Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 523

How Much Job Loss Is Too Much?

It’s getting harder and harder for minimum wage boosters to deny that there are real tradeoffs involved in a minimum wage hike. The latest evidence: A new review paper published by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco concludes that “a reasonable estimate based on the evidence is that current minimum wages [both state and federal] have directly reduced the number of jobs nationally by about 100,000 to 200,000, relative to the period just before the Great Recession”

The paper’s author, David Neumark of the University of California, Irvine, points out that this is a relatively small reduction relative to the total number of jobs created over this period, and that it “should be weighed against increased earnings for still-employed workers because of higher minimum wages.” These are reasonable points—but it’s not at all clear that they will still apply if minimum wage campaigners continue to get their way, and $15 dollar minimums are implemented in more states and localities across the country. The CBO has predicted that increasing the federal minimum to $10.10 (from the current $7.25) could cost up to a half-million jobs; the number of jobs destroyed by a $15 minimum could well total in the millions (although no one really knows, since there is no historical parallel for a hike this steep).The numbers could be debated ad nauseam, but it’s worth taking a step back and wondering: If an anti-poverty strategy necessarily destroys hundreds of thousands of jobs for the most vulnerable workers, is it really the best anti-poverty strategy available? As we’ve argued before, steep minimum wage hikes threaten to create a permanent underclass of citizens who are shut out of the labor force and unable to get the skills they need for a meaningful career. Surely there are better ways for the government to ensure (as it should) that all working people have a basic, decent standard of living.

US Says that B-52 Flyover Was a Mistake

What exactly is President Obama’s strategy in the South China Sea? After dithering for months on whether to conduct freedom of navigation exercises, the White House finally went ahead and sailed a destroyer past a Chinese artificial island in October. Then there was some confusion as Pentagon and Administration officials said the operation had been mischaracterized. Now, after a U.S. B-52 bomber flew over a Chinese man-made island last week, officials are indicating that the Pentagon made a mistake. The Wall Street Journal:

Pentagon officials told The Wall Street Journal they are investigating why one of two B-52s on the mission last week flew closer than planned to Cuarteron Reef in the Spratly Islands, an area where China and its neighbors have competing territorial claims. A senior U.S. defense official said that bad weather had contributed to the pilot flying off course and into the area claimed by China.

Beijing filed a formal diplomatic complaint with the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, which prompted the Pentagon to look into the matter.

Given that the United States does not recognize China’s claims, it’s unclear why, even if the operation was a mistake, the Pentagon would publicly acknowledge as much. Such mixed signals make it difficult to put significant pressure on Beijing. Moreover, this backtracking comes after several strong indications that the navigation exercises had emboldened Pacific allies like Malaysia and the Philippines. Just two weeks ago, we observed how refreshing it was to see American leadership in the South China Sea. All good things must come to an end, we know, but, under this Administration, they often do so with unusual—and distressing—speed.

Sanctions Process Revealed Italian Frustration

After two weeks of delays instigated by Italy, the EU finally extended sanctions on Russia by another six months. “Since the Minsk agreements will not be fully implemented by 31 December 2015,” the European Council said in a statement yesterday, “the duration of the sanctions has been prolonged whilst the Council continues its assessment of progress in implementation.”

A big story story behind the reauthorization is how it revealed Italy’s deep discontent with Germany. As we have covered, the Italians held up what was supposed to be a quiet, routine reauthorization for weeks, forcing it to the Prime Ministerial level and into the limelight. Why? The short version: They’ve had enough with how Germany is running the show in the EU.Italy’s Prime Minister Matteo Renzi revealed the extent of his discontent with Berlin in an extensive interview with the Financial Times, echoing themes that are sure to resonate across capitals across southern and eastern Europe. Italy, hurting economically to begin with, has taken a big hit from the sanctions, and so Renzi pointed out a piece of hypocrisy that particularly stings: The issue of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Renzi:

“So we say no to South Stream and then all of a sudden, quietly, we discover that there’s Nord Stream,” he says. “Who decided? Is that an EU energy policy choice? At the table, when I raised it, only Germany and Holland defended it. I understand this is important business, fine, I’m not scandalised — but I want to say either the rules apply to everyone, or no one,” he says.

More broadly, the Italian PM expressed frustration with perceived Germany hypocrisy over migrant policy, energy policy, and budget rules. Renzi insisted Italy would no longer stand by and just take it.

There’s a great deal of frustration in the EU’s south (and in France) with both German policy and Germany’s tone on European issues. Italy clearly feels it is in a better place to articulate that frustration now than it was previously. How hard Renzi will press—and how much of a hearing he will get from his fellow EU leaders, particularly now that several vital southern elections are over—could shape European politics in coming months.

Barack Obama and the Breaking of the UN

Will Barack Obama one day be remembered as the American President who precipitated the breakdown of the United Nations? It sounds like an improbable accusation. Obama appears to be an instinctive multilateralist. For good or ill, his foreign policy legacy will be bound up to a considerable extent in a small host of UN resolutions and treaties. This summer, the Security Council endorsed the Iranian nuclear deal with much diplomatic fanfare. In September, the President joined other world leaders in New York to sign off on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a sprawling list of aspirational aid targets meant to wipe out poverty by 2030. In December, Obama helped kick off another UN conference in Paris to sign off on an even more ambitious grand bargain, this time on fighting climate change.

