Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 510

Andrew Jackson’s Lead Widens in GOP Primary

Since he first arrived in the Senate, Sen. Ted Cruz has tried to straddle various wings of the Republican Party—libertarian and law-and-order, pro-immigration and Trump-lite, Jeffersonian and Jacksonian—making sure to leave himself wiggle-room by hedging his statements and declining to align himself too closely with any realistic GOP policy initiatives. But as the primary race intensifies and Cruz’s fortunes start to rise, he is moving quickly to redefine himself as more Jacksonian. The latest, and perhaps clearest, example to date is the Texas Senator’s nearly 180-degree turn on Edward Snowden and his exposure of classified documents. The Weekly Standard notes that the Texas Senator, who once praised Snowden, has changed his tune:

Texas senator Ted Cruz now says Edward Snowden is a “traitor” who should be “tried for treason,” Cruz told the New York Times in a statement his current view on the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked the details of a classified surveillance program.

“It is now clear that Snowden is a traitor, and he should be tried for treason,” he said, according to the Times.That’s a shift from Cruz’s position in 2013 after Snowden went public about the NSA’s program. Asked in June 2013 if Snowden was a traitor or a patriot, Cruz declined to answer, [saying instead]:… “If it is the case that the federal government is seizing millions of personal records about law-abiding citizens, and if it is the case that there are minimal restrictions on accessing or reviewing those records, then I think Mr. Snowden has done a considerable public service by bringing it to light.”

Cruz’s shift partly reflects the ways the world has changed in the last two years—the Iran deal, the rise of ISIS, and terrorist attacks at home and abroad have pushed the GOP’s more passive, Jeffersonian wing into near-irrelevance. (Sen. Rand Paul, one of Edward Snowden’s biggest boosters, won’t even be on the debate stage tonight). It also partly reflects the internal dynamics of the GOP race: Cruz is positioning himself to appeal to voters currently backing Trump, who has dominated with his hyper-Jacksonian of ultra-nationalism, “winning,” and personal toughness, unconstrained by constitutional limits.

To be sure, Cruz has also made sure to differentiate himself from more establishment positions as well, attacking Sen. Rubio for what he says is an excessively interventionist posture abroad. Jacksonians and Jeffersonians share a suspicion of foreign entanglements, but Jacksonians are more willing to deal out overwhelming force when threatened, and more willing to give the state whatever power it needs to find and destroy America’s enemies. In that sense, Cruz’s newfound hostility toward Edward Snowden (along with some of his statements on ISIS, like “carpet bombing them into oblivion”) encapsulates his transition to the party’s Jacksonian wing.Security-first Jacksonians are on the rise in the GOP, and libertarian Jeffersonians are in steep decline. Meanwhile, the Hamiltonian establishment hasn’t figured out a way to align the Hamiltonian agenda with Jacksonian values and interests. That’s one reason immigration is such a potent wedge issue: It divides globally-oriented Hamiltonians and nationalist Jacksonians, even as security issues drive them together. For an establishment candidate to beat out Cruz and Trump for the nomination, he will need to find a way to bridge this deep and growing divide.

Germany Ponders Big Increase in Defense Spending

In a surprise move that is sure to bring smiles to the faces of many Atlanticists across Europe and the United States, German Chancellor Angela Merkel asked the lower house of the country’s parliament to make “an appropriate” addition to the country’s defense budget for the next year. While Merkel did not name a specific number, she is said to have made reference to bridging the gap between what Germany is supposed to spend as a member of NATO and what it in fact does. Handelsblatt reports:

In 2014, the United States spent around 4 percent of GDP, or €560 billion, in defense for NATO, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Germany, by comparison, contributed about 1 percent of spending to defense, or €35 billion.

Both countries are members of NATO.“We must make a reasonable, significant contribution so that others — on the other side of the Atlantic — can be ready to engage,” Ms. Merkel told the committee, according to Bild, the popular German tabloid newspaper.Germany has consistently devoted about half of what NATO has asked of its members. To meet NATO spending levels, Germany would have to commit another €25 billion to defense, experts say.

It remains to be seen whether the German Bundestag will vote to raise spending by anything close to that amount. Nevertheless, Merkel has little domestic incentive to bring up such a dramatic increase unless she really means it; framing the conversation in these terms seems to suggest a genuine conviction that the amount German spends on defense needs to increase dramatically, rather than by the 3.6 percent that had been projected for this year. If Germany were to spend 2 percent of its GDP on defense (it currently spends around one percent), in accord with the NATO target, that would mean a 70 percent increase in the absolute amount the country spends in one year.

