Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 6

March 25, 2020

How to Think About China

Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy

by Kishore Mahbubani

PublicAffairs, 2020, 320 pp., $30

China’s Western Horizon: Beijing and the New Geopolitics of Eurasia

by Daniel S. Markey

Oxford University Press, 2020, 336 pp., $29.95

Maoism: A Global History

by Julia Lovell

Knopf, 2019, 624 pp., $37.50

In the acknowledgments to his new book, the Singaporean diplomat turned academic Kishore Mahbubani confesses that he “knew that it would be a challenge to find an American publisher.” This struck me as quite incredible. The appetite for books on China in this country shows no sign of being slaked. Alarmism sells: think titles like The Hundred Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower or China’s Vision of Victory. The coronavirus outbreak and the morally reprehensible finger-pointing it has inspired in Washington and Beijing bode well for the sales of future books on China. We already have articles on the need for decoupling and China’s use of the pandemic to reshape the global order. Savvy publishers are probably soliciting book-length versions right now, and I glumly expect to be reviewing a title like China’s Coronavirus: How Beijing Won a year or two hence. So it is unsurprising that PublicAffairs snapped up Mahbubani’s Has China Won?: The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy and, given all that has happened over the last couple of months, it will be unsurprising if the book sells even better than expected.

Unsurprising, but also disappointing—for Mahbubani’s little jeremiad is not particularly useful. Mahbubani comes to a conclusion that he notes is “paradoxical”: “a major geopolitical contest between America and China is both inevitable and avoidable.” Clever as this sounds, he never does get around to explaining the apparent contradiction. The “avoidable” side of this equation makes sense, though “undesirable” describes his argument better. The United States, he suggests, needs to adjust to China’s playing a role befitting a great power in the international system. Both countries would do better to focus on giving their citizens better lives rather than trying to kill one another (American politics since 2016 shows that this idea has resonance here). The global problems that confront all of humanity—climate change is his prime example; the virus came later—require the two superpowers to cooperate if we are to survive. This is all true, but much of Mahbubani’s book is preoccupied with what makes the geopolitical contest inevitable—and it is here that he falters rather badly.

There are, to be fair, some interesting nuggets of insight on the United States. Mahbubani is right to point out that the role of money in politics undermines political freedom—something that both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren put at the heart of their campaigns. He is right to lampoon the streak of moralism that runs through American foreign policy, and it is more than fair to observe that the United States is, as things stand, a far more interventionist power than China. There is much here for Americans to ponder, especially when it comes to forging a China policy—which, Mahbubani correctly notes, the United States lacks.

But Mahbubani never manages to bring that same skeptical, thoughtful outlook to bear on China. China, we are told “did not conquer or occupy any overseas or distant territories.” What of Xinjiang, Mongolia, and Tibet—not to mention Taiwan? Mahbubani swiftly reassures us that Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and Tibet were conquered by foreign dynasties rather than Han Chinese ones. This doesn’t explain the Chinese Communist Party’s use of lethal force to reconquer Xinjiang and Tibet once it came to power, but so it goes. “The relatively peaceful streak of the Han Chinese people is brought out when their behavior is compared with some of their neighbors,” we are told, only to be reminded a few pages later that “although China has fought countless wars with Japan, Korea, Myanmar, and Vietnam, the prospects of any such war breaking out in the next few decades are virtually zero.” It’s a style of argument that defines the book: Say something completely wrongheaded in strident tones, then rush through the opposite idea to cover all bases. Mahbubani’s reason for playing down the prospect of war between China and its neighbors is that those countries have developed “sophisticated and subtle instincts on how to manage a rising China.” Maybe—but those sophisticated and subtle instincts, at least in Japan, seem to include the recognition that war is a distinct possibility and that military strengthening (Sheila Smith, Japan Rearmed, is excellent here) would be wise.

Such moments abound. “The more powerful China has become, the less it has intervened in the affairs of other states,” Mahbubani announces. At this point, an Australian, New Zealander, Norwegian, or South Korean reading the book might howl in disbelief, but in a quick few lines on China’s dealings with Norway and South Korea, Mahbubani explains that “China was responding directly to what it perceived to be an attack on China’s national interests. It was not a gratuitous intervention in the affairs of another state.” That most interventions by most states are driven by perceptions, however misguided, of national interest is a point seemingly lost on him. When he finally lays into another author for a “contradiction . . . so brazen that it must indicate the author’s deep reluctance to acknowledge the facts”, one can’t help feeling that Mahbubani has diagnosed the failure that mars his own book. Meanwhile, misleading statements pile up. Mahbubani is “astonished how the quality of mind of Chinese diplomats has improved, decade by decade.” Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, Pan Tzuli, and Huang Hua to name but a few of China’s negotiators would be fully justified in taking umbrage here; they played a weaker hand with far greater finesse. “There is no question,” Mahbubani writes,“that if China suddenly becomes a democracy, it would emerge with a leader as interventionist and imperialistic as Teddy Roosevelt, not with a leader as restrained and non-interventionist as Xi Jinping.” There are some rather large questions about that. It’s always hard to tell what a country wants; China, with its malls and Hello-Kitty-obsessed youth, might well choose boring old consumerism. And whatever else Xi Jinping might be, he is decidedly not restrained or non-interventionist. Mahbubani’s account of Sino-Japanese relations seems extraordinarily naive. It’s nice to hope—one should hope—that a “culturally symbiotic relationship” between the two can foster stable, good relations. But to canter across the relationship as Mahbubani does while barely mentioning the territorial dispute shows a resolute unwillingness to face facts. “I was born an argumentative Indian,” he notes. The line that divides argumentative from plain silly is not particularly fine, but Mahbubani tumbles across it all too often.

This is a crying shame, for the call for common sense in American policy toward China that Mahbubani is making is important, perhaps more now than ever. Daniel Markey, formerly of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff and now a research professor at SAIS, makes a similar call, but in a very different style, in China’s Western Horizon. A tougher editor would have asked that Markey’s book either be expanded to encompass more than the three case studies in China’s foreign relations (Pakistan, Kazakhstan, and Iran) that it sets out to explore, or else be pruned to a hundred pages. But the book is a measured, thoughtful analysis of the nature and limitations of China’s influence in Eurasia. Markey’s central thesis is that the smaller countries with which China is interacting will shape the way the relationship evolves. “China’s new initiatives and ambitions are playing out against the backdrop of Eurasian realities,” he notes. “Beijing cannot run roughshod over these realities or avoid them entirely. To the contrary, China’s own interests will be shaped and implicated in regional dynamics in new, complicated ways.”

The best chapter is the opening one on Pakistan. (Much of Markey’s career has been spent studying or dealing with South Asia.) Markey begins with the story of erstwhile Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf asking China to invest in a new Pakistani port, Gwadar, and how the Chinese, despite being wary, were gradually sucked into the project. Markey offers a helpful sketch of the rivalry between India and Pakistan, and China’s attempt to walk a “vanishingly fine line” between those two countries. For a chapter titled “South Asia and China,” the Sino-Indian relationship feels short-changed here, and other South Asian countries need much more attention. But as a study in how Pakistan’s messy politics and “crony capitalism” will affect Chinese aims, it is valuable. The China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) has received a ton of attention; Markey skillfully highlights how ethnic groups such as the Baluch object to CPEC projects in their territory, how well-entrenched politicians enrich themselves through such projects, and how Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Imran Khan, seemed to lead a backlash against CPEC. (The full story here has yet to be told: I suspect that Khan—who is no relation of mine—was following the time-honored Pakistani tradition of shaking down a patron power.) Markey shows convincingly that China’s involvement in the region won’t fix Pakistan’s many problems, whatever Beijing and Islamabad say. He also suspects that China’s involvement in Pakistan will fuel Sino-Indian rivalry. This seems a stretch. China has a decent track record at balancing between those two countries and not letting Pakistan drag it into conflict with India, despite Pakistan trying repeatedly. It’s a possibility, certainly—just not as strong a one as the book suggests. Greater attention to the risk militant Islamism in Pakistan might pose to China, especially given how accounts of China’s gulag in Xinjiang are spreading among Pakistanis, would have been valuable. Nevertheless, this is a sound account of the Sino-Pakistani relationship and one that American policymakers worried about China’s reach would do well to read.

Markey sees similar challenges in China’s dealings with Kazakhstan and Iran: nasty internal politics and the risk of upsetting existing regional powers (Russia and Saudi Arabia). China has growing energy investments in Kazakhstan that, Markey contends, will be jeopardized by potential turmoil and Russian fears of being displaced by China. In the Middle East, he sees China’s burgeoning relationship with Iran strengthening the regime there but undermining Saudi confidence in the region’s stability, not to mention inviting American ire. These chapters are less well-developed than the Pakistan one, and Markey’s analysis of both Russia and Saudi Arabia could have gone further. As a roadmap to some of the pitfalls China will face in these regions, though, it is a good starting point.

Markey concludes with recommendations on the American response to China’s conduct abroad. It is true, he notes, that China’s involvement “will not necessarily bring greater stability or peace.” In Iran, in particular, China’s presence thwarts American interests, as Tehran uses Beijing to ameliorate the effect of sanctions and procure weaponry. And yet, Markey points out, there is a whole matrix of options on how to respond: one can embrace all-out competition or “strategic withdrawal.” Markey does not advocate the latter, but he does argue persuasively for “filtering the competition through the sieve of local realities.” There is no need, he argues, for Washington to match Beijing “dollars for yuan” in every corner of the world; instead, America should cooperate with China where it makes sense (anti-terrorism in Afghanistan, for example), win over partners where possible, and focus on long-term competition if that is where we are indeed heading. The prescription is asymmetric rather than symmetric competition, to borrow John Gaddis’s categories of Cold War containment strategies, and it makes eminent sense.

Both Mahbubani and Markey are wrestling with the issue of how China’s power is affecting the rest of the world and what the United States should do about it. As any historian will harrumph, we have worried about China’s influence and what to do about it before. A look at the past might help, and we are fortunate to have Julia Lovell’s Cundill prize-winning book, Maoism: A Global History—a truly superb account of China’s influence from Mao to now, and how that influence was refracted and changed by local circumstances. Lovell, an academic at Birkbeck, University of London, has drawn back the curtain on one of the 20th century’s great untold stories: Maoism and how it spread from China across the world. The book is based, for the most part, on secondary sources. This is a pity, for primary documents, even the well-known ones, look different to each eye, and Lovell, who has a reputation as a first-class literary translator, might have seen more than most. But there is a time and place for synthesis, and no one can fault so wide-ranging a book for building on previous (judiciously selected) research. Lovell’s great accomplishment is to bring several different theaters together in a coherent, often astonishing narrative, showing how a set of ideas traveled from Yanan to Lima, Beijing to Kathmandu, inspiring, killing, and morphing as it spread.

It’s an important tale: as Lovell points out, Maoism’s global impact still inspires far less scholarship than the ideologies of Hitler or Stalin, but remains a powerful force in the making not just of modern China, but of many other parts of the world. She begins with a brisk account of Maoist principles. Some are familiar—power coming out of the barrel of a gun, the importance of the peasantry, self-criticism, imperialism as a paper tiger. But perhaps the most remarkable feature of this opening chapter—and one that recurs throughout the book—is Lovell’s attention to a principle not usually explored at length: “Women can hold up half the sky.” Lovell does not gloss over Mao’s many mistreatments of women, but she shows too how “the young Mao . . . was positively feminist in his rhetoric” and how “the imputation of feminism to Mao helped push his ideas across the world.” Studies of foreign policy don’t often venture into women’s history; Lovell’s book is probably the finest example I know of on how those two areas can be integrated.

The narrative shifts to American journalist Edgar Snow’s time with the communists before they took over China and his popularization of Mao’s precepts. From here, Lovell gets to the Korean War—and to a terrifying account of how overblown fears about China’s capacity to brainwash people, including US citizens, led to CIA-sponsored psychiatric experiments. She also provides a much-needed summary of North Korean attempts to supplant China as a center of revolution. The PRC remained, however, a fount of inspiration and support for would-be Maoists. Dreamers, insurgents, revolutionaries from around the world—Burma, Malaysia, Vietnam, among others—are introduced, coming to China to get trained in Maoism. The overall response is perhaps best summed up by Lovell’s description of the Malaysian communist, Ah Cheng: “Ah Cheng’s emotions towards the CCP are interestingly mixed, combining reverence for Mao’s revolutionary experience with mounting disillusionment on witnessing the failures of Maoism in power.”

What is truly interesting about all this is how wide and deep China’s influence ran on a relatively low investment. There were exceptions—notably Korea and Indochina—but for the most part, China didn’t make massive troop commitments. Military advisers, weapons, cash, courses in blowing things up at PRC academies: China was good for these but fell far short of the kind of commitment the Americans made to Vietnam or the Soviets to Afghanistan. More than American or Soviet ideologies, Maoism seems to have been an import ideology more than an export one (like its American and Soviet counterparts, it could swing both ways, of course), with various people courting China for it. Beijing’s answering efforts were haphazard and, as Lovell notes, almost always subordinated to national interest. Nevertheless, Maoism fuelled mass murder in Indonesia, the building of the Tanzania-Zambia railway, the guerrilla movement in Zimbabwe, and the workings of the African National Congress. Amidst the carnage and upheaval Lovell charts there are some laugh-out-loud moments: Zimbabwean Maoists choosing names like Margaret Thatcher and James Bond, or French Maoists liberating “twenty sacks’ worth of caviar, foie gras, champagne, and cheese.” The humor underscores a crucial point: In foreign climes, Maoism often took on a form that Mao himself, had he been transplanted there, would probably have disavowed.

And it survived the Chairman. Lovell tells the story of Maoism in Peru, India, and Nepal, where it thrived well after Mao’s death (and in the cases of India and Nepal continues to thrive). The chapter on Nepal is where Lovell catches fire. The three pages on Comrade Kamala, a Nepali Maoist, alone would have made it worth purchasing. Here is Kamala’s first encounter with Nepal’s young revolutionaries:

The current system of government, they told locals, was a ‘multi-party democratic sham. When our revolution triumphs, women will be empowered and go to school.’ Kamala was impressed and inspired. She had always wanted to attend school but could barely sign her name. With the support of a newly formed women’s committee, she taught herself to read and write in just two months, staying up all night while she was out with the cattle. Her first ever letter—sent to her brother studying in town—got straight to the point: ‘Why is life so unfair? Why do you go to school but I don’t? Aren’t we born of the same mother?’ Kamala then secretly took on odd jobs—hard labour like hauling stones—to pay for her school enrollment, books, and uniform. When her mother discovered what was going on she thrashed Kamala so hard she broke three sticks in the process. ‘I didn’t cry once. I was so desperate to go to school,’ Kamala told me. In 1994, when her mother died of a stroke at the age of forty, her father resigned himself to his daughter’s ambitions. Kamala quickly became the top student in her class, and an active member of ‘the fighters’ group’, the youth wing of the Maoist party, which provided ideological, physical and firearms training.

