Author: AdamRowe

Mixing It Up: A New Progressive Political Strategy

This essay is an attempt to outline a domestic political strategy for progressives that focuses on ways to bridge our class, racial, and political divides.  It is built on the conviction that this cannot happen with more arguing, more posturing, or more manipulation by special interests.  It specifies policy choices that can bring Americans together, not metaphorically but in real life: integrated neighborhoods and schools, national service, unbiased news. It isn’t neutral between liberals and conservatives, it is resolutely liberal, but it does try to frame our choices in ways that can appeal to both sides.

I recently read Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance, which has become the go-to book for people trying to figure out why so many poor white Americans voted for Trump. Vance tells us how millions of Appalachians migrated out of the hills to find work and brought with them a culture of dysfunction—hair-trigger, chip-on-the-shoulder tempers; distrust of authority; wary of schools and learning; insanely loyal to family but violent and neglectful towards actual wives, husbands, and children. These tendencies were kept in check in the good times, but have eaten away at entire communities as jobs and opportunity evaporated. Today these communities are rife with opioids, alcoholism, suicide, and despair. Trump’s promise to bring back jobs, his belligerence, his scorn for the hated elites, has proven irresistible.

Vance is a thoughtful guy—I heard him recently in a discussion with Ezra Klein from Vox, and he integrates his personal history with a good knowledge of research on many of the issues—but he has a generally conservative takeaway that I think is off-base in one critical respect. He thinks because the problems are cultural that they can’t be solved by public policy. His hillbillies have a ‘learned helplessness’ that he believes is made worse by government policies that often reward people for failing. Bad policies are a serious problem, but Vance makes a mistake that is unfortunately common across the political spectrum in thinking that cultural change can only come from ‘within.’ Yes, cultures—values, identities, norms—do need to change, and not just for Vance’s ‘hillbillies.’ But culture is not something independent of policies and institutions; they are interwoven. And while cultural change has to take place in the head and the heart, the levers to induce it are often external.

The core experience that Vance relates is revealing. The Appalachian mindset cuts its members off from the outside world. Vance describes all the times he suffered from not knowing how the world worked—not just specific skills like how to apply for college or what to wear to a job interview, but deeper intangibles such as how a ‘normal’ family interacts, or how to respond to perceived insults without rage and violence, or how to resist the cycle of impulse buying, debt, and poverty. These ways of behaving were simply outside his experience. Anyone who has tried to unravel the knot of race and class in America has seen the same chaotic family dynamics, the same isolation from the broader world, in our inner cities.

Vance didn’t escape by some miraculous spiritual change. He did it with the help of two big public institutions: the US Marines, and Ohio State University. They were not the whole story—love and guidance from his grandparents were crucial–but they were necessary. Through them he came to understand the outside world and eventually navigate his way to a Yale law degree.

OK, so what is the lesson here? What do we do? Thoughtful people on both left and right properly lament the loss of community and shared identity in today’s America–and beyond, as anyone with even a casual acquaintance with European politics can attest. This problem has contemporary causes but deeper roots: Tocqueville worried two centuries ago about the atomization of modern man in an era of democracy and equality. Middletown in the 1920s and Robert Putnam 20 years ago in “Bowling Alone” lamented that radio, automobiles, and television were increasing social isolation and withdrawal into private life, trends now accelerated by the internet and social media.

What I propose is that we look hard at how this loss of civic community is endangering our democracy, and do something about it. This is what I see: communities of decline in both white and black America; rising economic inequality where a minority wins and the majority loses, spurring a furious winner-take-all mentality to seize the shrinking opportunities still available; political polarization that is furthered by gerrymandering and laws proclaiming ‘money is speech.’ We are segregating ourselves geographically by income, race, religion and politics. Not surprisingly, those who have the least actual contact with immigrants, minorities, or poor white ‘deplorables’ are those who fear them the most.

I think this can be tackled by public policy mixed with purposeful individual action. A ‘bring us together’ strategy that is about really bringing us together, not in some gauzy metaphorical way but real, no-kidding living with and dealing with other Americans across lines of race and class—that’s a way forward I think people can get behind. Americans know something is wrong but don’t know what to do about it. We need to mix it up. Here’s how.

Living together. Vance himself sees clearly that mixing is the key to progress: “As Brian Campbell, another Middletown teacher, told me, ‘When you have a large base of Section 8 [Federal housing vouchers] parents and kids supported by fewer middle-class taxpayers, it’s an upside-down triangle. There’re fewer emotional and financial resources when the only people in a neighborhood are low-income. You just can’t lump them together, because then you have a bigger pool of hopelessness.’ On the other hand, he said, ‘put the lower-income kids with those who have a different lifestyle model, and the lower-income kids start to rise up.’” [my emphasis]

Having said this, Vance turns it into another reason to bash the government: “Yet when Middletown recently tried to limit the number of Section 8 vouchers offered within certain neighborhoods, the federal government balked. Better, I suppose, to keep those kids cut off from the middle class.” This is unfortunate. The answer is, fix the policy so Middletown can do some valuable social engineering. Nobody will mix together if the market is left to its own devices. Do the hard work of convincing cities and counties to put low-income housing in wealthier neighborhoods. Fix restrictive zoning laws. Mobilize the private sector, which in many high-rent areas is unable to attract and keep workers because they can’t afford to live nearby. Use the clout the Federal government has with Section 8 and other housing programs to the same end.

Learning Together I. Housing is closely linked to education. Here too the answer is mixing together, integration. Research consistently shows that integrated schools are the single best way to raise the performance of the poor and minorities. Schools where kids from wealthier, more stable families help socialize their peers in the skills and attitudes needed for success—while learning their own invaluable lessons in empathy and diversity—are the best device we know for positive generational change.

When I lived in Montgomery, Alabama many black residents of a certain age told me similar stories of their own history. They had been lucky enough to go to the public schools when they were integrated (under court order) in the 1970s and 1980s. They had benefited from the better teachers, facilities, and learning environment. They had made white friends, many of whom they still had, giving them ongoing social connections in the business and political world of Montgomery. But most of them were saddened by what had happened since. In the 1990s support for integration ebbed as white politicians used racial and economic fear to undermine support. Court mandates expired. White families moved out of the city or sent their kids to private schools. Today’s black children go to largely all-black schools. Schools with too many students from high-poverty neighborhoods rarely succeed. The older generation of black Montgomerians shakes its head at the contrast between their school years and those of their children and grandchildren: no contact with white society, failing schools, violence and gangs, disrespect for authority.

In much of America we are going in the wrong direction. According to an analysis by ProPublica “In 1972, due to strong federal enforcement, only about 25 percent of black students in the South attended intensely segregated schools in which at least nine out of 10 students were racial minorities. In districts released from desegregation orders between 1990 and 2011, 53 percent of black students now attend such schools.”

Strong, integrated public schools that mix kids together as they grow up: easy to say, hard to do. Well-meaning and not-so-well-meaning parents and politicians have fought tooth and nail to keep poor people and black people out of their neighborhoods and schools. When unable to block programs, they have moved into new suburbs and sent their kids to private academies. Many politicians and activists have given up, and politicians continue to exploit the concerns of middle-class parents worried that their kids will fall behind in the ever-tightening race to get into the right high school, the right summer program, the right internship, the right college. But success here is foundational if we want to pull future generations out of poverty. Our country is failing millions and millions of its citizens.

This is not a pipe-dream. The Washington Post had an article recently about a decades long school desegregation program in Louisville, Kentucky that has been supported by community leaders in the face of fierce criticism. The Republican legislature is now trying to force Louisville to end the program. This is exactly backwards. We need more Louisvilles and more leadership from within our cities and counties to integrate schools and housing.

We also need to be honest about our language. “Privatizing” is often a code word for segregating. Privatized schools and “school choice” are ways for parents to evade integration and send their kids to schools with their own kind. We need to call out these programs which make it easier to unmix society. The remedy is to ensure that our public schools, all of them, are places where parents will not be afraid to send their kids because they are afraid they will fall off the education conveyor belt that leads to a good college and upward mobility. It cannot be acceptable anywhere in our country for schools to lack top-quality resources and teachers.

Learning Together II. If we aren’t mixing it up enough in elementary and secondary schools, we are doing no better when it comes to higher education. This is especially true for our elite schools, the most competitive, the ones where admission is an automatic ticket to success. At many of them strides have been made to include minorities, and there are lots of foreign students, but there isn’t enough real diversity of thought. The disturbing signs of this are seen in attacks on people who don’t hew to ‘acceptable’ standards, like the assaults—verbal and physical–recently on Charles Murray at Middleton College. Smart but often coddled 18 year olds show up on campus and are bathed in a sea of hypersensitivity and faux-outrage that would take a very mature and tough personality to resist. A vicious circle has been created in many departments where teachers and students with non-conforming (not just conservative or traditionalist, but moderate and liberal), views are not welcome and so stay away.

In response we’ve seen the creation of religious and self-consciously ‘conservative’ colleges, like Hillsdale College in Michigan. And there has been an explosion of foundations, thinktanks, and special on-campus institutes funded by the Koch Brothers and other rich conservatives hoping to inject their favorite ideas into the academic bloodstream. But these are cures worse than the disease, replicating the close-mindedness of ultra-liberal schools but with a conspiratorial focus on grooming activists to fight the culture wars. They serve to draw battle lines, not reach across them.

I have looked extensively at articles and essays by Trump-leaning intellectuals, and I can state categorically that nothing aggravates them and unites them with conservatives across lines of class and region and background like hatred of campus-based “political correctness.”  It symbolizes the out of touch, coastal elites. It is toxic because it is seen as not just disagreement with, but contempt for, a set of beliefs and values and behaviors. It is an assault on identity and meaning.

To be fair, many of these attacks are overblown, done for political effect, and based on a few anecdotes, not reality. A free, self-governing academic institution will, in my view, always incline towards pluralism, tolerance, and open-ended debate; in short, it will be liberal. Americans need to be confronted with hard truths about race, class, gender and other blind spots. But when Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld tell us they don’t like to do campus shows anymore because students can’t take a joke, something is wrong.

One battleground is college costs and accessibility. Conservatives are seeking to wring liberalism out of higher education by making once-affordable public colleges more and more expensive, hoping that high costs and daunting student loans will push students away from the humanities and social sciences and into less ‘ideological’ and more lucrative STEM majors. This would be a tragedy for our country: bad for the economy, which thrives not on narrow skills but on innovation and new ideas that bridge disciplines; and bad for democratic citizenship, which needs the perspective of the liberal arts. (A recent example of a state that steered its best and brightest into science and engineering and away from history, literature, and social science: the Soviet Union. That went well.)

Instead, it would be better to democratize higher education by making college more affordable, ensuring that the student body is more broadly representative across all the different parts of the university. Make sure the kids from Middletown and Detroit can go to a good college and, once there, can major in anthropology or English if that’s what they want.

(Mixing would be more likely if employers and society as a whole would stop fetishizing degrees from certain schools. There is plenty of evidence that successful graduates from State U’s are just as talented and hardworking as those from Harvard and Stanford. The top schools are sorting mechanisms that pull in lots of high-achievers who are looking for the imprimatur and network advantages of an elite degree. As long as that is true the wealthy and well-connected will continue to use all their tools to get their kids the inside track, elbowing aside those who get in the way and staying away from ‘lesser’ schools. Maybe putting some judges on the Supreme Court who didn’t go to Yale or Harvard would be a start.)

Serving Together. We don’t ask much of Americans these days. And we don’t do much to offset the increasing tendency of Americans to segregate themselves by income, by race, by religion, by political orientation. We used to have an institution, the draft, that did this for three decades, from 1940-1970. It threw together kids from all parts of the country, all classes, all races (after 1948). The poor, isolated ones from small towns and Appalachia and inner-city ghettoes got a crash course in the wider world. The wealthier and better-schooled got an equally valuable lesson in the narrowness of their comfortable lives, that wisdom and moral fiber are no monopoly of the well-off.

Vietnam ended support for the draft. One reason is that it stopped being a genuine equalizer. The rich and well-connected got exemptions and went to college, while the poor went to the rice paddies. Any mandatory service program that doesn’t apply to everyone is a nonstarter.

Our professional military is more capable than ever, but without the draft it is dangerously distant from the country it serves. In an age with little need for massed infantry, the draft may not be a military necessity. But some way to give our young people the experience of working together for the common good is, I believe, a moral and political necessity. The military can be one option, but not the only one, for a program of required service. And when supporters argue for it, they shouldn’t shy away from its purpose—not to save money, or give young people job skills, but to help create the kind of American citizens we need.

There is a tremendous appetite, in my view, for a national call to service. The privileged young understand that they have unearned advantages and need to get in touch with the ‘real world.’ In Born on Third Base, Chuck Collins tells us that many people born rich are eager to connect with those who have less. The less privileged for their part badly need the skills, the networking, the exposure to the outside world.

Martin O’Malley (remember him?) had a strong national service program in his campaign platform. He called for increasing AmeriCorps, starting multiple new federal service programs, integrating service programs into college curricula, and giving service graduates help with education and future employment. Not a bad plan, thought it’s not clear if a voluntary program is enough or if these programs will pull in poorer, less-educated volunteers. Service Year Alliance is a network that hopes to shift the culture to make a voluntary service year an expected part of life. Sebastian Junger in his recent book Tribe describes eloquently how Americans suffer from not feeling they matter, not feeling they belong to something bigger than themselves. He wants a big national service program. I’m with him.