As Christian Moelling, senior resident transatlantic fellow for security at The Marshall Fund in Berlin, told Handlesblatt, hitting the NATO target in one year “would be completely unrealistic.” “But in general,” he continued, “it is realistic for Germany to invest more; we have enough money. We can pay for it. Plus the current constellation in government with the Social Democrats and Conservatives in power looks like they are willing to do it.” Presumably, this is precisely the conversation Frau Merkel is trying to frame.If so, kudos to the Obama Administration, for according to German sources, Merkel specifically referenced “pressure from our American partners,” as well as economic growth, as the reason for her request. But it’s also not hard to see the role of the refugee crisis, and President Vladmir Putin’s increased adventurism, in this request.In 2014-5, history came roaring back with a vengeance, and Germany in particular was exposed as unready. Germany has the third largest economy in the world, is technologically advanced, and is surrounded by wealthy allies. And yet it’s struggling, due both to the collapse of a poor, distant country (Syria) and the moves of a second-rate collapsing power (Russia). In both cases, the common problem is a lack of German hard power and the will to use it—neither of which Germany anticipated needing. One thing the Obama Administration’s withdrawal from the Middle East (and its comparative neglect of European affairs) may have done is to teach mainland Europe the hard way why it needs to take defense seriously.But it will be a long, tough road to get back to readiness. As we’ve noted before, European members of NATO treated defense spending as a piggy bank they could raid at will during the financial crisis, collectively shedding the equivalent in manpower of the entire German army in the years that followed 2008. Measured from the end of the Cold War, the drop-off is even more dramatic. While Merkel may not get all of what she asks for, this request does point to the scale of the challenge involved—for Germany and the rest of Europe.

Gas Prices Fall to Six Year Low

Filling up at the gas station is feeling like much less of an onerous chore these days, as a surfeit of crude has helped push oil prices to new lows and, in so doing, has brought down the price of refined petroleum products like gasoline. In a survey of gasoline prices around the country last month, the American Automobile Association (AAA) found the national average price dipped below $2 down to $1.998, a level not seen since late March, 2009. Now the Energy Information Administration (EIA) is confirming what many drivers already know—that gas is a bargain these days—with its own survey data (that relies on different methodology). The EIA reports that the national average gas price fell to $1.996 this week:

…The U.S. average retail regular gasoline price had last approached, but not gone below, the $2.00 mark in early 2015. Falling gasoline prices are a result of falling crude oil prices and the seasonal slowdown in gasoline demand.

Four of the five regions in the United States currently have averages below $2.00/gal, with the exception of the West Coast, where the retail regular gasoline price averaged $2.63/gal on January 11. Gasoline prices on the West Coast tend to be higher than elsewhere in the country because of the region’s relative isolation from other gasoline markets and higher state taxes. Additionally, gasoline supply chains on the West Coast are adjusting to several refinery outages that occurred in 2015, which tightened gasoline supplies and increased prices.During the recent decline in gasoline prices that began this fall, the U.S. Gulf Coast was the first region where prices were below $2.00/gal, which occurred in late October. Average gasoline prices in the Midwest and the Rocky Mountains fell below $2.00/gal in November and December, respectively. The East Coast average gasoline price was $1.999/gal as of January 4, 2016, making it the most recent region with a sub-$2.00/gal gasoline price.

Between the China bubble bursting (weakening global demand for oil) and suppliers both within and without OPEC all pumping like there’s no tomorrow to protect market share, it’s no wonder that the market is oversupplied. Iran is set to unload new supplies in the coming months, too, as it seeks to boost output in the wake of Western sanctions being lifted, so there’s no reason to think $20 oil prices are all that far off.

As a result, the EIA expects gas prices will stay low throughout 2016, dipping down to $1.90 per gallon next month while averaging just $2.03 over the year. Next year should be similarly driver-friendly, as the EIA projects gas prices to average just a bit higher at $2.21 per gallon.All these gas savings mean more money in American drivers’ pockets, and to this point it looks like people aren’t being shy about spending that extra cash, and that increased consumer spending should have knock-on benefits for the economy. So while America’s oil industry reels and the world’s petrostates suck in their fiscal guts to tighten their belts, average Americans are enjoying the fruits of a bearish crude market.

African Exports to China Plummet

China’s economic crisis has devastated commodities exporters across the subcontinent, according to the BBC:

Presenting China’s trade figures for last year, customs spokesman Huang Songping told journalists that African exports to China totalled $67bn (£46.3bn), which was 38% down on the figure for 2014.

BBC Africa Business Report editor Matthew Davies says that as China’s economy heads for what many analysts say will be a hard landing, its need for African oil, metals and minerals has fallen rapidly, taking commodity prices lower.There is also less money coming from China to Africa, with direct investment from China into the continent falling by 40% in the first six months of 2015, he says.

