Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 45

China’s Health and Safety Scandals Test Its Governance Model

The resilience of China’s political system is catching many in the West by surprise. Pundits presumed that China would fail because it eschewed liberal democracy and rule of law, making the system brittle and unstable. In trying to explain the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surprising resilience, some China-watchers argue that, contrary to western misconceptions, the system is highly responsive to the desires of the people, operating as a kind of “phantom democracy.” They argue the system produces a surprising degree of accountability and transparency, pointing to the government’s obsession with opinion polls and its experiments with democratic institutions at the local level.

One area where the government’s performance has been underwhelming, however, is in preventing public health and safety crises. This issue is highly sensitive for the leadership because it tests people’s fundamental faith in the system. From the infamous baby formula scandal that caused more than 300,000 infants to fall ill to the more recent vaccine scandal, several high-profile emergencies have unnerved Chinese parents. Some wonder: If the CCP can’t ensure basic safety for our kids, what use is the Party?

That these issues remain so stubbornly relevant points to a frightening possibility for China’s leaders: The system itself cannot keep people safe—but reforming it would be next to impossible in China’s current political-economic environment.

The government’s draconian response to these recent crises, then, should come as no surprise. Authorities have been quick to respond by dismissing and minimizing the problems, issuing false and misleading statements, and, in some cases, criminalizing the victims. This suggests China’s “responsive authoritarianism” model is less responsive—and resilient—than its proponents argue.

When it was discovered in March that a school canteen in Chengdu had been serving contaminated food, the government did not express anything resembling gratitude to the parents who exposed the problem. After pictures of the moldy food went viral on the internet, the local government was more interested in silencing the victims than responding to parental concerns.

Authorities first responded by arresting and pepper-spraying the protesting parents. Next, they outright denied that the canteen had any safety problems despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The head of the Wenjiang District Health Bureau, Yuan Xiaoling, said that lab tests of the food and examinations of sick children “showed no abnormal indicators”. The parents had no choice but to take the authorities by their word, which lacked credibility given the large number of children with serious medical conditions and the photographic evidence of contaminated food.

The government then accused the parents of having intentionally contaminated the food themselves. Chinese netizens were quick to find evidence that, in fact, the government had framed the parents for fabricating the incident, in an attempt to direct public anger away from the authorities. According to official reports, the authorities took samples of the food to the lab at three p.m. on March 12. A surveillance video was subsequently leaked, supposedly showing parents contaminating the food in the canteen. The video, however, was taken around ten p.m. the same day, after the samples had already been taken to the lab, at which point the parents would have had little motive to contaminate the food. The video was promptly broadcast on major news outlets, and police allegedly snatched three parents for further investigation.

Although the school principal was eventually dismissed over the scandal, the authorities sent a very clear message that they would not tolerate parents raising concerns about the safety of their children. Several days after the scandal broke, the local government released an official statement that when parents so openly express concerns for their children’s safety, they risk “crossing the boundaries of the law and the bottom line of morality.”

A far more serious crisis occurred in July 2018, when the public discovered that more than 247,000 injections of faulty vaccines had been administered to infants. This was the third major vaccine scandal in China since 2010.  Their recurrence and severity suggest that administrative and legal problems are limiting the CCP’s efforts to maintain order.

And even when CCP officials do enforce some measure of accountability, it is often in an opaque, bureaucratic way. After the 2018 vaccine scandal, China’s head of government, Li Keqiang, announced that the biotech company responsible would be investigated and punished. But the government never disclosed the results of its investigation, assuming one was conducted at all. It simply announced that it had punished those responsible, and deleted social media accounts that continued probing. And because the CCP prohibits independent investigation, citizens must take the government at its word that justice is served. In a country where corruption and manufacturing fraud remain rampant, many citizens are reluctant to do so.

Another company found to be producing faulty vaccines, Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, was given a Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) certification in 2018 under highly suspicious circumstances. In 2017, the website of the Food and Drug Administration Bureau revealed that the company produced a total of 400,530 faulty polio vaccines. On May 29, 2018, the local Food and Drug Administration announced that they confiscated the income generated from the faulty vaccines and fined the company, offering no further details. But according to an employee from the bureau, they have not been able to verify why the vaccines were faulty. Despite public suspicions and anger, the company rejected all interview requests, and refused to offer any information regarding its production process. The fact that it is a state-owned company (the majority shareholder being the SASAC, the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission) and that it was able to receive a GMP certification despite severe production irregularities made many Chinese netizens suspicious.

When the scandal broke, multiple Chinese cities issued statements saying that local hospitals and health centers had not purchased supplies from the Wuhan Institute, in an attempt to mollify parents. But after the Zibo government in Shandong province released such a statement, parents quickly posted photos of their kids’ vaccination records online, showing that the city had in fact purchased vaccines from the faulty batch.

Children are not the only ones affected by China’s chronically low health and safety standards. Jiangsu province experienced two deadly industrial explosions last month. The first and more deadly of the two occurred on March 21, killing at least 78 people. Rather than credibly demonstrating accountability and transparency, the government’s immediate response was to minimize the severity of the event, denying that the area had water safety issues resulting from the blast, a major concern for nearby residents. However, a government report directly contradicted this assertion, showing that local water sources had been severely polluted.

The government then announced that the incident had not significantly impacted air quality and that indexes all fell within the normal range. This appeared to be a fabrication, as local residents reported difficulty breathing and their eyes tearing up. The government also said there were no residents nearby. But Google Maps shows that there are three villages within a two-kilometer radius of the site and, according to Pengpai News, those three villages contain two kindergartens and three primary schools.

The official response to these scandals suggests the Chinese government today is far from transparent or accountable. Most importantly, each new scandal is a greater political threat than the last because it undermines the government’s previous assurances that it would rectify the problem and punish those responsible. It is little wonder then why the CCP feels compelled to silence and criminalize victims.

Most China-watchers take it for granted that the government’s legitimacy depends primarily on economic growth. But in some sense, public health and safety issues are a greater threat to the government’s legitimacy than economic stagnation, simply because physical safety is a more fundamental need than prosperity. While an uncertain economic future is certainly a political problem, China’s inadequate health and safety standards could eventually pose an existential threat to the CCP’s survival.

Pundits are likely right that the Chinese Communist Party’s resilience is due, in part, to its responsiveness.  But as the recent health and safety scandals demonstrate, there are clear limits to the government’s response capabilities. In that case, what may keep the system going is not so much its responsiveness as its repressiveness.

The post China’s Health and Safety Scandals Test Its Governance Model appeared first on The American Interest.

A Texas Tale: Billy Lee Brammer and The Gay Place

Leaving the Gay Place: Billy Lee Brammer and the Great Society

Tracy Daugherty

University of Texas Press, 2018, $29.95, 448 pp.

It is, to my mind, one of the great opening paragraphs in American literature, though few Americans who are not also Texans will be familiar with it:

The country is most barbarously large and final. It is too much country — boondock country — alternately drab and dazzling, spectral and remote. It is so wrongfully muddled and various that it is difficult to conceive of it as all of a piece. Though it begins simply enough, as a part of the other.

After kicking off with this aerial view of a vast western landscape, Billy Lee Brammer—in his only published novel, The Gay Place—floats us in toward an unnamed state capital where the first stir of life in the city’s quiet streets is “an old truck carrying migratory cotton pickers.” Its clattering wakes two key characters from the novel’s first section, both politicians:

The younger . . . was named Roy Sherwood, and he lay twisted sideways in the front seat of an automobile that was parked out front of an all-night supermarket. Arthur Fenstemaker, the other one, the older one, floundered in his bedcovers a few blocks distant in the Governor’s mansion. 

“Arthur Goddam Fenstemaker,” as he calls himself, is modeled on Lyndon B. Johnson, whom Brammer served as a speechwriter when Johnson was Senate Majority Leader. Fenstemaker dominates the three novellas that compose The Gay Place, even though he’s only sporadically in the foreground action. Instead, the immediate focus is on a small circle of liberal Southern Democrats whose best intentions are in constant collision with their decadent personal excesses.

In “The Flea Circus,” the frequently hungover Roy provides our primary view of what’s going on behind the scenes in the state capital as Fenstemaker cajoles him into sponsoring legislation close to his heart, and seeks his advice on what to do about a lobbyist intent on bribery. Not that Roy is necessarily up to the job.

“He’s pretty damned independent,” we’re told. “And lazy. That’s a bad combination.”

In “Room Enough to Caper,” Senator Neil Christiansen, a gubernatorial appointee to the Senate for 10 months, is pressured by Fenstemaker to run for a full Senate term against a local Red-baiting demagogue whose role model seems to be Joe McCarthy. But Neil has trouble buying into his own campaign-trail act. Examining himself in the mirror, he tries “to affect the look of a winner, but the image that gaped back at him merely exuded a kind of vast, benign self-deprecation.”

“Country Pleasures,” the book’s final section, follows Fenstemaker and his entourage out to a film set where a movie (clearly based on Giant) is being shot. There they plan a photo-op with the film’s star, Vicki McGown, who happens to be the ex-wife of Fenstemaker’s assistant Jay McGown. Vicki, like Roy’s lover in “The Flea Circus” and Neil’s semi-estranged wife in “Room Enough to Caper,” follows wayward agendas of her own. Again and again, the women in The Gay Place aren’t just playthings. They break the rules as adeptly as the men do.

“Mr. Brammer,” Gore Vidal remarked in Esquire when the book appeared in 1961,

has written a political novel from inside and I don’t know of another work quite like it. The politics are at the state level and the state, though never named, sounds ominously like Texas. . . . The individual narratives tend to be somewhat formless and inconclusive and I think Mr. Brammer was wise to put the three into a single volume, if only because in that way he has been able to provide us with a full three-angle view of a splendid creation named Arthur Fenstemaker, governor of the state, a natural politician, sly, pragmatic, more inclined to good than evil, blessed with a roaring prose style.

The Gay Place, published when Brammer was 31, was a Book-of-the-Month club selection. According to Tracy Daugherty—in his stellar new biography of this half-forgotten writer, Leaving the Gay Place: Billy Lee Brammer and the Great Society—the novel got coverage on par with other notable literary debuts that year, including Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. In his lifetime, Brammer was sometimes compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald, and his book’s rueful, hedonistic strains do bring Fitzgerald’s work to mind, notably Tender Is the Night (a touchstone book for Brammer).

There are also echoes of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End in Brammer’s language, especially its occasional jazzy breakdowns into ellipsis-linked phrases and scattershot dialogue that brilliantly embody the quirks of the characters. Take this wistful exchange between Jay and his ex-wife, where halting dialogue and interior reverie are cunningly twined, becoming a poetry built out of sentences cut short:

Jay lay on his back with his eyes closed trying to think of sleep, release, escape, of shaking loose and giving in, of headlong flight and boozy, luxuriant fulfillment. Where were all the gay places? Where were—

“I’m looking forward to the Governor’s party,” Vicki said. “Will you ride up with me?”

Where was all the fun and—

“Will you ride up with me?”

It was out there somewhere, remote and unattainable. It was out here in these landscapes. It was at the Governor’s party it was—

“We can leave day after tomorrow, Jay.”

“Try to sleep,” he finally said. “Lie next to me if you want, the way you were, and try to sleep.”

Ford was on Brammer’s radar. A famous passage from The Good Soldier supplies an epigraph to the novel: “Is there then any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and coolness?” It’s paired with lines from a Fitzgerald poem that lend Brammer’s book its title: “I know a gay place / Nobody knows.”

The Gay Place didn’t have much commercial success, but it won Brammer a measure of fame and brought journalistic opportunities his way, including a gig at Time magazine. A movie adaptation, in the works for a while, failed to materialize. When two New York theater producers asked if he thought the novel would make a play, his response was quintessential Brammer: “I had to tell them I wasn’t quite sure if it would even make a book.”

That quip hints at Brammer’s instinctive snatching of defeat from the jaws of victory. Still, he worked on a sequel to The Gay Place for years and had publishers and editors encouraging him every step of the way. Though he lived until 1978, when he died of a meth overdose, no other book appeared.

For decades, the questions longtime devotees of The Gay Place have asked are: Where did this one-of-a-kind masterpiece come from? And what the hell happened to its author?

Daugherty’s biography tells us.

Billie Lee Brammer, as his parents named him (he changed the spelling to “Billy Lee” while in elementary school), was born on April 21, 1929, and grew up in the Dallas neighborhood of Oak Cliff. His father worked as a lineman for Texas Power and Light at a time when much of rural Texas was first getting electrified. Young Billy Lee accompanied him on some of these work trips and got his first taste of “boondock country” then.

LBJ first came onto Brammer’s radar in 1938, thanks to a radio address Johnson gave decrying the plight of Austin’s least fortunate citizens (“so poor they could not even at night use the electricity that is to be generated by our great river”). But Johnson was far from the only prominent public figure in Brammer’s life. Other highlights of the “Billy Lee Myth,” as Daugherty dubs it, are jaw dropping. Despite a lack of legitimate press credentials, Brammer was riding in a press car behind JFK when he was assassinated, and witnessed Jack Ruby’s killing of Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas municipal building—or so he claimed.

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Billy Lee Brammer
(Wikimedia Commons)

Even if he wasn’t there, he had firsthand connections to the players. “He had known John F. Kennedy; they shared a mistress,” Daugherty tells us. “He knew the man who had just been sworn in as the new president. . . . He knew Jack Ruby. In the days leading up to the Kennedy and Oswald assassinations, Brammer had stayed in the Dallas apartment of a friend who was dating a mobbed-up stripper from Ruby’s club.”

That same year—while fleeing a subpoena from his first wife, Nadine, who hoped to nab some of the windfall her husband was supposedly going to get for film rights to The Gay Place—Brammer landed in California, where he met Jerry Garcia and Ken Kesey and was introduced to LSD. Even Kesey was startled by Brammer’s drug appetites. “The gnome-like Texan,” we’re told, “gobbled acid. He began to inject speed.”

Brammer’s Austin circle included future San Francisco music-scene luminaries Chet Helms and Janis Joplin. Some said he was “single-handedly responsible for turning Austin, Texas, on to LSD.” One friend told Daugherty, “I’m pretty sure he gave Janis her first acid.” And then there was the time Gloria Steinem hired him to write anticommunist propaganda for the CIA. That’s a lot to pack into one man’s short life.

Brammer did abysmally in high school but managed to get into North Texas State Teachers College, where he immediately started writing for the college newspaper. There, his talents attracted the attention of the local town paper, which hired him to cover sports events. In the meantime, for his college paper, he wrote about LBJ’s second U.S. Senate run, Jim Crow-era injustices, and Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade.

At North Texas State, Brammer met his future wife, Nadine Cannon. They married when she was 19 and he was about to turn 21. Brammer already harbored intense literary ambitions and Nadine quite liked the idea of being a second Zelda Fitzgerald. It was Nadine who introduced Brammer to amphetamines, beginning a lifelong habit. “He said the pills helped with his writing,” Nadine recalled. “He could type for hours, nonstop.”

In 1951, they moved to Austin where Brammer became a sportswriter for the Austin American-Statesman. Their circle of friends included Dave and Ann Richards (the later governor of Texas), future screenwriter-director Robert Benton (Places in the Heart), and writer Willie Morris, whose wife Celia, in her memoir Finding Celia’s Place, vividly describes the strange flavor of Brammer’s presence. “He could be stiller than anybody I’d ever known,” she wrote.

