Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 87

Slow and Steady

When I was growing up, my extended Jewish family held an annual party. On one occasion, a visiting college student majoring in philosophy lectured us on his theory of justice. He explained why all trace of Christmas should be banned in public spaces, and not just nativity scenes, since the very notion of Christmas was an affront to both Jews and secularists. My family stood dumbfounded and aghast. My mother dismissed the young man as a fool, shouting at him, “Are you crazy? Let the goyim have their holiday!”

This young man is the only Jew I ever met who wanted to ban Christmas. Most other Jews I know share my mother’s attitude, more or less, not out of any particular philosophy, but because they see no reason to pick a fight with their far more numerous Christian neighbors. To their minds, Jews have rights and freedoms, life is good, and so why unnecessarily antagonize all those nice Christians by sanitizing the public square of Christmas trees, reindeer figures, and peppermint sticks?

This squabble between a young idealist and my more prudent mother is a small version of the larger, age-old question over how far to push social change. That question is especially relevant now in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which involved a devout Christian baker who refused to make a custom cake for a same-sex couple’s wedding. The Supreme Court narrowly ruled for the baker because the commission showed signs of “religious hostility,” but it left open the question of whether a religious person can be compelled to make a custom wedding cake with a personalized pro-gay marriage message. In theory, according to the Platonic ideal of leftist social justice, a religious person should be compelled, and some in the LGBT “community” demand this. Yet this represents an unwise change in tactics for a movement that until now has practiced an almost pitch-perfect strategy for furthering gay rights.

The debate between idealism and prudence can be traced back to Edmund Burke’s criticism of the French Revolution and the philosopher Rousseau, who died shortly before the Revolution but whose writings inspired it. Even before the mass executions and the Reign of Terror began, Burke warned that the Revolution would take a dangerous turn, organized as it was by intellectual speculators with abstract theories of justice.1 Rousseau, in particular, exemplified the new type: a person with no sense of the real world and therefore no comprehension of limits; a self-righteous thinker of big ideas; a social engineer eager to experiment with people in the same way a scientist experiments with mice in an air pump. Burke feared that fanatical idealists in the tradition of Rousseau would eventually demand their social theories be implemented without exception, and that in their single-minded pursuit of purity they would start killing people.

The only antidote to such a monomaniacal tendency in politics was prudence, Burke argued. Political leaders must know theory, he said, but they must also know the local conditions before applying that theory, to get a sense of how far to push. This allows for a more judicious application of theory that lets everyone, both reformer and traditionalist, live together in order and peace.

Burke was not against all revolutions. He supported the American Revolution for the same reason he opposed the French Revolution. In the American case, it was the British who were guilty of fanatically applying theory—not the Rights of Man but the Rights of Sovereignty. In theory, the king had the right to tax the colonists, but given the latter’s obsession with freedom it was unwise to do so, Burke counseled. Again, Burke’s warning proved prescient.

Rousseau-like speculators can be found today on both the political Left and Right. Whenever I ask social justice warriors for a solution to an obscure country’s problems, they invariably reply, “social justice.” An example would be their insistence on bringing the #MeToo movement to every country around the globe. When I pose the same question to extreme libertarians, they invariably reply, “free markets.” Neither group knows anything about the country at issue, nor do they think they need to know anything. All they need to know, they think, is their pet theory, which they are eager to apply anywhere and always and to the limit, independent of local conditions. If the planet Mars were ever colonized, leftist ideologues would demand social justice for the Martians, while conservative ideologues would urge free markets on them.

Besides violence, the problem with Rousseau-like reform tactics is that they can backfire. An example of this is the “pro-choice” abortion movement. Prior to Roe v. Wade in 1973, several states, including in the South, had started to liberalize their abortion laws. Although religious Catholics had always opposed abortion, many religious Protestants lacked strong feelings on the issue. Indeed, liberals who saw fetal rights as an extension of individual rights, rather than just conservatives, sponsored many of the early pro-life rallies.2 In the spirit of Burke’s wise counsel, American society was moving slowly toward easier access to abortion, with some states moving faster than others, as local conditions dictated, and the nation as a whole growing more tolerant of the practice.

Suddenly, with Roe v. Wade, a universal right to abortion was speculated into existence and applied to the whole country. A theory imagined out of thin air, or at least from a novel interpretation of the Constitution, replaced the slow but steady process of acclimatization that goes hand in hand with accepted social change. For many conservatives the move seemed tyrannical; more important, it infuriated millions of religious Protestants, who adopted the new “family values” motto. The country has been fighting over abortion ever since.

If the Burkean model of social change had been allowed to take its course, it is possible that the ire of religious Protestants would have never been stoked, feminists would have talked down the few liberals holding pro-life rallies, all 50 states would have evolved toward some kind of abortion access, and, most important, there would be little fighting today over the issue, as a moderate pro-choice position would have achieved national dominance organically.

Contrast the abortion mess with the outcome of the gay rights movement. Before he passed away, I had a conversation with Dudley Clendinen, author of Out for Good, an excellent history of the gay rights movement. Although the movement was not monolithic, activists who pushed for marriage equality generally recognized that achieving this goal would take time, and that there would be necessary intervening steps—for example, in the areas of fair housing laws, employment discrimination, and the right to serve in the military. On reflection, these steps can best be described as acclimatizing society to full and equal membership of gays and lesbians.

The average American may have been homophobic in the 1960s and 1970s, as organized psychiatry during that period still categorized homosexuality as a disease, but over the next several decades, the average American saw that gays and lesbians worked hard and paid their taxes like everyone else, making job discrimination seem unfair; and then they saw that they mowed their lawns and kept their houses orderly, making housing discrimination seem unfair; and then they saw that they kept their kids clean and well-mannered, making non-religious adoption bans seem unfair; and then they saw that they served their country honorably, making the military ban seem unfair (as Senator Barry Goldwater once said, “I don’t care if a soldier is straight, as long as he can shoot straight”); marriage equality became the natural next step. Marriage equality was not a sudden, bracing implementation of theory out of the blue, but rather a new value that had evolved naturally in the same way a tree grows a new bud.

When the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in 2015, some (but not all) social conservatives reacted angrily, but by and large the country accepted the decision because of the vital cultural spadework done beforehand. It has since moved on. Unlike abortion, which is still actively contested, and where even the non-ideological President Trump feels compelled to defend the pro-life position through regulation, efforts to reverse marriage equality have less energy and lack Trump’s support, if only because such support would be a political loser.

True, the path to gay rights and same-sex marriage was full of odd twists and turns, which happens when theory is not applied suddenly and universally in one bold stroke. The great mass of Americans groped their way to a new understanding. For example, in 1982, it was Wisconsin and not the coastal states that first outlawed discrimination based on sexual orientation. In 1993, President Clinton tried to thread the cultural needle with his makeshift “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” military policy, which let “closeted” gays and lesbians stay in the military. In supposedly progressive California a gay marriage ban passed in 2000 with more than 60 percent support, and then again in 2008, albeit with only 50 percent support; by 2015, when the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage, opposition to gay marriage in California polled less than 40 percent.3 People evolve, people change, as Burke observed, although the pace is sometimes too slow for impatient theoreticians.

After marriage equality passed nationally, some gay rights organizations shrewdly disbanded, having achieved their goal.4 There would be no “permanent revolution,” as some theoreticians call for. For many gays and lesbians it was time to go from being a new and exciting bud on society’s tree to blending in with all the other boring branches that give the tree its vital structure. In other words, it was time to assimilate, as Jews and other minorities had prudently done in their day after achieving their goals.

But the gay wedding cake issue in Masterpiece has thrown a monkey wrench into the plan. It signifies the ascent of theory over prudence.

Richard Thompson Ford, in a recent TAI essay titled, “Anti-Discrimination Eats Itself,” captures one aspect of that change. He notes that the theory behind anti-discrimination law has greatly expanded over the years, on behalf of both religious people and oppressed minorities, such that what was once a workable idea—for example, don’t discriminate against someone because of their race, religion, or sexual orientation—has expanded to include the illegality of discriminating against anyone for any kind of behavior. This is what led to the impasse in Masterpiece, notes Ford, as we now face an unresolvable conflict of absolutes: the freedom to behave in accordance with one’s religious belief and the right to have one’s culture accommodated in all situations. He suggests cutting back on the applicability of anti-discrimination law to religious people, and muses on the spinelessness of a liberal culture that hesitates to “outlaw discrimination against the discriminators.” This moves Ford closer to the LGBT position in the wedding cake debate. Yet even he admits that the culture itself must work these issues out, and that theories of rights get us nowhere.

This is precisely Burke’s point. Theory is an insufficient guide. Societies differ, their cultures differ, because the conditions in each society differ, growing out as they do from different histories. This is why universal theory can only take reformers so far. The question then becomes what to do. In the case of the French Revolution, rather than seek a workable solution unique to France, the idealists dealt with the inevitable pushback by imposing their theory of justice on everyone, violently and bloodily, inspired by Rousseau’s dictum that sometimes people must be “forced to be free.”5 In the name of freedom the idealists abolished freedom. The alternative approach to social reform, Burke observed, is prudence.

When writing this essay, I asked several legal scholars about analogous precedents in American law. I asked what happened in the past when a Jew went to a devout Christian baker and asked that baker to make a special holiday cake topped with a religious message slighting Christianity—for example, “We await the first coming of the Messiah.” The scholars told me they were not familiar with such a case. Some of them mused over how the case would be judged in light of Masterpiece. One of them said, “Obviously, such a case would never happen.” I think the last scholar had it right, yet it is the non-event that makes this imaginary case so relevant. The case has never happened because in the history of America no Jew has ever been stupid enough to ask a devout Christian baker to make such a cake, just as no Jew (except the one young man I met at my family’s holiday party) has been stupid enough to call for a ban on Christmas. There is no theory accounting for such a non-event. It is simply prudence on the part of Jews—and Jews have done well by such prudence.

Masterpiece did not decide the conflict between two conflicting theories. The justices seem to be as flummoxed as everyone else over how to resolve a contest between absolutes when prudence has been thrown by the wayside.6 The problem is that Masterpiece should never have occurred in the first place. The logical trajectory for gays and lesbians after the marriage equality triumph was to go forward in life happily but prudently, as all people in the United States do, given the diversity of cultures and the need for all of us to get along. Every baker in America must sell a generic wedding cake to a gay couple; most bakers are happy to sell them a special wedding cake. Why purposely poke the eye of the one baker in town who isn’t? Such behavior may be theoretically correct, but it is also crazy, as my mother would say.

To some degree, the LGBT activists who pushed Masterpiece are not to blame. The juggernaut of cultural change that has catapulted the theory of individual self-expression to the status of inviolate principle has caught them up, too. Already in the 1970s, writers such as Christopher Lasch in his Culture of Narcissism were commenting on the phenomenon. The theory of individual self-expression demands absolute autonomy, perfect self-esteem, unassailable safe space, and unbridled freedom of behavior in private life. It declares that we need not suffer even the slightest emotional inconvenience at the hands of others. But the theorists leading the movement forgot one important thing: We have to live with others. That leaves us with a stark choice. Either we destroy those who stand in our way, in the spirit of Rousseau, or we defuse the tension through prudence and try to get along with them, in the spirit of Burke.

1Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France.

2Daniel K. Williams, “The Partisan Trajectory of the American Pro-Life Movement,” in Religions, 2016, Vol. 6, pp. 451–75.

3Sonja Petek, “Californians’ Attitude Toward Same-Sex Marriage,” Public Policy Institute of California, July 2014.

4Chris Johnson, “Freedom to Marry on Track to Close, Despite Marriage Holdouts,” Washington Blade, September 11, 2015.

5Rousseau, The Social Contract, chapter 7, “The Sovereign.”

6For a good discussion of the justices’ confusion see Robert Tuttle and Ira Lupu, “Masterpiece Cakeshop—A Troublesome Application of Free Exercise Principles by a Court Determined to Avoid Hard Questions,” Takecareblog.com, June 7, 2018.

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The Right’s Straw Left

One of the most exhausting tropes in American conversation is that the Left has no ideas. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve been informed that “all they have to offer is identity politics.” It is all the more exhausting because it is simply not true. Rather than look, conservative thinkfluencers have built themselves them a straw leftist: an irate, dogmatic, anti-semitic campus activist with a genderfluid agenda railing against the patriarchy and campaigning against white privilege. But the Right’s straw Left has become something of a comfort blanket: easy to beat up in op-eds and “own” in stand-up politics acts.

The shock win of 28 year old socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should be a wake-up call. Because, whilst the Right was feeling smart watching the Ben Shapiro Show, the Left—the real Left that is, not the confused Democratic establishment—has been living through the most dramatic policy renaissance in decades. (Hint: it has nothing to do with bathrooms.) Not only is a populist policy platform coming together, but the Left has increasingly found the persuasive policy wonks—and the campaigners like the Democratic Socialists of America—to exert real influence among the ranks of the Democrats.

Whoever ends up running, a “Federal Jobs Guarantee” is the big idea already set to dominate the Democratic primaries in 2020. This simple idea would see the government guarantee a job to the 13.1 million Americans who are currently unemployed or underemployed. The go-to report on the topic, from the Center on Budget Policy Priorities, suggests a “guaranteed wage” would go with each one of these jobs, to the tune of $32,500. The program would cost $543 billion a year, but the authors suggest a significant chunk of the cost—over $220 billion—is in fact already being spent on public assistance programs that could be nearly eliminated.

For the Democrats, the like of which Ocasio-Cortez beat in the biggest primary upset of the year, a “Jobs Guarantee” would be new ideas enough. How are you going to pay for that? The emerging Left has an answer: by revolutionizing how we think about government spending.

The rise of Stephanie Kelton, the Professor of Public Policy and Economics at Stony Brook University, who advised Bernie Sanders in his 2016 campaign, is mirrored in the rise of her life-long cause: Modern Monetary Theory. According to Kelton, “money doesn’t grow on rich people,” but is in fact a product produced by the government, the only limits on which is inflation. Kelton, a founding fellow at the Sanders Institute and the latest Bloomberg columnist, is pushing the Democrats to embrace a fiscal revolution—immense deficit spending—because, she argues, this isn’t an automatic trigger for inflation and, crucially, that the government doesn’t have to balance the books for a resource it creates.

Transforming the American labor market and federal budget at the same time might seem like a lot. But the new Left is not done. The latest thinking, by two former Obama officials, has America’s financial markets in its sights. The big idea? Government bank accounts for all. In a new report, Treasury veterans Morgan Ricks and Lev Menand argue that every American citizen should be given an account at the Federal Reserve—currently a privilege only banks can enjoy. These “FedAccounts” would revolutionize banking, bringing the 35.5 million Americans with little to no access to the financial system inside, and insulating American citizens from the “too big to fail” curse. Predatory banking practices would be cut dead in one fell swoop. And since the Federal Reserve prints money and can itself never go bust, private banks would be freed to take commercial lending risks without the danger of losing ordinary people’s deposits.

And there’s more where that came from, as Sean Hannity was at pains to point out when he screened fourteen points of Ocasio-Cortez’s platform on Fox: single payer healthcare for all, higher education tuition for all, housing as a human right, restoring the Glass-Steagall Act, supporting seniors, gun control, clean campaign finance, criminal justice reform, an end to private prisons, immigration justice, and abolishing ICE. And, of course, women’s rights, and solidarity with everyone who identifies LGBTQIA+.

Taking heed of all this, there has been a stampede of Democratic 2020 hopefuls voicing support for a “Jobs Guarantee.” Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris and Corey Brooker all support some kind of pilot or variant of the scheme.

But the Right has no interest in what is being developed at the Sanders Institute, or gamed out on the pages of Jacobin, the Nation and the New Republic. Ideas such as raising the minimum wage, breaking up the big Wall Street Banks, or forgiving student debt—these, in the right hands, could be genuinely populist and competitive in the places the Democrats need to win. Similarly, the more wonkish ideas, the likes of which have long inspired the Left if not professional Democrats—such as turning the postal service into a bank offering safe alternatives to payday lenders for the poor, financial transactions taxes, clampdowns on offshore finance, carbon taxes, massive green energy boosts, or breaking up America’s oligopolies with revivified antitrust laws—could also be made to sing on the stump.

America’s new Left is a long way from taking over the Democratic Party, but not notably more so than the radical Right was at this point in the last electoral cycle. And just like the Trumpist insurgents did, the new Left has something others in their camp lack: enthusiasm. They feel they know what’s wrong with America, what is going to happen next, and that they have the socialist-inspired solutions that can put it all right. Call it what the old school socialists on the Left still do: a theory of history.

Not all these ideas are brand new, but they are ideas. And beyond defending the border and the interests of the Trump family, it’s not entirely clear what ideas there are on the Right. After the wall, after the tax cut, and after, as looks most likely, the new Supreme Court Justice, where does the Right really go next? Into doubling down ever more on anti-immigration politics at a moment of maximal public backlash? What worked so well in Pennsylvania in 2016 was in contrast to a lukewarm Clintonism. How competitive is Trumpism, in Michigan, when both parties enter the populist age?

The Right, by beating up a straw Left, has not only missed the ferment among their opposites. It has missed how it has opened a door. Because by embracing everything about Donald Trump, it has embraced the idea that something is terribly wrong with America, and that the country needs big, beautiful solutions for terrible, awful problems. When the Right becomes populist, embraces deficits, dunks on free trade, and rails against elites, it suddenly becomes a lot tougher for it to ridicule a populist Left that is credibly offering more.

There are no killer “owns” on the Ben Shapiro Show for this.

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Will the South China Sea Become a Chinese Lake?

In early June, I travelled by sea from Darwin, Australia to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. I was an observer on two French warships passing through the disputed waters and Spratly Islands of the South China Sea. Beyond the stirring naval encounters with the Chinese navy around the Spratlys, twelve days at sea provided plenty of time to reflect on what lies ahead for the South China Sea.

Let’s start with fundamentals. First, the name. Calling it the South China Sea in English, in a sense, reinforces the Chinese claim. With that name, many overlook that the southern part of the South China Sea lies more than 1,000 miles away from the Chinese coast line. In Chinese, it is named the South Sea, or Nanhai. By contrast, in Vietnam and the Philippines the sea is called, respectively, the East Sea and West Philippine Sea. Both make sense from their geographical perspectives.

Prior to the modern nation-states of Asia, historians now concur that the South China Sea was a nautical fulcrum of exchange populated by semi-nomadic fishers, traders, and pirates. Now each neighboring state tries to efface that history and claim long-standing historical sovereignty. China takes first place for boldness with its nine-dash line, in the shape of a “cow tongue” that extends around 1,000 miles from China’s own coastline and edges much closer to the coastlines of Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Brunei.

Bill Hayton, a scholar at Chatham House, has demonstrated how the Chinese sense of entitlement underpins the potential conflict at sea and how the Chinese Communist Party integrates its claims into its victorious national narrative. The government in Beijing is so certain of its claim that it has even engraved the South China Sea on Chinese passports. Chinese tourists in Vietnam stir strong reactions by wearing t-shirts with the “cow tongue.”

In reality, the nine-dash line dates from an imprecise map from the 1940s developed by the then-Chinese Nationalist government. When the nationalists departed for Taiwan, they continued to maintain their claims on the South China Sea—a position still held by the government of Taiwan to this day.

The very names of the islands demonstrate how much history has been written at a late stage. Many of the now disputed reefs got English names from sailors passing through the area. Richard Spratly was a British whaler. Mischief Reef, a feature we passed on my trip, was probably named after a clipper of the same name, but the Chinese name is meijie, a transliteration from the English. The Chinese used English maps as the basis for their modern claims. It all puts a big question mark around the claim of Chinese ownership since ancient times. The archives in Taiwan, which hold invaluable documents on this history, should be explored by an international group of scholars to dispel some of the fog of nationalist rhetoric on all sides.

Still, even equipped with accurate history, the South China Sea will remain a real conflict point. It is a test case for the integrity of international maritime law and diplomatic dispute settlement. It is also a test case for China’s “peaceful rise” and whether it will clash with its neighbors or the United States. I saw first-hand China’s impressive naval build-up with Chinese destroyers guarding Mischief, Subi, and Fiery Cross Reefs. A French naval captain told me that China has built new warships equivalent to the entire French navy in the past four years alone. It also matters to all of us, because a large part of global commerce and energy imports pass through the South China Sea and the critical choke point of the Malacca Strait. Conflict around the South China Sea could block that.

The U.S. position is not to take side on the sovereignty questions and who owns the disputed reefs, but to uphold freedom of navigation for its military ships. France takes the same approach, which was evident on the mission I was on.

Additionally, the United States is deeply concerned about China’s militarization of the islands, which Defense Secretary Mattis called out at the international Shangri-La conference at the beginning of June. As an initial counter-reaction, the United States disinvited China from the RIMPAC naval exercises. It didn’t seem to have any impact on China, and Xi Jinping explained sternly to Defense Secretary Mattis in Beijing on June 27 that China would not give up one inch of territory in the South China Sea.

There have been an increasing number of freedom of navigations operations (FONOPs) in the Trump Administration but little high-level attention. Trump’s quizzical tweet on Saturday, June 2—“Very surprised that China would be doing this?” as a response to Mattis’s statements about China’s “coercion” in the South China Sea—seemed to throw additional uncertainty on policy. Even so, talks with officials in the National Security Council tell me to interpret the comment as Trump being negatively surprised about the Chinese taking such actions in the South China Sea, thus confirming current policy. All in all, it does not seem the President has given much deep thought to the South China Sea and freedom of navigation as yet.

This also means that we should not rule out that the Trumpian transactional approach to international relations could include South China Sea. It could become a piece in a larger negotiation with China where trade and North Korea would loom higher on the U.S. priority list. Perhaps based on that uncertainty about longer-term U.S. commitments, countries such as the Philippines under Duterte are increasingly turning to cut an economic deal with China about access to resources in the South China Sea, although this will simultaneously weaken the Philippines’ sovereignty claims.

