Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 52

The Solution to Capitalist Inequality: Radical Markets

Some of our current economic policy debates can be likened to the (largely apocryphal) charge of Polish cavalry against Nazi tanks: Seeking to shape a world of rapid technological, economic, and social change, political leaders are obstinately applying recipes that are outdated and bound to be ineffective.

This failure of imagination afflicts the entire political spectrum, in Europe as in the United States. Retreating from the globalized world into cocoons of sovereign nation-states, as much of the populist Right wants to do, is simply retrograde. But equally tired are the mantras of the technocratic center, several of which were on full display in Davos last month. And, for all their social media panache, the rising generation of left-wing firebrands, exemplified by congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), suffers from much the same problem: not just playing fast and loose with the facts (of which AOC is hardly the worst offender), but also offering policies that are past their sell-by date—no matter how effective they are rhetorically or how much they move the Overton Window.

In reality, imposing steep marginal tax rates on top income brackets would not hit oligarchs and billionaires very much (and could in fact help entrench already existing wealth disparities). My AEI colleague Aparna Mathur has estimated that under plausible assumptions about how the wealthy would react, a 70 percent rate imposed on annual incomes above $10 million would generate a measly $5.4 billion in additional tax revenue. The rich do not simply receive a steady stream of income in their bank accounts. Rather, they hold portfolios of assets that can be structured to minimize the resulting tax liability.

The problems that the Left seeks to address are real. The interplay of the new economic environment and the outdated rules of the economic game has entrenched incumbents, denied economic opportunity to many, and keeps the economy from realizing its full potential. But those cannot be effectively addressed by tweaks to the tax code or by bringing back Glass-Steagall.

In one sense, then, the problem with the radical Left is that it is not radical enough. But if the movement is serious about trying to bring new and imaginative thinking into the public conversation, its representatives might consider giving a careful read to Eric Posner’s and Glen Weyl’s recent book, Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society. The authors, a well-known legal scholar and a maverick economist at Microsoft, share the Left’s discontent with crony capitalism, capture, and inequality. Yet, unlike the left, they offer a set of radical policy proposals that are counterintuitive, grounded in solid social science, and fly in the face of both right-wing and left-wing orthodoxies.

Consider one source of systemic injustice that has haunted economists since time immemorial: the existence of rents from immobile, fixed resources—traditionally land. A landowner who happens to own a plot adjacent to a new development may have done nothing to improve his land, yet they will see their wealth rise as a result of other people’s efforts. It only seems fair (and economically efficient) to heavily tax such gains insofar as they are not result of owner’s conscious decisions. Already in the 19th century, thinkers including Henry George and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon sought to tax rents from unimproved land.

Today, business projects are often forestalled for similar reasons, with property owners (or patent trolls, for that matter) seeking to extract as much revenue as possible for themselves. Worse yet, property owners may lobby for policies that will keep property prices high even when it means artificially restricting the supply of housing, usually to the detriment of the working poor and middle classes.

Posner and Weyl claim that this twofold problem of unfairness and stasis can be tackled through a mechanism inspired by modern auction theory, pioneered by the late Nobel Prize-winning economist William Vickrey: A common ownership self-assessed tax (COST) could be imposed on some fixed assets such as land and real estate, but also on radio frequencies, patents, and internet domain names. COST would be different from George and Proudhon’s idea insofar as it is not just a tax. The system would require each owner of assets to declare their monetary value—a necessarily subjective valuation—as the taxable base. But here comes the twist: The system would also enable anyone to purchase the asset in question at the declared price.

Because owners would be taxed at some percentage of the declared value, they would no longer have the incentive to inflate the self-declared value of their assets, as patent trolls or property owners in the Bay Area do, creating hold-out problems. In fact, it can be demonstrated formally that COST would incentivize owners to reveal the true value of their assets, much as certain kinds of auctions do. There would, of course, be plenty of ways for the wealthy to avoid being taxed—mostly by sticking to mobile forms of capital not subject to COST. But even the wealthy have to live somewhere. Given the amount of investment, some of it speculative, into real estate in cities such as London, New York, and Miami, including by oligarchs from authoritarian regimes, there appears to be a lot of low-hanging fruit ripe for the plucking by fiscal authorities.

More importantly, unlike other forms of taxation, COST would also help move resources to their most valued uses, resulting in a culture where constant churn, instead of holding on to assets indefinitely, would be the norm. Finally, it would provide a significant mechanism for redistribution, as the tax would be levied both on assets and related liabilities (resulting thus in a subsidy for homeowners whose property has suddenly fallen in value).

Posner and Weyl also take a hard look at antitrust law—a subject of considerable neglect among policymakers. The problem they identify is the rise of institutional investors—the likes of Vanguard, Black Rock, State Street, and Fidelity—as the most significant groups of shareholders across the economy. Their growth started in the 1970s, driven by the rising popularity of index funds, and leveled off in the late 2000s at around 26 percent of the entire stock market’s valuation.

By their nature, index funds are diversified across firms and sectors. Whether it is important banks, airlines, or manufacturing businesses, institutional investors are frequently the single largest shareholders in such firms. This means that firms are no longer owned fully independently and their managers are incentivized to engage in tacit collusion, driving up prices, lowering wages, lobbying more, and innovating less. That creates monopoly profits that accrue to those holding disproportionate amounts of capital—especially to households in top brackets of income distribution.

Posner’s and Weyl’s solution is relatively straightforward: update the existing legislation and enforcement to prevent institutional investors from acquiring large market shares. True, such restrictions would reduce the degree of diversification available to investors but those costs would be tiny. Holding as few as 50 different stocks can generate as much as 90 percent of the total benefits of diversification across the entire market. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that a more stringent antitrust enforcement would not only increase the efficiency of oligopolistic industries but also transfer around 2 percent of national income from capital owners to the wider public.

There is more, including a proposal for a “data labor movement” that would push—perhaps through a global “strike”—digital giants to compensate users for the valuable data which they provide to such platforms for free. With current technology, there is no reason why effective payment schemes could not be set up to give back to users some of the economic surplus that they create. Posner and Weyl discuss immigration too, as well as the idea of “quadratic voting”, which would enable voters and other decision-makers to assign weights to their votes, according to the salience of issues at stake.

Although based in rigorous social science, not all of their proposals are equally novel or compelling. Furthermore, the authors themselves recognize that the complexities of the social world tend to get ahead of even the best thought-out theories. As a result, the radical nature of their proposals needs to be balanced by moderation and incrementalism in implementing them. Local experiments, rather than irreversible federal schemes, are the way to go. But whatever the results, even if Radical Markets inspires just a handful of people— Right, Left, and center— to step out of their ideological and tribal ghettos, Posner and Weyl will have rendered a hugely valuable service to public debate in the United States and beyond.

The post The Solution to Capitalist Inequality: Radical Markets appeared first on The American Interest.

Getting Off the Sidelines

For many countries, victory in world sporting events is not just a matter of national pride and individual achievement, but also a means to cultivate and project power on the domestic and international stage. Although this is not a new phenomenon—recall Hitler’s use of the 1936 Olympics—today it has become more sophisticated and subtle and includes troubling new methods, avenues, and surrogates. Of these, doping fraud—the systematic application of doping through performance-enhancing drugs and related corrupt activities to defraud athletes of their rightful glory and winnings—has become especially important.

The United States is unique in its commercially oriented, highly decentralized, and largely privatized national sport governance structure. Unlike other nations, the United States has no ministry of sport. No congressional committee—or even subcommittee—is dedicated to the oversight of athletics. As a result, the United States has often remained on the sidelines of international sport governance, while other nations have taken advantage of the absence of any international oversight to harm U.S. citizens through state-sponsored doping fraud in international competitions, including the Olympics.

The one exception to U.S. disengagement in international sport governance was the 2015 FBI investigation into the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), which governs world soccer, including the World Cup. During the investigation, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) indicted more than twenty-five top FIFA officials and associates across the world for alleged decades-long racketeering, wire fraud, and money laundering. U.S. law enforcement had successfully identified that something is terribly wrong at the highest levels of global sport.

However, it was not until the dramatic revelation of institutionalized Russian doping by whistleblower Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov that the U.S. public truly understood this pervasive corruption and the enforcement gaps in the framework of international sport governance. Dr. Rodchenkov exposed undeniable evidence that numerous Olympic games had been compromised by Russian conspirators—most notably the Sochi Winter Olympics, where Russia committed doping fraud on an unprecedented scale.

The Russian government, like the East German government in the 1970s and 1980s, designed new drugs for its athletes to enhance their athletic performance and systematically encouraged or forced their athletes to take those drugs to secure victories that would enhance the image of their government.  But because anti-doping laboratories and organizations had been created to make sure what the East Germans did could not be done again, the Russians had to go even further, corrupting laboratories and anti-doping groups and international sports organizations like the IOC to make sure that Russian fraud would not be discovered, and that, even if it were, it would be covered up to evade punishment.

Still, U.S. policymakers may be tempted to see these Russian conspirators as “cheaters” rather than “fraudsters.” This would allow officials to continue to assume that the rest of the world views international sport like the United States—as an expression of global camaraderie and an opportunity for talented, hardworking athletes to compete for the greatest of honors, and inspire others to do the same. What the United States must recognize is the systemic nature of the problem and the importance of world sport to autocratic states.

For Russia, victory in international sporting events is a critical component of the state’s domestic and foreign policy agenda and is advanced by Vladimir Putin’s preferred political technique: the weaponization of corruption. With the recent DOJ indictment of seven hackers in relation to Olympic doping, it has become clear that doping fraud in sports is just one cog in a larger scheme of systemic international corrupt practices that include bribery, money laundering, and hacking, among other crimes. Unfortunately, international sport governance bodies have proven ineffective in countering this phenomenon since they, in large part, are already either victims or willing facilitators.

The United States should take all necessary action to clean up international sport, both to counter geopolitical adversaries and to protect itself and its citizens from the corrupt practices of autocrats. Passage of the Rodchenkov Anti-Doping Act (RADA), which would criminalize doping fraud conspiracies in international competitions, would be a powerful first step.

Call It “Doping Fraud”

State-run doping is a tool of authoritarian foreign policy. To many autocrats, major sporting events shore up the legitimacy of their regimes at home, while pushing the image of a constructive member of the international community abroad. It becomes centrally important that their national athletes triumph to demonstrate the superiority of their oppressive systems.

During the Sochi Olympics, a bevy of state agencies—the Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory, the Sochi Laboratory, the Russian Anti-Doping Agency, Russia’s Ministry of Sport, and the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (the successor to the KGB)—all conspired to commit fraud. Through a convoluted scheme, after the Russian government gave its athletes drugs to improve their performance, urine samples were tampered with and swapped so that doped athletes tested clean. This swapping occurred right under the nose of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), which maintains the World Anti-Doping Code and monitors the compliance of national anti-doping bodies with it. WADA officials were present in the Sochi lab but apparently saw nothing.

However, this was far from the only instance of doping fraud. WADA had long suspected the Moscow Lab of systematic doping, and once instituted proceedings against its director, yet Russia consistently escaped serious sanctions. From 2011 to 2015, more than 1,000 Russian athletes were beneficiaries of state-run doping and were protected from discovery or sanctions by state-run pay-offs, and from intimidation of anyone who could undermine the scheme or punish the athletes.

This fraud has gone unpunished. Not a single individual involved in the years-long Russian doping scheme has faced legal consequences. Some of them have actually been promoted—most notably Vitaly Mutko, who was elevated from Minister of Sport to Deputy Prime Minister. Moreover, few defrauded athletes—those who would have won competitions had they not faced government-enhanced competitors—have received compensation. Only a handful have been awarded their rightfully earned medals following revelations about those who had finished ahead of them. Sometimes that recognition comes too late. U.S. bobsledder Steve Holcomb had two medals upgraded from bronze to silver but died prior to the announcement.

Even athletes who do eventually have their medals upgraded can miss out on millions of dollars in rollovers, bonuses, and sponsorships that they would have obtained had they not been defrauded. This is in addition to the emotional toll of having been wrongfully denied a lifetime’s achievement only to unceremoniously receive a medal in the mail. They do not stand on the top of the medal stand, they do not benefit from millions of people seeing them crowned as champions, and when they receive a medal years later there is no fan or commercial interest in their retroactively recognized performance.

For individuals who dedicate decades of their lives to the perfection of a sport, this nonchalant theft of life achievement can be devastating. U.S. skeleton racer Katie Uhlaender, who was defrauded of her medal by a doped Russian athlete at the 2014 Sochi Olympics, had it awarded back to her when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) stripped the medals from those who committed doping fraud in that Olympics. However, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), which resolves disputes between athletes and sport governance entities, wrongly overturned the IOC’s decision, depriving Uhlaender once again of her rightfully earned victory.

Finally, as with most fraudulent activity, guilty parties will often seek to retaliate against the whistleblowers who brought their corrupt practices to light. For example, Dr. Rodchenkov faces threats to his life and has been forced to live in hiding since his revelations. High-level Russian officials have called for him to be “shot” as Stalin would have done, and Putin has made direct and public attempts to discredit him for his whistleblowing.

Autocrats have few incentives not to engage in doping fraud. They celebrate the accomplishments of their athletes on the world stage and achieve their foreign policy goals through those achievements. Even if a sports organization later takes a medal from an athlete, the desired benefits toward international diplomacy have already been achieved. In addition, there has been no prospect of punishment of the government or sports officials who are responsible for the fraud.

