Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 83

America’s Political Stress Test

In the aftermath of the financial crisis in 2008, Congress passed legislation requiring the largest banks to take a yearly stress test. The purpose is to determine whether important financial institutions have sufficient capital reserves to cope with various worst-case economic scenarios.

In politics, we lack the same kind of objective, widely accepted quantitative measures used in these banking simulations. But we can observe qualitatively how our system reacts to real-time political stress.

Whether due to his temperament or business experience, President Trump likes to make decisions unilaterally. He chafes under the tight constraints of our checks and balances and serves unwittingly as a foil to American government. Pre-Trump, political scientists could only speculate about the strength of our political system’s design. Now we have some evidence. The Trump presidency is America’s political stress test.

What have we learned so far? Overall, the U.S. system is generally holding up as designed, especially with respect to domestic politics. But there are a few worrying signs of weakness in our checks and balances system, particularly on the foreign policy front.

The Founding Fathers were concerned about the tyranny of unchecked executive power and pure democracy’s tendency to instability. President Trump combines both challenges in his uniquely disruptive leadership style. By means of bold executive actions and wide ambiguities in executive trade and treaty authority, Trump has forged ahead with tariffs and redefined our relationships with NATO, South Korea, Iran, and Russia. Through his mastery of social media, he has riled up racial, religious, and socioeconomic tensions and kept his party in line even as he radically departs from Republican, conservative orthodoxy. These kinds of unchecked actions and demagoguery are what American government was designed to minimize, if not prevent.

The checks and balances of the American system are abundantly layered. This institutional logic has frustrated President Trump in various ways as it did President Obama during his time in office. When the Democrats were in power, it was perfectly acceptable for the President to resort to executive actions to accomplish what could not be accomplished through legislative processes under divided government. But by expanding the scope and frequency of executive actions, Obama enabled President Trump’s mission to undo his predecessor’s legacy as quickly and thoroughly as possible.

Among the branches of the Federal government, the most reliable checks to date have emanated from the courts, the most unusual from individuals serving in the executive branch, and the least effective from the Republican-controlled Congress.

The courts have delayed or blocked some of the Trump Administration’s most controversial policies, such as its initial ban on refugees from seven Muslim countries, its effort to end the DACA program, and its attempt to overturn Obama-era rules that would limit methane emissions at oil and gas sites.

But the courts can really only ensure that the President adheres to approved processes like the Administrative Procedures Act or the language and principles of the Constitution. There is little that they can do with respect to the President’s power in foreign affairs unless the Congress asserts its authority more explicitly on matters such as tariff policy.

Other than the Senate’s recent 98-0 vote to reject Putin’s proposal to allow Russia to interrogate American diplomats and citizens in exchange for letting us question the Russians who purportedly hacked our last presidential election, Congress has not shown much willingness to stand up to the President. Rising levels of political polarization and fear of punishment by the party base have neutered Republicans in Congress. They would probably find widespread bipartisan support for reaffirming the American commitment to NATO or for curbing the President’s tariff authority, but neither seems likely to happen at the moment. If party control flips in either the House or the Senate in 2018, it will of course be a different story.

The most surprising checks on the President have come from inside the executive branch. These include staff efforts to manage the President (e.g. John Kelly), passive resistance from staff to presidential demands (e.g. Attorney General Sessions’s recusal from the Russia inquiry and the constant leaking inside the White House), and pushback from the FBI and national security agencies to Trump’s efforts to undermine their investigations. Many of the key people looking into Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election are Republicans (e.g. James Comey, Robert Mueller, Rod Rosenstein, and the FISA judges who authorized the investigation of Carter Page). Their commitment to the rule of law and democratic values is the most encouraging takeaway from all that has happened to date.

The checks and balances on policy get stronger as you move down the chain of government to the state and local level. Whatever the wisdom or merits of sanctuary city policy and other forms of local “resistance,” they are a reminder that states have reserved powers. While the Federal government has grown to some degree over time in this realm, its powers are still limited in important ways.

The current stasis at the Federal level on critical domestic issues like immigration reform or health care does not mean that the political system is broken. Rather, it is simply working as designed. The assumption of the American design is that it would be a mistake to impose policy at the national level before we have a chance to work out the implications and kinks at the state and local levels, or before there is a consensus at the national level about the right thing to do. The verdict is out as to whether the Trump Administration will try to impose its will on the states with respect to marijuana regulation or how local officials handle the incarceration of refugees and undocumented immigrants. But if they try, it will not be easy for them.

Finally, there is the check of the people. The Founding Fathers were well aware of the public’s limitations. If you are citizen slacker or a true believer, you are more vulnerable than ever to manipulation and exaggeration.  Lincoln’s aphorism about fooling the public has been sorely tested under this presidency.  Fortunately, the electoral check on presidential action does not require that all of the people figure things out some of the time. Just enough of the people in November will do the trick.

The post America’s Political Stress Test appeared first on The American Interest.

Pakistan 2018: A Space Odyssey

“Death to space aliens! Death to space aliens!” chant hundreds of people gathered outside a courtroom in Islamabad. They are supporters of politician Hanif Abbasi, who has just been sentenced to life in prison on a drug charge and is being bundled out of court by military commandos in an armored personnel carrier, usually used for transporting hard-core terrorists. “Death to space aliens, death to the ISI!” The cries get louder as the security convoy speeds away. Abbasi, a consistent winner in his Rawalpindi constituency, will no longer be able to contest the elections and like his leader, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif (imprisoned last week on corruption charges), will spend a long stretch in jail—if not the rest of his life.

Abbasi’s incarceration and disqualification on Saturday was the latest in a series of actions that supporters describe as part of an elaborate conspiracy to rig the elections by “space aliens”—a thinly veiled reference to the country’s ubiquitous intelligence agencies and all-powerful military. This new phrase joins an ever expanding and dexterous political parlance in Pakistan used to refer to the military, known variously as “Farishtas” (angels) “the boys,” “the brass,” “the boots,” “khakis,” “the Pindi club,” or simply “them.” When journalists are abducted, newspapers appear with blank spaces on their editorial pages, politicians are coerced or forced to change loyalties, or television networks mysteriously shut down, it can safely be assumed, though not openly said, that aliens have paid a visit. Sometimes it’s not felt necessary to even spell it out; the message is communicated with a coy smile and two taps on the shoulder to indicate epaulettes. In Pakistan, what is said is often different from what is meant, but what is meant is rarely unclear. Even the casual Pakistan watcher will be aware of the term “The Establishment,” a nebulous formulation that broadly refers to a collection of power elites in the military, intelligence apparatus, and civil bureaucracy. It is widely known that any civilian pretender to the throne must first seek the blessings of “the Establishment,” a veritable Mount Olympus in the country’s politics. Thus has it always been and thus, many are determined, shall it ever be.

But something new is happening that goes beyond business as usual. If local human rights organizations, international watchdog groups and the mass of the country’s journalists of repute are to be believed, Pakistan is heading into the most rigged elections in its history. What is occurring, by all these accounts, is unique—not about one election alone but about a fundamental restructuring of state institutions. “We are facing an unprecedented assault by the Pakistani military on the freedom of the press, which is threatening our chances for free and fair elections” writes Hameed Haroon, CEO of the Dawn group, one of Pakistan’s largest media houses, which last year found itself in the line of fire after reporting on deepening civil-military tensions in the so-called “Dawn Leaks” saga. Dawn’s newspaper distribution network was brought to a standstill across the country and its television channel taken off the air. The government remained helpless and genuinely oblivious in the face of these crackdowns, unable to answer why this was happening—though it was clear to all that this too was an extra-terrestrial event.

Journalists like Haroon say the new regime of suppression is manifold and characterized not only by muzzling of the press but manipulation of the judicial process, enforced disappearances, targeting of political opponents, use of banned extremist outfits as strategic assets, and control over electoral procedures. The disqualification, conviction and incarceration of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on corruption charges and the decapitation of the political leadership of his party is seen as being at the center of this multi-pronged attack on democratic institutions.

It’s not just journalists making such claims. This week a senior serving judge of the High Court in Islamabad, Shaukat Aziz Siddiqui, shocked the country by claiming publicly that judges of the superior judiciary are under immense pressure from the ISI, Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency, to deliver desired verdicts in a number of cases relating to Sharif. “In today’s era, the ISI is fully involved in manipulating judicial proceedings,” Justice Siddiqui thundered in a speech to the Rawalpindi District Bar Association. “Their [ISI] personnel instruct the courts to constitute judicial benches at their will.” Siddiqui also went on to say that judges have their phones tapped and their lives are not safe. “We were given clear instructions that Nawaz Sharif and his daughter Maryam must be kept in prison until the elections are over.” Siddiqui’s outburst has been met with added amazement as he has long been considered a pro-establishment figure sympathetic to far-Right religious parties traditionally allied with the military, a sign of how many fault lines the machinations of the deep state are opening up.

Despite widespread claims of gerrymandering, the elections remain a two-horse race. On the one hand, there is a beleaguered but defiant House of Sharif, the political dynasty led by three-time former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who will receive the election results in a prison cell—and on the other, his arch rival Imran Khan, who is seen as benefitting from the military-led dirty tricks campaign and is preparing to storm the ramparts of power imminently.

Sharif, who was convicted a fortnight ago by the Supreme Court and handed a ten-year prison sentence for failing to convincingly show a money trail for London apartments owned by his sons, is urging voters to come out and deliver a verdict that will break open the bars of his prison cell. In an audio message released from his Rawalpindi jail cell yesterday Sharif said: “I want to tell you that the time has finally arrived to give one final push to break the hold of those who have enslaved us.” The message, a bitter clarion call against the military, completes Nawaz Sharif’s transition from ultimate insider to renegade outlaw.

