Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 56

Revolution in China. Again.

Mao Zedong made the first modern Chinese revolution. He imposed Communist Party control on all aspects of Chinese life, centralized power in Beijing, and created a cult of personality around himself. Central planning rather than market principles governed Chinese economic life. Toward other countries Maoist China proclaimed its intention to foment communist revolutions, but in fact largely cut itself off from the rest of the world.

After Mao’s death his successor, Deng Xiaoping, presided over a second revolution, which set a different course. The Party relaxed its grip on the society and, in its wake, partly-independent organizations came into existence. Market practices largely replaced central planning and private enterprises appeared. China opened itself to the world, welcoming foreign capital, foreign firms, and foreigners coming to do business and, in the other direction, sending abroad Chinese tourists, students, and a wide range of products made in China.

Xi Jinping, the supreme Chinese leader since 2012, has brought yet a third series of major changes. The Party has reasserted control over much of Chinese life and publicly exalted the leader in ways not seen since the Maoist period. The state has increased its direct involvement in the Chinese economy. While continuing and in some ways broadening its engagement with the world, China has adopted a more expansive and, on occasion, even a belligerent approach to its home region, in contrast with Deng and his successors.

The motive for China’s first two modern revolutions was clear in each case. Mao was a convinced Marxist-Leninist, although by Western standards an eccentric one, emphasizing as he did the revolutionary role of the peasantry rather than the social class Marx had designated for this distinction: the proletariat. Mao aspired to create communism, as he understood it, in China. Deng sought to undo the damage that Mao’s violent political campaigns—especially the last of them, the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s—had done to the country. He wanted above all to address China’s greatest problem, its mass poverty, by promoting economic growth.

The motive for Xi Jinping’s efforts to transform the country are less apparent. The China in which he inherited power was, to all appearances, doing very well: achieving rapid economic growth, providing ever-greater opportunities for its citizens, and enjoying a high and rising reputation in the international community. Why has he felt the need to make major changes, indeed to drag China back toward—although certainly not all the way to—the Maoist patterns of governance and foreign policy?

The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State by Elizabeth Economy, a thorough and informative account of China’s recent past and present, provides the basis for an answer to that question. The author is the C. V. Starr Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, and her book is one of a series of timely and valuable volumes on international politics and foreign policy from the Council’s Studies Program. From her book the reader learns that while China may have appeared to the rest of the world to be flourishing, Xi, upon taking power, confronted what he saw as major threats to a feature of Chinese life to which he assigns the greatest value: the continued rule of the Chinese Communist Party. His own version of a Chinese revolution may be understood as having as its purpose the vanquishing of those threats.

One such threat comes from the corruption that, as Minxin Pei has shown, has become integral to the way the Party and the government function. Xi launched a major campaign against corrupt officials that has led, by one estimate, to the dismissal and even imprisonment of more than 1.3 million of them. The campaign amounts to a war by the leadership against significant elements of the Communist Party. In war, power tends to concentrate in the hands of the leadership, and that is what has taken place in China.

Western ideas and values, the political foundations of the Western democracies with which China has had increasing contact since Deng’s revolution, also threaten the communist monopoly of power. Xi has therefore moved to ban them from universities and keep them out of the media. Perhaps the greatest threat of this kind comes from the internet, which disseminates ideas more widely and more rapidly than any other medium. A large fraction of China’s immense population has access to the internet, and some Chinese have used it to organize public demonstrations of the kind that the Party seeks to prevent. The Xi regime has therefore created a vast system of internet censorship, employing an estimated 2 million people to suppress the transmission of impermissible information as well as to make the internet, like official newspapers, magazines, and radio, a vehicle for Party propaganda.

China’s heavily polluted air and water pose yet another threat to communist rule: people tend to lose respect for authorities whose policies are literally poisoning them. Xi has made the reduction of pollution a high priority. This, too, has led to the gathering of more power into his own hands: local authorities often fail to enforce the country’s anti-pollution laws because they gain financially from polluting industries.

Since Xi’s assumption of power, China has conducted a more aggressive foreign policy. Abandoning Deng’s injunction to proceed cautiously beyond China’s borders and emphasize its peaceful international intentions, China has trumpeted its status as a major power, accelerated the expansion of its armed forces, especially its navy, claimed as its own sovereign territory much of the western Pacific—against the competing claims of other Asian countries and contrary to international law as interpreted by the World Court—and built artificial islands in the South China Sea on which it has installed military facilities.

This newly assertive Chinese foreign policy stems from a deeply-rooted Chinese nationalism, which regards Chinese domination of East Asia as natural, normal, and just, based on the many centuries during which the Middle Kingdom held just such a position. It also stems, however, from Xi’s felt need to bolster the Communist Party’s standing among those it governs, by identifying the regime with the recovery of China’s rightful place in the region and the world. Nationalism remains a potent political sentiment in China as elsewhere, and the foreign policy on which Xi has embarked offers a way to tap it to strengthen Party rule. It also offers a way to generate hostility to the West, the source of the values that threaten that rule. The Chinese leadership blames the West (rightly) for weakening China in the nineteenth century and (wrongly) for trying to stifle China’s rise in the twenty-first.

Xi Jinping’s two revolutionary predecessors achieved their goals. Mao Zedong did create communism in China.  Deng Xiaoping did make possible the remarkable expansion of China’s economy. Will Xi enjoy comparable success?  That is far from clear.  Mao made the concept of contradictions– conflicts between and among different forces and different goals, even within the Communist Party itself – central to this political thought, and Xi’s new policies risk saddling the country with two very large ones.  The policies he has adopted to cope with the threats he perceives, that is, may well create new, different, and perhaps even more serious challenges to the communist regime.

The foremost goal of China’s government remains continued rapid economic growth, but the leadership recognizes that achieving this will require major changes.  The strategy that brought double-digit annual increases for the better part of three decades, which has included the large-scale movement of people from farms to factories, a major Chinese role in assembling the component parts of products designed and sold elsewhere, and creating demand for its output through ever-increasing investment and exports, has reached its limit. Now China must rely more heavily on upgrading the skills of its urban workers, sustaining demand through domestic consumption, and especially on innovation to generate new and more sophisticated products.  To this end the government is committed to making huge investments in technologically advanced fields such as artificial intelligence.

The kind of innovation on which the regime is basing its hopes, however, requires individual initiative, freedom from government controls, and the uninhibited flow of information. These are precisely the activities that the Xi program seeks to eliminate. The effort to acquire Western products while keeping out Western values—to have the hardware without the software of the West—has a long and not particularly successful history in China. In the twenty-first century, as well, Xi’s economic aspirations may prove to be incompatible with his political program.

Similarly, the Xi Jinping foreign policy may in the end diminish China’s power both in its region and globally. The country’s new assertiveness has, as Edward Luttwak has noted, alarmed its neighbors. They have, in response, begun to increase both their own defense spending and their military cooperation with one another. Deng and his successors reassured other countries, who welcomed the economic benefits of China’s remarkable rise. Xi has forced them to contemplate the political and military dangers that a resurgent China poses.

If Xi’s program has the unintended consequences of slowing growth and increasing international hostility, the obvious way to  reverse these trends is to make China the kind of country its current leader is devoting himself to preventing it from becoming. An open, tolerant China that protects the free flow of information and restricts the power and reach of the government within its borders, and that cooperates with rather than threatening its neighbors, would be able to bring the country peace and prosperity.

That is the kind of China that, as James Mann has written, Western countries believed, or at least hoped, Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, when extended and expanded, would ultimately create. When Xi Jinping came to power he steered it in a different, in fact in the opposite, direction.

Still, history takes unexpected turns, and China’s history is not finished. It is not impossible that the country will sharply change direction yet again and resume the path toward the embrace of Western values and the establishment of Chinese versions of Western institutions that it seemed to many to be following between the end of the 1970s and the second decade of the twenty-first century. That is what the West believed China’s next revolution would be. Perhaps that belief was not wrong but merely premature. Perhaps, in the fullness of time, the creation of a more liberal, democratic country will turn out to be not China’s third modern revolution, but rather its fourth.

The post Revolution in China. Again. appeared first on The American Interest.

The Problem with No Name

“We have now sunk to such a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”

 – George Orwell (1939)

Something about life in modern democracies really bothers people. Let’s call it the Problem that Has No Name. There are many theories about what the problem really is. The most popular involve wage stagnation, inequality, globalization, capitalism, the digitalization of the economy, social media, immigration, the disappearance of traditional venues for social life, the transformation of gender roles, the decline of religion. Some combination of these things infuriates people.

Whatever the problem really is, obviously it is complex. But the world around, voters have recoiled from the idea that their problems are complex. In one democracy after another, voters have decided the best person to solve these problems would be a brutish authoritarian.

Whatever the problem really is, it is either caused by, or the cause of, a blackout of rational thinking. The Gilets Jaunes embody this.

The General Narrative

No one formally speaks for the Gilets Jaunes, but a narrative about what’s bothering them has emerged. Their pouvoir d’achat—their purchasing power—has declined. Their taxes are too high and they receive too little money from the government. They resent a reduction in the speed limit. The word they use again and again is colère: rage. They can’t stand Emmanuel Macron. They say he’s the President of the rich. They want him to resign. They want direct democracy, the ability to vote for specific referenda, rather than a political candidate who represents them.

Many of these claims ring strange on closer inspection. The desire for direct democracy does not seem to match their interest in policy details. In this typical interview, Frederique Solivo, 39, says he is protesting because he’s fed up with high taxes and not knowing where his tax money goes. “Where is the money going?” The answer is no mystery. The French budget is transparent and detailed. But clearly studying it wouldn’t satisfy him. So it cannot be his real question. What is his real question? I don’t know.

Conspiracy websites catering to the Gilets Jaunes are worth perusing, not for news, but for insight into their mental apparatus. A rumor has swept through the Gilets Jaunes that Macron plans to hand the Alsace and Lorraine back to Germany. Another holds that Putin has banned all Rothschild Banks in Russia, causing economic growth there to soar. The Benalla scandal has only grown worse in recent weeks, which is contributing somehow to the colère. Benalla, it seems, not only had but retained two—no, five—diplomatic passports, and a top-secret defense phone, and used at least one of those passports to travel to Chad in advance of Macron’s recent trip. Benalla clearly enjoys humiliating Macron. When Macron most needs to project authority, Benalla leaks. He has told the press that he is still in contact with the President; indeed, that Macron has asked him for advice about the Gilets Jaunes. Benalla says he has copies of the text messages that prove it. “They can never deny it,” he says, “they” being the Élysée. “All these exchanges are on my cellphone.” What do they talk about? “We talk about different topics […] We might talk about the yellow vests, about so-and-so, about security issues. You know, ‘What do you think about things?’” Benalla obviously delights in Macron’s agony. He has denounced Macron’s entourage as “technocrats who belong to a family worse than the mafia, where everything goes, and everyone owes their career to each other.”

What can Macron say? It is an insalubrious situation, politically and morally, that makes it difficult for the government to establish epistemic authority. It reinforces every conspiracy theory the Gilets Jaunes can imagine. If everyone can see that Benalla and the President are mixed up in some unspeakable way, why would they believe the government when it says, “No, the world isn’t run by 1,000 Jewish families?”

At the beginning of the Benalla affair, Macron took responsibility for the scandal. “Let them come for me,” he said of his critics. He did not mean this literally, but now, whenever he leaves, the protests and the violence follow him. On January 13, launching her campaign for the European elections in May, Le Pen announced—in a clear reference to this comment: “We’re here.”

Like Benalla, the Gilets Jaunes seem very much to want to see the President humiliated. They claim that the President has condescended to them with disrespectful comments. They want vengeance: nothing short of Macron’s resignation, they say—and that of his whole government—will satisfy them. It does not occur to them that Macron’s humiliation is their humiliation, is France’s humiliation. This is part of the blackout of rational thinking.

“It Doesn’t Get Better”

Their anger does not correlate with economic facts. Never in French history have so many French men and women been so wealthy and so healthy. They are better fed, housed, and clothed than ever before. They live 20 years longer, on average, than they did at the beginning of the Fifth Republic.

After centuries of intermittent war, including two world wars, France has been at peace for six decades. It is one of the world’s wealthiest countries. France’s economy is the seventh largest; only three (the United States, Japan, and China) have more companies in the Global 500 rankings. Of the world’s very wealthy countries, its welfare system is the most generous. The French enjoy the shortest working week, the earliest retirement, and the best health care system in the developed world. Last year, France’s per capita GDP was U.S. $43,800—an all-time high for France. That is 337 percent higher than the world average.

But what about purchasing power, the pouvoir d’achat? It is also at a record high: U.S. $38,605.67. The inflation rate in France is low, and has been declining for several years.

What about inequality? France is enjoying the highest median standard of living in its history.

If the world’s wealth were to be redistributed from the rich to the poor, every last Gilet Jaune would become significantly poorer. Life expectancy at birth in France is now 83 years, exceeded only by Japan. In the past 20 years alone, women have gained 3.2 years in life expectancy, men 5.2 years. France’s literacy rate is 99 percent. Disposable household income in France is rising, not falling. (When I first came to work in France in 1986, I had neither a private toilet nor a phone; the only kind of phone available—though I couldn’t get one—was a rotary dial.) Only one country, Switzerland, has a cleaner environment. Any reasonably compiled list of “best countries to live in,” using any reasonable metric, will put France in the top ten, or perhaps the top five. I tried to explain the complaints of the Gilets Jaunes to a Turkish-American friend who moved here recently with her then-boyfriend, a refugee from Syria. “Are they insane?” she said. It’s a fair question.

In a satirical treatment filmed at a Carrefour supermarket, a Gilet Jaune marches stolidly before the camera, then unburdens himself of his discontent. “At the end of the month,” he says, his wife by his side, “I have to pay the rent, and the gas, and the electricity, and the insurance, and the food, and the car”—his wife begins to look uneasy—“and my wife’s car, and the iPhone, and my children’s iPhone, and gifts for Noël, and the contractor for the renovations,” whereupon his wife says: “Jean, shut up.”

A Psychological Issue

Is Macron the President of the rich? Is he arrogant and aloof? Perhaps. But that didn’t stop people from voting for him.

Josiane Joliy, 62, says, “Our spending power is the most important issue. I live on €480 a month and I can’t afford to go out and socialize. I’m lonely but luckily I have the internet, which sometimes feels like my only friend.” That seems more honest than the comment about not understanding where taxes are going. In this respect, the Gilets Jaunes have already solved their problem: loneliness. Getting together every Saturday meets needs that have gone unmet, not for greater “purchasing power,” but for companionship and a sense of purpose.

The Gilets Jaunes’ complaints are incoherent because they do not, truly, have a complaint that the government could possibly solve. They are consumed by resentment and the sense that other people are having a better time than they are. Getting together once a week to be a cheerful mob is an end in itself. They love their Saturday get-togethers. They are like play-dates.

The colère makes much more sense if we assume that the issue is psychological, not economic. But that doesn’t mean this can go on. They are having this fun at the expense of the rest of France, and the rest of Europe, as well. 

Disorganization as Strategy

The Gilets Jaunes insist they are apolitical and disorganized. No one speaks for them. They have no internal elections. They do not support a political party. The French police, however, say there is “nothing amateurish” about them; they believe the ostensible disorganization of the movement is strategic. The protesters aim, the police say, to “shake up the rules, destabilize the Republic and create the conditions for an insurrection.” The movement has been entirely infiltrated, according to the police, by red-brown thugs who evade their surveillance by communicating on encrypted networks before setting the streets on fire.

Accidental or strategic, disorganization and violence have served them well. The violence has forced the media and government to focus on their demands, even if they do not, formally, have demands. Their disorganization makes it impossible to discredit them. No matter what someone does in their name, others will say, “That doesn’t really represent the Gilets Jaunes.”

Some members have naturally emerged as media favorites. They babble away on television and they are clearly nuts. Nothing they say makes sense. They think the government staged a terrorist attack in Strasbourg to deflect attention from them. They threaten to withdraw all their money from the banks, simultaneously, to cause the banking system to collapse, even as they claim they haven’t enough money to make ends meet. They are obviously confused about banking; quite a number believe that bankers run the world, and of course the banks are controlled by Jews.

No matter how nutty their opinions, the movement can’t be held accountable to itself or the public. No one need accept responsibility for the deaths, the injuries, the death threats, the rape threats, the attacks on journalists, the lunatic conspiracy theories, or the French parents who have been unable, for weeks now, to take their kids to the park on Saturdays. Their appearance of disorganization permits everyone in France to project their fantasies upon them, encouraging militants on the far Left and far Right to believe, sincerely, that the Gilets Jaunes’ emergence confirms their ideology, even in the face of contrary evidence. Radical environmentalists have persuaded themselves that a movement triggered by a carbon tax is in fact on their side, and thus their new slogan: “End of the Month, End of the World: Same Cause, Same Enemy.”

