Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 82

What’s Wrong with Public Policy Education

Public policy education is ripe for an overhaul. Rethinking how it should be done has been one of my major preoccupations over the past decade, and is the focus of work that we are doing now at Stanford in restructuring our Masters in International Policy (MIP) Program. It is also at the core of several mid-career programs we run at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), such as the Leadership Academy for Development (LAD). The essence of the needed transformation is to shift the focus from training policy analysts to educating leaders who can accomplish things in the real world.

Public policy education in most American universities today reflects a broader problem in the social sciences, which is the dominance of economics. Most programs center on teaching students a battery of quantitative methods that are useful in policy analysis: applied econometrics, cost-benefit analysis, decision analysis, and, most recently, use of randomized experiments for program evaluation. Many schools build their curricula around these methods rather than the substantive areas of policy such as health, education, defense, criminal justice, or foreign policy. Students come out of these programs qualified to be policy analysts: They know how to gather data, analyze it rigorously, and evaluate the effectiveness of different public policy interventions. Historically, this approach started with the Rand Graduate School in the 1970s (which has subsequently undergone a major re-thinking of its approach).

There is no question that these skills are valuable and should be part of a public policy education.  The world has undergone a revolution in recent decades in terms of the role of evidence-based policy analysis, where policymakers can rely not just on anecdotes and seat-of-the-pants assessments, but statistically valid inferences that intervention X is likely to result in outcome Y, or that the millions of dollars spent on policy Z has actually had no measurable impact. Evidence-based policymaking is particularly necessary in the age of Donald Trump, amid the broad denigration of inconvenient facts that do not suit politicians’ prior preferences.

But being skilled in policy analysis is woefully inadequate to bring about policy change in the real world. Policy analysis will tell you what the optimal policy should be, but it does not tell you how to achieve that outcome.

The world is littered with optimal policies that don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of being adopted. Take for example a carbon tax, which a wide range of economists and policy analysts will tell you is the most efficient way to abate carbon emissions, reduce fossil fuel dependence, and achieve a host of other desired objectives. A carbon tax has been a nonstarter for years due to the protestations of a range of interest groups, from oil and chemical companies to truckers and cabbies and ordinary drivers who do not want to pay more for the gas they use to commute to work, or as inputs to their industrial processes. Implementing a carbon tax would require a complex strategy bringing together a coalition of groups that are willing to support it, figuring out how to neutralize the die-hard opponents, and convincing those on the fence that the policy would be a good, or at least a tolerable, thing. How to organize such a coalition, how to communicate a winning message, and how to manage the politics on a state and federal level would all be part of a necessary implementation strategy.

It is entirely possible that an analysis of the implementation strategy, rather than analysis of the underlying policy, will tell you that the goal is unachievable absent an external shock, which might then mean changing the scope of the policy, rethinking its objectives, or even deciding that you are pursuing the wrong objective.

Public policy education that sought to produce change-makers rather than policy analysts would therefore have to be different.  It would continue to teach policy analysis, but the latter would be a small component embedded in a broader set of skills.

The first set of skills would involve problem definition. A change-maker needs to query stakeholders about what they see as the policy problem, understand the local history, culture, and political system, and define a problem that is sufficiently narrow in scope that it can plausibly be solved.

At times reformers start with a favored solution without defining the right problem. A student I know spent a summer working at an NGO in India advocating use of electric cars in the interest of carbon abatement. It turns out, however, that India’s reliance on coal for marginal electricity generation means that more carbon would be put in the air if the country were to switch to electric vehicles, not less, so the group was actually contributing to the problem they were trying to solve.

As Matt Andrews, Michael Woolcock, and Lant Pritchett at the Kennedy School have argued, it is important to start from a concrete problem, that is, something that other people believe to be a problem. This means that there is already a constituency in favor of change, which can be the starting point for a coalition of people who want a different outcome.

The second set of skills concerns solutions development. This is where traditional policy analysis comes in: It is important to generate data, come up with a theory of change, and posit plausible options by which reformers can solve the problem they have set for themselves. This is where some ideas from product design, like rapid prototyping and testing, may be relevant.

The third and perhaps most important set of skills has to do with implementation. This begins necessarily with stakeholder analysis: that is, mapping of actors who are concerned with the particular policy problem, either as supporters of a solution, or opponents who want to maintain the status quo. From an analysis of the power and interests of the different stakeholders, one can begin to build coalitions of proponents, and think about strategies for expanding the coalition and neutralizing those who are opposed.  A reformer needs to think about where resources can be obtained, and, very critically, how to communicate one’s goals to the stakeholder audiences involved. Finally comes testing and evaluation—not in the expectation that there will be a continuous and rapid iterative process by which solutions are tried, evaluated, and modified. Randomized experiments have become the gold standard for program evaluation in recent years, but their cost and length of time to completion are often the enemies of rapid iteration and experimentation.

This three-stage process should not be thought of as a linear one, but rather one in which there is constant circling back to earlier stages in light of what one has learned in later ones. A failed solution may send one back to another option that was less favored but more feasible; indeed, it may force one to redefine the problem altogether. A proper stakeholder analysis should be fed back into the solution development: It may tell you that Option A, which produces the best outcomes, is impossible to implement, requiring moving to Option B or C instead.

This framework for policy problem-solving is not rocket science; rather it is common sense. Stakeholder analysis is something that every successful politician in the world has performed from the beginning of time. That is the essence of politics:  generating sufficient power by gathering allies and undermining opponents; it’s just that good politicians don’t apply a structured methodology to this task.

To accomplish this properly requires, however, thorough knowledge of local context, and it is appreciation for context that is most severely lacking in the way that public policy is taught today. That will be the subject of a subsequent post.

The post What’s Wrong with Public Policy Education appeared first on The American Interest.

An Election That Solves Nothing

The dust from Pakistan’s July 25 election has not yet fully settled. But notwithstanding the dispute created by the blatant election meddling of the country’s all-powerful military, it is clear that cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan will be the nuclear-armed, Muslim-majority country’s next Prime Minister.

Media reporting from Pakistan has already covered various aspects of Khan’s colorful personality and the young Pakistani voters’ disenchantment with traditional politics, which helped the maverick win. It is also important to explore why Pakistan, after four coups and several elections since its founding in 1947, is unable to shed its reputation as a state prone to crises.

Khan’s election and the surrounding controversy are emblematic of Pakistan’s deep-rooted structural problems. Most of his voters are young nationalists brought up on propaganda about how corrupt civilian politicians have deprived Pakistan of its rightful place under the sun. As a celebrity widely admired for building a cancer hospital in his mother’s memory after winning the 1992 Cricket World Cup, Khan was the perfect messenger for Pakistani hyper-nationalism.

After entering politics in 1997, he became all things to all men—democrat, supporter of authoritarianism, Islamist, liberal, anti-American, upholder of “true” Western values, anti-India demagogue, and the man who can make peace with India because of his relations with the country’s celebrities.

Khan, say his supporters, cares more about Pakistan than other politicians. Still, his plurality in the latest election was enabled by the military-led establishment, which has wanted to root out the two previously dominant political parties, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), for many years.

The absence of a level playing field for political parties in the run-up to the election and the many irregularities in the voting have been noted by EU election observers as well as the U.S. State Department. Protests over the rigged vote, some targeting the Pakistan Army, have also broken out in several parts of the country.

Although the demonstrations are likely to subside once the new government is installed, the polarization within Pakistan will not easily end. Khan’s Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI) received 16.8 million votes while the older parties, the PML-N and PPP, got 19 million votes between them.

Islamist parties, with more than five million votes, got little representation in parliament. But the sheer number of their voters means they will continue to cast a shadow over Pakistani politics. Having no stake in parliamentary politics, their role from outside could be disruptive unless they are handled deftly.

More important is the civil-military divide, which is likely to widen within society even if, unlike other elected civilian leaders, Khan does nothing to rock the boat within government. Pakistan’s military dominates almost all aspects of life and its control of the national narrative is profound.

On election day, Chief of Army Staff General Qamar Bajwa explained the reason why the army wanted so desperately to influence the outcome. “We are [the] target of inimical forces working against Pakistan,” he declared. The election was an opportunity to show the world that Pakistanis are “united and steadfast.”

From the army’s perspective, repeated regularly in Pakistan’s media and entrenched in school curricula, Pakistan is a nation under siege with many enemies and only one “all-weather friend”—China.

Pakistani politicians’ corruption not only hampers development, the army and its supporters believe, it also paves the way for Pakistan’s enemies (usually a reference to India but also at times applicable to the United States, Israel, or Afghanistan) to “buy” influence in the country.

The Pakistani military obviously wants a civilian façade in the form of an “elected” government that follows the military’s dictates on issues such as policy towards India, Afghanistan, jihadi terrorism, and relations with China and the United States. It does not want a genuinely popular civilian politician in power, backed by an electoral mandate, and certainly not one who might alter the country’s overall direction.

Pakistani politicians have often revealed their incompetence and corruption, and many Pakistanis share the simplistic view that bad politicians are the only thing that inhibits Pakistan’s greatness. But the country also needs a more realistic assessment of its size, its economic capacity, and its ambitions.

Pakistan is the sixth largest nation in the world by population and has the sixth largest army, but ranks at number 25 among the world’s countries by size of GDP on a purchasing power parity basis, and at number 42 in terms of nominal GDP. Although the country has an impressive nuclear arsenal, it has the smallest economy of any country that has tested nuclear weapons thus far (with the exception of North Korea).

Its literacy rates are abysmal. Forty percent of Pakistan’s population cannot read or write, including 57 percent of Pakistan’s adult population above the age of 15; 31 percent of all Pakistani men; and 45 percent of Pakistani women. Pakistan is home to the third largest illiterate population globally.

Furthermore, the country suffers from massive urban unemployment, rural underemployment, and low per capita income. Over 60 percent of Pakistan’s population lives on less than $2 per day.

None of this, of course, has stopped Pakistan’s leaders from recklessly pursuing military competition with India—a country six times larger in population and ten times larger in economic terms. Resolving the dispute over Kashmir is deemed more important than normalizing trade ties with India. Pakistan also supports the Taliban in Afghanistan, ostensibly to balance out India’s influence over secular Afghans. And none of this looks likely to change under Prime Minister Imran Khan.

Khan’s election campaign echoed several recurrent themes of Pakistan’s nationalist discourse. Khan linked corruption to treason and described ousted Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif derisively as “Modi ka yaar” (friend of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi). He branded the center-left PPP and other liberal or secular politicians as American agents and Western implants. His lieutenants portrayed Khan as the only patriot among politicians, one who would stand up to conspiracies by India and the “international establishment.”

Soon after the election, Khan made conciliatory remarks about the United States and India, though his first post-election speech included seven references to China. Khan’s most likely nominee for the position of Finance Minister has gone from talking about the conspiratorial “international establishment” to openly seeking an economic bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

For all his talk about changing the status quo, Khan seems to have no intention, let alone plans, of altering the course of Pakistan’s external relations. The hyper-nationalist agenda espoused by the Pakistani military featured intact in Khan’s post-election list of priorities: India must talk to Pakistan to settle the unresolvable Kashmir dispute; the United States must change its tone, return to its position as Pakistan’s benefactor, and recognize Pakistan’s preeminence in South Asia; and Pakistanis will build a great future for themselves if the rest of the world assists them with resources.

Historically, Pakistan’s geostrategic location was deemed to be its ticket to success. Soon after the country’s creation in 1947, Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah declared that “America needs Pakistan more than Pakistan needs America” as Pakistan sought arms and money from the United States. “Pakistan is the pivot of the world, as we are placed,” Jinnah had said, adding that it was “the frontier on which the future position of the world revolves” because “Russia is not so very far away.”

Pakistan leveraged its location well during the Cold War, and in the aftermath of 9/11, in the war against terrorism. U.S. economic and security assistance to Pakistan since 1954 stands at $43 billion, of which $33 billion have been given over the last 15 years. But being a rentier state, collecting rents for strategic location, is hardly a recipe for consistent progress.

The Cold War is long over, and the Trump Administration is in no mood to continue past policies of renting or buying influence in Pakistan. China remains Pakistan’s friend, but it is not clear that it will follow the U.S. pattern of plowing in money if Pakistan pursues policies contrary to its interest.

The timing of the change in the civilian façade of Pakistan coincides with a major balance of payments crisis. Pakistan’s hard currency reserves are at an all-time low just as several loan repayments are falling due. China has lent two billion dollars only recently to tide things over, but Pakistan might need as much as $12 billion from the IMF to avert default. Exports are stagnant at $22 billion.

Unlike in the past, this time the United States is unlikely to help Pakistan in dealing with recurrent financial crises. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has made it clear that the U.S. government would not support an IMF bailout for Pakistan if the money ends up being used to repay Chinese loans.

Pakistan’s track record with the IMF has not been good. On at least 11 previous occasions, Pakistan has promised economic reforms and failed to carry them to their conclusion. The United States has tended to quietly use its significant influence with the Fund to help Pakistan for political and strategic reasons.

It might make sense for Washington to let Pakistan’s negotiations with the IMF proceed on merit this time. Pakistan should get its bailout only if it commits itself to addressing its real problems. Meanwhile, as Pakistan increases its reliance on China, it will soon find out that all patrons have some expectations from their clients.

Having chosen a populist nationalist as Prime Minister, Pakistan’s establishment and young voters need to learn the hard way that low literacy, low exports, and high infant mortality are not the result of the actions of Pakistan’s enemies or even the consequence of politicians’ corruption. They are the product of the military’s national security policies and the desire to act as a great regional power on borrowed money. High defense spending limits the availability of funds for education; lower education levels reduce the human capital needed for economic productivity; terrorism and religious extremism discourage investment and attract sanctions.

Pakistan’s problems have deep roots and addressing them will require a fundamental shift away from the narrative that has brought the country to its current state. That process will take take more than one election cycle in any case—but as Pakistani elections go, this one has set the stage for an even more difficult road ahead.

The post An Election That Solves Nothing appeared first on The American Interest.

Terror and Stupefaction

Consider the fact that, on March 23 of this year in Paris, two men murdered a Holocaust survivor, 85-year-old Mireille Knoll, in a crime that French prosecutors characterized as one of an anti-Semitic motivation. Many observers leapt to the conclusion that this was a terror-inflected hate crime perpetrated by radical Muslims, partly because earlier that same day there had been an ISIS-inspired terror attack on a supermarket in the small French town of Trèbes.

But even at the time, based on what was reported at the inquest, the charge of anti-Semitic motivation seemed not to fit the facts. The prosecutors no doubt felt political pressure to describe it as anti-Semitic, partly because of the symbolism of Madame Knoll’s having escaped the 1942 Vichy roundup at Vel d’Hiv. But the suspects more resembled garden-variety criminal lowlifes who murdered the elderly Ms. Knoll for kicks or spare change—or perhaps, as one of them confessed, because she had earlier reported the other to the police.

One of the murder suspects is Alex Carrimbacus, a man who from the name we may surmise had as of March 23 never in his life set foot in a mosque. His accomplice, Yacine Mihoub, is of North African origin and so in some sense probably a Muslim, but at the time of the crime he was neither a devout nor a radicalized one. Unlike the terrorist in Trèbes, who was indeed a radicalized Muslim known to French security forces, Madame Knoll’s murderers were not.

Mihoub, an alcoholic and a drug addict, had previously been committed to a mental hospital after having threatened to burn down his own mother’s apartment building. The murder suspects met in prison, where Mihoub was doing time for sexually assaulting a 12-year-old girl, and Carrimbacus for aggravated theft. Carrimbacus may have tried to exculpate himself by telling the police that Mihoub did it because she was a Jew and he was a Muslim. Carrimbacus claimed that he did not know Madame Knoll was Jewish until Mihoub told him before murdering her. Mihoub, however, who had known Madame Knoll since his childhood, said emphatically that he didn’t kill her—Carrimbacus did. Carrimbacus alone is the source of the report that Mihoub cried the takbir before murdering Madame Knoll; but Carrimbacus, showing cognitive signs of protracted substance abuse, couldn’t even keep that story straight in the course of his interrogation.

Now consider the fact that almost exactly two years earlier, on March 22, 2016, three terror attacks were perpetrated in Brussels by a supposedly ISIS-affiliated terror cell located in the Molenbeek section of town. That same section of town, it turned out, had produced the terrorists who attacked Paris in November 2015—the infamous Bataclan theater murders, and other attacks in and around the town. What do we know about this terror cell?