There, in a single, well-told tale, is the essence of why Maoism appeals. There is desperation. There is hunger for change. And there is a yearning for adventure, a personality willing to dream of something bigger and to fight for it. Terrible things might come of the dreaming and the fighting—the struggle the Maoists called for killed 17,000 Nepalis—but to understand Maoism’s power, one needs to understand its appeal. Maoism gives us that, just as well as it chronicles the damage wrought.

Lovell doesn’t really engage with the debate over contemporary U.S. policy towards China, but her book offers a model of how to think about China and its role abroad. First and foremost, a patient, meticulous sifting of evidence, allowing the argument to emerge from it, rather than imposing a straitjacket view on messy circumstances. Second, an attention to the countries dealing with China that is every bit as engaged and unwavering as attention to China itself. From this comes an awareness of the gap between intention and outcome, between illusions of influence and developments on the ground. And finally, a sensitivity to the human dimensions of great power politics. Projections of economic growth and the balance of power matter, but they can be thrown off course by a Mao in a cave or a Kamala hungering for education, intent on writing their own stories. I would love to see a book on China’s role today (grounded in solid historical work) that brings those things together.

Only in the last chapter, when she returns to China, does Lovell strike a false note. It has become fashionable to compare Xi Jinping to Mao Zedong and Lovell does too: “China is ruled by the strongest, most Maoist leader the country has had since Mao.” But popularity doesn’t make a view correct, and this portrayal of Xi feels a little too pat. Xi is authoritarian, certainly, but barring his insistence on party control, there’s very little of Mao when you scratch the surface. No peasant mobilization. No Cultural Revolution. An assertive foreign policy, but not one that preaches world revolution with Chinese characteristics. No flocks of foreigners coming to learn Xi Jinping Thought. Xi abolished term limits on the presidency, but you can do that as a good old-fashioned authoritarian without being Maoist (ask Vladimir Putin). The adherence to Maoism is so “selective”—Lovell’s word—that it feels like the type of charade you’re meant to see through. Watching Xi in action and remembering what Mao fought against, I can’t help being reminded of the end of Animal Farm: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” China’s real revolutionaries—its own versions of Comrade Kamala—are not hanging out in Zhongnanhai, one suspects, but in the dark corners of a state both powerful and unequal: a migrant worker tired of being pushed around, a farmer whose land has been poisoned, a child who feels that the coronavirus took her parents too early and the state lied too well—too desperate to be pacified by symbols, too bold, too reckless to be quiescent forever.

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Published on March 25, 2020 11:52

March 24, 2020

The Geopolitics of the Coronavirus

Throughout history, great wars have overturned the international order, making and breaking entire countries and their political systems while increasing the power and status of some and reducing those of others. Modern weaponry has become far too powerful to permit conflicts on the scale, for example, of the two world wars of the last century, but in this century a variant has appeared: global crises. The one that began in 2008, with the near-meltdown of the American financial system leading to the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, boosted the confidence, increased the aggressiveness, enhanced the international stature, and generally accelerated the rise of China. The present crisis, the direct result of the coronavirus pandemic that began in China, could reverse those gains.

The surge in Chinese power and prestige after 2008 did not come out of the blue. It followed three decades of remarkable, double-digit annual economic growth in that country, and the evolution of a central role for China in the global economy as a critically important link in multinational supply chains, on which much of the world’s production has come to depend. By pouring immense sums into its own economy the Chinese government managed to make the economic downturn that China suffered in the wake of the financial crisis less severe than it was almost everywhere else. As a result of its success—and the failures, by comparison, of the Western democracies—China’s confidence and international standing soared.

The Chinese leader who came to power in 2013, Xi Jinping, abandoned his predecessor Deng Xiaoping’s admonition to “hide the brightness”—that is, to practice modesty—in its relations with other countries. Instead, Xi began openly to assert his confidence in his country’s power. His phrase “the China Dream” came to describe his national vision, with the implication, according to some interpretations, of its primacy in international affairs.

China claimed virtually all of the western Pacific as its territorial waters and began building artificial islands there with military installations on them. For the first time since the Maoist era, its government promoted the idea that the Chinese political system offered lessons, and indeed a model, for other countries. Beijing launched the ambitious “Belt and Road Initiative,” a huge program of infrastructure across Asia and Europe with the goal of tying other countries to China economically and politically.

For more than a decade after 2008, that is, the Chinese government enjoyed, in geopolitical terms, the wind in its sails. Then, this year, came the coronavirus, which originated in China and the existence of which the Communist government initially denied and then covered up, allowing it to spread worldwide. With countries everywhere feeling the need to quarantine their citizens, thereby administering serious and ongoing shocks to their economies, China bears the ultimate responsibility for the enormous suffering around the world. The failure of the Chinese Communist Party to acknowledge the virus and protect the world is likely to reverse China’s post-2008 gains in power and prestige.

Just as China’s rise began before 2008, so too were signs of resistance to that rise apparent even before people began falling ill in Wuhan last November. The Trump administration opened a trade conflict with Beijing with which other governments, even those least friendly to this particular American president, sympathized. The Chinese rate of growth began to fall from the lofty heights it had sustained for 30 years. Other Asian countries, along with the United States, objected to China’s maritime claims and began to cooperate militarily with an eye toward countering them.

The coronavirus has made it clear that China poses dangers to its neighbors and the world in addition to its territorial ambitions in the Pacific. The country has a habit of generating serious health hazards: This virus is the most serious in the last quarter-century but hardly the only one; the SARS pandemic of 2003 also began there. Because its political system rests on secrecy and the determination of the ruling Communist Party to avoid responsibility for anything that goes wrong, local outbreaks of disease in China can easily spin out of control, which is what occurred with the coronavirus. As Charles Lipson put it:

All the people locked in their homes in California, all the people lying in intensive care units in Milan, Marseille and Seattle desperately ill, all the people being carried from those ICUs to cemeteries around the world: they are there because of policy choices by the Chinese Communist Party.

Moreover, the global economy’s dependence on China now looks doubly perilous. Even if the coronavirus crisis had remained within that country’s borders, the tactic that Chinese authorities used to try to contain it—quarantining large parts of the population and shutting down major parts of the economy—would have imposed major losses on other countries, which depend heavily on supply chains that run through China. In addition, the world has discovered that much of its medicine and medical equipment is made in China. This affords, in a crisis such as the current one, powerful leverage over other countries to a regime that combines repression and incompetence at home with bullying abroad.

In the wake of the coronavirus crisis, therefore, diminishing China’s global role will seem all the more attractive to others. Efforts to reduce global dependence on products made or partly assembled there—a process known as “decoupling”—are likely. The American government’s warnings to its European counterparts against relying on communications equipment made by the Chinese firm Huawei will receive a more receptive hearing than they have thus far. Neighboring countries may well find the Belt and Road initiative less attractive and, given the economic losses the virus has inflicted on China, the Chinese government itself may deem it too expensive to carry out as planned. The Communist Party’s initial mishandling of the outbreak of the disease, with its high costs in lives lost and output foregone, will make China a far less appealing model in the eyes of non-Chinese.

Aware of the likelihood of such developments and the danger they pose to their country’s international standing, the authorities in Beijing have launched a propaganda campaign in their own defense. They claim that the coronavirus was brought to China by American soldiers, a wholly false charge that Chinese without access to uncensored media may believe but that foreigners will not. They also assert that China is coping with the pandemic in a more effective fashion than other countries, which remains very much to be seen, and in any event does not eliminate the Chinese responsibility for beginning it.

In 1977 the distinguished historian William McNeill published a book entitled Plagues and Peoples, which charted the large historical effects of major epidemics such as the Black Death in 14th-century Europe and the smallpox that the Spanish brought to the New World in the 16th century. The coronavirus pandemic, there is every reason to hope and good reason to believe, will not cause devastation on the scale of those two horrific events; both occurred, after all, long before the development of modern medicine. But if it serves, as seems entirely possible, to reverse the major geopolitical trend of the last decade, it will deserve its own place in future such chronicles.

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Published on March 24, 2020 14:10

How to Get the Coronavirus Rescue Right

There is no denying that the new coronavirus creates a health emergency, justifying federal, state, and local governments taking steps to reduce the transmission of the disease and protect the most vulnerable. But those steps are not themselves a fully rounded policy, merely one aspect of a policy that must include not only the health of our people, but the health of the economy which also affects the health of our people.

President Trump initially claimed expertise in these matters and denied that the disease existed, or if it did, that it would not prove widely transmittable. When that proved wrong, he appointed a task force to address the problem, headed by Vice President Mike Pence. Pence, in turn, quite sensibly gathered around him some leading scientists who, after initial stumbles, among them relying on the CDC for test kits it proved incapable of producing, devised a response to what has proved to be a pandemic. Meanwhile, the President declared war on the disease, and himself “a wartime President,” presumably in the tradition of Woodrow Wilson, of whom he might have heard, of Abraham Lincoln, whose memorial he has undoubtedly seen, and of Franklin Roosevelt, whose legend was still current when Trump entered the world a year after FDR’s death.

In a sensible effort at transparency, the task force, fronted by Trump, instituted a series of daily television briefings. This brought its scientist-members out of the obscurity of the federal government bureaucracy and onto center stage before an audience of millions.

Enter Congress, to address the collapse in the economy that the scientists’ policy is creating. Bipartisanship is the watchword of the day, but of a special kind: You approve my spending and I will reciprocate by approving yours. A probable $2 trillion later—10 percent of the nation’s GDP—their handiwork will be completed, later rather than sooner. Alas, few in Congress have the management skills to run a corner candy store, having spent their lives sheltered on the federal payroll, with its uniquely favorable benefits and pensions. The word “now” is not in the lexicon of Congress, a body that literally has the power to “stop the clock” when it cannot meet a deadline. Unfortunately, in the real world in which paychecks are paid, or not, rent bills must be paid, or not, interest on loans must be paid, or not, workers, employers, borrowers cannot stop the clock. For them, when they need help “now,” they need it “in the time immediately to follow,” if my dictionary is right.

Those most in need of help, owners of small businesses and the workers they are being forced to shed, need it now—as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell endlessly repeats. But Congressmen have spent their careers regulating economic activity, a habit they are not about to shed. So there will be forms that the average proprietor of a small deli will find incomprehensible, proofs that any injury to the business was the result of the epidemic, guarantees that the funds will flow through to laid-off workers—all so that Congress cannot be embarrassed by the fraud and gaming of the system that is inevitable in any mass distribution of billions of dollars. And there will be procedures: One leading tax adviser tells me that the money aimed at small businesses will flow through the Small Business Administration, and that “its forms are not one-pagers”. Also, the SBA requires collateral, usually real estate, which in practice means the borrower’s home. Many small businessmen would rather fold their tents than risk their homes.

The Senate Majority and Minority Leaders have between them spent almost 100 years in the public sector, and the leader of the House, more than three decades. Like the scientists guiding policymaking, these are all—well, most or many—honorable people. But they do not work under the pressures confronted by private-sector players. For proof, consider the parlous state to which they have brought the nation’s ledgers by not understanding that somehow everything they wish for the American people must eventually be paid for.

Worse still, politicians have their own agendas that they seek to tag onto every important piece of legislation coming across their desks. Some Republican legislators often try to attach anti-abortion amendments to unrelated bills. In this instance, Democrats want to withhold relief to airlines unless they agree to limit emissions, and to other companies unless they appoint a union representative to their boards or agree to a $15 minimum wage—in short, to settle issues simmering for decades at the expense of “now”.

But let’s be optimistic, and assume that Congress will get it right, that the bulk of the $2 trillion will be more or less well-spent in order to . . . to what? To repair or offset the damage caused by a policy crafted by scientists, unskilled in weighing the need of a healthy populace for a healthy economy, and who would be less than human if they willingly surrender their newly acquired power and the associated limelight. Under ordinary circumstances, the health of the economy would have been considered when making a policy to cope with this crisis. It would be weighed against the economic cost of that policy. But given the panic understandably caused by an unseen enemy visiting illness and death for an uncertain period, medical considerations were prioritized to the exclusion of everything else. It was appropriate then, less so now.

Late yesterday the President told the television audience tuned to the briefing of the Pence task force—its usual star, Dr. Fauci did not attend—“Our country wasn’t built to be shut down . . . If it were up to the doctors, they’d say let’s shut down the entire world and let’s keep it shut for a couple of years.” In short, Trump is hearing the voice of his inner businessman—an imperfect voice that often misled him in private life, but now is a much-needed offset to the advice of the doctors and scientists. Trump plans to begin unwinding some of the restrictions that have the economy headed for the rocks, and permanent damage. And sooner rather than later. New York governor Andrew Cuomo, most often a Trump critic and presiding over a state hard-hit by the virus, agrees that there must be “a pivot back to economic rationality.”

He will be told by many that this is simply not feasible, that the consequences will be an unacceptable increase in the spread of the virus. Trump might decide that these critics are right, that the balance of considerations dictates sticking with the current policy. But it will be a decision that has considered a range of factors. Besides, as Michael Mandelbaum pointed out in a recent TAI conference call/seminar, if the President doesn’t act soon, Americans will gradually begin to make their own pragmatic adjustments to the guidelines—not suddenly convening in large groups, or stopping washing their hands, but moving their behavior closer to what it was before the economy was shut down. Indeed, it is not clear that a centrally contrived loosening of the rules would prove more efficacious than the sum of individual decisions—but that’s a subject for another discussion. The point is to arrive at a policy that gives weight to previously ignored facts. My guess is that the restrictions will be eased, with life breathed into the faltering economy.

