Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 99

Why France Feels (Relatively) Comfortable with Trump’s America

To the surprise of many observers who see Presidents Emmanuel Macron and Donald Trump as polar opposites, Franco-American relations have come a long way since the days of Freedom Fries more than a decade ago.

Since Macron’s election, the Élysée has been able to deal with Trump’s White House in a more relaxed way than other close U.S. allies have managed. While German Chancellor Angela Merkel enjoyed an excellent personal relationship with former President Barack Obama, she now faces unrelenting criticism for maintaining a trade surplus and not spending enough on defense. As for the United Kingdom, even though British Prime Minister Theresa May came to Washington soon after the election in the hope of reasserting the privileged status of the UK in the eyes of the Trump administration, the current relationship seems to fall short of the support needed by London in the context of Brexit.

Why have Germany and the UK found themselves thrown so badly off-balance by the insurgent Trump Administration while France has been relatively unmoved? The answer lies in history.

Since the end of World War II and the establishment of Germany’s Basic Law (or Constitution) which was based on American recommendations known as the Frankfurt Documents, the Federal Republic of Germany has deemed its relationship with Washington as crucial to its existence, and its own legitimacy as anchored in values shared with the U.S. The perception that the U.S. President might appear to be putting this relationship into question has hit the Germans at the core of their self-understanding. The end result has been some serious soul-searching, best exemplified by the manifesto (“In Spite of it All, America”) penned by leading German foreign policy specialists in October of last year.

As for France and the UK, one needs to go back to Suez to understand how the two countries’ relationship with Washington has developed. In October 1956, Paris and London led a joint intervention to reclaim control of the Suez Canal which had been nationalized by Egypt’s leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. Washington reacted by pressuring economically both London and Paris to abandon their claim, leaving a deep sense of betrayal in both capitals.

But Paris and London drew opposite lessons from that event. The British government quickly moved to restore the Special Relationship and concluded that the cornerstone of its defense policy should be its ability to shape U.S. policy in favor of its own national interests. This, of course, presupposed that the United States would continue to have such a strategy. In the event that Washington enters a pronounced retrenchment phase and decides to focus on a more restrictive understanding of its national interests, the Special Relationship doesn’t necessarily wither, but it does certainly provide less leverage.

France’s foreign policy, on the other hand, conceived by General Charles de Gaulle, has been one continuous hedge against the possibility of a less predictable United States. Suez convinced the French that U.S. support should not be taken for granted, since Paris and Washington have distinct and legitimate national interests which may (or may not) converge. Furthermore, French officials decided that their foreign and defense policy would be grounded in the principle of national sovereignty and independence.

Since Suez, the name of the game for Paris has been to gain leverage by constantly balancing national independence with alliance solidarity. In the decade following the 2003 Iraq war crisis, the pendulum has swung toward closer defense cooperation between Paris and Washington, first with France’s decision to fully join NATO in 2008, and later with the 2013 military intervention in Mali.

Today the French playbook remains well-adapted to an “America First” presidency, with France ready to build on a decade of strong cooperation with the United States. Policymakers simply need to continue what they have always done: strengthen cooperation when interests align, note disagreements, try to find as much common ground as possible, and look for other ways to accomplish goals if Washington is not on board.

The convergence of interests is clearest in the fight against terrorism. From the Sahel to the Levant, French and American forces are cooperating like never before, sharing intelligence and coordinating operationally. When security interests are at stake, this convergence strengthens political trust on a fundamental level. On less consensual issues, the French continue to look for common ground where possible, and find opportunities for negotiation.

Take the trade issue. President Macron has been very critical of Chinese behavior when it comes to IP theft in Europe. France, along with Germany, is trying to strengthen EU screening of Chinese investments. There are shared preoccupations, but the unilateral approach taken by the Trump Administration, which hits European interests as well as Chinese interests, stands in the way of a more significant cooperation.

On Iran, while the French agree that Tehran poses real problems when it comes to security (not least because of its destabilizing regional influence in Syria), Paris thinks the nuclear deal as it stands, while not perfect, allows the West to address the proliferation issue. It fears that efforts to depart from the deal could lead to an unpredictable Iranian response and distract from other concerns over Iran’s behavior. The French have made it clear that Paris is willing to discuss and try to bridge policy differences with the Trump White House, if possible.

But that does not preclude the French from highlighting areas of disagreement. President Emmanuel Macron has shown his readiness to be Trump’s opposite number on climate change and multilateralism. But again, these disagreements confirm traditional French assumptions about the U.S.-France relationship: Europeans should not expect Americans to always share their views or interests. In a way, the Trump administration is actually helping the French by proving them right in the eyes of other Europeans.

Since the 2016 election, the long-held French view that the European Union should be more autonomous from the U.S., and ready to assert its own interests, has been justified and is gaining ground within the European Union. The past months have demonstrated that Europeans, and Germans, in particular, are increasingly willing to embrace the concept of “strategic autonomy” on a European scale as a response to “America First.” As Europeans can now see, such a move does not necessarily mean more distance from the U.S. After all, Paris is not doing too badly with Washington these days.

The post Why France Feels (Relatively) Comfortable with Trump’s America appeared first on The American Interest.

Democracy’s Gravediggers

How Democracies Die

Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt

Crown, 2018, 320 pp., $26

The ironic march in the third movement of Mahler’s First “Titan” Symphony is for a funeral procession of forest animals who bury the hunter. Similarly ironic, perhaps, is the procession of American political scientists who have studied authoritarian and totalitarian regimes and their aftermaths, using American liberal democracy as the gold standard, who now turn their gaze back on America, applying what they have learned from studying politics abroad to U.S. politics, whose gold standard may be turning to dross. 

There was always something artificial and even condescending about what Thomas Carothers called in a 2002 article the “transition paradigm.” The collapse of non-democratic regimes in Southern Europe, Latin America, and finally Eastern Europe in the last quarter of the 20th century, which Samuel Huntington dubbed the Third Wave of democratization, did not warrant the inference that those regime changes had a common cause, affected one another, or, least of all, shared a common destiny. Certainly Huntington never argued as much, but un-self-aware American ideology surfed the wave as a predictive explanation of the phenomena. Reality, however, eventually spited ideology, and before long Harvard government professor Steven Levitsky and University of Toronto political scientist Lucan Way published Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War (2010) to explain the failure of this ideology. 

Levitsky and Way offered an alternative to the democratic transition paradigm. It turned on the observation that many of the regimes that collapsed in the last quarter of the 20th century evolved not into liberal democracies, but into hybrid authoritarian regimes that combined authoritarian features with limited political competition and deliberately unfair elections. They did so—and here was the punch line—not because their tenured political elites could not manage their way to liberal democracy, but because they did not want to go there. Not every political culture wants to be like the one captured in America’s mythic self-image. Arguably one must be guilty of insular thinking to suppose otherwise.

Competitive Authoritarianism is already a classic of the disillusioned political zeitgeist of the second decade of the 21st century—much as Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan’s Problems of Democratic Transitions and Consolidation (1996), embodies the optimistic political spirit of the 1990s. The two books form a nice glass-half-empty, glass-half-full couplet for future generations to argue about, if they can agree on the shape of the glass to begin with.

Now Levitsky, with a new co-author, Daniel Ziblatt, also a Harvard government professor, is back in the saddle for another journey around the global commons, this time including the United States. In How Democracies Die they contend that the rise of America’s illiberal presidency has proved that American politics are not as exceptional as some have wished: “If, twenty-five years ago, someone had described to you a country in which candidates threatened to lock up their rivals, political opponents accused the government of stealing the election or establishing a dictatorship, and parties used their legislative majorities to impeach Presidents and steal Supreme Court seats, you might have thought of Ecuador or Romania. You probably would not have thought of the United States.” Just as it is possible for some formerly authoritarian political cultures to move toward democratic forms without embracing fully democratic and especially liberal substance, it is possible for liberal democracies to decay, maintaining “a veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance”—and even to become authoritarian. 

 Using metaphors from competitive team sports, Levitsky and Ziblatt highlight three mutually reinforcing processes that gradually transform democracies into hybrid authoritarian regimes: Illiberal governments come to control the “referees” of the political game, especially the judiciary; they weaken their opponents by taking the most competitive “players” for other teams out of the political arena; and, finally, they change the rules of the political “game” to ensure that they will continue to win apparently pluralistic and free elections. 

Capturing the judiciary and law enforcement functions protects the hybrid authoritarian regime and can be used to attack its opponents. For example, in Hungary, the prosecution, state audit office, ombudsman, statistical office and the Constitutional Court were used both to shield Fidesz’s corruption and to harass the opposition. Ruling illiberal democratic parties do not eliminate political opposition, but rather weaken and harass it, and sometimes bribe competitive political alternatives into division and ultimate submission. The same “bully or bribe” tactics are then applied to politically relevant sectors of civil society: the media, non-governmental organizations, and wealthy, powerful, or otherwise influential individuals. Once post-democratic regimes manage to control the constitution, its judicial interpretation, and the electoral system, they can prolong their tenure indefinitely. 

Transition from democracy is usually a gradual process that takes years. Elected leaders, legislatures, and the courts must work together to dismantle checks and balances, pack the courts, buy or intimidate the media and harass political opponents. There is no single revolutionary event, no storming of the Bastille or the Winter Palace, no burning of the Reichstag.

Levitsky and Ziblatt base their theoretical framework on a core of Latin American cases, Chávez’s Venezuela, Fujimori’s Peru, and Peron’s Argentina, democracies with weak institutions and polarized partly illiberal or authoritarian-minded electorates. Hungary and Poland share much with this group, though they are post-totalitarian with politically weak militaries and civil societies, weak rule of law and independent institutions, were closed from the world for more than a generation, have had strong net migration outflows, and courtesy of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union have suffered from ethnic and cultural homogeneity for two generations. Yet Levitsky and Ziblatt also include in the group of dead and dying democracies authoritarian regimes that attempted to use some veneer of legality and democracy but have never been true democracies: Russia, Turkey, Malaysia, post-Reconstruction U.S. states in the South, and so on. 

