Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 43

A Century of European, German, and Jewish History

Born to a Jewish family in Hildesheim just four years after the end of World War I, Günther Stern fled Germany two years before the start of World War II. He settled in Missouri, joined the U.S. Army, and as one of the “Ritchie Boys”—a group of German-speaking intelligence officers trained in Camp Ritchie, Maryland—was dispatched to the front lines. Stern was an early arrival on the Normandy coast, landing on D+3 (three days after D-Day). For the past three quarters of a century, Professor Stern has lived in Michigan as a scholar of German and comparative literature. He continues to lecture here and abroad.

Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Gedmin and Associate Editor Sean Keeley spoke with Professor Stern as he prepares his forthcoming autobiography. The following interview has been edited for clarity and expanded after the initial conversation. 

TAI: Can you begin by talking about the shape of your early life in Germany?

Guy Stern: I was born in January 1922 in Hildesheim, a medium-sized town in Northern Germany. My father had a small clothing store there. And until the Nazis came to power, we were under the impression that this was a particularly receptive small town, and an ecumenical living environment. My father worked himself up, from being an employee of a clothing store to opening his own store. He sent me first to a Jewish elementary school, and then to a German high school with mostly Protestant students. But I felt in those first years, 1932 or 1933, absolutely no antagonism. I felt well in the town. There were get-togethers between my family and our fellow citizens of Hildesheim. And then either that illusion was crushed, or people became unable or unwilling to continue contact with their Jewish neighbors.

TAI: As a child during Weimar, were you aware of the sense of grievance around Germany’s loss in World War I, the “stabbed-in-the-back” mentality?

GS: Yes, I went to my mother when I heard that the Germans had lost World War I. My early readings told me that Germany had gone from one victory to another. Her answer was concise: “Wir haben uns zu Tode gesiegt!”—“We conquered ourselves to death.” On another occasion she condemned Germany’s readiness to go to war and used strong language because two of her brothers had paid a heavy price. Her brother, Felix, was killed in a battle in France and her brother, Willy, was severely wounded during the gas warfare and was unable to take long walks or do strenuous tasks for the rest of his life.

On the other hand, her father gathered his family on Heldengedenktag, the holiday for commemorating the war dead. Once or twice we happened to be in Vlotho that day and he held a short speech as the patriarch of the family. “Let us think of my heroic sons and what they did for our fatherland,” he said.

TAI: Do you remember a distinct turning point when your family’s experience in Hildesheim began to change?

GS: Yes. Obviously, when the Nazis came to power end of January 1933, a change took place. In fact, on January 31st, my father brought my brother and me together and told us to be extremely careful, to not stand out, to not make waves, because caution for us was essential. He compared us to invisible ink, meaning that we would someday reappear, but right now, we had to be almost invisible. So we followed that advice.

It was well-taken because even close friends who were non-Jews made a sort of retreat from us. The parents of my fellow students in Hildesheim sometimes took the first steps back, and they told their children that it would be dangerous or would hurt their careers if they continued to be good friends to us. 

TAI: Do you remember other turning points that we now mark as steps in Hitler’s rise: the 1932 elections, the Reichstag fire, the Night of the Long Knives?

GS: My father feared the rise of Hitler, but also added that he like so many other German chancellors before would quickly do himself in. In the election of 1932 my father voted as usual for the Staatspartei [a short-lived party that sought to combine social liberalism and nationalist corporatism – ed.].

I remember hearing the news of the Reichstag fire, but more vividly, the daily news on the trial that followed it and the condemnation of van der Lubbe [the communist accused for having set the fire – ed.]. My parents remarked on the courage of the lawyers for the German Communists.

As for the Night of the Long Knives, my father believed that the assassination of [Storm Trooper head – ed.] Ernst Röhm would weaken Hitler. He sent me to the railroad station where the main Zurich newspaper was for sale and asked me to buy a copy. He felt that the newspaper account strengthened his prediction that Hitler’s hold on the Nazi Party would wane.

TAI: What about the Nuremberg Laws? Did those affect your family?

GS: Yes, my mother was very sorry that we had to give notice to our maid, Hilde. And my father complained ever more frequently about his loss of customers after the passage of the laws.

TAI: You eventually made it out of Germany to America, and then returned to Europe during the war as one of the “Ritchie Boys.” Tell us about that experience.

GS: I had left high school in Germany two years early, saved some money, and was taken in by an uncle, my mother’s brother, who lived in St. Louis. After working a series of jobs, such as a bus boy, I entered St. Louis University. Then in my sophomore year, Pearl Harbor happened. After trying unsuccessfully to enlist in Naval Intelligence—at that time, they had restrictions against non-native born Americans—I was eventually drafted and had my basic training in Camp Barkley, Texas. Then I was suddenly transferred to Camp Ritchie, Maryland—hence the “Ritchie Boys” nickname.

There we had intensive training for about nine weeks in all aspects of intelligence work. When the war moved closer to the United States, many of my fellow Ritchie Boys and I were shipped to England, where we awaited the invasion. I was assigned to be one of the early arrivals at Normandy three days after D-Day. Ten minutes after our arrival, I had my first prisoner. At that time, staying close to the shore, we were asked to provide tactical information. Where were artillery units stationed? What were their guns? What was the immediate plan of the enemy?

Later on, when we had a breaking out of the beachhead and struck out deeper into France, I was asked to be the head of the Survey Section of my particular unit, attached to First U.S. Army. There I was asked to answer many of the inquiries we received from other units, for example, how the Germans were able to so quickly replace damaged tracks and rolling stock to get their supplies and troops to the front lines.

I was also involved in a new approach of mass interrogation to assess the orders coming from German headquarters. We wanted to know about the arrival of new troops, what their capabilities were, and at the end of the war, whether the Germans had the capabilities to engage in gas warfare as they had in World War I.

TAI: How did you feel at that moment, going back to the country where you had grown up?

GS: I felt not that I had left Germany, but that Germany had left me. The tradition in which I grew up until I was 11 years old had disappeared. It was overpowered by dictatorship, tyranny, and brutal force, and that was not my country. I became an American patriot. This country had saved my life. I was absolutely devoted to my duties in the Army, with whatever strength I could supply. So there was no real conflict in fulfilling my duties as an American. I was absolutely convinced of the superiority of the American democratic system, and I still hold to that.

TAI: You would subsequently settle in the United States after the war and become a scholar of German literature, with a particular focus on the Weimar period. What do you make of this period in German literature?

GS: Early Weimar Germany saw an interlinking of various groups across the political spectrum. There were numerous examples of Jewish historians, intellectuals, and artists interacting with their counterparts throughout German society, and great collaborations were possible. That, slowly, was suppressed. Ever more stringent restrictions were put on Jewish artists and authors, so they were forced either to retract their contributions or to go into exile—and sometimes both.

TAI: You’ve written a book about the Neue Merkur, a Weimar-era literary journal period that published many of Germany’s leading writers. Tell us about this journal.

GS: The magazine was a victim of deflation following inflation, and it folded in 1925. So it wasn’t a victim of Nazi censorship. I’m one of the few people who has tried to preserve its legacy.

I see the magazine as important for introducing the German public to such diverse foreign authors as D.H. Lawrence and Isaac Babel. Some of Germany’s leading intellectuals also contributed to the magazine, including Ernst Bloch and Franz Oppenheimer. I’ve also tried to remind the public of the tremendous contributions of the editor, Efraim Frisch, by publishing essays by him in a 1963 volume.

The epilogue in my study of the Neue Merkur quotes the famous theater director, Kurt Hirschfeld, praising Frisch’s comprehensive knowledge of European literature (German, French, Russian, and Polish) and his equally comprehensive knowledge of Jewish literature, both religious and secular. I also republished the best stories of the Neue Merkur in a collected volume, which contained aphorisms by Franz Kafka and short stories by Martin Buber and by Frisch himself.

TAI: One of the most famous novels of the period is Alfred Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), which is celebrating its 90th anniversary this year. It’s recently come out in an acclaimed new English translation. Why do you think that particular novel has such staying power?

GS: I think it has to do with the author’s role in Germany. Döblin was not only an author but also a physician, who catered to people who were unable to afford doctors. He demonstrated a kind of activism that I think we still need. Döblin’s idealism reverberates in that novel and in several of his others. He was always on the side of the disadvantaged, telling their stories. That certainly applies to the book’s anti-hero, Franz Biberkopf: a murderer who has just been released from jail. I also admire his approach of using, as did such near contemporaries as James Joyce and John Dos Passos, his protagonists’ internal monologue.

I have taught this novel in my seminars. It’s an adventure story, of course, but it also seeks to uphold the principles of democracy—that all of us, all citizens of a country, are entitled to be protected, even if they cannot cope with the vicissitudes of life coming their way.

TAI: What other books of that period capture a sense of the time?

GS: Leonhard Frank is one of the authors who does. I have also long favored the works of Rudolf Frank. His work was often a kind of warning, much like Philip Roth some ten years ago with The Plot Against America, about the troubles that can undermine a democratic country.

TAI: You also have a particular interest in exile literature.

GS: Yes, I have often taught about this. Going through that mass of exile literature, through the ages and across the nations, has been one of the keystones of my career.

TAI: Two particularly famous exiled writers of the time were Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig, who fled Germany and Austria, respectively, as opponents of the Nazis. How do you evaluate their work?

GS: I have written about my perception of Thomas Mann in a lengthy chapter in a German volume, The Thomas Mann Handbook. My chapter is entitled, “Thomas Mann and the Jewish World.” I’ve also written about my personal encounter with Thomas Mann when I was a high school student in St. Louis.

I have written only one article on Stefan Zweig. I did, however, discover and track down a rare portrait of Zweig done by the painter Walter Kornhas for an exhibit at Munich’s Gasteig about four years ago. I consider Zweig one of the most important chroniclers of the Weimar period, both in his non-fiction works and in one of his last works, “The Royal Game” (“Die Schachnovelle”). To me that novella represents a portrait of the exiled intellectual who is trying to cling to the past and gets fixated on that pursuit.

TAI: Let’s move to the present. Today in the United States and parts of Europe, there is a concern that democracy is in trouble and that there’s a new authoritarian temptation. Do you see that?

GS: Well, I’m familiar with all the reports on the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe, and also that anti-Jewish attacks in the United States are happening more frequently than in the past. I think that’s something we all have to be alert to.

In Germany, leaders have taken some concrete, necessary steps to combat anti-Semitism. It’s one of the few countries in Europe that has really called attention to anti-Semitism by appointing officials to address the problem. And I have long argued that one must respond forcibly and in the spirit of democracy as soon as signs of anti-Semitism arise.

TAI: We know that history does not repeat itself; conditions in the West today are fundamentally different than they were in Weimar Germany. Having said this, do you think there are parallels between that time and our own?

GS: I think it has relevance. We have seen recent attempts to suppress the democratic tradition of free speech, and that is always an incipient danger for a successful democracy. Democracy, I’ve said elsewhere, is a delicate flower, and it is Jefferson who said, “The price of democracy is eternal vigilance.”

TAI: Do you see attacks on free speech coming more from the Left or the Right?

GS: I cannot take a partisan side. I would say that wherever we encounter infringements on our Constitution and on our rights, these are danger points. We have to watch and take counter action.

TAI: Do you see any tension between protecting free speech and preventing the worst kinds of hate speech? How do you allow all voices to be heard and still guard against extremism?

GS: Having been closely allied to life on campus for more than 50 years, I have always leaned toward the expression of free speech. But I see no need to give demagogues a free forum.

TAI: Today’s Germany is democratic, stable, and prosperous, but also, like many EU countries, riven by internal conflicts and the rise of right-wing populism. Do you have concerns about German democracy, or democracy in Europe for that matter?

GS: Yes, the rise of parties on the far Right is a new danger, and in Germany, it has spawned some surprising results at election time. There are now German representatives from the far Right in the European Parliament, in various state legislatures, and in the Bundestag. As I said previously, this has to be watched.

I don’t believe it’s a pressing national danger right now. Again, I commend the German leadership for having established watchdog offices both at the federal level and in various state parliaments. I see some other governments trying to cope with these right-wing parties by seeking an alliance with them. I think that is the wrong way to go.

TAI: What do you say to those who argue that some voters for these right-wing populist parties are indeed extremists, but others are merely discontent with Berlin or Brussels and feel like the mainstream parties are not representing them?

GS: I am not that much involved in politics, but the situation brings to my mind Lincoln’s words: I wonder “whether a nation so conceived will long endure.” We are being tested. We will, to my optimistic way of thinking, pass this test. We sometimes come through by the skin of our teeth.

TAI: You’ve had an extraordinary life. You saw the rise of fascism, Nazism, and communism. You saw the division of Germany, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and German unification. What are the broad lessons you’ve learned from this history?

GS: I echo a statesman of my times, Adlai Stevenson, who said in a campaign, “Change for the sake of change has no merit in itself.” And the advice I have given always to my students is: Think for yourself. The application of critical thinking is essential, even when we are being taught to follow one party or the other. Think for yourself. This is one of the bulwarks of a democracy.

TAI: Two final questions. First, do you have a favorite book?

GS: I can’t specify any single book, though as I’ve said, exile literature remains a touchstone for me. But I think what we need right now is literature that could offer a counterpoint to what is pernicious in our system of democracy and our republic. I am not answering your question precisely, but I’m saying we need models—not utopian ones —of a nation that makes its way out of various crises and will persist.

TAI: Finally, on a personal level, what’s the secret to a long, healthy, and happy life?

GS: Emulate a life of morality and ethics, which has been demonstrated by past leadership. The wisdom of Benjamin Franklin, or the eloquence of both Roosevelts—those examples would stand anyone in good stead.

The post A Century of European, German, and Jewish History appeared first on The American Interest.

Why It Won’t Happen Here

My friend and colleague Adam Garfinkle, the founding editor of The American Interest, thinks that America’s Jews are finished. “The American Jewish golden age . . . is over, folks.” he wrote in Tablet. What triggered the despair?

For one, two first-term Democratic Congresswomen, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, gained instant notoriety by trundling out ancient anti-Jewish tropes that seemed to be dead and buried, Tlaib accused two anti-BDS Senators of dual loyalty: “They forgot what country they represent.”

Tlaib was quickly upstaged by Omar who delivered more of the mean-spirited stuff, though wrapped in coded language. Her target was “the political influence that says it is okay for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.” Say “hello” to Jewish treachery. How did the Jews do it? By making money talk—all those “Benjamins,” tons of $100 bills. Why did they score so well? Because, as Omar had tweeted in 2012, “Israel has hypnotized the world.” It all added up to a CliffsNotes version of The Protocol of the Elders of Zion.

Still, what’s the big deal? These congressional novices, two out of 435, have enjoyed their days in the sun; since then, attention has shifted, as befits the Age of Tweets. Yet American Jews were not reassured as they watched a far larger drama unfold: the convulsions of the Democratic Party in the aftermath of Omar. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a few party stalwarts had condemned Omar’s “hurtful comments” as “deeply offensive.” In the end, the divided Dems could only agree on a one-size-fits-all resolution. Dutifully, it did denounce anti-Semitism, but also “Islamophobia, racism and other forms of bigotry.”

Add the Democratic Party’s leftward lurch. Throughout the West, a new dynamic is working its way through the political spectrum. In the past 120 years, anti-Semitism used to be a project of the Right, uniting clericalists, chauvinists, fascists, and Nazis. Today, the scourge has traveled to the Left, as most vividly demonstrated by Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. The common denominator is an obsessive aversion to Israel, but if you poke long enough, you unearth anti-Jewish tropes running from dual loyalty via subversion by Jewish money to global conspiracy.

