Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 67

The Afterlife Will Be Televised

Forever

Created by Alan Yang and Matt Hubbard

Amazon Prime (2018), 8 episodes

 

The Good Place

Created by Michael Schur

NBC (2016-2018), 33 episodes

When asked why she had chosen to wed Aristotle Onassis, Jackie O. reportedly told Truman Capote that “she couldn’t very well marry a dentist from New Jersey!” The opening montage of Forever, an Amazon Prime series starring Maya Rudolph and Fred Armisen, depicts the very normal life of Mrs. Onassis’s nightmares, down to the dentistry degree.

The real enemy in Forever, though, is not suburbia but sameness. As the show begins, we watch Rudolph’s June and Armisen’s Oscar meet, date, celebrate, and travel, all to Miles Davis’s “It Never Entered my Mind.” The sweetness fades, however, as a version of the same scene—Oscar presenting June with home-cooked fish he caught at their lake house—repeats itself again and again, year after year, as June’s smile becomes more and more forced. Oscar delights in the tradition, down to the little flourish with which he presents June’s meal, but June seems at first puzzled by Oscar’s lack of boredom, and later sadly resigned to it. For all his faults—an absence of vision beyond a well-run dental practice and an organized dishwasher, for one—Oscar is kind, and June tries to reciprocate.

For fans of the IFC sketch comedy Portlandia, which concluded its eighth and final season in March, Forever might feel like familiar territory. Armisen, who was a co-creator and co-star of Portlandia, played seemingly dozens of roles over the course of the series, including several variations on a kind of hyper-bourgeois, upper-middle-class atheist. But where Portlandia presented this type with fond contempt—we were meant to smile at the unworried, faddish Portlandians—Forever pulls back the curtain and lets us consider what their inner lives might really be like. June and Oscar still share some things, particularly a fondness for silly little games (June likes to ask Oscar amusing hypotheticals, such as the “best” way to sit or the “best” thing to do if one has an available half-hour). But where June looks at their child-free, crossword-playing, middlebrow existence and sees a sort of tedious abyss, Oscar takes comfort in their routine without wishing or understanding how to look at it with any philosophic distance.

Like NBC’s sitcom The Good Place, Forever quickly launches into an exploration of death. It also plays with the viewer’s perception of what will happen next. In the first episode, we assume a ski trip might somehow shake up the characters’ marriage, until Oscar crashes into a tree and dies. In the second episode, it seems that June is finally working through her grief over Oscar—she takes a chance on a new job, invests in a new wardrobe, and is on a plane to Hawaii for a work trip—when she, too, abruptly dies, by choking on a macadamia nut. In the third episode, their unexpected deaths behind them, June and Oscar find themselves stuck in a somewhat prettified version of their lives on earth. They become physically weak if they move too far from a fountain in the center of Riverside, the town they have somehow been assigned. To Oscar’s great joy, they can more or less pick up where they left off, albeit in a larger and better-furnished house (though, as he tells June, he would have preferred more information about their new digs, preferably via a brochure). Of course, this doesn’t satisfy June.

“Hell is—other people!” roared Garcin in Jean-Paul Sartre’s one-act play, No Exit. That cry is woven into both The Good Place and Forever, along with the optimistic suspicion that this sort of hell may be overcome. In No Exit, three strangers are stuck in a room—with notably distasteful “Second Empire” furniture—and politely condemned by a valet to spend eternity together. As Garcin comes to realize, they have been selected precisely for their ability to emotionally torture one another. The play also suggests that this torture is simply the consequence of being always awake and together with the same people—as Garcin put it, of “life without a break.”

The Good Place in particular seems like a cheerier American spinoff of the French existentialist’s tale. In the first season, four deceased strangers are unknowingly selected to make each other miserable in an experimental alternative to traditional torture methods. To the initial frustration of their demonic captor, however, they keep befriending and improving one another instead.

Forever’s vision of the afterlife resembles No Exit’s in a different way: Torment there, it seems, lies in mere unending repetition, “life without a break.” In an extended subplot on Forever, two characters named Andre and Sarah fall in love and begin an extramarital affair. When Sarah suggests they end it, Andre tells her that, at home, “everything is the same, day in and day out. With you, things are different.” Nevertheless, they eventually decide to part ways. Near the end of his life, after learning Sarah has died, Andre regrets that they “missed [their] chance.” As Andre grieves, June’s ghost looks soberly on. The message she takes, it seems, is that the couple sacrificed a meaningful life by remaining with their families and just keeping things the same.

Similarly, when June first arrives in the afterlife, she is horrified by Oscar’s explanation that people there “just kind of live.” “So this is it?” she asks in despair, “We just. . . .keep going? I mean, how long does this go on for?” Oscar sympathizes with her distress but is seemingly unbothered by her questions, and merely shrugs. They end up doing the same five things every day. To Oscar, the routine seems like its own religion, while to June it seems like death.

If this world is all there is, of course, then it could be heaven or hell, depending on one’s preferences. Oscar likes his house, his neighbors, and his shuffleboard court. As June mourns her situation, she asks Oscar what the point of “all this” is, to which he simply asks what the point “of the thing before this” was. He does not know or seem to care if there is a god. His nihilism is disciplined and conventional, that of a model citizen and unflinchingly loyal husband. He simply wants to proceed.

At a pivotal moment in No Exit, Garcin is given a chance to change his circumstances. After much pleading on his part, the door to the locked room swings open. Though it lets in a terrible heat, it also provides him with an opportunity to escape and find another kind of torture or perhaps something better. He shuts the door, choosing to remain with what he knows. In Forever, June is granted a similar opportunity, with lasting consequences.

Where The Good Place offers bold jokes, personalities, and colors, Forever is moody and muted. Both series take No Exit’s message and tweak it, and both present the afterlife as unnervingly similar to this life. But The Good Place operates within a clearer moral framework; NBC describes it as “a unique comedy about what makes a good person.” In Forever, notions of good and evil don’t appear as punchlines or even afterthoughts—they are seemingly not considered at all. Instead, there are reflections on poor or effective communication skills, healthy or unhealthy habits, positive or negative relationships. The only clear path to growth on Forever, it seems, is “trying new things.”

There is something to that, of course. As June identifies, stagnation and death can be related. But The Good Place offers a brighter line between good and evil, and a more appealing form of change. By the end of its first season, Forever seems like a fundamentally sadder show.

It is also something of a mysterious appetizer. The Good Place, for all its surprises, has an overarching goal that is consistent throughout: We are meant to root for the characters to become better people. Forever teases us with subtler questions. In these godless comedies about death, The Good Place distracts us from its subject matter with exaggerated personalities, loud humor, and general shininess. For better or worse, Forever lets more of a certain kind of real life into its atheistic exploration of mortality.

The post The Afterlife Will Be Televised appeared first on The American Interest.

Terrorism in America, Again

This past week two major incidents of domestic terrorism have occurred in the United States, one deadly and one, thank God, not: the murder of 11 Jews worshipping in their synagogue in Pittsburgh on the morning of October 27, and just a few days before the sending of pipe bombs—all duds, as it happened—to prominent Democratic Party personalities. What do these incidents have in common, and what do they mean, not just for the United States, but for all those people and nations abroad who look to the United States for security, inspiration, or both?

The first thing these incidents have in common is that they are only the latest in what has become a long string of domestic terrorism—many having to do with schoolchildren and others more overtly political, such as the deadly mayhem in Charlottesville, Virginia in the summer of 2017. Every so often an incident of U.S. domestic terrorism involves Muslims in one way or another—remember Fort Hood, San Bernardino, Orlando, and the Boston Marathon, for examples—but over the past few years most have not. And while many incidents predate the political rise of Donald Trump, a decided uptick has descended since his campaign, election victory, and inauguration. The uptick has mostly clustered around expressions of extreme bigotry and xenophobia—against African-Americans; immigrants the President has accused, in his Inaugural Address no less, of being responsible for “carnage”; and now Jews.

After the two incidents of this past week, both perpetrated by the classical loner personality that all experts in terrorism warn about—Cesar Sayoc and Robert Bowers being the latest cases out of a great many—both Donald Trump from the White House and Vice President Mike Pence offered standard-issue condemnations and garden-variety condolences. Neither mentioned any need for more rigorous gun control—relevant in the Bowers case—and Trump even blamed the synagogue in Pittsburgh for not having hired an armed guard for protection.

Neither termed either event an episode of domestic terrorism, although it is impossible to accurately characterize them in any other way. Why is that?

It’s simple: For Trump and his tenebrous spinmeisters, terrorism in the United States comes only from immigrants—“carnage,” remember? Terrorism by political definition cannot come from the alt-right. Moreover, for many of Trump’s base supporters, terrorism and terrorist are not words with actual definitions. They are instead pieces of vocabulary in a para-secular religion; they replace the earlier terms evil and evildoer. And it is clear for those who think and speak in such a way that only Muslims can be terrorists when the violence comes from abroad.

Worse, adding mightily to the Orwellian aura coming out of Washington, Pence declared that extremist and shrill political rhetoric cannot be blamed in the slightest for an atmosphere that abets political violence. “Everyone has their own style, and frankly, people on both sides of the aisle use strong language about our political differences,” Pence told NBC News Saturday. “But I just don’t think you can connect it to acts or threats of violence.”

It is true, as Pence said, that both sides engage in the use of strong language. It is unhelpful, for example, when Hollywood celebrities like Robert De Niro fling profanities in public venues toward the President of the United States, as he did at the Tony Awards ceremony this past June. Overheated language like that is counterproductive, for it baits Trump’s line and shows his base how radical and out-of-control the Left is. It helps the White House and the base, each in its own way, present all opposition to Trump as radical, ad hominem, and disrespectful of the office. Yes, lots of people like to quote “fight fire with fire,” but of course the fire department wisely chooses to use water.

Still, De Niro is just a private citizen; Trump and Pence are the only two elected members of the Executive Branch of the U.S. government. Do they really think, and hope to convince anyone, that they should not be held to a higher standard of conduct commensurate with the responsibilities of their offices? There is no equivalence, moral or otherwise, to be had here between senior elected officials and emotionally aroused critics.

Besides which Pence’s claim beggars belief, and flies in the face of all we know from social psychology. If he really believes what he said then he is shockingly stupid; if he doesn’t really believe it, but finds it convenient to obfuscate the connection between speech and behavior—far more like, I think—then he’s a liar. Of course evil and violent speech predicts evil and violent behavior; it always has, and it always will: Wherever there is the smoke of baseless hatred there is the fire of mad violence.

