Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 81

No News is Bad News

Since gaining independence from Britain in 1960, Nigeria has struggled with regional and ethnic conflict. This is hardly surprising, given its origin as a patchwork of smaller kingdoms and tribal states stitched together by British colonial rulers. Over time, that patchwork evolved into three distinct regions, each dominated by a major ethnic group. In the landlocked, largely agricultural north, the dominant group is the majority-Muslim Hausa and Fulani; in the oil-rich, commercially developed southwest, it is the majority-Christian Yoruba; and in the fertile, mineral-rich, yet economically depressed southeast, it is the majority-Christian Igbo.

For most of their history, these three regions had been separated not only by the natural barriers of the Niger and Benue Rivers but also by barriers of culture, religion, language, and loyalty. These were hardly erased with independence. On the contrary, the early 1960s brought coups, assassinations, and counter-coups, resulting in a series of highly unstable dictatorships. In 1967 the conflict grew deadlier when three Igbo-majority states attempted to secede and create their own independent republic, called Biafra. The government in Lagos responded with a brutal crackdown, including forced starvation, and in 1970 the Biafrans surrendered.

In the aftermath of the Biafran War (also called the Nigerian Civil War), the capital was moved from Lagos to Abuja, a planned city in the middle of the country, surrounded by a 2,800-sq-mi swath of savannah called the Federal Capital Territory. The idea was to affirm the government’s impartiality, and perhaps it did. The coups and dictatorships continued, but in the late 1990s Nigeria began the difficult transition to democracy. The present century has seen marginally greater stability, despite pendulum swings between polarized parties and the harsh suppression of recurrent revolts.

The highest-profile revolt (if you can call it that) is of Boko Haram, the radical jihadist group that viciously attacks fellow Muslims in northeastern Nigeria, as well as in the adjoining states of Chad, Niger, and Cameroon. Now split into two factions, each claiming allegiance to ISIS, Boko Haram is only one of many such groups operating in the Sahel, or belt of semi-arid land just south of the Sahara, which stretches from Senegal in the west to Somalia in the east. But Boko Haram may be the most important such group, because as noted by a retired senior commander at AFRICOM, “If Nigeria goes down it would make a giant sinkhole that would suck in six or seven other countries.”

In 2017 nearly 10,000 civilians were killed by Boko Haram, five times as many as were killed by ISIS in Iraq and Syria. And despite the Nigerian government’s rhetorical claims of victory, its efforts to crush Boko Haram have arguably made things worse. For example, the army, reinforced by foreign mercenaries, has driven almost 2.4 million rural farmers from their villages, razed their homes, and placed them in camps guarded by soldiers who extort favors and bribes from anyone attempting to enter or leave. Conditions in the camps are horrific, with frequent rapes of women and children, and thousands of deaths from starvation, thirst, and disease. A recent UN study reports that 71% of African jihadists say that their main reason for joining the radicals is corruption and brutality by government authorities. As an aid worker in the region put it to the Economist, the behavior of the military “feeds right into the recruitment strategy [of Boko Haram], which is that the Nigerian government doesn’t give a shit about them. It is like a factory for jihadis.”

Nor is radical jihadism the only form of revolt in contemporary Nigeria. Activists among the Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa-Fulani, Ijaw, and other ethnic groups are demanding changes ranging from greater local control of resources to outright secession. According to political scientist Jideofor Adibe, some Nigerian leaders have been calling for “a Sovereign National Conference to decide if the federating units of the country still want to continue to live together, and, if so, under what arrangements.”

In Adibe’s view, this approach is too top-down; what’s needed is a serious effort to resolve the issues democratically. As he writes: “There has never been a referendum in any of the areas agitating for separation, [so] it is difficult to know whether the leaders of the various separatist groups actually reflect the wishes of the people of those areas or whether the agitations are mere masks for pursuing other agendas.”

Many Nigerians would agree that the best way to deal with separatist demands is to put them to a vote. But there is a problem here, one all too familiar to the world’s liberal democracies. Extreme political fragmentation and polarization are hard to mitigate democratically, because they have such a corrosive effect on the very institutions that make democratic decision-making possible. One such institution is the media. When a country’s sources of information are themselves fragmented and polarized, its political divisions get worse. This is the situation now facing Nigeria.

In its 2017 report on press freedom, Freedom House gave Nigeria a score of just 50 percent. The reasons for this are not self-evident to the Western observer. Nigeria has no Ministry of Information dictating a party line and telling journalists what they can and cannot cover. Nor does it have an overweening state broadcaster ruling the airwaves and policing the internet. Its public broadcasting system, modeled on the BBC, is decentralized and hardly a monopoly. And in general, the media in Nigeria appear quite similar to their Western counterparts: privately owned, commercially competitive, politically diverse. Even Reporters Without Borders (RSF) declares on its websitethat “Nigeria has more than 100 independent media outlets.”

But appearances can be deceptive. The RSF website also states that “in Nigeria, it is difficult to cover stories involving politics, terrorism, and financial embezzlement by the powerful. Journalists are often threatened, subjected to physical violence, or denied access to information by government officials, police, and sometimes the public itself.” Curiously, RSF offers no explanation of how both statements can be true—that is, how “more than 100 independent media outlets” can exist in a country where journalists are intimidated, attacked, and otherwise prevented from doing their job.

The explanation lies hidden in the wording. Note that the report says “independent media outlets,” not “independent news outlets.” The distinction is crucial to understanding the challenges facing press freedom in the 21st century. The memory of 20th-century totalitarianism causes many Western observers to be especially wary of state-run media using heavy-handed propaganda to indoctrinate the masses in a particular ideology. This still occurs in a few countries, North Korea being the most notable. But it is no longer the main threat.

Instead, the main threat is of powerful officials and wealthy oligarchs using media to entertain, distract, and confuse the public, while at the same time suppressing any news and information that might impinge on their power. In authoritarian regimes such as Russia, China, and Iran, this is done in a planned and deliberate way, through a media system owned and controlled by the state. In a struggling democracy like Nigeria, the process is more haphazard, as corrupt elites—typically politicians and their private-sector cronies—acquire commercial media outlets and through bribery and intimidation strive to turn them into personal mouthpieces.

From the point of view of the average consumer, this new use of media is doubtless an improvement over the old totalitarian diet of mind-numbing propaganda. Just as the Roman emperors provided circuses, so, too, do today’s authoritarian rulers and corrupt elites provide the masses with movies, TV series, reality shows, and “infotainment” about sports, weather, fashion, and celebrity gossip. The masses are also regaled with an entertaining simulacrum of TV news that copies the worst practices of US cable channels: female hosts chosen for their sex appeal; politically slanted coverage accompanied by editorial heavy breathing; “debates” that consist of shouting matches; and endless nitpicking chatter that serves mainly to obfuscate the issues.

American observers, especially those who came of age after the media deregulation of the 1980s, have trouble seeing what is wrong with the media in a partly free country like Nigeria. All the distractions filling the airwaves in these foreign settings is hard to get any distance on, because they look so much like the clutter we have here. But there is a difference. In the West, even in Trump’s America, the clutter still exists alongside fair, accurate, responsible journalism.

Unfortunately, the American people’s access to quality journalism is subject to the same growing inequality that exists in income, education, family life, and all the other indicators of the good life in America. For the literate online news-seeker striving to hear all sides of a story, the digital age is a goldmine. But for the everyday citizen who used to rely on mass-market magazines and network news, access to quality journalism is harder than it once was. Indeed, the lower you are on the socioeconomic scale, the more in thrall you are likely to be to the worst practices noted above.

The tipping point comes not when large numbers of people decide that the existing media are corrupt and biased, but when they decide that there is no such thing as honest, fair-minded journalism. There is such a thing, and it is easy to identify. Just ask a serious reporter in an authoritarian regime or struggling democracy what he or she is not allowed to do. The answer will be clear. Reporters in such places are not allowed to do factually based, dispassionate stories about politics. Nor are they allowed to engage in the sort of investigative journalism that in the West still manages to expose high-level corruption and malfeasance.

These are, of course, the essential functions of a free press as defined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But to perform them, the media require two things: resources and political cover. Resources are needed because quality journalism almost never makes money. And political cover is needed because powerful malefactors will always try to suppress the truth. Something to keep in mind when considering the similarities between the Nigerian media and our own.

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Teaching Public Policy

In my previous post, I noted how public policy education needs to shift its focus from training policy analysts to training leaders who are capable of actually implementing good policies. In our experimentation both at my Center’s Leadership Academy for Development and in the new Stanford Masters in International Policy, case teaching has become an integral part of the approach.

Among the many problems with the current economics-centered approach to public policy education is the lack of appreciation for local context. Modern economics aspires to be context-free: it seeks universal rules of human behavior that can be mathematized in abstract models. Local context—what makes outcomes different in, say, East Asia as opposed to sub-Saharan Africa or Eastern Europe—is reduced to country fixed effects or an error term in the model specification. Yet understanding context, meaning the history, culture, politics, stakeholders, norms and institutions of particular times and places, is the sine qua non of successful policy problem-solving.

This is where case teaching comes in. A well-written case plunges the reader directly into a very specific context. If they are well written, there should be a specific decision-maker wrestling with a specific decision, and the students should be able to put themselves into his or her position.

Case teaching was pioneered at the Harvard Business School, and continues to be widely used in business classes around the country. It was also integrated into the curricula of public policy schools like the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, which like HBS maintains a great case library. But with the rise of economics-based teaching, the use of cases has gone into decline or is absent altogether in many public policy programs.

The point of a case is not to present “best practices.” In the language of statistics, conclusions from a single case have no external validity. Case teaching should actually point in the opposite direction: It should demonstrate to students that what works in Singapore will not necessarily work in Hyderabad, since so many contextual factors, from geography and climate to corruption and bureaucratic quality to unions and technology differ from one place to another. To the extent that cases teach best practices, they are practices related to the thought processes of individual policymakers as they try to formulate implementation strategies for their local conditions.

If students are to be able to solve policy problems when they get out into the real world, they have to be able to understand and absorb local context quickly. No two-year masters program in public policy will ever teach students enough local context to ever be truly useful. The policy school at which I taught for nearly a decade, the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), had a series of regional concentration for students wanting to focus on Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the like. But even this kind of area studies focus, together with the language training associated with it, will never be sufficient to prepare future policymakers for the specific challenges they will face.

What is needed is an appreciation for what you don’t know when you confront a problem, and a skill set that allows you to absorb the necessary local knowledge to solve it. Qualitative skills like the ability to interview a range of local stakeholders and assess their credibility, to connect them with historical and cultural traditions, to understand the workings of local institutions, formal and informal, and to appreciate how other people’s points of view may differ systematically from your own, are very much undervalued in policy education. They are closer to the skill set of a cultural anthropologist than that of an economist. And they are critical if you are to actually get things done in the real world.

Case teaching is a very effective way of honing these sorts of skills, but it is not the only possible approach. Many schools are experimenting with practicums that connect students directly with policymakers to help them solve problems. Many such relationships put students in the position of glorified research assistants, since that is what their training prepares them to do. A proper practicum should involve students in all phases of the framework: problem definition, solutions development, and implementation.

In my next post, I want to talk about the decline of public administration as a field of study. For a link to the cases developed in connection with the Leadership Academy for Development, click here.

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Some Dare Call It Treason

The depiction of President Trump as an unabashed instrument of the Kremlin has shifted into overdrive since his widely panned press conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. The groundwork for this charge had been laid even before Helsinki by Jonathan Chait’s piece in New York magazine, which speculated that Trump has been a Russian intelligence asset since 1987. Post-Helsinki, former CIA Director John Brennan set the tone by calling Trump’s remarks “nothing less than treasonous.” The charge was taken up with great gusto by the Usual Suspects in the mainstream media. CNN provided saturation coverage for several days after the summit, heavily larding its commentary with the treason question. The clincher for the prosecution was the President’s apparent willingness in Helsinki to accept Putin’s denials over the judgment of U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia had interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. Trump’s later explanation that he had misspoken was greeted with derision. The Helsinki remarks, some said, were proof positive that the U.S. President is a Russian agent, possibly under Kremlin control as a result of blackmail, and therefore must be impeached: “What further need have we of witnesses? We have heard it from his own mouth.”

What can we say about that ill-fated press conference with Putin? It would have been nice if Trump had taken the high road and avoided gratuitous swipes at his domestic opponents, including the inept boast that he had beaten Hillary Clinton “easily.” Alas, magnanimity is not one of the President’s characteristic virtues; moreover, we are living in a poisonous, scorched-earth political environment where no quarter is given and none asked. Regarding the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, Trump had leveled forthright (if overstated) criticism in Brussels about its negative geopolitical consequences, bluntly but appropriately taking Germany to task for the project. In Helsinki, by contrast, he blathered about American LNG competing with Russian piped gas on the European market, completely missing the real reason for opposing Nord Stream 2 and handing a specious argument to those who disingenuously claim that Washington is simply trying to displace Russian gas with more expensive American LNG on the European market.