Unlike many of the other forms of corruption they engage in, such as money laundering or bribery, doping fraud is not a criminal act, despite its clearly criminal consequences. Any disputes are conducted through international sport governance bodies that prevent the injured parties from bringing their claims to courts but require the disputes to be adjudicated confidentially before private arbitral panels without the power to investigate or to punish those truly responsible. Autocrats understand this and have done everything in their power to ensure that decisions made in these bodies will reflect their desired outcome.

International Sport Governance Bodies Have Failed

The international sport governance structure is sprawling, but the two most important bodies are the IOC, which governs the Olympics, and FIFA. The IOC and FIFA are complemented by CAS and WADA.

WADA has been central to the story of the Russian doping scandal. It released both the Independent Commission report in 2015, which concluded that a “deeply rooted culture of cheating” exists in Russia, and the McLaren Report in 2016, which confirmed Dr. Rodchenkov’s claims about the state-run doping program in the Sochi Olympics.

Due to the overwhelming evidence of state-run doping, the IOC suspended Russia from the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. According to The Economist, it took seven investigative reports and seven years to achieve this suspension.

The newspaper notes, “With a budget of just $30m per year, WADA is wielding a knife in a highly-charged arms race. Even when it finds clear evidence of systematic doping, as it did in Russia. . . .there is no guarantee that the IOC will act on it quickly and decisively.” Yet this suspension was still good news.

However, that is where the good news ends. Despite the official suspension at the Pyeongchang Olympics, many Russian athletes were still allowed to compete under the designation “Olympic Athlete from Russia.” Moreover, just days after the close of the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, the IOC lifted Russia’s suspension. After seven investigative reports and seven years, Russia was only suspended from one Winter Olympics (none of the Russian summer Olympic athletes were ever prevented from competing), and then only barely.

Making matters worse, WADA voted to reinstate the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) in late September 2018, despite RUSADA’s refusal to comply with two of the major requirements for its reinstatement: accepting the findings of WADA’s McLaren Report and providing data and evidence from, as well as access to, the Moscow laboratory. Russia was permitted reinstatement despite its failure to produce thousands of stored urine samples, which would likely provide additional evidence of its doping fraud program, including the identification of many other complicit athletes. When Russia then missed a crucial December 31, 2018 deadline to turn over these samples—the one concession of RUSADA’s wrongful reinstatement—WADA once again gave Russia a free pass by voting not to suspend it.

Russia’s status has been fully restored in the international sport governance structure without addressing any of the underlying problems. Whether due to apathy or complicity—and there is good reason to believe it may be the latter, given the reputation of international sport governance bodies and those who run them—Russia has fully achieved its foreign policy aims and clean athletes are left holding the bag. If anything, this process has served to incentivize corruption, encouraging further doping fraud and demonstrating that this fraud will be tolerated. It is a further confirmation to many that all of international sport competition is corrupt and a world to be shunned, not a world that provides inspiration. It is a betrayal of the spirit of sport. A new approach is needed.

The Rodchenkov Anti-Doping Act (RADA)

Introduced in the House of Representatives by Reps. Sheila Jackson-Lee (TX-18) and Dr. Michael Burgess (TX-26) and in the Senate by Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Roger Wicker (R-MS), RADA would enable criminal doping fraud conspiracy cases to be brought in U.S. courts, provided they occur at a “major international sport competition.” This standard includes a threshold regarding both the participation of U.S. and foreign athletes as well as a requirement that organizing entities receive sponsorship from companies doing business in the United States or are compensated for the right to broadcast their competition there. The legislation would fill an important gap in the authority of U.S. law enforcement and serve as a deterrent to those considering engaging in doping fraud, while potentially providing a portal to gain visibility into a wider net of international corrupt practices, such as money laundering and bribery, that are directly connected to doping fraud.

The authority to prosecute doping fraud gives investigators and prosecutors a powerful new avenue to pursue those threatening the integrity of international sport or seeking to abuse it for power politics purposes. For example, with this authority, the recent indictment brought against Russian agents for hacking U.S. and international anti-doping agencies and athletes could have included additional indictments for doping fraud conspiracy. The extensive evidence provided by Dr. Rodchenkov could also be mined to develop further cases.

The global reaction to the FBI’s investigation of FIFA demonstrates well what to expect from the enforcement of RADA. Countries and athletes around the world hailed the investigation, with a British MP commenting, “The chickens are finally coming home to roost.” However, as to be expected, Russia and some corrupt FIFA officials protested it. There is no reason to believe it would be any different here. The fulfillment of national security goals and the generation of international goodwill, along with the protection of hard-working athletes around the world who achieve their results fairly, are reason enough to enact RADA.

The United States must quickly wake up to the corruption present in international sport and the specific threat presented by doping fraud. The problem shows no sign of stopping. Without the proper deterrents in place, foreign autocrats will continue to see the doping of their athletes and concealment of their wrongdoing to be a highly beneficial, risk-free strategy, and the United States can expect the international sport governance structure to continue to bow to autocratic pressure. With its massive sports market and rule of law tradition, the United States has a unique opportunity to clean up international sport before its corrupting influence causes additional damage in the United States. RADA is the perfect place to start.

The post Getting Off the Sidelines appeared first on The American Interest.

“Just Because You Don’t Believe in the Devil Does Not Mean He’s Gone Away”

Tom Tugendhat is a British Conservative Party politician, military veteran (Iraq and Afghanistan), and chairman of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. He opposed Brexit, yet now opposes a second referendum. Tugendhat’s influence has grown since being elected to Parliament in 2015. Some consider him a future party leader. Tugendhat started as a journalist in Beirut. He studied theology, holds a master’s degree in Islamic studies, and speaks Arabic and French.

TAI Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Gedmin recently sat down with Tugendhat in London to discuss Brexit, Russia, China, and other challenges of the day. The following transcript has been edited for clarity.

Jeffrey Gedmin: ​In a recent issue of the Sunday Times, there was a column whose headline used the word fratricide. Within the Tory Party and between Tories and Labour, are people tearing apart or is this just healthy, constructive competition?

Tom Tugendhat: ​I think there are moments in every republic’s life—and here I count yours and ours, though we’re a republic pretending to be a monarchy—when the questions change so deeply that existing party structures struggle to keep up. The level of accountability has moved, which is why we’re all having a struggle with representative democracy, with personal accountability and personal media, for example.

So, social media is an example of this. For the first time you are your own publisher. You are your own decider on news sources. You are your own decider on community; you’re no longer geographically tied. And the same applies to democratic hurdles because our entire system of government is really based on geography. If you live in a certain area, you’re represented by a certain person, whether it is the Senate or the congress, or indeed in state politics where it divides further.

​And so, this ability to self-associate, this ability to reach different communities, has caused us to question quite a lot of the norms that we’ve had. This is where Brexit and Trump challenged the established settlement. And they’re not the same challenge, by the way, they’re different challenges with different implications. I’m not somebody who believes they are two sides of the same coin. But they are both expressions of the fact that established political norms aren’t working because they’re not addressing fundamental questions. That’s what’s challenging our parties, and I would argue yours too.

[image error]

Tom Tugendhat, MP
Official portrait via Wikimedia Commons

JG:​ At a debate I recently attended in London, with about 1,000 people in the audience, the moderator said, “Raise your hand if you feel that you are politically homeless.” And about 80 percent of the hands went up. Does that surprise you?

TT:​ No.

JG:​ Is that representative in any way? How do you speak to that?

TT: ​No, it doesn’t surprise me, but you could do the same in this Parliament and you’d get the same answer. And I say that because political parties are an expression of something that is possible to achieve when you have time and hard when you don’t, and that’s compromise. That’s management of difference. So political parties, and even parliaments, congresses, work when you take people that are empowered to represent you, you send them off, you trap them together, and they come back and say “This is the best compromise I could do for you.”

​If, however, the process is conducted at every stage in the full glare of minute publicity, and that publicity is now self-determined and so constantly reinforcing your current views, you find yourself unable to make compromises. And that means that anybody that does make a compromise inherently doesn’t represent “you,” because you’ve gone from being a values-based actor seeking representation across a range of subjects, to becoming a single-issue advocate for a particular cause. That leads to multiple, more temporary alliances to operate in Congress, Parliament and across society. Each cause creates its own alliance.

JG: ​Let’s turn to the United States. Putting aside President Trump’s Twitter account and theatrics, two years in, what’s going right and what’s going wrong with American foreign policy?

TT: ​It’s interesting because I don’t see quite such a break in U.S. foreign policy as many of my American friends do. I see it more as a continuum. I think that the attempted withdrawal from the international space—not a full retreat, but pulling back slightly—really started a long time ago. George W. Bush certainly spoke of it, until 9/11 of course, and Barack Obama tried it rather more successfully, and withdrew rather more successfully than his predecessor. So Trump is continuing that trend.

JG: ​Do you mean withdrawal from Europe, or—

TT:​ No, no, from the international space, generally.

JG:​ Isolationism?

TT: ​I wouldn’t use the term. I don’t think it’s isolationism to not seek to be the single preeminent international actor. And in any case, the United States will remain the single preeminent international actor even it withdraws by 50 percent. So scaling down its commitments to 80 percent or 70 percent or 60 percent of what they were still leaves the U.S. as a very international player.

Look at American troop deployments, the very obvious ones like Afghanistan and Syria, which still go on despite the President’s comments. But look also at training teams in the Philippines, huge bases in South Korea and Japan, joint exercises with the Indian Navy. You can go around the world and find place after place where the United States is still very heavily invested. From Djibouti to Darwin, you find U.S. troops based in foreign countries.

So American withdrawal can be overstated, and I’d be cautious about overstating it. And in that sense I think the current President has continued a theme, and in some areas I’d argue he has done the right thing: in Afghanistan, for example, where he’s listened to advice and changed his policy.

​I think in other areas, if you want to put it nicely, he’s been aspirational. And I think here of North Korea. If you’re gonna sup with the devil, use a long spoon. As for praising dictators, if you’re gonna do it, make sure there’s a definite outcome to it, because otherwise all you’re doing is whitewashing the brutality and murder that keeps them in place.

JG: ​And in Syria and Afghanistan, what do you want from the Americans on the ground and in leadership?

TT: ​On the ground I think the U.S. has done exactly the right thing. I think U.S. troop deployments in Syria have been appropriate, and tough, and clear. The problem comes when announcements are made that are not followed up, and worse, are made without consultation with allies. Foreign policy is not a game of surprise. If you want to have coordinated action then you need to make sure you bring your friends with you. You may want to surprise your enemies, but you sure as hell don’t want to surprise your friends. Otherwise you’ll rapidly find yourself acting alone because nobody will be quite sure what you’re going to do next.

JG:​ We have a pretty robust debate about how to characterize the challenge of Vladimir Putin. What does it look like from your perspective here in London? Is Russia a threat?

TT: ​Yes. But it’s a different kind of threat than what we’re used to. It’s a threat that is using a full spectrum of violence against us, not just the military. And because it’s so broad, it’s much harder to nail down. So if you look at things like corruption spreading from the Russian mafia to business interests in the City of London, if you look at the use of individuals to hide wealth and corrupt institutions in the West, those are threats. If you then look at the funding of political parties and seeking to influence and indeed to discredit those movements, that is a threat. If you look at the use of social media to amplify what used to be fringe movements and to make them appear greater, both at home in the UK and in parts of Europe, that is a threat. If you look at the way Russian operatives used chemical weapons in the UK, both in Salisbury and in London, when they murdered Litvinenko, that is a threat.

​These are modern Russian threats. And you parcel that together with probing flights by Russian aircraft and Russian submarines at sea, and you see a hostile state actor. But I think Russia needs to be put into context. Let’s be honest, Russia is a failing petrochemical economy, which has become so corrupted as to not in a real sense be a functioning state anymore. Salisbury was a very good indicator of this. That was the work of the Keystone Cops. The GRU, a once feared intelligence unit, has been so stripped of money and resources and so corrupted by its top officials who’ve stolen millions from the agency for their own gain that they’ve turned those two hit men into the Laurel and Hardy of assassins. It’s a complete joke.

​And the same is true of the FSB. These guys have gone from being equals to, and indeed better than, our own agencies to being effectively just fronts for organized crime, with all the loss in quality and credibility that goes with it. So I think you’ve got to be careful. The bear is real, but the bear is now rather mangy and flea-ridden, and we’ve got to face that. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have serious capabilities. Cyber is a very cheap capability, and if you’ve got the resources of the state and you can keep people focused on it, then funnily enough you can invest more in it. But Ethiopia has got a very good state-based cyber capability, so let’s not think that Russia’s special.

JG:​ Do you think that we underestimate the Russian threat, are we assessing it rightly?

TT: ​I think the problem is that we try to ignore them, because in so many circumstances Russia is today irrelevant. It’s not equal in any real sense to any western power; it’s just not. So we try to ignore them. The honest answer is we can’t quite ignore them, and so we are then constantly surprised by small things.

So when the pensions protests broke out in Moscow, for example, they were completely irrelevant to the UK. A pensions crisis in Germany would have very serious implications for the world economy because those are major global powers, economically speaking. A pensions crisis in Russia is irrelevant, so we don’t focus on it, but the quid pro quo is that like all failing dictatorships, and with aging dictators who have grown weaker as they get older, as the young men start to circle and look for opportunities, Putin then needs to react to his internal weakness, and so he exports violence. This is a perfectly traditional ploy by emperors and dictators throughout the ages, and it means that he then goes and invades Ukraine or Georgia.

