Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 96

Turkey’s Energy Ambitions

The year 2017 set a record in Turkey that only a few people noticed: namely, a historic peak in Russian gas deliveries. Gazprom sales to Turkish customers shot up by 17.3 percent and hit 29 billion cubic meters (bcm). This was partly due to an exceptionally harsh winter. On January 7, the cold wave sweeping down from Eastern Europe had the Bosphorus Strait closed for shipping. Heavy snow all but shut down Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport, grounding more than 650 flights. Not only did the freeze spike households’ heating bills, it also increased by a quarter the volume of gas burned by power stations. So there was Turkey, braving the elements, and there was Russia, pumping gas to keep people’s houses warm and the electricity running.

Record-level usage brings home the fact that Turkey is currently Gazprom’s second largest customer after Germany. Interdependence puts bilateral ties on a more solid footing than all the Putin-Erdogan summitry. Economic growth in Turkey has resulted in a surge of gas consumption, from 25 bcm in 2005 to a staggering 55.2 bcm in 2017. Russia supplies more than half of that volume. Moscow and Ankara are working side by side on strategic infrastructure projects as well. On April 29, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported that the TurkStream gas pipeline, crossing the Black Sea, has reached Kiyikoy on the Turkish coast, north of Istanbul. As soon as the end of 2019, Turkey is set to receive directly from Russia the gas that travels via Ukraine, Romania, and Bulgaria over the so-called Transbalkan Pipeline.

TurkStream adds to a partnership that has been growing since the late 1990s. In December 1997, Prime Ministers Viktor Chernomyrdin and Mesut Yilmaz wrapped up the first deal to build a submarine gas pipeline connecting Russia to Central Anatolia, including the Turkish capital of Ankara. Blue Stream became a reality eight years later, with Putin and Erdogan at the helm. In November 2005, the power duo inaugurated the venture in the Turkish Black Sea port town of Samsun, along with one Silvio Berlusconi, then Prime Minister of Italy. ENI, Italy’s energy champion, had formed part of the Blue Stream consortium. It was a landmark project. Blue Stream provided the blueprint for even more ambitious endeavors undertaken by Gazprom with major European firms, such as the highly controversial Nord Stream running through the Baltic Sea all the way to Germany. With Nord Stream 2 now in construction and Turk Stream nearing completion, Russia is edging closer to fulfilling its long-standing goal of bypassing Ukraine as a transit country. Erdogan, who otherwise enjoys a fairly positive relationship with Kyiv, is definitely playing along.

Except that it is not so simple.

Firstly, what is being completed is only one of the two parallel lines of TurkStream. Line 2, bound for the EU market, is still in question. The dispute between the European Commission and Gazprom over the application of EU rules is still unresolved. Brussels demands that Russia’s competitors should have access to newly built infrastructure inside the Union. Disagreement over the so-called “Third Energy Package” effectively put an end to South Stream, TurkStream’s predecessor, which was supposed to run through Bulgaria and the former Yugoslavia to Central Europe and Italy (ENI was involved in that project too). Russia’s annexation of Crimea in the spring of 2014 destroyed all good will in Brussels to work out a compromise. Now Gazprom is vowing that TurkStream’s second line will be laid down in the last quarter of 2018. But the timeline might prove elusive without an agreement with the European Union.  It is worth noting that Turkey has still not granted the permits for the onshore sections of the second line.

In addition, there is no clarity where Russian gas will be heading if and when it crosses Turkey’s borders with the European Union. Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov is keen to bring it to the Balkan Gas Hub, a project he has been pushing before Jean-Claude Juncker and the European Commission. A more realistic alternative would be the Transadriatic Pipeline (TAP) connecting Northern Greece and Italy. The pipeline, which is now being built by a group of companies including BP and Azerbaijan’s SOCAR, will bring Caspian gas to Europe and make the much discussed Southern Gas Corridor a reality. To meet Europe’s conditions, in other words, Russia will need to piggyback on players that are striving to wean away some of its market share.

This is where Turkey comes into the picture again. It is a central player in the Southern Gas Corridor. In another piece of recent news, Ankara announced that the Transanatolian Pipeline (TANAP) would come online on June 30. That is an event that has implications for the European Union too, in that TAP is an extension of TANAP. Long story short, Caspian gas is finally coming to both Turkey and Europe. Though initial volumes are small (10 bcm) there is a new export route which, over time, might bring in more gas from Central Asia and the Middle East, boost competition in the European Union, and give the Russians a run for their money.

Turkey has not abandoned its goal of diversifying its energy imports away from Russian gas. Even if it set a record in absolute terms, Russia’s relative share on the Turkish market shrank in 2017, by 1.1 percent. Turkey is investing into liquefied natural gas (LNG). It commissioned two floating storage and regasification units (FSRU) in recent years: one close to the city of Izmir in December 2016, and another off the shore of the southeastern province of Hatay in February 2018. Turkey also has one onshore storage facility on the Marmara Sea coast. There will be more such facilities coming. The growth of LNG (currently about 12 percent of the imported gas, with Algeria and Nigeria as the main sources) provides Turkey with a buffer in cold winters like the one in 2016-2017. More importantly, it increases Ankara’s leverage in future negotiations with the Russians once current long-term contracts expire between 2021 and 2025, as well as with Iran, the second most important supplier. Last but not least, LNG will further consolidate Turkey’s alliance with Qatar, a major gas exporter. And who knows, Ankara might start buying U.S. gas, rekindling ties that have recently hit rock bottom.

Ironically, Russia can end up undercutting Gazprom too. When the Akkuyu nuclear power plant built by Rosatom starts working—the projected date is 2023, the centennial of the Turkish Republic—it may displace gas used in electricity production.

Turkish policymakers, including Erdogan’s son-in-law and heir apparent Berat Albayrak, who serves as energy minister, are fond of talking up their country as a rising power in energy geopolitics. Some of that talk is substantiated: The new pipelines running through Turkey will add to its influence and generate income from transit fees. There is a good amount of grandstanding too. For instance, the aspiration to set up a trading hub and have Turkey buy gas from producer countries and resell to consumers in Europe has always been far-fetched.

Ankara’s Achilles heel remains the economy. With inflation spiraling out of control, energy imports are getting ever more expensive. Private companies, burdened by dollar and euro-denominated debt, need to sell at regulated prices to domestic consumers. That creates uncertainty in the market and puts pressure on the government to step in as guarantor of investment by the business sector, robust economic growth notwithstanding. But if Turkey succumbs to a crisis such as the one in 2001 that propelled Erdogan to power, its grand energy plans might fall apart. Then dependence on Russia will be the least of its problems.

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Drilling Down at Cannes

“Entertainment is the new oil.”

— Faisal Bafarat, CEO of the General Entertainment Authority of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

The Cannes Film Festival opens today, and there’s a new kid on La Promenade de la Croisette. This past December, the government of Saudi Arabia announced it was lifting its 35-year ban on movie theaters, and that, come spring, the Kingdom would be curating its first-ever pavilion at the grand-père of all film festivals, complete with panel discussions and the screening of five short films by Saudi directors. These changes are part of a long-term plan called Vision 2030, which seeks to diversify the Saudi economy and reduce its dependence on oil.

Cannes is nothing if not a market, and markets are made up of buyers and sellers. To judge by its official boilerplate, Saudi Arabia is making its debut at Cannes as a seller. In an official statement issued last month, the newly minted Saudi Film Council declared that its presence there will “offer several opportunities for delegates to interact with Saudi filmmakers,” and the head of the council, Minister of Culture and Information Awwad Alawwad, said he was looking forward to “celebrating and supporting the diversity of talent and opportunities within the Saudi film industry.”

This is not the perspective of the biggest seller, Hollywood. To Hollywood, the Kingdom looks more like a deep-pocketed buyer—and this is welcome news after the recent withdrawal of major Chinese investment under President Xi. Hence the red-carpet treatment extended to Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman during his recent whirlwind tour of the United States. Everywhere the crown prince went, from the swamps of Washington to the uplands of Beverly Hills and the sunny meadows of Silicon Valley, he made deals. In Hollywood, the deals focused mainly on the building of new theaters, but it is clear that the Americans expect those theaters to be filled with Saudis eager to watch the latest Hollywood fare.

Never a major business in Saudi Arabia, the public exhibition of films was banned outright after the 1979 seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by violent jihadis calling for the overthrow of the House of Saud. The rationale for the ban, and for the many other strictures that accompanied it, was that closer observance of Islamic law would mitigate the radicalism behind such terrorist attacks. But the ban makes little sense today, as Saudis of all ages are voracious consumers of entertainment. For the less affluent, and those who came of age during the 1990s, the main source of entertainment is still free-to-air satellite television. The country’s biggest satellite broadcaster, MBC, has eight channels devoted to entertainment, which reach across the entire Arabic-speaking region, from Mauritania to Oman. There are also hundreds of other satellite channels, both free-to-air and paid subscription, to choose from.

The story is different for Saudis under the age of 30, who constitute 70 percent of the population. Like their peers elsewhere, young Saudis have largely abandoned television for online media. A recent survey by YouTube ranked Saudi Arabia among the top countries in terms of “per capita watch-time.” And Saudi Arabia is among the many affluent markets being rapidly penetrated by Netflix and other digital streaming services.

In America, where audiences have become accustomed to having a full menu of entertainment available in the comfort of their homes, the general shift away from theaters is associated with a decline in exhibitors’ revenue. But not in Saudi Arabia. There, it seems, the theater retains its magic. Indeed, Saudis routinely drive long distances to Dubai or Bahrain to binge on movies the way Americans travel to Las Vegas to binge on shows. The sheer novelty of being able to venture out and see a film is expected to attract huge numbers of Saudis—especially teenagers and immigrants from other Arab countries, the Philippines, and South Asia, whose classic complaint (I am told) is, “There’s nothing to do in the Kingdom.”

Reflecting the expectations of Hollywood, the glowing news coverage of this story turned downright refulgent on April 18, when 600 invited guests took their seats in a converted conference hall in Riyadh’s financial district to watch Black Panther, the Disney Company’s hit adaptation of the long-running Marvel Comic series. Crown Prince Salman’s new friends in Beverly Hills did not attend, but they sent video messages saying how “thrilled” and “excited” they were about the event. Minister Alawadd was on hand to greet Adam Aron, the CEO of AMC, the U.S.-based exhibitor that won the first building contract. And Saudi filmmaker Haifaa al-Mansour, who now lives in California, sent a message, saying this “was a day I’ve dreamed of since I was a little girl….It changes everything, for the better, and there is no going back from here.”

I hate to be a spoilsport, but before we break out the champagne, let me offer you a nice cold glass of mineral water. We’ve seen this movie before. And I don’t mean Black Panther. I mean the 2009 story of a dynamic young prince shining a ray of light into the darkness of his cinema-starved country, with the blessing of a forward-looking king who believes it is now time for Saudi Arabia to join the modern world. Only in 2009 the dynamic young prince was Al-Waleed bin Talal, the reformist monarch was King Abdallah, and the breakthrough film was a Saudi-produced comedy, Menahi. Then, too, the public screening of a movie was hailed as “part of King Abdallah’s inclination to promote openness in Saudi Arabia, including in the cultural scene.” But everything did not change for the better.

In the same sober vein, it’s worth recalling that this past November, Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal and dozens of other Saudi billionaires, including Waleed al-Ibrahim, founder and CEO of the MBC satellite network, were confined to the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton for 12 weeks, on vague charges of corruption and with no more due process than has been granted to the hundreds of Saudi human rights activists now languishing in far less luxurious prison cells. If we can just get our heads around the idea of being on lockdown in the Ritz, then we may be able to grasp the point of the exercise, which by all non-official accounts was to torture the captives with room service until they coughed up a collective total of $100 billion.