We know that it consisted mainly of men of Moroccan Berber descent, including Ibrahim El Bakraoui, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, Mohamed Abrini, Najim Laachraoui, Abdelkrim Motii, Younes Tsouli, Salah Abdeslam and Brahim Adbeslam—all of whom were either born or grew up in Europe. But what stands out is that, like Mihoub, none of these men was particularly pious. Most seemed to have been proselytized via the internet by Anwar al-Awlaki, but all of them lived secular lives. According to numerous press reports at the time, many were petty criminals who hung around drinking in bars; several were familiar, let us put it, with neighborhood prostitutes; and many bought, sold, and used drugs. A drug of choice was Captagon, an amphetamine-based substance formally known as fenethylline. Not exactly models of Islamic rectitude they were.

Now consider the fact that on September 10, 2003, Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh was murdered in the ladies’ section of the Nordiska Kompaniet department store in central Stockholm by Mijailo Mijailović, a man born in December 1978 in Sweden to Serb parents. Mijailović later claimed that at the time he “felt hatred of all politicians,” Swedish and Serbian, and blamed his problems on them. He said that it had been “a coincidence” that his victim had been Lindh, and that he had been high on a hypnotic drug at the time: Flunitrazepam.

Also known as Rohypnol, Flunitrazepam is an intermediate acting benzodiazepine used in some countries to treat severe insomnia. It is a powerful hypnotic even when used in small amounts as ordered by physicians, and professionals only ever use it as a short-term medication. The reason is that Flunitrazepam impairs cognitive functions that may appear as lack of concentration and confusion. It also impairs psychomotor functions and abuse (long-term use or high doses) has been known to cause aggressiveness, agitation, loss of impulse control, talkativeness, agitation, confusion, convulsions, and violent behavior. Some have termed Flunitrazepam a date-rape drug, as well.

Mijailović had long-running psychiatric issues. Politicians did not cause them; an abusive alcoholic father who used to beat his mother in front of him might have, however. But his psychiatric issues were exacerbated by a long history of drug usage. Mijailović reportedly stabbed Lindh just five days after having been released from a psychiatric institution, which is probably where, somehow, he got his hands on Flunitrazepam. No Flunitrazepam, almost certainly no murder.

What do these three sad tales of violence have in common, aside from the fact that they all occurred in Europe? Drugs. They all involve drug use and abuse of one kind or another.

Doubtless there are many salafi-minded terrorists who are sober as a judge, as we Americans like to say. ISIS fighters in Syria, however, also used Captagon regularly and in large quantities; alas, many of them, too, have not been particularly religious insofar as their personal conduct is concerned. Alas, in addition to the radicalization of Islam, we now have the Islamicization of radicalism, as Olivier Roy has called it. We have, in other words, “Islam” pressed into service not as a cause or a belief system, but as a tether for identity politics among marginalized Muslims—often first-generation European—living outside of Muslim-majority societies. And it turns out that a lot of these individuals use and abuse drugs.

The phenomenon is not limited to Europe: Both the Tsarnaev brothers of Boston Marathon fame and Omar Mateen of the Orlando gay nightclub massacre were not particularly pious or knowledgeable Muslims. They were Daghestani and Pashtun outliers, respectively, in an American cultural context they struggled to understand and fit into—and both latched onto Islam as a counter-identity marker. And drugs? Yes, indeed.

Mateen reportedly researched anti-psychotic drugs before his attack, and aside from substantial cannabis and steroid use to which he admitted, may well have tried a few of them in a cycle where fearing a descent into madness had the ironic affect of helping to drive him mad. As for the Tsarnaev Brothers, the elder brother, Tamerlane, was deep in dope, selling and using heavily. Indeed, after his death, Federal prosecutors named him as a suspect in a brutal, drug-related triple murder that took place two years before the Boston Marathon bombing. Younger brother Dzhokhar was also a heavy doper, and a well-known drug dealer at UMass-Dartmouth.

None of this should be terribly surprising. The human urge to stupefaction is a fact of life, and it has been a fact of life for thousands of years. Anthropologists have this joke, or quip, which holds that men were probably pharmacologists before they were farmers. There is even some evidence from archeological sources that one of the reasons the agricultural revolution stuck was so that people could have a reliable supply of intoxicants. Ancient Near Eastern festivals that date to the spring barley harvest, or six or seven weeks of fermentation after it, suggest ritual paeans to beer and mead.

Why do some people stupefy themselves? There are basically two classes of reasons. The first is pain: Many people self-medicate because something is hurting them. The second is anxiety: Some people sense a greater distance between how their life is and how they think it should be or want it to be. With pain, drug use can bring at least temporary relief, even though it may cause other problems down the line. With anxiety, a much squishier issue, drugs can dull or alter consciousness. The underlying anxiety may remain but, depending on the drug, the anxiety can temporarily be dissociated from consciousness. As the anesthesiologist Ronald Dworkin puts it with respect to opioids,

Opioids work not by eliminating pain but by detaching people from their pain, causing them to grow indifferent to it. Other psychoactive drugs work similarly. The life circumstances that cause unhappiness may persist, but for those taking antidepressants, anti-anxiety drugs, and especially alcohol, the feeling of unhappiness becomes vaguely distant. Users care about it less, or even imagine that the unhappiness belongs to someone else. Whether it is opioids, alcohol, antidepressants, or anti-anxiety agents, what bothers sober people does not bother drugged people.

Pain aside, what creates the kinds and levels of anxiety that lead people to use drugs? Well, some personality types are more prone to drug use and addiction no matter where or when they live. It is also clearly the case that the availability of drugs, and the existence or lack thereof of social taboos against their use, will also factor into how many people use drugs, how often they use them, and how much of them they use. So culture matters: Some are relatively permissive when it comes to drug use—at least certain kinds of drugs—while others are less so.

All else equal, however, it also seems to be the case that some sets of social conditions are more conducive to producing anxiety than others. But what kind of social conditions may not be entirely obvious.

It stands to reason that perceptions of danger, physical or more abstract, will increase anxiety. So ambient fear produces anxiety. But so can alienation and a sense of meaninglessness that is often associated with weak social bonds. Thus, we know that loneliness produces depression and anxiety, as well, and lonely people are more prone to drug abuse than people with normal, healthy social ties.

Interestingly, however, affluence can also produce anxiety, when people think that having a lot of money and stuff is supposed to make them happy, and of course it often doesn’t. As John Steinbeck expressed the gist in his 1952 novel East of Eden, “Maybe everyone is too rich. I have noticed that there is no dissatisfaction like that of the rich. Feed a man, clothe him, put him in a good house, and he will die of despair.” And that, in turn, could be because most people do exhibit, as Dostoevsky once put it, “a craving for community” that affluence does not guarantee. Wrote Robert Nisbet in his 1982 book Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary:

What we know least about as the result of thousands of years of civilized history is affluence. We are the first affluent state, politically, psychologically and sociologically. And there is something about affluence that does not seem to produce community. Poverty will produce community—a sense of spirit, of organization, or working together. Affluence doesn’t seem to.

So it’s not a great surprise—or it shouldn’t be, anyway—that wealthy secular societies like those of the West produce bumper crops of anxiety, and drug taking.

Consider the trajectory, as best we can gauge it, in the United States. From colonial times and especially during the 19th century, America was a pretty consistently drunken place. Foreign visitors regularly noted it; old-timer Americans of English stock liked to blame it on immigrant Scots and later Irish; and it was not for nothing that Prohibition made its way onto the national political agenda. The famous “Johnny Appleseed” was not welcomed far and wide as he roamed the American frontier for the sake of apple pie—it was all about hard cider.

By the 1880s or thereabouts, in western Europe as well as in the United States, pharmaceutical entrepreneurs began to parse the various unpleasant feelings that prodded people to stupefy themselves with drink into categories (pain, insomnia, depression, anxiety), and then tried to target them with specific agents. Alcohol ceased to be the only solution as first laudanum and then codeine were added to the list of available anti-anxiety tools. By the end of the 19th century at least one in 200 Americans had an opioid addiction problem, and that was not to speak of the continuing rampant abuse of alcohol.

Now fast-forward to today, and what do we see? As Dworkin has summarized the data, about 60 million Americans use a sleep aid at night, about 30 million are on antidepressants, around 15 million are on anti-anxiety drugs, approximately 16 million regularly abuse alcohol, and 65 million admit to binge drinking at least once a month. Then there are the 2.1 million with an opioid abuse disorder. Add it all together and the number of Americans who regularly stupefy themselves comes to about half the adult population. This is not historically all that anomalous, except maybe just to a degree or two. It would not surprise me if the data on most wealthy, secular European countries, were such data available and reliable, were roughly similar.

Obviously, only a very tiny percentage of self-medicated Americans get publicly violent in a way we would associate with domestic terrorism. But it is likely that most, perhaps nearly all, of those who are thusly associated fall into the ranks of the regularly stupefied. It remains for more meticulous research to establish the specifics. Unfortunately, we do not always get toxicology read-outs on (often dead) terrorists.

And what of Muslims in Europe, the immigrant and especially first-generation cohorts from which nearly all terrorists that have attacked European societies in recent times have come? Again, only a very tiny percentage of immigrant and first-generation Muslim cohorts have been involved in terrorism, but aside from IRA and Basque terrorists of earlier years, nearly all of the attackers over the past two decades have been of Middle Eastern Muslim origin. The question is how many of that small number have been habitual drug users?

We can only speculate. As we have seen, many and probably most of these individuals lived secular and impious lives from an orthodox Sunni Muslim perspective. Many and probably most have been marginal misfits, with low personal social capital, in both local Muslim and “alien” national communities that are very affluent by almost any reasonable standard—the specifics of marginalization and affluence obviously differing somewhat from country to country. A thumbnail guess of the kind of anxiety levels that typically lead to stupefaction would be that they are generally high, and higher than the general social norm. Careful research by those with access to the relevant data will, I believe, bear that inference out.

So yes, radicalization of Muslims in Europe is real, and it is a problem that counterterrorist experts and officials acknowledge and deal with. But the ersatz Islamicization of radicalism born of confusion, fear, hopelessness, resentment, and anger is also real, and the intersection of that form of danger with stupefaction is very likely real as well. European officials whose job it is to protect their societies from terrorism probably know from experience about this intersection, and pay attention to it in their efforts at prevention. Expert analysis and scholarship, on the other hand, seem to have barely noticed it, if my scan of the extent literature has been accurate. There’s a doctoral dissertation for the taking.

Note: This is the third and final installment of an essay series on terrorism: “Terror and Charisma” ran in May; “Terrorism and Fear” ran in June. An earlier version of this essay ran at Al-Mesbar (Dubai), July 29, 2018.

For more details, see Claire Berlinski, “The Muted Soul: How the French Mourn,” The American Interest (July-August 2018).

Unfortunately and somewhat inexplicably, Carrimbacus’s supposed claim has “stuck” on American journalists; it was repeated as a fact by Adam Nossiter in a July 28 front-page New York Times article entitled, “France Grapples with ‘New Anti-Semitism’ After Wave of Violence.”

But just by the way—because I know what some of you are thinking—no, there is no ancient connection of drugs to political violence through the supposed etymology of the word “assassin.” It has become a veritably unshakable urban legend in the West that the word “assassin” comes from the word hashish, the intimation being that members of the Nizari Ismaili sect of the 11th-13thcenturies, holed up in the recesses of the Alborz Mountains of Iran (and later in Masyaf Castle in Syria), used to steel themselves with drugs before going out and selectively killing high-ranking enemies. It’s a great story, but it isn’t true. The “order of the Assassins”—asasiyun—derives from an Arabic word meaning principle. Sunni enemies of the order made the word-play connection with low-life drug users, and clueless Europeans from Marco Polo to a 19th-century French orientalist named Silvestre de Sacy took the word-play as etymological truth.

Ronald W. Dworkin, “Doctor’s Orders: Misdiagnosing the Opioid Crisis,” The American Interest Online, July 26, 2018.

It has been a long time since terror attacks in Europe have been perpetrated by Middle Eastern residents who came to Europe for the purpose, as with the Palestinian terror attacks of the 1970s.

The post Terror and Stupefaction appeared first on The American Interest.

Explaining the Indefensible

I recently participated in a panel discussion on the refugee crisis in the Middle East at the Jesuit university where I teach. I shared the podium with an undergraduate whose family had fled Syria and a colleague from the theology department. Responding to my co-panelists’ heartfelt pleas for humanitarian relief to populations in distress, I attempted to sound a note of realism by pointing to the difficult judgments that must be made between individuals needing shelter from duress and those seeking “merely” to improve their life chances here. I argued that one reason Americans generally were not more welcoming of those genuinely seeking sanctuary was that this critical distinction had long since gotten muddled in our decades-long debate over immigration.

My theologian colleague responded by citing the Biblical injunction “to welcome the stranger.” She went on to insist that as a political community we are obliged to welcome all “strangers”—immigrants and refugees alike. Overcoming my surprise at a Catholic so uncharacteristically invoking Scripture, I demurred and suggested that this could hardly be the basis of a sustainable national policy. But on that occasion, mine was the minority view.

My colleague’s refusal to differentiate between the claims of immigrants and refugees reflects the posture of the Catholic Church generally. Consider, for example, how at a Mass celebrated along the U.S.-Mexican border in February 2016, Pope Francis failed to draw any such distinctions and criticized the United States for denying entry both to Mexican migrants seeking to work or join relatives here, and to women and children fleeing economic, social, and, political chaos in Central America.

The refusal to critically evaluate such claims and the intellectual confusion that sustains them are hardly limited to Catholics, or even to other believers. It is a refusal strongly reinforced by Americans’ deeply engrained, virtually mythological misunderstanding of our history as “a nation of immigrants.” As historian John Higham pointed out decades ago, Emma Lazarus’s famous 1883 sonnet affixed to the pedestal of the Statute of Liberty praised “the Mother of Exiles” for welcoming not ordinary migrants but victims of anti-Jewish pogroms in Czarist Russia. Today, these people would be designated refugees. And yet the Statue is the symbol of our self-understanding as an immigrant nation.

This confusion has persisted and even flourished for many years now. In 1965 Lyndon Johnson signed the Hart-Celler Act, repealing the reviled national-origin quotas, which had been the basis of our immigration policy since 1924. He did so at a ceremony held at the base of the Statue of Liberty, and on that occasion thought it appropriate to also announce a new initiative to welcome refugees from communist Cuba. As Higham noted, “the revival of the myth of America as a refuge for the oppressed” was thereby affirmed. Decades later, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio got ensnared in this same farrago when he was criticized for claiming that his family was part of Florida’s “exile community,” even though his parents had freely chosen to emigrate from Cuba years before Castro’s revolution.

There are two overlapping but distinct sources of confusion here. The first is definitional: who precisely is a refugee and how does a refugee differ from a migrant—or from an immigrant? The second is political and arises as participants in the global debates over these issues adapt their goals and frame their appeals to suit varied and changing contexts, constituencies, and audiences.

The starting point for definitional issues is the 1951 Geneva Convention, which declared a refugee to be “any person who . . . owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country.” Or, as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) put it in a recent publication: “Refugees are persons fleeing armed conflict or persecution . . . it is too dangerous for them to return home, and they need sanctuary elsewhere.”

It is worth emphasizing that the 1951 Convention charged the UNHCR with supervising “application,” not enforcement, of its provisions vis-à-vis sovereign states. In recent years the Commission has been at pains to distinguish between what it refers to as “refugees” and “migrants,” defining the latter as those who “choose to move not because of a direct threat of persecution or death, but mainly to improve their lives by finding work, or in some case for education, family reunion, or other reasons. Unlike refugees who cannot safely return home, migrants face no such impediment to return.”

(For our purposes here, migrants who are able safely to return home but choose to settle in another country—and/or are so perceived by the citizens living in that country—will be referred to as immigrants. This is the prevailing usage in America.)

The High Commissioner’s original mandate pertained exclusively to events in Europe before January 1, 1951 and was set to expire in three years. But with old challenges lingering and new ones emerging, these bounds were extended and eventually eliminated. In time, the UNHCR also came to issue guidelines clarifying gender-based persecution as grounds for refugee status that were deemed implicit in the Convention’s original language.

Since then shifting geopolitical realities have raised much more daunting challenges to the Convention’s original assumptions and categories. One such has been the emergence of non-state actors, who were not “agents of persecution” as envisioned by the signatories to the Convention in the early 1950s. Potential claimants not anticipated then also include individuals forced to leave their country of residence due to environmental issues—“environmental refugees”—as well as those who have crossed an international border due to a natural disaster such as drought or famine—“forced migrants.” Finally, there are “internally displaced persons,” so-called IDPs, who have not crossed an international border but have nevertheless been forced to leave their homes or places of habitual residence as a result of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights, or natural or man-made disasters.

