Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 62

The Wireless Great Power Rivalry

Financial markets got a short-lived sugar high when Presidents Trump and Xi announced a tariff ceasefire in Argentina on December 1, after what Trump dubbed “an amazing and productive meeting with unlimited possibilities.” But Trump’s optimism cannot hide the fact that the United States is plunging into a prolonged great power rivalry with China. The arrest in Canada, at U.S. request, of a top executive of the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei is only the latest evidence. Both sides may try to disentangle that dispute, which seems partially based on an Iranian sanctions violation, from the trade negotiations, which have a looming March 1 deadline. Yet on balance, the United States is clearly veering toward great power competition rather than large trade deals with China. This rivalry is the new structural reality of the relationship. Markets, businesses, and U.S. allies alike should take note.

There is a creative tension at the heart of the Trump Administration’s approach to China. Trump wants to do a big trade deal that would entice China to buy more American goods, especially agricultural goods, and allow more market access for American companies in China. This fits with Trump’s instinct that trade deficits are inherently bad, and the U.S.-China trade deficit especially egregious. China’s monthly trade surplus with the United States did widen to $35.55 billion in November, a record high. Reducing that deficit is certainly possible, if the Chinese ramped up their buying of American goods and allowed U.S. companies better access. If the metric of negotiations is the size of the trade deficit, the contours of a deal are already apparent. That outcome would see the United States and China trading more, but with a smaller bilateral imbalance. It would be a natural extension of longstanding U.S. engagement and trade policy with China.

But such a “Buy More American” deal will not address the fundamental disenchantment with China. It goes far beyond trade. From the Trump Administration to Congress, from business to civil society, a reckoning with U.S. engagement policy toward China is underway. Vice President Pence’s China speech at the Hudson Institute in October was a sledgehammer to the foundation of earlier, uncritical engagement policy. After Congress introduced tighter scrutiny with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), Chinese investment in the United States has plummeted.

New Executive Branch rules tighten export controls, including in emerging technologies like artificial intelligence. The Pentagon is reportedly scrutinizing its supply chains for Chinese vulnerabilities. White House advisor Stephen Miller, one of the few who has stayed on since the earliest days of the Trump presidency, has toyed with slashing visas for Chinese students in the United States. In the think tank community and among China scholars, there is a self-reckoning about Chinese funding and cooperation schemes that allow Chinese agendas to permeate U.S. society. On Monday, Secretary of State Pompeo summed up the U.S. government view succinctly: “China presents the greatest challenge that the United States will face in the medium to long-term.”

All these data points fit within the great power rivalry framework laid out in the National Security Strategy and the National Defense Strategy. The U.S. military, steered by the new guiding document, is building up for China scenarios. As Defense Secretary Mattis recently remarked, “We will confront them where we must.”

Given that background, China policy might come to resemble Russia policy, whereby Trump seeks to build cordial relations at the top level with Putin but a mix of Russian belligerence, congressional toughness on sanctions, and the priorities of the rest of the administration box in options for expanding cooperation. In the end, the presidential policy space gets reduced to tweets.

The recent arrest of Huawei Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou on behalf of U.S. authorities suggests what the future may look like. Markets fell on the news, and several administration officials subsequently claimed that President Trump had no advance knowledge of the arrest. Regardless, the news demonstrates that the wheels are turning toward a tougher China policy across the administration. Reportedly, Meng was arrested because of possible sanctions evasion involving Iran, an area where the administration has recently stepped up sanctions and promised a tough line on enforcement. If the case leads to a conviction in a U.S. court, it will provide a public look into Huawei’s global operations, and could confirm allegations about its espionage activities that have circulated within the U.S. intelligence community for years.

Huawei, the nominally private but effectively state-supported Chinese telecom provider, is emblematic of the difficulties facing U.S.-China relations. Over the past several years, Huawei’s efforts to make a dent in the U.S. market have been stymied. In Congress, Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) are leading an effort to examine Huawei’s research partnerships with American universities. Both CFIUS, the national security investment screening process, and Congress keep a wary eye on Huawei and ZTE, another Chinese telecom provider. Yet both companies have global reach and continue to expand elsewhere.

Behind the scenes, the U.S. government has pressured close intelligence partners in the Five Eyes network to bar Huawei from building their 5G wireless internet networks. Australia and New Zealand have already moved in that direction. The UK government is under internal deliberations on the matter. Until recently, the United Kingdom has welcomed Huawei’s participation on major telecom projects, but in early December, the Chief of MI6, Alex Younger, sounded a cautionary note in a rare public appearance.

Elsewhere in Europe, governments seem oblivious. Huawei has inked up to 14 cooperation agreements on 5G networks, overtaking European providers such as Ericsson and Nokia. Last week, Portugal was the latest to proceed with a 5G-deal with Huawei.

U.S.-China rivalry is likely to manifest itself in proxy wars over wireless technology and artificial intelligence. That is the new reality that U.S. allies in Europe and Asia must face. It also goes for businesses, of whom the U.S. government is likely to demand more corporate patriotism. (Note Vice President Pence’s call-out of Google’s Dragonfly project, which would comply with Chinese digital authoritarianism.) Just as the mantra under the War on Terror was, “Are you with us or against us?,” allies may soon face another binary choice: “Are you with us or Huawei?”

The post The Wireless Great Power Rivalry appeared first on The American Interest.

From Pole to Pole: The Rise and Fall of Liberal Poland

In June 2004, O’Connell Street, Dublin’s main thoroughfare, spoke Polish. Or so it seemed, anyway, to me and the many other Poles there looking for a place to stay and a job—any job. I was lucky: I got one at a lunch franchise called Itsa Bagel. I wore a fully organic gray linen apron, made fancy sandwiches I couldn’t afford, and gained both a healthy appreciation for the hard work of employees in the service sector and a firm resolve that I never wanted to be one again. But I was 21, had just finished my third year of university, and the money I’d earn—a whopping €7 per hour, thrice what I would have gotten for the same job in Poland—would support me over the next semester. It was a temporary gig, an adventure, an exercise in self-reliance for a till-then rather pampered middle-class girl. Above all it was my first dip into life in the West, a promised land that we Poles so long aspired to.

On May 1 of the same year, my country, along with nine former communist states, joined the European Union. Back then its name was synonymous with prosperity, democracy, the welfare state, and security: in short, civilization. After a half-century of communism and 15 years in limbo, that this civilization would finally let us in seemed to us as close to heaven on earth as heaven ever got. No longer barbarians at the gate, we would become first-class Europeans. Or so we, the summer Gastarbeiters, twentysomething students armed with no real life skills and shamelessly embellished CVs, believed.

There were plenty of us in Ireland and the United Kingdom, the two countries that had bravely opened their labor markets to East Europeans in 2004. Even more Poles—plumbers, nurses, construction workers, strawberry-pickers or assembly-line workers, plus some white-collar specialists—would immigrate for good. Two and a half million more would come over 14 years, pushed by the then-20 percent unemployment rate in Poland. But ours was an unencumbered optimism: a feeling that the world was within our reach and we had just taken the necessary first step on the road to prosperity.

We were grateful to take jobs the British and Irish wouldn’t consider doing for themselves, to work harder and longer than they did, to save rather than spend, all in the knowledge that our future children wouldn’t have to make such sacrifices. They would be Europeans, born and bred, entitled to ski vacations in the Alps and gap years in Southeast Asia. Sure, if you compared salaries in Germany, the United Kingdom, or France with those in Poland, we felt like poor relatives, counting every euro and thinking twice if we could afford to have a beer in a pub instead of buying one at Tesco. But at some point in the not-too-distant future, we believed that we would bridge this wealth gap. Give us twenty years or so, and we would live like Germans.

Our friends and family back home seemed to share our enthusiasm. It was, after all, an impressive 77 percent majority that had decided a year before to join the European Union.

So, what happened? Fast forward to 2015, and Poland has elected a right-wing populist government known for its open hostility to European values. How did it come to pass that the poster child of successful democratic and economic transition become the living proof that liberal democracy doesn’t work in Eastern Europe?

In May 2009, in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, Prime Minister Donald Tusk had an unexpectedly optimistic message for his people. To hammer it home more effectively, he brought a prop: a map of Europe on which all other EU countries were painted bright, alarming red, accompanied by numbers showing how much their GDP had dropped during the past year. Poland, with meager 0.4 percent growth, was still green.

“The Poles passed their first test in times of crisis with flying colors. We are the only ‘green’ country in the EU,” said Tusk.

This narrative of Poland as the “green island,” the Central European success story, dominated the next six years of Tusk’s center-right Civic Platform government. The economy grew steadily if not spectacularly—about 29 percent between 2008 and 2015. The government built highways and bought high-speed Pendolino trains from Italy, finally enabling fast travel between Poland’s major cities. The European Union supported farmers with generous subsidies and financed infrastructure investments—roads, public transportation, aquaparks—in towns large and small. Successful businessmen gave motivational speeches about how, if only you worked hard and didn’t complain—and the state didn’t curb your entrepreneurial spirit with unnecessary taxes and regulations—the sky was the limit. Success, according to the conventional wisdom prevalent since the 1990s, was a reward for individual merit and effort. Failure was also of one’s own making.

Yet if you scratched this gilded surface, it was clear that for most Poles the limit was much, much lower than the clear blue sky. It was more like low-lying storm clouds.

“Don’t ask me what it means to be successful or I’ll hit you. Come on, let’s go for a walk, I’m getting worked up from all this success,” said Szymon Kazanecki, one of those Poles whose boat was not lifted by the proverbial tide. Konrad Oprzędek told Kazanecki’s story in “National Ink: Poland in Patriot Tattoos,” an article in Gazeta Wyborcza published in January 2016. Kazanecki, a born-again patriot—awoken, he said, by the Smoleńsk plane crash that killed President Lech Kaczyński eight years ago—has been accumulating Polish history tattoos, and at six-foot-one and 200 pounds, he made for an expansive canvass.

Kazanecki’s wife, Paulina, explained that Szymon is basically harmless, but can be set off by a few particular trigger points. “The green island. Also, don’t mention highways and aquaparks, because for my husband it’s just like putting fresh paint on a tenement house: the outside is bright and colorful, but inside you still have a mess and poverty,” she said. “Highways—yeah, rich people use them, but not us. When we visit our parents, we take side roads, because 40 zł ($11) for a ride is too much. Together we earn 3,600 zł after tax ($950), and we have two kids. We can’t afford Pendolino either,” she added.

GDP has indeed grown in Poland, but incomes haven’t grown proportionally. The share of Poland’s GDP consisting of wages and salaries is one of the lowest in the European Union (38 percent for Poland, versus 47 percent for the EU as a whole). Many Poles never felt that the official narrative of success had much to do with them. In 2014 the median after-tax income was just below 2,400 zł ($630) per month. And those who earned it in a full-time position, with benefits, could count themselves lucky.

Even though unemployment declined considerably after 2004, well into the single digits, work became increasingly precarious. Ever more Poles, especially young people, could count only on short-term forms of employment, which earned the unflattering nickname “śmieciówka” (trash contract). Such contracts offer no job security, no paid holidays, no sick leave, no health insurance, and no retirement savings. They make it nearly impossible to get a mortgage or make any long-term life plans, from planning a vacation to having children.

The śmieciówka emerged from the 2008 crisis as a means to increase work flexibility and unburden struggling companies. But the crisis ended and trash contracts remained: In 2015, they were the daily reality for 27 percent of working Poles. Most of those workers, research found, would have preferred a more stable form of employment. But it was an employer’s market, and rates were set by whim. In some cases, security guards worked for a mere 4 zł ($1) per hour. “It’s work stripped of dignity,” admitted Tusk—but the Civic Platform government did precious little to curb the trash contracts.