“If I have ever seen a full circle in politics (rudely put, your own creation turning to bite you in the ass) this is it,” tweeted Aamer Ahmed Khan, former editor of the BBC’s Urdu service. Most commentators agree that Sharif has had two political lives. Long considered a classic example of an establishment politician—Punjabi, traditionalist, button-downed, religious-minded, business friendly, pro-army, anti-India—an increasingly independent-minded Sharif has fallen spectacularly foul of the military after three spells in power, and joined his erstwhile critics on the barricades. Once anathema to liberal and secular swathes of society for his quasi-religious notions and autocratic tendencies, Sharif’s new allies across the political divide also hail him for his newfound social progressivism and re-think on the religion question.

Corruption cases against Sharif were set in motion last year after the Panama Papers revelations showed his sons were beneficiaries of offshore companies that held properties in London’s Park Lane. There is a widespread perception about the corruption of most politicians in Pakistan, especially the Sharif family, and their opponents have cashed in on this populist narrative. The Panama case culminated in his conviction, but there is a growing sense that Sharif is being punished for other things. His attempt to put former military dictator General Musharaff on trial for treason and his efforts to steer an independent foreign policy, particularly in regards to making peace with India, are widely believed to have put him on a collision course with the deep state.

The deck is now stacked squarely against the portly ex-premier, but his open defiance of the military and decision to leave his ailing wife on her deathbed in London to return to a prison cell in Pakistan has been met with large amounts of admiration. Sharif has walked straight into the fire and become an unlikely David for those that have always seen the army as the real barrier to democratic progress. “Pakistanis love a good fighter,” says journalist Changez Ali. “Most people understand the stakes, and despite their dislike of Nawaz Sharif, for many this has become a referendum on the role of the military in Pakistan.”

As Pakistanis head to the polls today, however, the most recent numbers indicate that Sharif’s PML-N party has slipped several points behind its chief rival, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice). As it stands presently, it is more likely that Sharif’s nemesis Imran Khan, oft introduced with the sobriquet “cricketer turned politician,” will now find himself “cricketer turned Prime Minister,” after a 22-year slog in politics spent mostly in the wilderness. For Khan, who was catapulted to the national stage by a wave of popular support in 2011, it has been a long time coming. A national hero even before he entered politics, having led Pakistan’s cricket team to a spectacular World Cup victory in 1992, there was scarcely anyone more beloved and desired in the country. His initial foray into politics, though unsuccessful, painted him in the public imagination as a gallant white knight up against a dirty and corrupt political system which would never let a good man in. From there on it has been a fairy tale in reverse.

While most understood that he would have to compromise with the system to some degree in order to get ahead, his willingness to collude with the most sinister characters on the political landscape has disillusioned many erstwhile supporters. For many years the cornerstone of his political message was that he would bring in new faces and banish old corrupt elites. It’s hard to stress how central this mantra-like pledge was to his early appeal. Today, most of his party is made up of what are cynically known as “Electables,” party-hopping career politicians, feudal landlords, and oligarchs who profess no loyalties or ideological leanings but hold the means to win elections. Most of these candidates are former MPs poached from the other major parties, the very people Khan has spent two decades denouncing as corrupt and rotten to the core. In a stunning recent admission Khan conceded that these Electables, also known as “Lotas” (a water receptacle used for anal hygiene in most Pakistani homes) are not people he can vouch for, but they are indispensable to his victory. In one of the most glaring recent such inductions Khan posed for photographs with a convicted gang-rapist turned politician as he welcomed him into the party fold. A social media storm ensued and the man’s membership was withdrawn soon after, but critics say this is one of many examples of shocking unscrupulousness currently on display from Khan’s camp.

Perhaps most controversial for many Pakistanis has been his slobbering support for the Taliban, who have killed over 70,000 civilians in the last decade but whom he describes as “misunderstood.” Khan’s consistent apologist role for the group and advocacy of “peace talks” led him to be nominated by the Taliban themselves as their representative in said peace talks with the government. At one stage he even appealed for the Taliban to be allowed to open offices in parts of the country to conduct negotiations—a statement he made while standing on the smoldering steps of a church in Peshawar, where 85 Christians attending Sunday morning mass had just been blown to bits by the Taliban. Khan’s deliberate obfuscation on the issue of militancy prevented any national unity on how to tackle the problem and resulted in many more lives lost until the military finally took action.

There are things to admire about Khan. His astonishing will to power and unwavering resolve are respected even by critics. There is no denying that he has been a revolutionary force in Pakistani politics and galvanized an entirely new generation of voters, particularly young people. But his blistering rhetoric, name-calling, regular assertions of dubious claims, veiled exhortations to violence and dog whistling on religious issues have also given rise to a culture of boorishness, conspiracy theories, hyper nationalism and rabid viciousness which is beginning to have a visible trickle-down effect. In a horrifying incident last week, a group of political workers from Khan’s party beat a donkey to a pulp after Khan compared supporters of Nawaz Sharif to donkeys. According to news reports, the group of cackling Khan supporters first wrote Nawaz Sharif’s name on the animal and then proceeded to kick, punch and rip out its nostrils “in jest.” The animal, which was also rammed with a car and tied up with ropes, has since died at an animal sanctuary where it was taken after the assault.

Imran Khan’s wafer-thin expediency and obsession with winning at all costs draw regular comparisons with Trump. “All that’s missing is orange hair-dye,” says Zarrar Khuro, a journalist and television show host. Like Trump also, Khan enjoys the Teflon effect. Very little seems to stick. A shocking tell-all book by his most recent ex-wife released days before the election paints a jaw-dropping portrait of Khan’s personal life. Reham Khan, who was married to Imran for less than a year, claims her ex-husband is desperate for power, hooked on cocaine, fond of sexual orgies, massively into the occult, has a clutch of illegitimate children, a penchant for gay porn, and is completely disconnected from reality.  The book has set tongues wagging across the country, but seems to have had no impact on his political campaign. There appears little that can stop Imran Khan now, but for many the dream has already gone sour.

The post Pakistan 2018: A Space Odyssey appeared first on The American Interest.

What Is Millennial Socialism?

You know it when you see it. The rose emojis, the Chapo Trap House downloads, the Jacobin subscriptions, and the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez retweets. This is millennial socialism. But how is it different from the old?

Spoiler: it’s very different. Because whilst the Right continues to fall for to the straw man drawn by Jordan Peterson—that of the ghoulish neo-Stalinist “Cultural Marxist”—the ideological building blocks of millennial socialism have changed.

This “dirtbag left” has a new sense of class, revolution, and democracy.

This is not their parents’ class struggle. Rewind a generation: the idea of the working class as an agent of change, embodying a Hegelian idea of Geist, was fundamental to socialism. The enemy was the middle class, the bourgeoisie—big and petty—exactly as Karl Marx’s described class power in the 19th century. Not anymore.

The slogan “We are the 99 percent” defines millennial socialism.

“I can tell you this: as I suggested we call ourselves the 99 percent,” says Professor David Graeber, the author most recently of Bullshit Jobs. “And I knew what I was thinking.” The slogan that went viral out of Zuccotti Park redefined class power.

“‘We are the 99 percent’ is a class model for a financialized political model. It was a way of talking about class power in a financialized version of capitalism. The idea is anyone but the 1 percent is on the receiving end of it. It allowed us to move beyond the inveterate divisions of traditional leftist politics and create a point of unity for everyone.” By making the enemy  “the 1 percent,” it opened the ranks of the Left and made it so anyone who wasn’t Sheldon Adelson could be a socialist.

“People had been throwing around the idea of the 1 percent,” says Graeber. “What really struck us was that it was the same 1 percent of the population that was taking the benefits of all economic growth, that it was the same 1 percent that were making almost all the political campaign contributions. So we were defining them as the people who are turning power into wealth and their wealth into power.”

What this slogan did was break decades of socialist thinking with its virality. The fraying middle class was not the natural ally of the wealthy; it was not protected by the 1 percent. People who looked middle class, thought of themselves as middle class, and had ‘middle class jobs’, but were in fact now drowning in mortgage debt, with their children saddled with vast college debt—these were also victims of the 1 percent.

“I don’t think it’s being emphasized enough: this was a massive shift in public consciousness that Occupy led to, about class and capitalism,” says Graeber.

Zuccotti Park set off a long slow-burning change of perceptions on the Left. Beginning with face-to-face encounters, with a sense that people were out, Occupy transformed into a lasting social force, leaving in its wake a slew of magazines, sites, activists, Twitter communities, intellectuals—a movement that has changed popular culture. And the shifts are real: respondents under 30 rated socialism more positively than capitalism—43 percent to 32 percent—in 2016.

“Where are they getting it from?” says Graeber. “You won’t have seen nothing, ever, nowhere, that would have had anything positive to say about socialism on American television. So it has to be from social movements. And that’s the legacy of Occupy.” Behind the slogan is the idea of an alliance of all against the super rich. Gone is the idea of the working class against the bourgeoisie. The suburban mortgage holder isn’t the enemy anymore; the hedge funds are.

“What I always tell people who tell me that Occupy failed because it didn’t set itself up like the Tea Party and try and get legislation through is that that’s not what we were trying to do. Because of course what we were trying to do was a long-term transformation. And that seems to have worked.”

