junior status in government. But perhaps the explanation isn’t so simple. A less dramatic but equally noteworthy downward trend is now discernible in Merkel’s CDU and its sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU) of Bavaria. Just like the SPD, the so-called Union of CDU/CSU suffered its worst European parliamentary election result in history last month, winning just under 29 percent of the vote. Attending the center-right European People’s Party (EPP) meeting in San Sebastián, Spain last month, it seemed clear to me that the crisis these parties face is not one of political profile but of bland centrism.

Of course, the Union and EPP remain the largest bloc in Germany and Europe, respectively, despite having lost significant support. As one seasoned EPP observer put it to me, “We lost but we still won.” Increasingly, however, Merkel’s advice to David Cameron seems ill-suited to the moment. In Germany and across Europe, centrist parties channeling EU incrementalism are buffeted by right-wing nationalists and left-wing eco-populists. It is they who are offering crisp answers to new challenges—and gaining in the polls. The disintegration of the Republicans in France, the weakening of the Tories in the United Kingdom, and the decline of Forza Italia in Italy all raise the specter of the CDU/CSU in Germany following the center-Left into the electoral doldrums.

In fact, for the first time in history, consecutive polls show the Greens ahead of both the Union and the SPD. This should shock no one. In the past year, West European elites have listened with rapt attention as a 16-year-old school girl from Sweden has lectured them on the dangers of climate change. In Germany, the 26-year old Vlogger, Rezo, in a highly polemical video titled “The Destruction of the CDU,” took aim at the party for its wobbly enforcement of climate policies. The video’s reach cannot be overstated: In a country of 80 million, it has been viewed more than 15 million times and discussed ad nauseam in the media. Today, no issue commands the same visceral, almost mystical status amongst Western Europe’s youth, activists, and intellectuals as climate change.

Merkel has grown all-too aware of this energy—and appears to have made her strategic choice. In a private session with the Union’s members of Bundestag earlier this month, she announced an end to “wishy-washy” climate policies and promised “disruptive change,” beginning this fall. Her preferred successor and CDU leader, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (affectionately known as AKK) followed suit with an op-ed arguing for more climate urgency.

The press may applaud such moves. After all, it is an open secret that a disproportionate percentage of the Berlin media harbors sympathy for the younger, more cosmopolitan Greens. In the last edition of Der Spiegel, Germany’s high-brow liberal magazine, its token conservative writer bid farewell to his readers with an aside that the majority of his editors, if forced to confess, would likely prefer a Green-led government.

But for the CDU/CSU, long the party of German business and conservative values, leap-frogging the Greens to climate purity and political correctness is not an obviously easy thing to do. Germany’s energiewende—its planned transition away from fossil fuels—has already proven costly, with Germany’s non-household electricity prices being now the highest in Europe. Unless it is prepared to alienate its base altogether, the CDU/CSU can do little more than co-opt a select few Green themes and hope that this satisfies the general public. Of late, for example, the talk is of a new climate ministry. But if this is the extent of the “disruptive change” Merkel has in mind, it’s unlikely to win the votes of those who take the Greens’ platform seriously.

There is, of course, another option: The Union could attempt to retrench itself among its more conservative base. In December, Merkel’s anointed successor AKK defeated the conservative darling Friedrich Merz to succeed Merkel as chair of the CDU. Ever since, she has struggled to find her footing. With the European elections past, a growing chorus of observers are wondering aloud whether she has what it takes to succeed her mentor when the time comes. If the regional elections this fall in the former East Germany unfold as badly for the CDU as opinion polls suggest, it will be difficult for her to lead the Union into a general election. As one prominent member of the EPP predicted to me in Spain, “Either Merkel stays or Merz is coming.”

If the CDU does rediscover its conservative tradition under Merz, it is more likely to peel off voters from the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has pooled large numbers of law-and-order voters, cultural conservatives, and critics of globalization over the past few years. This would make for a more natural path for the Union, which has long stood as the serious conservative party in German politics. Moreover, a renewed focus on innovation as the German economy slows might prove more successful in combating climate change than a watered-down version of Green party regulations.

Just as important, there is a template for how to execute such a shift. In neighboring Austria, the center-Right People’s Party has blazed an electoral trail by co-opting select themes from the right-wing Freedom Party while remaining connected to its conservative identity. In the process, it has shot into pole position while the country’s Social Democrats have languished.

If today’s politicians are expected to move heaven and earth to combat climate change, then it is just as legitimate for them to reconsider Europe’s other sacred cows. And that brings us back to the SPD. In neighboring Denmark, the Social Democrats (SD) won a major victory in early June after tacking right on immigration. In the process, the right-wing Danish People’s Party was slashed in half. If the CDU is to reverse its slide, it will have to move outside of the comfortable consensus of the past several years. The key to Europe isn’t simply a matter of optics, as Merkel suggested some years back, but of channeling the currents of our time. Whoever ignores them risks being washed away.

Just ask David Cameron.

The post The Hollow Center appeared first on The American Interest.

There’s Something About Putin

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

After two years of “Putin’s Master Plan” and “New Cold War?” chyrons, it’s not surprising to see some pushback. Unlike President Trump’s “Russia hoax” denials, these revisions are intended to stiffen our resistance.

Writing in Foreign Policy, under a “Don’t Believe the Russian Hype” headline, Swedish defense researchers Robert Dalsjö, Michael Jonsson, and Christopher Berglund warn that NATO is psyching itself out when it accepts “at face value” Russia’s claims about its missile systems and its ability in a conflict to create “no-go zones” to block NATO reinforcements from reaching the Baltics. “After all, exaggerating the capabilities of its A2/AD [anti-access/area denial] systems is enough to attain a deterrent effect if Western decision-makers believe these claims,” they write. In We Need to Talk about Putin, reviewed here by Karina Orlova, Mark Galeotti also worries that the West is psyching itself out when it sees Putin as a “Machiavellian grandmaster” rather than an opportunist, warning of a “minority opinion. . .that Putin is so dangerous and powerful that it is best to try and buy him off.” A recent article for the New York Times Magazine told readers “Russia is dead set on being a global power. But what looks like grand strategy is often improvisation–amid America’s retreat.”

These are important correctives if European leaders or NATO generals are contemplating self-deterring or suing for peace in the face of an all-powerful Putin. When I asked Alexander Vershbow, former Deputy Secretary General of NATO and former U.S. Ambassador to NATO and Russia, how much we have to worry about that, he said that there are some voices, mainly Italian populists and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, arguing that “we shouldn’t be challenging Putin. I don’t think it’s influencing NATO policy decisions,” he told me, adding, “It’s a trend worth watching.” Vigilantly.

The most clear and present danger is that we have an American President relentlessly underplaying Moscow’s myriad challenges and willfully looking for excuses not to act. Trump’s Chief of Staff blocked White House discussions about tightening security for the 2020 elections, because the President can’t tolerate a whisper of doubt about his 2016 victory. When reporters asked Trump at the G-20 summit if he would tell Putin not to meddle in U.S. elections, Trump grinned and wagged a finger at the Russian leader, saying, “Don’t meddle in the election, please.” Putin laughed and likely made a note to authorize overtime for the St. Petersburg troll farmers.

A less nuanced reading of the don’t-hype-Putin arguments could end up in the White House talking points as another reason to enable Putin’s worst behavior. If they instead raise hard questions everywhere else, including in the U.S. Congress and on the campaign trail, about why Putin has been able to play a weak hand so effectively against the United States and Europe, they will make an important contribution. How much of the problem is Putin? How much is us? And if Putin isn’t a strategic genius and the Russian system is as corrupt and troubled as it appears, what do we need to be doing differently to leverage those weaknesses?

Putin is far outmatched by the West. Russia has a gross domestic product of $1.658 trillion versus $18.8 trillion for the European Union and $20.5 trillion for the United States. Moscow spent $61.4 billion on its military last year versus roughly $650 billion by the United States (though when considering relative purchasing power, the gap may not be nearly as great or comforting). A Russian male born in 2017 is expected to live 67 years, versus 76 years for an American male and nearly 80 for one born in France.

It is also true that Putin isn’t getting many of the wins he’d hoped for: President Trump came into office determined to ease sanctions on Russia, but even the Republican-led Congress balked at that. More sanctions have been meted out (the White House is still months behind on a second, much tougher round of mandated punishments for the 2018 nerve agent attack on a former Russian spy in Britain). The number of NATO troops deployed in and rotating through Eastern Europe and the Baltics since Russia annexed Crimea has grown. And for all of Ukraine’s troubles—many self-inflicted, others Putin-generated—Russia has likely pushed Kyiv permanently into the Western camp. Putin is beginning to feel strains at home, especially since the government raised the pension age last year. In May, the state-funded polling firm VTsIOM reported that public trust in Putin had fallen to 31.7 percent. After the Kremlin expressed its irritation, VTsIOM immediately rewrote the question and went back into the field and–surprise!—Putin’s trust ratings jumped to 72.3 percent.