And then along came PiS, the Law and Justice Party, which promised—and delivered—the minimum hourly rate of 13 zł, a higher minimum wage, and the “500 Plus” program: a monthly benefit of 500 zł ($130) for every family with two children, and an additional 500 zł for every subsequent child. For many Poles these bread-and-butter issues, and the feeling that for once they could rely not only on themselves but on the state (as they had, in a very low-flying way, under communism), proved far more important than abstract ideals like an independent judiciary or a constitution. Benjamin Franklin, wary of the challenges to the bold American experiment, famously spoke in 1789 of “a republic, if you can keep it.” Poles might have kept the liberal democracy that emerged from communism, had they not been so eager to trade it for a pot of red lentils.

Yet explaining the PiS’s ascendency in Marxoid terms, by way of Bill Clinton—it’s the redistribution, stupid!—is far too simple. It was not only the losers from economic transformation, the “forgotten men and women” of Poland, who voted for Law and Justice in 2015. Yes, PiS was most popular among farmers and the working class; but it won among every socioeconomic and demographic group except for the managerial class.

The growth Poland has experienced since it joined the European Union awoke aspirations for higher standards of living. The Poles, especially those who had experienced life abroad, felt that they deserved access to well-paid, stable jobs and efficient, affordable public services, and that the state was to blame if they lacked it. The Civic Platform, stuck in its neo-liberal narrative of individual success, was unwilling to increase the government’s role in providing for a better life. PiS not only promised to do so, but also offered a new kind of legitimization to the aspirations of its electorate. Maciej Gdula, a social scientist who has conducted in-depth research among PiS voters that he published in a report called Dobra zmiana w Miastku (A Good Change in Middletown), calls it neo-authoritarianism.

Neo-authoritarianism is not old-fashioned authoritarianism because its mindset accepts democratic elections. But it accepts them only as a way to give the majority a mandate to govern unencumbered by minority rights. In other words, it accepts democracy only if it is fundamentally illiberal, as Western publics understand the term. This ruling majority—PiS politicians use the term “the sovereign”—is based on a narrowly defined national community (white, Catholic, ethnic Poles) and applies the solidarity principle only to its members. We “normal” people have to stick together, the pitch goes, form an impenetrable front against dangerous outside forces, and not let our unity be eroded by pity for the undeserving.

PiS promised its electorate that it would settle scores with the liberal elites who had been ruling Poland for the past quarter-century. In the party’s telling, the elite was inherently corrupt and disloyal to their own country (defined to include allowing foreigners to invest in the Polish economy). It follows that they did nothing to help the struggling and marginalized because they did not care about such people. In this mindset, if a politician, judge, or journalist criticized, say, the dismantling of the Constitutional Court, it was only because they had been “pulled away from the trough” and were desperate to get it back. “There is a terrible tradition of national treason in Poland. Some people, the worst sort of Poles, have it in their genes. And they are extremely active because they feel threatened,” said Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of PiS, about the people who took to the streets to oppose the judiciary reform.

Polish neo-authoritarianism is thus a form of community based on shared hostility toward the elites and the weak—women, refugees, those with “pathology” (that is, the poorest, people with alcohol or drug problems, broken families)—and bound by the sense that “normal” people have a right to dominate these groups. It gives the members of this community permission to be ruthless, to vent their frustration and inferiority complexes on someone even more miserable than themselves.

The figure of a refugee— the ultimate Other, so different as to be barely recognizable as human and thus dangerous—was significant in ensuring a PiS victory. Kaczyński warned during the campaign that migrants carry “all sorts of parasites and protozoa, which, while not dangerous in the organisms of these people, could be dangerous here.” In PiS rhetoric, a refugee equals a terrorist, and closing Poland’s borders to people escaping atrocities is both a patriotic duty and a common-sense measure.

Law and Justice gave its supporters an attractive and coherent common identity, and a monolithic worldview that has proven surprisingly resistant to critique. It is a kind of empowerment, albeit an empowerment that comes from the ability to humiliate, belittle, and bully others, and then to feel justified in so doing. It offers a surface narrative of regaining dignity, acquiring national pride, and restoring justice; but its underside exudes darker undertones of punishment, exclusion, and contempt. It is a classic case, in other words, of creating in-group solidarity by targeting supposed out-group threats. As such, it has much in common with both resentment and plain fear.

In a recent essay (soon to be a book) entitled “Explaining Eastern Europe: Imitation and Its Discontents,” Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes compare Eastern Europe to Frankenstein’s monster: a distorted imitation of a human being that, disillusioned and betrayed by its creator, turns against him. Harsh, yes; but the authors focus on the imitation, not the monster. A key reason why Poland and Hungary are now in the midst of an illiberal revolution, they argue, is the repressed resentment of the imitator toward its model.

The main goal for the East European countries after 1989 was “the return to normalcy.” What the Poles understood by this term, however, was not any return to a more or less imagined national golden age—Poland hardly had one in the 20th century—but rather being like the West.

The fall of the Berlin Wall meant not only the import of democracy and capitalism, but also of Western pop culture. In the early 1990s all of Poland stood still at 6 pm on Sunday nights to watch reruns of Dynasty, then seen as a realistic portrait of the American way of life. It was all that the Poles, fed for the past half century on an austere diet of communism, dreamed of: the overblown mansions and shiny Rolls Royces, the bejeweled dresses and umbrella drinks, designer consumerism on steroids. In order to catapult itself into this brave new world of limitless possibilities, we were told, Poland should imitate the West as closely as possible: establish liberal-democratic institutions, launch a market economy, and embrace Western cultural values. And, as it turned out later on, swallow the humiliation of acknowledging a foreign culture as superior to your own.

The problem is that imitation can never equal, let alone surpass, any genuine cultural original. Imitators tend to be seen as both culturally and morally inferior: as social climbers, as bumpkin country cousins. As Krastev and Holmes put it, “While the mimics looked up to their models, the models looked down on their mimics.” For the West, the post-communist countries floated always at the border of civilization. They were the wild East, embodied in pop culture as Ruritanias or Bordurias: strange, folksy, vaguely barbarian places inhabited by Borat, Baba Yaga, and polar bears roaming frozen streets. As such, they were treated with a mixture of mistrust and mild amusement, but above all as caricatured platforms undergirding their own sense of superiority.

As for the East Europeans, they learned that pursuing unattainable goal tends to be exhausting and, eventually, insufferable. One feels inferior, inadequate, insecure, guilt-ridden, and self-hating. This kind of frustration, combined with an inferiority complex and a fear of losing sovereignty—“if we give up our identity in order to imitate the West, what are we?”—breeds resentment.

And eventually it breeds a backlash when the imitators come to feel cheated. We were promised prosperity, opportunity, and stability, and we made all the necessary sacrifices to achieve them, only to see those goals fly from us right before our eyes. Barely four years after Poland joined the European Union, an economic crisis hit that threatened its very survival. And right after the hope of endless prosperity was shattered, so was the illusion of security when the Russian bear roared in Georgia, and then in Ukraine. Then the refugee crisis and a series of terrorist attacks in major European cities, along with the economic turmoil, made the Western model less and less attractive for the Eastern imitators. And the political vacuum thus formed by disappointment and anxiety was filled by right-wing populism.

“I prefer politics that guarantees warm tap water,” announced Mr. Tusk in 2010. The former Prime Minister, in his own words, wasn’t a man of bold visions; he favored a government that was “qualified, modest, moderate, and focused on solving the problems of ordinary people, not on carrying out great historical missions.” What he wanted for Poland was, in short, Western normalcy, a goal shared by most Polish governments since 1990 as well as the business and the mainstream media.

But in Poland, coming to normalcy could not be a passive act. It was not something that could be achieved just by adjusting a few beliefs, trying some new cuisines, and going shopping for clothes and toaster ovens. Alas, there was some history to parry.

We, the proud young Europeans of 2004—and those from older generations who always felt they were born on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain—embraced Western values of gender equality, minority rights, the secular state, entrepreneurship, and responsible individualism. We learned to be wary of any kind of excessive national pride; in a country with a shameful history of anti-Semitism such sentiments were dangerous. We welcomed the painful debate around Jedwabne, the small town where, during the German occupation in World War II, Poles gathered their Jewish neighbors in a barn and then burned them alive. We thought, still think, that the end of communism offered a rare chance to exorcise old demons, accept responsibility, and move closer to reconciliation. We also liked to think we were cosmopolitan, progressive, enlightened.

And so, frankly, we were embarrassed by our compatriots who weren’t eager to Europeanize.

We called them “Janusze” and “Grażyny,” the Polish equivalent of rednecks and hillbillies. We thought they still sadly clung to hopelessly outdated traditions, unable to keep up with cultural and civilizational change: backwards, pathetically parochial people who went to church every Sunday to please their neighbors, wore white socks with sandals, listened to music that made us cringe, and told homophobic jokes. We were ashamed of their xenophobic and sexist views, and of their lack of interest in the wider world. We knew better; we were on the proverbial right side of history—and we let them know it. For their own good, of course. But to the endless surprise of some of us in what was actually an enlightened and overwhelmingly urban minority, the result was not that Janusze and Grażyny apologized for their backwardness and changed their ways. Quite the contrary: They turned to someone who, for a change, promised to take them seriously.

In one sense, then—and definitely according to the Law and Justice spin—the PiS victory was a revolution for the dignity and empowerment of ordinary people. The PiS said to Janusze and Grażyny: You’re the salt of the earth, the moral majority, the real Poles—not those uppity, selfish, ungrateful elites who have mocked you and shamed you for all you hold dear. The party went even further. The liberal mainstream, it claimed, wanted to rob Poles of their national pride via “pedagogics of shame,” by which they understood any revision of history that complicated the narrative of Poles as innocent victims or tragic heroes. Now was the time for the real people to take their deserved places, the time for the real Poles to finally get up from their knees, be their deservedly proud selves, and shake off their “colonial” dependence on the patronizing West and its Polish cronies.

Or, as Donatan & Cleo, the folksy duo representing Poland on Eurovision in 2014 summed it up in their song “We the Slavs”: “What is ours is the best because it’s ours.”

Liberal democracy is demanding. It constantly tells its citizens to accommodate others, to give more space to underrepresented groups, and to tolerate unwelcome views. Populists, on the other hand, accept the people—the right kind of people, anyway—without any condescension or judgment. They have no ambition to turn anyone into some better version of themselves. They won’t scold anyone for espousing politically incorrect views, and they’ll let you say what you really think about those who are not like you. They will also manufacture for you a clear enemy who is responsible for all that ails you.

This is a powerful narrative strategy, one that PiS is very skilled at deploying. And so far, no other political party in Poland has managed to produce anything remotely as compelling. Has Poland proved unable to keep its fledgling liberal democracy? Is the verdict of history sealed, or is there still a way back to the new and better normal most Poles longed for in the early 1990s? Plenty of Poles wish they knew.

The post From Pole to Pole: The Rise and Fall of Liberal Poland appeared first on The American Interest.

Journalism Dies in Darkness

“Throughout the world, CNN has a powerful voice portraying the United States in an unfair and false way. Something has to be done, including the possibility of the United States starting our own Worldwide Network to show the World the way we really are, GREAT!”

So tweeted President Trump on November 26, when his gripe du jour was with Jim Acosta, the CNN showboat who rammed the POTUS showboat during a White House press conference on November 7. The story provoked a ripple of outrage among the yakking heads and online pundits in the commercial news media, whose relationship to Trump is similar to that of an addict to his drug: The addict knows the drug is bad for him, but he just can’t get enough of it. The difference, of course, is that the addict has to pay for his drug, while the yakking heads and pundits get paid for being hooked on Trump.

Two days later, the Washington Post ran an op-ed by a veteran newspaper editor and former head of investigative reporting for Bloomberg News, Amanda Bennett. Beginning on a sardonic note, Bennett lauds Trump for his “brilliant” idea, then points out that the same idea occurred to FDR in 1942, the year the Voice of America sent its first German-language radio broadcast into Nazi Germany. She then extols VOA as America’s real “worldwide network,” currently broadcasting in 46 languages to 60 countries, and using radio, TV, and digital platforms to reach 275.2 million people, 85 percent of whom “say they trust us.”

