Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 68

The Political Economy of a Zombie Nation

Nearly eight years ago my essay “Neo-Feudalism Explained” argued that Putin’s Russia resembles a feudal state, with an “aristocracy” that has become hereditary and ruling clans that have tightened their grip over econo­mic, social, and political life. In recent years this has become only more obvious as the scions of Russian ministers and deputies have flooded the top levels of the nation’s bureaucracy, with some even emerging as new members of the government.

But the feudal system as it existed for centuries was not merely about hereditary principles or centralized power embodied in a hierarchi­­cal system of subordination. It presupposed also the concept of “nobility” posses­sing the “natural right” to govern, as well as a stratified mass of serfs who were fully de­pendent on their masters. And while in Western Europe the liberation of villeins (not “bad guys,” but feudal tenants subject to a lord or manor to whom they paid dues and services in return for land) and serfs started as early as in the 14th century, in Russia serfdom was abolished just four years prior to the emancipation of slaves in the United States. Moreover, Russian serfdom grew steadily more entrenched through the end of the 18th century, with the obligations of Russian serfs and the power of Russian nobles both steadily increasing even as feudalism steadily diminished in Western Europe. Therefore the elements of feudal subjugation are much more deeply rooted in Russia, and the restora­tion of feudal practices inside the national elite has produced ripple effects across other social strata.

It is crucial to distinguish between two types of elites: the old Soviet nomenklatura and today’s Russian spetssub’ekty (“special subjects,” or those possessing a special status that ma­kes them immune to arrests, police searches, or cases brought by ordinary pro­se­cutors). The former were entitled to some financial or material benefits, while the latter are explicitly singled out for immunity in Russia’s Criminal Procedure Code. According to article 447, the category includes all deputies, judges, prosecutors, investigators, governors, mayors, personnel of the accounting chamber and electoral commissions, and a few other categories of public servants. Unlike the Soviet nomenklatura, today’s spetssub’ekty lie officially outside Russia’s declared system of laws.

This group is often colloquially referred to as the “new nobility,” a term first invented by employees of the Federal Security Service (FSB) to de­signate themselves as the crème de la crè­me of the current elite. In a broader sense, the “new nobility” has come to signify Russia’s multilayered bureaucratic and paramilitary elite. Yet there remain clear stratifications within this elite that bear close resemblances to those in traditional feudal society. Today’s Russian elite has its equivalent of the noblesse d’épée and the noblesse de robe, or strongmen and bureaucrats. It has a well-structured hierarchy, with clear lines of authority; the old medieval rule that “my vassal’s vassal is not my vassal” works quite well in Russia these days.

At the same time, the supreme ruler administers the system via his Praetorian Guard, namely, the Federal Security Service (FSB). Criminal cases against FSB officers are opened around six times less frequently than against police officers and prosecutors, and around 30 times less frequently than against other spetssub’ekty, as official Supreme Court statistics show. This Praetorian Guard has become the real source of power in Russia, and it is orga­nized along the lines of a medieval military order.

In short, in today’s Russia all the elements that existed in ancien régime France seem to have been restored: There are noblesse (d’épée and de robe) and clergy, and both are becoming increasingly powerful. As of 2016, there were approximately 200,000 FSB employees in Russia, more than 400,000 officers in the Ministry of Interior and ot­her security agencies, up to one million civil servants in “significant” positions, and around 100,000 clerics and monks. This approximates the demographic makeup of pre-revolutionary France, with its 140,000-150,000 nobles and 120,000 priests, together constituting a little over 1 percent of the population. But Russia’s main problem is not that it resembles the France of 250 years ago—the country that nurtured Voltaire and Diderot. The roots of its feudal pathologies run much deeper.

As everyone knows, feudal society is comprised not only of noblemen, but also of serfs, villeins, bondmen, state peasants, and many others who may be col­lec­tively called not so much plebeians as thugs and rabble. If today’s Russia were 18th-century France, it would be divided into nobility and the troisième état. The real situation, however, is much more complex. To understand it one must dig deep into Russian judicial history, such as it is.

In the mid-11th century, the Kievan prince Yaroslav the Wise and some of his heirs produced the first Russian legal code, widely known as the Rus­skaya Pravda, or “Russian Law.” In many aspects it resembles early European codes like the Lex Salica. One of the most important features of the Russkaya Pra­vda was a detailed description of levies (wergeld) imposed upon murderers. As in most European codes of that time, such levies were to be paid in silver or gold to the victim’s relatives, but what is remarkable is the multitude of different penalties assigned, each corresponding to the particular social status of the victim. The crucial point is that in the Rus­skaya Pravda “there is no wergeld for a kholop,” or slave. In practice this meant that a master could kill his serfs and slaves at will, since they were not considered peop­le. If another person killed a master’s kholop, he would pay not a wergeld, but a penalty as if he had killed cattle or destroyed property. Kholops were in Russia not subjects but objects of property rights who might be sold or exchanged both domestically and internationally.

Such a legal norm was not unknown to the Europeans; the Lex Salica says precisely the same about slaves, who possessed no legal rights and were treated as a kind of livestock. The difference is that the Russkaya Pravda was written five centuries after the Lex Salica, and its norms remained incorporated into Russian law centuries after both slaves and serfs had disappeared in western Europe. In other words, the institution of extreme serfdom—kholopstvo or “bondman­ship” in Russian—was not an historical accident but rather a fundamental element of the Russian state system. It was officially reconfi­rmed and described in great detail in the So­bornoye Ulozhenye, or Council Co­de of 1649, and was abolished only in 1723, two years before Peter the Great’s death and two years after Russia was proclaimed an Empire.

Moreover, kholopstvo was not only a legal status attributed to those who were partly slaves and partly serfs, but a category widely used even among the higher strata of Russian society. This practice became especially widespread after the Czar of Moscow retook Russian lands from the Mongols to become the undisputed ruler of the country. The noblemen considered themselves kholops while addressing the Czar from the end of the 15th century until the reforms of Peter the Great. What we see in today’s Russia—and what characterizes it much more than banal corruption or the ab­sence of the rule of law—is the rebirth of the kholops’ attitude to the state and to its ruler, and the reconstitution of a multilayered, highly stratified social structure. So much, then, for the 70-year effort to create the classless society and its “new man.”

In today’s Russia one can see the restoration of “feudal” practices in at least two different ways. First of all, a system of wergeld similar to the one described in the Russkaya Pravda is returning to everyday life, even if it is not strictly codified. The existing system presupposes that the life of a state ser­vant is worth more than that of an average subject, a view that differs markedly from the custom in most Western societies. The latter respect the life of military personnel or police officers, but their citizens believe these people take their risks voluntarily and are well rewarded for their ser­vice. Therefore, for example, if a U.S. soldier falls in action or a police officer is killed in the line of duty, their families typically get an average compensation of $100,000 (in the former case) or $350,000 (in the latter). By contrast, survivor benefits paid for civilian casualties—whether arising from terrorist attacks, medical malpractice, or managerial faults—tend to be much higher. Thus, the relatives of 9/11 victims earned an average payout of $2.1 million; medical malpractice claims have been settled for as much as $74.5 million; and the families of those who died in the 2018 bridge collapse in Florida were paid $15 million per victim.

In Russia, contrariwise, the life of an ordinary subject is cheap: The standard compensation for a death caused by an industrial accident does not exceed ₽1 million, or roughly $15,000 at the current exchange rate. The figure may be much lo­wer when it comes to local accidents that do not attract much public attention. The relatives of seven victims of a boat crash in the Southern Urals last year, for instance, got ₽100,000 ($1,500) for each deceased person. The compensation climbs if the case is considered damaging to the authorities; thus, the relatives of the 64 victims (most of them children) of a recent shopping-mall fire in Kemerovo got ₽5 million for each deceased. The largest payout for medical malpractice in Russia was ₽15 million ($230,000), in a case where a newborn child was mistreated and died two years later after intense suffering, while his mother became disabled. Most cases of the kind are settled at around ₽1-2 million ($15,000-30,000), or even smaller amounts.

But if an officer is killed in action, the payment rises to ₽3 million in most cases, and for an FSB employee it may be significantly higher. Moreover, one can see the practice of wergeld restored in its purest sense, with the amount depending on the social status and professional affiliation of both the victim and the killer. For example, in 2017 in the center of Moscow, a car supposedly registered to the FSB hit and killed a police officer who was checking the documents of a passing driver. The driver of the FSB vehicle was taken away by his colleagues and no criminal case was ever opened, but the family of the police officer was immediately paid ₽2 million by the Ministry of Interior, while the FSB contributed ₽4 million and a three-bed­room apartment in Moscow for his widow, valued at around ₽10-13 million.

One can compare this case with dozens of road accidents across the country when an ordinary subject (or kholop) is killed by a drunk police officer or a bureaucrat. Such cases once attracted a lot of public attention, as happened in 2005 when the son of the then-Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov hit and killed a female retiree with his car. But they have since become everyday, run-of-the-mill news. In September, the speaker of the Tyumen City Chamber of Deputies was found guilty of killing two people in a frontal crash, but had to pay a penalty of only ₽160,000 ($22,000). A police officer in Buryatia, meanwhile, was never sued, nor was his driving license revoked, in a similar incident. In most cases the victims are declared responsible for their own deaths, while the driver is set free without any charges after the case beco­mes classified. Many of these ca­ses have inspired popular protests and petitions in the past ten years, but none have resulted in jail sentences for high-ranking officials.

The general disdain of the “new nobles” for the “new kho­lops” is clearly on the rise. Ordinary Russians these days are absolutely defenseless if they are confronted by those identifying themselves with the state. Russian writers are increasingly turning to such themes for inspiration. One of the bestselling novels published in Russia in 2017, Dmitry Glukhovsky’s The Text, tells the story of a wrongly accused individual who gets out of jail, kills the low-ranking FSB investigator he believes is responsible for his arrest, and, stealing his smart­phone, manages to cause huge problems for his ill-wishers just by sending text messages to some of the influential people on the contacts list.

Vladimir Putin’s recent speech about the upcoming increase in the retirement age showcased similar themes. Mentioning the incre­dible misuse of funds by the bureaucrats managing the State Pension Fund, Putin said that it was nonetheless irrational to try to save money by cutting back on bloated expenditures. Even if corruption were success­fully extirpated and “we channel all the money into pensions, we will be able to pay them for just another six days. So this is not an option either.” This statement, more than any other, captures the prevailing attitude of the ruling nobles toward their “kholops.”

The second important trend may be seen on the regional level. The feudal system, after all, was based on several layers of subordination, and it is in Russia’s regions where contemporary practices most resemble the medieval. For one there is the obvious negligence of merito­cratic principles seen in the appointment of regional governors (even since their “election” by local citizens was restored in 2011, not a single ca­se of the Kremlin candidate losing has been recorded). Much more im­portant is the changing attitude of the local masters as to the opportunities their positions open for them.

For centuries in Russia the government service was considered to be a so-called korm­leniye: “feeding,” to put it literally—meaning the possibility for a bureaucrat to enrich himself while holding his position. In short, officeholders treated their posts as private fiefdoms. Before that the Russian czar awarded his outstanding servants and loyalists with pomestya (estates), making them landlords for life but not allowing them to pass the land to their heirs. The practices of the early 2000s resembled this picture, as local governors focused on amassing money in one way or another skim off the budget or take bribes from large industrial companies. The situation later changed as regional administrators began to build full-scale “business empires” that in some cases effectively owned the whole region or town.

Such cases are numerous and well-known in Russia. When Alexander Tkachev was elected governor of Kras­nodarskiy Krai in 2001, he and his father owned an agricultural farm of about 12,000 acres they we­re lucky enough to privatize in the early 1990s. By the time he moved to Moscow 15 years later after having been appointed Mi­nister of Agriculture, he was the largest landlord in all Europe, with more than 1.15 million acres of arable land under his direct control, equivalent to 9 percent of the entire territory of the province he used to govern. After being fired from the federal government earlier this year, he returned to his native region as chairman of the gigantic enterprise he had created. (During his tenure as governor, Krasno­darskiy Krai became infamous as the place where anything goes when it comes to building huge agricultural “business empires”; one of the local landlords, close to Mr. Tkachev, was accused of commanding local gangsters to kill at least twelve people in just one incident in 2010, after they rejected offers to sell their land. This case garnered tremendous public attention, and some of the lower-ranked people involved were jailed.)

Similar business empires can be found in the Republic of Mordovia, where governor Nikolai Mer­kushkin ruled for 17 years, or in the Moscow region, where the current governor Andrei Vorobyev controls the better part of the flourishing construction industry; the region leads all others in residential construction by a significant margin. Some cases are simply unimaginable in the Western world. For example, when the former Altai governor Alexander Surikov was appointed Russian Ambassador to Be­larus, the first thing he did was to strong-arm local carmakers into supplying parts and assembly-line equipment to a factory in his native Barnaul. This was one of many pro­perties he acquired during his tenure there, thus keeping this profitable business running for more than ten years despite his diplomatic status. In September, at the age of 78, he was removed from Minsk, and is now returning to Altay Krai to resume running his business there. Some Russian Mayors, meanwhile, control up to half of all the commercial real estate in the­ir cities. For example, the resort town of Ge­lendzhik on Russia’s Black Sea coast, which became very popular among top Russi­an officials after many of them were banned from foreign travel, is home to dozens of hotels belonging to the closest relatives of Viktor Khrestin, who has been the town’s Mayor since 2008.

The emerging trend in Russia is toward the transformation of entire regions from pomestya (estates) into real votchinas (patrimonies, or allodia), which were common prior to the 16th century as a kind of absolute hereditary possession that could be transferred from the older to younger generation without restriction. The Russian leadership, by all appearances, has encouraged this trend. It is no coincidence that those local bureaucrats who amass property in their regions or invest huge money into local businesses are doing qui­te well, while those who still act by the 1990s playbook, trying only to steal budget funds and channel them into offshore accounts, are much more vulnerable (the cases of Sakhalin Governor Alexander Khoroshavin and Komi Republic Governor Vyacheslav Gaizer, both arres­ted and fired in 2015, are good examples).

