Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 46

Brexit’s Democracy Lesson

​As the British government continues to flail ignominiously between different Brexit options, one wonders whether this is primarily a saga of political incompetence or a symptom of a more serious democratic flaw. While I lean more towards the former than the latter, there are nonetheless important institutional lessons in this woeful episode of British history.

There is a strong case that Brexit is a tale of political misjudgment. The Conservative leader, David Cameron, badly miscalculated in 2016 when he referred the question of whether the UK should remain or leave the EU to the voters in the form of a national referendum. Believing that the people would resolve his party’s internal split on the EU in his favor was fatal.

No doubt, he was misled to some degree by the “success” of the precedent set by Prime Minister Harold Wilson in 1975. Faced with a similar Labour party split over belonging to what was then called the Common Market or European Communities (EC), Wilson took the membership issue to the people and won the vote with broad support across the political spectrum and the mainstream press.

The apparent political lesson: When necessary, you can turn to the people to quell internal party resistance and resolve important policy issues. But this “lesson” turned out to be a dangerous illusion that falsely assumed that the people would either always follow the Prime Minister’s lead or know what was in their best interests.

Fast forward to 2016, and Wilson’s strategy backfired on Cameron. The voters did not follow Prime Minister’s lead and voted narrowly to leave the EU. Instead of resolving the problem and quieting the critics, Cameron’s appeal to the people made it worse. The Prime Minister immediately resigned and handed the whole matter over to Theresa May. So now we have a revised political lesson: Don’t ask for a popular vote unless you are sure you will get the answer you want from it.

But this discussion begs the deeper question of why one of the oldest and most stable representative democracies has not only ceded a critical policy decision to the public twice but is now contemplating doing it a third time? We Californians have certainly done our best to demonstrate to the rest of the world the folly of letting the people decide complex matters of policy and public finance. Did the Brits not get the memo?

Prior to 1975 in Britain, the idea of letting the people decide important policy matters was never taken seriously. Since then, there have been three national referendums in the UK, eleven major referendums within the separate UK nations on matters such as devolution, and a number of local government referendums under the terms of the 1972 Local Government Act. It brings to mind the work of Professor Russell Dalton, who in tracking the recent rise in the number of elections in advanced democracies found that the fastest growth category was direct democracy contests. The pressure to consult with the people is growing among many modern democracies, not just the UK.

Even so, it was not preordained that British referendums would or should be taken as seriously as they apparently are. National referendums in the UK are only advisory. The doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty still holds, which means that the government is not bound to follow the people’s advice.

Moreover, the people’s advice regarding the EU has at no point been clear or stable. Neither the leave nor remain position has ever achieved 50 percent approval in public opinion polls, and the number of “don’t knows” or “would not votes” on the matter hovers near 16 percent despite nonstop coverage of this topic. Nonetheless, the latest idea is to have yet another referendum and let the people give their ambiguous advice once again in the hope that it will rescue a government that has tied itself in knots over this question. Good grief!  

In some ways, the EU crisis resembles the U.S. health care debate. Like the Tories, the Republicans cannot agree on how to replace what they are committed to opposing. Despite having control over all the branches of government after the 2016 Presidential election, Republicans were unable to come up with a bill to replace Obamacare.

This would be less problematic if the Republicans were not concurrently using the courts to dismantle the health care system before they even devise an alternative. So just as the Tories invoked a withdrawal process with the EU before they had any serious plan for how to deal with the consequences of getting out, the Republicans are planning on withdrawing from the ACA without any consensus on how to replace it.

Even if political stupidity is the core Brexit problem, there is still at base an important institutional question about whether advisory votes and other forms of direct democracy have a role in representative democracy systems.

The British version of direct democracy differs from the United States in several ways. First, the United States does not have any direct democracy options at the national government level. Americans can thank the high barriers to U.S. constitutional change for that blessing. But at the state level, there is a wide variation in the types of permitted direct democracy measures, including legislatively referred statutes that resemble the British referendum.

At the same time, many states also allow citizens to put both state statutes and constitutional amendments on the ballot, and these typically preclude or constrain the ability of their state legislatures to overturn a citizen-initiated measure without going back to the people again.

So, in some respects, the British referendum looks less dangerous to representative democracy than the U.S. citizen initiatives. However, if the British governments act as if their referendums are binding, then the distinction between the U.S. citizen initiatives and the UK referendums blurs. In a political system that relies on norms, customs, and established practices, a precedent can become a democratic custom without much discussion or debate. To riff on Rumpole of the Bailey, parliamentary sovereignty has surreptitiously been ceded to they “who must be obeyed.”

I discuss this dynamic in my book Democracy More or Less. The evolution of modern democracy is toward expanding citizen opportunities to observe and participate in many levels and branches of government. In the U.S. states, the expectations of more direct democracy have mostly been imposed on elected officials in the wake of scandals thanks to the ease of altering state constitutional structures. In the UK, as deference to leadership has eroded, the tactic of using the people to tame political opponents is a risky business at best, and will likely have the unintended effect of ratcheting up future expectations of direct democracy.

As we have learned in California after a century of direct democracy experimentation, citizen capacity and attention is limited. Asking citizens who do not know even basic facts about the state budget to determine specific matters of appropriation and taxation leads to serious structural fiscal dysfunction. Similarly, there is no reason to think that many members of the British public will have studied the complex matters related to EU membership deeply.

If the Brits are destined in the future to tread ever more deeply down the direct democracy path, they would be well-advised to learn a few lessons from the U.S. experience. First, do not make critical decisions with a mere majority vote. A 52 percent referendum vote is a weak mandate at best, and, as we have seen, one that is likely to wax and wane over time. Consider adopting a supermajority expectation to advisory votes to ensure that there really is a consensus about what the public wants.  

Secondly, do not let referendums replace representative government. In the end, representatives need to make choices, even if it entails the risk of getting voted out of office. If the government cannot make up its mind or come up with an alternative, then the fallback position should be the last choice made by that representative democracy—in the Brexit case, remaining in the EU. If the party in power cannot find a direction away from the status quo, then so be it. Sometimes, representative government is incapable of acting competently, and citizens have to live with the consequences. But asking the people to do the job of governing for them is asking for even more trouble.

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The Taiwan Relations Act at 40: It’s Time to Deepen Ties

April 10 marks the 40th anniversary of the Taiwan Relations Act becoming the law of the land. The statute was a striking example of a Democratic-controlled Congress pushing back against a Democratic President’s decision to break diplomatic ties with the Republic of China (Taiwan).

On December 15, 1978, officials in Beijing and Washington announced that formal relations between the People’s Republic and the United States would commence with the New Year. In exchange, Beijing demanded that the United States end relations with Taiwan and withdraw from its security treaty with the island state.

The announcement came as something of a surprise to the rest of Washington. Although the possibility of normalization had been bruited about for some time, the Carter team’s tight hold on the discussions with China meant that Congress felt it had been handed a fait accompli, and that the Administration had ignored the statutory requirement that it be kept apprised about the state of talks.

Fully aware of the ties that had come to exist between Taiwan and the United States since the early 1950s, the Carter Administration attempted to soften the blow with draft legislation on maintaining “commercial, cultural, and other relations with the people of Taiwan on an unofficial basis.” But a bipartisan majority would not bite: Senate Foreign Relations Chair Frank Church (D-ID) described the proposed law as “woefully inadequate.” The chief complaint was that the measure lacked any provisions designed to mitigate the effects of ending the mutual defense treaty on the security situation. This gap was judged especially problematic in light of the Administration’s admission that it had failed to get Beijing to pledge to settle cross-strait issues peacefully.

What emerged from Congress was, in the words of Senator John Glenn (D-OH), a “revised bill” that “clarifies many ambiguities regarding trade, legal, and economic issues” but would also, when it came to security, “reassure the people of Taiwan” and “alert the PRC to our expectations concerning the future.”

The Act, as signed by President Carter, stated that “any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means . . . would be of grave concern to the United States.” And, to support that policy, the United States was “to provide Taiwan with arms of a defensive character” and “maintain the capacity . . . to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security, or the social or economic system, of the people of Taiwan.”

Yet as significant as the passage of the Act was at the time, its policy goals have been undercut in practice over the years by the fact that it left decisions about what was required to maintain peace in the Strait and about what weapons to sell Taiwan entirely in the hands of the Executive Branch. The result has been an erosion in the military balance in the mainland’s favor, as successive Administrations have put a priority on engagement with China and often have seen arms sales to Taiwan as complicating that effort. Members of Congress at times have protested Administration decisions about weapon sales, but never forcefully enough to change the underlying dynamic.

The Taiwan Relations Act was also intended to allow the people of Taiwan and the United States to remain in close partnership. Over time, however, successive U.S. Administrations have elaborated increasingly narrow perspectives regarding those contacts.

In the wake of the Korean War, U.S. officials saw Taiwan as a vital element in America’s strategic position in East Asia. The island was an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” and a great listening post for tracking what was going on in the mainland. But the ties between the United States and Taiwan would grow deeper and assume a greater importance, as officials and families from the two countries moved back and forth for military, business, and educational reasons.

Lost in memory is the fact that Americans in large numbers deployed to the island. Through the U.S. Army Military Assistance Group and U.S. Taiwan Defense Command, thousands of American servicemen and their families were immersed in Taiwanese culture as they provided equipment and training to Taiwanese forces in what at times became an active conflict zone. Some, like Lt. Cols. Frank Lynn of Chicago and Alfred Medendorp of Michigan, killed by shelling from the mainland, paid the ultimate price and are honored to this day by memorials on the Taiwanese island of Kinmen, located only a little more than a mile off the coast of the mainland.

The ambiguity in the U.S.-Taiwan relationship since ties were broken in 1979 is perhaps best captured by Ronald Reagan who, as Governor of California had visited Taiwan and who as a presidential candidate in 1980, had been critical of President Carter’s decision. Yet, once in office, Reagan rejected Taiwan’s request for advanced jet fighters and then publicly announced a policy “to reduce gradually” U.S. arms sales to Taiwan. Muddying matters further, Reagan, first in secret and then publicly, tried to reassure both Congress and Taiwan in 1982 by issuing six “Assurances,” which, among other things, stated that no date had been set for ending arms sales and that the United States still held to the view that the question of Taiwan’s sovereignty should be “decided peacefully.”

Thirty-seven years after the “Assurances,” a completely different geostrategic environment faces the United States in Asia. The Cold War is long over and so too the justification for using China as a card to be played against the Soviet Union. Also over is the hope that somehow economic engagement with China would gradually but inevitably lead China down the road to political reform and to becoming a “responsible stakeholder” in the international system. To the contrary, as its economy has grown, China has used these increased resources to engage in a quarter-of-a-century long military build-up that has led to a worrisome change in the region’s balance of power and an assertion of power in the South and East China Seas.

In this context Taiwan’s independence and security should be particularly important to Washington. With Russia’s annexation of Crimea, invasion of Ukraine and Georgia, and China’s destabilizing actions in the South China Sea and undermining of Hong Kong’s autonomy, Taiwan will be a key test of U.S. resolve in supporting partners in the face of great power pressure. Taiwan is also important in its own right as a thriving democracy and major U.S. trading partner. No less significant, the island is critical in the region’s balance of power, sitting between two treaty allies (Japan and the Philippines). North and south of the island are the sea gateways to the broader Pacific and America’s base in Guam. In a crisis, Taiwan could be a key partner in containing the Chinese military within the first island chain and preventing it from exerting significant reach into the Western Pacific

For these reasons, Congress should use the opportunity presented by the 40th anniversary of the Taiwan Relations Act to assess its successes, failures, and the changes that need to be made so that the United States can still fulfill its original intent to the people of Taiwan. The broad and deep relationship with Taipei that existed between 1949 and 1979 has narrowed. Congress can reinvigorate the spirit of the Act by pursuing a multi-pronged agenda for the U.S.-Taiwan relationship.

First, as the United States encourages partners to pursue economic decoupling from mainland China in sensitive sectors, it should also initiate negotiations with Taipei on a U.S.-Taiwan free trade agreement. China’s military buildup and its provocative maneuvers in the Taiwan Strait tend to command the most attention, but Taiwanese economic dependence on the mainland is also a significant national security challenge. Deepening trade and investment ties to the United States and other partners will be key to Taiwan’s continued independent existence, making it more difficult for Beijing to utilize economic coercion to interfere in domestic Taiwanese politics. Congress can encourage the Trump Administration to accept the Tsai government’s offer to resolve longstanding irritants in the U.S.-Taiwan trade relationship and begin negotiations on a free trade agreement as quickly as possible.

Second, the Taiwan Relations Act states that Congress intended to authorize “the continuation of commercial, cultural, and other relations between the people of the United States and the people on Taiwan.” Yet while business and cultural ties have continued to flourish, official interactions have become limited because of the caution of Administrations of both American political parties. And while Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress have met with Taiwanese officials, including the island’s Presidents, on U.S. soil and in Taipei, Executive Branch visits are overwhelmingly limited to working-level officials. The rules governing these contacts are not a matter of law but are set by State Department guidelines that can be modified at any time. Congress should direct the Trump Administration to update those guidelines to ensure that U.S. and Taiwanese officials of all ranks, including in the respective national security agencies and militaries, can meet to discuss issues of mutual interest. Congress should also consider making the Director of the American Institute in Taiwan, our de facto embassy in Taipei, a Senate-confirmed political position.

Third, the United States should take the steps necessary to ensure that the Taiwan Relations Act’s declaration that “any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means” would be “of grave concern to the United States” is addressed. Given China’s military buildup across from Taiwan and its now routine air, naval, and missile deployments designed to bully Taiwan, the Pentagon should, in addition to regularizing arms sales to Taiwan, invite the Taiwanese military to participate in exercises to increase the former’s proficiency in combined arms and to ensure that the two forces are able to operate effectively together should the need arise.

Finally, Beijing has put Taipei under increasing pressure by closing off its international space. It has attempted to poach Taiwan’s remaining diplomatic allies and has used its growing clout in many international organizations to block the more than 23 million Taiwanese from being represented in international organizations on issues such as health, law enforcement, and civil aviation. Congress should ensure that U.S. partners and allies understand that promoting ties and cooperation with Taiwan is a priority for U.S. policy, a priority that will be considered when Washington assesses annual assistance budgets.

Since 1949, Americans across all economic strata have engaged in friendship and exchanges with Taiwan. Congress intended the Taiwan Relations Act to preserve these ties and honor the sacrifices previous generations of Americans made to Taiwan’s success.

At a time when many wonder whether the world will be remade in China’s image, it’s important to remember that there is another model with Chinese characteristics out there—economically vibrant, raucously democratic, pro-American, and peaceful toward its neighbors. The cost of supporting Taiwan today is much less than it was in the 1950s. A good start would be to update the TRA in a way that reflects the deep historical ties between our two peoples.

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Start Planning NATO’s 100th Birthday

NATO’s key attraction is the same as Mount Everest’s. When Edmund Hillary, the first to reach the top, was asked, why he wanted to scale the world’s highest mountain, he famously answered: “Because it is there.”

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is celebrating its 70th birthday this month. It has been “there” longer than any alliance of free nations in history. Admittedly, this is technically not quite correct, given the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance of 1386 still on the books today. Effectively, Britain-and-Portugal has been superseded by the countries’ integration into NATO.

“Being there” at such an advanced age as 70 is an extraordinary feature of world politics. Normally, alliances expire when they triumph. The Soviet-American one against Hitler’s Germany was dead less than one year after V-E Day 1945. The World War I coalition against the Kaiser expired soon after the Versailles settlement, when Britain went back to balancing against its ancient rival France while Germany and Soviet Russia joined forces against the West at Rapallo in 1922. And so it went through the ages.

