Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 39

Crashing the Parties

The decline and demise of parties is rare, especially in the Anglo world. In the early days of the Republic, Alexander Hamilton’s Federalists gave way to Thomas Jefferson’s Republican Party. In the mid-19th century, the Whigs collapsed. Thereafter, the stage belonged to the GOP and the Democrats. In 17th century Britain, the Whigs and Tories began to dominate. Eventually, the Whigs were pushed aside by Labour, which would alternate in power with the Conservatives throughout the 20th century.

In postwar Europe’s multiparty system, the kaleidoscope turned more quickly. But fundamentally, two blocs led the pack: the moderate Left and the moderate Right. This system is crumbling away before our eyes.

Take France, where the Socialists once propelled Francois Mitterrand and Francois Hollande into the Elysée Palace. At last count, they gathered 8 percent in the EU elections. In Germany, their Social Democratic brethren, who once shone forth with chancellors Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt and Gerhard Schröder, are down to 13 percent in the most recent poll. The Italian Socialist Party was disbanded in 1994; previously they had placed men like Bettino Craxi and Giuliano Amato into the Pallazo Chigi, the seat of the Italian government. The PS left behind an ever changing bunch of parties with “Socialist” in their names. Today, the populists of the Right (Lega) and the Left (45 Stars) rule.

To get a grip on the sorry state of Social Democracy, look at the map of Western Europe. As late as 2000, the map was virtually drenched in red, the traditional color of the Left. Last year, only 5 of the EU-28 were governed by Democratic Socialists. Among the large countries, only Spain was inked in red.

You would think that the moderate Right would savor the decline of its rivals. Alas, the rot has also reached the likes of the German Christian Democrats, the French Republicans and the British Tories. The German CDU/CSU had vaulted into power with Konrad Adenauer, Helmut Kohl and Angela Merkel, who is in her fourth term. Kohl had 16 years in the Chancellor’s Office, Adenauer 13 (who captured an absolute majority in 1957). Now, their party is down to 24 percent in the most recent poll.

The French Republicans, the heirs of Charles de Gaulle, have seen their take in the 2017 national elections almost cut in half. The Tories, the party of Disraeli, Palmerston, Churchill and Thatcher, are currently committing suicide over Brexit. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party came in first in the EU parliamentary elections, leaving Tories and Labour in the dust. In the current YouGov poll, the Brexit Party is still number one. The Tories get 18 percent. So hard have the mighty fallen.

The Left’s losses, however, are not the Right’s gains; they are losing together, which is a bizarre pattern. Who, then, is winning? The outsiders, a motley bunch. Marine Le Pen’s National Front raked in one-third of the votes cast in France’s last presidential elections. The German AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) has come from nowhere and now stands at 14 percent in the polls. Nigel Farage’s anti-European nationalists scored 30 percent in the EU elections. In Italy, Matteo Salvini of the right-wing Lega is well positioned to capture the Palazzo Chigi in the next national contest.

The Right is on a roll, but so is the Left—when it puts on rightish clothes, as it did in Denmark. The Danish Social Democrats came in first in the June elections with a harsh anti-immigrant, but generous social policy. Label it “Keep them out and make them pay!” With its vote in the Folketing, the Social Democrats had been instrumental in passing the “Jewelry Law.” It empowers the border police to search asylum seekers for valuables and cash that will finance their upkeep. A nice deterrent, if you can impose it.

The hardest hammer blow against the established party system is the comet-like rise of the German Greens—pro-immigration ecologists who are on the center-left side of the spectrum. At 27 percent in the polls, they have (theoretically) outstripped both the Christian and Social Democrats who have ruled Germany for 70 years, either together or with smaller parties. The current grand coalition no longer commands a majority in the surveys.

Having dropped their leftish orthodoxies, the Green saviors of the planet are virtually everybody’s darling, drawing votes away from all parties this side of the extremes on the Left and the Right. Rigid left-wing ideologues in the not-so-distant past, they have put their best foot forward. They appeal to excitable college students as well as to the urban bourgeoisie, to hipsters as well as to tech workers and start-up artists. Their traditional pacifism has paled along with their leftwing economic policies. They are even downplaying their Nanny State ideas, such as prescribing a once-a-week “Veggie Day.” They are cool, yet with a friendly face and a modest demeanor.

Apropos of “face,” it helps if you don’t look like Angela (“Mutti”) Merkel, which is German for “mom.” It helps that the Greens’ standard-bearer, Robert Habeck, looks like your ideal son-in-law who threatens nobody. It helps that these by now nice middle-age folks are not at all like those Social-Democratic apparatchiks who have dominated German politics for decades.

“If you could elect a chancellor directly,” the pollsters recently asked, “for whom would you vote?” Four out of ten opted for Habeck, only 21 percent for Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, Merkel’s heir-apparent as Christian Democratic chancellor candidate.

So who will determine Europe’s future? All we know for sure is that the established system is rupturing. The disruptors don’t form a clear pattern. There is the liberal Emmanuel Macron, who has welded together his “Republic on the March” party ex nihilo. There is the Brexit Party that preaches Little England nationalism. There are Matteo Salvini’s hard-Right populists in Italy. In Denmark, the Social Democrats have scored with an anti-immigrant plus welfarist agenda. Farther to the east, nationalist authoritarians rule in Poland and Hungary. Yet in Germany, those kindly center-left Greens are on a roll with their “Save the Planet” message.

Is there a common denominator? If so, it is the mounting aversion to politics-as-usual, to the powers-that-be-no-longer. Add a dollop of isolationism and defensive nationalism triggered by apparently uncontrolled immigration in tandem with globalization. Or make it very simple and invoke sheer boredom with the politics and politicos of the status quo.

Is there revolution in the air? Europe is not living in 1789 or 1918 when revolutions spread across the continents. It is, by comparison, well-off and well-ordered. If anything, it resents too much change. But everywhere, the established party system is breaking up. Yet the bet is on rearrangement, not on revolt.

The post Crashing the Parties appeared first on The American Interest.

The Summer of Russia’s Discontent?

When Russian ministers, top managers, and oligarchs were boarding their first-class flights and private jets on their way back to Moscow from the glitzy annual Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum on Monday, they probably expected to read articles about themselves in the morning Russian business papers that are always offered on board. Instead, they saw three front pages with identical graphics screaming “I am/we are Ivan Golunov” in huge letters. In an unprecedented and bold showing of solidarity, the three staid outlets stood up in support of a journalist employed by the independent, Latvia-based online newspaper Meduza. The young man had been detained late last week in the center of Moscow and charged with possession of illegal drugs and drug dealing, which could entail up to 20 years in prison. He was beaten while in custody.

Golunov is one of Russia’s leading investigative journalists, and has exposed multiple billion rouble corruption scandals in Moscow’s Mayor’s office. He said he had received multiple threats over an investigation linking a shadowy funeral business to the FSB.

The police published photos of what looked like a narcotics lab said to be in Golunov’s apartment. When friends came forward saying the photos didn’t look like any part of the apartment they knew of, the cops changed their tune, saying the wrong photos had been leaked. Charges as to what drug was in question then changed—from meth to cocaine. No further evidence has been presented—no tests of drug traces on Golunov’s body, no fingerprints on the drug stash.

By midday Monday, no copies of the three main business newspapers, with a combined print run of 700,000, could be found for sale either in Moscow or in Saint Petersburg. Avito, the Russian version of Craigslist had a posting listing three copies for sale for over $3,500. Also, it is important to keep in mind that neither Vedomosti, nor RBC, nor Kommersant are anything like “opposition” papers. They have all three been forced to change owners recently, and now are owned by people loyal to the Kremlin. (Kommersant even belongs to the sanctioned oligarch Alisher Usmanov.)

The Golunov story ruined Vladimir Putin’s favorite annual PR event, the above-mentioned Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum. Google searches in Russia for “Ivan Golunov” significantly topped those for “Vladimir Putin,” right on the day that Russia’s leader was triumphantly meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

But the Forum spectacle was in trouble even before Golunov. The detention of American investor Michael Calvey, jailed in February and under house arrest since April, also cast a long shadow. U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman had refused to attend the Forum due to the flimsiness of the case. After Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov remarked that “we would like to see Michael among the participants at the Forum,” and the Russian prison agency said that Calvey could technically show up, the main news narrative became the American investor’s fate. On the opening day, some attendees wore pins with the name of Calvey’s investment fund Baring Vostok emblazoned on them. Calvey, however, did not show up.

Forum attendees were riveted by the performance of Russian Duma member Andrey Makarov, speaking at a prestigious Sberbank-sponsored breakfast event. Makarov, a member of the ruling United Russia party and the head of the tax and budget committee, deviated from the usual Kremlin script to denounce Russia’s economic policies and the silovikis’ influence on the business climate. He bashed Putin’s recently announced government-led stimulus plans, mocked the “economic ideas” of the well-connected silovik Aleksandr Bastrykin, and called out Maxim Oreshkin, the newly appointed Minister for Economic Development and a favorite of Putin’s, for describing the house arrest of Calvey as “a good sign for the investment climate.” Makarov said that fear permeates Russia’s business community—fear that if you succeed in business, everything will be taken away from you. Oreshkin, as well as other ministers, officials, and oligarchs, sat and listened to Makarov’s tirade. The head of the state nanotechnology investment fund Anatoly Chubais shared a video of the speech on Facebook.

This latent anger among some sectors of Russia’s business elites at how the economy is being managed by Putin and his corrupt silovik cronies perhaps helps explain the outcry when the Golunov story broke on the second day of the Forum. Journalists were asking attendees about Golunov, and the case was even brought up at one of the panels. The papers’ decision to print the covers had to have been informed by this general mood.

But the fallout seems to have been broader, and has snapped many Russians out of their resignation. Since Russian law prohibits unauthorized mass demonstrations, hundreds lined up in Saint Petersburg and Moscow to each in turn take up a single sign—the “single picketing” loophole to Russia’s repressive protest laws. Several famous journalists among the protesters were nevertheless detained by police, and then later released without charges being pressed. The picketing continued through the weekend as Golunov made his way from police custody to a hospital (to be treated for the beating he received) and on to court, where he was placed under house arrest—a lenient outcome for such serious charges.

Normally apolitical celebrities have joined the campaign, sharing videos and posts on social media. The famous actor Konstantin Khabensky, when he took the stage at the opening ceremonies for the major Russian film festival Kinotaur, spoke out against the criminal case and urged people to not be silent as “an inconvenient journalist is being locked up,” lest tomorrow, he said, the same happen “to us.” To illustrate how dramatically the mood has shifted in Russia in the past two years, when the award-winning director Kirill Serebrennikov was arrested on trumped-up charges of embezzlement, his colleagues didn’t speak up openly at Kinotaur’s opening ceremony, with a handful only mentioning the case in passing without saying his name.

The regime seems to be in damage control mode. Putin, as is normal for him, has remained aloof, feigning disinterest and ignorance of what is going on inside the country he rules—the old “Good Tsar/Bad Boyar” routine. The official media outlets have played along, pretending to be on the side of truth. Khabensky’s speech at Kinotaur was not cut during broadcast on state TV. Some of the mainstream TV anchors even called for an objective investigation, and the release of Golunov pending proof of his guilt. The lab test results showing that there were no drugs found in Golunov’s blood were openly announced on the main propaganda channel Rossiya-1. Finally, on Tuesday, Russia’s Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev announced that Golunov would be released from house arrest and the charges dropped. He also said that he ask Putin to fire three Moscow police officials involved in the arrest.

Protests that were scheduled for tomorrow probably had a lot to do with today’s decision to stand down. Thousands of Muscovites had pledged to take to the streets in support of Golunov, without any permission from the city authorities—and on the federal Russia Day holiday, no less. The question now is whether these unsanctioned protests will still go forward, and if they do, how big they will be. The government is banking that “righting” this specific “wrong” will take the wind out of the sails of the angry citizens. But given that the anger was never just about a detained journalist, but rather about the increasing brazenness of the siloviki more broadly, it’s quite possible that people will turn out anyway. The regime will then be faced with a real dilemma: if it cracks down on the illegal protest it risks another, even bigger public outcry; if it stands down, it could open Pandora’s Box by emboldening the opposition. Golunov’s release was the first time in Putin’s reign that public outcry saved an innocent person from prosecution, and the protesters may feel inclined to push their luck.

How and when will Putin’s regime come to an end? The short answer is that it’s impossible to know. Given that it’s a very personalized system without any clear plan for succession, one shouldn’t underestimate its brittleness. At the same time, it might not be a major event that affects a huge number of people—something like the unpopular pension reforms rolled out last year—that does the trick. Rather, it could be something small that triggers a wider reaction—like when a tiny bit of salt is added to a supersaturated solution causing the liquid to rapidly crystallize. It’s worth remembering that five years ago, in the wake of the annexation of Crimea, Ivan Golunov would have been denounced as a traitor and a member of a shadowy fifth column of oppositioners trying to undermine the state. It’s also worth remembering that confidence in Soviet stability was never as high as it was in the very late 1980s.

The post The Summer of Russia’s Discontent? appeared first on The American Interest.

Pakistan: Bad Moon Rising

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan is fond of using sporting clichés to explain complicated political dilemmas. “Bowling out the opposition” and forcing the “Umpire’s finger” are both regulars from his public speaking playbook. But as problems mount for Pakistan’s civilian leader, it’s getting harder to explain away reality with handy cricket metaphors. Cricket, after all, cannot be played in the rain—and Khan’s ship of state is about to run into some pretty bad weather.

Ten months into his innings as Prime Minister, things are bad—much worse than anyone expected. The economy is in free fall, a balance of payments crisis has become critical, inflation is at record levels, the cost of living has become stratospheric, unemployment is rising, the stock market has witnessed multiple bloodbaths, and the rupee has lost 30 percent of its value against the dollar overnight, becoming one of the world’s worst performing currencies. The government has been forced to join an IMF bailout program which is likely to make all these things worse before they get better, if it all they do. People are feeling the pain.