Where other men seemed out to prove something – to win an argument, perhaps, or score points, or feel their own sex magnetism – Bill simply liked women, and they liked him. . . . Although he did not seem personally driven by sex, he had an abiding sense of the havoc it wreaked with our best intentions, and perhaps he was the first person I really cared for who had something close to the tragic sense.

That “abiding sense” of erotic havoc informs almost every page of The Gay Place.

Sports coverage soon bored Brammer, who wanted to write about social changes that were fermenting in 1950s Austin. The local YMCA, for instance, was hosting interracial student gatherings, much to the displeasure of the University of Texas’s board of regents. Brammer eventually ditched the American-Statesman to write for the newly founded, left-leaning Texas Observer. An interview he did for the Observer with LBJ, following the Senator’s 1955 heart attack, led to Johnson hiring Brammer as a press aide and Nadine as a secretary. The Brammers moved to Washington, and it was there that most of The Gay Place was written.

On the surface, Brammer’s move into politics was an odd fit. “[H]e had never been, and never would be, a foot soldier for causes,” Daugherty points out.  Still, for “sheer drama,” Daugherty adds, LBJ was “impossible for a literary sensibility to ignore.”

What drew Johnson to Brammer? One friend believed LBJ admired Brammer’s “careful perspective and reflective temper, the inward bent of his mind, and he trusted him because he could dominate him, or so it seemed.” Brammer’s estimate of LBJ, in turn, was always clear-eyed. “He’s a sick man,” he wrote in 1959.

I don’t want to oversimplify, and I’m not a snap analyst, but it’s rather obvious that the thing that eats on him is a king-sized inferiority complex. He’s got to prove himself, to bowl people over, plow ’em under. He has to keep people off balance; he has to reach the top – even if it’s the presidency. He draws strength from other people’s weakness, and he must have adulation. And, of course, he’s thin-skinned out of all proportion.

Johnson’s uncouth contradictions are manifest in Brammer’s portrait of Fenstemaker—most vividly when the governor, pressuring Neil to have the gumption to run for a full term in the Senate, dangles this carrot: “You can go back up to Washington and vote that economic aid and lower the interest rate and maybe even get a nigger bill through. You’d prefer that, wouldn’t you?”

The language gives you pause, but the push for racial justice is a given—and in 1961 that language was as common as fleas on a dog. In one party scene, a bohemian type on the fringes of Neil’s social circle takes integration efforts into his own hands.

Kermit appeared in the kitchen with two Negro girls, one on each arm. They were both a little terrified, and Kermit made an extra-serious effort to introduce them in a civilized way. Everyone was polite. But no one knew quite what ought to be said. . . . They had grown so used to seeing these people – and not seeing them – behind counters and at the back sections of public conveyances . . . that it would take years to get any contact established. Even for the young people here who were desperately striving to learn one another.

Good intentions and clumsy gestures are so awkwardly intermingled in this passage that it’s difficult to know whether to be mortified or slightly encouraged.

To achieve his goals on the civil-rights front, Johnson had to straddle conflicting factions of the Democratic Party in ways that demanded the skills of a contortionist. “Southern conservatives held sway in the Senate,” Daugherty explains. “Johnson couldn’t afford to lose their support. At the same time, to broaden his power base, he had to persuade northern liberals he was on their side. All this he had to accomplish without riling his home-state backers . . . while appearing to be driven solely by principles rather than careerism.”

Brammer, Daugherty tells us, was “entranced” by the way Johnson shepherded the Civil Rights Act of 1957 through the Senate, and Fenstemaker shares LBJ’s strategizing genius. Still, some of Brammer’s friends felt he’d soft-pedaled the repellent sides of Johnson. “As a human being he was a miserable person,” LBJ press aide George Reedy said of his boss, “a bully, a sadist, lout and egotist. . . . His lapses from civilized conduct were deliberate and usually intended to subordinate someone else to his will.”

Johnson was also a habitual sexual harasser, as Nadine recalls in witheringly droll terms: “LBJ could grope your whole body in a split second: this once happened to me as he ‘helped’ me get out of the backseat of a car.”

That womanizing side of Johnson comes up in “Country Pleasures,” as Fenstemaker enjoys the company of the film’s star. Vicki, however, is more than capable of holding her own. Off on a liquor-fueled joy ride with the governor and his entourage to a nearby Mexican village (“Not the one we built, but [a] real one”), she gleefully snares Fenstemaker in a diplomatic fiasco. “We just gave everything back to the Mexicans!” she crows upon their return to the film set. “All of it! We had a little ceremony. . . .  You white men got twenty-four hours to clear out!”

Such humor abounds in The Gay Place. Sometimes it’s farcical—for instance, when Fenstemaker’s alcoholic brother, Hoot Gibson, reveals why the filmmakers are having trouble with the tumbleweed they’ve had to import from Burbank, California, due to a Texas drought.

“It don’t tumble,” Hoot Gibson said, overjoyed. “Even when there’s a good wind. It just don’t tumble. So they brought out some big blowers – big ’lectric fans – to make the tumbleweed tumble when they shoot the moom picture.”

Here and elsewhere, Brammer’s dialogue, a blend of canny phrasing and even cannier spelling trickery (“moom picture”), brings these characters jubilantly alive.

The humor takes a more incisive turn when we see Fenstemaker in backroom action. To Willie England, editor of a newspaper much like the Texas Observer, Fenstemaker explains what kind of press coverage he’d like for a hospital bill he’s trying to pass:

“It’s not much of a bill – not half enough of an appropriation – but it’ll close up some of the worst places and build some new ones and bring in a few head doctors. And this little bill can pass is the main thing. I’ll put it through next week if I don’t get everyone all stirred up and worried about taxes and socialism and creepin’ statesmanship. You gonna help me, Willie?”

“How can I help?”

Fenstemaker slapped his desk and showed his teeth. “Oppose the goddam bill!” His face beamed. “But just a little bit, understand?” he said. “Don’t get real ugly about it.”

“I don’t understand,” Willie said.

“Those fellows in the Senate – they think this is all I want, they’ll give it to me. But if somebody’s runnin’ round whoopin’ about how good this is, settin’ precedents and havin’ a foot in the door and braggin’ on how much more we’ll get next year, then all my support’ll get skittish and vanish overnight.”

“I see.”

“Only don’t oppose it too much, either. You raise hell and your bunch won’t go along. They’ll introduce their own bill askin’ for the goddam aurora borealis. I need their votes, too. Just oppose it a little bit – oppose it on principle!”

Brammer is just as sly when it comes to erotic matters. When things heat up between Roy and Ouida (a legislator’s estranged wife with whom Roy is, in Fenstemaker’s words, “hoo-hawin’ around”), the prose couldn’t be more seductive.

He leaned forward, splashing whiskey on his wrist, and kissed the place on her leg.

“Kiss me here,” she said, showing him where. He kissed her throat. She moved her arms around him and touched the back of his neck. “I like you here,” she said. “It’s nice to find a neck that’s not shaved. . . . In Florence last year, when Earle was running around with that lady parachutist, I’d go out walking in the afternoons just to look at the backs of men’s necks. They all had such nice shaggy necks.”

“We’re both sick,” Roy said. “You like hairy necks. I like that place on your leg.”

Even bad sex is fun in Brammer’s hands. Ouida, after winding up in the bed with a man she didn’t really want to sleep with, is left with “more the memory of exertion than exaltation.”

Brammer wrote The Gay Place while working full-time for Johnson and surviving on a diet of “Butterfingers, warm Jell-O, and amphetamines,” Daugherty tells us. “Sitting in Senator Johnson’s office at night, he would put on a Paul Desmond record, pop a ‘Christmas tree’ (a green-and-red Dexamyl), and hear the words of his novel, the lovely, flowing sentences, the music of his brain, brighten with electric clarity.”

And he found success. He was awarded a $2,400 Houghton Mifflin Fellowship for The Gay Place the year after Philip Roth won the same honor for Goodbye, Columbus. An editor at Houghton Mifflin, Mrs. G.D. de Santillana, wrote Brammer in 1959 about his manuscript-in-progress: “It is wonderful reading, it has swing and glitter and pace.” “Arthur Fenstemaker,” she added, “is rapidly becoming my great American hero.”

Brammer completed the novel in 1960, then postponed proofreading the galleys so he could work on LBJ’s 1960 presidential campaign. Meanwhile, Nadine filed for divorce and money issues between them became bitter. Still, she remained his confidante.

“Want to get this stuff over with so I can pay off lawyers and love you a little better,” he wrote her as they went ahead with divorce proceedings. In a line lifted, almost unaltered, from Roy Sherwood in “The Flea Circus,” he added, “I am not and never have been a well man.”

Reviews of The Gay Place, Daugherty tells us, were “almost uniformly positive.” And over the years, critics have weighed in on what makes it so special. In a 2005 Washington Monthly essay titled “Why Americans Can’t Write Political Fiction,” Christopher Lehmann singled out the book as “the one truly great American political novel.”

“As political animals,” Lehmann said of Brammer’s characters, “they’re accustomed to honoring few clear distinctions between their messy, conflicted, adulterous, and boozy lives and their obligations to the public weal. . . . The genius of Brammer’s novel is its willingness to wrestle openly with the implications of a tragic, divided political nature—not merely for stars of first magnitude like Fenstemaker but also for the many lesser political beings in his orbit.”

One cause of those inner divisions is the characters’ ongoing inability to buy into their own reality. Roy, wondering how to deal with “all the ceaseless demands of public ambition and private loves,” finds himself utterly incapable of taking responsibility for his “ill-furnished fraud of a life,” while Neil, in mid-senatorial campaign, starts to think that “what was needed was not so much cerebration or good intentions as convincing stage props . . . ”

This sense of fakery becomes literal when the action moves to that film set in the middle of nowhere. Jay, studying his ex-wife and Fenstemaker as they pose for their photo-op, muses, “They were not quite people, those two. They were a little hard to believe; each of them heightened by special technicolor effects.”

The one figure in the novel not assailed by these debilitating doubts about his own reality is Fenstemaker, whose physical presence on the page is gloriously raucous.

Fenstemaker pinched his nose, moved a big hand over his face as if probing for minute flaws in a piece of pottery. He rubbed his eyes, sucked his teeth, punched holes in a sheet of bond paper with a gold toothpick. He stood and paced about the room and stared out the windows and scratched himself. ‘Well goddam and hell…’ he said. It was like a high mass, a benediction.

Fenstemaker knows what he wants and how to get it, and if anyone tries to throw him off-track (“Everybody’s tryin’ to blur my public image,” he complains), he handily marshals them back into line.

Faced with a need to earn some cash after the commercial prospects for his book dimmed, Brammer took a job at Time magazine in the spring of 1961. His beat was the Kennedy Administration. That was when he found out (“this is the darnedest thing,” he told his boss) that he was dating one of the President’s paramours. “From friends and colleagues,” Daugherty writes, “Brammer knew, but did not report, what Seymour Hersh would make public many years later, that ‘Kennedy was consumed with almost daily sexual liaisons and libertine partying, to a degree that shocked many members of his personal Secret Service detail.’”

In the meantime, things had gone sour between Johnson and Brammer. Johnson felt Brammer had “abandoned” him and objected, hilariously, to The Gay Place because it “had too many dirty words in it.” But his real problem with the novel went beyond that:

“When’d you write that book?”

“When I was in Washington.”

“When you were working for me?”

“At nights.”

“You should have been answering my mail.” 

Those were the last words the two men ever exchanged.

Brammer was well embarked on a self-destructive path by then. His apartment, Daugherty reports, was cluttered with “open cans of Betty Crocker cake frosting, spoons stabbed into the thick, sugary goo, for when he got hungry or felt a craving for sweets.” He continued using his Time credit card but failed to report back to the office. That could not, did not, last long.

He had a brief stint working at the CIA-supported Independent Research Service, where Gloria Steinem was his supervisor. His job was to write anti-communist pamphlets. When Steinem sent him to a Soviet-sponsored youth festival in Helsinki “to inject anticommunist sentiments into the proceedings,” he tried to save money by taking a tramp steamer from Mobile, Alabama, rather than flying to Finland. The ship’s engines broke down mid-Atlantic and he arrived in the Finnish capital three weeks late. “In what had become a deeply ingrained habit,” Daugherty remarks, “Brammer simply wandered away from his job[s] without completing anything or officially resigning.”

By early 1963, he had retreated to Austin where, on his first day back, he asked a friend, “Do you know where I can get some speed in this town? I’ve been away for seven years. I work much better on speed.” At about this time, he met fellow novelist Larry McMurtry, with whom he briefly shared an apartment. “I didn’t know [Billy Lee] well,” McMurtry told Daugherty in 2015, “but I knew him well enough to know that he wasn’t going to make it.”

Publishers in the book, newspaper, and magazine worlds hadn’t quite figured out that he had become entirely unreliable. When Johnson assumed office, Brammer got an offer from Random House to write a biography of his former boss (“I think I hit the jackpot”). But LBJ’s White House declared him persona non grata, and the project promptly died. 

Still, in Austin he remained a local literary celebrity—and he was about to become some kind of counterculture guru, too. Despite the chaos of his existence, he somehow retained the loyalty of his friends, the devotion of his children, and even, to a certain extent, the exasperated fondness of his ex-wife Nadine. In 1963, he met his second wife, Dorothy Browne, a University of Texas undergraduate majoring in English. She was writing a paper on Tender Is the Night at the time—and lasted five years in the marriage.

All through the 1960s, Brammer was at the center of Austin’s party scene—not that he put much effort into it. “[T]he puzzling paradox of Billy Lee Brammer,” Daugherty writes, is that “he exhibited an essentially passive personality, always letting louder folks take center stage, yet on the strength of his quiet charisma and steady generosity, he was pivotal to his group’s activities, a powerful social catalyst.”

“He was never verbose the way most diet pill addicts were,” one friend said. “He listened and watched, somewhat tenaciously. People were always saying, ‘Look at Billie Lee over there watching us.’ I think most assumed he was gathering material. But looking back, I think he was living inside his head.”

His daughter Shelby, in retrospect, believes the Austin crowd her father ran with saw him as their “mascot of debauchery.” Her older sister Sidney adds, “There were so many drugs. It was so fraught. Rich guys with unlimited quantities of pot and meth.” Even when he tried to stay away from parties, Daugherty says, the parties came to him.

As the decade wore on, Brammer conceded “that the speed, which had helped him compose The Gay Place, was now working against him as an illness.” In his notebook, in 1968, he listed his substance intake for the day: “Midafternoon dope, plus doughnuts, Coke, sausages, more dope, little hash, ½ tab purple acid, little wine, some rum, some . . . stew, beer, coffee, Desoxyn, Nembutal … aspirin, more wine, much more grass.”

He did still take erratic stabs at fiction (one attempted short story was titled “Is There Life After Meth?”), and he was still capable of sharp political observations. “It’s really amazing when you think about it,” he quipped to one friend. “The last two Presidents of the USA have been functionally insane, and yet the American people don’t seem to notice.”

In 1972, after observing an ailing LBJ being honored at a civil rights conference for his role in the fight for racial equality, Brammer’s last published words on Johnson appeared in The Texas Observer. “President Johnson was a giant, and remains one. What he did wrong, he did royally wrong; what he did right, he did royally right. Events are out of his control now, and we seem fated to be led by less imaginative, less colorful, less real people.”