JG:​ Would you say a word about Nord Stream 2?

TT:​ Look, Nord Stream 2 is not about energy, bluntly. Nord Stream 2 is a strategic attempt to undermine the integrity of NATO by reducing the interdependence of nations in eastern Europe. Now, from a Russian perspective that’s a very logical thing to do. From a German perspective I think it’s staggeringly unwise to seek to effectively remove your bumper from the body of the vehicle. It reduces your strategic depth, it reduces your defense in depth. I think it’s very unwise of Germany to have agreed it, and I think it’s fundamentally undermining their own security. Sadly Germany’s relationship with Russia has been very different over recent years to the one that we got used to and the connections between former incumbents of the chancellery and the Putin regime really do raise questions.

JG: ​And Angela Merkel, otherwise Putin-skeptical, has somehow gone along with Nord Stream 2. How do you judge that?

TT: ​I don’t know the internal German politics that have seen that happen. I’ve spoken to members of the Bundestag who are as skeptical about it as I am, but I don’t know the internal politics. It is noticeable that more countries are turning against it. France recently spoke out against it, with good reason. I think it’s very unwise. That doesn’t make it illegal, that doesn’t make it easy for us to stop, but I think it’s very unwise. And the first losers of it will be Germany.

JG: ​As you know, there’s a growing consensus in Washington that China is a problem on trade and security. What’s the mood here, what’s your view?

TT:​ China is very different from Russia. Russia is a failing state trying to pull down the system, because it’s got nothing to lose and it’s just struggling to hold on. In fact, except for the United Nations Security Council seat that it has, Russia has no real strategic leverage anymore. China’s very different. And we’ve got to remember that China has gone from being economically a very minor player in the 1950s through even the early 1990s, to being the largest, or the second-largest, depending on how you count, economy in the world.

​So it’s not unreasonable that China, having seen the rules written in the period where it was economically less influential, is now seeking to change them now that it is one of the top two powers. That is a reasonable position for China to take. And that’s where we’ve got to look at China honestly and not in a binary sense. It’s neither hostile nor allied, it’s looking out for its own interests. What I mean is that if you look at things like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, it’s important to support China’s legitimate interest in regional economic development through infrastructure investment. I think that’s a reasonable thing to do. What’s not reasonable is to support some of the mercantile colonialism that we’re seeing in other parts of the region which are effectively based on debt diplomacy. I think that’s problematic.

​So there’s a balance here, because you can ignore Russia most of the time, but you can’t ignore China. China is a very serious power, and it brings other problems. I know that the Trump Administration has been thinking about Huawei and ZTE [two Chinese multinational telecoms companies under scrutiny by the U.S. government – ed.]. These are very strongly state-affiliated companies, and so the relationship between them and our public infrastructure providers, particularly in telecoms, is something we’ve got to be cautious about.

JG: ​And you don’t see China as a threat in terms of cyber, the same way as Russia?

TT: ​It’s a threat, but not in the same way as Russia.

JG:​ What about undermining the international system? They’re not about the liberal order.

TT:​ Nope. That’s right.

JG: ​They’re about ad hoc coalitions.

TT:​ Well, one could say the President of the United States is too. Much in the same way that I was saying politics has gone from the corporate to the individual—from the compromise of the body, the party, to individual pressure—so has international politics gone from the international space to the national argument. In the so-called “age of the strongman,” it is the current illusion that this is the way forward. But you know, there are great weaknesses to strongman politics, you don’t need me to tell you. Infrastructures and institutions are much more stable than strongmen. And I say that as a monarchist! But that’s why I look at President Xi abolishing term limits in China, and don’t see that as a sign of strength but rather a sign of weakness.

So I think you’ve got to be careful when looking at China. You’re looking at a unitarian and dictatorial state, true, but you’re also looking at an internally fractured state where provincial power is very real, and the further away you go from Beijing, as in all empires, the less influence the capital actually has.

​And on cyber, look, it’s no great surprise China is using cyber espionage to steal corporate secrets. That was, sadly, always going to happen. What’s more concerning is the way it’s playing with the WTO and undermining the international system that has made it rich. That is deeply unwise on its part. But is China a state actor like Russia seeking to pull the whole system down? No, China is trying to replace parts of it. That is a challenge.

JG: ​Let’s end on Iran. Are we on a good path now to defang Iran?

TT: ​No.

JG: ​So is conflict a possibility in the next couple of years?

TT:​ The tragedy of our relationship with Iran is that conflict has been a possibility for the last 40 years, and I think it’s a great credit to many different administrations that conflict has not arisen. It’s a difficult relationship, to put it nicely. Iran is beginning to realize that 40 years after the revolution people don’t remember the Shah. And so we’re seeing a very different Iran today than the one we were used to in the 80s and 90s. We’re seeing young people who do not understand, quite reasonably, why their quality of life should be diminished in order to fight unnecessary wars in Syria and Iraq, or why they should be hearing about brothers and cousins of theirs who died in conflicts in other parts of the Middle East.

​And this is where, just as social media has challenged our political system, it challenges others too. A lot of people are learning a lot more about their own country these days, and the inability to control the media means that the realization of the wars that Iran’s government is fighting has become rather more prevalent.

​The other thing, of course, is that Iran isn’t a single state. Iran is a very mixed country. From the mullahs to the government to the Revolutionary Guard, you’ve got different constituents, and those are only the ones in power, then you have all those that represent things like the Basij and the agricultural community and things like that. So you’ve got a very divided nation. I hope very much that we do come through this period because a powerful and free Iran is so much in the world’s interest. It’s an extraordinary culture and an extraordinary people, and having the country so cut off as it is today is a great punishment for the whole world, not just the Iranian people.

JG: ​What does it look like if the United States decides that a military action is warranted to diminish or impede the Iranian nuclear capability?

TT: ​I can’t see that in the moment. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I can’t see it. It would be a very heavy responsibility.

JG: ​Anything else you want to tell us right now?

TT: ​I have to say, we talk a lot about outside actors, quite reasonably: Iran, China, Russia. We talk less about inside actors, countries like our very close allies. We mentioned the internal politics of the United States and the internal politics of the UK, but I mean really close friends who are not helping. And here, the United States needs to be unequivocally committed to NATO. Not just for our benefit, but for yours. The United Kingdom needs to be unequivocally committed to the security of Europe for the same reason. By the way, that’s why this government has been very clear on our commitment to NATO and our commitment to work with European powers on security and cooperation whatever the outcome of the EU talks.

​But other issues that are arising are really problematic, and are much harder to deal with. So you look at the Gilets Jaunes movement in France, you look at the undermining of norms in Italian politics, or indeed the challenges that you see in certain eastern European countries where, frankly, democracy is not looking particularly solid. And you realize that it’s not just outsiders that challenge, it’s insiders too.

JG:​ From what you just said, one might get the feeling that the glue that held lots of things together internally and externally is beginning to dissolve. Do you have that feeling?

TT:​ There is a problem that arises after a while when people forget their past, and they forget that the devil exists. And just because you don’t believe in the devil does not mean he’s gone away. And just because you’ve forgotten what he looks like, does not mean he’s forgotten you.

And this is one of those things that those of us who’ve served in combat remember well: when you go into towns like Baghdad or Kabul, and you are in somebody’s abandoned house, in what was once a wealthy district, and you open a cupboard and there’s ballet shoes or French books or something like that, and you realize that middle-class communities lived here at some point in the last 20 years. They cared about their kids’ education and their daughter’s dancing lessons, but have now, for one reason or another, been forced to flee, or murdered.

Anyone who has fought in a war realizes that the veneer of civilization can be very thin, and that just because you don’t believe in the devil does not mean he’s gone away. And I think that today, there are too few of our leaders who’ve looked the devil in the face, and realize that when you’re playing with fire you can never control the flames.

The post “Just Because You Don’t Believe in the Devil Does Not Mean He’s Gone Away” appeared first on The American Interest.

The Long Freedom Slump

For democrats around the world, there is good news and bad news in the recently released Freedom House survey, “Freedom in the World 2019.” The good news—and we could really use some on the freedom front—is that things haven’t gotten dramatically worse. Or as The Economist Intelligence Unit found in its own annual Democracy Index, “Democracy stopped declining in 2018.” For the thirteenth year in a row, more countries declined in the Freedom House survey (68) than improved (50), but that ratio was not as bad as in many of the last dozen years, when it was often two to one in the wrong direction. No countries clearly entered the ranks of democracies, but Armenia and Malaysia took huge strides in that direction, and save for the tiny nation of Comoros, there were no more reversals of democracy. In fact, the overall ratio of “free” to “not free” countries at the end of 2018 (1.7 to 1) was not much worse than it was in 2005 (2 to 1), the last year before the onset of this extended democratic recession.

Beyond the dramatic alternations in power in Armenia and Malaysia (where in each case democratic forces mobilized impressively to defeat long-ruling parties), there were other hopeful signs. Two illiberal leaders misjudged their chosen successors, who now are turning their countries in more hopeful directions. In Ecuador, where President Rafael Correa was dragging the fragile democracy dangerously close to authoritarianism, his successor, Lenin Moreno, has restored presidential term limits and a greater climate of freedom for independent media. In Angola—one of the world’s most corrupt and badly governed countries—thirty-eight years of plundering rule by President José Eduardo dos Santos ended in September 2017 when he passed power to longtime ruling-party stalwart, João Manuel Gonçalves Lourenço. To most people’s surprise, the former Defense Minister has moved against the extreme levels of nepotism and venality in Angola. This stops well short of systemic change but has produced a big uptick in freedom.

The most hopeful positive change has been elsewhere on the continent, in Ethiopia, where nearly three decades of authoritarian rule by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) has come under intense challenge from a population fed up with corruption, oppression, and ethnic exclusion. In the face of a wave of popular protests, and in apparent desperation, the regime felt compelled last year to hand the reins of government over to an ethnic outsider within its ranks, the young and dynamic Abiy Ahmed. Since coming to power in April, Ahmed has released political prisoners, loosened media controls, and implemented a wave of other reforms—including appointing one of the most respected opposition figures to head the country’s electoral commission—in advance of elections due for 2020. Entrenched authoritarian interests and deep ethnic divisions threaten this liberalizing project. But with 100 million people, Ethiopia is the second most populous country in Africa, and if it became a peaceful, multiparty democracy, the implications for the continent would be enormous.

If you look at the public opinion data, it’s not that surprising that three of the six significant gainers in freedom last year were in Africa. The latest (2016-2018) round of the Afrobarometer survey continues to find robust public support for democracy, with more than two thirds of Africans on average saying that democracy is always preferable to any other form of government.  When people are presented with the Winston Churchill proposition—that “democracy may have its problems but it’s still the best form of government”—public opinion surveys worldwide find overwhelming support, averaging over 80 percent in Africa and East Asia, and about 70 percent or higher in Latin America and the Arab world.  The problem, as people generally recognize, is that this is too often not what their leaders are providing.

And that brings us to the bad news. While six countries significantly improved in 2018 (by at least three points on the 100-point Freedom House scale), 19 countries took a sharp turn for the worse.  And the significant decliners included five of the biggest emerging-market countries:

China, which has seen growing concentration of power, the rise of an Orwellian surveillance state, and a chilling assault on the rights of Uighur and other Muslim minorities;
Pakistan, which saw electoral alternation, but under the influence of a military establishment that continues to exercise predominant power, tilting the last election to its ally, the former cricket star, Imran Khan;
Bangladesh, where democracy has still not recovered from Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s abuse of power in advance of the previous 2014 election, with a fresh wave of assaults on the opposition and (according to Freedom House) “widespread irregularities and interparty violence” again deeply marring the December 2018 election;
Brazil, where a deeply illiberal, rightwing populist congressman, Jair Bolsonao, swept to victory in the October presidential election amid a sweeping corruption scandal that has discredited the entire political class; and
Egypt, where the brutal military strongman, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, arranged for his reelection in a completely farcical and meaningless March poll, and then yesterday gave the country a Valentine’s Day present: a landslide parliamentary vote for a package of constitutional amendments that could keep him in power till 2034 while further concentrating power in the military.

Perhaps democratic norms and institutions will rein in illiberal executive ambitions in Brazil (a country in deep economic and political trouble) about as well as they have done in the U.S. But as the new Freedom in the World survey stresses, in an unprecedented focus on “US freedom in decline,” there is plenty to worry about in the United States, where the total freedom score fell three points in 2017 due to President Donald Trump’s attacks on the judiciary, the media, truth, public faith in the electoral process, and norms of ethical conduct. As a result of this deterioration—which owes as well to deepening polarization and which began well before Trump came to office—the U.S. now ranks 52nd in political and civil freedom among the 195 countries that Freedom House assesses each year. It didn’t decline further in 2018, but who knows what will happen after this year of presidential emergency and a potentially deepening crisis around the Mueller investigation.

