Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 4

When to Leave?

Exile: Portraits of the Jewish Diaspora

Annika Hernroth-Rothstein

Bombardier Books, 2020, 208 pp., $27.00

 

In 1925, the Israeli writer and Nobel laureate S.Y. Agnon published “The Fable of the Goat,” a short story that asks a simple question: When is it time to leave? In the story, a young man and his father own a goat that repeatedly disappears for days at a time, returning with “milk whose taste was as the taste of Eden.” To figure out where she kept going, the youth tied a long rope to the goat’s tail so that he could follow her the next time she left. He ultimately accompanies the goat through a cave to the Land of Israel, and gets stuck there on the Sabbath when he cannot travel. He sends the goat back to his father with a note in the goat’s ear, urging him to join his son in the beautiful new country.

Tragically, the father assumes the worst when he sees the goat return without his son. In a fit of grief, he slaughters the goat, and only afterwards finds the note. He and his son spend the rest of their days apart. The story concludes that, “Since that time the mouth of the cave has been hidden from the eye, and there is no longer a short way. And that youth, if he has not died, shall bear fruit in his old age, full of sap and richness, calm and peaceful in the country of life.”

The animating question in Annika Hernroth-Rothstein’s first book, Exile: Portraits of the Jewish Diaspora, is nearly identical to Agnon’s: Should Jews stay or should they go? In 2013, Rothstein filed for asylum in her home country of Sweden to protest anti-Semitism, yet she has chosen to remain there. In researching her book, she visited little-known Jewish communities across the world—including Cuba, Siberia, and Iran—to find out why they too have chosen to stay in their old countries, and what that means for Jewish life.

Each chapter of Exile focuses on a particular community, combining a brief history of the area with a description of Rothstein’s trip. In the ancient societies of Uzbekistan, Morocco, and elsewhere, many Jews refuse to let go of cultural and religious heritages that seem to be disappearing. Of course, Jews have been described as a stiff-necked people since biblical times, but this attitude has produced mixed results. Rothstein often invites the reader to wonder along with her about the wisdom of encouraging young people to remain in their homelands despite dim economic and marital prospects.

These prospects vary: In the Tunisian island of Djerba, for example, Rothstein reports that the Jewish population has grown significantly in recent years, and around half the community is age 20 or younger. She stayed with a family that included four daughters and an untold number of sons; the oldest sister, 17-year-old Avia, was engaged to be married to a man she barely knew. The community is geographically isolated, strictly religious, and supremely sheltered. They are classified as dhimmis, secondhand citizens permitted to live under Muslim control, but in many ways Djerban Jews are thriving. Some of the young women Rothstein spoke to assured her that they wouldn’t choose to date and travel even if they could, that secular norms seem to ruin communities; many Djerban Jews never leave the island even for vacation. In spite or perhaps because of their cloistered life, they seemed happy. Rothstein was struck by the warmth, cohesion, and demographic growth of a group that had refused modernity and a type of freedom she’d been raised to cherish.

The splintered communities in Uzbekistan provide quite another picture. Whereas divorce and intermarriage are unthinkable among Djerban Jews, one of the Uzbek groups Rothstein met with seemed to have taken the opposite approach. To preserve Jewry in Uzbekistan, self-identified Orthodox Jews have defied rabbinical instructions by making it extremely easy to convert to Judaism. (Ordinarily, Orthodox conversion entails a lengthy process.) Bukharian Jews in particular have a long history in the region and seem determined to maintain their presence by virtually any means possible, including by compromising religious law. They are also competitive with nearby Jewish groups whose traditions differ from their own.

According to Rothstein, the Bukharians stubbornly guard a set of practices that seem confused. In one example, some men used their phones on the Sabbath—a clear violation according to virtually any Orthodox Jewish standard. At the same time, they were offended when Rothstein got up to ritually wash her hands before men at the table had finished doing so—an act that is obviously permitted by virtually any standard. In the conclusion of her chapter on Uzbekistan, Rothstein described a series of trips she’d made with a Jewish guide during which he repeatedly urged her to try local non-kosher delicacies. She would insist that she could not eat non-kosher meat, and he would insist that meat slaughtered according to halal standards was close enough. She was firm, explaining that the details of Jewish law matter, and, as she wrote, it was “obvious that her answer both bewilder[ed] and disappoint[ed] him.” To Rothstein, their circular conversations reflected a broader struggle. By circumventing or broadening the rules to maintain a semblance of Jewish life, Rothstein fears, Uzbek Jews are contributing to its destruction.

Rothstein has observed similar problems in her home country of Sweden, where religious observance has declined for decades among both Jews and the general population. According to the Swedish government, only 8 percent of its citizens regularly attend religious services, and Sweden was ranked the second-least religious country in the world by Gallup in 2015. But on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Swedish synagogues are packed, and the king and queen attend special services to honor the victims. To Rothstein, this emphasis on the Holocaust has replaced religious life for too many Jews. It also obscures government failures to protect its citizens from current anti-Semitic attacks.

Given Sweden’s history, prioritizing Holocaust commemoration makes some sense. During and after World War II, thousands of Jewish refugees sought shelter in Sweden, and this influx dramatically reshaped its previously tiny Jewish community. Sweden’s Jewish population doubled in size between 1945 and 1970, and it now stands at somewhere between 13 and 15 thousand. The inherited trauma of the Holocaust formed the Jewish identity of many of the refugees’ descendants, even as their commitment to Jewish practice waned.

At the same time Sweden’s Jews have drifted from tradition, disturbing incidents of anti-Semitism in Sweden have increased. Over the last decade or so, attackers have thrown dozens or perhaps hundreds of molotov cocktails into synagogues, Jewish community centers, and funeral chapels. In 2017, a Jewish youth club was holding its annual party at the Gothenburg synagogue when three men began throwing homemade bombs through the windows. (Rothstein reports that no one died and that a large fire was successfully put out.) That same year, a Jewish community center in Umea was shut down due to repeated death threats against its director. The Nordic Resistance Movement, which registered as an official political party in 2015 and whose stated goal is to rid Sweden of its Jews, has gained in popularity in recent years and appears to be behind many large and small anti-Semitic provocations.

Rothstein further argues that anti-Semitism in Sweden has taken more subtle forms. Kosher slaughter is prohibited, and there have been repeated attempts to ban circumcision and the importation of kosher meat. These trends have influenced the Jewish community, which counts fewer committed Jews in each successive generation. In considering the future for Sweden’s Jews, Rothstein reflects on the relationship between their Jewish identity and their approach to the Holocaust, and concludes that remembrance devoid of responsibility for future Jewish life seems empty. She’d like the government to do more to protect Swedish Jews from anti-Semitism, and for Jews to invest more in everyday communal and religious obligations.

Just around an hour’s flight away, in Finland, the situation is quite different. The story of Finnish Jews is discomfiting: They have long enjoyed religious protection in Finland, and the Finnish parliament even granted the Helsinki Jewish community a plot of land for a permanent home in 1906. In return, Finnish Jews tend to be fiercely patriotic, and they fought in the Finnish army as equals during World War II—which meant fighting Russia alongside Nazi soldiers. This episode was documented at length by John Simon in his recent book, Strangers in a Strange Land, and it is as bizarre and unnerving as it sounds. Heinrich Himmler visited Finland twice to request that the Finnish government give up their Jews for deportation, and he was refused both times. A German soldier pulled a gun on a Finnish comrade-in-arms upon learning he was Jewish, and a commander stepped in to “make sure everyone knew [he] was a soldier in his army.” Near the end of the war, Finland signed a peace treaty with Russia while Germans were still on Finnish soil, and German troops set fire to Finnish cities as they retreated. Three Jewish soldiers were awarded the Iron Cross at the war’s end, but none accepted. Ultimately, not a single Finnish Jew was sent to Hitler’s camps.

The community remains tiny, at around 1,500 people, but according to Rothstein it is surprisingly stable and deeply traditional. Sabbath services are well attended in Helsinki, and the synagogue Rothstein attended contains tributes to Jewish soldiers who died fighting for Finland in its many battles. The Jews there appear to feel welcome and are free to espouse Zionist views, unlike their Swedish neighbors. This is in large part because the Finnish government has long maintained friendly relations with Israel; in Sweden, Jews are often accused of harboring dual loyalties. Among the places Rothstein visited, Finland seemed the most like America—a modern country where religiously devout and patriotic Jews are permitted to thrive.

Perhaps the oddest politico-spiritual situation for Jews anywhere is found in Iran. Persian Jewry dates back some 2,700 years, preceding the region’s Muslims by around a millennium. Prior to the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the mostly prosperous Jewish population was estimated at somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000. Since then, it has plummeted to around 13,000, as Jews fled to Israel and the United States. The Jews that remain today find it hard to leave.

Despite having taken in Jewish refugees during World War II, the Iranian government aggressively denies that the Holocaust ever happened, going so far as to sponsor a yearly “Holocaust cartoon contest.” Citizens of Israel are banned from Iran, and Iranian Jews who visit Israel for even a short time put their families in Iran at risk. They are free to practice their religion in many respects, and the culture of Iran even encourages certain traditions. But they are closely monitored, and lack many of the freedoms Westerners take for granted. Rothstein reported that one woman quietly asked her to pray for them; others begged her to describe Israel. Yet many of the Jews she spoke to also pronounced their loyalty to and pride in Iran.

It’s difficult to know what the internal lives of Iranian Jews are like—they don’t seem able to speak freely. As long as they remain in Iran, it seems their identities must be shaped by their views on Israel and the Holocaust. In 2007, the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews helped 40 Iranian Jews emigrate to Israel, the largest group to arrive in the country since the Islamic Revolution. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which supports the immigration of religious minorities out of Iran, has also helped a few hundred Jews leave in recent years. But Iranian Jewish leaders have formally denounced offers from Israel to help them escape, and insist they are proud Iranians.

In each country Rothstein profiled, there appears to be some push and pull on these issues: Finnish Jews may publicly support Israel, yet must contend with a past that includes fighting beside Nazis. Cuban Jews are pressured to downplay the atrocities of the Holocaust; after a moment of silence for Holocaust victims during a 2017 UNESCO summit, Cuban representatives called for a moment of silence for Palestinians. Siberia’s Jews enjoy relatively substantial religious freedom, but the country largely maintains the Soviet Union’s narrative regarding World War II, which downplays crimes against Jews. Each tiny group must reconcile genuine appreciation and fondness for its home country and culture with the knowledge that it may not last.

Exile raises some important questions. It’s always hard to know when to leave, and few of us feel an acute, individual responsibility to preserve history, as Jews living in the ancient communities of Morocco or Turkey might. Rothstein saw great beauty in many of the places she visited—ornate synagogues, warm homes—but was almost always left with the question of whether these communities would flourish again or simply continue to hang on. As in the Agnon story, there is a poignant sense of missed opportunity. If nothing else, the book is a blessed reminder of how good religious minorities have it in the United States. It contains quite a number of technical errors, which is surprising considering that Rothstein is generally a superb stylist. One hopes that in a second printing, these mistakes will be corrected, as the book provides invaluable portraits of worlds that ought not be forgotten. 

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Viktor Orban’s Dictatorial Trajectory

Using the pretext of protecting the public space from panic-mongers, the majority in the Hungarian Parliament voted to grant PM Viktor Orban unlimited powers for an indefinite period of time. March 30, 2020 will remain as a very sad day in the history of liberty. The signals did not cease to arrive. The man who, in June 1989, at Imre Nagy’s reburial ceremony, gave a speech that would endure forever in the history of Eastern Europe, who founded the anti-totalitarian youth party Fidesz, whose intellectual mentor was the well-known dissident and former critical Marxist György Bence—this man, Victor Orban, has shifted toward a collectivist authoritarianism with xenophobic inflections.

Many things in politics are born out of resentment. Orban is unmistakably a man of noted intellectual prowess, yet those he perceived as some sort of urban aristocracy—the Hungarian Democratic Opposition leaders, including, first and foremost, János Kis, Gábor Demszky, and Miklós Haraszti—always gave him a strange inferiority complex. He regarded the Alliance of Free Democrats as an exclusive liberal club that he felt he was left out of. Other members of the Fidesz leadership shared the same neurotic feelings. In addition, Orban was attracted to classical liberalism and was distrustful of any form of internationalism, even a liberal or neoconservative one.

Endemic corruption associated with a socialist government radicalized Viktor Orban’s phobias and apprehensions. He started to entertain more intensely the idea of populist conservatism—which in Hungary is difficult, if not impossible, to dissociate from anti-Semitism. The media close to Fidesz (which in the meantime had become an ever more traditional and traditionalist party) excelled in insinuations against those who supposedly did not pass the test of pure Hungarianness. When Jobbik—a downright fascist party—was born, all it had to do was intensify as forcefully as possible topics which were already implicit in Orban’s rhetoric, including the idea that the radical left was somehow genetically constituted.

The Orban team began to insist on a majoritarianism increasingly intolerant of the opposition. The unassailable victories obtained in the elections made​ Orban less and less willing to acknowledge his own fallibility. Hungary has become gradually more provincial—ethnocracy has begun to stifle democracy. What a quarter of a century ago was the superb promise to reinvent politics through a revival of civic liberalism now seems destined to turn into a neo-authoritarian nightmare. Viktor Orban announces that liberal democracy is on the skids. He has taken it upon himself to become the champion of an authoritarianism which glamorizes the Putin-inspired police model and the Chinese “market Leninism.” Those interwar tenets endorsed by the prophets of fascism are being revived. A consistent and “ethnically” healthy body politic is being exalted. Liberalism is seen as rotten, corrupt, and decadent. This is the hour of the “magic savior,” akin to the demagogues described by Erich Fromm in his classic book on the escape from freedom.

What Orban seems to ignore is that NATO and the EU are not only political, military, and economic institutions. They define, as Václav Havel put it, civilizational options. The battle between the open society and its enemies continues. Yet another mask has fallen, which, after all, is far from a tragedy. It is rather a repugnant farce.

