Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 42

The Sources of CCP Conduct

In his Long Telegram to the State Department in 1946, Wisconsin’s George Kennan argued that the nature of the Soviet regime led to irreconcilable differences with the United States. Soviet leaders were “committed fanatically to the belief that with [the United States] there can be no permanent modus vivendi.” In order to preserve their own power, it was necessary to break “the international authority of [the American] state.” Dealing with this threat, in Kennan’s view, would be the “greatest task our diplomacy has ever faced and probably greatest it will ever have to face.”

Today, we face a similar strategic challenge. As Vice President Mike Pence argued in his October speech outlining America’s strategic competition with China, decades of well-meaning U.S. engagement have emboldened China’s rulers. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has grown more aggressive in the East and South China Seas, in its distortion of free markets and theft of intellectual property, and in its challenge to democratic values within China and around the world. These actions represent a holistic approach to maximizing Chinese national power at the expense of the United States and the liberal norms that we, along with our allies, have sustained for decades.

The free world faces a threat unlike anything seen since Kennan’s time. Pence’s speech was a long-overdue recognition of this fact and the most prominent exposition to date of CCP aggression. Yet he did not explain why the CCP behaves the way it does.

Seven decades ago, Kennan wrote that the “characteristics of Soviet policy. . . .are basic to the internal nature of Soviet power and will be with us. . . .until the internal nature of Soviet power is changed.” Likewise, understanding the CCP is essential to understanding China’s external ambitions and why they cannot be reconciled with those of the free world. Until the internal nature of CCP power changes, the regime will pursue policies that undermine U.S. interests and those of our allies. What follows is a closer look at the sources of CCP conduct, or put differently, the link between the nature of this regime and its behavior.

The Long Shadow of Chinese History

The first source of CCP conduct is Chinese history—or, more precisely, certain strongly held and CCP-perpetuated narratives about China’s history. Two narratives stand out, both of which reflect politicized versions of true history and blend chauvinism, insecurity, and imperial ambition.

The first narrative comes from Chinese dynastic history. Unlike Europe, where countries competed constantly for power, China enjoyed long periods without true rivals. Though dynasties rose and fell, the Chinese viewed themselves at the center of “all under heaven” or the central node in a world that revolved around them. To an extent, it did. Through a system that extended Chinese economic and political influence through much of East Asia, Chinese rulers received tribute “in exchange for economic and sometimes security benefits.” Echoes of this narrative can be seen in CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping’s 2014 declaration of a “new Asian security concept,” in which he called for “the people of Asia to run the affairs of Asia, solve the problems of Asia and uphold the security of Asia.” Xi’s message is clear: It is time for the Americans to leave and for China to return to its idealized traditional primacy over its Asian neighbor-vassals.

The second narrative is that the greatest threat to China is weak central leadership that invites foreign aggression and corresponding national humiliation. This narrative springs from several different periods in Chinese history. One is the early fifth century to third century B.C.E., known as the Warring States era. During this window, Chinese politics more closely resembled Europe, with multiple independent states balancing against one another, shifting their allegiances, and vying for power. In another period of weakness a millennium and a half later, colonial powers progressively eroded Chinese sovereignty beginning with the 1839 Opium War and continuing until the 1945 Kuomintang and allied victory over Imperial Japan—a period the CCP calls the “Century of Humiliation.”

Contemporary CCP leaders manipulate these narratives to justify the repression and expansion of China’s periphery. From the Warring States period, Chinese leaders have inherited a deep insecurity over territorial fissures, including Taiwan and Tibet. This insecurity is why “unification” with Taiwan is central to General Secretary Xi’s “Chinese dream” of “national rejuvenation”—despite the fact that Taiwan has never been controlled by the CCP, and only very rarely by any mainland Chinese government. CCP leaders also continually foster a sense of grievance about foreign meddling that, in its telling, only the Party could have stopped, and only the Party can prevent from happening again.

Chinese history also guides CCP leaders by allowing them to draw upon longstanding traditions in what they call “barbarian handling.” Long before the founding of the CCP, China mastered the practice of making adversaries dependent upon its economic largesse. China also successfully indoctrinated competitors, pressuring the leaders of competitive states to gradually shift their value systems closer to China’s. Historian Edward Luttwak writes that these practices had the effect of making adversaries “psychologically as well as economically dependent on imperial radiance, which was willingly extended in brotherly fashion when the Han were weak, and then withdrawn when [rivals] were reduced to vassalage.”

This history casts a long shadow over CCP policymaking. It predisposes China to view nations as either hegemons or vassals, not coequals. It teaches CCP leaders to foster economic dependence in other countries and to manipulate foreign elite opinion to perceive Chinese power as benign or beneficial. And internally, it encourages a chronic anxiety that China could at any moment succumb to separatist movements and fall back into disunity. All of these traits are apparent in daily CCP behavior.

The CCP as an Influence Organization

The second source of CCP conduct, and one habitually discounted by Westerners, is the Party’s own history as an underground influence organization. From its earliest days, the CCP has played the role of insurgent, first within China and then abroad as it has sought to expand its power. A central tool in this struggle has been “United Front” work, or “a range of methods to influence overseas Chinese communities, foreign governments, and other actors to take actions or adopt positions supportive of Beijing’s preferred policies.” Sometimes, the CCP channels such activities through seemingly benign organizations such as educational or cultural groups that quietly promote Party interests. Other times, United Front activities are clearly illegal, such as bribery or extortion. Regardless of its form, United Front work consistently aims to “stifle criticism of the CCP, spread positive views of China, and influence voters in foreign democracies to adopt domestic policies more favorable to China,” as a recent congressional report put it.

Although United Front work originated with Lenin, it has blossomed under the CCP. The Party spent its formative years too weak to pose a military threat to the Japanese or the Kuomintang, and relied instead on “intelligence” activities (a term the Party often used interchangeably with United Front work). The Party credits its underground influence operations for playing a decisive role in its victory in the 1949 civil war. The CCP Politburo went as far as to approve a resolution shortly after the establishment of the PRC that emphasized the role intelligence operations played in the Party’s victory.

Individuals well versed in United Front activities quickly rose to prominence within the Party bureaucracy. Many in the CCP’s core leadership today, including General Secretary Xi himself, are the direct descendants of United Front leaders. John Garnaut, an Australian journalist-turned-policymaker who was instrumental in alerting Western leaders to growing CCP interference in democratic societies, has argued that men such as Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun, “did not earn their seats at the revolutionary head table by feats of military prowess on the battlefield. Rather. . . .[they] were masters of United Front work and earned their stripes by massaging and manipulating the language, perceptions and actions of the Party’s adversaries.”

Seen in this light, the CCP’s roots were less as a political party than as an insurgent organization whose core mission was to manipulate external perceptions in order to advance its power. As Garnaut put it: “The Party’s contemporary institutions, ideology and methodologies continue to reflect its origins as an underground organization.” While the CCP’s United Front Work Department (UFWD) is nominally responsible for overseeing these efforts, “[a]ll of the Party’s 86 million members are expected to take on United Front responsibilities in their dealings with non-party members. In short, influence work is the Party’s stock-in-trade.”

In recent years, General Secretary Xi has singled out United Front work as a “magic weapon” to promote the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” establishing and personally leading a working group on United Front work, assigning UFWD officials to top posts, and adding about 40,000 UFWD cadres. These activities are increasingly bringing the CCP into conflict with democratic institutions abroad. United Front work is more than the CCP behaving badly; it is central to the Party’s identity, history, and global objectives. As long as the CCP governs China, United Front work will figure prominently into Chinese foreign policy.

Dictatorship and “Security”

The third defining source of CCP conduct is the dictatorial nature of its power. Like the ruling class in any autocracy, CCP leaders fear losing power. The party perceives itself to be engaged in a “life-or-death struggle” against Western ideas, including democracy, the universality of human rights, neoliberal economic policy, and even independent journalism.

In an infamous leaked memorandum known as Document No. 9, CCP leaders lay out an existential ideological struggle, couched in Orwellian terms, against “false ideological trends” at home and abroad. CCP propaganda hammers home this message by portraying liberal democracy as outdated and ineffective. As the PRC’s Xinhua state-run news agency puts it, “After several hundred years, 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.” The goal is to discredit Western ideas while presenting China as an alternative model for the developing world. For example, a CCP propaganda outlet argued the latest U.S. government shutdown showed American “democracy and government are unable to provide the solution to an enlarging income gap, opposition among different classes, worsening partisan polarization. [. . .] The government mechanism, designed more than 100 years ago, is malfunctioning.”

The CCP’s sense of ideological struggle also creates an absolutist view of security. As China analyst Peter Mattis has argued, the CCP’s quest for total security is embodied in the 2015 National Security Law, which defines “national security” as the absence of internal and external threats to the regime, its economic interests, or its territorial integrity. Since the CCP cannot claim legitimacy through elections, it seeks legitimacy by expanding its power at home and abroad, particularly through the use of technology for social control. Analysis from the Jamestown Foundation suggests that China’s domestic security expenditures have sharply increased in recent years and began outpacing Chinese military spending beginning in 2010. For example, spending on domestic security outpaced the budget for external defense by about 19 percent in 2017.

These investments support a “social credit” system, now in a pilot phase, that serves as an Uber-style rating for Chinese citizens collated from their most intimate data: their personal finances, their traffic infractions, the private messages they write on their phones, what they browse or buy online and in stores, where they go, and who they interact with—activities automatically monitored by hundreds of millions of surveillance cameras furnished with facial-recognition software. Loyalty to the government is also measured and, when deemed insufficient, punished. Citizens with higher scores receive perks such as easier credit, access to luxury hotels, lower insurance premiums, quicker access to government services, and scholarships to the best schools. Individuals who criticize or organize against CCP policies may find it hard to apply to college, travel, or even find a job.

Prominent CCP members and Chinese industrialists promote surveillance technology as a means of not only ensuring obedience to the Party, but also succeeding where every other Marxist experiment has failed. As Liu Qiangdong, founder of China’s online retailer JD.com, put it, “with the technologies we have laid out in the last two or three years, I have come to recognize that communism can indeed be achieved in our generation.” Alibaba founder and CCP member Jack Ma has argued that “with access to all kinds of data, we may be able to find the invisible hand of the market.” In both cases, a Silicon Valley-style blind faith in the transformative power of technology blends with the CCP’s concrete ambitions to centralize and optimize control over Chinese society and the economy.

The CCP has chosen the autonomous region of Xinjiang—where it feels threatened by separatists within the Islamic Uighur population—to field test its instruments of repression and provide a glimpse into the logical conclusion of its quest for security. As one UN report put it, the CCP has “turned the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region into something that resembled a massive internment camp shrouded in secrecy, a ‘no rights zone.’” In these camps, “detainees are subject to waterboarding, being kept in isolation without food and water, and [are] prevented from sleeping.” The total number detained in camps could be as high as three million—a number that would represent about 38 percent of the entire Uighur population of Xinjiang. Outside of the camps, Xinjiang’s population faces constant security checks and pervasive surveillance. Uighurs must download a smartphone application that scans personal data, including photos, videos, and documents for state review.

The CCP is using Xinjiang to perfect its totalitarian surveillance state throughout China. In the process, it is exposing the lengths it will go to stay in power and its intentions abroad.

United Front Work and the Subversion of Western Institutions

Driven by Chinese history, its own history as an influence organization, and its need for total security, the CCP is programed for interference in foreign societies. Like the Soviet Union in 1946, the CCP’s motivations, experiences, biases, and goals cannot be reconciled with those of the free world. The CCP does not believe in a permanent modus vivendi—at least not in the Indo-Pacific—with the United States.

As Chinese power has increased, it has become more aggressive, belligerent, and coercive. From the militarization of the South China Sea, to widespread technology transfer to seize the commanding heights of the global economy, to debt-trap diplomacy in developing economies, the CCP’s behavior makes sense considering its unique political personality. And as Vice President Pence outlined, the CCP’s belligerence in one domain cannot be separated from its aggression in another. Military activities are directly connected to economic initiatives, which are in turn connected with political interference operations.

The CCP’s political interference operations—intended to subvert and corrupt key Western institutions—are the least studied, most subtle, and perhaps most important of these forms of aggression. While it is easy to understand the threat posed by planting military equipment on disputed islands or hacking the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the CCP’s systematic delegitimization of Western institutions is more insidious.

At the United Nations, for example, in the 15 years following the Tiananmen Square massacre, the CCP defeated a dozen resolutions condemning its human rights abuses, often leveraging its economic power to help secure the votes of developing nations. While the CCP has continued playing defense at the UN over human rights, in recent years it has gone on offense, using bribery and intimidation and in the process blurring the lines between corruption and United Front-style political warfare.

Consider the case of Sheri Yan, a Chinese-born socialite who in 2015 was arrested on charges of bribing John Ashe, a former president of the UN General Assembly. Through a complex network of intermediaries, including suspected CCP spies, Yan funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars from United Front-affiliated sources through her UN-designated NGO to influential UN officials, including Ashe. At the same time, her NGO employed the wife of a second General Assembly president, Sam Kutesa. Kutesa was allegedly taking $500,000 in bribes from Patrick Ho, a United Front-associated former Hong Kong official. Ho was also accused of using a UN-associated non-profit to bribe UN diplomats, including both Kutesa and Ashe. Ho used his position of influence to advocate tirelessly for the Belt and Road Initiative. When asked about Ho’s corruption and his support for Belt and Road, a UN spokesman echoed Xi Jinping’s precise language, calling the initiative an avenue for “win-win cooperation.”

CCP United Front work has also aimed at subverting the institution of free speech, especially at foreign universities. In light of the key role students played in the Tiananmen demonstrations, the CCP created Chinese Students and Scholars Associations (CSSAs) to reassert ideological control over students at home and abroad. The more than 142 U.S. CSSA chapters are publicly designed to assist Chinese students studying abroad, but also double as mechanisms for the CCP to restrain the free speech and liberty of the same students they are supposed to serve.

The University of Tennessee CSSA mandates members “protect the motherland’s honor and image” while forcing students from Taiwan to support “national reunification.” CSSA chapters have threatened retaliation against schools that have invited the Dalai Lama to campus, while even those more hesitant to toe the CCP line have been pressured to submit proof of their cooperation to government officials. As more attention has focused on the state-supported nature of CSSAs, many chapters have taken to deleting, obfuscating, or otherwise concealing their financial connections to the CCP. Sometimes ties are more open, and CCP cells have sprung up in more than a half dozen states, spanning the country from California to New York. In one case from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, students returning to China after studying abroad were pressured to reveal whether their peers had demonstrated “anti-party thought.”

When a German journalism student studying in China was expelled after reporting on human rights abuses, Chinese state media ran an op-ed chiding him for not obeying Chinese laws. The op-ed argued: “If [the student] was a Chinese student studying in Germany, the Chinese people would accept he must obey German law. But the worst part is some Germans and Western people believe that their laws should play the dominant role in friction between China and the West, even in China. The reason is they believe their laws are universal.”

This rhetoric is disingenuous. Last November a Chinese soccer team cut short a visit to Germany after pro-Tibet demonstrators showed up at the game. A PRC Foreign Ministry spokesman stressed “mutual respect is what the official host should provide their guest, and that respect between any two countries should be mutual.” According to the Party, CCP norms, especially when it comes to free speech (or lack thereof), should prevail both at home and abroad.

Besides free speech, the CCP is attacking the institution of state sovereignty by arguing all individuals of Chinese descent, regardless of citizenship, are beholden to the CCP. For example, in speaking of Malays of Chinese descent, the Chinese Ambassador to Malaysia said, “No matter how far you are, no matter how many generations you stay, (for) overseas Chinese, China is forever your tender maternal home.” He further warned that China would “not sit idly by” in the face of “infringement on China’s national interests or violations of legal rights and interests of Chinese citizens and businesses.”

In recent years, the CCP has expanded efforts to assert the nationality of “overseas Chinese,” regardless of their actual citizenship or wishes. In 2017, CCP officials laid out an expansive vision of United Front work to ensure “[a]ll Chinese both at home and abroad are striving to realize the Chinese Dream.” As part of this strategy, the CCP encourages overseas Chinese to become politically active in an effort “to mobilize public opinion. . . . to promote the PRC’s economic and political agenda abroad.” Acting as if this overseas constituency votes as a bloc, the CCP recently threatened political repercussions if the Australian Labor Party did not support Beijing’s demands for an extradition treaty.

In a series of high-profile cases, the CCP has also detained foreign nationals it claims are PRC citizens. One Chinese-born Swedish citizen has been kidnapped twice by PRC authorities—once while on vacation in Thailand and once right in front of Swedish officials on a train from Shanghai. The Swede released a hostage-style statement while detained: “Although I now hold the Swedish citizenship, deep down I still think of myself as a Chinese. My roots are in China.”

In another case, two young Americans, Victor and Cynthia Liu, along with their mother, are being arbitrarily held in China. While Victor was born on American soil, the Chinese Foreign Ministry has argued that all three are PRC citizens. In both cases, the CCP’s message is clear: Chinese blood supersedes the rights of other states and their citizens.

Why Should We Care?

Americans might reasonably ask why such Chinese aggression matters. China, like any powerful state, is aggressively pursuing its interests. And even if the CCP were to successfully create an “Asia for Asians” and displace the U.S. as the dominant Indo-Pacific power, America would still have a strong economy, a dominant position in the Western Hemisphere, and frayed but strong alliances, especially in Europe.

To understand why this scenario would be threatening to American interests, Kennan again provides a helpful framework. In 1948, he argued that there were five centers of industrial and military power: the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and central Europe, the USSR, and Japan. America’s foremost interest was ensuring that Soviet political control did not extend over any of these centers beyond the USSR itself.