If you are wondering why a prominent private-sector journalist would leap to the defense of a foreign-language media outlet funded by the U.S. government, the answer is simple: Bennett is the director of VOA. Other prominent journalists have held that office, from John Chancellor in the 1960s to David Ensor in the 2010s, and they, too, have been VOA’s champions. But they are the exceptions. Throughout VOA’s history, the domestic news media have variously condemned it as a propaganda outlet, attacked it for saying unflattering things about America, dismissed it as a relic of the past—and most often, reported about it in ways that are vague, inaccurate, and stunningly uncurious.

According to a 2013 article in the Columbia Journalism Review, VOA was mentioned 188 times in the major U.S. print media between 2011 and 2012, compared with 2,000 references to CNN in the New York Times alone. Among the few mentions of VOA, only 15 percent referred to it as a legitimate news organization.

Two days after Trump’s November 26 tweet, Politico ran a squib about “Trump’s tense relationship with the press,” in which VOA is described as “an international radio broadcast source.” A five-minute Google search would have shown how outdated that description is. VOA’s English and foreign-language content is delivered by every conceivable media platform, from short-wave, FM, and medium-wave radio to cable and satellite TV; its streaming audio and video are carried by some 3,000 overseas affiliates; and its Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube pages have a robust following in places like sub-Saharan Africa, where struggling local reporters are being courted and compromised by the rapidly growing Chinese presence. But Politico did no such search. As I say, domestic U.S. reporting on VOA can be stunningly uncurious.

Uncurious and unfortunate, because the real work of VOA and its sibling networks (see below) is done by foreign nationals on the ground, whose “surrogate” reporting about corruption and abuse of power requires a lot more courage than interrupting an American President or resisting an intern trying to take away a microphone. By aspiring to be good journalists in the American mold, these Russian, Balkan, Moldovan, Uzbek, Turkmen, Afghan, Pakistani, Iranian, Iraqi, Yemeni, Syrian, Nigerian, Somali, Indonesian, Tibetan, Uighur, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Cuban, Venezuelan, and other local reporters risk more than a White House press pass. They risk, and occasionally lose, livelihood, liberty, loved ones, life itself.

Why, then, do America’s proud journalists do such a dismal job of covering VOA and the larger foreign-language media system of which it is a part?

The most salient reason is an abiding distrust of government-funded media. In 1948, when Congress passed the first legislation authorizing the State Department to engage in anti-Soviet information activities, there was considerable alarm at the prospect of “government propaganda” being circulated at home, so Congress included a strict prohibition on the domestic distribution of any materials produced by the participating agencies, including VOA.1  That provision was eliminated in 2012, almost 20 years after the Internet rendered it moot by allowing anyone with an online connection to access VOA programs.2

A second reason is the lack of a clear and consistent brand. This problem dates back to 1942, when VOA began its first radio transmissions into Nazi Germany. Unlike similar efforts by other nations, VOA was not a scaled-up version of an existing domestic broadcaster. The obvious contrast is with the British Broadcasting Company (BBC), which facilitated those initial VOA transmissions. The BBC’s domestic radio service was founded in 1922, its Empire Service ten years later. The Empire Service became the Overseas Service during the war, then the World Service in 1965. But it never ceased to be the BBC.

VOA’s global profile never developed a similar clarity and consistency, because it has been complicated by the piecemeal addition of four sibling networks, each with its own distinctive history and identity. As a guide to the perplexed, here are four thumbnail sketches:

Radio Free Europe (RFE) and Radio Liberty (RL) was founded in 1949 with covert funding by the CIA. Based in Munich, the purpose of RFE/RL was similar to that of VOA but with a harder edge. During the Cold War, RFE focused on Central and Eastern Europe, RL on the USSR. In 1972 the CIA ceased its funding, and two years later the combined RFE/RL became a formally private company directly funded by Congress. After the Cold War RFE/RL moved to Prague on the invitation of Vaclev Havel, and today focuses on the Russian Federation, Southern Europe, Central Asia, Iran, Afghanistan, and parts of Pakistan.

The Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB) was formed in 1983, and its radio channel, Radio Martí, sent its first broadcast in 1985, on the 83rd anniversary of the pre-Castro Republic of Cuba. For convoluted political reasons, OCB was established not as a Congressional grantee, like RFE/RL, but as a federal agency, like VOA. In 1990 OCB launched TV Martí. Despite much criticism, OCB is still the best funded network in the system, largely because of the support it receives from politically influential Cuban Americans.

Radio Free Asia (RFA) was launched in 1996 with more support from human rights groups than from the business community, whose main concern was to maintain good relations with Beijing. This situation persists, as RFA feels the ripples from increased tensions between the Trump Administration and Xi Jinping’s China, and has a small but significant audience speaking nine different languages in seven countries.

The Middle East Broadcasting Network (MBN) was created shortly after the attacks of 9/11, with the goal of penetrating the transnational Arabic media market, which thanks to satellite technology spans the entire region, from Mauritania to Oman. MBN operates Radio Sawa, focused on pop music and programming for youth; and Al-Hurra TV, a 24/7 news channel giving the “American perspective.” At present MBN is undergoing a makeover under the leadership of former U.S. diplomat Alberto Fernandez. But it remains to be seen whether this will make it more competitive in a media landscape that is overcrowded, deeply fragmented, and dangerously polarized.

Even more perplexing than this patchwork bureaucracy is the dysfunction of its governing body. Between 1994 and 2017, VOA and its siblings were overseen by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), a group of nine part-time political appointees, who despite their accomplishments in business and their professions often lacked the skills necessary for the job. Several had executive experience in commercial media, which might appear useful but was actually not, owing to the huge difference between running a for-profit media company in a familiar cultural environment and overseeing a far-flung, linguistically diverse media organization whose audiences are of no interest to advertisers.

After 23 years of floundering, the BBG board was abolished in the final days of the Obama Administration, and direct operational control of the system was assigned to a newly empowered CEO appointed by, and answerable to, the President.3 Clearly, this was done in expectation of a Clinton presidency. Under Trump, the office of the newly empowered CEO does not yet have an occupant. And it may never have one, because on December 3 of this year a new bill was approved by the House Committee on Foreign Relations that would roll back the powers of that office and restore oversight to the advisory board that was created at the same time—but which also does not yet have members.

This battle of the bureaucratic vapors took another turn in August, when John Lansing (the Obama appointee still serving as CEO under the old rules) announced a name change. Instead of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the system will now be called the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM). As Lansing explained, the new name is intended to correct the stereotype of VOA and its sibling networks as antiquated radio channels. It is also shorter and easier to pronounce than “Broadcasting Board of Governors.”

The only trouble is, this is Washington, land of acronyms. Did no one consider that “USAGM” is actually longer and harder to pronounce than “BBG”? After a few days of wondering how to pronounce it, I finally settled on “you sag ‘em.” But to speakers of American English, that sounds pretty dumb. And to speakers of British English (of whom there are quite a few in the world), it borders on profanity.

These are the stories that get covered in the media, and they are sufficiently eye-glazing that they attract very few eyeballs. And when the media ignore something, the politicians are likely to do the same. There has been almost no coverage of the growing persecution of USAGM journalists around the world, or of the rather drastic budget cuts that make those journalists more vulnerable to corruption and compromise. As the Washington Post likes to say when congratulating itself on its brave coverage of Trump, “democracy dies in darkness.” So does journalism, including foreign-language journalism supported by the government. And that is a topic worth shining some light on.

1The US Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 was introduced in the 79th Congress by Rep. Karl E. Mundt (R-SD); defended in hearings by prominent officials including US ambassador to Russia, Walter Bedell Smith; passed by the 80th Congress; and signed into law by President Truman on January 27, 1948.

2See section 1078 (a) of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013.

3See Section 1288 of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2017.

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The Rage of the Yellow Jackets

The Yellow Jacket violence that has afflicted France since mid-November is a multilayered phenomenon, with some root causes that are specifically French, others that are European, and some that are manifest across mature economies more broadly.

The violence is French. Flaming cars and smashed windows have been a recurrent spectacle for decades, with a particular intensity around New Year’s Eve. The usual arsonists are the “disaffected youth” of “les banlieues” (low-income housing projects surrounding the larger and richer metropolises), as well as small groups of “casseurs” who operate at the margins of soccer fandom and radical politics—skinheads, hooligans, rioters, and anarchists.

The Yellow Jackets come from different demographics. Wage earners or self-employed, small farmers or artisans, they came to the capital from rural areas and small towns to challenge a carbon tax. The “casseurs” came out to meet them in the streets and, amidst the excitement of violence, drunk on a power they had never imagined having, the Yellow Jackets enthusiastically borrowed their symbolic language. The result has been a weekend of unprecedented destruction, drawing parallels with medieval revolts and early modern revolutionary waves.

The sobering came quickly. Hundreds were arrested on the spot; dozens were tried within 48 hours, and sent on their way to months of incarceration. Unlike trained casseurs, who know how to escape the police and who may be psychologically prepared for the consequences, the novice revolutionaries went, in the span of a week or two, from law-abiding citizens to convicts, with dramatic consequences for the rest of their lives. They had tasted blood, but for many it was bitter. Women, who had been present in droves on the first barricades, were barely seen again after the pandemonium of December 1.

The disorder was facilitated by the collapse of traditional institutions of civil society: trade unions and political parties with decades of experience in collective action and bargaining. They know how to do crowd control, how to coordinate with the police to keep demonstrations on this side of the law. It is reported that many of the protesters who donned yellow safety vests and came out to block the roads had previously voted for, or felt sympathy for, radical parties, but their action was spontaneous and genuinely “independent” of affiliation. They came as free agents, and were easily carried away.

The desertion of historic parties and unions, those that have shaped European politics since World War II, is not just a French story. Brexit, Macron, and the rise of new contenders (the Five Star Movement in Italy, Ciudadanos and Podemos in Spain, AfD in Germany) are all manifestations of anti-systemic voting across old democracies. Paradoxically, the anti-systemic vote sometimes expresses itself through a pro-systemic agent, as is the case in Spain and, particularly, in France. By voting for Macron and his fledgling La République En Marche (LRM) party, electors purged the traditional ruling class from the institutions of the state, but were left with a substitute whose politics they did not necessarily embrace.

Overnight, Macron acquired all the reins of power, yet he had no real mandate, just a modicum of goodwill for being the disruptor. Macron tested that goodwill repeatedly. His pro-growth, pro-market reforms pushed the limits of what was thought possible in France, but unions were too enfeebled to stop him. The bigger challenge would come, unexpectedly, from an increase in the carbon tax, which could be felt directly at the gas pump.

The rejection of traditional parties and politics, now widespread across well-established democracies, is a consequence of the endemic pathologies of mature economies, and of specific violations of their social contracts. Over the past ten years, since the financial crash, public discourse has pointed at inequality of wealth and income as a source of social strife. This analysis is not wrong, but it deserves closer scrutiny.

People do not measure their situation only, or even necessarily, against that of the wealthiest 1 percent or 0.1 percent. Often the comparison is made closer to home, measured against peers, and particularly against oneself. The question for workers is not “why am I not as rich as Bernard Arnault, the CEO of LVMH?” Rather, it’s “why am I worse off than last year?” or “why am I worse off than my parents?”

Part perception and part reality, the deterioration in living standards has obvious causes. One is that in mature economies, productivity gains are hard to come by, and therefore wage increases elusive. Moreover, productivity gains often occur through automation, which leaves some workers jobless and forces the rest to chip in for social safety nets. Second, governments have arbitrary ways of measuring inflation, and the official figures from central banks may not correspond to what people experience. Stagnant incomes and rising prices have always fed resentment. And year after year of that regimen, with no hope of improvement for oneself or one’s children, will erode any sympathy for the political class.

