Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 38

Facing Russia, Close and Personal

Sauli Niinistö is stoic, wily, and seems almost wired to be anti-Russian. But that’s not the way he describes the state of play. Finland’s President, responsible for national defense and security, insisted to me during a recent conversation at his residence in Helsinki that his approach toward Russia is one marked by pure pragmatism.

There are ties that bind. As Deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg, Vladimir Putin liked to visit the city of Turku in southwestern Finland, where Niinistö studied law and worked nearby as a rural police chief early in his career. Even today, when the two Presidents meet, Putin will still ask about this or that acquaintance in common. “Putin never forgets that he was handled in a respectful way when he was not so high up. He doesn’t forget that kind of behavior. He still invites the then-Mayor of Turku to Moscow,” says Niinistö. As for Russian foreign policy, the 70-year-old Niinistö—who cuts a figure both stocky and lean, and a demeanor both cool and sympathetic—never forgets what are in his view the basics. “You must say no, clearly,” Niinistö stresses (Read my interview with the Finnish President here).

There was a bristling consistency about this single, simple thought as I made my way through ministries and media in the Finnish capital (I was part of a recent study tour to Finland, Estonia, and Latvia organized by the Hudson Institute). Ask Finns, for example, whether it was sensible to admit neighboring Baltic nations into NATO and you get a clear “yes,” often with an air of bemusement that the question is even asked. “If the Balts were not in NATO, we’d have Russian fighter jets roaming the skies above Helsinki today,” one defense analyst tells me. There’s no room here for the logic that would have you believe that, if only the West had not made Russia feel encircled through NATO enlargement, we would have a kinder, gentler Kremlin today. American diplomats say the first thing they hear from Finnish counterparts when they arrive in the capital is that “Moscow lies, all the time.” Goes one refrain: “If it’s not nailed down, the Russians will steal it.”

This doesn’t quite add up to the image many of us have of Finland. During the Cold War, “Finlandization” was synonymous with appeasement. The term was first used in West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s as a pejorative by those concerned about a possible draw down of American forces coupled with Bonn’s rapprochement with the Soviet bloc. Today, realists talk of Finlandizing Ukraine, meaning pressuring the country to put an end to its aspirations of joining the EU and NATO as a means of making peace with Russia. Ukrainians are unconvinced that any such thing would have the effect of domesticating the Russian bear.

In Finland’s case, the country is a member of the European Union but has never belonged to NATO. The debate about joining comes and goes. Finland is one of five countries known as NATO’s “Enhanced Opportunity Partners,” nations that make “particularly significant contributions to NATO operations and other Alliance objectives.” Last summer, President Niinistö told the Financial Times that the mere possibility that Finland could apply for NATO membership is “a security weapon in itself.” He tells me he always endeavors to be direct with Vladimir Putin about these matters:

We make very clear what we think, for example on sanctions and defending Finland. In Russia there were worries about why American troops were in Finland, so I said clearly to him [Putin], “Yes, we want to develop our interoperability and our skills.” Why? I said, “Every dependent country maximizes its protection.”

Finns have experience with their neighbor to the east. They were part of the Russian empire for most of the 19th century. They mightily resisted Russification in cultural affairs—and pressures for Czarist control in local political and administrative matters. Eventually they declared independence in 1917. Their relationship with Russia has remained, shall we say, rocky ever since.

When the Soviet Union invaded Finland on November 30, 1939, the Finns fought the Red Army and won victories on a number of fronts. They eventually lost the war, of course. But not before killing roughly 150,000 of the enemy, against the loss of 30,000 on the Finnish side. Then and today, Finnish defense doctrine rests largely on the concept of wearing down the aggressor in lake areas and heavily forested terrain before the fight reaches vital strategic areas.

There is conscription for men and voluntary service for women, who are present in all units of the Finnish Defense Forces and Border Guard (and whose fighting tradition goes back to the 1918 Finnish Civil War). The plucky Finns comprise a nation of 5.5 million, from whom 280,000 troops can be mobilized in the first 48 hours of a conflict. After Russia annexed Crimea the Finnish government sent out a letter—“We want to have a word with you,” went the greeting—to all 900,000 of the country’s reservists, aged 20-60 years old, reminding them of their role in a crisis situation. “We have a long history with Russia,” said Niinistö at the time. “So everything the Russians are doing, surely the Finns notice.”

This is all personal, and close. Finland has an 833-mile border with Russia. In the midst of the 1997 debate over an international agreement to ban the use of land mines, the Finns stood outside the EU consensus, often with the retort, “we are your land mine.”

A Swedish report from last year contends that the Finns have been investing since Crimea and are now ahead of their EU counterparts in defending against hybrid threats. “We are far from trigger happy people,” Finnish defense researcher Antti Seppo tells me in an email exchange from Berlin, “but we do have a deep sense of patriotism and duty when it comes to defending Finland.”

Of Russia today Niinistö tells me that Putin, “in a way, sees it as a form of respect if you push back.”

In Tallinn, the capital of Estonia (population 1.3 million), one encounters comparably clear and hawkish views. On a hotel roof top bar in the city center we share a drink with ex-President Toomas Ilves, who likes to say that Putin’s approach to international relations is “what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine.”

During his decade in office (2006-16) Ilves helped turn Estonia into a leader in cyber security and defense. Like Finland, for Estonia such matters are not merely academic in nature. In April 2007, amidst disagreement with Russia over the relocation of a Soviet-era statue, Estonia was hit with a series of cyber attacks affecting parliament, banks, ministries, and media.

During his tenure, Ilves also became the public face for his country’s aggressive campaign against Russian spying. Russian intelligence has been particularly active in the Baltics and Nordic states, as the Kremlin looks for ways of reaching into the EU, and into high tech sectors in particular. The Ilves approach on spying went something like this: nab, name, shame, and expel or imprison the culprits. Estonians are wily. Ten Russian spies have been caught and convicted in Estonia over the past three and half years.

I sat down with the country’s current President, Kersti Kaljulaid, at the presidential palace in Kadriorg, the expansive park a mile east from Tallinn’s old town. Kaljulaid, in office since October 2016—a biologist by training and businesswoman by career—is Estonia’s first female President. At 46-years-old, she also became the youngest President in Estonian history.

We talked as much about domestic politics as we did about Russia and foreign affairs. Kaljulaid takes flak at home, including from her predecessor, for her insufficiently clear words on Estonia’s Conservative People’s Party. EKRE, as the populists are known by their Estonian acronym, gained 17.9 percent in 2019 elections and have secured the interior and finance ministries. Some in EKRE are anti-immigration traditionalists, national conservatives. Others are far-right.

Kaljulaid calls EKRE’s rhetoric “disruptive” and “disrespectful to parts of the population.” To be sure. “If you’re black, go back,” says EKRE’s board member, Martin Helm, son of the party’s chairman. Kaljulaid, herself a socially liberal politician of the center—she ran as a non-partisan candidate—sees all this as a concession to reality and a reflection of the complexity of Estonia’s coalition politics, a problem that will work itself out.

Yet all this has a context. Across the West, mainstream parties are in trouble. In Finland it’s “True Finns,” a populist right-wing movement with radical elements, who have been benefiting. The Finns Party, as they are now known, won 17.7 percent of the vote in 2015, becoming the second-largest party in parliament. In parliamentary elections this past April they held steady with 17.5 percent, coming in just behind the Social Democrats.

In Helsinki, President Niinistö, while remaining optimistic, told me it all brings Weimar to mind, the disintegrating center in many European countries. Kaljulaid says mainstream politicians must say mea culpa. Of the rabble rousing, she says, the “goal is to make a lot of noise,” to always tell people, “it’s not your fault, it’s the government’s fault.” (Read my interview with the Estonian President here.)

The rabble-rousers in these parts tend to part company with their brethren elsewhere on the topic of Russia. Like Finland, Estonia has its share of experience with a predatory neighbor, the Baltic lands having also been part of the Russian empire. Estonia won independence at the end of World War I. In May 1932, the country signed a non-aggression treaty with the Soviet Union. In 1940 Moscow invaded. Some 8,000 people, including most of Estonia’s political and military elite, were arrested. Roughly 2,200 were executed in Estonia, with the rest sent to camps in Russia, most never to return.

I asked Kaljulaid about her recent visit with Vladimir Putin in Moscow, which she called “cold but polite.” She was criticized in Estonia, as the meeting with the Russian leader also stirred some concern in neighboring countries. I heard about this in Latvia, the Latvians claiming not to have been informed in advance. It’s one for all and all for one in these parts. Kaljulaid’s case for the visit is a simple one: “We say bad things about the Russians all the time. We need to talk to the Russians.” All this echoes the approach of Sauli Niinistö.

While being careful not to rule out territorial conquest as a Russian aim, what the Baltic countries and Finland seem to fear most is Moscow’s energetic attempts to widen and deepen fissures in their respective countries, and across the West. Putin aims to build Russia up by cutting the West down. And for this, say many in the region, he has a thousand tricks up his sleeve.

A next step scenario for the Nordic countries? Finland’s Åland Islands, situated off the mainland to the southwest, might serve as a military target, but with political objectives.

If Russia made a move, Finland would urge assistance in response. What would the United States do for non-NATO member Finland, and over some obscure islands no less? The European Union would quickly split. The non-aligned Swedes, who have bolstered their own defense posture in recent years—with Russian submarines turning up in Swedish waters and its fighter jets straying into Finnish space—would almost certainly jump to Finland’s side. NATO countries Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania would very likely also lean in. This, while the Germans, Austrians, Italians, and Hungarians would almost certainly insist on dialogue and restraint instead.

The Swedes worry about an island of theirs called Gotland. In March of this year, ex-Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili spoke publicly of the prospect of Russia attacking Finland or Sweden in this way. In 2015, Russia’s military rehearsed an operation to seize Finland’s Åland islands.

Who cares about the minutiae, the nibbling, all so far away? As Trump ally Newt Gingrich put it in 2016, why should Americans risk war “over some place which is the suburbs of St. Petersburg,” referring to Estonia. Indeed, Russia today is not the Soviet Union, nor is it a rising power like China.

The Pentagon takes defense in the Nordic-Baltic region seriously. Earlier this month 50 naval vessels and thousands of American and European service personnel conducted the largest military exercises off the Baltic coast since the Russian invasion of Crimea five years ago. Still, it’s the soft power threats that may loom largest.

Everywhere I go in Europe—I was in London, Berlin, and Prague the week before Helsinki, Tallinn, and Riga—European defense and intelligence experts seem to be uniting around the idea that Putin sees a bigger picture, namely that of the West in crisis, and sees his role as being a stoker, arsonist, and provocateur. Whether he is a grand strategist or merely an opportunist, Putin is efficient in identifying vulnerabilities. He knows how to widen cracks.

Brexit was home-grown. And a separate, parallel Brexit campaign with murky ties to Russian money and Kremlin security services also worked hard to help heat things up in UK politics. In Germany, it’s thought that Russian espionage is at levels rivaling those of the Cold War. In Berlin, influence operations are flourishing, say German officials, with possibly as many as a hundred individuals in the German capital doing the bidding of Russian interests, active in PR firms, publishing houses, businesses, and politics (a Bundestag member for the populist Alternative for Germany was revealed to have links to Russian handlers this spring). In France, the National Front takes Russian money. In the Czech Republic, Russian embassy operations are ballooning, as the diplomatic post is being used as a base for a variety of clandestine work in Central Europe.

Any of these details taken in isolation do not add up to anything monumental. Nations spy. Countries meddle. But together they suggest a robust campaign to disrupt and confuse, at a time when Western democracies are struggling. The poverty of our Russia debate does not help. The President and the Mueller investigation have brought frenzy, fatigue, and foolishness on all sides.

Finnish President Sauli Niinistö seems to have a pretty good compass. He has become one of his country’s most popular politicians, without pandering. He opposes same-sex marriage, while contending that same-sex couples should be allowed to have a common surname. As Finance Minister in the 1990s he pursued downright unpopular shock therapy methods in order to get Finland’s fiscal house in order. He wrote a national bestseller on how Finns tick. Niinistö was on holiday with his son Matias in Thailand in 2004 when the deadly tsunami hit, killing some 200,000 people. The two barely survived after hanging on to an electric pole for hours.

Last July, Niinistö hosted the Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki. This was the meeting where the American President rebuked U.S. intelligence for its contention that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election. “I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today,” said the American President at the time.

I neglected to ask the Finnish President what he thought of the performance, though one might suspect this was not a good example of telling Russia no, clearly.

Last June, back in Turku, Niinistö attended a book fair. He was spotted buying a stack of books before a panel that included his second wife, Jenni Haukio, a poet. The Finnish President got to the crowded auditorium a little late and decided to sit in the back on the steps.

Perhaps a dab of humility, knowing a little history, and trying to see a bigger picture would help us concentrate the mind.

The post Facing Russia, Close and Personal appeared first on The American Interest.

Facing East, from the West: A Conversation with Finland’s President

Jeffrey Gedmin for TAI: In many Western countries, voter ties to mainstream establishment parties are loosening, and those parties are in trouble. Is that happening in Finland and what does it look like? And second, you’ve been effective as a politician who is popular but not populist. How do you manage that?

