Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 44

Socialism in America?

American sociologist and political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset spent years trying to figure out why the United States was the only industrialized country that did not create a significant socialist movement or party. It’s a complicated subject, but Lipset was able to unpack it by comparing America to its nation-state cousins, Canada and Australia. Both are parliamentary monarchies where strong unions and deferential attitudes toward authority cultivated powerful socialist movements, policies, and parties.

Traditional socialism has been a non-starter in America. In 1912, the Socialist Party of America peaked, with its Presidential candidate Eugene Debs garnering 6 percent of the popular vote. But the party faded because its leaders advocated a takeover by government of the economy, opposed entry to World War I, were pro-immigration, strictly urban, and lost out to anti-state or even anarchical unions for worker loyalties.

The country flirted again with socialism after the collapse of 1929. But what ensued was the New Deal which was a crisis management scheme that granted an activist role to the state, and was not socialism. This hybrid gave rise to social security, infrastructure projects, and eventually other interventionist programs that supported Americans or employed them. After World War II, Washington introduced more social safety net interventions such as the GI Bill, major infrastructure projects, then Medicare and Medicaid in 1965.

Lipset posited that America rejected outright socialism because it was not aligned with America’s three principal tenets: equality or egalitarianism, equality of opportunity, and social equality. “Many years ago there was an American socialist intellectual named Leon Sampson, who wrote a book in which he was dealing with this question of why the socialists were weak in America,” said Lipset in a PBS interview. “And his answer, in part, was that the socialists were weak because America was socialist. Now, he didn’t mean it was socialist economically, but he meant it was socialist socially… that what socialists thought they would get in a socialist society—a society of equality—Americans already thought they had. And so, when socialists came along and said, ‘You should change your system so we can get more equality,’ they couldn’t appeal to people who thought they were living in an [egalitarian] society. . . .Again, it’s a society with obviously enormous inequality on the economic side, but not on the social side.”

In other words, fertile ground for socialism existed in societies where both social class distinctions and economic inequality existed.

But the collapse of 2008 provided the seeds and justification for another socialistic surge led by Bernie Sanders in 2016 and, ironically, exploited by Donald Trump. His guru, Steve Bannon, explained why.

“You know why the deplorables are angry?” he said. “They’re rational human beings. We took away the risk for the wealthy. Look, you have socialism in this country for the very wealthy and for the very poor. And you have a brutal form of Darwinian capitalism for everybody else. You’re one paycheck away from oblivion. Do you think the founders of this country. . . .do you think that’s what they wanted to have in the 21st century? Dude, this is #$@+ed up.”

Lipset’s insights provide a nuanced roadmap for the current political climate and the lead up to the 2020 election for Democrats, notably Bernie Sanders. Clearly, President Donald Trump is going to frame the next contest as a battle between capitalism and socialism. His first salvo was on Feb. 5, during his State of the Union address, when he jarringly stated that “America will never become a socialist country. America was founded on liberty and independence, and not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free, and we will stay free.”

This was aimed at Sanders who, in 2016, branded himself as a “socialist”, an historically tone-deaf label in the American context. He has since softened this to “democratic socialist”, but would have been well-advised to scrap the “s” word, as have Canadians and Australians, who call their democratic socialist parties the New Democratic Party and the Australian labor Party respectfully. Rebranding, as Sanders has paid partial lip service to, is important as Trump launches the next battle of the brands.

Trump’s strategy is to frighten the Democratic Party away from Sanders by billing him as a “red”, but this will fail. The Clintons and their cronies are no longer there to sabotage Sanders. When asked whether the Democratic establishment would “put their finger on the scales again” against his nomination, Sanders responded candidly: “I think the process will be fair. Clinton had 500 super delegates lined up, it was dumb and unfair, but this has changed.”

Sanders is ahead of the pack again with a manifesto about inequality that is getting more airtime than ever. He also has an even richer target this time: Trump’s track record and tax giveaway to the richest people and corporations in the country. “This is a tax bill written and pushed by Trump, who told the American people that the tax bill would not benefit the wealthy, when 83 percent of the benefits went to the top 1 percent,” he told the Fox News audience.

Sanders hammers away with his talking points: Three American families are richer than the 160 million in the bottom half of the population; and the richest man in America, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, pays no taxes while many people work two or three jobs just to pay the bills. But it is nuanced. Rich people and capitalism are not evil, but the tax system is grossly unjust. Trade is not evil, but bad trade deals are. Immigrants are not evil, but borders must be protected.

“I am urging Congress to vote down the new NAFTA deal. I voted against the first NAFTA deal, against China trade relations and other disastrous trade agreements, passed by Democrats and Republicans written by multinational corporations. American workers should not have to compete against desperate people around the world making $2 to $3 an hour. I believe in trade policy that works for working families and not just for the large corporations,” he declared.

As for the border crisis, “we need more border security, who doesn’t agree with that? But what we need is comprehensive immigration reform,” Sanders said at a speech in Iowa. “If you open the borders, my God, there’s a lot of poverty in this world, and you’re going to have people from all over the world. And I don’t think that’s something that we can do at this point. Can’t do it. So, that is not my position.”

He’s also tempered his idealism with a fiscal plan. His signature policies—free post-secondary tuition, Medicare for all, and enhanced Social Security—will be paid for by diverting Trump’s tax giveaway, he says. Tuition can be paid for with a Wall Street speculation tax; Medicare will be paid for by diverting user premium and co-payments to taxes; and Social Security hikes are affordable by increasing taxes on those with incomes of $250,000 or more. “We have a way to pay for everything we propose,” he said.

Not surprisingly, Sanders has the President worried and leads the Democrats in raising money and polls against Trump. According to recent major results, Sanders would trounce the President in 2020.

Sanders is redefining a 21st–century version of “socialism” to Americans. Whether he wins or not, the country’s first left-of-center revolution is underway following an unprecedented giveaway to the wealthy and corporations, the hollowing out of America’s heartland, and entrenched poverty. “What is democratic socialism?”explains Sanders. “It’s creating a government and economy and society that works for all rather than just the top 1 percent.”

The post Socialism in America? appeared first on The American Interest.

Russia Is No Great Power Competitor

A common thread throughout the two-plus years of the Trump Administration’s foreign policy, reflected in its National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy, and a growing theme in much of the op-ed and think tank commentariat is the notion of great power competition between the United States on one side and Russia and China on the other. In the case of the latter, one can make a strong argument. Not only is Beijing seeking to flex its muscles in the Asia-Pacific region; it actively seeks to enhance its influence elsewhere around the world through the financing of projects under its Belt and Road Initiative and through soft power projection to hold up the Chinese model as an alternative to the democratic system of government.

Russia, by contrast, is not a great power by most major measurements, except when it comes to its nuclear arsenal and its geographical size. Russia’s GDP is less than $1.6 trillion, placing it between Spain and Italy in country rankings. Compare that to China, with a GDP of nearly $13 trillion, or to the United States, with a GDP of more than $19 trillion. Russia’s economy is stagnant, and its population is declining; the economies and populations in both the United States and China are growing. Under different leadership, Russia could be doing better, but under Vladimir Putin, Russia is stuck playing the spoiler role on the international stage. Declining powers can pose serious dangers, and Putin’s Russia is no exception.

That said, in portraying Russia as a great power and placing it alongside China, the Trump Administration and commentators inflate Russia’s importance and role in the world. To be clear, the Putin regime should be taken seriously, but not as a great power. Instead it should be viewed as a destructive force wreaking havoc around the world, through use of military force, interference in others’ politics, and spread of corruption. Putin poses a grave threat to many American interests, as evidenced by: his interference in our election in 2016; his invasion and occupation of parts of Ukraine and Georgia; his bloody intervention to save the murderous Assad regime in Syria; and his most recent deployment of a small contingent of forces to Venezuela to blunt any possible U.S. military moves to remove the discredited Nicolas Maduro from power.

Unlike the Chinese Communist Party, which seeks to project a positive image of its leadership and model around the world, the Kremlin more or less has abandoned efforts to boost its image. RT and Sputnik, its propaganda outlets, are more interested in denigrating other countries and their governments than they are in extolling the advantages of the Putin model. Western leaders, in other words, are in no position to hector Russia about human rights abuses, use of military force, and corruption—we are all guilty!

These are not the makings of a great power but of a destructive one. In pursuing such a strategy, Putin has weakened Russian national interests and spread his forces thin in ways that leave them vulnerable. Take Ukraine, where Putin has arguably done more to unite that country than any Ukrainian leader in the past two decades. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, a majority of Ukrainians favored joining NATO; in the past, that number was stuck in the low teens. Putin seems to have no clue how to withdraw his forces from Ukraine’s Donbas region, as Ukrainian forces have courageously staved off further territorial encroachment by Russia

Other neighboring states, especially Belarus, are increasingly nervous about possible next moves by Putin. Instilling fear in one’s neighbors is one way, albeit an incredibly negative one, to project power, but it is not the sign of a great power. With his ratings in Russia dropping to levels not seen in close to a decade, Putin is not dealing from a position of strength. A Putin feeling desperate may well pose a threat, but out of weakness, not greatness.

As long as there remain countries in Europe aspiring to join the European Union and NATO, the West will have a much stronger had for winning over and influencing countries on the continent. The European Union’s total distraction with Brexit and the rise of populist and anti-democratic parties, however, combined with the Trump Administration’s alienation of European allies and undermining of NATO and the EU as key institutions, weaken the West’s hand and create openings for Putin. For the West, the problem here can be found when it looks in the mirror, not in great power competition with Russia—though Putin is a skillful opportunist who taps into our self-inflicted wounds and exacerbates them.

In response to all this, the Administration unwisely overlooks problems in parts of Europe and the Middle East because it views relations through the prism of great power competition.  It has gone completely quiet amid democratic rollback in Hungary and Poland, and it has even supported far-right and populist forces in Italy, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had no business visiting Budapest last month, unless he was there to read the riot act to Putin pal Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s Prime Minister. Instead of bolstering our allies in Europe, we are contributing to their problems and have been complicit in their undermining of democratic institutions. By looking the other way amid authoritarian moves in certain EU member states, we blur the distinction between us and Putin’s unprincipled approach. Standing up for our values would go much further to bolster Europe and our friends in the Middle East as well as deflect Putin’s efforts there.

Syria is another example of Putin’s misguided power projection. His decision to send Russian forces to Syria in late September 2015 undoubtedly saved Assad, who was teetering on the edge at that time. Putin stepped in where the Obama administration failed to act. Assad is still in power and talk of his departure has largely disappeared. But Russia now owns responsibility for keeping Assad, who has the blood of hundreds of thousands on his hands, in power. Between 200 and 300 Russian mercenaries in Syria were killed by U.S. airpower more than a year ago, and Russia never raised a stink about it, knowing they would lose any further showdowns there on the ground.

Russian diplomacy seeks to make additional inroads in the Middle East, with ties improving with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and most notably Turkey, a NATO member. Beyond arms sales, however, Moscow has little to offer these countries. The general disengagement of the United States from the region and our abandonment of human rights concerns in the face of brutal leaders in Cairo and Riyadh make Putin’s job easier and risk alienating the frustrated populations in the region, who see little difference between our approach and that of Putin.

In Venezuela, Moscow is propping up another murderous leader in Maduro. But Venezuela, far from Russia, is not the same as Syria, where Putin’s forces have greater ability to project power. Putin cannot resist trying to stick America in the eye in the Western Hemisphere, as a turnabout-is-fair-play for his sense that we have been doing that to him in his “near abroad.” But Russia is not a decisive player in Venezuela—unless we wrongly elevate it into such a role.

Adamantly averse to regime change amid color revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia and the removal of Qaddafi in Libya in 2011 for fear that such change might give his own population ideas, Putin is content to align himself with like-minded, bloody, authoritarian leaders. That should make any sense of competition between the United States and Putin’s Russia easier for us, if we consistently make it clear that we stand with democratic forces and human rights and the rights of states to choose their own way forward, not with bloodthirsty dictators.

Adding to the confusion over the Administration’s policy and attitude toward Russia is the contradictory rhetoric coming from most senior officials, and from the President himself. During the 2016 election campaign and even as President, Trump frequently asks, “Wouldn’t it be great if we and Russia got along?” The answer to that is yes, of course. But it’s the wrong question to ask. The better question is, “Can we and Russia get along as long as the Putin regime is in power without sacrificing our values, interests, and other countries?” The answer there is equally obvious: No! Moreover, Trump’s desire for better relations with his Russian counterpart and his unwillingness to fault Putin for virtually anything cloud the rest of his Administration’s approach in dealing with Russia.

Many of the Administration’s actions in pushing back on Putin are praiseworthy. Despite concerns in its very first week that it would lift sanctions against Russia, the Administration has maintained and even ramped up sanctions, thanks largely to congressional pressure to do so. It has provided lethal military assistance to Ukraine and Georgia to help those countries defend themselves against further Russian aggression, something President Obama refused to do. The United States, together with NATO allies, in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has beefed up its military presence in countries close to Russia, a move started under the Obama Administration.

The Trump Administration is boosting liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports to Europe, denting Russia’s share of the market there. It has strongly pushed for cancelation of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia to Germany that would make an existing pipeline running through Ukraine obsolete, causing serious financial harm to Ukraine to the tune of $2 billion per year in transit fees.

