Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 593

Pew Study: 87 Percent of Indians Like Modi

A Pew study conducted last spring and published today finds that an overwhelming majority of Indians hold a favorable view of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Pew:

Almost three-quarters of the public now think economic conditions are good. And about two-thirds have a very favorable view of current Prime Minister Narendra Modi. This high level of approval is two to three times that for other leading Indian politicians, according to a new 2015 Pew Research Center survey […]

Moreover, Modi’s aura has reinvigorated Indians’ faith in their government. About two-thirds of respondents who have a lot of confidence in the prime minister say the influence of the national government is now very good […]The Modi phenomenon transcends India’s traditionally partisan politics. On most of the challenges facing the nation, the prime minister and his party enjoy support from both the BJP party faithful and followers of the opposition Congress party. Moreover, Modi and the BJP now have greater backing than Congress in rural areas, traditionally a Congress stronghold

Polls are always unreliable, and Pew’s ability to conduct a thorough study in a country as large and diverse as India is limited. Still, these numbers are nothing short of astonishing, and we’ll be watching the upcoming elections in Bihar closely to see if the BJP is really so popular today as the poll found he was when Pew conducted it in April and May.

But if those elections do confirm that public opinion of Modi remains even close to that high, that raises a further question. If his government is so popular, it should have an easy time pushing through reform proposals. So, why hasn’t it?

U.S. Syria Force Down to “Four or Five” Fighters

The U.S. now has so few fighters in Syria you can count them on your fingers—of one hand. The New York Times reports:

Only four or five Syrian individuals trained by the United States military to confront the Islamic State remain in the fight, the head of the United States Central Command told a Senate panel on Wednesday, a bleak acknowledgment that the Defense Department’s $500 million program to raise an army of Syrian fighters has gone nowhere.

Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, the top American commander in the Middle East, also told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the United States would not reach its goal of training 5,000 Syrian fighters anytime soon.

General Austin for the first time confirmed earlier reports, which the Pentagon had attempted to deny, that the first graduating class of 54 fighters, code-named Division 30, had been attacked by Nusra Front fighters in July as they transited across Syria, and that most of the U.S.-trained fighters had either fled or were killed. Reports at the time indicated that Nusra had captured the leader of the division.

In July, Ash Carter caused a stir when he told the Senate, “I said the number 60 [fighters trained], and I can look out at your faces and you have the same reaction I do, which is that that’s an awfully small number.” But the most recent news means that that number was 1200-1500% larger than our current forces there. At the time, we quipped that “the U.S.’s preferred option still fields fewer fighters than a college football team”; now, they might not be able to start a pickup basketball game. To put this in perspective, the tiny Indian Ocean nation of the Maldives, best known for tuna fishing and honeymoons, currently has 50-100 citizens fighting in ISIS.Meanwhile, at the same hearing, General Austin indicated that the Pentagon was still completely flummoxed as to what Russia’s broader objectives were in sending arms and troops (far more than 5, or even 50) to Syria. The utter fecklessness of U.S. Syria policy continues apace.

Magical Thinking in Indian Agriculture

India’s agriculture minister had some eyebrow-raising advice for the more than 600 million people in his country that depend on agriculture for a living. According to the minister, sending seeds good vibrations and the right feelings will help produce higher yields. The BBC reports:

At a function attended by farmers and agriculture scientists in Delhi at the weekend, [Indian agriculture minister Radha Mohan Singh] stunned the audience by saying that “farmers should give vibrations of peace, love and divinity to seeds” to encourage growth and make them resistant to pests.

“Such exercise is accepted by my ministry essentially to enhance Indian farmers’ confidence. Indian farmers have, over the years, lost confidence in the age-tested knowledge of farming,” the minister was quoted by The Indian Express as saying.

It sounds like this Indian politician has a promising future in the global green movement. Western agricultural ideas are full of “yogic farming” type ideas—that organic food is better for you than regular produce, that GMOs are dangerous, that heavily subsidized and expensive ‘local food’ is better for the environment than more efficiently produced food grown where yields are higher and agriculture less difficult to carry out.

It’s not surprising; our relationship with the food that we eat (or the food we don’t eat, after declaring it taboo) stirs the depths of the human psyche. Like sex, another pivot of humanity’s spiritual and physical life, food is connected directly to the mysteries that confront every human consciousness. We experience ourselves as unique beings with a rich inner life, and we find ourselves in a world that is bigger than we are. The mysterious boundary between the ‘me’ and the ‘not-me’, what theologian Paul Tillich called the ‘ground of our being’ where we sense the dependence of our inner lives on the larger reality becomes, inevitably, a focus of our emotional and intellectual efforts to make sense out of our lives—why do we exist, what is life for, what does it all mean?So it’s not wrong for people to feel a sense of awe and wonder about the food that we eat, to be aware of connections between food and health, and to seek some kind of spiritual harmony between the way that we raise and prepare our food and the values that we believe shape and give meaning to our lives.Where ‘yogic farmers’, anti-GMO crusaders and other food faddists go wrong is in failing to integrate our scientific knowledge—limited and evolving as it is—with the spiritual quest. When we allow vague and fuzzy feelings to block our understanding of the actual facts of life, when we reject an agricultural technique that can feed the hungry even as it reduces the cost of human agriculture to the natural systems on which we all depend, then we aren’t just being untrue to science. We are betraying the quest for meaning and the aspiration toward harmony that shape our spiritual quests.In Western history, one way to express the balance needed between rational thought, planning and the quest for efficiency on the one hand, and utter openness to the world of meaning and spiritual aspiration on the other has been summed up in the advice to “pray as if everything depended on God, and work as if everything depended on you.” The yogic farmer or the green seeking ecological harmony with the earth aren’t wrong to see farming as connected with and accountable to ideas of morality and spiritual development; the mistake is in the failure to engage rigorously in the process of understanding and advancing the scientific knowledge that is available to us about how the world actually works.It’s a difficult balance to get right. Integrating emotional and spiritual values with pragmatic and hard headed scientific thinking is a challenge for everybody. But it is exactly this challenge that human beings need to engage in. We don’t need a world of spiritual quacks or of scientists without souls.At some level, most people understand this pretty well. That’s why ‘yogic farming’ and food nuts generally look so ridiculous to people not under the sway of the particular delusion at work.Many religious traditions think of humanity as standing with a foot in two realms: we are spiritual beings with a capacity to perceive and be moved by invisible realities and abstractions like justice, truth and love—yet we are also creatures of the physical world whose lives are grounded in the muck and mud from whence we spring. The secret to success, as an individual human being and for human societies and cultures as well, is to find a way to integrate these two aspects of our existence.