Freedom matters everywhere in the world. Smaller countries are significant not only for themselves but for the demonstration effects they can generate in their regions. Thus, when a smaller country has a breakthrough, like the electoral earthquake that brought down the Yahya Jammeh dictatorship in Gambia in 2016 or the more recent stunning turn in Armenia, it is something to celebrate, encourage, and support. Nevertheless, the more consequential stakes lie in the bigger countries, and this is where the rest of the picture is more sobering. Three of the biggest countries—India (the largest democracy in the world), Indonesia (the largest democracy in the Muslim world), and Nigeria (the most populous country in Africa)—are holding elections in the next three months (in fact, Nigeria’s poll is tomorrow). There is pressure on religious tolerance (and other liberal values) in India and Indonesia, but democracy itself does not appear in danger. With its weak rule of law—made weaker with President Muhammadu Buhari’s unconstitutional removal of the Chief Justice last month—and chronic election malpractices, Nigeria does not meet the minimum standards of electoral democracy. Yet the survival of multiparty constitutional government over the past two decades in a country that had previously suffered six military coups and a civil war has been a noteworthy development.

Beyond these three countries and the five listed earlier, there are 19 countries with over 50 million people.  Seven of these are liberal democracies: Japan, Germany, UK, France, Italy, South Korea, and the United States. These hardly seem in danger of breaking down, but beyond America, the European ones face rising stresses from immigration and illiberal challengers to norms of tolerance and inclusion.  Of the remaining 12, there are only three democracies—Mexico, the Philippines, and South Africa—and each of them have declined in quality in recent years due to serious problems of corruption and the rule of law. In Turkey, democracy has been thoroughly crushed by a now unapologetic strongman ruler—Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Nearly five years after the May 2014 coup, Thailand is still waiting for the military to hold elections and leave power; after that, the Royal Thai Army, under General Prayuth Chan-ocha, seems to be planning to reprise its previous role of ruling from behind the façade of a semi-parliamentary regime. In Myanmar as well, the military continues to dominate the levers of political power following the 2015 elections, and the hopes for a timely transition to real democracy have faded. Despotism is deepening in Russia; Vietnam and Iran remain highly authoritarian regimes; elections have just produced a patently fraudulent victory for the regime’s favored candidate in the “Democratic” Republic of Congo; and according to Freedom House, in Tanzania freedom has continued to steadily contract due to “mounting repression of the opposition, media outlets, and social media users who are critical of the increasingly authoritarian president, John Magufuli.”

Put differently, if you look past the seven advanced industrial democracies among these 27 largest countries, you find four democracies straining under the weight of corruption and crime (Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines, and South Africa); four countries where elected leaders have stifled democratic institutions or possibilities (Russia, Turkey, Bangladesh, and Tanzania); four countries where, in different ways, the military effectively dominates (Pakistan, Thailand, Myanmar, and Egypt); three entrenched dictatorships (China, Vietnam, and Iran); three huge arenas of political pluralism (India, Indonesia, and Nigeria); one African country where the door to democratic reform seems to be closing again (the DRC); and one—just one—with a real but tenuous possibility of democratic progress (Ethiopia).

Unfortunately, this is a grimmer picture than one finds by just looking at the aggregate numbers. Big countries do generate bigger demonstration effects. It is a reason to cherish and defend democracy in India and Indonesia; to watch carefully what happens in Nigeria as it meets its imminent electoral test; to support civic and institutional efforts to fight corruption and bolster the rule of law; to pressure de facto military regimes to really withdraw from political power; and to bet heavily on the one possibility for a big breakthrough to democracy in the coming year: Ethiopia.

The post The Long Freedom Slump appeared first on The American Interest.

The Star Wars Theory of History

The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

Jon Meacham

Random House, 2018, 416 pp., $30

In the wake of the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville in 2017, bestselling popular historian and former Editor-in-Chief of Newsweek Jon Meacham undertook a series of essays which he soon turned into a book. In The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels Meacham offers “a portrait of hours in which the politics of fear were prevalent—a reminder that periods of public dispiritedness are not new and a reassurance that they are survivable.” And he offers a plan for survival and overcoming: “In the best of moments, witness, protest, and resistance can intersect with the leadership of an American president to lift us to higher ground.”

The stories Meacham tells are familiar ones—intentionally so. By rehearsing episodes first encountered in grade school, Meacham hopes to convince fretful Americans that their own moment of redemption can soon be at hand if they follow the plan. A protest movement needs to force its righteous cause onto the national agenda and then elect a far-thinking President who will push transformative reforms into law. Meacham’s paradigmatic case is Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lewis setting the stage for the civil rights heroics of Lyndon Johnson.

As Meacham tells it, the forces of good in American history are incarnated in two forms: regular Americans embracing hope instead of fear, and Presidents with the courage to put themselves on the right side of history. The Presidents are the senior partner in this relationship. The Soul of America has never seen a conception of the presidency too big for its liking; the President alone assumes the mantle of leading the entire nation. Choice quotations from Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, Truman, and JFK are trotted out to reinforce this way of thinking.

As a popular historian, Meacham knows it is ambitious Presidents who capture readers’ imaginations most readily. And, to be fair, a handful of Presidents have been transformative figures in American history, both in charting the nation’s policy course and in reshaping our Federal government. Still, it is remarkable just how completely Meacham is willing to present presidential politics as the be-all-and-end-all of American politics. The notion that what is important in our constitutional system is a balance between the President and other institutions is almost wholly absent. In short, Meacham is arguing that great Presidents made America great, and will do so again once the forces of hope vanquish the current occupant of the Oval Office.

Unfortunately, this way of thinking about American politics is almost certainly the dominant one today. Yes, the thinking goes, we have a Congress; yes, it is our representative legislature; and, yes, that is somehow important for our democracy. But let’s be serious: it’s the Presidents who really determine the country’s fate. Most people already believe this; Meacham is merely adding a literary flourish by declaring presidential politics the arena in which the struggle for America’s soul is fought.

Meacham offers the following apology for his focus: “The emphasis on the presidency in the following pages is not to suggest that occupants of the office are omnipotent. Much of the vibrancy of the American story lies in the courage of the powerless to make the powerful take notice.” But the construction here is telling: ordinary people must be regarded as adding “vibrancy” through their direct actions that “make the powerful” (read: the President) “take notice.” Between the people and the President, there is very little worth mentioning.

Every now and then, Meacham allows that something good has come out of Congress. But his acknowledgments are extremely begrudging. Praising the Pacific Railroad and Homestead Acts, he describes them as “signed by Lincoln,” who had very little to do with them. Looking at Radical Republicans’ triumphs over Andrew Johnson’s veto, Meacham spots “a lesson: If sufficiently developed and organized, public sentiment, as manifested in Congress, can prevail over presidential intransigence.” Again, the construction gives away the game: Meacham dismisses the idea that Congress added anything important, and instead assumes that its members were merely “manifesting” sentiment then at large in the land.

This way of looking at history is deficient and deforming. If we fail to understand the role that Congress plays in grappling with the great problems of our history, we fail to understand how deep-seated conflicts are actually coped with. We blind ourselves to the central importance of cooperation between people with fundamental disagreements. And we end up with a Manichean outlook in which good must vanquish evil for progress to happen—which Meacham’s book exemplifies to a tee.

What Makes Politics Work

Understandably, given the widespread horror at what happened in Charlottesville, Meacham is eager to emphasize the destructiveness of bigotry and hatred. He writes:

When the unreconstructed Southerner of the late nineteenth century or the anti-Semite of the twentieth believed—or the nativist of the globalized world of the twenty-first believes—others to be less than human, then the protocols of politics and the checks and balances of the Madisonian system of governance face formidable tests. Mediating conflicting claims between groups if one of the groups refuses to acknowledge the very humanity of the others is a monumental task.

There is undoubtedly something to this claim. If the citizenry is made up of two camps, each of which regards the other as an implacable enemy, Madisonian politics is indeed impossible. But Meacham’s description nevertheless conjures up an image that is false to our history. To act as if you can adequately describe someone as an “unreconstructed Southerner” or “anti-Semite” or “nativist,” and so capture their essence, is to lose sight of their complex humanity, which is rarely so withered as to encompass nothing but hatred. Our Madisonian system has thrived precisely because it has forced people who have viewed their political opponents as despicable or inferior to nevertheless confront the nation’s shared problems, together. The idea that “we can’t do American politics with racists” is mind-boggling in its presentism. That is the whole of American history!

At various points, Meacham allows that slow-walking social progress has proved politically indispensable to those Presidents he judges as being on the right side of history. Lincoln’s statements distancing himself from abolitionists in 1854 and from the idea of full racial equality in 1862 are judged to be in tune with the electorate, for example. Fair enough. But Meacham has nothing to say about the leading role that Congress plays in figuring out how to digest major changes without rending the social fabric. Weighing the relative political intensity of conflicting impulses is Congress’s institutional forte. But Meacham focuses exclusively on the balancing that a President does in his own heart.

When he reflects on the lack of civil rights progress in the late 19th century, Meacham offers this judgment: “A succession of largely unmemorable presidents served after Grant; none successfully marshaled the power of the office to fight the Northern acquiescence to the South’s imposition of Jim Crow.” In this way of thinking, the nation is a canvas on which the President must leave his mark; if he fails to right some wrong, posterity will rightly rank him as uninspired or ineffectual. Of course it is good fun to rank our Presidents, but it is a lazy pleasure. In reality, not all Presidents are playing the same game. Congressional politics determine the live political possibilities of a given moment; Benjamin Harrison could not have become Lyndon Johnson if only he exerted himself.

Meacham’s sense of the President’s centrality comes out most clearly in his account of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which he attributes mostly to LBJ’s balls of steel. As Vice President, Johnson had understood what Meacham sees as the key to making progress; he explained to presidential speechwriter Ted Sorenson that the key was to put opponents “in the position almost where he’s a bigot to be against the president.” Once President, what allowed Johnson to see the Civil Rights Act to passage was his unparalleled skill at whipping votes, in which effort he was aided by then-Senator Hubert Humphrey and, after some skillful manipulation, Republican Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen. When the bill passed, Robert Kennedy told Johnson: “It’s just a miracle.” Meacham demurs: “But it wasn’t really—it was the result of incredibly intense work by the president to force the triumph of hope and history over political calculation and fear.”

This is an appealing story arc: Johnson finds the courage to defy his fellow southerners and change American history for the better. But it is just bad history. In reality, the process that culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a decade in the making. Johnson certainly played some part as Senate Majority Leader, but the modest bills that became law in 1957 and 1960 suggest that more than his formidable whipping skills was needed. The key to the passage of the more ambitious 1964 act was the very different process created by Mike Mansfield, Johnson’s successor as Majority Leader. Mansfield understood that if civil rights were going to stick, it would be because their opponents had been allowed to make their case in full and avail themselves of every last parliamentary tool of opposition. Once they were given that chance and nevertheless faced total defeat, they could credibly tell their constituents to respect the new law of the land, whether they liked it or not. In other words, rather than seeing opponents as mere obstacles to progress, Mansfield treated them as dignified human beings placed in an exceptionally difficult political moment who deserved the chance to fight hard for what they and their constituents believed.

The triumph of civil rights was not brought about, as Meacham would have it, by Johnson’s ability to brand his opponents as irredeemable bigots or to twist arms until he got his way. Quite the opposite, in fact. And the virtue of that subtler congressional process carries lessons for our own time. If we want to keep political losers as cooperative compatriots, it is important not to reduce them to mere bigots. For what can a respectable people want to have to do with bigots? And what can the man being branded a bigot want to have to do with those so branding him?

This point is reinforced by Meacham’s brief account of the triumph of gay marriage. Although it has little to do with his main narrative, Meacham’s conclusion cannot resist praising President Barack Obama for his magnanimity in reflecting on the triumph of gay marriage after it won constitutional status in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015). Obama declared:

Opposition in some cases has been based on sincere and deeply held beliefs. All of us who welcome today’s news should be mindful of that fact; recognize different viewpoints; revere our deep commitment to religious freedom. But today should also give us hope that on the many issues with which we grapple, often painfully, real change is possible.

Here is a social change that was indeed teed up by a movement, but was pushed across into national public policy not by Congress or even by a President but by a narrow majority of the Supreme Court, which declared that for the entirety of U.S. history there had been no legitimate basis for denying same-sex couples the right to marry. Obama paused to ask that the victors “recognize” the concerns of the losers, but that hardly dignified their opposition as worthy of admission into political contestation. The idea that this is a shining example of social change working its way through our political process is mind-boggling. It is more properly regarded as a result that forsakes the political process as a legitimate mechanism of change, and which relocates our central conflicts to our high court—with disastrous effects for our belief in the separateness of politics and law.

U.S. History as a Manichean Struggle

Meacham’s eagerness to conceal the complexities of politics is understandable in light of his overall polemical objective, which is a bifurcation of our historical inheritance into light and dark, hope and fear, “right and wrong.” “The message of Martin Luther King, Jr. … dwells in the American soul; so does the menace of the Ku Klux Klan,” he writes. “History hangs precariously in the balance between such extremes. Our fate is contingent upon which element—that of hope or that of fear—emerges triumphant.” Call it U.S. history as Star Wars.

Meacham-Yoda tells us, “Fear is about limits; hope is about growth. […] Fear pushes away; hope pulls others closer. Fear divides; hope unifies.” That all sounds very fine, but it does not have truth on its side. Acting together, enduring together—especially in the face of fearsome challenges—unifies. Merely hoping together creates weak ties.

Meacham nevertheless wants his historical homilies to stir his readers toward hope above all. “If the men and women of the past, with all their flaws and limitations and ambitions and appetites, could press on through ignorance, superstition, racism and sexism, selfishness and greed, to create a freer, stronger nation,” he intones, “then perhaps we, too, can right wrongs and take another step toward that most enchanting and elusive of destinations: a more perfect Union.”