Unfortunately, the President’s chief economist, Larry Kudlow, has forfeited some credibility by abandoning his long-held belief in freer trade and fiscal responsibility in order to line up with Trump on trade and tax policy, and early on adopted the Trump-Fox line that the virus was a minor annoyance soon to disappear. Unfortunately, too, Gary Cohn, a pragmatist with deep knowledge of how the economy and the financial system work, has long since departed the administration, removing a dissenting voice and leaving the President reliant on those who either agree with him or are reluctant to surrender the White House passes that they treasure.

Fortunately for the President, he has had one lucky break while succumbing to the siren song of the doctors. The Federal Reserve Board has dug deep into its toolkit to prevent a complete seizing-up of the credit and financial systems. The thank-you note from the President seems to be lost in the mail, but no matter: An independent central bank has proved more adept, quicker off the mark, than both Congress and the President.

And another lucky break when Kevin Hassett decided to return to the administration as an unpaid adviser acting in his personal capacity. Hassett did depart his first stint with honor intact, and his good sense and pleasant mien might enable him to broaden the horizons of Pence’s existing team to the point where the post-crisis economy will be worth living in. Correlation does not prove causation as we economists like to say, but the arrival of Hassett and the President’s new insistence that the cure for the epidemic might be worse than the disease—that at least some consideration be given to that possibility—is likely more than mere coincidence.

Now that we are headed towards a more balanced policy, “what is to be done?” (as Vladimir Lenin famously asked in another connection in 1901). For starters, get an imperfect rescue package passed and fix it later by having it expire at year-end. Ignore the pleas of companies (such as Adidas) that any rescue bill include long-sought special tax treatment (such as for purchases of gym equipment and memberships). Don’t turn the relief legislation into a Christmas tree on which Elizabeth Warren can hang the baubles she offered her party when it rejected her as its standard-bearer, or that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants to include: elimination of the Post Office debt, guaranteed same-day voting registration, reduction of airplane emissions, and credits for solar and wind power. Build in quid pro quos (a phrase well understood by all parties) such as an opportunity for taxpayers to profit in any recovery, as they did in the Great Recession. For political and economic reasons, bar share buybacks. Constrain or eliminate executive compensation.

We need a nation proud of having protected its vulnerable population from the virus, and its vulnerable businesses and workers from the catastrophic economic consequences of an onslaught they cannot reasonably have been expected to anticipate. Those goals are attainable, but not unless the existing policy-making mechanism undergoes major improvement and recognizes, as Hassett put it, if everyone stays home for six months “it’s going to be like the Great Depression.” And not unless Donald Trump is willing to become what George W. Bush called “the decider,” using such facts as are available rather than waiting for the completion of the enormous global database the doctors say they need. Presidents are elected to apply their judgment to imperfect data and if they get it wrong, admit it (not easy for this President) and try again.

Doing nothing might seem safer, but doing nothing is a policy, and in this case seems riskier than implementing a new one. Now.

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Published on March 24, 2020 14:02

How To Get The Coronavirus Rescue Right

Doing nothing might seem safer, but doing nothing is a policy, and in this case seems riskier than implementing a new one. Now.

The post How To Get The Coronavirus Rescue Right appeared first on The American Interest.

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Published on March 24, 2020 14:02

March 23, 2020

It Will Take More Than an Election

As Americans head to the polls in primaries across the country, many hope a new President will strengthen American democracy. But our research shows we should pity the winner who tries. America is not the first democracy to elect an authoritarian-tinged, populist leader. The pattern from countries with similar experiences is clear: Common types of damage, such as a weakened justice system, politicized civil service, and normalized corruption, will linger for decades. The extremes on both sides will probably gain strength. If a moderate wins, he can expect to leave after a single, unpopular term. And we should steel ourselves for the appearance of “Ivanka 2024” bumper stickers.

We looked at 11 case studies of polities that elected populist and authoritarian leaders, seven of which were subsequently able to restore democracy (Italy, Colombia, the state of Louisiana, South Korea, Peru, Argentina, and India) and four that, so far, have not (Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and Venezuela). Our research finds striking parallels. It also suggests both lessons and warnings for Americans who hope that a quick and easy return to a status quo ante is possible after President Trump leaves office. One thing is clear: Electing a different president is unlikely to solve the problem.

Countries that failed to bounce back lost the bedrock of a healthy democracy: real elections, functioning civil society organizations, and a free media. In Hungary, the ruling Fidesz Party at first won a legitimate landslide over a Socialist Party whose record was marred by corruption scandals and its handling of the financial crisis. Fidesz, however, moved quickly to hollow out Hungary’s democracy, adopting technocratic procedural changes that manipulated elections, gerrymandering districts, and dividing the opposition vote with puppet “opposition” parties. Targeted taxes and selectively blocking media mergers eventually forced 90 percent of the country’s media companies to sell themselves to government-friendly oligarchs. At the same time, new regulations targeted pro-democracy civil society organizations’ ability to operate. When Fidesz eventually relied on outright fraud to win elections in 2018, there was no way to protest and no independent media to cover the whimper of democracy’s demise.

Even in countries that did return to democracy, judiciaries came out the other side less trusted and more politicized. As the one institution designed to rein in an undemocratic leader, judges are always a target. Through stacking courts, manipulating appointments, or denigrating judges as partisans, a populist or authoritarian executive undermines the judicial system.

In Colombia, for example, when the courts stood in the way of his governing platform, newly elected President Uribe excoriated judges as “terrorists disguised as civilians,” accusing them of being leftwing enemy sympathizers in the country’s long guerrilla war. When the media uncovered corruption in his administration, revealed his use of the intelligence agency to wiretap opponents, and disclosed his support for paramilitaries accused of human rights abuse, Uribe pushed the idea of a leftwing judiciary even further, going so far as to bribe judges in order to discredit their decisions and legitimacy. Ultimately, the courts prevailed. By 2017 then-former President Uribe faced 28 cases against him. But the judiciary paid a heavy price: A 2017 Gallup poll found that 72 percent of the population had an unfavorable opinion of the Supreme Court and 63 percent viewed the constitutional court unfavorably.

Across every case we studied, leaders also co-opted prosecutors, domestic security, and intelligence agencies, either to prevent investigations against themselves or to weaponize investigations against opponents. A notable example is Louisiana populist Huey Long in the 1930s. The Long organization centralized the administration of justice and law enforcement in the governor’s office until eventually nearly every state and local office appointment—all the way down to schoolteachers—was a personal choice of the governor. Political opponents were likely to find themselves on the wrong side of the law or out of a job. The control over justice also allowed Long to corrupt statewide government, enriching himself without fear of prosecution. Long could simply ignore most state court proceedings—or, as once happened, have the state police kidnap a star witness.

After Huey Long’s politicization of justice, it took federal intervention by the Roosevelt Administration to begin to bring things back to order in Louisiana. But even today, the state has the greatest number of convictions for public corruption per capita, and its extreme history of police misconduct remains a legacy of that era.

Finally, though many consider capitalism to be an economic system that supports and mirrors democracy, populist authoritarians often transformed businesses into their accomplices. In all the cases we studied, leaders treated state institutions as extensions of their personal, private interests. They turned taxation, regulation, and other state powers against businesses that didn’t toe the political line while rewarding those that did.

During the early 1990s in Peru, President Fujimori gained the support of businesses by stabilizing an economy in free-fall and promising an end to the corrupt relationships between businesses and the state. Instead, he perpetuated the trend, particularly with the press. Peru’s government provided nearly a quarter of all advertising revenue for the media and directed it to pro-government outlets. Independent media weren’t banned, but they faced threats. Back taxes demanded of television stations curbed television news, leaving only independent print magazines (which were not read by many because they were too expensive for most Peruvians).

In this and our other cases, business leaders quickly learned that the business environment was more predictable, profitable, and easier to influence if they stayed on the right side of a single leader than if decisions were made through a more normal policy process. When Louisiana Governor Huey Long tried to use the leverage of tax policy and state printing contracts to pressure the newspaper companies into positive coverage, it took the intervention of the U.S. Supreme Court to set things right.

It is not difficult to see echoes of these events in the United States.

Thankfully, there has not yet been a comparable hollowing-out of civil society and media. And while there’s no question the President has used his office to enrich himself, the U.S. economy is too vast for one person to impose kleptocratic cronyism in just four years. Likewise, neglecting election security while tacitly welcoming foreign interference is a deeply worrisome sign, but our elections for the time being remain free and fair.

Nevertheless, serious damage has been done in other areas. When it comes to the independent judiciary, President Trump has frequently attacked judges who rule against his administration as partisan “Obama judges.” Judicial nominees increasingly come to the Senate backed by an ecosystem of ideological interest groups with clear partisan leanings. It should be no surprise that today, partisanship strongly affects citizens’ views of the courts. Republicans’ perceptions of the Supreme Court rose from a 30-year low in 2015 under Obama to the highest point in decades under Trump; by January 2019, Pew polling found that 82 percent of Republicans viewed the court favorably. Democrats’ favorable opinion of the courts dropped by 23 percentage points during the same period.

Notable as well is the erosion of norms around judicial nominations. After eight years of unprecedented use of procedural tools to block nominees, including refusing to hold hearings for Merrick Garland, since 2016 the Senate has reduced member rights to block judges, sped the process for putting them into office, and accepted nominees the American Bar Association calls unqualified. When U.S. leaders and the press treat courts as purely political actors or promote expanding the size of the Supreme Court to regain ideological control, they make democratic recovery more difficult.

President Trump’s politicization of the administration of justice has been subtler than Huey Long or Alvaro Uribe managed, but it is just as concerning. Today the Department of Justice insists that investigations of the president and his businesses, and subpoenas of staff and private citizens alike, are off-limits if the President opposes them. And on more than one occasion, the president’s personal associates or enemies have found themselves the beneficiaries of Justice Department procedural largess or critical attention.

Even if President Trump is not reelected, there is a strong chance that some of these patterns will deepen in American politics. We do not wish to be gloomy, but the trajectories of similar democracies suggests that America’s path to democratic recovery will very likely be long.

If moderate, pro-democracy leaders manage to get elected (as initially occurred in most of the countries we studied) they tend not to last. Voters see their efforts to rebuild democratic institutions as unexciting, and the slower, more deliberative policy progress leads the electorate to view them as less accomplished than their populist predecessors. Undoing a predecessors’ damage is difficult in part because populist and authoritarian leaders alter the expectations that citizens have about their government. Voters who grow accustomed to quick decisions made on personal whim rather than to bureaucratic policymaking become impatient with the give and take of democratic checks and balances. And if the economy crashes, as frequently happens when the bubble of populist policy bursts, new leaders are left holding the bag. The lesson for candidates committed to democracy like Matteo Renzi of Italy, Mauricio Macri of Argentina, or Morarji Desai of India? Expect to clean out the stables, but still get just one term.

What follows this is often wild, careening politics, as elections swing between extremes. Future leaders often adopt the populist political style. In 2018, Colombian voters had to choose between a far-right candidate and a former guerrilla for president. Italy was recently governed by a union of far-right nativists and the far-left. America’s weak political parties have slowly given up their gatekeeping abilities over time, and now have little power to weed out such candidates. The result is that political systems that were able to absorb the challenge of an authoritarian populist are unable to handle another legitimacy crisis so soon thereafter.

All of this sets populist leaders up for a comeback. Voters tired of the policy whiplash grow nostalgic: At least things were more predictable when they were in office! Famous, charismatic, and often unencumbered by the constraints of a real political party, their second act is frequently to elect a family member who can protect their legacy—or just keep them out of jail. In Argentina, President Nestor Kirchner’s wife Cristina Fernandez followed his two terms with two of her own. One term of a moderate reformer was followed, in 2019, by the election of a Kirchner confidant, with Cristina Fernandez Kirchner as his vice president. After slinking away in disgrace, Indira Gandhi was reelected as India’s Prime Minister a few years later before handing power to her son. The family still controls India’s Congress Party. In Peru, autocratic President Fujimori’s daughter came within a hair’s breadth of winning the presidency in 2016. After Huey Long’s assassination in 1935, a dozen family members held political offices in Louisiana well into the 1980s.

If President Trump loses reelection this year, do not be surprised to see one of his children running in 2024 against an unpopular incumbent Democrat. The chaos of today’s media and political landscape may simply create too much friction for a new American president to set the ship back on course in time for voters to recognize the benefits.

For many Americans, it is uncomfortable to critically assess the strength of our democratic tradition, and much less to compare our country to others overseas. Assumptions of American exceptionalism run strong. Yet for most of our 230-year history, we have struggled to build a democracy that reflects our best values. In many ways, our democracy is still young. After all, it was only in the late 1960s that most black Americans could vote without fear of violence, and that eleven states in the South emerged from de facto single-party domination.

Though it may be difficult to admit, admitting it is critical to fixing what is broken today: America is not the only democracy to dabble with populists and authoritarians. Recovery will be difficult, and things may well get worse before they get better. Still, we can learn from societies that have dealt with these kinds of leaders before, and by keeping their lessons in mind, perhaps we can make the task of restoring our democracy to health a little easier to carry out than it otherwise might be.

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Published on March 23, 2020 14:05

March 22, 2020

“Totalitarianism as a Mindset Can Be Anywhere”

The American Interest recently convened TAI Chairman Francis Fukuyama and Azar Nafisi, author of The Republic of Imagination and Reading Lolita in Tehran, for a wide-ranging conversation. They discussed the coronavirus pandemic, news from Iran, identity politics, campus trends, and why imagination and literature are essential to combatting authoritarianism. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Francis Fukuyama: Let’s start with the obvious issue, which is that we are now going through an unprecedented global coronavirus crisis. One of the countries that’s been hardest hit is Iran. I’m wondering what you think this crisis reveals about their government, and then maybe you can speculate a bit about where things could go. Obviously, Iran was under a great deal of pressure before this crisis hit, and now it’s in even worse shape. What do you think?

Azar Nafisi: One thing that has been on my mind for the past few weeks is the similarities between what happened in my first home, which is Iran, and what is happening in my second home, which is America. The Iranian regime is a totalitarian one and Iran is not a democracy, but totalitarianism as a mindset can be anywhere. The first thing that the Iranian government did was to deny that the virus had hit Iran. The second, coming especially from the Supreme Leader, was to say that this is a lot of fuss over nothing. Some even blamed “enemies” of the Islamic Republic or claimed that the virus was created in laboratories. The third thing I noticed was their utter incompetence.