So American (and British) Jews are rightly unsettled. As Garfinkle notes, “Jews are rapidly and irreversibly becoming homeless.” Do not ignore, however, that 70 percent of Jews still vote Democratic.

Where their saint FDR once reigned, hostility to Israel and coded Jew-bashing has moved from the kooky to the tolerable, intimidating the Party’s grandees as the tortured reaction to Tlaib/Omar shows. Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren have defended Omar, with the “Bern” disingenuously claiming that her critics were “stifling” debate—though the dispute was raging untrammeled through the land. Beyond Capitol Hill, deadly violence has flared. A French specialty—murderous attacks on Jews—has come to America: In Pittsburgh, a Jew hater massacred five congregants during Shabbat services, and in California another gunman murdered one and injured several.

Is this just a series of coincidences? Adam Garfinkle, sees not happenstance, but a gloomy pattern. “As a politically homeless, smaller, and less influential community,” he wrote in an earlier piece for The American Interest, “the future of American Jewry is grim. . . . The main trend lines are not reversible. That is why the tweets of Ilham Omar resonate so loudly in their heads.”

Is the love affair between Jews and America over? It Can’t Happen Here, pronounced Sinclair Lewis’ semi-satirical novel of 1935, but it did, spawning dictatorship and civil war, labor camps and torture chambers. Yet in the final pages, the democratic resistance is getting the upper hand. In Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, Nazi fan Charles Lindbergh is elected President; Jews are arrested and deported to the “heartland.” But Roth keeps the faith. In the end, the good America triumphs over anti-Semitism and fascism, Made in U.S.A.

Why won’t it happen here, whereas evil triumphed from Portugal to Poland after World War I? The simplest and most compelling answer is this: America is different. Just a few numbers for starters. In a 19-country opinion survey (2015), the ADL measured anti-Semitism by calculating an index score for each nation. In the West, Greece comes out on top with a score of 67. Next in line is Romania with 47. Hungary is third with 40. France gets 17 and Germany 16. The U.S. ranges way down with a score of 10. According to a recent Pew poll, a substantial majority of Americans—64 percent—say they have a favorable opinion of the Israeli people.

Such numbers suggest that America is the great exception, hardly a candidate for real-life dystopias in the way of Sinclair Lewis. Indeed, American exceptionalism—the genuine, not the self-congratulatory version—is at the core of the Jewish-American love affair. It comes in three parts.

First, go back to 1654. Long before the birth of the Republic, a band of Jews escaping from the Inquisition sailed from Recife, Brazil, to Nieuw Amsterdam, known as New York today. Peter Stuyvesant, the administrator, refused asylum to this “deceitful race” of “usurers” and “blasphemers.” Back home, the Dutch West India Company was not swayed, overruling Stuyvesant in the name of religious freedom. He obeyed, but fired off an angry letter: “Giving [the Jews] liberty, we cannot refuse the Lutherans and Papists.” Nor could he stomach Quakers.

Thus, a unique tradition struck roots in American soil. Let’s call it “equal-opportunity racism,” which, ironically, was a blessing for the Jews. For once, they were not singled out as Christ killers and bloodsuckers. Suddenly, they found themselves in good Christian company. For the Dutch Reformed Church, Lutherans were the real enemies. So were Catholics; allegedly beholden to the Pope, they were tainted as traitors.

All the way into the 20th century, “Papists” were suspected of harboring dual loyalties, a role normally reserved for the Jews. But in America, where bigotry was “universalized,” Jews were not evil incarnate, being only one outsider group in a country peopled by immigrants and minorities. Irish hated Italians, and both hated Poles, while WASPS despised everybody of different ancestry, faith, and color. Mutual contempt among a myriad denomination was a God-sent for the Jews; in contrast to Europe, they were merely one target among many, pace the KKK and the Know-Nothings.

Jefferson’s “wall of separation between Church & State” defines a second American exception. Where faith was married to power, as it was in Europe, dissidents and “heretics” ended up at the stake. Jews were ghettoized, slain, or expelled. But in the United States, the First Amendment became the law of the land. The state could favor no religion, nor establish one; every church was on its own. Never before had Jews enjoyed as much safety and equality as they did in the novus ordo seclorum. No wonder that they flocked to these shores by the millions. America was the Goldene Medineh, the Land of Gold.

Third, no nation is as “Jewish” as the United States. Unlike Europe’s Christians, the Puritans fell in love with the Hebrew Bible. They saw themselves as re-enacting Israel’s struggle against Pharaoh. Their flight across the sea was like the Exodus, and what they found in the New World was another Promised Land, bequeathed to them by a covenant with God. Puritanism as such no longer exists, but in the United States, it has exerted a lasting influence on the American creed, shaping religion, politics and culture.

John Winthrop, the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, impressed upon his flock: “If we keep this covenant we shall find that the God of Israel is among us.“ Cotton Mather called the Jews God’s “beloved people.” Yet Luther wanted to “set fire to their synagogues.” The settlers saw themselves as “Christian Israel.” They incorporated Jewish law into the early American corpus. They named their children Abraham and Sarah. They would build a “cittie uppon a hill,” a new Jerusalem. America is dotted with biblical place names like Jerusalem, Shiloh, Zion, Canaan, and Goshen. There is no Shiloh anywhere in Europe.

Transcending the headlines, the moral of this tale should be reassuring. The American-Jewish love affair is not one-sided, nor based on the fleeting convergence of interests. Indeed, interests have regularly clashed, especially with regard to Israel. It began with Harry S. Truman (who at first would not recognize Israel), continued with Dwight Eisenhower (who refused arms to the fledgling Jewish state) and ran all the way to Barack Obama (who tried to make nice to the Islamic world). Nixon coolly ignored Israel’s horrifying losses in the Yom Kippur War, initially holding back resupplies in order to soften up the Golda Meir government for the coming peace talks with Egypt. George W. Bush refused to deliver America’s biggest bunker-busters, capable of cracking Iran’s hardened nuclear sites. If those “Benjamins” really bought illicit influence, as Omar fantasizes, why did the United States and Israel regularly go mano a mano?

The real story is not about Jewish cash or the hidden hand of Jewish power. It about affinity and kinship without any parallel in the Western world. Of course, the past never guarantees the future. But 350 years of continuity spell out a heartening message. The tie is more deeply embedded in American culture than the recurrent flare-ups of anti-Semitism since the birth of the Republic.

If it does happen here, to pick up on Sinclair Lewis and Philip Roth, America would have to stop being what it has become. Such a transformation will require a lot more than anti-Jewish and anti-Israel tweets or BDS campaigns on campus. Rooted in American history, the relationship is part and parcel of the American creed. It all started in 1654 when that band of Brazilian Jews found a haven in New Amsterdam. By that time, Jews had been expelled from England, Spain, Austria and Germany. Greater New York now harbors two million of them.

The post Why It Won’t Happen Here appeared first on The American Interest.

The City of Europe’s Future

I’ve often wondered, “Where is Europe?”

Its essence could never be found in a modern megacity—any place too particular cannot really be “Europe.” It could not be found in too ancient a city either, because truth be told very few Europeans live in ancient homes. Europe, the Europe we live in, is really a continent of suburbs, supermarkets, and business parks, the Europe of Carrefour and le Corbusier knock-offs, its concrete tower blocks hidden behind the cathedrals.

I felt it, Europe as it is, watching the Eurolines pull into Victoria Coach Station, in London, at 6:00 AM, full of bleary eyes—migrants, students, tourists—on busses from Bucharest, Paris, and Rome. I felt it too, watching the truckers pull out of the mist at motorway service stations in Germany; or early in the morning, at the edge of Turin, where African migrants huddle at the camp gates, making plans to reach France. I thought this emotion, this feeling, maybe couldn’t be found in cities at all: Maybe the Europe of the twenty-first century was too diffuse to have a capital, like Walter Benjamin’s Paris was for the nineteenth century, with its arcades and its velvet sedans.

But then I found Rotterdam. This was quite unexpected. I’d been to Amsterdam countless times before but never set foot in the economic hub of the Netherlands—a city that figures prominently in supply chains but not on tourists’ itineraries. I realized I had been looking in the wrong places. Some cities, like Prague, had dazzled in the twentieth only to fizzle out in a swarm of EasyJets and stag parties in the twenty-first. Rotterdam was not one of these kinds of places. Flattened in 1940 by the Nazis, and rebuilt well into the 1970s, really nothing was expected of Rotterdam. And nobody was looking.

And yet it’s all here, I thought to myself as I was crossing the river Maas in a water taxi. Completely rebuilt from rubble by modernist town planners, it has become a city of the future quite different from what its visionaries imagined. Transformed not only by the European Single Market but also by mass migration, Rotterdam is an incubator for populist politics of all persuasions. It has a Muslim mayor, its own Islamist Party, and a statue of the pioneer of modern rightwing nativism, Pim Fortuyn.

Before Farage, before Le Pen, before Trump, it was “Pim” who broke through, right here in Rotterdam in the early 2000s. What made this alchemist so popular was his free-associating of bits of liberalism and nativism into a potent populist punch. Fortuyn single-handedly changed the vocabulary of the European far Right, encouraging them to embrace gays, Jews, and “the integrated” in order to hit at Muslims, ethnic change, and the culturally different. Fortuyn was assassinated in 2002, but his tactics have proved a winning strategy for anti-Brussels nativists across the continent.

For those hoping this kind of politics was a flash in the pan, the Dutch populist moment has stretched on and on. At recent elections, the success of Thierry Baudet and his Forum for Democracy shook the Netherlands. This upstart came from nowhere, scrubbing up and polishing the politics of Pim Fortuyn’s rougher, coarser heir Geert Wilders with an elite, professorial elan—a kind of Jordan Peterson effect. His sinister warnings, delivered with a patina of false erudition—he speaks of the “homeopathic dilution” of the Dutch nation, for example—have made his party the largest in the Senate.

All this goes against the current vogue for the Netherlands amongst Britain’s heartbroken Remainers. Not only the Economist but also the Financial Times have written Paradise Lost-like hymns to the stable liberal centrism they see in Amsterdam. If only Britain could have been as well-governed and serious about house-building, trains, and productivity as the Netherlands, it would be politics as usual.

Rotterdam tells a different story.

On the surface, Rotterdam is like a dream of Britain’s liberal-left come to life. It has a sparkling new train station—publicly owned—and the World Economic Forum approves. The Netherlands, it says, not only has the European Union’s most competitive economy but the continent’s best infrastructure.

Almost all the statistics about Rotterdam are striking. This city of nearly 640,000 people is Europe’s biggest port, bringing in almost 30,000 sea ships a year and over 460 million tons of cargo. It is also an “immigrant city”, with over 50.9 percent of Rotterdammers now reporting what is called an immigrant background, meaning either they or a parent of theirs was born abroad.

Whenever I travel, I seek out the immigrant neighborhoods. In Rotterdam, it is the Charlois, with its gritty workers’ cottages, on the south side of the Maas. Between the Bulgarian grocers, the Roma families, and the Turkish mosques live the new Rotterdammers, the city’s next generation, where over two thirds of young people have non-Dutch origins. With Europe’s demography changing so fast (some projections see Western Europe becoming majority-minority by 2100) these communities, with all their successes and failures, with their quiet, complex beauty, between the Lebara Mobile signs and the Halal butchers, are neither dystopias nor utopias. For decades now, both the far Right and far Left in Europe have projected their visions onto them: either as “no-go zones” or as “post-racial” communities. Neither sees them for what they are. These banlieues are the factories of the future, churning out both tomorrow’s voters and tomorrow’s politics.

Unlike in Britain’s provinces, these areas are the focus of serious public investment, significant housebuilding, experiments with tiny homes and green initiatives. Nevertheless, the politics here are far from placid.

I stopped by the water to stare at the Erasmusbrug bridge. If you were writing a book, you could write a whole chapter about this delicate thing over the water, sitting like a fluttering swan, bridging the gentrifying north to the migrant south. Built on the eve of the launch of the euro, as a symbol of Rotterdam’s cosmopolitanism and named after the 16th century philosopher Erasmus, it has now become an actual stage for identity politics.

All Europe’s culture wars seem to have taken to this bridge. Before I arrived, one weekend after another, Dutch supporters of the French Gilets Jaunes had been traipsing over it, singing a nostalgic nineties pop song from the Netherlands to make the point that Europe was better before. Their dog-whistles could be heard by all. Over the winter, a riot had broken out between supporters and opponents of Black Pete, an infamous and beloved Dutch Christmas character who wears colonial blackface. Eggs were pelted, fireworks were thrown, a banner shouting “Black Pete Is Racist” was hung off the side of the Erasmusbrug until the police intervened. In 2016, it was here that hundreds of Turkish Rotterdammers came out in support of Tayyip Erdogan against the Dutch government after a fierce row broke out between the two countries.

There is populism for everyone in Rotterdam. The city may have a liberal Muslim mayor—Ahmed Aboutaleb from the Labour party—but his party’s old ties to the immigrant community have badly frayed. Rotterdam today has two effectively Muslim parties: Denk, a national party believed to tied to Turkey’s AKP, and Nida, a more overt, anti-Semitic, Islamist party with ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. These are small, but far from inconsequential. In 2018, Denk picked up over 7.7 percent of the vote in Rotterdam and won four seats in recent elections to the city council. Nida, meanwhile, scored two out of a total of 45 members of the council. Both are social media savvy. Masters of trolling, both are echoes of the populism Rotterdam invented.

But for every populist in the Netherlands, there is an internationalist. The rise of Dutch nativism has been mirrored by the rise of Dutch anti-nativism. The Green Left, consummate culture warriors that make no bones about fighting for a postethnic future, are rising stars on the Dutch political scene.

In the most recent elections, Rotterdam seemed more polarized than ever. Thierry Baudet’s party came first, then Wilder’s party, winning a combined 29 percent. The Green Left came third, with 12 percent, with Denk winning 8 percent and Nida 2 percent of the vote. The traditional centrist parties, with no clear message in the culture war, struggled even in traditional fractured Dutch politics.

Caught between nativists and postnationalists, old-style Dutch liberals are not as relaxed as British Remainers would like to imagine them to be. Yet it is hard not to think Rotterdam’s globalists have made themselves an all-too easy target. Take Rem Koolhaas, the city’s liberal icon. Rotterdam born, Rotterdam based, the Europhile “starchitect” has turned himself into a neoliberal caricature.

It is ironic that the greatest professional achievement of the man so keen to tell Dutch voters right from wrong is the headquarters of China’s chief propaganda channel in Beijing. (“Wonderful things” is how Koolhaas described the work of the Chinese government last December at the World Architecture Festival.) His purposefully postnational architecture—he even pitched a redesigned EU flag that looked like a rainbow-colored barcode—has made him the perfect foil for someone like Baudet.

For Baudet, “Koolhaas is the greatest criminal against humanity,” whose work has destroyed the city a second time. For him Rotterdam, is the death of Europe. “Once you see it,” he tweeted, “it is suddenly very obvious: the modern architecture that is destroying our old cities comes from exactly the same path with our ideology as mass immigration and the EU.”

When you are stuck in a culture war, when the poor want to be protected and worry their elites have betrayed them, there is no greater gift liberals can give the far right than a Prime Minister flirting with disappearing upstairs to “work for Merkel” as one of the chiefs in the European Union, as Mark Rutte is rumored to be. Baudet’s demagoguery is painfully resonant: Unlike the elites of yesterday, whose side are men like Koolhaas really on?