Today the centers of economic production and power—the strongpoints Kennan sought to defend—have shifted to the Indo-Pacific. According to some estimates, Asia itself could comprise as much as half of global GDP by 2050. As Jakub Grygiel has argued, China’s growth in East Asia combined with Russia’s weakness in Eurasia have changed the locale of power, likely making the sea lanes of East Asia “the key lifelines of the world.” With this concentration of economic power in its own backyard, the CCP does not have to project power far in order to dominate the global economy.

Consequently, an American retreat from the Indo-Pacific would put the world’s vital hub of economic activity in Chinese hands. Given its track record, the CCP would use this Indo-Pacific sphere of influence to further subvert Western institutions and extract painful concessions. The CCP would not be content “solving” the Taiwan or Tibet questions and then focusing on China’s internal development. It would expand the boundaries of its growing surveillance state, targeting non-PRC citizens who oppose its agenda. It would nurture dependence in weaker states, creating a system of vassals rather than partners. Most of all, the free and open world built by the United States and our allies in the aftermath of World War II, with corresponding gains in global standards of living and human rights, would be replaced by a chaotic contest for the global commons and the steady expansion of CCP social control. The CCP’s Orwellian nightmare would replace America’s Lockean dream.

Through their actions, CCP leaders have warned us repeatedly that this is the world they are working to build. CCP policies reflect a remarkably clear and comprehensive agenda to overtake the United States, displace us in the Indo-Pacific, and corrupt our foremost institutions. As Kennan said of the Soviets, they show a “cautious, persistent pressure toward the disruption and weakening of all rival influence and rival power.”

Toward a Counter-Finlandization Strategy

To prevent this future, we must first recognize that we are in a contest for global leadership—but until recently, only one side has been playing. There are some signs, however, that America is starting to take this challenge seriously. The 2017 National Security Strategy and 2018 National Defense Strategy both identify China as a revisionist power and America’s top threat. Congress has also taken important bipartisan steps over the past two years like lifting defense spending caps in 2018 and 2019, expanding authorities for examining CCP-directed investments in the United States, passing the BUILD Act to help meet growing international demand for infrastructure investment, and shining a light on CCP espionage threats on college campuses.

America, in other words, is awakening to the challenge, but we still need a clear framework to guide our actions. If containment was America’s operative framework vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, we need a new organizing principle today, at least while the CCP remains in power. One might be found by examining the Soviet Union’s relationship with not the United States, but Finland. “Finlandization” became a Cold War shorthand for a nominally independent but functionally subservient country. As one declassified CIA report describes, the Finns “hoped to keep their independence by significantly limiting it, to secure their neutrality by generally leaning to one side, and to maintain their democratic privileges by restricting them in certain key areas. . . . In practice, this policy has meant the frequent sacrifice of Finland’s economic interests and political preferences to the needs of assuaging Soviet suspicions and meeting Soviet demands.”

Today, the United States must focus its efforts on preventing the Finlandization of the Indo-Pacific and beyond. Ultimately, a counter-Finlandization strategy is about choice—not between China and the United States—but ensuring that allies and partners have the confidence and the ability to choose their own path, free from economic and military coercion. Countries that wish to preserve their independence, regional peace, and economic prosperity will have to act with the understanding that all three are under threat from the CCP. This does not mean our friends need to agree with us all the time—it merely means standing up for national self-interest when it diverges, as it often will, from China’s.

An effective counter-Finlandization strategy should emphasize three things: material power, allies, and values. Taken collectively, these elements constitute not only the foundation of an effective strategy but the sources of American national strength. Just as we have examined the sources of the CCP’s conduct, we must understand our competitive advantages and ground our strategy in the enduring American principles that have made us the most powerful nation in history.

This begins with material power, both economic and military. American economic power did not emerge out of thin air. Our open economy, free society, and respect for the rule of law created a culture of innovation and hard work that catapulted America to the forefront of the global economy. We have regulatory burdens, rent-seeking behavior, and special interest capture, to be sure, but our system remains one that gives confidence to investors and entrepreneurs. This is a core advantage, and one we would do well to preserve.

As the global economy increasingly depends upon advanced—and easily manipulated— technologies, the private sector must voluntarily step up for the good of the nation and its own bottom line. Industry will need to make hard choices about the security of its information technology supply chains in China and research cooperation on dual-use technologies with the CCP. In particular, Silicon Valley, a leader in the corporate social responsibility movement, should modernize its conception of social responsibility to exclude technology partnerships with the CCP that are likely to lead to human rights abuses or the development of advanced weapons systems. We must ensure that the technologies that will shape the future of the global economy belong to the United States—and not the CCP.

Going hand in hand with economic power is American military power. Our foremost goal must to be ensure that the relative gap between U.S. and Chinese military capabilities is so wide that everyone—allies and adversaries alike—understands that any military conflict would end in a decisive U.S. victory. This is not just about winning a potential fight; it is about establishing a favorable peacetime condition in which allies and partners feel secure and Chinese leaders know that attempted coercion, even of smaller states, is futile. This will not come cheaply. But as former Defense Secretary James Mattis put it, “America can afford survival.”

Building on recent defense budget growth, the U.S. government must follow at the very least the National Defense Strategy Commission’s plan for three to five percent real annual growth in the defense budget to build force structure and next-generation capabilities. Furthermore, policymakers should focus on preventing what National Defense Strategy architect Elbridge Colby has described as “the most pointed form” of a potential Chinese attack: a fait accompli in which the People’s Liberation Army quickly seized territory and then raised the costs of a prospective counterattack to a level that would cause the United States to balk. The National Defense Strategy, punctuated by an under-appreciated shift from deterrence by punishment to deterrence by denial, is designed to do just this. Congress must exercise vigorous oversight to ensure the Pentagon follows through on this transformational shift.

America’s friends, allies, and partners constitute the second component of a counter-Finlandization strategy. Due to far-sighted policies implemented after World War II, the United States now enjoys a strong alliance system in the Indo-Pacific and beyond. The U.S. government must seize on every opportunity to draw closer to regional powers like Australia, Japan, South Korea, India, and Taiwan, while also seeking out emerging partners that share common interests. Simply put, we are the away team in the Indo-Pacific, and we will not be able to prevent Finlandization without establishing close working relationships with regional allies and partners. Nurturing local allies gives us greater military, political, and economic access and creates options for dealing with crises. As the Chinese academic Yan Xuetong wrote in 2011, “the core of competition between China and the United States will be to see who has more high-quality friends.”

Critically, this competition for friends is not limited to the Indo-Pacific. The CCP is trying to drive wedges between the United States and its partners wherever and whenever it can. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the Five Eyes intelligence sharing alliance at the heart of America’s global coalition. In recent weeks, China has exposed a critical gap in America’s “special relationship” with the United Kingdom over its reported decision to allow Huawei onto its 5G network—a decision which ultimately cost Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson his job. At the same time, New Zealand has indicated it will work with China on One Belt, One Road, which Secretary of State Michael Pompeo has strongly criticized for its “predatory lending practices.” Given that China has been able to score victories of this scale among the innermost core of the American coalition, it is not hard to imagine how the CCP will exploit and exacerbate tensions with other American partners.

Strengthening relationships with allies, friends, and partners will take actions both large and small. The administration should return to the congressional intent behind national security tariffs and end Section 232 actions and investigations against our allies. At the same time, the administration should offer and prioritize expanded trade relationships with countries that make responsible decisions such as banning firms like Huawei and ZTE from their future 5G networks and declining to join One Belt, One Road. Meanwhile, to fortify democratic governments, non-profits, academia, and the media should get to work on a public “United Front Tracker,” as suggested by the Hudson Institute’s Jonas Parello-Plesner, that would shed light on ongoing CCP interference campaigns abroad.

Finally, we need to better incorporate values as a foundational element of our strategy. In 1946, Kennan challenged the U.S. government to “formulate and put forward for other nations a much more positive and constructive picture of sort of world we would like to see than we have put forward in past.” As we think about what sort of world we would like to see—and how we should best communicate it—we could do a lot worse than grounding this vision in an expression of our foundational values: our internal sources of conduct outlined in our Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. This vision of equality, liberty, and the rule of law is a self-evident contrast to the future offered by the CCP. This is a contrast the U.S. government should draw explicitly and relentlessly, highlighting the human rights atrocities in the Xinjiang concentration camps, imposing harsh sanctions on the individuals responsible (like Communist Party Secretary for Xinjiang Chen Quanguo), and cutting off the flow of U.S. technology that enables repressive systems. If we fail to articulate the difference between our values—and our actions—and those of the CCP, we will be waging great power competition with one hand tied behind our back.

At the same time, if we abandon these values and instead try to “out China China”—going further down the road of social control, government antagonizing business through executive fiat, or reducing protections for privacy and free speech—we will lose our way. As Kennan put it: “the greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet communism, is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.” By better understanding our adversary and ourselves, we can avoid this outcome, prevent our friends, allies and partners from falling victim to Finlandization, and in the long run, leave the CCP on the ash heap of history.

Edward Luttwak, The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy, (Belknap Press, 2012), p. 24-25.

Ibid., p. 27.

Alexander Bowe, “China’s Overseas United Front Work: Background and Implications for the United States,” Staff Research Report, U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (August 2018), p. 3.

Ibid., p. 6

David Ian Chambers, “The Past and Present State of Chinese Intelligence Historiography,” Studies in Intelligence Vol. 56, No. 3 (September 2012), p. 32.

Bowe, p. 5-6.

Jessica Batke, “Surveillance, Suppression, and Mass Detention: Xinjiang’s Human Rights Crisis,” Testimony before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, July 26, 2018.

Bowe, p. 10.

Ibid., p. 12.

Ibid., p. 11.

Anne-Marie Brady, “Magic Weapons: China’s political influence activities under Xi Jinping,” Wilson Center (September 2017), p. 8.

John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security. (Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 29.

Grygiel, Great Powers and Geopolitical Change (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), p. xii, 170.

Eric Edelman and Gary Roughead, et al, “Providing for the Common Defense: The Assessment and Recommendations of the National Defense Strategy Commission,” National Defense Strategy Commission, (November 2018), p. 52.

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Orpheus and the Wall

Hadestown

Directed by Rachel Chavkin

Walter Kerr Theatre, New York, NY

Hadestown is a show touched by divinity. A musician loses his about-to-be-wife and walks into the realm of Death to regain her. He succeeds at the epic part of his quest, winning over the adamant Lord of the Dead, but fails during the grinding, quotidian part. Orpheus is forbidden to look back at Eurydice as he leads her out of death, but his resolve fails him on the cusp of success.

This version of the story, ably directed by Rachel Chavkin and now the frontrunner of this year’s Tony Awards, is acutely aware it is a retelling—and not just of the original myth. Songwriter Anaïs Mitchell developed Hadestown first as a song cycle, then as an off-Broadway staging, and finally as a full Broadway production. The set (by Rachel Hauck) echoes the theme of cycles, placing the actors on a small stage, but one fitted with three concentric turntables.

A story of gods and men requires magic, and the show achieves its moments of transcendence by hanging onto a scrappy, small-budget sensibility, with an admirable restraint that is sometimes lacking in Broadway transfers. In “Wedding Song,” for instance, when Eurydice is won over by Orpheus’s courtship, his singing animates the set. There’s no wirework (which must be a relief to the actor playing Orpheus, Reeve Carney, previously star of the perilous Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark). Instead, the five-person chorus moves tables and hoists chairs, giving shape to Orpheus’s promise that, despite his poverty, “The trees are gonna lay the wedding table.”

In another show, this might be part of the heightened tone of theater, unremarkable as the act of singing is in musicals. Orpheus seems to experience it that way, but Eurydice (Eva Noblezada) clearly experiences it as diegetic action. She turns in confusion to see the usually invisible extras and takes in Orpheus with new eyes. There is a real magic to his song, and the cynical Eurydice, focused purely on survival, begins to consider there might be something more to the world.

The gods have their power established through similarly simple effects. When Hades (Patrick Page) delivers his first lines, his subbasement basso profundo feels like a trick. Nearly every subsequent time he opens his mouth, the audience stopped breathing for a moment, awed.

To match him, Orpheus has an implausible falsetto in his signature song (“Epic”). The first time Carney arced into his high melody, I leaned forward, staring at his mouth, trying to figure out if he was still carrying the tune or if it had been passed off to another member of the cast. It was Carney every time.

His voice, in that register, is unearthly, not lovely. Orpheus hasn’t written this tune, he’s remembered it, and as he performs, it seems like something is singing through him. He isn’t a songwriter, it turns out, but he might be the last person who can hear this song—the original love song of Hades and Persephone, one that the lovers themselves have lost the tune of.

Hermes, the messenger-god who serves as narrator, warns us that “When the gods are having a fight, everybody else better hold on tight.” The world that Orpheus and Eurydice inhabit is wounded and weakened by the faltering love between Hades and Persephone. (This production does not frame Hades’s initial courtship as an abduction or rape, as many versions of the myth do.) The further away from each other they draw, the more the seasons are disordered: summers hot and scorching, winters freezing and famished. Like Oberon and Titania, Hades and Persephone can say, “This same progeny of evils comes from our debate, from our dissension. We are their parents and original.”

The gods themselves are distorted by their division. Hades is the obvious villain—the antagonist to Orpheus, the instigator of Eurydice’s death—but Amber Gray is galvanizing as an embittered Persephone. She has a furious energy to her dancing that convincingly conveys the power of a Greek god—attracting their attention, even favorably, is perilous. While her sepulchral husband turns to cold machinery and automation, she is riotous growth gone to rot, the stickiness of over-ripened grapes.

Everything is tainted by the broken relationship among the gods. The Fates (a stellar trio of Jewelle Blackman, Yvette Gonzalez-Nacer, and Kay Trinidad) buzz and swirl around the characters, and are so cruel that I kept getting mixed up and referring to them as the Furies when my husband and I discussed the show. He pointed out I was being unfair to the Furies—those creatures harried only the guilty, but here the Fates bedevil everyone. When Hermes introduces them, he warns the audience that they are “always singing in the back of your mind,” and, before the show is over, even Hades hears them giving voice to his fear.

So, if there’s something rotten in the state of Hadestown, what is it?

The show can be stretched to fit a number of narratives. Hades’s big song “Why We Build the Wall” invites Trumpian parallels (“The wall keeps out the enemy / And we build the wall to keep us free,” the chorus sings.) But the song long predates Trump’s catchphrase, and calling Hades a Trumpian figure is too generous to Trump. If anything, he aspires to be a Hadesian one.

The living who flee the natural evil of droughts and find themselves ensnared by the willed evil of Hades’s rapacious industrialism call to mind the migration from the Dust Bowl to the Rust Belt. The seasons in revolt might be climate change; the Fates undermining our will with their whispers could be depression. The show is too multifarious to be viewed as offering a single analogy. It will connect powerfully with people who see their own different stories reflected back at them, but the broadness weakens the ending a little—no one conclusion could resolve all these stories.

When Orpheus stands before Hades, he plays the king his own love song, recovered at last, and the world is…if not quite saved, then at least shored up. Touched by the music, Hades and Persephone aren’t fully reconciled, but they are willing to try. And in their renewal, there is a restoration of the world.

Hades tempted Eurydice into death by offering her Lethe’s oblivion as a solution to the difficulties of life. The residents of Hadestown recite his promises in “Chant II:” “He said he’d shelter us. He said he’d harbor me.” The gods have forgotten who they are, too. In Hadestown the goodness of being is a truth we have trouble remembering, a song we lose the beat of.

When Orpheus reminds them, he gives them the chance to recollect themselves. But Hades has only begun the process of healing, and he offers only a chance of mercy to Orpheus. He must make the journey back without certainty that Eurydice is following, without any guarantee that she will keep faith that life is worth living.

In the final moments of suspense, even knowing the original story, I watched with bated breath, waiting to see if the production was willing for Orpheus to fail. For him to turn back is predictable. To evade the ending is cheap. But the show has told us at the beginning (and will remind us at the end) that this is an old song, a sad song, and that “we’re going to sing it anyway.” But, in the conclusion, Hermes and the chorus admit that, even knowing and performing every night, they “begin to sing it again as if it might turn out this time.”

And for a moment, it’s imaginable that it could. That one day the marquee will be dark and the show will have suddenly closed, with the actors as surprised as the ticket holders for future performances, only able to offer in explanation, “Last night, he made it.”

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The Holy Roman Union

“If classified according to the rules of political science,” Samuel Pufendorf wrote about the Holy Roman Empire, it would appear “an irregular body resembling a monster.” Similar to today’s European Union, the Empire was neither a unitary state, nor a federation, “but rather a cross between the two. This condition is the constant source of the fatal disease and the internal upheavals.”

Given that the Holy Roman Empire outlived Pufendorf by more than a century, perhaps the predictions of the EU’s impending demise should also be taken with a grain of salt. More importantly, the parallels between the two are not merely accidental. Instead, they reveal something deeper about the European condition. Our present globalized world shares a number of characteristics with the Middle Ages and Early Modern period in Europe: overlapping sources of political authority with sometimes universal claims, and multiple and fuzzy political loyalties.

Like the decentralized European continent that shared the common anchors of Christianity and classical thought, today’s world embeds diverse countries in a shared setting of an integrated global markets, convenience communication and transport, global consumer patterns, a common business culture, and English as the world’s lingua franca. This is especially evident in the EU, where the depth of shared economic and cultural ties surpasses any comparable political project, save for actual unitary or federal states.