Now let’s have another sip of cold water and see if we can add two and two.

First, there is Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, reputed to be worth $18.7 billion when he checked into the Ritz-Carlton. The price he paid to check out is unclear, but in December the Wall Street Journal speculated that it was either $6 billion or “a large piece of his conglomerate, Kingdom Holding Co.” After the prince’s release, Arabian Business reported that he still controlled 95 percent of the conglomerate, which includes the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation and the Rotana Group, the largest entertainment company in the Arab world. Who knows? Prince Al-Waleed may not be a royal favorite these days (he never was), but he’s probably the only Ritz-Carlton inmate who had a chance of negotiating his own terms.

Then there is Waleed al-Ibrahim, the owner of MBC, which is not just the biggest entertainment network in the Middle East but also the home of al-Arabiya, until recently the region’s most respected news channel. The price of his freedom has been widely reported: the transfer of a 60 percent stake in MBC to Crown Prince Salman and his allies. This is portentous, because while MBC has never been totally independent of the Saudi government, its programming has been generally considered more open and fair than most. Now, amid the hoopla about building new movie theaters, there are mutterings about MBC being re-purposed as the “sole entity” responsible, not just for film distribution inside Saudi Arabia, but for all TV content carried on the MBC satellite to the rest of the Arab world.

According to an article in the Hollywood Reporter by Alex Ritman, the prospect of a single government entity controlling the flow of entertainment into and out of Saudi Arabia is raising concerns among Crown Prince Salman’s new friends in Beverly Hills. Such a move would be “troubling,” says one studio executive, who likened the proposed entity to “the state-run China Film Group,” which (as Hollywood knows all too well) “rules the distribution route.” Ritman quotes another source confiding that the “major studio reps” are “panicking.”

If you’re wondering what all the panic is about, Ritman makes it clear that while some people in Hollywood worry about “how much of films would likely end up on the cutting-room floor given [Saudi Arabia’s] strict sharia laws,” censorship is not the main concern. Instead, the studios are losing sleep over the prospect of “one monopolizing body” being in a position to “dictate financial terms.” In the words of Andrew Cripps, president of international distribution for 21stCentury Fox, “We’re all about the free market and the ability to trade freely….so I think any impediments put in that place would not be particularly welcome.”

It should come as no surprise that Hollywood puts revenue before free expression. For many years now, the U.S. film industry has willingly submitted its products to the scrutiny of state censorship boards in every country on Earth, from the United Kingdom to the United Arab Emirates. And when it comes to Hollywood’s main source of revenue, namely the special-effects blockbuster that costs hundreds of millions to make but (with luck) earns hundreds of millions more overseas, the product is carefully vetted beforehand. If you doubt this, ask yourself how much raw sex and violence can be found in such billion-dollar hits as Avatar, Titanic, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Jurassic World, Marvel’s The Avengers, Furious 7, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2—or, for that matter, Black Panther.

But here’s the rub. If the Saudi Arabia story is going to play out in a way similar to the China story, then there may be trouble ahead. The Saudi market is nowhere near as large as the Chinese, but the experts predict it could reach $1 billion by 2030, because the Saudi passion for entertainment is so intense. To return to my initial point, this prediction is based on the perception of the Kingdom as a deep-pocketed buyer, rather than an aggressive seller.

As I have written elsewhere, the same was said about China just a few years ago. Indeed, the Chinese passion for entertainment was the reason why American movies and television were allowed into China in the first place. But while Hollywood rushed in with dollar signs in its eyes, and the rest of America cheered it on, convinced that our movies would play a vital role in democratizing China, the Chinese Communist Party had a different vision. For them, agreeing to be Hollywood’s biggest customer was only the first step in a process that would lead eventually to the construction of a Chinese entertainment industry capable of beating Hollywood at both the domestic and the global box office. If you’re wondering how that works, consider how Facebook and Google were seduced into sharing their technology with Chinese partners who then thanked them very much and threw them out of the country.

As it happens, the global box office still prefers Hollywood blockbusters to lead balloons like last year’s The Great Wall, a $150 million Sino-American co-production about the valiant Chinese army defending the Song Dynasty against a horde of vicious monsters, with the help of two formerly cynical Western mercenaries inspired by the noble Chinese. But having carried the seduction this far, the CCP is now in a position to enlist Hollywood’s help in making domestic propaganda such as last year’s Wolf Warrior 2, a mid-budget action flick about the valiant Chinese army defending a place called “Africa” against a band of vicious American mercenaries. In the first week of its release, Wolf Warrior 2 made $608 million in China and peanuts elsewhere.

Between these two ambitions, that of rivaling Hollywood at the global box office and that of building a domestic entertainment industry capable of strengthening the existing regime, it is hard to imagine Crown Prince Salman harboring the first. But I can easily imagine him harboring the second, especially if that same domestic industry can also, through the skillful deployment of the MBC network, further Saudi hegemony throughout the region. Like President Xi, Crown Prince Salman has zero interest in freedom of expression. On the contrary, he may be seeking Hollywood’s help in fashioning a new kind of propaganda more powerful and persuasive than the old. If Hollywood wants to go along with this vision, then there’s not a lot the rest of us can do to discourage it. But at a minimum, we could refrain from cheering.

As described in a recent report from Chatham House, “Vision 2030 implies a degree of social liberalization to enable the growth of the entertainment and tourism industries, as well as extensive reforms to the education system, traditionally a stronghold of Saudi Arabia’s religious clerics. If followed through, this would transform relations between the state and its citizens.”

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Can Deterrence Theory Explain the Stephon Clark Shooting?

The city of Sacramento, along with the rest of the nation, watched in stunned silence on March 30 as officials released details of the death of Stephon Clark. Clark, a 22-year-old unarmed black male and father of two, was shot several times and killed in his grandmother’s backyard by two Sacramento police officers.

The two officers, guided by a sheriff’s helicopter unit, searched the neighborhood for a man in a hoodie allegedly breaking car windows with a “toolbar,” and identified Clark near the side of his grandmother’s house. When they came upon Clark, the officers shouted, “Hey, show me your hands! Stop!” For reasons that will never be known, Clark ran around to the back side of the house. Seventeen seconds later, the officers turned the corner and fired 20 rounds, hitting Clark seven or eight times. As he lay dying on his grandmother’s back patio, officers waited for six minutes after the last shot was fired before checking on Clark. Upon searching the scene and the body, the officers found only a mobile phone—no firearm, no “toolbar.”

Americans have endured this heartbreak far too frequently. While each shooting has its own unique set of facts, it feels as if we are watching the same film of police violence on repeat—violence that seems to disproportionately target black communities: Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Eric Garner in New York City; Daniel Shaver in Mesa, Arizona; Philando Castile in St. Anthony, Minnesota. The list continues to grow. So what explains the proliferation of tragic instances of civilian deaths at the hands of law enforcement?

One explanation comes to us from deterrence theory. It holds that, in situations where we deliberate over whether to break a law, we make simple, rational calculations. Laws that create fines or penalties, such as license suspensions for speeding violations, are designed to deter people from breaking the law. In John Locke’s terms, the threat of having our liberties stripped away or property seized forces us to consider the long-term consequences of our actions, which may prevent us from committing crimes. This theory has its roots in the works of Thomas Hobbes and other philosophers and is one of the cornerstones of the social contract.

In instances of police misconduct, deterrence theory may play out this way: An offending officer may learn that his fellow officers have not been disciplined for acting as he has. Perhaps he is aware that there are protections, whether legal or union contract-based, that eliminate most of the risk of consequences for certain behaviors, thereby cementing the notion that this style of policing is not wrong but rather is necessary to get the job done. He may consciously, or more likely subconsciously, ask himself why he should alter his behavior if there are no consequences.

So deterrence theory at least partly explains law-breaking behavior. But did the officer who shot and killed Stephon Clark break the law? To help answer this, we can look to the Supreme Court.

In Tennessee v. Garner (1985), the Court held that use of deadly force is not permitted against unarmed civilians fleeing the scene of a crime. However, Garner does establish an exception to this general rule in what is often referred to as the “fleeing felon doctrine”—a misnomer because the suspect does not need to be a felon. The Garner exception holds that deadly force may be used if “the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officers or others.” This is important because the recent independent autopsy administered by Dr. Bennet Omalu, the famed pathologist who shed light on the health consequences of concussions in the NFL, demonstrates that six of the eight bullets entered Clark’s back side. (The subsequent autopsy by the coroner’s office contradicted these findings somewhat.) The prohibition against shooting fleeing, unarmed civilians seems to be damning for the officers who shot Clark. But the “fleeing felon” exception makes it far less clear that the officers broke the law.

Such ambiguities help explain police misconduct through the lens of deterrence theory. According to the theory, when an individual is deciding whether or not to commit a wrongful act, three variables help tip the scales: the certainty of prosecution, the severity of punishment, and the swiftness of judgment. Vague exceptions to prohibitions of undue violence speak to the first variable: They suggest that there is little certainty of prosecution or punishment for officers who shoot civilians.

Whether or not the officers involved in the Clark shooting are guilty of breaking the law, the lack of deterrence seems to have encouraged an uptick in police violence in departments with long histories of controversial incidents. Very recent research suggests that police union privileges significantly increase the rate of officer misconduct. This dynamic is at play even in departments with a relatively uncheckered history, such as Sacramento’s. The clichéd “blue wall of silence” is as real there as it is in Chicago, and its role in preventing effective deterrence helps explain the rise in instances of police violence across the country.

Deterrence and Plato’s Ring

In order for deterrence to be effective, the negative consequences of an action must be greater than the benefits of going through with it. Punishment, after all, inflicts significant hardship on wrongdoers in part in order to communicate that society condemns these sorts of actions.

But what of cases where penalty and punishment don’t loom large, where one can preserve a semblance of respectability after wrongdoing? The “Ring of Gyges” story in Plato’s Republic argues that people are not willing followers of justice, and that morality is wholly conventional—a sucker’s game. Individuals calculate the maximum utility gained from breaking the law. Thus, when given certain protections or immunities, even the just man will behave unjustly, and police officers are more likely to act on their implicit biases if they have extra protections and recognize that they will likely not face consequences for errors or bad behavior.

We can apply the same deterrence theory framework to almost any environment governed by rules and regulations. In the workplace, for example, employees tend to take longer lunch breaks or feel at ease misbehaving at work if they know management will not impose certain, serious, or swift punishments, such as suspension or termination. From a manager’s perspective, such outcomes are undesirable. An institution cannot grant its employees such leniency without leading to micro-inefficiencies that damage the institution’s sustainability.

On balance, termination, discipline, and financial penalties are all appropriate consequences for bad behavior at the workplace, or even for mere poor performance. And this deterrence framework should be applied even more forcefully, it would seem, to occupations where misconduct or poor performance can lead to death or serious injury. Mistakes or negligence by a medical professional, for example, can harm or kill a patient. Doctors and nurses thus face the threat of losing not only their jobs and livelihoods (through revocation of their license), but their freedom as well, in cases of criminal negligence. Imagine if doctors had special protections against these kinds of punishments. Would it give you more or less faith in your doctors? And should others engaged in professions where mistakes can end lives have special job protections?

An Exemption in the Law

Many in the law enforcement community—more specifically, union leaders—argue that they should have such protections. They say the nature of the occupation warrants special treatment. And we cannot dismiss this perspective out of hand; at times officers do need to make split-second decisions that have life and death consequences for themselves and others.