Useful Idiots

If the mass of the Gilets Jaunes have no firm ideas, politically or economically, nor an allegiance to a political party, France’s political radicals certainly do. The Gilets Jaunes are fertile minds and very useful idiots. The shared goals of France’s far Left and far Right are to end the European Union, realign France with Russia, and destroy NATO. Under normal circumstances, American headlines would read, “Backed by Vladimir Putin, France’s far Right and far Left have joined forces violently to destroy the French Republic.” That is not an exaggeration, but such matters no longer seem to rank as news in the United States. Americans would traditionally consider a threat to France contrary to our ideals and interests, but we are distracted these days.

Repeatedly, in France, over decades, the extreme Left and Right have been crushed at the ballot box. Under normal circumstances, both are persistently irritating but marginal forces here. The rise of the Gilets Jaunes has presented extremists who have been unable to win power at the ballot box with a tempting opportunity to seize it on the streets. They are working together, and not at all tacitly, to exploit the Gilets Jaunes. Both the far Right and far Left believe they will be the ultimate beneficiaries of this convergence des luttes: the convergence of struggles.

In democracies, elections are meant to settle the question, “Who rules?” France’s two traditional parliamentary parties crumbled in the Spring 2017 parliamentary elections. Macron’s coalition won 60.7 percent of the seats in the National Assembly, and finished first in 451 of 577 constituencies. Marine Le Pen’s far-Right Front National did poorly, finishing first in only 20 constituencies. The parliamentary Left alliance, led by the Socialist Party, took first place in 23 constituencies; the Right alliance, led by the Republican Party, won first place in 67. Le Pen has since re-named the far-Right party the National Rally. Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-Left movement, La France Insoumise, was even more decisively rejected by the electorate. The people spoke, and they voted for a young, aloof technocrat with a weird marriage.

Mélenchon and Le Pen, egged on by Russia and Italy, are racing to harness the discontent expressed by the Gilets Jaunes to discredit the elected government. This is fair game in a democracy. But they are also attempting to exploit the Gilets Jaunes’ shocking violence to discredit the Fifth Republic tout court and undermine its system of representative democracy. This is not.

Russia, of course, is involved. Russian media, trolls, and bots are working assiduously to “accelerate the contradictions.” The Gilets Jaunes say that the only source of news they trust is Russia Today. The pipeline between Putin and the far Right in the United States is also well-greased. It is painful to read the comments about these events on Breitbart.

It’s a political platitude that the far Left and the far Right are not, like north and south, at opposite poles, but rather at the same end of a spectrum. Far-Left ideologues are much more easily converted to the far Right than centrists. We’re again seeing the ease with which this happens. Djordje Kuzmanovic, until recently Mélenchon’s right-hand man on matters of defense and diplomacy, has just embraced the National Rally: “The traditional Left,” he explains (by which he means La France Insoumise), “can’t win democratically; even in the best of scenarios, only 30 percent of the electorate would support it.” There is, he says, a “hierarchy of struggles.” At the top the hierarchy is leaving NATO, opposing the United States, engaging Putin and Assad, leaving international trade pacts, regaining France’s “sovereignty,” and rejecting capitalism. If the far Right is a more effective vehicle for achieving these goals, he reasons, then the Left will have to “postpone” its other demands.

In response to Macron’s speech of December 10, in which he effectively capitulated as best he could to the Gilets Jaunes, Mélenchon replied, “It isn’t enough,” and “This is only a fraction of the rage.” Le Pen replied, “We need to be discussing the fact of too much immigration; that’s at the heart of people’s anger.” (Immigrants have wisely stayed the hell out of this.)

Neither noted that the government changed its policies—even though it had a democratic mandate for them—in response to violence. Neither remarked that this set a regrettable precedent. As for that democratic mandate, critics have been swift to say that Macron is not popular and does not have the support of the masses. This is true: Macron was elected by white-collar professionals who amount to about 20-30 percent of the electorate. He won by default, because the alternatives were so disgusting. This does not amount to an argument against his legitimacy. The voters made it very clear they did not want the far Left or the far Right in power. A vote against is as valid, electorally, as a vote for.

But if you have no use for representative democracy, this doesn’t matter, and a substantial number of Gilets Jaunes do not. In the manner of neo-fascist Third Way intellectuals, they believe representative democracy is a failed idea. They want direct democracy by internet referendum. To judge from various lists they have compiled of their demands, this would not work very well. Two themes stand out. They wish to be left in peace with their cars, and they want money to be taken from the rich and given to them. In a direct democracy, this is exactly how they would vote.

A Casual Attitude Toward Violence

In Commentary, the French journalist Pascale-Emmanuel Gobry attempts to frame the movement in terms Americans understand. France, he says, has long been poorly governed by a “technocratic elite” that has no idea what it’s doing. Perhaps. He argues that the Yellow Vests “are a symptom of what the economist Tyler Cowen has called the Great Stagnation—the slowdown in real productivity growth and technological progress that has occurred since the 1970s. In a slow-growth environment, wealth tends to trickle up, as Thomas Piketty pointed out.”

Gobry makes several claims that sound compelling at first, but aren’t, really. Macron has not “turned parliament into a rubber stamp,” as he says. If the National Assembly has been inclined to support Macron, it is because the voters, in a landslide, gave Macron’s party the mandate to do so.

More substantively, he writes that the French have been governing themselves badly. They have made serious mistakes in economic policy. Such criticism is inevitable in any democracy, and it is good that it is: Liberal democracies prize freedom of expression, among other reasons, because governments serve us better when they’re scrutinized. He compares France’s elites unfavorably to those of China’s Communist Party, which, he says, at least “consciously spend time improving their average subject’s lot.” This is rhetorical excess, and silly, but that too is normal in democracies, where, unlike China, it is a right.

What is not normal is his casual shrug about this movement’s violence. Violence is not at all part of the normal effervescence of a vibrant democracy. It is antithetical to democracy’s ultimate norm: Governments change by elections, not force. “Protests are part of our way of life,” he writes, “and few of our protests go without at least some violence. . . . French history has always been a sort of dialectic between elites and the masses, and yes, this dialectic sometimes turns violent.”

That is a mighty casual attitude.

For all his complaints, some of which are warranted, he doesn’t seem to consider how much France stands to lose if this standard—“violence is an appropriate remedy when elected governments perform poorly”—were to be applied. “Elite dismay,” he writes, that “everyday people” would behave this way, given how badly they’ve governed, “is downright Marie Antoinette-ish.”

Two critical points get lost in this casual conflation of modern and pre-revolutionary France. First, the French Revolution was a sanguinary disaster that failed even on its own terms. By the end of the Napoleonic wars, 25 percent of its male population had been wiped out. Second, in 1789, the French overthrew an absolute monarchy. Modern France is a democracy, and a clean democracy, at that. There has been no scandal here, nor even an alleged scandal, involving voter fraud. France is governed by the rule of law. France recently had a free and fair election in which it overthrew its government without shedding a drop of blood. Every established party fell. There is no question but that it is possible to change the government here without violence and by means of elections.

Four Syrian photojournalists, all refugees, perfectly express the contempt every thinking person should feel for the idea that France’s problems are so severe, acute, and intractable as to justify revolutionary violence:

I heard a guy shout during the protest: “This is war!” I chuckled when I heard that. You can imagine what that sounded like to me. This isn’t war, man. I realize it’s more violence than you’re used to. But it’s not war. It’s not even close.

France is the tourist capital of the world. Tourism is a major engine of the French economy. Tourists come here because France is one of the most beautiful countries in the world, with one of the world’s richest civilizations. They come because France is peaceful, or was. “The Yellow Vests live in the unglamorous French exurbs that foreigners never see,” Gobry writes. “Tourists see our urban landmarks and our picturesque countryside.” One might conclude from this that a small elite sits in these French cities while a miserable majority lives in the exurbs. To the contrary: 80 percent of France’s population lives in the cities. Tourists aren’t missing “the real France.” The exurban population is a minority, and has no business dictating terms violently to the rest of France. If France’s Muslim population were doing this, you can be certain no one would be defending it in Commentary.

Ultraviolence

According to the police, there have so far been 1,700 serious injuries among the protesters, and 1,000 among law-enforcement officers. In no normal social movement in France do you have violence like this. Until this past weekend, the Gilets Jaunes’ numbers in the street were declining, but those who remained were increasingly violent. (Last weekend saw an uptick in protesters but less violence. It’s impossible to say whether this is a trend.)

On January 5, Gilets Jaunes hotwired a construction machine and bashed through the door of a government ministry on the rue de Grenelle. The government spokesman, Benjamin Griveaux, and part of his cabinet were evacuated to safety by Griveaux’s private security detail. Government forces were inadequate to protect the building. From videos of the event, it is clear that they would have lynched Griveaux had they been able.

Journalists, in particular, have been beaten, kicked and threatened with rape. The Gilets Jaunes have blocked newspaper printing centers and prevented the distribution of newspapers.

Libération has counted 93 serious injuries among the Yellow Vests and journalists. By “serious,” they mean “sufficient to cause lifelong disability.” People have lost eyes, hands, organs. Most have been injured by rubber bullets or flashbang grenades. It is hard to know if this count is accurate: It has been compiled through social media accounts, including that of a movement called “Disarm Them,” whose authors hold that the police are illegitimate by nature.

Images of terrible injuries have flooded social media, but it isn’t easy to distinguish between real and fake. Many people believe they are all real. The police may well be making things worse by using weapons that cause awful wounds—a legitimate question worthy of a National Assembly debate—but the idea that the police should be abolished and the Gilets Jaunes permitted to do whatever they please is absurd.

Grave injuries to protesters were inevitable once the Gilets Jaunes made the decision to pursue violence as a political strategy. Gilets Jaunes militants have repeatedly tried to breach the police cordon around the Élysée during their demonstrations. The French police, as I’ve explained in The American Interest, are unable to respond to an insurgency of this scale. They are already stretched to the breaking point, which explains why the police unions have been begging for reinforcement from the army.

The government and journalists are at pains to stress that not all of the Gilets Jaunes are violent. It is only a minority committing the arson, vandalism, burning, and looting. A minority are smashing windows and torching cars; attacking journalists, cops, and government ministers; and sending detailed, explicitly anti-Semitic and racist death threats to members of the government. A minority began raising money in support of Christophe Dettinger, the former light-heavyweight champion who was filmed punching gendarmes to the ground, then kicking a fallen cop in the head and face during a free-for-all brawl on a bridge over the Seine.

That it is “only a minority” is what the government must say. It would be politically inept to paint everyone who sympathizes with this movement as a violent criminal. But a majority of the Gilets Jaunes are participating in a movement that clearly encourages violence among the minority.

The Cost

No one even pretends it is only a “minority” of Gilets Jaunes who have been blockading French roads and fuel depots. The cost of these protests has been astronomical. The pure irrationality of this movement is obvious if you add it up. There is no way to meet the Gilets Jaunes’ demands for more money if they continue to attack every engine of economic productivity in France.

It is hard to put a precise figure on the economic damage the rioters have done so far. From the Arc de Triomphe to Place de la République, windows have been shuttered, covered in plywood, or smashed. Before the New Year, professional and business associations were suggesting the figure exceeded $15 billion. On December 3—seven weeks ago—the National Road Transport Association reported that road haulage and logistics companies were experiencing an “economic and social emergency. Trucks have been stuck in hundreds of kilometers of traffic jams or in logistics areas, without being able to deliver. Warehouses are inaccessible and staff are threatened. In addition, there are fuel supply problems in several regions. […] Road transport companies and logistics are in fact in a tragic situation, which induces a major risk [of life] and, in the short term, jobs.” The forced inactivity of this sector, they predicted, “will imminently lead to the paralysis of the entire French economy.” There were, they said, not enough police forces available “to ensure freedom of movement.” By January 8, the organization was desperate, and joined the call for “exceptional measures.” The free movement of people and goods, they said in a press release, “must absolutely and finally be guaranteed.”

According to the Ministry of Labor, some 58,000 people have lost their jobs or been partially unemployed by the crisis. They are mostly in small-to-medium enterprises. The Ministry made 32 million euros available in unemployment compensation. The financial sector was recently giddy at the prospect of poaching talent from London in the wake of Brexit. Spokesmen say they are no longer optimistic.

Tourists are rethinking their plans. International air arrivals in Paris have dropped by ten percent. Air France/KLM claims it has lost 15 million euros in sales.

Shortly before Christmas, the national federation retail sector estimated it had suffered a two-billion euro loss. “We are asking you to stop,” said Christian Gaulm, who represents the retail shops of Bordeaux. “Our backs are to the wall.” His pleas went unanswered.

Last week, the president of the National Association of Food Industries estimated losses of 13 billion euros for the agricultural sector. “It is mostly small-to-medium enterprises that are likely to suffer the most,” he said, fearing “bankruptcies.” Supermarket bosses, reportedly, have delivered food to the Yellow Vests as a bribe to refrain from looting their warehouses and destroying their trucks.

On January 10, the retailer FNAC Darty announced a 45 million euro loss caused by the closure of stores during protests and the diminution of shoppers. The indirect effect of this movement, said their CEO, “is monstrous. We see it in foreign investment, on the confidence to invest.”

The Committee of French Automobile Manufacturers reports “major difficulties in the delivery of vehicles that have poisoned the life of distributors.” Sales dropped by 14.5 percent compared to last December 2017.

This month’s census from the French Federation of Insurance reported that 4,000 claims had been filed for damaged vehicles, a few hundred more for damaged homes. More than 2,000 companies filed claims for property damage and the interruption of their business. The federation believes they will pay between €100 and 200 million.

Most of these estimates were predicated on the optimistic assessment that after the holidays, the movement would fizzle out.

It will cost billions to repair the damage done to roads and infrastructure. Roughly half of France’s traffic radar detection systems have been damaged. The Interior Ministry says that minor damage to a radar system costs, on average, 500 euros to repair. Major damage can cost up to €200,000. The French state will lose tens of millions of euros in revenues from this, too: In 2017, traffic yielded on average 84 million euros a month. This, of course, is exactly why the Gilets Jaunes smashed them. They believed the state was running a speeding-ticket racket. Those I’ve spoken to see no reason for speed limits. I was told that “cars have airbags now, so it’s safe to drive as fast as you like.”

The Central Bank has halved its fourth-quarter growth forecast. The Gilets Jaunes believe that taxes on the very rich will pay for all of this. They are incapable of thinking it through. The very rich can take their money somewhere else. They, on the other hand, are stuck in France.

Macron’s efforts to placate the Gilets Jaunes have thus far involved a package for low-wage workers that will cost the rest of France about 10 billion euros. France will breach the EU deficit cap, again. The movement has destroyed Germany’s hope of finding a sympathetic fiscal partner in France, destroyed Macron’s hope of persuading Germans that the French could be their partners, and made Macron’s suggestions about Franco-German fiscal and defense pacts sound absurd. Why should German taxpayers wish to finance French louts who torch their own country? How could they trust France with their defense when France can’t even defend itself? It is certainly not helping France to make the argument against Brexit.

The European Union, which the Gilets Jaunes loathe, is insulating France from the economic shock of their violent antics. This has been massively damaging to the French economy, but it is nothing compared to what would happen if France weren’t in the Eurozone. As Jean Quatremer has noted, all historic evidence indicates that if France had kept its own currency, the franc would by now be in the toilet; interest rates would be skyrocketing, the economy contracting, and inflation setting in. The euro has tempered and delayed this pain.

Violence and vandalism on this scale is a massive threat to the easy, privileged, safe, and luxurious life that everyone—yes everyone—in France enjoys. In no scenario is it anything but sterile and pointless, just as it was in 1848. It is terrible for France in every way: an act of self-mutilation and utter irrationality.

Incitement

The French were initially supportive of the Gilets Jaunes, with  about 80 percent describing themselves as “sympathetic.” Now, the number has declined to 50 percent, but this is still shockingly high. The hagiography of the French Revolution accounts for some of this. There has never been a fully honest reckoning here with the Revolution. Violent insurrection against the government has been romanticized. One of the most significant arguments in favor of democracy—that it obviates the need for political violence—seems to elude even intelligent and sensible observers.

It may be true that only be a minority of the Gilets Jaunes seek to overthrow the government by force. But the majority of the Gilets Jaunes seek to overthrow the government, irrespective of the will of the French electorate. And while neither Mélenchon nor Len Pen have personally committed an act of violence since the Gilets Jaunes took to the streets, both are clearly inciting it. Both insist that violence is “understandable,” and even “fascinating,” given the government’s refusal to embrace the policies they endorse. Both blame the violence on the government and the “system,” obviating the idea that French adults possess free will.

Both, when asked if they share the government’s call for calm, forcefully decline. “I’m not a guard dog,” says Mélenchon:

People do not have to make paternalistic or maternalistic calls to calm and all those beautiful phrases that the bourgeoisie likes to distribute to the people. Calling for calm makes no sense. It it is very offensive to those who hear it and those who are constantly invited to pronounce it. That is not my role. I believe in democracy, in politics, in dialogue.

But you do not believe in democracy, politics, or dialogue if you refuse clearly to say that none of these can take place unless all parties share a commitment to resolve their disputes without violence. Juan Branco, Julian Assange’s lawyer and an LFI intimate, says, “The elected politicians must tremble in their flesh, they must physically feel the fear.”

