Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 98

Zombie Lit

Sometime after the 1895 publication of The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane marched out into the middle of a Civil War battlefield, something he had never stepped foot upon prior to writing his Civil War masterpiece. He surveyed the terrain, tried to hear the ghosts, and walked back in the direction he came, saying to himself, “got it.” In other words, for whatever reason Crane wanted to confirm post hoc that he had captured the imaginative essence, and persuaded himself that he had.

Would we lambast Stephen Crane right now if he were alive, for having written about an experience that he had not actually lived? Not if we hewed to the standards applied to how literature has always functioned: A great artist steps beyond his or her own parochial experience to build worlds transcending direct experience with the help of extent literature produced by many others. Imagination was a communal affair, one that enabled individual writers to first create and then to enter into the lives of their own fictional characters. Imagination is what readers wanted, for it summoned whole worlds in which the universal and the particular did their glorious dance of open-endedness, setting up journeys whose own destinations they knew only through discovery. 

But if Stephen Crane were alive today, he would be in real trouble, for that formula for imagination is what the publishing world is trying its damnedest to kill off right now. The thinking behind that push—or rather not thinking but a miasma of leftoid sentiment—is that writers should only use their own subjective experience as a basis for their work. But what this especially means is that whites can only write about whites, men about men, and the classes who are deemed, in the current vogues, as the oppressor classes, need to shut the hell up about anyone else. Including, those people their imaginations might invent, who do not share their shading or genitalia. 

One of the more recent kerfuffle along these lines was last fall’s controversy over the young adult (YA, as it’s known) novel, American Heart, by Laura Moriarty. The book is about a 15-year-old white girl who is in favor of Muslim detainment camps until she meets a Muslim child who helps reshape her viewpoint. If you have heard about the controversy, you would know that Kirkus reviews originally gave the book a starred review, because it is apparently quite a good book. But then suddenly the review site stripped its star. 

Why? There was “a problem”: Moriarty is white and not a Muslim, as is her protagonist; but the Muslim child in the book is by definition beyond Moriarty’s ken because Moriarty is not a Muslim. So she is not allowed to put words into that Muslim child’s mouth, said the kind of people whose self-worth often runs a parallel course with the number of online comments they post. It seems that modern readers are as apt to have pitchforks in their hands as dust mites on them from rubbing up against pages. 

Once the staged outrage reached a certain pitch, Kirkus editor-in-chief Claiborne Smith announced that an “observant Muslim of color” was being consulted, even though the Muslim girl in the book is not described as being of “color,” and most Middle Eastern Muslims are not “of color” at all. Did Smith simply assume that Muslims, like people of “color,” are necessarily victimized people? Kirkus also consulted an expert in “white savior” narratives, in which a white character “rescues” a character of color—a trope which attempts to signal racial enlightenment even as it confirms the subordinate status of the marginalized. 

The verdict of the inquest? Bad writer! You went too far, Moriarty! Cultural appropriator! Star denied! In other words, Moriarty’s effort was artistically invalid from the get go, because of her skin color.

I’m now experiencing a similar form of inanity in my own publishing travails. For instance: I’m an expert on Billie Holiday. I write on her music often, I discuss it on the radio, I’ve studied it for 20 years. I’m a longtime contributor on jazz for many major publications. The 33 1/3 series—begun in 2003 and now published by Bloomsbury, and of which there are now 127 volumes, each on a single album—told me that I could write a book on a late-period Holiday album, only to renege a few days later by saying that they had to back out, because I was white and a male. And amazingly dense as it sounds (and though that editor has since resigned, but not because of this), the email containing this unhappy message asked me not to tell anyone about it.  

It happens increasingly with fiction, too. I recently published a short story in Harper’s Magazine, “Find the Edges.” Days later, a well-known literary journal told me that they couldn’t take a different story of mine because my story features a female narrator. Not that she wasn’t believable, I was told. Rather, it was because I was male, and so could not possibly be considered credible writing a female—unless I happened to be transgendered. I’m not. Which means, I was SOL. Not because I didn’t create something that wrote circles beyond the claptrap you, reader, are told that you should care about, which very few of you do, which is why you spend your entertainment dollars elsewhere, and not on the material that publishing insists will enrich your experience, lying to you all the time, as the industry constituents lie to themselves. But because a self-professed enlightened person, who spends their life telling the world how progressive they are, took issue with my biological sex and judged me on that, not my work.

Gee.

I thought we weren’t supposed to do that? 

But the reality is, this is the great age of ideological bigotry because certain forms of bigotry are countenanced as part of the morality that is being force-fed to all of us, where any dissension is not disagreement, but abuse, hate speech, harassment. Saying obvious truths most of us sane people know is akin to chemical warfare in the eyes of the self-loathing, depressed, terrified person who founders when having to deal with reality, rather than a life lived as wish-fulfillment intended to overcome deficiencies in morals and intelligence that would take actual hard work to overcome. Shut up and swallow could well be the bumper stick for 2018 for the rest of us. Take it. Unless, of course, you are in certain demographics, parroting tropes made up of words whose meaning you did not know seventeen months ago. In which case, rush for power. You are protected and can as you please. 

Until, of course, the day of reckoning comes. Which it will. It always does.    

As for my Harper’s story: Not it or anything remotely like it ever happened to me or anyone I know. It’s about a man who loses his wife who has two boys. One of the boys has been molested at school and as part of the burden of shame he feels strapped upon him, he is seeking other children to beat him up. I was never molested. I never had a wife who died. But I know that every syllable of that story rings true. And as they say, any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, was purely coincidental. It was, to repeat, fiction, born of my imagination, and my ability to extend myself into the lives of people who deserve our empathy, for it is from the fashioning of these realistic characters that we, in turn, see ourselves, in the very solidity, the very realness, of what they are.

The worst advice anyone could ever give a writer is to write what you know, with what you know being what you have experienced firsthand. What is happening is that a lot of simple, pretentious, unwell people in the publishing community are doing their damnedest to make sure that a lot of writers with limited talent to start with never grow that ability, and that they focus exclusively on a kind of fictive autobiography. Write only about people who look like you. Went to your school. Grew up with a trust fund in Greenwich, Connecticut. It is zombie lit—dead, but somehow still shambling along.

The book industry is becoming increasingly invested in making sure that books are PC-friendly. Its key decision-makers are hell bent on avoiding the uncomfortable side of the kind of people who live their lives trying to find things to be offended by, so as to become, if not a true victim, then at least a vicarious one. The market is filling with woke evangelists of the new “let’s all enable each other” gospel, the sort who speak of “my truth” to affirm that the subjective is the paramount kind of experience in a world without moral foundation, facts, or even truth. Truth overrules all. We answer to truth. We seek to deify our whims, our needs, what we want rather than what is, like children who don’t understand that sometimes you must depart the sandbox before you wish to. Truth is king, and we have to find and adapt to it. 

The assumption here is that this is all very progressive. But how is the progressive idea of a whole humanity advanced by balkanizing people into identitarian silos based on superficial physical characteristics? Isn’t this, in essence, akin to the “scientific racism” that reached its apogee in the racialist theories of the past two centuries? Books were burned then, and books are being burned again, in the sense of being rejected before they are written. 

And if you write something that is better than everything else, that could actually mean something to lives, that holds up a mirror rather than busts out the publishing version of the performance trophy? They are going to hate you. You’re going to be like me. You’re going to to have published 2500 works in your life, and in a week where you’re in the LA Times, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, and talking on the radio, they are going to hate you more than they did the week before, and they’ll hate you more the week after, when you’ve somehow kept going, adding to what you’ve done. 

You’re going to get banned, for life, like I did by the boss at a tiny publisher in Minnesota, called Coffee House, whose covers look like something you would have crafted on Printshop circa 1984 after powering through a Smurfs marathon. You dared to get a story in Harper’s, Colin, and it’s in a book you offered us six months ago? Well, rather than be happy to talk to you, because you’ve done well, and we pay no advance, so thanks for being willing to sit down and talk, we are going to show you that you went too far with your mold-breaking and your success, and you are banned forever. You can’t send us anything.

That’s just one example I could share with you, from the past few weeks. I’ve spent my life reading a lot of books, having a lot of varied experiences, and tragic experiences with death, loss, corruption, and I’ve encountered every opera, film, you name it, just about, and I’ve never encountered anything remotely as backwards as publishing in the here and now. 

But, eventually: this system is going to fall. Because no one wants any of this garbage. This may be where imagination comes to die. But it is also where imagination, which is brilliant, which means so much to keeping us human, making us human, can raise this system to the ground, and where imagination will resurrect the written word.

That’s what I believe, anyway, and I know a lot of people feel like I do, only no one wants to go against the Control Voice, as I think of it, of our broken, fear-mongering, “I’m going to get you” society right now. But I’m human, and I have imagination, and I will. And you do, too. So come with. Invite your friends. If you feel like maybe you don’t have a lot of friends these days, consider that as our imaginations are not nourished, neither is our ability to be vulnerable, to risk failure, to perhaps gain great reward, to gain that which we need more than anything else. Tell me a story. I’ll tell you a story. We’ll tell each other stories. That’s where connection always starts. With a story, made possible by courage to go beyond what we might normally deal in. That’s not only where a story starts. That’s where love starts. Friendship. Art. All at the same time. Because all of those things, really, belong to the same whole. In reality. Not in publishing.  

The policers of imagination try to slot fiction writers into two categories, in terms of adult writing. You are either a genre writer or a literary writer. Genre writing is long on tropes. Your brain cools out, as do your emotions. It’s word-based comfort food. People might get splattered on sidewalks in a crime thriller, but you know going in that they’re going to get splatted on sidewalks. There is little risk, because there is little surprise. 

Literary fiction, meanwhile, will be over-written and pretentious. Its narrative will involve a form of fictionalized autobiography about what is really a staid life, and the kind of people who are that person’s friends, who hobnob with him or her at conferences, will buy it. But only because they want their stuff bought as well, as part of the compact, and this is their makeshift community rather than a community of actual friends. That is the entire market. It won’t crossover into the world. It has no legs, rather like the knights who says “ni” in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a stump on the ground, still spouting off that there’s nothing to see here, all is good. 

The result? People will tell you that no one reads serious literary work any more or seriously funny literature, and they blame the public—those stupid people, fie on them, with their short attention spans. 

But the stupid people with short attention spans are not to blame, because they don’t read books at all. It’s what the system of policed imagination is producing that’s to blame. The mothers of these literary fiction authors don’t even like this work. They say they do; mothers do that, and people in artificial guild-like communities do that. But stick them on a desert island and there is no earthly way they want a Blake Butler book for companionship. Sorry, no way. 

Literary fiction is easily imitated, and easily taught. If it wasn’t easily taught, there would be no MFA system. Do you think Cervantes would have been a better writer if he got an MFA? Flaubert? Emily Dickinson? (She would be bounced so quickly out of any program for daring to innovate like that.)

No one can imitate Poe, or teach that style. No one can imitate A Christmas Carol; it is impossible to teach that level of invention. So when someone of legitimate talent dares to invent, there is the inevitable “not one of us” backlash from the imagination police, the members of which, in this case, aren’t focused on race and gender, but on insecurity and envy. That is, they can’t think up any of this stuff. The hate follows, the behind-backs trash talking, the blocking from anthologies, awards, publication, positive reviews. So what passes now for literary fiction, even beyond the obvious molds of genre writing, becomes super incestuous, with even the “starred review” books selling few copies because the truth is that almost all of it is tightly circumscribed, bereft of imagination. These are people for whom that Kirkus star means everything. 

What we now often seek to do—and Kirkus is only one example—is to vet writing endeavors not based upon their potential impact on readers, but as part of a screening process that aims to anticipate who might be offended. In the literary fiction community, that is a peer-based process, with conformity at a premium. With the overlords—the bastions of the reviews—there is punishment waiting for anyone with the temerity to invent something beyond one’s own life. Let’s face it: Most of us are not whalers dashing off to sea for ripping adventure and deep psychological penetrations. A lot of days, the dull commotion at the Starbucks is as exciting as it gets. 

Those who are offended by a white character daring to express her thoughts and feelings in observing a Muslim character are people who are always offended—and I’d argue unwell. Regrettably, such broken people, who cannot even grasp the simple concept that the universal and the particular in human cultures are complements, not opposites, are becoming increasingly important in publishing houses. Commercial publishing houses (and that includes that micro-ones, that make no money and pay no money, but want to pretend that they’re sufficiently intellectual that they are above it all, and the less you might enjoy something you read, the better it is for you!) are turning into cultural drug dealers, only their drugs are race and gender stimulants. Stop thinking; give us your money. We are giving them less and less of our money, though, because they are killing the artistic works that actually matter.

Real readers, people for whom literature becomes a life force, want imagination. We are at our most human when we invent and allow ourselves to be open to invention. We welcome the risks that come with pure creation grounded in empathy. We are waiting, back at the edge of that battlefield, for Stephen Crane’s return, and so many like him, so that we can agree when they say, “Got it.”