All this offers a sobering lesson to those in Britain and America who think populism can be calmed by strong growth, successful investment, and sinking unemployment. Because Rotterdam has all of those features and a prosperity hard to imagine for those who were born there a generation or more ago. Britain would be lucky to have one provincial city like this. Economic anxiety really isn’t the driver of nativism in Rotterdam. The main grumble, I heard time and again, was in fact gentrification.

Rather, Rotterdam appears to be warning, the great culture war that is emerging in Europe—in every election, in every country—really is about culture assimilation and ethnic change after all. It’s not the economy. And like Catholics and Protestants, the pious and the secular, in the Dutch past, this is a divide over values that will endure. Houses and trains and economic development are good things, and they can take the edge off. But they cannot magic away the fight about what it means to be a nation.

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Israel’s Multiple Identities

Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel

Matti Friedman

Algonquin Books, 2019, $26.95, 272 pp.

“I’ve learned over years as a reporter,” writes Matti Friedman in the beginning of Spies of No Country, “that time spent with old spies is never time wasted.”

He’s right. As the novelist John le Carré observed, “Espionage is the secret theater of our society.” Or as Friedman puts it, with characteristic elegance: “Countries have cover stories and hidden selves, just like their spies, and our clandestine basements conceal insights into the world aboveground.”

And this is the story he tells, one ostensibly about spies, but in reality about the state of Israel: its founding myths, the legends it created and continues to create about itself—its cover stories.

The book centers on “The Arab section,” a group of Arab Jews from the Islamic world that performed perhaps the most vital espionage work in and around the birth of Israel—spying on its neighboring Arab states, from the inside. He focuses on four in particular: Gamliel, Isaac, Havakuk, and Yakuba. From their interlocking stories emerges the section that eventually became the nucleus of Israel’s foreign intelligence service, the Mossad, a staple of Israeli pride and global conspiracy theorists ever since.

Here one must understand the importance of the Mossad as myth—both for Israel and its enemies. It is central to Israelis because their homeland is “a small country in a precarious position,” and because the legends of the Mossad “conceal the frailty of the people behind the curtain.” Equally, it is useful to Israel’s enemies in playing the role of the “hidden hand” that explains their repeated failure to defeat a tiny state with a (comparatively) minute population.

On one level, then, the book is a compelling yarn about spies, replete with secret identities, acts of sabotage and months (if not years) spent under deep cover. And like the best le Carré, in being a book about spies it is also a book about bureaucracy—in this case the near-total lack of it. As the section begins its work, before the state has come into existence, anything resembling an organized structure is almost entirely absent. Spies sit around in fields because they don’t have a proper headquarters. Spies are sent into Lebanon without a radio transmitter—that is to say, with no means of reporting back about the people and events on whom they are spying. Spies get caught for the most basic of mistakes. No one really knows what anyone else is doing half the time. And no one ever, ever has any money.

Friedman’s superb storytelling skills are such that he employs the devices of fiction, most notably the use of dramatic irony, which gives the narrative a particular poignancy in places:

Among the other men at camp was David, nicknamed Dahud, who already had a wife, and who would soon have a daughter but would never meet her; and Ezra, who provided comic relief and was known for asking his comrades to train him to withstand torture by beating him. One story has Ezra squeezing his own testicles and screaming, “I won’t tell, I won’t tell!” They used to roll with laughter but wouldn’t have if they’d known his fate. There was a pair of younger trainees from Damascus, Rika the saboteur and his redheaded friend Bokai, both with roles to play later on, one heroic and one tragic.

And then there are the thrilling details of tradecraft (so vital to spies and to their stories) that lend the narrative an urgency and depth that further draws the reader in as she learns how precarious it all was:

The war was barely six weeks old, but the distance between alive and dead had already become negligible—the length of an incorrect verb, an inconsistent reply to a sharp question. Or it could be a detail of dress—a villager wearing shoes better suited to a clerk, for example, or a worker whose shirt was too clean.

It’s all there, then. The tragedy, the deception, the tension—and for stakes that could not be higher. But Spies of No Country is much more than a mere caper. It is a meditation on Israel itself—because, for Friedman, who these four spies are has “something important to tell us about the country they helped create.”

The founding myth of Israel in the global imagination is that of a refugee camp for the Jews of the Holocaust, who came flooding in from Europe after the war. And for many, that is an image of western colonialism. But regardless of where you sit on the issue, that is only half the story. It was also a minority insurrection inside the world of Islam, where Jews from Iraq and Syria and Lebanon and Egypt and all across the Arab world, who had lived in the Middle East before the very existence of Islam, were expelled from the homes they had known for millennia and forced into the country not as pioneers but as refugees. As Friedman writes:

These were Israelis, but not the kibbutz pioneers of the old Zionist imagination, orphaned children of Europe. These were people from the Islamic world, in the Islamic world, their lives entwined with the fate of the Islamic world, like the lives of their grandparents’ grandparents. This was Israel, but an Israel not visible in the way the country is usually described.

As such, the book becomes yet something else: a meditation on identity. Who then, were Gamliel, Isaac, Havakuk, and Yakuba, these four spies?

They were certainly not Muslims, which is why they had to learn Islam. But were they Arabs? They would have said no, and most Arabs would have said no. But they were native to the Arab world—as native as Arabs. If the key to belonging to the Arab nation was the Arabic language, as the Arab nationalists claimed, they were inside. So were they really “becoming like Arabs”? Or were they already Arabs? Were they pretending to be Arabs, or were they pretending to be people who weren’t Arabs pretending to be Arabs?

The intermingling of identity is central to Israel, as it is, of course, to spying. And it helps explain the Israel that exists today: a state of multiple identities, a nation of immigrants (like the United States), but above all a Middle Eastern Country. This, Friedman concludes, is how best to understand Israel. As he rightly points out, “the last kibbutznik prime minister was voted out of office as this century began, as his peace plan collapsed in the Middle East of radical religion, black masks, and suicide bombers.”

Since then “Israel’s Middle Eastern soul has come out of the basement.” Israelis have come to realize that being Jewish in this region is not new; that it is native to half the people in the country, whose experiences must be acknowledged if Israel is to be properly contextualized today. Indeed, as Friedman nears the end of this important and beautifully written book, he makes an observation that we would do well to recognize:

For half the Jewish population of Israel, the Middle East isn’t new, and tension with a Muslim majority isn’t new, just the latest iteration of a force that has shaped their families for centuries.

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Vox Populi

At a glance, everything looked as it should. The chrome of the space-aged television studio was glistening. Three clean-cut men in trim, dark suits and one in rolled-up shirt sleeves took positions behind translucent podiums. They launched into their debate talking points.

Pedro Casado, the leader of the conservative People’s Party (PP), assailed the incumbent Socialist (PSOE) premier Pedro Sánchez for negotiating with Catalan independence parties. Sanchez chastised Casado for retrograde views on abortion and women. Pablo Iglesias, the pony-tailed leader of the leftist Podemos, brandished a copy of the constitution to emphasize rights on pensions, employment, equality and housing. Albert Rivera, leader of the center-right Ciudadanos party, promised to lower taxes and mocked the “practically communist” proposals by Sánchez.

“None of the candidates were convincing,” says Ana Sofía Cardenal, apolitical scientist at the Open University of Catalonia.

Something felt a little off, as if things were going unsaid. True, there was no talk of foreign policy, the euro, the future of the European Union, NATO, or the volatile situation developing just across the Mediterranean. But it was more than that.

Santiago Abascal, the bearded leader of the far Right Vox party, had been relegated to watching on television after Spain’s election commission blocked Vox from participating. Out of sight, he did not stay out of mind, tweeting a picture of four identical parrots lined up on a tropical tree branch. “Spot the differences,” he sniped.

With no members currently parliament (Vox received 0.1 percent of the vote in the 2016 general election), Voxdid not pass the legal threshold to appear on the debate stage. One of the TV channels had decided to invite them anyway, on the back of a strong showing (11 percent) in Andalusia’s December regional election. But the channel relented following complaints by other small parties to the electoral commission. The drama allowed Vox to spin the disinvitation as a ban ordered by some shadowy establishment cabal. And it did little to quell interest in the party, solidifying them as the “invisible alternative,” Cardenal says. Starting April 21, Vox was the subject of 3.6 times more web searches than their nearest competitors (PP and Podemos), according to Google Trends.

“It was a missed opportunity. The four on the stage are all skilled politicians in their own ways,” says Victor LaPuente, a political scientist at the University of Gothenberg and El Pais columnist. “Abascal would have looked mediocre. He has never been tested.”

Abascal is a sturdy, fire hydrant of a man. A refugee from the PP, he totes a gun, and hails from the autonomous Basque region. His father and grandfather were politicians, with the latter a mayor during the Francoist regime. Abascal denounces “progres,” his term of derision for progressives, and rails against “supremacist feminism and gender totalitarianism”. He is fond of soaring, if vague rhetoric. “We are not ashamed of our history,” he thundered at a rally earlier this week. “Wehavecome this far to guarantee Spaniards’ freedom and national pride.”

Vox has driven Spanish political debate since their out-of-nowhere debut last December. They now prop up a PP-Ciudadanos government in what is Spain’s largest region by population. Socialists had controlled Andalusia, where unemployment tops 25 percent, for the bulk of four decades. Nationally, Vox wants to do away with Spain’s 17 autonomous regions and centralize power in Madrid. They promise to bring Gibraltar—which has been ruled by the UK since 1713—back into the realm. While officially agnostic on the EU, they give off the sense that they simply have not thought about it much. Vox opposes abortion. They love capitalism, bullfighting, hunters and the Virgin Mary. They are not against immigration per se, so long as the immigrants come from Latin America.

Like elsewhere in Europe, Vox’s rise is due in no small part to a chaotic, splintering political scene. This is Spain’s third general election in four years. Amid politics long dominated by the PP and Socialists, the leftist Podemos burst onto the scene in 2014, followed by Ciudadanos in 2015. Sánchez has been Prime Minister since June 2018, one month after he mobilized corruption scandals to oust PP’s Mariano Rajoy from office. (Rajoy was so demoralized by the deft maneuver that he left parliament before the no confidence vote ended, reportedly retreating to a Madrid restaurant to quaff whiskey.) Sánchez then led a minority government, backed by Podemos and a mish-mash of regional parties, including some advocating Catalan independence. He raised the minimum wage and moved to exhume the remains of former dictator Francisco Franco from a fancy mausoleum (they will get a more austere home in June). In the wake of increased demands from Catalan independistas, and the failure to pass a budget in February, Sánchez called elections.

In the months since, Vox have pulled both the PP and Ciudadanos right, manufacturing a nationalist frenzy where there wasn’t one before. The PP’s Casado enthusiastically jumped into the fray branding Sánchez a “criminal” and “our country’s greatest traitor” for his willingness to speak with pro-independence Catalans. Meanwhile, on the Left, the Socialists and Podemos style themselves as bulwarks against a three party rightwing government resembling the one in Andalusia. The Left has branded that potential grouping el trio de Colón, a reference to a photograph that saw Casado, Rivera and Abascal together at an underwhelming February demonstration against Catalan independence in Madrid’s Plaza de Colón.

“We didn’t think Trump was going to win, or that people would say yes to Brexit,” Sánchez wrote on Twitter April 25. “To those who still have doubts but are clear that the trio de Colón cannot govern Spain, I ask you to focus your vote for [the Socialists]. We’re the only ones who can stop them.”

Fringe movements have steered European ships of state for quite a while, in conjunction with a political center that has shifted dramatically rightward over the past 40 years. A 2017 study by the scholars Markus Wagner and Thomas Meyer charted 68 mainstream European political parties from 17 countries on a “liberal-authoritarian axis”. They measured changes in positioning on issues like immigration, law and order, and nationalism between 1980 and 2014, and concluded “the average center-left party today is about as authoritarian as the average radical-right party was in the early 1980s.”

Such authoritarian drift has occurred almost entirely without overtly authoritarian parties in government. The study also rebuts conventional wisdom that says radical parties moderate themselves in pursuit of power. Wagner and Meyer show that the “radical-right” is actually becoming more radical and authoritarian. “The radical right has thus become more distinctive, while the party system as a whole has shifted to the right,” they write. In short, appropriating positions once considered extreme not only normalizes them, but also fails in its purported goal of subsuming or moderating radicals. If true, something like Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s 2017 appropriation of anti-immigration rhetoric from Geert Wilders was not the stuff of tactical genius, but a short-term gambit tantamount to strategic surrender.

Spain makes for a particularly interesting case study, as archetypal ideological divisions are clearly delineated by party, with the anti-capitalist Left, center Left, center Right, conservative Right and hard Right all poised to harvest at least a 10 percent share of the vote. Fluidity on the right is quantifiable. In the 2011 general election, PP received 44.6 percent of the vote. They now poll at less than half that, and all told PP, Ciudadanos and Vox (the proverbial trio de Plaza de Colón) account for the shame vote share in polls that PP had by themselves in 2011. In December, about 75 percent of Vox voters in the Andalusian election were former PP and Ciudadanos voters. In March, the Spanish polling agency Metroscopia released a study tracking voter movement between parties. It found some 400,000 voters poised to switch from Ciudadanos to Vox.

This suggests that the establishment PP, dragged down by the corruption and uninspired technocracy of the Rajoy years, are no longer a viable choice for a good portion of right-leaning voters. “They are fishing around for something else,” says Matthew Bennett, a journalist and analyst who runs The Spain Report, a bilingual reporting website. Ciudadanos was built on dissatisfied PP voters, who, still dissatisfied, now opt for Vox rather than return to PP. The faster PP and Ciudadanos adopt Vox positions, the faster their voters are migrating to Vox.

While Spain is plagued by high unemployment (13.9 percent nationwide) and the establishment is viewed as corrupt, the hard right’s traditional bête noire, immigration, is not a prevalent issue in Spanish society. In a survey last year, a full 83 percent of Spaniards said they were comfortable with welcoming immigrants—the highest in the European Union. Meanwhile Eurostat found that 71 percent of the Spanish say that immigrant “integration is successful” and 78 percent agree that immigrants “help fill jobs for which it’s hard to find workers”. Only 1.6 percent of Spaniards view immigration as the top problem facing the country, according to a poll last month by the Madrid-based Center for Sociological Investigations (CIS).

This makes Vox’s ability to get a serious hearing in this election all the more surprising. They have managed to stoke nationalism by doubling-down on opposition to Catalan independence. While PP and Ciudadanos already oppose independence, Vox outdoes them at every turn. PP pledges to suspend Catalonian home rule (just as Rajoy did following the 2017 independence vote), Vox wants to abolish regional autonomy as a constitutional precept. But even this, by normal measures of political rationality, seems a losing strategy, with just 3.7 percent of Spaniards viewing Catalonia’s bid for independence as the most important issue facing the country. This is far behind unemployment (39.5 percent), political parties (12.8 percent), corruption (11 percent) and general economic problems (8.2 percent) in the CIS study.

“Political entrepreneurs are able to show something and give it importance. Concerns of the people do not matter as much,” Lapuente suggests. “The supply side is more important than ever.”

Vox has made heavy use of the messaging application WhatsApp during the campaign. In Spain, the app is commonly exempt from mobile phone data plans, meaning it costs nothing to use even outside wifi coverage. Techniques like this, lead Cardenal to call their campaign a “black box” and help make, along with some 40 percent of voters that claimed to be undecided, the election the most “unpredictable in the history of Spain,” she says.

While it seems certain Sanchez’s Socialists will get the most votes April 28, the rest is anybody’s guess. A leftist coalition of the Socialists and Podemos is possible, and more likely with support from regional parties (likely Basques rather than Catalans). A Socialist-Cidadanos centrist government looks mathematically difficult. In polls, PP looks poised to lead the right, but the viability of a right-wing coalition depends almost entirely on Vox’s ability to turn out new voters or poach former working class leftists. Thus far, they have cannibalized the other rightwing parties. 