Then there was the reprise of Trump’s campaign foray into moral equivalency (“I think that our country does plenty of killing, too.”), this time to proclaim that the United States shares the blame for bad relations with Russia. Using the press conference to dole out responsibilities for the deplorable state of U.S.-Russian ties was a no-win gambit to begin with, but Trump compounded the problem by seeming to pin the blame (at least on the American side) on the Mueller investigation, peppering his remarks with frequent avowals that there had, in fact, been no collusion. Phrasing his remarks differently, Trump might have sounded downright statesmanlike in acknowledging some U.S. shortcomings in its dealings with Russia. However, with all the American “guilt” laid on the shoulders of the Mueller investigation, it was hard to avoid the impression that the President doth protest too much.

Regarding the question of Russian interference in the 2016 elections, Trump had this to say: “My people came to me, [CIA Director] Dan Coats came to me and some others, they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.” (Days later Trump issued a correction, averring that he had meant to say, “I don’t see any reason why it would not be.”) In Helsinki he added shortly thereafter, “I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.”

I will not try to parse the meaning of these awkward remarks, except to note one thing: Those who accuse Trump of consistently denying Russian meddling are factually wrong, even based on the simple meaning of his words at the Helsinki press conference. Trump has not consistently said anything about Russian meddling, for the simple reason that he has not been consistent.

It is hardly a secret that Trump is a man with no filter, prone to talk off the top of his head and not overly fastidious about whether his remarks track with what he has said in the past. I have known people of similar disposition, but Trump is perhaps the first such person ever elected to our nation’s highest office. On the question of NATO, Russia, or a whole host of other issues, you could attribute widely varied—even diametrically opposed—points of view to Trump depending on which of his remarks you chose to cherry-pick. Anyone preoccupied with rhetorical consistency will be driven to distraction by the current President.

Moreover, Trump’s introduction as President to his intelligence community was essentially to be informed that his campaign was under investigation for collusion with Russia. Surprise, surprise, they didn’t get off to a great start. Trump’s relationship thereafter with the U.S. intelligence agencies has been a rocky one, for reasons that are neither frivolous nor incomprehensible.

Finally, Trump’s opponents have used the fact of Russian interference in 2016 to try to delegitimize his election. Of course, it is two entirely different things to maintain that Moscow interfered on the one hand, and to insist on the other hand that Russian meddling swung the election. Trump’s most implacable foes have insisted on conflating the two, and Trump himself seems challenged at times to keep the two strands separate in his own mind.

Ultimately, Trump has no one but himself to blame for his clumsy handling of the Russian-interference issue at the Helsinki press conference, and he is taking his lumps accordingly.

The charge of treason leveled against him, however, is quite another matter.

The U.S. intelligence agencies regularly make assessments, expressing varying degrees of certainty, about the whole panoply of foreign policy and security issues. These assessments are purely advisory and are in no way binding on the elected leadership. It is the latter that has the constitutional authority to make policy, not the intelligence services, who in any event have proven to be every bit as fallible in their judgments as the rest of us.

The notion that it is treasonous for an elected head of state to disagree with the conclusions of his intelligence agencies is therefore profoundly disturbing. It is the sort of scenario one might expect to see in a quasi-authoritarian state where a shaky elected government is grappling for authority with powerful security services intent on retaining their power behind a façade of democracy. Recently retired intelligence chiefs are certainly entitled to their opinions, but it is deeply unsettling to see such individuals in the vanguard of a movement for the removal of a democratically elected President.

Moreover, the notion of Trump as a Russian agent cannot withstand any serious scrutiny. As a number of analysts (many of them Russian) have pointed out, at the Brussels NATO Summit Trump pummeled allies to increase defense spending and subjected Putin’s pet Nord Stream 2 project to withering criticism and the threat of American sanctions. The Brussels Summit communiqué was as tough as ever on Russian behavior and solicitous of Ukrainian and Georgian interests. Trump is committed to a U.S. military build-up; has authorized missile strikes against Russia’s ally Syria; has expelled a record number of Russian diplomats; has demonstrated the U.S. commitment to defending NATO’s eastern flank in deeds, not just words; has expanded the provision of U.S. weapons and training to Ukraine and Georgia; and (perhaps worst of all from the Kremlin’s long-term perspective) has made it a priority to increase U.S. energy production. None of these actions is calculated to endear Trump to Putin or to further the latter’s nefarious agenda.

Yet for all that, Trump has declined to criticize Putin publicly, and many pundits will be unimpressed by anything the President does with regard to Russia until he pokes Putin (rhetorically, and preferably literally) in the eye. Evidently Trump is insufficiently rude for some people’s taste. At his next meeting with Putin he’ll just have to work harder to overcome his natural meekness and reticence.

It should go without saying that, if Trump were actually taking orders from the Kremlin, his behavior would be the exact opposite. He would be lambasting Putin publicly for show while slashing U.S. defense spending, patting NATO fondly on the head as it slides into irrelevance, hobbling U.S. energy production, and quietly directing U.S. financing and technology into building more Russian pipelines.

Those who dislike Trump’s personal soft spot for Putin (and—who knows?—perhaps even some other aspects of the President’s policies) have constitutional recourse. They can campaign, donate, and vote against his party in the upcoming midterm elections, and can work to unseat Trump himself in 2020.

Alas, 2020 is such a desperately long time to wait. An astonishing number of people on the left are so stricken with an apparently incurable case of the DTs (delirium Trumpens) that they seem quite content to trust the intelligence agencies both to determine ground truth on various matters and to declare that disagreement with such assessments constitutes treason. Truly, what bizarre times we live in!

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Re: Cold War II?

To the Editor:

It was gratifying to see that Ambassador Andrew Wood chose our recent essay as the point of departure for his article on the West’s policy toward Russia. Ambassador Wood is an eminent scholar-practitioner with long experience in Russia. However, his article contains two references to our essay that are factually incorrect.

Ambassador Wood quotes from our essay that “Moscow’s vision has been deeply affected by its experience at the end of the Cold War and guided by a firm resolve to prevent it from being repeated.” Based on that quote, Ambassador Wood writes that we rely on the “mantra of the West’s humiliation of Russia” as the justification of Putin’s foreign policy. In fact, we do not argue that at all, and the word “humiliation” is not even in our essay. We would never reduce Russia’s experience at the end of the Cold War to humiliation by the West. To do so would mean overlooking the domestic decline and retreat from the world stage that no country in modern history suffered in peacetime, regardless of anything the West may have done. It was Russia’s crisis first and foremost.

Further, Ambassador Wood ascribes to us the view that “turning the page on Russian interventions in Ukraine, Syria, and the United States” would be the way to repair U.S.-Russia relations. We make no such claim. In fact, in the introductory section of our essay, we write “what is needed today is not another symbolic handshake or commitment to move past the old differences, but rather a sober look at the root causes of successive crises in U.S.-Russian relations as well as a clearer understanding of why major disagreements have lingered despite both sides’ attempts at reconciliation.”

We hope this clarifies our position.

Sincerely,

Eugene Rumer

Dmitri Trenin

Andrew S. Weiss

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Plucking Out the Heart

How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex Contagions

by Damon Centola

Princeton University Press, 2018, 312 pp., $35.00

The outstanding thing about China’s 600 million people is that they are “poor and blank” . . . . On a blank sheet of paper free from any mark, the freshest and most beautiful characters can be written; the freshest and most beautiful pictures can be painted.

– Mao Zedong

Some people love science for its own sake, but most of us value it because it enables good engineering. Few there be who enjoy reading circuit diagrams or materials science treatises, but everyone wants a powerful smartphone. Almost no one wants to wade through the equations of hydraulic physics, but people spend more than half a million dollars every day to cross the Lincoln Tunnel.

For social science, this relationship between science and engineering is nearly reversed. Non-scientists are more likely to share academic social science research findings with their friends than they are to share any other type of scientific research, indicating that many laypeople find social science interesting for its own sake. And on the other side, “social engineering” is an ugly term that scientists disown and that makes most people uncomfortable. Alone among the sciences, social science is prized more for its interesting ideas (science) than for its downstream technologies (engineering).

Princeton University Press’s ongoing Analytical Sociology book series provides reasons to be both excited about social science ideas and uneasy about their application, as most of us are. Damon Centola, of the University of Pennsylvania, has written How Behavior Spreads as the third book in the series. The book opens with a puzzle: Why is it that HIV has spread rapidly around the world but relatively easy behaviors that could prevent HIV infection have not? It is posed as a social scientific question, but it is easy to think of a social engineering analogue, something like: How can powerful institutions manipulate people’s behavior (to minimize the spread of HIV)?

The later chapters of Centola’s book are written to answer just these types of engineering questions, and the book is clear and innovative enough to serve as a primer on the implementation of social control by the powerful. But like all good social science, the ideas are more exciting than the implementation. While traditional behavioral research has either focused on individual psychology or population-level trends, this research occupies a fascinating place in between, examining the implications of the network structures that people form when they interact and connect.

The image below shows the types of networks that the research focuses on. In these graphs, each dot represents a person, and the lines between the people represent social connections. In the “regular” graph, each person knows his neighbor and his neighbors know each other, but no one knows anyone who is spatially distant. This is a simplistic version of what we might imagine the world looked like before the transportation and communication technologies of the last few centuries, when most people never traveled more than 50 miles from where they were born. It is a “large world” because if one person has a virus or letter or idea, it takes a maximally high number of steps to transmit it, neighbor to neighbor, to a distant person.

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Watts-Strogatz structures

 

The “Small-world” graph in the middle is quite similar to the “regular” graph: nearly everyone knows his neighbor and nearly no one knows anyone who is spatially distant. However, there have been a small number of “rewirings,” each maybe representing a person who has neglected his friendship with his neighbor in favor of a pen pal in Russia or an ex-girlfriend in Tahiti. Now that there are a few connections that cross wide spatial divides, the number of “hops” it takes to transmit a virus between any two randomly selected people is greatly reduced. In the “Random” graph, connections show no spatial pattern whatsoever, and the number of steps needed to transmit something anywhere is minimized—it’s the “smallest world.”

These network structures were popularized among academics by Duncan J. Watts and Steven Strogatz in a 1998 Nature paper. Their key insight was that even though the “small world” graph is extremely similar to the “regular” graph, its two or three rewirings were enough to make transmission across the world almost as efficient as the “random” graph. In other words, even if only a tiny percentage of the population is connected to someone far away from them, anyone can get a virus or an idea from anyone else extremely quickly.

The small-world notion is intuitively appealing. It is thrilling to think that even without a cosmopolitan personal network, one is only a few handshakes away from a Congolese peasant or the Sultan of Brunei or Kevin Bacon. On social media platforms like Twitter, it is easy to connect with strangers half a world away, and the social rewiring this creates has been used to explain everything from the success of new products to the Arab Spring. As more people travel or interact with distant strangers online, the world gets “smaller” and in theory it is easier for ideas and behaviors to “go viral” and spread quickly.

Except when it’s not. Centola documents a huge variety of cases in which ideas and behaviors have not spread via a small-world model of jumping across space and social divides. Rather, Centola shows that quite often large-world, old-fashioned, neighbor-to-neighbor transmission without immediate hops across space is both faster and more successful. This violates both intuition and the theory of contagion that used to be accepted.

To explain this anomaly, Centola introduces a distinction between simple and complex contagions. Measles and rumors are textbook examples of simple contagions: A single exposure is sufficient for transmission. They can travel quickly by airplane and spread the fastest in smaller worlds. A complex contagion requires multiple sources of reinforcement in order to be transmitted. Membership in social movements, behaviors related to health, and large investments are complex since one wouldn’t be likely to do them until one had been influenced by several connections rather than just one.

If three neighbors start a new political party, according to this theory, the party’s spread through a large world (like the one on the left of the image above) is straightforward and efficient. A person convinces his neighbor, with the help of another neighbor who is a mutual friend. In a large world, networks are clustered and one’s friends know each other. This clustering and the ubiquity of mutual friends make possible the multiple contacts that are necessary for the transmission of complex contagions. In the smallest possible world (like the one on the right of the image above), a political party will never expand beyond its founding members, because they have no mutual friends and so cannot “team up” to provide multiple sources of reinforcement to attract new recruits. Hence Centola’s central insight: While viruses and simple contagions spread the best in small worlds, new movements and other complex behaviors will spread best in large ones.

This result is especially important since the life-altering behaviors that we care the most about tend to be complex contagions. Centola identifies large-world-style behavioral contagion in contexts as diverse as birth-control practices in Korean villages, trade unionization in Northern Europe, participation in 1964’s “Freedom Summer,” and innovative house construction methods in Kenya.

The results of the book provide a strong reason to be leery of the rise of online social technologies. Every year fewer Americans know their neighbors well, and in general the internet makes our world smaller. This makes it harder for complex contagions to spread through our increasingly weak ties with each other. Centola describes the likely result of this change as

a form of social amnesia. . . .The everyday memory of how people interact and the kinds of gestures or civic-minded behaviors they are expected to display may be transformed. . . .While simple contagions may be conspicuously better spreaders, they typically are not very effective for. . . .transmitting new ideas that will improve the common welfare.