You can get it, too. Come with me. 

The post Zombie Lit appeared first on The American Interest.

Sean Hannity’s Learned Helplessness

A prime time current affairs host who rejects the notion of objectivity, a brazen proxy for the head of state, flexible with his ideology but obsessed with conspiracies, a moralist who hides his business interests behind opaque shell companies and for whom political declamations have become inseparable from economic gain … for anyone familiar with Russian propaganda, Sean Hannity is a familiar type. Propaganda is the dirtiest art form, and just like artistic movements flourish across the world at the same time as a response to similar conditions, so propagandists reach to similar tactics to catch the zeitgeist and manipulate the masses. There’s a method to the Kremlin-Hannity approach. What is to be done about it?

The typical Hannity monologue rises in a series of rhetorical questions until it topples over the edge of sense. On March 27, 2017, for example, a 2-minute long series of questions attacked rival network CBS’s objectivity by asking whether its presenters ever questioned their criticism of George W. Bush, whether they spiked stories which made Obama look bad, whether they had investigated Obama’s ties to a former terrorist, his commitment to American-hating “black liberation theology” or recorded Obama’s economic failings (here Hannity showed a list of stats on the screen, too briefly to read fully). Had CBS, Hannity went on, listed all the laws Hilary Clinton violated when she used a private email server as Secretary of State? Exposed every one of her lies about the death of U.S. diplomats in Benghazi? Explored how media colluded with the Clinton campaign? Questioned how much time they had given to the “conspiracy theory” that Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia?

The effect of such a long list, where some of the charges are serious, others spurious, many debatable, and none explored, is to leave the mind exhausted and confused. The semantic patterns reinforce Hannity’s main message: that we live in a world where there is no epistemological certainty any more. In the run-up to his anti-CBS monologue, Hannity had shown an excerpt of his own appearance on CBS’s Sunday Morning show with Ted Koeppel, where Koppel had accused Hannity of being “bad for America”: polarized news channels on the Left and the Right, argued Koppel, have undermined deliberative democracy and a shared public space. Koppel was placing himself above the fray, implicitly making the case that balance and objectivity were still possible: after all, there has to be a position where you can judge partisan polarization from. Hannity argued that by attacking opinion shows, Koppel was actually just “giving his opinion.” Hannity described himself as “honest” because he admits to being an advocacy journalist, while Koppel’s façade of being “down the middle” is actually fraudulent. “Journalism is dead in America,” concluded Hannity, a common refrain in his monologues: 14 days earlier he had announced that journalism is “dead and buried with flowers on top.” All pretense at objectivity is just subjectivity.

For anyone familiar with Russian media this radical relativism is something very familiar. Both Russian language and international Kremlin broadcasters insist that Western broadcasters such as the BBC can’t be trusted as they all have hidden agendas, and that “objectivity is a myth that is proposed and imposed on us.” It’s a tactic born out of the reality of today’s media environment: in a world where even authoritarian regimes struggle to impose technical censorship, one has to surround audiences with so much cynicism about anybody’s motives that they become immune to hearing other viewpoints and stop believing there is an unbiased voice anywhere. Vasily Gatov, the pre-eminent analyst of Russian media, calls this “white-jamming,” and compares it to putting the audience in psychological headphones. The Turkish, Hungarian and other regimes are adopting the same tactic: it’s the 21st century, information-overload playbook. It’s also a sign of a world where any “objective” ideologies and promises of rational progress provable by “objective” facts have failed people.

With the possibility of “balance” and objectivity undermined, what remains is to be more powerfully subjective than the other side and turn the news into an emotionally compelling drama. Consider the Baltics, which contain ethnic Russian minorities who have radically different versions of reality broadcast to them by U.S., European, national, and Kremlin media. In focus groups, audiences explain how they become unable to decide which version of the “truth” is accurate. Many are drawn towards Kremlin media because they are more resonant, telling a tale about Russians beset by enemies on all sides. Respondents in focus groups in Latvia, for example, explained how the news on Russian TV channels “are emotionally attractive, because some news you watch as an exciting movie. You don’t trust it, but watch it gladly.”

Fox Prime Time’s underlying “movie” tells of a rough struggle with a hostile world. In this mythical tale, the American Fox Hero has to fight off the monsters of the media, dangerous Snowflakes, crafty liberals—armed only with the weapons of sarcasm and outrage. Earlier in the Fox Prime Time evening line-up, Jesse Watters ventures out onto liberal campuses where everyone dislikes conservatives: “So again,” he smirks, “we are under attack.” By the time you get to the end of the night, you’ve reached a much wilder place: Hannity is the father who gets home late from work, mad at the world. His show’s branding features a Captain America-style shield with his name emblazoned on it. The implied takeaway of the narrative is that being surrounded by such a mean world full of dark conspiracies, we need for a superior strong hand at the wheel. How else can we deal with a world of unfathomable hostile plots? “Trump is our last chance to save America” was Hannity’s message in the lead-up to the election. Only Putin, his propaganda claims, can “raise Russia from its knees.”

The runaway success of the genre, in both Russia and the United States, suggests it’s far from trivial to counter-program. One high-minded approach focuses on improving media literacy: educating the audience to tell fake news apart from real, learning to deconstruct the media. Media literacy is noble and necessary, but it can also make publics so skeptical of any media that it erodes trust to the point of cynicism. Indeed, the likes of Hannity use the techniques of media literacy in their own approach. Hannity’s programs feature clips from CBS, NBC and other rivals, which he then deconstructs to show up biases and contradictions. By becoming the vehicle through which to interpret other channels, Hannity immediately places himself next to his audience, becomes its partner in dealing with the dizzying plurality of modern media. In a world of ever-multiplying sources of information, so multifarious they can undermine rather than add to a sense of coherent reality, one of the few things that can bring people together is the very act of watching TV. Whatever else we may be, we are all viewers. And the Fox viewer is on the couch together with Hannity, watching other channels together.

To counter the Hannities, you have to get on the couch next to the viewer and be even more relevant to them. By placing yourself next to the audience, representing their interests, and being involved in looking for solutions together with them, you can generate trust. It may well be that the sort of “objectivity” Ted Koppel yearns for is indeed increasingly impossible. If one were to build a new public service-spirited broadcaster today, it would struggle to be seen as somehow above the fray; it would be just another purveyor of “narratives” among myriads, no more or less trusted than the others. But if you can show you are the viewer’s partner, a different sort of relationship ensues.

Along with this new relationship with the viewer, one needs a mentality which can overcome the fear of a hostile world. Decades before Fox came on the scene, television news had already slipped into a recognizable pattern. Back in 1977, a study of CBS and NBC showed newscasts were so focused on the stories of victims that it “modelled helplessness” 70 percent of the time. “This study suggested that evening news was actually inducing learned helplessness to viewers,” writes Catherine Gyldensted, a Danish media professor and foreign correspondent. Gyldensted has become one of the leading proponents of “constructive news,” which combines the principles of positive psychology with rigorous journalism. As Gyldensted lays out in her book From Mirrors to Movers, “Constructive News” means approaching stories in a different way: instead of focusing purely on victim narratives, it looks for examples of how people have found ways to improve their situations. It means looking for the constructive aspects to any story or character: the same subject who seemed a purely passive victim might also have a resilient aspect. It also means asking different sorts of questions in interviews and debates with politicians, where you force them into actually proposing solutions and collaborating rather than merely mouthing off at each other in a verbal version of WWF wrestling.

At its worst “Constructive News” risks toppling into rose-tinted “happy stories,” the type of pablum dictators love, or worse, into niche stories of little relevance—investigative reports into bike lane improvements. But at its best, it can inspire and break learned helplessness. It’s also popular. In her book, Gyldenstedt quotes an analysis of the “virality” of 7,000 New York Times articles. Content with “low-arousal” emotions, such as sadness, were shared the least. Content which evoked “high-arousal,” negative emotions, such as anger or anxiety (the ones the Hannities specialize in) were widely shared—but not quite as much as those with high-arousal, positive emotions.

It’s no coincidence that the most successful independent TV project in Russia is “TV Rain,” whose catchphrase is “Optimistic Channel.” Between 2008 and 2011, the channel grew its audience rapidly (by Russian independent media standards) when it delivered a message outside the dark conspiracies and fabricated anger of Kremlin TV. TV Rain was at the heart of the mass protests against Putin in 2011 and 2012. The Kremlin crushed the protests with mass arrests, and has starved TV Rain of access to money and frequencies, so that we might never know whether the Optimistic Channel could have grown into something more significant.

U.S. broadcasters have no such excuses.

The post Sean Hannity’s Learned Helplessness appeared first on The American Interest.

Killing Tyranny with Kindness

The Winter’s Tale

directed by Arin Arbus

Theater for a New Audience, Brooklyn, NY

In The Winter’s Tale, a tyrant king brutalizes the kingdom of Sicily. But Theater for A New Audience’s wonderful recent production resisted the temptations that felled The Public’s cheap Julius Caesar. While that 2017 production in Central Park distorted the text in order to place Trump at the center of the show (just as the intrusive President himself would wish), TFANA gives the tyrant in The Winter’s Tale his proper place and weight. Indeed, if the play has any lesson, it is that tyranny must be met with generosity, not scorn or panicky exaggerations.

The Winter’s Tale stands alongside The Tempest, Pericles, and Cymbeline in a group of plays that could be called “tragedies that somehow escape their appointed endings.” By rights, Leontes, the king of Sicily, has written himself into a tragedy. Like Lear, he violently rejects his deserving daughter. Like Othello, he gives himself over to a jealousy that kills his loyal wife. Yet, while Leontes behaves no better than these men, somehow, he avoids their fates.

He is Sicily’s king, so any corruption in himself must disfigure the body politic. Leontes’s viciousness ultimately causes the deaths of his counsellor, his son, and (he believes) his queen. But all the harm he does is physical, not moral. This is not a House of Cards-style story, where everyone has a hidden seam of wickedness and evil sticks like pitch. Here, goodness is indomitable. Though the final act’s redemption reaches the tyrant king, those around him earn it, solving their political crisis quietly with patience, faith, and trust in the truth.

No villain ruins Leontes but himself—no wicked daughters deceive him with flattery, no Iago drips poison in his ear. In an instant he becomes convinced, despite the lack of evidence, that his wife Hermione has become the lover of King Polixenes of Bohemia, his dear friend. As he spirals into self-sustaining despair, Leontes becomes a tyrant to himself, before he acts tyrannically toward others. In Riccardo Hernandez’s scenic design, the stage is expansive, open, even to the heavens (snow falls intermittently). But Anatol Yusef (Leontes) contorts himself as if penned in as he falls victim to his fear. Shorter than most of the cast, he makes himself even smaller; he is his own jailer.

Leontes’s friends, followers, and family rebuke him at every turn, wishing he would allow them to do him good. If there were an external threat to refute or defeat, they might be able to do so, but they can’t find a way to cajole him into opening the door he has barred shut. As Leontes’s madness threatens them, each manages to do what he cannot: hold onto their interior freedom and trust they will find a way out, even if they cannot see it yet. More than that, they trust that the moral choice will lead them to this escape—or will lead others to take up the burden when they can go no further.

The trap for Camillo, a royal adviser, springs when Leontes orders him to poison Polixenes. To find his way out of an impossible situation, Camillo becomes a paradox: a loyal turncoat. He betrays his master’s plan and helps Polixenes escape, defending his king from his self-willed evil even at the expense of his affection.

Antigonus, another courtier, defends Leontes’s newborn daughter from her suspicious father, who has ordered her execution. The most Antigonus can accomplish with his pleading is to have the sentence commuted to exposure—Leontes commands Antigonus to abandon the baby Perdita on a foreign shore “where chance may nurse or end it.” In Bohemia, Antigonus sacrifices his life to keep Perdita safe for one moment more, by deliberately drawing off the bear that menaces the cradle. He cannot save the baby for good, but, moment by moment, he protects her so that she might be saved by someone who can do what he cannot.

Hermione is the most adamant of all. Despite all that Leontes does to persecute her—forcing her to deliver her baby in prison, bringing her to trial for treason when she is still weak from labor—her faith does not waiver. She persists in defending her own innocence, and, in what must be the greater act of hope, in believing that the king’s madness must come to an end. When her husband sends her (heavily pregnant) to prison, she says, “Adieu, my lord: I never wish’d to see you sorry; now I trust I shall.” Kelley Curran movingly conveys Hermione’s dignity and faith, enduring such degradations that we can barely believe she has kept either one.

Hermione spends 16 years either in hiding or transformed into a statue (in this production, the actress playing Paulina, her co-conspirator, seemed to lean toward the former interpretation and Hermione the latter). Either is an extraordinary act of trust that the crisis will end. She settles into an exile of sorts, trusting that her lost daughter will arrive, as prophesied, to call her forth again and clear her name. A modern audience might find this passivity troubling, wishing for an action-taking Lady Macbeth in her stead. But Hermione’s incorruptibility (physical and moral) is a pledge of faith. It requires as much daring as reckless action and seldom receives as much praise.