But even if we concede that police should have some level of protection or forbearance for mistakes, the question remains: How many accusations of misconduct should it take to lead to a disciplinary measure? A data point from the Invisible Institute’s “Citizen Police Data Project” highlights a case of a Chicago police officer who received 61 civilian complaints, of which only two resulted in disciplinary measures. To be sure, there are limitations to extrapolating general rules from an extreme example; nevertheless, it’s hard to imagine a fast-food employee keeping a job after more than a handful complaints from customers, let alone complaints as serious as those leveled at the Chicago officer.

If there are so many protections and few serious or timely consequences for misconduct, then how exactly are we to deter officers from continuing to engage in misconduct? Under conditions in which repeated misconduct allegations are ignored, it should not be surprising when, as deterrence theory suggests, many officers—even ones with relatively fewer infractions—succumb to the temptation to commit wrongful acts.

Eric Garner’s death raises this very concern. Garner, an unarmed black male, was placed in a fatal chokehold by a white officer. The chokehold went beyond the types of force that officers are supposed to use—for precisely the reasons Garner’s death illustrates. The officer in Garner’s case had racked up a long history of complaints before the tragic incident—14 to be precise. The complaints involved a substantiated abusive stop-and-frisk incident, an incident in which the officer was accused of refusing to get a person medical attention, and another incident in which the officer allegedly slammed an individual against an inanimate object. Following Garner’s death, the officer was subsequently placed on desk duty and received a $20,000 pay raise in the year following the incident. Only 5 percent of New York Police Department officers have received more than seven complaints, which begs the question of what an officer needs to do to be seriously disciplined or terminated. These facts surely do not go unnoticed by the taxpayers of New York City, who just paid out $5.9 million to the Garner family for his wrongful death.

Like any profession, there will always be a few “bad apples.” There are probably no consequences swift, sure, and severe enough to deter some individuals who join the force with a twisted moral compass and harmful biases. But if the vast majority of officers who are amenable to such consequences feel that they are protected by a union or the “blue wall,” then they will break the rules from time to time, and civilians may be harmed or killed. Criminologist Samuel Walker argues that these sorts of police protections create a “culture of impunity” that, along with other systemic issues, undermines our policing institutions.

We should not forget that there needs to be active engagement between the community and its police forces. Police officers exist to shield the community from violence. Countless honorable police officers risk their lives daily to fight violent gangs and drug dealers. While the vast majority of officers are good, hard-working Americans, a minority are living embodiments of the systemic problems in America’s policing apparatus. These “bad apple” officers have a contagious influence on their fellow officers—one of the many reasons why misconduct and lack of accountability have become more widespread. After all, the full aphorism isn’t just “a few bad apples” but rather “a few bad apples spoil the barrel.” Thus the problem is about much more than just a handful of harmful officers; it’s about how those few officers corrupt the entire culture of policing in a community.

A Fairer Comparison

We should be cautious in comparing policing to private-sector occupations. There is no question that policing is a unique profession. Routinely throughout this country, officers are yelled at, assaulted and, tragically, killed. Lately, they have been scorned for adopting military equipment and tactics—what some call “militarization”—and accused of unjustified shootings and other instances of brutality. Many officers feel like they are at war with their job, the people they project, and the people they arrest.

Luckily, there is another, similar profession we can look to that is in many ways even more dangerous and more demanding on its practitioners: military service. Interestingly, the so-called blue wall is almost non-existent in the military, largely due to the cultural values that the military has adopted. In the armed forces, mission comes first. While there have been exceptions to this rule (allegations of sexual assault and cover-ups, for instance), in general, when someone in the military is caught doing something wrong, it leads to punishment. Being stripped of rank, dishonorably discharged, or worse, sent to Leavenworth Penitentiary, is not an unheard of proposition for those caught misbehaving in the military.

This is not the case for police officers, who receive more protections, from more sources (union contracts, state laws, the courts, and public opinion), that make it difficult to take action against them. Even when a police officer is fired for misconduct, all too often he finds himself back in blue in a neighboring jurisdiction. One report found that 451 officers fired from 37 of America’s largest cities were rehired or reinstated as police officers or hired by another department because of union intervention and legislative obstacles. One former police commissioner in both Philadelphia and Washington, DC, Charles Ramsey, summed up the process by noting that he had to rehire 80 fired officers, three of them twice. “It’s demoralizing” to the force, he says.

The lack of accountability among police ranks keeps departments from doing their jobs. So much energy is spent defending the department and, in many cases, bad officers, that the complaints of those whom they are sworn to protect are ignored. Police must acknowledge the trust gap that exists between them and many of the people they serve. The first step in closing that gap has to be engaging in real self-reflection, much as the military did in the 1970s in the wake of the Vietnam War.

In addition, police would benefit greatly from the emphasis that the military has placed on building a professional body. This is certainly not to say that police officers are not professionals, but rather that they should treat themselves more like professionals. For instance, most police forces have promotion systems that are linked to and resemble the civil service, as opposed to the military’s performance-based system. For service members, virtually every advancement to every major rank is associated with some type of professional development school, from E-5 (sergeant in the Army) all the way to O-6 officers (Army colonel or Navy captain). And those O-6 officers must attend the War College before they are considered for promotion to general or admiral. Many senior police leaders, by contrast, have a little more professional training than a rookie fresh out of the academy. While certainly there is some ad hoc professional development in police work, the majority of training is tactical—learning how to get the shot group tighter—not on developing the maturity to determine when deadly force is appropriate. Not enough time is dedicated to the profession of policing or on how to lead other officers.

It is important not to take the police-military comparison too far. Police departments have a different relationship to the communities in which they operate than does the military. Police departments’ efforts to model themselves after military units by acquiring their weapons and some aspects of their training have damaged police-community relations. Between 2006 and 2014, law enforcement agencies acquired more than 6,000 mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles (MRAPs), 79,288 assault rifles, 205 grenade launchers, 11,959 bayonets, 50 airplanes, 422 helicopters, and $3.6 million in camouflage from the Department of Defense’s 1033 Program. One report found a correlation between the militarization of law enforcement agencies and the number of citizens killed each year by police. There must be limits, then, on the extent to which police departments imitate the military. Still, the police and military are similar enough that there is much the police can learn from how the military overcame similar challenges.

The Limitations of Deterrence Theory

While deterrence theory is a useful tool in explaining the uptick in violent interactions between police and the communities they serve, it cannot explain everything. It would be a big mistake to overlook the human cognitive biases that undoubtedly impact officers’ decision-making in high-stress scenarios. Race, fear, and general human error inevitably factor into police-citizen violence.

Deterrence only works to the extent that a given individual is deterrable—which is to say that a person’s responsiveness to the threat of sanctions exists at some non-trivial level. Recent literature in the field of criminology suggests that individuals can be broken up into multiple levels of deterrability: acute conformists, who “comply with the law not because they fear formal sanctions, but because they believe that conformity is the right and moral thing to do;” incorrigible offenders, for whom “increases in the perceived certainty and/or severity of sanction threats mean little;” and, somewhere in the middle, deterrable offenders constituting “a group that includes anyone for whom a sanction threat is potentially influential.” Under this framing, deterrence works better when a person is relatively risk-sensitive and not naturally inclined to misconduct.

Environmental factors attending emotionally intense encounters clearly play a role in the effectiveness of deterrence. Of these, three seem most important: the role of race, the proliferation of firearms in the general population, and the power of fear—from whatever source—to drive human error.

The Role of Race: To acknowledge that race may have played a role in the shooting of Stephon Clark is not to charge the police with racism—or even these particular police officers. Research suggests that police misconduct and the excessive use-of-force are linked to cities with larger densities of black and Hispanic groups.

Although Sacramento is a racially diverse city (nearly 14 percent of its residents are Black and 26 percent are Hispanic), Clark was killed in an area that does not mirror the city’s overall racial composition. The neighborhood in which the incident took place, Meadowview, is nearly 20 percent black, 30 percent Hispanic, and 15 percent white. The surrounding area has a history of residential segregation and the forced displacement of minorities into Meadowview. In short, Meadowview is predominantly a nonwhite area and has experienced problems with crime and development in the past.

While the 911 caller was not explicit on the race of the alleged subject—“He had a hoodie on, I couldn’t tell”—the two experienced officers entering the area were surely aware of the neighborhood’s racial dynamics. This may have led them to presume that Clark was dangerous, despite the reports that someone with a “toolbar” was breaking windows. After confronting Clark and approaching him in his grandmother’s backyard, the officers saw a mobile phone in his hand. Given the context—the predominantly nonwhite neighborhood, the history of crime, the alleged behavior, and presence of a “toolbar” —they mistook the innocuous phone for a dangerous weapon.

This cognitive transformation was not accomplished through comprehensive police work. Rather, it was the manifestation of how the officers perceived the residents in the neighborhoods, in combination with their knowledge of, and preconceived notions about, the suspect. These notions were intimately tied with race. As Bryan Stevenson writes, “people of color in the United States, particularly young black men, are burdened with a presumption of guilt and dangerousness. . . . We are burdened by our history of racial injustice in ways that shape the way we think, act, and enforce the law.” In short, the context of the call and the officers’ likely presumption of guilt led them to assume that Clark was a dangerous individual.

Firearms in the General Population: The sheer volume of guns in America represents a significant environmental factor influencing the rational decision-making of police officers. Research has shown that the mere sight of a firearm induces greater aggression and suggests that gun prevalence can at least partially explain police misconduct. In the rational actor model of deterrence, individuals will comply with the law and avoid sanctions when they believe the pain of potential punishment will outweigh the benefits of breaking the law. But the presence of a gun takes an officer out of any mode of rational calculus and tends strongly to elicit violent self-preserving instincts. Still, in the virtual absence of deterrence, establishing credible threats of punishment for misconduct could do more to reduce police violence than perhaps any other policy solution.

Fear and Human Error: Some may argue that the Sacramento officers were driven to shoot first out of fear. Betty Shelby, the police officer who shot and killed Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, reflected this sentiment best when she stated flatly that she “would rather be judged by 12 than carried by six.” In other words, she would rather shoot and kill the suspect out of fear for her own life—even if it turned out the suspect was innocent.

It might be unpopular to say so, but police officers do not have the authority to kill civilians simply because they are afraid. Being a cop is a dangerous job, no doubt. But that job necessarily involves placing oneself in life-threatening situations and following procedure to make the right call, regardless of fear.

Of course, when officers are facing an individual with a deadly weapon, who is capable of causing them or others immediate harm, they do not have the luxury of running through de-escalation techniques; the use-of-force continuum quickly jumps to deadly force. And certainly, an officer should not be expected to sit idly by while someone takes a swing at them with a crowbar, which is certainly a deadly weapon. Indeed, officers have every right to go back to their families at the end of their shifts, just as Stephon Clark had the right to go back home to his family.

However, officers must serve all members of the community that they have sworn to protect and serve, including those suspected of wrongdoing. “Suspected” does not translate to guilty—as guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment: “No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” In a democratic society, the policing apparatus is the enforcement agency upon which citizens principally rely for protection, not the one which plays judge, jury, and executioner against citizens who they are ostensibly obligated to protect.

Still, the fact that fear and the frequency of high stress/high stakes scenarios are a staple of policing implies that deterrence theory cannot fully explain police misconduct, and that, therefore, more effective deterrence may not be enough to reduce police violence. Put differently, even though officers should operate rationally, they will inevitably fail to make rational calculations in situations where their lives are on the line, at least from time to time. As previously noted, deterrence relies on individuals who are, at least to some extent, deterrable, but who is and who is not deterrable can vary according to circumstances.