In other words, the metaphor we have of “going viral” is apt: things that spread like viruses are simple, lowest-common-denominator, and require little investment or discipline, and most important they tend to be harmful like viruses. The trend of the world’s social network structure is towards enabling those types of contagions to spread more easily, and to make complex, socially beneficial contagions rarer and more often stopped in their tracks.

Centola’s careful analysis of network structures and the way that behavioral contagions spread may also provide a way to understand more intangible cultural trends. For example, a variety of commentators have asserted that our culture hasn’t generated distinctive innovations since about 1990, in fashion, art, popular music, and culture overall. Complex cultural practices are precisely the types of contagions that Centola claims are more difficult to spread in our increasingly small world. Could it be that the rise of the internet has caused us to live in a permanent cultural stasis or devolution in which every year is a slightly worse version of 1992? The question is too big to answer definitively, but Centola’s ideas would provide a strikingly apt explanation for this if it were true.

Part III of the book is about “social design,” a term more palatable but roughly synonymous with “social engineering.” Centola has been a pioneer in experimental sociology, and has found ways to connect members of online communities to each other to push the overall networks towards resembling either large or small worlds. In these artificially constructed networks, a few random nudges to some carefully chosen “seed” individuals can create cascades of behavior change, for example new diet or exercise practices that spread through the whole network.

The success of these experiments to spread complex behaviors invisibly among crowds of strangers is both impressive and discomfiting. With each advance in social science, some new ingenious method to control other people’s behavior becomes possible. If the science of behavior control experiences enough serious breakthroughs like Centola’s, we can imagine a future in which human liberty is curtailed by powerful groups who “weaponize” social science to bend crowds to their whims.

The desire to use social science for the sake of behavior control is not new. As Theodore Dalrymple has ably pointed out, it is even a plot line in Hamlet. King Claudius summons Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and points out “Hamlet’s transformation” of his “inward man.” He hopes that they “may glean, whether aught, to us unknown, afflicts him thus, That, open’d, lies within our remedy.” He wants to understand Hamlet’s psychology and behavior for the sake of using a “remedy” to control it—it is science for the sake of engineering again.

Hamlet obviously resists both the attempts to understand and to control him. He asks Guildenstern to play on a pipe, and after Guildenstern refuses because he lacks the skill, rebukes him:

Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass: and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ; yet cannot you make it speak. ’Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.

Hamlet has rightly identified the intention of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—the social scientists of the Danish court—to control him by understanding him. As social scientists in the centuries since have learned more of the “stops” of the human mind, they have gotten closer to a future in which they can play people like instruments. They are, as earnest scientists, trying to pluck out the heart of the mystery of human behavior, but as they try they are also getting closer to being able to control us.

Nor is this only a hypothetical concern for playwrights and paranoiacs. The World Bank and other powerful institutions continue to support the creation and development of governmental “nudge units” that seek to take advantage of the quirks of human psychology to control subject populations. Numerous private consulting companies charge huge fees to help them.

An understanding of social network structures casts new light on recent controversies. Eminent domain takings like the infamous Kelo v. City of New London of 2005 provide a case in point. These seizures push our social world to be smaller by destroying dense networks and large-world communities. The reasoning of judges who have allowed such takings is frequently some version of a public benefit vs. private harm argument: that the public (for example, economic) benefit is great enough to justify the private harm caused by displacing citizens from their private property. With Centola’s research, we can identify a serious public harm—the destruction of socially beneficial large-world networks—in addition to the alleged public benefits and private harms.

Outside of the United States, there are numerous recent examples of policies that have had (mostly pernicious) effects on citizens’ social network structures. In Singapore, a housing law was passed that directly prevents large-world clustered networks from forming by instituting racial quotas in apartment buildings. In China, land seizures have been conducted on a scale that dwarfs New London and other U.S. cases. As in the U.S. context, the victims of such takings abroad tend to be members of politically weak classes.

Advocates of busybody government intervention should remember that the unintended social network consequences of these policies could not have been fully understood when they were implemented. The unintended consequences of the laws we pass this year or next may similarly be unappreciated for decades to come.

Those who love science for its own sake tend to have confidence that it can continue to progress forever without limit. This is an exciting thought if we consider inventing food that can feed all of the hungry and interstellar travel that can carry us to distant galaxies. But for social science, unlimited progress in understanding human behavior would mean the possibility of unlimited control of some by others. It would mean that we could arrive at Mao’s fantasy, in which a central state could write on its citizens like blank paper by influencing and controlling their most important decisions. With recent advances in facial recognition technology, data storage infrastructure, and predictive modeling, Mao’s successors are already beginning to make that fantasy a reality.

Robert Cialdini, the famed scholar of psychology and marketing, once told me that he believed it vitally important for individuals to properly educate themselves about methods of social influence so as to more effectively resist them. For readers seeking to take up the challenge, Centola’s book is a superb place to start.

1 This particular illustration of the Watts-Strogatz networks structures comes from Ali Sydney, “Characteristics of robust complex networks,” 2009.

The post Plucking Out the Heart appeared first on The American Interest.

Whose Indo-Pacific?

American grand strategy has always aimed at suppressing security competitions and the rise of a rival hegemon. The not-so-peaceful economic and military rise of China and its ambition to craft a new maritime and continental order in Asia thus pose a challenge to seven decades of American preeminence in the region—a reality that the Trump Administration acknowledged in its first National Security Strategy. In response, the Administration has often touted its “Indo-Pacific” strategy, which in practice seeks to counter China by building a network of allies and partners to contain and push back against Chinese revisionism.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s speech at the Indo-Pacific Business Forum on July 30 sought to outline the U.S. strategy in the months ahead. Secretary Pompeo’s speech was akin to one made by former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson last year. This past October, Tillerson sought to lay out the contours of U.S. India policy; ten months later, his successor seeks to fill in the blanks on the wider Indo-Pacific strategy.

For some months now allies across Asia have voiced concerns about whether the United States is a reliable partner or whether it would withdraw from the region. A number of countries—including Australia, India, South Korea and several ASEAN members—have thus sought a hedging strategy with respect to China. Secretary of Defense James Mattis’s speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue in June was aimed at reassuring the region, with Pompeo’s speech as the follow-on. Secretary Mattis stated that the Indo-Pacific strategy was a subset of the broader American grand strategy for “stability, security, and prosperity” around the globe. Mattis also asserted that what underlined this strategy were “shared principles,” a “commitment to common values,” and a “shared destiny.”

One of the challenges facing the Indo-Pacific strategy has been that every country in the region has interpreted it differently. While everyone agrees with the “free” and “open” language, different countries have chosen to emphasize different parts of the Indo-Pacific concept.

Japan views it as a strategy to counter China. During a speech that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe delivered before the Indian parliament in 2007, he spoke about the confluence of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. Five years later during his swearing in as Prime Minister, Abe spoke about Asia’s Democratic Security Diamond, emphasizing the need for India, the United States, Australia, and Japan to cooperate for “peace, stability and freedom of navigation” in both the Oceans.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid out India’s definition of the Indo-Pacific during his June 2018 speech at Shangri-La, where he explained both how India viewed the idea geographically—a space extending “from the shores of Africa to that of the Americas”—and conceptually, in terms of “inclusiveness, openness and ASEAN centrality.” In their recent speeches both the U.S. and Indian leadership have emphasized that the ASEAN countries are central to the Indo-Pacific vision. That Secretary Pompeo is delivering a speech at the ASEAN security meeting in Singapore today underscores this point.

But doubts still linger, both within the United States and in Asian capitals, about whether the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy simply comprises stray speeches by key officials. While Secretary Pompeo’s speech did not flesh out a full-fledged strategy, it did send a few key signals.

First, Pompeo stressed that the Indo-Pacific remains critical to American interests and that the United States is in the region to stay. Echoing Secretary Mattis, Pompeo reiterated American support for a regional order of “independent nations” without “domination” by any one country and emphasized U.S. “commitment” to helping its partners and allies build their economies and their security. While the top American diplomat emphasized that the Indo-Pacific strategy did not exclude any country, the message was not lost on Beijing.

Pompeo also addressed queries about whether or not the United States was willing to invest economically in the region in order to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). At a time of economic protectionism, when the Trump Administration’s policy is to invest more money at home and ask American companies to do likewise, it is not politically feasible for the U.S. government to invest significantly more money abroad and compete dollar for dollar with China.

What Secretary Pompeo offered instead in his recent speech was a framework and a variety of existing mechanisms—including the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC)—through which the U.S. government would provide targeted assistance to countries in the region with the expectation that those countries would then use that aid to build their capacities. He also touted the BUILD Act, a development-finance bill currently under consideration in the Senate, and announced a $113 million investment to boost digital connectivity, cyber security, energy, and infrastructure.

The United States will also look to its partners and allies across the region to augment American efforts in the region. In 2017 India and Japan announced the Asia-Africa Growth corridor with over $200 billion in proposed projects across the region. In April 2018, the United States, India and Japan announced collaboration in the field of infrastructure in Nepal, Myanmar and Bangladesh.

In June 2018, Prime Minister Abe committed $50 billion for infrastructure projects across Asia. With China encroaching on Australia’s backyard in the South Pacific, Australia’s commitment to the Indo-Pacific has deepened in the past few months. Just two days after Pompeo’s speech, both Australia and Japan announced a trilateral partnership with the United States for infrastructure in the region.

Secretary Pompeo’s speech sent many of the right messages, but we still lack a clearly defined Indo-Pacific strategy. Fundamental issues still need to be resolved, starting with the geographical disconnect. While India would like the Indo-Pacific to include the western Indian Ocean (the Arabian Sea and the east coast of Africa), the United States and most others have—as of now—limited the Indo-Pacific to the western shores of India or the mandate of the INDOPACOM.

Further, the United States is not investing nearly as much money as China is offering and Japan’s billions, while necessary, are not sufficient to compete either. What is required is the elaboration of a detailed counter-strategy to China’s Belt and Road so that the world, including China, understands what “our” Belt and “our” Road is.

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The Outlaws

I left the hotel in Odessa just as the sun setting. Well-dressed citizens were wandering under the chestnuts of Pushkin Avenue in a picture of post-communist affluence, as life-weary teenagers smoked weed under the statue of the city’s modern founder, the Duke de Richelieu. Everywhere you looked, in every vista, the blue and yellow Ukrainian flag was fluttering.

As I approached the town hall, I met crowds of policemen. It looked like they were expecting a Russian invasion, but in fact they were only preparing for demonstrations that were slated for the following day, May 2. Southern Ukraine is still predominantly Russian-speaking and government forces retain a lingering fear of pro-Russian demonstrations and gatherings. The protesters were getting ready to commemorate a tragic event that occurred in 2014, when 42 anti-Maidan protesters were killed in a conflagration at the Trade Unions building, where they were hiding from their opponents.

“People fear the ultranationalists, but the state just makes room for them,” Timofei Hryniuk, a young lawyer and activist, told me, referring to government-sanctioned militias that have sprung up since Ukraine was invaded by Russia in 2014. “The problem is, it’s as if the war has created a permanent state of emergency. The city center is refurbished which is good for tourism, but who mainly benefits from the public spending? It’s the politicians. They are often the contractor and supplier at the same time. And by coddling the ultranationalists”—who often don the mantle of vigilante fighters against corruption—“they avoid protests.”

25-year-old Maksym Ishchuk has a different perspective. He had just graduated from university when the demonstrations on the Maidan in Kyiv in January 2014 broke out. He quickly joined the protesters. “When Yanukovych’s special police started shooting at us, it was clear that much was at stake. I know how it sounds, but I felt that our freedom was literally at stake.”

Journalist student Khrystyna Melnyk was also present on the Maidan. “We thought we were living in a European country, but the state did not protect us. We had to protect ourselves.”

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credit: Maksym Ishchuk

But how? Maksym took part in the fighting on the Maidan and was among the first to volunteer for the so-called “self-defense battalions” that sprung up as Ukraine’s southern province, Crimea, was infiltrated and annexed by Russia, and as rebellion spread to eastern Donetsk and Luhansk. He had never planned to become a soldier, but in the spring of 2014 the country was racked by paralysis. “A friend, an officer, was stationed in Crimea when the Russians invaded. He called and called to central command but got no orders. So, they surrendered.”

When the war broke out in 2014, Ukraine’s army was crippled after decades of neglect. The central staff proposed establishing paramilitary groups to fight pro-Russian rebels. Dozens of such groups were assembled after the Maidan revolution had toppled the pro-Russian regime in Kyiv. After a few weeks of very basic military training, it became apparent that “the generals did not know what to do with us,” Maksym told me. “We were not sent anywhere.” He heard from friends that Russian flags were being flown in Odessa and got leave to go home. Odessa has a huge Russian population, and until recently Ukrainian was rarely heard spoken here. “We feared that Russia would create a pretext to occupy all of southern Ukraine,” Maksym continued.