Lumping all these different cases together can be misleading. Russia was an imperialist totalitarian dictatorship that imploded. In the 1990s, the state became very weak and consequently an unregulated space emerged spontaneously for political pluralism and civil society, such as they were, as well as for crime and corruption. But Russia has never had the liberal institutions that underlie democracy. With Putin’s restoration the old secret police elite reasserted its control over a stronger, though still weak, state. Russian democracy did not die; it was stillborn. 

Turkey is an entirely different story. A decades-long power struggle between, on the one hand, a secular and modernizing yet authoritarian military-backed political elite and, on the other, an Islamist populist social movement imitating a political party ended recently after the suppression of a feeble military coup, which the AKP government used as a pretext to crush most political opposition and trash the constitution to lock in an authoritarian regime in all but name. During this struggle, the Islamists used their democratic popularity against the military, but they never constructed liberal institutions; nor has there been much of a constituency for liberal democracy in Turkey outside of Istanbul and a few other cities. So Erdogan’s post-coup consolidation of power and suppression of political opponents is at most the death of a hybrid democracy, because there had never been a liberal democracy in Turkey. It is probably more useful and accurate to say that recent developments signal the end of the institutional independence of the military, and its submission to the state. 

After the defeat of the Confederacy in the Civil War, the occupying North forced both abolition and democracy but eventually stopped enforcing the latter, which led to undemocratic single-party rule. One cannot exactly say that democracy died in the South; democracy must be alive and self-sustaining before it can die. In the case of the former Confederate states, democracy merely ceased to be externally enforced. Authoritarian regime permutations do not count. 

In short, it is not clear that the “democracies” of Russia, Turkey, and the post-Confederate South have ever been sufficiently alive to deserve to be buried with full honors in the same cemetery as democracies that had a full life before they expired. Yet, some scholars are even now digging new plots in that cemetery in anticipation of new decedents. Alas, political scholars and their reading publics prefer clear historical teleological patterns to messy, complex and difficult to generalize or predict political phenomena that happen without a preordained direction for many different causes, some common and global and some unique and local. So, as many once imagined that all states were trending to democracy in some glorious “end of history,” others now think that they are trending away from democracy. A crop of new books by Yascha Mounck, David Frum, Tim Snyder, and a new anthology edited by Cass Sunstein, attempt to analyze from different perspectives the reasons for the acute if not terminal apparent crisis of democracy.

Levitsky and Ziblatt do not subscribe to a democracy-to-authoritarianism transition paradigm. Their book is about how democracies die; it is not about prophesying a global democratic extinction event. They emphasize that democratic backsliders are balanced by democracies that have stabilized, such that the overall number of democracies has not changed much since 2005. Carothers agrees: He co-authored a Foreign Affairs essay a year ago entitled “Democracy Is Not Dying: Seeing Through the Doom and Gloom.” So How Democracies Die is not another in the dreary series of breathless “end of” books and essays we have come lately to expect. Let us bless small mercies.

Levitsky and Ziblatt are right that in trying to understand the crisis of American democracy we do need to look at how other democracies died in Latin America and Eastern Europe. Yet how they go about this task may leave something to be desired. The most important chapter of How Democracies Die compares Donald Trump’s conduct during his first year in office with other illiberal authoritarians. Trump has attacked the “guardrails,” “the referees,” and the checks and balances on presidential powers: the media, the judiciary, and local and state government. He has also attacked law enforcement and intelligence agencies, firing James Comey from the FBI and Preet Bharara from the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan (and reportedly wanted to fire Jeff Sessions and John Mueller as well). Trump has mused about changing libel laws and using licensing and anti-trust laws to muzzle the media. By an objective definition, he is as authoritarian as the worst of the illiberal strongmen. 

The difference is that in the context of the American constitutional order, Presidents are not strong enough to get their way in most such matters. The libel laws have not been changed, nor have most filibuster rules in Congress. Since How Democracies Die went into print the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity (known by its critics as the voter suppression committee) has been disbanded. The President’s authoritarian bark has been worse than his anti-constitutional bite:

President Trump repeatedly scraped up against the guardrails, like a reckless driver, but he did not break through them. Despite clear causes for concern, little actual backsliding occurred in 2017. We did not cross the line into authoritarianism. It is still early, however. The backsliding of democracy is often gradual, its effects unfolding slowly over time.

Levitsky and Ziblatt compare the Trump Administration’s first year to that of other would-be authoritarian regimes according to their three sporting metaphors criteria (capturing referees, sidelining competitive players, and changing the rules). Leaving aside for the moment where they started, Hungary, Peru, and Turkey were no further on the road to authoritarianism than the United States after one year of rule by democratically elected illiberal demagogues. As the man who fell off a skyscraper told himself half way down, “so far, so good.” The question is how did American democracy come to its current trajectory? 

Since the election of Donald Trump as President with a substantial minority of the votes was a very close contest, many contingencies combined to produce the result. What if fewer Democratic-inclined voters had taken Clinton’s victory for granted? What if the Obama Administration had not been asleep at the wheel while Russia hacked the DNC and trolled social media? What if Clinton had actually campaigned in the Midwest? And so on and so forth. It could have easily ended differently. 

Historians, lawyers, and social scientists often distinguish conditions from causes. For example, a discarded match caused the forest fire but the existence of the sufficiently parched woods was a necessary condition. One major criterion for distinguishing causes from conditions is manipulability: We can do nothing about dry forests, but we can expect people to be careful with matches. (Other criteria for distinguishing causes from conditions need not be examined here.) When scientists test hypotheses by conducting comparative studies, they attempt to hold the conditions constant. For example, they assume that all forests have combustible wood and ask for the percentage of forest fires that were caused by discarded matches. If that percentage is significant, then Smokey the Bear has good reason to warn that “only you can prevent forest fires.” 

Levitsky and Ziblatt chose to consider authoritarian-minded electorates as constant conditions for, rather than causes of, democratic demise. They assume that the authoritarian base of support for authoritarian demagogues in the United States is historically roughly constant at about 40 percent, and so discuss other causes for Trump’s ascendance. But though there have indeed always been populist demagogues in American politics, it is not clear how to empirically estimate the ebbs and flows of authoritarian electorates throughout history. Authoritarians often abstain from participation in elections. In the 2016 elections, when they obviously made it to the polling booths, the percentage of politically apathetic Americans who could not be bothered to vote was almost as high as the combined percentages of Clinton and Trump voters. 

From a comparative perspective, for twenty years (1990-2010) elections in Hungary and Poland resulted in mostly conventional European parliaments, with anti-systemic demagogues only at the margins. The main post-Communist anomaly was the occasional success of reformed Communist parties that attempted to present themselves as social democrats, and so did not challenge new liberal democratic institutions but rather sought to subvert them for their own corrupt ends. The decline in the fortunes of post-Communist as well as other center-Left parties coincided with the rise of right-wing illiberal parties. But it is not clear to what extent these shifts can be attributed to the same electorate, and whether that electorate can be characterized as illiberal, protesting, resentful of urban educated and cosmopolitan elites, reactionary in the sense of resistant to any change, or something else. 

A static view of any “characteristic” electorate seems a methodological stretch. By considering demographic authoritarian proclivities as constant conditions, Levitsky and Ziblatt exclude the interesting question about what caused their sudden political emergence since 2010 across different countries. In other words, they seem to bracket off the really interesting questions of causality. Instead, they concentrate on the United States and apply a version of the “betrayal of the elites” theoretical framework to explain the democratic backslide because it works better for their purposes.

Social scientists have noted that regimes rarely collapse before some of their elites defect to facilitate a smooth, sometimes even continuously seamless and apparently legal, transfer of power. This generalization holds in both directions of regime change, for transition from authoritarianism to democracy as in South Africa, Argentina, and Hungary, and for transition from democracy to authoritarianism as in the Roman Republic or Latin America. Democratic politicians defect to the authoritarian dark side and facilitate an authoritarian takeover without a struggle when they believe that they can control, contain, or coopt the authoritarian leadership and use it against what they consider greater political evils like socialism, and prevent a civil war which elites can only lose: case in point, the reasoning of members of the Conservative and Monarchist Weimar political elites in handing over the chancellorship to Adolph Hitler in January 1933 that the lucky among them lived to regret. Levitsky and Ziblatt accuse the Republican Party elite of hating the Democratic Party more than they love democracy, and consequently of betraying democracy in their failure to disown the Republican presidential candidate and support Hillary Clinton as a lesser evil. They unfavorably compare the Republican elite with conservative elites who supported the liberal-democratic candidates in the presidential elections in Austria and France. 

The comparison is imperfect because the support for Alexander Van der Bellen in Austria and Emanuel Macron in France came in the second of two election rounds, after the conservative parties’ candidates were eliminated. Worse, after publication of the book, the Austrian center-Right formed a coalition with the neo-fascist, Russian-bankrolled Freedom Party and gave it the Defense, Interior, and Foreign ministries. In countries with multiparty political systems like Austria, one calculation motivating the attempt to coopt authoritarian, anti-democratic, or populist movements (which Levitsky and Ziblatt do not mention) is that, without consistent, credible realistic policies or even coherent ideologies, they may just amount to protest movements. Theoretically, coopting protest movements into the establishment and having them share responsibility for policies should discredit them. 

This strategy works sometimes. For example, Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party accepted an invitation to join a coalition government with the center-Right in 2000, and then experienced electoral decline and disintegration. Austria’s new Chancellor, the 31-year-old Sebastian Kurz—who is in his own estimation the greatest German-speaking statesman since von Papen and Hindenburg—has attempted to re-enact that achievement. Obviously, the wild-eyed extremist simpletons of the Freedom Party are oblivious to these sophisticated maneuvers. They will, however, be surprised when they realize how the clever Kurz outwitted them by giving them control over Austria’s security forces and foreign relations. 