None of this has robbed Putin of his desire or ability to make trouble.

FBI director Christopher Wray (he, too, has fallen out of Trump’s favor) warned in April that Russia’s “use of social media, fake news, propaganda, false personas, etc. to spin us up, pit us against each other, to sow divisiveness and discord. . . .is not just an election-cycle threat. It is pretty much a 365-day-a-year threat.” That’s despite all the revelations, sanctions and last year’s indictments in absentia of 12 Russian intelligence agents for the Clinton campaign and DNC hacks. A report by the European Commission after this May’s European Parliament elections described “continued and sustained disinformation activities by Russian” and other sources seeking to divide the electorate and suppress turnout. Among the stories pushed out were claims that the collapse of Austria’s rightist government was the result of a plot by the “European deep state” and “German and Spanish Security Services” and that the devastating fire in Notre Dame Cathedral was a sign of the “decline of Western and Christian values.”

Moscow’s malign ambitions, of course, go beyond cyberspace. Russia’s support for Bashar al-Assad’s genocidal rule in Syria has been well and horrifyingly documented. Putin’s decision to double down on Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, as the country descends further into chaos, is a clear, in-your-face challenge to American regional leadership. Clear, that is, to everyone but Donald Trump. In April, after Moscow sent 100 Special Forces to Caracas, Trump declared, “Russia has to get out.” After a phone call with Putin a few weeks later, he decided that the Russian leader “is not looking at all to get involved in Venezuela other than he would like to see something positive happen for Venezuela, and I feel the same way.”

The revisionists insist that Putin has no strategic vision. (According to Galeotti, Putin also “doesn’t read philosophy.” He does, however, read his intel briefings.) Still, Putin has been upfront about his desire to break the U.S.-led rules-based order, what he described at the 2007 Munich Security Conference as “One center of power. One center of force. One center of decision making. It is the world of one master, one sovereign.” Since then Putin has sent tanks and troops into Georgia, annexed Crimea, and used Russia’s UN Security Council veto over and over again to ensure that the Assad government has never been called to account for its many war crimes. The decision to use Novichok—a nerve agent secretly developed by the Soviets and one Russia denies ever having—to try to assassinate former GRU colonel Sergei Skripal in England last year looks like an intentional assault on one of the few global norms, the ban on chemical weapons, that was still holding–until Syria and Salisbury.

How does Putin pull it off? How does a declining country—albeit one still with some 6,500 nuclear weapons—wreak so much havoc? And how should that inform our thinking about pushing back?

Answer One: It’s the Technology and the Times 

The Kremlin’s political technologists were far ahead of the curve in recognizing the power of social media to exploit and feed the anxieties spreading across the West. As early as the 2008 Russo-Georgian war, Russian hackers were defacing government websites, posting images of Hitler and other dictators alongside that of Georgia’s President. Now it seems like everyone (or everyone with bad intent) is in the game. Iran and Venezuela have mounted disinformation campaigns. Alt-right players in the United States and Europe are generating their own content and doing call-and-response with the Russians. In 2017 a group of Democratic operatives launched a small disinformation campaign during Alabama’s special Senate race and last month, the New York Times reported that a thirty-something working with the Trump campaign has set up a fake Biden website complete with creepy GIFs of the former Vice President kissing and patting little girls.

There is no way of knowing how much of an impact Russia’s fake and divisive news actually had on the 2016 election. In Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, one of the country’s leading experts on political ads and debates, makes the disturbing case that the real news mined from hacked Clinton campaign emails—particularly excerpts (some taken out of context) from Hillary Clinton’s paid private speeches—was more significant: dominating the news cycle and the second and third presidential debates, reinforcing public doubts about Clinton’s credibility and driving down her polls.

Improving cybersecurity for our entire election system is critical, which is why Trump’s refusal even to acknowledge the problem is so disturbing. The question of how to respond to disinformation is more complicated. We shouldn’t be surprised that Egypt, Belarus, Myanmar and Russia are using the excuse of “fake news” to justify even more censorship and violence against journalists. (As part of his noxious banter at the G-20, Trump told Putin to “Get rid of them. Fake news is a great term, isn’t it?”) Democracies are also courting danger. Germany’s NetzDG law, which threatens social media platforms with a €50 million fine if they don’t quickly take down defamatory or hate speech, could lead the companies to cut their risks and airbrush the Internet.

Media literacy, fact checking, and broader public awareness of why censorship is even more dangerous to the health of a democracy than hateful viral memes are all potential correctives. Peter Pomerantsev has argued persuasively in this magazine that any “regulation (whether government- or industry-led) needs to veer away from a focus on content to a broader concept of ‘viral deception.’” In practice, he writes, this would entail thinking “more about how to regulate inauthentic behavior and amplification” including “covert, coordinated campaigns by bots, trolls and cyborgs,” and search engine manipulation.

If Putin got out of the hack-and-hype business tomorrow, we would still have a problem and this work would still need to be done.

Answer Two: We’ve Enabled Putin

Putin had already rolled two American presidents by the time Trump was elected. George W. Bush had other priorities:  Getting out of the ABM Treaty (aides later told me his “look” into Putin’s eye was calculated to smooth the way), and fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In April 2008 Bush championed Georgia’s and Ukraine’s bids for eventual NATO membership—underestimating Putin’s anger or assuming he and his team would manage it. When Russian troops and tanks rolled into Georgia that August, the White House briefly debated a tougher response, then decided to leave it at a protest and some humanitarian aid and let France’s Nicolas Sarkozy negotiate an end to the fighting. More than a decade later, Russian troops are still in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

During the 2012 presidential debate, President Obama got off a great zinger about Mitt Romney describing Russia as our number one geopolitical foe, saying, “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.” When asked after the Ukraine invasion if Romney had been right, Obama dismissed Russia as “a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors—not out of strength but out of weakness.”

I’d like to believe that was part of some clever psychological operation. Obama’s record says otherwise: No lethal aid for Kyiv (sanctions for Moscow and troops for the Baltics, but the Russians had escalation dominance in Ukraine); his desultory response after Russian warplanes came to Assad’s rescue (Putin would regret getting sucked into the Syrian “quagmire”); and his decision not to strike back after the discovery of Russian interference in the 2016 election (why provoke more interference or play into Trump’s claims of election rigging, if Hillary was going to win). As it turns out, even regional powers can cause a whole lot of trouble if you let them.

One of Washington’s more recent parlor games is to debate whether Trump, as he claims, has been tougher on Russia than Obama. The decision to provide anti-tank missiles to Ukraine is an improvement, along with increased funding for European troop rotations and more gas sales to Europe.

But the words of a U.S. President—even this one—matter a lot, and Trump is incorrigible. When reporters asked him in July 2018 (two weeks before the disastrous Helsinki summit) if he would accept Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Trump said, “We’re going to have to see.” That followed a report he privately told G-7 leaders earlier that month that Crimea belonged to Russia because everyone there speaks Russian and publicly argued for letting bygones be bygones and readmitting Russia to the group. After his advisers finally dragged out an endorsement of NATO’s Article 5 collective defense commitment, Trump took it back on Fox News. When Tucker Carlson asked last year, “Why should my son go to Montenegro to defend it from attack?” the President enthusiastically shared: “I’ve asked the same question.” He then went further, declaring that the Montenegrins are “very aggressive people. They may get aggressive and congratulations, you are in World War III.” Who needs Russian disinformation when you’ve got the American President?

Trump has not been able to dig Putin out of his economic hole nor has he ceded the military space Putin wanted along his borders. But so long as he keeps personally excusing and enabling Putin, Putin will keep testing and pushing.

Answer Three: There Really Is Something about Putin 

Depending on who you read, Putin is a risk taker or an expert card counter. I go with risk taker, although he has done a good job reading three U.S. presidents and many of Europe’s leaders. Consider the Russian Navy’s seizure last November of 24 Ukrainian sailors in the Kerch Strait. A UN tribunal ruled in May that Moscow must release the sailors and their vessels. Moscow has blown the Tribunal off and paid no cost.

The revisionists also disagree about whether someone so brazen can be “gotten to” the way Putin got to Hillary Clinton, with hacking and shaming—in his case about billions in ill-gotten wealth. Putin’s reaction to the 2016 release of the Panama Papers suggests just how nervous he is about his money—and about the Russian public seeing details of what he’s stolen. That can only have gotten worse as sanctions have bitten even deeper and the public’s neuralgia has grown.

Putin isn’t mentioned in the legal documents, which detail a global web of shell companies and money laundering by the great and near great. But they linked Putin associates, including one of his oldest friends, cellist Sergei Roldugin, to $2 billion in offshore transactions. Russians do love their classical music. Putin immediately denounced the revelations as a U.S. plot to destabilize the Russian government, citing a tweet from Wikileaks that USAID and George Soros funded the investigative reporting project. (Wikileaks would take some of that back.) “Attempts are made to weaken us from within, make us more acquiescent and make us toe their line,” Putin told a forum of Russian journalists. (His remarks were broadcast live on state-run television.) “What is the easiest way of doing this? It is to spread distrust for the ruling authorities and the bodies of power within society and to set people against each other.”