Maybe Pence can’t (or won’t) connect the dots, but others have not had great difficulty doing so. One observer aptly noted that for about three years now Trump has been yelling “fire” in a crowded theater, alluding to the famous 1919 Schenck v. United States case involving Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. that established the reasonable limits of First Amendment rights. And it’s getting worse as we approach the midterms this coming week. So for Donald Trump to complain about the proliferation of hatred—“It’s a terrible, terrible thing what’s going on with hate in our country, frankly, and all over the world,” he said this past weekend—is like a farmer complaining about his crop setting fruit, for Trump’s modus operandi as a political entrepreneur is the sowing and harvesting of hate.

The “yelling fire in a crowded theater” metaphor is correct as a description of Trump’s rhetorical style, and it did not take a rocket scientist to see it coming long ago. Back on March 14, 2016—long before Donald Trump captured the Republican nomination for President—I warned, anticipating the whole “fake news” phenomenon as well, that:

Trump is . . . a political shaman. He is adroit at social magic, stirring emotion and changing anything he likes into anything else he likes. And his followers, hypnotized by the dramatic world of colliding forces that he enchants in simple schematic form, nod in agreement, not with his logic but with his demonic magic.

Donald Trump is therefore not just about the Republican Party’s nomination for President, and he is not even just about the presidential election. He is a harbinger, a warning, of a very deep strain of irrationality rising within the American body politic. He is, too, an incubator of potentially significant political violence. He has organized no para-military organization of course, but every time he threatens to punch someone in the nose he is, in effect, giving permission for his followers to be transgressive, not to exclude being violently so.

Many did not agree with my predictions of violence in March 2016, despite its already rising tide. Let’s review that rising tide, noting carefully that the atmosphere of radical intolerance predates Trump and, indeed, was a major contextual element in his political success.

We may begin our selective review by noting the first overtly racist mass murder in recent times: Dylann Roof’s killing of nine black congregants in a Charleston, South Carolina church in 2015. That was followed in the summer of 2016 by the assassination of five police officers in Dallas by a black activist. So yes, the violence, the terrorism, goes both ways to some extent. Then, after Trump’s inauguration, in May 2017 a Montana congressional candidate physically attacked a reporter—a sign of the times. On June 14 a group of Republican congressmen at a baseball practice in Alexandria, Virginia was attacked and several were wounded by gunfire. Again there was violence from both sides, each presumably feeding the other. In between all these episodes were several sundry campus riots against right-wing speakers, and clashes between leftists and neo-Nazis on the streets of Sacramento, California and elsewhere—all culminating in the August 12, 2017 disaster of Charlottesville. If that were not enough, then, on October 1, came the murder of 58 people in Las Vegas, for reasons no one has been able to determine—terrorism without a rationale, terrorism just because.

All of this violence has accumulated to the point where it has become normed in people’s expectations. And remember: Terrorism does not do its main damage by producing body counts, but rather by undermining the social trust that keeps communities engaged, united, and optimistic. The U.S. government has foolishly helped the terrorists in the years since 2001 by bureaucratizing paranoia; by reminding Americans of the prospect of mass murder several times a day with “if you see something, say something” announcements broadcast in public places, we have eaten away at the fabric of implicitly expected normalcy on which social trust ultimately depends. When just getting on a subway car or a bus pulls a cognitive load, however routinized, something is badly amiss.

Therefore, at times like this, after two new terror episodes in a single week, leadership’s role, were it responsible leadership, would be to heal divisions and counsel virtue at all levels. Trump and the Republicans instead stoke divisions, the better to harvest them politically in future.

Even after Charlottesville there were denials; still people refused to see, or at least to admit, any connection between the manifest proliferation of violent language and violent behavior, and refused to understand what first the Trump campaign and then the Trump White House was doing very deliberately. I don’t see how anyone can reasonably continue in denial about political violence in the United States, and its manipulation by the Trump White House and its supporters, after this past week.

What About the Jews?

The Pittsburgh synagogue attack was the most deadly attack ever on American Jews. It follows an upward tick in anti-Semitic incidents over the past two years, although the doyen of the data is frankly not to be trusted. The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, for all the good it has done in its illustrious history, is in the business of finding anti-Semitism. That is its only remaining raison d’être, and that is how it fundraises. For many years it has been exaggerating anti-Semitism, just as an organization like CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) exaggerates incidents of so-called Islamophobia—and for precisely the same reasons.

All that said, it would defy all reason to deny that both Islamophobic and anti-Semitic incidents are more prevalent today in the United States than they were, say, in 2009, when the Bernard Madoff Ponzi-scheme story broke. The Madoff affair was a perfect storm for expectations of rising anti-Semitism: it was Jewish through and through; it was deeply and perversely crooked; it involved finance; and all those involved “looked” Jewish (or Mediterranean, or Arab/Middle Eastern. . . .most Anglos can’t tell the difference, especially in a polyglot place like New York City). And nothing happened. Nothing; not so much as a scintilla of anti-Semitism could be detected arising from it.

Compare that resounding nothing to the ceaseless recent attacks by Republicans on George Soros, which are clearly dog whistles for anti-Semitism. In the wake of Saturday’s synagogue attack the head of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee refused to disavow a campaign ad linking a Democratic candidate to George Soros, one of those who received a pipe bomb in the mail last week. The ad, released back on October 18 and targeting Democrat Dan Feehan (who is running against Republican Jim Hagedorn to represent Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District), features a montage with Colin Kaepernick kneeling and warnings of “left-wing mobs paid to riot in the street,” followed by an image of Soros with stacks of bills. It repeats a classic anti-Semitic trope: “Billionaire George Soros bankrolls the resistance.”

This is not a one-off. Republican congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida recently claimed without evidence that Soros had funded the migrant “caravan” from Honduras; maybe he got that from a October 25 episode of Fox Business Channel’s Lou Dobbs Tonight, when Chris Farrell of Judicial Watch claimed—again without any evidence—that the caravan had been funded and directed by “the Soros-occupied State Department.”

There is more. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said in a tweet last week, later deleted after the synagogue attack: “We cannot allow Soros, Steyer and Bloomberg to BUY this election.” All three men mentioned are Jews by birth (Steyer is a converted Episcopalian).

And more: Earlier this month, during protests against now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Trump tweeted without evidence that the people protesting Kavanaugh were “paid for by Soros and others.” Rudy Giuliani retweeted a tweet referring to Soros as “the anti-Christ” in a conspiracy also suggesting that Soros was paying the Kavanaugh protesters.

The prize for sheer audacity, however, analogizing Soros to Hitler, probably belongs to Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert, who suggested that Soros controls Democratic Party politics. He said in a Fox News appearance, “They might as well raise their forearm and raise their hands and yell ‘heil Soros.’”

But Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar wins the prize for conspiratorial insanity. He suggested in a Vice News interview that Soros might have been behind the August 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville. “Wouldn’t it be interesting to find out,” he said when asked if he thought Soros funded the neo-Nazis that marched in Charlottesville. This is of a piece, for example, with rabid haters of Israel claiming that the Israeli government, not the Syrian regime, attacked rebel Syrians, mostly civilians, with massive doses of poison gas back in 2013. This kind of conspiracy mongering featuring a flipped big lie, when it penetrates normal discourse deeply enough, is a signal that something deranging is going on in the culture. It is an unerring predictor of violence.

The point is that, thanks in part to the toxic echo chambers of social media, which reward shock-value statements with almighty “hits,” it has now become, as ADL chairman Jonathan Greenblatt correctly noted, “normal and permissible to talk about Jewish conspiracies manipulating events, or Jewish financiers somehow controlling activities.” And again, anyone who is surprised by this, or thinks that Donald Trump bears no responsibility for this dramatic shift, simply has not been paying attention—or else has a bad memory.

So, then, let’s remember that during the campaign Trump joked at a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition that it wouldn’t support him “because I don’t want your money.” A campaign tweet about Hillary Clinton superimposed a Star of David over dollar bills. When in April 2016 Julia Ioffe published a critical essay in Gentleman’s Quarterly about Melania Trump, the alt-right deluged her with anti-Semitic insults and imagery, culminating in death threats such as an image of a Jew being shot execution-style or people ordering coffins in her name. When Trump was given a chance to condemn these attacks, he said, “I don’t have a message” for them. And then, of course, Trump said that the white-supremacist marchers in Charlottesville carrying a swastika flag included some “fine people.”

Direction by Indirection

Despite having a (converted) Jewish daughter and three Jewish grandchildren, Donald Trump has been an equal-opportunity sower and reaper of xenophobia and bigotry. Whatever he himself may think or believe, he has clearly absorbed an entire department store inventory of negative stereotypes and is not above unleashing his supporters to activate their bigotry on his political behalf. One is reminded of a classic scene from the 1964 film Becket, based on supposedly true events from the year 1170, where King Henry II gives direction by indirection, saying in the hearing of his court, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?”

No, Trump didn’t order the Star of David etched in over a pile of cash, nor did he tell anyone to send pipe bombs to people he regularly criticizes on Twitter, or order another deranged loner to tweet that a caravan of Hondurans moving toward America’s southern border is financed by George Soros before he attacked a synagogue congregation. He doesn’t need to; he just has to establish the tone and look the other way. Others will get rid of the meddlesome political opponents, immigrants, and Jews. When on October 23 in Texas Trump declared himself to be a “nationalist,” a label that can mean a dozen things depending on context, alt-right listeners heard that he was finally admitting publicly to being one of them. They are reportedly thrilled and newly mobilized. When they perpetrate more violence, Trump will look the other way, and privately smile.

So we now have a serious uptick in domestic terrorism in the United States abetted by a dark cloud of toxic politically rhetoric orchestrated in part by the President of the United States himself. While shocking, this too should not be surprising. After all, when Trump congratulated Matteo Salvini of Italy’s Northern League party and other members of Italy’s new far-right government this past June, he clearly aimed to harm the European Union. Using the third-rail issue of immigration, Trump sought to divide Europeans both within individual countries as well as within the EU as a whole. In short, his policy direction was indistinguishable from that of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

And so we come to the world outside of our borders. What lessons, and what warnings, should old friends and allies of the United States abroad take from all this? The first is that, at least for the time being, America has changed. It no longer operates with a moral compass and it is no longer a reliable ally, except accidentally—when interests temporarily coincide.

Will America change back, recover its vocation and common sense, when Trump is gone? Maybe; but things cannot go back to precisely the way they were. There were problems, there were elite pretensions and bad faith; Trump could not have gotten elected had things been otherwise. Trump has shaken the cage very hard, indeed, but for all anyone knows, a backlash against Trump and what he represents could veer far in the other direction, toward forms of utopian madness not themselves bereft of inclinations to violence. We just don’t know.

