Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 65

Securing the Peace

On the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meetings in New York this fall, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was asked about his commitment to a two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To both Donald Trump and several U.S. media outlets, Netanyahu gave essentially the same answer. “My view of a potential agreement is that the Palestinians have all the powers to govern themselves, but none of the powers to threaten us,” Netanyahu told NPR. “The key power that must . . . not be in their hands is the question of security. In the tiny area west of the Jordan River up to the Mediterranean . . . Israel must retain the overriding security responsibility.”

Conspicuous by their absence were issues the Israeli premier had previously touted as obstacles to peace, such as Palestinian non-recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, incitement, salary payments to prisoners and “martyr” families, possible settlement withdrawals, and the future of Jerusalem. In their stead he spoke of a single concern: security west of the Jordan River.

Security, to be sure, has been a major element in previous Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, with emphasis on maintaining an Israeli military presence in the Jordan Valley border region and other strategic outposts in the West Bank. The fear, going back decades, was an invasion from the east, across the Jordan River—a scenario that became much less acute after the 2003 fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. In more recent times, the Arab Spring uprisings raised concerns of instability and terror seeping into the West Bank.

There have been multiple plans put forward to allay this particular Israeli anxiety, with the most recent ones being by a U.S. mission, led by General John Allen, as well as by a retired group of Israeli security officers called Commanders for Israel’s Security. While the Netanyahu government has been less than impressed with these efforts, border security—including a continued Israel Defense Forces (IDF) presence in the Jordan Valley—should be a resolvable problem. The worst that can be said of the matter is that it doesn’t rise to the level of intractability of other final status issues like, say, Palestinian sovereignty in Jerusalem or the evacuation of Israeli settlers from Hebron.

Indeed, the long-held Israeli demand for a demilitarized Palestinian state—highlighted repeatedly by Netanyahu this fall—is a misnomer in two senses. First, the Palestinians have effectively conceded the argument, based on statements and leaks from past negotiating rounds; under any scenario, a future Palestinian state will not have an army, that is, a military equipped with heavy offensive weapons, armor, air power and the like. Second, and in contrast to the first point, demilitarized does not mean lacking a security force.

Recent statements made by Netanyahu and several of his senior ministers, comparing a future Palestinian state to Costa Rica (famous for having no military at all) are wide of the mark. “Different people mean different things when they say ‘states,’” Netanyahu told CNN, alluding to other state models and the need for demilitarization. “So rather than talk about labels, I’d like to talk about substance.”

Yet substantively, for over two decades a significant Palestinian security force—today numbering nearly 30,000 men-under-arms—has been operating west of the Jordan River; substantively, too, Israel has already ceded security control over large pockets of the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority (PA). Over the past decade, these Palestinian Authority Security Forces, trained by the United States and other international partners, have worked in close cooperation with the IDF to maintain stability. These forces are, in many respects, the most positive aspect of the entire peace process enterprise. Far from being the impediment, security could help set the foundation of an Israeli-Palestinian peace.

From the very first agreements signed as part of the Oslo Accords, the PA, envisioned as a temporary self-rule entity, was afforded a security force. By May 1994, jottings on maps became reality when Yasser Arafat and elements of the old Palestine Liberation Army returned to the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank to take up governing powers from vacating Israeli forces. The terminology used initially was a “strong police force” to provide “public order and internal security” for the Palestinian population—and they were allowed guns. But the larger objective was made clear by then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin when he infamously quipped, “The Palestinian Police will fight Hamas [i.e. terrorism] without B’Tselem, without the High Court, and without Mothers Against Silence”—that is, more effectively without the restraints placed on Israel by its human rights NGOs and judicial system.

As Arafat and the PA were given more territory to control, and more authority, the Palestinian Authority Security Force (PASF) grew exponentially: from the initial four branches to 12 by 2000; in 2004 the number was 15 by one count, and at a later point it had grown to an unwieldy 17. By the late 1990s, there was an officer-to-resident ratio of 1:50 in PA-controlled areas, making the small proto-state one of the most heavily policed territories in the world.

Despite the numbers, Arafat’s PASF in the 1990s didn’t in fact do what it was supposed to do: not only to crack down on Hamas and other rejectionist terror groups, but also to establish, writ large, a monopoly on the means of violence in the Palestinian Territories. As the late Middle East scholar Barry Rubin described it, Arafat “alternatively arrested, intimidated, complimented and freed Hamas leaders. He also let them maintain their institutions and even military networks.” The waves of suicide bombings inside Israel during this period were a testament, like nothing else, to the PA’s abject failure on this front. Disarmament of terror groups and outside militias (including ones from Arafat’s own Fatah party), as called for repeatedly in the Israeli-Palestinian agreements, was never carried out. Even Palestinian officials lamented the fact that the PA, far from being a model state, came to resemble Somalia, Afghanistan, or “the American West 200 years ago.”

Almost as concerning, serious incidents of PASF-on-IDF violence also took place during the Oslo years, beginning as early as 1994. The opening of a tourist tunnel in September 1996 near Jerusalem’s Western Wall/al-Haram al-Sharif complex unleashed the most serious escalation. The Hasmonean Tunnel riots, as the incident came to be known, marked the first time that PASF security personnel used live fire against Israeli troops on a wide scale. The unrest lasted for three days, claiming the lives of 69 Palestinians and 14 Israeli soldiers (including seven senior officers). It would of course be a dress rehearsal for what took place four years later with the outbreak of the Second Intifada (2000-05).

Arafat, it became apparent, never truly relinquished the military option with respect to Israel. PASF personnel and Fatah militiamen (the line between the two was increasingly blurred) became directly involved in the years of unrelenting terror. In response, Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, retaking most West Bank cities that had been turned over to the PA. For all intents, the PASF ceased to function, decimated by Israeli countermeasures and internal anarchy and chaos. In November 2004 Arafat died, paving the way for Mahmoud Abbas to assume the PA presidency. By that time Israel had already redeployed back outside most Palestinian-controlled areas, or “Area A” of the West Bank as they were termed by the Oslo Accords. The following year, in September 2005, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon withdrew all Israeli settlers and forces from Gaza.

The specter of Israel’s disengagement from Gaza haunts the peace process like nothing else before or since. Sharon, after all, demolished settlements and drew Israel back to the internationally recognized 1967 lines. After two years, however, Hamas violently overthrew the PA inside Gaza, the repercussions of which are still being felt more than a decade—and three wars—later. “We left Gaza and what happened?” Netanyahu recently posited. “This tiny thumb . . . became a position of radical Islam supported by Iran, they fired 4,000 missiles on us, not only on Beersheba and Ashdod—on Tel Aviv, Jerusalem. . . . Why is that? Because we’re not there.”

This position is shared, and promulgated, not only by Netanyahu and other right-wing Israeli politicians; it’s also a commonly held belief by much of the Israeli public. Unilaterally withdrawing from territory, as much of the world demands (that is, ending the occupation) was tried, and all it did was pave the way for a belligerent “Hamastan” on Israel’s southern edge. As an indictment of the PA’s ability to hold territory (absent the IDF) it is, for many, almost unimpeachable. The lesson remains, as Netanyahu went on to add, that Israel needs “to be there all the time—that’s why the West Bank [today] is not Gaza.”

Without absolving the PA of its own responsibility for the Gazan fiasco, the context within which the disengagement happened should also matter: When it was carried out, perhaps more than simply how, is a crucial point often missing from the conversation.

The Second Intifada, as mentioned, decimated the PASF as well as the PA more broadly. Disarmed, and with their infrastructure and equipment smashed, the PASF in many areas was an institutional shell. Armed gunmen from the various factions roamed the streets, taking the law unto themselves and often running localized protection rackets. Opinion polling on the eve of the Gaza disengagement in 2005 showed that the Palestinian public placed greater trust in the armed wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad than in the various PASF services. These militant groups, hardened after years fighting the IDF during the Second Intifada, were growing in strength. Indeed, even prior to the disengagement, the head of Israel’s military intelligence already assessed that Hamas had established a “‘parallel authority’ to the PA in Gaza.”

Fatah, on the other hand, was beset by internal rivalries, turf battles, and petty politics. Increasingly Fatah cadres couldn’t even protect themselves, let alone police territory. Mere days before the last Israeli left the coastal enclave, 100 heavily armed men stormed the Gazan home of Musa Arafat, cousin of the late President and a senior PA security chief in his own right. After an attack that lasted half an hour, Arafat was dragged into the street and executed in the first light of dawn. The offices of a rival PASF service were located nearby, yet none of its personnel deigned to intervene. Musa Arafat’s murder wasn’t an outlier, but just one example of the lack of cohesion and solidarity within Fatah/PA ranks. It would prove to be extremely costly.

In June 2007, after two years of internecine armed clashes between Fatah and Hamas, especially inside Gaza, matters came to a head. In a mere six days, an estimated force of several thousand Hamas personnel in the territory routed a much larger PASF/Fatah opponent with a combined strength of 20,000 fighters. “Combined,” however, was merely a theoretical concept: In truth, these forces were fragmented, largely leaderless, and lacking in organization, arms, and morale. As the local Fatah strongman Mohammed Dahlan (who was abroad during the putsch) lamented after the fact, “It would be very easy for a few people who have a goal to succeed over a large army that does not have a goal and does not have proper weaponry.” The fall of Gaza, in short, may not have been a death foretold, but it arguably should have been

Fast forward almost a decade. It’s a bleak winter day outside of Bethlehem in early 2016, and Lt. Col. Yair Pinto, an IDF battalion commander responsible for this sector of the southern West Bank, is driving with me in a lone jeep through various Palestinian villages. He gestures at a highway overpass ahead used by local teenagers to hurl rocks at Israeli cars below. “The expectation is that the Palestinian Authority’s security forces will take care of it,” Pinto, a veteran of the Second Intifada, said when I queried him on what countermeasures were in place. “I don’t feel there isn’t someone to trust on the other side.”

The loss of Gaza and the division of the Palestinian Territories was a wakeup call for the PA leadership. Hamas was a clear, present, and genuine threat to Fatah dominance. The double game of the Arafat era and the collapse of the Second Intifada had culminated in the nadir of Gaza. Change was now of paramount importance, beginning with the PASF and what Palestinians referred to as the “security chaos” in their midst. Mahmoud Abbas, along with his Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, embarked on a reform program that would, at long last, attempt to implement the elusive maxim of “one gun, one law, one authority”—even if only in the West Bank.

The efforts of the past ten years have created a reality west of the Jordan River that is starkly different from the years preceding them. PASF battalions, with close U.S. support and Israeli approval, have been reconstituted, retrained, and redeployed back into Palestinian population centers. (It’s true now, just as it was in the past and will be in future, that Israel doesn’t want to meet the high cost—militarily, politically, financially—of having its own soldiers policing Palestinians daily.) Unlike the Arafat era, the reform effort was sincere, consolidating a heretofore sprawling and ill-disciplined apparatus into eight clearly delineated services: Civil Police, National Security Force, Presidential Guard, General Intelligence, Preventive Security, Military Intelligence, District Coordination Office, and Civil Defense.

These forces, beginning shortly after the Gaza coup, embarked on three interrelated lines of operations: first, a law and order campaign to get the armed militias off the streets and restore a sense of personal safety to civilians; second, an anti-Hamas counter-terror campaign targeting the PA’s central enemy; and third (related to the first two), intimate security coordination with Israel. While not perfect or complete in any sense, the PA has made massive strides in all three areas.

By most accounts armed men who previously roamed freely in the center of Palestinian cities disappeared, crime fell, and business confidence returned. Even the onetime scourge of the Fatah militias—the Tanzim and its terrorist offshoot, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades—has, through a mix of persuasion and coercion, lain dormant, confined to small fiefdoms in various refugee camps and inner cities. Hamas in the West Bank is a shadow of its former self militarily and institutionally, harried constantly by the PASF (as well as Israeli forces). The shift on the part of the PA is palpable operationally but also conceptually. “Before the ‘state of divide’ [in June 2007, the PA was] aware of Hamas’s weapons but wasn’t strict,” Akram Rajoub, the governor of Nablus, told me in 2016. “Hamas weapons were a political tool used viciously against Fatah. . . . We can see the difference in how they were dealt with before and after the coup.”

In both campaigns, the PASF operates under a security coordination framework with Israel that holds within it several components: dialogue and intelligence sharing; counterterrorism; deconfliction during IDF raids into Area A; riot control; safe return of Israeli citizens; and civil defense (namely, joint firefighting and emergency first response). Abbas has on several occasions termed this policy “sacred,” buttressing his wider strategic decision, contra Arafat, of non-violence.

Israeli and Palestinian officers communicate and meet regularly, sharing intelligence on common threats—primarily Hamas—that could, as one senior PA security official told me, “impact the stable security situation on both sides.” The PASF is known to have assisted Israel during many of the high-profile terrorist manhunts of recent years. During the haba (eruption) of “lone wolf” terror attacks in 2015-16, the PASF worked to interdict attackers—predominantly young Palestinians—ahead of time. By the end of 2016, according to one count, the PASF were responsible for a third of all terror suspect arrests.

Israel, however, maintains considerable freedom of action to launch arrest raids and security operations inside Palestinian cities. This is coordinated in advance through an official deconfliction mechanism with the PASF that overall works extremely well, containing the risk of armed clashes between the two sides. “Once we needed a division to enter Jenin,” Israel’s then-Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon stated in late 2015. “Two days ago, we did it with a small force.”

On the popular side, the PA deploys its extensive riot control units to forestall large-scale demonstrations from escalating in the sensitive seam zones between Israeli and Palestinian control (highways, checkpoints and settlements), including stopping armed protestors from reaching the front lines. The PA has also refrained from mobilizing its people to take to the streets for years.

Finally, the PASF now safely returns Israeli Jewish citizens who stray into Palestinian villages and cities. An estimated 300 Israelis were returned in this manner in 2016, according to Israeli authorities; the Palestinians tout more than 500 Israelis in 2017 alone. One of the more recent examples took place in February 2018, when two uniformed IDF personnel drove into Jenin in midday in a clearly marked military jeep. PASF officers were quickly deployed to the scene, firing into the air and physically pushing back hundreds of rioting locals. Save for a few minor injuries, the Israeli soldiers were removed unscathed. Each of these incidents holds the potential to turn deadly—and in the past often did. The October 2000 lynching of two IDF reservists in Ramallah, detained in a PA police station at the start of the Second Intifada, is still seared into the Israeli consciousness.

Similar to the battalion commander quoted above, Israeli security officials up to the highest levels are aware of these vast changes. Without overstating Palestinian capabilities, the PA over the past decade has been remarkably successful in achieving, as one such official put it to me, “systemic order and stability in the West Bank.” The PASF as an institution, in contrast to earlier periods, has retained its cohesion and professionalism, weathering untold Israeli-Palestinian security and diplomatic crises. Orders emanating from the Muqata presidential compound in Ramallah to the various security chiefs, and on down to the field level, are indeed followed.

In their more self-aware moments, Israeli politicians, too, acknowledge the value of security coordination—yet too often minimize or distort the Palestinian role. “How come you don’t see that much terrorism in the West Bank? First of all, we have security coordination with the [PA]. That’s good,” Netanyahu told NPR. Yet he went on to add that the “bulk of the security operations is done by us,” claiming that Israel was forced to “send our soldiers there” and “take the risk” because the PA was unwilling to do so. The PA “want us to take care of their security and then they attack us internationally,” Netanyahu said.

Leaving aside the many other facets of the security relationship, enumerated above, that aid stability in the West Bank, the Palestinians in fact consistently ask to do more. Nothing creates friction between Israel and the Palestinian population quite like IDF arrest operations into Area A; they are the main source of illegitimacy for the PASF in the eyes of their own public. Already tarred with being “subcontractors for the occupation” and “dogs of the Jews,” the PASF then have to look on from the sidelines as the IDF regularly takes matters into its own hands—sometimes with reason, owing to the complexity of certain operations and the sensitivity of certain intelligence, but other times, according to one former Israeli security official, due to inertia and habit.

“Give me responsibility. Try me for a week,” Abbas said during an interview with Israeli television in 2016. “If I don’t meet my responsibilities then come back. . . . You want me to be your employee, your agent. I don’t accept this. I want to do this myself.”