The explanation is simple. When nations-in-alliance beat their foe, they start worrying about each other, just as the United States and Russia, the two real winners of WWII, did at the outbreak of the Cold War. So a reversal of alliances is a natural adjunct of victory as nations recalculate the balance. Or think of the Sunni powers tacitly aligning with Israel against Iran, never mind the many wars Arabs and Israelis had fought in the past. Now revolutionary Iran is the greatest threat to the region.

To note these dynamics makes NATO’s longevity even more astounding. Just as surprising is its expansion. In the beginning, twelve nations signed up. Now, the number has grown to 28, including the former Warsaw Pact countries (minus Russia). So longevity and growth suggest not just endurance, but also functionality. Even in those halcyon years between the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the resurgence of Russian ambitions under Vladimir Putin circa 2008, the Alliance held. Instead of shrinkage in the absence of an overweening threat, NATO gained new members.

How to explain such a startling turn that defies historical experience?

The mightiest factor, of course, is the United States. Realism bids us to concede that NATO at heart is a unilateral security guarantee, never mind that the Europeans field 1.5 million soldiers (at least on paper). Though Europe has as many armed forces as does America, the United States protects Europe, not vice versa. Nuclear deterrence is Made in the U.S.A., what with thousands of strategic warheads that dwarf the modest potential of Britain and France.

With America in play, the Europeans enjoy a broad margin of security at a significant discount. Safety on the cheap breeds loyalty instead of betrayal, especially among the smaller countries whose armed forces would not even fill a soccer stadium. The United States built the house, and its allies have been paying subsidized rent. Germany spends as as much on defense as a share of GDP (1.25 percent) as tiny Croatia.

An oft-neglected factor is deeply political. Why did ancient rivals like Britain, France, and Germany come together after centuries of rivalry and bloodshed? Why are arch-enemies like Greece and Turkey in the same alliance? Why did the smaller members get in bed with the strong who in the past invaded and swallowed them? Because of Uncle Sam in the guise of Mr. Big.

Suddenly, there was a player in the game bigger than each and all. He could protect his wards not only against Russia, but also against each other. That delivered trust, the scarcest commodity in the affairs of nations. France and Germany would never have linked hands across the Rhine. But once U.S. divisions were stationed in Europe, the ancient calculus of fear and suspicion changed in a benign direction. Indeed, France fought tooth and nail against West German rearmament in the early 1950s until the United States committed six divisions to Western Europe. For once, these two, who had fought three wars in a single lifetime (1870, 1914, 1940), could cooperate because America insured both of them against the perils of misplaced credulity.

If the arrangement was so profitable for the Europeans, what was in it for the United States? The tally is quite impressive. For one, the U.S. commitment kept the world’s most critical strategic asset out of the hands of the Soviets. Today, the same interest obtains in the face of Russia’s neo-expansionism under Vladimir Putin. “Just being there” deters Russian adventurism. Keeping 500 million people and the world’s second-largest GDP out of Mr. Putin’s claws is obviously a permanent American interest. What’s good for Europe is good for the United States. Hence watch Donald Trump’s actions rather than his bluster.

His bashing of NATO (“obsolete”) since 2016 would fill a medium-sized book by now. At the core of his litany is his constant attack on Erope’s free-riding, picking up where Barack Obama left. “Free riders annoy me,” Obama told The Atlantic. The difference? Obama cut U.S. forces in Europe, while Trump is bolstering the American commitment.

U.S. Special Forces are training Baltic soldiers in the arts of guerilla warfare.

In a clear signal to the Kremlin in 2018, the United States demonstrated its ability to dispatch heavy weapons to Europe, including 87 Abrams tanks and some 500 armored vehicles. 1,500 troops are being deployed to Germany. America’s 4,000-strong military presence in Poland is slated to grow. After 2005, the fabled Sixth Fleet dwindled to one ship permanently assigned to the Mediterranean. Today, Washington is planning to deploy a carrier force to the Med as a message to Moscow. The force would allow other Navy to ships to patrol the Baltic and the Black Sea.

If President Trump were really out to deconstruct NATO, he would not commit men and material to the European Reassurance Initiative. The gist of the matter is this: West European capitals fear and despise Trump, and he pays them back in spades with his threats and insults. Yet the hard facts show that the Old Lady has a lot of vigor in her at age 70. The Europeans started boosting defense spending before Mr. Trump entered the White House. Even the peace-minded Germans are increasing defense expenditures—no wonder when half their tanks (down to 280 from 2,500) are out of commission, and so are all of their six U-boats.

Yet in contrast to Mr. Trump’s badmouthing, NATO has not been idle in the face of new threats. The NATO Response Force (NRF) has grown from 13,000 to 40,000 troops. A Very High Readiness Joint Task Force (VJTF)—a multinational brigade—should be ready to deploy within two to seven days. NATO now exercises more frequently than in the past 20 years. Trident Juncture 2018 in Norway and Iceland, in the North Atlantic and the Baltic Sea, saw 50,000 troops in action, as well as 250 aircraft, 65 naval vessels and 10,000 vehicles.

NATO members have deployed one multinational battle group in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland as part of the Enhanced Forward Presence (EFP). These groups are led by Canada, Germany, the UK and the United States. These “tripwires” were once strung out along the intra-German border; today, they serve the same function on the eastern edge of the Alliance, which has also committed to beefing up heavy reinforcement forces. All told, European NATO members  have increased total defense expenditure by 13% in real terms from 2014 to 2018.1

Those who wring their hands over the impending demise of the Alliance, might also take solace from the past. Basically, the history of NATO has been the history of its crises, which can fill another book. Just to pick one egregious example: Under De Gaulle, the French pulled out of NATO’s integrated force structure. By 2009, they were back.

The explanation, to repeat, is “functionality.” Nations don’t ditch what has worked well for them in the past, no matter how turbulent their relationship. Alas, there are two caveats. First, Europe might organize its own defense and so render NATO indeed obsolete. Second, the United States might pull back into Fortress America. The first outcome requires turning the 27 members of the EU into an e pluribus unum. The second presumes America’s willingness to vacate its exalted perch at the top of the global hierarchy. Both might happen.

Hard-boiled realists, however, should bet on the Alliance celebrating its hundredth birthday in 2049.

[1] For more details, see IISS Strategic Comments 9, “NATO at 70”, April 2019.

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Finding Faith and Losing Religion in Flyover Country

Interior States: Essays

Meghan O’Gieblyn

Anchor, 2018, 240 pp., $16.00

During my years as a graduate student in Missoula, Montana, I was struck by the dynamic between the writers in the university’s M.F.A. program and the native Montanans who constituted most of the student body. While the hipster poets disdained anything that smacked of conservatism, they seemed perfectly at home adopting the accoutrements of working conservatives from the Mountain West. They donned trucker hats and flannel shirts, drank Pabst Blue Ribbon and cheap whiskey, and wore Wranglers and cowboy boots that they found at the secondhand store. Authenticity was synonymous with appearance, and though I enjoyed their company, they never quite seemed to step outside of their ironic projections.

Meghan O’Gieblyn begins her recent collection of essays, Interior States, by describing a similar dynamic in Madison, Wisconsin. Like Missoula, the city is home to a state university with a liberal reputation and, in recent years, has brimmed with corporate money and transplants from the coasts. At the farmers’ market there, she noticed that “the Amish men selling cherry pies were indistinguishable from the students busking in straw hats and suspenders.” Much like the Missoula poets used cowboy boots as cultural capital, the new economy in Madison re-appropriated Midwestern industry as commerce: “Old warehouses were refurbished into posh restaurants whose names evoked the surrounding countryside (Graze, Harvest). They were the kinds of places where rye whiskeys were served on bars made of reclaimed barn wood, and veal was cooked by chefs whose forearms were tattooed with Holsteins.” O’Gieblyn, who earned her M.F.A. in Madison, soon grew tired of the scene, realizing that it “suffered from the fundamental delusion that we had elevated ourselves above the rubble of hinterland ignorance.” The grass-fed beef and the shade-grown coffee didn’t trouble her; the lack of self-reflection did.

O’Gieblyn is more than qualified to weigh in on our contemporary divisions. A native Midwesterner raised in an evolution-denying, Evangelical environment, she attended the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago before a crisis of belief led her to leave the school and her faith. In her own words, taking a cue from Plato, she imagined that experience to be like “exiting a primitive cave and striding onto terra firma, where there would be no more shadows, no more distant echoes, only the blinding and unambiguous light of science and reason.” Yet she soon realized that her brave new world was as run-through with false pieties as the one she left behind. In Interior States she writes about a wide variety of subjects—a Creationist theme park, Ray Kurzweil, 1990s Christian rock, and Mike Pence, among others—to reveal our common irrationalities and penchant for self-deceit.

Much of Interior States reflects on how modern Evangelicalism’s adoption of secular marketing techniques has undercut its mission. In an essay entitled “A Species of Origin,” O’Gieblyn visits the Creation Museum in Kentucky and notices that museum patrons seem more interested in the sleekness of the exhibits than in the facts the exhibits make known. Visitors drool at the description of plans to build a full-size replica of Noah’s Ark—510 feet long, 51 feet high, 85 feet wide—as a testament to Biblical literalism (the exhibit has since been completed). O’Gieblyn herself had been schooled in Creationist apologetics as a child—she memorized certain ocean salinity statistics that suggested the Earth was no more than 6,000 years old, and knew to raise her hand when someone said otherwise and ask, “Excuse me, sir/madam: Were you there?” Though she later disavowed Creation science, she respected the rigor of her upbringing and its commitment to what her church understood to be true. But in the time between her childhood and adulthood, commercialism had crept into Evangelicalism, and now the faithful seem unable to make the “distinction between truth and the quality of its presentation.” The museum is temple to the idea of Creation science, not to the actual science.

“Sniffing Glue” reflects on the burgeoning Christian rock scene in the 1990s, when acts such as DC Talk and Carman aped mainstream sounds to win over religious-minded youth. Like O’Gieblyn, I was one of them, and I distinctly remember the thrill of hearing music that sounded exactly like what my friends were listening to, only with messages acceptable to my parents. I may not have been cool, but at least I listened to cool music. It is important for Christianity to speak the language of the people, but when it mines the resources of popular culture so heavily, O’Gieblyn suggests, it begins to lose its identity entirely. One pastor boasts that his services are so exciting that “a lot of people say they feel like they’ve just been at a rock concert.” But then why not just go to a rock concert? When the young O’Gieblyn was first exposed to MTV (surreptitiously, in a Russian hotel) she saw bands like Nirvana and the Smashing Pumpkins, and “knew she’d been cheated by Christian rock. This was crack, and I’d been wasting my time sniffing glue.” The real thing is always better than the imitation.

These efforts at evangelization miss the reality that our habits shape our desires more than the messages we hear. As Marshall McLuhan famously put it: “The medium is the message.” Fundamentalism’s wholesale embrace of consumerist practices, in O’Gieblyn’s estimation, has rendered it powerless to stand apart from secularism. Market research may not reveal that to be a desirable quality in a corporation, but O’Gieblyn’s essays suggest that is precisely what a faith needs to sustain the spiritual lives of its members. One reason she left the faith, in her early twenties, was because being Christian “was a label to slap on my Facebook page, next to my music preferences. The gospel became just another product someone was trying to sell me, and a paltry one at that.” Ultimately, she implies, her church failed her generation.

Despite this, O’Gieblyn does not dogpile criticism on her childhood faith. Instead, she recognizes that her upbringing trained her to recognize the many ways in which secularism—especially that of America’s coastal elites—functions as an ersatz religion. Hipsters and progressives have their own pieties, and their beliefs are often just as irrational as the denizens of the “rubble of hinterland ignorance.” The progressive goal of a suffering-free society is noble, no doubt, but how different is it, really, from the Puritans’ attempt to erect a “shining city upon a hill”? Progressivism and fundamentalism, she claims, are two sides of the same coin. In “The End,” O’Gieblyln reveals how the social reforms of the Progressive Era at the turn of the 20th century gave birth to American fundamentalism, which adopted the former movement’s Hegelian arc and bent it toward more religious goals. This included the once-popular belief known as “premillennialism”—that the second coming of Christ, predicted to happen before the turn of the 21st century, would usher in a thousand years of peace on earth. The Y2K scare, for which O’Gieblyn’s family extensively prepared, was in part fueled by the vestiges of this belief.

The connection between Christianity and progressivism is further developed in the collection’s most fascinating essay, “Ghost in the Cloud.” Originally published in 2017 for the journal N+1, it traces the apocalyptical Christian roots of the transhumanist movement. Transhumanism, whose most prominent spokesperson is the futurist and Google director Ray Kurzweil, contends that humans are progressing towards a Singularity in which we will merge with our technology and become more than human. For a time after her de-conversion, O’Gieblyn became an acolyte of the movement, because she recognized in it something similar to what her Christian faith had promised: in the apostle Paul’s words, that God “will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.” For O’Gieblyn, Kurzweil’s message was “the ghost of her first hope,” a secular doubling of Evangelicalism’s promise. The connection isn’t simply coincidental; the roots of Transhumanism are in fact Christian. The word first appeared in a nineteenth-century translation of Dante’s Paradiso, in which the poet coined the neologism transumanar to describe his sloughing off the limits of the flesh and becoming pure spirit in heaven. Not surprisingly, there exists today a Christian Transhumanist movement, which understands modern technology as actively ushering in the Parousia on earth.

O’Gieblyn’s attraction to Transhumanism was short-lived, however. Ultimately, its inadequacies proved to be those of American fundamentalism, namely, that it cannot account for suffering and human weakness. In the middle of “Ghost in the Cloud,” O’Gieblyn takes time to reflect on her occasion to leave her childhood faith:

My doubts began in earnest after I read The Brothers Karamazov and entertained, for the first time, the implications of the classic theodicies—the problem of hell, how evil could exist in a world created by a benevolent God. . . .I imagined myself evangelizing a citizen of some remote country and crumbling at the moment she pointed out those theological contradictions I myself could not abide or explain.

Theodicy, the attempt to reconcile the existence of evil with a good God, is an ancient problem. Ultimately the Christian tradition would say that despite our best efforts to explain it, suffering remains a mystery, one which often requires a deep faith to accept. Such a faith is not antithetical to doubt but rather tempered by it, and perhaps even coexistent with it. The Christian contemplative tradition understands this, and teaches that any meaningful encounter with God on this earth leads through the desert; redemption is only made possible by the cross. In this sense, O’Gieblyn’s rejection of Evangelicalism is only a “deconversion” if measured against the superficial notion of faith peddled by certain sects of modern Evangelicalism. A fuller notion is provided by the American Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor, who echoes the prophet Isaiah in calling faith “a ‘walking in darkness’ and not a theological solution to mystery.” Viewed in this light, Interior States marks O’Gieblyn’s deepening, not dissipating, faith.

The book also charts the author’s search for a more genuine community than American fundamentalism or secular progressivism can offer. She comes closest to identifying one in “The Insane Idea,” her essay examining the history and philosophy of Alcoholics Anonymous. AA has recently fallen out of favor because, as Gabrielle Glaser claims in a 2015 feature in the Atlantic, “nothing about the 12-step approach draws on modern science.” O’Gieblyn identifies the debate as between competing views of human agency, and puts her finger on the essential question: “Can the individual really—as Glaser alleges—help herself?”

AA flies in the face of the ethos of the self-made individual because it insists that we must rely upon each other to overcome our darknesses. Modern critics liken receiving treatment for addiction to taking a pill, but AA is not a product, and its members are not consumers. In fact, the intended beneficiary of AA is not the alcoholic receiving help but the alcoholic giving help. Bill Wilson founded the organization in the 1930s as a way to help himself stay sober: “It was not just a case of trying to help alcoholics…If my own sobriety were to be maintained, I had to find another alcoholic to worth with.” In other words, AA understands that the self is fundamentally absurd. Unlike so many groups O’Gieblyn describes in Interior States, it does not seek to purify its members or showcase their worthiness; instead, the organization takes as its starting principle the acknowledgement of our shared weakness. Not surprisingly, the American Trappist abbot and contemplative Thomas Keating called Alcoholics Anonymous “one of the most succinct and accurate expressions of Christian spirituality.” O’Gieblyn would concur.