The uber-point, therefore, is this: Once a political order becomes infested with violence, expectations of more violence make the next spasm of violence more likely. It begets a downward spiral that is hard to escape before the body politic face plants. Who is going to interrupt that spiral, and how? To be doomed or not, that is the question.

Note: An earlier version of this essay appeared in al-Mesbar (Dubai), Oct. 30, 2018.

Gabriel Schoenfeld, “Yelling fire in a heavily armed theater: That’s what Donald Trump has been doing for three years now,” New York Daily News, October 27, 2018.

Garfinkle, “On the Trumpenproletariat,” The American Interest, March 14, 2016. Emphasis in the original.

I discuss the possible sources of social trust depletion in the United States in “In Way Too Little We Trust,” TAI Online, December 13, 2017.

See Julia Ioffe, “How much responsibility does Trump bear for the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh?” Washington Post, October 28, 2018.

See my “Terror and Fear,” European Eye on Radicalization, June 25, 2018, also posted as “National Insecurity: Terrorism and Fear,” The American Interest Online, July 17, 2018.

The post Terrorism in America, Again appeared first on The American Interest.

On the Merits

When people today hear the term “meritocracy,” they tend to think of something like selective university admissions or civil service promotions, where an institutionalized sorting mechanism identifies and rewards the best and the brightest. Or they think of the socio-economic arrangements of Silicon Valley, where a performance and data-driven approach to reward and advancement has displaced the elitism and backward-looking traditions of the East Coast establishment. In both cases meritocracy means that privilege is determined by some objective measure of individual achievement or talent—test scores or productivity—as opposed to either accidents of birth or subjective factors. Meritocracy is the antithesis of the ancien régime, where family legacies and ephemeral virtues such as wit and honor determined one’s social position, and of the patronage systems of ethnic favoritism and ward-boss city politics. Meritocracy has come to underlie our civil rights laws, which effectively define unlawful discrimination in terms of a departure from meritocratic norms. It promises to be rational, objective, and evenhanded.

There’s so much to like here that until very recently it has been rare to hear anyone speak against meritocracy. Of course there are well-worn criticisms of class bias in university admissions and of sexism in Silicon Valley, but here the complaint is of an incomplete meritocracy, not a complaint about meritocracy itself. Accordingly, the demand is always for more and better meritocracy.

But recently critiques of meritocracy have proliferated. Many come from ideological conservatives who attack the snobbishness of the urban bi-coastal cultural elite, or the exclusivity of university admissions policies. While often valid as far as they go, these arguments are often transparently self-serving: They lambaste bastions of liberalism and propose solutions designed to promote their own ideological predilections, which on occasion even lurch into inanities such as “

But broader and less opportunistic critiques of meritocracy are emerging from across the ideological spectrum. Or, more precisely, the critique is re-emerging, for the neologism was first used as in the context of a trenchant social criticism.

When Michael Young wrote The Rise of the Meritocracy in 1958, he anticipated a world in which democracy would give way to rule by the clever. He even anticipated helicopter parenting, referring to the “sanctioned psychosis” of the successful parents of less well-endowed offspring who “imagine merit where none existed.” As Jonathan B. Imber put it in these pages back in 2012, “Young’s satire proceeds from a depiction of progress to one of warning, the meritocracy created by the new educational system turned from its traditional measures to testing and, eventually, to genetic selection. The future of 2034 was a world increasingly divided not only by intelligence but by the difference in opportunity and income that followed from that division—in other words, growing meritocratic rather than aristocratic inequality.”

Ever since Young coined the term as a species of social criticism, classical conservatives—in the mode of English statesman Edmund Burke as opposed to Austrian economist Fredrick Hayek—have pointed out that meritocracy disturbs customary social roles that once offered people of various social classes a sense of esteem and security. The institutions of meritocracy undermine security while the ideology of meritocracy sends the insulting message that those who are not on top deserve both their subordinate social status and the contempt of those who have outperformed them. Even the aristocrats of old Europe, to say nothing of the blue bloods of New England, felt a sense civic duty that included moral obligation to the less fortunate; meritocracy, by contrast, while it pretends to offer equal opportunities, it is in fact the cruelest and most vicious form of hierarchy, dominated by a de facto nobility lacking even the condescending charitable inclination of noblesse oblige.

Some observers have even tied the particular American form of meritocracy to systemic societal failure. Asking “how has so much amazing talent produced such poor result?” David Brooks noted five “ruinous” beliefs that have flowed from meritocracy unfettered or unleavened by any other sense of social virtue: an exaggerated faith in intelligence; a misplaced faith in autonomy; a misplaced, morally desiccated notion of the self; an inability to think institutionally; and a misplaced idolization of diversity that, when torn away from any sense of common purpose, “is infinitely centrifugal, and leads to social fragmentation.”

Meanwhile, critics of hyper-modernity such as Christopher Lasch and, much more recently, Charles Murray, have argued out that meritocracy, when successful, promotes an impoverishing brain drain in less privileged communities; potential future leaders of these communities are lured to elite universities and indoctrinated into a culture that defines success in terms of a career in a handful of cosmopolitan cities. As a consequence, they leave their hometown neighborhoods and neighbors behind.

There’s clearly nothing inherently conservative about these ideas; Lasch, for instance, came at meritocracy from a neo-Marxian framework, and the fact that many conservatives fell in love with him after his death would probably have appalled him. And Murray’s recent analysis echoes a staple of radical black nationalism already over half a century old. Black nationalists of the 1960s saw the inner city as akin to a colonized nation and condemned integration because it lured the best and brightest African Americans away to benefit white society—a form of resource extraction. (There is perhaps some irony in the intellectual debt, given Murray’s infamous writings on race and intelligence.)

Indeed, although anti-meritocratic thought is now most common among conservatives, the Left is still perhaps its most natural home. A Marxian argument now gaining popularity on college campuses, sees the meritocracy of higher education as an ideology of capitalist exploitation. The argument goes something like this: Meritocracy conscripts parents to prime their children for alienation and exploitation, sacrificing the innocence of childhood for the rigors of work in preparation for competitive service in the market economy. Higher education, once largely dedicated to the humanistic pursuits and intellectual enrichment, is now almost exclusively career driven. Scalable numerical indicia of merit serve to rank students as commodities and help determine whether they are worth “investing” in, and at what level. Selective schools claim to look at each student as a whole individual, but in fact they reduce students to scalable numerical criteria with dubious objective relationship to practical talent.

The main function of such ranking, the argument goes on, is to make them easily comparable—one might say fungible—for potential employers, and to create a permanent sense of unease and insecurity among them so as to facilitate their exploitation by businesses and encourage the self-exploitation that results when individuals willingly sacrifice a full life and even personal health in order to succeed in the careers that have become their only source of self esteem. Students engaged in such competitive pre-career training effectively work for free—indeed they pay for the privilege and find themselves in debt at the end of the process, desperate and hence more readily exploitable. Higher education—the great engine of meritocracy—facilitates a 21st century form of indentured servitude. Little wonder that a mental illness epidemic currently plagues both high school and higher education—a consequence of the relentless pressure of today’s exploitative academic competition and the spiritual emptiness of a life defined by it.

The conviction that unifies these disparate perspectives is that meritocratic evaluation and social ordering is not only dishonest but also ethically and spiritually empty. The argument is not that individual merit should be irrelevant. But to be meaningful, any measure of merit must serve social, intellectual and moral purposes that can’t be reduced to numbers and rankings. Meritocracy lacks any account of human virtue or social justice; at best, it is an imperfect means to some meaningful end. Yet somehow it seems to have acquired the status of a moral imperative in and of itself. Hence in the recent lawsuit against Harvard, each and every departure from an exclusive focus on numerical criteria—most unrelated to any plausible claim of racial bias—was treated as an embarrassment. From the meritocratic perspective, Harvard’s attempts to consider its applicants as complete human beings is a scandal. From a perspective that values human flourishing and dignity, it’s the only redeeming aspect of the whole sad and degrading process of sorting and ranking people like livestock at a county fair.

Meritocracy in its narrowest form reigns supreme because most people don’t trust Harvard—or anyone else for that matter—not to revert to ancient motivations of prejudices and patronage when not tethered to something seemingly objective. So we insist on sticking to the numbers, even though most of what really matters can’t be quantified. Meritocracy’s value and appeal lies in what it is not: It seems to be the only viable alternative to a hierarchy based on the accidents of birth, blood or race, or the corruption of patronage.

Yet even in this meritocracy increasingly fails, because the indicia of merit are now for sale: for instance, costly educational and testing preparation tutors guarantee significant improvement in scores; predictably, test scores reflect family wealth, so with each passing generation, meritocracy more and more closely replicates the hereditary hierarchies it is defined in opposition to. Louis XVI thought God ordained his social position; today’s meritocratic elites believe that their God-given talents ordain theirs.

My energetic, thoughtful, idealistic and extremely bright students are, with few exceptions passionate in their opposition to every social inequality—except that of the academic meritocracy that determines their status and, for too many, defines much of their sense of identity. We owe our young people better ideals and values than what a ranking of grades, scores and starting salaries suggests. More to the point, we owe them a better world than one governed by such empty benchmarks.

The post On the Merits appeared first on The American Interest.

The Iran Deal Pullout: How Will Tehran Respond?

Iranian leaders have doubtless been assessing their options in the wake of President Trump’s May 8 announcement that the United States would withdraw from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and pursue a policy of maximum pressure designed to force them back to the negotiating table. We may soon learn how their assessment concluded, since far-reaching sanctions are about to be reimposed on Iran’s oil sector (its main source of government revenue and foreign exchange) and foreign companies that do business with it—on November 4. Many foreign customers have already cut or halted purchases of Iranian oil in anticipation of this deadline. The challenge for Washington is to apply sufficient pressure to induce Tehran to renegotiate, while deterring it from using force to enhance its diplomatic leverage or impose costs on the United States.

In the past, Tehran has generally responded to pressure on its nuclear program by accelerating its nuclear activities in order to show that the greater the pressure, the greater Iran’s progress. Thus, despite the escalation of pressure from 2006 to 2015, Iran increased the number of operating centrifuges from zero to nearly 20,000. And as pressure on it broadened and intensified, Tehran responded more or less in kind—while eschewing escalatory steps that could have sparked a broader conflict with the United States. Thus, it countered joint U.S.-Israeli cyberattacks on its nuclear program with cyberattacks on U.S. banks and financial institutions (2012); it answered the assassination of its nuclear scientists with attacks on Israeli diplomats in several Asian countries (2012); and it responded to intensified U.S. drone overflights with attacks on U.S. drones in the Persian Gulf (2012-13).

