## 293 Donald Trump, Stephen Bannon and the coming crisis in American national life | Kaiser | TIME

## 293 Donald Trump, Stephen Bannon and the coming crisis in American national life | Kaiser | TIME

Donald Trump, Stephen Bannon and the Coming Crisis in American National Life

David Kaiser

Updated: Nov 18, 2016 5:22 PM Tokyo

During the 1990s, two amateur historians, Neil Howe and the late William Strauss, developed a new theory of American history in two books, Generations: the History of America’s Future (1991), and The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (1997). They identified an 80-year cycle in American history, punctuated by great crises that destroyed an old order and created a new one.

Though their theory is not widely taught in colleges or discussed in the media, Strauss and Howe may well play a major role in Donald Trump’s administration. Stephen Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News who has been appointed Trump’s chief strategist in the White House, is very familiar with Strauss and Howe’s theory of crisis, and has been thinking about how to use it to achieve particular goals for quite a while. I know this because Bannon interviewed both Neil Howe and myself in 2009 while he was making a documentary film about the ongoing financial crisis. The film, called Generation Zero, discussed those ideas in some detail.

Bannon focused on the key aspect of their theory, the idea that every 80 years American history has been marked by a crisis, or “fourth turning,” that destroyed an old order and created a new one: The great crises identified by Strauss and Howe included the era of the American Revolution and the Constitution (1774-1794); the Civil War and its immediate aftermath (1860-68); and the Depression and the Second World War (1929-45). Doing the math, they predicted another great crisis sometime in the first 15 years of the 21st century.

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Strauss and Howe’s major prediction has now obviously come true: Few would deny that the U.S. has been in a serious political crisis for some time, marked by intense partisan division, a very severe recession, war abroad and, above all, a breakdown in the ties between the country and its political establishment.

I was one of very few professional historians to become interested in the work of Strauss and Howe, and I incorporated their insights into books on the origins of the Vietnam War and Franklin Roosevelt’s role in leading the nation into World War II. I have also incorporated their theory into analyses of European history and current events. I must admit that I did not know exactly what I was getting into when Bannon, who was then working at the conservative group Citizens United, contacted me to ask me for an interview, but I appreciated any chance to discuss Strauss and Howe’s ideas and the crisis that was by then indisputably upon us. Bannon is both intelligent and charismatic, and he clearly enjoyed our interview as much as I did. In the finished film, he used my interview perfectly fairly, without attempting to give it his own extreme right-wing slant.

The power of Strauss and Howe’s theory of crises comes from its lack of a specific ideology. My own interpretation of it is that the death of an old political, economic and social order creates an opportunity for any determined movement or leader to put a new vision in place. To use the most striking example, both the United States and Germany were in the midst of a terrible economic and political crisis in 1933. The United States turned to Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal; Germany turned to Adolf Hitler and National Socialism.

In 2009, when Bannon and I met, I hoped that Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress would use the economic crisis of our own age to revive the values of the New Deal. Bannon obviously had other ideas about where the crisis would lead.

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As it turned out, Obama failed to embark on a New Deal. He evidently believed that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with our system and that it could be fixed with only marginal adjustments. Late in his term, he told David Remnick of The New Yorker that Presidents could not, in fact, remake American society, and that that was a good thing. That differentiated him from Lincoln and FDR—and also from today’s Republican Party.

Since at least 2000, in my opinion, the Republican Party has managed to seize and generally keep the initiative during our current crisis precisely because it is the revolutionary party of change, while the Democrats are essentially the party of the status quo. The Republican stance goes back, of course, to the early career of Newt Gingrich in the 1980s. (Gingrich was interviewed at great length in Generation Zero and is evidently destined for a very high position in the new administration. John Bolton, another possible Secretary of State, is also interviewed.) Meanwhile, House Speaker Paul Ryan has been dreaming for years of undoing Medicare and Social Security. The opportunity to do so has now come.

Trump, Bannon and the rest of the Trump campaign have already managed to destroy the old political order. Trump wiped out a slate of traditional Republican candidates and has won the White House, despite losing the popular vote. Meanwhile, a ceaseless Republican political offensive at various levels of government has given Trump an entrenched majority in the House of Representatives and a small majority in the Senate. Soon the conservatives will have a majority on the Supreme Court.

What will they do? Their rhetoric and personalities, viewed in the context of Strauss and Howe’s theory of crisis, suggest that they will not be bound by existing precedents and that they will rely on their own view of the heroes and villains of our time.

Generation Zero slanted the story of the economic crisis rather cleverly. On the one hand, plenty of contributors pointed out that greed and shoddy banking practices had brought about the economic collapse, but the ultimate blame is placed on liberals, bureaucrats and established politicians. And just as Republican politicians and commentators have done for the last seven years, many of the contributors—speaking at the dawn of the Obama administration—pictured a horrible fate under Barack Obama, featuring economic catastrophe and attempts to impose socialism.

This, however, is one of the terrible things about crisis periods: many people will believe almost anything. The United States faces a terrible crisis right now even though our economy is much improved from eight years ago and we are not involved in a large war. And the Republican Party and Donald Trump are poised to take advantage of it. In my opinion, Trump, Bannon, Gingrich, Ryan and the rest will use their opportunity during the next year or two to undo as much of the Democratic legacy as they can—not only the Obama legacy, but that of FDR and LBJ as well.

Meanwhile, however, two other dangers lurk—one of them embodied in my most vivid memory of my own encounter with Bannon.

When I was first exposed to Strauss and Howe I began thinking how their ideas explained the histories of other countries as well, and during our interview, I mentioned that crises in countries like France in the 1790s and Russia after 1917 had led to reigns of terror. Bannon included those remarks in the final cut of Generation Zero.

A second, more alarming, interaction did not show up in the film. Bannon had clearly thought a long time both about the domestic potential and the foreign policy implications of Strauss and Howe. More than once during our interview, he pointed out that each of the three preceding crises had involved a great war, and those conflicts had increased in scope from the American Revolution through the Civil War to the Second World War. He expected a new and even bigger war as part of the current crisis, and he did not seem at all fazed by the prospect.

I did not agree, and said so. But, knowing that the history of international conflict was my own specialty, he repeatedly pressed me to say we could expect a conflict at least as big as the Second World War in the near or medium term. I refused.

Apocalyptic rhetoric and apocalyptic thinking flourish during crisis periods. This represents perhaps the biggest danger of the Trump presidency, and one that will bear watching from all concerned citizens in the months and years ahead.

The Long ViewHistorians explain how the past informs the present

David Kaiser, a historian, has taught at Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, Williams College, and the Naval War College. He is the author of seven books, including, most recently, No End Save Victory: How FDR Led the Nation into War. He lives in Watertown, Mass.

...