The response of the UNHCR to such developments has been schizophrenic. On the one hand, while addressing the specific events of the past few years and noting how the terms “refugees” and “migrants” get used interchangeably in the media, the Commission has gone out of its way to assert the absolute imperative of maintaining the clarity of the distinction. As it insists, “Conflating refugees and migrants can have serious consequences for the lives and safety of refugees. Blurring the two terms takes attention away from the specific legal protections refugees require. It can undermine support for refugees and the institution of asylum at a time when more refugees need such protection than ever before.”

Yet in its recent annual reports, the UNHCR engages in just such blurring. It takes pains to present data not only on refugees, properly understood and strictly defined, but also on IDPs as well as persons in “refugee-like situations” and “other groups or persons of concern,” defined as “individuals who do not necessarily fall directly into any of these groups but to whom UNHCR has extended its protection and/or assistance services, based on humanitarian or other special grounds.” These are all then identified as “populations of concern.” Hence, the significance of the vague language in the title of one of the Commission’s reports: UNHCR Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2014.

As the UNHCR acknowledges, “politics has a way of intervening in such debates,” by which the Commission is decidedly not referring to its own politics. Apparently, individuals and organizations directly engaged in humanitarian work have a difficult time seeing themselves motivated or influenced by politics. Certainly as far as the Commission is concerned, “politics” is what other actors and organizations engage in. Thus, the UNHCR fails to acknowledge how its treatment of emergent categories such as those described in the paragraph above reflect not merely technical or administrative responses to changing realities, but also political responses.

Changing geopolitical realities have posed related but somewhat different challenges for Americans. These are due in part to the intensity of our ongoing debate over immigration, but also to critical developments in our politics. For instance, refugee advocates readily explain how they have built up alliances with immigrant advocates, and how doing so has afforded them the benefit of the relatively greater political clout of domestic interests supporting immigration. Yet this has undoubtedly been at the expense of the refugee advocates’ relatively greater moral claim on America’s conscience. So however shrewd a political calculation this may be, the indisputable result has been precisely the blurring of the distinction between refugees and migrants that the UNHCR seeks to avoid.

Another critical development in American politics is highlighted by Philip Schrag, a seasoned refugee advocate and professor of law at Georgetown. Schrag has written probingly of the challenges raised by the contemporary American expectation that politically inert segments of the population who in the past would have been overlooked or ignored should now be represented. As he explains, public-interest advocates seeking to represent such groups typically work through large, informal coalitions that encounter difficulties both coordinating among themselves and communicating their negotiating positions to adversaries. Moreover, such advocates do not easily agree on compromise or fallback positions on behalf of the groups they purport to represent. For while mindful of those groups’ interests, the advocates are not really accountable to them. As Schrag puts it, “public interest advocates are often concerned about legitimacy,” and consequently “perpetually doubt their right to take less than an absolutist position.”

In addition to blurring the distinction between refugees and immigrants, Americans have long misapprehended the motives of immigrants. Again, this can be traced back to the Statue of Liberty and Lazarus’s sonnet, from which generations of Americans have learned of “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses,” of “the wretched refuse,” and of “the homeless, tempest-tost” being welcomed by a lamp lighting the way to “the golden door.” This is yet another iteration of “the revival of the myth of America as a refuge for the oppressed” underscored by Higham.

In fact, most immigrants to North America have not typically been the poorest of the poor. As economic historians Jeffrey Williamson and Timothy Hatton have persuasively argued, throughout the 19th and into the 20th century, it was seldom the poorest strata of sending societies that migrated to the United States. Rather it was those with the cultural capacities and financial means to plan and pay for Transatlantic travel. Even among those who might today be considered refugees or even forced migrants—Jews escaping Czarist pogroms or Irish peasants fleeing famine—it was those with relatively greater resources who were most likely to pick up and leave.

Another widely ignored dynamic is that “immigrants” to America have not always intended to stay. Indeed, as the costs of Transatlantic travel declined over the 19th and into the 20th century due to development of the steamship, ever more “birds of passage” arrived planning to make enough money to allow them to return home and pursue some agenda back there. Such “target earners” explain why as many as half of those who arrived here from Italy and other southern and east European countries in the years leading up to World War I eventually returned home.

Whatever their original intentions, immigrants have typically experienced ambivalence, hesitation, and profound misgivings about leaving their birth countries for America. This emotional reality is well captured in the recent film Brooklyn, about a young Irish woman who in the early 1950s reluctantly leaves her widowed mother and spinster sister behind and arrives in Brooklyn, not really intending to stay. But she eventually meets and then secretly marries the son of Italian immigrants, a hardworking plumber. Then, suddenly, her sister back in Ireland dies. Our heroine returns home to help her bereft mother and quickly gets drawn into marriage schemes that her family, friends, and neighbors have concocted for her. She gets involved with a well-situated young man from her town and feels tempted to abandon her secret husband back in the United States, only to change her mind when she discovers she is pregnant with the latter’s child.

It is no coincidence that this film is a British-Canadian-Irish coproduction, for we Americans seem unable or unwilling to acknowledge the ambivalence that has so often characterized the experiences of migrants to these shores. Typically, we want to simplify these complex stories and above all flatter ourselves that anybody in their right mind would want to come here and become an American. Hence, the enduring if mostly misunderstood appeal of Lazarus’s sonnet.

Such varied and complex motives are similarly to be found among today’s undocumented immigrants—though once again, we Americans are largely oblivious to such subtleties. Indeed, we remain almost willfully ignorant of the intentions of those residing here illegally. We mostly lack any semblance of curiosity about why they come here. Yet not unlike those “birds of passage” who migrated from Europe a century or more ago, many undocumented arrive here not intending to remain, but rather to work hard, often at more than one job, to economize on living expenses, and then to return home, either having sent money back to their families or having saved enough to buy land, start a business, or the like. To maximize their savings, they crowd into substandard living conditions. Almost invariably, too, these are family-made decisions and strategies at work, not those of “pioneer” individuals.

Despite such intentions, many of the undocumented end up staying. But that is typically a difficult and drawn-out decision, involving movement back and forth between the United States and the homeland, especially if that homeland is Mexico or in Central America. Referring to the immigrant parents of his students, the principal of a barrio parochial school in Chicago explained one outcome to sociologists William Julius Wilson and Richard Taub: “Mexicans don’t think they’re going to be living here a long time. That makes them not invest that much in their neighborhood.”

Activist lawyer Jennifer Gordon, armed with a MacArthur genius award, came up against similar realities when she attempted—unsuccessfully—to organize undocumented Central American day laborers in suburban Long Island. Explaining why her efforts foundered, she describes these individuals as “settlers in fact but sojourners in attitude,” and notes that they were “ambivalent about settling in the United States, their hope of maximizing their earnings in the short term and returning home a persistent counterweight to the increasing stake they held in their life here as the years piled up behind them.” Since these findings were reported, it has undoubtedly become more difficult to go back and forth across the border, as many such “immigrants” had grown accustomed to doing. But even in the face of these facts on the ground, dreams of returning home die hard.

Such findings further highlight the fact that migration is not necessarily a straightforward, one-time event, but often a protracted and convoluted process marked by ambivalence, indecision, and psychological, as well as physical, movement back and forth. Contrary to the prevailing image of such individuals, whether migrants or refugees, as victims of global forces beyond their control, they can also be understood as free agents making rational choices, however difficult or even tragic those choices might be. Yet among my students and certainly my academic colleagues, it is virtually impossible to acknowledge that among the big winners from migration are not merely “employers” or “capitalists” but many immigrants themselves.

Still, it is not enough to acknowledge the agency of undocumented immigrants. After all, many of them make forced, ill-informed, or unwise choices. Some are merely marginal winners, others not winners at all. And even the shrewdest and most clever are almost inevitably vulnerable to exploitation. This, too, seems to be part of the migration process. It is certainly what gets the most attention from our academic, media, and political elites.

Among these elites, the nearly universal assumption is that the exploiters are non-immigrant whites. Though often true, what invariably gets ignored is how immigrants exploit other immigrants. Indeed, given the language and cultural differences between newcomers and non-immigrant Americans, there has always been a need for middlemen and interlocutors who have typically arrived earlier, settled in, and know enough English to negotiate some aspect of the unfamiliar terrain. Not infrequently, it has been just such intermediaries who take advantage of their recently arrived compadres.

In the agricultural sector, for example, Spanish-speaking labor contractors mediate between recently arrived field hands and Anglo bosses. They also serve as subcontractors who are the actual employers of undocumented workers, thereby shielding growers from potential legal problems for directly hiring undocumented workers. In urban barrios, such intermediaries fill other needs and find other opportunities to exploit—for example, so-called notarios who prey on their fellow Spanish-speakers by falsely claiming expertise in immigration law. And in a multicultural variant of the same story, Iranian Jewish entrepreneurs entrenched in the profitable Los Angeles car wash trade are notoriously unfair to their Latino laborers.

What, then, is driving the current arrival of Central American women, children, and youth at our southern border in such dramatic numbers? By now, the litany of factors routinely cited by journalists and commentators is familiar: poverty, unemployment, the drug trade, and gang violence. And because the gangs were spawned here and then “repatriated” to the region by the U.S. government, and since the drugs are destined for the American market, the clear implication is that the United States bears considerable responsibility for the drivers of this influx. Another factor frequently emphasized is American involvement in the region’s civil wars during the 1970s and 1980s.

However many times this litany is repeated, there are only a few serious efforts to evaluate the relative importance of the various factors in the current crisis. No doubt some of those arriving at the border are fleeing death threats from ruthless gangs. Others, surely, either seek reunification with loved ones or simply better employment opportunities. Yet in light of the 1951 Geneva Convention, how are we to differentiate, as the UNHRC would presumably insist, among such claims? Or are Americans to conclude that we bear complete responsibility for the civil disorder and chaos in the region? If so, should we play the role of a responsible imperial power and intervene massively and directly? Should Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador become the 51st, 52nd, and 53rd states in the Union? Clearly, this is not what Americans—whether saddened or alarmed by this influx, whether on the Left or on the Right—have in mind.

What many commentators do seem to have in mind is opening our borders to as many of those fleeing the chaos in Central America as our laws and public opinion will tolerate—and then some. Yet down this path lies not only heightened domestic political strife, but continued self-serving intellectual and moral confusion about the drivers of such migrant streams.

One effort to grapple with this phenomenon is a forthcoming study by Jonathan Hiskey of Vanderbilt. Relying on fine-grained survey data from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatamala, Hiskey and his colleagues conclude that crime victimization and violence are much more significant drivers of migration out of the first two countries than out of Guatamala, where economic factors are clearly dominant. Another relevant resource is the research of Middlebury College anthropologist David Stoll, who has spent the past 20 years engaged in field work in Guatemala.

Stoll also emphasizes the continuing importance of economic factors in this crisis. Focusing primarily on Guatamala, his analysis defies just about all of our assumptions. To be sure, his basic perspective rings familiar: The present influx from Central America is the result of powerful, complex social and economic forces unleashed by America’s economic and political involvement in the region since at least the civil wars of the 1970s. Similarly, Stoll acknowledges the civil strife and violence pushing women and children out of Central America and toward the U.S. border. Yet he definitely de-emphasizes these factors, pointing out, for example, that the violence such migrants encounter traveling through Mexico is as bad or worse than what they leave behind. As for gang violence, he argues that those leaving rural areas will likely face worse in U.S. cities.

Stoll’s particular virtue is his almost microscopic analysis of the incentives pushing and pulling the human traffic between Central America and the United States. Consistent with what we know from other migratory streams, but at variance with virtually all recent media stories, he reminds us that those departing the region are not the poorest of the poor. On the contrary, they are likely to be from families who have benefitted from the increased resources that have flowed into the region from earlier trips north.

But as Stoll emphasizes, the dynamic here is far from simple. Small property owners have grown dependent on income from the United States to pay off debts incurred to buy land, build houses, or pay off loans to micro-lenders. Meanwhile, the money that continues to arrive from the United States has inflated the price of land and the cost of living. Another factor is that young people in Central America start having children in their mid-teens, and, as Stoll puts it, “at an early age, girls start producing armfuls of children who will not be able to support themselves by farming.” So families who may have previously benefitted from the trek north now turn to this generation’s males to undertake another such journey. But this may require, especially these days, the services of a smuggler, which almost certainly means going into more debt.

So those who leave the women and children behind are target earners. They are expected to send home as much of their earnings as possible, and then return home themselves. Yet they may not find work, or perhaps not enough for a surplus to send home. Then, too, many of these young men and boys (including teenagers with families to support) get caught up in their new lives up north, get drawn into alcohol or drugs, start second families, and generally renege on their obligations back home. One result, as Stoll reports, is village leaders in Guatemala asking him to help abandoned wives to get their husbands deported from the United States!

As for the women, they often feel compelled to journey north with children to find their men and reunite their families. This likely increases the need for a smuggler, hence more debt. If and when families are reunited in the United States, the comparative advantage of the lower cost of living in Central America is lost, and family members must work even harder to sustain the household.

As Stoll emphasizes, integral to this dynamic is how these networks depend on earlier, more seasoned migrants—as contact people, drivers, lookouts, guards, and smugglers—to function. Not only do such individuals literally know the terrain, they have their own debts to pay off. As far as Stoll is concerned, this confirms his basic perspective: We are confronted here by a pyramid scheme that has built up over several decades and become entrenched since the Great Recession of 2008. As he observes: “The mistaken premise of a migration pyramid is that gainful employment in the United States is available to all. Once people have been recruited into the pyramid and invested in it, the only way they can recoup their loss is by recruiting more people into it.”

What this argument shows, to the extent that it is accurate, is that seeing the Central Americans arriving at our southern border as simply passive victims of forces beyond their control is mistaken. On the contrary, they have and are exercising agency. Yet Stoll’s is no simplistic libertarian perspective. He understands and acknowledges the powerful economic and political forces arrayed against such individuals, while at the same time identifying them as “agents of their own destruction.”

Nor does Stoll’s analysis hinge on some vapid communitarian fantasy. These families vie with one another in their Central American villages and neighborhoods for land, housing, and status, based on American consumption patterns. And the families themselves are riven by the egoistic drives of their individual members, especially the young men. Even when motivated by more rational or even other-directed goals, individuals caught up in this dynamic are often compelled by circumstances to exploit one another, sooner or later. Such is the logic of raw, unregulated capitalism, Stoll argues, and it shapes all who live within it.

Stoll’s analysis is not cynical, but it does penetrate the gauzy sentimentality and heavy-handed moralism that have pervaded the dominant discourse about immigration to this country. This is no minor service, especially since the nasty, resentful reaction to this discourse is precisely what Donald Trump has capitalized on. Stoll helps us more closely examine and evaluate our own motives and interests in this complicated morality play. After all, it’s a short but perhaps awkward step from understanding how migrants get caught up in a complex web of self-interested relationships that sustain the migration stream to facing up to how many Americans are complicit in it. Just as Central Valley growers rely on Latino labor contractors not only to “speak the language” of laborers but to provide a buffer against the immigration authorities, suburban homeowners pay landscaping contractors and others to serve as middlemen who absorb the costs and risks of employing undocumented laborers.

In the ongoing debate, the interests of businesses in a continuing stream of immigrant workers are typically taken for granted and accepted as legitimate, even by progressives. Yet seldom acknowledged are the specific interests of affluent Americans who can afford to hire unskilled immigrants—whether directly in their homes as au pairs, nannies, house cleaners, and so forth or indirectly at restaurants, hotels, resorts, and the like. Meanwhile, the blame in this drama gets assigned to less-affluent whites who do not see themselves benefitting from prevailing policies and who express their disaffection in harsh terms that make it easy to dismiss them as “racist.” Arguably, such anger is directed as much at the champions of immigrants as at the immigrants themselves.

Thus, those who either sympathize with or benefit from immigrants tend to exaggerate the dire circumstances that are presumptively compelling the latter to flee their homes. Such conditions certainly exist. But other factors and motivations are also at work—factors that place many of us near the top of the migration pyramid, where we benefit from the aspirations, the greed, the human frailties, and the yearnings for family life that are all fueling the crisis at our southern border.

Viewed from this perspective, it is suddenly not so clear that migration from Central America is an unqualified good, much less that many of those seeking entry should be admitted. At what point do we begin to ask if our demand for low-skilled immigrant labor is not only causing problems for us here at home, but also for the societies that are sending us their workers and families? At what point do we consider the impact of continued unskilled immigration not only on Americans, but on the wages and working conditions of earlier arrivals here who may still not be sure they want to be Americans? At what point do we begin to consider the extent to which our well-intended rationales to admit those seeking entry here may be tainted not only by our own self-interested need for their labor but by our need to flatter our moral vanity? It is hard to know, because we don’t seem to be near any such point yet.

