One Single Day. That’s All It Took for the World to Look Away From Us.
By Francis Fukuyama
Mr. Fukuyama is the author of the forthcoming book “Liberalism and Its Discontents.”
The Jan. 6 attack on Congress by a mob inspired by former President Donald Trump marked an ominous precedent for U.S. politics. Not since the Civil War had the country failed to effect a peaceful transfer of power, and no previous candidate purposefully contested an election’s results in the face of broad evidence that it was free and fair.
The event continues to reverberate in American politics — but its impact is not just domestic. It has also had a large impact internationally and signals a significant decline in American global power and influence.
Jan. 6 needs to be seen against the backdrop of the broader global crisis of liberal democracy. According to Freedom House’s 2021 Freedom in the World report, democracy has been in decline for 15 straight years, with some of the largest setbacks coming in the world’s two largest democracies, the United States and India. Since that report was issued, coups took place in Myanmar, Tunisia and Sudan, countries that had previously taken promising steps toward democracy.
The world had experienced a huge expansion in the number of democracies, from around 35 in the early 1970s to well over 110 by the time of the 2008 financial crisis. The United States was critical to what was labeled the “Third Wave” of democratization. America provided security to democratic allies in Europe and East Asia, and presided over an increasingly integrated global economy that quadrupled its output in that same period.
But global democracy was underpinned by the success and durability of democracy in the United States itself — what the political scientist Joseph Nye labels its “soft power.” People around the world looked up to America’s example as one they sought to emulate, from the students in Tiananmen Square in 1989 to the protesters leading the “color revolutions” in Europe and the Middle East in subsequent decades.
The decline of democracy worldwide is driven by complex forces. Globalization and economic change have left many behind, and a huge cultural divide has emerged between highly educated professionals living in cities and residents of smaller towns with more traditional values. The rise of the internet has weakened elite control over information; we have always disagreed over values, but we now live in separate factual universes. And the desire to belong and have one’s dignity affirmed are often more powerful forces than economic self-interest.
The world thus looks very different from the way it did roughly 30 years ago, when the former Soviet Union collapsed. There were two key factors I underestimated back then — first, the difficulty of creating not just democracy, but also a modern, impartial, uncorrupt state; and second, the possibility of political decay in advanced democracies.
The American model has been decaying for some time. Since the mid-1990s, the country’s politics have become increasingly polarized and subject to continuing gridlock, which has prevented it from performing basic government functions like passing budgets. There were clear problems with American institutions — the influence of money in politics, the effects of a voting system increasingly unaligned with democratic choice — yet the country seemed to be unable to reform itself. Earlier periods of crisis like the Civil War and the Great Depression produced farsighted, institution-building leaders; not so in the first decades of the 21st century, which saw American policymakers presiding over two catastrophes — the Iraq war and the subprime financial crisis — and then witnessed the emergence of a shortsighted demagogue egging on an angry populist movement.
Up until Jan. 6, one might have seen these developments through the lens of ordinary American politics, with its disagreements on issues like trade, immigration and abortion. But the uprising marked the moment when a significant minority of Americans showed themselves willing to turn against American democracy itself and to use violence to achieve their ends. What has made Jan. 6 a particularly alarming stain (and strain) on U.S. democracy is the fact that the Republican Party, far from repudiating those who initiated and participated in the uprising, has sought to normalize it and purge from its own ranks those who were willing to tell the truth about the 2020 election as it looks ahead to 2024, when Mr. Trump might seek a restoration.
The impact of this event is still playing out on the global stage. Over the years, authoritarian leaders like Vladimir Putin of Russia and Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus have sought to manipulate election results and deny popular will. Conversely, losing candidates in elections in new democracies have often charged voter fraud in the face of largely free and fair elections. This happened last year in Peru, when Keiko Fujimori contested her loss to Pedro Castillo in the second round of the country’s presidential election. Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, has been laying the grounds for contesting this year’s presidential election by attacking the functioning of Brazil’s voting system, just as Mr. Trump spent the lead-up to the 2020 election undermining confidence in mail-in ballots.
Before Jan. 6, these kinds of antics would have been seen as the behavior of young and incompletely consolidated democracies, and the United States would have wagged its finger in condemnation. But it has now happened in the United States itself. America’s credibility in upholding a model of good democratic practice has been shredded.
This precedent is bad enough, but there are potentially even more dangerous consequences of Jan. 6. The global rollback of democracy has been led by two rising authoritarian countries, Russia and China. Both powers have irredentist claims on other people’s territory. President Putin has stated openly that he does not believe Ukraine to be a legitimately independent country but rather part of a much larger Russia. He has massed troops on Ukraine’s borders and has been testing Western responses to potential aggression. President Xi of China has asserted that Taiwan must eventually return to China, and Chinese leaders have not excluded the use of military force, if necessary.
A key factor in any future military aggression by either country will be the potential role of the United States, which has not extended clear security guarantees to either Ukraine or Taiwan but has been supportive militarily and ideologically aligned with those countries’ efforts to become real democracies.
If momentum had built in the Republican Party to renounce the events of Jan. 6 the way it ultimately abandoned Richard Nixon in 1974, we might have hoped that the country might move on from the Trump era. But this has not happened, and foreign adversaries like Russia and China are watching this situation with unconstrained glee. If issues like vaccinations and mask-wearing have become politicized and divisive, consider how a future decision to extend military support — or to deny such support — to either Ukraine or Taiwan would be greeted. Mr. Trump undermined the bipartisan consensus that existed since the late 1940s over America’s strong support for a liberal international role, and President Biden has not yet been able to re-establish it.
The single greatest weakness of the United States today lies in its internal divisions. Conservative pundits have traveled to illiberal Hungary to seek an alternative model, and a dismaying number of Republicans see the Democrats as a greater threat than Russia.
The United States retains a huge amount of economic and military power, but that power is not usable in the absence of domestic political consensus over the country’s international role. If Americans cease to believe in an open, tolerant and liberal society, our capacity to innovate and lead as the world’s foremost economic power will also diminish. Jan. 6 sealed and deepened the country’s divisions, and for that reason it will have consequences echoing across the globe in the years to come.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/opin ... 778d3e6de3
FORMS OF GOVERNANCE
Jimmy Carter: I Fear for Our Democracy
By Jimmy Carter
Mr. Carter was the 39th president of the United States.
This article is part of a collection on the events of Jan. 6, one year later. Read more in a note from Times Opinion’s politics editor Ezekiel Kweku in our Opinion Today newsletter.
One year ago, a violent mob, guided by unscrupulous politicians, stormed the Capitol and almost succeeded in preventing the democratic transfer of power. All four of us former presidents condemned their actions and affirmed the legitimacy of the 2020 election. There followed a brief hope that the insurrection would shock the nation into addressing the toxic polarization that threatens our democracy.
However, one year on, promoters of the lie that the election was stolen have taken over one political party and stoked distrust in our electoral systems. These forces exert power and influence through relentless disinformation, which continues to turn Americans against Americans. According to the Survey Center on American Life, 36 percent of Americans — almost 100 million adults across the political spectrum — agree that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” The Washington Post recently reported that roughly 40 percent of Republicans believe that violent action against the government is sometimes justified.
Politicians in my home state of Georgia, as well as in others, such as Texas and Florida, have leveraged the distrust they have created to enact laws that empower partisan legislatures to intervene in election processes. They seek to win by any means, and many Americans are being persuaded to think and act likewise, threatening to collapse the foundations of our security and democracy with breathtaking speed. I now fear that what we have fought so hard to achieve globally — the right to free, fair elections, unhindered by strongman politicians who seek nothing more than to grow their own power — has become dangerously fragile at home.
I personally encountered this threat in my own backyard in 1962, when a ballot-stuffing county boss tried to steal my election to the Georgia State Senate. This was in the primary, and I challenged the fraud in court. Ultimately, a judge invalidated the results, and I won the general election. Afterward, the protection and advancement of democracy became a priority for me. As president, a major goal was to institute majority rule in southern Africa and elsewhere.
After I left the White House and founded the Carter Center, we worked to promote free, fair and orderly elections across the globe. I led dozens of election observation missions in Africa, Latin America and Asia, starting with Panama in 1989, where I put a simple question to administrators: “Are you honest officials or thieves?” At each election, my wife, Rosalynn, and I were moved by the courage and commitment of thousands of citizens walking miles and waiting in line from dusk to dawn to cast their first ballots in free elections, renewing hope for themselves and their nations and taking their first steps to self-governance. But I have also seen how new democratic systems — and sometimes even established ones — can fall to military juntas or power-hungry despots. Sudan and Myanmar are two recent examples.
For American democracy to endure, we must demand that our leaders and candidates uphold the ideals of freedom and adhere to high standards of conduct.
Jimmy Carter in 1976.
Credit...Leni Sinclair /Getty Images
First, while citizens can disagree on policies, people of all political stripes must agree on fundamental constitutional principles and norms of fairness, civility and respect for the rule of law. Citizens should be able to participate easily in transparent, safe and secure electoral processes. Claims of election irregularities should be submitted in good faith for adjudication by the courts, with all participants agreeing to accept the findings. And the election process should be conducted peacefully, free of intimidation and violence.
Second, we must push for reforms that ensure the security and accessibility of our elections and ensure public confidence in the accuracy of results. Phony claims of illegal voting and pointless multiple audits only detract from democratic ideals.
Third, we must resist the polarization that is reshaping our identities around politics. We must focus on a few core truths: that we are all human, we are all Americans and we have common hopes for our communities and our country to thrive. We must find ways to re-engage across the divide, respectfully and constructively, by holding civil conversations with family, friends and co-workers and standing up collectively to the forces dividing us.
Fourth, violence has no place in our politics, and we must act urgently to pass or strengthen laws to reverse the trends of character assassination, intimidation and the presence of armed militias at events. We must protect our election officials — who are trusted friends and neighbors of many of us — from threats to their safety. Law enforcement must have the power to address these issues and engage in a national effort to come to terms with the past and present of racial injustice.
Lastly, the spread of disinformation, especially on social media, must be addressed. We must reform these platforms and get in the habit of seeking out accurate information. Corporate America and religious communities should encourage respect for democratic norms, participation in elections and efforts to counter disinformation.
Our great nation now teeters on the brink of a widening abyss. Without immediate action, we are at genuine risk of civil conflict and losing our precious democracy. Americans must set aside differences and work together before it is too late.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/opin ... 778d3e6de3
By Jimmy Carter
Mr. Carter was the 39th president of the United States.
This article is part of a collection on the events of Jan. 6, one year later. Read more in a note from Times Opinion’s politics editor Ezekiel Kweku in our Opinion Today newsletter.
One year ago, a violent mob, guided by unscrupulous politicians, stormed the Capitol and almost succeeded in preventing the democratic transfer of power. All four of us former presidents condemned their actions and affirmed the legitimacy of the 2020 election. There followed a brief hope that the insurrection would shock the nation into addressing the toxic polarization that threatens our democracy.
However, one year on, promoters of the lie that the election was stolen have taken over one political party and stoked distrust in our electoral systems. These forces exert power and influence through relentless disinformation, which continues to turn Americans against Americans. According to the Survey Center on American Life, 36 percent of Americans — almost 100 million adults across the political spectrum — agree that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” The Washington Post recently reported that roughly 40 percent of Republicans believe that violent action against the government is sometimes justified.
Politicians in my home state of Georgia, as well as in others, such as Texas and Florida, have leveraged the distrust they have created to enact laws that empower partisan legislatures to intervene in election processes. They seek to win by any means, and many Americans are being persuaded to think and act likewise, threatening to collapse the foundations of our security and democracy with breathtaking speed. I now fear that what we have fought so hard to achieve globally — the right to free, fair elections, unhindered by strongman politicians who seek nothing more than to grow their own power — has become dangerously fragile at home.
I personally encountered this threat in my own backyard in 1962, when a ballot-stuffing county boss tried to steal my election to the Georgia State Senate. This was in the primary, and I challenged the fraud in court. Ultimately, a judge invalidated the results, and I won the general election. Afterward, the protection and advancement of democracy became a priority for me. As president, a major goal was to institute majority rule in southern Africa and elsewhere.
After I left the White House and founded the Carter Center, we worked to promote free, fair and orderly elections across the globe. I led dozens of election observation missions in Africa, Latin America and Asia, starting with Panama in 1989, where I put a simple question to administrators: “Are you honest officials or thieves?” At each election, my wife, Rosalynn, and I were moved by the courage and commitment of thousands of citizens walking miles and waiting in line from dusk to dawn to cast their first ballots in free elections, renewing hope for themselves and their nations and taking their first steps to self-governance. But I have also seen how new democratic systems — and sometimes even established ones — can fall to military juntas or power-hungry despots. Sudan and Myanmar are two recent examples.
For American democracy to endure, we must demand that our leaders and candidates uphold the ideals of freedom and adhere to high standards of conduct.
Jimmy Carter in 1976.
Credit...Leni Sinclair /Getty Images
First, while citizens can disagree on policies, people of all political stripes must agree on fundamental constitutional principles and norms of fairness, civility and respect for the rule of law. Citizens should be able to participate easily in transparent, safe and secure electoral processes. Claims of election irregularities should be submitted in good faith for adjudication by the courts, with all participants agreeing to accept the findings. And the election process should be conducted peacefully, free of intimidation and violence.
Second, we must push for reforms that ensure the security and accessibility of our elections and ensure public confidence in the accuracy of results. Phony claims of illegal voting and pointless multiple audits only detract from democratic ideals.
Third, we must resist the polarization that is reshaping our identities around politics. We must focus on a few core truths: that we are all human, we are all Americans and we have common hopes for our communities and our country to thrive. We must find ways to re-engage across the divide, respectfully and constructively, by holding civil conversations with family, friends and co-workers and standing up collectively to the forces dividing us.
Fourth, violence has no place in our politics, and we must act urgently to pass or strengthen laws to reverse the trends of character assassination, intimidation and the presence of armed militias at events. We must protect our election officials — who are trusted friends and neighbors of many of us — from threats to their safety. Law enforcement must have the power to address these issues and engage in a national effort to come to terms with the past and present of racial injustice.
Lastly, the spread of disinformation, especially on social media, must be addressed. We must reform these platforms and get in the habit of seeking out accurate information. Corporate America and religious communities should encourage respect for democratic norms, participation in elections and efforts to counter disinformation.
Our great nation now teeters on the brink of a widening abyss. Without immediate action, we are at genuine risk of civil conflict and losing our precious democracy. Americans must set aside differences and work together before it is too late.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: FORMS OF GOVERNANCE
The Week That Awoke the World
Over the last several years, that famous poem has been quoted countless times: “The centre cannot hold,” William Butler Yeats wrote, before adding, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” People cited it so often because it was true.
But it was not so true this past week. The events in Ukraine have been a moral atrocity and a political tragedy, but for people around the world, a cultural revelation. It’s not that people around the world believe new things, but many of us have been reminded what we believe, and we believe them with more fervor, with more conviction. This has been a convicting week.
The Ukrainians have been our instructors and inspirers. They’ve been the ordinary men and women in the Times video lining up to get weapons to defend their homeland. They’ve been the lady telling a Russian invader to put sunflower seeds in his pocket. They’ve been the thousands of Ukrainians who had been living comfortably abroad, who surged back into the country to risk death to defend their people and way of life.
We owe them such a debt. They have reminded us not only what it looks like to believe in democracy, the liberal order and national honor but also to act bravely on behalf of these things.
They’ve reminded us that you can believe things with greater and lesser intensity, faintly, with words, or deeply and fervently, with a conviction in your bones. They’ve reminded us how much the events of the past few years have conspired to weaken our faith in ourselves. They’ve reminded us how the setbacks and humiliations (Donald Trump, Afghanistan, racial injustice, political dysfunction) have caused us to doubt and be passive about the gospel of democracy. But despite all our failings the gospel is still glowingly true.
This has been a week of restored faith. In what exactly? Well, in the first place, in leadership. We’ve seen so many leadership failures of late, but over the past week Volodymyr Zelensky emerged as the everyman leader — the guy in the T-shirt, the Jewish comedian, the guy who didn’t flee but knew what to say: “I need ammunition, not a ride.”
It wasn’t only Zelensky. Joe Biden masterly and humbly helped organize a global coalition. Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany understood the moment. So did Emmanuel Macron of France and Fumio Kishida of Japan. Across governments, businesses and the arts, we were well led this week.
There’s been restored faith in true patriotism. Over the past few years, we’ve seen so much sour ethnonationalism from the right, an angry and xenophobic form of patriotism. From the left we’ve seen a disdain of patriotism, from people who vaguely support abstract national ideals while showing limited gratitude toward one’s own inheritance; people who rightly focus on national crimes but while slighting national achievements. Some elites, meanwhile, have drifted into a soulless globalism, an effort to rise above nations into an ethereal multilateral stratosphere.
But the Ukrainians have shown us how the right kind of patriotism is ennobling, a source of meaning and a reason to risk life. They’ve shown us that the love of a particular place, their own land and people, warts and all, can be part and parcel of a love for universal ideals, like democracy, liberalism and freedom.
There’s been a restored faith in the West, in liberalism, in our community of nations. There has been so much division of late, within and between nations. But now I wake up in the morning, pick up my phone and am cheered that Sweden is providing military aid to Ukraine, and I’m awed by what the German people now support. The fact is that many democratic nations reacted to the atrocity with the same sense of resolve.
The same is true at home. Of course, there are bitter partisans who use the moment to attack the left for being weak, or to accuse the right of being pro-Putin. There are always going to be people who are happy to be factually inaccurate if it will make them socially divisive. But at this point almost every member of Congress is united about our general cause.
That’s because we have learned to revile that which people for centuries took for granted — that big countries would gobble up small countries, that the powerful would do what they could and that the weak would suffer what they must. This week, perhaps, we’ve come to value more highly our modern liberal ethic.
There’s been a mood of democratic pessimism, as authoritarianism has spread and strutted. Academics of left and right have criticized liberalism. This week we have a clearer view of the alternative. It looks like Vladimir Putin.
The creed of liberalism is getting a second wind. There’s a school of academic realists who imagine that foreign affairs is all about cold national interest, conducted by chess master strategists. But this week we saw that foreign affairs, like life, is a moral enterprise, and moral rightness is a source of social power and fighting morale.
Things will likely get even more brutal for the Ukrainians. But the moral flame they fueled this week may, in the end, still burn strong.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/03/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Over the last several years, that famous poem has been quoted countless times: “The centre cannot hold,” William Butler Yeats wrote, before adding, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” People cited it so often because it was true.
But it was not so true this past week. The events in Ukraine have been a moral atrocity and a political tragedy, but for people around the world, a cultural revelation. It’s not that people around the world believe new things, but many of us have been reminded what we believe, and we believe them with more fervor, with more conviction. This has been a convicting week.
The Ukrainians have been our instructors and inspirers. They’ve been the ordinary men and women in the Times video lining up to get weapons to defend their homeland. They’ve been the lady telling a Russian invader to put sunflower seeds in his pocket. They’ve been the thousands of Ukrainians who had been living comfortably abroad, who surged back into the country to risk death to defend their people and way of life.
We owe them such a debt. They have reminded us not only what it looks like to believe in democracy, the liberal order and national honor but also to act bravely on behalf of these things.
They’ve reminded us that you can believe things with greater and lesser intensity, faintly, with words, or deeply and fervently, with a conviction in your bones. They’ve reminded us how much the events of the past few years have conspired to weaken our faith in ourselves. They’ve reminded us how the setbacks and humiliations (Donald Trump, Afghanistan, racial injustice, political dysfunction) have caused us to doubt and be passive about the gospel of democracy. But despite all our failings the gospel is still glowingly true.
This has been a week of restored faith. In what exactly? Well, in the first place, in leadership. We’ve seen so many leadership failures of late, but over the past week Volodymyr Zelensky emerged as the everyman leader — the guy in the T-shirt, the Jewish comedian, the guy who didn’t flee but knew what to say: “I need ammunition, not a ride.”
It wasn’t only Zelensky. Joe Biden masterly and humbly helped organize a global coalition. Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany understood the moment. So did Emmanuel Macron of France and Fumio Kishida of Japan. Across governments, businesses and the arts, we were well led this week.
There’s been restored faith in true patriotism. Over the past few years, we’ve seen so much sour ethnonationalism from the right, an angry and xenophobic form of patriotism. From the left we’ve seen a disdain of patriotism, from people who vaguely support abstract national ideals while showing limited gratitude toward one’s own inheritance; people who rightly focus on national crimes but while slighting national achievements. Some elites, meanwhile, have drifted into a soulless globalism, an effort to rise above nations into an ethereal multilateral stratosphere.
But the Ukrainians have shown us how the right kind of patriotism is ennobling, a source of meaning and a reason to risk life. They’ve shown us that the love of a particular place, their own land and people, warts and all, can be part and parcel of a love for universal ideals, like democracy, liberalism and freedom.
There’s been a restored faith in the West, in liberalism, in our community of nations. There has been so much division of late, within and between nations. But now I wake up in the morning, pick up my phone and am cheered that Sweden is providing military aid to Ukraine, and I’m awed by what the German people now support. The fact is that many democratic nations reacted to the atrocity with the same sense of resolve.
The same is true at home. Of course, there are bitter partisans who use the moment to attack the left for being weak, or to accuse the right of being pro-Putin. There are always going to be people who are happy to be factually inaccurate if it will make them socially divisive. But at this point almost every member of Congress is united about our general cause.
That’s because we have learned to revile that which people for centuries took for granted — that big countries would gobble up small countries, that the powerful would do what they could and that the weak would suffer what they must. This week, perhaps, we’ve come to value more highly our modern liberal ethic.
There’s been a mood of democratic pessimism, as authoritarianism has spread and strutted. Academics of left and right have criticized liberalism. This week we have a clearer view of the alternative. It looks like Vladimir Putin.
The creed of liberalism is getting a second wind. There’s a school of academic realists who imagine that foreign affairs is all about cold national interest, conducted by chess master strategists. But this week we saw that foreign affairs, like life, is a moral enterprise, and moral rightness is a source of social power and fighting morale.
Things will likely get even more brutal for the Ukrainians. But the moral flame they fueled this week may, in the end, still burn strong.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/03/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: FORMS OF GOVERNANCE
Will the Ukraine War End the Age of Populism?
If the past 10 years of Western history have featured an extended wrestling match between populism and liberalism, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has inspired many liberals to hopefully declare the contest over, their opponent pinned.
And with some reason. Putin’s war has struck two blows against populism, one direct and one indirect. First, there is the embarrassment involved for every populist leader, European or American, who has either offered kind words for Putin or at least held him up as an adversary whose statecraft runs circles around our own incompetent elites. Such flirtations have now largely ended in backpedaling and reversal, forcing populists to choose between self-marginalization and a shameless pivot. Which is to say: Don’t be surprised if Donald Trump somehow evolves into the biggest Russia hawk you’ve ever seen come 2024.
The more damaging blow, though, is the indirect one, the way the Ukraine invasion has revealed how uncertain and at sea the populist instinct becomes when it’s confronted with an adversary that doesn’t fit easily into its focus on internal Western corruption, its narratives of elite perfidy and folly.
This uncertainty isn’t confined to right-populists alone; rather, you see it among anti-establishment voices of all stripes at the moment — the left-wing gadflies who didn’t expect the Ukraine invasion because they did not expect Western intelligence to ever get something right, the critics of U.S. power who didn’t expect Ukrainian resilience because they assumed that any regime backed by our foreign policy elites would be too hapless to survive, the media personalities casting about for narratives that fit populist preconceptions because the bigger picture of Putinist aggression and Western unity does not.
Amid all this flailing, the Republican Party, the main vehicle for populism, seems to be returning to its pre-Trump instincts. Throughout Trump’s presidency there was a basic uncertainty about what populism stands for in foreign policy. Retrenchment and isolationism or a new cold war with China? Leaving NATO entirely versus strengthening the alliance by forcing its members to pay up? Fighting fewer wars or taking the gloves off? Pat Buchanan or John Bolton?
Now, though, if you look at polls of Republican voters or listen to G.O.P. politicians, what you see is mostly a reversion to straightforward hawkishness, to a view that the Biden White House probably isn’t being confrontational enough — which is to say, to where the party stood before the Trump rebellion happened.
But in that reversion you can also see one of the difficulties with assuming that if populism is floundering, liberalism must be the beneficiary. After all, Bolton is hardly a champion of liberal internationalism, and the return of Republican hawkishness is mostly a revival of old-fashioned American nationalism — working against populism, this time, rather than the two forces pulling the same way.
And what’s true within the G.O.P. is true more generally. The Ukrainian fighters everyone so admires are clearly fighting more for nationalism than for liberalism, and some aren’t fighting for liberal ideals at all. The European country arguably doing the most to assist them is Poland, until yesterday the bête noire of Western liberalism for its nationalist and socially conservative government. The sudden sense of Western unity seems very, well, Western; it’s not a global coalition confronting Putin so much as a Euro-American one, infused with more than a little of the civilizational chauvinism that liberalism aspires to stand above.
In the American media, too, it’s centrist jingoism rather than liberal cosmopolitanism that seems ascendant at the moment — the wave of Russophobic cancellations; the sudden “America: Love or leave it” enthusiasms of daytime TV personalities; the zeal for military escalation, nuclear peril be damned, among supposedly responsible figures who once led the opposition to Trumpism.
None of this should be surprising: It’s always been the case that a liberal society depends for unity and vigor on not entirely liberal forces — religious piety, nationalist pride, a sense of providential mission, a certain degree of ethnic solidarity and, of course, the fear of some external adversary. Liberalism at its best works to guide and channel these forces; liberalism at its worst veers between ignoring them and being overwhelmed by them.
Among the optimistic liberals of the current moment, you can see how that veering happens. “A Russian defeat will make possible a ‘new birth of freedom,’” Francis Fukuyama wrote last week, “and get us out of our funk about the declining state of global democracy. The spirit of 1989 will live on.” Following up in an interview with The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, Fukuyama framed the current moment as an opportunity for Americans and other Westerners to choose liberalism anew, out of a recognition that the nationalist alternative is “pretty awful.”
But one of the key lessons of recent years is that the spirit of 1989 was itself as much a spirit of revived Eastern European nationalism as of liberalism alone. Which is one reason countries like Poland and Hungary have sorely disappointed liberals in their subsequent development … up until now, of course, when Polish nationalism is suddenly a crucial bulwark for the liberal democratic West.
So liberals watching the floundering of populism need a balanced understanding of their own position, their dependence on nationalism and particularism and even chauvinism, their obligation to sift those forces so that the good (admiration for the patriotism of Ukrainians and the heroic masculinity of Volodymyr Zelensky) outweighs the bad (boycotts of a Russian piano prodigy, a rush toward nuclear war).
And they also need to avoid the delusion that Putin’s wicked and incompetent invasion means that all complaints about the West’s internal problems can safely be dismissed as empty, false, self-hating.
Last week, for instance, the Russia scholar Stephen Kotkin told The New Yorker’s David Remnick that Putin’s invasion disproves “all the nonsense about how the West is decadent, the West is over, the West is in decline, how it’s a multipolar world and the rise of China.” With the West rallying to a resilient Ukraine, “all of that turned out to be bunk.”
What was bunk was the idea that Putin’s Russia represents some kind of efficient postliberal or traditionalist alternative to the problems of the West, and one whose military could simply steamroller Eastern Europe. But all those Western problems remain: American power is in relative decline, China’s power has dramatically increased, and none of what I, as a self-appointed expert on the subject, would classify as the key problems of American decadence — demographic decline, economic disappointment and stagnation, a social fabric increasingly shadowed by drugs and depression and suicide — have somehow gone away just because Moscow’s military is failing outside Kyiv.
Since those problems are crucial to understanding where populism came from in the first place, it’s reckless for liberals to declare victory based on shifts in the international order while simply waving domestic discontents away. Populism’s poor fit for this particular moment has given an opportunity to its enemies and critics. But they will squander the opportunity if they convince themselves that the external challenge has somehow made the internal crisis go away.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/opin ... 778d3e6de3
If the past 10 years of Western history have featured an extended wrestling match between populism and liberalism, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has inspired many liberals to hopefully declare the contest over, their opponent pinned.
And with some reason. Putin’s war has struck two blows against populism, one direct and one indirect. First, there is the embarrassment involved for every populist leader, European or American, who has either offered kind words for Putin or at least held him up as an adversary whose statecraft runs circles around our own incompetent elites. Such flirtations have now largely ended in backpedaling and reversal, forcing populists to choose between self-marginalization and a shameless pivot. Which is to say: Don’t be surprised if Donald Trump somehow evolves into the biggest Russia hawk you’ve ever seen come 2024.
The more damaging blow, though, is the indirect one, the way the Ukraine invasion has revealed how uncertain and at sea the populist instinct becomes when it’s confronted with an adversary that doesn’t fit easily into its focus on internal Western corruption, its narratives of elite perfidy and folly.
This uncertainty isn’t confined to right-populists alone; rather, you see it among anti-establishment voices of all stripes at the moment — the left-wing gadflies who didn’t expect the Ukraine invasion because they did not expect Western intelligence to ever get something right, the critics of U.S. power who didn’t expect Ukrainian resilience because they assumed that any regime backed by our foreign policy elites would be too hapless to survive, the media personalities casting about for narratives that fit populist preconceptions because the bigger picture of Putinist aggression and Western unity does not.
Amid all this flailing, the Republican Party, the main vehicle for populism, seems to be returning to its pre-Trump instincts. Throughout Trump’s presidency there was a basic uncertainty about what populism stands for in foreign policy. Retrenchment and isolationism or a new cold war with China? Leaving NATO entirely versus strengthening the alliance by forcing its members to pay up? Fighting fewer wars or taking the gloves off? Pat Buchanan or John Bolton?
Now, though, if you look at polls of Republican voters or listen to G.O.P. politicians, what you see is mostly a reversion to straightforward hawkishness, to a view that the Biden White House probably isn’t being confrontational enough — which is to say, to where the party stood before the Trump rebellion happened.
But in that reversion you can also see one of the difficulties with assuming that if populism is floundering, liberalism must be the beneficiary. After all, Bolton is hardly a champion of liberal internationalism, and the return of Republican hawkishness is mostly a revival of old-fashioned American nationalism — working against populism, this time, rather than the two forces pulling the same way.
And what’s true within the G.O.P. is true more generally. The Ukrainian fighters everyone so admires are clearly fighting more for nationalism than for liberalism, and some aren’t fighting for liberal ideals at all. The European country arguably doing the most to assist them is Poland, until yesterday the bête noire of Western liberalism for its nationalist and socially conservative government. The sudden sense of Western unity seems very, well, Western; it’s not a global coalition confronting Putin so much as a Euro-American one, infused with more than a little of the civilizational chauvinism that liberalism aspires to stand above.
In the American media, too, it’s centrist jingoism rather than liberal cosmopolitanism that seems ascendant at the moment — the wave of Russophobic cancellations; the sudden “America: Love or leave it” enthusiasms of daytime TV personalities; the zeal for military escalation, nuclear peril be damned, among supposedly responsible figures who once led the opposition to Trumpism.
None of this should be surprising: It’s always been the case that a liberal society depends for unity and vigor on not entirely liberal forces — religious piety, nationalist pride, a sense of providential mission, a certain degree of ethnic solidarity and, of course, the fear of some external adversary. Liberalism at its best works to guide and channel these forces; liberalism at its worst veers between ignoring them and being overwhelmed by them.
Among the optimistic liberals of the current moment, you can see how that veering happens. “A Russian defeat will make possible a ‘new birth of freedom,’” Francis Fukuyama wrote last week, “and get us out of our funk about the declining state of global democracy. The spirit of 1989 will live on.” Following up in an interview with The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, Fukuyama framed the current moment as an opportunity for Americans and other Westerners to choose liberalism anew, out of a recognition that the nationalist alternative is “pretty awful.”
But one of the key lessons of recent years is that the spirit of 1989 was itself as much a spirit of revived Eastern European nationalism as of liberalism alone. Which is one reason countries like Poland and Hungary have sorely disappointed liberals in their subsequent development … up until now, of course, when Polish nationalism is suddenly a crucial bulwark for the liberal democratic West.
So liberals watching the floundering of populism need a balanced understanding of their own position, their dependence on nationalism and particularism and even chauvinism, their obligation to sift those forces so that the good (admiration for the patriotism of Ukrainians and the heroic masculinity of Volodymyr Zelensky) outweighs the bad (boycotts of a Russian piano prodigy, a rush toward nuclear war).
And they also need to avoid the delusion that Putin’s wicked and incompetent invasion means that all complaints about the West’s internal problems can safely be dismissed as empty, false, self-hating.
Last week, for instance, the Russia scholar Stephen Kotkin told The New Yorker’s David Remnick that Putin’s invasion disproves “all the nonsense about how the West is decadent, the West is over, the West is in decline, how it’s a multipolar world and the rise of China.” With the West rallying to a resilient Ukraine, “all of that turned out to be bunk.”
What was bunk was the idea that Putin’s Russia represents some kind of efficient postliberal or traditionalist alternative to the problems of the West, and one whose military could simply steamroller Eastern Europe. But all those Western problems remain: American power is in relative decline, China’s power has dramatically increased, and none of what I, as a self-appointed expert on the subject, would classify as the key problems of American decadence — demographic decline, economic disappointment and stagnation, a social fabric increasingly shadowed by drugs and depression and suicide — have somehow gone away just because Moscow’s military is failing outside Kyiv.
Since those problems are crucial to understanding where populism came from in the first place, it’s reckless for liberals to declare victory based on shifts in the international order while simply waving domestic discontents away. Populism’s poor fit for this particular moment has given an opportunity to its enemies and critics. But they will squander the opportunity if they convince themselves that the external challenge has somehow made the internal crisis go away.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: FORMS OF GOVERNANCE
This Is Why Autocracies Fail
Joe Biden correctly argues that the struggle between democracy and autocracy is the defining conflict of our time. So which system performs better under stress?
For the past several years, the autocracies seemed to have the upper hand. In autocracy, power is centralized. Leaders can respond to challenges quickly, shift resources decisively. China showed that autocracies can produce mass prosperity. Autocracy has made global gains and democracy continues to decline.