## 388 Trump’s refugee ban was emotion, not policy | John Pod-horetz Trump’s Refugee Ban Was Emotion; Not Policy 1 Item added Trump’s Refugee Ban Was Emotion; Not Policy By John Podhoretz, www.commentarymagazine.com View Original January 29th, 2017 paul musgrove tweet Politics & Ideas A Policy of Feelings, Not Facts Abdollah Mostafavi, center, ar-riving from Tehran, Iran, is met by his family including son-in-law Nasser Sorkhavi, left, daugh-ter Mozhgan Mostafavi, second from right, and grandson Kou-rosh Sorkhavi at San Francisco International Airport Saturday, Jan. 28, 2017, in San Francisco. Mostafavi was held at the airport for some time as a result of Pres-ident Donald Trump’s executive order barring citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the U.S. Photo by: AP Photo/Marcio Jo-se Sanchez This institution, COMMEN-TARY, has been at the forefront of the conversation about radical Islam since the publication of Bernard Lewis’s seminal article “The Return of Islam” in January 1976, forty-one years ago. Almost 30 years later, in September 2004, Norman Podhoretz published his seminal “World War IV” about the nature of the civilizational struggle between radical Islam and the West. In between and since, COMMENTARY has published literally hundreds of thousands of words on the subject. I bring this up in the context of Donald Trump’s executive order suspending all refugee entries from Syria, which is based, the president says, on protecting the United States from radical Islam coming to our shores. Indeed, nothing could be more important for the future of the United States, and nothing could be worse than enacting policies that are theoretically designed to serve that purpose but which complicate it immensely instead. The refugee executive order is not a policy based in fact. The facts do not support it. The facts since 9/11 do not offer the hint of a suggestion that refugees who have already gone through a vet-ting process pose a terrorist threat, either here or (as yet) in Europe. The most horrifying recent acts, the ones that triggered Trump’s initial announcement he wanted a total ban on Muslim travel to the United States, involve radicalized homegrown native-born citizen terrorists. Omar Mateen of the Orlando massacre was born in New York. Tafsheen Malik of the San Bernardino slaughter was born in Chicago (his wife, who came into the country because she married a citizen, was from Pakistan, not any of the countries named in Trump’s executive order). The Bataclan killers in Paris were born and raised in Belgium, not in Syria. And so on. Only the Tsarnaev brothers, who commit-ted the Boston Marathon bomb-ings, count as refugees, but they came after securing political asy-lum from Russia—another coun-try not on the list, obviously. So what does this tell us? It tells us this is a policy based on feelings. It is the very partial ful-fillment of a wild and radical campaign promise made hurried-ly after the San Bernardino kill-ings to ban all Muslims from the United States. Given the very partial nature of it, the policy is simply an immigration-restrictionist version of the classic liberal approach to problems; just do something. And do it big. And like such liberal solutions, it is also a form of virtue-signaling to those who support such wild ideas. It’s a way the president who got their vote flat-ters them for their seriousness of purpose and their uncompromis-ing understanding of the need to pursue the truth no matter the cost. Already, apologists and cynics alike are all pointing out Trump is merely doing what he said he would do during the campaign. Well, that’s not really true; you might even say he has taken the coward’s way out for failing to follow through on his proposal to ban all Muslims. Af-ter all, his promulgation of a mass Muslim ban in late 2015 was one of the many reasons many of us were horrified by his candidacy and opposed him, and he won the nomination and the election anyway, so as with everything that’s happened since election day, no one should be surprised. Which doesn’t make it good policy–taken on its own terms—as a way of preventing terrorism inside the United States. There are only two solid de-fenses of it. One is that the Unit-ed States posture toward refugees is entirely voluntary; we need not accept them if we don’t wish to. The problem there is the harsh judgment of history when we haven’t, though we could have. While it’s a solid argument, it’s an awful one, morally and, indeed, politically. The second is that the political correctness of the Obama administration made it impossible for prior officials to do the kind of screening we need—screening to ensure not just that terrorists don’t enter our country and stay here, but that radical Islamists who believe in the supremacy of sharia and promote a specifically non-American view of the proper political order of our liberal re-public are kept out as well. That, I believe, is the theory undergird-ing the baffling decision (appar-ently by Steve Bannon and Ste-phen Miller at the White House) to suspend all entry even by permanent residents with green cards who have traveled to the seven banned countries and are there now. The speculation is that this has been done to close a sharia/terror loophole as follows: Someone who goes back to visit can get radicalized and could be the next terrorist so if you want to dot all the “i”s and cross the “t”s you’ve got to keep them out, too. But in both these cases, it ap-pears even the Trump admin-istration is too politically correct to say any of this out loud, so how are its people going to pre-vail in an argument about it? That’s why I say this is a policy about feelings—about feelings relating to terrorism and sharia and Islam itself. It is a policy that, in its most dangerous it-eration, conflates Islam with rad-ical Islam precisely because it is not accompanied by an argument that separates the two. Rudy Giuliani gave the game away on television this morning. According to The Hill: Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) said in an in-terview on Saturday that Presi-dent Trump had previously asked him about legally implementing a “Muslim ban.” But Giuliani during then dis-puted the notion that the presi-dent’s sweeping executive order barring refugees and people from seven predominantly Muslim na-tions amounts to a ban on Mus-lims. “I’ll tell you the whole his-tory of it: We he first announced it, he said ‘Muslim ban,’” Giuli-ani said on Fox News. “He called me up, he said, ‘put a commission together, show me the right way to do it legally.’” Giuliani said he then put together a commission that included law-makers and expert lawyers. “And what we did was we focused on, instead of religion, danger.” What Giuliani was admitting here is that the overarching goal was a Muslim ban, but the dial-back was to focus on “danger” rather than “religion” even though “religion” was the true target. His panel of experts un-derstood a religious test could not pass constitutional muster, so they came up with a face-saver. In the end, Trump wanted this to fulfill his campaign promise—to show he’d follow through. Bannon and Miller, it seems, want to use it to send an ideolog-ical message about the new, harsher, more no-bull foreign policy approach they are cham-pioning. What the people who will actually have to implement the policy and defend it think—people like the secretary of state and the secretary of homeland security and the like—was not taken into consideration. The feelings ruled. So if this is a policy about feel-ings, feelings about building a wall not only between the U.S. and Mexico but between the U.S. and a whole bunch of other plac-es around the world, counter-feelings deserve a hearing as well. So let me tell a story about my feelings. In 2006, speaking before an audience in suburban Chicago synagogue at an event sponsored by a conservative Jewish organi-zation, I heard the first boos from a friendly audience I’d ever heard. I was asked a question about immigration and the out-rage then being expressed on the Right at George W. Bush’s im-migration reform package. I said, simply, that as an American Jew, I considered America’s openness to immigration the very reason for my existence and one of the nation’s glories. As an American Jew, I considered the knowledge that hundreds of thousands of potential refugees from Nazi Ger-many were turned away under the restrictions placed on immi-gration in a 1924 act of Congress to be one of the great tragedies of our time. Given these facts, I did not feel it would be moral for me to speak out against relatively loose immigration. The boos startled me because we were in a synagogue. But an-gry questioners went at me, that night and many other appearances to follow over the years, with the simple question: “Don’t you believe in enforcing the law?” And they were sure they had me. For how could I, a law-and-order conservative, defend illegal immigration when it was, in fact, illegal? All the pro-immigration arguments aside from the simple moral framework I had proposed—that immigration was a net positive for our economy, that crime had dropped over the course of the past decade even as illegal immigration from Mexico had surged so it couldn’t be a crime producer—could not answer that simple question. The way 12 million Mexicans, in particular, had come to the United States and settled here was illegal. Period. We were actually talking about two different things, but I have to admit we were both conflating them. I was talking about the im-portance of accepting refugees and immigrants fleeing persecu-tion generally, but my view had slid over from that into a more “let everyone in” view that was somewhat antinomian given the nature of the law at the time. They believed they were talking about illegality, but I don’t really think they were. Those driven to rage by illegal immigration— rather than, say, those who have come to accept the powerful but problematic ar-gument that illegal immigration has depressed working-class wages in the United Sates—are operating on the basis of culture, not policy. They believe the country cannot absorb these people and shouldn’t have to; that recent changes in the way our country functions give them no incentive to become good citi-zens or believers and participants in the American experiment, as was the case with previous gen-erations of (legal) immigrants. The organizations that exist to promote illegals do not promote the United States but rather a multicultural worldview that says it is racist to insist on a common language in English and a com-mon belief in American ideals. The more serious voices against freer immigration are right about this. It is a huge problem, and by rejecting the American gospel even as they insist on the right of illegals to live here and share public benefits and the like, these organizations have irresponsibly, foolishly, and reprehensibly helped feed the backlash against them. It is shameful that liberal cul-ture in the United States is no longer willing to say those who come into this country need to become Americans, and indeed, that is the kind of PC that “helped give us Trump.” Living here is a gift to those who were not born here, and it confers an obligation to become part of the American idea and the American experiment. But if Trump and his denizens are unwilling to make that argu-ment—and they are because, af-ter all, in their eyes this country isn’t great any longer and is a disaster and makes bad deals and is awash in crime and carnage—then they are justifying the argument against them that they are making horrible policy for naked political advantage based in disingenuousness. And that’s no way to run a country. ...