So dire was all this that Khan had to sack his entire economic team—individuals he had long promised would save the country—in one fell swoop. Naturally, he had a ready cricket metaphor to explain the ousters: “A captain must shuffle his batting order when necessary.”

In the midst of this economic turmoil, the Prime Minister finds himself on a collision course with the opposition. Despite allegations of systemic backing from the military establishment, Khan has cobbled together only a wafer-thin majority in parliament. Bolstered by support from the country’s ultimate power broker, he is unwilling to parley with his rivals, and hence unable to pass even one piece of significant legislation. Parliament is at an impasse. The opposition sees Khan as a Manchurian candidate launched by “higher powers” and claim he wants to engineer a one-party state at the behest of his benefactors in uniform. This has not been helped by relentless talk from his supporters of a presidential system in place of the current parliamentary one, which would give Khan unprecedented power. Verbal abuse, physical altercations, sulks and walkouts are regular fixtures in the sessions of the National Assembly, which has developed a Jerry Springer-esque feel to it. Khan’s inauguration speech on the floor of the house was shouted down with such intensity that he doubled down and promised to go after his opponents for corruption. “I will not let any of these thieves go,” Khan roared, “I swear it here before God.” Not even Trump made such a virulent maiden speech, went the scuttlebut in Islamabad—where uncanny parallels between Khan and the U.S. President are regularly noted with a mixture of amusement and horror.

The opposition, now run chiefly by the young scions of the Bhutto and Sharif political dynasties, have their backs against the wall, as the deep state continues an unprecedented—and highly successful—campaign to drive them from public life. Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is still in jail on corruption charges, disqualified from political office, and virtually the entire senior leadership of his party has been decapitated in similar fashion. Former President Asif Zardari (Benazir Bhutto’s widower) faces a plethora of corruption cases and was arrested on Monday for money laundering. The opposition, which has thus far avoided an all-out confrontation with the government and the military in hopes of leniency, has found none forthcoming and now sees no option but to fight. House Bhutto and House Sharif, once bitter rivals, have found common ground. Energized by a younger leadership, they have come together and announced they will take to the streets against Khan in what is being dubbed the “final battle.” A combined opposition movement planned after the Eid holidays in early June has serious potential to paralyze the country over the summer months.

Not given pause by this, Khan has bewilderingly gone and opened up another battlefront, this time with the judiciary. His government has recently filed a constitutional reference seeking to remove one of the most respected and fiercely independent minded judges on the Supreme Court. Justice Qazi Faez Isa, who has long earned the ire of the security and intelligence establishment for his unequivocal judgments against them, is next in line to be Chief Justice. The reference against Isa is seen as further proof of who’s pulling Khan’s strings.

The move has been met with predictable outrage from the legal community and the opposition. The Additional Attorney General of Pakistan resigned immediately in protest, accusing the government of attempting to “browbeat the judiciary.” The Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) and bar councils across the country have threatened to lock down the courts and called for street resistance.

The last time a similar reference was filed against a Supreme Court judge in 2007, it triggered a nationwide lawyers movement that led to the downfall of then-military ruler General Pervez Musharaff. The unprecedented struggle to restore judges sacked by Musharaff left an indelible impact on the consciousness of the country that persists today. Ironically, it was Imran Khan who was one of the key leaders of that street movement, and even close aides who manned the barricades alongside him then cannot fathom the wisdom of the present decision. “This time they should arrange for ambulances and not tear gas, as we will not court arrest but fight to the end,” said Amanullah Kanrani, president of the Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA).

If Khan is unable to defuse this impending judicial crisis it could spell catastrophe. However, this would require a huge climbdown, which he does not appear in the mood for. “No one is above the law” is the solitary statement attributed to Khan on the matter, relayed by an increasingly befuddled clutch of official spokespeople.

Just as things are coming to a boil with the economic crisis, the opposition parties, and the judiciary, an ethnic rebellion is brewing in the north. Disaffected Pashtuns are rising up against the government and the military for alleged human rights abuses in their home districts in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. Since 9/11 this region has been ground zero in the fight between the Pakistan army, the Taliban and a melange of global militant groups—not to mention the number one target for American predator drones. Crushed in between, the local people have suffered the worst consequences of war, with over 1 million displaced. Many of them have now found their voice in the rights group calling itself the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM), which has demanded the formation of a truth and reconciliation commission to address extrajudicial killings by the military, an end to enforced disappearances, and the removal of landmines from the tribal areas.

PTM rallies have attracted thousands of followers in what has thus far been a largely non-violent grassroots movement, but things are changing as the impasse with the army grows. Last week, 13 PTM activists were gunned down as they tried to break through a military checkpoint in North Waziristan. The army says it is willing to address genuine grievances of affected people but that the PTM leadership has been infiltrated by agent provocateurs and secessionists who are trying to exploit the situation. It says, too, that the group is receiving funding from the intelligence agencies of Afghanistan and India. This is not an entirely implausible claim; Pakistan’s inimical neighbors to east and west both share an interest in seeing the problem exacerbated, or at least kept simmering in order to extract concessions elsewhere.

Whatever its causes, the threat of burgeoning Pashtun nationalism is seen as an existential threat in Islamabad, and panic levels are rising. “Their time is up,” said army spokesperson Major General Asif Ghafoor in a recent press conference about PTM. The gloves appear to be coming off as the civilian government seems unable or unwilling to advance a political settlement, even as intellectuals in the salons of Karachi and Lahore scream themselves hoarse, warning of enormous consequences if the crisis is not handled deftly by politicians, and politicians alone. Here again, Imran Khan’s government seems out of ideas.

Further south in Balochistan, Pakistan’s largest and most resource-rich province, a less ambiguous separatist insurgency is picking up speed. Ethnic Baloch rebels have stepped up attacks against army installations and increasingly against civilian targets too. Last month a five-star hotel in the port city of Gwadar was stormed by militants. Three hotel employees and two soldiers lost their lives before security forces were able to clear the resort. Just weeks before this, a bus carrying naval officers in the province was ambushed by rebels and 13 Navy personnel were summarily executed. Targeted killings of ethnic Punjabi “settlers” in Balochistan have become routine, as well as attacks on Chinese workers. The deep-water port of Gwadar is the centerpiece of a $60 billion infrastructure project bankrolled by Beijing as part of its One Belt One Road initiative (OBOR). The Pakistan leg, known as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), provides the first ever land route connecting western China with the warm waters of the Arabian Sea, and is seen as vital to the whole scheme.

Pakistan has accused India of arming the rebels and has consistently provided evidence of this to the United Nations. The arrest of Khulbushan Yadev, an alleged senior-ranking Indian spy from Balochistan in 2017, and the subsequent death sentence handed down to him by a Pakistani military court has been much publicized in Pakistan but not elsewhere. Pakistan says it has arrested “hundreds of junior operatives” based on Yadev’s testimony who were “engaged in waging war against the Pakistani state.” The conviction has been frozen and is pending arbitration in the International Court of Justice, where high-powered legal teams from both countries fight over the alleged secret agent’s fate.

But there are few takers for Islamabad’s narrative, itself accused of harboring cross-border terror groups. Donald Trump last year accused the country’s leadership of “deceit and lies,” saying that Pakistan gives “safe havens to terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan. . . No more!” Pakistan has faced sanctions from the United Nation’s Security Council over its failure to crack down on jihadi groups on its soil. It is also facing an aggressive New Delhi-led campaign to get it internationally blacklisted as a global financier of terror via the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). Superpower-presumptive India, under a newly invigorated Narendra Modi fresh off another election win, sees no interest in dialogue with a hamstrung Pakistan. He has vowed to isolate it diplomatically at every forum and dispensed with blueprints for peace talks over Kashmir, painstakingly negotiated in years past.

Having narrowly averted an all-out war with India in March, Islamabad is taking frantic measures to clamp down on jihadi groups and avoid the FATF sanctions, before its upcoming session in Paris next week. There are signs that the pressure from Washington is easing somewhat since Trump’s thunderous tweets about Pakistan’s treachery. As the Afghan peace talks make awkward progress in Moscow, Doha, and Islamabad, Pakistan’s influence is crucial in bringing about an agreement to end the Afghan conflict.

Islamabad’s shopping list of foreign policy objectives is formidable: End the Afghan war, satiate the Americans while still having a stake in the future set-up in Kabul, uproot non-state actors at home, avoid terror-related sanctions, and maintain a détente with an increasingly belligerent India without ceding to its demand for total regional hegemony.

These are difficult odds for any country. Unable to find respite from domestic problems, winning a complex diplomatic war seems an even taller order for Khan’s fledgling government. Still, if he is able to do this deftly and secure the balance of power in the region, perhaps with a little help from Beijing, Khan could still come out on top.

It is understood in Islamabad that America’s levers of influence over Pakistan’s fate, with respect to India, terror sanctions, and IMF bailout conditions, will vary entirely based the outcome of the Afghan dialogue. The good news is that both parties want it to succeed. Policymakers in Washington would be well advised to seek the path of least resistance in dealing with Pakistan, which can still help bring home the bacon for Trump and end the longest war in American history. Pakistan’s support for, and influence over, the Afghan Taliban stems from its fear of encirclement by India via Afghanistan and its need for allies in Kabul to counter this. Understanding Islamabad’s security concerns is and has always been the key to a settlement in Afghanistan. Pushing its civil-military leadership to the wall has not worked in the past, and is not likely to do so under present conditions.

As Ramadan came to an end last week, millions of Pakistanis looked skywards to spot the crescent moon that signals the start of Eid. The holy month of fasting that precedes this is a lethargic period when the pace of politics in the country, much like the gastric metabolisms of its citizens, slows down considerably. People plan holidays and go shopping, sleep late, and skip work early. There is an unspoken pact that all contentious issues shall be dealt with after. As the backlog of problems continues to build, the eerie sensation of a calm before the storm is being felt widely. This year, the new moon brings no glad tidings. It’s going to be a long, hot, fateful summer.

The post Pakistan: Bad Moon Rising appeared first on The American Interest.

How (Not) to Regulate the Internet

It’s been just another month in the relentless mess of online manipulation. The European elections had the by-now habitual smorgasbord of bullshit that is so easy to churn out it makes a mockery of our outdated electoral laws.

Research by the London-based Institute of Strategic Dialogue spotted, among other delights: bot-nets in Spain pushing anti-Islam messages to support the new right-nationalist Vox party, fake Facebook accounts in Poland pretending to be pensioners and helping out the government by attacking striking teachers, and 24 Facebook pages in Italy spreading anti-Semitic and anti-vax content to 2.46 million followers, while also supporting the ruling populist Five Star and Lega parties. Disinformation is nothing new, but the difference is that it’s now easier to amplify to the masses, and easier for the official parties to deny any connection to these campaigns, and even to claim that they are merely the expression of concerned citizens’ freedom of speech.

The tension between freedom of speech and disinformation also hit new heights in the United States last month, where a bun-fight broke out after Donald Trump shared a video that seemed to show leading Democrat Nancy Pelosi slurring her words like a near incapacitated drunk. When it turned out the video had been purposefully slowed down to make her look sloshed, Facebook marked it as manipulated. This didn’t satisfy many punters who called for the video to be taken down entirely. But, countered others, weren’t calls for such takedowns an attack on freedom of speech?

The continuing failure of technology companies to deal with disinformation means that more regulation is now inevitable, whether it comes from government as in Europe, or through public pressure as in the United States. Get the regulatory approach right and it will help formulate rights and democracy in a digital age; get it wrong and it will exacerbate the very problems it is trying to solve, and play into the games of authoritarian regimes all agog to impose censorship and curb the free flow of actual information across borders.

In Europe we are seeing three approaches to regulation.

At one extreme is the German approach, which holds companies accountable for every piece of content that goes up on their platforms. If any content contravenes existing German law on “manifestly unlawful” speech (including hate speech and defamatory content), and the platforms don’t take it down tout de suite, they face whopping fines. It’s a whack-a-mole approach that tries to police the internet post-by-post and tweet-by-tweet. It equates the importance of something foolish or nasty blurted out on Facebook by your mother-in-law with a coordinated campaign by political actors, and encourages tech companies to play it safe and take down masses of content when they are not sure if it might be illegal or not.

The British approach is more in tune with the reality of the online world, where trying to police every comment is both impossible and pointless. Instead of trying to make platforms liable for every piece of content, the UK “White Paper on Online Harms” proposes to create a regulatory system where tech companies will have to ensure they have systems in place to mitigate the “harm” of online behavior—a bit like being obliged to have sprinklers and fire exits in a building in the event of a fire. The White Paper defines “disinformation” as what it calls “harmful but legal” content, which tech companies would probably not be expected to take down entirely but would need to, for example, down-rank and mark as inaccurate.

The “harmful but legal” category has appalled freedom of speech groups, who argue there is no such concept as “disinformation” in human rights law. They look more kindly on the French proposal, which is the lightest touch in Europe—stressing the need for tech companies to provide more transparency about how content is amplified and distributed on their platforms. The French proposal argues that if tech companies were more transparent, discrete decisions could be made between tech companies and a government regulator about problems as they emerge.

By fixating on “disinformation” as primarily about content, however, the European proposals and the various debates in the United States risk fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of online manipulation, missing its real dangers while setting themselves on an unavoidable collision course with the need to uphold freedom of speech. Consider the now well-documented Russian social media campaign in the United States. Plenty of the content the Kremlin pushed was neither true nor false, simply stating support for one or another cause. The “deception” here was not the content, but the behavior that promoted it and the actor behind it.

As a new Transatlantic Working Group on Content Moderation I am part of has been discussing, regulation (whether government- or industry-led) needs to veer away from a focus on content to a broader concept of “viral deception.” This would mean thinking more about how to regulate inauthentic behavior and amplification through covert, coordinated campaigns by bots, trolls and cyborgs; search engine manipulation and algorithmic biases that encourage inaccurate content; the non-transparent way personal data is used to target people by campaigns; the ad-tech system that encourages advertising dollars to flow to domains whose ownership is unclear and who have no editorial standards.