Yet there is little time or reason for rejoicing at UN headquarters. The organization seems to be rotting both from the head down and the bottom up. At the apex of the system in the Security Council, the U.S. and its allies have become trapped in a war of attrition with Russia and China over the future of Syria. There are now signs of a compromise peace deal emerging in the new year, but Moscow has already exploited the crisis to reassert its great power status at the UN and beyond. It has used its veto at the council seven times in the past five years—this may not sound like much, until one notes that it only vetoed six resolutions altogether between 1989 and 2010. China and Russia have also held up Western efforts to handle lower-profile crisis (such as the potential genocide now looming in Burundi) through the Security Council without resorting to formal vetoes, weakening the UN further.The burden of managing the widening array of suffering in the Middle East, combined with multiple crises in Africa, is pushing UN humanitarian agencies to their limits. The UN now needs over $20 billion a year for its relief efforts (more than double the figure for 2009, President Obama’s first year in office) and the money is running out. The World Food Programme (WFP) has had to make repeated cuts to the rations it gives Syrian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan, fueling the rush of refugees into Europe. Senior UN officials privately worry that they are approaching “peak crisis”: a moment when they simply cannot run any additional large relief missions.UN peacekeepers are also in trouble on multiple fronts, struggling in war zones such as the Central African Republic (CAR), South Sudan, and Mali. While there are 100,000 blue helmets on active service—a record—many are either under-equipped or unwilling to operate effectively. UN mediators are trapped in apparently endless, quite possibly hopeless, and perhaps even counterproductive efforts to negotiate peace in other trouble spots such as Libya and Yemen. “In the face of blatant inhumanity, the world has responded with disturbing paralysis,” the innately cautious but increasingly desperate UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned his counterpart at the International Red Cross this October. “This flouts the very raison d’être of the United Nations.”1The UN’s situation is not yet as dire as it was in the mid-1990s, when the disasters of Somalia, Rwanda, and Srebrenica wrecked its post-Cold War credibility. But it is badly wounded. The Obama Administration is working hard to patch it up, often digging deep to find extra funds for the WFP and other agencies in the Middle East when other donors do not come forward. Over the past few months, the President has personally focused on buttressing UN peacekeeping, convening fellow world leaders in New York to pledge over 40,000 new blue helmets in September (although the number of U.S. troops on UN missions is still under one hundred). He will host a further summit on the global refugee crisis next year. U.S. officials continue to try to engage China and Russia over Syria and other crises, such as the Libyan war, via the UN—despite repeated failures.The crises converging on the UN may well overshadow the Obama Administration’s diplomatic successes there. The bloodshed in Syria, and Russia’s intervention there, have already taken the shine off the Iran deal—to the extent there was one in the eyes of some beholders. The UN’s ongoing failures in the Middle East will feed into foreign policy debates in the U.S. presidential race. Hillary Clinton and her Republican opponents will bash Russia for its behavior in the Security Council, and most likely claim a willingness to intervene in future conflicts without UN authorization. In May, Marco Rubio gave a speech on his foreign policy vision at the generally quite internationalist Council on Foreign Relations without mentioning the UN or Security Council once. Ted Cruz grumbled in September that “what President Obama wants to do is he’s run to the United Nations and wants to use the United Nations to bind the United States and take away our sovereignty.”2This sort of stuff may just be campaign rhetoric, although it is hard to imagine Senator Cruz charming the UN General Assembly. Whoever wins in November, there is a high chance that the next Administration will be less sympathetic to the UN than the current one. Historians may come to see President Obama’s commitment to the UN as a hiccup, coming between the supposed unilateralism of President George W. Bush (who was readier to the work through the UN than his critics generally allow) and whoever and whatever comes next.This raises hard questions about what President Obama set out to achieve at the UN in the first place, and why the organization has faltered so badly on his watch. The President’s critics claim that he is attached to the UN out of idealism or weakness or both. There have indeed been moments in his presidency when Obama’s decision to work through the UN has smacked of confusion, such as his decision to compromise with Russia over Syria’s chemical weapons in 2013 rather than bomb Damascus. But Obama’s reasons for working through the UN have generally been more strategic.The Administration has, in truth, pursued a series of priorities at the UN that the President laid out at the very beginning of his first term. The nuclear deal with Iran, the SDGs, and the climate change agreement represent the culmination of an agenda he presented to the UN General Assembly on his first visit as President in September 2009. The Bush Administration had not engaged seriously in climate diplomacy, and had refused to back the SDG’s predecessors, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The new President reversed these positions, and signaled his desire to resolve the Iranian issue through diplomatic rather than military means, a dilemma Bush had left unresolved. He framed these issues, as well as a drive for an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, as parts of a greater push to reinforce the international system after the ructions of the Bush years and to realize “the promise embedded in the name given to this institution: the United Nations.”3While Obama’s first UN speech was rapturously received, he soon discovered that achieving these grand goals would be very difficult. The 2009 Copenhagen climate summit, intended to deliver a binding deal on climate missions, made that abundantly clear. It descended into chaos and climaxed with Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hammering out a thin, face-saving statement with their Brazilian, Chinese, Indian, and South African counterparts. While some U.S. officials spun this as proof of the President’s diplomatic skills, the whole experience largely demonstrated how dysfunctional UN diplomacy had become. Obama is reputedly no fan of multilateral meetings, marveling at other leaders’ capacity to burble on ineffectually (former Argentine President Christina Kirchner is said to be the worst repeat offender in Obama’s book). If he and his team chose to stick with the UN after the Copenhagen debacle, it was out of diplomatic calculation rather than deep affection.But stick with the UN they did. In 2010, Obama’s first ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, hammered out a deal on new sanctions on Iran in the Security Council, overcoming deep-seated Chinese opposition.4 These measures paved the way for Tehran’s eventual willingness to agree to a nuclear bargain. While Rice developed fractious relations with many other ambassadors on the Security Council, leading some to joke that they were “Snow White and the Fourteen Dwarves,” she scored a further tactical coup by securing the resolution authorizing the Libyan intervention in March 2011, even if this arguably set in motion a serious strategic mistake.Behind the scenes, U.S. officials played a leading role in rebuilding climate diplomacy after Copenhagen, persuading China to make a crucial joint pledge on cutting carbon emissions in 2014. Continuing to differentiate itself from its Republican predecessors, the Administration also made its political support for the SDGs clear, arguing in the 2015 National Security Strategy (NSS) that sustainable development “will foster export markets for U.S. businesses, improve investment opportunities, and decrease the need for costly military interventions.”5 The NSS as a whole contains few direct references to the UN, but reasserts the Administration’s commitments to “international cooperation, burden sharing, and accountability.”6Nobody imagines that the Iran deal or the SDGs are perfect. The former sets far less firm restrictions on Tehran’s long-term nuclear ambitions than the U.S. government initially envisaged. The latter are a laundry list of 17 goals, ranging from “peaceful societies” to “quality education” encompassing 169 specific targets. American negotiators wanted a far pithier text. There were fears that the Paris climate deal would be equally convoluted and weak. Happily, the final document was rather sharper than expected, in part thanks to ruthless process management by the French hosts, but it is still thin. Governments have pledged to cut their carbon emissions, but the agreement does not contain enforcement mechanisms, and most scientists worry that the pledges aren’t enough to limit global warming to tolerable levels anyway.The President can nonetheless argue that this series of flawed bargains still validate his original decision to invest in the UN and multilateral diplomacy. Obama has characterized the Iran deal as an imperfect agreement that allows the U.S. government “to shape events in ways where it’s more likely that problems get solved, rather than less likely,” and a similar logic applies to the SDGs and climate change deal.7 Such big, rambling agreements are not going to solve the proliferation dilemma, poverty, or global warming alone. But they provide some foundation for the United States and other powers to tackle them in future. For a President who preaches the virtues of “strategic patience,” and has tried to explain the limits of American power, that is a modest but very real form of success.Looking back seven years to his first address to the General Assembly, therefore, President Obama might be tempted to murmur “mission accomplished.” He has admittedly made no progress on one issue he flagged in 2009, an Israel-Palestinian deal, but his multilateral efforts have more or less worked out on other fronts. Yet when the President visited New York for his latest General Assembly address in late September 2015, his tone was more dour than celebratory. He boasted of his success regarding Iran, but also warned: “Dangerous currents risk pulling us back into a darker, more disordered world.”8 It was clear that Russia’s military build-up in Syria was at the front of his mind. President Vladimir Putin, who addressed the General Assembly shortly after Obama, commandeered diplomatic attention with a swinging attack on America.The standoff between Obama and Putin, who went on to hold fruitless bilateral talks at Turtle Bay, was arguably the culmination of one particular American gamble at the UN that misfired