Earlier this week, our own WRM noted in a must-read essay that there are really two China bubbles: the domestic one (which is itself really several bubbles at once) and the global one that was inflated over the past fifteen years by strong and growing Chinese demand. Companies and states around the developing world put a great deal of money and time into assets based on the expectation that China would continue to buy more and more raw materials every year.

Even if China manages to slow its fall, it won’t be as hungry as it used to be which means the billions of dollars of mines and forests and oil fields in Africa and South America and Asia are now of far less certain value. Moreover, the deals for those investments have often been structured, traded on, and insured in Western capitals. Almost everyone is exposed to the Global China Bubble, and markets are panicking because few investors have any clue what this will mean or how it will be stabilized. If China no longer supports robust economic growth in developing countries around the world, who will?

On College Affordability, Obama Swings and Misses

President Obama was right to highlight college affordability at his State of the Union address last night. America’s exploding student loan debt has become a national scourge, helping to hold back consumption and household formation, increasing inequality, and—in the long-run—causing wider trouble as borrowers start to default at higher rates. But his proposed solutions fell short of the mark:

And we have to make college affordable for every American. Because no hardworking student should be stuck in the red. We’ve already reduced student loan payments to ten percent of a borrower’s income. Now, we’ve actually got to cut the cost of college. Providing two years of community college at no cost for every responsible student is one of the best ways to do that, and I’m going to keep fighting to get that started this year.

The first of Obama’s proposed policy responses—extending and deepening student loan subsidies—is likely to make the problem worse in the long-run. One recent study found that federal loans account for almost all of the increase in college tuition over the last generation. As our friend Glenn Reynolds likes to say, “when you subsidize something, the cost goes up.” This is as true of higher education as it is of any other service. This doesn’t mean that the government should get out of the student loan business all at once, but it does mean that, if serious cost reduction is your long-term goal, extending subsidies is not a sustainable strategy.

The President’s second proposed policy, publicly funded community college, is also not a wise allocation of resources. As we’ve noted before, just one in four people who enroll in community college today will have a degree in the next five years. Many enrollees are there for remedial high school coursework. We are not optimistic about pumping more money into an inefficient system that already allows so many students to fall through the cracks.

A better approach would combine tighter criteria for student loan subsidies with regulatory changes that would enable a more dynamic higher education system. A study commissioned by Vanderbilt University found that federal regulatory burdens, which have grown and grown in the last decades, cost American universities around $27 billion per year. Moreover, the federal monopoly on higher education accreditation stifles competition, preventing new and alternative forms of education delivery from getting traction. To his credit, the President has taken steps to support vocational education, but the government could still do more to make room for alternatives to the four-year brick-and-mortar college, like online education.

In higher education as in healthcare, the answer is to be smarter, not merely spend more.

First US Crude Exports in 40 Years Cross the Atlantic

After Congress attached a resolution ending the 40-year ban on crude oil exports to a budget omnibus on December 18th, it took less than two weeks for the first tanker to be loaded with crude pumped from Texas and sent on its way to Germany. Shortly thereafter a second tanker departed Houston, bound for Marseille. The WSJ reports:

As with most new markets, the flow of American oil abroad is expected to start with a trickle and then steadily rise. The current price of foreign crude isn’t much higher than what a barrel of U.S. oil can fetch, making a tanker ride across an ocean look expensive to many buyers, experts said.

Oil pumped in producing countries from Norway to Nigeria is similar to the crude flowing out of Texas, but those countries are closer to Europe and Asia, making their shipments more attractive to buyers there for now, according to an analysis by RBN. But a massive expansion of the Panama Canal, scheduled to be complete later this decade, will allow much larger ships to pass through. That has the potential to open up new trade routes between the Gulf of Mexico and Asia.

One of the key reasons that boosters of lifting the oil ban cited for their position in recent years was the spread in pricing between West Texas Intermediate (America’s benchmark oil price) and Brent crude (Europe’s benchmark). In 2011, WTI was at one point more than $25 cheaper per barrel than Brent, and until last year, it was trading consistently at least $5—and often $10—below Brent. That discount hurts American oil producers, and is felt especially keenly by shale companies whose operations are relatively expensive. In the context of today’s bearish markets, even a spread of a few dollars can mean the difference between staying profitable or going under.

But that discount has evaporated recently, and looking at the latest prices today, we see that WTI is actually trading at a 30 cent premium to Brent. In other words, the gap that crude exports were meant to eliminate has already been closed. There will still be plenty of buyers keen on snatching up light, sweet American crude, but just as has been the case with the first shipments of U.S. LNG exports departing Louisiana this week, our oil is being unloaded on a world positively swimming in hydrocarbons.

Was Podemos Funded by Iran?