In point of fact, the PA over the past decade has quietly returned to many of the Oslo-era police hubs in outlying villages (“Area B,” under PA civil control but overall Israeli security control). More tellingly, in the past few years PA police stations have opened up in several Palestinian neighborhoods near and in East Jerusalem—that is, under full Israeli control and, in the case of the Jerusalem municipality, sovereignty. The purpose of these moves was practical, since such “no-man’s-lands” between Israeli and PA control have become havens for criminal activity. But there was also, to be sure, a political dimension: It allows the PA to be seen as “delivering” better daily security to its people.

Since at least 2015, PA security officials and senior IDF officers are known to have been in negotiations to increase the PASF’s authority and capacity in the West Bank, including the provision of more advanced equipment. The Israeli security establishment is believed to be more amenable to such moves precisely because they understand both the practical value of having a strong Palestinian partner—“the more the Palestinian security forces do, the less we have to,” a senior IDF officer once put it—and its worth as a political symbol.

Calculated leaks to the press, usually Israeli, have often scuttled these and more far-reaching plans, such as discussions on minimizing Israeli raids into Area A. As a source close to Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett stated, “The transfer of security authority over Areas A and B amounts to outsourcing the security of Israeli citizens to the [PA]. . . . Only the IDF will defend Israeli citizens.”

For this reason, Abbas’s imploration for Israel to “try him” has, to date, never truly been put to the test, despite the near unanimous praise for the PASF’s work and the ongoing security coordination. The question is whether this state of affairs, with us for the past decade, is sustainable given Netanyahu’s declared commitment that security west of the Jordan River will forever and completely be in Israeli hands (never mind that in practice, as we’ve seen, this has been caveated greatly).

After all, the Palestinians don’t just do all of this as a favor to Israel; far from it. They view the PASF and coordination with Israel as means to an end: the end being statehood. “We fought for many decades in a different way; and now we are fighting for peace,” Palestinian intelligence chief Majid Faraj told Defense News in 2016. “So I will continue fighting to keep this bridge against radicalization and violence that should lead us to our independence.”

Security—and with that Palestinian control over more territory, more Palestinian lives, and less IDF encroachment—is inherently tied to the issue of Palestinian statehood. The tension therefore is not, as Netanyahu would have it, of security holding back the political (“basically all the powers of sovereignty . . . but not the ones of security”), but rather the political potentially undermining security.

Without a genuine diplomatic horizon toward a two-state solution, the very real gains of the past decade may be for naught. Instead of using the security rationale as an alibi for the lack of progress, Israel would do well to test Abbas. The IDF, of course, isn’t leaving the West Bank tomorrow, and a formula for ensuring Israel’s overall security can be found—especially continued coordination with a strong, professional, and cohesive PASF. The basic wager of the peace process remains in place: land for peace, security for statehood. Different people may “mean different things when they say ‘states,’” as Netanyahu posited, but it’s highly unlikely that his definition of “security” is quite so fluid.

The post Securing the Peace appeared first on The American Interest.

Immigration and the Logic of Liberalism

Melting Pot or Civil War? A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders

Reihan Salam

Sentinel, 2018, 224 pp., $27

There’s a common refrain among American immigration skeptics—the most dogmatic ones, at any rate—that liberalism requires a taste for liberty, refined through practice and embedded within social mores and institutions. Our economy, our legal system, our constitutional heritage presuppose a particular kind of culture that is more or less consistent with Anglo-Protestant values, and for this reason open borders constitutes something like collective suicide: As demographics change and norms change with them, the consensus underpinning our politics gradually evaporates, leaving behind a factious anti-nation in which compromise is impractical and self-government impossible—or so some restrictionists contend.

But not Reihan Salam, whose Melting Pot or Civil War? makes a much more moderate argument than its bellicose title might suggest. The son of Bangladeshi immigrants, Salam eschews cultural determinism for dialectical materialism, presenting uncontrolled migration as a class problem more than an identity crisis. This doesn’t mean Melting Pot ignores culture—on the contrary, it goes to great lengths to show how porous borders undermine civic cohesion—but the book is always careful to attribute such breakdown to labor markets and mismatched skills, economic forces that would operate regardless of newcomers’ social values. Salam can therefore appeal to liberals who are worried about the return of jus sanguinis while at the same time courting conservatives worried about the fact that some 14 percent of the U.S. population is now foreign born. To the extent there’s a reactionary current here, it’s subtle and attenuate, the voltage uncharacteristically low for what in the Trump era has become a political third rail.  

This approach—restrictionism sans racism—is tactically savvy and morally laudable. But it also leaves one rather perplexed about the book’s title: How, exactly, are the economic problems Salam outlines supposed to precipitate a civil war, or anything close? Partisanship, sure; racial tensions, definitely. But a crisis as destructive and consequential as the deadliest conflict in American history? Melting Pot makes scant attempt to justify that comparison, despite the title’s obvious evocations, which suggests Salam has something else in mind when he warns of an impending crack-up.

Indeed, whereas many restrictionists see immigration as a threat to the social order, undermining the civic fabric on which it depends, Melting Pot seems to see immigration as the key to that order’s survival, a crystallization of its inner logic. And that means that by critiquing immigration Salam is implicitly critiquing liberalism itself. He’s not just making the case against open borders, in other words; he’s also making the case against the kind of society in which open borders make sense.

The Economic Worry

Excavating that argument, though, will require some work, so let’s begin with the obvious: What does Salam claim to be claiming?

Roughly this: By creating a large and ethnically homogenous underclass of low-skilled laborers, our current immigration regime will render liberal democratic politics impossible. While in the past America has absorbed such newcomers with relative ease, offshoring and automation have systematically reduced the need for cheap manpower, all but ensuring that low-skilled immigrants remain stuck at the income ladder’s bottommost rungs. “There is a widespread belief that immigrants and their offspring have poverty-defying superpowers that natives do not,” Salam acknowledges—but the reality is that “rags-to-riches stories delight and inspire us precisely because they are so rare.” Most immigrants will not start billion-dollar tech companies or become high-school valedictorians, and those who do typically come from privileged backgrounds, meaning they do not face a skills deficit upon arrival. For everyone else, it is “much harder . . . to climb out of poverty.”

And in an era of increasing geographic segregation, poverty undermines immigrants’ ability to assimilate, especially when their ranks are continuously replenished by new arrivals from the old country. Under these conditions, an immigrant community “has a much better shot at remaining separate and distinct,” which in turn generates “more in-group solidarity” and ethnic cohesion. Ghettoized from mainstream American culture, surrounded by people who overwhelmingly look and speak like them, low-skilled immigrants will begin to think (and vote) as an organized racial block, distrustful of native whites who always seem to come out ahead. That dynamic tends to manifest most strongly among second-generation immigrants:

As someone born and raised in neighborhoods transformed by low-skill immigration, I can confirm that: ‘You’re better off than you would have been had you been born in the Third World!’ is not a satisfying riposte. ‘Gee, thanks. I also can’t afford my rent.’

Native whites, on the other hand, will grow suspicious and resentful of their non-native counterparts—what Salam calls “the backlash paradox”—especially as they watch social resources being diverted to the new arrivals. Class politics will become color politics; compromise will become impossible. And America will become so polarized that it will become effectively ungovernable.

The only way to avert this crisis, Salam says, is by reducing low-skilled immigration—including legal low-skilled immigration—until those at the bottom are successfully assimilated into the American mainstream. Thus the last part of the book is spent outlining a compromise that would make such reductions politically palatable: Institute a skills-based system, but grant amnesty to people already here; tighten border enforcement, but increase foreign aid to the developing world; implement E-verify, but don’t deport DACA recipients.

These are all serious ideas, worth taking seriously. Yet they are unlikely to persuade the progressive-libertarian coalition agitating for higher immigration levels, in part because Salam never succeeds in showing how the economic forces he’s talking about could produce divisions remotely on par with the Vietnam era, let alone the 1860s. To be sure, his argument establishes that immigration is a problem: It will entrench inequality, exacerbate racism, and engender partisan gridlock. But would it do these things enough to spark widespread violence or a constitutional crisis? Probably not—and in any case Salam doesn’t sketch out a plausible pathway for how such calamities might transpire.

As a result, liberals and libertarians are likely to come away from Melting Pot thinking of immigration as a technical problem rather than an existential one: “Yes, immigration is deepening polarization and making it harder to get things done. No, we aren’t going to triple GDP growth or boost real wages anytime soon. But with the right mix of redistribution and political tinkering, surely we can take the edge off.” Furthermore, most of those liberals and libertarians have deep moral reasons for supporting immigration: To liberals, it’s about reducing global inequality and making up for colonialism, while to libertarians, it’s about protecting free movement and free markets from state encroachment. The side-effects must be reckoned with, no doubt, as Salam’s interlocutors will happily concede. But they hardly amount to a knock-down case for restrictionism, and they certainly do not amount to a civil war or anything close.

With its maudlin title, then, Melting Pot appears to have indulged in precisely the same sort of fear-mongering Salam spends so much time warning us against—or rather that’s what it would be doing, if the book were making only an economic argument.

In fact, it’s making just the opposite.

The Societal Worry

Close readers of Melting Pot will notice that it contains a separate, non-economic register that comes across in passages such as the following:

The real choice, I will argue, is whether we see the immigrants we welcome to our shores as permanent strangers to whom we have no real obligations other than to deliver them from the relative poverty of their homelands, or as free and equal citizens to whom we are pledging our loyalty in this generation and in those to come.

Later, Salam asks what it means for a baby to be “ours:”

If a baby—brown or white, Christian or Hindu—is ours, do we congratulate ourselves on having one more baby, and move on? Or does “owning” that baby mean we have concrete tangible obligations to it, and to its parents and the communities it will join? . . . This, to my mind, is one of the most important questions in the immigration debate, yet it’s a question we tend to dodge.

And finally, he notes that our immigration-induced underclass has a profoundly “undemocratic” character, with one group always coming out on bottom no matter what its members do.

In essence, these passages offer a rebuke of the economism that drives so much of the crusade for open borders—and, at some points, Salam’s crusade against them too. The logic is a bit opaque, but here’s what I take to be the overall argument:

Since nearly all second-generation immigrants are American citizens, the way they are treated therefore reflects citizenship’s value, or lack of value, in the United States. If we view them as “permanent strangers to whom we have no real obligation,” the thinking goes, that is eventually how we will view ourselves too: a community of unfamiliars in which everyone is unimportant to everyone else, where concourse and camaraderie are optional so long as some very basic needs are being met.

This social landscape sounds impoverished and more than a little dystopian. But it’s virtually indistinguishable from the one that has emerged in modern liberal democracies: atomized, faceless agents pursuing their own self-interest, bargaining and bartering with each other without any sense of shared identity or common purpose. And it’s ratified by a discourse that understands society as a social “contract,” a transaction that serves all persons and parties, if only very minimally. In opposing open borders, then, Salam is really opposing the liberal order itself—or at least, he’s opposing the technocratic liberalism we in the West have ended up with, the sort that shunts aside civic solidarity in in the name of social management.

Hence the title. Although Salam claims “civil war” refers to ethno-racial polarization—a comparison which, for obvious reasons, will strike many as overwrought—what it really describes is this liberalism’s intrinsically antagonistic character. No common identity means no common good—and no common good means each individual effectively becomes a sovereign nation unto himself, competing for resources and freedoms. There can be alliances between nations, of course, just as there can be battles and armistices. But there cannot be friendships or marriages or loves, just rational agents assessing potential allies—and potential threats.

The transactional logic of immigration thus reifies the transactional logic of modernity, plunging citizens into a kind of megalateral civil war with one another. Melting Pot, to be clear, never puts it in quite those terms; the book makes a reactionary argument with decidedly non-reactionary prose, and sometimes grows too wonkish for my taste. But Salam is still worth reading—and recommending—because in the end he understands that our immigration debate is not about facts and figures so much as culture and character, the way human beings relate to one another and ultimately themselves. If Melting Pot can impart that truth to even a tenth of our political class, it will have been a success.

The post Immigration and the Logic of Liberalism appeared first on The American Interest.

Making “Fort Trump” A Reality

President Trump never tires of repeating that “nobody’s been tougher on Russia than I have.” Yet, his unctuous performance at the Helsinki Summit, which opponents characterized as disastrous and even supporters called feckless, have made this claim seem tenuous at best.

Nevertheless, POTUS has an opportunity to alleviate some of these concerns by taking a step that will send an unmistakable message of combined NATO/U.S. resolve, deterring and reassuring in one action melding the symbolic with the substantive.

The Polish Ministry of Defense has requested that the United States establish a permanent military presence in Poland, and it has offered financial support of up to $2 billion for the deployment of an armored division. In September 2018, Poland’s President Andrzej Duda not only repeated the offer during his official visit to the White House, but, tongue-in-cheek, even suggested that the permanent U.S. base might be called “Fort Trump.” The U.S. government has been considering such a deployment since earlier this year, and there are signs it could well happen.

Such an American deployment would not be without risks and costs, but it would be timely, given Russia’s aggressiveness and uninhibited regional hegemonic ambitions. It would also convey an unambiguous message, particularly if President Trump enunciates such an intent before the substantive meeting that he and Vladimir Putin are scheduled to have on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Argentina at the end of November. It would clearly and forcefully signal that America will counter Russia’s malign activities.

There is little doubt that Russia, a non-superpower with superpower ambitions, would harshly condemn such a deployment. Russian media has already claimed that such a move would be an outright violation of the Russia-NATO Founding Act of 1997 and that Russia would likely target Poland with nuclear-capable Iskander missiles permanently deployed in Russia’s Kaliningrad enclave.

Surprisingly, even some reputed hawks such as General Ben Hodges, retired Commander of U.S. Army Forces in Europe, have voiced their opposition to such a permanent deployment (of even an armored brigade). While General Hodges admits that this would not be a violation of the Founding Act, he is concerned with its impact on alliance cohesion, and the political and economic costs in the United States. Further, he points to logistical problems, to the fact that the U.S. military is already taking part in NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence, which involves rotation of troops in the Baltics and Poland, and to continuing Alliance exercises that improve reinforcement capabilities.

These are not insignificant concerns and are undoubtedly shared by others in the United States and in Western Europe. To be sure, any major change in policy requires carefully weighing the risks and benefits. In this case, the benefits considerably outweigh the risks.

First of all, symbolism matters. A permanent deployment would redress a slight suffered by the post-Communist members of NATO. In their haste to join the Alliance, the new members were not prepared to challenge NATO’s decision, formalized in the NATO-Russia Founding Act, that would forego the permanent deployment of Alliance forces on their territory. This was a restriction that did not apply to the Western members of the Alliance, and it thus made them essentially second-class citizens of the Alliance, diminishing alliance reassurance as well as deterrence. In the wake of Russian military action in Georgia and Ukraine, this is keenly felt throughout Eastern Europe. Little wonder, then, that aside from Poland, a country like Lithuania also vehemently advocates for a permanent deployment.

Secondly, there is much misunderstanding of the Founding Act. It is not a legally binding document. Whatever political constraints it may have envisioned were contingent on the preservation of a status quo predicated on Russia continuing to build a democratic society, reducing its conventional and nuclear forces, and preventing any possibility of “returning to a Europe of division and confrontation or the annexation of any state.” With today’s Russia shrinking its zone of democracy domestically, aggressively occupying parts of Georgia and Ukraine, and threatening the newer members of NATO, it has demonstrated a behavior inconsistent with the security environment in 1997 and the Founding Act principles. Moscow should not expect that it can, for example, violate the Budapest Memorandum with impunity and have the West to unilaterally abide by the Act.

Third, though it may justifiably be argued that NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence is a helpful commitment to the newer NATO states, it is quite limited in capacity. (Even still, Russia has found it quite objectionable.) The four battlegroups in the Baltic states and Poland are minuscule and are deployed on a rotating basis only. And even if the rotations are continuous, the denial of permanence is psychologically and symbolically damaging; with each battle group numbering only slightly over one thousand troops, these are no more than tripwires. They do not rectify the well-founded concerns expressed in a 2016 RAND Study that Russia could seize the Latvian capital of Riga in 60 hours or less, and that they would present the West with a fait accompli before the West could get troops in place. Further, there is much reason to be concerned about the vulnerability of a thin piece of land—the Suwalki gap that connects Poland to Lithuania—which if captured by Russia would cut off the three Baltic states from the rest of the Alliance.