Such encouragement from the top is perfectly in line with the policy of the “(re)nationalization of elites” announ­ced by Vladimir Putin so­on after his return to the Kremlin in 2012, which manifested itself in a nominal ban on the appointment to public office of individuals who directly or through family members own real es­tate, commercial assets, or even bank accounts outside Russia. Now it is much more rational for elites to keep funds in Russia, since feudalism at home is more acceptable than participating in capi­talism abroad. In short, the “feudalization” of the country is proceeding apace, reinforced by both the Kremlin’s foreign policy and, unwittingly, by the sanctions and other restrictive measures imposed on Russia by Western powers.

In sum, Russia’s drive to establish what amounts to a neo-feudal order has made enormous progress during the past ten years. In the late 2000s such an order seemed to manifest itself in the existence of an elite that was neither elected nor selected according to meritocratic principles, and that showed some signs of becoming self-reproducing and closed to potential newcomers. Today we are witnessing the restoration of very old Russian habits throughout all social strata; coincidentally or not, this trend has evol­ved as political lea­ders, from President Putin on down, have increasingly praised Russia’s “traditional spiritual and moral values” and called for the restoration of the “historical roots” that made Russia great and mighty. This kind of traditionalism has become the major ideological tool for the Kremlin to justify Russia’s return to semi-medieval practices—though of course it does not call them that.

From the outside, what is going on within Russia’s political economy is describable as kleptocracy, and insofar as Russia shows its face to the West, that label is apt enough. But it falls vastly short of capturing the reality of the situation, which manifests itself in ways that, for most Westerners, are simply incomprehensible.

As Russia continues its process of de-modernization—or perhaps its escape from moder­nity—two trends are equally important for understanding the country’s future.

One is the ongoing stratification of current Russian society into those who are consi­dered gosudarevy lyudi (Czar’s men) and those who are counted as kholopy. This is not the kind of income inequality that has been intensively analyzed as the crucial problem endangering the stability of Rus­sian society; rather, it is a status inequality, with not bourgeois but distinctly feudal roots and causes. Contemporary Russian society has become a complicated system where legal norms are not so much neglected as entirely irrelevant if the parties to any dispute belong to different so­cial strata. Laws are respected only if the parties to legal proceedings are “equal” in terms of the implicit hierarchy. This stratification has also become the fundamental pillar of a new system of social management, which nurtures not so much totalitarian attitudes on the upper level but omnipresent servility attitudes on the “lower” one, making Russian society hopelessly un-modern. What we can expect from this is by no means a return of totalitarianism in its 20th-century meaning, but rather the creation of an absolutist system similar to those common in Europe two or three centuries ago. The ide­ology of such a system consists of “stability” and it is oriented only on the stable and unchallenged rule of the kholops by their immediate masters and by the “new nobility” as a consolidated social class. It’s not about economic development but social control.

The second trend is a rather new phenomenon: the institutionalization of massive property un­der the control of local bureaucrats, which is distinctly different from the construction of nationwide “oligarchic” empires in the 1990s. Property in Russia is now divided into that of “national” importance (which, even if formal­ly private, can be nationalized at any given moment) and “regionalized” property, which in large part belongs to the regional administrators who constitute the new feudal class. This situation doesn’t resemble the feudal disunity of Europe in the early Middle Ages, bit is much more akin to the 17th and 18th-century versions of feudalism, with the provincial aristocracy perfectly controlled from the top, the local lords exercising authority vested in them by the supreme leader. Therefore, the system is solid and durable, able to withstand both outside pressure and deep isolationism—so long as the goal remains control and not development. Russia’s leaders, it seems, are as con­fident in their system after the second war of Crimea as their predecessors were in the wake of the first.

How long can the new Russian feudalism survive? It will likely ta­ke decades to exhaust itself. Like any other classic feudal country, 19th-century Russia was a productive society that may not have been competitive with its neighbors, but had no alternative to encouraging population growth, implementing new production techniques, and establishing balances between different social classes. By contrast, contemporary Russia is a rentier economy with about two-thirds of its exports consisting of energy and commodities produced by less than 3 percent of its active population. In such conditions the ruling elite will never experience enough pressure from below to force signi­ficant chan­ges to the system.

The best the Western world can do is to await the exodus of those who feel themselves people of the 21st rather than the 16th century. Exodus from Russia will eventually ruin the system: Unlike the omnipresent feudalism of old, after all, the new version is contained only within one particular country. (Odd, is it not, how the idea of “socialism in one country” has given way to “feudalism in one country”?) But while waiting for the second death of this zombie, the West must prevent neo-feudalism from spilling over Russia’s borders to infect the modern part of the world.

Vladislav L. Inozemtsev, “Neo-Feu­dalism Ex­plained,” The Ameri­can In­terest (March/April 2011).

See, for example, Marc Bloch, The Feudal Society, Volume 1: The Growth of Ties of Dependence (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), pp. 256–66.

The historical and geographical reasons for this divergence in development are complex, some particular to Russia and others common to much of Eastern Europe. For one treatment, see Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011), pp. 373-401.

For greater detail see Michael Voslensky, Nomenklatura: The Soviet Ruling Class (Doubleday, 1984).

See Andrei Sol­datov and Irina Bogoran, The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB (Public Affairs, 2010).

See John Shovlin, “Nobility” and Nigel Aston, “The Established Church” in William Doyle, The Oxford Handbook of the Ancien Régime (Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 113 and 293–94.

See “The Pravda Rus­skaya: The Expanded Redaction,” in Da­niel Kaiser, ed., The Laws of Rus’, 10th to 15th Centuries (Charles Schlacks Publisher, 1992), pp. 20–34.

For more, see Alexander Zimin, Kholopy na Rusi s drevneishikh vremen do kontsa XV veka [Kholops in the Rus’ from the Earliest Times to the End of the 15th Century] (Nauka Publishers, 1973), pp. 38–9 and Piotr Melgunov, Ocherki po istorii russkoy torgovli IX-XVII vekov [Essays on the History of Russian Trade, 9th-17th Centuries] (Sotrudnik Shkol Publishers, 1905), p. 40.

See Loi Salique, Paris 4404, title X.

See Mikhail Tikhomirov, and Pyotr Yepifanov, Sobor­noye Ulozhenye 1649 goda [The Council Co­de of 1649] (Moscow State University Press, 1961), section XX [in Russian].

Andrei Yur­ga­nov, Kategorii russkoi srednevekovoy kultury [Categories of the Russian Medieval Culture] (Miros Publishers, 1998), p. 218 [in Russian].

Dmitry Glukhovs­ky, The Text (EuropaVerlag, 2018) [in German]. The English edition will appear early in 2019.

See, for instance, the Russian National Security Strategy (December 2015), paragraph 30.

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The New Jewish Question and the New Jew Hatred

Anti-Semitism may be the oldest hatred, but it still comes up horrifying surprises. One of them is a spike in anti-Semitism, stoked by a President who seems wildly pro-Israel and even has a Jewish daughter. This crazy dynamic climaxed yesterday when 11 Jews were murdered in a synagogue in Pittsburgh. Throughout history people have slaughtered Jews for every reason under the sun. But we still need to attend to their reasons.

The shooter, according to media accounts, was obsessed with immigration, and the broad support that more open immigration policy enjoys among Jews, an immigrant group with a long memory. Even Donald Trump was too much of a softy for him, but the shooter’s worldview is the metastasized version of Trump’s cynical weaponization of immigration as the Mother-of-All-Wedge Issues, the diversionary proxy for every bit of white working class social, economic, and cultural resentment he can milk from it for the sake of his deepest love: profitable, personally useful political theater, not to exclude theater redolent in allusions to violence. So POTUS can’t play dumb when his vultures come home to roost.

What is it about Jews that drives some people so crazy, and in such opposite and contradictory directions? Jews are evil capitalists and Jews are evil socialists. Jews are religious fanatics and Jews are godless atheists. Jews are overly ambitious and Jews are lazy parasites. Jews want to control the world and want to keep too much to themselves. How can this all be?

In no small part, it is because Jews are imaginably all of the above in different ways in different times and in different places. So is all of humanity. Jews live out some of the deepest quandaries of being human, on a small scale and on a large stage certainly in the past few centuries. Above all, they live out the endless drama starring the universal and the particular.

A central feature of Jewishness is an attempt to synthesize the particular and the universal. This has its origins in the deepest theologies of the Hebrew Bible. The Biblical God is the universal Creator of the world and giver of the universal moral law. He enters into a covenantal relationship with one specific people who He commands to live by that moral law for their own good and the good of all humanity. They are to take that universal truth and weave it into the fabric of their particular communal life. A deeper—and deeply challenging—message here is that there is at heart no contradiction between universality and intimacy. Passionate love and universal reason can go hand-in-hand, in nations as in families. But it takes a lot of work and the road getting there isn’t easy. It isn’t even, often enough, what military types call a permissive environment.

This creative tension has run through Jewish life for millennia. Modernity torqued it, twisted it, and released both its creative and destructive energies. When 19th-century anti-Semites said the Jews were capitalist money bags and socialist revolutionaries both, they were right. Jews were deeply involved in both, as both represented a new kind of transnationalism, detached from traditional communal structures that the modern nation-state had undone. (This is part of why George Soros, the liberal Socialist hedge fund billionaire, is such an inviting target; with him you get two for one.)

Anti-Semitism of the Left and the Right has each seized on one piece of the equation. Right/Trumpist anti-Semitism despises universalism, loves nationalism. Left/Corbyn anti-Semitism despises nationalism, loves universalism. The Jews stand to get it in the neck from both directions. This is how we can have a popular Israeli Prime Minister of the Right who seems in many ways indistinguishable from today’s anti-Semites; both are working with an extreme end of the national-universal divide.

Go back a few decades and it was the Global Left that was spearheading anti-Semitism. The players change, the divide stays more or less the same—and real live, flesh-and-blood Jews pay the price.

Islamic anti-Semitism partakes of this, too. Islam is itself a universalist religion, even if the universalism it espouses regularly speaks in tones very different from those of Western liberalism. At the same time, it is deeply connected by and to a language, Arabic—and language is the matrix of all cultural and national life, even when endowed with sacred status, just as Hebrew is for Jews.

And the President with the Jewish daughter? As I’ve written elsewhere, Trump’s entourage is a retreat from modern Jewish politics, a return to Court Jews. It is deeply disempowering, for it makes Jews, yet again, individual pawns in a gentiles’ game.

There is a difference between anti-Semitism and criticism of Jews, including reasonable criticism. The reasonable critic of Jews takes into account internal differences among Jews, and also takes into consideration how Jews understand themselves. The anti-Semite sees them all as one monolithic block, and couldn’t care less about how Jews see themselves. And all too often, unfortunately, this is how we Jews criticize one another. This is how the farther ends of anti-Semitism and some of the farther ends of philo-Semitism can meet—or rather collide.

We—America and the world—desperately need a real conversation about the dance of the ages between particular and the universal. The President is only interested in blowing it all up for the ratings and the rage and the profit and so far as one can tell that goes for his political party too—such as it is—and, where the rage is concerned, for some of the far ends of the Democratic Party as well. This Administration, to say the least, will not save us from our furies, it is the fury. It is we who actually care about building decent societies, from within goodwill disagreements, who have to have that conversation regardless, even if we have to do it ourselves. After all, God, the horizon in whose shadow our ideas and lives take shape, embraces the universal and the particular and transcends them both—and calls on us to do the same. And we will.

The post The New Jewish Question and the New Jew Hatred appeared first on The American Interest.

Brazil’s Right-Wing Resurgence

Known in Portuguese as the “Bancada do Boi, da Bala, e da Bíblia”, Brazil’s right-wing “beef, bullets, and Bible” caucus earned its pejorative acronym for its political ties with rural property-owners, arms and ammunition lobbyists, and Evangelical politicians. The “BBB” Caucus combines interests pertaining to deforestation and agribusiness, gun control and law enforcement, as well as abortion and women’s rights. This economically and socially conservative assembly demonstrated that it is a force to be reckoned with after the October 7 general elections to elect the nation’s next President, Vice President, and National Congress.

As is well known by now, presidential candidate and vocal BBB backer Jair Bolsonaro won the first round of the general election with 46 percent of the vote, defeating the Worker’s Party candidate and former São Paulo Mayor, Fernando Haddad. The two will compete in a run-off on Sunday, October 28, in which Bolsonaro is heavily favored.

Like most conservative politicians in Latin America, Bolsonaro is proudly anti-communist, often citing the sadly relevant example of Venezuela to lament the consequences of extreme left-wing politics. Bolsonaro’s party, the Social Liberal Party, champions economically liberal policies that support privatization and decentralization. The party platform has also grown to adopt more socially conservative policies on issues like abortion and the legalization of marijuana, as well as newer concerns regarding the teaching of sexual and gender identity in schools.

For Brazilians whose interests fall under the “balas” or bullets category of the BBB Caucus, Bolsonaro’s law-and-order stance against drugs and delinquency holds great appeal. (Brazil, after all, is a country notorious for its street violence.) The “Bíblia” or Bible constituency, comprised of millions of Evangelical Christians, is equally attracted to the Roman Catholic candidate for his defense of traditional family values. Likewise, rural lobbyists and land-owners who make up the “boi,” or beef, part of the BBB are attracted to Bolsonaro for his economic views critical of globalization and free trade.

A victory by Bolsonaro, a former army captain who aims to liberalize gun laws and take stricter measures against criminality and drug trafficking, would end a 16-year political winning streak of left-wing candidates for Brazil’s presidency. This victory would come, not unrelatedly, as a firm reaction to the corruption accusations against progressive politicians that have rocked Brazil’s politics for the past four years. These accusations and the ongoing “Operation Car Wash” corruption probe have produced some of the largest protests in modern Brazilian political history.

Bolsonaro’s current advantage has many political analysts in a state of bewilderment. An anti-establishment populist, using pro-military rhetoric that glorifies Brazil’s bygone authoritarian military dictatorship, is in line for the presidency of a country that adopted democracy only 33 years ago. It’s not a secret, moreover, that Bolsonaro has made derogatory comments against homosexuals and women, which makes his popularity all the more dazzling.