Still, Brammer’s writing career had flamed out. An idea for a rock-and-roll novel and a proposal for a “journalism-as-literature-textbook” went nowhere. One of his last journalistic gigs was with an alternative paper, The Rip-Off Review of Western Culture, where his official title was “Editor at Sea.”

He drifted into rock-music promotion as the psychedelic scene took off, booking acts like the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, and Big Brother and the Holding Company. But by the early 1970s, the drug excesses had taken their toll. It was, Sidney remembers,

. . . almost painful to visit him in his rattrap apartments with the electricity turned off and no phone. We’d watch him poke through the wreckage of his bedroom for his Coke-bottle lens glasses or dentures (he’d had cataract surgery and lost his teeth by the age of 42) while we browsed through a cornucopia of literature that always seemed to have been flung in great disorganized piles into his living quarters. . . . As painful as it could be, one often had a need to see him – because Billie Lee had a way of getting to the quick of your deepest despond, making you laugh at it, turning it to your own best end.

Dorothy, still in touch with him, remembers, “He was shooting crystal Methedrine and taking acid and mescaline at the same time. He was just a mess.” A friend who tailed him with a stopwatch at a party reported that longest interval between his requests for pills was 23 seconds. At some point he started helping himself to his pet poodle’s epilepsy medicine.

Yet he preserved the good will of those around him, with LBJ the exception that proved the rule. “I don’t think Bill ever had an enemy in his whole life,” Benton says. “You’d think that someone embarking on that path of self-destruction after he drifted back to Texas would make at least some enemies along the way, but he never did.”

When he was busted for drug possession in 1971, his friends rallied around him, raising money for a lawyer to defend him. (“No one wants to see the little bastard have to go to jail,” one of them said.) But the downward spiral continued. In ever more dire financial straits, he took a job as a hotel-restaurant dishwasher and chef’s assistant.

The end, from “acute methamphetamine intoxication,” came on Feb. 11, 1978. “Billy Lee didn’t look like himself in the coffin,” Shelby Brammer recalls. “Somehow, his dentures hadn’t made it to the service.”

So where does that leave us?

Well, we do have the one published masterpiece that has stayed in print—precariously, but more or less continuously—since first publication in 1961. Texas author Jan Reid, remarking on the novel’s staying power back in 2001, declared that “woven through it are themes that dominate our politics today: the siren’s song of lobbyists’ money, the ease of demagoguery, the lechery born of power, the cost of pursuing such a life on marriages and children. But at times these politicians do good things for the right reasons. The Gay Place succeeds because its characters have texture, resonance, and depth. . . . You care about them.”

Daugherty’s biography makes plain why Brammer was never able to deliver another novel, while also indicating there’s an abundance of Brammer correspondence and miscellaneous writings that merit being gathered into book form. Maybe someone will see fit to take on the project. Then again, given the way things have usually gone with Brammer, maybe not.

The post A Texas Tale: Billy Lee Brammer and The Gay Place appeared first on The American Interest.

Against Visegrád

Remember the “Little Entente,” maintained by Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia during the interwar period? The regional alliance was created under French auspices and its initial goals included preventing the reemergence of a greater Austria and Hungary and defending Eastern Europe against the threat of Soviet communism and later of German Nazism.

As late as in the mid-1930s, some in the region were still putting their faith in the arrangement. Yet, if “Little Entente” made sense at the time of its creation, fifteen years later it was apparent that all three actors were hopelessly insignificant in military terms. And also, their interests diverged. Yugoslavia was more open than its partners to cooperation with fascist, revisionist governments. In the face of Germany’s brazen aggression against Czechoslovakia in the fall of 1938, Romania blinked. And France’s real commitment to the project had never been particularly strong to begin with.

Fast forward to February 1991, when Hungary’s president Jószef Antall hosted Václav Havel of Czechoslovakia and Lech Wałęsa of Poland in the town of Visegrád, overlooking the river Danube. It was clear that the shared interest of the three (later four) countries was to join the West—the European Union and NATO—and to shield themselves against the possible return of Soviet domination.

It has to be said that the Visegrád cooperation worked realy well. The coordinated efforts of Central European countries convinced the initially reluctant Westerners that bringing the region into the fold of the transatlantic alliance was a good idea. Whatever challenges Central Europe raises today for NATO and the EU, those are insignificant compared to the chaos that has reigned across the Balkans and throughout much of the post-Soviet space that did not have a credible prospect of joining the West. After Slovakia flirted with Vladimír Mečiar’s authoritarianism during the 1990s, it was the Visegrád group that helped it catch up and get on the integration train.

Nevertheless, it is worth keeping in mind the main lesson of the “Little Entente.” Twenty-eight years since the foundation of Visegrád, the regional bloc has lost much of its original rationale without finding a new one. All of its initial members are members of the EU and NATO. More importantly, the interests of their governments have started to diverge dramatically. For a long time and regardless of who has been in power in Warsaw, Poland is the only one country among the four taking the Russian threat seriously.

The three remaining Visegrád countries are underinvesting in their security. And if Slovakia and the Czech Republic are at least nominally wary of Russia, Hungary has aligned itself with Moscow on a number of issues, oftentimes going against stated U.S. interests in Central Europe. Late last year, for example, the government refused to extradite Russian arms dealers, the Lyubishins, to the United States. This year, Viktor Orbán invited the Kremlin’s fake multilateral bank, the International Investment Bank, to set up headquarters in Hungary with a plethora of diplomatic privileges and immunities, thus creating a new channel for Russian espionage and influence operations in Europe and possibly also an avenue around the sanctions imposed on Russian after the annexation of Crimea and attack against Donbas.

More fundamentally, it has become hard to see Hungary as a free country, unlike the three others. Effective political competition has been curtailed through a partisan rewrite of the constitutional system and of the electoral law, concentration of media in the hands of oligarchs close to Fidesz, and through an effective dismantling of judicial review. To the extent that the Law and Justice party (PiS) in Poland has sought to emulate the Hungarian example, most importantly by attacking the judiciary, it has also faced a much stronger and better organized reaction of civil society. It seems to be a reasonably safe bet to expect PiS’ worst authoritarian policy decisions to be reversed once it moves to opposition or is forced to share power in a government coalition.

The Czechs and the Slovaks may have their own occasional flirtations with authoritarianism but those have never risen to a sustained effort at concentrating power in the hands of one political party or oligarch—not even in the case of Andrej Babiš, a Slovak-born Czech billionaire who became an anti-establishment politician and later the Prime Minister of the Czech Republic.

Attitudes toward the EU are another dividing line within Visegrád. Whereas Slovakia is a member of the Eurozone and most of its relevant parties are committed to ensuring the country is in the EU’s integration core, the Czechs have acquired a reputation for being the Brits of post-communist Europe, convinced of their own exceptionalism. It is hard to imagine a push for Euro adoption in Prague, or an influential constituency arguing for deeper forms of integration with the EU. In Poland, in turn, euroskepticism is currently enjoying its heyday. Yet, both the logic of geopolitics and much of Poland’s political landscape suggest that this might be just a phase and that post-2019 Poland will become, once again, a constructive player, seeking perhaps membership in the Eurozone in due course.

Hungary, in comparison, remains a specific case. The only thread connecting Viktor Orbán to the mainstream of European politics—Fidesz’ membership in the European People’s Party (EPP)—is a result of a combination of ineptness and cynicism, especially on the part of EPP’s German patrons, for whom the nature of Hungary’s political regime is secondary to the ability of German auto companies to do business in the country, not harassed by its nationalist regime.

It is far from clear what unites Visegrád, other than the common, largely reflexive rejection of immigration in 2015 and 2016. Arguably, it would be hard to imagine the four countries becoming a cohesive bloc even if they all had euroskeptic, anti-immigration governments (as perhaps some in the West mistakenly believe to be the case now). Contrary to Steve Bannon’s pipe-dream of a Nationalist Internationale, because of the zero-sum nature of nationalism, a juxtaposition of nationalist governments would only exacerbate the frictions between countries. To see why, one can look at the examples of Italy and Austria. The outreach that Vienna does to German speakers in Südtirol does not go unnoticed by Italian nationalists. And, while the Austrian government seeks to consolidate the country’s public finances, it is certainly not doing so to help out its supposed Lega allies.

Central European countries thus have to look beyond their immediate neighborhood. Especially for the more reform- and Western-minded among them, there is no point in seeking consensus with those who seek to benefit from disrupting European and Western unity. Slovakia’s president-elect, Zuzana Čaputová, for example, should not feel herself obliged to suffer too frequently through the tedium of pointless get-togethers with her Czech, Hungarian, and Polish counterparts—at least not until there is a real prospect for a meeting of the minds on substantive matters.

The Three Seas Initiative can be an example of such an effort to look beyond Visegrád. Whereas tighter cooperation on energy and infrastructure connectivity, or on digitalization projects is desirable among Central and Eastern European countries, those are not first-order issues. But what are such first-order issues? Geopolitical unity in the face of Russia and China is one—but that is hard to achieve among the Visegrád countries, much less in more expansive formats. Moreover, for post-communist countries on the EU’s and NATO’s Eastern flank, the game should not be primarily about developing ties between themselves but rather about connecting themselves inextricably to the West, in preparation for geopolitical turbulences that are coming.

For Slovakia, similarly to the Baltic members of the Eurozone, the future design of the monetary union, with its fiscal and political ramifications, is of utmost importance. There, a deepening ties with the likes of Estonia, Finland, and the Netherlands seems in order. Small Central European countries have also a stake in strengthening the single market—and in preventing France and more recently Germany from introducing damaging industrial policies that would jeopardize competition. After the UK’s departure, forging alliances with other pro-market voices in the Union, especially in its north, will be critically important. It is hard, however, to see the current Hungarian and Polish governments doing that effectively given their own in interest in cronyist “industrial policies.”

One specter haunting Brussels is the supposed divide opening between the EU’s East and West. Many in the Trump Administration and in the American conservative movement more broadly actively encourage that divide and see it as desirable. Yet, Europe’s real disagreements tend to be far more complex.

The formal and informal alliances between European countries ought to reflect the new alignments of interests and values, which often defy the casual distinction between between “old” and “new” Europe. If instead Central and Eastern European leaders insist on preserving an ossified Visegrád bloc, much like an earlier generation tried with the “Little Entente,” they risk being caught off guard and without reliable allies when the next crisis hits.

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The Intellectual Dark Web Cannot Defeat Identity Politics

There is something refreshing about the tendency of earnest people to mistake politics for an intellectual endeavor. These days, when the American people are fed a media diet of info-tainment, talking heads, and “fake news”—when public argument prizes purity over objectivity—a mass movement aimed at restoring free thought would appear a welcome intervention.

In many ways, the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW) represents just such a movement. Heterodox, empiricist, and cross-disciplinary, the IDW serves as a valuable check against the toxins of anti-intellectualism on both the Left and Right. Its members include Sam Harris, a neuroscientist and podcaster; Eric Weinstein, an investment banker at Thiel Capital; and (most controversially) Jordan Peterson, an outspoken critic of speech codes within and beyond the academy.

The IDW’s great foe in the culture wars is “identity politics,” and especially campus identity politics, whose march through the institutions has become more pronounced in recent years.

Yet because all politics is in some sense a matter of identity—our loyalties to groups and causes larger than ourselves—the phenomenon we call “identity politics” cannot be defeated without acknowledging the fact of social identity. Only by recasting identity in more inclusive terms—by focusing more on what we share and less on what we don’t—can the IDW achieve its goals.

First, though, we should get clear on just what identity politics is. The term is notoriously polysemous, admitting of multiple and at times conflicting definitions. Mark Lilla, for instance, defines identity politics as any politics that concerns identity—an extremely broad concept. The Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and 60s count as identity politics, Lila explained in an interview with Steve Paikin, because they integrated “African-Americans, women, gays, into the great American democratic we.” The goal was to enlarge the notion of Americanness so that it included previously marginalized groups.

But after the great mid-century successes and reforms, the movement took on a new emphasis.

In the 70s and 80s there was a shift to a second kind of identity politics, which was more personal, and about myself and my own very complex identity, and also a politics of difference. So rather than it being about bringing us together into a great “democratic we,” instead doubts were raised about the existence of it, and politics came to be conceived of on our liberal side as a politics of groups, of movements, and not party politics with a message that would offer a vision of American destiny that would attract Americans from all walks of life.

What began as an attempt to democratize rights and ideals morphed into form of tribalism that encouraged people to identify their interests with this or that demographic, rather than with the nation as a whole. Consequently, individual identity as an American was subsumed into group identity based on race, gender, and other factors.

That is the version of identity politics that predominates today, and the one Lila criticizes. He fears a politics that does not seek to unify our diverse experiences of American identity into a coherent whole greater than the sum of its parts. Francis Fukuyama agrees, arguing that the great threat of identity politics is not merely its de-emphasis on the individual, but its breaking of our larger identification with the nation:

I think that national identity as a practical political project is really the level at which you need to think about building these communal values, because frankly political power is still organized around these things we call nations, and those political institutions aren’t going to work unless you have those kind of integrative identities.

According to Fukuyama, it’s not the existence of subgroups, or political and social attachments to them, that threaten liberal values. It is the tendency of these allegiances to ignore or even oppose a more “integrative” identification with the American nation as a whole. In terms similar to Lilla’s, Fukuyama outlines a shift in the nature of identity politics, contrasting the identity politics of Martin Luther King, Jr. with what would follow: “As the Black Power movement began to evolve you got a different view—not that we’re simply trying to share in that same American dream but that we have a kind of different dream.”

The Intellectual Dark Web highlights the limitations of identity politics in ways similar to Lilla and Fukuyama. There’s individualism—IDW figures like Sam Harris and Ben Shapiro decry identity politics for its devaluation of the individual. There’s rationalism—the IDW bemoans identity politics for its attack on objective rationality.

But despite these similarities, the Intellectual Dark Web operates under a stricter definition of identity politics than the definition Lilla and Fukuyama use. Jordan Peterson articulated this difference clearly in an interview with GQ, rebutting the idea that identity politics is simply the organization of interests around a shared identity:

Let’s get our definitions straight here. You can’t lump all occurrences of non-equal treatment into the category of identity politics. Identity politics is a very specific thing, it’s really only existed since the 1970’s. . . .you can’t say that people’s proclivity to identify with their group is identity politics. That’s just tribalism. . . .Identity politics is something that’s nested inside a particular political view of the world. It’s got a Marxist basis and manifests itself in postmodernism. And it emerged in France first in the 1970s and then has swept through the American universities and increasingly the rest of the West since.

We have here two very different origin stories, and thus two different definitions. For Lilla and Fukuyama, the civil rights movement was a kind of identity politics, one that strove to link the identity of the sub-group with the broader identity of the nation. But for Peterson, any program that appeals to universal, objective values is a negation of identity politics, not an expression of them.