Sauli Niinisto: To your first question, yes, it is very worrying. I try to remember whether we have seen anything similar and unfortunately we have: in 1930s Germany. At the time normal parties collapsed, and at the end they were pushed away with violence. But nevertheless, we haven’t seen these kinds of elements taking place earlier on.

In Finland I’m not specifically worried because what we’ve seen is that the traditional system with three big parties—Center, Social Democrats, Conservatives—is broken for the first time since the 1960s. But who broke it? The Greens. Well, they are a stable party. And then the True Finns, which is a different kind of party.

Nevertheless, we have had these kind of True Finns before with different names. In the late 1980s, they actually collapsed after having responsibilities in government. So we have a movement but I think it will be tamed. You see the same thing in other countries, we have seen in France, for example, Le Pen didn’t do as well as expected in EU elections. In the EU parliamentary elections, EPP lost. The Social Democrats lost, but not as much as the pollsters predicted.

So maybe we are even seeing that this phenomenon is now almost at a stopping point and might turn around. It might be that we have similar parties in the future with different names but that are actually very responsible and stable parties. But surely one should also look in the mirror. If you lose your support it has to be asked why—why Social Democrats have lost for a couple of years, why the conservatives in a country like in France have lost almost everything. It has to be studied very clearly.

TAI: What about you? You are an exceptionally experienced politician, and a Finnish friend of mine told me that you wrote a book that was a national bestseller and had a real feel for Finnish life and perspective. How do you navigate these things?

SN: It comes automatically. I don’t make any plans.

TAI: Instinct.

SN: In a way, yes. But when I was a young student, I worked a lot in factories and different kinds of places and I was quite silent, observing things, because you never knew what those workers thought about a student. But I had a common experience. I noticed that in every single place I had been working, there was one mental leader who might have been lazy one day, but who eventually said that now we can’t continue, we have to do some task. We can take it easy afterwards, but first we have to do this. It’s a responsibility.

Those people were not necessarily in a leading position. They were usually elderly people who felt that, “well, we have been a bit lazy, so now we have to do something.” Later on, when I was out of university, I worked quite a long time in a court of appeals and I noticed the same thing. There were always a group of judges, and I, being the young lawyer, was the one who presented in front of them. And sometimes it seemed that there were difficult cases that were being shoved aside and neglected because it was a court of appeals. It was all through a written process, so you could do that very easily. Then suddenly somebody out of the fold would say, “Boys, we have to remember that the time to act is now.”

So in a way it is similar in politics, and I’m afraid that I have sometimes taken it too seriously. Every time I have seen that behavior as a party leader, starting with my election in 1994, I always looked around and I wondered, “Well, well, what is this?” The result was that all the credit cards were taken away from the boys in the office. Kind of a wake-up call. Now we take care.

TAI: Turning to Russia, one has the impression that Finland is brutally realistic but also that you in particular have a good working relationship with Vladimir Putin. There is shared history and culture; someone told me that as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, Putin would go to Turku. How do you balance a policy that is brutally realistic but also maintains a dialogue?

SN: First to Putin, I have told the story many times. I wasn’t in politics at the time, and not in Turku, but after becoming the President, Putin asked me about a mutual acquaintance in Turku, “How is he?” I was amazed and thought, “Why is he asking?” The explanation is that Putin never forgets that he was handled in a respectful way when he was not so high up. He doesn’t forget that kind of behavior. He still invites the then-Mayor of Turku to Moscow sometimes just because of that. That might also explain why he still keeps his old St. Petersburg friends around him now.

But how to handle this, I find it very simple. We make very clear what we think, for example on sanctions and defending Finland. In Russia there were worries about why American troops were in Finland, so I said clearly to him, “Yes, we want to develop our interoperability and our skills.” Why? I said, “Every dependent country maximizes its protection.”

He has never come back to that issue because he accepted the answer. It was natural, surely, but you have to be straight with him. Or when I told him that we were deciding on sanctions, for instance. If you are clear with him there is no problem. He once recounted at length to me his memories of going back and forth with George Bush, as they were sitting at a table and having a hell of an argument. Bush said that if Putin did one thing, he would do another. And Putin answered that he would do something else in turn to retaliate. He was remembering a quarrel but it was a positive memory for him. That was amazing.

TAI: Because of the clarity?

SN: Because of the clarity and because he was taken seriously. Putin, in a way, sees it as a form of respect if you push back. It’s a funny thing but that’s my feeling.

TAI: Let’s think big picture about America. Part of “America First” nationalism comes from the Republican Party, but there’s a version on the Left too. If in the next few years America starts stepping back from Europe—because of China or domestic politics—is Europe yet ready to step forward and shoulder the burden of defense?

SN: We Europeans have made a mistake. We should have concentrated years ago. The United States says that they are important for Europe, and I surely admit that, but we need to tell them why we are important for the United States, and if we are not important, we should make ourselves important. That’s the best guarantee, in my opinion.

TAI: I’m one of those Americans who is fully convinced. But how do you and I convince ordinary Americans that small to medium sized European countries are still vital to American interests today?

SN: Well, first to Europe, I go back to what I said. Europe should be able to clearly tell Americans why Americans need Europe. Or if it is not enough, we have to make ourselves more important to the USA. But there are a lot of elements: trade, investments, and lots of jobs created by the huge European investment in the United States.

Then there are the values, which are more intangible. It’s difficult to explain why it is important, but maybe we note that the United States actually created the multilateral system on the front lines, and Europe is a strong supporter of that, and ask if we lose it, what happens next? It’s a wide world and that is not good for Americans. Even though you’re a bit remote, you are not untouched if the world is getting really wide.

TAI: Relatedly, how do you explain to Americans that the European Union is in our interest when there are some who think this is the moment of sovereignty? Brexiteers say it would be better if the EU dissolved into a loose association of nation-states rather than this supranational Brussels-centric model. How do you argue against that?

SN: I do not see that the EU hurts American interests. Brussels is not a superpower. The European Union is not a superpower. A very tight connection led by Brussels doesn’t hurt the USA. On the other hand, I admit that there’s a lot of things that we should do better in the European Union, and that’s why I would like to start the Finnish presidency of the Council of the European Union by asking, what do we have in common within Europe?

I’m sure that the answers would be the need for security, how to prevent migration like it was in 2015, since we can’t stand that amount, how we guarantee decent welfare for all Europeans. This is not being so ambitious. You should start from there, building up and discussing what we have in common. I’m sure that there are a lot of common answers but they are a bit different compared to what Brussels has been doing.

One element is security. For the first time in a couple of years, you are actually hearing EU people talk about security. You didn’t hear this in the 1990s nor at the beginning of this millennium. Nobody was really worried about that, and the attitude was somehow when people started to think that we Europeans are the best, we have the best values, we are good and we will spread the good all over the world. That really didn’t succeed.

TAI: Was this a naivety in the United States too? We talked about spending the peace dividend because the Cold War was over, and though we had the Gulf War and Kosovo, in the United States too there was an idea that the West was prevailing, that democracy was prevailing.

SN: And that our enemies were far behind us. Yeah. Maybe, maybe.

TAI: So what about China and Russia today, from your perspective? Russia seems to be quite shrewd in using different methods to make our democratic renewal more difficult, and then China is a challenge of a different character. Could you speak to how you see those two countries?

SN: We don’t see here in Finland, in elections or even otherwise, any Russian propaganda.

TAI: Or internal meddling in election processes?

SN: Not at all. Not a single example.

TAI: So why is that? Because in the United States, whether you are pro- or anti-Trump, we know that it happened.

SN: Maybe they didn’t have any interest. I haven’t heard anything from Sweden or Norway, either. They both had elections; not a word to that effect. It’s difficult to say but we haven’t seen it ourselves.

But nevertheless, yes, like you said, in the States, that took place. Well, there has always been propaganda spread but now when we have social media technology it becomes more and more dangerous. You reach a lot of people and people have difficulties. If you hear a piece of gossip, you may just dismiss it as gossip, but if you read it on social media, that gives a different impression. It’s seen as more reliable. That is dangerous, but here in Helsinki we have the European Center of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats. We have to fight against this by means that they have developed in that sector.

TAI: So if those are techniques, what are Russians’ goals in Europe today?

SN: They say that they would like to cooperate more because they need Europe economically. But on the other hand, they seem to have close relations with certain movements in some countries too. In Italy we have heard voices that are doubting sanctions, for instance. But so far, unity has prevailed in the European Union, and I believe it will in the future too. Nevertheless, it is surely in the Russian interest to try to get rid of sanctions. But by these means, they won’t succeed in repairing the damages caused by the Ukrainian case.

TAI: And is China a different kind of challenge to the alliance and to Europe?

SN: They are investing heavily and we haven’t had any problem so far. But I think, and this is not only about China or Huawei, we have to be very careful with our important infrastructure—not to give it up easily. We have examples where for business reasons someone has been interested in infrastructure and it’s been partly sold, with not-so-good results. I would like to keep the central infrastructure in the hands of the state.

TAI: So in the case of Finland what kind of infrastructure?

SN: Water, waste water, electricity. There are a lot of examples of this kind of critical infrastructure, and 5G is one of those.

TAI: Are European colleagues similarly aware of the importance of ports and airports, too?

SN: Yes, I would guess that this is under discussion in many, many countries.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

The post Facing East, from the West: A Conversation with Finland’s President appeared first on The American Interest.

Facing East, from the West: A Conversation with Estonia’s President

Jeffrey Gedmin for TAI: The first question I want to ask you is about Estonian politics and the cohesion and stability of our democracies today. Across the West, including in the United States, mainstream establishment parties are having problems. This creates space for other parties, both of the far Left and the far Right. What does Estonia look like compared to other countries in Europe?

President Kersti Kaljulaid: The Estonian electoral system is such that it always delivers us a multi-party Parliament. Therefore, in Estonia, we’ll always have coalition governments. It’s practically impossible for anyone to achieve a majority. In these coalition governments, we are used to having various views represented. I think overall this is a good model, because it normally makes smaller parties in the Parliament more influential, since the big ones have to take them in the coalition. All of them, including the big ones, have to agree among themselves to form a government. In this format, you have a kind of wide spectrum of political interests in the government. The government decisions cannot, therefore, differ too much from what you would call mainstream or the middle way, simply because there are normally three-party coalitions. You have a few two-party coalitions over time as well. But normally it’s three parties.

Now, however, we also have a party which is exploiting the fact that policy making can never deliver for all and that some people lag behind. They’re also exploiting it smartly. Their tactic is mostly to tell people: “It’s not your fault, it’s the government’s fault. If we get power we will deliver for you. We will lower taxes and give you more benefits.” For some reason, people believe this is possible. In the Estonian case, there was a 30-year period of rapid development, which however in rural areas left some people behind. Estonia has lacked the resources and maybe also the knowledge and awareness to conduct sound regional policy. We are now remedying this through local county reforms. But it takes time.

So, we have such a party, the Conservative People’s Party of Estonia, and it commands 19 seats of our 101-member Parliament, and one-third of the government. Yes, it is able to make a lot of noise but it’s not able to make large policy changes. Of course, this doesn’t mean that it’s a comfortable situation to be in, because their rhetoric is really disruptive and also non-respectful to parts of the population. They are quite conservative in the view that, for example, women should not take such an active role in society. We are discussing, in Estonia, some issues which we thought had been long settled, like abortion rights. Still, all in all, the country is moving forward, in its digital development, in its economic development generally. Rapid economic growth, salary increases. I expect this to continue. I think the difficulties for Estonians are limited to a few brushes about the words used, rather than real policy change.

TAI: You mentioned the developments of the last 30 years. This fall is 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, after the Velvet Revolution, and changes in the region. Did you, in Eastern Europe, and did we, collectively across the West, underestimate the challenges of transition? Did we communicate to different publics that democracy and capitalism would solve problems faster than they actually would?

KK: No, because they have solved many problems quite fast. You cannot deny, at least in the case of Estonia, that the economic development is there and it has been extremely rapid. We exited the Soviet Union with salaries, on average, of about $30.00. Now, the average is $1,300.00. Even more spectacular are rising minimum salaries and pensions. This rise is huge, yet the differences in living standards between people are bigger than they were in Soviet Union, obviously. This has caused people to ask, “Has my state been treating me fairly?” If you can keep good education policy, good healthcare, and good regional policy, I think you can conquer this kind of worry.

Estonia has a really good education system. In Estonia, everybody who goes to whichever school, never mind if it’s in a rich or poor region, can reach the best universities of Estonia, where they study alongside children of top officials, for example. So we don’t have educational segregation at all. But people take this for granted.

We also have universal health care. Again, people take it for granted because they’ve not seen a different system and they don’t compare this to some even more developed democracies. But they do see that there is a concentration of people in towns. They also see that the salaries in the IT sector, which is 7 percent of the Estonian GDP, are extremely high. They have a fear that the simpler jobs are disappearing, of course, because of computers and automated systems taking over, and that they will be forever squeezed into this trap of slowly rising salaries. The average salary rise in Estonia is extremely quick, but the mean salary in Estonia is 1,000 Euros. Which, if you compare to global standards, is not bad at all. Estonia is, on average, the 30th highest salary-paying country globally.