“We do have important problems with the economy, child poverty, inequality, the sustainability of the pension and health care systems,” Lapuente says. “But what we are talking about is all the things Vox tweets about, or whatever Abascal is YouTubing”

Vox is not going to win the election, but in many important ways, they are winning the campaign.

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#MeToo Eats Itself

Manliness

Harvey C. Mansfield

Yale University Press, 2006, $38.99, 304 pp.

It is a source of no small gratification to me that ever since former Vice President Joe Biden was accused of smelling Lucy Flores’s hair in a sexist way, his popularity has risen. I am allowing myself to hope that perhaps the fever has broken, and that #metoo has finally jumped the shark. If so, it won’t be for the media’s failure to impress upon us the gravity of Biden’s transgressions. They have given him a #metoo Royale with Cheese: Joe hugged a widow and held a young woman’s hands while pulling in close to her face! He rubbed noses with his colleague Amy Lappos à la Eskimo!

At a fundraiser in 2012, the New York Times tells us, Joe allowed his hand to rest upon one D.H. Hill’s shoulder. “Only he knows his intent,” intoned Hill, a 59-year-old writer. Indeed. Only Joe knows whether he intended to drag, ravish, bludgeon, and dismember her, puree her entrails with a dash of lime, then emerge from the kitchen with a platter of zesty fajitas. Only he knows. “If something makes you feel uncomfortable,” she added, “you have to feel able to say it.”

Caitlyn Caruso said Joe hugged her “just a little bit too long.” They were attending an event “on sexual assault” (against it, presumably) at the University of Nevada. “She said it was particularly uncomfortable,” the New York Times reported solemnly, because she had just shared her own story of sexual assault and had expected Mr. Biden—an architect of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act—“to understand the importance of physical boundaries.” She said: “It doesn’t even really cross your mind that such a person would dare perpetuate harm like that. These are supposed to be people you can trust.”

Men reading this account will surely wish to know exactly how long it takes for a consoling hug to become a shocking perpetuation of the harm of sexual assault. Two seconds? Four? How long is too long? Only Ms. Caruso knows.

The media has done to Biden what it’s done consistently since the #metoo hysteria began. Why spoil a winning formula? “Two more women allege Joe Biden inappropriately touched them.” “How gross is Joe Biden’s touching?” “Can Joe Biden survive another #metoo moment?” But to the great sadness of Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, and publishers struggling to stay afloat at this difficult time for journalism, the number of women eager to share their gross feelings about being touched by Joe Biden has apparently topped out at eight.

That’s a revealing number. Biden has been known since 1969 as the archetypal retail politician. The clichés we use to describe this style of politics—pressing the flesh, kissing babies, gripping and grinning, glad-handling, face-to-face, eye-to-eye, personal contact—are a hint that retail politics involve touching people, pretty much all day long. Until recently, these gestures were considered politically obligatory, not optional. If touching a lot of aging, wobbly, unwashed flesh grosses you out, politics isn’t for you. Even if it is, Purell is essential.

Biden has probably hugged, touched, nuzzled, clasped hands, moistly empathized, or otherwise fondled as many as a thousand people a day, every day, for more than half a century. By my back-of-the-envelope calculation, some nine million American women have had some kind of physical contact with him. If we applied the same zeal to searching for women who believe that Biden’s touch cured their eczema, we’d probably find just as many.

When all is said and done, we’re sure to hear from more women who think that Biden’s touch is gross. Sanders’s operatives are doubtless searching for them right now. But if the operatives are capable of reading a poll, they’ll drop it.

The number of women who are deeply offended by Biden’s behavior is minuscule, the polls tell us, and the number of women who have just had it with the warlock hunt is growing. I suspect I speak for far more women than the media would have you think when I say that after looking at one after another photo of Biden hugging women—and touching, nuzzling, clasping, head-bumping, and nose-rubbing everything in sight—I liked him more. Who doesn’t like an affectionate man, or an affectionate woman, or an affectionate golden retriever? If Biden likes himself a hug, I say: Go on, Joe; we could all use one.

I like him more now than before despite my very considerable political reservations about him, not least because, as Emily Yoffe rightly points out, Biden has no one to blame but himself for this hysterical new Sexual Inquisition. Under normal circumstances, I would not vote for him—for precisely that reason.

But these aren’t normal circumstances. Once I might have rejected Biden out of hand because he plagiarized his speeches—and from Neil Kinnock, for God’s sake. Oh, how I long to return to a world in which those things mattered. But they don’t. All that matters is this: Every poll indicates that Biden would crush Trump in a general election. The repudiation of Trumpism is a necessary if not sufficient condition for the restoration of a measure of calm to American political life.

The polls likewise show that if the Democrats nominate Bernie Sanders, Trump will win. Or Sanders will. In either case, our growing hysteria, political polarization and radicalization will proceed apace. Neither we nor the world can take eight years of Trump. Nor can we take four of Trump followed by four of Bernie. There is no magic world where Americans can be that nuts, for that long, without paying a terrible price.

Biden is a normal politician. He falls within established American traditions. He’s not a socialist and he’s not Trump. Poll after poll indicates that Americans just want a President who’s not a socialist and not Trump. All the Democrats have to do is not screw this up. Yet somehow, with the Republic hanging in the balance, Democrats are busy getting their collective chains yanked by a Bernie operative named Lucy Flores who was mortally affronted because Biden smelled her hair.

And how has Biden reacted? By saying he “gets it.” Social norms have shifted. “The boundaries protecting personal space have been reset.” We enjoy new, more enlightened social mores. But what are these mores, exactly?

We can only guess, because the rules are a moving target, one becoming more exacting by the day. But they seem to be these: Physical contact of any kind between an unmarried man and woman—or a girl past the age of puberty—is streng verboten. The exception is the straight-armed handshake. Nancy Pelosi literally said this: “Join the straight-arm club.” At least on that point our new sexual mores are more liberal than the Taliban’s. Not by much, though. An Eskimo nose-rub, such as the one Biden offered to Amy Lappos in 2009—since  which time she has been nursing her trauma—is an affront to virtue. “There’s absolutely a line of decency,” she said. “There’s a line of respect. Crossing that line is not grandfatherly. It’s not cultural. It’s not affection. It’s sexism or misogyny.”

Is she serious? Apparently so. But whose culture is she talking about? In my culture, that gesture is affectionate and grandfatherly. According to Wikipedia, the nose-rub is “a non-erotic but intimate greeting” that is “usually interpreted as a friendly greeting gesture in various cultures.” Māori, Hawaiians, Mongolian nomads, Bengalis, Cambodians, Laos, Thais, Vietnamese, Timors, Sabus, Sumbas, Ibans, Scandinavians, and Arab tribesmen like to rub noses no less than Eskimos. I would swear that until Amy Lappos declared otherwise, We the People thought it was quite darling to rub noses.

If only Biden had the brio to say that #metoo is an oppressive hysteria, that he intends to lead the Democratic Party out of this self-destructive insanity—indeed, that the Democratic Party will never be the party of purdah and Puritanism—he’d be impossible to beat. Alas, he does not.

It is strange that none of the men who have discovered in #metoo a wonderfully useful weapon for clearing out the corner office appreciate that inevitably the weapon will be turned against them. Biden certainly didn’t, but neither does Sanders, even though there is no amount of money I would not bet that soon—quite soon, probably—Bernie will be soundly #metooed (Consider that: It has become a verb). I have every confidence Biden’s operatives are working on it now.

What prevents these men from appreciating this point? That’s an interesting question. Now that the hysteria has—perhaps—peaked, it is one worth asking seriously, along with several other questions about our year of living hysterically. Among the most important are these: Might we consider taking human nature into account as we construct our new, more enlightened social and sexual mores? And if these mores can only be imposed at the expense of liberal values, which one must go?

Let us begin retrospectively. In 2006, the political philosopher Harvey C. Mansfield wrote Manliness, a gentle, meandering book that defends modest assertions. Manliness has both good and bad qualities, he proposes. We should not forget the good ones. They include confidence and the ability to command. The manly man is good at getting things done,

and one reason is that he is good at ordering people to get them done. In politics and in other public situations, he willingly takes responsibility when others hand back. He not only stands fast but also steps up to do what is required. In private life, in the family, this ability makes him protective of his wife and children because they are weaker. Being protective (as opposed to nurturing) is a manly form of responsibility in private life analogous to getting into politics in public life. In both, there is an easy assumption of authority.

These virtues, he writes, are not unique to men. If John Wayne is “still every American’s idea of manliness,” Margaret Thatcher is every Briton’s. Nor, of course, is manliness always a virtue. Mansfield spends many pages assuring his readers he has grasped the ways these qualities may be put to sinister use—or as the Zeitgeist would have it, the way masculinity may be toxic. Nonetheless, he concludes, these qualities are sometimes good, and they are, he offers, more frequently found among men. Women too have their fine qualities, he assures us, but they are not the same qualities, and the “observable facts of plain biology” suggest these differences are innate, more a matter of nature than nurture:

Nature seems to have put the equipment of aggression in the hands of males rather than females. Men have more strength, size, and agility than females, who in turn have greater dexterity, delicacy, and endurance (they live longer). It is no small help to an aggressive disposition to have the means to express it in powerful fists, a sturdy chest, a head to butt with, and feet that can kick. Imagine the frustration of having a male’s desire to fight implanted in the yielding body of a female—an anomaly occasionally seen.

Ahem. My career in Muay Thai, which I took up passionately for several years in Istanbul, aids me in putting Mansfield’s modest propositions to the test. Of course he’s right. My enthusiasm for slugging people is an anomaly. It is, he says, “a considerable fact that almost any man can beat up almost any woman.” Consider it considered. But almost is not the same as every. Were Mansfield and I forced into a cage match, I would flatten him: I’m younger, more aggressive, and more accustomed—I hope—to hitting men than he is to hitting women.

Indeed, Mansfield cheerfully acknowledges, some women have manly talents, and he is content to see them exercise these talents. But he is not content with the assumption that these talents are evenly distributed. This, he argues, is the fatal conceit of what he calls our “gender-neutral society.”

This society emerges from a double predicate. The first is the liberal principle of equality of opportunity, to wit: a woman with manly talents should have the same opportunities to exercise them as any man. Mansfield has no quarrel with this principle; indeed, he sees it as self-evident. The second, however, is the belief that if women fail to exercise these talents in numbers equal to men, it is a priori evidence of unequal opportunity, however subtle its form. Specifically, this principle asserts, pernicious sexism, which must at all costs be extirpated, is the cause of any observable difference between men and women.

But this is not correct, he argues. Traditional gender roles are not mere social constructs. All things being equal, you will still find that women are more likely than men to enjoy home-making and child-rearing. You will still find that men are, on the whole, more eager than women to clamber up the greasy pole. In our insistence that men and women be more alike than they naturally are, Mansfield argues, we are making men and women alike confused and unhappy.

The revolution that made the gender-neutral society, he argues, was astonishingly sudden, successful and bloodless. Almost overnight, the patriarchy collapsed:

From one angle, the attempt to create a gender-neutral society, never before recorded in human history, has been an amazing success. It has aroused virtually no open opposition. There were segregationists to defend the Old South and its unjust ways, but the universal order of patriarchy found no spokesman to set forth an ideology on its behalf, let alone defenders to mount a countermovement. There was no George Wallace, no Bull Conner, no massive resistance to oppose the women’s movement.

Mansfield is correct to note that this is astonishing and too little noticed. Why was the women’s movement so suddenly and readily accepted? It succeeded, Mansfield argues, because it appealed to the liberal principle of equality, and in that sense, it was long overdue. Liberalism “is the dominant opinion of our age,” he writes, thus the women’s movement won an “easy victory.”

But Mansfield senses a bait-and-switch. Although it followed and in many ways resembled the civil rights movement, he notes, the women’s movement was led not by liberals, but by women of the Left. Feminist luminaries such as Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone, Germaine Greer, and Betty Friedan found much to admire in longstanding Marxist criticisms of the liberal society as faulty and hypocritical. As Mansfield puts it:

Liberal principles gave everyone a formal right to equality but deliberately refrained from examining whether formal equality was made actual. Under formal, liberal equality, the feminists said, women were at an actual disadvantage.

In theory, he writes, gender neutrality—the kind Americans were ready and eager to accept—means “abstracting from sexual differences so as to make jobs and professions (especially the latter) open to both sexes.” This is the natural application of the principles of a liberal society. But “for some feminists,” he writes, including its most notable intellectuals, it was not enough to set aside sexual differences: “pressure in favor of gender neutrality must be applied.”

For this, America was not quite so ready. Indeed, Mansfield doubts that any society will ever be ready, for men and women are simply different. Women, he suspects, just aren’t as manly as men. The insistence that they must be has caused women to be unhappy with their womanliness and men to be unhappy with their manliness. The unhappiness of men, he notes, seems to take the form of bewildered, passive-aggressive resistance. The pressure in favor of gender neutrality, furthermore, risks undermining liberal values, for “human beings cannot actually live that way, vigilantly stifling every thought or impulse due to one’s sex.”

Thirteen years later, two things are clearer. It is now incontestable that men are very unhappy. Their unhappiness now takes forms vastly more dramatic than those Mansfield described in 2006. And it is also starkly obvious that Mansfield was right: The second predicate of the gender-neutral society is incompatible with liberalism. What Mansfield clearly didn’t conceive, in 2006, was that by 2019 liberalism itself might no longer be “the dominant opinion of our age.”

Mansfield’s book is meandering, and not as manly as it might be. He is less compelling than the most prominent contemporary exponent of this case, Jordan Peterson. Peterson makes these arguments more confidently, decisively, and aggressively. Perhaps this is why the two men have been received so differently. Or perhaps they have been received so differently because, since 2006, the conflict between liberalism and the second predicate of the gender-neutral society has become aggravated, even as liberalism loses its power to compel public enthusiasm.

There was no great reaction to Mansfield’s book in 2006. The reviews, largely, were amused and patronizing. Walter Kirn of the New York Times portrayed him as a quaint old fart. Peterson, however, seems to scare the hell out of people. The New York Times’s Nellie Bowles was given roughly ten times the space to write about him as Kirn was given to write about Mansfield. In “Jordan Peterson: Custodian of the Patriarchy,” she writes that Peterson is “working diligently to undermine mainstream and liberal efforts to promote equality.” How so? She does not explain.

Peterson says, again and again, in interview after interview, that he does not reject mainstream or liberal efforts to promote equality of opportunity. He rejects extreme and illiberal efforts to establish equality of outcomes. He is very clear what he means by this, and nothing he says should shock or discomfit men and women of liberal dispositions.

Nevertheless, something about Peterson really riles people up—even though no one can quite say why. His lectures are undemanding and entertaining, suitable for easy listening during a light recovery-day workout. His arguments are neither more shocking nor less modest than Mansfield’s. He is a liberal defending the principles of a liberal society. For his pains, he’s been called a closet authoritarian, an outright authoritarian, and a fascist.

Many things have changed between the publication of Mansfield’s book and Peterson’s emergence on the scene. The rise of incessant rage, directed at everything, may account for some of the difference in critical reception. But probably, it is more than that.

Men and women seem angry at each other in a genuinely new way. Something is out of whack. Mansfield’s diagnosis of the problem is probably right: The tensions between the values of a liberal society and the second predicate of the gender-neutral society have become impossible to reconcile or ignore.