It must be fate that, just as the French government raised taxes on gas, the Japanese government arrested the CEO of Renault, the main French car manufacturer and a partly state-owned company, for tax evasion. The charges bear on what amounts to some €62 million of unreported income, earned between 2011 and 2017. Carlos Ghosn did not invent the automobile. He is an administrator who revived two venerable car companies by consolidating research and development and cutting costs. For those achievements he was compensated at around €20 million per year, about a thousand times the median yearly wage in France.

The allegation that he was evading taxes came to a public already primed for outrage by the fiscal scandals revealed in the Panama Papers and the Luxembourg Leaks. Mr. Ghosn, a Franco-Lebanese Brazilian, embodies globalization, as do the hundreds of thousands of migrants who are looking at Europe for well-paid jobs that may very well not exist. The United States faces similar challenges, and the anti-globalization, anti-immigrant discourse has been vociferous on both shores of the Atlantic. But unlike Europe, the United States has been able to smooth the edges with loose monetary policies and deficit spending.

In the United States, wages may be stagnant, but money is cheap, and the combination of tax cuts for corporations and very liberal government expenditures helps to create jobs. (Minimum wages and benefits are also lower in the United States than in Europe.) The downside is cyclical overvaluation in asset markets—bubbles that burst every decade or so, but that are reflated immediately by the Fed’s generous lending.

Eurozone countries, on the other hand, are constrained by the strict Maastricht rules that limit deficit spending (to 3 percent of GDP) and gross public debt (to 60 percent of GDP). In theory, those rules should have driven governments, in periods of rapid growth and full employment, to save money for lean years. When recession hit, they could have engaged in deficit spending to boost demand, in line with good Keynesian catechism.

In practice, for most Eurozone countries, fast growth and full employment never happened. Trapped in low-growth mode, always on the edge of recession, always exceeding their allowance (but not by too much to avoid the ire of Brussels and Berlin), they could not spend their way out of economic mediocrity. Unemployment remained as endemic as the debt remained irreducible.

Perhaps there was no other option, for the United States is unique in its ability to spend and borrow. A few European countries indulged in lavish borrowing, at their own peril. When the debtors called, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, they were wrecked. Spain and Ireland were forced to tighten their belts, and felt the pain for years afterward. But Greece, which had flaunted the fiscal rules with gusto (and malice), imploded. Its GDP collapsed and, ten years later, is nowhere near recovery.

Europe has a funny economy. It contains enough talent, hard workers, and cutting-edge technology for world-renowned firms to thrive. But beneath the glitz, wealth is not spreading fast. Europe has few native billionaires, and France only a handful. Flashy CEOs like Mr. Ghosn are tacky exceptions rather than the norm. Minimum wage aside, the average European worker makes far less than his American counterpart, especially in net terms. The much-derided consumerism of the West is duller on that side of the Atlantic, because unemployment keeps wages low, income taxes have to be paid, and payroll contributions to welfare have to be made.

The Yellow Jackets are not destitute. The truly impoverished can be found aplenty in and around France’s cities: living in tents or out of shopping carts, too disenfranchised to have access to welfare, too poor to be affected by a tax on gasoline. By contrast, the Yellow Jackets work, for the most part. But what they earn has to be spent, and very little of it on luxury. And since they do work, they feel they are being ransomed for those who have even less: those who lost their jobs due to globalization, and the asylum-seeking immigrants who cannot get one in the first place.

To those burdens, the environment (broadly conceived) has added new ones. The diesel cars most of them drive to save money are demonized and are being progressively phased out. (The tax increase that triggered the protests was highest on diesel fuel.) Their commutes are beset by hidden speed traps, which burden drivers with pricey tickets. (Just recently, the legal speed limit was reduced even further.) The electricity they used to buy cheaply from French nuclear plants is getting more expensive, to finance the transition to renewable energy. The cigarettes many still smoke cost a small fortune, most of it in taxes.

Among them, the farmers are the objects of the most severe scorn: for polluting waterways, for killing bees, for animal cruelty, even for poisoning children by spreading carcinogenic substances (glyphosate) and GMOs. Work in the fields has to accommodate the lifestyle of wild species, adding to labor and costs. Sustainability keeps fishermen on the docks, until depleted stocks can rebound. Herders have to coexist with reintroduced wolves and bears attacking their flocks.

The eco-revolution is still niche; it is a luxury. Rural France remains a world of long hours and small profits. It is also a dying world where babies are not born, schools are closing, and hospitals are leaving—an impoverished world from which the state is seen to disengage, but which it still dares to tax.

The radical, and to some extent even the traditional, currents from the Left and the Right envy the rage of the Yellow Jackets and their ability to humiliate the government. The marginalized parties would love to leverage their fury to hit back at Macron. But they can’t, both because the Yellow Jackets won’t let them (so far), and because the fight is not theirs. The Yellow Jackets are strictly reactionary. They don’t have a vision for the future or a political agenda, and they barely have a moral argument to articulate. It seems that they trust no one, and all they want is more personal comfort. It is hard to build and sustain a political movement around that.

The Yellow Jackets could take down the government only in fortuitous circumstances. By accident or exasperation, the police could kill some of them, even just one of them under compellingly empathetic circumstances. Public opinion is made with images. The government already looks inept after the havoc in Paris. It would look criminal if the Yellow Jackets had their Neda or Aylan Kurdi moment.1

Worse than a photogenic death would be defection, the security forces either walking away or crossing over. Reports allege that the Yellow Jackets have repeatedly tried to make such an appeal. There are similarities between the two sides, if only in terms of income and social condition. But to convince people whose life and career depends on the state is no easy feat. After a first weekend of chaos, the government deployed forces on such a scale that Paris seemed to have more police than protesters, squashing any speculation of defection.

The pain of the Yellow Jackets is a common experience in mature economies. It is born in part from a misguided nostalgia about a romanticized past—a time before globalization and mass immigration when “things were better.” But their doom mostly comes from technological change and global population growth, and it is all but impossible to stand against that. The British tried, by voting for Brexit, but that has brought them little solace.

What the rage of the Yellow Jackets exposes is that the adaptation to the new environmental age, if it happens at all, is going to be painful, especially at the lower end of the income ladder. The promises that new, high-productivity jobs will be created ring only partially true. Wind turbines clearly have to be erected and maintained. Solar farms have to be tended to. But not everyone will find their place in the new green economy. For most people, it is going to mean sacrifice.

The Greens understand that this is their challenge: to sell pain. Their dynamic is essentially sectarian, and their discourse religious in tone. As with any religious movement, their ranks include shrill doomsayers, moralizing bullies, and a few opportunists. But you also find eloquent prophets like Aurélien Barrau, who speak pointedly the language of Apocalypse, sacrifice and salvation.

Macron had a long run of luck. He rolled over the political class, bullied the trade unions, pushed forward a mainstream, pro-growth agenda, and even tried to address some environmental concerns—not enough to satisfy his star Environment Minister, who resigned in August, but enough to stand tall with the progressive leaders of California, Germany, and Canada. But Macron, for all his youthful charisma, did not know how to sell pain. When the people called him out with violence, the young President flinched. The increase in the carbon tax was suspended, then dropped.

A simple way to ease pain is to apply analgesic. Since World War II, that has been the role of growth—every year was supposed to be a little better for everyone than the one before, with consumption the metric by which one could measure progress. But there is an inherent contradiction between growth and protecting the environment, and while some still try to fudge the issue, other voices are now explicitly calling for halting growth. Not that there is that much growth to halt to begin with—the Eurozone has grown by less than 1 percent a year since the last financial crisis, ten years ago.

If growth is not the solution, there is redistribution, and the environmentalists are pushing in that direction. The paradigm is simple: taking from those who have to ease the pain of those who have not. The Yellow Jackets, in their own way, are asking for nothing less when they demand that Macron reinstates the wealth tax he had eliminated to spur growth.

But redistribution is something of a fraud. First of all, who should bear the burden of redistribution? The middle and upper-middle classes, which have more disposable income than the Yellow Jackets base, also vote at the polls or with their feet. Second, the wealth of the wealthier is hardly a renewable resource; the government already captures close to 50 percent of GDP (even more than that, if voluntary services with progressive pricing are included). France risks running out of wealth to tax before it can elevate the poorest, let alone save the environment.

Then again, why should France become virtuous when large chunks of the world are growing at a breakneck pace, trampling on the environment? Not quite eight billion humans today could be 12 billion tomorrow. True, they are all sharing the same planet, but that only means there will be many free riders among them. If climate change is unavoidable, resources may be better deployed adjusting to it rather than trying to reverse it.

Macron’s choice now is twofold: either he can follow in the footsteps of his predecessors, and spend the rest of his term staying out of trouble, or he can find another way forward. Macron has been all fist and no glove. The French call him regal, authoritarian, a President for the wealthy. He could certainly think of more creative, less painful ways to implement his agenda. Rather than taxes, for instance, if Macron wanted to wean French drivers off their diesel engines, he could have offered a 30 percent exception to the speed limits for electric vehicles. Instead, the little candy he brought, after weeks of crisis, to his grand televised speech on December 10—a €100 increase of the minimal wage and tax reductions on some income—was quickly derided as crumbs.

Cars will probably burn until the New Year, to keep up with tradition, but winter should silence the Yellow Jackets. Regardless, the turmoil in Paris stands as a cautionary tale for Macron and other likeminded leaders. Reformist politicians had better figure out how to sell sacrifice if they do not want revolutions to carry them away.

Neda Agha-Soltan was shot dead on film in 2009, during protests in Tehran; 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi was photographed, in 2015, drowned on a Turkish beach, his family escaping Syria

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Succession Politics in Post-Merkel Germany

Germany’s middle name might as well be “continuity.” Its largest party, the Christian Democratic Party (CDU), just dispatched its eternal leader Angela Merkel by electing a younger version, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, 56. Whoever heads the party has a very good chance of inheriting Merkel’s job as chancellor in 2021, if not earlier. There is just a small hitch: In a country usually run by folks with very short names—Brandt, Schmidt, Kohl—a chancellor with a seven-syllable moniker evokes a veritable revolution.

Yet “AKK,” as the media would have it it, is anything but a revolutionary. If she advances into the Chancellor’s Office, she promises to be a younger Merkel: a centrist who is a bit to the right of her predecessor on cultural issues, and a bit to her left on welfare policy. Like her mentor, who has groomed her for the top party job, AKK is like a captain who changes course by a few degrees only, prudently plumbing the depths. AKK will remember why Merkel stumbled—when she abandoned all caution and took in a million-plus refugees in 2015. That was the beginning of her long slide from power.

But what a run Merkel had! The pastor’s daughter has stayed at the helm for 13 years. She has outlasted three U.S. presidents—George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. She has seen three French heads of state come and go. In her heyday, she was feted as uncrowned empress of the European Union.

But Annegret is Angela II, at a moment when electorates throughout the West are opting for radical breaks with the status quo. Donald Trump embodies the most brutal rupture, first hijacking the G.O.P., then turning U.S. policy upside-down at home and abroad.  France’s Emmanuel Macron defied the past as well, raising his own political army on the ruins of his country’s party system. Touting his reforms, he vowed to make France great again.

Meanwhile Italy’s current government unites right-wing and left-wing populists—a historical first. The unlikely coalition is held together by nationalism and resentment of the E.U., as Brussels labors to impose fiscal discipline on a country that has always lived beyond its means. Italy’s national debt is Europe’s largest as a fraction of GDP.

To the east, in Poland and Hungary, rupture comes in a different guise—call it nationalist authoritarianism. In Britain, Brexit is doing away with half a century of continuity by absconding from the European Union.

“The times are out of joint,” the Bard would muse—but not in Germany, a country that was the epicenter of extremism in the 20th century. In 1918, revolution brought down the imperial regime of Wilhelm II. The Weimar Republic was ground down by the Nazis on the right and the Communists on the left. Hitler Germany almost destroyed Europe. Yet another revolution toppled the Berlin Wall and the communist regime in East Germany. The Germans had their fill of excitement, which explains why they have become as aggressive as pussy cats and as reliable as a VW before the company started cheating on diesel emissions. Behold the contrast: In Macron’s France, another march on the Bastille has brought the government to its knees; in Germany, the largest party (which stands to field the next chancellor) has elected Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, a pillar of continuity and a moderate’s dream.