If Mélenchon has overtly and crudely lent his support to the most radical and violent factions of the Gilets Jaunes, Le Pen is shrewder: She is playing the long game. The most extreme violence comes from the far Right, as it always has in modern France. She has done nothing to discourage it. “You’ve been a bit distant in this crisis,” a journalist from France World remarked to her. “Do you support it, do you condemn it?” After accusing the government of trying to “solve a political crisis with truncheons,” Le Pen answers:

I refuse to participate in the government’s trap of pitting Yellow Vests against blue uniforms. That’s comfortable for the government because it allows them to escape responsibility. We see the strategy: ‘Look at these Yellow Vests that hit the police.’ In the meantime, the government hides, and the anger is directed against the police, not the government. It is ignoble, cynical, and terribly dangerous for the unity of the country. I share the concerns of the Yellow Vests. I support their demands, provided they are compatible with my project, and it is true that there are many common points. Obviously I condemn violence wherever it comes from, and I deplore the victims, whomever they may be.

Like Mélenchon, it seems Le Pen does not truly believe that France has a legitimate, elected government and thus a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. She does not note any moral distinction between attacking people and property, which the Yellow Vests have done, and preventing them from doing so, as the blue uniforms are trying to do.

The Convergence des Luttes

Macron has taken the protesters literally: He believes that they genuinely wish to debate policy with him, and his government has thus introduced a project for a “great national debate.” They began with an online poll, asking French citizens what they think the government should do. Overwhelmingly, the respondents were less interested in the details of tax policy than they were in reversing the 2001 Taubira law that legalized same-sex marriage.

This response perplexed many on the Left. On the one hand, it is obvious that the Gilets Jaunes hold disagreeable opinions about homosexuals, Jews, and immigrants. Even though they say they want nothing to do with political parties, their instincts lean far Right, not far Left. But on the other hand, that’s close enough for communist purposes. As Lenin said, scrupling about the fate of minorities—or individuals—is a bourgeois concern, an infantile disease of communism. Or so Le Grand Soir reminds us:

Thus we have seen part of the left petty bourgeoisie disassociate from Yellow Vests because of the discriminatory behavior of certain individuals. These behaviors are to be condemned certainly, but in a struggle, the masses must be supported as a whole, regardless of the digressions. . . . “A barricade has only two sides”; in other words, you are either with or against the people. The proletariat has nothing to do with “allies” who can betray and betray, for their own petty-bourgeois interests, all the workers.

Nicholas Tenzer, head of the liberal think tank CERAP, drew the obvious conclusion:

This is an insurrection. . . . The far Right, in an unholy alliance with the far Left, comprise the majority. You can’t talk to people like this, they do not share the values of the Republic. The time for talking is after the violence stops.

He’s right. Both factions—far Right and far Left—believe their side will win in the end, and are hoping to exploit the violence and determination of the other side to topple the Republic, and then in due course to crush the other. “The ideology and the violence,” he said, “are consubstantial with the movement.”

“Consubstantial” is not the word I would have chosen in English, but it’s correct: The violence is inherent. It can’t be cordoned off or dismissed as “not truly representative” of the movement.

The rest of France is now faced with a choice. If the Yellow Vests continue to plunge France into chaos and beggary, it is fairly clear what will happen. France will be plunged into chaos and penury. Allowing the Gilets Jaunes to sack Paris once a week will have the effect of allowing the Sturmabteilung and the Rotfrontkämpferbund regularly to attack each other on the streets of Berlin; and eventually, a fed-up public will say, “Enough. We need order.” When they do, they will turn to the Right, not the Left. Then Marine Le Pen—or an even more authoritarian figure—will emerge as savior. France will become something more like Russia: more brutal, poorer, and more authoritarian.

Mélenchon and his ideological kin are so blinded by their own claptrap that they can’t see how badly this will end for them. So are those who minimize the significance of political violence with a shrug and an appeal to the French temperament. To say, “This is just what France does” is nuts. There is no justification for violence in an orderly, democratic, First World country. A lunatic contingent of France—certainly no more than 100,000 people—wishes to destroy the lives of the other 67 million people who live here.

It is irrational to say, “This is just our tradition in France.” If it is, it shouldn’t be.

The Gilets Jaunes are not behaving this way because they want to talk things over. Nor are they behaving this way because they have legitimate grievances. The French peasants are not starving and crying out for bread. Macron is not Marie Antoinette. This is not about the fuel tax, and it’s not about the cost of living either. No one knows what’s really causing this. It is hard for rational people to find reasons for irrational behavior. Obviously, however, whatever the reasons are, it is not what the perpetrators say it is.

There is, however, one obvious possibility. The Gilets Jaunes are behaving this way because they like it. The more violence they see, participate in, and hear about, the more excited they become at the prospect of it. When they see video clips of thugs attacking and overpowering the police, it does not make them think, “My God, that is terrible, where did our movement go wrong?” No “last men” here.

Those who were inclined to that reaction, or revulsion, have already left the scene. They had it when the Arc de Triomphe was desecrated during the third week of protests. Peace requires a Leviathan. But they have since seen that the Leviathan doesn’t have enough cops.

Destroying France will not meet anyone’s needs, of course. But the simplest logical calculations do not seem obvious to those afflicted with this unnamable problem. We’re living in a strange era where the obvious, even the axiomatic principles of civilization, are no longer obvious. Reason no longer counts. This worries me.

If you had asked me three years ago who would lead a violent uprising against the French Republic, I would have said, “The same people who attacked Charlie Hebdo. Obviously.” But the Islamists are, so far, sitting this one out. They’re not gone, although many did leave to join ISIS, and few are ever coming back. But more likely, they are waiting. After all, as Napoléon reminds us: Never interfere with an enemy in the process of destroying himself.

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A Hinge in History?

It is hard to escape the feeling that we may be approaching a dangerous hinge in history. For roughly three quarters of a century, the most important pillar of peace and prosperity has been the seemingly unshakeable alliance of the world’s advanced liberal democracies. The core foundation of this complex architecture has been NATO—the most successful military alliance in history—but to this were added the treaties, U.S. troop deployments, and related commitments deterring aggression and ensuring peace in East Asia, particularly in the neighborhood of Japan, the Korean peninsula, Australia and New Zealand, effectively, Taiwan, and the Indo-Pacific sea lanes. The parallel in the Middle East has been our commitment to the security of Israel and to freedom of navigation in the Gulf. A crucial complement in recent decades has been the process of European integration, which has expanded both in functional and geographic scope to become the largest and wealthiest economic union in the world, with 28 member states. Freer trade more broadly among the world’s liberal democracies further deepened this architecture and its dual foundation in common interests and common values.

Today, most of this is at risk of unraveling. Having declared the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [twentieth] century,” Vladimir Putin has set as his primary geopolitical goal the breakup of the Western democratic alliance that prevailed over the USSR. For Putin, that has meant, above all else, undermining NATO and the EU.  With his audacious and shockingly successful digital interventions in 2016—on behalf of the Brexit referendum in June and the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency in November—Putin took giant leaps toward each of those goals. An isolationist with a coldly transactional view of international affairs, Trump has cast a skeptical eye on all of America’s alliances and international commitments. He appears obsessed with two questions, both lacking in a larger vision or even an understanding of global power: what’s in it for us and how much does it cost?

Now, we learn from the superb reporting of Helene Cooper of The New York Times that over the course of the last year President Trump repeatedly expressed to aides his desire to pull the U.S. out of NATO. These were private conversations. But in a jarring two-day summit with the alliance’s 28 other states last July, Trump publicly berated his fellow leaders for their failure to increase their countries’ defense spending sufficiently (while praising himself as a “stable genius”).

It was clear back then (and well before) that Trump questions the value of the NATO alliance. At the same time, he has had nothing but praise for the authoritarian leader of a resurgent and expansionist Russia, Vladimir Putin. Even if there proves to be nothing to the suspicions—which the FBI reportedly began investigating in the wake of the 2017 firing of its Director James Comey—that Trump is so financially, morally, or politically compromised by Russia that he is actually “working on behalf of Russia against American interests,” the damage that Trump has been doing to our alliances, and to global confidence in American resolve, is beginning practically to have the same effect. Certainly, Putin must feel he has received, on balance, a handsome return on his “investment” in the 2016 U.S. elections. And as if to drive home the point that the Kremlin’s malign projection of power around the world will be embraced by the White House rather than confronted, the Trump Administration’s effort to lift sanctions on the businesses of one of Putin’s most important oligarchs—the infamous aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska—just narrowly survived a Senate vote to reverse this latest concession to Russian corruption.

The legislative bid, pressed by a unanimous Senate Democratic caucus, to reverse Trump’s action drew support from 11 mostly quite conservative Republicans—perhaps most surprisingly Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who has been close to Trump and who is rumored to be interested in the position of Defense Secretary (or even in succeeding Trump in the White House). One wonders what was running through the minds of so many of the other 42 Senate Republicans who have prided themselves for their tough stances on national security, senators like Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Joni Ernst, and the newly elected Mitt Romney. It seems the party of Ronald Reagan has fallen so low into supine submission to an isolationist populist president that it now supports a corporate amnesty for one of the shadiest oligarchs in Putin’s Russia—a man who Trump’s own Treasury Department had sanctioned as a key agent of the Russian government, and who stood accused of “threatening the lives of business rivals, illegally wiretapping a government official, and taking part in extortion and racketeering.”

Trump likes to brags about how tough he has been on Russia. And indeed, thanks to smart, tough-minded officials like Defense Secretary James Mattis and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, the Trump Administration fashioned during its first two years a robust response to Russia’s escalating efforts to compromise the sovereignty and institutional integrity of democracies, both in its neighborhood and well beyond. However, as our former ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, observed on Wednesday, Trump “has consistently made it clear that he does not support his own administration’s policy toward Russia.” Now, apparently unable to abide Trump’s isolationism and impetuousness any longer, Secretary Mattis is gone—having resigned on principle and then been fired by Trump before he could leave in an orderly fashion. McMaster has also been forced out, and with him another key intellectual author of the much-needed 2017 reboot of America’s National Security Strategy, Nadia Schadlow.

That well-received document advanced a wise and energetic strategy for a new era of great power competition with Russia and China. It pronounced a posture of “principled realism,” acknowledging “the central role of power in international politics,” while celebrating and clearly stating the principles we must use power to defend: “individual liberty, the rule of law, a democratic system of government, tolerance, and opportunity for all.” Those are indeed the values that distinguish and unite Americans, and that undergird the alliances that have produced the longest period of peace with freedom and prosperity in modern world history. Sadly, however, these are not the values of President Donald J. Trump.  They are not what emanate from his tweets and other unscripted words, and increasingly, they do not reflect his erratic and tempestuous conduct on the world stage.

As a result, the next two years threaten to be one of the most perilous periods for the United States since the end of World War II. The rising and resurgent great powers—China and Russia—see in Donald Trump a transactional president, detached from the guiding principles and steadfast alliances that have fostered and protected freedom for 75 years. For the moment, China is paying the price in an escalating and potentially quite damaging trade war, but if it is able to negotiate a grand transaction with Trump, it may also clear a path to more rapid dominance in Asia. Trump talks a big game about putting America first, but for him, it’s really all about money, not even power and certainly not global leadership in defense of enduring values.

As the government shutdown staggers on and the Mueller investigation enters its final phase, unthinkable scenarios become imaginable: a declaration of national emergency, impeachment, a constitutional showdown. Quite possibly, we are headed into a stress test for American democracy that will equal or exceed Watergate. But much more than in the Nixon era (which confronted its own serious dangers internationally), a domestic constitutional crisis would unfold in a global context of profound turbulence, with two great power rivals ready to exploit any sign of fracture in America’s alliances or equivocation in our readiness to defend them.

As both a constitutional and practical matter, the President has wide latitude to make and unmake foreign affairs. Now, as his recklessness and impulsiveness are more sharply revealed, and as the constraints from within his own administration melt away, Republicans in Congress must rally to the defense of our vital national interests. Above all else, that requires a veto-proof majority for legislation tying the president’s hands in any effort to withdraw from NATO. To borrow the terms of the President’s own National Security Strategy, failure to do so could have grave and long-lasting consequences for our security, our prosperity, and our way of life.

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What 2018 Tells Us About the Democrats’ Chances in 2020

Forecasting the 2020 election based on the results of one or even a few past elections is a risky business for professors and political pundits. Recent history is littered with a series of busted political predictions. In 2004, for instance, after the Republicans’ third straight election given them control of the House, Senate, and Presidency, there was talk that Karl Rove had created an 1896-like realignment; the 2006 and 2008 elections quickly shattered that illusion. Those two major Democratic wins caused, among others, James Carville in 2009 to claim that the Democrats would govern for a generation, but the 2010, 2014, and 2016 elections showed that generations are shorter than they used to be. Similarly, in 1994 and 2010, the Republican congressional landslides did not lead, as some predicted, to Clinton and Obama being one-term Presidents. In short, one election doesn’t necessarily determine the results of the next. But does it tell us anything? Are there any takeaways from the 2018 midterms that will likely influence the 2020 Presidential elections? Our answer is yes: We believe that 2018 offers several specific insights for looking ahead to 2020.

The first lesson is that Donald Trump generates intense feelings, which in turn drives unusually high turnout. In the 2014 midterm elections, some 83 million Americans voted; by contrast, 118 million Americans cast a ballot in 2018, a 40 percent increase. Indeed, it has been more than 100 years since an off-year election produced a better turnout. Presidential elections, of course, attract an even greater share of voters, and the 2020 electorate will be younger and less white, both of which are factors that normally favor Democrats. If the extraordinary 2018 turnout is any indication, the 2020 Presidential election vote totals will be enormous, exceeding 2016.  This development would benefit Democrats.

But the second takeaway, a variation of the first, is even more important: The midterms were a referendum on Trump. Figures 1 and 2 show the generic congressional vote, broken down by presidential approval numbers. From the very beginning of YouGov’s election polling in September, 80 percent of those who approved of Trump planned on voting Republican; the opposite held true for those who disapproved. Those proportions rose over the course of the campaign, however, and by Election Day, 90 percent both approvers and non-approvers intended to vote for congressional candidates consistent with their views of the Trump presidency. Since more voters disapproved of Trump than approved of him, the Democrats had an advantage going into November. If the President and his allies are worried about these numbers, they’re right to be. Given a host of ongoing scandals and negative publicity—the Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen revelations, the National Enquirer scandal, the fallout from the Mueller investigation, and the problems with his charitable foundations—it seems unlikely that Trump will reach 50 percent approval before the election.

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What else might carry over from 2018 to 2020? Possibly the relative size of four major electoral gaps in American politics: race, education, gender, and age. Table 1 shows these gaps for the 2014, 2016, and 2018 elections. The racial gap is generally the largest, usually topping 35 percent, but it actually decreased in 2018 as compared to previous years. This change is entirely attributable to the increase in the proportion of whites voting for Democrats. In 2018, 76 percent of Blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans chose Democratic candidates, almost exactly in line with the proportion that did so in 2014 and 2016. By contrast, white voters temporarily reversed their trend toward the GOP, with 44 percent voting Democrat (as compared to 37 percent in 2016).

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Unlike the racial gap, the gender gap did not shift significantly in 2018. Indeed, the difference in the preferences of men and women was actually slightly smaller than it was in 2016. The lack of a net change masks an important trend though—both men and women voted Democratic at significantly higher rates than they did in 2016 (5 percent higher for women and 6 percent higher for men). These statistics indicate that the scores of suburban women who turned against Trump were joined by a slightly larger number of men.

In contrast to race and gender, educational attainment was more divisive in 2018 than it was in the previous four years. College educated citizens voted 59 percent for Democrats, versus 49 percent of those without a degree. As such, the education gap was 10 percent, up from 8 percent in 2016. With Trump on the ballot in the next election, we expect this gap to persist in 2020.

Finally, the most surprising result was the dramatic increase in the age gap between those 18-29 years old and those age 65 and over. In 2016, the gap was only 10 percent, but in 2018, it grew to 19 points. While 55 percent of younger voters supported Democrats in 2016, that number rose to 67 in 2018. Now, we are mindful of the fact that, as people age, their voting habits change, so we do not conclude that Democrats have captured the under-30 generation. Nevertheless we are confident that nearly everyone in that demographic who voted Democratic in 2018 won’t shift and vote for Trump for President in 2020.

Since non-white voters consistently support Democrats at high rates, it is also useful to examine these same demographic splits among white voters. The percentage of white voters voting Democratic varies substantially from year to year, and understanding how they vote by gender, educational attainment, and age might provide some insight into this unstable group. We present these figures in Table 2.

Generally speaking, the gender, education, and age gaps among white voters resemble the magnitude of the gaps among the electorate as a whole. Nevertheless, some differences are worth noting. In particular, the education gap is substantially greater among white voters than it is among the broader electorate—among the former, the gap is 16 percent, as opposed to 10 percent for the latter. By contrast, the age gap is smaller among white voters as compared to the entire electorate; however, there was still a double-digit increase between 2016 and 2018 in the percentage of under-30 white voters who preferred a Democrat. Given that young voters are typically more numerous in presidential years, this trend stands to benefit Democrats.