Just as important as what regulation focuses on is how it is framed in terms of language and political logic. Current proposals around disinformation are described in negative terms: they are all about stopping “harms” and mitigating “dangers.” When we frame regulation as a negative, the result can play into the hands of authoritarian regimes such as Russia, whose leadership is only too happy to quote censorious Western laws as it censors opposition at home. Authoritarian regimes will do as they do and often there’s no doing anything about it, but we should not be setting the terms of the debate on information in a way which a priori lead us toward a vision of the future of the internet which they desire.

Consider, once again, the case of the covert Russian social media campaigns in the United States. If one frames the argument against such operations in terms of “foreign meddling” one is playing into the Kremlin’s favorite theme of the need for “information sovereignty” and the end of the free flow of information across borders. If, on the other hand, one stresses that that problem with the Russian campaign was not that it was foreign, but that it was covert and full of deceptive behavior, then it becomes about the rights of people on the internet to receive accurate information. Promoting the rights of internet users is one thing the Kremlin is very uncomfortable with.

As David Kaye, the UN Rapporteur on Freedom of Speech and a professor at UC Irvine, told me:

A “rhetoric of danger” is exactly the kind of rhetoric adopted in authoritarian environments to restrict legitimate debate, and we in the democratic world risk giving cover to that.

[But] another way to conceptualize the impact and purpose of viral deception—assuming we can define it sufficiently narrowly—is as a tool to interfere with the individual’s right to information. Coordinated amplification has a strategic aim: make it harder for individuals to assess the veracity of information. It harms public debate, but it also interferes with the individual’s right to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas of all kinds.

Conceived this way, it seems to me that solutions could be aimed at enhancing individual access to information rather than merely protecting against public harm. This may be semantic at some level, but I also think it allows us to ask a different question: What can public institutions and private platforms do to empower individuals?

Kaye’s concise, elegant and necessary book—The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet—shows how tech company bosses have publicly stated they want human rights law to become the basis for how their platforms are run. I wonder what this will mean in practice. Online human rights courts that adjudicate on content and behavior in almost real time? How will we adapt our thinking about freedom of speech in an environment where censorship happens not only through shutting people up but through creating so much noise the truth is lost—and where old truisms such as “more speech is the remedy to disinformation” have been found to be not so necessarily true after all?

The post How (Not) to Regulate the Internet appeared first on The American Interest.

The Rise of Progressive Occultism

Back in March 2019, an elected government representative shared something personal about her spiritual identity. Not a preferred Bible verse or a conversion story. Rather, progressive New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shared her birth-time with a self-described psychic and astrologer, Arthur Lipp-Bonewits, who in turn shared her entire birth chart with what can only be described as Astrology Twitter.

Astrology Twitter went wild. So did the mainstream media, with outlets from Vox to The Cut to Allure speculating about what Ocasio-Cortez’s astrological chart could tell us about her fitness for political office. “AOC’s Aries Moon indicates that she’s emotionally fed by a certain amount of independence, self-determination, and spontaneity,” concluded Allure’s Jeanna Kadlec. “But that independence always finds a way home.” Meanwhile, Lipp-Bonewits told The Cut’s Madeleine Aggeler that the stars predicted that Ocasio-Cortez’s “career in politics is likely to last the rest of her life.”

Ocasio-Cortez’s decision to share her birth-time with Lipp-Bonewits might be an unprecedented move for a political figure—Hillary Clinton famously avoided the question, sparking years of debate among astrologers. But it was also a canny one. Twenty-nine percent of Americans say they believe in astrology, according to a 2018 Pew poll, while just 22 percent of Americans call themselves mainline Protestants.

More importantly, however, AOC’s gambit taps into the way in which progressive millennials have appropriated the rhetoric, imagery, and rituals of what was once called the “New Age”—from astrology to witchcraft—as both a political and spiritual statement of identity.

For an increasing number of left-leaning millennials—more and more of whom do not belong to any organized religion—occult spirituality isn’t just a form of personal practice, self-care with more sage. Rather, it’s a metaphysical canvas for the American culture wars in the post-Trump era: pitting the self-identified Davids of seemingly secular progressivism against the Goliath of nationalist evangelical Christianity.

There’s the coven of Brooklyn witches who publicly hexed then-Supreme Court candidate Brett Kavanaugh to the acclamation of the thousands-strong “Magic Resistance”—anti-Trump witches (among them: pop singer Lana del Rey) who used at-home folk magic to “bind” the president in the months following his inauguration. There are organizations like The Satanic Temple —newly featured in Penny Lane’s 2019 documentary Hail Satan—a “nontheistic religion” and activist group that uses its religious status to demand for its black-robe-clad members the same protections afforded to Christians in the hopes of highlighting the ridiculousness of faith-based exceptions (Satanic prayer in schools, say). There are dozens of Trump-era how-to spellbooks that blend folk magic with activist practice: the 2018 anthology The New Arcadia: A Witch’s Handbook to Magical Resistance; Michael Hughes’s 2018 Magic for the Resistance: Rituals and Spells for Change; David Salisbury’s 2019 Witchcraft Activism: A Toolkit for Magical Resistance (Includes Spells for Social Justice, Civil Rights, the Environment, and More); and Sarah Lyons’s forthcoming Revolutionary Witchcraft: A Guide to Magical Activism. There are hundreds of thousands of users of witch-popular blogging platforms like Tumblr and Instagram, which at the moment boasts 8.5 million photographs hashtagged “#witch.”

And there are the ubiquitous feel-good articles in progressive-friendly millennial outlets, such as Marie Claire’s “This Is How Real-Life Resistance Witches Say They’re Taking Down the Patriarchy” and Broadly’s “How the Socialist Feminists of WITCH Use Magic to Fight Capitalism,” packaging the connection between left-wing politics and occultism as an integral part of the progressive millennial experience. (There has also been an inevitable trickle effect: In late 2018, high street makeup chain Sephora announced that it would be selling a $42 “Starter Witch Kit,” complete with burnable white sage and tarot cards; they later recanted after witches accused them of culturally appropriating witch practice for profit).

As an aesthetic, as a spiritual practice, and as a communal ideology, contemporary millennial “witch culture” defines itself as the cosmic counterbalance to Trumpian evangelicalism. It’s at once progressive and transgressive, using the language of the chaotic, the spiritually dangerous, and (at times) the diabolical to chip at the edifices of what it sees as a white, patriarchal Christianity that has become a de facto state religion.

They have a point. White evangelicals, after all, ushered Donald Trump into the White House. Since 2016, they have been the only religious bloc to consistently support Trump, and Trump has responded in kind, repaying his evangelical base with all-but-unprecedented access to the corridors of power and—no less importantly—with his Administration’s rhetoric. Bastions of Moral Majority-era evangelical institutions—Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, for instance—have dedicated time and money to promoting projects like the Liberty-funded film The Trump Prophecy, which heavily implies that Trump is a modern-day King Cyrus, specifically chosen by God to fulfill His vision for Israel. Members of Trump’s unofficial evangelical advisory council, such as Robert Jeffress and Paula White, have publicly stated that God chose Trump to be President—and that we owe him obeisance as a result of divine decree. Even more secular members of the Trump Administration have leaned heavily on the rhetoric of Christian nationalism. Both former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders invoked Romans 7:1-13—a plea for respecting earthly authority—to defend the Administration’s family separation policy during the 2018 migrant crisis. The White House has consistently used religious rhetoric, in other words, to underpin its temporal aims.

Now, its opponents are doing the same.

Progressive occultism—the language of witches and demons, of spells and sage, of cleansing and bad energy, of star and signs—has become the de facto religion of millennial progressives: the metaphysical symbol set threaded through the worldly ethos of modern social justice activism. Its rise parallels the rise of the religious “nones,” and with them a model of spiritual and religious practice that’s at once intuitional and atomized. Twenty-three percent of Americans call themselves religiously unaffiliated, a number that spikes to 36 percent among millennials (Trump’s white evangelical base, by contrast, only comprises about 17 percent of Americans). But tellingly, few among this demographic identify as atheists or agnostics. A full 72 percent of “nones” say they believe in God, or at least some kind of nebulously defined Higher Power; 17 percent say they believe in the Judeo-Christian God of the Bible. Suspicious of institutions, authorities, and creeds, this demographic is less likely to attend a house of worship, but more likely to practice the phenomenon Harvard Divinity School researchers Casper ter Kuile and Angie Thurston have termed “unbundling”: a willingness to effectively “mix and match” spiritual, ritualistic, and religious practices from a range of traditions, divorced from their original institutional context. A member of this “remixed” generation, for example, might attend yoga classes, practice Buddhist meditation, read Tarot cards, cleanse their apartment with sage, and also attend Christmas carol concerts or Shabbat dinners. They might tap into the perceived psychic energy of their surroundings at a boutique fitness studio like SoulCycle, which openly bills itself as a “cult,” and whose charismatic trainers frequently post spiritually tinged motivational mantras like “You were created by a purpose, for a purpose” on SoulCycle’s social media platforms. The underpinnings of religious life—meaning, purpose, community, and ritual—are more likely than ever to come from diffuse traditions, or indeed no tradition at all.

Within this paradigm, the popularity of what might be termed “New Age” practices makes perfect sense. This umbrella movement, born in the counterculture of the 1960s, combined a variety of anti-authoritarian spiritual practices that stressed the primacy of the self, the power of intuition, the untrustworthiness of orthodox institutions, and the spiritual potential of the “forgotten”—often women. Reconstructionist pagan religions like Wicca—founded in the 1950s by Gerald Gardner, who dubiously claimed it was based on ancient Celtic traditions—grew popular with a demographic that felt marginalized by “traditional” organized religions. Central to most of these movements was the idea that the intuitional, usually female self could access a deeper truth than patriarchal religions like Christianity grasped. Power came from within, not outside. As one influential New Age practitioner put it in her 1982 book Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics:

There are many names for power‐from‐within. . . .none of them entirely satisfying. . . .It could be called God—but the God of patriarchal religions has been the ultimate source and repository of power‐over. I have called it immanence, a term that is truthful but somewhat cold and intellectual. And I have called it Goddess, because the ancient images, symbols and myths of the Goddess as birth‐giver, weaver, earth and growing plant, wind and ocean, flame, web, moon and milk, all speak to me of the powers of connectedness, sustenance, and healing.

Still, throughout most of the New Age movement, the number of actual practitioners of Wicca were limited. In 1990, there were only about 8,000 self-identified Wiccans in America. But in the past few decades, those numbers have been growing: By 2001, there were 134,000, and by 2014, Pew data suggested that the combined number of pagans and Wiccans in America was over a million. Wicca, by that estimation, is technically the fastest-growing religion in America.

But contemporary witchcraft—the kind of occultism we see in Ocasio-Cortez’s star chart and the hexing of Brett Kavanaugh—isn’t limited to those who practice paganism or Wicca as a religion, with a well-structured set of metaphysical and magical assumptions. It appears far more often as a component of “unbundled” religious identity, where it is nearly always wedded to social justice activism. Like their New Age forebearers, contemporary witches understand witchcraft as a practice for those on the societal margins, a reclamation of power for those disenfranchised by unjust or oppressive systems. While traditional New Age culture focused primarily on the experience of (usually white) women, contemporary witch culture frames itself as proudly, committedly intersectional: an umbrella community for all those pushed to the side by the dominant (white, straight, male, Christian) culture. Symbols and images of the uncanny, the demonic, and even the diabolical are recast as icons of the falsely accused, the wrongly blamed, the scapegoated.

“Who, exactly, is the witch,” asks Kristin J. Sollee of the 2017 book Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive—one of the many feminist witch texts to arise out of the Trump era. “She’s Hecate, the ancient Greek goddess of the crossroads. She’s Lilith, the blood-drinking demoness of Jewish mythology who refused to submit sexually to her husband. . . .She’s Joan of Arc, the French military hero in white armor burned by her brethren for cross dressing and heresy. . . .She’s Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teen shot for her feminist advocacy and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. . . .she’s every woman. . . .at once female divinity, female ferocity, and female transgression.” Witchcraft is, in Sollee’s reading, divorced from religious belief—Joan, a committed Christian, and Malala, an observant Muslim, might well have been horrified to find themselves lumped in with mythology’s more nefarious blood-drinkers—and associated rather with a common, countercultural identity. Likewise, David Salisbury—author of the 2019 handbook Witchcraft Activism, which encourages readers to petition the Greek god Hermes to ensure that letters to congressional representatives have an effect—similarly casts witchcraft as the natural spiritual inheritance of cultural outsiders. “Witchcraft is the unconquerable shout at midnight,” Salisbury writes. “It screams to be heard because it is the lighthouse for the voiceless.”

Material witch culture—from books to magical paraphernalia—has likewise changed with the times. Any self-respecting witch looking to combine personal spirituality with intersectionality can, for example, pick up a Tarot deck like the one designed by queer illustrator Christy P. Road, which primarily depicts characters of color, sex workers, and non-binary characters, and is about “smashing systematic oppression, owning their truths, being accountable to the people and places that support them, and taking back a connection to their body that may have been lost through trauma or societal brainwashing.” (There are so many queer-friendly Tarot decks out there that lesbian website Autostraddle made a full listicle of them in 2015.)

While New Age practitioners of the 1960s onward often characterized their practice as unfailingly benign—the karmic “Rule of Three,” which predicted that any negative energy sent into the universe would reverberate threefold on a practitioner, was ubiquitous in neo-pagan circles—contemporary witch feminism rebrands occult darkness as a legitimate, even necessary response to a structural oppression. In one Brooklyn zine, author and non-binary witch Dakota Bracciale—co-owner of Catland Books, the occult store behind the Kavanaugh hexing—celebrates the potential of traditional “dark magic” and outright devil-worship as a levying force for social justice.