The big policy question is if the United States wants to take steps to freeze China’s creeping militarization of the islands. It needs allies for this. The freedom of navigation coalition is clearly growing. I noticed it first-hand as we passed through the Spratly Islands, which the British, Australians, and Americans sailed through within short time intervals. The next step could be joint patrols with allies showing China that it is not only the United States upholding freedom of navigation. Sanctions on Chinese companies doing land reclamation could be part of the toolbox as well. As for international law, it would not harm U.S. credibility if Washington were to ratify the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), but this seems increasingly unlikely.  Encouraging other claimants to follow in the footsteps of the Philippines and bring the issue to international arbitration could be helpful steps in obliging China and other claimants to clarify their specific claims and their basis in international law.

France is seeking to compel other Europeans to take a clearer stand for freedom of navigation. Its military patrols are bringing EU declarations about upholding freedom of navigation and international law into practice. Other Europeans should join in making them joint patrols at future occasions. Yet the European Union should have a role beyond the hard security defense of freedom of navigation as well.

As I passed through the South China Sea, I noted that pollution and overfishing are clearly much greater short-term challenges than the sovereignty issues or the naval great power game between the United States and China. Here the European Union could play a uniquely suited rule in promoting maritime multilateralism, something the organization has excelled at on managing fishing rights and environmental protection in European waters among member states. In the South China Sea, this would be extremely difficult and sensitive, given the low level of trust between the partners, but it could also be a building block for gradually restoring such trust. If no actions are taken soon, the South China Sea will truly become a Chinese lake, overfished and polluted.

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We’re Hiring: Assistant Editor

The American Interest is looking for an Assistant Editor to join its team as it works to reinvent the policy magazine for the 21st century. We are looking for someone who lives and breathes current events, but who also enjoys piecing together the bigger picture. In an ever-quickening world, our mission is to help unpack complex issues for our readers, putting the flood of breaking news stories in their proper perspective.

The Assistant Editor needs to be a good writer, but also should have an eye for detail and an appreciation for good design. We are looking for someone with broad interests, but who tilts towards domestic U.S. issues. Working closely with the editorial team, the ideal candidate will both help commission and edit pieces for online and print, as well as help lay out the print publication every two months. Familiarity with InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator—and some familiarity with at least the basics of the web (HTML/CSS/Javascript)—is a huge plus.

This is an entry-level position for someone who wants to launch a career in journalism or policy analysis in Washington. We offer a competitive salary and full health, vision, and dental benefits.

To apply, please email jobs@the-american-interest.com with your CV or resume and cover letter. No calls, please!

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Books That Burn

With all the critical accolades given to Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, it was inevitable we would see other attempts to cash in on the angst of the Trump era with film versions of other dystopian stories. One book in particular seems to have all the makings of a dark satire for the Trump era: Ray Bradbury’s 1953 classic Fahrenheit 451. And, sure enough, HBO seems to have been trying to scratch at least half of the nation’s anti-Trumpian itch in its recent adaptation of Bradbury’s vision of a dystopian future.

You could almost say Bradbury’s book about book burning was purposely built for flogging a President who has claimed (bragged?) that he doesn’t have time to read. (“I read passages, I read areas, chapters, I don’t have the time,” he told Megyn Kelly.) The America of Fahrenheit 451 is—again, just like the President according to some accounts—besotted with television. Mildred, the wife of the protagonist Guy Montag, spends most of the book fretting about when they will finally get around to buying a fourth TV wall for their parlor, so as to be fully surrounded by televised distractions.

It’s a shame, then, that HBO’s version, written and directed by Ramin Bahrani (Man Push Cart, Chop Shop), fails so miserably. Even the otherwise excellent Michael B. Jordan (Fruitvale Station, Creed) and Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road, Nocturnal Animals) can’t rescue this filmic violation of the letter and spirit of Bradbury’s paean to the already languishing art of deep reading. We have here the same high concept (what if firemen set fires rather than putting them out?) and most of the characters from the original, but the story has been stripped down to its bare bones: a sci-fi thriller of the kind that wasn’t particularly fresh even in their heyday in the mid-1990s. It’s hard to see this film as anything other than evidence that the unfortunate social trends Bradbury’s story was intended to illustrate have continued to advance since the book was published 65 years ago. The violence this movie does to the premise of the book is best encapsulated in the fact that the first contraband items the firemen burn aren’t books but computer equipment being used by underground rebels to upload works of literature to the “dark nine,” the “nine” being the film’s ridiculous, science-fictiony name for their heavily censored internet. The ludicrous and unnecessary modifications to Bradbury’s original story continue to pile up from there. After his crisis of conscience, our hero works surreptitiously to safeguard Omnis, a secret rebel plan to encode the sum total of human art, literature, and knowledge into the genetic code of a bird, and thence to countless animals in the wild. (I’m not kidding about this, unfortunately.) Presumably, once the animals have had time to be fruitful and multiply, the firemen wouldn’t be able to burn them all, and anyone who had a hankering for Proust (and a genetics lab?) would be able to grab a bird and extract the book. This is thin gruel that has nothing to recommend it over François Truffaut’s 1966 version, but even there one can’t help but feel that something is wrong with watching a movie lamenting the decline of reading books.

Bradbury’s novel introduces us to Guy Montag, a fireman whose job is to root out books and other literary contraband and burn them, along with the house in which they were hidden. “It was a pleasure to burn,” the books opening line tells us, and Guy seems to love his job—at least until he meets Clarisse, a teenage girl and neighbor of Montag’s whose social oddity Bradbury establishes by the fact that she likes to take walks and doesn’t watch television. The character of Clarisse evolved from an earlier short story, “The Pedestrian,” which was in turn based on Bradbury’s experience of being stopped and harassed by a police officer who thought that his taking a stroll down the road at night was somehow suspicious.

A simple question from Clarisse—“Are you happy?”—sets Guy on a collision course with society:

He was not happy. He was not happy. He said the words to himself. He recognized this as the true state of affairs. He wore his happiness like a mask and the girl had run off across the lawn with the mask and there was no way of going to knock on her door and ask for it back.

Up to that point, as we learn later, Guy had been secreting away books behind a vent in his house, but he hadn’t yet opened one up to look inside. So, the rubber band of his conscience drawn taut, Clarisse’s question finally snaps the band back violently, awakening Guy to his own desperate discontent and loneliness.

When his fire captain, Beatty, fails to bring him out of his angst with a pep talk, Guy eventually reaches out to a retired professor, Faber, whom he had once caught surreptitiously reading a book in a public park but hadn’t turned in to his superiors. He begs this professor, who’s old enough to have remembered a time when people still read books, to explain why they stopped reading. Faber describes the three things their world (and increasingly ours) lacks. “Number one: quality of information.” Information so detailed it has “pores,” he says elsewhere. “Number two: leisure to digest it. And number three: the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the interaction of the first two.”

This brings us to one of the many persistent confusions about Fahrenheit 451: that it is a book about censorship. Now, obviously, censorship is a part of the America that Guy Montag inhabits. Reading books is against the law, and the firemen are there to enforce that law and punish those who break it. But as Faber and Beatty explain, book burning arose not as the result of a totalitarian coup or in the chaotic aftermath of war (as Bahrani’s film has it). “There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with,” Beatty tells Guy. “Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.” In the world of Fahrenheit 451, fire isn’t a means of oppression; it’s a tool for purging anxiety. As Beatty tells Guy, their job is to make “each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.”

A second common misperception is that Bradbury is concerned with prediction. Instead, he’s more interested in warning. Fahrenheit 451 is a last-ditch letter to bring a lover back from the brink, that lover risking the loss of not simply books but also deep reading and sustained thinking of the kind that various forces of Bradbury’s own time were doing their best to burn away, like Guy Montag and his fellow firemen were doing in the book.

But this makes the book’s actual predictive track record all the more impressive. To read it again today, after the social forces Bradbury identified have had almost 70 years to advance, involves an uncomfortable degree of self-recognition. They have four-wall television; we have ubiquitous smartphones and tablets. Mildred has her seashells; we have Bluetooth headphones and earbuds to keep us oblivious to the people around us. Mildred interacts with her televised “family” on the wall; we have parodies of friendship and debate on social media. The firemen burn books to keep people safe from offensive or troubling ideas; we have speech codes and “safe spaces” on college campuses, while Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council and its counterparts at Facebook and Google stand at the ready to protect our fragile minds from forbidden thoughts and “fake news.” Consider the fate of Lindsay Shepherd, a teaching assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada who showed her communications class a televised clip of Jordan Peterson debating transgender issues: She was hauled into a closed door meeting with her superiors and accused of creating a hostile environment for transgender students, as well as potentially violating Canada’s Human Rights Act. Bradbury’s best-known quote says it all: “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”

Even the things that didn’t turn out quite the way Bradbury warned of strike a harmonic chord. The characters in the story are frequently described as being asleep. They barely register the not-so-subtle portents of imminent nuclear war: hints in radio news broadcasts, hypersonic bombers flying constantly overhead, and family members suddenly called to active duty. Today, by contrast, we are if anything perpetually agitated and aroused. People describe responsible political action with the sobriquet “woke” if they’re on the Left, or as “taking the red pill” on the Right. The point of the media-infotainment complex isn’t to keep us quiescent, but to make us obsessively engaged and enraged, click-click-clicking away our sanity and attention in pursuit of the kind of emotion-driven user-engagement that leads to healthy advertising revenues and vacuous political activism, but does little to provide context or understanding. Our politics is all heat and no light, and, as active as we superficially seem, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that we are no more awake than Guy or Mildred at the beginning of the story.

Yet as much as his observations apply to our own time, Bradbury’s primary concerns were for his own time. In his 1953 short story, “The Murderer,” we can see him working through his misgivings about technologies that keep us constantly distracted and “in touch.” In an essay in the Nation that same year, Bradbury worries about the sudden appearance of people walking absentmindedly down city streets with miniature radios held to their ears, the inspiration for Fahrenheit 451’s “seashells.” He wonders about the motives of the people or institutions feeding us information through these devices. Will the powers-that-be manipulate us for their own ends, or will they just feed us “mush,” reckoning that a populace that knows nothing is an even more useful outcome?

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the problem hasn’t mainly turned out to be that of a bad actor consciously spoon-feeding us mush or controlling our inputs so as to fix the outputs. To be sure, that goes on, but for every Russian psy-op or social programmer with an agenda, ten more programmers with conflicting agendas are trying to hijack our Twitter or Facebook news feed for no large, nefarious purpose, just lots of small, insipid ones. It makes more sense to pin the blame on the algorithms, primed as they are to feed us just what we like to eat, reinforcing our prejudices, cementing them in place to the point that we no longer think on a given topic but instead react by instinct. “You laugh when I haven’t been funny and you answer right off,” Clarisse tells Guy. “You never stop to think what I’ve asked you.”