Cleaning Up Real Nice

In December 2010, Heinz-Christian Strache made his first trip to Israel as leader of the right-wing populist Freedom Party of Austria. It was a visit that was a long time in coming. Years earlier, even before the party’s anti-Semitic founder and erstwhile leader, Jörg Haider, died in a drunken, late-night car crash in 2008, the nativist party had begun consolidating its menu of hate and reconsidering its allies. Whereas Haider had developed strong ties with Moammar Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein over the years, Strache, who took over party leadership in 2005 after Haider had left to form a new rightwing movement, believed that Muslims posed the greatest threat to Austria and the West. He saw Israel as being on the front lines in the battle against the advance of Islam—and hence as a natural ally to Europe’s genuinely Islamophobic rightwing.

Strache’s visit, though, quickly turned into a public relations disaster. Apparently seeking to emulate the Israel itineraries of world leaders, Strache chose to include Yad Vashem, the country’s vaunted Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, on his itinerary. Yet instead of borrowing a kippa to cover his head in accordance with museum policy, Strache put on a cap that he had brought with him—a cap emblazoned with the seal of a fraternity he had joined when he was fifteen.While roughly analogous with their American counterparts, fraternities in Austria—known as Burschenschaften—are widely associated with xenophobia, nationalism and anti-Semitism. For over a century, they have posed as staunch defenders of the homeland against all manner of perceived alien invaders. Historians have argued that Burschenschaften helped pave the way in Germany and Austria for the rise of the Nazi Party in the 1920s and 1930s. Caps bearing their insignia are not the kind of headgear one should be wearing to Yad Vashem.His deeply conservative Israeli host, Ayoub Kara, a deputy cabinet minister at the time, told him to remove the cap, which Strache did. But it was too late. Back home, speculation quickly spread that the FPÖ leader had been trying to send a message to the rightwing extremists among the FPÖ’s electorate, fraternity members first and foremost: “I may be visiting Israel, but I haven’t forgotten where I come from.”Two years later, in 2012, Strache again found himself the target of anti-Semitism accusations after posting a cartoon on his Facebook page showing a greedy banker with a hooked-nose and suit-coat buttons emblazoned with what appear to be stars of David. Austrian media reported at the time that the cartoon was an altered version of a much older, tamer drawing—a derivative that had been popular on rightwing websites for years.Yet for the all the fits and starts, Strache remains undeterred. If anything, he has intensified his efforts at strengthening ties with Israeli conservatives and distancing himself from hatred of Jews. Last December, he went so far as to make loyalty to Israel an element of official party doctrine, saying, “we are completely supportive of Israel’s right to exist and its right to defend itself.” And he has even tried to solve his fraternity problem. In April, an FPÖ politician in the Vienna city-state parliament, and the organizer of a pompous annual fraternity ball in the Austrian capital, led several other fraternity leaders in condemning anti-Semitism and expressing regret for anti-Semitic sentiments voiced by fraternity members in the past. Now, together with the FPÖ, they are publicly renouncing decades of anti-Jewish sentiment.“There is no anti-Semitism in the FPÖ”, Strache insisted to me in a late-May email. “Anti-Semitic statements (by party members) are punished immediately.”Most observers find such claims to be impossibly brash and extremely difficult to believe. Oskar Deutsch, for example, head of Austria’s Jewish Community, told me: “They are trying to have good relations with Israel. But they continue nevertheless to use expressions or commit actions of anti-Semitism. I don’t know if you can believe them when they profess to leaving anti-Semitism behind. What I do know is that Burschenschaft members who still haven’t broken with their anti-Semitic pasts remain in leading positions in the party.”Despite the obvious incongruences, however, many other rightwing populist groups across Western Europe are attempting to undergo the same transformation. Parties like the Swedish Democrats, Vlaams Belang in Belgium, Italy’s Lega Nord and National Front in France—all nativist parties with neo-fascist histories—have begun to parse their hatreds. Even as polls indicate that their voters and supporters harbor a significant degree of anti-Semitism, they are seeking to jettison decades of anti-Jewish enmity to focus on what they believe is the most dangerous threat facing Europe today: Islam.Ascribing a political home to anti-Semitism in Europe is no easy task. During last summer’s Operation Protective Edge, the most recent Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip, leftwing anti-Israeli protests in many countries in Europe became nasty. A widely shared video from a pro-Palestinian march in Berlin last July showed protesters shouting in unison: “Jew, cowardly pig, come on out and fight!” Not long later, leftist MP George Galloway held a speech declaring the West Yorkshire city of Bradford an “Israel-free zone”, saying that Israeli goods, services, tourists and academics were all unwelcome. In France, pro-Palestinian marches organized by leftist groups were banned after previous demonstrations had ended with marches on synagogues. At one gathering, protesters chanted “Death to the Jews!” and “Hitler Was Right!”The European Left, of course, has long been more sympathetic to the Palestinians than to the Israelis, but surveys muddy the waters even further. They seem to show that anti-Semitism is finding its way into the European mainstream. A survey conducted by the Berlin-based Friedrich Ebert Stiftung last autumn, for example, found that more than a quarter of Germans believe that Israeli treatment of the Palestinians was comparable to Nazi treatment of the Jews during World War II. A YouGov poll in January found that 20 percent of people in Great Britain believe that British Jews’ support of Israel “makes them less loyal to Britain than other Britons.” The French polling company IFOP found late last year that fully 35 percent of people in France believe that Jews use their status as Holocaust victims to their own advantage.Even France’s widely respected center-left publication L’Express has gotten into the act. Last August, the magazine’s publisher, Christophe Barbier, wrote an op-ed essentially accusing Jews of cowardice should they want to leave France to escape growing anti-Semitism there. “If they think that it is problematic to be Jewish while French, they vindicate those who say that it is problematic to be French while Jewish”, he wrote.The situation became so fraught early this year that even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu felt compelled to enter the fray. Following the brutal Islamist attacks in January on the editorial offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the Jewish supermarket HyperCacher in Paris, and the subsequent deadly attack on a synagogue in Copenhagen in February, Netanyahu urged European Jews to emigrate to Israel. “Jews have been murdered again on European soil only because they were Jews”, Netanyahu said. “We say to Jews, to our brothers and sisters: Israel is your home.”In such an atmosphere, rightwing propaganda practically writes itself. On the one hand, lobbing accusations of anti-Semitism at the leftwing, particularly with movements afoot in many European countries to follow Sweden’s lead and recognize Palestine, has become a useful way to try and balance the scales of prejudice. On the other, there is a widespread belief on the Continent that rising anti-Semitism goes hand-in-hand with rising immigration from Muslim countries—that hatred of Jews is essentially arriving in the baggage of newcomers from Syria, Iraq, and North Africa and would not otherwise be present in Europe to the degree it is. As Strache told me: “That anti-Semitism still exists undoubtedly has to do with mass immigration from Muslim countries.” He continued: “Unfortunately, many parties on the Left do not distance themselves from Islamist groups and even have close contact with them in order to attract the Muslim vote.”Perhaps the greatest challenge facing Strache and