The Empire, which existed for over a millennium, was a response to the combined reality of Europe’s highly decentralized politics and a shared, universalistic cultural frame. Until the Reformation, the pope’s jurisdiction was seen as universal, not limited to any particular territory, and included the right to award lands in terra incognita, though that authority was never backed by effective power. And while the Holy Roman Emperor styled himself as the pope’s secular counterpart and the successor to emperors of Ancient Rome, it would be misleading to graft Roman legal concepts onto the medieval world, conflating the emperor with summa potestas (highest authority), princes with praesides provinciarum (officials exercising delegated authority over provinces), and Imperial Diets with senatus.

Instead, the genius of the Empire was the way it brought together a variety of political units into a covenantal, rules-based system without sacrificing their diversity. The relations it created bound together hundreds of state-like entities: kingdoms, principalities, duchies, and self-governing cities, with different degrees of representation in the three-tier Imperial Diet—electors at the top, followed by other princes, bishops, and city representatives. At its peak, around three hundred different “states”, including very small ones, were part of the Empire.

To be sure, the result was not a kumbaya of harmony and peace on the continent. Conflicts continued, just as today disagreements exist between the EU’s member states. Yet the continual tension between papal and imperial supremacy—challenged by other centers of political power—prevented institutional sclerosis by keeping everyone on their feet. It was this seemingly imperfect institutional design that enabled the Empire to muddle through and gradually adapt, not unlike the EU.

The Empire itself had no standing army. Its own economic resources were limited to those of the Reichsgut—territories in direct imperial possession. But those yielded revenues that were increasingly insufficient, and the elected emperors, especially the Habsburgs, were forced to rely on their own resources. With the Reformation, the association between the Holy Roman Empire and the Catholic Church became tenuous, leading to the embrace of devolution as a solution to the problem of religious toleration.

As with the EU, there was not just one type of “membership” in the Empire. Some entities enjoyed “immediacy”, a direct relationship with the emperor providing substantial policy autonomy. Other political units, such as the Netherlands’ United Provinces or the Swiss Confederation, were connected to the Empire more loosely and eventually ended up leaving.

Following the Thirty Years War, the peace treaties of Westphalia, concluded at Münster and Osnabrück, provided a new legal backbone to the Empire. Contrary to popular opinion, those implied little in terms of “Westphalian sovereignty” and did not herald the beginning of an era of fully sovereign nation-states. Instead, the treaties provided the Empire with a constitution, superseding the previous reliance on customary law and a small number of fundamental laws such as the Golden Bull.

If one looks at the EU in this context, the current project looks less like an aberration and more like a return to historical norms following Europe’s century-long experiment with unfettered national sovereignty. Furthermore, the apparent resilience of the Holy Roman Empire should make one much more skeptical of the idea that unless the EU will collapse unless it proceeds aggressively to solve its underlying governance problems.

It is exceedingly easy to find flaws in the EU’s institutional architecture. For instance, European treaties nominally ban bailouts to insolvent countries, yet that rule is not credible given the systemic risks that financial panics in large economies entail. In practice, an ad hoc mechanism of financial assistance and a top-down system of budget management have been created, mostly outside the legal space afforded by European treaties. That solution is a far cry from the Hamiltonian bargain many believe is necessary for the Eurozone to function as an authentic federation. Yet the Troika descending on Greece did not look vastly different from the Debit Commissions appointed by the Imperial Aulic Council to resolve situations of insolvency in the Empire’s various principalities.

The EU departs from other principles of conventional federalism as well—most importantly subsidiarity. There are areas in which the EU does little, yet where a compelling rationale for joint action exists, such as defense and foreign policy. In other areas the EU is active without being especially coordinated or coherent—efforts to harmonize welfare systems driven by fears of unfair competition come to mind, or common agricultural policy, which does not seem to serve any collective European purpose and could be administered equally well at the national level.

The absence of a well-functioning single market, together with unfavorable structural and demographic changes, is probably the biggest constraint on the EU’s economic growth. But the Empire was not, for the most part, an economic powerhouse either. The Industrial Revolution did not start there but in England, Europe’s most centralized unitary state.

Institutional sclerosis and limited economic dynamism both seem to be parts of the European condition, as opposed to the hard-nosed, go-getter culture of American federalism. A continent as diverse as Europe might not be capable of a grand federalizing moment. Instead, it may have to settle for a constant muddling-through. But this is still vastly preferable to the competition and conflict that characterized the era of sovereign nation-states extricated from the Holy Roman Empire in the late 19thand early 20thcenturies.

That does not mean that complacency is in order. As the center of global economic gravity shifts away from Europe, it becomes less powerful and more vulnerable. In that regard, it is worth remembering how the Holy Roman Empire ended—not under the weight of its internal contradictions but rather as a result of its inability to stand united against aggressive and increasingly powerful neighbors, namely France. In 1806 Napoleon’s victory at Austerlitz empowered him to create the Rhine Confederation, composed of client states that had effectively broken away from the Empire, which was declared dissolved shortly thereafter.

Russia, China, and to a lesser extent Trump’s United States all represent challenges to the EU by their ability to drive a wedge between its members. China’s Belt & Road program and the bidding of Huawei for the completion of Europe’s 5G have been the most cunning of such efforts, as they offer tangible material benefits now, valuable especially to countries that have faced financial difficulties, in exchange for political concessions down the road.

It is a mistake for European institutions to allow for bargaining with China to take place in such a decentralized fashion. Neither the Czech Republic nor Italy nor the United Kingdom can provide an effective counterweight to China at the negotiating table—but a united EU could. Creating that sense of geopolitical unity in the face of adversaries that are seeking to divide the continent is thus the most important challenge facing the EU, more urgent than technocratic tweaks to its internal governance. Here’s hoping it can do better than the Holy Roman Empire.

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The New Face of Tyranny

When the First World War ended, there was a brief period when it seemed as if the world really had become safe for democracy—when it seemed as if history had come to an end and liberal democracy had achieved a lasting hegemony. The same thing happened again just over 70 years later when the Berlin Wall came down, Eastern Europe liberated itself, the Soviet Union fell apart, and the Cold War came to an end.

On neither occasion, however, were the heady hopes of the victors borne out. In both cases tyranny gradually re-emerged, and disappointment dogged those who had imagined that the dream articulated by Immanuel Kant in his “Essay on Perpetual Peace” would be fulfilled.

None of this should come as a surprise. Tyranny in one form or another has been the norm throughout human history, and it is not apt to disappear. As Montesquieu observed 270 years ago in his Spirit of the Laws, its avoidance requires artifice. “To form a moderate government,” he tells us, “it is necessary to combine powers, to regulate them, to temper them, to make them act, to give, so to speak, a ballast to one in order to put it in a condition to resist another; this is a masterpiece of legislation, which chance rarely produces & prudence is rarely allowed to produce.” Though it constitutes an assault on human nature, he adds, despotism is, in a sense, natural. It “jumps up, so speak, before our eyes; it is uniform throughout: as the passions alone are necessary for its establishment, the whole world is good enough for that.”

If we are to understand our present predicament, we will have to take into account just how fragile liberal democratic regimes are and the preconditions for their survival. In this regard, as Montesquieu insisted, size matters. As he noticed, the first republics known to man relied on civic virtue; and, to sustain themselves, they had to be small enough for shame to be a formidable force. In antiquity, as he also pointed out, all of the polities situated on an extended territory were despotisms—where fear was brought in as a substitute for shame as a source of political and social discipline.

In a large republic, Montesquieu observed, “interests become particular; a man senses then that he can be happy, great, glorious without his fatherland; & soon that he can be great solely on the ruins of his fatherland.” One consequence of such a republic’s size is that “the common good is sacrificed to a thousand considerations; it is subordinated to the exceptions; it depends on accidents.” The situation “in a small” republic is more favorable: There, “the public good is more fully felt, better known, closer to each citizen; the abuses are less extensive there & as a consequence less well protected.”

By way of contrast, Montesquieu added, “A large empire presupposes a despotic authority in the one who governs.” One cannot deny that “promptness in decision-making is required to compensate for the distance of the places to which orders are sent”; that “fear is required to prevent negligence on the part of the governor or magistrate operating at a great distance”; that, in such circumstances, “law must be lodged in a single head” and that “it must change unceasingly,” for “accidents” really do “multiply in a state in proportion to its magnitude.” This, he did not have to say, was the experience of Rome. That polity’s expansion was fatal to its republican character.

It was Montesquieu’s analysis that occasioned the great debate between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists in the United States in 1787 and 1788. As everyone understood at the time, the fledgling polity was far too large to qualify as a small republic. Federalism was the remedy suggested by Montesquieu. A loose confederation of republics could command sufficient resources to provide for the common defense while its member republics remained small enough to maintain free institutions. Unfortunately, however, most of the states composing the nascent American union were themselves too large to be considered small republics; and, under the constitution proposed by the Federal Convention, the national government had much greater scope than the confederations Montesquieu had in mind.

To meet the challenge posed by Montesquieu’s analysis of the lessons to be learned from the history of republics, James Madison and his colleagues looked to the French philosophe’s analysis of a third form of government—the species of law-bound monarchy, limited in scope, that emerged in medieval Europe—and to his discussion of the form of government that subsequently developed out of this in England as its monarchy evolved. These two species of government had upheld constitutionalism and the rule of law in polities situated on territories of intermediate size; and the latter of the two—equipped, as it was, with a House of Commons capable of imposing its will on the monarch—was quasi-republican in character.

In framing the proposed constitution, the delegates at the convention had combined two institutions that Montesquieu had praised—federalism and the separation of powers perfected by the English—and Madison even argued, counter-intuitively, that the multiplication of special interests attendant on the size of the fledgling nation could be put to good use. It would, he suspected, turn out to be an obstacle to the formation of a majority faction, and it would thereby encourage within the new republic’s legislature a spirit of accommodation and compromise conducive to the pursuit of justice and the common good.

In the 1790s, however, quite soon after the American republic was established, some of those quite deeply involved in the Founding came to have misgivings. It was in response to the legislative program proposed by George Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton that James Madison began thinking about the prospect his compatriots would eventually face—“a consolidation of the States into one government”—and the consequences that might follow from such an eventuality. First, he argued, the “incompetency of one Legislature to regulate all the various objects belonging to the local governments, would evidently force a transfer of many of” those objects “to the executive department.” Then, he contended that, if the state and local governments were made subject to the Federal government, the sheer size of the country “would prevent that control” on the Federal Congress, “which is essential to a faithful discharge of its trust, [since] neither the voice nor the sense of ten or twenty millions of people, spread through so many latitudes as are comprehended within the United States, could ever be combined or called into effect, if deprived of those local organs, through which both can now be conveyed.” In such circumstances, Madison warned, “the impossibility of acting together, might be succeeded by the inefficacy of partial expressions of the public mind, and this at length, by a universal silence and insensibility, leaving the whole government to that self directed course, which, it must be owned, is the natural propensity of every government.”

In short, Madison revisited Montesquieu’s argument concerning republics and the extent of territory suitable to them. And, at a time when the territory was much smaller than it is now, and the population was not even one-fifteenth of what it is now, he began to worry that the extent of territory encompassed by the United States and the size of its population might be too great. He was, moreover, virtually certain that, if the Federal government were allowed to encroach on the prerogatives of the states and the localities, as he believed Hamilton intended, despotism of one sort or another would be the result.

Madison was no doubt wrong about Hamilton’s program, and later in his life he tacitly acknowledged as much by proposing the establishment of the second national bank. But his analysis of what might happen was nonetheless on point. It foreshadowed Alexis de Tocqueville’s warnings concerning the dangers of administrative centralization; and it pertains to virtually every republic on the globe. All of them are based on the English or the American model, and, by now, in all of them, thanks to ambition and emergencies, the administrative state and the executive power loom large. Beneath the benign surface of every republic in the world, there lurks the edifice of a despotism more fully tyrannical than any government in earlier times. In the early 1930s, Adolf Hitler demonstrated just how easily one could transform a republic, equipped by the likes of Max Weber with all of the standard institutional safeguards, into a totalitarian state.

The tyrants of antiquity—Cleisthenes of Sicyon, Cypselus and Periander of Corinth, Peisistratus and Hippias of Athens, Polycrates of Samos, Hiero of Syracusa, and the like—were not especially ambitious, and the same can be said for the despots of medieval and Renaissance Italy. They desired power and glory, to be sure, and not infrequently they were great builders. They delighted in projecting power abroad; and in Greece, as Aristotle points out, they were exceedingly wary of domestic opposition. Men of distinction and “high thoughts” they sidelined or killed. Dining clubs and education they sought to eliminate. They did what they could to isolate citizens from one another and to sow distrust, and they employed spies—even to the point of encouraging women to inform on their husbands and slaves to report on the conversations of their masters. But they did not aspire to be lawgivers, and they interfered minimally with the lives of those who posed no threat to their rule. True ambition was left to Lycurgus, Solon, and the like—which is to say, to the founders of republics.

One could argue that Augustus in Rome was an exception to this rule. He surreptitiously founded a new regime and did so by a process of trial and error with considerable care and forethought, and it survived, more or less intact, for centuries. Oliver Cromwell later tried something of the sort with less success. But these two had no real successors. It was Napoleon Bonaparte who set the stage for the new species of tyranny that emerged in the wake of the First World War. His ambitions were those of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and one need only peruse the Code Napoleon to see just how self-consciously transformative his rule was. The great tyrants of the 20th century—Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao—and their imitators in countries of less heft—Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, and Fidel Castro—all claimed, as had Napoleon, that they were bringing wisdom and science to bear on human affairs.

For inspiration, the men responsible for pioneering the reconfiguration of tyranny looked to Machiavelli’s Prince—which celebrated as the pinnacle of princely virtue quasi-legendary figures such as Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus. These men the Florentine singled out because each was said to have overthrown the existing order and to have introduced what the Florentine called “new orders and modes,” and he intimated that their institution of new orders and modes was akin in each case to the establishment of a new religion. They were, he said, “armed prophets,” and he made it clear that their chief task was not just to govern, but to make men “believe.”

It was the vision of new orders and modes laid out by Machiavelli in The Prince that inspired Sir Francis Bacon to articulate in his Advancement of Learning something like a secular religion promising the creation of heaven on earth; and, as Bacon makes clear in his New Atlantis, it was this utopian aspiration that first gave tyranny a new face and justified its intervention in private life on a scale prefigured nowhere other than in the ancient Lacedaemonian republic. Where, however, the Spartan lawgiver, operating in a tiny community, could rely on shame, these tyrannies—situated, as they were, on extended territories—had to resort to terror and extend the ethos of fear and mutual distrust, hitherto restricted in tyrannies to the sphere occupied by men of distinction, to the world inhabited by ordinary women and men.

These tyrants were not without resources. They possessed via the apparatus of the modern state an administrative capacity unknown anywhere in antiquity. The ancient Lacedaemonians were policed by the oversight of their fellow citizens. Their modern Italian, Russian, German, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cambodian counterparts were kept in order by state agents in what came to be called a police state.

Nothing has happened in the past 30 years to impair the administrative capacity of the modern state. Instead, that capacity has advanced by leaps and bounds as a consequence of the digital revolution. The totalitarian states of yesteryear were totalitarian in aspiration but not fully in fact. A great deal escaped their purview; and, as the existence of samizdat suggests, dissent stubbornly persisted in the interstices of these societies. For surveillance, they depended on a great army of human beings—who were often careless, lazy, and negligent—and the demands they made on their bureaucracies often exceeded their capacity.

Now, however, thanks to CCTV cameras and facial recognition software, to cell phones and the devices that track them, and to the internet and the data-collection carried out by those who supply its users with search engines and other applications (all now seconded by artificial intelligence and the astonishing power of contemporary computers), privacy is a thing of the past, and it is in principle possible to track hundreds of millions of individuals through every hour of the day, noting where they go, what they do, with whom they communicate, and even what they write and say. Someday soon, electronic sensors may even be capable of reading the minds of women and men who happen to be nearby.

As everyone is aware, the Chinese government is now engaged in a great experiment testing the new technology of population control. There is no need to rehearse here the horrors being perpetrated against the Uighurs of Xinjiang province. What matters most is that the experiment seems to be succeeding; that the Chinese intend to employ the same techniques of surveillance and “persuasion” in the whole country; that other despotisms, such as the Iranian regime, are already using CCTV cameras and facial recognition software to hunt down dissidents; and that, in time, the full panoply of surveillance technology is apt to be adopted there and elsewhere. Had the old Soviet Union possessed such a capacity, that regime would probably be still with us.

Even more important, the same technology is available in the United States; in Japan, Australia, South Korea, and New Zealand; and in Europe. Our computers, cell phones, and search engines track our whereabouts, our interests, our tastes, and our opinions; and they report to others who promise to preserve our privacy and who make enormous profits from breaching that promise. Moreover, all the information that these private entities collect is in principle available to those who govern us. All it takes is a court order, and that is easily secured. Those in power who wish to remain in power have in the past abused the surveillance authority accorded the state, and they will certainly do so again. All that it takes to justify such requests is a widespread conviction that there is a national emergency or one of those waves of hysteria that liberal democracies engender from time to time—and, though the focus has changed, we still remain vulnerable to utopian aspirations. If there is one thing that human beings cannot resist, it is the temptation to busy themselves with the lives of others.