But if you see the differences within your own country, you get worried. It’s normal, I think, and it’s not limited in any way to Estonia. I think a big part of the problem in France or in the UK, with the Brexit discussions, is the fact that people have been seeing that government redistribution has failed in some aspects. And I mean redistribution in a wide sense—think education, think health care.

And then, some of the policymaking has really just been putting patches on the system, which have actually helped rich people more than poor people. Take in-job benefits. What is an in-job benefit? It’s a hidden subsidy for the rich. Because if you do not have in-job benefits, then pizzas and coffees for rich people in restaurants would cost more. And therefore, the salaries would be better for the worst off. But once governments put forward this kind of patch on the system, they will not make life for those people better. They will only take away the feeling of independence from these people, but not achieve better living standards for them.

TAI: So what do these problems look like to you as President of a small country? Britain will leave the European Union, and France and Germany in their own ways are struggling with many of these problems. The party landscapes in both countries are fluid. What does it mean from your perspective as a member of the European Union, if countries like Germany and France can’t develop a new kind of internal cohesion or stability?

KK: We know that from all times of turbulence, finally a new stability will come. Of course, when this stability will finally be achieved, that’s difficult to say now. But, I think we are all of the understanding that first we need to say to our people that some of our policies have been amiss. Mainstream politicians have to say mea culpa. We have ignored for too long that in order to develop a society where not everybody’s equal, but where everybody has equal opportunities if they wish to grasp them, we need equal education, equal health care, and a good social support system for those who are handicapped, and so on. We have to do more. But we have to do less of what is far more popular, which is to promise universal supports and benefits.

We have good universal child support. We have free school meals for all. It’s not at all means-tested, but it’s a waste of national resources not to target the weaker groups. So, I think we all need to re-target our educational, social, and health care policies. Make sure that people, through these, get equal opportunities. And that everybody who wakes up in the morning knows that at least the life of my child is not ruined because I am poor and am not able to put them in a good school or get ample healthcare.

If we own up honestly to the deficiencies of our system, we can use our democratic process to fix it. But I keep seeing these parties who are trying to use this kind of angst in parts of the population in a populistic way. They’re saying, “we can solve the problem.” But the problem is actually enhanced by having these populistic forces in the government. Because, if they are in the government, it’s not in their interests to bridge this gap, or to resolve the underlying problem because they are feeding on this underlying problem. So they’ll attack the rich, and maybe some international bodies and global markets as the culprits. But they have no incentive to really resolve the problems.

TAI: Let me move to foreign policy. Thirty years ago, roughly, with the Soviet Union, you lost an occupying power, an enemy. And you gained, or inherited, a difficult neighbor. You’ve been in Russia recently, you’ve met with President Putin. Talk to us about Estonian-Russian relations, Russian relations with the region, and what you think, broadly, we need to understand about how Putin ticks and what Russia wants.

KK: First, I don’t think we immediately inherited a difficult neighbor. When the Soviet Union broke down, our understanding was that we would all develop in a democratic way: the Baltic states, and all former Soviet Socialist Republics, including Russia. We didn’t think that it would go the way it has gone, and we’re deeply sorry that this is the case because it would have been much better also for the Russian people if they had enjoyed normal economic development. Which would make them support their leaders, without repressive autocratic measures. Because we honestly thought this would happen. We didn’t think it would be this way. Unfortunately, history has turned this way now.

TAI: Was this principally a result of developments inside Russia, or did this have something to do with Western policies? There’s an argument, for example, that the eastward expansion of NATO provoked Russia and is a source of tensions today. What is your view about that?

KK: No, not at all. I totally disagree. I think the reasons for what happened in Russia are actually quite similar to what happened in Ukraine. They both brought in an oligarchic system of management for the country. And we know how hard Ukraine, which is openly discussing the problems it has and trying to solve them, is now struggling to resolve the oligarchic economic system. So, I totally disagree with those who think it was an externally created problem. It was clearly an internally created problem where Russia did not manage privatization the way it was managed in say, the Baltic states or in Eastern Germany. There was a concentration of economic power in the hands of oligarchs. This kills democracy, we all know this kills all hope for democracy.

TAI: Did we not understand this at the time? At the time, we Americans were very involved.  Did we miscalculate, under-appreciate the problems of transition? Make fundamental errors in assessing the situation?

KK: Having an understanding that privatization has to be a free economy exercise probably helped, right? Free for all to participate, with as few strings attached as possible. With foreign links, with transparent corporate structures. You could have made it conditional, where the investment banks and multilaterals will not help, will not participate in privatization unless the legal space is such that it will guarantee corporate rights for people. And that actually could have been a sane thing to do. But everybody, of course, was rushing after the gold, not thinking that this gold can be taken from them if there is no proper legal space.

We were very much advised that we need to be a rule-of-law legal space where foreign investment is protected, because the stakes in this country were not so high. Of course, we ourselves also wanted that rule of law, to be able to protect our economic sovereignty vis-à-vis the predators, be they big countries or big companies. It’s easy to lose influence of your own economy in a tiny economy, in a tiny country. For example, look at what is happening vis-à-vis China and some African countries right now. If that would have been done properly, then I think Russia would have had a much better chance of evolving as a democratic free economy.

TAI: But we are where we are today, and now we have this constant conversation around dinner tables in Washington: is Vladimir Putin a strategist, or a tactician, or an opportunist? Does he have a vision? It seems to me that’s fundamental. Does he have a vision for Russia’s role for this region?

KK: He offers thoughts. He has a view of the world where power in your neighborhood matters, where international law does not protect those who are less powerful around you. Therefore, he believes in the politics of spheres of influence. We’ve taught ourselves, with our own actions, that we do not negotiate international treaties. I think in 2007, before the Georgian War, Russia made a push at the Munich Security Conference to kind of reopen a debate about how we protect the international world order. Or, how we develop international world order. There were no takers. Then the Georgian War happened.

Because after Georgia, it was very quickly back to business as usual. I think in 2011, the European Union was thinking of starting discussions about a visa liberation regime with Russia, a couple of years after Georgia. Everybody seemed to agree that this was a good way forward, which taught Russians the lesson that, “Yes, we can develop our spheres of influence by physical action, partial occupation of our neighbors who have not yet managed to join the EU or NATO. And this way, we can halt their westward development, put them in a difficult position where they are being told that you cannot join because you are partially occupied. Yet, they have absolutely no control over that partial occupation.” And we taught this lesson, that this is a useful tool, and therefore, Crimea happened. It’s our own fault, unfortunately. The combination of the Russian side seeking to have spheres of influence and less international law applying in its vicinity with our own kind of wrong conclusion, which we drew from the Georgian War.

I think we understood it finally in the case of Ukraine, where our red lines are standing quite strong and the sanctions mechanisms are there in the European Union. We’re sticking to our guns, and we’re sticking to our hope that one day Russia will see that respecting international law is a better policy.

TAI: What do you say to an American who votes for Donald Trump, or an American who supports Bernie Sanders, who says, “I understand this about spheres of influence, I regret this. However, Russia is a declining power. It’s a nuisance, that’s clear. But we don’t want a new Cold War with Russia, we Americans, because China is a bigger and growing threat.” How do you answer that? That’s part of the American debate right now.

KK: I think the old Cold War tools, including the dissemination of false information, are much better today than they were during the actual Cold War. But, if you have such a situation, within your own value-sphere—and we know that our coalitions globally rely on our values—then you will be globally weaker as well. We would be a lesser part of this liberal democratic pushback against rising autocratic powers. I think that would be my answer.

TAI: About the European Union, what do you say to those people in right-populist parties in Europe, including AfD in Germany and Brexiteers in Britain, as well as people in Washington you might call sovereigntists, who might be inclined to say: “I love Europe, but I don’t love this version: Maastricht, supranational, Brussels-centric Europe. I believe in a looser association of nation-states.” Is that something with utility? Or is it problematic or even dangerous if Europe moves in a different direction in terms of how it organizes itself?

KK: First, very often people paint Brussels as some kind of a straitjacket, which is weird because the most digitally advanced nation of Estonia exists side by side with the rigid job market in France, poor reforms in Germany, a deep structural banking problem within Italy. So, if somebody calls these kinds of widely divergent paths of development straitjacketed, a kind of commonly forced policy making, I don’t think they are fully accounting for these facts.

Second, what is the European Union? It’s a system, a political system, a treaty architecture, which tells us where European leaders govern, how they govern, how they make decisions, and how they implement these decisions. Compare this to, let’s say, tackling the climate change process. First we’ll have to agree where we gather. Then we’ll have to agree who sets the agenda which way. Then, we have to decide how to make decisions, each time individually. And then, we have nobody to implement the solutions. The EU just makes logical sense for settling the challenges of the continent.

TAI: Brexiteers would say, “But can’t we do this on an intergovernmental basis? Haven’t we ceded too much sovereignty from national capitals to supranational institutions?”

KK: Coming from many British friends, thank God that the rest are sticking together, imagine trying to negotiate with each and every one. That’s my answer.

TAI: Madame President, thank you.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

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Is the Mainstream Left, Right, or Center?

Why, mainstream is centrist, of course, by definition. What else could it be? In America, the word has historically been synonymous with the views of the majority, and the majority is always of the center. President Eisenhower, considered in his time to be as mainstream as they come, didn’t even find it necessary to claim the word; he simply called himself “middle of the road.” The middle of the road, he said, was the widest part, “where most Americans live.” In Ike’s world, middle of the road, mainstream, and centrist were interchangeable.

So why in the last few years, and especially since the 2018 midterms, have known leftists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez become ever more insistent upon calling themselves mainstream? How can avowed “democratic socialists” even attempt to identify as mainstream? In America you can’t be both leftist and mainstream. End of discussion. Or is it?

Can you be both rightist and mainstream? Some would say no, not any more than you can be leftist and mainstream. The mainstream is the center. Others might disagree, arguing that America has moved so far to the right that the mainstream is now itself located there. Ronald Reagan told the 1988 Republican convention that the choice that year was “between the policies of liberalism or the policies of America’s political mainstream.” Given such conflicting perspectives, how does one decide where is the correct place to locate the mainstream on the linear spectrum? And do the labels matter?

Yes, they do. Labels confer power. In a world where many have neither time nor interest to pursue detailed policy analyses, labels are a convenient shorthand, a way of summarizing without examining details. Many never get past the labels; they make their political judgments based upon their reactions to the labels themselves.

Moreover, political labels are not neutral. They are both descriptive and evaluative. That is true whether they are used by politicians, media analysts, or in supposedly unbiased news articles. Labels evoke intellectual and emotional responses, and thus carry great weight in determining how people will react to them. Otherwise, why would politicians pay so much attention to them, whether their own or those of their adversaries? Specifically, why would Sanders and AOC, as she is now known, even want to be called mainstream?

As their efforts suggest, political labels, including the word mainstream, have no have fixed, “correct” definitions. They have popularly accepted definitions for greater or lesser periods of time, but are still subject to non-stop competition among those wishing to control those definitions. What Sanders and his colleagues are attempting is nothing less than to change popularly accepted usage of the word mainstream. They are arguing that their policies entitle them to claim it as their self-designation. The “political revolution” now includes a linguistic revolution.

Has any prominent politician ever used the word mainstream as an epithet? An example from the current occupant of the Oval Office:

The Mainstream Media is under fire and being scorned all over the World as being corrupt and FAKE. For two years they pushed the Russian Collusion Delusion when they always knew there was No Collusion. They truly are the Enemy of the People and the Real Opposition Party!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 26, 2019

Nor is President Trump the only one to use the word in such derogatory fashion. Fox News regularly denounces the hated “mainstream media” or “MSM.” In short, the word mainstream is not a neutral designation. It is a weapon like all other verbal weapons, used to influence the way people think about and react to politics.

In this context one can more easily understand current efforts by Sanders, AOC, and supporters to identify as mainstream. It is a key part of their effort to claim support of the majority. Sanders cites polls showing that Medicare for All, a $15 minimum wage, tuition-free college, and environmental reform, ideas which in his words were only three years ago considered “radical” and “extreme,” are now supported by a majority of Americans.

For her part, AOC has taken the lead in summarizing her legislative program under the term Green New Deal. This is likewise integral to the linguistic strategy. It identifies the new challengers with the legacy of the President who, more than any of his peers in the 20th century, shaped majority views regarding government involvement in national economic life.

Rounding out the strategy is another traditional label which, after decades of disuse, has regained prominence, namely the progressive label. Ever since Reagan referred in 1988 to the “dreaded L-word,” it has been hard to find a politician willing to identify as a liberal. Even now the word remains a kiss of death. Thus the term progressive has re-emerged as a viable substitute.

Can self-styled progressives claim to be mainstream? Elizabeth Warren has done so for years. The 2008 economic collapse and subsequent discrediting of “Wall Street” politics gave such impetus to the resurgence of progressive rhetoric that by 2015 the two front-runners for the Democratic presidential nomination were actually competing for the label. In a striking illustration of the power of this linguistic evolution, by April 2019 even Speaker Nancy Pelosi was telling 60 Minutes interviewer Lesley Stahl, “I’m a progressive.”