Iran, however, now faces a more complex dilemma: It is suffering under U.S. sanctions that may cut deeply into its oil income but that Europe and many other countries oppose; yet the European powers have told the Iranian leadership that if it violates or withdraws from the JCPOA, they will vote to snap-back UN sanctions on Iran, ensuring that the U.S. policy of maximum pressure will be even more effective.

Thus, as long as Tehran stays in the JCPOA, it is constrained in what it can do in the nuclear domain to push back against U.S. pressure. It could approach but not cross JCPOA limits by, for example, ramping up production of enrichment feedstock and centrifuge components, pushing up against caps on enrichment levels and stockpiles, and conducting research on nuclear power plants for naval vessels. Or it could engage in low-level nuclear brinkmanship by crossing various JCPOA thresholds to see if there is any wiggle room with the Europeans.

If U.S. sanctions truly hurt, Iran could try to gain leverage over the United States by going far beyond JCPOA enrichment and stockpile caps, interfering with International Atomic Energy Agency monitoring or, in extremis, reviving its nuclear weapons program.

Or it could push back in areas that have not generally been linked to its nuclear program. It could: accelerate the detention and imprisonment of U.S. dual-nationals (resumed earlier this year following a 2016 hiatus); ramp up medium-range missile tests (halted in 2017) or the harassment of U.S. naval vessels in the Persian Gulf (likewise halted in 2017, after U.S. vessels fired warning shots across the bow of Iranian patrol boats); try to disrupt maritime traffic in the Strait of Hormuz (which it has threatened to do if it can no longer export oil); and resume offensive cyber operations against the United States (halted when nuclear negotiations gained traction in 2013). Iran could also use its militant proxies in Iraq to renew attacks on U.S. personnel there (which ceased following the withdrawal of U.S. forces in 2011). The U.S. government has warned of severe consequences should it do so, though this has not deterred recent proxy rocket attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Baghdad and Basra.

Tehran faces several difficulties, however. Kidnappings, missile tests, and the harassment of naval vessels would probably not provide leverage over Washington and could easily backfire. Attempts to close the Strait of Hormuz would gravely harm Iran’s own interests, as nearly all of its oil exports and imports pass through this chokepoint. It would make sense to do this only if all Iranian oil and gas exports were halted. While the United States may be vulnerable to Iranian cyberattacks, it can inflict much greater harm on Iran in this area. And the killing of U.S. personnel in Iraq or elsewhere could prompt the U.S. government to unleash its own lethal campaign against the IRGC’s Qods Force, employing techniques perfected in its war against al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Such actions would carry many dangers for Iran. Although Iranian leaders have learned since the 1980s that they can wage proxy warfare against the United States without incurring the risk of military retaliation, they nonetheless view the United States as an unpredictable and potentially dangerous adversary. After informing Baghdad that it had no position on the crisis leading up to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the George H.W. Bush Administration mobilized a global coalition to counter Iraqi aggression. George W. Bush, having rejected “nation-building” during the 2000 presidential campaign, ordered the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq after the 9/11 attacks, as well as costly nation-building efforts in both countries. And after pledging to avoid yet another Middle Eastern war, President Barack Obama launched a campaign against ISIS following its conquest of Mosul and northern Iraq in June 2014.

President Trump’s volatile personality and erratic policies have reinforced Iranian concerns about U.S. unpredictability. After declaring his intention to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria, the latter dug in and pushed back against probes and attacks by pro-Iran militias near Tanf and pro-regime forces near Deir al-Zor. U.S. forces also conducted two strikes in response to the use of chemical weapons by regime forces. Military officials have threatened to respond even more forcefully to future chemical attacks.

Tehran has taken a more cautious approach toward the United States since then, and for good reason. American officials have indicated that U.S. forces will remain in Syria as long as necessary to ensure the “enduring defeat” of ISIS and the departure of Iranian forces and their proxies. Tehran will likely continue its highly successful proxy activities, though at a level that it believes will not prompt the United States to use military force against it. And there will be an ever-present temptation to strike a painful blow against U.S. interests, entailing a risk of escalation.

In the face of firm U.S. ripostes in Syria and the Gulf, Tehran has ratcheted up pressure on America’s foremost regional allies, Saudi Arabia and Israel. It provided the Houthis in Yemen with missiles capable of reaching Riyadh (which has been targeted repeatedly since late 2017). It has likewise accelerated efforts to build up missile production facilities and other military infrastructure in Syria and Lebanon. And in February of this year, it sent a drone packed with explosives into Israeli airspace (it was shot down by Israel), prompting a series of clashes that led to a major Israeli strike against Iran’s military infrastructure in Syria in May.

Iran has also intensified activities against opposition groups that it fears may be used by the U.S. government against it, plotting an attack against a Mujaheddin-e-Khalq (MeK) rally in Paris in June, conducting a missile strike against the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran (KDP-I) headquarters in northern Iraq in September, and launching another missile strike against ISIS facilities in Syria in October, in response to a terrorist attack on a military parade in Khuzestan.

Iran’s response to the U.S. withdrawal from the JCPOA will largely depend, then, on how deeply renewed U.S. sanctions bite. If Iran is able to muddle through—because it sells enough oil, repatriates sufficient funds from foreign customers, benefits from higher oil prices, or some combination of these—it may continue to observe JCPOA limits and try to wait President Trump out, hoping for a different U.S. President in January 2021. Meanwhile, it may push back against U.S. efforts by largely symbolic means—in order to avoid a military confrontation with the United States, while lashing out however it can against U.S. allies, partners, and perceived proxies..

This is not necessarily a bad place for the U.S. government to be, with the Iranian leadership contained by the JCPOA and rigorous sanctions. It is not, however, what the Trump Administration had in mind when launching its policy of maximum pressure. As with so much else about the Administration’s policies, it’s not clear whether real but unanticipated benefits will share the same thought-space as likely unattainable maximal goals.

Should sanctions cut deeply and exacerbate ongoing domestic unrest, Iran will face a choice: agree to a new round of negotiations with the United States in which it offers concessions in return for sanctions relief, or undertake various destabilizing activities—violating JCPOA limits, intensifying proxy attacks on U.S. allies, or even conducting proxy operations against U.S. interests and personnel—so that it can re-engage Washington from a position of strength. If hardliners in Tehran win the day, destabilization efforts could even include waging a low-level, open-ended struggle to oust the United States from the region.

This being the case, what considerations should guide U.S. policy toward Iran, and what can the Trump Administration do to shape Iranian choices?

First, U.S. officials should strive to keep tensions with Tehran below the threshold of armed conflict. Domestic opinion won’t support another Middle Eastern war, with heightened tensions with North Korea, Russia, and China now making competing claims on U.S. military resources. Nor, by all appearances, would President Trump. Moreover, long-term strategic competitions of the sort that characterize U.S.-Iranian relations aren’t decided by a single knockout blow. U.S. policy must be tempered by and reflect that reality.

Second, hardliners in Iran may push for a military riposte in response to real and imagined U.S. actions, especially if the pressure campaign destabilizes Iran internally. And they might get their way if the influence of the IRGC grows, or the Supreme Leader becomes incapacitated or dies. Preserving the credibility of the U.S. deterrent will therefore be key to avoiding escalation.

Third, at least for the time being, Washington needs to avoid crossing red lines that might prompt Tehran to respond to U.S. pressure with proxy attacks or military action. In practical terms, this means permitting Iran to sell just enough oil and repatriate just enough income to keep its economy on life support, while eschewing efforts to actively foment regime change in Tehran. It is not a bad thing for Iranian leaders to know that the U.S. quiver still contains many arrows.

Thus, Washington should apply sufficient pressure to incentivize Tehran to re-engage in order to salvage its economy but avoid cornering Iran so that it feels it has no other choice than to fight back. Washington should also avoid sanctions so crushing that they could, in tandem with Iran’s ongoing water crisis, eventually transform it into another failed Middle Eastern state. With Iran, acting prudently will be the key to managing escalation, avoiding further instability and conflict, and achieving an acceptable policy outcome.

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Quietly Yours

Our current day version of Halloween is often tantamount to a bombardment of the senses, in keeping with our let’s-all-get-barraged-by-our-days style of living.

We are becoming people who do not process what is around us. Rather, we bounce from one would-be point of interest to another, thinking ourselves busier than we are, people who, above all, must get things done, though we’re getting worse at that, too, and we’re learning less as we go along.

At Halloween, you have the costume to procure, either for your kids or yourself, or both. The activities to ferry the children to. The requisite number of horror films and TV specials to watch, the candy to acquire and pass out from your front door. Come the morning after Halloween, it will feel as though Christmas is around the corner, and if you didn’t already sense it, the heavy-decorating touch at the local CVS is there to remind you. A frantic pace will thus double.

One result of all of this is that we don’t listen as we used to. We hear things, certainly, but even in conversation that person we’re talking to is increasingly someone we’re indulging, waiting for them to finish what they have to say, so that we might take our turn. As they talk, we work on what we’ll say, ordering through our points. It’s the result of the social media age, the one-sided conversation, a life of perpetual announcing, rather than significant processing.

It doesn’t have to be this way, and there are reminders of how glorious it might be when it is not. One of the great rewards of listening, rather than hearing, is that it allows us to speak with more substance, more clarity, more of a kind of zoning in, a quicker path to a point. You talk that way, and not only do you reach the person you’re talking with, you learn from them as well, which fosters accordance, deepens friendship, and revives something that we are increasingly losing: connection.

Not that you were able to add your own commentary, but discounting that, radio once served as the social media of its time, insofar as how it reached so many people, bringing them together, after a fashion. You weren’t scrolling through the main Facebook feed to see who had posted something new, but you were hunkered around your radio, letting your imagination twine with what you were hearing, knowing that many people—your friends and family among them—were doing the same thing. Seventy years ago, one might have first heard what is conceivably the scariest radio program to ever air in this country, one that is as perfect for Halloween in 2018 as it was in 1948, but perhaps more valuable in what it can teach us, by way of reminder.

The program to be touted here is called “The Thing on the Fourble Board,” an episode of the series, Quiet, Please, which ran for only two years. It was the creative spawn of Wyllis Cooper and Ernest Chappell, a somewhat unlikely duo. Cooper had already spearheaded the program Lights Out in the 1930s, which he intended as “a midnight mystery serial to catch the attention of listeners at the witching hour,” a premise I’ve long found pregnant with excitement and telling. You’ll note this idea of capturing someone’s focus, as though it was as fleeting back then as now, though focus is a strange thing to aim to capture at a time when most people are asleep. Then again, Cooper was a man of singular purposes. Lights Out is beloved by radio historians and buffs on account of its sound effects, which are easily the grisliest in the history of the medium. I am not exactly certain what the sound of a skull being cut in two is like, but I’m thinking it’s not far off from what I have heard on Lights Out.