All of these actions are laudable and represent a firm pushback against the Kremlin. They have been accompanied by tough rhetoric from a range of Administration officials who have not been shy in criticizing Putin’s regime, whether for its human rights abuses, its violations of its neighbors’ sovereignty, or Russia’s interference in other countries’ elections, not least the U.S. elections in 2016 and 2018. Vice President Mike Pence visited Estonia and Georgia in 2017, demonstrating solidarity with those frontline states.

But these actions are undermined by President Trump’s rhetoric. In 2012, President Obama told then-Russian President Medvedev that he, Obama, would have more “flexibility” after winning re-election when it came to dealing with Russia. Obama’s comments, picked up by an open mic, were not meant for public consumption, but critics rightly jumped all over him for making them. Trump says such things all the time, intended for public consumption, but few of his supporters push back.

When an Administration’s actions and rhetoric do not align, there is no clear, coherent policy. The 2017 National Security Strategy may portray Putin’s Russia as a great power competitor, but the President himself does not seem to agree, at least with the notion that Putin is a competitor. From his absolution of Russia for its interference in the 2016 election to his embarrassing performance in Helsinki during his meeting with Putin in July, Trump is on a different page from the rest of his Administration when it comes to Russia and Putin.

The President and his entire Administration need to get on the same page when it comes to dealing with Russia. They should not exaggerate Russia’s position into some great power competition; at the same time, they should recognize the serious threat Putin poses, from invading his neighbors and use of cyber-attacks to interference in our politics, support for like-minded murderous dictators, and violations of various arms control agreements. The Administration also should not forget Putin’s human rights abuses and the murders and poisoning of Kremlin critics both inside Russia and on other countries’ territory, including Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 and the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal last year, both in the United Kingdom. Suspicions surround the death of Mikhail Lesin, a former Russian official under Putin, whose body was found in a Washington, DC hotel in November 2015.

In short, Putin is a real threat, but not on a great power scale.

The post Russia Is No Great Power Competitor appeared first on The American Interest.

Welfare and Debt: A Moynihan Assessment

“The Moral Dimensions of a Two Trillion Dollar Debt” is the title of an address delivered a third of a century ago, by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, on January 27, 1986, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Rochester, New York. Pat began with the theological ambivalence toward the activity of lending, investment, and accumulation that we now call capitalism.1 The Hebrew Bible’s injunction pointed one way—Thou shalt not give [thy brother] thy money upon interest, not give him thy victuals upon increase. The New Testament’s parable of the talents pointed another—”the good servant puts his capital to work and it increases.” The Catholic Church, he observed, no doubt with a twinkle in his eye, had tended to view capitalism as a “Protestant heresy.” On this point, Pat sided with the heretics assembled before him: Christianity teaches the virtue of self-denial and “warns against the terrible cost of discounting future rewards in favor of present ones.”

The same was true of public borrowing—up to a point. The City of Rochester blossomed in the 1820s on heavy borrowing by New York State to finance the digging of the Erie Canal. In 1986, the city continued to thrive on public and private credit for “projects of indisputable virtue and reasonable prospects” (and he let it slip that some of those loans were provided by federal agencies through the good offices of Senator Moynihan). Nevertheless, Pat said,

… there can be no doubt that public debt is much more problematic. This arises from the obvious fact that the people who do the borrowing, which is to say elected officials, are not the ones who will do the repaying. The temptation is real to use debt not as a form of investment, but a means of consumption. Far from the denial of gratification, it can, and frequently does, reflect just the opposite.

Whereupon he delivered a nutshell history of American public finance—in his telling, centuries of resisting temptation followed by five years of dissolute debauchery. The federal government had run deficits many times in the nineteenth century, but only during wars and recessions—and “the debts were paid off with great promptness once there was a change in the particular circumstances that had given rise to them.” During the Great Depression, Keynesian economics had had “little if any influence on the New Deal.” But it did introduce a new way of thinking about deficits—not just as an unfortunate side-effect of economic hard-times and falling tax revenues, but as a deliberate policy to sustain incomes and demand until the economy recovered. This led eventually to a variety of innovations such as, during the Nixon Administration in the early 1970s, the “Full Employment Budget”—with deficits equal to the tax revenues that would have come in from the currently unemployed if they had had paying jobs. Pat called this counterfactual budget balancing “a euphemism of sorts.”

And then, with the arrival of Ronald Reagan in 1981, came dissolution. Supply-siders claimed that cutting tax rates would generate so much economic growth that tax revenues would hold steady or even increase at the lower rates. Libertarian spending-cutters doubted that would happen—but they thought the ensuing deficits might accomplish what they had failed to do directly. Friedrich Hayek had summarized the starve-the-beast strategy following a recent visit to the West Wing: “[I]t is impossible to persuade Congress that expenditures must be reduced, unless one creates deficits so large that absolutely everyone becomes convinced that no more money can be spent.”

But both Reagan camps had been wrong. Deficits had ballooned following the 1981 tax cuts, without inducing the least sense of spending restraint in Congress. The national debt had doubled from $1 trillion to $2 trillion by the time Pat spoke in 1986. “This,” he said, “has the makings of a crisis of the regime. I don’t think it will come to that; but it might.” Without a reversal of the 1981 tax cuts, either the currency would need to be debauched through inflation, or else critical defense and domestic programs would need to be cut “in a wholly indiscriminate and destructive manner.”

“The largest debtor nation with a declining defense program,” Pat concluded, “is not likely to remain for long the symbol of successful government.” In another lecture later that year, he put the matter even more colorfully: The Reagan Administration “borrowed a trillion dollars from the Japanese and gave a party.”

Today, with 33 years of hindsight and experience, we can see that Senator Moynihan got some things right and some things wrong in his Rochester address. But on one big thing he was stunningly perspicacious. This thing was not, as far as I know, seen by anyone else in 1986; and indeed few people see it even today. But before I tell you what it was, I first need to lay the groundwork by revising and extending Pat’s remarks.

Pat was exactly right that federal deficits were episodic throughout the nineteenth century. We may put the matter positively: From 1789 through the 1960s, the federal government followed a balanced-budget policy, where annual spending on regular operations was held to annual tax revenues. Borrowing was reserved for emergencies and investments—wars, recessions, natural disasters, and territorial development from the Louisiana Purchase to canals and railroads and highways. And the debts were paid down in businesslike fashion, out of economic growth and government surpluses. This was a bipartisan consensus. Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson agreed on the point. Andrew Jackson—the founder of Pat’s beloved Democratic Party, the frontier populist whose portrait now hangs in the Oval Office—was particularly emphatic. The War of 1812 had propelled the national debt to $127 million, and its subsequent retirement had been complicated by a succession of recessions and financial panics. It remained at $55 million in 1829 when Jackson took office; he resolved to pay it down to zero—and succeeded by the end of 1834 through vigorous administration, ample use of his veto pen, and a booming economy.

This history presents a great conundrum. The government that held to a balanced-budget norm for nearly two centuries was, structurally, the same one we have today. Congress possessed unlimited borrowing power. Taxes had to originate in the House, whose members faced the voters every two years. Presidents were prone to expensive visions and projects. What on Earth were they thinking? Why wasn’t their policy borrow, spend, and elect?

Two considerations seem to have been at work. First was Pat’s “moral dimensions”—the Old Testament admonition, plus the secular obligations not to burden future generations and to keep the powder dry for whatever troubles lay certainly ahead. The second was intensely practical—to police against corruption and mission-creep in the distant national capital. Most citizens had little interest or ability to keep track of what the politicians were up to in Washington. What they did know was that they and their neighbors were highly averse to paying taxes. Voila: holding spending to tax revenues was a natural device for limiting the opportunities for mischief. Budget balancing was more than an elite consensus—it was a popular consensus that practicing politicians were constrained to follow.

The dogma lived loudly in FDR. His fiscal policies shifted this way and that, but his budgets always cabined off deficits for spending on Depression relief and Depression recovery; and he insisted that Social Security be financed by its own tax revenues. Pat nailed Keynes, whose practical influence worked in slow motion. Amity Shlaes, in The Forgotten Man, notes that FDR found Keynes baffling and mathematical.

Keynes, too, was a budget-balancer, but over the period of the business cycle rather than the calendar year. He constructed a positive theory for the age-old expedient of running deficits during hard times and paying them off when things improved. In so doing, however, he introduced the idea that deliberate government borrowing need not be limited to public investments and wars. It was also legitimate, and economically smart, to borrow for private consumption—the technical term was “aggregate demand management.” After all, reputable private citizens borrow not just for business investments but also to calibrate their personal consumption and income. A young couple borrows against future earnings to purchase a house and station wagon while the kids are still young. They were doing so en masse in the postwar decades when Keynesianism finally began to sink in.

Moreover, public officials and their economic advisers came to interpret Keynes expansively. Government budgets were no longer mere bean-counting exercises, balancing current revenues and expenses. Now they were to balance the needs of the known present against the resources of an imagined future. But the present is always cluttered with problems and difficulties, while the future is an abstraction. The future is also, in the American mind, a happier, more prosperous place—especially if we can just get ourselves through today’s pressing exigencies. This manner of thinking was evident in the Kennedy and Nixon administrations’ budget proposals. Their deficits were minuscule by today’s standards, but they were the first ones justified not on grounds of necessity but rather of planning—of fine-tuning a peacetime, prosperous economy. This was a turning point.

When Pat got up to the immediate moment of Reaganomics, he got many things wrong. The Administration had not claimed the 1981 tax cuts would pay for themselves. It had said they would spur economic growth—job number one following the miserable stagflation of the 1970s. It thought the revived growth might compensate for 20 percent of the tax revenue that would otherwise be lost. Deficits ballooned in the mid-1980s mainly because Paul Volker’s Federal Reserve reduced inflation faster than anyone had anticipated. We were not bound for a recession by decade’s end, as Pat predicted, but rather for a decade and a half of strong economic growth interrupted by only a brief, mild recession in the early 1990s. That growth compensated the Treasury for 80 percent—not just 20 percent—of the Reagan tax-rate reductions.

Last but not least, much of the mid-1980s borrowing was devoted to a military buildup that, we now know, demoralized and then overwhelmed the Soviet Union—a high-return investment. The party was yet to come, held at the Brandenburg Gate on December 22, 1989.

Now, Moynihan at Rochester was a practicing politician, in the arena, interpreting an unfolding economic drama. The facts were in conflict; opinion was inescapable. Greg Weiner and Shep Melnick quote Pat the scholar-statesman: Scholars “enter the realm of speculation” at their peril—“but that is not a choice available in politics. Speculate or perish.” But statesmanship, too, had its demands: In the months following his address, Senator Moynihan was a leading author of the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which cut individual rates even further, while eliminating many shelters and loopholes.

Pat did have two incontestable facts on his side. First, debt and deficits had skyrocketed to levels never seen in peacetime. Second, this had not caused Congress, or the Administration, or the public, to demand, or even consider, significant reductions in expenditures. The obdurate, age-old balanced-budget consensus had simply vanished. It had vanished at a time of prosperity and good-feelings (“Morning in America” was Reagan’s landslide reelection slogan). Keynes was nowhere in sight—liberal demand management had been replaced by conservative supply management. Another turning point, and another puzzlement.

And here was Pat’s big, singular insight. Listen again to his strange admonition which seemed to come out of the blue: “The temptation is real to use debt not as a form of investment, but a means of consumption. Far from the denial of gratification, it can, and frequently does, reflect just the opposite.” Frequently does—he is not expounding Leviticus. And now consider his sally about borrowing a trillion and throwing a party. Pat was well aware of Reagan’s robust military buildup; he supported it and wanted it to continue. But he saw that something else was afoot. The public was not restive but festive. It was, he emphasized, getting what it wanted.

What was afoot was a transformation of the political economy of the federal government. From the founding until very recently, it had been primarily a provider of public goods for the nation—defense and diplomacy; courts and justice; development and infrastructure; latterly, support for basic research and schooling. Now it was becoming something quite different—primarily a provider of private consumption by individuals, through the medium of writing checks for Social Security and Medicare and a variety of means-tested welfare benefits. In 1960, public goods had accounted for about 75 percent of federal outlays net of interest payments on the debt, while “payments for individuals” were the other 25 percent. By 1970, payments for individuals had grown to 35 percent. In 1986 when Pat spoke, payments for individuals had become dominant at 55 percent. Today they are 75 percent and still growing; public goods are now the residual 25 percent of our national government and shrinking.2

We are accustomed to hearing that federal spending has been commandeered by middle-class entitlements—pensions and medical care for the booming, politically alert cohorts of older citizens of all incomes. That is a half-truth, or at most a two-thirds truth. Means-tested welfare—cash (including refunded tax credits) plus medical, food, and housing assistance—has grown at about the same pace as entitlements, amounting to about one-third of payments for individuals throughout the period since Medicaid came onstream in the late 1960s. The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 interrupted the growth of non-Medicaid welfare spending only briefly. If we include the recent expansion of state Medicaid spending induced by the Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ObamaCare), means-tested welfare is now nearly 40 percent of payments for individuals. Moreover, Social Security and Medicare are themselves redistributive, with benefit structures skewed toward those of lower income.