We might imagine that liberal democracy is built on a deeply rooted historical and intellectual foundation, but such a belief could not be further from the truth. Before 1945, the very idea of ​​“liberal democracy” was very much anathematized. In times of crisis (both moral and economic), democracy is attacked from the left and right alike. Be it Vladimir Lenin, Georges Sorel, or Robert Michels, the critiques all stem, to a certain extent, from the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and draw on the self-proclaimed image of  the “genuine democrat”.

For Orban, liberal democracy—with all its intermediary institutions, intermediate bodies, and parliamentary games—makes a terrible mess of the final and irretrievable fusion between, as Carl Schmitt explained in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, “the identities of the governed and the governing.” At the core of this “redemptive” political view stands none other than the mythological idea of unity (in this case, one based on ethnicity). In a populist translation of Orban’s political message, the masses are looking for identification. The coronavirus crisis had deepened this existential anguish. His promise, which also sounds like a prophecy, comes to provide precisely this redemptive identification.

What the Hungarian Prime Minister is essentially saying is that liberal democracies are reversible. That the counterpart of democratization is what we may call de-democratization  This, obviously, is not a complete novelty. What is actually new has to do with the metamorphosis of a politician who reached the pinnacle of power as a partisan of liberal values ​​and who morphed into an advocate for the opposite values. Exceptional laws for exceptional times. This was the entry into lawlessness in 1933 in Germany. Coronavirus serves the strongman in Budapest as the Reichstag fire re-enacted.

The post Viktor Orban’s Dictatorial Trajectory appeared first on The American Interest.

The Superpower Remover

The disturbing part of the ongoing developments related to the COVID-19 pandemic is that it has not fully sunk in for many commentators just how bad all this is likely to get. 

There has been much discussion in recent years about the fate of the U.S.-led world order, and about the possible acceleration of its decline in the face of both Russian and Chinese challenges, the waste of blood and treasure in Middle Eastern wars, and America’s political malaise at home. Much like Britain at the dawn of the 20th century, the United States has gone from a virtually unchallenged preeminent position in the world to a defensive crouch. But the debates about the causes of decline today feel like they are from a different era. Today, the United States is facing a pandemic, the response to which is triggering a massive recession. If COVID-19, with disturbing dark humor, is called the “#BoomerRemover” on Twitter for its toll on the elderly, it is also likely to exact a punishing toll on the United States in its role as the world’s sole remaining superpower.

The numbers tell a sobering tale. Before the pandemic began, the United States was already on an unsustainable fiscal trajectory. Before the Great Recession, U.S. gross federal debt (including that which the government itself holds) stood at about two-thirds of GDP—67.7 percent. It jumped in 2009 to 82.3 percent and never came down; over the next ten years, it continued to creep upward to over 100 percent. As of the end of 2019, it stood at 106.9 percent. Before the crisis hit, Congressional Budget Office projections were dismal. The U.S. budget deficit exceeded $1 trillion, against about a $21 trillion gross domestic product.

The situation is partly voluntary and partly structural. The problem begins with the recognition that the United States has been beset by economic stagnation since the 1970s, with each decade showing slower economic growth. Why this is so is hotly debated. Economists such as Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowen see this as the result of the maturing of the economy, with each breakthrough (improvements in electricity, running water, education, internet access, etc.) only achievable once. Others, such as Larry Summers, have revived a Depression-era theory of “secular stagnation”—the idea that the absence of investment opportunities would lead to unproductive saving. 

Whatever the exact causes, amidst this stagnation, and arguably in an uneven effort to mitigate its worst effects, the United States has been intermittently availing itself of a series of voluntary unfunded tax cuts. It cut taxes under Reagan before raising them partway, cut them again under George W. Bush and then allowed the upper income tranche to expire, and finally cut taxes again under Trump. Each of these tax cuts led to, or exacerbated, deficits at the time, which could not be addressed without unpopular or unsustainable spending cuts. 

The structural problem, which was arguably the more serious and intractable, was the inability to recover from recessions and the looming spike in old age entitlements from the aging of the Baby Boom generation. Despite the apparent surplus at the end of the Clinton Administration, the United States was already set up for a massive fiscal shortfall as the Baby Boom generation retired and began collecting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (which pays for nursing homes). The surplus, in other words, was a mirage, though what followed did not help. The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan led to deficits, though these were lower than GDP growth at the time.

It went well, until it did not. The 2008 recession led to massive revenue shortfalls at the exact same time that old age entitlement spending began to increase as the first of the Baby Boom generation began to retire. Even though the bank bailouts were mostly paid back and the ill-fated 2009 stimulus had been mostly unspent by the time the recession had formally ended in the second quarter of 2009 (and was therefore spread out over time), the United States was in serious financial trouble, running deficits of over a trillion dollars annually from 2009 through 2012. These equaled anything from 6 to 10 percent of GDP annually at the time, far beyond average economic growth of about 2 percent. It also exceeded, on an annual basis, the total nominal end-to-end cost of the Iraq or Afghanistan war.

The problem was solved in large part by the famous “sequester” of 2013, entailing across-the-board budget cuts. The Trump tax cuts of 2017, which reinstituted some parts of the Bush tax cuts that had expired in 2013, led to a “peacetime” trillion dollar deficit that the United States was still running on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent recession. It should go without saying that as these debts piled up, they never were paid down. At present, the outlook for entitlements remains gloomy, with funding shortfalls in the trillions projected for the coming decade, even before COVID-19 arrived.

It is hard to know what the total cost of the pandemic will be, but some preliminary estimates can be hazarded. The average ICU visit in the United States costs about $31,000, and some tens of millions of Americans (how many is unknown, but the projections from the Centers for Disease Control run to the hundreds of millions in worst-case scenarios) will be infected. Some of those—perhaps about ten percent, perhaps twice that—will end up in the hospital. A ballpark figure for the medical bills alone, therefore, is in the hundreds of billions. Whether these are paid by patients, the government, or healthcare providers and insurers agreeing to swallow the costs, they represent something like the absorption of 2 percent of GDP’s worth of brand new costs. There will also be a surge in spending—probably paid for in part with taxpayer funds—on basic medical supplies, including ventilators, which U.S. manufacturers are now promising to produce on a World War II scale.

Meanwhile, the productive capacities of the American economy will be hammered. Americans are going to ground for weeks or months. This is a giant hit to aggregate demand—the economy will shrink as nobody buys things—and there will be myriad knock-on effects, many of which are still hard to imagine. Some industries—anything to do with air travel, tourism, hospitality, food service, or live entertainment, not to mention education—are going to be devastated as people stay at home in compliance with social distancing directives. As many as 32 percent of the American workforce of are expected to lose their jobs. How long until they get them back is unknowable, but a year is a reasonable estimate; those projecting an “L-shaped” or “U-shaped” recession implicitly suggest it could take longer. The hit to the U.S. economy may be measured in trillions.

The classic response—economic stimulus, whether monetary or fiscal, intended to prop up demand—is unrealistic, doubly so since in some sense, depressed demand is the goal of lockdowns and social distancing. As one commentator noted, what is needed is not stimulus, but “life support.” The most that may be hoped for is some sort of mitigation to prevent masses of unemployed people from starving or losing their homes, an all-too-real prospect in a country where 69 percent of citizens have less than $1,000 in savings. Assuming that a fifth of America’s 160 million-person workforce are unemployed and need (conservatively) $10-20,000 a year to avoid this (assuming a poverty level of $12,750 per individual or $24,500 per family), the cost will be about a third of a trillion dollars. In practical terms, it will probably be several times that.

Various measures have been proposed. The U.S. Congress has just passed a $2 trillion stimulus bill, including broad-based unemployment benefits and a $1,200 stimulus check to each adult citizen, along with a variety of industry subsidies. More will be needed. (A more ambitious program that honestly accounts for the true cost of the entire economy losing a year’s income was proposed by the financial journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin. The plan would involve a “bridge loan” by the government to all American workers and businesses that could be repaid over time. Setting up the “life support” this way would mitigate the cost to the government and effectively pass it on to the public as a delayed tax increase. So far, there has been little interest in such an approach.)

But ultimately, how the COVID-19 recession is paid for—through government borrowing or through measures like the suspension of mortgage and rent payments—is beside the point. What Americans don’t take in in revenue will not go to the government in tax revenue either. The Great Recession, after all, led to deficits of over a trillion dollars a year. Regardless of precisely what form stimulus, relief, or simple revenue shortfalls take, the United States is in for running shortfalls at least that great now.

Overall, then, the least that can be expected is that the United States will spend several trillion dollars in total—about ten percent of GDP—handling the coronavirus and its fallout. But it is as likely, given where the United States is starting and what happened in the last recession, that federal debt will rise by trillions more. A debt-to-GDP ratio of 150 percent a few years from now is not hard to imagine.

Facing this much economic damage, the United States also faces a threat to its power and security, and the world order on which its security depends. Even as it looks to its citizens’ welfare at home, the United States must be cognizant of the national security challenge that the pandemic and recession pose.

On this point, it is important to recall that American global hegemony rests on its unparalleled ability to project force abroad. That ability is sure to be tested going forward. The U.S. defense budget will have to end up on the chopping block—if not now, then in the coming years when deficits really start to soar. At the moment, the United States is spending about $686 billion on defense annually, and $375 billion to service the national debt. The second is already projected to overtake the first. COVID-19 will no doubt accelerate this trend.

The entire U.S. alliance network, by which the United States has historically led the world, depends on the perceived ability of the United States to respond militarily if an ally gets in trouble. A blow to U.S. credibility in this area can bring the entire system down. If a NATO ally is attacked and the United States does not respond, NATO ceases to be credible and probably falls apart (and takes the EU with it). Similarly, if any of the countries along the First Island Chain—Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, or the Philippines—are attacked, and the United States does not respond, those states will quickly make their peace with China. If credible doubts about the United States’ ability to do any of the above emerge, serious strategic realignments could well break out across the world.

It is unclear where the breaking point is, but the numbers have not been moving in the United States’s favor. The U.S. Navy has been planning to deploy 355 ships as a (probably inadequate) measure to counter China’s growing fleet; as a popular naval blogger recently noted, a fraction of that number now looks optimistic. Similar statements could be made about efforts to modernize the Air Force or to retool the Army. In any case, the incentives are there for China, and perhaps even Russia, to test the boundaries of America’s already-wavering resolve and to undermine the credibility of U.S. security guarantees. We should expect more provocations if the United States visibly weakens.

Americans can and should start thinking hard about what we can do to mitigate this looming catastrophe. It is important to state outright, however, that any plans that demand the country sacrifice civilian lives in the service of American “power” and “greatness,” however those are construed, are non-starters. The pandemic is real, and it must be faced head on, costs notwithstanding. The first priority must be to save the lives of as many of our fellow citizens as possible, and to preserve Americans’ concern for one another. Our civil society was already badly fraying before COVID-19 hit us; becoming the country that threw millions of its citizens under the bus in a futile effort to preserve productivity will be a death blow.

On the fiscal front, therefore, there is only so much that can be done, but that is all the more reason to be careful. But the United States should, at the very least, avoid wasting money where it can help it. It needs to route bailout money toward those most in need, avoiding spending on those who can survive on their own. Industry bailouts, if needed, should be structured as loans; if exceptions need to be made for airlines and other industries that constitute critical economic and national security infrastructure, these can be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. 

The United States also needs to be mindful that its greatest geopolitical adversary, China, is also one of its greatest creditors, and, despite historically needing (until very recently, at least) to purchase U.S. debt for structural economic purposes, has also shown a willingness to use international credit markets for purely political purposes. Debt, while inevitable, must also be treated as a vulnerability best minimized. This is particularly true amidst efforts by U.S. rivals to partially replace the dollar as the global reserve currency, which could have severe implications for U.S. borrowing rates and the general economy.  

In the foreign policy area, the United States can cut back where it can. For example, the withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan, if it can be effected, will open up political and military options. A long-overdue look into wasteful defense procurement could mitigate some of the effects of likely future defense cuts and spur innovation. And a little leadership—even just in the form of token aid in these horrific times—would also reassure allies that the United States, for all its internal turmoil, is still present. At the moment, China is providing aid to U.S. allies and waging a propaganda battle even as it covers up its role in the pandemic’s start. The soft power aspects of U.S. leadership must equally be attended to with what little the United States can spare. 

Conspiracy theories about COVID-19 being a bioweapon have been debunked. But if you wanted to design a weapon to accelerate America’s decline as a global superpower, it would look like COVID-19. If we want to be the leader of the free world—if we want there to be a free world—we are going to have to be careful about how we manage the plague of our era.

The post The Superpower Remover appeared first on The American Interest.

A Short History of Decline

There are a particular Gang of Sodomitical Wretches in this Town, who call themselves the Mollies, and are so far degenerated from all masculine Deportment, or manly Exercises, that they rather fancy themselves Women, imitating all the little vanities that Custom has reconcil’d to the Female Sex, affecting to Speak, Walk, Tattle, Curtsy, Cry, Scold, and mimick all Manner of Effeminacy, that ever has fallen within their several observations; not omitting the Indecencies of lewd Women, that they may attempt one another by such immodest Freedoms to commit those odious Bestialities, that ought for ever to be without a Name.

So wrote Edward Ward, a sort of Morpheus Manfred of the 18th century, in A Compleat and Humorous Account of All the Remarkable Clubs and Societies in the Cities of London and Westminster, the seventh edition of a tract first published in 1709. Ward’s polemic seemed particularly apropos to the 1750s, capturing the public mood of imperial and national decline increasingly attributed to the decadence of elite society, a corrupt oligarchy and a foreign-born monarch. Moral panic and the fear of effeminate excess gripped much of the British political nation; John Bull recoiled in disgust from Ward’s “Mollies Club”—although that was also an emotion he reveled in—those “womanly men” who gathered on a pretext of “the Promotion of Trade,” but in fact for “a promiscuous Encouragement of Vice, Faction, and Folly, at the unnecessary Expense of that Time and Money, which might better be . . . spent with much more Comfort in their several families.”

