Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 619

The Nihilistic Populism of Donald Trump

Is The Donald a populist candidate? Our friend Glenn Reynolds argued in Sunday’s USA Today that the rise of Donald Trump is best understood as a populist event—“an indictment of the GOP establishment and, for that matter, of the American political establishment in general” and “a sign that large numbers of voters don’t feel represented by more mainstream politicians.”

Over at the Washington Post, Daniel Drezner, another friend, disputes Reynolds’ interpretation of Trump, arguing that though “there’s definitely something to this”, “on closer inspection this isn’t really a straightforward populist story, for two reasons.” The first is that “the policy preferences that Trump is pushing aren’t all that popular.” The second is that Trump, rather than emphasizing his solidarity with ordinary people, makes a point of flaunting his tremendous wealth and privilege at every possible opportunity in outrageous ways.But Reynolds is right and Trump is very much a classic populist—in the following sense. Populism isn’t always about taking majority positions or cultivating economic solidarity with non-elites. In some populist movements, specific policy positions that don’t always or even often have majority support gain energy by hooking up with generalized dissatisfaction with elites and the status quo. Late 19th- and early 20th-century populism, from a policy standpoint, put a lot of stress on agrarian issues and crackpot economic ideas that, though there weren’t any opinion polls at the time, don’t seem to have had majority support. So while, as Drezner points out, hard-line immigration enforcement may not be particularly high on the agendas of a majority of voters, Trump can use the issue to signal his contempt for the establishment—and voters pay more attention to the tune than to the lyrics.As for Drezner’s argument that Trump’s wealth and Ivy League credentials weaken his populist bona fides: Rich and successful men, from Catiline to Andrew Jackson to Ross Perot, have presented themselves as populists from time immemorial. The Donald’s high-flying, bombastic style, with its tasteless and vulgar flaunting of exactly the kind of wealth that populism resents, looks superficially like it ought to drive hoi polloi away. That’s not how it works. Populism is often a political tool for members of the elite who, for one reason or another, can’t make it to the top through conventional methods and have to play an outside game to realize their ambitions; elitists and men of the people have both played the populist card over the centuries.Some populists, like William Jennings Bryan, make a point of staying close to the people they sprang from. Some politicians build mass support by ostentatious simplicity; think of Gandhi in India. That is roughly the path that Scott Walker is taking, loincloth and Hindu mysticism aside. Some politicians appeal to popular constituencies by advocating for their economic interests, at least apparently. This was the path of Huey “Every Man A King” Long in Louisiana. It was also the strategy President Harry Truman took in 1948 when he warned working Americans against Republican plans to destroy the trade union movement and the New Deal welfare state.

But Trump offers a different kind of “representation.” By flouting PC norms, reducing opponents and journalists to sputtering outrage as he trashes the conventions of political discourse, and dismissing his critics with airy put-downs, he is living the life that—at least some of the time—a lot of people wish they had either the courage or the resources to live. In this sense he’s not unlike Italy’s bad boy Silvio Berlusconi, who accumulated tremendous popular support by flaunting his refusal to abide by conventional rules of behavior.

For voters who’ve come to believe that both parties are owned and operated by the kind of people who pay Hillary Clinton hundreds of thousands of dollars to make platitudinous speeches, who believe that the system is rigged and will never be reformed, that the candidates offering “real solutions to real problems” are fooling either themselves or, more probably, you, Trump at least offers the satisfaction of making the other rat bastards and pompous PC elites squirm. He laughs at them and makes them look small; he defies their hatred and revels in their pursed-lip disapproval. By incurring the hatred of the chattering classes, he seems to some voters to be signaling both that he hates the empty showmanship of the capital as much as they do and that, by making himself the enemy of the self-determined arbiters of the rules of the political game, he is throwing himself on the support of the American people.

Trump is a sham, of course, but for many Americans in 2015 the whole political process is a sham. Trump, however, is an entertaining sham, and some voters think that if the establishment is going to screw you no matter what you do, you might as well vote for the funny one.

So it doesn’t matter that Trump’s positions (insofar as he has taken any) are unpopular, or that he is so obviously and outrageously a member of the economic elite that has so many Americans riled up this year—indeed, it may help him. Donald Trump is living large, which is how many Americans wish they could live.