“There have been too many self-elected spokespersons for all of witchcraft,” Bracciale writes, “seeking to pander to the masses and desperately conform to larger mainstream religious tenets in order to curry legitimacy. Witchcraft has largely, if not exclusively, been a tool of resilience and resistance to oppressive power structures, not a plaything for bored, affluent fools. So if one must ride into battle under the banner of the Devil himself to do so then I say so be it. The reality is that you can be a witch and worship the devil and have sex with demons and cavort through the night stealing children and burning churches. One should really have goals.” As with the denizens of The Satanic Temple, Bracciale uses the imagery of Satanism as a direct attack on what he perceives as Christian hegemony. So too Jex Blackmore, a self-proclaimed Satanic feminist (and former national spokesperson for the Satanic Temple) who appeared in the Hail Satan? documentary performing a Satanic ritual involving half-naked worshippers and pigs’ heads on spikes, announcing: “We are going to disrupt, distort, destroy. . . .We are going to storm press conferences, kidnap an executive, release snakes in the governor’s mansion, execute the president.”

Bracciale and Blackmore’s language might be extreme, but their overall ethos—that progressive activism demands a robust, cosmic-level, anti-Christian (or at least, anti-conservative, evangelical Christian) metaphysical and rhetoric grounding—has permeated activist culture more broadly. Last month, for example, when pro-choice advocates marched on the South Carolina State House to protest the Alabama abortion ban, protesters held signs identifying themselves as “the grandchildren of the witches you could not burn.” (This phrase has also been spotted on placards at the annual Women’s March). Millennial-focused sites like Vice’s Broadly and Bust have sympathetically profiled the progressive potential of Satanic feminism in particular: One Broadly profile of an LA-based Satanic doo-wop band proclaims them “Feminist as fuck”, while another piece attempts to rehabilitate the mythological demon Lilith as “a Chill Demon” and a “powerful figure with a continued relevance for women today.”

Granted, most millennial denizens of “Witchblr” are more likely to cleanse their homes with sage, say, or practice mindfulness meditation than to cast a curse on Republican lawmakers. But the rhetorical and spiritual popularization of “resistance magic” in the age of Trump reveals the degree to which one of America’s supposedly most “secular” demographics—urbane, progressive millennials—aren’t quite so secular after all. From Tarot readings to spell craft, meditation to cursing, they’re actively seeking out religious and spiritual traditions defined by their marginality—traditions that at once offer a sense of cosmic purpose and political justice against what they see as hegemonic power. These practices may be less established, and far more diffuse, than those offered by organized religion, but they offer adherents some of the same psychological effects: a committed and ideologically cohesive community, a sense of purpose both on a political battlefield and a mythic one.

The scholars Joshua Landry and Michael Saler call this quintessentially phenomenon “re-enchantment.” In their 2009 book The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age, they argue that we are seeing a resurgence in seemingly atheistic spaces of “a variety of secular and conscious strategies for re-enchantment, held together by their common aim of filling a God-shaped void.” The contemporary millennial Left, increasingly alienated from a Christianity it sees as repressive, outmoded, and downright abusive, has used the language, the imagery, and the rituals of modern occultism to re-enchant its seeming secularism.

Followers of Ocasio-Cortez’s star chart, contemporary witch feminists, serious proponents of Satanic feminism, and dabblers in Sephora-accessible Tarot cards alike all share both a hunger for the grounding effects of spiritual presence and a fervent conviction that personal spirituality should resist, rather than renew, the newly waning power of institutional religion. In this, they’re finally following the playbook of their greatest foes. For decades, the Christian Right has been able to consistently mobilize its voters more successfully than most other religious groups, precisely because it raised the political stakes to a battle between Good and Evil, while the “religiously unaffiliated” have consistently failed to show up at the polls. In 2014, for example, “nones” made up 22 percent of the population, but just 12 percent of the voters; meanwhile, white evangelicals have consistently made up a quarter of voters, despite comprising 17 percent of the population. The proliferation of progressivism as a spiritual as well as political identity may well be the unifying force the Left needs to emerge as a bona fide demographic bloc.

Granted, these spiritual practices remain niche, even as their commercial manifestation becomes more commonplace. And their diversity and lack of shared metaphysical grounding —in part a function of millennial unbundledness—could constrain their ability to bring people together. Religious practices defined by intuition, rather than creed, may have a hard time calcifying members into an ideologically coherent group. But the fact that a religious impulse is fragmented and decentralized does not mean it is impotent: The Great Awakenings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not to mention the rise of the 1960s spiritual counterculture, began in just this way. And even mainstream progressives seem to be taking faith more seriously now than in the recent past—Pete Buttigieg, for instance, is quite open about his Christianity. It’s impossible to know where these diffuse strains of pietism will ultimately lead. But at minimum, they suggest that secularization is not the inevitable or even the most logical endpoint for today’s Left. Far from it. Rather, we’re looking at a profoundly pagan form of re-enchantment.

Back in 1992, Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson warned of the dangers of feminism, predicting that it would induce “women to leave their husbands. . . .practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” Many of today’s witches would happily agree.

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In Search of an Advertising Tax

Anyone who thinks that my failure to persuade an author to tackle the international comparative dimension of the rural-urban divide is the only unrequited labor of my nearly 14-year TAI editorship might want to think again. When I pick over the rubble of my failed initiatives, several boulders stand out for one reason or another. But the record for sheer frustration in my editor’s experience has to go to a man who will remain unnamed in order to protect the guilty.

I no longer remember where the idea came from, but I grew curious about the reasons why we do not tax advertising buys in the United States. We tax a great many other services—airline tickets, rental cars, toll roads, utilities, hotel rooms, licenses, financial transactions, cell phone usage—so why not advertising? There sits a multi-billion dollar business featuring a standard point-of-purchase contract arrangement that would be easy to collect taxes on, and here sits the Federal government with a $22 trillion-and-growing national debt about which the Congress seems prepared to do nothing except make it bigger. So this raises an obvious possibility, one would think.

Note that I am not talking about digital advertising, or at least not exclusively about that, which is a matter much in the news lately, especially in Europe. (The French government claims to be determined to tax Facebook’s and Google’s ad revenues insofar as they hover over virtual French airspace.) I am talking about advertising in general.

Being such an obvious question, one would think that tax-and-spend Democrats—some of whom have lately gotten behind the “magic money tree” (a.k.a. Modern Monetary Theory) concept of debt for reasons so self-interested that they really don’t require explanation—would have proposed this dozens of times by now. They haven’t: Apparently, obvious is a synonym for common sense, and we all know what Voltaire said about that. To the best of my knowledge, at the Federal level at least, no one has even raised the idea in recent memory, and with one or two exceptions, neither have the states. Furthermore, before the digital era, not even European welfare states were accustomed to taxing advertising buys. Why?

It seems that various national leaderships came to believe that advertising was good for their economies. Since everyone knows that you get less of what is taxed and more of what is subsidized, it would be unwise to tax advertising because that would conduce to a smaller economy, and you would probably pay a political price even for suggesting it. Indeed, in the tax code here in the United States, and probably also in most European countries, advertising is a legitimate business expense that can be deducted from gross receipts. The way the tax laws are written amount to a subsidy for advertising, especially since they allow for the very quick amortization of the expense. So we probably get more of it then we otherwise would.

The problem with this understanding of why advertising buys are not taxed is that, well, its premise is mainly wrong. When I consulted TAI editorial board member Tyler Cowen, it turned out that he had handy the outline of a lecture, or part of a lecture, on advertising that he gives to students at George Mason. Naturally, I asked him to write up his notes into a short essay; he declined (you can’t win them all). But the outline made sense and enabled me to put a proposition to another prospective author.

Here is the essence. Advertising is good for the economy and for the public weal generally under two conditions: when it provides information about the function, quality, or price of a good or service, and when it is not intrusive. We can make from this distinction a simple two-by-two matrix. On one axis, we distinguish between advertising that provides useful market signals and advertising that may be slick but is functionally useless. On the other axis, we distinguish between intrusive forms of advertising and forms that we choose to expose ourselves to for one reason or another.

So, for example, a television ad that tries to sell expensive cars to rich guys by posing a sexy woman in a slinky black dress near the car—suggesting subliminally that if the rich guy buys the car he gets the woman but otherwise telling us nothing about the car—is worse than useless. It is a diseconomy in economic terms because it misleads by disorganizing the stock of knowledge consumers have about that class of products. It is also arguably in bad taste, but then all television advertising tends to be in bad taste.

On the other hand, we may not be interested in razor blades, cheap beer, or erectile dysfunction medications, but if advertising revenue handed over to a television station brings us a baseball game to watch for free, then we may submit to viewing the advertising in order to get something we want. Sometimes we even seek out advertising in the process of shopping because of the market-relevant information it can provide. A highway billboard, contrarily, is ugly and grabs our attention whether we want it to or not (thanks to our evolved cognitive “novelty bias”). If it delivers useful information as we zoom by it, that’s one thing—it becomes an intermediate case on the matrix as neither economically positive nor wholly negative. But if it’s ugly, intrusive, and has no useful information about any product, service, or price, it is certainly a diseconomy—and an aesthetic pain in the ass, too.

Any scheme to tax advertising buys would therefore have to discriminate among these four types of advertising, one per quadrant of the two-by-two matrix. It would not tax much or at all advertising that furnishes usable market signals and is not intrusive. It would tax heavily advertising that furnishes no useful market signals and that is intrusive. It would tax mixed cases in-between.

As such, it would be part revenue raiser and part Pigouvian tax, designed to pay for externalities and, possibly, re-shape market behavior for the better. For example, economists pretty much all agree that advertising with clear and accurate price signals tends to be anti-inflationary, so more of that would be good. If most of the ugly billboards on our highways were to disappear as a consequence, I for one would not be the slightest bit put out: A lot less of that would be wonderful.

I put all this to someone I trusted to think the idea through. I had spoken with Tyler sometime during February 2014. My correspondence records show that I issued this invitation on February 28, 2014. I tried to make it easier for the author by providing an outline of an approach that would work for a long-form essay.

First, I suggested, establish the scale: How much do U.S. businesses spend on advertising in a given year, and what range of revenue might taxing it bring in? Then, second, I asked him to explain why all advertising is not created equal, basically using Tyler’s two-by-two matrix or some variant of it. Then, third, I asked for a little history, since Austria and a couple of U.S. states had tentatively raised the idea of taxing advertising over the years but had never pulled it off for long. And finally, fourth, I ask him to sketch a proposal for a Federal tax on advertising, it being stipulated that states might also design taxes of their own, and that the states could undertake experiments over time to see what works and what doesn’t. I added only that since we don’t want to hurt small businesses and small ad jobbers, some kind of threshold makes sense—maybe $250,000 per year in gross advertising buys and revenues. Above that threshold, rates could be adjusted/prorated for every $250,000 increment, just to keep it as simple as possible.

Well, to my delight, my target author waxed enthusiastic about the idea, and agreed in principle to do it. There then followed over the next 62 months some dozen or so email exchanges and telephone calls, each one initiated by me, asking when he thought he might deliver a draft, and each one replied to with a plea for more time.

The most recent reply, however, included an element sure to drive an editor foaming-at-the-mouth mad. My would-be author informed me that he had become so deeply interested in the subject, and had done so much research based on my essay sketch, that he couldn’t see how he could possibly shove it all into a mere essay. He needed more time, and anyway now had his heart set on a book. And then he thanked me for having provoked him into studying this fascinating policy question.

This is an argument for gun control. Don’t ask me to explain.

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Frederick Douglass Is Not Dead!

Frederick Douglass: America’s Prophet

D.H. Dilbeck

University of North Carolina Press, 2018, 208 pp., $28

 

Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man

Timothy Sandefur

Cato Institute, 2018, 140 pp., $14.95

 

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

David W. Blight

Simon & Schuster, 2018, 912 pp., $37.50

We take our birthdays for granted, but for Frederick Douglass one of the many evils of slavery was that it denied to slaves that basic fact about themselves. On the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay in Talbot Country, Maryland, where Douglass was born, few slaves, he wrote, “knew anything of the months of the year or of the days of the month,” let alone their birthdays. “Masters allowed no questions to be put to them by slaves concerning their ages. Such questions were regarded by the masters as evidence of impudent curiosity.” Since, as Douglass put it, “genealogical trees did not flourish among slaves” he made up his own birthday—July 14—but found out just a year before his death in 1895 that he was actually born in February 1818.

Not knowing these basic facts was infuriating and humiliating to a man as accomplished as Douglass, who began his life as a slave, emancipated himself, dedicated his life to ending slavery and fighting racism, and became the most celebrated African-American of his time. In our own time, Douglass is enjoying something of a scholarly renaissance, timed with the recent celebration of his bicentennial. Yet the quest to define Douglass—his personality, his political convictions, and his legacy—remains as contested as ever.

Douglass himself was the first to enter the fray, writing three versions of his autobiography. First came his unforgettable Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, published in 1845, which covered his life as a slave and his dramatic escape. As the century progressed, he updated his story with My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) followed by Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, revised in 1892) which dealt with events during and after the Civil War. In addition, he left behind hundreds of articles and two newspapers, the North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper. And then there are the thousands of speeches Douglass delivered, which cemented his reputation as one of the most compelling orators of his time. As David Blight writes, “Douglass worshipped books, cherished contemplation and debate. . . . Words and ideas were the bread and butter of his life.”

Blight would know. The Yale historian, who worked on his 750-page biography for almost ten years, has written what he “hopes” is “the fullest account ever written of the last third of Douglass’s complex and epic life.” It is this and much more. Drawing heavily on his autobiographies and speeches, Blight’s Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom also relies on new material unearthed in a private collection in Georgia, which consisted of scrapbooks put together by Douglass’s son Frederick Jr. These helped Blight fill in gaps in Douglass’s story from Reconstruction to his death in 1895.