In democracies, on the other hand, power is decentralized, often polarized and paralytic. The American political system has become distrusted and dysfunctional. A homegrown would-be autocrat won the White House. Academics have written popular books with titles like “How Democracies Die.”
Yet the past few weeks have been revelatory. It’s become clear that when it comes to the most important functions of government, autocracy has severe weaknesses. This is not an occasion for democratic triumphalism; it’s an occasion for a realistic assessment of authoritarian ineptitude and perhaps instability. What are those weaknesses?
The wisdom of many is better than the wisdom of megalomaniacs. In any system, one essential trait is: How does information flow? In democracies, policymaking is usually done more or less in public, and there are thousands of experts offering facts and opinions. Many economists last year said inflation would not be a problem, but Larry Summers and others said it would, and they turned out to have been right. We still make mistakes, but the system learns.
Often in autocracies, decisions are made within a small, closed circle. Information flows are distorted by power. No one tells the top man what he doesn’t want to hear. The Russian intelligence failure about Ukraine has been astounding. Vladimir Putin understood nothing about what the Ukrainian people wanted, how they would fight or how his own army had been ruined by corruption and kleptocrats.
People want their biggest life. Human beings these days want to have full, rich lives and make the most of their potential. The liberal ideal is that people should be left as free as possible to construct their own ideal. Autocracies restrict freedom for the sake of order. So many of the best and brightest are now fleeing Russia. The American ambassador to Japan, Rahm Emanuel, points out that Hong Kong is suffering a devastating brain drain. Bloomberg reports, “The effects of the brain drain in sectors such as education, health care and even finance will likely be felt by residents for years to come.” American institutions now have nearly as many top-tier A.I. researchers from China as from the United States. Given the chance, talented people will go where fulfillment lies.
Organization man turns into gangster man. People rise through autocracies by ruthlessly serving the organization, the bureaucracy. That ruthlessness makes them aware others may be more ruthless and manipulative, so they become paranoid and despotic. They often personalize power, so they are the state, and the state is them. Any dissent is taken as a personal affront. They may practice what scholars call negative selection. They don’t hire the smartest and best people. Such people might be threatening. They hire the dimmest and the most mediocre. You get a government of third-raters. (Witness the leaders of the Russian military.)
Ethnonationalism self-inebriates. Everybody worships something. In a liberal democracy, worship of the nation (which is particular) is balanced by the love of liberal ideals (which are universal). With the demise of communism, authoritarianism lost a major source of universal values. National glory is pursued with intoxicating fundamentalism.
“I believe in passionarity, in the theory of passionarity,” Putin declared last year. He continued: “We have an infinite genetic code.” Passionarity is a theory created by the Russian ethnologist Lev Gumilyov that holds that each nation has its own level of mental and ideological energy, its own expansionary spirit. Putin seems to believe Russia is exceptional on front after front and “on the march.” This kind of crackpot nationalism deludes people into pursuing ambitions far beyond their capacity.
Government against the people is a recipe for decline. Democratic leaders, at least in theory, serve their constituents. Autocratic leaders, in practice, serve their own regime and longevity, even if it means neglecting their people. Thomas J. Bollyky, Tara Templin and Simon Wigley illustrate how life expectancy improvements have slowed in countries that have recently transitioned to autocracies. A study of more than 400 dictators across 76 countries by Richard Jong-A-Pin and Jochen O. Mierau found that a one-year increase in a dictator’s age decreases his nation’s economic growth by 0.12 percentage points.
When the Soviet Union fell, we learned that the C.I.A. had overstated the Soviet economy and Soviet military might. It’s just very hard to successfully run a big society through centralized power.
To me, the lesson is that even when we’re confronting so-far successful autocracies like China, we should learn to be patient and trust our liberal democratic system. When we are confronting imperial aggressors like Putin, we should trust the ways we are responding now. If we steadily, patiently and remorselessly ramp up the economic, technological and political pressure, the weaknesses inherent in the regime will grow and grow.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/17/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Joe Biden correctly argues that the struggle between democracy and autocracy is the defining conflict of our time. So which system performs better under stress?
For the past several years, the autocracies seemed to have the upper hand. In autocracy, power is centralized. Leaders can respond to challenges quickly, shift resources decisively. China showed that autocracies can produce mass prosperity. Autocracy has made global gains and democracy continues to decline.
In democracies, on the other hand, power is decentralized, often polarized and paralytic. The American political system has become distrusted and dysfunctional. A homegrown would-be autocrat won the White House. Academics have written popular books with titles like “How Democracies Die.”
Yet the past few weeks have been revelatory. It’s become clear that when it comes to the most important functions of government, autocracy has severe weaknesses. This is not an occasion for democratic triumphalism; it’s an occasion for a realistic assessment of authoritarian ineptitude and perhaps instability. What are those weaknesses?
The wisdom of many is better than the wisdom of megalomaniacs. In any system, one essential trait is: How does information flow? In democracies, policymaking is usually done more or less in public, and there are thousands of experts offering facts and opinions. Many economists last year said inflation would not be a problem, but Larry Summers and others said it would, and they turned out to have been right. We still make mistakes, but the system learns.
Often in autocracies, decisions are made within a small, closed circle. Information flows are distorted by power. No one tells the top man what he doesn’t want to hear. The Russian intelligence failure about Ukraine has been astounding. Vladimir Putin understood nothing about what the Ukrainian people wanted, how they would fight or how his own army had been ruined by corruption and kleptocrats.
People want their biggest life. Human beings these days want to have full, rich lives and make the most of their potential. The liberal ideal is that people should be left as free as possible to construct their own ideal. Autocracies restrict freedom for the sake of order. So many of the best and brightest are now fleeing Russia. The American ambassador to Japan, Rahm Emanuel, points out that Hong Kong is suffering a devastating brain drain. Bloomberg reports, “The effects of the brain drain in sectors such as education, health care and even finance will likely be felt by residents for years to come.” American institutions now have nearly as many top-tier A.I. researchers from China as from the United States. Given the chance, talented people will go where fulfillment lies.
Organization man turns into gangster man. People rise through autocracies by ruthlessly serving the organization, the bureaucracy. That ruthlessness makes them aware others may be more ruthless and manipulative, so they become paranoid and despotic. They often personalize power, so they are the state, and the state is them. Any dissent is taken as a personal affront. They may practice what scholars call negative selection. They don’t hire the smartest and best people. Such people might be threatening. They hire the dimmest and the most mediocre. You get a government of third-raters. (Witness the leaders of the Russian military.)
Ethnonationalism self-inebriates. Everybody worships something. In a liberal democracy, worship of the nation (which is particular) is balanced by the love of liberal ideals (which are universal). With the demise of communism, authoritarianism lost a major source of universal values. National glory is pursued with intoxicating fundamentalism.
“I believe in passionarity, in the theory of passionarity,” Putin declared last year. He continued: “We have an infinite genetic code.” Passionarity is a theory created by the Russian ethnologist Lev Gumilyov that holds that each nation has its own level of mental and ideological energy, its own expansionary spirit. Putin seems to believe Russia is exceptional on front after front and “on the march.” This kind of crackpot nationalism deludes people into pursuing ambitions far beyond their capacity.
Government against the people is a recipe for decline. Democratic leaders, at least in theory, serve their constituents. Autocratic leaders, in practice, serve their own regime and longevity, even if it means neglecting their people. Thomas J. Bollyky, Tara Templin and Simon Wigley illustrate how life expectancy improvements have slowed in countries that have recently transitioned to autocracies. A study of more than 400 dictators across 76 countries by Richard Jong-A-Pin and Jochen O. Mierau found that a one-year increase in a dictator’s age decreases his nation’s economic growth by 0.12 percentage points.
When the Soviet Union fell, we learned that the C.I.A. had overstated the Soviet economy and Soviet military might. It’s just very hard to successfully run a big society through centralized power.
To me, the lesson is that even when we’re confronting so-far successful autocracies like China, we should learn to be patient and trust our liberal democratic system. When we are confronting imperial aggressors like Putin, we should trust the ways we are responding now. If we steadily, patiently and remorselessly ramp up the economic, technological and political pressure, the weaknesses inherent in the regime will grow and grow.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/17/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: FORMS OF GOVERNANCE
Xi, Putin and Trump: The Strongmen Follies
The last five years have been a master class in comparative politics, because something happened that we’d never seen before at the same time: The world’s three most powerful leaders — Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Donald Trump — each took drastic steps to hold onto power beyond their designated terms of office. One failed. Two succeeded. And therein lies a tale that says so much about our world today.
Trump failed for one very simple reason: American institutions, laws and norms forced him to cede power at the end of his four years — barely — despite both his efforts to discredit the electoral results and his unleashing of supporters to intimidate lawmakers into overturning his loss at the polls.
Putin and Xi fared better — so far. Unencumbered by institutions and democratic norms, they installed new laws to make themselves, effectively, presidents for life.
Pity their nations.
Lord knows democracies have their problems today, but they still have some things autocracies lack — the ability to change course, often by changing leaders, and the ability to publicly examine and debate alternative ideas before embarking on a course of action. Those attributes are particularly valuable in an age of accelerating technological and climate change, when the odds are low that one person in his late 60s — as both Putin and Xi are — will make better and better decisions, more and more alone, as he gets older and older.
Yet Putin arm-twisted his Duma in 2020 to essentially eliminate his term limits, allowing him to run for president again in 2024 and the chance to remain in office until 2036. And in 2018, Xi induced his lawmakers to change China’s constitution and abolish presidential term limits altogether, so he can officially remain in office forever — assuming that he is re-elected president at the National People’s Congress session in 2023. And you can assume that he will be.
Deng Xiaoping imposed a two-consecutive-term limit to China’s presidency in 1982 for a reason — to prevent the emergence of another Mao Zedong, whose autocratic leadership and cult of personality combined to keep China poor, isolated and often in murderous chaos. Xi has driven right through that roadblock. He sees himself as indispensable and infallible.
But as we can all see plainly, Putin’s performance in Ukraine is a walking, talking, barking advertisement for the perils of having a president for life, who believes that he’s indispensable and infallible.
Ukraine is Putin’s war, and he got everything wrong: He overestimated the strength of his own armed forces, underestimated the willingness of Ukrainians to fight and die for their freedom and totally misread the willingness of the West, both governments and businesses, to unite to support Ukraine. Either Putin was fed nonsense by aides afraid to tell him the truth, or he had grown so sure of his infallibility that he never questioned himself or prepared his government or society for what his own spokesman has described as an “unprecedented” economic war by Western sanctions. All we know for sure is that he has banned all media criticism and made it virtually impossible for Russians to punish him at the polls for his barbaric folly.
China is a more serious place, having brought some 800 million Chinese out of extreme poverty since the late 1970s. And Xi is more serious than Putin. Nevertheless, the perils of autocracy are showing. Xi was unwilling to do a serious investigation of how the coronavirus emerged, most likely in Wuhan, or, at least, share any findings with the world — for fear, it seems, that doing so might reflect poorly on his leadership. His reliance on a strategy of lockdowns, and on Chinese vaccines that appear to be less effective than other vaccines against the Omicron variant, is now seriously stressing his economy.
And Xi’s bet on an alliance with Putin’s Russia has gone bad fast. When the two leaders met on Feb. 4, at the opening of the Olympics in China, they released a statement declaring that the “friendship between the two states has no limits, there are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation.”
The fact that Putin apparently took that limitless friendship as a green light to invade Ukraine has clearly left Xi flummoxed and floundering. China is a big importer of oil, corn and wheat from Russia and Ukraine, so the Russian invasion has nudged up its costs for these and other food imports, while also helping to drive down China’s stock market (though it is bouncing back). It has also forced China to appear indifferent to Russia’s savaging of Ukraine, straining Beijing’s relations with the European Union, China’s biggest trading partner.
I wonder how many officials in Beijing are now muttering: “If this is what happens when you have a president for life. …”
I do take succor in the fact that one of the most hackneyed clichés in foreign policy is being exposed as nonsense: The leaders of China and Russia are so savvy, and always play the game of nations like chess grandmasters, while those stupid Americans — with their plodding, meat-and-potatoes approach to the world — know only how to play checkers.
It actually looks to me as if Putin has not been playing chess, but Russian roulette — and that he ran out of luck and blew a hole right through the heart of the Russian economy. And Xi seems paralyzed, unable to figure out what game to play, as his heart wants to oppose the West and his head tells him that he can’t afford to. So, China stands neutral in the face of the biggest war crimes perpetrated in Europe since World War II.
Meanwhile, Sleepy Joe over in the corner has been playing Legos — methodically adding one piece, one ally, after another, bound together by shared values and threats, and has built a solid coalition to manage this crisis.
In short, for now at least, the messy democracies with their regular rotations in powers are outmaneuvering the presidents for life, who need to choke off all sources of dissent more than ever.
This contrast could not come at a better time — when the global democracy movement had been stalling everywhere. Think of the evolution of democracy around the globe since World War II as having gone through several phases, argues Larry Diamond, the Stanford democracy expert and author of “Ill Winds: Saving Democracy From Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency.”
After World War II, the U.S. and its Western allies had amazing momentum, so democracy began spreading across the globe before getting bogged down by the Cold War and actually going in reverse in the 1960s, as a result of a wave of military and executive coups in Africa, Asia and Latin America. But another wave of democracy started in the mid-1970s, after the downfall of dictatorships in Portugal, Spain and Greece. Democracy also spread to Asia — and almost China in Tiananmen Square. Then the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 let loose another democracy wave in Eastern and Central Europe, and Russia.
But beginning in 2006, with the weakening of America because of two wars in the Middle East and the 2008 financial crisis — and the stunning economic rise of China — democracy went into “a global recession,” Diamond told me. “And China and Russia relentlessly pushed the narrative: ‘Democracies are weak and morally and politically decadent. They can’t get things done. Authoritarianism is the future.’”
The question now, Diamond added, is this: Was that Feb. 4 declaration by Xi and Putin — “spelling out all the reasons why their ‘democratic’ systems were superior to the bankrupt, feckless liberal democracies”— actually the high-water mark for their autocracies?
Because one thing is clear, quipped Diamond: The recent missteps of Putin and Xi “are giving authoritarianism a bad name.”
But for the authoritarian wave to be sustainably reversed, two big things are necessary. One is for Putin’s savaging of Ukraine to fail. That could cause him to lose power. To be sure, a Russia with no Putin could turn out to be no better — or even worse. But if it is better, the whole world becomes better if Russia has a decent leader in the Kremlin.
The second thing is even more important: It would be for America to demonstrate that it’s not just good at forging alliances abroad but that it can also build healthy coalitions again at home — to deliver good government, growth, uncontested transfers of power and a more perfect union. Our ability to do that in the past is what earned us the world’s esteem and emulation. That used to be us — and it can be again.
If it is, then my favorite lyrics from the musical “Hamilton” will be so relevant. It is when George Washington explains to Alexander Hamilton why he is voluntarily stepping down and not running for a third term:
Washington: If we get this right/ We’re gonna teach ’em how to say goodbye,/ You and I ——
Hamilton: Mister President, they will say you’re weak.
Washington: No, they will see we’re strong.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/22/opin ... 778d3e6de3
The last five years have been a master class in comparative politics, because something happened that we’d never seen before at the same time: The world’s three most powerful leaders — Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Donald Trump — each took drastic steps to hold onto power beyond their designated terms of office. One failed. Two succeeded. And therein lies a tale that says so much about our world today.
Trump failed for one very simple reason: American institutions, laws and norms forced him to cede power at the end of his four years — barely — despite both his efforts to discredit the electoral results and his unleashing of supporters to intimidate lawmakers into overturning his loss at the polls.
Putin and Xi fared better — so far. Unencumbered by institutions and democratic norms, they installed new laws to make themselves, effectively, presidents for life.
Pity their nations.
Lord knows democracies have their problems today, but they still have some things autocracies lack — the ability to change course, often by changing leaders, and the ability to publicly examine and debate alternative ideas before embarking on a course of action. Those attributes are particularly valuable in an age of accelerating technological and climate change, when the odds are low that one person in his late 60s — as both Putin and Xi are — will make better and better decisions, more and more alone, as he gets older and older.
Yet Putin arm-twisted his Duma in 2020 to essentially eliminate his term limits, allowing him to run for president again in 2024 and the chance to remain in office until 2036. And in 2018, Xi induced his lawmakers to change China’s constitution and abolish presidential term limits altogether, so he can officially remain in office forever — assuming that he is re-elected president at the National People’s Congress session in 2023. And you can assume that he will be.
Deng Xiaoping imposed a two-consecutive-term limit to China’s presidency in 1982 for a reason — to prevent the emergence of another Mao Zedong, whose autocratic leadership and cult of personality combined to keep China poor, isolated and often in murderous chaos. Xi has driven right through that roadblock. He sees himself as indispensable and infallible.
But as we can all see plainly, Putin’s performance in Ukraine is a walking, talking, barking advertisement for the perils of having a president for life, who believes that he’s indispensable and infallible.
Ukraine is Putin’s war, and he got everything wrong: He overestimated the strength of his own armed forces, underestimated the willingness of Ukrainians to fight and die for their freedom and totally misread the willingness of the West, both governments and businesses, to unite to support Ukraine. Either Putin was fed nonsense by aides afraid to tell him the truth, or he had grown so sure of his infallibility that he never questioned himself or prepared his government or society for what his own spokesman has described as an “unprecedented” economic war by Western sanctions. All we know for sure is that he has banned all media criticism and made it virtually impossible for Russians to punish him at the polls for his barbaric folly.
China is a more serious place, having brought some 800 million Chinese out of extreme poverty since the late 1970s. And Xi is more serious than Putin. Nevertheless, the perils of autocracy are showing. Xi was unwilling to do a serious investigation of how the coronavirus emerged, most likely in Wuhan, or, at least, share any findings with the world — for fear, it seems, that doing so might reflect poorly on his leadership. His reliance on a strategy of lockdowns, and on Chinese vaccines that appear to be less effective than other vaccines against the Omicron variant, is now seriously stressing his economy.
And Xi’s bet on an alliance with Putin’s Russia has gone bad fast. When the two leaders met on Feb. 4, at the opening of the Olympics in China, they released a statement declaring that the “friendship between the two states has no limits, there are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation.”
The fact that Putin apparently took that limitless friendship as a green light to invade Ukraine has clearly left Xi flummoxed and floundering. China is a big importer of oil, corn and wheat from Russia and Ukraine, so the Russian invasion has nudged up its costs for these and other food imports, while also helping to drive down China’s stock market (though it is bouncing back). It has also forced China to appear indifferent to Russia’s savaging of Ukraine, straining Beijing’s relations with the European Union, China’s biggest trading partner.
I wonder how many officials in Beijing are now muttering: “If this is what happens when you have a president for life. …”
I do take succor in the fact that one of the most hackneyed clichés in foreign policy is being exposed as nonsense: The leaders of China and Russia are so savvy, and always play the game of nations like chess grandmasters, while those stupid Americans — with their plodding, meat-and-potatoes approach to the world — know only how to play checkers.
It actually looks to me as if Putin has not been playing chess, but Russian roulette — and that he ran out of luck and blew a hole right through the heart of the Russian economy. And Xi seems paralyzed, unable to figure out what game to play, as his heart wants to oppose the West and his head tells him that he can’t afford to. So, China stands neutral in the face of the biggest war crimes perpetrated in Europe since World War II.
Meanwhile, Sleepy Joe over in the corner has been playing Legos — methodically adding one piece, one ally, after another, bound together by shared values and threats, and has built a solid coalition to manage this crisis.
In short, for now at least, the messy democracies with their regular rotations in powers are outmaneuvering the presidents for life, who need to choke off all sources of dissent more than ever.
This contrast could not come at a better time — when the global democracy movement had been stalling everywhere. Think of the evolution of democracy around the globe since World War II as having gone through several phases, argues Larry Diamond, the Stanford democracy expert and author of “Ill Winds: Saving Democracy From Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency.”
After World War II, the U.S. and its Western allies had amazing momentum, so democracy began spreading across the globe before getting bogged down by the Cold War and actually going in reverse in the 1960s, as a result of a wave of military and executive coups in Africa, Asia and Latin America. But another wave of democracy started in the mid-1970s, after the downfall of dictatorships in Portugal, Spain and Greece. Democracy also spread to Asia — and almost China in Tiananmen Square. Then the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 let loose another democracy wave in Eastern and Central Europe, and Russia.
But beginning in 2006, with the weakening of America because of two wars in the Middle East and the 2008 financial crisis — and the stunning economic rise of China — democracy went into “a global recession,” Diamond told me. “And China and Russia relentlessly pushed the narrative: ‘Democracies are weak and morally and politically decadent. They can’t get things done. Authoritarianism is the future.’”
The question now, Diamond added, is this: Was that Feb. 4 declaration by Xi and Putin — “spelling out all the reasons why their ‘democratic’ systems were superior to the bankrupt, feckless liberal democracies”— actually the high-water mark for their autocracies?
Because one thing is clear, quipped Diamond: The recent missteps of Putin and Xi “are giving authoritarianism a bad name.”
But for the authoritarian wave to be sustainably reversed, two big things are necessary. One is for Putin’s savaging of Ukraine to fail. That could cause him to lose power. To be sure, a Russia with no Putin could turn out to be no better — or even worse. But if it is better, the whole world becomes better if Russia has a decent leader in the Kremlin.
The second thing is even more important: It would be for America to demonstrate that it’s not just good at forging alliances abroad but that it can also build healthy coalitions again at home — to deliver good government, growth, uncontested transfers of power and a more perfect union. Our ability to do that in the past is what earned us the world’s esteem and emulation. That used to be us — and it can be again.
If it is, then my favorite lyrics from the musical “Hamilton” will be so relevant. It is when George Washington explains to Alexander Hamilton why he is voluntarily stepping down and not running for a third term:
Washington: If we get this right/ We’re gonna teach ’em how to say goodbye,/ You and I ——
Hamilton: Mister President, they will say you’re weak.
Washington: No, they will see we’re strong.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/22/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: FORMS OF GOVERNANCE
Putin Had No Clue How Many of Us Would Be Watching
Almost six weeks into the war between Russia and Ukraine, I’m beginning to wonder if this conflict isn’t our first true world war — much more than World War I or World War II ever was. In this war, which I think of as World War Wired, virtually everyone on the planet can either observe the fighting at a granular level, participate in some way or be affected economically — no matter where they live.
While the battle on the ground that triggered World War Wired is ostensibly over who should control Ukraine, do not be fooled. This has quickly turned into “the big battle” between the two most dominant political systems in the world today: free-market, “rule-of-law democracy versus authoritarian kleptocracy,” the Swedish expert on the Russian economy Anders Aslund remarked to me.
Though this war is far from over, and Vladimir Putin may still find a way to prevail and come out stronger, if he doesn’t, it could be a watershed in the conflict between democratic and undemocratic systems. It is worth recalling that World War II put an end to fascism, and that the Cold War put an end to orthodox communism, eventually even in China. So, what happens on the streets of Kyiv, Mariupol and the Donbas region could influence political systems far beyond Ukraine and far into the future.
Indeed, other autocratic leaders, like China’s, are watching Russia carefully. They see its economy being weakened by Western sanctions, thousands of its young technologists fleeing to escape a government denying them access to the internet and credible news and its inept army seemingly unable to gather, share and funnel accurate information to the top. Those leaders have to be asking themselves: “Holy cow — am I that vulnerable? Am I presiding over a similar house of cards?”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/03/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Almost six weeks into the war between Russia and Ukraine, I’m beginning to wonder if this conflict isn’t our first true world war — much more than World War I or World War II ever was. In this war, which I think of as World War Wired, virtually everyone on the planet can either observe the fighting at a granular level, participate in some way or be affected economically — no matter where they live.
While the battle on the ground that triggered World War Wired is ostensibly over who should control Ukraine, do not be fooled. This has quickly turned into “the big battle” between the two most dominant political systems in the world today: free-market, “rule-of-law democracy versus authoritarian kleptocracy,” the Swedish expert on the Russian economy Anders Aslund remarked to me.
Though this war is far from over, and Vladimir Putin may still find a way to prevail and come out stronger, if he doesn’t, it could be a watershed in the conflict between democratic and undemocratic systems. It is worth recalling that World War II put an end to fascism, and that the Cold War put an end to orthodox communism, eventually even in China. So, what happens on the streets of Kyiv, Mariupol and the Donbas region could influence political systems far beyond Ukraine and far into the future.
Indeed, other autocratic leaders, like China’s, are watching Russia carefully. They see its economy being weakened by Western sanctions, thousands of its young technologists fleeing to escape a government denying them access to the internet and credible news and its inept army seemingly unable to gather, share and funnel accurate information to the top. Those leaders have to be asking themselves: “Holy cow — am I that vulnerable? Am I presiding over a similar house of cards?”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/03/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: FORMS OF GOVERNANCE
Globalization Is Over. The Global Culture Wars Have Begun.
I’m from a fortunate generation. I can remember a time — about a quarter-century ago — when the world seemed to be coming together. The great Cold War contest between communism and capitalism appeared to be over. Democracy was still spreading. Nations were becoming more economically interdependent. The internet seemed ready to foster worldwide communications. It seemed as if there would be a global convergence around a set of universal values — freedom, equality, personal dignity, pluralism, human rights.
We called this process of convergence globalization. It was, first of all, an economic and technological process — about growing trade and investment between nations and the spread of technologies that put, say, Wikipedia instantly at our fingertips. But globalization was also a political, social and moral process.
In the 1990s, British sociologist Anthony Giddens argued that globalization is “a shift in our very life circumstances. It is the way we now live.” It involves “the intensification of worldwide social relations.” Globalization was about the integration of worldviews, products, ideas and culture.
This fit in with an academic theory that had been floating around called Modernization Theory. The idea was that as nations developed, they would become more like us in the West — the ones who had already modernized.
In the wider public conversation, it was sometimes assumed that nations all around the world would admire the success of the Western democracies and seek to imitate us. It was sometimes assumed that as people “modernized,” they would become more bourgeois, consumerist, peaceful — just like us. It was sometimes assumed that as societies modernized, they’d become more secular, just as in Europe and parts of the United States. They’d be more driven by the desire to make money than to conquer others. They’d be more driven by the desire to settle down into suburban homes than by the fanatical ideologies or the sort of hunger for prestige and conquest that had doomed humanity to centuries of war.
This was an optimistic vision of how history would evolve, a vision of progress and convergence. Unfortunately, this vision does not describe the world we live in today. The world is not converging anymore; it’s diverging. The process of globalization has slowed and, in some cases, even kicked into reverse. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine highlights these trends. While Ukraine’s brave fight against authoritarian aggression is an inspiration in the West, much of the world remains unmoved, even sympathetic to Vladimir Putin.
The Economist reports that between 2008 and 2019, world trade, relative to global G.D.P., fell by about five percentage points. There has been a slew of new tariffs and other barriers to trade. Immigration flows have slowed. Global flows of long-term investment fell by half between 2016 and 2019. The causes of this deglobalization are broad and deep. The 2008 financial crisis delegitimized global capitalism for many people. China has apparently demonstrated that mercantilism can be an effective economic strategy. All manner of antiglobalization movements have arisen: the Brexiteers, xenophobic nationalists, Trumpian populists, the antiglobalist left.
There’s just a lot more global conflict than there was in that brief holiday from history in the ’90s. Trade, travel and even communication across political blocs have become more morally, politically and economically fraught. Hundreds of companies have withdrawn from Russia as the West partly decouples from Putin’s war machine. Many Western consumers don’t want trade with China because of accusations of forced labor and genocide. Many Western C.E.O.s are rethinking their operations in China as the regime gets more hostile to the West and as supply chains are threatened by political uncertainty. In 2014 the United States barred the Chinese tech company Huawei from bidding on government contracts. Joe Biden has strengthened “Buy American” rules so that the U.S. government buys more stuff domestically.
The world economy seems to be gradually decoupling into, for starters, a Western zone and a Chinese zone. Foreign direct investment flows between China and America were nearly $30 billion per year five years ago. Now they are down to $5 billion.
As John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge wrote in a superb essay for Bloomberg, “geopolitics is definitively moving against globalization — toward a world dominated by two or three great trading blocs.” This broader context, and especially the invasion of Ukraine, “is burying most of the basic assumptions that have underlain business thinking about the world for the past 40 years.”
Sure, globalization as flows of trade will continue. But globalization as the driving logic of world affairs — that seems to be over. Economic rivalries have now merged with political, moral and other rivalries into one global contest for dominance. Globalization has been replaced by something that looks a lot like global culture war.
Looking back, we probably put too much emphasis on the power of material forces and technology to drive human events and bring us all together. This is not the first time this has happened. In the early 20th century, Norman Angell wrote a now notorious book called “The Great Illusion” that argued that the industrialized nations of his time were too economically interdependent to go to war with one another. Instead, two world wars followed.
The fact is that human behavior is often driven by forces much deeper than economic and political self-interest, at least as Western rationalists typically understand these things. It’s these deeper motivations that are driving events right now — and they are sending history off into wildly unpredictable directions.
First, human beings are powerfully driven by what are known as the thymotic desires. These are the needs to be seen, respected, appreciated. If you give people the impression that they are unseen, disrespected and unappreciated, they will become enraged, resentful and vengeful. They will perceive diminishment as injustice and respond with aggressive indignation.
Global politics over the past few decades functioned as a massive social inequality machine. In country after country, groups of highly educated urban elites have arisen to dominate media, universities, culture and often political power. Great swaths of people feel looked down upon and ignored. In country after country, populist leaders have arisen to exploit these resentments: Donald Trump in the U.S., Narendra Modi in India, Marine Le Pen in France.
Meanwhile, authoritarians like Putin and Xi Jinping practice this politics of resentment on a global scale. They treat the collective West as the global elites and declare their open revolt against it. Putin tells humiliation stories — what the West supposedly did to Russia in the 1990s. He promises a return to Russian exceptionalism and Russian glory. Russia will reclaim its starring role in world history.
China’s leaders talk about the “century of humiliation.” They complain about the way the arrogant Westerners try to impose their values on everybody else. Though China may eventually become the world’s largest economy, Xi still talks about China as a developing nation.
Second, most people have a strong loyalty to their place and to their nation. But over the past few decades many people have felt that their places have been left behind and their national honor has been threatened. In the heyday of globalization, multilateral organizations and global corporations seemed to be eclipsing nation-states.
In country after country, highly nationalistic movements have arisen to insist on national sovereignty and to restore national pride: Modi in India, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Trump in the United States, Boris Johnson in Britain. To hell with cosmopolitanism and global convergence, they say. We’re going to make our own country great again in our own way. Many globalists completely underestimated the power of nationalism to drive history.
Third, people are driven by moral longings — by their attachment to their own cultural values, by their desire to fiercely defend their values when they seem to be under assault. For the past few decades, globalization has seemed to many people to be exactly this kind of assault.
After the Cold War, Western values came to dominate the world — through our movies, music, political conversation, social media. One theory of globalization was that the world culture would converge, basically around these liberal values.
The problem is that Western values are not the world’s values. In fact, we in the West are complete cultural outliers. In his book “The WEIRDest People in the World,” Joseph Henrich amasses hundreds of pages of data to show just how unusual Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic values are.
He writes: “We WEIRD people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist and analytical. We focus on ourselves — our attributes, accomplishments and aspirations — over our relationships and social roles.”
It’s completely possible to enjoy listening to Billie Eilish or Megan Thee Stallion and still find Western values foreign and maybe repellent. Many people around the world look at our ideas about gender roles and find them foreign or repellent. They look at (at our best) our fervent defense of L.G.B.T.Q. rights and find them off-putting. The idea that it’s up to each person to choose one’s own identity and values — that seems ridiculous to many. The idea that the purpose of education is to inculcate critical thinking skills so students can liberate themselves from the ideas they received from their parents and communities — that seems foolish to many.
With 44 percent of American high school students reporting persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, our culture isn’t exactly the best advertisement for Western values right now.
Despite the assumptions of globalization, world culture does not seem to be converging and may in some cases seems to be diverging. Economists Fernando Ferreira and Joel Waldfogel studied popular music charts in 22 countries between 1960 and 2007. They found that people are biased toward the music of their own country and that this bias has increased since the late 1990s. People don’t want to blend into a homogeneous global culture; they want to preserve their own kind.
Every few years the World Values Survey questions people from around the globe about their moral and cultural beliefs. Every few years, some of these survey results are synthesized into a map that shows how the different cultural zones stand in relation to one another. In 1996 the Protestant Europe cultural zone and the English-Speaking zone were clumped in with the other global zones. Western values were different from the values found in say, Latin America or the Confucian zone, but they were contiguous.
But the 2020 map looks different. The Protestant Europe and English-Speaking zones have drifted away from the rest of the world cultures and now jut out like some extraneous cultural peninsula.
In a summary of the surveys’ findings and insights, the World Values Survey Association noted that on issues like marriage, family, gender and sexual orientation, “there has been a growing divergence between the prevailing values in low-income countries and high-income countries.” We in the West have long been outliers; now our distance from the rest of the world is growing vast.
Finally, people are powerfully driven by a desire for order. Nothing is worse than chaos and anarchy. These cultural changes, and the often simultaneous breakdown of effective governance, can feel like social chaos, like anarchy, leading people to seek order at all costs.
We in the democratic nations of the world are lucky enough to live in societies that have rules-based orders, in which individual rights are protected and in which we get to choose our own leaders. In more and more parts of the world, though, people do not have access to this kind of order.
Just as there are signs that the world is economically and culturally diverging, there are signs it is politically diverging. In its “Freedom in the World 2022” report, Freedom House notes that the world has experienced 16 consecutive years of democratic decline. It reported last year: “The countries experiencing deterioration outnumbered those with improvements by the largest margin recorded since the negative trend began in 2006. The long democratic recession is deepening.” This is not what we thought would happen in the golden age of globalization.
In that heyday, democracies appeared stable, and authoritarian regimes appeared to be headed to the ash heap of history. Today, many democracies appear less stable than they did and many authoritarian regimes appear more stable. American democracy, for example, has slid toward polarization and dysfunction. Meanwhile, China has shown that highly centralized nations can be just as technologically advanced as the West. Modern authoritarian nations now have technologies that allow them to exercise pervasive control of their citizens in ways that were unimaginable decades ago.