badly. This was the Administration’s decision to put the UN at the center of its response to the Arab upheavals. In doing so, Washington gifted Moscow with huge diplomatic leverage in the Security Council, and set the stage for the crises now shaking UN humanitarian and peacemaking efforts in the Middle East and North Africa.When demonstrations began to spread through the Arab world in early 2011, it was not clear that the UN could have a major role in managing the consequences. The Obama Administration was initially wary of intervening in Libya and hoped to parlay with Russia over Syria through quiet bilateral channels. But, driven by its overarching desire to limit the U.S. role in the Middle East, the Administration turned to the UN for political cover for the Libyan intervention and to mediate in Yemen and Syria. This initially looked like a successful strategy: UN officials seemed to stave off all-out civil war in Yemen in 2011 and facilitated credible elections in Libya after the fall of Qaddafi. In early 2012, there seemed to be a decent chance that former Secretary-General Kofi Annan could defuse tensions with Moscow over Syria and usher Bashar al-Assad out of power.Instead, the region began to implode, leaving the UN and U.S. Administration floundering for answers. Assad repeatedly ignored and humiliated Annan and his successor, Lakhdar Brahimi. Libya fragmented, helping to destabilize Mali. The rise of the Houthi rebels in Yemen undid the UN’s best efforts to find a political settlement, precipitating a bloody and ill-managed Saudi intervention. Today, UN officials are still trying to bring the Syrian, Libyan, and Yemeni wars to a close. After multiple delays, they hashed out a ceasefire deal for Yemen and a compromise on a unity government in Libya in December 2015, in addition to some progress towards a Syrian transition. Yet no sober analyst of any of these conflicts believes that these agreements have great credibility: At best, they represent openings for more grinding diplomacy, similar to the UN’s endless efforts to end the Bosnian war in the early 1990s and its more recent struggle to establish viable peace in Darfur.In the meantime, poorly armed African peacekeepers are also patrolling northern Mali, where they regularly face ambushes and roadside bombings by Islamist insurgents. Al-Qaeda affiliates have kidnapped UN troops in the Golan Heights. While these incidents summon up memories of Rwanda and Bosnia, a much deeper crisis is slowly paralyzing the organization’s humanitarian operations. As the number of refugees and Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) worldwide has pushed past 60 million, agencies such as the World Food Program (WFP) and UNHCR have struggled to find the resources to keep on. In September, the WFP had to halt rations to a third of the Syrian refugees on its books. Although the EU eventually scraped together funds to bridge the gap, nutritionists estimate that the majority of Syrian refugee children are badly underfed.9 While European officials have scrambled to find even more cash for the Syrians in recent months, UN aid efforts in half-forgotten conflict zones such as South Sudan remain massively underfunded.The gradual collapse of UN humanitarian programming in the Middle East and Africa is contributing to the flow of refugees from Libya and Syria across the Mediterranean to Europe, and reducing the chances that the displaced will ever elect to head home. Antonio Guterres, the former Portuguese premier who stepped down as head of UNHCR this year (and currently hopes to be the next UN Secretary-General) has called the humanitarian system “financially broke” and “exhausted.”10If the UN faces a perfect storm in the Arab world, the one political beneficiary is Russia. Moscow has not only used its veto powers to stop the U.S. government and its allies from applying pressure on the Syrian regime through the UN, but also employed more subtle techniques to maintain a central place in negotiations over Syria’s future. As I have argued elsewhere, “Russia’s preferred tactics involve (i) entangling the West in fragile peace initiatives that have little genuine chance of success and rely on Moscow’s goodwill; (ii) dispensing more-or-less illusory concessions on minor issues to appear constructive; and (iii) sending dark signals that, unless it is listened to, it may go on a diplomatic rampage and start blocking Western proposals far more brutally.”11These tactics have served Russia well. Secretary of State John Kerry has repeatedly tried to resolve the Syrian war through talks with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov. The current UN envoy for the conflict, Swedish-Italian diplomat Staffan de Mistura, has little choice but to follow suite. A vicious cycle has emerged in diplomacy over Syria: Russia’s tactics have repeatedly caused the war to worsen; each time the situation deteriorates, Moscow steps up to suggest that it can ease matters through the UN, a ruse that President Putin perfected in 2013 with his offer to defuse the chemical weapons crisis. In the meantime, Moscow has coldly vetoed Western efforts to condemn its Ukrainian adventure in the Security Council.It remains possible, perhaps even probable, that the UN will have some part in ending the Syrian horror story, just as it once helped end Cold War conflicts in Cambodia, Afghanistan, and in the Iraq-Iran war. But nobody could argue that the Obama Administration’s efforts to put the organization front and center over Syria, or indeed other countries in the Arab world, has proved to be strategically sound.Turning to the UN over Syria offered the Obama Administration a counterfeit way to avoid these hard choices, but in the end it really only worked to postpone them.At some point soon, the Administration will most likely have to make major concessions to Russia over the future of Assad (a compromise that many European governments increasingly advocate), or if not Assad then at least his regime’s stranglehold on the country. And that is because Russia has put more skin in the game than has the Obama Administration. If the Administration resists that course, it may finally have to take steps to push Assad out, and so tumble into the conflict that Obama has devoutly tried to avoid. Whatever the ultimate outcome, the Syrian crisis has done deep harm to the UN’s political and operational credibility.The damage extends beyond the current day-to-day strains on the organization’s mediators and aid officials in the Middle East. Syria has precipitated a much greater breakdown of trust inside and outside the United Nations. Sunni Arab governments have come to see the UN as an enemy, serving a Russian agenda. In New York, there is a broader disillusionment with the Security Council’s failures in the Middle East and doubts about its future. A recent note by UN staff to the Council noted that Arab and African officials and analysts in particular “have questioned the relevance, credibility and legitimacy of the United Nations and its peace operations in maintaining peace and security in their respective regions.”12 Unless the UN can pull through the current crisis in the Arab world, its credibility will sink even lower.The UN has been through even worse periods of desuetude before. The U.S. administration of the day has often been partially responsible. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations enthusiastically used the UN to defuse Cold War crises such as Suez and the collapse of the Congo. Kennedy even considered asking a UN official in a Canadian plane to monitor the withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba in 1962. Moscow became profoundly suspicious of the UN, and placed firmer limits on the UN’s action from the mid-1960s onwards. At the end of the Cold War, President George H.W. Bush (himself a former U.S. Ambassador to the UN) invested heavily in the organization, paving the way for its catastrophic operation in Somalia.Even if the current crises facing the UN do not have quite such destructive consequences, the organization will need time to rebuild. This will mean overhauling its mediation and peacekeeping systems to manage future crises in the Middle East and North Africa more effectively, and parallel reforms to its ailing humanitarian agencies. Ban Ki-moon, who has less than one year left in office, has taken some steps in this direction, but he lacks the political and financial resources to achieve much in his lame-duck phase. Negotiations over his successor are just warming up: Whoever gets the job will have hard work to do in order to right the institution.The Obama Administration is doing its best to tee up these reforms. In September, it released a new policy document about the support of UN peace operations as part of a broader effort to “spread the burden” of dealing with fragile states globally.13 While Obama is entering the lame-duck phase of his own tenure, he has pledged to oversee a leaders’ meeting on the refugee crisis to coincide with his final appearance before the UN General Assembly next September (a separate UN summit on the state of the humanitarian system in May is another potential opportunity for action, but it has aroused little serious political interest and most aid experts and officials fear it will be a flop.) The President must be conscious that his policies in the Middle East have contributed much to the plight of organizations like UNHCR and WFP: However unintentionally, the U.S. has helped saddle them with responsibilities well beyond their means to cope. So he owes them a last boost before he exits.Obama’s last-ditch efforts to assist the UN will not, of course, do much good if President Putin continues to exploit the Security Council as a source of leverage over the West. There is no guaranteed plan to deter Putin, but there are small but real signs that China—which has grudgingly backed Moscow over Syria—is frustrated with the Russian President’s tactics. President Xi Jinping used his own appearance at the General Assembly in September to offer large amounts of money and peacekeepers to assist the organization.14 President Obama was clearly delighted by this display of Chinese supportiveness, just as he and Secretary of State Kerry have lauded China’s role in the Paris climate summit despite many last-minute frictions there. There are obvious geopolitical risks in giving China greater leverage over UN affairs, but the U.S. government and allies must hope that they can now isolate Moscow by collaborating more closely with China in New York.Equally, if the next occupant of the White House concludes that the UN is a bad bet, it may have a depressing effect on multilateral diplomacy not only over future conflicts but also over Obama’s legacy issues like the SDGs and climate change.Obama has shown that the U.S. government can still backstop complex international deals by using the UN, but his successor could very quickly undo this progress with a few dismissive remarks. President Obama had a clear view of what he planned to achieve at the UN when he took office, and he has achieved much of it. But it will ultimately fall to his successor to revive the organization after the Syrian disaster—or let it drift into irrelevance.