That sounds like a strategy Putin and his trolls would instantly recognize. It also doesn’t sound to me like a man who feels invulnerable.

The post There’s Something About Putin  appeared first on The American Interest.

What If Trump Had Lost In 2016?

“Never had a Presidential campaign flamed out so spectacularly as that of Donald J. Trump in 2016,” wrote Mark Halperin in Game Over: The Shock Cruz Victory. “The object of media fascination in Iowa and a surprise winner in New Hampshire, the ludicrous political dreams of the host of The Apprentice were toast, sunk by the Access Hollywood Tape and the extraordinary revelations of E. Jean Carroll that dropped before South Carolina.”

This left the field wide open for Ted Cruz to build up his impressive lead among Republicans, one that only widened with his choice of Carly Fiorina, the formidable former CEO of Hewlett-Packard as his running mate. With the nomination clinched (“Inevitable,” wrote David Brooks in the New York Times) the pair began an aggressive pivot to the Right. Relentlessly focusing on the looming threat of a “hijacking of the Supreme Court” by Democrats, and a call for an urgent need to pull out of the Paris Climate Accords, the full scale offensive of the Cruz-Fiorina campaign began at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

His call to “Keep America’s Faith,” which was described as “anti-Semitic” by Jon Stewart and was termed “Christian Nationalism” by The Economist, became the rallying cry for an era where leaders like Jair Bolsonaro, Matteo Salvini and Viktor Orban had made strong gains around the world on the back of similar religiously-inflected campaigns. But Cruz’s gambit was not expected to win in America. No one believed there were enough “irrationals” (as Hillary Clinton dubbed them in a candid gaffe) in the United States to carry the day. Right up until election night, with national polls showing a slim majority for the wooden Clinton, few foresaw that Cruz’s religious—some said racially-tinged—message would resonate so deeply in places like Pennsylvania. The scale of the upset even shocked President Cruz at the time, as Bob Woodward detailed in his 2018 bestseller Faith.

For liberal America, his victory was a terrible blow. David Remnick, writing a week later in his New Yorker editorial titled “American Tragedy,” lamented that President Cruz had won without the popular vote and in the midst of an all-out assault of Russian fake news on social media in support of his “Christian Nationalist agenda.” Democratic activists pointed to the Russian hack of the Democratic National Convention as proof, as political consultant Peter Daou put it, “Moscow has always favored Republicans.”

President Cruz, pointing to his hardline policy to beef up the Ukrainian military with offensive weapons, brushed off accusations by John Brennan, Obama’s Director of the CIA, and other Democratic officials, questioning the legitimacy of the result. “Russiagate,” as it came to be called, was triggered by an NSA leak to the Intercept news site, alleging that Kremlin-backed hackers had targeted a U.S. voting software supplier in the week before the vote. Republican commentators closed ranks behind President Cruz. “A conspiracy theory of the highest degree,” Bill Kristol angrily tweeted at The Nation’s David Corn. “Have the Democrats gone mad?” asked David Frum in his Atlantic cover story “The Cruz Doctrine,” citing, amongst other policies, the incoming administration’s aggressive pushback strategy towards Putin.

Cruz’s poorly-attended inauguration, eclipsed by the drama of the Women’s March for Reproductive Rights that followed, was no omen for his successes in Congress that fall.  With Mitch McConnell (“The Real Vice-President,” quipped Time) running herd, the new President initiated an impressive, and for the Left devastating, series of maneuvers. There were creative acts, mainly targeted at big business, such as the rebranded Trans-Pacific Trade Deal (“Calamitous,” said Bernie Sanders). But most were destructive. Dismissing late-night calls from a frantic Angela Merkel, President Cruz first unilaterally pulled the United States out of the Paris Climate Accords and then the JCPOA, the Iran deal that formed the core of Obama’s foreign policy legacy.

By fall 2017, the newly-elected French President Emmanuel Macron was lamenting the “breakdown of the norms-based international order” and signalling “the urgent need for European strategic autonomy” as President Cruz moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. His move, three months later, to recognize the Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights, triggered a wave of European condemnation. “Rogue Nation,” was the headline in Der Spiegel following the embassy move, while Timothy Garton Ash lamented the “unprecedented break with the postwar consensus” in The Guardian.

Domestically, with the Democratic party locked in internal feuds over whether or not to support what the newly-elected congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders both called “neoliberal corporate trade pacts,” the Republican machine marched on. The marked unity among the party rank-and-file—both the chattering classes and on the Hill—was most clearly demonstrated when Senator John McCain cast the decisive vote consigning the Affordable Care Act to history, only weeks after the biggest tax cut of all time was passed by Congress.  

Podcasting came of age as a medium during the Democratic civil war of the Cruz era. Which ones you listened to was seen as a sign of whose side you were on, especially among the younger millennial activist set. Perhaps the most popular was Chapo Trap House, which lambasted the fawning behaviour of the White House press corps and the Washington establishment towards “the reactionary-psycho politics” of the Cruz Administration. Particular targets singled out for overtly deferential behavior included CNN’s Jim Acosta, branded by one of their hosts as “Suckup in Chief.”

But the fact that such podcasts, with their vitriolic claims that “This is not normal!” could be seen as identity badges by a small Leftist fringe known as the “dirtbag Left” underscored the success of President Cruz in channeling the “charismatic authority” of the Presidency—something Barack Obama had so revelled in. Nowhere was this more on display than at President Cruz’s powerful eulogy to continue John McCain’s “mission” at the Senator’s funeral. To quote the Washington Post: “Not since victory in the First Gulf War had official Washington felt such a common bond as following President Cruz’s moving words.”

Yet this Republican satisfaction in Washington was almost dashed completely by the near-derailment of Brett Kavanaugh as nominee for the Supreme Court. “A sexist, misogynist, illegimitate appointment,” said the Washington Post. But the Gorsuch and Kavanaugh victories were not the only achievement for Cruz. “An Evangelical Coup,” was how Rachel Maddow described the administration’s slew of appointments reshaping the lower branches of the judiciary.

Michelle Goldberg’s runaway bestseller, Kingdom Come: America Is Now A Theocracy, captured the intellectual moment. “What began under George W. Bush,” argued Goldberg, “is now completing itself under Cruz. And it may be too late.” A rush of books by Kevin Phillips, Randall Balmer, and James Rudin were derided as “the End of Democracy genre” by commentators like Ross Douthat on the Right, but avidly consumed by readers and magazine editors alike. Backlash was brewing.

The mass “Our Rights” protests, sparked in late 2018 by President Cruz’s ringing endorsement of attempts to pass complete abortion bans by Alabama and 15 other states (“I will do all in my power to help you succeed,” Cruz intoned) sparked a wave of anxiety that gay marriage rights were under threat. Media frenzy reached a peak when the Catholic firebrand Sohrab Ahmari, accused of being a “wannabee Franco-style authoritarian culture warrior” by Bill Maher, was revealed to have taken a job at the White House as an adviser. Rumors circled that Ahmari favored punitive taxes on gay nightclubs. “Save Gay New York,” screamed the iconic cover of New York Magazine.

Nevertheless, acceptance of gay rights kept steadily growing in polls. Neither the Cruz crusade nor the Resistance to it registered as even a blip in the statistics.

But Cruz’s focus on the religious Right was not without its critics among elements of his base. Breitbart.com, fueled by outrage flowing from bulletin boards like 4chan and a small group of nationalist subreddits, accused President Cruz of missing the real issues. Christians were being bought off by religious baubles, Ann Coulter railed, at the expense of “hard-working Americans” being “displaced by uncontrolled mass immigration”. Despite all this, Jeff Sessions, not to mention his notorious adviser Stephen Miller, still cut lonely figures in the Senate; their calls for mass so-called “child separations,” to be enforced at the internment camps on the Mexican border, were politely ignored by the White House, and dismissed by off-the-record officials as “inhumane.”

Dismissive as they were, the steep setback in the midterms saw Cruz lose his working majority in Congress (60 seats changed hands in the House, and four in the Senate) and thus found the President throwing himself into what Barack Obama called, in a shock intervention delivered at the Brookings Institution, a “dangerous new militarism.” Joint “pinpoint” strikes on Venezeulan military infrastructure with President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil were launched in January 2019.

Successive visits of Christian Nationalist leaders to Washington, including Prime Minister Matteo Salvini of Italy (“Cruz is my icon,” he said crossing himself outside the White House) and President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, were denounced as “demeaning to America” by the New York Times editorial board. Meanwhile, in East Asia, relations with China continued to deteriorate following Cruz’s meeting with the Dalai Lama, and a sanctions package on PLA front companies over human rights violations in Xinjiang.