By “press on through,” Meacham no doubt means “progress in spite of being dragged down by.” But, though it makes us deeply uncomfortable, it would be more accurate to say that our ancestors often “pressed on through”—in the sense of “were fueled by”—their selfishness, ambition, greed, and even racism, which after all is an empowering frame of mind for those on the right side of it. People animated by their animus often make history. The accomplishments of many of our most celebrated titans of industry and political leaders were often inextricably bound up with their resentments.

It would be convenient if only the qualities of character that we recognize as admirable were responsible for forging what is good in our nation. But that is a fairy tale that leads us to believe that the present generation’s righteousness might remake the world in its hopeful image if only they elect the right President. This is not so much a millennial fantasy as a millenarian one.

Those of us skeptical that righteousness is on the cusp of total victory—in the hearts of our fellow citizens or ourselves—need to recover an appreciation of our system’s ability to channel and politicize conflicting impulses, including fearful ones. This isn’t simply a story of “overcoming”; it is a story of figuring out how to live together. This sensibility is what creates an enduring political system. Were our republic’s survival contingent upon the friends of progress always (or mostly) triumphing over its enemies, we surely would not be here today. Our republican institutions’ great strength is their ability to keep real, flawed, intemperate people talking, not to gradually filter the evil out of our national soul.

Since Meacham is arguing that fear is the root of political evil, he naturally comes around to Senator Joe McCarthy. “Thoughtful people correctly gauged the McCarthy threat,” he writes, before approvingly citing comparisons of McCarthy and Hitler. He characterizes McCarthy as “showcasing largely unfounded accusations of Communist subversion” and treats him alongside the John Birch Society’s conspiracy theorists without bothering to acknowledge that communists had in fact penetrated various parts of the Federal government. Without a whit of circumspection, Meacham denounces the Birchers for believing themselves “to be engaged in an end-times struggle between good and evil.”

Meacham’s own failure to avoid that peril is especially disappointing because these are, in fact, unusually trying political times. If we rely on the interpretive lens offered by The Soul of America, our current difficulties can only be understood as symptoms of a national turn toward fear and anger—a collective embrace of the dark side. But Americans in 2019 are no more hate-filled or desirous of a demagogue than in times past. Our problem is that we have forgotten how to treat conflicting values and policy goals as anything less than existential threats. When that deficiency is combined with the assumption that only a social movement propelling a President to greatness can save us, it leaves many people with deranged ideas about the importance of winning the next election, such that there is no room in politics for pursuing any other goals.

The stories we most need, then, are not about the forces of hope vanquishing the forces of evil. We need illustrations of how conflicts have actually been kept from exploding, and sometimes resolved. Those stories, which would put Congress center stage, are harder to tell and less narratively satisfying than Meacham’s yarns of heroes and villains. Legislators doing their jobs seldom seem heroic, but then politics properly understood is not supposed to replicate the glories (or depredations) of war. As the art of the possible, politics is a game for satisficers who can sniff out a sustainable balance between societal forces in a particular moment. That kind of balancing act is what success looks like in our Madisonian system—and what ought to be regarded as the true soul of our political tradition.

For example, Meacham says that under Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, “the America that was rapidly industrializing and embracing many progressive reforms was plagued by theories of racial superiority and fears of the ‘other’ that kept us from acting on the implications of the promise of the country.” But progressive reformers, very much including these two presidents Meacham so admires, often had the confidence to impose regulation precisely because of their abiding sense of racial and cultural superiority. This is convincingly demonstrated in (now-Senator) Josh Hawley’s T­­heodore Roosevelt: Preacher of Righteousness (Yale University Press, 2008).

The locus classicus on the right is Publius Decimus Mus, “The Flight 93 Election,” Claremont Review of Books, September 5, 2016. Ironically, the no-longer-pseudonymous author of this infamously intemperate call to arms has lately written a rather good defense of the importance of political contestation. See Michael Anton, “Will the Real Authoritarian Please Stand Up?,” Claremont Review of Books, August 1, 2018.

The post The Star Wars Theory of History appeared first on The American Interest.

Europe’s Campaign Season Is Just Beginning

Last week, France recalled its ambassador to Italy for “consultations,” declaring that France has been “the target of repeated accusations, baseless attacks and outrageous remarks. . . . unprecedented since the end of World War II”. When referring to a recent “unacceptable provocation,” the Quai d’Orsay’s communiqué undoubtedly hinted at the recent meeting between Italian Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio and a senior figure of the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests), the anti-government protest movement which has roiled French politics for the past three months. Di Maio was looking for ways to cooperate with the Gilets Jaunes in the upcoming EU elections, and tweeted that “the wind of change has crossed the Alps.”

The latest diplomatic incident is the culmination of a series of skirmishes between French President Emmanuel Macron and Italy’s two Deputy Prime Ministers, Minister of Labor Luigi Di Maio of the Five Star Movement (M5S) and Interior Minister Matteo Salvini of the League, spats that go back to the Italian coalition’s ascent to power in Rome in June 2018.

Beyond the shows of mutual disdain, there is something bigger at play here: The looming European Parliamentary elections on May 26 are set to be a pivotal event for the European Union. Since 1999, these elections have regularly featured less than 50 percent turnout, and the contests themselves have focused on parochial national concerns. This time is different. France and Italy represent very different paths forward for European voters, with their leaders clashing on such diverse issues as immigration, trade, energy and climate, defense and security, monetary policy, and institutional reforms. At the risk of oversimplifying a little, the two countries, respectively, offer the choice between pro-European centrism and sovereigntist populism.

In 2017, a young and charismatic Emmanuel Macron stormed onto the French national stage, taking advantage of the misfortunes and public rejection of the major center-left and center-right parties to establish himself as a new kind of centrist—a pragmatic, unabashedly pro-EU alternative to what had come before. He defeated far right leader Marine Le Pen in the second round of the election, and went on to win a majority in parliament (306 out of 577 seats), an unprecedented showing for a completely new party. After almost two years in power, Macron has not fully delivered on his idealistic election promises, and his highly personalized approach to politics has alienated working class voters who increasingly see him as arrogant and out of touch. This broad discontent has fueled the Gilets Jaunes protest movement, which has in turn breathed wind into the sails of his far left and far right opponents. As the EP elections approach, Macron has framed both the domestic and the European debate as a titanic struggle between “nationalists and progressives,” taking aim in particular at Italy’s populist coalition partners.

In the last ten years, Italy has gone through a seismic political transformation of its own, and is (for now) the only EU founding member state governed by a ruling coalition featuring parties espousing both populist and sovereigntist stances. In 2018, around 11 million disenchanted Italian voters, primarily from the center-left but also from the center-right, voted M5S, which promised to address social inequalities stemming from unregulated globalization. Meanwhile the League, transforming itself from a chauvinistic regional party to an Italian nationalist party, captured Italians’ frustrations—and almost 6 million votes—over how Italy and Europe have handled the refugee crisis. Using narratives similar to Trump’s, Salvini called for an Italians First policy, promising defiant stances on EU spending caps and refugee laws, while also chastising France for turning back migrants leaving Italy at its own border, and refusing to collaborate on the migration front.

Both Macron and Italy’s coalition partners should be somewhat successful in the upcoming European Parliamentary elections. Although their absolute representation inside the European Parliament will be small in number after the elections, each hopes to exercise outsized influence.

In France, Macron’s party, La République en Marche, is still ahead in the polls (around 23%), closely followed by Le Pen’s Rassemblement National. The Gilets Jaunes protests may have energized Macron’s opposition, but it still remains an inchoate movement. Meanwhile, Macron’s supporters, sensing danger, are rallying behind their president. After the elections, Macron hopes that his centrist, pro-European platform will allow him to hold the balance of power when it comes to choosing the President of the European Commission or the President of the European Council. The two largest European political groups—the center-right European People’s Party (EPP) and the center-left Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D)—are likely to lose their majority, forcing them to work with the liberals of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) or with ad hoc groups such as Macron’s. If the “progressive” camp he represents performs well, it might enable him to force the status quo camp of the mainstream, led by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, to accept some of his integrationist ambitions.

In Italy, the polls show that Salvini’s League has now doubled its support from the 17 percent it scored in the March 2018 elections, while M5S has lost ground (from 32 percent to around 25 percent). Sovereigntist-populist forces will perform better in Italy than in any other EU country: The League is foreseen to quintuplicate its presence in the European Parliament, while M5S will gain 5 seats, reflecting its increased support compared to 2014. Despite their growing influence, they are pursuing separate paths at the European level.

The M5S is pursuing a political agenda that targets social inequality. It has sponsored a universal minimum income law, and is pushing Strasbourg to allow for the use of EU funds in anti-poverty measures. It has also stressed the need for “direct democracy,” by which they mean citizens more directly participating in the political decision-making processes. It has reached out to the Gilets Jaunes, Croatia’s Živi Zid, Poland’s Kukiz’15, and Finland’s Liike Nyt as partners, albeit with limited success thus far.

For their part, the sovereigntists have also found it tricky to unite: Salvini and Le Pen are planning joint rallies without going for a united list just yet; Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán has refused to endorse Salvini’s idea of a sovereigntist front and preferred to remain in the EPP; and partnership with Poland’s PiS might be complicated by Salvini’s pro-Russian views.

As the elections near, there are fears that the implosion of the European Union is at hand. The European Council on Foreign Relations released a report this week predicting that as many as a third of the seats would go to broadly euroskeptic parties, which, while not in perfect alignment in policy preferences, could still tactically cooperate to grind EU governance to a standstill. But much can change to alter the mood ahead of the elections. The final outcome of Brexit, and the immediate consequences of what follows, could go far to shape public opinion on what kind of gambles are worth taking.

What’s not in doubt is that the election campaign is now well underway, with the stakes being the soul of the European Union itself. Pro-European centrists will have their work cut out for them. If they are to prevail, they will have to stand their ground, defend their track record, and make a clear case for the importance of core European values such as openness and cooperation. Given the broad incompatibilities of the euroskeptic alternatives on offer, the fight will be won or lost on how well they are able to make the case.

The post Europe’s Campaign Season Is Just Beginning appeared first on The American Interest.

The Futile Search for a Russian Ideology

When we read about Russia in the media, we almost never hear about conceptions of Russia’s vision of the world. We hear a lot about what Russia does to the West, rather than what it thinks and envisions. In truth, Putin’s Russia has never proposed any ideology that is anything but an opportunistic counter-positioning to the West. We don’t know if Russia is on the right or left wing, as it finances both far-right parties in Europe and Maduro’s far-left regime in Venezuela. We don’t know if Russia is pro- or anti-Israel, as it supports Hamas and is friendly with Jerusalem. To paraphrase an old Soviet joke, Russia “has never diverged from the Party line [but] always diverges along with it.”

This week provided a new excuse to finally find Russia’s ideology. Intellectuals in and outside of Russia seized on the new opus of a man who has serious claims to be an ideological author of the Putin regime. Russian presidential aide Vladislav Surkov, a long-serving but still young apparatchik best known for coining the term “sovereign democracy,” has published a quasi-philosophical essay called “Putin’s Long-Lasting State.” And it has set heads spinning—in both Russia and the United States.

Enough prominent American pundits have taken Surkov’s essay seriously—calling it a glimpse into Putin’s thinking, “a rare and alarming moment of candor” from the Kremlin—as to suggest this is the real deal. Russians, to their credit, took it less credulously.

In truth, Surkov’s meandering essay—which feels about as long as Putin’s reign—is hardly worth serious consideration on the merits. But it does give us a glimpse of the sorry state of intellectualism in Russia today, and offers a few useful lessons for Western observers about what Russia is, is not, and cannot be.

But first, the context. Vladislav Surkov, currently Russia’s Special Envoy for Ukraine, was present at the origins of Putinism. When Putin was chosen as Boris Yeltsin’s successor, Surkov held the position of Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration. He can be seen celebrating Putin’s victory at campaign headquarters in 2000 in Vitaly Mansky’s documentary Putin’s Witnesses. Surkov bore witness to Putin for another eight years in the same position, then switched to Vice Prime Minister, until he finally landed as an aide to President Putin in 2013. Surkov, himself half-Chechen, has also worked behind the scenes for Chechen dictator Ramzan Kadyrov.

All these are well-known biographical facts. What is less known is that Vladislav Surkov is both a skillful political operator and one who has been bored for quite some time. A year ago he appeared in a photo taken by Kommersant newspaper looking gaunt and emaciated, with thinning hair and a sickly face. Rumors immediately spread that Surkov had an incurable disease, perhaps cancer. All of Moscow seemed to be discussing the photo until later pictures, these ones candid and unstaged, revealed that Surkov was absolutely healthy. The man was probably just on a diet. A few months ago Surkov seemed to repeat the ruse, appearing in a carefully composed photo-op leaning on a cane. What a “surprise” to see him days later walking totally normally.

When not playing PR games, Surkov has found other ways to stave off boredom: writing two novels under the pen-name Nathan Dubovitsky; ghost writing a play by the progressive director Kirill Serebrenikov (who was later imprisoned); throwing lavish dinners with creative types at the White Rabbit restaurant in Moscow. Surkov’s dalliances with the liberal intelligentsia might seem out of character for a Kremlin ideologue, but the chemistry works both ways: the liberals are charmed by proximity to power, Surkov is hypnotized by his self-proclaimed Svengali status.