At the end of “Dispatch from Flyover Country,” the author attends a mass Evangelical baptism in Lake Michigan. The potluck gathering is warm and genuine; we are no longer on the turf of Madison hipsters or slick-talking pastors. Though she is not a believer anymore, she feels a kinship with those gathered on the shore, “barefoot like refugees in the sand.” As she watches the scene from a distance, O’Gieblyn describes the mark that faith has left on her:

It is a conviction that lies beneath the doctrine and theology, a kind of bone-marrow knowledge that the Lord is coming; that he has always been coming, which is the same as saying that he will never come; that each of us must find a way to live with this absence and our own, earthly limitations.

After reading her collection, it is clear that O’Gieblyn’s way of “living with this absence” is by writing about it. Her essays convey a deep compassion for her subjects at the same time that they offer a trenchant critique of the American self, her own included. Though she is a fallen-away Evangelical, her writing is catholic—that is, universal—in a manner refreshing for those of us accustomed to the internecine polemics of American Christian culture warriors. O’Gieblyn may indeed be said to possess faith, albeit one closer to the wisdom of the desert than that of the mega-church. Interior States is a must-read for Americans of all stripes.

The post Finding Faith and Losing Religion in Flyover Country appeared first on The American Interest.

Toward a More Discriminating Theory of Discrimination

What do a conservative opposed to diversity, a black woman with dreadlocks, and Asian-American high achievers dreaming of the Ivy League have in common? They all claim to be victims of discrimination. James Damore was fired from his job at Google after circulating a memo criticizing Google’s diversity efforts and suggesting that women are biologically unsuited to jobs in tech. Damore’s champions have insisted that he was a victim of discrimination against white male conservatives. Chastity Jones was offered a job as an insurance telephone call center on the condition that she comply with the company’s dress code and change her dreadlock hairstyle. She refused and sued the company for race discrimination, claiming that her hairstyle was inseparable from her race. The Asian-American plaintiffs suing Harvard College were among the close to 95 percent of applicants that were not admitted. They claimed the reason was not their failure to meet Harvard’s famously high and somewhat obscure standards but instead race discrimination against Asian Americans.

Some might see this diverse set of discrimination claims as progress, evidence of our society’s growing commitment to fairness. But the notion of fairness that informs these claims is both unrealistically broad and far too limited: too broad because ultimately it would expand the concept of invidious discrimination to include any decision that cannot be objectively justified; too narrow because, to the extent the underlying complaints have any merit as a moral or ethical matter, they attack only specific examples of much broader injustices.

Let’s look at each of these claims in turn. James Damore argues that Google’s decision to fire him was a form of discrimination against white men and conservatives. The first element of the claim is almost laughable on its face: Google is an employer with an overwhelming male and predominantly white work force and Damore can point to no evidence whatsoever of discriminatory motivation with respect to race or sex. He and his lawyers seem to realize this and so have combined the race discrimination claim with their real gripe: that Damore was fired because of his conservative views. But Google, as a private employer, isn’t obliged to guarantee freedom of expression. Still, this actually might be a legal problem if he had been fired for political activity or views expressed outside the workplace. But Damore used Google’s resources to distribute a memo that attacked its diversity efforts and arguably disparaged his female co-workers, undermining collegiality and morale in the workplace in the process; he was fired, not because of his politics but because of his insubordination and lack of sensitivity. And it shouldn’t have surprised Damore that such subjective considerations weighed heavily in the highly collaborative environment of tech, where “culture fit” is a standard criterion for employment. To be sure, there’s good reason to worry that “culture fit” can be an excuse for discrimination, especially against women and people of color who may be unfamiliar with the “tech bro” atmosphere. But Damore’s theory of discrimination takes this critique of “culture fit” to extremes, insisting that Google was obliged to ignore the workplace tensions he created because they were not objectively disruptive but only undermined the atmosphere, collegiality, and culture of the workplace. The notion that an employer can’t discriminate based on disruptive workplace behavior implies that it must limit its assessments to objective measures of productivity.

The question of workplace culture is also at the center of Chastity Jones’s lawsuit claiming that an employer’s dress code is a form of race discrimination. Her legal theory—endorsed by the EEOC and now adopted by the New York City Commission on Human Rights—is that any dress code that applies to a hairstyle associated with African-Americans is discriminatory. As is the case with workplace “culture fit,” there is certainly reason to worry that strict dress codes can become a cloak for intentional discrimination or that they can have an unjustified discriminatory impact on underrepresented groups. But these new anti-dress code theories go much further and insist that a dress code that covers any hairstyle commonly worn by African-Americans—even when it also applies to many other hairstyles worn by whites and other racial groups—is discriminatory per se. The unstated premise here is that there is no good reason to enforce a strict dress code, so it’s fair to presume its main purpose is discriminatory (and in any event there is no real harm done in forcing the employer to make exceptions or even get rid of the dress code altogether). This argument is plausible in cases where the dress code is overkill for the job in question—for instance, Jones had applied for a job in a telephone call center, where no customer would ever see her. But a blanket rule against dress codes that happen to apply to hairstyles worn by African-Americans assumes that dress codes are always unnecessary. Again, the implication is that because hair, grooming, and attire are matters of taste and opinion they can never be legitimate employment considerations: Employers should limit their evaluations to objective job criteria and those who do not are guilty of some kind of bias.

Similarly, a subtext in almost every discussion of the discrimination lawsuit against Harvard College is that objective criteria—grades and test scores—are the only acceptable bases for university admissions: Any form of subjective evaluation is suspect at best. Hence, the observation that Asian-American applicants outperformed other racial groups on grades and test scores, but underperformed other groups on subjective evaluations, was taken by Harvard’s critics as prima facie evidence that Harvard discriminated against Asian-Americans. It’s true, of course, that subjective evaluation can hide racial biases. But qualitative assessment is indispensable to creating a community with norms, ideals, and a sense of mission and history. Critics of Harvard’s admissions complained these things are too subjective—matters of opinion about which people might disagree—and suggested that Harvard’s effort to shape a college atmosphere and set of norms is illegitimate, a form of discrimination against people of a minority cultural backgrounds.

In today’s polarized and acrimonious society, it’s all too easy to conclude that a decision one happens to disagree with must be motivated by invidious prejudice. And it’s easier still when the list of traits someone could “discriminate” against keeps growing and now includes things like “culture” and “ideology.” If Google’s management insists that its employees help recruit, retain, and work harmoniously with a diverse workforce, it is discriminating against conservatives like James Damore, who are opposed to or skeptical of the goal of diversity. If an employer believes a strict, conservative dress code instills professional discipline and suggests professionalism to clients or customers, it is biased against people who prefer more adventurous or unconventional hairstyles or attire. If Harvard promotes a distinctive campus culture through its admissions decisions, it is guilty of discrimination against minority cultures. Because our society is increasingly cosmopolitan, as well as ethnically and racially diverse, it is harder and harder to find widely shared cultural norms—almost every normative or aesthetic judgment is the product of a specific, limited, exclusive community. This seems to leave us with objective facts as the only common denominator, the only legitimate criteria of evaluation in a multicultural society.

According to this line of thinking, just about any effort to encourage a common set of norms and values will be attacked as a form of discrimination against people who don’t share the values in question. Taken to its logical conclusion, this reasoning would deprive every organization and institution of its distinctiveness and personality. The expansion of anti-discrimination rights into the domains of ideology and culture protects individual expression and personality at the expense of the collective culture of organizations.

This is not always a good trade. Indeed, as the societies of the West grow more cosmopolitan, rootless and anomic people increasingly yearn for a sense of authenticity that only a common culture can offer. Nostalgia for the confident and unapologetic collective culture of the past defines our contemporary moment, all too often taking an ugly and retrograde form in ethno-nationalism and belligerent, reactionary male chauvinism. The purpose-driven organizations of civil society—businesses, universities, civic clubs—may offer the possibility of a healthier collective cultural identity based on common ideals and sensibility rather than toxic myths of blood and soil. Unlike a national government, such institutions are numerous enough that they are likely to reflect numerous different sensibilities and ideals, so people ill-suited to one will likely find another that’s a better fit. In this light “discrimination” on the basis of culture and ideas is a necessity, perhaps even a virtue.

One can acknowledge the value in culturally distinctive—and, of necessity, exclusive—groups, organizations, and institutions as a general matter, even when one dislikes some of the specific examples. I personally disapprove of an uptight corporate dress code in a telephone call center. Conservatives may hate what they will see as Google’s craven political correctness. And many people may object to the patrician sensibility underlying Ivy League admissions criteria. But would we prefer a world where every decision was based on bottom line considerations or technocratic numerical criteria? The only alternative is to tolerate cultural sensibilities one does not share. Indeed, because culture is formed and expressed by groups—institutions and organizations, not isolated individuals—the only viable form of true multiculturalism (as opposed to disguised ethno-nationalism) is one that takes the culture of such groups seriously.

This doesn’t have to mean unfettered freedom for rapacious corporations or elitist universities to dominate, control, and exclude. It only suggests the need for a more precise analysis of how, when, and if they abuse their power. Employees keep trying to expand the scope and meaning of discrimination because we’ve failed to take more comprehensive steps to make workplaces fair and humane. If employers have too much power over their employees this suggests a need for stronger labor unions and laws that improve working conditions generally. Maybe such laws should include expressive liberties for all employees: This approach that would require us to balance the legitimate interests of employers in common norms against the expressive needs of employees. Recasting the problem as discrimination wrongly suggests that no such balancing is necessary because we can and should simply outlaw the discrimination.

Similarly people keep picking at the scab of university admissions—through anti-affirmative action lawsuits and other self-righteous calls for reform—because, perversely, selective universities have come to symbolize a rare avenue of upward mobility in an increasingly unforgiving and stratified society. But step back a moment and it’s a truly strange and sad idea that elite private schools like Harvard would be our society’s answer to economic mobility. Instead, perhaps it’s time to reinvest in public education and tackle the polarization of wealth that makes the stakes of university admissions so high and the competition so cut throat. There are plenty of real injustices: We should stop dreaming up fake ones, like ideological or cultural discrimination, where what’s really at issue is not prejudice but simply judgment.

The post Toward a More Discriminating Theory of Discrimination appeared first on The American Interest.

Misdiagnosing the Chinese Infrastructure Push

Is the Communist government of China scheming to use cranes and bulldozers to take over the world? Over the past five years, China’s newest packaging of its global economic expansion—the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—has fostered alarm and eagerness in nearly equal measures. How worried should the West be about this new stage of China’s outward march?

Beijing has portrayed the BRI as a “win-win” cross-border economic stimulus package: China’s outward march will spur economic growth in China and in other countries along the new Silk Road. China’s pledge to finance and invest in infrastructure, creating economic corridors that stretch across Central Asia and down to the seas of the Indo-Pacific, has been likened to a new Marshall Plan.

Yet others believe that China is predominately interested in the strategic payoffs of the BRI: using its economic muscle for political leverage, rewriting business rules and practices developed by the West, even military expansion.

China’s interest in overseas ports is central to many of these concerns. Investment by Chinese companies in ports in Greece and elsewhere in southern Europe is portrayed as a “Trojan Horse” entering through Europe’s “soft underbelly.” Though port investments with the potential for dual commercial and military use, China may be trying to “stealthily expand” its military presence along the ancient trading routes and vital shipping lanes.

In 2017, after a debt-saddled Sri Lanka turned over operational control of a loss-making port in Hambantota to a Chinese-dominated joint venture in return for $1.1 billion in investment from China Merchant Port Holdings (CMPort), an Indian security analyst came up with the now widely circulated meme: “Chinese debt-trap diplomacy.”

The U.S. government has jumped on this bandwagon. Top officials repeatedly warn that China has a deliberate strategy of entangling other developing countries in a web of debt, and then using this to exact unfair or strategic concessions. Our Johns Hopkins University research institute, the China Africa Research Initiative, and others at Boston University and William and Mary follow China’s overseas lending. Out of more than 3,000 projects of various kinds financed by Chinese banks, Hambantota is the only one that has ever been used as evidence for “debt-trap diplomacy.”

There are valid reasons for heightened concern about Chinese engagement. Most pressingly, in July 2017, the Chinese opened their first overseas military base in the strategic country of Djibouti on the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the gateway to Egypt’s Suez Canal. Only seven miles from the U.S. base at Camp Lemonnier, the Chinese naval base has raised suspicions about whether China’s rise will remain peaceful.

Debt sustainability in a number of the BRI countries is also a concern. Speaking at a BRI conference in China, the IMF’s managing director Christine Lagarde warned that the sheer scale of the BRI posed risks of “potentially failed projects and the misuse of funds.” Although infrastructure could boost growth, she noted, incautious borrowing for BRI infrastructure could lead to balance of payments problems. Most of the countries currently borrowing from China have histories of IMF bailouts, and they nearly all—including China—have weak institutions.

However, the evidence so far shows little reason for alarm regarding the security implications of Chinese companies’ advance into maritime and associated infrastructure projects across the Belt and Road and beyond. With very few exceptions, the logic of China’s growing presence in this arena can be explained primarily as commercial activities, albeit with an East Asian twist of “crony capitalism” that is at the heart of the BRI’s actual risks.

Why Did China Launch the BRI?

In 2013, China surpassed the United States to become the world’s top trading nation. The BRI, launched that year, is Chinese President Xi Jinping’s branding of his predecessors’ “going global” strategy. China is moving out of low-end manufacturing, has overcapacity in the construction industry, and still holds foreign reserves of around $3 trillion.

At first, the BRI envisioned a new network of economic corridors patterned on historic trade routes. The Silk Route Economic Belt would link China and Europe overland via western China and Central Asia. The 21st Century Maritime Silk Road followed the ancient oceanic trade route to link East and South China to Europe and the Middle East via the Indian Ocean and the Suez Canal.

Yet five years after it became Xi Jinping’s signature program, BRI seems to be everywhere. The label has been pasted onto projects across Africa. In 2018, Latin America and the Caribbean were invited to join the BRI, and even Italy has now thrown in.

The reason, it seems, is that the BRI slots neatly into low-income countries’ development aspirations. China has excess foreign exchange, construction capacity, and mid-level manufacturing and needs to send all of these overseas. According to the Asian Development Bank, the developing countries of Asia alone require infrastructure investments of about $1.7 trillion per year to maintain growth, reduce poverty, and mitigate climate change. In Africa, on the periphery of the BRI, the African Development Bank estimates annual infrastructure requirements to be $130 to $170 billion. The World Bank and donors in wealthy countries are only tentatively restarting their funding for developing country infrastructure after decades of decline.

Infrastructure has important multiplier effects. It creates a temporary economic stimulus through the demand for goods and services as construction is underway. And if the investment is sound, infrastructure improvements can have a powerful effect on economic development, most centrally by reducing costs. A preliminary analysis by World Bank economists found that BRI investments did appear to be significantly cost-reducing. If accompanied by efficiency-boosting policy reforms, transport costs could fall by a quarter in some BRI countries. And many countries around the world are keen to capture some of the Chinese manufacturing firms that are moving to cheaper locations.

Ports and Economic Growth

Why is China so interested in building and buying ports? China’s own history provides insight here.

Port projects were one of China’s top priorities when the country began to turn away from Mao’s isolated communism. Between 1980 and 2000, China built more than 184 new ports to support its rapidly expanding economy. Most of these came to have industrial parks and special economic zones nearby, where manufacturers could cluster and easily export. Because new ports are usually capital-intensive and have low rates of return due to their lengthy start-up periods, China gave preference to joint ventures with foreign firms expected to bring in capital and operating efficiencies.