In part, also, Trump’s popularity is the result of harmless good fun; our two-year presidential electoral cycle is a ridiculous spectacle and the reporters and pundits who discuss the horse race in such diligent detail are chasing will o’ the wisps and wasting time. Many of the people who answer the polls that get analyzed to death in long, thumb sucker pieces aren’t thinking seriously about how they will vote more than a year from now. You can also tell a pollster that you plan to vote for Trump simply, as George Wallace used to put it back in 1968, to “send them a message.” Trump offers average Americans the chance to pull the Establishment’s chain, and then watch the wonks and the pundits jerk and squeal. This is a lot of fun for the tens of millions of people out there who think the whole political class consists of high-minded incompetents and unprincipled parasites.

Nihilistic populism, that is, can also be a powerful phenomenon.

Oil Price Plunge Hits Venezuela the Hardest

These are not good days to be in the business of selling oil. The world is awash in the commodity, and that glut has depressed prices to levels less than half of what they were last summer. For oil majors, that means it’s time to tighten belts, reduce capital expenditures, and cull less productive projects. For petrostates, it’s a more complicated problem. Regimes around the world have consolidated power based on revenues generated from crude sales, and entire national economies rely on the oil sector. But if petrostates all across the world have it bad these days, Venezuela has been the hardest hit by the drop in prices, as the FT reports.

Like many other petrostates, Venezuela has used oil revenues to fund populist policies to placate what might otherwise be a restive public. Caracas is therefore loathe to trim its budget. But with domestic oil production stagnating, the country can’t expect to squeeze more out of its cash cow. Even when oil prices were above $100 per barrel, Caracas was forced to ration everything from toilet paper to sugar, milk to drinking water. Now, with crude trading around $50 per barrel, the Maduro government is trying to stave off creditors and manage its mounting debt. As investment bank head Russ Dallen, quoted in the FT, said,  “Venezuela is running on fumes…the current oil income is insufficient to allow the country to pay its debts, fund its imports and service its foreign bonds.”The latest indignity: the South American country’s taps are running dry as its largest beer distributor closes breweries because it can’t import necessary ingredients. Venezuela certainly can’t put all of the blame on ever-cheaper oil—we were seeing evidence of these problems well before the bottom fell out of the global crude market—but it’s making things much worse for the socialist nation.

The Daily News Brief

Every morning, some of our staff wake up before the crack of dawn (Eastern U.S. time) to scour the newspapers for what we think will be the important stories of the day, as seen through our particular filter. We pick seven stories, condense them into a few sentences each explaining why they are important, and provide links to the best coverage we find. It started out as something that we needed to do for our own work here at the magazine, and we have since been polishing it into something we hope you will find useful as well.

We started daily delivery last week, and we think it’s going pretty well. We’d love to add you to our list of readers. Sign up, below, and let us know how you like it. (It’s free!)And as always, if you like what we do and haven’t done so yet, please consider subscribing.
.mc4wp-form input[name="_mc4wp_required_but_not_really"] { display: none !important; }

Email Address:

First Name:

Last Name:

Scotland Duped into Banning GMOs

Scotland’s Rural Affairs Secretary Richard Lochhead has announced that the country will ban GMOs. In April, the EU proposed legislation that would speed up the process for approving GMOs for import into Europe, but it allows member states to ban GMOs within their own borders. Scotland has decided to take the EU up its concession. Reuters reports:

Scotland’s devolved government said on Sunday it intended to ban the growing of genetically modified (GM) crops on its territory to protect its “clean and green brand” and because there was little evidence that Scottish consumers wanted GM products.

“There is no evidence of significant demand for GM products by Scottish consumers and I am concerned that allowing GM crops to be grown in Scotland would damage our clean and green brand, thereby gambling with the future of our 14 billion-pound ($22 billion) food and drink sector,” [said Lochhead].

“Scotland is known around the world for our beautiful natural environment—and banning growing genetically modified crops will protect and further enhance our clean, green status,” said Lochhead. But not everyone agrees the move is so benign. The Guardian quotes Murdo Fraser, a Scottish Conservative: “I think this decision puts superstition before science. There’s a very strong scientific consensus that GM foods could be hugely beneficial, increasing the volume of food for the world’s population.”

