Adam's Ideas

Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause.  They will struggle for the sake of struggle.  They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom, for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle.  And if a greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.  Frank Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man. 

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them every where brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society… So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions, and excite their most violent conflicts.  James Madison, Federalist 10

So many right-wing crazies, so little time.  This must be why I had not heard of “Bronze Age Pervert” until recently, courtesy of an Atlantic article by Graeme Wood, “How Bronze Age Pervert Charmed the Far Right.”  Bronze Age Pervert, or BAP, is a slightly mysterious Yale-educated political science Ph.D who masquerades online as an unhinged, foul-mouthed purveyor of racism and misogyny, coupled with a love of bodybuilding and ancient Greece.  Yet he seems to have attracted a large and loyal following among young right-wingers.  Unraveling his attraction for today’s new-Right was the thread I tried to follow, leading through the labyrinth of modern right-wing thought.

Old and New Rights

In the United States, to be ‘on the right’ until recently meant that you were a firm supporter of a capitalist, free-enterprise system; limited government with low taxes and regulation; strong protections for individual rights with respect to property, speech, guns, etc.; and a believer in the rule of law.  You were almost always a proud defender of the Constitution, the military and law enforcement, America’s leading role in the world, and the American business community. You endorsed a level playing field because you believed that liberty allowed natural differences in talent, drive, and intelligence to manifest themselves and rise to the top.    

Today however almost none of this is true.  

What we call the right today in America still has some of its classic features.  But that is not where the grassroots energy is, not where the MAGA movement is, not where the intellectual fervor is.  Increasingly it is found in support of formerly fringe positions:  not limited government, but strong government empowered to enforce minority views on religion and morals; not the Constitution but the will of a demagogue; not universal individual rights but the rights of particular voices and groups; not a leader of the ‘free world’ but a selfish defender of national interests; not the military or law enforcement (see Senator Tommy Tuberville’s willingness to block military promotions); not even private businesses who insist on their right to hire and fire and appeal to customers as they see fit (see Governor De Santis’s fight with Disney). 

Donald Trump, and not only him, makes no secret of his admiration for authoritarian tough guys like Putin, Xi, Erdogan and their ilk.  This is largely because politics for Trump has nothing to do with policy, it is entirely about winning and losing—are you for me or against me.  It is struggle for its own sake.  

One way to sum up these changes is to say that the American Right now looks more like the old European Right.  In Europe, the Right, since the terms Right and Left came into general political use with the French Revolution, has stood for hierarchy and the rule of the strong and privileged.  It advocated for the close cooperation of church, state and business.  It promoted a blood and soil nationalism based on affinities of language, race, and faith, and against dangerous mixing with inferior races and peoples.  It fought virulently against advances for women, equal rights for gays, and other challenges to ‘traditional morality.’  It culminated in fascist regimes that glorified violence, struggle and war as ends in themselves.

That version of the Right seemed, after World War II, to be extinguished, never to rise again from the ashes of utter defeat and ignominy.  But it has returned, in almost every European state.  In Russia, Hungary, Poland, and now Italy it has taken power.  In other states it is growing, including here at home.

Hungary in particular has become the model for America’s new right-wingers, who are envious of Victor Orban.  It is nominally democratic but has been rigged by Orban to be a democracy in name only:    The courts, the press, the universities, the legislature are all cowed or bought off.  Xenophobia over a hyped immigration threat, and faux-indignation at having to abide by European human rights standards, help fuel Orban’s continued popularity. Freedom House now considers Hungary to be a ‘partial’ or ‘semi-consolidated’ democracy.

CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, an epicenter of today’s Right, in 2022 and 2023 held its annual conference in Budapest.  One of its leading lights, Rod Dreher, has said “Right now, the political leader of the conservative resistance in the West is the prime minister of a small central European [country] that most Americans never even think about.”   

Many of Orban’s most committed supporters are Catholic ‘integralist’ thinkers who want the state to explicitly privilege their faith, as is the case in Hungary.  The integralists reject liberal pluralism as dangerous to conservative practice (on abortion, LGBTQ rights, etc.) and contrary to Catholic doctrine, and want to seize control of the state to impose the truth.   Kevin Vallier, author of a recent book critiquing integralism, characterizes it this way:  “’We’re going to take the institutions established by liberalism and socialism and we’re going to turn them to our own ends.’ This is the great danger of the American integralists because they’re bringing the ideas of Viktor Orbán into the Republican Party. They’re one of the ones who are most responsible for it.”

Integralists are not the only ones who dream of capturing state institutions for their own purposes.  Trump has promised that if re-elected he will purge the government bureaucracy and change civil service rules to allow him to put his followers into every federal position.  Trump seeks not the standard conservative goal of less government, but the new-right goal of my government.

In the 1930s during the Great Depression small groups of Americans looked to foreign dictatorships on Right and Left—Mussolini’s Italy, Stalin’s USSR—as models for a troubled United States.  But there is no precedent for the leader of a major American political party, millions of his followers, and its intellectual spokesmen, to openly prefer explicitly illiberal, foreign, political systems.  

A number of different strands make up today’s right. (I have not found a satisfactory term to characterize today’s right-wing movements and thinkers:  New Right is an old term, ‘alt-right’ refers more narrowly to white nationalists.  The one term that does not fit is ‘conservative’—there is nothing conservative about today’s right, which is both radical and reactionary).  But they increasingly overlap.   

We have people of great wealth who, like the Trumps and Musks, cannot resist the temptation to meddle in politics and public affairs.  They are convinced that they got rich because they are superior beings, and that this superiority is transferable to other domains.  Many are openly hostile to democracy and see no reason for their inferiors to have an equal say in politics:  billionaire tech-entrepreneur and Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, for instance, wants to limit voting to those who can pass a civics test.  Today many of the most brazen of these Gilded Age throwbacks live in Silicon Valley and are prey to anti-establishment conspiracy theories: as Paul Krugman wrote recently,  “Arguably, the craziest faction in U.S. politics right now isn’t red-hatted blue-collar guys in diners, it’s technology billionaires living in huge mansions and flying around on private jets.”  

We have conservative nationalists like Steve Bannon, part of the Orban admiration society.  These are people who agree with Putin and Xi and Modi that the world is characterized by a ‘clash of civilizations’; we are divided into distinct religio-cultural spheres, each of which should be allowed to develop its own distinctive way of life.  Liberalism is despised because of its claims to universalism and attempts to criticize and reform non-liberal regimes.  Our sphere (the best of all) is Christian, white, and European.  We should proudly uphold it and keep out people and ideas from all those ‘shithole countries’.  

We have disaffected young men who rightly feel put upon by globalized capitalism, which has ravaged America’s industries and turned the once-proud working class into the precariat.  Their place in the world is unclear, and it is easy to blame feminism and affirmative action for their problems. They yearn for some greater cause to provide meaning and belonging, and often find it in right-wing organizations and leaders like Trump, who tell them liberalism is the arch-enemy, a world-view that looks down on people like them.  Embracing racism, anti-semitism, and misogyny and prepping for violence is exciting and fills the void that has opened up in their lives and communities. 

And we have a small but influential group of intellectuals and ‘thought-leaders’ who find liberalism unsatisfying and yearn for alternatives, sometimes in a resurgence of traditional religion, sometimes in  an anti- or post-liberal political order.  These are people who want a great cause to support, who want a world painted in clear black and white, with enemies to defeat and battles to wage.  Some see themselves as defenders of ‘true’ American values, but many are fascinated with theocracy and fascism.  

The Common Thread:  Hatred of Equality

What do these different strands have in common? The fundamental divide today, as for the last three centuries, is between those who accept and defend the fundamental equality of human beings, and those who do not.  The United States has until now been the nation that most clearly falls in the first camp, at least in its creed and publicly accepted principles.  The (many) deviations from this creed have come to be understood as mistakes that need to be acknowledged and overcome.  But as liberalism has moved more forcefully to identify and rectify these mistakes—racism and sexism, the destruction of indigenous peoples, the piling up of massive fortunes—it has produced a fierce backlash.  This backlash has now morphed from a defense of ‘classic’ American values, to a growing embrace of values that cannot by any stretch be called American. 

The dividing lines between these groups are increasingly blurred as what they have in common, their hatred of modern liberalism and egalitarianism, pulls them together.  This is aided by a powerful network of right-wing think tanks, institutes, and media outlets built up over decades and funded by wealthy patrons and businesses.  These wealthy interests want above all to reverse the modern liberal project, understood as empowering government to use some of the wealth generated by the private sector to provide welfare and opportunities for the poor and disadvantaged.  Even small steps to reduce inequality and check the power of the rich are characterized as socialism or communism.  

(While wealthy liberals tend to fund foundations that do ‘good works’ and create detailed policy proposals, conservatives tend to fund politically-oriented organizations that aim directly at influencing elected officials.  In Washington, the moderately-liberal Brookings Institution is a storehouse of broad-ranging policy expertise; its conservative counterpart, the Heritage Foundation, creates talking points for the House Freedom Caucus.)    

Claremont’s Turn to BAPism

One notable part of this right-wing network has been the Claremont Institute.  Claremont began as a vigorous defender of the Constitution, understood as embodying natural rights, that is, rights ascertainable by reason and hence true for all time.  Its teachings reached influential conservatives, notably Justice Clarence Thomas, a convert to the natural rights doctrine.  In this vein Claremont has long opposed critiques from the left that question America’s principles, as well as most forms of affirmative action.  It grounded itself in the ideas of Leo Strauss and his followers and often published interesting political and cultural analysis.  

But Claremont’s mainstreaming of “Bronze Age Pervert (BAP)” reveals how this supposedly patriotic and intellectually sophisticated effort has lost its way.  BAP has gained a cult following among some of today’s reactionary youth, reportedly including young staffers in the Trump White House.  His writings, including a 2018 book, Bronze Age Mindset, are a melange of (often crude) meanderings that glorify eugenics, manliness, classical Greece, bodybuilding, and violence, while tearing into feminism, Christianity, the bureaucratic state, democracy, non-white peoples, etc. 

In short, BAP is a Nietzschean.  The essential Nietzschean assertion is that human equality is a myth, foisted on modern man by Christianity, abetted by Greek philosophy.  This myth is destructive of all human excellence, a soul-sucking mistake that produces a world of joyless “Last Men.”  Just as BAP is romantically attached to Bronze Age Greece, the time of the Iliad, when men were men who kidnapped women and then fought to the death over them, Nietzsche admired ancient Rome for its unabashed love of violence, conquest, and the right of the strong to do what they will, while the weak suffer what they must.  BAP vilifies his contemporaries as ‘bugmen’ and dreams, vividly, of their violent demise.

Now there have always been American adolescents sitting palely in libraries, enamored of Nietzsche and his modern epigones, like the capitalism-worshipping Ayn Rand.  Via Rand, Nietzsche has had considerable influence in promoting a hard-edged libertarianism.  But his ideas have otherwise had little broader support in the United States.  Until now.

In 2019 Claremont published a review of BAP’s book by Michael Anton (the author of a hysterical Claremont piece in 2016, “The Flight 93 Election,” explaining why voting for Donald Trump was the equivalent of the hijacked passengers on Flight 93 fighting back against their al-Qaida hijackers.  Anton leveraged his article into a position on the Trump National Security Council.)  Anton acknowledged BAP’s outrageous views but basically defended him, saying BAP “speaks directly to a youthful dissatisfaction (especially among white males) with equality as propagandized and imposed in our day: a hectoring, vindictive, resentful, leveling, hypocritical equality that punishes excellence…”.

Anton implies—more than implies—that BAP’s exhortation to his followers to infiltrate the military and security institutions and await instructions is an understandable move; it is certainly consistent with the message of “Flight 93.” It is also consistent with Claremont Board President and main donor Thomas Klingenstein’s claim that America is in the midst of a ‘cold civil war’ and that America is a de facto ‘totalitarian regime’ under the thumb of liberals and ‘woke communists.’  Anton purports to be concerned that young right-wingers are being drawn to BAP rather than Claremont’s Americanism, but this is gaslighting.  Like many half-baked Straussians, Anton inserts numerous winks and nods to show that his surface reasonableness is just a facade, and what is really needed is an all-out war to overthrow liberal dominance.

Anton’s and Klingenstein’s dislike of liberalism is so great that anything is preferable, whether Trump, or an unhinged fascist like BAP.  This mirrors the overall corruption of Claremont, as outlined in detail in Katherine Stewart’s September New Republic article, “The Anti-Democracy Think Tank.”  

In Graeme Wood’s  “How Bronze Age Pervert Charmed the Far Right,” he tells us that according to the political philosopher Bryan Garsten, BAPism is increasingly the choice of many of his top graduate students:  “Garsten said his best students were choosing between the protofascism of Nietzsche and a neomedieval, quasi-theocratic version of Catholicism opposed to enlightenment liberalism.”  