While Blight presents us with a comprehensive biography, two other recent books explore different aspects of Douglass as a thinker and intellectual. Timothy Sandefur’s Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man concentrates on Douglass’s embrace of classical liberalism and the Constitution. D.H. Dilbeck’s Frederick Douglass: America’s Prophet, meanwhile, focuses on Douglass’s religious faith and prophetic Christianity.

The effort to pigeonhole Douglass is nothing new. A giant in the 19th century, Douglass’s stature was receding in the 20th. It was black writers like Booker T. Washington, who wrote his biography in 1906, and Benjamin Quarles, who published one in 1948, who kept his story alive. This changed when the Left claimed Douglass as a hero, concentrating on his antebellum abolitionist activities. American Communists of the 1930s and 1940s argued that Douglass was their predecessor, while historian Eric Foner claimed that his uncle Philip S. Foner rescued him from “undeserved obscurity” when in the 1950s he edited four volumes of his speeches and writings. More recently, he has been claimed by Republicans, libertarians, and conservatives. When a statue of Douglass was unveiled at the U.S. Capitol in 2013, GOP attendees proudly wore buttons that read “Frederick Douglass was a Republican.”

All of these claims on Douglass have some grounding in reality. But if Frederick Douglass can be all things to all people, it is paradoxically because his life was so complex—and his full legacy so impossible to circumscribe.

Frederick Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey to his enslaved mother, Harriet Bailey. Douglass was separated from her at birth and saw her only four or five times in his life. He was raised by his grandmother Betsey Bailey until he was six or seven, when she took him to the Wye House Plantation, part of the vast holdings of Edward Lloyd. The head overseer at Wye House was Aaron Anthony—owner of Betsey and her daughter, and, by some accounts, Douglass’s likely father. When they arrived at the plantation, his grandmother encouraged young Frederick to go off and play with his brother and two sisters, who had made the same journey before him and whom he was meeting for the first time, not letting on that he would be forced to stay there. When he returned to look for his grandmother, he was traumatized and inconsolable—she had left him without saying goodbye.

Douglass lived there for 18 months, experiencing bitter hunger and cold and witnessing terrible abuse. But he did, Blight tells us, make “two friends” at Wye House who helped to shape his future. The first was Daniel Lloyd, the 12-year-old son of Edward Lloyd, who treated him as both a friend and a servant. The second was Lucretia Auld, the daughter of Aaron Anthony and wife of Thomas Auld. Lucretia was the first white person who was kind to him, binding his wounds when he got into a fight and giving the hungry boy bread and butter when he would sing at the backdoor. In 1826, she delivered the good news that he was going to be sent to Baltimore to live with Hugh Auld, Thomas’s brother, and his wife Sophia, as companion to their son Tommy. “Going to live in Baltimore,” he wrote in Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, “laid the foundation, and opened the gateway, to all my subsequent prosperity.”

According to Douglass, Sophia Auld, at first “treated him more like a mother than a slaveholding mistress.” She began to teach him the alphabet and was proud of his progress. When she told her husband about the “aptness of her pupil,” Douglass wrote, “he was astounded beyond measure.” Hugh forbade her from giving him any more lessons, saying it was unlawful and unsafe to teach a slave to read. “There would be no keeping him,” Hugh reasoned. “Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world.” Douglass overheard their conversation and, from that moment, “understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.” It was “the first decidedly anti-slavery lecture” he had ever heard. Sophia Auld, he wrote, “became even more violent in her opposition to my learning to read than was Mr. Auld himself.”

Douglass had lost another nurturing maternal presence, and he felt the rejection keenly. Later in his life, he came to believe that it was the institution of slavery itself that could “divest a kind and loving woman of those qualities. . . . Nature made us friends, but slavery made us enemies. . . . We were both victims to the same overshadowing evil, she as mistress, I as slave. I will not censure her harshly.”

Now without a teacher, he made friends with the little white boys on his street and, carrying a Webster’s spelling book in his pocket, enlisted their help to learn to read. He had mastered the task by the time he was 13, thanks in large part to his discovery of the Columbian Orator: an anthology from 1797 composed of speeches, dialogues, and essays to help students master reading and grammar. What most captured his interest was a dialogue between a master and his runaway slave about the merits of slavery, which ended with the master emancipating his slave. The lesson, for Douglass, “was the power of truth over the conscience of even a slave holder.” Later he wrote, “The reading of these documents enabled me to utter my words, and to meet the arguments brought forward to sustain slavery.”

Literacy was not the only thing Douglass acquired in Baltimore, as Dilbeck demonstrates in his exploration of his religious education. There Douglass met free black boys whose families worshiped at the Bethel AME Church, where he met Charles Lawson, a devout black man whom he called his “spiritual father” and with whom he attended prayer meetings on Sundays. Lawson told him that God had destined him for more than the life of a slave, and that he would accomplish great work preaching the true gospel to a people who needed to hear it. To do this he would have to study the Bible. Lawson’s prophecy, though it perplexed Douglass at first, ultimately motivated him to do just that.

At 14, Douglass had “a classic evangelical born-again experience” and converted formally to Christianity. According to Dilbeck, Douglass’s conversion was one of the most important events in his life. He was drawn to “a distinctly evangelical kind of Christianity”—with its heavy emphasis on salvation through Christ’s death and resurrection, and on the centrality of the Bible as authority. However, Douglass did not start out with a favorable impression of the established church. As a slave he saw Southern churches use faith to justify slavery, and he believed that the worst kind of slave owner was a religious one who used Christianity to justify the cruelty he was inflicting.

After seven years, his life in Baltimore came to an abrupt stop, a result of a disagreement between the Auld brothers. Hugh sent him back to Thomas and the St. Michael’s plantation, but things did not go well. Thomas thought that Baltimore had had a “pernicious” effect on him and hired him out to a “slave breaker” named Edward Covey to whip him into shape. After weekly beatings Douglass finally snapped and fought Covey to a draw; Covey never touched him again. It was a turning point for Douglass and left him “with a determination to be free.”

When Aaron Anthony died and his slaves were going to be dispersed, Thomas decided to send the rebellious Douglass back to his brother Hugh in Baltimore, where he could learn a useful trade. Douglass became an expert caulker but was attacked by white caulkers, which ended when Hugh moved him to the shipyard where he was the foreman. Hugh then agreed to let him hire himself out and turn the money over to him, but Douglass was able to earn more than the minimum Hugh expected and saved the difference to plan an escape. In 1838, together with his savings and money given to him by Anna Murray, a free black woman he had met in Baltimore, the 20-year-old Douglass boarded the Negro car of a train with false papers and made his way to New York City. Anna soon followed him there, where they were married. Douglass was then advised by an officer on the Underground Railroad that he go should go North where he would be able to find work as a caulker. Soon the couple were on their way to New Bedford, Massachusetts, a booming whaling center.

“I was now my own master,” wrote Douglass, “the rapture of which can be understood only by those who have been slaves.” But in New Bedford, he was again met with resistance from white caulkers, and so turned to work as a laborer. There was a danger that if he kept his name he could fall into the hands of a slave-catcher, so he decided to change his name to Frederick Douglass.

A few months later, Douglass began reading William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper The Liberator which set his “soul on fire” and inspired him to attend all of the anti-slavery meetings held in New Bedford. He also found his way to the small black congregation of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (AMEZ), where he served as “sexton, class leader, clerk, and local preacher.” There he discovered and developed his talent for preaching, becoming formally licensed to preach in 1839.

In 1841 Douglass attended an anti-slavery convention in Nantucket and was urged to say a few words by William C. Coffin, a prominent abolitionist who had heard him speak about his experiences as a slave and as a fugitive in New Bedford. Standing at 6’4″, the handsome ex-slave was impressive as he told his story in a deep baritone and perfect diction. The abolitionists had never seen anything like him. An editor of a New England newspaper wrote that he could not help thinking of Spartacus. Women were enamored, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who wrote: “He stood like an African prince, conscious of his dignity and power, grand in his physical proportions, majestic in his wrath, as with keen wit, satire, and indignation he portrayed the bitterness of slavery.” Douglass was soon offered a job as an agent and lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.

This launched Douglass’s career as an anti-slavery activist and orator. He adopted the anti-slavery program of William Lloyd Garrison and the Garrisonian wing of the Abolitionist movement, whose platform for ending slavery relied on moral suasion to convince his countrymen to end slavery, called for secession from the South, rejected political involvement including the vote, and considered the Constitution to be a pro-slavery document. For 15 years Douglass made his living on the grueling anti-slavery circuit, recounting his dramatic story while Anna stayed home raising their five children: Rosetta, Lewis Henry, Frederick Douglass Jr., Charles Remond, and Annie. It was difficult work, requiring constant train travel, where he was made to sit in the Negro car or thrown off altogether. At times he met with angry mobs.

Everywhere he went, too, questions were raised about his authenticity. Was he too good to be true? Douglass did not speak in the way that audiences thought a Southern slave would sound, nor did he specify the names, dates, or places he so vividly described. To address his doubters, Douglass decided to write an account of his life. When Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass was published in 1845, it was a resounding success, selling 5,000 copies in the first four months. Though it helped him financially, it also made him vulnerable; the written account would make it easier for Hugh Auld to recover his property.

The Garrisonians suggested that he go to Britain until things cooled down. The 20 months he spent traveling around Britain, Ireland, and Scotland were eye-opening. For the first time, Douglass felt he was being treated not as a black man but as a human being. He also saw that political abolitionism worked; in 1833 slavery had been outlawed throughout the British Empire through their parliamentary process. Douglass was feted by leading anti-slavery advocates in Britain; in 1846, a group of them raised the money to purchase his freedom. Douglass was now free to go home.

Even before he had left for Britain, Douglass had been chafing at the restrictions put on him by Garrisonians who wanted him to confine his talks to his dramatic experiences as a slave and fugitive. He was bored and believed he had more to say. When he raised his desire to publish his own newspaper, they tried to talk him out of it, which Douglass resented. In 1847, when he returned from Britain, he was determined to move ahead with the paper. He moved his family to Rochester, New York, and proceeded to publish the North Star from his basement. Its banner read “Right is of no sex—Truth is of no color—God is the father of us all, and we are all brethren.”

As this motto suggests, Douglass believed in universal rights and felt a kinship with women in their struggles for equality. In 1848, Douglass attended the first women’s rights convention in Senecca Falls, New York, where he supported their list of demands, including the right to the franchise. He was the only black person there; throughout his life he was happy to be called “a woman’s rights man.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton called him “the only man I ever knew who understood the degradation of disfranchisement for women.” Douglass was grateful to Northern abolitionist women for their devotion and support of his cause and in his last autobiography wrote: “when the true history of the anti-slavery cause shall be written, woman will occupy a large space in its pages; for the cause of the slave has been peculiarly woman’s cause.”

Blight explores the complicated personal relationships that Douglass had with the women in his life. Although Douglass did not write about Anna in his autobiographies, Blight maintains that “she was his anchor, providing him with a home and family he never had; she was there for him when he returned from his travels and gave him the stability he needed.” However, Anna was illiterate and a private person, which limited her ability to share in his abolitionist and intellectual work. At different times two white educated women, Julia Griffith and Ottile Assing, lived with the family, with whom he could share such pursuits. Blight struggles to explain these relationships, writing, “Precisely how he justified to his entire family the blatant insensitivity of having [them] in his household is not altogether knowable. . . . What Douglass sustained, sometimes under one roof, was the comforting presence—for him—of both Anna (the mother and grandmother who would never abandon him) and the equally comforting and stimulating presence of adoring intellectual women. . . . it was as though Douglass had a conjugal and companionate mate, and they were not the same person.”

Among his British supporters was Julia Griffith and her sister Eliza, who escorted him around London and the English countryside. When Douglass started the North Star, having had no prior publishing experience, he had trouble managing his new enterprise and making it profitable. Julia offered to come to Rochester to help. She had the skills that the novice Douglass lacked; her father Thomas had worked as a publisher and was familiar with printing and paper sales. She moved in with the Douglasses and set to work raising money, became the paper’s business manager, and wrote a column. Her fundraising prowess was crucial in keeping the paper afloat. According to Blight, she also helped him with his physical and emotional problems. Douglass’s constant sermons and speeches gave him problems with his throat and Julia reported that he suffered from “inflammatory rheumatism” which sometimes put him in bed for several days at a time. He was so distraught over the paper and his ability to support his family that Blight believes he had a mental breakdown, which he would experience again in the 1880s.

Part of this stress no doubt came from the approbation of the Garrisonians, who viewed his new paper as competition for the Liberator. Some of them blamed Julia and floated rumors that the two were having an illicit relationship (which Blight thinks unlikely). They were even more dismayed that Douglass appeared to be moving out of their ideological camp.

In western New York, political abolitionists like Gerrit Smith were pursuing a different tack than those in New England. In 1843, Smith formed the first anti-slavery political party, the Liberty Party. He and other likeminded abolitionists argued that support for slavery or even a mention of it was not to be found in the country’s founding documents, while the concepts of liberty and equality were enshrined in it; therefore it could not be argued that the Constitution as written was pro-slavery.

Douglass struggled to find the right path forward. Sandefur points out that he began devoting “columns in his paper to debates with the pro-Constitution abolitionists.” He listened to Gerrit Smith’s arguments about the superiority of political abolitionism and studied the classical liberalism of the Founders. Douglass, ever the pragmatist, was finally persuaded that if you wanted to end slavery you had to be involved in the political process. In 1851, at age 33, Douglass officially announced his conversion and merged the North Star with Smith’s Liberty Party paper in a new venture called Frederick Douglass’ Paper, which lasted until 1860.