Autocratic regimes are now serious economic rivals to the West. They account for 60 percent of patent applications. In 2020, the governments and businesses in these countries invested $9 trillion in things like machinery, equipment and infrastructure, while democratic nations invested $12 trillion. If things are going well, authoritarian governments can enjoy surprising popular support.
What I’m describing is a divergence on an array of fronts. As scholars Heather Berry, Mauro F. Guillén and Arun S. Hendi reported in a study of international convergence, “Over the last half century, nation-states in the global system have not evolved significantly closer (or more similar) to one another along a number of dimensions.” We in the West subscribe to a series of universal values about freedom, democracy and personal dignity. The problem is that these universal values are not universally accepted and seem to be getting less so.
Next, I’m describing a world in which divergence turns into conflict, especially as great powers compete for resources and dominance. China and Russia clearly want to establish regional zones that they dominate. Some of this is the kind of conflict that historically exists between opposing political systems, similar to what we saw during the Cold War. This is the global struggle between the forces of authoritarianism and the forces of democratization. Illiberal regimes are building closer alliances with one another. They are investing more in one another’s economies. At the other end, democratic governments are building closer alliances with one another. The walls are going up. Korea was the first major battleground of the Cold War. Ukraine could the first battleground in what turns out to be a long struggle between diametrically opposed political systems.
But something bigger is happening today that is different from the great power struggles of the past, that is different from the Cold War. This is not just a political or an economic conflict. It’s a conflict about politics, economics, culture, status, psychology, morality and religion all at once. More specifically, it’s a rejection of Western ways of doing things by hundreds of millions of people along a wide array of fronts.
To define this conflict most generously, I’d say it’s the difference between the West’s emphasis on personal dignity and much of the rest of the world’s emphasis on communal cohesion. But that’s not all that’s going on here. What’s important is the way these longstanding and normal cultural differences are being whipped up by autocrats who want to expand their power and sow chaos in the democratic world. Authoritarian rulers now routinely weaponize cultural differences, religious tensions and status resentments in order to mobilize supporters, attract allies and expand their own power. This is cultural difference transmogrified by status resentment into culture war.
Some people have revived Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations theory to capture what’s going on. Huntington was right that ideas, psychology and values drive history as much as material interests. But these divides don’t break down on the neat civilizational lines that Huntington described.
In fact, what haunts me most is that this rejection of Western liberalism, individualism, pluralism, gender equality and all the rest is not only happening between nations but also within nations. The status resentment against Western cultural, economic and political elites that flows from the mouths of illiberal leaders like Putin and Modi and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro sounds quite a lot like the status resentment that flows from the mouths of the Trumpian right, from the French right, from the Italian and Hungarian right.
There’s a lot of complexity here — the Trumpians obviously have no love for China — but sometimes when I look at world affairs I see a giant, global maximalist version of America’s familiar contest between Reds and Blues. In America we’ve divided along regional, educational, religious, cultural, generational and urban/rural lines, and now the world is fragmenting in ways that often seem to mimic our own. The paths various populists prefer may differ, and their nationalistic passions often conflict, but what they’re revolting against is often the same thing.
How do you win a global culture war in which differing views on secularism and gay rights parades are intertwined with nuclear weapons, global trade flows, status resentments, toxic masculinity and authoritarian power grabs? That’s the bind we find ourselves in today.
I look back over the past few decades of social thinking with understanding. I was too young to really experience the tension of the Cold War, but it must have been brutal. I understand why so many people, when the Soviet Union fell, grabbed onto a vision of the future that promised an end to existential conflict.
I look at the current situation with humility. The critiques that so many people are making about the West, and about American culture — for being too individualistic, too materialistic, too condescending — these critiques are not wrong. We have a lot of work to do if we are going to be socially strong enough to stand up to the challenges that are coming over the next several years, if we are going to persuade people in all those swing countries across Africa, Latin America and the rest of the world that they should throw their lot in with the democracies and not with the authoritarians — that our way of life is the better way of life.
And I look at the current situation with confidence. Ultimately, people want to stand out and fit in. They want to feel their lives have dignity, that they are respected for who they are. They also want to feel membership in moral communities. Right now, many people feel disrespected by the West. They are casting their lot with authoritarian leaders who speak to their resentments and their national pride. But those leaders don’t actually recognize them. For those authoritarians — from Trump to Putin — their followers are just instruments in their own search for self-aggrandizement.
At the end of the day, only democracy and liberalism are based on respect for the dignity of each person. At the end of the day, only these systems and our worldviews offer the highest fulfillment for the drives and desires I’ve tried to describe here.
I’ve lost confidence in our ability to predict where history is headed and in the idea that as nations “modernize” they develop along some predictable line. I guess it’s time to open our minds up to the possibility that the future may be very different from anything we expected.
The Chinese seem very confident that our coalition against Putin will fall apart. Western consumers won’t be able to tolerate the economic sacrifice. Our alliances will fragment. The Chinese also seem convinced that they will bury our decadent systems before too long. These are not possibilities that can be dismissed out of hand.
But I have faith in the ideas and the moral systems that we have inherited. What we call “the West” is not an ethnic designation or an elitist country club. The heroes of Ukraine are showing that at its best, it is a moral accomplishment, and unlike its rivals, it aspires to extend dignity, human rights and self-determination to all. That’s worth reforming and working on and defending and sharing in the decades ahead.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/08/opin ... 778d3e6de3
I’m from a fortunate generation. I can remember a time — about a quarter-century ago — when the world seemed to be coming together. The great Cold War contest between communism and capitalism appeared to be over. Democracy was still spreading. Nations were becoming more economically interdependent. The internet seemed ready to foster worldwide communications. It seemed as if there would be a global convergence around a set of universal values — freedom, equality, personal dignity, pluralism, human rights.
We called this process of convergence globalization. It was, first of all, an economic and technological process — about growing trade and investment between nations and the spread of technologies that put, say, Wikipedia instantly at our fingertips. But globalization was also a political, social and moral process.
In the 1990s, British sociologist Anthony Giddens argued that globalization is “a shift in our very life circumstances. It is the way we now live.” It involves “the intensification of worldwide social relations.” Globalization was about the integration of worldviews, products, ideas and culture.
This fit in with an academic theory that had been floating around called Modernization Theory. The idea was that as nations developed, they would become more like us in the West — the ones who had already modernized.
In the wider public conversation, it was sometimes assumed that nations all around the world would admire the success of the Western democracies and seek to imitate us. It was sometimes assumed that as people “modernized,” they would become more bourgeois, consumerist, peaceful — just like us. It was sometimes assumed that as societies modernized, they’d become more secular, just as in Europe and parts of the United States. They’d be more driven by the desire to make money than to conquer others. They’d be more driven by the desire to settle down into suburban homes than by the fanatical ideologies or the sort of hunger for prestige and conquest that had doomed humanity to centuries of war.
This was an optimistic vision of how history would evolve, a vision of progress and convergence. Unfortunately, this vision does not describe the world we live in today. The world is not converging anymore; it’s diverging. The process of globalization has slowed and, in some cases, even kicked into reverse. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine highlights these trends. While Ukraine’s brave fight against authoritarian aggression is an inspiration in the West, much of the world remains unmoved, even sympathetic to Vladimir Putin.
The Economist reports that between 2008 and 2019, world trade, relative to global G.D.P., fell by about five percentage points. There has been a slew of new tariffs and other barriers to trade. Immigration flows have slowed. Global flows of long-term investment fell by half between 2016 and 2019. The causes of this deglobalization are broad and deep. The 2008 financial crisis delegitimized global capitalism for many people. China has apparently demonstrated that mercantilism can be an effective economic strategy. All manner of antiglobalization movements have arisen: the Brexiteers, xenophobic nationalists, Trumpian populists, the antiglobalist left.
There’s just a lot more global conflict than there was in that brief holiday from history in the ’90s. Trade, travel and even communication across political blocs have become more morally, politically and economically fraught. Hundreds of companies have withdrawn from Russia as the West partly decouples from Putin’s war machine. Many Western consumers don’t want trade with China because of accusations of forced labor and genocide. Many Western C.E.O.s are rethinking their operations in China as the regime gets more hostile to the West and as supply chains are threatened by political uncertainty. In 2014 the United States barred the Chinese tech company Huawei from bidding on government contracts. Joe Biden has strengthened “Buy American” rules so that the U.S. government buys more stuff domestically.
The world economy seems to be gradually decoupling into, for starters, a Western zone and a Chinese zone. Foreign direct investment flows between China and America were nearly $30 billion per year five years ago. Now they are down to $5 billion.
As John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge wrote in a superb essay for Bloomberg, “geopolitics is definitively moving against globalization — toward a world dominated by two or three great trading blocs.” This broader context, and especially the invasion of Ukraine, “is burying most of the basic assumptions that have underlain business thinking about the world for the past 40 years.”
Sure, globalization as flows of trade will continue. But globalization as the driving logic of world affairs — that seems to be over. Economic rivalries have now merged with political, moral and other rivalries into one global contest for dominance. Globalization has been replaced by something that looks a lot like global culture war.
Looking back, we probably put too much emphasis on the power of material forces and technology to drive human events and bring us all together. This is not the first time this has happened. In the early 20th century, Norman Angell wrote a now notorious book called “The Great Illusion” that argued that the industrialized nations of his time were too economically interdependent to go to war with one another. Instead, two world wars followed.
The fact is that human behavior is often driven by forces much deeper than economic and political self-interest, at least as Western rationalists typically understand these things. It’s these deeper motivations that are driving events right now — and they are sending history off into wildly unpredictable directions.
First, human beings are powerfully driven by what are known as the thymotic desires. These are the needs to be seen, respected, appreciated. If you give people the impression that they are unseen, disrespected and unappreciated, they will become enraged, resentful and vengeful. They will perceive diminishment as injustice and respond with aggressive indignation.
Global politics over the past few decades functioned as a massive social inequality machine. In country after country, groups of highly educated urban elites have arisen to dominate media, universities, culture and often political power. Great swaths of people feel looked down upon and ignored. In country after country, populist leaders have arisen to exploit these resentments: Donald Trump in the U.S., Narendra Modi in India, Marine Le Pen in France.
Meanwhile, authoritarians like Putin and Xi Jinping practice this politics of resentment on a global scale. They treat the collective West as the global elites and declare their open revolt against it. Putin tells humiliation stories — what the West supposedly did to Russia in the 1990s. He promises a return to Russian exceptionalism and Russian glory. Russia will reclaim its starring role in world history.
China’s leaders talk about the “century of humiliation.” They complain about the way the arrogant Westerners try to impose their values on everybody else. Though China may eventually become the world’s largest economy, Xi still talks about China as a developing nation.
Second, most people have a strong loyalty to their place and to their nation. But over the past few decades many people have felt that their places have been left behind and their national honor has been threatened. In the heyday of globalization, multilateral organizations and global corporations seemed to be eclipsing nation-states.
In country after country, highly nationalistic movements have arisen to insist on national sovereignty and to restore national pride: Modi in India, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Trump in the United States, Boris Johnson in Britain. To hell with cosmopolitanism and global convergence, they say. We’re going to make our own country great again in our own way. Many globalists completely underestimated the power of nationalism to drive history.
Third, people are driven by moral longings — by their attachment to their own cultural values, by their desire to fiercely defend their values when they seem to be under assault. For the past few decades, globalization has seemed to many people to be exactly this kind of assault.
After the Cold War, Western values came to dominate the world — through our movies, music, political conversation, social media. One theory of globalization was that the world culture would converge, basically around these liberal values.
The problem is that Western values are not the world’s values. In fact, we in the West are complete cultural outliers. In his book “The WEIRDest People in the World,” Joseph Henrich amasses hundreds of pages of data to show just how unusual Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic values are.
He writes: “We WEIRD people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist and analytical. We focus on ourselves — our attributes, accomplishments and aspirations — over our relationships and social roles.”
It’s completely possible to enjoy listening to Billie Eilish or Megan Thee Stallion and still find Western values foreign and maybe repellent. Many people around the world look at our ideas about gender roles and find them foreign or repellent. They look at (at our best) our fervent defense of L.G.B.T.Q. rights and find them off-putting. The idea that it’s up to each person to choose one’s own identity and values — that seems ridiculous to many. The idea that the purpose of education is to inculcate critical thinking skills so students can liberate themselves from the ideas they received from their parents and communities — that seems foolish to many.
With 44 percent of American high school students reporting persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, our culture isn’t exactly the best advertisement for Western values right now.
Despite the assumptions of globalization, world culture does not seem to be converging and may in some cases seems to be diverging. Economists Fernando Ferreira and Joel Waldfogel studied popular music charts in 22 countries between 1960 and 2007. They found that people are biased toward the music of their own country and that this bias has increased since the late 1990s. People don’t want to blend into a homogeneous global culture; they want to preserve their own kind.
Every few years the World Values Survey questions people from around the globe about their moral and cultural beliefs. Every few years, some of these survey results are synthesized into a map that shows how the different cultural zones stand in relation to one another. In 1996 the Protestant Europe cultural zone and the English-Speaking zone were clumped in with the other global zones. Western values were different from the values found in say, Latin America or the Confucian zone, but they were contiguous.
But the 2020 map looks different. The Protestant Europe and English-Speaking zones have drifted away from the rest of the world cultures and now jut out like some extraneous cultural peninsula.
In a summary of the surveys’ findings and insights, the World Values Survey Association noted that on issues like marriage, family, gender and sexual orientation, “there has been a growing divergence between the prevailing values in low-income countries and high-income countries.” We in the West have long been outliers; now our distance from the rest of the world is growing vast.
Finally, people are powerfully driven by a desire for order. Nothing is worse than chaos and anarchy. These cultural changes, and the often simultaneous breakdown of effective governance, can feel like social chaos, like anarchy, leading people to seek order at all costs.
We in the democratic nations of the world are lucky enough to live in societies that have rules-based orders, in which individual rights are protected and in which we get to choose our own leaders. In more and more parts of the world, though, people do not have access to this kind of order.
Just as there are signs that the world is economically and culturally diverging, there are signs it is politically diverging. In its “Freedom in the World 2022” report, Freedom House notes that the world has experienced 16 consecutive years of democratic decline. It reported last year: “The countries experiencing deterioration outnumbered those with improvements by the largest margin recorded since the negative trend began in 2006. The long democratic recession is deepening.” This is not what we thought would happen in the golden age of globalization.
In that heyday, democracies appeared stable, and authoritarian regimes appeared to be headed to the ash heap of history. Today, many democracies appear less stable than they did and many authoritarian regimes appear more stable. American democracy, for example, has slid toward polarization and dysfunction. Meanwhile, China has shown that highly centralized nations can be just as technologically advanced as the West. Modern authoritarian nations now have technologies that allow them to exercise pervasive control of their citizens in ways that were unimaginable decades ago.
Autocratic regimes are now serious economic rivals to the West. They account for 60 percent of patent applications. In 2020, the governments and businesses in these countries invested $9 trillion in things like machinery, equipment and infrastructure, while democratic nations invested $12 trillion. If things are going well, authoritarian governments can enjoy surprising popular support.
What I’m describing is a divergence on an array of fronts. As scholars Heather Berry, Mauro F. Guillén and Arun S. Hendi reported in a study of international convergence, “Over the last half century, nation-states in the global system have not evolved significantly closer (or more similar) to one another along a number of dimensions.” We in the West subscribe to a series of universal values about freedom, democracy and personal dignity. The problem is that these universal values are not universally accepted and seem to be getting less so.
Next, I’m describing a world in which divergence turns into conflict, especially as great powers compete for resources and dominance. China and Russia clearly want to establish regional zones that they dominate. Some of this is the kind of conflict that historically exists between opposing political systems, similar to what we saw during the Cold War. This is the global struggle between the forces of authoritarianism and the forces of democratization. Illiberal regimes are building closer alliances with one another. They are investing more in one another’s economies. At the other end, democratic governments are building closer alliances with one another. The walls are going up. Korea was the first major battleground of the Cold War. Ukraine could the first battleground in what turns out to be a long struggle between diametrically opposed political systems.
But something bigger is happening today that is different from the great power struggles of the past, that is different from the Cold War. This is not just a political or an economic conflict. It’s a conflict about politics, economics, culture, status, psychology, morality and religion all at once. More specifically, it’s a rejection of Western ways of doing things by hundreds of millions of people along a wide array of fronts.
To define this conflict most generously, I’d say it’s the difference between the West’s emphasis on personal dignity and much of the rest of the world’s emphasis on communal cohesion. But that’s not all that’s going on here. What’s important is the way these longstanding and normal cultural differences are being whipped up by autocrats who want to expand their power and sow chaos in the democratic world. Authoritarian rulers now routinely weaponize cultural differences, religious tensions and status resentments in order to mobilize supporters, attract allies and expand their own power. This is cultural difference transmogrified by status resentment into culture war.
Some people have revived Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations theory to capture what’s going on. Huntington was right that ideas, psychology and values drive history as much as material interests. But these divides don’t break down on the neat civilizational lines that Huntington described.
In fact, what haunts me most is that this rejection of Western liberalism, individualism, pluralism, gender equality and all the rest is not only happening between nations but also within nations. The status resentment against Western cultural, economic and political elites that flows from the mouths of illiberal leaders like Putin and Modi and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro sounds quite a lot like the status resentment that flows from the mouths of the Trumpian right, from the French right, from the Italian and Hungarian right.
There’s a lot of complexity here — the Trumpians obviously have no love for China — but sometimes when I look at world affairs I see a giant, global maximalist version of America’s familiar contest between Reds and Blues. In America we’ve divided along regional, educational, religious, cultural, generational and urban/rural lines, and now the world is fragmenting in ways that often seem to mimic our own. The paths various populists prefer may differ, and their nationalistic passions often conflict, but what they’re revolting against is often the same thing.
How do you win a global culture war in which differing views on secularism and gay rights parades are intertwined with nuclear weapons, global trade flows, status resentments, toxic masculinity and authoritarian power grabs? That’s the bind we find ourselves in today.
I look back over the past few decades of social thinking with understanding. I was too young to really experience the tension of the Cold War, but it must have been brutal. I understand why so many people, when the Soviet Union fell, grabbed onto a vision of the future that promised an end to existential conflict.
I look at the current situation with humility. The critiques that so many people are making about the West, and about American culture — for being too individualistic, too materialistic, too condescending — these critiques are not wrong. We have a lot of work to do if we are going to be socially strong enough to stand up to the challenges that are coming over the next several years, if we are going to persuade people in all those swing countries across Africa, Latin America and the rest of the world that they should throw their lot in with the democracies and not with the authoritarians — that our way of life is the better way of life.
And I look at the current situation with confidence. Ultimately, people want to stand out and fit in. They want to feel their lives have dignity, that they are respected for who they are. They also want to feel membership in moral communities. Right now, many people feel disrespected by the West. They are casting their lot with authoritarian leaders who speak to their resentments and their national pride. But those leaders don’t actually recognize them. For those authoritarians — from Trump to Putin — their followers are just instruments in their own search for self-aggrandizement.
At the end of the day, only democracy and liberalism are based on respect for the dignity of each person. At the end of the day, only these systems and our worldviews offer the highest fulfillment for the drives and desires I’ve tried to describe here.
I’ve lost confidence in our ability to predict where history is headed and in the idea that as nations “modernize” they develop along some predictable line. I guess it’s time to open our minds up to the possibility that the future may be very different from anything we expected.
The Chinese seem very confident that our coalition against Putin will fall apart. Western consumers won’t be able to tolerate the economic sacrifice. Our alliances will fragment. The Chinese also seem convinced that they will bury our decadent systems before too long. These are not possibilities that can be dismissed out of hand.
But I have faith in the ideas and the moral systems that we have inherited. What we call “the West” is not an ethnic designation or an elitist country club. The heroes of Ukraine are showing that at its best, it is a moral accomplishment, and unlike its rivals, it aspires to extend dignity, human rights and self-determination to all. That’s worth reforming and working on and defending and sharing in the decades ahead.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/08/opin ... 778d3e6de3
China and Russia Are Giving Authoritarianism a Bad Name
The last decade looked like a good one for authoritarian regimes and a challenging one for democratic ones. Cybertools, drones, facial recognition technology and social networks seemed to make efficient authoritarians even more efficient and democracies increasingly ungovernable.
The West lost self-confidence — and both Russian and Chinese leaders rubbed it in, putting out the word that these chaotic democratic systems were a spent force.
And then a totally unexpected thing happened: Russia and China each overreached.
Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and, to his surprise, invited an indirect war with NATO and the West. China insisted that it was smart enough to have its own local solution to a pandemic, leaving millions of Chinese underprotected or unprotected and, in effect, inviting a war with one of Mother Nature’s most contagious viruses — the Omicron mutation of SARS-CoV-2. It’s now led China to lock down all of Shanghai and parts of 44 other cities — some 370 million people.
In short, both Moscow and Beijing find themselves suddenly contending with much more powerful and relentless forces and systems than they ever anticipated. And the battles are exposing — to the whole world and to their own people — the weaknesses of their own systems. So much so that the world now has to worry about instability in both countries.
Be afraid.
Russia is a key supplier of wheat, fertilizer, oil and natural gas for the world. And China is the origin of, or a crucial link in, thousands of global manufacturing supply chains. If Russia is locked out and China is locked down for a prolonged period, every corner of the planet will be affected. And that is no longer a remote possibility.
Let’s start with Putin. He lulled himself into thinking that because his army had smashed a bunch of ragtag military opponents in Syria, Georgia, Crimea and Chechnya, it could quickly devour a country of 44 million people — Ukraine — that over the last decade had been moving to join the West and was tacitly being armed and trained by NATO.
It’s been a military and economic debacle for Russia so far. But just as important, it has exposed precisely how much Putin’s “system” is built on both lying upward — everyone telling superiors what they want to hear, all the way up to Putin — and drilling downward, tapping Russia’s natural resources, enriching a few Russians, rather than unleashing the country’s human resources and empowering the many.
Putin’s Russia is basically built on oil, lies and corruption, and that is not a resilient system.
You could see it right from the eve of the war when Putin conducted a nationally televised meeting of his top national security advisers, and none other than Sergei Naryshkin, chief of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, appeared confused over which lie Putin wanted to be told.
Putin said the eastern Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk should be allowed to become independent states, and then he polled these advisers for confirmation. But Naryshkin seemed to think Putin wanted to be told that the two provinces should be annexed to Russia. As Naryshkin stammered over the wrong answer, Putin, without a hint of irony, twice snapped at him to “speak directly” — as if that were possible anymore in Putin’s Russia. Only after Naryshkin gave Putin the lie he obviously wanted to be told did Putin snarl, “You can sit down now.”
How many Russian military officers watching that humiliation were ready to tell Putin the truth about Ukraine once the war started going badly? When the Russian military was up against foes in Georgia, Syria, Crimea and Chechnya, Russia could just indiscriminately bomb its way out of any problem. But now that Putin’s military has found itself in a war with Ukraine’s highly motivated army and its homegrown weapons industry, backed with some of NATO’s best precision weapons and training, the rot has really started to show. Russia’s tank and logistic forces were mauled into multiple junkyards of burning hulks in western Ukraine.
And it is impossible to exaggerate how incompetent the Russian Navy had to be to allow the command warship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, the Moskva missile cruiser, to be so badly damaged, reportedly by two Ukrainian-made anti-ship cruise missiles, called Neptunes, that the Moskva sank into the sea off Ukraine last week — the biggest loss of a naval ship in battle in 40 years.
For the Russian flagship in charge of coordinating all of the air defenses for the flotilla, and itself carrying 64 S-300F Rif air defense missiles, to be taken out by enemy anti-ship missiles had to have been the result of a cascade of systems failures in detection and response to an attack.
Moreover, Neptune missiles are not necessarily “ship killers.” They were more likely designed to be “mission killers” — to disable the radar and electronics of sophisticated destroyers like the Moskva — not specifically sink them.
So I pity the commander who had to tell Putin that Russia’s meanest, monstrous warship in the Black Sea, rumored to have been his favorite, had been sunk by a Ukrainian missile fired in war for the first time.
China is a much more serious country than Russia: It is not built on oil, lies and corruption (though it has plenty of the latter), but on the hard work and manufacturing talents of its people, directed by a top-down, iron-fisted but eager-to-learn-from-abroad Chinese Communist Party. At least, eager in the past to learn, but less so lately.
China’s economic success, and the sense of pride it has generated, seems to have lulled its leadership into thinking it could basically go it alone against a pandemic. By producing its own vaccines, rather than importing better ones from the West, and by repurposing its highly efficient system of authoritarian surveillance and control to curb travel, do mass testing and quarantine any individuals or neighborhoods where Covid-19 appeared, China bet on a “zero Covid” policy. If it could get through the pandemic with fewer deaths and a more open economy, it would be another signal to the world — a big signal — that Chinese communism was superior to American democracy.
But Beijing, while scoffing at the West, became shockingly negligent about vaccinating its own elderly. That did not matter as much when China was able to stem the spread of earlier variants of the coronavirus with tight population controls. But now it matters, because China’s Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines appear not nearly as effective against Omicron as the mRNA vaccines made in the West, although they still are effective at reducing hospitalization and death. In China today, more than 130 million people “aged 60 and above are either unvaccinated or have received fewer than three doses,” putting them “in greater danger of developing severe Covid symptoms or dying if they contract the virus,” The Financial Times recently reported, citing a University of Hong Kong study.
This has led Beijing to opt for that total lockdown of Shanghai, which has been so poorly managed that residents have reportedly had to scramble for food.
Dr. David L. Katz, a U.S. public health and preventive medicine expert who wrote one of the most prescient early guest essays in this newspaper about managing Covid at the onset, explained to me that the problem with having the kind of draconian lockdown policy that China maintained is that you are guaranteeing that your population develops little native immunity from having acquired and survived the virus. So, Katz said, if the virus mutates globally, as it did with Omicron, and you have “a less than effective vaccine, virtually no natural immunity in the population, and millions of elderly unvaccinated, you’re in a bad place and there is no easy way out.”
You can’t fool around with or propagandize away Mother Nature; she’s merciless.
The moral of this story? High-coercion authoritarian systems are low-information systems — so they often drive blind more than they realize. And even when the truth filters up, or reality in the form of a more powerful foe or Mother Nature slams them in the face so hard it can’t be ignored, their leaders find it hard to change course because their claims to the right to be presidents-for-life rest on their claims to infallibility. And that is why Russia and China are both now struggling.
I am worried sick about our own democratic system. But as long as we can still vote out incompetent leaders and maintain information ecosystems that will expose systemic lying and defy censorship, we can adapt in an age of rapid change — and that is the single most important competitive advantage a country can have today.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/18/opin ... 778d3e6de3
The West lost self-confidence — and both Russian and Chinese leaders rubbed it in, putting out the word that these chaotic democratic systems were a spent force.
And then a totally unexpected thing happened: Russia and China each overreached.
Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and, to his surprise, invited an indirect war with NATO and the West. China insisted that it was smart enough to have its own local solution to a pandemic, leaving millions of Chinese underprotected or unprotected and, in effect, inviting a war with one of Mother Nature’s most contagious viruses — the Omicron mutation of SARS-CoV-2. It’s now led China to lock down all of Shanghai and parts of 44 other cities — some 370 million people.
In short, both Moscow and Beijing find themselves suddenly contending with much more powerful and relentless forces and systems than they ever anticipated. And the battles are exposing — to the whole world and to their own people — the weaknesses of their own systems. So much so that the world now has to worry about instability in both countries.
Be afraid.
Russia is a key supplier of wheat, fertilizer, oil and natural gas for the world. And China is the origin of, or a crucial link in, thousands of global manufacturing supply chains. If Russia is locked out and China is locked down for a prolonged period, every corner of the planet will be affected. And that is no longer a remote possibility.
Let’s start with Putin. He lulled himself into thinking that because his army had smashed a bunch of ragtag military opponents in Syria, Georgia, Crimea and Chechnya, it could quickly devour a country of 44 million people — Ukraine — that over the last decade had been moving to join the West and was tacitly being armed and trained by NATO.
It’s been a military and economic debacle for Russia so far. But just as important, it has exposed precisely how much Putin’s “system” is built on both lying upward — everyone telling superiors what they want to hear, all the way up to Putin — and drilling downward, tapping Russia’s natural resources, enriching a few Russians, rather than unleashing the country’s human resources and empowering the many.
Putin’s Russia is basically built on oil, lies and corruption, and that is not a resilient system.
You could see it right from the eve of the war when Putin conducted a nationally televised meeting of his top national security advisers, and none other than Sergei Naryshkin, chief of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, appeared confused over which lie Putin wanted to be told.
Putin said the eastern Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk should be allowed to become independent states, and then he polled these advisers for confirmation. But Naryshkin seemed to think Putin wanted to be told that the two provinces should be annexed to Russia. As Naryshkin stammered over the wrong answer, Putin, without a hint of irony, twice snapped at him to “speak directly” — as if that were possible anymore in Putin’s Russia. Only after Naryshkin gave Putin the lie he obviously wanted to be told did Putin snarl, “You can sit down now.”
How many Russian military officers watching that humiliation were ready to tell Putin the truth about Ukraine once the war started going badly? When the Russian military was up against foes in Georgia, Syria, Crimea and Chechnya, Russia could just indiscriminately bomb its way out of any problem. But now that Putin’s military has found itself in a war with Ukraine’s highly motivated army and its homegrown weapons industry, backed with some of NATO’s best precision weapons and training, the rot has really started to show. Russia’s tank and logistic forces were mauled into multiple junkyards of burning hulks in western Ukraine.
And it is impossible to exaggerate how incompetent the Russian Navy had to be to allow the command warship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, the Moskva missile cruiser, to be so badly damaged, reportedly by two Ukrainian-made anti-ship cruise missiles, called Neptunes, that the Moskva sank into the sea off Ukraine last week — the biggest loss of a naval ship in battle in 40 years.
For the Russian flagship in charge of coordinating all of the air defenses for the flotilla, and itself carrying 64 S-300F Rif air defense missiles, to be taken out by enemy anti-ship missiles had to have been the result of a cascade of systems failures in detection and response to an attack.
Moreover, Neptune missiles are not necessarily “ship killers.” They were more likely designed to be “mission killers” — to disable the radar and electronics of sophisticated destroyers like the Moskva — not specifically sink them.
So I pity the commander who had to tell Putin that Russia’s meanest, monstrous warship in the Black Sea, rumored to have been his favorite, had been sunk by a Ukrainian missile fired in war for the first time.
China is a much more serious country than Russia: It is not built on oil, lies and corruption (though it has plenty of the latter), but on the hard work and manufacturing talents of its people, directed by a top-down, iron-fisted but eager-to-learn-from-abroad Chinese Communist Party. At least, eager in the past to learn, but less so lately.
China’s economic success, and the sense of pride it has generated, seems to have lulled its leadership into thinking it could basically go it alone against a pandemic. By producing its own vaccines, rather than importing better ones from the West, and by repurposing its highly efficient system of authoritarian surveillance and control to curb travel, do mass testing and quarantine any individuals or neighborhoods where Covid-19 appeared, China bet on a “zero Covid” policy. If it could get through the pandemic with fewer deaths and a more open economy, it would be another signal to the world — a big signal — that Chinese communism was superior to American democracy.
But Beijing, while scoffing at the West, became shockingly negligent about vaccinating its own elderly. That did not matter as much when China was able to stem the spread of earlier variants of the coronavirus with tight population controls. But now it matters, because China’s Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines appear not nearly as effective against Omicron as the mRNA vaccines made in the West, although they still are effective at reducing hospitalization and death. In China today, more than 130 million people “aged 60 and above are either unvaccinated or have received fewer than three doses,” putting them “in greater danger of developing severe Covid symptoms or dying if they contract the virus,” The Financial Times recently reported, citing a University of Hong Kong study.
This has led Beijing to opt for that total lockdown of Shanghai, which has been so poorly managed that residents have reportedly had to scramble for food.
Dr. David L. Katz, a U.S. public health and preventive medicine expert who wrote one of the most prescient early guest essays in this newspaper about managing Covid at the onset, explained to me that the problem with having the kind of draconian lockdown policy that China maintained is that you are guaranteeing that your population develops little native immunity from having acquired and survived the virus. So, Katz said, if the virus mutates globally, as it did with Omicron, and you have “a less than effective vaccine, virtually no natural immunity in the population, and millions of elderly unvaccinated, you’re in a bad place and there is no easy way out.”
You can’t fool around with or propagandize away Mother Nature; she’s merciless.
The moral of this story? High-coercion authoritarian systems are low-information systems — so they often drive blind more than they realize. And even when the truth filters up, or reality in the form of a more powerful foe or Mother Nature slams them in the face so hard it can’t be ignored, their leaders find it hard to change course because their claims to the right to be presidents-for-life rest on their claims to infallibility. And that is why Russia and China are both now struggling.
I am worried sick about our own democratic system. But as long as we can still vote out incompetent leaders and maintain information ecosystems that will expose systemic lying and defy censorship, we can adapt in an age of rapid change — and that is the single most important competitive advantage a country can have today.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/18/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Timeless Wisdom: George Washington Deemed Religion and Morality Essential to Political Prosperity
Various historians and statesmen attributed the downfall of the Roman Republic to the decline in religious belief and the accompanying unraveling of morality. "Rome: Ruins of the Forum, Looking Towards the Capitol" by Canaletto, 1742. (Public domain)
George Washington said something that many modern Americans would find nonsensical—and he did so not in some private document, but in perhaps the most public statement of his career, his Farewell Address published just prior to the end of his presidency.
He said the following:
“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. … A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity.”
According to Washington, it was impossible for an American to claim they were a patriot if they “should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness,” namely religion and morality.
He provided two reasons for his claim. First: “Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice?”
Washington was referring to oaths taken by citizens took in courts of law, or when they assumed various public offices. Such oaths invoked God as a witness to the truthfulness of the claim being made, whether with respect to evidence and testimony, or the rectitude of one’s intentions in assuming public office. No testimony of any kind could be accepted in court without an oath, for if the witness or expert were lying, they were also calling God a liar, and thus ensuring they would be cursed in the afterlife—something unimaginable for the genuinely religious person.
A portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart, 1795. (Public domain)
An anecdote from “Democracy in America” by Alexis de Tocqueville—a Frenchman who visited America in the 1830s—sheds some light:
“While I was in America, a witness attended a court in the county of Chester (state of New York) and declared his disbelief in the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. The judge refused to accept his oath given that the witness had destroyed in advance any confidence in his testimony. Newspapers reported the fact without comment.”
Why would an American judge consider belief in God essential to an oath? For the same reasons cited by William Blackstone, the English jurist most often cited by the Founders:
“The belief of a future state of rewards and punishments, the entertaining just ideas of the moral attributes of the supreme being, and a firm persuasion that he superintends and will finally compensate every action in human life (all which are clearly revealed in the doctrines, and forcibly inculcated by the precepts, of our savior Christ) these are the grand foundation of all judicial oaths; which call God to witness the truth of those facts, which perhaps may be only known to him and the party attesting: all moral evidence therefore, all confidence in human veracity, must be weakened by irreligion, and overthrown by total infidelity.”
This was closely connected with the second reason Washington offered in his Farewell Address to support his position: “Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
As I have frequently observed, the Founders were among the best-read generations in history. Among the topics they were most familiar with was history, especially Greek and Roman history.
Greek historians like Polybius ascribed the rise of the Roman state to (among other reasons) the gravity with which they treated oaths (judicial and otherwise) as divine obligations. Roman statesmen like Cicero made the same observation centuries later. Such beliefs held the Roman state together, and reinforced the mutual confidence Romans had in one another.
Likewise, various ancient historians and statesmen ascribed the downfall of the Roman Republic to the decline in religious belief, and the concomitant unraveling of morality. Even in pre-Christian days, they considered religion and morality as indissolubly connected because of the reality of an afterlife of rewards and punishments for the actions in this life. You may elude man’s justice, but you could never elude God’s justice, and this serves as a powerful bridle on the worst of human passions.
Belief in God, and what the Founders often referred to as a “future state” in which he would dispense “rewards and punishments” for one’s conduct in life was the cornerstone of their beliefs on the necessity of religion to a free society—whether they were very religious (like Benjamin Rush) or less religious (like Thomas Jefferson). All of them were agreed on this point.
They would all say, with John Adams, some form of the following:
“Religion I hold to be essential to morals. I never read of an irreligious character in Greek or Roman history, nor in any other history, nor have I known one in life, who was not a rascal. Name one if you can, living or dead.”
Therefore, as Washington so bluntly asserted, subverting these great truths of religion and morality could never be compatible with patriotism.
Joshua Charles is a former White House speechwriter for Vice President Mike Pence, No. 1 New York Times bestselling author, a historian, writer/ghostwriter, and public speaker. He’s been a historical adviser for several documentaries and published books on topics ranging from the Founding Fathers, to Israel, to the role of faith in American history, to the impact of the Bible on human civilization. He was the senior editor and concept developer of the “Global Impact Bible,” published by the D.C.-based Museum of the Bible in 2017, and is an affiliated scholar of the Faith and Liberty Discovery Center in Philadelphia. He is a Tikvah and Philos Fellow and has spoken around the country on topics such as history, politics, faith, and worldview. He is a concert pianist and holds a master’s in government and a law degree. Follow him on Twitter @JoshuaTCharles or see JoshuaTCharles.com.
https://archive.ph/Ihg0n
Can We Still Be Optimistic About America?
This is a season — an age, really — of American pessimism.
The pessimism comes in many flavors. There is progressive pessimism: The country is tilting toward MAGA-hatted fascism or a new version of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” There is conservative pessimism: The institutions, from primary schools to the Pentagon, are all being captured by wokeness. There is Afropessimism: Black people have always been excluded by systemic, ineradicable racism. There is the pessimism of the white middle and working classes: The country and the values they’ve known for generations are being hijacked by smug, self-dealing elites who view them with contempt.
There is also the pessimism of the middle: We are losing the institutional capacity, cultural norms and moral courage needed to strike pragmatic compromises at almost every level of society. Zero-sum is now our default setting.
These various kinds of pessimism may reach contradictory conclusions, but they are based on undeniable realities. In 2012, there were roughly 41,000 overdose deaths in the United States. Last year, the number topped 100,000. In 2012, there were 4.7 murders for every 100,000 people. Last year, the rate hit an estimated 6.9, a 47 percent increase. A decade ago, you rarely heard of carjackings. Now, they are through the roof. Shoplifting? Ditto. The nation’s mental health was in steep decline before the pandemic, with a 60 percent increase of major depressive episodes among adolescents between 2007 and 2019. Everything we know about the effects of lockdowns and school closures suggests it’s gotten much worse.
Economics tell a similar story. “Twenty-first-century America has somehow managed to produce markedly more wealth for its wealthholders even as it provided markedly less work for its workers,” observed Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute in a landmark 2017 Commentary essay. It’s in part from the loss of meaningful work — and the consequent evaporation of pride, purpose and dignity in labor — that we get the startling increase in death rates among white middle-aged Americans, often to suicide or substance abuse.
The list goes on, but you get the point. Even without the daily reminders of Carter-era inflation, this feels like another era of Carter-style malaise, complete with an unpopular president who tends to inspire more sympathy than he does confidence.
So why am I still an optimist when it comes to America? Because while we are bent, our adversaries are brittle. As we find ways to bend, they can only remain static or shatter.
This week brought two powerful reminders of the point. In Moscow, Vladimir Putin gave his customary May 9 Victory Day speech, in which he enlisted nostalgia for a partly mythical past to promote lies about a wholly mythical present, all for the sake of a war that is going badly for him.
Putin is belatedly discovering that the powers to humiliate, subvert and destroy are weaker forces than the powers to attract, inspire and build — powers free nations possess almost as a birthright. The Kremlin might yet be able to bludgeon its way to something it can call victory. But its reward will mainly be the very rubble it has created. The rest of Ukraine will find ways to flourish, ideally as a member of NATO and the European Union.
Meanwhile, in Shanghai, more than 25 million people remain under strict lockdown, a real-world dystopia in which hovering drones warn residents through loudspeakers to “control your soul’s desire for freedom.” Does anyone still think that China’s handling of the pandemic — its deceits, its mediocre vaccines, a zero-Covid policy that manifestly failed and now this cruel lockdown that has brought hunger and medicine shortages to its richest city — is a model to the rest of the world?
For all its undeniable progress over 45 years, China remains a Potemkin regime obsessed with fostering aggrandizing illusions: about domestic harmony (aided by a vast system of surveillance and prison camps); about technological innovation (aided by unprecedented theft of intellectual property); about unstoppable economic growth (aided by manufactured statistics). The illusions may win status for Beijing. But they come with a heavy price: the systematic denial of truth, even to the regime itself.
Rulers who come to believe their own propaganda will inevitably miscalculate, often catastrophically. Look again at Putin, who really believed he had a competent military.
Which brings me back to the United States. Just as dictatorships advertise their strengths but hide their weaknesses — both to others and to themselves — democracies do the opposite: We obsess over our weaknesses even as we forget our formidable strengths. It is the source of our pessimism. But it is also, paradoxically, our deepest strength: In refusing to look away from our flaws, we not only acknowledge them but also begin fixing them.
We rethink. We adapt. In bending, we find new ways to grow.
We have a demonstrated record of defanging right-wing demagogues, debunking left-wing ideologues, promoting racial justice, reversing crime waves, revitalizing the political center and reinvigorating the American ideal. Our problems may be hard, but they are neither insoluble nor new.
Those without our freedoms will not be so fortunate.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/10/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Is Democracy Finished? Francis Fukuyama and Yascha Mounk Wonder
Book Review of Two Books
Francis Fukuyama and Yascha Mounk Wonder, Is Democracy Finished?
LIBERALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS
By Francis Fukuyama
THE GREAT EXPERIMENT
Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure
By Yascha Mounk
The philosopher Francis Fukuyama is probably best known for a misinterpretation of his work. His 1992 book, “The End of History and the Last Man,” was assumed to be a statement of fact rather than the description of a process. He has been defending himself ever since: “The word ‘end’ was not meant in the sense of ‘termination’ but ‘target’ or ‘objective,’” he wrote in 2019. The Soviet Union had collapsed; Marxist collectivism wasn’t the “end” of history. Liberal democracy was. Fukuyama thus committed the sin of optimism, a dicey destination for a serious thinker. In his new book, “Liberalism and Its Discontents,” Fukuyama acknowledges that we’re in a rocky patch on the road toward that “end.”
There are serious threats from right-wing populism and left-wing identity politics. Illiberal democracy — autocracy — is on the rise. This is a conclusion shared by another prominent political philosopher, Yascha Mounk, in “The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure.” Both books raise serious challenges, from the political center, to the way liberal democracy has been operating for the past several generations in America and the world. They are a rare thing: academic treatises that may actually have influence in the arena of practical politics.
First, a clarification: Both authors use the word “liberal” in its classical sense. Liberalism is government by the rule of law, with the goal of protecting individual rights, equality and enterprise, built on a structure of rational, objective facts. “Democracy” is the process by which the law is agreed upon. Both authors assume that liberal democracy is the best way to manage competing interests in a diverse society. But the tensions are constant and, Mounk writes, “the history of diverse societies is grim.” Fukuyama adds, “American institutions have decayed over time, becoming rigid and hard to reform, and are suffering from capture by the elites.”
Fukuyama writes with a crystalline rationality — indeed, he has underestimated the power of irrationality in the past. He works to rectify that in “Liberalism and Its Discontents.” He identifies “neoliberalism” on the right and “critical theory” on the left as the primary threats to the American Republic. Those terms need to be unpacked as well: “Neoliberalism” refers to the Chicago and Austrian schools of economics, which “sharply denigrated the role of the state in the economy.” This was the philosophy popularized by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Fukuyama believes neoliberalism was a legitimate response to the “excessive state control” of the late industrial age, “a valid insight into the superior efficiency of markets” that “evolved into something of a religion” and led to “grotesque inequalities.” There was an undue libertarian emphasis on “personal responsibility.” Fukuyama believes, however, that individuals need to be protected from “adverse circumstances beyond their control.” Markets need to be regulated by the state. Economic efficiency isn’t the sole purpose of human life; there is a social component as well. People crave respect, not just as individuals, but as members of groups with distinct “religious beliefs, social rules and traditions.”
And so there has been a backlash from the left, an attack on the libertarian and capitalist excesses, the “primordial” individualist tendencies of neoliberalism. “Critical” theory argues that individual and economic freedoms were just a smoke screen for the basic power arrangements that underpin capitalist society. The system was rigged. Power lay in groups, in identity — in whiteness, in patriarchy, in a plutocratic business system. There was some truth to this: “Real world societies are organized into involuntary groups,” Fukuyama writes. The critical theorists believed liberalism “sought to impose a society based on European values on diverse populations with other traditions.” There was some truth to that, too, but also a broad-brush silliness. Critical theory — as practiced by French deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida — became an assault on the objective realities that provided the ballast for liberal democracy. “The search for human universals fundamental to liberalism was simply an exercise of power,” the critical theorists argued. Fukuyama believes they espouse “a radical subjectivism that rooted knowledge in lived experience and emotion.” It also led to notional academic exercises like “critical race theory,” in which society was defined by immutable racial groups, the whites “privileged” and “people of color” oppressed.
Enter Donald Trump, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the British Brexiteers — the right-wing populists of the past decade. If academics could traffic in radical subjectivity, so could demagogues. The idea that a divorced white woman with two kids, working three jobs, was “privileged” was crass foolishness. The idea that American society was divided between Caucasians and “people of color” was simplistic. Broad swaths of the recent immigrant populations, Latinos and Asians, wanted no part of that. Who spoke for these groups, anyway? The loudest voices. Where did legitimacy lie? If truth was purely subjective, where did reality lie? “Liberal societies,” Fukuyama concludes, “cannot survive if they are unable to establish a hierarchy of factual truths.”
Yascha Mounk’s analysis of the difficulties facing the “Great Experiment” of liberal democracy is very similar to Fukuyama’s, but he is a different sort of writer — more passionate and personal. He is Jewish, born and raised in Germany, a proud American citizen now. He is accessible in ways Fukuyama is not: “My political values are left of center. The American politician of the past 50 years I most admire is Barack Obama.” So it is no surprise that he agrees with Fukuyama about the economic inequalities imposed over the past 40 years by the neoliberal regime; and it is also no surprise that he is frightened by right-wing populism. His last book, “The People vs. Democracy,” explored that threat. But he is equally appalled by the “challenger ideology” — his term for critical theorists. He believes that “entitlement programs that are explicitly targeted at members of particular ethnic groups, for example, provide a strong incentive for members of all ethnicities, including whites, to identity with their racial groups and organize along sectarian lines.” And furthermore: “Diverse democracies should never waver from a vision of the future in which ascriptive identities play a smaller, not a larger, role.”
Mounk is a meliorist, not a radical. He understands that racial enslavement is an enduring American stain and burden. He doesn’t directly propose the elimination of race-based programs like affirmative action — and his argument is universal, encompassing and criticizing the anti-immigrant politics of his native Europe. Fukuyama agrees: “Social policies should seek to equalize outcomes across the whole society but they should be directed at fluid categories like class rather than fixed ones like race or ethnicity.” So both Mounk and Fukuyama pose a practical challenge to looming battles over identity politics in the Democratic Party and economic elitism among the Republicans. An effective liberal democracy, Mounk writes, “should oppose monopolies that allow inefficient corporations to quash would-be competitors.”
Easier said than done. Do Mounk and Fukuyama have any practical answers? Both these books have 10 chapters. Mounk playfully refers to “the Chapter 10 problem.” Tenth chapters tend to be thin: It is easier to diagnose the problems of liberal democracy than to propose solutions. Both authors suggest that some form of national service might be a way to bind the national wounds; Mounk includes a section on Gordon Allport, the 20th-century sociologist whose work suggested that it is harder to hate someone when you know them; interaction among tribes lowers the friction. But Fukuyama disdains what he calls “a laundry list” of policy proposals and, rather elegantly, settles on a plea for moderation, which is “not a bad political principle in general and especially for a liberal order that was meant to calm political passions from the start. … Recovering a sense of moderation, both individual and communal, is therefore the key to the revival — indeed, to the survival — of liberalism itself.”
Mounk comes to a more inspiring and unexpected conclusion: He makes the case for optimism. “Most diverse democracies around the world are vastly more just and inclusive today than they were 50 or 100 years ago,” he writes. Indeed, these years have seen the greatest advances in human rights in the history of our species — for Blacks, for women, for members of the gay community. Latinos and Asians are assimilating into American society in the same way that other immigrant groups have. Intermarriage is taking place at unprecedented rates. Cultural “appropriation” — a loathsome term — is taking place, too, as a beautiful and incredibly creative multicultural tapestry emerges from a multiplicity of American sources.
Racism remains a scourge, of course. The cultural aftereffects of enslavement — including high levels of Black crime — remain a problem, but Mounk argues persuasively that progress has been made, especially in income (if not the accumulation of wealth) and education. He cites a New York Times report that “from 2000 to 2019, the percentage of African Americans with at least a bachelor’s degree rose from 15 to 23 percent.” (The college graduation rates for Black women have been particularly impressive.) Over the same period, “the share of African Americans without a high school degree was cut by more than half.”
A significant Black middle and professional class has emerged. In fact, Blacks “are more likely than their white fellow citizens to ‘believe in the American dream’ or to say that the country’s best days still lie ahead.”
And yet a fashionable cloud of pessimism prevails, amplified by a sensationalist media that foghorns the loudest and most extreme and least tolerant voices. No doubt, it will be a challenge to overcome the encrustations of monopoly power and racial enmity, political gridlock and media cynicism. But a sense of helplessness is essential to the enemies of liberalism. Supporters of diverse democracies, Mounk writes, “will also have to keep in check the pessimists in their own midst.”
The advocates of enlightened liberalism may not be noisy. But, as the people of Ukraine are proving, they can be stubborn. We can only hope that Fukuyama was right the first time: that humanity is stumbling — against its worst instincts — toward a modest state of grace, a society that seeks the balance between economic freedom and inequality, that secures individual rights while promoting justice for all. It will not be easy; an active, engaged citizenry will be necessary. But any other fate is unimaginable.
Joe Klein is the author of seven books, including “Primary Colors,” “Woody Guthrie: A Life” and “Charlie Mike.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/13/book ... 778d3e6de3
Francis Fukuyama and Yascha Mounk Wonder, Is Democracy Finished?
LIBERALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS
By Francis Fukuyama
THE GREAT EXPERIMENT
Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure
By Yascha Mounk
The philosopher Francis Fukuyama is probably best known for a misinterpretation of his work. His 1992 book, “The End of History and the Last Man,” was assumed to be a statement of fact rather than the description of a process. He has been defending himself ever since: “The word ‘end’ was not meant in the sense of ‘termination’ but ‘target’ or ‘objective,’” he wrote in 2019. The Soviet Union had collapsed; Marxist collectivism wasn’t the “end” of history. Liberal democracy was. Fukuyama thus committed the sin of optimism, a dicey destination for a serious thinker. In his new book, “Liberalism and Its Discontents,” Fukuyama acknowledges that we’re in a rocky patch on the road toward that “end.”
There are serious threats from right-wing populism and left-wing identity politics. Illiberal democracy — autocracy — is on the rise. This is a conclusion shared by another prominent political philosopher, Yascha Mounk, in “The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure.” Both books raise serious challenges, from the political center, to the way liberal democracy has been operating for the past several generations in America and the world. They are a rare thing: academic treatises that may actually have influence in the arena of practical politics.
First, a clarification: Both authors use the word “liberal” in its classical sense. Liberalism is government by the rule of law, with the goal of protecting individual rights, equality and enterprise, built on a structure of rational, objective facts. “Democracy” is the process by which the law is agreed upon. Both authors assume that liberal democracy is the best way to manage competing interests in a diverse society. But the tensions are constant and, Mounk writes, “the history of diverse societies is grim.” Fukuyama adds, “American institutions have decayed over time, becoming rigid and hard to reform, and are suffering from capture by the elites.”
Fukuyama writes with a crystalline rationality — indeed, he has underestimated the power of irrationality in the past. He works to rectify that in “Liberalism and Its Discontents.” He identifies “neoliberalism” on the right and “critical theory” on the left as the primary threats to the American Republic. Those terms need to be unpacked as well: “Neoliberalism” refers to the Chicago and Austrian schools of economics, which “sharply denigrated the role of the state in the economy.” This was the philosophy popularized by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Fukuyama believes neoliberalism was a legitimate response to the “excessive state control” of the late industrial age, “a valid insight into the superior efficiency of markets” that “evolved into something of a religion” and led to “grotesque inequalities.” There was an undue libertarian emphasis on “personal responsibility.” Fukuyama believes, however, that individuals need to be protected from “adverse circumstances beyond their control.” Markets need to be regulated by the state. Economic efficiency isn’t the sole purpose of human life; there is a social component as well. People crave respect, not just as individuals, but as members of groups with distinct “religious beliefs, social rules and traditions.”
And so there has been a backlash from the left, an attack on the libertarian and capitalist excesses, the “primordial” individualist tendencies of neoliberalism. “Critical” theory argues that individual and economic freedoms were just a smoke screen for the basic power arrangements that underpin capitalist society. The system was rigged. Power lay in groups, in identity — in whiteness, in patriarchy, in a plutocratic business system. There was some truth to this: “Real world societies are organized into involuntary groups,” Fukuyama writes. The critical theorists believed liberalism “sought to impose a society based on European values on diverse populations with other traditions.” There was some truth to that, too, but also a broad-brush silliness. Critical theory — as practiced by French deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida — became an assault on the objective realities that provided the ballast for liberal democracy. “The search for human universals fundamental to liberalism was simply an exercise of power,” the critical theorists argued. Fukuyama believes they espouse “a radical subjectivism that rooted knowledge in lived experience and emotion.” It also led to notional academic exercises like “critical race theory,” in which society was defined by immutable racial groups, the whites “privileged” and “people of color” oppressed.
Enter Donald Trump, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the British Brexiteers — the right-wing populists of the past decade. If academics could traffic in radical subjectivity, so could demagogues. The idea that a divorced white woman with two kids, working three jobs, was “privileged” was crass foolishness. The idea that American society was divided between Caucasians and “people of color” was simplistic. Broad swaths of the recent immigrant populations, Latinos and Asians, wanted no part of that. Who spoke for these groups, anyway? The loudest voices. Where did legitimacy lie? If truth was purely subjective, where did reality lie? “Liberal societies,” Fukuyama concludes, “cannot survive if they are unable to establish a hierarchy of factual truths.”
Yascha Mounk’s analysis of the difficulties facing the “Great Experiment” of liberal democracy is very similar to Fukuyama’s, but he is a different sort of writer — more passionate and personal. He is Jewish, born and raised in Germany, a proud American citizen now. He is accessible in ways Fukuyama is not: “My political values are left of center. The American politician of the past 50 years I most admire is Barack Obama.” So it is no surprise that he agrees with Fukuyama about the economic inequalities imposed over the past 40 years by the neoliberal regime; and it is also no surprise that he is frightened by right-wing populism. His last book, “The People vs. Democracy,” explored that threat. But he is equally appalled by the “challenger ideology” — his term for critical theorists. He believes that “entitlement programs that are explicitly targeted at members of particular ethnic groups, for example, provide a strong incentive for members of all ethnicities, including whites, to identity with their racial groups and organize along sectarian lines.” And furthermore: “Diverse democracies should never waver from a vision of the future in which ascriptive identities play a smaller, not a larger, role.”
Mounk is a meliorist, not a radical. He understands that racial enslavement is an enduring American stain and burden. He doesn’t directly propose the elimination of race-based programs like affirmative action — and his argument is universal, encompassing and criticizing the anti-immigrant politics of his native Europe. Fukuyama agrees: “Social policies should seek to equalize outcomes across the whole society but they should be directed at fluid categories like class rather than fixed ones like race or ethnicity.” So both Mounk and Fukuyama pose a practical challenge to looming battles over identity politics in the Democratic Party and economic elitism among the Republicans. An effective liberal democracy, Mounk writes, “should oppose monopolies that allow inefficient corporations to quash would-be competitors.”
Easier said than done. Do Mounk and Fukuyama have any practical answers? Both these books have 10 chapters. Mounk playfully refers to “the Chapter 10 problem.” Tenth chapters tend to be thin: It is easier to diagnose the problems of liberal democracy than to propose solutions. Both authors suggest that some form of national service might be a way to bind the national wounds; Mounk includes a section on Gordon Allport, the 20th-century sociologist whose work suggested that it is harder to hate someone when you know them; interaction among tribes lowers the friction. But Fukuyama disdains what he calls “a laundry list” of policy proposals and, rather elegantly, settles on a plea for moderation, which is “not a bad political principle in general and especially for a liberal order that was meant to calm political passions from the start. … Recovering a sense of moderation, both individual and communal, is therefore the key to the revival — indeed, to the survival — of liberalism itself.”
Mounk comes to a more inspiring and unexpected conclusion: He makes the case for optimism. “Most diverse democracies around the world are vastly more just and inclusive today than they were 50 or 100 years ago,” he writes. Indeed, these years have seen the greatest advances in human rights in the history of our species — for Blacks, for women, for members of the gay community. Latinos and Asians are assimilating into American society in the same way that other immigrant groups have. Intermarriage is taking place at unprecedented rates. Cultural “appropriation” — a loathsome term — is taking place, too, as a beautiful and incredibly creative multicultural tapestry emerges from a multiplicity of American sources.
Racism remains a scourge, of course. The cultural aftereffects of enslavement — including high levels of Black crime — remain a problem, but Mounk argues persuasively that progress has been made, especially in income (if not the accumulation of wealth) and education. He cites a New York Times report that “from 2000 to 2019, the percentage of African Americans with at least a bachelor’s degree rose from 15 to 23 percent.” (The college graduation rates for Black women have been particularly impressive.) Over the same period, “the share of African Americans without a high school degree was cut by more than half.”
A significant Black middle and professional class has emerged. In fact, Blacks “are more likely than their white fellow citizens to ‘believe in the American dream’ or to say that the country’s best days still lie ahead.”
And yet a fashionable cloud of pessimism prevails, amplified by a sensationalist media that foghorns the loudest and most extreme and least tolerant voices. No doubt, it will be a challenge to overcome the encrustations of monopoly power and racial enmity, political gridlock and media cynicism. But a sense of helplessness is essential to the enemies of liberalism. Supporters of diverse democracies, Mounk writes, “will also have to keep in check the pessimists in their own midst.”
The advocates of enlightened liberalism may not be noisy. But, as the people of Ukraine are proving, they can be stubborn. We can only hope that Fukuyama was right the first time: that humanity is stumbling — against its worst instincts — toward a modest state of grace, a society that seeks the balance between economic freedom and inequality, that secures individual rights while promoting justice for all. It will not be easy; an active, engaged citizenry will be necessary. But any other fate is unimaginable.
Joe Klein is the author of seven books, including “Primary Colors,” “Woody Guthrie: A Life” and “Charlie Mike.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/13/book ... 778d3e6de3
The Difference Between a Democracy and a Republic
Video:
https://www.prageru.com/video/the-diffe ... a-republic
Transcript:
At the close of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, legend has it that a woman called out to Benjamin Franklin to ask what kind of government the delegates had created. Franklin responded “…a republic, madam. If you can keep it.”
A republic?
Shouldn’t Franklin have said “a democracy”?
Isn’t that what we have in the United States?
Most people today would say “yes.”
After all, if our country isn’t a democracy, what is it? It’s not a dictatorship, the rule of one man. Or an oligarchy, rule by a small group. In America the people are in charge. That’s literally what democracy means in the original Greek—demos kratos—the people (demos) rule (kratos).
But let’s pause for a moment and consider more deeply what the word means in practice and why the delegates in Philadelphia rejected it.
That’s right—rejected it.
Our government was established by a national charter—the Constitution of the United States. We are governed by the institutions, and according to the rules and principles, created and adopted when our forebears ratified that document, making it “the Supreme Law of the land.”
Are those institutions properly speaking democratic?
The men who bequeathed our form of government to us—those we call our founding fathers—didn’t see it that way.
They understood the institutions established by the Constitution to be republic.
In fact, though the founders believed in “government of the people, by the people, for the people” as Abraham Lincoln put it in the Gettysburg Address, they did not believe in pure or unrestricted democracy. They feared that democracy, strictly speaking, contained within it the impulse to mob rule—the stifling of civil liberty, the trampling by majorities of the rights of minorities.
To put it more bluntly, pure democracy frightened them.
So, while they built into the Constitution significant democratic elements, they also built in non-democratic features to protect liberty and prevent tyranny. It wasn’t simply that they favored representative government over direct democracy, though they did; it’s that they rejected the idea that “the majority wins” was by definition the just outcome.
Indeed, in what is perhaps the most famous of the eighty-five Federalist Papers—Federalist 10—James Madison, precisely in distinguishing a democracy, which he did not favor, from a republic, which he did, noted that a crucial advantage of republicanism is “to refine…the public views by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interests of the country…”
And, so, we have representative government, and more than that, we have a bicameral (that is, two-tiered) legislature—a Congress with a highly democratic House of Representatives and a not-very-democratic Senate.
Therefore, California, with its massive population, has fifty-two representatives in the House. Wyoming has one.
Yet Wyoming has two Senators—the same number as California and every other state.
A pure democrat would say, “that’s unfair!” Each Wyoming resident has far more power than every Californian.
But a republican would say, well, we aren’t and shouldn’t be a pure democracy. If we were large population states like California would overwhelm the needs and interests of small population states like Wyoming.
That’s why we’re called the United States of America. Each state has its own separate identity; holds its own separate elections. Just as we don’t want one person or small group of people to dominate our government, we don’t one state or a few states to dominate our government.
A republic is a way of diffusing power—and a brilliant one at that.
We see something similar in the Constitution’s procedures for choosing a president. An obvious possibility would have been by a national popular vote. The founders wisely decided against this option. Rather, they created an electoral college to protect the interests of the less populous states. Even today, their decision makes sense. As my Princeton colleague Professor Allen Guelzo observes, “a direct, national popular vote would incentivize campaigns to focus almost exclusively on densely populated urban areas.” The electoral college system incentivizes candidates to court voters more broadly—making presidential elections more fully national.
So, if we understand the system of government our founders bequeathed to us, we will see why they preferred to describe it as a republic rather than a democracy. Of course, it has strong democratic elements, but America was not created to be a pure democracy for very good reasons.
Those reasons remain as valid today as they were in 1789.
We should not go along with those who today are demanding constitutional changes simply because this or that institution or procedure established by the Constitution—say the Senate or the electoral college—is not “democratic.”
“More democratic” doesn’t necessarily mean better. It doesn’t necessarily mean more just. Our founders understood this. So should we.
We have a republic.
And we should keep it.
I’m Robert George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program at Princeton University for Prager University.
https://www.prageru.com/video/the-diffe ... a-republic
Transcript:
At the close of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, legend has it that a woman called out to Benjamin Franklin to ask what kind of government the delegates had created. Franklin responded “…a republic, madam. If you can keep it.”
A republic?
Shouldn’t Franklin have said “a democracy”?
Isn’t that what we have in the United States?
Most people today would say “yes.”
After all, if our country isn’t a democracy, what is it? It’s not a dictatorship, the rule of one man. Or an oligarchy, rule by a small group. In America the people are in charge. That’s literally what democracy means in the original Greek—demos kratos—the people (demos) rule (kratos).
But let’s pause for a moment and consider more deeply what the word means in practice and why the delegates in Philadelphia rejected it.
That’s right—rejected it.
Our government was established by a national charter—the Constitution of the United States. We are governed by the institutions, and according to the rules and principles, created and adopted when our forebears ratified that document, making it “the Supreme Law of the land.”
Are those institutions properly speaking democratic?
The men who bequeathed our form of government to us—those we call our founding fathers—didn’t see it that way.
They understood the institutions established by the Constitution to be republic.
In fact, though the founders believed in “government of the people, by the people, for the people” as Abraham Lincoln put it in the Gettysburg Address, they did not believe in pure or unrestricted democracy. They feared that democracy, strictly speaking, contained within it the impulse to mob rule—the stifling of civil liberty, the trampling by majorities of the rights of minorities.
To put it more bluntly, pure democracy frightened them.
So, while they built into the Constitution significant democratic elements, they also built in non-democratic features to protect liberty and prevent tyranny. It wasn’t simply that they favored representative government over direct democracy, though they did; it’s that they rejected the idea that “the majority wins” was by definition the just outcome.
Indeed, in what is perhaps the most famous of the eighty-five Federalist Papers—Federalist 10—James Madison, precisely in distinguishing a democracy, which he did not favor, from a republic, which he did, noted that a crucial advantage of republicanism is “to refine…the public views by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interests of the country…”
And, so, we have representative government, and more than that, we have a bicameral (that is, two-tiered) legislature—a Congress with a highly democratic House of Representatives and a not-very-democratic Senate.
Therefore, California, with its massive population, has fifty-two representatives in the House. Wyoming has one.
Yet Wyoming has two Senators—the same number as California and every other state.
A pure democrat would say, “that’s unfair!” Each Wyoming resident has far more power than every Californian.
But a republican would say, well, we aren’t and shouldn’t be a pure democracy. If we were large population states like California would overwhelm the needs and interests of small population states like Wyoming.
That’s why we’re called the United States of America. Each state has its own separate identity; holds its own separate elections. Just as we don’t want one person or small group of people to dominate our government, we don’t one state or a few states to dominate our government.
A republic is a way of diffusing power—and a brilliant one at that.
We see something similar in the Constitution’s procedures for choosing a president. An obvious possibility would have been by a national popular vote. The founders wisely decided against this option. Rather, they created an electoral college to protect the interests of the less populous states. Even today, their decision makes sense. As my Princeton colleague Professor Allen Guelzo observes, “a direct, national popular vote would incentivize campaigns to focus almost exclusively on densely populated urban areas.” The electoral college system incentivizes candidates to court voters more broadly—making presidential elections more fully national.
So, if we understand the system of government our founders bequeathed to us, we will see why they preferred to describe it as a republic rather than a democracy. Of course, it has strong democratic elements, but America was not created to be a pure democracy for very good reasons.
Those reasons remain as valid today as they were in 1789.
We should not go along with those who today are demanding constitutional changes simply because this or that institution or procedure established by the Constitution—say the Senate or the electoral college—is not “democratic.”
“More democratic” doesn’t necessarily mean better. It doesn’t necessarily mean more just. Our founders understood this. So should we.
We have a republic.
And we should keep it.
I’m Robert George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program at Princeton University for Prager University.
Political Kinship in Pakistan
In recognition of Stephen Lyon's appointment as the inaugural Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the Aga Khan University, we are reading his subtle analysis, Political Kinship in Pakistan. AKF congratulates him on his appointment.
Lyon illustrates how contemporary politics in Pakistan are built on complex kinship networks created through marriage and descent relations.
Book
Descent, Marriage, and Government Stability
STEPHEN M. LYON
In Political Kinship in Pakistan, Stephen M. Lyon illustrates how contemporary politics in Pakistan are built on complex kinship networks created through marriage and descent relations. Lyon points to kinship as a critical mechanism for understanding both Pakistan’s continued inability to develop strong and stable governments, and its incredible durability in the face of pressures that have led to the collapse and failure of other states around the world.
https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498582179/P ... 25c8c5fc8d
Lyon illustrates how contemporary politics in Pakistan are built on complex kinship networks created through marriage and descent relations.
Book
Descent, Marriage, and Government Stability
STEPHEN M. LYON
In Political Kinship in Pakistan, Stephen M. Lyon illustrates how contemporary politics in Pakistan are built on complex kinship networks created through marriage and descent relations. Lyon points to kinship as a critical mechanism for understanding both Pakistan’s continued inability to develop strong and stable governments, and its incredible durability in the face of pressures that have led to the collapse and failure of other states around the world.
https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498582179/P ... 25c8c5fc8d
American Democracy Is Not the Beacon It Once Was for Africa’s Elite
Campaign posters for various candidates on a wall in Nairobi.Credit...Simon Maina/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
NAIROBI — A Kenyan friend of mine who graduated from Harvard Business School recently told me that the United States is a good place to get an education, but “it is no longer a leading light.”