I get so many WhatsApp messages from Iran, from friends who are living under the most excruciating conditions, and I talk to a few on a regular basis. Here, two important things should be noted about the Iranian people. The first is their sense of humor. Frank, I wish I could show you the jokes I am seeing, the majority of which are directed against the government and the clerics. They’re hilarious. Then there are so many videos of people dancing and singing, saying that that is how they’re going to be resisting the virus and the regime. The second thing is the fact that people have taken things into their own hands. They are not expecting anything from the government. The hospitals, the doctors and the nurses, and the Iranian people as a whole have all been helping one another. They have had way stations where they deliver disinfectant and supplies to people who need them.

So I am amazed at the morale of the Iranian people, and I’m sure that you see similar signs in America, how states are taking things into their own hands. You see similarities, too, in how Mr. Trump and his administration are in denial, or lying, or are just plain incompetent in dealing with this crisis.

FF: Yeah, I think that that’s one of the most striking things, that when this crisis first broke out in China, a lot of Americans were saying, “Well, this shows that this kind of authoritarian system can’t handle a crisis, because their first instinct was to deny that anything was going on and to punish people who were actually telling the truth.” But then our administration ended up doing something similar. Only in the last week or so have they finally admitted that this is really serious, that it’s not just a hoax being perpetrated by Mr. Trump’s enemies. It’s quite striking that maybe our democracy isn’t performing all that much better.

AN: It reminds me of something Vaclav Havel said. He focused on this quite a bit, how totalitarian societies are a “convex mirror” of democracies. He said that they expose and reveal the potential and latent tendencies within democracies, because totalitarianism and democracy are both mindsets that can exist anywhere. Just as people are fighting for democracy in Iran, there is an authoritarian mindset that exists in the United States.

FF: I take it that you’ve been traveling around the Gulf recently. This virus is obviously spreading from Iran to its neighboring countries, who don’t seem to have things under terribly good control. Is that your impression as well?

AN: Well, I went there at the beginning of February, so they were just beginning to feel their way around the issue, but they seem to have been keeping things under control. There were other things about the Gulf countries which were welcome surprises to me.

FF: Like what?

AN: Well, especially since 9/11, there has been a sort of reductionism in the United States, reducing all these Muslim-majority countries into one aspect, which is their religion. And then to reduce that religion into just one form of it—almost like saying America is a Christian country, and all Americans are evangelical Southern Baptists. My books are popular in many parts of the Arab world, but apart from participating in a literary festival in Abu Dhabi, this was my first time visiting the Gulf, and what struck me most was the complexity and the contradictions.

For example, the day I arrived in Kuwait, I was told that my talk was banned. I heard from my sponsors and people in the know that it was banned at the last-minute request of the Iranian government. This is the negative aspect. But then, there was a whole surge on social media and within the press, and some of the most important Arabic papers started complaining and attacking the ban. One of them said, “We’re glad you had this ban, because we will now be reading her.” For each of the three remaining nights that I was in Kuwait, I was invited to a house to give a speech. So there is this contradiction between the ban on the one hand and the freedom people feel on the other. I am not trying to downplay the problems within these countries, nor claim to know everything about them from a short visit, but I want to challenge the reductionist image of what is wrongly called the “Muslim World,” to show the less mentioned side of these countries and nations, each of which have such ancient cultures going back thousands of years.

I was also struck by how well-informed and enthusiastic the people whom I talked to were, in Kuwait and Bahrain and Dubai. They were curious about imagination and ideas, and excited about others. One of my sponsors was this amazing bookstore owner, and the books that they were reading over there—from Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland to Hemingway and Marquez and Kafka—all of these works were very familiar to them. If I mentioned them to my former students in the United States, they might not know all of them.

The women were amazing, too. The ministers of culture in both Dubai and Bahrain are women. The one in Bahrain, Mai Al Khalifa, has taken up renovating old houses, turning some of them into coffee houses and literary cafes, and promoting Bahrain’s culture and history going back to 2300 BC, creating a conversation between the ancient and the modern. The homogeneous image of women in Muslim-majority countries was also broken. In public you saw women with the veil, you saw women without the veil. Despite the pressure from traditionalists, it was amazing how well-informed and active the women I met were.

FF: That corresponds to my experience, too. I’ve been to Bahrain and to Dubai in the past couple of years, and I was also struck by the number of well-educated women. I think that the universities in the Gulf are producing many more female graduates than male graduates right now, and so many administrative positions throughout the government in both of those places are held by women. There are women fighter-pilots, and so forth.

And I actually had a similar experience. I was supposed to give a speech, and I sent them my slides in advance, and it was critical of Donald Trump at a moment when they were trying to cultivate Trump’s support against Iran. So they said, “Oh, no, no, you can’t give this speech. You have to tone it down.” I took out the ones that they felt were too critical, and then as has happened several times, I was heavily lobbied that I should support an American nuclear guarantee for them, or basically a NATO alliance where they would be militarily guaranteed by the United States, which I think is a terrible idea.

But it’s also the case that culturally, the Gulf States have a lot of contact with Iran. That’s really one region, and there’s a lot of trade that goes back and forth. I think on a person-to-person level, that hostility between the leaderships is really not felt. And the Gulf States, even Saudi Arabia, have turned out to be quite flexible, because once they realized that the United States might not be the most reliable partner, they immediately started negotiating with Iran to see whether they can make a deal. So I do think the situation there is more complicated than it would seem from the outside.

AN: It definitely is. One of the things that people were telling me, in private, was how harmful Donald Trump has been to reform and democratic-minded people. Because, they said, you hear people in high places say that if he does it, why don’t we? One person told me that the United States used to be a model that people would look up to, and now when we look to Donald Trump, there is no one to look up to.

But Iran itself, here in the United States and sometimes in the West as a whole, is reduced again. People do not differentiate between the Iranian people and the Iranian government. Sometimes people criticize you for criticizing the Islamic Republic, saying that you’re criticizing Iran and Islam, while in fact both Iran and Islam are victims of the regime. The Iranian people’s fight for their human and individual rights should remind us that Americans do not have a monopoly on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that these concepts belong to whoever fights for them. In Iran this fight has been going on for 40 years.

FF: That’s right. Just on the subject of identity, I had an interesting conversation last year with Barham Salih, who is now the President of Iraq and is a Kurd. This was at the American University of Iraq in Sulaymania. He said that for many years, people in Iraq like him that were pro-democratic said that we ought to learn from the United States, and imitate the United States. But, he said, now the United States is imitating us—meaning that the politics in Iraq is completely determined by identity. So if you’re a Kurd in one of the two big parties in Kurdistan, that completely determines your political views and where you live and everything else. If you’re a Shi‘a, if you’re a Sunni, these identity groups are extremely powerful, and the whole political system is organized around these groups, rather than individuals who can freely make their own choices.

One of the things that worries me is that the United States and other modern democracies are moving in that identity direction, where it’s the color of your skin or your ethnicity that really determines what you think about the world and not what you as an individual think.

AN: Yeah, that is very true. One sees that the political elite seems to be moving that way. It has come more to the surface because of Trump, especially because of his treatment of and virulent rhetoric against migrants and different ethnicities. I always think that totalitarianism is the ultimate in identity politics. But what has happened in Iran, which is similar to the communist era in Eastern Europe, is that because the regime has banned the world from Iranian people’s lives, they have gone in the opposite direction. When I wrote Reading Lolita in Tehran, some Iranian academics said, “This is glorifying the West,” and so on. I said, “If this is glorifying the West, go and talk to Iranian youth.” They are the ones who are reading the world because the world was taken away from them. They are the ones who are reading Hannah Arendt and Karl Popper and Vaclav Havel. In fact, when I was teaching in Iran I was trying to challenge the rosy view of the West; rosy views are always dangerous. I posed to my students the question Saul Bellow poses: Those who survived the ordeal of the Holocaust, how will they survive the ordeal of freedom? For as we are discovering especially now, freedom is an ordeal that needs to be constantly protected and fought for.

Your own books are read in Iran, too; I saw this when I was there in the 80s and 90s. Your book on identity has also been translated. They are curious about the world, and that is the essence of a healthy society, to be curious about others. In our universities, we keep talking about “The Other,” but then we allow people only to talk about themselves. I always think, how boring, to only think about yourself, read about yourself, and write about yourself. Imagination means being curious about others and going under the skin of others for empathy and connection. How can you survive without that connection to others, without understanding them? I’m so frustrated with this idea on both the right and the left. But of course, you have written a whole book about this issue, so I’d love to know how you think about it.

FF: Well, in part, I’ve felt that it’s important to have a broader national identity. It has to be obviously democratic and open and accessible to people regardless of their race or ethnicity or religion, but people do need to have a common tradition. I think that we’ve actually been losing a sense of that tradition in the United States. Part of what creates the tradition are common narratives, which are really created by writers, by novelists, by poets. It’s very hard to think about France without the whole French literary tradition: Diderot and Molière and Rousseau.

I’m wondering, since you’ve written about American literature, who you would read today. You’ve referred to classics in American literature, but a lot of them are fairly old. Do you think that we’re losing that tradition, that sense of an American narrative?

AN: Well, you mention both in your writing and in your last interview with The American Interest that people in Western countries, including America, arguably have too much pleasure and entertainment. I feel that takes away from what, for lack of a better word, one might call their spiritual side. I’ve found since I’ve returned to the United States that there is a desire for intellectual comfort, for not wanting to be disturbed. Identity politics, whether it is on the right or the left, gives you comfort, because you’re always on the right side. James Baldwin, who these days is one of my favorite American writers, talked about how this categorization of people into little boxes, and denying their complexities and contradictions, leads to the death of paradox.

I think this is what has happened to America: the death of paradox, the denial of contradictions and complexities. People don’t want to be disturbed and Baldwin says artists are here to disturb the peace. When it comes to contemporary America, there are books that become popular and there are books that are very good, but they don’t have the same effect that books used to. We even search for comfort in fiction. And great fiction never offers you comfort. It always leaves you not with an answer but with a question. I feel that more than any other time, we need imagination and ideas.

FF: Well, I agree with you very much. I think one of the problems with the way we interpret identity is that it makes us take immediately as most important the identity of the author rather than what the author is saying. So whether it’s a woman or a racial minority, that becomes a more important fact than the complexity that you talk about.

I think the other problem in universities is that it’s impossible actually to teach students about a common cultural heritage. It used to be that in high school English classes, everybody in the United States would at some point encounter Shakespeare. For Abraham Lincoln, Shakespeare and the Bible were the two biggest literary influences, and it’s one of the reasons he wrote such beautiful speeches. But now under the pressure of identity politics and the need to raise the dignity of marginalized groups, even the idea that there’s a core literary tradition that every American child should know is being attacked. As a result, you really don’t have anything like a common cultural inheritance.

I saw this at Stanford over the years, where there had been a Western culture course that was built around 10 books, beginning with the Hebrew Bible and ending with Marx or Freud. But you know, they’re all white men, and this came under intense criticism beginning in the mid-1980s. As a result, now you can take a core course as an undergraduate on food, or you can take it on Navajo culture, or something else that is ultimately not the most important thing that you would want to learn as an undergraduate. Unfortunately, that’s where a lot of universities are now.

AN: The whole idea of that criticism was that Western culture thinks of itself as too exclusive. Well, we don’t want to replace one exclusivity with another. We want everyone to be inclusive. Now one of the ironic things about it is that we keep talking about cultures, but many of my students in America didn’t know much about great writers from other cultures. Very few know Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Guillermo Cabrera or Ferdowsi or Hafez.

But I want to bring in another example from James Baldwin, because everybody nowadays talks about him, but few really understand how important he is. He first became popular with his novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, which was about an African-American kid. Everybody loved it and said that a new African-American writer is on the horizon, fantastic. His second book was about a gay white man living in France. His agent told him to get rid of the book, and his publisher refused to publish it. They said, “They know you as a black writer. If you write this, this would be the death of you. You’re done.” You know what he said? He told them, in effect, “screw you,” and went and published it in England.

He said that that book, Giovanni’s Room, was his declaration of independence. That is the kind of attitude we need today. Art is the place where you don’t judge but try to understand. That is the whole purpose of going to university, not to have all the answers, but to ask the questions. I don’t understand why we’re not using the Baldwin model.

FF: Well, that’s the discourse now around cultural appropriation, that you can’t write about any group of people, particularly marginalized people, if you’re not actually a member of that group. So you couldn’t write about being black if you’re a white person, and well, Baldwin was gay, but he certainly wasn’t a white man. That was an early version, I think, of this attempt to exclude people simply on the basis of a characteristic like race that they were born with and can’t do anything about.

There was a really nice speech that was given by Lionel Shriver at a writers’ convention a few years ago, where she attacked this from the standpoint of a novelist, because, she said, the whole idea of being a novelist is to put yourself in the mind of someone different. If you only can write about people that are like you, you’ll never have any imaginative fiction ever written in the future.

AN: Yes, I mean, how can you survive as a human being, if you cannot put yourself in someone else’s shoes? Right now, during this coronavirus crisis, I’m thinking about myself and my family, but I’m also thinking about someone I’ve never seen who has caught it in Italy. The only way I can feel something about that person in Italy is through empathy, through putting myself in his or her place. I always call it “the shock of recognition.”

In the 1930s, the Germans said, Jews are different from us. The slave-owners said, slaves are different from us. Men said, women are different from us. Difference should be celebrated if it is accompanied by this shock of recognition, not of how different we are, but how alike we are. Having a common humanity, I think, is what makes us survive as human beings. That is why I’m glad you wrote about it.

FF: In my book Identity, I made this distinction between “lived experience,” which is very popular among identity politics promoters, and just plain experience. Lived experience is the experience that is limited to a particular group or a particular individual, whereas experience as we normally think about it is a communal thing that allows us to talk to each other, to cooperate, to work together. I think the shift toward everybody celebrating their lived experience and telling other people that they can’t possibly appreciate what that is makes society impossible down the road, because if you don’t have common, shared experiences, you’re not going to have a society at all.

AN: Yes, that’s exactly the problem. Added to that problem now is this mindset that denigrates anything that is not utilitarian. When I go to universities and I talk to students, I see how hungry they are for meaning and for something in their lives that is not utilitarian. I remember there was a quotation from Vaclav Havel. He used to say that the tragedy of modern man isn’t that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less. That is how I feel we are teaching our students, to bother less and less about the meaning of their life, and we’re doing it in two ways.