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In addition to extraordinary turnout and subtle demographic shifts, the 2018 election was notable for its reversal of the famous 1992 Clinton slogan, “It’s the Economy, Stupid.” In late October 2016, 94 percent of Republicans thought the economy was either stagnant or getting worse; by January 2018, 83 percent of Republicans thought that the economy was either holding steady or improving, with a full 50 percent thinking it was getting better. The opposite shift occurred in the economic perceptions of Democrats. In late October, 2016, 73 percent of Democrats thought the economy was holding steady or improving; on January 17, 2018, 75 percent thought the economy was stagnating or getting worse, with 42 percent saying the latter.

This trend is nothing new. As Figure 3 shows, the percentage of Democrats and Republicans thinking the economy is getting better is closely tied to whether the respondent’s party holds the White House. In 2018, though, partisan loyalty truly dominated economic perceptions when it came time to vote. Among Republicans who believed the economy was improving, 98 percent supported a Republican candidate for the House. However, 61 percent of the Republicans who believed the economy was getting worse still voted Republican. The trend was the same among Democrats, with 78 percent of those who believed the economy was improving still supporting a Democratic candidate for Congress. In short, the true state of the economy seems to have almost no influence outside the margins. Democrats who think the economy has been strong under Trump will still vote Democrat, while Republicans who believe the economy has been weak will still favor the GOP.

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Beyond the economy—and with the midterm elections becoming largely a referendum on Trump’s presidency—the Republican Party is now clearly the Party of Trump. A simple plot of Trump’s approval ratings among Republicans confirms this diagnosis. Figure 4 shows us that as time has gone on ever more Republicans have come to “strongly” approve of Trump, rather than “somewhat” approving of the President. In March of 2017, less than half of Republicans “strongly” approved of the President, while nearly 40 percent “somewhat” approved. The “somewhat” approve number remained above 30 percent through April of 2018, while the “strongly” approve number hovered around 50 percent. Moreover, those who were not strong supporters of Trump were less likely to approve of his trade policy, share his views on immigration, and were much more supportive of gay rights, among other issue differences. By the time of the 2018 election, however, internal resistance to Trump had largely crumpled among Republicans. The fraction that “strongly” approved of his performance rose to nearly 70 percent, with nearly 90 percent of Republicans at least “somewhat” approving.

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At the same time that Trump’s popularity was rising among Republicans, the proportion of the GOP who wanted him to run in 2020 increased as well. In September 2017, only 60 percent of Republicans wanted the President to seek reelection—by November 2018, that number was almost 80 percent. In sum, for now the 2020 nomination is Trump’s for the asking.

Thus far, our analysis has focused on the general electorate and the Republican Party. As we know, however, Trump’s victory in 2016 was the result of narrow wins in a few key states. Turning then to the Electoral College perspective, is there anything in the 2018 elections that provides insight into 2020?

Again, the answer is yes. In 2016, Trump won five states by a margin of four or fewer points. In Arizona and Florida, Trump won by 3.4 and 1.2 percent respectively, while in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, he won by less than 1 percent. In addition to these Trump states, there were seven states where Clinton won by five points or less: Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Nevada, New Mexico and Virginia. Collectively, these states are the most likely to change hands in an election where Trump is a candidate. Tables 3 and 4 examine these states, comparing 2016 results to 2018 across races for House, Senate, and Governor. In the five highly competitive Trump states, there were 47 Republican House members compared to 29 Democrats after the 2016 election; the 2018 midterms narrowed that margin to 39-37. While the Senate remained the same (six Democrats, four Republicans), the Democrats also picked up two governorships in those five states. Turnout in these areas was also up by more than six million votes in 2018 as compared to 2014, an increase of 37 percent; moreover, the Democratic vote share was up by more than 7 percent. In short, Democrats did well in these states in 2018, and that bodes well for them in the 2020 election.

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In the seven competitive states won by Clinton, the results were similar: The Democrats picked up five House seats, a Senate seat, and three governorships; overall turnout in these states was up; and the Democratic vote share was up compared to 2014. Taken together with the five Trump states, it seems that the most competitive swing states in 2016 moved decisively toward the Democrats in 2018, which, like our earlier results, favors them in 2020.

Indeed, all of the 2018 takeaways we have discussed thus far could be regarded as good news for Democrats. Turnout will be higher in 2020 than it was in 2016, and the electorate will be younger and less white than the strongly Democratic 2018 electorate. Trump has not increased his base over his first two years, and, compared to 2016, educated voters, young people, and white voters have moved toward the Democratic Party. Finally, the key Electoral College states moved back toward Democrats in 2018, bolstering the party’s hopes for 2020.

Right now 2020 is shaping up to be the Democrats’ to lose, all else equal. Of course, all else may not be equal. The party seems headed for a contentious, drawn-out primary and could potentially end up with an aggressively hyperliberal nominee. Such a choice would cut into the Democrats’ advantage among independents. During the course of YouGov’s election polling, it asked Democrats and independents what they thought about the Party’s ideology, and if they preferred Democratic congressional candidates who resembled Barack Obama or nominees who resembled Bernie Sanders. The responses are informative; only 27 percent of Democrats preferred candidates resembling Obama, while only 31 percent of Independents preferred candidates resembling Sanders. Likewise, a majority of independents (who were crucial to the Democratic victory in 2018) thought the Democratic Party was too liberal, as compared to only 12 percent of Democrats. These incongruous responses suggest that the presidential nominee Democrats are likely to choose might not have much cache among independents. Accordingly, it is possible Democrats choose an unviable general election candidate and lose again in 2020.

Of course, another alternative is that President Trump decides not to run in 2020. Perhaps reeling from the Mueller Report and from whatever additional political blows House Democrats manage to land via congressional investigations, Trump might declare that he has already achieved more than any other President in just one term, pack his bags, and ascend back up the escalator at Trump Tower. If, however, Trump runs and the Democrats don’t shoot themselves in some significant part of their anatomy, the GOP is in for a rough ride in 2020.

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Expert in Adversity

My plane touched down on a sunny Sunday in July 2015. The white-whiskered cabbie took my luggage and, with a crinkly smile, exclaimed in English, “Welcome to Sarajevo!” He offered this greeting with no trace of the irony it acquired during the 44-month siege of the city by Serbian nationalist forces that killed 11,500 people between 1992 and 1995. On the contrary, he seemed eager to offer a visitor her first glimpse of Sarajevo as it winds through the mountains alongside the Miljacka River. As the city’s red-tiled roofs, steeples, and minarets came into view, he even provided a soundtrack, switching on a CD of Andrea Bocelli’s 1995 hit, “Con Te Partiro.” Perhaps because my mental picture of Sarajevo was based on grim wartime images, the music, combined with the vision of a resurrected city, brought tears.

Travelers are prone to such moments: waves of emotion caused by equal parts imagination, expectation, and (often) naïveté. My naïveté consisted in not seeing certain lingering shadows of past events. For example, 1995 was also the date of the worst mass killing on European soil since World War II. In July of that year, Bosnian Serb forces rolled into Srebenica and neighboring towns in eastern Bosnia, and proceeded to kill 8,000 people, most of them Muslim boys and men who had already spent two years in UN-designated “safe areas” described by one early witness as “prison camps.” A few weeks later, those same forces bombed a Muslim enclave in Sarajevo, killing 41 men, women, and children. That was when NATO took the first military action in its history, ordering 338 airstrikes against Bosnian Serb positions.

Given this background, one might expect a seasoned observer—say, a native of Sarajevo who lived through the siege—to look with disdain upon a naïve American choking up over a mushy song that has nothing to do with that ordeal. But this was not the reaction of my traveling companion, Gordana Knezević, a native of Sarajevo who not only lived through the siege but also served as the deputy editor of Oslobođenje, the legendary newspaper whose Serb, Croat, and Muslim staff managed heroically to publish every day of those terrible 44 months. She just smiled as if to say, “That song affects me, too.”

Gordana and I had flown to Sarajevo from Prague, where she was director of the Balkan service at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). She had agreed to accompany me on the second stop in a round-the-world trip I was taking to research best practices for the U.S. Agency for Global Media. This was a great stroke of luck, because as I quickly learned, Gordana is esteemed throughout the region (and the world) for the qualities of character she displayed while helping to keep alive the only trusted source of information in the closed-off, hellish, morally bewildering world of the siege.

Those qualities of character include courage, integrity, shrewdness, gutsiness, persistence, and grace. In combination they constitute what the ancient Greeks meant by sophrosune—in essence, the ability to size up a hard and dangerous situation, and choose the right course of action. This is not just a matter of applying the right principle or rule, because in the hardest situations, principles and rules have a way of conflicting. Rather it is a matter alertness: of reading other people, fathoming their motives, and interpreting the writing on the wall. For Homer, the personification of sophrosune was Odysseus, “expert in adversity.”

After studying philosophy at the University of Sarajevo, Gordana went to work as a reporter for Oslobođenje (“Liberation”), the leading newspaper in Bosnia in the last decades of the Cold War. Founded by anti-fascist Partisans in 1943, Oslobođenje was the official newspaper of the League of Yugoslav Communists, and while that certainly doesn’t fit the American idea of press freedom, it was in fact an excellent training ground, because, as Gordana explained to me, “The Yugoslav media were controlled by the Party, of course. But every now and then a space would open where you could breathe for a while, at least until it closed again.”

Gordana elaborated with an anecdote about a workman who was installing pipes in a group of fancy villas being built for Party members. When the workman discovered that several lengths of pipe were missing, he exposed the shortfall, which was likely due to corruption on the part of various officials, and was promptly fired. Gordana wrote a story about this, in which she observed the Party line that corruption was a bourgeois problem that did not occur in socialist societies. But her editor, a former schoolmate who was also a local Party official, called her in anyway, and asked why she had written the story—what was her purpose? Taking note of the editor’s nervousness about the corruption angle, Gordana replied that her purpose was merely to help the workman get his job back. Which he did.

In 1988 Oslobođenje hired a new editor-in-chief, Kemal Kurspahić, who began the process of transforming it from an official organ of the Communist Party into something more closely resembling a Western news outlet. At first this meant livelier content and features such as sports and entertainment. But with the fall of Communism, it began to mean more. In June 1990, the Bosnian constitutional court ruled in favor of a multiparty system, and Oslobođenje responded by breaking (amicably) with the Communist Party and declaring itself “an Independent Bosnia-Herogovinian Daily,” and promising that during the upcoming election campaign it would “report objectively about the parties’ meetings and make it possible for all the parties to represent their ideas equally.”

It soon became clear that objective reporting would be nearly impossible, because only one of the three ethnic parties, the Muslim-dominated Party of Democratic Action (SDA), shared Oslobođenje’s editorial position in favor of Bosnian independence as a unified, multi-ethnic state. The other two, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) and the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS), were opposed to independence, in part because they distrusted the SDA, and in part they identified less with their fellow Bosnians than with their ethnic kin elsewhere. For the Bosnian Croats, that meant Croatia, which was fighting its own battle for independence. For the Bosnian Serbs, it meant the Republic of Serbia, which under Slobodan Milošević was vowing to create a “Greater Serbia” including every part of the Balkans with a sizable Serb population. As a result, neither the HDZ nor the SDS allowed Oslobođenje to cover its meetings or interview its leaders.

By March 1992, this aggressive form of Serb nationalism had sufficiently alienated the Bosnian Croats that, when the question of independence was put to a referendum, they voted strongly in favor of it, along with the Bosnian Muslims. It passed, and on April 6, the same day Bosnia’s independence was recognized by the EU, 40,000 Bosnians held a multi-ethnic rally commemorating the liberation of Sarajevo from Nazi occupation in 1945, and calling for a country where “We can live together!” Their jubilation was cut short by gunfire, coming from Serb nationalists barricaded on the other side of the river. The violence escalated the next day, when snipers holed up with SDS leader Radovan Karadžić began shooting people from the upper floors of a Holiday Inn.

Thus began the siege – and for Oslobođenje, the challenges of providing news to a city sinking rapidly into chaos. One such challenge was dissension among the staff, several of whom were Bosnian Serbs. Indeed, Gordana herself is an ethnic Serb who grew up in Sarajevo and married a fellow philosopher, Ivo Knezević, whose family were Croats from Vienna. During the years when the Knezevićes were raising their three children, Sarajevo was an island of relative freedom and religious tolerance, compared with the ethnic jingoism found elsewhere in Yugoslavia. But it was hardly a bubble: The Knezevićes and people like them grew quite adept at perceiving different shades of ethnic prejudice, from the ordinary animosity that makes life difficult to the murderous hatred that makes it impossible.

This point is important, because at the time of the Bosnian war, many Western officials, especially high-profile members of a foreign policy establishment flush with victory over the Soviet Union, simply assumed that Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians all detested each other in the same way and to the same degree. To be sure, most of these officials were less facetious about it than Maj. Gen. Lewis MacKenzie, the Canadian commander of the UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR), who reportedly quipped that the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims were “like three serial killers: one has killed 15, another 10, the other 5. Why would you help the one who killed five?”

Gordana and her colleagues were grateful to MacKenzie for keeping the Sarajevo airport open during the siege; without that lifeline, Oslobođenje would have ceased publication and the city would have likely have starved. But because Gordana understood the difference between ordinary animosity and murderous hatred, she was troubled by the moral equivalency implied by MacKenzie’s careless remark. This was because, in the words of one close observer, the Canadian journalist Carol Off,

The practical application of moral equivalency in the Balkan wars of the 1990s seems to have started as a way of being impartial and neutral during the conflict. But it eventually morphed into something more sinister … Neutrality probably works in situations where two armies have agreed, grudgingly, to stop killing each other and the foreign troops have come in to guard a negotiated green line… But it’s a lousy device in ethnic cleansing. Neutrality does not work in an arena where you have an aggressor and a victim. To be impartial in that case is to actually take sides, because you inevitably help the aggressor. We did this in the Balkans and it had devastating consequences.

This is not to suggest that Gordana went to the opposite extreme of painting the Serbs as devils and everyone else as angelic victims. That would have turned Oslobođenje into a propaganda sheet, not a newspaper. But what is an editor supposed to do in such a situation? In 1990, the goal had been to “report objectively … [and] make it possible for all the parties to represent their ideas equally.” But that proved impossible with Serb nationalists calling for the forced expatriation of other groups from what Radovan Karadžić claimed as Serb “living space.” A couple of years later, when the call was for “a black cauldron, where 300,000 Muslims will die,” simple adherence to the journalistic norm of objectivity would have brought its own devastating consequences.

This was when Gordana showed herself a true “expert in adversity.” Without her subtle moral discernment and shrewd editorial judgment, it would have been much harder to steer Oslobođenje between the Scylla of propaganda and the Charybdis of moral equivalency. For example, the Croats and Muslims who rose to Sarajevo’s defense included among their ranks a fair number of criminals, whose motives were decidedly mixed. Throughout the siege, reporters at Oslobođenje heard many credible stories about Croat and Muslim bandits forcibly, sometimes violently, seizing the property and homes of Serbs who had chosen to remain and, in some cases, contribute to the city’s defense.

If objectivity were the norm, then Gordana would have reported those incidents, along with the daily deaths and injuries caused by Serb bullets, mortars, and artillery shells. But she kept the banditry stories out of the headlines—for a compelling reason. The Bosnian war was very much an information war, and the Serbs were using every possible media outlet to spread lurid, mostly fabricated tales of atrocities committed by Croats and Muslims. Gordana feared that, by running true banditry stories, Oslobođenje would lend credence to these Serb fabrications. One could argue, of course, that a responsible newspaper would have run the banditry stories anyway. But Gordana had her eye on the larger situation, which included the disturbing fact that certain Serb fabrications were being taken seriously by the same Western officials who were claiming to seek a political solution to the conflict.

One of those fabrications involved the mortar attacks of May 27, 1992, in which 22 Sarajevo residents were killed as they stood in line waiting to buy bread. The Serb propaganda machine promptly blamed this on the Bosnian government, which was bad enough. But then, as Off reports, “several members of the international community … helped to disseminate a theory that the attack was planned and performed by the Bosnian government against its own people in an effort to win international sympathy.” Off spent five years investigating this supposed theory and found no evidence to support it. “It’s possible the Bosnians bombed themselves,” she wrote in 2002. “Anything is possible. But given that the Serbs were lobbing as many as 2,000 shells a day into Sarajevo while targeting clearly civilian positions, what seems more likely?” 

To the obvious question—why would highly placed officials lend any credence to wild claims that the victims of genocide would try to gain sympathy by committing further acts of violence against themselves—Off gives this withering answer: “It was a way of making the sides equal. Thus, not allowing any ‘side’ to have moral superiority.” Calling this “deeply cynical,” she concludes: “The problem with moral equivalency is that people actually start to believe it. It stops being a device and start to serve as an easy truth. A reason not to care.”