1Tom Miles, “U.N. and ICRC chide states for ‘paralysis’ in the face of conflict,” Reuters, October 31, 2015.

2Ted Cruz, comments at CNN Republican debate, September 16, 2015.3Remarks by the President to the UN General Assembly, September 23, 2009.4Trita Parsi, A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama’s Diplomacy With Iran (Yale, 2012), p. 161ff.5National Security Strategy of the United States, February 2015, pp. 17–18.6Ibid, p. 23.7Peter Baker, “Obama’s Iran deal pits his faith in diplomacy against skepticism,” The New York Times, July 15, 2015.8Remarks by the President to the UN General Assembly, September 28, 2015.9Harriet Grant, “Lack of food means Syrian children face ‘irreversible’ health issues says UN,” The Guardian, December 14 2015.10Antonio Guterres, Remarks to the International Peace Institute, November 20, 2015.11Richard Gowan, “Bursting the U.N. Bubble: How to Counter Russia in the Security Council,” European Council on Foreign Relations, June 30, 2015, p. 3.12Internal UN document, March 2015.13“United States support for UN peace operations” (memorandum for the heads of executive departments and agencies), White House press office, September 28, 2015.14For details see Richard Gowan, “Red China’s new blue helmets,” Order From Chaos, September 30, 2015.

Iranians Hack US Dam

Iranians hacked a dam not too far from New York City in 2013, according to new reporting from The Wall Street Journal on the breach, which remains classified. More:

Amid a mix of three-letter agencies, unclear Internet addresses and rules governing domestic surveillance, U.S. officials at first weren’t able to determine where the hackers had infiltrated, three of the people familiar with the incident said.

Hackers are believed to have gained access to the dam through a cellular modem, according to an unclassified Homeland Security summary of the case that doesn’t specify the type of infrastructure by name. Two people familiar with the incident said the summary refers to the Bowman Avenue Dam, a small structure used for flood control near Rye, N.Y.

The dam in question turned out to be fairly insignificant, in and of itself. But the larger problem it portends is very real. As fans of the movie The Dam Busters will recall, during the Second World War the Brits assembled a crack aviation team, armed with custom bombs, to demolish German dams in the Ruhr, flooding farmland and vital industrial sites and killing thousands. But now, you don’t need any of that: A computer operator can sit in an air-conditioned room in Tehran (or Moscow or Beijing) and open the floodgates remotely.

And as the Internet becomes more important economically and more and more pieces of infrastructure are connected to it, this kind of attack will likely play a bigger factor in national security debates. Unfortunately, right now our infrastructure is relatively poorly protected:

Many of the computers controlling industrial systems are old and predate the consumer Internet. In the early digital days, this was touted as a security advantage. But companies, against the advice of hacking gurus, increasingly brought them online in the past decade as a way to add “smarts” to U.S. infrastructure. Often, they are connected directly to office computer networks, which are notoriously easy to breach.[..]

The U.S. has more than 57,000 industrial-control systems connected to the Internet, more than any other country, according to researchers at Shodan, a search engine that catalogs each machine online. They range from office air-conditioning units to major pipelines and electrical-control systems.Security experts say companies have done little to protect these systems from would-be hackers.

It’s sad to say, but the Internet, once seen as a kind of innocent paradise, is going to become as full of trouble and strife as everything else. The invisible arms race continues as countries (and criminal syndicates and terror organizations) all over the world are rushing to militarize cyberspace.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., a debate that’s often presented as a binary choice between privacy and security will have to become more nuanced. Americans have a long and honorable tradition of resisting overly intrusive government. But when Iranians are hacking into local flood controls, the public is also going to demand a government that can protect them. Figuring out how to balance those two imperatives will be key to policymaking in the 21st century.[Update: The title and excerpt of this post originally referred to the hack as a “breach” and have been changed to clarify the electronic nature of the event]

A War We Deserve?

There is an old colloquialism amid the discourse in democratic political philosophy which holds that, most of the time anyway, a nation gets the government it deserves. Let’s spend a moment unpacking what this colloquialism means, and then another moment or two applying it to a pertinent case: the apparent reaction of the American people to the Islamic State, and how that reaction sheds light on who may become President in January 2017.

There is a certain moral poetry in the colloquialism, for it promises justice. If a nation is on the whole jealous in the protection of its liberty, it will get a limited government that respects its own democratically specified limits. This is the kind of republican government the Founders had in mind, and it seems to me that John Adams said it best: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” In other words, social regulation must be vested organically in society itself if government is to be properly and effectively light-handed. Adams may have had Edmund Burke’s famous admonition in mind as he wrote:

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites…. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon the will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

To punctuate the thought, then: If a nation is on the whole made up of individuals and families who are prudent, humble, modest, provident, and of a mind to be self-sufficient, it will get a government rich in such virtues as well. And if not, then not.