To properly appreciate this turn, look at AKK’s failed rivals for party leadership. The most fearsome contender was Friedrich Merz. He scored 48 percent of the delegates’ vote—very close, but still no cigar. He represented the “old” CDU that Merkel had slowly strangled by systematically moving the party to the left.

As strong as the longing for the party’s conservative past may have been, it did not undo what Merkel had wrought in her 18 years as chairwoman of the CDU. In the end, Merz was just a bit too much: too pro-market and too conservative. Nor did the party savor a millionaire with two (small) private planes. Or his lucrative past as corporate lawyer and director of a dozen companies, including  BlackRock, Germany, where he served as chairman. In egalitarian Germany, great wealth is no ticket to a top-tier political office.

AKK’s second rival, health minister Jens Spahn, was also a bit too much. Though openly gay, he is too much of a cultural conservative and just too hard on immigrants and Germany’s munificent welfare state, which redistributes about 30 percent of GDP .

By contrast, AKK was just right—a few inches to the right of Merkel, but no German Margaret Thatcher who would tear down what her predecessors had built. Yet AKK knew full well what had dethroned Empress Angela: a million-plus Mideast refugees. The price was the rapid rise of the far-right “Alternative for Germany” (AfD). Cutting into the CDU’s voter base, the AfD scored a historical first, making it into the Bundestag, which no right-wing party has ever achieved. Today, the AfD is ensconced in the legislatures of all of Germany’s 16 states.

Ever so subtly, AKK has positioned herself as “Merkel-minus”: centrism without open doors. As prime minister of her home state of Saarland, she took a harder line on those asylum seekers whose applications had been been rejected. Let’s deport them swiftly! In another bow to the immigration-weary electorate, she entered the culture war by taking on Muslim males who refused to take food from the hands of female aid workers. Let them go hungry, AKK advised. Merkel would have obfuscated.

AKK’s victory over her two rivals on the right comes with a larger message than “no munchies for macho Muslims.” For Armin Laschet, the CDU prime minister of Northrhine-Westphalia, AKK’s anointment signifies “great continuity.” He added: “There is no fundamental wish to change things.”

That is Germany ‘18 in a nutshell. By contrast, Deutschland’s neighbors are willing to put their money on the unknown because there is a “fundamental wish to change”—and damn the consequences. Change is not forward, but backward into what we might call a “reactionary utopia.”

Dreaming of a better past, the British are willing to risk economic and political isolation. In their street wars against Macron, the French want to return to enshrined group privileges and munificent welfare spending. The Italians seek salvation from strongmen who pretend that they can unhinge the laws of economics. Their brethren in Hungary and Poland echo the authoritarians of the interwar period.

Germany is the odd man out, but in a reassuring manner compared to the first half of the 20th century. When an Annegret follows an Angela, the statics of the country are firm. The rest of Europe in the age of Trump and Putin is another story. Who would have thought that Emmanuel Macron would buckle so quickly? Or that Italy would fall to the populists on the right and the left? These two were among the six founding members of the European Union.

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Clapton and the Devil Blues

Slowhand: The Life and Music of Eric Clapton

Philip Norman

Little, Brown and Company, 2018, 448 pp., $30

It appeared in 1965 in Islington, North London, spray-painted in black letters on a corrugated iron fence in a train station: CLAPTON IS GOD. Scrawled by an anonymous disciple, this graffiti of course referred to blues guitarist Eric Clapton, member of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. Clapton’s apotheosis was a sign of the times: It exemplified not only the remarkable rise of blues and rock music in 1960s Britain and across the world, but also the search for new gods to worship in an age of secularization and radical human autonomy.

Clapton was, in many ways, an unlikely candidate for deification: an insecure white schoolboy, raised in a placid English village, who popularized the music of poor black troubadours in the American South of the 1920s and ’30s. His idol was Robert Johnson, the mythic picker from the Mississippi Delta who, as the legend goes, went to a crossroads at midnight and sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for mastery of the blues. (Clapton would later cover Johnson’s song “Cross Road Blues,” also known as “Crossroads,” about the incident, and release an entire album of Johnson covers.) Clapton, too, would pay a price for his success throughout a life of pain and tragedy, all recounted in at times harrowing detail in a new biography by Philip Norman. But beyond the typical ’60s hedonism of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, Clapton’s life is a different kind of legend: an almost didactic tale about the ways that suffering can lead to redemption.

“It is said that famous men are usually the product of an unhappy childhood,” remarked Winston Churchill in his biography of his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough. So it was with Clapton. He was born an illegitimate child in 1945 in the working-class village of Ripley; his father, a Canadian soldier stationed in Britain during the war, refused to take responsibility for him and left his teenage mother, Pat. She, too, would abandon Eric after meeting another Canadian soldier and departing for Canada, leaving him with his grandmother, Rose, who he initially believed was his mother. When he was nine, Pat visited and icily told him that he should still regard her as his sister. They never reconciled, and from then on his family and friends would treat him as a “wounded child” and try to protect him from the difficulties of life, a kindness that Clapton would rarely reciprocate.

He found solace in the music of Delta bluesmen like Johnson. “In late-1950s Britain,” Norman writes, “they were to be found only in the loneliest aisles of specialist record shops, most often lumped together in cheaply packaged compilations. Brilliant instinctive musicians who. . .were dimly outlined in sepia in their dusty suits or dungarees, holding ancient acoustic guitars that looked as malnourished as they did.” A classmate who listened to records with Clapton noted “what an extraordinary connection he had with the blues. It seemed to go directly to his soul because of some pain that was in him.”

After flunking out of art college because he spent most of his time practicing the guitar, he worked for a time as a plasterer and bricklayer with his grandfather, before forming a blues band called the Roosters with other working-class acquaintances like Ben Palmer, a woodcarver-turned-pianist. He immersed himself in Britain’s burgeoning blues and rock scene, earning recognition for his loud and aggressive playing style and eventually composing iconic riffs for some of the most influential bands of the era: the Yardbirds, the Bluesbreakers, Cream, Blind Faith, Derek and the Dominos. (The Dominos had to paste “Derek is Eric” stickers on their albums to alert fans that the diffident guitarist played on their records.) And he befriended and jammed with the other star musicians of British popular music: Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones, George Harrison of the Beatles (it is Clapton playing guitar on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”), Pete Townshend of the Who, Jimi Hendrix. When he first played with Hendrix, Clapton stopped halfway through the song and walked offstage in astonishment. “You never told me he was that fuckin’ good,” Clapton said to Hendrix’s manager, his hands shaking.

Clapton never stayed in one band for long, quitting when disagreements arose or the music failed to reach to his standards, and leaving his bandmates without much explanation. He craved anonymity and a private life, even as that life was increasingly in shambles. Norman is harsh but fair when he writes that Clapton’s passionate yet short-lived relationships left women with “addictions as bad as his, or worse, and permanent collateral damage while he moved on to the next one without a backward glance.” Distraught after the Dominos disbanded and he had failed to lure away Pattie Harrison, the wife of his best friend and former Beatle George (the wailing guitars and supplicatory lyrics of the Dominos’ most famous song, “Layla,” not-so-subtly betrayed his longing), Clapton became a heroin addict, holing up for three years inside his English mansion Hurtwood Edge. He made Alice Ormsby-Gore, his 18-year-old girlfriend and daughter of the Welsh aristocrat Lord Harlech, travel to London to secure their heroin. Only decades later, when Alice died from a heroin overdose in 1995 after years of addiction and alcoholism, would Clapton realize, as he put it, “the damage I had done to this poor girl”—an admission of the devastation wrought by his vices.

Clapton eventually got clean after some intensive “neuroelectric therapy.” But almost immediately thereafter, he became an alcoholic to dull the pain of being sober. His regimen of two bottles of brandy a day nearly killed him; he collapsed after a show in 1981 and was taken to a hospital, where the medical team found five bleeding ulcers and declared him to be “45 minutes from death.” At other times, drinking was the only thing that saved him: “Whenever his mind turned to suicide, as it often did,” Norman writes, “what held him back was the thought that if he were dead, he’d no longer be able to drink.” Pattie, who did eventually leave George to marry Eric and tried without success to have a child with him, divorced him after despairing of his drinking bouts and affair with the Italian actress and photographer Lory Del Santo, with whom he then had the son that Pattie had always wanted. She was another victim of Clapton’s persistent juvenility and “wounded” mentality: “I thought I wasn’t worthy of anything decent,” he would later write, “so I could only choose partners who would ultimately abandon me, as I was convinced my mother had done all those years ago. . .If anything honest and decent came along, I would shun it and run the other way.”

The birth of his son Conor finally induced Eric to grow up and be the father that he never had, and he quit alcohol for good after another stint in rehab. But tragedy soon struck again: In 1991 Conor evaded his nanny and jumped out the window of a New York apartment building, falling to his death from the 53rd floor. Eric had been preparing to meet him that morning to take him to the zoo. Rather than succumbing again to drugs or alcohol to relieve his sorrow, or ending his life as so many musicians of his generation had (Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison), Clapton soothed himself with music and wrote some of his best songs: “Tears in Heaven,” a heartbreaking expression of his doubts about whether his son would greet him in the afterlife, sung in a lachrymose falsetto and accompanied by an ethereal Spanish guitar; and “My Father’s Eyes,” which described the experience of not knowing his father but somehow seeing him in the eyes of his son before he died. It’s a relatable epiphany for any man who has noticed the traits of his father in his own son, the mystic chords that link the living, the dead, and the not-yet-born:

I’m like a bridge that was washed away;

My foundations were made of clay.

As my soul slides down to die.

How could I lose him?

What did I try?

Bit by bit, I’ve realized

That he was here with me;

I looked into my father’s eyes.

A rarity among the tumultuous careers of most blues and rock musicians, Clapton’s has had a happy ending: He married American Melia McEnery in 2002 and has since had three daughters. He remains the only artist with three inductions into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame (Yardbirds, Cream, his solo career), and he’s releasing a Christmas album this winter with bluesy takes on classics like “White Christmas.” Leaving his childhood behind, Clapton has looked outside of himself to help others, establishing and financing the Crossroads Center on the Caribbean island of Antigua to help other recovering addicts.

Clapton, despite his decorated and lengthy career, is still less well known than other septuagenarian rockers like Paul McCartney, and Norman’s biography is a suitable introduction. He is a bit too fond of the sensational and bizarre detail, however (such as when Clapton consulted Dr. John, the New Orleans blues musician, about how he could use voodoo to woo Pattie away from George), and this overstuffed book fails to leave much space for reflections on Clapton’s life and times.

A “rock biographer” who has now chronicled the lives of McCartney, Jagger, John Lennon, and Elton John in addition to Clapton, Norman has written elsewhere that “the 60s’ most fervent acolytes tend to be people who never experienced them first-hand”; they pine for the “rosy blur of psychedelic colour, sexual permissiveness and Beatles music” while preferring to overlook the decade’s “complexity and manifold horrors.” He never quite says this, but Clapton’s life is proof enough of these horrors: the addictions to sex and drugs, for instance, which destroyed more lives than they “liberated.” Flower children and their wannabes wanted to be freed from the shackles of hierarchical authority, even from God; instead, they found a new form of servitude.

Clapton’s redemption came only when he rejected this bondage for a different form of obedience. When he returned to a rehab clinic to try and quit alcohol, he faced another crossroads in his life. He had made a habit out of taking the wrong path, but this time was different. The man who had been worshipped as a deity humbled himself; he got down on his knees and prayed. He surrendered. As he wrote in his autobiography:

Within a few days I realized that something had happened for me. An atheist would probably say it was just a change of attitude, and to a certain extent that’s true, but there was much more to it than that. I had found a place to turn to, a place I’d always known was there but never really wanted, or needed, to believe in. From that day until this, I have never failed to pray in the morning, on my knees, asking for help, and at night, to express gratitude for my life and, most of all, for my sobriety. I choose to kneel because I feel I need to humble myself when I pray, and with my ego, this is the most I can do.