In April 2000, the United Nations issued a report about its own failure, and that of other organizations and governments around the world, to prevent the mass killings that had occurred during the previous decade, not just in the former Yugoslavia but also in Rwanda. The accompanying press release reads as follows: “In its final observations, the Inquiry states that, faced with genocide or the risk of it, the United Nations had an obligation to act transcending traditional peacekeeping principles. There can be no neutrality in the face of genocide, and no impartiality in the face of a campaign to exterminate part of a population.” (emphasis added) 

This report adds a new and important dimension to the existing UN resolution against genocide, which observed its 70thanniversary in December. But decrees by international bodies can only do so much. Indeed, they bear the same relationship to real decision-making that a map of the Aegean Sea bears to the ten year journey of Odysseus. For Gordana Knezević, journalistic objectivity during the siege of Sarajevo did not mean refusing to take a stand or holding herself above the fray, in the manner of high-minded Western officialdom. Rather it meant taking countless stands, one right after the other, in a situation filled with danger, hunger, sickness, cold, the unending din of bullets and explosions, and the voices of human beings crying in agony, grief, hatred—and, occasionally, love.

That irony was immortalized when the greeting was used as the title of a 1997 film about an emotionally detached British journalist deciding to take sides and help rescue a group of orphaned children.

Hereafter referred to as Bosnia.

Quoted in Tom Gjleten, Sarajevo Daily: A City and Its Newspaper Under Siege (Harper Collins, 1995), p. 65.

At the time, Croats were 17 percent of the Bosnian population, Muslims 44 percent, and Serbs 31 percent.

In recounting these and other events, I rely heavily on the superb reporting of Tom Gjelten.

Quoted in Carol Off, “Doing the Right Thing in an Age of Cynicism,” Journal of Military and Strategic Studies, Vol. 6, Issue 3 (Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute, Winter 2004), pp. 7-8.

Off, p. 4.

Perhaps the most famous of these is Gen. Joven Divjak, an officer in the Serb-dominated Yugoslav National Army (JNA) who changed sides early in the war, joining the Bosnian Territorial Defense forces and eventually becoming a key strategist in the Bosnian resistance. Gordana introduced me to Divjak, who is reviled by Serb nationalists as a “traitor” and “war criminal,” but revered in Sarajevo for having defended the city on principle rather prejudice, and for his devotion to a variety of causes: education for war orphans, help for veterans suffering from PTSD, the repair of schools damaged by floods, full political rights for minorities such as Roma and Jews.

See Gjelten, pp. 159-162.

Off, pp. 8-9.

Ibid, pp. 9-10.

“Chairman of Independent Inquiry into United Nations Actions During 1994 Rwanda Genocide Presents Report To Security Council,” UN Press Release SC/6843 (April 14, 2000).

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The Road to (Super)Power

Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order

Bruno Maçães

Hurst, 2019, 288 pp., $30

Everyone, it seems, is writing books on China. And why not? After all, Beijing remains the only genuine challenger to U.S. hegemony and is, we have long been told, “rising.”

This voluminous body of literature on all things Sino (which fattens each year) makes Bruno Maçães’s achievement all the more impressive. If it’s easy to write a book on China, it’s difficult write a good one on it. Maçães has gone one better and written an excellent book. And he succeeds because he does something different yet vital: He analyzes China through the lens of “Belt and Road,” its most ambitious project of modern times.

Belt and Road is a phrase often heard but rarely understood. But understand it we must, because if it succeeds (and it may not, certainly in its entirety at least) it will be a once-in-a-century geopolitical initiative. It is nothing less than a network of Chinese-dominated trade routes designed to smother Eurasia.

Maçães makes clear from the outset, in lucid and compelling prose, that this is the project’s goal. Belt and Road is above all else a symptom of China’s final embrace of superpowerdom—its realization that, as Maçães writes, it is “capable of remaking the world economy and attracting other countries to its own economic orbit and ideological model.”

The shift in geopolitical outlook cannot be overestimated. China’s brutal reformer Deng Xiaoping massacred students at Tiananmen Square while he modernized his country and lifted millions out of poverty. His chosen method (economically at least) was one that would once have been considered heretical: imitation of the West. Deng dragged China into the 20th century; he made it a market economy and created a huge middle class. The national choice became simple: Re-education camps or color TVs. But his foreign policy always rested on the principles of tao guang yang hui, or keeping a low profile.

With Xi Jinping now at the helm, those days are gone. Xi understands that the United States has pretty much abandoned any pretension to shape the world in its image. Like nature, Beijing abhors a vacuum, and it has decided to fill the Washington-shaped hole in international affairs. Belt and Road is unambiguously a project for a new world order. As Maçães writes:

The global economy is less a level playing field than an organized system in which some countries occupy privileged positions and others, such as China, try to rise to these commanding heights. It was always like that, as you will be told in Beijing. The difference is that now someone else is inching closer to the center. The Belt and Road is the name for a global order infused with Chinese political principles and placing China at its heart.

So if Belt and Road is about cementing Chinese power globally, how does it seek to do it practically? The answer is, superficially at least, trade. Maçães asks us to imagine Belt and Road as “nine arrows crisscrossing Eurasia [the land mass comprising Europe and Asia, stretching from Lisbon to Shanghai] in all directions: six economic corridors on land and three sea routes whose final goal is to create a new global economy and place China at its center.”

This means a system of variegated trade networks strafing the world: a kind of 21st-century Silk Road (the ancient network of trade routes that connected East and West and was immortalized in the works of the explorer Marco Polo). China is putting together nothing less than an “interconnected system of transport, energy and digital infrastructure [that] would gradually develop into industrial clusters and free trade zones and then an economic corridor spanning construction, logistics, energy, manufacturing, agriculture and tourism, culminating in the birth of a large Eurasian common market.” To put it more simply: Chinese in. Americans out.

Of course, as Maçães notes, the Chinese couch the project in more genteel terms. “Win-win” is the mantra. China has overcapacity in several areas, steel and fertilizers to name just two. So what should it do? Well, Belt and Road provides the answer. For steel, it creates markets abroad by investing in infrastructure. For fertilizers it supplies countries such as Vietnam and the Philippines, which have longstanding needs for a reliable supply of phosphate.

Maçães quotes Huang Libin, an official with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology: “For us there is overcapacity,” he says, “but for the countries along the Belt and Road, or for other BRIC nations, they don’t have enough and if we shift it out. . . .it will be a win-win situation.”

Maybe. But then again maybe not.  As Maçães observes, China has emerged as a threat to a Western rules-based global order and “the Belt and Road is now often described as a dagger aimed at the heart of our economies and societies.”

That’s the thing: Once you start with trade and financial flows—or with giving countries what they sorely lack—cultural and political influence surely follows. And that is to say nothing of the military aspect to all this: China is unashamedly building dual-use ports able to berth both cargo ships and military vessels, just as it opens its first overseas bases in Djibouti and—imminently—Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

This is the brilliance implicit within Belt and Road, indeed what forms its very basis. At its heart is Deng’s vision of a “world organized as a network,” in this case of production chains. In understanding that power would eventually drift from rigid hierarchies like media monoliths or even governments to (now digitally-created and enhanced) networks, Deng, as both an autocrat and a hyper-capitalist, was in more ways than one ahead of his time.

The West is now waking up to the threat that Belt and Road poses both economically and geopolitically. Germany and France now talk of it as a hegemonic Chinese project. In Washington, Donald Trump rails more generally against China, but former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson also raised specific concerns about Belt and Road, describing it as “a Faustian pact by which countries sacrificed their independence for cheap loans.”

He may well be right. “Whoever is able to build and control the infrastructure linking the two ends of Eurasia will rule the world,” writes Maçães. In his view, this will be China. It’s a fascinating, intriguing and terrifying story, and Maçães tells it superbly. One can only hope, for our sake, that it does not become reality.

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Is Democracy the Problem?

In trying to explain the dispiriting descent of U.S. politics and governance into pervasive paralysis, conflict and sheer mediocrity, it is hard not to wonder if many of our ills result from intrinsic shortcomings of the democratic model itself—democracy design flaws, if you will. This outlook is gaining appeal not just because of what is happening at home, but because so many other democracies are encountering similar problems while authoritarianism appears to be enjoying a global surge of self-confidence.  As a result, not only are doubts about the value and wisdom of democracy getting a much wider hearing than they were a decade or two ago, so too are voices arguing that authoritarian regimes might be more capable and effective.

Democracy’s doubters tend to accuse democracy of suffering from at least five significant design flaws:

Short-termism: Due to their electoral cycles, democracies struggle to focus on long-term problems and usually remain mired in short-term policy approaches.
Pain aversion: To the limited extent they do manage to look to the long term, democratic politicians are averse to imposing near-term pain for long-term gain because of their need to keep voters happy for the next election.
Elite capture: By opening up decision-making power to competition among politicians who are constantly in need of money for elections, democratic systems are prone to becoming captured by the wealthy.
Division and conflict: Competitive elections foment or exacerbate destructive societal divisions, generating conflict and undercutting a strong sense of national unity and purpose.
Voter ignorance: Relying on ordinary citizens to choose leaders and make judgments among them based on policy performance condemns democracies to leadership and policy choices that reflect chronic voter ignorance and irrationality.

Certainly, these are all serious issues in the United States. Successive U.S. Administrations have proven woefully unable to focus sustained attention on a raft of major long-term challenges—whether it is infrastructure decay, the role of entitlement spending in the U.S. budget, or climate change—and unwilling to craft reforms that inflict short-term pain for the sake of long-term gain. The disproportionate influence of wealthy individuals and corporations in the U.S. legislative process is a well-known reality. With respect to political competition producing divisions and conflict, the U.S. political system is indeed beset by a high degree of polarization and a correspondingly low sense of common purpose. And looking at the state of U.S. political leadership today, it would be hard not to see voter ignorance and irrationality as major concerns.

But should we blame democracy itself, or should we blame ourselves for the pathologies of our own politics? In other words, are these problems in fact endemic to democracies? And are authoritarian governments largely able to avoid them, as some enthusiasts of authoritarianism claim?

The comparative empirical research on these questions is complex and does not always yield definite results. But at least some insights are available. They highlight that while many democratic systems do struggle with these issues, America’s political challenges in these domains are significantly of America’s own making. Moreover, most authoritarian systems do no better in these areas.

Short-termism

Although it is easy to understand why electoral cycles might incline or even condemn democracies to short-termism, in fact the empirical record is mixed with regard to how consistently democracies suffer from it, and how much autocracies escape it.

Climate change starkly demonstrates the challenge of finding the political will to take serious near-term steps to address a long-term problem. Western democracies are obviously struggling to respond adequately. Yet this does not appear to be a shortcoming particular to democracies. A recent systematic study comparing the climate change policies of democracies to those of autocracies found that democracies have done slightly better overall. It is established democracies, such as Germany and the Nordic countries, that have taken the most significant measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. China has of course attracted attention in the past few years for its engagement on climate change, but it has come relatively late to the issue, and is unusual among authoritarian governments in doing so.

The strong resistance of the current U.S. Administration and many senior Republican senators and representatives to address the issue at the Federal level is not primarily a result of endemic democratic short-termism. It reflects some distinctive features of U.S. politics—above all, the ideological aversion on the part of many American conservatives to any increased regulatory role of the Federal government. Where this ideological aversion is not dominant—as in California, for instance—a democratically elected government is able to take at least some serious measures to address climate change at the state level.

Comparing how countries provide public goods offers another way to examine the relative balance of short-term versus longer-term considerations. The short-term tack usually entails providing popular but economically inefficient subsidies on essential goods like fuel, while long-term approaches emphasize investments in areas like public education and infrastructure. Democracies tend to resort less to subsidies than non-democracies and to invest more in public goods overall. In developing countries, democratization tends to lead to greater spending on education, especially primary education, which is a good long-term investment.

The idea that most authoritarian governments generally engage in savvy long-term economic planning and policymaking is an illusion. Many authoritarian systems, dominated by strongmen with grandiose ideas and unchecked by strong accountability mechanisms, pursue ill-conceived white elephant projects, like Egypt’s plan to build a new capital city on the banks of the Nile or Saudi Arabia’s to construct an enormous luxury resort along the Red Sea. China’s investment in long-term infrastructural systems is impressive, but some of this spending emerges less from long-term planning than from rent-seeking by corrupt local officials who have similarly created empty cities and highways to nowhere.

Moreover, many authoritarian regimes are in fact subject to electoral cycles and myopic thinking, even though their elections are uncompetitive or semi-competitive at best. From Russia and Turkey to Venezuela and Zimbabwe, it has become strikingly common for authoritarian leaders to seek to legitimate their rule via elections. Such dictatorships suffer from many of the symptoms of short-termism and boost government spending by two percent on average during election years. Remarkably, these results hold even when no opposition is contesting the election, since autocratic leaders frequently feel pressure to demonstrate their popularity to fend off challengers from within the ruling elite.

Pain aversion

The tendency of U.S. politicians to avoid any fiscal or other such economic reforms that involve near-term belt-tightening has become a major problem for the fiscal health of the United States. Quite a few politicians talk a good game about the need for budget austerity, but when push comes to shove reveal themselves to be deficit doves. Of course, the United States is hardly alone among democracies in its chronic inability to inflict short-term pain for long-term gain. Many peer democracies, including Belgium, France, Italy, and Japan, have in recent decades struggled to cut budgets and reduce high levels of public debt. The issue bedevils some developing democracies as well. India under its current Prime Minister, for example, has been allowing deficits to expand in worrisome ways.

But not all democracies are pain averse. Last decade, Germany and Sweden imposed significant economic reforms that involved various amounts of near-term pain for the sake of putting their economies on a better long-term footing. After the 2008-09 financial crisis, British voters elected a conservative government that promised and then implemented tough across-the-board budget cuts, of a breadth and depth almost unthinkable in the United States. Political economists thus highlight that it is not democracy but rather particular features of U.S. politics—such as intensifying polarization and the economic overconfidence that having the world’s reserve currency brings—that have fueled America’s relative fiscal irresponsibility.

In fact, studies of the imposition of austerity plans in the developing world during the 1990s and 2000s have concluded that democracies generally did better than autocracies at putting such plans into effect. The example of Poland, with its harsh but effective austerity plan in the 1990s as it moved away from communist rule, is a positive example on the democratic side. Of course, some especially harsh autocratic governments have also proven able to impose tough austerity measures, relying on their capacity to repress objections to their doing so. In the 1980s, for example, Romania’s communist strongman, Nicolae Ceauşescu, forced the country into an extremely punishing process of paying down external debt for the stated goal of improving the country’s long-term economic health.

But many authoritarians chronically avoid obviously needed reforms out of the fear that the near-term pain those measures would produce might unsettle their hold on power. Egypt, for example, avoided cutting or removing subsidies on food, fuel, and other basic goods for decades under Hosni Mubarak. The Venezuelan government under Hugo Chávez and then his successor Nicolás Maduro has not dared to impose a desperately needed tax on gasoline, which costs less than $1 for a full tank (Maduro’s recent new gasoline policy seeks to crack down on smugglers rather than actually cut subsidies). Even China, which has long suppressed consumer benefits for the sake of long-term growth, struggles with this issue in myriad ways, including keeping numerous “zombie” firms afloat through various economic breaks rather than facing the anger that would be produced by cutting them off.

Elite capture

The United States clearly has a problem with elite capture of political power. Multiparty competition American-style has come to involve enormous amounts of money flowing into the system from wealthy individuals and corporations aimed at safeguarding their interests. Political representatives at the national level are far wealthier than average Americans. Many legislative and executive policies manifestly reflect the interests of the wealthy more than the poor, including numerous tax benefits specifically designed to help certain groups of wealthy individuals and powerful corporations.

The distorting and often corrupting role of money is almost always an issue in democracies, but certain legal and economic policy choices specific to the United States are aggravating this problem. These include tax breaks and other policies that contribute to high levels of inequality, especially the rapid expansion in recent years of a class of superrich citizens; a campaign financing system that allows enormous amounts of funding through political action committees; and lobbying rules and practices that open up the legislature to private interests to a remarkable degree.

Some other democracies such as Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Sweden do more to limit the flow of money in politics, avoid the dominance of wealthy people in legislatures, and craft national economic policies that limit inequality and represent interests more equally across different economic classes, especially in the fields of health care and education. Thus while the competitive pluralism intrinsic to democracy does naturally tend to pull money into politics, it is also true that some democracies are capable of taking measures to avoid or at least blunt elite capture. And of course some key institutions in democracy, including alternation of power in response to voter choices, respect for a free press, and independent rule of law also help fight against it.

The idea of sober, disinterested authoritarian politicians unswayed by money and devoted to a fair representation of interests is an appealing trope put forward by authoritarianism’s adherents, but is largely a myth. Only a few authoritarian regimes, notably Singapore, achieve anything close to it. Elite capture is in fact a defining feature of many authoritarian regimes. Russia is a textbook case. So too are Saudi Arabia, the other Gulf monarchies, and the Central Asian autocracies, among many others. The lack of public accountability mechanisms, and the centralization of power that obviates checks and balances, make authoritarian regimes intrinsically vulnerable to capture by entrenched interests.