## 388 Trump’s refugee ban was emotion, not policy | John Podhoretz

Trump’s Refugee Ban Was Emotion; Not Policy

1 Item added

Trump’s Refugee Ban Was Emotion; Not Policy

By John Podhoretz, www.commentarymagazine.com

View Original

January 29th, 2017

paul musgrove

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Politics & Ideas

A Policy of Feelings, Not Facts

Abdollah Mostafavi, center, arriving from Tehran, Iran, is met by his family including son-in-law Nasser Sorkhavi, left, daughter Mozhgan Mostafavi, second from right, and grandson Kourosh Sorkhavi at San Francisco International Airport Saturday, Jan. 28, 2017, in San Francisco. Mostafavi was held at the airport for some time as a result of President Donald Trump’s executive order barring citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the U.S.

Photo by: AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez

This institution, COMMENTARY, has been at the forefront of the conversation about radical Islam since the publication of Bernard Lewis’s seminal article “The Return of Islam” in January 1976, forty-one years ago. Almost 30 years later, in September 2004, Norman Podhoretz published his seminal “World War IV” about the nature of the civilizational struggle between radical Islam and the West. In between and since, COMMENTARY has published literally hundreds of thousands of words on the subject.

I bring this up in the context of Donald Trump’s executive order suspending all refugee entries from Syria, which is based, the president says, on protecting the United States from radical Islam coming to our shores. Indeed, nothing could be more important for the future of the United States, and nothing could be worse than enacting policies that are theoretically designed to serve that purpose but which complicate it immensely instead.

The refugee executive order is not a policy based in fact. The facts do not support it. The facts since 9/11 do not offer the hint of a suggestion that refugees who have already gone through a vetting process pose a terrorist threat, either here or (as yet) in Europe. The most horrifying recent acts, the ones that triggered Trump’s initial announcement he wanted a total ban on Muslim travel to the United States, involve radicalized homegrown native-born citizen terrorists. Omar Mateen of the Orlando massacre was born in New York. Tafsheen Malik of the San Bernardino slaughter was born in Chicago (his wife, who came into the country because she married a citizen, was from Pakistan, not any of the countries named in Trump’s executive order). The Bataclan killers in Paris were born and raised in Belgium, not in Syria. And so on. Only the Tsarnaev brothers, who committed the Boston Marathon bombings, count as refugees, but they came after securing political asylum from Russia—another country not on the list, obviously.

So what does this tell us? It tells us this is a policy based on feelings. It is the very partial fulfillment of a wild and radical campaign promise made hurriedly after the San Bernardino killings to ban all Muslims from the United States. Given the very partial nature of it, the policy is simply an immigration-restrictionist version of the classic liberal approach to problems; just do something. And do it big.

And like such liberal solutions, it is also a form of virtue-signaling to those who support such wild ideas. It’s a way the president who got their vote flatters them for their seriousness of purpose and their uncompromising understanding of the need to pursue the truth no matter the cost. Already, apologists and cynics alike are all pointing out Trump is merely doing what he said he would do during the campaign. Well, that’s not really true; you might even say he has taken the coward’s way out for failing to follow through on his proposal to ban all Muslims. After all, his promulgation of a mass Muslim ban in late 2015 was one of the many reasons many of us were horrified by his candidacy and opposed him, and he won the nomination and the election anyway, so as with everything that’s happened since election day, no one should be surprised.

Which doesn’t make it good policy–taken on its own terms—as a way of preventing terrorism inside the United States.

There are only two solid defenses of it. One is that the United States posture toward refugees is entirely voluntary; we need not accept them if we don’t wish to. The problem there is the harsh judgment of history when we haven’t, though we could have. While it’s a solid argument, it’s an awful one, morally and, indeed, politically.

The second is that the political correctness of the Obama administration made it impossible for prior officials to do the kind of screening we need—screening to ensure not just that terrorists don’t enter our country and stay here, but that radical Islamists who believe in the supremacy of sharia and promote a specifically non-American view of the proper political order of our liberal republic are kept out as well. That, I believe, is the theory undergirding the baffling decision (apparently by Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller at the White House) to suspend all entry even by permanent residents with green cards who have traveled to the seven banned countries and are there now. The speculation is that this has been done to close a sharia/terror loophole as follows: Someone who goes back to visit can get radicalized and could be the next terrorist so if you want to dot all the “i”s and cross the “t”s you’ve got to keep them out, too.