His former mentor, William Lloyd Garrison, attacked him for his disloyalty. He and Anna lost many friends over the split, but it forced him to define what personal freedom meant to him. Douglass answered his critics in his paper, “I CONTEND THAT I HAVE A RIGHT TO CO-OPERATE WITH ANYBODY, WITH EVERYBODY, FOR THE OVERTHROW OF SLAVERY IN THIS COUNTRY, whether auxiliary or not auxiliary to the American Society.” Blight writes that Douglass’s ability “to withstand this public barrage from old friends is as remarkable as it is bewildering.” But this is not self-evident: Was it so bewildering that after escaping from slavery Douglass would fight for his freedom however he thought it could best be achieved?

The following year, Anna concluded that Julia’s close working relationship with her husband and the long hours they spent together had finally become too much. In light of the swirling rumors of an affair, she ordered Julia to move out in 1852. Julia then moved in with other abolitionists, worked with Douglass on the North Star and returned to England in 1855, where she continued to support the anti-slavery cause.

A year later, German journalist Ottilie Assing came to interview Douglass and to ask for permission to translate My Bondage and My Freedom. Their meeting began a friendship that lasted for nearly three decades. She edited and wrote for Douglass’s newspapers, translated his works into German, and attended meetings and conventions with him. Between the late 1850s and 1872, Assing stayed with the Douglasses during the summer months where, Blight tells us, she was “Frederick’s intellectual and emotional companion.” Ottilie was in love with him and viewed Anna as an inferior and an impediment to their future life together. Blight believes that the possibility of an affair cannot be ruled out, though there is no hard evidence.

On July 5, 1852, Douglass delivered one of his most influential speeches to the women of the Rochester Anti-Slavery Sewing Society. “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” was a passionate, blistering attack on the hypocrisy of the country, incorporating both Douglass’s prophetic Christianity and his more recently acquired political abolitionism. Douglass started his speech on a positive note, praising the brave colonists for rising up against British rule and fighting for their independence. You have every right, he told his audience, to celebrate the founding of your country. But, asked Douglass, “Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence extended to us?” No, he said. “The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretense, and your Christianity as a lie. . . . Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call into question and denounce . . . everything that serves to perpetuate slavery—the great sin and shame of America.”

As he had done many times before, Douglass used the oratorical style of the Jeremiad to condemn slavery by using the stories of the Hebrew Prophets who had chastised the Hebrews for their wicked ways and admonished them to follow God’s commandments. Douglass went on to attack the country’s churches, which he called “the bulwark of American slavery,” and the clergymen who taught “that the relation of man and slave is ordained of God,” when in fact it was “an abomination in the sight of God.” He made the case that the Constitution did not support slavery, but liberty. The Constitution, said Douglass, did not offer “warrant, license, [or] sanction of the hateful thing; but interpreted, as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a glorious freedom document.” If the framers intended it to be a slaveholding document, he asked rhetorically, why could no mention of slavery be found in it? Douglass always tried to end his speeches on a hopeful note. Now he reassured his audience that “There are forces in operation which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery.”

Freed from the Garrisonians’ pacifism, Douglass was also rethinking the necessity of using force to end slavery. Douglass was never a pacifist. His experience with the slave breaker Covey had showed him that the only way to stop being brutalized was to fight back. He liked to quote a line from Lord Byron, “Who would be free, themselves must strike the first blow.” He thought that force, if it was effective, might be needed to put an end to slavery. This was reinforced by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required all escaped slaves upon capture to be returned to their masters; the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which granted settlers the right to decide by popular vote whether slavery could be extended into western territories; and the Supreme Court’s infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision.

Douglass had heard about John Brown, a religious white man who was fighting with his sons against slavery in “Bleeding Kansas,” and arranged to meet him. Afterwards, Douglass wrote that Brown struck him as someone who was “deeply interested in our cause, as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery.” They began a relationship, with Brown occasionally staying at his house and eventually laying out a plan to attack the South from the Northern mountains in Kansas. The plan was never executed, but when he came up with his next plan to attack a Federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, Douglass refused to join him and tried to talk him out of it. Brown proceeded with his attack in 1859, and it was the disaster Douglass had predicted. Douglass was almost indicted as a co-conspirator but once again eluded arrest by going to Canada and then to England.

By the time Douglass returned home, the country had turned its attention to the upcoming presidential election in November 1860. Douglass was not a fan of Abraham Lincoln. Although Lincoln ran on the Republican Party platform of banning slavery in all U.S. territories and took the position that slavery was a moral crime, Douglass predicted he would not act on it. In April 1861, when Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter, the war that would end slavery had begun, but Douglass was (justifiably) uncertain if Lincoln’s main motivation was to preserve the Union or to end slavery.

The war would make it a moot question. On January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, changing the legal status of slaves in Confederate-controlled Southern states from slave to free. Douglass considered it a heroic act, if not a sufficient one. When Douglass saw an opening for freed slaves to join the Union Army, he met with Lincoln in the White House to discuss it. Douglass reported that Lincoln was friendly, relaxed, and receptive to his arguments that black troops should be paid the same as white soldiers and that the government should promise to retaliate for any mistreatment of black soldiers. Douglass then spent his time enlisting black recruits, among them his sons Lewis and Charles.

When the war ended, the question remained about what role the freedmen would play in American society. For Douglass, legal guarantees for the freedmen’s rights as citizens were a priority. According to Blight, Douglass saw himself as a “founder and a defender of the Second American Republic” whose key pillars included the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments outlawing slavery, providing citizenship and equal protection under the law for all persons, and protecting citizens from being discriminated against in voting rights on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

The 1870s proved to be a difficult decade for Douglass, though not without opportunities. In 1870, he purchased the New National Era, a DC-based paper that he worked on with his sons and Ottilie Assing, and which he envisioned as a vehicle for black perspectives on Reconstruction policies. Douglass was a stalwart supporter of the Republican Party, which acknowledged and rewarded him for his anti-slavery work and his help during the war. In 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant appointed him to a commission to study the possible annexation of Santo Domingo. Douglass wrote supportive articles, arguing that post-Civil War America would deliver democracy and other benefits of the Second American Republic to the people. When critics accused him of imperialism, he answered that the United States had also annexed states like Texas and California to their inhabitants’ benefit. The proposed annexation never came about, due to lack of support in Congress.

In 1889 Douglass made another foray into foreign affairs when President Benjamin Harrison appointed him Consul-General to the Republic of Haiti. Douglass thought this a great honor; Haiti had symbolic importance because of the 1791 slave uprising led by Toussaint L’Ouverture. He resigned the post two years later when it became clear that the U.S. government was interested in possessing the Haitian port at Mole St. Nicolas. Douglass announced that he could not accept imperialism “as a foundation upon which I could base my diplomacy.”

Disaster struck the Douglasses in 1872 when their Rochester house burnt down, resulting in the family’s permanent relocation to Washington. Two years later, Douglass accepted the presidency of the Freedman’s Bank, created by the Freedman’s Bureau and chartered by Congress in 1865 to help African American veterans and former slaves. With 37 branches in 17 states and the District of Columbia, the bank appeared to be successful, but that was not what Douglass found. The Depression of 1873 had taken its toll, and the bank was in serious trouble with substantial liabilities and few reserves. Douglass informed Congress of its insolvency before depositors lost all of their money. The bank failed in June 1874. Another casualty of the downturn was the New National Era, which had been losing subscriptions and was forced to shut down.

Douglass’s chief source of income at the time was his speeches, forcing him to keep up an exhausting schedule. This pressure eased in 1877 when President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed him U.S. Marshall of the District of Columbia, making him the first African American confirmed for a presidential appointment by the U.S. Senate. It came with a lucrative salary, providing him financial security and enabling him to purchase Cedar Hill, a 15-acre estate in Anacostia. Later, in 1881, President Garfield appointed him the Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia.

Anna, whose health was declining, passed away on August 4, 1882, at 69. Blight writes that in the period before and after her death Douglass “seems to have fallen apart.” Rosetta said that her father was inconsolable and “seemed to feel that she was a protection to him in so many ways.” Answering a condolence letter, he wrote, “Mother was the post in the center of my house and held us together. . . . life cannot hold much for me now that she has gone.” A year later, he “fell ill,” in what Blight thinks was more likely an emotional breakdown.

Two years after Anna’s death, Douglass married Helen Pits, a 48-year-old educated white woman who worked as a copyist in the Recorder’s Office. Helen had met Douglass when she was 14 and he had stopped by to visit her family on a lecture tour. She had been involved in the abolitionist, women’s rights, and temperance movements, and in 1863 she became a teacher for the American Missionary Association, one of the Northern benevolent societies that recruited and financed the “Yankee schoolmarms” who went South after the Civil War to teach the freedmen. Douglass’s sudden elopement with Helen was a shock to his children, who had no idea about their relationship. Helen’s father was so outraged that he refused to talk to her; Douglass, meanwhile, was criticized by the black community because he had not chosen a black woman as his wife. True to his insistence on personal freedom, Douglass answered that God had granted the human race natural rights and among them was “the right to marry whom one pleased.”

The period of Reconstruction had initially been one of optimism for African Americans, but when it ended in 1877, as Hayes removed the last Federal troops from the South, Democrats gained control of the Southern states, reversing the rights and protections that had been promised to African Americans. Douglass, who believed that the right to vote was paramount, denounced laws meant to disenfranchise them through poll taxes and literacy tests. His speeches and writings increasingly focused on the growing violence against blacks in the South, especially lynching.

Douglass began to work with Ida B. Wells on an anti-lynching campaign. Wells, an African-American journalist and newspaper editor, had been investigating and documenting conditions in the South. Douglass wrote to her that “There has been no word equal to it in convincing power. . . . I have spoken, but my word is feeble in comparison.” She told him that his article “Southern Barbarism” inspired her work. To help advance it, Douglass gave her introductions to people who could be of help and financial support. Douglass influenced other young black leaders, among them W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, although he might not have agreed with DuBois’s radicalism and Washington’s willingness to accommodate.

On February 20, 1895, after attending a meeting of the National Council of Women in Washington, DC, Douglass died of a heart attack. He was 77. The next day, despite opposition from the Southern states, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution to adjourn out of respect for him. On February 25, after a small family service at Cedar Hill, Douglass’s body lay in state at the Metropolitan AME Church. Thousands of people, both black and white, passed by. Blight writes, however, that his memorial was “primarily a black-Washington solemn tribute to its most famous resident.” After a four-hour service, his casket was taken by train to New York City, where it lay in state for two hours, then on to Rochester, New York, where he was buried on February 27.

As much as Blight, Sandefur, and Dilbeck agree on Douglass’s important place in American history, they disagree on his primary influence and how the answer to that question affects his legacy. As Blight asks, “what shall we make of ‘our Douglass’ in our own time?”

Sandefur, a lawyer at the free-market Goldwater Institute, argues that the most important influence on Douglass was his embrace of the Founders’ classical liberalism, which is embodied by today’s libertarianism. While Sandefur writes that he does not consider Douglass a conservative, the Right has not hesitated to use his book to claim him as one of their own.

According to Sandefur, Douglass became a “leading champion of the principles of the American founding because he believed that “[i]ts basic principles are that all people are fundamentally free and equal—none the natural ruler over another—and consequently, that each person has the right to pursue happiness without interference from others or from the state.” Douglass also viewed “individual rights in terms of private property, in that a person’s right to freedom is a manifestation of his rightful, inalienable ownership of his mind and body.” Because of this, Sandefur contends that Douglass cannot be considered “a conservative but a radical—a radical for individualism” and this is “also what distinguished him from progressivism or any variety of collectivism.”

As evidence, Sandefur points to one of Douglass’s most popular speeches, “Self Made Men,” which he delivered more than 50 times to African American religious and educational institutions and to Native Americans. Sandefur named his book after the speech but changed his subtitle from the plural to the singular, implying that Douglass himself was a “self-made man.” However, Douglass admitted that in life no man is truly self-made. His goal in making the speech was to inspire his audience by providing hope as well as a blueprint for success. For Douglass, the worst thing that could happen to African Americans after slavery was for them to become a dependent class and be treated as a separate nation as had the Native Americans. To avoid this, he told them that it was essential for them to stand on their own two feet, fight for their rights, and insist on being treated as equals in American society.

To make the case that Douglass was a “radical for individualism,” Sandefur points to his answer about what should be done to help the slaves once they were emancipated. He said that America should “give the Negro fair play and let him alone. . . . Throw open to him the doors of the schools, the factories, the workshops, and all mechanical industries. For his own welfare, give him a chance to do whatever he can do well. If he fails then, let him fail.” He went on to say he did not think they would fail but would ultimately succeed in a country that respected work and was, unlike Europe, “predominantly the home and patron of self-made men.”

Blight is having none of it. A week after Sanderfur’s book was published, he wrote an op-ed in the New York Times claiming that Sandefur was mischaracterizing Douglass as “‘a radical for individualism’ who was never concerned with ‘the interests of the collective.’” The latter was not true, Blight argues, because, while “Douglass strongly believed in self-reliance [he] demanded an interventionist government to free slaves, defeat the Confederacy and protect black citizens from terror and discrimination.”  The freedmen would be safe “only within the state and under law.”

Blight, however, acknowledges that it is tempting to cherry-pick Douglass’s thoughts and actions because he delivered contradictory messages calling for self-reliance or for government help at different times. Blight also contends that while Douglass used his own story to inspire others by presenting himself as “self-made” he was not, because “without many people, especially women (his grandmother, two wives, a daughter and countless abolitionist women who supported his career) as well as male mentors, both white and black, he would not have survived and become Douglass.” He is wrong here, because Douglass had a different set of criteria for what it meant to be self-made, which didn’t preclude receiving help along the way. In his speech on the subject, Douglass defined self-made men as those “who under peculiar difficulties and without the ordinary helps of favoring circumstances, have attained knowledge, usefulness, power and position.” From his observation and experience, he said, “the chief agent in their success is not luck, nor is it great mental endowments, but it is well directed, honest toil.” It would be hard to find anyone who worked harder than Frederick Douglass: a true self-made man by his own definition.