1John Higham, “The Transformation of the Statue of Liberty,” in John Higham, Send These To Me: Jews and Other Immigrants in Urban America (New York: Atheneum, 1975), 78-87.

2Philip G. Schrag, A Well-Founded Fear: The Congressional Battle to Save Political Asylum in America(New York: Routledge, 2000), 251.

3William Julius Wilson and Richard P. Taub, There Goes the Neighborhood: Racial, Ethnic, and Class Tensions in Four Chicago Neighborhoods and Their Meaning for America (New York: Knopf, 2006), 105

4Jennifer Gordon, Suburban Sweatshops: The Fight for Immigrant Rights (Cambridge: Harvard, 2005), 36, 70-71.

5Jonathan Hiskey et al., “Leaving the Devil You Know: Crime Victimization, U.S. Deterrence Policy, and the Emigration Decision in Central America,” Latin American Research Review (vol. 53, no. 3; 2018; forthcoming). Findings consistent with Hiskey’s are presented in Ben Raderstorf et al., Beneath the Violence: How Insecurity Shapes Daily Life and Emigration in Central America: A Report of the Latin American Public Opinion Project and the Inter-American Dialogue (October 2017).

6David Stoll, El Norte or Bust! How Migration Fever and Microcredit Produced a Financial Crash in a Latin American Town (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013), 204.

The post Explaining the Indefensible appeared first on The American Interest.

A Taste of Kölsch

“History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided.”

– Konrad Adenauer

“No one thought of wars, of revolutions, or revolts. All that was radical. . . [it] seemed impossible in an age of reason.”

– Stefan Zweig, on Vienna before World War I

Chaima doesn’t need a menu or time to think. It’s a warm, slightly humid evening in July and we are sitting outside in Cologne’s hipsterish Belgian Quarter. “Gin Tonic bitte, mit Bombay Saphire,” she tells our waitress. Chaima is German, born in Bremen, 22 years old. She’s full-figured and pretty, with coal eyes and long jet-black hair. Starting at age 13, Chaima lived in Saudi Arabia for five years. Her mother is a German homemaker; her father, whose work took the family to Riyadh in 2008, an electrical engineer from Syria. She has two younger brothers who still live with her parents in Saudi Arabia.

Today Chaima Bankesli teaches the German language to refugees in a state-funded school in Siegburg, a town of some 41,000 barely an hour outside Cologne. Perhaps because of her own family story, Chaima is sanguine about migrants and integration, even if the composition of her own classes points to formidable problems.

The class of a dozen students I attend, my second time visiting her school—a small, nondescript building in a light industrial park a 20 minutes’ walk from Siegburg’s town center—includes both men and women, from their early 20s to mid-50s. There are Syrians and Afghans, a young Iraqi student, and a pharmacist from Cairo who fled Egypt because, he tells me, he was persecuted as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. There’s a fellow in Chaima’s class from Kashmir, and a young Tajik woman named Saodat, who shares with me during a coffee break how she made her way to Germany through Kazakhstan, Russia, and Poland. Many have paid smugglers to facilitate their way here; a young Afghan and his brother paid $10,000 a piece. “It’s scary,” says the Tajik Saodat of her circuitous route to Germany, “when men you don’t know fetch you in the middle of the night for the next leg [of your journey].” Saodat was traveling with her nine-year-old daughter.

The Siegburg school is a small window on broken biographies, intertwining destinies, and the immense problems faced by newcomers and host country alike in Germany today.

When Angela Merkel famously said, “Wir schaffen das”—“We’ll manage this!”—when heckled at a press conference after a visit to a refugee camp near Dresden in August three years ago, the German Chancellor was focused on the refugee crisis of 2015. The integration crisis, one has the impression, is still to come.

No one can fault the generosity. In 2015 Germany, a country slightly larger than the U.S. state of Oregon, population 82 million, admitted more than one million refugees from mostly Muslim-majority countries. According to a formula based on the population and tax revenues of individual federal states, they have been distributed across Germany. Since 2014, more than 1.4 million people have applied for asylum in Germany, more than 43 percent of all applications made to the European Union, and six times, for example, the number made to France.

Many are drawn to Germany because of the country’s prosperity, and because the German government was initially so welcoming. It is not always clear what people are fleeing, and similarly often unclear who will be permitted to stay in Germany.

Consider the refugees of the Siegburg school. Tajikistan is poor and authoritarian, but not war-torn. The Egyptian druggist from the Brotherhood insists he was not politically active. The Afghan brothers say they were threatened by the Taliban when they refused to pay protection money for their small business. Still, they worry their application for asylum will not be approved. At a “Flüchtlingsheim,” a complex of garden apartments built for refugees in nearby Troisdorf, one of the two young men lifts his pant leg and lowers his sock to show me a long scar, an injury for which he was hospitalized in Afghanistan after being nearly run over by a Taliban driver. In the Siegburg school 70 percent of the students come from Syria, 20 percent from Afghanistan, and 10 percent from a mix of other countries.

None of this is straightforward.

“There are different countries and cultures here, including divides between Sunni and Shi‘a,” says Chaima of her students. “There are Syrians who do not drink alcohol, and those who do. Some students would prefer not to have a woman teacher, you can feel it. A number are surprised to learn that I can understand their conversation when they speak Arabic during breaks.” I note that some female students in Chaima’s school wear headscarves, and some do not. In spring the state coalition government of Christian Democrats and Free Democrats here in North Rhine-Westphalia introduced a plan to ban girls under the age of 14 from wearing headscarves in school, a proposal that divided teachers, religious groups, and politicians. One suspects such initiatives stir controversy and confusion among new Muslim arrivals, too.

Here’s another window on the challenge at hand.

I’ve been twice in the past year in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a Bavarian ski village 90 minutes by car south of Munich. Garmisch is alpine-gorgeous and pristine; it has also been ethnically homogenous. Today, it’s where you’ll find between 200 and 300 refugees, many of them young men, most from Nigeria. In some cases, judgment on asylum applications has not yet been decided; in other instances, young men are not working because they’ve not yet cleared hurdles to join the workforce. In the meantime, many ride around on bikes during the day. Some get caught up in criminal activity at night.

Local mayor Sigrid Meierhofer, a Social Democrat in otherwise conservative CSU-dominated Bavaria—the Christian Social Union being the regional sister party to Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union—has warned state and federal authorities from the outset of a powder keg: young men, far from home, without women, families, or work. Looking at the situation across Germany, Peter Klöppel, anchor and former editor-in-chief of RTL television back in Cologne, tells me how Germans can be their own worst enemies. “We’re world class in process and in bureaucracy,” he says. “Our thoroughness about jobs training and certification can be an advantage in properly qualifying people. It shows itself now, though, to be a significant impediment to getting people quickly into the workforce.”

But it’s not just that it’s taking too long.

“Many feel the government has lost control—and until the government sends a clear signal that they have re-established control over borders, voters will send a message via the ballot box,” says Sascha Müller-Kraenner, a German Green Party member based in Berlin. “The problem doesn’t seem to be mass migration, as numbers are down to pre-2015 levels or lower, but rather the perception of uncontrolled migration.”

It’s the populist Right that profits from all this. Germany’s right-wing populist party holds seats now in 14 of Germany’s 16 state legislatures. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) secured 92 seats in the Bundestag last year with 12.6 percent of the national vote. The party began in 2013 focused on opposition to the Euro. After 2015, the party modulated quickly to a predominantly anti-immigration agenda. In eastern Germany, AfD has often a working class character and a strong preoccupation with refugees, while in western Germany AfD also includes middle class voters fed up with identity politics, and with what many see as regulatory overreach in the economy.

It is not simple to sort. AfD’s standard bearers are themselves a curious lot.

Alice Weidel, the 39-year-old Bundestag member and chair of the parliamentary faction, is a case in point. Weidel is a former Goldman Sachs banker from North Rhine-Westphalia, from the city of Gütersloh about an hour and a half drive northeast of Cologne. Weidel was a top student in her class at the University of Bayreuth where she studied business and economics. She lived six years in China, working there also for the Bank of China. Today, the Mandarin-speaking Weidel lives in Switzerland where she raises two boys with her lesbian partner Sarah Bossard, a 36-year-old Sri-Lankan-born Swiss filmmaker.

Weidel and AfD co-chairman Alexander Gauland are the two public faces of the AfD. At first glance, they are an odd couple. The 77-year-old ex-journalist from East Germany, a frumpy and acerbic national conservative, made news this summer with his quip that “Hitler and the Nazis are merely a speck of bird poop in 1,000 years of successful German history.” Gauland, who for 30 years has worn his signature green tweed jacket, says not everyone who has a German passport is a German. He calls for a de-acceleration of technological development, and a return to Heimat—a German word for homeland that connotes a strong sense of community, of connection and belonging. To some ears Heimat rings malignly nationalist.

Weidel is fit, slim, and attractive. She wears dark-rimmed glasses and pins her blond hair back. Weidel leads the pro-entrepreneurship side of the party. Yet she is not to be outdone by Gauland on core ideological issues. Weidel says Germany is “governed by idiots who function [still] as marionettes of the occupying powers who still want to keep Germany small.” She says she doesn’t want to see her country “covered with Muslims.” Last year she stormed off the set of a nationally televised talk show, ostensibly frustrated that her fellow panelists refused to distinguish between legal and illegal immigration. Although she herself lives with her lesbian partner and children, Weidel opposes gay marriage.

AfD is a hodgepodge of voter frustration, a “Sammelbecken,” as Germans call it, “or collecting bowl” for a range of grievances. It’s a protest party, and a platform where boundaries are frequently not entirely clear.

Uwe Tellkamp, a 49-year-old physician and best-selling novelist, is part of this milieu. Tellkamp is the author of the 2008 bestseller turned popular two-part TV movie Der Turm (The Tower), which captures in sharp relief—in 973 pages no less—the atmosphere of East Germany in the last years of communism. I heard Tellkamp address some 700 people in March in a packed auditorium in his hometown of Dresden. The event made national news.

In 2017 Tellkamp had signed something called “Charta 2017,” a manifesto attacking political correctness and the ostracizing of Germany’s new national conservatism. In the Kulturpalast in Dresden in spring Tellkamp asserted that 95 percent of refugees coming to Germany are not refugees fleeing war or political persecution but rather, foreigners looking to exploit Germany’s generous welfare state. Weidel says it’s less than 1 percent who are actually eligible for asylum. Bavaria’s CSU governor Markus Söder ignited national debate and controversy this summer when he demanded an end to what he called Asyltourismus (Asylum tourism).

All this is exaggeration for effect. Precise figures in many of these matters are actually unobtainable. In today’s divided Germany one side laments a growing lack of empathy, while the other insists rule of law is crumbling. There is anxiety over change, and a growing sense of losing control that is palpable in different parts of German society.

In March this year Tellkamp signed another public letter, this one called Gemeinsame Erklärung or “Joint Declaration,” in which signatories declared:

We observe with growing disconcertment the damage done by mass illegal immigration to Germany. We declare our solidarity with those who are peacefully rallying for the restoration of the constitutional order at the borders of our country.

In February, in the city of Essen in North Rhine-Westphalia, a food bank stirred national controversy when it announced that it would no longer provide food and services to migrants. Only those with German passports would be served.

The west Geman state of North Rhine-Westphalia has taken in the largest quota of refugees in all of Germany. Known as the land of coal and steel (Land von Kohle und Stahl), North Rhine-Westphalia—Germany’s most populous state—was once key to West Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle that transformed this part of the country in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Today, you still find big companies here like Deutsche Telekom and Ford. Some innovation industries have moved in. But the state lags nevertheless behind other parts of the country in economic indicators like growth and unemployment. There are more jobless foreigners than anywhere else in the country, and North Rhine-Westphalia has some of the highest crime rates in the country. It made national news when in June a 25-year-old man of Turkish descent stabbed a 15-year-old Romanian girl to death in a public park in the town of Viersen near Düsseldorf. The AfD tweeted sarcastically, “just another one-off incident.”

I’m interested in a particular detail. I want to know from Chaima about what I hear in Uwe Tellkamp’s Dresden; that, as a result of refugee flows and a burgeoning immigrant population, there are now 11 “no-go-zones” in Cologne.

“I’ve only heard of one no-go zone,” says Chaima, who lives in nearby Bonn, and “that’s Kalk.”

Kalk is where Henry Flory lives. And when I ask Flory about no-go zones in Cologne, he looks amused.

Flory is a 31-year-old American musician from suburban Virginia whose passion is 19th-century German romanticism—Brahms in particular—and who plays first section violin with Cologne’s symphony. Traced back, Flory is a beneficiary of Anglo-American largesse. His employer, the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) orchestra, was founded by British occupation authorities in 1947, part of a network of radio symphony orchestras founded after World War II by the allies, including by the Americans. Occupying powers grasped early on the hunger of local populations for culture, for distraction and relief from capitulation and destruction, and the need to knit Germans into the project of forging a democratic nation going forward.

In my conversations in Cologne, Kalk is mentioned frequently as a trouble spot. Flory describes Kalk, an industrial neighborhood in east Cologne incorporated into the city in 1910, as simply “Turkish working class,” and tells me he’s never had a problem. He does concede that his South Korean girlfriend Seowon with whom he lives—she, too, is a violinist—is not fond of the neighborhood. “There are groups of Turkish and Middle Eastern men hanging out on street corners who will make harassing comments,” Flory continues, “and there is some drug dealing in the neighborhood you need to be aware of.” What some see as threatening, others see as opportunity. Flory and his girlfriend, who arrived here in August 2017, have a bargain. They pay $900 a month for their apartment. But Seowon avoids walking alone at night.

A 2013 article in a local Cologne newspaper cheerfully describes Kalk as genuinely “multikulti” with “good prices” in shopping arcades, and special treats such as generous gelato portions (“the scoops are much bigger than in the inner city”). Cologne Cathedral on the other side of the Rhine would be 45 minutes on foot or a short bus ride.

In summer 2018 I find Kalk shabby and charmless, a far cry from colorful and gentrified Kreuzberg, Berlin’s Turkish enclave, or from the upbeat 2013 description in the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger. There are plenty of Turkish and Middle Eastern eateries. One stands out on the main street for the plainness of its name: “Syrian Restaurant.” Which reminds me of the cynical Cold War quip as Soviet proxies made gains across the developing world, forcing innocents abroad: “lose a country, gain a restaurant.”

To the north of Kalk lies Chorweiler, with its own 1970s public tower blocks where one sees abundant satellite dishes on balconies, presumably to receive foreign-language television stations. No, there are still no proper no-go areas here. But Cologne police recently counted 13 “dangerous vicinities,” Chorweiler and Kalk included, where crime rates are above the city’s average. In Kalk, some local Turks now say they themselves are victims of growing crime perpetrated by newcomers from Northern Africa and the Middle East.

Between Kalk and Chorweiler lies still another Turkish neighborhood called Mühlheim. It was here in the Keupstrasse in June 2004 that an explosive planted by neo-Nazis—a pipe bomb with nails—wounded 22 people. A barber’s shop was destroyed, with numerous stores and cars on the strip badly damaged as well.

Through what lens to look?

“Who told you that there are no-go-zones in Cologne?” says Werner Peters. “It’s ridiculous.”

Peters drinks a small beer at the same cafe where the Syrian-German Chaima and I had met, Cafe Central in Cologne’s Belgian Quarter. The beer is Kölsch, brewed in Cologne since 1906. Cologne—called Köln in German, both words coming from Colonia, as the city began as a Roman colony—had more than 40 breweries before World War II. After the war the number was two. Kölsch is also a dialect of German and, as Peters emphasizes, it connotes a local laid-back style of life. We’ve always been an “island of tolerance here,” local journalist Uli Kreikenbaum tells me in a separate conversation.

Peters himself hails from Düsseldorf, the financial center and capital of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, and in 1797 the birthplace of Heinrich Heine, the poet who penned the words already in 1823, “woman Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen”—“where books are burned, in the end, people will be burned, too.”