The hostilities peaked on May 2. Pro-Russian protesters barricaded themselves in the city center. What happened next is hotly contested. Both sides threw fire bombs. Maksym participated in the street brawls leading up to the deadly fire, but he claims that by the time he got there, the building was already burning. “We built a ramp to get to the windows. I tried to get in to save the people inside, but the smoke made it impossible. It is sad that people on both sides died. They were being used, without understanding it themselves.”

After the tragedy in Odessa, Maksym returned to a special political battalion dubbed Storm: “It is important to remember that at this stage, we believed that the unrest in the east should be treated as a police mission, lest it not provoke a Russian military intervention. The newly assembled paramilitaries led the charge. Battalion Storm was 200-300 strong and was sent off without heavy weapons.” I asked Maksym if he really left the war almost without training. He smiled. “Well, my mother was unhappy.” And his father? “He did as most fathers do, and spoke with his silence.”

On August 20, the battalion was eight miles outside Luhansk when it encountered an artillery barrage and, eventually, the full force of the Russian army. “It was the first time I saw the enemy. They attempted to break us in a pincer maneuver, but we dug in and held our position.” He showed me pictures of smiling soldiers posing with busted Russian military hardware. Battalion Storm lost four men during that fight.

Maksym willingly acknowledged that he was initially filled with a sense, as the Roman poet Horace expressed it, of dulce et decorum est pro patria mori—it is sweet and proper to die for the fatherland. But the realities of war tend to curb one’s enthusiasm. When I ask about the weeks and months when he fought in Donetsk and Luhansk, he grimaced. “I do miss the simple life at the front, but I do not want to return.”

An inconvenient truth: Some soldiers like war. Most men like competing, and war is the ultimate competition. In the chaos after World War I, a volunteer paramilitary faction was formed in Germany to defend its eastern borders against a bevy of new nation states that sought to expand their territories at Germany’s expense. You cannot understand recent German history without understanding the role of these “Free Corps,” and you cannot understand the Free Corps without understanding the Battle of Sankt Annaberg in 1921. In his 1930 novel, The Outlaws, Ernst von Salomon described the scene of setting out for the battle:

The train ran through the night. I stood out on the hallway and enjoyed the thrilling excitement over what had been set in motion. In all the carriages were young men like me standing and sitting. The conductor kept a suspicious eye on them, because they were dressed in worn grey cloth like myself; Their blond hair and arrogant faces gave them a family resemblance. We recognized and greeted each other. Without knowing each other, we had been drawn from all parts of the German-speaking world by the prospect of battle and danger. Without orders and without any other clear goal than reaching Upper Silesia.

In Leipzig, young men with feathers in their hats came on the train chatting in the Bavarian dialect. I walked past them, gesturing to their luggage and muttering. Firearms? The man who stood closest smiled. The boxes were marked “Oberland”. They came from all over the German empire. There were frontiersmen from the Baltics, members of student associations, union workers and business people. There were men from the Rhine and Ruhr, from Bavaria and from Dithmarschen. Balts, Swedes, Finns, Men from Transylvania and Tyrol, from East Prussia and Saar. All young, all prepared.

Although it would be going too far to suggest that modern German identity was created in the Free Corps wars, those wars nevertheless represented an important step in the evolution of Hessian or Bavarian identity into something bigger—the Deutschtum of which poets and thinkers spoke. The Weimar Republic had neither the ability to act nor the will to try. Von Salomon writes:

Where was Germany? In Weimar? In Berlin? Once upon a time it was at the front, but the front did not exist anymore. Was it the people? But the people shouted from bread and voted to get their thick bellies filled. What about the government? But the state was looking for an identity and instead found irresponsibility.

The Free Corps were united in their hate of the invaders in the east and of liberal politicians who seemed more interested in making moneyed interest prosper, rather than the people or the “culture.” The main character of the book, an airbrushed version of the author, put it best: “We believed that for Germany’s sake, we and no others should have the power. We felt that we were the embodiment of Germany. The ruling power in Berlin had no such legitimacy. “

A similar mentality can be found among volunteers in the now-infamous Azov battalion. Nestor Makhno is a nom-de-guerre. Behind the tinted windows of a restaurant in the Odessa district of Arcadia, he had few good things to say about the government in Kyiv. “We have given our blood for Ukraine. Ukraine was forged as a nation in our struggle. Are we nationalists? Of course we are! And people know we will not accept betrayal. Not by terrorists and not by our own politicians.”

I asked why the right-wing nationalists have so little support in elections. He waved his fist under my nose: “The politicians lie, steal and cheat. When the people wake up, we are ready.”

For what?

“For revolution,” he responded.

Ukraine’s paramilitaries trace their lineage to Germany’s Free Corps, specifically to their popular struggle against French occupation under Napoleon. The term itself refers to armed political formations, organized according to military principles. They represent not only the power of violence, but also a new source of political authority and organization of the state. In the book Paramilitarism in Europe after the Great War (Oxford, 2012), Ukrainian academician Serhy Yekelchyk describes how nationalist groups played a key role during the civil war in Ukraine in 1917-20. He claims that they are not best understood as the armed wing of a united Ukrainian people’s struggle for independence. Rather, the Ukrainian Freikorps represented “a confusing struggle between Ukrainian patriots of different shades” about what the future of Ukraine should be.

The same is true of today’s Ukrainian militias, which after 2014 have fractured into ever smaller ideological segments. Some of the paramilitary formations have been incorporated into the Ukrainian military forces, but not all. Despite international criticism of the fact that some of these groups harbor right-wing radicals and neo-fascists, the integration process has been slow. This has to do with the fact that these groups are popular: Their young men were willing to sacrifice themselves when the Ukrainian state floundered. It also has to do with the fact that paramilitaries are cheap. They come without pension obligations and are always ready to fight.

Yekelchyk claims the defeat of the Free Corps in the face of the Red Army owed a great deal to what he calls “failed state-building.” A shared struggle, it turns out, was not sufficient in itself to create a functioning state. The same conclusion held when Ukrainian patriots once again came together in various paramilitary organizations during World War II. One of the iconic leaders of that time, Stepan Bandera, is today one of the great Ukrainian heroes—this, despite (or, in some cases, because of?) Bandera’s cooperation with the Nazis, death at the hands of Communists and apparent willingness to abandon all principles in order to achieve an independent Ukraine.

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credit: Maksym Ishchuk.

Historian Jens Petter Nielsen has written that “the anarchy that developed in Ukraine after the February Revolution in 1917 triggered dormant contradictions, conflicts and enmities that were previously suppressed or played themselves out under the surface in controlled civilized forms. Now they were fought on open ground with weapons in hand, in violent confrontations.” Bandera saw the militias as the manifestation of the Ukrainian nation, even when fighting other Ukrainians.

What was once an icon of football hooligans and the radical right has been embraced by the state. Statues of Bandera are mushrooming all over Ukraine in the shadow of the ongoing conflict with Russia.

Scientist Vyacheslav Likhachev concludes in a report to the French Institute of National Relations that “the mere fact that these volunteer formations materialized had propaganda value in the first weeks of the conflict; but, on the whole, the media has seriously exaggerated the role the volunteers played in the Anti-Terrorist Operation. They did not actually play a significant role during military operations.”

And yet they have become a significant player in Ukrainian politics. The largest of these groups, Pravyi Sector, the militias’ umbrella organization, has been highlighted among the EU’s running concerns about the internal situation in Ukraine.

Artem Filipenko, who has been active with the Border Guard in Odessa, believes Pravyi Sector is “a ghost”, a phenomenon that acts as a kind of franchise—a label Russian propaganda uses to justify the fiction that Pravyi Sector is the armed wing of a “fascist regime” in Kyiv. Artem gave Battalion Storm support and equipment in 2014. The state had some weapons but lacked uniforms and boots. The lack of equipment is now less of a pressing issue, partly because of support from the United States. He believes that Western Europe’s warnings against nationalism are misplaced. “Modern Ukrainian nationalism is a self-defense ideology, not a political project.” Nobody knows how long the Minsk agreements, whose goal is to deescalate the conflict, will hold. Filipenko believes that the war can flare up again. “The Ukrainian army is much stronger than it was in 2014 and is likely to reclaim areas in the east, unless Russia intervenes…”

This may be a part of the logic underlying the fact that, despite repeated promises, Kyiv has failed to disband all of the militias. They are still fighting against the Russian-supported separatists in the east. But these informal groups have proven to be difficult to control, and a few of them are legitimately criminal outfits. Many have either been integrated into the armed forces or sent home. But not Pravyi Sector. The group reportedly has many thousands of members, including a battalion with hundreds of soldiers. They fight side by side with the government army, but it is unclear how much they respect orders.

Perhaps the government does not feel strong enough for a confrontation. A poll taken in November 2017 on behalf of the International Republican Institute showed that only 3 percent of the respondents believed that President Petro Poroshenko is doing a good job. Perhaps the state of play can be best understood as a kind of internal ceasefire. Some commentators have argued that Pravyi Sector has become less interested in the corruption that characterizes parts of the political system.

Meanwhile Ukrainian authorities have striven to explain away the Pravyi Sector to Western observers. Radical statements and actions are attributed to a small minority of members, which may well be true. But the group has indubitably attracted right-wing radicals and fascists from a number of European countries, and it takes only one Nazi to give an entire group a bad reputation. Thus, as long as these paramilitary groups are allowed to exist, Ukraine is running a grave reputational risk. The country is only a single paramilitary war crime committed away from suffering a stinging loss of moral credibility—not least in Germany, which, due to its own painful experience with its Free Corps, will be less than understanding.

The post The Outlaws appeared first on The American Interest.

The Debate over Underage Migration

Forced Out and Fenced In: Immigration Tales from the Fieldedited by Tanya Maria Golash-BozaOxford University Press, 2017, 272 pp., $24.95

 

Migrant Youth, Transnational Families and the State: Care and Contested Interests by Lauren Heidbrink

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014, 208 pp., $24.95

 

The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life

by Lauren Markham Broadway Books, 2017, 320 pp., $16.00

No issue polarizes the immigration debate like the increasing number of undocumented migrants under the age of 18. Legally these are children, so shouldn’t we welcome them with open arms? If they show up at the U.S. border without a parent, aren’t they running away from danger? Or given the fact that a large majority are teenagers, eager to find work, are they just another category of foreign job-seeker?

Underage migrants arrive from all over the world, but currently the majority are Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and Hondurans. To explain why, advocates point to Central America’s homicide rates, among the world’s highest, surpassing the annual toll once taken by the region’s civil wars. Escaping from Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and other street gangs has become a refrain in the stories told by Salvadoran, Honduran, and Guatemalan border-crossers. Yet the majority seek to join relatives who are already in the United States, some come from localities without a gang presence, and there is no mistaking their keen interest in U.S. jobs.

This is no surprise because, in economies undercut by globalization, nothing attracts like the dollar. Like so many others around the world, Central American youth are glued to their Facebook accounts and iPhones, so they live in a media-scape defined by U.S. consumption standards. Yet jobs in manufacturing and other value-added endeavors, which could boost their purchasing power, have been underbid by the cheap-labor industries of East Asia. Facing $5- or $10-a-day futures as security guards or vendors, they dream of new lives in Los Angeles, Houston, or New York.

In those same dream destinations, meanwhile, international wage competition is turning more occupations into jobs that only immigrants are willing to do. The “giant sucking sound” that billionaire populist and presidential candidate Ross Perot denounced in 1992, of U.S. jobs going south to Mexico, is now sucking young Central Americans north. They are encouraged by employers who want cheap labor, relatives who are hungry for remittances, and immigrant-rights advocates who, while highly critical of U.S. capitalism, still wish to believe that the United States is a haven for the downtrodden.

As for the majority of Americans, we shrug. Doesn’t the first generation of immigrants always suffer? Doesn’t the second generation always do better? And so millions of border-crossers and visa-overstayers, without legal status, have been allowed to settle into lower-class American life. Here they are barred from social benefits such as food stamps, but they can access emergency rooms for medical crises, any newborns are U.S. citizens, and through citizen children they can stake shaky claims to benefits and legal status.

Should these underground migration streams, improvising their own admission into American society, be legalized or uprooted? The answer from the U.S. political system is successive mood swings of leniency and punishment, which have turned the U.S. government’s immigration bureaucracy into a legal gauntlet. Woe to anyone who runs afoul of an opaque exclusion or deadline. Some unauthorized border-crossers and visa-overstayers are waved forward to legal residency; others are deported.

Three recent books delve into the tough issues posed by underage migrants. One is Tanya Maria Golash-Boza’s highly readable Forced Out and Fenced In. In short, dramatic chapters, more than 20 sociologists and anthropologists sketch portraits of a wide range of people facing deportation. Like so many current migration scholars, Golash-Boza and her contributors obey Nicholas De Genova’s injunction to focus on the “legal production of illegality.” If this strikes you as tautological, given that nothing is illegal unless there is a law against it, De Genova is arguing that, unlike laws against burglary that protect the boundaries of your home and laws against sexual harassment that protect the boundaries of your person, laws that protect the boundaries of your country have only injurious effects and therefore serve no defensible end.