While NATO’s Readiness Initiative agreement at the Brussels summit is a welcome development in terms of strengthening the alliance, it is still inadequate. Certainly, the creation of larger allied units—30 land battalions, 30 air fighter squadrons and 30 navy ships, which can respond to Russian aggression in 30 days or less—would make it more difficult for Russia to continue threatening Eastern Europe. But these forces would have to be brought to the area, and Russia would have ample opportunities for anti-access and area denial actions. The Readiness Initiative, therefore, is not a sufficient substitute for a substantive armored U.S. presence close to the Suwalki gap. A permanently stationed armored unit of no more than 15,000 troops would create an enhanced defense and deterrence capacity but would not present an offensive threat to Russia.

And although the United States has a thousand troops on a rotational basis in Poland as part of the Alliance’s Enhanced Forward Presence, this presence does not offer the symbolic or substantive benefits of a permanent armored division stationed there. As helpful as increased European defense spending in Eastern Europe has been, the United States is indispensable in providing the hard security guarantees that underpin the Alliance.

Fourth, though deployment of armored forces would be fairly expensive, significant savings could be generated by further reducing the 35,000-troop U.S. presence in Germany. Germany could easily compensate for that reduction by increasing its very low military expenditures, which are at barely 1.25 percent of GDP, well below the 2 percent NATO guideline. In terms of Alliance cohesion, it would be ironic (and unjust) if wealthy West European countries such as Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, which have greatly underspent on defense and feel few threats from Russia, would veto such an American deployment, and thereby deny the frontline Alliance states security from threats that the latter view as all too real. And with the increase of the U.S. defense budget to $700 billion in 2018, there is room for flexibility and fund re-allocation. (The U.S. government ought to even consider deploying a NATO flotilla to the Black Sea, to help reassure Romania and Bulgaria.)

Poland’s difficulties with the European Union over Warsaw’s decision to constrain the independence of its judiciary may, ironically and perhaps perversely, help its position with the Trump Administration. Yet whereas the EU leadership is alarmed by the nationalism, populism and Euroskepticism of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) government, these selfsame views align with President Trump’s in non-trivial ways. If the President wanted to signal displeasure to Berlin and favor to Warsaw, he may end up pulling the trigger on the plan.

And the U.S. Senate will likely back the decision. Senators James Inhofe and the late John McCain supported a provision in the annual defense authorization for the Pentagon to do a feasibility study on a permanent basis in Poland, and were both very much in favor of such a deployment. The 2018 midterm elections have not likely changed the Senate’s strongly favorable disposition.

Many have suggested that Trump would be reluctant to so directly confront Russia, and certainly his remarkably deferential attitude towards Putin, whenever they meet, seems to back up the case. There are, however, sharp differences between Trump’s own often obsequious rhetoric towards Moscow, and the actual policies of his administration. It is not only America’s participation and leadership in NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence and its command of the battlegroup in Poland, or its support of the forthcoming 30, 30, 30 and 30 NATO Readiness Initiative, that tells a different tale. It is also the Brussels Declaration itself, which President Trump signed shortly before the Helsinki summit with Putin, that showed a great deal of toughness. It not only reiterated a commitment to Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, but leveled withering criticism at Russia and issued tough warnings to Moscow. The Declaration also condemned Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, provocative Russian activity on NATO’s borders, its modernization of strategic forces, and “its irresponsible and aggressive nuclear rhetoric.” Moreover, it affirmed that the Alliance, including the United States, viewed Russia’s annexation of Crimea as illegal and illegitimate.

Furthermore, Moscow can’t be happy about the massive increase in American defense expenditures in both 2018 and 2019; or Trump’s relentless (and partially successful) push for greater NATO defense expenditures; or America’s leadership of the huge 50,000-troop Trident Juncture NATO military maneuvers in Norway that clearly envision Russia as a potential aggressor; or the U.S. offer to supply large quantities of LNG to Europe in order to diminish Russian energy leverage over the continent.

The inner workings of the Trump Administration remain as clear as mud; it’s never clear how decisions end up being made, and thus nothing should be taken for granted. Should the decision to move ahead be made, it would take quite some time to operationalize such a permanent deployment. An announcement now by the U.S. President would be important. It would send a powerful message to Moscow, and yield critical benefits well before even the first dollar was spent. And yes, politically President Trump may even do well by doing good.

The post Making “Fort Trump” A Reality appeared first on The American Interest.

Social Sources and Perils of the Trump Presidency

President Trump’s repeated thrashing of norms both political and interpersonal—and his ability to leverage this insurgent-style behavior into popular support among a significant segment of the American population and victory at the polls—shocked just about everyone in 2016. While it is easy to call him out or dismiss him for his antics, as many have done, it’s a much more complicated task to get at the deeper dysfunction in society that can explain his success. The widespread acceptance and even approval that Trump receives for breaking a wide range of long-standing norms shows that something fundamental about those norms has changed.

Social norms—the rules for how to treat other people or act in public, established and enforced by one’s group or the broader society—are a major part of a larger set of formal and informal institutions that shape behavior. Over the past two generations, the decline of informal social institutions has shifted many well-established norms, with the general effect of sharply increasing freedom from many historically imposed constraints. This has arguably yielded many benign effects across American society: more opportunity and equality for women and minorities; more freedom to explore new ideas, lifestyles, and places; and a more inclusive, democratic and competitive political system.

But whereas the benefits of increased autonomy and self-expression are often touted in politics and popular culture, the less desirable consequences connected to these same changes in social norms are rarely noted. Tradeoffs are generally not acknowledged, and indeed it has even become a sign of extreme political incorrectness to suggest that some bad outcomes may be mixed with the good. As David Goodhart writes, “Along with the decline in bad discrimination (based on race, gender and class) there has been a decline in good discrimination too—discrimination that helps to reinforce good, virtuous behavior in everyday life.” Along with new individual freedoms have come weakened family life (and worse outcomes for children), social breakdown (which has brought devastation if not exactly “carnage” to many communities), rising rates of social isolation, anomie (as seen in rising rates of suicide and drug abuse), and declining employment and civic engagement rates. The erosion of authority has undermined the capacity of institutions at every level of society to play constructive roles. This is even apparent at the national political level, where it is ever harder to assemble the coalitions necessary to get much of anything done. Thus the normative shift has percolated up from informal society into our formal politics.

The deterioration of the social institutions that have historically nurtured constructive norms has created a vacuum into which a set of novel destructive norms—or anti-norms—has flowed. Data from the World Values Survey and elsewhere help us specify connections between the changes in norms and changes in personal and political behavior. An analysis of this data offers several suggestions as to how both policymakers and civic leaders can contribute to the reconstruction of more virtuous norms.

Social Norms and Institutions

Institutions, the relatively stable sets of rules and structures that shape human activity, come in four forms: state organizations such as courts; state rules, such as laws issued by the government; social organizations or entities, such as communities, families, and churches; and the norms, rules, and values that social organizations and networks create.

Operating independently of the formal rules and laws made up by and enforced by the state, social institutions—the latter two categories—are essential to the development of complex social organization and cooperation because they efficiently guide behavior and frame choice. They are what Douglass C. North calls the informal “rules of the game” that “define the incentive structures of society.” They exercise authority in two ways: by providing meaning and defining ambition in ways that individuals see as desirable; and by pressuring and, as may be necessary, coercing individuals to comply.

These norms and codes, which can be positive or negative, depend in turn on the training of the various institutions (and networks) a person belongs to or participates in, especially early in their life: family, community, education, and social and work life as one ages. They include everything from whether one stands in line, jaywalks, litters in public spaces, speaks politely, talks loudly on a cell phone on a bus or train, showers regularly, leaves proper tips, claims a public benefit to which one is unentitled, and in general acts responsibly, honestly, and with a recognition of expectations of reciprocal altruism. Broader norms would include how one views women, children, people from different ethnic groups, strangers, dating, marriage, sex, work, charity, the law, and other kinds of formal authority.

Although there is usually some disagreement between people of various political and religious hues over which norms are constructive—for example, debates over everything from the role of religion in the public square to dress codes—a large body of norms that everyone can agree are constructive (generosity, honesty, acting lawfully) does exist. It is this latter group of norms that is the focus here.

Social institutions, also known as intermediate institutions, play a major role in strengthening society and bettering the human condition. When they work to promote constructive behavior (honesty, commitment, long-term perspective) and social cohesion (relationships within a community, inclusiveness), they promote positive social outcomes by binding groups together, curtailing dysfunctional behavior, and promoting desirable social outcomes as a complement to individualist aspirations. By increasing cooperation and commitment to the group, intermediating institutions reduce slacking and cheating, and mitigate other forms of selfish behavior. Such mechanisms strengthen groups and societies in a unique manner, and evidence from anthropology suggests that, while cultures differ in many ways, all of them possess such elemental mechanisms.

Laws, regulations, and tax codes—all formal institutions—have limited influence when societies do not provide an institutional ecosystem that supports their implementation. Many poor countries, for example, have laws and government bodies that on the surface look very similar to those of rich countries. But to varying degrees they lack the social mechanisms (and capacity)—the “social reality,” as Russell Kirk wrote—to ensure that these work as they should on paper; corruption, cheating, and deception thrives without the necessary underlying social ecosystem. Similarly, policies in the United States aimed at fighting poverty, strengthening education, increasing social mobility, and so forth do not work as expected without the social mechanisms to support them—in this case, robust families, dense social ties, and constructive norms and institutions. Women’s rights can be inscribed in law yet be spited by the behavior of powerful people—corporate executives, media moguls, and spouses—as recent events have made manifest.

Despite ample evidence of the importance of informal social institutions and the norms they nurture, only a handful of researchers—including Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the 1960s and Charles Murray and Robert Putnam in recent years—have zeroed in on the connection between decayed social institutions and the decline of constructive social norms, on the one hand, and social breakdown, truncated social mobility, and deteriorated family life, on the other. While researchers have long examined the connection between norms and political outcomes (such as the role of middle-class values and democracy), their focus has mainly been developing countries undergoing democratization; until the rise of populism across the West there was less interest in these connections in consolidated democracies such as the United States. There is little research and only limited discussion on the link between individual social norms and politics, books such as Ben Sasse’s The Vanishing American Adult (2017) being an exception.

This would surprise those writing a century ago or more. Even before modern sociology came into being, political thinkers such as Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville grasped the connection. Taking their cue from inherited assumptions, early sociologists clearly understood the danger of social disintegration in one form or another. Indeed, the field was founded to some extent to study such issues. Much of Émile Durkheim’s work is concerned with how societies can maintain their integrity and coherence and avoid becoming highly anomic as modernization weakens the social connectedness produced by strong ties to family, religion, and community. Similar concerns concerned Durkheim’s near-contemporary German colleague, Ferdinand Tönnies. The most recent U.S. election suggests we need to return to such concerns, and to look especially at how they contribute to destructive social norms and political decay.

The Impact of Declining Social Institutions

In an earlier era, people in the United States grew up embedded in and connected to a wide range of local neighborhood and communal social institutions that encouraged constructive, prosocial behavior, while providing greater integration of people from different socioeconomic backgrounds than is common nowadays. Today the state, porous peer groups, and various media play a more formative and mediating role; social institutions have decayed, lost influence, or even disappeared in many places. Television shows such as American Idol, Game of Thrones, and WWE Raw; social media; and the whole panoply of content available on the web shape the norms of millions in a way that was inconceivable only a few decades ago. Not only does society lack the instruments to impress upon citizens—especially youth—the basic values necessary to uphold laws and participate in government, but it also hosts large numbers of individuals with weak communal ties and low exposure to constructive norms.

Growing individualism and self-centeredness is both a contributor to and product of the decline of many important social institutions. As Charles Taylor has written, a “cultural revolution” has produced not only “moral/spiritual and instrumental individualisms,” but also “widespread ‘expressive’ individualism.” In A Secular Age, he calls the post-1960s era the “Age of Authenticity” after the “understanding of life” that emerged among the elite with the Romantic expressivism of the late 18th century. This understanding holds

that each one of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one’s own, as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from outside, by society, or the previous generation, or from religious or political authority.

This understanding has since expanded to become a “mass phenomenon,” but has produced a widespread sense that something has been lost, because “communities are eroding [and] families, neighborhoods, even the polity” are experiencing some sort of break-up.

In this new age, as C. S. Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man (1943), “the business of debunking” has become central to how people think while “the doctrine of objective value”—whereby certain objects or attitudes “did not merely receive, but could merit our approval or disapproval, our reverence or contempt”—has fallen by the wayside. Lewis warned that if we were no longer able to “initiate” youth in fundamental values based on their “intrinsic ‘justness’ or ‘ordinacy,’” society would lose its ability to develop the very qualities for which it clamors. “In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. . . . We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”

The rise of “expressive individualism” and a culture that, stripped of its various social mechanisms of constraint and responsibility, allows people to “do whatever you want and can get away with,” has, as former United Kingdom Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks argues, created huge, unappreciated and still not really understood or even acknowledged, costs:

People believed that the collateral damage could be dealt with by the state. It would care for the children of broken or abusive families. Its regulatory bodies would enforce financial and business ethics. Its tax regime would guarantee fairness in the distribution of rewards. But the state is no substitute for an internalised code of honour and personal responsibility.

Working and poor communities have been especially devastated by the rise of “expressive individualism” because they depended more than other groups on the communal social institutions, ties, and mechanisms that enforced normative standards. As David Brooks argues, “If you rob people of their good covenantal attachments, they will grab bad ones.” The severe social problems the country is now experiencing—such as the opioid crisis, the huge number of children growing up in unstable families, and major declines in health indicators for certain segments of the population—have few parallels (in terms of scale) in other advanced countries, probably because individualization and the alienation, loneliness, stress, discontent, and disorder it can bring has gone further here than elsewhere.

Even though the United States still has a deeper reservoir of nongovernmental organizations—what might be termed “visible” social institutions—than most other countries, the institutions that influence individual behavior—the “invisible” social institutions—have severely deteriorated, especially among the working class. This is a direct result of the decay of the religious and communal institutions that once knitted relationships around shared meaning and encouraged virtuous behavior—the two often going hand in hand.

Indeed, it is conceivable that some places have seen both an increase in non-governmental organization (NGO) activity and an appreciable decline in constructive social norms over recent decades—because the social decay that weakening social institutions brings about increases the need for NGOs to address the resulting deficits. But, as a rule, NGOs do not nurture, let alone re-knit, lost constructive social norms if nothing has replaced the institutions that once played such a role. For example, rising crime caused by social breakdown led to sharp growth in nonprofit groups responding to the violence “by cleaning streets, building playgrounds, mentoring children and employing young men.” Starting in the 1990s, “the number of nonprofits began to rise sharply across the country, particularly those addressing neighborhood and youth development,” according to the New York Times. Yet although some indicators of social breakdown improved during this period after decades of decline (such as crime levels, which dropped significantly), others continued their downward spiral unabated (for example, marriage norms, employment rates, and health indicators).

The Rise of Destructive Social Norms

Work, family life, civic engagement, and many other positive goods are all less valued today than they were in the fairly recent past. This “normative sea change” has been documented by Nicholas Eberstadt, Robert Putnam, Charles Murray, and others. But something even deeper is going on: Fundamental values such as responsibility, generosity, and honesty are now valued less and less. For example, there has been a significant decline in recent decades in the proportion of people who think undertaking unlawful acts like accepting a bribe in the course of one’s duties, cheating on taxes, wrongfully claiming a benefit, and avoiding a public-transit fare are never justifiable, as Paul Howe has shown using data from the American part of the World Values Survey (WVS). The number of people who see such behavior as at least somewhat justifiable is much greater—and growing much faster—among the young. Whereas in 1981, the year of the first WVS, roughly one in six people surveyed in the 18 to 29 age cohort believed that all four unlawful acts were at least somewhat justifiable, the proportion climbed to almost one in three in the most recent 2011 WVS. Similar but less significant rises are evident across all age groups, and especially among those who grew up after the 1960s.