Spanish police are looking into a claim that the leftwing populist party Podemos received €5 million from Iran in the run-up to this fall’s elections. The Local.es reports:

According to a report in the Spanish online newspaper El Confidencial, Podemos is alleged to have received some €5 million ($5.4 million) from media companies administered in Spain by Iranian regime-linked businessman and academic Mahmoud Alizadeh Azimi.

El Confidencial alleged that the companies concerned inflated sums paid to firms linked to Podemos for broadcasting services. And that the cash was channelled to the organization from Iran through third countries including Dubai and Malaysia.

Nothing has been proven. Yet, were this to be so, it would not be entirely out of character: A WSJ profile has shown that Podemos has deep albeit non-financial links to the Venezuelan regime. Furthermore, European radicals and leftists in general increasingly look toward anti-U.S. nations for leadership. (This is in some ways a weak echo of how Western European communist parties would look to the U.S.S.R.) Tom Gallagher has written recently in these pages about the Scottish National Party’s recent embrace of Iran, while ties between populist parties on both the far-Left and far-Right to Vladmir Putin are well-documented.

So, on the one hand, an outright gift of money on this scale from Iran to a Western political party would be something new; on the other, it would make sense given current, troubling trends. This is definitely something American officials need to keep an eye on. Europe is far from out of the woods, and it’s a realistic possibility that before the euro, refugee, and economic crises are resolved, somewhere, a third party will win. And if or when a party like Podemos sits in control of a NATO or EU country, we need to know about what ties like these may exist—and how deep they go.

The Long Road to Harvard

As reported in the New York Times on December 29, 2015, Vonette Zachary Bright, an important Evangelical leader, has died at age 89. She was born in 1926, the daughter of a farmer in Cowetah, Oklahoma. She received a bachelor’s degree in home economics from Texas Woman’s University, and went on to a master’s degree in education from the University of Southern California (definitely a step up). Subsequently she wrote a dozen books. It strikes me that she was born one year after the so-called “monkey trial” in Dayton, Tennessee, when a schoolteacher was tried for teaching evolution in defiance of state law. The trial, written up by H.L. Mencken, turned into a historic battle about the veracity of the Bible between Clarence Darrow, the famous defense attorney, and William Jennings Bryan, an equally famous Evangelical politician, who spoke on behalf of the prosecution. Bryan’s public humiliation in this debate was a turning point in the history of American Evangelicals, who retreated for several decades into a subculture despised by the cultural elite. Vonette Bright’s life span saw not just one but several changes in that turbulent history. This invites reflection.