Getting Informed Together. Just as “choice” in education ends up segregating kids by race and class, so expanded choice in how we get news and media is segregating us into narrow, like-minded circles. It is making us less informed and more vulnerable to being misled and manipulated.

For government to try and clean up ‘fake news’ or limit what Americans can search or say is very dicey. There is no appetite for a Ministry of Information. But there are things we can do.

Teaching us how to navigate our information environment needs to be a priority for our schools, in every subject, every class. It has never been more important to learn the fundamentals of the scientific method, how to marshal facts, scrutinize evidence, make a logical argument, write a coherent paragraph, and factcheck what you see and hear. We need to teach our children a history that tells hard truths and gives them a realistic foundation for confidence and pride in their country. We cannot scrub our information environment clean of germs and viruses–we need to inoculate ourselves, and we need to recognize that this is a heroic task for our educators, and give them the tools and recognition to do the job. They are on the front lines in a war that we must win. Let’s consider a ‘public education’ campaign akin to a public health campaign, with an Information General for the US with a fancy uniform and a platform to spread the gospel.

The information middlemen who are making money off our tweets and clicks also have to take responsibility, and fear damage in some way if they don’t. The incentives need to shift from delivering the biggest payoff to whatever meme or rumor or outrageous fabrication gets the most eyeballs. The culprit behind much of the distortion we see is advertising; if news providers depend on advertising, their first loyalty is not to accuracy or objectivity but to making users keep clicking. If they can achieve this with finger-pointing and partisan attacks and scary conspiracy theories, well then, welcome to Breitbart and Russian internet trolls.

Social media and search sites have competing incentives; they want traffic and users, but they don’t want their brand to become debased to the point that people get turned off. They’re taking hesitant steps to stop the worst offenders. Advertisers will keep ads off sites if they think customers will be offended. So let’s be offended. This requires naming and shaming, threats to boycott products and companies, and a well-funded movement to monitor advertising across lots of blogs and websites. The Facebooks, Twitters and Googles should be held to account by users who threaten to move to more responsible platforms if they don’t take meaningful action.

Walter Isaacson has a wise suggestion in a recent Atlantic article “How to Fix the Internet”:  rework the internet to remove the anonymity that lets hackers, basement-dwelling trolls and Russian interlopers have their way with today’s open system.  Anonymity lets a thousand flowers bloom, but today too many of them have turned into weeds.  As Isaacson says, “In Plato’s Republic, we learn the tale of the Ring of Gyges. Put it on, and you’re invisible and anonymous. The question that Plato asks is whether those who put on the ring will be civil and moral. He thinks not. The internet has proven him correct.”  We should not resign ourselves to seeing our communication system become a weapon aimed at democracy and at truth itself.

The advertising model needs to be rethought.  Isaacson recommends a new Internet protocol should include a built-in funding mechanism to let content providers get royalties from search engines whenever their material is used.  Funding platforms and content providers with user subscriptions or donations (like Wikipedia) might be a way to reduce the incentive to grab viewers with extreme content.

Voting Together. Gerrymandering is often described as “elected officials picking their voters,” rather than voters picking their officials. It works by carefully drawing district lines to create safe majorities for one party or another. Because the general elections are not competitive, the real competition occurs in the primary for the dominant party, which tends to focus on the most extreme and ideological voters, because that’s who comes out for primaries. In short, gerrymandering unmixes voters and makes politics more extreme. It makes it less necessary to craft a broad coalition to get elected. The theory of democracy embedded in the Constitution is that in a large, diverse country politicians will move to the center to grab the mythical “median voter,” requiring compromise and moderation. That’s not what we’re seeing today.

The negative effects of gerrymandering are magnified when it’s easy for special interests to fund elections and primaries. Thanks to Citizens United and earlier, related Supreme Court decisions, there are few restrictions today on how much private citizens, corporations, and PACs can give. Influencing a congressional or state primary where decisions are often made by a few hundred voters is a lot easier than influencing hundreds of thousands in a general election. And the best way to do this is to promote more extreme views to mobilize activists and raise money.

These are problems for which there are good policy fixes. Since the Constitution puts the power to define districts with the states, voters at the state level can support laws taking the power to set district lines out of the hands of legislatures and into a non-partisan commission. This has already been done in California, Colorado, Ohio, and other states. Undoing Citizen’s United and the doctrine that money is speech and corporations are people is harder, because it will take either a constitutional amendment or a shift in the balance on the Supreme Court. But multiple groups are building momentum for change, drawing on widespread dissatisfaction with the Court’s rulings.

Americans are self-congratulatorily exceptional in many ways, and one of them is our extreme conservatism when it comes to changing our political and electoral systems. The vast majority of Americans have no idea that in most of the world it is normal to elect more than one representative from a district, for legislatures to have multiple parties, for elections to result not in gridlock but in prime ministers and parliamentary majorities that can actually enact new policies; in short, for a kind of political diversity that is beyond our experience. The supposed laboratory of the states is a great wasteland of sameness when it comes to real alternatives. Many reforms could be tried at the state and local level if leaders are pressured by activists who want to mix us up by giving more voice to third parties, or funding campaigns with lots of small donations instead of a few big spenders.

Administering Together. Periodically reformers propose that one part or other of the Federal bureaucracy be moved out of Washington to the hinterlands. That time has come. Not only does modern communication make it feasible, but Washington is drowning in too many cars, too many high-priced condos, and too many well-to-do, well-educated, well-meaning bureaucrats and the pricy lobbyists and lawyers that follow them around. Move Housing and Urban Development to Detroit, Agriculture to Omaha, Interior to Albuquerque, Energy to Oklahoma City, Transportation to Philadelphia, Education to Birmingham. The rest of the country will benefit from an infusion of jobs and restaurants. More importantly, there will be less inclination for Americans to think of the government as some set of aliens dropped inside the Beltway by flying saucers, and less inclination for bureaucrats to forget where they came from.

Conclusion. This is not an exhaustive list, just some of the ways we can choose to mix or unmix America. It’s an argument to shift perspective that is politically neutral: that we are better off the more we live together, learn together, fight together, serve together, inform together, vote together, govern together. We have, both wittingly and unwittingly, often chosen to separate ourselves. This is a hard trend to buck because the good things we think we want, more money and freedom and choice, are exactly what let us buffer ourselves from fellow citizens who are different or make us uncomfortable.

The fear that our country is breaking apart is not a liberal or a conservative fear. I heard it in the Occupy movement and the ensuing national conversation about rising income inequality and the threat of a new oligarchy. I hear it in the anger of Trump supporters with identity politics, which they see as privileging sub-national or supra-national values at the expense of anything distinctively American.

Obviously most of what this essay proposes is out of step with the direction of the Trump Administration. But if the analysis here is right, Trump’s policies will make our divisions worse and many Americans will want even more desperately a way forward that brings us together. Liberals need to be ready with answers.

A terrible weakness of contemporary liberal politics, in my opinion, is that it comes across as all taking and no giving, all rights and no obligations. It is a list of things we want government to do for us. When liberals complain that “they” are voting against their self-interest, that’s what they mean: not voting for the clear benefits they’ll get from Washington. But nobody likes to be told that all they care about is their narrow self-interest. People often vote for reasons of identity and values and whether politicians seem to ‘get’ who they are. We need a liberal politics that asks Americans to sacrifice something for the sake of a shared national goal, something beyond requiring the rich to pay higher taxes.

If our American identity is to have real meaning it can’t be only a chest-thumping assertion of our rights, or a commitment to allowing everyone the maximum of individual choice and market access. Nor should it be a mystical Bannonesque communion of blood wrapped in a narrow Anglo-European culture. A democratic society cannot be held together by electrons; we are not going to post and tweet our way to a shared life. Democracy is about people knowing and trusting one another. It needs to be created and sustained every day in the way we Americans choose to live—together, or separately. Living together will require some risks and some sacrifices. Let’s be brave, and choose a life that brings us face to face with our fellow citizens.

Theory of Excess: The Rise of Addictive Behaviors

Some time ago I absorbed certain ideas from evolutionary biology and psychology into my mental framework, and now they are almost second nature. It is what keeps me anchored in the conviction that there are some fixed aspects to human nature and we are not free-floating bundles of random impulses. I recognize that some people have an aversion to evolutionary hypotheses, which are usually educated guesses and can be used to shore up rigid views of human behavior. I see them as interesting ‘just-so’ stories, not hard and fast truths, but this essay is probably not for you.

Carrying these concepts around and mulling them over and testing them against what I see has led me to what I call a ‘theory of excess’ that I think explains much of contemporary human behavior. The gist of it is that our modern mastery of nature, the combination of science and technology with industrial capitalism, allows us to satisfy all manner of natural, evolutionary-determined drives and desires, far beyond what was possible in pre-modern times. What pre-modern societies could grant only to a few, or none, is now available to most of us. This is readily acknowledged for some basic needs like food and drink, where our hard-wired affinity for sweets, fats, and salt—all things that were rare and difficult to find for our forebears—is now easily and cheaply satisfied, leading to an explosion of obesity and diseases like diabetes. But the same is equally true for many social, emotional, and psychological needs ranging from music to gossip to sports.

This has many consequences, some of them already abundantly evident, some that are still playing themselves out. We are seeing the development of addictions or addictive-like behaviors associated with a wide variety of human drives.  My list includes Alcohol and Drugs, Sex, Music, Gossip and News, Stories, Humor, Shopping, Sports, Games, and Gambling.  If you read this I hope you will suggest more.

ALCOHOL and DRUGS. All types of wine, beer, and liquor can now be gotten cheaply and in abundance. Of course alcohol has been known and abused for millennia, but before the 1700s it was largely in the form of weak beers and wine. Making straight alcohol was expensive and time-consuming and largely done at home in small batches. Read accounts of the havoc wreaked in England in the 1700s by cheap gin—they are similar to modern descriptions of crack cocaine and meth: mothers abandoning their babies, fathers selling their daughters, to get another drink. Add rum from the Indies and suddenly inexpensive spirits make alcoholism a widespread illness of the poor. Since then the variety and quantity of alcohol has grown by leaps and bounds; it has become very cheap, with predictable negative consequences, made worse of course by driving.

What is true for alcohol is multiplied by the mass production of all manner of other drugs. Again, drugs of all types—stimulants, hallucinogens, depressants—were known to many pre-modern peoples and used for spiritual, medical and recreational purposes; but they were usually rare and expensive. Today entrepreneurs are busy making old drugs cheaper, and devising ever new and more addictive drugs, employing every type of modern agricultural and industrial practice. As with alcohol, attempts to stop this through law enforcement have been ineffective and had the unintended consequence of fostering powerful criminal organizations, funding terrorists, destabilizing much of Central America, ruining the lives of countless people engaged in victimless drug use, exploding our domestic prison population, and enabling corrupt dictators from Africa to Southeast Asia.

SEX. Pornography is a $100 billion global industry that the Internet has made cheaply available to almost everyone. For sale material has become more and more extreme as entrepreneurs try to compete with enthusiastic amateurs. Online matchmaking services help people find marriage partners as well as one-night hookups. Viagra is a household word. Sex tours ferry wealthy men to Thailand, Brazil and other destinations. “Sex addiction” is now a recognized psychological disorder requiring professional intervention.

Food, alcohol, drugs, sex—these are obvious physical drives exploited by modern industry. But many other fixations of modern life share the addictive characteristics that tell us they are manifestations of powerful drives.

MUSIC. There is no consensus on why, from an evolutionary perspective, music exerts such universal power and attraction. Theories include music’s role in creating social bonds, or as an emotional release, or, as Darwin surmised, in impressing potential mates.  Whatever the reason, today technology and cheap communications make it possible for much of the world’s population to listen to any type of music they want, as much as they want. And listen we do.

It is startling to think that only a little over a hundred years ago, if you wanted to hear music you had to make it yourself or go where someone was performing live. Today young people in particular latch onto music as an identity marker for themselves, their group, their generation; often they seem unable to function without constant musical access (not like the good old days when we had to feed our musical obsession by putting needles on delicate rotating discs:). Listening to music now often blends seamlessly into watching music, sharing music, talking about music, in short, being constantly absorbed with music. Like drugs, music exerts a direct appeal to the brain, bypassing our cortex, stimulating and satisfying our emotions. And like drugs, today’s capitalist driven technology makes constantly available something that used to be rare.

If music is only a harmless epiphenomenon, or the sublime and uplifting gateway to the soul (as posited by 19th century romantics), then there is nothing to worry about. But both are off the mark. Plato warned us that music is powerful for good and bad and a society that simply throws up its hands and encourages music of every kind, in any amount, can expect trouble. There is a powerful scene in the movie version of “Cabaret” where we hear a sweet German song and then watch as the camera slowly tracks from the glowing face of the singer to his brown Nazi Youth uniform.

It’s not clear what this does to us, but to me there are some disturbing aspects. Kept from music, constant listeners become disturbed and go through a kind of withdrawal. More and more musical availability can lead to a spiral where listeners need more intense and more exotic forms to repeat a musical ‘high.’ Appreciation for more complex music becomes drowned out by the need to move on to the next song, the next artist, the next playlist. Adored and emulated far beyond their worth, musicians become highly questionable role models.

GOSSIP and “NEWS”. Another characteristic of modern society is the preoccupation with high-level gossip, intently following the lives of the famous: famous politicians, athletes, movie stars, pop stars, and of course people famous for being famous. We inundate ourselves with this sort of information, I think because it links with a strong underlying evolutionary trait for all social animals, the need to pay attention to status and especially to the intentions of higher status members of the group. Knowing what those above you in the pecking order want, what they intend to do, anticipating their needs, emulating them, circumventing them—these were critical survival skills for our ancestors, and of course still are. Commoners have always been well-advised to pay attention to what their lords and kings are up to.