The key point is that to these young thinkers, liberalism is no longer seen as a viable choice.  It is felt to be exhausted, done in by a wearisome and gridlocked politics, pointless overseas adventures, and the triumph of special interests.  Contemporary ‘wokism,’ which tries to shame infractions against progressive orthodoxy, is intolerable, on a par with the Gulag and concentration camps.  Reform is not possible.  The whole thing needs to be blown up.

This is perhaps the essence of the fascist mentality.  A violent cleansing is needed, via war or revolution, to clear away the dreck of the existing order and create the intense national, spiritual, and racial unity that gives meaning to life.  Various alien and subhuman enemies—the ‘bugmen’—must be identified and done away with.  Accomplishing this requires a Leader before whom one can kneel.  

Liberalism and its Discontents

This is not the first moment in modern times in which dissatisfaction with liberal democracy, and life under advanced capitalism, has been used to justify violence or tyranny.  It in fact appears to be a regular and inevitable accompaniment to life in a liberal democracy.  It has often been pointed out that liberalism is thin gruel, prioritizing as it does compromise, toleration, negotiation, and peaceful conflict resolution.  Liberalism teaches that no one has a monopoly on truth and we must live with ambiguity.  Those who yearn for moral intensity, great deeds, the triumph of good over evil, find this deeply unsatisfying.  

In Europe the period at the end of the 19^th century and up to WWI was a time of such dissatisfaction.  Europe had largely been at peace for 100 years.  The bourgeoisie—smug, narrow-minded, and materialistic—were triumphant.  The great critics of the bourgeoisie, Nietzsche and Marx, disagreed on everything except their disgust at complacent modern European man. 

Partly as a result, a generation welcomed war as a catharsis, a romantic escape from boredom and pettiness.  What they got, however, was a catastrophe that (for a time) discredited all such romantic notions.  While all existing regimes were damaged by the Great War, the biggest losers were the most reactionary and un-democratic.  Great oppressive Empires collapsed:  Russia, Austria-Hungary, the Ottomans.  America rose. 

The interwar period saw another surge in anti-liberal sentiments.  Liberal democracy in the 1930s seemed to be on the ropes.  The Depression caused many to question whether it was up to the task of creating prosperity and national unity.  Fascism, communism, and militarism seemed to be the wave of the future, offering meaning and purpose.  

Once again, however, the supposedly decadent and divided democracies rose to the challenge.  In WWII they reduced the cities of Germany and Japan to smoking ruins, then occupied them and, in a final twist of the knife, transformed them into liberal democracies.  Then in a burst of creativity they birthed  modern welfare states, built powerful militaries, and held on doggedly to outlast communism too.

After the collapse of the USSR it seemed that the last word had been written on the seeming flabbiness of liberal democracy and the superiority of various forms of authoritarianism.  In the contest to see which regime could best mobilize and harness the energies of its people to produce prosperity and national power, the democracies with their combination of individual freedoms, competitive politics, and private enterprise had clearly triumphed.  

But apparently not forever.  As we have seen before, liberal success contains seeds of discontent.  For guidance we can look to the ur-text of modern liberal triumphalism.  Frank Fukuyama became famous in the early 1990s for describing the “end of history,” where major conflicts would cease, drowned in a wave of success as democracy and capitalism joined hands and the world’s great powers converged in agreement on the path to prosperity and stability.  Major conflicts between and within states would diminish as all people gained ‘recognition’, the equal rights as citizens that would satisfy them and do away with the primary cause of war and rebellion.

The Perennial Right-Wing Challenge

But the millions who read and praised (and and have since largely turned on) Fukuyama’s thesis, failed to read his text to the end.  Remember, the title of the book was:  The End of History and the Last Man [emphasis mine].  The Last Man was Nietzsche’s sarcastic term for the bourgeois, pleasure-loving, pain-avoiding human being spreading rapidly over modern Europe.  

Fukuyama saw, at the moment of its apparent victory, that the combination of liberal democracy, capitalism, and scientific/technological progress could still be challenged.  From the Left it was vulnerable to ever-increasing demands for equality.  These would bump up against natural human differences—we are not equal in looks, in talents, in basketball-enabling height, in emotional stability, in mathematical intuition, and all manner of other characteristics.  The most important of these differences, as Madison understood, relate to the acquisition of wealth or ‘property’:  “From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results: And from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.”

Ameliorating the resulting inequalities via the modern welfare state is one thing. But eradicating them requires a monstrous tyranny, as we saw in the Soviet Union.  Short of tyranny, constantly harping on every instance of inequality quickly arouses irritation and anger and becomes counter-productive.  Fukuyama correctly foresaw the dangers from the always-woke, finger-pointing, micro-aggression-cataloguing vigilantism that is damaging life on college campuses, and beyond.  

But Fukuyama also correctly foresaw that the greater danger would come from the Right.  “Liberal democracy could, in the long run, be subverted either by an excess of megalothymia, or by an excess of isothymia—that is, the fanatical desire for equal recognition.  It is my intuition that it is the former that will constitute the greater danger to democracy in the end.”   (Last Man, p. 314).  Megalothymia is the desire to be better than others, to gain not equal but greater recognition—status, fame, glory, wealth, power.  It is impossible and undesirable to eliminate this desire, which exists to some degree in everyone, and to a very large degree in some.  Wanting to excel and be recognized for excellence is the great motor of progress and innovation. 

However, any stable society, and especially a liberal one, must check megalothymia.  Modern liberal democracies can divert this drive towards productive or harmless activities, like business or science or sports or Tik-Tok influencer, or even democratic politics, properly constrained.  But if they are to survive they must put limits on certain kinds of ambition, in politics or military affairs, and must insist on equality in ways certain to rankle those who want more than equality.

Especially important are limits on the acquisition of wealth and how wealth can be used politically—limits that America today has failed to enforce.  As we see every day, the Trumps and Musks and Klingensteins cannot resist the temptation to meddle in politics and public affairs.  Above all they want to consolidate their positions by shaping public policy to protect and grow their riches, thereby entrenching inequality.  (Hence actions like the recent $1.5 billion bequest to Federalist Society leader Leonard Leo—the largest ‘charitable’ transfer in US history—from an Islamophobic, climate-denying Chicago businessman who was able to engineer a $400 million tax break from his blatantly political donation.)    

Once these ‘malefactors of great wealth’ (to quote Theodore Roosevelt) have unleashed their resources to defend their interests, the cat is very much out of the bag.  The money spreads into unforeseen nooks and corners, activating more and more extreme views, drawing in equality-hating ideologues,  conspiracy-theorists, opportunists, and madmen.

It is difficult to put limits on the ambitions of people in the grip of the Nietzschean, BAP mindset.  They are motivated largely by resentment at what they see as the failure of society to give them the rewards and recognition that their moral or intellectual or racial superiority deserves.  No one who feels the clouds have parted after reading Thus Spake Zarathustra, or Atlas Shrugged, or listening to a Steve Bannon podcast, ever feels that they are not one of the elect (this is the real meaning of the right-wing meme ‘to be red-pilled’).  If they haven’t gotten their due, it can’t be their fault—someone else must be to blame. Today a young white man with limited education (or with an advanced degree but no job; see historian Peter Turchin’s increasingly fashionable theory of elite overproduction), will quickly find all manner of tempters—talk radio, FOX News, the Claremont Institute—eager to persuade him that his problems are all due to feminism, anti-racism, immigrants and progressive ideology.  

This resentment rarely issues in any productive or serious policy proposals. The energy, the focus, is entirely negative.

To some extent we must tolerate youthful exuberance and try to tame it for better ends.  But liberalism became intellectually complacent after the Cold War.  It is now on the defensive.  It doesn’t matter that what makes the modern right apocalyptic is, in the scheme of things, trivial and overblown.  We aren’t at each other’s throats in America over real issues like slavery or Vietnam, but over same-sex restrooms and elementary-school textbooks.  But this reveals the actual challenge, which is not policy differences but the drive for respect and recognition, for a life of meaning and challenge—or for raw power. 

Liberals are frustrated when Americans vote ‘against their self-interest,’ meaning against all manner of benefits they could get from good liberal policies.  But they underestimate how much people see their life in terms of values and identity.  Backing Trump is exciting, it makes your enemies furious, it gives you a reason to get up in the morning.  You feel seen.  If you are an intellectual you see opportunity to be one of the shapers of a new order after MAGA victory sweeps away the flabby elites in academia and government.  (Hint to intellectuals: No, you won’t.  You’ll end up in the gulag.)

Whether liberalism can get its mojo back is one of the key questions of our time.  Joe Biden has done excellent things in terms of policy:  inflation is down, job growth is strong, support for Ukraine has been solid and effective, long-term investment in manufacturing and sustainable energy is through the roof.  But his popularity remains low.  Enthusiasm is lacking, and not just because he is old.  Donations to progressive groups have fallen sharply.  Perhaps this will change as the reality of good times sinks in.  But man does not live by bread alone.  

The best case is that the brazenness of the attack on liberal values will rouse its defenders.  Openly embracing racism, violence, Christian nationalism, and obeisance to the superior man, is astonishing.  The task of defending liberal democracy and the Constitution in the face of January 6 and the Trump takeover of the Republican Party should bring excitement and unity back to American liberals who have become mired in minutiae and infighting.

Abroad, foreign leaders like Putin and Xi are openly contemptuous of liberalism and democracy and expect to ride a wave of tyranny that ousts the US and its allies from global leadership.  They claim their versions of efficient one-man rule are superior to liberal democracy’s messy collective decisionmaking.  

We have seen this movie; Hitler and Stalin made identical claims.  Supporters of democracy have rallied before and can do so again.  Already Putin and Xi have committed the predictable error of authoritarian over-reach, Putin in Ukraine, Xi in fighting Covid.  But it seems every generation has to learn these lessons anew.                               

Imagine that, after the Civil War, an American poet had written a great work purporting to embrace the history of the world—not a history exactly but a compilation of the myths and stories that have shaped the American soul—culminating with the triumphant Presidency of the great General Grant, who has ushered in a period of peace and prosperity after decades of strife and war.  Then suppose that in reading the poem, you discovered that most of it was a recounting of the legends about King Arthur and his knights, with a few stanzas dealing perhaps with Richard the Lionhearted or Robin Hood.  Then some chapters about the American founding, focused on the Mayflower, a long digression about Isaac Newton, a bit of concluding praise for Lincoln and Grant, and voila.

If this sounds a bit odd, then you can share my disorientation after spending several weeks with the Latin poet Ovid’s (Publius Ovidius Naso) masterpiece, the Metamorphoses.  This involved reading the whole work (which is very long, over 600 pages in the Penguin translation by David Raeburn^[1]) then re-reading it in stages for a week-long seminar at St John’s College, where students and tutors (none of us experts on Ovid) met every day for 5 days and discussed the text. 

Ovid flourished, and wrote Metamorphoses, during the reign of Caesar Augustus.  Rome was recovering from a century of civil strife and Augustus was creating what would become an imperial system of one-man rule, while pretending to preserve Rome’s republican institutions.  Ovid had achieved fame with earlier poems, in particular the Ars Amatoria, a sequence of lyric poems about love and more particularly about seduction, including rather detailed instructions for seducing married women (he also discussed how women might seduce men, a sign of his flexibility with regard to Roman norms).  You can get a taste of his approach from these lines in Ars Amatoria Book I:

But hunt for them, especially, at the tiered theatre:

that place is the most fruitful for your needs.

There you’ll find one to love, or one you can play with,

one to be with just once, or one you might wish to keep.^[2]

Just as he was finishing his poem, Ovid was exiled in AD 8 by Augustus to a remote village on the Black Sea in what is today Romania; he spent the last 10 years of his life there.  Despite desperate pleas for clemency, neither Augustus or his successor Tiberius allowed Ovid to return to Rome.  Scholars are not sure exactly why Augustus had it in for Ovid, with some speculating he was involved in anti-Augustan plotting and others arguing that Augustus disliked Ovid’s morality, or lack of it, especially with regard to sex.  (A fine modern novel about Ovid’s exile is An Imaginary Life, by David Malouf, which I highly recommend.  We’ll come back to it later).  

Metamorphoses is written in epic verse, like Homer and Virgil, signaling a different and presumably loftier intent. But it is unlike these other epics; it lacks a central hero or a recognizable story. Instead, Ovid tells us he intends to explore a particular theme, metamorphosis or transformation.  

The stories in Metamorphoses are loosely (very loosely) linked by this theme of ‘change’ or transformation.  ‘Transformation’ is not a metaphor or some internal psychological realignment, it is literal transforming, with people turning regularly into trees or birds or streams.  This happens commonly in the myths that compose much of Metamorphoses.  Typically a god, maybe Jupiter or Apollo, lusts after a pretty nymph or human girl, seduces and rapes her, then he (or some other deity) turns her into an oak tree or a seagull or a lion—sometimes as a kind of redemption, sometimes as punishment.  There are poignant descriptions of people losing their ability to speak and move as the transformation occurs, while remaining human on the inside.  These transformations are at first surprising but, repeated in hundreds of short vignettes, also repetitive.   