Why can Hermione, who has truly been betrayed, muster this faith, when Leontes crumbles, undone by the flimsiest of suspicions? Leontes’s fearfulness reframes the whole world as diseased. When he discovers that Camillo has left rather than become a murderer at the king’s command, he takes it not as a rebuke, but as evidence that everything is corrupt. “All’s true that is mistrusted,” he catechizes himself. If Camillo could abandon him, it’s all the more proof that his wife has betrayed him as well.

He sees himself as the only sane man, the only one willing to face the darkness of the world. “How blest am I,” he says, “in my true opinion.” If others do not recoil, it is because they haven’t caught on to the cruel trick of the world yet:

“There may be in the cup

A spider steep’d, and one may drink, depart,

And yet partake no venom, for his knowledge

Is not infected: but if one present

The abhorr’d ingredient to his eye, make known

How he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides,

With violent hefts. I have drunk,

and seen the spider.”

Perhaps Leontes’s paranoia is the tyrant’s curse. Yet the play offers another explanation, a psychological distinction embodied by the citizens of the two countries, Sicily and Bohemia. Leontes personifies one end of what Scott Alexander calls the “Survive/Thrive” spectrum. People with “survive” mindset believe they live in a precarious world, one ruled by scarcity, in which they can only, at best, narrowly and temporarily avoid disaster. Those with the “thrive” mindset believe that life is relatively safe, and now is the time to live expansively and take risks.

We don’t meet characters living in a “thrive” culture until Act Four, when the action shifts to Bohemia. The story skips forward 16 years, so we can meet Perdita, the lost princess rescued by a shepherd and his doltish son (John Keating and Ed Malone, both excellent). In the countryside (costumed in a mix of overalls and ‘80s attire by Emily Rebholz), the thrive mentality is given full rein, arguably to excess.

In Sicily, hope and fidelity seem like profligate madness when tyranny reigns. In peaceful Bohemia, the peasantry seems punch-drunk. Perdita loves a man who is above her station. Her adoptive brother traipses around with his two lovers (as the text of the play specifies), both heavily pregnant (as it does not specify).

The overflowing bounty of the countryside presents a target for the scheming Autolycus (Arnie Burton, brilliant at misusing his charisma). He sells fripperies and picks pockets, though as he walks away with more purses than will fit down his pants, we have no sense that he has seriously harmed his victims. The Bohemian peasants exist among such fecundity that nothing taken is missed.

Indeed, the transition from Sicily to Bohemia is jarring. While in Sicily, the stakes were life and death, in Bohemia, everything seems tinged with farce. Now Polixenes plays the tyrant, as he threatens Perdita’s adoptive family with death for (as he sees it) conspiring to help her seduce his son. But they escape him easily, and their danger only offers another opportunity for Autolycus to fool and fleece them.

For this reason, perhaps, the story can only come to an end in the graver kingdom of Sicily. Camillo, Antigonus, and Hermione didn’t have the Bohemian expectation of endless bounty. Yet they refuse to narrow themselves to fit into Leontes’s extreme “survive” mentality. They hold to the faith that the “thrive” mentality reflects the truth of our condition, and all experience to the contrary can only be a temporary aberration. Each has a smaller yet weighty conviction that evil will not triumph, not even in the heart of one man. And their faith is proven correct.

As the show concludes, the shepherds-turned-gentlemen, now in Polixenes’s good graces as the foster family of his daughter-in-law, have the last laugh on Autolycus. In the thief’s final scene, he robs the shepherd and his son one last time (a plausible addition, one not required by the text). He gets everything he wants: their money, their promise to plead for him with Polixenes, and evidence, he thinks, of their inferiority. Autolycus shares a laugh with the audience about the absurdity of these simpletons being elevated to lords.

But rifle through their wallets as he may, they carry something about them that he doesn’t think to envy. The two men have an expansiveness to them. They take pleasure in the reunion of Perdita and her family. Passion is flowing out over the whole kingdom: A courtier reports that “Who was most marble there changed colour.” And Autolycus can only think that none of this benefits him.

Leontes keeps shrinking his own world, leaving no room for trust or love. Autolycus is, as his name suggested, an artist of autonomy, able to wriggle his way out of anything. Both of them, in their own ways, cut themselves off from hope in something other than themselves.

Together, they suggest that the first victim of a tyrant or a con-man is always himself. A resistance does not need to answer cruelty and crudity in the language of the tyrant’s own actions. After all, he can’t be outdone; he has already enslaved himself to his own passions. Opposition, both political and personal, can take the form of an invitation to virtue (as in Sicily), and even to joy (Bohemia).

Camillo, Antigonus, and Hermione do not only offer a “no” to Leontes, they make their lives a witness to saying “yes” to hope. They are part of an invisible conspiracy—they do not coordinate their actions as part of a larger plan, but, because each denies evil where he or she can, and tries to leave room for the aversion of tragedy, they navigate their way from tragedy to miracle.

The ending is too improbable for anyone but the author to have masterminded. Redemption depended on a willingness to act without knowing or designing the larger picture—a reward not always forthcoming in the real world. To make the right choice, to avoid being mastered by tyrants (internal or external), “It is required you do awake your faith.” Theater for a New Audience’s production will make believers of its patrons.

The post Killing Tyranny with Kindness appeared first on The American Interest.

Armenia’s Crisis of Legitimacy

The resignation of Armenia’s long-time leader Serzh Sargsyan shows that the Armenian political establishment suffers from a crisis of legitimacy. While Armenia’s political environment is likely to get more lively, there is no indication that any political force is ready to tackle the country’s main conundrum: the tight interlinkage between Armenia’s reliance on Russia and its conflict with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh.

Serzh Sargsyan had served as Armenia’s President for a decade, and being term-limited, sought to engineer a transition to a parliamentary form of government in which he aimed to maintain power as Prime Minister. This appears to have been too much for many Armenians, who took to the streets to demand his resignation. Public opposition appeared to be strongly entrenched: Signs of splits in the army surfaced in the past week, with soldiers fraternizing with protesters and army units making it clear they would not obey orders to be deployed in the capital.

Public protests are no novelty in Armenia. The country did maintain a strong sense of political unity in the first years of independence, a time when it fought a war against neighboring Azerbaijan over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, a mainly Armenian-populated enclave in Azerbaijan. Thanks to Russian support and Azerbaijani disorganization, Armenia managed to gain military control not only over Nagorno-Karabakh but over seven adjoining Azerbaijani districts. But as soon as that victory was assured, Armenia’s own internal disputes came to the fore.

In 1996, the opposition challenged the legality of the re-election of Armenia’s first President, Levon Ter-Petrosyan, with street protests. While it failed to prevent his swearing in for a second term, this episode prepared the ground for a palace coup in early 1998, not coincidentally after the President had indicated his willingness to make concessions to Azerbaijan in the all-important Karabakh conflict. Sensing that his public legitimacy was weak following his disputed election, a triumvirate of his closest advisors unseated him, all of whom were intimately connected to Nagorno-Karabakh. Robert Kocharyan, who would succeed Ter-Petrosyan as President, had been the president of the unrecognized territory; Vazgen Sargsyan was the leader of Armenia’s union of war veterans; and Serzh Sargsyan (unrelated to Vazgen) had been the leader of the Nagorno-Karabakh military forces. For the 20 years that have passed since the 1998 presidential election, a native of the separatist territory has held the office of Armenia’s President.

Since Kocharyan’s term ended in 2008, public protests have become the norm following Armenian elections. Sargsyan’s election to succeed Kocharyan that year was marred by opposition claims of fraud, and led to violence on the streets of Yerevan that claimed the lives of ten demonstrators. In other words, the resentment in parts of Armenian society against Sargsyan that is currently on display did not emerge suddenly: It has been brewing for a decade. During that time, Sargsyan sought to balance the fractious and outspoken nature of Armenia’s polity with an effort to build up a semi-authoritarian form of government with the reins of both political and economic power firmly in the hands of his Republican Party of Armenia.

But Sargsyan also led Armenia deeper down the path it chose in the early 1990s, when it sacrificed much of its independence and sovereignty for the sake of territorial conquest. Moscow had been playing both sides of the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict to gain maximum control over both, a policy that continues to this day. It promised assistance to whichever country would accept allegiance to what we now call Russia’s sphere of influence. In the end, the two countries made opposite choices: Azerbaijan decided that the country’s independence was more important than the unclear prospect of securing Russian help in getting back Karabakh. Armenia, by contrast, felt that maintaining control over Karabakh trumped all other matters.

In the years that followed the 1994 ceasefire, Armenia’s leaders made a series of choices that appeared gradual at the time, but taken together, came to limit the country’s room for maneuver. It joined Russian security structures, welcomed the expansion of Russian military facilities on its soil, handed control of its international borders to Russia, and transferred ownership of strategic industries to Moscow to pay off its debts, including its nuclear power plant and energy distribution networks. But Armenia simultaneously sought to maintain as intensive relations with the West as it could. This policy of “complementarity” worked until 2013, when Armenia, like Ukraine, was scheduled to sign an Association Agreement with the European Union. Much as in Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin objected to the signing—and following a tense meeting in Moscow that September, President Sargsyan announced Armenia would not sign the EU deal, and instead join Moscow’s Eurasian Economic Union. Yerevan has since signed a much watered-down version of the agreement with Europe, but the episode showed that when push came to shove, the country’s independence was subject to question.

For Moscow, Armenia has been both a reliable ally and a source of trouble. On the one hand, Russia’s influence on Armenia is paramount, and Yerevan rarely challenges Moscow’s policy priorities. On the other, Moscow has often felt that Armenia’s government does not control its population and civil society effectively enough. Indeed, over the past several years, Russian authorities have pushed Sargsyan to deal more “effectively” with the opposition. Mindful of his public legitimacy and aware of the dangers of going too far, Sargsyan did not heed that advice.

It is telling that all forces in Armenia now emphasize that the dispute is purely domestic, and has nothing to do with the country’s foreign policy. Indeed, Armenia defies the Western imagination, in which post-Soviet states fit neatly into two categories. On one side, we imagine countries with authoritarian governments that cling to Moscow for their security; on the other we see nations yearning for democracy that are also oriented toward America and Europe. Thus, ever since Russia’s actions in Crimea, Western politicians have repeated their intention to shore up Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova and defend these democracies against Russian pressure—and ignored the countries, from Armenia or Azerbaijan to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, who do not fit neatly into these categories.

But this confusion of normative matters and geopolitical orientation is artificial, and certainly was of no help in guiding Western policy toward the two protagonists of the South Caucasus, Armenia and Azerbaijan. For these two countries, geopolitical orientation has nothing to do with their domestic system of government, and everything to do with the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh. Therefore, Armenia’s opposition leaders have gone out of their way to stress that they do not aim to change Armenia’s foreign policy orientation.

The problem is that Moscow may see things differently. Russian officials have seen all popular challenges to government authority in the post-Soviet space as a threat to its own regime interests. President Putin understood long ago that if countries like Georgia and Ukraine succeeded in building accountable, democratic forms of government, Russian citizens would demand the same. On a deeper level, Moscow’s claims to a “sphere of influence” demands weak, authoritarian governments that respond to the wishes of the Kremlin and not to their own populations.

Some observers have expressed surprise at Moscow’s apparently unperturbed reaction to the loss of a trustworthy ally in Sargsyan. But in fact, it is likely that Moscow learnt from the experience of its protégé Viktor Yanukovich in Ukraine, and urged Sargsyan to step down to avoid a challenge to the Armenian system of government as it stands. This would explain the speed, uncharacteristic for the region, with which Sargsyan stepped aside.

But the Armenian opposition, led in the streets by the firebrand Nikol Pashinyan, is not satisfied: They appear intent on pressing for more systemic change to the way Armenia’s political and economic system is run. If so, it may not matter that they pledge allegiance to Armenia’s Russian orientation: They would be seeking to undo a regime type that is a requirement for Russia’s sphere of influence, and which Moscow may very well intervene to preserve.

For the past decade or more, the West has stood by silently while Armenia has sunk deeper into the Russian sphere of influence. Neither America nor Europe has endeavored to find a way to offer Armenia an exit ramp from its dependence on Russia. The Obama Administration did make a brief attempt at this, but it made the mistake of seeking to “unlock” Armenia through its relations with Turkey. That ignored the fact that the main factor determining Armenia’s foreign and domestic policy is not its relationship with Turkey but the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh. This is not an easy nut to crack, but until the West invests seriously in resolving this conflict, Armenia will remain the prisoner of choices it made in the past 25 years—and peace and stability will continue to elude the South Caucasus.