Whatever you make of that, Golash-Boza and her contributors provide plenty of detail about their subjects, so you can make up your own mind about whether each of them deserves a break. Some are victims of ethnic profiling; others are involved with illegal drugs; still others blame vendettas by relatives for their predicament. Consider Paloma, one of tens of thousands of Mexican citizens whom the U.S. government has deported to the Mexican city of Mexicali. Growing up on both sides of the border, Paloma produces three U.S.-citizen children with an undocumented husband, who then makes a unilateral decision to legalize himself by marrying someone else—a neighbor who has U.S. citizenship.

Standing in the way of this strategy is not so much Paloma and her children but the husband’s record of domestic violence against her. To get around this, the husband accuses Paloma of being abusive and addicted and gets the children sent to foster care. When Paloma goes to court to reclaim her children, the Migra—Spanish slang for immigration officers—have been summoned by her husband and she is grabbed. As of 2009, both Paloma and her husband have been deported, leaving their U.S.-born children on the U.S side of the border in foster care.

Couldn’t all this enforcement, trauma and expense have been avoided by granting Paloma and her husband legal status? That’s the very sensible conclusion of the sociologist who tells her story, Heidy Sarabia. Wouldn’t it be great not to spend $20 billion a year on border enforcement?

Like Golash-Boza’s other contributors, Sarabia conveys the family situations that bring migrants to the United States and send them into the nets of the legal system. This is a background that tends to be heavily edited once migrants tell their stories to advocates advising them how to meet requirements for legal status. Illustrating this important point is anthropologist Lauren Heidbrink’s research on unaccompanied minors in foster care in her book Migrant Youth, Transnational Families, and the State.

Heidbrink shows that migrating youth are actors in their own right, not just pawns in family migration strategies. They are eager to join the labor force, not least to pay back the money their families have borrowed to send them to the United States. But they are prevented from working by the fact that, having been caught crossing the border under the age of 18, they are wards of the U.S. government. Heidbrink gains access to such youths, detained against their will, inside foster-care shelters. We learn a lot about how they interact with officialdom, but only occasionally about their relationships with their families, who were tough to locate and therefore tend to fade into the background. Toward the end, Heidbrink concludes:

. . . unaccompanied children and youth are intensely embedded in kinship and social networks, which facilitate migration and shape their everyday actions. While there are certainly migrant children who are alone, fleeing abuse, violence or poverty and seeking employment, education and opportunity, more commonly children and their families leverage social and financial capital to facilitate their transnational migration and settlement (even if temporarily) in the United States.

In short, parents are using their children to speculate on the potential high returns of U.S. jobs and legal status. Don’t such parents deserve some of the skepticism that Heidbrink reserves exclusively for the U.S. government?

Thus when the parents of 11-year-old Goz tell him to withhold information from U.S. authorities, Heidbrink concludes that “state policies and practices” are separating Goz from his family. What about the role played by his parents? With parents conveniently crouching out of sight, Heidbrink verticalizes the responsibility for their children to the U.S. government. It sounds as if she would prefer a more laissez-faire approach, in which family networks are allowed to send junior members into the U.S. labor market. Given her subjects’ age, should they, their families and their employers be allowed to violate U.S. laws against child labor? If the answer is yes, the next question is, should they be considered children at all? The U.S. legal system prolongs childhood in ways that Central Americans do not. But if such migrants shouldn’t be considered children, why should they get special treatment?

Lauren Markham’s The Far Away Brothers raises an even more uncomfortable issue about underage migration from Central America. In 2014 Markham was a counsellor at Oakland International High School, across the bay from San Francisco. One fourth of its students entered the United States as unaccompanied minors. Among them were a pair of identical twins from El Salvador, whose ordeals brought them to Markham’s attention. Ambitious to write her first book, Heidbrink not only befriended Ernesto and Raul but went to El Salvador to interview their family. This enables her to reconstruct the decision-making that sent them north from a small town where MS-13 had begun collecting renta or extortion payments.

Family networks in this milieu are vast, but they foster feuds as well as cooperation. Competition for income is intense and physical violence is often a possibility. The town’s first MS-13 members are invited by a local patrón who happens to be the twins’ own Uncle Agustín. Two of MS-13’s first victims are another uncle, who is a drunk, and a cousin, who is a thief. Then Uncle Agustín fails to pay the twins fairly for picking coffee. He also turns out to be a moneylender and coyote who smuggles migrants to the United States.

The human smuggling is why Uncle Agustín hires MS-13 as bodyguards and why local youth start to hang out with these new role models. By the end of the book, Cousin Juan is leading the local MS-13 chapter and Brother Ricardo is a wannabe gangster. And so Markham documents how paranoia over gangs (“they are everywhere”) pervades not just Salvadoran society, but the kin network of her two subjects.

Ironically, Ernesto and Raul don’t realize that running away from gangs is their motivation for going north until they reach the United States. Only there do the twins grasp that this is the theme that immigration advocates are invoking to help them obtain legal status.

As for the household decision-making that sent them to the United States, at least as expressed to Markham, this consists of frustration over Salvadoran income levels in an economy that, since 2001, has been dollarized. The twins’ father Wilber is an enterprising small farmer with enough land to support nine children, but not enough to support their future upward mobility. When the twins’ older brother Wilber, Jr. passes a university entrance exam, Wilber, Sr. has a better idea—why not go north and send us remittances? Wilber, Jr. reaches his destination, pays off the $6,000 his father borrowed to pay for the journey, then stops sending remittances and falls out of contact.

Seven years later, 17-year-old Ernesto volunteers to go north. But the plan is complicated by family tensions with Uncle Agustín, as well as with another angry relative who is said to be affiliated with MS-13. After Ernesto naively announces his imminent departure on Facebook, he must flee from his own relatives, whose animosity could also endanger his identical twin brother Raul—so now Raul has to go north too. Paying for all this is $14,000 that dad has borrowed from another local moneylender, at 20 percent interest and guaranteed by the titles to the family’s precious agricultural land.

The twins get as far as the thorny scrub of South Texas before being caught by the U.S. Border Patrol. Still shy of 18, they are classified as juveniles, which means that, pending a future court date, they can be released to a family member. This turns out to be their older brother Wilber, Jr., whose own lack of legal status is no obstacle to his serving as their guardian. All he has to do is pay their airfare from Texas to California and stick them in school, not the labor market—to the chagrin of the twins, who are increasingly anxious about their father’s migra-loan.

Fortunately for the twins, they now meet their author/mentor Markham, who connects them with a low-cost lawyer, who knows that family conflicts with an uncle will not qualify them for political asylum. Conceivably they could qualify for Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS), but this is for kids who have been abused by their parents. Moreover, if they win status as abused minors, their now legally certified abusive parents will never be able to join them in the United States. Neither issue prevents an obliging immigration judge from clearing Raul and Ernesto for SIJS status.

The other big hurdle is that the twins are too independent to settle down to tenth grade in an Oakland high school. They are distracted by iPhones, girls, cigarettes and booze; only their never-say-die teachers and counselors prevent them from flunking out. There is occasional talk of suicide, and occasional threats against others that never cause physical injury. The obvious bright spot is their dedication to the low-level service jobs which many American teenagers now shun and for which American employers now prefer immigrants. Where Ernesto and Raul shine is as a bus-boy and a dishwasher.

Compared to the travails of many unaccompanied minors, this is a success story, thanks to an older brother who provides a temporary home and an immigration judge who sets them on the road to legal residency. Yet the twins debate whether the United States is a better deal than El Salvador. Their first interpretation of an Oakland neighborhood is that it is poorer than their hometown. As for the violence they allegedly fled, it is in Oakland that they get mugged, not in El Salvador. On the migrant trail is where they suffer their worst experiences—in Guatemala Raul is beset by fake policemen who rob him and rape his female coyote, while in Mexico Ernesto witnesses his own coyotes murder a fellow migrant.

Only at the level of consumption—and of prestige in the eyes of Salvadorans who wish to follow their example—is California clearly a big improvement over El Salvador. Every photo the twins post on Facebook excites envy, including financial requests from the gangster relatives who allegedly chased them north. Given the boys’ excellent luck with the Oakland public schools and the immigration bureaucracy, their biggest worries lie elsewhere.

Unlike many immigrant-rights advocates, Markham does not ignore the theme that preoccupies so many Central Americans in the United States—the debt and interest threatening their family’s patrimony back home. Even after the twins drop out of high school to earn money as fast as they can, a succession of necessities and temptations prevents them from assembling the monthly $1,000 needed to save the family farm—until Ernesto’s impregnation of his 15-year-old Oakland girlfriend, followed by an expensive baby shower, ends this pretense once and for all. Up against the wall, Wilber, Sr., sells one parcel of land in the hope that the cash will save the other parcel.

In short, the family is liquidating a viable farm in order to send what Salvadorans call a chain of migrants into the lowest level of the U.S. proletariat. But even after three sons have been sent north, the vision of receiving remittances fails to materialize. As guilt gnaws at the twins, back home their relatives are tempted by the latest migration scams to come north themselves. These include 1) paying a U.S. citizen for a phony marriage or 2) showing up with a small child, which is said to guarantee release with the right to work. But each will require borrowing more money to pay smugglers. The book ends with the twins’ older sister receiving a $500 extortion threat over the phone—possibly from an MS-13 cousin who presumes they are rolling in remittances.

What does Markham conclude from this tangled saga? For her, the most important problem is how to overcome the limits of existing laws, as well as the prejudices of her fellow Americans, in order to ease the path of Ernesto, Raul, and others like them. Only by reaching the United States, she presumes, will they be able to escape poverty and violence. That the United States is no haven from poverty and violence, and that the underground migration industry might be stimulating poverty and violence in Central America by producing M-13 gangsters who seek to extort remittances . . . none of this seems to have occurred to her.

Yet The Far Away Brothers is an honest book, with Markham reporting circumstances that do not support her message. One telling detail is that, even in the supposed safety of Oakland, the twins are unsure of the loyalties of the people around them. Even in the Bay Area, they are afraid someone will come after them Salvadoran-style. Are they just being paranoid? Not if enough Salvadorans join them. In another telling detail, even Markham seems unsure whether one of the twins briefly belonged to a gang or not. If it is this hard to tell, after several years’ acquaintance, how are U.S. government officials supposed to identify who deserves to be protected from whom?

MS-13 murders on Long Island corroborate the problem. Since 2014, Long Island has received at least 8,600 unaccompanied minors processed by U.S. migration enforcement, then released to guardians who are usually relatives. Over a span of 17 months, Suffolk County police attributed 17 murders to MS-13, with federally placed unaccompanied minors turning up among the accused. For example, of the 13 MS-13 members arrested for murdering two girls with machetes and baseball bats, seven had federal unaccompanied minor status. Of five MS-13 members who were arrested while attempting to abduct another victim, three arrived on Long Island with federal unaccompanied minor status. Of the latter five detainees, all but one attended Brentwood High School, five of whose students have been murdered by MS-13 members. The mother of one of the victims is suing Brentwood High for failing to protect her daughter from the gang. The school is also being accused of unfairly profiling students as possible gang members by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Seventeen murders, including five in a single high school, raise the question: Exactly who is capable of picking out gang members from a mass migration? Who is capable of doing so without error and without triggering lawsuits by civil libertarians? Which matters more, civil liberties or physical safety? If Salvadorans are fleeing not the Salvadoran state but their fellow Salvadorans, won’t a generous policy of admitting Salvadorans reproduce the dangers they face on U.S. soil?

Adding to the underage furor are thousands of Central American parents, usually mothers, who are showing up at the U.S. border towing small children. According to the Department of Homeland Security, the number of “family units” apprehended at the Mexican border has increased 600 percent between spring 2017 and spring 2018. The women say they are running away from gangs or domestic violence. They also have the idea that arriving with child in hand will give them a permiso or quick release into U.S. society. The permiso is a folk interpretation of how unaccompanied minors and women with small children were handled by the Obama Administration. Underage migrants qualified for a legal hearing, as did migrants who expressed a “credible fear” of persecution in their own country. Under this policy, tens of thousands have been released with temporary legal status, pending a date in immigration court that, thanks to a backlog of 700,000 cases, will take years to arrive.

Now the Trump Administration is striking back with zero-tolerance policies. In May Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that border-crossers with children will be separated from those children. There was such an outcry that the policy has been reversed—supposedly. In June Sessions made a second announcement with far wider implications: Fear of domestic abuse or criminal gangs will no longer be accepted as grounds for an asylum hearing.

The idea that the United States is a haven for the poor of low-income countries is an enduring feature of American national mythology. In actuality, American capitalism takes quite a toll on immigrants, especially when immigration levels are high, as they are at present. Fortunate outcomes can never be presumed. The consequences of high immigration flows for sending societies are, if anything, even more troubling. Immigration advocates have yet to realize that the migration industry and its remittances are a mighty contributor to the extortions and homicides wracking Central America. As a lucky remittance-receiver in a poor neighborhood wends her way down a rutted lane, chatting on her iPhone, she presents quite an opportunity for enrichment.

The post The Debate over Underage Migration appeared first on The American Interest.