Peters has lived in Cologne for decades. He’s a hotelier, writer, and political organizer. He’s also an America enthusiast. His first book in 1992 was titled, The Existential Runner: On Democracy in America. His boutique hotel in Cologne’s shabby chic Belgian Quarter is called Hotel Chelsea after the fabled New York property which for years had been home to writers, actors, and musicians. At the Chelsea Arthur Miller drafted “The Chelsea Affect.” Dylan Thomas died of pneumonia in room 205 in 1953. While staying at the Chelsea Arthur C. Clark wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Peters’s adopted city of Cologne has close links to West Germany’s roots. The father of the modern Federal Republic Konrad Adenauer came from the city. Adenauer—strongly anti-Prussia and devoutly Catholic—served as Lord Mayor from 1917 to 1933 before being sacked by the Nazis. He was later re-installed by the Americans, but then dismissed by the British who apparently objected to his cockiness. His insistence on looking eyeball-to-eyeball with the allied powers put him in good stead with fellow Germans, though; he was eventually elected West Germany’s first Chancellor, leading the country from 1949 to 1961. It was largely because of Adenauer that the West German capital found itself a home in nearby Bonn. Modest Bonn was appropriately nondescript, and non-threatening. It was a city without a past, as Adenauer put it.

Werner Peters is himself at first glance quintessentially west German: secular, pacifistically-inclined, socially liberal and a strong proponent of the social market economy, or Rheinisch capitalism—as opposed to the rough-riding Anglo-Saxon variety. Peters was nine years old when, four years after the end of World War II, the west German state was founded. Peters is also a quirky, eclectic fellow. You know a person by the company they keep, as they say.

In the artsy-Bohemian restaurant in Hotel Chelsea I meet over dinner Peters’s friends Susanna Piontek and Guy (formerly Günter) Stern, German Jews living outside Detroit. She’s a fiction writer, of short stories and poetry. Susanna’s husband is a professor of German literature. She is 54 years old; Guy is 96. Günter Stern was a member of the “Ritchie Boys,” war refugees who escaped Hitler’s Reich—a good number of them German Jews—who were trained as intelligence officers and interrogators at Camp Ritchie, Maryland for return to the front lines.

Susanna says over green tea and salad that it’s unlikely she would ever move back to Germany. “It may already be too late for Germany,” she says, lamenting the recent influx of foreign migrants. Susanna, of liberal persuasion, is appalled by stories of Muslims in Germany refusing to shake the hands of females. There’s no doubt that the country is becoming a more complicated, untidier place.

One evening Peters, at his home a five-minute walk from Hotel Chelsea, was preparing for us asparagus and Parma ham. He was just back from holiday in Provence and, as he began to tell me about the artist Martin Kippenberger, our dinner conversation was interrupted by a scruffy fellow who had stopped by to pick up a key. The man is homeless. Peters hired him once as a night clerk in his hotel, but it didn’t work out. “He’s somehow tormented,” Peters tells me. The key is to a second apartment Peters owns upstairs, where the gentleman is invited to find shelter and a shower. Peters’s most recent book is called Generosity.

Starting in the mid-1980s Martin Kippenberger lived off and on in Peters’s hotel for years. In an arrangement not out of kindness, but rather one of business and barter, the artist received a room at Hotel Chelsea in exchange for the loan of his artwork exhibited in the hotel.

Kippenberger was not only a painter. He was also a conceptual and installation artist, and an eccentric par excellence. He inherited 700,000 German marks from his dermatologist mother who was killed when a pallet fell off of a truck, after which the artist started making art out of pallets. He tried acting in Florence. He ran a night club and started a punk band in Berlin. He opened the “Martin Bormann Gas Station” in Brazil. In Berlin he once went into a bar posing as a Nazi. He got himself badly beaten, and he then painted a picture of himself, his face entirely bandaged. Before he drank himself to death in 1997 at the age of 44—and well before he became famous—Kippenberger let Peters have his work “Young Sympathetic Communist Girl” for a song. The painting hangs today in a Cologne museum, appraised at 3 million euros.

The mild-mannered Peters has been calling for resistance and peaceful insurrection for years. He is slender, dressed often in a black or charcoal gray shirt, with a wry smile seemingly always at the ready. He’s also passionate and furious about what he sees as rigged systems. “In Cologne,” says Peters, “the politicians own the city.” Fed up with what he views as self-dealing elites in local and national politics, Peters founded in 1998 “Die Partei der Nichtwähler”—“The Party of Non-Voters.” That year his own protest party stood for national elections and captured 6.8 percent of the vote in North Rhine-Westphalia (the only state in which they ran). Today Peters wants a radical restructuring of the German party system to allow space in parliament for those who find no natural home or access to the existing party landscape.

Peters also preaches a gospel of tolerance. “No one talks about refugees in Cologne, even though there are many,” he says, “whereas in places like Dresden, where there are none, that’s all they talk about it.” He’s proud of the spirit of liberalism and the attitude of live-and-let live that have defined Cologne’s culture. “Et hätt noch emmer joot jejange.” That’s Kölsch dialect for, in standard German, “es ist immer gut gegangen”—things have always worked out—one of Cologne’s “commandments” Peters is fond of citing to me. Peters’s partner Maria is a retired high school teacher. His 33-year-old daughter Nelly is a musician, a pop singer in Cologne. Older son Guido is a business consultant in Bonn.

During most of its history Cologne was an outward-looking, international-oriented trading city. The English word cologne, the fragrant scents used by men, was originally a special water from Cologne doctored and concocted by the Italian chemist Johann Maria Farina who settled in the city in 1709. Today, Cologne is the site of Germany’s biggest gay pride festival each year. Peters approves enthusiastically. The openness of the city is also reflected, says Peters, in the free-wheeling style with which the people of Cologne celebrate Karnival, or Mardi Gras. I have to admit I’m struck that, as we walk around the Belgian Quarter—with many streets bearing names of German military leaders like Goeben and Moltke from the 1870 Franco-Prussian War—Peters crosses on red lights. It’s not the typical German thing to do. “Is this a Cologne thing?” I ask. He smiles, and keeps walking.

On the tolerant, genteel ways of the Rhinelander, Peters is mindful of the limits of his own cheerful narrative. Cologne’s pedigree for tolerance is complicated. He points out that the Kölner were active and enthusiastic participants in the pogroms against Jews in the 1930s, and directs me to the National Socialist documentation center, a grim museum housed in the old Gestapo headquarters. In a 1937 Karnival parade, one float carried Germans made up as bearded Jews with a banner proclaiming “The Last To Leave.” Most of Cologne’s Jews were deported to concentration camps. One can go back further. On August 24, 1349 angry mobs attacked Cologne’s Jewish quarter and killed most of its residents, who were thought to be behind the bubonic plague that was raging through Europe.

In the midst of today’s intense and increasingly raucous political debates, Peters is sanguine about foreigners in Cologne. He practices what he preaches. I took him with me once on a visit to the refugee school in Siegburg. Before we left he was trying to make arrangements for the hire of one of the Central Asian students. For years his business partner was a German-Turk named Osman. Hotel Chelsea’s front desk is staffed by a young woman from Eritrea.

None of this means Peters is naive about the problems of integration. If British writer David Goodhart has it right, that a principal divide today in many Western countries is between “somewheres” and “anywheres”—the latter being post-national cosmopolitans who tend to embrace change and who feel basically comfortable working and living at home or abroad, and the former being more locally rooted, traditionally patriotic, and change-averse—then perhaps people like Peters are “anywheres” who are now being mugged by reality. Peters was incensed in May when two top German soccer players of Turkish ancestry fawned over Turkey’s authoritarian leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, one even referring to Erdogan as “my President.” This is a “disaster,” says Peters; “third generation, these two men were born, grew up and are a product of liberal democratic Germany.” Adding insult to injury for Peters was the quip of the German soccer coach who, in defense of the players, said “one needs to understand  “how Turks tick.”

“I would never vote AfD,” Peters tells me, laughing a little, seemingly amused that I even asked. Yet for all his liberal leanings, Peters tells me he has some sympathy for Die Alternative. The party got 7.4 percent of the vote in last year’s state elections, its first time on the ballot in North Rhine-Westphalia, a part of the country that has been led most of the last 30 years by SPD-dominated governments. Peters will have none of the vulgar hyperbole of the right-wing populists. He blames the conservative mass-circulation Bildzeitung for promoting what he claims is a “national hysteria” over foreigners. “But the AfD is not all wrong on the need for stronger control of our borders, and on the failure of multiculturalism,” he adds. Peters has also had a change of heart on the euro and deepening European integration. “Watch [French President] Macron bamboozle us Germans into giving away more of our money for his priorities in the south,” he says.

Exceptional times make for exceptional bedfellows. Peters plans to meet up in Berlin soon with Beatrix von Storch of the AfD. They were both, at different times, congressional fellows for Democratic representative Lee Hamilton years ago. From the west German northern port city of Lübeck, Von Storch is the provocateur who tweeted out in January, after police authorities in North Rhine-Westphalia posted New Years’ greetings in different languages including Arabic: “Are we appeasing barbaric Muslim rapist hordes of men?” Her remark referred obliquely back to New Year’s Eve 2016 when there was mass harassment and a large number of cases of sexual assault on women near the Cologne train station. Peters places chief responsibility for that night’s debacle on Cologne’s ill-prepared police.

What a swirl all this is becoming. The alignments that start to emerge are noteworthy.

Some, like Die Linke’s radical left-wing icon Sahra Wagenknecht—the 49-year-old wife of ex-SPD leader Oskar Lafontaine—sound a lot like AfD when they voice their concern for German workers whose jobs are threatened by the influx of foreigners. AfD is now making inroads into German labor unions, long dominated by Social Democrat functionaries who, critics argue, have lost touch with the working class.

Old categories of Left and Right seem to be breaking down. In some respects AfD is a national-socialist party; that is, anti-immigrant nationalist, while advocating a strong social welfare state and government intervention in the economy. Can it be that the old establishment parties are losing relevance? In national elections last September, Germany’s Social Democrats—garnering 20 percent of the vote—registered their worst result since the end of the Second World War. And Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, projected to secure roughly 40 percent of the vote, also badly underperformed, ending up with 33 percent.

In a 2013 book titled Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy Irish political scientist Peter Mair was recording structural shifts in European politics generally: voters’ ties to establishment parties had for years been loosening, observed Mair, civic participation was on the decline, trust in elites and mainstream was eroding. At that time Mair was asserting:

The age of party democracy has passed. Although the parties themselves remain, they have become so disconnected from the wider society, and pursue a form of competition that is so lacking in meaning, that they no longer seem capable of sustaining democracy in its present form.

Perhaps Peters was already onto something back in the late 1990s with his “Party of Non-Voters.” So was Spinoza back in the 17th century when he observed that nature abhors vacuums.

Back in our refugee school in Siegburg I am told by school director Andreas Wojcik—a Pole of German ancestry who left Poland for Germany in the 1980s—that “it’s fine to call for integration, but what should people here integrate into? Do Germans know who they are?” For Wojcik you cannot talk about integration without talking about Germany’s own “fehlende Identität—their own “identity deficit.”

Wojcik’s young associate, the German language teacher Chaima tells me, “Of course part of me is Syrian.” When I ask whether Chaima is religious, she says: “I see myself as a Muslim-Christian-Jewish believer. . . . but I must admit, most of my German friends are secular, because there is no proven reason to be religious.”

Back in Cologne I’m still wondering about the claim of 11 no-go zones I keep hearing about from eastern Germans. There are no no-go areas where police and civil authorities do not feel safe enough to enter. There’s nothing like that. Broadly, though, some of Cologne’s problems are quite worrisome. 

Ebertplatz is a small square in the northern part of the city known for night-time drug dealing, mostly by black Africans. In October last year, a 22-year-old man from Guinea in West Africa was stabbed to death at the square by a 25-year-old Moroccan. The mayor of the Innenstadt district Andreas Hupke, a member of the Green Party, declared at the time that “the police have given up control of Ebertplatz.”

Adjacent to Ebertplatz, behind Cologne’s main train station, is the immigrant neighborhood of Eigelstein, which has become known for lively pubs, panhandling, and drugs, and increasingly out-of-control street prostitution. On a sunny, hot, and humid summer afternoon walking through Eigelstein I see a prostitute wandering the streets. Her top is a see-through knit. She looks haggard. The woman, who leans on a cane, is probably 60 or 70 years old. It is hard to tell whether she is German.

Issues of law and order and social cohesion are becoming pressing matters in parts of Germany. One wonders if at the bottom of all this lie deeper issues than is ordinarily acknowledged. For decades elites and polite society have been fixated on the issue of “Europe,” and of “European identity.” It seems now the issue becomes:­ What does it mean to be German?

Editor’s Note: See part one of Jeffrey Gedmin’s German diaries here. 

The post A Taste of Kölsch appeared first on The American Interest.

Why Cutting Military Aid to Lebanon Would Be a Mistake

Even for the most ardent supporters of U.S. military aid to Lebanon, myself included, it is hard to deny that the optics of such aid in Washington are terrible and, if unaddressed, could very well upend the whole enterprise. To be clear, these optics—U.S. funds and equipment going to the armed forces of a country whose government is co-opted by an entity classified by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization—have always been poor. But under the Trump Administration they threaten to become unbearable.

That Hezbollah and its allies had a robust showing in the latest Lebanese parliamentary elections has only exacerbated U.S. concerns, and contributed to the growing unease among various influential members of Congress and senior White House officials about U.S. military assistance to Lebanon. That aid is now coming under intense scrutiny by a Trump Administration that is eager to counter Iran and, as shown in its new National Security Strategy, has shifted its attention and policy focus from counterterrorism, which undergirds most U.S. security assistance programs in the Middle East, to great power competition. This means, practically, fewer resources and less political bandwidth in the U.S. government for the former.

Nonetheless, the case for supporting the Lebanese military remains strategically sound and luckily has powerful backers in the Pentagon and Foggy Bottom, including U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Elizabeth Richard. The question is whether this inter-agency consensus on Lebanon will be enough for the program to survive, at least in its current form.

Notwithstanding the new environment, I suspect Washington will not end or make major cuts in military aid to Lebanon any time soon. That’s primarily because President Donald Trump is not in a position to pick a fight with the generals, which would introduce unwanted political turbulence to a foreign policy team that has already come under a lot of pressure. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, along with the Joint Chiefs and CENTCOM Commander Joseph Votel, is a strong advocate of the program.

The Pentagon holds the view that if Washington stops the aid, it would lose a major point of access to the Mediterranean and forfeit the largest investment it has ever made in Lebanon. The United States also would effectively cede the country to Iran, which is dying to see the Americans leave, and invite Russia, which is chomping at the bit to get its hands on the Lebanese military and ultimately expand its regional presence at the expense of U.S. interests. Finally, the United States would abandon a dependable military partner who has done a superior job, thanks to U.S. support, battling ISIS and al-Qaeda.

But there’s also a broader political consideration here by the Administration. If the White House does open this can of worms and starts more aggressively questioning the value of U.S. military aid to Lebanon, no security assistance program in the Middle East or elsewhere will be safe on Capitol Hill. This would cause alarm bells to ring in the Pentagon, which could lead to a political showdown with the Administration.

To be sure, Washington’s entire approach to security assistance with partner nations around the world is in desperate need of a rethink. There are multiple problems with U.S. security assistance, most of which are quite old and fundamental. Washington has had a tendency to blame the recipients of U.S. aid for most, if not all, of the failures of security assistance. But the reality is that the U.S. security assistance architecture has major deficiencies too.

My eight-month review of U.S. security assistance to the Middle East, which relied on a large set of personal interviews with senior officials and officers in the Department of Defense and Department of State, led to one inescapable conclusion: “The source of all security-assistance ills is not the amount of funding, the quality of training, the speed of U.S. weapons delivery, or the type or quantity of arms that Washington provides. It is the often-broken U.S. policy toward the recipient country that profoundly undermines the entire enterprise.”

Mara Karlin concurs and has argued in Foreign Affairs that the main reason why U.S security assistance programs don’t work is because Washington has traditionally paid scant attention to the political context of these programs, treating them almost exclusively as technical matters. And writing in this magazine, Justin Reynolds has rightly faulted Washington for expecting “far too much from these programs” and for its lack of cultural sensitivity and flexibility in implementing them. Karlin, Reynolds, and I, along with Melissa Dalton, also share the assessment that despite some recent, important reforms, there is still confusion and tension in the U.S. government over who does what and when in the security-assistance process. The inter-agency process, involving cooperation and synchronization primarily between the Department of State and the Department of Defense, has improved modestly but still needs a lot of work.

But going haphazardly after the program in Lebanon, the one that has offered the greatest return on investment in the region, is surely not the way to solve all these problems. If Washington is serious about getting it right, perhaps it should start with the security assistance programs of Pakistan, Egypt, and Iraq, which have cost the United States far more in blood and treasure than Lebanon’s with far worse results to show for it.