Pat mentioned none of these developments in his Rochester address, but he was well aware of them. Indeed, he had been present at the creation—at the moment of our first tentative turn toward routine deficit spending. When he was crafting the Family Assistance Plan (FAP) in the Nixon White House in 1969, everyone assumed that its added expenditures, perhaps $5 billion a year, would be covered by tax revenues. The government was then running a surplus. With the expected unwinding of hostilities in Vietnam, the Budget Bureau was projecting an “annual peace-and-growth dividend” of $7-8 billion in the coming years. In the internal White House debates over FAP, one of Pat’s most effective arguments was that a big initiative would preempt Congress’s natural inclination to fritter away the surplus. Memo to the President: “Once you have proposed it, you can resist the pressures endlessly to add marginal funds to already doubtful programs.” When President Nixon unveiled FAP in a television address on August 8, 1969, the White House was cheered by this incoming telegram: “TWO UPPER MIDDLE CLASS REPUBLICANS WHO WILL PAY FOR THE PROGRAM SAY BRAVO.”3

But the peace-and-growth dividend was not to be. It was preemptively consumed, not by congressional spendthrifts, but by automatic spending growth in established programs. Pat announced the discovery himself that very August, using a fine simile that made the evening news. Speaking to the press outside the Western White House, he said, “I’m afraid the peace dividend tends to become evanescent, like the morning clouds around San Clemente.” The Administration temporized for a time with the “Full Employment Budget.” But federal payments for individuals nearly doubled in the early 1970s. Beginning in 1975—the first year such payments exceeded half of non-interest spending—annual deficits became large and continuous, defying any attempt at rationalization. Deficits became much larger in the 1980s, as we have noted, and continued so through most of the 1990s.

Still, America prospered. In 1989, Jonathan Rauch wrote in The Atlantic, “We have learned in this decade that we throw away the balanced-budget rule at great peril to our machinery of governance and our national conscience, but we have also learned that the economy is unlikely to stop us.” Indeed, the economy gave us four surplus years at the end of the 1990s, an unanticipated gift of the dot.com wealth bubble. Then the bubble burst. . . .and so did the Twin Towers. Routine deficits resumed their upward trajectory, reaching a peak in 2009, the year following the financial collapse. Altogether, through good times and bad, deficit spending and payments for individuals have grown in tandem for nearly fifty years. In the nine years since 2009, the Treasury has had to borrow on average 4.8 percent of America’s entire Gross Domestic Product to pay the bills for 22.3 percent of federal spending. We are now contending with the moral dimensions of $1 trillion annual deficits.

These developments are no longer the work of anyone’s economic theory, not of Keynes or the supply-siders, not of Paul Krugman or Lawrence Summers. They reflect the emergence of a new budget norm—the borrowed-benefits norm—that is every bit as populist as the balanced-budget norm it replaced. This, I believe, is what Pat noticed. Voters and public officials were forging a new political compact: for the government to pay out benefits considerably in excess of what it collects in taxes, and to borrow the difference from nonvoting future generations. The benefits are fine in principle; Pat devoted much of his career to promoting them, and to attempting to calibrate them to support rather than undermine family and community. But however worthy, necessary, or urgent they may be, they are mainly present consumption and are not going to generate returns to pay off the borrowed funds. Borrowing for consumption leads to immoderation now, immiseration down the road, all the while corrupting democratic self-government. When Pat put his hand to Social Security reform in 1998, his first principle was that it be returned to pay-as-you-go funding—lower payroll taxes, smaller defined benefits, and personal investment accounts.

If Pat Moynihan were still with us today, trying to make sense of what has become of our national life, I am certain that he would be impressed by our comprehensive rejection of constraint—not only in public finance but in politics, in constitutional structure, in rhetoric, and in culture. There was no more consistent theme of his thought and action than the reality of constraint in human endeavor, and the necessity to acknowledging it, and accommodate it, if one is to make any kind of progress. This, to me, is the deep takeaway of his celebrated distinction between having one’s own opinions and having one’s own facts. But Pat also recognized that opinions themselves can be constraining—so that defining problems incorrectly can make politics “the art of the impossible” (the title of a Moynihan essay).

Let me suggest that these are the circumstances of the contemporary American welfare state. It is too little constrained by the objective facts of sustainable public finance, which we are either pretending do not apply to us or are simply ignoring. This is a thoroughly bipartisan delusion. At the same time, it is too much constrained by subjective opinions that are confusing debate and complicating reform. This is a specialty of the politicians of the progressive Left. They maintain that our welfare state is too small and miserly. It ought to be vastly extended with Medicare For All, and a guaranteed income for all, and a green energy economy while we’re at it. All to be paid for with sharply higher taxes on corporations, on capital investments, and, especially, on the rich—“Every Billionaire is a Policy Failure.” In these endeavors, we are advised to follow the example of Sweden.

To be sure, we are dealing here with profuse with errors of fact. Sweden’s taxes are higher than America’s but, unlike ours and unlike those now being proposed, Sweden’s fall mainly on the middle class. Its income tax is relatively flat beyond moderate incomes—as compared to America’s, which is the most progressive of all the developed economies. Sweden taxes corporate and capital income relatively lightly. Along with Europe’s other large welfare states, it relies heavily on taxes on consumption, especially the Value Added Tax, that are regressive. Sweden has more billionaires per capita than the United States.

These fun facts are, however, largely beside the point. Sweden is a tidy country with a population equal to Michigan, smaller than Georgia or North Carolina. It is (or was until quite recently) highly homogeneous and communitarian. It can hardly be a model for a sprawling, diverse, fractious nation of immigrants, thirty-two times its size. But Sweden is not really being offered for empirical support. Rather it is a Valhalla—the idealization of an aspiration. And that aspiration is thoroughly homegrown. In my own home, around the breakfast table, I may rail that the Democrats been taken over by a gaggle of little Leninists and one ancient Stalinist. But, on the points we are considering, they are giving voice to venerable domestic sentiments that run back to the source of our problems with welfare finance.

America’s system of income and capital taxation was constructed during the Progressive Era, in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. It was extraordinarily progressive by international standards—Thomas Piketty, the French economist and high-tax advocate, notes that “very high taxes on the very rich” were “invented in the United States.” It has remained so ever since; tax rates on the highest earners have come down in recent decades, but so have rates on the middle class, and growing numbers of citizens have been removed from the tax rolls altogether. Today a substantial proportion of the adult population, more than 40 percent, pays no income tax at all. High progressivity has generated innumerable statutory preferences and exclusions and private strategies of income manipulation. Compared to those of the other advanced economies, the U.S. tax system is outstandingly progressive, outstandingly complex, and outstandingly meagre in revenue production. It is this longstanding tradition that set the stage for the debt-financed welfare state.

A few scholars on the academic Left understand the problem. Sociologist Monica Prasad of Northwestern University writes that “America has greater poverty [than any other developed economy] because a set of progressive interventions backfired … progressive taxation and reliance on consumer credit undermined political support for the welfare state.” Her argument is complex, but is nicely adumbrated in the title of her 2012 book I have quoted from, The Land of Too Much (a phrase coined by Huey Long). Precisely because the American economy, beginning with the farm economy, has been so spectacularly abundant and productive, our political attentions have focused on sharing the great wealth in our midst and maintaining widespread purchasing power in the face of glut. Tax specialist Edward D. Kleinbard, of the University of Southern California Law School, makes a complementary argument in a 2014 New York Times op-ed entitled “Don’t Soak the Rich.” Social equality, he argues, is best promoted by public spending—on food stamps and other means-tested welfare, on Social Security and Medicare with their progressive benefit schedules, and on highways and defense and other public goods which are inherently egalitarian. They all depend on large, broadly based revenue systems, which we have denied ourselves through misdirected progressivism.

But academic arguments such have these have had as much influence on the political Left as Keynes had on FDR. During his first presidential campaign in 2008, Barack Obama was asked whether he would favor raising taxes on capital income even if that would suppress investment and reduce government revenues. He answered that yes, he would, because that would be more fair. Pat Moynihan would not have made that mistake. The pursuit of redistribution among the more-or-less well-off is a distraction from the noble aims of the welfare state as Pat conceived them—to alleviate real poverty and hardship, to strengthen the family, and to sustain community and nation. But there it is: a constraint, no less so for being subjective opinion, and we shall have to cope with it.

1. This is the text of an address delivered at a conference, “‘But Not Your Own Facts’—Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Evidence and Public Policy,” held at the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Center for Scholarship and Statesmanship, Assumption College, Worchester, Massachusetts, on April 5, 2019. The Moynihan papers discussed in the text are unpublished; they are available from the author.

2. Figures calculated from OMB Historical Table 6.1.

3. The figures and quotations in this paragraph are from Daniel P. Moynihan, The Politics of a Guaranteed Income: The Nixon Administration and the Family Assistance Plan (1993), pp. 176–179, 233, 251.

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The Child Care Primary

With so many women running for the Democratic presidential nomination, it is perhaps unsurprising that child care is emerging as a major topic on the policy agenda. Senators Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, and Kirsten Gillibrand all feature child care proposals on their campaign websites. So far, Senator Bernie Sanders is the sole male candidate to do so. Not to be outdone, first daughter Ivanka Trump is offering a distinctively Republican approach to the issue.

In child care, as in so many other social policy domains, the United States has taken its own unique course. Unlike most wealthy market societies today, the United States has failed to develop a nationwide, government-subsidized and -regulated system of child care. Instead, we have what many have disparaged as a “patchwork” of services, varying in quality and inadequate in quantity. As record numbers of women with pre-school children enter the labor force or pursue higher education—many of them the sole breadwinners in their households—demands for more affordable, convenient, and high-quality child care have grown louder, and candidates are heeding the call.

This is not the first time presidential candidates have talked about reforming child care. In 2016, Hillary Clinton placed it on her campaign to-do list, proposing that the Federal government subsidize the cost of child care so that it would take up no more than one-tenth of a family’s total household income, with anything over that to be reimbursed via tax credits. Sanders, then her primary opponent, went one step further, calling for universal child care funded by the government, though he ended his campaign without providing specifics.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump came up with not one but three ways to address the high cost of child care: expanding the tax credit for low-income families, giving higher-income families a tax deduction, and allowing families to set up tax-free savings accounts for care expenses. At least two of these measures, Trump claimed, would especially benefit low- and middle-income families. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center differed, pointing out that “about 70 percent of benefits [would] go to families with at least $100,000 and 25 percent. . . . to families with at least $200,000. Very few benefits,” they concluded, “[would] go to the lowest income families who are likely to struggle most with paying for child care.”

Even analysts at the conservative American Enterprise Institute saw the same flaw in Trump’s proposals. Michael Strain, one of their economists, told the Washington Post, “I’m most concerned about a single mother who doesn’t earn a lot of money and who has a couple of kids at home. . . .The benefits of this policy will not accrue to the people who most need help.”

Hillary Clinton, by contrast, had been thinking about child care for decades. Her first job out of Yale Law School, in 1973, was as a staff attorney at the Children’s Defense Fund, the pioneering advocacy organization headed by Marian Wright Edelman. Clinton went on to join CDF’s board and eventually became its chair. In 1989, she was invited to join a delegation of 14 prominent professionals who, under the aegis of the French-American Foundation, spent two weeks visiting public child care facilities in France. Lauding the variety of services on offer for children from infancy to pre-school age—some free, some charging on a sliding scale—Clinton told the New York Times, “It all adds up to a systematic approach to young children. . . . The problem in the United States is that we have no approach.”

What Clinton no doubt had in mind was the exchange on child care between 1988 presidential candidates Michael Dukakis and George H.W. Bush, which revealed the parties’ wide divergence on the issue. Both candidates called for roughly the same amount of funding (just over $2 billion) but differed sharply on how it would be spent. Dukakis emphasized the need for more regulation; Bush seemed to support anything but. While he proposed giving tax credits to families with children at all income levels, either to help support stay-at-home parents or pay for care by other relatives, neighbors, or unregulated services, Dukakis wanted to direct Federal payments to low- and moderate-income families with wage-earning parents and cover only services that met Federal and state standards.

By the time Clinton went to Paris, the debate over child care had migrated to Capitol Hill, where a heated debate ensued between the Democratic-controlled Congress and the new Republican occupant of the White House. The Democrats persisted in calling for more regulation and subsidies to low- and moderate-income families, but also requested funding to improve the quantity and quality of services. Meanwhile the Republicans continued to resist regulation and pushed for measures encouraging mothers to stay at home (by this time more than half of women with children under age one were in the labor force). In addition, the Republicans, responding to heavy lobbying by evangelical groups, demanded that religiously affiliated services be covered.

After two years of wrangling, Congress finally produced the Child-Care Assistance Act, which was folded into the 1990 budget reconciliation bill. The $22.5 billion, five-year package expanded the earned-income tax credit to cover the cost of child care and offered grants to states to improve quality. When it came to regulation and religion, lawmakers compromised: To be eligible for Federal funds, providers had to be “licensed, regulated or registered” and comply with applicable state-level health and safety requirements, but parents would be allowed to obtain vouchers which they could use to pay for religiously-affiliated services. Modified over time and eventually renamed the Child Care and Development Block Grant, the CCAA is still in place, but it has failed to keep pace with the cost of child care and is thus considered inadequate by most Democrats and even some Republicans.

A Plethora of Proposals

This time around, the most thought-out plan comes from Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), whose Universal Child Care and Early Learning Act has two main goals: making affordable, high-quality child care universally available and preparing children for school. Services would be free to households earning less than 200 percent of the Federal poverty line (currently $51,200 for a family of four) and available on a sliding scale to households above that level, up to 7 percent of their total income. “In the wealthiest country on the planet, access to affordable and high-quality child care and early education should be a right, not a privilege reserved for the rich,” Warren has stated.