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Zelensky, the Post-Soviet Man

In the early 2000s I arrived at graduate film school in Moscow thinking I would be surrounded by brooding lovers of avant garde Soviet cinema, devotees of the evasive spiritual allegories of Tarkovsky or the high-art agitprop of Sergey Eisenstein. To my surprise, most of my mature co-students—many of whom were from outside Moscow, as well as from the Baltics, the Caucusus, and Ukraine—were more interested in imitating the bittersweet psychological dramas of the late Soviet era. The films they loved were quietly anti-Soviet in that they shunned great power narratives in preference for private stories about love and friendship. The heroes of these films were often humble, tired men looking for the sparks of values—friendship, loyalty, love—in a somewhat cynical, cold world.

I was reminded strongly of these 1970s Soviet movies when I began watching the new Ukrainian President, Volodomyr Zelensky’s, television series Servant of the People, where, as I’m sure you’ve heard, he plays a humble school teacher who accidentally becomes President. The utterly lovely opening song, with its easy melody and friendly irony, is right out of a late Soviet film:

I love my country, my, wife, my dog

I already have everything I need, decency and honor…

Zelensky’s character, the school teacher Goloborodko, is an archetypical 1970s crumpled male: His wife has left him; he lives with his parents in the most Soviet-looking apartment one could possibly imagine; the characters in the communal courtyard seem to have wondered out of Mosfilm central casting.

Thrust into the cynicism of government-level politics, Goloborodko is the late Soviet “decent” everyman trying to preserve his values in a mean world. His guides are great historical figures who advise him how to behave in dreams, such as Plutarch and Abraham Lincoln. They are largely from the Western canon of democratic heroes (Ukrainian historical characters only appear late in season 2). Thus the positive part of the Soviet cultural legacy is fused with aspiration for a Western-style government and global history.

As the very sharp Ukrainian philosopher Volodomyr Yermolenko first noted to me, part of Zelensky’s appeal is that he offers a way for people who still feel close to Soviet and Russian pop culture to become politically European. This is attractive to many. Since 1991 the main way to head towards “Europe” in Ukraine was a post-colonial Ukrainian identity, centered, like many 19th- and 20th-century national-liberation projects, around language and memories of martyrs sacrificed in the name of independence over many centuries of imperial oppression—an approach that the previous President Poroshenko tried to encapsulate with his election slogan “Army, Language, Religion.” With Zelensky’s approach, one can be “European” while retaining the attributes of late Soviet culture.

This process can upset those who have risked, sacrificed, and staked much on the project of Ukrainian national liberation over the centuries. But it is also potentially subversive for Putin’s cultural model of the Russian world too: It opens a space where you can take the positive associations of Soviet culture and fuse them with a desire for democracy. The great, late 1970s Soviet films are still shown in prime time TV slots in Russia and beamed to Russian speakers in the post-Soviet “near abroad.” The emotions they capture—that desire for values in a cynical world—still resonate. By screening them next to Putin TV’s ultra-propaganda with its sneering, sarcastic tone, the Kremlin has managed to co-opt the wistful yearning for decency of the older Soviet films with geopolitical ambitions: Come for the lovely, gentle movies that prove you have a soul, stay for the spittle-laden current affairs show brimming with hate that satisfies other needs.

This has been the skill of the Kremlin: to own both the snarling cynicism of Great Power Bullying and its emotional critique—simultaneously to own arrogance and humbleness, so the whole rainbow of experiences can be subsumed into one great Russian World of feeling where all emotional roads and cultural associations lead to the Kremlin. Breaking the Kremlin’s emotional geography on all ways to think and feel in Russian, to feel a connection to the past, is an important and subversive project.

And it could resonate in other countries once colonized by Moscow, where large parts of the Russian-speaking population, descendants of peoples moved there by Soviet population shift, find themselves caught up in local national liberation projects which by definition they struggle to belong to. I have met “Russian minority” Latvians and Estonians who are completely loyal to their Baltic homelands politically, but feel adrift in terms of culture, not wanting to be part of Putin’s “Russian World” but also unable to find a steady sense of self in the national liberation projects around them. It’s a challenge that is producing a generation of very interesting writers and poets who deal with the question of how to be simultaneously Latvian, Estonian, Russian, and European in ways more subtle, if less popular, than Zelensky.

Just to be clear: I’m making no comment here about Zelensky’s politics, which are perturbingly opaque. Though he speaks of “fighting corruption,” it is as yet unclear if part of his appeal is not more reforms but actually undoing the few that have taken place already, which, like securing independence from Russian energy flows, have been hard and expensive for people. The more experienced Ukrainian experts I have spoken to roll their eyes at all the identity dramas I have discussed in this piece. Zelensky, they fear, is just another layer of cover for another set of clans to exploit the country.

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The Last Man and the Future of History

TAI: This year marks the 30th anniversary of your famous essay, “The End of History?” But few of your critics pay any attention to the “Last Man” thesis that you developed in the book based on the essay. Can you talk about that idea—what it means and how it speaks to today’s challenges?

Francis Fukuyama: The whole “Last Man” section is about what could go wrong with democracy in the future. One of the issues is that if you simply have a society that’s stable, prosperous, and peaceful, people don’t have anything to aspire to. That aspiration—what I call megalothymia, the desire to be recognized as greater than other people—doesn’t get satisfied. You have to have outlets for this, and if you can’t struggle for justice, as in prior history, then you’ll struggle for injustice.

If you think about the current world, it’s kind of crazy that we’re having all this anxiety, anger, and populism. First of all, there’s no major war, there’s no major crisis going on anywhere in the western world. Sure, incomes are flat, but we could be in the Great Depression when incomes fell 25 percent. There’s no disease; there are no Martians over the horizon. You look at a country like Poland, which was the fastest growing EU country in the ten years prior to the rise of the Law and Justice Party, and you ask: What do they have to be upset about?

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Francis Fukuyama (via Wikimedia Commons)

Part of my book’s point was that there are plenty of sources of discontent other than serious insecurity or serious material privation, which really have to do with people’s feelings of dignity. People will not be satisfied with endless consumerism and buying the new iPhone every 18 months, because they actually want to be recognized for something. I do think that critics failed to recognize how I said that nationalism and religion would not disappear from the world, and could come back to bite us.

TAI: Could you say a little bit more Central and Eastern Europe in this context? It’s not just Poland where we see this trend of greater prosperity and greater discontent.

FF: Well, you have an entire generation now that had no adult experience of communism. If you’re living under an authoritarian political system, you understand what real tyranny is, right? I took my students last year to see The Lives of Others, the film about the Stasi in East Germany. It was funny watching their reactions, because they don’t even remember September 11th, and they had no experience of totalitarianism, so to see a real police state was shocking.

I think that people who were adults in that period are really grateful that they’re living in a democracy. But you’ve got this entire younger generation that didn’t have that direct experience, and so they can say things like “Brussels is the new tyranny,” which is ridiculous.

I also believe Ivan Krastev. He wrote a piece which argued that Eastern Europe never went through social liberalization the way that Western Europe did. They pretended everything was fine in terms of race, ethnicity, and tolerance under communism, but that’s only because a repressive state kept all that under wraps. Whereas if you think about Germany, they actually taught a couple of generations about the Holocaust and the need for tolerance and different kinds of social norms. It was a really wrenching experience, to the point where some of them even got annoyed at being constantly lectured about how bad they were. None of those Eastern European countries did that kind of cleansing of themselves. There was some lustration but it really wasn’t the same thing.

TAI: Why did we miss that opportunity?

FF: It’s like communism froze in aspic those societies for the time that it was ruling them. There was no immigration in any of those countries in that whole period, whereas it was happening in a big way in places like the Netherlands and France. Then all of a sudden the wraps come off in 1989 and they inherit the society that had existed in 1945. But in the meantime, Western Europe had moved on considerably.

TAI: If you go back to 1989 and the period that followed, what were our assumptions and choices that seem wise and effective, and what did we get wrong?

FF: Well, I’ve been reading Bill Burns’s autobiography, who I worked for when he was in Policy Planning and James Baker was Secretary of State, so it’s been a big nostalgia trip. And I must say that reading about Bush 41 makes you want to cry because those people were so confident. Obviously they made mistakes, but the general moderation, and this realization that this was going to be a really traumatic experience for the Soviet Union and they didn’t want to rub salt into the wounds, was commendable.

In fact, I remember at the time that those of us in Baker’s group at State were having a big fight with Condi Rice and Brent Scowcroft at the White House, because they wanted to move even more slowly, and we felt that they didn’t understand the underlying social dynamic and pressure from civil society for a revolutionary change. On that part I think we were right, but they eventually got there. And just reading that account, and thinking about the care with which something like German unification was handled, made me say to myself, “Boy, we were sure lucky that these people were in charge.”

Afterward, I think there were some real mistakes. One of the biggest was the economic advice that we gave the Russians after the break-up of the Soviet Union. I think it was a case of dizzy-with-success syndrome, where we thought that they could just get rid of all these state structures and things would take care of themselves, the markets would form spontaneously. I think that Jeff Sachs and all of those guys who went over at that time were selling them a bill of goods.

In retrospect, if they had gone slower in terms of privatization; if they had worried about building up a state, things might have been different. This has become my research agenda ever since, because I now understand the importance of having a strong state that can actually do things like hold an auction of an SOE fairly and not sell it off to insiders. At that time nobody in Washington cared about that.

The second thing is NATO enlargement, which I still don’t know what to think about. Bill is actually quite skeptical about whether that was a good idea and says he was arguing against it at the time. It’s one of those counterfactuals that no one can ever settle. You can certainly see how it fed a lot of Russian resentment. I gather that Baker and Bush had at least made informal assurances that they would not expand NATO. What makes me not sure is what the Eastern Europeans were arguing to us at the time—that it wouldn’t make any difference to the Russians. You behave moderately towards them now, but the moment they get stronger they’re just going go back to their old habits. Maybe that was right.

TAI: That brings us to democratic retreat and authoritarian resurgence. You’ve been involved with state-building and democracy promotion efforts in Ukraine and Georgia. Any wisdom you can share?

FF: Well, I think Ukraine is the single most important front of this war against authoritarian expansion. That’s why I’ve gotten involved. Clearly it matters a lot to Putin that Ukraine does not succeed as a democracy. He wants to show that all of these color revolutions lead to anarchy, and so he’s perfectly happy to see Ukraine floundering. Therefore I think they have to show that they can and have made progress. Ukraine is a major European country and if it ends up going back toward the Russian orbit, or if it doesn’t solve its corruption problems, that’s not going to bode well for democracy in Europe as a whole.

TAI: Can Ukraine succeed so long as there’s a government in Moscow that’s committed to its failure?

FF: I think it can. At Stanford we just hosted Ukraine’s Deputy Minister of Economic Development and Trade. She was saying that, in a way, the Russian boycott and hostility to Ukraine was great for Ukraine because their trade had been 90 percent dependent on Russian markets and now it’s reversed—it’s 90 percent dependent on Europe and the United States. That’s put them in touch not with corrupt Russian oligarchs but modern Western companies.

Similarly, I think the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of the Donbas was actually good for their national identity. This is Charles Tilly’s old social science theory about war making the state and the state making war. A lot of Ukrainians didn’t understand themselves as being all that different from Russians before the war, but now they have a sense of being different; they want to protect their independence.

I’m optimistic in the long term because of my own personal experience. We try to train young Ukrainian reformers and get them to network with one another, and I’m always amazed how many of them there are. They’re well educated; they really want to be European, so I think that it’s a generational issue. The Soviet generation is getting off the stage now, and once these people that are in their thirties forties and forties now take over, the country’s got a chance.

TAI: Many people speak now about great power competition with Russia. Do you see it that way?

FF: I wrote my dissertation on Soviet foreign policy in the Middle East, and the whole thrust was to show how cautious the Soviet leadership was. They would make threats to intervene but they’d always wait until the crisis had really passed so that they wouldn’t have to follow through on it. And although they sent weapons and advisors they rarely put their own troops in harm’s way.

Putin has completely thrown that out the window in a country that’s a third the size of the former Soviet Union. Certainly the military balance between Russia and NATO is a lot worse from a material standpoint than it was during the Cold War. So first, he’s a huge risk taker. Sending troops to Venezuela, for example, is totally crazy. If we really wanted to, we could swat that back so easily. I think he’ll get his comeuppance at some point.

But the other part is this asymmetric warfare, where he’s used his limited resources in a really clever way, through election interference and the use of the internet. They figured this stuff out way before anybody else in the West did, and they’re way ahead of the Chinese in their ability to exploit the internal divisions of Western societies.

TAI: You say that Putin’s a risk taker. Is Donald Trump a risk taker?

FF: No. I don’t see that Trump’s taken any big risks—certainly not anything that involves the potential use of force. He’s shot some missiles in Syria, but Obama should’ve done that. That was an extremely low-risk venture.

I do give him credit in a couple of cases. The one where I think most people would agree is the trade policy towards China. That’s risk taking, in a way, because when you threaten tariffs you really could get major reciprocation and an escalating trade war. That may still happen, but I actually think it was necessary to do something like that. I actually had this discussion with Larry Summers recently; I said, “That’s what you guys should’ve done back in the 2000s, or under Obama.” The Chinese just weren’t scared of us up until this point.

The other area where I think the Trump Administration probably did the right thing was toward North Korea, because they were really ready to go to war. There were concrete plans for different kinds of military operations. I think that both the North Koreans and Chinese saw that this was happening and that’s what led to the summit. It hasn’t produced a result yet that makes it worth it, but that did amount to taking a risk.

TAI: You mentioned a few areas where you see virtue in Trump’s foreign policy. Where do you see problems and liabilities?

FF: That’s just so easy. You have a President who changes his mind every other day. Credibility matters for something, and Trump’s got no credibility on anything. I don’t see how anyone can do a deal with him because the moment that you think you’ve got a deal, he starts changing the terms. This U.S.-Mexico-Canada deal looks like it’s about to fall apart for this reason.

The basic values issue is serious, too, because the United States used to stand for democracy globally and it doesn’t anymore. It’s clear that Trump just doesn’t give a damn about democracy. It also leads to an incoherent foreign policy. I said the China policy is good, but what he ought to be doing is getting all of the Europeans and Japan to line up to put pressure on China at the same time. Instead he’s attacking all these potential allies and doing trade offensives against all of them simultaneously. That doesn’t make any strategic sense at all.

TAI: What do you make of Trump-Russia?

FF: I’ve always thought his behavior was bizarre, even in terms of his own self-interest. The moment the election interference stuff came out he should have said, “This is outrageous; this is completely unacceptable. Even if they’re trying to help me, as an American I think that they shouldn’t be allowed to do this.” And instead, he does the opposite. In fact, he plays the part of Moscow’s man in Washington so well that it actually makes you think it’s not true—because if the Russians really were cultivating a Manchurian candidate they wouldn’t get somebody that’s so obvious about it.

I think he’s probably the most selfish individual I’ve ever encountered in public life, but even given that, he doesn’t calculate his own self-interest well in a lot of cases, because his narcissism gets in the way. I think Russia is one of those cases.

TAI: After Trump, what advice would you give the new American President to help restore American credibility and the cohesion of our alliances?

FF: Well, I’m not sure that that’s going to be such a hard thing, because I think our allies really didn’t have an alternative to the relationship with us. The Europeans aren’t going to go to China and Russia because they can’t get what they want out of Washington. Everybody’s just been waiting and hoping, and a lot of Americans are saying to these allies, “just be patient; this guy’s only there for four years and then things will go back to normal.”

I think the big problem is that he’s now mobilized a lot of his base to be, for example, pro-Russian in a way that they weren’t before he became President. We’ll have to see whether the Republican Party has now reverted to the kind of isolationism that characterized it in the 30s and 40s. That’s a big danger.

But the biggest change is not so much about what the President says, or what the Secretary of State does; it’s American society. For many of our allies, American society has evolved into something that they just don’t understand and find really scary.

When we started The American Interest, it was in the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion when Europeans were saying “Boy, these people come from Mars; we really do not understand what’s driving them.” That’s always been part of the purpose of the magazine, to try to bridge that gap in mutual understanding. But if you thought we were crazy then, well, now we’ve gone off the charts.

TAI: Is it possible the Democratic Party will embrace its own version of protectionism and isolationism?

FF: Yeah, it’s certainly possible. That’s a big temptation. A lot of the Democratic presidential candidates have been outbidding each other, just like in the French Revolution. Nobody wants to be outflanked on the left, and that’s dangerous.

I think the countervailing force is just that they really want to win this election, and a lot of Democrats believe that if they shift too far to the left then that’s going to help Trump. But the trouble is that nobody is in control of either party right now. There’s nobody that can say, “We have to make these kind of strategic calculations and come up with this kind of candidate.”

TAI: Are political parties in trouble now across the West?

FF: Yeah, I would say they are. American parties have been in decline for a long time, by which I mean there’s no core group within the party that can make decisions on its behalf. It’s all about external donors and whoever manages to win these demolition derbies called primaries, but the party apparatus itself really has very little power.

Britain was a classic Westminster system. You have a two party-system reinforced by a first-past-the-post electoral system that produces two disciplined parties and a Prime Minister who is a kind of elected dictator. With Brexit this has completely gone out the window, because both parties have these internal cleavages and so the leaders of the Tories or Labour can’t disciple their own members. In Germany, same thing, the SPD has lost 20 percent of its electorate since the 1990s. The French Socialist Party has disappeared.

TAI: You were in Europe recently on tour for your newest book, Identity. What kinds of questions were people asking there?

FF: The biggest question is whether modern democracies need a national identity. In Europe a lot of people on the Left don’t think that’s necessary. They think that national identity inevitably leads to nationalism and aggression and exclusion and all of these bad things.

On the Right, you get people who do think national identity is important but they want to go backwards and reinforce an ethnic understanding of identity that excludes people. What I don’t really see is a centrist position that says yes, you should think about national identity but it has to be a democratic and an open one. Whether that’s possible in Europe was a central issue that I was discussing in every country that I visited.