This has allowed millennial socialism to be a movement for the middle class—class struggle as against the likes of Elon Musk, and not the suburbs. But the Right—keep tuning into that silly Ben Shapiro show—is missing this. When an outlet like Newsmax tries to show that someone in the Democratic Socialists of America of America is middle class, it doesn’t bother millennial socialists one bit. Flagging up that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez grew up in a house in Yorktown Heights? That is missing 99 percent of the point.

“Revolution” was to a generation of socialists what Godot was to Vladimir and Estragon. Waiting for the revolution, anticipating the revolution, planning for the revolution, paralyzed a generation of socialists in Britain and America.

“We can’t sit around waiting; our chance is happening right now,” I remember my friend James Schneider told me when he co-founded Momentum to support Jeremy Corbyn. This attitude, and how prevalent it is, matters.

The idea of the revolution crippled a generation of socialist activists and intellectuals. Not anymore. Britain’s millennial socialists believe that the Labour Party can be made the vehicle for the revolution they want—breaking 1 percent financial capitalism—and they can achieve it through the ballot box.

This idea of the revolution could not be more different from the older generation. The old Left—think Perry Anderson and his New Left Review—went from believing Harold Wilson could open the path to socialism through the ballot boxes, to waiting expectantly for a May ‘68-type situation to emerge in the United Kingdom, to writing it off completely as a historic impossibility in the 1990s.

That old idea of the revolution—the massive crowds, the vanguard and the Kalashnikov chic—is so absent from millennial socialism that it’s hard to get across how important it was to the old Left. What for the new is commodified ironic Soviet kitsch was deadly serious to the founders of the New Left Review, for whom October 1917 was an inseparable part of thinking about socialism. Late-night discussions in the upstairs room at pubs in Islington about the exact moment to seize Parliament based on analysing Karl Liebknecht’s mistakes for when the ‘situation’ next comes round? That was the old 1970s Left. Go to the pub with millennial socialists and all you will hear about is party politics.

What Corbyn has done for Britain—turning a generation that might otherwise have gone on to be Vladimirs and Estragons into a party generation—Bernie Sanders has done for America. Through his unashamed class rhetoric and his campaign organization “Our Revolution,” Sanders has mobilized a generation to believe party politics can break the power of the 1 percent.

Now—even more so since the success of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—millennial socialist activists are convinced that the hollow establishment parties that their forerunners disdained are instruments ripe for the taking. This is chalk and cheese to the old Left. The new want to move the “Miliband window.” When Marxist intellectual Ralph Miliband published Parliamentary Socialism in 1961, he spoke for his generation in arguing that Labour was committed to parliamentarism, and thus could never be a socialist party. Both his sons, Ed and David Miliband, as if convinced by his thesis, and that the revolution was never going to happen either, ended up centrist Labour politicians. Today the millennial socialists I know are dedicated to proving that thesis wrong.

And in doing so, they have both downsized and got the violent out the idea of the revolution.

What makes millennial socialism different from what we saw in the Cold War is not just class and revolution but its idea of democracy. This is a generation whose spirit is not Marxist-Leninist or Marxist-Stalinist, but Marxist-anarchist.

The Left has always been an alphabet soup of hyphenated socialists.

But a generation ago, hard Left socialists were likely to have negative understandings of democracy. With a few exceptions here and there, they were either Marxist-Leninist, or Socialist-Trotskyites, or Stalinists, with ideas of “democratic centralism.” Or Western Maoists and Guevaraists, whose Marxism was wedded to the idea of the militarized, paramilitary vanguard. Not anymore.

Yet again this comes from Occupy. “There are a lot of would-be Leninists and Stalinists trying to organize the DSA,” says David Graeber, who identifies as an anarchist himself. “But the general spirit is not with them. It makes sense to talk about what’s happening in the way that Immanuel Wallerstein talked about 1789, 1848 and 1917 being world revolutions, which happened on a certain level all over the world, because they were revolutions that changed political common sense. This is what happened in 2011, with Occupy, the idea of how to organize.”

This is often the trickiest thing for liberals to grasp: for millennial socialists, America does not need a GOSPLAN, a super powerful state, or central planning. What they believe it needs is as much democracy as possible.

Workers’ control, autonomism, corporate democracy, locally supervised nationalized industries—not high-up, mandarin-allocated indicative planning. This is millennial socialism: dreams of socially-owned Ubers and AirBnBs.

You could even say this generation has absorbed part of the neoliberal critique of the state—that it is not the site of liberation—and kept something of the “think global, act local” into which the Left retreated in the 1990s. What they want is a patchwork of social enterprises, collectives, town enterprises, and union-run factories, because they reject Soviet-style centralization.

“What’s happening with people is the basic idea of democracy has changed,” says Graeber. “It no longer has just to do with the state. This is the legacy of Occupy and also seeing how social movements have played out across the world. And there has come to be the idea that you need to have institutions outside of the political structures to maintain democracy that you can integrate with those working inside the political system.”

This is because millennial socialists think in terms of a matrix of oppression.

Intersectionality has convinced this generation—feminism is socialism, anti-racism is socialism, LGBTQI is socialism. Their understanding of it is as a democratic process that reverts marginalization, through above all, voice. “I would compare what has happened since Occupy,” says Graeber, “to feminism and abolitionism—about changing people’s basic moral perceptions.”  

Those listening to Jordan Peterson and seeing, like he does, little Soviet troopers in the advance of Corbynism and the Jacobin Generation are missing the point. Leave the psychologist to fight his imaginary Left.

The best place to see what a millennial socialist agenda might look like in practice is the Labour Party’s 2017 report on Alternative Models of Ownership. The expert group commissioned by the party lays into ministerial central planning, the very essence of old socialism, lamenting that in the 20th century “national state ownership has traditionally been in the hands of a private and corporate elite” and that “these industries were heavily constrained in their ability to borrow to finance investment” on the market.

These are some of their alternatives: national profit sharing-schemes, community land trusts, municipal businesses, workers’ cooperatives like Legacoop in Italy or the Mondragon Group in Spain, employee stock ownership plans or a sovereign wealth fund to which FTSE-listed companies are required to issue a percentage of stock on incorporation.

Millennial socialism is not trying to stop the market economy, but to change its players and rewrite its rules.

“What the Labour people are are trying to figure out,” says David Graeber, “Is mixing these notions of bottom-up democracy with a parliamentary model. That’s the puzzle for today. Nobody has yet worked out a way to make these two types of institutions not undercut each other.” But are these wonkish plans going to live up to millennial socialists’ visions of radical democracy?

Maybe not. Ideas never survive contact with the real world in their pure form. But so far this generation has one major advantage: a kind of grassroots energy fueling turnout and internet culture that keeps going viral. And if you believe these millennial socialists will have no effect on real world politics, then you have to be captive to a whole other set of rigid and fossilized beliefs.

Just like Joe Lieberman, Howard Schultz or “fellow Democrats” like James Comey clearly are.

The post What Is Millennial Socialism? appeared first on The American Interest.

What is Millennial Socialism?

You know it when you see it. The rose emojis, the Chapo Trap House downloads, the Jacobin subscriptions, and the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez retweets. This is millennial socialism. But how is it different from the old?

Spoiler: it’s very different. Because whilst the Right continues to fall for to the straw man drawn by Jordan Peterson—that of the ghoulish neo-Stalinist “Cultural Marxist”—the ideological building blocks of millennial socialism have changed.

This “dirtbag left” has a new sense of class, revolution, and democracy.

This is not their parents’ class struggle. Rewind a generation: the idea of the working class as an agent of change, embodying a Hegelian idea of Geist, was fundamental to socialism. The enemy was the middle class, the bourgeoisie—big and petty—exactly as Karl Marx’s described class power in the 19th century. Not anymore.

The slogan “We are the 99 percent” defines millennial socialism.

“I can tell you this: as I suggested we call ourselves the 99 percent,” says Professor David Graeber, the author most recently of Bullshit Jobs. “And I knew what I was thinking.” The slogan that went viral out of Zuccotti Park redefined class power.

“‘We are the 99 percent’ is a class model for a financialized political model. It was a way of talking about class power in a financialized version of capitalism. The idea is anyone but the 1 percent is on the receiving end of it. It allowed us to move beyond the inveterate divisions of traditional leftist politics and create a point of unity for everyone.” By making the enemy  “the 1 percent,” it opened the ranks of the Left and made it so anyone who wasn’t Sheldon Adelson could be a socialist.

“People had been throwing around the idea of the 1 percent,” says Graeber. “What really struck us was that it was the same 1 percent of the population that was taking the benefits of all economic growth, that it was the same 1 percent that were making almost all the political campaign contributions. So we were defining them as the people who are turning power into wealth and their wealth into power.”

What this slogan did was break decades of socialist thinking with its virality. The fraying middle class was not the natural ally of the wealthy; it was not protected by the 1 percent. People who looked middle class, thought of themselves as middle class, and had ‘middle class jobs’, but were in fact now drowning in mortgage debt, with their children saddled with vast college debt—these were also victims of the 1 percent.

“I don’t think it’s being emphasized enough: this was a massive shift in public consciousness that Occupy led to, about class and capitalism,” says Graeber.

Zuccotti Park set off a long slow-burning change of perceptions on the Left. Beginning with face-to-face encounters, with a sense that people were out, Occupy transformed into a lasting social force, leaving in its wake a slew of magazines, sites, activists, Twitter communities, intellectuals—a movement that has changed popular culture. And the shifts are real: respondents under 30 rated socialism more positively than capitalism—43 percent to 32 percent—in 2016.

“Where are they getting it from?” says Graeber. “You won’t have seen nothing, ever, nowhere, that would have had anything positive to say about socialism on American television. So it has to be from social movements. And that’s the legacy of Occupy.” Behind the slogan is the idea of an alliance of all against the super rich. Gone is the idea of the working class against the bourgeoisie. The suburban mortgage holder isn’t the enemy anymore; the hedge funds are.