“We are looking elsewhere, not just the West,” she said. “Democracy? I don’t believe in it.”
She made the comment at a dinner party I attended in the garden of a gated neighborhood in Karen, a wealthy Nairobi suburb earlier this summer, as Kenyans were preparing to elect a new president. Nearly everyone in attendance was a Kenyan who had graduated from a top American school and gone on to an impressive career in finance, business consulting or government service. They were technocrats and intellectuals, preoccupied with how the continent’s cash-strapped governments can deliver better health care, education and jobs to about 1.4 billion people.
They aren’t looking to the United States for pointers. The American political model has not produced the results that Africans have been hoping for and now seems to be failing America itself, they told me. The people I met that night all spoke of American power in the past tense. (Most spoke to me candidly, with the understanding that I would not identify them by name, since the sentiments they expressed could cause a stir at their jobs.)
Their comments underscored the heavy geopolitical cost of American political dysfunction at a time when the Biden administration sees an epic competition between democracies and autocracies, especially with China. Globally, the perception of American decline is eroding confidence in democracy itself.
I was struck by how much had changed since the late 1990s, when I lived in Kenya, and even since my last visit six years ago. In the past, the Kenyans I met expressed admiration for the United States and gratitude for U.S. assistance in midwifing Kenya’s democracy. In 1992, Kenya held its first multiparty elections in over two decades, after Smith Hempstone, who was then the U.S. ambassador in Nairobi, threatened to cut off aid unless the opposition was allowed to participate. Many American foreign policy analysts at the time believed that, with the Cold War over, every nation would eventually embrace democracy.
Today, the United States has become more of a cautionary tale than an exemplar, with Donald Trump’s claims of a rigged election, the attack on the capitol on Jan. 6 and the near daily news reports about mass shootings. Meanwhile, China has become the biggest player when it comes to financing infrastructure in Africa. It’s also not unusual to hear African leaders and even a few Western scholars arguing that the Chinese system of meritocratic autocracy is a better route to middle income status for countries such as Kenya.
To be sure, Kenya’s thriving multiparty democracy has more in common with the American model than the Chinese one. The country will select a new president on Aug. 9, and the faces of candidates loom on billboards over the new elevated expressway, where drivers who can afford to pay a toll can zip across town, looking down at the traffic crawling below. In grand mansions and tin-roofed shacks, Kenyans swap theories about why the retiring president, Uhuru Kenyatta, is backing an opposition leader, Raila Odinga, over his own deputy, William Ruto. Two rival political dynasties — the Kenyattas and the Odingas — are burying the hatchet. Most of my Kenyan friends are feeling more optimistic about their next election than my American friends are.
Raila Odinga at a campaign rally in Kirigiti Stadium, in Kiambu.Credit...Ed Ram/Getty Images
William Ruto campaigning in Eldoret.Credit...Baz Ratner/Reuters
And yet signs of disillusionment with the achievements of American-style democracy are everywhere.
“Initially, things were going on well,” my friend Joseph Mutua, who works at a hardware store, told me. But now, he said, “the leaders are just recycled.”
The sheer cost of running for office in Kenya fuels the perception that elections are a corruption machine. “The more they spend, the more that you know that there will be corruption” later so candidates can pay themselves back, Henry Nyutu, a real estate agent, told me.
The perception of rising corruption is a major reason that democracy has lost some of its luster, according to Afrobarometer, a nonprofit research network. The group interviewed 48,084 people in 34 African countries from 2019 to 2021 and found that many Africans are disillusioned with what democracy has produced, even as large majorities still support it over any other system. In a separate survey, the group found that the percentage of Kenyans who saw the United States as the best model for development declined from 49 percent to 42 percent between 2014-15 and 2019-21. That was still far higher than the 23 percent who preferred China as a model. But I sensed a shift.
Take the people I met at the garden party. For the most part, the leaders they looked up to the most were not paragons of Western-style democracy but rather leaders in the global south who have succeeded despite bucking Western criticism and advice.
Some pointed to the success of the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, who turned his genocide-stricken homeland into one of the most efficiently run countries in Africa. Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, who unveiled the biggest public health insurance program in the world, and Lee Kuan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore, who transformed a tiny outpost into one the wealthiest and least corrupt countries in Asia, both inspired respect.
Sure, the dinner party guests admitted, Mr. Kagame has been accused of killing critics and silencing dissent, but he’d also overseen a dramatic rise in the life expectancy of his people, from 31 years in 1995 to 69 in 2018. Partisan political competition in a country where half the population had tried to kill the other half would be courting disaster — until or unless such divisions healed, one guest declared. Modi, despite being democratically elected, was viewed more skeptically, since weaponizing the Hindu majority against the Muslim minority risks tearing India apart.
Kenyans are acutely aware of how elections in a multiethnic society can lead to violence when politicians stoke ethnic grievances to win. In 2007 and 2008, more than 1,000 people died and hundreds of thousands were displaced after the incumbent president, Mwai Kibaki, was hastily sworn into office despite being credibly accused of vote rigging by Mr. Odinga.
After that violence, surveys began to show anxiety about democracy, Murithi Mutiga, the Africa program director at the International Crisis Group, told me. “People prepared for elections like they are preparing for war,” he said, by stocking up on food and medicine. This year the atmosphere is far less tense, but low levels of voter registration among new voters suggest another challenge, he said: “disappointment at the choices people face.”
If the aim is a competent government that strikes a healthy balance between the masses and the elite, which has the ability to lift people out of abject poverty and correct itself when things get off track, the rewards of democracy don’t always seem worth the risks.
Kenyans I spoke to last month complained that Americans promote democracy selectively, when it serves their own interests, and that the concept is too narrowly defined. Indigenous models should have been considered self-government, too. Many African villages had been run by effective councils of elders before colonizers came. Now they’re stuck with rules that give an 18-year-old who has never raised a child or held down a job as much of a voice as a 65-year-old.
“The ideal of democracy is inspiring,” admitted James Mwangi, the executive director of Dalberg, an international consulting firm. “It created a space in which there was a flowering of thought, engagement and ideas. We are all products of that.”
But democracy required a shared public square, and that just doesn’t exist anymore, he argued. Parts of Africa with low levels of literacy and deep ethnic divisions have always struggled to take part in a single national political discourse. Social media has further fractured the conversation, creating spaces for sets of alternative facts for specific audiences, not just for Kenyans but Americans too.
“America is being reintroduced to what preliterate or highly ethnically divided societies that have tried to implement the American model have known all along,” he observed. “All politics are tribal and zero-sum. You have created tribes and the tribes aren’t talking to each other anymore.”
Maybe now that Americans are struggling with some of the same challenges as Kenyans, we’ll approach them with more humility. We might think twice before we divide the world into a democratic “us” and an undemocratic “them.” And those of us who still believe in democracy — as I most certainly do — ought to realize that we’ll win more supporters by modeling competence than by issuing mandates.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/03/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Queen Elizabeth's Warning 65 Years Ago Still Rings True
The death of Queen Elizabeth II on Thursday brought to an end a reign that reached back from our digital age, back across decades of stunning transformation, into a time that few today would even recognize.
It goes without saying that much changed during her 70 years on the throne. But, of course, some things stayed the same, including Elizabeth herself.
In 1957, five years after becoming queen, she reminded her subjects of what must always stay the same — and what would happen if it did not. In 2022, we would do well to look back and be reminded.
The queen’s Christmas address that year was televised for the first time. It was, as she noted, a technological advancement that could give her a more “personal and direct” connection with the British people. But how quickly advancement becomes upheaval! How easily change leads to confusion!
Through a medium that marked a new and shifting world, Elizabeth encouraged her listeners to build on an old and solid foundation.
“That it’s possible for some of you to see me today is just another example of the speed at which things are changing all around us,” she said.
“Because of these changes, I’m not surprised that many people feel lost and unable to decide what to hold on to and what to discard, how to take advantage of the new life without losing the best of the old.
“But it is not the new inventions which are the difficulty,” she said. “The trouble is caused by unthinking people who carelessly throw away ageless ideals as if they were old and outworn machinery.
“They would have religion thrown aside, morality in personal and public life made meaningless, honesty counted as foolishness and self-interest set up in place of self-restraint.”
(When was the last time you heard a leader promote self-restraint? Doubtless, Elizabeth’s words sounded quaint even just a few years later in the turbulent 60s.)
“At this critical moment in our history,” she continued, “we will certainly lose the trust and respect of the world if we just abandon those fundamental principles which guided the men and women who built the greatness of this country and commonwealth.”
This message has never lost its urgency in the 65 years since it was delivered.
You can watch it in its entirety here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBRP-o6Q85s
It is still the job of conservatives to heed Elizabeth’s warning to a disoriented world.
The queen had the conservative’s impulse to preserve what is good in our time-honored traditions. Indeed, as a modern-day monarch she couldn’t help but bring the past into the 20th and 21st centuries.
She was not, of course, a political figure. She did not advocate for candidates or policies. As she put it in the same broadcast, “I do not give you laws or administer justice.”
No, she had a different authority.
She was the embodiment of what she pointed to on Christmas Day 1957 — the cultural foundation of virtue and faith laid down by our ancestors. She was a symbol of continuity as society was overhauled around us and every possible break seemed to be made with the past.
Elizabeth was a living relic, just as the monarchy itself is; I do not say it with a sneer.
Alexis de Tocqueville said democracy “gives men a sort of instinctive distaste for what is ancient.” He was right.
Americans don’t generally go in for the funny outfits and mummery of the monarchy. But if you are a conservative, you must recognize your mission in the person of Elizabeth and now King Charles III.
We must preserve the meanings and memories of the past — Christianity foremost among them. That is the solid foundation in a world of sinking sand.
God save the king, indeed.
https://www.westernjournal.com/queen-el ... ings-true/
With Queen Gone, Former Colonies Find a Moment to Rethink Lasting Ties
In Commonwealth nations with British colonial histories, Queen Elizabeth’s death is rekindling discussions about a more independent future.
Queen Elizabeth II in Tuvalu during a 1982 tour of the South Pacific, which also included a stop in the Solomon Islands.Credit...Tim Graham Photo Library via Getty Images
HONIARA, Solomon Islands — Millicent Barty has spent years trying to decolonize her country, recording oral histories across the Solomon Islands and promoting Melanesian culture. Her goal: to prioritize local knowledge, not just what arrived with the British Empire.
But on Friday morning, when asked about the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Ms. Barty sighed and frowned. Her eyes seemed to hold a cold spring of complicated emotion as she recalled meeting the queen in 2018 with a Commonwealth young leaders’ program.
“I love Her Majesty,” she said, sipping coffee on the Solomon island of Guadalcanal in the Pacific, 9,300 miles from Buckingham Palace. “It’s really sad.”
Reconciling a seemingly benevolent queen with the often-cruel legacy of the British Empire is the conundrum at the heart of Britain’s post-imperial influence. The British royal family reigned over more territories and people than any other monarchy in history, and among the countries that have never quite let go of the crown, Queen Elizabeth’s death accelerates a push to address the past more fully and strip away the vestiges of colonialism.
“Does the monarchy die with the queen?” said Michele Lemonius, who grew up in Jamaica and recently completed a Ph.D in Canada with a focus on youth violence in former slave colonies. “It’s time for dialogue. It’s time for a conversation.”
Many former British colonies remain bound together in the Commonwealth, a voluntary association of 56 countries. The vast majority of them are connected by their shared histories, with similar legal and political systems, and the organization promotes exchanges in fields like sports, culture and education. Especially for smaller and newer members, including a few African countries that were not British colonies and joined more recently, the group can confer prestige, and while the Commonwealth has no formal trade agreement, its members conduct trade with one another at higher-than-usual rates.
Most of the Commonwealth members are independent republics, with no formal ties to the British royal family. But 14 are constitutional monarchies that have retained the British sovereign as their head of state, a mostly symbolic role.
In these countries, the monarch is represented by a governor-general who has ceremonial duties like swearing in new members of Parliament, though there have been moments when their actions proved contentious — a governor-general dismissed Australia’s prime minister, Gough Whitlam, in 1975, to end a political conflict. And though Prince Charles has now been proclaimed the new king for all these “realm and territories,” in many of them, the queen’s death has been greeted with bolder calls for full independence.
Queen Elizabeth with India’s first president, Rajendra Prasad, during her visit in 1961.Credit...Popperfoto via Getty Images
On Saturday, the prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda announced plans to hold a referendum on becoming a republic within three years. In Australia, the Bahamas, Belize, Canada and Jamaica, debates that have simmered for years about their democracies’ ties to a distant kingdom have started to heat up again. From the Caribbean to the Pacific, people are asking: Why do we swear allegiance to a monarch in London?
Historians of colonization describe it as an overdue reckoning after the seven-decade reign of a queen who was as diminutive in stature as she was commanding in her use of duty and smiles to soften the image of an empire that often committed acts of violence as it declined.
“The queen, in a way, allowed the whole jigsaw puzzle to hang together so long as she was there,” said Mark McKenna, a historian at the University of Sydney. “But I’m not sure it’ll continue to hang on.”
Her son King Charles III, at 73, has little chance of matching the queen’s power as a shaper of global opinion — a task she took on at a younger age, in a different time.
Some Key Moments in Queen Elizabeth’s Reign
Card 1 of 9
Becoming queen. Following the death of King George VI, Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary ascended to the throne on Feb. 6, 1952, at age 25. The coronation of the newly minted Queen Elizabeth II took place on June 2 the following year.
A historic visit. On May 18, 1965, Elizabeth arrived in Bonn on the first state visit by a British monarch to Germany in more than 50 years. The trip formally sealed the reconciliation between the two nations following the world wars.
First grandchild. In 1977, the queen stepped into the role of grandmother for the first time, after Princess Anne gave birth to a son, Peter. Elizabeth’s four children have given her a total of eight grandchildren, who have been followed by several great-grandchildren.
Princess Diana’s death. In a rare televised broadcast ahead of Diana’s funeral in 1997, Queen Elizabeth remembered the Princess of Wales, who died in a car crash in Paris at age 36, as “an exceptional and gifted human being.”
Golden jubilee. In 2002, celebrations to mark Elizabeth II's 50 years as queen culminated in a star-studded concert at Buckingham Palace in the presence of 12,000 cheering guests, with an estimated one million more watching on giant screens set up around London.
A trip to Ireland. In May 2011, the queen visited the Irish Republic, whose troubled relationship with the British monarchy spanned centuries. The trip, infused with powerful symbols of reconciliation, is considered one of the most politically freighted trips of Elizabeth’s reign.
Breaking a record. As of 5:30 p.m. British time on Sept. 9, 2015, Elizabeth II became Britain’s longest-reigning monarch, surpassing Queen Victoria, her great-great-grandmother. Elizabeth was 89 at the time, and had ruled for 23,226 days, 16 hours and about 30 minutes.
Marking 70 years of marriage. On Nov. 20, 2017, the queen and Prince Philip celebrated their 70th anniversary, becoming the longest-married couple in royal history. The two wed in 1947, as the country and the world was still reeling from the atrocities of World War II.
Losing her spouse. In 2021, Queen Elizabeth II bade farewell to Prince Philip, who died on April 9. An image of the queen grieving alone at the funeral amid coronavirus restrictions struck a chord with viewers at home following the event.
Her reign began overseas when her father died in 1952. She was 25, traveling in Kenya, and she made it her mission to ease the transition away from colonial rule. On Christmas Day in 1953, in a speech from Auckland, New Zealand, she emphasized that her idea of a Commonwealth bore “no resemblance to empires of the past.”
“It is an entirely new conception — built on the higher qualities of the spirit of man: friendship, loyalty and the desire for freedom and peace,” she said.
Queen Elizabeth went on to visit nearly 120 countries. She met more leaders than any pope and often embarked on 40,000-mile jaunts around the world, all while colony after colony bid adieu to old Brittania after World War II. India and Pakistan became independent nations in 1947 and declared themselves republics in the 1950s. Nigeria did the same the following decade. Sri Lanka became a republic in 1972, while the most recent country to cut ties with the crown was Barbados, just last year.
Prince Charles at a ceremony in November marking the end of the queen’s status as Barbados’s head of state.Credit...Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
“The British monarchy has shown a capacity to evolve over the ages, from colonial to a post-colonial monarchy, and the queen undertook that re-creation quite well,” said Robert Aldrich, a historian at the University of Sydney.
Unlike many of England’s political figures, she was quick to accept former colonies’ independence. She often signaled her approval with awards and a personal touch.
After the Solomon Islands pursued its independence in the 1970s, she knighted the country’s first prime minister, Peter Kenilorea. His son, Peter Kenilorea Jr., a current member of Parliament, was 10 at the time.
“I remember how nervous I was — and how her smile put me at ease,” he said.
Even in some countries with deep colonial wounds, the queen often seemed to benefit from a belief that she could be separated from Britain’s at times callous rule. Queen Elizabeth was assigned little blame when the British authorities in Kenya tortured suspected Mau Mau rebels in the 1950s, or after British forces fighting anticolonial unrest used similar tactics against civilians in Cyprus in 1955 and Aden, Yemen, in 1963.
“She was seen merely as a female monarch,” said Sucheta Mahajan, a historian in India, where the queen was also welcomed after decades of exploitive British rule. “Nothing more, nothing less.”
Decades later, Queen Elizabeth was still seen by many as a unifying symbol of august values. Even in countries where the push for a republic has grown, people found themselves getting emotional about the queen.
“She is not only a constitutional monarch for the country I was born in,” said Sarah Kirby, 53, a public relations executive in the Bahamas. “She was also, for me, just an amazing representation of what a woman can do and how to serve your country with honor and to be the backbone of the country as well.”
But as the queen aged and receded from view, and as the world tackled a broader examination of the sins of colonialization, it became harder to keep the monarchy at a benign distance from racism and the acts of empire. In former colonies worldwide, demands for a full accounting of the pain, suffering and plundered riches that helped contribute to the royal family’s enormous wealth have been increasing.
How the World Reacted to the Queen’s Death
Queen Elizabeth II’s death elicited an array of reactions around the globe, from heartfelt tributes to anti-monarchist sentiment.
In Britain: As Britons come to terms with the loss of the woman who embodied the country for 70 years, many are unsure of their nation’s identity and role in the world.
In the U.S.: In few places outside Britain was the outpouring of grief so striking as in the faraway former British colony, which she never ruled and rarely visited.
In Africa: Though the queen was revered by many on the continent, her death reignited conversations about the brutality the monarchy meted out there.
In Australia: The queen’s death renewed questions about the monarchy’s role in Commonwealth countries. In Melbourne, reactions ranged from grief to apathy.
At the ceremony in November marking the end of the queen’s status as Barbados’s head of state, Prince Charles acknowledged “the appalling atrocity of slavery” in the former British colony.
Onlookers waiting this past spring for the arrival of Prince William and his wife, Kate, in Jamaica.Credit...Chris Jackson/Chris Jackson Collection, via Getty Images
In Jamaica in March, Prince William and his wife, Kate, were met with protests that demanded an apology and reparations. And in August, President Nana Akufo-Addo of Ghana — which gained its independence from Britain in 1957 — urged European nations to pay reparations to Africa for a slave trade that stifled the continent’s “economic, cultural and psychological progress.”
Now that the queen is gone, even her royal accouterments face a more critical gaze. Twitter users have begun loudly calling for the Great Star of Africa — the largest uncut diamond in the world, which is part of the Sovereign’s Scepter — to be returned to South Africa.
In India, newspapers have also asked about the future of the Kohinoor diamond, which sits in the queen’s crown and is said to have been taken from India.
And yet, trying to decolonize — to free a country from the dominating influence of a colonizing power — is an empire of work in its own right. The queen gazes from the currency of many countries, and her name graces hospitals and roads. Institutions like the Scouts have created generations who swore allegiance to the queen, and educational systems in many countries still prioritize the British colonial model.
“Post-colonial does not mean decolonized,” said Dr. Lemonius, who runs community projects in Jamaica, including one focused on sports for young girls. “The eye still looks to the monarchy, toward the master. Once you shift your gaze away from that long enough, you have the time to start looking at yourself and moving toward reconstruction.”
Wreaths placed around the statue of Queen Elizabeth II at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, on Saturday.Credit...Tracey Nearmy/Getty Images
Some Commonwealth countries find it hard to get worked up either way about the monarchy. Only a slight majority of Australians favor making their country a republic, and in a poll of New Zealanders last year, just a third expressed that preference.
“It’s simply not an important part of our life,” said Jock Phillips, a New Zealand historian.
Yet, inevitably, royal succession is a turning point, and not just for the new sovereign.
Ms. Barty, 31, who studied in England and at Columbia University, said the queen’s former realms would keep evolving. Western and Indigenous ways of thinking, she said, can complement each other — the kauri tree Queen Elizabeth planted when she visited the Solomon Islands for the first time nearly 50 years ago has grown into a tower of shade.
“To get to the thought where I’m decolonizing the system, I had to come through the Western system,” Ms. Barty said. “It’s about reconciling.”
And perhaps, she added, the process begins with what the queen tried to embody.
“For me personally, what she upholds — and what I feel needs to be a lasting legacy that we continue to instill in our youth — is service,” Ms. Barty said. “She fulfilled her services; she lived a life of duty, all the way through to the day she died.”
Reporting was contributed by Suhasini Raj from New Delhi; Skandha Gunasekara from Colombo, Sri Lanka; Victoria Kim from Seoul; Abdi Latif Dahir from Nairobi, Kenya; Yan Zhuang and Natasha Frost from Melbourne, Australia; Jasper Williams-Ward from New Providence, the Bahamas; and Tamica Garnett from Georgetown, Guyana.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/11/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Queen Elizabeth II in Tuvalu during a 1982 tour of the South Pacific, which also included a stop in the Solomon Islands.Credit...Tim Graham Photo Library via Getty Images
HONIARA, Solomon Islands — Millicent Barty has spent years trying to decolonize her country, recording oral histories across the Solomon Islands and promoting Melanesian culture. Her goal: to prioritize local knowledge, not just what arrived with the British Empire.
But on Friday morning, when asked about the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Ms. Barty sighed and frowned. Her eyes seemed to hold a cold spring of complicated emotion as she recalled meeting the queen in 2018 with a Commonwealth young leaders’ program.
“I love Her Majesty,” she said, sipping coffee on the Solomon island of Guadalcanal in the Pacific, 9,300 miles from Buckingham Palace. “It’s really sad.”
Reconciling a seemingly benevolent queen with the often-cruel legacy of the British Empire is the conundrum at the heart of Britain’s post-imperial influence. The British royal family reigned over more territories and people than any other monarchy in history, and among the countries that have never quite let go of the crown, Queen Elizabeth’s death accelerates a push to address the past more fully and strip away the vestiges of colonialism.
“Does the monarchy die with the queen?” said Michele Lemonius, who grew up in Jamaica and recently completed a Ph.D in Canada with a focus on youth violence in former slave colonies. “It’s time for dialogue. It’s time for a conversation.”
Many former British colonies remain bound together in the Commonwealth, a voluntary association of 56 countries. The vast majority of them are connected by their shared histories, with similar legal and political systems, and the organization promotes exchanges in fields like sports, culture and education. Especially for smaller and newer members, including a few African countries that were not British colonies and joined more recently, the group can confer prestige, and while the Commonwealth has no formal trade agreement, its members conduct trade with one another at higher-than-usual rates.
Most of the Commonwealth members are independent republics, with no formal ties to the British royal family. But 14 are constitutional monarchies that have retained the British sovereign as their head of state, a mostly symbolic role.
In these countries, the monarch is represented by a governor-general who has ceremonial duties like swearing in new members of Parliament, though there have been moments when their actions proved contentious — a governor-general dismissed Australia’s prime minister, Gough Whitlam, in 1975, to end a political conflict. And though Prince Charles has now been proclaimed the new king for all these “realm and territories,” in many of them, the queen’s death has been greeted with bolder calls for full independence.
Queen Elizabeth with India’s first president, Rajendra Prasad, during her visit in 1961.Credit...Popperfoto via Getty Images
On Saturday, the prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda announced plans to hold a referendum on becoming a republic within three years. In Australia, the Bahamas, Belize, Canada and Jamaica, debates that have simmered for years about their democracies’ ties to a distant kingdom have started to heat up again. From the Caribbean to the Pacific, people are asking: Why do we swear allegiance to a monarch in London?
Historians of colonization describe it as an overdue reckoning after the seven-decade reign of a queen who was as diminutive in stature as she was commanding in her use of duty and smiles to soften the image of an empire that often committed acts of violence as it declined.
“The queen, in a way, allowed the whole jigsaw puzzle to hang together so long as she was there,” said Mark McKenna, a historian at the University of Sydney. “But I’m not sure it’ll continue to hang on.”
Her son King Charles III, at 73, has little chance of matching the queen’s power as a shaper of global opinion — a task she took on at a younger age, in a different time.
Some Key Moments in Queen Elizabeth’s Reign
Card 1 of 9
Becoming queen. Following the death of King George VI, Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary ascended to the throne on Feb. 6, 1952, at age 25. The coronation of the newly minted Queen Elizabeth II took place on June 2 the following year.
A historic visit. On May 18, 1965, Elizabeth arrived in Bonn on the first state visit by a British monarch to Germany in more than 50 years. The trip formally sealed the reconciliation between the two nations following the world wars.
First grandchild. In 1977, the queen stepped into the role of grandmother for the first time, after Princess Anne gave birth to a son, Peter. Elizabeth’s four children have given her a total of eight grandchildren, who have been followed by several great-grandchildren.
Princess Diana’s death. In a rare televised broadcast ahead of Diana’s funeral in 1997, Queen Elizabeth remembered the Princess of Wales, who died in a car crash in Paris at age 36, as “an exceptional and gifted human being.”
Golden jubilee. In 2002, celebrations to mark Elizabeth II's 50 years as queen culminated in a star-studded concert at Buckingham Palace in the presence of 12,000 cheering guests, with an estimated one million more watching on giant screens set up around London.
A trip to Ireland. In May 2011, the queen visited the Irish Republic, whose troubled relationship with the British monarchy spanned centuries. The trip, infused with powerful symbols of reconciliation, is considered one of the most politically freighted trips of Elizabeth’s reign.
Breaking a record. As of 5:30 p.m. British time on Sept. 9, 2015, Elizabeth II became Britain’s longest-reigning monarch, surpassing Queen Victoria, her great-great-grandmother. Elizabeth was 89 at the time, and had ruled for 23,226 days, 16 hours and about 30 minutes.
Marking 70 years of marriage. On Nov. 20, 2017, the queen and Prince Philip celebrated their 70th anniversary, becoming the longest-married couple in royal history. The two wed in 1947, as the country and the world was still reeling from the atrocities of World War II.
Losing her spouse. In 2021, Queen Elizabeth II bade farewell to Prince Philip, who died on April 9. An image of the queen grieving alone at the funeral amid coronavirus restrictions struck a chord with viewers at home following the event.
Her reign began overseas when her father died in 1952. She was 25, traveling in Kenya, and she made it her mission to ease the transition away from colonial rule. On Christmas Day in 1953, in a speech from Auckland, New Zealand, she emphasized that her idea of a Commonwealth bore “no resemblance to empires of the past.”
“It is an entirely new conception — built on the higher qualities of the spirit of man: friendship, loyalty and the desire for freedom and peace,” she said.
Queen Elizabeth went on to visit nearly 120 countries. She met more leaders than any pope and often embarked on 40,000-mile jaunts around the world, all while colony after colony bid adieu to old Brittania after World War II. India and Pakistan became independent nations in 1947 and declared themselves republics in the 1950s. Nigeria did the same the following decade. Sri Lanka became a republic in 1972, while the most recent country to cut ties with the crown was Barbados, just last year.
Prince Charles at a ceremony in November marking the end of the queen’s status as Barbados’s head of state.Credit...Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
“The British monarchy has shown a capacity to evolve over the ages, from colonial to a post-colonial monarchy, and the queen undertook that re-creation quite well,” said Robert Aldrich, a historian at the University of Sydney.
Unlike many of England’s political figures, she was quick to accept former colonies’ independence. She often signaled her approval with awards and a personal touch.
After the Solomon Islands pursued its independence in the 1970s, she knighted the country’s first prime minister, Peter Kenilorea. His son, Peter Kenilorea Jr., a current member of Parliament, was 10 at the time.
“I remember how nervous I was — and how her smile put me at ease,” he said.
Even in some countries with deep colonial wounds, the queen often seemed to benefit from a belief that she could be separated from Britain’s at times callous rule. Queen Elizabeth was assigned little blame when the British authorities in Kenya tortured suspected Mau Mau rebels in the 1950s, or after British forces fighting anticolonial unrest used similar tactics against civilians in Cyprus in 1955 and Aden, Yemen, in 1963.
“She was seen merely as a female monarch,” said Sucheta Mahajan, a historian in India, where the queen was also welcomed after decades of exploitive British rule. “Nothing more, nothing less.”
Decades later, Queen Elizabeth was still seen by many as a unifying symbol of august values. Even in countries where the push for a republic has grown, people found themselves getting emotional about the queen.
“She is not only a constitutional monarch for the country I was born in,” said Sarah Kirby, 53, a public relations executive in the Bahamas. “She was also, for me, just an amazing representation of what a woman can do and how to serve your country with honor and to be the backbone of the country as well.”
But as the queen aged and receded from view, and as the world tackled a broader examination of the sins of colonialization, it became harder to keep the monarchy at a benign distance from racism and the acts of empire. In former colonies worldwide, demands for a full accounting of the pain, suffering and plundered riches that helped contribute to the royal family’s enormous wealth have been increasing.
How the World Reacted to the Queen’s Death
Queen Elizabeth II’s death elicited an array of reactions around the globe, from heartfelt tributes to anti-monarchist sentiment.
In Britain: As Britons come to terms with the loss of the woman who embodied the country for 70 years, many are unsure of their nation’s identity and role in the world.
In the U.S.: In few places outside Britain was the outpouring of grief so striking as in the faraway former British colony, which she never ruled and rarely visited.
In Africa: Though the queen was revered by many on the continent, her death reignited conversations about the brutality the monarchy meted out there.
In Australia: The queen’s death renewed questions about the monarchy’s role in Commonwealth countries. In Melbourne, reactions ranged from grief to apathy.
At the ceremony in November marking the end of the queen’s status as Barbados’s head of state, Prince Charles acknowledged “the appalling atrocity of slavery” in the former British colony.
Onlookers waiting this past spring for the arrival of Prince William and his wife, Kate, in Jamaica.Credit...Chris Jackson/Chris Jackson Collection, via Getty Images
In Jamaica in March, Prince William and his wife, Kate, were met with protests that demanded an apology and reparations. And in August, President Nana Akufo-Addo of Ghana — which gained its independence from Britain in 1957 — urged European nations to pay reparations to Africa for a slave trade that stifled the continent’s “economic, cultural and psychological progress.”
Now that the queen is gone, even her royal accouterments face a more critical gaze. Twitter users have begun loudly calling for the Great Star of Africa — the largest uncut diamond in the world, which is part of the Sovereign’s Scepter — to be returned to South Africa.
In India, newspapers have also asked about the future of the Kohinoor diamond, which sits in the queen’s crown and is said to have been taken from India.
And yet, trying to decolonize — to free a country from the dominating influence of a colonizing power — is an empire of work in its own right. The queen gazes from the currency of many countries, and her name graces hospitals and roads. Institutions like the Scouts have created generations who swore allegiance to the queen, and educational systems in many countries still prioritize the British colonial model.
“Post-colonial does not mean decolonized,” said Dr. Lemonius, who runs community projects in Jamaica, including one focused on sports for young girls. “The eye still looks to the monarchy, toward the master. Once you shift your gaze away from that long enough, you have the time to start looking at yourself and moving toward reconstruction.”
Wreaths placed around the statue of Queen Elizabeth II at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, on Saturday.Credit...Tracey Nearmy/Getty Images
Some Commonwealth countries find it hard to get worked up either way about the monarchy. Only a slight majority of Australians favor making their country a republic, and in a poll of New Zealanders last year, just a third expressed that preference.
“It’s simply not an important part of our life,” said Jock Phillips, a New Zealand historian.
Yet, inevitably, royal succession is a turning point, and not just for the new sovereign.
Ms. Barty, 31, who studied in England and at Columbia University, said the queen’s former realms would keep evolving. Western and Indigenous ways of thinking, she said, can complement each other — the kauri tree Queen Elizabeth planted when she visited the Solomon Islands for the first time nearly 50 years ago has grown into a tower of shade.
“To get to the thought where I’m decolonizing the system, I had to come through the Western system,” Ms. Barty said. “It’s about reconciling.”
And perhaps, she added, the process begins with what the queen tried to embody.
“For me personally, what she upholds — and what I feel needs to be a lasting legacy that we continue to instill in our youth — is service,” Ms. Barty said. “She fulfilled her services; she lived a life of duty, all the way through to the day she died.”
Reporting was contributed by Suhasini Raj from New Delhi; Skandha Gunasekara from Colombo, Sri Lanka; Victoria Kim from Seoul; Abdi Latif Dahir from Nairobi, Kenya; Yan Zhuang and Natasha Frost from Melbourne, Australia; Jasper Williams-Ward from New Providence, the Bahamas; and Tamica Garnett from Georgetown, Guyana.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/11/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Why legitimacy is the key to rulers
The Quality That Sustained Queen Elizabeth Is Hobbling Putin
Why is Vladimir Putin failing to win his war in Ukraine? The answers multiply: hubris, corruption and incompetence on the Russian side; military valor, canny leadership and American munitions on the Ukrainian side.
But the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the wave of antique pageantry help illuminate one of the Russian president’s important weaknesses. He has been hobbled in his fight because his regime lacks the mystical quality we call legitimacy.
Legitimacy is not the same thing as power. It’s what enables power to be exercised effectively amid trials and transitions, setbacks and successions. It’s what grounds political authority even when that authority isn’t delivering prosperity and peace. It’s what rulers reach for when they call their societies to sacrifice.