The stories of Metamorphoses (a Greek, not a Latin word) are almost entirely, for the first 80-90 percent of the book, Greek stories.  Ovid has sources lost to us but for the most part they are familiar from Homer, Hesiod, the Greek playwrights and other writings.  The settings are Greek, the cities where they occur are Greek, the gods and kings and queens and heroes are familiar Greeks though sometimes with Latin names:  Jupiter and Hera, Apollo and Bacchus, Jason, Theseus, Hercules, Perseus, Medea, etc.  Ovid to be sure puts his own spin on them, carefully describing some particularly outlandish changes, drawing out aspects of character, occasionally dwelling on the internal struggle a character faces when trying to decide what to do.  But the stories are part of the tradition, not invented by Ovid.

It is difficult to convey the often bewildering experience of reading Metamorphoses, especially for a modern reader not steeped in these old tales.  Many of the stories are short, while some go on for 10-15 pages; sometimes different stories are linked together by their narrator (Orpheus has a long string of tales), or nested confusingly (a primary story, then a character digresses with another story, which reminds someone of yet another, and so on).  Ovid is a master of many moods and styles. He can be lyrical, terse, playful, earthy, or grand; he can imitate the goriest battle scenes of the Iliad; he can appear pious or irreverent.

There is a sometimes delightful, sometimes annoying stream of consciousness as you read, enjoying the variety but then asking yourself ‘what is the point here; why am I reading about Venus seducing Adonis one minute, and the flaying of Marsyas the next?’  The book is a kind of labryinth in which it is almost impossible not to get lost.

Two Key Themes: Sex and Honor

However, some themes do reoccur.  One of them is sex.  We are not for the most part talking about love here: when a guy—often a god (sometimes a goddess)—sees a girl he is often inflamed with desire which can’t be resisted, pursues/seduces/rapes her, then for the most part takes off while the lady lives with the consequences:  maybe a baby, maybe disgrace, maybe revenge from the guys wife (Hera is a particularly nasty revenge-seeker) or an outraged parent.  In any case, for the most part eros causes people/gods to damage one another, with the excuse being that they couldn’t help themselves.  

Ovid’s landscape is littered with the offspring of these liaisons, to the point that most characters have some deity or other as a parent or grandparent or uncle.  There is a quite literal intermingling of human and divine.

Another theme is lack of respect—the gods are endlessly upset when humans don’t acknowledge them properly or forget to offer sacrifices or trespass on their domains.  This leads to horrible payback, like when Actaeon accidentally spies Diana bathing and the outraged goddess turns him into a stag who is torn apart by his own dogs.  Ovid blithely notes afterwards that “Comments varied: some felt the goddess had overdone her violent revenge; while others commended it—worthy they said of her strict virginity.”  ^[3]But outside judgment seems beside the point.  Gods are gonna do what gods are gonna do.    

The transformations that Ovid delights in are often enjoyable for their own sake, but also can be seen as attempts to repair or restore cracks in the order of things.  When terrible rapes or violent vengeance occurs, the perpetrators are not usually punished—there is no moral reckoning—but there is recognition that the fabric of the world has been torn and should somehow be set right.  When the gods change victims into trees or flowers or birds or springs, some kind of harmony has been restored.

Jupiter in particular is both a constant source of disorder, and the one who keeps the world within certain bounds.  It’s Jupiter who has to take down Phaeton with a thunderbolt when he carries the sun too close to the world and threatens to burn it to ashes, and who periodically drowns mankind, like a basket of unwanted kittens, when we get overly nasty and disrespectful—taking care however to preserve a select few to carry on the race.

Poetic Troublemakers

Within this dizzying merry-go-round, Ovid draws our attention to a few characters who stand out for their independence and creative powers; people who rival the gods and who we can arguably identify with Ovid himself.  One is the woman-weaver Arachne, who claims to be the equal of Minerva and is challenged by the goddess to prove it.  People who challenge the gods do not generally come out well in Ovid, and Arachne is no exception, but she claims our respect.  Unlike most of Ovid’s protagonists, Arachne is not high-born:  “Arachne’s distinction lay not in her birth or the place that she hailed from, but solely her art.”^[4]  She doesn’t back down when Minerva warns her, and her work is fully the equal of the goddess’s: “Not Pallas, not even the goddess of Envy could criticize weaving like that.”^[5]   But while Minerva weaves pictures showing the gods and goddesses at their most majestic and benevolent, Arachne details all the crimes against women of Jupiter, Neptune, Apollo and the rest, all the rapes and deceptions and abandonments.  

Typically, the goddess when thwarted decides to overturn the board:  “The fair-haired warrior goddess resented Arachne’s success and ripped up the picture portraying the god’s misdemeanours.”^[6]  Then she turns Arachne into a spider. But Arachne/Ovid is the real winner.  The tapestry is destroyed but Ovid preserves for us the image of this strong young woman using her artistic talent to tell truth to power.   Ovid—who himself came from a well-off but not particularly prominent family—is in the midst of raining down on us thousands of carefully-crafted words showing in detail the lusts, jealousies, and multiple shortcomings of the gods.  It doesn’t take a great deal of extrapolation to see the gods as stand-ins for the rich and powerful of Rome (and elsewhere), who do as they please and punish anyone who takes exception.  

Another independent craftsman is Daedalus, the famous inventor responsible for the Labryinth that imprisons the Minotaur; the wings that allow him to escape from Crete; and other marvels.  When Daedalus begins to work on his wings, Ovid says he “put his mind to techniques unexplored before and altered the laws of nature.”^[7]  He has no help from the gods.  Of course his marvelous work proves fatal to his son, Icarus, who flies too high.  Challenging established ways is risky and possibly impious; the observers of the flying Daedalus and Icarus say “They certainly must be gods to fly through the air!”^[8]  Ovid is perhaps another Daedalus, using his fabulous technique to create a new kind of epic poetry but with the risk of coming too close to the sun, endangering those he loves and affronting the powerful.

A third heroic artist is Orpheus, the extraordinary musician who famously travels to the underworld to retrieve his dead wife, Eurydice, succeeds in charming even grim Pluto with his song, then loses Eurydice again when he looks around on their way back to the upper world. Orpheus’s power extends to nature as much as the gods; he is described as able to charm even the rocks and trees and animals to come to him when he plays.  

After losing Eurydice, Ovid says that Orpheus would “have nothing to do with the love of women” and instead turns to young boys: “Orpheus even started the practice among the Thracian tribes of turning for love to immature males.”^[9]  Ovid’s Orpheus becomes in fact a celebrator of strange and unnatural loves; after praising Jupiter, he says “Now there is call for a lighter note.  Let my song be of boys whom the gods have loved and of girls who have been inspired to a frenzy of lawless passion and paid the price for their lustful desires.”^[10]  This is followed by a series of stories, told by Orpheus, that include Jupiter’s infatuation with the beautiful boy Ganymede; Apollo’s similar love for the young Hyacinthus; the origin of prostitution; Pygmalion’s twisted desire for his own statue; a long and detailed account of the young girl Myrrha who pursues her own father; and the doomed love of Venus for Adonis.   

Orpheus ends up being torn to pieces by wild Thracian ‘bacchanals’, who resent his disdain for women.  Orpheus’s music deflects their attacks for a while, but finally Ovid says “cacophony won.  The hideous screech of the Phrygian pipe…the clapping of hands and the bacchanals shrieking drowned the sound of the lyre…”.^[11]  All of nature mourns his passing, the birds and beasts, rocks and rivers and trees.

Although the ‘bacchanals’ seem to act along typical Bacchic lines, Ovid tells us that the god Bacchus takes revenge on them because Orpheus has been a ‘priest of his mysteries’.  Bacchus is prominent throughout the Metamorphoses—he is a ‘new god,’ a celebrator of disorder and female empowerment, who has to win his place against the opposition of the Olympians.  Ovid likewise loves to tell stories about the breakdown of good order, with a number of them highlighting strong women who succeed in enacting vengeance or getting their man:  Medea the powerful witch who revenges herself on Jason; Arachne; Salmacis the abnormal nymph (“The only naiad not to belong to the train of Diana”) who desires, attacks, and is joined permanently with young Hermaphroditus; Procne, wife of the evil Tereus, who plots successfully to have him torn apart in Bacchic ritual after he brutally rapes her sister and cuts out her tongue.   

Ovid as a great poet I think identifies with Orpheus, and with Bacchus, who reverses the rules and turns the world topsy-turvy.  Augustus is busy building a conservative movement to “Make Rome Great Again,” restoring religious practices, building temples, and, controversially, trying to clamp down on adultery.  He makes an example of his own daughter Julia, who he sends into exile for playing around.   These efforts to restore ‘traditional’ morality are controversial.  The Roman historian Suetonius writes in The Twelve Caesars that the new laws Augustus introduced “dealt, among other matters, with extravagance, adultery, unchastity, bribery, and the encouragement of marriage in the Senatorial and Equestrian orders.  His marriage law being more rigorously framed than the others, he found himself unable to make it effective because of an open revolt against several of its clauses.”^[12]

The Ovid who in earlier works described at length how to commit adultery, and in Metamorphoses is often preoccupied with sexual misconduct and out-of-control desires, is not likely to have found Augustus’s reforms congenial.  At the end of the poem, after comparing Augustus explicitly to Jupiter, Ovid throws down his own challenge to the gods: “Now I have finished my work, which nothing can ever destroy—not Jupiter’s wrath, nor fire or sword, nor devouring time…My name shall never be forgotten.”^[13]

Bringing Greece and Rome Together

Those are some themes I think one can make out in the often bewildering labryinth of Metamorphoses.  But what about the work as a whole?  Can one stand back and make out an overarching theme or story?

Here is where the question of Metamorphoses’s “Greekness” is worth pursuing.  We take it for granted that the Greek and Roman worlds are one, that Zeus equals Jupiter, that Rome is the natural extension and follow-on to Greece.  When Ovid calls on the gods at the beginning to “spin me a thread from the world’s beginning down to my own lifetime,” and at once launches on an account of creation borrowed from Homer and Hesiod, it takes an effort to ask whether this is just how it has to be, or whether the interweaving of these two cultures is something problematic.  

Ovid like many generations of educated Romans before him was steeped in Greek poetry and philosophy.  He studied in Athens for a year.  Rome had interacted with Greek colonies in southern Italy for centuries, conquered Greece in the 2^nd century BC, and then gone on by Ovid’s time to rule all of the Eastern Mediterranean, a world that had previously been conquered and Hellenized by Alexander the Great.  The Greek language, Greek literature and philosophy, and Greek institutions were the norm from Egypt (where Alexander was buried, in the great Greek city of Alexandria) through the Levant and Asia Minor.  This had a profound effect on many Romans, who were putting together an Empire on the back of an invincible military, but had little to offer of what we today call ‘soft power.’ They were awed by Greek accomplishments and quickly adopted them for themselves.    

Many, but not all.  Plenty of Romans thought of the Greeks as effete chatterboxes, and sources of decadence and decline.  Tough, virtuous Romans are sent off to rule Egypt and Syria and Macedon, and end up like Marc Antony; corrupted by the riches and temptations of the East, they lose themselves and forget their duty to Rome.  (There are parallels here to the way Thucydides tells us Spartans, similar to Romans in their single-minded focus on martial virtues, are prone to fall prey to greed when they leave Sparta to rule other parts of Greece during the Peloponnesian Wars).

Cato the Elder in the early 2^nd century is strongly opposed to growing Greek influence, as is the later Augustan-era historian Livy.  Livy is particularly critical of the cult of Bacchus, which he describes as a Greek import, for encouraging the unregulated mixing of sexes and classes.  (The Roman analogue to Bacchus is Liber Pater, identified with freedom and the rights of the plebeian class, according to modern scholars^[14]; Ovid often refers to Bacchus as Liber).   Livy, a conservative who sees Rome as threatened by moral decline, was close to Augustus.  He is suspicious of all so-called ‘mystery religions,’ such as the worship of Bacchus, and describes approvingly how in the early 2^nd century the authorities violently suppressed the growing Bacchus cult.  Rome’s expansion has allowed all manner of foreign customs and gods to infiltrate Rome itself, weakening the state.  

In this back and forth one can say that ultimately, Greece wins.  Under Constantine the Empire is divided, with the center of gravity moving to the new Eastern Capital at Byzantium.  Its language is Greek, not Latin.  The Empire in the West eventually collapses and Rome itself falls to barbarians, but the Greek, Christian version of Rome in the East carries on for another thousand years.  (Whether the Greek East, in the form of another new cult, Christianity, was the cause of Rome’s downfall has been debated for 2000 years).  

This is far in the future for Ovid.  What he sees in his time is a challenge to this more sophisticated, more open-minded Greek-Roman future.  Augustus is trying to restore the old Roman morality, arguably to make his radical usurpation of power look like a return to tradition.  Ovid’s poem asserts the oneness of the two cultures.  In this he follows Virgil, who in the Aeneid ties Rome’s founding directly to the fall of Troy.  Rome’s story comes straight out of the Iliad.  It doesn’t get any more Greek than that.