“What I always tell people who tell me that Occupy failed because it didn’t set itself up like the Tea Party and try and get legislation through is that that’s not what we were trying to do. Because of course what we were trying to do was a long-term transformation. And that seems to have worked.”

This has allowed millennial socialism to be a movement for the middle class—class struggle as against the likes of Elon Musk, and not the suburbs. But the Right—keep tuning into that silly Ben Shapiro show—is missing this. When an outlet like Newsmax tries to show that someone in the Democratic Socialists of America of America is middle class, it doesn’t bother millennial socialists one bit. Flagging up that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez grew up in a house in Yorktown Heights? That is missing 99 percent of the point.

“Revolution” was to a generation of socialists what Godot was to Vladimir and Estragon. Waiting for the revolution, anticipating the revolution, planning for the revolution, paralyzed a generation of socialists in Britain and America.

“We can’t sit around waiting; our chance is happening right now,” I remember my friend James Schneider told me when he co-founded Momentum to support Jeremy Corbyn. This attitude, and how prevalent it is, matters.

The idea of the revolution crippled a generation of socialist activists and intellectuals. Not anymore. Britain’s millennial socialists believe that the Labour Party can be made the vehicle for the revolution they want—breaking 1 percent financial capitalism—and they can achieve it through the ballot box.

This idea of the revolution could not be more different from the older generation. The old Left—think Perry Anderson and his New Left Review—went from believing Harold Wilson could open the path to socialism through the ballot boxes, to waiting expectantly for a May ‘68-type situation to emerge in the United Kingdom, to writing it off completely as a historic impossibility in the 1990s.

That old idea of the revolution—the massive crowds, the vanguard and the Kalashnikov chic—is so absent from millennial socialism that it’s hard to get across how important it was to the old Left. What for the new is commodified ironic Soviet kitsch was deadly serious to the founders of the New Left Review, for whom October 1917 was an inseparable part of thinking about socialism. Late-night discussions in the upstairs room at pubs in Islington about the exact moment to seize Parliament based on analysing Karl Liebknecht’s mistakes for when the ‘situation’ next comes round? That was the old 1970s Left. Go to the pub with millennial socialists and all you will hear about is party politics.

What Corbyn has done for Britain—turning a generation that might otherwise have gone on to be Vladimirs and Estragons into a party generation—Bernie Sanders has done for America. Through his unashamed class rhetoric and his campaign organization “Our Revolution,” Sanders has mobilized a generation to believe party politics can break the power of the 1 percent.

Now—even more so since the success of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—millennial socialist activists are convinced that the hollow establishment parties that their forerunners disdained are instruments ripe for the taking. This is chalk and cheese to the old Left. The new want to move the “Miliband window.” When Marxist intellectual Ralph Miliband published Parliamentary Socialism in 1961, he spoke for his generation in arguing that Labour was committed to parliamentarism, and thus could never be a socialist party. Both his sons, Ed and David Miliband, as if convinced by his thesis, and that the revolution was never going to happen either, ended up centrist Labour politicians. Today the millennial socialists I know are dedicated to proving that thesis wrong.

And in doing so, they have both downsized and got the violent out the idea of the revolution.

What makes millennial socialism different from what we saw in the Cold War is not just class and revolution but its idea of democracy. This is a generation whose spirit is not Marxist-Leninist or Marxist-Stalinist, but Marxist-anarchist.

The Left has always been an alphabet soup of hyphenated socialists.

But a generation ago, hard Left socialists were likely to have negative understandings of democracy. They were either Marxist-Leninist, or Socialist-Trotskyites, or Stalinists, with ideas of “democratic centralism.” Or Western Maoists and Guevaraists, whose Marxism was wedded to the idea of the militarized, paramilitary vanguard. Not anymore.

Yet again this comes from Occupy. “There are a lot of would-be Leninists and Stalinists trying to organize the DSA,” says David Graeber, who identifies as an anarchist himself. “But the general spirit is not with them. It makes sense to talk about what’s happening in the way that Immanuel Wallerstein talked about 1789, 1848 and 1917 being world revolutions, which happened on a certain level all over the world, because they were revolutions that changed political common sense. This is what happened in 2011, with Occupy, the idea of how to organize.”

This is often the trickiest thing for liberals to grasp: for millennial socialists, America does not need a GOSPLAN, a super powerful state, or central planning. What they believe it needs is as much democracy as possible.

Workers’ control, autonomism, corporate democracy, locally supervised nationalized industries—not high-up, mandarin-allocated indicative planning. This is millennial socialism: dreams of socially-owned Ubers and AirBnBs.

You could even say this generation has absorbed part of the neoliberal critique of the state—that it is not the site of liberation—and kept something of the “think global, act local” into which the Left retreated in the 1990s. What they want is a patchwork of social enterprises, collectives, town enterprises, and union-run factories, because they reject Soviet-style centralization.

“What’s happening with people is the basic idea of democracy has changed,” says Graeber. “It no longer has just to do with the state. This is the legacy of Occupy and also seeing how social movements have played out across the world. And there has come to be the idea that you need to have institutions outside of the political structures to maintain democracy that you can integrate with those working inside the political system.”

This is because millennial socialists think in terms of a matrix of oppression.

Intersectionality has convinced this generation—feminism is socialism, anti-racism is socialism, LGBTQI is socialism. Their understanding of it is as a democratic process that reverts marginalization, through above all, voice. “I would compare what has happened since Occupy,” says Graeber, “to feminism and abolitionism—about changing people’s basic moral perceptions.”  

Those listening to Jordan Peterson and seeing, like he does, little Soviet troopers in the advance of Corbynism and the Jacobin Generation are missing the point. Leave the psychologist to fight his imaginary Left.

The best place to see what a millennial socialist agenda might look like in practice is the Labour Party’s 2017 report on Alternative Models of Ownership. The expert group commissioned by the party lays into ministerial central planning, the very essence of old socialism, lamenting that in the 20th century “national state ownership has traditionally been in the hands of a private and corporate elite” and that “these industries were heavily constrained in their ability to borrow to finance investment” on the market.

These are some of their alternatives: national profit sharing-schemes, community land trusts, municipal businesses, workers’ cooperatives like Legacoop in Italy or the Mondragon Group in Spain, employee stock ownership plans or a sovereign wealth fund to which FTSE-listed companies are required to issue a percentage of stock on incorporation.

Millennial socialism is not trying to stop the market economy, but to change its players and rewrite its rules.

“What the Labour people are are trying to figure out,” says David Graeber, “Is mixing these notions of bottom-up democracy with a parliamentary model. That’s the puzzle for today. Nobody has yet worked out a way to make these two types of institutions not undercut each other.” But are these wonkish plans going to live up to millennial socialists’ visions of radical democracy?

Maybe not. Ideas never survive contact with the real world in their pure form. But so far this generation has one major advantage: a kind of grassroots energy fueling turnout and internet culture that keeps going viral. And if you believe these millennial socialists will have no effect on real world politics, then you have to be captive to a whole other set of rigid and fossilized beliefs.

Just like Joe Lieberman, Howard Schultz or “fellow Democrats” like James Comey clearly are.

The post What is Millennial Socialism? appeared first on The American Interest.

Only a Pawn in Their Game

Reporter: A Memoir

Seymour M. Hersh

Knopf, 2018, 340 pp., $27.95

There’s much pleasure to be had in reading Seymour Hersh’s recently published memoir, but it’s the book’s cover, really, that tells the entire story. Hersh, his face an approximation of that old journalistic metaphor, shoe leather, is seated behind a desk cluttered with thumbed-through files. He is positioned in three-quarter view, as if the photograph were taken by Hans Holbein. Behind him is an enormous map of the world, and above him the book’s title, Reporter. “This book,” a blurb affixed to the cover by means of a blue sticker informs us, “is essential reading for every journalist and aspiring journalist the world over.” The blurb’s author is John le Carré.

Why tap the master of modern espionage fiction to boost a book by a man too often hailed as America’s greatest living investigative journalist? It’s because, properly read, Reporter isn’t a memoir at all: It’s a novel about the sort of chap le Carré knows best, the gullible guy who becomes a pawn in a game of intelligence and intrigue whose rules he doesn’t understand but whose players, for some strange reasons, he trusts.

Read almost any Hersh story, going back now for decades, and sooner or later you’ll come across a staple of his reporting: unnamed sources. These shadowy figures emerge at critical junctures to shed light on astonishing plots, like the alleged one by the Bush Administration to manipulate Iraq’s democratic elections: “I was informed by several former military and intelligence officials,” Hersh wrote in the New Yorker in 2005, “that the activities were kept, in part, ‘off the books’—they were conducted by retired C.I.A. officers and other non-government personnel, and used funds that were not necessarily appropriated by Congress.” A year earlier, unnamed sources also informed Hersh that the Department of Defense, inspired by a 1973 book about Arab psychology, had launched a program, codenamed “Copper Green,” designed to use sexual abuse and humiliation to get Iraqi prisoners to share useful intelligence. And in 2017, Hersh published a widely criticized article in the German Die Welt, rushing to the defense of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad: The World Health Organization and Doctors Without Borders may have ruled the April 4 attack on Khan Sheikhoun, leaving 92 dead, to be a chemical attack orchestrated by the Syrian regime, but unnamed sources assured Hersh that the deaths were caused by toxic discharge released as a result of a conventional attack on a nearby jihadi facility.

