Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 568

Forget Russia in Syria

“In the history of warfare I do not recollect a more fortunate retreat”, one of George Washington’s closest aides once said. The reference was to events in the late summer of 1776, when the Continental Army was being routed by the British in New York. General Washington was spent. He had exhausted himself riding up and down the lines at Brooklyn Heights, rallying dispirited troops. One of every five of his solders was sick from either dysentery or smallpox. Militia units were deserting in droves. There was heavy pressure from Congress to defend New York harbor.

Under cover of a dense early morning fog, however, the commander of the Continental Army pulled off a brilliant surprise retreat. Rather than seeing his forces decimated, his troops were saved to fight another day. It turned out to be a turning point in the war.That example can inspire us today, as the U.S. considers how to respond to Russia—and the fraying global order.The U.S. would be well-advised to resist the impulse to rashly respond to Russia’s intervention in Syria. For one thing, one should “never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake”, as Napoleon put it. If we’re lucky, Russian forces in Syria will meet a similar fate as the Soviets in Afghanistan. But it’s also urgent we regroup from the shambles that is the Obama Administration’s foreign policy. The Western-led world order is crumbling today. Our failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, deep cuts to our defense budgets, a resurgent Russia, a rising China, the emergence of ISIS, and the staying power of a theocratic Iran, bent—with or without nuclear weapons—on regional hegemony all suggest a future where peace will be constantly threatened and our interests undermined at every turn.We can’t solve this nexus of issues at once. Nor can we have high hopes that President Obama will suddenly grasp why so much is coming unraveled. But we can start a discussion about our larger aims, as Eliot Cohen suggested in these pages recently, and we can begin that by proposing that we manage a key problem at hand. We must end the insidious cycle whereby Russian President Vladimir Putin acts and we scramble to react. Playing whack-a-mole siphons precious resources and chips away at our reputation as a world leader. Putin has his agenda. It’s time we get back to ours.Our vision ought to be straightforward. On the continent, we want a Europe whole and free, with a strong NATO and a stable, prosperous European Union. In the Middle East—current chaos notwithstanding—we want American primacy (not hegemony) in order to protect our economic and security interests and, where and when possible, to advance the cause of democracy and human rights. Equally straightforward: In both cases, Putin—a cunning opportunist and master of playing a weak hand strongly—has become far more than a mere annoyance. Putin wants to build Russia up by cutting America down. He needs his comeuppance. We need a strategy to contain him, and to prepare for improved relations with Russia once Vlad (our impaler) is gone.What does such a strategy look like?First, NATO: We must provide vigorous support for alliance members at risk—at the moment, the three Baltic states and Poland. The administration’s current plans are inadequate. Additional troops and tanks on a rotating basis are okay. Infinitely better, though, is a permanently based, brigade-size, multinational force across the Baltics. America and the West need real skin in the game.In addition, we need to find ways to embed the Scandinavians in all of this, including non-NATO members Finland and Sweden. Both countries have been subject to a myriad of Russian threats the past several years. This past spring, the five Nordic defense ministers jointly pledged in a public declaration to strengthen military capabilities. Let’s capitalize on this initiative and work to promote deeper, regional political cohesion.For its part, Poland needs permanent NATO bases. We must do everything we can to allay fears among Poles that the country may become one day “a buffer state” against Russian aggression. We need screaming red lines for article 5 and sub-article 5 threats for all NATO members. This requires very close consultation with our allies—most of all the Germans—who have been the least keen of all NATO members to move in this direction. All of this (plus ongoing NATO enlargement) must be part of the agenda for NATO’s summit in Warsaw next July. NATO’s doors must remain open for countries like Georgia, Montenegro, and Macedonia if we’re serious about a Europe whole and free, and if we want to get back to setting our agenda rather than perpetually reacting to an agenda determined by others.Second, Ukraine: We need to extend robust economic, political, and military support for Kiev. Ukraine is not peripheral for Putin; it is at the core of his concerns. He can’t lose here and win at home—or anywhere else. We won’t drive him out anytime soon, but, as an element of our larger strategy, we can make his Ukraine adventure far more costly.Sanctions have been useful, but they need to be expanded and sustained. As NYU Professor Mark Galeotti has argued, sectoral sanctions are fine and good, but we should also target more members of the Kremlin’s inner circle, including preventing their spouses and children from vacationing or studying abroad. A step in this direction is much more likely to put pressure on Putin directly.We also need to help train and begin seriously to arm Ukrainians who are fighting valiantly for their country. Hostilities have died down in the country’s east for the time being as Russia focuses on Syria, but, as we well know from various other precedents, a frozen conflict—and make no mistake, that’s where the Minsk protocol is taking the Donbas—is more a perpetual standoff than a lasting peace. With Putin looking elsewhere, we ought to take the opportunity to put Ukraine’s fighting forces on the best possible footing going forward. It’s very true that the Ukrainian armed forces, even after several rounds of reforms, are not in particularly good shape, and by some accounts they are still riddled with Russian spies. But that only means that the fixes won’t be easy—not that they should not be attempted.Yes, Putin will probably respond, and there will be an escalation ladder. Peaceniks in Europe will be out in large numbers, bankrolled in part by Moscow, as they have been in the past. EU capitals will hardly be inclined to confrontation from the get-go. We’ll need to horse trade, and this will include helping Europeans with their migration crises. But not taking this opportunity to build up Ukraine’s defense capacities would be a strategic blunder of the first order. Our approach has to be the stuff of a long game. Ukrainians know this, and appear to be ready for it. We mustn’t leave them hanging.Third, in the realm of ideas and in the information war, it’s imperative that we stop fretting about how we respond to Russian propaganda. Here, too, let’s focus on our agenda and on the narratives we want to advance. Putin is popular, or so it’s said. So was Mussolini, for a time. The way to deflate Russia’s malign nationalism is to end Putin’s string of perceived victories—Georgia, Ukraine, Syria, and other instances where he thumbs his nose at the West—and show Russians what it looks like when a petty tyrant goes on a losing streak. And we must get Russians talking to Russians about all of this. Let’s nurture our ties not only to Russian liberals but also—more importantly—to Russian nationalists, who may well in due course turn against Putin and consider a more pragmatic approach in their relations with the West.Let’s look for cleavages. Let’s drive wedges in Mr. Putin’s ruling class. It’s what a broad coalition of anti-Communist Russian broadcasters working for Radio Liberty did brilliantly during the Cold War. In the information space, we need to work with our European allies. Our joint efforts require the use of multiple platforms—web, radio, television, social media—and creative and compelling programming. (Take note: Putin’s RT, like our very own Donald Trump, knows how to entertain.) And when we’re fully prohibited from working inside the country, as is sure to happen in due time, let’s get back to beaming into Russia from the outside.Fourth, speaking of narratives, the sprawling kleptocracy Putin presides over may well be the Achilles heel of his regime. Corruption is not merely a byproduct of his authoritarianism: Kleptocracy is at the heart of how the Putinist system gets things done. The personal enrichment of the Kremlin leader and of those closest to him needs to be documented and fully exposed. Russians need to know the extent to which Putin and his cronies are looting their country—financially, culturally, and spiritually. And to get this piece completely right, we need to tackle the Western enablers, too: Putin and his fellow kleptocrats can only do what they do because Western banks, high-flying real estate firms in places like London and New York, and financial institutions knowingly handle dirty money. (Full disclosure: I’m on the board of the Kleptocracy Initiative, a project funded and led by the publisher of The American Interest.)None of this can happen over night. And even if we manage to deliver 100 percent on what I have outlined above, there will still be an immense amount to do to continue advancing a coherent vision for Europe and the Middle East. Dealing with Putin’s Russia, however, is a necessary first step—a clearing of the heavy brush.In the summer of 1776, Washington would not have had a prayer to prevail had his famous retreat not taken place in the context of a larger vision and plan. To get where we need to be, we must place our foreign policies once again in a larger view of things. If we keep floundering without a compass or a map—or a clue of where we want to end up—our endless reactive tactics will grind us down until, for the West, there’s nothing but confusion and disarray left.