Ovid’s view of what is at stake may perhaps be hinted at towards the end of Metamorphoses, where he describes at length the views of the Greek philosopher Pythagoras.  Pythagoras comes to Croton, a Greek colony in southern Italy, fleeing from political oppression on his home island of Samos.  Ovid’s Pythagoras, (who seems to be a composite of Greek thinkers rather than the real Pythagoras) teaches that all things are permanently changing and in flux, always metamorphosing, coming and going—including great kings and cities.  Recognizing and embracing this is the key to wisdom.  

Ovid tells us that at one point Numa, one of Rome’s first kings who takes the throne after Romulus, travels to Croton to meet Pythagoras.  Ovid singles out Numa as “a capable thinker…His restless, ambitious mind led him on to explore the mysteries of nature itself.”^[15] After being taught by Pythagoras, Numa returns to Rome, where he “converted a nation practiced in brutal war to follow the arts of peace.”^[16] Ovid may be suggesting that Augustus, who promises Romans peace after over a century of civil war, should also learn from the Greeks; he should embrace a changing world rather than resist it.  Here is Ovid’s own point of view, from Part III of Ars Amatoria:

Others may delight in ancient times: I congratulate myself

on having been born just now: this age suits my nature.

Not because stubborn gold’s mined now from the earth,

or choice shells come to us from farthest shores…

but because civilisation’s here, and no crudity remains,

in our age, that survives from our ancient ancestors.^[17]

Whatever Ovid’s intent, Augustus does not appreciate it.  Just as Ovid was finishing Metamorphoses, Augustus banishes him.  

Ovid In Exile

David Malouf’s 1978 novel, An Imaginary Life, invents a trajectory for Ovid in his exile.^[18]  It is told as though written by Ovid himself (though Malouf acknowledges his story is based on almost no evidence).  After an initial period of extreme disorientation, Ovid comes to terms with his fate; he learns the local language, and starts to appreciate the beauty of the bleak landscape.  He plants a garden of flowers, something that surprises and confuses the locals, who do nothing that is not entirely practical:  “My little flowerpots are as subversive here as my poems were in Rome.” 

He has an epiphany about the meaning of metamorphosis:  “I have stopped trying to find fault with creation and have learned to accept it.  We have some power in us that knows its own ends…This is the true meaning of transformation.  This is the real metamorphosis.  Our further selves are contained within us, as the leaves and blossoms are in the tree…”   

Malouf’s Ovid becomes fascinated with a local ‘wild child’, a young boy who roams the woods with the wolves and is eventually caught.  Ovid takes it on himself to teach him to speak.  The boy for his part shows Ovid what it means to genuinely transform into another being:  “In imitating the birds…He is being the bird. He is allowing it to speak out of him. So that in learning the sounds made by men he is making himself a man.”  Through speech, especially perhaps poetic speech, we enable ourselves to become another person, perhaps the person we imagine ourselves to be.  Exercising this power, which is a kind of love, cracks us open, softens us.  Ovid dies happily in communion with the natural world.  

America and Rome

I started by imagining an American version of Ovid.  The Romans cultivated an image as a practical and pious people.  Many Americans too think of themselves as especially pragmatic and God-fearing; a people who should beware an ‘Old World’ seen as a den of corruption and godlessness.  But others have thought our character needed deepening and widening via engagement with the arts and traditions of Europe and the West. Waves of American poets and thinkers made pilgrimages abroad in the late 19^th and 20^th centuries, exiling themselves from what they saw as American narrow-mindedness.  Many are among the first rank of American writers: Henry James, Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin.  It would be hard to imagine today’s America without them. 

In 2017 the City Council of Rome officially revoked Ovid’s banishment.^[19]

---

^[1] Ovid, Metamorphoses, transl. David Raeburn, Penguin Books, 2004.

^[2] https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/ArtofLoveBkI.php#anchor_Toc521049262, Art of Love, transl. A.S. Kline, 2001

^[3] Metamorphoses, Book III, lines 253-255.

^[4] Metamorphoses, Book VI, lines 7-8.

^[5] Metamorphoses, Book VI, lines 128-129.

^[6] Metamorphoses, Book VI, lines 130-132.  

^[7] Metamorphoses, Book VIII, lines 186-187.

^[8] Metamorphoses, Book VIII, lines 218-219.

^[9] Metamorphoses, Book X, lines 79-85.

^[10] Metamorphoses, Book X, lines 152-155.

^[11] Metamorphoses, Book XI, lines 15-17.

^[12] Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves, pp. 73-74.

^[13] Metamorphoses, Book XV, lines 871-876.

^[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liber

^[15] Metamorphoses, Book XV, lines 3-6.

^[16] Metamorphoses, Book XV, lines 483-484.  

^[17] https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/ArtofLoveBkIII.php, The Art of Love, transl. A.S. Kline, 2001

^[18] David Malouf, An Imaginary Life, Vintage Books, 1978.  

^[19] The Guardian, “Ovid’s Exile to the Remotest Margins of the Roman Empire Revoked,” Dec. 16 2017  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/16/ovids-exile-to-the-remotest-margins-of-the-roman-empire-revoked

“Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first deprives of reason.”                    

It would seem hard to argue that the war in Vietnam was not America’s worst foreign policy mistake in the post-WWII era.  It ended in a complete defeat with our enemy, North Vietnam, and its Soviet and Chinese allies, ousting the United States (complete with humiliating helicopter departures) and occupying the South.  It cost over 50,000 American lives and an unknowable number of Vietnamese, perhaps over a million in both North and South.  Relations with major allies were stressed and damaged.  At home, it tore the United States apart along generational and class lines, and permanently undermined public trust in government.  It cost Lyndon Johnson re-election, distracted the US from domestic reforms, and led to the Nixon presidency.  The prestige and morale of the US military were deeply compromised, and the military spent a decade rebuilding itself.  The huge cost of the war, financed by increased borrowing, hurt the US economy and contributed to the stagflation of the 1970s.  

Hard to argue.  But Ross Douthat, the moderately conservative New York Times columnist, thinks the Iraq War was worse.  At first glance this seems like an odd position.  American casualties were far lower, and Iraq today, though unstable and racked by corruption and violence, is intact and in many respects a US ally.  Far from being pushed out, the United States retains a small military presence to train the Iraqi military and assist in the fight against ISIS.  Domestically, the war quickly became unpopular but Bush was re-elected in 2004; with fighting done not by draftees but volunteers, Iraq never roused the same intense public opposition as did Vietnam.   

But Douthat points to the larger strategic context to make his case.  After Vietnam, where the goal was to stop the spread of communism and prevent Vietnam from becoming a Soviet and Chinese ally, the US eventually rebounded while the USSR and the global communist movement collapsed.  The United States emerged in the 1990s as the sole superpower.  Vietnam and China went to war in 1979 and remain bitter enemies.  Relations with major allies healed.  

America’s strategic goals in Iraq, however, were never realized.  Even today it is difficult to say exactly what the US hoped to accomplish, largely in my opinion because the underlying cause was emotional, a primal desire to respond to the attack on 9/11, to show ‘strength’ and ‘determination’.  Other reasons were given but this was the driving force.  

However, we can try to judge the war in light of three strategic goals that stand out, based on statements by US leaders and key war supporters:  1) end the threat to the US and the region from Iraq’s pursuit of WMD; 2) reduce the terrorist threat to the US, by ensuring that Iraq did not assist al-Qaida and other radical groups; and 3) create a democratic, flourishing Iraq to hem in Iran and be a catalyst for change in the Middle East.  Obviously the first goal was not attained, since Iraq had no serious WMD programs and was hemmed in by draconian international sanctions.  As for the other two, in most respects the invasion undermined their achievement.  And there were other serious strategic setbacks that were either ignored or not anticipated.  Today, 20 years later, we are still living with the consequences.  

Here is my own brief summary of what I see as the major strategic results, many of which are mentioned by Douthat.

Strengthened Iran.  For long-term US interests, perhaps no goal was more important than weakening Iran by putting a strong, pro-US democracy next door.  However, the opposite happened. The invasion removed Iran’s biggest threat in the region and gave Tehran immense leverage inside Iraq.  Iran was initially frightened at the US intervention, but the botched and lengthy reconstruction put US troops and civilians within range of Iranian proxies, in Iran’s backyard, where they were attractive targets. The violence and disorder of post-invasion Iraq helped discredit democracy and give Iran’s rulers an easy argument against liberalization and Westernization.  And the example of forceful regime change strengthened the perceived need to acquire nuclear weapons as a deterrent.  

Strengthened anti-US Islamic militants.  Just before the invasion, terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman was asked what Osama bin-Ladin’s likely reaction would be.  Hoffman said “It’s his dream come true.”  The American attack confirmed all of al-Qaida’s warnings about US aggressive intentions in the region and US disdain for Islam and Arabs.  Abu Gharaib and US detention practices destroyed trust in the US throughout the Muslim world. 

Terrorists conduct high-profile attacks largely in hopes of producing a disproportionate response that will radicalize moderates and bring in new recruits.  The 9/11 attack achieved all this and more. 

The lengthy US presence in the heart of the Muslim world catalyzed a new generation of jihadists, more brutal and extreme than before:  first Al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI), then its follow-on, ISIS.  These new terrorist formations made large parts of Iraq deadly battlegrounds, incited sectarian civil war, sparked deadly attacks around the world, and eventually spread into Syria, Jordan, and beyond.  Today ISIS, despite US and Kurdish success at pushing it out of Mosul and other occupied territory, remains a dangerous presence not only in the Middle East but in Afghanistan and Africa.        

It is tragic and bitter that in fact Saddam had little contact with al-Qaida and no interest in helping Islamic militants, who were his mortal enemies.  The claims to the contrary within the US, used as a major rationale for the invasion, were largely manufactured by the Pentagon and other war supporters.   

Distracted US from Afghanistan.  At the time of the Iraq invasion, the US was of course already heavily engaged in Afghanistan.  After the extremely successful overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 there was at this point no serious resistance and the overall US presence was small.  Washington seems to have concluded that Afghanistan could safely be put on the back burner.  But US military and civilians in Afghanistan warned that a consistent and well-resourced effort was essential for stability and to prevent the growth of an insurgency—the Taliban were down but not out, retrenching across the border in Pakistan.  These warnings were largely ignored by policymakers determined to argue that invading Iraq would be cost-free.  As Iraq ramped up, resources and attention at the White House, the Pentagon, the intelligence community, shifted away from Afghanistan.

Largely as a result, in the years after the Iraq invasion the situation in Afghanistan deteriorated.  There is no way to prove that the tragic outcome in Afghanistan in 2021 would otherwise have been avoided.  But there is no doubt that there was a pattern of neglect during a critical period during which the Taliban re-emerged as a serious insurgent threat.  By the time Obama took office, the so-called “good war” in Afghanistan had become a crisis.  And unlike in Iraq, where a last-ditch “surge” of troops and resources in 2007-08 succeeded in averting a civil war, a similar effort in Afghanistan turned out to be too little, too late.  

Alienation of Moscow and Beijing.   We might forget that after 9/11, Russia and China were strong supporters of US counter-terrorist initiatives.  Putin gave his OK to a massive US logistic network for Afghanistan that went through Central Asian states seen historically as Russia’s sphere of influence.  Neither Moscow nor Beijing wanted al-Qaida to entrench itself in Afghanistan and were happy the US was taking the lead to rout it from the region.  

But Iraq changed this calculus.  It was seen as an act of US imperialism, not a necessary anti-terrorist step.  The stated rationales for US action were viewed as excuses to insert the US into the Middle East and gain control over oil resources.  The use of massive force in the name of regime change, done unilaterally and without UN approval, frightened Russia and China, who saw it as a proof-of-concept which might be directed at them or their allies.  In their eyes the US had become an unpredictable ‘rogue state.’ 

In both Moscow and Beijing it became easy to think that what was sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander. If the US superpower felt entitled to do what it wanted, where it wanted, why shouldn’t we?  There is a line from Iraq (and from Clinton’s intervention in the Balkans, and Obama’s in Libya) that runs towards Putin’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine, towards China’s build-up in the South China Sea and threats to Japan and Taiwan.    

Further, as the US floundered, the initial fear turned into a kind of contempt.  The US, for all its power, didn’t seem to know what to do or how to achieve victory.  It was expending its energy and resources and credibility on a secondary target.  Its military was being harassed and beaten by ragged insurgents with no modern weapons.  The US was seen as both out of control, and a paper tiger.  It was not invincible.  Here again we see how Iraq reinforced hubris in Russia, China, and other US adversaries.  This conviction of US decline was reinforced by the 2008-09 financial crisis—which some economists attribute in large part to the war—and the growing political and social divisions inside the US that the war in Iraq helped stimulate.