The fear of geopolitical decline and social decadence has been a periodic theme in the West, in Great Britain and the United States, especially during “post-war” eras. The Roaring 1920s framed the popularity of Oswald Spengler, whose obtuse reasoning and prose “style” might be otherwise unaccountable. The Red Scare of the 1950s saw the publication of James Burnham’s jeremiads against liberalism, and now the post-Cold War Time of Trump is coincident with not only a large body of declinist literature and a sense that material interests trump political ideology, but a rising anxiety that liberalism has devolved into social and moral decadence and a loss of virtue—especially manly virtue. In each case, concerns about geopolitical weakness have coincided with the blurring of traditional gender roles and identities, reflecting—and perhaps in some way creating—a broader sense of political, strategic, social and cultural panic. 

Panic that, as we shall see, was often unfounded.

The Effeminate Years

Gendered fears of decline were at the forefront of the British politics of the 1750s. The Anglican priest, playwright and essayist John Brown was even more appalled than Ward had been. In 1757, his popular pamphlet An Estimate of Manners and Principles of the Times—it was so popular that Brown, who died in 1766, has forever since been best known as John “Estimate” Brown—described “so important and alarming” an apocalyptic state of affairs “rolling to the Brink of a Precipice that must destroy us.” 

As Declan Kavanagh has shown in his recent study titled The Effeminate Years, the cause was a cultural collapse brought on by the blurring of gender distinctions. Men were “sunk into Effeminacy” and, perhaps worse, women had “advanced into Boldness.” This degeneracy had been insinuating itself into British life during the course of the Hanoverian regime and the long dominance of the Whig party of Robert Walpole and his successors, sapping the roast-beef-and-liberty patriotism of England. 

“Effeminate minds cannot contain public spirit or Love of our Country,” wrote Brown. The combination of Continental, even “Oriental” despotism—for the Hanoverian element in London was often likened to a louche Persian court—with rising urbanity was reducing Britons to a “vain, luxurious and selfish Effeminacy.” Indeed, Brown suggested that the growth of trade and more sophisticated finance that was undercutting the leadership of the traditional landed nobility also was undercutting the national tradition of manliness and martial fervor. Yes, the commercial community had contributed “loyal subscriptions” to help put down the Jacobite uprising of 1745, but “This is weak reasoning: for will not cowardice, at least as soon as courage, part with a shilling or a pound to avoid danger? The capital question therefore still remains, ‘Not who shall pay, but who shall fight?’”

With the onset of the Seven Years’ War, the truth of this critique appeared self-evident. Thanks an unknown and wet-behind-the-ears Virginia colonial militia colonel, George Washington, who could neither control his Iroquois auxiliaries when they ambushed and scalped French troops in the Ohio River backcountry nor understand the terms of surrender he signed shortly thereafter, the British had in 1754 blundered unprepared into an unwanted, but soon to be worldwide, war. In an attempt to get this strategic toothpaste back into the tube while still securing the American frontier, in 1755 the British government sent Maj. Gen. Edmund Braddock and two regiments of British regulars to intimidate the inland Indian tribes and drive the French back to Canada. The subsequent “Massacre on the Monongahela” of July—during which Washington rode at Braddock’s side—provided lurid tales of scalpings, cannibalism, and disaster that the English press milked for every penny. 

Worst of all was the failure, in 1756, of Admiral John Byng to relieve the embattled British garrison on the Mediterranean island of Minorca. Formal declarations of war had barely been issued when a French amphibious force landed on the island, surprising both the small British force there and the government in London. Byng’s small and poorly prepared squadron was hurriedly dispatched in May to drive off the French fleet and to reinforce and resupply the Minorca post. But by the time he arrived, the French had put thousands of troops ashore and opened a siege of the British fort. On May 20, Byng attacked the French at sea. The opposing forces were roughly equal, but Byng’s strict adherence to the Royal Navy’s rigorous “fighting instructions” to attack in line of battle, and his subsequent caution in the aftermath of the bloody initial exchange that allowed the French to draw off out of range, smacked of excessive caution. He neither pursued the French nor relieved the garrison—which, by heroic contrast, held out until the last extremity—but instead withdrew to the safety of Gibraltar to lick his wounds.

As the historian Brendan Simms has written, “A profound sense of paranoia and unease now gripped not only popular opinion but much of the political nation. Britain had been defeated not just on land but in her own element: at sea.” Britons no longer ruled the waves, with the inevitable result, made plain in broadsheet verse: 

And when to the French you’ve lost your Trade

Soon to the French Slaves, vile Slaves you’ll be made. 

Another declared that the British had become a “nation of Harlequins,” too effeminate—too Frenchified—to defeat the French. Another still attacks the weakness of the British government:

Trulls, toupees, trinkets, bags, brocades, and lace

A flaunting form, and a fictitious face

It was unthinkable that the foppish French could go toe-to-toe with the British navy in a fair fight. The only explanation for such an ignominious defeat would be an “ostentatious and voluptuous” gentleman captain. Even before the Minorca expedition, London newspapers had begun to revive this trope. The Monitor observed that, trapped ashore, officers had started to “display their effeminate capacities in balls and masquerades.” Nor could John “Estimate” Brown resist the temptation to comment:

[I]t would be ill-taken, to suppose, that the fashionable and prevailing manners not abound in the Army and Navy. The Gentlemen of these professions are even distinguished by their taste in dress, their skills at play, their attendance, provided it be but fashionable. And sure it must be by miracle, if this trifling and effeminate life conduct them to knowledge or produce capacity.

Minorca, in this reading, was no more than an accident waiting to happen, and poor John Byng was made for his role. He was a sociable sort, the son of a peer, and a client of Baron George Anson, now First Lord of the Admiralty. Though just moderately successful in his command career, he had nonetheless amassed a small fortune, including works of art and fine china, then very much in vogue. He was a member of Parliament from 1754, and, in his vanity, regularly sat for portraits. In London he owned a house in Mayfair and had begun work on a country estate. Pointed in the right direction by the Newcastle ministry, the popular press piled on. “Was he afraid of the smell of gunpowder, or did he love the touch of gold?” asked the Gentlemen’s Magazine. The campaign against Byng culminated in the poem Admiral Byng and the Elysian Shades, which conjured the ghost of his heroic father Admiral George Byng, to chastise him for his unmanliness:

Arriv’d at manhood, when did you display

Of martial sunshine even a single ray?

Effeminate and soft you tripp’d along,

Some Molly still the burden of your song…

With skin and downy hands as white as milk,

Ton’d thy affected voice as soft as silk

Your dress, the emblem of your fripp’ry mind,

Was for Farinelli too refin’d.

How delicately showed your morning hours,

Midst Tulips, richlesses, and senseless flowers!

Drest in a gown, loose dangley, sad mishap!

In red-heeled slippers and en-ribboned cap,

You wanted a hoop, or a little more

A cardinal perhaps or a pompadour

To make you downright woman . . .

“Farinelli” was the stage name of Carlo Maria Michelangelo Nicola Broschi, one of the greatest Italian singers in opera history, and a castrato with a soprano’s range. It is hard to imagine a more devastating attack on Byng’s masculinity. He was court-martialed, and—perhaps from a guilty conscience—appealed to the King for clemency. On March 14, 1757, a squad of Royal Marines shot Byng dead on the quarterdeck of the HMS Monarch.

The fury that erupted in the 1750s and vented itself on the unfortunate Admiral is thus best understood as the culmination of a long-brewing crisis of British domestic and imperial politics, society and culture, fueled also by an extreme and extremely rigid partisan divide. Dispossessed of power by a Hanoverian regime nervous about its own status, the Tories came increasingly to doubt the legitimacy of a governing class that excluded them. Endlessly entangled abroad and addicted to the stock-jobbing riches that flowed from debt-propelled militarism in service to foreign interests, the traditional, benevolent, agrarian, native and natural social order of Old England had sunk into cultural decadence, producing government corruption and geopolitical retreat. The heart and measure of the matter were the disruption of traditional gender roles. Women had grown too bold and men—including, horror of horrors, the Royal Navy—grown effeminate. The rot at home made for weakness before the larger world. And salvation and imperial restoration could only come with the ascent of a patriarchal and patriotic monarch, who would banish the plague of partisanship—along with the proscription of Tories—and revive civic virtue and love of the common good. Only thus could Great Britain be made great again.

Decline & Decadence Revisited

“I wouldn’t go to war with you people. You’re a bunch of dopes and babies.”

So said President Donald Trump to Defense Secretary James Mattis, the assembled Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on July 17, 2017. Trump has yet to execute any officers on the quarterdeck, and the commander-in-chief’s preferred “locker-room” mode of rhetoric is less elegant than that of John “Estimate” Brown. But he’s clearly not afraid to insult the manhood of his senior diplomatic adviser and generals. The Trumpian moment is also clearly one of late-stage declinism, seeming social decadence and red-pill revanche that rings with the echo of the clanging bells of the 1750s. And now, as then, perhaps loudest in the cacophony of complaint is the note of gender anxiety. Trump, whose public persona reflected a nationalistic and atavistic response, stands as the complainer-in-chief against the loss of the traditional social order, and the champion of its return.

The rise of “declinism” and the growing sense of cultural decadence over recent decades have been nothing short of meteoric. The collapse of the Soviet empire and the resulting end of the Cold War may have taken American elites by surprise, but they quickly engendered an almost shameless triumphalism. As early as September 1990, essayist Charles Krauthammer declared that the post-Soviet era was a “unipolar moment. . . . The center of world power is the unchallenged superpower, the United States, attended by its Western allies.” Yale historian Paul Kennedy, originally known as the Cassandra of the great powers, in 2002 described the United States as “The Greatest Superpower Ever.” He began the piece with a near-erotic meditation on the U.S. Navy’s large-deck aircraft carriers and overall military might, and concluded it thus:

Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power; nothing. I have returned to all of the comparative defense spending and military personnel statistics over the past 500 years that I compiled in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, and no other nation comes close. The Pax Britannica was run on the cheap, Britain’s army was much smaller than European armies, and even the Royal Navy was equal only to the next two navies —right now all the other navies in the world combined could not dent American maritime supremacy. Charlemagne’s empire was merely Western European in its reach. The Roman empire stretched farther afield, but there was another great empire in Persia, and there was a larger one in China. There is, therefore, no comparison.

But as early as 1992, in The End of History and the Last Man, political scientist Francis Fukuyama went a step beyond, asserting not simply that the post-Cold-War, American-led order was durable and uniquely historically and globally dominant, but that humanity was no longer able to conceive of a viable alternative to democratic capitalism. This Whiggish and progressive paradigm reigned supreme; even China—which remained a rigid one-party state and seethed with centuries of resentment at the West—was regarded as a potential “responsible stakeholder” in the world America had made. Still, even with such large loose ends to be tied, history, in the Hegelian, ideological sense, had ended.

This spirit animated both the Clinton and, especially, the George W. Bush Administrations. Clinton couldn’t “stop thinking about tomorrow,” sure that it would be “better than before” and seemed pleased that “Yesterday’s gone!” In the wake of the September 11, 2001 al-Qaeda attacks and the initial successes in Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush transformed himself from a “compassionate conservative” promising a “humble” foreign policy to a man who aspired to the “greatest achievements in the history of freedom.” These he sketched in his second Inaugural Address. “We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom,” he declared. “We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in the dark places, the longing of the soul. . . . History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty.” 

To be sure, this triumphalism from the start had its discontents; as Fukuyama completed his zeitgeist-defining work, the French-American cultural critic Jacques Barzun was publishing his bestseller, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, arguing that, while Western modernity had resoundingly defeated its ideological competitors it had run its course over the five centuries from the Renaissance to the end of the Cold War. It described decadence as a “falling off.”

It implies in those who live in such a time no loss of energy or talent or moral sense. On the contrary, it is a very active time, full of deep concerns, but particularly restless, for it sees no clear lines of advance. The loss it faces is that of Possibility. The forms of art as of life seem exhausted, the stages of development have been run through. Institutions functioned painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result. Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.

Another refugee from Europe to America, the Hungarian-born historian John Lukacs, saw a similar falling off of a civilization, a cultural arc coming full circle. His 2002 meditation At the End of an Age described an exhaustion in our notions of progress, of history itself, of science, on the limitations of knowledge and, finally, how we understand our place in the universe. Lukacs’ cosmic and quietly Christian confessional reflection is a succinct encapsulation of the fin-d’une-ère frame of mind: “It is due to our present historical and mental condition that we must recognize, and proceed from not at all a proud but from a very chastened view of ourselves, of our situation, and of our thinking—at the center of our universe.”

Most recently, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has sounded a similar note. In The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success, he characterizes “late-modern civilization as a treadmill rather than a headlong charge.” Like Barzun, Douthat acknowledges what appears to be the frenetic pace of early 21st-century life, but the whirring treadmill masks a slowing of the kind of change that “really counts: growth and innovation, reform and revolution, aesthetic reinvention or religious ferment.” As he looks about the modern world and sees meritocratic elites, the columnist sees “the last of a series, without a clear sense of what comes next.” The good news—sort of—is that the material progress of the previous centuries has been so great that it inoculates us against a too rapid or violent unraveling; we can remain comfortably numb for some time to come.

As in the mid-18th century, the sense of cultural decadence dances in step with geopolitical decline. This is especially evident in the writings of the “realist” school of international relations, which posit a naturally-occurring balance of power whereby states are reluctant to entrust their security and sovereignty to the mercies of others. But by the end of the second Bush term, as Iraq turned from a swift “mission accomplished” to a grinding counterinsurgency and a financial crisis sparked a global recession, even the previously-bullish Paul Kennedy doubted the staying power of history’s greatest superpower. The theme of “imperial overstretch,” the central thesis of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, again dominated his mind; in a 2009 column in The Wall Street Journal he reckoned that “American Power Is on the Wane.”