Swedish Exceptionalism Hits a Wall

The “Swedish model” is popular among many members of the American Left, who see a progressive heaven: a healthy social democracy that combines a strong economy with an all-encompassing welfare state. But that image is dated. Sweden today is angry. In its upcoming September elections, the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats party could well become the largest political force in the country as the political establishment whistles past the graveyard.

The model’s bubble burst in 2015, when Sweden took in more than 160,000 asylum seekers—nearly 2 percent of the population. By November of that year, Green Party leader and Deputy Prime Minister Åsa Romson—the leading advocate of open borders—announced, unable to hold her tears back, that Sweden’s borders would now be closed. There was no more space.

Immigration is only part of the problem: For years, core elements of the state showed evidence of significant dysfunction. After the 180-degree turn in immigration policy, normally deferential Swedish voters suddenly began questioning their political class as never before. Once begun, the public’s willingness to obey their thought police in government and media dissipated rapidly; it was as though a magic spell of some sort had been broken. Since then, Swedes have begun to remake their country’s politics, and there is now no going back. But exactly what lies ahead is not yet clear.

The Rise of Swedish Exceptionalism

To understand how Sweden got to this point requires a short review of Swedish exceptionalism: how Sweden’s elites convinced themselves, and their population, that their country is more moral and righteous than the rest of the world.

Sweden used to be a poor country: In the 1860s, it experienced one of the last great famines in Europe, which among other factors triggered massive emigration to North America. Yet by 1900, Sweden had recovered and began to build what would become an immensely successful economy. An advantageous geographic location and political leaders that kept the country out of two world wars certainly helped. But so did a market economy, a homogenous population where farmers had been free and never experienced feudalism, and an ensuing culture of consensus that rendered society peaceful and orderly. Sweden spawned industries that figured among the world’s leading brands: Which other country of just seven million in 1960 could boast brands like Volvo, Saab, Ericsson, Electrolux, or IKEA, and build its own fighter jets?

The economic boom was remarkable. From the turn of the 20th century to the 1970s, Sweden’s GDP grew by an average of 2.4 percent—compared to less than 2 percent for the United States and Western Europe. Sweden’s GDP per capita soared from the global average in 1850 to double the average by 1930 and triple in 1965.

This export-fueled growth occurred in a peculiar political setting: From 1928 to 1991, Sweden was ruled by a single political party—the Social Democrats—for all but six years. This single-party rule presided over a corporatist state that was extremely friendly to large corporations, while building a cradle-to-grave welfare system on the back of very high levels of taxation. This stifled small business and entrepreneurship, but that mattered little as long as big industry and government provided sufficient employment for the population.

The Social Democratic “Swedish model” became in effect a hegemonic state ideology: a third, allegedly morally superior path in opposition to both Soviet-style communism and American-style capitalism. With this came a public rejection of all political or military alliances with a view to maintaining neutrality in wartime. In private, Sweden’s Social Democrats—who in the interwar period had taken a clear stance against communism—threw their lot in with the West, including far-reaching covert defense planning with NATO. But only a select few in the country’s military and political leadership knew this; the population at large, and the left-wing grassroots, did not.

Following the events of 1968, the Swedish Left became mesmerized by an increasingly intense Left-radical ideology that embraced Third World leftist revolutionaries, and identified the United States, NATO, and Israel as the enemy. During the 1970s, this powerful leftist wave took over much of the Social Democrat Party, the bureaucracy, and even the Lutheran State Church. Cooler heads ensured they never gained influence over finance and the economy, but they became dominant in foreign policy and particularly foreign assistance. During the long tenure of the charismatic Olof Palme, Sweden’s foreign policy became increasingly focused on supporting leftist causes. The growing aid budget largely went toward left-wing regimes, in particular the “African socialism” experiment in Tanzania, for which Sweden provided a whopping US$7 billion. As the late Per Ahlmark has documented, the Swedish Left fawned over all sorts of left-wing demagogues and tyrants. While Palme compared American bombings in Vietnam to Nazi Germany, during the 1970s and 1980s his government championed left-wing “liberation movements” across Latin America, Africa, and Asia. During a visit to Cuba in 1975 Palme hailed Castro’s revolution; in 1984, he was the first European leader to visit Nicaragua’s Sandinistas.

The extent and depth of the ideological zeal that gripped Sweden for a generation can hardly be overstated. In the 1970s, many young leftists like Birgitta Dahl publicly defended Cambodia’s genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, and rejected allegations of their mass murder as “lies.” Dahl rose to become Speaker of Parliament in 1994, without having to recant. Pierre Schori, a life-long advocate for communist dictators like Castro and the Sandinistas, was elevated to Deputy Foreign Minister and then Development Minister. Crucially, whereas Swedish Social Democrats had been ardent supporters of Israel in the past, in the 1970s they turned against Israel and embraced Yasser Arafat long before he publicly renounced terrorism.

The end of the Cold War only temporarily slowed this left-wing juggernaut. The Swedish Left quickly reinvented itself by embracing the postmodern causes of the New Left and repackaging itself accordingly. It now presented itself as a world champion of globalism. It had embraced “New Left” issues such as feminism and environmentalism already in the 1970s, but now expanded and fortified them with postmodern and postcolonial theorizing. At home, the Social Democrats determined that Sweden suffered from “structural discrimination,” was essentially a racist society suffused with deeply ingrained prejudices against “the other,” and had to be transformed from above by policies that counteracted all real or supposed manifestations of “white privilege.” A growing element was climate alarmism: Hardly a day goes by without dire warnings of impending doom unless Swedes, who are responsible for about 0.2 percent of world carbon emissions, radically change their lifestyle.

The prevailing ideology also led Sweden to adopt one of the world’s most liberal immigration policies. The number of people granted residence permits grew exponentially, the yearly average climbing from 20,000 a year in the 1980s to 40,000 in the 1990s and 70,000 in the 2000s. Between 2010 and 2015, the average hit 110,000: more than 1 percent of the country’s population each year, exceeding the peak of U.S. immigration over a century ago. Between 1995 and 2017, Sweden took in more than 1.8 million people. Meanwhile, the country’s leftist establishment in government and media branded as “racist” anyone daring to use the term “volumes” when speaking of immigration policy. The Left’s media dominance is palpable: Polls have showed that over half of print journalists, and two thirds of those in state TV and radio, sympathize with the Green or Left parties, which have never achieved a combined vote of more than 16 percent.

While the globalist agenda was driven by the Left, the center-right gradually accommodated to its rhetoric. Indeed, Fredrik Reinfeldt, who took over as leader of the supposedly conservative Moderate Party in 2003, gained power in 2006 largely be realigning the party with prevailing dogma. He slashed defense budgets and labeled national defense a “special interest,” while memorably stating that “only barbarism is genuinely Swedish. All development has come from abroad.” When the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats were first elected to parliament in 2010, Reinfeldt reacted by concluding an immigration pact with the Green Party to further liberalize immigration. His explicit purpose was to show that a vote for the Sweden Democrats would not cause him to change policies.

Key to the dominant leftist dogma has been to divide people into oppressor and oppressed groups. In the spirit of this “intersectionality,” the Swedish Left at home and abroad embraced Islamists because they claim to represent oppressed Muslims. The driving force has been the Social Democrats’ influential religious organization, which in a formal agreement with the Muslim Brotherhood-controlled Swedish Muslim Council pledged to secure political representation for Swedish Muslims—or rather, their self-proclaimed representatives. In 2013, the Social Democrats elected Omar Mustafa, leader of the Brotherhood-aligned Islamic Association in Sweden, to its party board—only to backtrack following reports of his connections to anti-Semitic and anti-gay statements. The Green Party has similarly been embroiled in Islamists scandals: In 2016, Housing Minister Mehmet Kaplan was forced to resign over connections to Turkish far Right and Islamists, and a candidate to the party board was forced to withdraw after his refusal to shake women’s hands caused a furor.

The confusion of the Swedish Left as its simultaneous embrace of feminism and Islamism clashed with one another would be amusing if the consequences were not so dire. Left-wing anti-Semitism has grown rapidly in the country, often bolstered by immigrants from the Middle East. The Swedish Left has been remarkably reluctant to deal with the problem in its own ranks. And in foreign policy, this romance with Islamism helps explain the harshly anti-Israel positions that have characterized Swedish foreign policy in recent years.

Trouble in Paradise

Left-wing elites gained firm control over agenda setting, which they exercised through Sweden’s media and political landscape. But as pollster Markus Uvell has detailed, this agenda did not correspond to the views of most Swedes, surprising numbers of whom espouse conservative views. How, then, did the Left succeed?

Swedes as a whole differ from Americans with their contentious civic associations and raucous debate. By contrast, Swedes are reluctant to speak out against a perceived consensus, which they tend to follow—until it fractures. In recent times, this phenomenon has been named the “opinion corridor”: a society with a very narrow space of acceptable political speech, with everything outside considered beyond the pale and leading to the exclusion or banishment of the perpetrator. In this sense, Swedish society as a whole could be likened to a liberal U.S. college campus, where views challenging the dominant Left-liberal ideology are voiced only at one’s own peril.

But reality has a tendency eventually to break even the most rigid dogmas. In Sweden the reality that ate away at the national fantasy was the gradual decay of four core functions of the state: education, health, public order, and defense. All the dominant parties were complicit in this failure: the Social Democrats who ruled from 1994 to 2006, Reinfeldt’s center-Right coalition that ruled until 2014, and particularly the Left-Green coalition in power since then. It stems from a combination of mismanagement, opportunism, and political correctness, exacerbated by the massive challenge posed by large-scale immigration. Leftist ideology played a key role in this. But mishandled privatization efforts played their part, too, as did fads in public administration, such as New Public Management theories, which imposed enormous administrative and reporting requirements on public service providers.

Sweden’s defense was long based on a healthy deterrent force. But after 1989 Swedish politicians surpassed their counterparts elsewhere in Europe in concluding that national defense was anachronistic in the new and peaceful era they believed to be emerging. Defense spending is headed toward less than 1 percent of GDP.  By 2013, the Chief of Sweden’s General Staff announced that if faced with a foreign invasion, Sweden had the capacity to defend itself only for one week. It was in response to this sober assessment that Prime Minister Reinfeldt angrily dismissed defense and everyone connected with it as merely a “special interest.”

As for education, the Swedish public school system became a kind of guinea pig for the social experiments conjured up by the 1968 generation. Grades and report cards were banned until the eighth grade. Schools came to focus on social skills and “values” rather than knowledge. The authority of teachers was downgraded, so that they can no longer discipline students. Classrooms are notoriously chaotic, with students chatting, playing, and spending time on their smartphones. A firm selling hearing protection now actively markets its products to teachers and children with brands like “Silenta” and “Coolkids,” which motivated students use because it is the only way to shut out the noise and concentrate on learning.

Meanwhile, new public administration practices have imposed huge administrative and reporting requirements on teachers, while their pay in real terms shrunk to under $40,000 per year. Teachers burn out and quit at an alarming rate, while schools are unable to recruit replacements. By 2022 the country will need 77,000 new teachers, but they are nowhere to be found. The impact on test results has been predictable, with Sweden sinking like a stone in the Program for International Student Assessment rankings. In 2003, Sweden was above average in reading, math, and science; by 2012, it was below average in all three. The downward trend was halted by 2015, but Swedish schools are far below the performance of their counterparts in neighboring countries.

Generous and high-quality healthcare has been another signature of the “Swedish model.” Sweden’s medical system does continue to deliver high-quality treatment—the problem is getting access to it. To reduce wait times, the government guarantees that patients see a primary care doctor within seven days, a specialist within ninety days, and receive surgery or other action within another ninety days. These are among the longest waiting times in all Europe, but even these goals are not being met. The National Healthcare Board in 2018 concluded that health providers fail to meet this timetable in more than 25 percent of cases.

Politicians respond by pouring money into the healthcare system. But the problem is not money: Sweden ranks fourth in the OECD on healthcare spending. The average German doctor treats over 2,400 patients per year, but in Sweden the number is under 700. Swedish doctors, again because of mismanagement and the quest for quantifiable reporting, spend so much of their time doing paperwork that they have less time to see patients. Meanwhile, real salaries in healthcare have plummeted. Specialist doctors receive half the salary of their counterparts in France or Britain; nurses earn so little and have such heavy workloads that group resignations are now commonplace. Sweden now has the lowest hospital bed capacity per capita in Europe, at 2.4 per thousand, compared to an EU average of 5.1.

Law and order is the last core area of state decline. Sweden has always prided itself on being a safe country, but things have decisively changed. Most dramatic is the unrelenting rise in gang crime, including deadly shootings, in Swedish cities. Gang criminals regularly target each other in public places in broad daylight, and they increasingly issue threats or take action against law enforcement officials. Swedish women, in particular, express growing concerns about crime, making it the top issue ahead of the September 2018 elections. A third of women now report fearing violence in the vicinity of their homes at night.