This worsened matters in North Korea. Cruz’s refusal to dialogue with Pyongyang without a total cessation of all nuclear activity, coupled with his snap decision to move an additional 1,000 U.S. troops to bases in Japan and the Korean Peninsula, triggered panic selling in Seoul and Pusan. “Give Kim A Chance,” tweeted Dennis Rodman, before appearing on Vice News promising to broker a summit to avert war. His call was echoed by Ro Khanna and other left-wing members of Congress during the war scare.

Perhaps feeling bulletproof on the back of Cruz’s own claims to moral decency, the era saw an unprecedented era of Republican-commissioned opposition research on the “dirty secrets” and private lives of senior Democrats, including most sensationally Corey Booker and Joe Biden. “Never have I seen such dirt being kicked around,” said President Jimmy Carter at the Aspen Ideas Festival panel on “Decency and Hypocrisy” in contemporary politics. “Things used to be less coarse in America.”

Repeated threats to “put boots on the ground”  in Venezuela, delivered by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, rattled the Europeans. Tensions ran high between Cruz and his counterparts at NATO summits, especially after German foreign minister Heikko Maas openly questioned his country’s long-term future in NATO in an interview with the Washington Post. British, Spanish, and French opposition leaders harrumphed approval.

But, perhaps unsurprisingly, the real flare-up was to take place in the Middle East. With tensions with Russia and Iran running high in Syria following the build-up of 20,000 U.S. troops in the country, and the imposition of crippling new sanctions on the Islamic Republic, clashes began in the Persian Gulf. U.S. airstrikes, killing at least 150 people, pounded Iranian naval bases following what American intelligence claimed was an attack on a Japanese tanker.

Events quickly escalated. An all-out assault on the Iranian air force followed a wave of sucicide bombings on U.S. bases in Bahrain, and at a Jewish community centre in Istanbul that killed 43 people. “Cruz has ushered in the end of the American world order,” a frail George Soros warned at a panicked gathering of the GMF Brussels Forum, weeks before his own death. “Insane,” French President Emmanuel Macron was caught muttering on a hot mic after an emergency G-7 summit.

It was like the 1970s has returned to America. It was a commonplace that the country had never been more divided. “Warmonger!” Bernie Sanders yelled in Congress, pledging to start impeachment proceedings against President Cruz, as 300,000 people rallied in New York. But even as protests led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar outside the Israeli Consulate turned violent and Cruz’s poll ratings nosedived, nothing seemed to shake the resolve of the President to finish with the Iranian nuclear program once and for all. Mainstream Democrats, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, said that impeachment was off the table—“A distraction from issues that really matter to voters.”

“One thing is certain,” wrote Paul Krugman in the New York Times. “The only beneficiary of a war this expensive will be China, steadily building up economic and trading capacity as the United States wastes its blood and treasure on yet another empty threat in the sand.”

But the attention of the public was elsewhere: on the protests and focused on the solemn, nightly speeches, President Cruz was delivering on national television elaborating the eternal truths of Just War and why, this time, America had no choice.

The post What If Trump Had Lost In 2016? appeared first on The American Interest.

“Better Angels” In Our Past

Across our broad land, there’s a new birth of enthusiasm for the phrase “better angels.”

At least four non-profit organizations, including one that I co-founded in 2016, are now called “Better Angels.” Two best-selling books from the 2010s, along with numerous others that aren’t best-sellers, feature the phrase in their titles.  Two recent documentary films are called “Better Angels.” So is a 2019 song recorded by Barbra Streisand as well as a 2019 album and concert tour by two other recording artists. I’ve seen the phrase used as both a corporate slogan and as names of conferences. God help us, there’s now a beer called “Better Angels.” In our politics, members from both sides of the aisle seem increasingly to invoke the phrase. 1 2 3 4

For the source of this trend, we can look generally to the ugliness of our current public conversation. The more our better angels flee us, the more we discuss them and wish for their return. And of course we can look particularly to Abraham Lincoln, who used the phrase so beautifully in his First Inaugural Address on March 4, 1861, on the eve of our Civil War.

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Although Lincoln’s peroration is justly famous, Lincoln did not coin the phrase “better angels.” The phrase and its cognates have appeared in English literature since at least the early 17th century. To understand the phrase, and to deepen our understanding of Lincoln and his times, let’s examine the lineage and usages of this evocative term.

We know that Lincoln personally wrote the phrase into his speech.5 We even have a picture of it. We also know that William Seward, who would serve as Lincoln’s Secretary of State and arguably most important advisor, had originally suggested that Lincoln close his speech by calling upon the “the guardian angel of the nation” – a pietistic but stock phrase that would surely have been little noted and not long remembered.

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But Lincoln scratched out Steward’s suggestion and replaced it in his own handwriting with a phrase saying that what the nation needed in its time of reckoning would not come from outside us, as in an angel guarding us from above, but instead from within us – something “better” in the “nature” of both northerners and southerners. In stating so poetically that profound idea, Lincoln in one phrase told us as much as any president before or since who we can be, and thus what America is.

No one knows with certainty how Lincoln first encountered the phrase “better angels.” But based on available evidence, one possible source stands out as the most likely: William Shakespeare’s play, Othello, written about 1603. In the play, Othello has murdered his wife, Desdemona, accusing her of adultery. Her uncle, Gratiano, declares that it’s good that Desdemona’s father, Brabantio, is dead:

Poor Desdemona! I am glad thy father’s dead:

Thy match was mortal to him, and pure grief

Shore his old thread in twain: did he live now,

This sight would make him do a desperate turn,

Yea, curse his better angel from his side,

And fall to reprobation.

Three factors point to Othello as Lincoln’s source.  It’s highly likely that Lincoln read the play.6 There’s no positive evidence that he read any of the other English works published prior to 1861 that use the phrase.7 And as regards intended meaning, Lincoln uses the term exactly the way Shakespeare uses it.

For Shakespeare, as for Lincoln, “better angels” were neither individual people nor supernatural beings, but instead aspects of temperament.  A “better angel,” in this construal, is a composite of those praiseworthy traits within us that exist alongside of, and contest with, unworthy traits. In Othello, for example, we fear that Brabantio, in his “pure grief” at his daughter’s murder, would “curse his better angel from his side” such that he would do deeds of “desperate turn” causing him to be damned by God (“fall to reprobation”).  In one of his sonnets, written about 1599, Shakespeare similarly tells of us “two spirits” that are “both from me” – a “better angel” that is “right fair” and a “worser spirit” that “tempteth my better angel from my side” and thus “would corrupt my saint to be a devil.”8 For Lincoln, the “better angels of our nature” are those civic and patriotic qualities, shaped by shared memory, that permit us, even in times of national fracturing, to “swell the chorus of the Union.”

This conception of “better angels” as admirable aspects of temperament, or aspirations toward what is good, is likely the dominant meaning of the term in English and U.S. history. Edward Bulwer-Lytton in about 1839, for example, prefigures Lincoln exactly when he yearns for “the better angels of the human heart.”9 Earlier, in 1715, in Nicholas Rowe’s The Tragedy of Lady Jane Gray, we learned that we need “our better Angels” to help us participate in “Friendship’s Hour and Friendship’s Office”:

To come when Counsel and when Help [for others] is wanting,

To share the Pain of every gnawing Care,

To speak of Comfort in the Time of Trouble,

To reach a Hand and save thee from Adversity.

What are the “worser spirits” that our “better angels” strive to overcome? An essayist in The London Magazine in 1784 says:

Away then, fear, despondency, and doubt,

My better angels drive such traitors out.

 A British essayist in 1832 tells a tale:

As he at once formed his decision to obey his better angel, his spirit, previously clogged by the dull, heavy weights of combined misery and despair, seemed now of ethereal lightness and buoyancy.

In The Golden Farmer, from about 1832, Benjamin Webster says:

You’ve proved my better angels. Ere I knew yon, ay, and since, for a time, the vice of gain, either by honest or dishonest means, had taken possession of my breast to an almost miserly feeling; but your bright example has taught my heart to flow with better thoughts.

In a sermon from 1837, the Rev. William Whewell warns his congregation:

We not only refuse to listen to our better angel, but drive him from us with mocks and insults. We plunge willingly into the slough of selfishness, and refuse to pass onwards.

In 1851, the Rev. Frederic D. Huntington preached a sermon in Cambridge, Massachusetts, following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act – a federal law which the anti-slavery Huntington fervently opposed, and which Lincoln, notwithstanding his opposition to slavery, supported in his Inaugural Address as a means of attempting to preserve the Union. Calling the law a “national sin,” Huntington warns of what he calls “the everlasting law”:

With every wanton denial of our purer aspirations, those aspirations themselves grow faint. Resistance to our better angels drives those angels away.

 (While there’s no evidence to prove it, it’s certainly plausible to suspect that Lincoln might have read this sermon.)

If this small corpus is to be trusted, our “better angels” as evoked in our literature are primarily those inner traits guiding us toward friendship, unity, good conscience, and lightness and buoyancy of spirit, as they are simultaneously challenged and sometimes overcome by tendencies toward selfishness, divisiveness, fear, despondency, and heaviness and dullness of spirit.