Of the two politicians, Fraser is the one with his facts right. Despite popular movements against the crops and the modern environmental movement’s demonization of the technology, GMOs have time and time again been shown to be safe for human consumption. Not only that, they’re capable of feeding more people on less land in more extreme conditions with fewer pesticides. In other words, they’re the best hope we’ve got for feeding a global population Malthusian greens insist is on the cusp of exploding, and in the warmer, more extreme climate that the same group ceaselessly reminds us is right around the corner.By banning GMOs, Scottish officials are putting the plaudits of Luddite environmentalists before the interests of the planet.

‘Yes Means Yes’ May Be Illegal, Judge Rules

Just as affirmative consent standards are proliferating at campuses across the country, a Tennessee state judge issued a ruling that casts doubts on their legality.

The case before the court, Corey Mock vs. University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, is the archetypal he-said-she-said campus sexual assault dispute that we have grown painfully used to over the last few years. Corey Mock, a wrestler, met a female UTC student on Tinder and they became friends. He invited her to a late-night house party, where they both got drunk and had sex in a bedroom. She later said that the sex was non-consensual and filed a complaint. Mock insists that she actively participated and gave no indication that she did not consent. On orders from the campus chancellor, Mock was expelled; Judge Carol McCoy’s ruling, released last week, reversed Mock’s expulsion.McCoy is not the first judge to side with a male student who says he was treated unfairly by his campus in a sexual assault proceeding. But the novel rationale she used—in a nutshell, that the “yes means yes” standard the University applied is fundamentally unfair—could prove highly influential if heeded by other courts.“Affirmative consent” or “yes means yes,” requires that the person initiating sexual contact of any kind obtain positive agreement from the other party before proceeding. Instead of requiring the complainant to prove that he did not consent, affirmative consent effectively places the responsibility on the accused to show that his partner consented.Critics of affirmative consent have long argued that this standard perverts due process by essentially requiring the accused person prove that he is innocent. McCoy’s ruling is a full-throated endorsement of this reasoning. “The UTC Chancellor,” she wrote, “improperly shifted the burden of proof and imposed an untenable standard upon Ms. Mock to disprove the accusation.” She acknowledges that the Chancellor interpreted the campus’ affirmative consent policy as “an effort to change the culture of sexual relations on campus and to clear up the ambiguity surrounding consent.” However, she said, the imperative of combating sexual assault does not entitle the university to require Mr. Mock “to disprove the charges against him.” In the most quotable passage of her opinion, McCoy states that “Yes Means Yes,” as implemented by the University, is untenable because:

Absent the tape recording of a verbal consent or other independent means to demonstrate that consent was given, the ability of the accused to prove the complaining party’s consent strains credulity and is illusory.

McCoy never explicitly states that “Yes Means Yes” is unlawful per se. She merely says that it is unlawful as UTC applied it in Mr. Mock’s case. However, if other courts apply McCoy’s reasoning, that may be a distinction without a difference. The essential feature of affirmative consent standards is to shift the burden of proof and require that the accused to show he received consent. As Judith Shulevitz wrote regarding criminal affirmative consent standards:

if the law requires a “no,” then the jury will likely perceive any uncertainty about that “no” as a weakness in the prosecution’s case and not convict. But if the law requires a “yes,” then ambiguity will bolster the prosecutor’s argument: The guy didn’t get unequivocal consent, therefore he must be guilty of rape.

Shulevitz was talking about hypothetical criminal standards, but the same feature applies to campus rules: Affirmative consent, by its nature, shifts the burden of proof from the authorities to the accused person. If this runs afoul of “the fundamental requirement of due process,” as Judge McCoy says it does, then affirmative consent itself is untenable, and the policies of hundreds of colleges and universities may need to be reversed.

This decision represents the only time, to our knowledge, that a state court has explicitly evaluated an affirmative consent standard, and there is no guarantee that other courts will follow. But as affirmative consent gains momentum—it has already been mandated by state legislatures of California and New York in the last year—there will be no shortage of opportunities for students to challenge it in courts of law.

Japan and the Philippines Bond Over China Threat

Relations between Tokyo and Manila have been warming recently thanks to solidarity over the threat of Chinese expansionism, but never so rapidly as in the past week. Now, in the most tangible result of the friendship yet, Japan is trying to give surveillance aircraft to the Philippines, according to unconfirmed but solid Japanese sources who spoke to Reuters:

Four sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters that Japan was looking to offer three Beechcraft TC-90 King Air planes that could be fitted with basic surface and air surveillance radar.