The Trouble with BRICS

The transition from “emerging” economic power to “actual” economic power is a lot more difficult than many pundits and prognosticators understand. Many developing countries are bedeviled by entrenched interests whose deadlock on policy-making prevents these countries from realizing their full potential. Brazil’s unsustainable and deeply unjust pension system is an example. The New York Times:

An exploding pension crisis here in Brazil, Latin America’s biggest country, is wreaking havoc on its public finances, intensifying a political struggle over the economy that already has the president fighting for survival.

Brazilians retire at an average age of 54, and some public servants, military officials and politicians manage to collect multiple pensions totaling well over $100,000 year. Then, once they die, loopholes enable their spouses or daughters to go on collecting the pensions for the rest of their lives, too.The phenomenon is so common in Brazil’s vast public bureaucracy that some scholars call it the “Viagra effect” — retired civil servants, many in their 60s or 70s, wed to much younger women who are entitled to the full pensions for decades after their spouses are gone.

Breaking this pension system and replacing it with something sustainable would require something like a revolution in Brazilian politics—and Brazil is not a revolutionary country. And the pension system is only one piece of a system, entrenched over decades, in which vested interests have paralyzed policy making and blighted development prospects for South America’s largest and most important country. The political parties are creatures of this system, by and large, and political struggles consist of battles between coalitions of vested interests over slices of the pie. Real reform is off the table.

India, China, South Africa and many other developing countries are hamstrung by similarly destructive and similarly entrenched deadlocks. It’s a classic political arrangement: band together to form a coalition that extracts resources from the state. Over time, society becomes addicted to the subsidies, and as people build their lives and companies build their business models around patterns of state patronage and subsidy, the structure becomes progressively more dysfunctional and less easy to reform.These invisible barriers to success, often deeply rooted in the culture and history of a particular society, will play a growing role in determining which countries prosper in the 21st century. Societies that succeed in reforming, trimming and where possible abolishing these destructive patterns will be the ones best positioned to take advantage of the opportunities before us. The others will moan about their ‘bad luck’, flirt with various ‘alternative models’ that never seem to get anywhere, and generally flounder in a morass of frustrated ambition and discontent.