In short, Vladislav Surkov has always seen himself as much more than a simple bureaucrat, and he has a major penchant for self-promotion. In 2006 he famously came up with the concept of “sovereign democracy” to explain what Russia is and should be. It was widely mocked by (real) Russian intellectuals as an oxymoron and never became Russia’s official ideology. Apparently “democracy,” even the “sovereign” kind, was too liberal a concept for Putin to stomach.

Thirteen years later there is still no new ideology on Russia’s horizon, so Surkov has come up with a new idea, this one as simple as can be. To hell with democracy, sovereignty, and other foreign concepts: “Putinism” is what Surkov proposes to us. In his new essay Surkov rejects the “illusion of choice” offered by Western-style democracies, dismissing such notions as “imported chimeras.” He propounds instead “a new type of state,” describing the need to “apprehend, think through and describe Putin’s system of governance and the entire complex of ideas and dimensions of Putinism as the ideology of the future.” He speaks of an “informational counter attack by Russia in the West,” to contest “the hegemony of the hegemon” (read: the United States), and finally speaks of a “deep state” conspiracy in America, which Surkov seems to take as seriously as do QAnon truthers.

Surkov has a few words to say about Russian rogue behavior overseas, too. Moscow doesn’t simply meddle in elections in other countries, claims the essay. “The situation is even more serious: Russia interferes with their brains.”

Surkov even brings up two American TV series about power, Boss and House of Cards. He thinks that they “paint correspondingly murky scenes of the establishment’s day-to-day.” Blasting Western democracies as “scoundrels,” who “can only be beaten by scoundrels,” Surkov concludes that in Russia the people trust the leader alone: “The contemporary model of the Russian state starts with trust and relies on trust.” In the end, Surkov foresees something truly great coming: “Our new state will have a long and glorious history in this new century,” he writes. “Putin’s large-scale political machine is only now revving up and getting ready for long, difficult and interesting work. . . many years from now Russia will still be the government of Putin.”

Lest our readers think that we have unforgivably simplified the great work of a Russian intellectual, consider the purple prose of a passage like this one: “With its gigantic mass the deep nation creates an insurmountable force of cultural gravitation which unites the nation and drags and pins down to earth (to the native land) the elite when it periodically attempts to soar above it in a cosmopolitan fashion.”

Surkov’s essay was predictably mocked on both sides of Russian political aisle. Echo of Moscow editor-in-chief Alexey Venediktov said the essay reminded him of the argument by German leaders in the 1930s, when they tried to explain why the Third Reich would last for a millenium. Only “a Thousand-Year Reich with such an ideology did not last long. What are hinting at, Mr. Surkov?” asked Venediktov.

Sergey Dorenko, the chief editor of the Kremlin-friendly Moscow Speaks radio station, called Surkov’s essay an “amazing loyalty oath.” “I won’t comment on the passages dedicated to a direct and poetical love for Putin—I just read them on my knees, in tears of ecstasy,” said Dorenko, adding that he anticipates a serious career promotion for Surkov.

Indeed, the entire essay, searching for some ad hoc ideology to explain what Russia is doing, might be nothing but a servile plea addressed to exactly one reader: Vladimir Putin. This skill is what Vladislav Surkov was known for long ago, when he started his career as a top manager at Menatep Bank, owned by Yukos’ Mikhail Khodorkovsky. As Surkov’s then-boss Leonid Nevzlin told me in an interview last year, Surkov didn’t know how to work with people. He could do it “either from the bottom, or from the top. . .he could either give orders to people, or look at them from the bottom and bootlick.” Surkov left Menatep in 1996 to join Mikhail Fridman’s Alfa Bank and, subsequently, the Family, which he has been part of ever since.

Maybe Surkov never learned his lessons from Leonid Nevzlin, and his essay simply reflects his longstanding talents as a fawner. From praising Putinism and the longevity of Putin to the House of Cards reference (a show Putin watches, according to Mikhail Zygar’s book All The Kremlin’s Men), Surkov is saying only what Vladimir Putin wants to hear.

Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov implicitly confirmed the theory that the essay was written exclusively for Putin. But unfortunately, Peskov said, Russia’s President was too busy preparing for his address to the Duma to have time to read the essay. The humiliating tone of the comment might actually mean that Surkov was fighting not for promotion, but for keeping his current position.

Kremlinology aside, the larger lesson is that Surkov embodies the poverty of Russian intellectual discourse around Putin. And Western observers who lend him credibility—like Foreign Policy magazine, which recently placed him on their list of top global thinkers—are committing a serious misreading of Putin. As Mark Galeotti brilliantly put it in an interview with The Guardian, published before the Surkov essay, Putin has become like a “Rorschach ink blot in which everyone can invest their own fears and suspicions and come up with their own personal Putin.” Talking about Russia’s meddling in the U.S. elections, Galeotti suggests, and fairly, “the more we talk up their impact, the more power we give Putin. Arguably, we ought to be laughing at the Russians a lot more.”

An essay like Surkov’s shows where the past eight years of moral and intellectual degradation have led Russia. Like Sharikov, the protagonist of Mikhail Bulgakov’s classic novel The Heart of a Dog—a dog converted into a human being who mouths hollow Soviet platitudes—all of Russia is now speaking the same empty language of Putinism. To treat Surkov’s essay, with its compendium of clichés and pretentious re-iterations of Putin’s talking points, as an authentic intellectual contribution is to give the Kremlin far more credit than it deserves.

The post The Futile Search for a Russian Ideology appeared first on The American Interest.

More Ballast, Please

The accusations are flying thick and fast against Americans of European descent who at some point in their lives have applied black or brown makeup, shoe polish, or face paint in order to pose as Americans of African descent. The general term for this is “blackface,” and according to the torrent of wrath pouring forth from the media, the politicians, and the activist Left, the individual who wears blackface is signaling not just nostalgia for slavery, rape, lynching, and legal segregation, but also support for present-day police brutality, inequities in the criminal justice system, and white supremacist violence.

Accompanying these accusations is a single, unchallenged, politically correct narrative: Blackface, also known as minstrelsy, arose in the 1830s and quickly became the first popular form of entertainment in America. It started as live theater, but in the early 20th century it transitioned into Hollywood movies, radio (where it was conveyed vocally), and television. It was condemned by the civil rights movement and thereafter suppressed. But it creeps back whenever white people get together to have fun, because America is a country where the majority white population spent many years openly delighting in a form of theater whose sole purpose was to mock and humiliate an enslaved and oppressed black minority.

To provide this narrative with some historical ballast, the New York Times, AP News, and other news outlets have been quoting Frederick Douglass’s 1848 description of such well-known antebellum troupes as the Virginia Minstrels, Christy’s Minstrels, and the Ethiopian Serenaders. Writing in The North Star, the anti-slavery newspaper he founded in 1847, Douglass noted that these troupes consisted of white men in blackface clownishly imitating the music, dance, and humor of black slaves, and condemned them as “the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow-citizens.”

Douglass’s words are powerful, but the trouble with ballast is you need a lot of it. The Oxford Dictionary defines ballast as “heavy material, such as gravel, sand, or iron, placed in the bilge of a ship to ensure its stability.” Too little, and your ship will capsize. That is why, begging the reader’s forbearance, I add a bit more.

The key question is whether ugly racial stereotypes are, by themselves, sufficiently entertaining to attract a large and varied audience over a period of roughly 100 years. In her magisterial work, The Music of Black Americans, Eileen Southern offers a more balanced assessment: “The practices of white minstrels in the nineteenth century established unfortunate stereotypes of black men—as shiftless, irresponsible, thieving, happy-go-lucky ‘plantation darkies’ . . . And yet, blackface minstrelsy was a tribute to the black man’s music and dance, in that the leading figures of the entertainment world spent the better part of the nineteenth century imitating his style.”

Many of the more celebrated white minstrels were Irish immigrants, but even before the Civil War, a handful were African Americans. For example, the renown of the Ethiopian Serenaders depended heavily on the contributions of a dancer named William Henry Lane, known by his stage name, Master Juba. When Charles Dickens visited the United States in 1842, he witnessed a particularly galvanizing performance by “this lively young negro, who is the wit of the assembly,” and concluded that he was “the greatest dancer known.”

Such praise might be dismissed as the amused condescension of an Englishman, were it not echoed a few years later by a more exacting critic: Frederick Douglass. In another article published in 1849 about a rare all-black troupe called Gavitt’s Original Ethiopian Serenaders, Douglass found much to criticize, from the players’ self-disfiguring with “burnt cork and lamp black” to their “plentiful lack of [wit].” But he also found much to praise, from a singer with “a really fine voice” to a “master player” of the percussion instrument known as “the bones,” to a dancer whose “Virginia Breakdown excelled anything which we have ever seen.”

Mindful of his readers’ “dislike of everything that seems to feed the flame of American prejudice against colored people,” Douglass nevertheless argued that “it is something gained when the colored man in any form can appear before a white audience,” and that “even this company, with industry, application, and a proper cultivation of their taste, may yet be instrumental in removing the prejudice against our race.” Black minstrels must, of course, “cease to exaggerate the exaggerations of our enemies.” But if the best ones “bring around themselves persons of equal skill,” they may well “seek to improve . . . more the refinement of the public, than its vulgarity.”

I do not want to exaggerate, but there is a sense in which Douglass’s wish came true after the Civil War. The 1880s and 1890s were a terrible time for African Americans, especially in the South. But that was also when gifted black performers like songwriter James A. Bland, actor Sam Lucas, and comedian Bert Williams shed the trappings of minstrelsy and toured the theaters of America, Britain, and Europe as elegantly dressed and much celebrated artists. The contrast in fortunes with the cruel subjugation of their countrymen is obviously bitter. But as Southern explains, it is a mistake to see nothing but racial subjugation in this latter phase of minstrelsy:

It is true that black minstrels blackened their faces with burnt cork (no matter how dark their skins), made up enormous red lips, and used traditional slapstick jokes and gestures, comic patter-songs, and stylized dances. But they also brought to the stage much genuine humor, original dancing, the poignant songs of their people, and superb solo and ensemble performance, both vocal and instrumental. After the [Civil] war, minstrelsy offered to the creative black man an opportunity to acquire experience in the theatrical arts that could scarcely have been obtained any other way during the period.

My effort to add ballast to the politically correct narrative is not—repeat, not—intended to justify in any way the odious practice of using blackface as an excuse, or license, to engage in crude and offensive behavior. But it may help to explain some of the more bizarre steps and gestures seen in last week’s performance of the (updated) Virginia Breakdown.

Let us begin with the fast shuffle executed by Governor Ralph Northam on February 1, when the world learned that his page in the 1984 yearbook of Eastern Virginia Medical School features a photo of two partygoers, one dressed in a Ku Klux Klan outfit and the other in plaid trousers, plaid bow tie, panama hat, sunglasses, curly black wig, and oily black makeup. The governor’s first step was to confess being in the photo, although not in the KKK outfit. Then he performed all the steps required of a disgraced public figure: 1) writhe in visible guilt; 2) reach out to all those who might have been hurt by his actions; 3) express the sincere hope that this will be a learning experience, not only for him but for everyone; and 4) call for the healing to begin.

But the very next day, Northam changed his tune. Prompted, perhaps, by the glee of his Republican foes and the mixed response of his Democratic friends, the governor called a press conference on February 2, and reading from a prepared statement, announced that he was not in the offending photo after all. Then came the bizarre part: neither was he innocent, because a year after graduating from medical school, while serving in the military in San Antonio, he had committed the lesser sin of “darkening my face as part of a Michael Jackson costume” before entering a dance contest. For good measure, he boasted that he had won the contest by performing Jackson’s famous Moonwalk.

Why this odd second act? Was Northam thinking along the same lines as Megyn Kelly, when last October she led a discussion of controversial Halloween costumes while hosting the Today show on NBC? Forgetting, perhaps, that she was no longer on Fox, Kelly declared, “When I was a kid [blacking up] was OK as long as you were dressing up like a character. . . . Who doesn’t love Diana Ross?” When Kelly was subsequently fired, some people blamed this comment, while others pointed to low ratings. In Northam’s case, the ratings appear to be holding steady. Indeed, a poll taken on February 6-9 showed the following percentages of Virginians saying that that he should not resign: Virginians overall 47 percent, Democrats 57 percent, Republicans 42 percent; Independents 43 percent; Whites 46 percent; African Americans 58 percent.

Could it be that one of the legacies of blackface is that a white person accused of stealing “a complexion denied to them by nature” may mitigate the offense by saying, in effect, I didn’t do it out of racism, I did it to pay tribute to an African-American idol whom everybody loves?

Unfortunately for Northam, the name of his idol slipped his mind a minute later, when having set aside his prepared statement, he responded to a reporter’s question by saying, “Yes, I dressed up as . . . oh, uh, what’s his name?” When his wife provided the name sotto voce, he exclaimed, “That’s why I have Pam with me!” At this point the performance turned comic, as another a reporter asked Northam if he could still do the Moonwalk, and, before his body language could register total panic, he was saved by another sotto voce: “In appropriate circumstances.” Smirking like a 12-year-old, Northam repeated the phrase: “In appropriate circumstances!” And everyone laughed as if the Moonwalk were salacious, which it is not.

This bumbling does not inspire confidence. Moreover, if Northam’s story was concocted by his staff (or perhaps Pam), they chose an African-American idol who, unlike Diana Ross, is not universally loved. In fact, HBO is currently in a dispute with the Jackson estate over an upcoming documentary consisting of four hours of evidence, including plenty of eyewitness testimony, that the singer was a serial pedophile. This was not public knowledge back in 1985, when Northam was dabbing “a little bit of brown shoe polish on [his] cheeks.” But here’s another bizarre twist: By 1985 Jackson was already showing signs of emotional instability in the form of serial plastic surgeries intended to narrow and sharpen his nose and make it look…well, whiter.