But in both these cases, it appears even the Trump administration is too politically correct to say any of this out loud, so how are its people going to prevail in an argument about it?

That’s why I say this is a policy about feelings—about feelings relating to terrorism and sharia and Islam itself. It is a policy that, in its most dangerous iteration, conflates Islam with radical Islam precisely because it is not accompanied by an argument that separates the two. Rudy Giuliani gave the game away on television this morning. According to The Hill:

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) said in an interview on Saturday that President Trump had previously asked him about legally implementing a “Muslim ban.”

But Giuliani during then disputed the notion that the president’s sweeping executive order barring refugees and people from seven predominantly Muslim nations amounts to a ban on Muslims. “I’ll tell you the whole history of it: We he first announced it, he said ‘Muslim ban,’” Giuliani said on Fox News.

“He called me up, he said, ‘put a commission together, show me the right way to do it legally.’” Giuliani said he then put together a commission that included lawmakers and expert lawyers. “And what we did was we focused on, instead of religion, danger.”

What Giuliani was admitting here is that the overarching goal was a Muslim ban, but the dial-back was to focus on “danger” rather than “religion” even though “religion” was the true target. His panel of experts understood a religious test could not pass constitutional muster, so they came up with a face-saver.

In the end, Trump wanted this to fulfill his campaign promise—to show he’d follow through. Bannon and Miller, it seems, want to use it to send an ideological message about the new, harsher, more no-bull foreign policy approach they are championing. What the people who will actually have to implement the policy and defend it think—people like the secretary of state and the secretary of homeland security and the like—was not taken into consideration. The feelings ruled.

So if this is a policy about feelings, feelings about building a wall not only between the U.S. and Mexico but between the U.S. and a whole bunch of other places around the world, counter-feelings deserve a hearing as well. So let me tell a story about my feelings.

In 2006, speaking before an audience in suburban Chicago synagogue at an event sponsored by a conservative Jewish organization, I heard the first boos from a friendly audience I’d ever heard. I was asked a question about immigration and the outrage then being expressed on the Right at George W. Bush’s immigration reform package. I said, simply, that as an American Jew, I considered America’s openness to immigration the very reason for my existence and one of the nation’s glories. As an American Jew, I considered the knowledge that hundreds of thousands of potential refugees from Nazi Germany were turned away under the restrictions placed on immigration in a 1924 act of Congress to be one of the great tragedies of our time. Given these facts, I did not feel it would be moral for me to speak out against relatively loose immigration.

The boos startled me because we were in a synagogue. But angry questioners went at me, that night and many other appearances to follow over the years, with the simple question: “Don’t you believe in enforcing the law?” And they were sure they had me. For how could I, a law-and-order conservative, defend illegal immigration when it was, in fact, illegal? All the pro-immigration arguments aside from the simple moral framework I had proposed—that immigration was a net positive for our economy, that crime had dropped over the course of the past decade even as illegal immigration from Mexico had surged so it couldn’t be a crime producer—could not answer that simple question. The way 12 million Mexicans, in particular, had come to the United States and settled here was illegal. Period.

We were actually talking about two different things, but I have to admit we were both conflating them. I was talking about the importance of accepting refugees and immigrants fleeing persecution generally, but my view had slid over from that into a more “let everyone in” view that was somewhat antinomian given the nature of the law at the time. They believed they were talking about illegality, but I don’t really think they were.

Those driven to rage by illegal immigration— rather than, say, those who have come to accept the powerful but problematic argument that illegal immigration has depressed working-class wages in the United Sates—are operating on the basis of culture, not policy. They believe the country cannot absorb these people and shouldn’t have to; that recent changes in the way our country functions give them no incentive to become good citizens or believers and participants in the American experiment, as was the case with previous generations of (legal) immigrants. The organizations that exist to promote illegals do not promote the United States but rather a multicultural worldview that says it is racist to insist on a common language in English and a common belief in American ideals. The more serious voices against freer immigration are right about this. It is a huge problem, and by rejecting the American gospel even as they insist on the right of illegals to live here and share public benefits and the like, these organizations have irresponsibly, foolishly, and reprehensibly helped feed the backlash against them.

It is shameful that liberal culture in the United States is no longer willing to say those who come into this country need to become Americans, and indeed, that is the kind of PC that “helped give us Trump.” Living here is a gift to those who were not born here, and it confers an obligation to become part of the American idea and the American experiment.

But if Trump and his denizens are unwilling to make that argument—and they are because, after all, in their eyes this country isn’t great any longer and is a disaster and makes bad deals and is awash in crime and carnage—then they are justifying the argument against them that they are making horrible policy for naked political advantage based in disingenuousness. And that’s no way to run a country.

...

The Party Declines

The Party Declines

by Jacob T. Levy

January 18, 2017

For just over forty years, the Republican Party had a famously orderly succession to its leadership. From 1968 until 2012, every non-incumbent presidential nominee was, in one sense or another, the next in line, as either (1) the most recent Republican vice-president, (2) the runner-up in a previous contested Republican primary, or (3) the namesake son of the previous Republican president.

This lent even raucous Republican presidential nomination races an aura of seriousness and stability. The nomination sometimes went to someone who was once a rebel within the party (such as Ronald Reagan or John McCain), but only after he had put in some time in the organization, been given a thorough second look by the electorate, and developed into something more like a respected elder statesman.

Well, things continue until they don’t.

The 2016 election exposed grave vulnerability and fragility in the American party system. One major party was successfully hijacked by an extremist outsider in the face of initial opposition from a huge portion of the party’s elites and elected leaders. The other party came surprisingly close (if still not objectively very close) to meeting the same fate—and if Bernie Sanders had the advantage over Donald Trump of long experience in the Senate, his relationship to the Democratic Party was even more attenuated than Trump’s relationship to the Republican Party. (Sanders formally became a Democrat for the first time only in order to run in the primaries, and in the Senate he still identifies as an independent who caucuses with the Democrats.)

It is little appreciated how much liberal democracy depends on strong parties, and a revitalized, re-understood liberalism adequate to the moment will have to overcome a traditional distaste for partisan politics.

Seventy-five years ago the political scientist E.E. Schattscheider wrote that political parties are “the orphans of political philosophy.” For more than a decade, a handful of political theorists led by Harvard’s Nancy Rosenblum (full disclosure: my undergraduate advisor) have been working to integrate an appreciation for parties and partisanship into our understanding of what healthy democratic government is like. The election of 2016 showed how urgent that task is; as political scientist Julia Azari has been arguing for months, “the defining characteristic of our moment is that parties are weak while partisanship is strong.”  