Things are not really so simple, of course. A benign social order can decay for reasons beyond the power of individuals or families to resist. And if that inner order and discipline should decay a great deal, the substituted soft despotism of the state, the coming of which Tocqueville foresaw, can be a evil less onerous than the injustices and indignities that the powerful may visit upon the weak. As far as citizen virtue and responsibility in a democracy are concerned, public issues can become so voluminous and complex, as the state fills the vacuum where a benign, more or less self-regulating social order once was, that such things as rational apathy and the logic of collective action can come to dominate the workings of government. When that happens, distortions of political economy are inevitable, trust in institutions eventually erodes, and an ambient anxiety can fill the very collective soul of a people.That, it seems to me, pretty much sums up the state of affairs in the United States today. Notwithstanding a good deal of misinterpretation and demagogy surrounding the growth of “inequality,” there is no question that we live in an age of plutocracy in which the American political economy has been structured to redistribute income and wealth upward. The impossible-to-understand convolution we call a tax code testifies to the fact, but the instruments of that upward redistribution are both subtler and more structurally insidious. A vague awareness of this reality goes far to explain why an avowed socialist still has a chance to win the Democratic Party’s nomination for President, and possibly even the election. The ambient anxiety that attaches to an unnamed sense that the system is “fixed” in such a way that honest, hard-working people cannot get an even break also goes far to explain why a know-nothing fear-and-loathing huckster has a chance to win the Republican Party’s nomination for President, and possibly even the election.Most pundits and supposedly sage observers label Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump “populists” as though the term were itself a dirty word. But populists will rise among democratically minded publics when responsible elites sell their birthrights for a pot of red lentils. Something like that happened in America’s Jacksonian upheaval some 150 years ago, it certainly happened in the first, post-Civil War gilded age, and it is happening again. Hold that thought, please.Americans, it seems, are afraid of the Islamic State. In the aftermath of the San Bernardino terrorist episode, following closely as it did on the Paris attacks of November 13, there now seems to be a popular—populist?—majority willing to send large numbers of American soldiers into the Levant to battle Caliph Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi and his legions. If people get the government they deserve, in democracies people also sometimes get the wars they deserve.My contention, however, is that the ambient anxiety that so many Americans feel about life at home today is the source of their fear of the Islamic State, not the other way around. In other words, I am positing a relationship between what usually passes as “domestic” affairs and what goes typically by the term “foreign” affairs. Of course, I am not alone in this. For example, H.W. Brands, in his barely pre-9/11 book The Strange Death of American Liberalism, argued that national security crises tend to raise Americans’ social trust in government. That allowed the civil rights movement to form in the cauldron of the Cold War. To simplify somewhat, no Cuban Missile Crisis, no Voting Rights Act. At first highly counterintuitive, the argument makes more sense the more one thinks about it. I am arguing a kind of converse thesis: that institutional decay and eroded trust at home are spilling over into perceptions of national security threats, creating an optic of existential danger where there is none.Do not misunderstand me: ISIS is dangerous, more so that one could reasonably have posited 18 months ago. But it is not an existential threat, just as al-Qaeda after 9/11 was obviously dangerous but also not an existential threat. No group of that kind, whether strictly terrorist like al-Qaeda or more of a hybrid like ISIS, is an existential threat short of its highly unlikely attainment of deliverable weapons of mass destruction. But a rattled American body politic scares easily nowadays for reasons about which it is largely not self-aware.Consider that fear of ISIS really got traction in the United States in the summer of 2014 thanks to the theatrically ghoulish beheading of two unfortunate American journalists who ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. The American mass media, always looking to exploit anxiety to gain market share, hyped the beheadings into an extravaganza of outrage. Not a few politicians on the make helped a lot, as well. But what actually happened? We would have been wise at the time—and we would be wise now—to try to understand events before working ourselves into an emotional froth over them.After ISIS erupted into our consciousness by seizing Mosul in June 2014, the U.S. government began bombing its formations in Iraq. ISIS was active in Iraq at the time, and only a bit in parts of Syria adjacent to the Iraqi border; ISIS leaders had not attacked American targets as such, and its spokesmen had made no threats against the United States. When James Foley and Steven Sotloff were arrested within ISIS-controlled territories, ISIS spokesmen demanded that the U.S. government cease bombing their members. ISIS leaders may well have wrongly believed that Foley and Sotloff were spies; conspiracy theories are not rare in that part of the world, and—even short of full-fledged conspiracy theories—minds such as those of salafi extremists do not assimilate well the concept of coincidences.So try to put yourself, hard as it may be, into the shoes of ISIS’s leaders. These are tribal people, and tribal people survive through concepts of shared responsibility and shared guilt. They unwittingly project their tribal frames of social reference onto societies that are not tribally organized (any more), just as we project our frames of reference onto them. Foley and Sotloff were, to them, members of the faraway tribe that started a blood feud by bombing them for no good reason as far as they could see, since they had not attacked or threatened us. By their reasoning, if they did not exact retribution for what they saw as unjustified aggression against them, they would appear to be weak, thus inviting further attacks. Remember that ISIS spokesmen specifically described the beheadings as retaliation for and warnings against further American air attacks.Again, don’t misunderstand: I am not exonerating ISIS for its barbarous behavior, and I am not trying to find excuses for it. I am merely trying to describe as objectively as I can how all of this looked from its point of view.The U.S. government did not take the warning. Indeed, the beheadings steeled President Obama into giving a speech on September 10 that announced a new, if highly desultory, air war against ISIS in Syria as well as Iraq. The eventual result of those attacks, and later French and British participation in them, was to evoke from ISIS, dateline Raqqa, threats against the source of those attacks—specifically, threats against France, Britain, and the United States. We may not like to hear such threats, but the ISIS leadership has acted no differently from any government or proto-government: Someone attacks you, you threaten to return the favor.One such attack took place in Paris on November 13, or seemed to. There is no question that the eight participants in the Paris attack were associated with ISIS. Some had been to, and been trained in, the caliphate. So far there is no evidence that anyone in Raqqa or anywhere else inside the caliphate gave an order to carry out the Paris atrocities. The eight terrorists seem to have organized and acted on their own, though clearly meaning to do so in ISIS’s name.Now let’s look at the San Bernardino attack. Here there is also no evidence whatsoever that anyone inside the caliphate initiated, organized, ordered, directed, or even knew about this impending attack. The two murderers clearly had been radicalized and started amassing weapons and explosives long before ISIS splashed into our consciousness in June 2014. Insofar as internet propaganda affected them, it was propaganda from a wide rage of jihadi sources. Moreover, they declared fealty to the Islamic State only after the attack. If the Paris attack was perhaps one or two degrees of separation from operational connectivity with ISIS, the San Bernardino attack was at least six or more. And yet, however irrational and bereft of evidence, the American people seem, if recent polls can be believed, to connect the tragedy directly to the machinations of the Islamic State.This inference replicates the emotion-propelled foolishness that followed 9/11, when large chunks of the American public insisted that Saddam Hussein was directly connected with the 9/11 attacks. Cognitive psychologists understand the phenomenon, which is fairly common: In a state of emotional arousal, people frequently conflate disparate threats into a single, monolithic target of their fear; and the less they know about these threats, the more likely they are to do so. A people prone to Manichaeism are prone to quickly jump to such conclusions, no less now than fearful Americans in early Cold War days were to see Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Yugoslav, and for that matter American communists as part of a monolithic conspiracy aimed at the beating heart of the United States.We Americans like our enemies to be very orderly and right-angled, apparently, even when (especially when?) they’re not. So a side effect of the obsession with and exaggeration of the Islamic State threat is to discount, downplay, and even forget about the threat to the region—and U.S. interests therein—of Iran and its various allies, satraps, and proxies. Most adult Americans know at least vaguely that in Syria today the humanitarian catastrophe of our time is unfolding in slow motion. The Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad is responsible for the deaths of more than a quarter of a million people, millions of refugees, twice as many millions of internally displaced people, and the children eating grass to survive the regime’s starvation sieges. Russia and Iran are trying to save this mass-murdering regime. And yet, if you ask the Americans who, the polls say, want to send the U.S. military to liberate Raqqa and Mosul who is responsible for the death of more innocents in recent years in Syria, my guess is that they will almost invariably say “ISIS.”The polls notwithstanding, I do not think that the Obama Administration is going to send the U.S. military in large numbers back into the heart of the Middle East. While the Administration has never had a coherent or effective strategy to deal with Syria or all of its various horrific emanations, in this particular judgment it is correct. The President’s giving in to media pressure after the beheadings, which characteristically evoked one of the most feckless displays of American military power ever, only fed the mania that now expresses itself so powerfully after San Bernardino. The right time for the President to have pleaded with the American people for patience and forbearance was late in the summer of 2014, not late in the autumn of 2015, by which point he should have devised a strategy that actually made sense.Alas, that was then and this is now. What’s done is done, and what’s gone sort of crazy is indeed sort of crazy. The Islamic State is not going to be extirpated within the year, and a new President will have to deal with it one way or another. I worry that the projectile fear that Americans are launching from deep within the home front to the Levant nowadays will in due course create a war that such irrationality deserves. I hope I’m wrong.

Taliban Rising?

Another crisis that the Obama Administration thought it had successfully relegated to the back burner appears to be furiously bubbling up again. Three rockets slammed into Kabul yesterday, according to Reuters:

Initial reports said one rocket had landed near Masoud Square close to the entrance to the U.S. Embassy, another hit the nearby area of Shirpur while a third landed further away near the city centre, Kabul police officials said.

Sirens could be heard in the area but no details were immediately available on any casualties or damage.The explosions took place hours after a suicide attack on a military patrol near Bagram air base killed six NATO soldiers, including Americans, and just over a week after an attack on a Spanish embassy guesthouse in the Afghan capital.

The Taliban has been consolidating its gains in the south of Afghanistan at a steady clip, having all but taken the city of Sangin in Helmand province in the past 24 hours. Most of the government buildings in the city, as well as the city’s bazaar, were overrun in an offensive yesterday after fighters besieged the city over the weekend. The police headquarters in the city was said to be holding out, but its defenders were low on ammunition and food. Around 60 American Special Forces and around 30 British SAS fighters have been in pitched combat in and around the city, with NATO airstrikes likely forthcoming.