In most of the world today there are only two solid foundations for legitimacy: the demos and the nation, democracy and national self-determination. The legitimacy that once attached to imperial rule has washed away, and likewise, outside of the Middle East and a few other places here and there, the legitimacy of hereditary monarchy. Alternative claims to legitimacy exist — the ideological authority invoked by the Beijing Politburo, the religious authority invoked by the mullahs in Tehran — but those claimants rely more on repression for power and survival.
The Elizabethan pageantry emphasizes this global reality because the House of Windsor is an exception that proves the rule. Like almost no other institution in the West outside the Vatican, the British monarchy has retained a pre-modern, pre-democratic legitimacy; in the outpouring of secular grief there was still a sense that the queen was somehow God-ordained to sit on the throne. But the royal family has kept that legitimacy by giving up all but a fraction of its personal power; it has legitimacy and little else.
In Moscow you have the contrast: personal political power, far greater than the power of King Charles III, that lacks deep legitimating structures. Putin is a pseudo-czar but not a real one, with no divine anointing or ancient oath. He claims some Russian-nationalist legitimacy, but his system is actually a polyglot imperium. He claims some democratic legitimacy by holding regular elections, but their results are neither fair nor free.
So all he has to really justify his power is success. Which he has delivered for most of his career — a Russia richer and more stable than in the years before he took the presidency, and a series of successful foreign policy gambits.
But now comes the test, the gambit that hasn’t delivered, the specter of defeat, and what does he have to fall back upon? Not the authority of a czar: He cannot mobilize the Russian people as feudal subjects, calling on them to treat imperial Russia’s grand projects as their own. Not the authority of a national leader in a struggle for self-determination: He is the invader; it’s Ukraine that’s fighting for a nation. And not the authority of a democratic leader: He cannot have his war policy vindicated in an election, as Abraham Lincoln did in 1864, because any election would be a masquerade.
In recent years, as authoritarian leaders have gained ground around the world and democracy has decayed, there’s been a fear that these figures have a stronger hand to play than the dictators of the past, because their authoritarianism is gentler and subtler, and also wrapped in the legitimating structures of elections.
But Putin’s predicament suggests that this subtler authoritarianism is weaker than its predecessors in a crisis. The 20th century’s totalitarian regimes often co-opted the rhetoric of democracy and nationalism, but at bottom they made their own unique (and dreadful) claims to legitimacy — the people’s republic, the rule of the master race. Putin, lacking any such foundation, cannot just be a proud imperialist or autocrat or revolutionary: He has to legitimize his ambitions in the frameworks of his Western enemies, with absurd results (Ukraine isn’t a real nation, Russia is liberating Ukraine from Nazis, the Russians are fighting for human rights).
There are parallels to the internal politics of the United States, where movements tempted toward authoritarianism nevertheless legitimate themselves in the familiar language of democracy. Thus Donald Trump has to claim that the will of the people was thwarted in 2020, not that he had a right to autocratic rule. Likewise, the push from the left to cancel or de-platform, to steer public opinion via censorship, tends to be justified in the name of “safeguarding democracy.”
This pattern doesn’t mean there aren’t authoritarian perils in our politics, anymore than Putin’s legitimacy problems make his invasion any less destructive. But it helps to see our crises clearly if you recognize that they’re still happening inside the lines of late modernity — that as Elizabeth II is laid to rest, nothing like her radically un-democratic legitimacy seems ready for rebirth.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/17/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Why is Vladimir Putin failing to win his war in Ukraine? The answers multiply: hubris, corruption and incompetence on the Russian side; military valor, canny leadership and American munitions on the Ukrainian side.
But the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the wave of antique pageantry help illuminate one of the Russian president’s important weaknesses. He has been hobbled in his fight because his regime lacks the mystical quality we call legitimacy.
Legitimacy is not the same thing as power. It’s what enables power to be exercised effectively amid trials and transitions, setbacks and successions. It’s what grounds political authority even when that authority isn’t delivering prosperity and peace. It’s what rulers reach for when they call their societies to sacrifice.
In most of the world today there are only two solid foundations for legitimacy: the demos and the nation, democracy and national self-determination. The legitimacy that once attached to imperial rule has washed away, and likewise, outside of the Middle East and a few other places here and there, the legitimacy of hereditary monarchy. Alternative claims to legitimacy exist — the ideological authority invoked by the Beijing Politburo, the religious authority invoked by the mullahs in Tehran — but those claimants rely more on repression for power and survival.
The Elizabethan pageantry emphasizes this global reality because the House of Windsor is an exception that proves the rule. Like almost no other institution in the West outside the Vatican, the British monarchy has retained a pre-modern, pre-democratic legitimacy; in the outpouring of secular grief there was still a sense that the queen was somehow God-ordained to sit on the throne. But the royal family has kept that legitimacy by giving up all but a fraction of its personal power; it has legitimacy and little else.
In Moscow you have the contrast: personal political power, far greater than the power of King Charles III, that lacks deep legitimating structures. Putin is a pseudo-czar but not a real one, with no divine anointing or ancient oath. He claims some Russian-nationalist legitimacy, but his system is actually a polyglot imperium. He claims some democratic legitimacy by holding regular elections, but their results are neither fair nor free.
So all he has to really justify his power is success. Which he has delivered for most of his career — a Russia richer and more stable than in the years before he took the presidency, and a series of successful foreign policy gambits.
But now comes the test, the gambit that hasn’t delivered, the specter of defeat, and what does he have to fall back upon? Not the authority of a czar: He cannot mobilize the Russian people as feudal subjects, calling on them to treat imperial Russia’s grand projects as their own. Not the authority of a national leader in a struggle for self-determination: He is the invader; it’s Ukraine that’s fighting for a nation. And not the authority of a democratic leader: He cannot have his war policy vindicated in an election, as Abraham Lincoln did in 1864, because any election would be a masquerade.
In recent years, as authoritarian leaders have gained ground around the world and democracy has decayed, there’s been a fear that these figures have a stronger hand to play than the dictators of the past, because their authoritarianism is gentler and subtler, and also wrapped in the legitimating structures of elections.
But Putin’s predicament suggests that this subtler authoritarianism is weaker than its predecessors in a crisis. The 20th century’s totalitarian regimes often co-opted the rhetoric of democracy and nationalism, but at bottom they made their own unique (and dreadful) claims to legitimacy — the people’s republic, the rule of the master race. Putin, lacking any such foundation, cannot just be a proud imperialist or autocrat or revolutionary: He has to legitimize his ambitions in the frameworks of his Western enemies, with absurd results (Ukraine isn’t a real nation, Russia is liberating Ukraine from Nazis, the Russians are fighting for human rights).
There are parallels to the internal politics of the United States, where movements tempted toward authoritarianism nevertheless legitimate themselves in the familiar language of democracy. Thus Donald Trump has to claim that the will of the people was thwarted in 2020, not that he had a right to autocratic rule. Likewise, the push from the left to cancel or de-platform, to steer public opinion via censorship, tends to be justified in the name of “safeguarding democracy.”
This pattern doesn’t mean there aren’t authoritarian perils in our politics, anymore than Putin’s legitimacy problems make his invasion any less destructive. But it helps to see our crises clearly if you recognize that they’re still happening inside the lines of late modernity — that as Elizabeth II is laid to rest, nothing like her radically un-democratic legitimacy seems ready for rebirth.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/17/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Is Liberal Democracy Dying?
Voters around the world are electing leaders with authoritarian tendencies.
Last weekend, voters in Italy handed the reins of government to a coalition led by a party directly descended from Benito Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship, delivering one of the biggest victories to the far right in Europe since World War II. “Today is a sad day for Italy,” said the leader of Italy’s center-left Democratic Party, who during the campaign had cast the contest as nothing less than a fight to save the country’s democracy.
If such language sounds familiar to American ears, it’s because countries around the world, including the United States, are confronting what experts say is a worldwide wave of democratic backsliding. According to data from V-Dem, a monitoring institute based in Sweden — where, as it happens, a far-right party with roots in neo-Nazism made a strong electoral showing two weeks ago — more democracies were deteriorating, and even slipping into autocracy, in 2021 than at any point in the past 50 years.
What explains the global resurgence of authoritarian politics, and what does it portend for the future of democracy? Here’s what people are saying.
Liberal democracy, in retreat
Democracy’s spread over the past few centuries has rarely been linear, instead ebbing and flowing with the competing forces of autocracy. Some political scientists divide democracy’s progression into three waves: the first beginning in the 19th century; the second beginning in the aftermath of World War II; and the third beginning in the mid-1970s, which crested with 42 liberal democracies, a record high, in 2012. Today, only 34 liberal democracies exist, down to the same number as in 1995, according to V-Dem. (The share of the world population living in liberal democracies also fell in the last decade, to 13 percent from 18 percent.)
As The Times’s Amanda Taub has explained, this recent democratic decline — which some scholars say constitutes “a third wave of autocratization,” the first having begun in the 1920s and the second in the 1960s — has been primarily driven not by coups or revolutions, but by the actions of legitimately elected officials: “Once in power, unscrupulous leaders can sometimes manipulate the political environment to their own benefit, making it more likely that they will be victorious in future contests. By winning those elections, they gain the stamp of democratic legitimacy — even for actions that ultimately undermine democratic norms.”
In Europe, the most prominent practitioner of this kind of “soft autocracy” by election is Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary. After being voted into power in 2010, he has worked to build what he calls an “illiberal democracy” by eroding civil liberties and media freedom, subjugating the judiciary, and restructuring his country’s electoral system. In the process, he has become a model to the far right around the world, including in the United States.
To varying degrees, the decline of liberal democratic norms and institutions is visible in almost every region:
In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, elected in 2014, has presided over a sharp rise in Hindu nationalism — with violent, frequently deadly consequences for the country’s Muslim minority — and a stifled speech environment.
In the Philippines, voters recently elected the son of a former dictator to succeed Rodrigo Duterte, who during his six years as president cracked down on the news media and launched a war on drugs that led to thousands of killings.
In El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele, elected in 2019, has deployed the army in Congress to pressure legislators, defied the Supreme Court’s attempts to restrain his use of military force and jailed thousands with little due process under a state of emergency over gang violence.
And then, of course, there is the United States: Political scientists have warned that, in a trend that predated Donald Trump but accelerated under his presidency, the Republican Party’s commitment to liberal democratic norms has diminished, its messaging now resembling that of authoritarian parties like Orban’s.
Unlike ruling parties in many other backsliding democracies, though, the Republican Party has been able to win control of government without commanding popular majorities. As The Times’s David Leonhardt wrote recently, because of a confluence of geographic sorting trends and the small-state bias of Congress and the Electoral College, every branch of American government now favors one party (Republican) over another (Democratic) in a way they did not for much of the country’s history.
“We are far and away the most countermajoritarian democracy in the world,” Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard, told Leonhardt.
What drives democracies toward autocracy?
No two democracies backslide for identical reasons, but political scientists and others have posited some common themes. One is backlash to threats, real or perceived, to the majority’s sense of national identity.
“First, society polarizes, often over a backlash to social change, to demographic change, to strengthening political power by racial, ethnic or religious minorities, and generally amid rising social distrust,” The Times’s Max Fisher, who has reported widely on global democratic decline, recently explained. “This leads to a bottom-up desire for populist outsiders who will promise to confront the supposed threat within, which means suppressing the other side of that social or partisan or racial divide, asserting a vision of democracy that grants special status for ‘my’ side, and smashing the democratic institutions or norms that prevent that side from asserting what is perceived to be its rightful dominance.”
How does class come into the picture? Some scholars have theorized a link between democratic backsliding and the Great Recession, if not global free-market capitalism itself. In India, for example, Debasish Roy Chowdhury argued last month in The Times that “neoliberal policies have compounded inequality, with the state retreating from fundamental responsibilities such as health and education.” He continued: “This breeds a life of indignity and powerlessness for millions who take refuge in group identity, gravitate toward strong leaders promising to defend them against other groups and easily become hooked on the mass opioid of religious hatred now being used to redefine secular India as a Hindu state.”
Taking another materialist view, Richard Pildes, a constitutional law scholar at New York University School of Law, attributes the rise of illiberal forces to the dispersal of political power among a growing number of political parties, which he argues limits the ability of democratic governments to function effectively. “When democratic governments seem incapable of delivering on their promises, this failure can lead to alienation, resignation, distrust and withdrawal among many citizens,” he wrote in The Times last year. “It can also trigger demands for authoritarian leaders who promise to cut through messy politics. At an even greater extreme, it can lead people to question democracy itself and become open to anti-democratic systems of government.”
Can democratic backsliding be stopped?
History has shown that the arc of human civilization does not inevitably bend toward liberal democracy. But its tendency toward autocracy is also highly contingent. In The Washington Post, Miguel Angel Lara Otaola noted this year that since 2000, even as democratic backsliding became the predominant global trend, nine countries managed to transition back to democracy after a period of authoritarianism. “These countries show us that democracy is resilient and that countries can and do return to democracy,” he wrote.
The organization Otaola works for, the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, has proposed numerous ideas for halting and reversing democratic backsliding, including investing in civic education, reforming campaign finance laws, and strengthening coordination between international organizations with peacekeeping initiatives like the United Nations, the European Union and the African Union. Other experts have argued for abolishing two-party systems, more heavily regulating tech giants and imposing financial penalties on backsliding governments.
Yet there are also those who believe technocratic fixes are unequal to the problem. In a 2016 essay, the Indian writer Pankaj Mishra presented the declining health of democracy around the world as a crisis for the ideology of modern market-based liberalism itself: A “religion of technology and G.D.P. and the crude 19th-century calculus of self-interest,” it can neither account for nor provide an answer to the anger of those who feel left behind by the disruptions and inequalities wrought by globalized capitalism.
To chart a path forward, those who believe in the ideals of liberal democracy will “require, above all, a richer and more varied picture of human experience and needs than the prevailing image of Homo economicus,” Mishra argued. “Otherwise, in our sterile infatuation with rational motivations and outcomes, we risk resembling those helpless navigators who, De Tocqueville wrote, ‘stare obstinately at some ruins that can still be seen on the shore we have left, even as the current pulls us along and drags us backward toward the abyss.’”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/28/opin ... 778d3e6de3
*************
Related article:
Welcome to the age of anger
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... exit-trump
Last weekend, voters in Italy handed the reins of government to a coalition led by a party directly descended from Benito Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship, delivering one of the biggest victories to the far right in Europe since World War II. “Today is a sad day for Italy,” said the leader of Italy’s center-left Democratic Party, who during the campaign had cast the contest as nothing less than a fight to save the country’s democracy.
If such language sounds familiar to American ears, it’s because countries around the world, including the United States, are confronting what experts say is a worldwide wave of democratic backsliding. According to data from V-Dem, a monitoring institute based in Sweden — where, as it happens, a far-right party with roots in neo-Nazism made a strong electoral showing two weeks ago — more democracies were deteriorating, and even slipping into autocracy, in 2021 than at any point in the past 50 years.
What explains the global resurgence of authoritarian politics, and what does it portend for the future of democracy? Here’s what people are saying.
Liberal democracy, in retreat
Democracy’s spread over the past few centuries has rarely been linear, instead ebbing and flowing with the competing forces of autocracy. Some political scientists divide democracy’s progression into three waves: the first beginning in the 19th century; the second beginning in the aftermath of World War II; and the third beginning in the mid-1970s, which crested with 42 liberal democracies, a record high, in 2012. Today, only 34 liberal democracies exist, down to the same number as in 1995, according to V-Dem. (The share of the world population living in liberal democracies also fell in the last decade, to 13 percent from 18 percent.)
As The Times’s Amanda Taub has explained, this recent democratic decline — which some scholars say constitutes “a third wave of autocratization,” the first having begun in the 1920s and the second in the 1960s — has been primarily driven not by coups or revolutions, but by the actions of legitimately elected officials: “Once in power, unscrupulous leaders can sometimes manipulate the political environment to their own benefit, making it more likely that they will be victorious in future contests. By winning those elections, they gain the stamp of democratic legitimacy — even for actions that ultimately undermine democratic norms.”
In Europe, the most prominent practitioner of this kind of “soft autocracy” by election is Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary. After being voted into power in 2010, he has worked to build what he calls an “illiberal democracy” by eroding civil liberties and media freedom, subjugating the judiciary, and restructuring his country’s electoral system. In the process, he has become a model to the far right around the world, including in the United States.
To varying degrees, the decline of liberal democratic norms and institutions is visible in almost every region:
In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, elected in 2014, has presided over a sharp rise in Hindu nationalism — with violent, frequently deadly consequences for the country’s Muslim minority — and a stifled speech environment.
In the Philippines, voters recently elected the son of a former dictator to succeed Rodrigo Duterte, who during his six years as president cracked down on the news media and launched a war on drugs that led to thousands of killings.
In El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele, elected in 2019, has deployed the army in Congress to pressure legislators, defied the Supreme Court’s attempts to restrain his use of military force and jailed thousands with little due process under a state of emergency over gang violence.
And then, of course, there is the United States: Political scientists have warned that, in a trend that predated Donald Trump but accelerated under his presidency, the Republican Party’s commitment to liberal democratic norms has diminished, its messaging now resembling that of authoritarian parties like Orban’s.
Unlike ruling parties in many other backsliding democracies, though, the Republican Party has been able to win control of government without commanding popular majorities. As The Times’s David Leonhardt wrote recently, because of a confluence of geographic sorting trends and the small-state bias of Congress and the Electoral College, every branch of American government now favors one party (Republican) over another (Democratic) in a way they did not for much of the country’s history.
“We are far and away the most countermajoritarian democracy in the world,” Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard, told Leonhardt.
What drives democracies toward autocracy?
No two democracies backslide for identical reasons, but political scientists and others have posited some common themes. One is backlash to threats, real or perceived, to the majority’s sense of national identity.
“First, society polarizes, often over a backlash to social change, to demographic change, to strengthening political power by racial, ethnic or religious minorities, and generally amid rising social distrust,” The Times’s Max Fisher, who has reported widely on global democratic decline, recently explained. “This leads to a bottom-up desire for populist outsiders who will promise to confront the supposed threat within, which means suppressing the other side of that social or partisan or racial divide, asserting a vision of democracy that grants special status for ‘my’ side, and smashing the democratic institutions or norms that prevent that side from asserting what is perceived to be its rightful dominance.”
How does class come into the picture? Some scholars have theorized a link between democratic backsliding and the Great Recession, if not global free-market capitalism itself. In India, for example, Debasish Roy Chowdhury argued last month in The Times that “neoliberal policies have compounded inequality, with the state retreating from fundamental responsibilities such as health and education.” He continued: “This breeds a life of indignity and powerlessness for millions who take refuge in group identity, gravitate toward strong leaders promising to defend them against other groups and easily become hooked on the mass opioid of religious hatred now being used to redefine secular India as a Hindu state.”
Taking another materialist view, Richard Pildes, a constitutional law scholar at New York University School of Law, attributes the rise of illiberal forces to the dispersal of political power among a growing number of political parties, which he argues limits the ability of democratic governments to function effectively. “When democratic governments seem incapable of delivering on their promises, this failure can lead to alienation, resignation, distrust and withdrawal among many citizens,” he wrote in The Times last year. “It can also trigger demands for authoritarian leaders who promise to cut through messy politics. At an even greater extreme, it can lead people to question democracy itself and become open to anti-democratic systems of government.”
Can democratic backsliding be stopped?
History has shown that the arc of human civilization does not inevitably bend toward liberal democracy. But its tendency toward autocracy is also highly contingent. In The Washington Post, Miguel Angel Lara Otaola noted this year that since 2000, even as democratic backsliding became the predominant global trend, nine countries managed to transition back to democracy after a period of authoritarianism. “These countries show us that democracy is resilient and that countries can and do return to democracy,” he wrote.
The organization Otaola works for, the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, has proposed numerous ideas for halting and reversing democratic backsliding, including investing in civic education, reforming campaign finance laws, and strengthening coordination between international organizations with peacekeeping initiatives like the United Nations, the European Union and the African Union. Other experts have argued for abolishing two-party systems, more heavily regulating tech giants and imposing financial penalties on backsliding governments.
Yet there are also those who believe technocratic fixes are unequal to the problem. In a 2016 essay, the Indian writer Pankaj Mishra presented the declining health of democracy around the world as a crisis for the ideology of modern market-based liberalism itself: A “religion of technology and G.D.P. and the crude 19th-century calculus of self-interest,” it can neither account for nor provide an answer to the anger of those who feel left behind by the disruptions and inequalities wrought by globalized capitalism.
To chart a path forward, those who believe in the ideals of liberal democracy will “require, above all, a richer and more varied picture of human experience and needs than the prevailing image of Homo economicus,” Mishra argued. “Otherwise, in our sterile infatuation with rational motivations and outcomes, we risk resembling those helpless navigators who, De Tocqueville wrote, ‘stare obstinately at some ruins that can still be seen on the shore we have left, even as the current pulls us along and drags us backward toward the abyss.’”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/28/opin ... 778d3e6de3
*************
Related article:
Welcome to the age of anger
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... exit-trump
The Triumph of the Ukrainian Idea
The war in Ukraine is not only a military event; it’s an intellectual event. The Ukrainians are winning not only because of the superiority of their troops. They are winning because they are fighting for a superior idea — an idea that inspires Ukrainians to fight so doggedly, an idea that inspires people across the West to stand behind Ukraine and back it to the hilt.
That idea is actually two ideas jammed together. The first is liberalism, which promotes democracy, individual dignity, a rule-based international order.
The second idea is nationalism. Volodymyr Zelensky is a nationalist. He is fighting not just for democracy but also for Ukraine — Ukrainian culture, Ukrainian land, the Ukrainian people and tongue. The symbol of this war is the Ukrainian flag, a nationalist symbol.
There are many people who assume that liberalism and nationalism are opposites. Liberalism, in their mind, is modern and progressive. It’s about freedom of choice, diversity and individual autonomy. Nationalism, meanwhile, is primordial, xenophobic, tribal, aggressive and exclusionary.
Modern countries, by this thinking, should try to tamp down nationalist passions and embrace the universal brotherhood of all humankind. As John Lennon famously sang, “Imagine there’s no countries/ It isn’t hard to do/ Nothing to kill or die for/ And no religion too.”
Those people are not all wrong. Nationalism has a lot of blood on its hands. But it has become clear that there are two kinds of nationalism: the illiberal nationalism of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, and the liberal nationalism of Zelensky. The former nationalism is backward-looking, xenophobic and authoritarian. The latter nationalism is forward-looking, inclusive and builds a society around the rule of law, not the personal power of the maximum leader. It’s become clear that if it is to survive, liberalism needs to rest on a bed of this kind of nationalism.
Nationalism provides people with a fervent sense of belonging. Countries don’t hold together because citizens make a cold assessment that it’s in their self-interest to do so. Countries are held together by shared loves for a particular way of life, a particular culture, a particular land. These loves have to be stirred in the heart before they can be analyzed by the brain.
Nationalism provides people with a sense of meaning. Nationalists tell stories that stretch from a glorious, if broken, past forward to a golden future. Individuals live and die, but the nation goes on. People feel their life has significance because they contribute these eternal stories. “Freedom is hollow outside of a meaning-providing system,” Yael Tamir writes in her book “Why Nationalism.”
Democracies need nationalism if they are to defend themselves against their foes. Democracies also need this kind of nationalism if they are to hold together. In his book “The Great Experiment,” Yascha Mounk celebrates the growing diversity enjoyed by many Western nations. But he argues they also need the centripetal force of “cultural patriotism,” to balance the centrifugal forces that this diversity ignites.
Finally, democracies need this kind of nationalism to regenerate the nation. Liberal nationalists are not stuck with a single archaic national narrative. They are perpetually going back, reinterpreting the past, modernizing the story and reinventing the community.
Over the past decades this kind of ardent nationalism has often been regarded as passé within the circles of the educated elites. I suspect there are many people in this country who are proud to wear the Ukrainian flag but wouldn’t be caught dead wearing an American flag because they fear it would mark them as reactionary, jingoistic, low class.
The first problem with this posture is that it opened up a cultural divide between the educated class and the millions of Americans for whom patriotism is a central part of their identity. Second, by associating liberalism with the cosmopolitan global elite, it made liberalism seem like a system used to preserve the privileges of that elite. The populist class backlash combined with an anti-liberal backlash, imperiling democracies across the globe. Third, it opened the door for people like Trump to seize and hijack American patriotism.
Liberal nationalism believes in what liberals believe, but it also believes that nations are moral communities and the borders that define them need to be secure. It believes that it’s sometimes OK to put Americans first — to adopt policies that give American workers an edge over workers elsewhere. It believes it’s important to celebrate diversity, but a country that doesn’t construct a shared moral culture will probably rip itself to shreds.
American nationalism has characteristically been a liberal nationalism. From Alexander Hamilton to Walt Whitman to Theodore Roosevelt, it has often been a song in praise of a liberal revolution, a liberal constitution and a diverse, liberal society. Trumpian nationalism doesn’t flow from that traditional American nationalism but is a repudiation of it.
Ukraine’s tenacity shows how powerful liberal nationalism can be in the face of an authoritarian threat. It shows how liberal nationalism can mobilize a society and inspire it to fantastic achievements. It shows what a renewed American liberal nationalism could do, if only the center and left could get over their squeamishness about patriotic ardor and would embrace and reinvent our national tradition.
Yael Tamir makes the essential point: “Self-centered individualism must therefore be replaced with a more collectivist spirit that nationalism knows how to kindle.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/opin ... 778d3e6de3
From Moscow to Tehran, a Crisis of Illiberalism
The worldview behind Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine assumed the following premises: The West and America are declining, decaying and internally divided. The globalized world is becoming multipolar, with “civilization-states” re-emerging and competing to claim their spheres of influence. And Russia and China in particular represent potent alternatives to Western liberalism that stand ready to contend for global dominance.
As badly as the war has gone for Putin, some of this analysis still holds up. The world has indeed responded to the Ukraine War along multipolar lines. Saudi Arabia’s snub of the Biden administration’s plea to pump more oil is just the latest example of how the anti-Russian coalition is essentially a Western coalition, with India, China and the Arab world playing more cynical and complicated parts.
Meanwhile, the West’s unity, while obviously more impressive than Putin expected, is still a thin netting flung over deeper vulnerabilities. There has been no sustained post-Covid boomtime, no new era of good feelings. The populist wave is not receding; since the war in Ukraine began the European establishment has suffered political disappointments and defeats in Sweden and Hungary and Italy. Two of the governments most committed to the defense of Ukraine, Joe Biden’s administration and Britain’s Tory government, are well underwater in approval polls. Europe has only just begun to feel the cost of its naïve energy policies, and Western economies are caught between measures that feed inflation and solutions that might induce recession.
So in key respects the world still looks as Putin imagined it more than seven months ago, with clear opportunities for a potent challenger to the liberal world order. But now we know something that he didn’t when he ordered the invasion: Russia isn’t that potent challenger, and its claims to represent an alternative to the liberal West have melted into Ukrainian mud.
It’s not only Putin’s regime showing signs of illiberal meltdown. Beijing still looks much more powerful than Moscow, but China’s early-Covid successes have given way to an insane-seeming attempt to sustain a “zero Covid” policy at whatever cost to prosperity, domestic tranquillity and global influence.
At the same time Iran, whose Islamic Republic represents a different sort of rival to Western liberalism, is enduring a wave of protests that, even if they don’t topple the regime, are a reminder of just how miserably unpopular the Islamic Revolution is today.
As the right-wing gadfly Richard Hanania, usually a critic of liberal pieties and American self-regard, acknowledged in a recent essay, 2022 has been pretty good for the well-worn, Francis Fukuyama argument that liberal democracy lacks plausible ideological competitors. Liberalism has enemies aplenty, sure, and relative to the origin point of Fukuyama’s “End of History” argument in 1989, the liberal order is showing clear signs of internal decay. But a desire for alternatives is not enough to bring them into being; instead, we’re seeing that a world system can weaken dramatically without its rivals being ready to supplant it.
If Russia is the biggest, ugliest flop, China is the more interesting case. It was always clear that Putinism existed in an imitative, parodic relationship to the West — as a pseudo-democracy, not a true rival with a different source for its legitimacy. But China over the last few decades seemed to be creating something more stable and self-legitimating, a one-party meritocracy capable of managing peaceful transitions from one leader to another, resistant to cults of personality and able to steward rapid economic and technological progress.
But the combination of Xi Jinping’s Mao-lite consolidation of personal power and his government’s conspicuous failures (on economic management and soft-power diplomacy, not just the Zero Covid blunders) suggests that China’s system is reverting to an authoritarian mean, that the idea of one-party meritocracy collapses back into banal dictatorship the moment you get a mediocre leader.
Then the turmoil in the Islamic Republic is interesting in a different way. As Shadi Hamid noted in a provocative essay for First Things, the Muslim world’s various Islamist movements anticipated the more recent Western fascination with (and fear of) “post-liberal” politics — offering non-Western attempts to forge a political-cultural system that could claim to be secular liberalism’s successor, not just a throwback to the past.
So their mixture of failure, defeat and, in the Iranian case, corruption and stagnation stand as a sustained caution to Western thinkers trying to imagine something after liberalism.
These imaginings will continue because liberalism remains on a path to an unhappy destination — sterile, fragmented, stagnant, dystopian. All the optimistic chest-thumping about the Ukraine War inspiring a wider liberal revival has not altered that reality.
But in Moscow, in Beijing, in Tehran, you can see other roads available, and all of them run quickly down into the dark.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/08/opin ... 778d3e6de3
As badly as the war has gone for Putin, some of this analysis still holds up. The world has indeed responded to the Ukraine War along multipolar lines. Saudi Arabia’s snub of the Biden administration’s plea to pump more oil is just the latest example of how the anti-Russian coalition is essentially a Western coalition, with India, China and the Arab world playing more cynical and complicated parts.
Meanwhile, the West’s unity, while obviously more impressive than Putin expected, is still a thin netting flung over deeper vulnerabilities. There has been no sustained post-Covid boomtime, no new era of good feelings. The populist wave is not receding; since the war in Ukraine began the European establishment has suffered political disappointments and defeats in Sweden and Hungary and Italy. Two of the governments most committed to the defense of Ukraine, Joe Biden’s administration and Britain’s Tory government, are well underwater in approval polls. Europe has only just begun to feel the cost of its naïve energy policies, and Western economies are caught between measures that feed inflation and solutions that might induce recession.
So in key respects the world still looks as Putin imagined it more than seven months ago, with clear opportunities for a potent challenger to the liberal world order. But now we know something that he didn’t when he ordered the invasion: Russia isn’t that potent challenger, and its claims to represent an alternative to the liberal West have melted into Ukrainian mud.
It’s not only Putin’s regime showing signs of illiberal meltdown. Beijing still looks much more powerful than Moscow, but China’s early-Covid successes have given way to an insane-seeming attempt to sustain a “zero Covid” policy at whatever cost to prosperity, domestic tranquillity and global influence.
At the same time Iran, whose Islamic Republic represents a different sort of rival to Western liberalism, is enduring a wave of protests that, even if they don’t topple the regime, are a reminder of just how miserably unpopular the Islamic Revolution is today.
As the right-wing gadfly Richard Hanania, usually a critic of liberal pieties and American self-regard, acknowledged in a recent essay, 2022 has been pretty good for the well-worn, Francis Fukuyama argument that liberal democracy lacks plausible ideological competitors. Liberalism has enemies aplenty, sure, and relative to the origin point of Fukuyama’s “End of History” argument in 1989, the liberal order is showing clear signs of internal decay. But a desire for alternatives is not enough to bring them into being; instead, we’re seeing that a world system can weaken dramatically without its rivals being ready to supplant it.
If Russia is the biggest, ugliest flop, China is the more interesting case. It was always clear that Putinism existed in an imitative, parodic relationship to the West — as a pseudo-democracy, not a true rival with a different source for its legitimacy. But China over the last few decades seemed to be creating something more stable and self-legitimating, a one-party meritocracy capable of managing peaceful transitions from one leader to another, resistant to cults of personality and able to steward rapid economic and technological progress.
But the combination of Xi Jinping’s Mao-lite consolidation of personal power and his government’s conspicuous failures (on economic management and soft-power diplomacy, not just the Zero Covid blunders) suggests that China’s system is reverting to an authoritarian mean, that the idea of one-party meritocracy collapses back into banal dictatorship the moment you get a mediocre leader.
Then the turmoil in the Islamic Republic is interesting in a different way. As Shadi Hamid noted in a provocative essay for First Things, the Muslim world’s various Islamist movements anticipated the more recent Western fascination with (and fear of) “post-liberal” politics — offering non-Western attempts to forge a political-cultural system that could claim to be secular liberalism’s successor, not just a throwback to the past.
So their mixture of failure, defeat and, in the Iranian case, corruption and stagnation stand as a sustained caution to Western thinkers trying to imagine something after liberalism.
These imaginings will continue because liberalism remains on a path to an unhappy destination — sterile, fragmented, stagnant, dystopian. All the optimistic chest-thumping about the Ukraine War inspiring a wider liberal revival has not altered that reality.
But in Moscow, in Beijing, in Tehran, you can see other roads available, and all of them run quickly down into the dark.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/08/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Thank You, Xi Jinping
Dear President Xi:
Please accept my country’s gratitude and congratulations as you embark on your third term as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. Though it may not be obvious now, we believe your reign will one day be recognized as one of the great unexpected blessings in the history of the United States, as well as that of other free nations.
A few exceptions aside, this was not what was generally expected when you first became paramount leader 10 years ago.
Back then, many in the West had concluded that it was merely a matter of time before China was restored to its ancient place as the world’s dominant civilization and largest economy. China’s astonishing annual growth rates, frequently topping 10 percent, put our own meager economic progress in the shade. In one industry after another — telecommunications, banking, social media, real estate — Chinese companies were becoming industry leaders. Foreign nationals flocked to live, study and work in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Beijing; well-to-do American parents boasted of enrolling their children in Mandarin immersion classes.
At the policymaking level, there was widespread acceptance that a richer China would be vastly more influential abroad — and that the influence would be felt from Western Europe to South America to Central Asia to East Africa. Though we understood that this influence could at times be heavy-handed, there was little political will to curb it. China seemed to offer a unique model of capitalist dynamism and authoritarian efficacy. Decisions were made; things got done: What a contrast with the increasingly sclerotic free world.