I suggested in my previous essay that “voting patterns didn’t change enough between 2012 and 2016 to justify big claims about new national moods or about Trump’s distinctive appeal. I believe the consequences of this election will be deeply abnormal. But the voting behavior that brought it about was, in the end, very normal.” That normality was the strong partisanship mentioned by Azari. 89% of Democrats voted for Clinton, 90% of Republicans for Trump. Those figures are down a touch from 2012—both major parties lost more voters to third parties than in 2012—but considering the year of headlines about how unpopular both candidates were, the result is stark.

For a while in the Fall it seemed that Trump would alienate enough Republicans to suffer a sizeable loss to Clinton. But those alienated Republicans had mostly shifted their voting intentions to third parties, not to Clinton, and most of them came home again by election day. Which is to say, we should start by understanding that partisans are very, very likely to vote for their own parties’ candidates, regardless of those candidates’ personal merits or indeed the substance of their views. Republicans will even vote for an opponent of free trade and of the postwar western alliance who grossly offends against conservative Christian sexual mores, if that’s who is at the top of their ticket.

The most important political science book of 2016, Christopher Achen’s and Larry Bartel’s Democracy for Realists, shows that we should expect this. Systematic political beliefs, ideas about policies, and views about the state of the world don’t drive decisions about what party to support among most voters most of the time. It’s the other way around: the initial judgment call about which side I’m on (a judgment call that is often shaped by intergenerational habits or membership in identity groups: which party is the party for people like me?) then leads me to bring my beliefs, ideas, and views into line with those that prevail on my side.

This is in part a matter of economizing on information, which we all do, because we have to. No mind could contain the information needed for sufficiently-informed decisionmaking about the countless policies decided by a modern government, and no life contains enough hours to study it, even if the mind could contain it. But it’s not just a matter of low-information voters using parties as a substitute for judgment.

Achen and Bartels show that the adjustment of beliefs (even about factual questions) to match the party’s often increases with greater information and education; it takes some sophistication to correctly understand which side of an issue one’s party is on, after all.

All of which is to say: once Donald Trump got the nomination, there was a real chance of his being elected. (Note that this means no one should ever wish for, and they certainly shouldn’t engage in, strategic cross-party voting to help a major party to nominate a truly disastrous candidate. The other party’s candidate starts with a very large part of the electorate that’s almost sure to vote for them; and that could well put them close enough to a plurality that they’re a stock market crash, a terrorist attack, or an FBI letter away from winning. Although there is now some debate about this finding, Achen and Bartels argue that there’s strong evidence that weather or even shark attacks can jiggle the needle.) In the face of strong partisanship among voters, a lot depends on the strength and quality of the parties as institutions in shaping nomination outcomes.

The question, then, is how did Trump win the nomination?

The immediate answer involves a lot of nervous, feckless, or opportunistic Republican elites waiting for other Republican elites to do the risky work of seriously opposing him, or just taking for granted that he’d implode of his own accord like previous vanity and novelty candidates like Herman Cain had done. In the fall of 2015 Trump flirted with the possibility of running as a third-party candidate if he didn’t like how the Republican establishment treated him; and any of his rivals who took direct aim at him became the target of his mud-wrestling style of politics. (Ted Cruz stood out for the shamelessness of his strategy: hug Trump close and actively praise him, the better to be able to sweep up his support once, presumably, other Republicans had done the work of taking him down.)

Democratic elites, in their capacity as superdelegates, at least faced some pressure to get off the fence and declare for a candidate, allowing Clinton an early show of strength. The Republican Party doesn’t have superdelegates to defend the party’s organizational interests, and Republican officeholders were extremely slow to endorse or rally around any candidate. The RNC seemed so unnerved by the third party threat that its leadership sat on their hands.

Enumerating these bad decisions is just the detailed way of saying: it turned out that the party establishment didn’t have enough organizational strength to be able to repel the invader. An RNC more confident in the party’s strength would have made different choices. Republican officeholders and donors with a clearer sense of partisan coherence might have rallied around one alternative and pressured others out of the race soon enough to matter.

In other words, while we can easily imagine smarter, earlier, and braver action by party elites that would have changed the outcome, suggesting that the party might not have been organizationally impotent, the party elites managed things so haplessly in part because they were organizationally weak and didn’t have tools they were confident in.

In an important new paper, NYU law professor Samuel Isaacharoff argues that the ability of American parties to effectively coordinate political action has been undermined by reforms and legal restrictions including the decline in patronage, the increasing reliance on primary elections (I would add, especially “open” primaries), and campaign finance reform that disproportionately targets highly-visible fund-raising by the parties themselves. The result is “hollowed out” institutions that are vulnerable to “hostile takeover.” Presidential campaigns end up standing substantially on their own in organizational terms, and remake the party afterwards if they win. Trump had notoriously little organizational contact or useful coordination with the RNC in the summer and fall; it turned out not to matter as much as nearly all pundits expected.

Why should we care?

The expectations of the founders notwithstanding, parties aren’t a pathology. There is no case of anything resembling democratic politics in a large modern nation-state that doesn’t involve party competition. Parties aggregate ideas, interests, and ideologies into medium-to-large coalitions, offering information to voters that is even approximately manageable. (Imagine if responsible voting involved not only a mastery of millions of pieces of information about thousands of policies, but also finding out about where the dozens of candidates who appear on a typical ballot—from president to dogcatcher—stood on each of them.) Parties encourage tradeoffs and turn-taking among the groups that make up those coalitions, providing rewards for moderation and patience. And they monitor both their own politicians and the other side’s politicians for gross malfeasance or misgovernment.

A party has a longer time horizon than does an individual politician, and doesn’t want to be tarred with an individual politician’s sins. The individual politician may have an interest in short-term corruption, demagogic popularity, and personal power, but their own party has an interest in keeping them in check. And if their own party forgets about that interest, the opposition is there to remind them.

The elites in the Republican Party spent late 2015 and 2016 showing every sign of knowing that Trump was bad for their party. They simply couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do enough about it. As voters and as people we should hold them responsible for their failure, but as citizens trying to understand the current state of affairs and looking for routes toward improvement, we should worry about the institutional weakness their failure revealed.

Democratic government needs parties; parties do not need democracy. As a method of integrating large numbers of people into organized mass politics, the party has also been a tool of authoritarianism and totalitarianism—indeed, party organization is one of the key ways in which modern totalitarianism differs from pre-modern tyranny.

In other words, the fact that we need parties as such is the beginning, not the end, of responsible analysis here. We need healthy and competing parties with reasonably responsible elites operating under rules and institutions that encourage ongoing responsibility. The breakdown of parties like that is an easily-overlooked piece of the fragility of free societies—for example, when they become vehicles for the organization of mass support for one strongman, instead of coalitions of cooperating groups brought together by groups of intermediating elites. Parties are only semi-formally a part of the state, and at first glance don’t seem like a part of its constitutional machinery, but their weakness or breakdown becomes weakness and breakdown in the system as a whole.