Quiet, Please, was going to be something different, its very title a sort of play on words—well, sounds—indicating that what you heard on Lights Out won’t be what you hear here. There will not be that bombardment of sound effects. You’re going to have to listen more, rather than hear; the former is more active, the second passive. What Cooper wanted was engagement from his listeners that bordered on participation. As though they were part of a dialogue. If ears could speak, they would be in constant communication with Quiet, Please. As it were, they were tasked with doing what they do best.

Speaking of listening: Chappell, who served as host and usually the lead actor, had been the announcer on The Campbell Playhouse, that august program where Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre troupe did their very considerable thing, with their emphasis on precise, artful sonics. Chappell had been a song-and-dance man, a professional baritone, and never thought of himself as an actor, which suited Cooper just fine. Because what he heard with Chappell was an Everyman voice, somewhat raddled at its edges, but full of warmth and vibrancy at its center, where the sound was not quite gravelly, on account of how hearty it was. Bonhomious. Welcoming. And a welcoming voice, when matters turn sinister, when the voice itself turns sinister, can do a real number on you, based upon the expectations that that voice sets up.

The set-up for the show was Chappell telling a story, usually in the first person, in which he featured, with no more than two or three other actors involved. Orson Welles had a thing for the first person singular, and so too did Quiet, Please, and to no greater effect than with “The Thing on the Fourble Board,” first broadcast in June 1948, and the ultimate in American terror on the air.

Chappell’s character is at home, presumably sitting in his living room. He sounds like a guy who is about to kick back with a beer. He’s friendly. He has a wife he calls out to, because he wishes us to meet her, but she can’t hear him, ostensibly because she’s busy in some other portion of the house. She’ll join us later. This ingratiating fellow used to work on the oil fields, on derricks. He doesn’t have to anymore, thankfully, and his days as a “roughneck”—which, mind you, isn’t a pejorative term, in his view—are behind him. But something happened once that was unlike anything else that had ever happened to him, and that’s what he’s going to tell us about. [Mild spoilers follow.]

Cooper’s pet peeve was acting; he simply wanted someone to talk to you, with the natural caesuras of human speech. One wag critic mentioned at the time that if you eliminated the dead air from Quiet, Please, the twenty-five minute episodes would run for half of that time. Organist Albert Berman helped fill in some of the lacunae. We all know the standard organ-based sound clichés of vintage radio, which are as familiar to us as a metal tray being bent to signify thunder looming in in the sky. But Berman’s organ became a character unto itself, fitting into the gaps in the radio-play, sometimes restating the show’s theme in a different key, like Bach had a descendent whose love of fugue carried him to a mid-century radio gig.

Chappell certainly doesn’t act as we think of acting. He sounds like someone who is consulting you, more than merely asking you to hear him. He starts to describe a singular night back out on an oil platform, and this he does by bringing you into the world of the oil driller. Most of us are not oil drillers, most of us do not know the terminology of this world. And almost all radio programs would try to find a way around that, rather than educate us in this world, but Cooper takes care to do just that, with Chappell providing the perfect voice that prompts us to say to ourselves, “Hmmm, I had no idea, that’s damn interesting!” You are listening so intently; the harder we do so, the more our surroundings wherever we happen to be sitting, back in our world, dissolve around us; the more we come to take up a post, too, on the oil platform.

A fourble board is an especially high platform, a catwalk that’s four lengths of drilling pipe up in the air. Quiet, Please affairs were set pieces, normally, for two or three characters, and it’s no different this time. An uneasy man has joined the narrator by the derrick at night. He’s heard something, the narrator tells him that it’s easy to hear things, and offers him a pork chop, which he likes to cook up on a portable stove on nights like this. It’s a perfect selection, a pork chop. So innocuous. That writing choice further takes one’s guard down. We begin to expect that the narrator is going to experience some oddity, a curio he’ll speak to us about, but which isn’t deadly. Nothing graven—or, as it were, earthen. Deep earthen.

Suffice it to say, things are not going to end well for the narrator’s friend, and after that dispatching, the narrator starts to hear this mewling, high-pitched voice that is part otherworldly baby, part Theremin, its volume highest at the top of the oil derrick, on the fourble board, which the narrator then mounts. Science and myths of ancient earth are now coming to bear on what seemed like a simple recounting by a friendly guy kicking back with some beers for a tale of what had happened a few years ago that was well over now but could still stoke our curiosity. This is very Lovecraftian, but also with a dash of Tolkien, though it still feels intimate, self-contained, and yet as if the earth had become the sea, and was essentially bottomless, with more creatures lurking than our human imaginations had begun to conceive of.

Cecil Roy plays the sound—I will not call it a voice—of the creature who draws the narrator to the fourble board. She was dubbed The Girl of a Thousand Voices, but I re-brand her in my head as The Girl of the Unique and Horrifying Sound. If you’re a radio buff, this is a signature performance that you live for, that you replay, that thrills you that it can be revisited, though you would be wise to save that for special occasions.

The narrator is not killed, at least not so far as we think of standard death. But something will happen to his mind, something which won’t stop him from talking to us, as he has been all along, as he has been drinking his beer, waiting for his wife to join him from “somewhere else in the house.” What has played out is a kind of psychical, mental raping from the subterranea of Hollow Earth, and a wonderful play on temporality, as the past that had been recounted, in tones of well-meant friendship, becomes the ultimate nightmare of domesticity, with implications that begin to open up to us as the program comes to a close, leaving us to deal with someone else’s nightmare made real.

That they don’t think it’s a nightmare makes it all the more tortured and evil, so far as what this presence, this “wife,” has wrought upon having come home, as it were, that night. Chappell signs off, as he always did, “And so, until next week, at this same time, I am quietly yours, Ernest Chappell.” And it’s like, are you? Are you Ernest Chappell at all? Or are you that which is possessed by some plutonic demon? What, even, is the radio, or the computer screen where the clicked link has brought us to a place that questions our very concept of safety? What is not a potential portal? And what radio program signifies delicious terror more than this one?

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A New Great Schism

On October 15, the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate officially broke with the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Russian Orthodox priests are now prohibited from joint prayers with clerics of the Constantinople Patriarchate, Patriarch Bartholomew I will no longer be commemorated during religious services, and the Russians refuse to participate in all theological and administrative bodies under his chairmanship.

These démarches came as retaliation for Constantinople’s decision to annul its 1686 ruling that placed Ukraine under the jurisdiction of the Muscovite Church. Bartholomew’s own remarks made the reasons for that decision plain. Sketching the history of the dispute, Bartholomew spoke of a long-suffering Ukrainian Church that had yearned for centuries to remove itself from Moscow’s yoke, but was stymied by geopolitical bullying and the “obstinacy” of the Moscow Patriarchate. “Thus, since Russia, as the one responsible for the current painful situation in Ukraine, is unable to solve the problem,” he went on, “the Ecumenical Patriarchate assumed the initiative of resolving the problem.” It is easy to see why the move angered Russia: In one fell swoop, Bartholomew rejected any pretense of neutrality on the canonical affiliation of Ukrainian parishes and decided the issue unilaterally, by granting independence to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

Russian Patriarch Kirill has compared Bartholomew’s attack on the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate to the events of the 1920s, when Constantinople meddled in a dispute between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Soviet government. But the present situation has a better and more recent historical parallel. In 2014, the Russian state humiliated Ukraine by annexing Crimea and starting a hybrid war in Donbass. Now the Russian Orthodox Church is experiencing an ironic reversal of this history upon itself, humiliated as an “external enemy” (to use the language of Russian propaganda) attacks its sovereignty and violates its supposed historic right to Ukrainian territory.

As ever in Putin’s Russia, the fates of the Orthodox Church and the Russian state continue to be deeply intertwined. Yet the current church crisis is one that the state has only compounded, triggering a process that could result in a loss of important income for the Church and degrade its international influence. The crisis could severely damage the harmony of the Church and the Russian state, even if it is unlikely to bring a much-needed separation between secular and spiritual authorities.

The Russian Orthodox Church refuses to recognize the Kremlin’s foreign policy as the origin of its current problems. This is perfectly understandable, since the Kremlin is the ultimate guarantor of the Church’s well-being as well as its preferential treatment from tax authorities. Like all religious institutions officially recognized by the state, the Church enjoys tax-exempt status on its income, which has been estimated at $500 million annually. But its privileged relationship with the state goes much further. The Church has vast, secretive commercial interests and enjoys the preferential patronage of the Central Bank, which periodically props up the Church by injecting capital to Peresvet, the near-bankrupt bank that holds its accounts. According to the Deposit Insurance Statistics, the bank’s restructuring cost the Central Bank almost 100 billion rubles ($1.5 billion).

Whatever the constitution may say, the Russian Orthodox Church is a de facto state church. The state helps out in property disputes with other denominations; the Catholic church of Arnau in the Kaliningrad region, for instance, was transferred to the Russian Orthodox Church in 2010 with the help of local legislators (and consequently damaged during a botched restoration). In the Church’s interest, the state also bans or severely restricts the activity of rival religious sects that might lead people away from the Church: Jehovah’s Witnesses were effectively outlawed in 2017, while stringent regulations limit the evangelizing activity of Protestants. The Orthodox Church even feels emboldened enough by state support to steal masterpieces from museums. The 14th-century icon of the Holy Mother of Toropets, one of the oldest in Russia, was “temporarily” removed from Saint Petersburg’s Russian Museum in 2009 and placed in a privately built Orthodox cathedral in a suburb of Moscow. Two years later, the Ministry of Culture issued an order to remove it from the museum’s inventory; the icon still remains in the cathedral today. The Church also started a war with the Saint Petersburg intelligentsia for ownership of the landmark St. Isaac’s Cathedral, a rare commercially successful public museum.

The Russian state, of course, also cultivates the support of the Church. For one, the Kremlin needs an acquiescent population, which dovetails nicely with the Church’s calls for obedience, endurance, and deference to authority. The Church also had a role to play in crushing the 2011-2012 opposition protests. The authorities exploited the Church’s social conservatism and sensitivity to religious slights during the infamous Pussy Riot trial, when the two participants of the “punk prayer” in Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral were sentenced to a two-year prison term for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.” The secular authorities not only supported the verdict, but also used it as a pretext for toughening the law: On June 29, 2013, Vladimir Putin signed a federal law prescribing up to three years of imprisonment for anyone whose “public actions” demonstrate obvious disrespect for the community or “insult the feelings of religious believers.” Finally, the Church is an ideal place for Russian rulers to publicly demonstrate their adherence to old Russian moral values. Appearing at church services on big religious holidays is a much easier form of political theater than organizing “direct lines with the President,” for instance.