There are exceptions to this usage. Sometimes in our literature a “better angel’ is a person, usually a woman.  The poet and dramatist Henry Jones in 1753 describes his “gracious Queen” as “My better Angel, and my Guardian Genius!”  A poet in London in 1761 says: “WIVES our better angels are.” And lest we forget daughters, here is William Guthrie in 1754:

Daughters, said he, thou hast acted like my better Angel.

Henceforth I resign myself to your Conduct.

Sometimes a “better angel” is, well, an angel. The historian Francis Newman in 1878 describes early Jewish proselytism:

Special angels, perhaps evil spirits, were supposed to uphold the pagan dynasties, which fell when the invisible patron was overcome by better angels.

But “better angels” as either individuals or as supernatural beings appear to be less common. The dominant conception, at least through 1861, and as clearly intended by Lincoln, is captured precisely by Charles Dickens in his 1841 novel, Barnaby Rudge:

So do the shadows of our own desires stand between us and our better angels, and thus their brightness is eclipsed.

For Lincoln, the “shadows of our desires” standing in 1861 between “us” and “our better angels” were fanaticism, fear, self-righteousness, and perhaps most of all, mistrust.

Nearly his entire address that day was an appeal for the restoration of trust. He speaks directly to southerners, seeking to reassure them that the government will not threaten their peace, property, or personal security. He insists that as president he cannot legally interfere with slavery in the southern states and has no desire to do so even if he could. He reiterates his support of the Fugitive Slave Law. He does refuse, as did most Republicans, and to the alarm of white southerners, to accept the Supreme Court’s pro-slavery Dred Scott decision as final, but even here Lincoln equivocates and avoids strong language. The tone throughout, according to the respected Lincoln scholars J. G. Randall and David Herbert Donald, “struck the note of gentle firmness and breathed the spirit of conciliation and of friendliness to the South.”

Citing law and history, Lincoln argues that the Union is perpetual, cannot consent to its own destruction, and therefore cannot be legally undone on the “mere motion” of one or a group of states. He says that, as a president sworn to uphold the law, he has no legal authority under the Constitution to “fix terms for the separation of the States.” He says that he trusts that this fact “will not be regarded as a menace” and that in carrying out his “simple duty” to defend and maintain the Union “there needs to be no bloodshed or violence, and there shall be none unless it is forced upon the national authority.”

Like a lawyer speaking to a jury, he suggests that separation would make the nation’s current problems worse, not better. He appeals to reason: “Physically speaking, we cannot separate.” He proposes that in a democracy the ultimate wisdom of the people can be trusted to prevail and he reminds those who would oppose his Administration that even bad governments have limited powers and limited terms of office.  He says that both north and south “profess to be content with the Union, if all constitutional rights can be maintained,” and pledges again that these rights will be maintained. He pleads for calmness. He argues against a rush to action: “Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time.”  He closes by appealing to “our bonds of affection” rooted in “the mystic chords of memory.”  And finally, he promises that we will be “again touched” by “the better angels of our nature.”

In practical terms, the speech was a failure in nearly every respect. Hardly a southerner attended the inauguration ceremonies. Many southern newspapers, especially in the Deep South, simply ignored Lincoln’s address, and those which did notice the speech frequently mangled and misrepresented the text. Southern commentators commonly portrayed Lincoln as an untrustworthy hypocrite, claiming in the speech that he did not want civil war while promising in the same speech to do exactly what would cause one.  As an editorial in Midgeville, Georgia, Southern Federal Union put it: “Mr. Lincoln talks with a forked tongue.” On Inauguration Day the Richmond Examiner called Lincoln “a beastly figure” whom “no one can hear with patience or look on without disgust,” and the following day the Richmond Enquirer said that Lincoln’s address consisted of “the deliberate language of the fanatic.”

Lincoln took office as a beleaguered president, widely disliked and mistrusted in the country. Many in his own party viewed him as a crude, unreliable man. Many in the South viewed as a would-be despot, while many others in all parts of the country viewed him as a weakling who would be, or could be, controlled by others. The immediate result of his election was further to divide an already dangerously divided nation. His Inaugural Address did little to change any of these realities. Five weeks after the speech, Confederate forces fired upon Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and the war came.

The year 1861 was an important year for a phrase we now remember and revere. It was not a good year, at least insofar as Lincoln intended the term, for the better angels of our nature.

1. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Farewell Address to the U.S. Senate, December 12, 2018:

If there were ever a time in our history to heed the better angels of our nature, I think it’s now. How can we answer Lincoln’s call to our better angels?

2. Former California governor Arnold Swarzenegger (R), May 12, 2018:

We must stretch for our better angels instead of falling toward our lowest instincts.

3. Former President Barack Obama, September 7, 2018:

Our antibodies kick in, and people of goodwill from across the political spectrum call out the bigots and the fear mongers, and work to compromise and get things done and promote the better angels of our nature.

4. Vice President Joe Biden (D), speaking in Sydney, Australia, July 20, 2016:

The better angels in America will prevail. So at a time like this, in the face of xenophobia and demagoguery and what is being trumpeted around the world, we have to remember who we are as Australians and Americans and reflect our best selves back to the world.

5. William Safire, “First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861,” in Harold Holzer and Joshua Wolf Shenk (eds.), In Lincoln’s Hand: His Original Manuscripts with Commentary by Distinguished Americans (New York: Bantam Books, 2009). Ronald C. White, Jr., “Honest Abe Reminds Us of the Power of Words,” National Public Radio (NPR), posted March 4, 2017.

6. Robert Bray, “What Abraham Lincoln Read – An Evaluative and Annotated List,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 28, no. 2 (2007), 74.

7. Bray, ibid.

8. Sonnet 144: “Two loves I have of comfort and despair.”

9. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, “Cromwell’s Dream,” by 1839.

10. Mrs. Batire, “Epilogue to Dr. Stratford’s ‘Tragedy of Lord Russell’”, London Magazine, September 1784.

11. G. Henderson (ed.), The ladies cabinet of fashion, music and romance 6 (1832), 181.

12. F. D. Huntington, “National Retribution and the National Sin,” in Sermons for the People (Boston, 1857), 424.

13. Henry Jones, The Earl of Essex, 1753.

14. “Song.  By a Gentleman in London. Addressed to his Wife in the Country,” The Scots Magazine 23 (April 1761).

15. William Guthrie, Friends: A Sentimental History. Describing Love as a Virtue, as Well as a Passion, 1754.

16. Francis W. Newman, “On Jewish Proselytism Before the War of Titus,” Living Age 137, no. 1777 (July 6, 1878), 42.

17. J. G. Randall and David Donald, The Civil War and Reconstruction, 2nd Edition (Boston: D. C. Heath and Company, 1961), 164.

18. Marie Hochmuth Nichols, “Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address,” in J. Jeffery Auer (ed.), Antislavery and Disunion, 1858-1861: Studies in the Rhetoric of Compromise and Conflict (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1968).

19. “Mr. Lincoln’s Inaugural Address,” (Midgeville, GA) Southern Federal Union, March 12, 1861.

20. Editorial reprinted in Richmond Examiner During the War; or, The Writings of John M. Daniel (New York: Printed for the Author, 1868), 6.

21. Cited in Nichols, 410.

22. Randall and Donald, 163.

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School Busing: Yes, It’s Personal

This is personal for me. When you hear these words uttered by a political candidate, what do you expect will follow? If you are closer in age to Joe Biden than to Kamala Harris, you will likely expect a reasoned argument, or perhaps an anecdote intended to show that the candidate has hands-on experience with a certain issue. If you are closer in age to Harris, these same words will likely translate as, This my turf, not yours! You cannot possibly know anything about it, so get the hell off! And what follows will be a fierce proprietary claim, not just to a particular identity but to exclusive, authentic, unassailable, nontransferable knowledge of everything associated with that identity, whether or not the person actually possesses such knowledge.

Case in point: during the second presidential debate on June 27, Biden and Harris had a testy exchange about school busing, a topic that was a very hot potato half a century ago but has long since become a very cold spud. Why did Harris decide to re-heat it? Is she planning to make school busing a key proposal in her campaign? Or was that cold potato the only vegetable she could find to hurl at the white guy who served alongside America’s first African-American president? I suspect it was the latter, and there is no denying that it worked. For an entire news cycle (which now means about 15 minutes) the Twittersphere was deeply divided on the issue of whether school busing is an effective remedy for racial inequality.

For the record, I do not question Harris’s assertion that she benefited from Berkeley’s decision to bus students from the lower-middle-class neighborhood in the western flatlands to an upper-middle-class school in the eastern hills. Nor do I dispute her self-identification as African American, although it does strike me as odd that racial identity and sexual preference must now be regarded as inborn and indelible, while biological sex is celebrated as a matter of free choice.

As for Biden, I do not think it is entirely his fault that the media describe him as coming from a blue-collar background. After all, it took me almost five minutes on Google to learn that his father started out as a salesman, then worked his way up to executive, co-owner of a small airport, and sales manager for car dealerships and real-estate firms. By the time a reporter did that, the news cycle would be almost over.