But the problem runs even deeper than technology. Even Bradbury, through the voice of Faber, confesses that there’s nothing inherent in television or any other visual media that prevents it from having “pores.” Rather, the problem is to be found in human nature itself in the form of our appetites, and in a society arranged in such a way as to provide absurdly large rewards and societal approval to those who satisfy those appetites. As Kingsley Amis wrote in his study of dystopic science fiction, New Maps of Hell, the book shows us

how far the devolution of individuality might go if the environment were to be modified in a direction favorable to this devolution. The lesson to be drawn from the more imaginative science-fiction hells, such as Bradbury’s, is not only that a society could be devised that would frustrate the active virtues, nor even that these could eventually be suppressed, but that there is in all sorts of people something that longs for this to happen.

The most uncomfortable moment of recognition reading Fahrenheit 451 today comes when one realizes that we have indeed devised a society that seems primed to frustrate the active virtues. And who can honestly say that we didn’t want this?

Why don’t more people read and think? A better question may be, “When have they ever?” Few people have historically had the leisure time necessary to do so. Perhaps what’s different about our own times, from Fahrenheit 451’s beginnings in the 1950s up to the present, is that we no longer expect or reward our elites for reading widely and consuming media wisely. This isn’t a subtle dig at the President who doesn’t read or the people who voted for him who mostly don’t either. Quite the contrary: Our never-Trump elites are just as subject to the algorithmically fed id as are the masses—perhaps more so, because they are even more linked-in and arguably have more leisure time in which to consume political outrage porn and mass entertainment.

In a lesser writer, a story like Fahrenheit 451 would have come off as pompous. At times and in places, it may even be that. (Harold Bloom called it a “short, thin, rather tendentious novel” even as he praised it overall, especially for its ability to inhabit different time periods.) Perhaps the sign of Bradbury’s genius is his ability to check the inherent cynicism of a dystopian novel with his relentless joy for life, learning, and the human mind without it coming off as either jarring or sentimental. Perhaps that’s because Bradbury earned his appreciation for these treasures in an unusual way. He wasn’t Ivy-educated, or even college-educated; when he graduated from high school, “I went down to the local library and I spent ten years there, two or three days a week, and I got a better education than most people get from universities.” Libraries were his workshop as well as his classroom. Fahrenheit 451 was written in the basement of UCLA’s Powell Library, where a dozen coin-operated typewriters would let you write as much as you could for a dime per half hour. When he needed a break, he would take a walk amidst the stacks, perusing whatever tomes struck his fancy.

As fervent as was his love for books and reading, Bradbury offers no deus ex machina, no assurances of the triumph of the human spirit or woolly notions of progress. Many critics have commented on the weak consolation of the ending of the story: Amid the ruins of a blasted civilization, Guy joins up with a band of human “books,” people who have committed selected great works to memory. In their camp, the candle of civilization flickers uncertainly in the winds of nuclear devastation. (Truffaut’s film retains this ending, but it somehow feels even less hopeful.)

Perhaps we are destined to chuck our own collective wisdom into the incinerator. It sometimes seems certain that we will, given enough time. That is how the unusual number of literate Romans must have felt just after the fall of the western empire, after which literacy rates for free adult males plummeted rapidly from somewhere around 30 to 40 percent to at most 3 to 4 percent in the so-called Dark Ages. It took hundreds of years, but Europe’s life of the mind recovered. Bradbury’s book shows us that learning, like life, is valuable despite—and because of—its sometimes fragile and fleeting nature. The hope he leaves us with is not the hope of a generation, but that of many generations. It is vastly better than no hope at all.

Just this past June, the American Library Association , deeming her characterizations of blacks and Native Americans too problematic for our tender children.

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The Age of Flux

The future arrived first in Russia. Not because of anything mystical. Simply because the old world died there harder and faster. Belief in big, rational (or supposedly rational) ideas of progress and the future crashed there first.

First communism, then by the mid 1990s democratic capitalism. Old identities folded too, more dramatically than elsewhere:

“We were an absolutely blank canvas. The Soviet concepts of ‘workers,’ ‘collective farmers,’ ‘intelligentsia’ had nothing at all to do with politics,” remembers Gleb Pavlovsky, one of the 1990s spin doctors, who started to work out a new approach to politics where 20th century identities and ideologies were gone. The idea of “Russia” needed to be created. With no parties that made sense, elections became the practice of collecting different sub-groups and resentments, uniting them not through an ideology but an emotion—a fear anyone could project themselves into. In 1996 this was the fear of civil war and chaos, uniting everyone from the secret services to democrats to oligarchs behind Boris Yeltsin. This fell apart after a few months; such liquid movements always do. Over the next three years there was obsessive polling, almost as an ersatz for having any stable reality to refer to. It told them that the most poplar heroes in the country were spies, Russian James Bonds.

In 1999, the Putin majority was created:

“We knew there would be a majority of those who had lost out. It included the army, which was wildly dissatisfied, poor, corrupt. It included the secret services. And on the other hand it included the scientists, academia, doctors, teachers. We had to build a majority from these left behind—they had to know that this was their last chance to win… I think that Russia was the first to go this way, and the West is now catching up. The West can be considered to follow a proto-Putinism of sorts…”

In the West, the default ideology—a democratic capitalism posing as inevitability—ran on for longer, still powered by the energy of victory in the Cold War, a cartoon character running over the edge of a cliff until, after Iraq and the financial crash, it looked down and saw there was nothing underneath and plummeted.

The dissipation of old identities happened more gradually but undeniably. Pollsters used to predict elections based on ideas of economic class and ideology, nowhere more so than where I live in the UK. Then, as the old economy changed and the Cold War ended, this became a poorer predictor of how one votes. In a world where government was a consumer service provider, marketing labels predominated. Sales firms such as Experian served up concepts like “the Ford Mondeo Man”—the swing voter whose desire for a certain type of car politicians had to fulfill. Now Mondeo Man seems far too fuzzy. Political targeting is more granular, looking for the little trigger which will get you out to vote.

Social media both helped crack open the vessels in which the old ideologies and identities were pickled in, and to ferment a new approach. Tom Borwick, digital director of the official Brexit campaign in the UK, thinks that for a population of 20 million, one usually needs 70 to 80 types of targeted social media messages: Animal Rights and Pot Holes, Death Penalty and Health Services. And, as Pavlovsky already knew in 1990s Russia, in a situation where groups you target are so varied, where identity itself is so fractured, one unites them round a vague feeling, as any concrete ideology would get in the way: Drain The Swamp or Take Back Control. And instead of a coherent vision of the future, conspiracy becomes the way you lassoo your vote together. The Deep State (for Trump). The CIA (for Putin). The Establishment (for everyone).

“Conspiracy,” says the Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev, “is what you have after ideology has died.” And just like Russia in the 1990s, these pop-up movements scatter after they have made their mark, to be reformed again in new configurations for fresh ends. Even the so-called “far Right”, seemingly so energized by the internet, dissolves when you approach it: Brexit nationalists march alongside Identitarians dreaming of an EU Empire in the name of Freedom of Speech; anti-Islam activists who claim they don’t like Muslims because of their treatment of women stand next to anti-feminists of the Manosphere. These groups can coalesce for a few moments around a march, but then fall apart, only to join up in new constellations for new missions.

The greatest mistake in this endlessly formless and reforming flux is to think something could be solid. In 1917, after the Russian Empire fell, thousands of White Russians escaped by boarding ships which sailed from Crimea away from the big batteries of the Bolsheviks. On board was a whole civilization floating on the water: newspapers, a brothel. White Russian intellectuals debated the finer points of the differences between Social Democracy and Democratic Socialism, and how they would return to rebuild Russia any moment now. Running into a social media fight the other day between “Conservatives,” “Progressives,” and “Centrists,” I was struck with the same feeling: how nostalgic it felt, as if that compass meant anything coherent any more. Where is the Center? The True North? When in the UK Thatcher’s Conservative Party now brazenly claims “fuck Business!” and the far-Left leaders of the Labour party have become the City of London’s more reliable partner? Or in the United States, where détente-leaning Democrats now gnash at Putin, while Republican Cold Warriors now approve Kremlin conquests (and where the Kremlin assembles its international allies with targeted messages to every segment, just as it did in the 1990s at home)

In this flux one clings on to simple binaries like lost parents. If Right versus Left don’t explain the world then maybe Closed versus Open psychological profiles do? Or is it all about the “Somewheres” versus “Anywheres”? This latter duet updates the old anti-semitic trope of “rootless cosmopolitans” with split loyalties pitted against hearty blood and soil nationalists committed to their local worlds. It’s a binary sometimes used to explain the Brexit vote in the UK. A recent study shows up its limitations. While it is true that people who’d lived abroad were more likely to vote Remain, the split between cities and countryside was much smaller than it was first considered. Most importantly, in both the countryside and cities, people who played an active role in local life, the opposite of the “rootless,” were the ones more likely to vote Remain.

And if we think, instead of ideology, some algorithm holds a solid identity out there for us, we’re wrong. Recently I’ve been looking for my digital self, for some company which holds all my data and can thus give me my own data Dorian Grey Portrait (let it be ugly, but at least it will be me!). I haven’t found it. Instead there’s broken bits of information (something about health, something about shopping), jagged edges which can be added and stacked up in different patterns according to different short-term purposes—little writhing squiggles of impulses and habits which can be impelled to vibrate for a few seconds to get me to buy something or vote for someone.

Where will the flux take us?

I’ve met many who think it can be configured as a new post-class socialism, all the different resentments targeted at Oligarchs and Tax-Dodgers and The Establishment. Perhaps. But if so, it will have to pick its way with care to harness but never intertwine the very different economic angers of students in big cities and the “left behind” in the flyover states. Whatever socialism this will be, it won’t be one you can put in a big tent for long. In the UK, the Labour party has at times managed this trick by accident more than by design; internal divisions mean they can lead different campaigns in different places.

Meanwhile it would be foolish not to be alarmed. Along with the collapse of the old linkages, nastiness has been normalized. If Russia is where the future first arrived, then it’s a warning too. The only way to keep a magicked up “majority” together is through finding bigger and badder conspiracies to play at war with. Krastev has playfully asserted that a certain type of Western liberal’s newfound alarm at Russian “interference” is powered by a deeper fear, that what’s left of the West is becoming more like Russia: the lack of belief in any positive ideology, the wild relativity, elections which change nothing, and institutionalized corruption.

But for all its human tragedy there was also a sense of possibility in the Russia of the late 1990s and early 2000s—an opening. Am I the only one who feels that way today?

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Unless Ye Become as Little Children

Jeannette, The Childhood of Joan of Arc

Directed by Bruno Dumont KimStim Films; 115 minutes

Many of our most formative experiences—the extremes of pain or joy, moments of terror or sexual ecstasy—can’t be represented within the conventions of so-called realism. In his new film Jeanette, The Childhood of Joan of Arc, writer-director Bruno Dumont (Outside Satan, Hadewijch) attempts to bring his audience inside two of these most personal and disorienting forms of experience: childhood, in which we have not yet learned what to expect from ordinary life; and religious vision, in which those rules are suddenly and terrifyingly overturned.