These attitudes do not operate in isolation, and they have manifest political implications. They are strongly correlated with aggressive, even violent, tendencies, as evidenced by answers to questions related to the justifiability of parents beating their children, a man beating his wife, and undertaking violence in general. They also correlate with anti-democratic views, as evidenced by answers to questions related to whether it is good “having a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections,” whether “having the army rule is a good thing,” whether civil rights are necessary to protect people’s liberty from state oppression, and whether it is absolutely important to live in a country governed democratically. Such sentiments are substantially more common among the less-educated portions of the population. As Howe, one of the few people who has been examining the links between social norms and politics, notes, they indicate that “indifferent feelings towards democracy are interlaced with a broader set of self-interested and antisocial attitudes that are present among a substantial minority of the U.S. population.”

As the groups with unconstructive norms get better established, they naturally reinforce their values and norms in much the same way that groups with more constructive values and norms do—through interconnectivity, feedback loops, and various incentives. As S. L. Price writes in his portrayal of a western Pennsylvania steel town, “decline worked like acid on everything. . . . Definitions . . . shifted: little by little, behaviors considered immoral or fringe or ‘crazy’ edged toward the center. The town’s idea of convention gradually split from the world’s.” Whereas the latter operates in a virtuous cycle (as with trust encouraging trust), the former is trapped in a vicious cycle (as with mistrust encouraging mistrust). While the decline in social institutions provided the opening for such social changes, the growth of the internet and social media has accelerated the dynamic because of how these media provide an alternative unfiltered source of values and norms. As a report published by the Citizen Crime Commission of New York City notes, the “unique features of social media have created an environment in which healthy social norms are not ubiquitously followed.

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Figure 1: Tolerance for Unlawful Acts by Age Cohort, 1981-2011 Source: Paul Howe, “Eroding Norms and Democratic Deconsolidation,” Journal of Democracy (October 2017). The data comes from the World Values Survey, Waves 1, 2, 4 and 6, U.S. respondents only. Valid N ranges from 1,194 (1999) to 2,240 (1981). Valid N for individual age groups (in specific years) ranges from 171 to 764.

These changes have had an enormous impact on political outcomes. As Emily Ekins and Jonathan Haidt argued in a February 2016 article, voters who “score high on authority/loyalty/sanctity and low on care . . . are significantly more likely to vote for Donald Trump. These are the true authoritarians—they value obedience while scoring low on compassion.” As the proportion of such voters has increased, the chance that someone like Trump might win an election has increased. On the other hand, as Timothy Carney and Michael Barone have documented, the places with the highest levels of social connectedness (as measured by indicators such as Penn State’s county-level measurement of social capital, Putnam’s studies on social capital, divorce rates, disability insurance rates, church attendance, and ethnic and religious backgrounds)—and thus constructive social norms—consistently gave Trump lower levels of support in the primaries than comparable regions. According to Barone, whereas Trump received only one-fifth to one-third of the vote in the primaries and caucuses in the 13 states with the highest levels of social connectedness, he received one-third to one-half of the vote in the 11 states with the lowest levels of social connectedness. Republicans in heavily Mormon Utah, for example, which has very high levels of social connectedness compared to most other places, only gave Trump 14 percent of the vote in the primary. A March 2016 Pew Research Center poll found that Republicans who attended church every week preferred Ted Cruz by 15 points; Republicans who did not attend church preferred Trump over Cruz by 27 points.

Political Perils

These social trends suggest that the growing mistrust, discontent, and alienation that flavor American politics—and account for the rise of Donald Trump and his populist cohort—may have less to do with objective analyses of government performance and economic conditions and more to do with the growth of a narcissist, self-indulgent mindset and the hyper-individualist norms that accompany it. Social dynamics and values color political opinions. The decline of constraints in the private sphere has laid the groundwork for the decline of constraints in the public—political—sphere.

This would explain the decline in trust and legitimacy of institutions—government, media, universities, banks, and so forth—which has been the most common explanation for the rise of Trump and other populists. But it would clash with the common view that Trump’s rise is primarily caused by a dissatisfaction with government performance, or with corruption in Washington. The latter is the view of political scientists such as Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk, who believe that the cause is the lost “trust of many citizens who no longer believe that democracy can deliver on their most pressing needs and preferences.” This view may be partly correct, but it is unlikely to be the whole answer given the aforementioned data. It explains the success of someone like Bernie Sanders—an outsider who never violated traditional political and social norms—but only a “normative sea change” can explain the rise of Trumpism.

Although party loyalty and the growing “tribal” nature of politics surely benefitted him in the general election, Trump thrived initially and throughout the competitive primary season because of, not despite, his repeated norm violations. His core base recognizes Trump as “one of them” at least partly because his set of social norms—notably different from that of other politicians—more closely matches theirs—as any visit to a Trump rally would show. A generation ago no such cohort would have existed, and so no such politician could have achieved the same level of success in attracting and mobilizing its support.

The astounding acceptance of such behavior by a potential, and now actual, head of state by a significant number of people can only be explained through the lens of social norms. If these had not changed so substantially, Trump never would have received the opening he did in the primary and never would have been accepted (however unhappily) by so many in the general election. (Of course, dislike for his opponent and for progressive ideology helped.) Trump is not just or even mainly a cause of political decay as much as he is a symptom or product of a larger social decay that laid the ground for his rise. Since becoming President, he has also been an accelerant for both, but it is misleading to focus on the man. Yet that is precisely what the mainstream media has done, contributing to the mass confusion about the nation’s circumstances.

Rebuilding Social Institutions and Norms

The only way to reverse the decline in virtue among politicians (and financiers and fathers) is to reverse the decline among the general population. But strengthening constructive, virtuous social norms is not something governments can do easily. Government arguably performed such a task in the civil rights era, but even there it more followed than led gradual changes in social attitudes embedded in the social institutions that matter most—families, schools, communities, churches, and so forth. The decline of these institutions—what Burke might have called the sinews of healthy social life—is the major reason that social and political norms have changed and Trumpism has flourished. Only the reinvigoration of these in some form can reverse the process that has brought us here.

Yet there is no significant political constituency today in the United States for an agenda to strengthen the underlying social system of the nation. Indeed, the opposite is true: Both Left and Right champion agendas that laud the removal of constraints in a way that would inevitably decimate the social institutions that underpin constructive social norms. Whereas the Left’s emphasis on individual rights and social justice encourages the systematic dismantling of social institutions, the Right’s emphasis on the market above all else is simply a different flavor of individualism—one that has also wreaked havoc on social institutions. The latter may not have explicitly called for their dismantling but pursued a policy mix that inevitably created great damage when pursued in isolation. As David Brooks argues, both have “individualistic worldviews,” promoting “policies designed to expand individual choice. Neither paid much attention to social and communal bonds, to local associations, or invisible norms. . . . no matter who was in power, the prevailing winds [have] been blowing in the direction of autonomy, individualism, and personal freedom, not in the direction of society, social obligations, and communal bonds.”

If there were a suitable constituency or political leadership in place, what kind of policies could strengthen core social institutions and norms?

First, it is essential to encourage the growth and expansion of social institutions that build social connectedness and impart strong constructive values. Too often, government policies do the reverse today, such as when disagreements over the role of religious organizations limit their ability to offer public services (for example, orphanages, healthcare facilities, and so forth), when tax policy discourages marriage and childcare, and autonomy and choice are promoted without consideration for the implications. Instead, some sort of incentive (matching grants?) should be offered to any philanthropy, nonprofit organization, or religious body that establishes new programs or chapters in areas identified as especially low in social capital and that sought to build social connectedness and cohesion and to bolster constructive norms. This effort would parallel attempts to attract business investment into poor areas, but with a focus on social rather than narrowly economic impoverishment.

Similarly, incentives for marriage should be enhanced by, at the very least, lowering its cost. For example, housing could be made less expensive (by, for instance, rolling back land-use restrictions and expanding the supply of affordable and multi-family housing), mobility for work could be made easier (by, for example, easing commutes, paying for relocations, and expanding opportunities to work remotely), and tax credits for children raised by two-parent families could be expanded.

Religion, which has historically been the best producer of social institutions and constructive social norms, must play an essential role here. As Robert Putnam and David Campbell quantified in American Grace, those who frequently attend a religious service are more likely to donate money to charity, volunteer, help the homeless, donate blood, spend time with a person who is depressed, offer a seat to a stranger, or help someone find a job. Religiosity is a better predictor of altruism and empathy than education, age, income, gender, or race.

Other studies show that regular attendance at religious services results in a host of constructive social norms like strong marriages, stable family life, well-behaved and emotionally secure children, reductions in occurrences of domestic abuse, crime, and addiction; and gains in physical health, mental health, education levels, and longevity. As Patrick Fagan notes, “these effects are intergenerational, as grandparents and parents pass on the benefits to the next generations.”

Putnam’s work shows that too much individualism weakens social cohesion and a wide range of social norms and constructive values, while religion builds community, strengthens empathy and altruism, and shifts focus away from the self and toward others and the common good. Roger Trigg posits that societies without religion risk over many generations losing the very mechanisms—embedded in social institutions—that have held them together and enabled them to thrive historically

Other social institutions can have a similar effect, though usually on a smaller scale. These can include labor unions, guild-like associations, various types of regular volunteer activities, and even local political party organs that can provide deep meaning and dense social ties.

Of course, any initiative to expand the role of religion would require the lead of non-state actors (for example churches and philanthropies). At the least, government should provide more space for faith-based organizations to play a larger role.

A Philanthropy Roundtable initiative designed to “strengthen families and the religious participation that bolsters family life” in three cities (Phoenix, Jacksonville, and Dayton) shows how this might work. Recognizing the unique role marriage plays in the development of constructive norms, social mobility, the reduction of poverty, and the promotion of a wide range of positive social outcomes—and the unique role religion plays in promoting it—the Philanthropy Roundtable has launched the “Culture of Freedom Initiative,” a partnership aiming to strengthen families and the religious participation that bolsters family life. Secular programs or outreach to people from various religious backgrounds are not excluded, but religious participation occupies a central role. The term culture in the title indicates the importance of cultural norms to a healthy society. As the head of one of the partner institutions says,

A lot of families have never seen what healthy looks like. They’ve been in generational cycles of divorce and incarceration and poverty. . . .  You have to be taught how to become a man or woman of your word. This is not automatic; it has to be learned. It’s cultural. Right now, for a lot of people, it’s simply not taught.

The $50 million targeted for the initiative will be used to strengthen local nonprofits capable of having a substantial impact on the core issues.

A second approach to reinvigorating positive social norms might be a new voluntary national service program—the one top-down government initiative that could reproduce some of the impact that social institutions have on norms and beliefs. Youth are the most vulnerable to the breakdown in social institutions, as the WVS results show, but they are also the most open to change and thus are a natural entry point for any effort to revitalize constructive social norms. Political leaders could develop a national service program under which everyone 18 years old works for a period of time (say, for example, one year) doing a variety of public service work. This could be patterned after programs such as Teach for America or military service, with some preliminary training followed by time working on one of the country’s myriad socioeconomic problems (social support services, drug rehabilitation, urban development, youth development, prisoner reintegration into society, and so forth) with people from different backgrounds. This could start with work close to home (to avoid the startup challenges of housing huge numbers of people) and eventually be transformed into something that encourages participants to explore a different part of the country. The more the national service program forced people to work across social, economic, and political divides, the more it would help heal some of the divisions that have increasingly plagued the country.

Third, schools and other public institutions need to invest more in the development of constructive norms. As Margaret Stimmann Branson of the Center for Civic Education argues, schools should play a much greater role teaching civic values, knowledge, skills, and disposition. This would require reduced emphasis on testing, metrics, and the deranged overarching message that a person is only as valuable as his or her economic output. For example, learning activities could include opportunities for students to cooperate through councils, mock courts, and mock elections to develop greater “civility, courage, self-discipline, persistence, concern for the common good, respect for others, and other traits relevant to citizenship.” Debating, evaluating, and defending ethics could be part of these exercises. Tutoring, cleaning up the environment, and volunteering for community service programs would develop greater “self-discipline, respect for others, civility, punctuality, personal responsibility, and other character traits.” The celebration of national, state, and local holidays and the achievements of classmates would build a greater “recognition of shared values and a sense of community.”

This points to the fact that even though nationalism (and pride in one’s country) is sometimes disparaged or misused, it remains an essential tool for building the social bonds and developing the generosity, honesty, concern for the common good, respect for others, and other constructive social norms essential to the functioning of a modern society. When leaders emphasize “nation-building at home”—which both Trump and Obama have done in different forms—they should recognize that this requires a greater investment in social cohesion and social institutions as well as infrastructure.

Obviously, an agenda like this will be difficult to implement. Only a concerted, simultaneous effort by a coalition of political, religious, and civic leaders can hope to reverse the malign trends that have taken hold in so many places. If national leadership on this score is presently impossible, local political, religious, and civic leaders must take the lead, ideally in partnership with each other and with ample support from the latest marketing and communication techniques to advance their causes and monitor their progress.

Although it is rarely acknowledged, the liberal order is very much tied to the promotion of constructive values such as responsibility, duty, and virtue, as well as the social institutions such as family, community, and religion that nurture them. As James Madison emphasized when urging his home state of Virginia to ratify the Constitution, “No theoretical checks, no form of government, can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.”

The only way to create “virtue in the people” is by promoting the social institutions which ensure that individuals learn constructive norms and curtail their autonomy and choice in some contexts. As Mary Ann Glendon argues, “Because individuals are partly constituted in and through relationships with others, a liberal politics dedicated to full and free human development cannot afford to ignore the settings that are most conducive to the fulfillment of that ideal.”

Although existing legal and political vocabularies can easily handle issues related to rights, markets, and the state, they do not provide an easy way to value and make use of the smaller groups and systems that inculcate the values and practices that shape how societies and countries as a whole evolve, and thus how effectively their democracies and governments will work, Glendon added. Many of the problems the United States now faces are arguably products of a decaying social ecosystem. Only a concerted effort to restore or revitalize this ecosystem—to repair the torn social fabric—can reverse these trends. More humility about what individualism and unchecked forms of political egoism can accomplish would be a good start.

Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics (Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 222.

Kirk, Enemies of the Permanent Things: Observations of Abnormality in Literature and Politics (Arlington House, 1969), p. 168.

Taylor, A Secular Age (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 473-5.

Lewis, The Abolition of Man (HarperSanFrancisco, 1974), pp. 14-26.

Price, Playing Through the Whistle: Steel, Football, and an American Town (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2016), p. 342.

Roberta Liggett and Stephanie Ueberall, Social Media Impacts Behavior and Norms (Citizen Crime Commission of New York City, 2016), p. 2.

Ekins and Haidt, “Donald Trump Supporters Think about Morality Differently than Other Voters. Here’s How”, Vox, February 5, 2016.

Barone, “Does Lack of Social Connectedness Explain Trump’s Appeal?,” Washington Examiner, March 27, 2016.

Peter Beinart, “Breaking Faith,” The Atlantic (April 2017).

Foa and Mounk, “The Danger of Deconsolidation,” Journal of Democracy (July 2016), p. 16.

Brooks, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (Random House, 2011), pp. 314-5.

Putnam and Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (Simon & Schuster, 2010).

Fagan, “Why Religion Matters Even More: The Impact of Religious Practice on Social Stability,” Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No. 1992, December 18, 2006. See also W. Bradford Wilcox, “The Latest Social Science Is Wrong. Religion Is Good for Families and Kids,” Washington Post, December 15, 2015.

Trigg, Equality, Freedom, and Religion (Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 22-3 and 139.

Heather Wilhelm, “Closing the Marriage Gap,” Philanthropy (Summer 2016),

Voluntary national service has been promoted in TAI over the years. See, for instance, “A Call to National Service” (January/February 2008), and Adam Garfinkle, “What’s Wrong and How to Fix It, Part 11: National Service” (February 2013).

Branson and Charles Quigley, The Role of Civic Education, (The Communitarian Network, 1998), pp. 28-9.

Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (The Free Press, 1991), p. 137.

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The Privatization That Wasn’t

Now it’s official: the much-hyped “privatization” of Russian state-owned oil giant Rosneft in 2016 was anything but. Citing nine sources familiar with the deal, Reuters reports that over half of the sale’s value, $6 billion, was financed by the state-owned Russian bank VTB.