It’s clear enough, then, why church and state continue to reinforce each other in Putin’s Russia. But the Ukrainian schism now finds the Church unmistakably caught up in the Kremlin’s geopolitical intrigue in a way that threatens negative consequences for all parties involved.

Until now, the Russian Orthodox Church has kept studiously silent about the annexation of Crimea and the war for the independence of Donbass. In Ukraine that silence has been understood as a clear sign of support for both measures. As a result, many Ukrainians have lost confidence in the Russian Orthodox Church and have sought schismatic alternatives, like the unrecognized Ukrainian Orthodox Church  of the Kyiv Patriarchate. The further alienation of Ukraine’s Orthodox community will be a huge blow to Church interests. Ukrainian parishes account for more than a third of all its parishes, and they generate significant cash flow. Exact contributions of diocesan fees to the budget of the Church are unknown, though it is well-documented that Orthodox priests posted in Ukraine regularly travel with bags full of cash across the border.

The decoupling of Ukraine from the Moscow Patriarchate will also be a powerful blow for the Kremlin. The schism calls into question the very idea of ​​the “Russky Mir” (“Russian World”), a vague imperial concept that helps Russia’s leaders to justify interference into the affairs of neighboring states. Orthodox faith is a powerful constituent of the “Russky Mir” ideology, along with special appeals to Russian speakers in breakaway regions of Georgia and Moldova, and EU citizens of Russian origin in the Baltics. The splintering of the Church will undermine the ​​spiritual pretenses of this ideology, with the Russian Orthodox Church becoming less credible in its claims to speak for the Orthodox population in many post-Soviet countries.

Can the Russian Orthodox Church reverse the situation? In the past, it might have done so by breaking its silence and voicing its attitude toward the war in Donbas, the legitimacy of the return of Crimea, and finally the rights of Ukrainians to a separate identity and statehood.  But its clear deference to Kremlin prerogatives is now more obvious than ever, and the chance of a reconciliation seems to be lost. A Church in decline will unite ever more closely with the state of which it is the biggest institutional victim so far.

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Russia’s Syria Problem

Several recent publications and organizations have proclaimed victory for Russia and the Assad regime in the Syrian civil war. President Obama’s prediction back in the autumn of 2015 that the Russians would end up in a quagmire has been dismissed if not forgotten, associated as it now is with his Administration’s less-than-stellar record in dealing with the Syrian civil war. It’s true, after all, that Russia’s intervention has achieved its immediate military goals of preventing a victory by the Syrian opposition. It has not only maintained but expanded Russia’s strategic access to the Middle East and the wider Mediterranean zone. And in a region that favors the “strong horse,” the ruthless tactics in which Russia has participated along with the Assad regime and its Iranian proxies—for example in Aleppo last year—has burnished Russia’s reputation as stalwart protector of its clients and a bane to those who oppose them.

All that said, it is also true that in Russia’s first foray into high-stakes geopolitics outside its immediate region in several decades, its leaders are learning the same bitter lesson that American leaders have learned: The military destruction of an enemy does not automatically lead to the achievement of the political goals that made the war worth fighting in the first place. Unless battlefield successes can be translated into achieving sustainable political goals, all one is left with is a lot of dead bodies.

It is in this context that we must remember that, in March 2016, again in December 2017, and yet again in June 2018, Russia announced the withdrawal of its forces from Syria. None of these announced withdrawals, however, resulted in a decrease in the number of Russian forces deployed in Syria, which still stands close to 3,000. So despite its latest announcement that Russian forces have conducted 39,000 airstrikes, killed up to 86,000 “militants” and eliminated some 121,466 “terrorist targets,” Russia finds itself unable to disengage from Syria. Yes, Russian air power has been instrumental in defeating Assad’s enemies in much of the country, but Syria is no closer to a durable, sustainable political settlement than it was when Russia intervened in September 2015. And having cast itself as the defender of stability and the savior of what it calls the legitimate government of Syria, Russia is unable to extricate itself as long as Syria remains unstable and the government in Damascus lacks the ability to extend its writ over much of the country.

All this might not be enough to conjure the word “quagmire” in the American mind (that label remains associated with the jungles of Southeast Asia), but it’s no picnic either.

Russia’s problems in Syria are now primarily political. They are the kinds of problems that killing “militants” and destroying “terrorist targets” can’t solve. One way to examine these problems is geographically.

A look at the map reveals three areas where Russia’s drive to reunite the country under Assad’s rule is being thwarted. The first is Idlib, where some three million civilians and thousands of fighters are clustered in the opposition’s last large stronghold in western Syria. The influence in Idlib of Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, one of the strongest and most radical Syrian opposition groups, was always going to make the fight there bloody and difficult.

Russia and the Assad regime have complicated their problem in Idlib by funneling fighters from other opposition groups there after they conquered territory those groups controlled. Many of these were moderate opposition groups that were parties to the 2016 Cessation of Hostilities agreement but are now likely radicalized after their sustained interaction with Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and their prior experience of being brutalized by Russian and Iranian tactics elsewhere in the country.

The enemy Russia now confronts in Idlib is not only stronger than it had previously been but also includes groups tied to Turkey, one of Russia’s key partners in its drive to sideline the U.S. government and the United Nations in a postwar settlement. If Russia were to opt for a sustained bombing campaign to deal with its enemies in Idlib, it would certainly lose Turkey’s support and could even bring on a confrontation with the Turkish military, which has forces deployed there. So Moscow chose to conclude an agreement with Ankara delaying military action in Idlib, kicking the can down the road.

Al-Tanf is another area where Russia’s drive to unify Syria under Assad’s regime is being thwarted. The problem here is the U.S. military. After several strikes by Russia and the Syrian regime on U.S.-backed groups in the region, the U.S. military established a garrison at Al-Tanf and declared a 55-kilometer security zone around this garrison. On several occasions it has enforced this zone by destroying vehicles or aircraft that have entered it.

Further complicating the situation around Al-Tanf is the existence of the Rukban camp for internally displaced persons, which sits inside the U.S. security zone. Russian claims that the Rukban camp harbors terrorists unnerve U.S. policymakers, who fear a bloodbath there if U.S. forces withdraw.

Finally, the U.S. presence at Al-Tanf, which is in the Syria-Jordan-Iraq tri-border region, is a source of reassurance for Jordan and complicates Iran’s vision of a “Shi‘a Crescent” stretching from Tehran to Beirut. A near-term U.S. withdrawal from Al-Tanf is therefore unlikely. But without pushing the U.S. military out of its garrison there, Russia can never satisfy its allies in Damascus and Tehran.

Syria’s northeast is the last area where Russia’s goals are being thwarted. Here again the problem is the U.S. military and its partner, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which is a coalition of Kurdish and Sunni Arab militias. The SDF is well-led, well-trained, well-equipped, and has embedded U.S. military advisers, making it a formidable adversary. Russia’s attempt to challenge the SDF by using Wagner Group mercenaries to attack it in February brought U.S. counterstrikes that killed more than 200 of the attackers.

In addition to its military success in liberating northeastern Syria from ISIL, including the group’s “capital” of Raqqa, the SDF has proven politically adept. In each liberated area it has established civic councils to govern and provide essential services. The recent U.S. announcement that it will remain in Syria to thwart Iran there will boost the confidence of the SDF and further complicate matters for Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran.

Even with these three areas remaining outside of regime control, it may still be possible to reconstruct some semblance of postwar normalcy in the rest of the country. So, having destroyed or displaced the internal enemies of the Assad regime in much of Syria, Russia’s task is now to translate its military success into a sustainable political settlement based on areas the regime does control. But it will struggle to do this.

First, Moscow must manage the goals of its allies and partners, some of which conflict with its own preferences. The Assad regime makes no secret of its intent to reunite all of Syria by military force. But without Russia’s backing, the regime lacks the military and diplomatic weight to achieve this goal. Unconditional Russian support for Assad, however, could embolden him to test the resolve of the SDF and the United States by moving against northeastern Syria, bringing on a confrontation with the U.S. military that Russia doesn’t want.

Similarly, Iran will struggle to achieve its goal of establishing a Shi‘a Crescent across the Middle East without Russian support. But Iran’s goal crosses a well-established Israeli red line, and Israel has not hesitated to attack what it sees as Iranian threats emanating from Syria. Despite its aggressive rhetoric and deployment of the S-300 missile system to Syria, Russia is keen to avoid a direct confrontation with the Israeli military. But Iran and its proxies may be either less cautious or more accident-prone, and so could force Russia into either accepting such a confrontation or publicly backing down. The campaign has now reached the point that Moscow can no longer get away with telling all of its partners what they want to hear; the Kremlin will soon have to make some tough choices.

As it manages the members of its Syria coalition, Russia will also have to deal with the actions of the United States, Israel, and Turkey there. Each of these three can frustrate Russia’s goals in important ways. To this point Russia’s policy has been to resist the U.S. government, cooperate with the Turkish one, and keep pragmatic channels of communication open with Israel even while subverting Israeli security through its partnership with Iran. Recent events have shown that the long-term viability of that Russian juggling act is open to serious doubt. Having sidelined much of the international community in Syria, Russia should familiarize itself with Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn Rule”—if you break it, you own it. Or if it’s too much to ask the Russians to respect the words of an American Army general, they can recall their Goethe: Beware of what you wish for, because you may get it.

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The Progressivism Pendulum

With the midterms barreling down on them like a blind date and 2020 not far behind, Democrats find themselves in much the same situation that Republicans did in 2010, with grassroots activists setting the agenda for the party elite. Just as the GOP establishment incorporated Tea Party demands into its official platform, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and other presidential hopefuls have begun to parrot talking points from the most extreme sectors of progressive politics. Firebrands like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley are rapidly replacing the Democratic old guard—think Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden—and this in turn has fueled the perception that the American Left is at a crossroads. It can either double down on starry-eyed idealism, and against capitalism, or it can swing back toward the center, advancing pragmatic, attainable reforms that fall well within the Overton Window.

In one sense that perception is accurate. Yet framing the dilemma as a “crossroads” also has the unfortunate effect of implying that the Democrats’ travails are somehow new or unprecedented when they are anything but. 