One of the most critical types of information about social superiors has to do with their mates, children, and relations, since power and resources often flow in kinship channels. I think this is why we see an obsessive interest in every rumor about the marriages, divorces, dalliances, affairs, courtships, pregnancies, breakups and so on of the celebrity class. These cravings are fed by a robust industry of gossipmongers, using all the tools of modern media and communications, from late-night television and its endless celebrity guest lists to magazines at the grocery checkout counter.

Further, there are many gossip creators who thrive on inventing and distorting rumors in order to attract more eyeballs and make money—or become famous themselves–from this human need. Of course this is harmless up to a point, but for many I think easy access to this information has turned into a craving, especially for people who are more sensitive to social hierarchy or more nervous about the risks of not being on top of the latest news. And for many this inborn need to focus on—and often to emulate—social superiors leads to an unhealthy preoccupation with unworthy and destructive models.

Information about violent threats would have been another critical category for our ancestors, hence the “if it bleeds it leads” approach taken by many news purveyors. News sources who are criticized for putting out an endless series of stories about car crashes, gang murders, and terrorist plots always say “that’s what the public wants!,” and of course they are right. We find it hard to stay away from stories that feature violence and warnings about violent threats. The steady diet of this information distorts our perception of the world and makes it hard to distinguish between the most sensational and graphic threats, such as terrorist shooting sprees, and more common or more serious—but less vivid–threats like climate change or the rising consumption of opioids.

Political gossip is an important and growing sub-category of news. In the US we have seen a steep growth in radio, TV, and online sources specializing in 24/7 political coverage and commentary, much of it highly partisan and argumentative: as a great Washington Post Magazine cover recently proclaimed, “We Have Reached Peak Punditry.” Why do many people find it compelling to listen to pundits argue and predict (“lightning round, you have 10 seconds!”) about current politics, even when they have no special knowledge and their track records are abysmal? I think it’s because political gossip combines multiple human drives: the ‘need to know’ of gossip generally, the love of competition characteristic of sports and games (see below), and the fascination with threats. The business model of much political gossipmongering and talk radio is to fuel anxiety by publicizing and exaggerating dangers. We are stimulated to keep paying attention to find out more (“don’t turn that dial”!).

STORIES. This is a category I am ambivalent about including, because I don’t want it to be true, but I think it is. We love stories and no human culture is without an extensive repertoire of tales, myths, histories, and people who specialize in making and telling them. Can it be overdone? I fear it can, and is. We have a huge storytelling industry that started with printing and literacy and has exploded with the arrival of radio and film and television and the internet.. Every time I turn on Netflix I see a dozen new series in every genre: dramas, comedies, fantasies, thrillers and new genres trying to combine elements of each. Some storytelling experts look for the blockbuster, the story that appeals to everyone, but today storytellers also seek the niche audience, the special demographic.

I think the reasons we like stories are complicated, and so are the effects of too much storytelling. Stories inform us about other people and other ways of life beyond our immediate grasp, and so challenge our parochialism and loneliness; they distill lessons about human action and how to be in the world; they bind us together by providing the common points of reference for our particular people, our community, and sometimes for humanity as a whole; they provide us the raw material for our own judgments and save us from having to learn everything through direct experience. And of course they amuse and distract us from the pain and boredom of everyday life.

All of these vital purposes can be distorted by the storytelling avalanche of our times. For instance, what stories anymore can bind us together when we are all reading and listening to and watching different stories? Every now and then a Harry Potter comes along and makes us all part of one big story-absorbing community, but those events are rarer and rarer.

Stories are about specific people and specific actions in a specific place and time (though we all recognize that some types of myths or tales are meant to go beyond the individual). The specificity and individuality are key to the story’s attraction, its power to engage the emotions and imagination, and to stick in memory. When we seek more general accounts we have left storytelling and moved into the world of history, philosophy, science. Drawing accurate and meaningful generalizations from the mix of our own experience and the stories we are told is hard, and human beings have always been prone to let the specifics of a good story or anecdote take precedence over abstractions. I’m not sure, but I wonder if the huge sea of stories that everyone now swims in is responsible for the surprising attraction of irrational explanations and the ease with which many people today dismiss scientific and expert judgments.

The dominance in the global marketplace of American stories, pumped out by our prolific and expert entertainment industry, has its own dangers. Our particular American take on life—our individualism, consumerism, love of violence, sexual informality, and so on—has often become the standard for other societies, or caused an intense backlash against America.

HUMOR. The other day I saw a reference to the “comedy industry.” What a strange formulation—humor as a commodity that gets designed, built, marketed, and sold like cars or anti-perspirant. But it seems to be successful; anyway, there is certainly a lot of comedy around these days, in movies, on TV, U-Tube, and of course in all the manifestations of ‘stand-up.’ Comics now seem to migrate seamlessly into other arenas, like news (The Daily Show) and every nook and cranny of television.

What exactly is the demand that the comedy industry is seeking to meet? Humor is present in every part of every society and seems vital to living together. Humor in many of its forms—satire, irony, black humor, dirty jokes—brings to the surface fears and anxieties that we have a hard time addressing head-on. Think of how “All in the Family” let Americans talk together about racism. Other variants give us perspective on our own problems, puncture pretensions, and I think make us feel more like members of the big and hopelessly dysfunctional human family. Humor is the great leveler. And humor is at bottom hopeful: comedies end in weddings, tragedies in funerals.

Too much of at least some kinds of comedy, however, is worrisome. I like Colbert and John Oliver, but their sarcastic take on politics, repeated night after night to an audience that probably gets no other take on public life, is corrosive and contributes to a growing distrust of every type of authority that is undermining democracy. The Comedy Central view of the world discourages engagement and reinforces a sense of unearned superiority.  Internet trolls–mostly young men living in their parent’s basements–who spread ridiculous pro-Trump lies in the recent campaign defended themselves by saying it was all for laughs.

Competing comics trying to find their niche in the industry move quickly to more extreme, more vulgar, more shocking material. Sex is funny, but it’s also tender, and mysterious, and needs privacy.  If everything is funny, nothing is.  Appreciating humor requires that some things not be funny, that some things not be overlaid with irony.

SHOPPING. I saw an ad the other day at the gas pump while I was filling up my car (another zone of privacy invaded by Madison Avenue) that featured a young woman extolling the gas company credit card for allowing her to pursue “my favorite hobby: shopping!” What on earth does that mean? How can shopping be a ‘hobby’? But it seems obvious that many of us get a lot of enjoyment from shopping, above and beyond the value of anything that is actually purchased. Comparing prices, going to stores, tracking sales, clipping coupons, bargaining with sellers, selling stuff ourselves on E-Bay and Craigslist—clearly the activity of buying and selling is compelling to many people. As Adam Smith said, there is a natural inclination to ‘truck, barter and exchange,’ and with more disposable income and more to choose from than ever, we are trucking at an amazing clip.

I’m sure I’m not the only person who has gone to the mall, or wandered around Amazon, just because I was bored. Shopping for many these days is a ‘default’ activity, what you do when you don’t have anything else to do. At the far end of this spectrum are chronic ‘shopaholics’ and hoarders who can’t stop themselves from accumulating things far beyond any identifiable need. You can glimpse in this an ancestral drive under conditions of scarcity to get as many valuable things as possible to store up for the hard times to come.

Over-shopping is a major cause of debt and bankruptcy. It clogs our closets and basements and landfills with stuff we don’t need. We pay professional organizers to come into our homes and convince us to let go. But these efforts are dwarfed by the forces encouraging more shopping, not only the need of a million sellers to create new desires, but the conviction of economists and politicians that more consumer spending is needed to create jobs and growth.

SPORTS. All over the world we can’t seem to get enough spectator sports. Sporting events get top ratings on TV and radio, attract huge and loyal audiences on social media, are dissected and obsessed over around the clock by a phalanx of commentators and analysts. Why do we like to see people competing, individually and in teams? One reason is the chance to identify unreservedly with our tribe and our tribe’s representative—the Boston Red Sox, we can say, representing the collective identity of New England. Since sports are self-contained and (usually) have no off-the-field meaning, we can fully back them without the guilt or trade-offs involved in backing a political party, or my country versus others. It recreates the fundamental us vs. them of tribal life.

In the ancestral environment we were highly alarmed and frightened by real threats (from wild beasts, other tribes, natural dangers like storms and floods and famines and wildfires) on a regular basis, probably every day. We courted danger by hunting and gathering, and by raiding our neighbors. We developed complex physiological and psychological reactions: we had to decide when to remain calm, and when to run like hell; and we had to learn from these intense experiences and pass this knowledge on to our kin.

To capture game and conquer enemies we had to work together in small groups and came to value the intense social bonds associated with the hunt and the raid. So in a perverse way we have been designed to enjoy these situations of danger and stress and competition, maybe even seek them out. Further, because being successful in these high stress situations was essential for survival, those who excelled were celebrated and granted authority and status.

Human play teaches these same basic skills. As children we fight and compete and create groups to see who is faster, tougher, smarter, more skilled physically and socially. Through play we develop our personalities, find our comrades, identify our rivals and our enemies.

Watching competitive sports triggers fear and anxiety as we identify with the competitors, share their fear of losing and the shock of expected and unexpected threats, with many of the same attractions outlined above for horror movies and political debates. And through this we bond with the athletes and with fellow fans. The deep drives that this taps into can be seen in the behavior of soccer hooligans and other organized fan bases. A book that opened my eyes is Among the Thugs, about British soccer fans, where the author immerses himself in a culture of drinking and violence and describes the intense pleasure—which he explicitly compares to taking drugs–of allowing himself to disappear into the postgame mob.

GAMES. More people are playing sports as well as watching them, but today far more people satisfy themselves with video games. A new multi-billion industry has arisen to fill the gap between being a full participant and being a spectator. Using all the tools that technology and clever marketers can muster, games appeal to multiple audiences but especially young men. Many spend a large part of their life immersed in games, and the dangers of excess are now emerging—poor socialization, low impulse control, decreased sensitivity to violence, loss of interest in other activities, a need for more and more intense experiences. Video game addiction is being explored by the American Psychiatric Association for inclusion in the official list of psychiatric disorders.

GAMBLING. Video games appear to share some of the features of gambling, another activity widely practiced in most known human societies that has been greatly expanded by modern capitalism and technology. Huge enterprises and entire cities have been constructed to attract gamblers; slot machines and lotteries have been honed using sophisticated psychological research to maximize their addictive properties. Online systems allow people to gamble anywhere, anytime. Gambling, which some evolutionary theorists think draws on an innate attraction human beings have to situations where outcomes are closely balanced (because in an inherently unpredictable world we might not keep trying unless we ‘enjoyed’ a certain amount of risk) appears to produce the same dopamine-induced high as many drugs. Problem gambling is now classified as an addiction in the most recent DSM (5) of the American Psychiatric Association.

CONCLUSION. All of the underlying drives and desires described here have a positive, in some cases absolutely necessary, part in human life when pursued in moderation or at the right time for the right reasons. Making it easier and cheaper to satisfy them is what modernity is all about, and of course we can point to the many ways life has been improved over the past several hundred years. But a world in which millions and millions of the smartest people are spending all their time finding ways to feed your desires and make money off them has some clear downsides. This may be especially true now that (in the developed world at least) most straightforward needs have been addressed and much of this ingenuity is directed to stoking more problematic drives.

I am not thinking only of the clear dangers of over-consumption like climate change and resource depletion. We are at greater and greater risk of being manipulated in our most common and everyday decisions, as clever sellers study human behavior like hawks, seeking the slightest competitive advantage. More and more of our interactions are mediated by online systems that are trying to sell us things or set us up for advertisers, where the name of the game is to amass as much data as possible on each consumer and then deploy it to keep us shopping, gambling, gaming, and gossiping. The other day I heard a Freakonomics podcast describing the incredible effort that Facebook and Google put into keeping us on their sites for just an extra 10 minutes—thousands of hours of work by the smartest tech geniuses in the world, all aimed at seducing you and me. Not only does this seem like a sad waste of talent, it is dangerous for human privacy and autonomy. Their work feeds into the algorithms that determine what each user sees on-screen, so that we think we are getting an objective view of the news or our friend’s interests, but instead what we see is subtly manipulated to put us in the mood to buy.

Capitalists are not the only players. Politicians and political parties are doing the same thing, using the same research and the same core human drives to sell candidates. Modern campaigns assemble huge databases—often borrowed from market research–to reach each individual voter and figure out exactly what issues and interests will get him or her behind their candidate. Governments are not far behind. China is creating a “social credit” system to rate its subjects, using a “vast national database that compiles fiscal and government information, including minor traffic violations, and distills it into a single number ranking each citizen,” according to the BBC.

I think that our frequent sense of disorientation, of inauthenticity, is closely tied to these trends.  The things we want, the music we hum, the people we admire, the jokes we tell, the politics we obsess over–we sense that these are not really ours, that they have been foisted on us.  The drives and desires that used to serve us well are no longer trustworthy.

A bumper sticker I saw recently says “Do not believe everything you think,” which is excellent advice. We could add to it, “Do not desire everything you want.”