When Obama came to office, he promised to pull out of Iraq and focus on fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, which he said was the necessary war, the one we needed to win. And yet Afghanistan is currently another example of the dangerous world Obama will leave behind. Unless things change pretty dramatically next year, some thick and urgent dossiers will await the next inhabitant of the Oval Office. The world the President is preparing to leave behind him increasingly doesn’t look like the one he promised on the campaign trail in 2008.

The Moral Crisis Behind Deutsche Bank’s Russia Scandal

Bloomberg has the latest on an ongoing internal investigation by Deutsche Bank, which has thus far found upwards of $4 billion in “suspicious trades” and an additional $6 billion in mirror trades, all connected with the bank’s Russian concerns. Some details:

The mirror trades, as described in a Russian central bank report earlier this year on Deutsche Bank, involved clients buying Russian shares for rubles in Moscow and simultaneously selling them in London, usually for dollars, according to people familiar with the central bank’s findings.

That sort of trade, while legal in some circumstances, can also be used to skirt U.S. rules on reporting large international movements of money.Assets in some of the accounts under review at Deutsche Bank were believed to belong to close associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin, people familiar with the matter have said. These associates include a relative of the president and two of his longtime friends, Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, the people said.

Russia’s central bank has slapped a derisory $5,000 fine on Deutsche Bank. Bloomberg, however, reported in August that U.S. prosecutors had launched an investigation, currently ongoing, into the mirror trades. Worried about Western prosecution, the bank has set over $1 billion aside in “litigation reserves,” even as it investigates itself to figure out just how much it has run afoul of the law. It has closed its Moscow branch in recent months, supposedly to “simplify operations,” and is now finally cutting back its Russia business as a whole.

In case it wasn’t yet fully apparent, this story underscores just how immense the scale of theft and fraud in Putin’s kleptocracy actually is. And these are not victimless crimes—far from it. The most powerful Russians are squeezing ordinary people dry. Despite the talk of Russian values and Russian nationalism, this regime is just as coldly indifferent as any Soviet commissar or Tsarist noble to the well-being of the average Russian citizen.And make no mistake, significant Western institutions have been corrupted by their close contacts with this sordid mafia operation disguised as a government. It is safe to apply the iceberg rule to this phenomenon: What we see is only a very small percentage of what is going on. If even a prime German bank and flagship company like Deutsche Bank is vulnerable to the sleazy temptations offered by Russian money, what do we think is happening across much of Europe?The contrast between the moralistic lectures, finger-wagging, and ostentatious dedication to high values that mark the rhetoric of the European Union on the one hand, and the sleazy indifference to corruption that characterizes much of the shadowy transactions of European elites on the other, isn’t remarked upon often enough. That Volkswagen and Deutsche Bank should be caught in such open acts of deception and fraud provides a window into the way the supposedly squeaky-clean German economy operates. What, then, do people think corporate governance might look like in Italy, Belgium, France, and Spain? Romania and Bulgaria? Cyprus and Greece?Some progress is being made in fighting corruption globally. U.S. prosecutors are making Herculean efforts to clean up international banking—much as they are trying to clean up international soccer. It is getting harder for the Putinistas to launder their money, and that’s a very good thing. More, please. And faster.But foreign prosecutions alone won’t be able to get the job done. The decline in the willingness of large German companies to observe basic standards of business ethics, and what is clearly a collapse of individual morality, point toward a more profoundly spiritual crisis, rather than merely an institutional one. Yes, regulators missed some dubious transactions. But the more important fact is that so many people were willing to sacrifice their personal integrity to participate in ugly and illegal schemes. It is not just that these people aren’t afraid of the regulators; they aren’t afraid of the consequences of breaking the moral law. When a country’s elite becomes so arrogant and so shortsighted that morality doesn’t matter to them anymore, bad things are coming. And instead of feeling smug about Europe’s challenges in this respect, Americans need to take a long, hard look in the mirror. We are losing touch with the values on which our national success depends.

Why Polarization Matters

What do we mean when we talk about polarization in American politics? It depends who’s doing the talking, but two basic guidelines can help us clarify the problem.

First, don’t imagine that polarization refers mainly to politicians behaving badly. Polarization is less a “them” problem than an “us” problem. The political scientist Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia puts it well: “So often blamed just on the politicians, polarization actually has its roots in us, the electorate.” It’s true that party activists are more polarized than average voters.1 But that fact doesn’t mean that polarization is simply or even primarily an elite or Washington, D.C.-centric phenomenon. It isn’t.And second, please don’t imagine that polarization is the same as strong disagreement. In a free society, people naturally have diverse and strongly held views. That’s normal and even desirable. Polarization involves something else, such that a good slogan is “Don’t polarize my disagreement!”So what exactly is polarization and why does it matter? Former TAI editorial board member James Q. Wilson once put it this way:

By polarization I mean . . . an intense commitment to a candidate, a culture, or an ideology that sets people in one group definitively apart from people in another, rival group. Such a condition is revealed when a candidate for public office is regarded by a competitor and his supporters not simply as wrong but as corrupt or wicked; when one way of thinking about the world is assumed to be morally superior to any other way; when one set of political beliefs is considered to be entirely correct and a rival set wholly wrong.

This phenomenon—having strong, personal, and emotionally charged negative feelings about those in the other political camp, or what scholars call affective polarization—has risen sharply in the United States in recent decades. For example, one study reports that the proportion of Americans who think members of the other party are “selfish” has more than doubled, from 21 percent in 1960 to 47 percent in 2008. Compared to 1960, Americans today are also far less likely to describe those in the other political party as “intelligent” and far more likely to say they would be displeased or unhappy if they had a child who married a member of the other party.2 Remarkably, a Pew survey in 2014 found that 27 percent of Democrats and 36 percent of Republicans currently view the other party as “a threat to the nation’s well-being.”

Americans are also now voting for an ideology with their feet. For example, a recent study suggests that rising rates of “ideological migration”—Americans relocating to areas where most other people share their political views—is contributing to both ideological segregation and polarization in U.S. society.3 For that and other reasons, we Americans are increasingly living in more ideologically homogeneous environments, in which both the people with whom we regularly interact and the media we regularly consume reflect and reinforce our political perspectives and biases. For example, in 1976, only about a quarter of U.S. voters lived in a county which a presidential candidate had won by a landslide margin. By 2004, that figure was nearly half.4In addition, research suggests that people in homogenous communities grow both more extreme and more certain in their political beliefs. As Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing put it in their 2008 book, The Big Sort, summarizing the results of a significant body of research on what scholars call “group polarization”:

Mixed company moderates; like-minded company polarizes. Heterogeneous communities restrain group excesses; homogeneous communities march toward the extremes.

Finally, whereas in previous high-conflict eras in the United States polarization tended to be rooted in only a few and often related issues—disputes over foreign alliances and the size of government around 1800, the National Bank in the 1830s, the split over slavery in the 1850s, the agrarian revolt and related currency disputes in the 1890s, the struggles over the New Deal in the 1930s and over Vietnam and civil rights in the 1960s—today’s polarization (in a trend that some scholars call “conflict extension”) appears to be much broader and more comprehensive, such that it seems to draw almost all issues (from educational standards to guns to climate research to foreign policy to church-state issues) into its maw. In short, political polarization in the United States today has become, by historical standards, less issue-specific and more generalized.