Indeed, racial bias, variations in officers’ sensitivities to risk, the prevalence of civilian firearms, and other environmental factors will surely mitigate the effectiveness of the threat of sanctions for misconduct. But the argument here is not that stronger deterrence can solve the problem entirely, but that establishing clear and swift punishments for misbehavior can substantially reduce violent encounters between law enforcement and communities. Deterrence is not a silver bullet, but it represents perhaps the best opportunity for reform, in combination with better training in deescalation and implicit racial bias, hiring emotionally intelligent applicants, and offering robust educational and professional development opportunities for officers.

The “culture of impunity” and “blue wall” that make it difficult, if not impossible, to get bad cops out of the profession are the direct result of policymakers’ decisions to insulate public employees from scrutiny and accountability. To quote Radley Balko, author of Rise of the Warrior Cop, reforms are not “anti-cop;” they’re anti-politician:

Bad cops are the product of bad policy. And policy is ultimately made by politicians. A bad system loaded with bad incentives will unfailingly produce bad cops. The good ones will never enter the field in the first place, or they will become frustrated and leave police work, or they’ll simply turn bad. At best, they’ll have unrewarding, unfulfilling jobs.

The following reform proposals aim to rollback bad policy and establish effective deterrence, allowing the many good cops to thrive.

Rollback “Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights” (LEOBR) laws. Maryland became the pioneer state for LEOBRs when it passed the first such law in 1972 following police union lobbying efforts. LEOBRs add substantial due process protections for officers being investigated for abuse of power. Their exact provisions vary by state, but there are several common privileges. For instance, there are “cooling off” periods in which an officer can abstain from responding to any questions once a complaint has been lodged. Interrogations must be conducted at a “reasonable hour,” with a union representative present. There can be as many rest periods in interrogations as the accused officer wishes. And if an officer is threatened with disciplinary action during the investigation, whatever he says after that threat may not be used against him. Further, departments cannot publicly acknowledge that the officer is being investigated or disclose the nature of the complaint, and the officer cannot be questioned by “non-government agents,” a provision which precludes civilian review boards. While total transparency during these investigations may not be in either the officer or the public’s best interest, and while some layers of protection may be necessary to shield officers from frivolous complaints, reasonable people can agree that these protections are much more than is necessary to protect the rights of the accused. At the very least, civilian review boards should be allowed to operate in states with LEOBRs.

Limit police union contracts that erase misconduct records, require cities and taxpayers to pay for misconduct, and limit oversight and discipline of officers. Police unions exert tremendous influence over lawmakers’ decisions regarding policing policy in city and state governments across the country. One study analyzed police union contracts in 81 of America’s 100 largest cities and found that more than 40 allow for misconduct records to be erased after a certain period of time if the officer requests or is exonerated. Many cities’ contracts also require taxpayers to cover misconduct settlements and the full cost of legal defense, prevent civilian oversight boards from administering punishments, and a host of other cushy protections for officers accused or found guilty of misconduct. Such protections make it exceedingly expensive and difficult for cities and departments to purge violent officers from their ranks, or they allow “bad cops” to simply move on to a new department after dismissal. Unsurprisingly, researchers at the University of Chicago found that affording police unions collective-bargaining rights increases the risk of misconduct.

Remove caps on intelligence scores among applicants, and encourage hiring candidates with higher general and emotional intelligence scores. Deterrence works even better when the population in question is prone to good behavior. Police departments, then, can decrease the likelihood of violent relations with communities by hiring officers with higher “general” and “emotional” IQs. Some police departments set caps on acceptable general intelligence test scores to reduce turnover, fearing smarter candidates will become bored with day-to-day policing. This hiring practice also limits the “emotional intelligence” of the applicant pool—the applicants’ ability to perceive, use, manage, and understand their emotions and the emotions of those around them. Those with lower emotional intelligence scores may be more prone to violence, according to some research.

Increase opportunities for professionalization. Departments have generally not considered the need for more professional development for their officers. The consensus across many departments has been that “street smarts” are more important than “book smarts” to the job of policing. Indeed, in many cases officers look down on their more educated peers. Departments should adopt military performance-based systems, where professional development in a classroom setting factors into advancement through the ranks.

Encourage officers to pursue higher education. Finally, departments should capitalize on the prevalence of online training and education to encourage their officers to seek college degrees. A study conducted by Michigan State University found that college-educated officers had a lower propensity for violence, and a Florida report found that 75 percent of all disciplinary actions were leveled at officers who have only a high school diploma.

In The Republic, Plato makes the case that justice is a good in and of itself, and preferable to injustice on those terms alone. Yet Plato also teaches that one needs a noble soul to realize the truth of this. Unfortunately, the world we live in is not filled exclusively with people with noble souls. All people have biases, some more serious and dangerous than others. Consequently, wrongful acts will continue to tempt, and if it were possible to be assured of success in a wrongful act, the vast majority would indulge in them at least sometimes.

When it comes to police, who at times have the power over life and death, emphasizing protections at the expense of deterrence is especially dangerous. This is true because these protections have to, on some level, influence the rational calculations of some officers.

To what extent can a failure of deterrence explain the shooting in Sacramento? Did a bad apple ruin the bunch, did entrenched union protections subconsciously allow the officers to neglect de-escalation tactics, or were their motivations influenced by a combination of racial bias and the likelihood that they would not face swift punishment for their actions? The answer is not readily available. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to conclude that the absence of effective deterrence explains a substantial proportion of police misconduct in departments across the country, and in all likelihood it played a role in the Stephon Clark shooting as well.

While the lack of effective deterrence is not the only reason for police misconduct, it is certainly a major one. Humans are neither entirely good nor entirely bad, but they will weigh the possibility of having their liberties stripped against the benefits of breaking the law.

The immense power police officers wield, once mishandled and corrupted, poses one of the greatest threats to our institutions of law and order. Misuse of power has the potential to cause not only a breakdown of the police force but of our republic as well, which is why we must do more to ensure that the badge does not become a shield from injustice—a Ring of Gyges.

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Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

Vladimir Putin was sworn in for a fourth term as Russia’s President yesterday. In a move that should surprise no one, he then proposed Dmitry Medvedev as his candidate for Prime Minister, a nomination that was quickly confirmed by the Russian Duma today.

As I have explained before, Medvedev’s position is not a political one. It doesn’t matter for Putin whether his Prime Minister is efficient and successful as the head of government. The only true function left for Medvedev is to become Putin’s successor in case of emergency. In other words, Vladimir Putin needs to make sure that if he suddenly falls ill, he is not isolated and subject to a coup attempt, as happened with Mikhail Gorbachev in Foros, Crimea in 1991, when he was placed under house arrest and proclaimed unfit to serve as Soviet President.

Since 2011, Dmitry Medvedev has been the ideal candidate for this role, perhaps even the only viable one. He proved his higher loyalty to Putin when he willingly decided to step down as President and switch roles with him on September 24, 2011.

But even though Medvedev has long been the frontrunner for Prime Minister, a fight for the position has been raging until recently. Medvedev’s main opponent was Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin, with whom he has had a longtime feud. The fight will surely resume in the fall, when a new political season begins.

In other news, First Vice Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov will leave the government, with his position to be taken over by the current Finance Minister, Anton Siluanov. The latter will keep both positions. This constitutes the only serious shakeup in the new government.

Otherwise, the only novelty about Putin’s inauguration was a change in his traditional route to the Kremlin ceremony. Previously Putin’s convoy drove all the way from his residence outside Moscow to the Kremlin. And though there were never crowds to greet him alongside the route, the travel was openly broadcast to the public.

This time, Putin started his route from his office, which is only 650 feet away from the Grand Kremlin Palace. He also made the trip in a new Russian-made Cortege limousine instead of the usual Mercedes. Perhaps Putin did not want to risk a longer journey, knowing the quality of Russian vehicles. Or perhaps this was a symbol of things to come in Putin’s fourth term: showing how Russia’s President is getting further and further away from the people, more distant and aloof, with his policies set to become more reactionary, his repressions tougher, and his crackdown on freedoms more severe.

In fact, the spirit of Putin’s fourth term was clearly defined two days before the inauguration, when Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny and his supporters took to the streets of Moscow and a dozen other big Russian cities to protest Putin’s inauguration.

The rallies, organized under the slogan “He is no czar to us,” took place on May 5 and ended with an unprecedented number of arrests and physical assaults on the protesters, including middle school students. Embarrassing pictures of Russian National Guard officers fighting kids are now all over the Internet.

The protests were not crowded: The police say 1,500 people turned out in Moscow, while independent journalists estimate the number at between four and five thousand. But the number of those arrested was flabbergasting. Over 700 people were detained in Russia’s capital, and a total of 1,600 people were arrested throughout the country.

Viktor Zolotov’s squads were accompanied by members of the Central Cossack Troops. These self-proclaimed voluntary troops of order, dressed in their bizarre Cossack uniforms, showed up at the Moscow rally armed with horsewhips and brutally beat up protesters. The National Guard did not interfere.

The next day it became clear why: The Cossacks had been trained by the Moscow Mayor’s office. The Bell confirmed that since 2016 the Central Cossack Troops have received annual contracts from the city worth 16 million rubles (approximately $300,000) for training on how to maintain law and order during mass public events. The training sessions take place 30 miles from Moscow, in Kuzenevo. The Cossacks are taught how to properly pull protesters away and use violent force if necessary. 100 Cossacks attend the training every year, according to an official report, complete with pictures, published on the website of the Moscow Mayor’s office. The troops are headed by Ivan Mironov, a retired FSB lieutenant general and former deputy of the Samarskaya Oblast state government.

The U.S. government should be aware that protests are not the only public events to which these Cossacks will be deployed. The FIFA World Cup is fast approaching, and it has been announced that the very same Cossacks, alongside National Guard troops, will help keep “law and order” during soccer matches in Russian cities. 750 Cossacks will be deployed to Sochi alone.

Combined with the anti-American hysteria continually encouraged by Russian propaganda, it might be truly unsafe for Americans to visit Russia during the World Cup. For instance, two of my friends were recently attacked in Moscow solely for wearing pro-LGBT T-shirts. The U.S. government would do well to warn its citizens of this situation.

As for detaining and beating up kids at the rallies, Putin’s regime has demonstrated its full commitment to violence. The message for Putin’s fourth term is clear: Any fight against the government promises to be cruel and potentially bloody. There will be no peaceful transition of power.

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The Fifties Were Awful, But Not the Way You Think

Conventional wisdom says there was a period in American life called the “1950s,”—or colloquially the Fifties—organized around family values, continence, and thrift. Amy Wax, a University of Pennsylvania law professor, recently got into trouble for praising the values of this supposedly lost decade when she argued that we are “paying the price for breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture.”

According to the same conventional wisdom there was also a period in American life called the “1960s”—a.k.a. the Sixties—when the bourgeois values of the 1950s were replaced with self-absorption and impulsiveness. These two decades are so fixed in people’s minds that how people think politically often starts with which decade they prefer.

Quite aside from the inherent artificiality of decadal thinking, the narrative is simply false.

First, the “1950s” did not start in the 1950s. The Lonely Crowd, David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denny’s classic study of so-called 1950s culture, was actually first published in 1950, meaning it was researched and written in the 1940s. The same goes for C. Wright Mills’s White Collar, a study of the new class of office workers published in 1951. Because a lag typically exists between a new culture and its identification by social scientists, at least some of what The Lonely Crowd observed in the 1940s probably dates back to the 1930s. The uptick in people’s consumption of non-necessities, for example, and the rapid expansion of credit—both hallmarks of the new consumer culture—actually began in 1920.