Harvey C. Mansfield, Manliness (Yale University Press, 2006), p. 17.

Mansfield, Manliness, p. 42.

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What We Know About Peace

Peace has a golden reputation. Worshippers pray for it. A Norwegian committee awards a celebrated prize to individuals and organizations that it believes promote peace. The central figure of Christianity bears the honorific “the Prince of Peace.” Yet peace on Earth has proven elusive. In the three decades since the end of the Cold War, however, the world has learned a great deal about peace, and what we have learned makes it, if not simpler to establish, then at least easier to understand. It is not a mythical beast, the unicorn of international history. It has been sighted, in the post-Cold War era.

We have learned what peace looks like and how it comes about. The 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall were the most peaceful in history. During that period, while there was certainly violence in such places as the Balkans, central Africa, and Syria, the major countries did not fight each other. In these countries, in fact, war fell to the bottom ofthe national agenda. Their governments ceased to feel an urgent need to prepare for war and to gear their foreign policies to the likelihood of war, as governments had done since time immemorial. They enjoyed a deeper peace than ever before.

​This new and different condition of international politics came about because of three monumental global developments. First, the military dominance of the United States discouraged aggression by other powerful countries. Second, the expanding volume of trade, combined with the rapid increase in international investment, also discouraged war. It meant that armed conflict, by interrupting commerce, would impose particularly high costs on the warring countries—even on those that won. Third, the spread of democracy—which combines free, fair, and regular elections with the protection of religious, economic, and political liberty—reduced the capacity for war by giving people the means to check their sometimes bellicose rulers at the ballot box and by fostering a political culture of peaceful compromise that, when extended beyond a democracy’s borders, curtail warlike intentions.

​To be sure, these three features of post-Cold War international politics cannot guarantee peace. Nothing can. The events of political life, including war, are determined by the interplay of many forces, which vary in strength from one time and place to another. Still, the three did make major war a far more distant prospect than ever before.​

The years since the end of the Cold War have taught us not only that deep peace is possible but also that it is fragile. For that peace no longer exists. It ended because an important country in each of three crucial regions conducted policies, including the use of force, aimed at overturning the prevailing, peaceful, political and military rules and norms there. In Europe, Russia invaded and occupied neighboring Ukraine. In East Asia, China claimed as its own sovereign territory—contrary to international law—most of the western Pacific and built artificial islands there on which it placed military installations. In the Middle East, Iran spread its influence throughout the region by subversion and violence.

The leaders of the three countries had more than one motive for embarking on their campaigns of aggression but they all shared a common desire to enhance their standing with the people they ruled by presenting themselves as the defenders of the nation against dangerous enemies and as the architects of an expansion of their power, influence, and respect in their home regions and in the world. Seeking success abroad as a way of reinforcing a political position at home is a strategy of long standing. In no other period, however, has this tactic loomed as large in international politics as it has in recent years.

We know, too, what is necessary to restore the lost peace: democratic governments. Of the three forces making for peace in the international arena, democracy exerts the strongest effect. Numerous studies have found that modern democracies have a powerful tendency not to go to war, at least not with each other. A wholly democratic world would surely be a more peaceful one than is the world of 2019, with war less likely and preparations for war less urgent and costly. If Russia, China, and Iran were to become democracies they would not give up their ambitions for international influence but would be far more likely to seek it by peaceful means than are the current governments of those countries. Prediction is hazardous, but it seems safe to say that the political transformations of Russia, China, and Iran into stable democracies would do more to make Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East zones of peace than any other development.

We cannot know when or indeed whether any of the three countries will have democratic governments. While none of them is a democracy now, a popular impulse for it does exist in each.  An ongoing struggle is taking place between the forces of democracy and the government’s efforts to suppress them. The struggle occasionally breaks through to public awareness, as with the protests against Vladimir Putin’s rigged elections in 2011, the large demonstrations in Tienanmen Square in Beijing and other Chinese cities in 1989, and the Green Movement protests in Iran in 2009.  

While the long-term outcome of each struggle is uncertain, we do know that it depends, in each case, on the people of the three countries. We have learned that democracy cannot be established from the outside. The United States tried and failed to do this in far weaker countries than Russia, China, and Iran, indeed countries that it actually occupied—Haiti, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Those efforts failed because democracy must rest on particular social and economic traditions, which not every country possesses, and they must be home-grown rather than imported from abroad. Countries do become democracies, as many have over the last four decades, but they cannot be made to be democratic by even powerful and well-intentioned outsiders.

This leads to the final, bittersweet lesson about peace that emerges from recent history. After millennia of warfare we now possess a plausible formula for peace. We now know that peace emanates, above all, from democratically-governed countries. But we lack the means to implement that formula. We know what must be done, but only the Russian, Chinese, and Iranian people can do what is necessary to turn the hopes and prayers for peace on Earth into reality.

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The Illiberal Temptation

Liberal democracies are once again under assault from without and within. During the Cold War, the internal challenge came from the totalitarian Left. Powerful Communist parties, all of them loyal to the Soviet Union, could be found in the leading European liberal democracies. But the existence of such parties presented a puzzle. By 1973, when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s three-volume Gulag Archipelago was first published, so much was already known about the purges, the terror, the camps, the artificial famines, one would have thought it indisputable among all thinking people that the god of Communism had failed. But the Stalinist model, despite its glaring defects, continued to appeal to millions. In his 1976 The Totalitarian Temptation, Jean François Ravel attempted to unravel the mystery. “Why are democratic societies, inside and outside their area, vilified much more than totalitarian states?” was one of the questions he asked.

Nearly fifty years later, the Soviet empire is gone and the few remaining states adhering to the Stalinist model hold little allure. But the extraordinary vilification of liberal democracy persists. By some strange historical inversion, the vilification is no longer coming from the Left but the Right. A case in point is the widely discussed book, Why Liberalism Failed, by Patrick Deneen, a professor of political science at Notre Dame.

Deneen’s basic argument is that liberalism has failed because of a contradiction lying in its very heart. Thanks to the radical individualism that is its core idea, liberalism acts “as a solvent upon all social bonds,” inexorably causing the disintegration of the fundamental ties of civic and familial life that make a decent social order possible. “Liberalism has failed,” he writes, “because liberalism has succeeded. As it becomes fully itself, it generates endemic pathologies more rapidly and pervasively than it is able to produce Band-aids and veils to cover them.”

Thanks to the relentless advance of liberalism’s individualistic ethos, neighborhood and nation, family and religion are all left in “ruins.” Promising “an ennobling set of political ideals,” what liberalism has actually accomplished is the realization of “new and comprehensive forms of degradation.” No matter which direction we turn in Deneen’s tour of the horizon, he exposes the falsity of liberalism’s claims. A political philosophy “that was launched to foster greater equity, defend a pluralist tapestry of different cultures and beliefs, protect human dignity, and, of course, expand liberty,” in practice, Deneen writes, “generates titanic inequality, enforces uniformity and homogeneity, fosters material and spiritual degradation, and undermines freedom.”

Representative government, supposedly a hallmark of our liberal democratic order is, to Deneen, a sham: “Our capacity for self-government has waned almost to the point of nonexistence.” What we call democracy is nothing more than “an emaciated form of spectator politics.” Indeed, we are no longer truly self-governing but instead subjected to the rule of a new class of “select elite actors.” Liberal democracy, “having claimed to bring about the downfall of aristocratic rule of the strong over the weak, culminates in a new, more powerful, even more permanent aristocracy that fights ceaselessly to maintain the structure of liberal injustice.”

Apart from the emergence of its own nomenklatura, in other critical respects, argues Deneen, liberalism shares critical features with fascism and Communism. For one thing, like its two great ideological cousins, liberalism is an “architecture that proposed transforming all aspects of human life to conform to a preconceived political plan.” To be sure, qualifies Deneen, the creation of a liberal order has not hinged on a “visibly authoritarian” regime. Instead, liberalism works invisibly, as the backdrop to our lives. In this respect liberalism is if anything “more insidious” than its past competitors. Moreover, a “signal feature of modern totalitarianism was that it arose and came to power through the discontents of people’s isolation and loneliness,” which leaves “deracinated” individuals “to seek belonging and self-definition through the only legitimate form of organization remaining available to them: the state.” Acknowledging that few contemporary thinkers would apply that analysis to liberalism, Deneen demurs from the consensus, writing that “there is no reason to suppose the basic political psychology works any differently today.”

If liberalism, to Deneen, has totalitarian features but is not itself totalitarian, it is still a form of tyranny, one that he labels “liberalocratic despotism.” One of its mechanisms is the pervasive destruction of traditional local culture, including by a dehumanizing materialism in which we “consume prepackaged, market-tested, mass-marketed consumables, often branded in commercialized symbolism that masks that culture’s evisceration.” Another is the forward march of technology, which instead of conducing to our betterment often “ends up ruling or destroying us.” Yet another is the formation of a powerful state, whose reach grows according to “the logic and grain of the regime.” Altogether, the combined forces of a “massive state architecture and a globalized economy” have a crushing impact, atomizing society and leaving “the individual powerless and overwhelmed by the very structures that were called into being in the name of freedom.” Given the way liberal democracy has unfolded, it is nothing short of an “accumulating catastrophe.”

In presenting Deneen’s charge sheet, one must be complete. For even as he indicts liberal democracy for a panoply of grave sins, he also qualifies. Having painted liberal democracy with the darkest colors, toward the end of his book Deneen abruptly picks up a brush with a more optimistic hue. Attempting to imagine a “humane alternative” to the philosophy he decries, he begins by declaring that the “achievements of liberalism must be acknowledged.” He adds that “the desire to ‘return’ to a preliberal age must be eschewed” and any movement forward must build upon liberalism’s achievements while still “abandoning the foundational reasons for its failure.” He says that post-liberal theorizing should be cognizant of both “the rightful demands” liberalism makes, “particularly for justice and dignity,” and also of liberalism’s “retention of essential concepts from a pre-liberal age—especially that of liberty.” He cautions, however, that any movement forward requires not incremental reform but overturning liberalism root and branch: “The only path to liberation from the inevitabilities and ungovernable forces that liberalism imposes is liberation from liberalism itself.”

In summarizing Why Liberalism Failed to highlight some of its distinctive aspects, I do not want to obscure the fact that it is brilliantly written. For both its erudition and sparkling prose, it has amply earned the wide attention it has garnered. The book features blurbs not only from leading conservative thinkers but also from liberals including Barack Obama, who praises it for “cogent insights into the loss of meaning and community that many in the West feel,” as well as voices further to the left, like Cornel West, who calls it “courageous and timely,” and, following Deneen, warns that “if we remain tied to liberalism’s failure, more inequality, repression, and spiritual emptiness await us.”

The receptive audience Deneen has found is itself a significant point of data, for what leaps out from Deneen’s pages, at least to this reader, is the extravagant language of Deneen’s indictment. What, for example, is the precise nature of the “catastrophe” that he says has befallen our liberal democratic order? Where are the “ruins” in the midst of which he contends we are living? What constitutes the “new and comprehensive forms of degradation” that he finds wherever he turns his gaze? Beginning with his book’s question-begging title, Deneen is remarkably apodictic. Readers are repeatedly confronted with pronouncements about the condition of liberal democracy—in particular, diagnoses of great social ills—that are presented as if they are incontestable facts.

Much of Deneen’s argument hangs, for example, on the contention that, thanks to the forces unleashed by liberalism, there has been a “breakdown of family, community, and religious norms and institutions, especially among those benefitting least from liberalism’s advance.” If by “breakdown,” Deneen means deterioration and not total collapse, his is no doubt an accurate claim about trends over the last several decades. And the social decay he points to, just as he also claims, has unquestionably hit hardest those on the bottom rung of American society, those left out of the modern information economy by the relentless meritocratic sorting of both our educational system and our employment market.

But shouldn’t an evaluation of a socio-political system’s merits and demerits take under consideration its flexibility and its capacity to adjust? One hundred years ago, those “benefiting least from liberalism’s advance” were the African-Americans of the American south—and not only the south—consigned by the system of Jim Crow to a life apart, second class citizenship, a systematic deprivation of the franchise, and the lynching of the guilty and the innocent alike. Was that moment—and the decades of segregation that both preceded and followed it—less or more of a “catastrophe” than our own?

And one hundred years before that, the forebears of the same African-Americans who endured segregation were slaves. Men, women, and children were placed on the auction block, their naked bodies exhibited for inspection, and then sold to the highest bidder, often never to see their family members again. Here is a passage about one of his overseers from the memoir of the escaped slave Frederick Douglass:

I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood. No words, no tears, no prayers, from his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose. The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood-clotted cowskin.

Once again, one must ask: Were commonplace moments like that more or less comprehensively degrading than anything occurring in our own era? Deneen writes that “[t]oday, as in past centuries, a vast disconnect exists between our stated ideals and our practices.” That claim is a falsehood, or at best a partial truth, for even if a gap persists between our ideals and practices, in any fair appraisal it has narrowed significantly from 100 or 200 years ago. In assessing the condition of liberal democracy, surely the arrow of progress must be taken into account. But Deneen, never pausing to look at history, instead offers an entirely static evaluation of his subject.

“There is a great deal of ruin in a nation” is Adam Smith’s famous observation, an observation that Deneen and like-minded conservatives overlook to their intellectual peril. Deneen’s method is to take a snapshot of the ruin he finds in contemporary America and declare it a horror show. The fact of the matter is that one can take snapshots of America at previous moments in our history and find ruin an order of magnitude greater. Heaping obloquy on contemporary liberal democracy, Deneen uses the word “bondage” profligately throughout, decrying the bondage of the autonomous self, our bondage to technology, our bondage to economic inevitability, and so forth and so on. But he never applies the word to the genuine bondage of slavery that our liberal democracy permitted under its constitution and abolished at great cost. As Ravel points out in The Totalitarian Temptation, “inequity in a society can be measured at a moment in time or over the long term.” Choosing among these two yardsticks, the West European Communists of the 1970s incessantly decried whatever evils of contemporary capitalism appeared before their eyes but elided all discussion of capitalism’s success at creating and distributing wealth over time. Deneen’s appraisal of liberal democracy proceeds in precisely the same fashion.

A significant part of Deneen’s indictment of liberal democracy is the claim that “the liberties that liberalism was brought into being to protect—individual rights of conscience, religion, association, speech, and self-government are extensively compromised.” Is he right about any of this?

To begin with the rights of conscience and religion, it is undeniable that today threats come from both Left and Right. On the Right, the bald fact is that America’s President is a religious bigot, summoning hatred of Muslims from his followers, a feature of his political complexion overlooked by a number of prominent Christian intellectuals and theologians who, with open-eyed hypocrisy, hail him as a champion of religious liberty. On the Left, one finds a strand of progressivism with an agenda hostile to religion and religious freedom and which would extend government deep into the most intimate spheres of life. That agenda has made considerable progress both in the legal arena and in the formation of public opinion. Serious Christians in America, and not only Christians but also worshippers in other faiths, are not wrong to see themselves besieged by a post-modern culture that not only rejects time-honored teachings about the nature of marriage and the immutability of gender, but also, and what is far more egregious, condemns the public defense of those time-honored teachings as a form of bigotry. The progressive attempt not merely to drive religion from the public square but to place it in the stocks can rightly be called “totalitarian” in its ambitions, as George Weigel has done.