If you are asking why I do all this, I will tell you. . .because it works, as simple as that.

The blues may never be as popular again as they were in the ’60s, but their enduring power lies in the evocation of an ancient sadness: a sadness that existed long before an English boy was abandoned by his parents or former slaves suffered the poverty and oppression of the American South. It’s the all-too-human sadness of pain, alienation, and forsakenness. But as Clapton discovered, if you humble yourself, if you express gratitude for the gift of being, you can learn to love others. And find peace.

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Remembering Edgar Graham

Thirty-five years ago today, mid-morning on December 7, 1983, Edgar Graham, a law professor and recently elected member of the Northern Ireland Assembly, was standing outside the library at Queen’s University Belfast. He was 29 years old, the beneficiary of an Oxford education, and a rising star in the legal and political world. And that, many unionists claim, is why he was murdered.

Edgar Graham was shot six times in the head. The IRA took responsibility for his death, which, its statement as reported in the New York Times explained, was intended to provide “a salutary lesson to those loyalists who stand foursquare behind the laws and forces of oppression of the nationalist people.” Edgar Graham had certainly expressed some very forthright political opinions, which were controversial even among his fellow unionists. His emphasis on “law and order” and his support for cultivating informants was threatening to paramilitaries on both sides of the conflict, and might even have brought them together in a common cause: he had claimed, in the weeks before his death, that republicans had been conspiring with loyalist terrorists to plan for his execution.

The murder shocked the political establishment on both sides of the border even as, contemporary reports alleged, it prompted cheering in the student union. Edgar Graham was an unusual “legitimate target,” as the terminology of the conflict put it. He was a civilian, uninvolved with any paramilitary activity, who was not even a member of the Orange Order, the popular Protestant fraternity that stages marches every summer. And, like almost all of 3,500 victims of the Troubles, no-one has ever been held to account for his death.

Edgar Graham’s legacy is in many respects unremarkable. His death has never been at the center of a public debate, like the murder of his colleague, Pat Finucane, who died at the hands of loyalist paramilitaries with the collusion of security forces in 1989. The Police Service of Northern Ireland historical enquiries team, which examined evidence in relation to unsolved Troubles crimes, did not produce any new report on the circumstances of his death, despite holding information on file when it wound up in 2014. Unlike Mary Daly, a Queen’s academic linked to the INLA who was murdered by loyalists in her home in 1980, his death is not commemorated in any of Belfast’s famous political murals. Schools in the Belfast area award public speaking prizes in his honor, and his name has been given to a teaching room in the law school in which he taught. His death warrants a passing mention in the relevant volume of his university’s history, where he shares a paragraph with Mary Daly, though neither are included in the index. But there is not much else by way of public commemoration. Only in a foyer of the parliament buildings at Stormont does a plaque memorialize his passing, with its exhortation, from Euripides, to “Keep alive the light of justice.” Remembered by an always diminishing number of friends and colleagues, Edgar Graham’s death is like many of the thousands of unsolved, and often forgotten, troubles tragedies.

But, 20 years after the Good Friday Agreement brought an end to the 30 years of violence, Edgar Graham’s death remains quietly controversial. Earlier this autumn, Michelle O’Neill, the progressive leader of Sinn Fein, gave a lecture at Queen’s that was attended by Edgar’s sister, Anne Graham, who pressed the leader of nationalism to condemn his execution. The question put O’Neill in a familiar bind, which suggests to many observers that Sinn Fein politicians cannot yet establish a critical distance from the activities of the terrorist organization with which they were once so closely identified. And so it was perhaps no surprise that O’Neill did not confirm that Edgar Graham’s killing was wrong: In the pattern that is now familiar in local political conversation, she expressed regret for his murder without being able to condemn it.

Whatever else it may signal, O’Neill’s response highlights both the potency of historical memory and the difficulty of sustaining within Northern Ireland a society based upon rights. Twenty years after the end of the Troubles, the history of the conflict continues to be weaponized, both by those who were once closely identified with the group that took responsibility for Edgar Graham’s death, by the broader community of constitutional nationalists who brought Sinn Fein to the negotiating table, and by the unionists who stood most resolutely against them. While, 35 years after the event, the leader of Sinn Fein cannot yet condemn the murder of an academic lawyer and recently elected politician, her critics among the SDLP, among the earliest champions of civil rights, and among political commentators continue to decry her party’s “re-writing of history.” And, among unionists, concern about this revisionist impulse within the local education system is now strong enough to warrant several parties making electoral commitments to stop it happening.

This action of the unionist parties may be a significant tactical error. If truth is the first casualty of war, memory may be one of the worst casualties of civil war, as David Armitage notes in his volume on that theme. For if history is part of the problem, it may also be part of the solution. In Northern Ireland, history is being re-written to favor the narratives of the most powerful political parties, and to occlude the memories of many of the victims, but it could also be re-written to take account of the expanding archival base upon which the interpretation of this period must be based, a task all the more pressing if it is to adequately address the thousands of tragedies whose stories have never properly been told. Better and more inclusive histories could underwrite progress towards the society of mutual respect that seems forever out of reach.

But maybe the first step towards a more inclusive account of the Troubles is moral, rather than intellectual. Those who remember the past must consider what they choose to remember, and what they choose to regret, as well as forget, as first steps towards more effective reconciliation. But how hard can this be? What if, in this particular instance, part of the price of the reconciliation to which everyone says they are committed is for all parties to recognize that killing lawyers and academics is wrong? If there is “no hierarchy of victims,” as O’Neill observed at an IRA commemoration in 2017, why can’t Edgar Graham’s death, like the deaths of Pat Finucane and Mary Daly, warrant both regret and condemnation?

Twenty years after the end of the conflict, peace in Northern Ireland still comes dropping slow. There is plenty of evidence that almost everyone who lives here wants to move on from the past. As they know, only too well, it takes time, care, and patience to build a new kind of society. Lasting trust is built on thousands of insignificant gestures of goodwill as much as it is on the public scaffolding of politics and law. But there is a lot of work to be done while it remains controversial to claim that killing lawyers is wrong.

In the meantime, people of goodwill from every kind of background want to “keep alive the light of justice,” as Edgar Graham’s commemorative plaque puts it. Not many people pass that plaque these days. The parliament chamber in Stormont into which that foyer opens remains unused by politicians, as the province pushes ever further into its world-record-breaking achievement of being the jurisdiction with the longest period without a peacetime government.

In circumstances like these, it will never be easy or uncomplicated to “keep alive the light of justice.” In Northern Ireland, peace approaches cautiously, from silence and slow time. We will make better progress when our leaders can finally agree that killing lawyers is wrong.

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Protestantism’s Lasting Sting

In his Wednesday New York Times column, Ross Douthat argued that, contrary to respectable opinion, the old WASP aristocracy really wasn’t so bad—and that what has replaced it is in some ways worse.  Whereas yesterday’s elites drilled a spirit of noblesse oblige “that trained the most privileged children for service”—in part, Douthat concedes, as a way of fortifying their status against potential challengers—the problem with today’s ruling class is that it does not even recognize itself as such.

Rather, it uses the aegis of meritocracy to exonerate its members’ perpetual misrule, which in turn fuels nostalgia for the kind of old-school style patricianism embodied by the likes of FDR and George H.W. Had our elite retained their “historic religious faith (instead of exchanging Protestant rigor for a post-Christian Social Gospel and a soft pantheism),” as well as their “more self-denying culture (instead of letting all that wash away in the flood of boomer-era emotivism),” we might have ended up with a stronger, more competent establishment, one capable of adding diversity without thereby sacrificing its effectiveness.

Douthat is right that the WASPs had a distinctive and, judging by Twitter, underappreciated set of virtues whose recovery would serve the nation well. And he’s right that there is no necessary connection between self-denial and bigotry, whatever else our current meritocrats may claim.

But the “WASP-to-lost” story recounted here also omits a crucial truth: The worst impulses of American meritocracy were themselves outgrowths of American Protestantism.

This is certainly evident in foreign policy, where the bien pensant outlook remains more or less Calvinist: pro-individual, pro-market, pro-scripture—and very much not pro-hierarchy. From Wilson’s screeds against the Habsburgs to Clinton’s human rights credenda, U.S. statecraft has long revolved around the idea that non-liberal, non-democratic states are de facto illegitimate—that a written constitution, or, if you will, covenant, is the best and highest mode of political order. Such thinking could only seem obvious “in a culture shaped at its origins by Protestantism,” wrote the historian James Kurth, “rather than by some other religion.”

Then of course there’s the economy. Because Protestantism emphasized salvation through grace alone—and because the Protestant faith was founded on a denial of hierarchical ecclesia—it could not simply take for granted that works in church constituted evidence of salvation. Instead, the relevant standard became success in the material world, giving rise to what Max Weber called “the spirit of capitalism”—a spirit that has proven significantly more resilient than the WASP establishment that incubated it.

These two impulses—a missionary zeal abroad and a market-oriented zeitgeist at home—didn’t go away with the rise of a new meritocratic elite; they just degenerated into less palatable forms. The Bush administration’s self-described “crusade” in Iraq; the Obama administration’s disastrous intervention in Libya; and from both parties, a technocratic consensus in support of neoliberalism—all of which has grown increasingly unpopular with WASPs and non-WASPs alike.

So when Douthat pins our current malaise on a WASP elite “pre-emptively dissolv[ing] itself,” he’s only telling one side of the story. Yes, the old regime had virtues that made it seem a lot more competent and legitimate than what we’ve ended up with since, but those virtues also kept in check a great many vices whose origins were every bit as Protestant, every bit as American, as the piety and self-discipline Douthat would like to see revived. The problem, then, isn’t that meritocracy displaced the WASPs; it’s that meritocracy displaced the ascetic parts of WASP culture while leaving the rapacious parts intact.

But even this framing is arguably too generous, for the WASP demission wasn’t just the result of exogenous secularism. Rather, secularism was the predictable result of the Protestant faith itself, especially in its personalist American variant. By tearing down the intermediaries between God and man, the Reformation elevated the individual vis a vis all existing hierarchies—including, eventually, those hierarchies encoded into its own theology. Thus, writes Kurth, “we no longer say ‘In God we trust’ and really mean it; we trust in ourselves and ask God, if he exists, to say, ‘Amen.’” In which case the loss of self-confidence was somewhat understandable once WASPs began recognizing their own contingent position on the totem pole. Douthat writes that “the combination of pious obligation joined to cosmopolitanism gave the old establishment a distinctive competence and effectiveness in statesmanship.” Maybe, but that combination was always unstable, held together by a religious logic that deplored any sort of pecking order. Indeed this logic is so firmly embedded within American life that even our current elite cannot escape it: To acknowledge its role as an elite would be to reject the egalitarian premises underlying the “Protestant Deformation”; and to reject that would be to reject an enduring strain of civic culture—which, like it or not, the WASPs bequeathed unto their successors. In this sense as in others, our ruling class remains more WASPy—well, more Protestant—than either its critics or advocates may like to think.

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In Ukraine It’s Not Merely About Ukraine—Which Is Why the West Must Respond

Russia’s military actions against Ukraine in and around the Azov Sea have triggered more than a week now of reaction. Both the UN Security Council and the NATO-Ukraine Commission convened emergency sessions. NATO member states issued statements. President Trump blurred American condemnation by saying, “We do not like what’s happening either way,” while also cancelling a planned bilateral meeting with Vladimir Putin at the G-20 and attributing the move to Russia’s actions. We’ve also seen a spate of op-eds, some insisting that Ukraine belongs to Russia’s sphere of influence; others arguing that Ukraine is vital to American security, and that the United States as a result must respond with the full weight of American diplomacy and the threat of military action.