Second, 1950s culture was not a conservative bourgeois culture, at least not in the spirit of Self-Help, the 19th-century bestseller by Samuel Smiles that preached continence, thrift, and temperance. It was just the opposite for most people. So eagerly did 1950s Americans act on taste signals from advertisers, and fuss over which neighbors had what amenity, that thrift often went by the wayside. The advent of television, above all, was the shaper and accelerator of this shift. If the idealized American of the 19th century was provident and sensible, the idealized mid-20th-century American was a buy-now, pay-later, status-craving climber unmoored from most traditional values. To the degree this new American did refrain from buying too much, it was not out of piety or prudence, but to avoid exciting a neighbor’s envy, just as buying too little was checked by his or her own envy of others.1

Third, 1950s culture has never really ended. It remains foundational because it is not and never was what Professor Wax claims it was. Confusion over this point most likely stems from a common foible—the assumption of equal opposites. Since so many proud Baby Boomers like to assume that the Sixties were a great turning point, it follows that what it turned away from (the Fifties) was diametrically opposed to what was new. But this is simply false.

Middle-class Americans at mid-century—which includes most Americans both by self-definition and by statistics—belonged to tight-knit peer groups that told members what kind of furniture to buy, what kind of car to drive, what kind of music to like, what kind of political opinions to have, and so on—in other words, how to live and think. They were, in Riesman’s terminology, other-directed as opposed to inner-directed. The peer groups in those days were suburban “court cliques” and corporate “teams”; today, corporate teams still exist, but peer groups have expanded in type and number to include lifestyle enclaves and virtual communities on social media. These peer groups give members the same feeling of belonging as the old ones did, while also shaping their tastes and opinions. Riesman et al. argued that other-directed types were necessary to the functioning of modern society, but that other-directedness came at a cost to personal autonomy. In other words, the peer group was both a friend and a tyrant. Little has changed.

Americans at mid-century exploited small differences in product lines to boost their status, what Riesman, Glazer, and Denny called “marginal differentiation.” They fussed over whether a pair of jeans had one pocket or two, or whether a host had served a tossed salad or a salad with dressing on the side, all in accordance with the status rules of their particular peer group. Little has changed, except now there are more consumer brands and options to choose from when trying to shine among others.

Americans at mid-century embraced a youth culture controlled by advertisers and mass marketing. They obsessed over student self-esteem, and focused more on a child’s social and psychological adjustment than on his or her intellectual performance.2 Little has changed.

They viewed politics as entertainment. As Riesman et al. note, politics became just another consumption good. It embraced glamour; it needed to conform to people’s tastes; the candidate had to be “packaged”; he or she needed to “appeal.” Eisenhower supporters, the authors observed, found in their candidate someone who “has everything”—whom one could wholeheartedly like.3 Little has changed except people’s tastes, especially with the recent election of the first reality television President.

Americans at mid-century often used psychoactive drugs to get through the day. In the 1950s the drug of choice was Miltown; in the 1960s it was Valium; today, it is Zoloft.

Even the mid-century swap in the symbolic meanings of food and sex persists. Riesman, Glazer, and Denny noted that 19th-century Americans looked on food as an unexciting means of nourishment; sex, on the other hand, was glamorous and exotic. In mid-20th century, an inversion occurred, with food becoming a source of glamour, even titillation, as people aspired to become gourmets, while sex became a mechanical, toneless, and hygienic subject, replete with how-to manuals. Sex became just another product for consumption. Little has changed.

The culture of the 1950s remains foundational because it was actually not a conservative bourgeois culture; it was the destructor of that culture. It was a culture of other-directed people who used external cues to shape their personalities, rather than of inner-directed people drawing from a character implanted early within life. As the Lonely Crowd authors noted, mid-century Americans had radars, not gyroscopes. We live in a similar culture today.

What then is the legacy of so-called 1960s culture? Not much, considering that the true origins of greater tolerance for diversity and non-traditional gender roles—two advances often associated with the Sixties—are actually found much earlier than that. The sexual revolution it spawned seems to be on the wane. Young men today have about the same chance of getting thrown out of college for inappropriate sexual behavior as they did in the 1950s. The 1960s mostly built on the blueprint of the previous era by expanding the variety of peer groups, albeit with same tendency toward “groupthink.” It is no surprise that in a hip Manhattan bar filled with social rebels almost everyone wears the same styles of clothes, or that in a deep blue-state neighborhood most people share the same opinions. Despite the iconic status of “diversity,” Americans today are at least as conformist as they ever were.

The Sixties seem different in retrospect because the political context changed. The Fifties showcased no obvious large-scale social and political movements, while the Sixties had desegregation and the Vietnam War protests. But these were changes in context, not social essence. Still, the confusion endures.

The mid-century moment is important because it shapes the political ideologies of our day, and therefore the debates of our day. Broadly speaking, our debates draw on four ideologies: social conservatism, feminism, economic conservatism, and identity politics. According to Marx, the purpose of ideology is to portray society as cohesive rather than riven by conflicts of interest. In fact it is mainly the latter, but people conceal the social and economic contradictions with ideas. This, Marx observed, is why all ideologies distort reality (without acknowledging that his own, which he considered a “science,” did so as well). Because we conduct our debates through the prism of four ideologies that distort reality, they never seem to go anywhere. The mid-century moment is the origin of the distortions—and our paralysis.

Take social conservatism. Professor Wax builds on a distorted version of the 1950s to promote conservative bourgeois values. As noted above, the 1950s did not actually embrace such values; if anything, those values were on the defensive during that period. Professor Wax is correct that bourgeois values go hand in hand with a stable society, and that a stable society once existed alongside bourgeois values. But whatever made the 1950s stable, insofar as they actually were stable, it was not bourgeois values.

Yet her error goes beyond simply misdating the past. One can’t just resurrect values from any time period, be it the 1950s or the 19th century, and apply them to the present. This is what Professor Wax wants to do when arguing for bourgeois values as a solution to today’s problems of family breakdown, opioid abuse, and rampant inner-city violence among low-wage earners. Bourgeois values, like all values, are merely links in a chain that must connect to something real. In the 19th century that chain connected to a very real socio-economic circumstance: an economy based largely on family farms and small businesses. But it was the circumstance that anchored the chain and lent value to all the links. It made bourgeois values possible. Without something tangible in the world of work and life to connect to, bourgeois values themselves have become abstract theories profoundly misaligned with social facts; they are, in effect, rosy bits of unreality. There is nothing real in 21st-century America for bourgeois values to connect to in the world of low-wage earners. For Professor Wax to use bourgeois values to try to reach a stable society is like throwing a rope’s end into the sky and trying to climb up it. If anything, pleading bourgeois values becomes just a means to ignore, or an excuse to explain away, today’s noxious conditions of working-class life.

The mid-century effect on feminism offers another example of ideology covering up reality’s contradictions. Nineteenth-century (or “first-wave”) feminism demanded basic freedoms such as the right to vote. To follow in the spirit of Marx, that aspiration made first-wave feminism a sub-genre of capitalist ideology—meaning, the feminist ideology of freedom and rights concealed the exploitation and inequality inherent in capitalism. I disagree with Marx on the value of the vote, but to continue his line of thought, second-wave feminism represents a new kind of cover up.

Notice that second-wave feminism did not begin until Betty Friedan’s publication of The Feminine Mystique in 1963—after the 1950s. Second-wave feminism was not a criticism of the status of women; it was a criticism of the status of women in the suburbs. It arose because of a new reality facing women, caused to a high degree by government at mid-century. Had government skipped insuring housing mortgages in the 1930s and declined to create the interstate highway system in the 1950s, it’s hard to say whether the suburbs would have come into being the way they did—isolated and in the middle of nowhere. During this same period, government pushed housewives out of their traditional roles as the organizers of orphanages, museums, hospitals, old people’s homes, and fundraising, and awarded these duties to credentialed professionals.4 Stuck in the suburbs and now with nothing much socially useful to do beyond their own nuclear family, no wonder educated women grew dissatisfied.

This mid-century experience shaped the feminism that followed. Feminism became focused on getting women into the workforce and disparaging the role of housewife—not surprisingly, given what the housewife role in the 1950s had become. But as Marx would say, feminism was again concealing the exploitation of women (and men) inherent in capitalism—for example, by deceiving young women into thinking they would have exciting careers, when most women (like most men) have boring jobs in the division of labor; forcing two spouses to work for nearly the same family income that previously one spouse could earn alone; and dissuading women from thinking of motherhood as something on par with paid work. The mid-century moment pushed feminism toward new ideals, yet those ideals hid reality from women no less than before.

The mid-century’s effect on economic conservatism is another example of ideology covering up reality’s contradictions. Adam Smith may have been the intellectual founder of capitalism, but he would have rejected the “free market” ideology that arose at mid-century and sanctified businesspeople. Smith remained suspicious of the grasping industrialists of his time, warning that they “generally have an interest to deceive and even oppress the public.”5 Although Smith is considered the patron saint of contemporary economic conservatism, he was actually more hostile to the motives of businesspeople than many Bernie Sanders supporters are today.

This healthy skepticism was lost at mid-century when corporations seemed to befriend workers—for example, swearing loyalty to veteran workers, hiring “people-minded” personnel managers to boost morale, and building human resources departments to help workers “fulfill” themselves.6 Corporate downsizing and offshoring eventually exposed much of this as manipulation for profit rather than sincere expression of kindness, but free market ideology overlooked the truth, arguing that corporate restructuring led to a wealthier society over all. Adam Smith would have agreed on the wealth point, but not with the elevation of businesspeople to sainthood that followed in the train of the mid-century public relations juggernaut, which free-market ideology subsequently incorporated.

One can readily observe the resultant blather when talking to free-market ideologues about economic policy. Suddenly their minds flip into a protocol; they emphasize the positive aspects of business and businesspeople at all points; they wince when they hear that what they love might be flawed. Smith, on the other hand, was never a proponent of the class of businesspeople.7 His suspicion of businesspeople caused him to be more supportive of government intervention for humanitarian needs than many contemporary free market ideologues are—for example, on behalf of public education, or in rescuing workers from the stultifying effects of mass production.

Smith understood capitalism’s defects because he understood capitalists. He recognized their tendency to form monopolies and exploit the consumer. While free-market ideologues praise private health insurance companies over government regulated or controlled medicine, a true Smith disciple would zero in on why and how it has come to be that consumers of health care do not dictate price. The ideologues have turned support for capitalism and capitalists into a form of idolatry. An example would be their effort to “privatize” most services based on the assumption that businesspeople are uniformly more worthy of trust than are government bureaucrats. The mid-century moment has so distorted the reality of how businesspeople actually operate when allowed to do so that free-market ideologues have all but lost their sense of caution and prudence when entrusting them with public responsibilities.

The mid-century influence on the civil rights movement provides a final example of ideology covering up reality’s contradictions. The movement originally preached a kind of universalism: All people, independent of race or ethnicity, should be treated with fairness and respect. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the movement morphed into the black identity movement, which then expanded into the path of wider multiculturalist ideology. Today, identity politics ideologues see the world in the form of closed groups based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and ability that presumably exist beyond any capacity for outsiders to comprehend. The therapeutic sensibility of the mid-century moment is largely responsible for this course deflection.