And while it is unclear to what degree other individual members of the IDW subscribe to Peterson’s definition, in general the IDW treats identity politics as categorically cancerous. From their perspective, the antidote to regressive tribalism seems to be polemicism, directed against the norms and pieties of political correctness. Ben Shapiro has built a massive following doing precisely that. In this view, identity politics goes wrong by attacking the intellectual and ethical sovereignty of the individual, a concept that supposedly spans the entire Western tradition—from the Hebrew Bible and the Catholic Church all the way to the Enlightenment. So the polemics can be thought of as a kind of counterattack, an attempt to rid Western civilization of hostile, anti-Western forces.

I sympathize with that project and believe it is necessary. But the sovereignty of the individual does not entail the irrelevance of everything else. And it will be difficult to conserve that sovereignty if we do not rehabilitate the shared values and understandings on which it is based. This means the IDW must do more than expose the double standards of contemporary identity politics—though these problems must be confronted. It must also strengthen the sense of civic connection between groups by constructing a common identity, so that pluralism does not cause social breakdown.

Some IDW members seem sympathetic to this goal. When I asked Heather Heying, an evolutionary biologist associated with the group, whether diversity necessarily undermines cohesion, she answered me this way:

We will find in-group/out-group divisions, we will become tribal, this is what social organisms do. There is no way around that. But as humans. . . .we should aspire to think about our shared humanity first. Think of humans, think of the entire planet and humanity first, and then focus on the individual.

So there is an awareness of the need for some kind of connection, some kind of shared identity, in certain pockets of the IDW.

But, as Fukuyama and Lilla note, shared humanity isn’t enough. Shared experience is what binds us together, what makes political life possible. A sense of solidarity will therefore emerge among ethnic, racial, and religious groups, whose members have similar backgrounds. To be sure, nations can have shared experiences, values, and stories too. The degree to which this shared national identification can be restored in America is the degree to which pernicious manifestations of identity politics can be rolled back or rerouted toward a shared commitment to the common good.

This in turn requires a re-telling of our individual narratives so that they flow into a larger American story that upholds our values and heritage—a story of common inheritance. The African-American struggle for freedom testifies to the seminal American value of liberty. The woman’s rights movements suffused fuller meaning into the American conviction that all men are created equal—that by “man” we mean “mankind.” Indeed, these are themes by which civil rights advocates, not just in the 1950s and 60s but all the way back to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass, articulated their beliefs. They moved people, with particular commitments to particular groups, to pursue those commitments in a public-spirited way, with an eye toward the common good.

As Jonathan Haidt has demonstrated, it is not arguments but stories that sway people’s thinking. Good arguments can change our minds, of course, and polemics can help us correct flawed ways of looking at the world. But if the IDW wants to defeat identity politics—of the bad, postmodernist stripe—it will have to do more than embarrass social justice warriors. It will have to give true believers something better to believe in.

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The Improbable Rise and Uncertain Future of Syria’s Kurds

The phenomenal rise of Kurds in Syria onto the international stage took the world by surprise. “Out of nowhere,” as the title of Michael Gunter’s 2014 book suggests, the Kurds managed within a short span of time (2012-19) to take control of one-third of Syria and, with but modest help from others, to defeat the most dangerous jihadi force in the Middle East, the Islamic State (IS). Their success raises some intriguing questions: What internal dynamics within the Kurdish community enabled this success? What tactics and strategies did the Kurdish entity develop in order to achieve its goals in a swift-changing geopolitical landscape? And with the U.S. military now drawing down in Syria, what are the prospects for its survival?

Consolidating Power

From the beginning of the Syrian uprising in 2011, a tacit struggle for power erupted between two rival wings within the Kurdish camp. One is a conglomerate of some 20 small parties established during the late 1950s that has been supported by the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iraq (KDP) from across the border. Relations started from the time of Mulla Mustafa Barzani in the early 1960s, but his son Mas’ud cemented them into an alliance under an umbrella organization in 2011.

The second is the Democratic Union Party (Partiya Yekitiya Demokrat, PYD), established in 2003 as an offshoot of the Turkish Kurdish Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK). During the Cold War the Soviet Union and its ally Syria supported the PKK, and precursor Kurdish groups, with a view to weakening Turkey and NATO.

Between 2012 and 2014, the two wings made some halfhearted attempts to join forces, but the PYD ended up marginalizing its more fragmented rivals to secure military, political, and administrative control. The PYD’s relative cohesiveness, martial spirit, superior organizational capabilities, and ideological arsenal mattered, but its military force, the Yekineyen Parastina Gel (YPG), trumped all.

Initially the lines dividing the political and military wings were quite blurred. However, since the beginning of war a division of power has developed, with the PYD controlling the administrative system and diplomatic ties and the YPG leading the fighting on the ground.

The YPG proved its mettle from the beginning of the Syrian war. Its successes enabled the establishment in 2015 of an autonomous region composed of three cantons: Qamishlo, Qobane, and Afrin. By early 2019 it had managed to destroy Jabhat al-Nusra and defeat the Islamic State on the ground, but lost control of Afrin.

The PYD also imposed one party-rule in Syrian Kurdistan by announcing in 2014 a law forbidding Kurdish political parties that did not recognize its administration. Later it was blamed for persecuting members of the other wing and imposing authoritarian rule in the region.

In contrast to its policy of isolating rival Kurdish parties, the PYD initiated alliances with non-Kurdish groups and communities including Assyrians, Turkmen, and most importantly Arabs. The rationale was to enlarge its influence over areas with Arab demographic dominance that came under its control during the war, as well as to present an image of a pluralistic, democratic, and modern society. It was also driven by a desire to establish an anarchist-inspired polyethnic society that aimed at sharing power among all ethnic and religious communities and invalidating the notion of a larger nation-state.

In truth, however, the PYD remained the hegemonic power within the group of organizations, sharing power with its non-Kurdish allies in merely symbolic ways. Thus, after the establishment in 2015 of the military alliance—the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), with Arab, Assyrian, and other forces—the YPG continued to be the decision-maker and dominant force on the battlefield. Similarly, the political system the SDF established in the areas under its control was the embodiment of PYD/PKK ideological tenets, and more precisely experimentation in the social-political concepts of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan. Ocalan was famously influenced by the writings of the Marxist-turned-anarchist Murray Bookchin. From him he drew ideas such as “democratic federalism,” “social ecology,” and the need to renounce the concept of a nation-state. Indeed, following Bookchin’s death in 2006 the PKK paid public tribute to him for helping to shape its ideology and theory of administration.

The leadership, too, was monopolized by pro-PYD Kurds. For example, TEV-DEM, the coalition governing the autonomous region, is headed by two Kurdish co-chairs: Gharib Hesso and Zelal Ceger, whose predecessors were also Kurds. Kurdish national culture set the tone, as well. For example, the SDF celebrated the liberation of the last IS basis in Baghouz on March 24 with the Kurdish national anthem “Ey Reqib.”

The party discourse itself, which has been full of studied dissimulation, exemplifies the two opposite pressures operating on the PYD: namely, the need to retain and downplay its Kurdish identity at the same time. For instance, unlike Kurdish parties in Iraq or the other so-called nationalist Kurdish Syrian parties, the PYD has avoided the terms Kurdish or Kurdistan in its title to allay concerns from Damascus, Ankara, and potential non-Kurdish partners over the specter of Kurdish separatism.

Tellingly, the PYD chose the name “Rojava,” which simply means “west” in Kurdish, for the name of its autonomous region, rather than Rojavaye Kurdistan (“west Kurdistan”), which would have put it in the context of other parts of Greater Kurdistan: Bakur in Turkey, Rojhelat in Iran, and Bashur in Iraq. Later, due to political pressure either from its Arab partners or the Syrian regime, it thought it more prudent to drop Rojava and use the term “Northern Syria,” as for example in the document “The Social Contract of the Democratic Federalism of Northern Syria.” It then shifted to “North and East Syria” as the tide of battle moved that way. Ironically, while the PYD tended to avoid the term Rojava after 2015, most world media outlets continued to use it.

These fluctuations illustrate the challenges facing the PYD as a result of the shifting boundaries in the ongoing war and its need to adapt its discourse and maps accordingly. Indeed, the PYD-led government kept publishing changing maps of the region, including a virtual one showing Kurdistan of Syria reaching the sea. However, following the Turkish occupation of Afrin in 2018 it had to drop this map, and with it the dream of an outlet to the sea. The PYD’s name changes and vacillations in terminology—including a shift from terms like democratic autonomy to the less fear-provoking “self-administration”—have similarly been made in deference to its other partners in the SDF but, no less importantly, to President Bashar al-Assad, with whom it hoped to reach an agreement on postwar Syria.

These fluctuations notwithstanding, the PYD has stood on firm ground regarding other crucial issues. One important constant was that it has kept intact its links with the PKK, with all the positive and negative consequences entailed. At the same time it has been trying to nurture deep-rooted change on the societal level by engineering a gender revolution and administrative innovation, while also fostering Kurdish national identity in the education system.

Kurdish women have been leading a gender revolution in Syria simultaneously with the main one. In addition to their effective participation in the war against IS, women are represented in the various diplomatic and political echelons of public life. Their most important achievement has been the co-chairing arrangement anchored in the provisional constitution of 2016. Thus Article 12 states:

The Democratic Federalism of Northern Syria adopts the co-presidency system in all political, social, administrative, and other fields. It considers it a main principle in equal representation of both genders. The co-presidency system contributes to organizing and establishing the democratic confederate system of women as a special entity.

In many societies, women who come to the fore during wartime are sidelined when the war ends. For Kurdish women in Syria, however, the changes may be too widespread and deep to be uprooted when the guns go silent.

Another area of deep changes is in the education system. In contrast to pressures for blurring Kurdish identity in the public discourse, Kurdish activists felt freer to introduce a heavy dose of Kurdish nationalism in Kurdish textbooks. In this they hoped to thwart the regime’s continuous attempts to Arabize the Kurds. Examining several textbooks for small children, one is struck by their overwhelming emphasis on Kurdish identity and Kurdish nationalism as a whole.

To give but a few examples: One textbook presents a map of Greater Kurdistan carrying the original names of Kurdish cities and places instead of the official ones given them by the governments as part of their longstanding de-Kurdification policies. The term Kurdistan is repeated time and again, and the same is true for famous national Kurdish poets such as Ahmad Khani or Cegerxwin.

Pan-Kurdism is also carefully interwoven into the texts. For example, one textbook includes a poem about the Kurdistan Republic of Mahabad, which existed for a few months in 1946 in Iran. Another mentions the 1988 massacre in Halabja in Iraqi Kurdistan, where some 5,000 Kurds were killed by the Iraqi Ba‘ath regime’s chemical attack.

The Kurdish language is another identity marker given much attention in the textbooks. Kurdish is glorified as “the sweet and beautiful language” and “the star of the world.” Interestingly, no allusion whatsoever to Islam may be found; instead the stress is on Nowruz as a sacred day for the Kurds.

Foreign Maneuvers

The long war in Syria forced the Kurdish leadership to wage war on several fronts, but simultaneously to leave as many channels as possible open for forming ad hoc alliances and maneuvering between potential partners. One major problem was that the more victories the Kurdish forces scored against IS, the more they antagonized Turkey, which came to view them as an existential threat. Initially, the PYD attempted to reach an understanding with Turkey, Syria’s nemesis, when its leader Salih Muslim visited Ankara twice in summer 2013. The attempt failed: Turkey turned gradually from a passive into an active anti-Kurdish adversary. In two operations, in August 2017 and January 2018, the Turkish army and its proxies took control of Syrian lands—in Jarablus and Afrin, respectively—in hopes of eliminating the Kurdish dream of creating a contiguous autonomous region.

Sandwiched between two archenemies, Turkey and Syria, the PYD managed successfully to keep a channel open to the latter. Thus, from the start the leadership has maintained a tacit understanding with President Assad with regard to the administration of the region from which the Syrian army had withdrawn in 2012. This meant, for example, that Kurdish employees could continue receiving salaries from Damascus and thus avert a serious economic crisis. For its part, the regime maintained a token force in an enclave in Qamishlo, the capital of the Kurdish autonomous region.

Ad hoc cooperation did not prevent occasional armed clashes between Kurdish forces and the Syrian army, as happened in April 2016 and September 2018. The latter clash signaled the strengthening of Damascus and its aspiration to reassume actual control over the autonomous region. Indeed, in the negotiations between the parties in summer 2018, Assad was reluctant to acknowledge the Kurdish demand for autonomy.

Confident of the Kurds’ unique contribution to the rout of IS in Syria, the PYD initiated diplomatic moves early on to gain legitimacy for Kurdish autonomy. However, the position of its so-called allies—especially that of the two major players, Russia and the United States—proved inconsistent and frustrating.

The Kurds depended on Russia, which granted them some diplomatic space by allowing a Kurdish representation in Moscow, and by mediating between them and Assad. However, when put to the test, Russia’s backing proved ephemeral. Moscow not only offered no tangible military support to the Kurdish forces fighting IS, but also granted Turkey a green light to occupy Afrin. Russia also dismissed talk of an autonomous region in postwar Syria. Thus, in the mediation talks between the Kurds and Damascus in early 2019, the Russian Foreign Ministry told the Kurdish representative that Russia was ready to “work together to protect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Syria”—not a word about Kurdish autonomy. Meanwhile, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused the U.S. administration of trying to establish a Kurdish state in Syria’s north.

For all of Russia’s accusations, the American stance regarding a Kurdish entity was no less ambivalent than its own. The PYD itself had to adapt itself quickly to a new partner with which it had no earlier ties. The Kurds’ need of American military assistance moved the PYD to soften some of its leftist ideological tenets. This flexibility combined with Kurdish military achievements prepared the ground for the ad hoc military cooperation between the parties initiated at the end of 2014.

Reluctant to send its own boots to the battlefield and leaning on Kurdish YPG fighters as the best proxies for defeating IS, the U.S. government was even willing at times to prioritize its relations with Syrian Kurds above those with Turkey. However, paradoxically enough, the YPG’s victories stood once again to jeopardize the continuity of American support. The best illustration of this paradox was President Donald Trump’s sudden declaration at the end of 2018 to withdraw all American forces from Rojava with the excuse that IS had been defeated. Obviously, both Turkey and Syria were enthusiastic about this sudden declaration, which carried an opportunity to get rid, each in its own way, of Kurdish aspirations for autonomy. This American capriciousness induced the Kurdish leadership to use various diplomatic channels in Washington and the world at large to curtail losses and safeguard Kurdish autonomy.

A decade ago Rojava was a nonentity, but within eight years the PYD/YPG managed to put it on the regional and international map. Yet its collapse could happen as quickly as its rise. The PYD’s victories brought it a major enemy, Turkey, but no real friend. The U.S. government, its ad hoc ally, used it as a proxy for fighting IS but might now abandon it. Clearly, the U.S. administration was oblivious to the fact that the Kurds have paid dearly in this proxy war—around 11,000 killed and many more wounded, according to the Kurds’ estimates.

For all its uniqueness, the short history of Rojava resembles that of many other minority communities in the Middle East by illustrating a major paradox: Rather than helping oppressed minorities, the backing of external powers in the region proved catastrophic for them. As ever, minorities are used as proxies only to be abandoned after having fulfilled their task.

A few examples suggest the trend. Great Britain used the Assyrians as proxies throughout its mandatory period in Iraq (1920-32) but abandoned them in the Iraqi army’s infamous Simele massacre in 1933. The Soviet Union used Iranian Kurds during World War II as a bargaining chip against the central government and even assisted them in establishing the Mahabad Republic, only to leave them to their devices at the end of that war. The United States used Iraqi Kurds as a balance against Baghdad and its patron the Soviet Union during the Kurdish-Iraqi war in 1974-75, but was instrumental in ending that war with catastrophic results for the Kurds.