Let’s take the measure of it all 11 days in.

Ukraine doves on both sides of the aisle point out that Ukraine is not a member of NATO. It is also a fact that Ukraine is a country whose democracy struggles mightily under the weight of pervasive corruption and kleptocracy. Some argue that Ukrainian President Poroshenko is taking advantage of the current crisis to boost his political fortunes, and criticize his declaration of martial law as overreach.

The American approach to the problem must be clear-eyed and hard-headed. This includes making it plain to our European allies that Ukraine is first and foremost a European interest. Yet, to note Ukraine’s flaws, or to say (again) that Europe must step up, does not mean the United States can afford to step down. Profound American interests are at stake.

For one thing, we have an enduring interest in the cohesion and vitality of NATO, and we have a Russia undertaking actions time and again that test our alliance on each and every front. “Putin’s war with Ukraine, like nearly everything else he pursues, is in the end all about America,” says Julia Joja, a Black Sea security expert and former adviser to a Romanian President. “Putin measures Russia’s success by American failure,” she tells us from Berlin. Indeed, Ukraine is a piece in a larger puzzle.

We used to do puzzles rather well. We once understood that nations maintain alliances to enhance their power. World War II, the Marshall Plan, the Korean War, the Berlin airlift, and the Cold War defense of Western Europe all had in common the defense of American interests. They all set the stage for American freedom, security, and prosperity.

To take such a view of things hardly makes one a relic of the past.

It is perhaps fitting to recall, as we prepare to lay to rest former President George H.W. Bush this week, that Bush grasped a larger view of things. Together with his Secretary of State James Baker III, Bush assembled in 1991 a coalition of 32 nations to eject Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait. It was the United States and Britain that did the military heavy lifting. Yet the United States depended heavily on NATO bases in Europe for all sorts of logistical support, including ammunition transfers, air traffic control, and refueling—and for political legitimacy. It is also easily forgotten that Operation Desert Storm actually had little to do with tiny Kuwait. The White House had a vision and strategy for the Middle East and the world in those days. We deemed it unacceptable that Saddam would grab Kuwait in a move designed to advance Iraq’s larger ambition for regional hegemony.

There are parallels today, even if oil and Israel do not figure into the current equation. Do not think for a moment the current Ukraine crisis is merely about a few vessels in the Azov Sea. It’s all of a piece, Russia’s slice and dice, the Kremlin’s cheat and retreat: cyber-attacks on Estonia, the invasion of Georgia, meddling in Moldova, the annexation of Crimea, the mischief with Iran and Syria, the interference in elections across Europe—and in the United States—and the ongoing war with Ukraine.

We bristle over the Washington conference parlor game whether Putin is a leader with a strategy, or whether he is merely an opportunist. Of course, he is both! Much in the spirit of what Scoop Jackson used to say of the Soviets—Putin is a cat burglar in a hotel, checking to see which door was left unlocked. Sometimes he slips in to commit the grand larceny of an election, sometimes the murder of an opponent. Yet none of this tactical opportunism means Putin is a man without a vision.

Can it really be lost on us by now that Putin wants to restore empire in the East, weaken and divide Europe in the West, and—the main event—build Russia up by cutting America down? It’s folly to think we can separate and contain these ambitions.

Let’s calm the hyper-realists and neo-isolationists. Of course, Russia is not a rising power like China. Nor are we suggesting Americans fight Russians in Ukraine. Rather, we are arguing that it is finally time for us to have a vision and strategy of our own, and that we will never get anywhere until we’re ready to push the Kremlin back. For the likes of Vladimir Putin, deterrence is respected. Weakness is provocative. In this instance, how to show strength? It’s high time we take full measures in order to allow Ukraine properly to defend itself. That must start with a substantial increase in the supply of lethal weapons to Kyiv. Sanctions should be expanded as well, both against Russian goods that move by ship and Russian individuals involved in maritime activities.

As long as we are seduced by the idea that all the bits and pieces of Russian aggression do not connect, we enable Vladimir Putin to advance his vision of a world where American power is diminished and diluted. This would be a world where NATO as a U.S.-led community of democracies sees itself ultimately relegated to the dustbin of history, and talk of advancing American interests pretty much anywhere becomes just that—all talk.

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What Harvard Needs to Make Leaders

One difference between today’s charge that Harvard discriminates against Asians and the fact that Harvard once did discriminate against Jews is that today’s Harvard thinks Asians too soft-spoken, while the old Harvard thought Jews too loud.

Otherwise the situations appear similar. Both cases involve a smart, high-achieving minority threatening to change Harvard’s student demographics, and a devious counter-strike by the college’s administration to prevent it. Today, Harvard awards many Asian applicants low personality scores using questionable criteria, thereby lowering their overall scores and making it harder for them to gain admission relative to whites, blacks, and Latinos. In the 1920s, then Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell purposely set the date for college interviews on Rosh Hashanah to force Jews to choose between worshipping in their faith and applying to Harvard; then he hatched a plan to make applicants submit photographs (to see if they looked Jewish) and a history of name changes (to catch any sneaky attempt at Anglicizing) to enforce a quota on Jews.

Still, there is a big difference between how the two cases ended up. In the 1920s, Harvard rejected Lowell’s plan and crafted an alternative that satisfied public opinion (of which more below). Today, after digging in its heels, Harvard has ended up in court, accused of discrimination. The latter, a public relations debacle, reflects a failure of leadership on Harvard’s part. Things should have never gotten this far. Such a failure of leadership is ironic, since Harvard sees its job as training the nation’s leaders.

A confused definition of leadership led Harvard astray. One cannot conceive of a society without leaders, yet few people today could offer a good definition of leadership other than to say that a leader is someone who wields power. This is not enough. Anyone can wield power. A technician or a bureaucrat can wield power. The same nation, composed of the same people, will show itself to be either disciplined or rebellious depending on the quality of its leadership, and that depends on the leader being more than a competent professional or a fine administrator. A leader must have equal shares of tact and wisdom, both born of experience and perhaps a bit of luck in living.

Each of the three parties in the Harvard dispute—the Asian applicants, the “legacy” applicants, and the black and Latino applicants—offers a vision of leadership. Yet each of these visions is really an example of what leadership is not. It is why Harvard got itself into trouble: It threw its lot in with the minority and legacy visions at the expense of the equally flawed Asian vision, without thinking too much about the kind of leaders it wants to train, beyond the banal persuasion that there not be too many Asians in the mix.

Three Visions of Leadership

The Asian applicants suing Harvard push the idea of meritocracy, where leaders are chosen on the basis of merit. They argue that because they got the grades and aced the exams, they are entitled to Harvard diplomas and all they entail. Intuitively, the notion seems fair because the conditions are the same for all competitors. Everyone takes the same exams; no one gets into Harvard just because their parents gave money or because they can claim membership in an official victims’ group.

Yet the merit system has flaws. The starting conditions are not the same for all competitors. Many college applicants, including many Asian applicants, pay for test-prep courses and high-quality tutors that other applicants cannot afford.

The more serious problem with meritocracy is that it does little to guarantee good leaders, which is Harvard’s stated goal. Leaders must direct the activities of others, not by following in detail the activities of each technician under their command, but by thinking more broadly, with one eye always on the public interest. With so many fields of endeavor now rarefied and specialized, meritocracy tends to produce not wise and thoughtful generalists but elite technicians—people who excel in knowing their field’s details to the exclusion of everything else. This is why they do so well on exams. They know minutiae. But knowing minutiae is not character, just as information is not culture, and scholarship is not leadership. Nothing in mastering a field’s details necessarily translates, for example, into the ability to maintain one’s composure during a crisis. Nor does scoring well on a test translate into an ability to use the minds of others. Leaders must be able to do these things.

Worse, elite technicians tend to be, well, elitist. They are impatient with stupidity. In my experience they don’t think average people should have much say in public life. In politics this means elected officials should defer to experts. In foreign policy this means turning the planet into a federation of lawyers. Such attitudes provoke resentment in a democracy, as well they should.

Finally, supporters of meritocracy tend to view leadership as something best earned through appointment, just as they view college admission as something best earned through scholarship. In other words, they believe a person should be picked to lead after achieving certain milestones. They are wrong. In a crisis situation, for example, no one appoints a leader. The leader imposes himself or herself on the situation. Leaders make themselves. Checking the right boxes on a test or compiling a fine work record is not a necessary prerequisite to becoming a leader.

The “legacies,” or children of Harvard alumnae (and usually white), push the idea of aristocracy, where leaders inherit their positions. It is like the old order of primogeniture. They argue that while their test scores may not be up there with the Asian applicants, they have the cultural background necessary for leadership, since someone in their family went to Harvard. In addition, their parents are typically rich, and when money speaks in America, it speaks authoritatively, making legacies natural members of the leadership class. Most important, because they compose the bulk of Harvard’s donor class, legacies make Harvard possible, which, they argue, benefits everyone.

As with meritocracy, the problem with aristocracy is that it does little to guarantee good leaders. Leaders have to be acknowledged as such, and in a democracy it is hard to win public approval for a hereditary leadership class, especially so in bad economic times.

A natural aristocracy is different from a self-created one. Harvard legacies exemplify the latter and enjoy a prestige that is not natural. On the contrary, many Americans see Harvard’s legacy class as manipulating the system to secure higher admission rates (a 33 percent acceptance rate for legacies versus a 5 percent rate for average people) to further its own personal interests. In the ideal, aristocratic leaders feel themselves bound to the people they lead by ties of honor that require sacrifices of them. Today, average Americans see Harvard legacies getting plenty of benefits, but without making any sacrifices beyond cutting a check to the college’s development fund.

Leaders must know how to make decisions and take responsibility for them. This requires willpower and the moral courage to stick to one’s guns after making a decision. At different times, leaders must also display reserve, solemnity, and discretion. There is nothing distinctive in legacy culture to predict these traits. Some Harvard legacy students, with their cool finals clubs and campus frolics—for example, washing cars in scantily-clad Speedos or dressing up like bees and bringing honey to class—sound like great people to hang out with. But their personalities do not suggest leadership material, although nothing prevents jokesters from evolving after graduation.

There is also the drug and hook-up subcultures found on most college campuses. People who are curious, mischievous, and able to persuade others, but who are powerless over themselves, rarely make good leaders—although this description could apply to anyone at Harvard, not just legacies. Yet if legacies are no different from other students in this regard, then as a class of potential leaders they don’t deserve special treatment.

Most important, aristocrats tend to be dismissive toward average people, more out of social snobbishness than meritocratic elitism. Many legacy students come from blue states and live in or near big cities. When they see lower middle class people, many of whom voted for Trump, they sometimes think: “deplorables.” Yet grasping different approaches to life, and different starting points in society, is a factor that leaders must take into account in human affairs. Harvard’s future leaders must expect to encounter “deplorables” and listen to them patiently. The highly parochial culture of Harvard’s legacy class often prevents this trait from developing.

Many black and Latino applicants push the idea of diversity, where leaders emerge after previously disenfranchised minorities have gained access to elite institutions. They enroll at Harvard not necessarily because they earned their positions through merit—two-thirds of black students and one-half of Hispanic students at Harvard benefit from affirmative action—but as compensation for society’s unjust past. When they graduate, these minority students, like all students at Harvard, leverage their networks and the college’s prestige to secure good careers. They become leaders within their minority communities by virtue of their special accomplishment of having gone to Harvard; then they cross over into general leadership positions by virtue of their good careers and because diversity demands its share of minority leaders.

The problem with diversity, as with meritocracy and aristocracy, is that it often fails to produce good leaders. Minority students who push diversity believe so strongly in equality that it sometimes seems as if they dislike the very idea of leadership. They want to tear down hierarchies, as most revolutionaries do. Yet revolutionaries often lack a sense of what is possible, and so the general public fears entrusting them with their affairs.