Dazzling, that is, if we don’t consider that voters have more important considerations than a candidate’s language. Brazilians’ main concern for this election, and rightly so, is their country’s problem with corruption. The failures of Brazil’s progressive governments, and the hypocritical actions of its self-dealing politicians, are fresher in voters’ minds than the years of military dictatorship. Bolsonaro, controversial and bold as he may be, has not been implicated in any cases of federal corruption like the ones that haunt Worker’s Party politicians. For many voters, that fact alone is an improvement and compelling enough reason to vote for him.

Brazil’s disillusionment with progressive rule has been a long time in coming. Since the Worker’s Party President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva rose to power in 2003, Brazil has been ruled by a series of leftist governments that have produced in turn a series of scandals. The year 2014 was particularly tumultuous, as Dilma Rousseff, also a member of the Worker’s Party, was re-elected President after taking over from “Lula” when he was accused of corruption. To make matters worse, in 2015, Rousseff faced proceedings of her own on similar charges of corruption. Rousseff was temporarily suspended in 2016 until the Senate voted 61-20 in favor of her impeachment upon finding her guilty of breaking budgetary laws.

The Vice President of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, Michel Temer, took over Rousseff’s duties and implemented some policies that broke with her Worker’s Party platform. Although more pragmatic and amenable to compromise with conservative politicians, Temer has nonetheless proven a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He was eventually charged with racketeering and obstruction of justice, resulting in an abysmal approval rating despite his generally more moderate views. The disillusionment with Temer shows that voters do not just want a right-leaning candidate who pays lip-service to tackling corruption. This fact is provocatively borne out by one of Bolsonaro’s campaign videos, which brushes aside the fact that the candidate has been compared to Mussolini and Hitler to conclude, “they call him everything but CORRUPT.”

Indeed, the divisive presidential candidate for the world’s fourth-largest democracy has been roundly criticized; he has been repeatedly protested; and, as is now standard for any right-wing populist, he has been likened to Donald Trump. In one incident, Bolsonaro was rushed to a hospital after a left-wing protester stabbed him on the streets during a rally. Bolsonaro’s popularity among undecided and politically independent voters increased after the stabbing, likely because the event validated Bolsonaro’s criticism of street violence and corroborated his call for gun ownership in one of the world’s most violent countries. A women’s march against Bolsonaro also took place at the end of September, after which it was reported that support for Bolsonaro among women increased. These reactions against Bolsonaro’s conservative views have actually helped his popularity; such is the backlash that senseless uprisings tend to have among independent or undecided voters.

An article in Foreign Policy recently observed that the reason for the “Trumpfication of the Latin American Right” is primarily social, because the “rampant” problem of inequality throughout Latin America “makes electoral politics in the region structurally difficult for right-wing parties.” As a result, Presidents like Chile’s Mauricio Macri and Michel Temer himself “have been slow to dismantle popular anti-poverty programs.” The reality of mass Latin American poverty complicates the practical implementation of the free-market economic principles for which many right-leaning Latin American politicians advocate, leading them to embrace half-measures. If elected, that may well prove true of Bolsonaro, who has already shown signs of bucking free-market orthodoxy.

Be that as it may, it is misleading to frame events in Brazil as resulting from the “Trumpification” of the country’s politics. This political race should not be reduced to a mere consequence of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. It is all too common, and frankly egotistical of U.S. commentary, to assume that the “emergence” of right-wing political figures throughout Europe and Latin America is due to the political influence of the U.S. Executive Branch. It would behoove Western progressives to consider in political, intellectual, and cultural humility that their desire to see socially and economically liberal policies in traditionally conservative countries is being met with opposition.

Champions of liberal democracy have long pinned high hopes on Brazil from afar. In 2016, Brookings senior fellow Ted Piccone published a book called Five Rising Democracies, which argued that India, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, and Indonesia were at opportune moments in their political histories to serve as exemplars of liberal ideas and practices. They were in this unique position, he argued, because of their recent shift from authoritarian governance to democracy. Piccone wrote that an “embrace of globalization and liberal norms” has “directly, and positively, affected [the countries’] own trajectories both economically and politically.” The book came out in February, months before the mass protests against the corruption accusations and eventual impeachment of Rousseff.

A similar premise can be seen in a Financial Times column by Gideon Rachman discussing the years 1995-2003, when Fernando Henrique Cardoso served as President of Brazil and implemented liberal economic reforms. Those reforms, writes Rachman, took place “in an era when liberal economic and political ideas were in the ascendancy around the world” in other developing countries; in the subsequent Lula era, progress continued and Brazil implemented several social programs to combat its notorious inequality, attracting global praise. Yet in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis and the country’s corruption scandals, Rachman writes, things grew dark again. The conclusion of the article astutely notes that in good times, Brazil’s policies were a symbol of the “triumph of liberal politics and economics around the world,” while “in the bad times . . . Brazil’s plight has become a symptom of a global crisis in the liberal order.”

What both these analyses share is the common error of judging Brazil according to outside expectations of “progress,” rather than the actual concerns of its citizens. Many of them are plainly unsatisfied with the leftist agendas that have accompanied Brazil’s economic modernization. Brazilian Evangelicals, for instance, are one large subgroup of people who are voting for Bolsonaro because of a sentiment that the Left “went too far” by pressing social issues regarding sexuality, gender, and race. Bolsonaro also tends to dismiss the work of human rights organizations. This Tuesday, for instance, he stated that he will attempt to stop funding human rights organizations if he were elected President, and also pull out of the United Nations Human Rights Council, which he called a “meeting of communists.”

The social concerns now motivating most Brazilian voters are inseparable from Brazil’s particular history of economic development. Milton Santos, a Brazilian geographer and scholar in the urbanization of developing countries with vaguely Marxist sympathies, predicted this turn of events several decades ago. Santos noted that a rapidly changing society in an underdeveloped country, kindled by economic pressure to grow, would eventually face social upheaval. Writing at the end of the 20th century, Santos saw Brazil’s period of modernization as attempting all too frantically to adopt progressive economic, political, and social norms that had worked for countries whose history of development had run a different course. He became a critic of globalization and late in life wrote a book advocating “an other globalization” that does not derive “from the dominant perspective of the West.”

Santos argued that modernization created rigid class divisions in Latin American countries, the result of economic policies that worked in one country being generalized and applied in a quite different context. Although he was primarily an analyst of urban development in Latin American nations, he also astutely realized the social and political consequences that would arise from imposed modernization.

Today Santos would recognize a similar error in American analysts’ attempts to describe Brazil’s political situation in terms of their own. It is all too easy—and simplistic—to believe that Bolsonaro’s popularity stems from the same rotten roots of bigotry, misogyny, racism, and xenophobia that allegedly produced Trump. Such accusations are particularly perplexing in a country where the majority of people consider themselves to be of mixed-race descent.

Santos was part of an intellectual tradition of Brazilian thinkers who were keenly aware of the social reality of inequality and poverty in their nation. He recognized the close association that exists between economics and culture, and between culture and politics. He wrote, “Whenever the complex of economic, social, political, cultural and moral subsystems causes old variables to re-emerge or creates new ones, the influence of the world system over its dependent space takes on different forms.” His technical language notwithstanding, Santos’s judgment is a valuable one. “Subsystems” are his terminology for the ways of life of underdeveloped nations, as compared with the influential way of life of “world systems.” The historical maturation of “the complex” of the different facets of life that he mentions in any particular nation will cause “old variables”, or old values, to re-emerge and change, as things naturally tend to do. The problem, then, is not with change, but rather with the belief that the influence of a predominant world system will be identically manifested in another place. Quite the contrary, it will “take on different forms.”

Brazil today is demonstrating just such a reaction to foreign pressure to adopt progressive, liberal values. Some of the intervention comes from private organizations like the Ford Foundation, whose work in Brazil aims to promote social justice, focusing on “women’s rights, antidiscrimination efforts . . . reproductive health and the new social environment challenges.” The Ford Foundation claims that the roots of Brazil’s inequality lie in discrimination, but well-meaning efforts to change Brazilian society can create new problems, just as Santos predicted.

To take one example, efforts to address racial inequality modeled on our own sociopolitical contexts have created new social problems surrounding race identity in Brazil, and a controversial new means to categorize racial make-up. A recent article in Foreign Policy about Brazil’s “New Problem with Blackness” captures the controversy over affirmative action laws in Brazil.

The laws, implemented in 2001, are similar in theory to those implemented in the United States, creating de facto race-based quota systems for placement in federal universities or government jobs. Brazil’s distinct history of race-relations however, which encouraged miscegenation, resulted in a “racial democracy” that is decidedly mixed-race. Thus, the seemingly simple question of asking a student whether he or she identifies as black has not translated well to the Brazilian context. The article rightly suggests that issues plaguing one country are not experienced in the same way elsewhere, and that policies working in one context may not be effectively translated to another: “What’s already clear is that affirmative action, as a strategy for racial equality, has proven an uneasy fit for Brazil, resolving certain racial dilemmas by creating entirely new ones.” Brazilians have clearly felt this change. One article on Bolsonaro’s popularity reported that some voters feel that the Left in Brazil has only created division “between whites and blacks, gays and heterosexuals.”

In short, what we are witnessing now in Latin America’s largest country is the fulfillment of Santos’s predictions. At the heart of the matter is a collective reaction against social shifts that have been attempting to displace and replace traditional family values that Latin Americans hold dear with a progressive disposition, imposing secularism, globalism, and individualism on a people who are largely opposed to such a way of life. A country predominantly comprised of Christians is not ready to accede to liberal social policies on abortion, sex education, or economic policies that flirt with socialism, much less communism. The present turmoil in Brazil is the result of a frantic and rushed modernization, entangled with the complicated, historical consequences of an economic and social development that failed to resolve the country’s poverty and inequality, all yielding to popular backlash.

So can it be a mere reflection of U.S. politics that Latin American nations are demonstrating a return to traditional conservative values? Not if it is considered that Latin America has always been generally conservative, and that it has the salutary reference of proximate countries like Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia to constantly remind it of the problems that corrupt, pseudo-Marxist rule can bring. All three countries, it should be added, have also precipitated immigration crises in their economically strong neighbors, whose Presidents tend to be more conservative. The economic collapse of Venezuela, for example, replete with food shortages, rising inflation, and social instability, has spurred a wave of emigration over the past two years that has damaged the Left’s case for socialism anywhere in Latin America.

Many of those who fled Venezuela crossed over to one of its neighboring countries, Colombia. And just in May, Colombia’s presidential elections witnessed the victory of Iván Duque Marquez, a self-proclaimed centrist, devout Catholic, and member of the right-wing party Centro Democrático, founded by the conservative politician and former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe. Venezuela’s problems, spilling over into its neighbor, may well turn Colombia away from left-wing populism, joining other nations like Argentina and Chile. Bolsonaro, too, is close to joining the ranks of other right-leaning Latin-American Presidents, like Argentina’s Mauricio Macri and Chile’s Sebastián Piñera, who have openly criticized mass immigration for their nations, advocated free-market principles, and firmly resisted socially liberal agendas relating to abortion and sex education in schools.

The issues that resonate most with supporters of candidates like Bolsonaro are those that have their origins in religious and family values. It is in the social realm, after all, that cultural shifts are most palpable. The recent voting outcome of Brazil’s general election and in Colombia this past spring are the political manifestations of a social disposition to resist changing values. To put it curtly, this phenomenon of right-wing candidates rising to power is not new. It is a case of old values resurfacing, and warily taking on a new form after years of dissatisfaction with progressive politics.

Should Bolsonaro be elected on Sunday, it will open a new chapter for Latin America, as most of the continent’s economic powers will be run by conservative Presidents. But even if Bolsonaro does not win the election, it is important to remember that social conservatism in South America is alive and well, and it will command many voters’ political loyalties for years to come. If our goal is to understand Latin American culture and to elucidate the continent’s politics, ignoring these social concerns, or dismissing those who espouse such stances as ignorant, would do them—and us—a great disservice.

Milton Santos, The Shared Space: The Two Circuits of the Urban Economy in Underdeveloped Countries (Routledge, 1979), p. 15.

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Russia Shows Us Where Political Violence Leads

Three years ago, I fled Russia because of death threats I received due to my work as a journalist for the last liberal radio station in Russia, Echo of Moscow. The threats came shortly after Chechen dictator Ramzan Kadyrov announced open season on journalists in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris. 700,000 people rallied in Grozny at his summons, in support of Islam and condemning the murdered journalists. On his Instagram account—which was ultimately shut down—he first threatened former Yukos owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then Echo’s editor-in-chief Alexei Venediktov, and soon all of Echo’s journalists.

For a split second, there was a moment of ambiguity in how Vladimir Putin Might approach the situation. He seemed to be pausing when he didn’t immediately comment on Kadyrov’s actions. There was a sustained public outcry at the time, and it looked like the Russian President might intervene. But he chose not to, and simply stayed silent on the matter. (Needless to say, official Russian human rights institutions kept silent, too.)

Less than two months later, a prominent Russian opposition leader, and one of Putin’s sharpest critics, Boris Nemtsov, was shot dead not far from the Kremlin by Chechen gunmen. Nemtsov, who was an advocate for the passage of the Magnitsky Act, and who counted the late Senator John McCain as a close ally, had been a target of intimidation for years, especially since the 2011-2012 Moscow protests against Putin. While many Americans may have heard of Nemtsov, very few know how the threats started. In the summer of 2011, pro-Kremlin activists threw a toilet bowl on Nemtsov’s car. It happened at night, the car was empty, and no one was hurt. It took less than four years to get from an act of political vandalism to an assassination. Kadyrov, in the meantime, rose to international prominence with his grotesque record of human rights violations (up to and including murder) against the beleaguered LGBT community in Chechnya.

A year ago, a colleague of mine, Tatiana Felgengauer, was stabbed in the neck right in Echo’s offices in Moscow. She miraculously survived. Three weeks before the attack, Russian state TV had run a news piece accusing Felgengauer of being liberal and “working for the West”—that her salary was paid for by the U.S. State Department and George Soros. (Echo, incidentally, is owned by Gazprom.)

These days, we have the head of the National Guard, General Viktor Zolotov, publishing YouTube clips promising to “make mincemeat” of opposition leader Alexey Navalny.