But ambitions are one thing. Realization is another. The coexistence of competing systems of morality, exceptional in human history, is one of the great achievements of liberal democracy. It also can be one of its most painful features, for maintaining such coexistence is not an automatic process. Rather, it entails constant resistance to the encroachments of the intolerant, coming today from both Left and Right. Religious liberty is certainly under assault today, but it can be and is being defended via the channels of democratic decision-making. That is no small part of what our hotly contested elections and our intense fights over judicial usurpation and judicial nominations are about. Deneen inveighs against “the inevitabilities that liberalism imposes.” In so doing he treats liberalism as if the abstraction itself were some sort of tyrannical agent inexorably grinding down religious and other forms of freedom. Such historical determinism is nothing more than a fiction convenient to his argument: No outcome is preordained. In a liberal democracy such as ours, living, breathing individuals are the real agents of history. In public opinion, in the courts, and in the political arena, the pendulum of democracy swings and will continue to swing.

What is more, when it comes to freedom of conscience, in the broader sweep of things we are very far from a low point in the arc of the pendulum. Consider the position of Catholicism in the United States in the 19th century. Many in the dominant Protestant majority regarded the Pope as the “anti-Christ” and Catholics as his agents; lurid tales of sexual slavery, torture, and infanticide circulated widely, stirring fear and hatred. Belief in a Catholic conspiracy to undermine liberty was a driving force behind the growth of the Know Nothings from a secretive fraternity to a full-fledged political party. Among the planks of its 1856 platform were:

Hostility to all Papal influences, when brought to bear against the Republic.
Eternal enmity to all those who attempt to carry out the principles of a foreign Church or State.
War to the hilt, on political Romanism.
American Laws, and American legislation; and death to all foreign influences, whether in high places or low!

These were not mere words. As impoverished Catholic “hordes” poured into the country from Europe, they were targeted by nativists and subjected to pogroms in which Catholics were murdered and churches burned to the ground. Once again, if one compares the darkness of that era to the travails of our present moment—including, for example, the genuine trespass on religious liberty of forcing nuns to purchase health insurance policies that cover contraception, or compelling a conscientiously objecting Christian baker to bake a wedding cake for a homosexual couple—should one conclude that liberalism has failed or that it has enjoyed considerable success? All such comparisons across time are absent from Deneen’s account.

Deneen’s cements his relentless case for pessimism by concluding that the mechanisms of self-government have been irretrievably subverted. Our electoral processes, he writes, seem to be “a Potemkin drama meant to convey the appearance of popular consent.” And appearance is one thing, reality another. “The genius of liberalism was to claim legitimacy on the basis of consent,” Deneen writes, but what it has actually done in practice is to “arrange periodic managed elections, while instituting structures that would dissipate democratic energies, [and] encourage the creation of a fractured and fragmented public.”

But what exactly is the problem with elections that Deneen is identifying? Is he talking about ballot access, voter suppression, corporate contributions, gerrymandering, a surfeit of political advertising, or one or more of the above? Deneen never says. Instead, his claims are left hanging in the air as if they are established facts. And, once again, he attributes to our liberal order features of totalitarianism. In the Soviet Union and its empire, after all, elections truly were Potemkin affairs, periodically “managed” to demonstrate unity and crush the potential non-conformist by returning unanimous results.

Has freedom of speech also been extensively compromised, as Deneen maintains? Evidently assuming this to be a widely recognized fact, he offers not a single example to back up this claim. I was left presuming that he is referring to the plague of political correctness, particularly evident on college campuses, that inhibits honest discussion of vital subjects. Whatever Deneen has in mind, once again it is worth turning one’s head to episodes in liberalism’s past. Across the 19th century, laws punishing sedition, criminal anarchy, and conspiracy were employed to suppress the speech of abolitionists, religious minorities, trade union organizers, and suffragists. The Virginia Act of 1836 provided that anyone who came to the state to “advise the abolition of slavery” by speaking or writing could be punished by up to three years of imprisonment. In the early 20th century, Americans were imprisoned under the Sedition Act of 1918, which forbade either the utterance or the publication of “any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States.” How do those kinds of draconian legal restrictions on speech stack up against a political correctness that, however antithetical to the free exchange of ideas, is enforced almost entirely either by social pressure to conform or by private agents like university administrators?

Deneen invokes Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard commencement speech to bolster his claims about liberalism’s “lawlessness.” In turn, it is worth invoking Solzhenitsyn in connection with freedom of speech. In writing The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn had to operate in secrecy, keeping his labors hidden from the authorities who were desperate to suppress it. In the summer of 1973, his devoted typist, Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, was detained by the KGB and interrogated. Placed under pressure, she revealed that a copy of the manuscript was buried at the dacha of an associate. Three days after the KGB released her, she hung herself. When a professor at a distinguished American university bemoans, without a scintilla of substantiation, the supposed fact that free expression has been “extensively compromised” in our open society, one is encountering the same travesty that Ravel found on the Left in the 1970s: the “fashionable intellectual processes by which free societies are transformed into totalitarian societies.”

In a similar vein, Deneen sees great social harm emanating from the fact that the “liberal state expands to control nearly every aspect of life” (emphasis added). One begs to know whether Deneen, who teaches political science, is acquainted with states, some still in existence, that accomplish exactly that. Stalinism at its height aimed for such total control. So did Chinese Communism. Interestingly, the Soviet press in the relative thaw of the post-Stalin era sometimes described—quite accurately—how such controls operated under the leadership of Mao Tse Tung, as in this excerpt from the Soviet weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta, quoted by Ravel:

Several houses make up a cell whose members are required to report their thoughts and actions to each other. . . .Each week the head of the family reports on the ideological situation in the family to the neighborhood revolutionary committee, which is nothing less than a system of informing. In practice everyone is required to do the same, including schoolchildren who at the end of the week write essays on the class struggle in their families and among their classmates. The individual has no right to a personal life: each of his actions is subject to rigorous surveillance. Everything he does at home. . . .where he goes, what he talks about, what he eats, what he reads, what he listens to on the radio, all this is immediately learned by those around him and reported to the neighborhood revolutionary committee.

Here we see a picture of what it really means for a state “to control nearly every aspect of life.” It is getting tiresome to point out that the failings Deneen attributes, without evidence, to liberal democracy are actually the central features of totalitarian regimes. The totalitarian temptation analyzed by Ravel rested on just such slanderous transposals.

Deneen’s is not a lone voice. There is an emerging school of conservative intellectuals who, with variations, are adumbrating similar ideas. Ryszard Legutko’s 2016 book, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, comes packaged in a red, white, and blue dust jacket, complete with stars of the American flag juxtaposed to the communist hammer and sickle. Legutko, a professor of philosophy at Jagellonian University in Krakow, Poland, a member of the European parliament, a former official in Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party, and, before the collapse of Communism, an activist within Solidarity, finds extraordinary commonalities between liberal democracy and Communism.

To be sure, Legutko forcefully acknowledges the “superiority” of liberalism to Communism, citing his own personal experience of living under both kinds of regimes. No reasonable person, he writes, would question the advantages of one over the other, although this argument, he cautions, should not be used as a form of “intellectual and moral blackmail.” His purpose, he says, is to explore the “profound” similarities of the two systems, which cannot be “absolved or explained away by the mere fact of this superiority.” Though Legutko acknowledges in one breath the critical qualification that Communism rested on terror and liberalism does not, in another breath he qualifies his qualification, explaining that both systems rest on some form of coercion. They are both, he writes, “all-unifying entities compelling their followers how to think, what to do, how to evaluate events, what to dream, and what language to use” (emphasis added).

Liberal democracy presents itself as a “system of breathtaking diversity,” writes Legutko. In fact, he maintains, “the opposite view seems now closer to the truth.” If anything, liberal democracy is an engine of conformism, “a powerful unifying mechanism, blurring differences between people and imposing uniformity of views, behavior, and language.” Far from being distinct from Communism, liberal democracy is merely “a new ideological shell,” one in which “people became hostage to another version of the Newspeak but with similar ideological mystifications.” As under Communism, there are “[o]bligatory rituals of loyalty and condemnations,” only a variation that entails “different objects of worship and a different enemy.”

Like Deneen—and using strikingly similar language—Legutko argues that liberalism is more “insidious” than its totalitarian sibling. Under Communism, writes Legutko, it was clear that the official ideology “was to prevail in every cell of social life.” To achieve that end, the Communist party employed “brutal coercion” and “propaganda.” Liberal democracy achieves the same goal even though “official guardians of constitutional democracy do not exist.” This, he explains, both reflects and creates a paradox: “the overarching nature of the system [is] less tangible, but at the same time more profound and difficult to reverse.”

Contributing a foreword to Legutko’s volume is the British conservative John O’Sullivan, a former top editor at National Review and currently the president of the Danube Institute, a government-funded think tank in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. O’Sullivan unhesitatingly embraces Legutko’s equation of contemporary liberalism with Communism, writing that, like Marxism, liberal democracy is becoming “an all-encompassing ideology,” one that, “behind a veil of tolerance, brooks little or no disagreement.” In this, as in other respects, continues O’Sullivan, liberal democracy in its modern form shares “a number of alarming features with communism.” Both, he explains, are utopian projects, and in seeking to realize their utopian vision, both “require that all social institutions—family, churches, private associations—must conform to liberal-democratic rules in their internal functioning” (emphasis added).

Reviewing Legutko’s The Demon in Democracy, Adrian Vermeule, a chaired professor of law at Harvard Law School, laments the fate of “illiberal citizens” in our liberal democracy; as a self-professed Catholic integralist, that is, as a believer in the establishment of a Catholic confessional state, he includes himself in this category. Such illiberal citizens, writes Vermeule, must endure the ordeal of dwelling in societies where they are “trapped without exit papers, suffer a narrowing sphere of permitted action and speech, shrinking prospects, and increasing pressure from regulators, employers, and acquaintances, and even from friends and family.” Just as Communism falsely boasted of being supremely democratic, liberal society also presents a false face. It “celebrates toleration, diversity, and free inquiry, but in practice it features a spreading social, cultural, and ideological conformism.” Given their overlapping qualities, Vermeule finds the “stock distinction between the Enlightenment’s twins”—namely, that “communism is violently coercive while liberalism allows freedom of thought”—to be “glib.”

But, of course, unlike in the Communist world where citizens were truly unable to obtain “exit papers,” and were physically “trapped” by an iron curtain bordered by minefields and guarded by soldiers in watch towers armed with machine guns, Vermeule or anyone like-minded is free to leave the United States at any time and emigrate to a more congenial country, be it Poland under Legutko’s Law and Justice party, Orbán’s avowedly illiberal Hungary, or Vladimir Putin’s Russia. In actual fact, however, despite all of the ruins supposedly surrounding us and all of the supposed repression, in the average year out of a population of more than 325 million, fewer than 5,000 Americans renounce their citizenship, typically not to escape the depredations of liberalism but to avoid paying taxes. At the same time, millions of foreigners strive to come to the United States, many of them giving up all their worldly possessions and risking their lives on the journey. These migration patterns would seem to suggest that our liberal democracy, far from being reduced, as in Deneen’s assessment, to “burning embers” amid the “gathering wreckage of [its] twilight years,” still retains a modicum of health.

We also need to inquire if Vermeule is correct that in commenting on public affairs from his perch at America’s premier law school, he—or any American—is subjected to a “narrowing sphere of permitted action and speech” of the kind that dissidents under Communism encountered. Obviously, Vermeule understands that Communism rested on terror and liberalism does not. And just as obviously, in likening himself to a Soviet refusenik, Vermeule is indulging in a vicarious form of victimhood; America’s culture of victimhood, formerly the bane of conservatives, has apparently become contagious. As for Vermeule’s contention that the distinction between liberalism and “violently coercive” Communism is “glib,” it has to rank as a prize-winning classic in the genre of moral equivalence, a kind of fallacy that, once upon a time, conservatives vociferously condemned.

John O’Sullivan’s assertion that under Communism the social institutions he cites—the family, churches, and other private associations—were compelled “to conform to liberal-democratic rules in their internal functioning” is a weird inversion of historical reality. As O’Sullivan surely knows, there were no private institutions in the Soviet Union. As he also surely knows, all of civil life was run not to conform to “liberal democratic rules” (whatever he might mean by that), but according to Marxist-Leninist principles, with hierarchical control extending downward from the vanguard party at the top. O’Sullivan states that the parallels he draws between liberal and Communist institutions “must strike a newcomer to the argument as absurd.” In that claim, at least, he is right. They are absurd. In certain conservative circles, the desire to calumniate liberal democracy by equating it to totalitarianism has led to grotesque distortions of the past.

It is notable that today’s anti-liberal theorists are, for the most part, rather vague about what they envision replacing the liberal-democratic order they decry.

Legutko faults liberal democracy for not giving Christianity the privileged position it has enjoyed across centuries. “All the objectives the communists set for themselves,” he writes, “and which they pursued with savage brutality, were achieved by the liberal democrats who, almost without any effort and simply by allowing people to drift along with the flow of modernity, succeeded in converting churches into museums, restaurants, and public buildings, secularizing entire societies, making secularism the militant ideology, [and] pushing religion to the sidelines.” Though Legutko shrinks from specifying any particular form in which Christianity could or should assume state power, he pronounces it to be “the last great force that offers a viable alternative to the tediousness of liberal-democratic anthropology.”

Deneen, for his part, seeks a “humane alternative” that would dwell in peaceful coexistence within liberalism’s framework. He has in mind building up “the remnants of orthodox religious traditions” like the old-order Amish, along with fostering “localized practices of care, patience, reverence, respect, and modesty.” Here he leans heavily on the writings of Wendell Berry, the writer and environmental activist who, in Deneen’s telling, sees community as a “place of constraint and limit” that makes possible “healthful family life.” Deneen notes approvingly that Berry advocates “the communal prerogative to demand that certain books be removed from the educational curriculum and insist on the introduction of the Bible into the classroom as ‘the word of God.’”

Vermeule has a more well-defined objective. He rejects Deneen’s “retreat into localism” as insufficient, arguing that such a communitarian vision can “exist only at the sufferance of the aggressive liberal state.” The proper response, he suggests, is “to co-opt and transform the decaying regime from within its own core.” This can be best achieved by refocusing liberal institutions, in particular the bureaucracies of liberalism’s administrative state, toward the construction of an integralist Catholic order:

It may thus appear providential that liberalism, despite itself, has prepared a state capable of great tasks, as a legacy to bequeath to a new and doubtless very different future. The vast bureaucracy created by liberalism in pursuit of a mirage of depoliticized governance may, by the invisible hand of Providence, be turned to new ends, becoming the great instrument with which to restore a substantive politics of the good.

Of course, “the new and doubtless very different future” Vermeule has in mind—rule by some illiberal Catholic entity that determines what constitutes “the good”—is not likely to be palatable to non-Christians, nor, I suspect, to most Christians as well. That said, it is easy to agree with Vermeule that Deneen’s stab at communitarianism is not a sufficient replacement of the liberal democratic order he deems “bankrupt,” nor does it correspond to the gravity of the ills Deneen sees as afflicting that order. Needless to say, the technologically abstemious Amish, who shun electricity (except when it is produced by their own windmills), do not offer a practical model for the social organization of a modern society comprised of hundreds of millions of citizens.

Evidently stung by criticism that he fell short in developing a plausible alternative to liberalism, in the paperback edition of Why Liberalism Failed Deneen returns with a more radical cast of mind. He writes in a new preface that after the passage of several months since his book first appeared, and with the fragility of liberal democracy having been exposed by the sudden rise of left-wing socialist and right-wing nationalist movements, it now appears to him that the existing order is rapidly approaching its terminus. Indeed, we are drawing near to a moment, he writes, akin to the sack of Rome in 410 A.D., when what is required is “epic theory” that will call forth “a new departure in political thinking.” But he confesses that he is not at present prepared to engage in epic theorizing and expresses hope that some young reader of his book will one day come forth to do the job.