Co., however, is not that of painting the Left with the same brush of prejudice they have long been daubed with. But that of clearly separating themselves from the swamp of racism further out on the rightwing continuum of hatred. Among classic neo-Nazi parties—such as the National Democratic Party of Germany or Golden Dawn in Greece—one can still find the kind of racial anti-Semitism, virulent xenophobia and extremist nationalism that fueled Adolf Hitler’s murderous ideology. There are also myriad militant rightwing extremist groups that occasionally land in the headlines for their black-booted, shaved-head marches through the downtowns of European cities.Rightwing populist parties, by contrast, can be found in the narrow strip of Islamophobic, irredentist, and xenophobic ground in between the neo-Nazi extreme right and mainstream center-right parties, themselves no great friends of immigration. But even on that strip, there is room for nuance. Parties such as the FPÖ, Vlaams Belang of Belgium and the Swedish Democrats have been extremely careful to avoid any association with Jobbik, believing as they do that the Hungarian party veers too far into extremism. Meanwhile, the Danish People’s Party and Geert Wilders, the radical preacher of Islamophobic hatred in the Netherlands, have both been wary of working too closely with National Front and the FPÖ, mainly out of concern that their pro-Israeli credentials were not up to snuff. The British anti-EU party United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) has refused to have anything to do with National Front. And the rightwing group in European Parliament, known as Europe of Freedom and Democracy prior to its demise in the wake of 2014 European elections, twice rejected FPÖ applications to join out of similar concerns.The reasons for their mutual skepticism are clear. Even as they need each other to wield greater clout in Brussels and Strasbourg, all these parties are, at their core, nationalist. And they need to carefully tailor their hate for the electorate back home. For those parties that are slowly gnawing their way into the political mainstream, accusations of associating with others that are even further out on the radical fringe can be costly. “European collaboration among far-Right parties is still very much a secondary issue for all these parties,” Cas Mudde, a Dutch expert on rightwing parties and a professor at the University of Georgia, told me. “They still live in a world where the nation-state is almighty. So although various parties focus a lot on many of the same things, they still kind of feel they can fight everything off with a national politics.”The conscious shift away from anti-Semitism among West European rightwing parties has been perhaps most jarring with the National Front in France. Party founder and long-time leader Jean-Marie Le Pen is a notorious xenophobe who has been convicted several times of inciting racial hatred. But Jews, in particular, have always held an honored spot in his pantheon of prejudice. Speaking to German right-wingers in 1996, for example, he said: “If you take a 1,000-page book on World War II, the concentration camps take up only two pages and the gas chambers 10 to 15 lines. This is what one calls a detail.” The comment earned Le Pen a fine at the hands of a Munich court for minimizing the Holocaust. There are myriad subsequent examples. Indeed, even on the day in 2011 when he handed over party leadership to his daughter Marine, he responded to a Jewish reporter’s implication that he had been treated poorly by the party because of his Jewish background by saying you couldn’t tell he was Jewish, “neither by looking at his identity card, nor at his nose.”Since taking over the party, Marine has desperately tried to whitewash National Front’s history and has demonstratively thrown her support behind Israel. In early May, she went so far as to suspend her father from the party. By August, he was expelled entirely. His crime? Repeating his views that the gas chambers were but a detail of World War II history.“We are changing our identity, slowly but surely”, Aymeric Chauprade, a National Front delegate to the European Parliament, told me earlier this year. “We need to clear our history and reputation and convince people that we are a completely new party—a patriotic party with people from different traditions, from the Left and the Right.” It remains staunchly Islamophobic, however. Chauprade, earlier this year, was strident in his condemnation of Islam following the Paris attacks, saying that Muslims living in France represented a “fifth column.” Publicly, he was censured by the party and stripped of his status as foreign policy advisor to Marine Le Pen. But by late May, it appeared he had been restored to good graces, accompanying the party leader on a trip to Egypt.The shift elsewhere has been more gradual, but no less stark. And it has also been accompanied by the need for occasional house cleaning. Last spring, for example, on the eve of European Parliament elections, the FPÖ lead candidate, Andreas Mölzer, compared the EU to Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime and warned that the EU risked becoming a “nigger conglomerate.” Strache initially hesitated, but ultimately shoved Mölzer aside and took him off the ballot. In Sweden, Björn Söder, a senior member of the Swedish Democrats, said in a 2014 interview with the Swedish paper Dagens Nyheter, that “most people with a Jewish background who have become Swedes leave behind their Jewish identity”, before adding that it was important to differentiate between citizenship and nationality—comments that earned him a place on the Simon Wiesenthal’s list of the most anti-Semitic statements of 2014. Söder responded to the vocal outcry with an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post in which he wrote: “We are . . . Sweden’s most ardent pro-Israel party, strongly opposed to Sweden’s recognition of a Palestinian state.”Public opinion polls hint at a possible explanation for the far Right’s attempt to moderate its image. Even as anti-Semitism in Europe appears to be on the rise and anti-Zionism has once again become de rigueur, the Continent’s 20th century history dictates that overt bile directed at Europe’s Jewish population does not go over well with the vast majority of voters. And increasingly, rightwing populist parties have a lot to lose. The Swedish Democrats in August became the country’s largest political party, with support spiking to a record high of 25.2 percent, according to a YouGov poll. National Front has likewise seen a surge in support recently, as frustration with President Francois Hollande remains high and the ongoing influx of refugees dominates headlines. In the first round of local election in March, the party hauled in 25 percent of first-round votes. In Austria, the FPÖ has also been boosted by the refugee crisis and is now, with 30 percent support, the country’s largest party. In Vienna mayoral elections on October 11, Strache has excellent chances of becoming the next mayor of the Austrian capital.Toned down hate, free of anti-Semitism, plays a role in that increased popularity and can help rightwing parties continue to make inroads into the mainstream, particularly if they focus primarily on issues such as immigration and emphasize their anti-EU credentials instead of their exclusionary nationalist prejudice. Peter Kreko, director of Hungary’s Political Capital Institute and an expert on European rightwing politics, calls it “perfume fragranced radicalism.”