Vladimir Putin did not condemn the attack on Felgengauer, and he hasn’t said anything about Zolotov’s threats. He did comment on the stabbing, however: It had nothing to do with politics, or freedom of speech, he said. It was just the insane act of a sick man.

An authoritarian leader with a natural instinct for political survival and a pinch of smarts, Vladimir Putin has been relying on hatred as his go-to mobilization tool. He legitimized his rule early on the back of the bloody second Chechen war. And when that concluded, he found another group of people to be his chosen enemies: liberals—which is code for anyone who opposes him. (Russia’s “non-systemic” opposition is notoriously divided on many issues, including liberalism, however construed.)

In 2014, Ukrainians were added to the list.

Putin and his propaganda machine have leveraged all manner of invective against Russia’s “liberals”: “enemies of the people,” “paid by the Americans,” “trying to destroy the greatness of Russia.” Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov was crystal clear when offering commentary on the 2012 Moscow protests: “Protesters who hurt riot police should have their livers smeared on the pavement,” he said. It played well with Putin’s hard-core base. Much of the broadcast media, some owned by private businesses close to Putin, toed the line. Two years after Peskov’s comments, the hatred routine was well-practiced: The vast majority of Russians quickly approved the invasion of Ukraine after it happened.

Hatred gives easy answers to complicated questions. Politicians know that. Intellectuals should know that.

Trump knows Obama didn’t wiretap him, and Soros didn’t pay the protestors at the Kavanaugh hearing. The Republicans in Congress know that. The conservative media outlet owners and journalists probably know that. Those who know, use hatred for one purpose only: to stay in power.

It’s not that voters are stupid, but it’s that they don’t pay close attention. They sense the mood, and the mood is threatening. And those who can’t tell a lie from the truth, and end up believing all the stories about President Obama, Hillary Clinton, George Soros, CNN, and everyone else in opposition to Donald Trump—well, they know what they have to do, if they’re daring enough.

Thankfully, no one was hurt in yesterday’s pipe bomb mailings destined for prominent opponents of President Donald Trump—or better put, those whom the American President has publicly labeled as enemies, bad people, enemies of the people, and dishonest—wrongfully but purposefully accusing them of things they have never done. But these are not one-off events, and history tells us where all this leads. And President Trump has already shown that he will double down.

Hatred is a universal feeling, and is used as a political tool universally. Many Americans I talk to usually shake their heads when I try to draw parallels between the dangerous tendencies I’ve seen develop with my own eyes in Russia, and what I’m seeing happen here in the United States. They answer me by invoking the “power of institutions” to keep the worst at bay. They say that America is not Russia.

And indeed it is not. But the evil tricks that worked in Russia do work in America, and in the very same way.

It’s true that the shooting attack on Republican lawmakers last year came out of this Same atmosphere of hatred. Words and gestures, especially when wielded by leaders, have enormous consequences. No politician should call for violence. But since Trump and the Republicans hold all three branches of government at the moment, yesterday’s attack is fully their responsibility: the overall tone in the country is of their own making. And if that tone leads to leftists shooting Republicans, the end result is the same: Violence against the party in power ultimately benefits the party in power.

Make no mistake, all leaders know how these things work. They act with purpose. Those of us who do understand what is going on should look to Russia’s experience. And believe me when I tell you, you don’t want to live in a country like Russia.

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Sorting Out Brexit

Margaret Thatcher’s greatest gift to Britain and the European Union was her instrumental role in delivering the EU single market. It has generated more economic benefits for the European Union as a whole and the United Kingdom in particular than any other EU measure. And it is popular too: The Brexit vote notwithstanding, polling in the UK consistently demonstrates the highest support for options that leave the United Kingdom in the single market.

All of which underscores the awful muddle the country has got itself into over Brexit. It’s not just that the process of leaving the European Union has proved to be much more difficult than many of its proponents initially believed; British strategy, to the extent that there was a strategy at all, has also been unbelievably clumsy, alienating negotiating partners on the continent while creating divisions at home. London is currently negotiating a withdrawal treaty in Brussels which is likely to be rejected by Parliament, leaving Britain with a last-minute choice between a catastrophic “no deal” exit and revoking the withdrawal process, thus remaining an EU member state.

Underneath all the confusion and rhetoric, however, there is, even at this late stage, a compelling argument for an alternative approach that would respect the initial referendum result, maintain open borders between the UK and Ireland, protect both the UK and EU economies from the effects of a no-deal Brexit, and provide a significant strategic advantage for London and for the European Union. This approach is for the United Kingdom to, like Norway, be a part of the single market via what is known as the European Economic Area, while being a full participant in the EU Customs Union, which would avoid erecting a hard border with Ireland. This deal would square the circle: It would not undermine the British economy, not threaten the political integrity of the United Kingdom, and avoid a return of the Troubles to Ireland. Toward the end of the Brexit process, it is the one way out for a floundering Prime Minister and her divided party—a chance to resolve many of the conflicts they face while providing the means to turn the tables on their opponents.

Much of the blame for the British Brexit muddle deservedly falls on former Prime Minister David Cameron. The previous referendum debate on Scottish independence took place over two years. As a result, by the end of the referendum campaign the Scottish electorate was fed up with the issue and the information all sides had bombarded them with for 24 months. However, the info dump seems to have had a positive effect, giving voters a good grip of the issues when they finally cast their ballots in September 2014.

By contrast, the British electorate only had a referendum debate of four months. For the large part of their country’s 45 years of EU membership, few Brits had given much thought to the European Union. To the extent that Brussels impinged on British consciousness, it was through stories in the British media about crazy EU regulations (some of which were true, most of which were phony or very heavily distorted). Given the lack of knowledge and awareness of the role of the European Union in British economic and political life, it was vital that such discussions took place during the campaign. However, the four-month campaign was marked less by informed debate than by assertion and counter-assertion from all sides. Crucially there was only limited debate on the importance of the EU single market, the Customs Union, and the dangers of a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

The underlying assumption in much of the debate was that the United Kingdom had infinite options between, say, EU membership, a Norway model, or third-country status (namely, no special economic relationship with the European Union) with a free trade agreement. The assumption was that the costs of any of those choices were minimal, and that any of them could be executed speedily, allowing Britain to continue on economically and politically pretty much as it had before the referendum. This low-cost view of Brexit was shared by both Remainers and Leavers, as well as across much of the British political and media class. It is also entirely wrong. Now, it’s true of course that, during the referendum campaign, David Cameron did raise the prospect of economic disaster if Britain voted to leave the European Union, but he talked up the prospects of disaster in such blood-curdling terms that it is doubtful even he believed it. In any case, it was certainly not believed either by the Leavers or by the elites on both sides of the debate. Once the votes were in, even elite Remainers in the political and media class automatically accepted that Britain should leave the European Union, and that all options were on the table, including having no special economic relationship with the EU.

What the people and the elites overlooked was the reality that the United Kingdom had become progressively locked-in to the EU market over the past four and a half decades. This process of economic lock-in accelerated after the formal completion of the EU single market in 1993. The single market removed almost all barriers to trade in goods and much of the barriers to trade in services. Within the single market there are now fewer barriers to trade between EU states than there are between U.S. states. As all the internal trade barriers disappeared, businesses created EU-wide distribution systems; a wave of mergers saw EU-scale rather than national-scale firms being created; foreign investors created globally competitive supply chains; and smaller specialist companies were able to grow and develop at the continental level. The effects of this economic transformation were as immense as they were underappreciated. In essence, the United Kingdom went from having a largely independent trading British economy to being in essence the British part of a European economy. As a result, any attempt at leaving the single market, if not the European Union, then became fraught with serious economic danger.

Somewhat ironically, by becoming the greatest exploiter of the value of the single market, Britain magnified this threat. After the creation of the single market, the UK saw a flood of foreign direct investment. Investors believed the UK’s global language, its ease of doing business, and its common law made it the best European base for trading into the rest of the single market. As a result, the United Kingdom has the world’s third-largest stock of foreign direct investment, behind only the United States and China. It also used the European Union’s right to trade in services to create a world-beating services exporting machine. After the United States, the United Kingdom is the world’s largest exporter of services. The UK first used the EU’s open market services rules to open up the financial, business, and legal markets in the EU, then deployed EU trade negotiators to gain access to services markets in third states. Britain’s success dramatically raised the costs of exit from the single market.

None of this was properly debated or even acknowledged by either side during the four-month referendum debate. It has only been in the two years since the referendum that the true economic costs of exit from the single market have slowly but surely become apparent.

The other issue which was almost entirely unaddressed during the referendum campaign was the Irish border issue. Despite being raised by former Prime Ministers John Major and Tony Blair during the referendum campaign, the issue received very little media attention. This again reflects the “curse of Cameron” in having such a short campaign period for a referendum dealing with a decision involving so many vital issues and a media unable to work out what was important in the limited time available. The Irish border issue, as it happens, is a crucial one, involving not just economics but potentially also matters of life and death.

Under the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, approved by 71 percent of those voting in Northern Ireland and 94 percent of those voting in the Republic of Ireland, the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland agreed, amongst a number of other peace measures, to remove from their land border all physical barriers, which had proved over the previous 80 years to be a major impediment to peace. The border had been the result of an agreement between the United Kingdom and the Sinn Fein-led government in December 1921 in the Anglo-Irish Treaty to accept a border between the then Free State and Northern Ireland. The issue split Sinn Fein and led to the Irish Civil War, in which approximately 14,000 people died. After the Irish Republic stabilized politically in the 1930s the Sinn Fein splinter group, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), still ran border bombing campaigns to protest against the boundary in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. The “Troubles,” beginning in the late 1960s, saw rising violence in Northern Ireland; by the time the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998, more than 3,600 lives had been lost. Throughout the Troubles the IRA regularly launched attacks on the border posts because they were physical representations of the hated division of the island of Ireland.

The Good Friday Agreement put the border issue to sleep. This was possible because both Ireland and the United Kingdom were EU member states. Within the European Union the single market permits the removal of all national regulatory barriers and the EU Customs Union removes all tariff controls. With the Good Friday Agreement and the agreement to end the armed struggle with Sinn Fein, the IRA, and the armed loyalist (paramilitary groups nominally “loyal” to the Crown) groups, the UK and Ireland could the abandon all security controls on the Irish border.

Brexit, however, threatens to reopen not just the terms of the Good Friday Agreement but also, given the bloody history of the Irish border since 1921, hostilities in Northern Ireland. If the United Kingdom is no longer an EU member state—and thus potentially no longer in the Customs Union or single market—there will have to be a border between Northern Ireland and the Republic.

London and Brussels have been locked in a dispute as to how to create a special regime for Northern Ireland that avoids the need to erect a border. This dispute has been made much more difficult by Theresa May’s dependence on the ten loyalist Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) MPs to sustain her government’s parliamentary majority. The DUP are wholly opposed to any EU special regime for Northern Ireland, where the province is in the single market and Customs Union but the United Kingdom is not. The DUP also has a significant body of support on this issue amongst 40-80 Conservative MPs. To make matters worse for May, if Northern Ireland gets a special deal, then the Scottish government will be pushing very hard for a special deal for Edinburgh as well.

The danger for May is that, even if she can get a deal with the European Union that includes a special regime for Northern Ireland, Parliament could vote down the deal. The DUP and Conservative Brexiteers will not support the government on that deal, and the opposition will object to any deal that does not keep the UK in the single market at least. The question then is what should the UK do?

This is where the European Economic Area (EEA) and Customs Union come in. The EEA involves accepting approximately one-third of the body of EU case law and legislation, so as to significantly lessen the burden of complying with EU rules. If the whole United Kingdom were to remain in both the Customs Union and the single market, then there would be no need for a border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, protecting the Good Friday Agreement and peace in the province. Furthermore, an EEA and Customs Union deal would bring the British government into compliance with the referendum, as the United Kingdom would no longer be an EU member state.

The argument against this solution comes down to two points. First, remaining in the Customs Union will restrict the UK’s trade sovereignty. It is true that the UK would not be able to make its own trade deals if it remained in the Customs Union and accepted the EU’s trade authority under the common commercial policy. The question one ought to ask, however, is why would the UK want to exercise trade sovereignty on its own in the first place? Given its trade weight, the European Union is always going to be able to extract better trade deals for its members than the UK could alone.

The second point is that being in the EEA would mean the United Kingdom would become a rule taker rather than a rule maker, having no influence on the development of single market rules. However, that is not strictly true; the EEA has its own court separate from EU courts, its own rule-making procedure, and its own secretariat.

Furthermore, with the UK as a member, the EEA would begin to significantly develop its own reach and influence on the European Union. It is likely that the increasingly isolated EU states not in the Eurozone would, when faced with an EU dominated by EU states in the Eurozone, consider switching to EEA membership. This would be more likely if participation in the Customs Union and common commercial policy were possible. The EEA could develop into a parallel European structure focussed on the single market and the Customs Union. The EEA would end up influencing the EU as much as the EU influenced the legal and policy development of the EEA.

Politically, an EEA/Customs Union solution provides the means for May’s government to play a political master stroke. There is now rising pressure for a second “Peoples’ Vote” on any deal with the European Union in the British polling; approximately 700,000 people marched in London in favor of a new vote last week. This pressure is understandable given the shallowness and shortness of the original referendum debate. May could deploy this pressure to her advantage. If, as now seems likely, she fails to get a vote through Parliament, she can go back to the European Union and agree to remain in the EEA/Customs Union—and then put that deal to a referendum. She would be likely to triumph in such a vote given the high and consistent public support for the single market, if not the European Union as a whole. It is very likely that such a deal would gain most of the pro-Brexit vote, and the more reluctant Remainers would also plump for an EEA/Customs Union solution.

Who knows? Playing the single market card may turn out to be an advantage for more than one British Prime Minister.

The post Sorting Out Brexit appeared first on The American Interest.

Danger: Falling Powers

Which is more dangerous: The revisionist power on the ascent or the revisionist power in decline? We naturally tend to think it is the former. “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this inspired in Sparta that made war inevitable,” Thucydides famously wrote. That line is often interpreted as meaning that rising revisionists—states dissatisfied with the current international system—display growing ambition, assertiveness, and impatience. This behavior elicits a hostile response by the reigning hegemon; tensions spiral and war results. This view of how great-power wars begin—call it the Thucydidean formula—shapes our understanding of global affairs even today.