When we look at the overall linguistic strategy of the insurgents, we thus see a linking of the Rooseveltian legacy, the progressive label, and a determined effort to identify as mainstream. Medicare for All, a livable minimum wage, free college tuition, and environmental responsibility: all Rooseveltian, all progressive, all mainstream. That being said, why do these challengers also identify as “left” and “socialist”? Don’t those labels undercut their efforts?

The answer is they don’t identify in those ways. Just as one searches in vain for politicians willing to identify as liberal, so can one search in vain for self-styled progressives willing to identify as left. That is not what they call themselves; it is what opponents in both parties, and the media, call them.

Even before her 2018 primary victory over incumbent Democrat Joseph Crowley, who, she noted, took money “from the same people who finance the Trump presidency,” AOC remarked: “it’s . . . not as much about left versus right as it is top versus bottom.” She reinforced this during the summer, tweeting: “I’m not running from the left; I’m running from the bottom.”

There’s a reason the challengers do not identify as left. Given the extremist, authoritarian connotations many Americans still attach to the word, their opponents are happy to hurl it at them as an epithet. Ignoring AOC’s own vocabulary, including her “top versus bottom” definition of the situation, her opponents continue to label her as left. Equally important, supposedly neutral media routinely validate such attacks by repeating the labeling as if it were merely descriptive rather than pejorative. The challengers know better.

Nor do they identify simply as “socialists.” On the contrary, they are careful to call themselves “democratic socialists,” to underline that they identify with west European and especially Scandinavian countries rather than the failed Soviet Union. Sanders has also been careful to define “democratic socialism” as completely consistent with the New Deal tradition, first in his Georgetown University address of 2015 and more recently and expansively in his June 2019 address at George Washington University. Again, it is critics in both major parties and the media who routinely omit the word democratic as a way of linking Sanders, AOC, and their supporters to the failed Soviet experiment as well as to more recent targets such as Venezuela.

Given this verbal competition, do the challengers have any realistic chance of being accepted as mainstream? Is there any way to overcome detractors’ vocabularies and redefine American political discourse on their own terms?

The short answer is, not so long as they allow their opponents’ vocabularies unchallenged acceptance in the media. In this, they have a huge linguistic battle on their hands, and it is not at all clear that they will win it. Part of the problem is that the challengers face a paradox. Is it possible to explode opponents’ labeling games while still promoting labels of their own? Not entirely. Labels still have a shorthand function, and they still elicit both intellectual and emotional responses. Under the circumstances, the best they can do is elucidate their own labels as much as possible with specific policy details while going on the offensive in calling out opposing vocabularies.

What does going on the offensive entail? First, it means never missing an opportunity to expose unwarranted inferences and omissions, as in the case of the term democratic socialism. Second, and equally important, it means turning their opponents’ vocabulary against them. It is in the latter respect that the 2020 campaign is already looking very different from that of 2016.

In his 2015 Georgetown University address, Sanders pointedly quoted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. about “socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor.” The implication was that the rich welcome government involvement in the economy when it benefits them, but not when it benefits working people. As a counterattack, it was a start, but one on which Sanders did not consistently follow through during the 2016 primary campaign.

This time, he has been more consistent and far more explicit. In the George Washington University address, after detailing historic Republican usage of the word socialism as an epithet, Sanders went on to state:

While President Trump and his fellow oligarchs attack us for our support of democratic socialism, they don’t really oppose all forms of socialism. They may hate democratic socialism because it benefits working people, but they absolutely love corporate socialism that enriches Trump and other billionaires.

Listing such government assistance as subsidies, bailouts, incentives and tax breaks, including $885 million that went to the Trump family itself, Sanders noted: “That is the difference between Donald Trump and me. He believes in corporate socialism for the rich and powerful; I believe in a democratic socialism that works for the working families of this country.” The next day, responding to an attack by JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, Sanders tweeted: “I didn’t hear Jamie Dimon criticizing socialism when Wall Street begged for the largest federal bailout in American history—some $700 billion from the Treasury and even more from the Fed.”

For her part, AOC has also been active in calling out opposition labeling. At a recent hearing of the House Oversight Committee, of which she is a member, she set a striking example of linguistic counterattack in replying to a Republican charge that the Green New Deal is “an elitist fantasy”:

You want to tell people that their concern and their desire for clean air and clean water is elitist? Tell that to the kids in the South Bronx which are suffering from the highest rates of childhood asthma in the country. Tell that to the families in Flint, whose kids . . . have their blood . . . ascending in lead levels, their brains are damaged for the rest of their lives. Call them elitist. You’re telling them that those kids are trying to get on a plane to Davos?

Apart from Republican vocabulary, the challengers also face major issues with the vocabulary of opponents in their own party. In a July 2017 New York Times op-ed, former Clinton advisers Mark Penn and Andrew Stein argued that “the path back to power” for Democrats was “unquestionably to move to the center and reject the siren calls of the left, whose policies and ideas have weakened the party.” Many Clinton supporters have since embraced this conventional wisdom and continue to claim both the centrist and mainstream labels for themselves while labeling Sanders, AOC, and their supporters as left, therefore non-mainstream. In a 2018 interview, for example, Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth said that Ocasio-Cortez is only “the future of the party in the Bronx,” adding: “I don’t think that you can go too far to the left and still win the Midwest.”

Equally important, major media have consistently reinforced this vocabulary by reproducing it as if it were neutral. During the 60 Minutes interview, with no prior prompting from Pelosi, Lesley Stahl noted that AOC was proposing “some out of the mainstream measures.” Having thus been set up by a supposedly neutral interviewer, Pelosi responded: “By and large, whatever orientation they came to Congress with, they know we have to hold the center, we have to go down the mainstream.”

By early May, she was already shifting her vocabulary, telling Glenn Thrush of the New York Times that the Democratic Party must “own the center left, own the mainstream.” The shift from center to center-left was significant for two reasons. First, it was an acknowledgment on her part of the growing traction of the insurgents. Second, it suggested that rather than trying to ignore or crush them, she was now shifting to a strategy of co-optation.

As the article made clear, however, Pelosi’s overall goal had not changed. The headline of the Thrush interview read: “Pelosi Warns Democrats: Stay in the Center or Trump May Contest Election Results.” At the same time, the text noted that Pelosi was “focused on pursuing center-left policies she thinks will help her party out in 2020,” including “pragmatic improvements to health care” rather than Medicare for All, which she has not supported. The combined effect of headline and text was to give Pelosi influential media support by utilizing her own labeling as if it were in fact neutral.

The bottom line: any group wishing to redefine American political discourse must sooner or later challenge not only the vocabulary used by opponents but the reinforcement of that vocabulary by supposedly neutral media. More specifically, if Americans are to reconsider their views as to what qualifies as mainstream, that can only happen in the context of a sustained public examination of the labeling game itself. The question then becomes: In any such examination, which side has more to gain and which has more to lose? The answer to that question may well determine the future of the republic.

For an extended discussion of how Clinton Democrats have consistently labeled Sanders as left, see my “What’s In a Label?” The American Interest, January 2, 2018.
Tellingly, this op-ed was presented uncritically as the advice of two Democratic Party stalwarts, notwithstanding that Stein publicly backed Trump in 2016 and Penn would soon pivot to pro-Trump punditry.

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Democracy à la Modi?

Elections in India seem both implausible and inevitable. Implausible because a country so wildly diverse, encompassing 22 different languages and 720 dialects, with large religious minorities and a majority religion, Hinduism, divided among many hierarchically organized and often mutually hostile castes, seems unlikely to have the level of social trust and tolerance required to allocate power peacefully through the ballot box. Inevitable because such a fragmented country, and one never unified before the British rule in the nineteenth century, can hold together only through the peaceful resolution of its many differences, for which elections are indispensable. In fact, during the seven decades of the country’s independence, free, fair, regular elections have become part of the fabric of Indian life, evoking eager anticipation and wide and enthusiastic participation on the part of the country’s 1.3 billion people.

Ruchir Sharma’s Democracy on the Road: A 25-Year Journey through India provides a sense of the sights and sounds, the flavor and the texture of these remarkable national rituals. The author, a native of India who is the Chief Global Strategist at the Morgan Stanley bank in New York and is best known for his writings on economic topics, has for the past 25 years organized trips for a group of journalists to observe at firsthand election campaigns through the country. He has conducted these political tours during both the national elections that take place every five years and the numerous state elections that are held in between.

He paints a vivid picture of the carnival atmosphere in which Indians select their leaders: the large, boisterous rallies, the colorful and often (by Western standards) eccentric candidates, and the catchy slogans that serve as distilled arguments for the parties and individuals seeking office. He also describes the corruption that pollutes Indian politics and government: candidates routinely far exceed campaign spending limits and government officials use their positions to enrich themselves, their families, and their friends. Although completed before the 2019 general election, which took place over six weeks in April and May (there is no single Election Day in Indian national elections), Sharma’s book helps to explain its outcome and its implications for India’s future.

More than 600 million Indians voted in what was, as all nation-wide elections in the world’s most populous democracy are, the largest such exercise in the history of the planet. In the end, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its prime minister, Narendra Modi, won a sweeping victory. Having gained a majority in the Lok Sabha, the national parliament in New Delhi, in the previous election in 2014, this year the BJP increased its total from 282 to 303 of the 543 seats. (With allied parties the number is 352.)

It owes its success in no small part to its leader. In Modi it has a powerful orator, an energetic campaigner, and a man whose life story—rising from humble beginnings as the son of a tea-seller—resonates with millions of Indians. In his first term as prime minister he compiled an eminently respectable record of governance, with economic growth averaging more than 7 percent.

Moreover, the BJP benefits from a mass movement associated with it, the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevek Sangh (RSS), by some accounts the largest voluntary organization in the world with five million members, who can be mobilized to work on behalf of the party. Modi himself joined the movement at an early age.

The BJP was able, as well, to capitalize on the shortcomings of its principal opponent, the Indian National Congress, which led the country to independence in 1947, gave India its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and dominated its politics for the first three decades of independence. The Congress is the only other political party with a national reach. Very roughly speaking, and with many exceptions and considerable overlap, while the BJP advocates growth-promoting economic politics and Hindu nationalism, the Congress stands for redistributionist schemes and secular politics, with religion deemphasized or excluded entirely.

For decades the Congress leadership has been the personal property of the Nehru-Gandhi family, passing from Nehru to his daughter, Indira Gandhi, then to her son Rajiv, both of whom also served as prime minister and were both assassinated in office. Now Rajiv’s Italian-born wife Sonia dominates Congress from behind the scenes: her son Rahul is its public face and was the party’s candidate for prime minister in 2019. Sharma and his colleagues have encountered Rahul several times over the years and while he shows improvement as a politician, it is clear from the author’s account that he lacks the personal qualities that make Modi compelling to Indians—and this in a political system in which personality counts for a great deal. The weak leadership that the Nehru family has provided to Congress weighed on its electoral performance this year.

In increasing its majority the BJP overcame several electoral handicaps. It began as a party of and for upper-caste Hindus, and while it has tried over the years to expand its appeal, it holds no attraction for Muslims and relatively little for Hindus of the lower castes, who make up a large part of the Indian electorate. In addition, the BJP’s strength is concentrated in northern India. While it did unexpectedly well this year in the eastern state of West Bengal, it has a very light footprint—or none at all—in the southern states, where people tend to be less fervent about religion and resent any effort to compel them to use the north’s preferred language, Hindi, which the BJP is sometimes suspected of wishing to do.

As is to be expected in such a large and diverse country, moreover, India’s states differ significantly from one another, which has made them fertile soil for parties confined to a particular state that emphasize local concerns. In their respective states they compete with, and sometimes surpass, the BJP and the Congress. In Uttar Pradesh, for example, two local parties, the Samajwadi and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), regularly outpoll them and the leaders of these parties have served as the state’s chief minister. The strength of the state-based parties means that the two national ones have regularly failed to gain clear majorities in both state assemblies and the national legislature, so that multiparty coalitions have been needed to form governments. That is what most observers expected to happen nationally this year, but the BJP confounded their expectations by improving on its already impressive 2014 performance.

Its massive victory raises four major questions about India’s future under its rule. The first is whether Modi will use his mandate to implement reforms that, while not popular politically, can enhance the country’s long-term potential for economic growth. While the 7 percent annual increases of his first term as prime minister would be received with delight (and no little astonishment) in an advanced industrial democracy, India is poor enough to aspire to Chinese-style double-digit yearly growth in its GDP. To achieve this, however, it must put state-owned enterprises in private hands, roll back the country’s high tariff barriers, ease restrictive labor laws that discourage business expansion, and change the regulations governing land ownership and banking.  Sharma writes that he once believed that “for India to become an economic miracle it needed a mass-based leader who would push free-market reform aggressively”—a leader like Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher. Modi had the political strength but not the personal inclination to pursue such a course after 2014. He now has a  second opportunity to do so. Whether he chooses to take it will help shape the country’s economic future.