Back in the United States, Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that, had the Bush family and other members of the Republican traditional leadership publicly called on their supporters to vote for Hillary Clinton, history would have spared us President Trump. It is a difficult counterfactual to parse. On the one hand, the Never Trumpers made themselves heard among Republicans, and the Bush magic was thoroughly spent, as Jeb’s woeful fate tells us. On the other hand, the gap in the crucial states was so small that even minor causes and effects could have reversed the results. Indeed, it is equally true that had the leadership of the tiny Green Party called on its supporters to vote for Clinton, she could have won just as well. At the time, however, it seemed unnecessary to further split the Republican Party to stop a Trump presidency because the received wisdom was that he would lose, and lose badly. 

Ultimately, the relevant consideration here may not be political or social-scientific but moral. Ethicists debate whether we should act to bring about the best consequences or whether we should fulfil our absolute moral duties regardless of the consequences. The consequentialists and Kantian deontologists will probably continue this debate forever, but, at least in situations where it is impossible to compute the probable results of our actions in complex situations, we may agree that we should just do the right thing. The Republican elite did not do the right thing.

Levitsky and Ziblatt hold political parties to be democracy’s gatekeepers and blame the Republican Party for failing to fulfil this role. They attribute this failure to open primaries that replaced elections controlled by party insiders in “smoke-filled rooms”—a historically fitting metaphor, as the decline in party control happens to coincide with the decline in consumption of tobacco products. Since the book was published, the Democratic Party has announced its intention to revise its primary system to eliminate some of the “super delegates” that prevented a Bernie Sanders-led populist takeover of the party. The Democrats have now joined the Republicans (and Britain’s Labor Party) in surrendering their gatekeeper role over the electoral process to the activists, who tend to be more extreme than those who cannot be bothered to vote in primaries.

Levitsky and Ziblatt detect a deeper weakening of political parties, but it is not clear if their package of reasons is complete. They do have at least one thing down pat—something that has changed America politics significantly in the past few decades: changes in the flow of money.

Traditionally, candidates in democratic systems depended financially on their parties; now multimillionaires like Berlusconi, Babiš, Trump, and others can run their own campaigns, and underwrite the campaigns of others without any help or say-so from party elites. The shift in the flow of money has long since inflected American national politics, weakening party leaderships and congressional processes. More recently, crowd-funding has allowed other candidates like Bernie Sanders to raise small amounts from numerous sources directly. A third source of money that Levitsky and Ziblatt do not mention is, of course, Russia, which has been openly financing the political extremes in many European countries, if not also in the United States. 

Beyond the money flow, social media has allowed political leaders, including demagogues, to connect directly with their base, bypassing parties and the legacy media. Consequently, illiberal and populist leaders can take over existing political parties, as Orban and Trump did, or when traditional political parties are weak and do not have a “tribal” base, start their own parties, as Fujimori, Berlusconi, the Kaczyńskis, Babiš, and also Macron did. 

The super-rich can now control or own traditional media outlets, pushing them to become highly partisan. Levitsky and Ziblatt focus on FOX and talk radio. Yet a comparison with non-American media is instructive: European print media has often been partisan in the sense that it argued mostly for a set of policies. For example, in the United Kingdom, the Times has argued for different policies than the Guardian, as Le Figaro and l’Humanite did in France, and readers knew that if they wanted to be exposed to alternative arguments they should buy more than one daily. When the Independent daily was founded by former Daily Telegraph editors in the United Kingdom, its innovative gimmick was non-partisanship. 

Media partisanship is neither new nor dangerous. Dangerous partisanship operates on a different level by manipulating strong passions instead of appealing to interests and ideals through arguments. The media business model of appealing to passionate irrationalities, chiefly scaring and seducing, xenophobia and pornography, was pioneered by Rupert Murdoch in Australia but gradually took off throughout the globe. As the English joke goes, the Times is read by the people who run the country. The liberal Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country. The Financial Times is read by people who own the country. The Communist Party’s Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country. The Conservative Daily Telegraph is read by the people who think it already is. The Sun readers don’t care who runs the country, as long as she’s got big tits.

If we assemble only these elements of change—and ignore for now other reasons for party weakness that Levitsky and Ziblatt do not raise—we recognize elements of a very old rather than a new regime: direct democracy. Ancient direct democracy was prone to demagoguery and self-destruction, which is why Aristotle, Plato, and others distrusted it to no small extent. Modern constitutional representative democracies, especially in the United States, were designed to curb that self-destructiveness. Some modern checks and balances have ceased to work effectively, however, and others are now under constant pressure. Consequently, we are to some extent back in 4th-century BCE Athens.

Levitsky and Ziblatt wisely do not attempt to predict the future of democracy. They suggest possible scenarios. Like other commentators, they warn against a “Burning Reichstag” scenario, whereby Trump would use a security crisis to silence the opposition, rally public opinion, and facilitate a gradual authoritarian takeover. Such a crisis may happen, as it did on 9/11. Trump may also cause one unintentionally, or even intentionally—for example, by waging a war against Iran or North Korea.

Such a security crisis does not even have to be real. The Hungarian and Polish authoritarian leaders have used the fictional threat of Jewish financiers paying Muslim and African refugee hordes to invade Europe to manipulate ignorant, bigoted, and paranoid citizens into voting for them. Trump may bungle a provocation, or pervasive levels of distrust in his leadership may prevent him from using a “burning Reichstag” effectively. Yet he may still succeed in making America more like contemporary Hungary or Peron’s Argentina, establishing illiberal democracy with permanent white majorities, voter suppression, and a subservient judiciary. 

Levitsky and Ziblatt consider such a scenario unlikely but nevertheless not inconceivable, because “it is difficult to find examples of societies in which shrinking ethnic majorities gave up their dominant status without a fight”—for example, the South after Reconstruction, or Lebanon. The truth of this generalization depends on the meanings of “ethnic” and “fight,” and the time frame. The initial Anglo-Scottish-Dutch Protestant dominance in the United States was gradually diluted and then overwhelmed by other European ethnicities like the Irish, Poles and Italians, who had been treated no better than Mexicans are today, with comparatively little friction. In Israel, the early Ashkenazi dominance over oriental Jews, who immigrated to Israel mostly after its founding, is largely in the past. In history, the Macedonian Empire, its successor Diadochi states, and the later Roman Empire ceased being ethnically Macedonian, Greek, or Roman and became ethnically universal and culturally syncretic for centuries. The multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire maintained Austrian dominance and harbored tensions between its ethnic groups, but by the later 19th century it offered Slavs, Magyars, and especially Jews unprecedented opportunities for upward mobility. Had it not been for the folly of the World War, it is not inconceivable that the Habsburgs would have been successful in forging a multinational empire without a dominant ethnic group. Finally, what can be called the “Brazilian Dream” of post-ethnic national identity that appealed so much to quintessential Austro-Hungarians like Stephen Zweig can and did happen without civil wars.

The second scenario that Levitsky and Ziblatt consider is of a Democratic (party and regime) restoration, what I would call “the California Dream.” Trump could lose the 2020 elections or be impeached and convicted after losing Congress in the upcoming midterms. The political carnival, with its jester king, would end, and quiet, PG-13 political life would stabilize on the basis of a new liberal tolerant consensus. But Levitsky and Ziblatt consider a return to political consensus unlikely because of the long-term polarizing trends that began well before Trump. 

The most likely scenario Levitsky and Ziblatt foresee is the “North Carolina-ization” of America. The guardrails of democracy will weaken in the context of increased polarization and political and cultural strife, gerrymandering, and surgical suppression of black and Hispanic votes. 

It is tempting to imagine such a middling scenario between the “Hungarian” and “Californian” extreme scenarios. Yet the recent, admittedly short, history of neo-illiberal democracy in Europe and Latin America proves that it is an unstable regime. The constant scraping against the guardrails turns quickly into shoving matches in which one side or the other must give way. Illiberal democracy either overhauls the institutional guardrails to reach authoritarianism with manipulated majority acclaim, or a firm push back restores liberal democracy: There is no stable equilibrium that is neither liberal nor authoritarian. This is the cause of much of the “drama” that accompanies illiberal democracy, for it can only end with a Hungarian or Californian stable regime.

Levitsky and Ziblatt’s recommendations are fairly commonsensical: The Democratic Party should build a broad coalition and avoid extremism that may alienate businesses, religious groups, and centrist Republicans. Recent Democratic Party successes in Pennsylvania and even Alabama prove that occupying the center may be more effective than occupying Wall Street. Whether the results of future Democratic Party primaries allow the party to drift to the ruling center rather than to oppositional margins is still a mooted question. Levitsky and Ziblatt emphasize that Democrats should also resist the temptation to adopt populist positions against minorities and immigration to appeal to Trump’s voters and lose their own. To alleviate tensions between the white lower middle classes and the black poor that the Affordable Care Act made worse, they recommend universal rather than means-tested entitlements. “Republicans today must expel extremists from their ranks, break sharply with the Trump Administration’s authoritarian and white nationalist orientation, and find a way to broaden the party’s base beyond white Christians. The German CDU,” they argue, “may offer a model.” 

This will just not fly. Trump is no Hitler, but today’s GOP is very short on “Adenauers” and long on “Von Papens.” Republicans still try to fence sit and wait for the plague to pass without having to take sides. As Yuval Levin noted in his Weekly Standard review of How Democracies Die, there is reason to worry, but not to panic, about Trump’s authoritarian tendencies. Forgive me, but I cannot help associating this sangfroid wisdom with Kevin Bacon’s character at the end of National Lampoon’s Animal House, who instructs everybody to remain calm as the Deltas wreck the town.

Levitsky and Ziblatt are right to highlight the long-term deleterious effects of this presidency on civic virtue. Since the founding of the Republic, Federalists and Republicans have been debating whether its proper foundations are Jeffersonian civic virtues or well-designed constitutionally erected institutions. Illiberal attacks on institutions are visible; the corruption of civility by what Hannah Arendt called Radical Evil, the open advocacy of immorality, is less visible but it is more deleterious. The world imitates America. The next President may have to deal with Latin America replete with Trump clones and an America where people imitate the former President in how uncaringly cruel exploitative and disloyal they treat and manipulate each other and their families. A house divided in such a way cannot stand, and a house made of rotten bricks will collapse under its own weight even if it is built according to the best architectural constitutional design.