Jeanette depicts the early life of the girl who would go on to become St. Joan of Arc. It shows the inner life of a visionary child, and as such, it’s got the right to be weird—though the specifics of its weirdness might be enough to deter the casual viewer. Dumont gives us complex theology sung at high speed by a single character who is played by twins; desultory scenes of young Joan sulking; awkward dancing, off-key singing, rapping, miming, and nuns head-banging to thrash metal. (The music for the film is done by Gautier Serre, but it’s easier to imagine what it’s like if you know he’s credited by his stage name, “Igorrr.”) If Vatican City entered the Eurovision Song Contest, Jeanette is what they would submit. For some viewers that will be a warning; for the viewers who take it as enticement, a thrilling film awaits.

Jeanette is an adaptation of two related works by the French poet Charles Péguy, his 1897 Jeanne d’Arc and the 1910 Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc. In between the two works, Péguy returned to the Catholic faith. Dumont, for his part, is no believer: “God alienates people from themselves,” he has said. “Yes, my films are mystical, to make people feel the mystery, to inspire them experience for themselves the miracle of existence. . . . Cinema is my religion.” And so Jeanette is a strange breed: an atheist’s adaptation of a writer who was both atheist and Catholic.

What Jeanette captures more than any other film I can think of is the strangeness of Christian faith even to its adherents. Any intimacy we experience with God is unpredictable. For the film’s Joan as for so many believers—even those whose earliest education was formed by faith—God breaks in from the outside. Jarring contrasts, like complex theology issuing from the mouth of a little child, have become almost predictable in art films. But by using these contrasts to depict genuine religious visions, Dumont both revitalizes art-film conventions and portrays, more than any other hagiographical film I know, the weirdness of the saints. (Dumont has praised Alain Cavalier, whose 1986 Thérèse is another unsettled, beautiful film that captures the strange currents of a girl-saint’s mind—though Cavalier worked in a much less aggressive mode.)

Dumont’s film begins in what seems like an idyll: A nine-year-old girl is singing her prayers as she watches her sheep by the side of a winding river. But the prayers are not idyllic. Jeanette (Lise Leplatte Prudhomme) breaks off before she finishes, and begins to change her entreaties into challenges: “Your Name is so far from being hallowed and Your reign from coming,” she laments to God. Under a huge sky, in an expanse of pastoral beauty (this is a gorgeous film that didn’t spend its money on set dressing), Jeanette cries out her frustrations at France’s political divisions—and at the silent God who does not help. She sings fiercely, apocalyptically, “And there is nothing; there is never anything.”

She is so small. Sheep baa in a kind of farmland rimshot punctuating her prayers. She turns cartwheels, because she hasn’t learned to hold her body with adult reserve. She has intense theological arguments with her best friend, another little girl named Hauviette (Lucile Gauthier), both actresses speaking the complex lines with bizarrely credible conviction.

Eventually a nun appears, Madame Gervaise, to guide Jeanette. This sister is played by twin sisters (Aline and Elise Charles). Like all the film’s strange choices, it isn’t pointlessly edgy. When the nun speaks in chorus she is no longer an individual giving an opinion, but the voice of religious community; she is a community within herself, like the Trinity. She’s definitely weird, and there are hints here of the confrontational imagery of a horror movie—she appears out of nowhere, inexplicably doubled, a real person whom Jeanette’s friends know and yet also a vision. She chastises Jeanette (“You must suffer if you [want to] call God to account”). The two of them have a theological song battle, with a rock guitar backing, which rises to a high pitch of ecstasy when they suddenly begin head-banging—and the nun’s wimple falls as her hair, a woman’s glory, the sign that she and Jeanette are alone before God, streams down and whips across her face. It’s a stunning moment, feminine and aggressive all at once, joyous and strange. The mentor becomes young again, and the girl becomes a warrior working herself up before battle.

The visual vocabulary of Jeanette is simple: sky, sheep, river. Late scenes in Jeanette’s father’s hut are the film’s one concession to the idea that audiences might like the occasional change of scenery. The musical vocabulary is not so simple. The combination of unaccompanied singing and thrashing guitars suggests that Joan’s story links our time and her own. The music does not respect the barrier of time; it is as if the audience, like God—and like the saints, interceding in our lives from their vantage point in Heaven—can see and hear from the perspective of infinity. The distance between past and present dissolves in the ecstasy of experiencing the great “I AM.”

The film’s vocabulary of movement is similarly meaningful in its awkward strangeness. These actors delight in their bodies. The children’s bodies twist and stretch and turn upside-down, which is both realistic and perfectly in line with the movie’s portrayal of a world awry and overturned.

Jeanette’s explicit theological concerns include questions about whether one should wish to be damned to rescue others, whether she is called to suffer for the damned, and whether the existence of damned souls should cause her own soul to rebel. These questions, which bring sharp rebukes from Madame Gervaise that Jeanette does her best to accept, are unrelated to the mission the audience knows she will eventually receive. There is a long, incantatory passage about how we don’t know our own happiness—in the midst of our misery we have our happiness in Christ, even if we don’t believe—which, if anything, might suggest that there is no need for a dangerous military mission. Obviously a movie about Saint Joan will depict Christian faith, but Jeanette suggests that its heroine did not understand her own task in the same terms that we would.

Once Jeanette receives her mission, the film screeches to a halt, then meanders around for a while. Jeanette, now played by Jeanne Voisin, tries to find the Dauphin (which we don’t see, because Dauphins are far outside this film’s budget). She fails; she mopes. She ponders the morality of lying, and makes some startlingly bad justifications for it, which the film lets stand. There’s chicken-plucking and artsy dancing which can only be described as “Europeasant,” and the thrills of the movie’s early sections begin to fade.

Presumably it’s easier to give urgency to scenes of ecstatic religious vision than to scenes of everyday confusions and obstacles. Perhaps Dumont intends to depict Jeanette adrift, unguided now that her visionary companions have left her, trying to work out what they might want but struggling to make her own limited resources match her task. She becomes complicit in the usual human self-justifications (man is the rationalizing animal) and struggles to find the path forward. But the danger of form-follows-function is always that the audience will be as confused as the characters. It must be possible to depict frustration without being frustrating. In this final section, both the thinking and the filmmaking seem to slacken.

The final scene recaptures some of the early grandeur. It’s a surprisingly normal and intimate portrayal of the girl riding away from her home. It’s as if we are leaving behind the transforming, surreal inner experience of the childhood visionary, and entering the part of Joan’s life which can be communicated through dates and maps. She rides out of childhood, into adulthood; out of apocalypse, and into history.

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True Grit in Baku

We met this month at an outdoor cafe in a park in Baku’s city center. After spending a year and a half in prison—she was released two years ago—Khadija Ismayilova has three years’ probation still to serve. She is surveilled 24/7. She is not permitted to leave the country. Her mother left Azerbaijan in March for medical treatment in Turkey. She had been diagnosed with cancer, and it was there in Ankara this spring that she died. Khadija had requested permission to see her mother in those final days. She received a reply from authorities, two months after her Mom’s death, asserting that her application had been improperly prepared.

Khadija Ismayilova, now affiliated with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, had been an award-winning investigative reporter for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. She got herself into trouble by doing what journalism is supposed to do: hold government accountable. Such work is often harrowing. Khadija’s neighborhood is exceptionally difficult.

Azerbaijan is part of the Caucasus, the region situated between the Black and Caspian Seas, at the edge of Europe and Asia, which comprises as well part of Russia (including Chechnya), Armenia, and Georgia. The country shares borders with authoritarian Russia to the north and with theocratic Iran to the south. According to Freedom House, “corruption is rampant” in Azerbaijan, and the regime’s “extensive crackdown on civil liberties in recent years [has left] little room for independent expression of activism.” On its scale of one to seven, Freedom House gives Azerbaijan a seven for political rights, a score otherwise reserved for the likes of Turkmenistan and North Korea.

For Khadija, prison was not easy. Political prisoners are kept among the general prison population; in her case, alongside 170 female inmates, in spartan conditions (ten toilets in total). Many of the women had been convicted of drug smuggling and violent crime, including murder. During her time behind bars, prison authorities would often spread rumors about Khadija to turn other prisoners against her; one whisper being that Khadija comes from Armenian stock. The two countries are bitter enemies and have fought for years now over Nagorno-Karabakh, currently occupied by Armenia. In the midst of threats, intimidation, and worse—much of the behavior from all sides was really “quite nasty,” she tells me—Khadija says: “one must always remain calm, without ever showing any sign of weakness.” Khadija took up causes for her fellow incarcerated, lobbying, for example, that authorities provide women with hygiene supplies for their periods.

Out of prison Khadija has become mentor to a growing network of fearless young reporters, most of them women. Their method is investigative journalism; their principal target, the nepotism and corruption of the First Family and their cronies. Their goal: to open up to public scrutiny the kleptocratic system and culture that has thrived under the country’s President Ilham Aliyev. It was Khadija’s reporting on offshore accounts, a Panamanian mining company, a prominent Azerbaijani bank, and airline services all owned by President Aliyev’s wife and daughters that first got her in hot water. Aliyev’s 11-year-old son, Khajda’s research revealed in 2010, owned real estate in the United Arab Emirates estimated to be worth $44 million.

The conflict between Khadija and the regime is a fundamental one. In autocracies, journalism is to serve the governors, not the governed. A 2012 law passed by Azerbaijan’s rubber stamp Parliament made it illegal to reveal details of company ownership unless by court order or by police investigation. On Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, Azerbaijan ranks 122 out of 180 countries, behind places like Pakistan, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Ecuador.

Khadija has won considerable international recognition for her work, including a prestigious PEN Award, an Anna Politkovskaya award (after the slain Russian journalist), and the Right Livelihood Award in Sweden, often referred to as the “Alternative Nobel Prize.” Were she able to leave the country she could easily find a perch, and an opportunity to continue her work. I prod her about a possible campaign to get her out. “But what kind of signal would that send to younger people,” she tells me, “if I escaped to the safety of the West?” Is she safe in Baku? “I never walk alone at night,” she says, though adding: “ I also get greeted warmly by strangers; there are cab drivers who, when they recognize me in the back of their taxis, will refuse to let me pay the fare.” We spent four and a half hours sitting together outside over pizza and mineral water. Twice men approached our table to shake Khadija’s hand.

Azerbaijan’s oil and gas reserves, and the fact that the country sits between Russia and Iran, typically gives foreign policy realists grounds to dismiss people like Khadija in the name of stability. Indeed, when I met President Aliyev in 2009—I had traveled to Baku as CEO of RFE/RL to urge his government to stop threatening our journalists—the Azerbaijani leader was quick to point out the security and energy partnership his country enjoys with the United States. Khadija argues that Aliyev’s corrupt and authoritarian ways make the regime inherently unstable. She points to things like a proliferation of stores selling wine on the one hand, and religious material on the other—Azerbaijan is a Muslim-majority country with the world’s second largest Shi‘a population after Iran—as indication that growing numbers are fed up with the deep pattern of kleptocratic self-dealing.

We ought to know by now that matters like religion, history, and culture figure prominently in the evolution and transition of any country to democracy. Says Kenan Aliyev (no relation to the country’s President), a fellow journalist: “Pluralism and accountable government will take time and genuinely committed leadership in a place like Azerbaijan.” None of this is to say that we should fall for the folly of realism, however. “Courageous people like Khadija are crucial in showing the way forward, as inspiration to those who want freedom and as a rebuke to those who don’t,” says Aliyev, Khadija’s friend and former editor at RFE/RL.