Something may well have to change in the Lebanese program to make it more politically palatable. But current ideas to cut the aid are short-sighted, failing to account for its strategic utility and the many problems that would arise if it were dispensed with.

The U.S. Congress is currently finalizing legislation targeting Hezbollah that might also reduce or condition U.S. assistance to the Lebanese military. The new law, which is supposed to come out in the next few months, will expand the sanctions against Hezbollah to now include the party’s “associates.”

This approach presents several clear executional problems. First, decades of failed U.S. experiences with sanctions against foes offer a cautionary tale about the effectiveness of this tool. In Lebanon’s case, no matter how potent and comprehensive the old sanctions have been and the new sanctions might be, and even if Washington extracts every single penny from the Lebanese banks that might belong to Hezbollah, it won’t succeed because this is not where the party is making its money. Both the Treasury Department and the intelligence community know this. Most of Hezbollah’s bank accounts reside outside the country, in places like Africa, Europe, and Latin America, and whatever funds the party keeps at home are “administered” by Lebanese individuals who aren’t members or even supporters of the organization. It’s not easy, of course, to monitor external accounts, but spending energy and resources to keep pounding the Lebanese financial system misses the point.

Second, how will Washington define “associates” of Hezbollah? Such a definition could encompass almost the entire Lebanese political class. With a few largely irrelevant exceptions, everyone in Beirut has some form of accommodation with Hezbollah, including the staunchest critics of the organization, as a means to promote their political careers or increase their personal financial gains.

Perhaps there is a nuanced way for Washington to do this by adopting a tiered system, whereby those who are truly in bed with Hezbollah are targeted most directly, and those who have mere marriages of convenience with the party are issued stern, private warnings. But that is easier said than done, because Washington may end up punishing or pressuring no fewer than four major figures in the Lebanese government—the President, the Speaker of the House, the Prime Minister, and the Foreign Minister—while trying at the same time to prevent political collapse in Beirut.

Regardless of how Washington uses its new sanctions against Hezbollah and its Lebanese allies, it should take the Lebanese military out of the picture. Washington’s problems in Lebanon simply have very little to do with the Lebanese military, and it makes no sense for U.S. officials to continuously threaten to punish this institution. If Hezbollah gains prominent ministerial posts in the next cabinet, is it the fault of the military? No. If Hezbollah decides to stay in Syria, is it the fault of the military? No. If Hezbollah refuses to comply with international law, is it the fault of the military? No.

The responsibility rests with Lebanon’s politicians, who oversee the country’s armed forces. Lebanon is not Pakistan or Egypt, run by the military, but rather a democracy, imperfect and dysfunctional as it may be, whose military and security services answer to the civilian leadership. Whatever the President and the Council of Ministers decide, the military does, not the other way around.

It would be best for Washington to stop shooting in the wrong direction and focus instead on the real culprits: the politicians. But that must be said with a huge caveat: This has to be done very carefully, and with a high dose of realism and humility. Many of these politicians might be allied with Hezbollah not out of love or conviction, but out of necessity.

Some, like Prime Minister Saad Hariri, have lost their loved ones and made painful sacrifices trying to resist Hezbollah’s policies, but there’s only so much that they can do on their own. A predecessor of Hariri, Fuad Siniora, for example, tried along with his pro-U.S. coalition to confront Hezbollah in 2008 by calling for an investigation of the organization’s private fixed-line communications network. Hezbollah went bananas. In one violent swoop, it took control of the western sector of Beirut and subdued the Druze part of the Mount Lebanon region. Hezbollah’s political adversaries never again dared to challenge it.

Washington is right to ask these Lebanese politicians to challenge Hezbollah’s most controversial policies, but it’s useful to remember that the United States did almost nothing to prevent Iran from taking over Syria next door, which of course helped cement Hezbollah’s grip over Lebanon. Washington has also failed to stop Tehran from transferring weapons to Hezbollah through land and aerial routes, subcontracting this task to Israel, which has resorted to bombing Iranian and Hezbollah targets in Syria every other week. So if the U.S. government didn’t or couldn’t push back against Iran effectively itself, why should it expect weak Lebanese politicians to fare any better?

That’s not to say that Lebanese politicians can’t do anything; they can. Because the optics in Washington matter a lot nowadays, there are measures they can pursue that are palatable at home and might also positively change the Lebanon conversation in Washington. These include the formulation of a ministerial statement, whenever the cabinet is formed, that doesn’t put the “resistance,” i.e. Hezbollah, front and center in the country’s soon-to-be-discussed national defense strategy. Nobody is asking these politicians to disarm Hezbollah, but there is no need for them to endorse the organization’s narrative and support its weapons and military autonomy in public forums.

If Washington still objectively assesses that U.S. assistance to Lebanon is not contributing to American objectives and that it’s better off without it, then by all means it should suspend or withdraw the funds. But it is silly and dishonest to keep treating this assistance as if it is charity. Both sides get something out of it. On balance, the considerable pros outweigh the cons, which Washington could further minimize by making it less risky for its allies in Lebanon to take the necessary steps to distance themselves from Hezbollah’s detrimental policies.

There’s no substitute for a coherent U.S. policy toward Lebanon, which is the missing piece that nobody wants to talk about in the conversation on security assistance. That should be the starting point of this debate—not the money, not the weapons. In Lebanon as elsewhere, we have to remind ourselves once again that security assistance is not an end in itself but rather a means that should not be driving U.S. policy.

1. See Justin R. Reynolds, “Training Wreck,” The American Interest (March-April 2017).

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Individualism and the Disinformation State

When the KGB were coming to arrest my father, grandmother developed a secret code using sausages to communicate vital information. If she were to bring a certain kind of sausage to his cell and slice it one way, it meant that news of his arrest had been passed to the West, broadcast on Radio Free Europe, and taken up by international human rights groups. If it were sliced another way, it meant that they hadn’t managed to get the information through.

It was 1978, in Kyiv, and my father, Igor Pomerantsev, had been detained for “allowing friends and acquaintances to read copies of harmful literature”: books censored for telling the truth about the Soviet prison system (Solzhenitsyn) or for being written in a style too subversive for the regime (Nabokov). He also signed human rights petitions condemning politically motivated arrests and wrote literature that went against the grain of Soviet Social Realism. The narrator of his first novella, written at the time of his arrest, is a budding poet who comes from a family of Soviet journalists, and who contrasts the regime-sanctioned, imperial, impersonal writing he finds in newspapers with his own stream-of-consciousness approach:

“This country has thrown off the chains of Capitalist Slavery! Welcome the Socialist Sun! Let the Darkness be gone!”

and

“Just a minute ago you were walking the street, breathing in air and breathing out words, now you have burst through to the page, now it will pour out, like wild berries you’d been carrying inside your jacket. Is there any joy greater than writing in the first person?”

In 1978 human rights, freedom of speech, freedom to access and produce information, a hyper-individualized sense of self and a modernist aesthetic could still be wrapped around one central notion of “freedom,” which was in turn part of a greater geopolitical struggle where the by-now lazily totalitarian Soviet Union used censorship as its modus operandi.

Fast forward 40 years, and a remarkable new report by the Institute of the Future shows how everything has turned topsy-turvy. Eighteen months in the making, the report looks at how governments use online campaigns to reinvent the old process of “silencing, harassing, intimidating, discrediting and ultimately arresting those perceived to be a threat to state power.” The old methods of censorship may have become technically untenable, but nasty regimes have adapted, employing an approach which uses, in the words of philosopher Tim Wu, “speech itself as a censorial weapon.”

One the one hand it is now much easier for a dissident to speak out online. But regimes can also viciously attack them without ever admitting to doing so, disguised behind masquerades of online activists (trolls) and automated accounts (bots), or instigating online mobs.

The Institute for the Future categorizes several types of such campaigns.

There are the operations where the government controls the whole process. For a modicum of deniability one could hire a black PR company or work through a youth movement. In Azerbaijan, for instance, there is Ireli, created, according to its leader, for the “education of young people and the protection of Azerbaijan’s interests in the virtual world.” In practice this means sending online threats to critical journalists like Arzu Geybulla: “I’ve been called many things; a slut, a dog, a pig—you name it. These insults involved my ill mother and deceased father. She was a whore; he was a traitor who slept with an Armenian slut.”

A step away are “state-coordinated” campaigns, such as in Venezuela, where the Maduro government has set up closed social media channels to direct enthusiasts on whom to attack, with what messages, and when, but doesn’t carry out the work itself.

A more sophisticated approach is to merely inspire a campaign, but then take no part in its organization.

This is common in Turkey, where ruling party-member columnists incite mob attacks. When the journalist Ceyda Karan, for example, was sentenced to two years of prison after writing a story which inadvertently showed a picture which mocked the Prophet Mohammed, a regime party-member columnist tweeted that the sentence had been too short. Over the next three days Karan received 13,000 tweets from 5,800 users, many calling for her hanging under sharia law. This approach can have its downsides, however: Sometimes mobs attack the wrong person, leading the President to have to call them off.

This sort of campaign has also become a feature in the United States, inspired by Donald Trump himself and his social media manager Dan Scavino, and has led to journalists, academics and opposition political actors to receive death and rape threats as well as accusations of treason. As Freedom House wrote,“Fake news and aggressive trolling of journalists both during and after the presidential election contributed to a score decline in the United States’ otherwise generally free environment.”

What gives extra spice to these campaigns is that they use the philosophy of freedom of speech as their justification, crying “censorship!” whenever there is any chance of their being taken down by social media platforms. Though many countries do have concepts like “hate speech” and “incitement to violence,” they end up being very hard to pin down in practice, beyond blocking the most direct instructions to harm someone physically. As a Mexican feminist activist and journalist described to me recently, “We have spent our whole lives fighting for freedom of speech. It’s very hard to now ask for censorship. When does a death threat become real? When they just hurl abuse at us? When they threaten us? When they publish our address online?”

The Institute for the Future’s report tries to find a clever way around, arguing that this “speech” is itself actually an attack on someone’s human right to express themselves—a form of censorship essentially—and as states have a duty to safeguard human rights, they can’t just ignore these attacks by excusing them as “free speech” and therefore claim it’s none of their business. Flipping the script to focus on the rights of the victim is smart, but it may be only that. The problems are far knottier. We are still light years away from even something basic as getting social media companies to respond in a concerted way to protect those who are attacked online. What hope is there for thus corralling regimes who covertly instigate attacks themselves?

The era of online information abundance and digital technology has scrambled the old equivalences of freedom of speech and human rights, warped the logic of censorship versus self-expression. In a much more insidious way it also undermines the idea of a free “self” as formulated in opposition to top-down, totalitarianism-versus-individualism oppression.

“Is there any joy,” my father had written in 1978, “greater than writing in the first person?” The thought was elaborated by his contemporary poet Joseph Brodsky, who was first arrested and exiled from the USSR at a similar time. “The surest defense against Evil,” Brodsky told his students at Cornell in 1984, “is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even—if you will—eccentricity. That is, something that can’t be feigned, faked, imitated.”

But the subtler forms of social media-powered propaganda encourage you to speak about yourself as much as possible, be as individualistic as you can: “What’s on your mind?” Facebook asks when you log on. And then this self-expression is transmuted into data to target you for political purposes, pushing you into behavior without your consent or awareness: hyper-individualism undermining the individual’s autonomy. And when it comes to “eccentricity” and “whimsicality,” there are few who can outdo the current American President, who undoes the oppressions of grammar, spelling and rational thinking to release a riot of first-person writing which can read like a satire on modernist poetry.

Yulia Komska, the Dartmouth scholar who rediscovered the Brodsky quote for me in her sublime, co-written new book, Linguistic Disobedience, insists that this sort of individualism-as-narcissism gets Brodsky’s point wrong. “For Brodsky, the tongue-twisting idiosyncrasies joined forces not so much to benefit the self as to perfect the art of estrangement. This oppositional stance . . . holds one’s oppressive reality in contempt and works to reshape it at the same time. Nowadays, rampant individualism may scream capitalist conformity to many, but its more renegade uses capture the anarchical spirit of society’s fraying margins, where disobedience often comes to roost.” In other words, there is a way to use individualistic writing not as self-indulgence, but as a way to see the world and the self afresh and thus open the possibility of transforming it.

It’s not the only strategy available. Poets often sense approaching cataclysms earlier than political scientists, and by the mid-1990s my father, by now living in the West, began to leave behind first-person writing. Instead he began to look for other ways to explore what the freedom to experience the world in undictated-to terms might mean. He began to explore the language of anthropology, biology. In a work from 1999, he moved the focus away from the first person altogether, fashioning a work based around an analysis of a dictionary of winds. It’s clear that he’s talking about freedom, but there’s little mention of the “I” at all—just detailed, metereological descriptions of gales, breezes, gusts, breaths.

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Serbs Are Not “Little Russians”

In Serbia, it makes no difference whether the discussion is among friends in a bar or on a talk show with the most distinguished social scientists: No matter their walk of life, Serbs are seemingly united in the belief that the West will never accept them. Even the most pro-European and pro-American Serbs sense that they will always be seen as “little Russians” due to the two countries’ shared ethnic and religious heritage. Feeling under suspicion because of their Slavic, Orthodox identity, Serbs believe that they have been pegged as Russia’s Balkan proxy—and are turning away from the West in response. This mutual miscomprehension is worrying, because increased ties between Russia and Serbia have been the cornerstone of Russia’s revived presence in the Balkans, and because the European Union and the West cannot stabilize the region without Serbia.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Part of the problem is that Western thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic all too often emphasize a supposed “traditional” alliance between Serbia and Russia. An April 2018 report, “Do the Western Balkans Face a Coming Russian Storm?” written by Mark Galeotti for the European Council on Foreign Relations, described Serbia as Russia’s potential “Trojan Horse” in the European Union. That same month, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post titled, “Don’t wait for the western Balkans to blow up again. The U.S. and the E.U. must act.” Clark made a reference to “pro-Russian” Serbs. There are real dangers in such a misreading—not least of which is that the notion of Serbia’s “alliance” with Russia could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Serbs are not innocent in this matter. In official statements Serbian and Russian officials often use the vocabulary of traditional allies. As Serbian Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic said in June during his visit to Russia: “Russia and Serbia are traditional friends and allies. . . .We will remain friends forever.” At the celebration of the World War II victory in Moscow on May 9, 2018, Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic, along with Benjamin Netanyahu, was one of only two foreign leaders to officially attend and stand at Russia’s President Vladimir Putin’s side. In June 2018 in Russia, Serbian armed forces took part in trilateral military exercises alongside their Russian and Belarus colleagues entitled “Slavic Brotherhood 2018.”

Nevertheless, it’s misleading to call Serbs and Russians allies. Behind the oversimplified moniker portraying Serbians as “little Russians” lies a more nuanced relationship that bears closer examination.

Histories of Serbian-Russian relations often trace their roots to imperial Russia’s support for the liberation of the Balkans from the Ottoman Empire in the 19thcentury. Others argue that the modern relationship began with Russia’s alliance with Serbia in World War I. But this selective reading of history fails to appreciate the complex relationship between Serbia and the Great Powers.

As was the case with many Balkan nations, Serbia’s national awakening in the 18th and 19th centuries was inspired by intellectuals who sought to modernize and Westernize their nation through the importation of European intellectual influence. Serbia’s first constitution is a case in point—the Sretenje Constitution of 1835 was inspired by France and Belgium.

Nonetheless, history has many twists and turns. During the 19th century Western diplomatic thought on Serbia was divided between two camps. The first perceived Serbs as an extension of Russian interests that needed to be contained by preserving the Ottoman Empire, while the second thought that Serbia should be embraced and converted into a bulwark against Russian influence.

Serbia itself was a reflection of these interests. While the country tried to transform itself along European constitutional and cultural lines, it found itself frequently aligned with Russia. These tended to be for reasons of hardboiled realism rather than ideology. Russia was the only great power that actively sought the downfall of the Ottoman Empire. For Serbs, it was possible to apply the dictum that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” for many years.

Thus Serbs have reason to be grateful to Russia—the renewal of Serbian statehood in the 19th century would probably not have happened without Russian support. Yet relations were full of ambiguities. Serbs tried to secure Russian support without compromising their autonomy, while Russia was frequently frustrated by Serbian disobedience, as in the case of the Obrenovic dynasty, which frequently was not willing to coordinate its foreign policy with Russia. Moscow was particularly hesitant to support Belgrade out of fear it would be sucked into a great power conflict, as would eventually happen in 1914.