When the Rosneft deal was announced two years ago, it was touted by the Kremlin—and interpreted by some gullible Western journalists—as a meaningful turning point, a sign that Russia was back in business and still capable of attracting global investors despite the burden of Western sanctions. Now, the market distortions and public deceptions surrounding the deal have been laid bare, and the Kremlin’s narrative is collapsing. (Predictably, VTB is denying the new reports.)

In many ways, however, the truth about Rosneft has been hiding in plain sight all along. From the beginning, when details of Rosneft’s 19.5 percent “privatization” first emerged, I called it out for what it really was: a murky transfer of one-fifth of the Russian oil giant from the government to someone else. We now know the deal was financed by VTB; and the only person in Russia who is entitled to approve $6 billion in credit lines by state-owned bank is Vladimir Putin himself.

Here’s what we know: In December 2016 Rosneft announced that it had finalized the sale of 19.5 percent of its assets to private owners. The buyer was a consortium consisting of the Swiss oil trader Glencore and the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) sovereign wealth fund, which itself is a major shareholder in Glencore. Together, they agreed to pay €10.2 billion for the shares. However, Glencore committed to pay only €300 million, while the Qataris threw in €2.5 billion, with the remaining €7.4 billion to be financed by undisclosed banks. The Italian Intesa Sanpaolo bank was rumored to have provided half of that €7.4 billion. The acquired Rosneft stake would have been mortgaged.

A month later it became known that VTB had given a bridge loan of 693 billion rubles (the equivalent of €10.2 billion at that time) to QHG Shares, Ltd., a vehicle co-owned by Glencore and the Qataris, just days after the privatization deal was announced. The loan was secured with the privatized shares. The money was paid by QHG to Rosneftegaz, the state owner of Rosneft, after which VTB transferred the loan onto Rosneftegaz’s books. Then, it was said, QHG received its €10.2 billion credit from Intesa and paid the balance to Rosneftegaz. Rosneft explained the involvement of a state-owned bank in the deal by referencing a desire “to avoid market volatility,” and strongly denied the deal was financed by VTB. It was strictly about money conversion, Rosneft’s spokesman Mikhail Leontiev said.

As the Reuters reporting now appears to confirm, this was a flat-out lie: The deal was financed by VTB, which provided a $6 billion loan to QIA. Even more cynically, VTB had borrowed the ruble equivalent of $5.4 billion from the Russian Central Bank before issuing this loan.

What was obvious from the very beginning has only become clearer: the deal that was officially supposed to refill depleted state coffers has instead filled someone’s pockets. And no one but Vladimir Putin could have approved both the “privatization” deal and the VTB loan to the Qataris. It Putin were lining his own pockets, how exactly would the scheme work? As I initially suggested, the Rosneft share that was mortgaged on the $6 billion VTB loan (worth roughly 11 percent of the company) would be quietly transferred to third parties after QIA cannot pay the debt and the lenders foreclose. This part is of the maneuver will likely remain out of sight.

The Rosneft deal was indeed “a triumph for President Vladimir Putin,” as the Financial Times rushed to proclaim in 2016. But it was not the triumph of a capable leader as much as most likely the financial triumph of the world’s greatest kleptocrat, achieved at the expense of the struggling Russian people.

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Debunking Economic Piety

Relevant Reading:

The Working Hypothesis

Oren Cass

The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America

Oren Cass

Richard Aldous: Hello and welcome. My guest today on The American Interest podcast is Oren Cass, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of the new book The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America. Oren, welcome to the show.

Oren Cass: Thank you so much for having me.

RA: Congratulations on the new book. Not only are you worried about how the economic pie gets divided up in society, you also think the whole idea of a pie is wrong to start with.

OC: Yeah, that’s right. I think we’ve talked about the economic pie and taken it for granted for so long. [It’s] really both political parties; you can read about it in The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times. Everyone kind of assumes we’re going to grow the economic pie, everyone can have a bigger slice, and who doesn’t like pie? That’s an almost exclusively consumer-focused conception of our economy. It assumes that we don’t care how the pie gets made or who gets to help bake it, to stretch the metaphor maybe too far.

I think, in fact, that that doesn’t reflect people’s experience. I think people care a lot more about their role as productive contributors, as people who are actually making something and involved in productive work themselves, and so if all we worry about is maybe letting a few people make the pie and then redistributing it around, I think you can end up with a very broken system.

RA: Some people—for example, you quote Steven Pinker in your book—have said that, actually, we’ve made a lot of progress in pulling people or lifting people above the consumption poverty line. Not only have they been able to eat more pie, but they’ve also got things like iPhones in their back pockets.

OC: Well, that’s right. The idea of the consumption poverty line is a really interesting one. In some respects, it’s important. I think it’s important for us to understand that, with respect to material deprivation, we’ve made extraordinary progress through the construction of our safety net. When you hear things like all these Americans are living on less than $2 a day, I think that’s been fairly conclusively disproven. In fact, we have managed to make sure that just about everybody has access to food, and shelter, and medical care, and so forth.

That’s worth celebrating in its own right, but it’s important to recognize that that doesn’t, by itself, meet people’s needs; that if people aren’t actually able to find work that allows them to achieve self-sufficiency and to participate fully in the economy, then we haven’t really lifted them out of poverty. We haven’t really put them on a successful trajectory, and we’re not really going to get the kinds of outcomes that we hope for in society.

RA: A lot of these things do actually seem to be about morale as much as they are about this consumption poverty line. For example, you point out that half of Americans born in 1980 are earning less at 30 than their parents had made at the same age, that most Americans still don’t have even a community college degree. Then you have these terrible figures about what you describe as the deaths of despair, that mortality rates have risen in this century. Americans are riven by high levels of suicide, liver disease, drug overdoses, and so on. In many ways, in terms of morale, it’s a very bleak picture.

OC: I think it is pretty bleak, and I think the key driver of that morale is work. I think what we miss when we talk about the consumption measures and say, literally, “Look how many people have iPhones,” is that that’s not actually what drives life satisfaction. It’s not what drives happiness. It’s not what drives fulfillment. It’s not what provides opportunity to children. It’s not what helps families form and stay together. For all of those things, we actually have to look at work, and we have to look at whether people are encountering a labor market in which they have the opportunity to participate, to fulfill their own obligations to society and to the family, and to feel like they’re actually doing something that contributes to the world.

RA: Actually, you describe this as your “working hypothesis,” in other words, that the labor market is a key determinant in thinking about supporting strong families and communities and long-term prosperity and that, actually, public policy really should be focusing on this.

OC: Right. The labor market is, on the one hand, a very abstract concept. With the stock market, everyone can picture the ticker with the prices, or at the supermarket, everyone can pick through the bins of produce. The labor market we talk about in funny ways. For instance, we say that employers provide jobs, and that’s not actually right. It’s people who provide their labor to the labor market, and employers are the buyers in the labor market.

At the end of the day, the labor market is just a market. It works on a lot of the same principles, and it dictates what kind of work is available, who’s able to do it, where it happens, at what wages. Those things are what determine the opportunities that are available to people. When we just focus on the economic pie and we say, “Well, as long as consumption is rising, we’re doing fine,” we actually end up pursuing a lot of policies that can very badly damage the labor market, especially for less-skilled Americans, for Americans who might just be struggling to make ends meet.

My argument, and what I call the working hypothesis that the book focuses on, is that that’s what we’ve gotten backward; that to actually do policy right, the labor market should be what we focus on, making sure everyone actually has the opportunity to find a job that’s going to allow them to support their families, their communities. That’s what’s going to drive our prosperity, and economic growth is going to be the outcome. Economic growth is what you get at the end of the day if you actually have built a healthy society. It’s not the thing to aim for up front and then hope the healthy society comes out the other end.

RA: Presumably, in many ways, society is pushing the rock uphill on this one. We had Jamie Susskind on the podcast last week to talk about his new book, Future Politics, in which he looks at the challenges that things like AI and algorithms are going to have on the labor market, and that’s not a particularly bright future in many ways.

OC: I should say I’m actually much more optimistic about the implications of the technology, and that’s something that I address a lot in the book. I think this argument that either the problems that we’re having now or the problems that we are going to have are a function of technology is a little bit misguided. Certainly, if you look at the evidence as of today, we see very little sign that technology is what’s causing disruption. If anything, we see a lack of technology. What I mean by that is that, when we talk about automation or this idea of machines doing work that people used to do, that’s literally synonymous with productivity gains. The entire premise of rising wages and rising prosperity for workers is that we find ways for workers to make more stuff with less of their time. That has always been the formula. It’s really the only formula.

What we’ve seen happening is not that, all of a sudden, machines are rushing in and replacing workers at an unprecedented rate. In fact, the rate at which we’re managing to do more with less, the rate at which productivity is rising, has actually slowed. We’re actually in an unprecedented period of poor productivity gains, and so what’s happened to the labor market, and especially in an area like manufacturing, is not that machines are suddenly pushing people out faster than they used to. It’s that we’ve stopped growing the amount of stuff we make, so instead of seeing a formula where the same number of people can make more stuff than before, we’re seeing fewer people making the same amount of stuff as before.

That’s what needs to change. We need to get back to an economy in which we actually encourage the growth of output, that we encourage development in our manufacturing and industrial sectors because that’s actually what a lot of people still want more of and what workers would be capable of doing more of, and that really is exactly the roadmap to prosperity and one that’s compatible with a lot of technological progress.

RA: One of the issues that you identify in the book is the problem of low wages. There have been a number of ideas circulating about how to deal with this, including things like a universal basic income. What do you make of that?

OC: I think universal basic income is exactly the wrong approach. Certainly, it doesn’t take on wages at all. It ignores the question of wages, and it’s really the exact logical endpoint of this obsession with the economic pie or what I call in the book economic piety, which is this idea that it doesn’t matter if we just have a few people creating all of the economic activity and wealth, and then we can just chop that up and mail checks to people, and then everybody can be happy. That’s really the concept underlying UBI. As we were just talking about, I think that’s exactly wrong. I think, if you’re not building an economy in which everyone has an opportunity to be a productive contributor, then you’re headed down a path of very serious dysfunction.

I also think we have to look at UBI not just in economic but, really, especially, in cultural terms, that a huge part of the value of work for individuals and their families comes not just from the dollars in the paycheck but also from those more social and cultural dimensions, that it really is the means by which people fulfill their obligations to their families, to their communities. It’s the means by which they find fulfillment in their day-to-day lives. If we say, “Actually, the obligation for providing for yourself and your family is no longer an individual obligation, that’s now the government’s obligation,” you’re actually, in a very real sense, depriving people of something. You’re taking away the possibility that work will fill that role, and I think that’s going to have very negative consequences.

RA: One of the other ideas which has got a lot of traction is what’s sometimes termed the “Fight for $15,” the campaign to raise the minimum wage. That does seem to have got traction. For example, Amazon and Jeff Bezos have announced that they are going to introduce that at the company. Do you think that that is something which has a future for addressing the kind of issues that you’re talking about?

OC: I’m worried by that approach as well. I think the Amazon example actually illustrates the challenge, which is if you look at what Amazon did, they raised the wages at the bottom, but also, with much less fanfare, also announced that they’re, I believe, almost entirely discontinuing profit sharing with their workers, and it’s not clear the extent to which the total money that goes to workers is even going to go up as a result. Then, in parallel with this, they announced they were launching this big political lobbying campaign to try to force other firms to do the same thing, so it was really as much a competitive maneuver as it was some sort of kind-hearted offer to boost workers’ fortunes.

That’s what we should expect. The labor market is a market. I think one thing we’ve learned in many types of markets over time is that, if you go in and try to just intervene and command a different result, what you often get is not the result you wanted at all. One thing that we’ve seen in recent years as we’ve added more and more burdens onto employers and onto the employment relationship is employers are essentially doing everything they can to get out from under those burdens and to avoid employment relationship. Most of the growth you see in employment in recent years, for instance, is actually coming in the form of temporary, and on-call, and contract, and gig-type jobs, which ultimately isn’t necessarily good for employers or workers.

RA: It does seem to suggest that there might be political lessons, though, that could be learnt from that campaign, the Fight for $15. Whatever the outcomes, it is something where they set a very specific objective, and they did manage to move the dial in terms of a massive company in the United States.

OC: It certainly had an effect, and I think that, in a lot of these areas, what we will see, as more pressure builds behind the inadequacy in our labor outcomes, is there will be more and more pressure to make some change. I think the challenge for policymakers, and for employers, and for activists is to figure out how to do it in a way that’s constructive and that’s actually going to not just feel good in the moment but is actually going to produce benefits for workers in the long run.

That’s why I think we really need to focus less on, essentially, just rules that say we want something different to happen and more on the actual structural conditions in our economy because, at the end of the day, a market is a processing mechanism. It takes the conditions that it encounters, and it spits out results. If we’re not happy with the results, we really need to go back and look at the conditions that we’ve asked the market to operate in and say how can we change these conditions to be ones in which we’re going to get better results?

RA: The really eye-catching idea in your book strikes me as being that for a subsidy for low-wage work. Tell us how that would operate.

OC: Yeah. A wage subsidy is actually, I think, something that contrasts very nicely with a minimum wage increase because both come from the same place, which is to say we’d really like to see low-wage work pay better.

Let’s take a hypothetical $9-an-hour job and say, gosh, we’d really like that to be a higher-paying job. Well, how are we going to do that? The minimum wage increase approach is to say, well, let’s just order the employer to do that. The alternative, which is a wage subsidy, is to say we actually want to put more money in that paycheck, but we’re going to do that through a public program. We are actually going to, essentially, create a reverse payroll tax, so just as today when you get your paycheck you see that little line for FICA and the amount that the government has taken out, we could just as easily create a line that says work credit, and you see the extra money that the government put in. For low-wage workers, you could say, “Look, that $9-an-hour job, now it is a $12-an-hour job. We’re going to put an extra $3 an hour into the paycheck.”

In a sense, from the worker’s perspective, it has a comparable effect to the minimum wage increase, but from the labor market perspective, it’s an entirely different, almost opposite policy because now you’ve done something where, as the minimum wage discourages the employment of these kinds of workers in these kinds of jobs, the wage subsidy is going to encourage it. It’s going to make it more attractive for employers to create and offer this kind of work. Then you have to ask, well, who pays for it? On the one hand, certainly, a wage subsidy looks more expensive. The government, via taxpayers, has to put that money into the paycheck.

On the other hand, in the abstract, it’s not any more expensive. Either way, somebody has to put the extra money into the paycheck. One thing economists fight about a lot is who’s actually putting that extra money into the paycheck through the minimum wage. Sometimes it’s the employer. Sometimes it’s actually, ultimately, the customers in the form of higher prices. Sometimes it’s other workers who see lower raises or lower wages themselves to cover the cost of the minimum wage increase. I think if, as a society, we have a commitment to saying we want to get those paychecks up, it should absolutely be society’s program to put that money in and to do it in a way that’s going to encourage and foster the low end of the labor market instead of really interfere with it.

RA: How do you win the public opinion war on something like that? For example, coming back to the $15 fight, that’s something where people can say, “Well, look, Amazon is having to fund that,” whereas there are going to be critics with the subsidy who are going to say, “Oh, this is just another handout.”

OC: The key political question is how do we understand the wage subsidy relative to all of the other policy programs that we have. It’s interesting. We say it’s a handout. Well, who is it a handout to? Some people are going to be upset because it’s a handout to the workers, and it feels like another big anti-poverty program in a sense. From that side, I think one of the things that’s really important to do is to try to fund it out of our existing safety net to the extent that we can.

We already spend more than $1 trillion a year on programs aimed at lower-income households, almost all of it in ways that either ignore the value of work or actually discourage work, and so I think it would make much more sense to say, well, let’s take a significant share of that. For the kind of program I describe, let’s take 150 or 200 billion out of that trillion, and let’s actually put it toward a wage subsidy so it’s still going to low-income households. We haven’t cut the safety net and, from the other side, we’re not adding new spending, but we’re doing it in a way that we think is going to be a lot more constructive and helpful.

From the other side, an objection that you’ll hear a lot from the Left is that this is essentially a handout to employers, and why should we be helping these low-wage employers when they are kind of the bad actors who aren’t paying enough? Again, I think that reflects just a really serious misunderstanding of the labor market and the role that employers play in it. Employing low-wage workers and finding business models that are profitable and that make use of unskilled labor is actually really, really hard.