They said talks within the Japanese government were preliminary and would need to overcome legal hurdles. Japan had yet to formally propose the planes as an alternative to more sophisticated Lockheed Martin P3-C aircraft that Manila wants to track Chinese submarine activity, they added. […]

The planes would make a genuine difference for Manila, which said last week that it didn’t have almost any surveillance capacity at all, and that it had relied on the word of returning fishermen to find out about China’s massive land reclamation projects in the Spratly Islands

If the donation gets through, it will be Japan’s first ever gift of military hardware to another country, making it a minor milestone in Shinzo Abe’s campaign to push Japan towards militarism. There’s every reason to think Tokyo will do all it can to make it happen. Japan has a strong vested interest in the territorial disputes in the South China Sea, although it claims none of the area for itself. And lately, as China has cooled things off in the East China Sea, where it had been threatening Japanese vessels around the Senkaku Islands, the country has stepped up aggression in the South China Sea, bringing tensions there to an uncomfortable boil. Tokyo seems to have taken note, and its feelings of solidarity with fellow opponents of China can only be bolstered by its desire to keep China focused southward—and to keep the action at arms length.China, for its part, has made it more than clear that it despises surveillance overflights, and at last week’s ASEAN meeting, Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi loudly decried what his country interprets as Manila and Tokyo’s collusion. Watch this space to see how it all plays out.

Apocalypse Watch

A group is advancing a plan to breed red heifers in Israel, according to a piece in the Times of Israel. That’s much more important than it may sound: Both Christian and Jewish holy books appear to predict the construction of a new Jewish Temple before the world ends. One of the obstacles has been that the ashes of a red heifer “without blemish or spot” are needed for certain ceremonies connected with it. It appears now that some embryos with the right genes are ready to go—if suitably kosher farms can be found for them in Israel. Times of Israel:

Red heifers were slaughtered as sacrifices in the Temple and the ashes were used in purification rituals, especially for people who had become impure through contact with dead bodies.

The Temple Institute is a 28-year-old organization that has built more than 70 artifacts that can be used when a Third Temple is built. Its latest project is to import frozen embryos from Red Angus cattle in the United States to create a herd of kosher red heifers in Israel. […]In order to create an environment that will sufficiently protect the cows and safeguard their ritually kosher status, [Temple Institute co-founder Rabbi Chaim] Richman and his supporters toured a number of farms in Israel, ironing out the details of the layout and infrastructure to minimize the possibility of harm.

We’re not reporting this because TAI is in the doomsday prediction business. Indeed, the Temple Institute itself denies that its motivation is bring about the end times—as the Times piece reports, “Richman said that the organization’s focus on building ritual objects ready for use in the Third Temple does not have a messianic agenda and does not aim to hasten an eschatological end of days.”

But projects to supply the Third Temple invariably will have eschatological overtones for some people, and the story reminds us that the politics of the 21st century is increasingly driven by messianic longings and apocalyptic fears. With anxieties about nuclear apocalypse, runaway global warming, the rise of intelligent machine overlords, and many fears about other threats circulating in human imaginations, we are living in a time when humanity’s ultimate nightmares threaten to come to life. At the same time, scientific progress offers continuing hope for blessings, ranging from universal prosperity to greatly extended lifespans. The human mind bounces like a ping pong ball between hope and fear.The most important political consequence of this radical uncertainty are drives toward radicalism like the ones we see upending both the Shi’a and Sunni worlds in Islam. And Israel is not exempt; the cells of religious fanatics like those taken into custody this week are as driven by the emotions of our age of millenarian upheaval as the ISIS fighters just a few tens of miles to their north.We live in interesting times.

Germany Remembers It Has a Military

It’s been an embarrassing year for the German military. Earlier this year, German soldiers participated in a drill using black-painted broomsticks as stand-ins for guns, while the government was forced to dispatch its equivalent of Air Force One because none of its other military aircraft were kept airworthy.

But now Berlin appears to be stepping up its game. This summer Germany’s Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen vowed to increase spending, and now the defense ministry has announced it will commit over six billion euros to a program to upgrade German planes, helicopters, and other military equipment, according to an Agence France-Presse report published by Yahoo News:

Der Spiegel news weekly, which first revealed the investment programme, said the army planned 120 measures to boost personnel and stocks of spare parts.