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India and China: The Risks of a Reset

When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi travels to Wuhan, China on April 27, many will be waiting with bated breath to see whether there will be a reset in India-China relations. On the Chinese side, Foreign Minister Wang Yi is already setting the tone, promising “a new starting point in the relationship” after a particularly difficult year of high-profile disagreements. Whatever the outcome of the summit, however, Modi should be wary of such rosy promises: As Japan has already learned the hard way, a reset in relations with China at this stage is likely to benefit China far more than its counterparts.

Japan’s experience should be a cautionary tale for India. Tokyo spent decades investing in deepening economic ties with Beijing, hoping that a China that was integrated globally would rise peacefully, enabling the eventual resolution of all pending bilateral issues. China, however, used the space provided to build its economic and military capabilities and cultivate North Korea as a deterrent to Japan. To this day, China refuses to accept any Japanese sphere of influence, and continues to arouse anti-Japanese sentiments in the Chinese media whenever convenient.

India must avoid falling into the same trap. Delhi has long sought to compartmentalize its disputes with all its neighbors, hoping that economic ties and people-to-people relations will over time build trust to help resolve any lingering border disputes. While this policy has worked with some of India’s immediate, smaller South Asian neighbors, history suggests that it is unlikely to succeed with China.

More than two decades after the 1962 war, Sino-Indian relations improved after the 1988 visit of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. The two countries sought to build people-to-people ties and economic relations while putting the border issue on the backburner. Today China is one of India’s top economic partners and the two countries do collaborate globally in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and on issues like climate change.

China has used the last four decades of peace with India to create its economic miracle and modernize its military. India’s economy, by contrast, has not grown consistently at double digits, and its military modernization is decades behind what it should be. Meanwhile, the border disputes are no closer to resolution, as last summer’s outbreak of hostilities along the Doklam plateau made clear.

The fundamental problem is simple: India believes it is China’s equal, but China does not believe the same of India. South Block mandarins may believe that a high-level visit will “break the ice” and help resolve key issues. But while Beijing may play along to give Delhi the pretense of a victory, at its core China is pursuing a policy consistent with its decades-long, adversarial strategy in Asia.

From the start, the “peaceful rise” of Communist China has been a function of Beijing’s savvy ability to convince other countries to give up their own areas of influence. China has achieved this by building economic and strategic relationships with the immediate neighbors of its competitors—in India’s case, all of its South Asian neighbors—and then egging the neighbors on to push back against perceived hegemony by the country in question.

Starting from the 1950s, China built a close relationship with Pakistan, an alliance which today has a strong military, nuclear, and economic component. From assistance in the nuclear arena to protection at the United Nations Security Council, China has openly supported Pakistan. In return, Pakistan has become, in the words of scholar and diplomat Husain Haqqani, China’s secondary deterrent against India.

Beijing has consistently encouraged Pakistan’s desire for parity with India, and its pursuit of superpower allies who would provide economic and military assistance to enable its debilitating competition with India. The $53 billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the showcase initiative of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), is a prime example. All the massive infrastructure being built inside Pakistan will provide China with access to the Persian Gulf via the port of Gwadar. Unless Pakistan’s economy grows substantially, the country will only end up further in China’s debt under the project’s massive high-interest loans.

Knowing full well that all of India’s smaller neighbors bear a latent resentment against Indian predominance in the region, Beijing has always used the India card in its relations with these countries. Ever since the 1990s, 60 percent of China’s arms exports have gone to three of India’s immediate neighbors: Pakistan, Myanmar, and Bangladesh.

To be fair, Delhi has often hurt its own interests in the region by intervening too deeply in its neighbor’s affairs and ignoring their interests and demands. While the majority of India’s developmental assistance is provided to its immediate neighbors in South Asia, Delhi has never expended enough resources to provide sufficient aid. Further, India’s ability to deliver projects on time has also been hurt by complacency, bureaucratic negligence, and political indifference.

Sri Lanka is another case in point. Sri Lanka’s relationship with China dates back to the 1950s, during the era of Asian bonhomie and non-alignment. The long civil war in Sri Lanka, and India’s sporadic support for Tamil rebels, hurt India’s relations with the country, creating an environment of mistrust which Beijing has subsequently exploited. Defense cooperation between the two countries began in the 1980s, with Chinese support for the Sri Lankan military in its civil war against the terrorist group LTTE (Liberation of Tamil Tigers Eelam). China has since become the leading provider of arms to Sri Lanka. Beijing pursued closer economic relations with Colombo beginning in the 1990s, and large Chinese investments began flowing after 2003. The relationship has only deepened since the Chinese inked a deal to build the Sri Lankan port of Hambantota in 2007.

Bangladesh owes its creation to the 1970 civil war and the 1971 war between India and Pakistan. Delhi’s level of trust with Dhaka is better than with Colombo, but this has varied depending on which government is in power in Bangladesh. Bangladesh is critical to India’s security, especially its northeastern states, but Delhi’s policy has traditionally been one of emphasizing security while ignoring the economic needs and interests of its immediate neighbor.

China supported the government of West Pakistan during the 1971 war, but over the next few decades it built close relations with Bangladesh. China is Bangladesh’s top trading partner, with most of its investment focused on infrastructure, from bridges and highways to power plants.

Most recently, China has set its sights on Nepal, which has long been seen as India’s buffer with Tibet and China. Nepal is also the only Indian neighbor with whom India has an open border policy, which has helped trade and tourism but has also created security challenges. Delhi had strong relations with the Nepalese monarchy for decades, while it supported the nascent democratic movement within the country.

But Nepal’s own identity issues and long civil war, Delhi’s support to the ethnic Madhesis in Nepal, and the perennial fear of Indian economic might overwhelming the smaller landlocked Himalayan state have increasingly led Kathmandu to turn to Beijing for economic assistance. In 2016 a Madhesi-led blockade of the India-Nepal border led Prime Minister K.P. Oli to sign deals with China that allowed Nepal to use Chinese roads and ports. Nepal also supports China’s Belt and Road Initiative, with Oli stating that Nepal would like to remain “neutral” between India and China. Just a few days ago, as part of BRI, China proposed a trans-Himalayan trilateral corridor connecting China, Nepal, and India. New Delhi is wary of any such corridor and will attempt to dissuade Kathmandu from accepting it as well. But the fact remains that China is already the second largest trading partner of Nepal—and the two countries are deepening their military cooperation as well, to India’s consternation.

Modi should not let China’s charm offensive obscure its fundamentally hostile actions. Beijing has mastered the art of using a democracy’s own tools against it. The formula is simple: first, instigate a minor conflict with a country like India (as happened last summer in Doklam); then, display aggression and rattle sabers; then summon traditional and social media platforms to create a major stir—and then, after enough time has elapsed, offer talks or back off, playing the role of the conciliatory peacemaker.

The endgame is to allow that country’s own leaders, media, and business elite to make the argument for why that country should talk to China and avoid conflict. This leads to a semblance of “win-win” cooperation and enhances Chinese prestige, all without forcing China to surrender one inch of its territory or give up on any core interest. Unfortunately, this line of thinking has clearly taken hold of much of India’s leadership in recent months. In December 2017, BJP General Secretary Ram Madhav stated that “China is our important neighbor and we want to strengthen our ties with it” and also remarked that “engaging with China” was “the best available option” for the resolution of the issue of Tibet. Since January 2018, senior BJP leader Subrahmanyam Swamy has stated that instead of “embracing” the United States, India should hold secret talks with China to improve relations.

Modi should beware of this trap. South Asia and the Indian Ocean region were and should always remain India’s core area of influence. Any signs that Delhi is willing to accommodate Beijing’s interests in these regions will only hurt Indian interests.

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The Roots of German Radicalism

In the September 2017 German Federal election, the anti-immigrant populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) took nearly 13 percent of the vote, earning it 94 legislative seats, making it the 3rd largest party in Germany’s parliament. Plenty of ink has been spilled to explain AfD’s surprising strength. The most notable and comprehensive example comes from the European think-tank Bruegel. They regress AfD’s vote against an extensive battery of regional statistics: education, population age, immigration-related characteristics, religion, urbanism, and of course communist history. That last point has come to dominate discussions of AfD’s success: it is impossible not to notice that AfD performed incredibly well in the states that once composed communist East Germany.

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But there is one powerful factor driving AfD’s strength that will be familiar to American poll-watchers but has been mostly ignored in commentary on Germany: sex. The German government collects demographic data on a stratified random sample of voters, and releases tabulations of that data for public use, published in a way to guarantee anonymity of individual voters. This data enables us to say with some degree of precision exactly who voted for which party. With specific data for each State-Age Group-Sex combination, we don’t need to guess who propelled AfD to victory: we can see it directly.

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The first point to note is that many previous analyses of AfD’s performance may have tripped up on the impact of age because they assume age should have a linear effect. But in reality, we can see that AfD performed best among middle-aged people, and worse among the young and old. This pattern repeats itself across virtually all the German Federal states.

But even more striking than age is the sex breakout. AfD performed far worse among women than among men. There is no state and age group pair anywhere in Germany that saw women give a larger share of their votes to AfD than men, and in fact the gaps are reasonably consistent across regions.

AfD didn’t just win men: wherever men made up a relatively large share of a given age cohort in a given state, even women in that state and age cohort were more likely to vote for AfD. An increase in the male-female ratio for a given cohort of 1% is associated with about a 0.5-1.5 percentage point increase in even women’s votes for AfD.

Why do men favor AfD so much more than women? Well, why do American men favor the Republican Party more than women? In the U.S., we often tell it as a story about religious social values. Yet AfD is strongest in the most secular places, and multi-variate regressions show that increased religiosity is actually associated with significantly less support for AfD. So whatever makes German men hostile to immigration (AfD’s defining issue), it isn’t traditional religious values. Rather, it may be that changes in the global economy have systematically disfavored historically male-dominated industries, or that men are more likely to take a protective or defensive view of nationhood.

Or, it may just be that men in some societies are pulled towards more radical politics of many varieties, and just happen to be ticked off at their former political home. This leads to the next vital observation which has been too-often overlooked for Germany: the importance of history. Polling on voter history suggests that at least 420,000 voters switched from the Die Linke party, the successor to the old East German communist party, from 2013 to 2017. While this is fewer than switched from the conservatives—about 1 million—the raw numbers are misleading. The graph below shows what percentage of each party’s 2013 voters switched to AfD in 2017.

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As you can see, more than 1 in 10 Die Linke voters switched to AfD. That’s only matched among “other parties,” which includes a huge swing from the ultranationalist National Democratic Party of Germany, which lost over 90 percent of its voters in 2017, presumably with many going to AfD. AfD also appears to have made major gains from various protest and single-issue fringe parties.

But these figures are almost certainly an underestimate, because the same survey says 1.4 million AfD voters also voted for AfD in 2013. The only problem? AfD only received 810,000 votes in the whole country in 2013 in the constituency vote, and about 2 million in the party vote. It’s plausible that 1.4 million of the 2 million party-line voters showed up again, but AfD also massively overperformed in the constituency-level voting. At the constituency level, AfD probably made even bigger gains from other parties, especially Die Linke.

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Tellingly, we can also look at the age and sex makeup of Die Linke’s voters in 2013, compared to 2017. These polls show that Die Linke experienced significant losses among middle-aged men, especially in East Germany, the exact category that AfD won with flying colors. Across every metric, the story is clear: the rate at which AfD peeled off voters from the center-right, neoliberal, and center-left parties was quite similar, but the formerly-communist Die Linke, extreme-rightist minor parties, and protest parties hemmhoraged voters to AfD. The story here isn’t of conservatives getting more conservative, but of the extremes of the political spectrum bending back on themselves, and a cluster of East Germany men with weak commitments to stable democratic institutions voting for whichever party most symbolizes protest, anger, and opposition. In the past, that meant Die Linke with its communist ties, the NPD for its ultranationalism, or even the Pirate Party. Today, it means AfD, a loosely-organized political movement based around being a thorn in the side to Germany’s political establishment.

But if weak commitment to institutions is a driving factor, then we may want to explore German history from before 1989, or even 1945. Political institutions can be quite durable. A well-known map of Poland’s electoral outcomes shows that the formerly Prussian-controlled part of Poland reliably votes for somewhat less populist parties in Polish elections. Other research has shown that the spread of the Reformation through Germany left a durable political imprint to the present day. Across the border in Austria, right-wing populists have also seen recent victories. The interesting thing about Austria, however, is that, like Germany, it experienced communist occupation in part of the country. For ten years after WWII, the USSR occupied a large portion of northeastern Austria. Economic research has shown that this occupation created economic and demographic dislocations with real effects persisting to the present day.

So might there be a deeper origin to which parts of Germany have a weaker commitment to stable democratic institutions? Virtually every analysis of the 2017 election notes the blindingly obvious fact that East Germany was a hotbed of AfD support. This is written down to the legacy of communism, which seems plausible. Conservative populism has proven appealing in virtually every post-Soviet country from East Germany to the Russian Far East.