It is too easy for political theorists to forget that all political regimes exist in time, they are historical. No political form is eternal. Liberal democracy is no exception, but a historically hard-won achievement, something rare and built up only over a long time; it doesn’t have an “instant” formula that admirers can assemble in a quick do-it-yourself manner for export or import. Liberal democracies with young and brittle stems and shallower and weaker roots in a hard, dry, and unforgiving historical soil as in Hungary and Poland can be uprooted and blow away when the economic winds change. Democracies with the deepest roots, as in Britain and its former colonies, where institutions and attitudes have come to align most closely, are the most difficult to uproot. Demagogues can shake them, yet they remain rooted. It is useful to compare the prospects of American liberal democracy with the modern experiences of Latin American countries, Poland, Hungary, Turkey, and so on, noting some general forms of democratic demise. But painting all political pictures with the same brush without attention to different path dependencies can lead to misleading comparisons. Vice versa, assuming ahistorically that there is an authoritarian electoral constant or near constant may obscure the global anti-democratic or rather democratic self-destructive factors at work that can be compared between countries with different histories.

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Macron’s Risky American Bet

French President Emmanuel Macron can expect a warm, bipartisan reception when he arrives in Washington DC on April 24th for the first state visit of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tenure. Since his election in May 2017, Macron has forged a close personal relationship with Trump, not least because the two leaders have more in common than most pundits realize. Furthermore, with the United Kingdom mired in uncertain Brexit negotiations and Germany hobbled by a fragile coalition, France is now seen by both parties in Washington as its key interlocutor in Europe. The recent joint strike in Syria was a potent symbol of the growing cooperation on national security matters between the United States and France.

Does any of this mean that Macron will be able to win meaningful concessions in other areas—most notably getting a permanent exemption from Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs—during his visit? As with most things that concern the Trump Administration, it’s hard to be 100 percent confident in one’s predictions. One thing is for sure, however: Macron needs to come back to France with something to show for his efforts, and is likely to leverage his considerable political talents to that end.

The trailblazing French president has set for himself an ambitious reform agenda at home, which he has had some success in pushing through. Where he has prevailed, he has done so for several reasons. First, Macron’s En Marche! party commands a supermajority in the French parliament, which therefore offers little resistance to his government’s proposals. Second, Macron is implementing campaign promises which have a critical mass of support. Third, French society has evolved from the stagnant, bureaucratic stereotype of the past. Young people in France today are more entrepreneurial and less averse to risks than their parents. Paris is now home of the world largest startup campus, Station F, and France has become the new European tech hub. Even older generations recognize that the country can no longer put off reforms.

But as Macron arrives in Washington, his reforms are entering a critical phase. He has locked horns with France’s beloved, but expensive and uncompetitive, national railway system—a historic hazard in French politics. The railway unions have responded by announcing strikes that are set to go on for three months, with their far-left allies threatening to spread protests to other parts of French society. But in contrast to 1995, when huge strikes prompted then-President Jacques Chirac to back down, Macron shows no signs of caving. He understands that his only chance at re-election is in seeing his reform agenda to the end.

Macron also knows that reforming France alone will not suffice to stave off the nativist forces he saw off in 2017. Unlike many of his European peers, who have leaned on nationalist narratives to exploit rising economic and cultural anxieties across the continent, Macron has sought to appeal to globalization’s losers by sketching out a vision of a stronger European Union that actively protects and works on behalf of its citizens.

To his disappointment, however, a revitalized Europe increasingly looks like an unlikely prospect in the short term. Germany’s new government appears as reluctant as the previous one to embrace France’s ambitious Eurozone proposals. Italy’s populist turn leaves France without a reliable ally in Europe’s South. Northern Europe remains inflexibly wedded to the ideology of economic austerity. And countries like Hungary and Poland have taken a starkly Euroskeptic—if not outright Europhobic—turn and will serve as an obstacle to Macron’s vision of a more integrated Europe.

The United States thus represents both an opportunity and a test for Macron. He is under pressure from skeptics in Paris to show concrete results from his relationship with President Trump. Should he deliver, he would return to Europe greatly strengthened, able to pursue tough reforms both at home and in Brussels. The Trump Administration ought not to miss an opportunity for a clever play of its own.

Trump’s new national security strategy identifies the geoeconomic threat from China as one of his Administration’s top priorities. Macron shares Trump’s concern about predatory Chinese economic behavior. Both presidents want greater reciprocity from Beijing in terms of investment access, intellectual property protection, and technology transfer. As long as the U.S. threatens the European Union with tariffs on surplus steel and aluminum imports, France cannot convince Brussels and other EU countries to work alongside Washington in challenging China’s behavior. Thus, Trump should offer his French friend the prize of permanent European exemptions on steel and aluminum tariffs and aim to forge a U.S.-EU alliance in demanding greater concessions from China. The prize of the U.S. and Europe speaking together on Chinese trade issues is far more consequential to America’s economic future than the upside of steel and aluminum tariffs on European imports.

Donald Trump is fortunate to have a friend like Emmanuel Macron who has great ambitions at home and abroad. As the test of wills with Russia and China is sure to intensify, Trump will want a strong Macron and a strong Europe in his camp. Trump should make sure his French friend leaves Washington with something to show for his visit—not as a gift to Macron, but as the surest way to advance Trump’s own agenda.

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Trump and the Future of English

A linguist such as myself is often asked whether Donald Trump’s way of speaking will have an effect on American English of the future. Because American Presidents are seen as standard-bearers and Donald Trump is one of the most flagrantly inarticulate men ever to occupy the office, it is natural to wonder. Many Presidents resonate in our memory with fondly remembered sonorous phrases — “Nothing to fear but fear itself,” “Ask not what your country can do for you” — while Trump gives us “Sad!”, “No collusion!”, “covfefe,” and other assorted helpings of verbal coleslaw.

The truth is that we need not worry that this man will become a linguistic role model. Trump’s language usage reflects less how we will use language than ways that we actually already do.

Indeed, however, we need not worry that any Americans are taking their oratorical cues from Trump in any meaningful sense. Linguists have documented that there are ways of speaking which become, whether justified or not, so stigmatized that people cringe from imitating them. That is, linguistic traits do not exert influence merely by dint of their prominence: They can not only inspire imitation but revulsion.

For example, before the Second World War New Yorkers of all classes often had an “r-less” dialect, leaving off r’s from the ends of syllables. Hence Franklin Roosevelt’s “fe-ah” for fear and Jackie Gleason’s Ralph Kramden pronouncing Norton as “Naw-uh-ton.” After the war, perhaps because enlistment had brought people from all areas of the country into contact, this r-less pronunciation became an object of ridicule. It has been in rapid retreat ever since.

In the same way, Trump’s bed-head style of speaking and tweeting will inspire no future aspirants to high office. If anything, he will serve as something to model against, like an unkempt suburban lawn or underheated lasagna. Trump-style talkers have always been among us, doing no harm and even providing a degree of hygge: the fondly remembered trash-talking camp counselor, one of your favorite old bartenders, that Jack-and-Coke-sipping great uncle who livens up family gatherings. What is unusual now is that such a type is occupying the Oval Office. It shall pass, and the chances that the next occupant of the Oval Office will talk like Trump, regardless of party, are next to nil.

There are indeed things that Trump teaches us about the future of American English, but they are less obvious than the fantastical notion of Trumpese becoming America’s preferred medium of public address.

For example, many consider colloquial sprinkles of like a sign of grammatical devolution among the young folks. However, in America of the future, people on walkers, too, will be using like virtually as punctuation—and Trump is one way we can know it.

Trump’s use of like in one of his better-known tweets is indicative: “My two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart.” Most of us marveled that a President of the United States would express himself with a usage of like most readily associated with teenagers. Yet the colloquial like can no longer be classified as a quirk of youth. It has infiltrated American English ever more since the 1970s and is now used liberally by quite a few people now graying at the temples and beyond. Trump, despite his dye job, is one of them: His usage of like in the tweet is quite authentic.

Crucially, using the colloquial like idiomatically is complex and subtle enough to have inspired dissertations and a book. In other words, like most of language, the colloquial like is used subconsciously, and Trump, in his twenties in the 1970s, internalized it as natively as legions of young people did at the time.

Trump is hardly unusual among septuagenarians in using the colloquial like today, even if not as liberally as teenagers and twenty-somethings. However, people a generation below him already often use it more than he does, and today’s twenty-somethings will be graying parents in 20 years. Neither parenthood nor mortgages transform how we speak casually. Like has become a part of colloquial English, like it or not, and Trump’s using it in a tweet, even at his age, was less a goofy aberration than a harbinger of the future.

Even Trump’s casual approach to communication in general, while markedly heedless in the comparative sense, is less exotic in its essence than many suppose. Casual speech has occupied an ever larger space in the American public forum since the 1960s: We shed interest in the old-school formality of the “public address” along with fedoras, girdles, salad forks, and dances with set steps. It isn’t an accident that what were once called speeches are now called talks.

Trump’s Twitter-holism, then, is predictable from someone who grew up after the era of the “speech” and doesn’t read. Twitter is a way of communicating with the public minus the effort of crafting oratory. It is writing in a mechanical sense, but its brevity and instantaneous reach parallel casual speech. The notorious “covfefe” mistake nicely reveals the essence. The context shows that Trump was almost certainly trying to write “coverage,” and a look at the keyboard reveals that his fingers simply slipped northwestward a tad and then settled down for a bit. That is, Trump fell asleep while tweeting—and yet was comfortable communicating with the world in such a groggy state in the first place. He was, in other words, just “talking.”

Heedless? Yes—but hardly otherworldly in an America that has cherished talking over speaking to the extent that part of what kept Mitt Romney from the White House may have been that he wasn’t chatty enough.

It is the content of Trump’s utterances that may create actual change in how America uses language. Trump’s all but unvarnished sexism, racism, and xenophobia, and how much they appall so many, are helping to focus another change that has long been ongoing in American English: a reclassification of what constitutes profanity.