Critics of polarization, however, must recognize that it does have its advantages—and its defenders.Fundamentally, humans form in-groups (“us” in opposition to “them”) for purposes of protection and community, which in human evolutionary terms are adaptive—that is, they enhance chances of survival and success. And there is an arguably unavoidable price to pay for this adaptive strategy: Forming beneficial in-groups tends to foster intellectual habits such as binary thinking (consistently dividing phenomena into two mutually opposing categories) and negatively exaggerating and stereotyping the views of outsiders.Relatedly, being part of an in-group that defines itself at least in part as being against an out-group provides individuals with definite psychological benefits. It helps to create and intensify in-group friendships and provide a sense of belonging and status security. It can help to give life meaning and a sense of purpose. For these and other reasons, in-group solidarity can help reduce loneliness, stress, and anxiety. These are powerful and understandable attractions.Second, and from a different vantage point, recent research suggests that the degree of partisan animus in the U.S. now exceeds the degree of racial hostility.5 Isn’t that fact likely a sign of progress? Related to the apparently universal tendency to form in-groups, Edward O. Wilson observes that in all human groups there seems to be a “powerful urge to dichotomize, to classify other human beings into two artificially sharpened categories.” This urge should be consciously criticized and resisted, yet perhaps dichotomizing on the basis of political views is less socially harmful than dichotomizing on the basis of skin color or religion.Third, observers as far back as Tocqueville have complained of the ideological fuzziness and even incoherence that in many eras have characterized our two main political parties. When the effective choice facing voters is between Tweedledum and Tweedledee—when, as Alabama governor George Wallace famously put it decades ago, “there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference” between the two main parties—politics arguably becomes less meaningful. Conversely, coherent ideological frameworks competing with one another and sharply clashing issue agendas—which almost certainly foster polarization—might produce election results that more accurately reflect voter preferences, make it easier to hold politicians and parties accountable, and perhaps at times even unfreeze certain policy domains and make positive change more likely.Fourth, polarization can be a great mobilizing strategy. As one recent study concludes: “Increased negativity toward political opponents among the mass public is a promising development for those eager to mobilize the base of either party.”6Finally, if you are a strong proponent of unpopular views on issues that you view as critically important, what others fretfully call “polarization” may be exactly what you think the country needs most. Anti-slavery leaders in the 1830s and 1840s were widely viewed, in the North as well as in the South, as intemperate extremists and what we would now call polarizers. John Brown was viewed essentially as a terrorist, not without some justification. The same is true of numerous other expressions of American radicalism across the decades, from early calls for women’s suffrage to early calls for the right to bargain collectively, many of which today are widely lauded by respectable moderates as having helped to produce important social progress.Polarization has had its advocates on the Left and the Right, and it still does. On the Left, Saul Alinsky, the famous community organizer of the 1950s and 1960s who worked to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” taught polarization as a core goal and strategy of community organizing. Similarly, many social and religious conservatives today, given what they view as a choice between being called an extremist by liberal elites and being either co-opted or ignored, are more than willing to engage in polarization tactics as one of the necessary costs of being heard. A 2012 book by the conservative leader and writer Jeffrey Bell is entitled The Case for Polarized Politics.But to whatever degree we can tolerate and even at times have sympathy for the usages of polarization, it’s clear that polarization today in the United States—and in particular mass affective polarization—has become a major problem. We have far too much of it. It is crippling our politics, coarsening our culture, weakening our intellects, and making it harder to be good neighbors and good citizens. Let’s briefly enumerate its major harms.1. It produces policy gridlock.Especially at the national level, partisan rancor now dominates nearly every public policy issue and consideration. As a result, less and less gets done, as the actual work of legislating and policymaking is increasingly subordinated to the demands of permanent political warfare. One example: Each of the last two Congresses passed fewer than 300 laws, the fewest in modern history. By comparison, the widely criticized “do-nothing” Congress of 1947–48 passed 906 laws. While it’s true that the activism of a given congressional session cannot be construed as a measure of its wisdom or effectiveness, today’s level of polarization is clearly causing paralysis in our governance, in part by entrenching a “status quo bias” that can delay or prevent us as a nation from responding to new challenges, including major issues such as climate change, war and peace, and America’s role in the global economy.72. It degrades our public discussion.Why is our public discussion so dominated by rancor and divisiveness? Why do our politicians in their public utterances increasingly resemble silly children throwing food at each other? Why do our “news” programs on TV so often consist of people dealing out abuse and accusations at decibel levels most people would consider unspeakably rude were they to be heard in one’s home?Of all the manifestations of affective polarization, probably the hardest to miss for most Americans is the degradation of our public discourse. Mass affective polarization and hyper-partisanship are not the only causes of our coarser, dumbed-down public conversation. But they are important ones.3. It likely contributes to inequality.The rise of American economic and social inequality in recent decades has corresponded with the rise of political polarization, and some current scholarship suggests that there are at least some reasons to believe that the two trends are causally related and mutually reinforcing. For example, political partisanship today is increasingly correlated with income levels, resulting in a steadily widening rich-poor divide between the two main parties. The contest between Republicans and Democrats is in some respects increasingly one between the economic interests of higher-income Americans and those of lower-income Americans. More broadly, according to Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, “polarization in the context of American political institutions now means that the political process cannot be used to redress inequality that may arise from nonpolitical changes in technology, lifestyle, and compensation practices.”8 Whatever the exact nature of what McCarty and his colleagues call the “dance” of polarization with inequality, it seems clear that the two are locked in a kind of mirror relationship with one another. On the one hand is a steadily rising polarization that itself has socio-economic dimensions, and on the other is a steadily widening gap between upscale, college-educated Americans and everyone else, producing what observers as diverse as Charles Murray on the Right and Robert Putnam on the Left agree is the nation’s most disturbing social problem.It may be unrealistic to expect that depolarization by itself could cause a reduction in inequality. But it is at least plausible to expect that, just as these two trends have risen together, they may fall together as well.4. It segregates us.Polarization separates and divides us. Of course, not all forms of separation are harmful—it is at least arguable, as Robert Frost concedes, that “good fences make good neighbors”—but the segregating effects of American affective polarization, which now even include growing residential and geographical segregation, are almost certainly socially harmful, in part because they produce social echo chambers in which people increasingly rarely befriend or even personally encounter someone who disagrees with their political views, and in part because ideological segregation is the proven ally of ideological certitude and extremism.Depolarization is integrative. It desegregates. Frost again: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,/ That wants it down.”5. It undermines trust.Trust is the indispensable social glue that helps make possible the rule of law, effective governmental institutions, a thriving civil society, and economic dynamism. Robert J. Sampson, for example, finds that mutual trust is a critical component of what he calls “collective efficacy.”9 On many key indicators of well-being, high-trust societies do better than low-trust societies. In recent decades social trust appears to have declined significantly in the United States.Polarization reduces social trust at two levels. First and most obviously, polarization magnifies mistrust of government. Current mistrust of government in the United States has multiple sources, but several scholars have argued that “a primary consequence of polarization is that it undermines citizens’ trust in the capacity of government to solve problems.”10 It’s probably more than a coincidence that extremely high levels of polarization in Congress today coexist with extremely low levels of public trust in Congress.Second and arguably most consequentially, polarization magnifies mistrust of each other. One recent study concludes that, since the mid-1980s, trust in others in America has “declined dramatically.” Part of the reason has to do with “generational replacement,” as “more trusting generations of Americans have been dying and being replaced by younger, less trusting Americans.”11 Another recent study reports: “Trust in others and confidence in institutions, two key indicators of social capital, reached historic lows among Americans in 2012 in two nationally representative surveys that have been administered since the 1970s.”12 Polarization is not the only contributor to this trend, but it is a significant factor.Tragically, the loss of trust in others traceable to polarization appears to be a similar process, writ large, to what happens during a couple’s divorce. As Joseph Hopper and other researchers have pointed out, a divorce tends to be an intensely polarizing process.13 Trust ebbs. Anger grows. During the course of—and as a result of—the process of separation, each spouse’s views of both the present and the past tend to harden and become more extreme and one-dimensional. For example, the view that blame or responsibility for the marriage’s breakdown is mutual tends to be replaced by the view that all or nearly all blame or responsibility for the breakdown rests with the other spouse. Quite often, the once-firmly held view that “we fell in love and had a good marriage” at least for a while is replaced by the view that “it was never a good relationship, it was wrong from the beginning.” That is what polarization looks like, up close and personal. In divorce, the polarization is often strong enough to help produce a new way of seeing other people and of experiencing the world. As Bob Dylan writes, describing his own divorce: “I can’t feel you anymore, I can’t even touch the books you’ve read.”14Separation typically polarizes and polarization magnifies the consequences of the separation. And arguably the deepest consequence of this dynamic process, for both the couple that splits and for the society that splits, is the loss of trust.6. It thwarts empathy.The word “empathy” came into the English language in the early 20th century as a translation of the German word “Einfuhlung,” which means “feeling into.” The word began largely as an aesthetic term, as philosophers struggled to explain why works of art, or scenes of nature, can move us emotionally. Today we typically use the word to mean the capacity to identify emotionally with another person’s situation and feelings. Discussing the related concept of sympathy in 1759, Adam Smith wrote that “it is by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to conceive or be affected by what he feels.” That’s also a lovely description of empathy.Scholars seeking to understand the qualities of wisdom consistently report that empathy—putting oneself in the other person’s shoes—is a key pathway to wisdom.Polarization in general, and affective polarization in particular, are enemies of empathy. Polarization involves negatively exaggerating the views of others—an intellectual pursuit that in two ways undermines empathy. First, why would you even want to engage empathetically with people whom you view collectively as despicable, untrustworthy, or incomprehensibly alien? Second, even if you did decide to engage, how well are you likely to succeed if you begin the process surrounded by a self-constructed protective barrier—a kind of intellectual, ethical, and emotional firewall—which in your view is usefully separating good from bad, right from wrong, desirable from undesirable? Someone in thrall to polarization needs empathy like a fish needs a bicycle.Conversely, of the intellectual trends that encourage polarization, one of the most important is the belief that society is divided into two mutually incompatible groups—the group of me and those like me who stand for truth, justice, and virtue, and those not like me who stand for the opposite. Probably the most powerful antidote to this increasingly popular but deeply wrongheaded way of seeing the world is empathy.Finally, more empathy in society not only corresponds with less polarization, it also almost certainly means more wisdom, which in turn helps to make us better family members, neighbors, and citizens.7. It weakens our intellects.An antonym of empathy is “misunderstanding,” and the misunderstanding that necessarily accompanies affective polarization is, among its other qualities, an intellectual deficiency that for practical purposes is akin to a handicap. Polarized thinking is almost always distorted thinking—the mental equivalent of looking in a fun-house mirror while believing that you’re not. Like all forms of distorted thinking—for example, believing that I am at the center of the universe, or that my racial group is superior to all others—the errors of thought corresponding to polarization directly threaten intellectual rigor and integrity. That some smart people today are also polarized thinkers does not change this fact.8. It lowers the caliber of our citizenship.In his famous Federalist essay no. 55, James Madison asks whether there “is sufficient virtue among men for self-government.” Madison’s answer is a qualified yes. But the issue worries and engages him, in large part because when it comes to “qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence . . . republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.”We should take heed. What self-government presupposes and fundamentally depends upon is precisely what polarization corrodes. Less trust in our political institutions and in each other. Less empathy. More separation. More inequality. More anger. Poorer thinking. Dumber public discourse. Stuck politics. Together, these fruits of American polarization reflect nothing less than the diminishment of our civic capacity. Few problems we face are more dangerous than this one.It’s time for a new direction, a fresh breeze. The paradigm of polarization that dominates our politics and, increasingly, our society is clearly failing us. Left to continue, it will cause us great harm—and not for the first time.In late 1862, at a time in which affective polarization was probably at the highest level in our history, Abraham Lincoln wrote in a message to Congress: “As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”American depolarization in the decades ahead will require a similar undertaking. First and foremost we must “think anew.” In our public conversation and in our public deeds, we must also “disenthrall” ourselves from the long-developing habits of heart and mind that now threaten our national experiment in ordered liberty. The success of that experiment may depend on it.