These outlandish allegations nearly always turn out to be unverifiable. Frequently, they turn out to be dead wrong: In 1974, for example, another anonymous source informed Hersh that the one-time American Ambassador to Chile, Edward Korry, was instrumental in orchestrating that country’s coup d’état. Seven years later, faced with incontrovertible disconfirming information, Hersh was forced to write a 3,000-word story correcting the record and recanting his earlier reporting.

Of course, relying on anonymous sources is an important part of an investigative journalist’s job. People in a position to know sensitive information, especially information pertaining to national security, aren’t likely to amble into a newsroom and volunteer information that is likely to jeopardize their careers and, sometimes, their freedom. Even our best reporters err from time to time, an inconvenient truth you’re taught sometime during your first semester in journalism school. But Hersh errs far more than most, and the pattern of his errors is instructive.

Take l’affaire JFK, in which Hersh, accepting papers that allegedly belonged to the late President, was duped into believing that Kennedy was beholden to mob boss Sam Giancana and blackmailed by Marilyn Monroe. In Reporter, Hersh dispenses with the entire episode, one of the most seminal of his career, in a handful of pages. A 1997 account in the New Yorker by David Samuels, however, paints a more satisfying—and more troubling—picture.

In December of 1994, Hersh, who was then working on a new biography of JFK, was approached by a group of men and informed that a new trove of papers in Kennedy’s handwriting had been unearthed. Their owner, Lex Cusack, was the son of the late President’s legal adviser, and was now putting the documents on the market. Hersh took a meeting. The nature of the transaction being proposed was not lost on him: If the documents were featured by a celebrated reporter such as himself, Hersh knew, their price tag would skyrocket. “Once we have published,” he told Cusack, “I believe that your documents will have even greater value and be more in demand—especially by Hollywood.” Soon, Hersh started receiving photocopies of the letters by FedEx. He was also asked to attend a meeting with potential investors who were hoping to purchase the papers, and crooned that he would purchase them all himself if he could.

Were the papers real? “I was assured,” he writes in Reporter, “that the papers had been analyzed and authenticated by one of America’s foremost handwriting experts on such material.” The papers were indeed authenticated by one expert, but Hersh’s own reporting soon raised some red flags. A handful of former Kennedy aides rejected them as forgeries, which Hersh largely ignored, thinking they were only aiming to protect the reputation of their old martyred boss. More troubling, Cusack himself turned out to be a serial fabricator, lying about everything from attending Harvard to being a member of Naval Intelligence. Hersh let the whoppers slide, all of them. “In my business,” he later told Samuels, “you don’t really go around psychoanalyzing people who give you stuff.”

Hersh’s reputation—he was, after all, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who had broke the story of the My Lai massacre—led to a deal with NBC to turn the upcoming Kennedy book into a documentary. The network paid nearly $1 million for the privilege, but when its forensic experts found the documents to be fakes, the network dropped out. Hersh didn’t: Not in the least concerned by what was now a very distinct possibility that he had been duped, he took his stuff to ABC and signed another TV deal. But questions kept mounting, including why a letter Kennedy allegedly wrote in 1961 would feature a ZIP code, a system not introduced until 1963. Hersh tried holding on to his story for as long as he could, but eventually had to go on air and admit that he was “an idiot.” Press reports at the time seemed to agree, with some accusing him of what amounted to a second assassination of the slain President.

By the time American troops marched into Iraq in March 2003, Hersh, now writing for the New Yorker, was ready to reclaim his position at the top of the journalistic heap. A 2005 profile in New York magazine enumerated his scoops: “Videotape of young boys being raped at Abu Ghraib. Evidence that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi may be a ‘composite figure’ and a propaganda creation of either Iraq’s Baathist insurgency or the U.S. government. The active involvement of Karl Rove and the president in ‘prisoner-interrogation issues.’ The mysterious disappearance of $1 billion, in cash, in Iraq. A threat by the Administration to a TV network to cut off access to briefings in retaliation for asking Laura Bush ‘a very tough question about abortion.’ The Iraqi insurgency’s access to short-range FROG missiles that ‘can do grievous damage to American troops.’ The murder, by an American platoon, of 36 Iraqi guards.”

The curious thing, as the profile’s author, Chris Suellentrop noted, was that none of these major, shattering revelations were made in print: Instead, they were all unveiled by Hersh in speeches on college campuses and elsewhere. And, by his own admission, many weren’t true. “I can’t fudge what I write,” Hersh told Suellentrop, “but I can certainly fudge what I say.” 

Why would a reporter fudge the facts? And why, given Hersh’s record for running into trouble with the truth, would venerable publications like the New Yorker continue to employ him?  The answer to all these questions is the same: It’s because, in Hersh’s worldview, it’s always 1969, there’s always a secret war going on, and the American military is always seeking for the next target to destroy. There is always another target for Hersh’s permanent adolescent rebelliousness, which took on the form of an infantile left-wing radicalism and is what years ago led New York Times’ editor Abe Rosenthal to refer to Hersh, playfully one supposes, as “my little commie.”

Often, this forever-hippie worldview comes off as entertaining. In his seminal March 2012 Commentary takedown of Hersh, James Kirchick dug up an interview that Hersh gave the Progressive in 1997. “It was easy to go to war against the Vietnamese,” Hersh opined then. “I thought in the 1992 campaign Bill Clinton might be the first president since the end of World War II to actually bomb white people. But I was disappointed, as usual. He found it easier to go after the Somalians. Just like Ronald Reagan found it easy to go to Grenada, and Bush found it easy to go to Panama, to the Third World, or to people of a different hue. There seems to be some sort of general pattern here.” That Clinton had in fact bombed Serbia, a European country inhabited by Caucasians, did little to cure Hersh of his vision of America’s perpetual malignant racism.

Put a man like that in continuous proximity to our national security apparatus, and you hardly need a John le Carré to dream up a scenario or six in which the idealistic journalist with an impressive capacity for ignoring facts that contradict his wishful thinking gets played by his unnamed sources. Believing anything a source would tell him merely to preserve the source, Hersh is an intelligence officer’s dream reporter; all you have to do is make sure that the story you tell him hints at some sort of official American malfeasance, and he’s bound to buy into the tale, no matter how tall.

But if that’s professionally problematic—and of course it is—the real problem is that Hersh’s colleagues and editors found his attitude very convenient. When he slandered the ghost of JFK, he was accurately labeled a fantasist and a hack; when he resurfaced, a few short years later, to treat George W. Bush in the same precarious way, he was once again hailed as our finest living investigative journalist. His current editor, David Remnick, appears to have contracted Hersh’s intolerance for asking questions that would too greatly upset what he wants to believe. After another of Hersh’s wild speeches—he claimed that the U.S. Army was run by a cabal of officers who all belong to a secretive Catholic sect and who see wars in Muslim lands as a continuation of the crusades—Remnick was asked to comment on his star reporter’s tenuous grasp on reality. “Sy is one of the greatest reporters the country has ever known,” he said, “and that is all I need to know about him.”

Are the neo-crusaders for real? Was there really an operation Copper Green? We’ll perhaps never know, but we’re as likely to be as good at guessing as Hersh has ever been. Like India’s former Prime Minister Morajri Desai—who sued Hersh after the reporter claimed he was a paid agent of the CIA and lost, in large part because he was too old and feeble to travel and testify against Hersh—we’re left with the frustration of trying to corroborate Hersh’s wild accusations. “We just had to take Mr. Hersh’s words for it that he talked to someone,” Desai said at the time. As James Kirchick poignantly noted in his piece, the same applies to anyone who tries to make sense of Hersh’s twisted and tilted journalism.

Not that Hersh’s work leaves us entirely without clues. One of the most riveting passages in Reporter describes his first big scoop: It was early in 1967, and the official line from the Pentagon argued that only military targets in North Vietnam were bombed, and that any damage to civilian structures was minimal and unintentional. Learning from reporters on the ground that this was likely untrue, Hersh went to visit one of his sources, a U.S. Navy admiral who—surprise—remains unnamed.

“He agreed to see me,” Hersh writes in Reporter, “as I thought he might; I was sure he knew what I wanted. He’d had it with the lying; it was as simple as that. He told me that there were many post-bombing photographs (known as BDAs in the Pentagon, for bomb damage assessments) that confirmed the extensive damage to civilian targets.” Hersh, to his credit, verified the claim and wrote the story. It made him known in Washington.

To other reporters, the episode might’ve been a heartwarming one: Some senior military officials tried to cover up a ruinous policy, and others had the courage to speak out against it. To Hersh, however, the story wasn’t an example of the system working, but an indictment of its inherent evils. The same is true for the story that won Hersh not only his Pulitzer but also his fame and his fortune: Hersh did not break the story of My Lai by risking his life in the jungles of Southeast Asia; he did so by receiving a tip that, as he writes in the book, “the army was in the process of court-martialing a GI at Fort Benning, Georgia, for the killing of seventy-five civilians in South Vietnam.” It was, he later admits, “the U.S. Army itself that filed the murder charges.” Hersh only got his story because justice was in the process of being served, but he then spent a lifetime pretending as if justice was served only because he had reported his story.

It was similarly the U.S. Army itself that launched an investigation into the abuses at Abu Ghraib, punishing those responsible. Yet Hersh learned no lessons from a lifetime of observing the U.S. military correct its course. For every William Calley, Jr., the platoon leader convicted of murdering 22 unarmed civilians, there’s a Hugh Thompson, Jr., who stopped the massacre by threatening to shoot the men in Calley’s platoon if they continued to slaughter civilians. The military pressed charges against six soldiers involved in the Abu Ghraib abuses in March of 2004, two months before Hersh ran his first piece. And yet, for Hersh, the dark shadows of conspiracy always loom large and the wrongdoing is always systemic, if not endemic.