But I do object to all the sloppy rhetoric that went flying around after the debate. And here’s why. School busing is personal for me, too.

A few decades ago, I conducted a natural experiment in what today might be called the intersection of race, class, and public education. I use the word experiment because it was in vogue at the time. My experiment was conducted in three stages, and in each, I learned a different lesson.

The first stage was a master’s program in urban education at the University of Pennsylvania, in which I enrolled in after college—not because I had always dreamed of being a teacher but because I was obsessed with race. The word woke was not known to me at the time, though its African-American roots are deep. But woke is what I was trying to be, the only imaginable alternative being a white racist.

I chose the Penn program because it was “experimental,” meaning no formal courses in education. Instead, I and a dozen other well-meaning college grads were given sink-or-swim placements in a half-dozen “experimental” schools around Philadelphia. Mine was in the Free School, a mini high school housed in a Chestnut Street storefront near the Penn campus. All but one of the teachers were white, and all but two of the 50 students were black. The students were also quite motivated, their parents having sought out this alternative to the overcrowded chaos of West Philadelphia High. The head teachers, both white, had taught in “the system” and were committed to freeing the students from its rigid routines and cramped, irrelevant curriculum. I was in total agreement, having read Jonathan Kozol’s exposé of the Boston public schools, Death at an Early Age, and adopted its radical view that the system was deliberately destroying black youth.

My best friend in the program was Diane, a working-class Italian American from western Pennsylvania who taught math at a different school called Parkway. Diane considered the Free School a bit flaky, and it didn’t help when I sang the praises of “experimental” courses such as “Police-Community Relations,” “ESP and Parapsychology,” and “Making Sense of Your Senses.” To my defense of these courses as fun and relevant while also imparting basic skills, Diane looked dubious, and remarked that there were a lot of ways to teach math, but she had never found one that did not require more work than fun.

I might never have seen Diane’s point if the students in the Free School hadn’t staged a walkout. At ten o-clock on a sunny October morning, they rose from their seats en masse and marched out onto the sidewalk, where they declared their intention to picket the Free School until it started teaching “real” courses instead of “hippie” ones. This came as a shock to me, because my own memories of high school were singularly lacking in the vitality and din of the Free School, where great funky music was always playing somewhere, and every class was enlivened by the students’ quick wit and abundant street smarts.

I had noticed that when it came to doing the actual assignments, those same witty, street-smart students bubbled—indeed, effervesced—with excuses. But not until the frank discussions that followed the walkout did I begin to see the problem. The star students could handle the fun, relevant assignments, but because they were stars, they wanted a more serious curriculum. Meanwhile, the majority were bright and eager, but lacking in the necessary skills, and none of the teachers wanted to admit that what these students really needed was dull, boring remedial instruction. The Free School was supposed to be experimental, not remedial.

For me, the Free School was highly instructive in a subject the students did not need to study: soul. Soul had been part of African-American culture since Day One, but I had only discovered it in college, where I made my first black friends and gained my first exposure to the music called by that name. Soul was style, crackling energy, spiritual electricity—the quintessence of blackness and the opposite of everything stolid and repressed about my own upbringing in an affluent WASP suburb of Boston. I knew I would never have soul in a true sense, but I wanted to tap into just enough of it to jolt other white people out of their racist stupor.

I soon got the chance. After my year at the Free School, I was hired as one of four teachers in an even more experimental program called Sidetrack, an outgrowth of a Boston-based program called METCO (Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity), which since 1966 had been busing students from Roxbury and other black neighborhoods out to white suburban schools—on a purely voluntary basis. By 1971 METCO was spending nearly $2 million to bus 1,600 black students to 30 suburban schools and had a waiting list of 1,300.

The next step, according to a group of educators in the wealthy town of Lincoln, was to obtain a grant under Title III of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act, passed in 1965. Title III was devoted to “innovative projects,” and that was just what the Lincoln folks had in mind. As argued in their proposal, METCO did not go far enough, because it failed to address the “major environmental imbalance [that] results from insulated urban and suburban ghettos where racial prejudices are left unchallenged and unchanged.” As a remedy, Sidetrack would bus black students from Roxbury out to Lincoln, while at the same time busing white students from Lincoln into Roxbury.

This plan had a marvelous symmetry. There would be two classrooms, one in the Lewis Middle School in Roxbury, and the other in the Brooks Middle School in Lincoln. Each classroom would have two teachers, one of each race, and 30 students, 15 of whom would be bused from the other school. Halfway through the year, the two classes would switch locations, and the students who had been attending Sidetrack in their home school would now get bused to the alien one. One reason why the plan struck a responsive chord in me was that Lincoln bordered on Weston, the town where I grew up. I looked forward to the day when the Sidetrack soul train would pull into Lincoln with me riding shotgun.

It did not work out that way. The story is long, and I am not the heroine. Suffice it to say that I began the year in Lincoln, attempting with my co-teacher, a charismatic math teacher named Morris, to cope with the daunting challenge of reconciling Sidetrack’s contradictory goals. The first goal, set forth in the proposal and emphasized by the Lincoln sponsors (who controlled the money) was to foster “positive cross-cultural changes” and help suburban kids “relate to every variety of humankind in myriad situations.” The second goal, emphasized the Roxbury sponsors, was to give the urban kids a high-octane academic boost.

It was unclear how we were supposed to pull this off, because most of the Roxbury students were one or two full grades behind their Lincoln counterparts. What we did, messily but not unsuccessfully, was individualize the lessons, so that on any given day, the two nerdiest boys from Lincoln would spend an hour doing their schoolwork and the rest of the time building catapults out of pipe cleaners; while the four hippest Roxbury students would solve ten math problems in exchange for permission to play music and teach each other the latest dance step. This approach did not produce instant racial harmony. On the contrary, the students quite often made pungent comments about each other that got everyone so riled up, Morris and I would take them all outside for a quick game of soccer.

By December we were making progress, but the optics were not good. Our classroom and activities were being monitored by the Lincoln sponsors, and they did not like what they saw. Warnings were issued, and on the eve of Christmas vacation, I was summoned to the superintendent’s office and fired. It seemed obvious why the Lincoln sponsors fired me and not Morris. He had more leverage, by virtue of his sex and color, and I was just another white liberal who for reasons of her own treated other white people as soul-deficient. That made me eminently dispensable.

What happened next was remarkable. Morris refused to accept the decision, and immediately launched a letter-writing campaign among the students—and, more important, among the Roxbury sponsors. It would be nice to report that the black parents and educators of Boston were outraged at losing me, but that was not really the point. The point, which Morris kept alive throughout the holidays, was that the Roxbury sponsors had not been consulted. In January they met and decided to flex some political muscle. Lincoln may control the purse strings, they said, but the right to hire and fire resided equally with them. To drive home the point, they voted to reinstate me.

But Sidetrack never recovered. The federal grant called for a second year, but that spring, plans were made to downsize it to a six-week “student swap,” and the ambitious language about “positive cross-cultural exchanges” got deleted. As for academic achievement, that sore topic was postponed till the summer, when all 60 students were tested. As it turned out, neither Roxbury’s hopes nor Lincoln’s fears were realized. In each school, the scores of the Sidetrack students were roughly the same as those of their non-Sidetrack peers. It was too late to argue that the students had learned valuable lessons not included in the tests. The program was kaput.

A couple years later, Morris took a graduate course for which he wrote a paper about Sidetrack. In that paper, with no ill intention, he held a mirror up to me. I will never forget what that mirror revealed:

Martha came from a setting very similar to Lincoln and was anxious to demonstrate to Lincoln people that her allegiance was not with them but elsewhere. She was much more outspoken than I against the values and attitudes Lincolnites brought to the program. In large measure, she was rejecting all that Lincoln stood for. Nonetheless, the question remains as to whether she realized that, in so completely rejecting Lincoln, she was also rejecting much of who she was. That unfortunate detail did not escape the attention of all of us even at the time; it certainly did not escape the attention of all of the students. That, however, would be another study in itself.

The third stage of my experiment was a two-year stint in the Achievement School, a remedial program for underachieving middle-school boys, housed in Rindge Tech, an all-male vocational high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A few years later Rindge would merge with Cambridge Latin, the city’s academic high school. But when I taught there, it was a demoralized and demoralizing place, with poor attendance and shabby facilities, known mostly for the prowess of its basketball team.

This was the first time I taught students who were not in my classroom voluntarily, and the differences were palpable. It was not unusual to walk down the corridors of Rindge and see a student, or occasionally a teacher, being forcibly ejected from a classroom. The constant fighting, cursing, and yelling assaulted my ears, and I grew to hate the sound of my own shrill voice trying to make itself heard. Rindge is only a few blocks from Harvard, but the tough, often troubled youth filling its halls were not the sons of academics but of blue-collar and welfare families in what was still then a working-class city.