Distracted US from Big Power Threats.  The flip side of greater focus on the US in Russia and China, was the loss of focus in the US.  Trillions of dollars that might have gone to strengthening US capabilities in Europe and Asia instead went down the drain in Iraq.  The time and attention of key leaders, perhaps the scarcest of strategic resources, went disproportionately to Iraq.  Obama tried desperately to “re-balance” towards China, but Iraq, ISIS, and the Taliban constantly pulled his administration away. 

Russia and China, of course, were ecstatic that the US was squandering its money and attention and reputation, leaving them a much freer hand.  They had no incentive to help a distracted US overcome its self-inflicted wounds.  According to a Western historian who specializes in studies of intelligence, “The strategy that China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), its principal civilian intelligence service, took toward the United States after 9/11 followed a Chinese saying, ge an guan huo, which roughly translates as ‘watch the fires burn from the safety of the opposite river bank, which allows you to avoid entering the battle until your enemy is exhausted’”.

Frayed and weakened US standing in the world.  The Iraq intervention was opposed by many major US allies, including key states in the Middle East such as Saudi Arabia, who warned the US that toppling Saddam would strengthen Iran.  Many thought it violated basic tenets of international law, the UN charter, and global norms against aggression and forcible change of governments.  Others saw it as poorly executed, likely to fail and bog down the United States and its supporters in a lengthy conflict with no clear endpoint.  Germany and France, joined by Russia, broke publicly and forcefully with the US over the decision to invade. 

The Bush administration’s post 9/11 strategic doctrine seemed designed to justify unilateral action against any state the US deemed a potential threat.  The US was seen as willing to go it alone, without regard for countervailing views, even from its friends.  As Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

The unwillingness today of many states in the developing world to join the US in helping Ukraine and condemning Russia is in part a result of this experience.  In many capitals US appeals to international law, norms of non-aggression, and violations of human rights, ring hollow.  The invasion badly damaged a key source of US strength in international affairs, our claim to act not just in our own national interest but in the interest of international order and universal principles.   

Image of US strength and competence.  Iraq dealt a terrible blow to the reputation of the American national security establishment. The intelligence community in particular has never recovered from its strong claims about Iraq’s WMD programs.  Rightly or wrongly, it is also blamed for misjudging the strength of the resistance.  The US military, despite heroic efforts and sacrifices, made fundamental errors in failing to anticipate the kind of conflict it was waging, being consistently behind the curve in adapting to changes in the war, and moving slowly to train and equip Iraqi forces to take its place.  

At the top, the war was pushed and designed by leaders thought to represent the very acme of national security insight:  two-time Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Vice-President (and former Secretary of Defense) Cheney, Secretary of State (and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) Powell, National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, and a host of other luminaries.  But rather than engaging in an honest evaluation of the risks, or putting together a campaign plan that reflected the views and experience of military professionals, this new incarnation of the Best and Brightest indulged its fears and followed its own private agendas.  In key areas they actively and deliberately misled their own government and the American public by cavalierly downplaying the costs and exaggerating the threat.  Glib analogies were made to successful US efforts at rebuilding Japan and Germany after World War II. 

Many experts advised that the US intervention force should be much larger and should anticipate the need to administer a collapsed state for a considerable time.  This advice was treated with contempt, especially by Rumsfeld, who was obsessed with showing the world that the military could win with a small, precise force able to get in and get out fast.

War proponents were opposed to ‘nation-building’ and refused to plan for it.  Neither military or civilian agencies possessed the language and cultural skills needed to cope with a broken society, especially when American administrators decided early on to disband the Iraqi Army and fire most Ba’ath Party members.  These decisions created a large, alienated, and furious opposition that morphed quickly into armed resistance.

Undermining domestic trust.  When the intervention quickly resulted in a growing insurgency and a failed state, an angry population, no WMD, and huge expenditures with no end in sight, public support understandably faded.  Abu-Gharaib raised questions about military discipline and our ability to conduct a messy low-level conflict while adhering to acceptable standards of human rights.  The elected leaders who had championed the war were discredited.  The cynicism and distrust that had taken root with Vietnam deepened. 

George Bush was re-elected in 2004 before the full picture had come into focus.  The partial success of the so-called ‘surge’ in 2007 salvaged some of his reputation, but he left office with many historians judging him among the worst Presidents in American history. (Luckily for Bush, the advent of Donald Trump has allowed him to appear decent and competent by comparison). The Republican Party, once a reliable supporter of US strength in the service of international order, is now split with an ascendant wing, led by Donald Trump—who campaigned by attacking the war and its supporters—highly critical of US engagement and alliances.    

Unlike Vietnam, public anger did not spill over into broad attacks on the military.  Americans generally supported ‘the troops’, if not their leaders.  The military was therefore not broken by Iraq in the way it was in Vietnam, but still endured huge costs in deaths, injuries, trauma, and morale as soldiers cycled through multiple tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan.    

Ongoing Impact on Foreign Policy.  Iraq continues to affect US willingness to engage in the Middle East and around the world.  No American decisionmaker wants to repeat Iraq by committing US forces in a ‘war of choice,’ and there is particular reluctance to intervene in the Middle East.  This reluctance is one reason Russia has been able to become a major player in Syria and the region. 

Major parts of the American public, on both left and right, are now instinctively suspicious of American national security elites.  They do not accept their claims to understand US interests or how to advance them overseas.  

Is Ukraine a Possible Turning Point?  Douthat suggests that US actions in support of Ukraine could repair some of the damage.  US intelligence was praised for its accurate advance knowledge of Russian plans and for revealing them to the world (though in some quarters these claims were quickly dismissed, because of the intelligence failure in Iraq). Unlike Iraq, Ukraine vs. Russia is seen by most Americans and our major allies as a ‘good war’ with clear objectives in defense of a worthy ally.  So far US support has been effective in enabling Ukraine to stand up to Russia.  NATO is back in business, led by the US; the countries most alienated by Iraq, France and Germany, are on board though questions remain about their willingness to stay the course.   

So, when I add it all up, I think Mr. Douthat has a point. In any case, when you can seriously argue whether something is ‘even worse’ than Vietnam, that’s pretty bad.

Thoughts on Hand-Off

It is with all this in mind that I recently read chunks of a new book, Hand-Off:  The Foreign Policy George W. Bush Passed to Barack Obama, a compilation edited by former Bush National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley.  It consists of declassified transition memos written by Bush administration national security officials in 2008-09, designed to help the incoming Obama administration.  In each case a post-script has been added to analyze how well the original memo stands up. 

(Full disclosure:  I was on the National Security Council staff at this time and made comments on the Iraq memo, though I was not the principal author). 

Iraq.  Unsurprisingly, the memo on Iraq, written by Brett McGurk, does not dwell on the decision to invade or the difficult first years of occupation. It focuses on the positive results of the 2007 ‘surge’ and the prospects for improving stability, withdrawing US troops, and negotiating new agreements with the Iraq government.  

What about the retrospective commentary, written by Meghan O’Sullivan (Senior Director at the National Security Council for Iraq and Afghanistan from 2004-07)? Here there are some questionable ideas.  

The underlying narrative is that Bush handed Obama an Iraq on the path to success, and Obama blew it. O’Sullivan gives Obama credit for at first continuing Bush policies, but ultimately faults him for withdrawing US troops in 2011. This resulted from Iraq Prime Minister Maliki’s refusal to accede to the US demand that US troops be given immunity from Iraqi law, seen by Iraqis as an unacceptable infringement on their sovereignty. The essay, moreover, fails to point out that one reason Obama was not enthusiastic about keeping troops in Iraq is that at this same time he was greatly expanding US forces in Afghanistan to deal with deteriorating security, caused in large part by the Bush administration’s Iraq focus.

Obama is also blamed for ‘allowing’ Maliki to remain in office after controversial Iraqi elections in 2010.  However, it is not clear how the US would have determined the outcome without being accused of unacceptable interference in Iraq’s internal affairs.  America was of course suspected of pulling the strings on all Iraqi political decisions, and had to bend over backwards to try and show that Iraqis were genuinely independent.

It is fair to say that Maliki was persuaded to let the US ‘surge’ succeed 2007-08 only because Bush spent a huge amount of time and energy personally managing him. This was something that Obama and his team, focused on a global economic crisis and Afghanistan, were unwilling to do.  Left to his own devices, Maliki—a stubborn Shia sectarian—quickly indulged his suspicions and reneged on commitments to anti-terrorist Sunni allies who had worked closely with the US.  This contributed to the rise of ISIS and the eventual need to return some US forces to Iraq in 2014.

O’Sullivan asserts in defense of the original decision to invade that “From President Bush’s perspective, the military invasion of Iraq in March 2003 came only after all diplomatic avenues had been exhausted and where the alternative was to let Saddam Hussein defy the international community, the United Nations, and the United States without consequences—and to allow Saddam to continue to threaten the United States and the region.”  This ignores the reality that from the end of the First Gulf War in 1991 until 2003 Iraq was subject to withering economic sanctions (blamed for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths from malnutrition and lack of medicines) and intense UN inspections to prevent the development of WMD and long-range missiles.  Extensive no-fly zones in the north and south prevented Iraqi forces from threatening the Kurds and major Shia cities.  Much of the damage done by US air attacks in 1991 was never repaired, and the country’s oil sector and basic infrastructure was close to collapse.  In short, the regime was under tremendous stress, and there was no prospect of Saddam being able to credibly threaten his neighbors, much less the US. 

O’Sullivan is further off-base in describing the post-invasion chaos.  She says “An unanticipated collapse of order and Iraqi institutions prevented the United States from being able to transition sovereignty to Iraqi political leaders, as had been done in Afghanistan.”  Far from unanticipated, a host of experts on Iraq and post-authoritarian transitions—including US intelligence analysts—warned about these exact consequences.  They also warned, accurately, that the Iraqi leaders that some in the US counted on to take charge, notably the notorious Ahmad Chalabi, were unreliable exiles with little support inside Iraq.

The discussion of “Lessons Learned” is a mixed bag.  There is acknowledgement that post-conflict stability and reconstruction are difficult tasks and that “significant efforts to rebuild countries should only be undertaken when truly vital US interests are at stake.”  Likewise with democratization:  “No society is incapable of democracy.  But the various layers of institutions, norms, and practices required for a sustainable democracy take considerable time to construct and remain perilously fragile long after they are initially established.”  

It is not explained, however, why these fairly obvious realities were not taken into account from the start.  In large part, I would argue, this is because pro-war advocates deliberately stoked fear while glossing over costs and difficulties that might have slowed the drive for war.  And President Bush had a strong personal conviction about the desire of all peoples for freedom that made him prone to optimism about democratization.                                   

O’Sullivan draws a more useful lesson that US foreign policy is “overmilitarized” and that civilian capabilities need to be better funded and integrated into military planning.  This is something the US should keep in mind as we supply Ukraine with weapons.  Ukraine’s ability to resist and become a stable democracy depend on strengthening its government institutions, civil society, and economy.  

Other Costs.  Does Hand-Off acknowledge the many other costs of the war such as the strains in our alliances, deterioration of relations with Russia and China, and distraction from Afghanistan?  Only in passing, judging from the essays on Afghanistan, Russia, China and Europe.

The Afghanistan discussion admits in several places that Iraq distracted policymakers and constrained US actions, though it is not clear how central this was to the deterioration of security.  While the section on “Lessons Learned” is well-done, it would have been useful to include an explicit recognition that it is irresponsible to take on two complex counter-insurgency/nation-building challenges at once.   

The Russia essay points to the many reasons that Russia in the post-Iraq period became increasingly aggressive and hostile to the West, culminating in its 2008 invasion of Georgia, 2014 annexation of Crimea, and 2015 intervention in Syria.  The role of Iraq is acknowledged but not discussed in any depth.  The tectonic shift is there only in the background:  “While the President’s strategy of personal diplomacy met with early success, disagreements with Putin following the Iraq War made this strategy more difficult.  Emboldened by rising oil prices and Russia’s rapidly growing economy, Putin quickly aligned himself with French and German leaders to oppose US “unilateralism” and establish a “multi-polar” world.” 

The memo on Europe admits that “The invasion…initially divided the United States from key European allies, especially France and Germany, and inflamed European publics.”  It says that cooperation on the Bush “Freedom Agenda” in Europe was ‘complicated’ by these disagreements, which were however supposedly largely overcome in the second Bush term.  By this time, however, the Iraq War had helped harden Putin’s opposition to NATO expansion.     Obama was received ecstatically by Europeans in 2009 largely because of his opposition to the war.

The analysis of China points out that, like Russia, China’s leaders initially saw terrorism cooperation after 9/11 as a potential turning point in relations: “President Jiang Zemin…told his advisors that the common fight against terrorism could cement his relations with President Bush in the same way that Deng Xiaoping’s common cause with his US counterparts against the Soviet Union improved relations in the 1980s.”  As with Russia, this honeymoon was short-lived as leaders concluded that the Iraq invasion showed the US ‘war on terror’ was a cloak for the expansion of US power.  China’s decisive turn against the US under Xi has many causes, but the Iraq War is certainly one that should have been discussed more extensively.