When critics of immigration point out the massive over-representation of immigrants and asylum seekers in crime statistics, they step on a hornet’s nest of political correctness. Meanwhile, like teachers and doctors, policemen are mired in paperwork and are quitting in droves. A thousand officers have left the capital region alone in recent times, leaving only 1,300 officers for a metropolitan area of 2.2 million. The result: the percentage of crimes that are ever solved is plummeting. Less than 4 percent of burglaries and 12 percent of assaults were resolved in 2015. Unsurprisingly, alternative and social media are rife with anger and frustration over the breakdown of law and order.

These facts, and the proliferation of social media, lend themselves to exaggeration. Some Swedish populists, as well as Russian news channels like RT and Sputnik, regularly portray Sweden as being on the brink of total collapse. This, of course, is nonsense. But it does feed the rise of violent right-wing extremists who seek to capitalize on the anger in the population.

It is against this background that the dominant dogma began to slip. As Uvell details, a growing rift is now opened between what politicians have said and what regular people have seen in their daily lives. Some 74 percent of Swedes, he reports, agree that politicians “focus too much on odd symbolic issues rather than things that matter in citizens’ life.” The decline of the public services created a powerful disconnect precisely because Swedes had been led to think of themselves as constituting the world’s most perfect society. When it became clear that this was no longer the case, and Swedes saw their country ranked with poorer southern European countries in category after category, the traditional Swedish deference to authority began to crack. As it did, the anti-establishment Sweden Democrats rose to take advantage.

The Rise of the Sweden Democrats

The rise of the Sweden Democrats has been dramatic. In 2010 it gained representation in parliament with less than 6 percent of the vote. Today, polling data predict that it has a realistic shot of becoming the country’s largest party. But unlike the Norwegian Progress Party and the Danish People’s Party, and more like France’s National Front, the Sweden Democrats have nasty roots. When formed in 1988, its leadership included many skinheads and Nazi sympathizers. But by the mid-1990s, a new generation of leaders began to clean the party up—particularly after a “gang of four,” led by the 26-year old Jimmie Åkesson, took over the party in 2005. The four, who had been student friends and built a nationalist association in the university town of Lund, rapidly rebuilt the party with a nationalist and social conservative ideology. Over time, Åkesson and his friends introduced what they called a zero-tolerance approach to racism and fascism, and have used this policy to expel literally hundreds of members. In an important turnaround, the Sweden Democrats are now strongly pro-Israel.

Because of the Sweden Democrats’ shady past, members of the establishment parties did everything in their power to freeze them out. In 2014, to keep the Sweden Democrats down, the established parties agreed to let the largest bloc rule even though it did not command a parliamentary majority. In practice, this means the center-Right has refused to govern even though there is an anti-socialist majority in parliament. But this strategy, which involved high-pitched alarmist rhetoric and public shunning and shaming, backfired spectacularly. In a development that will seem familiar to Americans, the Sweden Democrats turned out to be much more attuned to the sentiments and fears of the rank-and-file of voters than the political and media establishments. Every effort to isolate Åkesson and his group only increased voter sympathies for them: In 2014 they doubled their vote to near 13 percent. Opinion polls now indicate they are on track to receive between a fifth and a quarter of the vote. These new voters are comprised mainly of disillusioned former Social Democrats and conservatives.

These developments, as fundamental as they have been unexpected, show that the deeply engrained status quo in Swedish politics is collapsing. The Social Democrats are tumbling in the polls, amid a deep division between a Left focused on identity politics and those seeking to restore their position among the working class through a pragmatic approach that includes more restrictive policies on immigration. Their leader, Prime Minister Stefan Löfvén, appears at a loss to manage this very public rift.

As for the opposition, Swedish liberals (in the European sense of the term) and conservatives traditionally buried their differences in order to struggle against the almighty Left. Reinfeldt’s Allians för Sverige coalition of four center-Right parties—Moderate, Center, Liberal, and Christian Democrat—succeeded precisely because he took his nominally conservative party in a liberal direction. But the upheavals of recent years brought rising divisions within the Allians to the fore. The Moderates have rediscovered their conservative roots and embraced a restrictive immigration policy. While their new leader, Ulf Kristersson, is well-liked and competent, the party suffers from a credibility problem: All its top leaders were part of Reinfeldt’s inner circle and supported his open-borders immigration policies. Voters concerned with immigration thus ask themselves, “Why not vote for the real thing?” Such reasoning grew in appeal after Kristersson’s would-be coalition partner, the Center Party, refused to jettison its libertarian approach to immigration.

While broad sections of Swedish society are trashing about in this deep turmoil, the establishment has shown little inclination to adapt to reality. Just this spring, the Left-Green coalition government and the Center Party passed a special law to provide residence permits to 9,000 “unaccompanied minors” whose applications for asylum had previously been rejected. Most of these 9,000 were young Afghans who, according to medical examiners, were disqualified by age from the category of “minor.”

Meanwhile, the government’s most visible priority is to free Sweden of dependence on fossil fuels by 2030, a policy it has pursued by instituting punitive taxes on aviation. Opinion pages regularly publish articles that demand the prohibition of domestic air travel altogether. If successful, such a policy may temporarily restore Sweden’s tarnished self-righteousness, but only at the cost of its economic competitiveness. Amid heavy snowfall in 2016, Stockholm’s city government applied a feminist snow-removal policy, prioritizing sidewalks and bike paths supposedly used mainly by women rather than roads in business districts where mainly men work. And while the Russian Air Force simulates a nuclear attack on Sweden, the Swedish government emphasizes that it will be guided in all its actions by its “Feminist” foreign policy.

Light at the End of the Tunnel?

Sweden faces massive challenges in coming decades, challenges that require sober and pragmatic approaches rather than fantasies derived from progressive ideology. But the political and media establishments appear incapable of adapting to changing circumstances. All established political parties continue to proudly proclaim they will never cooperate with the Sweden Democrats. This, of course, is the safest recipe to ensure their continuing rise.

In the meantime, the country could become ungovernable. After the September 2018 elections, there is no realistic scenario in which either the Left-Green or center-Right blocs will be able to achieve a parliamentary majority. There is no denying that a dramatic shift has occurred in what has long been a center-Left society: Swedish voters are revolting against left-of-center parties, who are likely to command less than 40 percent of the vote this coming September. By contrast, right-of-center parties—if we include the Sweden Democrats—are likely to win the support of nearly 60 percent of voters. This is the new Swedish paradox, at least as things stand now: The Left is discredited, but the Right cannot or will not step up to the challenge of ruling the country.

After September, something will have to give if Sweden is to have a government. Liberals could defect to the Left, or conservatives could decide to rule with Swedish Democrat support. In any case, Sweden is destined for the foreseeable future to be ruled by weak coalition governments. That is unlikely either to solve the country’s problems, or to restore the myth of the perfect nation.

The post Swedish Exceptionalism Hits a Wall appeared first on The American Interest.

The Paradox of Our Safety Addiction

Western society has become addicted to safety. Virtually every institution claims safety as one of its core values. Safety has become an end in itself, and even the mere hint that a particular product or form of behavior is unsafe causes it to be denounced as immoral. Perversely, the very obsession with safety fosters a climate of anxiety that makes people feel more insecure, not less. When safety turns into a supposed supreme problem that touches on every domain of human experience, people’s capacity to make sense of their fears diminishes.

Throughout history, communities have deliberated on the relationship between safety and fear. “Fear is the foundation of safety,” noted the early Church Father Tertullian, reasoning that concern with safety motivates people to deliberate and plan. And indeed the aspiration for safety has been usually expressed through individuals and communities taking sensible precautions to limit exposure to harm. But the meaning attached to safety has become radically transformed in recent times.

In the current era two important and mutually reinforcing developments have altered the way safety is perceived. First, the definition of harm has greatly expanded and, second, its consequences are perceived as far more damaging and catastrophic than previously imagined. As to the latter, in the language of everyday life harms are often dramatized with the use of terms like “existential,” “incalculable,” and “irreversible.” As to the former, these inflated threat assessments are not confined to high-profile dangers such as those pertaining to the environment and global terrorism, for example; they are now regularly applied to the everyday experiences of society. So children who have been harmed are referred to as “scarred for life” or “damaged.”

The hyperbolic expansion of the meaning of harm has led to a fundamental revision to the significance that society attaches to safety. Safety has become a cultural obsession to the point that many institutions and policymakers have adopted the ideal of a “harm-free” world as a realistic objective, a fantasy perhaps most strikingly expressed through intolerance toward risk and accidents. Thus, America’s emergency medical establishment has been in the forefront of the movement to banish the word “accident” from their lexicon, replacing it with the term “preventable injury.”

The assumption that, in principle, all injuries are avoidable is integral to the project of constructing a harm-free world. At least rhetorically, what use to be a pious hope has mutated into a belief in it as a realistic option. With so much energy devoted to the elimination of harm, safety is not simply valued; it has become a value in its own right.

During the course of investigating society’s aspiration for a harm-free world, I inspected 150 corporate and institutional value statements selected randomly online. No doubt such value statements are principally drawn up with a view to responding to the exigencies of liability and public relations. Nevertheless, the ethos they adopt and the norms they promote provide useful insights into the institutional culture they represent. Virtually all the statements reviewed refer to safety as a “core value.” Many of them also uphold a commitment to what they refer to as a “safety philosophy”, and often contend that they uphold safety as a “way of life.” Advocates of so-called safety policy often promote the ideal of zero harm. As one advocate of “Treating Safety as a Value” explained:

The “safety is a value” ethos is founded on the fundamental philosophy that all injuries are preventable and that the goal of zero injuries can be achieved. To introduce this concept to a workplace, company leaders must develop a vision and commit to it. This commitment must be cascaded down through the management structure.

The importance that advocates of a zero-harm society attach to safety means that all other concerns and principles have to be subordinated to this goal. But one need not worry about tradeoffs, for there are none. The author of the above statement goes on to promise that the “reward of zero injuries over the long term will make the effort worthwhile—in both financial and human terms.” From this institutional perspective, the objective of a zero injury environment is not only realistic but also a worthwhile proposition with no downsides—just good business practice.

The introduction of rigorous safety regimes in workplaces, public institutions, and throughout society has made a significant contribution to the reduction of physical injuries. OSHA may be bureaucratized and overbearing at times, but virtually no one prefers things the way they were before the law creating it went into effect in December 1970. Most economically advanced societies, not just the United States, are safer for workers than in any previous stage of human history.

But paradoxically the achievement of unprecedented levels of physical safety has coincided with a heightened sense of insecurity. In these circumstances, the constant pursuit of a utopian vision of a harm-free world does little to help people feel secure. Since it continually draws attention to safety as a condition that is presumably still absent, it reinforces the sense of insecurity. In other words, Western society’s permanent quest for safety serves to highlight the absence of it. That is why, despite the unprecedented resources devoted to securing a harm-free world, Western societies appear to be far more troubled than others on account of safety’s presumed absence.

Safety and Fear

As also noted, the contemporary Western meaning of fear stands in sharp contrast to the way it was perceived in previous historical epochs. Until the 20th century fear was often regarded as an emotional state that meshed with moral concerns. According to the cultural norms dominant until about the end of the 19th century, fear was regarded as a medium for cultivating moral values. Distinctions were often drawn between good and bad fears, and communities provided people with moral and practical guidance on this subject. Religious and moral codes praised the positive attributes of fear, so long as it was the right kind of fear.

In the Judeo-Christian context, fear—specifically the “fear of God,” as the English translation of the original Hebrew invariably has it—is praised for helping people to discover, embrace, and adhere to moral virtues. According to the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is through the fear of God that the righteous may gain access to moral knowledge. That is why the fear of God is a central feature of Jewish and Christian theology. Some have argued that the earliest term for religion in biblical Hebrew and other Semitic languages is “fear of God”, and the usage of that phrase as a synonym for religion continued until relatively recently.

Both the Old and the New Testaments treat the fear of God as the prerequisite for the acquisition of moral virtue. The Bible offers a veritable cultural script providing guidance on what, and what not, to fear. Time and again Moses encouraged the Jews not to fear their enemies but to fear God instead. Moses exhorted his people, “Thou shalt fear the Lord thy God” (Deuteronomy 10:20-21), and continued: “Do not be afraid of the nations there, for the Lord your God will fight for you” (Deuteronomy 3:22). Elsewhere, he advised the Jews to “fear not, stand firm, and see the salvation of the Lord, which he will work for you today.” He promised that, “the Egyptians whom you see today, you shall never see again” (Exodus 14:13). Throughout the Hebrew Bible, the fear of God is endowed with positive attributes and is depicted as a moral duty. The Book of Job informs us that, “the fear of the Lord is wisdom” (Job 28:28), and also Proverbs: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (Proverbs 1:7).

Abrahamic religion is avowed on the grounds that it helps people to come to terms with their fears by endowing this and other aspects of human emotional experience with meaning—specifically, by integrating fear into culturally common socializing narratives about right and wrong, credit and blame.