Since then, Chinese ports have hosted numerous foreign investors, including the Danish firm Maersk, British firms P&O and Swire, CSX World Terminals (once upon a time an American firm), and the Port of Singapore Authority. As early as 2001, the year that China joined the WTO, 25 container terminals in China were jointly owned, managed, or operated by transnational corporations.

Over the past several decades, ports in many nations have been privatized and globalized, so Chinese port business is not remotely an outlier in the present international environment. Even in the United States foreign companies operate most container terminals. Global shipping is increasingly concentrated. The Danish shipping firm Maersk and its subsidiary APM Terminals have investments in 172 ports and inland terminals in 57 countries. Switzerland’s Mediterranean Shipping Co (MSC) runs 54 terminals in 29 countries. Dubai’s DP World operates 77 ports in 40 countries. A French firm, Bolloré Ports, has 21 port concessions in Africa.

As growth slows in their home ports, Chinese shipping and port management corporations are looking abroad. One of the largest, China Merchants Port Holdings (CMPort), became a global company in 2012 through a joint venture—Terminal Link—with French firm CMA CGM, the world’s third largest container shipping company.  Through its shares in Terminal Link, CMPort now has port investments in 15 countries. “Our growth engine will and must come from overseas,” CMPort observed in 2015.

Just as China needed to learn from foreign firms, other countries are now eager for Chinese capital and operational know-how. CMPort and other Chinese firms are now poised to be the foreign firms bringing this in. The Chinese group China Harbor Engineering Corporation (CHEC) has a joint venture with CMA CGM to operate a new container terminal in Kribi, Cameroon. And CMPort has partnered with another French firm—Bolloré Ports—to run Tin Can Island Port, the second busiest port in Nigeria. A Chinese company runs one of the terminals at the Port of Los Angeles, the busiest container port in the United States. Another Chinese firm owns a third of the largest container terminal in Taiwan.

In most cases, Chinese investors in European ports have minority positions in joint ventures with European and other firms. Rare exceptions include the Piraeus Container Terminal in Greece and the Zeebrugge Terminal in Belgium, both of which are 100 percent owned by the Chinese firm COSCO. It “makes good business sense for Chinese players to acquire overseas port assets,” Neil Davidson, a senior analyst at Drewry, a London-based maritime research consulting firm, told a reporter. “I don’t think European countries feel threatened because in almost all cases the landlord function remains in the hands of the local countries.”

Chinese investment in the Greek port of Piraeus is often cited as an example of the benefits countries can gain with a Chinese partnership. As part of its economic restructuring, Greece privatized the operation and modernization of two terminals of the Port of Piraeus in 2009. The Chinese shipping conglomerate COSCO was one of only two bidders at Piraeus. Yet their vertical integration strategy paid off. COSCO’s control of China’s largest shipping fleet meant that traffic in COSCO’s half of the port rose quickly. By 2018, COSCO’s management and new investments had made Piraeus the fastest growing port in the world.

Not all port investments will be profitable so quickly, or at all. “The port industry is about strong nerves,” The Economist has noted. A 2013 investment by CMPort in expanding Sri Lanka’s Colombo port was expected to take at least 15 years to become profitable. Global financial crises can put a brake on trade, and port revenues can plummet without warning. However, countries also need to be ready when trade begins to climb again. Building out ports ahead of demand makes business sense, according to the consulting firm Pricewaterhousecoopers. Their recent survey of Africa’s port business recommended that countries focus on building the “hub” ports of the future.

Yet as Sri Lanka found, when it comes to ports it’s not always clear that if you build it, the shipping will come.

Debt-Trap Diplomacy? The Sri Lanka Case

According to China’s Ministry of Transport, Chinese firms have been involved in the construction or operation of at least 42 ports in 34 countries along the Belt and Road. The idea that Chinese banks and companies are luring countries to borrow for unprofitable projects so that China can leverage these debts to extract concessions is now deeply embedded in discussions of China’s BRI program. Critics invariably point to a single case—the Chinese takeover of Sri Lanka’s Hambantota Port—as proof of this strategy. Yet the evidence for this project being part of a Chinese master plan is thin.

Located in an underdeveloped part of the island nation, a major port in Hambantota has been part of Sri Lanka’s official development plans for several decades. In 2002, the French company Port Autonome de Marseille offered to carry out a feasibility study without charge, commenting that they had been “highly impressed” by its location, with some 36,000 ships passing by annually.

In 2004, the Hambantota District was devastated by a major tsunami. The rebuilding of Hambantota’s fishing docks was contracted to a Chinese firm, China Harbor Engineering Company (CHEC), under China’s aid program. Learning of Sri Lanka’s ambitious plans for Hambantota, CHEC began working to position itself to be selected as the builder. If CHEC could assist Sri Lanka to obtain a loan from China Export Import Bank, a negotiated contract could be arranged rather than an open tender.

After the country’s long civil war ended in 2005, Sri Lanka’s plans to transform the country into an Indian Ocean hub for trade, investment, and services took off. The country’s only major port—Colombo—was cramped and stuffed with containers. In 2006, a feasibility study by the Danish engineering company Ramboll concluded that Hambantota could compete with Singapore’s vehicle transshipment and bulk cargo handling facilities. Ramboll prepared the port’s master plan. A 2006 WikiLeaks report noted fears of Sri Lankan business leaders that if the government did not go forward with the plan, “opportunities would be grabbed by other ports in the region.”

In 2007, after hard lobbying by CHEC and the Sri Lankan government, the China Eximbank agreed to finance Phase I of the port with a $307 million commercial buyer’s credit. CHEC got the contract.

For Sri Lanka, building a major new port was a leap of faith, just as China had constructed terminals before they were needed. Although Hambantota was only ten nautical miles from the main Indian Ocean shipping channels, it was an isolated backwater, lacking rail and highway links to Colombo. The business plan required ancillary investments in fuel bunkering, and an industrial zone. In 2010, the Sri Lankans launched a second phase, with a China Eximbank concessional loan package at a fixed interest rate of 2 percent.

Port traffic rose from 32 ships in 2012 to 335 in 2014, and the port handled over 100,000 vehicles that year, in line with the projections in the Ramboll feasibility study. Yet the port needed business partners with a strategic plan to attract shipping. Under management by the Sri Lankan Port Authority (SPLA), Hambantota began to accumulate significant losses.

In 2015, a new coalition government came to power in an election upset, in part because of public concerns about the country’s growing debt burden. By the end of 2016, Sri Lanka had an external debt of $46.5 billion; according to the IMF, the country’s $4.6 billion debt to China was about 10 percent of this.

The new government arranged a bailout from the IMF, and sought other options for raising foreign exchange to pay $4.4 billion in debt service due in 2016. The port at Hambantota had been a pet project of the opposition party and was not yet profitable. The new government decided to raise cash by privatizing state-owned assets, including a major stake in Hambantota.

Two Chinese firms bid on the project: CHEC and China Merchant Port Holdings. The government selected CMPort, which offered the government an upfront payment of $1.12 billion for 70 percent of the shares in a joint venture with SLPA. CMPort noted that they would need to invest an additional $600 million to create an industrial zone and transshipment hub for the South Asian and East African shipping business. The proceeds from the sale went to the Sri Lankan treasury, which used them to make payments on the Chinese loans and other debt service obligations. In return, the central government also took over the loan responsibility from SLPA.

Sri Lanka’s actions in selling a majority stake in the new Hambantota Port have some parallels with the Greek privatization of Piraeus. Both countries had borrowed heavily from a number of lenders and were in desperate need of foreign exchange. Inefficient state-owned companies ran both ports.

When Piraeus was privatized, Wei Jiafu, Cosco’s chief executive, said, “We have a saying in China, ‘Construct the eagle’s nest, and the eagle will come.’ We have constructed such a nest in your country to attract such Chinese eagles.” Sri Lanka is now hoping that CMPort will be able to construct an eagle’s nest in Hambantota, attracting other Chinese investors.

Djibouti: Singapore of Africa?

Indian concerns about Hambantota have spilled over into U.S. government concerns about China’s port investments in the small African country of Djibouti. In 2015, after nearly seven years of supporting anti-piracy operations along the trade routes off the coast of Somalia, China located its first overseas military installation in Djibouti, joining half a dozen other countries with military outposts in the strategically located nation.

While Djibouti has capitalized on its location to attract military tenants, China is the only country that also sees Djibouti (which is the outlet to the sea for land-locked Ethiopia) as a significant economic partner. As in Hambantota, Djibouti’s own aspirations to take advantage of its location to become “the Singapore of Africa” are at the heart of China’s lending and investment in Djibouti’s port and zone projects.

Djibouti began its port modernization program in 2006, giving the Dubai company DP World an exclusive 30-year concession. DP World built and operated the Doraleh Container Terminal but then balked at Djibouti’s plans for expanding its port investment. After a series of long-running disputes, the Djibouti government unilaterally terminated DP World’s concession in 2018.

Meanwhile, CMPort invested in the Port of Djibouti in 2013, and helped Djibouti access a loan from China to build the Doraleh Multipurpose Port, connected to the Djibouti-Ethiopia railway terminal. In 2018, Chinese companies launched the 240-hectare pilot phase of what they hope will become an 18-square-mile industrial and free trade zone with a focus on trade and logistics, export processing, and duty-free retail. By mid-2018, China had become the small nation’s largest creditor, with loans of around $1.3 billion. The IMF warned that Djibouti was “at risk of debt distress.”

CMPort is now a Fortune Global 500 company listed in Hong Kong. It is positioning Djibouti to be a showcase for its “port-park-city” development package. Yet this success is by no means certain. DP World has sued CMPort for what amounts to “alienation of affection”— luring Djibouti into breaking its exclusive contract with DP World.

Djibouti remains, as a recent report noted, “attractive but risky” as a maritime investment option. At the entrance to the Red Sea, the transit routes of Suez Canal shipping, and one of Africa’s most populous countries, Ethiopia, the new Djibouti zone is well located as a hub for transshipment, industrial processing, and duty-free wholesale. Yet CMPort will be competing with some of the savviest and most experienced free zone developers in the world. Dubai and 36 other free zones are located close by in the United Arab Emirates.

At the same time, despite its setback in Djibouti (and earlier, in Oman) the far more experienced DP World remains bullish on the commercial prospects in the region. The company has begun building a rival port in a far riskier location: the self-declared state of Somaliland. “The whole Horn of Africa is short of ports. It’s stifling,” DP World told The Economist. This suggests that CMPort is ahead of the game in the competition to run the primary hub in the Horn.

The Real Challenge: East Asian Model and Crony Capitalism

In infrastructure, today, the real challenge of the Chinese push is not military or strategic, and it is not really related to the Communist Party that still controls China.  For the United States, the challenge is that China’s approach—investing in infrastructure—is, not surprisingly, quite attractive to many low-income countries and we do not have the tools to offer something better. But for the developing countries that borrow from China, the challenge is to overcome the rent-seeking and cronyism that is an integral part of the East Asian region’s economic history.

Governments in East Asia see the conquering of new markets as an important strategic goal. Businesses are the vanguard, but they are closely supported by the state. In global shipping and construction markets, Chinese firms and the Chinese state see themselves as playing catch-up where European firms have had a big head start, boosted by their own governments under earlier rules of engagement. China’s embassies are united in working hard to help secure new business for Chinese firms. The Ministry of Commerce has multiple funding tools to support Chinese advances in construction, natural resource exploration, and technology exports. This is a far cry from the “markets first” approach advocated today by Washington and its allies.

Chinese policy bank funding enables Chinese firms to gain business advantages in building economic infrastructure: ports, roads, telecoms, and power plants. The China Development Bank said that it had committed at least $110 billion to projects in BRI countries as of mid-2018. China’s Export Import Bank announced it had provided $90 billion. While the United States has relatively generous pockets, committing nearly $35 billion in economic assistance in 2017 alone, very little of this went to economic infrastructure. According to OECD data, only Japan has an outlook similar to China’s. In 2017, Japan provided developing countries over $10 billion in concessional funding for economic infrastructure. U.S. aid and capital markets supplied just over $1 billion.

In the United States, our bridges and roads are crumbling, but China’s relentless investment in shiny new ports, roads, railroads, and power projects at home and abroad is welcomed and admired in countries where the vast majority of people live without access to electricity.

The United States can’t easily counter China’s business diplomacy. Although the Trump Administration has proposed a new agency to compete with China, the details are vague and roll-out will be slow.

On the other hand, China’s control over banking, and the close ties between state and capital prized by the East Asian model, have their own significant weak spot. The system can encourage investment; but it can and usually does also lead to rent-seeking and cronyism. Just as the pen is proverbially mightier than the sword, the pens that sign warped economic arrangements can be as devastating to prosperity, and at times to peace, as military tension and conflict.

The Achilles Heel of China’s bank financing model is that it relies heavily on Chinese companies to develop projects together with host country officials. This creates strong incentives for kickbacks and inflated project costs. Particularly in election years, companies and public works ministers may collude to get projects approved. In 2018, Chinese President Xi Jinping warned that Chinese funding was unavailable for “vanity projects,” suggesting that banks will examine proposals more critically. That would be to the good.

China does present a challenge in its port and infrastructure investments, but this is not a new challenge. As IMF chief Lagarde noted, investments in major new infrastructure always need to be carefully managed. The West can help shape the BRI by being more closely involved. Multilateral partnerships can build capacity among borrowing governments and their civil societies to analyze the public-private partnerships that are evolving as key financing methods for BRI. So far, China has been relying on loan capital far more heavily than equity in BRI financing. Yet equity investments from China would shift more of the risks to Chinese investors, and away from borrowing country governments and their taxpayers. This should be encouraged.

As for transparency and the risks of corruption, these are very present. Support for watchdog organizations like the anti-corruption NGOs Transparency International and Global Witness can help expose malfeasance if and when it occurs. But here, the West will have to be careful lest its own national companies end up with egg on their faces. While many present “the West” as a group united in probity and good business practice compared with a nefarious China, a 2014 survey by NGO Transparency International found that only four OECD members (the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland) were  “actively” enforcing their own anti-corruption legislation, and that activity has not been very effective given the inherent jurisdictional problem of enforcing national law in a global business environment. The wealthy East Asian OECD countries Japan and Korea, along with the Netherlands and Spain, were among the countries with the weakest enforcement. It seems the Chinese may not be so different from “the West” after all.

The post Misdiagnosing the Chinese Infrastructure Push appeared first on The American Interest.

Nathan Glazer—Merit Before Meritocracy

The death of Nathan Glazer in January, a month before his 96th birthday, has been rightly noted as the end of an era in American political and intellectual life. Nat Glazer was the last exemplar of what historian Christopher Lasch would refer to as a “social type”: the New York intellectuals, the sons and daughters of impoverished, almost exclusively Jewish immigrants who took advantage of the city’s public education system and then thrived in the cultural and political ferment that from the 1930’s into the 1960’s made New York the leading metropolis of the free world. As Glazer once noted, the Marxist polemics that he and his fellow students at City College engaged in afforded them unique insights into, and unanticipated opportunities to interpret, Soviet communism to the rest of America during the Cold War.

Over time, postwar economic growth and political change resulted in the relative decline of New York and the emergence of Washington as the center of power and even glamor in American life. Nevertheless, Glazer and his fellow New York intellectuals, relocated either to major universities around the country or to Washington think tanks, continued to exert remarkable influence over both domestic and foreign affairs. The improbability of all this was driven home to me in the mid-1980’s, when I was living in Washington. While hosting some friends from South Texas (where they were deeply enmeshed in local Democratic politics), I asked a neoconservative colleague working in the Reagan White House to arrange a VIP tour. My Texas friends were delighted but also quite baffled to hear that their Reaganite tour guide was a former socialist. (I didn’t have the heart to tell them that my friend had been not just any socialist, but a Shachtmanite!)