These surgeries, along with the prolonged use of skin-bleaching chemicals to treat the pigment-destroying disease vitiligo, eventually transformed Jackson from a handsome black youth to a pale, pitiful wraith whose features were distorted beyond recognition. The causes of this weird transformation lie in the sheer misery of the singer’s life, from the beatings he suffered at the hands of an abusive father (who taunted him with the epithet “Big Nose”) to the trauma of a childhood exposed to the harsh glare of publicity. But Jackson got little sympathy from the activist Left; their chief verdict was that he betrayed his race by becoming, in effect, a whiteface minstrel.

Let me close with Attorney General Mark Herring. This Virginia troubadour had a better week than his Governor, no doubt because of two smart moves. The first was to seize the initiative with a statement that, even though no one had unearthed any incriminating photos, he, too, had erred: “In 1980, when I was a 19-year-old undergraduate in college, some friends suggested we attend a party dressed like rappers we listened to at the time, like Kurtis Blow, and perform a song. It sounds ridiculous even now writing it. But because of our ignorance and glib attitudes—and because we did not have an appreciation for the experiences and perspectives of others—we dressed up and put on wigs and brown makeup.”

Herring’s second smart move (apart from the word “brown,” which both he and Northam seem to think will have a mitigating effect), was to choose an African-American idol who is still widely loved. If you were a politician in a swing state trying to deflect criticism by mentioning the name of a famous rapper, you could do a lot worse than Kurtis Blow.

Born Kurtis Walker in 1959, this icon of old-school hip hop has never been associated with the type of gangster rap that celebrates drug-dealing and violence, or with the “party” rap verging on porn that provides the soundtrack to innumerable frat binges and other revels indulged in by young and not-so-young white Americans—for example, campus “theme parties” attended by students dressed up as “pimps and ho’s.” Quite the contrary: Kurtis Blow became an ordained minister in 1994, and his reaction to Herring’s blackface story shows a balancing of righteous judgment (toward the offense) and merciful forgiveness (toward the offender) that is all too rare these days.

Speaking of rap, it is striking to see the absence, from the politically correct narrative, of the obvious connection between the ugly racial stereotypes found in minstrelsy and their modern equivalents in the more exploitative—and commercially successful—styles of rap. There have been efforts to draw this connection, from Bamboozled (2000), Spike Lee’s hard-to-find satire about a minstrel show becoming a huge hit on network TV, to Byron Hurt’s riveting and still-relevant documentary Beyond Beats and Rhymes (2007). But these are rarely cited, perhaps because the media, the politicians, and the woke folk on the activist Left tend to blame America’s cultural grotesqueries on everyone except themselves.

The Music of Black Americans (Norton, 1971), p. 104. A scholar of Renaissance as well as African-American music, Southern was the first black woman to be awarded tenure at Harvard.

Quoted in Southern, ed., “Black Musicians and Early Ethiopian Minstrelsy,” in Annemarie Bean et al, eds., Inside the Minstrel Mask (Weslyan, 1996), p. 48.

Southern, p. 269.

For a discussion of this type of “theme party,” see Donna Freitas, Sex and the Soul (Oxford, 2008), p. 5.

On the DVD of Bamboozled (now selling for $85 on Amazon), Lee gives an interview in which he says, quite candidly, that the highly commercial styles of rap that emerged in the 1990s amounted to a new version of minstrelsy. Lee no longer talks about this, but Hurt certainly does, often in tandem with Chuck D, the former leader of the politically “conscious” but (for a while) highly successful group, Public Enemy.

The post More Ballast, Please appeared first on The American Interest.

Nigeria at the Ballot Box

Contemporary Nigerian Politics: Competition in a Time of Transition and Terror 

A. Carl LeVan

Cambridge University Press, 2018, 292 pp., $29.99

Millions of Africans will vote in over a dozen national elections in 2019. One of these is this week’s pivotal presidential election in Nigeria: Africa’s most populous country, a top-ten global oil exporter, and the site of Africa’s largest Islamic State-affiliated insurgency. Nigeria exemplifies some of Africa’s greatest possibilities and most severe challenges. Its political trajectory will have an undeniable impact on the continent and the world.

Thankfully, political scientist A. Carl Levan has set out to demystify the country’s complex electoral politics in his timely new book, Contemporary Nigerian Politics: Competition in a Time of Transition and Terror. Levan takes the buzzwords from the international headlines on African elections—corruption, ethnicity, terrorism, vote-rigging—and investigates how Nigerian voters, and by extension other African electorates, value these issues in elections. The fact that Nigeria has only been a democracy since 1999, following years of post-independence military rule, limits Levan’s data set, but his thorough analysis of Nigeria’s last presidential contest in 2015 provides crucial context for this year’s tumultuous election season.

Levan argues that Nigerian democracy achieved incremental but notable progress in the 2015 elections. International observers deemed the elections generally free and fair. President Goodluck Jonathan stepped down peacefully after losing, marking the first “turnover” election since the end of military rule. Jonathan’s defeat broke the 16-year grip of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), turning Nigeria off a path toward the de facto one-party rule of many other African countries. The 2015 elections were a significant improvement over previous elections, especially the 2007 contest that European Union observers described as the worst they had ever seen anywhere in the world.

Levan’s most noteworthy contribution is his insightful, if at times dense, empirical analysis of speeches, talking points, and party advertisements from the 2015 election season. This research challenges oft-heard dogmas of African democracies: that voters fearing insecurity elect strongmen, and that narrow identity groups always determine voters’ interests. Levan instead demonstrates that Nigeria’s two main parties, the then-ruling PDP and the challenger All Progressives’ Congress (APC), campaigned on issues other than security and ethnicity. Concerns over electoral integrity and economic performance strongly motivated Nigerian voters in 2015. Levan identifies several policy issues that are increasingly important to Nigerian voters, among them the inclusion of women in party leadership and youth underemployment.

Levan’s book argues for a more nuanced and even optimistic understanding of Africa’s largest democracy, but his research also highlights the risks to Nigeria’s democratic development. Ethnicity, while not the sole factor in Nigerian politics, is undeniably important. Ethnic mobilization occurs, sometimes to deadly effect, even if politicians cannot rely exclusively on their ethnic constituencies to carry them to office. Intercommunal violence between farmers and herders in the Middle Belt states is killing more Nigerians than Boko Haram, and local politicians are frequently complicit. Corruption also permeates Nigerian politics. While grassroots campaigns are emerging, politics remain a largely top-down affair in which political elites make backroom deals that trade patronage for constituents’ votes. Levan argues that contemporary Nigerian politics largely developed from pacts brokered by political elites in the 1999 transition from military rule. The legacy of this transition includes de facto impunity for former military leaders and an imperfect system of rotating the presidency between northern and southern candidates.

Levan investigates how insurgent violence affects elections, a question that is as relevant for Nigeria in 2019 as in 2015. He shows that, while the Boko Haram insurgency did not alone cause the defeat of then-incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan, voters repudiated Jonathan for his false claims of victory against the group. This does not bode well for this year’s incumbent, the APC’s Muhammadu Buhari, who has repeatedly claimed to have defeated (or better yet, “technically defeated”) Boko Haram just as an Islamic State-aligned faction of the group is overrunning army bases in the northeast. Buhari has also downplayed the seriousness of farmer-herder violence in the Middle Belt, prompting a deluge of criticism and conspiracies based on his ethnic ties to the herders.

Nigeria’s electoral integrity may be at greater risk now than in 2015. President Buhari’s decision to replace the head of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) shortly after taking office in 2015 was the first indication of possible trouble in 2019. That INEC chief was critical for gaining the public’s trust in 2015, according to Levan, and many Nigerians are skeptical of INEC’s current leadership. Similarly, Buhari’s recent suspension of the Supreme Court chief has raised accusations of a “judicial coup.” Nigerians are also concerned that INEC is unprepared for the possibility of an unprecedented run-off election, which could spark violence.

Buhari would not necessarily be as magnanimous in defeat as Jonathan, who in 2015 declared that his political ambitions were not “worth the blood of any Nigerian.” Buhari ran and lost in the three elections prior to his victory in 2015. He went to court each time over well-founded concerns of electoral irregularities. Buhari is now on the other side of the equation, however, and may not adhere to his litigious precedent. A former military leader who took power in the early 1980s after a coup, Buhari does not face the same restrictions he did as a challenger. Buhari could use his influence over the courts and security services to sabotage the elections or forcefully overturn a PDP victory. Even if Buhari were willing to concede defeat, his political coterie may be more resistant to forfeit influence and wealth.

Levan’s specialty is Nigeria, but his research offers insight into electoral politics across the continent. Levan’s analysis of political pacts can help explain the unexpected results of last month’s election in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The election was the first case of an African leader rigging a vote in favor of an opposition candidate. Outgoing President Joseph Kabila, having exhausted all means of extending his term, appears to have brokered a deal with one of his more corrupt challengers in order to maintain his influence and looted wealth. The Congolese election may be a cautionary tale for Nigeria, warning of backsliding if political elites continue to erode norms and institutions, mismanage internal conflict, and pump ill-gotten petrodollars into elections. It also foreshadows how Africa’s most corrupt leaders can develop new strategies to manipulate elections.

Africa faces pivotal and potentially destabilizing elections in the near future, making Levan’s call for nuanced analysis of the region’s politics all the more welcome. South Africa, a member of the BRICS and Africa’s second largest economy, will elect a new national assembly and president later this year. Burundi faces a tense election in 2020. Any instability in the country could spark a wider conflict in the volatile Great Lakes region. Many Ethiopians hope that elections in 2020 will cement their new Prime Minister’s reforms, but elections could just as well catalyze further turmoil in an already violent country. The problems that have bedeviled Nigeria’s democratic transition are more severe in Ethiopia. Politicians stoke conflict; the country lacks independent institutions; and its system of ethnic federalism undermines social cohesion. Outside stakeholders should temper their optimism for Ethiopia’s transition and recognize that free elections are rarely a panacea for countries experiencing widespread internal conflict.

Levan’s book reminds us that in young democracies elections are unpredictable, complex, and consequential affairs. U.S. policymakers would do well to familiarize themselves with Levan’s arguments as Africa’s strategic and economic significance grows and a wave of democratic backsliding sweeps across much of Africa and the world. For these reasons, all eyes should be on Nigeria this week.

The post Nigeria at the Ballot Box appeared first on The American Interest.

A Conservative Case for German Leadership in Europe

Since Reunification in 1991, Germany has intermittently and ambivalently contemplated a more significant leadership role in international politics, including the Atlantic Alliance. The central question here is where relations with the United States are headed. For the past 30 years, German leaders have chosen to leave this question for a more convenient time.

During the Balkan wars, Germany was attracted to the humanitarian aspects of intervention but not to the military burdens that came with separating the combatants. In the event Berlin ended up cheerleading for American forces and waiting for the European Union to take charge of putting the Western Balkans back together. During the subsequent debate on NATO expansion, Germany liked America’s interest in Eastern Europe better than the alternative, but worried privately about how Russia would react. In 2000, Germany decided to leave the credit for creating a New Europe to the United States and dutifully took up the thankless job of integrating new members into European institutions.

Very little changed over the years in Germany’s handmaiden relationship with American power until 2003, when Germany discovered its own interests during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Indeed, the German Chancellor at the time led the opposition, questioning both America’s obsession with out-of-area operations and the evangelical fervor that Washington brought to the mission of creating democracies. At the next major shock to the international system, the Great Recession of 2008, the uneasy consensus in German policy for “leadership from the second row” crumbled.

From the Greek financial crisis to the wars in Georgia and Ukraine—and culminating in the mass migrations from Syria and Sub-Saharan Africa—U.S. and German interests began to diverge rapidly. The overall financial instability of Southern Europe and the mass migrations across the Mediterranean Sea were of no concern to Barack Obama. As the American President was declining to intervene in crises of great importance to Germany and Europe, the United States as a whole was blaming Europe for not doing its “share” to bear the burden of what were largely self-appointed American missions around the world. By 2014, well before the election of Donald Trump, the European and especially German acceptance of a paternalistic America had disappeared. This was the year German President Joachim Gauck asked the Munich Security Conference when Germany would finally begin to lead, though Germany was far behind in its thinking about these new and unfamiliar circumstances.

The first two years of the Trump Administration ended up clarifying the situation for Berlin. There was no relationship between Germany and the United States other than a negative and adversarial one. Germany’s historic, often romantic, relationship with American leadership is dead. Unlike Angela Merkel, who nursed along the fading relationship with the United States and the diverging of allied interests for years, the next generation of German leaders will have to manage a relationship with Washington characterized by sharply opposing interests to defend.

With America in profound political and moral turmoil, and with its ability to continue to lead the West in grave doubt, there is no longer a question about German leadership. There is only the imperative to do something.

The problem of Germany today can be summarized as a combination of America’s abdication of credible and responsible leadership and the pathological reticence this loss has revealed in the national security policies of Germany. As a senior State Department official explained last year to his colleague from the German Foreign Ministry, Berlin should stop worrying about President Trump’s reactions and make decisions based on German national interests. This is excellent advice, and at the same time stunning that the nation that educated Clausewitz has to be reminded to follow its own interests and let the chips fall where they may.