All of this was new, but what struck me most forcefully was the presence of whites. Along with the African Americans I was used to, there were West Indians, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Cape Verdeans—as well as Irish, Italians, Greeks, and other white ethnics, many from fatherless families in the East Cambridge housing projects. And the most unruly and unreachable ones came in all colors.

This is where I found myself in the strained atmosphere leading up to the Boston busing crisis. In 1965, the state had passed a bill, the Racial Imbalance Act, which classified as “racially imbalanced” any public school that was more than 50 percent non-white. The bill had been pushed through the legislature by a coalition of black and white citizens concerned about discrimination in the Boston public schools. But as noted by its many critics, the vast majority of whites who supported the bill lived in the surrounding suburbs and adjacent cities like Brookline and Cambridge, where its provisions did not apply. Instead, the bill applied to Irish and Italian enclaves like Charlestown, Dorchester, and South Boston, where the memory of class and religious discrimination by Boston’s Brahmin elite had not faded.

The same was true of the June 1974 court order handed down by Federal District Judge W. Arthur Garrity. Like the Racial Imbalance Act, this court order focused exclusively on the legal municipality of Boston, as opposed to the larger and generally more affluent metropolitan area. This meant that the buses would carry students from the city’s poor and predominantly black neighborhoods into its poor and predominantly white neighborhoods. Not surprisingly, this opened deep fault lines, not just between black and white but between white and white.

I felt this acutely, because most of my white liberal friends were so supportive of the court order, they could scarcely contain themselves. Indeed, every discussion of the topic turned into a contest over who could most strenuously denounce the anti-busing groups. I was no fan of those groups—for example, I was disgusted by the way ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights) copied the tactics of the civil rights movement while carrying picket signs saying “NIGGERS SUCK.” But I was repelled by my peers’ flamboyant loathing. And as for the radicals still active in Boston and Cambridge, they had long since gone off the deep end: Maoists and anti-Maoists squabbling over whether to mount an armed invasion of South Boston.  (I’m not making this up.)

Yet neither was there refuge in the mainstream. The Boston Globe insisted on treating court-ordered busing as a public works project similar to cleaning up the Harbor, duly voted upon by a majority of citizens and guaranteed to create a more pleasant and healthful environment for future generations. Given the obvious class dimension of the conflict, this bland managerial optimism struck me as the height of hypocrisy. In this respect, if not others, I empathized with the angry working-class whites whose expressed political will was being circumvented by an unaffected, hypocritical elite.

I also doubted whether the educational problems of the poor were best addressed by starting a race war. The slogan “racial balance” stuck in my craw every time I walked into Rindge Tech: there was plenty of racial balance there, but what difference did it make?  I did not buy the proposition that black children could not learn unless they went to school with whites.  On the contrary, my Sidetrack experience had made me sympathize with, if not fully support, the black separatist impulse to educate black children in a setting that keeps the mostly hostile, sometimes patronizing white world at a distance.

My friend Morris acknowledged these anti-busing points but insisted that the issue was political.  The schools had to be integrated, he said, not for integration’s sake but to force the Boston School Committee to equalize resources. “Green follows white” was his motto, and in Boston there was plenty of evidence to back it up. The system was one of patent inequality, clearly evident in the conditions we had seen in the Lewis Middle School. A recipient of federal funds under Title I, the Lewis School that has served as a partner in Sidetrack was better off than most of the predominantly black schools in Boston. But that wasn’t saying much.

All of this left me pro-busing, but not for the usual reasons. If the court order was basically a bludgeon to crush the power of the school committee, then perhaps the federal court should call it by its right name and get the crushing over with? The only white person I could share this blunt opinion with was my new boyfriend Peter. I had met Peter through my Philadelphia friend Diane, and like her, he was from a blue-collar background. And while he was “political” in the sense of having protested the Vietnam War, worked with a Catholic youth group in rural Mexico, and done community organizing in Dorchester, he was not “political” in the sense of force-feeding his radical opinions to every human being he met. It is hard to convey how refreshing this was.

Peter lived in a group house in Cambridge, and one of his housemates was a recent graduate of Haverford, pursuing a joint degree in law and education at Harvard. Marc was keenly interested in the busing issue, but as I soon discovered, his chief concern was the narrowly legalistic one of whether city officials would in fact enforce “the law of the land.” I tried to engage Marc on what I saw as the larger political questions, but our conversations, while initially good-natured and leavened by Peter’s friendly ribbing of Marc as a bookworm lacking real-life experience, soon became tense. Marc’s big project at the time was drafting a “Bill of Rights for Public School Students” at the Harvard Center for Law and Education (where the busing litigation was also underway).

One evening while having dinner with Peter and his housemates, I asked Marc how he expected such a measure to get through the myriad of legislatures governing the nation’s public schools. He replied that it would not go through the legislatures, it would go through the courts. Then he explained that, in his view, the resulting policy would be implemented by placing a legal advocate in every school to litigate student complaints. I had consumed a fair amount of wine at that point, and at this prospect I felt a subversive ripple of mirth. A lawyer in every principal’s office? Envisioning how this scenario would play out in the Achievement School, I commented sarcastically how grateful my fellow teachers and I would be to have every rowdy kid and his brother represented by counsel.

Ignoring my sarcasm, Marc proceeded to make it clear that he was not about to compromise lofty principle for something as mundane as school discipline. From there the conversation degenerated. The more elevated Marc’s defense of my students’ constitutional rights, the more deliberately outrageous my assessment of their character—until I heard myself, say, in the deadpan absurdist style I had picked up from other teachers in Rindge, “Look, Marc. Here’s what you don’t realize. The only way to keep the little buggers in line is with a baseball bat!”

Peter laughed. His housemates did not. And it came to me in a flash: I was not a racist, but neither was I a guilty white liberal, much less the type of aggressive anti-racist that today is called “woke.” What I was, had no name. It still doesn’t. But in today’s insanely polarized environment, perhaps we should give it one.

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Follow the Weed Money

Editor’s Note: TAI will be hosting a debate about the drug war July 25th.

For many years now, public policy analysts have been carefully studying the tradeoffs involved in decriminalizing some combination of the smoking, selling, and growing of marijuana. In the serious analyses the main factors in argumentative play have remained fairly constant until recently.

To simplify somewhat, on the side of decriminalization-if-not-legalization, there has stood the huge mess made of our justice and penal systems occasioned by categorizing marijuana use as a felony. That mess has included the thoroughly disgraceful, wildly uneven application of penalties between white middle class and black underclass violators, a problem that elides into a much older and even more damaging mess with which we also still struggle. The often gang-encrusted and violent criminal activity associated with the growing, importation, and the sale of marijuana (and other banned drugs, of course) has played out in ways that have turned entire urban neighborhoods, their public schools included, into virtual war zones. Black markets really are bad, and criminalizing marijuana has helped create massive, multi-layered ones.

And there has also stood the argument that marijuana use is no worse—and arguably less bad—for human health than alcohol use, so why the double standard?

On the side opposing change in the legal status quo have stood arguments that marijuana is a gateway drug that leads to use of more dangerous and addictive substances, and that legalization would lead many to indulge who might not otherwise do so—the predicate here being that all drug use is undesirable from the perspective of the common weal. Whether what is undesirable—and who gets to decide what is undesirable—should also ipso factobe unlawful are other issues of a legal-philosophical nature, but not trivial or irrelevant issues.

A related legal-philosophical issue, this time in the form of the slippery slope: legalize marijuana, then why not legalize LSD, cocaine, methamphetamines, and heroin while we’re at it? Where and how do we draw the line between libertarian permissiveness and common sense?

It is fair to say that virtually no one who has studied the problem objectively over the years liked the status quo, but concluded that the risks of changing it in one way or others could neither be precisely measured nor glibly pushed away. The values involved were incommensurate, after all: How was it possible to measure the extant cost of criminal and legal dysfunction of a ban against the potential human health risks of repealing or relaxing the ban?

The resultant uncertainty produced political gridlock on the issue, doubtless reinforced by partisan gridlock on many other issues. And from what the polls tell us, public opinion until recently has been about as uncertain as expert opinion, so calculating politicians saw nothing much to gain by advocating a significant deviation from the status quo. In short, we have been more or less stuck for decades at the legal level, with the depredations of the status quo inflicting more pain and damage over time.

Four things have changed this picture in recent years, some of them longer in gestation than others.

First, several states have legalized aspects of marijuana use, increasing steadily with the passage of time, putting themselves in opposition to Federal law—which did not change in essence from 1937 until last year. That has been awkward, and made manifest the problem in the political arena.

Second, major strides have been made in the study of medicinal uses of the key chemicals in cannabis. Research has been ongoing for a long time (on LSD, too, to a lesser and narrower extent), but it has really only been in the past year or so that the putative health benefits of marijuana have entered broad public consciousness.

And third, partly as a result of the first two changes, public attitudes have shifted significantly, making reform an appealing political stance on the Federal level really for the first time. Already at least one Democrat running for President, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, proposes that Federal law following suit to match the states that have legalized marijuana. Politicians don’t make proposals like that unless they think a strong majority of their kind of voters will approve.