I speak a lot on business school campuses, and one thing that I often challenge the students on is I ask them, “How many of you are planning to go off and start businesses or work in companies where your business model is going to employ unskilled workers or where you’re going to be directly working with and trying to build the skills of low-wage, less-skilled workers?” The answer is, typically, virtually nobody. If we want more job opportunities for these kinds of workers, we actually have to recognize that employers are a constructive part of the solution here who we should be supporting, not people who we should be attacking and criticizing.

Then the last thing I’ll say about it, just quickly, is it’s very funny when you think about all of our safety net programs. Food stamps, for instance, are technically a subsidy to the grocery store. Medicaid is technically a subsidy to the doctor. Any time we jump into any market and say we’d really like to see a transaction happening that’s not going to happen on its own, at the end of the day, we’re doing that through some sort of subsidy.

Under the thinking of economic piety, we’ve put all of our investment into doing that on the consumption side. How do we foster more consumption by people that wouldn’t be able to happen in the market on its own? At the end of the day, my argument is let’s get back to the production side, to work, and say how can we foster more work that wouldn’t happen in the labor market on its own? I think that’s a much more constructive way to try to help folks who are struggling in our society.

RA: You mentioned going to campuses there. Do you think there is some kind of a genuine seismic shift going on among young people? I noticed, for example, that a recent poll, a Harvard IOP poll of young people showed great support for things like a Federal jobs guarantee, eliminating tuition and fees at public four-year colleges, and even for single-payer healthcare, sometimes referred to as Medicare for All, so there does seem to be a shift in opinion in that rising generation.

OC: I think that opinion certainly exists. I don’t know to the extent that it’s a shift. If I think back to when I was in college, it wouldn’t have surprised me to think that those were wildly popular then, or if you think back to any prior generation, it’s always sort of been the young people who hold the most radical left-of-center views. There’s the famous expression if you’re 20 and you’re not a liberal, you don’t have a heart, and if you’re 40 and you’re not conservative, you don’t have a head.

I think what we’re seeing is what has always been the case with young and idealistic people and, frankly, people who haven’t maybe accumulated as much life experience in the real world yet, and it’s just manifesting itself in response to the problems that we’re seeing in our society right now, which are very concentrated on a lack of economic opportunity for less-skilled Americans. I think their hearts are in the right place.

I think the discussion that we have to have and which folks on the Right, which conservatives have been woefully absent from, is how do you do that constructively? Because I think conservatives have historically taken the view, “Well, the market will just deliver the best result. We can maybe do some redistribution on the back end if we need to, and we’re really just going to emphasize education as a way to provide opportunity to everybody.” The reality is that that’s not enough. What we have historically thought of as kind of right-of-center, conservative economic policy is really almost entirely libertarian. Libertarians take the market outcome to be the correct outcome, per se, and the end unto itself. Conservatives, I think, have to take a different view and say, “We are really focused on the health of society, on the stability and flourishing of families and communities.”

Free markets are certainly a piece of that, but when we find situations where markets are not delivering that outcome—and I think that’s the case today with respect to the labor market—then we have to say that there’s a problem and that our approach to solutions might be different than what the kind of big government solution would look like. I hope it’s different, but we have to actually be out there acknowledging that there are problems and trying to offer solutions. That’s what I’ve tried to do with the book.

RA: Yeah. One of the interesting aspects of the book is, although you don’t say this explicitly, in some ways you argue against it, but there is a sense in which you recognize that there is almost a need for populists, both on the Right and on the Left, to realign our politics and to focus more on the workers who have pretty much been ignored, particularly during the ’90s and the first decade of the 21st century.

OC: Yes, I think that’s right. I think populism, in the abstract, isn’t. . . .Well, it all depends on how you define it. You can define it as something that’s bad, but the idea that looking at how people are actually feeling and what they’re concerned about and saying that that really needs to be the focus is actually a pretty important thing.

I think a problem that we really had and that really came into focus in 2016 was that we’ve trusted a certain set of economic metrics that were very focused on consumption and GDP growth to tell us how we’re doing. We’ve built a set of public policies that aimed to further progress on those metrics. When people said, “Actually, we’re not happy with that,” the response has been an extraordinarily condescending view that either they don’t understand how great things are or the appreciation that they should have for how great things are is being crowded out by a kind of closed-mindedness, and so on and so forth.

I think we actually need to step back and say, “No, people are saying that they’re unhappy because they actually have a lot to be unhappy about and, from what they are saying. . .” And I don’t hold myself out there as an expert on public opinion or what everybody’s saying or what it means, but I think the best way of understanding the challenges that we are having as a society is that we wanted the wrong things economically.

We’re sort of like the romantic comedy heroine who got all the things that she thought she wanted but she wasn’t happy because she wanted the wrong things, and so I think it’s appropriate, at that point, to step back and listen to what people are saying. Then the question is how do you marry that populism around respecting the interest that people actually have out there in society with a responsible and constructive approach to actually trying to solve those problems.

RA: Now, quite properly, you keep yourself above the partisan political debate, but Donald Trump, the President, looms over your new book. How would you assess his administration’s economic record so far?

OC: Well, I think the economic record is pretty good in terms of how the economy is performing. My concern is in understanding how much of that performance is just a function of the business cycle versus any actual progress and underlying structural factors. What I mean by that is I certainly celebrate that we have such a tight labor market. Other things equal, that’s certainly better, but if you go back and look, historically, at the peaks of business cycles, this peak is worse than past peaks. Labor force participation among men, right now at this peak, is certainly better than it was during the recession, but it’s worse than during the peak in 2006, and that was worse than the peak in 2000, and that was worse than the peak in ’89, and so on and so forth.

You see a similar trend for wage growth, and so I worry that what we’re seeing is what I would call bumps on a downward slope, that is, that the underlying secular trajectory of our economy and our labor market continues to be pretty poor and, every time we get a cyclical bump, we celebrate, as we should, but we let our guard down and say, “Well, therefore, we must have figured things out.” Until we actually make the structural changes in the policy areas that the book discusses in terms of the way we regulate, the way we educate, the way we approach trade and immigration, the way we approach organized labor, the way we approach the safety net and something like wage subsidies, the way we think about work culturally—until we make those changes, we’re not actually going to shift that underlying trajectory from a declining one to an ascending one.

I think that Trump, in some of the problems that he’s identified and in some of the topics he’s put on the table that I think were previously ignored and really need to be debated, could be a constructive force in that respect. But I don’t think we’re there yet on having an agenda defined or having the policies in place that are going to get us on track.

RA: The book is The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America. It’s written by my guest, Oren Cass and will be published by Encounter Books in mid-November, but listeners can get a sneak preview with an extract here at The American Interest. For now, Oren, congratulations again and thanks for joining us on The American Interest podcast.

OC: Thank you very much. It was a great discussion.

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Murky Nuclear Business in New Europe

It is no secret that the Kremlin has invested heavily into its most prominent Czech ally, President Miloš Zeman. What is it getting in return?

Back in 2012, few expected the then-retired ex-Prime Minister (1998-2002) and former leader of the post-communist Social Democratic party (ČSSD) to make a successful political comeback. Yet he did, following a campaign strategy organized by Martin Nejedlý, the recently retired head of LUKOIL Aviation Czech, a subsidiary of the Russian oil giant. When Zeman was sworn in as president in March 2013, Nejedlý became one of his closest advisors, a position he still holds in spite of lacking the required security clearances.

Earlier this year, in spite of his deteriorating diabetes and inability to campaign effectively, Zeman successfully sought re-election. Towering over an underwhelming field of candidates, he projected charisma and showed himself attuned to Czechs’ anti-immigration sentiments in ways that other candidates were not. It has been uncovered that a half of all the funding received by the political group that nominated him, the Citizens’ Rights Party, came from employees of a cobweb of companies owned by Sergei Roldugin, the godfather of Vladimir Putin’s daughter, Mariya.

Provided that the presidency in the Czech Republic is mostly a ceremonial affair, why does Zeman seem to matter to the Kremlin? For years, Zeman was not able to do much for Putin, other than constantly wind up the Czech Republic’s Atlanticists by giving speeches supportive of his regime and critical of the post-2014 sanctions regime imposed on Russia by the European Union. Due to his worsening health, the Czech President has not even attended the high-profile Valdai Forum or the “Dialogue of Civilizations” conference organized by Vladimir Yakunin over the last few years.

One tangible pay-off is looming on the horizon, however: one of the Czech Republic’s aging nuclear power plants, Dukovany, will soon be due for an upgrade and expansion. The plant has been in operation since 1985, with a projected lifespan ending in 2035. Since the Czech government has committed itself to boosting its nuclear energy capabilities in order reduce its current dependence on coal, building a new reactor in Dukovany seems like a natural step.

Unsurprisingly, Zeman has been actively lobbying on behalf of the Russian energy company Rosatom. It has been revealed, for example, that Nejedlý conducted secret talks about Dukovany with Rosatom’s CEO, Alexei Likhachev. On his recent visit to the plant, the president stated that he was “personally not opposed at all to the application of the same model as the one used in Hungary with its Paks power plant.”

What happened in Hungary, of course, was that Orbán’s government awarded a $13.7 billion contract to Rosatom without going through a public tender. Financing has been provided largely through loans extended by Russian banks, and various details of the contract have been classified as matters of national security.

Zeman’s support extended to Rosatom is not just cheap talk. The President has leverage extending far beyond his normal constitutional duties. He played an active role in forming the current cabinet led by Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, who is now leading a minority government with ČSSD, which relies on the votes of the Communist Party (KSČM) in order to secure passage of critical pieces of legislation. That alone was a first in post-1989 Czech politics, where Communists had previously been systematically ostracized.

The arrangement was made under Zeman’s auspices and it is his personal influence that keeps parliamentarians in line. As a result, Zeman has been making frequent trips to parliament to whip the votes necessary to pass key legislation, including the government’s budget. Not only is that bizarre and unseemly in a parliamentary democracy, it has also given Zeman a degree of power over the government’s policy not enjoyed by any of his predecessors.

Earlier this year, for example, Zeman refused to appoint the Social Democratic nominee Miroslav Poche, a member of European Parliament, as foreign minister. After a brief stand-off, the coalition caved in and instead appointed a much more junior candidate, Tomáš Petříček. Zeman cited Poche’s views on immigration as the reason for his rejection—a highly unusual feat in a system where the president’s appointments of cabinet ministers are a formality. But given Zeman’s ties to Russia, it is no conspiracy theory to suggest that it is in his (and the Kremlin’s) interest that the Czech Republic’s diplomacy be as leaderless and malleable as possible.

Today, Zeman is trying similarly heavy-handed methods to push Rosatom through. As Jakub Janda, director of the Prague-based think tank European Values, wrote, “the President’s office are blackmailing the Prime Minister that if he fails to award the CZK 150-200-billion ($6.6-8.8 billion) to the Russians, he will lose Zeman’s support, who will then destroy his coalition by using Communists and some Social Democrats.”

The situation puts the spotlight on Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, a billionaire turned technocratic populist. In principle, his government could turn to a number of other prospective bidders instead of Rosatom, including the U.S. giant Westinghouse, France’s Areva and EDF, and Japanese, Korean, and Chinese companies. The economics are tricky, however, as the Czech energy giant ČEZ lacks the necessary resources to finance the expansion on its own—at least not without depriving its vocal minority shareholders of dividends for decades to come. If the government decides to go ahead, the taxpayers will have to underwrite at least a part of the final bill.

Yet, the EU places stringent restrictions on state aid to investment projects involving private parties. Furthermore, Dukovany is close to the border with Austria, where strong and well-organized opposition to nuclear energy, underscored by the country’s 1978 referendum on the subject, is intent on torpedoing any expansion of existing nuclear structures in neighboring countries through legal challenges at the EU-level. All of that makes a crude government-to-government agreement with Russia look like an appealing alternative to a “normal,” competitive tender—especially so if Russia provides cheap financing.

So far, Babiš has refused to play along with Zeman and the Russians, suggesting instead that the lifespan of the existing plant be extended until the mid-2040s, at a fraction of the cost of a full upgrade and expansion. Inadvertedly, the situation turns Babiš into an advocate of renewable energy. Support for wind, solar, and biofuels increased dramatically under previous governments, to a point where Babiš called the increases in support “scandalous.” His government was widely expected to reduce them.

To observe Babiš’ reluctance is heartening, but the Prime Minister is no Russia hawk. Although his government expelled three Russian diplomats following the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter, the Prime Minister has been also a critic of the EU’s sanctions against Russia, seeing them as harmful to Czech business interests.

What seems to matter more to him is the massive cost of Dukovany’s potential expansion, which dwarfs the burden of subsidies to renewables, which amount to a little over $1 billion each year. (And, as a side note, Babiš’ business conglomerate, Agrofert, has often found itself on the receiving end of those subsidies.) But Dukovany would be by far the largest public procurement contract under his tenure as Prime Minister. Recent history in Europe, furthermore, does not offer many examples of successful nuclear energy projects either—at least not without massive delays and cost overruns.

To complicate things further, Nejedlý and Rosatom might not be the only agents of foreign powers trying to influence Zeman. In 2013, the China General Nuclear Power Group (CGN) was given the green light to expand the plant at Cernavodă in Romania, together with a 51-percent stake in the joint venture company, in spite of being a sole bidder in the announced tender. The Czech president has long fostered ties with Beijing, culminating in a state visit by President Xi Jinping in 2016 and the appointment of Ye Jianming, the founder of Chinese investment conglomerate CEFC, as Zeman’s advisor. Though Ye has since fallen out favor, the regime has not lost its interest in Zeman. In fact, the Czech President just visited a business forum in Shanghai at the beginning of November, where he was hosted personally by President Xi.

How the relevant actors play their cards now is critical, as a decision of some kind is expected by the end of this year. A Russian- or Chinese-run expansion of Czech nuclear energy capabilities would shape the country’s geopolitical options for decades to come, possibly long beyond the current crisis of the EU, NATO and of the Western-led ‘liberal order.’  And if there was ever a moment for the Trump administration to go on a charm offensive in the Czech capital, it is now. If Dukovany ends up in Russian or Chinese hands, recovering the lost Western influence will be an extremely difficult feat.

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The Irony and Tragedy of the Brexit Negotiations Endgame

In The March of Folly, the eminent historian Barbara Tuchman offered three criteria for inclusion in the list of history’s most senseless decisions: when those who were responsible were warned in advance of the potential for disaster of what they were getting themselves into; when groups, not individuals, perpetrated the foolishness; and when there were feasible alternatives to the course they took.

With the official date of Brexit set, the people and leaders of the United Kingdom are on the brink of adding themselves to this dubious pantheon, and in so doing meet all three of Tuchman’s criteria. However, after nearly a million Britons marched last month  in favor of a second referendum, and with public polls in the United Kingdom continuing to swing against Brexit, there is realistic talk of a scenario in which British citizens may get another choice as to whether they wish to remain in the European Union.

In fact, in light of the fraught negotiations of Prime Minister May’s government with the European Union, with her cabinet, and with pro- and anti-Brexit Conservative members of Parliament, it is just as likely that the UK will crash out of the EU with no negotiated deal between them as it is that they will reach a deal that May can get through parliament—and just as likely that the British public will get a second chance to vote in a referendum under conditions of a more informed electorate. The United Kingdom has gone from being in the European Union and wanting opt-outs to being nearly out and wanting opt-ins.

In spite of this, the EU clearly would prefer the UK to remain, for a range of reasons: The UK has formidable defense, intelligence, and diplomatic capabilities, and Europe has made history together over many decades, creating a single economic market, borderless travel, and the unifying legal jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), as well as making all European citizens better off and acting as a beacon for the democracies of East Central Europe after the shroud of the Soviet Union was lifted.

It would be calamitous for both the United Kingdom and the European Union for Brexit to go forward. The EU would lose one of its most powerful and capable member states, and—as a vast range of high-minded studies have indicated—the UK will be much worse off, primarily in macroeconomic and personal livelihood terms. The UK would not even be able to rapidly negotiate a series of new bilateral trade deals with the United States and other countries, for other governments will be waiting to see what the specific nature of the UK’s trade relationship with the EU turns out to be, something that will not begin to be negotiated until the UK leaves.