Warren envisions a network of federally funded but locally run facilities comprising both child care centers and family child care homes, all of which would be required to meet rigorous standards based on those currently governing U.S. military child care and the Head Start program. The estimated cost, $700 billion over ten years, would be offset by another Warren proposal: her “Ultra-Millionaire Tax.” Once in place, she estimates, her plan would nearly double the number of children in formal child care, from 6.8 million to 12 million.

Warren’s proposal has already generated lively debate on the Left as well as the Right, with some surprising convergence. Both Reihan Salam, executive editor of National Review, and Matt Bruenig, writing in Jacobin Magazine, worry that capping family expenditures at 7 percent of income would encourage parents to opt for expensive “Cadillac” child care centers, since the government would pick up the tab for any additional cost. While it is understandable that parents want the best for their offspring, such a policy would rapidly drive the Federal government into bankruptcy. As Salam puts it, “Closing future federal deficits with a wealth tax would require importing a slew of new ultra-millionaires from another dimension and then taxing them with abandon,” something Congress would likely prohibit. Bruenig, however, contends that the cost-control problem could be avoided by capping the amount centers could pass on to the government.

Both Bruenig and Salam also criticize Warren for not including some form of compensation for stay-at-home carers. Bruenig objects to this for reasons of equity; Salam, similarly, notes that this omission “would mean privileging one normative conception of family life over another.” Salam also fears that encouraging more parents (read: mothers) to enter the labor force would drive up the cost of living and competition for real estate in neighborhoods with good schools. Both authors note that, ironically, Warren brought this objection on herself by arguing, in her 2004 book The Two-Income Trap, that such “frenzied bidding wars” would force all parents to work outside the home, whether they wanted to or not. Oddly, Warren’s position here seemed to echo that of the Republicans in the 1988-89 debates over child care.

Other candidates are tailoring proposals to meet the child care needs of their own states. For Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), cost is paramount, so she proposes expanding the existing Federal child care tax credit from $3,000 to $14,000—a whopping figure, but one that is more in line with the actual cost of services in New York State. Gillibrand also calls for tax incentives to encourage businesses to create more on-site child care and become more family-friendly by allowing employees to telecommute.

Gillibrand is the only Democratic contender to propose mobilizing business in order to expand child care. While some policymakers see this as a sensible solution, others fear that on-site services bind employees too closely to a particular employer. Employees may be reluctant to leave jobs that don’t suit them or take better offers if it means uprooting their children from familiar surroundings and caregivers and facing the challenge of finding another slot. (Retaining valued employees is, of course, the reason employers offer on-site child care in the first place.)

Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) regards her state’s most pressing problem to be “child-care deserts”—rural areas where a lack of services bars parents, especially women, from working outside the home. Her bill, the Child Care Workforce and Facilities Act, which she introduced in March along with Republican Senator Dan Sullivan (AK), would address this shortage by allowing states to compete for Federal grants to create or expand existing facilities and train more child care professionals. “Child care shortages across the country pose a moral and financial issue for communities when parents are forced to decide between working and staying at home with their children,” Klobuchar states on her website.

Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) is also concerned about the supply of qualified child care professionals, but her approach differs markedly from Klobuchar’s. Instead of calling for Federal funding, she supports unionization for child care workers. By organizing, they could raise wages and Improve working conditions, thereby making the occupation more attractive. Harris recently told a contingent of workers, “The greatest expression of a society’s love of its children is to put resources and support into anybody who is caring for those children.” Like Gillibrand, Harris also calls for increasing the refundable tax credit—in her version, from $3,000 to $6,000—but she would not limit it to child care expenses.

Just a Women’s Issue?

Disappointingly, most of the male Democratic candidates have shown little interest in, much less understanding of, child care. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), along with Gillibrand, Harris, and Warren, co-sponsored the 2017 Child Care for Working Families Act, but he does not feature it on his website. Entrepreneur Andrew Yang calls for “tax breaks for child care services,” without acknowledging those that are already in place. Julian Castro (D-TX), former Maryland Representative John Delaney, former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, and Washington State Governor Jay Inslee all express support for pre-K or early childhood education without indicating that they understand the difference between those part-time programs and full-day child care. Inslee, in fact, has been called out for just that. Ryan Pricco, a Washington-based child care advocate, chided his governor for failing to appreciate the scope of the challenge. “We’re literally at a point where demand for child care is higher than it’s ever been in our country’s history,” Pricco said, “and we’ve never, ever invested in child care at a level that would provide an infrastructure to take on that demand.”

Other male candidates have been even less forthcoming. Beto O’Rourke, a former Congressman from Texas, has been rather cavalier on the issue, joking that his wife was raising their kids “sometimes with my help.”

The two male exceptions are Bernie Sanders (D-VT) and Pete Buttigieg, the gay Democratic mayor of South Bend, Indiana. Since his run in 2016, Sanders has made child care one of his central issues. While the female candidates all refer to their personal challenges in finding decent affordable child care, Sanders has relied on the experience of his policy director, Kathryn Becker Van Haste, who reportedly had difficulty finding slots for her children in both Vermont and Washington, DC. But limited personal experience has not prevented Sanders from sharpening his analysis of the child care policy dilemma.

Like the other candidates, Sanders regards the cost of care as a huge burden for many families. To make matters worse, he believes, child care workers are, in effect, subsidizing the system through their low wages. Sanders agrees with Harris that their wages should be raised but warns that doing so without public subsidies would make the cost of child care even more prohibitive for parents.

One reason child care is so costly, according to Sanders, is that the United States is the only developed country that does not offer paid parental leave, which gives parents the option of staying home to care for newborns. We have had unpaid family and medical leave since 1993, when it was signed into law by newly elected President Bill Clinton (after being vetoed twice by President Bush), but low- and moderate-income parents can seldom afford to take it because it means foregoing wages. However their alternative—using infant child care—is hardly viable since it the most expensive of all because of (understandably) high mandatory caregiver-to-child ratios.

Buttigieg also acknowledges the need for paid parental leave. In response to a question about child care at a recent town hall in Fort Dodge, he deplored the fact that the United States is the only advanced country that does not have such a policy and reported that, in defiance of his state’s refusal to set a community standard, he had instituted six weeks of paid parental leave for all city employees, joking that it caused “something of a baby boom.” With regard to child care, Buttigieg acknowledged the high cost, calling for a “child allowance for working parents,” and he also suggested that there should also be some kind of assistance for elder care, but did not go into detail about either one.

The Republican Option

Except for the aforementioned Senator Sullivan, Republican lawmakers have been largely silent on the subject of child care. President Trump’s daughter Ivanka, however, has made it one of her signature issues. In one respect, Ivanka Trump’s ideas resemble Kirsten Gillibrand’s: Both favor encouraging businesses to take the initiative in increasing supply. But while Gillibrand does not specify either a funding cap or time limit for Federal aid, Trump calls for a one-time, $1 billion investment “to increase the supply of child care to underserved populations.”

It is not unusual for Republicans to trust the market to provide social benefits (think health insurance), but Ivanka Trump’s plan adds a few extra GOP twists. First, she stipulates that states must “establish targets for reducing unnecessary regulatory or other requirements that limit the supply or increase the cost of child care.” Such a proviso is alarming in a human service field that is already notoriously under-regulated. The White House, however, insists that what daughter Trump seeks to eliminate are not health and safety standards but, for example, restrictive zoning laws that keep child care centers out of residential neighborhoods. The statement suggests that someone in the President’s circle was aware of the Democratic outcry that ensued when George H.W. Bush tried to lower standards. But the proposal itself offers no guarantee that regulations needed to protect children’s well-being will be maintained, much less strengthened.

Second, in a little-noticed section of her proposal, Trump suggests that states use funding “to support child care providers that operate during nontraditional hours.” It is true that many employees, especially but not only those in low-skilled jobs, must work long hours and take shifts that fall outside the usual 9-to-5 parameters that child care services typically accommodate. But should children have to pay the price for satisfying employers who demand that workers be available at all hours of the day or night? An emergency room physician who works the night shift can probably afford to hire a babysitter to care for her child at home, but an office cleaner cannot, so her child would be the one placed in a “night nursery,” possibly to the child’s emotional detriment. (And when, one might wonder, does that office cleaner herself have a chance to sleep?) Having more facilities with non-traditional hours in place would only encourage employers to take advantage of wage-earning parents who lack other job opportunities.

Child care aside, Congressional Republicans have been more vocal when it comes to improving maternity and parental leave, which has always been unpaid in the United States. To remedy this shortcoming, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Representative Ann Wagner (R-MI) recently introduced the New Parents Act, a bill that would cover about two-thirds of the wages of parents earning less than the median family income (currently about $60,000). “Our economic policies have left young, working families behind at a time when our marriage and childbirth rates are falling,” Rubio told the Washington Post. “It is time to realign our economic policies in support of American families.”

But again, this proposal comes with a Republican-friendly twist: parents would have to repay any leave money they receive by foregoing some of their future Social Security benefits, by either delaying retirement for three to six months or allowing deductions from their pensions for up to five years.

The United States Among Its Peers

The absence of paid parental leave and universal child care are just two of the (non)policies that make the United States exceptional when it comes to social protection. Most of its political and economic peers in the OECD have some sort of public provisions for young children—at least part-day early childhood education, if not full-day child care—leaving the United States at the low end of the scale.

In the field of child care, France and the Scandinavian countries are the well-known stars, with systems of universal, high-quality, and highly subsidized provisions that have been expanding since the post-World War II era. The United States could learn a great deal about child care from these countries, yet most of our policymakers seem either willfully oblivious to or reluctant to cite these excellent models (perhaps out of fear of being labelled socialists). Again, Sanders is the exception; his proposal touts Finland as a model, where even the wealthiest parents pay only $300 a month for child care (whereas for American parents, the average fee is $1,000 per month per child).

To be sure, the political cultures and associated histories of welfare state development in these model nations differ markedly from those of the United States, but their trajectories may be converging. Child care experts on both sides of the North Atlantic have historically separated child care from early childhood education. But new studies of early brain development have drawn policymakers’ attention to the overlap between these two realms and the need to integrate them more fully. In the United States, “educare” has become a catchword, while the Europeans have led the way in devising programs in “ECEC”—Early Childhood Education and Care.

While the goal of gender equality does not enjoy quite the level of support in the United States that it does in Scandinavia (where it is not only enabled by social policy but written into many areas of law), it has certainly become more mainstream here than ever. With so many women vying to lead our nation and a record number of women in Congress, it is becoming clear that advocacy for child care, among other women-friendly positions, is good politics—so much so that even the current incumbent of the White House seems to be coming on board.

The proposals on child care that current candidates have (or have not) laid out tell us much more than their views on this one particular issue. They indicate whether candidates view children solely as an individual and family responsibility, or as the country’s future and therefore worthy of public support. They reveal candidates’ beliefs about women’s roles in our society and their commitment to achieving gender equality. They also show how candidates think about what role, if any, government should play in organizing and supporting social provision.

Debating child care may not only produce a stronger and wiser approach to this important issue but will also give voters an opportunity to see the candidates in action, addressing an issue that challenges millions of families every day. While not the only basis for choosing our next President, child care policy seems like a good place to start.

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Make Aristocracy Great Again

Far from exposing meritocracy as a lie, last month’s college admissions scandal revealed just how meritocratic our society has become—how it distributes power on the basis of talent, how it assesses talent on the basis of tests, and how it constructs tests that are very, very hard to game. The power is why rich people bribe their way into Yale; the hard-to-gameness is why bribery is expensive.

So expensive, in fact, that the bigwigs charged in admissions-gate are actually the exceptions that prove the rule: By and large our elite consists of talented self-starters whose credentials reflect grit and IQ more than birth or blood—who don’t need bribes, thank you very much. They thus tend to see themselves as having earned their status, and everyone else as having earned theirs. “You’re here because you’re competent, smart, hardworking,” the meritocracy insists, “not because you hit the jackpot.”

Except most of them did hit the jackpot, insofar as competence, drive, and IQ all depend on factors largely beyond our control—the genetic-environmental matrix through which talent is formed. And that gap, between self-conception and real life, causes two problems.

First, meritocrats often lack what we might call a leadership temperament. Because their status depends on aptitude—nothing more, nothing less—they tend to spurn patriotism and piety and noblesse oblige, virtues our republic desperately needs. The result, Yuval Levin notes, is that “even when today’s elites devote themselves to public service,” they do not “see it as fulfilling an obligation. . . .but as further demonstrating their own high-mindedness”—moralizing unmoored from morality.

Second, because smart people tend to have smart babies, who grow up around smart peers, meritocracy ends up being hereditary despite its democratic pretenses, based around raw intelligence as opposed to some genuinely endogenous trait. You could address both problems by paring back merit-based admissions to focus instead on elite-crafting—on picking the best leaders rather than the best students, on making sure your class cares about and represents the people it will one day rule. Several schemes might work here, from increased demographic quotas to full-fledged lottocracy.

But each entails a trade-off between stewardship and fairness, for although talent is largely unchosen, there’s still something perverse about a brilliant physics whizz or chess champ or debater being turned away from his dream school because he’s not lucky, or because he is Asian, especially when some Ivy League students can’t even write coherent English. It’s doubtful many people would accept this trade; more to the point, it’s doubtful that they should.

The question, then, is whether you can have meritocratic admissions without a meritocratic self-conception. And the answer depends on how, exactly, that conception came about.