 

Why Trump Wants Us Angry and Afraid

“Totalitarianism begins in contempt for what you have. The second step is the notion: “Things must change—no matter how.  Anything is better than what we have.” Totalitarian rulers organize this kind of mass sentiment, and by organizing it articulate it, and by articulating it make the people somehow love it.” (Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism)

President Trump’s inaugural address painted the United States as a failed state. Besieged by terrorists and immigrants, covered with rusting factories, ravaged by carnage in our cities, we teeter on the brink of collapse.

Of the many astonishing things that Trump has managed to convince us of, this is perhaps the most astonishing. How is it that in the wealthiest country in the history of mankind, where unemployment is below 5%, the stock market is booming, the deficit is shrinking, and interest rates are low; in the most powerful country in the history of mankind, with bases around the globe, at peace (other than minor far away conflicts) and under no significant threats that come close to those faced in the Cold War or previous world wars–that we elected a President on the strength of this apocalyptic message?

The United States has many challenges, some of them quite serious—rising inequality, climate change, racial injustice, job loss from automation, creeping oligarchy, terrorism, an aggressive and risk-taking Russia—but none of them are crises (well, maybe climate change) and none of them insoluble. In any case, other than a crudely-hyped terrorism, none of these were the focus of Trump’s campaign.

This sense of impending doom is understandable in the poor white working class that was Trump’s special target and might plausibly be receptive to a message of decline. But it is equally prevalent among intellectual supporters, who seem to see Trump as the last chance for America to escape collapse.

Mark Bauerlein, for instance, the editor of First Things and an English professor at Emory University, thinks that American society will disintegrate without the drastic corrective represented by Trump, who he describes as a Hegelian ‘World Historical Individual’ who represents the spirit of the age (no, I am not making this up).  http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/10/12/13244444/trump-conservative-figure-defense-pc What is the existential threat that Trump will save us from? Is it nuclear proliferation or climate change or a shrinking middle class? No, it is Political Correctness. Bauerlein writes: “The problem is this: Our society has sunk so far into sensitivity and guilt that it has relinquished the liberalism that both liberals and conservatives espouse. I mean the liberalism that gives people a bit of room to think what they want to think; that doesn’t automatically define one’s character by one’s politics or religion; that accepts human frailty and forgives people for brief lapses into racism, sexism, and any other prejudice.” This is like standing on the deck of the sinking Titanic and worrying whether the band is out of tune.

The anonymous Publius Decius Mus (recently revealed to be Michael Anton, a former Bush speechwriter and contributor to the Weekly Standard) who wrote the much-discussed article “The Flight 93 Election” in the September issue of the Claremont Review–which argued that voting for Trump has the same life or death status for the country as storming the cockpit of a hijacked airliner—makes political correctness central to his critique of modern society.  http://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/the-flight-93-election/ Even more than Bauerlein he takes an apocalyptic view in which only the providential arrival of Trump might save us. Claremont regular and professor John Marini argues in a turgid article from July that Trump is here to rescue us from rule by professionals and elites who embrace an identity politics that has destroyed old-fashioned American virtue. Charles Kesler, another Claremont Straussian, wrote in May in the Claremont Review: “But his [Trump’s] savvy opposition to P.C. implies something like this defense of America, because there is nothing political correctness stands for so much as the denigration of America, its history and principles. P.C. liberalism doesn’t stop there; its hostility extends to the theological, philosophical, literary, and scientific heritage of the West.” And so forth and so on.

The Trumpist intellectuals are especially incendiary and hysterical about the implications of diversity. Publius, in explaining why immigration is The Issue Of Our Time, says “This [open immigration] is insane. This is the mark of a party, a society, a country, a people, a civilization that wants to die. Trump, alone among candidates for high office in this or in the last seven (at least) cycles, has stood up to say: I want to live. I want my party to live. I want my country to live. I want my people to live. I want to end the insanity.” Bauerlein is a bit less histrionic but strongly supports a southern wall because it sends a signal that we value our ‘home,’ that America has some kind of boundary. (These fears of immigration are ironic for those who argue the biggest threat to society comes from intellectual elites—surely it is new immigrants raised in other traditions and in love with old-fashioned values of work, family, faith, and community that tend to reinvigorate the country.)

Now, there is plenty not to like about the more extreme manifestations of identity issues on college campuses and elsewhere. As someone who went to St. John’s College and takes very seriously the Western tradition, I deplore the kind of political correctness that encourages students to throw over past thinkers because they are white or male or hold views out of step with contemporary sensibilities. We would be better off with less posturing and less hypersensitivity. But the level of hysteria leveled against ‘political correctness’ by Trump and his intellectual supporters is so excessive that we are forced to conclude that the real reason to whip up fear and anger lies elsewhere.

There is no way to know for sure if Trump and Bannon and their ilk are really so gloomy about America. But it is quite clear why they have made this their main message: because, as Hannah Arendt points out, maximizing fear and anger is a tried and true way to seize power. When people are convinced that they face urgent and massive threats, they are willing to bend norms and laws and throw themselves at the feet of a savior: “Only I can fix it.” Bannon once described himself as a Leninist, seeking to overthrow the established order. Lenin rode hatred of capitalists into absolute power. The Bauerleins and Marinis who see themselves as making a last stand for Western Civilization are eager to legitimize the new Leninists. They may not love Trump, but the enemy of my enemy is a friend, and they hope he will topple their hated PC foes who occupy the commanding heights in the academy.

This is playing with fire. The kind of reactionary politics encapsulated in the slogan “Make America Great Again,” as Mark Lilla reminds us in The Shipwrecked Mind, can be particularly extreme and violent. For progressives history is moving, albeit slowly, in the right direction. But for hardcore reactionaries we are always at the edge of the cliff, it is always one minute to midnight, the sky is always falling. This election or this vote in Congress are The Last Chance to prevent disaster. Listen to Publius go on about how today’s conservatism doesn’t go far enough: “To simultaneously hold conservative cultural, economic, and political beliefs—to insist that our liberal-left present reality and future direction is incompatible with human nature and must undermine society—and yet also believe that things can go on more or less the way they are going, ideally but not necessarily with some conservative tinkering here and there, is logically impossible.” To declare that liberalism is ‘incompatible with human nature’ is to say that anything is excusable to defeat it.

In his first inaugural address in 1932, Franklin Roosevelt told us that “The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.” He meant that we must not be paralyzed by fear, and we must not act out of fear. In 1932 the country was facing the Great Depression, a real crisis, unlike Trump’s fake apocalypse. Other countries devastated by economic catastrophe were abandoning democracy for dictatorship. This didn’t happen in America, but it might have. Roosevelt chose not to stoke our fears but to encourage optimism, remind us of our underlying strengths, and promise energy and action aimed at real, not false dangers.

Why did Roosevelt succeed and bring the country together, while Obama’s response to the Great Recession—similar in many ways to Roosevelt’s–further divided us? I am not entirely sure, but three things strike me. First, our politics has been characterized for many decades by an escalating conservative message of anger and resentment, aimed at government and fueled by wealthy interests seeking lower taxes. This laid the ground for conservative leaders to successfully characterize the Obama administration’s necessary and reasonable efforts to deal with the recession as a plot to expand government.

Second, the Depression hit everyone more or less equally. The rich, the poor, the middle class—all declined, all took dramatic losses. But in the recent recession the poor and middle class were hammered, while the rich by and large went their merry way. We were manifestly not in it together. And Obama foolishly chose not to make those who caused the disaster pay a serious price. The have-nots noticed, and blamed government for not standing up for their interests.

Third, Roosevelt did not face Fox News. Since its inception in 1996, Fox has had a business model of exaggerating the dangers facing the US and blaming most of them on liberals. Fox has almost singlehandedly legitimized a brand of paranoia and partisanship that reached new heights during the presidential campaign. Contemporary internet trolls have followed the Fox lead of making money via extremism and conspiracy theories.  Roosevelt used radio masterfully to get out his message.  Obama’s voice was often distorted and drowned-out.

We are at a very dangerous point. Just as al-Qaeda and ISIS hope to provoke the United States into an excessive response that mobilizes the Muslim world, so Trump and Bannon want their tweets and directives to make the liberal opposition so angry it over-reacts. In their eyes every coastal city demonstration, every New York Times op-ed, is a victory. It confirms their message that the elites are the enemy. Like right-wing nationalists of the past they yearn to demonstrate strength. They may hope for an excuse to impose emergency measures, which will lead to a police state or civil war. Michael Anton—Publius Decius Mus (a Roman general who dedicated himself to the gods before charging suicidally into the enemy)—now works in the White House.

Yet not reacting is not an option. The opposition needs to walk a fine line mixing determination with discipline, non-violence, and an inclusive message. The opposite of fear is truth. We are far from perfect but we are not weak, not declining, not taken advantage of by other countries, not impoverished, not hopelessly decadent. We are unimaginably strong. We need to know this and be confident.

Why Modern Life Makes Us Crazy

Without any counter on the left, unregulated markets have run rampant and made us insecure, frightened, and ripe for reactionary populism

In what seems like the blink of an eye, the world has taken a sharp turn for the worse. Deep verities about the strength of liberal democracy, the weakening of nationalism, the self-evident value of open borders and trade, have been thrown into doubt—not in some far corners of the world, but right here. The inhabitants of Western Europe and the United States seem suddenly fed up with their governments, their leaders, their underlying operating systems. Theories and speculations abound about why this should be so.

Towards the beginning of the modern age, when technology and capitalism were joining forces to drive rapid economic growth, two seminal figures, Adam Smith and Karl Marx, agreed on what capitalism was all about. They agreed that it was both the most productive and most disruptive force ever invented. “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned,” Marx wrote. Smith described in detail the accelerating processes of change and specialization that threatened to create an impoverished, imbecilic population.

Ever since, modern societies have struggled to enjoy the tremendous wealth produced by capitalism while keeping in check its destructive tendencies. Unregulated free markets uproot established communities, subvert long-held identities, and subordinate individuals to impersonal and far-away masters. Today’s cutting edge capitalists trumpet the glories of ‘disruption’ and ‘change,’ which all too often are corporate euphemisms for sending jobs abroad, or downsizing, or throwing workers on the scrap heap and telling them it is their responsibility to go back to school and retool themselves so they can earn a place at the shrinking trough. Even for the winners, accelerating cycles of automation and globalization are reducing the room at the top. Competition to ensure that your children succeed—buying a house in the best neighborhood with the right schools that feed into a top college that gets you key internships and on and on—gets more and more cut-throat.

The battles between the acolytes of unregulated free markets and those trying to temper their disruptive effects have been going on for 200 years. Nineteenth-century market liberalism was met with socialism, communism, trade unions, new democratic political movements and new ideas for social safety nets and progressive government. In the United States the extremely rough edges of global industrial capitalism were sanded off by the Progressive movement, good government reforms, and ultimately by New Deal programs to cushion people from the vagaries of unregulated markets. Communal and family support systems that were no longer adequate were supplemented and replaced by public programs. European states often went further but the general direction of change and reform was the same.

But the seeming consensus around these changes began to erode in the 1970s, especially in the United States and Great Britain. Business interests were alarmed by the anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist ethos of the 60s; when economic growth hit some speed bumps caused by the need to adjust to new global actors and rising oil prices, staunch and well-financed opponents of government intervention in the economy struck back. In a strategic campaign at the level of ideas, politics, and popular culture they succeeded in changing the terms of the debate. It became less and less legitimate to worry about raising up the poor and unfortunate, and more au courant to wring our hands about entrepreneurs and businessmen who were being hampered by taxes and regulations. Unions were no longer heroic defenders of the average Joe against the rich and powerful, but corrupt obstacles to private enterprise. Americans who had supported huge post-war public programs to help white men buy homes and go to college and start businesses were encouraged to reject them when they began to include blacks and women and immigrants.

As new thinking was translated into more conservative, market-friendly policies in the 1980s and 90s, however, it turned out that no change was ever enough. Criticism of government, unions, and ‘liberalism’ accelerated with every electoral cycle. What had begun as a corrective to moderate the growth of the welfare state turned into a determination to destroy it root and branch. Ideas at the margins of libertarian and conservative thought, such as privatizing schools and eliminating inheritance taxes, quickly migrated to the center and became dogma, not just for Republicans but across the political spectrum.  Networks of rich activists created an industry of talk-show hosts, political consultants, and ‘think-tanks’ to push more and more radical ideas.  Instead of a conservative swing of the pendulum, the United States incubated a full-blown reactionary movement based on anger, fear, and outlandish conspiracy theories.

The results have been far-reaching. Trust in government and politicians has plummeted. Tax cuts, deregulation, and anti-worker policies have shifted massive wealth to the very rich. Economic inequality has skyrocketed. Programs to support the poor and cushion workers from the impact of deregulated capitalism are opposed not only on fiscal but moral grounds, as contrary to American values of freedom and individual rights.

Internationally, the same neoliberal ideology manifested itself in an embrace of ‘globalization’—free trade, free flows of capital, of ideas, of people—and an eagerness to use economic power and international financial institutions to impose these values around the world. Abstract theories about ‘comparative advantage’ glossed over the reality that back in the US some groups were big winners—largely the investor class—and others, like industrial workers, were big losers. Consistent with the new ‘tough love’ attitude to people in distress, not enough was done to help people whose lives were upended by the outsourcing of jobs and the rise of China. Instead of bringing their growing wealth home to benefit everyone, the rich took advantage of globalization to move it offshore and become ‘citizens of the world’ with fewer and fewer ties to their home countries.

An in-depth analysis of global economic trends (Branco Milanovic, Global Inequality) since 1988 shows that the big winners have been the global poor, mostly in China and other parts of Asia; and the very rich, especially in the US. The losers have been the lower-middle classes—the working class–in the industrialized West, whose incomes have barely budged for 30 years.