The second important question is how far Modi and his government will fulfill his party’s promise (many would call it a threat) to make India an avowedly Hindu country rather than an officially secular one—at the expense of its religious minorities, 172 million of whom are Muslims. India is far too big, diverse, and disorderly to make feasible the nation-wide imposition of strict religious rule, as in Saudi Arabia. Non-Hindus, however, have experienced discrimination and violence in the past, and these could increase in the next five years. The BJPs “virulent social media campaign,” according to the Financial Times, “was awash with anti-Muslim rhetoric.”

The third question the BJP’s resounding electoral success raises is whether Modi will try to follow an all-too-familiar contemporary pattern and make himself an autocrat, like Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan or Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Something like a cult of personality has formed around the prime minister and India has experienced the suspension of democratic governance once before, when Indira Gandhi declared an “emergency” for 18 months in 1974-1975.

Sharma’s account of the country’s elections shows this possibility to be very remote. After almost 75 years of them, elections have become deeply ingrained in Indian life. The public expects them and takes part in them at a very high rate; two-thirds of all eligible voters cast ballots this year, a considerably higher percentage than Western democracies achieve. It is doubtful in the extreme that any leader, no matter how strong, popular, and determined, could do away with them or would even try.

Fourth and finally, assuming the continuation of free, fair, and regular elections, will the BJP continue to dominate them? It has clearly eclipsed the Congress. Yet its electoral performance this year may have surpassed its actual standing in the country. It received substantial assistance from an unexpected quarter: Pakistan. In February a suicide bomber drove an explosives-laden vehicle into a convoy of Indian security personnel in Kashmir, the Muslim-majority Indian state that has been the subject of a political dispute between the two countries, and the scene of considerable violence, since India and Pakistan became independent in 1947. Forty Indians died. A Pakistan-based terrorist group claimed responsibility for the attack.

In response, Modi ordered an air attack on Pakistani targets that may or may not have done modest damage. He then proceeded to base his electoral campaign on appeals to patriotism, portraying himself as the unyielding defender of the Indian nation. That appeal very likely earned his party more votes than it would have received if the terrorist attack had not occurred.

Unless Pakistan obliges with more terrorism—a distinct possibility, unfortunately, given the commitment of the Pakistani military, which controls the country, to harassing India—the result of this year’s election, with the government increasing its majority, is unlikely to be repeated. Instead, the anti-incumbent pattern that is more common will in all probability reassert itself, and for a reason that emerges from Sharma’s account of his political travels.

The urge, to use the American phrase, to “throw the bums out” turns out to be recurrent and powerful in India. A principal reason for this, as Democracy on the Road makes clear, is that the performance of Indian governments at all levels consistently disappoints. All across the country the governmental services on which people depend are frequently substandard or missing entirely. Sharma’s traveling party constantly has to cope with bad roads. It visits villages with poor sanitation and where schoolteachers seldom show up for work. The group frequently finds itself having to endure power outages. It comes across examples of a sclerotic system of justice, including a protracted legal wrangle over the ownership of Sharma’s grandfather’s house, during which the property deteriorates badly. Compared with Western democracies and neighboring China, India has a weak, dysfunctional state.

Indian voters suffer the consequences of this widespread weakness and dysfunction in their daily lives. While 2019 was an exception, they tend to vote accordingly, in protest against those who happen to control the state machinery when the election takes place. If, as in the past, the new government in New Delhi and the various state governments that will be elected during its five-year term of office don’t do better, the voters will register their disapproval in what has become, over more than seven decades, the time-honored Indian way: at the ballot box.

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Turkey’s Hour of Nationalism: The Deeper Sources of Political Realignment

The March 31 local election in Turkey was a bombshell: Contrary to expectations, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) lost not only the capital Ankara, but the country’s biggest metropolis, Istanbul, where Erdoğan himself rose to prominence as Mayor in the 1990s. The Supreme Electoral Council’s May 6 decision to cancel the Istanbul election and order a June 23 rerun was equally significant. To many, it amounted to the final nail in the coffin of Turkish democracy. EU Turkey rapporteur Kati Piri said it “ends the credibility of democratic transition of power through elections.”

Canceling an election is no small matter: President Erdoğan’s legitimacy has always rested on a raw, majoritarian understanding of democracy. Few aside from the ruling AKP’s most loyal supporters will accept the official narrative, in which Turkey, uniquely in the world, is a country where the opposition and not the government commits electoral fraud. The economic ramifications are also considerable: The Turkish lira continued to slide in spite of government efforts to shore it up, and capital flight from Turkey is likely to increase further, worsening an already highly problematic economic situation. In other words, the Turkish leadership is taking strong risks for the sake of a municipal election—especially given that the rerun might backfire, as the widespread sense of injustice may bring increased turnout to support the opposition. Indeed, polls in mid-June show that CHP candidate Ekrem Imamoğlu has opened a lead over AKP candidate Binali Yıldırım.

It is easy to characterize the move to cancel the election results as a “Hail Mary” by a power-hungry President Erdoğan. But a closer examination of the past few weeks suggests otherwise: In conformity with a growing trend in recent years, it is not Erdoğan but the Turkish nationalist Right that has been in the driver’s seat. Indeed, this process cements the role of Turkish nationalism as the organizing principle of Turkish politics for the foreseeable future. But it also exposes deep rifts within the ruling coalition.

The conventional wisdom on Turkish affairs is that President Erdoğan has acquired a firm grip on the country and its government, and that he has succeeded in establishing himself as a new Sultan. Erdoğan is certainly the most powerful political figure in Turkish history since Kemal Atatürk founded the republic in 1923, and he has towered over the political scene since he first was elected in 2002. But behind these facts lies the reality that Erdoğan has constantly relied on political alliances to rule the country, not least because he simply lacks sufficient numbers of followers who are both loyal and capable. His rise to prominence was possible because he secured the support of Turkey’s liberal intelligentsia, a significant number of moderate Kurdish politicians, and, most importantly, the large social movement led by the reclusive, Pennsylvania-based preacher Fethullah Gülen. The latter was crucial because the Gülen movement’s focus on education has led it to produce thousands of well-educated professionals who gradually rose to positions of influence or control within various agencies of the Turkish state.

By contrast, one of Erdoğan’s most outspoken adversaries was the nationalist MHP’s leader, Devlet Bahçeli. Bahçeli decried in the harshest term Erdoğan’s decision to negotiate with the imprisoned leader of the outlawed Kurdish Workers’ Party, Abdullah Öcalan, in an effort to find a solution to the country’s long-running Kurdish problem. He was similarly critical of the jailing, on the flimsiest of charges, of hundreds of retired and serving military officers.

All that began to change in 2013, when the relationship between Erdoğan and Gülen turned sour. Increasingly isolated, Erdoğan struck a more conciliatory tone with the military by freeing some jailed flag officers. By 2015, his isolation deepened after his treatment of the Kobani crisis in Syria alienated Turkey’s Kurds, delivering him a defeat in the June 2015 parliamentary elections. Erdoğan reacted by promptly ending talks with the Kurds, and instead struck up an alliance with the MHP, as well as with nationalist-minded forces in state institutions. Turkey once again adopted a military solution to the Kurdish problem, which had the added benefit of prompting voters to rally around the flag in a rerun parliamentary election in November of that year. Ever since, MHP support has been crucial to Erdoğan’s electoral victories.

Who’s in the Driver’s Seat?

A key question in the treatment of the March 31 election results is who has been the driving force behind the cancellation of the election. In this, a distinction appeared between President Erdoğan and his alliance partner, the leader of the Nationalist Action Party Devlet Bahçeli. Erdoğan was hardly pleased by the loss in Istanbul, but his voicing of allegations of irregularities appeared half-hearted. At times, he appeared to concede defeat; and he certainly appeared willing to take on a conciliatory tone. Most notably, after a recount confirmed Ekrem Imamoglu’s victory in Istanbul, Erdoğan on April 19 voiced his belief that it was time for “shaking hands, embracing one another and strengthening or unity and solidarity.” He then floated the idea of a “Turkey alliance,” aiming to put aside all political differences for the sake of the country.

This raised eyebrows, as Erdoğan’s AKP was locked in a “People’s Alliance” with the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). Meanwhile, Erdoğan also downplayed the role of the MHP, and pointed to the party’s 7 percent share of the vote. In so doing, he appeared to be appealing to the significant constituency within his own party that saw the alliance with the MHP as a mistake, and who have been unhappy with the direction of the country under the presidential system. Indeed, his former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu has publicly slammed the alliance, and both he and former President Abdullah Gül are rumored to be planning to start new political initiatives.

Erdoğan only decisively called for a rerun on May 4, a few days before the Supreme Electoral Commission canceled the vote. This stands in sharp contrast to Devlet Bahçeli’s position. For one, Bahçeli publicly rebuked Erdoğan for his demeaning comments on the MHP’s vote share as “unjust and unfair,” pointing out its low share of the total vote was the result of the People’s Alliance’s joint candidates in big cities running on an AKP ticket. In this, Bahçeli was correct: In almost all provinces where the AKP and MHP fielded separate candidates, the AKP lost votes and the MHP gained. Compared to the 2018 parliamentary election, the AKP lost up to a quarter of its votes in provinces like Elazığ, Kastamonu, Afyon, Aksaray, Tokat, Erzincan and Kütahya. Meanwhile, the MHP share of the vote increased markedly—even doubling in several provinces. In other words, it appears that many voters disaffected with Erdoğan are now supporting the MHP, and by some counts the MHP was the big winner of the local elections.

More importantly, as Halil Karaveli has detailed, following the March 31 vote Bahçeli rapidly emerged as the most uncompromising advocate of annulling the Istanbul election and organizing a rerun. He repeatedly characterized the matter as one of “national survival,” and accused the opposition of having won only thanks to the support of the Kurdish separatist PKK and the outlawed Fethullah Gülen movement, whom the government accuses of orchestrating the July 2016 military coup. In a carefully crafted May 1 speech, Bahçeli also used sharp terms to admonish Erdoğan for his conciliatory talk of a “Turkey alliance.” Against the background of the challenges and threats facing the nation’s survival, he said, questioning the “People’s Alliance” is tantamount to questioning the Turkish nation itself and putting the country’s survival at risk. This forced Erdoğan to promptly retort he had no intention of abolishing the People’s Alliance. Tellingly, he has not raised the idea of a “Turkey Alliance” again. The demeanor of the two leaders would prompt anyone who did not know better to assume that Bahçeli, not Erdoğan, was the senior partner in the alliance.

What’s the Fuss About?

Why, then, this talk of “national survival” over a municipal election decided by the thinnest of margins? Why couldn’t Erdoğan and Bahçeli leverage their control of the national executive to allow Imamoglu to take office while undermining him at every turn, waiting patiently to recapture Istanbul with a stronger candidate four years later?

A partial answer lies in the importance of Istanbul for the AKP’s clientelism and patronage network. The metropolis’s procurement is the cash cow on which Erdoğan built a new network of Islamist tycoons loyal to him. Losing Istanbul would not only mean losing that, but potentially unpleasant revelations of corruption. Still, the key lies in the origins and justification of Turkey’s presidential system itself.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan began to raise the possibility of altering Turkey’s constitutional system almost a decade ago. He failed to obtain necessary support for a number of years; in fact, he went so far as to implement a presidential system de facto, having himself elected to the presidency in 2014. But for his first term in office, he ruled under a constitution in which the Presidency’s powers were largely ceremonial. Turkey remained a parliamentary republic in theory, but in practice, it was ruled as if the presidential system had already been adopted. Erdoğan then proceeded to argue that the constitution should be changed to reflect the reality that was in fact in place.

Until 2016, Erdoğan did not have enough support to ensure the passage of such a referendum. As noted, Bahçeli’s MHP was an ardent critic of Erdoğan, something that began to change in 2015. When the AKP lost its parliamentary majority in the June general elections that year, this provided a golden opportunity for the opposition to take power. But Bahçeli refused to accept any participation in government—specifically not one depending on the support of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democracy Party (HDP), which had shocked the Turkish political system by gaining as many seats as the MHP. Bahçeli’s recalcitrance allowed Erdoğan to call new elections that November. In the intervening months, Erdoğan made a 180-degree turn on the MHP’s pet issue, the Kurdish problem: Rather than negotiating with Turkey’s Kurdish nationalists, as Erdoğan had sought to do for several years, he now ordered a military offensive that led to urban warfare in many cities and towns of Turkey’s southeast, and to the leveling of many neighborhoods where Kurdish nationalism ran strong. Riding a nationalist wave, Erdoğan’s AKP proceeded to regain its majority that November.

It should be noted that this nationalist wave was not entirely fabricated: It rested on considerable popular opinion. Erdoğan’s peace overtures toward the Kurds had coincided with America’s support for the Kurdish YPG militias in northern Syria—which, in turn, almost everyone accepts are thinly veiled subsidiaries of the PKK, an organization that has fought Turkey for decades and that America itself considers a terrorist organization. Washington’s assurances that this was only a matter of defeating the Islamic State fell on deaf ears. This was the case in part because the chief result of the peace process was to allow the PKK to consolidate and advance its positions in Turkey.

Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania-based Gülen had ramped up his political struggle with Erdoğan, feeding into long-standing conspiracy theories that Gülen, on account of his American residence, was in fact a CIA asset.

This perfect storm came to unite Erdoğan and the nationalists, both of whom saw an American hand behind not only the Kurdish problem but also the Gülen conspiracy. This alliance was consummated by the failed July 2016 coup, which nearly everyone in Turkey agree was orchestrated by Gülen’s organization. Enter the presidential system, which Bahçeli and the MHP had strongly opposed up to that point. On October 11, Bahçeli announced his endorsement of the transition to a presidential system; it passed parliament three months later and was narrowly approved by referendum in April 2017. The next year, he formally launched the idea of a “People’s Alliance” with the AKP, which enabled Erdoğan to win re-election in June of that year, and which also allowed the alliance to secure a continued parliamentary majority.

Bahçeli, being the representative of the Turkish nationalist Right, had in fact been the prime beneficiary of the conflict between Erdoğan and Gülen. This civil war between two sections of Turkish political Islam not only compromised popular support for Islamist ideology; it also led to the purging of tens of thousands of alleged Gülen supporters in the bureaucracy and thus created a vacuum that nationalist forces within the state rapidly filled. Meanwhile, alarmingly for the Turkish nationalists, the 2015 elections had shown that Kurdish nationalists were now positioned to be the kingmakers of Turkish politics. This was unacceptable: Ever since the 1983 military-inspired constitution, Turkey had implemented a 10 percent threshold to parliament mainly to deny to Kurdish nationalism parliamentary representation and thus political influence. But Bahçeli’s about-face had led to a rebellion within his own ranks and the creation of a splinter party, the Good Party, led by former Interior Minister Meral Akșener. Thus, ironically, the Kurdish nationalist party was practically assured to maintain more than 10 percent support, while Bahçeli’s own party was at risk of failing to pass the threshold.

To Turkish nationalists in the MHP and within the state, this made the transition to a presidential system an imperative. Only that system could neuter Kurdish nationalism, because it rendered parliament more or less redundant, concentrating power in an elected executive that Kurdish nationalists would never win. It mattered less that this meant giving Erdoğan what he wanted: The AKP was now weakened enough that it would remain dependent on nationalist support, and the People’s Alliance ensured it would continue to implement nationalist policies in areas of key concern to the MHP.

There was only one slight problem. By amending the electoral code to allow for alliances between parties, the AKP and MHP inadvertently presented the opposition with a credible path to power. In the 2018 parliamentary election, to assuage nationalist feelings, the key opposition parties refrained from including the Kurdish nationalist HDP in their coalition. But in the 2018 mayoral race in Istanbul, the HDP explicitly signaled its support for Imamoğlu, urging the city’s millions of Kurdish voters to push him to victory. If Kurds could push an opposition candidate to victory in Istanbul, the same could happen on the national scene. In other words, Istanbul had jeopardized the nationalist plan to suppress Kurdish nationalism through the presidential system.

Lest anyone doubt that this is a paramount goal, witness the pro-government press’s aggressive labeling of both CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu and Akșener as traitors to the Turkish nation. This culminated in the attempted lynching of Kılıçdaroğlu at the funeral of a slain Turkish soldier on April 21. Tellingly, both Bahçeli and Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu refused to condemn the incident, blaming it on Kılıçdaroğlu himself.

A Rising Nationalist Tide

Turkish nationalism has risen to become the dominant political current in present-day Turkey. In fact, it has come to eclipse—at least for now—the conflict between Erdoğan’s Islamism and the opposition’s secularism.

The main opposition Republican People’s Party dubs itself social-democratic, but its star candidates look more like old-fashioned nationalists. Bahçeli’s outrage against Ekrem Imamoglu’s victory in Istanbul is ironic: Imamoglu hails from a conservative family in Trabzon on Turkey’s Black Sea coast. His father cut his political teeth in the center-Right and in the moderately nationalist Motherland party of former President Turgut Özal, and both senior and junior Imamoglu have been viewed positively by Turkey’s nationalist movement.  In his election campaign, Imamoglu underscored his nationalist and religious credentials. Lest anyone harbor any doubts, on April 4—as if appealing to the powers that be not to cancel his election—he took to Twitter to issue a respectful commemoration on the anniversary of the death of Alparslan Türkeș, Turkey’s legendary nationalist firebrand agitator.

As for Mansur Yavaș, who won the mayoral election in Ankara, there is not even a shadow of doubt: Yavaș joined the MHP exactly 30 years ago, and served as head of an Ankara municipality for a decade. He first ran for Mayor on the MHP ticket in 2009, before switching parties to the CHP. Even party leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, whose Kurdish ancestry and left-wing roots make him a bad fit for the far Right, went out of his way to pay homage to Turkish nationalism. At selected campaign stops, he went so far as to make the hand sign of the gray wolf, a symbol of Turkish far Right nationalism.

Erdoğan, too, deployed the gray wolf sign at rallies across the country, and his rhetoric in recent years has shifted in tone from Islamist to much more nationalist. Nevertheless, Erdoğan remains at heart an Islamist, not a nationalist. And as much as he plays the nationalist card, Turkey’s nationalists are not fooled. They have not forgotten the pro-Kurdish policies of his early tenure, which they believe undermined the country’s integrity. Nor do they disregard the fact that Erdoğan allowed Gülen’s followers to take over the bureaucracy and only a few years ago joined them in the jailing, on trumped-up charges, of dozens of nationalist senior military officers.

Erdoğan may be trying to ride the nationalist wave, but the past two years show that he has lost control over it. Had it not been for nationalist support, he would not have won re-election last year. And without the nationalists, he has no majority in parliament. It is no exaggeration to say that the nationalists presently control Turkey’s security policy, and it is only a slight exaggeration to state that Erdoğan remains in power at the mercy of the nationalists.

Implications for American Policy

At this time of deep problems in the U.S.-Turkey relationship, it is crucial for American policymakers to thoroughly analyze the country’s political dynamics. Clearly, if one reads the issue in Turkey as being Erdoğan’s “sultanism,” that would call for one set of conclusions. But if the reality is more complicated, as I argue here, that presents a different set of challenges and opportunities to U.S. policy. If Turkey’s regime is not monolithic but in fact quite divided and fragile, what does that mean for U.S. policy?

The first and most important implication is that it might be too early to give up on Turkey. Erdoğan may have wanted a consolidated strongman regime, but he has yet to achieve it. In fact, as Karaveli argues, he has presided over a system where first Gülenists and now nationalists are using the institutions of the state to their own advantage, for goals that differs from Erdoğan’s. The extent to which the “People’s Alliance” is viable is not clear. But if history is any guide, the longevity of informal alignments of power in Turkey is not impressive. Given the tensions that have already emerged into the open, there is little reason to think the Islamist-nationalist alliance will be any different.

If tensions between Erdoğan and the nationalists grow, American policies could tip the scales in one side’s favor. If so, should the U.S. empower Erdoğan, or strike a deal with the nationalists? Determining whether either option is feasible, and which one better suits America’s interests, may be more complicated than it seems. Erdoğan’s Islamist instincts belie a worldview that is fundamentally anti-American. But paradoxically, a weakened Erdoğan may be more willing to compromise on matters important to American national security in the short term, including Syria and the Kurdish question. He may also be willing to extend a hand to the opposition for a time, but that period is not likely to last. Erdoğan has repeatedly showed his penchant for authoritarian rule.

Turkey’s nationalists may also appear anti-American, but their grievances are about concrete and substantial matters, such as U.S. support for PKK-aligned groups in Syria and America’s harboring of Gülen. They are unlikely to budge on these issues, which they define as existential. But crucially, anti-Americanism is not enshrined in their very ideology and worldview. The United States could hammer out an understanding with them that could, over time, restore the Turkish-American relationship. But this would require several acts of good faith, including curtailing U.S. ties to Syrian Kurds and indicating, at the very least,  American apprehensions about the Gülen network.

Deciding which way the United States should go requires careful consideration. But one thing is clear: America has done very little over the past decade to reach out to nationalist constituencies in Turkey. Assuming the rise of Turkish nationalism won’t stop here, now may be a good time to start.

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Hong Kong’s Freedom Movement Won’t Stop Now, or There

For the first time in the 30 years since the Chinese Communist regime massacred thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square, the government has backed down in the face of popular opposition. On June 15, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam, after consultations with her managers from the mainland, announced that legislation that would permit the extradition of Hong Kongers and anyone who happens to be in Hong Kong and whom Beijing deems a “suspect” to mainland courts would be “suspended.” She blamed “poor communication” about the bill for massive protests that have been met with increasing police violence.

Protests against Beijing’s threat to Hong Kong’s rule of law drew one million people—one in seven residents—who bucked a global tendency to appease China’s land-grabs, its exploitation and coercion of weak and poor nations, its subversion of universal human rights principles in international institutions, and its horrific oppression of religious minorities and any who deviate from its rigid control.

The protests will not stop now, or there. Human rights and democracy campaigners insist that mere suspension of the legislation leaves what Democratic Party leader Emily Lau called “a sword hanging over our heads.” They insist that the legislation must be withdrawn, and on June 16 more than 1.5 million—one in five Hong Kong residents—were again on the streets demanding Lam’s resignation and the release of arrested students. They have tasted victory, and they want further dissociation and protection from the mainland dictatorship. Yet not only Hong Kongers but all who dream of a free and democratic China must seize this moment to push through the opening it has created.

The U.S. Congress and Administration need to be aware that protests against the proposed extradition law have been substantially different from those in past years, in which ordinary Hong Kongers have demanded more political rights. The recent protests are rather those of people with their back against the wall, determined to hold on to laws that protect their right to justice.

This conflict is not and will not be confined to Hong Kong. Crucially, the new protests have drawn in members of the Hong Kong-based mainland elite. It has thus opened a fissure among its members, people who have settled in Hong Kong and obtained residency there over the past 20 years. They would be in particular danger if this legislation were to pass: They would be subject to the risk of being extradited back to the mainland if they, their family members, or their “patrons” in China happened to lose out in Communist Party power struggles, or if they had issues, political or economic, with Beijing in the first place. The arbitrariness of China’s anti-corruption campaign, and the law enforcement system, would make them most vulnerable under the proposed extradition law. Indeed, the mainland-Hong Kong elite have obtained residency there largely for protection from this potential threat.

Many, therefore, including those with ties even to powerful military families, have supported the anti-extradition bill protests. And because of their intertwined familial, economic, and political ties, the fissure extends to the Beijing ruling elite itself, for they too fear arbitrary justice in mainland courts. The protests have sparked doubts among leading Chinese who harbor ambitions for themselves and for their children to live in a society that respects individual freedom, a society where ritualized ideological automatism does not pollute China’s deep cultural and philosophical traditions. There has been support for the protests even within the dominant pro-Beijing bloc in the Legislative Council.

The retreat in Hong Kong is Chinese ruler Xi Jinping’s worst nightmare come true: It has demonstrated to all that the regime will back down in the face of massive, peaceful civil protests. The protests, if they maintain sufficient scale and momentum and last long enough, have the potential to be a game changer in the politics in Beijing.

Only terror will stop them, and then only temporarily.

Thirty years ago, confronted with massive popular demands for freedom, Chinese rulers opted for a bloody hard line, following debates that have recently been exposed for the first time.1 Then, as the documents show, they blamed the protests at Tiananmen on foreign interference and their own relaxation of revolutionary discipline. The ambivalent reaction of the Chinese authorities back then is further evidence of a fissure penetrating the ruling class and its members’ thinking. The People’s Daily reflexively followed the Tiananmen template, attributing the dispute to “anti-China lackeys.” But then on June 15, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said that the decision to suspend the extradition law signaled a determination to “listen more widely to the views of the community,” supporting the “rights and freedoms” of Hong Kongers.

This same official had earlier demanded that American diplomats “stop all interference in Hong Kong’s affairs,” since Hong Kong is “purely the internal affair of China.” Except that it isn’t. Given China’s massive influence in the world, what is happening in Hong Kong palpably affects people everywhere—people who would be better off if China treated its own citizens, and those of other lands, with respect. Chinese officials have warned about threats to “stability” in Hong Kong, but it is their own policies that have caused instability. Indeed, Xi’s rule is a reversion to an approach to social control based on force, but its verticality makes it vulnerable. As the Helsinki Accords of 1975 affirmed, threats to human rights are threats to security.

Now, at this turning point in Chinese and Hong Kong politics, the United States can help those seeking democracy and freedom. The U.S. Congress and parliaments of other democracies can deny entry visas and impose other sanctions on Hong Kong legislators who do not oppose police violence, and on those who refuse to permanently withdraw the offending legislation.

The people of Hong Kong have risen up, not only for their own freedoms, but for ours as well. Let us meet their courage with firm and principled support.