In one telling (the one presupposed above), meritocratic criteria bred meritocratic culture by selecting for and valuing intelligence, causing elites to see themselves more as victors of a competition than stewards of a republic—more Horatio Alger than Horace Mann. It also reorganized social life along cognitive lines, which had the paradoxical effect of entrenching inequality rather than challenging it.

But another story (the one I find most plausible) goes like this: Meritocratic culture—its arrogance, its excess, its egoism—arose out of a peculiar set of historical conditions having very little to do with meritocratic criteria. Rather it was the ’60s lurch toward individualism, away from piety and tradition, that made personal achievement so central to elite credentialing. At the same time, it undermined what had long sustained America’s class compact: a chastening form of social awareness, of seeing your place in (and duty to) society.

On this view, merit-based admissions are a symptom, not a cause, of elite decadence, in which case getting rid of them won’t do much to remoralize our upper class. It’s possible, of course, that culture and criteria inevitably co-occur, that you can’t fill the Ivies with brilliant overachievers and expect them to exhibit patriotism or civic-mindedness. But that account seems too neat for it to be the whole story—not when meritocracy emerged during a period of social upheaval, not when self-love and secularism left such indelible stains on American life.

So: How do we wash them out?

You could argue revised admissions criteria would help by disrupting meritocracy’s cultural logic, signaling to elites that they haven’t earned their status after all. But those revisions wouldn’t occur unless our elite already believed talent was contingent, heteronomous, unchosen, at which point it would no longer think of itself in meritocratic terms. The solution assumes away the problem.

What’s needed is a project of moral reform that challenges bourgeois selfishness without attacking meritocracy per se—that vilifies greed instead of grit, individualism instead of intelligence. Easier said than done, I know, and arguably impossible absent some sort of communitarian revival.

But a communitarian revival seems less far-fetched—and less offensive—than trading fair play for just rule. So if we want to Make Aristocracy Great Again, we’d better hope “moral meritocrat” is not an oxymoron.

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Will China Drive a Wedge Between the US and Europe?

Europe finally seems to be waking up to the fact that is has been the object of China’s extended “western strategy” for the past two decades. In Brussels, there is an emerging awareness that the flow of Chinese money into Europe has positioned Beijing to shape the Continent’s economic landscape and influence its politics. But one aspect of Beijing’s long march west that has yet to register fully is its determination to alter the military and security calculus in Europe and across the Atlantic. If unchecked, this push into Europe will turn the Continent into yet another battleground for Beijing’s deepening great power competition with the United States.

China’s economic modernization has been accompanied by geostrategic assertiveness, first along its immediate periphery, then deeper into the Indo-Pacific, and now across Central Asia into Southeastern Europe. China’s military forays into Europe ramped up in 2011, with the first notable deployment of the People’s Liberation Army Navy in the Mediterranean. Since the publication of its 2015 “white paper” on military power, Beijing has pursued, in addition to military modernization, a determined long-term effort to increase the equipment and skill level of the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), and to gain access to key ports in the Mediterranean as a gateway to southeastern Europe. PLAN naval operations in the Med have increased rapidly in the past two years, with Beijing leveraging new logistics capabilities and the supply base it opened in Djibouti in 2017. In the fall of 2018 the PLAN completed its first joint naval exercise with the EU Naval Force in the Gulf of Aden. The degree of interoperability in the Mediterranean and in the Black Sea today between the PLAN and the Russian Navy, which have conducted joint drills since 2015, further underscores the shifts in the regional balance of power in southeastern Europe over the past decade. The PLAN is also targeting the High North; China is currently building a 30,000-ton nuclear-powered icebreaker.

The PLAN has been mapping out the operational zones it deems strategically important, gathering maritime information, and building on the extension of the Belt and Road Initiative and the 16+1 format to grow China’s political influence. Through its growing number of port calls and joint drills, the Chinese navy aims to gain experience from advanced naval powers, including Europe and Russia. China’s current stakes in port facilities in the Mediterranean, including in Greece, Egypt, Spain, Morocco, and Italy, have positioned Beijing to project power into southeastern Europe and deeper into the Continent.

Equally important has been China’s military entry into the Baltic Sea, and especially its seeming determination to expand its reach further north into the Arctic. Chinese-Russian joint maneuvers in the Baltic in 2017, including Russia’s granting PLAN vessels access to the Baltiysk naval facility in the Kaliningrad District, speak to the growing level of cooperation between Moscow and Beijing. There are also indications that the PLAN intends to deepen its cooperation with Russia’s Northern Fleet, with the Barents Sea serving as the gateway to the Arctic. This increased cooperation between the Chinese and Russian militaries reflects the larger alignment of their geostrategic objectives.

While China still lacks full blue-water capabilities, the Chinese Communist Party has prioritized investment in the PLAN, with Beijing reportedly planning to operate five aircraft carriers by 2025 (at least one of them, and possibly two, nuclear-powered), with some projecting that by 2035 China will be operating four nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. As these new ships come online, China will be poised to expand its global naval presence and to increase exponentially its activities in the European theater. Since Europe’s alliance with the United States is central to the global power distribution, the effects of China’s competing for influence will ripple across the globe.

Whereas the United States sees European states as key allies, China sees Europe as a region whose wealth and technology can be mined to further its strategic objectives. At its core, China’s Europe strategy, including its economic push, seems to be driven by Beijing’s determination to prevent Europe from helping the United States contain its global rise. Launched in 2000, the larger Chinese “western strategy” has followed a three-pronged approach. The first prong involved targeting Eastern Europe with Chinese cash for infrastructure development to solidify continental links to Belt and Road Initiative projects in Eurasia. Next came China’s acquisition of assets in Southern Europe after the 2009 Eurozone crisis. Finally, China has targeted Western Europe, aiming its largest investments at corporate acquisitions, especially European high technology companies, to accelerate China’s decoupling from the United States as its principal supplier of know-how.

While the Chinese military’s growing interest in Europe follows almost two decades of rapidly increasing economic activity across the Continent by Chinese- and Hong Kong-based entities, the trend has truly ramped up over the past ten years. On the investment side, Europe has seen about 50 percent more activity from China than from the United States. China has also established a dominant position in Europe as the preferred provider of current and next-generation digital networks. Washington’s concern over Huawei’s provision of 5G technology across the European Union is but the most recent indicator of this trend. Ranging across loans, infrastructure projects, stocks, real estate, and technology acquisition, China has embedded itself in Europe in a way that is poised to change both intra-European relations and the very foundations of security cooperation across the Atlantic. The 16+1 format in Central and Eastern Europe, established by China in 2012 (Greece just declared its intent to join, and the organization will be renamed 17+1), has indirectly framed the Italian government’s decision to sign on to the Belt and Road Initiative as the latest manifestation of this trend.

Two key developments have aided the rise of Chinese influence in Europe: first, the resurgence of a revisionist Russia along Europe’s eastern flank, which has drawn NATO’s focus away from Southeastern and Western Europe; and second, the rise of centrifugal tendencies in Europe following the Eurozone crisis and MENA immigration debacles, which make a coherent EU-wide response to the surge of Chinese influence unlikely. Developments in the Caucasus and on Europe’s eastern flank over the past decade have proved fortuitous for China’s Europe strategy. Since the 2008 Russian-Georgian war, China has benefited from Russia’s great power revisionism, which has drawn the attention of the United States and Europe to the Continent’s periphery. Russia’s seizure of Crimea in particular was helpful for Beijing, as it cast Russia in the role of America’s principal adversary. Meanwhile, the regnant globalist ideology and the lingering consensus in Washington that market access and export-driven modernization would lead China down the path of democratic transformation reinforced the policy of “benign neglect” towards China.

The hardening of U.S.-Russian relations also made it easier for China to deepen its influence in Central Asia. Squeezed by sanctions, Russia has struggled with a host of economic issues, giving it little choice but to accede to China’s “Big Eurasia” agenda. Over the past decade, Central Asia has restructured its economic links away from Russia and toward China. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently remarked that Moscow has no issue with China’s Eurasia strategy. China is now decisively outpacing Russia in the region on investment, trade, and infrastructure development, investing heavily in the Kazakhstan-China oil pipeline and the Central Asia-China natural gas pipeline.

For the United States, there is a clear national security dimension to the impending tectonic economic shift in Europe. Increasingly, Beijing’s financial and political influence, both in the United Kingdom and on the Continent, are calling into question America’s traditional assumptions when it comes to close cooperation with our allies, including issues surrounding sensitive technologies. The situation is likely to get even more difficult in short order, as the next round of U.S.-China great power competition is poised to extend beyond the economic and military domains, morphing into an ideological competition between American free market democratic capitalism and Chinese state-driven mercantilism.

China’s deepening involvement in Europe is now registering at multiple levels—financial, technological, political, and increasingly military—and could soon reorder the foundations of Euro-Atlantic relations. If current trends continue, one consequence may be the bifurcation of Europe into one area, in which the Transatlantic link remains strong, and another, in which China will increasingly shape not just the economic but also the political and military security environment. Though the outcome of China’s accelerating competition with the United States is by no means preordained, one thing is clear: China has become a power in Europe, perhaps even a “European power” increasingly capable of shaping the Continent’s destiny and Europe’s relations with the United States.

The post Will China Drive a Wedge Between the US and Europe? appeared first on The American Interest.

The Rule of Law in the Russian Jungle

Damir Marusic for TAI: What is Russia’s stated case for holding the kidnapped Ukrainian seamen captive?

Ilya Novikov: First of all, I will not use the term “kidnapping” because the Russians insist it was an arrest, and we, the defense team, prefer to call it a capture of prisoners of war. In my opinion, the Russians didn’t really plan things this way. What happened? Let me explain.

On the morning of the 25th of November last year, three Ukrainians vessels approached the Kerch Strait, from the side of the open sea [ed. entering the Azov Sea]. They were ordered to stop by the Russian Navy—the part of the Russian Navy that belongs to the Russian Border Service. (They have vessels of their own, it’s not a part of the Black Sea Fleet.) The Ukrainian vessels were told that this is a closed area, which is not true because such messages were not dispatched by the navigation system.

That very evening, after dark, it became quite clear that the Russians would not permit the Ukrainian vessels to enter the Azov Sea—access to which, I hasten to add, is guaranteed both by international law of the seas and by bilateral treaties between Russia and Ukraine.

When it became clear that they would not be permitted to enter, the Ukrainian vessels were ordered by the Ukrainian Navy to return and to stop any attempts to enter the strait. And when they set sail towards the open water, they were attacked by the Russian Navy. They were fired upon. According to our information, more than 1,000 rounds were fired at them out of 30 millimeter automatic guns. Three of the Ukrainians seamen were wounded. And after the vessels had been stopped, the Russian Navy boarded them. The Ukrainian seamen were made to proceed to the Russian-controlled Kerch Port on the Crimean Peninsula, where they were arrested.

From the Russian point of view, this is just a normal criminal case. There are no international law aspects, no politics to talk about—nothing. That’s their position.

We insist that the Russian government is wrong three times over. First, they are wrong when they claim that they are entitled to control movement and navigation in the Kerch Strait. This position is not in accordance with international law. The Russians cannot claim that the Kerch Strait itself is a line of the Russian border, but they nevertheless insist that the Ukrainian vessels violated the Russian state border.

Second, they are wrong from the point of view of Russian criminal law. The 24 Ukrainian seamen, five of whom are officers, were indicted for violating Russian state borders as an organized group, which means they face up to six years of prison time each. I keep repeating the question when pleading the case in court, when discussing with investigators, or when talking to people who believe that Russia has a valid argument: “You insist that there was a violation of the border. What is a Ukrainian sailor supposed to do when he supposedly understood that his captain had violated the Russian border? Should he have jumped over into the sea and drowned himself in order to not become a culprit from the Russian point of view?” And nobody has proposed any reasonable alternative. It’s quite impossible to explain how thesailors would have enter into a conspiracy with their superior officers. It’s impossible to explain what they had to do when their superior officers supposedly decided to sail the vessels towards the Azov Sea. But Russia insists it was all one large group. It’s absurd. It’s nonsense.

Third, the Russian are wrong about the current legal status of the prisoners. Like I said, I’m quite sure nobody on the Russian side planned things to go this way. They just decided after they had fired upon the vessels and captured the people to treat them as ordinary criminals in order to justify that they opened fire.

But it happens that, due to not thinking things through, they captured them exactly as prisoners of war. We refer to the Third Geneva Convention about the treatment of prisoners of war. It states very clearly in Article 2 that, whether or not declared war exists between two states, any member of the military personnel of a state party to the Convention captured as a result of hostilities—as a result of military conflict of any nature—will be treated as a prisoner of war and will enjoy all the guarantees the Convention prescribes.

Russia is thus not entitled to hold these people in jail-style facilities. They cannot be held in custody in jail. Meanwhile, they are right now in the top-security Lefortovo jail in Moscow. They cannot be separated from one another. And yet they are being held in 24 separate cells. They cannot be prohibited from wearing their uniform. And yet the first thing the Russians did after having brought them to jail was to force them to change into prison uniforms. If Russia wants to legally prosecute them, they should be prosecuted in military courts. They were denied that. They were told, “You are just normal criminals. You are not members of the Russian armed services.”

So we insist that, given the situation, Russia must meet all the conditions set forth in the Third Geneva Convention. They have failed to do so. We are quite sure that our case is well-grounded.

The Russian position is quite simple: “We completely ignore international law. We know nothing about what these laws say about straits. We simply arrested 24 culprits. We are going to prosecute them as normal criminals.”