The 20th century has proved no less complicated. Serbia, both independently and as part of the newly formed Yugoslavia, proved that it was equally able to ally itself with Western powers as its interests dictated, as demonstrated by its alliances with the United States in the First World War and France during and after the war.

Between the two world wars, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, ruled by the Serbian Karadjordjevic dynasty and with an ethnic Serbian majority, was part of the Eastern European buffer against both Germany and the Soviet Union. The honeymoon that began with the Soviet liberation of Yugoslavia from Nazi occupation and the inception of a communist government in Yugoslavia was short-lived. In the Cold War era, the desire by Yugoslav communist strongman Josip Broz Tito for independence from Moscow led in 1948 to the famous Tito-Stalin split. George Kennan, the legendary father of containment, perceived a communist but independent Yugoslavia as a way to drive a wedge within the Soviet bloc.

During the Yugoslav Wars, Russia was frequently portrayed as a supporter of Milosevic’s regime. This is inaccurate. Boris Yeltsin despised Milosevic for his support of the failed communist coup against Gorbachev, after which Yeltsin came to power. The NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999 represented a turning point for Russian foreign policy, and not because of sympathies toward Serbia. For Moscow the intervention was a clear sign that it had lost its status as a great power, as it was ignored by NATO and bypassed in the UN Security Council.

Meanwhile, in the post-Milosevic era governments in Belgrade have been suspicious of Putin due to his studiously neutral stance during the anti-Milosevic revolution. Besides, Moscow did not show much interest in Belgrade; shortly before and after Milosevic’s fall Russia’s main interlocutor in the former Yugoslavia was Milo Djukanovic’s regime in Montenegro. It would be wrong to argue that there has been a long-standing Belgrade-Moscow compact.

In this sense, Moscow’s development of closer ties with Belgrade over the past decade should not be seen as the renewal of an old alliance but instead as the product of purely modern, Putin-era foreign policy. It is through this prism that the current relationship should be assessed.

One notable example has been Moscow’s support for Serbia’s sovereignty over Kosovo. This support suits Moscow’s interests neatly. By backing Serbia on issues like Kosovo, the Kremlin believes that it gains support and influence in the Balkans cheaply. Without needing to invest significant effort or resources, Moscow can oppose the West in its own backyard—a “win-win” for Putin.

By backing Serbia, Russia is testing its own desire for a multipolar order, one based on a concert of great powers. At the core of this is an effort by Moscow to overturn the unipolar world order it perceived in the Balkans in the 1990s, and to reaffirm its status as a global great power—a status it feels has been wrongfully denied by the West. But by seeking to do this on the cheap, Russia has limited the extent of its ability to influence. Moscow has no military presence in the Balkans; Putin pulled Russian peacekeepers out of Bosnia and Kosovo in 2003. Surprisingly, Serbia has far more military exercises with NATO and Western countries than with Russia. The European Union outguns Russia economically in Serbia and, with the exception of the energy sector, is Serbia’s largest investor and employer. The European Union is also the country’s largest donor.

Given this, it would be reasonable to ask why Serbia feels the needs to juggle between Russia and the West. The answer is that Serbia has pursued this balancing act in the power vacuum that has existed since 2008, when the European Union and the U.S. government ceased paying close attention to the Balkans. The shock of the Euro crisis created an impulse in Serbian foreign policy for hedging and diversification of partnerships, as Serbia increasingly felt itself on the periphery of the Western world.

This power vacuum has been exacerbated by the migration crisis and Brexit. Both have raised very real questions of whether Serbia will actually join the European Union. Consequently, Serbia is accepting overtures from non-Western players—not only Russia, but also Turkey, China, and the UAE. Seeing only deadlock in its efforts to join the European Union, Serbia is ready to pit Western and non-Western actors against each other to see from whom it can extract better political and economic conditions.

Serbia’s current balancing act between Russia and the West also has a source in Serbian domestic politics. According to public opinion polls 41 percent of Serbs perceive Russia as Serbia’s greatest friend, with Putin still the most popular foreign leader in Serbia.

However, Russia’s popularity is the result of a Serbian emotional backlash against Western policies in the 1990s and the independence of Kosovo. It is not the product of emotional ties from the past. Another reason why the Serbian government has kept the Russian option open is so as not to alienate pro-Russian segments of the Serbian electorate. Serbia and the Balkans have seen a rise in illiberal political movements in recent years, with EU policymakers frequently turning a blind eye to these developments. As a result, the Serbian government keeps a Russian option alive as leverage over the West, and to avoid criticism for a downward trend in democracy and the rule of law, as the political scene remains dominated by a single man (Vucic) and freedom of the press continues to decline.

These domestic calculations have been further exacerbated by the underlying power that Kosovo holds in Serbian politics. For Serb nationalists it is regarded as integral for Serbian national identity, while for pro-Western Serbs the West’s support for Kosovo’s independence was a sign that Serbs are not actually embraced by the West. The Serbian political class is aware that it cannot move forward without progress toward resolving the long-standing Kosovo issue. But in order to save face with its constituents, the Serbian leadership has to come up with some settlement in which Serbia will not be perceived as the total loser of the Kosovo dispute. To that end, Serbia must have a great power backer in the negotiating process, and as Serbia lacks a patron in the West, Russia is useful in that role. As long as Kosovo remains in play and as long as Serbian leadership lacks a settlement acceptable to public opinion, Russia will have a high place in Serbian foreign policy considerations. The West should be cognizant of this as this it leaves a major door open for Russian overtures into Serbia and by extension the Balkans.

There are lessons to be drawn. Russia will continue its current policies for as long as it can, but it is aware that the Balkans will remain anchored to Europe. This means that there are limits on how far Russia will go. Meanwhile, there is no reason for Serbia not to treat Russia as a friendly country, but Belgrade should be aware that sooner or later it must decide what its long-term foreign policy priorities are. In doing so, Serbia’s political leaders must make a point of explaining to their citizens that just because Serbia’s interests are not always aligned with the West does not mean that they are identical to Russia’s.

For their part, both the European Union and the United States need to be aware that close ties between Russia and Serbia are in large part the result of taking Serbia and the Balkans for granted. Serbs got a taste of this on July 9, 2018, when the Balkan leaders came to London for a summit intended to be hosted by British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, only to be stood up as Johnson dramatically resigned. Beyond avoiding such obvious slights, Western diplomats must understand that there is no ancient compact between Moscow and Belgrade, but that Serbian-Russian relations have evolved over time as the two countries’ shared interests and cultural history have occasionally intersected. This simple recognition could be the beginning of a much-needed new approach from both Serbia and its interlocutors in the West, one that could stabilize and re-integrate the Balkans’ most geographically central country.

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Misdiagnosing the Opioid Crisis

Some people are impatient before I give them anesthesia in the operating room. They want the drugs, especially the potent narcotic fentanyl, because they want to feel, in their own words, “wonderful,” “amazing,” or “without a care in the world.” A few of those headed for general anesthesia ask me to delay giving them the final knock-out dose so they can enjoy the good feeling a little longer.

This experience conflicts with what I was taught in medical school about opioids, which is that these drugs produce a feeling of euphoria in people with pain but cause a feeling of unease in the absence of pain. Thirty years of anesthesia practice have taught me that people need only experience anxiety—not necessarily pain—for opioids to make them feel better.

The problem for society, of course, is that everyone feels anxiety at some point, which means everyone might at some point in life seek and enjoy these drugs. Not for nothing do they call it the nervous system. Indeed, anxiety springs from life’s most fundamental contradiction: Each of us desires lasting happiness, yet each of us knows that lasting happiness is impossible. The resultant anxiety varies in intensity in any given person and on any given day, but for at least 2,000 years human beings have been stupefying themselves with alcohol or drugs to escape some version of this contradiction. The current opioid crisis and its remedies need to be understood against this very long-standing phenomenon.

True, within the context of the past 50 years, today’s opioid crisis does seem different, if only in the rate of overdose deaths. The heroin epidemic of the 1960s and 1970s caused 1.5 overdose deaths per 100,000; the “crack” epidemic of the 1980s resulted in two overdose deaths per 100,000; the current opioid crisis produces 10-20 deaths per 100,000. Yet applying a mere five-decade time frame obscures the fact that human beings have been stupefying themselves for many centuries.

Christopher Caldwell’s April 2017 essay in First Things exemplifies this narrow perspective. Caldwell argues that society has grown lax over the past half-century in enforcing the moral and social taboo against aggressive opioid use—for example, by “renouncing our allegiance to anything that forbids or commands.” He means, of course, mainly religion. However, 19th-century America, which was animated by a strong religious ethos, also had a serious opioid addiction problem. One in every 200 Americans was addicted to opioids by the end of that century.

While Caldwell does mention the 19th century’s addiction problem, he attributes it to “zealous doctors” who over-prescribed opioids to middle-class women, as well as to a one-off event, the Civil War, that led many wounded soldiers into drugs. But opioids were available without prescription during the 19th century; laudanum was one of the most popular over-the-counter forms, and its use often had little to do with doctors. Opioid abuse was also a problem in Great Britain, where there was no 19th-century civil war.

Doctors often get blamed for today’s opioid crisis, too. Dr. Tom Frieden said it as plainly as possible while serving as Director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC): “This is a doctor-caused epidemic.” There is some truth here, as reportedly 80 percent of heroin users begin with prescription opioids, and doctors, for their part, have been prescribing opioids more aggressively over the past few decades. In the form of Vicodin, opioids are now the most popular prescription drug in the United States.

But there are good reasons for the change in prescription patterns. Pain was woefully undertreated in the past. In my own specialty of anesthesiology, for example, mild to moderate post-operative pain was typically ignored for much of the 20th century. Many anesthesiologists wrongly thought that if they aggressively treated post-operative pain with narcotics they risked turning their patients into addicts. In obstetrics, although the epidural technique for analgesia during childbirth was invented in 1942, well into the 1960s only 10 percent of American women received epidurals. Doctors, predominantly male, saw labor pain as simply a natural part of life.

In general medicine also, doctors wrongly discounted pain that lacked a visible origin. They called it “functional pain” and consigned it to a sub-category of mental illness. Later research showed that functional pain had a real physiological basis—for example, a misfiring of nerves—although it was undetectable by microscope.

Finally, many doctors in the 20th century wrongly adhered to the old Cartesian paradigm that separated mind from brain, with pain a hard-wired brain experience that supposedly occurred independent of people’s psychology. Anyone who has experienced pain knows that this rigid division is wrong, and that, for example, unhappiness exacerbates pain.

Caldwell correctly notes that opioids were taboo for many 20th-century doctors, which kept opioid prescriptions down. But if the taboo was rooted in error and bad science, why should anyone pine for its return?

A 2015 TAI essay by Hudson Institute fellows David Murray and John Walters blames much of today’s opioid crisis on the recent increase in heroin production. Like the other time-sensitive explanations, their argument carries some truth and may help to explain the three-fold increase in heroin-related overdose deaths in the past decade. Then again, heroin was responsible for only a third of all opioid overdose deaths in 2016, so increased heroin production can account for only part of what is going on.

In a recent Wall Street Journal editorial, drug-policy adviser Kevin Sabet and former Congressman Patrick Kennedy also analyze the opioid addiction phenomenon within a narrow time frame. They pin the blame on marijuana’s recent legalization in several states, supplementing their charge with the statistic that 70 percent of today’s illicit drug users started with marijuana, not prescription opioids. But this statistic is misleading. Plenty of young people try pot. Indeed, the average age of a marijuana initiate in the United States is 18. Yet the vast majority of teenagers who try pot do not go on to opioids. For those who do, the events may be unrelated. That a 45-year old man with a bad back falls into a prescription opioid habit has nothing to do with the fact that he puffed on a joint 30 years before.

All of these explanations for the opioid crisis come with a solution. But because the explanations are either inadequate or just wrong, so are the solutions. A better solution demands a better explanation. To get it we need to ponder some long-standing trends in Western society.

My specialty, anesthesiology, has exhibited a clear trend since its inception in the mid-19th century. It has divided and sub-divided the targets of anesthesia, including pain, awareness, amnesia, and consciousness, such that putting patients to sleep with anesthetic gas alone has been replaced with using specific agents to dull select feelings and experiences. For example, to block a patient’s memory formation and awareness I use the drug Versed. To induce loss of consciousness I use Propofol. To lessen incisional pain I use opioids. To lessen deep tissue pain I sometimes use Ketamine. To lessen post-operative pain I use Toradol.

What happened in anesthesiology is a microcosm of what happened in society at large. Two centuries ago (and long before that) people used alcohol the way doctors used anesthetic gas. Alcohol numbed people to life’s problems, non-specifically, almost by scattershot. When people felt discord between their lives and their consciences—in other words, between how they lived and how they thought they should be living—they drank. Neither the cause of their discord nor the quality of their misery mattered. All that mattered was that, for one reason or another, people across the centuries have been plagued by some inner voice telling them that their lives were wrong in some way. Because they could not silence life, they silenced their consciences by dulling consciousness generally, using the only or easiest thing available to them: alcohol.

Over the next two centuries, pharmaceutical entrepreneurs eyed the various unpleasant feelings that prodded people to stupefy themselves with drink, then divided them into different categories (for example, anxiety, depression, insomnia, or pain), and then, as in anesthesiology, targeted them with specific agents. Alcohol ceased to be the only solution. Laudanum was an early addition to the apothecary. Codeine was another popular opiate.

Today, we have multiple classes of psychoactive and pain relief drugs, as well as multiple subclasses and subtypes within those subclasses, all targeting a particular form of mental distress. For example, to treat insomnia, one Valium-like drug gets people off to sleep immediately, another kicks in after four hours to forestall an early morning wake-up, while a third’s claim to fame is protecting REM sleep. Over 60 different benzodiazepines now exist. In pain therapy, naturally occurring opiates, semi-synthetic opioids, and synthetic opioids exist alongside non-opioid pain relievers. Even the synthetic opioid fentanyl has more than 1,000 subtypes, including Alfentanil, which is intense but short-acting, and therefore useful in ear, nose, and throat cases, and Sufentanil, the most powerful opioid of all.

It was not advancing science alone that made this targeting possible. Drug companies spotted needs both in my specialty and in society at large, and invested in efforts to create new drugs to address them. That made them money and enabled better medicine. Curiously, in the case of the opioid crisis, this event has generated odd-bedfellow critics. Leftists regularly accuse capitalism of causing evil, but some conservatives have also joined in with criticism of the pharmaceutical industry for creating abusable substances. But this is absurd: All that capitalism has done in this case, as with most others, is identify a market and serve it to mutual benefit, which is what it is supposed to do. Consumers drive capitalism, and silencing inner discord is what consumers wanted—only they wanted something better than the big gun, alcohol. They wanted drugs that would safely and precisely treat their shade of inner turmoil.

The safety issue is important. Before the 20th century, people in a non-sober condition were able to accomplish much. Not all people with inner discord went to work outright drunk, but many were calmly intoxicated, at least from the residual effects of drinking the night before. Millions of men climbed up Manhattan skyscrapers, stayed there a while, put in rivets, and went down again; or they laid down rails in the middle of the desert, surrounded by rattlesnakes and scorpions, and lived apart from society for months; or they went into battle as soldiers to kill or be killed. They submitted against their reason, sometimes even against their will, and for many of them, some degree of intoxication made all this possible by stifling their consciences within. Meanwhile, their intoxication risked their own safety and the safety of others. Many industrial accidents happened.

The new drugs, including anti-anxiety agents, antidepressants, and opioids, calm people’s inner discord more selectively. They cause fewer symptoms of intoxication and make the users of such drugs safer to be around—not completely safe, but safer.

One other long-standing trend in Western society feeds today’s opioid crisis. From ancient Greece to the present day, writers have generally agreed that pleasure is good and pain is bad. From east to west there are religious traditions encouraging self-denial, but by and large in the West, from Epicurus to John Stuart Mill, the strategy has been to parse both pleasure and pain, and to argue that just as some pleasures are better than others, some pains are worse than others.

But the subjectivity of pleasure and pain has always dogged the effort to finely distinguish degrees among them. Over the past two centuries, as industry targeted people’s bad feelings with drugs, the West gradually surrendered on this other point, and agreed that each person has his or her own private experience of pleasure and pain. This new view penetrated medicine. Doctors were no longer granted the authority to tell people how they should be feeling based on some supposedly objective assessment of their bodies. Just as Adam Smith said in his time, it became a matter of professional consensus that no objective standard exists by which to judge.