1See Morris P. Fiorino, “America’s Missing Moderates: Hiding in Plain Sight,” The American Interest (March/April 2013) and Didi Kuo, “Polarization and Partisanship” The American Interest (November/December 2015).

2Shanto Iyengar and Sean J. Westwood, Fear and Loathing Across Party Lines: New Evidence on Group Polarization (Working Paper, June 2014).3Matt Motyl, et. al., “How ideological migration geographically separates groups,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (March 2014).4Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing, The Big Sort (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008).5Iyengar and Westwood, Fear and Loathing Across Party Lines.6David C. Kimball, Bryce Summary, and Eric C. Vorst, “Political Identity and Party Polarization in the American Electorate,” paper presented at the conference “The State of the Parties: 2012 and Beyond,” Akron, Ohio, November 7, 2013. These authors conclude that today “followers of both parties express increasing levels of fear and contempt toward the opposite party and its presidential candidates, with the 2012 election cycle producing record levels of out-party demonization.”7See Michael Barone, “The Gridlock Myth,” The American Interest (November/December 2010).8Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches (MIT Press, 2006).9Robert J. Sampson, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (University of Chicago Press, 2012).10McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal, Polarized America.11April K. Clark, Michael Clark, and Daniel Monzin, “Explaining Changing Trust Trends in America,” International Research Journal of Social Sciences (January 2013).12Jean M. Twenge, W. Keith Campbell, and Nathan T. Carter, “Declines in Trust in Others and Confidence in Institutions Among American Adults and Late Adolescents,” Psychological Science (October 2014).13Joseph Hopper, “The Rhetoric of Motives in Divorce,” Journal of Marriage and the Family (November 1993).14Bob Dylan, “Idiot Wind,” 1974.

US Gas Prices Dip Below $2

American drivers, rejoice! The average U.S. gas price yesterday dropped below $2 per gallon for the first time in six years. The Hill reports:

The average gas price on Monday morning was $1.998 per gallon, [said AAA], or about 41 cents cheaper than one year ago. The last time prices were this low across the United States was March 25, 2009.

Gas prices traditionally fall during the winter months because people use less fuel. But AAA said they are particularly low this year because of high gasoline supplies and low oil prices around the world. The group expects the low prices to last through at least January before rising later on in the winter. Prices could drop further, however, if crude oil remains low.AAA said the average price of a gallon of gas may not go above $3 per gallon next year due to low crude oil prices and high supplies.

So what’s behind these discounts at the pump? Domestically, we can look to shale production for some explanation: U.S. oil production is averaging well over 9.3 million barrels of crude per day so far this year, a far cry from the 2000s when daily output generally stayed between 5 and 6 million barrels per day. Fracking has bolstered American oil production, which has in turn helped bring down the prices of refined petroleum products like gasoline.

Of course, American shale firms aren’t the only producers contributing to what today is a considerably oversupplied global oil market. OPEC’s petrostates have kept output up in the face of falling prices, as has Russia (recently nearing post-Soviet highs). And with China’s slowing economy weakening global demand, oil prices have plunged from a high in June 2014 of more than $115 per barrel down to just $36.17 today.Cheap oil has plenty of geopolitical consequences, but it affects average Americans, too. As drivers take to our nation’s highways to visit family this holiday season, they’ll be spending less on gas than they have since 2009. It’s hard not to read that as good news.