Certainly, rising revisionists can create profound geopolitical friction: Note how China and Russia have used their resurgent power to disrupt the U.S.-led international system, and the increasing alarm that behavior has stirred among the Washington policy elite and American allies. Yet we often lose sight of a different pathway to great-power war, for peril may emerge when a country that has been rising, eagerly anticipating its moment in the sun, peaks and begins to decline before its ambitions have been fulfilled. The sense that a revisionist power’s geopolitical window of opportunity is closing, that its leaders cannot readily deliver the glories they have promised the population, can trigger rashness and risk-taking that a country more confident in its long-term trajectory would avoid.

Indeed, this combination—ambitions fired by a revisionist power’s ascent, followed by the fears that emerge when a premature fall begins—has historically created some of the most dangerous moments in great-power relations. It is also a combination worth worrying about today. American strategists are properly concerned about how Russia and China will behave if they become more capable of contesting U.S. leadership; dealing with a rising China in particular may be one of the greatest challenges American statecraft has ever confronted. Yet they should be no less concerned about how those countries will act as their relative power starts to fade.

The dangers created by a rising revisionist power are obvious. As a dissatisfied nation accrues greater strength, the state uses that strength to avenge perceived slights and attain greater influence. It enlarges its definition of national interests; and it defends those interests more vigorously. Constraints and threats that seemed tolerable when the state was weaker come to seem intolerable as it gains the power to affect them. And as the rising state behaves more assertively, its ambitions inevitably collide with the interests of established powers and their allies. Progressively sharper moves and counter-moves typically ensue; competition intensifies; the system plunges into military conflict.

This sequence sounds familiar because it has played out many times. World War I was a lot of things, but it was partially a clash between Germany, which was seeking to translate its growing economic and military might into a position of European dominance and global power, and the United Kingdom, which was determined to protect its European interests and global primacy. During the Cold War, too, arguably the most dangerous moments came when the growth of Soviet military capabilities tempted the Kremlin to more boldly assert its interests against the West.

Shortly after Stalin acquired nuclear weapons, he authorized the North Korean invasion of South Korea, causing global tensions to rise. When the Soviets subsequently acquired a ballistic missile capability, Nikita Khrushchev used this power to pursue gambits—trying to foreclose Western access to Berlin, deploying nuclear missiles to Cuba—that brought the world to the brink of war. Fear of being overtaken by the Soviets, in turn, sometimes pushed American leaders to consider risky policies of their own. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, some American strategists—and some wayward philosophers like Bertrand Russell—advocated waging preventive war before the Kremlin acquired usable nuclear weapons, for fear it would be impossible to contain Moscow once that threshold had been crossed.

Fortunately, the Thucydidean formula never reached its grim conclusion during the Cold War. But the underlying pressures were there, and they have reappeared as great-power competition has surged anew.

As Russia recovered from its post-Cold War weakness beginning in the early 2000s, it made progressively stronger moves to reclaim lost influence and prestige. By waging wars of conquest against vulnerable, Western-oriented neighbors such as Georgia and Ukraine, by projecting military power and geopolitical influence into the Middle East, by interfering in U.S. elections and using a variety of measures to sap the strength and cohesion of the nations opposing it, Russia has shown that it no longer accepts the unipolar order that prevailed after the Cold War.

And as Chinese power has grown exponentially over the past quarter-century, Beijing has become steadily more assertive in challenging American influence in the Asia-Pacific and globally. Beijing’s creeping expansionism in the South China Sea and East China Sea, its efforts to draw the countries along its periphery and beyond into its economic and geopolitical orbit, and its development of more advanced military capabilities and projection of both military and economic power ever farther abroad have produced growing fears among Washington and its allies. Observers such as Harvard’s Graham Allison have warned, not implausibly, that Washington and Beijing may be headed for a great hegemonic war like the one between Athens and Sparta.

There is, then, no disputing that rising powers can have profoundly disruptive effects. Yet such powers might not actually be the most aggressive or risk-prone type of revisionist state. After all, if a country’s position is steadily improving over time, why risk messing it all up through reckless policies that precipitate a premature showdown? Why not lay low until the geopolitical balance has become still more favorable? Why not wait until one has surpassed the reigning hegemon altogether and other countries defer to one’s wishes without a shot being fired? So while a rising revisionist power may be tempted to assert itself, it should also have good reason to avoid going for broke.

Now imagine an alternative scenario. A revisionist power—perhaps an authoritarian power—has been gaining influence and ratcheting its ambitions upward. Its leaders have cultivated intense nationalism as a pillar of their domestic legitimacy; they have promised the populace that past insults will be avenged and sacrifices will be rewarded with geopolitical greatness and global prestige. Yet then the country’s potential peaks, either because it has reached its natural limit or because of some unforeseen development, and the balance of power starts to shift in unfavorable ways. It becomes clear to the country’s leadership that it may not be able to accomplish the goals it has set and fulfill the promises it has made, and that the situation will only further worsen with time. A roll of the iron dice now seems more attractive: It may be the only chance the nation has to claim geopolitical spoils before it is too late. In this scenario, it is not rising power that makes the revisionist state so dangerous, but the temptation to act before decline sets in. In this sense, the dynamic bears a resemblance to the famous Davies J-Curve theory of revolution, wherein a populace is held to be more inclined to revolt not when it is maximally oppressed but rather when raised expectations are shown to be in vain.

Obviously, rational analysis does not always prevail in world politics. Rising states can become intoxicated with their own strength; they may simply get tired of waiting to attain the status they desire; or some domestic pressure may impel leaders to act dangerously. But revisionists whose power has begun to decline, or who have hit a rogue bump in the road, may not feel that they even have the option of waiting.

Consider again the outbreak of World War I. From a long-term perspective, Germany may have been a rising and increasingly confident power prior to the war, but Berlin’s decision-making in 1914 took place against the more immediate backdrop of deep pessimism caused by the fear of impending decline. In the east, Germany was menaced by the growth of Russian military power and the approaching completion of an improved railroad network that would dramatically shorten Russia’s mobilization timetable. In the west, changes in French conscription laws were rapidly enhancing the military manpower of another rival.

The result, in Berlin, was mounting apprehension that Germany’s ability to fight a two-front war—the cornerstone of its military strategy—was about to collapse, and that its geopolitical aspirations were about to be crushed in a Franco-Russian-British vise. If that happened, internal frictions might become unmanageable: Nationalism and geopolitical ambition might no longer be able to dampen the shocks caused by intensifying conflicts between rival social and political groups. This is why Germany ran such enormous risks in the July 1914 crisis—by pushing Austria-Hungary to take an uncompromising position against Serbia after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, by promising to back the Dual Monarchy come what may, by implementing the Schlieffen Plan for a knock-out blow against France despite the danger that this would bring Britain into the war. Chief of General Staff Helmuth von Moltke acknowledged the danger of a “war which will annihilate the civilization of almost the whole of Europe for decades to come,” but he and his colleagues pushed forward on grounds that Germany’s dreams of greatness would become hopeless illusions if not realized soon.

Similar motives were at work in World War II. Hitler’s Germany had the most radical designs of any revisionist power in history, and it is inconceivable that Hitler would not have used Germany’s revived economic and military might to precipitate a major conflict at some point. Yet Hitler’s calculations about when and how to do so—namely, by invading Poland in 1939—were strongly influenced by fears of imminent decline.

Due to rapid rearmament, the Germany economy was overheating by 1938-39, creating concerns that Berlin’s relative economic power would soon fade absent additional conquests. Just as importantly, German officials believed that their early rearmament and the absorption of resources from Austria and Czechoslovakia had given them a critical military advantage over other European powers, but that this advantage would fade as those countries—and the United States—began mobilizing. It had become necessary “to begin immediately,” Hitler explained to Mussolini to following year, “even at the risk of thereby precipitating the war intended by the Western powers.” In the same vein, the sense that the future would only be worse—that Germany had reached the apex of its power, that it must act boldly while it still could—underpinned the decision to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941. As Timothy Snyder has argued, Hitler believed that Germany had only a finite window to seize and colonize Soviet lands—thereby solving the Third Reich’s food supply problems and making it strategically invulnerable—before ongoing British resistance and America’s feared entry into the war began to undermine Berlin’s position.

Japan, too, was likely influenced by calculations of impending decline. The Japanese empire had been steadily expanding between 1931 and 1940, advancing toward dominance in the Asia-Pacific. But what ultimately provoked the Japanese to strike at America was the realization that the possibilities for attaining that dominance were fading. American rearmament, symbolized by the Two-Ocean Navy Act of 1940, was bound to vitiate Japanese military advantages. “Anyone who has seen the auto factories in Detroit and the oil fields in Texas knows that Japan lacks the national power for a naval race with America,” warned Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku. Likewise, the U.S. oil embargo of 1941 had the unintended effect of convincing Japanese leaders that they had to move quickly before they lost the economic wherewithal to wage war. Imperial Japan, like Nazi Germany, was an aggressive power with enormous ambitions; but its penchant for aggression grew strongest when it started to fear those aspirations might not be realized.

This history has implications for understanding great-power rivalry today. Both Russia and China have broadened their geopolitical horizons in recent years; both are often thought of as rising or resurgent powers. Yet both Russia and China face the prospect—whether immediate or more distant—that their relative strength may ebb, a phenomenon that could make these countries more aggressive rather than less.

The specter of decline surely haunts Vladimir Putin. Russia has compiled an impressive record of expansion over the past decade; it has achieved a significant military overmatch vis-à-vis NATO on the alliance’s eastern flank; it has attained a degree of global influence greater than that enjoyed by any government in Moscow since the 1980s. Yet Putin cannot be confident about Russia’s long-term trajectory.

After all, Russia’s economic revival from the early 2000s onward was largely a function of high energy prices; the collapse of those prices after 2014 revealed the long-term weakness of an economy that is probably destined—absent another sustained period of high energy prices—to stagnate over time. Russia is already losing ground against its rivals: Its inflation-adjusted GDP declined from 2014 through 2017, while that of the United States increased by over $1 trillion. And although Russia’s demographic trajectory is no longer as catastrophic as it once was, population growth will be anemic at best and negative at worst in coming decades. These trends, combined with the impact of Western economic sanctions, are beginning to upset Putin’s plans for continued military modernization: Kremlin defense spending declined, perhaps by as much as 20 percent, from 2017 to 2018, as Russia also began to cut spending on key social programs and pensions. Finally, fear of political instability is omnipresent for Russian leaders, who must deal with separatist forces in the North Caucasus as well as dissent provoked by their own repression and policy incompetence.

Putin surely understands that these challenges imperil his goals of reasserting Russian dominance within the near abroad and playing a pivotal role in a more multipolar world—which is precisely what makes his statecraft so dangerous. Putin has already established a reputation as a risk-taker who uses bold strokes to compensate for Russia’s limited resource base. His method is to know what he wants and to catch stronger adversaries napping. (That tendency has only become more pronounced in recent years as Russia’s economic prosperity has faded and Putin’s domestic popularity has begun to wane.) He has argued that Russia requires authoritarian rule to be influential abroad; he has promised the Russian populace that the hardships it has endured will be rewarded by greater global stature. “Enormous sacrifices and privations on the part of our people,” he has declared, are the cost of “occupying a major place in world affairs.” If Putin perceives that he has only limited time to deliver on these promises, if he senses that the opportunity to redress his longstanding grievances against the West is slipping away, the effect may be to encourage still greater risk-taking.

Russian risk-taking could take varied forms: more aggressive behavior in a crisis with NATO in the Baltic or Black Sea regions, perhaps aimed at discrediting NATO’s Article 5 guarantee; a more confrontational posture with respect to America and its partners in Syria or another Middle Eastern hotspot; intensified Russian efforts to disrupt U.S. and European electoral processes; more damaging cyberattacks on critical Western infrastructure; efforts to stir up additional “frozen conflicts” in the former Soviet space; a stronger propensity for escalation—perhaps involving limited use of nuclear weapons—should conflict between Moscow and Washington break out. Whatever the specifics, Washington could find itself facing a competitor with a “now-or-never” mentality—always a dangerous mindset for an authoritarian, revisionist state to have.

By contrast, the Chinese leadership still seems to have a “time is on our side” mindset. Even as Beijing’s energy and assertiveness have surged, Chinese leaders have proven less risk-acceptant than their Russian counterparts. They have remained satisfied to advance China’s aims through small, incremental steps—such as island-building and coercion in the South China Sea—rather than dramatic, aggressive lunges. Yet even Chinese leaders cannot be confident that the country’s upward trajectory will continue unbroken for very much longer.

In a geopolitical sense, Chinese officials must worry about whether the country’s window is opening or closing with respect to issues like Taiwan. For while China has greater military capability than ever before to pursue reunification through forcible means, Taiwanese support for peaceful unification is at rock-bottom levels, the development of a distinctive Taiwanese national identify becomes more unmistakable every year, and the political pendulum in Taipei is clearly swinging away toward greater resistance to Chinese pressure.

There are also warning lights flashing—perhaps flashing in the distance, but flashing nonetheless—when it comes to the fundamentals of Chinese power. Economic growth has been broadly declining for at least a decade (although it may have ticked upward slightly last year), according to official government estimates that are almost certainly inflated. China suffers from astronomic debt levels and has seen dizzying volatility in its stock market, both of which may be precursors to bigger economic troubles ahead. The demographic problems China confronts are even more severe than Russia’s: The rapid aging of the population will strain social spending, inhibit growth, and confront Chinese leaders with sharper guns-versus-butter trade-offs.

Beneath the façade of stability imposed by increasingly repressive governance, moreover, dissatisfaction with a corrupt and autocratic elite is increasing: Chinese officials stopped publicly reporting the number of “mass incidents” in 2005, but the frequency of such incidents is widely believed to be rising. If the drastic domestic security measures taken in areas such as Xinjiang and Tibet are any indication, major sections of the country seem to be seething with discontent. Add in the fact that China’s behavior is stirring greater fears not just in Washington but throughout the Asia-Pacific and beyond, and Beijing may soon find itself dealing with greater geopolitical pushback, including the development of military capabilities designed specifically to neutralize the leverage provided by China’s own build-up. As unlikely as it may seem right now, it is entirely possible that sometime in the next decade or two, Chinese leaders may have to face a future that is not so bright and shining as seems the case now.