NYT: Under the ACA, Employees Find Insurance a Hard Sell

Even after the ACA has gone into effect, many employees are reluctant to purchase the insurance their employers offer. That’s the claim a new NYT article makes, as it rounds up the “growing” evidence that many Americans don’t find employer-sponsored insurance, for which the law does not offer subsidies, all that affordable. More:

But 10 months after the first phase of the mandate took effect, covering companies with 100 or more workers, many business owners say they are finding very few employees willing to buy the health insurance that they are now compelled to offer […]

“Based on what we’ve seen in the marketplace, we’re advising some of our clients to expect single-digit take rates,” said Michael A. Bodack, an insurance broker in Harrison, N.Y. “One to 2 percent isn’t unusual” […]

Around 7.5 million taxpayers paid the fine, according to a preliminary report by the Internal Revenue Service. That is significantly more than the three million to six million the government had forecast.

The ACA counts an employer-sponsored insurance plan for an individual as affordable if it costs no more than 9.5 percent of the individual’s household income. But even at those rates, many appear to be forgoing coverage. As the NYT notes, low take rates can create challenges for small businesses, because it can mean that only the employees with more serious health care needs buy the policies, triggering insurer fears about the sustainability of the company’s pool.

The ACA’s third open enrollment window for the individual market will open on November 1, and the website is once again experiencing technological problems in the run-up. But the bigger problem, whether we are talking about employer-sponsored insurance or the individual market, remains the same: Health care in this country was too expensive before the ACA and it remains too expensive now.

Another Asian Giant With Inflated GDP Stats?

The most recent Nobel Prize winner for economics, Princeton’s Angus Deaton, says that India’s official growth figures may not be as accurate as many might assume:

“The national accounts are showing, you know, a huge increase in the amount that people have, year, upon year, upon year, and we’re just not picking it up in the household surveys,” Mr. Deaton said. That’s “a very, very serious gap and I think not enough is being done to address that,” he said.

Mr. Deaton, a professor at Princeton, said the differences raise doubts about the accuracy of growth numbers. “I’m sure some of that growth is exaggerated,” Mr. Deaton said. “I’ve no idea how much, it might be just a point or two. It might be a lot more than that.”“One of the things you worry about with statistics is that growth is so much a flag under which recent Indian governments have flown,” Mr. Deaton said. “They are very much tied to that measure of success. That makes it very difficult for accurate data-keeping.”

Even if there isn’t an attempt to bump up the numbers for political reasons, measuring economic activity in a country as big, and as diverse as India, with levels of development ranging from world class software firms to indentured slave laborers making bricks out of mud, is a task that, realistically speaking, is probably beyond the capacity of the Indian government—or indeed of any government on the planet.

And furthermore, none of this means that official figures are worthless. As with China’s unreliable books, there are still useful things that can be discerned from by looking at them. But it’s all too easy to forget, as we look at a table of nice crisp statistics, that reality is usually much more complicated than the paperwork says it is.

No One’s Happy with the State of Climate Talks

The world’s richest countries aren’t doing their share of the work needed to address and adapt to climate change. Or, at least, so says a new report co-authored by 18 groups, including the World Wildlife Foundation and Oxfam, which announced that “[t]he ambition of all major developed countries falls well short of their fair shares.” Reuters reports:

Monday’s report said the rich could afford to shift from fossil fuels to cleaner energies, while helping others, and have more responsibility because they have benefited from burning coal, oil and natural gas since the Industrial Revolution.

By those yardsticks, it estimated that the United States and the European Union had promised about a fifth of their “fair shares” and Japan about a tenth.By contrast, it found that emerging economies’ plans “exceed or broadly meet” their fair share. China was doing more than its fair share, for instance, counting its emissions since 1950, while Brazil was contributing two-thirds.

First, you can be sure that the developing nations of the world will be pointing to this study when they sit down at the negotiating table in Paris six weeks from now. But while poor countries will be glad to have some extra ammunition heading in to the December climate summit, this isn’t a positive development for that conference’s chief ambition: crafting a Global Climate Treaty.

The division between the developed and developing worlds remains the most intractable problem with this quest for a GCT. Poorer nations won’t want to sign on to a deal that appears to restrict economic growth in the name of green goals, especially if they see the richer countries of the world as not doing their part—after all, while the developing world’s ongoing industrialization is the bigger emissions issue going forward, the developed world is responsible for most of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions to date. In that context, this study will only serve to make it more difficult for the two sides to find common ground.That’s not the only worrying sign for the Paris summit, either. A bloc of African nations criticized the current working draft document for Paris, demanding a series of amendments be made before they would participate in talks. The draft is, in the bloc’s eyes, “unbalanced, and does not reflect the African Group positions, and crosses the group’s redlines.” In making that statement, the group of African countries is throwing a wrench in the process at a very late date, which in and of itself raises further questions about how delegates will reach an agreement in France.And while the developing world digs in ahead of the talks, a Russian oligarch is making the opposite case, saying that if the world’s industrializing nations aren’t held to stronger climate commitments, businesses elsewhere will be placed at a competitive disadvantage. This already has the feel of a he-said she-said stand-off, and we’re only going to see an increase in tensions in the remaining weeks before this whole event kicks off.