Fostering divisions

The tendency of competitive democratic politics to entrench and sometimes intensify basic divisions within a society is something that genuinely puzzles many observers from China, Russia, and other non-democracies. They often scratch their heads over why Americans think it makes sense to have a political system that seems to sharpen societal divisions rather than emphasizing consensus and unity.

It is easy to invoke the standard answer—that competitive pluralism helps ensure that diverse interests in a society are well-represented by the government and encourages different groups and perspectives to forge productive compromises and hold each other accountable. But it is hard to offer that answer without acknowledging that polarization is indeed a serious problem in American democracy, one that has reached a fever pitch in recent years, fostering legislative gridlock, reducing public trust in the judiciary and other key institutions, and fueling social tensions and anger.

It is not hard to see how democratic electoral competition can pull a country into polarization. Competing parties often have incentives to accentuate differences between them rather than to emphasize common ground, to caricature and even demonize their opponents, and more generally to appeal more to emotion than reason in their quest for votes. And the past several years have seen a marked rise in polarizing political dynamics in democracies in different parts of the world. In Europe, angry populists are drawing harsh lines in the sand against well-established parties. In India, the ruling party has played up Hindu nationalism in ways that aggravate divides within the society. Brazil has just been through its most polarizing election in many years.

Yet polarization is not an inevitable feature of democracies. Most European democracies enjoyed multiple decades of relatively unpolarized political life in the second half of the 20th century, and considerable common political ground among competing parties. Canada proved able to navigate the potentially polarizing divide in the society between English and French speakers through democratic means. Indonesia’s democratic progress of the last two decades was built on overcoming the many regional, ethnic, and religious divisions in the society rather than aggravating them. Where polarization is rising in democracies, it is usually not a product of the political system itself, but public anger over poor socioeconomic performance, or deep divisions over social changes like immigration. In the United States, specific institutional features that are not intrinsic to democracy but rather particular to this country—like primary elections and a first-past-the-post electoral system that discourages the emergence of small or new parties—have incentivized movement away from the center. Thus, blaming democracy for polarization is too blunt and unfocused a charge.

With respect to authoritarian regimes, some do give an impression of purposeful unity and consensus. Over the last ten years, for example, many Russians have genuinely favored the tremendous centralization of power around President Vladimir Putin and his wielding of that power in various nationalistic endeavors. And many Chinese feel comfortable with a political system that emphasizes unity and consensus. But even to the extent that some authoritarian governments achieve such unity, the costs are high in human terms—the repression necessary to maintain it involves torture, imprisonment, expulsion, and other brutal measures, as well as a deadening of society through the suppression of ideas, voices, and associations. The Uighurs of China experience authoritarian consensus in a very different way than many other Chinese.

Moreover, numerous autocracies also face serious internal conflict and divisions. When one particular group in society imposes order by suppressing the views and interests of other groups, whether ethnic, religious, or tribal, autocracies often generate substantial conflict. The eruption of internal conflict in Uzbekistan in the mid-2000s, the Shi‘a protests in Bahrain of 2011, and the eruption of protests in Hong Kong in recent years all highlight this fact. Iran has been roiled by significant protests, reflecting serious societal divisions that its authoritarian system is not able to resolve. The most severe cases of countries collapsing into all-out civil war in recent years, such as Syria and Yemen, have been those in which authoritarian leaders fight tooth and nail to subjugate groups they have long excluded politically. And of course, autocratic regimes frequently scapegoat unpopular minorities and direct campaigns against them for political purposes. The worst examples of internal ethnic, religious, or political violence—such as the genocides in Cambodia, Myanmar, Nazi Germany, and Rwanda—have occurred in undemocratic countries.

Voter ignorance

One of the most basic design elements of democracy is the mechanism of performance accountability that is supposed to come from citizens voting. In simple terms, it is assumed that voters know what they want, are capable of identifying what policies will help them get what they want, and vote for candidates who pursue such policies and deliver results. Yet in Democracy for Realists, the political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels offer a comprehensive critique of this view, which they bruisingly label the “folk theory” of democracy. They demonstrate that U.S. voter behavior is determined primarily by partisan identities that voters assume, based on various sociocultural factors, especially race, faith, and peer groups. In other words, voters’ policy preferences are shaped by their partisan identity, rather than independent thought on any particular issue. They also find that most voters are far too ignorant of political actors and policies to accurately associate specific policy choices with particular parties or candidates. Partisan loyalties are relatively fixed, but voters are enormously inconsistent on specific issues.

They also argue that voting based on past policy performance (like economic performance) does not provide any kind of clear check on governmental behavior. Voters are too ignorant of the overall facts, such as underlying economic conditions, and too swayed by extremely specific and often minor factors (like gas prices) to exert such control in a regular and rational fashion. Even if a large share of voters did possess significant amounts of economic knowledge, assessing responsibility or causality for economic performance is extremely complicated, something about which even the most well-trained experts can strongly disagree.

Achen’s and Bartels’s work, which draws not just on their own research but many dozens of specific studies by other researchers, is focused on the United States. There is no similar comprehensive study of this set of issues that looks comparatively across democracies. There are, however, some comparative studies of civic literacy of citizens in different democracies. While they show that the United States does tend to fall on the lower end of wealthy established democracies when it comes to civic literacy and voter ignorance, they indicate that significant levels of voter ignorance are a reality in most democracies. In other words, the shortcomings of voting as a mechanism for enforcing governance accountability are a design issue that all democracies face.

Yet contending views on this point exist. In their recent book, Democracy in America?, Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens take serious issue with it. They contend that while individual voters do lack fully informed opinions about most issues, the collective or aggregate policy preferences of all Americans are not so problematic. The aggregation process leads to collective policy preferences that are reasonably stable over time and that in fact reflect a certain amount of deliberative process, “because individuals form their opinions through a collective social process that brings deliberation and information to bear on the issues of the day.” They argue that the expressed preferences of Americans deserve much more respect from policymakers than they currently get in the largely captured American political system and that voter majority rule “tends to produce public policies that benefit the largest number of people and promote the common good.”

Furthermore, the evidence for the idea of government by technocratic decision-making, that isolating policy decisions from citizens’ control broadly produces better policies than incorporating citizen input through elections, is scarce. So too is the evidence for the notion that not allowing citizens to choose their leaders but relying instead on force, family lineage, or other such factors will produce better leaders than elections. Adherents of this view tend to focus on the very small number of authoritarian leaders who have governed well, and to ignore the very large number who have not. They compare the best of authoritarians, like Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, to the worst of elected leaders in established democracies, like Silvio Berlusconi. But a more systematic look at authoritarian leaders and their policymaking during the last 50 years reveals an enormous number of cruel, ignorant leaders exerting their power in ineffective and unhelpful ways for the majority of their citizens. And the technocratic model requires a high level of state capacity—to allocate resources and implement policies in a well-calibrated fashion—that most countries saddled with dictatorial leaders lack.

Facing ourselves

Given the dispiriting state of U.S. democracy, it is hard not to give in to the temptation to blame the democratic model itself and start to imagine that non-democratic alternatives might do better in delivering basic governance. But this is misguided thinking. Chronic short-termism, an unwillingness to accept short-term pain for long-term gain, undue policy influence of the wealthy, a startlingly high level of division and conflict within the society, and voter ignorance and irrationality all do appear in many democracies. They are not, however, inevitable characteristics of democratic governance.  They can be limited, sometimes greatly, through smart policies and good leadership. Feeling the weight of these issues now, Americans should not lose sight of the fact that some other democracies have been doing better on these fronts and take seriously the need to overcome our country’s longstanding avoidance of learning from the domestic political experiences of other countries. Nor should Americans slip into thinking that authoritarians naturally or usually avoid these problems. Many authoritarian governments struggle with the same issues as much or more than the United States and other democracies do.

In short, Americans concerned about the state of U.S. democracy need to focus less on what they might believe to be shortcomings of democracy itself, and more on what specific and often distinctive elements of the U.S. political system are exacerbating these issues. Blame for our current political predicament belongs much less with the idea or model of democracy than with ourselves.

The post Is Democracy the Problem? appeared first on The American Interest.

Making Up Monsters to Destroy

Robert Kagan’s appeal as a thinker has always been that his arguments are less saccharine or sentimental than those of his ideological fellow travelers. One could describe his project as an attempt to show that the steely pose of most foreign policy “realists” is compatible with advocacy for America doing more abroad.

His most famous work to make this argument, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (2003), suggested that European squeamishness about the use of military power is the product of their having hid behind a mighty American shield since the end of World War II. Europeans, he argued, favor multilateralism and dialogue over the use of force because they, unlike Americans, have not had to deal with the world as it is for decades. Their Eden-like EU, the product of enlightened reason, was only possible because American hard power kept the monsters at bay. Dangerous Nation (2006) tried to be similarly hard-edged, arguing that Americans’ cherished self-image as a peace-loving people devoted to perfecting their union at home and ignoring the world beyond is a delusion. Since its inception, Kagan argued, America has violently transformed the world in the name of its own brand of commercialized liberalism. Rights and values are part of the package, but not necessarily the most pertinent part.

Of Paradise and Power was published on the eve of the second Iraq War. The Policy Review essay on which it was based came out the year before. I remember reading the essay at the time and being captivated by its ideas precisely because of this unsentimental quality. To this day, I remain attracted to foreign policy analyses that temper deeply felt American idealisms and try to channel them to sounder purposes. But as I read more Kagan through the years, it became clear that his goal was different: He sought to justify idealistic interventionism abroad by showing it was also “realistic.” Especially after the disaster of the second Iraq War, this project seemed unwise.

Donald Trump’s ascent to power has given birth to something of a cottage industry of articles and books dealing with the demise of the so-called liberal world order, and at least on its surface, Kagan’s most recent effort, The Jungle Grows Back, falls firmly within this genre’s bounds. I confess that I almost did not read the book, as this particular genre has been one of the least edifying intellectual phenomena to emerge in the last two years. Then I read an excerpt of it in the Wall Street Journal and was captivated anew. While you know from the outset exactly where he will end up, Kagan’s “realist” grittiness helps his argument transcend the genre he is playing in, even as it turns on and critiques its own premises.

So what exactly is this genre? We are all familiar with the general thrust of the “sentimental” version of the liberal world order argument. To wit: “We, in the West, have to stand up for our values against the rising authoritarian challenge. This is a civilizational struggle. Malevolent, atavistic forces are on the move. Nothing less than the world as we know it—a world we painstakingly built and sacrificed for throughout the long 20th century—is at stake.” The problem with the argument is not that it is strictly wrong, but rather that it is sloppy. Ill-defined, broad categories tumble out one after another—concepts like “the West,” “values,” and “authoritarian” abound—suggesting weighty and ominous things without ever really defining in real-world terms what is being spoken about.

It’s not that the sentimental narrative as a whole is implausible. Something is definitely changing, geopolitically speaking, and it has been doing so since at least 2010. Several large countries—albeit regional powers—are challenging a broad if uneven American hegemony in various theaters around the world. It’s an unsettling and unfamiliar time, and on some level we appreciate efforts at coming to terms with it all. Still, one can’t help shake the feeling that we’re being preached at rather than informed. There’s a strident call-to-arms quality here that feels overwrought, the product of largely self-induced panic rather than calm contemplation.

Most of these writers seem to proceed from under-examined first principles and build out from there. A key unifying belief is the existence of progress—material progress, yes, but also a kind of moral progress, an emancipation from superstition and oppression. History is nothing more than a story of this progress, and it has a broad directionality to it. Progress is achieved through the application of reason, and since reason is a universal human faculty, we can expect a kind of societal convergence over time. It may be fitful, but it is unavoidable. And it has been shown that societies progress by committing to individualism, to free trade and market economies, and to democracy. This is not a subtle philosophy that weighs the centuries of debate surrounding these complicated questions. It’s more like half-remembered para-Whiggish platitudes culled from an undergraduate political science survey textbook—more Enlightenment-as-dogma than a developed, considered worldview.

And since it is dogma, its negation arouses strong feelings. The election of Donald Trump, Brexit, the rise of “populist” forces across Europe—these events are not just seen as regrettable setbacks, but also as demonstrably wrong, and, as a result, threatening on a different scale altogether. After all, we live in democracies, which means we live and die by the voice of “the people.” And “the people” includes the poorly educated and unenlightened. (At this point, a note of condescension usually creeps into the argument.) Voters’ choices are explained away as either being the product of irrational emotional resentments that have arisen due to the cruelties of globalization, or, perhaps more ominously, as the result of machinations of foreign powers striving to subvert the sovereign will of democratic societies by confusing otherwise rational voters with disinformation.

And who would these “foreign” powers be? Non-Western challengers opposed to the liberal world order, of course—societies that have yet to properly internalize the rationally derived truths of political development, and still live by the illiberal rules of authoritarian states. Russia is often identified as the fount of the purest form of this anti-rationalist, embittered, revanchist ideology, with China and Iran as ambitious fellow travelers also seeking to profit from rewriting the rules of the game.

It all comes together quite tidily from there. Individualism, markets, trade, democracy, these are wholly good things—instrumentally good for progress, and therefore with positive moral content. Meanwhile, anyone opposed to them is either an unlettered fool helplessly swimming against the grand currents of history, perhaps justified in being frustrated but still doomed to fail; or else a dupe of one or more hostile foreign powers. The foreign powers themselves are in thrall to what amounts to a coherent but false ideology that has more than a passing resemblance to some of the intellectual currents that flourished in the interwar period in the 20th century. With that, the sermon is complete: We must gird ourselves for the ultimate moral struggle of our time, a fight of good versus an elemental evil, long thought vanquished but in fact resurgent.

The Jungle Grows Back immediately distinguishes itself from the pack by taking direct aim at the key piety that ties the standard narrative together: the idea of progress. “Unlike other cultures, which view history as a continuous cycle of growth and decay, or as stasis,” Kagan writes, “we view history as having a direction and a purpose. . . . we have come to believe that, while there may be occasional bumps and detours on the road, progress is inevitable.”

This is all a myth, he unequivocally states. The world as we know it, the international system as it is currently constructed, is a mere contingency—an historical aberration.

We have witnessed amazing progress over the past seven decades, and not just technological progress but also human progress. Yet this progress was not the culmination of anything. It was not the product of evolution, of expanding knowledge, of technological advances, the spread of commerce, and least of all of any change in the basic nature of human beings. It has been the product of a unique set of circumstances contingent on a particular set of historical outcomes, including on the battlefield, that could have turned out differently.

In other words, the liberal world order is a happy accident, the result of the liberal side triumphing in the Great Power struggle of the nuclear age. It didn’t have to work out that way. And it is precisely because of this contingency that we must prize the achievement highly. Don’t be complacent, Kagan is arguing, for it could all disappear in a heartbeat. The United States must therefore return to an expansive leadership role, one perhaps even more ambitious than the one it undertook in 1945. The rest of the book is largely Kagan making that case, and suggesting how such a newly expansive role might be shaped.

In doing so, Kagan admits something that most of his peers usually either miss or happily gloss over: America’s commitment to prosecuting the Cold War was driven by an overwhelming fear of the Soviet Union. At one point Kagan notes in passing that the direct threat to Americans’ way of life may even have been “exaggerated” by elites, both for effect but also because these selfsame elites were trapped by their own logic—that of “containment.” Kagan’s cramped history of containment leaves something to be desired; he makes no distinction, for example, between George F. Kennan’s more limited, inward-looking approach that emerged directly in the aftermath of World War II, and what containment became as early as 1951 after Paul Nitze got his hands on the concept. This is an important conflation, more on which later. But Kagan’s broader point stands, and is important: Fear of the enemy drove U.S. Cold War logic.

Kagan focuses on this because he rues the fact that, with the Soviet Union gone, no bogeyman big enough to keep Americans focused on maintaining their preeminent position in the world exists. It’s not the failures in Iraq or Afghanistan, or even the blow of the financial crisis in 2008, that have hollowed out America’s commitment. It’s that without a pervasive threat, Americans mark the world as a solved problem—“the widespread conviction that the role the United States has been playing in the world for the past seven decades is no longer necessary, perhaps was never necessary, and in any case no longer serves American interests,” he writes.

Kagan therefore makes an attempt to cast first Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and then Xi Jinping’s China, as authoritarian challengers and potential threats to the American way of life. In doing so, he makes another important assertion: The true ideological nemesis of liberalism was not communism but authoritarianism—not economics but politics. Communism, after all, was a product of Enlightenment thinking—a bastard child of liberalism and positivism—that wound up at a dead end. Their mutual antagonism from the 19th century through 1989 was a fraternal affair. Authoritarianism, however, is a reaction against the Enlightenment itself, and in Europe something that has grounded itself in, and has appealed to, human longings completely different from those satisfied by liberalism.

And so the book ends up in much the same place as every other liberal world order sermon: The ideological struggle of our time is between the forces of light (the liberal followers of Enlightenment principles) and the forces of darkness (the obscurantist reactionaries to that tradition). Americans, the purest children of the Enlightenment, may think the struggle has long ago been won, but they are wrong—as wrong as the naifs who refused to confront illiberalism in the 1930s.