Things have now come to a breaking point. The Great Recession pulled the rug from under an already precarious middle class and exposed the inadequacy of a blind faith in markets. Open borders and immigration seem to many Americans a plot to steal their jobs, erode their culture, and leave us vulnerable to random terrorist attacks. There is no slowdown in the pace of technological and financial change that guarantees a never-ending stream of economic and cultural disruption. In much of Europe the economic distress is far worse, home-grown terrorism has blossomed, and absorbing immigrants seems an insurmountable challenge.

The threat to capitalism from an organized, dangerous Left disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s embrace of a market economy. The Leninist alternative was a cure far worse than the disease, but embodied in powerful states it succeeded in scaring capitalists into concessions to humanity. Since then there has not been an effective voice to counter the corrosive effects of markets on human communities. Arguments that rely on economic rationality and maximizing efficiency continue to carry the day with so-called conservatives who have forgotten that conservatism is meant to safeguard families and communities. An existence fully exposed to unbuffered economic forces lacks the security, predictability and dignity needed for a decent life. After enough battering people will push back, often in ugly ways.  Societies that become unmoored are open to finding scapegoats and to embracing demagogues promising salvation.

Market fundamentalists have now created the conditions for a tidal wave of reaction. While the success of Bernie Sanders suggests that many are ready for a renewed progressive populism (though Bernie’s ‘socialist’ identity was usually seen as the vestige of a bygone era), the reaction has so far been captured by nativists and nationalists. People see a few at the top making off with more and more of society’s wealth, and using that wealth to shape the political system in their favor. They resent immigrants and minorities asking for a piece of the pie. They have contempt for new educated elites who seem preoccupied with identity and gender issues but oblivious to their problems.

Capitalism has always been too important to leave to capitalists. Plenty of today’s capitalists know better, but as Warren Buffett warned us: “There has been a class war going on for twenty years, and my class has won.” Winning has meant making life worse for too many fellow citizens. We are reaping the whirlwind.

Reorienting Liberalism

My two-cents on how to go forward. I have five suggestions: get mad, get organized for 2018; start mixing it up, literally; make political reforms a priority; create a liberal defense of liberty; and crack the communications code.

As liberals/progressives/Democrats start to assemble the predictable circular firing squads in the wake of the Trumpocalypse, I offer my two cents worth of advice. This is informed among other things by having been a committed conservative for a long time, a happy voter for Reagan and other Republicans right up to Bush II, may God forgive me. So I know all the conservative arguments from the inside.

I strongly accept the lessons that liberals should have learned from the Sanders campaign: restore historic ties to the working class, stay focused on economic inequality and opportunity, and play down the identity politics that define much of modern progressivism. A serious political movement has to make choices and our country’s future as a genuine liberal democracy now hangs in the balance. And I am convinced this is necessary–not sufficient, but necessary–to reduce racism and fear of minorities. People who are deeply anxious about their lives and their children’s prospects, who see their communities drowning in addiction and suicide, are vulnerable to Republican appeals to their worst instincts—especially if no one else is standing up for them.

Get mad, get organized for 2018. Liberals have been complacent because they bought into the historic inevitably of a progressive majority. Some day, maybe. But while we wait, the country is being reshaped by enemy forces. It is vital for Democrats to at least gain back control of the Senate in two years, before Trump has a chance to appoint more Supreme Court justices or make irreversible changes to social programs or unwind US commitment to fighting climate change. Republicans did this in 2010, just two years after Obama took office.  The Tea Party movement helped Republicans make huge gains in Congress and at the State and local level. How did this happen so fast? There was white-hot grassroots anger at government and Wall Street, which was channeled by money and backing from networks outside the Republican Party—the alternative conservative worlds of the Koch Brothers and talk radio and the alt-right. For liberals the Trump administration should whip up plenty of anger, but someone will have to offer some serious money and strategic direction or it will implode into bickering tribes like Occupy.

Start mixing it up, literally. Liberals are self-flagellating over being too elitist, too urban, cut off from the ‘real America’. That’s basically crap; cities are good, that’s why it’s called ‘civilization.’ But everyone needs to mix it up more. Rural and small town—and lots of suburban–Americans have no bleeping idea what it means to live with the mix of people in big American cities, and educated urbanites are equally clueless about life elsewhere. The big eye-openers that used to help this were going off to college, and going off to the military. College could introduce smart kids from small towns to the bigger world; the military threw boys from all kinds of backgrounds together. We badly need cheaper, quality higher education and more apprenticeship programs. And we badly, badly, badly need some form of mandatory national service.

Make political reforms a priority. We should tell Trump voters, you’re damn right the system isn’t working. But you’re crazy if you think it will work better if you throw out the old bums and put in some new ones. What we need is a different system. We need to get rid of the electoral college (yes, Republicans, it worked for you this time, but that’s just luck); shorten ridiculous multi-year election campaigns that ramp up partisanship; make voting mandatory; start experimenting with different electoral systems like multi-member districts and ranked voting to give voices to 3rd parties; go after the gerrymandering and closed primaries that give extremists make or break power over elected officials. Yes, and fix Citizen’s United and big money in politics. Trumpism is going to quickly bog down in the morass of special interests and veto players that define modern American democracy. That’s good, but it will end up deepening cynicism and lead to even greater extremism. Instead, let’s start thinking outside the stupidly narrow box of traditional American practices. When Democrats take back power, they need to make these changes job #1.

Create a persuasive liberal defense of liberty. We can talk all day about inequality and using government to help with jobs and opportunity, but I am 100% certain this will fail if delivered as a narrowly selfish message. Nobody likes to be told that they are only interested in themselves. Lots of conservative voters see themselves as defenders of limited government and individual liberty. Conservative strategists have successfully wrapped specific policy appeals (many of them cynically designed to help special interests) around this broad narrative—anything having to do with guns is all about standing up to the government, climate change is about fending off government expansion, etc. Liberals tend to be successful ‘foxes’ with a 10-point plan to fix every problem, while conservatives tend to be ‘hedgehogs’ with one big idea that frames how they view every problem. Unfortunately there are only so many votes you can get from policy wonks. Liberals need a powerful alternative framework that puts policy specifics in context and explains why individual liberty is better protected by liberalism.  Ideas welcome.

Crack the communications code. Many of the people we need to reach are living behind a high wall of alternative media, dominated by unscrupulous people who bombard followers with are untruths and partial truths. The underlying strategy has been to delegitimize any claim to objectivity in order to make people vulnerable to lies, rumors, and conspiracy theories.  (Here is a quote from a recent New Yorker piece, “Trolls for Trump,” about a very successful alt-right blogger, Mike Cernovich: “Look, I read postmodernist theory in college. If everything is a narrative, then we need alternatives to the dominant narrative.” He smiled. “I don’t seem like a guy who reads Lacan, do I?”) Long ago in a galaxy far, far away, conservatives warned that this kind of left-wing theorizing was going to lead to moral chaos. Well, they were right. Narrowing the range of what people accept as within the bounds of serious discourse is a necessary condition for success. And very difficult. It will depend on vigorous journalism, internal policing by social media, and finding trusted spokesmen for liberal ideas.

Claremonsters and The Shipwrecked Mind

Back in the day I was a student for a year at Claremont Men’s College, today known as Claremont-Mckenna, in Southern California. My father sent me there hoping I would be influenced by Leo Strauss and some of his famous students, who had somehow ended up in the Los Angeles suburbs. A few ideas rubbed off but for the most part I treated Claremont as a chance to enjoy what I saw as Californian freedom, little of which involved studying political theory. Ironically, as it turns out, many of my best friends were Hispanics who were trying to organize and agitate their way (this was 1970 after all!) into Claremont’s conservative Anglo heart.

This was long ago and only lasted a year, but still I am surprised that I had not heard the term “Claremonster” until today, when I read a review in the New Yorker of Mark Lilla’s new book The Shipwrecked Mind. ‘Claremonster’ refers to the militant wing of West Coast Straussians who inhabit the Claremont Institute and publish the Claremont Review. Among the things that they oppose and loath (they are defined for the most part by their dislikes) are political correctness, Ivy League elites, and Barack Obama, not necessarily in that order. A number of them are close to Clarence Thomas, and Thomas has acknowledged the influence of the ur-Claremonster, Harry Jaffa. Jaffa is famous for penning parts of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 acceptance speech but in Claremonster circles is better understood as the founder of the Abraham Lincoln cult that most subscribe to.

The Shipwrecked Mind deals with a slew of 20th century thinkers, including Strauss, who were backward looking and obsessed with discovering ‘where things went wrong.’  That something awful is wrong with modern life is the starting point for their thinking, and while for a Strauss or Eric Voegelin who lived through Nazi Germany and WWII this is not hard to understand, it seems problematic to apply the same dire lens to the United States, as is the habit of many of today’s Straussians. (And not, in my admittedly limited understanding, of Strauss himself).

Now, in the Claremonster universe someone must be to blame for today’s American horror show of political correctness and federal overreach and rule by unelected intellectual elites, and after searching high and low they have hit upon…Woodrow Wilson. Wilson it seems is the symbol of Progressivism and the creator of the modern bureaucratic, technocratic state. (Whether this is true, or a bad thing, is debatable, but since it isn’t debatable that Wilson was an unadulterated racist, perhaps the Claremonsters can make ironic common cause with Princeton agitators who want Wilson effaced from campus).

Lilla distinguishes ‘reactionaries’ from conservatives because of their revolutionary inclinations—to set things right by correcting whatever the great historical error was. Here is where the danger of Claremonsterism comes to light, because it is one thing to do intellectual battle with Machiavelli or Gnosticism or Hegel’s historicism or whatever intellectual trend you think is undermining Western civilization, but another to think, with the Claremonsters, that Donald Trump is a potential savior of the Republic. They believe Trump’s shortcoming—things like chronic lying, racist scapegoating, threatening political opponents with violence, and conspiracy-mongering–are forgivable because he is right on the Big Issue, rejecting the political correctness and identity politics that are the products of progressivism.

What is the Claremonsters’ not-so-secret dream?  A central figure of the cult, John Marini, wrote in July that “Regardless of his motives, therefore, Trump has gone to the heart of the matter and made a political issue of these intellectual and social crises. Trump has not attempted a theoretical justification for doing so. That remains to be made by the thinkers.”   Once one stops laughing at the idea of Trump attempting a theoretical justification of anything, the historical mission of the Claremonsters becomes clear. Look soon for an essay on the “inner greatness” of Trumpism.

Tribes, Neoliberalism, and Public Service

A few weeks ago I heard a talk by Sebastian Junger, the journalist and documentary filmmaker who wrote The Perfect Storm. He was talking about his latest book, Tribes, which draws on his time embedded with a US platoon at an isolated outpost in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. Junger is trying to understand why our troops coming home from today’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have such high rates of PTSD and often find it so hard to re-integrate into society. Studies suggest PTSD rates are higher now than for Vietnam vets, which were higher than after World War II—an odd trend since the average level of violence was greater in Vietnam than in Iraq, and far greater in WWII than either.

Junger thinks the key problem is not that war has become worse, but that modern society has become worse: “Today’s veterans often come home to find that, although they’re willing to die for their country, they’re not sure how to live for it. It’s hard to know how to live for a country that regularly tears itself apart along every possible ethnic and demographic boundary. The income gap between rich and poor continues to widen, many people live in racially segregated communities, the elderly are mostly sequestered from public life, and rampage shootings happen so regularly that they only remain in the news cycle for a day or two…In combat, soldiers all but ignore differences of race, religion, and politics within their platoon. It’s no wonder many of them get so depressed when they come home.”

Junger makes much of the experiences of Indian tribes and, by extension, other hunter-gatherers where people lived intimately in small groups and there was no gap between warriors and the larger community. If you fought, you knew who you were fighting for, and you returned to a group where everyone worked, played, fought, and loved together and for one another. As Junger points out, throughout American history thousands of Europeans ran off to join the Indians, but virtually no Indians ever voluntarily crossed over to join ‘us.’

Junger thinks we are products of a long evolutionary experience in which we evolved for this kind of life, and our deepest satisfactions come from intense experiences of group solidarity, often under threat. He says we get glimpses of this after 9/11 or a hurricane or an earthquake, when people forget their differences and band together against an enemy or to deal with the breakdown of normal life. When this happens suicide rates and instances of depression—terribly common in modern America, and virtually unknown in tribal societies—go down, despite the fact that life has objectively gotten worse.

It is easy to deride this sort of romanticism. Tribal life may be nobly egalitarian and communal, but it can also be stifling, cramped, and full of arbitrary decisions and restrictions. Anthropological studies of existing hunter-gatherers suggest levels of intra-tribe and inter-tribe violence are intense, with up to 1/3 of males dying in murders, feuds, raids, skirmishes, and wars. Indians, as Junger acknowledges, often inflicted stomach-churning tortures on captives. Not to mention famines, diseases, wild animals, floods, and countless other dangers. Human beings shifted to settled agricultural communities with strong hierarchical social systems for some very good reasons.

But I think Junger nevertheless has it partly right. There is a debate in Western thought between those who explain human brokenness—our own internal sense that we are divided from our fellow man or God or our own best self—as inherent in our flawed natures, and those who argue it is because we have somehow strayed from the right life for human beings. The Bible, and the Plato of the Symposium, with Aristophanes’ portrait of human beings cut in half and always seeking their missing self, are in the first camp. Man is born/created as a divided being. In this view, it doesn’t matter whether you live in a tribe or a city or a great empire—you take your brokenness with you.