I asked Khadija about the utility of “quiet diplomacy” to advance the cause of human rights. “It’s insulting,” she says.

Toward the end of our afternoon together Khadija and I are joined by one of her young charges, a petite, 20-something young woman, shy and modest in demeanor. This young woman had been taken by police recently for interrogation to a facility notorious for torture and rape.

“Were you afraid?” I asked. “Oh yes,” Khadija’s young associate tells me; “I just barely passed off my laptop in time to someone else.” She was worried about protecting her sources. I had meant something different.

“Share what you said when you were released the next morning,” nudges Khadija.

At this point the soft-spoken young woman smiles and says: “I told gathered media that the questions I was asked over night were silly, but the tea was quite good.”

That’s true grit. “Stay calm, never show signs of weakness,” is the mantra. It’s a humbling reminder to realists, and to anyone else inclined to write off human rights in a country like Azerbaijan.

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Affirming Disadvantage

And here we go again. Students for Fair Admissions is suing Harvard for bias in its admissions against Asian students. Asians, it turns out, are scored overall as having the least estimable personalities, often knocked down in the stack by notes designating them as not quite interesting or quirky enough despite top-notch grades, test scores, and extracurricular activities.

Slander of hard-working Asian children, pure and simple, and why? Because it makes space for black and Latino students, who are much less likely to be designated as too “unexciting” to deserve admission. Black students are rated highly on personality in the top eight deciles, Asian applicants in only the first decile. Overall, a dossier that would give an Asian student a 25 percent chance of admission gives a black student a virtual guarantee (95 percent). Being black gives a Harvard applicant a bonus twice as big as that for a student of any other color under the income bracket of $60,000.

Recall that we are usually told that whites harbor subconscious but powerful biases against blacks as people. If this is true, then it only makes clearer how artificial and sinister these “personality” rankings at Harvard have been, in directly contravening how Implicit Association Tests so commonly indicate black people are perceived. This is, in a word, a hustle. Yet all indications—such as a memo from Harvard’s President Drew Gilpin Faust—are that Harvard will respond with dissimulations, pretending not to be doing to Asian students exactly what was done to tamp down Jewish admissions until well into the previous century.

So, black and Latino students are preferred over Asian students with the same qualifications, despite that last time I checked Asians are “of color,” often attest to experiencing discrimination, and would often contest that they have not experienced “disadvantage” growing up. What exactly is the rationale for this? There is one, kind of, but it’s a signal that it’s time for enlightened America to hit reset on affirmative action once and for all.

Mind you, gleaning what the rationale is requires almost Talmudic exegesis. Our answers will be couched in a smokescreen web of buzzwords and catchphrases reminiscent of medieval scholastic debates on theology. Considering how racial preferences have been discussed since the 1980s, Thomas Aquinas would find his intellectual abilities well suited to parsing the actual meaning of words like diversity, segregation, racism, qualifications, holistic, “welcoming,” and even education.

Hacking our way through this damp, heavy overhang of rain forest vines, holding some stray ones back for a second and gasping for air, one may glimpse a patch of sunshine through the canopy above. That is, we are to think that racial preference policies in admissions consist of identifying equally qualified candidates and then, from among them, making sure that a representative number of the admitted students are black and Latino, for the most part. All claims that opponents of the current orthodoxy are racists who want to bar brown kids from opportunity and resegregate America’s universities are founded on an assumption that this is how racial preferences work in admissions. And indeed, few would or should have any problem with them—if this were the way the procedure actually worked.

The heart of the endless debate over racial preference policies is that it has been revealed at countless institutions since the 1990s—Rutgers, the University of California, the University of Michigan, and the University of Texas, among others—that actually, black and Latino students are admitted with adjusted standards. That is, there is a bonus for being black or Latino factored into whether these students even reach the final pool considered. Only at the very top universities such as the Ivies does admissions actually use the “thumb on the scale” process claimed to be the one everywhere, in which race is taken into account only amidst a pool of candidates with truly comparable qualifications. Beyond these few institutions, matters are what we like to call more “complicated.”

We learn the truth at those rare but inevitable times when someone happens, for some reason, to actually use clear, honest, adult language about these matters. These Candid Moments come usually in private, but give away the game. Ten years and change ago I spoke on racial preferences for a black student group at a selective (but not Ivy-level) school, making my usual argument that today, affirmative action should be based on socioeconomics, not skin color. A black professor actually said, straight out: “If ‘spunk’ hadn’t played a big part in their evaluation, then almost none of the black students in this room would be here. Is that what you want?”

I might add that this man was genial about this; it wasn’t an angry moment. But he was spelling out that for the black students, grades and test scores had indeed played a crucially lesser role in their admission than for other students on campus. He clearly supposed that there were larger factors that justified the brown subset of that school’s student body being cherished for their spunkiness rather than their nerdiness. But what are those factors? And do they hold water in 2018?

The Affirmative Action 1.0 justification, which made sense 50 years ago, was that black people can’t be subject to truly serious competition because all but a squeak of us are poor—or at least, too poor to be able to be expected to really ace a test. A lot of black people weren’t crazy about this line of reasoning even then, but in 2018, with the dramatic burgeoning of the black middle class directly as the result of these policies, this sense of black as shorthand for poor is catastrophically antique as sociological reasoning.

Suddenly all understand what an obsolete, condescending dismissal of the civil rights revolution this is when someone like Donald Trump implies that black America is one huge, violent, depressed ghetto. Bring on the objections to “pathologizing” the inner city, and newer claims that the very term is obsolete, that the conditions in question are now a cross-racial problem, and so on. All well and good—in 2018, while proportionally more black people are still poor than whites, to baldly equate black with poor is a hopelessly ignorant flub. But to understand this pulls the rug out from under the idea that brown skin requires lowered standards.

Because this was already clear as far back as the Carter Administration, starting with the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke decision in 1978, the custom of the country has been to defend this fiddling with cutoffs for brown people as necessary in a quest for “diversity.” All know that this term, whose meaning has narrowed in a way that would be opaque to a time traveler from as recently as 1970, refers not to all of humanity but to black and Latino people. Geographical, political, religious, and even Asian diversity are tacitly understood to be “not what we really mean”—the one-legged Mormon lesbian from Idaho is less “diverse” than the middle-class black boy from Cleveland.

We hear that having a certain number of black and Latino students is vital to a good education. However, all quietly know that diversity has nothing to do with French irregular verbs or systolic pressure—i.e. the actual content of most courses. Some will trot out assorted studies showing that “diversity” has some kind of larger benefit in education—a current favorite is one that suggests that “diverse” study groups are better at arriving at solutions to problems. However, what looms over all of this is whether these rather vague benefits—and never mind that many studies of campus “diversity” show no benefit and even downsides—justify the endless bitterness and doubletalk that adjusting qualification cutoffs for black and brown students entails.

Many seem to think that they do, but it’s unclear they are truly examining the matter from a critical distance. For example, black students, so cherished in their “diversity,” often complain that they actually don’t like being singled out for their views on race issues in class.

Or: New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio thinks he is Doing the Right Thing by eliminating or at least downsizing the role that the entrance test plays in gaining students admission to the city’s elite public schools like Stuyvesant, with a special percentage of admittees admitted despite having scored a certain amount below the traditional cutoff. The idea here is to raise the sadly minimal proportion of black and Latino students at these schools. But after upping the brown figures with this method, get ready for the news stories a few years from now with black and Latino students complaining that other students think they got into the school with a lower test score than theirs—with it considered blasphemous to venture that they probably did.

Note: why not tell these students they were admitted because they are “diverse”? For one, because few things illuminate the weakness of that argument more than trying to tell an actual “diverse” individual that it’s why they were admitted. Plus, the argument will seem even weaker in a school full of equally brown-skinned South and Southeast Asians.

Folks, the dog won’t hunt—at least not anymore. Is all of this anger, hurt, confusion, and lying really worth continuing forever? Or even for the next ten years? Let us remember: In 2003, to the comfort of many—you could almost hear a big sigh rising out the living rooms of the Acela corridor intelligentsia—Justice Sandra Day O’Connor decreed that racial preferences would be necessary for another 25 years. That was now 15 years ago. We’re way past the halfway point, and what exactly will happen during the next ten years that justifies maintaining this fragile business for that much longer?

One of the most pernicious aspects of the culture of racial preferences is that it has taught all of us to think of black people as inherently less intelligent than other people. Oh, not overtly, of course. But the problem is clear in assorted cultural tropes that could owe their existence to nothing else.

Consider the conception of “welcome” that has become so entrenched in these discussions. “If you don’t admit me, then it means you don’t like me,” we instruct the young black student to think. This notion of welcoming would make sense if it were done after actually comparing people with the same grades and test scores. But when the “welcoming” is amidst changing qualifications for brown people, then it can only mean that the whites “welcome” people despite their lesser dossier stats—with the implication that this lesser performance is eternal, an inherent facet of the body of black and Latino students.

This is, quite simply, calling brown students dim. Yes, Lyndon Johnson said, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race, and then say ‘you are free to compete with all the others.’” But ladies and gentleman, is this quotation not now a bit elderly? It works beautifully today for a brown student who grew up disadvantaged. But only a small fraction of today’s black and Latino students at selective universities grew up in anything like poverty, as we know from endless reports of how grievously few poor people of any kind gain admission to selective schools.

And no, residual racism does not qualify as any kind of mic-drop here. Say that an upper-middle class black student is hobbled from tippy-top performance by the residual racism of 2018 and you are calling her a weakling. You are also leaving a perfectly valuable objection from assorted non-black people working with obstacles such as poverty, illness, family tragedy, and even racism (as some Asians can legitimately claim) as to why they don’t deserve the same special treatment or why this black student does.

Even sadder is that this sense of blackness and school has percolated into too many black Americans’ sense of themselves. On schools like Stuyvesant, a black New Yorker casually tells the New York Times that “the exam is built to exclude blacks because it’s heavy on math and black people can’t do math.” In academia, some black professors have been arguing that fields requiring heavy-duty quantitative analysis are racist in failing to hire or promote black professors whose work eschews numbers, the idea being that non-quantitative analysis constitutes a valuable alternate (“diverse”?) perspective. Again the idea that it is somehow logically impossible for black people to be number-crunchers. A hundred years ago civil rights leaders would unhesitatingly have sought to get black people the skills they needed to break in, not indignantly demand that the powers that be change what they think of standards.

And then, there is the tendency for black teens to associate doing well in school with “acting white.” Often when I refer to this, it elicits indignant claims that the “acting white” idea has been somehow debunked. It has not, and I am unmoved by these objections. The facts are painfully clear in countless books and articles, and detractors are nimbly working around, rather than with, the reality because they find it inconvenient to see a black community problem attributed to something other than white perfidy. If it makes them feel any better, the “acting white” charge began when black kids were alienated by white teachers’ scorn for black students amidst desegregation orders in the 1960s, and is maintained by whites’ tacit assumptions that serious scholastic ability is diagonal to what being black is.