When this happens, will Beijing become more or less aggressive on the global stage? The answer may well be “more.” Xi Jinping and other Chinese leaders have been promising that the nation is on the verge of achieving national rejuvenation, that it can now take center stage in world affairs. The regime has assiduously stoked Chinese nationalism; it has staked out inflexible positions on maritime disputes and other issues; it has even begun to issue soft deadlines for reunification with Taiwan. It has done so on the assumption that the continued growth of national power will enable Beijing to make good on its pledges and back up its demands.

If that assumption does not hold, if the “Chinese Dream” begins to elude its dreamers, Chinese leaders may be tempted to take more dramatic steps rather than admitting that they cannot deliver. In these circumstances, an attempt to retake Taiwan by force or coercion, to teach Japan a lesson in the East China Sea, to break Vietnamese or Filipino resistance in the South China Sea, or to rupture America’s alliance system in the Asia-Pacific would still be highly dangerous. But these initiatives might come to seem more attractive than simply remaining passive while Beijing’s relative power fades.

Robert Kaplan has put it aptly: If a confident China has been pursuing a “methodical, well-developed” strategy of revisionism, an insecure China could shift to “daring, reactive, and impulsive behavior.” Limiting the damage done to U.S. interests by a rising China will be a test of epic dimensions for American policymakers. But the moment of peak danger in the relationship may actually come when China starts to fade from its own wishful trajectory.

All this poses a genuine dilemma for U.S. policymakers, who must contain the ambitions of today’s revisionist powers without encouraging desperate behavior that might lead to war. One way of addressing this dilemma would be simply to take steps that ease American rivals’ perceptions of insecurity and decline—by conceding them larger spheres of influence that might satisfy their ambitions, or by declining to build military capabilities or strengthen alliances that might undercut those rivals’ positions and thereby exacerbate their fears. Yet the downside of this approach is obvious: It would require Washington to sacrifice some key interests and forego some of the strengths needed to sustain them. The United States might decrease the danger that a declining challenger would behave rashly, but only by exposing itself to other perils.

What will be required instead is a combination of careful prudence with great strength and resolve. U.S. leaders must not gratuitously antagonize U.S. rivals or put them in situations where they fear they must use their power before they lose it. This means staying away from efforts to overthrow or seriously destabilize the Russian and Chinese regimes (although perhaps not from more measured efforts to raise the costs of authoritarianism within those countries). It means avoiding acts, such as supporting a Taiwanese declaration of independence or excluding Russia from the SWIFT payments system—that would foster a “little to lose” mentality in Moscow or Beijing. Additionally, when Washington must issue explicit warnings—about Beijing’s behavior in the South China Sea, or about Russia’s meddling in U.S. political processes—it should do so privately, to minimize the reputational cost that American competitors must pay by backing down. As Dwight Eisenhower said during another great-power competition, America should carefully consider “how much we should poke at the animal through the bars of the cage.” Such caution is especially important when the animal is already frightened.

Yet the counterpart to prudence must be unmistakable military strength and geopolitical resolve. The challenge in dealing with declining revisionists is that their calculations of risk and reward may shift suddenly, and in potentially explosive ways: Actions that seemed unattractive or unthinkable before become more appealing as the perceived costs of inaction rise. The imperative, therefore, is to manifest a level of power and commitment sufficient that even a more risk-acceptant rival will understand that a geopolitical gamble is highly unlikely to pay off. This requires restoring the military supremacy necessary to defeat Russian or Chinese gambits in the Baltic, the Western Pacific, and elsewhere, and cultivating—across the entire array of U.S. foreign policy decisions—a reputation for credibility in upholding American commitments against revisionist challenges. The better the record the United States compiles in standing up to Chinese and Russian probing behavior in the near-term, the less likely the leadership of those states will be to think that more dramatic action will succeed at some point down the road.

A balance of firmness and caution is always difficult to strike, but it is never impossible. After all, there have been instances in which America has successfully managed the eclipse of a dangerous revisionist power. The Soviet Union might have tried to escape the dilemmas of terminal decline in the 1980s by pursuing a more aggressive policy, but it didn’t. It opted not to do so in part because the Reagan and Bush Administrations offered assurances that they were not seeking the destruction of the Soviet state (which happened anyway, mostly for other reasons) and that they would not publicly humiliate Soviet leaders. Yet the Soviets also chose restraint because America and its allies had amassed, throughout the Cold War and during the 1980s in particular, sufficient power and credibility such that more aggressive Kremlin policies would not be rewarded.

Given the degree of disruption China and Russia are posing today, managing the decline of ambitious revisionist powers is the sort of problem American strategists might love to have. Yet doing so effectively will be a major geopolitical challenge in its own right, if things roll that way. It will demand, once again, a mixture of flexibility and strength.

The exact quote varies in the different translations of Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War.

See Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy (Princeton University Press, 1991).

Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’ Trap? (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017).

Jack Snyder, “Better Now Than Later: The Paradox of 1914 as Everyone’s Favored Year for War,” International Security (Summer 2014), p. 71.

Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (Penguin Books, 2006), p. 317.

Timothy Snyder, The Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (Hachette, 2010), pp. 155-162.

Jeffery Record, Japan’s Decision for War in 1941: Some Enduring Lessons (Strategic Studies Institute, 2009), pp. 24-5.

See the constant-dollar GDP statistics provided by the World Bank.

James Kirchick, The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age (Yale University Press, 2017), p. 22.

Robert Kaplan, “Eurasia’s Coming Anarchy,” Foreign Affairs (March/April 2016), p. 33.

Robert Bowie & Richard Immerman, Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy (Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 158.

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An Important Announcement

The American Interest is thrilled to announce that Jeffrey (“Jeff”) Gedmin is now Editor-in-Chief. Adam Garfinkle moves into the role of Editor Emeritus, which we hope he will hold for the foreseeable future.

TAI, under Jeff’s leadership, has plans on various fronts. Please stay tuned!

Charles Davidson, Publisher

The post An Important Announcement appeared first on The American Interest.

China’s LinkedIn Honey Traps

“What the Russians are doing pales in comparison to what China is doing across this country,” said Vice President Pence in a recent speech at the Hudson Institute warning of Chinese interference inside the United States. Coming a few weeks ahead of the midterm elections, and in the midst of a dramatic reappraisal of China policy within the U.S. government, his was a timely and necessary wake-up call.

But there is at least one major example of Chinese interference that wasn’t on Pence’s otherwise fulsome list: that occurring on LinkedIn, the social media business networking platform. Russia’s Twitter and Facebook-driven election interference still dominates the headlines and the attention of Congress. But beneath the radar, the Chinese Communist Party is using other social media to build varied and long-term relationships that blur the lines between classical espionage and influence-seeking. And LinkedIn fits hand in glove with the Chinese concept of guanxi, which facilitates business and social relationships in China.

LinkedIn is the only American social media platform not banned in China, and for good reason: It has become a favorite tool for Chinese spying and influence operations. Just recently, William Evanina, head of the National Counter-Intelligence and Security Center, warned against Chinese spying through fake LinkedIn profiles. These are often women with beautiful profile pictures—an electronic update of the Cold War’s female honey traps. A Chinese government spokesperson has dismissed such allegations as “complete hearsay and groundless.”

Not so. I know because it happened to me.

Back in 2011-2012, I was asked to connect over LinkedIn by a handsome Chinese woman representing a recruitment company, DRHR, in China. I accepted. She had LinkedIn connections to well-seasoned China scholars, which lowered my alertness. Back then I had just started a book project on how Chinese companies risk manage in fragile environments around the globe, so I was interested in connecting with Chinese companies through DRHR. Initially not much came of the connection.

On a later trip to Beijing, she suggested an opportunity to meet. My LinkedIn contact never showed but claimed she had important business in Hangzhou. Instead, at the St. Regis, a five-star hotel where foreign delegations often congregate, I was greeted by three inconspicuous Chinese men. They vaguely presented themselves as representatives of a Chinese state-sponsored think tank, but never provided me with business cards. In China, this is as awkward and unusual as being naked in a meeting. I soon understood that they worked to recruit Westerners on behalf of the Chinese party-state.

The meeting was circumspect and meandering, with my interlocutors adopting a careful tone, but its purpose was unmistakable. First, they tried to tempt me by appealing to idealism: “You could help ensure that there is no conflict between the United States and China.” They also tempted me with ambition: “You could have access to any top Chinese official.” (Since hearing that offer, I have become suspicious of Western China experts with too-good-to-be-true contacts in the Chinese system.) Finally, they tempted me with simple greed: “We could finance your research.” Their suggested next step was an all-inclusive trip to Hangzhou to build our relationship. I thanked them diplomatically, told them no, and later reported the events to the relevant authorities in the United Kingdom, where I was then residing, employed at another think tank.

Recently, LinkedIn purged DRHR and other China-linked profiles following their public exposure by Western intelligence agencies, particularly Germany. But they might be merely the exposed tip of the iceberg. The pending trial of ex-CIA officer Kevin Mallory, who fell for such a LinkedIn trap and was later paid by Chinese agents for handing over information, demonstrates the national security ramifications. Yet many ordinary businessmen, scholars, and consultants are still unaware of how the Chinese Communist Party and its spying apparatus lurk behind lucrative business offers on LinkedIn and elsewhere.

The Chinese party-state has one overarching goal: to sustain its rule. At home, that means repression. Abroad, it means making the world safe for Chinese Communist Party rule by building long-term relationships and dependencies. Australian politics, media, and business were penetrated to such a degree that it compelled the writer Clive Hamilton to label it a “silent invasion.”

Pence’s speech on Chinese interference could spark the needed awareness among the American public and democracies worldwide. And sharing such experiences publicly can help shine a light on these practices, contradicting the Chinese official mouth-pieces who deny such interference exists. In the end, it is individual citizens—aware, engaged, and collectively committed to doing what is best for the health of a free and open society—who will ultimately prove the best defense against such foreign interference. Reporting and shutting down all China’s LinkedIn honey traps would be a good start.

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The Sprightly 230-Year-Old

Ill fares the national political system of the United States. In 2016 its major political parties nominated the two least popular candidates for president since the beginning of systematic polling, and almost as soon as the winner took office he became the subject of a “resistance” against his presidency, including efforts to have him removed from office. The Congress has difficulty performing its most basic tasks, notably including passing an annual budget. The most recent hearings for a nominee to the Supreme Court turned into a cross between a circus and a particularly ugly trial. Unsurprisingly, public confidence in the federal government has plummeted.  A 2013 study found the Congress to be “less popular than root canals, NFL replacement referees, head lice, the rock band Nickelback, colonoscopies . . . traffic jams, Donald Trump, France, Genghis Khan, used-car salesmen and Brussels sprouts.”

Something, Americans increasingly feel, has gone radically wrong with the system, which leads to the conclusion that radical measures are needed to fix it.  The word radical means “concerning the root” of something, and the root of the American political system is the Constitution of 1788. Predictably, calls for changing that document and proposals for doing so—including junking it entirely and starting from scratch with a new constitutional convention like the one in 1787 that produced it—have begun to proliferate.

Robert S. Singh begs to differ. A professor at Birkbeck College of London University and one of Great Britain’s leading authorities on both American politics and American foreign policy, he has written an elegant and persuasive book whose title announces its purpose: In Defense of the United States Constitution. In the tradition of two classic 19th-century studies of the United States, the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and The American Commonwealth by the Englishman James Bryce, it combines deep knowledge of America with the detached perspective of a non-American.

The defense Professor Singh presents rests on three broad, well-argued propositions. First, over the 230 years that it has been in effect the Constitution has, by reasonable standards, performed well.  Second, while the American political system undoubtedly has problems, some of them serious, they do not arise from its foundational document, from which it follows that substantially altering that document or discarding it altogether would  fail to solve these problems. Third, a few changes to the Constitution do have the potential to improve the working of the national political system, although all would affect the system at the margins and none would be easy to enact.

Singh begins by setting out four goals that a democratic constitution should be expected to achieve: channeling social conflict into normal, nonviolent political conflict; enacting majority preferences while protecting the rights of minorities; ensuring the peaceful transfer of power; and permitting revisions and adjustments when necessary. On all four of these criteria, he concludes, the 1788 Constitution has a good if not perfect historical record, especially in comparison with the experiences of other countries. He also assesses it by its own standards. Its Preamble states its framers’ expectations for it: “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the blessings of Liberty. . .”  Over more than two centuries in which the Constitution has served as the supreme law of the land, Singh argues in a stimulating chapter, the United States has done well on all six criteria. Overall, the Constitution has provided a clear and sturdy framework for governance that has at the same time proved flexible enough to permit the transformation, over the course of its existence, of a collection of thirteen small, weak, agrarian, mainly British settlements on the east coast of North America into a multiethnic continental super-power with the largest economy, the most powerful armed forces, and the widest international influence in the world. That is no mean achievement.

Professor Singh does not insist that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds in the United States in 2018. He does believe, however, that the causes of the distempers and dysfunctions that the country is experiencing do not lie in the details of its Constitution. To be sure, its particular institutional design does matter in the public life of any political community: that is one of the founding principles of the discipline of political science. Whether a democracy chooses its representatives through a system in which the winner of the highest vote total in geographically defined districts is elected, as in the United States and Great Britain, or by a nation-wide system of proportional representation, as in Israel, or through some combination of  the two, which is the German practice, does help to shape its politics and government.

While the rules of the political game matter, however, the characteristics of the players and the nature of the stakes for which they are playing usually matter more; and that, in Singh’s view is the situation in the 21st-century United States. The features of their country’s politics that dismay so many Americans do not stem from the separation of powers that the Constitution decrees, or the Bill of Rights that it includes, or any of its other basic provisions. They are instead the products, according to the author, of the rapid and sweeping technical, social, and demographic changes that America is undergoing, which both contribute to and are aggravated by unusually severe political polarization.