A Priest, a Cleric, and an Imam Walk Into a War Zone…

Last month, we watched a Saudi Imam gleefully firing artillery into Yemen. Now, some other religious leaders are getting in on the action. First, we have an Orthodox priest blessing a Russian fighter jet:

Bless this mess: Orthodox priest sprinkles holy water on missile for Russian plane #Syria pic.twitter.com/2lFClAygOG

— Noah Browning (@Noah_Browning) October 11, 2015

And second, we have footage from the Middle East Media Research Institute of a Gaza cleric brandishing a knife from the minbar. The Times of Israel ran a story about the sermon, from which we pull this choice quote: “My brother in the West Bank: Stab! My brother is the West Bank: Stab the myths of the Talmud in their minds! My brother in the West Bank: Stab the myths about the temple in their hearts!”It easy to laugh off these people as wackos—indeed, that is what many Western observers do. Yet the involvement of religious leaders is a driver of further polarization and a sign of how deeply entrenched today’s global conflicts are. Such events shouldn’t be overlooked.

Japanese-South Korean Relations Warm as Tensions Mount

A canary in the coal-mine: South Korea and Japan are entering a period of warmer relations, according to Bloomberg:

When Gen Nakatani arrives in Seoul on Tuesday he’ll be the first Japanese defense minister to visit South Korea in nearly five years, signaling that growing regional security risks are trumping the disputes over territory and history that have blighted relations between the countries.

Nakatani’s trip comes days after South Korean President Park Geun Hye said she was willing to hold her first bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Park will host the Japanese leader in two weeks for the resumption of annual trilateral summits with China and South Korea that ground to a halt in 2012 when relations turned sour.Any sign of easing tensions between Japan and South Korea will be welcomed by the U.S., whose efforts to balance out China’s growing assertiveness in the region and deter threats from a nuclear North Korea have been hampered by animosity between its two main East Asian allies. The flurry of diplomatic activity comes 18 months after U.S. President Barack Obama sought to nudge Park and Abe toward a rapprochement by inviting them to trilateral talks in the Hague.

China has been trying to soften Japan and South Korea lately, but, at least for the moment, Seoul and Tokyo appear unconvinced, with North Korea’s growing nuclear arsenal and China’s new warmth toward Pyongyang inspiring wariness.

And in a move that shows just how intense regional tensions have become, this skepticism is pushing Seoul and Tokyo closer together. Bad feelings run deep between the populaces of Japan and South Korea, and these reluctant allies only hug when they must. In that sense, ugly relations between Japan and South Korea would actually be a better sign for the future of northeast Asia than the rapprochement this story depicts. A detente between the two countries would only happen in a deteriorating regional environment.

Where Are the Whigs (When We Need Them)?

Donald Trump is leading in the Republican polls, and Bernie Sanders is running a far more popular campaign than Hillary Clinton. A few years ago, even during the height of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street epoch, such an outpouring of populism would have been unthinkable. The Right’s nativist, quasi-libertarian vision, well supported among middle-American “Jacksonians”—to invoke Walter Russell Mead’s terminology—and the Left’s multiculturalist, quasi-socialist brand, selling briskly among urban coastal dwellers, are both alive and doing well. But they will fade, and not only because they will be outspent and out-consulted by orders of magnitude. They will fade because all they really represent is widespread popular dissatisfaction with the entrenched establishment politicians of the two major parties, rather than true, pragmatic alternative governing philosophies. Enough voters will figure this out in due course to quash their chances.