The paper Der Spiegel cited “numerous” defence documents, which confirmed the “hardware problems constraining the capacity” of the Bundeswehr.It listed radar problems with Eurofighter jets and with winches on board the NH90 transport helicopters that hampered their use in operations.Only four of military’s 39 NH90 helicopters are currently useable, Der Spiegel said.

Germany remains the strongest power in Europe, and its failure to maintain a serious military force stands as a testament to NATO’s lackluster commitment to defense spending as a whole. For the U.S., this trend, which is only able to persist because NATO and other allies assume the Americans can deal with any serious military issues, is no small problem. Global threats are on the rise, and the U.S. needs other NATO members to make real, though not equal, contributions. Germany’s program to scrape the rust off its considerable fleet of weaponry is a good if limited sign there—now if only we could get a few more countries to buy into the idea of meeting their NATO obligations to spend 2 percent of GDP on defense.

The Politics of a Panic

We Believe the Children

by Richard BeckPublicAffairs, 2015, 352 pp., $26.99

In August of 1983, Judy Johnson, a single mother in Manhattan Beach, a wealthy Los Angeles suburb, called the police to report that she believed her three-year old son had been sexually abused at McMartin preschool. There was something wrong with his anus, she said, likely because he had been sodomized by one of the teachers. The police sent out a letter to hundreds of parents asking if they had suspicions about the teacher. Before long, the department was inundated with accusations.