One thing we could do is to look at German governance before Germany was a unified state and see if it predicts modern political choices. The borders of German states pre-unification were different from modern borders in many cases, so can help explain district-level variation within and across German states. I have coded every election district in Germany based on its pre-unification governance, and tested their statistical associations across a wide range of models. Across almost every test I could define, one factor kept popping up: the longer a given electoral district had been governed by Prussia, the less it favored AfD given almost any set of controls.

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Different places saw different amounts of time controlled by Prussia. But broadly speaking, areas with Prussian dominance are associated with between 0.5 and 5 percentage points lower AfD vote after controlling for age, sex, sex ratio, and other key factors, with that range mostly determined by variation in the duration of Prussian rule. This helps explain AfD’s great strength in Saxony and Thuringia, yet relative weakness in Brandenburg, all three of which were dominated by communism. It also helps explain why AfD made greater gains in southern Germany, never directly dominated by Prussia, than North-Rhine Westphalia or the Rhineland, where Prussia was the dominant power for over a century. Just as a more free market rightist party did better in Prussian-dominated parts of Poland, so the German neoliberal FDP party made major gains in formerly-Prussian parts of Germany as well.

Determining causality is challenging and must be left to more formal academic study. But it should be noted again that this is a very similar effect as observed in Poland: Prussian dominance versus some other polity, be it the Electorate of Saxony or Russia, is associated with less support for populist or extremist movements in recent years. It should be noted as well that East Germany’s distinctiveness and radicalism is not new. Many German commentators have mourned the rightward turn in Saxony because Saxony was once a pioneering progressive state. But that misses the point: Radicalism, the appeal of revolutionary protest politics, is less about coherent policy platforms, and more about the appeal of mob, tribe, and movement. For all its legacy of militarism and authoritarianism, Prussia also left a legacy of education and stable bureaucracies.  Moreover, East Germany’s borders were not quite so new as we may think. East Germany was clearly a very different political world than West Germany well before communist domination, as can be in the electoral maps of 1933, 1920 ,1912, 1898, and 1893. To the extent that communist history is associated with a major political break, it may be partly tracing far more ancient divisions than the Cold War.

Indeed, from October of 2017 to October of 2018, the Protestant world is celebrating one of Europe’s oldest movement-based, mass-media-fed, anti-institutional, protest-oriented populist social movements: the 500thanniversary of the Reformation. The Reformation began, of course, in Saxony, the AfD heartland. It is not too much of a stretch to suggest that populist revolt has been a crucial element of East German politics for at least 500 years, especially among middle-aged men dissatisfied with their lot in life, their treatment by formal transnational institutions, and their options in conventional politics.

Postscript: Much has been made of AfD’s mobilization of nonvoters. However, every party made net gains among nonvoters, that is, picked up more 2013 nonvoters than it lost to nonparticipation. Some parties did better than others of course, but two parties stand out for having over net participation changes account for over 10% of their 2017 vote: net participation increases account for 23% of AfD’s constituency-level voting or 20% of their party-list voting, while it accounts for 22% of FDP’s constituency-level voting and 14% of their party-list voting. In other words, AfD did slightly better than FDP at getting nonparticipants to show up and vote. Overall, FDP picked up more CDU/CSU voters than AfD as well, as well as more Greens, first-time voters, and new residents of Germany. The only category where AfD truly excelled was in taking voters from Die Linke.

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Rebooting the Dismal Science

At a May Day parade in Moscow, according to a Soviet joke of the 1970s, a foreign communist is standing atop Lenin’s Tomb in the place of honor next to the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev. Marching troops pass in front of them, followed by artillery pieces, tanks, and rockets. Bringing up the rear walks a group of middle-aged men carrying briefcases. “Comrade Brezhnev,” the visitor asks, “who are those men with briefcases?” “Oh, them,” Brezhnev responds, “those are our economists.” This puzzles the visitor: “But what are economists doing in a parade displaying the military might of our great socialist motherland?” To this Brezhnev replies, “You’d be amazed at how much damage they can do.”

Economic officials and the professional economists who supply them with ideas about economic management have considerably less power in the free-market economies that now dominate the world than they did in the centrally-planned systems of traditional communism; but what they think and what they write still matter a great deal. The promotion of economic growth has become the supreme goal of governments everywhere. Credentialed economists have become latter-day versions of the high priests of traditional societies, presumed to have special insights into the achievement of the highest social goals. Dani Rodrik is a credentialed economist—he teaches at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard—who believes that economists have done economic and political damage, not, certainly, on the scale of powerful armed forces but in significant ways that bear identifying and correcting, all of which he discusses in his book Straight Talk on Trade.

Rodrik is best known for his warnings, going back two decades, that the expansion of the cross-border flow of goods, money and people known as globalization was going too far too fast to be sustained politically. The ongoing backlash against it, evident in the election of Donald Trump to the presidency in the United States and the rise in Europe of populist parties hostile to globalization, have borne out his prediction. This book, an amalgam and reworking of his occasional writings for non-specialists, does address globalization and its defects. Its title, with “straight talk” understood as unconventional or dissenting ideas, accurately reflects some of its contents. It could with equal accuracy, however, be entitled “The Trouble With Economics and Its Practitioners.”

Rodrik charges his fellow economists with acting, on occasion, in something approaching bad faith. He offers as an example the establishment of Europe’s common currency, the euro. Economists understood that without a complementary set of Europe-wide political institutions the euro was unlikely to function smoothly. Rather than oppose establishing it without them, however, Europe’s economic officials and their advisors largely kept silent, assuming that such institutions would ultimately be put in place and that all would be well. Europe still lacks continent-wide political institutions and the economic troubles the euro has caused have in fact generated popular resistance to creating them, leaving the Europeans with the worst of both worlds: for economic reasons they cannot afford to abandon the common currency, but for political reasons they cannot manage to take the steps necessary to make it work.

Economists have also, Rodrik says, oversold the benefits and downplayed the costs of trade. They have done so “for fear of empowering the protectionist barbarians” who favor restricting trade for their own narrow, selfish reasons. Economists do have good reasons to defend free trade. The doctrinal basis on which the case for it rests, the Englishman David Ricardo’s early-nineteenth-century theory of comparative advantage, comes as close to being universally valid, like a law of physics, as any proposition in the social sciences. Moreover, in the 1930s the erection of barriers to trade, which is what protectionists seek, worsened the economic suffering that the Great Depression imposed. (While they are unlikely to lead to economic disaster, the tariffs the Trump Administration has announced are also unlikely to make America and the world better off.) Then, after World War II, the expansion of trade not only contributed to postwar prosperity but also tied the Western countries together politically, helping to end the animosities that had historically produced wars between and among them and cementing the coalition that confronted the Soviet Union and international communism during the Cold War.

Trade does bring benefits to the countries that participate in it. It seldom if ever, however, brings such benefits equally to everyone it affects. In addition, trade changes the distribution of wealth: some people gain, others lose. Trade, like other economic activities, is subject to “market failures”—distortions that lead to less-than-optimal outcomes in response to which government intervention may be warranted. Economists know this, of course, but had they been willing to say it publicly with greater force and frequency, Rodrik suggests, they might have helped to foster policies that could have minimized some of globalization’s undesirable side-effects and thus mitigated the political backlash against it. In general, he believes, restraining, or at least not expanding, international trade and finance is necessary to reduce the opposition to them and preserve the economic benefits they undoubtedly bring.

Finally, Rodrik argues that the professional habits and biases of economists have encouraged the adoption of unsuitably universal, one-size-fits-all approaches to economic matters. Many roads, he believes, rather than a single golden highway, lead to the Nirvana of economic growth. Outside Europe and North America “economic growth miracles happened not where policy makers slavishly copied policies and institutional arrangements from the West but where they crafted new arrangements more appropriate to their conditions.”

In countries around the world, the United States, Germany, and the International Financial Institutions imposed standard programs of “structural reform” on economically distressed countries, Greece being a prime example. The standard formula for such reform, however, tends to yield growth only over the long run, exacting politically toxic economic costs in the short term. In addition, some studies show that rapid growth is associated “with a targeted removal of key obstacles to growth,” which will vary from country to country, rather than with “broad liberalization and economy-wide reforms” of the kind the proponents of structural reform invariably recommend.

This misplaced universalism has its roots in a misunderstanding of the nature of the discipline of economics. It cannot, as the physical sciences do, discover laws that are valid everywhere and at all times. “Propositions in economic science,” Rodrik notes, “are typically context specific rather than universal.” Economists are in the business of building models—simplified representations of the way the economic world works; but they, and the policymakers they advise, should never rely on a single model. Their task is to decide which models are most useful in particular cases, which is a matter of judgement and therefore an art rather than a science.

Rodrik certainly does not recommend that policymakers ignore economists, or that economists cease to offer their views on issues with which policymakers must grapple. From his book, however, emerge three guidelines for their engagement with public policy. The first is candor: “A more honest narrative on the world economy,” he writes, might “have prepared us for the eventual backlash [against globalization] and, perhaps, even rendered it less likely.”

Economists ought also to encourage, and practice, a diversity of approaches. Different policies for different circumstances, and small-scale experiments rather than the application of a single economic model, will maximize the chances of success. Mao Zedong’s slogan of the 1950s (honored, like much of what the Chairman said, more in the breach)—“Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend”—provides an appropriate rule for policymaking.

Finally, economists, like almost everyone else, could do with a greater measure of humility. Speaking in 1974 in accepting the Nobel Prize for Economics (known officially as the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel” to distinguish it from the other, older, Nobel awards) Friedrich von Hayek confessed his concern that “the Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess.” He was, he went on, “almost inclined to suggest that you require from your laureates an oath of humility, a sort of hippocratic oath, never to exceed in public pronouncements the limits of their competence.”

In the same spirit forty-four years earlier, in an essay entitled “Economic Prospects for Our Grandchildren,” Hayek’s intellectual sparring partner and friend John Maynard Keynes, the greatest of all twentieth-century economists, had established a goal for his profession. “If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people, on a level of dentists, that would be splendid.” That remains an appropriate goal for the economics profession and, according to Dani Rodrik, one that its members have not yet achieved.

The post Rebooting the Dismal Science appeared first on The American Interest.

How the French Mourn

On March 23, an ISIS-affiliated terrorist stormed a supermarket in the small French town of Trèbes, shot two people dead, and took others hostage as human shields. After security forces had negotiated the release of all but one of his captives, a senior gendarme, Arnaud Beltrame, volunteered to take her place. He saved her life and paid with his own. Later that day, in Paris, two hoodlums murdered a Holocaust survivor, 85-year-old Mireille Knoll. Prosecutors have characterized this as an anti-Semitic crime. 

The events had this in common: One could not speak intelligibly of them without discussing Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. The faiths of the murderers and the victims were central facts, not incidental ones. This, precisely, is not supposed to happen in France: France is culturally inhibited and legally prohibited from recognizing citizens as Jews, Christian, and Muslims. You are either a citizen of France or you are not. Faith is a private matter. The French believe the government has no business involving itself in religious affairs, nor does religion have any business involving itself in government. 

Yet this happened in France, and the outpouring of emotion that followed, and the way this emotion was expressed, was suggestive. The words the French didn’t use to describe what had happened, the allusions they didn’t make, hint at France’s inability fully to confront, or properly to mourn, traumatic and neuralgic episodes in France’s own history. These same words suggest the limitations of laïcité as a legal and intellectual apparatus.

From the French state’s mythical origins in 496 CE to the Revolution of 1789, the Catholic Church and the French state were entwined.1 They were legally wed, in a sense, lending legitimacy to an arrangement that might otherwise seem sordid. Yet one suspected that avarice played some role in their ardor, and the more extravagantly the two spent, the more one wondered if the pious devotion was a pretense. 

Nonetheless: The Church was undeniably beautiful. Skeptics, Voltaire most notably, chafed under royal censorship and deplored the clergy’s influence on the monarchy. But the unyielding fact remains: The period France spent under the influence of the Catholic Church before the Revolution was much longer than the time elapsed since the Revolution. Unsurprisingly, the Revolution failed to expunge the legacy, institutions, and habits of mind of Catholicism. The notion that France could simply start anew was a conceit. 

The Revolution was as anti-clerical as it was anti-monarchical. On October 10, 1789, the National Constituent Assembly seized the properties France’s largest landholder. This was the Catholic Church. They stripped the Church of its privileges. Clerics who refused to swear their loyalty to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, placing it above any religious doctrine, were first replaced, then punished, then exiled. Subsequently, if caught they were subject to summary execution, along with anyone who harbored them.

Some 30,000 priests were sent into exile or penal colonies. During the Reign of Terror, mobs aroused by ghastly rumors and equipped with munitions from plundered arsenals descended upon bishops and priests, massacring them and mutilating their bodies. Women on their way to mass were beaten on the streets. Clerics were drowned—200 at once, in Paris; Carmelite nuns sent to the guillotine, buried naked in mass graves. Countless more died in prison of disease or hunger. The Sabbath and the Christian calendar were abolished, replaced with months named “Liberty” and “Reason.” Monastic vows and religious holidays were banned. Shrines, statues, icons, bells, abbeys, and priories were destroyed, and crosses, heaped into piles, were set alight in public bonfires. Saints’ days were abolished. St. Tropez was renamed Héraclée. By 1794, the vast majority of France’s 40,000 churches had been sold at auction, converted to another use, or destroyed.