Dilbeck tells us his goal in writing his religious biography of Douglass was “to explain the substance of (his) faith and to show how it shaped his career.” In this he is successful. After Douglass’s conversion at 14, Dilbeck writes that it was the Bible that provided him with the means to address the institution of slavery. For Douglass, “the abolitionist movement epitomized the true Gospel of Christ in action,” and the Bible played a major role in how he came to view the Constitution, because he believed that the Bible, like the Constitution, “was a radical message of liberty and human dignity.”

Douglass never gave up hope or his belief in God. In 1890, when things looked bleak, he delivered a speech called “The Race Problem” to an African American audience at the Metropolitan AME Church in Washington, DC, telling them:

I have seen dark hours in my life, and I have seen the darkness gradually disappearing and the light gradually increasing. One by one, I have seen obstacles removed, errors corrected, prejudices softened, proscriptions relinquished, and my people advancing in all the elements that go to make up the sum of general welfare. And I remember that God reigns in eternity, and that whatever delays, whatever disappointments and discouragements may come, truth, justice, liberty, and humanity will ultimately prevail.

Reading Sandefur and Dilbeck’s books side by side, one can only conclude that both classical liberalism and prophetic Christianity were essential in making Douglass the man he became. Blight’s biography seeks to put both strains into perspective and to reconcile them. He writes that Douglass’s

personal faith no doubt changed over time; the early influence of Father Lawson in the streets of Baltimore, Douglass’s early years preaching from biblical texts in the AME Zion Church, gave way to a widely read, politicized mind and advocate of the natural-rights tradition. But as he employed the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the new creeds of the nation’s second founding against his own country, he never gave up on the Exodus story nor the majesty of Isaiah’s wisdom nor Jeremiah’s warnings.

If Blight cites Douglass’s prophetic Christianity more frequently than his classical liberalism, this is likely due to Douglass’s early conversion and Blight’s heavy reliance on his speeches—tinged as they so often were with the rhetorical tradition of the Hebrew Prophets.

All three books were published in 2018, the year of Douglass’s bicentennial.  Democrats, Republicans, and the President came together that year to pass the Frederick Douglass Bicentennial Commission Act, charged to “plan, develop, and carry out programs and activities” to honor him. Blight, Sandefur and Dilbeck have all made important contributions. Blight writes that Douglass “saw to the core of the meaning of slavery, both for individuals and for the nation, and then captured the multiple meanings of freedom—as idea and reality, of mind and body—as perhaps no one else ever has in America.” Sandefur believes that Douglass was “an authentic genius” who is entitled “to a place among America’s Founding Fathers,” and Dilbeck believes that he “is one of the most important and heroic figures in American history.”

One of Douglass’s contemporaries left perhaps the most fitting tribute. On the occasion of his funeral Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote, “Frederick Douglass is not dead! His grand character will long be an object lesson in our national history. . . . His lofty sentiments of liberty, justice, and equality, echoed on every platform over our broad land, must influence and inspire many coming generations!” Stanton would be happy to know that 201 years after his birth, her prophecy still rings true.

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In Support of David Frenchism

“I still consider myself broadly a liberal,” Sohrab Ahmari told the critics of his widely discussed piece directed against traditional political conservatives like David French. Yet it is hard to see how his argument, which posits the need for conservatives to “fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good,” is compatible with any form of liberal society.

To be sure, the debate about the future of conservatism is a necessary one. Intellectual and political movements need contestation and updating. If cutting taxes and containing Soviet communism were clear priorities in the 1980s, one gets much less mileage out of the Reaganite conservative consensus today, in part because it is silent on the most salient issue currently dividing the center-Right coalition: cosmopolitanism versus parochialism.

The problem, due in part to Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, is that a disproportionate amount of energy on the political Right is being thrown behind a regressive agenda that risks making conservatism toxic for decades to come. Many of the emerging alternatives to Reaganism essentially give up on the project of a pluralistic, open society, and hope instead to “enforce our order and our orthodoxy, not pretend that they could ever be neutral.” This extension of Michael Anton’s Flight 93 alarmism has its roots in Pat Buchanan’s paleo-conservatism, as well as the online “neo-reaction” of Mencius Moldbug and the Eurasianism of Aleksandr Dugin.

While Ahmari is sincere in his travails, others treat all this as little more than a fun intellectual exercise. The Twitter persona of Adrian Vermeule, a Harvard law professor and vocal proponent of Catholic integralism, has effaced the boundaries between debate, trolling, and self-parody, essentially becoming a highbrow version of Charlie Kirk or Candace Owens.

Yet ideas have consequences, including bad ones—and the idea that the coercive apparatus of the state should be deployed in pursuit of “the Highest Good” ranks among the more discredited in human history. At a basic level, it is irreconcilable with traditionally conservative tenets of prudence, aversion to large-scale social experiments, and preserving institutions that work. Nor is this a new debate on the political Right. In 1927, one of the gurus of classical liberalism, Ludwig von Mises, had this to say about those who wanted to infuse politics with a deeper sense of meaning and spirituality:

“Liberalism has often been reproached [that] it has had nothing to offer man’s deeper and nobler aspirations. But the critics who speak in this vein show only that they have a very imperfect and materialistic conception of these higher and nobler needs. Social policy, with the means that are at its disposal, can make men rich or poor, but it can never succeed in making them happy or in satisfying their inmost yearnings.”

It is no coincidence that the new reactionaries praise Viktor Orbán’s regime in Hungary, as well as the Law and Justice government in Poland, which proceeded in their defense of supposedly conservative values by packing courts, shutting down independent media, cracking down on freedom of association, and creating a clientelist network of government-connected kleptocrats.

We are told that teaming up with autocrats and emulating their methods is justified by the extraordinary circumstances of the situation. Everything conservatives hold dear is supposedly under assault by an aggressive, intolerant left. We are told that “Christians and other people of faith” are being “persecuted in America”—and unless conservatives shed their scruples, they will lose everything.

But what is the evidence for such extraordinary claims? Abandoning one’s commitment to the rule of law and individual autonomy because of a “Facebook ad for a children’s drag queen reading hour at a public library in Sacramento” is frivolous at best—and, more likely, symptomatic of deep-seated bigotry. Granted, there is a lot of silliness on university campuses, where politically correct bureaucracies have ballooned over the past decades. But universities have always been hotbeds of political radicalism and are hardly representative of social life at large. And if anything, recent data indicate that the pushback against the excesses of the non-platforming culture has been effective.

True, there are genuinely polarizing cultural issues. But the claim that religious liberty is under assault in America confuses many different things: a rising tolerance towards sexual minorities across the political spectrum (in my understanding an unambiguously good thing), the belated arrival of the “secularization thesis” to the United States, and a number of difficult policy questions that have to do with health insurance mandates and abortion rights. On this last front, social conservatives have seen victories (Masterpiece Cakeshop was a 7-2 decision, after all) as well as defeats. But that’s just how things work in a pluralistic society. Abortion, for instance, involves a conflict between the putative right to life of the unborn, of great value to some, and of the woman’s right to bodily autonomy, of great importance to others. Unless we are planning to purge or disenfranchise those on one or the other side of this clash of values, free societies will always have to balance the two through some uneasy compromise.

If anything, the fascists of the interwar period had a much stronger case for their own ruthlessness because they could point to the dangers of Soviet communism. And although the f-word is overused on the political left, it is difficult qualify the Manicheanism of America’s new reactionaries—according to which society can and should do without uncomfortable settlements between conflicting values—as anything other than fascist. Both the substance and the tone of the messages coming from Ahmari and others tick a number of boxes on Umberto Eco’s 14-point list of the features of Ur-Fascism. The cult of tradition and rejection of modernism are obvious connections between the two, together with their appeals to frustration. We are told that previous generations of conservatives just kept losing, and that technocratic centrism has left behind large swaths of Western populations. Furthermore, “to people who feel deprived of a clear social identity,” Eco writes, “Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country.” Sound familiar?

The new reactionaries’ enemies, like the enemies of fascists, are both weak (fragile liberal snowflakes) and all-powerful (a clique controlling the academia and popular culture). Fascism is populist, as are contemporary reactionaries: “If you’re getting a plurality or 43 percent of the vote, you’re not ‘far right,’” Vermeule says of Poland’s Law and Justice Party.

While reactionaries claim to be “open to heterodoxy—on things like taxes, trade, regulation, health care, and other issues that in prior decades might have been seen as issues where there was only one acceptable conservative position”—on metapolitical questions “[they] brook no dissent.” Disagreements on matters “that determine whether or not conservatives will be able to wield power” are off limits and thus tantamount to treason. Fascism is also characterized by machismo and characterizes life as a struggle. Is that so far off from the calls for conservatives to become “wartime conservatives”?

Like fascism, the new reaction is anti-intellectual. Roger Kimball, a noted Trump whisperer, suggests that “it is time to think about closing [universities] rather than reforming them.” The issue cannot be reduced just to universities’ left-wing bias or to the growing conflation of a large part of humanities with the social justice movement—a subject that deserves a separate discussion. Instead, the problem with reactionaries is that they do not see any valuable role for expertise at all, and are completely unfazed by the vanishingly small number of experts who agree with them on specific questions of public policy, such as Trump’s tariffs, or on the economic effects of Brexit—not to speak of the elevation of fraudsters and hacks to positions of supposed skill.

One corollary of Eco’s characterization of fascism is that it is impervious to reasoning. The only hope for the likes of Ahmari is deradicalization, similar to the kind experienced by Katie McHugh or European-born Muslims who joined Daesh. The problem is that such deradicalization typically occurs as a result of a clash between ideologically driven expectations and reality. Arthur Koestler’s famous book, The God That Failed, provides a famous account of communists who abandoned their beliefs under the pressure of a cognitive dissonance between their ideology and the reality of Soviet communism. For many, such as André Gide, the journey away from communism involved visiting the Soviet Union and witnessing some of the horrors of Stalin’s regime first hand.

One can only hope that, this time around, deradicalization will occur before anyone has to live under the regime the new reactionaries have in mind. Ideally, it should happen before center-Right politics is made completely unpalatable to a younger generation of American voters.

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The European Slide Toward Irrelevance

Elections for the European parliament, regardless of the results, are always a celebration of the EU project. Blue flags with the 12 golden stars are omnipresent when a “European electorate” casts its vote in what is considered the largest election in the world outside India. But the most recent elections are important for a different reason: They are part of a longer trend that is pushing Europe toward global irrelevance.

Two election results in particular are striking, not because of their novelty but because they demonstrate the resilience of certain political forces that are leading to Europe’s withdrawal from the global chessboard.

First, the rise of the “greens” in Europe. While not a new political force, the “green” movement is no longer an afterthought. In Germany it is now the second-largest party, replacing the Social Democrats. These results reflect a continent-wide drift toward environmental concerns instead of “social justice.” Essentially, they show the greening of the Left; the social justice warriors are now climate change worriers.

It is possible that this is just a momentary uptick in the political importance of the greens, driven by fashionable protests to save the planet. Over the past few months, for instance, teenagers across Europe happily joined a movement that invited them to skip school on Fridays to advocate for drastic policies to change the climate and save the planet. Of course, it remains to be seen whether truancy or the planet was the real motivation for these actions. But, in the end, the electoral gains of the “greens” mean that European states will come under pressure to impose even higher costs on the economies by phasing out coal and reducing emissions.

Beyond the added burden this will place on already weak economies, the increased heft of the “green” political bloc will also increase Europe’s (and especially some states’) dependency on Russian gas. Various environmental think tanks, for example, have called for the elimination of coal in ten years in order to meet the objectives of the Paris Agreement. Germany plans to dramatically decrease its reliance on coal in the coming years, and the decline of the Social Democrats (SPD) at the hands of the Greens will reinvigorate the pursuit of this goal. The outcome is that Germany, having already abandoned nuclear energy, will increase its dependence on Russian gas, pushing it toward a posture that is even more pro-Moscow. The rise of the “greens” in Europe, and in Germany in particular, is a huge victory for Russia.

Other countries in Europe, notably Poland, will likely resist abandoning coal for domestic reasons but also because of security concerns. Such a policy will pit Poland as well as other Central European states from Slovenia to Bulgaria against EU authorities, creating another line of fracture in Europe. The choice is to be coal-free but Russia-dependent, or to be anti-“green” but strategically independent.

A “greener” EU will weaken Europe. As Europe cuts its emissions, hostile powers are making it more dependent. Moreover, while European societies are enthralled by the environmentally friendly truancy of their teenagers, Russia is arming, Iran is belligerent, and China is buying its way into the Continent. The“greens” claim they are concerned with global challenges, but in effect they are turning Europe into the weakest link in a rapidly accelerating great power competition.

If the European Union continues on this path, it will slide into geopolitical irrelevance while being at the forefront of a nonexistent global fight to solve global challenges.

The second result of the EU elections is also not new, but striking all the same: Although these elections are ostensibly “European,” they are really national contests about national concerns. They are exercises in national introspection, particular to each state. In the past, elections for the European parliament were an easy, cost-free way for voters to express their distaste for particular national parties. To the extent that they paid any attention to them at all, voters thought of these elections as low-impact opportunities to vent. Thus the fact that there was surprisingly high participation this year (more than 50 percent) does not imply the rise of a European demos. The project to build such a demos by creating a common market and a common currency, and by criticizing those who express deep attachment to their own country (as the outgoing President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, did in a moment of great sincerity), is not succeeding. On the contrary, it has generated an increasingly assertive opposition. Brexit is the clearest and most powerful expression of this reaction against the attempt to impose uniformity on the Continent. But there are other signs, from Italy to France, indicating that there are sizable portions of national electorates that are critical of what the European Union has become.