Even though the SDF declared its final victory over IS in March, American zigzagging declarations and policies do not bode well for sustaining that victory. The big question mark is therefore whether the Kurds of Syria will be able to break the vicious circle of other minorities, or whether that typical fate will once again befall them.

Indeed, the real war for protecting their hard-earned autonomy has just begun. To succeed in their endeavor the PYD/YPG has to move on various levels simultaneously. Domestically, they have to lower the public profile of their relations with the PKK, soften their monopoly on power, and reconcile with the other major Kurdish wing in Syria as well as with its patron across the border in northern Iraq. Such policy may also increase Kurdish socio-political cohesiveness overall and gain the backing of an influential Kurdish diaspora in the ongoing battle for diplomatic support in the West.

Regionally speaking, the PYD/YPG has yet to cope with its two major enemies, Turkey and Syria. Regarding Turkey, the PYD/YPG should continue to mobilize the support of its allies against possible Turkish encroachment and alternatively insist on taking part in a safety zone, should one be established. The AKP’s weakened position following recent elections may be instrumental for a change of policy in Ankara, especially since the PYD/YPG have never carried out any terrorist attacks against this country.

As for relations with postwar Syria, the Kurds have already allayed Assad’s fears by renouncing separatism and adopting the notion of autonomy within the Syrian state. Still, they find themselves on the horns of a dilemma between negotiating with Assad and adhering to Washington’s warning to refrain from doing so. In the final analysis, they might be forced to come to terms with Assad, but American backing could be crucial for gaining a better deal for the Kurds.

On the international level, the Kurds should press home the idea that they are indispensable for keeping jihadi forces in the Levant at bay. Thus, they may use the West’s need for them as leverage against their abandonment­­. The PYD/YPG may also argue that continuing to back them would serve strategic American interests in the region, such as balancing the deteriorating U.S. relationship with Ankara and putting obstacles in the way of greater Iranian encroachment in Syria. If the Kurds can make that case, they may just be able to defy history and protect their hard-earned position.

Harriet Allsopp, “Kurdish political parties and the Syrian uprising,” in Gareth Stansfield and Mohammed Shareef (eds.), The Kurdish Question Revisited (Hurst and Company, 2017), p.289. Alssopp describes them as “the parties of 1957,” as many were established that year.

See Zeynep Kaya and Robert Lowe, “The Curious question of the PYD-PKK relationship” in Gareth Stansfield and Mohammed Shareef (eds.), The Kurdish Question Revisited (Hurst and Company, 2017), p.279.

Allsopp, p.297.

For further details, see Zeynep Kaya and Robert Lowe, pp. 275-287.

Ofra Bengio,”Game changers: Kurdish women in peace and war” Middle East Journal (Volume 70, Number 1, Winter 2016).

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The Washington-Hollywood Pact

Has Hollywood ever relied on Washington for help? Many Americans would guess no, because compared with the film industries of most other nations, ours has always been privately owned, competitive, and devoted chiefly to profit, with other goals trailing a distant second. Not only that, but for the last half-century Washington and Hollywood have often been at loggerheads, with Washington blaming Hollywood for glorifying social ills such as drug abuse and gun violence, and Hollywood portraying America’s political institutions in a negative light.

Yet when it comes to the rest of the world, Washington and Hollywood are like an old married couple who quarrel at home but are deeply united in public. The fact that America exports more than ten times the number of films it imports is not simply the result of the free market. On the contrary, it is the fruit of a century of cooperation between the two partners that I call the Washington-Hollywood Pact. The Pact was originally based on President Woodrow Wilson’s stated belief that the cinema “speaks a universal language [that] lends itself importantly to the presentation of America’s plans and purposes.”1 But it has changed a lot since then.

The Era of Reciprocity

When America entered World War I in 1917, President Wilson set up the Committee on Public Information (CPI), known as the Creel Committee after its chair, journalist George Creel. One of the first things Creel did was ask the fledgling film studios to help the war effort. They obliged by making anti-German films such as Escaping the Hun and The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin, that, like the British propaganda at the time, used atrocity stories, including some that were fabricated, to rally isolationist Americans to the cause.

After the war, Washington rewarded Hollywood with the Webb-Pomerene Export Trade Act, which allowed the studios to form a cartel when operating abroad, even though this was illegal at home. Soon that cartel, otherwise known as the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA), was strong-arming its way into foreign markets still recovering from the war. Back in 1910, the international market had been dominated by the French studios Pathé Frères and Gaumont. By 1925, America was producing 577 films versus France’s 68.

This is not to suggest that Hollywood forced itself on foreign audiences; its products proved immensely appealing. But without Washington’s help, it would likely have been harder to make the world safe for Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.

For the next two decades, the MPPDA focused on profit, not politics. For example, the studios continued doing business with Italy and Germany right up until Mussolini and Hitler banned the import of foreign films in 1939. Historians disagree about the studios’ motives for selling movies to fascists. But there is no doubt that the minute America entered World War II, Hollywood began working closely with the Office of War Information (OWI) and other government agencies, including the armed forces and intelligence services. The result was a steady stream of productions ranging from Frank Capra’s army training films, Why We Fight, to hundreds of features that, more often than not, managed to support the war aims without sacrificing entertainment value.

With victory came unprecedented power for both Washington and Hollywood. The MPPDA became the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and formed an overseas arm, the Motion Picture Export Association (MPEA), dubbed “the little State Department.” The MPEA’s first priority was to distribute the industry’s wartime backlog of over 2,000 films into as many foreign markets as possible. This took a bit of doing, because foreign governments had other priorities.

For example, when the financially hard-pressed British government realized that 80 percent of the films on British screens were American, and that $70 million of the revenue from those films was flowing back to Hollywood, it imposed a 75 percent customs duty. The MPEA responded with an embargo, forcing British theaters to either go dark or repeat the same (American) films for weeks at a time. The public outcry was such that the government had little choice but to lift the duty.

In France, the Vichy ban on foreign films had whetted the appetite of audiences (and theater owners) for U.S. films. But like the British, the French were financially strapped and unwilling to see Hollywood take advantage. In addition, French elites considered American movies an assault on French culture. (It didn’t help that the films were being physically transported by vehicles belonging to the U.S. Army’s Division of Psychological Warfare.) So Paris imposed a quota, only to be reminded by Washington that the United States was at the time France’s sole source of debt relief and cash. This situation was resolved by the Blum-Byrnes Agreement of 1946, which relieved France of its war debt and provided $650 million in U.S. aid—in exchange for Paris yielding to the wishes of Hollywood. Within a year, French film production declined by 50 percent.

If this was America’s policy toward its allies, how did it treat its vanquished enemies? Not that differently. At war’s end Washington was preparing to engage in new battles, not just for markets but also for hearts and minds. In Britain and France, the battle was expected to be against the encroaching power and influence of the Soviet Union. In Japan and Germany, it was against both communist influence and the specter of resurgent fascism. In a memo sent to the MPAA in 1944, the State Department made clear its hope that the dream factory would remain on board:

In the post-war period, the Department desires to co-operate fully in the protection of American motion pictures abroad. It expects in return that the industry will co-operate wholeheartedly with the government with a view to ensuring that the pictures distributed abroad will reflect credit on the good name and reputation of this country and its institutions. (emphasis added)2

Translation: Washington agrees to help Hollywood pry open foreign markets, on the condition that the films flowing into those markets would serve to remind audiences of America’s many virtues and good intentions in their part of the world. Rarely had the terms of the Pact been spelled out so clearly.

In Japan, the Pact was upheld by Washington when the U.S. occupation authority oversaw the distribution of over 500 Hollywood films, which all parties assumed would help to create a market. And the studios cooperated by making sure that the films they donated did not contain “imperial” themes such as feudal loyalty and military honor, but rather emphasized individual rights, freedom of speech, free enterprise, and other democratic values.

Germany was a special case, due to the sheer clout of that nation’s film industry under National Socialism and the eagerness of the MPEA to establish its dominance in that market. Initially, the U.S. occupation authority went along, discouraging any attempt by the German studios to revive and asking the MPEA to donate films that, as in Japan, would promote democratic values. But rather than donate films that had the potential to make money in Germany, the MPEA donated films that did not have that potential, such as war films showing the Allies beating Germany, and pre-war comedies that, according to one U.S. intelligence officer, only “irritated” the Germans with their “superficial escapism.”

Concerned less with Hollywood’s profits than with a possible resurgence of Nazism, the U.S. occupation authority took seriously the same intelligence officer’s insistence that “Germans faced with bitter realities” preferred to “hear their own language” and “see “backgrounds and themes as well as actors” that were “familiar.”3 So it decided—against the expressed wishes of the MPEA—to hire out-of-work German filmmakers to make films that would placate the German audience.

Hence the Heimatfilme, a series of sentimental musicals set in Alpine villages untouched by war or Nazism, which (in a nod to the future interests of the MPEA) showed how traditional German values could be reconciled with American-style consumerism. Scorned as reactionary kitsch by Germans born after the war, the Heimatfilme were eventually displaced by the New German Cinema, whose attempts to reckon with the recent past were too bleak to attract a mass audience.

Yet even if the New German filmmakers had been Disneys and Spielbergs, the deck would have been stacked against them, because U.S. dominance of European film markets was built into the Marshall Plan. To most Americans, the Marshall Plan was a generous aid package launched in 1948 to help war-ravaged European nations, including Germany, get back on their feet. To Europeans, however, it was also the leading edge of “U.S. cultural imperialism.” As noted by historian Thomas H. Guback, the Plan’s ideological justification was not only “to strengthen faltering economies against risings from the Left,” but also to serve “to open and maintain markets for American films, . . . seen as propaganda vehicles for strengthening western European minds against pleas from the left.”

Today this analysis sounds either nefarious or necessary, depending on your political perspective. In 1948 it was unremarkable, because it dovetailed nicely with the Washington-Hollywood Pact. What no one foresaw at the time was how quickly the terms of the Pact would change. By 1969, when Guback published his analysis, a covenant based on patriotism and profit had been transformed into a contract based solely on profit.

Estrangement, Loyalty, and the End of Reciprocity

The process began with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings of 1947-1951. These were not the first such hearings: a decade earlier, the predecessor, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, spent three years probing the political loyalties of the film industry. But because those earlier hearings were focused on Nazism, they did not damage the Washington-Hollywood Pact. The same cannot be said of the anti-Communist rounds.

One thing is clear: from the 1930s through the 1940s, there were a significant number of Party sympathizers in Hollywood, just as in other walks of American life. What is not clear is how dangerous they were. Herein lurks an irony: during the war, the filmmakers most willing to take direction from Washington were Party members committed to Stalin’s Popular Front, which urged cooperation with all forms of anti-fascist cultural production.

The clunky pro-Soviet films produced by these filmmakers—The North Star, Song of Russia, Three Russian Girls—were box-office flops. (Even the movie buff Stalin disliked Mission to Moscow.) But once the war was over, the actual impact of these films mattered less to HUAC (and the studio heads) than the ideological predispositions of the men and women who had made them. And many of these people were fired and/or blacklisted.

These events left a bitter legacy of distrust between the nation’s government and its dream factory. And the two partners dealt very differently with that legacy. Hollywood cultivated its bitterness, never letting the world forget how certain writers and directors suffered under the blacklist. And when the United States went to war again in Asia, there were only a handful of films supporting the anti-communist cause in Korea and even fewer in Vietnam (I can think of only two, both pretty bad).

Yet while Hollywood made a point of distancing itself from America’s geopolitical priorities and concerns, Washington behaved like a loyal spouse who will do anything to save a bad marriage. Most significantly, U.S. political leaders gradually ceased to care whether Hollywood reflects credit or discredit “on the good name and reputation of this country and its institutions.”4 On a more mundane level, Washington has labored mightily to devise legislative remedies to every significant threat, not only to the survival of the American film industry, but also to its global hegemony.

The first such remedy was the Informational Media Guaranty (IMG) of 1948, under which Washington promised to redeem in dollars the overseas earnings of U.S. companies, including film studios, selling “informational media” in countries with non-convertible currencies. As noted by former studio chief David Puttnam in a widely read history of this period, the IMG was based on the still operative assumption that the films being distributed by the MPEA would present “a favorable picture of American life.”

By the 1970s, that assumption was kaput, but that did not stop Washington from riding to Hollywood’s rescue yet again. In 1969, the major studios were hemorrhaging money on lavish musicals and other conventional films that, to say the least, failed to resonate with domestic audiences deeply divided over the Vietnam war, campus protests, urban riots, and political assassinations. With the support of the Nixon administration, Congress enacted tax reforms allowing up to 10 percent of production investment to be deducted from the studios’ overall corporate tax. As Puttnam observes wryly, most of the “bold and adventurous” films of the countercultural 1970s, such as Five Easy Pieces, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Taxi Driver, “were financed using tax shelter money.”

Since the 1980s and 1990s, Hollywood has sought Washington’s help around two major issues: piracy—or “movie theft,” to use the preferred term of an industry that has made billions of dollars on a franchise called Pirates of the Caribbean; and attempts by foreign governments to protect their cultural heritage—and domestic film industries—by restricting the import of U.S. films and other media.

The first issue, piracy, is relatively straightforward. Ever since the invention of tape recording, the U.S. entertainment industry has been concerned about the illegal sale of its products. These concerns intensified in the era of the DVD, and today they are part of an ongoing campaign against the theft of intellectual property broadly conceived. Indeed, in April of last year the Office of the US Trade Representative issued its latest report on the topic, which won kudos from Charles Rivkin, currently the head of the MPAA. Noting that “America’s film and television industry is one of the most highly competitive global industries, generating a positive trade surplus of $12.2 billion and supporting 2.1 million U.S. jobs here at home,” Rivkin reiterated the need “to protect creators’ rights and promote our nation’s creative economy.”

Less straightforward is the second issue. On several occasions between the 1980s and the 2000s, France and whatever allies it could enlist lobbied the World Trade Organization to carve out a “cultural exception” to the free-trade ethos of the post-Cold War liberal order. The American response was always the same: to deny the legitimacy of such claims, on the ground that there is no meaningful distinction between trade in commodities and trade in cultural expression. And in recent years, as the Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping has asserted ever more control over the production, content, and distribution of U.S. films in China, the response by both Hollywood and Washington has been equally supine with regard to the protected nature of film as free expression.

There is a rich irony here. In 1915, when the new medium was in its infancy, the Supreme Court decision Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio defined film as “a business, pure and simple.” This exposed film to government censorship at the local, state, and federal level, so over the next several years the MPPDA developed the Production Code, which regulated the content of movies from 1934 to 1968. This being America, the studios also pursued a legal strategy that by mid-century resulted in film being judged a constitutionally protected form of artistic expression. In 1968 this new status led to the elimination of the Production Code and the adoption of the ratings system still in place today. In sum, American filmmakers now have more creative freedom than any of their predecessors, to say nothing of their peers in the rest of the world.