“We are seeing the ‘mainstream-ization’ of the far right”, Kreko told me. “Not just in the sense that their issues are appearing in general dialogue, but that the far right is trying to speak in a way that is closer to the political mainstream. In the way they speak and look, they are trying to demolish their extremist image. Voters don’t see them as extreme. They see them as more moderate.”Still, David Lasar, a member of the Viennese city council for the FPÖ and an important architect of the party’s overtures to Israel, rejects suggestions that the FPÖ’s embrace of Jerusalem and rejection of anti-Semitism is tactical in nature. Lasar is unfailingly polite and he employs the kind of overt solicitousness often encountered in the Austrian capital. “How are you Herr Hawley? How is your family? It is so good to hear from you!” The standard Viennese farewell, “alles Liebe” (“all my love”), actually sounds sincere coming from his lips. And it is all delivered with a sing-song accent and a slightly rumpled, distracted-professor persona. Talking to him, journalists can forget that a healthy disregard for their profession is a significant pillar of the rightwing populist Weltbild.But like all rightwingers, Lasar has a strident streak. Accusations of racism are met with protestations of innocence, criticism of overt Islamophobia is cast aside as being naïve, and rejection of rightwing dogma is countered by long disquisitions that ultimately traipse down one of three well-worn paths: Islam is a global scourge; the EU is essentially a dictatorship and should be significantly weakened; or immigration will be the death of European culture.And when he begins talking about Islam, his voice hardens. Like his boss Strache, Lasar is of the opinion that one of the reasons the European Left has become more anti-Semitic is because it is pandering to the Muslim vote. It is, in essence, the political professional’s variation on the standard rightwing trope: “Europe is being taken over by Islam.” In Lasar’s words, it sounds like this: “Today, politics is very shortsighted and there are unfortunately no politicians anymore who look far into the future. The problem is immigration and integration in Europe. Today, the question politicians ask is: Which constituency should I approach? Which one will get me the most votes? In Europe, that means Muslims. And the Muslims are anti-Semitic. They have always been anti-Semitic.”Crucially, as prejudiced as such sentiments may sound to more sensitive ears, they are widespread in Europe. Indeed, surveys in Germany—where the anti-Islam movement PEGIDA drew tens of thousands of protesters to weekly demonstrations in Dresden throughout the late winter and early spring—show that up to 50 percent of the population harbors anti-Muslim beliefs, and the numbers aren’t much different elsewhere in Europe. The claim that a huge percentage of Muslims hate Jews is not one likely to raise eyebrows, even in polite company.Esra Özyürek, an associate professor at the London School of Economics, takes it a step further. In a forthcoming article for the academic journal Comparative Studies in Society and History, she makes the case that anti-Semitism in Europe, as currently manifested, is widely seen as a foreign entity, brought into the Continent via Muslim immigration. Indeed, she notes, most efforts at combatting anti-Semitism in Germany, where she did much of her research for the article, has been focused in recent years on the country’s Turkish population, as though native Germans had become somehow immune to the scourge of anti-Jewish hatred due to the shock of the Holocaust. “It is noteworthy that in Vienna and Berlin, birthplace of the worst modern form of anti-Semitism, immigrants were accused of bringing anti-Semitism to a Europe imagined to be otherwise free of it”, she writes. “Anti-Semitism is now seen as the mindset of an external enemy that threatens European civilization and security.” Essentially, she told me in a recent telephone conversation, “it is the racialization of anti-Semitism.” It has become an attribute assigned to immigrants while white Europeans have come to be seen as “anti-anti-Semitic.”To be sure, Islamist terror is a significant problem in Europe, and Jews were certainly the targets of the attacks in Paris and Copenhagen earlier this year. But Özyürek’s research sheds a new light on the rightwing’s professed rejection of anti-Semitism. If rightwing populists believe the main threat to Europe emanates from Islam, and Muslims hate Jews, then the rightwing rejection of anti-Semitism has a certain logic. “I think rightwing groups are being smart,” Özyürek says. “If they want to be accepted in society, they can’t be seen as hating Jews. This is not your grandfather’s rightwing discourse. They work hard not to look like Nazis.”Michael Kleiner, a senior member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, has decided to take the European far-Right at its word. Rightwing parties, he told me, “are better at recognizing the real danger that Europe is facing from the Muslims, the real intentions of the Muslims.” With the European mainstream having become even more critical of Israel recently as a result of last summer’s incursion into the Gaza Strip, he believes rightwing populist parties such as FPÖ, Vlaams Belang, Lega Nord and even National Front are Israel’s natural allies.“We are a small nation surrounded by an ocean of around one billion Muslims who are brought up to hate us. If somebody is opening his arms toward us, we cannot afford to be the ones to say no, we don’t want your help”, Kleiner says. “We have no reason to question the sincerity of the FPÖ, for example. Today, we are fighting Islam and the rightwing parties in Europe have a true picture and a real picture about Islam, unlike the other parties in Europe, who believe that you can appease dictators and appease an animal that only wants to feed on you.”Kleiner, to be sure, is considered conservative even within the Likud, a party that Netanyahu has guided well to the right of center. Fifteen years ago, Kleiner took the step of leaving Likud to found a party even further to the right, one that trumpeted its hawkishness and found Netanyahu too accommodating to the Palestinians. But after a ten-year hiatus, Kleiner rejoined Netanyahu’s party in 2009—only to found the “Tea Party of the Likud” not long later, an attempt to emulate the reactionary Republican movement in the United States.Nevertheless, he was chosen in 2013 to become the president of the party’s “Supreme Court”, a body that adjudicates matters pertaining to the Likud constitution and passes judgment on divisions within the party. It is, in short, not an unimportant position and it is one that brings Kleiner in regular, close contact with Netanyahu.Kleiner’s view of European rightwing parties is no longer as isolated as it once was in Israel. Many in the country are beginning to wonder just how reliable today’s Europe is when it comes to defending Israel from the numerous threats it faces. Indeed, not long after Sweden recognized Palestine, an editorial appeared in the Jerusalem Post arguing that Israel’s only allies in the country were the rightwing populist party Swedish Democrats. The piece had been written by an intern at a prestigious think tank, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.“You hear a lot about it in the rightwing discourse in Israel, in the debate about the Islamic threat in Europe and that Islam is taking over and that European politicians are being gradually shaped by concerns of the Muslim communities who are trying to turn them anti-Israeli”, Nimrod Goren, the former Israeli ambassador to the European Union and now head of the Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies, told me. “And that’s why when these people get together with those forces in Europe that are [opposed to the] Muslim community in Europe, they are able to find a common language.”Some on Europe’s rightwing fringe are hoping that this growing sentiment in Israel will ultimately help bring them in out of the nativist, racist cold by giving them the official stamp of anti-anti-Semitism approval. Within the FPÖ, excitement has been growing in recent months at the possibility that party leader Strache could receive an official invitation from the Netanyahu government to visit Israel. Up until now, even as rightwing populists have been shown around by conservative members of Knesset, official government organs have steered clear. Were Strache given a Foreign Ministry seal of approval, it would be a significant coup for the party.Ultimately, though, it will be the voters back home in Europe who decide whether the new face of the right wing is one that can be trusted. And even Lasar, of the FPÖ, at least tacitly admits that that is what the game has always been about. “If we were really as bad as people say, we would never have the support that we do now”, he says. “It has taken some time, but the message, and the definition of the right wing in Europe has begun to reach the voters.”Skepticsm, though, isn’t likely to disappear soon. “I am of the opinion that it is political calculation”, says Oskar Deutsch, the president of the Austrian Jewish Community of Austria. “It is opportunistic for these parties to try to improve relations with Israel, but on the other side, these things such as anti-Semitism and racism continue within the rightwing parties. It is not possible to be just a little bit pregnant. Either you are, or your are not.”