I take it as an encouraging indicator of liberal democracy’s intrinsic strength that one of its most aggressive critics cannot even pencil-sketch the contours of a plausible superior alternative. But that is not to say that alternatives are presently lacking. Deneen and like-minded anti-liberal theorists are writing at a moment, not entirely unlike the 1930s, when liberal democracy is in retreat around the world, confronting energetic populist and authoritarian movements and states. Deneen places himself on the side of the populist challengers. Yet it is one thing, as George Weigel does in a judicious essay in National Affairs, to regard the rise of populism as akin to a fever in a human body signaling that something is wrong. It is another thing, as Deneen does, to welcome the fever.

Deneen characterizes the word “populist” as a pejorative applied by liberals to dismiss policies and politicians that do not accord with liberal commitments. For all of populism’s problems, among which Deneen himself includes “its easy manipulation by demagogues,” he nonetheless judges that it “signals a reinvigorated democratic impulse.” But recent and not so recent history, which Deneen characteristically ignores, does not support such a sanguine stance. Populists in power have a dismal record when it comes to maintaining the rule of law, protecting the independence of the judiciary, defending freedom of the press and individual rights, and tolerating minorities. The Know Nothings of the 19th century were a classic populist movement, one at the hands of which Catholics, much like Muslims and Hispanic immigrants today in their encounter with Trumpian populism, bore the brunt.

In any event, given that Deneen contends that liberal democracy is already a form of despotism, he is singularly ill-equipped to draw distinctions between political movements that support freedom and those that would trample on it should they ever come to power. In this respect, as in others, Deneen is in alarming congruence with the leftist intellectuals of the Cold War era, pointed to by Ravel, for whom “the faults of free societies are so magnified that freedom appears to mask a totalitarian reality.” Indeed, Deneen echoes no one so much as Herbert Marcuse, the quasi-Marxist philosopher of the Frankfurt School, whose contempt for the “false” freedoms offered by liberal democracy provided inspiration to the New Left of the 1960s and whose doleful influence lingers to this day.

Like Deneen, Marcuse regards liberalism as a mask for tyranny. What Deneen calls “liberalocratic despotism,” Marcuse calls a society of “total administration” and “totalitarian democracy.” In his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance,” Marcuse insists—in language which Deneen closely maps—that the promises of liberalism are actually camouflage for social control: “What is proclaimed and practiced as tolerance today, is in many of its most effective manifestations serving the cause of oppression.” To Deneen, the pernicious promises of liberalism are also camouflaged: Liberalism, he writes, is “a pervasive invisible ideology” that “surreptitiously” remakes the world in its despotic image.

Marcuse rails against the “false needs” generated by advertising amid the dehumanizing broader culture of consumerism. Deneen offers nearly the identical complaint, condemning consumerism as a pathway to spiritual impoverishment: “We have endless choices of the kind of car to drive but few options over whether we will spend large parts of our lives in soul-deadening boredom within them.” Deneen sees democratic elections as a “managed” process that serves to “dissipate” democratic energies, fragment the public, and consolidate the power of a new “permanent aristocracy” bent on maintaining a regime of “liberal injustice.” Marcuse, for his part, writes that the exercise of political rights such as voting in elections “only strengthens the system of total administration by testifying to the existence of democratic liberties which, in reality, have changed their content and lost their effectiveness.”

Deneen see liberal democracy as resting on an insidious false consciousness, a phenomenon Marcuse explicated in his 1964 One Dimensional Man. Marcuse writes there that a “comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization” and that liberal democratic society “takes care of the need for liberation by satisfying the needs which make servitude palatable and perhaps even unnoticeable.” For his part, Deneen offers the breathtaking admission that the failures of liberalism have been “generally undetectable to the denizens of liberal regimes,” or at least undetectable to those denizens who are satisfied with its successes. Continuing with what is nothing other than a Marcusean mode of materialist analysis, Deneen argues that “liberalism’s apologists” are in the grip of a “self-deception” that is “generated by enormous reservoirs of self-interest in the maintenance of the present system.”

To be sure, despite all the congruence, Deneen and Marcuse would prescribe very different cures for liberal democracy—or perhaps, to put it more accurately, they would kill off the patient in very different ways—but they find a strikingly similar set of malignancies in their diagnoses.

Serious contemplation should be provoked by the convergence of the destructive anti-liberal philosophy of the New Left with the emerging anti-liberalism of contemporary conservative thinkers. Given the warm reception Deneen’s book has enjoyed at both ends of the political spectrum, it is plain that the sirens of an illiberal temptation are seductively beckoning. One is left wondering whether writings like Why Liberalism Failed will, as has been the case with Marcuse’s work, reverberate for decades, chipping away at the moral and intellectual foundation of the most humane socio-political order ever to grace the face of the earth. Without a doubt, as Deneen argues, radical individualism taken to an extreme carries the potential to undermine the social bonds necessary to sustain self-government and freedom; that is not in dispute. But conservative jeremiads that condemn liberal democracy as irredeemably flawed from its inception and which baselessly equate its institutions with those of the most bloodthirsty regimes in modern history damage the cause of freedom at a moment of liberal democracy’s mounting vulnerability.

Deneen professes to value liberty, but the liberty he values is distinct from what he calls our currently existing “ersatz version,” the primary negative achievement of which is combining “systematic powerlessness with the illusion of autonomy in the form of consumerist and sexual license.” If Deneen succeeds in his project of liberating us from liberalism root and branch, one trembles to contemplate what substitute will come in its place as the fruit of post-liberal “epic theorizing.” Given all the hard lessons we have learned over the last century about human nature and the fragility of civilization’s veneer, liberal democracy in a developed mass society is exceedingly unlikely to evolve into something resembling the quaint localism of the old-order Amish and far more at risk of lapsing into the kind of blood and soil nationalism that, here and abroad, we are watching take shape before our eyes.

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Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists

Capitalism is in crisis. Who says so? Bernie Sanders, a 77-year old millionaire white male senator from rural Vermont, a state that established a single-payer health care system and then abandoned it because it required untenable tax increases; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a young telegenic congresswoman who has become a leader of the Left and a thorn in the side of moderate Democrats; and many in the media, for whom “Capitalism is in Crisis” is a gripping headline. But more gripping than accurate.

Karl Marx predicted that a vast reserve army of the unemployed and capitalism’s internal contradictions would bring it down. America’s version of capitalism, a mixture of markets and regulation, exhibits neither. The ranks of the reserve army have been depleted: The unemployment rate is 3.8 percent. Capitalists who would immiserate the working class are being forced by persistent labor shortages to offer higher wages to woo staff from competitors. And America’s healthy economic growth belies the notion that internal contradictions are at play. For those, see:

the former Soviet Union, where Sanders spent part of his honeymoon;
Venezuela, from which capitalists fearful of expropriation and workers fearful of starvation are fleeing in droves;
East Germany, when it could no longer keep its inhabitants walled in;
And Cuba, home to charming decades-old cars because no one can afford the Toyotas and Volkswagens available to them on international markets.

Donald Trump’s description of America as a nation in need of being made great again was, and is, simply wrong. The downtrodden masses in America don’t feel, well, downtrodden. A recently conducted poll by the Gallup organization found that 86 percent of Americans are “very (56 percent) or somewhat (30 percent) satisfied” with most aspects of their lives: “your education”, 93 percent; current housing, 88 percent; personal health, 87 percent; “your standard of living, all the things you can buy and do”, 84 percent; “your job or the work you do”, 79 percent; your household income, 77 percent. The one earlier survey, in 1995, was not strictly comparable but suggests that levels of satisfaction have increased since then. No surprise, since annual per capita personal income has increased since then by 288 percent, or from $23,600 to almost $54,000 last year, after adjusting for inflation. Unlikely performance for a system in crisis.

These expressions of satisfaction seem inconsistent with polls that indicate that some 53 percent of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction. But they aren’t. One can be satisfied with one’s personal circumstance but unhappy with the nation’s condition—control by an elite that imposes costs on workers from which it immunizes itself, such as job-destroying trade-deals; the deterioration of the nation’s finances: and, perhaps most important, the state of what we might call the nation’s culture.

Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb complains of a government that “think[s] that smog and insecticides are perilous enough to call for restrictions on liberty but that pornography and obscenity are not.” One can love one’s house, family and job, but be unhappy with the nation’s cultural condition, whether because traditional mores are breaking down and bathrooms have become unisex, or because mores are not breaking down quickly enough, and those annoying “men” and “women” signs remain ubiquitous. One can view restrictions on the use of obscenities in media as restrictions on freedom of speech or, alternatively, as insufficient when the limitation permits the use of f**k as an adjective or verb.   

Still, it would be a mistake to draw too fine a line between cultural and economic concerns, or to think most Americans are satisfied with the economy overall. As Irving Kristol forty years ago wrote, “There would appear to be little doubt that the matter of equality has become, in these past two decades, a major political and ideological issue…. In the United States today, one might fairly conclude from the political debate now going on that capitalism … is about equality and will stand or fall with its success in satisfying the egalitarian impulse.” In a way, the concern about inequality is a symptom of a deeper malaise, a perceived loss of control over many aspects of life—from the scheduling of work at Walmart and MacDonald’s, to workplace conditions at an Amazon warehouse, to access to your doctor or, indeed, to any doctor. Try to reach Internal Revenue for the answer to a question and your chance of reaching someone who can give you prompt and correct information is not very good. Try to find an alternative to Facebook, and you’ll discover that the antitrust authorities took a decade-long nap while Mark Zuckerberg snapped up all potential competitors. Little wonder non-elites feel envious of those in a position to view life with greater equanimity.

Weather for these deeper reasons or not, Gallup polls show that 66 percent of Americans are somewhat or very dissatisfied with the way income and wealth are distributed. No use telling them that a rising tide raises all boats, both rowboats and yachts. Those in the smaller craft feel destabilized by the wake of the larger, even if their own boats are more lavishly fitted out than ever before. The somewhat and very dissatisfied, urged on by capitalism’s critics, look with anger at the pay gap between bosses and workers, a statistic most economists believe is a meaningless measure of inequality, but is easily understood and therefore is politically potent. Equilar, a compensation consultant, reports that the median chief executive last year earned 254 times his or her median employee. Trade union statisticians put the ratio much higher (347 times), and the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute estimates that in 1989 the figure stood at only 58-to-1.

“Politicians know that this is an issue that really strikes a chord with people across the political spectrum,” thinks Sarah Anderson, a political scientist at the Institute for Policy Studies, which styles itself a progressive think tank. It seems she is right: almost half of Americans polled favor having the federal government take steps to limit the pay of executives at large companies. It is not that Americans generally object to people earning large sums of money. Few begrudge Jeff Bezos, who has given them the option of never seeing the inside of a retail establishment again, his enormous wealth. Great entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates are widely admired. Few of the working stiffs in the stands boo Bryce Harper because he held out until the Philadelphia Phillies came up with a $113 million, 13-year contract. Or LeBron James, because he negotiated a four-season, $154 million contract that brings him $500,000 every time he sets a sneaker on the court. Pay and performance are clearly related.

It is the corpocracy that attracts attention. Corporate compensation systems are opaque and, worse, rife with conflicts of interest. Compensation consultants eager to please their CEO clients make recommendations to boards of directors chummy with the CEO and eager that “their” CEO not earn less than the median CEO salary. “No CEO below the average” seems to be the received wisdom.

It is difficult for shareholders to deny high-flying executives their hearts’ desires. Almost 90 years ago Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means pointed out what economists have come to call the principal-agent problem. Scattered shareholders cannot control actions by the managers when those actions are not in the interests of the shareholder-owners of the business. It is only recently that institutional investors, with large blocs of voting stock, have begun to force companies to be more transparent about how executive compensation is determined, and to relate pay to performance, admittedly not an easy thing to do.

It is also difficult to deny that in many ways the system is “rigged” against the middle class and the poor. As the late Mancur Olson, an economist and social scientist, pointed out: “When a group that constitutes only a narrow segment of the income-earning capacity of a society is able to act collectively, its main incentive is to distribute to itself through lobbying and price fixing and to continue such activities even when the losses to the society are large in relation to the amount the group obtains through its distributional struggle.” Powerful lobby groups extract favourable tax treatment for wealthy hedge fund operators and property developers; Corn growers in Iowa receive subsidies from politicians eager for votes in the crucial Iowa caucuses; Silicon Valley billionaires agree not to compete for each other’s workers so as to depress wages and increase profits; hair dressers and morticians form lobbying groups to make competitive entry into their trades difficult-to-impossible. Little wonder that only 11 percent of Americans tell Gallup pollsters they have a “great deal or quite a lot of confidence” in congress, less than they have in big banks (30 percent), the medical system (36 percent), and, no surprise here, the military (74 percent). Or that 52 percent of millennials say they would prefer to live in a socialist or communist country than a capitalist one. For these young men and women, promises of free health care, free college education, student-debt forgiveness, cradle-to-grave benefits, and higher taxes on the “rich” sound alluring. Margaret Thatcher’s warning—“Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people’s money”—is lost on them.  

Of course, talking to a pollster and walking the walk are two different things. The millennials who pine for life in a socialist paradise are not forming caravans to make their way to Venezuela, or even to Sweden, which they imagine to be a socialist system that “works”. Capitalism is not doomed to to the ash heap of history quite yet. For one thing, there is no rival system capable of producing and distributing such enormous material wealth. The typical household classified as “poor” by the U.S. government in 2013 had a car, air conditioning, two colour televisions, cable or satellite TV, and a microwave oven according to Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation. It has more living space than the average non-poor European. And 92 percent of Americans with incomes of less than $30,000 own a cell phone. “The American bottom is indeed better than the middle in most places on Earth,” concludes The Economist.

For another, capitalism has historically demonstrated an amazing ability to incorporate reforms without destroying its driving innovative force. When the Great Depression hit, and many eyes turned to the competing economic systems on offer—Hitler’s National Socialism, Mussolini’s Fascism, Stalin’s Communism—Franklin Roosevelt reined in the big banks; provided electricity to the under-served; created useful jobs for many, from artists to planters of trees; and created a legal system that allowed trade unions to balance the bargaining power of employers. To the surprise of those who expected to see masses of unemployed veterans peddling apples—the fruit, not yet iPhones—the economy emerged from WWII with renewed dynamism. American firms now account for 57 of the world’s 100 most valuable listed firms.

Still, it is past time for another round of reform. Capitalism must be saved from the capitalists. One of that breed, hedge fund operator Ray Dalio, writes, “I believe that all good things taken to an extreme can be self-destructive and that everything must evolve or die. That is now true of capitalism.” Policymakers will have to look at the world through the eyes of those who do not run hedge funds, develop properties, or manage banks when deciding whether to enact a $15 minimum wage, or whether to back features of the tax code that lower the effective tax rate on high earners such as Bernie Sanders and winners of the sperm lottery such as Donald Trump Jr. They’ll also need to reconsider the incentive systems that have produced scandals at Wells Fargo, Boeing, Goldman Sachs, Equifax, JP Morgan Chase and other companies, as well as give weight to social considerations: Shell Oil is developing a system that pegs compensation to executives’ ability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  

Capitalists, who have the political clout to push these reforms, will have to ask themselves whether and how to accommodate new pressures for reform of capitalism. That might mean accepting more rather than less regulation. It might mean exercising a bit of self-restraint, a bit of modesty in appraising the value of their contributions to society, and using some of the political clout they undeniably have to press for significant reforms—perhaps not on the scale of FDR’s restructuring of the American economy, but significant nevertheless. That’s something they have avoided doing for too long.