The revolutionaries took special pains to desecrate Notre Dame Cathedral by holding the “Festival of Reason” inside it. Perhaps it is this suppressed memory that has given rise to hysterical fantasies of ISIS raising the black flag over Notre Dame. ISIS will never raise that flag. Anyone who contends otherwise is deeply confused. The French themselves did this, to themselves, and have never managed to come to terms with it. 

Every ideology in France since has represented an attempt to replace the faith that was lost with a new form of devotion: nationalism, reason, science, liberty, the rights of man. The substitute ideologies have proven their power to compel faith, for better and for worse, and not just in France. They are all creedal systems; they are different from Catholicism, but all fulfil the same human yearning to make meaning of things.

The Revolution was hope, spectacle, and infamy. Without it there would be no modern France. But it was also a failure on its own terms by the time Napoleon was crowned Emperor in 1804. France does not know quite what to think of it. The monarch and the aristocracy had to go, but did monarchy and aristocracy as ideals have to go with them? And the Church, too? And the Terror—was it a necessary evil? Might the ends have been achieved without the bloodletting and the inexorable, permanent rancor to which it gave rise? Even Jean-Paul Marat, of all people, saw what was coming. His timetable was wrong, his prophecy correct: “You are forever annihilated, 50 years of anarchy awaits you, and you’ll only emerge with a dictator, a true patriot and statesman. O babbling people, if only you knew how to act!”2

Many on the French Left to this day cannot admit the revolutionaries did anything wrong. Others cannot quite define what the Revolution did right. It was something, to be sure; but what exactly? They do not agree. A few have regretted the whole business, as the history of the founding of Sacré Coeur church illustrates vividly. Laicité, usually translated as secularism, descends from this history of irreconcilable division. Its purpose, in a sense, is to cordon off this debate, that political life might proceed.

Laicité is one of the creedal values of Republican France, with overwhelming public support. But this is not secularism as Americans understand it. If contemporary Americans imagine that Christian piety and Enlightenment values fit together, this is owed not to their natural fit but to a uniquely American experience of reconciling them. France has never reconciled Christian piety and the Enlightenment. We see evidence of this in the species of perplexing spectacle I will soon describe.

Republican France has inherited another ideal directly from the Revolution: individual rights, as opposed to communal rights. Official France recognizes citizens, not the religious or ethnic groups to which they belong. When the French Revolution emancipated Protestants and Jews, it did not emancipate them as groups. It declared them citizens of France. By implication this meant they were equal citizens, entitled to the rights of all citizens. To this day, the French state vigorously rejects religious or ethnic particularism in the public sphere. 

The 1905 law on the Separation of the Churches and State finalized this process by ending all public funding of religious groups.3 In other European countries, religious groups have long enjoyed something like a corporate identity. In Germany, for example, the state subsidizes officially recognized religious communities, affording the state some measure of control over instruction in religion and binding members of these communities to the state’s secular codes of public appearance and behavior. Not in France. Because most Catholic churches were built well before this law was passed, the state continues to maintain them as public facilities. But immigrants who have arrived since—Buddhists, Protestants, Muslims, or Jews—must build and pay for their own places of worship. In theory, this means the Church and the State have at last been near-perfectly separated. In practice, it means that France’s mosques are often foreign-funded, usually by states that do not remotely share French ideals. 

In theory again, laïcité, guaranteeing equality before the law for all citizens, militates against anti-Semitism.4 This is why the religions of the murderers and their victims must be irrelevant. But they are obviously not irrelevant, because secular France is today home to half a million Jews and some 4.5 million Muslims. These figures are estimates based on polling data: France counts its citizens by their citizenship, not their religion; questions about religion are banned from its formal census.

The overwhelming majority of Jews and Muslims are recent arrivals to France, most from former French colonies in North Africa. If anyone suggests to you that French Muslims are not “really French” because they are not part of its ancient and traditional fabric, keep in mind that this is also true of French Jews. When dignitaries and celebrities declare that France would not be France without its Jews, as in this manifesto, they are forgetting—perhaps deliberately?—that before decolonization, when some 80 percent of contemporary France’s Jewish population arrived, France was France. 

No matter: Here they are. They have perhaps brought some enmity with them, the narcissism of small differences, but many will attest that they lived together amicably enough in North Africa. French Muslims, however, have since been worshipping at mosques where imported imams advance a more astringent agenda than the folk Islam practiced by their grandparents. French society lacks both the habits of thought it needs to describe with precision the obscurantist currents beneath le long fleuve tranquille of French life, and it moreover lacks the legal apparatus deal with them.

The achievements of post-Christian France have been remarkable. Reason, science, liberty, and the rights of man are now universal ideals. France is a humane, advanced, and decent country. There is no hunger. Bakers are never on strike. By law, bread must be abundant in the capital. The government will never make that mistake again. Heretics are not burnt at the stake. Agents of the state lay down their lives to save ordinary citizens. It a free country, where all may practice their religion as they see fit, so long as they don’t see fit to murder anyone in its name. Or they may practice no religion at all. Everyone in France may speak freely, as Voltaire hoped—but there are some telling exceptions to this rule, exceptions that show where laïcité and reality cannot quite be reconciled. 

Through the process of psychoanalysis and conscious mourning, Freud held, neuroses and their associated hysterias and compulsions could be transformed into ordinary misery. France has not escaped the tangle of religion and politics, faith and ideology, that the Revolution was to have ended. Many believe they have moved beyond it, but when events prove them wrong, their tongues get tied in knots. This haunted house of repressed memory, not political correctness, is why the French cannot bring themselves to speak forthrightly about Jews and Muslims, or about Christians for that matter. The memories are too painful and give rise to longings that produce too much internal conflict.5

It is no easy matter to work out the connections, of course; any thesis about the way mental habits and psychological traits formed by centuries of religious culture inform the secular present is by definition untestable. Carl Jung, inspired by a Freudian notion, wrote that, “The faith of a Catholic is not better or stronger than the faith of a Protestant, but a person’s unconscious is gripped by the Catholic form no matter how weak his faith may be.” He believed this accounted for the fanatical atheism of lapsed Catholics, particularly in Latin countries like France: “The absolutism of the Catholic Church seems to demand an equally absolute negation, whereas Protestant relativism permits of variations.” No one can prove such an assertion true or false. But no one can dismiss it out of hand, either.

France, largely—and certainly the rest of the world—has forgotten the details of the Revolution. That a psychological struggle over it is nevertheless at work is clear to any outside observer. I will show you how.

Let us return to the events of March 23. Redouane Lakdim, a 25-year-old dual citizen of France and Morocco, hijacked a car in Carcassonne, wounding the driver and killing the passenger. According to toxicological reports, he was stoned out of his mind. He opened fire on four police officers, seriously wounding one, then drove to nearby Trèbes, where he stormed a supermarket. Swearing allegiance to the Islamic State, he demanded the release of Salah Abdeslam, the only terrorist to survive the coordinated attacks on Paris of November 13, 2015.

The news flashed across everyone’s screens: ISIS, a supermarket, at least two dead, more trapped. GIGN, the elite tactical unit of the French National Gendarmerie, was on the scene almost immediately. The hostage has since been identified as Julie, a married 40-year-old mother of a two-year-old girl. A professional engineer, she was working at the Super U because she had been laid off. For 45 minutes she was the last captive remaining, with a terrorist’s pistol glued to her temple.

The gendarmes entered the supermarket. Lieutenant-Colonel Arnaud Beltrame put down his weapon and walked toward the terrorist with his hands in the air, asking him to release the hostage and allow him to take her place. He left his cellphone on the table, the line open, so that his colleagues could listen. The terrorist agreed, having told Julie how eager he was to kill someone in uniform. Julie fled, unharmed. Three hours later, shots rang out. GIGN stormed the building. They killed the terrorist, but it was too late: Beltrame had been mortally wounded, shot in the throat and stabbed. 

Beltrame was a devout Christian. He had recently married his wife in a civil ceremony; they were engaged to be married in a religious ceremony in June. As he lay dying, the priest who was to marry him at the Basilica of Saints Nazarius and Celsus instead married him in his hospital bed. Then he performed the last rites. As Beltrame’s brother Cédric said, “He certainly knew he didn’t stand a chance.” Julie says she cannot stop thinking of her savior. 

Does this bring any particular story to mind? Of course it does.6 If it was obvious beyond words, it was also beyond words. The event triggered an unconscious, or half-conscious, collective memory, and a grief long suppressed. Thus Aurélien Marq, a columnist whose biography describes him not only as a Senior Official in charge of Homeland Security, but as a man “passionate about religious history,” wrote a tribute to Beltrame that made every imaginable allusion to one particular religious history—and yet could not put it plainly in a column published four days before Easter Sunday: 

It seems as if by pouring your blood you have caused myriad flowers to bloom at the foot of the tricolor, placed by the hands of an entire people. There has never been such a spring. . . .

I do not think anybody imagined how much France needed you . . . you made the sacrifice of your life to save someone else’s. . . . You have proven to us in the most beautiful way that we are still capable of grandeur, of courage, of nobility, of heroism. Because you are a hero—and about you, this word is not overused.

Because there is Arnaud Beltrame, every Frenchman can feel proud of his country and his culture, of a certain chivalrous idea of ​​what we aspire to be. Because there is Lieutenant-Colonel Arnaud Beltrame, every French soldier can carry even higher the honor of the army, and every gendarme now discovers, putting on his uniform, that it shines with greater brilliancy than he realized just a few days ago. Because there is Arnaud Beltrame, everyone knows that France is worth it, that its dignity is intact, and that it will never surrender. …

One day, our children’s children will ask not “why” but “for what” did Arnaud Beltrame die? Our children will be able to answer them: “He died to save an unknown, because he was a good man. He died to save France, because he was a soldier. He died so that we could think and speak freely today, because he was a man of faith and a seeker of truth. And do you know? Arnaud Beltrame is immortal.

Beltrame, in this column as in so many others, and in every official oration in his honor, died for every glory of France—for its culture, for the honor of the army, for the uniform, for France’s dignity, its chivalry, its nobility, its grandeur, its freedom of expression—except Christian virtue. 

The philosopher Martin Legros struggled on television: “President Macron says he is a French hero, a servant of French liberty and fraternity.”

Almost…

“The hero is one who, by his decision, embodies values and revives them. Watch how he almost erased the terrorist attack through his heroic action. As if the hero conquered death by his own death.”

So close…

A psychiatrist, Legros finally allowed, might even see something Christ-like in the gesture. He pronounced the word—Christique—as if it were a rare psychiatric condition. 

Why is this? It is because France has no history of being both a Christian country and a free one at once. Morality has been officially defined since 1789 in exclusively secular terms. As a Christian country, France did not embrace religious tolerance; to the contrary, anti-Muslim sentiment here may be traced to the Battle of Tours. French anti-Semitism, too, is an atavism of its Christian past. The long French history of killing and expelling Jews culminated in the most shameful event of modern French history: The 1942 roundup of Jewish refugee children, by French police, on behalf of the Nazis. More than 4,000 children were herded into the Vel d’Hiv velodrome and deported to Auschwitz. How did the police justify this to themselves? On the grounds that these children were not French citizens. The very logic that emancipated the Jews was used as a pretext for infamy.

This rafle du Vel d’hiv was precisely the event Mireille Knoll escaped. What we were watching, then, in the wake of March 23, was a France trying to reconcile its shame, not only about Madame Knoll’s murder but all the other murders it has committed in the name of religious particularism—of Jews, of Protestants, of Muslims—with their longing to love Beltrame’s sacrifice as the Christ-like act it was. 

This admixture of shame, grief, guilt, and longing for the taboo resulted in a strange day. On the morning of March 29, the French took to the streets to honor Arnaud Beltrame, laying flowers before every gendarmerie and police préfecture in the country, watching the procession of his coffin, accompanied by a full honor guard, from the Pantheon to les Invalides. Flags were lowered to half-mast on public buildings. Throughout, the bells of Notre Dame Cathedral tolled. In the evening, they took to the streets again to protest Madame Knoll’s murder, all the while unable clearly to say why Beltrame’s heroism was so glorious or Madame Knoll’s murder so infamous. 

Everyone (or Americans, anyway) defaulted immediately to the hypothesis that Madame Knoll was murdered by Jew-hating Muslims, as opposed to “real” French people. Some Americans concluded that this proved the National Front must be good folk who basically had the right idea about Muslims. Bari Weiss made an argument all too close to this in the New York Times and got far too many of the critical details wrong. Yes, France has a Muslim anti-Semitism problem. It also has far-Right and far-Left anti-Semitism problems that are far older and much deeper. 