As police and mental health professionals began to interrogate the children, and as parents began to gossip obsessively about the preschool, the nature of the allegations became more and more grotesque. The children hadn’t merely been molested; they had been taken into underground tunnels forced to watch Satanic animal sacrifices; they had been flown out of Los Angeles International Airport and photographed by child pornographers across the state; they had been forced to participate in sex acts with several preschool teachers at once. Prosecutors believed a massive criminal conspiracy was at work and that hundreds of children had been abused. Manhattan Beach was soon embroiled in the longest criminal trial in American history.The McMartin preschool case is the most famous example of the child abuse hysteria that swept across the nation three decades ago, and it is the focus of Richard Beck’s ambitious and meticulously researched new book, We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s. But it is not the only case, or even the most bizarre one, that Beck describes. In Kern County, a working-class area in central California, a couple was convicted of “selling their children for sex in area motels and abusing them while the children hung from hooks in the ceiling,” and other children “claimed their abusers wore black robes and brandished inverted crosses.” A Texas prosecutor said at trial that children were abused by a group of men “dressed as monsters and werewolves.” The panic was a national phenomenon, with communities descending into witch-hunt style investigations from Washington to Minnesota to Massachusetts.Beck, an editor of the avant-garde literary journal n+1, is an able historian and a clear writer. His thorough analysis of media reports, police records and court transcripts successfully brings this nightmarish cultural episode to life. The book is a devastating indictment of the earnest but irresponsible detectives and psychologists who effectively projected their own fantasies into young children’s imaginations over the course of extended interrogations, and of overzealous prosecutors—including such high-profile figures as Janet Reno and Martha Coakley—who put innocent people in prison.But We Believe The Children is not only, or even primarily, a work of history. It is first and foremost a sophisticated culture war polemic. Woven throughout Beck’s measured, journalistic accounts of the investigations and prosecutions is a radical political argument—an all-out attack on “the patriarchal nuclear family,” an institution that he sees as having no function whatsoever except to suppress individual freedom. It is the “patriarchal nuclear family,” Beck insists, that is the real cause of child sexual abuse. The heroes in his narrative are the radical feminists who sought to dismantle the family in the 1960s and 1970s. And the villains are the Reagan-era social conservatives who sought to stem its decline. According to Beck, these reactionaries created the 1980s hysteria by terrifying parents into thinking that alternative social arrangements would put their children in peril.Beck’s cultural story begins in the 1950s, when physicians treating injured infants often ignored evidence of abuse. The doctors’ willingness to look away, Beck says, “speaks volumes about the nuclear family’s status in postwar society: the prestige, the respect, and especially the extraordinary degree of privacy that families regarded as their natural right.” This sets the stage for a theme Beck returns to again and again: the traditional family, America’s “most sacred institution,” is actually the site of terrible violence. Child abuse stems in large part from “the relative powerlessness of women and children within nuclear families.”There is something quite strange about Beck’s casual association, over and over again, of “the patriarchal nuclear family” with child abuse. As W. Bradford Wilcox and Robin Fretwell Wilson have pointed out, the data show that children living with their married biological parents are an order of magnitude less likely to be abused—sexually or otherwise—than children living in other social arrangements. Children are more likely to be abused by someone they live with than by a stranger, but stepfathers and men cohabitating with the child’s mother are among the most frequent perpetrators. One can debate the extent to which poverty factors into these statistics—poor children are more likely to live with single parents or step-parents—but there is no dispute that children living in the “patriarchal nuclear family” that Beck so despises are least likely to be harmed at the hands of their guardians. So Beck is standing more on ideological than empirical footing when he insists that the weakening of the family as a social institution from the 1960s onward was an unalloyed good, and that the conservative campaign to shore up the family is born purely out of fear, bigotry, and reaction. But that is his view, and he is certainly not the only person on the cultural left to see things that way.This understanding of post-1960s cultural politics leads Beck to interpret the child sex abuse hysteria of the 1980s as essentially a conservative campaign to slow down the sexual revolution. After the 1960s, Beck says, social conservatives saw “a country in which porn, gays and women had run amok,” and “argued that the confines of traditional family life, with its breadwinning husband and housewife mother, provided a shelter from social madness.” One key weapon in their political arsenal, he says, was to cultivate a sense that the nation’s children were in danger. Each of the child sex abuse cases dramatized the way a different social transformation endangered children. The day care cases served as “a warning to mothers who thought they could keep their very young children safe while pursuing a life outside the home.” Other investigations targeted parents in non-traditional family structures to send the message that “mixed families lead to predatory sex rings.” And in several of the cases, police and prosecutors used gay and lesbian defendants’ sexual orientation against them.Beck’s theory of the sex abuse hysteria as a right-wing campaign to intimidate working women, remarried couples, and gays probably captures some truth. But it is complicated by the fact that feminists played a huge role in perpetuating the child abuse panics, as he acknowledges. Gloria Steinem wrote self-help books targeted at “women who had recovered memories of ‘ritual or cult abuse’,” and “Ms. magazine, the country’s largest feminist publication, put out an issue with the cover headline: ‘BELIEVE IT! Cult Ritual Abuse Exists. One Woman’s Story’.” The 1980s feminist anti-pornography movement, led by Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, also overlapped substantially—in terms of supporters, legal interests, and rhetorical strategies—with the child abuse panic.The large-scale feminist complicity with the hysteria would seem to undermine the notion that it was an anti-feminist enterprise. But Beck claims that the panicky, censorious, victim-oriented feminism that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s was merely a byproduct of the period’s conservative revival. Conservative arguments about sex had “gained so much momentum,” he writes, “that even some feminists joined in, arguing that the liberalization of sex had gone too far and produced not freedom but anarchy, danger, pornography, victimization and psychological trauma.” It might be the case that this type of feminism (as opposed to the more libertarian, sex-positive, 1960s version) was merely a projection of the culturally conservative mood of the 1980s, but it seems unlikely—not least because social conservatism today is weaker than it has ever been before, and yet what might be called “MacKinnon feminism” is as strong as ever, especially on college campuses.One wonders if Beck deliberately chose to publish this book in the midst of the national outcry over campus rape in order to draw implicit parallels between the 1980s hysteria and what is taking place today. Beck recounts how, in a 1984 hearing on child abuse, Senator Arlen Specter said, “The molestation of children has now reached epidemic proportions.” Senator Mark Warner used the same term to describe the campus rape problem at a press conference earlier this year. Beck recounts how legislators and voters responded to the child abuse hysteria by giving prosecutors vast new powers—for example, making hearsay evidence admissible and scrapping preliminary hearings. Today, universities across the country, under pressure from the federal government and state legislatures, are narrowing due process rights in sex cases so as to obtain more convictions. Beck recounts how ordinarily perceptive people suspended disbelief and believed outrageous stories about Satanic abuse despite obvious countervailing evidence. That more or less describes why Rolling Stone recently printed—and was then forced to retract—an apocryphal story describing a monstrous, three-hour long gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity party. Beck describes the way “recovered memory” therapists, who encouraged women to recall childhood abuse, “outfitted victimization with a redemption narrative, and in recasting victims as survivors, it made victimization into an identity with its own kind of bleak attractiveness.” Much the same dynamic is at work on our sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia-obsessed campuses today.Beck insightfully notes that while “some ritual abuse skeptics have explained the panic as a simple failure of reason . . . it hardly explains anything at all to point out that people got their facts wrong.” In the same way, many observers who doubt the campus “rape epidemic” narrative simply bash its proponents for being unreasonable, without thinking carefully about the broader social trends that might have made the narrative so appealing to so many people, from the dean’s office to the White House. One possible reason for its appeal is the transformation in campus gender relations that has taken place since the sexual revolution. As Heather MacDonald has noted, relations between college men and college women used to be regulated by informal norms of modesty, propriety, and restraint, as well as formal parietal rules governing dorm visitation. Once this system was swept away, the campus sex scene became much more hostile to women, who were increasingly confronted by drunk, boorish, exploitative young men who think that they are entitled to sex on their first encounter. Even if male behavior does not usually rise to the level of assault, the campus sex scene is morally corrupt, and the rape epidemic narrative provides a vocabulary for cultural progressives to express this without breaking with the liberal shibboleth that more sexual freedom is always an unqualified good.A similar dynamic might help account for the 1980s hysteria. As Beck notes, families began to break down in the 1960s, as divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births surged. Beck thinks that the expansion of personal sexual freedom at the expense of the nuclear family structure made people happier—that “people actively wanted these social changes to take place, even if they often found this was a desire they could not bring themselves to acknowledge.” But maybe they didn’t. Maybe people felt that rising rates of divorce, cohabitation, abortion, and single motherhood were actually worse—for parents and children alike. Maybe parents, like college students, felt that while the sexual revolution brought many blessings, it brought a number of challenges as well. And maybe the day care hysteria was in part a projection of peoples’ anxiety about this brave new world.