This dissatisfaction is well justified. The Republican and Democratic parties are simultaneously more ideologically polarized yet more wedded to plutocratic interests than they have been since the days of the railroad and oil barons. Those plutocratic interests appeal to different strains of American culture through a network of media, think-tanks, and other institutions, and manage to secure broad popular support for ideologies that legitimize fundamentally rent-seeking behaviors. Sure, both parties have internal divisions, but those are of scale rather than substance.The new politics is populist in its talk, but still elitist in its walk. This doesn’t make for either good public discourse or good public policy—just perpetual rentier stagnation and worsening hyper-partisanship. A parasitic elite clings to power while the shifting masses divide against each other. A lot of Americans sense this, and they don’t like it.At times like these we would do well to remember that our presidential democracy, though naturally tending toward a two-party arrangement (since that’s the only way to win an Electoral College majority), does not in fact condemn us to forever choose between the plutocratic demagogues of Right and Left. Reformist movements have periodically risen and transformed politics, and a few of them have been far saner than the vapid ideologies currently in fashion. The most influential of these was the Whig tradition. That tradition currently lies dormant, but in the contemporary elitist, ideological political climate, we could really use a resurgence of the Whigs for two main reasons.First, only a new movement with a reformist engine can unsettle and hopefully upset the plutocratic corruption and bureaucratic stagnation that plagues us. But second and even more importantly: Whigs are, by nature of their core beliefs, “centrists” on the American political spectrum when it comes to the most important question of the day: What should the role of government, especially the Federal government, be in American life?The deep-blue Democrats think that government can provide the solution to every problem, while the raging red Republicans think government is the problem. The big-versus-small government argument returns every once in a while, and always remains irrelevant, because the size of government is not and never has been the real issue. What matters is not government size but government quality and purpose—what roles should government take on, and how should it carry them out?Whigs have understood all this, and more, throughout the history of the Republic. They have been biased toward a government that was both energetic and limited, directed toward growth and unity, and they have historically done very well in crafting and manning that sort of system.The American Whig tradition started with President Washington and his brilliant young assistant, Alexander Hamilton. It found explicit expression in the lives of Whig Party members Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, and existed as well in the National Republican Party under John Quincy Adams. It then morphed into the new Republican Party under the guiding hand of Abraham Lincoln, the intellectual descendent of J.Q. Adams and Daniel Webster and a self-identified “old-line Henry Clay Whig.” The tradition decayed in the first Gilded Age, but found new life under Theodore Roosevelt in the early 20th century.But after TR, the Whig tradition fell to intense internal divisions. Half of the strong-government types among the Republicans began to subscribe to the new pseudo-scientific progressivism and followed Franklin Roosevelt into the Democratic Party; a smaller group gradually subscribed to unchecked capitalism and a laissez-faire attitude, giving rise to the meager Republican presidencies of the 1920s. A few Republicans maintained the tradition largely as it had been, including Arthur Vandenberg, Wendell Wilkie, and Thomas Dewey. But by and large, in the mid-20th century, it was progressive New Deal Democrats who implemented “Hamiltonian” policies, checkered with progressive excess and, in time, costly and painful experiments in social engineering.The 1952 election of Dwight Eisenhower put the Whigs back in power briefly, but the Ike presidency did little to institutionalize this breed of Republicanism the way the Lincoln presidency did. As a result, starting in the 1960s, the last of the Whiggish Republicans—then known as the Rockefeller Republicans, and including in their number George Romney and Jacob Javits—fought a losing battle against the newly ascendant “conservative” populist wing of the Party, while conservative Democrats in the Whig tradition, like Scoop Jackson, were edged out of their own party by a succession of FDR New Deal Democrats, McGovernite liberals, and then multicultural leftists.By the late 20th century, the old Hamilton-Clay-Lincoln-TR tradition was effectively dead in American politics, though occasional stragglers have periodically surfaced even into the 21st century. Virginia Senator Jim Webb, a Democrat, and New York Governor George Pataki, a Republican, are among the last who have served as elected officials. Both are currently running for President of the United States, but the dismal status of their campaigns shows how long the odds are for Whigs in current era of plutocratic populist politics.Whiggery was and remains a complex tradition, no less than modern liberalism or conservatism. But like their better-known rivals, Whigs do share some core principles in common among themselves. At least three strains of thought, when combined, distinguish politicians in the Whig tradition from those in others: temperamental conservatism about human nature that informs social and cultural policy, a preference for Hamiltonian activism on economic and administrative issues, and a concern for national union on political and strategic issues. We might summarize the essence of Whig thought in a single central question: “Human nature being what it is, what objectives must the government accomplish to ensure the preservation of the American nation and the American way of life?” All other concerns are ancillary.Temperamental Conservatism distinguishes Whig political thought from the post-Theodore Roosevelt progressives. Progressivism, broadly defined as the notion that rational ordering and utilitarian values can result in continuing human progress and greater human happiness, tends to result in utopian boondoggles that Whigs abhor. Whigs, in Burkean fashion, prefer maintaining social stability, traditional customs and institutions, and classical moral norms of duty, service, and enterprise. At the same time, Whigs believe in individual liberty, and have taken stands against truly oppressive institutions and injustices in the name of human dignity. They are far more deeply informed by moral realism than