Technically, we are taught that certain “four-letter” words relating to religious concepts, bodily functions, and sex are “profane.” However, in terms of how freely most modern Americans of all classes use these words today, they qualify more as what we might call salty. We treat them as profane only in shielding children from them—but for reasons ever more abstract, given that the media will marinate our children in such words from their early adolescence onward and few of us could honestly say we consider it a tragedy.

Rather, what a Martian anthropologist would immediately classify as our profanity is slurs against groups. Today’s profane words begin with, respectively, n referring to black people, f referring to gay men, and in its abusive usages, b referring to women as well as another word beginning with c. These are the words we shudder to imagine our children using even as adults, that many of us prefer not to utter ourselves even in quotation marks, and whose usage can get a person fired. That is, these words are profane to us in the sense that f— was to Scribners editor Maxwell Perkins in the 1920s when, discussing a Hemingway manuscript, he could only bring himself to communicate the word via putting it in writing.

This revolution in what constitutes true profanity was in motion before Trump became President. However, as his shameless disdain for those unlike him has helped spark the #MeToo movement, likely helped focus attention on the racism-focused film Get Out, and reinforces the vigor (and even excesses) of today’s campus revolts against various forms of discrimination, our sense of discriminatory language as uniquely offensive and subject to censure crystallizes ever further.

One way we see this is in cases in which many cannot help perceive a certain excess. Shortly before Trump’s election, Good Morning America host Amy Robach spent a week on the Twitter griddle for a speech error in which she referred to “colored people” rather than “people of color.” Yet while “colored people” is antique, few would consider it a slur. More recently, a student objected to Columbia University political scientist Todd Gitlin’s use of the term “Negro” when discussing the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s—again, many would be hard pressed to see him as having levelled an offense.

This oversensitivity is symptomatic of something larger and more urgent, a heightened sense of discrimination as uniquely unpardonable. In this, Trump is having more of an effect on language usage than any possible repercussions of “covfefe.”

Grammatically, then, we all often express ourselves more like Trump than we often realize. Of course, the tribalist content of his utterances is hardly unknown among the populace, either. But there thrives a critical mass of Americans for whom Trump’s messages will serve as a spark for seeking more civilized ways of speaking and thinking. In this, the language of Trump may ironically have progressive results.

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A Raw Deal for Shinzo Abe?

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s summit with U.S. President Donald J. Trump this week at Mar-a-Lago maintained all the usual trappings and chummy theatrics of their public bromance. Throughout the two-day summit, in both public speeches and on Twitter, Trump heaped compliments on Abe and Japan, while treating his guest to another round of golf diplomacy. Yet despite the golf game and a brief respite from his troubles at home, the Japanese Prime Minister is heading back to Tokyo all but empty-handed. The summit was most notable as a turning point for Japan, clarifying that Tokyo must now embrace and advance its newfound role upholding the beleaguered liberal international order without an enthusiastic Washington leading the way.

Abe was hoping for a major foreign policy breakthrough, and expectations were high given his successful track record of managing Trump. He also hoped to boost his flagging poll numbers at home, which have recently reached historic lows of just above 20 percent. However, he failed to reach a tangible agreement with Trump over any major policy issues, apart from a promise to raise the issue of Japanese abductees in North Korea in forthcoming talks with Kim Jong-un. The summit showed the pitfalls of Abe’s excessive reliance on his personal relationship with Trump. Japan received its baptism into Trump’s signature “art of the deal”: a transactional, bilateral approach to alliance management conducted with little regard for broader global stakes.

Abe’s “bromance” strategy has backfired largely because of Trump’s peculiar personality and the circumstances around his presidency. Since returning to office in December 2012, the Japanese Prime Minister has successfully cultivated and leveraged a personal rapport with strongmen around the world, particularly Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. When Trump was elected in November 2016, Abe hoped to do the same, and became the first world leader to meet the then-President-elect at Trump Tower, followed by official summits with obligatory golf diplomacy throughout the following year. Unlike Abe’s autocratic Eurasian partners, however, his American counterpart has from the start been under fire from all corners, prone to volatile policy shifts and fixating on quickly manufactured policy accomplishments to sustain his presidency.

During the latest Mar-a-Lago summit, Trump again seized the initiative from Abe and caught the Japanese Prime Minister off guard. Even before the summit, the two leaders differed over many important items on the alliance agenda, including North Korea. For example, Abe had long abandoned the option of direct engagement with Pyongyang and instead sought “maximum pressure”on North Korea with the aim of isolating the country on the world stage. By contrast, Trump recently opened secret communication channels with Pyongyang, using Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) assets—and a clandestine trip by Director Mike Pompeo—to pave the way for an official dialogue with Kim Jon-un. Lacking comparable intelligence capabilities, Abe was blindsided when Trump dropped this bombshell while standing next to him. (Trump’s announcement in March of his intention to meet Kim had already surprised Abe, leading the Japanese Prime Minister to make an about-face and seek an official summit with the North Korean leader.)

While maintaining the same rhetoric of “maximum pressure” at Mar-a-Lago, Abe acquiesced to Trump’s preferred form of engagement with Pyongyang. Having yielded the initiative to Trump on North Korea, the Japanese leader found himself in a worse position to discuss international trade the following day, especially after the U.S. President’s nighttime tweetstorm rejecting a return to the Trans Pacific-Partnership (TPP), which Abe had been personally championing.

The two-day summit at Mar-a-Lago confirmed the changing dynamics of the U.S.-Japan alliance. For decades, the United States utilized the alliance largely as part of its global security strategy, in service of its forward-deployed assets. President Obama’s 2012 “Pivot to Asia” strategy significantly expanded the scope of the alliance and sought to leverage it as a key pillar for multilateral engagement in the region. Obama’s renewed Asia strategy was a departure from Washington’s traditional “hub-and-spoke” engagement in the region, spawning multilateral frameworks, such as the TPP, and leading to the globalization of the U.S.-Japan alliance.

By contrast, Trump’s transactional, bilateral approach to the region is essentially a reversion to the old “hub-and-spoke” strategy. Meanwhile, Japan is no longer just a “spoke” in Washington’s regional engagement and has emerged under Abe as a proactive player in shaping the regional order. Indeed, Japan has been the de facto leader of the new TPP-11 format and is also involved in many other multilateral regional frameworks, particularly the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue and the Moscow-proposed connectivity project for the Far East. In short, as Washington increasingly becomes introverted with its preference for “America First” and bilateral engagement, Tokyo finds itself in a unique international position as a proactive leader both willing and capable of globalizing the alliance.

In charting the future of the U.S.-Japan alliance, Japan must maximize this emerging international role. The first imperative for Tokyo should be to institutionalize the shifting dynamics of the alliance. Japan’s newfound role is largely a legacy of Abe’s proactive foreign policy. As the Japanese Prime Minister faces the toughest political scandal of his career, Tokyo must ensure that its growing international clout survives his potential exit after the upcoming general election this year.

Such an undertaking would first involve conceptualization of a U.S.-Japan+Alpha formula, a possible framework for a multilateral approach to the U.S.-Japan alliance. Abe’s single most important foreign policy legacy is his cultivation of burgeoning personal relations with an expanding network of contacts around the globe—not only democratic leaders like German Chancellor Angela Merkel but also autocratic strongmen like Putin and Erdoğan. In other words, Japan has been emerging as a bridge to many countries that Washington increasingly has difficulty dealing with. Tokyo must therefore consolidate Abe’s foreign policy legacy by boosting its institutional exchanges with other world capitals like Moscow and Ankara. As Washington backtracks on its global engagement, institutionalization of Tokyo’s steadfast engagement with world leaders would contribute to realizing a multilateral U.S.-Japan+Alpha formula.

Second, Japan must deepen its multilateral engagement to lay the foundation for a U.S.-Japan+Alpha formula to counter China’s growing global clout and its One Belt, One Road (OBOR) Initiative. For example, Russia and Japan have been boosting their bilateral relations in recent years, culminating in Tokyo’s September 2017 pledge to expand the scope of their cooperation to include greater Northeast Asia, including North Korea. Moreover, Moscow and Tokyo could expand their burgeoning economic cooperation beyond the Far East to other parts of Eurasia. Likewise, Tokyo must leverage its emerging ties with Ankara, such as the upcoming Japan-Turkey Security Council Meeting, to further consolidate Japan’s geo-economic influence in the region. Meanwhile, Japan can also act as a democratic lynchpin connecting Europe and the Indo-Pacific in defense of the liberal international order. Indeed, the European Union and Japan finalized the negotiation of an EU-Japan free trade agreement (FTA) in December 2017. Tokyo and European capitals can further boost their multilateral cooperation across the G7 and G20 platforms with an eye to the Asian market as well as maritime security in the South China Sea.

Finally, Japan should institutionalize its relationships across Eurasia and the Indo-Pacific. In December 2012, Abe proposed a Democratic Security Diamond for Asia, consisting of the U.S. state of Hawaii, Japan, Australia, and India. Five years on, his geostrategic vision is increasingly becoming tangible, with the possibility of transforming into a veritable Indo-Pacific Security Diamond, thanks to growing institutionalization efforts like the 2017 resumption of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue. Given Abe’s significant foreign policy legacies across Eurasia, Tokyo should also consider a possible Eurasian Geostrategic Diamond consisting of Russia, Turkey, India, and Japan by combining geo-economic investment and trade liberalization in the region. A Tokyo-led Eurasian Geostrategic Diamond would bolster Washington’s diminishing presence in the region, and Japan’s liberal connectivity agenda known as Quality Infrastructure Investment would be a significant counterweight to China’s Silk Road Economic Belt. Two geostrategic diamonds anchored in Japan would consolidate Abe’s foreign policy legacies over the last five years and would lay a solid foundation for the future of the changing, globalizing U.S.-Japan alliance.

The latest U.S.-Japan summit was Abe’s official, belated initiation into Trump’s transactional approach to foreign policy. Although the Japanese Prime Minister may head home with little to show for himself, the summit may come to be seen in the long term as an inflection point for Japan: clarifying for Abe the need to consolidate and institutionalize his foreign policy legacy, while picking up the slack from a more tentative and transactional Washington.