Many secular thinkers and philosophers have also emphasized the moral dimension of fear. Aristotle understood that harms could not be abolished and argued that moral virtues, particularly courage, could serve as a medium for coming to terms with our fears. From this perspective, the aspiration for safety was a practical matter, not an idealized virtue. Friedrich Nietzsche praised the Athenian leader Pericles, who in his the famous Funeral Speech celebrated his people’s “indifference and contempt for safety, body and life.” Nietzsche characterized society’s preference for safety and comfort over risk as a form of slave morality.

Many 19th-century philosophers and thinkers shared a modified version of Nietzsche’s contempt for the valuation of safety. John Stuart Mill admonished those for whom safety trumped all other causes, stating that a “man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.”

Since the early 20th century, but especially since the 1970s, the regulation of fear through shared moral norms has largely unraveled. As Philip Rieff pointed out as long ago as 1966 in his classic The Triumph of the Therapeutic, it is not theologians or philosophers who now provide authoritative guidelines about the relationship between fear and safety, but psychologists.

One of the most significant contributions of psychology was to disassociate fear from the grammar of morality. By the 1970s a medicalized version of fear gained hegemony and psychology dictated that most people, and especially children, lacked the resources to deal with their fears. From this perspective, the threat posed by the emotion of fear was of such magnitude that its management required the intervention of psychologically informed experts. The medicalized account of fear has been underpinned ever since by the assumption that people, again especially children, are too fragile to deal forthrightly with the harms they face. The expansive regime of safety serves to protect people from having to confront threats that are increasingly perceived as harboring the potential to inflict irreversible emotional harms.

The shift from the moral to the psychological basis for thinking about fear is, above all, what has transformed Western society’s perception of safety. The rhetoric of a harm-free world and its obsessive quest for safety should be understood as a sublimated expression of fears that are morally uncontained.

The Quest for an Inverted Quarantine

Although many values statements celebrating safety tend to focus on preventing physical injuries and harms, in recent times the threats that preoccupy society are increasingly directed at damages caused to people’s emotions. Emotional injury to the individual is frequently portrayed as more damaging than a physical injury; as something that, again, can leave the person “damaged for life.” Hence the moral panic of a few decades past about the supposed great prevalence of child sexual abuse, recalled through the medium of repressed memories almost miraculously liberated by experts.

Unlike physical harm, emotional harm is limited only by the imagination, and as everyone knows, the imagination can concoct pretty much anything, whether it has a basis in lived experience or not. So regardless of intent, a gesture or a comment can be perceived in a way that causes damage. According to child protection guidelines used now in Britain, emotional abuse can refer to virtually every parental failing, from “failure to meet a child’s need for affection” to being so “over protective and possessive” that children are prevented from experiencing “normal social contact or normal physical activity.”

The expansion of the diagnosis of emotional harm is not confined to children. Contemporary cultural norms work to continually lower the threshold of acceptable distress, and therefore encourage individuals to interpret unpleasant experiences, or merely “blue” periods,” as damaging to their emotional health.

The omnipresence of emotional harms lends the deification of safety. The adjective “safe”—as in safe sex, safe drinking, safe eating, safe schools, and safe space—signals responsible behavior; the exhortation to “stay safe” is a secular version of “may God be with you.” That is why the demand for safety and protection from harm is so readily recognized as a legitimate claim for an entitlement to be validated and recognized. The attribution of safety to an experience or to a product endows them with qualities that automatically earn our approval, while individuals and institutions are frequently attacked for not exercising enough caution.

These psycho-social dynamics have not gone unnoticed. The UC-Santa Cruz sociologist Andrew Szasz invented the concept of “Inverted Quarantine” as a way to describe these developments. Unlike a traditional quarantine, which seeks to isolate sick individuals to keep them from spreading disease to the public, an inverted quarantine represents the opposite impulse of people isolating themselves from the harms that they perceive as threatening. Inverted quarantines constitute a response to the fear that the human condition is inherently unsafe.

Arguably the most striking example of a demand for an inverted quarantine is the emergence of the ideal of a safe space. Unlike a gated community set up to keep out undesirable outsiders, the purpose of a safe space is to protect its inhabitants from unwelcome criticism and thoughts. A shift in emphasis from gaining physical security from the threat of outside intruders to securing a sanctuary from exposure to unwelcome ideas illustrates the constant expansion of the demand for safety from something physical and visible to something abstract and invisible.

More than any aspiration thrown up by our culture of fear, the concept of a safe space highlights its two key features: the contention that the space inhabited by humanity is fundamentally unsafe, and the assertion that people are inherently “at risk” and so “vulnerable” that they are unlikely to cope with the challenges that life hurls at them without professional help.

The tendency to perceive virtually every dimension of human experience as a safety issue has altered people’s attitude to the future and the uncertainties they encounter. It often leads to the emergence of a sensibility that Christopher Lasch once characterized as survivalism. “Everyday life has begun to pattern itself on the survival strategies forced on those exposed to extreme adversity,” observed Lasch. In his superb study of this important cultural shift, Lasch attributed this development to the prominence that Western societies in general and America in particular gave to the question of survival from the early 1970s onwards. One symptom of this obsession with survivalism was the normalization of crisis and a tendency to perceive every issue, no matter how “fleeting or unimportant,” as a “matter of life or death.”

The idealization of safety and survival as values in their own right has acquired a commanding influence over public life. From this perspective the exaltation of heroism and courage by previous generations became almost entirely incomprehensible, except perhaps within the confines of societies’ warrior classes—the military and, far less so, police work. “Survivalism leads to a devaluation of heroism,” remarked Lasch, as was the “entire stock of allegedly outworn ideals of honor, heroic defiance of circumstances, and self-transcendence.” These traditional virtues have been displaced by the quest for safety.

But in this quest safety has acquired an indeterminate quality. To the question “safe from what?” the only logical answer is “potentially anything.” And again we are taken from the precincts of lived reality, which is typically experienced in a direct unmediated way, into those precincts indistinguishable cognitively from magic and mysticism, which can only be apprehended though abstractions.

The Freedom/Safety Tradeoff

Thomas Hobbes is the philosopher most widely associated with the project of assigning safety a central role in political discourse. In the aftermath of the upheavals of the English Civil War, Hobbes attempted to harness people’s basic impulse of self-preservation to justify a theory of sovereignty underpinned by fear. He argued that, driven by the fear of death and the aspiration for security, people would be willing to trade away their freedom in exchange for the safety provided by an all-powerful sovereign. He wrote that people “agree to create a sovereign because they are afraid of one another.”

In contrast to Hobbes, who highlighted the fear of death as the motive for exchanging freedom for security, in the contemporary era concern about safety is directed at the most banal, everyday features of life. Judging by the numerous health warnings issued about the most mundane aspects of human existence. it is not the actual fear of death but rather the fear of life that preoccupies the 21st-century Western imagination. Unlike the age-old practice of the politics of fear, the politicization of safety intrudes on the minutiae of people’s lives.

One of the most unattractive features of the deification of safety is the apparent tendency to elevate its dictates above the value of freedom. Within the moral framework of the culture of fear, safety and security are first-order values, while freedom is reduced to a second-order value at best. That is why the argument that curbing the right to free speech on college campuses is supposedly a small price to pay to protect someone from the pain of being offended has gained traction in recent times.

The relationship between freedom and safety has been a subject of debate throughout history. In numerous instances, the very human impulse to achieve safety has been used as an excuse to limit the exercise of freedom. This point was recognized, not least, by Alexander Hamilton: “Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct,” he wrote in November 1787, warning that “even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates,” which will “compel nations” to “destroy their civil and political rights.” With a hint of fatalism, Hamilton suggested that “to be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free.” Another of Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin, was unequivocal about the matter: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Of course tradeoffs between freedom and safety are real. The liberties that people enjoy do need to be harmonized with a community’s need for security; no polity guarantees absolute freedom, which is why every civilization has laws and means to enforce them. Security concerns are in a sense constant because no society can ever be perfectly secure, but they also can fluctuate, which is why measures to protect the commons—whether from terrorism, pandemic disease, or civil strife—must fluctuate as well. An extraordinary situation can rightly call for extraordinary protective measures, but they have to be recognized as extraordinary and temporary, rather than being ground into the bedrock of social reality to persist long after the dangers calling them forth subside.

That is what the argument about the responses to the post-9/11 “war on terror” has come down to at this point. On both sides of the Atlantic, the exigencies of safety and security were used to justify laws and procedures limiting aspects of civil liberty. One of the most troubling dimensions of this development has been the relentless trend towards the colonization of people’s private lives. Advocates of expanding intrusive instruments of surveillance actively promote calls for trading off privacy for safety, and in many instances citizens have been convinced to accept “Big Brother” watching over them in order to keep them safe. But what made sense to many as a precaution 17 years ago does not make so much sense now, as mass-casualty terrorism never amounted to an existential threat to any Western state. That this turned out to be the case was not clear at the time, and the politics of the time reflected that uncertainty.

But again, the key issue is what kind of danger and harm we are talking about. When a danger is real and most everyone can agree on what it is, the threat to liberty in taking precautions is relatively mild. We can still argue about whether President Lincoln was right to suspend habeas corpus during the Civil War, but no one argues that it should not have been reinstated when the situation changed. The real problem for liberal democracies, anyway, is when dangers are imagined, or exaggerated, or fabricated, and can be manipulated by political entrepreneurs.

The argument that liberty should be traded for security has been raised and re-raised by authorities throughout history. Erich Fromm’s classic 1941 book Escape from Freedom didn’t spring forth from a void. And many intelligent observers have criticized the ease with which political leaders were able to win public approval for now seemingly permanent abridgments of freedom in the aftermath of 9/11.

But when a similar surrendering of freedom is proposed in relation to prohibiting offensive speech in order to protect the emotional state of people who are offended by it, the advocates of freedom are conspicuous by their silence. Indeed, trading off freedom for some alleged psychic benefit is not unlike the argument that authoritarian-minded politicians frequently employ for justifying policies that curb people’s rights in order to “preserve their freedom”—a form of argument that takes us deep into Orwellian territory. How are people freer if they require a phalanx of supposed experts and institutions to keep them safe?

But here we are, living at a time when fear untethered to any traditional, meaning-giving framework of moral reasoning has driven people of nearly every political persuasion ever so slightly crazy. Take Donald Trump’s campaign promise to build a big, beautiful wall on the U.S.-Mexican border. A wall designed to prevent Mexican migrants from entering the United States was regarded by many of Trump’s supporters as a symbol of dutifully confronting an existential security threat. So we wall ourselves in to keep ourselves safe, as an expression of our freedom?

Yet many of Trump’s opponents are no less committed to constructing an inverted quarantine to keep people safe from other more abstract, emotional dangers. The impulse that fuels the demand for safe spaces is not entirely unlike the yearning for safety encapsulated by the slogan “Build that Wall.”

Alas, the act of trading in freedom for security does not make people feel safe. It heightens people’s awareness of their lack of control over their lives and thereby enhances their sense of insecurity. Moreover, the loss of any of our freedoms undermines people’s capacity to deal with the threats they do face. Examples are so plentiful from everyday life that one would think that pointing this out would be unnecessary. What happens when “helicopter” parents refuse to let their kids walk to school alone, or self-organize outdoor play, or go trick-or-treating without adult chaperones, or ride their bike around the block without a helmet? Kids are not stupid: They pick up on their parents’ fears and most ultimately assimilate much of it, making them far more fearful of life in general than they otherwise would be. No one should need to point out something so obvious, but we do need to point it out all the same.

The generic problem is no secret. It has been recognized by numerous policymakers working in national security, for example. Back at the turn of the present century, The Report of the National Commission on Terrorism (2000) took the view that “if the terrorists’ goal is to challenge significantly Americans’ sense of safety and confidence,” even a relatively small chemical or biological attack “could be successful.” Though the report’s prognosis was excessively pessimistic, it pointed to a real problem—for indeed the quest to achieve safety from terrorism, in the form of the bureaucratized paranoia we have inflicted on ourselves, has had the perverse effect of making us feel more insecure.

Safety cannot be acquired just by wanting it, and it certainly cannot be acquired by wanting it so badly that people ignore the very consequences of wanting it so badly. Those who propose avoiding risk and gaining safety will inevitably discover that what they acquire are obsessions about their insecurities, not solutions for them.

The constant focus of policymakers and politicians on the issue of safety unwittingly intensifies the public’s anxieties and insecurities about the future. And the more insecure people feel—having been taught that only experts can manage their problems—the more they turn to authority to assuage it.

Dominic Cooper, “Treating Safety as a Value,” Professional Safety (February 2001).

R.H. Pfeiffer, “The Fear of God,” Israel Exploration Journal

Vol. 5, No. 1 (1955).

Mill, “The Contest in America,” Dissertations and Discussions, vol. 1, p. 26 (1868). First published in Fraser’s Magazine (February 1862).

Szasz, Shopping Our Way to Safety: How We Changed from Protecting the Environment to Protecting Ourselves (University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

Lasch, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival In Troubled Times (W.W. Norton, 1984), p. 57.

Lasch, p. 60.

Lasch, pp. 72-3.

Hamilton, “The Consequences of Hostilities Between the States,” Federalist 8.

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