America at mid-century was enthralled with psychotherapy. Freudian ideas had been popular with intellectuals and artists in the 1920s, but by the 1950s they had widely penetrated the public consciousness. Journalists of the time wrote about infatuation and subliminal influences. Probation officers would discuss a juvenile delinquent’s family background in the context of aggression and compensation. By one estimate, 14 percent of the American population had undergone some form of psychotherapy by 1957.8 This therapeutic sensibility gradually penetrated the civil rights movement. Notions of self-esteem, the emotional life, and personal identity grew central to the movement’s worldview. Racism became both a conscious and subconscious phenomenon. In turn, psychotherapy came to be seen as a tool of political change. It is not too much to say that the civil rights movement fused race and therapy.9

The result was identity politics, which is also an ideology and hence distorts reality. By appealing to group identity, it conceals the insecurity and frank desperation that many low-wage earners in all groups face in the new gig economy. To use a Marxist phrase, identity politics deforms class consciousness. The Sanders-Clinton rivalry exposed the fault line on this issue within the Democratic Party during the 2016 election. Not surprisingly, the Clinton camp, which embraced identity politics, had the backing of the business establishment. Sanders, to his credit, abhors identity politics and was not shy about saying so.

When low-wage earners express their anguish, causing the subject of immigration to sometimes arise, speech codes and rules against micro-aggressions shut them down. Speech codes are the natural consequence of the civil rights-psychotherapy alliance, as therapy deals with sensitivity and hurt feelings, which leads to notions of “hate speech,” which leads to restrictions on speech. It should not surprise anyone that many affluent white progressives at elite colleges have glommed onto identity politics to conceal their own privileged position in the economy, while also easing their consciences. It is the contemporary version of the once radical urge, from the Sixties, of those ashamed of their white-skin privilege to support the Black Panthers. The worker may complain of suffering, but that complaint can be dismissed by the privileged if the worker is deemed a racist.

The real 1950s culture, not the funhouse mirror version concocted to elevate the importance and virtue of the 1960s, has thus given rise to four ideologies that dominate our politics today, all of which have become irrelevant to the material reality of average Americans. Worse, rather than just ignore reality they distort reality.

That so many average Americans reject these ideologies sometimes confuses the ideologues. Social conservatives scratch their heads when they see religious people vote for the libertine Trump. Feminists scratch their heads when they see so few women willing to call themselves feminists, and a majority of white women voting for Trump. Free market ideologues scratch their heads when they see that almost half of Americans distrust capitalism and that working people voted for Trump’s protectionist and big spending agenda. Identity politics ideologues scratch their heads when they see 20 percent of black males and 30 percent of Hispanics voting for Trump, and even some progressives recoil at “political correctness.” The common denominator in all this is that a large portion of the electorate feels unrepresented by the four major ideologies of our day. The other common denominator is a President Trump who seems to have won the election by rejecting, to one degree or another, all four ideologies.

This is where the real 1950s culture has brought us, and the recognition of it shines a light backwards on The Lonely Crowd’s warning of what a massively other-directed society could be like. One may still disparage and even hate the 1950s, but one should get the reasons straight. We live in an era when a significant portion of the American population observes various ideological rules and maxims only outwardly, while in fact living a semi-underground mental life. People go to work and vote on whatever is being voted on, but on the sly they tell jokes against political correctness, roll their eyes when lectured to by social conservatives, feel anxious about feminism, and scoff at capitalism’s defenders. They are glad to read literature that the establishment condemns if any comes their way on the internet, as it increasingly does. They rarely challenge social and political authorities openly, and they observe the accepted rituals of the four ideologies, if only halfheartedly. Perhaps their only heroic political act in life was to vote for Donald Trump, even knowing that he would burn down the outhouse without any confidence that he could also build a better one. Their existence, and now their political clout, attests to the tremendous fissure between leaders and the led in this country.

Because the social changes of the 1950s are the origins for much of this mess, perhaps it’s time to retire that decade from its place of honor among some conservatives; progressives can continue to despise it if they like, but only if it’s for the right reasons.

1David Riesman et al., The Lonely Crowd, p. 80.

2The Lonely Crowd, p. 60.

3The Lonely Crowd, p. 215.

4The Lonely Crowd, p. 333–4.

5Quoted in Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers, p. 54.

6The Lonely Crowd, p. 130. William Whyte, The Organization Man, p. 84, 135–6, 214.

7Heilbroner, p. 52.

8Ellen Herman, The Romance of Psychology in the Age of Experts.

9Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Race Experts, p. 111.

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Reading Gone with the Wind in China

A Chinese scholar I met in Hangzhou, China, this past summer asked if I would collaborate on an essay comparing Scarlett O’Hara to Wang Hsy-feng from Cao Xueqin’s 18th-century novel, A Dream of Red Mansions. She wanted to look at a strong American character at a time of economic shock and growth and a strong Chinese character in a similar period of upheaval at the end of the Qing Dynasty, focusing on each woman’s survival strategies.

“Sure,” I replied, unsure. I hadn’t yet finished reading A Dream of Red Mansion, let alone dug into the historical context. But I know Gone with the Wind well as a novel and a film and wondered how Li viewed it. I have come to expect the unexpected from Chinese scholars of American literature. Since 2011, I have lectured at six universities in China, meeting with students and professors launching their academic careers on Edgar Allen Poe, Toni Morrison, and Stephen King. Free from the invisible social constraints, disciplinary norms, and trends that govern literature departments in most American universities, Chinese scholars are asking better and more insightful questions than we are about what texts are deserving of study and why, like why we prefer William Faulkner to Margaret Mitchell, even though Gone with the Wind beat Absalom Absalom! for the 1937 Pulitzer Prize.

“Send me your abstract,” I told Li.

Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind “tells the twists and turns of the love story of Scarlett O’Hara, describing the social dynamics of the United States from the slave-based plantation economy to the capitalist industrial economy,” Li writes. A fearless heroine, Scarlett “adapts to the trend” of Northern industrial civilization, seeking “to build a new life in the old ruins as a trend-setter during a critical moment of transition.” She “sees the potential of the exchange between the North and the South, seizes the opportunity to do business with the Yankees, and gets rich.”

Why not? I thought. In many ways Li’s reading is not wholly new. Historians have given the novel a thorough going-over, drawing on the work of Drew Gilpin Faust and others to suggest that Scarlett’s physical exertions, business sense, and anti-Confederate attitudes were not rare.1 Indeed, Scarlett O’Hara fits the archetype of the rapacious and driven American CEO.

Scarlett is bored by war talk, bored by Ashley Wilkes’s plantation reminiscences, and annoyed by Jefferson Davis’s goatee. After the war, she comes to loathe Lost Cause nostalgia. “Scarlett correctly cares about tomorrow,” Li writes. She cares about profits.

What about the other successful businesswoman in the novel, the red-haired Atlanta brothel owner, Belle Watling, I ask? Let me think, Li replies.

Given the Chinese fascination with the terrible history of slavery and race violence in America—the first American novel translated into Chinese was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in 1901—I was surprised to see that Li’s reading downplayed the novel’s unapologetic white Southern politics and its deplorable portrayal of African Americans. Well, she said, Gone with the Wind punishes everyone who looks backward. Scarlett is the hero because she survives and looks forward.

But we need to address the novel’s racism, I press. The portrayal of characters moving seamlessly from slaves to loyal servants is a fiction that readers should question. Given the current debates in the United States about removing Confederate monuments and the violence this past summer in Charlottesville, some theaters worry about screening Gone with the Wind. The film is a kind of Confederate monument.

Li responds that Ashley is the biggest villain in the piece precisely because he “embodies the Southern Knight spirit and typical aristocracy”—but his failings go beyond his racial pride. He won’t see that he is living in “the ascendant phase in the American history, with the rising capitalists representing the advanced productive forces against the declining decadency of the southern plantation.” When he works for Scarlett’s lumber company, he can’t even keep the account books, she writes.

You forget that Ashley’s in the Klan, Li adds. That’s right—the movie version of Gone With the Wind doesn’t mention the Ku Klux Klan, I write. And David O. Selznick famously would not let the “n-word” be spoken in the film. Except for Rhett Butler, all the men around Scarlett are Klansmen. Even recent essays don’t mention this.

“The novel is full of bias toward black people,” Li writes, in what at first seems like an understatement but in fact is perfectly put. The novel is indeed “full of bias.” But bias is not directed exclusively at blacks, Li adds, pointing to Scarlett’s use of white convict labor in her lumber mill as evidence. “Scarlett’s attitudes toward former slaves are transitional, like the era,” Li writes, urging me to see Scarlett in a more positive light. In Mitchell’s novel, Scarlett calls the Klansmen “crack-brained fools” that “stir up the Yankees” unnecessarily. The times have moved on, and so has she.

We decide to put the Chinese novel on hold to focus solely on Gone with the Wind. I ask Li if she has given more thought to Belle Watling, about whom I found little scholarship. Both Mae West and Tallulah Bankhead turned down the invitation to play the notorious flaming-red-haired prostitute in the film because the part was “too small.”

Anne Sarah Rubin, one scholar who mentions Belle Watling, notes that she “won’t be received in proper society, but she exhibits more decency than most of the Atlanta matrons.”2 Backwards-looking Melanie always liked her, Li points out. But not Scarlett. Readers of Gone with the Wind first meet and hear Belle through Melanie’s voice after Belle donates 50 dollars in gold to the Confederate cause. “Ain’t I a Confedrut, good as you?” Belle says, perversely echoing Sojourner Truth’s famous question, “Ain’t I a woman?”

Li directs me to the following passage:

Scarlett, there’s fifty dollars here! And in gold!” cried Melanie, awed, as she counted the bright pieces. “Tell me, do you think it’s all right to use this kind—well, money made—er—this way for the boys? Don’t you think that maybe God will understand that she wanted to help and won’t care if it is tainted? When I think of how many things the hospital needs….

Melanie and Belle Watling would give money after the war for statues, Li proposes. But not Scarlett. Aha, I say aloud. Indeed Melanie (had she lived) would have chaired the monument committee and Belle would have quietly footed the bill. Even Rhett would have contributed. But not Scarlett, the “representative of advanced material civilization and of the emerging bourgeoisie.” Scarlett wants to do business with Yankee businessmen.

We skip forward 700 pages to where Scarlett is deliberately kept ignorant of the Klan raid after she is assaulted in Shantytown. (She had been traveling unescorted to check on her lumber business, and was rescued in the nick of time by the ever-loyal Big Sam.) “Scarlett, perhaps we should have told you but…you were always so outspoken against the Klan—” Melanie says. See? writes Li.

Belle provides the alibi for the men participating in the botched Klan raid, testifying to the Yankee officers that the men were in her “sporting house.” Melanie goes along. For Mitchell’s narrator, this is the scene of Belle’s redemption:

Belle Watling! To owe their men’s lives to her! It was intolerable! Women who had ostentatiously crossed the street when they saw Belle coming, wondered if she remembered and trembled for fear that she did. The men felt less humiliation at taking their lives from Belle than the women did, for many of them thought her a good sort.

For Scarlett, Belle Watling is common and vulgar, and only vile people had anything to do with her. But Melanie has already decided that politics trumps morality. The next day, Melanie meets Belle to thank her, already rehabilitating the “fallen woman” in her mind:

Somehow this handsome, sedately dressed woman sitting in the darkness of the carriage didn’t look and talk as she imagined a bad woman, the Madam of a House, should look and talk. She sounded like—well, a little common and countrified but nice and warm hearted.

To Li, Melanie’s complicity in postwar racial violence is clear—and defines her role in the novel. “Melanie has to die,” Li writes, “so Scarlett’s emotional ties with the old world can break.”

Reading Gone with the Wind with this insightful Chinese scholar during our current political moment, I found myself reassessing the novel. If I taught Gone With the Wind in an African-American literature course, I suspect we would have pounced on the Klan passages at once. But we don’t teach Gone with the Wind in African-American literature courses. Li encouraged me to read the novel as if we do.