The post A Raw Deal for Shinzo Abe? appeared first on The American Interest.

New Cold War…Not

I’ve decided to thematize my blog in this space—as opposed to my regular monthly column and the occasional feature—by calling it Niagara Falls Moments. So below will be Niagara Falls Moment #1, followed by #2, and, well, you get the idea. How many will there be? Can’t say; don’t know. 

I’m calling it Niagara Falls Moments for a reason—namely, to allude to what I thought was a very famous pre-World War II era comedy skit that, like most from that era, made a transition from being a vaudeville standard to the movies, and from the movies to being a perennial “repeat” on then black-and-white television, where I first encountered it as a boy circa age eight. The skit was such standard comedy fare that at least four versions made it to my television set: one, probably the most famous, by Abbott and Costello; a second by The Three Stooges; a third from an episode of I Love Lucy, and one courtesy of Milton Berle. As best I can tell, no one really knows who crafted the original vaudeville version, or when. Performers Harry Steppe, Joey Faye, and Samuel Goldman all claimed to be the inventor, but each was a world-class fabulist—a trait that more or less went with the tall-tale territory of vaudeville. If S.J. Perelman were still alive, or Groucho Marx or George S. Kaufman, they might know the truth of the matter. But they’re not.

So how did the skit go, and why am I appropriating it for a blog theme? As I say, I think I shouldn’t have to explain this, but I obviously do. I know this because on Tuesday night, at a dinner downtown, I raised it with Robert Samuelson of the Washington Post as a prelude to a point I wanted to make in our conversation, and he claimed he didn’t know what I was referring to. Bob is five and half years my senior and is no stranger to the pop cultural zeitgeist, so if he doesn’t know the reference, I have to conclude that an explanation is needed.

So there are these two guys in a jail cell, and one asks the other what it was that got him thrown in the clinker. So the other guy begins this sad yarn about a cad who steals his wife and baby, an extrusion of which is that whenever someone says “Niagara Falls,” he flips out, says “slowly I turned, inch by inch, step by step…,” and then begins wailing on whoever utters the magic words. In the Abbott and Costello skit, featuring Sidney Fields as the madman, Abbott foolishly says “Niagara Falls” three times. You have to see this to appreciate it, so if you haven’t—that includes you, Samuelson) go have a look. 

I appropriate the Niagara Falls skit it for the blog because I do the same thing, albeit in a subtler and (so far) less violent way: Flip out and boil over whenever I hear certain idiotic or misguided language nuggets repeated over and over again. I fear going insane unless I find ways to release the tension, so I intend use of the theme as a form of auto-therapy. Readers may consider themselves most welcome eavesdroppers. 

It’s not just me. My cherished anthropologist colleague Anna Simons at the Naval Postgraduate School—someone whose brilliant work has appeared in TAI several times—gets wound up but good and tight whenever she hears the word “tribe” or “tribal” mis- or misleadingly used, which is quite often lately. Last we discussed it via email Anna happened to be in Niamey, Niger; I agree with her analysis, but that is no sure protection, as the skit reveals. However, she was much too far away to reach out and clobber me—she’s petite but very strong—so I felt safe hitting the send button.

This will not be the first time I will have exploded in print over this sort of irritation. I did it last year when “Niagara Falls” sounded like “Sykes-Picot borders,” which also happened to call forth one of my favorite neologisms: “.

Countering a Kleptocratic Kremlin

With every passing week we have new evidence of the threat that Vladimir Putin’s kleptocracy poses to our democracy, our national security, and the entire liberal world order. Putin’s regime—something akin to an organized crime ring masquerading as a state—has looted the wealth of Russia, subjugated its people, attacked neighboring former republics of the USSR, annexed Crimea, and hacked the electoral process in the United States and other Western democracies.

Ill-gotten Russian wealth—in the tens of billions of dollars—has been pouring into the banking systems and property markets of Europe and the U.S., corrupting and distorting our own institutions. With the eager assistance of British “banks, law firms, accountants, private schools, art galleries, and even Conservative Party fundraisers,”Anne Applebaum recently wrote, the UK has become such a gratifying safe haven for the illicit wealth of Russian oligarchs that they have dubbed the nation’s capital “Londongrad.”  Even in the wake of the brazen assassination attempt on British soil of a former Russian intelligence agent with a Soviet-era chemical nerve agent (the latest in a string of suspicious deaths in Britain linked to the Kremlin), the safe haven remains.

In the Middle East, Putin is trying to make Russia a dominant power player again by propping up one of the world’s most murderous dictators, Bashar al-Assad, while providing cover for Iran to deeply penetrate Syria with its Shia militias, who now sit within five miles of the Israeli border. Putin’s intervention in Syria has given Russia extended military bases and geopolitical sway that it has not had since the demise of the Soviet Union, but at the price of making the Syrian civil war one of the most devastating of the last half century in terms of lives lost and displaced.

We need a better strategy for dealing with Putin and his regime. If there is one thing we should have learned from history, it’s that you don’t contain an autocrat like this by whispering pleasantries in his ear—or worse, pronouncing them publicly. Both the Obama and Trump strategies have failed because they have not been tough enough and principled enough in confronting this mafia-style regime. How can we do better?

We can start by listening to a group of people who share our values but understand Putin much better than we do—Russia’s democrats. One of Russia’s bravest and most brilliant democrats is the man who the Putin regime twice tried to kill by poisoning—Vladimir Kara-Murza. A lucid analyst and dogged activist, Kara-Murza was a close associate of the opposition leader, Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated (Russian democrats have no doubt, by the regime) just steps from the Kremlin in 2015.

On a visit to Stanford this week, Kara-Murza shared with me three important guidelines for dealing with Putin’s threat to democracy. “First, stop saying Russia when you mean Putin.” Putin wants to frame the conflict as a battle between the Russian people, trying to preserve their culture and sovereignty, and a decadent and overbearing West. But our conflict is not with the Russian people. It is with a predatory ruling elite that has hijacked Russia’s state and its vast natural resource wealth. We are not the only victims of Putin’s crimes. There are over 140 million Russian victims as well. In our diplomatic statements, we need to make a clear distinction between Putin’s repressive kleptocracy and the Russian people. And we need to constantly work to separate the two.

Second, don’t offer Putin gratuitous praise. The last thing we should be doing is congratulating him on his election “victories”—a mistake both Presidents Obama and Trump have made. These were not real elections but rather grotesque charades to mimic a democratic process in the hope of giving some shroud of legitimacy to Putin’s dictatorship. Russian democrats are urging us: Please don’t legitimate this fake exercise in democracy. Don’t encourage Putin. And don’t discourage Russian democrats who are trying to fight for the real thing. We need a new golden rule to deal with autocrats like Putin: If you can’t say something critical about him, don’t say anything at all.

Third, we need to ratchet up the pressure on regime elites where it hurts—in their assets and their ability to enjoy them. The vehicle to do this is targeted sanctions on the people responsible for human rights abuses, predatory corruption, and other criminal acts. A milestone on the road to accountability came with the passage in 2012 of the “Magnitksy Act,” named for the Russian anti-corruption whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky, who was beaten to death in a Russian prison in 2009. After it authorized visa and banking sanctions on those believed responsible for his death, the Obama administration placed 18 Russians on the list. In March 2014, responding to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its military operations in eastern Ukraine, a U.S.-led coalition of Western governments began imposing sanctions on numerous other Russian government officials, military officials, business oligarchs, banks, and companies. These actors were thereby prevented from traveling to or doing business with the West. Under President Donald Trump, more Russian oligarchs and their businesses have been added to the list.

Targeted sanctions are effective because they punish corrupt and abusive individuals, not the Russian people at large. Kara-Murza recalls Nemtsov saying that the Magnitsky Act was the most pro-Russian legislation ever passed in a foreign country. “because it targets the people who abuse the rights of Russian citizens and who steal the money of Russian citizens.” “For now,” Kara-Murza says, “We can’t stop the kleptocrats from stealing in Russia, but we can stop them from spending their stolen riches in the West.” Indeed, what’s the point of stealing all this wealth if you can’t use it to buy property in New York, London, and the French Riviera; if you can’t dock your yacht on the Mediterranean coast; if you can’t send your kids to the most prestigious American and British universities; and if you can’t buy Western lawyers, bankers, and PR and lobbying firms to launder your image and your money through layers of transactions until you come out a respected businessman and philanthropist?

In 2012, Kara-Murza was a passionate advocate for passage of the Magnitsky Act. Now he urges other democracies to join the campaign for accountability. “If you have Magnitsky laws on the books, enforce them. If you don’t, pass them.” Several other countries, including Canada and the UK, have passed or are considering Magnitsky sanctions laws. Those that have them need to ensure that the Kremlin’s leading killers, kleptocrats, and enablers are on the sanctions list.

But we have to go further to attack the swiss-cheese system of legal loopholes that enables venal rulers and their cronies worldwide to launder their dirty money and dubious images in the West.  The Kleptocracy Initiative, based at the Hudson Institute, has produced superb analyses documenting the problem and recommending reforms.  We can start, for example, by ending anonymous shell companies (which the U.S. leads the world in facilitating), and by ending anonymous real estate purchases in the U.S. We need to modernize the entire American legal system for anti-money laundering. This will squeeze not only Russian kleptocrats but also drug traffickers, terrorists, human rights abusers, and organized crime networks around the world.

Finally, we shouldn’t yield to glib and cynical pessimism about Russia’s political future. The Russian people haven’t given up on the quest for democratic and accountable government in Russia, and neither should we. After the most prominent surviving opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, was disqualified in January from the Russian presidential election, Russians braved freezing weather and official obstacles in scores of cities across the country to protest the lack of political choice. As Kara-Murza stresses, large numbers of Russians, including young people, are fed up with the corruption of the Kremlin cabal. In truth, we can’t really know how popular Putin is because in his nearly two decades of rule, “the assertion has never been tested in a free and fair election against credible opponents.”