are most American thinkers, and that can be traced in their thought from their pragmatic anti-slavery stances to their post-1960s opposition to radical activist movements.Hamiltonian Government Activism basically deals with the policies that Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton supported in the name of national growth: a modern and centralized finance system; massive public investments in technology, education, and infrastructure; and Federal support for fledgling and strategic economic sectors. In this view, Federal activism is the progenitor of national economic growth, and instead of managing the economy for purposes of stability or stepping back from the economy for purposes of maximizing liberty, Hamiltonian Whigs work to drive the economy for purposes of dynamism. This tends to promote entrepreneurship and middle-class opportunity, other Hamiltonian values. Dynamism is the key word here, and it has been visible in the various “American System” economic programs built over the centuries, from that of Clay to the reformism of the Roosevelt Administration. The intense Whig focus on technological innovation, too, runs from Lincoln’s own patent (he was the only President ever to hold one) to, more recently, very Whiggish advances in defense, medical, and space technology.National Union is, of course, a value that all sane American political movements have endorsed, but Whigs have endorsed it above all other competing concerns. This applies to domestic political structures, foreign policy and grand strategy, and questions of national identity.So while some focused neurotically on a narrow definition of “states’ rights” since the Founding, conservative Whigs have always emphasized Federal supremacy on crucial policy issues and condemned rebellion of any sort. Whig grand strategy has emphasized preserving the American political union against both internal threats to its unity and external threats to its sovereignty; and it has often combined with asserting American political and economic interests abroad to create a shield against direct threats to the homeland. And as America has always been a diverse nation, Whigs have sought to craft an inclusive yet unitary national identity based on a fostered culture of citizenship and nationhood. Rather than going nativist and appealing to the white Scots-Irish majority, or abandoning national identity for the sake of multicultural diversity, Whigs have demanded a civic and non-racial “100 percent Americanism.” Hence Hamilton’s arguments for Federal supremacy and Lincoln’s savage war on the recalcitrant South; the crafting of international order in the postwar years; and the emphasis on immigrant assimilation and the cultivation of citizenship. Whigs view the American nation as an end in itself, and its unity, security, and internal harmony as being crucial for its survival.These three core elements of the Whig political personality—temperamental conservatism, Hamiltonian government activism, and national union—have defined American Whigs across the centuries, whatever they formally called themselves. Yet regrettably, no major political force in late 2015, heading toward the election in 2016, displays all three of them, and most political forces these days do a terrible job of displaying any of them.For example, the socially conservative wing of the Republican Party is “temperamentally conservative”, but its obsessive focus on sexual issues overwhelms those much more pertinent issues of social capital and national culture almost completely. All wings of the Democratic Party theoretically support “government activism”, but that activism relies more on clunky Keynesian management and bloated entitlements than on strategic investments and effective infrastructure. Most Democrats aren’t particularly friendly to business, either. And with very few exceptions, there’s no discussion of a united and inclusive national identity. The Democrats obsess over identity politics, from the excesses of the LGBT movement to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Republican rhetoric, on the other hand, tends to cater to the white Christian working class. This can be seen in ideas of Christian victimhood, anti-immigrant tirades, and a dismissal of the concerns of black America.There’s good reason to be concerned about the future of the country, given the current trajectory. Populist extremism rages on the Left and on the Right, dysfunctional governmental institutions cast in the pre-internet world continue to decay, and a plutocratic tide swamps the democratic legitimacy of government at all levels. Our decadent ruling class is incapable of much cerebral activity, our reserves of social capital are draining away, and inequality spikes while middle-class opportunity and social mobility stagnate at historic lows. Our populace has forgotten its identity and sense of purpose. The problems are complicated and multifaceted, and never before have they permeated an America lacking a Whig political class. The crisis is real, and we have no Whigs to face it.Fortunately, though the Whigs are long gone as a movement, their ideas have not died.1 They simply lack a political establishment to embody and implement them. A couple of well-respected and moderate thinkers have articulated the outlines of a 21st century Whiggery, carrying the torch into our own day.2 Many more thinkers and writers have subconsciously arrived at Whig ideas on specific policy areas. Meanwhile, a select few politicians do possess this temperament. And the defense industry, along with the national research labs, sustains the last significant area of Hamiltonian public-private partnership, though most of its adherents are probably unaware of their political ancestry.So what sorts of policies would 21st century Whigs propose? How would they be different from standard party-line Republicans and Democrats? What policies would a resuscitated Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, or Dwight Eisenhower favor for the republic of 2016? Probably very similar policies to those they advocated in their own days—updated, of course, for the present state of affairs.Historically, Whigs have been big spenders in those areas of the economy that drive growth, in a Schumpeterian sense: infrastructure, innovation, and education. Henry Clay’s American System featured “internal improvements” heavily, while Franklin Roosevelt’s public works projects and Dwight Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway system modernized American infrastructure. Hamilton and Lincoln both sought the creation of the 18th– and 19th-century equivalents of today’s national labs, and in the mid-20th Century, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon poured money into the Space Program for the same strategic-economic reasons. Lincoln allocated public land for the land-grant colleges (the Morrill Act of 1862), and the 20th century saw massive support for public funding of education.Twenty-first-century Whigs would stay true to that legacy. Without necessarily reducing the size of the Federal budget, Whigs would allocate a larger percentage of it—perhaps by reforming entitlement spending—to the productive investments of infrastructure, innovation, and education. R&D, in particular, has the potential to transform other policy areas as diverse as healthcare, manufacturing, energy, defense, education, and transportation. Whigs would generously fund and modernize America’s transportation, energy, and water infrastructure with the latest available technology, and craft an economy where diverse transportation options and energy sources would be cheaply available for consumer use. In a similar vein, Whigs would pump money into the U.S. public education system, but open it up to private competition and the latest technology to offer Americans a diversity of options at low prices.The logic of public investment within the free market system has typically pushed Whigs to be very pro-business, to the point of cozying up to and protecting certain strategic industries. Hamilton advocated protections for nascent American manufacturing companies and a modern finance system that would make capital readily available to entrepreneurs. Few remember, but Lincoln ran as a railroad man, and spent the Civil War furiously working to promote railroad interests in the West. Much of Teddy Roosevelt’s legendary condemnation of “the malefactors of great wealth” was premised on opening up opportunities and niches for smaller entrepreneurs and strivers, who were otherwise crushed by the monopolistic industries of TR’s time. The deregulation of certain industries in the late 20th century, too, opened the markets for entrepreneurs and competition, just as contemporary policy reform in the wake of the Information Revolution is solidly pro-business.Whigs today, then, would seek to promote across-the-board growth in all sectors, rather than focusing on narrow financial growth (which policies since the 1980s have privileged.) Whigs would seek a regulatory and tax environment favorable to smaller businesses and to working class and middle class Americans. Massive regulatory review and reform should be undertaken, though reasonable regulations will remain in place for environmental and consumer protection reasons. The tax code should be simplified and become more progressive, favoring working-class and middle-class Americans and small businesses. The complex web of social-engineering taxes should be eliminated. A better and fairer business climate—guarding against both monopoly-induced and government-induced stagnation—is crucial to a dynamic, opportunity-based economy.Whiggish political leaders have tended to advocate against concentrations of power by various actors in government, including the government itself. The Constitution, designed largely by Whiggish-leaning thinkers, is the manifestation of this sentiment, premised as it is on the separation of powers. And when various sub-interests—aristocratic, plutocratic, bureaucratic—have accumulated too much power and gone unchecked, Whigs have sought reform and rebalancing of elites against elites. The Whig Party strongly opposed the Southern oligarchy that dominated American politics in the antebellum years, and Abraham Lincoln waged the bloody war that finally removed that aristocracy from its perch. The industrial plutocrats whom Lincoln had accidentally enabled to rise later found themselves opposed by the greatest reformer of American history, Theodore Roosevelt. And Dwight Eisenhower, sensing the sheer overreach of the Federal bureaucracy put in place by FDR and expanded by dint of Depression and war, worked to make the institutions of government more efficient and decentralized.Today, we have two forces that preclude truly representative and effective governance: the Blue Model bureaucratic institutions that were designed for another era, and the ascendant financial plutocracy that dominates Washington and the statehouses. Whigs wouldn’t choose one or the other problem to fight, for they are interlinked. Twenty-first-century Whigs would fight for a thorough reform of the Federal bureaucracy’s methods and regulatory structure to make for more responsive governance. They would particularly seek to revolutionize governance the way the Information Revolution has transformed business and society. Simultaneously, Whigs would take a populist stand against the undue influence of money in politics, attacking plutocracy by calling for campaign finance reform, lobbying reform, electoral reform, redistricting reform, and media reform, to dissolve the unholy bonds between plutocrats and politicians insofar as is possible. This war on plutocracy and bureaucracy, alongside some common-sense rules that reform groups like No Labels have proposed, is integral to the transformation of American governance for the 21st century.This sketch barely scratches the surface of Whig policy—the 21st century Whig manifesto and policy guide has yet to be written. But it gives a basic idea of which ways the Whigs, if in power, would steer the country.Those seeking this sort of Whig revival, though, run into a wall that all American political reformers face. Third parties never do well in American politics. If the Whig tradition is to have new life, it will have to be through Whig wings of the Republican and Democratic Parties. Besides, it would be counterproductive if the Whigs, once in power, went about their business without consulting the other traditions of American politics. There are strengths and benefits in the other traditions, too—from localism and subsidiarity that create social capital to moral reform and progress that validates America’s identity as a “City on a Hill.” Jeffersonian romanticism is just as much a part of the American tradition as Hamiltonian nationalism, whatever its problems. It would be a real loss if any of the currents of thought in American political thought disappeared entirely; part of what makes America American is the tension and dialogue among them, and the history and heritage that they spawn.Unfortunately, that is exactly what has happened to the Whigs. As a political force, they have been extinct for a half-century or more, and the absence of their voice in the national conversation is acutely felt. They once brought an important perspective to the table that has gone unrepresented for too long, and we can attribute the current national crisis at least in part to the lack of classic Whig ideas in our approaches to economic growth, national identity, and social policy over the last several decades. A core political tradition that built this country and guided its greatest statesmen deserves a revival. The Whigs must rise again.