NYT: Obamacare Reducing Competition

A long article by Reed Abelson in the New York Times business section expertly illustrates a point that we at Via Meadia have been making for a while: One of the major effects of the Affordable Care Act has been to reduce competition in the health insurance sector. The piece—the latest in a series of NYT stories documenting the ACA’s shortcomings in the private insurance market—attempts to explain why the once-vaunted Obamacare co-ops (alternative, not-for-profit health insurers) are failing so spectacularly. The answer: The law has not lived up to its supporters’ promises that it would foster competition and drive down prices, and instead has created an insurance market increasingly controlled by large carriers. NYT:

As the new co-ops begin failing just a year into the effort to remake the health care industry with more competition and lower costs, the marketplace is proving hostile to newcomers trying to break into an industry dominated by powerfully entrenched businesses. […]

The co-ops’ problems are compounded by moves among the industry’s biggest companies, like Anthem and Aetna, which plan to buy their rivals to become even bigger. That raises the specter of even less competition in the marketplace and less room for smaller players to make a dent.

The existing health insurance landscape isn’t just a problem for co-ops, which are subject to a special set of rules and regulations; it’s a problem for for-profit insurers trying to break into the market as well:

In addition to the co-op failures, there have been other notable departures. Assurant Health, a for-profit insurer that tried an aggressive entry into the individual insurance market last year, stopped selling coverage altogether. Even one of the most popular new plans in Minnesota, offered in 2014 by a collaboration of local hospitals and doctors, no longer covers people through the state marketplace.

The McKinsey Center for U.S. Health System Reform counted dropouts among insurance carriers that were selling insurance to individuals for the first time (rather than group coverage to small businesses or large employers). It found that eight carriers had dropped out of nine states so far.

Furthermore, “only two for-profit companies that were not already health insurers have entered the state marketplaces so far.” The market is unfriendly to new entrants because premiums are rising as insurance companies take on sicker customers. Moreover, major insurers’ connections and capital gives them a substantial advantage on the ACA exchanges. This could become a vicious cycle: As competition wanes, premiums will rise, which will make the market even more unaffordable for new insurance companies. This would be good news for giants like Blue Cross and Aetna, which look likely to dominate a greater and greater share of the health insurance market, but not so good news for consumers looking for affordable plans.

The NYT article on health insurance competition is a reminder that looking at the raw number of Americans who are insured gives only an incomplete window into how well our healthcare system is working. Today, the Obama Administration announced that the percentage of Americans without health insurance fell in the last year. This doesn’t say anything about what kind of coverage the newly insured will get, or how sustainable the system is over the long run. If competition continues to collapse, the law will not fare well by these measures.

Inequality Hasn’t Made Americans Support Redistribution

With America’s top earners enjoying bigger and bigger gains each year relative to the rest of the population, most voters would probably see their post-tax-and-transfer income go up (at least in the short term) if the United States implemented a European-style welfare state. So why haven’t voters demanded more redistribution? Why, after forty years of rising economic inequality, does the American political consensus remain so market-oriented, at least relative to other industrialized countries?