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Takin’ it to the Streets in Algeria and Morocco

Eight years after Mohamed Bouzazi’s self-immolation in a dusty provincial Tunisian town ignited a tsunami of popular protest and political upheaval across the Arab Middle East and North Africa, another round in the increasingly contested politics of the region appears to be underway. This time around the tumult is concentrated in North Africa, and despite the appearance of resolution in one case, Sudan, all of these episodes are ongoing, with no clear destinations in sight.

Massive weekly demonstrations in Algeria prevented the country’s long-serving and infirm 82-year-old President Abdelaziz Bouteflika from being elected to yet another five-year term in office, and are continuing to challenge the ruling military-bureaucratic oligarchy there. In neighboring Morocco, the authorities remain firmly in control, but the usual formula—repression, co-option, and limited liberalization—no longer guarantees continued success. Bouteflika’s forced exit, and the recent massive protests that toppled Sudan’s indicted war criminal President, Omar al-Bashir, after 30 years in power, surely give pause to autocratic rulers and entrenched elites everywhere in the region. That includes Cairo, Abu Dhabi, and Riyadh.

At the same time, as the upheavals of 2011 amply demonstrated, removing a ruler, however euphoric and inspiring it may be, hardly guarantees a better future. ­­­­In the Libyan case, Muammar Qaddafi’s brutal dictatorship has been succeeded by a chaotic struggle for power, lately of a decidedly kinetic sort, with continuing implications for the whole region and beyond. Syria’s tragedy has been unspeakable, as has Yemen’s. Egypt eventually became a case of “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”—with apologies to Peter Townshend. Only Tunisia, where it all started, has emerged as a genuinely pluralist, albeit fragile, democratizing country, but its success has yet to substantively ameliorate the socioeconomic and psycho-social conditions that underpinned the widespread alienation of the region’s overwhelmingly youthful population that drove the 2011 protests.

Algeria

In 2011, Algeria was a noted exception to the wave of regime-challenging upheavals. To be sure, protests over specific grievances did ensue, and have been a regular feature of Algerian life ever since; the authorities moved quickly to raise salaries and promise liberalization measures, including constitutional change. Moreover, it is fair to say that the country was still suffering from the effects of the “Black Decade” of the 1990s, in which more than 150,000 Algerians perished in a brutal conflict between Islamist insurgents and an equally noxious military regime, and had little stomach for renewed instability.

Bouteflika, whose place in public life reached back to the war of independence against France (1954-62), and subsequent service as Foreign Minister for the victorious FLN, was elected President in 1999, thanks to support from the military. He received considerable credit for engineering a reconciliation process that tamed most of the remaining politically active Islamists and brought a degree of normalcy back to Algerian life, enabling his easy re-election in 2004 and again in 2009.

This did not mean, however, that Bouteflika was the sole or unchallenged master of the house. Indeed, Algeria’s ruling pouvoir has always constituted a number of cliques or “clans,” based on familial, geographic, and personal ties who compete over, and share, the country’s riches. The country’s formal political institutions (parties, parliament, judiciary) mask the real sources of power, whose decision-making processes have always been opaque, albeit occasionally revealed by a pluralist and competitive media usually affiliated with one power center or another.

By 2014, Bouteflika was seriously ill, having already endured stomach cancer and a 2013 stroke that left him seriously disabled, unable to even cast a ballot unaided.  Nonetheless, the pouvoir decided that he should continue to serve, and successfully engineered his re-election by 81 percent of the vote, according to official figures. By 2016, he had completely disappeared from public life, and even from Cabinet meetings, supplanted by his portrait.

Up until 2014, Algeria, Europe’s third-largest supplier of natural gas, had been awash in oil and gas revenues. They were the source of 95 percent of its foreign currency receipts. However, the subsequent precipitous price decline cut the country’s foreign currency reserves by half. Keeping domestic peace through massive food and energy subsidies, the classic strategy of rentier states, raised the budget deficit to 9 percent of the GNP in 2018. This was becoming increasingly unsustainable, particularly since the hydrocarbon sector required massive new investment that was not available, even while corruption remained rampant. Completing the familiar picture of frustration and alienation was the high unemployment rate among Algeria’s overwhelmingly youthful population: approximately 60 percent of the country’s 42 million persons are under the age of 30.

With presidential elections scheduled for April 18 looming, the inner circles of power decided that Bouteflika would again stand for re-election. Whether the decision stemmed from an inability to agree on a successor, or utter contempt (hogra, in North African Arabic) for the public, or both, it was a shocking display of ineptitude, and the straw the broke the camel’s back.

Beginning on February 16, hundreds of thousands of Algerians from all walks of life poured into the streets in massive weekly peaceful demonstrations demanding an end to the farce. We don’t yet know what level of organizational prowess has been behind these demonstrations, but the energy exhibited and momentum they generated recalled the heady days of Cairo’s Tahrir Square and Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution. Dubbed the “Smile Revolution” (revolution du sourire), the ubiquitous Algerian national flags and the oft-creative and humorous slogans signified an effort to reclaim the legacy of the anti-colonial struggle in the name of the people.

Amazigh and Kabylian flags were also present. Algeria’s Amazigh (Berber) minority, particularly its historically well-defined Kabylian segment, were keen to participate in this massive civic outpouring against the well-entrenched establishment, as well as to advance their particularist ethno-cultural demands in a new and more democratic Algerian order. No less significant, perhaps, was the fact that Bouteflika lost the support of an important segment of the country’s business class. As had happened in Tunisia, local chapters of the national labor union joined the protestors as well.

Slow to respond, the ruling power elites offered one half-measure after another to try and placate the demonstrators: reshuffling the government; a Bouteflika promise that he would step down after one more year in office following the election; and then a postponement of the election entirely, while matters would be rethought. Bouteflika then promised that he would resign on April 28. None of this placated the demonstrators, and though they constantly proclaimed that “the army and the people are brothers,” all eyes were on Army Chief of Staff Ahmed Gaid Salah, who both promised not to lift a finger against the demonstrators and yet warned darkly of imminent chaos if the demonstrations continued. Under pressure from Salah, Bouteflika finally resigned on April 2.

For Salah and his allies in the pouvoir, it was now time for the demonstrators to go home. Abdelkader Bensalah, a trusted Bouteflika ally, was appointed Interim President, and a date for new presidential elections was set (July 4). What General Salah was offering, essentially, was the model that the Egyptian military had sought to impose in 2011 with Mubarak’s removal, and eventually succeeded in doing so in 2013, with the removal of Mohammed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood-led government.

Indeed, among the first measures taken by the post-Bouteflika regime followed the Egyptian script, as it began purging some of Bouteflika’s clan from power, placing his powerful brother Saïd under house arrest, arresting a leading businessman and Bouteflika intimate, Ali Haddad, and summoning the former Prime Minister and Finance Minister for judicial questioning. And then came news that five well-connected Algerian billionaires were about to be defenestrated.

By now, though, the demands of the demonstrators had already shifted: It wasn’t just Bouteflika and his close associates to whom they were opposed, but the entire regime which, they insisted, should be replaced by a truly democratic and representative government. However, political transitions are notoriously vulnerable to manipulations, setbacks, reversals, and outright hijackings. Given the absence of a national coordinating body uniting the various political factions and streams within Algerian society, the successful pursuit of a transformative path toward a genuinely new political system seems more like a utopian vision than one with a real chance of attainment for now.

At the same time, the formerly powerful pouvoir seems more vulnerable than ever: One telling indication is that numerous local municipalities were reported to be refusing to cooperate with the Interior Ministry’s instructions to prepare for the presidential election. With the situation in flux, an enormous amount of political smarts will be required from both official quarters and civil society sectors if the Sisyphean task of fashioning a new Algeria can even get underway.

Morocco

Algeria’s neighbor to its west, the Kingdom of Morocco, has been Algeria’s intimate geopolitical rival since both countries shook off the shackles of French colonialism more than a half-century ago. Sharing a common spoken Arabic dialect, large autochthonous Berber-speaking populations, Maliki and Sufi Islamic doctrine and praxis, and the intrusive and influential experiences of French colonialism, the two countries have been territorial rivals since the border War of the Sands in 1963, a rivalry which continued to express itself in the unresolved 45-year long struggle over the adjacent territory of ex-Spanish Sahara.

Moreover, their legitimacy formulas and regime types have stood in stark opposition to one another. Whereas Algeria’s regime is grounded in its revolutionary anti-colonial legacy, Morocco’s foundational mantra is “Allah, al-Watan, al-Malik” (God, Country, King). Monarchical rule is integral to Moroccan political culture: The current Alaouite ruling dynasty, which claims descent from the Prophet Muhammad, and thus religious as well as political legitimacy, is 350 years old; and the monarchical form of rule in the territory goes back 1,200 years. As such, public criticism of the King or his family is strictly forbidden.

However, even if this sort of monarchy provides the regime with a comparative advantage, it hardly insures lasting stability. Modern governments, whatever their form, have to deliver the goods to their large, youthful, educated, and restless populations. King Mohammed VI, who came to power at age 35 upon the death of his long-ruling autocratic father Hassan II in 1999 (the same year Bouteflika came to power, coincidentally), was keen to push the reset button, and humanize what had been a remote and feared monarchy.

Controlled liberalization of political life and the press, reconciliation with long-time political opponents, symbolic (and later constitutional) recognition of the Amazigh language and culture as an integral part of Moroccan national identity, and large-scale development projects were all part of the new package. All of this bought time and a measure of good will, but didn’t change the underlying nature of political, economic, and social life. The makhzen, the historic Moroccan political term for the interlocking political, military, economic, and religious establishment, continued to call the shots, just as the pouvoir did in Algeria.

In contrast to Algeria, the excitement of the Arab Spring did manifest itself in Morocco. A heterogeneous February 20th movement, calling for comprehensive regime reform (islah al-nizam) and democratization (“parliamentary monarchy”), brought out the largest number of anti-government protestors across the country since the mid-1960s. However, the King quickly gained control of the situation, engineering a constitutional reform process and new nationwide elections that produced a new government led by an Islamist party. The moves gradually took the wind out of the movement’s sails, while leaving real power in the Palace and its associates.

Lacking Algeria’s oil and gas riches, and having a much larger population, proportionately, in the non-urban peripheral areas, the process of economic integration and educational social development has proceeded at a slower pace than in its neighbor. Morocco ranks 123rd on the UN’s Human Development Index, nearly the lowest among Arab states; unemployment for those aged 15-34 stands at 20 percent, 75 percent of whom have no social security, and 60 percent would like to emigrate.

Meanwhile, even as he promoted an image of a benevolent “King of the Poor,” Mohammed VI has become fabulously wealthy during his two decades in power. According to a 2015 Forbes report, his own personal wealth amounted to $5.7 billion, with he and his family owning decisive stakes in every sector of the Moroccan economy—banking, mining, media and telecommunications, insurance, the cement industry, energy, food and agricultural production. Much of this was detailed in an investigative French-language book, Le Roi Prédateur (The Predator King), which was banned in Morocco but has been widely available in PDF form. A Wikileaks document from 2009 stated that all major investment decisions involving the giant Omnium Nord Africain holding company were made by three people: the King and two of his advisers.

In the political sphere over the past decade, it has likewise been business as usual, as the authorities continued to use tried-and-true methods of manipulation, co-option, and selected repression to prevent the emergence of any serious challenges to the status quo. And internationally, Morocco has steadfastly promoted an image of a moderate Islamic country, one that is open for business, embraces a multicultural heritage, and constitutes a veritable paradise for tourists.

But the degree and variety of social protests that have manifested themselves in recent years suggest that all is not well, and that the old methods of governing may no longer be enough. Water scarcity in pre-desert villages such as Zagora prompted repeated outcries, led by colorfully robed women carrying empty jerrycans. The Imider protests against a Palace-owned silver mine draining the neighboring villages’ water and poisoning their crops is now in its seventh year; the fatal shooting of a female student on a dinghy seeking to cross the Mediterranean to Europe by a Moroccan naval patrol resulted in violent demonstrations in her home city of Tetouan; consumer boycotts of large water bottling and dairy products companies, and a network of petrol stations owned by a government minister and tycoon friend of the King, organized through social media, have been surprisingly successful; teachers have struck for decent wages and conditions repeatedly, sometimes clashing with the police.  The protest song “F’bladi Dalmouni” (“In My Country I Suffer from Injustice”), has become the anthem of the fans of Casablanca’s RAJA soccer team, and its soundtrack has been viewed by millions of YouTube viewers.

The most sustained protests, ultimately drawing the harshest response, have been those of the Hirak al-Rif (“movement”).  The northern, predominantly Rifian Berber region has historically been alienated from the center of makhzen power: It was the center of Abdelkrim’s short-lived anti-colonial republic in the 1920s, saw a brief revolt in 1958-59 that was crushed brutally by forces commanded by then-Crown Prince Hassan, and was thereafter entirely neglected by the Palace. Upon coming to power, Mohammed VI initiated major reconciliation measures and invested heavily in the region. Nonetheless, the sense of alienation has remained widespread.

The Hirak movement was sparked by the horrific death of Mohcen Fikri, a fish monger in the city of al-Hoceima, whose goods were confiscated by the police and thrown into a garbage truck, on October 28, 2016. Desperate to retrieve them, he jumped into the truck, only to be crushed to death when someone ordered the driver to activate the grinder. Naturally, the incident was captured in the gathering darkness by a cellphone camera and distributed on YouTube.

The incident, recalling Bouazizi’s death six years earlier, sparked large-scale ongoing protests calling for bringing the perpetrators to justice, combined with broader themes condemning the regime’s hogra toward the region. These protests also carried an ethnic dimension, with the flags of Riffian icon Abdelkrim being flown prominently in the demonstrations, along with the pan-Berber Amazigh flag and occasional Moroccan ones. Eventually, a movement leader emerged, Nasser Zafzafi, a 40-year old political militant with family ties to Abdelkrim’s short-lived government.

Zafzafi’s message was angry, unadorned, and populist, with a dash of religious rhetoric thrown in as well. His confrontational interruption of a mosque sermon, which quickly appeared on social media, proved to be the last straw for the regime, which decided to put an end to the protests. Around 400 activists, including Zafzafi, were arrested in May 2017. Zafzafi was secretly held for a time, and eventually convicted of undermining state security, disrespecting the King, and accepting foreign funds to help destabilize the country. His 20-year prison sentence was recently upheld by the Casablanca appeals court. More than 40 other protestors were sentenced from one to 20 years, as well as a journalist who covered the protests. The crackdown, credible reports of torture, and harsh sentencing have drawn strong criticism from Human Rights Watch.

Will the crackdown finally deflate the Hirak? One never knows. For a long time, the odds seemed to be in the regime’s favor. However, this past Sunday’s “march of the Moroccan people” in Rabat—a thousands-strong manifestation against the detainment of Hirak activists—suggests that the equilibrium may be changing. Given Morocco’s underlying problems, its developing culture of protest, and not least the demonstration effect of renewal of contested politics elsewhere in the region, one senses that active, and not just cosmetic, measures are required if Morocco is to successfully renew the increasingly fraying social contract between the regime and the public at large.

Sudan shutters in chaotic uncertainty, Libya endures a so-far low-level renewal of civil war, and Algeria continues to launch headlines into the global media space. If the streets of Rabat are any indication, Morocco, too, will not be immune to the region’s unrest.

For a view of the stadium scene, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgaMxgBBftY; for a translation of the lyrics, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyQVhkEweUg

The post Takin’ it to the Streets in Algeria and Morocco appeared first on The American Interest.