1There is even a Modern Whig Party with a national membership and a well-done website. But it’s small enough to be invisible to the mainstream press.

2These arguably include, in my estimation, David Brooks, Jim Pinkerton, Adam Garfinkle, Reihan Salam, Ross Douthat, and some others.

A 2016 Defeat Would Be Devastating for Democrats

While the media fixates on supposed Republican disarray—the Washington Post recently declared breathlessly that the GOP is “on the verge of ceasing to function as a national political party”—Republicans are actually quietly wielding (and consolidating) more political power than either party has held in decades. Democrats currently hold the presidency, and are exercising its powers energetically. But outside of the White House, as the liberal stalwart Matt Yglesias notes in a perceptive piece for Vox, the Democratic Party’s position is extraordinarily weak:

The presidency is extremely important, of course. But there are also thousands of critically important offices all the way down the ballot. And the vast majority — 70 percent of state legislatures, more than 60 percent of governors, 55 percent of attorneys general and secretaries of state — are in Republicans hands. And, of course, Republicans control both chambers of Congress. […]

Winning a presidential election would give Republicans the overwhelming preponderance of political power in the United States — a level of dominance not achieved since the Democrats during the Great Depression, but with a much more ideologically coherent coalition.

It’s worth pausing to take stock of where, in the grand scheme of things, the two parties stand as 2016 approaches. If a Republican candidate wins in 2016, the GOP is likely, though not certain, to retain the Senate as well. (The GOP has a virtual lock on the House for at least the next few cycles). This would give the Republicans unified control of the federal government (not to mention a continued conservative majority on the Supreme Court) to top off their state-level dominance. And even if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2016, the Republican Party will still retain one, if not two houses of Congress, as well as its preponderance of power in state capitals. In other words, we are entering what looks likely to be a tight 2016 presidential election in a political context where one party—the Democrats—has vastly more to lose. It’s striking how quickly the notion of an “emerging Democratic majority” has vanished into thin air.

What happened, exactly? Many liberal commentators attribute the party’s woes largely to demography. As Yglesias writes, “the natural distribution of population in the United States tends to lead the average House district to be more GOP-friendly than the overall population.” Thomas Edsall has similarly argued that “the inefficient distribution of Democratic voters” is a significant factor in the party’s recent losses at the state and Congressional levels. This analysis is accurate—current Democratic voters (minorities, young people, single women) are packed tightly into urban areas, while Republican voters (white people, married people, people born before 1980) are more geographically spread out—but it only gets us so far. After all, there is no rule that the Democrats can only compete for their current voters. The Democrats’ New Deal coalition, and Bill Clintons’ Third Way coalition after it, was able to win House seats and state legislative seats outside of urban liberal strongholds. This is in part because the old-time Democrats were a broader, more moderate, and more flexible party, while Democrats around the country are today uniting around a more stridently liberal agenda (war on women! $15 minimum wage! gun control!) that has much less appeal outside of major cities.

As we’ve seen in 2008 and 2012, this can be a powerful tactic in presidential years. But it has also contributed to the hollowing out of the party at all levels of government outside of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. If the party loses the White House 2016, it will have almost nothing left, and the steep risks of doubling down on the Obama coalition will be laid bare.

Chinese Soft Power is Collapsing in Taiwan

Fearing a wipeout in the next election, Taiwan’s pro-Beijing Kuomintang (KMT) party has dumped its presidential candidate and picked another, according to the New York Times:

The party chose its chairman, Eric Chu, the mayor of New Taipei City, as its new presidential candidate at a special party congress. He replaced Hung Hsiu-chu, who in polls has badly trailed Tsai Ing-wen, the nominee of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party, and even at times polled behind a third-party candidate.

The combination of a harsher Chinese foreign policy stance and Beijing’s internal crackdown have seriously weakened support for the KMT in Taiwan. Ironically, the KMT, the party founded by Chiang Kai Shek that fought and lost a brutal civil war against Mao’s communists, is now the pro-Beijing party in Taiwan because the KMT believes that Taiwan and the mainland are one country that must some day be reunited.

Many Taiwanese are not so sure. Taiwan was only loosely associated with the mainland for much of modern history, and between the years in which it was a Japanese colony and the 75 years since the Chinese civil war it has developed in a very different direction than Beijing has. The more threatening and unpleasant the mainland looks, the more Taiwan voters fear a closer embrace with Beijing—and these days, mainland China isn’t looking very attractive. The KMT is worried about a massive electoral defeat, which is why it has replaced an unpopular candidate seen as too pro-China.If the DPP wins the election, many in the region and in the U.S. will worry that an angry Beijing leadership will respond to the setback in ways that raise tensions — or that the DPP, “dizzy with success”, will embark on a quest for international recognition that creates a crisis in cross-Straits relations.Certainly the DPP is likely to enjoy close relations with Japan. As we noted, its presidential candidate visited Tokyo last week. But whatever happens in Taiwanese politics, the U.S. will stick with the “one China, no drama” policy that goes back to the Nixon administration. In 1979, the U.S. recognized the PRC in Beijing as the legal government of China and withdrew diplomatic recognition of Taipei and the KMT. However, the U.S. reserved the right to sell arms to Taipei, and continues to oppose any change in the status quo, whether initiated by Beijing in the form of an invasion of the island, or by Taipei in the form of a declaration of independence.