Closely related to the reluctance of German leaders to define their country’s interests is their psychological tendency to dismiss disagreements with the Trump Administration as both weird at the personal level and unserious as a matter of policy. This tendency grossly understates the seriousness of the differences between the two countries and the barriers they create for future Atlantic relations. Take, for instance, Assistant Secretary of State A. Wess Mitchell’s October 18 remarks to the Atlantic Council on the future of Europe:

For too long many in the West have touted international institutions without acknowledging that they derive their authority and influence from the nation state. . . . The West must reclaim the tradition of supporting the nation state as its own and work harder to ensure that international institutions reflect the democratic will of nations or expect institutions to lose influence and relevance.

No one is guiltier of touting international institutions like the European Union than Angela Merkel, and Germany as a whole. In fact, for the past 70 years, the European Union has built a community based on shared sovereignty between nation states, on restraining populist passions, and limiting the nation state. In Mitchell’s view, the United States should champion states like Poland, Hungary, and Ukraine, wherein the pursuit of national sovereignty is an end in itself. It is the policy of the United States that the normative influence of the European Union is denying these primitive throwback states the breathing space they demand and, therefore, this influence should be reduced.

It is difficult to imagine a more profound difference of political values than that which separates America—the champion of muscular, even ruthless, nation states—and Germany—a founding member of the European Union. In effect, Washington is insisting that Europeans abandon not only large parts of their history but also the most ambitious multilateral project of our time, in favor of a handful of illiberal democracies absorbed with their past.

Meaningful differences exist not only at the level of political philosophy, but also at the practical level of national security and statecraft. For centuries the North German plain has been the autobahn of invasion in any direction. Relations between Germany and Russia arguably remain the most consequential of Europe’s enduring bilateral enmities. Even though recent German Chancellors have been reluctant to speak in terms of national interests, no one can doubt that Russian pipelines, Russian aggression in Eastern Ukraine, and the economic and political disorder of post-Soviet states are serious threats to modern Germany. Why then has German foreign policy failed to modify or contain Russian behavior, end the war in Eastern Ukraine, or provide for the energy security of Germany and Northern Europe?

In a nutshell, it has failed to do these things because Berlin has bizarrely agreed to a diplomatic structure that represses the legitimate pursuit of national interest. The format for negotiating an end to the Russian-Ukrainian war is evenly split between the would-be peacemakers Germany and France, and the two belligerents. Effectively, this awards Putin a veto and rewards Poroshenko for his self-promoting nationalism. A separate process has developed involving a bilateral exchange between mid-level U.S. and Russian officials who rarely if ever actually meet. The three initiatives in 2018 that emerged from telephone conversations between Putin and Merkel (the deployment of UN peacekeepers, Ukraine gas transit after 2019, and direct negotiations on peace for pipelines) were killed by a distrustful State Department and its client in Kyiv. The structure of peace talks on the war in Eastern Ukraine seems designed both to fail and to preclude the diplomacy of France and Germany from developing the political foundations for post-war Ukraine and a plan for the reconstruction of the war-torn region. As was the case in the Balkans in the 1990s, Europe’s interests in the Russian-Ukrainian war lie in the withdrawal of foreign military forces, meaning Russia, and in limiting the post-war influence of outside powers, including the United States.

At heart, what is a stake between the United States and Germany in Eastern Europe is not a dispute about pipelines or negotiating tactics; it is an argument over first principles. The United States believes, to quote Mitchell, that “the return of great power competition is the defining geopolitical fact of our time,” and therefore the road to peace in Ukraine leads through crippling economic sanctions, arms sales, and, ultimately, regime change in Moscow. The German view is much different. The alternative peace leads through negotiations to Kyiv, constitutional reform, and the reconstruction of Eastern Ukraine.

In the German approach, international peacekeepers are more useful than arms sales. Protecting minority rights under the Helsinki Final Act is a more reliable strategy than building up sovereignty by displacing language, religion, and populations. Dividing gas transit between Germany and Ukraine might even be a better way of creating economic interdependence than disrupting trade flows throughout the post-Soviet world.

The point here is not whether Berlin or Washington have cracked the code to containing Russian aggression. Neither has corralled Moscow. Neither has brought peace to Ukraine. The point is that these are very different worldviews. The State Department sees Europe’s eastern flank as a no-holds-barred great-power competition. And Berlin sees Russian aggression and the humanitarian tragedy in Ukraine through the lens of European history since 1945. The difference of values implied by these visions matters greatly.

Finally, there is a serious divergence between the United States and Germany on the appropriate relationship between the economy and the interests of the state. Angela Merkel, like most Germans, has a largely benign view of economic activity. Growth is good, diminishing inequality within the population and integrating new members. Trade, particularly exports, is wonderful in distributing comparative advantages around the world. Prosperity is its own reward in modern Germany, and trade relations are not intended to achieve the objectives of the German state. One could imagine that, in the not too distant future, Germany might even return to the project of building vast, trans-oceanic free trade zones around in the world.

Not so in Washington in 2019. There are walls to be built. Economic activity, to again quote Mitchell, draws its “foundational importance from the American nation state and national sovereignty as one of the key sources, along with natural law, from which political legitimacy ultimately derives.”

Setting aside for a moment the odd part about natural law, this is a militant and fundamentally illiberal declaration of mercantilist principles. As Mitchell confirms, “To a much greater extent than in the recent past, the United States must treat the promotion of U.S. business as inextricably linked to the future of our nation’s strength and influence abroad.”

There are two sides to the dysfunctional Atlantic Alliance: Donald Trump’s America, which has selfishly substituted aggressive mercantilism and exploitative diplomacy for international order; and a fretful Germany, which is oscillating wildly between confusion and denial. It is the interaction between America’s abandonment of altruism in favor of crude economic bullying and Germany’s tendency to apologize and ingratiate that threatens Euro-Atlantic order. If Europe wants to survive as a community, its leaders must first realize that these are not trivial disagreements. If Assistant Secretary Mitchell is to be believed, the United States will try even harder to ensure that Europe does not succeed in taking its destiny into its own hands.

Unlike most EU member states, Germany has rarely viewed its leadership positions in the European Commission as a means for defending German interests. To date, Germany has done far more to realize the vision of Schumann and Monet than the Brussels bureaucracy has done in practical terms for Germany. Without effective coordination with the European Union, it is not surprising that the level of German defense spending is set during American Presidential campaigns. German exports of aluminum are regulated by the U.S. Trade Representative, and exports to Iran are within the purview of the Treasury Department. Tariffs on Daimler, BMW, and Volkswagen are subject to the whim of White House economic advisers. Germany’s energy policy is directed by threats from both the State Department and the Secretary of Energy. The only major aspect of Germany economic decision-making that is not a target of U.S. interference is climate change policy. And this has been a moot point since 2017, when President Trump withdrew the United States completely from the Paris climate agreement.

In this new world of mercantilism, protectionism, and unilateral diktat, German industry is defenseless. From the heady days of 2014-16, when the largest free trade deal in history between the United States and Europe was within sight, to the trade wars and coercive economic practices of the present, the descent has been profound and more than a little frightening. Here again, Germany has not reacted effectively to the changed circumstances and has thereby hastened its own financial decline.

As the largest economy in the European Union, Germany should at a minimum take steps to secure the position of Competition Commissioner and support the creation of a European Commission willing to defend the integrity of European industry and markets. Moreover, the U.S. Congress is now playing a significant role in legitimizing mercantilist practices by passing legislation to pressure EU members. For example, the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) explicitly threatens European companies with criminal penalties. If one believes that there should be no taxation, sanctions, or criminal penalties imposed on EU citizens without representation, European political parties need to organize defensive blocs in both the Bundestag and the European Parliament. The purpose of these blocs should be to defend a balanced trading system between the United States and European Union, to void extraterritorial legislation damaging to the European economy, to prohibit coercive practices, and, if appropriate, to retaliate against unfair trading practices and meddling in EU internal affairs.

As 2019 opened, both political parties in the United States responded to Trump’s reckless decision to announce a withdrawal from Syria and Afghanistan by adopting Jim Mattis as a contrasting symbol of rectitude and honor. Such theatrics are certainly easier to pull off than it is to explain to voters that their President (and Congress) have treated their European allies shabbily. Paeans to august personalities are no response to Russian aggression in Europe’s East, or to U.S. withdrawal from NATO’s out-of-area mission. Germany’s silence has enabled the Washington’s compromised political elite to get away with run-of-the-mill jingoism, a pointless Government shutdown, and the preposterous claim that immigrants are a far greater threat to Western civilization than the violent aggression of ISIS, the Taliban, and Iran. These falsehoods should have been challenged more directly by German leaders.

Certainly isolationism and the duplicitous character of President Trump pose serious threats to American democracy, but Germany’s inability to recognize and explain the greater threat that American conduct poses to the political cohesion and defensive capability of NATO is far more serious. Having solicited America’s NATO allies to join multiple Washington-led alliances of the willing in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Greater Middle East, the United States cannot now withdraw abruptly, without warning or consultation. Words such as cowardice, betrayal, and desertion exist to describe such conduct on the battlefield, but they have not been heard clearly from anyone in Europe, particularly in Germany.

The conceptual problem here is that conservative German leaders give the impression that ingratiation and flattery are the price to be paid for keeping Donald Trump in a multilateral alliance. This is a very bad idea. Military alliances, like good marriages, are maintained and strengthened by a readiness to rebel at the first sign of the undermining of the moral values that serve as the foundation for these institutions. The absence of indignation in Berlin at the behavior of President Trump is a sign that the process of national decathexis, (in this context, the withdrawal of a political and emotional investment) is well advanced in Germany. The fragmentation of NATO cannot be far behind.

An asymmetric relationship has developed between the State Department and the German Foreign Ministry that bodes ill for sustaining a friendship between equals. In Washington, German diplomats are overly polite, often retiring, and usually ignored. In the classical tradition, the German Embassy celebrates the political and cultural achievements of Germany: brilliant automotive engineering, masterful football teams, the architectural and social triumphs of German Reunification, and pilsner beer.

By contrast, American diplomats in Berlin are stunningly rude and aggressively lobby against the business interests of their hosts, against the government, and against the foreign policies of elected German officials. The State Department is in Berlin to oppose, to disrupt, and often to undermine. The U.S. Ambassador Richard Grenell has sided with Kaczynski against Germany, attacked German immigration policy, threatened German companies with U.S. sanctions, and held himself out as a virtual proconsul for U.S. extraterritorial overreach. It is hardly a secret that the European Bureau of the State Department is no ally of Germany.

There are two discrete problems in the current Atlantic relationship. There is the moral hazard of inequality in the application of treaties and the economic danger in deteriorating trade relations between the United States and European Union. In addition to the unethical connotations of subordinate or second-class states, unequal relations are unstable and pose a danger to an international system of order based on laws being equally applied. No one benefits in a relationship where only one side can do the shouting, the bullying, and the sanctioning. This same point applies to diplomatic manners and protocol. Unsurprisingly, Germany is the country where Trump Administration officials have deliberately behaved most poorly since 2016.

Uniquely, Germany is the only economically successful advanced democracy with little to say about its reasons for being so, or where its destiny lies. In sharp contrast to the interminable self-promotion and deceptions of Donald Trump, Germany is virtually mute in a world of constant conversation. Whether this is due to the reserved personality of Angela Merkel or a standoffish domestic political temperament is irrelevant. Great nations at the beginning of the 21st century shouldn’t be ashamed to place the pursuit of their economic and geopolitical interests within the frame of their larger humanitarian, environmental, and political goals. A well-developed explanation of national purpose and shared political values is a necessity of statecraft. Sadly, perhaps due to the hesitancy with which Germans are conditioned to view modernity, the stories of German purpose and leadership are missing.

The above recommendations are intended to suggest how German leadership might reverse the deterioration of Western wealth and politics caused by the derangement of America’s moral compass and the deterioration of its capacity for leadership. The basic premise is that the adoption of more disciplined and self-interested policies on the part of Chancellor Merkel’s coalition government and its successor would serve to rebalance the Euro-Atlantic alliance and its system of trade. I’ve attempted here to draw on a tradition of conservative sensibility common to Germany and America that is liberal in its intentions if not in its theory.

A conservative sensibility suggests that Germany could lead more effectively if it were respected rather than merely liked, just as it would claim that the United States could more easily recover its former status if it were respected rather than disliked and feared. More to the point, Germany’s leaders should not accept unequal or one-sided relationships as the norm in international politics. These relationships are fundamentally destabilizing and undermine the principle of fairness on which the NATO alliance and Euro-Atlantic system of free trade rely.

If in the past Europeans hated the command economies of the communist world, today they should enthusiastically oppose the bullying economic policies of the Trump Administration, which also distort economies, coerce free enterprise, and seek unfair advantage in trade wars.

Finally, it is a fundamental principle of realism that geography, history, and cultural proximity convey a seniority of interest to the nation that lies closest to international disorder in terms of shared values, common history, experience, and military and economic risks. Therefore, it is absurd that relations with Russia, peace in Eastern Ukraine, and the energy security of Europe are decided in distant Washington and not by Berlin, Paris, and Brussels.

It is a grave mistake to think that Germany does not have a role in enforcing appropriate behavior in diplomacy and ensuring that even Germany’s longtime allies do not overstep.

The post A Conservative Case for German Leadership in Europe appeared first on The American Interest.