But there is a second tradition that gives more weight to the type of society you find yourself in. In this camp are Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx and other moderns where the division is historical, not natural. For Hobbes the escape from the state of nature is a necessary tragedy; freedom is too dangerous to endure. For Rousseau it is an unnecessary tragedy that we need to repair. In the Discourse on Inequality Rousseau imagines man in the state of nature as peaceful and content, but not really human at all—solitary and speechless. One cannot genuinely want to return to such a condition, however awful modern society might be. But Rousseau thinks a happy medium exists, and is not a utopia—it is a reality for many people, or at least it was when he wrote in the 18th century. Rousseau says that the stage of human development between the “indolence of the primitive state” [the pure state of nature] and the “petulant activity of our vanity” [modern life] was “the least subject to revolution, the best for man, and that he must have come out of it only by some fatal accident…The example of savages, who have almost all been found at this point, seems to confirm that the human race was made to remain in it always; that this state is the veritable prime of the world…”. He points out in a footnote what Junger borrows, that no savage has ever voluntarily become civilized, while thousands of Europeans have gone the other way; even Christian missionaries have praised the calm and innocent days spent with savage peoples. Rousseau acknowledges that life in this state is imperfect, “bloodthirsty and cruel.” But it is simple, direct, and infused with natural sympathy and affections.

The industrial and scientific revolution generated a burst of enthusiasm that now at last we had found a way to square this circle. The abundance of the new productive economy would let everyone be equal and do away with the need for tyrannical government. Fighting over scarce resources, at the root of so much conflict within and between societies, would wane, and the martial virtues would be less esteemed. All men would become brothers.

These hopes have been partially realized. Violence has in fact dramatically dropped in advanced industrialized countries, contrary to popular opinion, and this despite extremely destructive interstate wars. Much of the world lives in unprecedented conditions of security against the vagaries of nature. Modern democratic governments are less arbitrary and tyrannical than any large-scale governments known in the past.

But no one would say modern society has recreated the closeness of the tribe or even of the agricultural village—quite the opposite. The drive to maximize productivity has rested on maximizing the individual and fostering competition, envy, acquisitiveness, and self-assertion. There have been many small-scale efforts to escape from this society and live by other rules in communes and collectives, most of which fail. The most successful seem to have a strong religious center that enforces a strict separation from the outside world, like the Amish and Hutterites in North America. The Soviet Union and other large-scale efforts to create socialist societies that foster group solidarity over individualism have been markedly less productive and have led to new forms of tyranny.

We aren’t about to give up the benefits of modern life to recreate tribal experiences or close-knit communities. But within these bounds we can do better. Think of the difference between WWII veterans and today’s. WWII was everyone’s war with mass conscription, where the hero was the average guy, GI Joe. People from all walks of life and all parts of the country served together and made connections that often endured long past the war itself. When soldiers came back they got little compared to the medical and psychological support available today, but they did get recognition from a society where most people had served and sacrificed. They got the GI bill that not only helped a whole generation move into the middle class but was a signal of how the country valued what they had done.

Soldiers now are volunteers, so whatever they suffer, the unspoken thought from fellow citizens is “well, you chose it.” By previous standards today’s soldiers are well-paid and provided for, and get a lot of post-service benefits, many of which are easy to abuse—as Junger painfully acknowledges. Just as many Americans see those in the military as individuals who have chosen a job with certain risks, no different than a miner or oilfield worker, so soldiers can easily see it as a transactional relationship where they are entitled to get every penny they can squeeze out of the system. A pat on the back and “thank you for your service” from a public that neither knows nor cares what they did only deepens the divide.

Junger strongly recommends some form of mandatory public service for all citizens. In an increasingly polarized country where we have segregated ourselves more and more by income, class, politics and race, he wants to ensure that everyone has at least once in their life a communal experience with a cross-section of fellow Americans. This remedy for selfishness has been regularly suggested ever since we ended the draft, but runs counter to the neoliberal individualism that has dominated public debate in the US for the last 30 years. Junger is scathing in his description of how our embrace of the most extreme versions of individualism has contributed to creating a society soldiers can’t identify with. His exhibit A is the 2007 financial meltdown where the perpetrators escaped without punishment, despite the terrible damage done to their community.

We won’t be able to consider fixes such as mandatory service until we shake off the idea that markets are the measure of all things. We can start by recognizing the abundant warning signs of social and political disarray, including the returning soldiers our country has sent, and continues to send, to war with so little care and with so little understanding of why they feel alone and adrift.

I have felt part-Hellene since I was young but had never visited. My father taught Ancient Philosophy and always held up Hellas and its thinkers and poets as nonpareil. I went to St. John’s College, where we learned Classical Greek and studied the Hellenes non-stop for an entire year, steeping ourselves in Homer and the Periclean classics. Few of us, and certainly not I, failed to identify with Hellas as our true home, more real by far than the contemporary world. Most of us knew the geography of Troy and Thermopylae better than anything in these United States. After St. John’s I renewed my vows to Hellas at the University of Chicago with more Greek language studies, more classes and seminars on the classics.

But eventually, like most of us, I strayed. Over the years I occasionally re-read the books, or went to a lecture or an alumni seminar that rekindled some of the old magic. Just enough to want more, but life intervenes. Then a few years back I had a chance to teach a class where I assigned Thucydides and Plato, and I spent a summer back at St. John’s reading classic histories.

At some point I wondered to myself, shouldn’t I go visit? Perhaps this should have been obvious, but it wasn’t, to me. The Hellas I loved was 2500 years ago. What if I was disappointed? What if today’s Hellenes didn’t measure up; what if they ruined the whole thing so that I could no longer enjoy my sweet memories? It was like thinking about going to your high school reunion—maybe it was better not to see what the Prom Queen looked like now.

So the long and short is we decided on short notice to take a guided tour last May, with three days in and around Athens, and six days cruising different Greek islands. Here’s what I learned:

Don’t say ‘Greek.’  Greeks aren’t fond of being called ‘Greeks.’ ‘Greek’ is a Roman appellation; for a long time under the Byzantine Empire, Greeks called themselves ‘Romaioi’ or Romans. Under the Ottomans, when Greece fell into decay, the term ‘Greek’ developed connotations of stupidity and banditry. Greeks today call their country Hellas, and they are Hellenes.

I learned this, as much else, from Roula Skoula, the intrepid tour guide for our group. Roula was from Crete and frequently reminded us of all the great things that Crete—which was, alas, not on our itinerary–had given to Hellas and the world. She had great energy and knew most of what tourists might want to know about Hellenes, but with just a hint of the weariness appropriate to an ancient and much-put-upon people going through some particularly hard times. We all loved Roula.

Hellenes are not Western Europeans. This is counter-intuitive if you are steeped in the story of Greeks-as-founders-of-Western-civilization. But modern Hellenes have a very different picture of the past than us Americans, who come at it through British and Western European eyes. For us, Rome fell and the world entered the Dark Ages, emerging fitfully via the Renaissance and and Enlightenment to pick up the broken tradition a thousand years later. But for Hellenes Rome didn’t fall until much later, in 1453. The Byzantine Empire was a period of glory and pride, combining Hellenic culture and language with Christianity. To be Hellene was to be at the center of things.

I noticed that when our guides mentioned the fall of Constantinople, they never said just “In 1453 when Constantinople was captured by the Turks.” Instead, they always said “On May 29, 1453, when Constantinople was captured by the Turks.” The exact date of the fall is burned into Hellenic memory, like December 7, 1941 for Americans. It is the great catastrophe, the start of their Dark Ages under Turkish rule.

Hellas missed the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and to a large extent the Industrial Revolution. It was cut off from Europe and became a backwater, even though some individuals identified as “Hellenes” rose to high office under the Ottomans and others made fortunes as merchants. Ironically, it was these merchants and officials who, when they came into contact with Western Europe in the 18th century, discovered to their surprise that just being from Hellas or speaking Greek gave them special status among Western Europeans, who by this time had rediscovered Hellas and made classical Greece the symbol of learning and culture. Hellenes were eventually able to play on this connection to get help from the West to gain independence from the Ottomans.

Hellenes have some grievances. Since gaining independence, Hellenes have been striving to re-connect to the West. After many ups and downs they appeared to have succeeded in 1981 when they were allowed into the EU. Tragically this has not turned out well, causing anxious debate about whether this shows that Hellas is not at heart sufficiently Western (the German view) or that the Western powers took advantage of a small, weak country (the Hellenic view). There is a lot of very vulgar, pointed anti-German graffiti on the walls of Athens. It isn’t helped by memories of the tremendous suffering of Hellas under Italian and German occupation in WWII. We saw a number of memorials commemorating German massacres of entire villages.

A regular theme of Roula’s when visiting archeological sites was how Hellas has been exploited by unscrupulous outsiders. British Lord Elgin is a particular target for looting selected artifacts from the Parthenon to pay off his debts; the Acropolis Museum pointedly contains empty slots for the missing parts of the Parthenon frieze, still held in London despite strenuous efforts to get them back. The more-than-slightly-crazed German Heinrich Schliemann is another target. In the 19th century Schliemann used dynamite to excavate the site of ancient Troy and sent precious gold relics from Mycenae back to Berlin (many of them now in Moscow, having caught the eye of Soviet conquerors in 1945). When I was young I was taught that Elgin and Schliemann did a service to civilization by ‘saving’ precious objects and making them available to the world. Not how it looks to the Hellenes.

Hellas has many layers. My education taught me that ‘Greece’ meant mostly the short period in the 5th and 4th centuries when Periclean Athens was in full flower. It remains a staggering accomplishment. But Hellas has a long, long history and the Classical period is just one short episode. I loved our visit to Mycenae, Agamemnon’s hilltop fortress-home, built centuries before Pericles out of huge stone blocks. The Homeric poems and later tragedies that record part of his story superimpose an Olympian paradigm on top of a pre-Olympian past—more layering.

On the island of Santorini we visited an ancient town buried in 1500 BC by a huge volcanic explosion—like Pompeii, though it appears the people in Santorini had enough warning to get away—and closely connected to (or maybe an outpost of) the Minoan civilization on Crete. After Pericles came Alexander and centuries of Hellenistic art and study, followed by hundreds of years of Roman rule. At many sites like the Athenian Agora, or Delos, or Ephesus, extensive Roman-era ruins sit side-by-side, or on top of, earlier ‘Hellenic’ artifacts.

Our visit only touched on Hellas’ Christian tradition. Even so, for many visitors Corinth doesn’t signify the Peloponnesian Wars, and Medea’s revenge against Jason, as it did for me; it is the site where Paul preached. You can see the excavated Roman-period stage in the agora. We spent a day on Patmos, an island where the Apostle John was exiled and wrote the Book of Revelation (or not, depending on which scholarly interpretation you believe). The New Testament was written in Greek and Christianity became a universal religion when it jumped from the small community of Jews to the much larger and cosmopolitan community of the Hellenes.

Hellas is full of mountains and islands. Ok, that shouldn’t be a surprise, but you have to see it to get it.  No much of the terrain is flat, as far as I could tell; it is like having your whole country consist of West Virginia, or Western Colorado. So if you think about moving people and armies around in pre-modern times, it is incredibly time-consuming and difficult. The few flat areas good for agriculture are extremely valuable. We went to Delphi, about 100 miles from Athens and way up a mountain valley. It’s built on the side of a steep hill with temples and theaters and arenas carved into the mountainside—what labor! When you read in Sophocles or Herodotus that this or that city sent a delegation to Delphi to get a reading from the oracle, it’s not a hop, skip and a jump. It’s a long, arduous trip and not something you would do lightly–perhaps why Delphic prophecies were so valued. Traveling by sea would be much better.

And sea travel is eased by all the islands. What I realized traveling by boat through the Cyclades in the Aegean is that you are never out of sight of land. There is always an island of some kind in sight. So you can set sail in relative peace knowing you can get ashore if the weather blows up or you run short of water—though some of the smaller islands are pretty bleak.

On our way to Santorini we sailed close to, but not in sight of, the island of Melos. Melos is the notorious site of the “Melian Dialogue” described by Thucydides, which ends with Athens destroying the neutral Melians after they refuse to submit and join the Athenian Empire. The Athenians probably do not deserve to be let off the hook for this, but sailing through the region shifted my perspective on the Athenian demand. The islands are a chain that stretches out into and across the Aegean. Lose one link in the chain and it could break. Maybe Melos was right that its neutrality didn’t threaten Athens. But I could see an Athenian admiral, or just a plain ship’s captain, worrying that Athens needed every island, every part of the chain.

WHAT DARK MONEY BUYS THESE DAYS

In the Renaissance, as in some other times and places, wealthy patrons supported philosophers and scientists and writers; they endowed schools, funded scientific expeditions, paid for books to be published. Often there was a fairly clear quid pro quo—the struggling scholars and artists were expected to glorify and flatter their patrons, indulge their pet ideas, tutor their children. In return they had the opportunity to work on what they considered important. We may imagine the scholars had the better of the deal; they got the princes to support all manner of new ideas that ended up subverting the old order and leaving the prince-oligarchs in the dust. But what if the oligarchs want revenge?