Yet when it comes to penetrating overseas markets, both Hollywood and Washington behave as though it were still 1915. While their shared stance that film is “a business, pure and simple” may work as pushback against the protectionism and diktats of foreign governments, it fosters a troubling disconnect between profit and patriotism. In the short term, it may be good business to treat American movies as widgets with no cultural significance. But in the long term, it is lousy diplomacy.

1. Quoted in Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire (Harvard University Press, 2005), 299.

2. Quoted in David Puttnam, The Undeclared War (Harper Collins, London, 1997), 212.

3. Confidential report from Robert Schmid, ODIC, Intelligence Branch (1946), quoted in Heide Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany (University of North Carolina Press, 1995), n275.

4. This argument, which favors neither censorship nor propaganda, is set forth in my book, Through a Screen Darkly (Yale 2014).

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Algeria’s False Spring?

The resignation of Algeria’s President Abdelaziz Bouteflika on April 2, after weeks of sustained protests, has raised the inevitable question: is this time really different? Algeria has seen streets protests before, and each time the regime has turned the situation around to emerge stronger from the experience. It started to learn the hard way 30 years ago, in October 1988, when in the space of a week popular protests degenerated into a convulsion of riots and repression that left up to 500 dead and thousands wounded.

Algeria was at the time a single-party Republic eaten away by the economic failure of a collectivist model. The price of hydrocarbons, the main revenue of the Algerian state, had been dropping severely in the years prior, provoking a fiscal crisis. The IMF intervened, imposed price hikes, and violence ensued. To help the nation get over the trauma of the riots, then-President Chadli Bendjedid opted to open up the political system.

Algeria had been, since 1962, under the control of the FLN/ALN, the Liberation Front cum military organization that gained independence through a brutal war with France. A pretense of democracy did not last a year. Ahmed Ben Bella, a dictatorial Prime Minister who had spent much of the war in prison, shoved aside other senior FLN figures to seize the presidency in the one-sided 1963 election, with support from the ALN’s Chief of Staff, Colonel Houari Boumédiène. Boumédiène then overthrew Ben Bella in 1965 and would hold the Presidential Palace until his death in 1978. The long Boumédiène years established the structures of the Algerian deep state, run by the top brass of the FLN and known simply as Le Pouvoir.

Ten years after the death of Boumédiène, Le Pouvoir was struggling economically and politically. The new constitution, drafted in 1989, provided for multiparty elections quickly dominated by a Muslim Brotherhood-type party, the FIS (Front Islamique du Salut). The popular verdict was unequivocal. At the end of December 1991, in between the two rounds of Parliamentary elections, the FIS was poised to obtain an absolute majority, while the FLN could barely manage to win 20 seats.

The military stepped in, suspending the electoral process, which ignited a civil war that would last for most of a decade and claim the lives of roughly 150,000 Algerians. Those years would see a President assassinated, mass massacres of civilians, the assassination of priests and Imams, extrajudicial executions, acts of terrorism on French soil, and even a plane hijacking intended to target the Eiffel Tower.

On the side of Le Pouvoir, the civil war was fought, and ultimately won, by a group known as Les Éradicateurs: men like Major General Khaled Nezzar, who had crushed the 1988 riots; Lieutenant General Mohamed Lamari, the Chief of Staff; and Major General Mohamed Mediène, head of the DRS (intelligence and internal security).

Choosing elimination over compromise, the Éradicateurs incited extreme violence from the radical Islamist fringe. They wanted Algerians, the French, and the world to turn their back on the Islamists, so that they could be eliminated with unrestrained brutality. They largely succeeded, as options became limited to a choice between Le Pouvoir and the notorious GIA, the Armed Islamic Group responsible for bloody terrorist attacks and gruesome massacres of whole villages.

By 1997, the tide had turned decidedly in favor of Le Pouvoir, now faced with the task of normalizing the political system for the long term. They understood there was no going back to single-party rule, allowing instead for alternative but sympathetic parties to populate the political space. The FLN would remain, alongside a more civilian and liberal RND (Rassemblement National Démocratique), and even a sanitized, government-approved Islamic Party, the MPS (Mouvement de la Société pour la Paix).

The regime had drafted Westernized liberals in their war against the Islamists, allowing a degree of freedom to the press, intellectuals, and artists. Keeping on with the seductive tone, they brought back from exile a man they hoped would be a consensual figure of national reconciliation: Abdelaziz Bouteflika, elected President in 1999.

Bouteflika was an unassuming man who, during the war of independence, had risen through the ranks of the ALN by virtue of being a close associate of Boumédiène. Minister of Foreign Affairs at 26, he would occupy the position from 1963 to 1979. But, never more than Boumédiène’s shadow, he was pushed aside after the death of his patron amidst accusations of stealing money from the Foreign Ministry.

A man like this, back from exile, seemed unthreatening to Les Éradicateurs. His long diplomatic stint, including at the United Nations, made him useful: He could call on his connections in the world’s capitals to legitimize the Algerian regime. Although by 1999 most Algerians were far too young to remember the war of Independence, his war record proved useful in crafting his avuncular persona, as a pseudo-national hero and a fixture of the easier Boumédiène years who had come back to reconcile a divided nation.

At first, Bouteflika played to the script. A velvet glove around the iron fist, he presided over an amnesty and rehabilitation program for survivors of the security onslaught against Islamists. Externally, he could simultaneously cash in anti-colonial credentials and maintain a good rapport with France, where he had spent his exile. One great success was a quasi-apology for colonization from President Hollande. In general, the West took to him as the grumpy but benign face of a new Algeria. Oil and gas flowed, keeping the treasury afloat. Algeria is not a fast-growing, open economy, but he channeled investments in infrastructure projects in and around Algiers. Contracts were signed with great fanfare.

Under the surface, the reality was bleaker. First, Algerian liberals and intellectuals had acquired a taste for freedom of expression during the civil war, when they mostly denounced the exactions of the GIA. However, their scrutiny of the actions of the government was unwelcome in peacetime. Issues ranged from violations of human rights during and after the civil war to the shady attribution of state contracts. Very quickly, critics had to take the path of exile, usually to France.

The custodians of the regime who had selected Bouteflika may not have realized the full constitutional depth of the role of President. In particular, his influence over governmental appointments allowed him to oversee contracts and appropriations. The FLN had been from its origins a socialist enterprise, Boumédiène presiding over the nationalization and collectivization of most sectors of the Algerian economy. For the military, the business model of the country was to export oil and gas. The budget came mostly from Sonatrach, the state-owned oil and gas company. The working class was organized within the UGTA, the historic trade Union, itself under the control of the FLN.

Bouteflika saw the benefits of a private sector and diversified economy. Infrastructure, in particular, was vastly inadequate in 1999, and Algiers looked suspended in time since the departure of the French, its buildings unmaintained and decaying. Vast infrastructure projects were launched under Bouteflika, including the construction of Algiers’s metro (the second in Africa) and a gigantic mosque. As President, he patronized private businesses and built a constituency among a group of entrepreneurs, which in turn gave him some autonomy from the security apparatus.

This oligarchic clique is embodied by Ali Haddad, a younger man born after independence and the founder and CEO of a construction group often awarded state contracts. Haddad also came to own a football club and a media group, and was elected in 2014 to lead Algeria’s main entrepreneurs’ association (Forum des Chefs d’Entreprise). Public figures like Haddad actively promoted the President, who in return facilitated their business concerns.

Bouteflika’s powerful brother, Saïd, was instrumental in the growth of those relationships with entrepreneurs.  A cleavage formed within Le Pouvoir between Bouteflika’s business clique (the oligarchs and some key civil servants), and the old socialist guard of the FLN. The terms of the dispute involved both power and principles. The rising political influence of private oligarchs jarred with the security service’s vision of an Algeria where the state was everything, its authority absolute.

One man who seized the opportunities and navigated the limitations of the new century was Issab Rebrab, Algeria’s richest man. In 1998 he founded Cevital, a conglomerate with interests in real estate, steel, and agribusiness. Rebrab could keep his distance from the Bouteflikas without payback because of a good rapport with the military and because of an international profile—his company has investments overseas, in France especially, and pictures of him with French Presidents are widely circulated.

Rebrab’s unusual autonomy exposes the challenge of political protection in a state with weak rule of law like Algeria. Another tycoon, Rafik Khalifa, had profited from tight military connections to build a banking and transport empire in the late 1990s. But he sided with those generals opposed to the re-election of Bouteflika in 2004. Not long after, his empire collapsed: a cautionary tale for anyone who dare cross the President.

The presidential elections, held every 5 years from 1999, were an unnerving test for Le Pouvoir. The military-security apparatus had never intended for Bouteflika to last past his original reconciliation mission, but the presidency carried enough weight that the incumbent was able to re-impose his candidacy on voters not once but four times: in 2004, 2009, 2014, and initially in 2019. The elderly man, first selected as a weak figurehead, was unmovable.

During his 20-year tenure, Bouteflika cycled through a long list of prime ministers. Beholden to the system of Le Pouvoir, the cabinet was appointed and dismissed to accommodate ongoing power struggles between factions. Ahmed Ouyahia, a career civil servant close to the military and Éradicateurs, founder of the RND, had four long stints as Head of Government. Abdelmalek Sellal, the technocrat who ran Bouteflika’s re-election campaigns, occupied the position between 2012 and 2017.

Dismissals, appointments, and indictments were the main weapons in this internecine conflict. Bouteflika and the security apparatus used mutual accusations of embezzlement to take down each other’s protégés. It was a nasty game of factional attrition, in which Bouteflika prevailed because top military men would prefer to eliminate each other.

The first to fall was Mohamed Lamari, the Chief of Staff and kingmaker who had ruthlessly won the civil war.  His chosen candidate for the 2004 presidential election was Ali Benflis, then General Secretary of the FLN. But Mohamed Médiène, the long-standing and powerful head of the DRS, switched support to Bouteflika, giving him a second term. Lamari was forced to step down, replaced as Chief of Staff by General Ahmed Gaid Salah. Like the President, Salah balanced credentials from the war of independence with a well-earned reputation for corruption, which left him vulnerable to prosecution and thus checked his ambitions.

The DRS was a state within the state, and it seemed for a decade that Bouteflika was the useful idiot and Médiène the strongman behind the scenes. But then the remains of the notorious GIA regrouped as “Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb”, pestering Le Pouvoir with occasional bombings and ambushes. In January 2013, a hostage crisis in a major gas facility in the Sahara weakened Médiène’s position as the DRS was held accountable for the failure. A brutal power struggle ensued, as Bouteflika suffered a major stroke in April, Salah was promoted to Vice Minister of Defense in September, and the DRS was placed under partial control of the government. The daunting Médiène was forced to resign in 2015, and the DRS was dissolved in 2016 for good measure.

The Algerian people—almost 43 million in 2019, half of them under the age of 27, more than 10 percent of them unemployed or underemployed—had joined the wave of the Arab Spring in 2011, before the security forces met them on the streets and put an end to it. In 2011, the fearsome Médiène was still in charge of internal security, and the memories of repression were vivid. Bouteflika was still functional, and even if Médiène only tolerated the President, all the instruments of the state were aligned to protect Le Pouvoir from the street.

The 2014 Presidential elections were heartbreaking for Algerians. Bouteflika had just suffered a debilitating stroke; their country was about to re-elect a crippled, silent man in a wheelchair. But the enthusiasm of the Arab Spring had evaporated. The two prevailing sentiments were political apathy and hope of emigration. Algerians were looking at Europe, where their kindred thrived not only in soccer (Zinedine Zidane, Kylian Mbappé) but also as musicians, authors, directors and entrepreneurs. By contrast, Algeria is a virtual wasteland devoid of opportunity or freedom.

The 2019 Presidential elections looked bound to follow the same script. Some protests against the President running for a fifth consecutive term were predictable given the circumstances, and the first gatherings were meek and tentative. What surprised everyone, starting with the protesters, was the absence of public response in those early days. This tolerance emboldened Algerians, who took the to the streets in ever greater numbers across the country.

There are two ways to read the situation. In one scenario, the elite had resigned itself to run Bouteflika once more to push the can of succession further down the road, and avoid an internal bloodbath. The spontaneous reaction of the streets compelled them to rethink their strategy on the fly; the seeming paralysis of Le Pouvoir is a symptom of the deep divisions within it.

The alternative scenario is that Salah, the strongman behind the final years of the Bouteflika reign, has staked a claim on power, using the street to take down the Bouteflikas and the oligarchs. There are signs of premeditation, such as the massive purge of potential army rivals in the summer of 2018 (under allegations of corruption). As the protests unraveled, Salah seemed to control the situation, methodically progressing from supporting Bouteflika’s bid, to accepting the need for another candidate, to pushing for impeachment.

Meanwhile, Bouteflika’s camp was panicked, making desperate attempts to placate the streets with bizarre proposals—he would do a fifth term, but not complete it—that fell on deaf ears. Clearly, his ranks were trying to gain time and salvage what they could. Ali Haddad, Bouteflika’s oligarch-in-chief, was arrested without charges while trying to drive across the border. In the end, Bouteflika would not only pass on a fifth term, but was forced by Salah to resign before the end of the fourth.

The inter-elite massacre was bound to happen eventually, and Salah was best prepared to exploit it. The protests gave him the pretext, though first he had to let them run their course. The risk now is that the demonstrations escape his control, given the genuine frustrations of the people. The street will not be content with just the head of Bouteflika, but wants to take down the entire system and its elites. Protesters have already besieged the headquarters of the UGTA, the official worker’s union, asking for the resignation of its leader, close to Bouteflika.

The street may detest Le Pouvoir but there is no structure to stand against it. Algerians show an exceptional level of distrust for authorities and institutions, perceived to be corrupt and dictatorial. The mindset is a mix of conspiratorial paranoia and apathetic rage, of hatred and despair. No one is happy with the status quo, and yet cleavages between the population exist that could be instrumentalized during a drawn-out struggle for power: between Islamists and secularists, between Arabs and Kabyles (Algeria’s largest Berber group), between Sunni Arabs and Mozabite Berbers, between workers and employers, between Algerians and the diaspora.

The FLN is experienced in the domain of divide and rule. They marginalized Kabyles in the name of Arab nationalism, yet succeeded in coopting their leaders and disarming the explosions of anger that began with the Berber Spring of 1980. Against the Islamists, the military recruited westernized liberals, and even manipulated Islamist factions against each other. Between 2013 and 2015, they let ethnic violence convulse the Saharan city of Ghardaia, until everyone turned to the state for relief. As a last resort, to silence critiques of the regime, they accused them of being agents of neo-colonialism hired to destabilize Algeria.

Le Pouvoir could lose control if, and only if, security forces fractured over the issues of succession and repression. Salah is a Berber from Batna, in the Aures mountains, a guerilla fighter at 17 who then rose through the ranks of the FLN/ALN. He is the last of this class of men who picked up arms in the 1950s, seized power, and has never relinquished it. Yet today’s Algerian military is a conscript army and its effective cadres are no longer from that generation. The question for Salah is thus the extent of his hold on the security apparatus and the price he will have to pay to clear the streets.

Once Bouteflika’s resignation was secured, it was a return to business as usual for Le Pouvoir. Presidential elections were expeditiously scheduled for July 4, making it impossible for a putative “opposition” to make any serious bid. And on the following Friday (the usual day of prayers and protests), the police made, for the first time since February, a genuine attempt to break up the demonstrations. The question is whether the crowd will accept this reality, or test the patience or the regime. It is always unfortunate to start one’s rule on a carpet of corpses, but if push comes to shove, history suggests that Le Pouvoir will not shy away from repression.