In 1951 she and her husband William R. Bright (whom she had known since grade school) founded Campus Crusade for Christ, originally a student ministry at the University of California, Los Angeles. Bill Bright, as he was generally known, died in 2003. He graduated in economics from Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. (Neither Bright could be accused of having been shaped by elite academia.) The organization they founded has now grown into a huge international organization, probably the largest in the Evangelical world. With headquarters in Orlando, Florida, it now claims 25,000 full time staff and 300,000 volunteers in 175 countries. No longer limited to campus ministry, it now covers a much broader spectrum of activities. Because of this it has now changed its name to just Cru (a not very happy choice, I would say, but the old name is still used). In 1966 the Brights founded Athletes in Action, thus carrying on a venerable tradition of “muscular Christianity”, which long ago also gave birth to the YMCA. [I think it goes back to the British public school whose pedagogical maxim was “make them so exhausted that they forget about sex”—not a very successful strategy, it seems.]Since 1976 Campus Crusade has conducted a “family life program”—with conferences, small groups and individual marriage counseling, advocating what in those circles is usually called “the traditional family” (which historically is actually the bourgeois family, a tradition about as old as the steam engine). It is fair to see this as a campaign against all the consequences of the sexual revolution that began not long before the “family life program”. The latter has hardly been a great success, except in the deeper recesses of the Evangelical subculture. [There you can find such scintillating phenomena as “virgin clubs”—young women making a vow to remain virgins until marriage, wearing a ring with an inscription to that effect, and attending large annual conferences to “renew their vows”—accompanied by their fathers, who might see this as practice for “giving away” their daughters to the putative deflowerers.]Campus Crusade’s most ambitious initiative has been the Jesus Film Project, launched in 1979. The Brights wanted to produce a film that would be “Biblically correct” yet have all the technical sophistication of a top Hollywood production. It is based on the text of the Gospel of Luke. Wealthy donors initially supported the project to the tune of about six million dollars. It has been a vast undertaking, not least linguistically: The film has been dubbed in over one thousand languages. So even illiterate viewers can hear Jesus speaking in Hindi, or Swaheli, or Quecha. A large screen has been developed on which the film can be seen from both sides simultaneously, for large gatherings of viewers. It is claimed that some 200 million people have seen the film. The aim of the project is that before long every person on earth will have had the opportunity to see the film and thus have the option to make a decision for Jesus (some Evangelicals believe that this will hasten the Second Coming). After each big showing staff go around and ask who might be interested in learning more about Jesus; those who say yes are asked for their contact information; they are later visited by local pastors or church workers. Some years ago I had the occasion to ask someone from Campus Crusade whether this procedure is not resented in some places. Yes, they replied, and spreading the Gospel has often been dangerous and sometimes may lead to martyrdom.Revivalism has of course been an important feature of Evangelical Protestantism in America, ever since the First Great Awakening in the 18th century, followed by the flowering of Methodism and innumerable local revivalists, and other large movements of similar intensity. The period in which Campus Crusade first flourished, 1950s and 1960s, has been called by some a Fourth Great Awakening. During this last period there were other movements that began on college campuses, notably the Intervarsity Christian Fellowhip, begun in 1941, operating today on 649 campuses in the US and some abroad, but it cannot compare with the size of Campus Crusade.Probably most important during this period has been the meteoric rise of Billy Graham, who began his “crusades” in 1947 and, though (now in his nineties) he has turned over a highly organized enterprise to his son Frank Graham, who has continued to be a religious celebrity. Billy Graham is liked and admired by people who do not share his beliefs. In some ways he resembles the Dalai Lama, though his spirituality is more noisy (no Buddhist tranquility here!). While rarely making political statements, he has been cultivated by presidents beginning with Dwight Eisenhower (who made the famous statement of his profound respect for faith, “I don’t care what it is”).I would venture to say that the core features of the Evangelical revival have persisted in all these manifestations: a constant appeal to Biblical authority, an urgent appeal to repent before it is too late, and then the “call to come to the altar”, be converted in a highly emotional way, and enter into a “personal relationship with Jesus”. There are of course different variants, but this is the “deep structure” of a very distinctive type of religion, whether in one of Billy Graham’s rallies of many thousands in a football stadium, or in the first revival I ever attended, in a humble Evangelical church in Springfield, Ohio. [I went out of curiosity with my then Finnish girlfriend. She became very tense as the preacher’s helpers fanned out to invite people to come to the altar. As one of them leaned over and asked “sister, are you saved?” she replied in her strong accent “I am a member of the Church of Finland”. A wonderful clash between two very different versions of the Christian religion!]Campus Crusade for Christ started in 1951. What has happened to American Evangelicanism since then? Around that date it had just begun to rouse itself from the depressed marginality into which it had retreated from the debacle in Dayton, Tennessee. An era of publicity-wise mass evangelism, of which Billy Graham was the shining exemplar, had begun. The combination of Evangelical piety and “traditional values” was a good fit with the robust patriotism of the Cold War. Yet Evangelicals were still wary of plunging confidently into the political arena (probably their last foray was with the Temperance movement that culminated in Prohibition, a Pyrrhic victory if ever there was one!). For a while they pinned hope on Jimmy Carter, the peanut farmer from Georgia, one of their own. But although he taught Sunday school every week, his presidency (1977-1981) was a disappointment. Evangelicals were most upset by the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the 1970s, and the feminist and gay movements that were rising in tandem. So there was reason to hope when Carter convoked the White House Conference on the Family. But the liberationist caucus that had already been on the ascendancy in the Democratic Party pressured the administration to change the topic of the conference from “the family” to “families”. Carter collapsed before this aggression as readily as he did before the Islamist students occupying the U.S. embassy in Tehran (he did send an under-equipped rescue team that failed to get there). An irate group of conservative delegates (many of them Evangelicals) walked out of the conference in protest. That was the end of what one admirer of the administration had called “the end of the secular Enlightenment”.The administration of Ronald Reagan, which followed immediately, clearly heralded a change in the political climate. Jerry Falwell, a militantly Evangelical Baptist preacher, had already founded the Moral Majority in 1979; ideologically similar groups followed. The so-called New