TAI: How do you think these identity questions are playing out in the United States compared to Europe?

FF: I think that overall we are in a better position than the Europeans, because we really did, after a long struggle, develop what I call a creedal or civic identity. By the end of the civil rights movement it was an identity that wasn’t based on race or ethnicity but on belief and basic American principles.

But I think that’s under threat. From the Right you have, if not Trump himself, a lot of his supporters who would like to restore this old idea that Americans are basically white people. And on the Left, you have a different problem. You get people who don’t believe that there’s a shared identity, or that it’s all about racism, patriarchy, and colonialism; there’s no positive story you can tell about the United States. Both of those positions take a less extreme form in the United States than in Europe, but it’s happening here too.

TAI: One thing we haven’t talked about is corruption and kleptocracy, and the enabling role the West plays for authoritarian regimes. Could you talk about that as a threat to democracy?

FF: What strikes me is how the free market ideology of the Reagan years ended up justifying tax havens. Rich people never want to pay taxes, nobody does, but they used to make a principled argument against taxes. This took the form of the Laffer Curve and all sorts of theories about how low rates of taxation were good for economic growth, or that if we pay taxes the government will just waste them on some pointless social program.

Now you have the proverbial nameless rich American who, say, established a charitable foundation, has funded a lot of good causes, but lives on a little island in the Caribbean because he doesn’t want to pay American taxes. And I don’t think he feels bad about it. He says, “Tax rates are too high in the United States, so why should I pay them?” And it’s perfectly legal to live in a tax haven.

The political obstacle is that people actually don’t want enforcement of these rules. They want private banking divisions of investment banks to help them hide their money from the taxman. I think that Reaganism, or Thatcherism, gave them a principled justification for doing this. It wasn’t just, “well, I should be richer than I am,” but this idea that it was unjust to tax productive people.

TAI: But it seems like something’s different from 25 and 50 years ago, that these issues have come into sharper relief.

FF: Well, I think capitalism always worked well when it was balanced by a sense of social responsibility and an awareness that capitalist institutions were embedded in a larger society that had norms, that put boundaries around certain kinds of behavior.

Paul Collier, the development economist at Oxford, has just written a very nice book, The Future of Capitalism, which makes this point about the nature of the firm. Back in 1970, Milton Friedman published a widely cited article that said the only business of a company is to benefit its owners. Collier argues that you have a whole couple of generations of business school students who have internalized this notion, and that’s led to squeezing employees, getting every last drop of pay out of them, cutting their benefits, using political power to prevent them from unionizing, and so forth.

And capitalism wasn’t always like that. Especially in Germany and Japan after the Second World War, the business elites realized that they had been feeding an incredibly adversarial relationship with their workers in the interwar period and that if they were actually going to have social peace and democratic political systems, they had to accept sharing the wealth a little bit. I think American capitalists were like that in an earlier generation too.

TAI: If these are matters of habits and values, behavior and culture, then how do we change things for the better?

FF: Part of it is going to be a natural political adjustment. You’re now seeing ideas that have not been articulated on the Left for a long time, like a 70 percent upper tax bracket, or breaking up Google and Facebook. Six months ago this would have seemed unthinkable, but now a lot of people are jumping on that bandwagon. I think there will be a big shift in the Overton Window in terms of economic policy. At the left edge of the window it’s going to go too far, but the middle of the window may find a place that’s appropriate.

I think what’s missing is a good articulation of a moral basis for doing all of this. There is a moralism on the Left, but what the Left really needs is a political entrepreneur to articulate exactly what kind of society you want to have emerge as a result of these economic policies. I haven’t seen that articulated yet.

TAI: Let’s come full circle, back to 1989. How do you inculcate a sense of that year and its meaning—what we’re fighting for and what we’re fighting against—to a new generation that never experienced it?

FF: The only thing you can do is teach history, and we don’t do that very well. There are plenty of things I’m only aware of thanks to my study of history. For example, the interwar generation that went through the Great War had a very different moral experience from the Second World War generation. At least for the Americans and Brits, the Second World War was an elevating moral struggle where they stood up against tyranny, they won, and democracy triumphed. But the First World War is a completely different animal. It undermined bourgeois morality, because you had all these young men who were fighting for king and country and then they went off into a meat grinder and at the end there was no point to it all. And so you have a much more nihilistic outcome.

I didn’t experience that, and the only way I can appreciate it is by reading about it and thinking imaginatively about what it would have been like to be a soldier, or to have lived through that period. A lot of it has to be done through fiction. I remember reading Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet On The Western Front back in high school and being completely traumatized by the book. I think it’s possible to keep memory of these things alive.

Editor’s Note: This transcript has been edited for clarity.

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Sudan’s Half-Revolution

For thirty years the Sudanese people trusted in the eventual demise of ruling General Omar al-Bashir. Then on April 11, 2019, they heard in quick succession the news of his resignation and, within 36 hours, also that of his successor, Lieutenant General Ahmed Awad Ibn Auf. Although popular anti-regime protests had been going on since mid-December, the suddenness of events shocked even those most desirous of them. So what precisely happened, and what does it portend?

The answer is still murky, and the endgame uncertain: a genuine manifestation of popular grievances has given way to a shadowy game of elite intrigue, with the ambitious Deputy of the Military Council, Lieutenant General Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo, the most powerful player standing. Whether his ascent was orchestrated by al-Bashir himself remains a matter of debate. But as one cynical young observer put it to me, at least one thing seems certain: “The benefits of the sit-in outside the army headquarters were reaped by those inside.”

A History of Deception—and Repression

In 1989, the National Islamic Front took power over Sudan in a military coup d’état against Sudan’s democratic government. It camouflaged its Islamist orientation in a theatrical display of events that saw Hassan al-Turabi, the godfather of the Islamic regime, put in prison. But the true nature of the new arrangement was captured in the counsel al-Turabi gave to al-Bashir during the coup: “You shall go to the palace as President and I shall go to jail as a prisoner.”

Larger deceptions followed, along with internal divisions both real and fictitious. Al-Bashir proved adept in these internal battles, prevailing by pitting his opponents against one another. The new regime also arrested the major party leaders and launched heinous campaigns of repression, where dissidents were abused in detention centers known as “ghost houses.” Many local elders fell victim to these campaigns, and thousands suffered from arbitrary forced retirement (euphemistically known as “referrals for the public interest”). Economic policies were established upon a security rationale, to inspire general fear in the populace. For example, some citizens were executed for possessing dollars, others were killed for illicit trading, and the charge of undermining the national economy was used profusely to sideline regime opponents and confiscate their property. Meanwhile, a new class of corrupt pro-regime businessmen emerged.

During the regime’s first years a new political body formed called the National Democratic Alliance, which included dozens of Sudanese political parties. It led an armed movement against the regime that lasted until the early 2000s. However, the Alliance failed to overthrow the regime from abroad, and in Sudan its back was finally broken with the return of former Prime Minister Sadiq Al-Mahdi to Sudan. The final nail in the coffin came when Dr. John Garang—leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM)—signed the Comprehensive Peace Agreement with the National Congress, paving the way for his deputies to join General al-Bashir’s government.

Real political life in Sudan remained weak, obstructed, and backward. Political debates were poisoned by vapid ideological struggles, while realistic programs were absent. To add to that, each party had four clones. The Communist Party had split into sections, the Islamists subdivided into factions beyond counting (Popular, Nationalist, Reformist, Moderate, and so on) and several parties developed their own armed wings. There were reasons for this, the main ones being the absence of an organized political structure, the dominance of authoritarian thinking, the prevalence of local and tribal loyalties, and the general lack of political awareness tied, in most cases and as usual, to an absence of deep literacy among the population.

Even more harmful was absence of a serious response to the social, political, and religious divides in Sudanese society. Although Sudan gained its independence in 1956, the Sudanese people had no more than 11 years’ total experience of free political activity: from 1956 to 1958, from 1964 to 1969, and then from 1985 to 1989. Eleven years is not so bad, by modern Arab standards, and the street demonstrations that overthrew Ibrahim Abboud’s military government in October 1964 were an early prefiguration of the Arab Spring. But the rest of the time the Sudanese lived under a totalitarian military dictatorship that usurped their right to think, let alone express a political opinion.

During the Muslim Brotherhood’s long military rule, pockets of discontent persisted. Meanwhile, the ideologues of the military government focused on containing the major political parties: the National Umma Party led by Sadiq al-Mahdi, the Democratic Unionist Party led by Mohammed Osman al-Mirghani, and the Communist Party led by Mohamed Ibrahim Nugud and, after his death, by Mohamed al-Khatib. Al-Bashir’s regime worked as well to stifle civil society, which it perceived as threats to its control, so it split up Sufi orders, large local councils, civil administrations, and even sports clubs.

The major parties learned to adapt to these conditions, as well as to the loss of the southern part of the country in 2011. But newer parties arose in rebellion against them, seeking in small pockets to foment rebellion and appealing to the youth, who joined the larger parties even while outgrowing old loyalties to them. Over time significant change crept into Sudanese politics as increasing numbers of young people joined an ever-growing number of civil society associations. Among them were groups dedicated to medicine, teaching, and volunteering; youth also developed new musical styles and dialects that set them apart from the rest of society.

Both the established political parties and the military positioned themselves to marginalize these new parties and movements, and they used a well-honed method to do so. Throughout his years of rule, al-Bashir mixed populist rhetoric with folksy, religious appeals to endear himself to the people. But the limits of this approach became clear as differences emerged between him and the Islamists. In 1998 Sheikh al-Turabi lost favor, and al-Bashir sought to prove that the Islamic Movement belonged to the government (not the other way around), and that the government belonged to al-Bashir. The dispute developed well into 2013, as al-Bashir and the Islamists—who ostensibly supported him—sought to outbid each other in mutual disdain. This game went on for some time, distracting the public until economic conditions grew too dire to ignore.

A coalition of professional unions opposed to the regime emerged on December 19, 2018. It led a revolution dependent on the youth and imbued with a deep understanding of their concerns. It was able to attract many who had previously shown little interest in politics. At first the movement vaguely questioned all political forces, sometimes zealously and sometimes objectively, evincing a muted sympathy for Sudan’s youth but leaving its intentions unspoken, perhaps for fear of a crackdown. But it soon became clear that the youth had adopted a commitment to regime change—one stronger than at any time in the past.

The bloc organized a policy of demonstrations and neighborhood sit-ins, which at first ebbed and flowed. Then they began to organize ongoing marches, which security forces responded to with troubling but curiously inconsistent violence.

Revolutions and Coups

On December 24, the National Intelligence and Security Service leaked the first set of fabricated documents in a bid to manipulate the revolution. It spoke of a coup d’état led by the Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Kamal Abdul-Maarouf, and another led by Lieutenant General Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo—known by his nickname Hemeti—the head of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Since the counterfeit paper did not mention Salah Abdallah Gosh, the head of the National Intelligence and Security Service, some interpreted it as a preparation for him to assume power.

The emergence of Hemeti’s name at this point was logical. His RSF, established by al-Bashir in 2013, have their roots in the Janjaweed and other militias used by the government to carry out its campaign in Darfur. Hemeti’s is a purely tribal organization, less ideological than the tribal Islamists of the Popular Defense Forces—Sudan’s other major paramilitary force. The RSF was thus carefully sponsored by al-Bashir to be a counterweight to both the Army and the Islamist forces. Unlike the Islamists, the RSF are drawn largely from the northern Rizeigat tribe, which is divided into the Abbala camel-herders and the Baggara cattle-herders.

Hemeti’s quasi-tribal “state” has been expanding in the past few years to the sound of its victories against other tribal elements, including those represented by his cousin Musa Hilal, the leader of the Um Jalul Arab Mahamid tribe in Darfur. It has also scored major victories against both rebels and known smuggling networks; in 2016, Hemeti proudly proclaimed that his “Rapid Support Forces are combating human trafficking on behalf of the Europeans.” Whatever the value of his victories, Hemeti is known for holding longstanding grudges and a hunger for acquiring more power and wealth. The curious thing is that al-Bashir rarely hesitated before granting him what he wanted, apparently believing that a dictator should keep his friends close but his potential enemies even closer.

Al-Bashir has always been a skillful manipulator of potential rivals. In the 1990s, al-Bashir abandoned his membership in the Islamic Movement and is now jumping ship from its second incarnation, the National Congress. He had been drawing closer to the Army, having cleverly enabled it to govern the states, in partnership with some elements of the security system (police, security forces, RSF).

This time around, as new pressure mounted for him to step aside, al-Bashir may have counted on the fact that he had shown leniency to rivals in the past. He did not, for example, execute Islamist officers, and often freed detainees in previous coup attempts, most recently Major General Salah Abdallah “Gosh” and General Kamal Abdul-Maarouf. Al-Bashir believed—correctly—that he gave the Army and its leaders a favored position they could not dream of attaining on their own under the miserable economic situation in Sudan. Moreover, he granted them, along with the security apparatus, special privileges exempting them from the government’s restrictive decisions and rendering them the only body capable of end running the shortage of foreign exchange. Al-Bashir thus had good reason to think that, in the Army’s calculation of costs and benefits, no coup would end in a transfer of power to civilians.

As protests grew, al-Bashir rose to the podium to give his speech at the Republican Palace in February, and declared that the Armed Forces would take control in the transitional period. Furthermore, he indicated a major transformation was in the offing for two elements, the first being the Army and the second being the National Dialogue. He also stressed the role of the youth, and acknowledged their grievances. Everyone treated these words as the usual rosy rhetoric intended for domestic consumption.

At the same time, the media machine accelerated its attacks on of the coalition of professional unions and national forces seeking change. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister of the new government, Mohamed Tahir Ela, started his mornings by liquidating corrupt companies tied to the Islamists.

The situation continued to move toward imminent change. Al-Bashir worked to ensure that all of his potential successors, both Islamists and coup members, were wanted by the International Criminal Court, as he was, or were in the process of being indicted. If his successor were chosen from the National Congress Party, it would be Ahmed Haroun; if he were chosen from the Army, it would be Lieutenant General Awad Ibn Auf. Even the National Dialogue Parties’ Secretary-General is wanted by the International Criminal Court.

Before the Coup: Increased Regional Discontent

On April 3, Eritrea, Sudan’s neighbor to the east, issued a statement labelling Sudan, along with Turkey and Qatar, a security threat. Al-Bashir had lost his armor. Over the past four years he had stood with the powerful when uprisings raged throughout the Middle East, saying he “makes peace, not revolution.” The Eritrean statement was similar to the accusations of the Libyan Army claiming that al-Bashir’s regime opposed Field Marshal Haftar. Amid the turmoil, al-Bashir also met with the Chadian President, who had his own concerns. Foreign affairs looked to leave al-Bashir friendless, in part because he had tried to maintained a stolid neutrality between Qatar and the more moderate, pro-status quo Arab countries, but had been unable to escape difficult decisions by so doing.

Two days earlier, the umbrella coalition of professional unions had called for a sit-in in front of the General Command of the Armed Forces. Then, on the historic day of April 6, the crowds came to the leadership headquarters in the country’s biggest sit-in yet. Their showing was so massive that some accused elements of the security establishment of facilitating it.

In the first two days of the protests, security forces attempted to break them up at night through direct confrontation. But at crucial moments, the Army seemed to be defending the protestors and preventing their dispersal. Young soldiers were sent to show solidarity with the protesters, in an apparent bid to win the youth’s trust. Soon enough, some of the attendees began chanting demands for them to take the reins of power. The Military Council, after al-Bashir’s dismissal, trusted in these manufactured slogans—and will surely cite them after the fact to say that the people asked the Army to take over.

The umbrella coalition of professional unions, consisting of trade unions and other political groups represented by the Freedom and Change parties, continued to play politics with one another. They were competently led by the head of the Sudanese Congress Party, Omer al-Digair, an eloquent man and the eldest son of a venerable family that produced over four senior government officials. However, the anti-regime coalition remained highly disjointed. Ibrahim al-Sheikh, the former president of the Sudanese National Congress Party (SNP), pre-empted military statements by conducting individual meetings with the military junta. The SNP drew strength from the crowd even as it sought to direct it; at times, the party did not conceal its jealousy of the Professionals’ Association.

But this was a battle without an opponent. The ballot boxes in Sudan were accustomed to propping up two political parties based on silenced blocs whose foundation was purely social: the Democratic Unionist Party represented by Mohammed Osman al-Mirghani, and the National Umma Party represented by Sadiq al-Mahdi. The latter quietly and shrewdly supported the demonstrations, knowing that in the event they succeeded, only a transitional period would stand between him and an electoral victory.

This is why the small yet active parties—whether anti-Islamists, leftists, or independents—have suggested that the transitional period should last four years. They believe a long interregnum would help them enlighten the masses about the threat posed by al-Mahdi and al-Mirghani, as well as the Islamists, and would give them time to establish a mature political foundation.

A Premature Battle?

Far removed from the discord in the streets, however, Sudan’s fate was being determined high in the corridors of power. This was a coup in the fullest sense, and its stars were al-Bashir himself, Awad, and Salah Gosh, in addition to the Islamists.

In the mid-1990s, when Hassan al-Turabi realized his Islamist civilizational project had suffered a strategic loss due to the mismanagement of his government, he wrote in his journal that the regime’s departure and the transfer of power to civilian politicians was necessary in order to make Islamists reflect on their experience in power, and develop new ideas capable of bringing them back. Even while endorsing free elections, however, his sine qua non was that the Army maintain supra-constitutional authority, protect the state’s Islamic character, uphold sharia law, and prevent the Islamists from being banned.