After the 2016 election, progressives understandably began to move away from the technocratic elitism of the Clinton clan, opting instead for younger, socialist candidates like Ocasio-Cortez. But both models—party-based oligarchy and grassroots activism—have deeper roots than many realize. The origins of the technocratic Clinton model trace back to Walter Lippmann, founding editor of The New Republic and a student of Harvard pragmatist philosophers George Santayana and William James. In his 1914 classic Drift and Mastery, Lippmann argued that in order to preserve harmony in an increasingly complex state, power must be entrusted to a technocratic few, whose specialized professional knowledge and political tact would both ensure stability and promote the general good. The legacies of Drift and Mastery were many; progressives today have Lippmann to thank for being conscious consumers, valuing organized labor, and having faith in science.

By contrast, the origins of the grassroots model trace back to the student movement of the 1960s, which cast itself as a democratic antidote to an entrenched establishment. The New Left took shape on campuses in Berkeley, California and Port Huron, Michigan. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the fresh-faced movement led by college undergrads and organized labor, endowed progressivism with a newfound moral dimension. Students vowed to “put their bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels” of oppressive systems of power. Uncompromising in its demands for a better world and unequivocal in its moral beliefs, the SDS’s 1962 “Port Huron Statement” brought “participatory democracy” to the forefront of progressive rhetoric.

Why has the SDS ethos won out, at least for the moment? Part of the answer is that both parties—Democrats and Republicans—have weakened themselves with a series of ill-conceived reforms. In a recent essay for The American Interest, Frances McCall Rosenbluth and Ian Shapiro argue that by expanding the role of primaries in the presidential nomination process party establishments lost their ability to serve as institutional gatekeepers. Downgrading the role of superdelegates within the Democratic Party had a similar effect. As Rosenbluth and Shapiro put it, the problem with both reforms is that “bottom-up decision-making is not the same thing as democracy. Political parties are the core institution of democratic accountability because parties, not the individuals who support or comprise them, can offer competing visions of the public good.” Having undercut their own disciplinary mechanisms, Democrats began to find it much more difficult to fend off populist challengers.

But the problem is ideological as well as institutional. Hillary Clinton was all policy and no vision, the standard-bearer for a cold and bloodless liberalism that would have made even Lippmann cringe. As a result, Lippmann’s brand of politics has fallen out of style. Although Lippmann is often heralded as the father of American progressivism, these days technocracy is most frequently associated with “the swamp,” a deep-state of Ivy League policy wonks making backroom deals. These criticisms of Lippmann’s technocratic program are somewhat justified, and the demise of Clinton demonstrates the dangers of moving too far in the Lippmannian direction.

This means the progressivism pendulum is unlikely to swing back toward the center anytime soon, as long as the New Left 2.0 holds the establishment under its spell. Liberal leaders have been unable to push back, to say “no” to some of the demands of young progressives. Unlike establishment conservatives, who have at least made a stab at resisting the xenophobic alt-right forces sweeping their ranks, establishment liberals have embraced radicalism. There is little difference these days between the impassioned rhetoric of an Elizabeth Warren or Cory Booker and an idealistic college campus liberal. The crisis in leadership is compounded by the generational differences between older and younger progressives, with older Dems favoring technocrats like Clinton and “woke millennials” flocking to idealists like Ocasio-Cortez and Pressley who champion radical participatory democracy. On the right, extremism remains (barring Trump) on the fringe, while on the left, it is much closer to the mainstream of party politics. The progressive left has shown itself unwilling to crack down on its own radical populism, thereby alienating voters who still prefer the stay-the-course pragmatism of Lippmann to daydreams of an American Sweden.

There is, however, a crucial difference between today’s progressives and their SDS predecessors. In 2016, voters perceived (correctly I think) that Clinton lacked the moral message and grassroots appeal; they were right to demand a politics of morality that went beyond rank technocracy. But any sort of democratic reform movement must contain a positive spiritual or moral message, making a claim on the ultimate dignity and power of the individual. The Port Huron Statement, somewhat forgotten by modern-day progressives, did just that. “We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love,” the statement proclaimed. Values like hope, charity, and community—the glue holding together the 64-page document—were once the rock-bed of progressive rhetoric, keeping its technocratic leaders spiritually grounded. But that is no longer the case: From universal healthcare and free education to sweeping protections for illegal immigrants and transgendered people, the current progressive agenda reads more like a hodgepodge of special interests than a unifying moral narrative. It has something for everyone, but stands for nothing.

To make matters worse, this bloated wish list is coupled with an arrogant complacency. An idealistic attitude of political “fair play” has led to political suicide, a fact nowhere more evident than during the Kavanaugh hearings, when Democrats seemed unwilling to ask substantive questions and preferred instead to soapbox. As the columnist Dave Barry once said: “Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they have the management skills of celery.” Add to this the solipsism of carrots, the self-righteousness of cabbage, and the political extremism of rhubarb. In October, New York Times columnist David Leonhardt felt moved to tell Democrats to “get involved” in politics, demonstrating the extent of complacency on the progressive Left. Put another way, Lippmann’s professional class seems unwilling to wield the power it has, for over a century, believed itself justified in holding. Conservatives, for their part, have been able to achieve (albeit with many compromises along the way) their own ideological ends.

With the midterms just days away, the Democratic Party must either jettison its more idealistic progressives or reinvigorate their ranks with a Lippmannian commitment to the here-and-now of political mobilization. Otherwise they are doomed to become the “wet-rag” party, swept along by forces that, as Lippmann wrote, “move beneath the troubled surface of events.” Rather than treating the current conservative dominance as an unprecedented and dangerous takeover, Democrats should also show less hubris toward their political opponents, remembering that having morality on your side does not guarantee political success. Finally, establishment progressives must begin to lay down the law within their own party, leading from the top-down to suppress intra-party squabbling.

But the stakes go well beyond the midterms. In 2016, a combination of institutional weakness and ideological radicalism brought us Donald Trump. More than a few commentators argued that this was a distinctively Republican problem; Hillary Clinton herself said that political polarization has not been symmetrical, a clear jab at the GOP’s perceived extremism. But after Clinton’s defeat, Democrats have arguably become every bit as extreme and un-pragmatic as their opponents. Their party institutions have arguably eroded even more than those of the Republicans—a trend that shows no sign of slowing down. Without a healthy synthesis of strategy and vision—one that encompasses both starry-eyed millennials and security-conscious middle-aged voters—the risk isn’t just that Democrats will lose to Trump; it’s that they will end up with a Trump-like figure of their own.

Let’s hope we don’t get there.

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Yes, It Can Happen Here

In an ironic twist of fate, two decades after Western experts touted various “state-building” and “nation-building” theories and projects as the precondition for democratization and stability in the Muslim world after 9/11, democracies across Europe and North America are now also fast approaching the point at which systemic state failure is no longer a fantasy. After decades of multicultural deconstruction of its nation-states, the Western democracies are internally fracturing, and their societal and national bonds are dissolving. Today, thinking about national security in the West means taking stock of the effects not only of the dwindling sense of mutuality of obligation among the citizenry but also of levels of ethnic, racial, and political polarization not seen since the late 1960s. The current fashion for identity politics has advanced to the point that the progressive decomposition of Western nation-states is now a near-term possibility.

While civilizational collapse may still be a long way off, Western democracies face an erosion of the consensus of what constitutes the larger national community, and hence why its members should rally to defend it in an emergency. As internal national bonds weaken, the viability of a Transatlantic solidarity that rests on more than just geostrategic calculations loses some of its luster. A 2015 Pew study offers disturbing insight into the views of Western publics when it comes to allied solidarity: In the polling only Americans and Canadians declared themselves willing to go to war to defend their NATO allies in an Article 5 emergency, and even in these cases the numbers were not that impressive (56 percent for the United States and 53 percent for Canada); by contrast, in no European country was there a majority in favor of meeting the NATO commitment if this meant possibly going to war.

For close to half a century now, the United States and some of the most storied democracies of Europe have framed their key domestic and foreign policies around the foundational premise that democratic governance and systemic stability rest on rightly sized political institutions, normative systems, and the rule of law. The borderline fetishization of diversity as a value in Western political discourse offers both a safe haven from “nationalism” and, more importantly, the ultimate justification for democratic institutionalism as a panacea for the messiness of representative government.

Democracy is by definition disruptive, and when bereft of a strong overarching concept of a shared national identity that translates into a sense of mutuality and reciprocity across society (and, ultimately, patriotism), it bifurcates into anarchy and an “ordering impulse” that in extremis will slide into totalitarianism, whether of the left-or right-wing variety. Political compromise, the mother’s milk of Western democratic politics, has been historically possible not just because the norms of democratic discourse and the rule of law have been sufficiently consolidated, but also because there existed a larger sense of belonging to a nation that transcended group interests, thereby suppressing our natural propensity for competition and promoting compromise. In the final analysis, institutions are only as strong as the people who make, structure, and use them. No amount of institutional tinkering can overcome group interests and individual preferences if the larger polity is bereft of a deeper sense of reciprocity and mutuality of obligation.

While the fracturing of societal consensus on Transatlantic solidarity is a key consequence of the balkanization of nations along ethnic lines across the West, the more fundamental process underway threatens to undermine Western nations’ ability to maintain the resilience that is essential to national security. One of the greatest accomplishments of Western democracies has been the ability to absorb multiple ethnicities and confessions while retaining the essential overlay of a larger national monoculture to serve as the essential framework for democratic processes. However, since the coming of age of the ’60s generation, the overarching concept of Western cultural affinity as the foundation of national identity in a democracy—one in which an overarching shared heritage can be filled by multiple ethnic narratives but ultimately remains the key trope defining the values at the center of idea of citizenship—has been progressively displaced. In a world where national solidarity is increasingly deconstructed by the narratives that have begun to leak into broader society from their wellsprings in the academy and media, tribalism will ultimately render the nation unable to function not just in the area of public policy, but most critically when it comes to national security and defense. If Western culture is nothing but a mechanism of oppression, what is the meaning of Transatlantic solidarity in a crisis? If our nations are little more than shared legacies of shame and systemic injustice, why risk blood and treasure to defend them?

The larger question in the present moment is this: What happens once multiculturalism and group identity politics run their course? Notwithstanding the growth of international institutions and regimes, the nation-state with clearly defined territorial boundaries remains the most effective way to provide security and, by extension, societal and individual freedom. The national security function of the state remains irreducible. When the nation as such loses the ability to shape its own destiny, discussions about rights or freedoms or social justice ultimately become academic.

It is long past time that our societies should have begun a meaningful national security discussion of both the vital importance of a shared national identity and the inherent dangers of multicultural ideology. The reluctance to address both of these topics stems, of course, from Europe’s history with nationalism and totalitarianism and the calamitous racism and genocide that regimes animated by them produced. Because the proponents of identity politics have consistently labeled as racist calls to preserve the larger Western heritage and culture, they remain paralyzed when it comes to addressing this critical aspect of national resilience, and by extension national security and the preservation of the Transatlantic security community.