Europe has much to fear should things get out of control. The population of Syria was 23 million before the civil war, and the population of Libya only 6 million. Yet the wave of refugees from those conflicts profoundly destabilized the Union. Algeria is home to 43 millions, and unlike Syrians or Libyans, many of them have European relatives across the Mediterranean. It will be impossible to stop that tide.

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The Future of Bibi Netanyahu

Against all odds—and every pollster—Bibi Netanyahu managed to single-handedly win the elections in Israel. These were a referendum on his suitability to keep leading the country amid piles of pending indictments and corruption charges. He has clearly achieved his goal to reconstitute a right-wing coalition that would allow him to stay Prime Minister even if the Attorney General decides, after a July hearing with his lawyers, to bring at least three cases of bribery, deceit, and breach of trust to court, where a conviction would probably sentence him to serve time in jail.

Netanyahu performed a one-man show, running all aspects of the campaign himself, employing every possible trick, including those not in the traditional book of Israeli political etiquette. He did not hesitate to bring to the contest disciples of the outlawed Kahana movement. He depicted supporters of the “Left”, e.g. anyone not in the Likud or right of it, as being beyond the pale of patriotic loyalty to the Zionist vision, constantly insisting that the two Arab parties should not be counted as potential coalition partners. Netanyahu relentlessly kept up attacks on the media and law enforcement institutions, including the judicial system and the police, and topped them off with last-minute promises—which he has always avoided—to start annexing settlement blocks in the West Bank, thus reducing whatever slim prospects still exist to reach a two-state deal with the Palestinians.

Netanyahu’s personal conduct together with his aggressive style of propaganda alienates the more educated classes of Israeli society. Many have come to view him as a reckless, divisive, and dangerous politician, who prioritizes his own personal calculations over the interests of the state. But Bibi’s slogan was that he plays in “another league,” and the majority of voters seemed to agree. For them, Bibi’s faults are less important than his policies, and they are proud of his statesmanship on the international stage. The old “base” of the Likud has expanded to new areas in both the periphery and smaller towns. Tel Aviv and the surrounding suburbia voted for Blue and White’s Benny Gantz, so Israel is now divided between the pro and anti-Bibi camps; hence the elation among his supporters, and the bitter frustration among his critics.

At this point Netanyahu can form a government with a majority of 65 out of 120 members of parliament. This margin will constrain the extent of concessions that smaller partners in the emerging coalition can extract from him. Still, he is certainly not going to press the 16-strong ultra-religious parties on sensitive issues such as Haredi enlistment in the army, LGBT rights, conversion to Judaism, or women prayers at the Western Wall. He should be expected to sanction expanded settlements—if not annexation of some Settlement Blocks—and also pursue the ongoing plan to curtail the authority of the Supreme Court.

Bibi’s victory owes much to the ambiguous message of his main rivals in the Blue and White list. General Benny Gantz and his allies refrained from presenting a comprehensive platform on the topics the public most cared about. They would not take a clear stand on the concept of a Palestinian State and had very little to offer in terms of economic policy. Gantz proved unable to explain whether he would change the course of Israel’s policy on Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, or Hamas. Moreover, Gantz succeeded in winning almost the same amount of seats as the Likud, but failed to win over right-wing voters. Instead, his numbers derived from the Yesh Atid party under Yair Lapid, who joined him through a deal for rotation at the Prime Minister’s Office, and by sucking up almost three quarters of the Labor Party’s 2015 vote share. Labor—once the dominant ruling party—was decimated to only 6 seats. Gantz’s hasty declaration of victory, based on shaky exit polls, turned out to be an amateur’s mistake. Now he promises to fight Netanyahu from the benches of the opposition.

In the right-wing camp, Bibi has imposed his supremacy over his future coalition partners—Moshe Kahlon, Avigdor Lieberman, and Naftali Bennett (assuming he makes it across the 3.25 percent bar to the Knesset). They have all lost votes to the Likud, which added six seats to its Knesset faction. Netanyahu is offering Lieberman and Kahlon a chance to rejoin the Likud and, when the time comes, fight for succession. Lieberman wants to end up back at the Defense Ministry, despite widespread objections to handing him this position, and Kahlon will most likely be back at the Treasury. Netanyahu may again keep the Foreign Ministry to himself. The two main problematic appointments involve the Justice and Education Ministries claimed by the two Zionist religious parties, yet Bibi is bent on doing whatever he can to keep his lieutenants there.

Once entrusted by President Reuven Rivlin to form (within 40 days) a government, Bibi now faces the challenge of looming indictments. He can respond to this challenge in one of three ways:

The Israeli law permits a Prime Minister—but no other minister—to stay in office while being prosecuted; the Prime Minister only needs to resign if he’s convicted by the last instance of appeal. This can take a few years. Netanyahu may ask all his coalition partners to abide by this provision instead of ousting him upon indictment, as happened to a previous Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert. Netanyahu would then face the long grueling trial ahead of him while in office.
Alternatively, Netanyahu may try to obtain commitments by his partners to turn down the Attorney General’s request to remove his immunity, thus deferring the trial until he bows out. In this scenario the Prime Minister’s office becomes a shelter.
A third option is to attempt to pass the “French Law,” which prohibits putting a Prime Minister on trial as long as he is in office. It is difficult to see all coalition partners agreeing to support such new legislation.

At any rate, contrary to the expectations of Blue and White leaders, Netanyahu has a reasonable chance to form a stable government that will not force him to resign when indictments are filed later this year.

If so, the thrust of Netanyahu’s policy would be to pursue his undeclared doctrine of forging alliances with countries outside the Middle East while upgrading collaboration with Sunni Arab states, especially in the Gulf, in order to further isolate the Palestinians—the hope being that the Palestinian Authority will eventually soften its terms for resolving the conflict.

Netanyahu rejects the common assumption that a deal with the Palestinians is the key to constructing close relations with the Arab world and beyond the region. He seems determined to wear down Palestinian refusal to accept his vision of a demilitarized pseudo-state. His success over the past decade in pivoting to Asia—especially India and Japan but also China; his new “Jewish-Hellenic” alliance with Greece and Cyprus based on the East Med gas fields; his close cooperation with Eastern Europe and effective coordination with Russia—will remain the focus of his efforts. At the same time the strikes against Iran’s ambition to establish a war machine in Syria and western Iraq will continue, with the full backing of the U.S. government, and he will remain focused on containing—but not attacking—Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Netanyahu hopes President Trump—who applauded his victory at the polls—will defer presenting “The Deal of the Century” at least until the summer, and if it were up to him would seek to convince Trump not to put his plan on the table at all for the foreseeable future. If the plan is presented, Netanyahu’s strategy is clear: Let President Abbas reject it first.

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Why the Latest Border Surge Is Bad News for Democrats

What to make of our latest immigration controversy? Once again, President Trump has been threatening to shut down the Mexican border. Opponents say he has cooked up the crisis to fortify his base for the 2020 election. They also assume that highlighting his Administration’s cruelty at the border will make Americans feel bad and backfire against him. They can hardly conceal their glee at the string of humiliations. Last year’s family separation plan was a fiasco. Then his government shutdown failed to extract wall funding from Congress. Next his declaration of a national emergency provoked defections from Republican Senators. Now his latest border threats endanger U.S. workers who depend on Mexican supply chains, prompting further opposition from within his ranks.

Whatever Trump does on the southern border, it seems to prove that he is an ineffectual windbag. But border enforcement has polarized Americans for decades. The main response from Democrats thus far—to defend every migrant’s right to ask for and receive provisional humanitarian asylum—will alienate the swing voters they need in 2020.

We know that many conservatives fear rising immigration flows, while many liberals still welcome them. What about centrist voters? How do they react to smugglers bussing Guatemalans to the border so that, as many as 300 at a time, they can line up for credible-fear interviews? If asylum applicants can stick to the claim that they fear going home, they win provisional legal status in the United States until their case is heard by the immigration courts. If they have a child with them, according to a court order, the child cannot be legally detained in a border facility for more than 72 hours. Since the system only has residential capacity for 3,326 parents and children, most asylum applicants are soon at liberty on the U.S. side.

This is the humanitarian loophole that, in December, beckoned to a Guatemalan farmer and his daughter. The 7-year-old Jakelin Caal Maquín grew up in a non-gang locality. According to the mayor, 200 families left for the United States in less than two months; Jakelin’s father probably borrowed between $5,000 and $10,000 to pay smugglers to get him and his daughter to the border. They showed up with 161 other adults and children whose need for food, shelter, and medical help, near Antelope Wells, New Mexico, overwhelmed U.S. border personnel. As the group was bussed to a holding facility, Jakelin began vomiting; when she went into seizures and her temperature reached 105.7 degrees, she was airlifted to a hospital where she died.

Migrant advocates blamed Jakelin’s death on the U.S. government, but it was her smugglers who had carefully chosen a remote location. Under pressure from voters, the U.S. government has been hardening the border for decades. This gives smugglers an incentive to choose higher-risk crossings, in harsher locations, which kill about 400 migrants a year. Who’s more to blame—the smugglers or the U.S. government? Should Uncle Sam wave these people through so that, even if they don’t meet legal requirements for entering the United States, they won’t endanger themselves and their children?

Here’s my question for migrant advocates: If the only requirements for entering the United States are now a child in tow and a statement that you fear going home, how many more applicants will arrive? A few weeks before Jakelin’s death, the Washington Post found a Guatemalan village whose schools were emptying out as children were taken north, with some families even selling their children to other adults for this purpose. Such “adoptions” were being facilitated by the nearest government registry, which was selling fake papers to prove parenthood. “This is a crime,” observed a local educator. “This is human trafficking.”

In another region of Guatemala, where I have interviewed migrants and their families, smugglers are reportedly using a local radio station to advertise parent-child packages to the United States for a mere $3,300. For several years now, I have heard about a special low-price for “delivery to the border”—that is, delivery of you and your child to a uniformed U.S. agent—as opposed to much higher prices for old-fashioned, evade-detection smuggling. To pull together even this sum, migrants must borrow heavily from relatives, moneylenders, or banks and put up their property as collateral. In other words, they are taking out mortgages to deliver themselves to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

What smugglers tell migrants is accurate: There is a new permiso that enables you and your children to win quick release, join your stateside relatives, and look for a job. Going north with a small child is a tactical improvement on the previous approach: paying smugglers to take work-ready “unaccompanied minors” a bit under the age of 18. The flaw? Especially if they are girls, DHS will release them only to a credible sponsor. Absent a sponsor, they are locked into a shelter where they claw the walls, unable to look for work, unable to pay the interest on their loans, and unable to send remittances to their frustrated and pleading parents.

The places where I have interviewed migrants, and where the Washington Post was interviewing, are not ruled by gangs extorting everyone within reach. What about Central Americans who do come from gang territory? Don’t they need humanitarian asylum?

Yes, some applicants have strong cases. But surveys by the International Office for Migration (IOM) show that, for Central American migration streams, running away from gangs is not the central motive. According to an August 2016 survey of returned Guatemalans, the three most important reasons they left for the United States were economic (64.1 percent), family reunification (9.1 percent), and violence (3.3 percent). As for those Guatemalans who planned to leave for the United States in the next 12 months, their reasons were economic (55.2 percent), family reunification (18.6 percent), insecurity (3.4 percent), and sexual discrimination (2.4 percent). In similar IOM surveys of Salvadorans, from 2011 to 2017, 73.8 percent said they were going north to find work; only 16.3 percent cited insecurity as their motive.

Yes, many asylum applicants are desperate. But are they desperate because they fled death, or are they desperate because they bet the farm on a U.S. job? Much of the desperation at the border is the result of the gamble to come north. Not only have most Central Americans taken out steep loans; when their smuggler gang runs afoul of another smuggler gang, they are held for ransom and arrive in far worse shape than when they started.

For the current wave of asylum seekers we can thank the interaction between congressional mandates, administrative directives, and court decisions. According to the Mayor of El Paso, Texas, who has spoken out against Trump’s rhetoric and whose city is now swamped with applicants, what’s to blame is the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008. Passed by both parties in Congress to protect minors from being exploited by criminal networks, the Act has enabled the same networks to swarm the system with “family units” who cannot lawfully be turned away.

For the first time, real or pretend family units now outnumber single men. Of the 76,103 Southwestern detainees in February 2019—a 30 percent rise from the month before—40,385 were in family units and 7,249 were unaccompanied minors. The numbers for March have reached 100,000, the highest since 2006, with most detainees now knowing what they must tell the Border Patrol to qualify for provisional legal status. In the immigration courts that will decide whether they actually qualify for asylum, the caseload has doubled since 2016 to more than a million. Hearings are being scheduled as far as five years from now.

If one shaky premise is that these are refugees, another is that they will benefit from joining the U.S. job market. The more Central Americans crowd into Central American niches in the United States, the less likely they are to find enough work to repay the loans that got them here, let alone send the remittances demanded by their relatives. Even if they find a job, it tends to be in the informal sector where they are unprotected by labor laws. If the jobs are in the formal sector, they tend to be far from the low-rent neighborhoods where Central Americans can afford to live, thus requiring long, costly commutes.

Central Americans gambling on migration do not foresee how impoverished they will be. Most are following relatives who went north and who they assume to be far more successful than is actually the case. They have been misled by the buying power of the U.S. dollar in Central America, which vanishes as soon as they cross the border into U.S. prices.

If their debts were simply caused by border enforcement driving up the cost of migration, it might make sense to stop enforcing the border. But the debts have deeper roots, in surplus labor in the Central American and U.S. labor markets. The hegemonic forces pulling migrants north are the risk-transfer mechanisms of the dollar and the U.S. economy. The lure of higher consumption levels, transmitted via the smartphones that so many migrants now carry, traps them into a reserve army of labor that will usually just add to their debts. Worse, migrants drowning in debt become targets for human traffickers operating inside the United States, as illustrated by the massage parlor chains operating out of Flushing, New York that have indentured thousands of Asian women into prostitution.

This shocking consequence has been aided and abetted by the careless assumption that anyone who claims to be fleeing a threat deserves the benefit of the doubt, that is, the right to file an asylum claim and obtain provisional liberty in the United States. Unfortunately, debt slavery is not the only perverse outcome. In the case of Central American flows, giving provisional legal status to anyone who asks for it endangers migrants who do need refuge from criminal networks. The more applicants swamp the credible-fear process, the more gang members will slip through. This is not just prejudice or speculation: MS-13 extortion rackets already menace Central Americans in Langley Park, Maryland. If Central Americans are fleeing members of their own society, how can mass migration from these same societies not recreate the threat on U.S. soil?

Genuflecting to any asylum claim has yet another evil consequence, to discredit applicants with much stronger cases. Here I’m thinking of asylum seekers, including Central Americans and especially Hondurans, who can prove that they or close relatives were attacked by corrupt authorities. At the moment, such applicants are being used as poster-children to justify what is mainly labor migration from the same countries. This increases the risk that their applications will be washed away by political reactions.