But it’s not yet clear that any of these problems defined this murder. From what was reported at the inquest, it may not be easy to prove beyond reasonable doubt the charge of anti-Semitic motivation. The prosecutors were under tremendous political pressure to describe it as anti-Semitic, particularly because of the symbolism of Madame Knoll’s escape from the roundup at Vel d’Hiv. But from what we know so far, it sounds as if these were garden-variety criminal lowlifes who murdered her for kicks or spare change—or perhaps, as one of them confessed, because she reported the other to the police.

One of the murderers is named Alex Carrimbacus. He has probably never set foot in a mosque in his life. Indeed, this human scum seems to have been so “authentically French” that his prison nickname was “Le Marseillais.” His accomplice, Yacine Mihoub, was of North African origin and one assumes in some sense a Muslim, but neither a devout one nor even a radicalized one. In fact, Interior Minister Gerard Collomb was clear on this point: Whereas the terrorist who killed Arnaud Beltrame was indeed a radicalized Muslim, known to French security forces, Madame Knoll’s murderers were not. At first, Collumb told the National Assembly that Mihoub had said to his accomplice, “She’s a Jew, she must have money.” But according to anonymous judicial sources, even this is unclear. These words, they say, cannot be found in any recording of the hearing. 

Mihoub, an alcoholic and an addict, had previously been committed to a mental hospital, having threatened to burn down his own mother’s building. The murderers met in prison, where Mihoub was doing time for sexually assaulting a 12-year-old girl, and Carrimbacus for aggravated theft. Carrimbacus sounds like what the far Right would call un français de souche—a real Frenchman. And Mihoub? If we assume Carrimbacus is a real Frenchman who harbored a real French hatred for Jews, it’s plausible to imagine that under interrogation he sought to exculpate himself by telling the police that Mihoub did it because he was a Muslim. He says he did not know Madame Knoll was Jewish until Mihoub told him before murdering her. Mihoub, however, who had known Madame Knoll since his childhood, emphatically says he did not kill her—Carrimbacus did. In any event, the prosecutors indicted both men for murder aggravated by religious animus. But Carrimbacus alone is the source of the report that Mihoub cried the takbir before murdering Madame Knoll, and he couldn’t even keep that story straight. 

Writing for the New York Times, Bari Weiss, or more likely her editor, clearly thought she would offer refreshing moral clarity with the headline: “Jews Are Being Murdered in Paris. Again.” Weiss continued: “Authorities are investigating the murder as being motivated by the ‘membership, real or supposed, of the victim of a particular religion.’ But euphemisms should have no place in describing the nature of Mireille Knoll’s death.” It is not a euphemism. It is a legal definition, like “a person is guilty of manslaughter in the second degree when, with criminal negligence, he or she causes the death of another person.” 

“Anti-Semitism,” Weiss continued, “was supposed to be a disease of the far Right. But the people actually killing Jews in France these days are not members of the National Front. They are Islamists.” Anti-Semitism wasn’t supposed to be a disease of the far Right; it is a disease of the far Right. The National Front has a surprising amount of support in the so-called sensitive urban areas. (That is a euphemism.) The anti-Semitism of the National Front does not turn Muslims off. Islamists and the far Right are on the same side of the spectrum in France: the counter-Enlightenment side. And no American Jew, including Bari Weiss, has any business apologizing for the National Front.

In reality, anti-Semitic crime has of late been declining sharply, not rising, in France: Since 2015, such crimes have decreased by 58 percent.7 Spectacular terrorist murders aimed at Jewish targets—a school, a kosher supermarket—make the news precisely because they are exceptionally rare events. Jews are extremely safe in France.

“She was murdered by men apparently animated by the same hatred that drove Hitler,” Weiss continued. No. There is no evidence that they ascribed to anything like the Nazis’ ideology, or any ideology at all. The murder of an elderly Holocaust survivor is an abomination, and particularly upsetting in its symbolism because she was a survivor of the rafle du Vel d’Hiv. (Let’s remember where the National Front stands on that event.) But to insinuate that contemporary France is anything like Nazi Germany—or even like Vichy France—trivializes Nazi Germany and Vichy France alike. 

The French pride themselves on France’s freedom of expression, and given its history, it treasures particularly the freedom to blaspheme. France paid a heavy price for that freedom in the blood of the French Revolution, and continues to pay it now. In the wake of the attack on Charlie Hebdo, the words ascribed to Voltaire (though he never said them) were recited endlessly in the French media: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” At the same time, there are exceptions. They are telling.

In the wake of Beltrame’s death, Stéphane Poussier, a former candidate for la France Insoumise, disgraced himself. Poussier, appropriately, means dust. Upon the news of Beltrame’s passing, with the nation convulsed in grief—but also stunned with pride to have produced such a man—Poussier immediately took to Twitter to relieve himself: “Whenever a cop gets whacked, and it’s not every day, I think of my friend Remi Fraisse. But this time, it’s a colonel,” continued Poussier, “what a kick! At least that’s one less Macron voter.”8 

It was a repulsive thing to say, but that is all it was. Poussier, however, was arrested on terrorism charges, tried almost immediately, given a suspended sentence of a year’s imprisonment, and stripped for seven years of his civil rights. He had company. The same fate befell a vegan activist who posted an odious Facebook message about the butcher who had been killed in the attack on the Trèbes supermarket: “So then, you are shocked that a murderer is killed by a terrorist. Not me. I’ve got zero compassion for him, there’s some justice in it.” A crazy vegan said a crazy vegan thing. What of it? Here is what: She too was immediately hauled off to trial and given a seven-month suspended sentence. 

However proud the French may be of their freedom of expression, France does not enjoy the protections the First Amendment affords Americans. Its constitution emphasizes the preciousness of freedom of speech by incorporating Articles 10 and 11 of the Declaration of Human and Civic Rights of 1789, but these articles are wan and emaciated compared to the words, “Congress shall make no law.” 

Article 10: “No one may be disturbed on account of his opinions, even religious ones, as long as the manifestation of such opinions does not interfere with the established Law and Order.”

Article 11: “The free communication of ideas and of opinions is one of the most precious rights of man. Any citizen may therefore speak, write and publish freely, except what is tantamount to the abuse of this liberty in the cases determined by Law.” (My emphasis.)

It is not unconstitutional, therefore, to forbid speech that is “tantamount to the abuse of this liberty.” The Gayssot Act, for example, forbids Holocaust denial. I oppose criminalizing speech—even that speech, but its legal logic is not subject to dispute. The Gayssot Act is the law of the land, so penalizing Jean Marie Le Pen is the natural sequel. Le Pen is a Holocaust denier, and what he has done repeatedly violated a law with well-defined terms. That is why, on March 27, Le Pen’s conviction was upheld. 

Poussier, however, was convicted for “apologizing for terrorism.” This law was enacted in 2014, transferring the interdiction of “apologizing for terrorism” from an 1881 press law to the entire population. Its scope is near limitless and the penalty may be seven years in prison:

Apologizing for terrorism consists in describing or commenting favorably on a terrorist act that has already been committed. For example, approving of an attack.

Apology is different from denial. The denial of a terrorist act is when a person totally or partially denies these acts without directly approving them. If, for example, she invokes a conspiracy theory.

To be punished, the apology must have been made publicly. The public character of speech should be assessed in the same way as insults or defamation. Thus, comments made on a social network open to the public may be repressed.

“Terrorism” has no juridical definition, nor does the law confine itself to prohibiting apologies for terrorist attacks committed on French soil. Any expression of sympathy with a terrorist attack, defined in any manner, anywhere, could thus potentially result in a seven-year prison sentence. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has described writing a poem as a terrorist act. The PKK is—both under EU law and in fact—a terrorist group, but like all Western newspapers, the French media is full of paeans to the eco-feminist paradise in Rojava. If applied rigorously, this law would surely put half of France’s population in jail.

The law is what the French would call liberticide. It is absurd to imagine that Poussier, or the vegan, in any way incited a terrorist act. Poussier is a pathetic stunted adolescent who, when confronted with the actions of a real man, thought it would be clever, or deliciously transgressive, to mock another man’s heroism and death. That’s detestable, but it should not be criminal. 

As for the vegan? She’s a vegan. 

I suspected this law would be abused, but assumed it would be used—as it was—to 

arrest loudmouthed Muslims who couldn’t yet be nailed for a real crime. To do so was obviously wrong, but at least conceivably connected to a real terrorist threat. Arresting a lunatic vegan and a boor? However repulsively, both expressed strains of political thought that have always run through French life: This country gave us the phrase épater le bourgeois, after all. Were they arrested, I wonder, to prove that when it comes to repressing speech, France is entirely secular? Or was something stranger at work? 

Something stranger, I suspect. Beltrame’s death represented not only a remarkable act of heroism, but a disciplined masculinity typical of France’s police, armed forces, and firefighters. France does not deserve its reputation for cowardice. Its political leaders have sometimes been beneath contempt—Pétain and the Vichy government were morally complicit in the collapse and surrender of 1940—but a class of otherwise ordinary French men adheres to a code of chivalry. The motto of the sapeurs-pompiers—the fire service—is “save or perish.” They mean it, and the deep well of religious-historical precedent from which it comes is not obscure. Poussier and the vegan literally committed an unspeakable crime. Let us then divulge its name: blasphemy. 

The murder of an elderly Jewish woman shocked the nation’s conscience and caused street demonstrations. The outrage was entirely genuine. France is a secular country, and a liberal one that is tolerant of all religions; indeed, religious tolerance, often scarce in Catholic France, has become an article of faith in post-Revolutionary France. France believes it is governed by reason in the full manifestation of secular logic as law—except, as Poussier discovered, that secular logic is obviously not free of faith, nor is the law logical. His arrest and conviction, along with the lunatic vegan’s, tainted a dignified, appropriate—and fully warranted—national homage to a heroic man, for can anyone be sure this is what people in France really feel if they know it is forbidden to say otherwise?

Thus France, far from God yet longing for holiness; disdainful of priests yet priestly in bringing judgment on the blasphemous—or, as Voltaire really did say, “What a fuss about an omelet! How abominably unjust to persecute a man for such an airy trifle as that!” The old theology has long crumbled, but the logical and emotional forms that held it in place for centuries past have migrated, surprisingly intact, to the early 21st century. 

Such things happen all the time, and not just in France. But when countries refuse to look clearly at the past, they are like neurotics controlled by compulsions they cannot understand. Freud proposed that through the process of psychoanalysis the suppressed memory of trauma might be restored to the light of consciousness; allowing analysands honestly to mourn what must be mourned, transforming their hysterical misery to ordinary unhappiness. Surely that would be more wholesome that the spectacle of such an Enlightened country arresting a vegan for being an idiot.

1Clovis I unified the Franks. France as a recognizable national entity appears much later. Charles de Gaulle nonetheless identified 496 as the beginning of French history: “For me, the history of France begins with Clovis, chosen as king of France by the tribe of the Franks, who gave their name to France. Before Clovis, we have Gallo-Roman and Gallic prehistory. To me, the decisive aspect is that Clovis was the first king to be baptized a Christian. My country is a Christian country and I date the history of France from the accession of a Christian king who bore the name of the Franks.” David Schoenbrun, Les trois vies de Charles de Gaulle (Julliard, 1965). My translation.

2L’Ami du peuple, September 20, 1792, Number 684.

3There are a few anomalous regions, such as Alsace-Lorraine, governed by older laws.

4See The Hope of Marseille for a fuller explication.

5Adam Garfinkle recently described American strategic culture, in these pages, as “a secularized manqué of Anglo-Protestantism.” Religious sentiment in the United States, he argued, migrated into politics, and if few Americans now remember the origins of their mental habits, they may nonetheless be discerned. I am arguing that this is also true of France. Presque tous les malheurs de la vie viennent des fausses idées que nous avons sur ce qui nous arrive, as Abraham Lincoln said.

6John 15:13. Rom. 5:10 and 5:18. Cor. 15:3. John 19:30. Eph. 2:16. Phil. 2:8. Col. 2:14. Heb. 2:14. 9:15-16. 1 Pet. 1:18-19. 1 Pet. 3:18. 1 John 2:2. Isaiah 53:4-7. Zech. 12:10.

7If you want to wander into a wasteland, try to find meaningful statistics on anti-Semitism in France. This is the best data we’ve got. Note the sharply downward trend, and see page 18, particularly. Which is more logical, if you are a Jew: leaving France for the safety of Israel, or vice-versa? But even this report tells us little that warrants definitive conclusions. We can’t distinguish from this the difference between a crime wave and a crime-reporting wave. Graffiti and homicide are not comparable crimes. 

8Fraisse, a 21-year-old environmental activist, died in a violent clash with the police protesting construction at the Sivens dam. He was hit by a stun grenade, in principle a non-lethal instrument of crowd control. But something went wrong. His death prompted riots throughout France. An administrative inquiry, conducted by the Inspector General of the Gendarmerie, resulted in the suspension of the use of stun grenades.