Indeed, anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock can sense the momentum for legalization in virtually all forms and at all levels of government. And that sense is a familiar one, reminiscent of several other shifts in the American cultural Overton Window from the fairly recent past.

One such shift public opinion with specific legal consequences, dating from about half a century ago, concerned both divorce and abortion, which was of a piece with a broader shift in attitudes concerning women’s rights and equality. More recently we have seen a shift in attitudes and legal consequences about so-called marriage equality, which is of a piece with a broader shift in attitudes about homosexuality. Both of these changes were launched out of the counterculture and eventually became mainstream views as the nation’s demographic pyramid leaned into the future. For those old enough to remember, the sense of inevitability about both gradually but unmistakably grew before our eyes.

More liberal policy sentiments concerning marijuana were bound to follow eventually from the same source, and be carried along, as with the others, by an avalanche of popular culture goads. In this case those goads have included Cheech & Chong ad nauseum, the role of “The Dude” in The Big Lebowski, the popular television series Weeds, and most of us could compile a list of other examples printed in 28-point font that could easily reach the moon and return without exhausting the supply of pot-normalizing mass entertainment fare.

But I said four things have changed recently. Beyond the precedents set by vanguard states, the medical use appeal, and the breeching of the threshold of a more or less evenly divided public opinion, what other new wheel is in spin?

It’s the money, man.

April a year ago, Jim Hagedorn, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board at Scotts Miracle Gro, told a small group assembled that he was investing heavily in hydroponic equipment to meet the burgeoning demand of weed-growers. He confirmed that measured by dollar-for-dollar return on investment, his company was going to make way more money out of that then it was selling plant fertilizer and weed-killer. Hagedorn subsequently offered to buy Sunlight Supply to add it to the part of Miracle Grow focused on the cannabis trade—Hawthorn Gardening—run by Jim’s son Chris.

Hagedorn’s enthusiasm for supplying pot growers with the tools of the trade surprised me at the time. That’s not what I expected to hear from a former USAF fighter jet pilot. But I soon began noticing all kinds of internet ads trying to entice investment in cannabis-related companies of one kind or another—usually the sort of stuff trolling after some news item or feature, mixed in with the miracle cures and celebrity fluff. I began to see more and more of them over the past fourteen months because, I think, there have actually been more and more of them.

In tandem with corporate money machines of various types and shapes getting into gear, the media has recently been leaping onto the weed wagon. At O’Hare Airport in Chicago a few weeks ago, stopped over briefly on my way to Denver, I beheld a sudden proliferation of magazine copy hailing the advent of legalized marijuana. I first noticed Willie Nelson smiling out in a cloud of smoke from the cover of Rolling Stone, telling everybody how marijuana had saved his life. Then I noticed a magazine I’d never seen before in a Hudson’s called Cannabis. Its cover looked to illustrate a swirling drop of about-to-be-ignited hash oil at the end of a pipette (please don’t ask me how I know that). And then I saw the cover of Time magazine devoted to the case for medical marijuana.

Taken together, sandwiched in between Foreign Affairs and the Atlantic and the gossip and muscle-building and hot-rod car magazines, I knew what it meant: This was normalization with a vengeance, the profit motive in the lead. I wondered whether some corporate conglomerates and investment firms now quietly staking out an interest—call it hedging if you like—in cannabis companies might also have downstream financial interests in some of these slick magazines.

So what’s it all mean? The first thing it means is that all the serious, careful study that has been done over the years about the cons as well as the pros of marijuana legalization now amounts for all practical purposes to a hill of cow flop. When there are tens or even hundreds of million dollars to be made, pretty much nobody gives a damn about objective research and dispassionate consideration of likely tradeoffs and downsides.

We can see that basic impulse already at work in some of the states that have legalized marijuana for recreational and/or medical purposes. One of the first things typical state legislators tell you is how much revenue it’s added to state coffers. They love it, and they’re not shy about saying it.

Colorado is one such state, of course. Do many folks in the statehouse care that one of the consequences of Colorado’s legalized recreational marijuana is that downtown Boulder is now crowded with aggressively rude panhandlers, often working in teams, high as kites and present-oriented to the max? If they do they don’t talk about it.

Do many legislators care that medical marijuana is wildly abused in many states? It’s so easy, in California, say, to get supposedly medical access to weed that it’s hardly unknown for folks to walk out of the dispensary and turn around and sell the stuff to 16-year-old kids on the street for a healthy profit. They don’t seem to care, as long as the state can tax the deuce out of at least the first in the sequence of sales.

To me, this puts legalized marijuana, medical or otherwise, on a similar ethical plain with state lotteries and other forms of state-sanctioned gambling. I don’t think it’s any state’s business, or the business of the Federal government, to interfere with games of chance played in private among consenting adults. But that’s a far cry from the state essentially blessing an activity that everyone knows preys on those citizens who can least afford it: poor people and especially those addicted to gambling. State endorsement of such behavior is morally wrong in a democratic environment, and I don’t care if the money taken in is used to support the schools, or the elderly, or whatever. If those needs are important enough, let the politicians go to the public and ask that they be supported through the normal routines of taxation.

Recreational or medical marijuana comes with the same problem, only worse.

I don’t doubt that there are legitimate medical uses of marijuana. I don’t doubt that recreational use of marijuana is no different, and is perhaps less harmful, than recreational use of whiskey and rum. I don’t have a problem with the principle of a sin tax either. I do have a problem with government at one level or another appearing to sanction, endorse, and essentially bless behavior that it knows is harmful to many people.

Here’s the real rub: When the specific-source tax revenues become so important to a government, it’s all too easy for merely sanctioning a behavior to bleed over into promoting it. How to recognize that bleed? When states allow others or themselves to undertake advertising expenses to sell the stuff. Thus does a government addicted to sucking revenue by any means necessary offload other forms of addiction onto others in the process.

What others? I’m not concerned with the casual or social smoker anymore than I am about the casual or social drinker. I’m talking about the roughly 8-12% of the adult population—probably a conservative estimate—who can’t reliably handle intoxicating substances. There is such a thing as an addictive personality, and that’s why even beer, let alone marijuana, can be and often is a gateway drug. We can rephrase F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous line about alcohol and have it be just as true for weed: First you take a toke, then the toke takes a toke, then the toke takes you.

We do have in place a poor system for dealing with alcoholism, because the problem has been with us for generations. We have almost no effective system in place for dealing with people who become addicted to weed, and the clinics we do have tend to be mandated in effect by the criminal justice system. Anyone who tells you that marijuana isn’t and can never be “physically addictive” just doesn’t know what he or she is talking about. That’s amateur chemistry mixing with ignorance about human psychology to produce wishful thinking of a decidedly absurd sort.

And to boot, for those aging hippies who don’t yet know, the weed commonly being smoked in recent years—even when unlaced with additives—is not remotely like the gentle, lifting stuff you smoked in college 40-50 years ago. No more light buzz from half a dozen people passing four or five joints around in the course of a few hours while listening to music. It’s more like kick your ass in a hallucinogenic hole after four or five puffs.

The ban on marijuana, where it still exists, does deter many people, especially young still personality-forming people, from trying the drug. Lift the ban and many who never would have indulged will do so, and some non-trivial percentage of them will before long find their lives a wreck as a result. As with alcoholism, whole families are inevitably sucked into these kinds of problems. Count yourself lucky if you’ve never experienced anything like that close at hand.

I know which way the big waves of money are flowing now. I look forward to all the problems legalization will or might solve and, as plainly noted above, they are hardly minor. But I don’t look forward to all the problems it will create with no backstop for dealing with them.

So if I were sitting in some legislature, in some state capital or in Washington, I would condition my vote for any relaxation of current laws on there being full provision in any reform bill for the adequate medical and mental health care of those who get thrown beneath the axles of the onrushing legal shift in process. To do any less would be both heartless and irresponsible.

Why do I worry that what is coming down the road bears no mere light load of heartlessness and irresponsibility? That we are about to trade one clutch of problems for another? Because I’ve been around the block some, and the experience has, as Van Morrison once put it, “stoned me to my soul.”

I may be biased, but to me the best older essays on this subject are Mark A.R. Kleiman, “Dopey, Boozy, Smoky—and Stupid,” The American Interest, II:3 (Winter 2007), and Angela Hawken, Beau Kilmer, Jonathan P. Caulkins, & Mark A.R. Kleiman,“A Voter’s Guide to Legalizing Marijuana,” The American Interest, VIII:2 (Holidays 2012).

Oregon decriminalized marijuana use in 1973, and California became the first state to legalize medical cannabis in 1996. In 2012, Colorado and Washington legalized cannabis for recreational use. The majority of states have since followed these leads. Meanwhile, the 2018 farm bill legalized low-THC hemp nationwide and thus essentially removes hemp-derived cannabidiol (CBD) from the Controlled Substances Act. That marks a significant precedent.

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