Two explanations are popular on the left. The first explanation—popular among Bernie Sanders-style economic populists—posits that voters actually do want more redistribution, but their democratically expressed preferences are blocked by a billionaire class that has the political class in its pocket. The second explanation—popular among elite social liberals—is that many socially conservative voters are duped into voting against their economic self-interest by Republicans’ exploitation of their latent prejudices and resentments on social issues. But the data presented in a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper from researchers at Yale and Princeton casts serious doubt on both of these explanations.First, consider the Sanders theory. The thrust of the paper (written by Vivekinan Ashok, Ilyana Kuziemko, and Ebonya Washington) is that Americans’ support for economic redistribution has remained constant or declined since inequality began rising in the 1970s. Public support for the statement “government should reduce income differences between the rich and the poor” has trended gradually downward for the past forty years, and public support for the statements “government should do more to solve the nation’s problems” and “government should do more to help the poor” has trended sharply downward. (Support for the statement “government should ensure that everyone has a decent standard of living” has remained flat or risen modestly). So while it may be that elites do push public policy in a less redistributive direction than the voters would like, the data suggest that the decline of New Deal/Great Society liberalism over the past generation is largely the product of changing public opinion rather than the secret machinations of plutocrats.Now consider the “elite social liberal” theory that many low-to-middle-income Americans (especially working class whites) ignorantly vote against their economic self-interest because of their primitive views on race and culture wars issues. It is conventional wisdom on the left that many poor whites moved to the right economically in the post-Civil Rights era because of racial resentment. Like all matters of conventional wisdom, this theory probably has an element of truth—but it is complicated by the facts that blacks moved even more dramatically against redistribution than whites did over the forty year period addressed by the study. “While there has been no significant movement on the issue by whites, in both datasets, blacks, who have a much higher desire for redistribution on average, have significantly decreased their support,” the authors write.The authors also more-or-less explicitly tested the Thomas Frank hypothesis that cunning Republican demagoguery on God, guns, and gays leads low-information voters to support a plutocratic agenda. They control for views “on certain ‘hot-button’ issues—abortion, homosexuality and gun control” and find that “these single issues explain less than 10 percent of our trends in redistributive views by age and race.” In other words, it appears that public opinion on economic redistribution is mostly independent of public opinion on social issues.Ultimately, while the data in this study don’t provide any concrete explanations for one of the political-economic paradoxes of the past generation—that Americans have not moved in favor of wealth redistribution even as the economy delivers more and more unequal returns—they do suggest that this trend is more complicated than many on the left would like to believe. They also highlight the perils of a materialistic model of politics that assumes that people’s preferences are based on clear incentives, rather than a complex matrix of cultural, historical factors.That said, economic libertarians shouldn’t be too overjoyed about this study. It only uses data through 2012, and the fact that the public hasn’t yet responded to rising inequality by demanding more redistribution doesn’t mean that it never will. Indeed, given the Democrats’ sharp leftward shift and the rise of a less classically liberal right in Donald Trump, this seems like an increasingly distinct possibility.

American Oil Producers Punch Back in Price Fight

For Saudi Arabia and the rest of the world’s petrostates, facing off against upstart U.S. oil producers must feel like playing a game of whack-a-mole. A year ago, conventional wisdom said most shale plays needed an oil price upwards of $70 per barrel to stay profitable. When prices tanked, OPEC elected not to cut production in an attempt to fight for a share of the suddenly crowded market, hoping that shale producers would be forced to curtail their own output.

Clearly, something went wrong with that strategy. True, U.S. output is now flagging and analysts expect it to dip further next year, but we haven’t seen a dip in production anywhere near big enough to put a significant dent in the global market’s oversupply. The American oil industry’s ability to innovate has shocked the Saudis and stymied their strategy, and even now we’re seeing evidence of new techniques being employed to help keep the crude flowing in today’s bear market. Drillers are now finding that they can drill or even re-frack vertical wells from mature fields to help stay afloat, as Reuters reports:

[O]ld vertical wells…can quickly be drilled, injected with water or fracked for a second time to increase production at low cost. Overshadowed by the fracking boom that delivered record oil and gas volumes, vertical wells are making a comeback as investors and producers shift focus away from production growth to capital discipline in the downturn.

“It makes more sense to develop vertical wells in a lower price environment because they are not growth plays but they are a very strong cash flow asset,” said Benjamin Shattuck, principal analyst at Wood Mackenzie. “They are going to give you that cash flow that you need today.” […]Squeezing crude from shallow mature fields allows the shale companies to produce more at a lower cost. They can use less powerful rigs that are cheaper to rent and shorter wells can be bored and brought into production in as few as 10 days, whereas a big horizontal well would normally take a month or more to complete.

Horizontal well drilling has, along with hydraulic fracturing, stolen the limelight in the U.S. oil industry of late as it’s allowed producers to tap shale formations across the country. But companies are seeing now that, in the haste to get the shale boom off the ground, they perhaps left behind some productive vertical plays that can be re-tapped and re-fracked relatively cheaply.

This is far from the first creative U.S. solution to the problem of continuing to produce oil at sub-$50 per barrel prices, and you can be sure that it won’t be the last. When the Saudis strong-armed OPEC onto a collision course with shale producers, they were banking on the fact that American companies would blink first. They’re now re-learning an old lesson: Don’t bet against American innovation.

Compassion and Interests

The German news magazine Der Spiegel, in its issue of August, 29, 2015, had the unusual feature of having not one but two covers, one following the first. The first cover, titled “Bright Germany”, showed a cheerful picture of a festival organized for refugee children, balloons and all, staged by local people in a small town in Lower Saxony. The second cover, titled “Dark Germany”, showed a refugee home in flames in a small town in Baden-Wuerttemberg, after an arson attack by an anti-immigrant mob. Each cover had the same sentence under the title: “It is up to us how we shall live”.