One is the corporate culture—and I wrote my book The Republic of Imagination mainly because of this—which is so utilitarian, and tells you that if you want to make money, don’t go into philosophy or history or literature. The second thing is this ideological mindset that divided everything into good and bad and it became very facile, because we all want to be good, so we don’t need to think. It took away our power of thinking independently.

This is what I think has been taking over both our political and intellectual elite; the polarization you see today is based on this. I just don’t know how the young generation is going to save itself. You have been in close contact with them. I wonder if you see any changes within them, wanting something different.

FF: Well there are a couple of different things. I think we went through this long 20-30 year period where students became very apolitical and they started worrying about their jobs and their careers. What I found in many students was actually not an interest in ideas and imagination and literature, but the question of well, where am I going to get my job once I graduate? What skills do I need in order to get that first job and then to be successful?

Now, it’s hard to blame anyone for worrying about that. But it’s also the case that it doesn’t really prepare you to take advantage of the education that you could be enjoying. Now in the last few years there’s been a big rise in political activism, all these young people who are going out and voting for Bernie Sanders. I basically applaud that. I think that people really ought to be citizens and they ought to pay attention to public affairs, and not just to what they as individuals are going to do in their next career move. I think, however, that it’s also leading to a strange naivete in politics, because it’s as if young people have been asleep for a whole generation.

They didn’t experience the end of communism and all the things that we grew up with. Then they wake up and they say, “Oh, there’s inequality and there’s corporations and there’s all these billionaires, and we have to do something about that.” I think a lot of them don’t appreciate how difficult it is to operate in the world as it actually is. Part of what’s going on now in the Democratic Party is a reflection of that. All the millennials really don’t have a negative association with the word socialism, for example, that I think you and I do.

AN: Yes, that is very true, and I remember that you mentioned elsewhere that that is why they need to read history. That’s one thing we’re neglecting by downplaying humanities and the liberal arts, which by the way is what the authoritarian systems are most afraid of. China comes and takes our science and technology, but it’s afraid of our liberal art colleges. To cite the most extreme example, Ayatollah Khomeini, a man who has a whole army and weapons and power behind him, issues a fatwa against a man whose only weapon is his pen. How afraid must he be of a writer to believe that his safety means killing that writer?

I always bring up the example of Iranian youth. The reason that countries like Iran can bring lessons to young people in America is that young Iranians have felt the necessity of human rights and individual rights, risking not just their livelihoods but their lives. You know, we used to hide hundreds of Xeroxed pages of Lolita and risk reading it and maybe being arrested or expelled. Iranian women get long sentences and are flogged for not wearing their veils, and still they’re not wearing their veils—not because they’re against Islam, but because they’re for freedom of choice. They understand it. When they say they want freedom of choice, and they want to read books, they have paid for it.

But I ask my friends over here, do we need to pay for it to really understand?

FF: You know, I’m afraid that one of the things we’re seeing is people living in open, free, democratic societies coming to take it for granted. If you live in a place like Iran or China or the former Soviet Union, you really appreciate the ability to read books that we Americans could download on Kindle any day of the year. But if you live in a stable, prosperous country, you begin to think, “Well, that’s just normal life. Of course, I can do this. I’m not being deprived of anything.” It makes you value these valuable things less, because you think, “Well, they’re always going to be around, I can always get to it later.” Or you are just distracted by all of the attention-grabbing things on social media.

So that’s why it seems to me that in many ways, repressive countries breed much more serious intellectuals, because they don’t have that easy access to ideas and literature. I think that may partly explain why we’re getting this populism right now. It’s odd because it’s happening in Eastern Europe, which 30 years ago was overjoyed to be liberated from communism, but now they’re re-creating authoritarian systems within the European Union, because you’ve got an entire generation of young Hungarians or Poles that didn’t have their parents’ experience of what it was like to live under a repressive regime. They therefore can say, well, the EU is the new dictator that we have to struggle against.

AN: And isn’t it also true that few places in Eastern Europe went through this sort of soul-cleansing and soul-searching in terms of what happened to them?

FF: I think that’s right. The Germans especially spent a lot of time trying to teach their children about the Nazi era and the Holocaust, whereas the Communist regimes in the postwar period pretended that everybody there was resisting Nazism and the Communists were the liberators, so they never really were inculcated with the kinds of liberal values that I think most people in Germany were.

AN: And there are economic effects to consider, too.

FF: Yes, I think that the economy has evolved in ways that are very unexpected. It’s disappointed a lot of ordinary people, because the current way that globalization works has created a class of oligarchs or billionaires in very many countries, and it’s left a lot of ordinary people still struggling over their lives. I think that is one of the reasons that there’s been such a disappointment with the world, even though in many ways, we’re richer and more stable than ever before.

AN: By the way, you’ve had experience with democracy-building in places like Ukraine. What can you tell us about those experiences?

FF: Well, I think up until a couple of weeks ago, it was going fine. We were training a whole generation of young Ukrainians that had Western values and really wanted to fight corruption, but there are some very powerful underlying forces in that society that are dragging it backwards towards a more Russian model. Right now we’re just not sure where that’s going to lead. I hope that they don’t manage to undo everything we’ve been working for.

But Azar, before we conclude, I want to ask you whether you’re working on a new book, and if so, what is it?

AN: I am trying to work on a new book. It focuses on the concept of the enemy, on how we nowadays both invent enemies and have lost the ability to talk to our opponents. I focus on five authors and how their fiction teaches us how to deal with opposition, how to deal with trauma, how to deal with crisis.

FF: That’s really interesting. Who are the authors?

AN: The authors are James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, David Grossman, Salman Rushdie, and Margaret Atwood. Each of these writers deals with a kind of extreme traumatic situation. The lesson that they give us is that in order to defeat an authoritarian or totalitarian mindset, one must not become like the authoritarian, not speak their language, not use the same methods. In order to stand up to someone like Trump, for example, you cannot become like Trump. He uses slander, you use slander. He lies, you lie. He polarizes, you polarize. No, you have to go into another domain, one that he does not know the language of. So my book is about how to avoid becoming like your enemy.

FF: Well, I think that’s something that we really need right now. How far along are you on it?

AN: Well, I have finished my first draft, and I’m working on individual chapters. I always thought that imaginative knowledge is not just about escaping the world, it’s like Alice in Wonderland—you leave the world in order to come back to it with what Tolstoy used to call “clear washed eyes.” Imaginative knowledge is a way of perceiving the world, reflecting on the world, and changing the world. I’m using these authors to show how from their perspective you change the world.

I learned in Iran that the struggle against authoritarianism should not be just political. For example, Iranian women are fighting the regime not because they belong to a political group or organization, but because this fight for them is existential. It goes to their identity as human beings. This regime tries to take away your identity, who you are, and you fight to preserve it. You don’t fight to defend one ideology against another, and that is why in countries like Iran as in Eastern Europe, imagination becomes so central to the fight against authoritarianism.

FF: Well, I look forward to that. It sounds like a book that is really needed for the times that we’re living in.

AN: Well, you know how it is: It’s like giving birth! I’m going through the labor pains right now. What about you, Frank?

FF: No, I don’t have anything I’m writing right now. I do have a vague idea to write a book about technology, but it’s still a very unformed one, so it’s going to be a while.

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Published on March 22, 2020 05:00

March 21, 2020

Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Managerial Class

It is always easier to live a homogenous life, one that begins and ends, comfortably, within the boundaries of a single age. Unfortunately, we are not destined to do so, as artificial intelligence (AI) will force us to straddle two ages.

The period that began in the late 18th century inaugurated the last age. It began with revolutionary changes spawned by technology, such as the spinning jenny, which gave rise to the modern factory. It stretched to include the end of the 20th century, when new gadgets still had a link with the old. For many people, the cell phone was just a glorified telephone, and the car a glorified horse. But AI, especially machine-learning AI, is something new, which is why people’s imaginations run wild when they think about it. They wonder if AI will have free will or deserve rights. No technology has ever posed such metaphysical questions. Even the atom bomb was just a big bomb. As the older age wanes and we enter a period of transition, people rightly feel anxious.

Ironically, at precisely the moment when it is difficult to think of anything but of what will be, it may yet be worthwhile to cast a glance backward at what was. People want to know AI’s impact on society, but this means understanding how AI fits along capitalism’s long timeline. Yes, AI represents a major technological breakthrough, with many applications still unforeseen. But AI didn’t just appear out of the blue; it appeared because people wanted it to appear—and capitalism is about giving people what they want. Indeed, the whole capitalist project since the end of the 18th century has been about people using technology to perfect their own lives. AI is part of that project. To understand where AI is taking us, we must first understand capitalism and its trajectory over the past two centuries.

How AI Is a Creature of Capitalism

Only a fool would sell his merchandise for exactly the same price he paid for it. Such a person would go bankrupt. This is why capitalism is more than just profit making, which has been around for millennia. Instead, capitalism is a unique method of wealth accumulation that draws ever more products into the system of exchange to meet people’s ever-expanding needs. A capitalist may look at the trees when walking through the woods but not at the sky. Why? Because the sky doesn’t pay interest. People need lumber but they don’t need the sky. When they do, capitalists will look at the sky. Under capitalism, whatever people need is eventually absorbed into the economy.

We tend to think of people’s needs as stable, but this is not so. During the 19th century, capitalism delivered food, energy, and housing, and still does, but rarely are people content with just being alive.

Under capitalism, needs beget more needs. For example, when manufacturing goods in factories, noise is also manufactured—often in great quantities. In this way “quiet” enters the system of exchange. Living in quiet neighborhoods often costs more, simply because they have less noise. Quiet becomes an object of trade—and it is costly merchandise. Marx observed how needs multiply as capitalism advances, writing, “Every person speculates on creating a new need in another, so as to drive him to fresh sacrifice.”

Over time, as new needs arose, some of them fell under the category of the purely psychological. People themselves often don’t know much about their innermost moods, and they blunder out of one into another. They have days of peevishness and sullenness, of blank resignation and despondency, and occasional fits of rage and longing. We tend not to think about feelings as part of the system of exchange, especially in the 19th century, when the times were dirtier, lousier, tougher, and simpler. People then suffered mental anguish as people today do, but capitalism exists to satisfy needs, and in those days most needs involved a lack of things, such as food and plows. They had the mark of physical necessity. Besides, no technology other than alcohol or tobacco existed to reliably satisfy mental anguish unrelated to a lack of things. The vast universe simply brought people joy or sadness according to its own laws.

The first psychological issue to be taken seriously as a need in the United States, and to be serviced on a mass scale, was the feeling of security. During the 1930s and ’40s, the Depression rent the social fabric of order, while fascism and communism threatened Americans in another way. People wanted to be able to go about their daily lives without fear of destitution or attack from foreign armies. What arose in response was the notion of “social security” in the domestic sphere and “national security” in the foreign policy sphere, each expressed through new and large governmental bureaucracies.

Domestic programs such as Social Security were thought antithetical to capitalism, and in one sense they were. They required tax increases and interfered with the free market. But on another level they were really extensions of capitalism, and not just because they rescued the capitalist system. Instead, capitalism’s private property impulse had penetrated deep into people’s minds; security became another thing to possess, to consume, to have. Improved technology, such as actuarial science, made servicing this “need” possible. That the Federal government ran Social Security in competition with private sector programs is less important than the fact that all these programs met people’s new need for security.

The second psychological issue to be taken seriously as a need and serviced on a mass scale was happiness. In the popular press, the 1950s and ’60s were called the “Age of Anxiety”; the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s were called the “Age of Depression.” During the second half of the 20th century, many Americans not only became acutely aware of being unhappy, they needed happiness. Psychoactive drugs such as antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs became the technology of choice to meet this need. Today, 15 to 20 percent of Americans are on some kind of psychoactive drug, with many of these prescriptions written for everyday unhappiness rather than true clinical depression. This is not real happiness. It is Artificial Happiness.

The third psychological issue to be taken seriously as a need and serviced on a mass scale was loneliness. Loneliness was not even on society’s radar screen through most of the 20th century. Then, in the 1970s, sociologists observed that 10 percent of Americans were lonely. By 2004, that number had climbed to 25 percent. Today, half of Americans are lonely.A technology—psychotherapy—was tapped to service this need, leading to the creation of a gigantic caring industry. There has been a 100-fold increase in the number of professional caregivers over the past 70 years, although the general population has only doubled. A form of talk therapy that closely mimics the experience of real friendship, called “short-term therapy,” was adapted from existing technology to supply lonely people with a service similar to what friends and relatives used to offer. This is not real friendship. This is Artificial Friendship.

The rise of Artificial Intelligence coincides with the fourth psychological issue to be taken seriously as a need and serviced on a mass scale: certainty. Certainty differs from security. Security demands protection from specific threats, such as poverty or military attack, and a floor through which one cannot fall, while leaving the rest of life in play. Certainty is demanded by those who see danger everywhere, who consciously feel an element of gambling in every action, and who want everything in life to be risk free. Rather than a specific threat, the enemy of certainty is a mass of suppositions provoked by just living, and hard to get a grip on.

Over the past 30 years, Americans have grown incredibly risk-averse. As a child, my friends and I would happily make Creepy Crawler monsters by baking a plastic liquid that gave off toxic fumes in an open-faced electric oven, which we had plugged into a wall socket with our hands still wet from the swimming pool, despite the frayed electric cord—all with our parents away. Such behavior now is unthinkable. Parents police their children’s activities for any threat. People ride their bikes fully padded and helmeted. The major reform effort in health care now is to eliminate all possibility of error. The anxiety toward risk is ubiquitous. No matter what the activity, Americans live in a state of melancholy apprehension as they try to eliminate uncertainty in every aspect of their lives.

This is a businessperson’s dream. No limits exist to the number of uncertainties that can be rooted out in life. New risks crop up at every moment. Just going out the front door poses a risk. People anticipate the disaster; they wait for it; they give it temporal duration by providing it with a future.

Behavior during the Age of Coronavirus conceals the more enduring change in people’s attitudes toward risk, for serious risk now exists in small everyday actions, such as touching and breathing. Yet frayed nerves and the tendency to see danger in the smallest daily doing predate the Coronavirus epidemic. Some scientific experts complain that the Coronavirus mortality rate may not be as bad as we imagine, and that we lack sufficient data to judge. They say the media is scaring people. Then again, it is easy for media to implant the fear of mishap into the mind of a worried man who already has his imagination on the lookout for an enemy. In the Coronavirus epidemic, immediate worry and fear over something major has combined with the more longstanding worry and fear over things minor to make people doubly worried and afraid.