But well ahead of that, there also happens to be plenty of irony and tragedy in the endgame of the Brexit negotiation itself. The departure deal is 95 percent complete, but the last 5 percent is proving dramatically difficult to finalize. The primary remaining areas of disagreement involve both the need to avoid a new hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, and whether the UK will remain partly or wholly in the EU Customs Union.

The European Union and its chief negotiator Michel Barnier have a difficult decision to make on its endgame negotiating strategy. They must decide whether to proceed to agree a final deal with the UK (and likely arrive at a “soft” UK exit), or refuse to agree on a final deal, in effect sabotaging May (and likely arrive at a possibility of a second referendum). The irony is that by sorting out the Irish border issue and getting to a final deal, the EU would be helping bring about  an outcome it does not want.

The tragedy is that the best shot at keeping the UK in the EU would undermine May and probably force her from office. For in all likelihood, if the European Union were to exit without a deal, it would engender acute political instability in the Britain, including a range of possibilities, such as May losing a confidence vote, pro-Brexiteer Boris Johnson replacing her, a fresh national election (that the Labour Party would likely win), and either May herself (before she bows out) or new Prime Minister Jeremy Corbyn calling for a fresh referendum.

Tragically, the set of conditions necessary for triggering a new referendum (that nearly all observers assume will lead to a majority vote for the UK to remain in the EU) will not necessarily be sufficient; the scenario of the UK failing to get a departure deal will be highly uncertain. May could easily lose her premiership to Boris Johnson, who most certainly would not lead the UK back in the EU once it got out. It is not precisely clear whether May could manage to get a vote in Parliament passed in favor of a new referendum, before she loses a no confidence vote, a party leadership vote, or both.

But as the costs mount and UK public opinion continues to shift in favor of remaining in the EU, the time has come for courageous leadership on both sides of the Atlantic to help the UK avoid the ultimate self-inflicted wound and save the vaunted special relationship. The Prime Minister is living politically on borrowed time, with the sparing grace of history to end up on her side only if she seizes the moment and defies expectations by keeping the UK in Europe—and America can help, though not in the Trumpian way one might presume.

First, British leaders and citizens alike have had ample warning of Brexit’s disastrous impact on the country’s economy and political standing. Moreover, the damage from Brexit will ripple beyond the British Isles: to the Continent, where it will amount to an enduring challenge to the permanence of the European Union; to Moscow, Beijing, and autocrats everywhere, who will see Brexit as proof of the vitiation of the liberal democratic order; and to Washington, where its long vaunted special relationship with a now less-significant, serially broken UK will undergo a substantial downgrading.

Second, though it has had prominent champions, including vocal Trump supporter Nigel Farage, Brexit remains largely an expression of group ‘id’ – a dark, damn-the-facts mix of anti-immigration, anti-Brussels, and anti-anything-that-smacks-of-elitist sentiments.  Neither Theresa May nor Jeremy Corbyn are politically or ideologically wedded to Brexit. Yet there simply is no truly significant political figure in the UK whose political destiny rests on Britain’s departure from the EU, not even Boris Johnson.

Third, and most important, the UK ship of state can actually avert the approaching Brexit iceberg. Unlike Tuchman’s examples of historical follies, the United Kingdom’s fate is wholly in its own hands, unaffected by the military or political stratagems of others. The only question is how to awaken Britain’s leaders and the wider public to seize this last opportunity to avoid the ignominy of a catastrophic self-inflicted wound. Tony Blair has tried to sound the alarm but remains too tainted by his Iraq debacle to command attention. Others, like Lord Kerr, the author of Article 50—the very provision that allows a country to exit the European Union—find their desperate urgings to turn back from Brexit mostly ignored.

Bereft of a Churchillian figure who can, in the great leader’s infamous words, “give the nation a roar,” it is the British people who need to show their leaders they still have a lion-like heart. As in the United States after the election of Donald Trump, ordinary British citizens will have to summon the will to resist the Brexit disaster. “Indivisible,” the post-Inaugural Woman’s March in Washington, and the widespread response to the violence in Charlottesville show that organizers can translate revulsion into mass action.

Converting grievance into action, however, will take more than a grassroots British movement. Theresa May has distinguished herself by a remarkable lack of leadership qualities. Her woeful performances at recent Conservative Party conferences have become the stuff of parody. She called an election and promptly lost her party’s parliamentary majority. She “commands” a Northern Irish party-supported thin margin in Parliament where her most important ally seems at times to be opposition leader Corbyn, whose potential ascent to 10 Downing Street inspires widespread anxiety in its own right.

May’s palpable weakness creates an opportunity for those with strength—chiefly France’s Emmanuel Macron—to craft a Remain deal with his counterparts in Brussels. But with his primary partner Angela Merkel now so weakened she won’t be running in Germany’s next election, even with strong support from the Dutch and Spanish Prime Ministers for a new deal more attractive to the UK in immigration terms, winning over Britain’s recalcitrant Brexiteers may not be in the cards. Negotiating as a united European Union to force the UK out without an exit deal may be their best shot.

At first glance, there appears little that the United States could do to prevent Brexit. President Obama, even with his high popularity in Britain, was unable to move the needle for the Remain campaign. And President Trump, loathed by many British, happens to be a toxic Brexit booster. Trump’s stance opens the door for the five living ex-Presidents—each of whom has now publicly criticized the current occupant of the White House—to speak out against Brexit.

A short, powerful joint statement in support of a second referendum issued jointly by Obama, Bush 43, Clinton, Bush 41, and Carter may well resonate across the Atlantic, and across the English channel. Ordinary Brits and officials alike would perhaps sit up and pay attention to remonstrations from “beyond the pond.” The joint missive would likely vex Trump into a pugnacious Tweet, only reinforcing the appeal of five former POTUS.

There is little doubt about the degree that the special relationship has already been hollowed out. May and Trump—in each leader’s feeble attempt to take their respective country down the wrong path—have reinforced the initial negative tendency of the other, thereby making Brexit and the U.S. retreat from global leadership more likely. May needs a post-Brexit trade deal with Washington; Trump needs political legitimacy from London. The conference of both have only served to hollow out the special relationship still further.

Trump aside, for its own interests the United States needs the UK to remain in the EU. More importantly, by any measure conceivable, it is in the UK’s own interest to cancel Brexit. Doing so is not difficult; it merely requires some timely application of vintage British pluck. Beyond the issue of how the referendum was not legally binding—and how Russian interference may well have tipped the vote—is the legal simplicity of a simple majority parliamentary vote to un-invoke Article 50, as Lord Kerr has pointed out. If the British government doesn’t do it, tragically the European Union may have to undermine Prime Minister May in order for the British people to have a second chance to safeguard their destiny.

Brexit is reversible. The dramatic damage to the world’s oldest democracy would not be, assuming that languid UK leadership persists in its quixotic gambit. If the British people ever wondered just how much their country matters, long after the demise of the British empire, now they know: a great deal indeed.

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Resilient Democracies

Two years ago, I left my native Denmark to briefly live in the Suffolk village of Higham as part of a research stay at the University of Essex. Higham is a designated conservation area, situated in the picturesque Dedham Vale, consisting of old cottages and farmsteads as well as a couple of manor houses. Higham also has a 15th-century church, St. Mary’s, where I would walk most afternoons. The church was being renovated and it was therefore closed to the public. However, on the penultimate day of my stay, I came across two builders and asked if I could enter. Inside, my attention was caught by a stained-glass window, which—below an image of Richard the Lionheart—listed the six Higham men who fell in the Great War of 1914-19.

Higham today has fewer than 200 inhabitants. There are no shops, not even the obligatory English village pub. I don’t know how many inhabitants Higham had a hundred years ago—or if it had a public house then—but those six war victims must have made up a non-trivial percentage of the adult male population. Had there been no war but six murders in Higham between 1914 and 1919, the mortality rate would have made even the most violent cities in the United States, Mexico, Venezuela, or South Africa today look tranquil by comparison. Indeed, it would have placed Higham on a par with the violence that has marred some hunter and gatherer societies without a Leviathan to enforce peaceful conduct.

At the same time, there is nothing unusual about the six Higham dead. Driving around Suffolk and Essex, I saw that each village has its memorial, normally in the form of stone monuments in the cemetery or city square. They document similar death rates, and show that several members of the same family were often among the victims of the war. Of course, we also find Great War memorials scattered across Continental European countries such as Germany and France, which shed even more blood during the years between 1914 and 1918. The memorials remind us of how destructive this first fully industrialized war was for local communities across Europe.

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The War Memorial window in Higham St. Mary’s Church
Photo © Adrian S Pye (cc-by-sa/2.0)

A century has elapsed since the fighting ended in November 1918. But the two decades after the fighting were not on balance happy times for the former European combatants. Massive dislocation and collective psychological trauma soon flowed into the maw of the Great Depression, out of which came in no small part the political maelstrom that gave rise to the second Great War—or better perhaps, the second part of the one and only Great War. It is not surprising, then, that on the heels of many recent books about World War I we now may note a string of even newer books that have revisited the interwar period that followed to understand the challenges facing today’s democracies. These books include Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future, Madeleine Albright’s Fascism: A Warning, David Runciman’s How Democracy Ends, and the anthology Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America edited by Cass Sunstein.

These books are testimony to what Aviezer Tucker in these pages has termed “the disillusioned political zeitgeist of the second decade of the 21st century,” and they have won much acclaim in Western media and journals. They have at least two other things in common. First, they issue stern warnings that even established democracies in Western Europe and North America face grave dangers due to the rise of populism out of the “Great Recession” that began in 2008. Second, they turn to history in general and the interwar period in particular for parallels, and they use these parallels to argue that present-day democracies are more fragile than we like to believe. And perhaps they have a third characteristic in common: They make historical analogies that are mainly false.

This is where the Higham memorial came to my mind. In 1919, the United Kingdom had to return to political normalcy in a situation where more than a million sons, brothers, and fathers had died in the trenches. Several million other war veterans had to find their place in society while fighting mental and physical injuries. No better attempt to describe this struggle exists than J.L. Carr’s wonderful novel A Month in the Country. The novel is set in the summer of 1920, and it tells of two war veterans who spend a month in a village much like Higham. At some point, the protagonist, Tom Birkin, having just dined at a local home and seen a photo of the family’s fallen son, Perce, finds himself yelling out loud to no one in particular along an otherwise empty road: “Oh you bastards! You bloody bastards! You didn’t need to have started it. And you could have stopped it before you did. God? Ha! There is no God.”

There were thousands if not millions of Tom Birkins in the United Kingdom after the war. To make matters worse, the war trauma was merely one of many calamities. The economic dislocation that followed from dismantling the war economy created a severe post-war slump, the General Strike of 1926 was seen as a near-revolutionary situation, at least in the media, and in 1929, the Great Depression hit the British industrial economy with a vengeance. One of the political repercussions was the split of the Labour government over crisis policy in 1931.

If democracies are inherently fragile, interwar Britain would have been a good candidate for democratic breakdown. But nothing of the sort happened. On the contrary, British democracy proved remarkably stable between the two world wars. Labour replaced the Liberals as the main center-left party and peacefully took office in 1924 and 1929, while the Tories developed into a broad conservative party that closed the flank to extremist movements such as Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. When Labour split over the size of public spending cuts, in the midst of what British historian Eric Hobsbawm in The Age of Extremes termed the “largest global earthquake ever to be measured on the economic historians’ Richter Scale,” it did not open the gateway for political extremists. Instead, a national government consisting of Labour’s right wing, Liberals, and Conservatives, led by former Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, was established. This broad coalition provided political stability and governance during the economic crisis.

One might object that the United Kingdom is hardly your average democracy. But the fact of the matter is that Britain is merely one among a string of democracies that have been remarkably stable for a very long period. If we equate democracy with a system where governments can lose power at elections—a minimum definition widely used in political science and economics—the United States has been a democracy since 1776, the United Kingdom since 1832, Canada since 1867, Australia since 1901, and New Zealand since 1907. Turning to Europe, if we disregard the democratic breakdowns that occurred due to the German occupations under the two world wars, Belgium has been continuously democratic since 1830, the Netherlands and Switzerland since 1848, France since 1870, Norway since 1884, Denmark since 1901, and Sweden since 1917. Indeed, the most recent democratic breakdown in any of these former British settler colonies or Western European countries dates to Napoleon III’s self-coup in France in 1851, more than 150 years ago.

The remarkable stability of these “Northwestern” democracies seems to belie Levitsky and Ziblatt’s observation on the very first page of How Democracies Die that “even though we know democracies are always fragile, the one in which we live has somehow managed to defy gravity.” The United States, it seems, is merely one of a relatively large number of countries that have defied gravity.

However, it is not the interwar trajectories of these “Northwestern” countries that form the basis for the many recent warnings that even well-established democracies might prove brittle in the face of crisis. It is the dire fate of democracy in countries such as Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s that haunts this new scholarship. To see why this is the case, take Germany, which was also hit by the Great Depression in 1929.

As in Britain, the social and economic consequences were brutal. Unemployment exploded while public spending and wages fell. But the political repercussions differed fundamentally. The economic crisis tore apart the centrist foundations of the very young Weimar democracy. President Hindenburg responded to the crisis by using a hitherto dormant clause in the Weimar Constitution that allowed him to appoint governments—led by first Heinrich Brüning, then Franz von Papen, and finally Kurt von Schleicher—that were not supported by a parliamentary majority. Meanwhile, the crisis led to large-scale political radicalization. At the last pre-crisis election, in May 1929, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) had received a meagre 2.6 percent of the vote. At the first crisis election, in 1930, its vote tally skyrocketed to 18.3 percent, and at the July 1932 election—at the trough of the Great Depression—the NSDAP received 37 percent of the popular vote. An additional 14 percent of German voters opted for the Communist Party, which also wished to do away with Weimer democracy.

Political radicalization meanwhile returned to the streets, a decade after the violent “German Revolution” of 1918-19. The membership of the Nazi paramilitary organization, the Sturmarbteilung or SA, increased from 60,000 in 1930 to half a million on the eve of Adolf Hitler’s Machtergreifung in January 1933. This increase in paramilitary activity found an outlet in large-scale brawls and regular street battles: In 1931 alone, clashes between Nazi and Communist groups, in particular, led to more than 8,000 casualties. The close link between the economic crisis and political radicalization provides some vindication for Franz von Papen’s claim, in his Memoirs, that in the early 1930s, “the material conditions in Germany were so desperate that many young people took the brown shirt not because it was brown but because it was a shirt.”

Germany was not a singular case. In a broad arc from Lisbon to Tallinn, all democracies save that of Czechoslovakia broke down, some in the 1920s, others in the 1930s. But based on what we know about democratic stability, this is really rather unsurprising. A voluminous body of research has shown that new democracies are fragile, especially if they are poor and especially if they are hit by economic crisis before institutions and attitudes mutually supportive of democracy can form. These characteristics apply to all the interwar democracies that were created in the aftermath of the victory of the Entente democracies in the First World War. To make matters worse, most of them were grafted on agricultural societies, which made it virtually impossible to establish modern mass parties. In countries such as Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania there was no working class of note to mobilize, and there was little in the sense of a civil society that could be used to undergird political activities.

The exceptions were the industrialized countries in Central Europe: Germany, Austria, and Italy (or at least the northern and central parts of Italy). It is probably for this reason that these countries figure prominently in recent warnings about the dangers of the rising populism. But these were also new democracies, and on top of that they were bedeviled by the legacy of the World War. Germany and Austria were the two principal losers of that war, and while Italy was part of the Entente, both the Italian political elite and the voters felt that a grave injustice had been done to the country after the war: Italy did not receive the Ottoman and Habsburg territories that France and the United Kingdom had promised in return for joining the Entente in 1915. This created revanchist yearnings in all three countries, which could be harnessed by undemocratic forces on the Right that had, in the first place, been brutalized by four years of fighting in the trenches. Furthermore, Germany, Austria, and to a lesser extent Italy were pestered by the Continental inflation crisis of the early 1920s, which eroded the savings of the middle class. Finally, all three countries had a strong stratum of noble landowners—epitomized by the Prussian Junkers—who were openly hostile to democracy, and who wielded a large influence in mainstream conservative parties. This was one of the reasons that these parties often proved disloyal to the new regime form.