But I am getting ahead of my story. Not all New York intellectuals were neoconservatives. Nor for that matter were all neoconservatives New York intellectuals. And of course, since 9/11 and the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, neoconservatism has been identified almost exclusively with a particular foreign policy perspective advanced by a younger generation of intellectuals and policy entrepreneurs, not with critiques of Great Society domestic programs that originally defined the term. As for Nathan Glazer, over the years he explicitly declined many opportunities to identify himself as any kind of neoconservative. Indeed, in 1972 he voted for George McGovern for president, and in 1980 for Jimmy Carter.

Yet Nathan Glazer’s passing is much more than an occasion to reflect on shifting political currents and alliances in twentieth century America. In fact, Nat Glazer was not a very political person. Still, his life and career do shed light on important developments in our political life and institutions over the past several decades, especially the role our cultural and intellectual elites have come to play in contemporary politics. This then points to critical changes in the institution where Glazer ultimately found a home and made his career—the university. And however much the emerging scandal over rigged admissions raises troubling questions about higher education’s priorities, the ensuing outrage should also remind us how central the university and its meritocratic values have become in twenty-first century America.

Anyone who ever met Nat Glazer appreciated that he was not easily summed up by any label. Without doubt, he was one of a kind. As others have noted, he was remarkable for his even-handed, fair-minded analyses of controversial issues on which he was nevertheless invariably prepared to take a stance. Some have emphasized his willingness to “change his mind.” But this misses the point, for Glazer came from a milieu in which one did not simply change one’s mind. Rather, one changed one’s position. The phrase reflects embeddedness in a dense network of personal and intellectual relationships that would be powerfully impacted by any such reconsidered pronouncement on the issues of the day—a bit like the movement of tectonic plates beneath the earth’s surface that may result in earthquakes.

Yet unlike many New York intellectuals, Glazer did not take himself quite that seriously; he never quite regarded his positions of such world-historical significance. To be sure, the range of his interests—the Rosenberg spy case, the Jewish experience in America, urban planning and transportation, welfare and social policy, the continuing plight of African Americans, ethnicity and religion in the United States as well as overseas, immigration, affirmative action and multiculturalism, and modern architecture—could be downright intimidating. But then at times his passions, such as his eagerness to observe first-hand the installation artist Christo’s wrapping of the Reichstag in Berlin, could seem frivolous—at least to a younger version of myself.

Always dispassionate, Nat’s views were often unpredictable. I recall a conversation about Pat Buchanan in which it became clear that he, unlike his many neoconservative friends and colleagues, did not consider the conservative journalist an anti-Semite. That was Nat: always willing to give the other side, or sides, of the argument their due and never indulging in personal animosities or emotional vendettas.  He simply assumed that in a pluralist society there would be inevitable—and sharp—differences among the many groups and perspectives competing for attention and dominance. This posture did not mean that he would agree with such views, merely that he would take them into consideration as he sifted and resifted through his own evaluations in light of what seemed necessary for the broader public good (though I cannot recall or envision him ever invoking such an abstract, high-minded notion).

Such qualities did not mean that Nat Glazer was the easiest person to talk to. While he was invariably responsive and helpful to students, colleagues, and friends, there was about him an air of distraction. He was not evasive, but he could be difficult to pin down. He evinced a certain benign aloofness: not arrogance but preoccupation with his own thoughts, which were definitely his but not just about him. Perhaps the best descriptor is “semi-detached,” like much working-class housing in Britain—just the kind of feature that would attract his almost childlike enthusiasm and curiosity.

What those of us fortunate enough to have known Nat Glazer will miss most is what Sandra Fells, his live-in caretaker during his declining years, called his “zest for life.” Whether for my wife’s savory Brussel sprouts, served with a chicken dish of his own making on the occasion of his 95thbirthday; for a recently unearthed book about Ezra Pound; for fretting about a brilliant former student having difficulty finding his niche in life; for Amor Towles’s novel, A Gentleman in Moscow; or for an article about India from an old issue of The New Yorker that he was emailing about to family and friends the week before he died; that zest was contagious.

One of my fondest memories is of Nat savoring a snifter of Belgian beer with a meal at the lively Kirkland Tap and Trotter bar and restaurant around the corner from where he lived, served by a young woman whose tattoos, piercings, and inappropriate familiarity did not faze him in the least. Another is of Nat enjoying a summer dinner on the terrace of a restaurant in nearby Union Square, ground zero for Boston’s real estate developers as well as young techies. Surveying the scene and then looking squarely at me and my wife, he matter of factly concluded, “All the young people I know are so old!”

Now I risk indulging in fond remembrances and nostalgia, the last thing Nat would countenance. I can hear him asking in his gently insistent, scratchy-voiced way, “What does it all mean?” Indeed, his passing should alert us to troubling changes in our cultural, intellectual, and political life. But what I have in mind transcends our disagreements over the current occupant of the White House. So here is a brief look at Nathan Glazer’s story more or less from the beginning.

Nat would have been the first to say that he was a lucky man. Born in 1923 to a struggling, Yiddish-speaking immigrant couple, he was the youngest of seven children, none of whom were expected to attend college or pursue a profession, but rather to begin working at an early age and contribute to family finances. His oldest sibling, Sam, drove a bakery delivery truck for most of his working life. Nat escaped this fate simply because, as he once wrote, he was the youngest: “I showed no sign of being the brightest; indeed, some evidence indicates that I was not.”

Indeed, young Nat flubbed an interview that might have earned him a scholarship to Columbia. But he did attend City College, where he met other children of immigrants, especially young Jews caught up in the left sectarian politics of the era. They were of course reacting to the Depression and the rise of fascism in Europe, even in America. But as Glazer later wrote, he and his comrades were socialists not so much by reflection or conviction but by descent. He traced the moderate socialist views of his youth to the influence of his father, who consistently voted for Norman Thomas and was staunchly anticommunist, growing out of his experiences in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). With his characteristic appreciation of the serendipitous, Glazer once speculated that if his father had been a furrier, his union would have been dominated by communists, toward whom his father—and by extension Nat—would have likely been sympathetic!

In that era, young people from such humble backgrounds, even those attending college, had modest or ill-defined ambitions. As Glazer emphasized, none of his peers at City College anticipated careers as professors or even as writers. After more than a decade of economic depression and hardship, as he once put it, “Who dreamed of any job except a government clerk?” Still, Glazer’s goals were apparently more ill-defined than most. Unlike Seymour Martin Lipset, whom he got to know on the subway on their way to City College, Glazer did not turn to sociology in the hope that it would lead (as Lipset later wrote) to “steady work” as a social worker. Neither Glazer nor Lipset anticipated that sociology would lead to wildly successful academic careers that would bring them together as colleagues first at Berkeley and then later at Harvard.

Thus, young Nat wandered from major to major—from history, to economics, to public administration—until he finally settled on sociology. But even then, he lacked direction. A critical juncture was his meeting Seymour Melman, an older student who had graduated from City College a few years before. Melman eventually taught economics at Columbia and became a prominent anti-nuclear activist and critic of America’s “permanent war economy.”

But when they met, Melman was a Zionist activist who connected Glazer to Zellig Harris, a young academic at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was soon to establish the first modern linguistics department in the United States. Harris subsequently gained world renown as a structural linguist, and political fame of a sort as the teacher of Noam Chomsky.

Harris was also the leader of a self-styled vanguard of intellectual Zionists whose vision for Palestine was not a Jewish state but some kind of binational socialist federation of Arabs and Jews. The group was a chapter of Avukah (The Torch), the youth affiliate of the Zionist Organization of America. And before long, young Glazer was working on Avukah Student Action, the organization’s national newspaper. It was the first of many writing and editorial positions he was to hold during his long life.

While still an undergraduate at City College, Glazer divided his time between New York and Philadelphia. On the train ride back and forth, he got to know another member of the group, Ruth Slotkin, who became his first wife, mother of his three daughters, and a respected chronicler of Jewish life in Germany. Unlike their own families’ homes, Nat and many of the other students in Avukah “found the Harris household. . . .very attractive. . . .comfortable, a lot of people would come to eat.” And there were “a lot of books.” But this new milieu entailed much more. Harris’s Zionist activities put him in contact with Louis D. Brandeis and Albert Einstein, with whom the linguist’s wife, Bruria Kaufman, a theoretical physicist, worked at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

Glazer got drawn into Harris’s academic research and by 1944 had earned a master’s degree in linguistics from Penn, around the same time that he received his bachelor’s degree from City College. These were heady circles for a youth of his humble origins. Still, one does not get the sense that he was a wunderkind as much as a young man not sure of what he wanted, spreading himself a bit thin and exploring his options. He was certainly no careerist.

But then, it was not clear in those days what kind of career was to be had. At some point, Glazer’s aspirations had presumably advanced beyond a government clerkship. But when he was offered a fellowship to pursue a doctorate in anthropology at Penn, he was dissuaded from accepting it by a different mentor (not Harris) who apparently suggested that as a Jew he would have a difficult time pursuing an academic career.

“And so I returned to New York to look for a job,” Glazer later wrote. And in those days and in those circles, the guy to turn to, as Nat once explained to me, was “Dan Bell, who knew everyone!” Then an editor at the socialist but staunchly anticommunist New Leader, Bell would become Glazer’s life-long friend, future colleague at the Harvard sociology department, fellow editor of The Public Interest, and neighbor in the Francis Avenue neighborhood of Cambridge. Bell connected Glazer to the German émigré social scientist Max Horkheimer, who had just been hired by the American Jewish Committee to research anti-Semitism. But he was Horkheimer’s research assistant for only a short time, and soon moved, almost literally, across the hall to work at an AJC publication, The Contemporary Jewish Record.

As the war in Europe and then in the Pacific ended, there was a push to revamp CJR. In   November 1945, it got relaunched as Commentary, with Glazer as an editorial assistant. He was tasked with his own recurring feature, “The Study of Man,” which afforded him a platform to review and comment on the burgeoning social science literature that sought to make sense of the postwar world. So, at the age of 22 Nathan Glazer found himself present at the creation of arguably the most consequential opinion journal in America during the second half of the twentieth century.

During this same period, Glazer was also a part-time graduate student in sociology at Columbia, where for a tuition of $12.50 per credit he enrolled in three-credit lecture courses that met late afternoons or evenings for two hours a week. These were attended by many individuals who never obtained advanced degrees or pursued careers in sociology, but who nevertheless got to hear lectures by the likes of Paul Lazarsfeld, Robert Merton, and C. Wright Mills. Glazer had applied for a fellowship and been turned down. But there was apparently no great shame in that, since graduate programs in that era—at least sociology at Columbia—were so loosely structured.

It was also around this time that Daniel Bell introduced Glazer to David Riesman, who was then heading up an undergraduate social sciences program at the University of Chicago. Bell was teaching in that program, and Glazer had a notion that he might be interested in doing so, too. But Riesman had other plans for him. Familiar with Glazer’s writing in Commentary, Riesman recruited him to work on a research project about post-war angst in America that culminated in 1950 with the publication of The Lonely Crowd.  With his name listed on the cover along with Riesman’s and Reuel Denney’s, Nathan Glazer was at the age of twenty-seven coauthor of a book that was not only an immediate success, but eventually one of the all-time best-selling social science studies in American history. Yet it would be another decade before he obtained his doctorate in sociology from Columbia.

In 1954, when Glazer moved on from Commentary, it was not to a teaching or research post at a university, but to the publisher Doubleday. He was recruited there by the young Jason Epstein, who was just then launching Anchor Books, the first attempt in the United States to publish quality paperbacks—like Penguin Books in the United Kingdom. Needless to say, Epstein was prescient, and went on to further success and renown at Vintage Books and Random House.

But the story about Epstein that Nat most liked to tell—and retell—involved a different publishing venture. In the middle of the 1961-62 New York newspaper strike, it was Epstein’s business acumen that helped launch the highbrow political, literary magazine that had long been an ambition of Epstein’s wife Barbara, along with editor Robert Silvers, writer Elizabeth Hardwick, and her husband, poet Robert Lowell. Knowing first hand how desperate publishers were during the strike to publicize their titles, Epstein recognized that their advertising dollars—not a grant from a foundation or wealthy patron—could provide the financing needed to launch the critical first issue of The New York Review of Books. The rest is publishing history!

While at Doubleday, Glazer was commissioned by historian Daniel Boorstin to give a series of lectures at the University of Chicago on Judaism in America, a topic that his involvement with Zionism and Commentary well prepared him for. This was the genesis of his 1957 book, American Judaism. Around this time, Glazer participated in a Ford Foundation-funded project on the history and influence of communism in America. During the late 1950’s he also began teaching full-time, one-year stints at various colleges and universities: UC-Berkeley, Bennington, and Smith (where he met Sulochana Raghavan, his second and surviving wife). He still did not have a doctorate. But with the help of his old City College friend Marty Lipset, who was then teaching at Columbia, Glazer  managed to maintain his ties to the sociology department there. In 1961 his book from the Ford project, The Social Basis of American Communism, was published. The following year it was submitted as his doctoral thesis—making him, as he later wrote, “at the age of 39, a full-fledged sociologist, if I wanted to be one.”

It was during this same period that Glazer was taken with the improbable idea to “become an expert on Japan.” After an informal conversation with a program officer at the Ford Foundation, he was told to submit a letter about what he planned to study there. He did so, explaining that he “wanted to learn about Tokyo by living in Tokyo, the way I had learned about New York by living in New York.” The foundation’s response? “I was given a substantial grant and first-class airfare without having to trouble anyone for letters of recommendation,” he later recounted, “at a time when I held no academic position in the United States, and without having to arrange any academic affiliation in Japan.” This was all very felicitous, especially since Glazer knew no Japanese. As he rightly concluded, “How gloriously free and easy were the foundations in 1961!”

Upon his return from a chastening year in Japan, Glazer spent a year (1962-63) in Washington at the Housing and Home Finance Agency, predecessor to the soon-to-be-established Department of Housing and Urban Development. He held a vaguely defined post that afforded him ample opportunity to observe and participate in early deliberations on the impending war on poverty. His perch had been secured with the help of his friend and collaborator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Moynihan had already arrived in Washington with the new Kennedy administration and held an appointment at the Department of Labor, from which was eventually to issue his controversial but prophetic report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.

During this period in the early 1960’s, Glazer and Moynihan collaborated on the book for which they would both become most widely known, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Ethnic Groups of New York, published in 1963. It was primarily Glazer’s idea, and it was he who recruited Moynihan to the project. Approaching middle age and still without a secure academic post, Glazer sought out not another sociologist or even another Jewish intellectual, but a fellow New Yorker who had recently managed to complete a doctorate in international diplomacy from Tufts, but was, in truth, a haphazardly educated, ambitious policy entrepreneur who had worked for New York governor Averell Harriman.

In the fall of 1963, after his year in Washington, Glazer secured his first regular teaching post, in the department of sociology at UC-Berkeley. Three years later, Moynihan became a tenured professor of education and urban policy at Harvard and director of the Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies. And three years after that, Glazer moved to Harvard, where he spent the rest of his career.

Such mobility into the very highest levels of academia is striking but not difficult to understand. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, higher education was a booming growth industry. Urban and race issues were prominent on the national agenda, and knowledgeable analysts like Glazer and Moynihan were in demand. Today, by contrast, it would be difficult to imagine a Moynihan or a Glazer so readily installed at Harvard. I say this only partly on account of the changed political tenor in Cambridge. Just as important would be the diminished luster, in the 21st-century academic marketplace, of resumés like theirs.