To meet this need for certainty, capitalism has combined the intelligence of human beings with the reliability of the machine. We are entranced by the machine. We are entranced by its amazing perfection—a perfection more enduring than ourselves. Unlike a human being, a machine is all sureness and no chance. The result is not real intelligence but Artificial Intelligence. Wherever it is installed, AI promises to make us everlastingly safe and put an end to the game of possibilities.

AI’s earliest commercial applications demonstrate how capitalism has drawn this obsession with certainty into the marketplace. AI didn’t just show up everywhere in the marketplace all at once; it began where certainty was most wanted. The big push has been in health care, driving, cybersecurity, and the financial industry. In the first three sectors, small errors risk lives; in the fourth sector, they risk money.

Certainty, like security, happiness, and friendship, has become vital property to possess. The need for it completes capitalism’s timeline to date. Many Americans today get their security from government, their happiness from a pill, and their friendship from a therapist; in the near future they will get their certainty from an AI system.

What Comes Next

It takes very little to spoil a nice day. A waitress comes over to your table to take your order, but she gets it wrong. Nothing can please you then. But the remedy is simple: replace the waitress with AI. This is already happening, and not just for waitresses. An estimated 36 million jobs are at risk.

The AI trend builds on an earlier one at the turn of the last century, when industry aspired to make work “foolproof” (an Americanism coined during the same period). “Foolproof” means protection from the fool. Industry distrusts people; it has little faith in their resourcefulness; whenever possible it tries to protect itself from errors native to a living creature. Only the primitive state of technology kept industry in the early 20th century from fully implementing this principle on the assembly line.

The same was true for the emerging service industry. But in the latter, customers also resisted the trend. For example, in the first half of the 20th century, automats put different kinds of food inside little glass closets, which people accessed with their dimes and nickels. Despite a customer getting exactly the food he or she wanted, automats never made it big in America. Coffee drip machines, which dripped exactly as much coffee as they were supposed to drip, did well, but not automats. Despite the uncertainty that comes with human servers, customers still wanted a waitress when ordering their food.

This preference for human servers abetted the rise of the service economy, which let most American workers identify as middle-class for much of the 20th century. To this day, on one side of the work spectrum are the laborers of old—the small fraction of Americans who still work on the assembly line, who build things, or who farm, and who wrestle all day with the object world. At the other extreme is the pure managerial class, which never deals with the object world directly, but, instead, influences or commands people connected to the object world, typically by cajoling, bargaining, convincing, or ordering. The managerial class lives by persuasion; lawyers, politicians, CEOs, professors, social workers, and lobbyists persuade others to pay them. Between these two poles exists an enormous army of service workers who are part-laborer and part-manager.

A waitress, for example, moves objects such as plates, but she also laughs, smiles, and speaks in a friendly manner to her customers to get tips. She persuades her customers to pay her. Politeness is a tool for this task of persuasion. The same is true for the restaurant valet, the doorman, the greeter, and the coat checker. The laborer-manager hybrid exists across the service economy. The labor component moves objects, while the manager component works through persuasion. Because the latter requires fine manners, nice clothes, a good disposition, and good interpersonal skills, millions of Americans in the service economy feel themselves to be more than just laborers, despite their low pay. Indeed, many job titles emphasize this managerial component to boost their prestige. A tow operator is sometimes called a “roadside counselor.” A sales clerk is called a “merchandising counselor.” A head butcher is called the “meat manager.”

AI will upend this world, with the drive for certainty as the motive force.

AI systems will replace many pure laborers, as business wants certainty. Productivity growth over the past decade in the United States has been at its lowest since the 1940s. To increase productivity, business will substitute machines for laborers who move objects in the object world. Unlike a laborer, an AI system is never late for work, never calls in sick, never tires, and rarely errs. AI promises certainty, which is profitable.

Business will also substitute AI for many hybrid workers who are part-laborer and part-manager. These include low-skilled hybrids, such as waitresses and bank tellers, but also high-skilled hybrids, such as doctors, nurses, and engineers, who have traditionally been viewed as part of the managerial class. The work of nurses and doctors includes a labor component that involves the direct movement of objects. Many engineers work at a distance from the objects they move through their technical knowledge, but that distance is only a half step. Engineers need not excel at the art of persuasion to get paid; they get little from politeness; although members of the managerial class, engineers are also hybrids. Many hybrids today work for large companies, including doctors, who were once mostly independent professionals. This exposes high-skilled hybrids to big business’s drive for certainty and replacement with AI.

Not all hybrids will lose their jobs, just as not all laborers will lose their jobs. AI will never completely substitute for an expert’s natural intelligence. Also, a hybrid’s managerial component will still be useful, although not as much as one might expect: Often the commonplace words of a machine carry more persuasive weight than a wise comment from a mid-level administrator. Still, much of a hybrid’s labor component will be given over to AI—for example, calculating, shuffling papers, checking, and inspecting—reducing the need for even high-level hybrids.

The persuasive skills of pure managers, including CEOs, lawyers, therapists, politicians, promoters, professors, human resource specialists, and salespeople, will still have value. But with fewer human workers in business to command, cajole, or influence after their replacement with AI, the need for pure managers will decline. To the degree that professors are, in fact, not pure persuaders but more like hybrids, since they disseminate information as much as they convince students of new truths, their jobs are also at risk. Entertainers such as comedians and talk show hosts are safe, as persuading people to laugh is no easy trick, but garden-variety actors are vulnerable, as AI-generated actors (virtual actors) can entertain by simulating an actor’s motions and speeches.

Consumers will also drive this change. Today’s consumers want certainty. It is a “need” that must be satisfied, and they will compulsively surrender some of their pleasure to get it—for example, giving up the pleasure of driving a convertible, top down, on the open highway, in exchange for eliminating the risk of car collisions.

What signal in consciousness led to this obsession with certainty among consumers is hard to say. People live longer and have fewer children, therefore the stakes are higher, as losing one child risks making one childless, while serious injury at middle age robs one of many decades of life to come, rather than just a few years. In addition, today’s economy demands more efficiency from its workers. When a worker leaves the office there is only so much time to pick up the kids, go to the cleaners, or go to the store—especially when capitalism demands both spouses work. For a single parent, it’s even harder. Needs multiply under capitalism, but to meet those needs in today’s environment, people need certainty. They can’t wait on a dry cleaner who might screw up, or a locksmith whose shop has closed unexpectedly. Jeff Bezos recognized this when building Amazon on the notion that people would pay a little more to shop online to save time, so vital had time become.

With little slack in the system, peace of mind depends on things going smoothly in the manner of a machine. The AI refrigerator must communicate directly with the AI grocer when food levels drop, to save people time and inconvenience. The AI exercise machine must cut the time needed to work out at the gym to just 45 minutes a week. On vacation, the travel agent must have scheduled the itinerary with certainty, the security guard at the resort must practice perfect vigilance, and the waitress at the fine restaurant must get the order just right—otherwise, stress. This is why these workers must be replaced with AI.

AI Gives Rise to a New Politics

Tension between the managerial class and the working class, first described by James Burnham in the mid-20th century and highlighted most recently by Michael Lind, dominate our politics today. But it will not do so once the AI revolution has run through both the working class and the managerial class, upending the service economy. Four demographic groups will change in size as a result—and change our politics.

The first group includes laborers, hybrids, and managers who will lose their jobs to AI. To the extent that they market their skills to find new ones, they will all immediately become pure managers, in the sense that they try to persuade others to hire them. Even homeless people who beg are pure managers in this regard, as they persuade others to give them money on the street. In the new AI economy many of these people will be unemployable; hence the idea of Universal Basic Income, pushed most recently by Democratic candidate Andrew Yang, to pension them off.

But this won’t work. The problem is not just that these people will be robbed of their dignity, but that they will grow bored without work, which is dangerous, because boredom makes people discontent. They will meditate on their discontent as if it were a horror story left open on a table. Their boredom will pursue them everywhere, which is a sign that they are failing to develop their potentialities. Many of them will funnel their creative energy into ideologies and believe blindly, having lost all contact with the object world.

The object world anchors people in reality. It is why workers and peasants have traditionally been the least ideological demographic. Such people live and think in real labor; at every moment they have contact with the object world, which, other than religion, puts a restraint on the imagination. Such contact forestalls a kind of thinking that results from working with the conceptions of the mind alone. It is why most of the major ideologies in history—for example, fascism, communism, romanticism, environmentalism, feminism, and nationalism—were the thought products of bourgeois philosophers. Even the ideology of courtly love grew up in the 12th century not among tailors and blacksmiths, nor even among doctors and lawyers, but among wealthy women with enough time to perfume their skin and wealthy men with enough time to adore them.

No one can predict what new ideologies will emerge from this group. At least one of them will be violent, as people pensioned off will dwell on their loss of dignity and create an ideology dedicated to the smashing of AI machines. With ex-managers giving formidable intellectual guidance and ex-laborers scorning fine manners, this group will share in the worst of both worlds: the manager’s tendency toward idealism and (unless they are beggars) the laborer’s impoliteness.

The second group also consists of pure managers. It can be broken down into two subgroups.

The first subgroup includes ex-hybrids trying to earn a living through small-scale capitalism. These people will invent and market unnecessary products that play on people’s desire for certainty, thereby attempting to create in people unnecessary needs. One already finds these entrepreneurs, for example, on the television show “Shark Tank,” where they hawk unnecessary products, such as a device that keeps one’s tie straight while running, or an AI-tailor that guarantees perfect custom-made shirts. The necessity of this work is not enough to sell it; entrepreneurs must persuade other people of its necessity. Many future small-scale entrepreneurs will have less contact with the object world than past entrepreneurs did; they will leave much of the object world to AI; their success will come not from technical knowledge but from amiability and relations with other people.

The other subgroup consists of ex-hybrids and managers who will lose their jobs and become community and nonprofit activists. The nonprofit sector has already grown to 10 percent of the workforce. Rather than hawk unnecessary products, these people will hawk ideologies, including those ideologies bubbling up from the unemployed.

Laborers and hybrids working in the object world live from minute to minute, with one minute following the next. They live as they are living—in the present—as they try to overcome nature. Such people are often happy because they can forget; working in the object world, they stop thinking of themselves. Activists, on the other hand, lack contact with the object world, and so they have time to speculate on their miseries, which they get from a past they dredge up and a future they invent. They act out in their imaginations a brilliantly clear tragedy in which they portray all the world’s wrongs; they interpret everything through their anger, and their anger, in turn, is increased. They are like the angry painter who, in painting a picture of war, grows even angrier. They become rabid ideologues. Their ideology sometimes turns into a delirium, and, through persuasion, they pass their delirium on to others.

The third group consists of government workers. As laborers, hybrids, and even pure managers lose their jobs to AI in the private sector, government will expand to receive them, to quell popular unrest. Senator Bernie Sanders is already pushing Federal Jobs for All legislation. Because government work does not require making a profit, the need for certainty in such work is less, and so is the need for AI. Laborers and hybrids hired by government will be able to satisfy the human urge to connect with the object world, despite the uncertainty they bring to their tasks. In the expanded public sector there will still be human ditch diggers and waitresses, human firemen and security guards, human cashiers and car drivers. There will also be a place for ex-managers who persuade people for a living, but whom the private sector has judged to be redundant in the age of AI, including some teachers, lawyers, administrators, and professors.

But as the public sector expands, the problems that come with more government also expand. Capital is siphoned off from the more efficient private sector. Politics often play a big role in getting a government job, demoralizing those who believe in meritocracy. Inefficiency worsens, as government need not be efficient. In addition, human workers themselves are sources of inefficiency because of the uncertainty they bring to their tasks, which private sector AI tries to eliminate.

The first two groups will likely join with public employees to pit the state against the now-shrunken managerial elite in the fourth group, and which the state was once allied with.

The fourth group consists of pure managers and high-value hybrids with natural intelligence that AI cannot replace. Pure managers, such as CEOs, social workers, and therapists, will continue to make their living through persuasion. High-level hybrids, such as elite doctors, scientists, pilots, and artists, will enjoy the best of both worlds: the mental satisfaction that comes with triumphing over nature in the object world and the pleasure that comes with hard work in cooperation with others. A liberal arts education will still benefit these people, not because they must persuade human workers beneath them to carry out orders, as AI will have replaced many of these workers, but because they must still persuade other elite managers in boardrooms. They must still live, in part, by words; they must still arrange words in the right way.

But the managerial class, at least as traditionally understood, will have shrunk to such a degree that it may cease to be a class. Paradoxically, as the number of managers increases in society through the AI revolution, stemming from the increase in beggars, the unemployed seeking work, the pensioned-off, the small-scale marketeers, the nonprofit activists, and many of the new public employees—all of whom “persuade” for a living—the power of managers as an elite class will decline. Much of post-World War II politics in the United States turned on a kind of iron alliance between the managerial class and the state. The managerial class got the economic benefits and culture it wanted, while the state got the managerial class’s support. But in the future, because of AI, the number of traditional managers will dwindle. While the private sector will remain the source of wealth, the old managerial class will not necessarily remain a source of votes. Indeed, after the AI revolution there may be more hybrids and pure managers working in the public sector than in the private sector, as the state becomes employer of last resort. Along with the other new “managers” created by the AI revolution, a new relationship between the state and those who persuade for a living may come into being.

Other ramifications follow. As AI replaces workers across the board, the call for more immigration will decline. An ideology of nationalism may take hold again, and not just among laborers. Hybrids and pure managers already see their jobs under threat from AI; unbridled immigration creates a double threat. In another possibility, with more managers in society relative to laborers—meaning all the people who persuade in one form or another to make a living—expect political correctness, which has become a new kind of manners, to cement itself. As a group, pure laborers have been the most resistant to political correctness. But AI threatens pure labor. In a world where AI runs the object world, and the ability to persuade is a human’s being most valuable skill, people will keep a tight rein on their words and gestures. They will avoid saying the kind of thing they might later regret.