How to judge such a man? Observing nothing but the facts, you may want to shake him off as a loon. At points in his profile, Suellentrop seems to suggest just that. “Not too long after the Abu Ghraib story broke,” he wrote, “Hersh spoke to the annual membership conference of the American Civil Liberties Union. He stood before the crowd and in mid-speech appeared to talk to himself. ‘Debating about it,’ he muttered, then paused. ‘Um.’ Clucked his tongue. ‘Some of the worst things that happened that you don’t know about. Okay?’” He then went on to make more allegations, many of which turned out to be unfounded, leading Hersh to later ask the ACLU to remove parts of the video from its website.

But there’s another way to read Seymour Hersh, and that’s the Seymour Hersh way. If you forget the truth and focus only on the tales, you’ll get a man who spent a lifetime as a “useful idiot” of one kind or another channeling a torrent of intelligence fed to him by men who sized up his utility. Some of it was true. Much of it was false. Most of it likely served purposes we’ll never fully understand. But like a character in a great espionage novel, he was always burning with that pale fire of the unperturbed true believer. If only for that, he deserves to be read; but not believed.

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Europe’s Political Stasis

The increasingly troubled state of European politics today suggests that the continent is facing a problem whose roots run deeper than arguments over policy. Today, the policy elites of Europe’s wealthiest states seem to inhabit an alternate reality to that of their voters, one in which the growing public rejection of globalism is but a hiccup, and that the European project in its current form is still implementable. As for the Transatlantic alliance, many a government seems to think repeated assertions of shared values and NATO’s immutable solidarity can take the place of defense expenditures and genuine capabilities. In capital after European capital, what appears to pass for governance is management—with an admixture of wishful thinking, in which day-to-day risk avoidance is applauded as transformative decision making, as everyone hopes that in the end things will work out somehow. 

European societies have been increasingly sending the message to their leaders that the nation state is not something they want to see dismantled, but rather something they want to preserve. Moreover, their voting patterns would suggest that, in their minds, national cultures are valuable legacies that ought to be cherished and passed on to the next generation. This way of thinking does not make your average Italian, German, Swede, or Hungarian an unreconstructed xenophobe; rather, it represents an intuitive sense in community after community that an orderly and secure society requires more to flourish than the availability of cheaply produced goods and efficient bureaucratic institutions. Hence, regardless of what formula the European Union ultimately adopts as its preferred framework for reforming itself, if the European project is to continue it will have to factor into its strategic calculus the increasingly strong public desire for a European Union that favors the preservation of the nation-state, with the concept of subsidiarity enshrined in its core documents. The problem is that this message seems not to have gotten through to Europe’s policy elites, the result being that political stasis is increasingly the new normal across the continent.

Europe’s once proud dream of federalism is withering on the vine, with Britain not so much leaving the Union in an orderly fashion as pitching one political tantrum after another. The internal disputes within the British government are perhaps less a display of regret over the electorate’s decision as they are a response to being pulled in multiple directions by multiple players. Despite its great wealth, Germany struggles to lead as it engages in spurts of reactive politics, plugging holes in the country’s increasingly frayed fabric of societal consensus. It seems to be still too unsure of itself and deeply constrained by its historical limitations to move beyond the mantra of “more Europe…”, though with each passing month it becomes harder to ascertain what this oft-repeated remedy would actually entail. France’s power is too limited in comparison for the youthful Macron to reorient the behemoth that was once the European Union in any but a strategically irrelevant direction. Italy struggles to control immigration and to keep its head above water when it comes to the economy. Meanwhile, the smaller players, such as Austria, the Netherlands, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland, have begun to chart their own course, though they remain too fragmented (excluding the Visegrád Four, perhaps) to meaningfully impact Europe’s overall direction. Meanwhile, the urgent problem of acculturating immigrants and reversing the internal balkanization of European states continues to pose a fundamental policy challenge across the continent.

Europe’s future hinges first and foremost on what happens in Germany in the next couple of years, for it will be the outcome of the ongoing German party realignment that will set the tone for what is to come. Furthermore, most economic projections for the next decade show that the wealth imbalance between the Federal Republic and its EU partners will only continue to grow. Given the anticipated GDP growth rates for the largest economies in Europe in the next decade, there is no escaping the fact that Germany’s economic and financial strength will play an ever-greater role on the continent, the more so after the United Kingdom, Europe’s second largest economy, leaves the Union. Hence, with each passing year, the notion that one can count on France and Germany working in a relatively co-equal political tandem to drive the EU train forward will grow ever more problematic, more a sign of nostalgia for the European project’s founding moment than a path into the future.

The second key variable that will shape Europe’s future will be how U.S.-German relations evolve going forward. The tenor of this bilateral relationship has been increasingly contentious. There are also some disturbing trends over the horizon when it comes to how Germans view the United States. Today more Germans want the U.S. military to leave their country than want it to stay. According to a recent poll, 42 percent want U.S. troops out of Germany, with only 37 percent in favor of their remaining and 21 percent expressing no opinion. Even more pointedly, the extremes have clear majorities in favor of severing military ties with the United States, with voters for the far-left Die Linke and far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) calling for an end to U.S. army bases (67 percent and 55 percent, respectively). What’s more, 35 percent of Angela Merkel’s CDU voters align with the extreme left-right voters on the issue of the U.S. military presence in Germany. These are disturbing trends that require leadership from both Berlin and Washington to address, for the bilateral U.S.-German relationship is central to NATO’s effectiveness.

Europe’s dilemma is not just internal, however, as pressure continues to build around it. The Middle East remains a cauldron whose sectarian wars and terrorism will continue to blow toxic steam onto the European continent. The immigration wave is not going to stop anytime soon, and unless the European Union finally develops the will to secure the external border and stop the inflow of immigrants, the grand idea of Schengen visa-free travel and a de facto borderless Europe will soon be history. Externally, amidst the growing regional turmoil, Iran’s confrontation with Israel constitutes a risk not seen since the Yom Kippur War. As the United States works to strengthen NATO’s defenses and also finds itself increasingly compelled to look to the Pacific, Russia and Turkey will stake ever-stronger claims to shape the new order in and around Europe.

There are few certainties left when it comes to the future of Europe; the shopworn platitudes still in circulation will no longer suffice. There is no doubt that it is simply beyond the capacities of many a politician to contemplate fully the alternatives to the crumbling status quo. Still, it remains to be seen whether, and if so how quickly, Europe’s elites will dispel their illusions about what the continent’s future should look like, reconnect with their electorates, and deal with the here and now. Clinging to old mantras is likely to only marginalize the political establishment further: As the political middle in Europe shrinks, the flank movements are likely to continue to gather in strength and could ultimately capture the public square.

Today Europe is headed toward an inflection point that will define issues as fundamental as individual freedom, the meaning of nationality, and ultimately perhaps even peace and war. Still, governments across the continent lack consensus on the strategic principles needed to guide them over the stormy seas. Until that consensus is reached, Europe will continue to slouch into what threatens to become systemic paralysis.

The post Europe’s Political Stasis appeared first on The American Interest.

Ukraine Thrown Under the Bus?

During last week’s Helsinki press conference between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Associated Press reporter Jonathan Lemire asked Putin what Trump said about possibly recognizing the annexation of Crimea, the peninsular part of Ukraine that Putin illegally seized in 2014. In the lead-up to Helsinki as well as during his presidential campaign, Trump hinted that he might consider recognizing the annexation. At the G7 meeting last month in Quebec, Trump reportedly told fellow leaders that, since they speak Russian in Crimea, the territory really belongs to Russia anyway.

It was left to Putin in Helsinki to state Trump’s position: “[T]he posture of President Trump on Crimea is well known and he stands firmly by it. He continues to maintain that it was illegal to annex it.” Trump didn’t say a word about Ukraine, including Crimea, during the entire press conference.

Subsequently, we have learned from Russian authorities that Ukraine was discussed in the meeting between the two Presidents and in the wider meeting with advisers from both sides. On Thursday, before a gathering of his diplomatic corps, Putin as usual blamed Ukraine for the lack of progress in resolving the conflict—which he, Putin, started:

The reasons are the same as always: non-compliance of the Ukrainian authorities with their own commitments and refusal to settle the conflict peacefully.

Time and again, we see open disregard for the agreements, as well as an unwillingness to talk to their own people and a reliance on military scenarios. We believe that the Minsk Package of Measures provides fundamental grounds for a political settlement of this crisis.

In a closed session to the same audience, according to press reports, Putin also raised the idea of conducting a referendum in eastern Ukraine. A referendum on what, exactly, was not clear. For independence? Autonomy? Joining Russia?

A National Security Council spokesman dismissed the idea of a referendum, saying it would have “no legitimacy.” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the Trump Administration is “not considering supporting a referendum.” Let’s hope not.

Ukraine is an independent state that Putin invaded in 2014, starting with Crimea and continuing into the Donbas region. The United States should make it clear to Putin that he has no business pushing for another referendum there as he illegitimately did in Crimea.

Until the use of force by Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, Ukraine, for all its challenges, had been a peaceful country. There had been no indigenous separatist or secessionist movements. There were no threats to citizens, including Russian-speakers, living in Crimea. But that was the narrative fabricated by Russian officials and their propagandists after the Euro-Maidan Revolution and after Yanukovych fled for safe haven in Russia.

Nor did those living in eastern Ukraine face any danger after the revolution in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital—until, that is, Russian forces and mercenaries crossed the border to stir up phony “separatist” movements in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, where such movements previously did not exist.