Christian Right burst on the political scene and was poised to become an important constituency for the Republican Party. The religious difference between the two parties, geographically expressed in the ideological difference between Oklahoma and Harvard Yard, persists as an important aspects of U.S. politics. It was perfectly caught in Barack Obama’s (presumably unguarded) characterization of his political opponents as people clinging to their religion and their guns. What also happened during the Reagan administration was the rather uneasy political alliance between Christian conservatives (Evangelical and Catholic) and the heavily Jewish intellectuals of the neoconservative movement. This was definitely not a marriage made in heaven, but it worked for a while politically. (The unease in the relationship was mitigated by the fact that Evangelicals, because of their understanding of the Old Testament, are strongly pro-Israel.)Politics can change quite quickly. Cultural changes are usually slower and may not be noticed for a while. What was been happening more gradually than American politics was the effect of social mobility on the Evangelical community. The cultural association of Evangelicals with Tobacco Road was becoming less plausible as Evangelicals grew richer and more educated. In 1994 the historian Mark Noll, who is Evangelical himself, published The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, which castigates his coreligionists for being anti-intellectual; ironically things were changing by then. Evangelicals are acquiring an intelligentsia of their own. There is now a network of Evangelical centers—universities, think tanks, publications. Significant academic centers are Baylor University, Calvin College, Gordon College, Wheaton College, and Fuller Theological Seminary. These institutions have faculty members with degrees from excellent universities in the US and abroad. The students, insofar as I have encountered them, are of two distinct lots: some are as good as any in elite universities, others come from institutions that few have ever heard about, but are bright and eager to prove how good they can be.There is an interesting fact to consider here: Faculty selection in elite institutions is biased in terms of the ideological prejudices in the selection process, with thoughts such as these in the minds of those on hiring committees: “we may have enough women applicants to satisfy federal diversity requirements, and (though we are not really allowed to ask) it seems that this candidate is a woman, but is she likely to be acceptable (that means ideologically acceptable) to the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies?” Such questions are somewhat less likely to be raised in the case of student applicants, who after all are by definition still available for correct indoctrination (though of course there are still the legal or not so legal quotas for those labelled “federally protected groups”). In the top category of this new Evangelical intelligentsia there are scholars with impeccable credentials who, if they so choose, could just as well be employed by non-Evangelical elite universities. Among them are the aforementioned historian Mark Noll (who moved from Wheaton College to Notre Dame) and the philosopher Alvin Platinga (who moved from Calvin College, also to Notre Dame).This is a new phenomenon. It is comparable to the movement of Jews, especially after World War II, into academic institutions (not to mention private clubs and classy neighborhoods) from which they were previously excluded. “Fundamentalism”, a category that in the progressive lexicon of elite secular culture includes both Evangelicals and conservative Catholics, is still (uneasily) acceptable in faculty clubs. Anti-Semitism is, still, considered taboo, unless one wants to apply the term (sometimes fairly, sometimes not) to the often passionate anti-Israel sentiments prevalent in progressive academia. Where is this going? In his book The New Evangelicals (1987) the sociologist James Davison Hunter anticipated that younger and better-educated Evangelicals would come to resemble the more secularized mainline Protestants. This has not quite come to pass. To be sure, some of the more robustly anti-modern beliefs of many Evangelical are difficult to hold onto if one has acquired a modicum of tertiary education—like the belief in the “inerrancy” of Scripture even in the account of creation (the beautifully named “young earth theory” aka “creationism”), or in the surviving rigid moral codes (relevant joke: Why are Southern Baptists against extra-marital sex? Because it might lead to dancing!). But I don’t see that the core beliefs of Evangelical Protestantism, as outlined before in my description of revivalism, have significantly diminished (somewhat mellowed perhaps, emphasizing the promise of heaven over the threat of hell). Evangelicals have not moved in the direction of Unitarians (another relevant joke: What happens when you cross a Unitarian with a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan? You get someone who burns a question on your front lawn!). Compared to the theologically liberal, they are remarkably feisty.The Veritas Forum was founded in 1986, a very interesting case of the new Evangelical intelligentsia. Its purpose is defined as the open discussion in academic settings of “the relevance of Jesus Christ to all of life”—the emphasis is on discussion, not preaching. Christian perspectives are of course introduced, but always in conversation with critics of Christianity or religiously neutral experts in various fields. The program began at Harvard; its headquarters is still in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As far as I know, the organization is well-funded. Its young and very well educated staff conducts programs in fifty institutions, mostly in the U.S., some in Europe. The intellectual level is consistently high. The organization reminds me a bit of Opus Dei, the conservative Catholic order whose avowed aim is to infiltrate elite institutions, including universities, with Catholic ideas and values. The Veritas Forum does this with a measure of chutzpah symbolized by its name—which of course simply means truth in Latin, the Christian truth claims with which the organization unabashedly identifies—but which so happens is also on the logo of Harvard University. (It is an old military custom to display captured enemy banners in victory parades!)The Veritas modus operandi is twofold: big public events, usually with well-known individuals, and also (usually before and/or after the public event) small-group discussions of the public topics, often at the Harvard Faculty Club. I had had contacts with the group before, but in October 2015 I was invited to have a public event about religious pluralism with Ross Douthat, a conservative Catholic and (nevertheless) a regular columnist of the New York Times. The event was intelligently planned and very well attended. The Venue, Harvard Memorial Church, was appropriate in view of the Forum’s stated purpose. For one, it is ur-Harvard: Located in the center of the campus, the present building was built in 1932, but its architectural predecessors conducted daily morning prayers and Sunday services ever since 1636. I knew its last senior minister who died in 2011—Peter Gomes, a Baptist, whose father came from the Cape Verde Islands and whose mother was African-American. He was an erudite man who refused to be intellectually imprisoned in any narrow category. He was a theologically conservative Evangelical, a registered Republican, and openly gay. This particular combination is not exactly typically Harvard. All the same, he was generally well-liked—he was open-minded, witty and an eloquent preacher. (In all those respects, I would say, rather different from Josemaria Escriva, the founder of Opus Dei!)