The rapid growth that has made East Asia the dynamo of the international economy—in combination with the economic lethargy of Western Europe—and the rise of China as a global, great-power competitor have reinforced the notion of American relative decline. The Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani has long argued “The Case Against the West” and that the 21st century is an “Asian Century.” Beyond what he calls the “ridiculous” invasion of Iraq, Mahbubani sees a general loss of geopolitical “competence” in the West and a corresponding rise in Asian competence not only in handling “regional” but “global” challenges such as climate change. Mahbubani, too, sees the prospect of decadence in decline. In sum, the West is the past and now a problem, Asia is the future and the solution. “Are there domestic structural reasons that explain this?” he asks. “Have Western democracies been hijacked by competitive populism and structural short-termism, preventing them from addressing long-term challenges from a broader global perspective?”

But perhaps the most enthusiastic decadent-declinists are Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin. For the past decade, a central element in Putin’s campaign to legitimize his rule has been that the American-made political order is obsolete: Liberalism has “outlived it purpose,” he recently repeated to Britain’s Financial Times. At the most recent congress of the Chinese Communist Party, the state-owned Xinhua news agency “reported” that “the Western model is showing its age.”

It is high time for profound reflection on the ills of a doddering democracy which has precipitated so many of the world’s ills and solved so few. If Western democracy is not to collapse completely it must be revitalized, reappraised, and rebooted. . . . The Chinese system leads to social unity rather than the divisions which come as an unavoidable consequence of the adversarial nature of Western democracy today. Endless political backbiting, bickering, and policy reversals, which make the hallmarks of liberal democracy, have retarded economic and social progress and ignored the interests of most citizens.

Perhaps not surprisingly, these two dictatorial strongmen have won, among a growing number of Western conservatives—and President Trump—a kind of admiration that is far from grudging. Speaking at the Davos forum of world leaders, the President has declared he and Xi “love each other” and “will always be friends.” The venerable Pat Buchanan, the original conservative culture warrior, writes in The American Conservative, a publication now in the forefront of the Trump-era conservative movement, that Putin is getting a bum rap. “He is no Stalin, no Communist ideologue,” explains Buchanan, “but rather a Russian nationalist who seeks the return of her lost peoples to the Motherland, and, seeing his country as a great power, wants NATO out of his front yard.” Tellingly, Buchanan praises Putin’s attacks on “the excesses of multiculturalism and secularism,” particularly the West’s increasingly tolerant attitudes on homosexuality and gender identity. Asks Putin and approves Buchanan: “Have we forgotten that all of us live in a world based on Biblical values?”

Bold Women & Effeminate Men

In their disgust at the decadence of American and Western society and culture and the geopolitical fatalism that accompanies it, 21st-century conservatives are taking on a distinctly Tory aroma. They similarly yearn for a return to tradition in all things, but particularly in religion, social morals, and the exercise of national sovereignty. They admire strong, manly, and patriarchal leaders—not just for autocracies but for democracies, men like Trump and the emerging populists of Eastern Europe. As the critic Camille Paglia first observed during the 2016 election, “Trump’s fearless candor and brash energy feel like a great gust of fresh air, sweeping the tedious clichés and constant guilt-tripping of political correctness out to sea.” And, importantly for the “Middle American” voters who would provide his margin of victory, Trump “has a swaggering retro machismo that will give hives to the Steinem cabal. He lives large, with the urban flash and bling of a Frank Sinatra.”

Trump’s swagger is at the heart of his political success; his most avid supporters are drawn to his attitudes—beginning with his attacks on “political correctness” and the excesses of distant elites—more than particular policies. As George III “gloried in the name of Briton,” Trump promises to “Make America Great Again.” In 2019, in a speech before the General Assembly of the United Nations, Trump asserted that “the future does not belong to globalists. The future belongs to patriots. The future belongs to sovereign and independent nations.” The speech was a paean to particularist national identity, with Trump insisting that governments must defend their “history, culture and heritage.”

The Trumpian hour comes at a moment when analyses of American geopolitical decline have given way to assessment of cultural decadence and, especially, forebodings about the fluidity of gender and sex roles. For many conservatives, the process of social redress that began with the civil rights movement—which they originally doubted not for its efficacy but for its legitimacy—has run amok, encompassing first the women’s movement, then gay rights and now, at what seems the last bastion of traditional order, an open tolerance for “transgender” people. As R.R. Reno, editor of the influential journal First Things, wrote recently about the abuse of the pervasive civil rights analogy: 

Our anti-discrimination law was set up to address pervasive discrimination against black Americans . . . to use the full force of government power to address clear and present injustices in American society. This is not the situation for gays in twenty-first-century America. . . . In the present circumstances, it is absurd to speak of gay rights as an anti-discrimination imperative with any relevance to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. . . . There is no evidence that those drafting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 imagined extending its protections on the basis of sexual orientation; certainly not on the basis of gender identity.

What is telling about the essay is not its legal reasoning. Indeed, Reno castigates those who make a textual case against subsuming gay and transgender claims under the “sex” provisions of Title VII of the original law. Rather, Reno argues the case as a matter of resisting oppression by secular, decadent elites. Thus he encapsulates the cultural panic increasingly common to Christian and Catholic conservatives: 

[I]t is dangerous to give powerful people the weapons of anti-discrimination law. They will be tempted to use those weapons to destroy the institutions, organizations, and people whom they happen to disfavor. This is all the more likely to happen when those powerful people live disordered lives, engaging in sexual practices that make their consciences, however malformed, whisper doubts.

But it is probably Rod Dreher, a frequent First Things contributor and senior editor of The American Conservative, who has given, in his best-selling The Benedict Option, perhaps the most fulsome exposition of the fears of “Christians in a post-Christian Nation.” The book charts a neat timeline at how creeping modernity led the United States and the West arrived to its present “blasted heath of atomization, fragmentation and [religious] unbelief:” the 14th century saw “the defeat of metaphysical realism by nominalism,” severing the link between “the transcendent and material worlds;” the Renaissance shifted “the West’s vision and social imagination from God to man;” the Protestant Reformation “birthed an unresolvable crisis in religious authority” and “unending schisms, the 17th century scientific revolution introduced the idea of “the universe as a machine;” the Enlightenment made “Reason the polestar of public life, with religion . . . relegated to private life,” while the French and American revolutions “broke with old regimes and their hierarchies;” the 19th-century Industrial Revolution “pulverized the agrarian way of life, uprooted masses. And brought them into cities” and into “alienation.” The “horrors of the two world wars of the 20th century” led to a cult of autonomous individualism and a “Sexual Revolution [which exalted the desiring individual as the center of the emerging social order, deposing an enfeebled Christianity as the Ostrogoths deposed the hapless last emperor” of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century.”

This is Whig history stood completely on its head, progress as regression and social unraveling, liberty as nothing but license, the supplanting of the divine by individual eros. What elevates this Toryism of the 21st century above and beyond its 18th-century ancestor is its obsession with “transgenderism,” a phenomenon unknown to “Estimate” Brown. This, in Dreher’s reckoning, is the final fulfillment of the self-made man, the “newest vanguard of the Sexual Revolution.” 

[T]ransgendered people . . . refuse to be bound by biology and have behind them an elite movement teaching new generations that gender is whatever the choosing individual wants it to be. The advent of the birth control pill in the 1960s made it possible for mankind to extend its conquest and subjugation of nature to the will to the human body itself. Transgenderism is the logical next step, after which will come the destruction of any obstructions, in law or custom, to freely chosen polygamous arrangements.

Having thus viewed the awful “endpoint of modernity,” Dreher argues that engagement in present-day politics is, for conservative Christians, a fool’s game, that “[t]rying to regain our lost influence will be a waste of time or worse,” and a temptation to make common cause with a “strongman” like Donald Trump “who would impose order by force of will,” when what is needed is a “reinvention and new beginning” grounded in a renewal not just of faith but pious obedience to God.

Yet political quietism does not come naturally to those who believe themselves to have been wrongly deprived of power while the society and states they love careen toward decline and decadence. Here, for example, Reno and Dreher seem to part ways. Reno’s latest work, 2019’s The Return of the Strong Gods, is a kind of apologia for a Trump-style populist nationalism. Reno writes that the atavistic movements surging through American and Western nations reflect a response to decadence and decline that “is not entirely wrong.” He at least grants Enlightenment reason and individual interest to be necessary influences shaping “the strong god of self-government and sovereignty,” but he asserts that such consensual and contractual arrangement are insufficient to sustain a society; only a patriotic and pre-rational “love” of a national “we” can supply such inspiration. In place of Lockean “idolatry,” he writes, “we need to nurture two primeval sources of solidarity that limit the claims of the civic ‘we:’ the domestic society of marriage and the supernatural community of the church, synagogue, and other communities of transcendence.” Though there is a role for government in promoting these sources of social solidarity, there remains a cultural war to be waged, “to combat the radical feminism that is hostile to even the weakest expressions of distinct male and female roles. . . . [W]e need a sober conversation about what it means to be a man and a woman.” Moreover, he argues, religious faith makes more “stable and stalwart citizens, less likely to be inflamed by ideological promises that are surrogates for true religion. . . . [A] strongly transcendent faith grounds a person.”

Even in these high-minded formulations, these yearnings for traditional order cannot be separated from the current Internet-fueled culture; feminism, gay rights and all things transgender are conservative, Christian, and Catholic click-bait. Like all websites, First Things keeps track of trending topics. “Pornography,” “homosexuality,” and “transgender” are consistently top-five topics; its concerns about “feminism” have muted with time, but began with Richard John Neuhaus’ 1991 piece, “Boys and Girls: The Long Way Back to the Obvious,” which argued, in a more-hopeful, pre-decline-and-decadence world, that “[w]e now may be entering a new period of reconfirmation, notably in the realm of sexuality, and also among young people at college.” Even mainstream, old-light conservative publications like National Review seem to have discovered the marketing secret: Madeleine Kearns is a talented and incredibly prolific young writer for this and other conservative outlets. During 2019, she wrote about 175 pieces for National Review; fully 75 were on transgender issues. Nor is the appeal of promoting social tradition confined to journalism. The Canadian psychologist, author and lecturer Jordan Peterson has turned his determinist arguments for traditional and hierarchical social structures—and his stand-offs with various and vicious manifestations of political correctness—into successful speaking career. He counts 2.6 million subscribers to his YouTube channel. Click-bait these may be, but they provide some index of the conservative cultural zeitgeist.

History does not repeat itself, or perhaps even rhyme, but it can echo, and the conservative choirs of the 1750s and the 2020s do seem to be in tune—Handel would be appropriate to both. To begin with, the despair of decline and decadence of the mid-1750s was reversed almost immediately, though in an ironic twist: when William Pitt—previously the most powerful parliamentary voice for a Tory approach to the war with France—took the helm of wartime leadership, he turned his sails in a decidedly Whiggish direction. Indeed, he pushed Whig strategy—deep engagement in continental conflict and subsidies to anti-French allies, especially in Germany—to new extremes. George II, who had loathed Pitt and resisted bringing him into the government, was delighted. Pitt also formed an effective partnership with his prior nemesis, the Whig grandee Duke of Newcastle, who continued to manage Parliament through his patronage networks and to raise revenues and loans almost as fast as Pitt spent the money. Pitt further came about in regard to strategy for North America, continuing to deploy British regulars but substantially subsidizing colonial militias—the local assemblies, particularly in New England, responded with unbridled imperial enthusiasm—and Indian diplomacy through the powerful agency of the Iroquois confederation. While Pitt occasionally threw a strategic scrap in a Tory direction—not only be continuing the buildup of the Royal Navy but conducting indecisive-but-popular naval “descents” of the French coast—he did nothing to reduce the size of the British army and exacted ever-higher taxes from the landed classes while courting London financiers at every turn. In critical ways, it was Edward Ward’s supposedly corrupt “Mollies Club” which sustained the war effort; “who paid” was, arguably, more important that “who fought.” The result, by 1761, was a global British empire on which the sun never set. What vexed the great victory—and left the Bourbon monarchies alive to lick their wounds and contemplate revenge—was the death of George II and the ascension of a Patriot King. George III pushed Pitt out and brought Tory proscription to an end.

The Tories of the 1760s had learned nothing from Pitt’s triumphs, which they believed were due simply to the return of the natural order of things, nor forgotten any of the experience of their proscription. The Newcastle patronage networks were decimated even more thoroughly than Louis XV’s forces, the lot turned out of government with great speed and no mercy. The Tories trusted in their own manly virtue and the Patriot King to lead them and to restore the Anglican church, a traditional society, and proper humility about Britain’s role in the world. In this way could the British ship of state be set on its proper course, the endless and expensive war with France brought to an honorable conclusion, the sprawling and disturbingly diverse empire be reformed and reorganized, and the government’s finances placed on a “sound” footing. The Tories styled themselves not as partisans but as “king’s men,” working in the name of what they saw as the common good. In this way they crashed bravely, manfully, and confidently ahead into the iceberg of 1776, insensate to any of the warning signs from the colonial frontier—indeed, the warning signs incited them to ever-greater efforts to demand compliance and the army in America became not a tool of expansion but oppression. What soured the Americans was their devotion to individual liberties, a contractual model of government, and relentless desire for continued imperial growth. This proved, within the span of just two decades, to be a more powerful love than the traditional, hierarchical, and patriarchal arrangement on offer from London. Whiggish political independence and autonomy trumped Tory tribalism.