He began to establish an Islamic opposition, and left the remainder of his pupils in power where they continued to apply his ideas in government. The only opponent of this idea was al-Bashir, who was exhausted by his indictment by the International Criminal Court. And so he began to rule merely for the sake of ruling, with no safe haven except the Presidential Palace. For if he did not trust the Islamists, he ought not to trust the Army either, which had slowly started to Islamize and become Hemeti’s creature.

Dr. Elnour Hamad, a prominent Sudanese intellectual, told me in 2015,

I have no doubt that the regime is aware of the danger of Hemeti and his militias. For today’s ally, who only works for money, can become tomorrow’s avaricious authorities. General Omar al-Bashir’s small inner circle must now prepare to put a ceiling on Hemeti’s ambitions and his militias, or somehow rid themselves of these militias when an opportunity arises. Perhaps this new force in the Libyan quagmire is one such option. However, in general, the regime will not necessarily be rescued every time.

Today, it seems that there is no ceiling to Hemeti’s ambitions. A few hours before al-Bashir was deposed, Hemeti was al-Bashir’s sole guarantor. However, over the course of playing the political game he morphed into al-Bashir’s successor by means of his own alliances. He may not have had the support of the Islamists, but he is younger, more ambitious, stronger, more bloody-minded, and more tribal even than al-Bashir.

Hemeti has several assets. He leads a force created by al-Bashir, and has a tribally founded support base that has compelled the Army’s recognition. He also has a financial empire with impressive reach in the media, one that includes all the political parties, and which no president can ignore—al-Bashir and al-Burhan included. He is also free from any binding ideological loyalties. Now he insists on the departure of Awad Ibn Auf and Salah Gosh from the scene, on the pretext of placating the protestors. Before long, he may well hang up a portrait of himself labelled as the protector of the revolution.

The Army remains divided among itself between Hemeti’s allies and former Islamists. As for the security apparatus, it has fired and replaced Salah Gosh and his loyalists. Gosh, who was appointed to head the intelligence in February 2018, had previously been accused of leading a coup attempt in 2012. He was released in July 2013, just two months before demonstrations that shook al-Bashir’s reign and then died away.

Conspiracy?

In Sudan, it is hard to avoid suspicion that the current military coup d’état is an Islamist conspiracy. Indeed, most of the available evidence justifies that suspicion, from the names thrown up to lead the transition to the strategy of splitting up the main parties. The fact that all of the military junta’s decisions and political decrees, including the revision of the Public Order Act, were prepared in advance by al-Bashir, also supports this conclusion. Even the decision to absorb the role of the National Congress Party was being discussed by al-Bashir’s confidantes months ago. Al-Bashir may not be the mastermind, but certainly his close associates, and those close to the Islamists, have played a crucial (and unfinished) role.

The December 19 Revolution did triumph, however, not only by ousting al-Bashir but also by bringing the youth bloc back into the heart of political activism, convincing it fully of the legitimacy of engaging in political decision-making. What the youth have achieved represents a truly impressive result: the fruit of the activism that began in 1989. But their chances of consolidating their success are small.

The large banners being raised by the protesters calling for accountability are premature and will not lead to anything. Even some on the Military Council are now claiming that whispered demands for accountability will turn into reality “soon.” But the crimes brought about by the 1989 coup—crimes against the Constitution, and against Sudan’s people—have rendered it impossible to trust the Islamists.

The external settlement with the Army was not concealed from al-Bashir or his Islamists. He took the country into the Yemen war and permitted military exercises with Qatar, the most recent of which was in March. These coordinating efforts, and the behind-the-scenes plotting of various players to replace al-Bashir, have been reported for months. As early as December 24, reports appeared that coups were attempted by Hemeti and General Kamal Abdul-Maarouf, as well as by the Islamists.

Ruling out a conspiracy from these incidents is not feasible. These situations tend to give rise to new arrangements in quick succession, especially in cases of military and security mobilization. This does not mean that the claims and loyalties of the participating leaders are inherently suspect. But it does mean that these loyalties are inevitably governed by fears and desires that will clutter the path forward with obstacles. Betting on the survival and stability of one party’s position is a gamble. On the other hand, sometimes gambles pay off.

Change in Sudan’s current path, in the most optimistic scenarios, would still be fragile and unsustainable under the current leadership. Sudan remains vulnerable to penetration, diversion, and coups, if not by the former Islamist military leaders, then from within the Council or outside it.

Even if the revolution succeeds, the deep imprints left by foreign states and Islamist conspiracies will persist. Even if people besiege the National Congress Party, it will not end. Even if they insinuate themselves within the Islamist movement, what is required must be new standards, fundamental changes in the way Sudan’s politics are conceived and practiced. Sooner or later, people will realize that dismantling the Islamist tyranny that has long governed them can never come about by military decisions, for Islamists have always earned their luster from abortive revolutions and manufactured sacrifices.

As the region braces for the uncertainties of Sudan’s transition, much will depend on four key variables.

The war in Darfur. The war has not ended, and now that Lieutenant General Hemeti has become the strongest man in Sudan’s fragile equilibrium, the horizon is cloudy. If the country remains aligned toward the moderate Arab states, Qatar will undoubtedly intervene to support its opponents in Darfur, some of whom are Islamists, such as Dr. Gibril Ibrahim Mohammed.
The incomplete democratic transformation. While some political forces demand four transitional years and a civilian government, and the Council insists on two years, Hemeti thinks that six months is appropriate. While politicians are fighting for their share of the civil government, issues of civil rights and individual freedoms remain secondary. This is why the Sudanese should heed the wisdom of one their most famous phrases: Democracy’s mistakes can only be dealt with by democracy. They must stop justifying further coups.
The uncertain harmonization of the Transitional Military Council and political forces. The issue of open-ended wars in conflict zones with neighboring countries, and the Sudanese military participation in wars outside Sudan, are the main points of contention. The Army understands that maintaining the role of its forces and the RSF abroad is important. Meanwhile, some influential parties insist on withdrawing them, without realizing the disastrous political consequences this would entail.
The worrying economic future. The structural imbalance in the Sudanese economy requires serious attention from serious thinkers, and they exist. However, we must not forget that a deteriorating economy has long been a gateway for military coup plotters to tighten their grip on power.

This generation succeeded in making it halfway toward a revolution, and strengthening itself incalculably. Yet it now stands surprised to discover that all its goals have been rendered illegal, and that it was playing a rigged game all along. The generals profited from its revolution, along with a few Islamists, but almost no politicians. This youth is currently struggling with the shadows of entities it has not even seen and which will not make themselves visible.

Now the youth must regroup themselves within existing political entities, or invent its own entities, and learn from this experience. This will require mature political leaders. Enlightened thinkers must take advantage of the opportunity to combat racism, consolidate patriotism, overcome gender discrimination, and re-establish the idea of Sudanese ​​statehood.

Sudan is the land of missed opportunities, and it may miss one again despite a worthy beginning. For now, it suffices to recall the statement of Sudan’s finest writers, al-Tayeb Salih: “I am only afraid of those who are exceedingly confident in their own views.” In that spirit, this uncertain moment in Sudan’s history is a time for humility above all else.

The post Sudan’s Half-Revolution appeared first on The American Interest.

Comfort in Chaos

Pioneer venture capitalist Ann Winblad hails from Minnesota and became a star in Silicon Valley. She was an early investor in many of the country’s most successful startup tech firms, and has dazzled the VC scene ever since. TAI editor-in-chief Jeffrey Gedmin sat down with Ann Winblad outside Lisbon recently, on the margins of a Horasis conference, to ask how she sees our politics from her perch in entrepreneurship and business innovation.

TAI: In 2016, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump were both the anti-establishment candidates running against, in their own ways, Washington and Wall Street. Our two parties seem to be in turmoil. What can you tell us about how business and technology are affecting and disrupting our politics, for better and worse? What lies still ahead?

Ann Winblad: If you accept that in a matter of a few years roughly 80 percent of the eight billion people on the planet will have a digital identity, then we can estimate there will be one trillion sensors. Those sensors aren’t just devices that we’re holding in our hands; they’re our home appliances, they’re our reading glasses, and they’re ourselves, probably, by that time.

Parts of the world economy have a very strong sense of their past, and so protectionism is very important for their voters. The older economies are having the hardest time with the integration of all this new technology, and with the balance of the need to protect versus looking ahead to some very big issues that could occur with a fully digitized platform. If you look at other economies, like China’s, [the government – ed.] has no qualms about surveillance, that identity is being quantified. They want to surrender everything so they can actually leverage the entire platform.

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Ann Winblad (Photo via Hummer Winblad Venture Partners)

A related issue: open source, open technology. Take CRISPR, an open technology. Used incorrectly, that could change our entire species. Google, Facebook, Microsoft give away their core technologies, including their core algorithms, so that people will use their platform rather than the other guy’s platform. But that means anybody can use it—both good actors and bad actors. Should we regulate the world and these open technologies based on the bad actors? Or encourage even more openness and light regulation to facilitate innovation, already happening at breakneck speed?

TAI: In the United States, how do we allow the flourishing and innovation I think you want without leaving behind a significant number of our fellow citizens?

AW: In a recent television interview, Warren Buffett said that our economy is still the richest economy in the world, but it’s impossible not to leave some people behind. What do we do with people who have reached the end of the line? What obligation do we have to bring them along? But for us, in the United States, we’ve got many problems that are not associated with technology. We have a brittle K-12 education system in our public schools and a very diverse level of quality across the states. We have an enormously expensive health care system that breaks the bank for many people, especially people who are transitioning from a safe career to a riskier one. If they’re unlucky enough to have a health problem during that time, then that could be the end of the line for them.

There are other issues, too: About 1 percent of our GDP gets siphoned off by litigation. These are not technology problems at all. In fact, we have technology groups trying to work on health care. I would bet that if you start looking at the macro issues in all sorts of other economies, you’ll find similar existing big issues that have just been hauled along and piled on top of us and aren’t about technology. But I will say that it is now requiring a higher and higher level of education just to participate in the “better” economy. We also have issues of the cost of education. It’s not just “Here’s $120,000, go educate yourself,” it’s “Here’s $120,000, and if you take these particular classes from these reputable schools that we picked and you aim yourself at these career areas, then you’re likely to get an upwardly mobile job.”

TAI: We Americans love freedom and free media and choice. We seem to adore technology. And now we have a market that is largely unregulated. Are we not losing judiciousness, restraint, and responsibility?

AW: I think it was a bad idea to eliminate the fairness doctrine [introduced in 1949 and requiring broadcasters to present honest and balanced views of controversial issues – ed.]. Powerful people use the media to serve their own interests, and it’s not that this has unknown, unintended consequences; we know it has horrible consequences.

But I don’t want censorship. If I had the magic bullet for this, I would tell you right now what it is. In some ways this goes back to balancing between overdoing protectionism and the need to guard against unintended consequences. I remember being at a conference around the time of the Arab Spring, when all of these people were freeing themselves using the Facebook platform or other social media platforms. But as soon as a social media venue becomes a platform like that, you are inviting the bad actors to use it too. And, by the way, the bad actors seem to know how to use this platform better than Facebook itself knows how to run it, and this is interesting because it’s something social media companies like Facebook never anticipated.

Even Facebook, in their attempts to regulate themselves, to decide what is good content and bad content, to have all of these poorly paid people sitting there in front of screens monitoring people’s posts to decide if that’s really going to be a suicide so we need to pull it down, or hey is this is violating the censorship rules of the country we’re operating in? That’s not scalable. Can the government handle that any better than Facebook? I don’t think so.

TAI: Privacy today means something different than it meant yesterday, and the train is speeding very fast down the rails. We believe in free enterprise and free trade, but there are questions about how American innovation and technology abroad can enable authoritarian regimes that do not share our values.

AW: I’m not against GDPR [the European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation on data protection and privacy – ed.]. In California they’ve adopted their own version of that in fact. If there were a survey done of the hundreds of millions of Facebook users about how many people have actually looked at the privacy policy—really read it, versus just surrendering everything—it would probably be a small percentage. I’m actually one of those people who actually reads the privacy policy. GDPR is the kind of policy that is much easier to manage than some of the other proposals out there. It said, “Wait, don’t you read this stuff?” It’s about saying, “Hey, we’re going to use your data unless you say no.” It’s about calling attention to the fact that you have a choice. You don’t have to be on these things. You don’t have to surrender all this data. You probably don’t want to surrender some of this data in fact. It’s a really good thing to call attention to the fact that we have these digital identities I mentioned in the beginning that are part of our core identity now.

I do worry about our own Federal government and our own agencies keeping up with this. They’re competing for the same talent as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and the new hot startups. Are the best and brightest going to work for the U.S. government on these issues? I don’t know but I think it’s a talent race that we’re probably losing at the government level.

TAI: Let me ask you a question about higher education. If one were starting from scratch and looking for a template, for the ideal American university that affords students the right sort of education and opportunity for tomorrow’s economy, what would it look like?

AW: First of all, all universities should have quite a bit of diversity in their faculty.

TAI: Diversity in what respect?

AW: Diversity in race, gender, and age to really represent what the population is looking like coming to these universities now. America has a very diverse population. Universities are still struggling on their diversity quotients. We’re not talking about the MITs or the Stanfords and whatever, but there are hundreds and hundreds of universities that are nationally ranked that really if they took everybody that just wanted to come there, they probably wouldn’t be as a diverse as they want to be.

Second, one of the deans at the University of St. Thomas, where I’m on the board of trustees, is now working with Stanford University on an ethics course. Unbelievably, there was not an ethics course offered in the engineering school at Stanford. The two of them, the Stanford professor and the professor from St. Thomas, which has a strong ethics course, have been going to all these collegiate meetings talking about how to teach ethics and how to bring ethics into not just the general curriculum, but the engineering curriculum specifically, and also into other curriculums, especially in the STEM areas. Ethics, based on a really deep understanding of mission, not just markets.

I think that’s really, really important for companies. If you look at Salesforce in San Francisco, it has been one of Marc Benioff’s hallmarks that, since the beginning, the company has taken a small percentage of its revenue and put it in a foundation. Benioff is a significant civic voice and civic leader in a very complex city, San Francisco. But no matter what role you play in a company now, from the CEO on down, you’re not just a rank-and-file employee anymore. Everybody is a participant, one way or another. So it’s really important to understand mission, understand ethics, and not lose sight of the humanities.

TAI: What do you say to those people who say “We’ve got to get on top of our game in science and mathematics. History and literature, philosophy and religion, all those things are lovely, but guess what? In a tough competitive world where we’re establishing priorities, they don’t make the cut.”

AW: Well how do you even think about things like human behavior, which is what artificial intelligence is supposed to be mimicking? Is that STEM, or is that humanities? What about communication skills as a leader? Is that STEM, or is that humanities? I was a double major in math and business, with all the computer science classes. But they didn’t have a way to graduate early, so I had to take one last class, and I took an acting class. I petitioned to be let in because they only wanted the acting majors, and they sadly, mostly unwillingly, took me.

Later, a year out of college in Minneapolis, I had just left my job as a systems programmer at the Federal Reserve Bank, and I was a good little programmer, and at my young company we had written this great little business plan, but I had to get some money. There were ten banks in Minneapolis and St. Paul at that time, a big banking headquarters in the mid 1970s. By the time I got to the ninth bank, I knew that the gentleman sitting in front of me would start lowering his eyes and just say, “Well, you know, you have no collateral, and what is this stuff you’re talking about. . . . software?” Remember this was 1975, the same year Microsoft started. Before I went to the ninth bank I said, “I’ve got to do this, I’ve got to do this.” It was my acting class that saved me. Not my computer science class, not my business class, not my math class. I practiced crying in front of a mirror, which we had to do for the acting class. And when that ninth banker got ready to lower his eyes and say no, I burst into tears.

I left the bank with that check in hand. So I will always have great love for the humanities.

TAI: You must have advice that you like to give to people who are thinking about their careers within a framework of values and purpose.

AW: I’m the oldest of six kids. My dad was a high school basketball coach in Minnesota, my mom a nurse. My dad made $38,000 his highest paying year. We were a good, solid, middle-class family in Minnesota, right on the edge of not being middle-class. There are really three things I tell people that I need to do my job every day: First, I have to see uncertainty and complexity as opportunity. Life is much more fun if you see complexity and uncertainty as opportunity versus fear them.

Second, especially if you consider yourself an innovator and a real entrepreneur, no one is going to give you the answers to your questions, because no one has done it before. I was fortunate when I was growing up. I was the oldest of six. When I got to be a teenager, I started hearing all these rules from my friends about being home by a certain time. But my dad said to me, we don’t have any rules here, Ann. You should just trust your own good judgment. So what I say to people is, you’re going to have to trust your own good judgment. The word “Good” is important to hear as well as “judgment.” You’re going to have to make decisions about what you’re doing. Will it have a ripple effect out into the world and into the future that you’ll be proud of?

If you have a strong moral compass, you’re able to trust your own good judgment. If you have a strong moral compass, you are also able to lean into this complexity and uncertainty. But realistically, the noise level around us growing up was much lower. The amount of data we had to take in was less, and we had a lot of time to be thoughtful. There’s a lot of pressure and a lot of needles pushing on your skin right now. Getting the centeredness and finding any point of where you feel that you can trust anything is hard. It’s really easy to just say, I’m just going to go toward the noise. This is really what is the gift of the great entrepreneur. The entrepreneur walks into the loudest noise field you’ve ever heard, where everyone and everything is telling them to make different decisions, but they can actually find a space of trust where they can make decisions, and make them frequently—where they can build frameworks around themselves of assumption sets that tell them who their customer is, what value they’ll buy the products for, and who their competitors will be.