1Zuihou de mimi: Zhonggong shisanjie sizhong quanhui “liusi” jielun wengao (The Last Secret: The Final Documents from the June Fourth Crackdown) (New Century Press, 2019). See Andrew J. Nathan, “The New Tiananmen Papers,” Foreign Affairs (July 2019).

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Howard Hawks’s The Thing and Our Echo Chamber Age

The Thing from Another World

Directed by Howard Hawks and Christian Nyby

1951, Warner Archive Collection, Blu-ray, $21.99

There was a time when, if you viewed yourself as a complex thinker who loved sci-fi, and cared what others might think about you, you had to nurse something of a secret shame.

By mid-century, popular cinema in this country was dominated by Westerns, now that color was an option, and directors of wide-open spaces fell in love with the expansiveness of CinemaScope. Westerns were made by directors Americans grew to respect: people like John Ford and Howard Hawks. The genre could have an element of guilty comfort, to be sure; many cheapjack Westerns were akin to that last drop of tainted water in a prairie dog hole long after the rains came. But the best of them were prairie operas: Shakespearean fare with holsters rather than scabbards.

But sci-fi? That was about human-sized bugs with eyes like blinking copper pancakes, actors rather longer on histrionics than chops, whose performances could often be assessed by how convincingly they bunched up their brows to express confusion about how runoff from the nearby atomic energy plant had produced this latest bit of mutant nastiness.

Now we have Comic-Con and the galloping space operas of the Star Wars films, whose toyetic hold on society as cultural forces eclipses their status as films and stories. But 1950s sci-fi is another genre entirely. I watch more of it than ever these days, because I am certain that no genre of film, in any period, is more relevant to our digital dung heap of an age, with its emphasis on anxiety, fragmentation, turning on each other, and our way of curb-stomping connectivity as we become less human by the latest refresh of the news cycle.

One of the best sci-fi pictures of the 1950s was made, as it happens, by one of our two greatest directors of Westerns, who was also a master of the screwball comedy and the romance-noir genre. I am talking about Howard Hawks, whose films were always oriented around talk—not talkiness, which is different, but real talk, captured in films that immersed the viewer in relationships that developed verbally, just as they do in the real world.

Hawks wasn’t a sci-fi guy, and the only sci-fi film he really directed was one he didn’t even take credit for. That film is The Thing from Another World, which has recently been handsomely, lovingly issued on Blu-ray by Warner Archive. Along with 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, you can do no better with sci-fi cinema. Nor can you do better in terms of all-time masterwork cinema: Hawks’s film can hang proudly with more familiar mainstays like Ford’s The Searchers, Welles’s Chimes at Midnight, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow, and Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past.

The Thing, as the title is commonly truncated, was based on John W. Campbell, Jr.’s 1938 novella, Who Goes There? Good sci-fi prose is clear, despite its venturing into dimensions beyond our regular world. Campbell’s was not, managing to be both turgid and turbid. Charles Lederer worked with Hawks to both slash and grow the original story, which is about researchers in the Arctic battling an alien shape-shifter, which would be the focal point of John Carpenter’s 1982 remake. The 1951 version features a plant-like creature in humanoid form, played by James Arness, later to be Marshal Dylan on Gunsmoke. But here he is a sort of vampiric carrot, the arrived outsider who tests the bonds of the insiders.

Hawks’s editor, Christian Nyby, was the nominal director. There has been some debate over why he received this billing, when the film is clearly Hawks-helmed. Perhaps Hawks sought to do his friend a solid and boost his career; perhaps Hawks was merely to serve as overseer, and then both agreed that Hawks should command. Whatever the reason, Nyby never was bothered by allegations that his director’s credit was a hollow one. Cast members spoke later of Nyby walking to the edge of the sets and consulting with Hawks, then returning to try a scene or a camera set-up a different way.

No matter. You know Hawks when you see Hawks, and you know Hawks when you hear Hawks. Like the best of his films, The Thing has been directed to show us how people come together, via rapport, and how bonds fragment, as rapport breaks down.

The plot is pointed in The Thing. A U.S. Air Force crew deploys a portion of its members to check out an Arctic crash site. They find an object buried under the ice. Each man walks to the edge of the object, and in an overhead shot we see that they are now standing in a great circle. This is pure cinema, when words are not necessary to convey the meaning inside of our heads: in this case, “Damn, that is a flying saucer.” An attempt to extricate the saucer from the ice destroys it, but they do find a frozen creature—our Mr. Arness in plant form—who is brought back to base inside of his ice-prison block, a chill rectilinear portent.

He’s accidentally defrosted, the ice block melts, and carrot-man is loose, to feed on the blood of the base’s dogs. Despite this being the North Pole, we are in a hothouse of paranoia.

It is here that the film’s contemporary resonances come into view. I believe that the more you hit the refresh button on your social media pages, to see what has changed, the more layers of your soul you pare away. Shave them right off. We are connected globally, but we become prisoners of whatever room we are in. We fail to communicate in person because we are busy refreshing as we get better at dying. We become prisoners within a particular digital prism, held in abeyance, with no forward motion.

So it goes at the base as the men question each other’s motives. A scientist among them is willing to risk human life in an attempt to communicate with the plant-humanoid. Walls do not literally close in, but as the film advances, spaces get narrower. Bodies fit less well in passages. The base takes on qualities of chambers of the heart, with their walls desiccated, drawn closer to each other as if flow were becoming harder and harder.

William Sloane, an academic and author of two excellent sci-fi books in the 1930s, once wrote, “Science fiction, at its best, is truly fiction, and fiction is a form of vicarious experience.” The phrase “vicarious experience” is key—our lives have become extended forms of vicarious experiences, to the point that we practice self-vampirization, which is what the men of The Thing realize they are on the verge of, lest they deal with this creature.

At the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, we find the hero, still human, on a California freeway, begging people—who doubtless think their lives are exceedingly busy and must get to where they are going as quickly as possible—to stop their cars, to assist him, for he has knowledge to share. That knowledge, of course, is that humans have literally become pod people. Life can certainly feel like that in our current age, as though there should be a secret handshake that the still-living greet each other with, so as to signal that they have yet to be claimed as a number of the walking dead.

As our man on the freeway sees car after car zoom past him—nobody really cares—it’s worth noting that Hawks was the least passive of movie directors. Galled by what he had seen in Fred Zinnemann’s 1952 film High Noon, with Gary Cooper as an outnumbered, outgunned sheriff who solicits the help of townsfolk, he clapped back with 1959’s Rio Bravo, a film about men badly outnumbered and outgunned holding a man in a jail cell and asking no help from anyone. We are tasked with the obligations of duty; one of those, for a Hawksian character, is being an individual of self-determination, conscience, active free will, clear thinking, and self-reflection, often aided by conversation with those with whom one has rapport (or with whom one seeks rapport). In Hawks’s films individuals serve, for other individuals, as mirrors; whereas, now, they serve as bolsterers and boosters of our platitude-lined echo chambers—which is what the base in The Thing from Another World increasingly approaches.

When the monster carrot is destroyed, thanks to some especially human ingenuity, there is an assertion of free will unlike any I’ve ever seen in cinema. We see unnatural order reversed, and natural order restored. The plant-humanoid is essentially fried via electrocution as it attempts to navigate its way through a chamber towards the men. It’s a torturous scene. This isn’t a jolt of electricity, a quick zap before the credits roll. The death scene protracts. It lasts. It lingers. It is death as the close of a James Brown show, with the hardest working man refusing to vacate the stage. As the men watch, and we watch, it is difficult not to think that we can, easily, end up doing a version of that jolting, and protracted dying, to ourselves. The scene lasts until James Arness’s enormous, 6’7” frame has been reduced to ash, leaving no trace. All this is the product of sustained, active human effort. One cannot be too active in these matters.

The claustrophobia lifts. There is a change in the rhythms and inflections of interaction and discourse, as though natural human rapport has been actuated. The lid has been lifted off the shoebox, and oxygen circulates again for the creatures inhabiting it. The perceived external monster—and we are not even sure if this creature was such a being—was nothing compared to the real internal monster. The plant-humanoid feeds on fragmentation, in a more debilitating manner than it had fed on the blood of dogs, just minutes before.

The film signs off with a tagline that is the linguistic equivalent of that final freeway scene in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. “Watch the skies, everywhere. Keep looking. Keep watching the skies!” Keep looking indeed. And if there was any doubt, remember: the sky is us, the sky is you.

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Will Trump Bluff His Way to Reelection?

President Trump apparently believes that his tariff threats “succeeded” in getting the Mexican government to take more vigorous actions to block the flow of Central Americans looking for refuge status in the United States. The President also made it clear that he will continue to use economic threats in the future to win concessions on trade and immigration policy, two items that he believes are critical to his re-election. Can this work for him politically?

My answer is maybe. A political win does not necessarily require major policy achievements, although the latter can certainly facilitate the former. From a purely electoral perspective, a visible effort to deliver on campaign promises usually beats not trying, and winning even minor concessions is typically better than ending up with nothing at all.

To be sure, Trump’s crisis-generating MO does not seem like a carefully calculated strategy. It expresses his deep frustration with obstruction by the Democrats, judges, media, and even a few Republican lawmakers. Crisis creation is an addiction that the President does not want to quit. After all, it keeps him in the spotlight, satisfies his urge to act, distracts his opponents from other problems, and succeeds just often enough to encourage him to do more.

But given that practically everyone knows that this is Donald Trump’s MO and that he usually portrays any outcome, however modest, as a “beautiful” victory, why does his bluffing work? A poker player who bluffs too much usually loses the credibility necessary to convince other players to fold. Will this happen to Trump?

In the language of Game Theory 101, Trump has transformed trade and immigration issues from a cooperative into a zero sum game. Whereas President Obama and most economists believe that nations can do better by working together rather than pursuing narrowly defined national interests, President Trump sees economic rivalry as a game of chicken. It is all about winning the deal, not accommodating mutual interests. And when it comes to playing chicken, it can be perversely advantageous to seem irrational. When the two cars converge towards one another, the rational person swerves and lets the madman win.

In this latest crisis, the President made it clear that he was willing to sacrifice the economic interests of the U.S. auto industry, farmers, and others in order to force Mexico to take the Central American refugee crisis more seriously. In the earlier NAFTA negotiations, President Trump could at least argue that he was trying to get a better economic deal for his domestic supporters.

This time, however, he not only put the recently negotiated USMCA at risk, but he held some of his supporters economically hostage in order to get the immigration concessions he wanted. This sent a pretty clear signal to the Mexicans that he meant business, and that he was willing to absorb any domestic criticism that came with this strategy. If he could prevail in the negotiations, he might reasonably expect that most of his “hostages” would forgive him by the 2020 election.

But it is one thing to bluff the Mexicans and another to bluff the Chinese or even the North Koreans. The Chinese hold some strong economic cards, including a large amount of U.S. debt. And the North Koreans have their own “madman” who has shrewdly parlayed his country’s nuclear missile threat into political leverage. It will likely be much harder to get any face-saving concessions out of either.

So this gets us back to the electoral merits of trying to implement the MAGA platform versus not seeming to try at all. For voters who resent the coastal elites, who feel left behind by the economic recovery and high tech boon, or who fear that United States has been invaded by immigrants and sold out to the Chinese, the President, for all his flaws, is their guy. As for the rest of the Republican coalition, they go along to get along. Congressional Republicans and Wall Street may signal their anxiety with each new Trump crisis, but the market quickly recovers and the Members nod their heads in agreement when Trump declares victory.

Elections are about comparisons: The question in 2020 will be Trump compared to whom. If people believe that there are multiple crises, they may want someone strong to lead them out of the mess. Will the Democrats nominate anyone who seems stronger than Trump? Joe Biden’s retreat on abortion, which made sense in terms of the internal politics of the Democratic Party, did not help him seem stronger. And we shall see in the coming months how the others fare.

Then there are the election fundamentals: the state of the economy, involvement in unpopular wars, the relative balance of partisan strength, the length of time one party has been in office, and Presidential popularity. Many of these favor the Republicans. The economy has been a plus for the President so far. Tax cuts have extended the duration of the “Trump bump,” even as it bequeaths us a bigger deficit that will loom over us for many years after the 2020 election. Good for Trump, but bad for us.

For all his many flaws, the President is a pacifist at heart, so we are not currently as deeply mired in unpopular wars as we have been in recent years. The Democrats have an advantage in the generic vote, but the public tends to give first term Presidents the benefit of the doubt when they run for reelection.

The biggest negative against the President is his approval rating and highly flawed character.  Even so, the President’s job approval numbers have not varied much during his time in office: More people do not approve of him than do, but the margin is tight enough to shift. Assuming he cannot replicate the Electoral College victory without winning the popular vote, President Trump will need to win over more independent voters than his Democratic opponent.

If the economy turns dramatically down and the Chinese continue to call his bluff, the Trump bump could become a Trump slump leading to an electoral defeat. But if neither happens, and the Democrats cannot hold together, the President may finally get the popular vote victory he was denied in 2016.

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Universal Basic Income: Does It Work?