It thus behooves 21st-century Tories to reconsider the strength of this liberal god. Past reports of the death of Western civilization—and particularly its Anglo-American variant—have proved greatly exaggerated. Indeed, it is the very fluidity of liberal culture, its insistence on epistemological rigor even at the expense of metaphysical certitude, that has enabled the liberal order to reform itself, and helps account for its longevity. Past panics over political decline and moral decadence have been precursors to renewal, not collapse. Moreover, it’s fair to wonder whether Benedictine obedience and discipline translate well from the spiritual to the secular realm, or provide a reliable guide for a pluralistic polity. We might ask why St. Benedict was so beloved by Charlemagne, and whether dreams of a new Holy Roman Empire, with a reconciliation of state and church, lie beneath modern monasticism.

The post A Short History of Decline appeared first on The American Interest.

The Poetry of Baseball

Baseball is America’s “National Pastime.” At least it used to be. For while it’s still called that, the phrase has become a wish in hope of redemption. Baseball has been overcome in popularity in recent decades by football and probably basketball, and maybe by now by soccer, too. One reason for this is that professional-level baseball pretty much has to be played, or have been played in younger life, to be truly appreciated.

For that reason, probably, it’s not as obviously appealing as a spectator sport as football, because while football is modeled on military principles—taking, holding, dominating territory by brute force and maneuver—baseball is far more a head game, between battery and batter, baserunners and fielders, manager and manager, and more besides. To appreciate it as a spectator thus requires an inner knowledge that you project into the heads of those on the field. The action really doesn’t speak for itself; it demands a level of interpretation simply not necessary to watch football.

And watching baseball requires far more patience than watching football, soccer, or hoops. It’s undeniably a slower, less telegenically kinetic game, certainly than football. Even huddles don’t really slow football down; they’re just breaths taken between collective spasms of violence, called “downs,” I think, for a reason. Watching baseball can even be relaxing in a way that watching football just isn’t. That’s why it’s played on a diamond in a field, and not in a colosseum suitable for gladiator contests.

Baseball is also more philosophical a game than sports defined by finite space and a ticking clock. Baseball is infinite in time and space. If a team is not ahead at the end of an inning, the game can, in theory, go on forever. If a ball is put in play between the first and third baselines, it is a fair ball that can, again, in theory, roll all the way to and beyond the Andromeda galaxy and still be a fair ball.

That’s why gentle aphorisms like “Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains” fit the feel of baseball in a way they could never fit the feel of football. Baseball has Berra-isms; football has never produced anything more enlightened than the quotable verbal brutalities of a Bear Bryant or a Woody Hayes, a coach who once ran on to the field during a game to tackle an opposing player to prevent him from scoring a touchdown.

These characteristics of baseball, I think, explain why America’s “National Pastime” has been eclipsed in popularity by more vulgar and violent spectacle-friendly sports. Patience is a virtue, but patience is in increasingly short supply in a society sped up to distraction by frenetic TV cut-shot editing, and more recently by a plethora of accelerative screen addictions. Subtlety is intrinsic to true art, but subtlety has no place in a public culture that looks ever more like a random episode of the Jerry Springer Show. Can anyone imagine staged “in your face” crassness taking pride of place in an episode of “Father Knows Best” or “Leave It to Beaver”?

We have gone from Bedford Falls to Pottersville in less than two generations as life has predictably imitated very bad art. We are as a society more vulgar and spectacle-mesmerized than ever. How else could a man like Donald Trump ever have been elected President? It is therefore no coincidence that baseball’s nadir has moved in lockstep with that melancholy journey. When Paul Simon wrote the lyric, presumably in 1967 in time for the soundtrack of The Graduate, “Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you?” did he realize the stunning predictive power in that line?

But it ain’t over ‘til it’s over. (Thanks, Yogi.) We are not toast, and no one should be picking up forks to stick anywhere in particular just yet. We still have baseball, even Major League Baseball, weakened though it may be by greedy owners, avaricious agents and lawyers, spineless commissioners, and increasingly questionable umpires and proposed rule changes. And baseball, you must understand, is powerful. Baseball can save us.

We Americans need more patience, and baseball teaches patience. We need teamwork, and baseball is all about teamwork. We need hope, and baseball exudes hope because in baseball even a weak team can beat a strong team on any given day—far more often than is the case in football or basketball. We need to understand that a society thrives from diversity and that everyone can play a positive role, and in baseball people of all heights, sizes, and shapes can excel; you don’t have to be a looming hulk or a pituitary freak to fit in or even to be a star.

Baseball isn’t just a sport. It’s a metaphor for a life well lived. It’s a beacon for a society unified in pursuit of virtue. And if you can suspend critical judgment for a moment and take on the sheer magic of Susan Sarandon’s skills, it’s a church. If we build baseball anew, the people will come, and they will be doused in the champagne of victory.

So imagine, then, what it’s like to be a long, long-time Washington baseball fan, looking to Opening Day the season after the Nationals brought a World Series to town for the first time since 1924. I don’t have to imagine what that’s like, because that’s me. My father was a 19-year old Washington native in 1924. He told me all about it when I was a boy, often, sometimes with tears in his eyes. These things pass along, you know. (It kills me that my kids were all born in Philadelphia, and so became Phillies fans against my pleading, but that’s their problem too, isn’t it?)

Imagine what it’s like to remember, scene by scene, almost word for word, the 1958 movie Damn Yankees, with Tab Hunter, Gwen Verdon, and Ray Walston. I can, because I saw it more times than I could possibly count as a kid—I was 7 when it came out. And imagine Damn Yankees playing in muted descant in my head all last season, growing ever louder as the Nats inched and then leapt toward the championship.

And now this: Now this damned pandemic. Now this aborted Opening Day. Now this intolerable disruption of sweet enlightened normality at a time when we need it most. Now this delayed gut punch from outer space, because it’s from outer space that viruses, like most of the water on the planet, probably came from. Remember Michael Crichton’s first book, The Andromeda Strain? Maybe a baseball long ago rolled there and played the role of the proverbial fluttering butterfly wing…

But I digress. I spent the end of last season, including playoffs and World Series, in Singapore. I obviously couldn’t get to any of the games, or really even watch them. Embassy Singapore, to my regret, made no provisions for baseball fans in the Red Dot. After the last out of the seventh game in Houston, I ran down the hallway of my office looking for someone to embrace. The best I could do was latch on to a Canadian, a lapsed Blue Jays fan, who wasn’t even aware that the Series was being played. You might say I was a socially distanced fan.

I just had to do something to celebrate, and that something could not require proximity to a baseball diamond—since I’ve not seen a single one on this island. So I wrote a poem. Here it is. I hope you like it, today of all days, as a partial substitute for an Opening Day that should’ve been.

It will help you to like it, I think, if you are a dyed-in-the-wool Washington baseball fan. It will help especially if you are not a Yankees fan. It will help if you know the game from having played it. But if none of that describes you, well, sorry: Three strikes, you’re out. Hey, it’s OK: There’s always tomorrow.

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Ode to the Nats of 2019

[in gratitude, to Ernest Lawrence Thayer]

The prospect wasn’t bright at all for the Washington Nats in May;

Their record stood at 19 and 31, with 112 gruesome trials to play,

Turner he got injured, and ‘ol Zim he turned up lame;

Despondency settled upon the hometown fans, again and again and again.

A faithless few their precious season tickets went to pawn,

But most just sighed with wistful longing, their hopes cruelly smashed and torn,

They thought that if only their pathetic bullpen could finally come around,

The pall of desperation would at least be lifted from the mound.

They blew so many saves we despaired of keeping track,

Of hit-and-run and sacrifice bunts there certainly was a lack.

They bobbled grounders, overthrew first, and dropped innocent pop flies,

You’d have thought the guys were trying to play the game with ‘baca plugs glued upon their eyes.

Our heroes stumbled through a maze of ghastly springtime torpors;

At one point losing five games straight, even getting swept by them New Yorkers;

“Fire the manager!”, the disgusted minions insistently demanded.

As if that would have made any difference, to be perfectly candid.

At last faint embers of diamond life slowly began to glow,

In early June they finally managed to win four games in a row;

The bats all at once seem to jump, their Louisville sluggers did thrive,

The pitching improved significantly with a revised rotation of five.

Little by little they strove to turn their season right around,

By the All-Star Break they’d mostly healed and felt pretty gosh darn sound,

Before long they passed up the Mets, then swiftly dropped the Phillies,

Waving back to Bryce as they gave chase for Atlanta willy-nilly.

They never did catch ‘em, their goofy tomahawk chop to still,

But they played good enough to climb high enough upon the standings hill,

To wild card their way into the lustrous postseason playoffs,

Finishing the regular season with a win streak that handsomely paid off.

So it was that the Nats came face-to-face with the Milwaukee Brewers,

In a winner-take-all single game, fans’ nerves jangling as if on skewers

Scherzer fell behind early, three big runs to zip,

The lineup looked utterly punchless, not one batsman connected with a rip.

Strasberg came in to relieve Max, for his very first relief stint ever,

And shut down Milwaukee’s mighty crew in a masterful endeavor;

Then with but six outs between them and cursed oblivion,

The eighth inning became at last a friend, and started us a-singin’. 

For Taylor got plunked (maybe), and Zim cracked a solid single,

Rendon then walked to fill the bases, and Soto solidly delivered ‘em.

Three runs came home before the dust had settled, their first lead of the game,

Then Hudson came in to shut the door, and the town went totally insane.

“Beat LA!” the crowd then chanted, but that demanded gallantry;

The mighty Dodgers had won 106 games, and the Nats a mere 93,

The first game was a six-zip shutout, things did not look at all good.

But the Nats won the second 4 to 2, they knew in their hearts they could.

Game 3 was an unmitigated full-frontal home field disaster,

LA scored ten runs and our faces turned to alabaster,

Now down two games to one in a short best-of-five series,

Our breathing went giddily shallow and our attitude turned quite leery.

The guys pulled out game four 6-1, to even the series two and two,

But back to LA they had to go for the crucial deciding set-to.

They fell behind again, three-nothing after two,

Exactly as in the Brewers game; hmm, could that be a clue?

They tied it in the eighth off Kershaw, the poor bedraggled fellow,

Rendon and Soto dinged him back to back, and we felt oh so mellow.

Then Howie Kendrick slammed the Dodger door shut in the tenth,

After which Mr. Excitement Sean Doolittle one-two-threed a breathless heaven-sent.

Then came Saint Louis for to joust the coveted NL Pennant,

This was to be no ordinary series, and we really truly meant it.

For oh how cruelly had the Cardinals crushed us back in 2012,

Erasing a 6-run Nats lead in game six, dropping us straight down into hell.

The Nationals were taking no prisoners this time around,

They chewed up the Red Birds, flung them hard down on the ground,

Plucked them but good they did, winning four games in a row;

No one believed the Nats could sweep ‘em; it only goes to show.

And so came the World Series, the Nation’s Capital exploded

With joy and rapture and mirth; some folks even got loaded.

Off to Houston the victors then made for to travel,

As serious underdogs surely, most thought, bound quickly to unravel. 

But we whooped ‘em twice in Texas, ‘twas hard even to conceive!

Our spirits were buoyant, you bet your sweet life we believed.

Houston was supposed to be down in the great state of Texas, doc.

But the Nats left that city reeling in a total state of shock. 

Not so fast countin’ your chickens, said the Astros, we ain’t done yet.

Then they won three straight in DC; d’ya think we got upset?!

Now down three games to two, and facing two more on the road,

The odds-makers smirked, the Nats’ll flush right down the hall-of-shame commode.

But we pulled out the first one 5 to 4, forcing a deciding game seven,

On the day before Halloween no less, we were jumpier than a flea in denim.

The guys got down two zip with but a measly nine outs to give,

It seemed that maybe, just maybe, the boys had finally run out of fizz.

But that’s not how it ended, I’m oh so glad to tell,

The guys sliced clean through the Astros bullpen pell-mell;

Howie lined one off the right-field foul pole; Houston sunk down in pain.

How he even hit Harris’s low outside sinker at all, no one could explain. 

In the baseball dome of heaven dugout angels rejoiced on high,

The Big Train looked down on where Griffith used to be and plaintively cried,

Huzzah and hosannah, shouted Saint Kenesaw Mountain Landis,

Not since Calvin Coolidge was President have I seen anything so marvelously outlandish.

So hats off to the Nationals, true champions of baseball lore,

Bringing the Nation’s Capital its first Series win since 1924.

We even booed the President, and some held out snotty hankies.

The only way it could have been better? Had the Astros been the goddamn Yankees.

Adam Morris Garfinkle, Nov. 2, 2019

The post The Poetry of Baseball appeared first on The American Interest.

Safeguarding the Constitution—and Election—During COVID-19

TAI Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Gedmin and Publisher Charles Davidson recently spoke with contributing editor William A. Galston for his perspective on the COVID-19 pandemic. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Jeffrey Gedmin for TAI: As a TAI editorial board member, you’ve told us that the current crisis should focus us on the rule of law, the Constitution, and the possibility of presidential overreach. Can you elaborate?

William A. Galston: Let me give you a concrete example. Earlier this week, President Trump was threatening to, in effect, create a no-go zone around New York, New Jersey, and parts of Connecticut. Query: Does he have the legal or constitutional authority to do so? The governors are quite convinced that he does not. There is some language on the CDC website suggesting that he does, appealing to the interstate commerce clause. Many constitutional scholars that I’ve read think that is not a sound constitutional basis for that sort of quarantine. Fortunately, the President backed off on that idea before it came to a legal confrontation.

A broader issue in the same frame: Suppose the President decides that he wants to “reopen the country,” or at least some states. A governor of one of those states says, “No, in my judgment, we’re not ready to reopen. The rate of infection is still too high.” On my reading of the Constitution, the governors have the ultimate authority in the exercise of what the Constitution calls their police powers—matters having to do with the health, safety, and welfare of their own populations. The President can make recommendations but he cannot issue orders to governors.

These are issues that are popping up in real time, and I think we have to be conscious of the ways in which existing laws can be expanded beyond legislatively intended limits and deployed for purposes for which they were not intended. Regrettably, over the past four decades, Congress has created more than 127 separate emergency powers, many of which are well past their sell-by date but remain on the books. As Alexander Hamilton reminded us, the Constitution creates a strong executive for good reason, but a strong executive is not an unlimited executive. I think it is the responsibility of Congress, the courts, and ultimately the citizens to police those bounds.