One of the ways I know this is how so many of us are quietly thinking is shown by Candid Moment No. 2, which tragically but usefully illustrates my larger point. The spring after racial preferences had been banned at UC Berkeley in 1998, a student in one of my classes was a black undergraduate who was working in the minority recruitment office spending time with black prospectives. This was the first body of black applicants who had been admitted without racial preferences. She very casually said to me that she and the other people at the office were worried that black students who performed at that high a level wouldn’t be concerned with maintaining a sense of black community at Berkeley.

There it was: She expected me to spontaneously understand that the black nerd probably isn’t “really black.” That statement was unimaginable from a Chinese-American or Jewish student, and neatly explains why even black people are so often comfortable with the idea that they require “welcome” for doing very well rather than excellently. Black students aren’t supposed to be too good in school, was this woman’s message, delivered, I might add, quite calmly. And in fact, some years later I heard, unbidden, from two black students who had entered Berkeley with that class, telling me that they had indeed encountered a cold shoulder from more than a few of the older black students who were suspicious of them for being post-preference admits.

Much can be said about how slavery, Jim Crow, and white racism have conditioned a people to underestimate their own cognitive abilities. However, the nasty truth is that racial preferences, in being maintained so far past their sell-by date, now maintain rather than break with toxic preconceptions we should be long past. To wit, lowering standards for black and Latino applicants is now a retrogressive rather than progressive approach.

Or, racist, at least. I know of no more vivid indication of racism today than the idea that brown people are human history’s first who can only truly compete under ideal conditions. I know of no more vivid hypocrisy on the part of those who style themselves black people’s fellow travelers than to earnestly dismiss claims that black people’s average IQ is lower than other peoples’ while in the same breath nodding vigorously that a humane society must not subject the same people to challenging tests. Moreover, I know of no more tragic indication of a people’s internalization of the oppressor’s racism than a bright black NAACP lawyer arguing with proud indignation that if black people don’t do well on a test it’s society’s job to eliminate the test or make it easier.

Racial preferences were a fine idea in the 1960s and 1970s when they arose, as a temporary strategy for giving a race just past Jim Crow, most of whom were still poor or close to it, an unprecedentedly abrupt, sincere, and even rule-bending leg up at a crucial juncture in American social history. Any who brand this article as “anti-affirmative action” reveal themselves as having failed to read up to this point.

However, even in a society where racism itself is not extinct, this approach fails as an open-ended strategy. While racial disparities certainly exist, there is now far too much black success, and far too many different kinds of people in our population since the Immigration Act of 1965, for it to ever again make sense in any real, lasting way to maintain different standards for black and Latino people, specifically, in perpetuity. This regime is now supportable only via doubletalk, agitprop, silencing, lies, suspicion, condescension, and recurrent challenges in court stirring up hollow, manipulative justifications that sound more Orwellian by the decade. None of this is worth what has evolved from a pragmatic strategy of reparation into a craven, self-oriented display of anti-racism that persists only because no individual person or institution has the guts to call it for what it has become and move on. Racial preferences should be thought of as a kind of chemotherapy, targeted very specifically for a sternly limited period of time, due to the massive collateral damage that comes with its healing properties.

Part of the very definition of certain administrators’ jobs has become to gracefully manage the tightrope equipoise of making racial preferences sound constructive rather than gestural. Candid Moment No. 3: a selective university President once told me that they agreed with the kinds of things I am writing here but simply could not, as part of their job, say such things in public. It’s time to let this all go, and we don’t need another ten years to admit it.

Do I oppose affirmative action? Not at all. But I suggest that what we now “affirm” is disadvantage suffered by all kinds of people. Few will resent or question adjusting standards because of true, obvious and incontestable obstacles to success. Those who do will mostly be educable; the sliver who continue to resist will classify as mere static—there’s always some.

A preference policy based on disadvantage will take in plenty of brown people— enough to foster “representative” populations of brown people on college campuses, as Richard Kahlenberg has documented, including in his under-consulted The Remedy. But it will not take in brown students born of parents two generations past the old days and doing just fine, and that is progress, not bigotry. It’s time we brown people who have overcome, in any sense the world and history would recognize, stop being given a hand up on the basis of our supposed “diversity.” And even the fact that we might run up against a nasty time trying to relax at a Starbucks leaves that logic intact—unless black people are human history’s weakest renditions of the species.

So no, I do not think universities should foster a brown subset of students admitted as much because of their “spunk” as because of their scholastic chops. But I must be grilled the same way I am grilling so many others—how do I feel about what that room at that selective school would look like if admissions were barred from using Spunk Points?

First, I have every expectation that in an America where the only way black students could gain access to the very best schools was to submit applications equal to other students admitted, then after about a generation, the black American community would master the skill set necessary to do this and pass it on to the next. Non-black administrators so horrified that letting Spunk Points go would mean “resegregation” would surely put their hearts and souls into the effort. Anyone who thinks those people will actually reveal themselves as closet racists happy to let campuses “resegregate” might consider investing in some Xanax. Accuse me of being a Pollyanna and I ask back: Why do you have so little faith in black people? Are you not perhaps demonstrating exactly the internalized sense I just described of black people as uniquely and eternally handicapped in the noggin? And, I will also ask: Why would we expect a people to do excellently when the larger culture teaches them that for them, doing pretty well is excellent?

Second, I think my interlocutor that night was painting with rather broad a brush. Eliminating racial preferences does not yield the purely white and Asian campus we are so often warned of. At Berkeley after preferences were banned, the number of black students first went way down—and then went back up, and stayed there. The number has never been as high as in the old days. But meanwhile, at solid but second-tier UC San Diego, the year before racial preferences were banned there had been exactly one black freshman honors student in a class of about 3,200. By 1999, with many black students who would once have been admitted to Berkeley and UCLA now attending schools like this one, one in five black freshmen were making honors, about the same proportion as white freshmen.

How this qualified as racism or resegregation was decidedly unclear, which was much of why stories like these were almost never heard beyond certain circles. Yet the myth persists even today in discussions of affirmative action that the issue is Yale or jail—that somehow only the tippy-top schools provide students with “opportunity.” I’ve often wondered how the batteries of teachers and administrators at schools beyond the Ivies and a handful of others feel about the discourse that lustily implies that to attend schools like theirs does not qualify as providing “opportunity.”

Candid Moment No. 4: In 1998 a young black filmmaker swore me to secrecy about a short he was directing in response to the ban on preferences. It’s now been 20 years, I doubt the film was made, and if it was, it is now a period piece unviewable by any but this man and his friends, and so I take the liberty of revealing the script’s plot. It opened with a young black man giving an anti-affirmative action speech in a sweater vest to a white audience, going home, and changing into his regular “authentic” garb of hoodie and big sneakers. He is a classic black conservative sell-out, openly cawing that he’s saying what The Man wants to hear because it’s the only way he knows to get rich in The Man’s America. A young black woman whose brother just got turned down by Berkeley after the ban has killed himself in despair, and she has hunted our opportunist down with a gun, corners him, but then at the last minute leaves him to escape growling “He ain’t even worth it anyway.”

Yes, that was the plot; I still have the script—and this director was a bright, poised, educated man (in fact, wearing a sweater vest when I met him). Yet he seriously sought to make a film in which being turned down by Berkeley was like being barred from earning a Bachelor’s Degree at any institution of higher learning in the world. But here in real life, the black people who were turned down by Berkeley and UCLA back then are now pushing 40, many of them parents, maybe a few years before realizing that the gray hairs are coming in too fast to bother plucking them out anymore. How many of them do we suppose would say that their lives were ruined by having to settle for the misery of making do with UC Santa Cruz or UC San Diego? In broader view, for all of the disgusted, howling hue and cry over the banning of racial preferences in University of California schools in the late 1990s, a generation later what damage to black advancement did the preferences ban effect? In which profession in California are there fewer black people now than there were then because fewer black students went to Berkeley and UCLA? The evidence is surely in by now, and none exists.

Enough.

No more people thinking they’re doing black people a favor in asking “Then how come it’s okay for legacy students (or George W. Bush, as it was popular to substitute during the aughts) to get in under the bar?”—as if the very comparison wasn’t the quintessence of disrespect for black excellence.

No more “White students need to learn how to work with different kinds of people in the workplace”—upon which the question must be, but never is allowed to be: “Exactly what is it about black people that we are hoping people will learn?”

No more nonsense like New York Chancellor Richard Carranza declaiming that Asians think they “own admission” to schools like Stuyvesant. Just which Asians ever said that, or even implied it? And, how is it that Asian students are claiming they “own” a school when all they have done is do excellently on the test required to get into it?

The reason America can never truly come together in understanding racial preferences is not benighted racism rearing its head as always. It’s because the rationales simply no longer make any damned sense. The second you find that discussing affirmative action requires looking over your interlocutor’s shoulder into the distance and shaking your head a bit, claiming that the issues are “complex” and quietly hoping the discussion will now peter out, you know something has gone off the rails. That something is your conscience. Heed it.

Black Minds Matter, and it’s time we hit reset on how we show that we understand that. Pretending that black means poor in 2018 shows no such thing. Long live affirmative action. But let’s affirm disadvantage, and stop spitting in black America’s face by pretending that to be black is to be morally exempt from hard-core competition in getting into top schools even if you grew up no more “diversely” than the whites and Asians you’re competing against.

Educated white America—please open up to letting the lying go. You’re not only insulting us, you’re hurting us by suckling us on a pernicious web of unspoken assumptions that foster a sense that to be brown is to get a pass on really showing what we’re made of. Please spare my daughters, 15 years from now, being assessed in this condescending, fake way that only makes sense to you because it makes you feel good for a while.

We shall preserve affirmative action—as affirming disadvantage. Many reading that will guiltily note the internal sense of release, and shouldn’t resist it. What you’re feeling is what under another name would be called a sense of moral justice.

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The Coming Crisis in the Taiwan Strait

“The people’s eyes are sharp. Whether this disputed issue can be resolved is an important indicator of how Taiwan people will view the future direction of relations between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait.” So said Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council in a statement issued on January 31. The not-so-subtle warning to Beijing: Change course or say goodbye to your dream of unification. This MAC statement was specifically in reference to China’s then-recent unilateral announcement of new commercial flight routes over the Taiwan Strait, but it can also be understood as a response to China’s two-year pressure campaign on the island.

With the election of Tsai Ing-wen to Taiwan’s presidency in early 2016, Beijing wisely concluded that its previous charm strategy for bringing about unification had failed. During the previous Ma Ying-jeou Administration, Hu Jintao had pursued cross-Strait economic agreements, the obvious rationale being that economic integration would increase the island’s economic reliance on the mainland, eventually making unification inevitable. The people on Taiwan would see the benefits, especially economic, of embracing the People’s Republic and recognize that future attempts to distance themselves from China would hit them where it seems in normal times to hurt most—in their pocketbooks. At the same time, Beijing permitted Taiwan a tad more international space; for example, it didn’t object when Singapore and New Zealand pursued their own free-trade agreements with Taiwan, nor did it object to Taiwan’s participation as an observer in the World Health Assembly.