What Do the Normativists Stand For?

The events of 2014–15 dispelled many of the illusions that arose in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia’s return to the global arena as a state demanding the right to interpret the rules of the game (or to undermine them) ruined the post-Cold War hopes that we were beginning a benevolent new chapter in history. The international crisis provoked by Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the Russo-Ukrainian war, and soon Kremlin’s Syria foray, also forced the world to confront an unpleasant truth: international institutions are fragile; the liberal democracies are dysfunctional; and the illiberal world, meanwhile, is racing to fill the void.

It seems like an apt time to think about what happened, to ponder why Russia, much as it did in 1917, has once again punctured the world’s complacency, and to understand why the world appears to have no answer to the Russian system of personalized power, which is playing out its desperate struggle for survival in a global arena.The process of understanding new and confusing realities is inevitably shot through with failures and epiphanies. Failures in this task often take the form of futile efforts to defend illusions, to preserve worn out stereotypes. This kind of intellectual paralysis is precisely what has happened within the Western expert and decision-making community; it has clearly misjudged Russia and its trajectory—at enormous cost. Russian experts, especially in foreign policy, aren’t doing much better (mainly due to their conformism, or to lack of courage).Our inability to understand Russia’s trajectory and its shift toward the anti-Western model in many ways proceeds from the normative disorientation (and, consequently, the lack of objective criteria for analysis) that prevailed both in Russia and in the West after the end of the Cold War. However, this fact alone does not absolve us, the experts, from taking comfort in this disorientation.Let’s see where we erred in our expert assessments of Russia’s development. What qualities did we underestimate? What signs did we misinterpret? Only by understanding our misconceptions can we formulate an adequate response to the challenge posed to the world by Russia. The issue today isn’t even past mistakes; the major problem now is the experts’ persistent refusal to acknowledge their errors, as well as their efforts to crystallize a new mythology.Part 1: The Normativists: What Do They Stand For?Today, the expert community both in the West and Russia is retracing the steps that Sovietologists made in the 1980s, when they turned out to be completely unprepared for the disintegration of the global socialist system, revolutions in Eastern Europe, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The 1989—1991 events spelled disaster for political science and the politicians who acted on advice from Sovietologists. As political science theorist Adam Przeworski wrote “the ‘Autumn of the People’ was a dismal failure of political science. Any retrospective explanation of the fall of communism must not only account for the historical developments but also identify the theoretical assumptions that prevented us from anticipating these developments.”1In their Anticipations of the Failure of Communism, American political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset and Hungarian sociologist Gyorgy Bence analyzing why political scientists failed to predict the end of Communism noted that “the scholars sought to explain how the system worked. They took the fact of the USSR’s long-term existence for granted. Thus, they looked for institutions and values that stabilized the polity and society.” Meanwhile, they needed “to emphasize dysfunctional aspects, structures, and behaviors, which might cause a crisis.”2The expert community learned nothing from the Sovietologists’ failure. Those who for years proffered flawed analyses—and thus misleading (albeit unwittingly) politicians and the public–demonstrated their incompetence yet again in analyzing Russian processes and predicting Russia’s new moves.Let’s see how Russia experts explain Russian political realities. Despite the differences in their approaches, Russia experts fall into two categories: the “normativists” and the “pragmatists.” The normativists are in favor of a values-based approach to both internal political developments and foreign policy; they also believe in international laws and treaties, rather than the balance of forces and interests, as the basis for international relations. Moreover, the normativists think that in many respects Russia uses its foreign policy as an instrument for survival of the Russian personalized power system.For their part, the pragmatists don’t care about domestic policy all that much, looking at it as independent from external developments. They believe in the primacy of interests in foreign policy and pay less attention or no attention at all to values; they consider the balance of powers to be the basis for international relations.Let’s take a look at the normativists, the camp to which I belong. Did we rise to the post-Cold War challenge? Let’s face it: we did not!We, the normativists, have always been critical of the Russian System, and we turned out to be right about its vector of development. Today we can say: didn’t we warn you that Russia was moving to system of governance that would be more repressive and hostile to the West—one which is bound to lead to its external aggressiveness? But there’s no reason for us, the normativists, to be happy about the accuracy of this prediction. After all, we were unable to present a coherent analysis of the decay of personalized power and its implications. Finally, while we were critical of Western acquiescence to the Russian system, we failed to suggest to the West an alternative foreign policy. Our lamentations and criticism were self-serving and had no serious political implications.What were the reasons for the normativists’ weakness? Just like the pragmatists, most normativists were disoriented by the Soviet collapse. Many of us began to believe that Yeltsin’s Russia was embarking on a democratic transition. Later on this approach prevented normativists from finally recognizing Russia’s authoritarian evolution.De-ideologization, which has triumphed among experts and politicians after the fall of Communism, was an even more important factor. Ideology and values no longer mattered. Political demands also played a role here. Acting on the assumption that Russia would be integrated into Europe, Western leaders began to demand the creation of models premised on cooperation with Russia. To a significant extent, business has begun to shape the nature of the dialogue between Russia and the liberal democracies—and business cannot abide values-based discussions.The normativists have faced a number of methodological problems too. One of the problems was their inability to adopt a dual-track approach incorporating both interests and values. The normativists also hoped that if Russia began to imitate norms and was admitted to Western institutions (the Council of Europe and the G-8), it would eventually adopt these norms in earnest. Besides, the normativists concentrated on democracy promotion in Russia, which was frequently reduced to cooperation between Western institutions and an increasingly authoritarian Russian leadership, as well as Western funding for the mechanisms of Russia’s imitation democracy (a fact the normativists were frequently embarrassed to admit).3 The normativists also failed to take note of another development: the Russian System created a mechanism to lobby for its interests in the West, thus undermining Western liberal principles from within. In other words, while the normativists were trying to teach Russian society democracy, they missed the fact that the Western world had become a safe space for Russian authoritarianism. The normativists were also dealt a blow by the war in Iraq, in the course of which they became associated with a policy of regime change. This complex of reasons explains the normativists’ failure to provide expert support for Western foreign policy. In fact, they are still perceived as human rights defenders, and their activities are described as civil rights advocacy. In Russia, the normativists have never had any impact on foreign policy debate, let alone foreign policy itself.