TAI: If we get to that moment where the President wants to “reopen the country,” even though authority properly rests with governors on these questions, what would the politics look like—between Trump and his voters, between Trump and GOP governors?

WAG: I’ll give you a weaselly but I think accurate answer: It depends.

Let’s take three Republican governors. Mike DeWine of Ohio has been quite aggressive in telling individuals, businesses, and other institutions within his state that they had to shut down or dramatically curtail their activity. He has put public health and safety first and has taken some heat for doing that, but has also gotten a lot of support from the citizens of Ohio. If the President were to tell Governor DeWine to stand down prematurely, I am pretty sure that DeWine would tell the President to go to some place he’s probably bound for anyway.

Likewise, I’m pretty confident that in a showdown between Charlie Baker and President Trump in Massachusetts, Governor Baker would have a pretty strong hand to play. And the third example is Larry Hogan in my own state of Maryland, who has been increasingly aggressive. He said he was very much afraid that in two or three weeks portions of Maryland would look like portions of Italy, which is not what you want these days. There again, the President would get a lot of pushback.

I’ve surveyed all the polling conducted on this issue. And as things now stand, the American people across party lines think that this is a national emergency and that all of the measures taken by the public sector to address it so far are sensible.

TAI: Some of us have been concerned from the beginning about Donald Trump’s authoritarian instincts, and Viktor Orbán, for example, has revealed himself in this crisis as a true consolidator of power. In the case of Trump, though, he’s been inconsistent and perhaps chaotic, but thus far hasn’t been bent on accumulating power and challenging checks and balances. Do you see that differently?

WAG: I think that’s basically right up to now. I have noted the multiple occasions in which the courts have rendered judgements that infuriated the President, and he has yet to outright violate a ruling of the court. That’s a good sign. I think in this crisis he has not revealed himself as an effective manager of the Federal government’s resources, but he doesn’t seem to have exploited the situation to the ends that Viktor Orban has. It is telling that Orban has now done what Adolf Hitler did just a few months into his chancellorship, which is to put through an emergency law allowing him to rule by decree. I think that would still be unthinkable in United States.

TAI: You have stressed to us the importance of holding elections on time. How should we be prepared to execute on that? And what if circumstances argue for rescheduling or postponing?

WAG: It’s not just important to me, it’s important to the country. It’s one thing for states to postpone primary elections. Those elections are within the state’s power. As state after state has pushed back its primary, there has been very little criticism. Everybody recognizes that conducting a fair and inclusive election under these extreme circumstances will be difficult and trying to do so would probably be irresponsible.

But A, we ought to be in a very different place with the disease by November, and B, a national election is a constitutional requirement. It has constitutional standing and it’s not clear to me whether anybody at the level of the Federal government has the power to change the date of the national election. That’s a constitutional question in itself. I think it would be a tremendous blow to national confidence, and to people’s confidence in our public institutions, if the election were postponed. It would give rise to an orgy of suspicion that it had been delayed for partisan purposes. We do not exactly live in an era of high trust, either in government or one another. It would be Bush v. Gore on steroids.

TAI: How should we make this happen, practically, if people aren’t able to vote in person? Do you have some idea about the logistics?

WAG: Well, I have a very simple idea and it’s already been introduced as a legislative proposal by a couple of senators—namely, that we should move to a system where voting by mail is permitted in every state. My reading of that law is that it is consistent with the constitutional division of powers between the state and the Federal government when it comes to the time, place, and manner of elections. Obviously, the law would have to authorize and direct the several states to set up reliable verification mechanisms. But we know that some states are already using it. The state of Washington is almost entirely a vote-by-mail state and they’ve made it work. There’s no reason why, if we had some lead time, the rest of the country couldn’t too.

That is as close to a silver bullet remedy for this problem as we could possibly devise. No doubt that proposal would become mired in partisan debate, but I would hope that that cooler heads would prevail, and the old patriotism and respect for the Constitution would dominate the proceedings.

TAI: Is there anything else, practically speaking, that needs to be done in terms of ensuring the election? Making vote by mail national seems to be a pretty simple thing. Does Congress have the authority to do that?

WAG: Well, hold on for just a minute. I’m going to walk downstairs and double check my copy of the Constitution. [Pause]

Okay, found it. So in Article One, Section Four we find the following: “The Times, Places, and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such regulations.” I read that language as giving Congress the power over the particular manner of holding elections. That’s for senators and representatives.

As to the election of the President, let’s take a look at Article Two. Section One reads, “The Congress may determine the Time of chusing [sic] electors and the Day on which they shall give their votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States.” So the President has no power whatsoever to determine or change the day of his own election, nor does he have the power to determine or change the time for the election. Both of those powers are given by the Constitution squarely to the Congress—period.

The post Safeguarding the Constitution—and Election—During COVID-19 appeared first on The American Interest.

Why Elections Must Go On

The COVID-19 pandemic is disrupting societies across the world. In both Europe and North America, schools have been closed, people have been ordered to work from home (while taking care of their children), and in some places curfews have been implemented, the right to assembly curbed, and even parliaments suspended. Several U.S. state primaries have been delayed, and there are even worries that elections could be cancelled or at least postponed. American political scientists have therefore petitioned for measures to be taken to ensure that the November U.S. presidential election will take place, even if people may not be able to go to the polling booths to vote in the usual way.

If our societies enter a prolonged state of emergency due to COVID-19—and that seems almost unavoidable now—all other popular events, from sports to music to theater, will no longer be possible. What is it about elections, the modern popular event par excellence, that makes them so different that they deserve to be held even in this situation, provided it can be done in a way that limits physical contact?

As the petition notes, “[i]t is widely understood that elections are the heart of modern democracy.” This might come as a surprise to some. For decades, bare-bones electoral definitions of democracy have been criticized by public intellectuals and scholars who have come to expect more of democracy than merely a way of handling power transfers or government turnover. Among other things, democracy is often seen as inseparable from individual freedom, the rule of law, or even social rights, and it is sometimes construed as a way of ensuring high levels of public participation in the policymaking process or rational deliberation about societal problems.

There is no shame in expecting a lot of democracy. The problem is if these expectations make us forget the essentials. The great contribution of modern representative democracy is its ability to substitute electoral competition for raw power, or more precisely to prevent violence from becoming the arbiter of political conflicts.

Two recent examples showcase this. Last year, Denmark had a parliamentary election. It was called by a center-right coalition government that had been in place for four years, but it was won by the Social Democrats, whose leader, Mette Frederiksen, formed a new government on June 27, 2019. The December 2019 British general election, meanwhile, paved the way for a second Johnson ministry, after the Conservatives won their biggest majority since 1987. In both instances, the losers—former Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn—gracefully conceded defeat.

We are so used to elections deciding who takes charge of government that we no longer stop and wonder in amazement about this. Considering the stakes—the control of the public sector, with all that this implies in a modern welfare state, where (in many European countries) government expenditure accounts for about half of GDP—it is remarkable that the losers readily accept the verdict of the polls. In his 1942-book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, the Austrian economist Joseph A. Schumpeter identified this ability of elections to decide government as the hallmark of modern representative democracy. Schumpeter construed democracy as a regime form where governments call elections knowing that they might suffer defeat—and where they nonetheless abide by the results. Political scientist Adam Przeworski later described this as the regularly repeated combination of  “ex ante uncertainty” and “ex post irreversibility”—or, in a word, the “institutionalized uncertainty” that is democracy.

As in so many other cases, Karl Popper formulated this insight best. In one of the entries included in his memoir, All Life Is Problem Solving, he notes, “There are in fact only two forms of state: those in which it is possible to get rid of a government without bloodshed, and those in which this is not possible. . . . Usually the first form is called ‘democracy’ and the second ‘dictatorship’ or ‘tyranny’.”

Democracy in the Schumpeterian or electoral sense solves a first-order problem of political communities: the preservation of civil peace during power transfers. Only because this first-order problem is solved does it become meaningful to consider second-order problems such as individual liberties, social rights, good government, or public participation and deliberation.

History illustrates this vividly. All other political systems have struggled when it comes to the transferal of public authority from one ruler to the next. The number of great realms that broke down following the death of their rulers is legion. The most famous example is probably Alexander the Great’s Empire, which was torn apart in succession wars between his generals upon his death in Babylon in June 323 BC. The empires of Charlemagne and Genghis Khan both disintegrated in struggles between their grandchildren. Likewise, the problem of succession has been singled out as a key cause for the fracture of the great Caliphate of the Abbasids, centered on present-day Iraq, in the ninth and tenth centuries and the (lesser) Caliphate of Córdoba in the Iberian Peninsula in the 11th century. In both cases, the symptoms of lurking breakdown were frequent ruler successions that created very short average reigns and an almost permanent political instability.

Even polities that have in other respects proven remarkably stable were regularly thrown into chaos during power transfers. The Roman Empire saw its share of civil wars unleashed by the death of emperors, as did its progeny, the Byzantine Empire. In both cases, the reason was the same: Neither the Romans nor the Byzantines succeeded in devising a constitutional mechanism that could tackle the succession, and military power therefore normally settled who would wear purple. The Byzantines even developed a theory that legitimized this. The idea was that God’s will was—ex post—revealed by who was the strongest contender for the throne. Might makes right, as the saying goes.

The Ottoman sultans practiced a more fratricidal version of this theory. In a context of polygamy, Ottoman sultans would normally have many sons. Rule passed within the family, but no constitutional mechanisms decided which of the many sons would inherit. The result was that the sons would often fight it out after the death of their father, and the victorious son would sometimes execute his surviving brothers to hinder future attempts to rob him of this power. Mehmet III, who has the dubious honor of holding the record for fratricide in Ottoman history, executed 19 of his brothers at his accession.

While these conflicts did not tear apart the Roman, Byzantine, or Ottoman Empires, they did create repeated spikes of violence and instability, not only during successions but also in anticipation of future turnovers, as would-be rulers and elite groups attempted to bolster their position and gather strength for the coming storm. When it is not institutionalized, uncertainty tends to create havoc.

These chaotic successions contrast with what is probably the smoothest solution to the problem of power transfer devised before modern representative democracy: hereditary kingship. In medieval and early modern Europe, the institution of primogeniture (eldest-son-taking-the-throne) provided stability in a world of high mortality where rulers were relatively weak and rebellion by high nobles and high clergy was a permanent risk. The principle of primogeniture meant that it was clear who the successor was (by definition, a monarch could have only one eldest son), and that this successor was a generation younger than the ruler. Recent research has demonstrated that the death of kings in medieval and early modern Europe would often spark civil wars but that the principle of primogeniture mitigated this risk.

Nonetheless, even in the context of hereditary kingship, successions often proved conflictual. A recurrent byproduct of primogeniture was the establishment of minorities where the new ruler was underage and therefore ruled via protectors or a regency. Famous examples include Henry III’s minority in England from 1216 to 1227 and Louis XIV’s minority in France from 1643 to 1651. These minorities almost always weakened royal power, and they would often incite civil wars. For instance, Henry’s protectors, led by the magnate William Marshal, had to fight and win the First Barons’ War to ensure the Plantagenet succession, and to bolster their standing they reissued what became known as the Magna Carta three times during Henry’s minority. Louis’s minority was dominated by the ferocious civil war known as the Fronde from 1648 to 1653, just as the previous French Wars of Religion had begun in 1562 in the context of Catherine de’ Medici’s regency for her underage son Charles IX. It is telling that medieval and early modern European intellectuals would often cite Ecclesiastes 10:16: “Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child.”

Even hereditary kingship was thus not a bulletproof solution to the problem of power transfer. Nor are today’s authoritarian systems, whether they are structured around parties (as in the People’s Democracies in the former Eastern Bloc), families (as in the Gulf monarchies), military juntas (as in the many Latin American military dictatorships during the 20th century), or personal rule (as in many dictatorships in Africa during the Cold War). Take what are arguably the three most important autocracies still standing. In Russia, Vladimir Putin’s eventual retirement is bound to create political instability, unless he somehow manages to designate a successor who can elicit broad support both among the elite and in the population.

The People’s Republic of China uniquely seemed to have devised a nondemocratic system of leader rotation—based on fixed term limits—that systematically groomed future leaders and forced old leaders to regularly retire. But the current President Xi Jinping has jettisoned this system to stay in power. While this is proving relatively unproblematic in the short run, it means that all bets are off when it comes to Xi’s eventual retirement. The Chinese development shows just how difficult it is to create clear rules of succession in authoritarian states where institutions are not independent of the powers that be. Another example of this is Saudi Arabia, where in June 2017 King Salman broke with the hitherto observed succession principle of agnatic seniority (in which the king’s oldest brother takes the throne) by appointing his 32-year-old son Mohammed bin Salman as Crown Prince. This required a de facto purge within the Saudi royal family, and there is reason to suspect that we have not heard the last of the simmering conflicts over the inheritance of the House of Saud.

The recurrent problems of leader succession in authoritarian states serve as a reminder about the beauty of democracy. To be sure, modern representative democracy did not emerge as a peaceful engine of leadership succession from one day to the next. As American political scientist Daniel Ziblatt points out in his book from 2017, Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, the great challenge for modern democracy was to make the defenders of the old regime reconcile themselves with the risk that they could lose power at elections. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, democracy was still an unstable regime form in much of the Western world, just as it is today in many new democracies.

But over time, a more pragmatic attitude to politics emerged. The result was widespread acceptance of the key rule of Schumpeterian democracy: “Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose.” The population and elites have become habituated to this principle in old and battle-proven democracies, such as those of Western Europe and North America. This is illustrated by the fact that we find no example of a Western democracy that has broken down after an uninterrupted period of, say, 20 years with alternations in government via elections. This did not even happen during the dark days of the Interwar Period, where democracy had to face a string of mutually reinforcing crisis, including the Great Depression after 1929.