First Fruit of Iran Deal: Assad Getting a Break?

Will the US or its traditional allies drag Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in from the cold along with Iran? Recent reports rounded up by the AP suggest that may be the case—with potentially explosive results in the region:

— In the wake of mediation by Assad’s Russian patrons, a quiet, ice-breaking meeting took place in Riyadh in late July between Brig. Gen. Ali Mamlouk, the head of Syria’s powerful National Security Bureau, and Prince Mohammad Bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s deputy crown prince and defense minister. That represented a significant shift and an opening of channels between two countries that have become arch foes in Syria’s conflict. Saudi Arabia along with other Gulf states has been a key backer of rebels fighting to topple Assad.

— Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem flew Thursday to Oman after a two-day visit to Tehran, amid unconfirmed reports in pro-Assad media outlets that the Omani government was trying to broker a meeting of the foreign ministers of Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia.— Iran has said it is preparing to submit a four-point peace plan proposal for Syria to the United Nations. According to some reports, it includes a “national unity government.” That is code for allowing Assad a face-saving period in which he shares power — and elections under international supervision. But it would also bring some prominence to the otherwise marginalized relative moderates who have failed to dislodge Assad militarily.

As Walter Russell Mead has pointed out in these pages and in Congressional testimony recently, the Iran deal sets the Administration up to do one of two things in the Middle East. Either it can confront Iran’s expansionism now that the nuclear threat is, as the White House would argue, off the table, or it can reconcile with an increasing Iranian hegemony in the region. The first would take a great deal of diplomatic finesse to pull off while keeping the nuke deal intact. The second seems easier, but could help fuel an increased Sunni-Shi’a sectarian war in the medium-to-long-term, as well as pose grave threats to U.S. national interests in the Gulf.

Syrian diplomacy can be a bit opaque. Recent U.S.-Russian meetings, for instance, have hinted at some sort of post-Assad Syrian rapproachement between the two powers, and the Gulf Sunni monarchies seem to be hedging their bets in the wake of the nuclear deal. But if Assad stays in any form—and both he, the Russians, and the Iranians seem loath to accept any other solution—and is accepted by the outside powers, it will be taken as a clear sign of an assent to Shi’a hegemony, with all the dangerous reactions from the Sunni that would entail.For U.S. Senators and Congressmen voting on the deal, meanwhile, this bears close watching. Even within the short span of sixty days, it may be that by this deal’s fruits, ye may start to know it.