Far from the conventional pedigrees of elite academics, Moynihan and Glazer’s credentials were earned in the rough-and-tumble of New York political and intellectual life at a particularly critical juncture in the nation’s history. During the Depression and then World War II, the city was already the epicenter of American commerce, finance, journalism, publishing, theatre, and the arts. With America’s emergence from the war as the global power, the subsequent arrival of the new United Nations headquarters at Turtle Bay, and even the ascendance of commercial television networks headquartered in Manhattan, New York’s preeminence was secured not just nationally but internationally. And as Glazer made clear on several occasions, it was in and around such worldly, profane venues, not at the city’s educational institutions, that what he called “the shaping part”of his education occurred.

Mid-century New York was home not only to refugee scholars such as Lewis Coser, Max Horkheimer, Leo Lowenthal, Erich Fromm, and Hannah Arendt, but also to gifted American editors and writers such as the peripatetic Paul Goodman; Jane Jacobs at Architectural Forum; Will Herberg at the International Ladies Garment Workers Union; and many more. Every Friday afternoon, there was an informal seminar at the office of the New Leader, where these or other free-floating intellectuals would show up. Meanwhile at Commentary, as Glazer later reported, “the pressure was remarkably low. There seemed to be time for work on the magazine, attendance at Columbia courses, my own writing, and even chess games beginning at lunch that sometimes lasted through a good part of the afternoon.”

This extraordinary milieu can be explained, in part, by the social turmoil and fluidity resulting from the Depression, the rise of Nazi Germany, and war in Europe. New York was the port of entry for refugee intellectuals and academics as early as the mid-1930’s. More arrived as war approached, erupted, and widened with U.S. entry. Then the war’s end meant still more refugees as well as the return of hundreds of thousands of young veterans whose “education” had been jump-started by their wartime experiences.

Young Glazer was exempted from military service for health reasons. But Irving Kristol, another City College socialist who became his colleague at Commentary and eventually at The Public Interest, served overseas in the Army during World War II. I recall a talk Kristol gave in the late 1980’s explaining how his wartime experiences had finally disabused him of any leftist leanings as he came to realize that the Italian-Americans in his unit “would turn socialism into a racket.”

Clearly, Kristol was not the only veteran whose wartime service upended certain assumptions about their fellow Americans. Even after the war and into the 1960’s, the military draft meant that most young men were compelled to live and work with individuals from backgrounds starkly different from their own. Today, of course, such broadening (and levelling) experiences are harder to find—and easier to avoid. However well-intentioned, a year of post-graduate volunteer service with a secular or religious charitable enterprise doesn’t have the same impact. Neither, regrettably, do two years with Teach for America; or even two years with the Peace Corps in Gambia. Participation in such public service programs just ain’t the same as having to submit to the authority of a drill sergeant from Alabama.

One thing is clear: America’s wartime mobilization helped generate demand for higher education from returning veterans. One outcome was the GI Bill, which both responded to and further fueled that demand. And then a few years later the children of those veterans began knocking on the doors of colleges and universities in unprecedented numbers. While leftist intellectuals like Michael Harrington complained that the post-war expansion of higher education co-opted the avant-garde, it also facilitated the academic careers of Glazer, Moynihan, and other talented writers and intellectuals.

Among these was Glazer’s mentor and Lonely Crowd co-author, David Riesman, who with a law degree and a peripatetic career that included no formal social science training was nevertheless appointed professor of social relations at Harvard in 1958. Even as late as 1973, it was possible for Riesman’s student and co-author, Christopher Jencks, to be granted tenure in the Harvard sociology department on the basis of writing and research conducted without a doctorate.

Those days are now long gone. Today the growth boom is over, and the enterprise of higher education is more formalized, structured, and professionalized. Universities have greater resources, but they are also more bureaucratically demanding. Many of these changes came about in service to meritocratic goals, which—ironically—would have benefitted Glazer and his City College peers. Aside from the obvious anti-Semitism, they also faced obstacles posed by their genuinely humble (today, we would say “disadvantaged”) origins. For those of us who knew them as mentors and senior colleagues, it is easy to overlook or ignore those origins. Yet Glazer did not recall his father ever speaking anything other than Yiddish. His parents were literate enough to write letters to relatives back in Poland, but there were only a few books in their home. Lipset’s family was intermittently on home-relief. And Daniel Bell grew up in even more desperate circumstances on the Lower East Side.

But if Glazer and his peers would have benefitted from the opportunities offered by today’s meritocratic university, one cannot help but wonder about the quality of education they would receive, compared to what they secured for themselves in mid-century New York.

Today’s university administrators understand that they are competing for good students, not just with academic offerings, but also with amenities such as high-speed internet connectivity, gourmet cafeteria food, apartments with kitchens, professional athletic facilities, and a full range of medical, counseling, and psychiatric services. Ironically, this leads to a milieu where undergraduates are encouraged to “think globally,” but have fewer and fewer reasons to leave campus. And when they are induced to leave, it is typically for a highly programmed but not very rigorous semester abroad, during which they spend most of their time socializing with other Americans and (if they are lucky) with foreign students who speak English.

To be sure, there are also the inevitable “service” programs where students venture forth to “engage with” and “assist” populations that are “disadvantaged” and “underserved.” But these, too, tend to occur in a bubble of oversight and guidance that is not easy to escape. If by chance an adventurous undergraduate seeks to venture forth and investigate some genuine social or political issue or controversy, he or she must negotiate a vigilant bureaucracy dedicated to averting the ever-present danger that a student’s curiosity might result in a violation of the rights of those with whom they wish to talk.

Then, of course, students have their own rights. Indeed, the right of undergraduates to privacy extends to their medical and academic records, to which their parents are not permitted access. To be sure, parents invariably pay the bills. But under the perverse logic now permeating higher education, the students, not the parents, are the “customers.” And the customers must be served, which necessarily means that the authority and judgment of educators get circumscribed. Until recently, the point of undergraduate education was to teach the young what they need to know in order to make intelligent choices about their lives. Done properly, this meant according educators the discretion and authority to preside over the varied opportunities for the formal and informal learning necessary to accommodate the diverse and complicated paths from adolescence to adulthood. Today, however, higher education increasingly directs students down paths that are ever more rule-bound, bureaucratized, and narrow. The only ground left upon which faculty can exercise authority is that of career counselor and trainer. And this role is reinforced by the preoccupation of students—and their parents—with planning ahead to retire the debt accumulated to pay for the various “educational services” they have been persuaded to consume.

At the graduate level, the trends are similar. For Glazer and company, their passion for politics and social science burned somewhere between avocation and vocation. Today, graduate education in these fields is a career ladder, pure and simple. It is almost unthinkable that someone could or would climb such a ladder on a part-time basis. This means no more itinerant writers and intellectuals wandering in and out of lectures. A master’s degree in these fields has become a mere rung on the way to the doctorate, which typically requires a full-time commitment for at least five years, in return for which carefully selected candidates can expect tuition-waivers and stipends for living expenses, as well as teaching responsibilities. Not all of these developments are ill-advised.  Yet no one is expected to enjoy this experience, and it cannot be an accident that one’s chosen academic field is typically referred to as “the discipline.”

It may be objected that these changes are necessary, because the social sciences today are much more methodologically rigorous and quantitatively sophisticated than in Glazer’s day. “Big data” is now the order of the day. This is true, but it is also true that this increase in scientific rigor has been accompanied by a troubling decrease in attention paid to the full range of normative assumptions and choices informing social science research, other than ritual accommodation to the political fads of the moment. Moreover, competition for academic teaching positions is now sufficiently intense that doctoral candidates are encouraged, and in some cases required, to go on the job market with not just a completed doctoral thesis but published articles in peer-reviewed journals, which effectively reinforces these narrow professional norms.

In such cloistered environments, the fundamental distinction between politics and moralism gets blurred—even in political science departments. As an about-to-be-minted Ph.D from Stanford recently declared in a presentation for a teaching post in my department, “I don’t like to talk to politicians because they don’t tell the truth”! (This candidate did not get the job, I am pleased to report.) Undoubtedly more typical is the tendency among many young political scientists today to regard elected officials and politicians as powerful individuals to be debunked, demystified, and deconstructed.

The obverse tendency is to view those deemed bereft of power or influence as victims and/or heroes, rather than as self-interested political actors. For example, I recall having dinner with a group of University of Oregon graduate students who had been interviewing farmworkers seeking to unionize. My dinner companions elaborated at length on the unenviable plight of these workers, but could tell me nothing about the political tactics, strategies, or goals of their unionization efforts.

To be sure, there is a political valence to my criticism here. But the point would not be much different if contemporary social science were dominated by conservatives. Given the basic dynamics of today’s meritocratic university, conservative social scientists would be (and typically are) equally obtuse about how their professional aspirations and norms limit their ability—and inclination—to understand and analyze social, cultural, and political realities in contemporary America. The rise of the Tea Party and the subsequent success of Donald Trump suggest that conservative academics, as well as their confreres in journalism and at think tanks, are just as inept as their liberal adversaries at assessing the challenges confronting many Americans.

It is critical here to point out the significant difference between the way our universities present themselves to the wider society and the way academics tend to behave among themselves. In much of what emanates from our universities, the dominant tone is one of aloofness and arrogance. But within the academy, the day-to-day, lived reality is one of timidity, risk-avoidance, and conformity to a general will that gets defined and enforced by whatever putatively marginalized group appears capable of seizing the attention of skittish administrators.

Yet the onus for this scenario cannot be placed exclusively on higher education. Over the last several decades, critical changes in our nation’s cultural and political life have also been at work. One of these was signaled in the late 1980’s when Irving Kristol moved The Public Interest from New York to Washington—a city that he had yet to set foot in when at the age of 33 he moved to London to become coeditor of Encounter magazine.

Today, an internship in Washington is virtually a required stop on the itinerary for just about any undergraduate interested in politics and public policy. Universities have encouraged this trend by setting up their own programs in the nation’s capital. (I myself helped UCLA set up its first undergraduate residential program in Washington in 1990.) But beyond such endeavors, the vast majority of young people in Washington today are recent graduates busily making their way in the world and helping (along with limitless supplies of caffeine and the absence of skyscrapers) to make the nation’s capital feel like one big, sprawling post-graduate campus.

What this image suggests is that today’s ambitious, well-educated youth have escaped the bubble of the contemporary university only to find refuge in the bubble of today’s political class. The United States has always had political elites, needless to say. At its founding the nation was blessed with a particularly wise, far-seeing elite, now blithely reduced to the status of “privileged white males.” The founders were that, to be sure. But they also represented diverse economic, cultural, religious, and regional interests.

Whatever their shortcomings and failings, the founders knew their own local terrain and were reasonably reliable guides to whose interests they were representing—and whose they were neglecting.  But in recent decades a confluence of factors—economic growth and affluence, modern warfare, increasing levels of education, and the rights revolution—have not only eroded Americans’ ties to their local communities but also undermined the prerogatives of local and state governments. Another factor is the media, transformed by deregulation and a series of technological revolutions. Today the media are less professional and more ubiquitous than ever, making them a highly problematic “fourth branch of government,” whose role in the 2020 presidential campaign promises to be no more constructive than it was in 2016.

As power and influence have been amassed in Washington, routine political discourse has shifted from unobtrusive jockeying back and forth over narrow interests to noisy debates over public goals and purposes, resulting in the lion’s share of attention and resources going to those best able to articulate broad policy objectives. In 1979, James Q. Wilson observed presciently that “what counts now are ideas more than interests.” Yet Wilson did not say that interests had disappeared, much less that the ideas in question were necessarily valid or coherent. One consequence of these developments has been the increased visibility of think tanks, which today seem to do less “thinking” and more “messaging.” More to the point, those who think they have ideas do not seem to believe they have interests. And those with interests pretend they have ideas.

What’s missing from this tableau are intellectual entrepreneurs accustomed to surviving in the marketplace. Washington today is not the kind of place where a Jason Epstein would identify a business opportunity as a way to finance a high-brow publication, and wind up making money on the deal, as he did with New York Review. Nor would an Irving Kristol start a publication like The Public Interest, run it out of his one-room office at the publishing house employing him, and never pay its senior editors (Kristol, Bell, and Glazer) a dime for their work. On the other hand, contemporary Washington is the kind of place where political and public policy entrepreneurs seek out hedge fund billionaires to support journals and organizations that everyone knows will lose money.

The point is not to denigrate the ethos of Washington today compared to New York in its heyday. After all, the latter was ground zero for “the organization man” and “other-directedness.” Then, too, the left-sectarian milieu from which Nathan Glazer emerged was typically mired in petty in-fighting and self-important rivalries. As Glazer pointed out on more than one occasion, he and his peers were strikingly insular, and out of touch not only with much of America but even with their own Jewish heritage and institutions. There was also what he charitably described as “the old New York style of pronouncing judgments on a basis of less than adequate knowledge in politics and literature.” Indeed, whenever I come across some of the essays on McCarthyism written by Bell, Lipset, and others, I cringe at their shallow understanding of their fellow Americans in postwar America.

Yet despite these limitations and shortcomings, the legacy of the New York intellectuals hardly seems threatened by any of their would-be successors. Indeed, it is not clear who could fairly and accurately be designated in that role. It would certainly be hard to find such individuals among the ranks of social scientists at today’s universities. Strikingly, the work of a few young writers and analysts, many of them from immigrant backgrounds, exhibits an intellectual vitality, engagement, and rigor reminiscent of Glazer and company. Yet most aspiring young people today, including those from immigrant backgrounds, seem totally absorbed in the latest iteration of identity politics. America is a big country, so the entrepreneurialism, bravado, and intellectual creativity of Nathan Glazer and company may well be brewing out there somewhere. But it does not seem evident in Washington or New York, much less in the groves of academe.

In closing, I am mindful that the achievements of Nathan Glazer and his fellow New York intellectuals will not likely impress the disadvantaged youth now aspiring to climb the ladder of achievement and success in higher education. Presented with the idea that minority youth in particular might benefit from the story recounted here, both they and their mentors in the social sciences will likely ask: What could we possibly learn from the experiences of these old, now deceased Jewish men? A lot, I believe, if only we were able to summon the patience and goodwill to listen to one another.

Finally, I also wonder whether Nat Glazer would agree with my assessment of our contemporary situation. As I have already hinted, his perspective was rather Tolstoian: Everyone’s point of view gets considered, everyone gets their due. And the process never quite reaches closure—witness his changed positions on affirmative action and multiculturalism. Nat was ever the optimist, albeit with modest, realistic expectations. I suspect he would find my perspective a bit too gloomy. But then he would he mull on it, reconsider it, and weigh it against subsequent evidence. And therein lies his legacy for us all in these dispiriting times.

Recognizing the drawbacks to their over-programmed lives, some college-bound youth and their families are opting for gap years between secondary and higher education. But now ever-entrepreneurial university administrators are seeking to organize and formalize these experiences as well. See Melissa Korn, “Colleges Widen Gap-Year Opportunities,” Wall Street Journal (December 26, 2018)

The post Nathan Glazer—Merit Before Meritocracy appeared first on The American Interest.

Handling the Transatlantic Stress Test: A Conversation with Lithuania’s Foreign Minister

This week marks the annual NATO ministerial meeting in Washington, when foreign ministers from the Alliance’s 29 members convene to discuss shared security threats. It also marks the 70th anniversary of NATO itself: a milestone that has been met with both celebration of NATO’s past and trepidation about its future.

One of the foreign ministers in town this week is Lithuania’s Linas Linkevičius, a seasoned diplomat who has long argued for a tougher line on Russia and for prioritizing the fight against disinformation. Charles Davidson, Publisher of The American Interest, and TAI Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Gedmin recently sat down with the Foreign Minister to discuss the state of the NATO alliance at a time of profound uncertainty. This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Charles Davidson for TAI: I’ve known you for many years as a strong defender of Western values, and I remember an incident about four years ago when you were speaking at a think tank in Washington. In the Q&A at the end, a young man from the Russian Embassy stood up and disputed what was really happening in Ukraine. You spoke to him directly, first debunking his claims, and then saying that he must know in his heart that what he said was completely inaccurate. And he sat down with no rejoinder.