Indeed, the acceptance of losing power at elections has today become so ingrained in Western democracies that it is virtually impossible to imagine that a candidate would be able to successfully rally his supporters based on a refusal to concede defeat, even in ideologically polarized societies such as the United States. And if this were attempted, the strong and independent institutions that we find in old democracies would surely rise to the challenge.

We are living in a world where what the German-American international relations scholar Hans Morgenthau termed the animus dominandi—the human “lust” for power—has been tamed, or at least domesticated, by institutions that regulate government turnover. This is the real wonder of democracy, and the key reason for the political stability that has characterized Western Europe and North America for generations, and which is arguably making headway in many other regions of the world as a consequence of the large-scale democratization that has taken place since the 1970s.

But for democracy to work its magic, we need regularly repeated elections. In the context of the present public health crisis, the danger is that we have come to take for granted the wonder of democracy: its ability to tackle power transfers without bloodshed. Even, perhaps especially, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, we must not forget the essential importance of elections for modern representative democracy.

Let us end by going back to the political scientists’ petition. It concludes its call for ensuring that the November presidential election can be held with a both striking and heartening historical observation: “In the entire history of the United States, there has never been a missed election. Elections were held during the Civil War, during World War I, and during World War II.” Now is not the time to ruin this flawless historical record.

The post Why Elections Must Go On appeared first on The American Interest.

The Chinese Big Lie

Why is China apparently lying about its citizens infected with and dying from the COVID-19? It is increasingly apparent that its numbers do not add up. As my AEI colleague Derek Scissors has pointed out, when you compare COVID-19 attributed deaths in South Korea and Singapore—both held up as models in responding to the pandemic—to Chinese provinces outside of Hubei, you get orders of magnitude fewer deaths after adjusting for population. Is it probable that the rest of China, with a greater proximity to Wuhan and a health system still more second world than first, somehow contained the virus more effectively than even the best cases elsewhere? If reports of stacks of burial urns in Wuhan are any indication, then, China is fudging the facts.

But again, why? The simplest answer with which to start is: Because Beijing can.

Absent medical and health professionals from outside the People’s Republic on the ground there and reporting accurately, the data is whatever Chinese officials say it is. In the absence of such data, sites in the United States and around the world are posting numbers given out by the Chinese. Reasonably enough, officials in this country as in others have kept their focus on stemming the pandemic domestically. Getting into a “he said, she said” dispute can be a distraction from dealing with the immediate problem at hand.

Still, that’s an opening the Chinese seem to be taking advantage of, with the working assumption being that if you repeat a lie enough, it will stick somewhere. Precisely because liberal democracies are open regimes, there are always domestic critics willing to hear how their own governments are ineffective—or worse. The Soviets understood how to take advantage of this dynamic, and there is no reason to believe that the information warfare instinct of Leninist parties is any less acute in the Chinese Communist Party. Quite the opposite, in fact. With the availability of social media that is global in reach, the Chinese are spending considerable sums utilizing this new tool to spread misinformation and disinformation.

Moreover, the Chinese probably believe that, even if their numbers are not fully accepted, history shows there will be little price to be paid for lying. From Mao’s Great Leap Forward to Tiananmen Square, and from the internment camps of the Uighurs to the crackdown in Hong Kong, China’s leaders have seen time and again that foreign leaders and businessmen will still want to do business with them regardless of the scale of the atrocity. In recent years, there has been an obvious change in how many in the West view China. But one has yet to see a fundamental reordering of relations with Beijing in Berlin, Paris or London despite that change. Even in the case of Washington, there is a question of just how far America will be willing to go in disengaging from the Chinese market.

China’s fibbing is also of course tied to the effort to put doubt in the air over the virus’ point of origin. If the U.S. or Italian numbers are greater, shouldn’t one suspect that the virus actually has spread more widely in these places precisely because that is where the pandemic started? One does not have to subscribe to conspiracy theories (such as the one that the virus was intentionally produced in the government-run bio-research lab in Wuhan) to see the advantage of China trying to distance itself from the start of the pandemic. Slow and disingenuous over the outbreak in Wuhan, they have been trying muddy the waters over the virus’ origins since.

Overlapping the desire to shift blame and look more successful in handling the virus is Beijing’s goal of preserving Chinese President Xi’s reputation as an effective leader. Although it is correct to see Xi Jinping as perhaps the most powerful PRC leader since Mao, or at least Deng Xiaoping, that power has come at the expense of the more typical consensus-style rule that preceded him. Xi has consolidated his sway not by accommodating his rivals but by squeezing them through intimidation and arrests in the guise of cleaning up the Party. Given how much corruption there was—and because it was an essential element in leading party members to be “loyal” to the existing regime—Xi’s anti-corruption effort has both increased his power by cowering or eliminating pockets of competitors within the Party and, at the same time, likely narrowed his base of support within the Party. As long as Xi is seen as being successful, there is little room to challenge his rule. Should that assessment change, however, it is not hard to imagine grudge-holding party members attempting to coalesce in an effort to challenge him. Given the mediocre performance of the Chinese economy and the problematic turn in U.S.-China relations—a turn not everyone in the Party thinks is wise—getting pinned for an ineffective response to the virus and the resulting deaths of thousands is certainly not something Xi at this moment wants.

In short, there are good reasons for China to lie. Ultimately, the question for the West is not whether they will get away with it; the facts will almost certainly become obvious in time. Rather, the question is, will Beijing pay any price for engaging in the lie and, in turn, should Xi himself face a counter-narrative from the West that is both accurate and aimed at the Chinese themselves.

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A Short-Term Fix for the Ventilator Shortage

As an anesthesiologist, if I were asked my opinion on the aggressive ventilator policy being used to combat COVID-19—for example, splitting a ventilator between two patients, as some NYC hospitals are now doing, or refitting anesthesia machines as ICU ventilators—I would say we had pretty much reached the limit of what we can do. But if my own daughter had COVID-19, and her life were at stake, I know I could (and would) do more. The question is whether what I would do as an anesthesiologist, out of desperation to save my own child, can provide a strategy for the country as a whole, if the April peak in COVID-19 cases results in a ventilator shortfall.

The country has roughly 160,000 ventilators. An additional 40,000 ventilators are attached to anesthesia machines in the nation’s operating rooms. It is uncertain whether this number includes the anesthesia machines in outpatient surgery centers, but for the sake of argument let’s say 200,000 ventilators exist in the United States. That might not be enough to manage next month’s expected deluge of severe coronavirus cases, especially when other patients need those ventilators for traditional reasons. Governor Cuomo of New York has asked for 30,000 ventilators for his state alone. Hopefully more ventilators will come online as the automobile companies re-tool to manufacture them, but they may not come fast enough.

We need ventilators to treat the severe acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) that can occur with COVID-19. ARDS increases the pressure a person must generate to take a breath. When the person tires out and grows hypoxic, he or she needs a ventilator. I’ve often observed the high positive pressure needed to force air into the lungs of ARDS patients during surgery. In some cases, especially in ARDS stemming from major trauma or burns, the requisite pressure can be enormous. In the past, when dealing with such patients, and when ventilator therapy was a little different, I would ask the ICU team to transport the patient’s special ventilator with the patient for use during the anesthetic, since an anesthesia machine ventilator cannot reliably generate such high pressures. Instead of giving gaseous anesthesia through the anesthesia machine, I would bypass the machine and use total intravenous anesthesia.

These days, doctors ventilate ARDS patients with lower pressures—up to the “30” mark on the pressure gauge, rather than the “70” mark, or higher, which is hardly more than what I use when ventilating healthy anesthetized adults. This is because ARDS patients are given half the breath size that healthy patients under general anesthesia receive, although the number of breaths per minute is correspondingly increased, often to 35. The old method of ventilating ARDS patients with bigger breaths and slower breathing rates, which mimics how people usually breathe, increases their mortality rate by ten percent, through pressure-induced lung injury.

With my healthy anesthesia patients I sometimes bypass the ventilator on my anesthesia machine when breathing for them. I just manually squeeze the anesthesia bag to a pressure of “30” every few seconds to give a breath. It’s tiresome to do so over a long period, but it is doable, and I often do it. In fact, I don’t even need the anesthesia machine to give these manual breaths. Some of the older disposable anesthesia circuits (called T-piece systems) come with an anesthesia bag attached. When I hook up the circuit to sufficient fresh gas flow, to wash out the patient’s carbon dioxide that exits with each breath, I squeeze the bag and ignore the anesthesia machine altogether. There are many such circuits lying around; at the very least they would be easy to manufacture. In addition, thousands of Ambu bags sit in paramedic trucks, doctors’ offices, recovery rooms, and patient hospital rooms across the nation. They are, by definition, a bag that can be squeezed. I use them often when transporting patients to the recovery room.

A T-piece-like system or an Ambu bag is the kind of contraption I would use on my own daughter if she developed ARDS from COVID-19, and no other ventilator option existed. There will be naysayers to this strategy. “You can’t squeeze a bag 35 times a minute for long,” they will say. True, but I can squeeze 15 times a minute using larger breaths, which may not be optimal, but it’s better than nothing, I would reply. “You can’t squeeze a bag for longer than two hours at a time,” they will say. True, but a father’s dedication can carry one pretty far, and when I grow tired I can get friends and family members to take turns squeezing the bag, I would reply. “You can’t give 100 percent oxygen for long, as you’ll cause oxygen toxicity,” they will say. True, but I have 24 hours before that occurs, I would reply, during which time I’ll send someone to find a gas canister filled with air to mix with the pure oxygen to lower the concentration. “You can’t apply positive-end-expiratory-pressure (PEEP),” they will say. PEEP is the pressure maintained against the lungs at the end of each breath, and used in ARDS therapy to keep the lung’s air sacs open. Although not optimal, there are portable PEEP valves that I can stick onto an Ambu bag, I would reply. They’re better than nothing. T-piece-like systems even come with tiny valves restricting the exit of gas that I can tighten to create a version of PEEP.

With the imminent peak in COVID-19 cases, policymakers fear they may have to ration care. Plans to do so already exist. For example, the media recently leaked a memo from the Henry Ford Health System that discusses the rationing of ventilators as a “worst case scenario.” In Italy, rationing has become the norm. In one well-publicized case, an Italian priest, in an act of charity, surrendered his ventilator to a much younger person and died as a result. In the sterile, unemotional boardrooms where policymakers make decisions about health care, the inability to think outside the box is understandable. Only when a crisis hits home do people really start to innovate in ways previously considered unthinkable.

Rationing positive-pressure ventilation in COVID-19 patients need not occur. In a worst-case scenario I can envision enormous tents filled with ICU-like beds, built alongside hospitals already full, with ARDS patients lying in those beds, spaced 20 feet apart and surrounded by some friend or family member taking a turn at ventilating a loved one, and using an Ambu bag or T-piece-like system hooked up to the tent’s source of oxygen and air. Rather than a family member or a friend, maybe it will be a volunteer who has recovered from COVID-19 and is immune. Maybe it will be a National Guardsperson taking a turn at the Ambu bag. (President Trump recently activated National Guards units for service.) Naysayers will say this is beyond the call of duty for reservists, yet American soldiers saw much more onerous duty in World War II battlefronts. Asking them to take turns squeezing a bag, assuming they wear proper protection while doing so, would not be beyond the call of duty.

Two days ago, officials in NYC announced they were exploring the possibility of using manual ventilation to compensate for the lack of ventilators. Yet their unease when making the announcement was palpable, which may detract from getting the program off the ground in quick time. In regard to the plan, Governor Cuomo said, “The short answer is ‘no, thank you.’ If we have to turn to this device on a large-scale basis, that’s not an acceptable situation.” Yet detailed instructions for how to manage a crisis do not always come with that crisis. Established rules for how to care for a disease in normal times cannot always guide decisions during a situation with no precedent. I know this as a physician. I know what these government officials are thinking and feeling. The inner voice of judgment whispers a way forward, but established protocols for how to manage a disease in normal times clouds their minds. The protocols make their minds afraid to deviate from the prescribed path. The idea that officials should manage a crisis not through universal rules, but through a half-conscious sense of the vital elements in a situation, unnerves them—as it has unnerved me occasionally, as a doctor, when facing highly unusual situations. But now is not the time for government officials to embrace habit or crave routine. Doing so will not save them or the COVID-19 patients with ARDS. Practicing medicine for 30 years taught me that conventional treatment algorithms do not always apply, although doctors wished they did. Rules and guidelines have exceptions, and the COVID-19 crisis is one of those exceptions.

Why not plan for this? In 2018, President Trump signed the Right to Try Act, which allows patients with terminal disease to try experimental therapies that have not yet received FDA approval. Such patients will die without any therapy; perhaps an experimental therapy will work, so why not let them try, goes the thinking. The same principle applies during a ventilator shortage. Patients (and their loved ones) have the right to try when not trying leads to certain death.

Medical professionals typically resist inviting laypeople to help provide health care in a crisis, as they jealously guard their turf. Just recently, for example, the American Society of Anesthesiology expressed concern that legislators might allow more nurse anesthetists to practice independently of anesthesiologists during the COVID-19 crisis. Nurse anesthetists are not even laypeople; they are co-professionals; and yet there is still wariness. The Society makes a good argument for why the practice should not occur during a period of normalcy, but the COVID-19 crisis is not a period of normalcy.

A longstanding trend in health care makes the assistance of laypeople feasible in another way. The division of labor, meaning occupational specialization, has intensified in health care—indeed, in all fields—over the past 40 years, much to the chagrin of many health care workers. Doctors and nurses often train and specialize in carrying out a few technical procedures over the course of their careers. This causes some doctors and nurses to grow bored with their work, while also making them very good at what they do—better than what a generalist can do when performing the procedure only sporadically. Consistent with this trend, medical practice has become a series of tasks. Fortunately, a couple of those tasks are uncomplicated. Semi-skilled laborers can learn to perform them in a few days.