There are several pictures in the issue similar to the ones that have flooded international media about the masses of desperate people, most of them from the Middle East and Africa, seeking to reach the wealthy countries of the European Union, some by boat across the Mediterranean, others on land across the Balkans. It does not include the photo which most recently has deeply disturbed people all over the world: that of a three-year old little boy lying dead on a beach on the Greek island of Kos, after the flimsy boat carrying him and his family capsized offshore. (His mother and a sibling also drowned, leaving only the father to survive; he said that nothing was left for him to live for and that he was returning to Syria.)No matter where they first arrived on European soil, many of the refugees intend to reach Germany, where the asylum laws are very liberal. But the sheer numbers are putting this liberality under severe stress. About 800,000 refugees claiming asylum are expected in Germany in the next few months. The Spiegel issue shows the photo of a cute seven-months old little black girl from Ghana, whose mother gave birth to her in a refugee facility in Hannover. The caption under the photo says “Angela is happy here”. Her mother, out of gratitude to Germany for letting them in, gave her daughter two first names: “Angela Merkel”.As in other European countries, there have been very different reactions to the flood of new migrants. There have been hostile demonstrations against the refugees, threats of violence, and a number of arson attacks on facilities housing them. But there have also been outbursts of sympathy and actions of support—welcoming demonstrations, organizing activities for children and German language lessons, assisting in contacts with German bureaucracy, inviting newcomers to the homes of local families. Much of this has been supported by both Protestant and Catholic churches, but much was spontaneous and locally organized.The latter phenomenon is certainly evidence of a vital civil society—indeed a democratic society—that has developed in Germany since World War II. It is not just a political ideology at the foundation of the Federal Republic. It is that too. But it has seeped into ordinary everyday life. I first came to work in Germany as a young man in the mid-fifties. It was in the making then. One can assess the change that has occurred since then by recalling scenes (in themselves quite trivial) that would be inconceivable now. I was hanging around in a café in the university town of Tuebingen and became friendly with a young man from Turkey who was studying dentistry there. Mustafa told me the following story:He had his first meeting with the professor who was supposed to be his advisor. On the door was the full title of this man, before his name: “Obermedizinalrat Professor”. Mustafa had knocked and, when invited to enter, had introduced himself, simply addressed the professor as “Mister”. This august person asked Mustafa whether he could read, then told him to recite the full title out loud. Mustafa was then instructed to go out again, close the door, knock again, and upon re-entering using the proper form of address.This would be quite unimaginable today. Trivial? Of course. But the small rituals of everyday life often indicate much less trivial facts of social life. It seems to me that an interesting indicator of present-day German democratic culture is the rather amazing fact that, some seventy years after the Holocaust, there are now over 200,000 Jews living permanently in Germany, some 15,000 of them Israelis in Berlin. In interviews some Israelis have said that they like it in Germany, because they feel safe here and have no compunctions speaking Hebrew on the street. By law any persons forced to flee by the Nazis, or their descendants, have the right to German citizenship. There have been a good many applications from Israel.But this is not the point I want to make here. Rather, I am impressed by an editorial dubbed “a manifesto”, written for the editors by Elke Schmitter (a journalist and novelist). She comments on the plan, now beginning to be pushed by the Merkel government, to distribute the refugees by spreading them across the country by a quota system, and to recommend a similar system for spreading the refugees throughout the EU (some members of which have already declared that they want to have nothing with such a scheme).Schmitter begins her piece with a surprising analogy: In 1957, four years after the U.S. Supreme Court had declared racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional, Orval Faubus, the governor of Arkansas, decided to defy the Supreme Court mandate and ordered the state national guard to bar entrance to the central high school in Little Rock to the nine black students who had been admitted in accordance with the Supreme Court mandate. Thereupon President Eisenhower ordered federal troops in full battle gear to escort the black students into the school. They were surrounded by a white mob who hurled insults and spat at the students. For a while it seemed possible that there would be a reiteration of the American Civil War, with federal troops and the militia of a Southern state firing on each other. That scenario was prevented by Eisenhower’s willingness to use the overwhelming power of the federal government to enforce desegregation. Arkansas backed down, the so-called “Little Rock Nine” could finish their high school education, and of course the public schools of Arkansas are now as desegretated as those in every other state.But Schmitter stresses another point: The black students had a terrible time during their years at Central High, shunned and taunted and even physically threatened by angry white students. They prevailed and have justly been honored for their courage (recently by a memorial monument in front of the state capitol). Schmitter points to an interesting parallel with the campaign against the refugees in Germany today—mobs full of hatred and prone to violence ready to defy the will of the democratic government. Of course the mobs must not be allowed to prevail, by force if necessary. But she asks the following question: “Does it have to be the most vulnerable who have to bear this war on their backs and in their souls? Not for a few stressful weeks, but as a daily experience? Under police protection in their homes, unwanted and hated, as a living provocation of the local population?”Schmitter suggests another approach: There are regions in the country in which resentment sits “like a toad bloated by feelings of disappointment” (nice image!). More optimistic people have already left these regions, already marked by economic decline. Let the toads stew in their resentment! And do not force the most traumatized people to live in toad-country. There are other regions, where the refugees are already being welcomed, and where there is an awareness of the very negative demographic situation into which Germany, along with most of Europe, is rapidly sinking—with a declining number of people in the labor force having to support a growing number of the aged. Unless indigenous German women have many more children (sociologically unlikely) or the generous German welfare state vastly expands (economically impossible with declining growth), Germany urgently needs large number of young, healthy immigrants willing to work. This suggests a policy of rewarding communities ready to welcome and integrate refugees—bureaucratically and financially. The local results, in addition to strengthening the demographic basis of economic growth, will be very visible—finally a new swimming pool, an expanding hospital, a center for seniors. Put simply: Reward the “bright Germany” and, apart from police measures against violence, let the “dark Germany” stay in its condition of economic disappointment. (Schmitter does not say this, but before long there would be intra-German migration from the “dark” to the “bright” regions of the country.)The older one gets, the wider becomes one’s set of associations: One thinks of one thing, and immediately any number of other things pop into one’s mind. Just that happens to me just now. As the logic of Elke Schmitter’s argument becomes clear, it reminded me of something about the relation of compassion and interests that I learned (of all places) in South Africa. From 1985 to 1988 I chaired an international working group on the future of South Africa, financed by Harry Oppenheimer and a number of other business leaders. Oppenheimer, the head of the Anglo-American mining conglomerate and one of the richest men in the world, was passionately opposed to apartheid which he considered to be a moral outrage; he put his money where his mouth was, financially supporting much if not most of the non-violent part of the anti-apartheid movement. But something that was happening about the time that I first came to South Africa was that the majority of the business community had decided that apartheid had to go. This happened first among the English-speaking business leaders, who had been in matters other than race less identified with the Nationalist government’s agenda. But now it was also happening with their Afrikaans-speaking colleagues.I’m sure that Oppenheimer was not the only businessman opposed to apartheid on moral grounds. But the general shift in elite business leaders, whether English or Afrikaans, was not due to mass conversions to racial liberalism resulting from the preachings of Archbishop Desmond Tutu and other anti-apartheid advocates. I think it was due to something more vulgar: Business leaders saw that the country was becoming ungovernable and that this would wreck the economy, including their businesses. In the final period of the apartheid regime big business played a very positive role, mediating (then illegal) contacts between the government and the African National Congress (the umbrella resistance movement led by Nelson Mandela), and then financing the huge negotiating process that led to the collapse of the regime. As an anti-apartheid activist put it: “We talked ourselves through a revolution” (he might have added, “and Harry Oppenheimer picked up the tab”). I learned a very useful lesson from having closely observed this history: A moral vision is important, but it helps greatly if you can appeal to hard interests as well as to conscience.I don’t know Elke Schmitter, but it seems to me that she is applying this lesson here. (If I were to give her unsolicited advice, I would say: Be sure to include the business community in a campaign to advocate your plan for “bright Germany”.)