Isaacharoff’s paper analyzes parties through the model of the corporate business firm. This is useful and illuminating. As Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast have argued, there’s something important in the early-19th-century conjunction of the rise of mass-membership partisan democratic politics and the transformation of the corporation from a monopolistic tool of mercantilist power into an organizational form open for anyone to access in a competitive market. That is, modern competitive democracy and modern competitive commercial capitalism are both part of what they call the “open access order” in which access to organizational tools that solve collective action problems is widely available.

In classical liberal or libertarian social thought, the commercial corporate firm is an object of constant analysis; but when it comes to firms’ political counterpart, that body of thought looks more like political philosophy than like political science, and parties are nowhere to be found. (A thinker like F.A. Hayek might mention that he identifies as an Old Whig to signal what his commitments are, but the sense of the Whigs as a political party doesn’t play any part in that.) I would argue that this is of a piece with classical liberal social theory’s neglect of democratic political processes and indeed of political science as a whole. Classical liberals rightly don’t believe that politics is the most morally valuable thing in the world, but the liberal order that encompasses such values as freedom of religion and speech, due process of law, and open commerce is structured and protected by its political environment. That order  is acutely vulnerable when those political structures fail. Our colleagues in economics (and in law-and-economics) do constant valuable work analyzing which legal rules and institutional forms best allow the commercial corporate firm to fulfill desirable economic functions—and which are most likely to become perverse institutional failures. Liberal political thought desperately needs to pay as much attention to the firm’s political counterpart.

I haven’t offered solutions here. I hope to develop ideas about solutions in this space over the next year. But treatment comes after diagnosis. We have to start by understanding that the dangers faced by the political and constitutional order have a lot to do with the weakness of the parties that we rely on to to make that order function.

Jacob T. Levy is Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory and Director of the Yan P. Lin Centre for the Study of Freedom and Global Orders in the Ancient and Modern Worlds at McGill University; author of Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom; a blogger at Bleeding Heart Libertarians; and a Niskanen Center Adjunct Fellow and Advisory Board Member.

Dec. 3. 73歳運転の車がゴミ収集車と衝突 銀行に突っ込む(2016/12/03 11:55)

Asahi link

Google Drive link

東京・渋谷区で、73歳の女性の運転する乗用車がごみ収集車と衝突し、近くの銀行に突っ込んで女性3人がけがをしました。

乗用車、じょうようしゃ。passenger vehicle;; ゴミ収集者、ゴミしゅうしゅう。rubbish collection truck;; 衝突（する）、しょうとつ（する）。collision; crash;; 突っ込む、つっこむ。to thrust into (as in a car crashing into a wall); to poke;;

警視庁によりますと、（3日）午前6時半ごろ、渋谷区幡ケ谷の交差点で、右折しようとした73歳の女性の運転する乗用車と直進してきたごみ収集車が衝突しました。

警視庁、けいしちょう。(Tokyo) Metropolitan Police;; 幡ヶ谷、はたがや。Hatagaya (an area in Shibuya);; 右折する、うせつする。making a right turn;; 直進する、ちょくしんする。going straight ahead;;

その衝撃で2台は歩道に乗り上げ、乗用車は近くの銀行に突っ込みました。

衝撃する、しょうげきする。shock, crash;; 乗り上げる、のりあげる。to run aground;;

乗用車を運転していた73歳の女性と一緒に乗っていた20代と40代の女性がいずれも軽いけがをしました。

何れも、いずれも。both; either; any; all; neither or none (with neg., verb);;

ごみ収集車の運転手らにけがはありませんでした。

運転手ら、うんてんしゅら。drivers (NB: the ら makes it plural);;

事故当時は早朝で交通量は少なく、警視庁が事故の原因を調べています。

早朝、そうちょう。early morning;; 交通量、こうつうりょう。volume of traffic;;

現場は甲州街道で、首都高速道路の降り口が近くにあることなどから見通しはあまり良くないということです。

現場、げんば。scene of the crime or incident;; 甲州街道、こうしゅかいどう。A road;; 首都、しゅと。capital city;; 高速道路、こうそくどうろ。highway; freeway; expressway; motorway;; 降り口、おりぐち。top of a flight of stairs; exit involving a descent (e.g. from a bus);; 見通し、みとおし。unobstructed view; visibility;;