I am struck too by Mitchell’s stage-managing of Melanie’s capitulation to Belle Watling’s power. As Li points out, we can read Belle as more than the “whore with the heart of gold” stereotype that Mitchell wants us to see. And this is not simply a case in which “politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough” as Noah Cross famously remarks in Chinatown.

No, the universally beloved Melanie Wilkes and her Klan-supporting circle have demonstrated a political-ethical calculus that, despite our country’s Puritan origins and mega-churched countryside, is as American as peach pie. The notorious Madam Belle Watling is Team Lost Cause and that is what matters to Melanie. “Ok,” I write. “I’m in. We can write about Scarlett’s break from Southern traditions to be a prototypical CEO. And poor Melanie be damned.”

And it occurs to me that while so many political pundits are scratching their heads as to how so many good-hearted American evangelical Christian voters came to support a man with as brazen and sordid a past as the current President’s, our own fiction—that brief scene in Belle Watling’s darkened carriage—tells us what we need to know.

1Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (University of North Carolina, 1996). Kathryne Bevilacqua, “History Lessons from Gone with the Wind,” The Mississippi Quarterly  (Winter 2014), pp. 99-125; Katherine Lane Antolini, “Scarlett O’Hara as Confederate Woman,” West Virginia University Philological Papers 51 (2004), pp. 23-35.

2Rubin, “Why Gone with the Wind Still Matters; or, Why I Still Love Gone with the Wind,” Civil War History (March 2013).

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Donald Trump, John Edwards, and the Mistress Loophole

Federal prosecutors are investigating whether President Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, broke campaign finance laws in paying Trump’s alleged former mistress, Stormy Daniels, $130,000 to keep quiet in the last weeks of the 2016 campaign. Trump admits that Cohen was representing him, and his new lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has just claimed Trump reimbursed Cohen. The media are currently ablaze with speculation—or wishful thinking—that the Stormy Daniels scandal could spell the end of the Trump presidency.

Yet tawdry, disgusting, and harmful to the nation and its offices as the scandal has been to date, it probably won’t.

Cohen and Trump have less to worry about than many suppose, which may be why Giuliani seems, in this case anyway, mostly to know what he is doing in trying to defend the President. Former Democratic and Republican members of the Federal Elections Commission have opined that “third party” payments to or for a candidate’s mistress are not campaign contributions subject to the $2,700 limit and public disclosure requirements. And in the absence of clear guidance from the FEC prosecutors might struggle to convince a jury—or a Senate weighing impeachment—that the payoff was intended to influence the election.

On these matters, there is no better recent reference than the 2012 criminal case U.S. Government v. Johnny Reid Edwards. The former Senator and vice presidential nominee was charged with violating campaign finance laws over payments for his pregnant mistress during his unsuccessful pursuit of the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. His trial ended in a hung jury, with a significant majority favoring acquittal.

A principal question jurors faced was whether the law prohibited the candidate’s close political associates and friends from contributing large amounts of money to keep his mistress out of the news as the primaries approached. If it did not, then Edwards could not be convicted of violating it.

The government contended that $725,000 provided by his largest political donor for “non-campaign” expenses, and $194,000 spent by the campaign’s Finance Chair to hide the mistress right before the Iowa and other January primaries, were political contributions because they met the legal standard of being “for the purpose of influencing” a federal election. By accepting them, Edwards, a veteran candidate who was fully aware of the individual contribution limit, “willfully” broke the law.

However, defense counsel Abbe Lowell told the jury, “Every witness you heard from, whoever had any experience with this area of the law, said how the payment by a third party to another third party, not to John . . . concerning the issues of a mistress and an affair would never come up as being a contribution.” In developing what he called “this critical case deciding point,” Lowell emphasized the testimony of not only the campaign’s chief financial officer but also former Democratic FEC Chairman Scott Thomas, who had spent 30 years with the commission. Thomas confirmed that these specific issues had never come up as “a topic that needed to be addressed under the Federal Election Campaign Act.” Acting in “good faith,” Lowell concluded, Edwards would not have regarded such payments as “contributions.” So, he did not “willfully” violate the law.

One can imagine how Lowell’s argument would be grasped by counsel defending Cohen and Trump. So would other statements about the Edwards case by former FEC Commissioners. Before the trial, Thomas and another Democratic Commissioner retained by the defense were shown the government indictment charging that Edwards orchestrated the payments for electoral purposes. Nevertheless, they wrote, the payments “would not be considered campaign contributions or expenditures under the law” and the FEC would agree “if asked.” At the same time, Republican Commissioner (and current White House counsel) Don McGahn agreed the donations were “not reportable.” Concerning the Daniels payment, President Trump has stated, “There were no campaign funds going into this.” This is the Edwards defense: “third party” financial arrangements over an alleged affair outside the formal campaign are never contributions.

Prosecutors attempted to surmount this legal argument by showering the jury with facts and inferences indicating that one purpose of the payments was to influence the election. But they lacked “smoking guns”: strongly corroborated witnesses, thoroughly incriminating recorded conversations and documents, self-damning testimony from the principals (Neither donor appeared—one had died and the other, a 101-year-old, was excused—and Edwards declined to testify). The defense cast “reasonable doubt” on the donations’ having anything to do with elections. It challenged the truthfulness of eyewitness testimony by Edwards’ close aide. Most important, it offered evidence of donors’ strong personal friendships with Edwards, suggesting that they might have helped him regardless of the campaign and asserted that Edwards’ only purpose was to hide the affair from his wife.

In a trial today, Cohen could be expected to stress his long history of personal loyalty to Trump, including his 2011 efforts to squelch Daniels’ story and deep concern about its potential impact on Trump’s marriage, family, and reputation. Trump would expand on the latter in any impeachment proceeding. Could prosecutors produce enough “smoking guns” to erase reasonable doubt about the presence of electoral concerns?

In my view, Trump’s behavior was illegal. The payoff was made less than two weeks before the election. It is not credible that the election was not one of the purposes of the payment. While Trump can donate as much as he wants to himself, he is legally bound to report it. He never has. But reasoning it out is one thing; proving it in a courtroom beyond reasonable doubt or in an impeachment trial is another. And that points us back to the Federal Election Commission.

Beneath the surface, the FEC and its Commissioners act to weaken campaign finance law. Even after the Edwards saga, the agency has offered no specific guidance concerning the factual circumstances in which a third-party payment for a candidate’s mistress—or other personal expenses—would or would not be a contribution. It’s a standing invitation for candidates to fashion additional loopholes.

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Let’s Dance the Machiavelli

Mr. President, you have done really well by putting the axe to the open global order the United States has built and maintained since World War II. Well, but not well enough! Let’s get serious about protecting this “blessed plot” America from these foreigners. Think not just about punitive tariffs on steel (25 percent) and aluminum (10 percent) against the European Union, Canada and Mexico, which, unfortunately, you have just postponed for 30 days. Don’t forget the real threat to the United States, which is people rather than goods.

A good start was the wall along the country’s southern border to keep out Mexican and Central American hordes. Tightening immigration in general was also a brilliant idea. Immigrants are like steel; they destroy American jobs. Even better, your State Department now wants to go after tourists, too. To get a visa, applicants will have to submit their social media user names, email addresses, and phone numbers used over the last five years. This will hit about 15 million annually who want to gaze at the Statue of Liberty and shop till they drop. It’s worth it! No terrorist will slip through this net.

Mr. President, please don’t listen to those free-trade fanatics and globalists who claim that freedom of movement supposedly increases the welfare of all nations, and above all your own. This is how they argue (erroneously, of course):

Slapping a tariff of 25 percent on steel imports will raise steel prices at home. This will increase the prices of domestically-produced cars, bridges and construction machinery, lowering demand and employment. However, finished goods—foreign-made earth movers or trucks—will not be affected by these charges. So Americans will buy less from Mack and more from Volvo, killing more domestic jobs.

The globalists also moan that you will endanger 6.5 million jobs in the steel-using industry to protect 140,000 positions in the steel-making sector. Nor is this all, they keep carping. If those foreigners retaliate, say, against U.S. agriculture, more jobs will go.

Be firm and steady, Mr. President: America’s dignity is not a matter of picayune book-keeping. We’ve got to show them that they cannot play the United States for a patsy, flooding our country with dumping-priced goods and outselling us with their deliberately undervalued currencies. Punishing them will make America great again, as you have so eloquently promised.

Immigrants are even more insidious. They steal our jobs directly by inundating the labor market and offering their services at lower wages. Yes, stopping this will cause some pain initially, as hospitals run out of doctors and caregivers, restaurants out of cooks and waiters, and house builders out of roofers and brick layers. We’ll get lots of people off the welfare rolls, including single mothers and folks who can’t wait to attend nursing school for the next four years.

Never mind that we are at full employment, with labor scarcities besetting the U.S. economy. Also, don’t fret about all those Indians, Russians, Chinese, and Israelis who have made Silicon Valley great. Keep them out, and American engineers will make the Valley even greater. Since American students don’t like hard sciences, this will take only a generation or two.

Your most brilliant idea, Mr. President, is plugging the hole your predecessors have blithely ignored: tourists and all those supposedly uber-bright folks who come here to study or do business on non-immigrant visas. There are about 14 million of them per annum. True, they bring lots of cash with them. They spend it on tuition, consumer goods, hotel and restaurant bills. According to the International Trade Administration, more than 70 million arrivals spent about $250 billion in 2016. But safety must come first! Hidden among these 70 million are those heinous terrorists who want to do in America.

Don’t listen to Bloomberg (“Tourists Are America’s Renewable Resource”). According to their numbers, for the period spanning 2002 to 2016, only one terrorist hid among the 379 million entrants of all nationalities. It is also true that the vast majority of terrorist assaults over the past few years have been committed by people who were born and raised here.

So what? The real point is that one killer who slips the net is one too many. And this is why your idea, Mr. President, is so ingenious. If we make it really hard for friendly visitors to get into the country, we will keep out that one bad guy as well.

In fact, your State Department isn’t tough enough. Exempt from the planned third-degree vetting procedure are all those, mainly our European allies, who travel to the United States on the visa-waiver program ESTA. They can gain entry just by filling out a computer form in the comfort of their homes and paying a measly 14 bucks. This gaping hole must be plugged, subito! ESTA is just too easy.

The mainstream media, Mr. President, will try to feed you all kinds of bunk. According to those virtue-mongers, America will no longer be America if it closes itself off. Extreme vetting, they claim, will alienate the multitudes who regard the United States as a model or a magnet. They preach that this country became great by welcoming the world.

The truth is that those foreigners have taken us for a ride. No more Mr. Nice Guy. So what if we lose jobs, profits and talents? As Machiavelli famously put it: If the prince has to choose, it is better to be feared than loved.

So let’s show them.

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Hezbollah After Lebanon’s Elections

With Lebanon’s parliamentary elections just around the corner, Washington will be watching closely how its Lebanese nemesis, the powerful Shi‘a party Hezbollah, sets itself up for the future.

The most likely scenario on Sunday is that Hezbollah, along with its strategic Shi‘a ally Amal, will secure all 27 seats allocated for Shi‘a in the parliament and form a sizable parliamentary coalition with other allies, comprising roughly 65 deputies (of the total 128 members that make up the Lebanese Parliament).

Yet despite this expected electoral victory, there are socioeconomic trends in the country that might challenge the group’s control of the Shi‘a community and compel it to adjust its future role in the Lebanese political system.

Since its inception in 1982, Hezbollah has benefited tremendously from the political, economic, and military sponsorship of Syria and Iran, which transformed it from a local militia into a regional force. But the group’s center of gravity and Achilles’ heel has always been its local Shi‘a constituency. Hezbollah will go as far as the Lebanese Shi‘a community will take it, which is why the group is extremely sensitive to the latter’s preferences and concerns.