This is not to say that the Constitution embodies perfection and needs no changes at all. To the contrary, Professor Singh carefully assesses the proposals that would-be Constitutional reformers have offered and, while finding most of them either irrelevant to the country’s current shortcomings or likely to be counterproductive in addressing them, he does call attention to several that would help to disperse some of the toxic fog of anger that has come to surround the transaction of public business in the United States.

For presidential elections, while he favors retaining the Electoral College, he suggests changing the allocation of votes within it from the present system, whereby the winner of each state receives all of its electoral votes, to one in which each candidate receives the number of such votes proportional to his or her share of the popular vote. This would expand the scope of presidential campaigns.  Currently candidates devote virtually all of their time and resources to the handful of “swing states that each side has a chance of winning. The change would provide an incentive for candidates to campaign everywhere—Republicans in California, for example, which they now avoid, and Democrats in Texas.

As for the Congress, Professor Singh suggests that the inequality in representation in the Senate stemming from the fact that each state has two senators—a feature of the Constitution from the beginning—has become unacceptably extreme. Now Wyoming has one Senator for every 293,000 people while California has one for every 19.5 million, a disparity all the more glaring because unlike the upper chambers in many bicameral legislatures, the United States Senate has considerable power: it has exclusive jurisdiction, for example, over presidential appointments and the ratification of foreign treaties. “Some kind of reckoning is likely to occur,” he writes, “once sufficient Americans begin to remonstrate about the profound democratic deficit that is institutionalized on Capitol Hill . . .”  He recommends giving the larger states more representation in the Senate.

He suggests, as well, that federal judges not be appointed for life—a standard established when the American life expectancy was 40 years (it is now twice that)—but rather until a mandatory retirement age. Finally, he believes that the process for amending the Constitution should be made modestly more permissive and proposes the rules for constitutional change in effect in Canada and Australia—in neither of which constitutional revision is easy or frequent—as a substitute.

He acknowledges, however, that none of his proposals would be easy to adopt. For all the criticism that it currently attracts, the Constitution, in its original form, has shown remarkable staying power. In its 230 years of life it has been amended only 27 times, and the first ten of these were created together immediately after it was adopted. So it is altogether likely that seventy years from now the document written near the end of the eighteenth century will celebrate its 300th birthday in more or less the form that its framers gave it.  It is one of the several achievements of Robert Singh’s book that it leaves the reader if not delighted then certainly more or less content with this prospect.

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America’s Permanent Mobs

Never trust anyone whose political convictions are unaccompanied by doubts. Without the willingness to entertain doubt, the signal virtue of true liberalism, a person takes his or her principles to be unconditionally correct and absolutely binding. The person becomes a dogmatist, and dogmatists are dangerous. They tend toward a totalitarian mentality made up of equal parts arrogance, utopian fantasy, and, when given a chance, a penchant for inflicting their own biases on others.

Like all people, dogmatists have different things on their minds, but a good part of the time they think about whom to destroy and how. All dogmas divide people into believers and heretics. During the Middle Ages there were only two ways to deal with heretics: Let them alone or torture them to death. Today’s dogmatists recoil from either course, and so they have devised a compromise: Torture heretics, not to death, but to some extent.

And so we arrive at the mindset of contemporary Western identity politics. The practitioners of identity politics do not wish to physically destroy those who question the #MeToo movement (think actress Catherine Deneuve) or casually misspeak (think Roseanne Barr). They wish only to torture them to some extent, by making their lives a living hell. Thus thousands of people have been smeared with charges of sexism or racism, charges that ruin their peace of mind, their reputations, and occasionally their livelihoods. All this has happened in the name of some higher good.

Many people feel something to be wrong in all this. Not everyone’s conscience sits well with dragging people into the public square to humiliate them, people who had whispered a bad joke or perhaps tried to think through a complex subject out loud. But they usually keep quiet about it out of fear of being attacked themselves.

Critics call this “totalitarian,” which is an accurate description, more or less. But understanding how identity politics is totalitarian, and how it is not, is an important first step toward fixing the problem. Assuming it can be fixed.

It’s Not the Economy

A striking difference between identity politics and other political ideologies is the former’s focus on non-economic issues. Feminism combats sexism. Black Lives Matter combats racism. LGBT groups combat so-called homophobia. These issues touch on economics only tangentially, which is why identity politics is usually somewhat vague on policy matters. Socialists have precise proposals, such as national health insurance and a higher minimum wage. Feminists, on the other hand, dislike how some men treat women, but then are vague about how to get men to change their behavior. Black Lives Matters is similarly vague on how to improve relations between the police and African-Americans. At times, different groups within the identity politics movement voice support for progressive taxation and more government regulation. This conjures up the ghost of Marx among some conservatives, who then call identity politics “cultural Marxism.”

This is wrong. Marx would have disagreed with too many aspects of identity politics to be associated with any such movement. Marx rejected censorship. He rejected “tribalism.” He believed strongly in industry and material progress. He supported the withering away of the state, not the transformation of the state into an aggressive monitor of everyday life. Identity politics does not share these ideals.

The key to understanding identity politics is to take its vagueness at face value and not to look inside for any conventional system of policy ideas—because there is no such system. Indeed, most Americans accurately sense that identity politics is a form of theater. In the media or on the internet they see dramas play out involving accusers and accused, dramas that are staged to both entertain and edify. The accused have said something or done something politically incorrect, something racist, sexist, or homophobic; accusers then arrive on scene to place the correct interpretation on what viewers are watching and hearing, so that viewers can benefit from the lessons as well as from the warnings they might contain. Like all good theater, the drama unfolding on the screen has the power to affect viewers personally and directly; the accused are familiar to them, or at least like them, they are people in whose place viewers could without great stretch of the imagination imagine themselves. And so viewers are meant not only to be entertained and edified but also to be horrified, and perhaps terrified, by a spectacle that hits very close to home.

Identity politics and political correctness are first and foremost tactics. The media spectacles and the opportunities for public shaming arise by chance, as moral panics tend to do—for example, the Harvey Weinstein case that sparked the #MeToo movement or the Ferguson police shooting that fueled Black Lives Matter. The method of identity politics is to exploit opportunities as they arise by taking seemingly unconnected incidents and showing how they purportedly fit a pattern that, taken as a whole, sums to an indictment of the American status quo. Indeed, identity politics synthesizes patterns into a meta-pattern called “intersectionality,” meaning that abuses in the area of race are intimately connected to those in the area of gender and sexual orientation, as well as in business and the environment.

Armed with a unified theory of America’s evil, identity politics activists seek to subject people to politically correct theater for the greater part of their lives. They strive to make it constant and intensive even in unexpected places—for example, in sports or children’s literature—in order to spur people to develop a new mental background with fixed orientations and conclusions.

When they succeed the critical thinking faculties of their targets become blurred such that the ability to distinguish between the real and the imaginary is lost. Objectivity goes begging, and people start to invest even the simplest events with political meaning. In theory, they remain free people, but they are not free people; they are politically correct people; they have been educated in the awareness that their every email exchange or daily doing could be instantly discovered, discussed, condemned, and punished—and rightly so, they think, for identity politics has convinced them that the desire for objectivity betrays a desire to distance oneself from the identity politics cause, which betrays doubt in the cause’s goodness. Thus, people begin to worry if, for example, putting a flag up at home is a fascist act, or if singing an ethnic song is an example of cultural appropriation. In a recent BBC comedy sketch, one person wondered if water is racist.

In this respect identity politics owes more to Lenin than to Marx. Russians used to say that Marx is for theory, Lenin is for practice. In other words, Lenin is for tactics. Lenin developed many of his ideas in response to events, so much so that Leninism is not a “system” (like Marxism), but merely a bunch of scattered observations organized around a specific purpose: social control. Lenin’s ostensible goal was to erect a new regime that would make life better for the abused, but he spent far more time on revolutionary tactics than on any specific policy ideas for how a communist health care system or wage system might work. His policy ideas were vague, just as today’s identity politics practitioners’ policy ideas are vague. Indeed, Lenin’s first act after creating the Communist Party was not to issue policy directives but to create a newspaper for purposes of propaganda.

The emphasis on tactics in identity politics surfaces in another way. When judging an action, Lenin had a straightforward test: “Is it or is it not good for the Revolution?” Lying, cheating, and killing innocent people were fine if they helped the Revolution. As for the question of morality, “Morality is whatever serves to destroy the old exploiting society.” Everything that serves that aim is good, he said, while everything that hinders its realization is bad. Marx believed in some moral norms, but morality had no steady meaning for Lenin; it was a wholly instrumentalized concept. Until the Revolution, and even after as the Revolution tried to defend itself, writing a magazine article existed on the same moral plane as gunning someone down.

Adherents of identity politics adopt a similar approach. From their perspective, hounding innocent people who may simply not share their views (think the recent campaigns to boycott In-and-Out Burger and Chick-Fil-a), shouting them down (think visiting speakers on college campuses, a tactic that used to be called “revolutionary intolerance”), lying about them (think Duke lacrosse players or the University of Virginia rape case falsified by Rolling Stone), or destroying their reputations (think the young man terrorized by Mattress Girl at Columbia University) are no different from disseminating revolutionary literature or preaching on the radio. If such activities show the rot in the American system, then they are all morally equivalent and good, according to the logic of identity politics.

Besides, no one with power can really be innocent, say the adherents of identity politics. That is because all power is acquired through exploitation of one kind or another, from which often follows the enigmatic verdict in cases of people who are able to prove their innocence: “Not guilty, but does not deserve lenient treatment.” Although the Duke lacrosse players may have been innocent on the night in question, they were likely guilty at other times, so there is no reason to hold back. As the old Soviet prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky once said, “Give me a man and I will find the crime.” The crime is always there, somewhere.

Another Leninist tactic was to dehumanize the accused, not just to sow contempt for the old regime, but also to render obsolete the normal rules of assessing individual guilt or innocence. Lenin called businesspeople “dogs” and “pigs” unworthy of humane consideration, which cast a compelling spell on those asked to judge them. During the show trials of the 1920s, evidence was deemed superfluous because the accused had already been stigmatized as “carrion,” “vermin,” and “degenerate.” Similarly, in the United States today, accused murderers and thieves enjoy the benefit of conventional standards of evidence during trial, but those accused of sexism and racism by identity politics vigilantes are called dogs and pigs at the outset; hence actual evidence is unnecessary.

This tactic surfaced in the recent Brett Kavanaugh hearing. If Judge Kavanaugh had been accused of murder, evidence would have to be presented, but since he was accused of sexual misconduct, he was suddenly a “pig”; evidence became unnecessary as the identity politics crowd pronounced him guilty on day one. Indeed, the act of even asking for evidence was judged sexist and piggish: Senator Kirsten Gillibrand declared that forcing his accuser to testify was tantamount to silencing her—which was more Orwellian than merely nonsensical.

Identity policy tactics, like Lenin’s tactics, are immensely flexible. A person is accused of sexism, racism, homophobia, or any other bias, and the rest follows naturally. Thought leaders prepare the spectacle for presentation to public opinion; the proper ideological blanks are filled in, although the background is painted with a few distinctive colors to give the event an accent of singularity; the spectacle is then linked to other similar spectacles and presented to the public as a coherent whole. The distinction between truth and illusion in people’s minds grows ever more blurred. People make artificial connections between isolated incidents of alleged wrongdoing, and start to imagine that if the American system were only destroyed once and for all, peace and justice would reign.

The spectacles also remind people of the dangers besetting them from those whom identity politics calls the enemy. In a curious way, by helping people keep up their nervous tension, and by encouraging them to be on guard for racism and sexism, identity politics, like Leninism, shrewdly raises people’s self-esteem. Most people sense that they are non-entities in daily life. But if suddenly they are told that vast forces are arrayed against them, including the patriarchy and the white race in general, and that these forces are tied in with the big banks and corporate America, then people suddenly come to realize that their lives have colossal value as victims and even martyrs. They are important after all, for otherwise why would these great forces be out to get them?

Until recently, many of the accused played the role in the drama allotted to them. They confessed their crimes and admitted their need to be re-educated in the hope of receiving leniency. Now that the accused realize that leniency is rarely given, and that careers and lives are typically ruined, they increasingly refuse to admit guilt—at first. The identity politics crowd then sets to wear them down through Twitterstorms and other social media crusades. Sometimes this works. After all, without repentance, the accused would be outcasts, enemies of the people, cut off from humanity. Yet the accused—who very often hail from progressive enclaves—can themselves feel a certain loyalty to the cause of identity politics; they think that a confession on their part would be a service to that cause, so they give one, or at least pay their respects to identity politics.

Thus Aziz Ansari, the comedian recently accused of sexual misconduct, announced how he very much supported the goals of the #MeToo movement that was now devouring him. His behavior is indistinguishable from that of the old Soviet official who suddenly found himself in the dock falsely accused, but who confessed his crimes anyway because he remained loyal to the Communist cause—even though that cause had grown disfigured and debased beyond recognition. For without a cause, some people cannot live.

There are others who do persevere in their defense against false charges of sexism and racism, which then often calls forth more aggressive tactics to destroy them. In some ways the old style of torture to the death was kinder, as torture “to some extent” can go on for decades.

The Primacy of Dogma

Because identity politics is more about tactics than policy, one might mistakenly think dogma plays no role in it. People made a similar error about Leninism. On matters that Communists were supposed to be dogmatic about—economic policy—Lenin was surprisingly flexible. Although eager to bring agricultural production under state control, he was open-minded about the details, once musing that there was more to growing corn than issuing decrees and shooting peasants. Nevertheless, Lenin declared that there was a sharp contrast between good and evil, between darkness and light, which turned on a person’s complete and unwavering support for the Revolution. Such either/or, black-and-white distinctions lie at the root of all dogma.

Identity politics makes an analogous distinction. It divides the world into Social Justice Heaven and Social Injustice Hell. The problem for average people, then and now, is how to prove that one is not going to Hell for wrong-think. A pose of neutrality is insufficient. Lenin said that anyone who claimed to be neutral was a secret enemy. Identity politics shares this view. A withdrawal from politics is itself political, and suggests membership in the odious Silent (and generally White Male) Majority. So people must speak up; they must be political—which is just another way of saying that they must pray out loud and be part of the congregation. But when they speak they risk having their words parsed by experts in political correctness. They may accidentally commit a transgression, necessitating punishment. In the current Florida governor’s race the Republican candidate told people to vote for him so as not to “monkey around” with the economic recovery. This was a stellar example of such a misstep, for “monkey” has a racist connotation—even though, as any dictionary tells us, the English-language idiom “to monkey around” has nothing to do with race or racism. The candidate has gone from being ahead in the polls to being five points behind.