Linas Linkevičius: No one supported him, that’s right. Although there were other people from the Embassy present, I remember.

TAI: Let’s start by talking about that incident, and about culture. Lithuania has a strong culture of freedom and democracy. But when we look at the broader arc of Eastern Europe, we see big differences in how committed people are to liberty. How do you view this issue of culture in Eastern Europe, and how can Lithuania be a leader, encouraging others to follow your example?

LL: It’s not a question unique to Eastern Europe. This applies to Western Europe, as well. We talk a lot about “resilience” nowadays—it’s a popular word, and it has to do with information. If people are informed, they are more resilient. If people are not informed, they really have no immunity to disinformation.

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Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius (Wikimedia Commons)

We had a hard time explaining this to our allies in 2013, when we held the presidency of the European Union Council. For instance, we said that we had to take this counter-propaganda issue very seriously. It was not understood. Many colleagues said, “No, we’re not going to do European propaganda. We’re not going to do censorship and prohibitions.” And we said, “No, we are not calling for that. We are just asking that you take these propaganda attacks seriously.” If you’re brainwashing people, it’s a very efficient weapon. And you can prepare people to be demotivated during elections and referendums.

Now we have some movement on this issue. We have the East StratCom Task Force in the European External Action Service. Next year its budget will be increased. We have the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence in Riga. I still believe we need more interaction within NATO because we all face the same challenges, the same sources of disinformation. We’re not necessarily trying to lead on this issue, as you said, but these developments do make us feel better.

You used the word “debunk,” which reminds me of something else. We have a great resource that was recently mentioned in the Financial Times: Debunk.eu. This is a Lithuanian platform run by journalists that involves media, smart software solutions, IT solutions, and even artificial intelligence. They’re screening about 10,000 articles per day in real time, and debunking fake news. I’m really proud of this initiative because it shows that it’s not just government that should play a role here, but also ordinary people, journalists, and NGOs.  They’re doing this on their own time, for free, because they’re so enthusiastic. This is an example of resilience, and it works.

You mentioned this one Russian guy at the think tank. I also once participated in a discussion with Russia Today journalists, and I talked to them in the same way. I said, “You are deliberately lying. You know that there are Russian soldiers on Ukrainian soil, but on your channel, you are saying something else. So why are you doing this? Do you really believe it? No.”

If you are deliberately spreading lies, this is not an alternative point of view. This is not freedom of expression. It takes time to learn this lesson. So to get back to your question, we do not think that we are smarter than others on this issue—but maybe we have more experience.

I still remember, let me remind you, how dramatic the events of January 1991 were. I remember the victims by the television tower [when Soviet soldiers fired on crowds of civilians in Vilnius – ed.]. And in the Soviet Union, they couldn’t show this on TV. If there was no CNN or BBC coverage, it would have been lost, and nobody would know what happened. That experience of so many years ago showed us how this fake news works, how powerful it is. We needed no persuading that we should take this threat seriously. But it takes time to explain to allies and partners.

TAI: Some Americans look at the world and see China, Iran, North Korea, and a host of domestic challenges, and they ask, “when it comes to Russia and Eastern Europe, what’s wrong with the idea of letting America step back and the European Union step forward?” How would you respond, Minister?

And second, about President Trump specifically. There’s one group that notes his peculiar fondness for Vladimir Putin, and another that says, “But you know what? On Eastern Europe, in practice, he’s been better than Obama.” What are your thoughts?

LL: On your second question, yes, I’m always saying, “Let’s judge by the developments on the ground—what is visible, what is tangible.” So, as an example, we have these Enhanced Forward Presence troops in the Baltic states and Poland. 1,500 is really not a big number. But it’s a strong multinational message to the world and to the framework nation, Germany. For them it was a big deal. There is a clear U.S. presence, a clear U.S. engagement, resources and money being allocated.

So I really would like to distinguish between rhetoric and what is happening on the ground. There is a real predictability and continuity to U.S. policy on the ground. And we have to behave ourselves, too. I’m so happy that my country’s a member of this 2 percent co-op [NATO members spending at least 2 percent of GDP on defense – ed.], and it’s meaningfully supported across our whole political spectrum. It’s sustainable, and we will increase to 2.5 percent by 2030, by agreement between our political parties.

It’s not just numbers that are important. We are strong supporters of cohesion between the European Union and NATO. We want to have interactive policies. We want to see mutually complementary relations, rather than competition.

But let’s take rhetoric, which is also important. We are now undergoing a stress test of Transatlantic unity. And there are some not-so helpful calls in Europe to discuss a European army, which is meaningless. There is nothing here. That’s an example of something that creates ambiguity, uncertainty, or mistrust in the United States.

And then there are the rumors that the United States might eventually leave NATO. This doesn’t help, either, because then the forces who speak for autonomy in Europe get louder, and say, “You see, they’re discussing this option, so we have to go our own way.” And they don’t want to support each other. This would be extremely detrimental to the fate of liberal democracy in the world. If Euro-Atlantic unity is shattered, it will cause tremendous damage.

But again I say, let’s not judge just by personalities or tweets. Let’s judge by developments on the ground and let’s focus on what we have to do ourselves.

On China, Iran, and North Korea, the European and American positions should match more. The last example was more or less positive. And Venezuela? The Americans made a decision, the Europeans discussed it, and the majority of us decided to support the Interim President. This was exactly the kind of cooperation we would like to see. If that would happen with regard to Iran, it would be good. China, as well.

China is emerging as a global player. This didn’t start yesterday. There’s nothing surprising here. They have huge potential. It’s also not a secret they try to intervene into strategic sectors of the economy. By the way, we cannot neglect Russian and Chinese naval exercises in the Baltic Sea. This had never happened before, until a few years ago.

You’re right that if some player leaves the region, somebody else will return. But I do not think it will be the Europeans, unfortunately. We have to be more active in solving international conflicts and managing crises. We, the European Union, have potential to do more, but we’re not doing it. And this is another problem. So when the Americans are leaving, like in Syria, they should understand that Iran and Russia will take over, and we all know the results. So these are really quite unwelcome developments.

TAI: You said Lithuania is a member of the 2 percent club. When we Americans are not in the room, and you Europeans are talking to those who are not members of the 2 percent club, what is that conversation like?

LL: We have such conversations, but those conversations have deeper roots. It has to do with history. When Western Europe was quite well developed and secure, people had to be convinced that they should spend more on defense. And in countries that have a relatively high GDP, this poses a very big challenge. For Germany or the Netherlands, 2 percent is really big money. I’m not trying to defend their position, but just trying to say that this is not so simple.

Believe me, I am saying to my colleagues that we have to deliver, because otherwise we will undermine trust. We will provide unnecessary arguments for opponents. That’s true. But we are talking about this in context, and also inviting Americans to talk more about output efficiency and not just these sacred numbers. You can spend resources, but it’s more important how you’re spending these resources. You can create autonomous structures or do something nationally with no thought toward collective gain or filling real gaps in capabilities. This is wrong. Output efficiency is important.

And in the same context, pragmatically speaking, you have to respect the taxpayer’s money. People paying taxes want to see results. First of all, it’s not a secret that they need to have health care and education, especially if you’re living in a secure environment like Western Europe. And why should you steal resources from health care to pay for something else whose purpose is not clear? So it takes time to explain to the public that you should also share some responsibility and sacrifice something for the common good.

In the course of these discussions, I often mention Judy Dempsey, who has written about this at Carnegie. Some time ago, when Americans allocated resources for Germany to get back on its feet, it was so the Germans would take responsibility on their own. And that was understandable at the time. Later, this idea disappeared, and the security felt like a given.

It will not come tomorrow, it will not come soon, but this is a gap of understanding that should be filled. And we would be happy to play a role here.

TAI: You’re right that there can be an absurd quality to the debate if we just focus on spending, if everybody is buying different equipment and there isn’t interoperability. Could Lithuania could play more of a leadership role on that issue? At the EU level, how do you ensure there’s some intelligence and coordination in defense purchases?

LL: This is a matter for big dealers, basically. We are not the country that will make a difference here. But I can provide you a relevant story. You probably know that there is a European Defense Agency in the European Union.

I was Defense Minister when we were discussing the name of this new agency. There were two camps at that time. One wanted to call it the European Procurement Agency, the other was for the European Capabilities Agency. We were members of that second camp, the UK and us. We knew we needed capabilities to contribute to and supplement our defense. And some were more focused on procurement preferences that are economic, let us say. As a result of that fight, we established the European Defense Agency. That was a kind of compromise.

But these people are still alive, you know? Those who were discussing and competing with us. And that explains certain aspects of the debate. So we would like to play a role in this debate, and we will make our positions clear, but, unfortunately, those big dealers who have huge resources, who are buying fighters, missiles, and other capabilities, are engaged here too. They should understand that cohesion is more important than national, narrow interests.

TAI: Six months ago, supporters of Donald Trump and his Europe policy would assure people by saying, “There are a lot of Atlanticists in this administration: General McMaster, General Kelly, General Mattis, Wess Mitchell.” Now they’re all gone. How do you interpret that? Is that a cause for concern?

LL: Sure, the world is concerned. But we cannot pre-judge. We don’t know what will happen, who will replace whom, and what kind of continuity there will be in Congress and the Administration. And, frankly, there’s a lot at stake, and I do not believe it’s so easy to change course. I hope. But these last developments you mentioned are really concerning, because I believe it’s a big loss to Transatlantic unity, cohesion, and practical deliverables. Let’s hope it will not be worse, but we will wait and see.

During recent discussions, we’ve sometimes said that there are not so many at home in this Administration. All the acting and temporary officials—this is not a good sign. It would be good to have more clarity here.

TAI: You’ve been Lithuania’s Defense Minister, Ambassador to NATO, and Foreign Minister, and over the years you’ve developed a very good relationship with Angela Merkel. She will leave office soon, and German politics are very fluid. What hopes and concerns do you have about a post-Merkel Germany?

LL: There are concerns. Frankly, it’s a matter of leadership in Europe. We need leaders who are able to lead—not just to respond, to defend, or to clarify when something happens, but to lead. And Chancellor Merkel still is one of a few who are doing this. So this is a big loss.

Who will come next is difficult to say. There will be elections in Germany in 2021, and who knows who these alternative forces will be. And before that there are the elections in the European Parliament, which are coming up soon. Predictions say that there will be less success for traditional forces and that radicals or populists will take over. That’s also a situation of great uncertainty.

This is a crisis of leadership, and when these crises emerge in history, usually somebody steps up. Somebody tries to lead. We desperately need these people. If not, the fate of alliances and liberal democracy will not be a given. When I’m asked if I am confident about the future, well, I have to say that I’m really not. I’m not confident. It has to be fought for, now.

The post Handling the Transatlantic Stress Test: A Conversation with Lithuania’s Foreign Minister appeared first on The American Interest.

The French Connection in Europe’s Elections

French President Emmanuel Macron’s address to the “citizens of Europe” on March 4 launched the campaign for the European parliamentary elections, now scheduled for the end of May. Yet those elections remain overshadowed by events just outside the Continent: namely, Westminster’s uncertain ratification of the separation treaty with the European Union. The Brexit drama has even led some Europeans to imagine that, with a second referendum, Britain could remain after all.

Such an outcome would actually be a tragedy for the Union. Europeans should fear the resentment of millions of Leavers, trapped in an institution they had for two years planned to escape. They should realize, too, that few among the other half of the British electorate would accept anything other than the status quo ante, when Britain was barely in the Union anyway. The United Kingdom, after all, was never in the eurozone, nor party to the open-borders Schengen Agreement; and its contribution to the European budget was generously discounted. When Britain did not obstruct initiatives to increase cooperation, it opted out of sharing the burden of refugees and asylum seekers.

Britons are not the only ones who have, in the past decade, rethought their attachment to Europe, the value of EU membership, and the sacrifices that membership demands. The harshest test came for the Greeks, faced in 2012 with a stark choice between defaulting on their debt and crashing out of the eurozone, or enduring a generation of economic contraction to honor their obligations to European creditors.

Belt-tightening has also been the fate of the Spaniards, Portuguese, and Irish. The Euroskeptic Five Star Movement, voted in by Italians on a platform of public spending, has been forced by Brussels to relent on its profligate ways. The prioritization of European constraints over voters’ preferences feeds sentiments that the Union is anti-democratic, while eurozone membership has become synonymous with Germanic austerity—and with Germany throwing its weight around.

Euroskepticism has taken over the governments of Poland and Hungary. While Poland has no intention of leaving the Union—fear of Russia takes care of that, as does the fact that Poland usefully exports more labor than it imports—its ruling Law and Justice party echoes the pre-Brexit position of the United Kingdom: Yes to Europe, so long as its provisions benefit us. Hungary’s Fidesz, meanwhile, has stepped off the reservation with sovereignist provocations and anti-immigrant tirades that violate core Union values.

Against this backdrop, Macron stands almost alone against the EU malaise. Not a year had passed since the 2016 Brexit referendum when Macron triumphed over a Euroskeptic opponent. In his campaign and subsequent speeches, the young leader laid down grand ambitions for the Union, in particular a common defense. Macron was one of the few European leaders to grasp both the reality and the promise of Brexit. Britain had voted to leave because it finally understood the European Union to be a political project—after opting in the 1970s to join an economic union only. With Britain out, the French President proposed to be the engine that would propel the political union forward.

His plans hinged on buy-in from the Germans, however, which was not to come. The far-Right AfD Party, rising from the fallout of the 2015 refugee crisis, took a bite out of the CDU/CSU majority. Only months into Macron’s tenure, Angela Merkel became a lame duck, yielding a yawning political weakness in the core of the Union.

At least one thing has been going well for Europe during those two years: The European Union has kept a united front in the Brexit negotiations. But with the agreement shipwrecked on the shoals of British politics, all eyes have turned to the drama across the Channel, to the exclusion of Europe’s own elections.

As a rule, European elections inspire indifference even when there are no distractions to account for it. A low turnout would thus not be unusual, but it would help the Euroskeptic parties—including Germany’s AfD, France’s Rassemblement National (the renamed National Front), Italy’s Five Star Movement, and to a lesser degree Spain’s Podemos—achieve a strong showing. However unexciting, European elections remain a test of the ability of mainstream governing parties to rally their base—a crucial test for both France and Germany this time around given the weakness of the ruling order in both countries.

Macron realized the danger, and went on the offensive in his typically lofty rhetorical style. His written address to the “Citizens of Europe” is meticulously crafted, ambitious in its reach, and strategic in its design. In less than 1,600 words, Macron managed to touch on all the hot topics of the day. Brexit, Trump, Putin, Facebook, immigration, xenophobic populism, and the environment are, under his pen, bound together in a constructive narrative about the European project. The health of France’s political economy and Europe are similarly fused, in a symbiosis where progress for one is also the solution to the other.

And France needs solutions. The victory Macron secured in the spring of 2017 was hardly a mandate for change. Once President, engaged in delicate, pro-market reforms, he dodged several bullets until the full-blown revolt of the Yellow Jackets at the end of 2018. In a way, he is the victim of his own success: The collapse of the traditional Gaullist and Socialist parties, and the weakening of the trade unions, have opened a space in which less conventional and well organized opposition can thrive. But his main problem is not institutional: Genuine grievances drove the protesters to the public arena.

The Yellow Jackets started out disorganized, displaying an undefinable blend of spontaneity, violence, and radicalism with hues from Left and Right. Before long, the largely rural protesters seem to have been infiltrated by seasoned stormtroopers of both extremes. No matter the evolving mix, their message is clear as can be: down with the neoliberal, transnational agenda of the European Union, seen to benefit the wealthy and the cosmopolitan while impoverishing the nation. Another theme is expressed in a pithy, rhyming slogan: Macron démission, a command for the President to step down.