Finally, entrepreneurs need luck. Some of us, God blessed with luck.

The post Comfort in Chaos appeared first on The American Interest.

The Law of Nature and the Love of Self

No single teaching can be acceptable to everyone. Nevertheless, we expect those who embrace one teaching not to simultaneously embrace its opposite. For example, you can’t believe in both capitalism and communism, or atheism and God. And so one struggles to understand a worldview in progressive politics today: a reverence for nature, and, at the same time, a denial of nature when it comes to human beings.

In popular discourse, these two opposing beliefs often take the form of extreme environmentalism and extreme gender politics. Extreme environmentalism commands people to think of nature as a kind of great temple to be worshipped. Extreme gender politics, on the other hand, brushes nature aside. DNA means nothing; if a man says he’s a woman or a woman says she’s a man, that’s all that matters. The question is, how can people worship nature and want to get back to nature, but then say there is nothing natural in sexuality and that it is all a social construct?

Conservatives mock all of this, because they can see parts of the contradiction. But they can’t see into its depths, since they often have a worldview equally contradictory. In fact, much of humanity has believed in opposing ideas for centuries. This is because three different religions have tugged at people’s minds, pulling them this way and that. To understand the progressive contradiction, and the catastrophe toward which it is ushering us, we must first look at an earlier contradiction and the catastrophe that resulted from it.

Three Religions and a Catastrophe

Early on in my medical career, I took care of a religiously devout patient who was scheduled to donate a kidney to a stranger. When she spoke of her belief in God I listened with gravity and courtesy, although I myself was secular. At one point she asked me if I thought she was doing the right thing. I demurred, yet had I spoken truthfully, I would have told her that I would give a kidney to myself because I was most important, or to a family member, but only to certain ones because some I didn’t like, and then maybe to a friend, but beyond that I would not donate at all, and certainly not to a stranger. The last act seemed crazy to me, given the surgical risk.

My error in all this was to think of myself as the secular party. I was not. I was as religious as she was. Only mine was a different religion.

Religion has many definitions, but the simplest may be the best: Religion is how people define their relationship to the infinite world that surrounds them. For “conventional” religious people, such as religious Christians and Jews, their most important relationship is with God. For others, their most important relationship is with some group—for example, communists prioritize their relationship with their class, nationalists with their nation, racists with their ethnic group, and bourgeois parents with their families. Others put their relationship with themselves first; they prioritize their personal happiness. Plenty of Americans fit in this last category, ranging from libertarians to liberals.

These three fundamental relationships have defined religion in the West for more than two millennia. Most morality flows from these relationships, which leads to conflict, since different moralities arise as a result. For example, an avowed communist thinks it right to betray his nation to help his class, while a nationalist thinks it wrong. A woman thinks it right to marry someone of lower status, while a bourgeois father, worried about the family name, thinks it wrong. The conflict between the moralities never ends, as people cannot behave otherwise until they alter their relationship with the infinite world around them—and many of them never will.

Some people have tried to meld the different religions, resulting in their holding contradictory beliefs. For example, some Christians prize their personal happiness while still calling themselves Christians. Some Christians prize their class—they call themselves Christian socialists. Some Christians prize their nation or race—they call themselves Christian nationalists. None of this makes sense. Christianity (and Judaism for that matter) holds that one’s highest aim in life should be to carry out the will of God. It says nothing about loving oneself, one’s class, or one’s nation first. Indeed, what emerges from all this is not just contradiction but hypocrisy, as people skillfully pretend and deceive others. They officially embrace Christianity but their true motivation behind their behavior is, in fact, their love for their group or for themselves.

This was yesterday’s contradiction. But if people could just love everyone, reformers proclaimed, the contradiction would disappear. The effort to make this happen led to some of the 20th century’s major political catastrophes.

Christianity preaches love, but until the late Middle Ages, most knowledgeable people distinguished religious love—whether one calls it “charity” or agape—from sensual love. In the centuries to follow, the distinction faded. In fact, many clergymen envisioned a new alliance between religious love and sensual love that would let people enjoy the happiness of a private passion while, at the same time, forever coaxing them to widen their circle of sensual love to include all mankind, thereby spreading sensual love ever wider and wider, thus moving them closer to God’s perfect love.

This was the plan: Every man loves himself, which is natural and needs no incentive; then he loves his family, which brings him happiness; then his tribe, which supports and protects him; then his race, which may not be so instinctive, but is also common. From here, the love impulse faces a steeper climb. A man is encouraged to love his countrymen, who speak his language and share his traditions, yet love for one’s country is less real than love for oneself or one’s family, since loving a nation involves loving strangers. At this aggregate of humanity, the man’s power to love begins to wane. Yet, despite this weakness, the man is coaxed to take one final step and expand his love to include all humanity.

By the 18th and 19th centuries, humanitarians had adopted a secular version of the plan: Expand the kingdom of love to build a new global community of people who will live together in peace, although not in the name of God. Extend an individual’s love ever outward until it reaches all of humanity.

Yet so long as people fell short of loving all humanity, the intensification of all the parochial loves—each supposedly a necessary step along the way to loving all humanity—destabilized society. People who loved themselves or their families most were troubling, but far worse were the racists, the communists, the fascists, and the ultra-nationalists, who built new political ideologies based on their respective idealized communities, each of which envisioned total strangers coming together in a group and loving each other most.

This was the plan’s fatal flaw. People were encouraged to intensify their love for others, to join in consciousness with an ever-expanding number of individuals, with loving all humanity the final goal. But it is impossible to know “humanity” in the concrete. Humanity is a fiction; it cannot be loved. The love that people felt for others in their immediate life lost its efficacy as the objects of love grew more distant. The concept of humanity evoked no feeling in people.

Disaster loomed. With the threat of communism, fascism, racism, and ultra-nationalism rising at the turn of the 20th century, it became all the more essential to widen the sphere of love to include all humanity, to keep the peace. Yet by doing so, by calling on people to look beyond their personal lives toward some ideal community, and to love strangers, the reformers only made things worse, as the goal of loving all humanity could not be reached. With their parochial loves stoked, people simply grew more racist, nationalist, classist, and tribalist.

The end result was catastrophe: the First World War (nationalism), the Second World War (fascism and racism), and the Russian Revolution (communism).

The Progressive “Contradiction”

Several years ago, I attended a humanities conference where the subject of California’s water restrictions came up. Most of the participants supported the restrictions to help vulnerable fish, although the restrictions also threatened the livelihoods of thousands of farmers. When I announced that I cared more about the farmers than the fish, one professor smirked, and replied in a condescending tone, “I care more about the fish than the farmers.”

The professor espoused other conventional progressive views. She revered nature and harbored a special hatred for developers. She subscribed to identity politics, and supported Black Lives Matter and undocumented Latino immigrants struggling against deportation. She voiced support for the poor and called for an expanded welfare state. She declared all gender to be a social construct and said people should be able to choose their gender. Her positions were closely reasoned and not simply delivered under the influence of a hypnotic spell. Yet the contradiction between her first and last points, revering nature on the one hand and ignoring it on the other, seemed lost on her.

My first instinct was to lump her in with the hypocrites of yesteryear, albeit with a small substitution. The professor saw life’s meaning in personal happiness; she believed every individual should be able to decide his or her gender. She also saw life’s meaning in the well-being of a particular group; she supported people of color and the poor. She also saw life’s meaning in service to the Will that created her, only in her case that Will was not God’s but nature’s, which she thought divine. Yet a person cannot profess three relationships with the infinite world. One must prevail.

To trap her in a contradiction, I asked her: Would you surrender your tenured position at the college to an immigrant or a person of color? Would you cancel your plane ticket to Europe to spare the atmosphere extra carbon dioxide? In other words, whom do you love most: yourself, some group, or nature?

When religious people feel themselves caught in a contradiction, usually a shocked hush arises. They look embarrassed and worried; their consciences are uneasy; their split personality has caught up with them. This sometimes happens when a presumably devout religious man is caught having passed on the collection plate at church, or when a presumably devout religious woman is exposed as a bigot. The compelling spell of religion’s message—love all humanity through love of God—is hard to resist, and while it cannot easily overcome people’s love for themselves or their group, it has the power to sap their will and produce strain beneath the surface whenever they stray from it. To force religious people to admit that their self-love or group love is greater than their love for God can be a humiliating experience.

None of this happened with the professor. She was not crushed when exposed. As for the poor farmers threatened by water restrictions, their demise she assumed to be a matter of course. She scoffed at the idea of giving up her job for someone else. She hadn’t cheated to get her professorship, she said; she hadn’t skipped to the front of the line or snuck in through a back door; the only problem was a job shortage that more government jobs, paid for with higher taxes, would fix, she declared. The carbon dioxide challenge left her incredulous, as if only a fool would skip a European vacation to save the planet. She enjoyed the luxurious life. Sure, she worried about climate change, but she also had other things on her mind.

The professor said all this without fear of contradiction, because there was no contradiction, I realized. She had only one religion—love of self—and that’s all she ever had. True, she cared for certain disadvantaged groups, but she never loved them; she was not even a member of one. She cared for nature, but she never loved nature. If caring for nature were inconvenient, she would simply stop caring. Nature existed for her pleasure—and pristine nature gave her pleasure, which is why she wanted it to remain pristine. Nevertheless, her caring for nature was merely an extension of her own self-love. She even expressed the urgency of climate change through her self-love. “Climate change is going to ruin my life and my future!” she insisted. Her mindset recalls that of the affluent white liberals in Nantucket who strongly supported wind energy, but then opposed building windmills in Nantucket Sound when it threatened to ruin their view.

Saint Augustine explained how a love for nature that bordered on the religious could, in fact, be a concealed form of self-love. In the fourth century, he fought against Manicheism, a religious system that rivaled Christianity. The Manicheans believed nature was divine, in the sense that bits of the divine (called Light) lived in every animal and plant. Manicheans were forbidden to eat meat because the divine part supposedly escaped when the animal died, leaving only filth (called Darkness), thereby defiling anyone who consumed it.

All this was vanity, Augustine declared. Such reverence for nature was, at bottom, self-love, a way for people to imagine themselves superior to others through diet. Yet who is nobler, Augustine asked: the man who eats small amounts of meat, politely and respectfully, or the man who lusts after heaps of fruits, vegetables, and bread, who sups all night on the pile, who stuffs his face grossly, who chews with his mouth open, and who passes gas in public both from above and below while doing so?1 According to Manicheism, the latter is more moral, because the food is more moral, which is ridiculous, Augustine said; it is not what goes into a man’s mouth that defiles him but what comes out.

Augustine’s criticism of the Manicheans applies to today’s extreme nature lovers: The obsession with golden melons and shining berries; the way you pick through produce, fussing over whether vegetables are organically grown, as if looking for crumbs of Light amid a sea of factory-produced heathen Darkness, comes from a vain delusion that you can search for God with nose and palate.

Self-love rears its head again, Augustine declared, when the Manicheans searched for God with eyes and ears. The Manicheans were the extreme environmentalists of their age. They revered nature and saw the divine in nature; they dared not even pick a fig for fear that it might cry. They wanted nature left untouched; humans only brought contamination, they insisted.

We hear similar arguments among today’s extreme environmentalists. Augustine’s riposte is still relevant: Extreme environmentalists reject building an amusement park in the forest because it is too bright, too loud, too stinky, and too cramped, but, to paraphrase Augustine, are not the colors of flowers brighter and more varied; are not the sounds of rushing water louder; are not the smells of animal waste more putrid; is not the dense forest more cramped and claustrophobic?2 Why does the whiteness of a flower speak to you but not the whiteness of painted metal? Why do you call the blue ocean one of God’s treasures while a sea of blue cars is despised? Like the Manicheans, today’s extreme environmentalists sniff contemptuously at human-made objects, yet, to paraphrase Augustine, do not the ingredients that go into metal and paint come from nature? And if so, why does the intervening hand of humanity defile those ingredients? And if humanity defiles them, then why do you grow angry when trees planted by human beings are cut down to make way for an amusement park also made by human beings?

Such reverence for nature, joined to a belief that one has the power to discriminate between good and evil matter, Augustine said, springs not from a love of nature but from a love of self, from a vain and false delusion that one can discern the presence of the divine in material things. It is a delusion that allows people to imagine that they are living on the highest plane of existence.

Such vanity has persisted through the centuries. Today’s progressives, for example, would find a kindred spirit in the 18th-century philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, who spoke of his reverence for nature, and how contact with nature gave him a mad rush. Walking along a river, smelling the flowers and trees, he imagined himself the humble exile, the thoughtful artist, the quiet hero, the conscience of society, obliged to return to the vile city and chase its contemptible dollars, yet, until then, cherishing a moment of divine beauty that put him on the same level as the distant snow-capped mountains. When Rousseau smelled nature, his nose was altogether in the air.

Christianity is a religion of love that competes with other loves. It sets half-hearted believers up for the charge of hypocrisy when they claim to love God but really love their group or themselves. No such tension exists in progressive politics when people revere nature on the one hand and view all sexuality as a social construct on the other. There is no competition between different loves and therefore no contradiction. Both points of view flow out of a love of self. Even nature is appreciated with an aristocratic nose, one with an upward tilt.

It is easy for someone who strives for personal happiness to identify with other individuals striving for the same thing. In this spirit, the professor mentioned above supported transgender rights. Yet supporting transgender rights demanded of her no real sacrifice, as nothing about the demand inconvenienced her. Lucky for the transgendered that the price of the professor’s caring for their personal happiness came cheap; otherwise she might not have paid it. After all, she refused to take a small pay cut to help adjunct professors at her college get health insurance.

A Caring Catastrophe

During a radio interview several months ago, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam appeared to defend infanticide. Commenting on pending abortion legislation, he said a deformed baby would be delivered, the infant would be resuscitated if the parents desired it, and then “a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother,” ominously suggesting that the discussants might take away the life they had just returned. Progressives pushed back and said Governor Northam had meant something altogether different. Nevertheless the sense that society’s moral foundations had shifted was inescapable. Governor Northam’s error was simply to have introduced the new approach unwittingly, clumsily, and halfheartedly.

As a physician, I was not surprised by what Governor Northam, also a physician, had said, for there is a natural, unthinking tendency among doctors to treat other people like animals (who are commonly euthanized). Doctors’ minds are so focused on anatomy and physiology, which humans share with animals, that sometimes they confuse the two groups. At the very least, doctors do not love their patients; they only care for their patients, and caring is how a human being feels toward an animal. Animals are handled with care; they are handled with love only if the handler pretends they are substitute children, best friends, or blood brothers—that is, if the handler pretends they are human. Love is a feeling reserved for a relationship between one human being and another. Caring, on the other hand, has within it a high degree of indifference. This is why religion (especially Christianity) embraces love as the one attribute that has the potential to lift humanity out of the rough, brutal ways of the animal kingdom.

When Christianity was the West’s pole star and love was the message, catastrophe ensued when reformers imagined joining humanity together through love and stoking people’s parochial loves to get there. Today, nature is the West’s pole star (or at least for the “progressive” West). As a vehicle to express self-love, nature is far more amenable than Christianity and God were. No more contradiction. The problem is that in nature, animals care for one another rather than love one another. The result for humanity is a dynamic as frightful as the earlier one.

The law of nature, which doctors and scientists know well, is the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. It declares that each person, in order to attain his or her well-being or that of his or her group, must be the fittest, so that it is some other person or group that perishes. Many people fear this law and its application to life, which is why progressives believe in “caring” to ameliorate its consequences. Even then, the law of nature peeps through. A deformed baby will not survive in nature; Governor Northam simply proposed moving that inevitable process along, albeit in typical caring fashion, by making the baby “comfortable” before killing it.

Because the law of nature is contrary to any known morality, progressives substitute another idea from nature as a restraining force. This is the plan: People are no different from animals, and just as animals live in herds, so do people. Their desire for company will help to suppress their anti-social tendencies. In addition, just as animals use force to suppress behavior harmful to the group, so will people. In sum, people will care for each other the way animals care for each other, and this will help preserve some semblance of morality.

The Christian dream of getting everyone to love humanity is replaced with the progressive dream of herding people together to restrain their natural urge to compete against one another and slaughter one another to survive. People are herded first into families; then into gender groups, sexual orientation groups, ethnic groups, tribal groups, disability groups, age groups, groups of poor, and so on, with each member sacrificing his or her individual self-interest for group self-interest. These groups are then expanded to include more people around the globe. Once humanity is united in the form of a single state, with a single government, the law of struggle will cease, argue progressives.

It is in this spirit that progressives push identity politics. The more that individuals are pushed into groups, the safer society will be, progressives think, while the more nations are pushed toward a single world state, the safer the world will be.

Yet a dangerous dynamic arises. No single state can arise, since progressives herd people in a way that permanently pits one group against another, even on a global scale—for example, women against men, blacks against whites, gays against straights, disabled against abled, Muslims against Christians, and so on. The struggle will always remain the struggle. It is the same struggle for existence as before, only it has been extended from the individual to the group. Even if a single state ever did come into being, which it cannot, the struggle would continue—for example, between human beings and the animal kingdom. Human beings prejudiced against animals have already been accused of “speciesism”—that is, of thinking themselves superior to animals. With the establishment of the single state, the law of struggle would continue. But the single state will never come into being. If the law of struggle is nature’s eternal law, then it cannot be conveniently cast aside by arguments about social progress, or diminished from within by some ethical code that springs out of nowhere. The various groups will fight each other, although more viciously than individuals do, since groups can arm themselves more heavily.