Kiss This Important Climate Goal Goodbye

The green movement’s coveted 2C goal may be dead: UN climate chief Christiana Figueres has now said that global climate commitments aren’t enough to keep earth’s warming below two degrees Celsius. In preparation for this December’s big climate summit in Paris, countries are submitting pledges to curb emissions at the national level. So far only 62 member states have turned in their UN homework, but that number accounts for some 70 percent of global emissions. And from the looks of things so far, Figueres thinks that those pledges “do not add up to 2 degrees”, and she “guesstimates” that we’re much more likely to end up somewhere around three degrees Celsius of warming, as compared to pre-industrial levels. Reuters reports:

Aware of the shadow cast by the 2009 Copenhagen summit, the last attempt to reach a global climate deal that ended in failure, EU officials and the U.N. stress Paris is a step, not the end result.

Figueres told reporters in Brussels she wanted it to be “pellucidly clear” that the INDCs were not the magic route to 2 degrees, set as a target by the Copenhagen Accord, from the current trajectory of 4-5 degrees.

So what would missing that target by a full degree mean for the planet? Nothing good, according to researchers. “Beyond two degrees of warming we are leaving the world as we know it”, said the Potsdam Institute for Climate Change Research’s Anders Levermann. Even Figueres, who has taken on the role of chief hedging officer in the run-up to this year’s climate summit, couldn’t put a good face on this news as she broke it. “Three degrees is much better than 4 to 5 degrees, but it is still unacceptable”, she cautioned. We should take the most apocalyptic predictions with a grain of salt, but nevertheless, if Figueres is right, greens have just been handed a huge defeat on their own terms.

Greens have heaped the expectations high on the Paris summit, but in the months leading up to these supposedly historic talks all we’ve seen has been backtracking and expectation management. Perhaps, just perhaps, this has something to do with the entire approach Paris represents? A Global Climate Treaty can only be effective if it’s both binding and enforceable, and it’s practically impossible to see how delegates from around the world will unanimously sign off on such a document. The U.S. Senate, for one, would never ratify such a treaty, but we’re not the only obstacle—Poland promises to throw a wrench in the works, too. Then also there’s the fact that the gap between the developed and developing worlds looks as wide as ever on the issue.It hardly seems like we’re heading into a successful chapter in our approach to climate change.

France to Bomb ISIS in Response to Homeland Threat

France has announced that it’s preparing to launch airstrikes against ISIS in Syria. The move is a response to intelligence that the terror group is training jihadis to return to France to carry out attacks there. The Wall Street Journal reports:

While Islamic State periodically calls for sympathizers in Europe to launch attacks, the group has mainly relied on Europeans coming to its Syrian strongholds to replenish the ranks of fighters killed in battle. But intelligence from France and its allies shows a new profile of jihadist recruits emerging from Europe: those who are traveling to Syria not principally to fight alongside the group in Syria, but for weapons training to commit attacks back in Europe, the officials say.[..]

“[Before] we knew that it was a threat, but it remained vague,” said a second French official. Intelligence reports throughout the summer provided “very clear” information that Islamic State was recruiting Europeans for training who would then be sent back to Europe to carry out attacks, the official said.

The migrant crisis will surely intensify the danger that European nationals fighting for ISIS could return home. And France has a lot of nationals to be worried about, with PM Manuel Valls putting the number of French citizens with links to Islamist groups at 1,880 (of those, 441 are reportedly currently in Syria).

It’s good to see France taking measures to combat this threat, but the following series of calculations on the part of the country’s government, as reported by the Journal, raise the possibility that the airstrikes may not be part of a compelling strategy:

France’s airstrikes would build on the U.S.-led campaign to degrade Islamic State’s strongholds in Syria. France has been participating in airstrikes to check Islamic State’s advance in Iraq since September 2014. But it had refrained from bombing the group in Syria for fear of bolstering Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad, one of Islamic State’s main foes. French officials say Mr. Assad’s position is now sufficiently weakened that the risk of attacking his enemy has diminished.

“We consider that an action targeting Islamic State wouldn’t inevitably help Assad,” one French official said.

As Walter Russell Mead noted yesterday, former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari his recently said that the West turned down a Russian offer to jettison Assad because it believed he would fall on his own. And America’s desultory bombing campaign against Assad’s enemies has done much to convince Sunnis that we’re serving as his air force, in turn reinforcing ISIS’ claim to be the anti-Shi’a militia par excellence. Sunnis wary of Iran therefore look more favorably than they otherwise might upon these jihadis who, whatever their faults, at least are fighting the Shi’a.

This time it may be different. Assad may be indeed about to fall, and bombing ISIS may indeed not strengthen his position enough to stop that. But with Russian and Iranian troops and aid pouring into Syria to help prop him up, we’d be leery of taking odds. Commendable as the French turn against ISIS is, does Paris have any more strategy to deal with the problems posed by Syria than we do?