Karina Orlova for TAI: Given the total disrespect for the rule of law in Russia, do you have any hopes to win this case in court? Or are you hoping for a prisoner exchange, as occurred with another former client of yours, the captured Ukrainian pilot Nadia Savchenko?

IN: Actually, the case of Nadia Savchenko was an exception. I believe that her release was not motivated by the Russian authorities’ eagerness to get their two soldiers released in exchange for her, but rather was the result of uniquely strong international pressure.

KO: Interesting.

IN: In the beginning of the Savchenko case, I once joked that we will have her released after the President of United States and the Pope both speak up in her support. The President of the United States and the Pope, as well as the President of France, the Prime Minister of Germany and others in fact did express their support, so Putin had no other option but to release her.

The experience of the last five years has shown that the Russian authorities are not too concerned with the destiny of their own people in Ukraine. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry has published a list of some 100 Ukrainian citizens who have so far been arrested and convicted in Russia for political reasons. They proposed an exchange, but the Russians have thus far not shown any interest. So we cannot expect that the Ukrainian seamen will be exchanged for anyone.

Right now, we hope that strong messages—like the sanctions that have already been imposed on Russia and Russian officials as a result of this incident—will help. President Trump’s refusal to meet with Putin—when he canceled his meeting with Putin [ed. on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Argentina] and explained clearly that the reason was this very incident—can also help persuade Putin that it’s not worth prolonging the situation. He needs to get rid of it.

We are also quite surethat after 2014 [ed. the Maidan uprising in Ukraine], in cases such as these, there are no effective legal remedies in Russian courts. No Russian judge will do anything other than what he is told to by his superiors. A very clear message was sent to us in the middle of January, when the arrest terms were prolonged by three different judges in Lefortovo District Court in Moscow. These three judges delivered strikingly similar opinions in their decisions. And the same situation happened in the court of appeals in Moscow City Court. We are quite sure that we have no options. We cannot persuade the judge because the judge is not a person to be persuaded. He knows from the very beginning what he has to do.

DM: I read that in the appeals case, the deliberation took eight hours, behind closed doors. What were they doing for eight hours if they are getting phoned-in instructions from the top?

IN: I can only talk about the part of the case I myself participated in. We have 24 defendants in total. They were divided into six groups of four. And the attorneys—and this is a very important part of this story—the attorneys are not permitted to present a combined defense. I was told I cannot defend more than one defendant in this case.

I saw how it worked very clearly in our situation. It might be normal for a judge to deliberate on the decision of prolonging detention for an hour or so. But our motion to change the venue to a military court was a surprise to them. The fact that we claimed that the seamen are prisoners of war and should not be put in a detention facility was not a surprise for the judges—we had already made that claim as part of our case. But the motion tochange the venue was a surprise. And the deliberation on this subject took each of the three judges much longer than an hour and a half. But they adjourned at the same time.

You asked me about phone calls. Yes, I believe there were phone calls. It’s just how business in Russian courts is conducted.

DM: If you could just maybe talk a little bit more about that. Besides your pro bono human rights work, you have a private law firm as well. Give our readers a sense: in your experience, is there any rule of law in Russia? How does it work? How broken is it?

IN: It’s quite broken.

DM: Bribery?

IN: It’s not about bribery. The Russian judicial system is very corrupt, but in a different way, not by private money. Every judge in Russia understands that he or she may be easily disrobed if the head judge of the court is unhappy with him or her. They understand quite well that if they acquit the defendant, that acquittal will be appealed by the prosecution—something that is permitted by Russian law—and that acquittals are overruled by appeal courts much more often than convictions. So even if the judge sees that the case is poorly investigated, that the prosecution has no position, just in order to save his own career, just in order to not get in a quarrel with the prosecution, the judge will strive to do the prosecutor’s work for them, and will lean towards conviction even with a lack of needed evidence.

So even in non-political cases, in so-called normal criminal cases, the defendants cannot expect much from the system. If their case has already been brought to court, if the case was not dropped by the prosecutor’s office, he is as good as convicted already. And we, the attorneys, know that the main part of our job, where there are the best chances for a client, is to have the charges dropped before the case is brought to court. When it’s in court, it’s too late to do anything. If you’re in court, the best you can hope to achieve are some palliative measures. At that point, we just try to save our client from the worst, not to get him acquitted.

KO: That’s probably what explains the recent statistic that 0.5 percent of cases lead to acquittals in Russian courts, right?

IN: I don’t believe it’s 0.5%. It’s a tricky number. It’s counted out of the cases without plea bargains. And in Russia, plea bargaining is something very different from what it is in America. In Russia up to 80 percent of all cases end up with a plea bargain. But it’s not bargaining, it’s unconditional surrender. It’s called a “special form of procedure,” but really, it’s not special. It’s standard procedure. The exceptional is called regular, normal justice. People have to unconditionally surrender to the prosecution and face whatever punishment the prosecution may call for, realizing they have no chances to get acquitted in trial. This is so normal in Russia, that it’s hard to explain to an outsider how we deal with it. We just live in it.

KO: You said that it’s not corrupted by private money…

IN: It’s corrupted wholly by the state.

KO: Yes, but there are new statistics that claim the FSB has increased the number of cases it runs on economic crimes. Can we talk, for example, about Michael Calvey, the American investor arrested and put in jail earlier this year…

IN: Unfortunately, it’s my case and I’m not entitled to comment on it because I’m on a legal team that defends one of the Russian citizens in the same case.

KO: Fair enough. But is it fair to say that more and more businessmen in Russia are fighting each other with the help of the security services? That the FSB opens criminal probes into well-connected businessmen’s competitors in order to strip them of their assets or money?

IN: That’s not something that started recently. It has always been this way. It’s just that within the last five years, after Crimea, with the Russian economy crippled, when there is less and less money in Russia, it’s just become more harsh. There are far fewer possibilities for compromise. The siloviki have developed greater appetites. Competition has become more difficult and more zero-sum. This entire situation resembles the so-called cursed 1990s. It was one of the greatest Russian political traumas, the 1990s. But we have pretty much the same thing right now—maybe even worse, because we have Crimea. We have a quarrel with, actually, half the world. We got involved in Syria.

KO: What about human rights cases? You are representing Oyub Titiev, the Chechen human rights activist currently detained in Grozny. [ed. Titiev was the head of human rights NGO Memorial, whose previous leader in Chechnya, Natalya Estemirova, was kidnapped and murdered in 2009.] How does justice and the rule of law work in a case like that?

IN: I have already explained how it’s normal to not be able to win a case in Russian courts. The best a lawyer can do for his client is to prevent the case from coming to court. Acquittal is scandalous; having the case dropped by the prosecutor is not so scandalous. It’s how it works.

Titiev’s case was a special one. He was accused under Article 228 of Russia’s criminal code, which criminalizes the possession of drugs. As a result of this statute, a great number of people are sentenced every year to jail time.

DM: In Chechnya, or all across Russia?

IN: All across Russia. In Chechnya the situation is somewhat different, because Chechnya’s President, Ramzan Kadyrov, personally decided to crack down on drug addicts. So while in other parts of Russia people go to jail, people in Chechnya are often just killed.

Titiev is a practicing Muslim and a man of great authority in his community. We had as many as 20 of his neighbors testify on his behalf, most of them older men, of the generation of Chechens who were born in exile after the entire Chechen nation was deported [ed. by Stalin in the 1940s]. When they returned, they came back as whole villages. They were born in the same village in exile, and they returned to their homeland, villages in tact. Titiev’s village was called Kurchaloi.

These people know each other from childhood. They came to the court and said, “We do not believe it. Titiev could not be in possession of drugs.” I believe that’s the reason he was charged exactly with that. The purpose was not only to stop his activities as a human rights advocate in Chechnya’s capital, Grozny—not only to punish him for his activism, but to intimidate him and shame him, to make him a pariah to his neighbors. Had people believed that he had drugs on him, he would have probably been marked for death in his village. And it’s quite clear that that was the authorities’purpose.

The drugs—200 grams of marijuana, a rather big package—were planted in his car in January of 2018. Normally when a defendant says, “These are not my drugs,” there is no way to find out the whole truth: you can either believe him or the police. [The various irregularities and procedural violations surrounding his arrest] give us a very good way to demonstrate who is right in this story. I am quite positive that he is not guilty.

And the level of support he has received can only be explained by the merit of his goodness. International institutions and human rights NGOs supported him because they believe he is innocent. He received two international awards for his human rights activity while he was in jail. And all this support probably explains why his sentence was lenient by Russian standards, and especially by political standards. He was sentenced to four years in a penal colony instead of 10 years of jail time.

DM: To circle back to the beginning: international pressure is important, even if it doesn’t solve everything.

KO: Even for Kadyrov?

IN: Kadyrov was quite angry when people started to support Titiev. It’s not common in Chechnya to challenge what authorities say, and Kadyrov made a number of angry comments. He complained, “How can you call this man a human rights defender? Because a real human rights defender would have challenged Instagram for deleting my account.” [ed. Kadyrov’s account on Instagram was suspended in 2017.] He is quite sensitive to such things.

KO: Kadyrov called Oyub a drug addict, right?

IN: Yes, and after Kadyrov publicly stated that Titiev was a drug addict, we could not expectany Chechen policeman, or investigator, or prosecutor, or judge to challenge Kadyrov. That would have been quite impossible.

DM: And yet international pressure still led to a more lenient sentence for him, even in Chechnya, even under Kadyrov.

IN: This level of international support made this situation inconvenient for Russia itself. Putin was personally addressed, at least from what I understand, by French President Emanuel Macron, specifically on the Titiev case. And it probably had an effect.

Conversely, the other lesson we can derive from such cases is that the worst possible option is when you start with international pressure but cannot deliver it on a high enough level, or consistently. If a person who initially received some support, if their case is forgotten, that person becomes subject to revenge by the authorities.

So it’s important, if you start to support somebody, don’t stop it. Take the case of the Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov. He received some significant support from many different countries early on, but it was clearly not enough to gain his release. Now he is in a high-security prison serving his 20-year sentence, and we see no signs that he will be released anytime soon.

KO: You know what caught my ear? You said that the community in Chechnya, in Kurchaloi, they did not believe a word from the prosecution. So does it mean that the authoritarian Kadyrov is not as powerful as he is portrayed, and as he likes to be portrayed? Because Kadyrov called Oyub a drug addict, a bad person, a criminal. But then this community raises its voice, as if it couldn’t care less about what Kadyrov has to say.

IN: It’s a good point. It’s not only what they believed, but that they spoke up openly. It was not just rumors, people whispering seditiously about the authorities. The official account was challenged in the courtroom by these people, openly.

I think that Kadyrov may be sensitive to such things because he claims to not only be the ruler, but also the leader of his nation. He claims that he expresses what his people want and what they believe. And of course it was important for him to silence Titiev, but he doesn’t want to get in a quarrel with his people either. So, I’m sure that is a factor in our story.

I would like to tell you about one more illustrative case. Have you heard about the Yatsenyuk case? The former Ukrainian prime minister? Did you know that he was detained for a short time in Geneva after Russia placed a notice for his detention?

DM: They had an Interpol red notice out there, yes.

IN: Did you know what the reason was?

DM: No.

IN: Russia claimed that in 1995, when Yatsenyuk was 20 and a student in law school, he traveled to Russia—to Chechnya—and took part in the war there, and that he shot 30 Russian soldiers and officers, himself.

DM: Chechen Rambo.

IN: You are smiling, you don’t believe it because you know who Yatsenyuk is, and what he looks like. You can evaluate the likelihood of the validity of these accusations, and you don’t believe it. Now let me explain to you that two other Ukrainian citizens were captured, tortured, and sentenced to 20 years each in high-security prisons. Both have already served 5 years, solely in order to make the case against Yatsenyuk.

Actually, it’s not a funny story at all. We’re sure that they are innocent, that they were not in Chechnya at the time. They had good alibis, but not good enough for a Russian court. The case was tried in Chechnya, but then was appealed in the Supreme Court of Russia. The Investigative Committee Head Aleksander Bastrykin, in an interview with an official Russian newspaper, assured their conviction before the trial even started. He said, “Yes, we found out that Yatsenyuk was fighting in Chechnya against our soldiers, we are quite sure of that.”

The red notice was canceled by Interpol within two weeks as being politically motivated, Yatsenyuk never faced any real possibility of being extradited to Russia. But these two people whose detention and conviction was only motivated by the wish of the Russian state to intimidate the prime minister of another country, keep serving their terms in very harsh conditions.

That’s a landmark case that shows very clearly how justice works in Russia.

The post The Rule of Law in the Russian Jungle appeared first on The American Interest.

Punishment with a Point: How to Use the Traffic Code to Improve Misdemeanor Justice

Disorderly conduct, possession of marijuana, and trespassing. Crimes of the century, they are not. Yet their impact on those who commit them—including everything from employment barriers to the social stigma of a criminal record—may well last that long. Even a victimless misdemeanor can derail the life of a transgressor.

But it doesn’t have to. And we know this because we’ve already devised a way of addressing offenses that eschews excessive criminalization and mass incarceration: the U.S. traffic code.

Traffic infractions such as speeding and running red lights cause more than 32,000 fatalities and two million injuries every year, whereas nonviolent misdemeanors, by definition, do not. Yet we punish the latter much more aggressively than the former on the flawed assumption that nonviolent misdemeanors are exceptional acts, meriting heavier sanctions and higher levels of enforcement. But this is false—and what’s more, few of us make it to middle age without at least one potentially criminal misstep. All too often, the dividing line between those with a record and those without is not moral desert but a combination of luck and systemic bias. A points-based system, not unlike the one we use for traffic violations, could begin to change that.