AI and the Politics of Relationships

In the era before toothpaste and gyms, people didn’t expect their lovers to have perfect teeth or perfect bodies. It may have been desirable, but such traits occurred too infrequently in the population to become a conscious “need.” Now they have become a need, along with other traits, thanks to the technology that makes them possible. For many people, certain physical and psychological traits in their romantic partners have become essential property; they must be had. Yet they are “owned” by the other party, in the same way drug companies own Artificial Happiness and therapists own Artificial Friendship. The other party may not want to make them available; after all, not everyone clicks. Worse, getting such property usually involves more than just paying cash. The first party must offer up control over his or her traits to the other party, through a kind of contract known as a “relationship.” The first party must then remain loyal in that relationship. Even worse, if the first party falls in love with the other party, there is no certainty that the other party will keep the vital traits that the first party fell in love with. The other party might get fat, or turn into a bully or a shrew. Nor is there certainty that the other party will remain loyal. Add in today’s pre-existing distrust between the sexes, as evidenced in the #MeToo movement among women and the MGTOW (men going their own way) movement among men, and the interest in AI robot lovers (called “sexbots”) should not surprise.

In Marxist language, AI sexbots end “reciprocity in alienation,” where each party must surrender some of his or her freedom to get vital properties held by the other. These properties, along with the certainty that the party who has them will keep them and continue to offer them, must be owned, people think, to live a happy life. But such certainty is impossible. It requires the other party to be perfect and, second, to cooperate perfectly. Yet sexbots make it possible. The physical and personality traits of a sexbot can be customized to perfection. When the sexbot is purchased, it is owned for good. Thus, love can be made certain and purchased in the same way people buy security, Artificial Happiness, and Artificial Friendship.

Sexbots are already a multi-billion dollar industry. Half of Americans expect sex with robots to become routine by 2050. If large numbers of people pursue this option, the U.S. population will continue to plummet. Already the number of births is below replacement rate; only immigration buoys the growth rate above zero. True, the downward trend complements the AI revolution. With AI replacing human workers, fewer births will be needed (just as fewer immigrants will be needed). Yet sexbots, along with AI robot companions more generally, risk triggering a troubling cascade of psychological events.

In the eyes of the buyer, the sexbot becomes an ideal being, and while such a state as this lasts, the result is an almost perfect life for the buyer. All the physical and psychological traits desired are there, and reliably so. The sexbot is not alive; nevertheless, to the buyer, there seem to be two people in the room, especially when the sexbot utters homely, human remarks.

But although the sexbot is never hostile the way some human lovers become, it is not exactly friendly. Psychologically, the experience is comparable to traveling in a foreign country and meeting people one doesn’t know well. The conversation is pleasant. There are no opportunities for barbs. People wear polite expressions. Companionship is easy. It’s as if the sexbot shows its best side to someone it doesn’t know very well.

The sexbot is not complicated. Nevertheless, it soon becomes grating. Novelty is a potent attraction, but it is also the most perishable. Besides, pleasure that is just handed to us never provides the joy we expect. In a partner, we want to be chosen, not endured. Winning in love brings no lasting happiness unless the person won was possessed of free will. True, winning risks uncertainty, and therefore anxiety, since love might not be requited, or last. In a relationship with a sexbot, the buyer need never wonder, “Is it over?” Then again, uncertainty is what makes winning in love an even keener pleasure.

The buyer wants to achieve something certain in love, but he or she encounters a defect in AI that is applicable to all AI-human relationships. We want certainty, yet no love or friendship is possible without faith and loyalty, which hinge on uncertainty, for faith and loyalty might not be deserved. This is why there can be no love or friendship with an AI robot. There is too much certainty.

Millions of AI sexbots and robots will be produced in the future. They will perform important, titanic work, including satisfying the sexual urges of millions of Americans. But in all this shifting of masses and weights, there will be nothing to break the monotony of certainty. Machine-learning AI can learn many things—except the art of not tiring people.

What Comes After Certainty?

The stimulus of American life has always been money. Everything that brings in money develops; everything that does not bring in money withers away. Combined with the popular American notion that life must be improved, we arrive at the fundamental principles of capitalism.

Still, when looking at the AI systems to be produced in the future, one has a sense of sadness, which probably comes from the incompleteness of capitalism’s conquest. Security, happiness, friendship, and, soon, certainty will have been won, but we will still hover on the brink between the primeval and the perfect. People will grow bored in an AI world, some because they have been pensioned off and have no work, others because their activism leads to nowhere, and still others because their sexbots deny them the pleasure of winning mates for themselves, through their charms.

Therefore, the next psychological need to be serviced on a mass scale will be pride. People want to build or destroy. Their pride in doing so will become the new need. AI will likely lend a hand in satisfying this new need, perhaps through virtual reality contraptions where people spend most of their private lives in a constructed universe so realistic that they can imagine themselves to be living another life, and in a narrative that stokes their pride. As Marx observed, capitalism always looks forward, not backward. To revive the feeling of pride that AI machines have destroyed, people will not need a newfound reverence for tradition. On the contrary, they will need to work that much harder to perfect their power over nature. They will need even better machines.

M.E. Bragg, “A Comparative Study of Loneliness and Depression,” quoted in Benedict McWhirter, “Loneliness: A review of the current literature,” Journal of Counseling and Development, (March/April 1990).

Miller McPherson, et. al., “Social Isolation in America,” American Sociological Review (June 2006).

Drawn from Federal Census data in the 1940s and 2010s. See Ronald W. Dworkin, “The Rise of the Caring Industry,” Policy Review (June/July 2010).

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Published on March 21, 2020 05:00

March 20, 2020

National Security and the Pandemic of 2020

The current pandemic is a reminder that the public at times needs government to step in where the private sector falls short. This isn’t an argument for the government to take over in every which way, but simply a statement of fact that governments set the conditions, and often have the most immediate tools at hand, to help secure the public’s welfare. This becomes most obvious in times of crisis. The young Whig politician Abraham Lincoln probably never thought that, if ever President, he would be declaring martial law, suspending habeas corpus, and spending money on arms and supplies not appropriated by Congress. However, that’s what the times called for, and, under the color of law and the Constitution, he acted.

While securing the health and lives of American citizens should be the most immediate goal of the Administration and the Congress, it shouldn’t completely obscure other lessons to be learned from the pandemic, or some of the concrete problems arising from it.

Perhaps a point to start with is how vulnerable the world’s economy seems to serious disruption. The liberal economic order that has done so much to improve the lives of hundreds of millions rests on a peaceful and stable world. If a virus can cause this much economic and social pain, just imagine what a war between major powers might do to our lives. Although such a war might be unlikely, keeping it at bay largely rests with keeping America’s military sufficiently strong to deter the likes of Russia or China. It’s should be thought of as an insurance policy that is, in terms of the country’s GDP, just pennies on the dollar to prevent the worst from happening. We’ve largely become immune to that possibility because of our position of strength following the Cold War and the general weakness of our would-be competitors. But that preferential balance of power is no longer the case, and the line between being sufficiently preeminent and not has closed significantly in recent years.

One consequence of the pandemic will be to see that line get even blurrier. Following the Great Recession of 2008, defense budgets both in the United States and among allies began to fall—this on top of the reductions (the “peace dividend”) everyone took after the demise of the Soviet Union. In recent years, in response to Chinese and Russian behavior, the western democracies had begun to reverse course on military spending. One could argue that, neither here nor abroad, was the reversal sufficient or quick enough, but the fact is, billions upon billions were being added to boost military capabilities. Given the likely severity of the economic downturn resulting from the steps taken to mitigate the pandemic, and the amount of resources governments will pour into their economies to prevent an even more catastrophic downturn, it seems almost inevitable that defense budgets will be the bag governments dig into to find monies and balance their fiscal books. Both here, in Europe and in East Asia, allied militaries were finally digging out from the strategic hole in which they found themselves post-2008. A major consequence of the Pandemic of 2020 might well be to find ourselves back in that hole.

Drilling down further, the pandemic is going to have an immediate and longer-term affect on the defense industrial base. It’s hard to imagine defense production lines of major contractors and sub-contractors not being impacted. You can’t build a plane or ship from your study at home. Already, F-35-related manufacturing plants in Italy and Japan have been closed. Plus, an aerospace company like Boeing, which depends on a healthy airline industry and is already in financial straits because of the problems with the 737 MAX, is now facing major liquidity problems. Reading the market, the Dow Jones U.S. Aerospace & Defense Index was down by more than 30 percent this month. Congress and the White House are looking for ways to keep small businesses and lower-wage workers from falling off the fiscal cliff—as they should. But as the government works its way through the consequences of this crisis, it shouldn’t overlook larger companies who employ hundreds of thousands of skilled workers and keep what remains of the American defense industrial arsenal healthy.

As Eisenhower was ending his presidency, he gave a speech in January 1961 that famously suggested the public “guard against . . . the undue influence . . . [of] the military-industrial complex.” But he also noted that “a vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor my be tempted to risk his own destruction.” The truth is, the so-called military-industrial complex has become a much smaller “complex” from the time Eisenhower spoke, continually shrinking since Reagan’s second term until today. But Ike’s point about what keeps the peace has not changed.

It would be perverse if—as a result of People’s Republic’s failure to contain the spread of COVID-19 when it could have and saved thousands of its own people’s lives, or even alerted the world to its discovery in a timely way—the West is not only economically weaker but also less capable of guaranteeing its own security. The Pandemic of 2020 could be a strategic game-changer, if we are not careful.

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Published on March 20, 2020 09:16

A Man for All Seasons

You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington

Alexis Coe

Viking, 2020, 301 pp., $27

Washington’s End: The Final Years and Forgotten Struggle

Jonathan Horn

Scribner, 2020, 330 pp., $30

“It is far easier to take George Washington apart than to put him together” notes Mary Wells Ashworth in George Washington: First in Peace, the final volume of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Washington’s life completed in 1957. Douglas Southall Freeman, the series’ primary author, died suddenly of a heart attack while penning the conclusion to Washington’s first term in office, which left research assistants Ashworth and John Alexander Carroll the task of completing his magnum opus. Although she was quoting Freeman, Ashworth was speaking from experience.

Ashworth’s warning has not deterred the legions of journalists and historians who have attempted to disassemble and reassemble America’s preeminent Founding Father over the past half century. The arrival of a biography promising to shed new light on Washington every February has practically become civic ritual, even as the majority cannot help but retread lengths of the path originally laid by Ashworth, Carroll, and Freeman. Perhaps this phenomenon has something to do with Noemi Emery’s supposition that “the unacknowledged void between the needed fire of the soldier-president and the dim oddity we have been handed does something upsetting to our lives.” Washington’s perceived reticence is a vacuum continually drawing those who seek either a model to emulate or a figure to blame in troubled times.

Alexis Coe’s You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington, published this year, is one of the latest additions to the genre. A historian by training, Coe brings a pop culture sensibility to her research that would make Sofia Coppola smile (her previous monograph, Alice + Freda Forever, explored the sensational trial of a woman who murdered her female lover at the turn of the century). Despite the suggestive title and cover art (a modern painting of Washington smirks at us as he jauntily adjusts his jacket), Coe’s work purports to be the first “adult” single-volume biography of Washington written by a woman since Emery’s 1976 Washington: A Biography. Coe argues that books on the nation’s first President have been overwhelmingly produced by “The Thigh Men of Dad History”: male writers who follow “rote” narrative protocols and spill an inordinate amount of ink in their thousand-page tomes obsessing over Washington’s character and masculinity. Her “addition to a crowded bookshelf” is an attempt to unravel the male-dominated discourse that has reconstituted Washington from “a man” to “the embodiment of the nation at its best, most noble and public-spirited.”

If Coe is annoyed that scholars such as Ron Chernow and Joseph Ellis hyper-fixate on Washington’s musculature, she definitely has a bone to pick with Abigail Adams. Upon meeting Washington in the summer of 1775, Abigail humorously chided her husband for failing to prepare her for the encounter. “I thought the one half was not told me,” she breathed to John before quoting a poem by John Dryden. “Mark his Majestick fabric! he’s a temple/ Sacred by birth, and built by hands divine.”

Washington’s physical attributes were as much a source of fascination in the 18th century as they are today, and the observations in surviving accounts have driven the pages expended on this subject in modern biographies—not the other way around. Regardless, Coe mocks the Thigh Men as a “‘size matters’ crowd,” failing to appreciate the thousands of primary and secondary sources that historians must grapple with as they build an understanding of Washington and his world. It’s just one of many anti-intellectual moments in a work that seesaws between serious engagement with Washington historiography and interludes on Washington’s “likes,” “dislikes,” “frenemies,” and “pettiest acts” (to name a few) that interrupt her story like a pop-up from a bizarre online dating profile.

Even Coe herself cannot help but hit the same beats as her forebears, as she trudges through Washington’s beginning as a teenage officer in the Seven Years’ War, marriage to Martha, growing animosity toward colonial rule, rise as commander in chief of the Continental Army, succeeding terms as President of the United States, retirement, and death. Nevertheless, she generates flashes of brilliance when incorporating new interventions on some of the most understudied individuals in Washington’s world.

Mary Ball Washington, Washington’s mother, has been unduly maligned as an uneducated and unfeeling nag who only burdened her eldest son. Marshaling research by specialists on gender in the 18th century—such as historian Martha Saxton, who has since produced a magnificent new biography on Mary—Coe successfully recasts the Washington matriarch as a shrewd and resourceful businesswoman who instilled the principle of hard work in her children while “push[ing] the boundaries of wifehood in early America.” Coe similarly weaves in recent studies on Washington’s slaves to powerfully emphasize the moral cost of his complicity in perpetuating human bondage, such as Ona Judge, a seamstress who successfully escaped Washington’s control at the end of his presidency.

While adding needed complexity to Washington’s story, Coe’s quest to rebuke everything the Thigh Men stand for ultimately leads her to stumble analytically. She correctly notes that the Townshend and Intolerable Acts “radicalized” Washington and his fellow colonists into supporting separation from Great Britain but forgoes a study of Washington’s evolving politics in favor of revisionist history propagated by the New York Times’ 1619 Project. Coe posits that Somerset v. Stewart, a 1772 British legal decision establishing that chattel slavery was unsupported by common law, “terrified” Southern colonists and galvanized them to rebellion—an interpretation that has since been contested by numerous historians of early America, notably Sean Wilentz. Nowhere does she examine countervailing evidence, such as Washington’s involvement in passing the Fairfax Resolves of 1774, which included among its demands for the restoration of colonial rights “our most earnest wishes to see an entire stop for ever put to such a wicked, cruel, and unnatural Trade [in slaves].”