And thus the fates of Macron and the European Union are tied. His party, La République en Marche (LRM), now stands on the front lines of the coming European elections—its first real test since winning the French Parliamentary majority in 2017 as a fledgling party. The European elections will show if the center can hold, and whether the Gaullists and Socialists still have life in them. The LRM can thrive against two extremes, but it will struggle in a five-party landscape.

The European campaign also coincides with the conclusion of a period of popular consultation in France, concocted by Macron in December to hollow out the Yellow Jacket movement. Inviting the French to express written grievances on any matter is an exercise with an ominous precedent. Louis XVI fatally had his subjects compose Cahiers de Doléances in the lead-up to the Revolution that would later claim his head.

Macron will need more than words to turn the situation around. Placating public grievances will likely force him into the “more for less” trap—promising higher benefits and lower taxes, in contravention of the fiscal prudence that a good rapport with Germany demands. Internationally, his call for a European Renaissance may demand more from France than visionary declarations of intentions. Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, Merkel’s replacement as the head of the CDU, put the question bluntly by asking for France’s permanent seat at the UN Security Council.

The European Union will still count 27 members after Brexit, but the Franco-German axis remains as central as ever. On January 22, in the historical Carolingian capital of Aachen, Macron and Merkel marked the anniversary of the famous 1963 Élysée Treaty of Friendship between France and Germany, which ended centuries of rivalry and hostility, with a newly minted Treaty of Cooperation and Integration. The ambitions laid down at Aachen are small but significant. If allowed to develop they will tend to progressively erode some of the administrative and cultural boundaries that make the two countries distinct.

The response to the Aachen ceremony was hostile from the extremes and, with the Yellow Jackets and Brexit stealing the limelight, indifferent from the rest. Amid the morass, Macron retook the initiative by proposing a three-pronged vision to the citizens of Europe.

The first part of the vision, aimed squarely at Russia, is to protect European democracy from malicious disinformation. True to form, in the same breath, Macron equates countering cyber attacks by foreign powers with censoring hate speech which, from the perspective of his far-Right adversaries, could be construed as silencing free speech.

For the second project, he aggregates different agendas under the common rubric of border security. Macron first reiterates his central ambition to build a common European defense—the one domain where the UK is invited to participate. He then includes under this rubric tax evasion, environmental dumping, outsourcing and, crucially, immigration—a strategic blend of themes, some designed to please the Left, others catering to the growing number of voters tempted by the nationalist Right.

The third project is based around the loose, feel-good category of “progress.” Here, Macron taps into the fears of a European electorate wary of GMOs and chemicals, of carbon emissions, of the privacy violations of hegemonic Big Tech companies, and of the risks to privacy posed by AI, metadata analytics, and 5G networks. By tying progress on all those issues to the European project, he aims to transform the image of the Union from a pit of neoliberal stasis to a force for progressive change.

A crucial aspect of his progressive agenda is a coordinated European effort against social dumping, with standardized workers’ rights and protections. With this, he loudly slams the door behind the United Kingdom. Common social regulations represent the kind of infringement on sovereignty that Britain abhors, and for Macron to make a push on that front is to take stock of Brexit and write off the possibility of a remain—or a return. But Britain to the side, one wonders if Macron understands the complexity and cost of actually doing what he has proposed. It would require creating countercyclical functionality in the EU economic space, and addressing the rural/urban segmented economies problem in every EU member state. No one yet even knows how to do that.

In any case, EU regulations will affect future trade negotiations between Britain and the European Union. Brexiteers come in many flavors, not all of them xenophobic isolationists. Entrepreneurs in their ranks were hoping to retain free access to the common market, minus labor and environmental regulations, which would have enabled them to outcompete European firms.

That’s how, aside from the sensitive legacy of The Troubles, the border with Northern Ireland became the Trojan Horse of Brexit. It would either be a gateway for EU regulations to impose on the UK (the backstop), or for cheap products to invade Europe from the UK. Brussels fought successfully in the Brexit negotiations to avoid the latter, and any future trade agreement with London is unlikely to be complacent toward regulatory dumping.

Britons have a selective memory of their great history. Their country became a world power at a time when it had famously abandoned mercantilism for free trade, in the 19th century, and from these days linger an association between unfettered commerce and prosperity. They brought this attitude to Europe. For them, the Union is a market, access to which they would regret to lose, but nothing more. They have no appetite for norms and regulations originating from across the Channel.

But Britons did more than trade with the world. The Crown established profitable colonies, from Jamaica to the eastern shores of the United States, which became nations. The East India Company had armies, and went to war with Indian Maharajas and Arab Sultans and Chinese emperors, in part to secure favorable terms of trade, but also to impose its vision of an international order. Certainly, when Britain put an end to the slave trade, it was not by arguing the merits of free enterprise. It happened when the British navy ruled the sea, and felt entitled to board ships that violated the norms it had set for everyone else in the world. One may daresay they acted then a bit like Americans have often felt entitled to act more recently.

It is in relation to norms, to the regulation of the international order, that European construction is so important. The world’s countries are clearly not converging toward liberal democracy. The regression of Turkey, in particular, should alarm Europeans. This is a country that, at the turn of the century, was aligning its regime and institutions on the European model, in support of its application to EU membership. Since then, those plans have been thoroughly jettisoned, and Turkey has become an increasingly crude, corrupt Middle Eastern autocracy.

The aftermath of the Arab Spring has not seen a southward expansion of European values (whatever they may constitute at this point), but a confirmation of divergence, and an affirmation of the influence of alternative global powers. Russia has elbowed its way from Ukraine to Syria, while hacking computer systems throughout Europe and killing people on British soil.

China, meanwhile, has staked a claim to be a future superpower, and is poised to have an outsized influence on global norms in everything from international trade to financial transactions, international copyright protection to internet freedom, the laws of the seas to the laws of airspace and outer space—to say nothing of carbon emissions and global climate change.

Since World War II, the United States has played the pivotal, even hegemonic, role in setting the rules of the international order in ways that were mostly agreeable to Europe. But whether the United States disengages from its international commitments willingly or is no longer able to sustain them, Europe needs unity if it is to have any future say at the table. This is not Confederative idealism, but an argument for unionization and collective bargaining in a turbulent world.

Macron understands that Europe will only decay if it does not keep moving forward, pulled by vast ambitions. A clean Brexit; an orderly rejuvenation of Germany’s CDU under Kramp-Karrenbauer; a stabilization of French politics and a good showing for Europeanists in the forthcoming elections are needed to improve prospects for the Union. A crucial step would be the creation of a Eurozone budget. Optimists envision that this would drive the laggards to join the common currency, and allow for needed investments in infrastructure and a common defense, starting with the European Border and Coast Guard Agency.

Alas, none of these necessary predicates may occur. If they do not, then Macron’s skillful proposal and address to EU citizens will reveal, yet again for those who need the tutoring, that grand and noble ideas require power to bring them into contact with reality. Shakespeare said it well to start his 34th sonnet:

Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day

And make me travel forth without my cloak,

To let base clouds o’ertake me in my way,

Hiding thy brav’ry in their rotten smoke?

The post The French Connection in Europe’s Elections appeared first on The American Interest.

DC Statehood? There’s a Better Way

A pet policy initiative of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats she leads since the midterms is a push for statehood for the District of Columbia. You may have been sideswiped by the news over the past few weeks, but if you’re like most people, you’ve not seen much background or analysis. So, as happens from time to time, I, a native-born Washingtonian, again come to your rescue on points of local puzzlement (as I did recently with this).

Let’s get right to the point: Nancy, we know it’s a partisan ploy. We know it would require a Constitutional Amendment to happen, and so it’s highly unlikely to happen.

We also know that every minute of congressional time this effort consumes is time Congress spends not governing. There is a difference, remember, between politics and governing, although given what’s been going on for such a long time now a person could be forgiven for forgetting the distinction.

Not that the Democrats have been entirely missing in action on the governance front: The House did pass HR. 1, which had some positive qualities, and which in turn explains why Mitch McConnell’s first reaction was to butcher it and nail the bloody carcass to his office wall—in other words, to put politics ahead of governance. So the Democrats’ response with the DC statehood stuff is neither unusual nor entirely without justification. Still…

But let’s get right to the second point: The DC statehood idea is nothing new. In August 1978 Congress submitted the District of Columbia Voting Rights Act to the states for ratification—and any change must be a Constitutional Amendment because Article 1, Section 8 lays down specific definitions of what and where the District is. As it happened then, ratification failed before the deadline, and several Democratic-leaning states were among those that did not ratify. In 2014 Maryland’s two Democratic Senators introduced a similar initiative. It went nowhere.

Knowing a bit about the prior history to all this offers some edifying context. When Washington was chosen as the Federal District in 1790—as a compromise between those wanting it in the north, in Philadelphia or New York, and those wanting it in the south, in Richmond or Charleston—there were only about 11,000 people in what was still a rural area, a small population even by late 18th century standards. So no one paid much attention to the question of political representation.

Skipping right on by the British burning of the city—what there was of it—in 1814, the next significant thing that happened for purposes of our inquiry was the retrocession of the part of District on the Virginia side of the Potomac back to the Old Dominion in 1847. The City of Alexandria was part of that retrocession, and the new county was for a short time called Alexandria County. Then the City of Alexandria separated itself and the rest of the area became Arlington County. Arlington County was pretty bare at the time, save for the Custis-Lee Mansion and estate, which, as everyone knows, is now the site of Arlington National Cemetery.

Why the retrocession? The reasons are actually more relevant than you might suppose. One reason was that most Alexandrians didn’t like being disenfranchised. Another was that they were being discriminated against after Congress specified in 1791 that no Federal buildings were to be erected on the Virginia side of the District. And a third was that Alexandria hosted a major slave market, and as the Abolitionist movement took shape most Alexandrians worried that slavery would be declared illegal in the District.

Anti-slavery Virginians opposed retrocession because it would add two pro-slavery congressional seats to the state congressional delegation and to the statehouse, but the majority of Alexandrians favored it. In 1846, they got their way when President Polk signed the legislation granting it. The Virginia House of Delegates ratified it the next year. The Compromise of 1850 soon outlawed the slave trade in the District (but it did not outlaw slavery there), so the Alexandrians had predicted accurately.

Why is this relevant? Because the issue of disenfranchisement is still the democratic essence of the problem. Those “taxation without representation” DC license plates ain’t just whistling Dixie, so to speak (seeing as how license plates can’t actually whistle Dixie). And speaking of Dixie, race and racial politics are still the nub of the politics here, which bears a history within the history.

The best guess is that Washington today is about 48 percent African American, down from about 71 percent at its height in the mid-to-late 1960s. In 1957, Washington became the first American city with a majority African-American population.

What’s the backstory? African Americans made up an unusually large percentage of the population in Washington even before the Civil War, and most—more than 80 percent in 1860—were free blacks, not slaves. The city had become a popular congregating place for free blacks and “fugitives” from slave states in which manumission had become more common during the previous decade: mainly Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. Then, on April 16, 1862, eight months before the Emancipation Proclamation, slavery was made illegal, which attracted even more African Americans to the city.

As the city’s population grew after the Civil War, the percentage of blacks fell, but then rose sharply as the momentum of the Great Migration out of the south increased. Several incentives drew blacks to Washington: It was closer to family left at home than New York, Chicago, or St. Louis; there was already an established black community, organized largely around vibrant churches and businesses; and thanks to it being the seat of the Federal government, the District was formally desegregated. Much de facto segregation existed anyway for the most part due to semi-formal residential segregation, but before 1913 black and white schoolteachers in Washington received equal pay. Dunbar High School became perhaps the premier black high school in the nation.

What happened in 1913? Woodrow Wilson happened. President Wilson ordered the segregation of all Federal buildings in Washington, an order that ramified through city institutions. Washington remained basically segregated until 1954.

During Wilson’s tenure too, in July 1919, a four-day race riot took place in the city. Whites, including uniformed white soldiers and sailors, some recently returned from World War duty, randomly attacked blacks based on a false rumor about a rape arrest. When police refused to intervene, blacks fought back. Fifteen people died and hundreds were wounded before the White House reacted; but before Federal troops did anything, thunderous rainstorms doused the madness.

The NAACP protested to President Wilson, who replied vaguely to a visiting delegation that segregation was good for both races. From time to time I visit Wilson’s tomb in the Washington Cathedral just to make sure that the messianic-addled bastard is still there.

In the 21st century the Great Migration momentum has begun to reverse itself, with many African Americans moving out of the city, some to suburban Maryland and some back to the south for family and economic reasons. Meanwhile, gentrification has brought more whites and others into the city. The year 2011 was the crossing point when the majority of District residents were no longer African American for the first time in about 55 years.

Despite all these coming and goings, all political observers agree that Washington would be solid blue were it to become a state. The numbers say it all: Since the 2000 presidential election, about 85 percent of the District vote has gone Democratic. Folks: 85 percent is a very big number in electoral politics. And that is, to repeat, the obvious principal reason that Democrats want statehood and Republicans don’t. To understand most of what will go down over this issue in this Congress and possibly the next, this is really all you need to know.

As for the argument that District residents are disenfranchised, this is a partial truth. The representation problem has been half a problem since 1961, when the 23rd Amendment was ratified, giving the District representation in the Electoral College. (The only state rejecting the amendment was Arkansas.) Washington has three electoral votes; every one cast since the 1964 election, with a single exception, has been for the Democratic ticket.

In 1971 came the District Delegate Act, which authorized District residents to elect one non-voting representative to Congress. That delegate can do everything every other Congressman can do—speak on the floor, sit on committees, propose legislation—everything but vote. And to round out the picture, the Home Rule Act of 1973 set up a City Council and a Mayor’s office, thus taking over many of the responsibilities formerly vouchsafed entirely in the Congress.

The net result is that Washington residents have full fingers in the Executive Branch and in local self-government, but only part of a thumb at best in the Legislative Branch. That’s been good enough for most, and the status quo is far more positive today than it was in 1888, when the first proposal to create full political rights for District residents was mooted. Until now, at least since the quickly aborted 2014 effort, the issue has not been near the top of either party’s agenda. So why are the Democrats raising it again now if few people who actually live in the District really care? Duh.

If political representation were really the issue here, as opposed to bald partisan politics wearing a bad toupee, an easy and logical solution is at hand: create a congressional district or two and attach them to the State of Maryland. It is true that when asked about such a solution in recent years, neither Maryland nor District residents have favored it. But then no leaders have bothered to make a specific argument for it either.

Note that it would be possible for the District to remain a Federal zone as per the Constitution, so, as with the 1847 retrocession to Virginia, no amendment would be necessary to make the change. Just as the 1961 law enabled District residents to vote for President without jeopardizing the status of the area, so for purposes of congressional representation DC residents could vote in Maryland for that purpose. It needn’t mean that District residents would become full Maryland citizens, or pay taxes to Maryland, or anything else. It would be an adjustment solely to solve the problem of legislative political disenfranchisement.

Should Washington’s electoral college votes also then be transferred to Maryland? Either choice would be fine with me because, either way, the political implication would be neutral: Maryland has a Republican governor right now, but it votes dependably “blue” most of the time. It currently has eight outrageously gerrymandered congressional districts: seven occupied by Democrats and one by a Republican. It has voted blue in every presidential election since 1992. So if the District were added to Maryland for this limited and specific purpose, Maryland would simply become bluer, which would change nothing that matters.

This is a solution everyone can get behind. It would solve the problem of “taxation without representation” for District residents. It would not disadvantage Maryland residents in any way. It is bereft of net partisan implication. It is the right, pragmatic, intelligent thing for Congress and the Administration to do.

So it obviously doesn’t stand a chance.

The post DC Statehood? There’s a Better Way appeared first on The American Interest.