On May 6, most of the country’s Shi‘a will once again vote for the Hezbollah-Amal duo, but this time around, there are likely to be more Shi‘a voices expressing doubt about the relationship.

It is in the regions of the Beka‘a Valley and Baalbek-Hermel where confidence in Hezbollah appears to have waned. While the trend should not be exaggerated, even the smallest crack in the special bond between Hezbollah and its Shi‘a base worries the organization.

It is no great mystery why some in these regions are losing faith. Both areas, the Beka‘a Valley especially, have given generously to Hezbollah over the years and yet received very little in return. For decades, they have endured abject poverty and neglect by both Hezbollah and the Lebanese state. More recently, they have sent hundreds of their young men to fight and die in the battlefields of Syria as part of an Iran-sanctioned mission to prop up the regime of Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad.

Fueling this sense of disappointment with Hezbollah is a prevalent perception among Beka’aites that the south receives preferential treatment: paved roads, development projects, running water, electricity, public education and hospitals, remittances from Lebanese Shi‘a living abroad, and funds from international donors, all of which are either lacking or nonexistent in the Beka‘a Valley.

Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s Secretary General, is acutely aware of the risk of growing discontent in those areas, which is why he started addressing this issue by admitting guilt in a recent speech, before shifting to blame Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri and his government for abandoning the region. He also spoke via a screen at a major electoral rally this week in Baalbek about Hezbollah’s commitment to that region. In attendance were the head of the group’s executive council, Hashem Safieddin; the head of the political council, Ibrahim Amin al-Sayyid; the political advisor to the secretary general, Hussein Khalil; and the head of the coordination unit, Wafiq Safa. If Nasrallah weren’t worried about voting and overall public sentiment in Baalbek, he wouldn’t have instructed almost the entire Hezbollah leadership to show up at the rally.

There is also a generational change that is noticeable in those regions, and across the country more broadly. Fewer Lebanese Shi‘a relate to the history of conflict with Israel, as many were not even alive during the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon from 1982 to 2000. That Hezbollah’s resistance narrative resonates less among some Shi‘a represents a challenge for the group moving forward (although another confrontation with Israel like the 2006 war could easily change that).

The reality is that Hezbollah is struggling to provide for its support base. The group is exhausted as a result of its ongoing involvement in Syria and feeling a significant financial crunch because of dire economic conditions in the country, U.S. sanctions, and the economic troubles of its main partner, Iran. Hezbollah is shouting from the rooftops that it needs the Lebanese state’s help because the burden of delivering social and economic goods to its constituency has become too heavy.

In his speeches over the past few weeks, Nasrallah has discussed at length the issues of corruption and debt in the Lebanese system, even suggesting the creation of a new economic planning ministry. His message is clear: Gone are the days of Hezbollah leaving economic and bureaucratic matters to its political rivals and focusing exclusively on issues of war and peace.

For the first time in its history, Hezbollah is participating in national elections with a detailed and comprehensive program that touches on various aspects of Lebanese state administration. Of course, whether the group can actually contribute serious ideas of economic reform, having removed itself all these years from the economic decision-making process, is a separate matter altogether. That Washington and other Western capitals consider it a terrorist organization would further constrain its ability to participate in Lebanese economic affairs.

Hezbollah’s “rediscovery” of the Lebanese state is welcome and long overdue, but its motivations and timing are suspicious, to say the least. Since its founding, the group has consistently sought to separate itself from the state to preserve its military autonomy and control of the Shi‘a community. Indeed, it is precisely because of the gap between the Lebanese Shi‘a and the state that Hezbollah exists. The group’s newfound emphasis on the state is most likely an election tactic, meant to justify its decreasing ability to provide for its constituency.

Hezbollah’s electoral victory is virtually guaranteed, but the day after carries some uncertainty. The group is currently deciding what larger role it might or must play at home in order to fulfill three priorities: protect “the resistance,” maintain its independence, and provide for its community.

Hezbollah will ultimately realize that it won’t be able to have it all, but meanwhile, Lebanon will have to cope with the group’s likely expanded domestic agenda.

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The Alt-Ostrich Movement

As our most senior public officials repeatedly conflate fact and fiction—confusing opinion with information, mistaking wishfulness and crankiness for analysis —the challenges of policymaking in a technologically complex and politically polarized world become even more difficult. In last week’s New York Times Magazine, Jason Zengerle presents a devastating portrait of the delusional and malicious Representative Devin Nunes, who has so misused his position as chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that his sabotage of the investigation into Russian interference in our political process is not even the most disturbing tale of his tenure.

Even before the Age of Trump, though, reference to serious, fact-based research in support of policymaking had fallen into disfavor in Washington. The notion that data could be gathered in a systematic manner, examined according to social science theories about correlation and causation—after which the theories would be updated, revised and then tested again, in order to provide an intellectual foundation for a policy debate—had come to be considered, well, quaint.

Science-based policy discussion is so rare, in fact, that the American Academy of Political and Social Science a decade ago created a prize for it: the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize, “to recognize public officials and social scientists who champion the use of informed judgment to improve public policy and advance the public good.” The AAPSS is a learned society of scholars that dates from a Philadelphia conclave of 22 professors in 1889 and has sought since its founding to bring rigorous research to policymakers.

Moynihan, of course, was a public official and a social scientist. He was a public intellectual who served his country as a naval officer, diplomat, presidential advisor and United States Senator, author of more books than many members of today’s Senate will have read—and surely the only person in American history to have served in the cabinet or sub-cabinet of four consecutive Presidents, two Republicans and two Democrats. As the AAPSS says about the purpose of the prize,

Honoring the memory of Senator Moynihan through a prize that bears his name reminds us of our shared values and goals and promotes bipartisan so­lutions to the challenges that face our country.

When I worked for him as a legislative assistant, a long time ago, Pat Moynihan cherished the dueling magazine covers featuring caricatures of his long face that he had framed and hung above the toilet in the bathroom in his office in the Russell Senate office building.  The Nation, on the stern left, labeled Moynihan a “neo-conservative,” while The New Republic, ambiguously progressive, called him a “neo-liberal.” In fact, he was a social scientist with a PhD from Tufts University whose thesis examined the International Labor Organization, the only part of Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations arrangements that survives to this day. He came to Washington to serve in JFK’s Labor Department, and worked as Richard Nixon’s domestic policy advisor. In his politics, Moynihan sought to bring a small-d democratic sensibility to the realm of public policy, deferring to Democratic orthodoxy only on lesser matters. He often reminded us, the hired help, of what he said in public time and again—namely that “You are entitled to your own opinions, but you are NOT entitled to your own facts!”

Pat Moynihan would, of course, be appalled by what has befallen the Congress he so revered, where he served for 24 years. More than once that I recall, he reminded us younglings, when we seemed insufficiently to appreciate the majesty of the opportunity provided us to inform serious Senate deliberation, that the position of a Senator is a job “written into the #*!& United States Constitution.” (He used some French words—or maybe it was Navy talk.) There was another lesson Moynihan imparted to me quite directly. During an election year, when I dared to offer an assessment of the electoral implications of an upcoming floor vote, he quickly cut me off to say, “your job is to provide me information, and your best advice on what the correct policy is for the United States; others can worry about whatever the political implications may be.” He was clearly annoyed. He just wanted the facts, the analysis and policy input from me. Tell me how many members of today’s Congress would chastise an aide in this manner.

Today, we are far removed from a fact-based discourse. The most infamous case of ignorance-as-policy, of course, is the Dickey Amendment and its consequences. As Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Hiltzik has cogently written in the Los Angeles Times, this is the provision of law that effectively bars federal research on gun violence as a public health matter, without actually even banning federal research on gun violence.

The National Rifle Association was outraged by research supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), specifically its National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, that found having firearms in the home sharply increased the risks of homicide. So, the NRA successfully pressed Congress in 1996 to strip the injury center’s funding for gun violence research – $2.6 million. Congress then passed a measure drafted by then-Rep. Jay Dickey (R-Ark.) forbidding the CDC to spend funds “to advocate or promote gun control.” Though the Dickey Amendment didn’t bar gun violence research, the real blow, wrote Hiltzik, “was delivered by a succession of pusillanimous CDC directors, who decided that the safest course bureaucratically was simply to zero out the whole field” in order to avoid another targeted cut in the appropriation.

Even though Mr. Dickey came to regret the role he had played in thwarting this research, as he made clear after he left office in a 2012 column he co-authored in the Washington Post, the Dickey amendment is added every year to the funding law for the CDC. In Dickey’s words:

As a consequence, U.S. scientists cannot answer the most basic question: What works to prevent firearm injuries? We don’t know whether having more citizens carry guns would decrease or increase firearm deaths; or whether firearm registration and licensing would make inner-city residents safer or expose them to greater harm. We don’t know whether a ban on assault weapons or large-capacity magazines, or limiting access to ammunition, would have saved lives in Aurora or would make it riskier for people to go to a movie. And we don’t know how to effectively restrict access to firearms by those with serious mental illness.

It is well worth reading the eight-page 1993 article in the New England Journal of Medicine that started the uproar. Chock full of data, and thoughtful consideration of alternative interpretations, the study was led by Arthur L. Kellermann, then at the University of Tennessee, and concluded that “[r]ather than confer protection, guns kept in the home are associated with an increase in the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance.” That was a quarter century ago, and the U.S. government has not built on that research in the years since then. Laws to make guns more widely available, even to place them in schools, are proliferating across the country, and there is virtually no social science being done to forecast what the likely consequences will be of these policies.

With the wider war on science being waged these days by the appointed heads of the U.S. government’s science agencies—the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department, for instance—it is time to note that there is a quiet resistance movement under way. And it is centered in the academy, and specifically in the AAPSS.

Last year’s recipient of the Moynihan Prize was Princeton professor Alan Krueger, an economist who spoke in his acceptance speech about the implications of today’s part-time or “gig” economy, demonstrating that “the steady increase in the number of self-employed workers over the last few decades raises concerns about where and how these workers obtain health insurance and other benefits.” Krueger went on to outline the pros and the cons of various public policies that might be supportive of such workers, including a proposed “Shared Security Account” that would be portable and more flexible than current available benefits. Tellingly, Krueger built his lecture around data from the Princeton Survey Data Center, an intensive effort that regularly interviews workers of all kinds.

On May 17, Dr. John P. Holdren, who was Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy throughout the Obama Administration, and is now at Harvard University, will become the 2018 Moynihan Laureate. Holdren will deliver a lecture at the Willard Hotel in Washington on the occasion. In announcing his selection, the AAPSS noted that in a 2010 article entitled “Social Science Data and the Shaping of National Policy,” Holdren wrote:

To make public policy on the basis of bad data or no data is almost always a serious error . . . [R]esearch in the social sciences has given rise to a large array of explanatory concepts and analytic tools such as cost benefit analysis, the concept of risk aversion, the notion of unintended consequences, national accounts, randomized field trials for policy design, and so on.

Historian Timothy Snyder explains the seriousness of this distinction between fact and fiction in his brief 2017 manifesto, On Tyranny. “To abandon facts,” he writes, “is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power because there is no basis upon which to do so. … Post-truth is pre-fascism.”

I myself am not always keen for a lecture on the scientific method or randomized trials. But these days in Washington, it just seems like the right thing to do—to show some solidarity with social scientists and others with actual knowledge. So I will be at the Willard on the 17th of May, joining the scientists in their resistance—to be part of the alternative to the Ostriches all around us—celebrating this year’s winner of the Moynihan Prize, John Holdren.

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