December 13, 2016

The Defense of Liberty Can’t Do Without Identity Politics

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by Jacob T. Levy

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In his post introducing the Niskanen Center’s project to revitalize liberalism, Will Wilkinson called for both restating old liberal truths and for updating them for our own era, in light of what we have learned, echoing F.A. Hayek’s articulating of his own task in his era. My first essay was a restatement of the “old truth” of, well, truth, recalling arguments from Hayek’s own era of the struggle against totalitarianism. This one will be more of an updating, a defense of an important evolution in liberal ideas. Since Hayek’s time, liberalism has become more, and more self-consciously, amenable to what’s sometimes (and usually derisively) called “identity politics.” This is progress to hold onto, not a mistake to be abandoned.
There’s a hypothesis afoot that identity politics or “political correctness,” particularly on the left, generated a backlash that elected Trump. This backlash is sometimes understood as a self-conscious turn to white identity politics, and sometimes as just sheer middle-[white-]American irritation with cultural elites and an attraction to Trump’s willingness to ignore their taboos and pieties. Part of the claim about identity politics is that it is self-undermining and so needs to be discarded, regardless of its substantive merits. In the language of political philosophy, the claim is that attention to the concerns of minorities violates a requirement  that  norms or ideals demonstrate stability when acted upon. Given the prominence of this idea in post-election commentary, I think it’s important to show that it’s wrong before turning to the actual merits of identity politics.
Throughout I’ll be using the contemporary language of “identity politics,” but building on arguments I developed using the different language of “multiculturalism” in The Multiculturalism of Fear and of “intermediate group pluralism” in Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom.
Electoral backlash
The politicians and commentators who have talked about the election as a backlash against identity politics and political correctness range from the Bernie Sanders left to the George Will right. Some of the most prominent voices have been libertarians or centrist-liberals like Reason’s Robby Soave or historian of political thought (and my former colleague) Mark Lilla. What they all share, as far as I can tell, is an irritation with identity politics that predates the election.
Soave is a fixture on the “political correctness” beat and his post-election commentary openly acknowledged that its purpose was to tell us that he told us so.
Lilla’s book The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction had already approvingly cited the idea that “left-wing activists [in France] made a disastrous mistake in the 1970s by abandoning the traditional working class and turning toward identity politics. Deserted, the workers turned toward the National Front and adopted its xenophobia…”
Not everyone who has been sounding alarm bells about identity politics and political correctness has written a post-election commentary blaming them for Trump’s victory; longtime critic Jonathan Chait has been conspicuous by his refusal to indulge the genre. But those post-election blamings have all come from such pre-existing critics. This alone should tell us to be on the lookout for the so-called “pundit’s fallacy,” the idea that one’s own normative commitments just happen to also be the best political strategy. The pundit’s fallacy when applied to losses takes the form of a morality play: because you fools did the thing I don’t like, the voters punished you. Lilla solemnly noted that “those who play the identity game should be prepared to lose it.” The headline on Soave’s article was less subtle still: “Donald Trump won because leftist political correctness inspired a terrifying backlash: What every liberal who didn’t see this coming needs to understand.”
The 2016 election is bringing forth especially strange versions of pundits’ fallacies and morality plays. Donald Trump received a smaller share of the popular vote than Mitt Romney did in 2012, but his Electoral College victory was so unexpected that it seems to call forth explanation after explanation. The result is almost certainly over-explanation: theories get offered that, if they were true, would seem to imply that Trump should have done much better than he did, and much better than Romney did. But there is a powerful temptation to attribute the surprising and dramatic fact of Trump’s win to some issue about which one had some preexisting ax to grind.
The backlash hypothesis is of this sort. Trump got a lower share of the white vote than Romney did (58% vs 59%). There was some change in both directions within the white vote: college-educated whites shifted toward the Democratic column by a few points (though a plurality still voted for Trump), but non-college-educated whites moved in larger numbers toward Trump (he got 67% of their votes, versus 62% for Romney). White men shifted toward Trump by 1% relative to 2012, white women in the other direction by 3%. This back-and-forth of course meant that Trump eked out victories in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and therefore the presidency, by a combined 80,000 or so votes across the three states. But fundamentally, voting patterns didn’t change enough between 2012 and 2016 to justify big claims about new national moods or about Trump’s distinctive appeal. I believe the consequences of this election will be deeply abnormal. But the voting behavior that brought it about was, in the end, very normal.
An 80,000 vote margin in a 137 million vote election, about .05%, is susceptible of almost endless plausible explanations. The number of different factors that might well have moved that many votes is very large. So there are a lot of different true but-for explanations: but for Clinton’s failure to campaign in Wisconsin, but for the Comey letter, but for stricter voter ID laws and reductions in the numbers of polling places, but for Jill Stein, and so on, ad infinitum. A Democratic party strategist has good reason to take lots of them very seriously. But anyone trying to generalize about popular beliefs or the electorate’s mood should be very wary of any of them. Grabbing a plausibly-true but-for explanation of 80,000 votes, as if it says something big and true about the whole electorate, will over-explain the outcome. An explanation that is one of the many valid ones for those 80,000 votes, and thus for the Electoral College outcome, but that implies some large shift in opinion or mood toward Trump, is a bad explanation overall.
So too is any explanation that is incompatible with the observed variation in the polls over the course of the campaign. The worst moments for Trump’s campaign focused on egregious episodes of political incorrectness.  These included his sustained attack on Judge Gonzalo Curiel as being unfit to judge a lawsuit against him because of his “Mexican heritage”; his feud with the Khizr and Ghalaza Khan after the Democratic National Convention, prominently including his suggestion that Ms. Khan wasn’t allowed to speak on camera because she is Muslim; the week when he kept attention on the Alicia Machado story and thus on his history of sexist remarks; and the days after the release of the Billy Bush video in which he bragged about kissing and sexually grabbing women without their consent. In other words, the more the electorate focused on his proud political incorrectness, the more they recoiled from him. The narrative about some broad celebration of his political incorrectness can’t account for this in any sensible way. Ultimately Trump’s racism, misogyny, Islamophobia, and willingness to give a platform to online anti-Semitism didn’t stop a normal level of white voters from voting for him. But the poll evidence suggests that they were most reluctant to support him at the moments when these things were most vividly on their minds.
Even among explanations that are unpersuasive because they overpredict Trump’s support, some are worse than others—for example, any that depend on implausible claims about voter knowledge. The kinds of pet explanations that appeal to professional pundits are very likely to be of that sort. Take Soave, who has been complaining about “political correctness” on university campuses for years. The day after the election, he wrote:

But there’s another major piece of the puzzle, and it would be a profound mistake to overlook it. Overlooking it was largely the problem, in the first place. Trump won because of a cultural issue that flies under the radar and remains stubbornly difficult to define, but is nevertheless hugely important to a great number of Americans: political correctness. More specifically, Trump won because he convinced a great number of Americans that he would destroy political correctness.