This is something I’ve been thinking about because I recently finished reading Dark Money, Jane Mayer’s new book about the Koch Brothers and the network of rich politically active conservatives that they exemplify. The most important point I took away away from Dark Money is the importance the Kochs and their allies place on ideas. Their strategy started with trying to change the way American elites think about government, the private sector, individual liberty, and so on by making neoliberal or libertarian ideas—which when they started in earnest in the 1970s were viewed with scorn by policy experts and politicians, in both parties—acceptable and mainstream. They have largely succeeded. Today large numbers of people accept that government is inherently dysfunctional, taxes should always be lower, wealthy businessmen are heroic job creators, regulation stifles the economy, unions are the work of the devil, climate change is a left-wing conspiracy, and more. The Republican Party has been captured lock, stock and barrel by Kochean ideology. How did they do it?

As Dark Money (and another equally good account, Invisible Hands: The Businessman’s Crusade Against the New Deal, by Kim Phillips-Fein) tells us in detail, they did it through philanthropy. It was philanthropy that was sometimes scattered around, sometimes wasted, but with a strategic focus of supporting organizations and individuals that shared at least some Kochean views. One of the central goals was to insert neoliberal thinking into the most influential organizations in order to move it from the fringe to the mainstream. This meant into Washington DC think tanks, into major universities, and into the mass media.

So for instance, one of their first steps was to build up the Cato Institute in Washington. Though it is hardly a secret that it was founded and funded by the Koch Brothers (its original name was the Charles Koch Institute) to further their libertarian agenda, Cato has over time become seen as a valued voice in policy debates. Instead of being dismissed as the mouthpiece for a narrow, extremist ideology it is now one of the boys. Washington insiders tend to say “I don’t agree with them, but it’s a valid point of view. It adds to the debate.” Media outlets regularly use Cato analysts to give ‘balance’ to discussions. Cato papers and studies are quoted and taken seriously.

In short, build it and they will come. When you have jobs and grants to offer, leading to media exposure and policy influence, you can be sure to find eager takers. Some will be true believers; others will choose to believe to get on the gravy train. And from the Koch’s perspective, even if sometimes Cato doesn’t say exactly what they might want and a few voices go off the reservation, on balance it’s well worth it. The appearance of independence actually makes Cato more credible. While Cato is closest to the Kochean worldview, they and their allies support other DC think tanks like Heritage and AEI, organizations that reliably support conservative positions and together make up a network that creates, amplifies, and legitimates an overlapping set of ideas and policies.

Implanting game-changing ideas into the larger society requires more than just think tanks; it needs the imprimatur of academia. The largest single recipient of Koch money has been George Mason University in Fairfax, VA, just outside Washington. Thirty years ago GMU was a 3rd-tier state commuter school; today it is a well-endowed, fast-growing powerhouse that keeps getting bigger and gaining stature. People in the DC area are frequently amazed at GMU’s transformation—“I remember when it was just another glorified junior college. How did they get so big?” How indeed. GMU had an ambitious and entrepreneurial President who wanted to up GMU’s academic game, but Kochean money has played a big part. The Kochs have given $30 million to GMU, much of it to the Mercatus Center, a prolific advocate for libertarian views and Austrian Economics. Other parts of the Koch’s “donor consortium” have added substantially more.

Though not on the Mercatus scale, similar centers and think-tanks associated with major universities have blossomed with infusions of Kochean money. You can find them at Princeton and Brown, Florida State and West Virginia. In many cases the Koch network supports individual professors and graduate students to conduct research expounding free market ideology. It’s not just the Kochs, either: Western Carolina University is discussing a new Koch-funded $2 million “Center for the Study of Free Enterprise,” proposed by its very own “BB&T Distinguished Professor of Capitalism.” The retired head of BB&T, a major regional bank in the Southeast, has made it his life mission to use his considerable fortune to teach America’s youth the virtues of the free enterprise system, having had his own eyes opened by reading Ayn Rand.

“Philanthropy” has a nice ring to it, but it isn’t just donations to art museums and hospital wings. It can be a dangerous vehicle for oligarchs to use their enormous wealth to distort the public square (at the public’s expense, too, given the way our tax system turns these programs into tax write-offs) and further their private interests. In a recent paper (“The Koch Effect: The Impact of a Cadre-Led Network on American Politics,” Jan. 2016) one of our foremost students of the American Right, Theda Skocpol at Harvard, examines the Koch network in detail to try and understand why the Republican Party has moved so inexorably to the right, even when this runs against the interests of Republican voters and mainstream business interests. She concludes the Koch network has acted like a ‘force field’ pulling the Republican Party to more extreme positions. Its success has rested on the ideological networks built up over 40 years to create the illusion that there is a genuine constituency for libertarianism and for policies like slashing social programs, giving the rich more tax breaks, and ignoring global warming. There isn’t, but it’s hard to separate the signals from the constant noise generated by Koch-funded ideamongers.

It takes two to tango, and of course the Kochs would have no influence if so many university boards, ambitious administrators, and grant-hungry graduate students weren’t ready to be bought. Like politicians, none admit that the money will influence their research or conclusions (even though in private you can find multiple cases of alarmed academics complaining about Koch attempts to set ideological requirements for faculty, or mandate what is in the curriculum, often including Charles Koch’s peculiar management theories). We should note that the drying up of public funding for higher education—a policy zealously approved by free market enthusiasts—has greatly increased the vulnerability of colleges and universities to anyone with an open checkbook.

Other cases. Lest we think this is the only case where money is used to distort and influence, I mention several other scandalous influence-buying operations that have long operated in plain sight. In a recent Atlantic article on President Obama’s foreign policy, his national security staff was quoted as describing Massachusetts Avenue in DC (the K Street of think-tanks) as “Arab-occupied territory.” A VOX piece (“How Saudi Arabia Captured Washington,” March 2016) concluded that

“Many say a sort of taboo has developed against needlessly antagonizing Gulf states by criticizing them or by taking policy positions that those states consider red lines, for fear of upsetting a current donor or alienating a future donor. Even the money itself has become a taboo subject. Everybody knows about it, but no one likes to talk about it, because they all want the money too. ‘ Nobody wants to risk that their institution won’t get their share of the pie,’ one said.”

The Gulfies aren’t the only culprits here—the VOX article has examples of Japanese and Norwegian (??) influence—but they are by far the biggest donors (donations from the Gulf have risen sharply in the past few years) and have the most at stake in trying to influence an Administration that has been noticeably less enamored of the US-Saudi alliance than its predecessors.

One could draw a fascinating parallel between the Koch network and its 40 year effort to spread neoliberalism, and the Saudis and their 50-year effort to spread Wahhabism. Both actors leveraged massive wealth to take what at the beginning were marginal views held by a few zealots, and make them pervasive and influential. In both cases the results have been disastrous, and in both cases the perpetrators remain active, powerful, and unbowed.

Politicians and those who bankroll them dance a similar minuet. We all know that today’s politicians take money, mostly from companies and wealthy interest groups, but also from unions, rich individuals and so on. And we all know what they say if they’re accused of doing anything in return, of being bought and paid for: “Of course not! I have NEVER changed a vote or introduced a bill or (fill in the blank) in return for any donations from anybody!” Why then do organizations do this? If you believe the politicians, it’s all because the money-givers just think he/she is a swell person and they see eye to eye on the issues.

Of course if you do believe the politicians, you are a sap, and hardly anyone does. But it’s hard to nail down exactly how the system works. Politicians are right that only very rarely is there an explicit quid pro quo—a bag of money here, a favor there, clearly linked. Maybe that’s what happened in the bad old days, but not now. But clearly donors and lobbyists get a good return on their political investments, and careful analysts have explained it in detail. Lawrence Lessig, for instance, in Republic, Lost gives us chapter and verse in how money buys access, gets particular views a seat at the table, and builds up personal relationships that end up affecting the views and actions of politicians and people around them. The donors end up shaping the agenda, defining the options, setting the terms of the debate. Politicians know exactly what they need to do to keep the money coming. It’s still corruption, but it’s subtle.

In fact, it’s so subtle that the practitioners on both sides of the transaction can easily convince themselves that they’re doing nothing questionable. The recipient of the money and favors, like the Renaissance-era patronizer, can even go further and say—“Let them think they’re manipulating me! I’m my own man/woman, and I’ll use their resources as I see fit. I’m using them, not the other way around. If they want to throw $600,000 at me to give a speech, well, why not?”

It’s not hard to see that this is usually a dangerous fantasy, a justification for doing something politicians desperately want to do without admitting that there is a price.

Liberal Shortcomings. The manipulative and cynical attitude towards political ideas taken by the Kochs is unfortunately matched by the indifference and dismissiveness of the liberal establishment. While conservatives seek to appropriate the American founding, Christianity, and Western Civilization generally as one long march towards free markets, liberals by contrast often seem indifferent, or worse, determined to deconstruct these traditions into oblivion. Intellectual and religious traditions of great power and meaning are too easily dismissed as outdated, insufficiently enlightened, racist, sexist and irreparable.  This leaves the field to the terrible simplifiers.

Part of the reason for conservative success has been because Americans, like all people, have an appetite for a coherent account of things. What is our country all about? What does its history tell us? What is its government for? Neoliberal dogma, honed to a fine edge by the Kochean idea factory, presents a seamless story that offers followers clarity and principle: Government is bad, so the less the better. Markets should decide, not governments. Most importantly, we are all about individual liberty; the other guys are all about restricting it.

There is no real liberal equivalent. It is not enough for liberals to say that liberalism is undogmatic, or pragmatic, or that it avoids either-or dichotomies and recognizes ambiguity and grey areas. True, but also a flag of surrender. Most damaging, liberals have largely ceded the ideal of liberty to the libertarians. Liberals have been good at explaining specific benefits voters will get from liberal programs, but not how these programs add up and how they will make us more free.

Even though in the aggregate liberal and progressive-leaning think tanks have a lot more money, and liberals seem permanently embedded in many parts of academia, they are constitutionally unable to focus their efforts. According to a 2005 study, “The War of Ideas,” by Andrew Rich:

“Nonconservative foundations – what might be labeled “middle of the road,” “mainline,” or “liberal foundations” – have devoted far more resources than conservatives to influencing thinking about public policy. This spending simply has not been as deliberate or effective. Conservative think tanks have quite successfully provided political leaders, journalists, and the public with concrete ideas about shrinking the role of the federal government, deregulation, and privatization. They are succeeding by aggressively promoting their ideas. By contrast, liberal and mainstream foundations back policy research that is of interest to liberals. But these funders remain reluctant to make explicit financial commitment to the war of ideas, and they do relatively little to support the marketing of liberal ideas.”

Rich concludes that while liberals and progressives support objective research that they hope will influence public policy, without knowing in advance what the research will show, conservatives support the propagation of ideas in support of what they already know to be true. Conservative think tanks tend to spend much more on communications and hire people with business backgrounds to run focused influence campaigns aimed at politicians; liberals hire academics and prioritize links to non-profits and government bureaucrats. Liberals tend to be foxes who look for solutions to an array of particular problems, while Kochean conservatives are hedgehogs who fight for One Big Idea.

Conclusion.  I am frightened at the ease with which today’s versions of the old Renaissance patrons have been able to use their money to have their way with our democracy. We have become the Koch’s science project.  Like Russian hackers, the Kochs and their cadre of well-paid professionals circle our democracy, probing ceaselessly for vulnerabilities, ways to take control of the operating system without alerting the clueless owners.  Here is how Jane Mayer summarizes their plan:

During the 1970s, a handful of the nation’s wealthiest corporate captains felt overtaxed and overregulated and decided to fight back. Disenchanted with the direction of modern America, they launched an ambitious, privately financed war of ideas to radically change the country. They didn’t want to merely win elections; they wanted to change how Americans thought. Their ambitions were grandiose—to “save” America as they saw it, at every level, by turning the clock back to the Gilded Age before the advent of the Progressive Era.

I suspect that in their annual get-togethers with their billionaire peers the Kochs share a hearty guffaw at the stupidity of the people, for whom libertarians generally feel contempt; and at the many useful idiots in the intelligentsia who are willing to be bought. So far, unfortunately, the defenders of democracy have not been able to prove to them that these low opinions are not deserved.

The death of Judge Antonin Scalia has occasioned much commentary and reminiscing. About a number of things there seems to be consensus: he was extremely smart; he was a ‘happy warrior’ who reveled in argument and intellectual combat; he wrote and spoke eloquently; he was funny; he was a good friend and mentor, even to those with whom he disagreed; he was a committed social and political conservative; and he claimed to make legal decisions in accord with a detailed theory of originalism designed to counter individual subjectivity.

The challenge I think Scalia poses is whether he was really able to contain this explosive mix of brilliance and partisanship in the tight confines of his judicial method. Our reasoning is always in danger of being corrupted by a range of biases: self-interest, past experiences, prejudice, unexamined suppositions, commitment to a cause, and so on. People seem to assume that the more intelligent you are, the more able you are to recognize and overcome these, but I don’t think this is true, or rarely so. What is more common is that great intelligence is used to confirm our bias and prejudice. We become better at marshaling arguments in our favor and demolishing those of our opponents. If we are exceptionally talented communicators, like Scalia, the danger only increases, because the praise we get for our skillful presentations confirms we are right.

A 2014 Vox article by Ezra Klein called ““How Politics Makes Us Stupid” makes this argument in detail, drawing on psychological research, such as experiments that ask people to estimate probabilities and do math problems; people who are perfectly objective at problem-solving begin to make ‘mistakes’—always in their favor–when the problem is given a political spin. The researcher, Dan Kahan, a Yale law professor, calls this Identity Protective Cognition, a fancy way of saying that people fight fiercely against evidence and arguments which, if accepted, would undermine their basic sense of who they are. In fact Kahan, when pressed by Klein about the potentially disastrous implications for our ability to be objective, cites Scalia as an example:

“At one point in our interview Kahan does stare over the abyss, if only for a moment. He recalls a dissent written by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in a case about overcrowding in California prisons. Scalia dismissed the evidentiary findings of a lower court as motivated by policy preferences. “I find it really demoralizing, but I think some people just view empirical evidence as a kind of device,” Kahan says.