Through various means, Putin sought to destabilize Ukraine after its Euro-Maidan Revolution. Putin feared that a successful revolution in Ukraine, based on demands for an end to corruption and the freedom to join Euro-atlantic institutions, might trigger Russians to want the same thing. Thus, Putin decided he had to move quickly to stanch any domino effect.

The result, as the International Criminal Court (ICC) ruled in November 2016, is “an international armed conflict between Ukraine and the Russian Federation.” It is not a civil war.

As a result of Putin’s invasion and aggression, the death toll in Ukraine has exceeded 10,300. Putin bears responsibility for the murders of 298 people in the shootdown of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which never would have happened had Putin not sent in forces and armed proxies in eastern Ukraine. Putin has failed to live up to a single commitment under two ceasefire accords, known as the Minsk agreements, from September 2014 and February 2015. He even denies that the Russian military plays any role at all in eastern Ukraine, despite massive evidence to the contrary.

After Putin violated Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, the West imposed sanctions on Russia. It also launched negotiating tracks—a European one and a direct U.S.-Russian one—that have led nowhere, despite the heroic efforts of U.S. negotiators Victoria Nuland and Kurt Volker. The West should declare the Minsk agreements null and void. In place of them, Europe and the United States should maintain and even ramp up sanctions unless and until Russia withdraws all of its occupying forces from all of Ukraine, including Crimea. Putin will only change course if the West inflicts more pain through tougher sanctions and isolation.

The Trump Administration deserves credit for providing Ukraine with lethal military assistance, including anti-tank missiles, to help it defend itself against further Russian aggression, something President Obama refused to do. On Friday, the Pentagon announced it would provide an additional $200 million in security assistance to Ukraine for “training, equipment, and advisory efforts to build the defensive capacity of Ukraine’s forces.” That is laudable.

But Russian Ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov, said Friday, according to Interfax, that “the Ukrainian issue was not at the center” of the Trump-Putin talks. That’s unfortunate.

Trump should have made it clear in Helsinki that until Putin respects Ukraine as a sovereign, independent state and withdraws all his forces and proxies from Ukrainian territory no normalization of relations with the United States is possible and no invitation to the White House will be extended. Even then, we still have the issues of Russian support for Assad in Syria and interference in our elections, among other matters, to address.

Instead, Putin was the only one who referenced Ukraine during the Helsinki press conference, and Trump has invited him to Washington this fall. We can only hope that Ukraine will not be thrown under the bus in the process.

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Getting Ready for 2020

Twenty-twenty may be a year like no other in American history. It is possible that if President Donald Trump were to lose the presidential election, he will contest the results and claim, as he did in 2016, that millions voted fraudulently. He might then be able to mobilize his supporters and unleash havoc, probably will fulsome support from the Russian government.

It will be a year when the cumulative damage inflicted by Trump on the U.S. domestic and foreign policy will have peaked. As the recent Helsinki and NATO summits have amply demonstrated, the dangers are real: The alliance system that has been the bedrock of American foreign policy and international peace will be in tatters, trade wars will dominate global exchanges, and domestic politics will have been polarized beyond recognition by an array of deliberately divisive policies that aim to harvest fear for political purposes.

The opposition to Trump, be it from Democrats or Republicans who can no longer stomach him, has to start planning for 2020 now. The planning will require three approaches.

First, a concerted effort must be undertaken to deter the Russians from interfering in American internal affairs. The Kremlin no doubt is already planning its moves for disrupting the November midterms, a warm up for 2020. The Director of National Intelligence, former Republican Senator Dan Coats, has sounded the alarm regarding the vulnerabilities of our cyber security infrastructure. Given the distinct lack of interest emanating from the White House, elected officials in Congress need to be reaching out to intelligence agencies for help, to get the process started.

Domestic preparation is also key. If we have learned anything during Donald Trump’s presidency thus far, it is that he has an uncanny ability to sow confusion, trash existing norms and guidelines, and impose his own rules on the body politic. Trump’s allegations of fraud—if he loses—will be abetted by his fellow travelers in the media, in Congress, and out on the streets. He has already done much to undermine one of the institutions that can best stand against him: the press. Given that many of his followers subscribe to his conspiratorial accusations against “fake news,” we should not assume that any reporting on results on election night in 2020 will have validity for all those Americans systematically desensitized to the notion that facts matter. Democrats, in particular, need to start planning for how they will confront the assault Trump and his followers may unleash. At a minimum, this will require beefing up polling stations and procedures, training poll watchers, and working with local law enforcement authorities to prepare for all eventualities.

Second, well before the start of the selection process of potential challengers to Trump, a bipartisan group of senior policy thinkers ought to begin charting policy initiatives designed to reverse the damage done by the Trump Administration. There are a sufficient number of centrist Democrats, Republicans who have not lost their principles, and independents for the task—although admittedly forming and operating such a group will be a challenge.

Here, again, time is of the essence: If a new administration is to hit the ground running, it will need a detailed plan, since the transition process is not long enough to tackle many of these issues in detail. The creation of such a group would have the added benefit of signaling to friends and allies alike that they, too, have to prepare themselves for change. In effect, what we would be asking of them, as well as of the nation’s governors, is to design policies that work backwards from 2020 to minimize the costs being incurred today.

Finally, it is also important to limit Trump’s current capabilities. It is time for observers and critics to make clear to all political appointees planning to enter Trump’s service that they will pay a high price one day for their complicity. It is one thing for Generals James Mattis and John Kelley to continue to serve, as they came in early on; but others who are joining the Trump Administration now do not deserve any benefit of the doubt about their motives, and are nothing more than enablers. The message has to be clear: If you support Trump on what you suppose are the merits, then fine, that’s your choice; but if you are joining the Administration while holding your nose, in hopes that you will once be called “honorable” for trying to save the country, you should be disabused of your fantasy. This message ought to be delivered also to the many currently serving political appointees who are disenchanted with Trump’s policies. They are no longer helping the nation as they may have thought at the onset of the Administration; they are aiding and abetting the undermining of our liberal democratic heritage.

Deterring political appointees from joining and encouraging others to leave will have the added benefit of strengthening the remaining professionals working in government, many of whom have already left in substantial numbers. Forcing Trump to rely on professionals to manage the affairs of state not only protects the latter, but also diminishes the damage he can inflict.

Combatting Trump will not be easy. The time for constructing a well thought out strategy is now; there is not a minute to waste.

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The Bad Faith of First Reformed

First Reformed

Directed by Paul Schrader

A24 (2018), 113 minutes

There’s a kernel of an interesting religious film in First Reformed, the new arthouse release from writer-director Paul Schrader (Mishima, Taxi Driver, The Last Temptation of Christ). Unfortunately, it’s buried underneath the grim weight of the terrorist fantasy that Schrader really wants to explore.

The film stars Ethan Hawke as a tortured Protestant reverend slowly killing himself with alcohol and self-neglect. His manly grimacing may net him an Oscar; it’s the sort of intense, agonized performance that the Academy loves to reward. But is there something there? That is, are Schrader and Hawke getting at a truth about God or man by putting Reverend Ernst Toller through the wringer? Or are they mostly demonstrating how little spiritual insight there is to be gleaned from the vigilante antihero genre?

Early scenes lull us into a false hope. We get a glimpse into Toller’s life in a fascinating subdomain of Protestant Christendom. He’s the lonely pastor of a historic outpost church in upstate New York, a Dutch Reformed building purchased and preserved by a nondenominational megachurch called Abundant Life. Toller exists on the outskirts of Abundant Life, which has its own drama of youth groups, remote-streamed services, and deep-pocketed big-business donors. At First Reformed he preaches to a sparse flock and shows tourists around the landmark building, hawking hats from their sad gift shop. We see portraits of the previous pastors of First Reformed, and Toller’s immediate predecessors are wearing suits and ties. Toller himself is in clericals. Does he have more traditionalist leanings than the church he’s landed in? Or is he ruefully nodding to how the place makes him feel like a museum piece?

Toller is largely unpastored himself, partly by choice. We see Pastor Jeffers of Abundant Life (Cedric the Entertainer, embracing a more serious persona) ask Toller about his physical and emotional health and get stonewalled. Toller lives in furniture-less austerity, perhaps as some kind of self-imposed penance for a past that includes a dead son and a broken marriage. He’s taken aback when a pregnant congregant named Mary (Amanda Seyfried) asks him to counsel her husband, who doesn’t want her to keep their baby. A man who sees little enough to live for in his own life is called, just by virtue of the collar he wears, to make the case for life. It’s an interestingly intimate narrative setup, grounded, in some ways, in the hypervisibility of religious life. Then it all gets blown to hell as we discover the true subject of the film. First Reformed is a movie about jihad.

I use the word “jihad” advisedly, as the film winkingly drops it as a clue early on. Pastor Jeffers tells Toller that online recruitment by jihadis is one of the dangers he worries the young people of his congregation are facing. In the moment, we’re meant to think Jeffers’s fears far-fetched. But Toller is the one being radicalized. Mary’s husband Michael (Philip Ettinger) is an environmentalist and would-be ecoterrorist, and his influence fires Toller with a purpose he hasn’t felt in years. “Will God forgive us for what we’ve done to His creation?” becomes Toller’s catchphrase. Toller, in a body polluted by alcohol abuse and stomach cancer, seizes on environmental pollution as a holy casus belli. Schrader wants to transplant jihad, that contested concept from Islam that can mean spiritual struggle or the fiery annihilation of infidels, into the context of American Protestantism.