The Core Lesson.  So what is the real lesson here? Ultimately Hand-Off fails to come to grips with what I think is most important, the fatal mistake of making decisions based on fear and anger. These emotions can be valuable catalysts to action, but they distort one’s ability to calculate risks and costs.  After 9/11 American leaders wanted desperately to ‘do something’, and did not see the relatively quick and easy ouster of the Taliban as sufficient.  This was not enough to properly demonstrate America’s righteous anger.  For many Americans, it was hard to accept that the US could be hurt by a rag-tag group of militants half-way around the world.  Someone more powerful must be to blame, some major state actor, and Iraq filled the bill.

Fear and anger overlapped with the over-confidence that had built up in large parts of the American foreign policy community since the collapse of the Soviet Union.  That the United States was now the ‘indispensable nation’, that it stood alone as the arbiter of international order, that American-style democracy and free markets were the inevitable wave of the future; these and similar ideas had become deeply ingrained.  No other nation came close to matching US military capabilities.  Neoconservatives on the right, and neoliberals on the left, largely agreed that America had the power to do whatever it wanted without serious consequences.       

When fear and anger take center stage, there are always players in the wings ready to take advantage.  ‘Never let a crisis go to waste’ was the unspoken motto of neocons like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz— and paleocons like Dick Cheney—who had long wanted to oust Saddam as a way to remake the Middle East and demonstrate US power.  The 9/11 attacks were seized upon as the opportunity to market an agenda that had little to do with fighting terrorism.  This was done by relentlessly appealing to our fears.  George Bush, inexperienced in foreign policy, scared of what might come next, in need of a coherent strategy, was easy prey.

These reinforcing factors combined to warp all the major actors: the White House, intelligence agencies, the military, Congress, the press, and the public.  All moved in the same direction, towards interpreting Saddam as the key threat that must be destroyed, towards overestimating American knowledge and power, and towards underestimating the risks and costs, until we had collectively lost touch with reality. 

Useful analysis:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/u-s-invasion-of-iraq-20-years-later-intelligence-matters/

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/how-donald-rumsfeld-deserves-be-remembered/619334/

Make America Great Again—what is that all about?  What time in the past are the people in the red hats  looking to?  Great in what way?

There’s no one answer, of course.  It’s a useful phrase because it means many things to different people.  But I think there are two basic meanings.  One is quite awful and dangerous, but the other is actually something progressive politicians and activists should support.  And they are connected.  If we articulate clearly what we mean, maybe we can make inroads into the heads of MAGA supporters.

The awful and dangerous meaning has been frequently pointed out and is clearly front and center for the reactionary side of the MAGA movement.  This is a desire to restore or impose ‘traditional’ norms regarding the role of women, homosexuality, non-white minorities, Jews, and atheists and non-believers.  In the not so distant past, the post-war period up to roughly the early 1970s, these norms all favored white, male, Christian power.  Then, in the eyes of traditionalists, it all fell apart in a cascade of youthful protest, black empowerment, women’s movements, gay movements, Native American movements, surging immigration, and on and on.  

MAGA enthusiasts want most of this rolled back.  They may not be against any and every aspect, but the overall trend is personally uncomfortable and frightening; white Christians are now becoming a minority with attendant threats to power and status.  Women are asserting themselves in work, politics, education, everything.  What used to be seen as ‘normal’ American life based in rural areas and small towns and manufacturing (or living in the suburbs and working for big corporations), has been replaced by urban lifestyles dominated by minorities and immigrants and educated professionals.  

This discomfort is comprehensible, but unacceptable.  It amounts to a reactionary desire to reject basic premises of American life:  the equal worth and dignity of all Americans, the right of all to participate in choosing our rulers, equal respect before the law, the ability of everyone to pursue the ‘American Dream’ of economic success and advancement. 

But I think there is another side to MAGA nostalgia, one that has real weight.  During the same postwar period that traditionalists praise as a time of solid, family-oriented, Christian values held up by white men, the American economy was (for those same white men) a juggernaut of success.  It was during the roughly 30 years after WWII that the United States saw its longest period of sustained growth, growth that benefited all classes more or less equally—a rising tide that really lifted all boats.  Growth was steady and strong and similar for blue collar workers, white collar professionals, and executives.  As productivity climbed, wages and compensation climbed for everyone.  Work was characterized by job security, pensions, and benefits, fought for and protected by strong unions.  

Pay for corporate executives was of course higher than for regular employees, but not so much higher that they lived in different economic universes.  In 1962 the CEO of the average company made about 25 times as much as the average employee, unlike today where it is often 400 or 500 times as much.  Marginal tax rates as high as 90% discouraged very high salaries.  

The good times were made possible in large part by an expanded role for government.  Social security, the GI bill, financial regulations, and government infrastructure programs like the national highway program boosted growth and gave Americans economic security.  A broad consensus, that seemed permanent at the time, took hold that government had a central role in making sure the economy avoided major recessions and worked for everyone.  As Richard Nixon famously said, “We are all Keynesians now.”    

The postwar economic (and demographic) boom was the necessary condition for the challenge to traditional cultural norms and hierarchies that took hold in the 1960s. Rising incomes, greater economic security, and a huge increase in access to higher education made it easier to argue for radical social change that would make the fruits of prosperity available to all.  Extending rights, opportunity, and government assistance to everyone was now seen as both just and affordable.  

But then, in an ironic turn, changing norms about race and gender and patriarchy contributed to the eventual collapse of support for the postwar egalitarian economic system.  Economic stress in the 1970s—caused by the unfunded war in Vietnam, growing international competition, and the sharp rise in oil prices from OPEC—led to embracing Reagan’s neoliberal model which championed unbridled competition, small government, lower taxes, weak unions, and free trade.  This caused skyrocketing economic inequality and, eventually, the hollowing out and destruction of much of the unionized manufacturing that had been the underpinning of America’s shared prosperity.  The trajectories of corporate managers, investors, and educated professionals began to diverge sharply from those of America’s blue collar and lower middle class, where incomes stagnated and jobs disappeared.

Economic stress is almost guaranteed to exacerbate racial and social tensions; it is much easier to get broad support to share a growing economic pie, than a shrinking one.  As economic prospects began to contract, more and more Americans were easily persuaded that liberal social and economic policies were to blame.  Minorities and immigrants and women were taking the jobs and privileges that rightfully belonged to regular white guys.  Conservative politicians and culture warriors were happy to connect the dots, redirecting anger and frustration away from corporate and political decisionmakers towards undeserving ‘others’ who were being given unfair advantages.  Business interests who had never accepted the postwar consensus about the role of government in managing the economy pushed a new Friedmanite, anti-Keynesian ideology that said all good things come from the private sector.  They grew in power and took over the Republican Party. 

So the two sides of the MAGA worldview—anger at efforts to include all Americans, and anger at the loss of economic security and opportunity—are in fact closely connected.  They are linked by a zero-sum view that sees any gains for others as a loss for ‘us’.  In the MAGA mind, the decline of jobs and prosperity and status for white men is because everyone else has been rising.  And though there is plenty of disdain for women and people of color, the real hatred is reserved for the white liberals who brought this about and are seen as traitors.

If liberals want to defuse this anger, we must push policies that separate these goals, and find a better language for talking about them.  We should start by agreeing that we need to re-create a version of the more egalitarian economic and social system we once had.  There are genuine traitors who have sold out working class Americans, but they live mostly on Wall Street and Silicon Valley, not college campuses.  They have hoodwinked working Americans with neoliberal claptrap about ‘trickle down’ economics and ‘move fast and break things.’ 

At the same time we can’t back down on the need to include everyone.  White Protestants have no right to keep their historical privileged position.  We are a nation united by a common creed, not a common ethnic or religious heritage.  But we also must avoid ‘flipping the script’ to such an extreme that it panics those who we need to win over.  If America cannot properly be described as an exceptional “city on a hill,” neither should it be described as a version of hell.  This is thoughtless as well as dangerous.

MAGA Republicans have some things deeply wrong, but some things right.  Acknowledging that the past was better in some respects might help reduce and redirect the simmering anger that is dividing Americans.  

The correct answer may be, both Russia and Ukraine are winning.  

How can this be?  In wars, if one side is winning, isn’t the other side by definition losing?  

Yes, if we only look at the battlefield.  But let’s cast our gaze more widely, and ask what the impact of the war has been on the the two nations, on their sense of identity, their cohesion, and the power and future prospects of their leaders.  If we do that, I would argue, both are in some senses doing very well.

Of course Ukrainians would never choose to undergo a terrible war, with tens of  thousands of casualties, millions displaced, children abducted, cities reduced to rubble, electricity and water systems bombed in the middle of winter.  But the war has, according to Ukrainians themselves, created a nation out of disparate pieces.  It has cemented a unity and a clear direction, towards Europe and the West.  It has made their leader into an international hero and a symbol of Ukrainian character and heroism.  It is clear now that Ukraine will never again be Russian and that it will receive military and economic aid from the US and Europe for the foreseeable future. 

Ukraine’s future might, of course, be tragic.  It might lose the war, or be a permanent battleground.  But it will go down fighting.  And if it wins or at least holds on it will have achieved something glorious that will define it for the ages.  

What the war is doing for Russia is less glorious but no less profound.  Russia too would never have chosen to be humiliated on the battlefield, lose its main energy market, be hit with sanctions and made into an international pariah.  But tyrants almost always find wars useful to justify repression, the mobilization of society, and isolation from the outside world.  Putin is using the extended conflict to reshape Russia, moving decisively in directions he had already taken but had not, until now, had the ability to fully achieve. 

Since the invasion all vestiges of an independent press, independent civil society, and independent political forces, have been destroyed.  Hundreds of thousands of potential opponents have more or less voluntarily fled the country, leaving Putin that much more secure.  Russia’s imperial nationalist identity has been reinforced, and the split with the West made deep and permanent.  Society has now returned to Cold War levels of distrust of the outside world, combined with a paranoid search for internal enemies.  The military and security services are exalted as the defenders of the Motherland.  Western companies, possible vectors of  alternative values, have left Russia, leaving the field open for Russian competitors.  

Like many past lovers of war, Russian nationalists see war as enabling a kind of moral purification. The New York Times recently quoted Konstantin Malofeyev, a crazed ultraconservative businessman:  “Liberalism in Russia is dead forever, thank God! The longer this war lasts, the more Russian society is cleansing itself from liberalism and the Western poison.”

Both Ukraine and Russia, in distinct ways, have had their national pride and unity reinforced.  It is quite possible that Putin will see it in his interest to continue the war indefinitely.  Despite terrible losses, life for most Russians has remained normal.  Eventually the costs will hit home; Putin’s version of Russia is like the proverbial dinosaur, already dead but waiting for the signals to reach its extremities.  As the cemeteries fill up and sanctions take their toll Russians will revolt, but it may take years to catalyze genuine resistance.

Every generation of Russians seems to find a new way to commit national suicide.  Ukraine is now making a bid to escape from this destructive cycle, like an abused spouse who has finally said “I won’t take it any more!”  But a prolonged draining war could also be fatal, with Ukraine unable to realize the fruits of freedom and falling into anger and despair.  The positive effects of war have been realized; more war is not in Ukraine’s interest.  Outside support is vital to keep hope alive for Ukrainians, bring the war to a quick end, and make it clear to Russia that time is not on its side.

In Orwell’s 1984 constant war is a tool to maintain the system.  Who the war is against is unimportant—every few years the enemy changes.  1984 is now one of Russia’s best selling books, and its continued relevance is clear from the state’s official attempt to distort what the book teaches:

 “For many years we believed that Orwell described the horrors of totalitarianism. This is one of the biggest global fakes … Orwell wrote about the end of liberalism. He depicted how liberalism would lead humanity to a dead end,” Maria Zakharova, the spokesperson for Russia’s foreign ministry, said during a public talk in Ekaterinburg on Saturday.  

No more Orwellian statement has ever been made.  And no statement has better demonstrated the continued strength and relevance of liberalism.

I don’t normally watch “Antiques Roadshow,” the popular PBS series that travels around the country and invites people to bring out stuff that’s been sitting in the attic and get it appraised by professionals.  But the show was recently in Santa Fe, our hometown, so we watched several episodes.  We saw the usual range of items, some surprisingly valuable—a mid-19^th century Indian beaded jacket, worth an estimated $150000–others interesting but worth next to nothing.  

When the estimated price was revealed to the owner, you could often see an internal struggle take place.  Maybe the picture had been part of their childhood, or associated with a favorite uncle, or was just beautiful and moving—but now it was ‘worth something.’  What would win out, affection and sweet associations, or money?  Would it be kept or sold?