But Kagan’s tone is ultimately very different. He counsels steely resolve rather than moral panic: “To know that the jungle will always be there is not to despair of keeping it at bay, as we have done for decades.”

Let’s circle back to the question of progress, because it is in denying the idea of progress that Kagan’s argument is at its most interesting and original. As noted above, he says there can be no progress because there exists a “basic nature of human beings” that remains stubbornly resistant to change. Later in the book, when contrasting authoritarianism to communism, Kagan expands on the point:

[Authoritarianism] appeals to core elements of human nature that liberalism does not always satisfy—the desire for order, for strong leadership, and perhaps above all, the yearning for the security of family, tribe, and nation. If the liberal world order stands for individual rights, freedom, universality, equality, regardless of race or national origin, for cosmopolitanism and tolerance, the authoritarian regimes of today stand for the opposite, and in a very traditional and time-honored way.

This is the primeval “jungle” of his title that keeps encroaching despite the best clearing efforts of the civilizers. And it’s not just some kind of human id at work; Kagan, following the work of Isaiah Berlin, sketches out in broad strokes a well-developed intellectual tradition that arose in reaction to the Enlightenment. Unlike Berlin, however, he is less careful about drawing out the differences among the various arguments within that tradition, and ends up suggesting at times that illiberalism leads to Hitlerism. He cites Hannah Arendt’s invocation of “subterranean streams of Western History” out of context to make the connection, though Arendt’s approach to excavating the intellectual roots of totalitarianism is substantially different from Berlin’s, and thus from Kagan’s.

The strike against the idea of progress is at first glance welcome, for it sobers up a debate that otherwise tends toward hysteria. A Burkean pose is even detectable in some of Kagan’s passages—a world-weary acknowledgment that liberal precepts cannot sate endlessly complex and needy human souls. But his pivot back to a kind of Manicheaism is unfortunate, as it collapses important distinctions that would otherwise help us make sense of the current moment.

So is there really such a thing as an illiberal authoritarian challenge to liberalism? It’s a contentious point at minimum, and I would argue that it’s more the result of loose definitions than anything real. Or, to put it somewhat differently, what we are witnessing today looks almost nothing like the nightmare scenario that the liberal world order folks would have you believe is imminent.

The reality is that the illiberal, anti-Enlightenment tradition is far broader and most of it less dangerous than Kagan allows. American conservatives work hard to place Edmund Burke within a broad liberal tradition in order to claim him for their own, but in truth Burke was self-avowedly illiberal. He singled out John Locke for abuse, stating in Parliament that his Second Treatise was among the worst books ever written. What annoyed him most about Locke was the pretension to universal truths discoverable by reason—precisely the attitude Kagan identifies as unacceptably retrograde. Burke admitted to rights, but not “natural” ones; rights were founded on historical contingencies, and, in the case of “English rights,” a natural treasure to be carefully preserved and cultivated by the country’s elites.

There are of course illiberal thinkers who fit the mold Kagan has in mind. Joseph de Maistre, probably the second most famous critic of the French Revolution after Burke, was a brilliant and acerbic Catholic reactionary who comes under close scrutiny by Berlin as a forerunner of the “attitudes of mind” that found fullest expression in Nazi Germany. A lot separates Maistre from Burke, true, but it would be difficult to draw too thick a dividing line between the two thinkers on the question of the value of Enlightenment ideas. They are both “illiberal” critics who think that liberalism leads humanity astray. But in denying the “truth” of liberalism, does illiberalism pose a mortal threat to it?

It’s within Kagan’s grasp to lay out the way in which it doesn’t. He points out that the communist tradition could not countenance competition from liberalism because its core values sprung from the same source. Both traditions laid claim to the promise of reason to liberate humanity from both feudal penury and obscurantist religion, and both saw the success of the other as a fatal challenge to its own legitimacy. There could be only one.

Illiberalism, on the other hand, exists on a spectrum with liberalism. They are incommensurate at the extremes, yes, but it doesn’t stretch the mind to imagine illiberal conservatism and liberalism, opposed as they are to each others’ first principles, coexisting just fine in the middle. Indeed, it’s easy to imagine because that is arguably the role that a moderate Burkean flavor of “illiberalism” has played in the success of liberal democracies. Compare, for example, the success of the American Revolution to the chaos and reversals unleashed by the French. Or, as the Hungarian theorist of social democracy Karl Polanyi might have put it, just as market capitalism has atomizing tendencies that a successful society must balance against, so does pure universalist liberalism eat away at the cultural sinews that tie a polity together—a tendency that also needs balancing against if a society is to thrive.

In other words, one could think of “illiberalism” as a means of keeping liberal hubris in line.

And liberal hubris is Kagan’s greatest weakness, just as it is for of all the high priests of liberal world order. Kagan may well reject the idea that the French Revolution failed in large part because it was too imbalanced toward universal ideals, and thus far too destructive of that which kept France together as a society. At one point, he sounds as fanatical as Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson in claiming that the ideas voiced in the Declaration of Independence trump those found in the U.S. Constitution. It’s an argument of sorts, and not an uncommon one these days, but it is deeply wrongheaded nonetheless. It seems self-evident that had Jefferson been our sole Founding Father, and had his egalitarian universalism not been tempered by the skepticism of his peers, the United States would be a far inferior nation today—if it existed at all.

Or similarly, consider George F. Kennan, whom Kagan enlists as one of the heroes of his cause. In reality, Kennan was much more hostile to universals than Kagan’s telling would have you believe. He was a WASP of the old school, a religiously observant man steeped in a form of noblesse oblige that no longer exists in America—and in the grip of every single one of the soft bigotries attendant to that worldview. His idea of containment was to do the least possible to prevent the Soviet Union from occupying the urban, industrial centers of Europe and the Pacific rim, the fall of which would allow the Soviets to threaten the United States directly. He had both a deep knowledge of and a deep sympathy for Europeans, but strove to keep his cherished America at arms’ length from the continent. He was against the creation of NATO because he worried about what permanent militarization would do to his country’s soul. It’s a pity Kagan doesn’t spend more time exploring these facets of Kennan, opting instead to paint him in his own preferred color palette. While Kennan may not have been right in everything he did or advocated, his life is a testament to what a properly circumscribed, humble liberalism put into practice looks like—both as a philosophy and as a policy guide.

That is precisely what today’s moment cries out for: Kennan’s humility rather than a new crusade against a new Evil Empire. It cries out for a skeptical liberalism that sees the world as it is rather than going looking for new monsters to destroy. It’s true that the world is full of hostile powers that are increasingly pushing back on American hegemony, and that their doing so is not to our advantage or to the advantage of our allies. And it’s also true that the liberal powers that emerged victorious after 1989 are suffering self-inflicted body blows to their professed ideology. But seeing these body blows as being delivered on behalf of a rival “illiberalism” is a dangerous misdiagnosis.

Our geopolitical challenges spring from large countries jostling for relative advantage, with especially China looking to assert its growing might. But “authoritarianism” is not a rival ideology. It tells us very little about the nature of the challenge from either China or Russia or Iran. Our ideological troubles spring, I have argued before, from liberalism’s lack of perceived legitimacy. Authoritarianism emerges as a symptom either where the liberal approach to organizing society has failed to take root, or where an established liberalism is seen to be overreaching unopposed. We ought to be on the lookout for these failures of liberalism—for “the appeals to core elements of human nature that liberalism does not always satisfy,” as Kagan nicely puts it—and making humble corrections, rather than doubling down on a path that has helped to delegitimize those very ideas in a growing number of people’s eyes.

The Jungle Grows Back is an important book insofar as it contains all the debates outlined above within it. And Kagan opens the space for these ideas to breathe a little by rightly dismissing teleological progressivism in his book’s opening pages—a great service that makes reading the book a richer experience than it otherwise might have been. But a more moderate, and therefore much wiser, conclusion is passed over by an author whose commitment to his priors prevents him from seeing what a gem he might have had on his hands. It’s too bad.

See Adam Garfinkle here for more on the sloppiness of the Liberal World Order theorists—one of the earliest and best critiques of the phenomenon.

Once again, it’s hard to do better than Garfinkle on the subject of America’s secularized religion that drives its foreign policy.

Frank Fukuyama is all over this idea in The End of History and the Last Man with his discussion of megalothymia, and has expanded and updated his thinking in his most recent book Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment.

The post Making Up Monsters to Destroy appeared first on The American Interest.

US Should Slap Magnitsky Sanctions on Ortega Regime in Nicaragua

The year ended in Nicaragua with a crackdown on NGOs, an occupation of prominent newspapers, and a warrantless confiscation of journalists’ computers, hard-drives, and private documents. President Daniel Ortega’s government has even blocked the import of ink and paper, reprising a practice used during his rule in the 1980s that has left most journalistic outlets with a maximum lifespan of about two months before having to shut down the presses. Many journalists now write clandestinely. Meanwhile, nearly 100,000 people have been forced to migrate from Nicaragua since the crisis began in April 2018. Among those targeted was Carlos Fernando Chamorro, the founder of Confidencial and perhaps the most famous journalist in the country. In this newest phase of violence, it is clear that the Ortega regime views civil society itself as the seedbed of an opposition movement bent on his downfall.

In addition to its attacks on NGOs and media outlets, the regime expelled prominent human rights monitors established by the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights (IACHR) after the initial unrest broke out. (The IAHCR has documented gross human rights violations committed mostly by Ortega’s national police and paramilitary groups.) After this year-end assault, there are few functioning, independent human rights bodies remaining in the country. Recently approved regulations require independent groups and NGOs to register with a financial analysis and accounting agency, which will scrutinize their operations and potentially reveal the origins of their funding. With the looting of this information, the Nicaraguan regime now possesses highly sensitive and personal data that could put at risk many lives in a country where violent repression has led to nearly 500 deaths and more than 500 political prisoners—twice as many political prisoners as Venezuela in a much shorter period of time.

The Trump Administration has met each phase of Nicaragua’s unfolding crisis with carefully crafted sanctions, but invoking the Global Magnitsky Act to sanction Ortega himself would be a justified escalation. As his rapid and total shutdown of Nicaraguan civil society enters what could be the decisive phase in the conflict, applying Magnitsky Act sanctions would send just the right message: that Ortega’s murderous new regime has become a worse human rights violator than the dictator the Sandinistas helped topple in 1979.

Global Magnitsky Act sanctions on Ortega would be befitting of Nicaragua’s membership in what U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton has deemed the “Troika of Tyranny.” How else is the United States to respond to the leaders of a regime that forces doctors to deny care to wounded protestors in contravention of the Hippocratic Oath; allows paramilitaries to burns families alive, including infant children; and uses snipers to kill more than a dozen people on Mother’s Day? These are the kinds of heinous acts that the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts—a working group assembled by the OAS—says constitute “crimes against humanity” in a recent report, for which crimes they place the blame squarely on both Ortega and Vice President (and wife), Rosario Murillo.

Such sanctions would also complement U.S. efforts already underway against Murillo, who insiders say is the hardliner calling many of the shots. Because “decisions cannot be made without [Murillo’s] approval,” according to sources close to the couple, U.S. strategy should seek to deepen the growing rift between the two leaders on the future of Nicaragua. Simply put, sanctions on Ortega could further split the matrimony of convenience currently ruling the country.

The couple’s crackdown has followed a Venezuelan-style playbook of escalation. First, they responded to protests with police and paramilitary brutality. Next, the duo vowed to sweep up any remnants of protest and declare a return to normalcy. Arbitrary detention followed closely thereafter. When these tactics proved futile, the couple resorted to outright criminalization of dissent. Fittingly, the weapons associated with each step of repression also increased in their lethality: Canisters of tear gas morphed into rubber bullets, rubber bullets became real bullets, and, eventually, real bullets turned into military-grade firepower. There are now ominous signs that Ortega’s national police forces are preparing for the possibility of civil war, as they have been documented training with grenade launchers and RPGs reserved exclusively for the Nicaraguan military.

A Long History of Institutional Decay

There is a clear reason the couple is targeting civil society. In the absence of any meaningful political opposition to the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN), NGOs and the independent media have often played the traditional role of loyal opposition, asking tough questions about democratic backsliding and the independence of institutions, uncovering corruption and organized crime links, and seeking accountability.

While this is less ideal than a scenario in which political parties serve as the principal opposition, a constellation of civic groups is certainly a marked improvement from the period of early Sandinista rule. To rein in opposition from civil society during this period, Nicaragua emulated Cuba in creating government-controlled mass organizations to channel and control civic participation. Indeed, Cuba has a long-standing relationship with the Sandinista Front, dating back to the early days of its formation as a revolutionary guerrilla movement fighting Anastasio Somoza, that ought to serve as one of the best reminders of the FSLN’s enduring authoritarian instincts.

Although Ortega did step down after his stunning electoral defeat in 1990, he nevertheless moved to consolidate his power. Before departing office, the Sandinistas nationalized state assets and expropriated private property in an event known in Nicaragua as “La Piñata”—like the popular papier-mâché party decorations burst open for the treats they hide within. This power grab permitted Ortega to remain highly relevant and well-financed as he transitioned to the role of opposition figure. By attacking private property rights, Ortega seized economic power from potential enemies, allowing him to continue to dictate the terms of doing business in Nicaragua. Even while out of power, Ortega claimed to “rule from below” through student groups and labor unions controlled by the Sandinistas.

In 1996 and 2001, Ortega struggled to return to the presidency. Finally in 2006, he won with a miniscule 38 percent of the vote—the result of a shady deal known as “El Pacto” (the pact), made years earlier with the corrupt President Arnoldo Alemán, exchanging immunity for the former for electoral advantage for the Sandinistas. The backroom deal lowered the threshold for winning the presidency to as little as 35 percent of the first round vote, provided the margin of victory was at least 5 percent. In an accord made by the caudillos of the Liberal Party and FSLN, Alemán thought he had outwitted Ortega and cornered him in a game that he could never win. He was wrong.

Back in power for more than a decade, Ortega and Murillo now control virtually all levers of the Nicaraguan government through co-optation and outright suppression of any significant opposition. The National Assembly, the Supreme Court, the judiciary, the police, and the prosecutor’s office all remain firmly in their possession, aided by the strategic empowerment of Ortega loyalists—including some of his 11 children. Co-optation of the Supreme Court and National Assembly led to the lifting of a ban on consecutive terms for Presidents, paving the way for Ortega’s indefinite reelection. Additionally, $500 million a year in Venezuelan aid ensures the permanent dependence of an entrepreneurial class on FSLN largess.

Notably, the Nicaraguan army is the sole institution that, for the moment, is not under the sway of the Ortega-Murillo clan. The army values its professional reputation and institutional relationship with its U.S. counterpart. Moreover, the army established its own independent identity under General Humberto Ortega, the brother of Daniel, from whom he is bitterly estranged. Insiders say that for more than a decade the army’s leadership has remained adamant that it will never accept Murillo as President and commander-in-chief.

The cult of personality surrounding Ortega and Murillo and their near total control of Nicaragua’s political institutions explain why they were taken by surprise when civil society awakened and large-scale protests arose to threaten their grip on power. Just one week after protests began, and after it became clear that the opposition’s momentum could not be slowed with promises of dialogue, the couple broadened the definition of terrorism and began manufacturing a well-worn narrative: that political unrest was nothing more than a soft coup (“un golpe suave”), reducing all political grievances to illegitimate claims stemming from U.S. and international pressure on Nicaragua.

A House Divided Against Itself…

Thus far, sanctions against Nicaragua have taken multiple forms. Much to its credit, in July the Trump Administration invoked the Magnitsky Act against three people close to Ortega and Murillo, including the National Police Commissioner. In November, sanctions based on a new Executive Order hit Murillo herself and the National Security Advisor, Nestor Moncada Lau. The U.S. Congress also passed the Nicaraguan Investment Conditionality Act (NICA Act), intended to leverage U.S. influence to block loans to Nicaragua from international development banks unless the Ortega regime recommits itself to democracy and fair elections. The Organization of American States (OAS) has considered applying the Inter-American Democratic Charter against Nicaragua, which could lead to further sanctions or expulsion from the organization. (In an act of desperation, Nicaragua has lobbied against application of the democratic charter, on the basis that OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro is acting as a pawn in a soft coup.)

Still more must be done if Nicaragua is to realize early elections (in which neither Ortega nor Murillo should participate) and step back from the precipice. Many see the promise of political dialogue as a farce that will afford the couple more time to solidify their hold on power and divide the opposition. Some members of the FSLN do not agree with the couple’s repressive approach and would like Sandinismo to chart a different path, suggesting an inter-party spat that the United States ought to leverage to add another front of pressure on Ortega and Murillo to leave office early and proceed with early elections. Indeed, this is a tall order, but prominent figures who have split with Ortega might persuade fellow Sandinistas that the time has come to put country before party.