If Coe provides only a superficial account of Washington’s revolutionary turn, she completely fails to grasp his most important contribution to the fight for independence. To counteract modern perception of Washington as “an unparalleled military leader,” Coe describes the Revolutionary War primarily through Washington’s “diplomatic, propaganda, and espionage campaigns.” While this presents an entertaining opportunity to highlight Washington’s spy ring, it precludes a discussion of Washington’s critical role in uniting a heterogenous army, poor in resources and experience, against one of the most powerful fighting forces in the world. Other generals were certainly better strategists, but as Chernow puts it, they could never rival Washington’s “genius for exalting the mission of his army and enabling [them] to see themselves, not as lowly grunts, but as actors on the stage of history.”

Unfortunately, Coe is fundamentally uninterested in acknowledging any of Washington’s virtues. This becomes especially clear when examining Washington’s decision to emancipate his slaves at the end of his life. Coe treats Washington’s careful revision of his will in 1797 as a last-ditch publicity stunt, an attempt to restore a reputation that had suffered after eight years of wrangling hardening political divisions in his cabinet and across the country. This cynical characterization once again betrays an unwillingness to trace Washington’s evolution over time. Coe sees no distinction between the Washington that (she rightly notes) once callously sold a slave to the Caribbean for rum and molasses in 1766 and the one who decades later amassed tracts on antislavery thought and schemed in vain to end his involvement in the practice. But Coe cuts Washington no slack, criticizing him for not giving up “everything” to free his slaves during his lifetime. Instead of addressing scholarship on the intransigence of the slave system in Washington’s society, she picks fights with random authors at The Federalist. Even Mary V. Thompson, an historian whose groundbreaking work on slavery at Mount Vernon Coe extols, argues that the institution was so “entrenched . . . as a social and economic system in Virginia by the eighteenth century . . . that trying to get out of slave-owning was pretty much impossible for most of George Washington’s life.”

Coe spends so much time deconstructing Washington that it’s hard to get a sense of what she’s putting back together. If there’s a coherent portrait, it’s not unlike the book’s smarmy jacket: Washington the ambitious, self-serving, and emotionally unavailable patriarch; a man who fails upward and values reputation above all else. In her quest to fight “male” myth-making, Coe has engendered some myths of her own.

Coe’s vision fits comfortably within a cultural narrative that wishes to knock down the idols we have made of our founding generation. Even if the impulse has some merit, the rubble is about as true or useful as outright hagiography. Instead, a reconstruction of Washington that may better meet the needs of our fractured and rudderless age is Washington’s End: The Final Years and Forgotten Struggle, the latest offering from former White House speechwriter Jonathan Horn.

Washington’s End begins not long after the point when Ashworth and her colleague took up Freeman’s mantle in George Washington: First in Peace, opening at Adams’s inauguration. Using meticulous research, Horn demonstrates how “peace” eluded Washington throughout his retirement, which was repeatedly interrupted by partisan attacks, tensions with political allies, and the specter of war with France. Underlying these challenges was Washington’s quiet campaign to navigate his new role as a “private citizen,” a position upon which the legitimacy of America’s democratic system fundamentally depended.

Although Horn centers his story on Washington’s final three years, he finds unique ways to exceed the boundaries of this narrow frame. He bounces backwards and forwards across Washington’s lifetime while using thematic anchors to gradually inch his way from the end of Washington’s presidency in March 1797 to his death in December 1799. While this allows Horn to cover considerable ground, it may prove confusing to readers who are not already familiar with Washington’s chronology.

More interestingly, Horn eschews Freeman’s preference for the third person limited (or as he put it, the “fog of war”), presenting Washington’s life largely from the perspective of his contemporaries. The competing interests of the diverse men and women that formed his society complicate Washington more effectively than our modern judgment. Rapidly he shifts from Elizabeth Willing Powel’s cherished confidante to James Monroe’s hated nemesis; from a hero John Adams could never rival to a master the enslaved Hercules eventually outwitted. The eyes of the people who knew him throw his virtues and imperfections into sharp relief.

As Horn lays out over the course of his work, Washington’s dedication to balancing competing interests dominated his retirement almost with the same intensity that it defined his generalship and his presidency. Even “under his vine and fig tree,” he could never feel truly free to act on his impulses, lest he somehow disrupt the peaceful transition of power that had signaled constitutional democracy’s triumph in 1797. The pros and cons of every personal decision therefore had to be carefully measured. Should he publicly respond to defamatory letters and pamphlets circulated by Thomas Jefferson and his Republican allies, or would that only heighten the partisan passions engulfing the nation? Would it be appropriate for him to shelter the son of the Marquis de Lafayette, a dear friend who gave everything to the United States, while France seized American ships and meddled in national politics? Should he accept Alexander Hamilton’s urging to resume command of a standing American army, and if he did, how would he share power with President Adams without being accused of autocratic designs?

While Washington did his best to live up to his reputation as the American Cincinnatus, he nevertheless was active in transforming the seat of American power. Horn treats the City of Washington itself as a deuteragonist, following its evolution from a wooded plot of muddy terrain along the Potomac to the site of the nation’s capital. Washington guided the development of his namesake at many junctures. He used his experience as a surveyor to plot the city’s boundaries and approve the general layout, selected the design of the future United States Capitol building, invested in the land, and encouraged others to do so as well. As much as Washington hoped to profit from his involvement, his attempt to establish a national university in the city that would bring together students “from all parts of the United States” to receive a republican education uncorrupted by “state prejudices” underscored his larger aspirations. More than anything, Washington wanted the capital to serve as an institution that would strengthen the Union by training succeeding generations to view the United States as he did: “one great whole.”

Like its protagonist, Washington’s End is not a perfect book. Horn’s florid prose, designed to engage a wide readership, occasionally verges on the melodramatic. He relies on traditional interpretations of characters like Mary Ball Washington and fails to give the slaves forced to labor at Mount Vernon attention that matches their inextricable presence in Washington’s life. Unlike Coe, who clearly articulates her position on Washington, Horn’s thesis is also more difficult to discern. It only reveals itself in full in his conclusion, when Washington the President coalesces with Washington the capital: “[Future citizens] will marvel at its influence and decry the influences under which it has fallen; complain that it moves too slowly and shudder at the speed of its wrath; plead for it to do more and wish it would go away; view it as worthy of its memorials and see it as a betrayal of a revolutionary past. . . . In every succeeding generation, they will talk as if they are living in the last days of Washington.”

The version of Washington that we need today is the same Washington we have needed since June 1775. It is the man who did his best to cultivate self-mastery in disposition and prudence in decision-making; who signed the final version of his will not as a Virginian but as “a citizen of the United States.” Preserving the institutions that the Revolution created was his constant preoccupation, because he believed in the principles of the Declaration of Independence and trusted that they were best served by the political structure enshrined in the Constitution, however frustrating and turgid it appeared to outsiders. Washington valued systems, and argued that, even if they contained flaws, they would do more in the long run to secure “the happiness of my fellow-citizens” than mere democratic anarchism. “The Constitution is the guide which I never can abandon,” he asserted in 1795, and he allowed it to shape the execution of his public and private duties throughout his lifetime.

This may not be a satisfactory attitude when the systems that surround us appear to be so riddled with inefficiency and injustice that the temptation to burn everything down seems almost justifiable. Nevertheless, we would be wise to follow Washington’s inclination to work through rather than around them, leaning into whatever roles we occupy to best advance the happiness of our fellow citizens. And if we must rebuild Washington, it should not be Washington the saint, nor Washington the scoundrel. It should be as he has always been: Washington the institutionalist.

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Published on March 20, 2020 09:04

March 19, 2020

Russia’s Orthodox Grand Strategy

Little stands in the way of Putin extending his presidential leadership until 2036 after a constitutional amendment was approved by Russia’s constitutional court earlier this week. If the amendment is validated in a referendum currently scheduled for April (as it is likely to be) and Putin chooses to stay, he will end up being one of the longest-serving Russian leaders, having been in power since 2000. He may have wanted to retire and exercise influence from behind the scenes, but it appears that dictators cannot retire peacefully. Putin is not an exception and, having conquered power in Moscow, he cannot give it up easily. As with tyrants in the distant past, he too is now perennially insecure and can nourish little hope of a peaceful life.

But focusing on Putin and his personal hold on power does little to inform us about Russia’s future politics and grand strategy. Whether he stays in the Kremlin or moves on to other pursuits may have a very limited impact on Russian foreign policy because his two decades at the helm have already shaped Russia in ways that will outlast him. Russia, that is, is not merely Putin’s.

One key aspect of the Russia we will continue to face—namely, the growing role played by the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) in influencing the military and in particular its nuclear forces—is well described in a fascinating book by Dmitry Adamsky, Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy (recently reviewed in these pages). The book focuses on how the ROC went from providing support for a low-morale army to formulating a vision of Russia’s role in the region and world—and a robust rationale to retain effective nuclear forces as a key tool to defeat “satanic forces” and to maintain a strong Orthodox Russia. Putin may or may not be a true believer but the ROC has tied itself to the Russian state, molding its institutions and behavior. (On Putin, Adamsky carefully parses the evidence, implying that the Russian leader may be more than an agnostic KGB agent who uses religion for purely instrumental purposes; there’s some reason to think that he has actually become a true Orthodox believer. This would make him even more problematic, as he may see war as a welcome necessity and victory as achievable even in a nuclear confrontation.)

The implications of this development, however, transcend the bureaucratic fate of this or that institution or military branch. The revival of the ROC is leaving an imprint on the goals and means of Russian grand strategy. It seems that the traditional symphony of the Orthodox Church and the Russian state is tilting in favor of the former, bestowing upon it not just prestige, wealth, and a more exalted role for its clergy, but also enormous influence over the decision-making processes and doctrines of the state. It is not that the state authorities are using the Church instrumentally—though some individual leaders may do this—but that the Church is shaping the state and its key levers (including nuclear forces) to achieve its own temporal and eschatological goals. The ROC needs and wants a strong (and nuclear) Russia so that “the sovereignty of the Orthodox way of life against satanic forces” can be preserved.

The outcome is that Russian grand strategy is being shaped, and underwritten, by the ROC.

Four points, in particular, are worth considering.

First, the Orthodox Church has skillfully inserted itself into the military, a foundation of the Russian state, providing unity and support in the moment of its greatest weakness in 1991. But the effect is exponential: The ROC has given the seeds of civilizational unity to a country in disarray. After the dark decades characterized by the violent emptiness of communism, the Orthodox Church offered a renewed national purpose, motivating the military and the wider nation. The outcome is a civilizational unity that is much stronger than its preceding Soviet construct and, arguably, has a coherence that is increasingly missing in a divided West lost in a post-modern nebula of identities and self-proclaimed individual preferences.

As Adamsky describes it, Orthodox priests attached to particular military branches are akin to the old Soviet political officers, but the latter were hated and mistrusted while the former are welcome and deeply appreciated. The civilizational strength is being built from the bottom up, in submarines sent to distant seas with Orthodox priests in them, in Russian bases abroad accompanied by deployable churches, and in various other efforts, encouraged by Putin, to buttress the presence of the ROC across the military and society writ large. The resulting bet placed by Russian leaders may be that Russia, bolstered by the ROC, is much more resilient and stronger than its Western rivals—a hypothesis that many Western analysts, calculating economic data, demographics, or technological advances, do not share. But it does not matter who is right; it matters that Russian leadership may think that Russia is stronger than the decadent West and may act accordingly.

Second, the Church has also shaped the geographic vectors of Russian foreign policy. Enemies are to the south and the west. In the south, there is anti-Christian violence; from the west, civilizational decadence and moral turpitude. The southern frontier is with Islam, and the destruction of the Christian communities in the Middle East is a tangible symptom of the threat arising there. Russia, therefore, presents itself as the main protector of Christianity in this region, as Europe is powerless and the United States in a process of seeming retreat. On Russia’s western frontier, the menace is moral corruption leading to social and political decadence. The West is seen as a source of instability. Russia, then, is presented as the last bastion—the Third Rome—of civilizational strength. Note that in such a worldview China (the eastern frontier) does not appear as a prominent preoccupation. This does not mean that Moscow sees a blossoming alliance of sorts with Beijing, but only that China does not warrant the bulk of attention and resources. In brief, even after Putin, Russia will continue to focus and project power to her south and west, reflecting a threat assessment heavily influenced by the ROC

Third, the ROC thinks of a long term competition with Russia’s enemies, a sacred struggle with the Antichrist. The expectation is that the threats facing Muscovite territory and the civilization therein will exist for decades and Russia needs to be prepared for that. The lengthy time-horizon may, therefore, have an impact on how Russian leaders make their cost-benefit analysis: The goal is to create the conditions for the survival and ultimate success of the “Third Rome” and to do that they may be willing to accept short and medium-term costs in the expectation of a triumphant Orthodox Russia in the distant future. What the ROC then offers is the argument that immediate sacrifices, whether in the market or in the battlefield, are worthwhile for the higher good of an Orthodox victory. Imposing costs on Russia is less likely therefore to stir immediate domestic pressures on the Kremlin to alter its behavior. The goal, instead, should be to deprive Russia of the available means to be aggressive abroad—to limit and constrain Russia rather than to hope for a domestic political change of mind.

Lastly, related to the previous point, the revival of Russian Orthodoxy and its operationalization in Russian grand strategy is tied to a rebuilding of the myth of Russian victimhood. Russia is perennially under assault from the forces of evil—Poland, Napoleon, Hitler, the United States, the “West,” and, of course, the Islamic tribes on the southern frontier. These forces seek to destroy the civilizational core of Russia, grounded in the Orthodox faith. In this myth-making, even Stalin comes out as a supporter, albeit perhaps a reluctant one, of the ROC, a support that guaranteed Russia’s victory during World War II (the “Great Patriotic War”). As a perennial victim, Russia seeks revenge for the unjustified assaults on its peace-loving Orthodox nation. The debacle of the 1990s is seen not as self-imposed by a corrupt regime but as yet another example of foreign aggression, seeking to dismantle the Third Rome. A nation that seeks revenge is risk-prone because the will to hurt the perceived enemies is much greater than the fear of potential costs. Consequently, a revanchist nation is a great risk-taker, less amenable to a negotiated settlement, creating the conditions for a highly unstable and long-lasting confrontation.

Putin will leave sooner or—as it seems—later. But modern Russia, shaped by a revitalized Russian Orthodox Church, will outlast him, remaining a strategic problem.

The post Russia’s Orthodox Grand Strategy appeared first on The American Interest.

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Published on March 19, 2020 09:30

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