We can use this trend in health care to our advantage during the COVID-19 crisis, as laypeople can be trained very quickly to perform uncomplicated tasks in an ICU setting. Their presence can free up trained medical professionals to engage in more important duties. A layperson, for example, can be trained to suction a COVID-19 patient’s endotracheal tube or to help turn the patient prone every few hours, which assists in ventilation of the lungs.

The scheme is not perfect, but an imperfect scheme put into action is sometimes better than a perfect one accomplished too late. New ventilators may not come online until after the peak in COVID-19 cases has passed. Allowing a layperson to function as a “human bellows” during that peak may help some ARDS patients survive when the alternative is no ventilator at all—and certain death. It may also free up the more sophisticated ventilators to be used in the most complicated ARDS cases.

Now is no time to adhere closely to traditional rules and regulations. We must ignore the person who insists that something can’t be done simply because it has never been done before. In this spirit will I stand ever ready in April, endotracheal tube and Ambu bag at my side.

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The False Promise of the Surveillance State

In May 2017, I walked through the main gate of the Id Kah Mosque complex on the main square of Kashgar, the Uighur-majority city on China’s far western frontier. The mosque has been the center of Kashgar for hundreds of years, a reminder of the city’s ancient Central Asian heritage. The six video cameras hanging from a metal railing above demonstrated the Chinese Communist Party’s determination to forge a techno-authoritarian modernity. At the time, in 2017, the Party’s escalated campaign of repression against their Uighur Muslim minority was in its early stages. The cameras above my head showed that Beijing was already placing surveillance at the center.

Three years later, China’s nationwide system of facial recognition is one of the Communist Party’s proudest accomplishments. The country hosts several young tech firms valued at over $1 billion that specialize in selling facial recognition software to China’s government and around the globe. Beijing’s worldwide exports of surveillance tech seek to spread its governance methods and bolster authoritarian allies. Foreign visitors entering China have their fingerprints scanned at passport check, after which a computer screen declares “fingerprints captured!” Then their photo is taken and, presumably, uploaded to a facial recognition database. “Face captured!” the computer screen declares, as an animated face smiles happily at you.

Most of the debate over the PRC’s vast surveillance apparatus has focused on whether it is a good thing to have your “face captured” by China’s Communist Party. Beijing’s tech-enabled surveillance state enables the security services to track more easily anyone who dares question the wisdom of Xi Jinping Thought. For China’s Uighurs, who are subjected to batteries of cameras at every turn, and forced to upload tracking apps to their phones, the rollout of surveillance tech has been accompanied by forced labor and re-education camps.

China’s construction of this vast surveillance apparatus is a tremendous achievement, we are frequently told, giving the party new tools, better information, and, as a result, increased longevity. The notion that intensified surveillance improves governance outcomes and stabilizes the regime is the justification for Beijing’s techno-authoritarianism at home. It is also the sales pitch for Chinese tech abroad.

But are these claims true?

Medieval China is said to have had Four Great Inventions—gunpowder, paper, printing, and the compass. Yet despite this technological prowess, the Industrial Revolution happened in Northern England rather than Northern China. Today, Beijing is betting on the Four Great Inventions of Xi Jinping’s China—facial recognition, AI, smartphone tracking apps, and 5G connectivity—to undergird the Party’s rule over the next generation. New technologies have funneled extraordinary volumes of information to the Party’s security apparatus. China’s government probably has more data on its people than any government has accumulated in history.

New surveillance technologies are justified on the grounds that they give governments more useable information, allowing authorities to resolve previously insurmountable dilemmas, and to address longstanding challenges with fewer resources. More data and better tracking ought to allow individualized responses to policy problems. We ought to see governments tackling threats before they arise, and using more targeted interventions in the place of blunt methods. For China, surveillance tech ought to replace Maoist mass mobilization—the political technology of the peasant society—with precision technocracy. If surveillance tech works, in other words, it ought to make China’s government less overt in its strategies of repression. It should also make the Communist Party more capable and responsive, thereby extending its hold on power.

There is no doubt that technology gives autocrats new tools. But does it improve their political skill? In China, the homeland of surveillance tech, the promised benefits have not panned out. There is little evidence that Chinese politics is being transformed by technology. In China, the rise of surveillance tech has coincided with a turn away from technocracy. Except for the smiley animations on its facial recognition software, Beijing has abandoned the pretense of moving toward Singaporean-style soft authoritarianism. During the days of Xi Jinping’s predecessor Hu Jintao, many analysts in China and abroad suggested that the Communist Party had embraced technocracy and looked to Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew as an example of enlightened governance. Yet under the People’s Leader (as Xi is now officially known), Chinese politics have re-emphasized sticks over carrots. And the construction of the surveillance state has been accompanied by a reinvigoration of Marxist-Leninist ideology and resuscitation of Mao-style mass mobilization campaigns.

Beijing has forged a surveillance state without peer. But information alone provides no ironclad guarantee of the Communist Party’s future. There is some correlation between governments’ ability to procure information and their capacity to govern. The Romans’ road network was built with this aim in mind. The U.S. Constitution empowers Congress “to establish Post Offices and Post Roads” for a similar reason. But bringing information from the provinces to the center only accomplishes so much; the information must be analyzed and deployed, too. The infrastructure needed to understand and to interpret—including transparent institutions and well-aligned incentives—is very different from the equipment needed to collect data. This is why China’s surveillance apparatus has not created the ultra-efficient techno-dystopia predicted by sci-fi novelists: the modern surveillance cameras have simply been fitted into the standard authoritarian dystopia bequeathed by Marx and Lenin. China’s tech ecosystem has blossomed, but Chinese politics are little changed, which is why Chairman Xi is reinvigorating the personality cult of Chairman Mao. Artificial intelligence, it turns out, is no guarantee of intelligent government.

The coronavirus coverup in Wuhan is but the latest evidence that China’s surveillance state is not delivering on its promises. A properly functioning surveillance apparatus would have immediately notified Beijing of the outbreak. Instead, local authorities had early knowledge of the virus but declined to share this news lest they be punished. When the hospitals were too full of people dying of pneumonia to cover up, Beijing was finally notified. Then Chairman Xi chose to deny and delay until the virus had spread across China and the world.

China’s state media have celebrated the country’s tech firms for developing apps to manage the crisis and enforce the quarantines. More significant, though, is the failure of the surveillance apparatus to prevent the pandemic in the first place. Terabytes of data were streaming toward Beijing, volumes unimaginable just years earlier, from surveillance cameras, from smartphones, and from the internet of things. None of this provided any benefit in the crucial early weeks of the COVID-19 outbreak when the virus was allowed to spread from Wuhan to the world.

Many governments have struggled with the new coronavirus, so Beijing’s inept policy response cannot be blamed solely on its surveillance state. But the surveillance apparatus deserves little credit, either. The causes of the COVID crisis—excessive secrecy, distorted incentives, an unaccountable elite, and suppression of criticism—are standard fare in Chinese politics. They explain why in addition to COVID, the Communist Party has also bungled the handling of a swine fever over the past year and a half. These factors were also behind the Party’s failure to promptly tackle SARS in 2002 and AIDS before that.

The Chinese Communist Party’s eventual response to the COVID crisis—a mixture of mass mobilization and denunciation—are standard policy responses in the People’s Republic, whether to epidemics or other threats. In the spheres most important to the Party’s hold on power, there is little evidence that technology is improving policymaking. Consider Beijing’s campaign ostensibly to crack down on violent Uighur separatism. Rather than target individuals linked to violence, Beijing has reportedly locked up hundreds of thousands of Uighurs in re-education camps. The pinpoint accuracy promised by surveillance state advocates ought to enable the government to arrest hundreds rather than hundreds of thousands. Yet instead of careful tracking, the CCP is sorting citizens by ethnicity—a type of “facial recognition” that requires neither smartphones nor software.

Digital facial recognition technology may well provide some benefits to humanity. Owners of the newest iPhones appear generally to like signing in with their faces rather than their thumbprint. When people begin returning to airports after the COVID quarantines subside, they will find it increasingly common to board planes by scanning their faces rather than their boarding passes. But it is one thing to sign onto an iPhone, and quite another to manage a political system. In the world’s epicenter of surveillance tech, the thesis that it will transform politics is being daily disproven.

The main accomplishment of China’s surveillance state has been to reproduce the indignities of authoritarianism in the internet age. Denunciation culture has gone digital. The surveillance apparatus did nothing to stop the COVID epidemic from spreading, yet apps proved capable of denouncing people “infected” with the virus. Singaporean-style soft authoritarianism this is not. Pinpoint accuracy remains a far-off dream.

Will the surveillance state at least provide the political stability that the Communist Party craves? History does not suggest cause for optimism. Authorities tasked with guaranteeing political stability always want more information. All security chiefs find frightening the volume of things they wished they knew but do not. Yet there is no obvious relationship between the size of a surveillance apparatus and the longevity of a regime. Nor is there a straightforward link between the quantity of data flowing into a government and the quality of analysis that comes out.

All governments want information, and regimes that fear for their hold on power tend to want more of it. For centuries, secret police forces have opened letters, sought informants, studied rumors, and employed spies. In the years before the French Revolution, King Louis XVI’s agents tracked his opponents not only across the country, but in London, too. From the late 19th century, the Russian czars’ fearsome Okhrana ran operations across Europe to follow dissidents and would-be assassins, even placing double agents inside revolutionary cells. Even democracies gather reams of information, both on external foes and on purported internal threats. At the height of Cold War-era insecurities about communist subversion, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover ran a series of illegal information gathering efforts against domestic rivals such as Martin Luther King, Jr.

Some amount of surveillance is needed to investigate run-of-the-mill crime. Information gathering can also protect against violent opponents of the constitutional order. But surveillance is only ever a tool, not a panacea. The failures of secret police agencies are in many ways more spectacular than their successes. They were not enough to help the Bourbons or the Romanovs, who remained blind to the threat even as the revolutionaries were pounding down their palace gates.

And it was not only the old monarchies who wrongly trusted in their secret police. The most technologically advanced surveillance state before Xi’s China was found in East Germany. The Stasi had recruited one in ten Germans to work as informants, and, in addition to old-fashioned letter-opening, employed an advanced system of surveillance technology. Yet this did little for the East German Communists. Their regime’s collapse in 1989 came almost as a complete surprise. They had almost unlimited information, but little understanding of the revolutionary surge that ripped through East German politics in mid-1989, at the speed with which the coronavirus tore through Wuhan in January.

It is far easier to collect data than to analyze it, and easier to recognize faces than to understand the minds behind them. Some parts of human life, like traffic and shopping, follow patterns that are easy to model. But though prophets from Karl Marx to Nate Silver claim to have discovered a science of society, politics rarely follows predictable patterns. Most of the world’s great revolutions came as an absolute surprise. And many of the contemporary world’s most frequently predicted revolutions, from the downfall of Venezuela’s Nicholas Maduro to Iran’s religious leaders, stubbornly refuse to happen.

Because analysis is hard, and because predictions are vulnerable to falsification, surveillance chiefs prefer to devote resources to collecting rather than predicting. A spy chief is rarely criticized for finding new ways to tap phones or hack emails, but they can easily be attacked for forecasts that go wrong. Yet surveillance apparatuses face a problem like the one that economist Friedrich Hayek diagnosed in centrally planned economies: they can collect many types of information, but not the ones that they really need. “Knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use,” Hayek wrote, “never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.” The rough political equivalent is the adage that “all politics is local”—something that centralized databases are unlikely to manage well.

Soviet economist Leonid Kantorovich won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1975 for his work on the algorithms to optimize a planned economy. Yet even when he ran their numbers through the USSR’s most advanced computers, his best efforts never approached the efficiency of the decentralized price mechanism.

The KGB tried to manage Soviet politics with a similar emphasis on centralized information planning. But it faced similar dilemmas as did Gosplan. “Garbage in, garbage out”—the constant problem of the data collection machine. The Soviet security services reported on all sorts of capitalist subversion that didn’t exist, but that they assumed bosses would like to hear about. They neglected to report on the far more important fact that the security services and party elite were themselves losing faith in socialist ideology and the Soviet system. If planning the Soviet Union’s economy was difficult and inefficient, planning its politics proved impossible, as its completely unexpected collapse proved.

The reality is that politics cannot be planned or predicted, regardless of the quantity of data streaming toward the center. Every U.S. President comes into office with a plan, written by the experts that staff their transition teams. Then presidents are forced to toss these plans out as they spend their days in office dealing with unexpected shocks: terrorist attacks, hurricanes, recessions, and pandemics. Authoritarian systems have more need for planning and predicting. Presidents need only to survive four or eight years in power, while dictators must plan for indefinite rule.

Surveillance and information gathering can help solve some problems, but only in a supporting role. South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore have led the world in tackling COVID thanks in part to technology like tracking apps. The West, too, is likely to adopt new surveillance tech in the aftermath of the epidemic, making use of instant virus testing, smartphone GPS data, and perhaps also facial recognition to manage quarantine and social distancing regulations. But these types of health surveillance will only be as effective as the institutions in which they are embedded. Today, some Republican governors are as uninterested in taking COVID-19 seriously as were Communist Party leaders in Wuhan in January. No amount of virus surveillance data can change this. Those societies that were always on top of the virus—using old-world techniques like face masks and contact tracing—will find that new tools graft straightforwardly onto existing institutions. South Korea has used apps to track the virus, for example, but no one thinks that its politics have been in any way transformed. Technology complements state capacity but it cannot substitute for it.

Advanced surveillance tech will, therefore, prove a false hope for politicians worldwide, as it already has for China’s leaders. They hope that it will provide the information needed to predict politics and shape the future. And yet the most advanced technologies seem rarely to address the question most need answered: what will come next? Nobody knows—and least of all someone convinced that the answer will be found by accumulating ever more information about the present rather than thinking about the future.

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