##251 Trump and Putin’s game theory

##251 Trump and Putin’s game theory

Trump and Putin’s Game Theory

Why Cooperation Won’t Last

By Alexander J. Motyl

What happens when one unstoppable force meets another? We’ll see at the first face-to-face Trump-Putin meeting, which will probably take place in the next few months. Despite the mercurial nature of both men’s style of governance, we know at least one thing to be true about them: both have a loose relationship with the truth. They readily exploit fake news, and they believe that reality is what they say it is. Worse, both men have a strong paranoid streak, with Trump primarily seeing enemies at home and Putin primarily seeing enemies abroad. Both are also certain of their own greatness: Trump regularly asserts that he’ll be the greatest president since time immemorial, while Putin asserts that he and Russia are one and the same.

It’s hard to see how such men can come together on anything of substance. Imagine for the sake of argument that Russia and the United States do indeed share a variety of common national interests. Imagine, as well, that they hammer out a deal: the United States will do A, B, and C in exchange for Russia’s doing D, E, and F.

Given the traits that they share, a rational Trump could never believe that Putin will stick to his word, just as a rational Putin could not believe that Trump will stick to his. This would be true even if, objectively, a deal might benefit both sides: each side would stand to gain even more if it failed to do its part of the bargain while its interlocutor stuck to its own. U.S. President Ronald Reagan understood this when he famously stated that the United States should “trust, but verify” Moscow with respect to nuclear arms reductions. But nuclear weapons can be counted, and their reduction can therefore be verified. In contrast, it would be difficult to verify any Russian withdrawal of troops from the occupied Donbass, especially since Putin insists that there are no troops there at all. Likewise, Putin would have a hard time verifying that the United States really did cut all aid to Ukraine.

As such, both men would have to assume—rightly—that their interlocutor has no intention of fulfilling his part of the bargain. If both men were even marginally familiar with each other’s past behavior, their mutual mistrust could only grow. Putin has cavalierly suspended, ignored, or violated many of Russia’s international commitments, the key one being the 1994 Budapest Memorandum that supposedly obligated Russia to guarantee Ukraine’s territorial integrity and security. Meanwhile, Trump has demonstrated in his first few days in office that he intends to end America’s involvement in free trade pacts and alliances.

Complicating things even more is that there is no sovereign authority to enforce international deals. And neither man would want to call on international institutions, other nations, or alliances of nations to do so, since both of them disavow the right of those parties to interfere in their country’s internal affairs. As a result, the deal could not survive.

Since both sides would likely assume that the other would violate its commitments as soon as the ink dried, they would rationally conclude that they would be foolhardy not to violate the deal as well. Naturally, both sides would accuse the other of mendacity and of being responsible for the deal’s failure to take root. Very quickly, the initial claims of trust and friendship would be followed by accusations of bad faith. The “bromance” would end, and Russo-American relations would be worse than they were before Putin and Trump tried to outwit each other.

There is a larger moral to this story, one that relates specifically to what U.S. policy toward Russia should be. Realist analysts such as Henry Kissinger, John Mearsheimer, and Stephen Walt insist that states interact on the basis of their national interests; in that sense, their analysis seems to overlap with Putin’s and Trump’s own views of international relations. But national interests are divined by policymakers such as Trump and Putin, who have their own personality quirks, ideology, culture, and the like. We can all agree that survival, stability, power, and wealth might be defined as permanent national interests. But the real question is how to decide what those words mean, both in general and in particular circumstances.

Both Trump and Putin claim to place their countries first and to want make their countries great again. Their approach to international politics has often been called nationalist, but Lenin’s term “great-power chauvinism” could be more appropriate. Can great-power chauvinism be squared with realism? The former is rooted in a peculiar ideology and mindset; the latter purports to be an objective assessment of national interests.

In an ideal realist world, Putin would not be a great-power chauvinist committed to imperial grandeur, and Trump would not be a disrupter. In fact, the United States and Russia wouldn’t even be at odds, since Russia wouldn’t have pursued imperialist aggression in Georgia and Ukraine, and the United States wouldn’t be creating strategic disasters in the Middle East.

In reality, Putin’s Russia is a dangerous adversary. It has launched two wars already—in Georgia and Ukraine. It is also threatening to seize Belarus, rattling sabers and violating the borders of the Baltic states, and arming Kaliningrad and Crimea with medium- and long-range missiles; moreover, it has officially stated that it would use nuclear weapons in response to a conventional threat and is actively supporting anti-Western, anti-American, and anti-European parties in the West. Such activities are deeply destabilizing for Europe and the United States. Even worse than the crushing of democracy, the potential streams of refugees from Ukraine and Belarus, and the spillover of war into Poland, Finland, Hungary, and other states is the fact that Russia could soon overreach and find itself on the brink of collapse.

Vital U.S. interests are threatened by Putin—not because it is in Russia’s objective interest to threaten them, but because Putin and the regime and ideology he has created require such a hostile policy. The United States should be concerned and should attempt to prevent his aggression. Yet Trump appears to believe that Putin has been misunderstood, or that his recent aggression relates to NATO enlargement. According to that line of thinking, Putin invaded Ukraine because of some possibility of Ukraine joining NATO (a possibility that no one, either in Ukraine’s policy circles or in NATO’s, would consider realistic). If that were the case, it would follow that by defanging NATO, the United States could turn Putin pacific.

Alternatively, if one takes Putin at his word and examines the nature of his regime, one has to realize that Russian aggression is largely motivated by an imperialist ideology that serves Putin’s power and has deep roots in Russian political culture. And if one dispassionately examines the military capacity of NATO states and sees that they pose no conceivable objective threat to Russia, one may also have to realize that Putin’s invocation of the NATO threat is either a cynical ploy or the symptom of a paranoid megalomania. NATO is therefore anything but “obsolete,” as Trump calls it. The United States benefits directly from a strong and defensible Europe—as well as a strong and defensible Ukraine—because that is the only way Putin’s aspirations can be contained.

Both Trump and Putin want to make themselves and their countries number one. That is impossible. Sooner or later, U.S.-Russian relations will take a serious turn for the worse. At that point, Putin will long for the moderation and predictability of Barack Obama.

...

## 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

tweet

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.

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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.