The Traffic Code

The unforgiving skew of our criminal system translates into a panoply of collateral consequences that attach to even minor offenses. Depending on the particular offense, thousands of legal prohibitions and constraints can snap into place the instant a person is convicted, covering everything from professional and business licenses to parental rights and volunteer opportunities. Often, a mere brush with the justice system is all it takes to start pushing a life off course; researchers have found that even a single arrest for disorderly conduct reduces the odds of securing employment.

These effects are, in most instances, extremely difficult to outrun. Expungement may require lengthy waiting periods or involve byzantine procedures and hefty fees that make it a practical impossibility. As a result, the vast majority of eligible individuals never have their records expunged. Then again, even “successful” expungement may not actually help many people; the background checks employers rely on are rife with errors, and the routine publication of booking photos and arrest reports ensures that many alleged crimes remain a permanent stain on an individual’s reputation, regardless of expungement.

The traffic code eschews this kind of “one strike and you’re out” approach in favor of what is known as a demerit point system. While the details vary, generally it involves drivers accumulating demerit points based on the severity of any traffic infractions they commit. As these points build up on a person’s record, he or she will face a series of escalating sanctions.

Unlike most entries on a criminal record, these points are not permanent. Over time, they will automatically drop off a person’s driving record. Usually, drivers can accelerate this process and knock points off their record early by completing driver’s education or other safety courses. Only for very serious infractions can authorities circumvent the system and file criminal charges.

While few of us like racking up demerits, the fact that no one is seriously protesting it shows, at a minimum, that the system is fairly widely accepted—probably because it works. In California, for example, each stage of the state’s escalating point-based sanctions has repeatedly been found to significantly reduce crashes and driver citations.

Applying a Demerit System to Misdemeanors

With this blueprint in hand, it’s not hard to envision a demerit system for misdemeanors; it would simply be a matter of picking eligible misdemeanors, weighing them to determine points, and then selecting relevant sanctions. Just as traffic law leaves particularly egregious violations to the criminal system, a misdemeanor demerit system would likely exclude violent and other, more serious misdemeanors. This would leave a mix of relatively benign offenses—such as disorderly conduct, trespassing, shoplifting, simple drug possession, and public intoxication—subject to points.

Initial sanctions might include official notices or warning hearings, with higher point totals entailing mandatory treatment or programming. Rather than a loss of a driver’s license, the ultimate sanction might be a criminal prosecution at the tipping-point offense. Individuals could avoid this result by proactively reducing point totals through activities like community service, voluntary programming, or paying restitution. Finally, just as with the traffic code, states could maintain police authority to directly file criminal charges for especially flagrant violations.

By introducing a greater degree of forgiveness, a demerit system would better reflect both an imperfect citizenry and a flawed justice system. Practically speaking, it would reduce the number of individuals laboring under the inordinate weight of an unnecessary criminal record. Equally important, treating records as malleable and offenses as lapses in judgment (rather than irreversible descents into deviancy) could counteract the destructive “othering” of our current system, eroding the stigma attached to petty crime.

A demerit system is also a fairer way of dealing with minor breaches of public trust that are too prevalent to be constantly policed. Whereas now, a single brush with the law can easily initiate destructive feedback loop within the justice system, a point system would have a built-in pressure release, requiring multiple police interactions for heightened sanctions and providing opportunities for people to remedy past errors. On its own, a demerit system would not be able to overcome all the effects of over-policing or law enforcement bias; it would guarantee, however, that all individuals received some measure of reprieve, thereby alleviating some of the unequally shared pain other elements of our justice system dole out.

Any fears that reducing punishments in this manner will encourage a new wave of criminality are misplaced. Research has suggested that swift and certain sanctions, but not necessarily severe ones, can be highly effective. Additionally, by eliminating the need to arrest, book, and prosecute people for misdemeanors, it would free up law enforcement and the courts to spend time pursuing justice for serious felonies and violent crime.

Poll after poll shows overwhelming public support for a justice system that is less punitive and more rehabilitative. Boston just elected a District Attorney who campaigned on a promise not to charge people for committing any one of 15 misdemeanor offenses. District attorneys in Philadelphia, New York, and elsewhere have similarly declined to prosecute or have downgraded various minor offenses. A misdemeanor demerit system simply codifies these positions into law.

Public intoxication, shoplifting, and disturbing the peace are not desirable behaviors. Yet that does not mean they warrant incarceration or lifelong labels. Indeed, the moral opprobrium associated with these acts is closer to that of speeding or running a red light than misdemeanor assault or burglary. It’s time we started treating them more like the former than the latter.

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The Long Game of Democratic Reform

With the intense controversy around the Mueller Report (which was released in its redacted form yesterday before this essay was written), debate over the troubled state of American democracy will now once again fixate on the conduct of the President, his aides, and his campaign. Even if Democrats should launch impeachment proceedings—an even less likely prospect now before Mueller concluded his work—it seems obvious that the only way Trump will be removed from the presidency is via the ballot box.

But whether or not Trump is reelected in 2020, the United States will remain deeply polarized and the quality of its democratic institutions seriously diminished. The annual Democracy Index of the Economist Intelligence Unit now places the United States in the category of “flawed democracies,” trailing Spain, South Korea, Japan, Chile and Estonia, in 25th place among 167 states evaluated. Freedom House is even more withering in its assessment. On its 100-point combined scale of political rights and civil liberties, the America has fallen from a robust score of 94 in 2010 to 86 in the last two years. As the 2019 Freedom in the World report notes, this places “American democracy closer to struggling counterparts like Croatia than to traditional peers such as Germany or the United Kingdom.” In fact, the United States ranks just behind Greece and Latvia on the Freedom House scale and is not even in the top 50 countries. Freedom House holds nothing back in attributing much of the recent decay to Trump’s norm-busting assaults on truth, ethics, independent media, and the rule of law. But it also notes that the decay began well before Trump appeared on the political scene, owing to toxic levels of polarization and unaccountable money in politics. Whatever happens with Trump, the country needs a long game of systemic democratic reform.

And that is where the good news is starting to emerge. Across America, civil society is now teeming with organizations that are working from the bottom up, the top down, and every side way imaginable to reform, rejuvenate, and repair our democratic institutions and practices. Much of this effort is aimed at reducing partisan polarization in our public life. The Millenial Action Project is working to get young congressional and state legislative members and staff to think and talk about policy issues across partisan lines. With Honor is trying to do this—and promote concrete bipartisan behavior—among military veterans in Congress. No Labels some years ago created a bipartisan “Problem Solvers Caucus” to forge ties that might promote legislative compromises. And it has promoted numerous reforms to make Congress function more rationally. The Aspen Institute’s Rodel Fellowship Program identifies political comers from both parties at the state and local level and brings them together periodically to talk about values and policy challenges on which Republicans and Democrats can find some common ground, or at least narrow their differences. Issue One has created a bipartisan caucus of Congressional reformers who will work to strengthen ethics, accountability, and transparency in government and politics. Some of the country’s biggest foundations, including the Madison Initiative of the Hewlett Foundation, have been supporting these kinds of organizations, as well as an array of think tanks and analytic efforts to better understand the drivers of democratic decay and the needed and plausible reforms.

But the reform community is also realizing that transcending partisanship cannot be an end in itself, and neither will it be achievable without institutional changes that cut deeper to address the perverse incentives in American politics. Those incentives now drive our elected representatives to appeal disproportionately to narrow constituencies—and far too often to wealthy individuals and corporations and dollar-rich special interest groups—because that is what gets them elected.

Change the incentives and then all the other efforts to take some of the partisan venom out of our politics will be enabled and even supercharged. Remove the pernicious influence of dark money—at least by requiring full transparency in all contributions to all candidates, and by promoting greater public financing through campaign vouchers that every citizen can spend—and we will see candidates wanting and needing to respond to more diverse interests. Diversify the political and demographic profile of more districts, by ending gerrymandering, and we will see more competitive Congressional (and state legislative) elections, forcing candidates to look for more votes in the political center, because that is where elections are more often won in swing districts. Stop voter suppression and resume vigorous enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, and we might see a little more moderation from Republicans in the South, who will find it more difficult to just write off minority voting constituencies and still win.

However, whether they work on one type of reform or many, whether they are non-partisan or bipartisan or anchored in one party, a growing array of reformers are coming to see the compelling logic of “master reform,” the one most likely to break the logjam on all the others: Ranked Choice Voting. Noble and innovative though many of the current efforts at bridge-building are, they swim against a powerful contrary logic: It pays to go deep and divisive in election campaigns, because that is the most frequent path to success. Before a legislator (federal or state) can worry about reelection in November, she first has to worry about winning the nomination of her party in a low-turnout party primary. Given that more ideological voters (on both the left and the right) are more likely to turn out in these low-turnout affairs, primary elections are a powerful first filter punishing moderation and compromise. For some years, beginning around 2010, it seemed to be mainly the Republican Party (thanks to the Tea Party) that was paying the price in a lurch to the extreme, but now we are beginning to see this effect more clearly in Democratic primaries as well.

One could say to moderate challengers or incumbents inclined toward bipartisan compromise: “Don’t worry, if you lose your party’s primary, the broader electorate will reward you in November if you come back and run as an independent.” After all, that is how Joe Lieberman got reelected to the Senate in 2006 in Connecticut after losing the primary to the more liberal Ned Lamont. And that is how Lisa Murkowski came back to win reelection in November 2010 after losing the Alaska Republican U.S. Senate primary to a Tea Party candidate. But Lieberman could contest in November because Connecticut was one of only a small handful of states that does not protect the two-party duopoly with something called the “sore loser rule,” which bans candidates from appearing on the ballot in November if they lose their party’s primary. And coming from a state that had such a rule, Murkowski could only prevail by becoming the first U.S. senator in more than half a century to be elected by a write-in vote.

Moreover, any moderate without one of the two party nominations now faces a formidable hurdle in a general election: Voters don’t want to “waste” their vote on an independent, however promising and appealing, and thereby risk electing the candidate they find most truly appalling. So invariably, they retreat to the “lesser evil.”

This is the dynamic that is grinding down compromise and creativity in our politics. Unencumbered by any serious competition in November save from their major party rival, candidates play to the ideological base in the primary. Often, because so many districts tilt so heavily Republican or Democrat (partially due to gerrymandering, but also due to geographic sorting), winning the primary is then tantamount to election. But even if it’s not, when the low-turnout primaries are the first hurdle and the only real competition in November is between a Republican well to the right and a Democrat well to the left, politicians are incentivized to mobilize and play intensely to their ideological base. And compromise is something reserved for theoretical discussions, or a small caucus of “problem solvers” on the occasional finely balanced and not too high-stakes issue.

Now imagine a different dynamic. The purists in the party flanks no longer have a veto on the behavior of their representative. If she opts for a workable but painful legislative compromise, say on immigration or restricting the sale of high-powered automatic weapons, and the party militants “primary” her out, she can plausibly come back and contest in the general election because the sore loser rule is gone. And if her state has adopted Ranked Choice Voting, she can say to her district (or state): “Make your first choice a vote for a workable Congress—me. If I don’t make it, your vote won’t be wasted. If no one gets a majority of first-preference votes and I finish last, your vote will be transferred to your second preference. But you know what, if enough people start saying they want to put country over party, I will make it, and the country will be better for it.”

With Ranked Choice Voting and an end to the sore loser, the system will start to unfreeze. At least some members of congress will find the courage to do the right and necessary thing, even if it means departing from party orthodoxy. I do not submit—in an era of alarming acceleration in climate change and income inequality—that every policy answer is to be found in the center, or that moderation is an end in itself. But most ordinary voters—even many pretty far to the left or right—feel that our elections have become dull, tired, and wooden affairs. Why bother turning out in November if the outcome is more or less pre-determined, or if neither of the alternatives excites? Ranked choice voting would restore life and creativity to the process, enabling not just independents but third parties like the Greens and the Libertarians to have a shot at being heard and considered in an election campaign. It would make elections more civil, because it is hard to go negative in a scorched-earth campaign against your rival when there is the possibility that the winner in the end could be a third candidate who refuses to play the game of mutually assured destruction via campaign advertising. Or, you might need the second-preference votes of that other candidate to win.

Of course, the two party establishments are not going to welcome ranked choice voting. It is rare when a group that has benefited from constraints on competition recognizes that in the long run it, too, will be better off—becoming a more vigorous and innovative competitor—with more competition. But the ground is shifting in America. Twice—in November 2016, and again (and by a larger margin, when the politicians stole their initial victory) in June 2018—the voters of Maine have voted to adopt Ranked Choice Voting for their elections. Reformers have taken note of this remarkable victory, and interest is now growing in states like Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Colorado, among others. A growing number of political reformers in California now see that the state’s 2010 electoral reform—which eliminated party primaries and simply selects the “top two” finishers to face off in November—has disappointed, for a simple reason: It is still the more ideologically committed voters who dominate the low-turnout primaries. They are now asking, “What if California instead chose the top four candidates from the non-partisan primary to then face off in November, with a ranked-choice election?” Almost all elections would then have at least one Democrat and one Republican, and in many instances, maybe an independent, too. It could get interesting. It could stimulate participation. And in some districts, it might wind up really rewarding moderation.