Sometimes the owner would let you know right away, “Oh, I love this, it’s not going anywhere!”  Sometimes it was clear it would be sold.  But often it was hard to tell; the owner might be flabbergasted that this jewelry piece from her mother was worth thousands of dollars, and she didn’t know what to make of it.  Suddenly this thing had changed its meaning, had become something with two faces: the old, comfortable, well-known face and a new face with a dollar sign on it.  It had become ‘monetized.’

Monetization is at the heart of modern capitalism.  Figuring out how to convert not just things but services and normal human drives and emotions into cash—creating ‘value’—is a process we all know well and have come to take for granted.  Thousands of trained, eager experts leap every year out of business schools, looking for some new way to extract yet more ‘value’ and reap the sometimes astronomical rewards.  Silicon Valley and Wall Street are the epicenters of monetization expertise.  Uber lets us convert our cars into cash machines; AirBnb does the same for our houses.

Yesterday I read a story about how private equity now has its eye on childcare—the ‘childcare industry’ (whenever something gets tagged as an ‘industry’ you can be sure monetization is well-advanced)—with predictable results:  exaggerated promises of new investment, higher pay, and better results, and the reality of exploitation.  People who love children and want to help them are suddenly nothing but inputs and labor costs.  People who have struggled to create a small business around something they value and love become roadkill as distant outsiders with zero stake in actually taking care of children work to suck all the ‘value’ out of their new business and then sell the empty husk.  

These processes often occur step by step, looking innocuous at first until before we know it things and activities we love have been swallowed.  It is well-advanced for sport, which increasingly looks like an adjunct of the sports-betting industry.  Sports like baseball that once fought betting like the plague have totally succumbed, and every broadcast now features pitches from Draft Kings and other multi-billion dollar betting platforms.  No surprise, this has been abetted by our clueless Supreme Court, which in 2018–influenced by a tremendous lobbying campaign—struck down a statute that had restricted sports betting to Nevada.  Colleges and universities are there too, justifying it (of course) as necessary to raise money for education:  “College sports betting may have already become too big to fail. Wagering on sports in the Power 5 conferences is now an $11 billion/year industry, according to sports betting watchdog US Integrity”.  Today’s students are swamped with ‘free bets’ and other introductory offers designed to get them hooked on sports betting, with problems of gambling addiction and ruined lives not far behind.  

All of us have become aware of how social media platforms and search engines have ‘monetized’ our personal data, in order to target us with advertising.  Something we used to happily share, such as our name or what city we live in, has become a revenue source.

The world of art has also been thoroughly appropriated.  Today’s art ‘investors’ typically buy expensive paintings and statues, then store them in Swiss vaults to keep them safe while their value appreciates.  So wonderful pieces (according to one estimate, 1000 Picassos) literally never see the light of day.  

An eye-opening new book, Wild New World:  The Epic Story of Animals and People in America, by Dan Flores, chronicles how North America’s wildlife was monetized during European colonization.  While the Spanish and Portuguese to the south saw the New World as mostly a huge lump of gold and silver, the English and French saw it as an endless source of fur and hides and feathers.  Native tribes, despite their reverence for the animal world, were quickly and successfully enlisted to get as much as possible as fast as possible, trading enormous quantities of beaver, deer, bison, fox and otter pelts for knives, iron pots, firearms and liquor.

It was essential to act quickly, before someone more ruthless could beat you to it.  The Hudson’s Bay Company and John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company pioneered many of capitalism’s most predatory practices.  “Move fast and break things” was not invented by Facebook.  The result was the extinction and near-extinction of many of the continent’s most iconic species:  beaver, passenger pigeons, grizzlies, bison…the list goes on and on.  Flores summarizes the result:  “Buffalo and passenger pigeons stand today as the premier case study of a core economic principle.  Without regulation, free-market forces inevitably drive the species they target to extinction.”    

Though Flores is appropriately scathing about the modern European mindset of appropriation and monetization, with its roots in Judaeo-Christian convictions about man’s privileged place in the natural order, he does not spare our earlier ancestors.  The first humans to arrive in force in North America, some 13000 years ago, ransacked the place at least as thoroughly as more recent arrivals.  Most of the continent’s large animals—horses, mammoths, camels, giant sloths, great bison—were exterminated in what seems to have been a frenzy of slaughter as highly-skilled human hunters found themselves in a cornucopia of tasty beasts with no innate fear of man.  Predators like the saber-toothed tiger and dire wolf went too, as their food sources dried up.  This is a permanent human dynamic, not something peculiarly modern or Western.  Only afterwards, as humans began to realize what they had done, did a new ethos of care and identification with our fellow animals take hold among Native Americans, as it is now taking hold, fitfully, in our own time.   

Let’s turn now to another field that has become a lucrative site of monetization—politics.  Yes Virginia, there is now a multi-billion dollar ‘politics industry.’  Of course politicians are part of it, but they are the tip of a gigantic iceberg that includes pollsters, consultants, fund-raisers, pundits, and every type of media that benefits from political advertising.  (Media includes not just egregious cases like Rush Limbaugh, who got $85 million a year for his politico-cultural rubbish, but the full range of newspapers, TV, radio, and online platforms).  All of these actors are interested first and foremost, not in actual policy, but in keeping the politics industry lucrative and growing.  What this means in practice is nurturing features that ensure more elections with more fund-raising, more advertising, more polarization, more, more, more.  

The United States already has the longest election season in the developed world. Presidential campaigns in the US often begin with candidates declaring years ahead of time, while in Canada campaigns are limited by law to 78 days, and Mexico 147 days.  In Japan it’s 11 days.  These constraints mean that political advertising, for instance, can only be conducted during limited periods.  Such restrictions here in the US are considered out of bounds, a violation of unimpeded free speech.  The longer the campaign, the more opportunities for the politics industry to fatten its bank account.  

Of course the US is the unchallenged kingpin when it comes to political donations, otherwise known as political corruption.  Our Supreme Court has again helped out by a series of decisions, most recently Citizen’s United, that make it almost impossible to regulate and limit the amount of money that can be given, or to make this giving open and transparent.  Money is speech, and speech is subject to First Amendment freedoms.  This helps make fund-raising the central feature of American politics.  Members of Congress spend more time fund-raising than any other activity, paying for many things but above all advertising, which flows to TV and radio and newspapers and makes American media complicit in keeping the politics industry going.  

Our primary system is another feather in the politics industry cap.  It means that all the money-making opportunities afforded by elections can be duplicated, if not triplicated or quadrupled, in the run-up to the election.  The more candidates, the more money that needs to be raised and spent, and the industry grows.   

With America’s federal system and its 50 separate states, there are always elections somewhere.  And nowadays there are always consultants and direct-mail companies and radio personalities ready to argue that every election, everywhere, is Very Important and must be invested in with money and polls and the full paraphernalia of industrialized politics.  While in the dim past all politics was local, now all politics has been nationalized, that is, become part of the national politics industry.

I think I speak for most Americans who are confused, exhausted, frustrated and, if they have any energy left, outraged at this system.  They know that it no longer exists to make actual policy or to serve the interests of voters.  They know it battens on anger and outrage, the better to obscure the ways it serves the interests of the rich and powerful.  It has become a self-licking ice cream cone, dominated by wealthy interests and professionals who can afford the time and money to master the machinery, and who live directly and indirectly by the process itself, not the results.    

We could of course fix some important elements.  Katherine Gehl and Michael Porter, authors of the 2020 book  The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy, recognize the nature of the problem:  

The problem is not specifically a politician problem, a policy problem, or a polarization problem: It is a systems problem. Far from being “broken,” our political system is doing precisely what it’s designed to do. It wasn’t built to deliver results in the public interest or to foster policy innovation, nor does it demand accountability for failure to do so. Instead, most of the rules that shape day-to-day behavior and outcomes have been perversely optimized—or even expressly created—by and for the benefit of the entrenched duopoly at the center of our political system: the Democrats and the Republicans (and the actors surrounding them), what collectively we call the political-industrial complex.

They recommend some excellent fixes, especially two:  ranked-choice voting, and top-5 primaries.  These reforms would produce better results, more reflective of what voters actually want, while reducing some of the wasted effort generated by the politics industry (ranked-choice voting would, for instance, make it unnecessary for Georgia to hold the enormously expensive follow-on Senate elections it has been required by law to conduct in 2020 and 2022).  Alaska recently adopted both reforms via referendum and in its 2022 elections voted in more moderate candidates, sending Sarah Palin to the dustbin of history where she belongs.  

But I don’t think this is radical enough.  We need to stop looking to elections as the best or only way to run a democracy.  I know, I know—we have been taught to think of elections and democracy as one and the same.  But they aren’t.  An alternative model is to use sortition and pick our legislatures by lot, as we pick juries, rather than by voting.  This method would create Citizen’s Assemblies and at one stroke eliminate the advertising, the polling, the primaries, all the fund-raising and professional jockeying.  And it would, if done well, give us decision-making bodies that are far more representative and closer to the people than we have now.  The politics industry would deflate like a pin-pricked balloon.

Sounds crazy and utopian.  But it isn’t.  It’s been done and is being done, here, in Europe, around the world.  Disillusionment with the present functioning of democracy is so strong that we must address it now, before the tidal wave of populism and authoritarianism becomes irresistible.  If you aren’t familiar with how Citizen’s Assemblies work, please start here.  

Monetization should always be viewed skeptically.  Sometimes it is trivial, sometimes  annoying, sometimes even useful.  But when it takes hold of critical areas of human life, it needs to be exposed and resisted.  The monetization of democratic politics is clearly one of those areas.  It is weakening and delegitimizing the core institutions of our country.  Let’s not go down without a fight.  

The 2020 novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, has been widely praised (it was one of Barack Obama’s favorites) for its portrayal of how the world finds the will to tackle climate change.  Robinson is a well-established science fiction writer who has addressed global warming in previous works.  Ministry is set several decades from now, when the UN has created a body, the Ministry for the Future, to think about longterm impacts and design policies to effect change.  It has little actual power other than what it can generate via publicity and seeding the system with good ideas.  Nevertheless it ultimately succeeds in prodding the global system to take action and bring emissions of greenhouse gases down to levels that avoid disaster. 

As a novel, Ministry is disappointing.  The writing is long-winded, the characters flat and uninteresting, and there are frequent digressions and mini-chapters crammed with supposedly relevant tidbits of science or technology or sociology.  However, the generally positive reviews and popular response are not because of the book’s literary qualities, but because unlike most “cli-fi,” Ministry paints a picture of success in coping with global warming.  Plenty of bad things happen, but mankind avoids the worst case, both planetary and political.  

Robinson tries to weave together every dimension of the problem, throwing into his mix major geo-engineering projects; economic tools (notably a new currency offered by major central banks); shifts in norms and culture; geopolitics; and some fairly serious violence and terrorism.  You might call Ministry a ‘novel of ideas,’ but that would not be quite right. The main issue is clear, the question is what to do about it.  It is chock full of facts and engineering options.  It is a novel not so much of ideas, as of information.  

The point of the book is not really to entertain.  It is to instruct and to offer a positive vision of how the pieces of a solution might come together.  Critics have correctly said that Robinson glides over many huge obstacles and downplays the strength and ruthlessness of the opposition.  But he offers enough specificity to make Ministry seem at least plausible and give hope to those fighting for global action.  

The most controversial piece of the ‘solution set’ that Robinson shows us is the value of violence, mostly in the form of terrorist attacks and threats.  In Ministry these are mostly aimed at industries or individuals responsible for greenhouse gas emissions.  Shadowy terrorist groups use drones to destroy airliners to stop polluting jet travel; they infect cattle with ‘mad-cow’ disease to cut down on beef consumption; board and sink fish-factory ships; blow up power plants; and hunt down billionaire arms-dealers and stab them in their beds.  Climate activists kidnap the rich, powerful attendees at Davos and hold them to draw attention to their cause. 

How important is this violence to the success of the fight against global warming?  It seems fair to say that it is a necessary though not sufficient cause.  It is perhaps inevitable that terrorist attacks and kidnappings and so on will stand out in a novel more than accounts of meetings between bureaucrats, so maybe they appear more important than they are.  But terrorism has real impact on global behavior.  Jet travel largely disappears.  Beef consumption craters.  Heads of oil companies and other bad actors are forced into hiding.  Shadowy non-governmental organizations use drone swarms to largely end the superpower monopoly on the use of force in international relations.  

Is this realistic?  Does an effective global movement against climate change need a ‘black wing’ able to threaten violence and conduct terrorist attacks? 

These are questions that some will answer purely on a moral basis with a decided ‘no’.  Many in the environmental movement are strongly opposed to violence.  But given the tremendous stakes for humanity, including the likelihood of immense suffering and death for hundreds of millions of people if global warming is not stopped or slowed, it is not clear that morality lies with an absolute rejection of violent means, if our best analysis tells us they are useful or even necessary.

That is the question to consider.  Is violence, in this case terrorism, likely to help reduce global warming?  Or is it more likely to do harm by alienating the public and calling forth intense government efforts to suppress terrorism and the movement it is associated with?  