Soave covers disputes about political correctness for a living. Other media professionals, as well as academics, might read this and nod worriedly; they follow the flare-ups about cultural politics and freedom of speech on university campuses, or disputes about which celebrity has said or done something “problematic,” routinely. But these remain obscure to the vast majority of voters. And the important thing to know about voters who are still undecided a week or two before a presidential election is that they know exceptionally little about politics. To a first approximation, we should guess that they know nothing about any particular political dispute that isn’t on national television that day. Journalists and academics constantly overestimate how much other people follow political news (as well as overestimating what proportion of important and relevant political information we ourselves have, a separate problem). This is one of the sources of the pundit’s fallacy. And it absolutely applies here.
I should be clear that I’ve got my own list of wacky, ridiculous, and sometimes quite wicked excesses of identity politics and political correctness. I suspect that most people who spend much time on university campuses, and aren’t themselves very far on the left, do. It turns out that 18-year-olds seized of the conviction of their own righteousness are prone to immoderation and simplistic views. (Who knew?) And the last several years have absolutely seen a new level of identity-politics policing of popular culture. This has certainly not come only from the left: witness GamerGate and the preemptive online fury against the new women-led Ghostbusters movie. But there have been cases on the left I would identify as excesses.
What I can’t see any excuse for doing is mapping my list of excesses onto the voting behavior of 80,000 very-low-information voters in three states, and then ignoring either Trump’s unpopularity at the moments of his own political incorrectness, or the absence of any general (or white) swing in Trump’s direction relative to the baseline of ordinary partisanship. A lot of butterflies flapped their wings to bring about the November 8 result, but we have particularly little reason to think that this was one of them.
What this means is that identity politics hasn’t somehow been shown to be self-undermining by this election. It doesn’t violate what’s sometimes referred to as the stability condition of a normative project. If we had reason to endorse identity politics on November 7, we didn’t lose it on November 8. Of course, Soave, Lilla, and company all would have denied that we had good reason to support it on November 7. I now turn to the argument that we did.
Identity politics and political action
Let’s begin by making clear that identity politics isn’t really the name of a new phenomenon. Relative to an Old Left expectation that economic classes are the fundamental lines of political division, the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s associated with the civil rights movement, with American Indian politics, and with women’s and gay liberation seemed anomalous. But there was never any reason to believe the Old Left’s story in the first place, least of all in the United States where a large proportion of the country had almost always been governed by a political coalition defined by white identity politics.
There is something particularly absurd in the post-election morality plays that say “whites [or white Christians, or white Christian men] have now learned how to do identity politics and how to vote like an aggrieved ethnic group, because that’s what other groups have been doing all these years.” White identity politics is a constitutive fact of American politics, and if an election in which the Republican got the normal share of the white vote counts as white identity politics in action, well, that suggests a deep problem, but it doesn’t suggest a new problem.
White identity politics has moreover been a constitutive fact of the illiberal expansion of state power. The effect of some of the oldest instances of this are still with us, as is seen in the recent struggle over placing the Dakota Access Pipeline on lands that were reserved to the Sioux nation in an 1851 treaty that was subsequently violated but never voided. The effects of the decades-long white welfare state and the redistributive subsidizing of white wealth accumulation through housing policy are very much still with us in the wealth gap between whites and blacks, to say nothing of the enduring effects of racially discriminatory housing and urban policy on the shape of American cities. But the most currently politically salient effect of white identity politics as a source of state power is the combination of policing, imprisonment, crime policy, and drug policy.
If you think—as I think any liberal who cares about liberty, whether classical, market, neo-, welfarist, Rawlsian, or whatever, must—that the combination of mass incarceration and aggressive policing amounts to a grave injustice, then you need to be able to think in race-conscious terms. What brought about this crisis? The war on drugs and police militarization, some readers will say. Okay, but what brought about the war on drugs and police militarization? The answer isn’t some simple intellectual mistake. The answer is deeply tied up in American racial politics.
The disproportionate impact of mass incarceration and aggressive policing on African-Americans isn’t some unfortunate side-effect of well-intentioned policies. The politics of drug prohibition, the war on drugs, and the subsequent expansions of police power and imprisonment were never racially innocent to begin with, and it is no accident that Nixon launched the War on Drugs when the ink was barely dry on the formal end of Jim Crow segregation and disenfranchisement.
As has so often happened in American history, state power expanded in order to persuade white voters that blacks were being kept under control. The appropriation of the language of freedom and anti-statism by those seeking to defend state-level racial tyrannies in the south fools more people than it should, but illiberal state power has far more often been caused by white racism than resisted by it. To think otherwise, one has to think that police and prisons don’t count as instances of state power at all.
Let’s return to Lilla:

The moral energy surrounding identity has, of course, had many good effects. Affirmative action has reshaped and improved corporate life. Black Lives Matter has delivered a wake-up call to every American with a conscience. Hollywood’s efforts to normalize homosexuality in our popular culture helped to normalize it in American families and public life.

On the other side of the scale, he puts… the demands on college campuses to allow students to identify the gendered or non-gendered pronouns by which they wish to be addressed. Treating these as comparable in magnitude suggests a deep failure of perspective.
Black Lives Matter has provided the first truly large-scale political mobilization against police violence and mass incarceration since the War on Drugs began. It’s perfectly true that many liberal (very much including libertarian) scholars and analysts have been calling for reform of police practices, an end to police militarization and civil forfeiture abuse, respect for civil liberties, and drug decriminalization or legalization for a long time. It’s true that it’s possible to offer those analyses in a race-neutral way. But given that the policies aren’t race-neutral, it shouldn’t surprise us that opposition to them isn’t either, and that the real political energy for mobilizing against them would be race-conscious energy.
If Black Lives Matter is “identity politics,” then identity politics has provided one of the most significant political mobilizations in defense of freedom in the United States in my lifetime. That doesn’t belong on the “to be sure” exception side of a rule that is driven by the politics of gender pronouns. It’s precisely the other way around.
If there is any feature of identity politics that has triggered a political backlash, I think it is far less likely to be gendered pronouns or the more exotic extremes of campus politics that Soave covers on a regular basis, and far more likely to be the high-profile Black Lives Matter. But on any plausible account of political action and political change—something liberals have sometimes lacked—the political energy provided by BLM is sure to be vital to any effective long-term solutions to the policing and incarceration crises.
The point generalizes. Until 2003, many states criminalized a variety of forms of sexual behavior between consenting adults. There were identity-neutral ways of describing the illiberal wrong of this. But the laws weren’t identity neutral in intent, and often weren’t even formally identity-neutral; they were criminal prohibitions on homosexual sexual activity that legitimized routine police harassment even when they weren’t enforced. The laws were unjust according to liberal principle, but would never have been repealed (in many states) and struck down (in the rest) without the identity-conscious political mobilization of gay and lesbian activism.
Identity politics at its best, in other words, isn’t just a matter of being on some group’s side. It’s about fighting for political justice by drawing on the commitment that arises out of targeted injustice, and about having the intellectual resources to let us diagnose that targeted injustice. It lets us spot the majority group’s identity politics rather than treating it as the normal background state of affairs, and to recognize the oppression and injustice that it generates.
By all means, we should criticize identity politics when it goes wrong, as it often does in moments of symbolic, cultural, and campus politics. But there’s no source of political energy and ideas that doesn’t sometimes go wrong; goodness knows that a commitment to abstract philosophical principles often does. But a revitalized liberalism must be a vital liberalism, one with energy and enthusiasm. The defense of liberal principles—freedom of speech and religion, the rule of law and due process, commerce and markets, and so on—has to happen at least in part in the political arena. In that arena, in liberal politics, we’ll always depend on the passionate and self-conscious mobilization of those who are the victims of state power and domination.
Lilla insists that liberalism is founded on principles that all could share, and that liberal politics should “speak to the nation as a nation of citizens who are in this together and must help one another,” then appeals to FDR, one of the architects of the white welfare state and the imprisoner of Japanese-Americans, to drive the point home.
As political scientist Ira Katznelson has documented, Roosevelt’s ability to bring the New Deal into existence depended on active complicity with southern white identity politics—an easy and tempting thing to do for those who are too convinced that their political goals represent neutral and universal political truth.
Political fights aren’t won with universal principled arguments alone, and pretending that they are is often a mask for the identity politics of the staatvolk. As citizens of a liberal state trying to preserve it, we need to be able to hear each other talking about particularized injustices, and to cheer each other on when we seek to overturn them. Members of disadvantaged minorities standing up for themselves aren’t to blame for the turn to populist authoritarianism; and their energy and commitment is a resource that free societies can’t do without in resisting it.
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Jacob T. Levy is Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory at McGill University, author of Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom, and a Niskanen Center Adjunct Fellow and Advisory Board Member