It’s not that there isn’t material out there for a religious drama about environmental stewardship. Pope Francis famously discussed the need for sustainable development and the dangers of pollution and climate change in his encyclical Laudato si’, which includes the oft-retweeted line, “The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.” If a pastor became convinced his denomination was too beholden to wealthy polluters, what could he do? How do you cleanse the temple? Who can cast the first stone? But a film about this topic would have to take God and the earth seriously, rather than simply slouching towards a one-man Armageddon. First Reformed skims shallowly over theology and environmentalism, hoping to make up for it with the shock value of a reverend in a suicide vest.

The film tantalizes us with Biblical references: Toller’s dead son was named Joseph, the pregnant young woman in need of his help is Mary. But the real sacred text of the film is any given angry Facebook post about global warming. Toller’s radicalization comes about through some late-night Googling of “top polluters” and some cherry-picked Bible verses. On this flimsy reed the film builds a motivation for mass murder. No matter how hard Hawke glowers, it’s a tough pill to swallow. The film frames Toller as if we should be half-afraid and half-enamored of his self-destructive crusade. But I never bought it for a second. The film’s storytelling earns none of the trust it assumes. We are plunged into Toller’s unpleasant and untruthful perspective, but we gain no insight thereby. If the filmmakers want us to long for the subversive catharsis of a Sunday morning church-bombing, we need more than a few Saturday morning cartoon platitudes.

First Reformed boasts impressive cinematography, with a limited palette of white-washed churches and shadow-soaked rectories. The camera often holds still and frames a room like a stage set, with characters passing in and out of frame as they enter and exit the scene. The framing creates unease, as Schrader intended. And it drives home that Schrader thinks this is a morality play, albeit one with barely a virtue in sight. But the film’s biggest cinematic coup is calculated to create an unsatisfying cop-out. Schrader tinkered with the ending until it was sufficiently ambiguous that audiences didn’t know what Toller’s fate was. That’s a lot of work to create something as maddeningly cliché as an is-it-all-a-dying-dream ending.

The best scene of the movie sees Toller at loggerheads with Pastor Jeffers. The two debate environmental stewardship by shooting Bible citations back-and-forth. Pastor Jeffers takes God’s promise to Noah (“the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh”) to mean Toller’s worries about climate change are overblown. Toller answers back with his own interpretations. The tension between these men is not just about political differences but a crisis of exegetical authority. Jeffers gets in one more theologically meaty line here. “You’re always in the garden, aren’t you?” he says to Toller, referring to Jesus’s pre-Crucifixion agony in the garden of Gethsemane. Jeffers’s point is that a pastor can’t afford to make agonizing doubt his spiritual center. He’s obviously correct about that, but of course it’s only the agonized, wavering, and endlessly self-analytical pastors that filmmakers care about.

Leaving First Reformed, I was angry I’d been tricked into taking another dose of sophomoric sacrilege, like that which Schrader’s sometime collaborator Martin Scorsese showed us in Silence. Schrader, speaking to the New York Times, admitted First Reformed’s protagonist is not a portrait of a theist: “I don’t think Toller stands in any Christian tradition other than the existential one—this notion of Albert Camus’s: I don’t believe, I choose to believe.” Because what we really need is another artsy film about an explosive existentialist.

I for one am tired of the cinematic antihero pastor, and tired of filmmakers who assume that the most interesting thing about a man of faith is his doubt or despair. Like most American Christians, I am acquainted with members of the clergy, but I don’t recognize any of these people (in their vibrancy, their foibles, their humanity, and their holiness) onscreen. What I wouldn’t give for a bluegrass-scored film about the Hillbilly Thomists that took theology half as seriously as the friars themselves do. Or a drama film that sat with the dying alongside the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, giving screen time both to suffering and grace. Instead we get Travis Bickle in a clerical collar.

What holds First Reformed back from being a film that takes Christianity seriously, despite Schrader’s protestations to the contrary, is its Apocalypticism. The fate of Schrader’s universe once again comes down to a self-willed, manly moment of existential martyrdom. And yet any Christian versed in the rhythms of liturgy or the writings of the saints could tell him that’s a delusion. God calls us most often to slow and small and self-forgetful acts of service. Perhaps someday we’ll see American movies that combine Schrader’s meditative storytelling with an actual theological sensibility, like the 2016 French film The Innocents. Till then, filmgoers of faith are Charlie Brown, Hollywood is Lucy, and we keep kicking at the football of a spiritually serious film and finding ourselves flat on our backs.

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Multiculturalism and the World Cup

Before the 1998 soccer World Cup, French far-Right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen shocked many by claiming the team was “artificial” because it “brought players from outside,” and not representative of France because of their skin color. Unfortunately for Le Pen, France triumphantly won its first World Cup that summer. Over the next years, the idea that the team was too “African,” “multicultural,” that the players were not singing the Marseillaise loud enough, was a recurrent and nasty far-Right trope brandished after each underperformance. Behind this was the suspicion these French citizens, often recent immigrants, weren’t truly French—were somehow others.

This helps explain how disturbing it is to many French people to see the team that won the 2018 World Cup celebrated in the United States as “Africa’s team.” No offense is clearly meant by those doing the celebrating, but their enthusiasm hits a very sour note. Trevor Noah, the host of the Daily Show, sang “congratulations to Africa for winning the World Cup.” “Look at those guys,” Noah went on. “You don’t get that tan by hanging out in the South of France, my friends”—a sentence that would surely warm Le Pen’s heart. A viral tweet, pointing to racism in France, claimed the team was “80% African,” echoing similar sentiments ricocheting across social media and op-ed pages. Just because these sentiments are naïve does not excuse them. They clearly mirror the far Right in essentializing individuals because of their skin color or country of origin. More importantly, they deny people agency over their own identity, all to make a simplistic feel-good political point.

Confronted by the outrage their casual language had sparked, defenders of the “Africanness” of the French team tried to explain the controversy away by gesturing at the differences between how France and the United States integrate newcomers. It is well known the French are less comfortable with multiculturalism (“communitarianism”) than their American counterparts. The French model of citizenship is in theory linked to a sense of belonging to universal republican institutions, not to a collection of tribal groups. When granting full citizenship to Jews during the French Revolution, the Count of Clermont Tonnerre famously told the National Assembly, “We should grant everything to Jews as individuals and nothing as a nation.” In this sense, the Revolution consecrated a national identity that, already under the old Regime, was built on a unique relationship between the state and individuals. Specific identities, or religion, were fine at home, not in the public sphere: ethnic polling is prohibited, and the very notion of the word “race” was recently stripped from the constitution.

But I’m reluctant to even grant that point. Explaining away this debate as just cultural differences between the United States and France would mean implying the argument has some validity in the American context. It doesn’t. Even here, it is, as they say, “problematic.” If we restrict it to sports, let’s try this counterfactual: Would anyone have dared call the American Olympic basketball team “African” after its 1992 triumph? Perhaps some might try today, but that only serves to underline the silliness of our times. A very recent obsession with tribalism and identity politics has made it acceptable among certain people to assign other individuals their identity, even against their will—to contextualize their speech and their accomplishments. It’s one thing to claim pride in multiple identities as is often the case in the United States, or to find inspiration in a diverse team; it’s another one to constantly stress differences and essentialize people against their own will.

Let’s turn to the French players themselves. 21 of 23 of them were born French citizens. During the tournament, they kept repeating how proud they were to represent France. After-game interviews were often peppered with genuine displays of patriotism—Pogba or Griezmann echoing Macron by saying “Vive la République! Vive la France!” They ran onto the pitch with French flags after defeating Croatia last Sunday. They hugged and applauded a wounded veteran of the French intervention in Mali that Macron had brought to the locker room. Benjamin Mendy even tweeted back at an account that put the flag of the country of origin next to each player, replacing the foreign with a French flag, and adding “fixed.” Nicolas Batum, a star player for the French basketball team was less diplomatic in his reaction: “Go ‘check’ yourself. (…) Yes, my dad and last name are from Cameroon but I was born, raised, taught basketball in France. Proud to be FRENCH.” There’s nothing inherently contradictory between being French and having an attachment to another country. But it’s better to listen to how people feel before assigning them another identity.

What about the consequences of politicizing the victory in such a way? If France’s 2018 triumph is the success of immigration or diversity, then should the reverse be said of its defeats? Is the racist narrative (“they don’t care about France”) to be put forward after France’s humiliating show at the 2010 World Cup, where the team was wracked by conflict between towering egos, which culminated in an actual strike—the Frenchiest thing ever—when players refused to train in protest of a coaching decision? In mimicking the far Right’s obsession with race and origins, identity politics activists are paving the way for this kind of racist backlash.

The French victory this year is first and foremost the success of an exceptional generation of talented and mature players, like Kylian Mbappe, Paul Pogba, and Antoine Griezmann; astute coaching by Didier Deschamps (himself the captain of the 1998 team); and a concerted effort to invest in training academies and scouting over the last decade, an area in which France was sorely lacking with respect to its neighbors. It is also a success for a team representative of France itself, from its countryside to its banlieues—a diverse country, where citizenship is not defined by ethnicity or skin color.

The daily reality is of course more complex. Critics are right to point to the persistence of racism in France. Many citizens of African descent don’t have access to the same opportunities, from jobs to education to nightclubs. A study by the Labor Ministry found 30 percent of companies discriminating during the hiring process. An applicant with a foreign-sounding name will have to look for a job four times as long as a candidate without one.

At the same time, the National Assembly, in the wake of Emmanuel Macron’s win, has never been so diverse, or so gender-equal, in French history. Of course much more can be done to further the cause of equality. But it certainly won’t help to treat our champions like foreigners.

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