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The Real Tocqueville?

Who is Alexis de Tocqueville? In an essay recently published in this magazine, my Hudson Institute colleague Ben Judah claimed that the oft-quoted French aristocrat is “not what he seems.” Ben’s broadside is an exciting tale of violence, intrigue, and conspiracy. He exposes Tocqueville the handsome adventurer, who visited the new world in 1831 to revel in its youthful democracy, as the aging French politician who supported the violent subjugation of the Algerian people. He reveals the renaissance of Tocqueville’s work in American liberal thought to be a product of the machinations of Raymond Aron and other opponents of Marxism. But we have a simpler, if less scintillating, way to understand Tocqueville and his place in the liberal tradition: We can read his books.

In Ben’s words, Tocqueville appealed to the opponents of Marxism because “Democracy in America established a dichotomy between liberty and equality.” This oversimplifies Tocqueville’s arguments: Democracy in America does not reject equality. Nor does it assert that equality is incompatible with liberty. It does, however, condemn that idea that we must achieve equality at any cost; as Tocqueville writes, “I know only two manners of making equality reign in the political word: Rights must be given to each citizen or to no one.” Despotism provides a certain type of equality—one born of subjugation. Democracy promises another kind: an equality under law that promotes liberty and self-government. The love of equality can even lead ordinary people to aspire to greatness: “There is in fact a manly and legitimate passion for equality that incites men to want all to be strong and esteemed.” While Tocqueville believes that equality under law is natural to democracy, liberty must be nurtured, for democrats too easily sacrifice liberty for equality: “[W]hat they love with an eternal love is equality; they dash toward freedom with a rapid impulse and sudden efforts, and if they miss the goal they resign themselves; but nothing can satisfy them without equality, and they would sooner consent to perish than to lose it.”

Tocqueville’s other great work, The Ancien Régime and The Revolution, further reveals his concern that not all kinds of equality lead to liberty. Far from asserting, as Ben declares, that one “can never escape the old order,” Tocqueville’s analysis of the French Revolution explains that revolutionaries can shake off old orders—even destroy them so completely that they become distant memories. However, revolutions do not simply create conditions of liberty: The nature of the revolution matters, as does its motivation and goals. “Radical as it was,” Tocqueville writes, “the Revolution introduced fewer innovations than has been generally supposed.…What it really achieved was the destruction—total, or partial, for the work is still in progress—of everything which proceeded from the old aristocratical and feudal institutions…”

Tocqueville’s description of France before the Revolution reveals a country where liberty had been lost and administrative centralization had, literally, become king. Beginning with Louis XI, French kings stripped the aristocracy of much of their local power, isolating them from other classes of Frenchman and consolidating the king’s control of the French military, legal order, and economy. The Revolution killed the king but did not decentralize his power. Administrative centralization survived because it was in no way a product of the old aristocratic order, but anathema to it, and because centralization benefited the new tyrant as it had the old, allowing the citizens of France—now in charge—to destroy tradition and compel equality by means of terror.

Tocqueville traveled to America to investigate the American prison system. But Democracy in America became a commentary on the conditions of freedom in the new world, cataloguing the possibilities of the new regime, the threats to its continued existence, and the freedom of its people. Having seen administrative centralization destroy liberty in one democracy, he warned of its dangers to America. Having witnessed the French Revolution, Tocqueville analyzed America’s own, which freed a country from tyranny without destroying the traditions of its people. And having witnessed the desire for equality extinguish the hope for freedom, he cautioned Americans against the embrace of all varieties of equality. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville reveals his urge to understand how France might become simultaneously democratic and free, like the United States, though he is not so naive as to believe that one country can adopt the mores, principles, or institutions of another.

At the time of Democracy in America’s publication, Tocqueville’s description of America’s virtues and vices fascinated intellectual heavyweights from Chateaubriand to J. S. Mill to Sainte-Beuve. Harvey Mansfield notes that Tocqueville even wrote Mill personally, saying, “Mill was the only one to have understood him.” But after Tocqueville’s death his countrymen largely forgot him. His political life was far from successful, and France was far too consumed with establishing its own identity as a burgeoning democracy to attend to a commentary on the American Republic. Raymond Aron indeed deserves credit for reintroducing Tocqueville to his home country, but he hardly reintroduced Tocqueville to America. America never forgot its French visitor.

Contemporary American scholars have disproved the popular myth that Aron resurrected Tocqueville, among them Scott Sandage and Matthew Mancini. Carefully examining the publications, comments of public intellectuals and politicians, and the popular book lists of the time, Mancini has made the fallacy clear in a number of essays. As the American Civil War raged, Henry Adams wrote to his brother that Democracy in America was “the Gospel of my private religion.” In 1899, a new edition of the book appeared in Appleton’s World’s Great Books series, “a publication whose editors included Edward Everett Hale, Thomas B. Reed, Speaker of the House of Representatives, and William Rainey Harper, the founding president of the University of Chicago.” One year later, Colonial Press republished Democracy in America as one of its World’s Great Classics.

Aron himself commented that Tocqueville was already popular in the United States. Describing Tocqueville in Main Currents in Sociological Thought, Aron writes, “I feel it is worthwhile to set forth briefly the leading ideas of a man who in Anglo-Saxon countries is regarded as one of the greatest political thinkers of the nineteenth century…and yet who, in France, has always been neglected by sociologists.” Aron may well have used Tocqueville to fight Marx, but in doing so he did nothing intellectually dishonest: He used one great political theorist to counter another.

Why does any of this matter? If the real Tocqueville, as Ben implies, is a racist and a colonist, then is he not a man whom true liberals should never read, teach, or quote? Should we not understand Democracy in America to be simply “a fabulous historical artifact,” as Ben puts it? A book we may keep on our shelves, but only if filed next to the works of Alexander Stephens and Roger Taney?

I do not dispute that Tocqueville is guilty of a multitude of sins. While Tocqueville’s Algerian letters display a greater initial hope that the French and Algerian people might live together in harmony and happiness than Ben gives him credit for, I agree that Tocqueville’s final position on the subject was cruel and contemptible. Disappointed with the success of French intervention in Algeria, Tocqueville began to advocate for control of a vicious nature. In our more enlightened age, we can look back with disdain on his actions in Algeria, and we ought to. But this does not obligate us to view Tocqueville simply as a racist. Ben neglects to mention that Tocqueville was also an abolitionist who argued for the emancipation of all slaves in French colonies—going as far as to suggest laws that would promote assimilation and provide for the education of former slaves. Most importantly, Ben’s comments presume that Tocqueville’s position on French Algeria should color our reading of all his work. We should not deceive ourselves: Democracy in America is not a fabulous, historical artifact, but a serious work of political philosophy.

American liberals read and quote Alexis de Tocqueville for one simple reason: He wrote brilliantly about democracy, liberty, and equality in the United States—the very same issues with which liberals continue to concern themselves. We should not forget Tocqueville’s less democratic positions, just as we should not, and do not, forgive Thomas Jefferson for owning slaves. However, as liberal thinkers we must have confidence in our ability to distinguish the Algerian letters from Democracy in America. We should continue to read, teach, and quote Democracy in America, just as we continue to study and celebrate the Declaration of Independence—not least because we have yet to attain a truly enlightened age. If we treat these books as merely historical, we may forget that we have achieved only partial equality and partial liberty. We may forget that we too are on a quest to understand how we can be free.

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Facebook’s Russian Business Model

A man dressed as a Russian troll doll attended the recent Facebook Senate hearing, his costume emblematic of the company, its Russian scandal, and worrisome history. Few realize that Facebook goes back a long way with the Russians and, in fact, its spectacular success dates back to 2009 when an audacious $200-million investment was made by Russian investor Yuri Milner. The transaction raised eyebrows in Silicon Valley, not only because Milner was Russian, but because the investment appeared excessive. His price, to acquire less than 2% of Facebook, established a value for the start-up of $10 billion.

Eight years later, in 2017, the world found out through the Panama Papers that Milner’s backers were oligarchs and companies linked to the Kremlin and Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. But back in 2009, this was a secret, and the burning question then was simply why did Milner pay so much and what did he know that the rest of the world didn’t? “We have a unique perspective on this investment” he said in an interview “because we see something that other people don’t see, because we see the monetization profiles of our other social networks in our part of the world.”

Milner gave the 25-year-old Zuckerberg financial credibility and also a profitable template borrowed from the Russian “Facebooks” that Milner partially owned. He knew that profits were incredible if content was free, users multiplied exponentially, and data was captured from users, secretly compiled into profiles of their lifestyles, friends, and personality traits, then sold as advertising targets to corporations, governments, politicians, or causes. Facebook’s dirty little secret, in other words, became its business model, also adopted by Google, Twitter and others, as a private sector espionage and propaganda service. In geek speak, however, the model was euphemistically referred to as big data mining and advertising.

In the next three years, Milner and Zuckerberg sped toward a lucrative “exit”, or sale to the public of shares, by steadily announcing dramatic leaps in the number of “active users”. They also forged an aggressive business model that brought trouble by November 2011 when the company had to settle with the Federal Trade Commission following allegations of user deception and privacy breaches.

Just six months after its FTC skirmish, Milner convinced Wall Street into selling off his and other Facebook shares for a bundle. The company stated it had a winning strategy and 901 million active users, anumber that was preposterous, equivalent to the population of India, and nine times’ more than the 100 million users Facebook had when the Russians bought in. It seemed, frankly speaking, unbelievable. And it probably was.

The 901 million number had not even been audited, or certified by an independent third party. This was inappropriate—like taking as fact a mining company’s estimated ounces of gold in the ground. I wondered if my Facebook page, opened years before and never used, was a so-called “active user”. My page was there, but so were another 33 Facebook pages with my name, an egg in place of a photo, and a link to my email address. Looking back, these were bots.

On May 25, 2012, I wrote a column headlined “Is Facebook for Real?” in The Financial Postand questioned that, if there were 33 fake pages in my name on Facebook’s registry, how many other fake users were there? Dividing 33 into 901 so-called “active” users, did this mean there were really only 27 million real users which would reduce the value of Facebook shares to $1.15 apiece from $38?

My calls to Facebook for responses went unanswered, and the column created a stir in trading circles and at the Securities and Exchange Commission. The stock steadily fell in price in the weeks that followed down to as low as $19.69 from its issued price of $38 a share. Then, on August 2, 2012 Facebook admitted that there were as many as 80 million fake or bogus accounts, in a report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company said this represented only eight per cent of the total, but provided no explanation as to why this had occurred, who had done this, and did not provide a pledge to independently audit “active” users in future.

This was also unacceptable, so on August 17, 2012, I wrote “Is Your Facebook Lying to You?” and reported that Facebook’s “active” user figures still included the 33 fake Facebook pages in my name. Others had come forward too, including persons who opened a page for a pet or a child that suddenly proliferated into dozens of fake pages. Another friend told me that he counted 100 fake pages of his site. Some advertisers publicly questioned its user metrics, but as the company’s espionage-and-propaganda template and bots steadily rolled out, so did profits, as prophesied by Yuri Milner years ago. The Russians cashed out in 2012 for at least $6 billion, and Facebook continued business as usual.

Bots and trolls became more sophisticated and Facebook becamethe perfect tool for Russian as well as advertiser skullduggery. That led, in February 2018, to U.S. Justice Department charges against 13 Russians and three companies for perpetrating a scheme to subvert the 2016 election and support Trump’s presidential campaign by using stolen identities to pose as Americans, to sow discord among the electorate by creating Facebook groups, distributing divisive ads, and posting inflammatory images. The owners of these companies were secret but, like Milner, believed to be linked to the Kremlin.

By 2018, Facebook was claiming more than two billion members after expanding into corrupt societies and ruthless dictatorships and then doing their bidding. For instance, in 2014 Facebook agreed, at the request of the Kremlin, to censor pages in support of a protest against the jailing of popular Putin critic Alex Navalny; it blocked 29 other pieces of content, and, ominously, agreed to store all data about Russian users inside Russia. In 2016, leaks from Facebook employees exposed that Facebook had created a censorship tool for China. Then in March 2018, the United Nations said Facebook played a role in the Rohingya genocide by spreading hate speech.

Today, Facebook’s Russian influence lingers. My 33 fake pages were finally removed when I last checked in 2015, but goodness knows how many other “users” are bots. And finally in 2018, after the Facebook data misuse and election scandals, the FTC realized compliance had been non-existent and reopened its privacy and deceptive practices case.)

Unfortunately, the social media giant became to technology what Russia has been to geopolitics: an intrusive and often unethical player. Over the years, it has played fast and loose with regulators, facts, the press, and deployed a sketchy business model that Google and others have adopted, that should be illegal.

Fortunately, the Europeans are about to crack down on Facebook and others, and not a minute too soon. The United States should follow suit. And, most of all, Facebook’s management should look for another line of work.

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