Those reactions seem inevitable because, under current incentives, the only reasonable expectation is that the number of asylum seekers will soar. Just in Central America, according to the Gallup World Poll’s most recent surveys, 31 percent of Guatemalans, 46 percent of Salvadorans, and 48 percent of Hondurans express the wish to move to another country—mainly but not exclusively the United States. Of all potential transnational migrants around the world, judging from Gallup surveys, 21 percent or 147 million people hope to move permanently to the United States. True, many will never make the journey, but these projections are from several years ago, which means that they preceded the current open door for almost anyone who asks for asylum.

The unprecedented opening of the southern border carries deep dangers for the Democrats. Earlier migrant surges embarrassed the Obama Administration and contributed to Trump’s Electoral College victory in 2016. Ever since, he and the Democrats have been locked in judicial stalemates over border enforcement. Congressional solutions are unlikely until Democrats or Republicans control both houses of Congress, and perhaps not even then. Currently the Democrats are enjoying Trump’s border failures, but their 2020 candidates probably will not. They will need to win swing voters, and not just Anglos. Economically, no one is hurt more by mass migration than previous arrivals who must compete with new ones for jobs.

The Democrats will not need to persuade swing voters that Trump is a bad President—a majority already agree. But they will have to show that they are a credible alternative. If Democrats confine themselves to sympathetic mantras about immigrant rights, the Republicans will be able to claim that liberals are to blame for the flood of dubious asylum seekers. Backlash voting, or “plague on both your houses” voting for third-party candidates, or not voting at all, could give Donald Trump just the edge he needs in 2020.

The post Why the Latest Border Surge Is Bad News for Democrats appeared first on The American Interest.

The Return of William McKinley’s Republican Party

The Triumph of William McKinley: Why the Election of 1896 Still Matters

Karl Rove

Simon & Schuster, 2015, 497 pp., $19.00

In 1999, Stephen Moore co-founded the Club for Growth, a conservative, pro-business advocacy organization known for its ardent opposition to taxes and regulation. Having worked for the Heritage Foundation, the Reagan Administration, and Representative Dick Armey (R–TX), Moore was almost the epitome of a hardline conservative economist. So it was quite arresting when he threw in his lot with Donald Trump during the 2016 election, and then, after Trump’s victory, instructed a group of Republican lawmakers on the new dispensation: “Just as Reagan converted the GOP into a conservative party, Trump has converted the GOP into a populist working-class party.” For pulling off this repositioning, Mr. Moore has now won himself a nomination to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.

Moore is hardly the only one espousing a new vision of the who should be the dominant force in the Republican Party’s coalition. Tucker Carlson famously began 2019 with a rant that launched a thousand think pieces, in which he denounced Republican elites as more interested in making “the world safe for banking” than tackling the very real problems of working American families. Conservative leaders, he declared, would only become capable of providing virtuous leadership if they “unlearn decades of bumper sticker-talking points and corporate propaganda” and generally reject free market orthodoxy. A number of prominent social conservatives have more recently piled on, announcing that they are “Against the Dead Consensus” that was Republican Party thinking before Trump, and especially its willingness to valorize individual autonomy. Rebuking their growth-obsessed co-partisans, they write: “Advancing the common good requires standing with, rather than abandoning, our countrymen. They are our fellow citizens, not interchangeable economic units.”

All this is jarring for those of us who have grown accustomed to Grover Norquist’s Republican Party. Indeed, it is sometimes a little hard to take the prophets of the refashioned party seriously. Republicans as the worker’s party?! It meshes uneasily with the party’s recent past, especially its record as an implacable foe of unions.

But a longer lens should remind us that this is precisely how the Republican Party sold itself in the late 19th century, when it was also locked in a tense, back-and-forth struggle with Democrats. By the election of 1896, it had made that sale with spectacular success, with William McKinley winning an outright majority of the popular vote and a strong Electoral College victory, thereby ushering in more than a decade of unified Republican control of government. And it must be said that quite a number of the themes of the newly inflected Republican Party of 2019 resonate with their forbears five generations back, especially on the central point of how Americans should view their obligations to each other.

Helpful in making these connections is a book by none other than the architect of the now-badmouthed GOP coalition of the 2000s, Karl Rove. In The Triumph of William McKinley: Why the Election of 1896 Still Matters (Simon & Schuster, 2015), Rove offers an admiring portrait of McKinley, whom he sees as a trailblazer in both strategy and tactics. In painstaking detail, Rove shows how McKinley and his associate, the strategist Mark Hanna, revolutionized the long game of presidential politics, positioning McKinley for the 1896 Republican nomination and, more importantly, deliberately fashioning an expanded coalition for his party. (As an aside, it is worth noting that Rove’s book is not some ghost-written pop history, but the deeply researched work of an obsessive driven to understand every last detail of the campaign tactics of an earlier era. I doubt there are more than a handful of people capable of evaluating its more intricate arguments.)

A large part of McKinley’s success was his appeal to laboring Americans. Some of this was quite direct. As Governor of Ohio, McKinley opposed President Grover Cleveland’s intervention to end the Pullman strike of 1893, supported mandatory arbitration that forced employers to bargain with unions (making Ohio the second state, after Massachusetts, to adopt such a law), and supported the eight-hour workday. But more generally, McKinley’s political genius was to brand the central planks of the Republican platform as being for the benefit of working Americans. From his time as Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in the House, McKinley was known as the “Napoleon of Protection,” and he wore this as a badge of honor, insisting that the tariff’s support for American industries was indispensable to the broad health of the American economy. Likewise, although he tried to straddle the fence on monetary politics, he eventually provided a spirited defense of the gold standard as the bedrock of America’s commercial prospects. In McKinley’s view, these policies were pro-business and therefore pro-labor; whereas the policies of his adversary, William Jennings Bryan, were to be dismissed as the well-meaning but fundamentally destructive ideas of parochial agricultural interests who were insensible to what urban laborers needed. Rove notes that the labor vote was instrumental in helping Republicans “carry nine of the nation’s ten most populous cities.”

The inclusivity of McKinley’s appeal came from his embrace of Americans as producers—with rising consumption seen as a happy by-product of making the maturing industrial machine hum along. Said McKinley in his first inaugural address, “Legislation helpful to producers is beneficial to all.” Today’s insurgent voices in the GOP coalition also hope to prioritize production over consumption, with a renewed emphasis on the nation’s manufacturing prowess but also an eye on the service economy. Foremost in this regard is the Manhattan Institute’s Oren Cass, who offers the “working hypothesis”: that a labor market capable of supporting “strong families and communities is the central determinant of long-term prosperity and should be the central focus of public policy.”

Cass’s pitch is framed in economic terms, as it is with economic thinkers he aims to cross swords. But his frame of mind is moral as much as economic, concerned with the basic dignity of each citizen’s effort to find a meaningful role in our fast-changing modern world. To those who believe the best strategy is to maximize GDP and then redistribute the proceeds, Cass insists that the condition of dignifying, productive employment cannot be redistributed. Likewise, genuinely respecting fellow citizens as equals, as commanding duties superior to those of aliens, is not a commitment that can be met through mere application of wealth. Cass asks: “In the past, our society was much less affluent, and yet the typical worker could support a family. How could it be that, as we have grown wealthier as a society, we have lost the ability to make that kind of arrangement work? Or do we just not really want to?”

In other words, the question is not just who is to be cut in on the nation’s prosperity, but how—with elites presuming to dispense favors to various groups, as their magnanimity allows, or by giving working people a real seat at the table.

In surveying the political triumph of William McKinley in his Education, Henry Adams offered a typically jaded take: “Mr. McKinley brought to the problem of American government a solution which lay very far outside of Henry Adams’s education, but which seemed to be at least practical and American. He undertook to pool interests in a general trust into which every interest should be taken, more or less at its own valuation, and whose mass should, under his management, create efficiency. He achieved very remarkable results.” Adams, who was a staunch (if incorrigibly ironic) Democrat, threw the word “syndicate” around as he described this Republican bargain, indicating a kind of new, nation-sized machine. The old bossism was left behind, but the Federal government would broker a new sort of transactional politics, in which all parties would be treated as a serious political force, deserving of their share.

Well, not everyone, of course. As with today’s worker-courting Republicans, McKinley’s party was eager to delineate who were authentic Americans, and who were interlopers capable of destroying the equilibrium in which fellow citizens would prosper. Former slaves were nominally included—Rove has fascinating material demonstrating how important McKinley’s courting of southern black delegates was to securing his nomination—although the party had long since ceased to exert itself on behalf of their rights when faced with southern intransigence. But in general, it was Americans of Anglo-Saxon stock who were understood as parties to the bargain, and their health and prosperity that it was meant to safeguard.

One might think racist pride would have made the champions of Anglo-Saxon might anxious to take on the whole world, but in fact the idea that laboring Americans should be subjected to all manner of foreign competition was rejected out of hand. The laboring masses of Europe were often spoken of as debased, let alone the “hordes” of immigrant Chinese. Josiah Strong, a leader of the Social Gospel movement, catalogued the threats to the healthful, steadily progressing Anglo-Saxon people in his influential book, Our Country (1885). He identified Catholicism, liquor, divorce, socialism, and the “American barons and lords of labor” who reign despotically over regular laborers. In general, Republicans sought to connect the moneyed interests and the threatening hordes as fundamentally united, politically, against the good middle classes striving for decent, wholesome American lives. Immigration was acknowledged to have brought benefits, but further dilution of the country’s racial stock was feared. As Strong put it, Americans did not want to be overwhelmed by the “European peasant, whose horizon has been narrow, whose moral and religious training has been meager or false, and whose ideas of life are low.”

The general message was one of selective solidarity: if solid Americans would only stick together, the great American experiment would flourish. Conversely, if Americans could be induced to sell each other out for immediate gain, “Americanness” would lose its distinctive meaning—and those left out of the nation’s prosperity, including unassimilable arrivals, would justifiably turn to foreign-inspired radicalism.

Two of today’s leading conservative voices against unlimited immigration, Reihan Salam and George Borjas, can hardly be accused of Anglo-Saxon chauvinism; their names and personal histories relieve them of that charge. Nor are their views driven by any other kind of xenophobia. But they nevertheless echo many of the themes of the Gilded Age opponents of immigration, especially the idea that allowing millions upon millions of new unskilled workers into the country represents a fundamental betrayal of their fellow citizens and the nation’s foundational commitment to social equality.

“Loyalty” to fellow-citizens is Salam’s watchword, and “amalgamation” his aspiration. To the cosmopolitan proponents of open borders (or something close) who profess an altruistic desire to decrease global inequality, Salam cites the example of Gulf states like Qatar in which natives are allowed to benefit from the superabundant cheap labor provided by foreigners. Embracing such a permanent service (servant) underclass, Salam asserts, would forfeit the ideal of citizens with truly reciprocal duties, meeting in politics on equal terms. Borjas, a Harvard economist whose work was cited in Donald Trump’s acceptance speech, has attempted to measure exactly how much poorly educated workers lose when they are exposed to immigration influxes, and concluded that the effects are significant—on the order of a five to eight percent decrease for high-school dropouts. He has also provided empirical evidence for the proposition that America’s ability to assimilate new immigrants has slowed down, showing that the education and wage gaps between immigrants and their children and the native-born have been growing over the last half century. Much as we cherish the image of the children of immigrants taking their place among the nation’s economic elites, Borjas argues that this is no longer the typical pattern for those who arrive with little education. Instead, there is a strong likelihood that such families will be a net burden on society, in the form of social welfare spending outstripping taxes, for multiple generations.

Both Borjas and Salam see room for continuing immigration of highly skilled immigrants, who can become full partners in the 21st century American economy without the help of heroic policy interventions. For them, this is not any kind of code word for a racially exclusive policy; Salam, with his sometime coauthor Ross Douthat, has tried to make the case for a “pan-ethnic nationalism” in which American solidarity encompasses all varieties of Americans. Just as in McKinley’s time, party elites must strike a delicate balance: rejecting the most exclusionist varieties of populism, which are electorally damaging (and morally odious), without forfeiting their advantage among those voters who have been convinced they are the truly representative party for “real” Americans.

That brings us to a central question: Notwithstanding some apparent similarities, don’t McKinley’s Republican Party and the one finding itself today draw on roughly opposite bases of support? In other words, isn’t the modern GOP using the brand of McKinley, but the electoral map of his rival, William Jennings Bryan?

A friend pointed out to me that McKinley’s electoral map in 1896 looked like the opposite of today’s—or, actually, more like that of 2004, he said. And he isn’t wrong: Most McKinley states went for John Kerry. Those that went Republican in both elections? Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, North Dakota, Ohio, and West Virginia. But George W. Bush’s party drew much of its support from the same solid south that was once a lock for Bryan’s Democrats. And, of course, the southern and western states contained a far greater proportion of the country’s population in 2004 than in 1896.

Donald Trump’s winning electoral map in 2016 kept the South in Republican hands—though not entirely solidly, with Virginia defecting. But his campaign also brought a number of McKinley states back into the GOP fold: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. Most analysts seem to agree that it was Trump’s most McKinleyan elements—his faith in tariffs, his conviction that American companies should go out of their way to create and protect American jobs—that unexpectedly won those states for him.

Just as Stephen Moore said, those values are not “conservative” in the familiar contemporary sense of the word. Indeed, McKinley’s successor, Theodore Roosevelt, provides an object lesson in how a solidaristic instinct, wielded righteously on behalf of a vision of working class flourishing, can be turned in decidedly activist and progressive directions.

It was not all that hard to imagine Donald Trump pursuing such a course back in 2016, but for the most part he has presided over a more conventionally conservative governing program even as his rhetoric has remained oriented toward (“focused on” would be saying too much) worker-centric America First themes. The Republican Party machinery that Trump ultimately chose to lean on has, not surprisingly, proven resistant to change, not least because of its reliance on donors whose hostility to activist government was not suddenly discarded as obsolete just because of Trump’s victory. The would-be McKinleyites in today’s party thus have their work cut out for them in securing a durable producerist reorientation, one capable of winning an actual majority of Americans.

That should come as little surprise. In their 2007 book, Grand New Party, Douthat and Salam offered a brief history of the modern Republican coalition in which promisingly activist impulses, pledged on workers’ behalf, were sufficient to win elections—for Nixon, Reagan, Gingrich, and Bush the younger. But once power was secured, those impulses were largely stifled by the party’s small-government acolytes or wasted on unwinnable culture war forays. They noted in passing Karl Rove’s fascination with McKinley’s 1896 grand coalition building, but judged that as a practitioner he was too distracted by the temptations of win-now base turnout politics to really heed the example.

It may be that Republicans in modern times are simply constitutionally unsuited to build a working class majority. For those who hope otherwise, the greatest hope today is probably a generational divide taking shape among GOP lawmakers. It has been younger members who have generally tried to push more policies geared more toward the working class, such as when Senators Mike Lee and Marco Rubio successfully pushed for greater refundability of the child tax credit as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. So far such moves have not amounted to all that much. But more generally, it is easy to understand why the verities of the Reagan years carry less weight with younger members who came of age in the Clinton or Bush 43 administrations. When the party is finally ready to look beyond Trump, whether in 2021 or 2025, Boomers will be aging out of active political life and the fight among Gen-Xers and Millennials will determine where the GOP goes next. McKinley’s name may sound too antique to be revived, and his front porch campaign is long gone, but the vision of the Republican Party he once represented may yet recur.

Howard Wayne Morgan, William McKinley and His America (Kent State University Press, 2003), p. 122.

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