Determined to snuff out any possibility of a political alternative, the Kremlin has been gradually ending competitive elections for mayors.  The most recent victim of this tightening of the authoritarian noose is the charismatic mayor of Ykaterinburg (Russia’s fourth largest city), Yevgeny Roizman. Having beaten Putin’s candidate for mayor five years ago, he was stopped in 2018 with a blunt instrument: A bill rammed through the regional legislature abolishing direct elections for the city’s mayor. Yet Roizman vows to continue resisting the concentration and corruption of power in Russia. He says, “Surrender is not in our vocabulary.” That’s also a good motto for how we in the West should deal with Putin’s kleptocracy.

Karen Dawisha, the author of the definitive study, Putin’s Kleptocracy, passed away last week after a battle with cancer. A great scholar and person, she did not believe that predatory authoritarianism was stamped into the Russian DNA. And neither should we.

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Divided Over a House

Susette Kelo is an unlikely movie heroine, and her struggle against the City of New London’s decision to take her house in the name of urban renewal—played out in community meetings, courtroom hearings, and awkward television interviews—lacks the stuff of cinematic legend. But writer-director Courtney Balaker, adapting Jeff Benedict’s book by the same name, has turned her story into a compelling little movie complete with well-known Hollywood actors. Little Pink House doubles as a libertarian David vs. Goliath epic and a surprisingly sensitive portrayal of the dilemma facing American communities in economic decline.

As the movie begins, we see Kelo (Catherine Keener) coming home from her job as a paramedic to find her husband passed out drunk. Wordlessly, and accompanied by a rather sentimental piano score, she concludes this chapter of her life and goes in search of a new beginning. She finds it in a dilapidated little house next to the Thames River in Connecticut. She buys it, pours her hard work into fixing it up, and paints the exterior “Odessa Rose”—or, to everyone else’s eyes, pink. The movie paints Kelo as a responsible, hard-working citizen trying to stake out her place in a downscale community, and making a real go of it. She even starts up a romantic relationship with her fourth-hand furniture seller. Her life is decidedly unglamorous, but distinctly hopeful.

Her adversaries appear as moderately cartoonish movie villains. We first meet Governor John Rowland (Aaron Douglas), who is never named in the film, as he consults a political fixer in a bar, asking the man to deliver the City of New London unto him for use in a development scheme. The fixer puts him in league with Charlotte Wells (Jeanne Tripplehorn), the president of a fictional local college (she’s meant to represent real-life Connecticut College President Claire Gaudiani). Rowland and company arrange to have Wells appointed as head of the long-dormant New London Development Corporation. The governor expects her to clear all obstacles to securing part of the deindustrialized town for a new Pfizer development, in order to reverse its failing fortunes. (We are treated to a liberal dose of Viagra jokes at Pfizer’s expense throughout the proceedings.) The movie portrays the governor and his cronies as corrupt—fair enough, given that Rowland later served time for corruption and Pfizer’s promised development turned out to be a total dud.

Notwithstanding these broad brushstrokes, Little Pink House renders the tensions between the development and anti-development crowds with sensitivity. We know which side has the filmmakers’ sympathies, but to their credit, they do not portray the protagonist and her allies as having more answers for their community’s problems than they actually did. We get a quick shot of Wells kicking off some kind of young professionals’ event, making big promises to turn New London around for the benefit of the larger community. While we know cynicism has brought her there, she manages to gather some real youthful energy behind the idea of a city with a brighter future. Unfortunately, those who envision such a future must see Kelo’s neighborhood as nothing more than blight; they imagine the residents should be thrilled to sell their houses at market rates.

The movie portrays Kelo and her neighbors, on the other hand, as aging and focused on the past; some want merely to die in their homes. There is not a single child in sight. They have nothing but contempt for the idea of “Pfizer as savior,” but neither do they think about how their community will survive. Upon meeting Kelo for the first time, one character says that at least her work as a paramedic must be reliable, given the way people in the neighborhood keep dropping. That said, these people come off as quiet, dignified, and even admirable. Kelo eventually says that she wants above all to be left alone in her home, unmolested by someone else’s idea of what progress should look like. That feeling has a long and venerable pedigree in American history—but, then again, so does the relentless push for progress, often with little regard for those on the losing side.

That conflict between American values helped make the 2005 Supreme Court case that bore the heroine’s name, Kelo v. City of New London, something of a sensation. To Kelo’s knights in shining armor, the libertarian public-interest firm Institute for Justice (IJ), the filmmakers, and the majority of the audience at the screening I attended at Washington’s Cato Institute, it was patently obvious that the Constitution’s provision for government takings, justly compensated, should never permit the government to take land from one private party and simply give it to another. The film ably represents that constitutional argument, but also airs New London’s rebuttal: Development schemes almost always end up facilitating such transfers anyway; requiring a government to retain complete control over its takings would defeat the purpose. More importantly, far-sighted communities must have the power to determine which kinds of plans best serve their long-term goals. As a result, any legal case becomes a question of who should have the final judgment: the community’s elected representatives, or judges. Unfortunately, the movie makes this choice seem easier than it is: It portrays the city council’s members, who appear just once, as pusillanimous servants of the wealthy. Yet it’s hardly true that local governments always squelch “the little guys,” or that judges always come to their rescue.

Indeed, the Supreme Court itself did not come to the rescue. The majority opinion in Kelo, penned by Justice John Paul Stevens (and joined by Justices Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer), argued not that New London made judicious or effective use of its eminent domain power, but that judges are not well positioned to second-guess local governments. The dissent, written by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor (and joined by Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas), decried the new law of “reverse Robin Hood,” in which cities can take property from the poor and give it to the rich whenever they deem it economically advantageous.

To my mind, the story then takes a happier turn, which the movie acknowledges only in a quick flash of text at the end. Riding an unexpectedly widespread political backlash against the court’s decision, Kelo’s fight moved from the courts to the state legislatures. IJ partnered with organizations across the political spectrum, including the NAACP and ACLU, to win by democratic processes what they could not accomplish judicially. In his book The Grasping Hand, Law Professor Ilya Somin details those efforts, which resulted in the reform of eminent domains laws in more than 40 states, affording citizens protections that the Constitution, according to Kelo v. New London, does not guarantee.

The movie gives a small glimpse of what this movement would become, showing us how Kelo reluctantly takes on the role (at IJ’s urging) of political campaigner. In mobilizing her neighbors against an external threat, she calls forth a communal purpose she had never felt before, transforming from a solitary seeker of peace into the standard-bearer of public spiritedness. In one scene, Wells (the developer) tells a large group of community members that redeveloping their neighborhood will make New London a better place; Kelo immediately retorts, “Who decides what a better place is?!” She could not have put it better. The struggle over this exact question defines political life in a self-governing, democratic system.

One is tempted to say that this political blossoming redeems her loss in court, but Susette Kelo herself would not say so. She was crusading to save her home; the political battle mattered far less. Though present at the screening, she clearly found it painful to relive the saga that ended in the demolition of her beloved waterfront home in service of empty rhetoric. While answering questions, she touchingly described herself as a simple person who wished most of all to return to her quiet life before all this happened. Somin notes that some of her neighbors endured even more harrowing displacements than Kelo did. We cannot take much comfort from democratic victories, he argues; even after the state reforms, homeowners’ property rights have considerably fewer safeguards today than prior to the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Little Pink House does not fit neatly into the political scene of 2018—and perhaps because of that, I found it especially valuable to ponder its quandaries. We now have a high-stakes fight developing between NIMBYs and YIMBYs (“not” or “yes” “in my back yard”) that seems increasingly central to political conflict, although in confusingly cross-partisan ways. As IJ’s Scott Bullock noted at the screening, President Donald Trump has said he supports the Kelo decision 100 percent—not surprising, considering that eminent domain has enabled not a few of his real-estate developments over the years. On the other hand, the film has an anti-corporate, small-is-beautiful, communitarian ethos that seems central to Trump’s 2016 campaign appeal—not to mention Bernie Sanders’. Both Democrats and Republicans are struggling with factions that do not find economic development, especially the kind driven by multinational corporations, worth prioritizing, and  Little Pink House portrays the inherent nobility of resisting self-appointed agents of progress. But such struggle does not provide a viable way of life for future generations, who, through their scant presence in the film, seem to be voting with their feet and prioritizing other problems. Bulldozing people’s cherished homes for corrupt political reasons is an obvious miscarriage of justice, but less literal bulldozers are coming for many Americans’ way of life, and mere assertions of rights may not be enough to turn them away.

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Professors Support Free Speech

Controversy about speech and speakers has become de rigueur on our nation’s college campuses. Students are front and center in these debates, and numerous reports and surveys paint an inconsistent picture of their views on free speech. While students claim to value the First Amendment and the inclusion of many conflicting ideas in debates, they also support limits on speech to promote greater diversity and inclusion, or to safeguard particular groups of people.

While student attitudes toward openness are of value, these undergraduates are still developing intellectually and politically. What is notably absent in the current research is an examination of the faculty tasked with teaching these students.

Professors, who remain fixtures on campus while students just pass through, set the tone for many facets of collegiate life both in and out of the classroom. I recently surveyed close to nine hundred faculty members around the country to gauge their views on free speech.

The data tell a clear story: College faculty overwhelmingly support free speech along with open environments for learning on their campuses. Furthermore, the differences of opinion between faculty of different ideological bents are far less pronounced than the differences between students with different ideologies.

The survey makes it clear that 93 percent of faculty agree with the statement that, “[U]niversity life requires that people with diverse viewpoints and perspectives encounter each other in an environment where they feel free to speak up and challenge each other.” There is almost universal support for the exchange of ideas and open discourse.

With respect to classroom teaching, 80 percent of professors believe that, “Faculty members should be free to present in class any idea that they consider relevant.” Liberal faculty are more supportive of this statement than conservative faculty, with 88 percent of liberal faculty agreeing compared to 67 percent of conservative faculty. Similarly, in the historically liberal humanities and social sciences departments, support for real academic freedom is higher than in the more technical and conservative departments. Over 90 percent of faculty in English, history, political science, arts, and humanities departments support that statement, compared to 70 percent in business and education. Despite these ideological differences, on the whole the faculty is overwhelmingly in favor of intellectual openness.