Perhaps to Beijing’s surprise, the charm approach did not work. If anything, familiarity bred greater contempt. From the perspective of many in Taiwan, the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA)—a pseudo-FTA between Beijing and Taipei—did not live up to its promise, with GDP growth below 2 percent for most of Ma’s tenure. Indeed, many in Taiwan, especially among the younger generations, were suspicious of tightening cross-Strait ties during Ma’s second term. When the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) moved to speed the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement through the legislature in March 2014, students and civic groups occupied the Legislative Yuan’s chambers. A March 30 rally attracted more than 100,000 people (116,000 according to police; half a million according to organizers) marching in support of passing a law governing cross-Strait agreements before considering the trade-in-services pact.

At the least, the so-called Sunflower Movement slowed the pace of cross-Strait economic integration. Perhaps more importantly, it presaged significant electoral setbacks for the KMT in the nine-in-one elections—local polls for a variety of leadership positions, from village chiefs to big-city mayors—later that year and in the 2016 general election. Following the general election, the Democratic Progressive Party for the first time in Taiwan’s history captured both the presidency and the legislature.

Beijing attempted to dictate terms to Taipei regarding the basis upon which it would engage with the new Tsai government going forward. But Tsai would not be dictated to—after all, she has voters to whom she must answer. China has acted like a petulant child in the two years since that election, but that understates the seriousness of Chinese behavior. China’s pressure campaign may be more sophisticated now than it was during the 1995-96 Taiwan Strait Crisis, when its missile launches bracketing the island both failed to sway Taiwanese voters and, ultimately, demonstrated Beijing’s strategic impotence in the face of the undaunted U.S. commitment to the island’s defense. Although it has not recently resorted to displays of force, its bite today can more closely match its bark.

Beijing’s Frustration

Beijing has long looked askance at the Democratic Progressive Party, which Tsai Ing-wen leads, primarily because it has not shared the Kuomintang’s commitment to eventual unification of the island with the mainland. Chen Shui-bian, the first DPP candidate to be elected President of the Republic of China (Taiwan), openly considered a referendum on the island’s sovereignty, leading to a nadir in both cross-Strait and U.S.-Taiwan relations.

More generally, the DPP holds that the Republic of China on Taiwan is an independent sovereign state and, therefore, a formal declaration of independence is unnecessary. Unlike the KMT, the DPP rejects the “’92 consensus.”1 This has deeply frustrated Xi Jinping. Despite Tsai’s oft-repeated commitment to upholding the cross-Strait status quo—an eminently responsible position given the DPP’s history—Beijing harbors suspicions that her true goal is formal independence. Evidence to support that contention is flimsy, but that hasn’t stopped China from deriding the Taiwanese President. Indeed, given Chinese suspicions, Tsai’s inaugural address should have been reassuring. She contended that “stable and peaceful development of the cross-Strait relationship” should be advanced based upon “existing realities and political foundations,” which she went on to define in terms meant to offer an olive branch to Beijing without betraying Taiwan’s populace:

By existing political foundations, I refer to a number of key elements. The first element is the fact of the 1992 talks between the two institutions representing each side across the Strait (SEF & ARATS), when there was joint acknowledgement of setting aside differences to seek common ground. This is a historical fact. The second element is the existing Republic of China constitutional order. The third element pertains to the outcomes of over twenty years of negotiations and interactions across the Strait. And the fourth relates to the democratic principle and prevalent will of the people of Taiwan.

The authorities in Beijing, no doubt, found the fourth principle troubling, but as President of a freewheeling democratic polity, she couldn’t very well leave it out. Beijing, however, found it impossible to take (from its perspective) the bad with the very good: namely, the emphasis on the “existing” Republic of China constitution, in which the national boundaries are defined in accordance with those of “one China.”2 China’s Taiwan Affairs Office described Tsai’s speech as an “incomplete test answer.” According to the TAO spokesman, in order to pass Beijing’s test, Tsai would have to confirm “adherence to the common political foundation of the 1992 consensus that embodies the one-China principle.” Tsai has not done so, and is unlikely to change her mind.

Beijing’s frustrations, however, run deeper. They do not stem from having to deal with one particular leader or party; they have more to do with Taiwanese society itself. First, long-term trends are not in China’s favor. Since 1992, surveys have tracked how the people of Taiwan self-identify and their attitudes toward independence and unification. Put simply, since 1992, the share of those surveyed identifying as “Taiwanese” has grown from 17.6 percent to 55.3 percent—hitting a high of 60.6 percent in 2014 during the Ma Administration—while the share of respondents identifying as either “Both Taiwanese and Chinese” (37.3 percent, down from 46.4 percent in 1992) or “Chinese” (3.7 percent, down from 25.5 percent in 1992) has dropped. Accordingly, the shares of those favoring unification, whether as soon as possible or eventually, have decreased, while the shares of respondents favoring independence (again, either as soon as possible or eventually) have grown. Support for maintaining the status quo has grown as well.

Beijing’s efforts to shape the behavior and views of the people on Taiwan, moreover, have largely failed. In 1996, China bracketed Taiwan with missile tests in hopes of dissuading citizens from casting their votes for Lee Teng-hui in the island’s first direct presidential election. In the event, turnout was 76 percent, with Lee winning in a landslide.

The downturn in cross-Strait ties during the Chen years was one reason for the KMT’s presidential victory during the 2008 election, but that victory did nothing to forestall larger trends in Taiwanese society. Rather, the growth in the share of survey respondents identifying as “Taiwanese” accelerated during the Ma years. As noted, discomfiture with tightening cross-Strait ties rose to the surface during 2014’s Sunflower Movement and is a significant factor in Tsai Ing-wen’s 2016 victory.

The past two decades of Chinese strategy with respect to Taiwan have shown Beijing that Taiwan’s people are not easily intimidated and that—confounding to Chinese leaders, no doubt—economic self-interest is not a primary factor in determining the type of relationship the people of Taiwan seek with their neighbors across the Strait. If Taiwan’s people cannot be scared into submission or bought off, if they do not understand Chinese leniency as magnanimity, then what is the best way to bring about peaceful (even if coerced) unification? Beijing lacks an answer to that question; indeed, Beijing seems to have little idea how to deal with a democracy such as Taiwan—and therein lies the problem.

Xi Jinping’s China Dream

The ineffectiveness of Beijing’s approaches for Taiwan thus far have been laid bare at a time when unification is perhaps becoming more important to the Chinese leadership. Since Xi Jinping’s declaration in 2012 that “to realize the great renewal of the Chinese nation is the greatest dream for the Chinese nation in modern history,” it has become clear that Xi is a leader cut from a different cloth than his immediate predecessors. Through a crackdown on civil society entailing a re-extension of state power, a years-long anti-corruption campaign at times indistinguishable from an old-fashioned purge, and a more assertive foreign policy, Xi has sought to strengthen the role of the CCP at home and his own role within it, and from that base to enhance PRC power abroad.

At the same time, Xi Jinping has made some big promises. In his work report to the 19th Party Congress last November, Xi asserted that by mid-century the CCP would “develop China into a great modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious, and beautiful.” The Chinese economy, however, may well enter a protracted period of stagnation. Slowing growth, soaring debt, demographic challenges, and the central role of the CCP and of state-owned enterprises in the economy all point to significant headwinds. As Dan Blumenthal and Derek Scissors argue, “Absent powerful pro-market reform that is nowhere in sight, true economic growth will halt by the end of this decade, no matter what the government claims.”

To the extent that Xi cannot deliver on promises of widening prosperity, his other targets become more important. As such, his comments on military power and on Taiwan to the 19th Party Congress take on added significance. Regarding the former, Xi asserted, “We will make it our mission to see that by 2035, the modernization of our national defense and our forces is basically completed; and that by the mid-21st century our people’s armed forces have been fully transformed into world-class forces.” With respect to Taiwan, Xi explained that Taipei’s acceptance of the ’92 consensus and the “One China” principle is a precondition for the “peaceful development” of cross-Strait relations and for cross-Strait dialogue. Then, in what was one of the biggest applause lines of his speech, Xi drew a line in the sand:

We stand firm in safeguarding China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and will never allow the historical tragedy of national division to repeat itself. Any separatist activity is certain to meet with the resolute opposition of the Chinese people. We have the resolve, the confidence, and the ability to defeat separatist attempts for “Taiwan independence” in any form. We will never allow anyone, any organization, or any political party, at any time or in any form, to separate any part of Chinese territory from China!

In case there were any doubts, Xi made clear that unification was inextricable from his animating vision of the “China Dream”:

Realizing the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is a dream shared by all of us as Chinese. We remain firm in our conviction that, as long as all the sons and daughters of the Chinese nation, including our compatriots in Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan, follow the tide of history, work together for the greater national interests, and keep our nation’s destiny firmly in our own hands, we will, without doubt, be able to achieve the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.

In time, Xi’s definition of national rejuvenation may increasingly emphasize what might be called “external” efforts—securing contested territory, unification with Taiwan, influence abroad, military power—as the Chinese economy stalls. Indeed, the beginnings of such a shift have likely already occurred. China has proven an ability to sustain pressure on Japan around the disputed Senkaku Islands, has made remarkable progress in securing its position in the South China Sea, and launched an unrelenting pressure campaign on Taiwan for which it has, thus far, faced few if any consequences.

The Pressure Campaign

Beijing met Tsai Ing-wen’s election with harsh words. China’s Taiwan Affairs Office promised to “resolutely oppose any form of separatist activities seeking ‘Taiwan independence.’” The TAO affirmed, “We are willing to strengthen contact and exchange with any parties and groups that recognize that the two sides belong to one China.” In other words, Beijing would not engage with the ruling DPP.

Beijing’s first shot across the bow came two months later, two months before Tsai’s inauguration. In 2013, Gambia, one of Taiwan’s few remaining diplomatic allies, broke ties with Taiwan and offered to recognize the People’s Republic as the sole government of China. Beijing’s role in this is uncertain—though it is difficult to believe the Chinese government lacked advance warning—but in any case, China rejected the offer. Ma Ying-jeou was still President and cross-Strait relations remained amicable, at least on the surface. Thus the CCP pocketed a weapon it could withdraw at any moment.

That moment came in March 2016, when Gambia and the PRC established formal diplomatic relations. Then, in June, another shoe dropped: Beijing’s Taiwan Affairs Office announced the suspension of the cross-Strait communication mechanism “because Taiwan did not recognize the 1992 Consensus, the political basis for the One China principle.” Taipei and Beijing have several channels through which to communicate, but China’s decision to cut off this more-or-less official conduit (to Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council) sent an unmistakable signal: Our way or the highway. It also suggested that Beijing might now tolerate higher risk in crisis management.

Next, Beijing went after Taiwan’s economy. Ma Ying-jeou had opened Taiwan to tourism from China; now, China would keep its tourists away from the island. In the five months following Tsai’s inauguration, the number of tourists from China fell by 27.2 percent on a year-on-year basis. Businesses catering specifically to mainland tourists suffered.

But despite the drop-off in Chinese visitors, Taiwan had a .