The primary goal of U.S. policy towards Nicaragua should be to lead an international response preventing the situation from careening out of control, while the secondary goal should be safeguarding against pro-government groups veering into transnational organized crime, as they have in Venezuela. Given the assiduousness with which the Nicaraguan police have taken note of participants in the protests for the purposes of harassment, jailing, torture, and even summary execution, the time to act is now. The more Ortega and Murillo consolidate their power by destroying civil society and any effective political opposition, the less plausible peaceful forms of protest become as a means of restoring democracy in Nicaragua. After all, it would not be difficult to start a war in a country awash with weapons and a history of violent insurrection against dictators. Worse yet, it is only a matter of time before some kind of extra-regional intervention occurs—for example, before China transferring technology to assist the authoritarian clampdown, as it has done in Venezuela, or before Russia swoops in to play the spoiler to U.S. interests in its own backyard.

Even though the United States must recognize the limits of its leverage, there is reason to be optimistic that the Trump Administration can leverage sanctions as part of a comprehensive strategy for getting to early elections. First, the administration has already pursued an aggressive policy of sanctions against both Nicaragua and its benefactor, Venezuela. Second, the Venezuela situation increases the incentives to act, since it serves as a daily snapshot of a tragedy foretold when severe economic mismanagement and authoritarianism are permitted to fester in the region. Third, while the U.S. government does not deploy the term lightly, Trump called out Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro as a dictator early in his term and ought to see the glaring similarities with Daniel Ortega. What remains to be seen, however, is not whether the administration can put in place a policy of harsh sanctions to help engender an endgame situation in Nicaragua, but rather whether it will muster the leadership necessary to affect the final resolution.

There is also cause to be slightly more confident about the effectiveness of sanctions as part of a comprehensive policy toward Nicaragua. Simply put, Nicaragua is a different animal than Venezuela. It is highly dependent on foreign aid and remittances, and it lacks the vast natural resources of Venezuela, as well as being a much smaller and less developed country. Nicaragua remains the second poorest country in Latin America, and its economy is still largely rural and agrarian. The economy, which was predicted to grow 5 percent in 2018, has instead slumped 4 percent, with an additional 7-10 percent drop in GDP projected for 2019. Further sanctions on Nicaragua could bite even harder as the economy enters free fall and Ortega resorts to praising the virtues of Nicaragua’s “rice and beans” economy. Lastly, Ortega’s principal role in the Piñata episode, as well as years of lavish Venezuelan aid with little oversight, virtually ensures that loads of cash have been ferreted out of the country and laundered through overseas markets.

To be sure, the United States has a long and complicated history in Nicaragua. But Global Magnitsky Act sanctions on Ortega himself would represent a step in the right direction, by standing with much of the inter-American community in defending human rights. Sanctions could also encourage the European Union and Canada to follow suit, since neither has sanctioned Nicaragua yet. U.S. sanctions could also turn up the heat on Ortega, drive a larger wedge between him and Murillo, force the couple to accede to an OAS resolution calling for early elections, and prevent a dynastic dictatorship from forming in a country that recently fought a bloody revolution to prevent one. With the right combination of pressure and support for the opposition, the mechanisms of repression that Ortega and Murillo hoped would ensure their hold on power could soon turn to quicksand.

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Churchill’s Canvases

Churchill: The Statesman as Artist

David Cannadine

Bloomsbury, 2018, 192 pp., $30

“We have been told that Faust sold his soul for the right to command the moment to remain,” Winston Churchill told the politicians and artists gathered at the Royal Academy’s summer banquet. “Without the slightest prejudice to their future destination,” Churchill continued, artists have “the power to command the moment to remain, not only for their own advantage and reputation, but for the pleasure of everyone else.”

In a single turn of phrase, Churchill managed to beatify half the room and damn the other. Whereas an artist’s Faustian bargain was to capture a moment for all to enjoy, the politician’s deal with the devil was for enduring power and influence. Churchill would know. By the time he offered these remarks in 1927, he had run for office as a Conservative, as a Liberal, as a short-lived “Constitutionalist,” and then again as a Conservative. Lord Asquith had already kicked him out of his government following the devastating defeat at Gallipoli, and Churchill had spent several years rehabilitating his image commanding men in the trenches of World War I Belgium.

Churchill would make both Faustian bargains in his life, as a politician and artist. Yet for historians more familiar with battlefield strategy than compositional form, Churchill’s artistic legacy is often swept into the dustbin.

In the latest biography by Andrew Roberts, one of Churchill’s preeminent historians, just three pages out of 1,500 are devoted to the statesman’s artistic legacy. Yet painting was one of the most enduring and enriching activities he embraced in his lifetime. The signs are there: a prodigious output of over 544 canvases; a longstanding relationship with Britain’s Royal Academy, eclipsed only by his relationship with the House of Commons; and a traveling exhibition of his work that garnered a public response unlike any in the 20th century. When Dwight D. Eisenhower convinced a gallery in the Midwest to exhibit his work (and convinced Churchill to allow them), it sparked Churchill’s creative apotheosis across the world’s English-speaking countries. At the Art Institute of Chicago, the director’s decision to decline the traveling exhibition caused such a furor he was forced to resign. In London, gallery goers lined up around the block of the Royal Academy to see Churchill’s work. The only other artist drawing larger crowds at the time was Leonardo da Vinci.

A new book by British biographer David Cannadine sets out to highlight Churchill’s artistic legacy, or least pull it from the heap of his political accomplishments. Published this past fall, Churchill: The Statesman as Artist traces Churchill’s artistic development and influences. Alongside a biographical essay, Cannadine has collected all of Churchill’s known writings on art and has paired them with a selection of writings by Churchill’s art world contemporaries, providing a window into how his art was perceived in his own time.

Was Churchill a “good artist”? Cannadine dodges the question by calling him a “successful amateur,” and rightfully so. The motivations that drive professional artists, to create artwork original enough to attract patrons and posterity, were the least of Churchill’s concerns. He painted to “command the moment to remain,” to capture a moment for himself when the rest of his life was decided by committee and public opinion.

The Faustian bargain that drove Churchill to seek an enduring impact in politics also drove him to the canvas. When he was forced to resign as First Admiral following Gallipoli, the sudden plummet from political influence brought on a deep-seated depression. “Like a sea-beast fished up from the depths, or a diver too suddenly hoisted, my veins threatened to burst from the fall in pressure,” he wrote later in life.

The sudden shift in political fortune led Churchill to art. Listless and depressed, he rented a country home in Surrey with his wife Clementine, far away from the political establishment that so quickly shunned them. While family visited one weekend, his brother’s wife Goonie, an artist herself, encouraged him to pick up the brush.

At 39, Churchill took to painting immediately. It likely didn’t take much prodding; painting was a common pastime in the military. Officers trained in the close observation of terrain could transfer those skills to the sketchbook, while lightweight supplies could be toted to any colonial outpost. And the skills sharpened at Westminster translated to the canvas as well. As Churchill noted in his Faustian Bargain speech, art resembles politics. When crafting the “policy of a nation, or planning a battle on sea or land, you would come across the same sort of decisions and complex compositions requiring flair and judgement as are always presented in the course of painting any large or serious picture.” The complementary traits of art and military strategy also tempted Ulysses S. Grant at West Point, not to mention Churchill’s peers, including General Eisenhower, Field Marshall Harold Alexander, and Field Marshall Sir Claude Auchinleck.

As suggested by a remarkable output of over 544 paintings, Churchill would go on to prioritize painting above his other non-political activities. What caused him to dedicate so much time—which surely could be spent on more practical pursuits—to pushing paint around? Unlike the shifting frontlines of a battlefield or political career, a canvas painted is territory forever won. Yet in the process of winning it, any mistakes made in oil paint could be easily erased. “One sweep of the palette-knife ‘lifts’ the blood and tears of a morning from the canvas and enables a fresh start to be made; indeed the canvas is all the better for past impressions,” he wrote in 1948. Amidst the terrible loss of lives at Gallipoli and the early derailing of his career, Churchill took solace in the malleability of a canvas and paints.

In war, the result is never final. Carl von Clausewitz’s observation on the impermanence of victory could have been Churchill’s catchphrase, given the unceasing “blood, toil, tears and sweat” that he offered the British Empire. But when painting, he had complete control, with no committees or constituents to appease. All personal choice and no public consequence, each canvas was a moment permanently captured. In doing so, he strengthened his mental defenses against the impermanence of victory that marked his career.

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Self-Portrait, 1920
© National Trust / Charles Thomas

Cannadine provides 32 examples of Churchill’s work, beginning with a spectral self-portrait painted during his political exile after Gallipoli. Accustomed to Churchill’s bright public talents, our eyes have to re-adjust to the humbler glow of his art. The persuasive power we associate with Churchill’s writing is largely absent from his canvases. He eschewed grand subjects in favor of modest landscapes, interior settings, and still lives of items scrounged around Chartwell.

In an early self-portrait, painted around 1920, Churchill’s pale figure is nearly subsumed by black shadows pressing in on all sides. A sharp light glances off his face, illuminating his tightly set mouth and hollowed eyes. Churchill portrays himself as a weary figure, diminished yet resolute.

Following this early self-portrait, Churchill’s artwork becomes curiously immune to the darkness and disruption of war-ravaged England. He painted the ornate interiors of Blenheim, Chartwell, and his friends’ country estates. The settings of his travels throughout Europe, Egypt, and Morocco also captured his attention. Much like his speeches, his paintings are animated by an abundance of color. While presiding over the Cairo Conference as Colonel Secretary in 1921, Churchill created one of his finest early works. In a painting of the Great Pyramids, silhouettes of the commanding structures are dashed in plum and orange. Around them, blue and gold is woven into a prismatic sky that belies impressionist influences. When he wasn’t painting, his days in Cairo were filled with intense negotiations over Sykes-Picot and the Balfour Declaration. Each canvas became a brief refuge, a unit of time, space, and deliberation belonging solely to Churchill.

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The Pyramids, 1921 © The Churchill Heritage Ltd. Photo credit: National Trust Images

The intensely personal nature of Churchill’s artwork might surprise viewers expecting to see his public persona rendered on canvas. While he occasionally submitted artwork to juried exhibitions (under a pseudonym, to dissuade overgenerous assessments), he was humble in his artistic ambitions. Missing from his canvases are the grand narratives, calculated sophistication, or consciously autobiographical details that often mark the work of a career artist. As a hobbyist, Churchill painted for an audience of one, or occasionally two or three if he was gifting his hosts with a canvas.

Churchill’s appetite for experimentation was generous and unprejudiced. A still life of a metal canister might carry the earthbound tones and smooth finish of social realism, while a villagescape that same year is built from vibrant, impressionistic brushstrokes. He briefly embraced photo-sensitive canvases, which created the ghost of a photo’s image to guide painting. While these canvases reflect finer technical execution, it’s hard to escape the “paint-by-numbers” quality. Works produced at this time, such as the monochromatic Tea at Chartwell (1928), seemed drained of life and Churchill’s characteristic vibrancy. No matter, the artist would likely respond: “If you try and fail, there is not much harm done. The nursery will grab what the studio has rejected.”

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Tea at Chartwell, 1927
© The Churchill Heritage Ltd. Photo credit: National Trust Images

Yet art was serious business for Churchill, as Cannadine proves with his collection of Churchill’s writing, 12 articles, essays and speeches spanning 1912 to 1954. The majority are speeches given by Churchill during the Royal Academy’s annual summer banquet. Cannadine has also unearthed exhibition reviews written by Churchill for the Daily Mail; a speech given at the opening of a naval art exhibition that examines the role of propaganda; and “Painting as Pastime,” a rousing essay on the benefits of painting as a hobby, a call-to-canvas for Britons mired in the postwar gloom. Read together, the writings reveal Churchill’s belief in the importance of free artistic expression in a world increasingly shaped by cold realpolitik.

During wartime, Churchill often tied creativity to democracy’s cause. Speaking before the Royal Academy’s banquet in 1938, just months before Germany would invade Poland, Churchill examined­ the dangers of fascism from a painter’s perspective. “In this hard material age of brutal force, we ought indeed to cherish the arts,” he spoke to the assembled crowd. “In another country—which certainly shall be nameless—an artist would be sent to a concentration camp for putting too much green in his sky, or too much blue in his trees.” (An audio recording of the speech highlights Churchill’s comedic delivery.)

More than a clever turn of phrase, Churchill’s banquet speech referenced chilling remarks given by Adolf Hitler in the preceding months. In the lead-up to World War II, Hitler’s cultural division removed over 17,000 works of art from Germany’s museums. Many of these modernist and avant garde works were then organized into an exhibition of “degenerate art” in Munich, staged as a foil to a companion exhibit of “Great German art” that fulfilled Hitler’s Teutonic ideal.

At the opening of the Munich exhibition of “degenerate art,” Hitler said that an artist who paints a sky green, must have done so out of genetic deficiency or to agitate his countrymen. Either scenario would be “deeply regrettable for these unfortunates.” It would require the involvement of the “Reich Ministry of the Interior…to deal with the question of preventing such horrible visual defects from being passed on.” By the end of the speech, Hitler had expanded the reach of his genocidal aspirations. “Every person…participating in this perversion should realize that the hour of his elimination will come sooner or later.” As a failed artist with some technical ability but little originality, Hitler could now control those more creative than himself. Art was now a means of “purifying” Germany’s cultural bloodline.

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View of Marrakech, 1943
© National Trust / Charles Thomas

In contrast, Churchill embraced the Royal Academy and its creative output as a symbol of Britain’s priceless freedoms. Speaking at the 1937 banquet, he noted the Academy’s “broad tolerance and fair play” to all artists who submitted artwork to the juried exhibitions, from “dustman to duke.” And he fell along that spectrum. When the Academy resumed its annual summer exhibition after the war ended, Churchill submitted several works for consideration under the pseudonym “David Winter.” Two of them were accepted, and his identity revealed—the first time that a Prime Minister exhibited at the Academy.

If creativity threatened Hitler, Churchill viewed it as a force of regenerative power. In time for Christmas in 1948, several of Churchill’s essays on art were republished in the booklet “Painting as Pastime.” He turns the full power of his persuasion to the recruitment of new amateur painters, offering numerous enticements:

Inexpensive independence, a mobile and perennial pleasure apparatus, new mental food and exercise, the old harmonies and symmetries in an entirely different language, an added interest to every common scene, an occupation for every idle hour, an unceasing voyage of entrancing discovery—these are high prizes. Make quite sure they are not yours. After all, if you try and fail, there is not much harm done. . . you can always go out and kill some animal, humiliate some rival on the links, or despoil some friend across the green table. You will not be worse off in any way.

If an artist’s success is measured by his or her ability to connect with the public, the conservative wartime leader was a fine artist indeed. Public opinion of Churchill improved in the waning years of his life, and traveling exhibitions of his artwork took on the nature of a public benediction. Like the relics of a saint, the canvases carried the promise of personal connection to one of the saviors of liberal democracy, drawing massive crowds wherever they appeared.

Churchill’s first major exhibition took place in 1958, at the Nelson Art Gallery in Missouri. President Eisenhower, a fellow amateur painter himself, convinced both Churchill and the gallery to allow for the display of 30 canvases. The show drew record crowds in Kansas City, and the canvases found welcoming venues all over the United States, including the Met in New York and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The canvases continued their tour, reaching four cities in Canada, seven cities in Australia, and four cities in New Zealand. In each instance, the elected leader of the host country provided the exhibit’s foreword, a tradition that began with President Eisenhower in Kansas City, Missouri.

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Cap d’Ail, Alpes-Maritimes, 1952
© The Churchill Heritage Ltd. Photo credit: Royal Academy of Arts

Churchill had long denied requests by British institutions to mount solo exhibitions of his work. But, worn down by the success of the traveling exhibition, he acquiesced. The Royal Academy opened an exhibition of over 60 Churchill canvases, setting visitorship records on its opening day. With wait lines that stretched down Piccadilly, the exhibit’s run time was nearly doubled from three to five months. Critics offered carefully worded praise, noting that the Academy had never hosted an exhibition “by so great a man as Sir Winston Churchill or more joyous paintings.”

Here, Cannadine provides a window into how Churchill’s art was perceived in its time with a selection of six writings by art world contemporaries. Cannadine adds to the canon with a previously unpublished preface written by Augustus John for the Royal Academy’s exhibition catalogue, rife with flattery and self-serving anecdotes. The essay was fortunately scrapped from the catalogue but provides a cringe-worthy example of how Churchill’s power influenced assessments of his artistic talent. Cannadine’s most illuminating find is an essay by John Rothenstein, the former director of England’s Tate Gallery. Five years after Churchill’s death, Rothenstein recounts his visits to the studio at Chartwell and 10 Downing Street. We see Churchill as a living artist with his own eccentricities, strong views on what canvases the Tate might acquire, and a penchant for sending off guests with a double shot of whiskey.

On the day that Japan surrendered during World War II, Churchill stood on the shores of Lake Cuomo with his artist’s palette in hand. Speaking to the young officers who accompanied him, he repeated the words he spoke decades years earlier at the Academy banquet. “Out of a life of long and varied experience, the most valuable piece of advice I could hand on to you is to know how to command the moment to remain.” As many historians have catalogued, Churchill spent most of his life pursuing the Faustian bargain of enduring political influence. But through art, he finally commanded the moment to remain.

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