Historically “multiculturalism” has been not an end-game, but merely a transitional phase leading to the fragmentation and eventual disintegration of larger communities. If we do not find the courage to speak to this issue, the Balkanization of our nations will continue apace, with an all-too-predictable outcome.

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Be Afraid? Yes, But Don’t Overdo It

Should we Americans be afraid nowadays, more afraid than, say, we had a right to be ten or thirty years ago? The answer is “yes,” but to understand why we need first to orient ourselves as to what fear actually is, briefly parse the main underlying sources of our current fears, and finally link these basics to what’s been happening lately in our country and in the world.

Fear is a basic human emotion, always latent in everyone if not actually present at any given waking moment. And the reason is that fear helps preserve us from danger; without it, and the fight-or-flight physiological complex that goes along with it, humans would not have gotten very far as a species.

But humans are not like other animals in that we alone are capable of articulate conceptual speech through our capacity for symbolic logic, and hence our ability to project our emotions—love and compassion as well as anger and fear—into fairly well developed hypothetical futures. That means that we can be afraid of an actual snarling dog that accosts us in a public park just after sunset, but also of highly mediated, abstract fears for which no discrete physical referent is present or may ever be present. We can fear for the future of liberal democracy and imagine how such fears may be realized, just as we can hope and hence plan for its improvement where it exists and its expansion where it doesn’t. We can fear for the sustainability of the global environment, and on that basis we can hope to mobilize action to preserve it. We can fear a slow, or not-so-slow, descent to great power nuclear war, or we can act to mitigate such fears. Other animals can’t do that.

So abstract forms of fear can be a good thing for humans, when they helps us to plan and act to avoid harm to ourselves and others. But it poses a novel problem, too. When fears become projectile abstractions they sometimes tend to bundle or pool together, eventually coalescing around vivid events, a bit like how water vapor coalesces around floating particles to form rain. Underlying sources of angst often go unrecognized in the emotions of the moment.

So people think they are afraid of terrorism, or of pandemic disease, or of losing a job on which whole families depend. Or of a President who behaves in an authoritarian manner, is systematically mendacious, starts ruinous trade wars, and destroys the bedrock Western alliance on which great-power peace has depended for 75 years. And we are afraid of these things, or should be. But the depth of our fears typically draws on myriad other insecurities, some held in common with our neighbors and some not, that we rarely stop to consider. The gist is that already shaky people—and relatively insecure nations—tend to be shaken more by alarming events and omens of misfortune, realistic or fanciful, than those of a more stoical temperament.

We Americans, and many other too, have grown pretty shaky in recent times. Why is that? There is no settled consensus, but a short list of possible causes is easy to assemble.

First and probably most significant, we live amid a technological tsunami that is arguably unprecedented in nature and scope. Earlier innovations, even generative ones like steam power, substituted machine power for human power; but the information technology/artificial intelligence revolution substitutes knowledge-infused machines for many aspects of human thought. The result is an accelerating cascade of eruptive discontinuities in social life affecting work and the economy more broadly, family structures, and political life to an extent that not even Josef Schumpeter—famed coiner of the phrase “creative destruction”—could have imagined. The same disintermediating technology that has put most travel agents out of business, and lets us get cash-and-pump gasoline without having to encounter another human being, is basically the same technology that enables Donald Trump to demean and weaken American governmental institutions by tweeting directly to his base of support.

Second, our politics have grown polarized and shrill, government often can’t address let alone solve basic challenges, our military wins battles but not wars, and our political elites—of both major parties—have consistently made promises that fell short and told stories of credit and blame that we increasing cannot bring ourselves to believe. It is frightening for people to realize that their leaders have failed them, and twice: first in letting the deal go down, and second in misunderstanding how to pick it up again.

Arguably, too, the well-intentioned democratizing reforms we have enacted in recent decades over a range of institutions have made things worse, not better. Our two main political parties are weaker and less able to commute their responsibilities; for reasons that go deeper into cultural change, the sinews of social authority in nearly all forms have flattened to the point that we lack social discipline and the ability to get much of anything new or big done; and increasingly people deny that expertise and evidence is relevant to collective problem solving. It’s all just a matter of opinion now, in a society where one person’s opinion is now widely deemed to be just as potentially valid as anyone else’s. This is what the secular religious doctrine of totally undifferentiated egalitarianism, which social meliorists have been pounding for many years now into semi-educated heads, will get you.

Third, terrorism has rattled us, starting with 9/11 but continuing through lesser forms of murder and mayhem ever since—the kind perpetrated by radical Muslims via internet indoctrination (for example, Ft. Hood, Boston Marathon, San Bernardino, Orlando) and the more nativist kind perhaps more so (for example, Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Dylan Root, Stephen Paddock, and, just this past week, Cesar Sayoc and Robert Bowers). Terrorism does its damage not mainly through body counts but by undermining the social trust that keeps communities engaged, united, and optimistic. The bureaucratized paranoia we have allowed to develop as a consequence hasn’t helped in the least—“If you see something, say something” spoken a hundred million times a day across the country by our now ubiquitous automatonic ghosts. By essentially reminding people of the real prospect of mass murder several times a day, it’s been on balance counterproductive as well as very expensive.

Fourth, broken families produce more insecure children; kids who feel emotionally betrayed by those who are supposed to love and protect them often grow into insecure adults, replicating insecurity by often failing to form secure loving bonds. Deep-seated insecurity is a host on which fear feeds, and so is the loneliness that is often the result of a love-deprived life. Unfortunately, American family life has been hurting now for some time, especially among lower socio-economic cohorts under growing economic pressure.

Fifth, there is the late Penn professor George Gerbner’s “mean world syndrome.” Gerbner demonstrated that people who watch a lot of commercial television and Hollywood shock flicks come to believe that violence, perversion, and plain evil are as plentiful in real life as they are in mass-entertainment fiction. That makes many Americans artificially afraid, and has contributed to a protracted moral panic in our culture about safety—which in turn has been multiplied many times over by the toxicity of social media wormholes. But even before social media became such a problem, “helicopter” parents insisted that their children be absolutely safe, going so far as to chaperone trick-or-treating. All that does, of course, is scare the bejesus out of the kids—with the predictable results we now see on campuses that feature safe spaces and trigger warnings for so-called snowflakes.

Then, sixth, there has been, arguably, too much immigration too fast into the United States to assimilate in a culture whose swoon of collective self-confidence has made local elites feel guilty about demanding that assimilation. Native-born folk who fear the evisceration of the benign stabilities of shared reciprocal expectations in day-to-day social life are not all racists, bigots, or “deplorables” any more than choosing not to give money to a beggar is morally equivalent to hitting him over the head with a crowbar. Almost invariably, the actual origin of anti-immigration anxiety is pro-“us,” not anti-“them.” But fear is fear, no matter the details.

Finally, since fear is ubiquitous, every civilization has devised ways to manage it. That has typically been accomplished in the context of religious culture. Dangers are easier to cope with for most people when they are seen as something other than completely random and meaningless, when they are integrated into shared narratives that make a certain kind of emotional sense. When traditional religious templates erode, as they have in most Western societies in recent times, the frameworks that control the psycho-social impact of fear erode with them. They have been replaced, in a manner of speaking, with the pseudo-religion of the therapeutic, whose obsession with absolute security has only served to make nearly everyone more anxious, not less.

That’s a short list—it could be made longer—but the essence is clear: We Americans are living in unstuck times. We don’t trust each other as much as we used to when we had a common Cold War adversary and common goals to build things together, whether a genuinely color-blind society or landing a probe on Mars. We increasingly lack moral templates that give our fears any sort of sharable meaning, so we’ve become uncharacteristically pessimistic about the future—“progress” has all but become a dirty word, or a bad joke—which is a problem rolled over itself. Our reservoir of latent fear is grown large, and that’s a problem.

It’s a problem because fearful societies—and American society obviously isn’t the only example—develop markets for fear abatement. The most effective way for political entrepreneurs to tap into such markets is to focus on what or, better, who to blame for what makes people afraid. The simpler the depiction of fear’s source the better for the would-be political hustler. No matter how varied and interactively complex the real sources of fear and insecurity may be, rattled people are easily manipulated by demagogues offering parsimonious, emotion-driven conflations—say, about “carnage” caused by immigrants.

Indeed, we have become so beset with ambient fear in recent decades that Donald Trump’s rise to the White House would be inexplicable without it. Too many people, abetted by the media, focus on the man: That’s a mistake. The proper focus needs to be on what has happened to our culture that has allowed a man like that to become President—and what it may lead to next. Alas, in modern historical cases where demagogues have oozed their way to power by harvesting fear, they have often solved small problems—making the trains run on time, muffling the cacophony of democratic debate, maybe next building a “big, beautiful wall”—only at the cost of themselves soon becoming a much greater problem.

Are we there yet? American democracy is not in imminent jeopardy but American liberal democracy—predicated on the rule of law, individual rights, and tolerance for dissent—does seem up for grabs in a way it has never been in my lifetime. The willful trashing of U.S. postwar grand strategy takes us anew into a world based not on a U.S.-led Western rules-based order, but on a ragged concert of great powers with zones of influence in which power-based relationships alone define relations between big and small nations. We’ve been there before and we’re still here to tell of it—but earlier epochs of balance-of-power realism did not proceed in a world with nuclear weapons.

So, should we be afraid? Yes. But understand that what we think we fear may not exhaust its real sources. We should realize that Donald Trump is a symptom of deeper dysfunctions as well as a multiplier of dysfunction in the false guise of an insurgent, supposedly anti-elitist savior.

More important, we should acknowledge that our fear is necessary, for without it we become passive victims of our own bewilderment. We can still work our way out of the mess we’re in, with fear as our fuel. But to do that we must understand and tame our fear, not let it drive us crazy—even despite events like Saturday’s murder of eleven Jewish worshippers in a Pittsburgh synagogue. For many people, naturally enough, the difference can sometimes be a thin line.

A substantially truncated version of this essay appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer on July 22, 2018.

There is clearly a connection between ambient fear in a given society and its effects on social trust. Usually, to use Robert Putnam’s basic vocabulary, the more fear the more narrow bonding trust there is—the misnamed “tribal” phenomenon—and the less bridging trust. I have discussed the possible sources of social trust depletion in the United States in “In Way Too Little We Trust,” TAI Online, December 13, 2017. For those who prefer their analysis in French, see “Pourquoi n’avons-nous pas confiance en grand-chose?” Commentaire, N° 164, Hiver 2018-19.

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