Not that we thought that all was well with China. Your rise coincided with the dramatic downfall of your principal rival, Bo Xilai, amid rumors of a possible coup. Longer-term challenges — widespread corruption, an aging population, the role of the state in the economy — required prudent management. So did the international resentments and resistance that swiftly rising global powers invariably engender.
Still, you seemed up to the job. Your family’s bitter experience during the Cultural Revolution suggested that you understood the dangers of totalitarianism. Your determination to crack down on corruption seemed matched by your willingness to further liberalize your economy — demonstrated by your appointment of the competent technocrat Li Keqiang as your premier. And your stay with a family in Iowa in the 1980s raised hopes that you might harbor some fondness for America.
Those hopes haven’t just been disappointed. They’ve been crushed. If there’s now a single point of agreement between Donald Trump and Joe Biden — or Tom Cotton and Nancy Pelosi — it’s that you must be stopped.
How did you do it?
Your war on corruption has turned into a mass purge. Your repression in Xinjiang rivals the Soviet gulags. Your economic “reforms” amount to the return of typically inefficient state-owned enterprises as dominant players.
Your de facto policy of snooping, hacking and intellectual-property theft has made Chinese brands like Huawei radioactive in much of the West. In 2020 F.B.I. Director Christopher Wray noted in a speech, “We’ve now reached the point where the F.B.I. is opening a new China-related counterintelligence case every 10 hours.”
Your zero-Covid policy has, at times, transformed China’s great metropolises into vast and unlivable prison colonies. Your foreign policy bullying has mainly succeeded in encouraging Japan to rearm and Biden to pledge that America will fight for Taiwan.
All of this may make your China fearsome. None of it makes you strong. Dictatorships can usually exact obedience, but they struggle to inspire loyalty. The power to coerce, as the political scientist Joseph Nye famously observed, is not the same as the power to attract. It’s a truism that may soon come to haunt you — much as it now haunts Vladimir Putin as his once-fearsome military is decimated in Ukraine.
You could still change course. But it seems unlikely, and not just because old men rarely change. The more enemies you make, the more repression you need. Surrounding yourself with yes men, as you are now doing, may provide you with a sense of security. But it will cut you off from vital flows of truthful information, particularly when that information is unpleasant.
The Achilles’ heel of regimes like yours is that the lies they tell their people to maintain power ultimately become lies they tell themselves. Kicking foreign journalists out of China makes the problem worse, since you no longer have the benefit of an outside view of your compounding troubles.
None of this solves our problems here in the United States. In many ways, your truculence exacerbates them, not least in the increasing risk that we may someday come to blows. But in the long-run competition between the free and unfree worlds, you are unwittingly helping make the case for the free. To adapt a line from my colleague Tom Friedman, does anyone want to be your China for a day? I doubt it.
Which is why we want to say thanks. We know our Union is faulty; we know our leaders are flawed; we know that our society’s edges are frayed. To take one hard look at you is to prefer all this to your dismal alternative.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/18/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Please accept my country’s gratitude and congratulations as you embark on your third term as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. Though it may not be obvious now, we believe your reign will one day be recognized as one of the great unexpected blessings in the history of the United States, as well as that of other free nations.
A few exceptions aside, this was not what was generally expected when you first became paramount leader 10 years ago.
Back then, many in the West had concluded that it was merely a matter of time before China was restored to its ancient place as the world’s dominant civilization and largest economy. China’s astonishing annual growth rates, frequently topping 10 percent, put our own meager economic progress in the shade. In one industry after another — telecommunications, banking, social media, real estate — Chinese companies were becoming industry leaders. Foreign nationals flocked to live, study and work in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Beijing; well-to-do American parents boasted of enrolling their children in Mandarin immersion classes.
At the policymaking level, there was widespread acceptance that a richer China would be vastly more influential abroad — and that the influence would be felt from Western Europe to South America to Central Asia to East Africa. Though we understood that this influence could at times be heavy-handed, there was little political will to curb it. China seemed to offer a unique model of capitalist dynamism and authoritarian efficacy. Decisions were made; things got done: What a contrast with the increasingly sclerotic free world.
Not that we thought that all was well with China. Your rise coincided with the dramatic downfall of your principal rival, Bo Xilai, amid rumors of a possible coup. Longer-term challenges — widespread corruption, an aging population, the role of the state in the economy — required prudent management. So did the international resentments and resistance that swiftly rising global powers invariably engender.
Still, you seemed up to the job. Your family’s bitter experience during the Cultural Revolution suggested that you understood the dangers of totalitarianism. Your determination to crack down on corruption seemed matched by your willingness to further liberalize your economy — demonstrated by your appointment of the competent technocrat Li Keqiang as your premier. And your stay with a family in Iowa in the 1980s raised hopes that you might harbor some fondness for America.
Those hopes haven’t just been disappointed. They’ve been crushed. If there’s now a single point of agreement between Donald Trump and Joe Biden — or Tom Cotton and Nancy Pelosi — it’s that you must be stopped.
How did you do it?
Your war on corruption has turned into a mass purge. Your repression in Xinjiang rivals the Soviet gulags. Your economic “reforms” amount to the return of typically inefficient state-owned enterprises as dominant players.
Your de facto policy of snooping, hacking and intellectual-property theft has made Chinese brands like Huawei radioactive in much of the West. In 2020 F.B.I. Director Christopher Wray noted in a speech, “We’ve now reached the point where the F.B.I. is opening a new China-related counterintelligence case every 10 hours.”
Your zero-Covid policy has, at times, transformed China’s great metropolises into vast and unlivable prison colonies. Your foreign policy bullying has mainly succeeded in encouraging Japan to rearm and Biden to pledge that America will fight for Taiwan.
All of this may make your China fearsome. None of it makes you strong. Dictatorships can usually exact obedience, but they struggle to inspire loyalty. The power to coerce, as the political scientist Joseph Nye famously observed, is not the same as the power to attract. It’s a truism that may soon come to haunt you — much as it now haunts Vladimir Putin as his once-fearsome military is decimated in Ukraine.
You could still change course. But it seems unlikely, and not just because old men rarely change. The more enemies you make, the more repression you need. Surrounding yourself with yes men, as you are now doing, may provide you with a sense of security. But it will cut you off from vital flows of truthful information, particularly when that information is unpleasant.
The Achilles’ heel of regimes like yours is that the lies they tell their people to maintain power ultimately become lies they tell themselves. Kicking foreign journalists out of China makes the problem worse, since you no longer have the benefit of an outside view of your compounding troubles.
None of this solves our problems here in the United States. In many ways, your truculence exacerbates them, not least in the increasing risk that we may someday come to blows. But in the long-run competition between the free and unfree worlds, you are unwittingly helping make the case for the free. To adapt a line from my colleague Tom Friedman, does anyone want to be your China for a day? I doubt it.
Which is why we want to say thanks. We know our Union is faulty; we know our leaders are flawed; we know that our society’s edges are frayed. To take one hard look at you is to prefer all this to your dismal alternative.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/18/opin ... 778d3e6de3
No, Capitalism and the Internet Will Not Free China’s People
Communist Party rule of China has been punctuated by one mass public campaign after another, each designed to commandeer Chinese minds in service of the state.
There was the Great Leap Forward, the industrial reform campaign begun in 1958 that precipitated a devastating famine; the political witch hunts of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, which nearly tore China apart; and many more, some more damaging than others, and each targeting some political, social or economic imperative of the day. Their cumulative effect is one of the Communist Party’s greatest achievements: a near-perfect symbiosis between dictatorial government and subservient population.
The government’s nearly three-year-old zero-Covid campaign may be the worst of all.
It’s an affront to science and common sense, yet — reminiscent of the mindlessness of the Cultural Revolution — officials and citizens around the country go to ridiculous lengths to execute it. Entire cities are shut down even for small outbreaks, and coronavirus tests are conducted on fish and other food products, cars, even construction materials. It has brought chaos and suffering for China’s people, who have been repeatedly locked down, detained for missing coronavirus tests and have lost jobs or businesses. When Chengdu, a city of 21 million people, was locked down in September, residents were blocked from leaving their flats even when an earthquake struck.
Past campaigns of mass control have come and gone, but this one will have lasting consequences thanks to its most insidious aspect: the surveillance technology rolled out nationwide to suppress Covid but which allows citizens to be tracked by authorities, their movements circumscribed. Government officials used this system to restrict the movements of people who wanted to take part in a protest in central China in June. Those officials were later punished, but the fact remains that the government now has a system that Mao Zedong could only have dreamed of, powered by data and algorithms, to monitor and control the people.
The West has been wrong about China. It was long assumed that capitalism, the emergence of a middle class and the internet would cause China to eventually adopt Western political ideas. But these ideas cannot even begin to take root because the Communist Party has never allowed the intellectual soil needed for them to germinate. And it never will.
Chinese minds have in fact never truly been free. China has been a largely united, centralized state for most of the past 2,000 years, and similar ethics and a similar relationship between ruler and ruled have endured throughout. No fundamental change is possible; China’s lowly people are expected to merely obey.
When the Communist Party seized state power in 1949, hope for a new era flickered briefly. My father, Ai Qing, then one of China’s leading poets, had already enthusiastically joined the party. But Mao shrewdly capitalized on China’s ancient power dynamic, enshrining the party as the new unquestioned ruler. Like many intellectuals, my father soon came under attack during Mao’s repeated political campaigns to root out those who dared think independently. China’s spiritual, intellectual and cultural life withered.
In 1957 — the year I was born — Mao launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign. My father was branded a rightist, subjected to fierce public attacks, and we were driven to internal exile in a bleak corner of the remote Xinjiang region. Some of his peers committed suicide.
He came under attack yet again during the Cultural Revolution, paraded through the streets in a dunce cap to public gatherings where abuse was hurled at him. He came home one night, exhausted, his face black after someone at a political rally dumped a pot of ink over his head. In an example of the helplessness and resignation of China’s people, he suggested that we just imagine that grim place had always been our home, accept our lot in life and get on with it. China’s people still live under this mentality of surrender today.
When I ran afoul of authorities in 2011 after criticizing the government, the police threatened me with an “ugly death” and said they would tell all of China about the absurd allegations they leveled, like tax evasion, to discredit me. I asked if China’s people would believe their lies. Ninety percent will, an officer told me. In China, where all “truth” comes from the party, he may have been right. Three years later, at an art exhibition in Shanghai, pressure from local government officials led to the abrupt removal of my name from a list of exhibitors. Not one of the Chinese artists whose work was on display, many of whom knew me well, came forward to defend me.
Things have only worsened in the past decade. Authorities have smothered remaining traces of independent thought, decimated Chinese civil society and cast a chill over academia, media, culture and business.
To be fair, individual thought and expression are constrained in Western democracies, too. Political correctness forces people to hold in what they truly believe and parrot empty slogans to superficially comply with prevailing narratives. And Western engagement with China has been driven by the pursuit of profit rather than values. Western leaders criticize Communist Party violations of human rights, free speech and spiritual freedom, but long have continued to do business with Beijing. U.S. hypocrisy about independent thought is evident in its approach to the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who stands for freedom of information but whom the U.S. government is prosecuting.
Millions of Chinese take pride in modern China’s growing wealth and power. But this feeling of well-being is a mirage conjured by superficial material gain, constant propaganda about the decline of the West and suppression of intellectual freedom. China is in fact decaying morally under the influence of the party. In 2011, a 2-year-old girl was run over by two vehicles in southern China and left bleeding in a street. Eighteen people passed by without doing anything, some even swerving aside to avoid her. Don’t think, don’t get involved, just keep walking. The girl later died.
Freedom relies on courage and sustained risk-taking. But a vast majority of China’s people feel that resistance, even at the philosophical level, is impossible, and that personal survival depends on compliance. They are reduced to an anxious servility, lining up like sheep in long lines for their coronavirus tests, or scrambling for food before sudden lockdowns.
Freedom and individuality can never be completely suppressed. And no country, no matter how strong it appears, can truly prosper without diversity of opinion. But there is no hope for fundamental change in my country while the Communist Party is in power.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/20/opin ... 778d3e6de3
There was the Great Leap Forward, the industrial reform campaign begun in 1958 that precipitated a devastating famine; the political witch hunts of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, which nearly tore China apart; and many more, some more damaging than others, and each targeting some political, social or economic imperative of the day. Their cumulative effect is one of the Communist Party’s greatest achievements: a near-perfect symbiosis between dictatorial government and subservient population.
The government’s nearly three-year-old zero-Covid campaign may be the worst of all.
It’s an affront to science and common sense, yet — reminiscent of the mindlessness of the Cultural Revolution — officials and citizens around the country go to ridiculous lengths to execute it. Entire cities are shut down even for small outbreaks, and coronavirus tests are conducted on fish and other food products, cars, even construction materials. It has brought chaos and suffering for China’s people, who have been repeatedly locked down, detained for missing coronavirus tests and have lost jobs or businesses. When Chengdu, a city of 21 million people, was locked down in September, residents were blocked from leaving their flats even when an earthquake struck.
Past campaigns of mass control have come and gone, but this one will have lasting consequences thanks to its most insidious aspect: the surveillance technology rolled out nationwide to suppress Covid but which allows citizens to be tracked by authorities, their movements circumscribed. Government officials used this system to restrict the movements of people who wanted to take part in a protest in central China in June. Those officials were later punished, but the fact remains that the government now has a system that Mao Zedong could only have dreamed of, powered by data and algorithms, to monitor and control the people.
The West has been wrong about China. It was long assumed that capitalism, the emergence of a middle class and the internet would cause China to eventually adopt Western political ideas. But these ideas cannot even begin to take root because the Communist Party has never allowed the intellectual soil needed for them to germinate. And it never will.
Chinese minds have in fact never truly been free. China has been a largely united, centralized state for most of the past 2,000 years, and similar ethics and a similar relationship between ruler and ruled have endured throughout. No fundamental change is possible; China’s lowly people are expected to merely obey.
When the Communist Party seized state power in 1949, hope for a new era flickered briefly. My father, Ai Qing, then one of China’s leading poets, had already enthusiastically joined the party. But Mao shrewdly capitalized on China’s ancient power dynamic, enshrining the party as the new unquestioned ruler. Like many intellectuals, my father soon came under attack during Mao’s repeated political campaigns to root out those who dared think independently. China’s spiritual, intellectual and cultural life withered.
In 1957 — the year I was born — Mao launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign. My father was branded a rightist, subjected to fierce public attacks, and we were driven to internal exile in a bleak corner of the remote Xinjiang region. Some of his peers committed suicide.
He came under attack yet again during the Cultural Revolution, paraded through the streets in a dunce cap to public gatherings where abuse was hurled at him. He came home one night, exhausted, his face black after someone at a political rally dumped a pot of ink over his head. In an example of the helplessness and resignation of China’s people, he suggested that we just imagine that grim place had always been our home, accept our lot in life and get on with it. China’s people still live under this mentality of surrender today.
When I ran afoul of authorities in 2011 after criticizing the government, the police threatened me with an “ugly death” and said they would tell all of China about the absurd allegations they leveled, like tax evasion, to discredit me. I asked if China’s people would believe their lies. Ninety percent will, an officer told me. In China, where all “truth” comes from the party, he may have been right. Three years later, at an art exhibition in Shanghai, pressure from local government officials led to the abrupt removal of my name from a list of exhibitors. Not one of the Chinese artists whose work was on display, many of whom knew me well, came forward to defend me.
Things have only worsened in the past decade. Authorities have smothered remaining traces of independent thought, decimated Chinese civil society and cast a chill over academia, media, culture and business.
To be fair, individual thought and expression are constrained in Western democracies, too. Political correctness forces people to hold in what they truly believe and parrot empty slogans to superficially comply with prevailing narratives. And Western engagement with China has been driven by the pursuit of profit rather than values. Western leaders criticize Communist Party violations of human rights, free speech and spiritual freedom, but long have continued to do business with Beijing. U.S. hypocrisy about independent thought is evident in its approach to the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who stands for freedom of information but whom the U.S. government is prosecuting.
Millions of Chinese take pride in modern China’s growing wealth and power. But this feeling of well-being is a mirage conjured by superficial material gain, constant propaganda about the decline of the West and suppression of intellectual freedom. China is in fact decaying morally under the influence of the party. In 2011, a 2-year-old girl was run over by two vehicles in southern China and left bleeding in a street. Eighteen people passed by without doing anything, some even swerving aside to avoid her. Don’t think, don’t get involved, just keep walking. The girl later died.
Freedom relies on courage and sustained risk-taking. But a vast majority of China’s people feel that resistance, even at the philosophical level, is impossible, and that personal survival depends on compliance. They are reduced to an anxious servility, lining up like sheep in long lines for their coronavirus tests, or scrambling for food before sudden lockdowns.
Freedom and individuality can never be completely suppressed. And no country, no matter how strong it appears, can truly prosper without diversity of opinion. But there is no hope for fundamental change in my country while the Communist Party is in power.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/20/opin ... 778d3e6de3
The India Quandary
Idealism and pragmatism have long made rival claims on American foreign policy, forcing hard choices and sometimes leading to disappointment. There was a moment in the 1990s when the collapse of the Soviet Union looked to clear the way for a universal political and economic order, but that chimera soon gave way to the more complex world we inhabit today, in which the ideals of liberal democracy — often in otherwise well-functioning democracies — sometimes seem to be in conflict with the popularity of strongmen leaders, the desire for security or the forces of xenophobia or grievance.
For American presidents and policymakers, this poses a challenge; it is no longer enough to champion the ideals of liberal democracy and count on the rest of the world to follow. Lecturing any country, be it global powers like Russia or China or regional powers like Turkey and Saudi Arabia, can embolden autocratic tendencies; engagement can, at least sometimes, lead to further dialogue and space for diplomacy. Advancing American ideals requires being pragmatic and even accommodating when our democratic partners fall short of the mark — and humility about where the United States falls short, too.
Take India, and the quandary it poses for Washington, which is on display as Prime Minister Narendra Modi makes a state visit this week.
India is a democracy in which the world’s biggest electorate openly and freely exercises the fundamental right to choose its leader. Its population is the largest in the world, and its economy is now the fifth largest in the world; its vast diaspora wields huge influence, especially in American business. With its history of close relations with Moscow, long and sometimes contested border with China and strategic location in a highly volatile neighborhood, India is destined to be a critical player in geopolitics for decades to come. Mr. Modi, the prime minister since 2014, commands sky-high popularity ratings and a secure majority in his Parliament, and is in the enviable position of leading a country with a relatively young, growing population.
While India has a long history of wariness toward America — most of its military equipment comes from the Soviet Union and Russia, and it would prefer to steer clear of direct involvement in the U.S.-China rivalry — senior American officials believe that India’s views of the United States have fundamentally improved in recent years.
This is partly through the work of the dynamic Indian diaspora, partly through greater strategic partnership, and partly because of the growing interest by American companies in India as an alternative to China for expansion in Asia. India has joined the United States, Japan and Australia in the “Quad,” an informal grouping that seeks to counter China’s increasingly assertive behavior in the Indo-Pacific region. And hundreds of American business and industry leaders will gather to meet with Mr. Modi this week. The visit is expected to include major deals to build American jet engines in India and to sell American drones.
So it is not hard to fathom why India’s leader is getting rock-star treatment in Washington, from a state dinner at the White House to an address on Capitol Hill. President Biden is right to acknowledge the potential of America’s partnership with India using all the symbolism and diplomatic tools at his disposal.
But Mr. Biden cannot ignore the other, equally significant, changes in India during the last nine years: Under Mr. Modi and his right-wing, Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, India has witnessed a serious erosion of the civil and political rights and democratic freedoms guaranteed by the Indian Constitution. Mr. Modi and his allies have been accused of policies that target and discriminate against religious minorities, especially India’s 200 million Muslims, and of using the power of the state to punish rivals and silence critics. Raids on political opponents and dissenting voices have become frequent; the mainstream news media has been diminished; the independence of courts and other democratic institutions has been eroded — all to a chorus of avowals from the B.J.P. that it is acting strictly within the law.
In March, a court in Mr. Modi’s home state sentenced the opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi, to a two-year prison term for defaming the prime minister; though Mr. Gandhi has not been jailed, the sentence led to his expulsion from Parliament, and will most likely prevent him from running again. Before that, in January, the Modi government used emergency laws to limit access to a BBC documentary that reexamined damning allegations that Mr. Modi played a role in murderous sectarian violence in Gujarat State 20 years ago, when he was chief minister there. As this editorial board warned, “When populist leaders invoke emergency laws to block dissent, democracy is in peril.”
This remains true, and it behooves Mr. Biden and every other elected official and business leader who meet with the Indian delegation this week to make sure that a discussion of shared democratic values is on the agenda.
That may be a tall order. Mr. Modi has demonstrated a prickly intolerance for criticism and may still harbor resentment from the nearly 10 years he was effectively barred from traveling to the United States for allegations of “severe violations of religious freedom” over the Gujarat violence. (He has repeatedly denied involvement, and the visa ban was lifted by the Obama administration when Mr. Modi became prime minister.) A public scolding from the White House, especially when the United States is wrestling with its own threats to democracy, would serve little purpose except to anger the Indian public.
Nevertheless, Mr. Biden and other American officials should be willing to have a forthright, if sometimes uncomfortable, discussion with their Indian counterparts. America’s own struggles are humbling proof that even the most established democracies are not immune to problems. As Human Rights Watch notes in a letter to Mr. Biden: “U.S. officials can point to how the U.S. political system has itself struggled with toxic rhetoric, while working to maintain an open and free media. These topics can be discussed openly and diplomatically in both directions.”
The quandary is not limited to India. How the United States manages its relationships with “elected autocracies,” from Poland’s Law and Justice government to Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition in Israel to Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government in Turkey, is one of the most important strategic questions of American foreign policy. The leaders of these countries and others will be watching closely to see how the Biden administration deals with this indispensable but increasingly autocratic Asian democracy.
The administration also faces the problem that the United States’ democratic credentials have been tarnished by Donald Trump and the possibility that he may be back in the White House before long. Mr. Trump’s politics have been openly hailed as inspiration by many an elected autocrat — including Mr. Modi, whose magnetism Mr. Trump likened to Elvis Presley’s at a rally in Houston on an official visit in 2019.
President Biden knows, from his many years in public service, that there will always be points of friction even in the closest partnerships between nations, let alone in relationships with leaders who have a very different view of the world. And senior U.S. government officials say that the administration is keenly aware of the flaws of the Modi government. Yet they believe that India’s vital role on the global stage supersedes concerns about one leader. Far better, they say, to raise concerns in private; and they insist they have raised them in many difficult conversations, and said they would raise them in this week’s meetings with Mr. Modi.
It is essential that they are raised. India has shaped a great and complex democracy out of a rich panoply of people, languages and religious traditions, and it is reaching for a more prominent role in global affairs.
But it is also critical to make clear that intolerance and repression run counter to everything that Americans admire in India, and threaten the partnership with the United States that its prime minister is actively seeking to strengthen and deepen. America wants and needs to embrace India; but Mr. Modi should be left with no illusion about how dangerous his autocratic leanings are, to the people of India and for the health of democracy in the world.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/22/opin ... 778d3e6de3
For American presidents and policymakers, this poses a challenge; it is no longer enough to champion the ideals of liberal democracy and count on the rest of the world to follow. Lecturing any country, be it global powers like Russia or China or regional powers like Turkey and Saudi Arabia, can embolden autocratic tendencies; engagement can, at least sometimes, lead to further dialogue and space for diplomacy. Advancing American ideals requires being pragmatic and even accommodating when our democratic partners fall short of the mark — and humility about where the United States falls short, too.
Take India, and the quandary it poses for Washington, which is on display as Prime Minister Narendra Modi makes a state visit this week.
India is a democracy in which the world’s biggest electorate openly and freely exercises the fundamental right to choose its leader. Its population is the largest in the world, and its economy is now the fifth largest in the world; its vast diaspora wields huge influence, especially in American business. With its history of close relations with Moscow, long and sometimes contested border with China and strategic location in a highly volatile neighborhood, India is destined to be a critical player in geopolitics for decades to come. Mr. Modi, the prime minister since 2014, commands sky-high popularity ratings and a secure majority in his Parliament, and is in the enviable position of leading a country with a relatively young, growing population.
While India has a long history of wariness toward America — most of its military equipment comes from the Soviet Union and Russia, and it would prefer to steer clear of direct involvement in the U.S.-China rivalry — senior American officials believe that India’s views of the United States have fundamentally improved in recent years.
This is partly through the work of the dynamic Indian diaspora, partly through greater strategic partnership, and partly because of the growing interest by American companies in India as an alternative to China for expansion in Asia. India has joined the United States, Japan and Australia in the “Quad,” an informal grouping that seeks to counter China’s increasingly assertive behavior in the Indo-Pacific region. And hundreds of American business and industry leaders will gather to meet with Mr. Modi this week. The visit is expected to include major deals to build American jet engines in India and to sell American drones.
So it is not hard to fathom why India’s leader is getting rock-star treatment in Washington, from a state dinner at the White House to an address on Capitol Hill. President Biden is right to acknowledge the potential of America’s partnership with India using all the symbolism and diplomatic tools at his disposal.
But Mr. Biden cannot ignore the other, equally significant, changes in India during the last nine years: Under Mr. Modi and his right-wing, Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, India has witnessed a serious erosion of the civil and political rights and democratic freedoms guaranteed by the Indian Constitution. Mr. Modi and his allies have been accused of policies that target and discriminate against religious minorities, especially India’s 200 million Muslims, and of using the power of the state to punish rivals and silence critics. Raids on political opponents and dissenting voices have become frequent; the mainstream news media has been diminished; the independence of courts and other democratic institutions has been eroded — all to a chorus of avowals from the B.J.P. that it is acting strictly within the law.
In March, a court in Mr. Modi’s home state sentenced the opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi, to a two-year prison term for defaming the prime minister; though Mr. Gandhi has not been jailed, the sentence led to his expulsion from Parliament, and will most likely prevent him from running again. Before that, in January, the Modi government used emergency laws to limit access to a BBC documentary that reexamined damning allegations that Mr. Modi played a role in murderous sectarian violence in Gujarat State 20 years ago, when he was chief minister there. As this editorial board warned, “When populist leaders invoke emergency laws to block dissent, democracy is in peril.”
This remains true, and it behooves Mr. Biden and every other elected official and business leader who meet with the Indian delegation this week to make sure that a discussion of shared democratic values is on the agenda.
That may be a tall order. Mr. Modi has demonstrated a prickly intolerance for criticism and may still harbor resentment from the nearly 10 years he was effectively barred from traveling to the United States for allegations of “severe violations of religious freedom” over the Gujarat violence. (He has repeatedly denied involvement, and the visa ban was lifted by the Obama administration when Mr. Modi became prime minister.) A public scolding from the White House, especially when the United States is wrestling with its own threats to democracy, would serve little purpose except to anger the Indian public.
Nevertheless, Mr. Biden and other American officials should be willing to have a forthright, if sometimes uncomfortable, discussion with their Indian counterparts. America’s own struggles are humbling proof that even the most established democracies are not immune to problems. As Human Rights Watch notes in a letter to Mr. Biden: “U.S. officials can point to how the U.S. political system has itself struggled with toxic rhetoric, while working to maintain an open and free media. These topics can be discussed openly and diplomatically in both directions.”
The quandary is not limited to India. How the United States manages its relationships with “elected autocracies,” from Poland’s Law and Justice government to Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition in Israel to Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government in Turkey, is one of the most important strategic questions of American foreign policy. The leaders of these countries and others will be watching closely to see how the Biden administration deals with this indispensable but increasingly autocratic Asian democracy.
The administration also faces the problem that the United States’ democratic credentials have been tarnished by Donald Trump and the possibility that he may be back in the White House before long. Mr. Trump’s politics have been openly hailed as inspiration by many an elected autocrat — including Mr. Modi, whose magnetism Mr. Trump likened to Elvis Presley’s at a rally in Houston on an official visit in 2019.
President Biden knows, from his many years in public service, that there will always be points of friction even in the closest partnerships between nations, let alone in relationships with leaders who have a very different view of the world. And senior U.S. government officials say that the administration is keenly aware of the flaws of the Modi government. Yet they believe that India’s vital role on the global stage supersedes concerns about one leader. Far better, they say, to raise concerns in private; and they insist they have raised them in many difficult conversations, and said they would raise them in this week’s meetings with Mr. Modi.
It is essential that they are raised. India has shaped a great and complex democracy out of a rich panoply of people, languages and religious traditions, and it is reaching for a more prominent role in global affairs.
But it is also critical to make clear that intolerance and repression run counter to everything that Americans admire in India, and threaten the partnership with the United States that its prime minister is actively seeking to strengthen and deepen. America wants and needs to embrace India; but Mr. Modi should be left with no illusion about how dangerous his autocratic leanings are, to the people of India and for the health of democracy in the world.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/22/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Long Live the King!
LONDON — With the thrill of coronation still in the air outside Buckingham Palace, it’s tempting for a Yankee to mock the British for the shop windows full of coronation plates and King Charles III coffee mugs. And how can we not roll our eyes when a slice of cake from the 2005 wedding between the new king and queen now sells for $1,600?
Yet I won’t indulge in mockery for two reasons. First, many of the tourists buying the souvenirs have undeniable American accents.
Second, I would never admit this in public — but I’ve come to think that maybe there are advantages to having a royal family.
Britain is, like America, so polarized that any political leader is loathed by a sizable chunk of the population, sowing conflict and risking violence. But with the monarchy, the U.K. is guaranteed a nonpolitical head of state who amounts to a unifying force.
“It helps to have someone who is above politics and can bring people together,” said Chris Patten, a longtime political leader who is now formally Lord Patten of Barnes.
A May poll found that 62 percent of people in Great Britain favored remaining a monarchy, compared to 28 percent who preferred a republic. Young people were somewhat less enthusiastic about royalty than older people, but that has been true for decades: As they age, Britons appear to become more pro-monarchy.
A monarch is not the only option for a nonpolitical head of state. Germany, Israel and other countries have non-royal largely ceremonial heads of state who can stand for harmony above the fray. President Isaac Herzog of Israel tried to do that this year to promote compromise, preserve democratic norms and calm the mass protests in Israel; he warned that the conflict could even lead to civil war.
But even the nonpolitical presidents like Herzog are often former politicians and don’t seem to have the healing power of monarchs. King Charles declined to be interviewed (when I requested time with him, I think his staff giggled). But I’ve occasionally interacted with other members of his family and with royalty in other countries — and it’s funny how even we Americans go weak-kneed over even a measly duchess or, say, a Tongan king.
When Japan gave up fighting in 1945 to end World War II, many in the Tokyo government bitterly opposed the decision. It was perhaps only Emperor Hirohito as the revered leader of Japan who could convince the army to stand down, even if his speech announcing surrender was royally elliptical: “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”
One study of 137 countries over more than a century found that monarchies perform better economically than republics over the long run. The authors concluded that this was in part because monarchs provided a national symbol of unity, reducing internal conflict and threats to property rights.
Kings can be expensive, of course, and it can seem ridiculous to provide public housing in the form of palaces to one family, while countless others are homeless. But in Britain, the royal family may pay for itself with tourism income, and constitutes a useful tool of foreign policy: Every foreign leader wants tea with the sovereign, so when prime ministers ruffle foreign feathers the royals can smooth them.
The royal family is “an integral part of our soft power strategy,” noted Arminka Helic, now the Baroness Helic, a foreign policy expert. Helic grew up in the former Yugoslavia and came to Britain only at the age of 24, but she says she still sees the royals as “the family to which we are all related no matter where we come from.”
I’m not advocating for royalty in America, even if we may be more perilously divided than at any time in a century. George III soured us forever on kings. Which raises the question: What happens when a bad (or mad) king comes along?
Britain dodged a bullet when King Edward VIII abdicated in 1936, for he was a racist who was soft on Nazism, especially because he lived a long life, dying only in 1972. The United Kingdom hit the jackpot with Queen Elizabeth II and seems to have relatively reliable heirs in the form of King Charles and Prince William.
Thailand is less fortunate. When the last, much revered Thai king died in 2016, he was succeeded not by the king’s widely admired daughter but by his scandal-plagued son — who has spent a great deal of time in Germany with his paramours and once promoted his poodle, Foo Foo, to the rank of “air chief marshal.”
Bad kings are difficult to recover from. They’re one reason the number of monarchies has fallen from 160 in 1900 to fewer than 30 now.
But today’s constitutional monarchies like Britain, Japan, Sweden and the Netherlands may benefit by turning to an apolitical family that, in exchange for palaces, will supply a nation with gossip, tourism and a bit of harmony.
So don’t tell a soul, but as I stand outside Buckingham Palace, I think: “God save the king!”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/01/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: FORMS OF GOVERNANCE
My father who was a wise man used to tell me one day all the kings will be gone. Only 5 Kings will remain, the King of Britain and the 4 kings in the deck of cards. Wherever he heard this, the sentence has always been in my thought 
.
.We’re Failing as a Nation - US Poll
These Voters Share Almost No Political Beliefs, but They Agree on One Thing: We’re Failing as a Nation
In a recent poll, some Democrats and most Republicans share a sense of doom.
There are few things that Republicans and Democrats agree on. But one area where a significant share of each party finds common ground is a belief that the country is headed toward failure.
Overall, 37 percent of registered voters say the problems are so bad that we are in danger of failing as a nation, according to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll.
Fifty-six percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said we are in danger of such failure. This kind of outlook is more common among voters whose party is out of power. But it’s also noteworthy that fatalists, as we might call them, span the political spectrum. Around 20 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say they feel the same way.
Where they disagree is about what may have gotten us to this point.
Views on the State of the Country
Percentage saying America is ...
Respondents who said the country was headed in the wrong direction were then asked if the country was in danger of failing as a nation or if problems were bad but the country was not in danger of failing. Percent who chose "don't know" or refused to answer not shown.Source: NYT/Siena College survey of 1,329 registered voters conducted July 23-27, 2023. By The New York Times
Why Republicans say the U.S. is in danger of failing
Republican fatalists, much like Republican voters overall, overwhelmingly support Donald J. Trump. This group is largely older — two-thirds of Republicans over 65 say the country is on the verge of failure — and less educated. They are also more likely than Republican voters overall to get their news from non-Fox conservative media sources like Newsmax or The Epoch Times.