Every electoral reform is in some sense a venture into the unknown. You can’t be certain how it will work until you try it out. The beauty of the American federal system is that it allows many forms of experimentation and innovation in the pursuit of a better and more workable democracy. That is the long game of democratic reform in the United States, and it will quietly begin to play out in 2020 even as the country fixates on the contest between Donald Trump and his democratic rival—a contest that, like almost every other in modern American history, will lack a third serious alternative because of the polarizing logic of our plurality electoral system.

 

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The Roots of Sudan’s Revolution—and the Road Ahead

After three decades of authoritarian rule, the news finally came on April 11: Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir, the infamous “butcher of Darfur,” had been forced out of power by incessant and effective street protests. Nothing like this had happened in Sudan since the April 1985 ouster of the military regime of Jaafar al-Nimeiri and before that the October 1964 ouster of Ibrahim Abboud. Soon after al-Bashir’s resignation, his appointed successor, Mohammed Ahmed Awad Ibn Auf, announced on live television that he would head a transitional government. He pleaded with protesters to accept military-imposed curfews for the good of the country.

But the angry protesters who had spent six days camping in front of military headquarters were not pacified. “We do not replace a thief with a thief!” they cried. As the sun went down, protesters dug in their heels, defied the curfew, and vowed to stay put until their demands for a civilian government were heard. “We are going nowhere soon!” they shouted. Less than 36 hours after the fall of al-Bashir, his henchman resigned as well. But the appointment of still another military figure in his place meant that the struggle was not yet over.

The perseverance of Sudan’s protesters has captivated analysts of the region, most of them long since disillusioned by the failure of the so-called Arab Spring revolutions. It has even dared some to ask: Will the Sudanese people succeed where Egyptians and Libyans failed?

What has so far set this revolution apart is the protesters’ dogged tenacity and commitment to stay the course for the long haul—not entirely unlike the October 1964 events that took at least several weeks to play out. Nationwide protests against the regime of Omar al-Bashir erupted in mid-December 2018. The protests, which began in the northern city of Atbara as an outcry against a deteriorating economy, shifted into the demand “tasqut bas!” (“be toppled, enough!”). Young Sudanese from diverse ethnic, tribal, and religious groups came together for demonstrations and sit-ins in Khartoum, Wad Madani, El-Fasher, Nyala, Port Sudan, Gedaref, and Kassala. They faced teargas, rooftop snipers, and brutal beatings. Yet they continued protesting on a regular basis, several times a week, until the climax of April 6, 2019, when the street in front of the army headquarters became Sudan’s own Tahrir Square.

The Economic Situation Deteriorates

One of the driving factors behind the protests was the rapid decline of the economic situation. Between 1997 and 2017, the U.S. government imposed economic sanctions on Sudan owing mainly to its government’s links with international terrorist organizations. The lifting of those sanctions by the Obama Administration gave hope to the Sudanese people that economic growth would follow. But Sudan remained on the U.S. state sponsors of terrorism list, and companies and banks were still wary of doing business there. State corruption, widespread nepotism, and the international memory of the Darfur slaughter all conspired to make Sudan a decidedly unattractive place for foreign investment.

By 2018 the inflation had reached such an extent that ATMs were without cash to dispense. In a country without online banking and where credit cards have yet to be introduced, this generated a major predicament for the majority of population. In September 2018 the lack of cash cast a shadow over the nine million farmers who needed to harvest their crops in the eastern region of Gedaref. That same month the Bank of Khartoum saw fit to announce in the newspapers that it was not bankrupt. Since the government was aware that around 90 percent of Sudanese currency was in circulation, it employed various tactics to cajole the Sudanese people to deposit their money in the banks instead of hiding it in their homes. Yet people had lost trust in the banking system.

At the same time, shortages of basic commodities took a toll. The prices of subsidized bread were cripplingly high, and austerity measures regulated how many loaves each family could buy. Fuel supply was also becoming unreliable; every other week gas stations were running out of diesel or unleaded fuel. Basic medicines were also becoming scarce; malaria medicine was often unavailable outside Khartoum and insulin was lacking in country where 11 percent of the population is diabetic. Waiting in line for hours to get money, bread, or fuel, and being unable to travel by car, was becoming part of the daily routine in Sudanese life.

The Protests Begin

Small-scale protests preceded the December 2018 outbreak in Atbara, which has been widely touted as the beginning of the revolution. In August 2018, for example, a group of youth in Khartoum protested against the dire economic circumstances, and teachers staged a sit-in inside one of the banks to protest the fact that they were not receiving their monthly salaries. In October and December journalists protested the lack of press freedom in front of the parliament, and several were arrested. In early December the oppositionist Sudanese Congress Party and the National Umma Party proposed mass protests against the deterioration of the economic situation in Sudan. But these protests were sporadic and failed to unite the various assembled groups into one movement.

This changed on December 19, 2018. After a shortage of subsidized bread that lasted three weeks, the price of bread tripled. Hundreds of people in Atbara took to the streets. It is noteworthy that the wave of protests began in the periphery and not in Khartoum. This gave rise to an authentically national movement that stretched beyond Sudan’s major cities. All Sudanese could identify with the protests; all shared the same basic grievances.

Another factor that sparked the opposition movement was the return of opposition leader Sadiq al-Mahdi the day after the protests began in Atbara. Sadiq al-Mahdi is the head of the oppositionist Umma Party, the former Prime Minister of Sudan (1966-67, 1986-89), and the great-grandson of the self-proclaimed Mahdi who fought for Sudanese independence from Anglo-Egyptian rule in the last decade of the 19th century. He is undoubtedly a popular political and religious figure in Sudan.

The effect of his return from self-imposed exile had been a subject of widespread speculation. Sadiq al-Mahdi arrived to a cheering crowd in Khartoum. Even though he urged his supporters to restrain from violence and did not publicly call for the end of Omar al-Bashir’s regime, the crowd felt emboldened by his return. That same night in Atbara the building of the National Congress Party—the political party of al-Bashir—was set on fire by the protesters. The genie was out of the bottle.

The Protests Turn Political 

Once the protests had started, the protesters quickly shifted from demanding economic change to demanding the fall of the regime. More than half of Sudan’s population has never known a President other than Omar al-Bashir. The corruption of the ruling elite, the absence of civil liberties, the privileged status of people from certain tribes, restrictive rules on how to behave in public and private life, and the high youth unemployment rates were all reasons for protesters to call for the end of his regime.

Al-Bashir came to power in a military coup in 1989. In the initial years of his rule he allied himself to the Islamist Hassan al-Turabi and paved the way for the institutionalization of sharia law in the country. Sudan’s links to fundamentalist Islamic organizations and its invitation to al-Qaeda to reside on its soil in 1992 did not make the regime popular in Western eyes, and helped motivate the U.S. economic boycott.

During his rule, al-Bashir violently suppressed several regional insurgent groups, including the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in the south and the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) in the western region of Darfur. The conflict between these groups and the government became a humanitarian disaster with millions of civilians being murdered, displaced, raped, and starved. The International Criminal Court contends that Omar al-Bashir is responsible for ethnic cleansing against non-Arab Sudanese tribes in Darfur beginning in 2003. This occurred in tandem with a rising tide of Arab cultural and racial supremacy in Sudan.

The protests of 2018-19 referred back to the injustice and tragedies of the past, as Sudanese of all backgrounds joined together to call for the regime’s overthrow. In an effort to provoke discord along the traditional Afro-Arab lines, the regime blamed non-Arab Darfurian “rebels” for using the protests to their own advantage. But protesters responded by raising the chant, “We are all Darfurian.” In doing so, they appropriated the trauma of the Darfurian genocide for the construction of Sudanese national consciousness, and for the shaping of a national identity for deployment as a means of mobilization and resistance.

The government responded to these protests with violence. The security forces fired live ammunition on the protesters and adopted a “shoot to kill” policy. In January 2019 security forces entered Omdurman Hospital, used tear gas, and shot at wounded protesters being treated in the emergency room. People hiding protesters in their houses or asking for mercy for the wounded were also shot at. Many protesters were arrested or simply disappeared. Nevertheless, the protests continued on a regular basis. The Sudanese Professionals Association organized regular demonstrations and sit-ins several times a week, which were announced in advance. Slowly but steadily the opposition movement acquired momentum.

The protesters come from all backgrounds. Women, comprising around two-thirds of the protesters, have been particularly prominent. Under the Public Order Law, passed in 1992 and amended in 1996, Sudanese women could be arrested or beaten for wearing tight or revealing clothes, uncovering their hair or being seen alone with a man who is not their relative. They have now seized on the demonstrations to fight for their rights. Displaced women in particular—who have been more vulnerable to arrests, sexual harassment, and the lack of basic commodities—are playing a major role.

A picture taken of a Sudanese woman standing on a car in the middle of the crowd and chanting against the regime became a symbol for the Sudanese revolution. Wearing a traditional white thobe and large golden earrings, people have compared her to the Nubian queens (Kandakat) who played an active political role in ancient Sudan. The picture went viral on social media, where many have commented that “the revolution is feminine.”

The Military Takes Over

The turning point was Saturday, April 6, 2019. This was a date with special meaning, marking the anniversary of the revolution that toppled the authoritarian regime of former President Jaafar al-Nimeiri in 1985. To mark that day, thousands of people camped out in front of the army headquarters for six consecutive days. Security forces responded with violence and a number of protesters were killed. Finally, on Thursday, April 11, the military announced the end of Omar al-Bashir’s rule.

The joy of the protesters quickly turned into anger when Defense Minister Mohammed Ahmed Awad Ibn Auf announced that the military would lead a two-year transitional government, and that a three-month state of emergency would be implemented with a curfew from ten p.m. until four a.m. Salah Gosh, the head of the National Intelligence Services, was also still in his old position. These military men were high up in the regime of Omar al-Bashir and played a role in the brutal suppression of the uprising in Darfur and the mass murder that followed. Ibn Auf was the head of military intelligence during the Darfur conflict. He was allegedly an intermediary between the Sudanese regime and the so-called Janjaweed militia, which carried out ruthless attacks on civilians in Darfur with the support of the government. He is also suspected of directing the assaults on Darfurian villages. Salah Gosh, the former national security advisor during the Darfur conflict, has also been implicated for war crimes during that period. From the perspective of the protesters, these men represented everything that was wrong with Sudan.

After hearing the news that al-Bashir had been replaced by his henchman, the protesters remained raised a new cry: “tasqut tani” (“be toppled, again!”). In less than 36 hours they had succeeded. Ibn Auf resigned from his position as the head of the military council. Soon afterwards the head of the National Intelligence Services, Salah Gosh, also resigned. Lieutenant General Abdel Fattah Abdelrahman Burhan became the head of the transitional military council with Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo (“Hemeti”) as his deputy. This was a victory for the protesters, since Burhan, who was the former chief of staff of the ground forces, lacked a clear connection to the atrocities in Darfur. The military made another concession to the protesters by placing al-Bashir in the high-security Kobar prison and by arresting his brothers.

The Sudanese Professionals Association, representing the protest movement, are also demanding the removal from office of Burhan’s deputy, known as “Hemeti.” He had been the leader of an Arab tribal militia in Darfur, and had obtained support from the Sudanese government to use violence to suppress the uprising. Hemeti briefly defected from the government with thousands of heavily armed rebel soldiers in 2007, but in return for government subsidies, he rejoined it in 2008. He became the head of the Rapid Support Forces, which was just a new veneer for the former Janjaweed militia. For the protesters, Hemeti is part and parcel of Omar al-Bashir’s ancien régime.

What Next?

Several analysts have expressed the fear that the current situation will escalate and turn into a bloody civil war. It is possible that if the military establishment resists the demands of the protesters, and continues to use violence to suppress them, younger officers in the lower ranks will turn against their seniors. It is possible, too, that Islamists will take up arms against the military establishment. There were reports of violent clashes in Darfur between people displaced by war and perceived collaborators with the old regime. These violent circumstances could bring Sudan to the brink and put it on a path toward failed statehood, along the lines of Libya and Yemen.

This would have disastrous implications for regional stability. In a state of anarchy with a free flow of weapons, cross-border militias could take advantage of the situation to destabilize neighboring states such as Chad, which is home to some of the same tribes as those living in Darfur. It could also affect already fragile states attempting to recover from brutal civil wars, such as South Sudan and the Central African Republic. This would also put more pressure on Europe, which fears a fresh influx of refugees attempting to cross the Mediterranean.

There is also the Egyptian scenario, in which the military would stay united and keep a strong hold on power. In such a case there would be no dramatic departure from the essence of Omar al-Bashir’s government. The question is whether the protesters, who have sacrificed so much already, would put up with such a scenario, and what price they would be willing to pay to challenge it.

A third, more positive scenario remains possible. The perseverance of the protesters has thus far proven to be a successful strategy against a brutal regime. The momentum is with the protesters, and they know the legacy of October 1964 and April 1985, when, briefly at least, a military government was overthrown by popular protest from the street and democratic reforms followed. This time around the protesters have kept up the civil disobedience, marches, and sit-ins for months. They forced Omar al-Bashir’s “mirror image” military replacement to resign after one day.

The same cannot be said even for the protests that happened during the so-called Arab Spring in Egypt. Moreover, the Sudanese protests have been largely non-violent, which has prevented the downward spiral to civil war, as occurred in Syria. Given that early success, hopes remain that the unique Sudanese recipe for revolution will succeed—and that the fresh winds of freedom will return to a country that has so far had precious little experience of it.

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