Proposals for universal basic income (UBI) programs—rightly understood as unconditional equal transfer payments to all—have been gaining political traction and capturing the popular imagination recently. New York entrepreneur and dark horse Democratic primary candidate Andrew Yang has made a $1,000 per month UBI proposal the central plank of his campaign. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like UBI plans because they see them as facilitating disruptive innovations involving automation that may put many people, at least temporarily, out of work. McKinsey forecasts that between 75 million and 375 million workers globally and between 16 and 54 million in the United States will have to try to find new jobs over the next decade, because 60 percent of existing jobs will have on average 30 percent of their current activities automated. Most threatened are office and manufacturing workers and drivers. The wide range of possible forecasts underlines the degree of uncertainty and consequently the anxiety that many workers feel. Nobody really knows how many jobs will be lost and, more importantly, how many of those laid off will find it impossible to find new jobs or update their skills.

Given the anger, fear, and backlash that followed the last recession, the stakes are high for finding the right policy mix for responding to disruptive innovation. From a political and social perspective, anxieties over jobs and status are even more important than actual economic reality. Recent research has shown that, though the economy and employment prospects have been improving, millennials have grown more pessimistic about their job prospects. If workers who have safe jobs feel anxiety, they will behave as if they are facing economic oblivion and social ostracism. Welfare cannot alleviate such anxiety. But perhaps a well-designed UBI program can.

UBI programs—meaning unconditional, direct, and universal payments—offer greater personal security and dignity than means-tested welfare programs because they are unconditional and have no time limits. Furthermore, by eliminating the bureaucratic layers that test the means of welfare beneficiaries and control and monitor the distribution of welfare, UBI programs would shift funds from administrative intermediaries and put them directly in the hands of beneficiaries. They may even make parts of the welfare system redundant—for example, the enactment and monitoring of minimum wage laws. Universal basic income may encourage economic risk taking, entrepreneurship, mobility, prosperity, and professional self-fulfillment, while reducing envy, fear, and resentment, since everybody would receive exactly the same transfer payment.

In an era when old political ideologies seem hard pressed to offer viable new policy ideas, UBI is an idea that is cutting through the traditional Left-Right lines of polarization in interesting ways. Although it is being explored today mostly on the center-Left, it has a chance at winning bipartisan support as a better alternative to the welfare state. In fact, a generation ago, the push for UBI came from the libertarian-conservative Right, counting among its proponents the likes of Milton Friedman, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and—within the context of supporting a carbon tax to pay for UBI—James Baker, Henry Paulson, and George Schultz.

Contemporary critics of UBI, such as the Democrats’ 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton and current 2020 Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden, retort that such programs would be prohibitively expensive and would require a combination of growth-killing high taxation, government debt, and inflation. Others argue UBI may create incentives for able workers to go idle rather than take low paying or otherwise unfulfilling jobs. Consequently, the economy may become less competitive, with more poets and potters and fewer sanitary and social workers. Employers would have to either raise wages beyond those offered in countries without UBI or, when possible, further outsource those jobs. Undoubtedly, in a UBI universe, there would be new risk-taking entrepreneurs who would generate technological progress, values, and jobs absent from our universe. There would also be able workers who work in our universe but would prefer to live on the public purse in a UBI universe. The question is whether entrepreneurship and self-fulfillment would compensate for the costs of idleness.

Advocates and critics of UBI have theorized and speculated about these questions, and about the virtues and vices of UBI. There is also a growing literature on the topic, including, of course, an academic journal: Basic Income Studies. Several pilot programs have been tried recently around the world and in the United States, and more are planned by public and private institutions. On limited scales, pilots cannot do much harm, even if worst-case scenarios are realized. But this raises the question: What kind of pilot programs can give us good information about the prospects of UBI programs on a larger, or even national, scale? This is an important question to get right, if we are to go beyond theory and speculation and have a serious public policy debate about UBI. What follows is thus a brief sketch of the kinds of pilot proposals that can generate useful knowledge about the costs and benefits of UBI.

Well-designed and executed pilot programs should generate hard evidence for estimating the costs and benefits of UBI in comparison with those of welfare as we know it. Over time, pilots may measure the extent to which UBI encourages the assumption of economic risks: changing jobs, starting businesses, acquiring education and professional training, moving to a new house or city, and so on. In the even longer term, it may be possible to measure whether this risk-taking pays off and provides individuals with greater incomes and the state with higher tax revenues to pay for UBI.

Less tangibly, pilots may measure how much safer and self-fulfilled—and how much less envious—people feel when they benefit from UBI. It may be possible to discover correlations between increased personal security and tolerance, reductions in political extremism, and less drug use. We could find that families are strengthened by removing financial stressors, or when partners are released from economic dependency, and so on.

However, many of the pilot programs going under the name UBI these days cannot generate useful evidence. For example, a 2017-18 pilot in Finland that received heavy press coverage conscripted 2,000 randomly selected unemployed Finns to receive €560 per month for two years—an amount comparable to standard Finnish unemployment benefits. If unemployed beneficiaries found employment while enrolled in the program, they continued to receive the €560. Program participants were thus released of the onerous and for some humiliating bureaucratic procedures necessary for receiving unemployment benefits. After two years, the researchers concluded that the experiment had had no effect on rates of employment, though they did find that participants enjoyed improved psychological well-being on various scales by about 10 percent. Now, however one chooses to judge this program—successful or not—this was not in fact a UBI pilot but rather an experiment with a new system for distributing unemployment benefits designed to eliminate disincentives for working low-wage jobs. Perhaps it didn’t work because the previous system of unemployment benefits did not disincentivize recipients from finding work to begin with, or perhaps it was because the misalignment between the Finnish labor market and the unemployed was so extreme that the added incentives and efforts to find work didn’t yield results. But however one chooses to read the outcomes, the program was not true UBI. By limiting the pilot to a random sample of unemployed over a limited time horizon, rather than extending it to the whole of society, indefinitely, and without considering the system of taxation, they were testing something other than a genuine UBI program.

The Finnish pilot, at least, worked with a random, compulsory, and sufficiently large (and therefore representative) sample. Last year’s pilot program in Stockton, California, had no such representative sample. The Stockton experiment, which was managed by local government and paid for by private foundations like the Economic Security Project, chose 130 adults who live in the city’s lower-income neighborhoods (Stockton is one of the poorest cities in California) to receive a monthly stipend of $500 for a period of 18 months in the form of debit cards, so researchers could monitor their expenses. One could perhaps make a case that such a program could measure demand patterns among the very poor, but its results can tell us nothing about Universal Basic Income. Similarly, in Jackson, Mississippi, another “UBI” program is set to give 15 African American mothers $1,000 per month, in addition to leadership training and counseling with a social worker. A noble philanthropic program, perhaps—but it’s not UBI.

The legendary Silicon Valley high-tech incubator Y Combinator ran a pilot in Oakland, California, that gave 100 families $1,500 per month each, while a control group received $50 per month for its cooperation in the research. This program ran into difficulty in recruitment and engagement, especially for the control group. Recently, Y Combinator hired the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center to set up a different study of a random sample of 1,000 residences in neighborhoods where the median household is $46,000 or less in two states. Each household will receive $1,000 per month for three to five years. A control group of 2,000 households will receive $50 per month for their troubles. While this program is better than the previous pilot, it is still far from universal and so is merely yet another experiment with means-tested welfare.

The University of Michigan Survey Research Center also collects data for another project entitled “Baby’s First Years,” led from the University of California Irvine. The project intends to recruit 1,000 low-income mothers from maternity hospitals in four cities, half of whom will receive an unconditional $333 per month, while the control group will receive $20 per month. This is again an experiment with a welfare program, not UBI. Such research may even be somewhat redundant as many countries around the world have enacted child allowances for parents, either because they faced demographic declines due to sub-replacement fertility levels, or because governments wished to encourage parents to increase the population.

Finally, Massachusetts’s State Senate is considering two draft proposal for UBI pilots. One proposal, on which I have had some unofficial input, is still in the works. The other proposes three studies of 100 individuals each in three different kinds of communities in the state of Massachusetts that should include minorities (though that goal may be somewhat challenging in rural western Massachusetts). Each program participant is to receive a flat $1,000 per month.

Some of these pilots are more statistically valid than others, but because they are all directed at various disadvantaged sectors of society they are, at best, pilots for new welfare programs. At worst, they may even seem like little more than populist publicity stunts marketed as “money for nothing” or “free checks in the mail.” Though not intended as such by their organizers, they are reminiscent of the kinds of lotteries that populist regimes like Peronist Argentina organized, in which a few well-publicized individuals were chosen at random to receive rewards and thus spread hope for similar luck among the rest of the struggling poor.

Obviously, useful UBI pilots must be based on representative samples, divided randomly between experimental and control groups. The “treatment” of the experimental group should be the closest possible simulation of universal basic income. The pilot should measure the effects of UBI on the experimental group by comparing it with the control group and with its own baseline. The groups must be composed of households rather than individuals, because an individual with UBI whose family is not covered will make decisions based on nuisance variables, the total non-UBI condition of the household.

The basic income should be enough to live on. It may be based on an index of cost of living, the minimum wage, Social Security, or a combination of them. UBI should be guaranteed for a lifetime. Cutting corners, offering a few hundred dollars per month for a couple of years to means-tested poor or to unemployed volunteers cannot stimulate the kind of life-changing decisions and emotions that UBI promises. Most significantly, none of the above pilots attempted to simulate the financing of UBI which would obviously require rewriting the tax system. The misleading intuition was that UBI should benefit the poor, so the middle and upper classes can be safely excluded from the pilots. This misses what distinguished UBI from the welfare state.

A simple formula may determine how much each household should receive from, or contribute to, a pilot scheme (please excuse the accounting, but I am writing this after submitting my tax return so I got used to the genre). That formula should start by adding the household’s universal basic income to its actual gross income. Let’s call it Gross UBI Income. Then we should compute how much in taxes the household would be required to pay in a UBI universe (presupposing that we’ve modeled a taxation system that could pay for UBI). Let’s call that UBI Taxation. The balance between gross UBI Income and UBI Taxation is UBI Net Income:

UBI Gross (Gross actual income + Household UBI) – UBI Taxation (taxes for sustainable UBI – actual paid taxes + actual welfare receipts) = UBI Net

Since pilots take place in the real world, pilot participants will still pay taxes and may receive welfare benefits where they live. If they pay more in taxes than they receive in welfare, the balance should be deducted from the UBI taxes and their UBI net income will increase. If they receive more in welfare than they pay in taxes, this balance should be added to the taxes they pay in the pilot, and their UBI net income should decrease.

This formula is flexible enough to accommodate different pilot models that experiment with different personal taxation systems such as flat or progressive taxation. They may also model welfare systems co-existing with UBI. For example they may assume privatized services such as health or education that will necessitate high UBI net income and higher taxes to pay for it; or they could assume socialized services, paid from taxation and managed by the state, so UBI net income would be lower, but taxes would be needed to pay for social services.

In this way researchers would have to consider from the start how they plan to pay for UBI. What sort of tax system could sustain such a wide safety net? Practically, it would allow pilots to include the middle and upper classes, because, although the UBI guarantee is universal and no household’s UBI net can fall below the minimum level, different households would receive different sums of money from the pilot or be required to pay different sums (in other words, they would have negative UBI net in the above formula), depending on their gross actual income and actual tax payments. In this way, the pilots would not be likely to see payments being transferred to the rich unless they were to stop receiving any income from other sources.

Ideally, UBI pilots could operate with minimal external funding to cover the research and not the transfer payments and in this way prove or disprove their viability. In practice, external funding will likely be required for two reasons: Though a successful UBI scheme would replace the welfare state in whole or in part, the subjects of a pilot will continue to pay into existing welfare systems. The taxes paid into the existing welfare system would have to be deducted from the taxes collected by the UBI scheme, and the value of the services provided by the existing welfare system would have to be deducted from UBI net income. But the overhead gap between bureaucratically managed welfare programs and a relatively low-overhead UBI program would still have to be covered. Secondly, randomly chosen participants who would have to pay into the scheme more than the net income they would receive might understandably be unenthusiastic about participating in a program that, in effect, will offer them little more than a guaranteed minimum income and the moral satisfaction of participation. Of course, it is also possible that the whole thing is unsustainable because it is too expensive, but that is what we need pilot programs to find out.

Pilot programs cannot answer all the interesting questions about UBI, especially on the macro-economic level. For example, how would they affect labor costs, or the global distribution of labor and production in a world where some labor markets would have UBI and others would not? Other interesting questions could only be answered over the very long term. Still, there is plenty to be learned from a well-designed UBI pilot that does not misinterpret the idea as yet another welfare entitlement program directed at means-tested volunteers; that is sufficiently funded; and that has statistically meaningful samplings. Without these things UBI pilots are little more than populist gimmicks.

The UBI literature includes: Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght, Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy (Harvard University Press, 2019); Karl Widerquist, Jose A. Noguera, Yannick Vanderborght, and Jurgen De Wispelaere, eds., Basic Income: An Anthology of Contemporary Research (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). For enthusiastically supportive popular accounts see: Andy Stern and Lee Kravitz, Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream (Public Affairs, 2016); Annie Lowrey, Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World (Crown, 2018); Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future (Hachette, 2018).

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