Given that this debate deals with the degree of protection given to students in their intellectual environment, I asked professors to choose which environment they preferred: an open environment or a more protective environment where free speech could be curtailed.

Specifically, professors were asked to choose between two types: “An open learning environment where students are exposed to all types of speech and viewpoints, even if it means allowing speech that is offensive or biased against certain groups of people” or “A positive learning environment for all students that prohibits certain expressions of speech or viewpoints that are offensive or biased against certain groups of people.”

A large majority of professors—69 percent—support an open environment where students are exposed to all types of speech, while only 31 percent favored positive environments where speech can be limited to help ensure that all students feel safe and respected. This strong inclination toward openness mirrors a 2018 Knight Foundation poll which found that 29 percent of college students supported a positive environment and 70 percent supported an open environment.

However, there was a notable difference between students and faculty when ideology was factored in. Whereas the Knight Foundation poll found that almost 90 percent of Republican students wanted an “open environment,” compared to 60 percent of Democrat students, similar partisan divides were not present among the faculty. 70 percent of Democratic and 66 percent of Republican college professors favored an open environment over a positive environment. Faculty in both humanistic and technical departments also show a similar degree of support for openness, demonstrating that professors across the board are united in believing that the free exchange of ideas should be promoted and protected. For example, on the technical side, 72 percent of business and 73 percent of engineering professors support openness, while 73 percent of faculty in the fine arts, 75 percent of those in the social sciences, and 81 percent say the same.

One reason the difference in support for openness between faculty and students is considerable could be as simple as experience. The way partisanship has sorted over the past decade suggests that Republicans prefer openness while Democrats want intervention and protections and this lines up with the undergraduate statements. These students have not spent their careers on college campuses and may not recognize that collegiate life is often messy and requires balancing openness against the considering students with diverse backgrounds and needs. Many professors generally understand this after being in the academe, and the data suggests that a commitment to openness transcends partisanship for professors.

While faculty were strongly in support of openness in theory, members of varied ideological persuasions differed on how to manage free speech, specifically over the use of “safe spaces.” Only 61 percent of professors agree either completely or with some reservation that safe spaces “help students feel comfortable sharing their perspectives and exploring sensitive subjects.” Unsurprisingly, 78 percent of liberal faculty agree while only 39 percent of conservative faculty do. Additionally, safe spaces are far more welcome by faculty at small liberal arts colleges, at 91 percent of such professors, compared to 68 percent of those at private universities and 65 percent of those at public universities.

Finally, with respect to students who disrupt the functioning of a college to protest against certain speakers or ideas (an increasingly common occurrence), 67 percent of faculty agree to varying degrees that such students should be expelled or suspended. 84 percent of conservative faculty support these measures compared to 59 percent of liberals, a less dramatic split than the divide over safe spaces. Overall, faculty members favor preserving both order and freedom on campus, though with slightly different ideas of how to go about it.

The data on faculty views about free speech is encouraging, revealing widespread and strong support for intellectual openness, the cornerstone of higher education and social progress. Faculty must train students to think, question, debate, and listen to each other, and they clearly remain committed to those pursuits.

Of course, college administrators play a significant and often underappreciated role in shaping the debates on campus, as they regularly interface with students as well. Understanding the attitudes and approaches of administrators would be of great value, but no survey data exists to date on this important group. Researchers interested in the state of our college campuses would do well to examine how administrators influence student opinions on free speech and expression; the opinions of students and faculty are not the only pieces of this puzzle.

Despite the absence of administrator data, the data on faculty support for free speech and openness goes a long way toward demonstrating that such values are still embraced on college campuses. As controversies continue to flares up, students and colleges would benefit if, instead of disconnecting and going home, faculty members took the lead and made their strong support of free speech known.

The survey was conducted online between December 2016 and the end of January 2017. The faculty sample was part of a larger panel of Americans maintained by a top survey firm. The data was weighted to be representative of the academe and particular attention was paid to ensure samples by geography, academic field, and college type—such as small colleges and big research universities.

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The Question of Borders

When the going gets tough politically or personally, President Trump’s recovery move is to turn to his base voters. This has yet to increase his job approval numbers much beyond 40 percent, but it keeps his support level from falling into a total collapse. With sex scandals swirling and the Mueller investigation closing in, Trump recently took action on an issue that matters a great deal to his base—immigration. The President initially wanted to send active military to the Mexican border, but upon advice from the military settled for the more conventional tactic of deploying the National Guard.

It was no surprise that Texas and Arizona were quick to respond, but it was less clear what California, a self-proclaimed bastion of Trump resistance, would do. In the end, Governor Jerry Brown also complied after some hesitation. He took care to explain that the purpose of his order was to protect against “criminal threats,” and not to “round up women and children or detain people who are escaping violence or seeking a better life.”

Immigration was a hot topic in California decades before Trump ran on the issue in 2016. As the Latino and Asian population grew in the 1970s and 1980s, the predominantly white state electorate passed ballot measures that would have restricted government services to undocumented residents and limited bilingual education in the schools. Peter Wilson, running for re-election in a recession, focused his campaign on the fiscal drain that immigrants put on county governments. Minutemen patrolled the California-Mexico border and tensions developed between Latinos and African-Americans over public sector jobs in Southern California. Governor Brown, who witnessed all of this from the perch of one office or another during this period, chose “prudently” to follow a “measured” path with respect to Trump’s order, well aware that the embers of immigration politics never die out entirely.

Immigration in the new millennium raises many of the same cultural, economic, and political issues that were debated in the 1980s and 1990s, but there is a new element of physical threat. Terrorists (homegrown and foreign), drug-related violence, and Central American gangs feature more prominently now in the immigration discussion than they did several decades ago. This new angle generates fear, the most powerful electoral force in any setting—even in blue states like California.

Fear has driven California public policy in the past. The threat of drug-related violence led Californians to adopt mandatory sentencing and a harsh three-strikes law several decades ago. Governor Brown, who found himself on the wrong side of public sentiment on the death penalty and sentencing rules in his first stint as Governor, is clearly determined to avoid making the same political mistake again.

The recent debate has focused on the fate of the dreamers and funding Trump’s wall, but there are deeper themes at work. Many “isms” have assumed wrongly that national, cultural, racial, and religious identities could be swept aside by larger forces. The normative premise of economic liberalism and globalism is that rational individuals should prefer the efficiencies of trade and the free movement of labor to an inefficient world of protected markets. Marxism assumed that class identity could substitute for older traditional identity ties. Cosmopolitanism promoted the ideal that people could identify as citizens of the world. For some individuals, these assumptions were correct. But for many, they were not.

Protectionism is back, trumpeted by a political party that used to promote free trade most avidly. The fall of communism revived nationalism and religion in the former Soviet Union. Cosmopolitanism thrives only in limited domains populated by educated elites, not in red state Trump territory. Theories that overlook the importance of social identification, or dismiss it as irrational tribalism, or assume that it can be subsumed by loyalty to an occupational class or bureaucratic entities like the European Union, will often not foresee the backlash that inevitably follows.

The need to belong to a community is manifest in cyberspace as well as social geography. Many social media users cluster into homogenous networks, reinforcing common viewpoints and values among themselves. Homophily is omnipresent. First observed by Plato and Aristotle, and then later developed into a sociological theory by Paul Lazarsfeld in 1954, it holds that people generally prefer to associate with others like themselves—i.e. those who share similar values, religion, politics, and culture. Borders protected many of these homogenous communities in the past, but modern trends—free trade, social media, and the like—have eroded those buffers.

Political and economic elites have embraced the values of globalism, regionalism, and humanitarian concern for refugees more eagerly than many of their constituents. Recent research by political scientists John Ferejohn and David Brady found that in almost all of the political parties in the OECD countries they surveyed, party leaders were perceived to be more pro-immigration than their party’s supporters. From one perspective, this is far-sighted leadership. From another, it constitutes a representation gap, sowing the seeds of discontent with democracies that seemingly ignore what voters want in favor of interests that benefit various types of business, political, and nonprofit elites.

Where it has worked reasonably well, pluralist societies accommodate homophily with a tolerant, multicultural approach that allows for distinctive communities within common borders. Ideally people could self-sort by residence or in cyberspace, and at the same time maintain their trust in the impartiality and fairness of the rules that govern them. California aspires to this ideal. Today it is a clustered patchwork of disparate communities, not a uniformly integrated population. But racial tensions persist, as the Rodney King riots reminded us.

Problems arise when political or financial advantage is perceived to run along racial, cultural, religious or ethnic lines. Geographic and social media homophily, taken to an extreme, can undermine empathy for and an understanding of others. We can see signs of these problems in today’s national politics. Some whites in American believe that the United States went too far in redressing past injustices to minorities. Many minorities perceive that injustices persist. The political parties and residential patterns increasingly sort along white-nonwhite lines.

Much that has happened in recent years has reacquainted us with the fragility of democratic systems. Democracies work only to the degree that people trust in the institutions and adhere to its rules. And if the policies of these systems create sub-populations who believe that they are always losing and ignored, it will foster anti-system attitudes and “the hell-with-it” choices for leaders.

The short terms costs of necessary economic transitions may pale in comparison to the long-term gains of the free movement of people, capital, and work, but economic efficiency is only one value among several in a well-functioning democracy. If the system does not work for large numbers of people, faith in that system of government will eventually erode. Efforts to re-train workers in conjunction with NAFTA were half-hearted and eventually dropped. The transition to a green economy created winners in coastal states and economic losers in states that depended on fossil fuels. High tech ensconced itself in urban clusters, limiting the spread of benefits from the new economy to areas badly in need of economic rejuvenation.

In some instances, institutions can determine policy. In others, policies can make or break institutions. Border issues may fall into the latter category. Even if the Congress and the President can find solutions for the “dreamers” and better ways to protect the border, the tension between national borders and greater international connectedness will fester. However uncomfortable this will be for politicians, avoiding or obfuscating it is not an option, as recent elections have demonstrated.

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