Many of the new books that have turned to history to understand the present challenges facing Western democracies thus base their arguments on what happened in a set of democracies that bear little resemblance to the democracies we know today, in a period that was characterized by crises of a completely different magnitude than what we have seen in recent years—the Great Recession included. The books thereby create a false historical analogy between the patterns of breakdown in new and mainly poor democracies and the challenges that mature and affluent democracies face today.

The place to look for historical insights about how well-established democracies respond to crisis is rather to scrutinize what happens in this kind of regime when crises hit. In the case of the interwar period, this means scrutinizing the Northwestern democracies that had a longstanding experience with democracy on the eve of the Great War. If we do this, the historical lesson that emerges is much more heartening: Old democracies are remarkably stable even in the face of crises as devastating as those of the interwar period.

There are probably many different reasons for this democratic resilience. One important factor is the experience with democracy itself. As Dankwart Rustow observed in a 1970 article that is today seen as the harbinger of the much denigrated “transition paradigm”:

With its basic practice of multilateral debate, democracy in particular involves a process of trial and error, a joint learning experience. The first grand compromise that establishes democracy, if it proves at all viable, is in itself a proof of the efficacy of the principle of conciliation and accommodation.

Over time, learning and habituation mechanisms teach both political elites and the broader citizenry that defeat in an election is only a temporary setback; losers get another chance in the future. Moreover, in well-established democracies, losing power does not mean losing everything; defeated parties and their voters need not fear repression by the victors. They are free to carry on their activities and wait for their day.

Lurking behind these learning and habituation mechanisms is the fact that well-established democracies have vibrant civil societies. As Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out in Democracy in America, civil society bolsters democracy by creating a bottom-up bulwark against transgressions by the powers that be. Civil society associations—which were already ubiquitous in the America Tocqueville visited in 1831-32—bind individuals together, increase their political involvement, and enable them to speak truth to power, thereby resisting the centralization of power that Tocqueville had seen in France in his own lifetime and that he so feared. Seymour Martin Lipset and his co-authors elaborated these ideas in their seminal Union Democracy, published in 1956, in which they argued that democracy can only become institutionalized where voluntary associations provide information to citizens, school them in democracy, and allow them to oppose the cabals and maneuverings of would-be dictators.

Civil society and a democracy legacy obviously do not appear deus ex machina. To understand why vibrant civil societies and long democratic legacies had come to characterize the Northwestern countries on the eve of the First World War, it is necessary to delve back into deeper patterns of state formation and economic development. But the important point remains that a prior experience with democracy, coupled with a fine-grained associational landscape, enabled the “old” democracies in Northwestern countries to channel the frustration wrought by the interwar crises—including the mass unemployment of the Great Depression—without it leading to the kind of political radicalization that we find in the arch from Lisbon to Tallinn.

A good example is interwar Scandinavia. In How Democracies Die, Levitsky and Ziblatt fleetingly refer to interwar Sweden for evidence that the key to democratic survival is that moderate political forces fight extremists. The story they relate is the following: In the 1930s, the youth organization in the Swedish equivalent to the British Conservatives, Allmänna Valmansförbundet, was strongly inspired by fascist ideas in general and Mussolini’s example in particular. In March 1933, the conservative youths founded a militia clad in grey uniforms with blue ties and blue armbands, and they attempted to push the mother party to radicalize. Their elders in the Conservative Party disowned these tendencies. In 1934, the youth organization therefore broke with the Conservatives and founded a decidedly fascist party, Sveriges Nationella Förbund. The new party included three members of parliament and it contested the national elections in September 1936. However, the fascists got a meagre 1 percent of the popular vote; two other fascist outfits fared even worse.

Levitsky and Ziblatt construe this as evidence that moderate political forces can stem the tide of extremism by actively resisting it. But surely the most spectacular aspect of this episode is the lack of popular support for fascism in Sweden in the 1930s, even in a situation where the world economic crisis had wreaked havoc on the Swedish economy and where Hitler and Mussolini had allegedly eradicated unemployment and made the trains run on time. What the Swedish example shows is that some democracies are so stable that they can weather even severe economic crisis without political radicalization.

Similar political dynamics played out across the Sound where the Danish Conservatives also fought radicalization in the youth party and where extremists had even less success during elections in the midst of the Great Depression, and in a situation where totalitarianism was the shining model—or contagious disease, if you prefer—of the day. As in Sweden, the moderate Danish parties came together to give a democratic answer to the crisis in the form of large-scale social settlements (the most important being the so-called Kanslergade Agreement, concluded on the very same day that Hitler became Chancellor in neighboring Germany). Thus they were able to hold on to their voters and fight undemocratic movements via legislation. If anything, the Scandinavian democracies were strengthened by the interwar convulsions. More generally, all the European countries or former British settler colonies that had democratized before the end of the World War—meaning that democracy was not an external consequence of the victory of the Entente in the war but had emerged from internal political struggles during the 19th or early 20th century—survived the repeated and often mutually enforcing interwar crises.

This is not to deny that the American political system is mired in a deep crisis of legitimacy at present. It is indeed worrying that an outsider and populist such as Donald Trump could come out of nowhere and win the presidency against the will of the political establishment; and that part of this political establishment has subsequently rallied to his side.

However, the history of the Northwestern democracies does nothing to bolster the notion that American democracy is in jeopardy. The stained-glass window in St. Mary’s Church in Higham serves as a reminder of democratic resilience, one among thousands of similar war memorials in the United Kingdom. It also shows why any attempt to make analogies with the interwar period is vulnerable to the objection that today’s context is fundamentally dissimilar. It is hard to imagine a situation more radically different from the circumstances in which the six Higham men were commemorated than the present one. There were no Tom Birkins in Higham when I lived there—as there are no Tom Birkins anywhere in Western Europe these days. As David Goodhart recently pointed out in these pages in his retroview of Erich Fromm’s 1941 book Escape from Freedom, the Great Recession that began in 2008 never developed into anything like the Great Depression that began in 1929. The populist parties now making headway in many Western democracies are fundamentally different from the “anti-system” parties of the interwar years, which openly denounced democracy and whose militiamen fought to the death in the streets. Indeed, there are no parties of note in any of the Western democracies that aim to introduce an alternative system to the democratic one—as we did see as recently as the 1970s and 1980s. This is not 1919, 1929, or 1933. Whatever challenges our democracies face today, they differ fundamentally from those of the interwar period.

Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Tim Duggan Books, 2017); Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die: What History Reveals about our Future (Crown, 2018); Madeleine Albright, Fascism: A Warning (Harper Collins, 2018); David Runciman, How Democracy Ends (Basic Books, 2018); Cass Sunstein, ed., Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America (Harper Collins, 2018).

Aviezer Tucker, “Democracy’s Gravediggers,” The American Interest Online, April 23, 2018.

J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country (The New York Review of Books, 2000), pp. 88-89.

E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (Michael Joseph, 1994), p. 86.

See Svend-Erik Skaaning, John Gerring, and Henrikas Bartusevičius, “A Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy,” Comparative Political Studies, vol. 48, no. 12 (2015), pp. 1491-1525.

Levitsky and Ziblatt, p. 1.

Christopher R. Browning, “For Fighting We Were Born,” New York Review of Books, vol. 65, no. 6 (April 5, 2018), p. 24.

Richard J. Evans, “Men He Could Trust,” London Review of Books, vol. 40, no. 4 (February 22, 2018), p. 37.

Franz von Papen, Memoirs (Dutton, 1953), p. 255.

Michael Bernhard, Christopher Reenock and Timothy Nordstrom, “Economic Performance and Survival in New Democracies: Is There a Honeymoon Effect?” Comparative Political Studies, vol. 36, no. 4 (2003), pp. 404-431; Milan Svolik, “Authoritarian Reversals and Democratic Consolidation,” American Political Science Review, vol. 102, no. 2 (2008), pp.153-168.

John D. Stephens, “Democratic Transition and Breakdown in Western Europe, 1870-1939: A Test of the Moore Thesis,” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 94, no. 5 (March 1989), pp. 1019-1077; Gregory M. Luebbert, Liberalism, Fascism, or Social Democracy: Social Classes and the Political Origins of Regimes in Interwar Europe (Oxford University Press, 1991).

Dankwart Rustow, “Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model,” Comparative Politics vol. 2, no. 3 (April 1970), p. 358.

Seymour Martin Lipset, Martin A. Trow and James S. Coleman, Union Democracy: The Internal Politics of the International Typographical Union (Free Press, 1956).

Thomas Ertman, “Democracy and Dictatorship in Interwar Western Europe Revisited”, World Politics vol. 50, no. 3 (1998), pp. 475-505.

See Agnes Cornell, Jørgen Møller and Svend-Erik Skaaning, ”The Real Lessons of the Interwar Period”, Journal of Democracy vol. 28, no. 3 (2017), pp. 14-28.

Aspects of American liberalism are under greater attack than democracy, it being understood that the two have different ontological statuses and different histories. Indeed, in some respects too much democracy is the problem; case in point: no open primaries in the Republican Party, no Trump presidency.

David Goodhart, “Fromm 1941 to Now,” The American Interest (November-December 2018).

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Why More Caravans Are Coming

With the midterm elections behind us, the migrant caravan from Honduras has largely dropped off the national radar—mercifully for people like myself who, instinctively, rally to anyone attacked by our President. But the caravan still deserves careful attention. Not because of Trumpian tweets about Middle Eastern infiltrators; terrorists have no need to walk across Mexico. Nor does it deserve our attention just because the media imagery, of an unstoppable column marching to the U.S. border, prompted an AR-15 owner to massacre Jews in Pittsburgh. That’s an even more important story, but a different one. Rather, the caravan deserves our attention because it consists of who it claims to: Central Americans sufficiently desperate or adventurous to walk 1,500 miles to the U.S. border.

Why would as many as 7,000 Central Americans cross Mexico on foot? Why did as many as 1,500 do so six months ago, and why were three new caravans reported last week? The usual explanation, that Central Americans hope to escape violence and poverty in their own countries, is true enough. But the usual explanation overlooks a tragic paradox: What they hope to escape is the unintended result of previous migration north.

Something like 12 percent of the combined Salvadoran, Honduran, and Guatemalan population has already moved to the United States. Most did so by crossing the border surreptitiously or overstaying tourism visas. Their remittances to relatives are their countries’ largest source of foreign exchange. Dollars from the United States have become the lifeblood of millions of Central American households.

Perversely, this is lifeblood that sows discord like the dragon teeth of Greek mythology. When Cadmus sowed dragon teeth, warriors sprang from the furrows and fought each other to death. Nowadays in Central America, sending money to relatives has produced so much income insecurity and crime that it pushes even more people north.

Remittances usually get rave reviews. They go directly from wage-earners to relatives without being drained away by intermediaries, bureaucracies, and kleptocrats. But they replace wage-earners who live at home with wage-earners who live thousands of miles away, subject to all the tribulations of lower-class life. Worse, remitters only get to the United States by borrowing heavily, often from the same relatives who are supposed to benefit. Exactly who deserves to be repaid, and how much, becomes an issue. Even if conflict does not break out, extended family members are always looking on hungrily.

Yes, remittances boost consumption levels, but their flow is unreliable and the interruptions lead to deficits that deepen as time goes on, even in households that seem to prosper. Even generous remitters send less over time, as they develop new ambitions in the United States and new obligations, such as U.S.-born children. Back home, therefore, relatives who depend on remittances are usually under pressure to send more earners north.

Monetizing family ties and stretching them across continents is not, on close inspection, a reliable escalator out of poverty. Nor is borrowing large sums of money to move to the bottom of the U.S. labor market. Think of the impact that low service-sector wages have on working-class Americans—many work full-time without getting their chins above the poverty line. Now put Central Americans in the same position. Why should they be more successful?

Paying immigrants badly has exactly the same outcome as paying Americans badly—it drives them deeper into debt. What’s different are the specific ways they are trapped, and how they struggle to climb out. For low-wage Americans, access to bank credit makes it easy for the financial industry to bleed them. They run up balances on credit cards, pay penalties, become addicted to payday loans, and lose everything but their due dates.

Irregular immigrants have much less access to the financial industry, so how do they cope? One way is to bring up reinforcements from Central America—additional family members who become additional earners. However low each wage, these can be pooled to rent a crowded apartment. Any kids can be put in school, serious injuries can be taken to an emergency room, and any newborns will be U.S. citizens, who might qualify for certain benefits.

The losing battle reverberates back to Central America in the form of unmet financial needs which, cumulatively, can destabilize entire zones. Remittances, by pouring down on some but not all households, by stopping and starting unpredictably, can be thought of as a machine for producing relative deprivation. In neighborhoods where most households used to share a rough equality of means, non-recipients feel more deprived than they did before. Remittances become rumored treasure, prompting jealous neighbors to pretend to be gangsters, disguise their identity over cellphones, and demand extortion payments. Then there are the real gangs, and good luck figuring out who is who.

Gangs have thrived on migration for a long time; think of the Irish and the Sicilians in eastern U.S. cities. Since then, Los Angeles has become gang central in the United States. This is where the most homicidal network in Central America, Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), began among Salvadoran youth in the 1980s. Then the U.S. government helped spread MS-13 by deporting members back to their birth countries.

But that’s not the sum of the problem, or even its origin: how could Salvadorans have arrived in the numbers they did without the sanctuary movement, which offered them refuge from the Salvadoran civil war? Unfortunately, sanctuary activists—the founders of today’s immigrant rights-movement—could not protect immigrants in low-income Los Angeles neighborhoods from Los Angeles gangs. That’s why Salvadoran youth started MS-13: to protect themselves. Even now, so-called “1.5 generation immigrants”—youth brought to the United States as children or teenagers—are especially vulnerable to gang recruitment, as a way of defending themselves from gang harassment.

In Central America, kids who join up are often kids who were abandoned by their parents, for reasons that include departure for the United States. Also consider that gangs are involved in Central American smuggling networks, that Mexican cartels enforce head taxes on smugglers approaching the U.S. border, and that smuggled humans can quickly become trafficked humans. The idea that Central Americans escape gangs in their own countries by fleeing through Mexico and reaching safety in the United States is, all in all, a bit of a stretch.

What about the migrant caravans now making their way across Mexico? The first to get international attention was launched from southern Mexico, this past Easter, by an advocacy group called Pueblo Sin Fronteras. People Without Borders regards border enforcement as an infringement of migrants’ rights to enter the United States. They also run a shelter, which is usually overflowing, so someone had the idea of organizing the overflow into a Migrants’ Way of the Cross.

The ritual of a Good Friday procession attracted lots of sympathetic media, which attracted lots of migrants and dissuaded the Mexican government from breaking up the show. Mexico has its own legal restrictions on Central American transients. Until now, the only safe way to get to the U.S. border has been to pay smugglers, also known as coyotes. If migrants don’t pay coyotes to bribe cops and cartels, the journey through Mexico becomes a gauntlet of robbers, rapists, and ransom-kidnappers. But coyotes charge high prices: as much as $13,000 to $14,000, depending on the kind of trip.

The caravans are an astonishing new way to get across Mexico that, if they are able to continue, could shake up the entire migration industry. Not only are they cheaper than coyotes; the caravan this past spring got a substantial number of its members into the United States with provisional legal status.

Of the 1,500 Central Americans who left southern Mexico in the Easter Caravan, according to the New York Times, 403 attained “credible fear” interviews with U.S. authorities. That is, they got the chance to explain why they were afraid to go home, and “more than 90 percent” persuaded a government interviewer that they had credible grounds. While only three migrants have won asylum and another 30 remain in detention, the majority have been released pending future court dates.

Eventually, the caravanners will have to persuade an immigration judge that they deserve asylum, that is, permanent residency with the opportunity to become a U.S. citizen. But the ever-lengthening backlog of immigration cases is approaching 800,000, with some hearings being scheduled out as far as 2023.

For an irregular immigrant, winning even provisional legal status in the United States is quite an accomplishment. Claiming credible fear now appears to be the easiest way to do it. In 2009 U.S. border officials processed 5,000 credible fear claims. Eight years later, from October 2017 through June 2018, U.S. border officials processed 73,283. They accepted 55,562, for an acceptance rate of 76 percent.

Whoever is leading the latest caravans has found an ingenious way to provoke President Trump’s thunderous rhetoric on border security, then outflank it. What remains to be seen is who this will ultimately serve.

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