About two decades ago it was possible to win elections by simply advocating for “Europe.” The European project was the great aspiration, and most political parties espoused greater European integration (and accompanying centralization of power). The European Union’s navel-gazing was grounded in a revisionist history that presented this political project-in-progress as the solution to wars and as the victor of Europe’s 20th-century conflicts. To confirm these views, the 2012 Nobel Prize was awarded to the European Union as the player that transformed Europe “from a continent of war to a continent of peace.” So much for the boys of Pointe du Hoc.

These days saying that “Europe is the answer” to every possible problem—from war to poverty—is no longer an automatic ticket to victory. The electorates are seeking answers to problems that are particular to their nations, whether migration or economic woes or environmental concerns. And more often than not, the answer is not “Europe,” which has demonstrated that it cannot stabilize North Africa and the Middle East, cannot address youth unemployment in southern Europe, and cannot secure its eastern frontier. Those domestic problems cannot be outsourced to the European Union and thus are forcing national politicians to turn their gaze inward. There are benefits to such a dynamic, of course, insofar as electorates are holding their own politicians accountable. But it also suggests that European nations are shrinking their horizons and curtailing their ambitions. The world, with all its revisionist powers and other bad actors, will have to wait.

The EU elections, then, did little to arrest Europe’s long slide toward geopolitical impotence. Each European nation will have to make its own calculation as to how to adapt to this reality: by ignoring it, accepting it, or by seeking its own strategic independence through a different configuration of alliances.

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The Death of the Two-State Solution

Jared Kushner is set to unveil his closely held Middle East peace initiative early next month in Bahrain, just after the end of Ramadan. Though some information leaked two weeks ago to an Israeli newspaper, people with connections to the Trump Administration have cautioned against reading too much into the reports. Shared sovereignty over Jerusalem? All existing settlements annexed by Israel? A Chinese-financed causeway linking Gaza and the West Bank? It might all be hearsay.

What is overwhelmingly likely is that the plan breaks with earlier American peace effort orthodoxies. As Politico recently noted, Kushner sees his lack of experience in the Middle East as an asset, “telling lawmakers he is free of preconceived notions that stymied previous attempts.” Whatever the specific proposals end up being, Kushner’s plan ends talk of a “two-state solution”—language that is virtually sacrosanct among those who have devoted their lives to cracking the Israeli-Palestinian standoff. “If you say ‘two-states’ it means one thing to the Israelis, it means one thing to the Palestinians, and we said, let’s just not say it,” Kushner told Robert Satloff on CSPAN recently.

Satloff subsequently made a strong case in our pages that offering up a comprehensive peace plan in an atmosphere where the two sides are so far apart means near-certain failure. Failure, Satloff argued, not only risks scuppering the longstanding Oslo process that still undergirds an unhappy-but-relatively-stable status quo, but also risks delegitimizing any of the plan’s good ideas going forward.

Like Kushner and unlike Satloff, I am no Middle East expert. And without the plan in hand, it’s pointless for me to speculate on specifics. But I imagine media coverage of the plan is likely to harp on Kushner’s break with precedent in not explicitly backing a two-state solution. Avoiding talk about a two-state solution may well be bad. But having just spent a week in Israel (on a trip sponsored by the excellent Philos Project), I can say one thing with some confidence: Kushner’s decision to sidestep this question accurately reflects a grim reality on the ground—that the two-state solution has a rapidly shrinking constituency, on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides.

That this is so should be obvious from just reading the news. After all, though Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu just barely won re-election last month, his squeaker of a win had little to do with public unhappiness on how he had been approaching the Palestinian question, and his failure to subsequently form a government even less so. On that matter, at least, there is broad consensus in Israeli society today: The stance of the opposition Blue and White coalition on any putative peace deal was not all that different from what Likud has long been pushing. As for the Palestinians, they haven’t held an election in over a decade. Polls, however, clearly show that a solid majority has lost faith in a two-state solution in the course of the last two years.

So yes, not surprising. Still, it’s one thing to know something and another to experience it firsthand.

Among the Palestinians, we heard that younger people were increasingly supportive of a one-state solution. One analyst suggested that the prospect of a “true” democracy in a single state between the Jordan and the sea—a democracy, notably, where Palestinians would constitute an absolute majority—appealed both to young people’s idealism, as well as to their sense of social justice. Time is on their side, they believe. Maybe it’s better to abandon the peace process and heighten the contradictions by forcing Israel to directly govern them against their will.

Young people’s disdain for the existing peace process is not merely philosophical and strategic, a Palestinian pollster explained to us. It is linked to a deeply-felt disillusionment with the pervasive corruption of the Palestinian Authority in general, and Fatah in particular. Their rejectionism is born more of resignation than anger and despair, and Hamas’ radicalism does not necessarily present an appealing alternative. Nevertheless, the pollster cautioned, these numbers are not dispositive. If an election were to be called and Hamas were campaigning, sentiments could change.

The PA officials we met in Ramallah were the only people clinging to the two-state solution as the way forward. They were angry at the United States for preparing to break with two-stateism, and repeatedly invoked the international community and the EU as if they were talismans for warding off what was clearly coming. When we asked about corruption and young people’s disillusionment with it, they mostly dodged the questions. Their frustration with the impending peace proposal was palpable. “You are witnessing the destruction of all the Arab moderates!” one Palestinian official exclaimed at one point.

Moderates? Israelis don’t see any. Among the Israeli analysts we met, we kept hearing reservations about Bibi and worries about where his policies in the West Bank are leading. Many claimed to have voted against him last month, and some were quite anguished about the moral consequences of continuing Israel’s de facto dominion over a large Arab population in the West Bank. Nevertheless, none can imagine granting full sovereignty to a Palestinian state located west of the Jordan River. The failure at Camp David in 2000, followed by the second intifada and the rise of Hamas in Gaza in 2005, we were repeatedly told, had convinced most voters that they have no credible Palestinian partner to negotiate with.

The more optimistic among them still hold out hope for a “Sadat moment”—something akin to the breakthrough in 1977 when the Egyptian leader addressed the Knesset and recognized Israel’s right to exist. If only a Palestinian leader could do the same, Israeli opinion would change over night, they said. Others, however, dismissed the very notion of a Sadat moment as the product of magical thinking: “As if an incantation could make all these problems go away, just like that.”

The paradox is that Israel enjoys an overwhelming conventional military advantage over the Palestinians, and has managed to craft a system of surveillance and control that has successfully stymied the kinds of terrorist attacks that wracked the country in the early 2000s. Despite all that, its military advantage does not translate to a sense of security through deterrence. Palestinians’ perceived intransigence on Israel’s right to exist, coupled with their proven record of waging asymmetric warfare, means that absent a binding promise from a Palestinian leader who can credibly speak for the entire community, there is no alternative to the status quo.

But who is more guilty of magical thinking in this situation—the hopeful Israelis waiting for Sadat, or the resigned realists? The closer you look, the more confusing it gets.

We spent an evening with Jewish settlers in the West Bank who were downright serene about a future where Israel eventually annexes all the territories. Over Shabbat dinner in the settlement of Ofra, a father of six children waved away our questions about demography. Arab Israelis’ birthrates, only recently thought to present a fundamental threat to Israel’s future as a Jewish-majority state, have plummeted to barely below replacement levels, while the ultra-orthodox Haredi are still producing very large families. As for the Arabs in the West Bank, our host told us, there is no reason to assume they represent an absolute majority—there hasn’t been a census since 2007. And if they are in the majority today, there is no reason to assume that they will be forever. It’s true, he said, that there was no question of granting full citizenship rights to West Bank Arabs in an expanded Israel right away. But over time, gradually, he envisioned them becoming a constituent, smallish minority in Israel—as content as, and proportionately not much larger than, the total population of Israeli Arabs today.

Many other Israelis view this possible future with much less equanimity. They recognize that the status quo—which Israel’s electorate repeatedly votes for—is not static. No movement towards some kind of resolution with the Palestinians means Israel will inevitably get more and more involved in running the West Bank, with its Arab population—whatever the size—disenfranchised and increasingly restive. This, in turn, would call for more restrictions on movement, more surveillance, and perhaps more violent repression. If the Palestinian Authority collapsed or disbanded itself, responsibility for governance would fall squarely on the Israeli state’s shoulders. This would represent not only a moral catastrophe, but perhaps an insurmountable challenge. Disengagement and separation, therefore, are imperative. But how to get there?

The majority of Israelis feel trapped, consumed by the problem but unable to imagine a way out. Secular techies living in Tel Aviv pride themselves on not doing politics. Others have come up with ways of easing the friction of Israeli dominion in the territories—building special secure roads connecting the larger Arab cities in the West Bank, for example, thereby limiting the need for intrusive checkpoints. Full sovereignty, however, is no longer discussed. And not only is there no partner for peace right now, Israelis look at the declining legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority and conclude it would be courting disaster to sign any kind of agreement that could easily be abrogated by a future Palestinian government. Israel’s geographic realities—pinched between the West Bank and the Mediterranean—are unforgiving.

The real magical thinking doesn’t have to do with the desperate Israeli hope for a Palestinian Sadat. It’s prevalent among solution-obsessed foreigners—at least those who optimistically believe that a two-state approach will necessarily lead to lasting peace. This belief is rooted in so-called democratic peace theory—the idea that democracies simply don’t go to war against each other. And this, in turn, is rooted in a questionable theory of political change. Call it the Middle Eastern version of Democratic Determinism: Yes, the Palestinian Authority is dysfunctional today, the thinking goes, but just add the responsibility inherent in full sovereignty and some democratic accountability, and you are well on your way to a kind of society that would never go to war with Israel.

Experience suggests the real world is a lot messier than theory, and the path to lasting peace is much bumpier and longer than the optimists care to admit. Let’s leave aside the contentious question as to why the Palestinian Authority is so debilitatingly corrupt today—whether its dysfunction can be explained away as the result of Israeli domination, or whether its causes arise from elsewhere. The sad truth is that whatever its cause, it’s clear that after several decades political dysfunction is a deeply ingrained fact of life in the PA-controlled territories. This matters not only because the PA’s legitimacy is being eroded today, but also because endemic corruption is likely to render future governments weak and unstable. A corrupt political culture has a nasty way of replicating itself, even in democratizing societies.

One need only look at all of the former Soviet republics to see how persistent these problems can be, even with the full weight of the Western international development apparatus brought to bear. Ukraine, one of the more successful of the lot, is still more accurately described as a competitive oligarchy than a true multi-party democracy. It has gone through two revolutions in the last fifteen years, and a third is still not out of the question. Even in former Warsaw Pact countries, where democratic norms have more fully established themselves, supposedly successful reforms turned out to be much more shallowly rooted in society than we are fond of admitting. Once entry into the European Union was achieved for most of these countries, barely submerged old habits bobbed to the surface once more.

None of this is to say that the Palestinians are somehow intrinsically not “ready” for democracy or full self-rule. Palestinian individuals are certainly capable of participating and flourishing in mature democracies when they emigrate to the West. Culture, however, is a sticky thing in aggregate, and is much more determinant than any individual’s beliefs and desires. And change takes time. Meaningful, lasting change requires much more than simple technocratic fixes, and sprinkling “democracy” into the mix doesn’t necessarily make things better. To thoroughly reform political culture, at least one generation needs to die off, and even then regressions and setbacks are common.

Israelis’ pessimism is thus not only rooted in a grim reading of the present, but also in a sober reading of the future. It’s important to remember, however, that this was not always the attitude. As one former leftwing Israeli told me, the 1990s were a decade that exuded a bewitching sense of limitless possibility. Europe was being transformed before the world’s eyes, and the Israeli peace movement drew its strength from these developments. It’s impossible to understand the Oslo breakthrough and the start of the modern peace process without considering the broader global context in which it occurred. But that moment has passed. History has returned with a vengeance. And a solid majority of Israelis are no longer willing to stake what they see as an existential question on unproven liberal theories of democratic political change.

The 1990s were a quintessentially American decade. America is an optimistic place, suffused with that same sense of limitless possibility that leaked out into the rest of the world after the collapse of communism. Americans don’t like to admire problems. They ignore the past and relentlessly focus on the future—on what can be done rather than on what is impossible. This attitude has led to some mis-assessments in foreign policy, but it is also undeniably the source of the country’s great dynamism and capacity for reinvention.

It’s not surprising, then, that the post-1990s sobering that has been spreading across the West has reached the United States last. Chastened by the twin state-building failures in Iraq and Afghanistan—two of those unhappy misjudgments of what was in fact possible—and faced with a cratering economy at home, President Obama began to introduce a dose of steely realism to America’s foreign policy during his two terms in office, albeit masked with hopeful language about the long-term progressive bent of history. He regretted getting involved in Libya, and saw Syria as an intractable disaster (arguably even before it became one). Secretary John Kerry tirelessly shuttled around the Middle East in search of a breakthrough in the Arab-Israeli peace process, but the White House invested precious little capital in it. For all his bombast, President Trump represents a deepening of this same trend, further shifting America’s approach to the world away from idealism while completely foregoing Obama’s flowery talk.

But the dream dies hard for many Americans, especially within the Washington DC foreign policy community. Obama’s crypto-realism caused bipartisan grousing in its time, and Trump’s unrepentant America Firsterism has amplified what was mere grumbling into a deafening roar. The coming fight over Kushner’s peace plan in the United States will mirror the other foreign policy fights that have emerged in the last two and a half years of the Trump presidency. Part of what deeply offends Trump’s opponents is his frontal assault on all the pieties of the 1990s—that he is an outspoken American chauvinist rather than an American exceptionalist. And while abandoning a two-state solution is not obviously an “America First” policy, it is definitely a repudiation of the kind of idealism that has characterized many Americans’ outlook—and their self-conception—for almost two decades after the Berlin Wall fell.

Should Trump lose the elections next year to someone like Joe Biden, we will likely see a return to exceptionalist rhetoric—and, probably, a revival of talk of the two-state solution. The question is whether the talk will be accompanied by any serious change in policy away from the relative circumspection that will have characterized the past 12 years. It’s hard to imagine that it will. Re-enchantment is not easy to achieve.

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