Not only will groups fight other groups, they will also break apart into smaller groups. Progressives encourage people to care for each other in their group, and the groups, in fact, demand this. But caring conceals a deeper self-interest; unlike love, it is not a strong bond of affection, and the law of struggle persists within it in a discrete, latent form. Inevitably, people within a group will refuse to sacrifice their own advantages in order to preserve the group, and the group will break apart because of competitive interests arising from within.

For example, the concept of intersectionality is supposed to unify different sub-groups under an all-encompassing framework, as overlapping systems of oppression bring them together. But fights are already occurring between the subgroups. For example, at women’s conferences, poor black feminists have criticized wealthy white feminists for being part of the corporate system of oppression. Transgendered people have criticized gay people, including tennis player Martina Navratilova, writer Andrew Sullivan, and activist Julia Beck, for pushing the agenda of gays over that of the transgendered, or, in the case of Navratilova and Beck, pushing the agenda of feminists over that of the transgendered. These people were once all united, but to escape domination, they must break with others in their group and concentrate their hatred and fear of the rest of the world in a new and smaller group. The group may break up altogether into lone individuals who know only self-love and the law of the struggle—the very danger that progressives tried to ameliorate in the first place.

The life of the man who knows only self-love and the law of the struggle has already set the tone of life in the progressive West. That man fights on his own, like a lone wolf, and like a wolf he is full of hate, and thinks it right to hate, and that all his angry feelings must be given free rein. He wanders about, his spirit tossed; he gets into fights; he pushes people aside or gets pushed aside in turn; he goes through life afraid and full of hatred for the world.

Hatred is a feeling very difficult to guard against. In the Christian era, so much emphasis was put on love, yet the end result was hatred that brought wars and revolutions that killed millions. This was not Christianity’s fault, but it testifies to the fact that even love can serve as a springboard for hate. The danger then was group hate on a mass scale. Today, the danger is the lone man who hates on a mass scale.

Identity politics struggles against hate, but it also preaches hate; indeed, hatred becomes a kind of “sacred” feeling in identity politics, a way to signal virtue among its practitioners. In this respect it is the opposite of Christianity. Science, in turn, tells people that they are nothing more than animals, and that the proper attitude toward people is to care for them. Nothing good can come from this combustible mix.

Take our lone wolf. The world for him becomes a steady parade of media impressions floating mistily in his head—of people to envy, to resent, to blame, and to hate. He is alone with his thoughts in a vast alien world in which everything moves slowly and stealthily, and everyone lives a strange, watchful, and rapacious life.

What does such a man think? If he is an animal who wants to retain his dignity, he takes his hatred into his lonely life, and thinks, “To see everything as it is, in order to change everything that is.” He becomes occupied with one thought—one hate—to which he returns unceasingly, no matter what other thoughts fill his mind. He never parts with it; it is the last and only thing that remains to him. If he creates a murderous plan, he will do everything in his power to fulfill it.

Should it surprise that two-thirds of the worst mass shootings in American history have come in the last 20 years—with most of these crimes committed by lonely, half-crazed men? We know more mass shootings will follow. It has nothing to do with the gun laws. If guns were unavailable other weapons would be found. It has to do with the fact that there is very little these days in progressive culture to restrain and condemn the animal side of people’s lives; at the same time, it stokes their hate. This is the catastrophe that arises when nature becomes humanity’s pole star, a human being becomes nothing more than an animal, and caring replaces love: a world of struggle and violence, at every level and at every turn.

1Augustine, The Catholic and Manichean Ways of Life (Catholic University of America Press, 1966), p. 84-5.

2Augustine, The Catholic and Manichean Ways of Life, p. 92-6.

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The Coming Secessionist Wave?

The lure of the past in Europe is now as strong as, or stronger than, that of the future. The great futuristic project of the United States of Europe is quietly but unmistakably over. And the prolonged torture which Brexit has enforced on Britain’s politics is a warning, like a skeleton on a mediaeval gibbet, to any other country rash enough to attempt to leave the European Union, even as the popular pressures which caused Brexit are surging in states across Europe. The EU parliamentary elections on May 23-26 will show how strong the populist-nationalist forces are: If they make large gains, Brexit will cease to be the Union’s largest problem.

French President Emmanuel Macron is the only major figure with an active vision for a more integrated Europe; little encouragement now comes from Germany, the indispensable country. In March, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s chosen successor as leader of the ruling Christian Democrats—and thus the politician best placed to succeed her—said in March that the EU should focus on concrete issues instead of pushing for more integration. It was a clear snub to Macron. 

With the soaring vision of the European future grounded, the European past, in many national forms, strides on to the stage. One version of that past, long waiting in the wings, is the attempt to resurrect the statehood of old nations, taken in centuries ago by larger states and reduced to mere regions. Those nations have so far had little luck with secession, but if one breaks through to statehood, a cascade may follow. 

The most likely to make the break is Scotland.

Scotland, one of the four nations that make up the United Kingdom, is the model for the other European areas wishing to recover long-lost independence. Those most actively pursuing this end are, first of all, Catalonia, in northeastern Spain, and Flanders, in northern Belgium. The region of Veneto, in northeastern Italy with Venice as its capital, has a strongly pro-independence president, Luca Zaia, who has mooted a referendum on independence some years ago but has since withdrawn it. It may, however, come back on the agenda if Scotland prompts a wave of small country nationalism.

Catalonia, Flanders, and Scotland, are relatively wealthy; all three have storied histories of fighting for independence; all three make a claim that they, as an historically separate people, should rule themselves; all three have pro-independence parties which dominate their politics. Though these parties are the most powerful secessionist forces in Europe, other regions harbour separatist movements that could eventually rival them. When I was growing up in Scotland in the 60s and 70s, the Scots nationalists were regarded, indulgently, as a bit of a joke. Now they are somehow the largest political force in their home nation, and stand as an example to others.

With the support of the small Green Party, the Scottish National Party presently has a majority in the National Assembly, and sends a 35-strong delegation to the House of Commons—the largest party after the ruling Conservatives and the opposition Labour Party. Though no law governs this, everyone in both the British and Scottish governments accept that if a simple majority—even 50.1 per cent—is achieved in a future referendum, Scotland can initiate secession without hindrance from Westminster or the judiciary.

Scotland’s desertion would, literally, destroy the United Kingdom. The 1707 Act of Union of what had been two independent and often warring nation states, created it. With the Scots gone, it could no longer claim to be “united”. In a discussion with a former senior civil servant (who requested anonymity), I was told that the UK’s position on the UN security council, its profile in the Commonwealth, and its status in Europe and the world would all suffer badly: The nationalists’ demand that the country’s main base for nuclear-armed submarines be relocated to England would cost billions and weaken Britain’s position in NATO.

Scotland’s secession would encourage others to follow suit. The principle of being freed from the sometimes-unwelcome decisions taken by a distant capital, and of “being governed by our own people”, would be given a living existence. 

Catalonian nationalists have long envied Scotland’s freedom to maneuver. Spain’s constitution, like most in Europe, proclaims the national state as indivisible: Attempts to convince citizens to secede are criminalised. When in October  2017 the secessionist parties in the Catalonian parliament declared independence from Spain, the Madrid government invoked article 155 of the constitution, which permits it, with the backing of the senate, to take the “necessary measures” to discipline any region which fails to comply with the constitution, or “undermines the interests of Spain”.

Nine pro-independence activists, seven of them politicians, were jailed, where they remain; the former Catalonian president, Carles Puigdemont, is in exile in Belgium, and six of his colleagues also fled abroad, including the former education minister, Clara Ponsati, who returned to her job in Scotland as an economics professor at the University of St Andrews. The current government in the Catalonian capital of Barcelona is strongly pro-independence, but there is presently a stalemate between Barcelona and Madrid.

The Spanish general election last weekend saw the Socialists become, by some way, the largest party: though either they must run a minority government, or try to attract coalition partners to achieve a majority. At the same time, a far right party, Vox, entered the national parliament with 10 per cent of the vote and 24 seats: the first time a party explicitly of the far right has done so since the death of the Caudillo (broadly, the dictator) Francisco Franco in 1973. The Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, is prepared to negotiate with the Catalan separatists, but his room for maneuver is limited. If there is a prolonged delay in forming a government, the Catalan separatists may argue—like the Scots—that national politics are a mess, and thus secession is the better model.

Belgium, created as an independent constitutional monarchy in 1831, has evolved into a federal state, with no prohibition on organizing for independence. Thus in Dutch-speaking Flanders—the more populous and wealthy of the two major regions, the other being French-speaking Wallonia—the New Flemish Alliance has been free to become the largest party both in Flanders and Belgium itself. It has adopted the “civic nationalism” position of the SNP—that is, a liberal politics which largely eschews the anti-immigrant, anti-EU rhetoric of the national populists elsewhere, and which favours a slow but decisive break with the Belgian state. 

On its right in Flanders is the Vlaams Belang party, much more in the mainstream European populist tradition, which the Alliance’s success had relegated to the status of a minor player—though in the past year, under the new, 32-year old leader Tom Van Grieken, it displays signs of an upturn, with strong showings in the 2018 local elections on an anti-immigrant, anti-EU platform. The problem for the Flemish nationalists of all stripes is the status of the capital, Brussels, enfolded in Flanders but with a French-speaking majority. Until a new status is agreed, a split in Belgium cannot be carried through. Various proposals have been mooted, including the creation of a city-state, or “European capital district”; none command agreement. Anti-immigrant feeling, which remains high all over Europe, may again favour a harder line: Scots independence would enthuse the activists and increase pressure for change.

The politics of Veneto are bound up with the creation, in 1991, of the Lega Nord, a party which drew most of its support from Veneto, Lombardy and Piedmont and which called for autonomy, sometimes amounting to independence, for what it called  “Padania”, an area taking in these states with others in the northern parts of the country. 

Since Matteo Salvini, the current deputy prime minister of Italy, took over leadership, the party has dropped the “Nord” and sought, successfully, to present itself as a Euroskeptic, anti-immigration party of the nationalist-populist Right. In its own area, however, it continues to attract those who, like President Zaia, seek at least autonomy for Veneto. Any separatist ambition would, however, run up against article Five of the Constitution, which declares Italy, like Spain, “one and indivisible”. But how far would the coalition government, whose most popular party, the Lega, had itself supported independence in the past, strongly oppose?

As noted earlier, Scotland’s nationalists face no such encumbrances. The rise of the SNP in the 2000s has been partly due to the organizing and rhetorical abilities of its two most recent leaders: first, Alex Salmond, and, since 2014, Nicola Sturgeon. Both, especially Salmond, were able to rouse and politicize the resentment many Scots felt toward the English and, for those with a grasp of Scottish history, the loss of a Scots parliament and statehood in 1707. 

Scots, however loyal to the Union, have always insisted on the preservation of the separate institutions to which the Union had agreed: a separate judiciary, a separate education system, and a separate national church. Scots—a dialect of English, in its strong form unintelligible to an English speaker—was widely spoken, especially in the working and lower-middle classes. Scots culture, even where (or especially where) it shaded into kitsch, preserved a much greater popularity than the largely lost traditions in England, especially with regard to music and dance. The Union had preserved Scottish culture, but not Scottish sovereignty. 

To this the nationalists add political and economic grievances. Scotland, especially in the western agglomerations of population around Glasgow and in the great shipyards of the River Clyde, had been the “workshop of the world” in the imperial 19th and early 20th centuries. Beginning in the 1920s, however, the rise of the U.S. and European states like Germany and France tore apart the heavy industries on which Scotland’s wealth had depended. Scotland declined, especially when compared to London and the southeast of England, the richest part of the UK.

Over the course of her long premiership, Margaret Thatcher set out to whittle away the state in its role as owner and subsidiser. Her regime privileged finance, services, and emerging industries. But it rang the death knell for those sectors that had survived from the 19th century—coal mining in particular, reduced to near extinction after a grinding year-long strike. Her economic policies, and the cost of high unemployment, were greatly assisted by the discovery and exploitation of large oil and gas deposits in the North Sea. In a bitter irony, the sudden windfall that could have allowed a successful nationalist party to make an independent Scotland among the richest in Europe—as oil rich Norway, with still-large deposits in the North Sea, presently is—rose to its peak at a time of SNP weakness, only to decline, in recent years, when the SNP was at its strongest.

Thatcher remains one of the Scots nationalists’ greatest allies: her brusque refusal to regard Scotland as special, her opposition to any kind of devolution, and her unpopular poll tax to fund local authorities in Scotland were gifts both to a party which could claim that only independence could protect the Scots from leaders like Thatcher. 

As Conservative rule continued through the 1990s under Thatcher’s successor John Major, that message—only independence could properly address Scotland’s problems—began to eat away at the once-dominant Scots Labour’s heartlands: the SNP emerged, in the late 1990s, as its strongest opposition. Devolution to a Scots parliament in 1998 was seen as a way to kill nationalism, but an aggressively-led SNP used the new forum as its loudspeaker, successfully taking leadership in the Edinburgh parliament from Labour in 2007. In 2015, the nationalists secured an absolute majority in Scotland and all but wiped out the main parties’ representation at Westminster, leaving Scottish Labour, Conservatives, and Liberal Democrats with one seat each.

2015 was the high watermark for the SNP: the election of 2017 saw the unlikely rebound of the Scots conservatives under a young, bright, jolly woman named Ruth Davidson, a proclaimed lesbian who is, since October last year, with her partner Jen Wilson, parent of a baby son. Even as the SNP reached new heights of popularity and party membership, the 2014 referendum on independence which the party had demanded showed a majority of 55 per cent for continued union. Scots, it seems, like the SNP as an idea, but not a core policy.

The SNP now faces the pressures and disillusion common to long-serving parties in democracies. Schools, once seen as Scotland’s strength, are underperforming badly. The health system, part of the National Health Service but independently administered, suffers delays and rising complaints. Alex Salmond, who resigned after the 2014 referendum defeat, now faces serious charges of sexual assault and two of attempted rape while in office as First Minister, while his job as a presenter for the Russian propaganda channel RT continues to attract criticism. The latest version of the party’s economic program for an independent Scotland has come under fire from opponents for being far too optimistic, and from the party’s left for being too austere.

Yet Brexit may be its savior, by giving the party a ready-made cause. Where England and Wales voted decisively for leaving the EU, Scotland voted much more heavily—by nearly 2:1—for remaining. First Minister Sturgeon can play the party’s strongest card: that British government does not represent Scotland. 

She did so last weekend, at the Party’s spring conference in Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital. Pointing to polls that showed a majority for independence—especially if the UK leaves the EU with no agreed deal, the so-called “hard Brexit”—Sturgeon, to a standing ovation in a crowded hall, said she would initiate legislation in the Scottish assembly to prepare for a referendum. Though after the failure of the first independence referendum five years ago, she will doubtless be cautious as to when exactly it will be mounted.

The prolonged, crisis-ridden efforts by UK Prime Minister Theresa May to secure a deal with the EU which could command the assent of parliament has exasperated the British and pointed more Scots than before to exit, not from the European but British Union. A recent poll showed 53 per cent of Scots prefer independence to Brexit, rising to 59 per cent if Britain leaves with no deal.

The stakes are thus high for the UK—and high, too, for Europe and beyond. A successful achievement of what Scots nationalists call “freedom”, in imitation of the cry of William Wallace from 1995 Hollywood film “Braveheart”, will likely cause a chain reaction. The Catalonian, Flemish, Venetian and perhaps other nationalists would be on their mettle to follow suit—well-positioned as the richest parts of their nation states, each with a major seaport: Barcelona in Catalonia, Antwerp in Flanders, and Venice in Veneto: Scotland itself has Glasgow, once the centre of world shipbuilding and, with Liverpool, the chief Atlantic port.

And there could be more. Quebec secessionists all but won a referendum in 1995, polling 49.4% to 50.6%. Since then, support for independence has waned, to the point where, in the provincial elections last year, a new party of the Right, the Coalition Avenir Quebec, came from nowhere to sweep the polls on an explicitly anti-independence platform. But the very rapidity of the switch in voters’ choice betrays an unsettled polity: given an economic turndown, and turmoil in the Canadian capital Ottawa, the banner for “Liberté!” could be hoisted again.

If relative wealth is a prompt for secession, then both Germany’s Bavaria and the America’s California come into the frame. Leaders of California’s secession movements—there are more than one—claim that their memberships have doubled since the election of Donald Trump, and that California’s position as the fifth-largest economy in the world easily qualifies it for a wealthy independence. Californians presently oppose secession by 2:1, but that too could change with a national economic downturn, or a full-blown conflict between Democrats and pro-Trump Republicans causing prolonged blockage in Washington.

Bavaria, Germany’s second richest state after North Rhine-Westphalia, has long had an independence movement, ever since Bavaria was brought within the new German state in 1871. The independence party was a member of a coalition governing the state in the 1950s; since then, its support has fallen to low single figures, as its powerful economy was thought to have been assisted by Germany’s success. Yet in 2017, a YouGov poll showed 32 per cent of Bavarians want independence from Germany. Meanwhile the national economy is trembling on the edge of a recession as Europe’s economy as a whole slows, together with China—a crucial market for Germany. 

These are long shots: So far, popular fear of the unknown and opposition from the existing states have prevented a breach in the wall. But the fragility of Europe, the continuing popularity of the nationalist-populists, and the attraction of “governing ourselves”, especially where “ourselves” live in a rich region, give the independence movements hope that tomorrow belongs to them. If Scotland’s nationalists seize the chance that Brexit may give them and their fellow Scots give them a majority this time, they are quite likely to spark a deluge. 

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