But Scalia’s comments were perfectly predictable given everything Kahan had found. Scalia is a highly ideological, tremendously intelligent individual with a very strong attachment to conservative politics. He’s the kind of identity-protector who has publicly said he stopped subscribing to the Washington Post because he “just couldn’t handle it anymore,” and so he now cocoons himself in the more congenial pages of the Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal. Isn’t it the case, I asked Kahan, that everything he’s found would predict that Scalia would convince himself of whatever he needed to think to get to the answers he wanted?”

I will admit that this has been for some time my view of Scalia—a really smart guy with many attractive characteristics who unfortunately uses his big brain to validate a set of conservative policy preferences. Since he is on the Supreme Court and not blogging from his basement, this has done tremendous damage to our country on issues such as money in politics, gun control, and voting rights.

But could I be selling Scalia short? Maybe Scalia, knowing that he has strong views, is trying to counter his own prejudices. One piece of evidence is that Scalia had a practice of always having one liberal clerk on his staff (out of the standard four for Supreme Court justices) to offer a different point of view. Several of these liberal clerks have praised Scalia and said he challenged them and made them better thinkers and better lawyers. Lawrence Lessig, who clerked for Scalia in the early 90s, says that on a number of occasions, when Scalia’s ‘originalist’ method produced an outcome that went against Scalia’s conservative principles, Scalia would grit his teeth and go with originalism, saying “I don’t believe in an originalism of convenience.”

If this were consistently the case it would paint a different picture. Scalia knows he needs to hear contrarian voices, so he puts liberals on his staff. We know he was good friends with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a strong liberal voice, and had many friends with different views. Perhaps more importantly, he adopts a method of interpretation designed to rein in his policy preferences by forcing him to follow the method wherever it leads—sometimes to a liberal, sometimes to a conservative conclusion.

There are two questions we have to answer to decide if Scalia was a clever partisan or an admirable jurist. First, how consistently did Scalia allow his method to deliver unwelcome (to him) conclusions? In particular, did he do it for big, important cases? It’s common to try and defuse criticism by acting against expectations on some small, secondary issues and then pointing to those decisions to prove lack of bias. If most of the consequential cases go the other way, it calls the impartiality into question.

The second question has to do with the nature of Scalia’s ‘originalism.’ Is the theory itself fair, or is it a method that puts a strong conservative thumb on the scales? Does choosing that approach guarantee conservative outcomes, not in every case, but for the most part? Even if it does, that might not prove Scalia is biased—perhaps he holds conservative views because that’s where the method leads him, not the other way around. But it would make me suspicious.

On the first question, whether Scalia overruled originalism or otherwise ignored evidence that went against his conservative ideals, the evidence is somewhat mixed. We saw above where Kahan (himself a law professor and Supreme Court clerk) claims Scalia ignored factual material. Lessig, the liberal clerk who praised Scalia for being principled, goes on to say that later on he told Scalia “that he had ruined me as a constitutional lawyer, because I was constantly predicting he’d choose originalism over conservatism. Yet too often, I said, when the decision came down, I felt like Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin.” Lessig doesn’t specify which cases he has in mind, but the implication is that it was unwise to bet on Scalia adhering to originalism when it contravened his conservatism.

William B. Gould, a Stanford professor of law and former head of the National Labor Relations Board, claims Scalia was inconsistent on the rights of unions; in a 1991 decision, according to Gould, Scalia backed the right of public sector unions to require dues, while in the recent California case (before the Court and undecided at the time of Scalia’s death) he signaled his support for the argument that all public sector bargaining is ‘political’ and hence we cannot require people to support it. Gould says Scalia shifted because in 1991 there was no chance of success, while in 2016 the conservative majority saw the chance to cripple public sector unions, a core conservative policy goal.

Those who see Scalia as more principled point to his support for 4th and 6th amendment rights. Justice Ginsburg regularly pointed out in defending Scalia from charges of conservative bias that he had written a number of strong decisions on the 4th amendment protection against “unreasonable searches and seizures” (Kyllo vs. United States, 2001; United States vs. Jones, 2012), and defended the free speech right to burn the American flag.  While significant, I would argue that on the questions that matter most for political and social conservatives, like gun control, voting rights, equating money and speech, abortion, gay marriage, and so on–not to mention a decisive vote to make George Bush President in 2000–Scalia stayed true to his partisan roots.

The second question on the merits of originalism is harder to untangle. (Not being an expert on constitutional interpretation I will happily accept correction if this is off-base, but it’s the best I can do with what I’ve got). Originalism is defended by Scalia and his supporters, as stated in his 2012 book Reading Law, as necessary to “reject judicial speculation about both the drafters’ extra-textually derived purposes and the desirability of the fair reading’s anticipated consequences.” Otherwise constitutional interpretation becomes an assertion of preferences or a consequentialism that looks to results rather than rights. (The slippery slope is very steep in the arguments of originalists. I hypothesized that Scalia may have embraced originalism in part to check his own strong conservative views, but it is certainly true that originalism is largely designed to check the views of liberal believers in a ‘living Constitution.’)

Is originalism necessarily conservative? Defenders say no, or only incidentally. But critics argue that this is disingenuous. The most pointed argument that I know of comes from Judge Richard Posner, who wrote a scathing review of Reading Law in The New Republic called “The Incoherence of Antonin Scalia.”  Posner, also a conservative but with a much more libertarian bent than Scalia, says:

It is true, as Scalia and Garner [Scalia’s co-author Bryan Garner] say, that statutory text is not inherently liberal or inherently conservative; it can be either, depending on who wrote it. Their premise is correct, but their conclusion does not follow: text as such may be politically neutral, but textualism is conservative.

A legislature is thwarted when a judge refuses to apply its handiwork to an unforeseen situation that is encompassed by the statute’s aim but is not a good fit with its text. Ignoring the limitations of foresight, and also the fact that a statute is a collective product that often leaves many questions of interpretation to be answered by the courts because the legislators cannot agree on the answers, the textual originalist demands that the legislature think through myriad hypothetical scenarios and provide for all of them explicitly rather than rely on courts to be sensible. In this way, textualism hobbles legislation—and thereby tilts toward “small government” and away from “big government,” which in modern America is a conservative preference.

To Posner’s objection one could add that in a Groundhog-Day interpretive world where it is always the late 18th century, judges will remain tethered to views and values that do not reflect changes in the understanding of the basic rights articulated at the time. Few today would defend the prevalent views in 1787 about the status of women, or blacks, or Catholics, or the propertied. Originalists argue logically that if mores have changed, we should change the laws to match—but amending the Constitution is hard, and we count on judges to re-interpret it, without doing violence to our respect for the text.

Even Scalia acknowledged that he was sometimes a “faint hearted originalist,” because the implications of a consistent originalism are so troubling. Under originalism, for instance, Brown vs. Board of Education would have gone the other way. The Court would have been unable to step in to help the nation overcome its centuries-old logjam over race; and since the Court’s conservative shift in the 1970s, it has largely ceased to play that role.

This tendency is stronger under Scalia’s specific form of originalism. While I suspect most Americans assume that seeking the original meaning involves trying to understand what the authors of the Constitution and Bill of Rights intended, this is not what Scalia has in mind. He is four-square against any attempt to base interpretation on “original intent,” or on the legislative history, or what the legislators who wrote and debated the law said they meant. What matters is what the text meant to the average reader at the time. So if Madison or Franklin or others at the Constitutional Convention agreed to value slaves as 3/5ths of a man, but perhaps did so in the hope that in time American views of slavery would evolve—under the influence of an upbringing shaped by the new understanding of individual rights and popular government—this is irrelevant to Scalia. The law becomes operative when it is voted on and approved by the states, and what matters is what they think they are approving, which we can know by seeking out the common understanding of words and phrases. Scalian originalism is characterized by detailed historical research into dictionaries and thesauruses and finding how many times a particular phrase is used and in what context, at approximately the time and place when the Constitution and Bill of Rights or whatever law under discussion was approved.

This is why, in addition to its conservative bias, Posner criticizes originalism as epistemologically flawed:

The decisive objection to the quest for original meaning, even when the quest is conducted in good faith, is that judicial historiography rarely dispels ambiguity. Judges are not competent historians. Even real historiography is frequently indeterminate, as real historians acknowledge. To put to a judge a question that he cannot answer is to evoke “motivated thinking,” the form of cognitive delusion that consists of credulously accepting the evidence that supports a preconception and of peremptorily rejecting the evidence that contradicts it.

If you want to test this for yourself, try reading one of Scalia’s most famous decisions, his majority decision in Heller vs. District of Columbia on the 2nd Amendment, the case that sharply expanded the right to keep and bear arms.  I did, and came away convinced that Posner’s critique is on target.  Scalia takes the reader on a galloping tour through late 18th and early 19th century texts in an effort to define each of the key terms of the Amendment (what are ‘arms’? what did ‘bear’ mean? what were the different definitions of ‘militia’?). One is left with a good deal of interesting information, along with assertions that the particular texts and examples cited are exhaustive and determinative. But no one who is familiar with historical research or textual interpretation in other contexts (philosophy, religion, literature) can doubt that different researchers could unearth other texts and other examples and come to different conclusions. Or as Posner says, citing the author of Reading Law’s Preface, Judge Frank Easterbrook:

“Easterbrook goes on: “When the original meaning is lost in the passage of time…the justification for judges’ having the last word evaporates.” This is a version of the doctrine of judicial self-restraint, which Scalia and Garner endorse by saying that a statute’s unconstitutionality must be “clearly shown”—which it was not in Heller. Justice Scalia’s interpretation of the Second Amendment probably is erroneous, but one who doubts this should conclude that the relevant meaning of the amendment had been “lost in the passage of time,” and so the Court should have let the District of Columbia’s gun ordinance stand.”

As many Scalia critics have pointed out, a genuine conservative would be inclined to follow precedent and defer to legislatures, but Scalia has been aggressive in using his method to challenge and overturn established understandings.

These are the basic reasons why Posner concludes, after examining many specific cases in Reading Law, that Scalia’s arguments don’t add up and that in fact they provide a convenient excuse for furthering his policy preferences:

A problem that undermines their entire approach is the authors’ lack of a consistent commitment to textual originalism. They endorse fifty-seven “canons of construction,” or interpretive principles, and in their variety and frequent ambiguity these “canons” provide them with all the room needed to generate the outcome that favors Justice Scalia’s strongly felt views on such matters as abortion, homosexuality, illegal immigration, states’ rights, the death penalty, and guns.

Scalia also defends originalism from a different direction that we should consider. When Scalia and liberal Justice Stephen Breyer conducted a series of debates over their competing approaches, Scalia often justified originalism by using the well-known joke about the two campers attacked by a grizzly—you don’t have to be faster than the bear, just faster than the other camper.  In other words, originalism may be far from perfect, but it’s better than the subjective alternatives.

If the conclusion is that originalism should be the only or dominant mode of interpreting the Constitution, I would disagree, but I do think that having a tough-minded originalism in the mix of competing approaches is a good thing. I want judges and scholars to take the original meaning of the text and the intentions of the drafters seriously. I want them to clearly justify an interpretation that stretches the original meaning. Many observers credit Scalia and other originalists with raising the level of debate and challenging argle-bargle liberal thinking. We have nine Supreme Court justices and we’re better off with someone like Scalia on the bench, making their case forcefully and keeping the rest of us on our toes. But given originalism’s shortcomings, Justice Breyer’s more eclectic approach that includes six interpretive tools—text, history, tradition, precedent, the purpose of a statute, and the consequences—is a better model for the Court as a whole.

I would describe Scalia as like an alcoholic who knows he has a problem, goes to occasional AA meetings, but regularly falls off the wagon. Much of the time he is charming and funny and great company at the bar. But when he goes on a bender, it’s a doozy and there’s a lot of smashed-up furniture. The American people will be paying the bill for decisions like Heller and Citizen’s United for a long time to come.

Conclusion. I think at bottom we have an issue that depends on which aspect of the American founding you want to emphasize. Was the great innovation at our country’s birth the discovery of rights, eternal principles that, once discovered and properly defined, don’t change and need to be protected in their pristine vigor? Or was it representative democracy, the idea of basing government on the will and interests of the people, making use of what Hamilton in the Ninth Federalist calls a new and improved “science of politics” to create new institutions to guard against the dangers of popular rule?

If the former you will lean towards originalism, because the great danger is that as we become more distant from, and forgetful of, our origins, as conditions change and immediate interests come to the fore, we will infringe on these rights. The original meaning should be our constant rudder as we move into the future.  (And a pox on democracy, too, if it gets in the way. Case in point:  David Harsanyi, who wrote a shrill conservative rebuttal to Ezra Klein’s argument about politics making us stupid, is the author of a recent book called The People Have Spoken (And They Are Wrong):  The Case Against Democracy.)

If the latter you will want a living Constitution that responds better to the people’s will. You will side with Thomas Jefferson’s intent (if not necessarily his exact prescription) in proposing that the Constitution be rewritten every generation to keep society from being tyrannized by the past.  You will not want the original intent or the meaning of a piece of text in the eyes of people in 1787—which you may think is impossible to know in any case–to be an anchor that prevents us from moving at all.