Many of these gloomy Republicans see the Biden administration’s policies as pushing the country to the verge of collapse.
Sign up for the Tilt newsletter, for Times subscribers only. Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, makes sense of the latest political data. Get it in your inbox.
“Things are turning very communistic,” said Margo Creamer, 72, a Trump supporter from Southern California. “The first day Biden became president he ripped up everything good that happened with Trump; he opened the border — let everyone and anyone in. It’s just insane.”
She added that there was only one way to reverse course: “In this next election if Trump doesn’t win, we’re going to fail as a nation.”
Many Republicans saw the pandemic, and the resulting economic impact, as playing a role in pushing the country toward failure.
“Covid gave everyone a wake-up call on what they can do to us as citizens,” said Dale Bowyer, a Republican in Fulton County, Ind. “Keeping us in our houses, not being allowed to go to certain places, it was complete control over the United States of America. They think we’re idiots and we wouldn’t notice.”
Why Democrats say the U.S. is in danger of failing
While fewer Democrats see the country as nearing collapse, gender is the defining characteristic associated with this pessimistic outlook. Democratic and Republican women are more likely than their male counterparts to feel this way.
“I have never seen things as bleak or as precarious as they have been the last few years,” said Ann Rubio, a Democrat and funeral director in New York City. “Saying it’s a stolen election plus Jan. 6, it’s terrifying. Now we’re taking away a woman’s right to choose. I feel like I’m watching the wheels come off something.”
For many Democrats, specific issues — especially abortion — are driving their concern about the country’s direction.
Brandon Thompson, 37, a Democrat and veteran living in Tampa, Fla., expressed a litany of concerns about the state of the country: “The regressive laws being passed; women don’t have abortion access in half the country; gerrymandering and stripping people’s rights to vote — stuff like this is happening literally all over the country.”
“If things continue to go this way, this young experiment, this young nation, is going to fall apart,” he said.
More than just on the wrong track
Pollsters have long asked a simple question to take the country’s temperature: Are things in the U.S. headed on the right track or are they off in the wrong direction?
Americans’ views on this question have become more polarized in recent years and are often closely tied to views of the party in power. So it is not surprising, for example, that currently 85 percent of Republicans said the country was on the wrong track, compared with 46 percent of Democrats. Those numbers are often the exact opposite when there’s a Republican in the White House.
Views on the country’s direction are also often closely linked to the economic environment. Currently, 65 percent of Americans say the country is headed in the wrong direction. That’s relatively high historically, though down from last summer when inflation was peaking and 77 percent of Americans said the country was headed in the wrong direction. At the height of the recession in 2008, 81 percent of Americans said the country was headed in the wrong direction.
Most Think Country Is Headed in the Wrong Direction
Do you think the United States is on the right track, or is it headed in the wrong direction
What seems surprising, however, is the large share of voters who say we’re on the verge of breaking down as a nation.
“We’ve moved so far away from what this country was founded on,” said William Dickerson, a Republican from Linwood, N.C. “Society as a whole has become so self-aware that we’re infringing on people’s freedoms and the foundation of what makes America great.”
He added: “We tell people what they can and can’t do with their own property and we tell people that you’re wrong because you feel a certain way.”
Voters contacted for the Times/Siena survey were asked the “failing” question only if they already said things were headed in the wrong direction. And while this is the first time a question like this has been asked, the pessimistic responses still seem striking: Two-thirds of Republicans who said the country was headed in the wrong direction said things weren’t just bad — they were so bad that America was in danger of becoming a failed nation.
“Republicans have Trump and others in their party who have undermined their faith in the electoral system,” said Alia Braley, a researcher at Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab who studies attitudes toward democracy. “And if Republicans believe democracy is crumbling, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, in that they will stop behaving like citizens of a democracy.”
She added, “Democrats are often surprised to learn that Republicans are just as afraid as they are about the future of U.S. democracy, and maybe more so.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/19/upsh ... 778d3e6de3
In a recent poll, some Democrats and most Republicans share a sense of doom.
There are few things that Republicans and Democrats agree on. But one area where a significant share of each party finds common ground is a belief that the country is headed toward failure.
Overall, 37 percent of registered voters say the problems are so bad that we are in danger of failing as a nation, according to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll.
Fifty-six percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said we are in danger of such failure. This kind of outlook is more common among voters whose party is out of power. But it’s also noteworthy that fatalists, as we might call them, span the political spectrum. Around 20 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say they feel the same way.
Where they disagree is about what may have gotten us to this point.
Views on the State of the Country
Percentage saying America is ...
Respondents who said the country was headed in the wrong direction were then asked if the country was in danger of failing as a nation or if problems were bad but the country was not in danger of failing. Percent who chose "don't know" or refused to answer not shown.Source: NYT/Siena College survey of 1,329 registered voters conducted July 23-27, 2023. By The New York Times
Why Republicans say the U.S. is in danger of failing
Republican fatalists, much like Republican voters overall, overwhelmingly support Donald J. Trump. This group is largely older — two-thirds of Republicans over 65 say the country is on the verge of failure — and less educated. They are also more likely than Republican voters overall to get their news from non-Fox conservative media sources like Newsmax or The Epoch Times.
Many of these gloomy Republicans see the Biden administration’s policies as pushing the country to the verge of collapse.
Sign up for the Tilt newsletter, for Times subscribers only. Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, makes sense of the latest political data. Get it in your inbox.
“Things are turning very communistic,” said Margo Creamer, 72, a Trump supporter from Southern California. “The first day Biden became president he ripped up everything good that happened with Trump; he opened the border — let everyone and anyone in. It’s just insane.”
She added that there was only one way to reverse course: “In this next election if Trump doesn’t win, we’re going to fail as a nation.”
Many Republicans saw the pandemic, and the resulting economic impact, as playing a role in pushing the country toward failure.
“Covid gave everyone a wake-up call on what they can do to us as citizens,” said Dale Bowyer, a Republican in Fulton County, Ind. “Keeping us in our houses, not being allowed to go to certain places, it was complete control over the United States of America. They think we’re idiots and we wouldn’t notice.”
Why Democrats say the U.S. is in danger of failing
While fewer Democrats see the country as nearing collapse, gender is the defining characteristic associated with this pessimistic outlook. Democratic and Republican women are more likely than their male counterparts to feel this way.
“I have never seen things as bleak or as precarious as they have been the last few years,” said Ann Rubio, a Democrat and funeral director in New York City. “Saying it’s a stolen election plus Jan. 6, it’s terrifying. Now we’re taking away a woman’s right to choose. I feel like I’m watching the wheels come off something.”
For many Democrats, specific issues — especially abortion — are driving their concern about the country’s direction.
Brandon Thompson, 37, a Democrat and veteran living in Tampa, Fla., expressed a litany of concerns about the state of the country: “The regressive laws being passed; women don’t have abortion access in half the country; gerrymandering and stripping people’s rights to vote — stuff like this is happening literally all over the country.”
“If things continue to go this way, this young experiment, this young nation, is going to fall apart,” he said.
More than just on the wrong track
Pollsters have long asked a simple question to take the country’s temperature: Are things in the U.S. headed on the right track or are they off in the wrong direction?
Americans’ views on this question have become more polarized in recent years and are often closely tied to views of the party in power. So it is not surprising, for example, that currently 85 percent of Republicans said the country was on the wrong track, compared with 46 percent of Democrats. Those numbers are often the exact opposite when there’s a Republican in the White House.
Views on the country’s direction are also often closely linked to the economic environment. Currently, 65 percent of Americans say the country is headed in the wrong direction. That’s relatively high historically, though down from last summer when inflation was peaking and 77 percent of Americans said the country was headed in the wrong direction. At the height of the recession in 2008, 81 percent of Americans said the country was headed in the wrong direction.
Most Think Country Is Headed in the Wrong Direction
Do you think the United States is on the right track, or is it headed in the wrong direction
What seems surprising, however, is the large share of voters who say we’re on the verge of breaking down as a nation.
“We’ve moved so far away from what this country was founded on,” said William Dickerson, a Republican from Linwood, N.C. “Society as a whole has become so self-aware that we’re infringing on people’s freedoms and the foundation of what makes America great.”
He added: “We tell people what they can and can’t do with their own property and we tell people that you’re wrong because you feel a certain way.”
Voters contacted for the Times/Siena survey were asked the “failing” question only if they already said things were headed in the wrong direction. And while this is the first time a question like this has been asked, the pessimistic responses still seem striking: Two-thirds of Republicans who said the country was headed in the wrong direction said things weren’t just bad — they were so bad that America was in danger of becoming a failed nation.
“Republicans have Trump and others in their party who have undermined their faith in the electoral system,” said Alia Braley, a researcher at Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab who studies attitudes toward democracy. “And if Republicans believe democracy is crumbling, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, in that they will stop behaving like citizens of a democracy.”
She added, “Democrats are often surprised to learn that Republicans are just as afraid as they are about the future of U.S. democracy, and maybe more so.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/19/upsh ... 778d3e6de3
The Problems With China’s Economy Start at the Top
This is a perilous moment for China. The numbers portray a stalling economy, but there is a far more profound concern. Chinese consumers and businesses are losing confidence that their government has the ability to recognize and fix the economy’s deep-seated problems. If President Xi Jinping’s government doesn’t tackle this fundamental issue, any other measures will have little impact in arresting the downward spiral.
Mr. Xi’s government has prioritized state enterprises, which hew closely to the Chinese Communist Party line and are under direct government control, over the private sector. Technology companies, including highflying fintech businesses like Ant Group, that were seen as having grown too big and powerful have been forced to break up into smaller units and are now subject to more state control. The crackdown, which intensified after Mr. Xi tightened his grip on power late last year when the legislature amended the Constitution, allowing him to extend his reign, has also enveloped private companies in education and other sectors. In addition, the government’s apparent hostility toward foreign businesses amid rising geopolitical and economic tensions with the United States and other Western countries — which could affect China’s ability to maintain access to global markets and technology — are worsening the loss of confidence.
The government’s unwillingness to modify its increasingly untenable “zero Covid” policy, followed by the abrupt reversal of that policy last December, further undercut confidence in the policymaking process. This confidence problem is apparent in the tepid private investment and weak household consumption over the past year. Reflecting their concerns about economic prospects, households are saving more and spending less on big-ticket items like cars. China’s currency, the renminbi, is depreciating in value as capital flows out of the country and foreigners become less willing to invest in China.
The worrying cognitive dissonance between the government and entrepreneurs became apparent during a recent trip I took to China. It was striking how officials in Beijing seemed relatively sanguine about the economy and argued that, in recent months, enough had been done to reassure entrepreneurs that they were seen as making important contributions to the economy. Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, thought that the government’s actions spoke louder than its words and that actions taken to cut successful businesses down to size were clear indications of its hostility toward private enterprise.
The reality, which Beijing seems to acknowledge only grudgingly, is that the private sector is crucial to keep the economy chugging. The labor force is shrinking, which leaves productivity as the key driver of growth. Private enterprises, which made the country a global leader in digital payments for instance, have tended to be far more innovative and productive than doddering state enterprises. The government’s desire to encourage domestic innovation and shift the economy toward higher-tech and green technologies cannot rely just on large state enterprises.
Small- and medium-size companies, particularly in the more labor-intensive services sector, are important for employment as well. Despite rapid growth in gross domestic product in recent decades, the Chinese economy has not been able to generate many new jobs, because much of that growth has come from manufacturing investment, and the government has been trying to cut jobs from bloated state enterprises. At a time of slowing growth this becomes a particular concern, as evidenced by the surging youth unemployment rate, which poses risks to social stability.
The increasingly centralized and often wayward nature of policymaking under Mr. Xi has also hurt confidence. One example comes from the property sector, which Beijing has long relied on as a pivotal source of growth — and which had become marked by speculative activity, in part because of government policies that increased the availability of mortgage financing. The Chinese government has rightly let some air out of this bubble, including by limiting financing for multiple home purchases and by tightening eligibility restrictions.
Some property developers told me that they understood the rationale behind the government’s actions but not the abrupt way in which some policy changes were introduced, leaving them little time to adjust. This has reportedly led to a sharp fall in housing prices and construction activity, which the government has now tried to compensate for by reversing some of the restrictions. Such abrupt policy shifts hardly inspire confidence. One view is that officials in Beijing “live above the clouds,” lacking a full understanding of how their attitudes and policies affect businesses.
Private enterprises see worrying signs of rhetoric that could have practical consequences. Mr. Xi’s “common prosperity” initiative, introduced in 2021 and officially described as an effort to quell public disquiet about rising income and wealth inequality, has been interpreted by successful entrepreneurs as being directed squarely at them. The initiative, which has spurred regulatory and anti-corruption crackdowns, has served as a cudgel against private businesses as well as banks and even government officials straying from the party line.
The government’s response to the drumbeat of concerns about rising youth unemployment was to scrub the release of those data. In doing so, it seems to believe that the spread of bad news is behind the loss of confidence. Similarly, even as it becomes apparent that prices for goods and services are falling because of weak demand and excess capacity in some industries, the government has pushed back against talk of deflation. Investors and analysts outside China have said that they have recently been denied access to some of the services provided by Wind Information, a private database with corporate and financial data that had been used to flag concerns about China’s financial markets.
While it has not publicly acknowledged the severity of the economic situation, there are signs that the Chinese government is aware that the confluence of domestic and external difficulties is creating a deflationary spiral that will become increasingly challenging to reverse.
The central bank recently cut interest rates, but cheaper and more plentiful credit will not get households or private businesses to spend more if they are anxious about the future. The move could also worsen currency depreciation and capital flight. Measures to cut income taxes and strengthen spending on health and education could help marginally bolster household consumption. Still, such measures might not amount to more than Band-Aids.
The real challenge is for the government to explicitly recognize that without a strong relationship with its private sector, its hopes of transforming the economy into a high-tech one capable of generating more productivity and employment growth are unrealistic. It needs to back this recognition up with concrete measures to support the private sector, including financial-sector liberalization that will help direct more resources to private businesses rather than state-owned ones. Transparency about information and about its policymaking process will help the government a lot more.
President Xi might favor a command and control system, but he is learning that private-sector confidence is the hardest thing to control. And yet it is vital for realizing his visions for the Chinese economy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/26/opin ... nping.html
Mr. Xi’s government has prioritized state enterprises, which hew closely to the Chinese Communist Party line and are under direct government control, over the private sector. Technology companies, including highflying fintech businesses like Ant Group, that were seen as having grown too big and powerful have been forced to break up into smaller units and are now subject to more state control. The crackdown, which intensified after Mr. Xi tightened his grip on power late last year when the legislature amended the Constitution, allowing him to extend his reign, has also enveloped private companies in education and other sectors. In addition, the government’s apparent hostility toward foreign businesses amid rising geopolitical and economic tensions with the United States and other Western countries — which could affect China’s ability to maintain access to global markets and technology — are worsening the loss of confidence.
The government’s unwillingness to modify its increasingly untenable “zero Covid” policy, followed by the abrupt reversal of that policy last December, further undercut confidence in the policymaking process. This confidence problem is apparent in the tepid private investment and weak household consumption over the past year. Reflecting their concerns about economic prospects, households are saving more and spending less on big-ticket items like cars. China’s currency, the renminbi, is depreciating in value as capital flows out of the country and foreigners become less willing to invest in China.
The worrying cognitive dissonance between the government and entrepreneurs became apparent during a recent trip I took to China. It was striking how officials in Beijing seemed relatively sanguine about the economy and argued that, in recent months, enough had been done to reassure entrepreneurs that they were seen as making important contributions to the economy. Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, thought that the government’s actions spoke louder than its words and that actions taken to cut successful businesses down to size were clear indications of its hostility toward private enterprise.
The reality, which Beijing seems to acknowledge only grudgingly, is that the private sector is crucial to keep the economy chugging. The labor force is shrinking, which leaves productivity as the key driver of growth. Private enterprises, which made the country a global leader in digital payments for instance, have tended to be far more innovative and productive than doddering state enterprises. The government’s desire to encourage domestic innovation and shift the economy toward higher-tech and green technologies cannot rely just on large state enterprises.
Small- and medium-size companies, particularly in the more labor-intensive services sector, are important for employment as well. Despite rapid growth in gross domestic product in recent decades, the Chinese economy has not been able to generate many new jobs, because much of that growth has come from manufacturing investment, and the government has been trying to cut jobs from bloated state enterprises. At a time of slowing growth this becomes a particular concern, as evidenced by the surging youth unemployment rate, which poses risks to social stability.
The increasingly centralized and often wayward nature of policymaking under Mr. Xi has also hurt confidence. One example comes from the property sector, which Beijing has long relied on as a pivotal source of growth — and which had become marked by speculative activity, in part because of government policies that increased the availability of mortgage financing. The Chinese government has rightly let some air out of this bubble, including by limiting financing for multiple home purchases and by tightening eligibility restrictions.
Some property developers told me that they understood the rationale behind the government’s actions but not the abrupt way in which some policy changes were introduced, leaving them little time to adjust. This has reportedly led to a sharp fall in housing prices and construction activity, which the government has now tried to compensate for by reversing some of the restrictions. Such abrupt policy shifts hardly inspire confidence. One view is that officials in Beijing “live above the clouds,” lacking a full understanding of how their attitudes and policies affect businesses.
Private enterprises see worrying signs of rhetoric that could have practical consequences. Mr. Xi’s “common prosperity” initiative, introduced in 2021 and officially described as an effort to quell public disquiet about rising income and wealth inequality, has been interpreted by successful entrepreneurs as being directed squarely at them. The initiative, which has spurred regulatory and anti-corruption crackdowns, has served as a cudgel against private businesses as well as banks and even government officials straying from the party line.
The government’s response to the drumbeat of concerns about rising youth unemployment was to scrub the release of those data. In doing so, it seems to believe that the spread of bad news is behind the loss of confidence. Similarly, even as it becomes apparent that prices for goods and services are falling because of weak demand and excess capacity in some industries, the government has pushed back against talk of deflation. Investors and analysts outside China have said that they have recently been denied access to some of the services provided by Wind Information, a private database with corporate and financial data that had been used to flag concerns about China’s financial markets.
While it has not publicly acknowledged the severity of the economic situation, there are signs that the Chinese government is aware that the confluence of domestic and external difficulties is creating a deflationary spiral that will become increasingly challenging to reverse.
The central bank recently cut interest rates, but cheaper and more plentiful credit will not get households or private businesses to spend more if they are anxious about the future. The move could also worsen currency depreciation and capital flight. Measures to cut income taxes and strengthen spending on health and education could help marginally bolster household consumption. Still, such measures might not amount to more than Band-Aids.
The real challenge is for the government to explicitly recognize that without a strong relationship with its private sector, its hopes of transforming the economy into a high-tech one capable of generating more productivity and employment growth are unrealistic. It needs to back this recognition up with concrete measures to support the private sector, including financial-sector liberalization that will help direct more resources to private businesses rather than state-owned ones. Transparency about information and about its policymaking process will help the government a lot more.
President Xi might favor a command and control system, but he is learning that private-sector confidence is the hardest thing to control. And yet it is vital for realizing his visions for the Chinese economy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/26/opin ... nping.html
America Is an Empire in Decline. That Doesn’t Mean It Has to Fall.
Mr. Rapley is the author, with Peter Heather, of “Why Empires Fall: Rome, America and the Future of the West.”
America likes to think of itself in garlanded terms. The shining city on a hill. The indispensable nation. The land of the free. There’s something to each sobriquet, to be sure. But there’s another phrase, not always so flattering, that also applies to the United States: global empire.
Unlike the other notions, which originated in the birth struggles of the Republic, this one dates to the final stages of World War II. At the famous Bretton Woods Conference, the United States developed an international trading and financial system that functioned in practice as an imperial economy, disproportionately steering the fruits of global growth to the citizens of the West.
Alongside, America created NATO to provide a security umbrella for its allies and organizations such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to forge common policies. Over the second half of the century, this system attained a degree of world domination no previous empire had ever known.
In the past two decades, however, it has sunk into decline. At the turn of the millennium, the Western world accounted for four-fifths of global economic output. Today, that share is down to three-fifths and falling. While Western countries struggle to restore their dynamism, developing countries now have the world’s fastest-growing economies. Through institutions like BRICS and OPEC and encouraged by China, they are converting their growing economic heft into political power.
From this view, it can seem that the United States is following the course of all empires: doomed to decline and eventual fall. America, it’s true, will never again enjoy the degree of global economic and political domination it exercised in the decades after the war. But it can, with the right choices, look forward to a future in which it remains the world’s pre-eminent nation.
To call America an empire is admittedly to court controversy or at least confusion. After all, the United States claims dominion over no countries and even prodded its allies to renounce their colonies. But there’s an illuminating precedent for the kind of imperial project the United States forged after the war: the Roman Empire.
By the fourth century, that empire had evolved from a conquest state into one where the Eternal City remained a spiritual center but actual power was shared across the provinces, with two centers of imperial authority: one in the east and another in the west. In return for collecting taxes, provincial landholding elites enjoyed the protection of the legions, their loyalty to the empire cemented by a real share in its benefits and what the historian Peter Heather calls a unifying culture of Latin, towns and togas.
Like modern America, Rome attained a degree of supremacy unprecedented in its day. But the paradox of great imperial systems is that they often sow the seeds of their own downfall. As Rome grew rich and powerful from the economic exploitation of its peripheries, it inadvertently spurred the development of territories beyond its European frontiers. In time, the larger and politically more coherent confederations that emerged acquired the ability to parry — and eventually roll back — imperial domination.
In the same way, America’s decline is a product of its success. Although developing countries grew more slowly in the postwar period than their Western counterparts, they still grew. By the end of the century, they had started to convert that expanding economic clout into political and diplomatic power. Not only had they begun to acquire the capacity to negotiate better trade and financial agreements, but they also had a crucial bargaining chip in the form of two resources Western businesses now needed: growing markets and abundant supplies of labor.
One of the earliest signs of this more assertive periphery came at the 1999 World Trade Organization conference in Seattle. A group of developing countries joined forces to halt the proceedings, ending the longstanding practice of a handful of Western allies hammering out a draft agreement for presentation to delegates. Since then, developing countries have gradually reduced their dependence on the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, formed lending institutions and begun experimenting with trading arrangements that lessen their dependence on the dollar.
Rome, the story goes, was toppled by so-called barbarian invasions. The truth is more complex. Within a single chaotic generation on either side of the year 400, several confederations crossed into the western half of the empire. On Roman soil, these immigrants then formed themselves into still larger alliances — like the Visigoths and Vandals — that were too powerful for the empire to defeat.
Some commentators have been quick to see modern migration into the West as an equally destructive force. But that’s the wrong lesson to take from Roman history. Its economy was primarily agricultural and steady. If one power rose, another had to fall, since you could not simply expand the resource base to support both. When Rome proved unable to defeat the new contenders, it lost a source of taxes from which it could not recover.
Today’s situation is completely different. Thanks to technological change, economic growth is no longer a zero-sum game, possible in one place but not another. Although Western countries no longer dominate manufacturing and services, they still retain an edge in knowledge-intensive industries like artificial intelligence and pharmaceuticals or where they’ve built brand value, such as in luxury goods, sports and entertainment. Economic growth — even if more slowly than in the periphery — can continue in the West.
But it will require workers. Given that Western societies, with declining birthrates and aging populations, aren’t producing enough workers, they will have to come from the global periphery — both those who immigrate to the West and the many more who stay at home to work in businesses serving Western supply chains. Migration may have eroded the Roman Empire’s wealth. Now it’s what stands between the West and absolute economic decline.
Other parallels with Roman history are more direct. The eastern half of the Roman Empire rode out the collapse of the west in the fifth century and was even able to establish a hegemonic position over the new kingdoms in its lost western territories. This situation could have survived indefinitely had the empire not expended vital resources, starting in the late sixth century, in an unnecessary conflict with its bitter Persian rival. Imperial hubris drove it into a series of wars that, after two generations of conflict, left both empires vulnerable to a challenge that would overwhelm them both in just a few decades: a newly united Arab world.
For America, it’s a cautionary tale. In responding to the inevitability of China’s rise, the United States needs to ask itself which threats are existential and which are merely uncomfortable. There are pressing dangers facing both the West and China, such as disease and climate change, that will devastate all humanity unless nations tackle them together. As for China’s growing militarization and belligerence, the United States must consider whether it’s really facing Thucydides’ trap of a rising power or simply a country defending its widening interests.
If the United States must confront China, whether militarily or — one hopes — just diplomatically, it will inherit big advantages from its imperial legacy. The country still has sources of power that nobody can seriously rival: a currency that faces no serious threat as the world’s medium of exchange, the deep pools of capital managed on Wall Street, the world’s most powerful military, the soft power wielded by its universities and the vast appeal of its culture. And America can still call upon its friends across the globe. All told, it should be able to marshal its abundant resources to remain the world’s leading power.
To do so, though, America will need to give up trying to restore its past glory through a go-it-alone, America First approach. It was the same impulse that pushed the Roman Empire into the military adventurism that brought about its eventual destruction. The world economy has changed, and the United States will never again be able to dominate the planet as it once did. But the possibility of building a new world out of a coalition of the like-minded is a luxury Rome never had. America, whatever it calls itself, should seize the opportunity.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/04/opin ... mpire.html
Coups Are on the Rise. Why?
A recent surge is surprising because successful coups are rare.
Members of Gabon’s Republican Guard got ready before the start of a military parade in honor of Gen. Brice Oligui Nguema, inaugurated as the country’s interim president, in Libreville this month.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Following the news lately is enough to make one wonder if coups might be contagious.
Military leaders seized power in Gabon on Aug. 30, adding it to a list of at least seven African countries — including Niger just a few weeks earlier — that have experienced military takeovers in the last three years.
The recent surge is particularly surprising because coups, particularly successful ones, had been relatively rare in the decades following the end of the Cold War.
“If you told me a decade ago that would be happening today, I would not have thought that that was a reasonable expectation,” said Erica De Bruin, a Hamilton College political scientist who wrote a book in 2020 about coup prevention.
Coups are not actually “contagious” in the sense that one directly causes another, experts say.
“We are seeing more coups not because of a contagion, but because of a more permissive environment,” said Naunihal Singh, a political scientist at the U.S. Naval War College. “So countries that are already coup-prone are less restrained.”
Shifts in the international community’s responses have made coups marginally less risky for would-be plotters. And military leaders may also be learning from each others’ experiences, drawing lessons on how to evade sanctions and international condemnation, and hold on to power.
International condemnation used to make coups riskier. Now, not so much.
To understand why coups are on the increase, it helps to look at why their numbers had fallen after the Cold War ended. There were a lot of reasons for that, of course, but experts say the international community’s new willingness to impose sanctions on regimes that had taken power by force had a significant effect.
“Coups are going to happen when members of the military have some sort of grievance against a regime that they don’t feel they can get addressed, but also where they have the opportunity to see those grievances actually addressed by the coup itself,” De Bruin said.
International sanctions didn’t alter the underlying grievances. But they did change the calculus on the likelihood that a coup would successfully address them: Sanctions, particularly those imposed by regional organizations like the African Union and the Organization of American States, made it harder for military leaders to hang onto power, reducing the chances that they’d stay in office long enough to address the grievances that inspired them in the first place.
Image
A crowd waves flags.
Supporters of Niger’s National Council for Safeguard of the Homeland hold Nigerien flags as they attend the army support concert in front of the Niger and French air base in Niamey, the capital, this month.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
But then, a few years ago, those powerful anti-coup norms began to erode.
One reason is that enforcement has gotten spottier, Singh wrote in a recent article in the Journal of Democracy. The United States, for instance, has repeatedly carved out exceptions to laws requiring foreign aid to be cut off after coups, particularly in countries where national security interests make the US reluctant to jeopardize its relationship with military leaders.
“The U.S. cares more about security and competing with China and Russia than defending democracy,” he said in an interview.
And even when sanctions are imposed, the rise of China as a global power has cushioned their impact. In the decades after the end of the Cold War, most developing countries relied on the United States and other wealthy Western democracies for aid, making sanctions by those governments a particularly potent threat. “But today, the military junta in Burma, for example, can offset U.S., EU, U.K., and Canadian sanctions with Chinese financial and diplomatic support,” Singh writes.
The rise of private mercenaries like the Russia-affiliated Wagner group have allowed a similar kind of substitution. After France announced that it would withdraw its troops from Mali following coups there in 2020 and 2021, for instance, the government turned to Wagner for security assistance instead.
How to launder power
But there is something else going on too, De Bruin said: Coup leaders are learning from others’ examples, figuring out how to use elections to transform their coup-installed governments into something more palatable to the international community.
Think of it as ‘coup laundering’: just as criminals can launder dirty money by running it through legitimate transactions, coup leaders can launder political power by running it through elections.
That’s because there is something of a loophole in the international condemnation of coup-installed regimes: they aren’t considered coup-installed anymore if, after seizing power by force, they win an election.
Image
An official wearing a heavily decorated uniform rides in car.
Gabon coup leader General Oligui after being sworn in as interim president in Libreville, the capital, this month.Credit...Reuters
That has led to a new playbook, De Bruin said: seize power, hang onto it long enough to hold elections, use electoral manipulation and other resources of leadership to win them, and then relax as sanctions on your no-longer-coup-installed regime are lifted.
“What I think we are seeing is some element of learning,” she said. “And so now we have coup leaders who have been able to win elections and then just remain in power. The sanctions disappear, the suspensions disappear.”
That doesn’t mean that coups are likely to return to the high levels seen during the Cold War, when many coups were proxies for the fight between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. But coups can have a compounding effect: as more leaders hang on to power after seizing it by force, the more influence they will have within international organizations. Over time, that may make interest in policing coups fall even further.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/13/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Members of Gabon’s Republican Guard got ready before the start of a military parade in honor of Gen. Brice Oligui Nguema, inaugurated as the country’s interim president, in Libreville this month.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Following the news lately is enough to make one wonder if coups might be contagious.
Military leaders seized power in Gabon on Aug. 30, adding it to a list of at least seven African countries — including Niger just a few weeks earlier — that have experienced military takeovers in the last three years.
The recent surge is particularly surprising because coups, particularly successful ones, had been relatively rare in the decades following the end of the Cold War.
“If you told me a decade ago that would be happening today, I would not have thought that that was a reasonable expectation,” said Erica De Bruin, a Hamilton College political scientist who wrote a book in 2020 about coup prevention.
Coups are not actually “contagious” in the sense that one directly causes another, experts say.
“We are seeing more coups not because of a contagion, but because of a more permissive environment,” said Naunihal Singh, a political scientist at the U.S. Naval War College. “So countries that are already coup-prone are less restrained.”
Shifts in the international community’s responses have made coups marginally less risky for would-be plotters. And military leaders may also be learning from each others’ experiences, drawing lessons on how to evade sanctions and international condemnation, and hold on to power.
International condemnation used to make coups riskier. Now, not so much.
To understand why coups are on the increase, it helps to look at why their numbers had fallen after the Cold War ended. There were a lot of reasons for that, of course, but experts say the international community’s new willingness to impose sanctions on regimes that had taken power by force had a significant effect.
“Coups are going to happen when members of the military have some sort of grievance against a regime that they don’t feel they can get addressed, but also where they have the opportunity to see those grievances actually addressed by the coup itself,” De Bruin said.
International sanctions didn’t alter the underlying grievances. But they did change the calculus on the likelihood that a coup would successfully address them: Sanctions, particularly those imposed by regional organizations like the African Union and the Organization of American States, made it harder for military leaders to hang onto power, reducing the chances that they’d stay in office long enough to address the grievances that inspired them in the first place.
Image
A crowd waves flags.
Supporters of Niger’s National Council for Safeguard of the Homeland hold Nigerien flags as they attend the army support concert in front of the Niger and French air base in Niamey, the capital, this month.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
But then, a few years ago, those powerful anti-coup norms began to erode.
One reason is that enforcement has gotten spottier, Singh wrote in a recent article in the Journal of Democracy. The United States, for instance, has repeatedly carved out exceptions to laws requiring foreign aid to be cut off after coups, particularly in countries where national security interests make the US reluctant to jeopardize its relationship with military leaders.
“The U.S. cares more about security and competing with China and Russia than defending democracy,” he said in an interview.
And even when sanctions are imposed, the rise of China as a global power has cushioned their impact. In the decades after the end of the Cold War, most developing countries relied on the United States and other wealthy Western democracies for aid, making sanctions by those governments a particularly potent threat. “But today, the military junta in Burma, for example, can offset U.S., EU, U.K., and Canadian sanctions with Chinese financial and diplomatic support,” Singh writes.
The rise of private mercenaries like the Russia-affiliated Wagner group have allowed a similar kind of substitution. After France announced that it would withdraw its troops from Mali following coups there in 2020 and 2021, for instance, the government turned to Wagner for security assistance instead.
How to launder power
But there is something else going on too, De Bruin said: Coup leaders are learning from others’ examples, figuring out how to use elections to transform their coup-installed governments into something more palatable to the international community.
Think of it as ‘coup laundering’: just as criminals can launder dirty money by running it through legitimate transactions, coup leaders can launder political power by running it through elections.
That’s because there is something of a loophole in the international condemnation of coup-installed regimes: they aren’t considered coup-installed anymore if, after seizing power by force, they win an election.
Image
An official wearing a heavily decorated uniform rides in car.
Gabon coup leader General Oligui after being sworn in as interim president in Libreville, the capital, this month.Credit...Reuters
That has led to a new playbook, De Bruin said: seize power, hang onto it long enough to hold elections, use electoral manipulation and other resources of leadership to win them, and then relax as sanctions on your no-longer-coup-installed regime are lifted.
“What I think we are seeing is some element of learning,” she said. “And so now we have coup leaders who have been able to win elections and then just remain in power. The sanctions disappear, the suspensions disappear.”
That doesn’t mean that coups are likely to return to the high levels seen during the Cold War, when many coups were proxies for the fight between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. But coups can have a compounding effect: as more leaders hang on to power after seizing it by force, the more influence they will have within international organizations. Over time, that may make interest in policing coups fall even further.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/13/worl ... 778d3e6de3