Sometimes leaders can make a clean sweep and impose the mold of their minds on a country for generations. But most leaders must move within circumscribed limits. They must take into account tradition and custom. They must work with people as they are, not as they think they ought to be. Minority students fed on diversity ideology often imagine things differently. They create faultless social systems and formulate plans for absolute justice; they preach doctrines and imagine schemes. Nor are their ideas acquired from experience. They are learned from textbooks written by people with little worldly experience themselves. Students have trouble putting these ideas into practice when they graduate because no one ever has.

In addition, a leader’s mind must have some degree of simplicity and clarity. Too much complexity can be paralyzing. But all sorts of complex theories, such as post-colonialism and intersectionality, hobble diversity fanatics. An over-organized mind wastes as much time and energy as an under-organized one; both are bad for leaders. Although diversity fanatics can convince some people of their theories, other people start to imagine that diversity fanatics probably can convince themselves of any theory. This makes normal people hesitant to follow them.

Finally, like meritocracy and aristocracy, diversity exhibits the same pattern of viewing the average person as an administrative pawn, whose objections can be dismissed with the words: It’s none of your business. Such contempt arises not from technical elitism or social snobbishness but from anger and resentment that sometimes crosses over into blind hatred, especially toward white males. A good leader does not give in to such temptations. Indeed, an important quality of a leader is to be unbiased and without excessive self-interest. Leaders who cloak their bitterness with feigned scruples about equality—feigned, because in diversity ideology some people are more equal than others—are pious in the worst sense of the word. Many people instinctively resist their claim to leadership out of fear.

Harvard Then and Now

In 1922, when Harvard President Lowell foolishly went public with his plan to put a quota on the number of Jews, two of the three leadership visions dominated the ensuing conflict: aristocracy and meritocracy.

Old American Protestants (like Lowell) pushed aristocracy. Jews had gone from 7 percent of the Harvard student body in 1900 to 10 percent in 1920, to 15 percent in 1921, and to 20 percent in 1922—with the expectation that their numbers would soon climb to 40 percent. In the process Jews were accused of changing Harvard’s culture. It’s not just that “Jews set the pace,” pushing scholastic standards so high that everyone else had to work ten times harder, one person complained at the time, but that Jews were taking over campus institutions like student government and the school newspaper. Meanwhile, in classes, one critic observed, no longer did students sit quietly in solidarity with each other when a professor asked a question; instead, Jews eagerly raised their hands, as if they actually enjoyed learning. Worse, Jews argued about everything in an aggressive, take-no-prisoners style. Of the Jewish college man, the head of fraternities complained, “You can hear him a mile off.”

Already in 1922, Harvard’s aristocrats saw Harvard as training the nation’s leaders, yet they envisioned those leaders in the mold of Christian gentlemen, with the Roman patrician’s love of free inquiry added in. Jews did not fit this mold. The aristocrats had no problem with a few Jews entering Harvard; they could and would be assimilated, and Jews were fine as long as their behavior did not stray from the norm. The problem, they said, was too many Jews, who would then form a state within a state, or change the culture altogether. William F. Buckley, a Yale graduate, spoke wistfully on the problem years later, when he asked, “But is it meant in welcoming students of other creeds, that a college must forswear its own traditional creed?” Curiously, some Jews, especially established German Jews like Walter Lippmann, agreed with the Protestant aristocrats and supported the idea of quotas.

The Jews pushed meritocracy and for good reason. Not many college opportunities existed for them in those days. State colleges generally did not exist at today’s level, while some prestigious colleges such as Yale, Princeton, and Columbia already had Jewish quotas. If Harvard, the most prestigious of them all, enforced quotas, other colleges would close their doors and Jews would be denied access to a route to the middle class that led through higher education and credentialing.

Harvard’s president lost control of the process when his quota plan went public. In 1923, a Harvard committee resolved the issue. It accepted the meritocratic vision and rejected quotas. It also accepted the aristocratic vision and believed Harvard’s culture worth preserving. It settled the conflict by introducing a new vision of leadership—democracy—to sit alongside the other two. The committee recommended that Harvard seek wider regional representation among its student body, especially west of the Mississippi. The result artificially lowered the number of Jews at the College by dint of a different method.

This third vision of leadership proved critical a decade later when Hitler came to power. Although Hitler respected America’s industrial strength, he did not believe America would fight. He saw America as a “mongrel nation” incapable of forming a national army. Given the history of states’ rights in the United States, where even as late as the first decade of the 20th century some U.S. Army groups continued to identify themselves by state (for example, New York’s 69th regiment or the 29th Maine infantry), and given mass immigration to the United States from other countries during the first quarter of that century, Hitler came to the erroneous conclusion that America lacked the national cohesiveness to go to war.

Almost as if anticipating the crisis to come, the Harvard Plan helped to train American leaders who saw value in merit and tradition, but who also saw the need to bring the country together, both regionally and ethnically, as a unified fighting force. This was part of the “Americanization” project of the first half of the past century. To this day, critics of the Harvard Plan complain that it caused the number of Jews at Harvard to drop back down to 10 percent, as more Americans (usually non-Jews) from other regions entered the college at the expense of Jews. That is true, but they ignore the Plan’s vital contribution to American leadership at a crucial moment in history.

Three visions of leadership dominate the current Harvard debate: meritocracy, aristocracy, and now diversity. Today’s circumstances are analogous to those in the 1920s. In the 1980s, Asian students comprised only 4 percent of the Harvard student body. That number quickly rose to 21 percent in 1993. At some point the new personality scoring system kicked in, and Asians drifted back down to 17 percent in 2015. Without that system, Asians would comprise 43 percent of Harvard students.

But unlike in the 1920s, hypocrisy and cynicism accompany the three visions. The flaws that exist in each vision as a stand-alone justification for leadership have grown so obvious that each vision by itself has deservedly become a target of ridicule.

The Asian students push meritocracy, but unlike the Jews in the 1920s, who rightly feared being shut out of the American college system, Asian students need have no such fears. Excellent state universities now exist, and Asians often dominate their student bodies—for example, making up 34 percent of the University of California system. They also dominate prestigious private universities such as Cal Tech (43 percent).

No, many Asian students want to go to Harvard for very un-meritocratic reasons. For the merit system to be fair, life after Harvard, and not just before, must be a series of exams open to all, so that everyone can compete fairly for the best jobs. This, of course, doesn’t happen, nor do Harvard graduates—Asian or otherwise—expect this to happen. On the contrary, they expect the social networks they forge at Harvard to give them a leg up when applying for jobs; they expect to intern for Harvard alumni in high positions, putting them on the inside track for prestigious careers; they expect the name “Harvard” to open doors for them, as if by magic. One recent Harvard graduate described this to me as “dropping an H-bomb” during a job interview. Meritocracy’s supporters believe in merit as the fair standard on the way into Harvard, but not on the way out.

Just as hypocritical, some Asian students reverse course once admitted to Harvard and publicly oppose meritocracy, the way some Jews voiced support for Jewish quotas once they were safely ensconced at Harvard. Hypocrites make for bad leaders, and people who push meritocracy until the moment meritocracy becomes inconvenient are hypocrites.

Black and Latino students push diversity, but diversity’s supporters then go overboard and downgrade the importance of merit altogether, even calling it a myth. Some diversity supporters see testing as a manifestation of white privilege; others want to replace objective measures of merit with a straightforward lottery, as if admission by chance is somehow fairer than admission by merit. They ignore the fact that grades do matter and often predict student outcome in college. They ignore evidence for “mismatch,” where minority students with poor academic records often do worse when placed in elite colleges instead of colleges more appropriate for their level of academic accomplishment. They ignore the fact that after college some jobs, such as aviation and anesthesiology (my own field), really do require merit, and that without it innocent people get killed. Dreamers who ignore reality make for bad leaders, and diversity supporters who ignore reality are dreamers.

The “legacies” who push aristocracy are the most bankrupt of all. In the 1920s, Harvard’s aristocrats wanted to preserve a very real culture, but what culture do today’s aristocrats want to preserve? Certainly not a Christian culture—Harvard is almost hostile to Christianity. Certainly not a tradition of free inquiry—Harvard is as rife with speech codes and political correctness as nearly every other college. Certainly not a culture at risk of disappearing because student government, campus clubs, and the school newspaper are being taken over by a new student demographic—unlike the Jews at Harvard in the 1920s, Asian students today show no predilection for swarming these institutions. No, legacies want to keep their path into Harvard free and clear, to secure for themselves and their children high-paying careers afterward. Their problem is that they have no ideology to give their self-interested behavior cover, so they cynically support diversity, hoping that by stoking the conflict between diversity and meritocracy they will divert attention away from themselves and continue to slide into Harvard unnoticed.

And Harvard has gone along with the legacies, siding with aristocracy and diversity at the expense of meritocracy. That has exposed the college to the charge of discrimination, even while the motivations of those making that charge are just as suspect.

Harvard needs to implement a fourth vision—democracy—alongside the other three visions to restore some balance. If the United States experiences a major war in the next 20 years, it will not be against a hostile power like Nazi Germany; it will far more likely be a kind of civil war. Nonetheless, the precautionary measures needed are the same. The Harvard committee of the 1920s wisely understood that what is true of Harvard is true of the factory, the hospital, the business office, and the country. Someone has to take command when people need to act together. For this to happen, those in leadership positions must recognize and respect all of those whom they would lead. Indeed, leaders must be able to foresee unhappiness and remedy injustices before complaints get out of hand. To do so they must maintain close contact with the people they govern. They must have an understanding of other people’s lives. Today, Harvard’s meritocrats, aristocrats, and diversity supporters, each for different reasons, often have contempt for average people, and especially for red state people. Average people and red state people know this, and reciprocate that contempt. It is a dangerous situation.

If Harvard sees itself as training the country’s future leaders, then it needs to bring this fourth, democratic vision of leadership back to campus. It needs a 1920s-like Harvard Plan, where geographical distribution, especially from rural areas, influences admissions. To make room for these new students Harvard should cut most from the legacies, who are the most ideologically bankrupt; then from the meritocrats, who are often just hypocrites; and least from the diversity students, who are mostly guilty of just dreaming.

To lead is a trust, not a privilege. Indeed, trust is what makes leadership possible. Leaders must be able to think creatively and suggest something new, while still retaining a broad following. They must be able to order sometimes reluctant subordinates to get things done, but without resorting to the dictatorial way to overcome their problems. They must be able to smooth over conflicts that erupt among those they lead, but without losing their ability to exercise personal will and power. None of this is easy, but none of this is even possible without trust between leaders and the led. People will allow themselves to be led if they believe their leaders know where they are going, care about their concerns, and have the nation’s best interests at heart. In a democracy this means that a leader’s mind must be marked, at least in part, by a democratic sensibility.

In Plato’s Republic, the best leader has a mind in which reason, spirit, passion, and desire exist in balance and work in concert. To become a leader, a Harvard student needs meritocracy, aristocracy, diversity, and democracy to share space on campus. That is not the case today.

Oliver Pollack, “Anti-Semitism, the Harvard Plan, and the Roots of Reverse Discrimination,” Jewish Social Studies (Spring 1983).

Klaus Fischer, Hitler and America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). For commentary on Fischer’s thesis see Cezara Anton, “How Did Hitler Perceive the U.S.?”, as well as this review of Fischer’s book.

Some argue that the percentage of Jews at Harvard actually increased for a short time after implementation of the Plan, dropping sharply afterward. See Marcia Graham Synnott, The Half-Opened Door (Greenwood Press, 1979).

Data posted by Stephen Hsu, June 16, 2018.

For example, see this response by Catherine Ho, co-chair of the Harvard Asian American Women’s association. “A lawyer asked Ho to reflect on what would happen if Harvard weren’t able to consider applicants’ race, and if, as a result, the number of minority students on the campus declined. Would that affect her experience? ‘Without a doubt,’ Ho said. ‘For the worse.’” See also Hua Hsu, who said that if Harvard became 50 percent Asian, “Harvard would no longer be Harvard.”

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