This is one reason why platitudes have become the coin of political conversation in the United States, as was the case in Lenin’s time. Fearing retribution, speakers often restrict their public speeches to stock phrases that emphasize “diversity,” “inclusion,” “tolerance,” and “fighting against hate.” This often strikes even favorably disposed listeners as meager and monotonous, yet it is dangerous to digress, to express nuances, or to admit the possibility of gray areas. The actor Matt Damon, for example, got into serious trouble after he tried to make distinctions between different levels of sexual harassment during the peak of the #MeToo crisis.

The Long March, Fifty Years On

Identity politics, like Leninism, possesses a clearly defined body of inexpungeable secularized religious dogma, binding on everyone, which permits neither laxity nor neutrality. For Lenin, the source of all dogma was the Communist Party. For identity politics, the source of all dogma is the academy, meaning the universities.

It was Lenin, not Marx, who pushed the concept of “false consciousness,” which holds that people fail to see their true interests because society has warped their minds. This is why Lenin said people must be led by a group of professional revolutionaries with true consciousness, in the form of a political party. The Communist Party was to supply people with ready-made answers to all political questions.

Identity politics shares an analogous relationship with the academy. It argues that only certain people are “woke.” Those who are woke must lead those with false consciousness, a process that half a century ago went under the name “consciousness raising.” Although the Democratic Party houses the identity politics movement, the academy is the movement’s source of social justice dogma. It operates in a way that Lenin would have well understood.

Lenin created the Party because he believed spontaneous anger among oppressed workers was insufficient to make a revolution. Instead, he argued, professional revolutionaries operating within an ideologically unified, centralized, hierarchical structure must guide workers toward a socialist consciousness. Not intellectuals—revolutionaries. For Lenin, intellectuals were too individualistic, undisciplined, and capricious to accomplish the task.

The academy works in analogous fashion. Like the Party, the academy has become the center of all forms of protest against social oppression. But it is not the true intellectual in the academy that raises consciousness. As Lenin said, intellectuals are too unreliable; their heads are in the clouds. Instead, professional activists in the university, people who have made social justice advocacy their major purpose, form the vanguard of identity politics. Although they may also teach, their primary purpose is to deliver “correct” ideas on social justice because they supposedly know the historic situation of oppressed people and thus what their consciousness should be. Like Lenin’s professional revolutionaries, these activists masquerading as professors represent the oppressed not because the oppressed agree that they should, but because they supposedly know best the laws of social development.

From these professors-cum-activists originates identity politics dogma—for example, the concepts of microaggressions, trigger warnings, mansplaining, subconscious racism, and intersectionality. Many supposedly oppressed people reject these concepts, at least to the extent they can even decipher them. But activists believe they represent the interests of the oppressed whatever the oppressed themselves may think. Lenin’s professional revolutionaries argued similarly.

Because the academy is the organ of dogma, speech inside the university must be policed more aggressively than in society at large. Lenin would have understood. Any deviation from the identity politics line, however slight, leads inevitably, irresistibly, to more deviations. Heterodoxy always spawns more heterodoxy. For a dogmatic ideology to succeed, the organ of dogma must present a united front; there can only be one source of political initiative.

Moreover, to avoid any tendency toward factionalism, conspiratorial conditions must apply. This is why today’s academy aggressively restricts speech on campus, as well as publishes books that no one outside the academy reads. Everyone knows in advance that these books will be bereft of original content, that they will be written in exact conformity with existing prescriptions, and that they will not contain a single idea that questions the basic precepts of identity politics dogma. They play the role of sermons to keep believers from straying from the official truth. Dogmatists know the power for evil lurking in “dangerous thoughts”—what used to be known as heresy. They know that a difference of opinion carries within it the germ of conspiracy. Such things must be stifled quickly, smothered in their cradles; for if professors deviate, or if students deviate, others will follow and the system risks collapse.

The academy is especially at risk here. Again, Lenin would have understood. Average people are not in the business of ideas. Seeing which way the political winds are blowing, many choose to submit to identity politics and just live with the foolishness. But freethinking intellectuals do take ideas seriously, and the honest ones sooner or later will start comparing them with practice, raising the risk that they might reject those ideas. This is why Lenin kept a watchful eye on Party members and disliked debate, and it is why the identity politics movement on any given campus keeps close tabs on what professors are saying. They exhibit Stasi-like antennae. Bret Weinstein, the biology professor hounded out of Evergreen State College for questioning the propriety of a special campus day without white people, is an example. Nothing threatens dogma more than an honest intellectual.

In my experience, the majority of professors are honest intellectuals. Today most of those honest folk live in fear. If a counter-revolution against identity politics ever begins, it must start with the academy. Many professors will privately be grateful. Few, however, are willing to throw the first rock.

The Democratic/Totalitarian/Authoritarian Triangle

A useful rule of thumb to distinguish between democratic, totalitarian, and authoritarian regimes is that under a democracy one is more likely to get fired for being publicly drunk than for being politically incorrect; under totalitarianism, one is more likely to get fired for being politically incorrect than for being publicly drunk; under authoritarianism it’s a toss-up. Today in the United States, one is more likely to get fired for being politically incorrect. QED.

The rule suggests that democracy and totalitarianism lie on opposite ends of a continuum; but the relationship between them is actually more complicated than that. Democracy, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism are like three points on a triangle, each sharing something with the other two. Democracy and authoritarianism allow civil liberties (much less in the latter than in the former); totalitarianism shuts them down completely. Democracy and totalitarianism, on the other hand, encourage people’s participation in politics (think Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies or Mao’s Red Guards), while authoritarianism prefers a passive, half-asleep populace. And of course, totalitarianism and authoritarianism both concentrate authority in the hands of demagogues, systematically disenfranchising the people.

By this measure, the charge of totalitarianism against today’s purveyors of identity politics may overstate the case, or state it too narrowly. Yes, some angry political mobs have been unleashed in America, but mobs exist under both democracy and totalitarianism. Tocqueville compared the mob fervor in 19th century American elections to a river that periodically threatens to overflow its banks and destroy everything, before subsiding until the next disruption.

And yes, identity politics has penetrated every aspect of American social life—sports, movies, literature, science, art, education, and even children’s play— which parallels Lenin’s refusal to allow any sphere of life to exist outside of politics. Lenin united all activities under a single worldview controlled by the Party. That tactic almost defines totalitarianism. But identity politics activists do not control the state, at least not the United States; therefore the identitarians have no choice but to let most Americans be as politically passive as they choose to be. Moreover, Tocqueville described how 19th century Americans brought their political rules of democracy into all aspects of life, including children’s play and table manners at a feast. Identity politics brings different rules into everyday social intercourse, but the principle remains the same.

The Vulnerabilities of Loneliness

To truly understand the threat of totalitarianism today one must understand what makes totalitarianism a distinctly modern phenomenon. According to Hannah Arendt, totalitarianism depends on the existence of atomized individuals whom tyrants can reconstitute into a kind of mob. The atomized individual goes from being alone to marching in lock step with others, such that he or she ceases to have a private existence and commits fully to a political cause.

This atomized individual is a modern phenomenon. Yet even in modernity, completely atomized individuals are rare. Even Tocqueville’s individualistic Americans were not atomized. Americans may have mocked authority, bucked tradition, and pursued their individual ambitions, but Tocqueville describes them as living in tight circles of families and friends. The pioneers generally moved west as families. When they found a place worthy of homesteading they built up common spaces—town squares, parks, libraries, music halls, and the like—as a community-in-the-making, working off the principle of self-interest rightly understood. What we today call mediating institutions—from book clubs to bowling leagues to Little League—were a prominent feature of the social landscape well into the 20th century. A society has to work at creating atomized people, including American society.

Lenin, Hitler, and Mao created atomized individuals in part through terror, by severing the traditional social bonds between people. To grab total power, for example, Hitler had to break apart the bonds that connected the German people to tradition, to local nobles, to local churches, to local state officials, to neighbors, to members of extended families, and so on, so they would look to the Nazi Party for all guidance. When people grew too afraid to talk to their neighbors, he accomplished this.

Curiously, in the United States atomized people have come into existence, at least to some degree, almost naturally as our reservoirs of social trust have run dry. A loneliness epidemic has worsened over the past sixty years. Fifty percent of Americans have either no one or at most one person to talk to about their private problems. Americans increasingly live alone or spend much of their time alone, increasingly in front of one sort of screen or another, where strangers pour powerful narratives into their heads. A third of all dinner meals are now eaten alone. As Arendt shrewdly observed, loneliness is the “essence of totalitarian government.”

Permanent Mobs

But identity politics in the United States today has taken atomization to the next level—through the old-fashioned method of terror, albeit of the psychological and not physical sort.

Today, men and women increasingly fear each other. As a group, women fear men as potential rapists in our so-called rape culture, while men fear women as potential false accusers of sexual harassment. Increasingly men and women avoid each other at work. It’s no longer a Hobbesian situation where every man fears every other man (Hobbes had little to say about women), but rather an even worse situation where every person fears every other person.

Political correctness terrifies most people. It stifles casual, everyday banter. People from different backgrounds increasingly avoid everyday conversation, especially at work. They fear running afoul of speech codes or committing a microaggression that will get them fired, and so they avoid unnecessary conversation, or at least carefully watch themselves around others. They look for “safe” conversational partners. All of this produces more atomization, more tinder for the identity politics activists of psychic totalitarian aggression. Crushed, lonely, and scared Americans grow ripe for totalitarian coordination, what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung.

In Lenin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Nazi Germany it was the Party that did the coordinating. In the United States today it is social media. The fact that the former was planned and deliberate while the latter is accidental and incidental is worth noting, but as a practical matter it doesn’t change the resultant dynamic very much.

Social media takes people who feel humiliated, unhappy, and lonely and gives them an online life. In whatever online community they join, they confess their most holy aspirations, their proudest, most secret dreams, and receive the same confessions from others. Online, a nobody can become a hero, a genius, someone who could become the pride of the nation and change the course of history—but only insofar as he or she trades real life for the one on screen, and follows the online community’s unified purpose. But doing that has consequences: Bit by bit the mind submits to a never-ending, ever-intensifying socializing process. Thousands of people come together in an online bubble and lose themselves as they become cut off from other political and intellectual influences, from other standards of comparison, and are subjected to propaganda so concentrated and unremitting as to leave its mark on even the strongest intellect. In the women’s sphere and the manosphere, in the black supremacist sphere and white supremacist sphere, and so on, reality increasingly exists only in people’s imaginations.

From this acquired surreality arises the totalitarian psyche of the permanent mob, as opposed to the passionate but merely momentary insanity of the acute mob. From it arises too the relentless eagerness to destroy someone in the name of collective reason. Sometimes all that’s left of a person’s individual humanity after being completely socialized is his or her touchiness.

The Utopian Temptation

One other totalitarian trend is worth noting. Arendt argued that totalitarian societies have a different understanding of law. In conventional societies laws are static, designed to protect people and property; in totalitarian societies laws are “laws of movement” designed to move society toward utopia—the classless society in Lenin’s Soviet Union; the master race in Hitler’s Germany. Laws of movement make no sense in conventional societies. They even connote lawlessness because they have such an unconventional purpose. Lenin’s laws led to many innocent people being killed, and this suggests lawlessness, but as laws of movement they pushed society toward a new form. By the totalitarian standard of law these killings were just.

Something analogous is happening today. For example, reverse racism violates conventional laws that demand people be treated equally, but laws of movement are designed to move society toward social justice utopia, and therefore do not recognize the possibility of reverse racism. Similarly, conventional laws in the framework at least of Anglo-American jurisprudence demand that people are judged innocent until proven guilty, and that women who accuse men of sexual harassment must produce evidence; but laws of movement designed to move society toward utopia declare that women must always be believed, no matter what. Hence the potential for a near-permanent “warlock hunt.”

The utopia in identity politics is a society in which power exists but is somehow never exercised or felt, where an individual need not experience any psychological discomfort at the hands of any other person. Like Lenin’s utopia, it is considered the highest expression of humanism. But also like his utopia, cruelty and hatred are necessary to achieve it.

What is curious in all this is how much history repeats. Modern-day readers look back at grotesque political events in the Middle Ages and the 20th century and wonder how such things could have happened. Fortunately, they say, cruel dogmatists no longer exist, and given humanity’s experience they would not be allowed power if they did exist. But that’s not the way things really are.

Today’s generation in the West has its dogmatists, who are no better or worse than those of previous generations. They yield to the temptation of glorifying their own creedal system and destroying people who believe otherwise. Lenin would have understood. In all this they think they are different from dogmatists of past generations and could never become like them. But they are not different. As before, they refuse to see or admit their own dogmatism, insisting that they merely want to establish a good life in America for good people and a bad life for bad people, all in accordance with what amounts to revealed Truth. But what they actually reveal is simply how much the sum total of ignorance and viciousness in humanity neither increases nor decreases over the centuries, but stays roughly the same.

Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism (W.W. Norton, 2005), p. 769.

Arkady Vaksberg, Stalin’s Prosecutor, (Grove Press, 1991), p. 107

Bari Weiss, “When the Left Turns on Its Own,” New York Times, June 1, 2017.

For examples of this in theater and children’s literature, see: Terry Teachout, “‘Straight White Men’ and ‘Head Over Heels’ Reviews: All Identity, All the Time,” Wall Street Journal, July 26, 2018; and Meghan Cox Gurdon, “Children’s Books: The Young Person’s Guide to Grievance,” Wall Street Journal, August 30, 2018

See Bella Depaulo, “Single People Aren’t to Blame for the Loneliness Epidemic,” The Atlantic, August 28, 2018; Miller McPherson, et al., “Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks Over Two Decades,” American Sociological Review (June 2006); and the new book by Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other—and How to Heal (St. Martins, 2018), especially chapter 1, “Our Loneliness Epidemic.”

Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, Part 3 (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), p. 173.

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