1Seymour Martin Lipset and Gyorgy Bence, “Anticipations of the Failure of Communism,” Theory and Society (April 1994).

2Lipset and Bence, “Anticipations of the Failure of Communism.”3See: Lilia Shevtsova, Lonely Power (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2010).

Solar Stocks Plunge Alongside Oil Prices

After a downright dismal 2015 for producers, oil prices are finding new lows this year over fears about a Chinese economic slowdown and a global glut of crude. And, as Reuters reports, solar stocks have fallen right along with oil prices over the past two weeks:

The [MAC Global Solar Energy Stock index] has dropped 16 percent so far in January, due in no small part to oil’s 20 percent slide so far this year. Oil briefly fell below $30 a barrel on Tuesday for the first time in 12 years, [O/R] and the solar index tumbled 2.75 percent [. . .]

“They are not substitutes,” Raymond James research associate Angelica Jarvenpaa said of crude oil and solar energy. “However there is probably an impact on market psychology.” Some investment funds, Jarvenpaa said, have sold off their energy holdings altogether as the oil market carnage has intensified and caused financial pain to oil producers across the world. Solar and renewables, as energy stocks, are often dumped along with other energy shares even though solar installations are expected to log a 30 percent increase for 2015 and the cost of solar has come down so much that it remains cost competitive with traditional energy sources in many places.

Renewables don’t directly compete with fossil fuels. If they did, we would have hardly any wind or solar farms. Those green energy sources simply can’t beat their dirtier cousins on price, and so they survive on the grace of heavy government subsidies, not consumer demand. Therefore, the reason why solar stocks have plunged alongside oil prices is not because lower prices help oil beat out renewables in the marketplace.

But just because renewables might be insulated from market forces by government support doesn’t mean falling oil prices can’t still pose a threat. As we’ve noted before, cheap oil can change the political calculus underpinning these subsidies if policymakers are no longer willing to pay what amounts to increasing premiums for renewables.Subsidizing current generation renewables has never made much sense, but it’s looking downright foolish now as natural gas and oil prices plummet in a world swimming in hydrocarbons. This kind of government support often isn’t sustainable (just look at the mess in which Germany has found itself), but it also carries with it an opportunity cost: The hundreds of millions of dollars spent propping up today’s relatively inefficient solar panels and wind turbines could be better spent on the research and development of technologies that might one day be a cheaper option than fossil fuels. That’s the path towards a greener global energy mix, and the sooner global greens wake up to that reality, the better off the planet will be.