Against this historical backdrop, the controversies surrounding today’s opioid crisis come into better focus. Some people blame drug companies such as Purdue, the maker of OxyContin, for creating and aggressively marketing new opioids. But, as already suggested, it makes little sense to blame capitalism for responding to consumer demand, even if we could perhaps agree that the marketing has sometimes been a bit too aggressive. Consumers resent a one-size-fits-all mood-modifying drug like alcohol as much as they resent a one-size-fits-all car. They want substances tailored to their particular forms of inner discord, whether anxiety, depression, or pain. The drug companies have simply responded to that demand.

Some people still insist on blaming doctors for over-prescribing opioids. But how can a doctor question another person’s subjective pain experience? When I doubt a patient’s pain complaint in the recovery room—for example, when the patient has a tiny surgical incision but wails nonetheless—the patient looks at me as if to say, “I am the person who feels and not you. You cannot know or judge what I feel.” The patient is right. Inevitably, I give in to my patient and prescribe more narcotic. Millions of other doctors give in to their patients for the same reason, causing an increase in opioid prescriptions and, reasonably enough, cases of addiction.

Some people bemoan the fact that unhappy people have turned to opioids for pleasure, not for pain relief. With a touch of contempt they note the positive correlation between bad economic conditions and the opioid abuse rate (and the Trump vote) and imagine huge crowds of malingerers with nothing better to do than to get high. But deep down, what bothers these almost invariably upper-class critics is not that unhappy people in Trump country use drugs; it’s that they use the wrong drugs. If people feel lousy because they have lost their jobs and can’t support their families or measure up to what is expected of them, then they should be on an antidepressant, not an opioid. If they can’t sleep because of their unhappiness, then they should be on an anti-anxiety agent, not an opioid.

Embedded in this criticism is an admission that opioid addicts hardly differ from other people who want to hide from their own active minds the unwanted aspects of their lives. How opioids work confirms this point. Opioids work not by eliminating pain but by detaching people from their pain, causing them to grow indifferent to it. Other psychoactive drugs work similarly. The life circumstances that cause unhappiness may persist, but for those taking antidepressants, anti-anxiety drugs, and especially alcohol, the feeling of unhappiness becomes vaguely distant. Users care about it less, or even imagine that the unhappiness belongs to someone else. Whether it is opioids, alcohol, antidepressants, or anti-anxiety agents, what bothers sober people does not bother drugged people.

If we add up the 60 million or so Americans who use a sleep aid at night, the 30 million Americans on antidepressants, the 15 million Americans on anti-anxiety drugs, the 16 million Americans who regularly abuse alcohol, and the 65 million Americans who admit to binge drinking at least once a month, the 2.1 million Americans with an opioid abuse disorder represent just a small fraction of Americans who regularly stupefy themselves to escape some ugliness or senselessness they perceive in their lives. About half the country self-intoxicates. The opioid addict’s error is sometimes little more than taking the wrong drug for a life condition that includes anxiety and unhappiness but not pain.

Some people worry about the crime and family break-ups associated with the opioid crisis, although they also worry about the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) pushing addicts toward illegal heroin by cracking down on legitimate opioid prescriptions. Yet these worries spring from the illegality of opioids in the first place. If opioids were less restricted there would be no illegal market for them, let alone criminal gangs associated with that illegal market. Nor would opioid addicts need to exhaust their family savings, rob, or murder to get money to buy drugs. They could stupefy themselves legitimately the way anxious and depressed people do now with anti-anxiety agents, antidepressants, and alcohol.

Some observers cite the high death rate from opioid abuse as a reason to restrict opioids. Yet on balance opioids are safer than alcohol. I would much rather manage the emergency anesthetic of a trauma victim “high” on opioids than the anesthetic of someone drunk, as alcohol causes far more physiological trespass. True, opioids are not harmless; they cause gastrointestinal trouble and may depress the immune system. But the major health problems associated with opioid abuse typically arise from their illegality and not from the drugs themselves—for example, AIDS, sepsis, hepatitis, and endocarditis stemming from the use of dirty needles, or overdoses that occur because of inaccurate drug doses created in street labs.

Way back in 1990 I supported the idea of government-run safe injection sites where opioid addicts could legally inject opioids while under physician supervision, thereby removing the need for addicts to steal to get drugs. I have not since changed my mind. The sites, I argued then, would also rid the streets of dirty needles while rendering the illegal drug market superfluous. This idea became a reality in several Canadian cities a decade ago and was introduced just this month in New York City. It works in Canada and it will work in New York. It lacks the appeal of a morally pure, revelatory sort of solution that will banish sin and restore virtue—but it does work. Similar programs should therefore be encouraged throughout the United States as at least a partial solution for today’s opioid crisis. Blaming doctors or pharmaceutical companies or capitalism is futile; bad diagnoses will always generate bad solutions.

At this point it does not matter how the great mass of today’s opioid addicts became addicts, but only that they are addicts now. The error up to now has been to push these individuals outside the stream of history and award them the status of special malefactors. People have been self-stupefying for thousands of years. As the old joke goes, man was probably a pharmacologist before he became a farmer. The main problem with opioid addicts—and one they share with other addicts like alcoholics—is that their efforts to escape life’s troubles can sometimes go too far, necessitating safe injection sites for opioid abusers, just as AA is sometimes needed for alcohol abusers.

The opioid crisis will likely fade over time. It’s not that doctors will suddenly fine-tune their prescriptions. Addictive behavior is sometimes an unavoidable risk factor when treating chronic pain with opioids. In some cases the treating physician must ask himself or herself, “What is a reasonable degree of addictive behavior in this patient, allowing the patient enough pain relief to function but not so much that the addiction itself leads to problems?” Fine-tuning with opioids is hard.

Instead, such fine-tuning may become unnecessary. In response to consumer demand, industrial capitalism will likely develop non-opioid pain relief alternatives, just as it developed opioids, antidepressants, and anti-anxiety agents in the past. The economy might also improve, reducing somewhat the number of people who seek to use drugs to hide from themselves the truth of their lives. With aggressive mental health programs, those still unhappy with their lives will be routed toward more appropriate antidepressants or anti-anxiety agents.

Yet so long as there is pain, there will be opioid addiction of one kind or another—and thus there will always be a need for safe injection sites. And yes, there will be problems with these sorts of band-aid solutions, as we know from our experiences using methadone as a substitute for heroin. Human beings will never stop comparing how they live with how they want to live or think they should be living. They will never accept their pain as a product of unavoidable circumstances, and they will never stop wishing for their pain to go away. In their misery, they will never stop craving opioids if opioids are the only drugs that work for them. In short, whether you consider them to be acting for good reasons or bad, people in pain will never stop wanting to stupefy themselves. Nor, for other reasons that lead to other drugs, will billions of other people.

See “Annual Causes of Death in the United States,” in Drug War Facts. See also Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (University of California Press, 1991).

For the antidepressant rate see Olfson and Marcus, “National Patterns in Antidepressant Medical Treatment,” Archives of General Psychiatry, 66:8 (2009). For insomnia aids see Robin Lloyd, “Sleep Deprivation: The Great American Myth,” Live Science, March 23, 2006. One in six Americans now takes a psychiatric drug.

Ronald Dworkin, “Drugs and the Principle of Utility,” The Evening Sun, May 30, 1990.

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Starbucks and the Swimming Pool

The media have been reporting with a new regularity episodes of being disrespected for what we might call Existing While Black. The black men in Philadelphia arrested for sitting at a Starbucks waiting for a friend without ordering coffee seems to have started the trend. More recently we have heard of whites calling the cops on black people for barbecuing by a lake, wearing socks at a pool, spending a good amount while having a meal at a restaurant, and so on.

The regularity with which these grievous incidents have been reported is, in larger view, a component within a larger narrative. Today’s educated American consensus seeks with an almost furious diligence to demonstrate that racism pervades American lives even if no one is burning crosses on lawns anymore. We are to smoke out and revile all evidence useful to this observation, disdaining those “out there” who think racism is “over.” Black psychologist Price Cobbs just passed away; with William Grier in the late 1960s he pioneered a conception of whites as harboring inner racism they are unaware of and must be made aware of with often uncomfortable exchanges and sessions. A neat sign of the times is the recent publication of a book urging the exact same kind of practice—except written by a white woman.

In this light, the phenomenon one might refer to generically as “Starbucks and the Swimming Pool” can be taken as precious evidence that “It ain’t over.” And it ain’t—anyone who really thinks racism was slavery, Jim Crow, and Archie Bunker but that modern blacks claiming to experience it are just fibbing ought to heed these incidents.

However, I worry that the bearers of the orthodoxy read “Starbucks and the Swimming Pool” as something more than that. One might suppose—and find it resoundingly confirmed on Twitter—that many read each one of these episodes as a refutation of anyone who bucks the MSNBC/collegetown consensus on race. We are to see these incidents as evidence that to be a black American in 2018 is to suffer this kind of degradation on a regular basis, and to filter our sense of sociopolitical issues relating to black people through that lens. Many black people support that approach: Social media is full of black Americans claiming that they suffer racism “EVERY DAY. EVERY DAY.”

Well, if that’s what being black is like, then certainly it will shape our position on racial preferences (“Naturally all that abuse makes it hard to be a tippy-top student”), reparations (“They’re experiencing a variation on what their grandparents went through and somebody needs to pay for it”), white privilege (“White people don’t have to go through that kind of thing while black people go through it all the time and so…”), and cultural appropriation (“They get chased away from pools and cafes—we can’t deny their humanity in yet another way!”).

I disagree. Starbucks and the Swimming Pool is real. But it does not deep-six the views of black conservatives, or black “contrarians” in general (of which I am apparently one), questioning the orthodoxy that insists that black people can only truly succeed under perfect conditions.

Every day? In my experience certainly not. But maybe twice a year. I have not been asked to leave stores or pools, but I have been discriminated against because of my color twice in the past year. At a doctor’s office, I was in line in front of the white female receptionist’s desk. She handled two white men ahead of me with dispatch. Then when it was my turn she looked at me and then quietly looked down to riffle through some papers. This continued for about 30 seconds. Finally, I said “Miss?” and she looked back up, still paused, upon which I said “I’m here for an appointment,” upon which she realized her mistake—“Oh …!”—and took care of me. But why did I need to summon her that way? Because she made a spot, subconscious assumption, based on my skin color and likely the fact that I wasn’t wearing business clothes, that I was the help of some kind. Or, at least, not a patient. Classic microaggression.

The latest one was when I actually was wearing business casual, having entered a corporate office one evening to teach a night class on philosophy to some Columbia alumni. The receptionist—again a white woman about 32—smilingly asked me if I was “tech.” In other words, she assumed I was there to get the projector set up and so on, as opposed to my being there to, well, teach the class. Golly, I wonder what made her think that?

So, no, I don’t deny that racism exists. Nor do any of the black people (or most of the white ones) who question the modern orthodoxy on “white privilege,” racial preferences, and reparations. What we question is what that kind of racism—subconscious, residual, and passing—affects. For example, I can say quite honestly that neither of those incidents affected me in the least. What I retain most from the first incident is that I went in and got a marvelously effective cortisone shot; what I retain most from the second one is that I taught a fun class to some smart people (and frankly, that I got to do that rather than be a receptionist!). Life is never perfect, and there are much grosser imperfections in mine than petty misinterpretations by people I’ll never see again.

The question, again, is what effect these things have, and the answer to that question extends far beyond my own personal perspectives. We hear much about how Implicit Association Tests reveal racist biases one didn’t know one had—but less about findings that these tests do not correlate with how whites actually behave. Black American public school students at Dunbar High in Washington, DC in Gaslight Era America, in the wake of Plessy v. Ferguson, in a country in which lynching was legal, were regularly trouncing white students on standardized tests—and we know what would have happened to any of them if they had even ventured near a white café or pool. Or—if racist encounters so conclusively stanch black initiative and mental acuity that we cannot be expected to do well on tests, then why does no one expect us not to do well as, say, musicians? Coltrane and Questlove have known their microaggressions quite well, thank you very much.

Should anyone be arrested for insisting on their right to wait for someone without buying coffee? No. Nor should a man at a pool find the shadow of cops looming over him just because he is a Black Wearing Socks. These things must be reported and reviled. However, we fail our responsibility as a society if we let our aggrievement over these incidents morph into a denial of black people’s basic dignity as human beings, equivalent to the one already suffered by being insulted by cops for nothing. A key part of dignity is resilience; another part is the ability to distinguish the passing from the fundamental.

An episode of All in the Family from 1971 strikingly demonstrates how peculiar our orthodoxy on race has become, despite how familiar—and even scripturally unassailable—it seems now to so many. Remember, 1971 felt just as modern to enlightened sorts as 2018 now feels to their equivalents. The long, hot summers, the assassinations of King, Malcolm X and Robert Kennedy, Jimi Hendrix, “Black Power,” afros, dashikis, and the Panthers were all very much on people’s minds. Selma was recent.

And yet—two black burglars break into the Bunkers’ house (played, for the record, by Cleavon Little and Demond Wilson, later of Sanford and Son). Archie inevitably says some racially ignorant things, and “woke” lefty son-in-law Mike intervenes, telling the burglars that they need to understand that Archie doesn’t understand the “underlying social causes” that are making them do what they do. In a moment that now qualifies as almost bizarre, Little responds “Oh, you must be a liberal! And an honest-to-God bigot!”

What? Mike is reciting “root causes” liturgy and gets called a racist? In a script written by educated, racially aware people? The nut is that the black guys feel condescended to by that explanation. They go on to indulge in a mock dialogue nakedly exaggerating the deprivations they’ve suffered in almost minstrel fashion. What they mean is that Mike’s idea that they have so little ability to cope with the disadvantages they’ve suffered dehumanizes them, makes them cartoon characters, and stupid ones at that. The limitations of the sitcom form—especially 50 years ago—leave unanswered what their justification for their criminality is. However, what they certainly know—and what Norman Lear and his writers wanted us to know—is that black people are not poster children. Or at the very least, the idea was that no black person wants to be treated as one.

Things have changed. Today we are to recite faithfully and repetitively the kinds of things Little and Wilson’s characters found condescending, on the pain of being tarred as ignorant and insensitive. I have even heard one prominent black writer telling of fans on the street praising him for doing this, calling it “telling the story” (i.e. the parable, the gospel). Many consider this new way of thinking, under which obstacles and disadvantage are to be limned as fundamental to our essence and coloring all that is thought about us and any judgment of us that may become necessary, as an advance. Apparently there was something those dashiki people were missing.

I don’t think so—it’s today’s zeitgeist that is missing something, or has lost sight of it. I think it infantilizes black people to be taught that microaggressions, and even ones a tad more macro, hold us back, permanently damage our psychology, or render us exempt from genuine competition. I refer, of course, not to being shot or physically abused, but to these Starbucks and the Swimming Pool incidents—sad, unpardonable stains in our national fabric that must be expunged but nevertheless quite plausibly leave black dignity intact.

Many won’t like me saying that. They will feel that I am invalidating their feelings. Some, based on my experience, will agree with me privately—it’s not exactly a complicated point that there is no strength in claiming weakness—but dislike that I am airing such a view publicly, out of a sense that whites must be kept “on the hook.” Well, on that, I can only offer this: When people offer the orthodox view, I feel my own perspectives are being invalidated, and am just as uncomfortable seeing whites reading such arguments as if they are truth sacrosanct. To wit, my feeling has always been that to allow “microaggression” to ravage me, stick with me, in any way is to let ignorance win. Unless it is absolutely necessary, unless I am utterly disempowered, I will not—I could, would never—let stupid win. And if you call that “self-hating” we have a major disagreement about definitions.

Nor do I accept that my views are somehow indisputably naïve or uninformed, or the corollary notion that my views may “‘make you think’ but still…”, given that the orthodoxy leaves no room for this “thinking” to lead anywhere except back to the usual plangent platitudes. The modern media, beyond conservative or “eccentric” sources, give the illusion that all black people with any sense think like, well, you can fill in the names. But this is because of a benign kind of bias: an Ibram Kendi is much more likely to get a National Book Award for a book like Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America than a Coleman Hughes would for a book just as carefully reasoned. Yes, Shelby Steele got that award for the “conservative” The Content of Our Character, but that was almost 30 years ago now and the editorial climate has transformed. Today’s mainstream editorial pages, for example, dread black heterodoxy to an extent that they did not until about eight years ago. What Salon thinks is less in step with what lots and lots of black people think than is always obvious.

In short, Starbucks and the Swimming Pool incidents are indefensible and must be aired. I am not claiming that they are over-covered. However, anyone who thinks these incidents refute Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell, my friend Glenn Loury, or me is operating under an assumption that Black Power cherishes claiming Black Weakness. We “contrarians” are quite proud in our failure to understand that assumption.

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