There has been considerable research on the utility of terrorism as a means to achieve political goals, and for the most part it concludes that terrorism is not very effective.  For instance the very comprehensive work undertaken by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan for their 2016 book, Why Civil Resistance Works:  The Strategic Logic of Non-Violent Resistance, seems to show that “The rank ordering is something like this: nonviolent resistance is the most effective, followed by large insurgencies such as the Chinese Revolution or peasant rebellions, and the least effective is terrorism.”

There are a number of reasons, however, why we might need to think more carefully about the case of climate change before concluding that terrorist violence is a bad idea.  First, the climate crisis is categorically different than the cases considered by Chenoweth and Stephan, who included in their database only instances of government overthrow or territorial liberation.  The attacks in Ministry are not aimed primarily at discrediting or overthrowing governments. They are targeted at major polluting industries—airlines, the beef industry, fishing, shipping—and at individuals who own or run or support these industries.  The goal is to stop particular damaging activities.  There is no clear aim to change particular governments or states, or terrorize the general public.  The attacks on aircraft, for instance, target primarily private jets and business travel.

Maybe for this reason the world’s major powers do not exert their full force to stop these acts of terrorism and to destroy terrorist organizations and networks.

Second, the higher success rate for nonviolent methods may be misleading.  Insurgency and terrorism are often resorted to only after the failure of nonviolent strategies. The use of violence may be an indicator that peaceful protest cannot succeed against a given target.  Violence is therefore not a ‘less viable’ strategy, it is by definition a strategy used in the most difficult cases. 

And nonviolent methods may be chosen in the first place because those seeking change judge they are likely to work.  Usually this is because the target has weaknesses or vulnerabilities that can be exploited. It might be a fragile authoritarian regime with fissures in the ruling coalition and uncertain support from its security forces; or a democracy that allows a fair amount of room for political organizing and protest.  We all know that Gandhi and Martin Luther King were successful because they went up against democratic, open societies; they would have failed against a Stalin or Mao.  

There is no doubt that in Ministry—several decades in our future—peaceful protests and political activism have not been enough.  The book starts with a catastrophe in which tens of millions of Indians die from an unprecedented heat wave that literally cooks people alive.  Something more is needed, and the heat deaths precipitate radical responses on multiple fronts.  India undertakes a unilateral geo-engineering project to lower temperatures by injecting aerosols into the upper atmosphere, and the terrorist group Children of Kali emerges to attack people and institutions judged responsible for climate change.  

Third, there are many hybrid examples where a successful political movement has both an overt and a covert, violent side:  the Irish Republican Army and the African National Congress, to name two.  The American civil rights movement had elements that threatened violence or armed resistance.  American businessmen acquiesced in Progressive era and New Deal reforms in part because they were afraid that otherwise there would be a socialist revolution and they would be hung from the nearest lamppost.

The existence of a violent element, whether actual or only threatened, is often very important to the success of a peaceful strategy.  It allows the leaders using peaceful methods to appear relatively moderate, and to make the argument that unless demands are met, and speedily, violence will grow and peaceful leaders will be discredited.  

In Ministry it is clear that the violence perpetrated by the Children of Kali and similar terrorist groups is supported and coordinated secretly by people within the Ministry for the Future.  The head of the Ministry avoids probing too closely into the actions of one subordinate, who obliquely acknowledges what he is doing; she supports him but needs to maintain distance and deniability.    

The conflict being waged in our day around climate change, as in Ministry, is two-fold.

• There is first a kind of civil war within industrialized, developed countries.  Powerful status quo forces want to continue burning fossil fuels and maintain a carbon-intensive economy and way of life.   Growing anti-status-quo forces want to stop using fossil fuels and transition very quickly.  

• Second, there is a struggle between industrialized, developed countries and developing countries, which have not contributed to global warming and are bearing much of the cost and damage.  The developing world wants the rich, industrialized states to take the lead in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, pay developing states to transition to renewable energy, and if necessary feel some of the pain as well. 

Let’s look at these two different though parallel conflicts and ask whether terrorism is appropriate or possibly useful.  The short answer is ‘probably not’ for the civil war within advanced economies, and ‘maybe’ for the struggle between advanced and developing countries.  

Terrorists often have multiple goals for their actions.  There is an overarching strategic objective such as ‘socialist revolution’ or ‘evicting the United States from the Muslim world,’ but particular attacks often aim more narrowly at demonstrating resolve and capacity; recruiting new members; provoking over-reaction from the government; showing government weakness; or publicizing demands.

The relation between the stated strategic goal and the means used is crucial.  A goal that is extremely ambitious may be so unpopular or difficult to justify that no amount of effort or tactical success can make it viable; a good example might be the Red Brigades and other underground revolutionary groups in Europe in the 1970s and 80s, which carried out a number of spectacular terrorist actions but never generated much popular support for a Marxist revolution.  A modest goal may have more support, but violent means may seem out of proportion to the stated aim.  

Could climate terrorists in the developed world articulate a strategic goal that threads the needle to gain significant support while also justifying violence?  I think the answer is probably ‘yes’, but it would require very disciplined messaging and associated actions.  A successful argument would be that a. We are out of time. Global warming is not being addressed quickly or decisively enough, as shown by (floods, droughts, storms, sea-level rise, etc); b. This threatens our way of life and the future of our nations and communities; c. The obstacle to successful action is a minority of powerful political and economic interests; d.  Attempts to overcome this obstacle by normal channels have been exhausted; e.  Our goal is not to end capitalism or force you to become a bus-riding vegetarian; we are trying to save something approximating your present lifestyle.  

One could imagine an extremely focused campaign, like the one in Ministry, that targets mostly infrastructure and a small number of unpopular people, and refrains from major political demands.  But terrorism is not generally conducted under such controlled conditions—it tends to spill out to a broader range of targets, to spawn ever more radical splinter groups, and to escape the direction of sober leaders with limited aims.  In Ministry the senior official who has directed the ‘black arm’ ends up pleading with the Children of Kali  to call off their assassination campaign now that most of their objectives have been met—it is not clear if he is successful.  

The closest historic analogue for the violence depicted in Ministry would probably be the “eco-terrorism” of groups like the Animal Liberation Front and the Environmental Liberation Front.  These movements did not aim at government overthrow and conducted mostly vandalism or arson directed at property.  According to one study, only about 2% of all attacks were directed at people, and in no case (other than the Una-Bomber, who was a lone wolf without any affiliation with established groups or movements) were there fatalities.  The purpose was to gain publicity and cause economic damage to institutions such as research labs, logging companies, and fast-food restaurants.  (Because ALF/ELF actions did not target people and did not have an explicit political aim, it is not clear that they were acts of “terrorism” as generally understood.)

“Eco-terrorism” succeeded in imposing some economic damage on targeted companies and government institutions, and gaining publicity for animal rights and environmental protection.  It also provoked a strong backlash including a major FBI investigation and legislation specifically targeting animal and environmental rights groups.  In 2006 the FBI, in a truly comical overstatement, called ‘eco-terrorism’ the most dangerous domestic terrorist threat in the US.  If our leaders were willing to go so far against a minor threat, what would they do against the kind of attacks described in Ministry, which are far more disruptive and destructive than 9/11? 

Terrorism succeeds only if it gains broad sympathy and support for its cause.  A terrorist campaign conducted by groups in the developing world against developed states (perhaps with state support or at least acquiescence) might do this.  A campaign with limited goals—greater aid to developing countries, reparations for climate-caused damage, faster cuts in greenhouse emissions—could probably gain considerable sympathy from people in the target countries.  

Such a campaign would be very different from 9/11 and terrorist attacks against the West in the name of Islam.  These never had any chance of gaining support from sympathetic Western forces; in fact the strategic aim was to stoke mutual hatred and permanently divide the West from governments and peoples in the Muslim world.  Despite this, this terrorist strategy had considerable success.

• It provoked the US into over-reacting by invading and occupying Muslim countries.

• US actions helped radical Islamic groups to recruit and expand, caused the US and its supporters to waste tremendous resources, and stoked deep fissures between the US and its allies.   

A terror campaign built around global warming and ecological collapse, however, could be quite popular among many in the West who sympathize with its aims.  If it was targeted carefully at Western oil and gas infrastructure, associated financial institutions, and some key government, industrial and financial leaders, while avoiding mass-casualty attacks, it might become viewed as a ‘Robin Hood’ venture, attacking the rich on behalf of the poor.  One can think of the popularity of Che Guevera and other revolutionaries in the 1960s.  By dovetailing with the broad aims of Western environmental and climate change movements, it could play an important role in persuading political and economic leaders that the status quo is untenable.  

On the other hand, it might reinforce suspicion of immigrants and create a backlash against assistance programs.  Anti-terrorist programs would expand, diverting resources while strengthening the national security apparatus in the US and many allies.  Attacks would likely be concentrated mostly against wealthy, democratic societies and major multinational institutions identified with the West, rather than police-states like Russia or China, leading to suspicions about the movement’s underlying intentions.    

Where does this leave us?  Advocating or intellectually justifying terrorism on behalf of climate action is clearly a last resort.  It could easily backfire and make progress less likely.  How desperate is our situation?  

Robinson describes himself as an optimist:  “And I want to mention that this notion of being optimistic, it has become a truism about me. I am science fiction’s or this culture’s great optimist.”  ‘Optimism’ is not a term usually associated with climate activism, but it may be more warranted than seemed possible only a few years ago.  Recent analysis suggests temperature projections are coming down due to a combination of factors; as climate expert David Wallace-Wells recently wrote:  “Thanks to astonishing declines in the price of renewables, a truly global political mobilization, a clearer picture of the energy future and serious policy focus from world leaders, we have cut expected warming almost in half in just five years.”  

We don’t want to jeopardize these trends.  But we can’t afford to slow down either.  The stakes are too high.  I for one would be happy if policymakers and central bankers and CEOs sitting around their tables were more than a little worried that failure to act might lead to a violent reaction.  They might consider that life can imitate art:  eco-terrorism in the 1980s and 90s was incubated by Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel The Monkeywrench Gang.  The vandalism of that era is a pale shadow of what might be in store.  If Ministry helps put that thought in their heads, I say:  good. 

My own love-affair with JRR Tolkien goes back a long way.  In 1963, when I was 10 years old, my 6^th-grade teacher read The Hobbit to us in class.  My mother, an English major with a special interest in medieval literature, knew of Tolkien as a scholar; she had connections who could get their hands on The Lord of the Rings, at that time virtually unavailable in the US.  (It became a US sensation only after the paperback came out in 1965.)

I read it again and again and again.  I loved the Appendices.  I memorized Elvish script.  As more Tolkien writings appeared over the years I read them too.  I know my way around Middle-Earth.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not a Fan, I don’t haunt Tolkien chat rooms or dress as a Hobbit.  There are volumes of Tolkienish literature I have never cracked.  But I feel more than a little proprietary, even now that the movies have made Tolkien mass entertainment.  (Peter Jackson’s LOTR is pretty good, his Hobbit is an abomination…)

Honestly, I don’t much want to analyze Lord of the Rings; I just want to enjoy it, like a 10-year old.  But there is a dangerous cloud on the horizon so, reluctantly, I am taking up my pen.

Tolkien Appropriation

It is with anger mixed with perplexity that I have seen Tolkien appropriated by some on the far right.  It would be disastrous, and wrong, to associate him and his writings with these people and movements.  What is going on?

• In Italy, the incoming neo-fascist prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has played up her love for Tolkien, the influence of right-wing “Hobbit Camps” for children, and the supposed message of traditional values found in LOTR and other Tolkien writings.  She has gone so far as to say Tolkien is a ‘sacred text.’

• In the US, Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley pseudo-intellectual who has been bankrolling Trumpist political candidates this election cycle, such as his former employee JD Vance in Ohio, is a big fan.  He has given various companies and enterprises Tolkien names, like Palantir Technologies and Valar Ventures.  

Tolkien himself was in my view certainly conservative, but the opposite of a fascist or libertarian.  He did not want people to read politics into his books—they were not ‘allegories’ about Hitler or Stalin—and always resisted talking about his own political views.  He despised Nazi racism and was deeply offended when a German publisher in 1938, thinking of publishing The Hobbit, asked him whether he was an Aryan.  But he was a devout Catholic and equally despised communist attacks on the church. 

Tolkien’s own political or social views, however, are not what matter.  It is the political and social views readers absorb from his writings, or read into them, that I want to discuss.  So while there can be endless discussions about Tolkien’s personal politics drawing on his numerous letters, unpublished papers, marginal jottings, conversations with his children, etc., what matters for our purpose is the major writings, The Hobbit and LOTR and, to some extent, the Silmarillion. 

To determine whether Tolkien gives support, even inadvertently, to Meloni’s neo-fascism or to Thiel’s anti-democratic libertarianism, we must identify what these mean.  The characteristics of fascism are generally understood to include extreme nationalism; strong racial prejudices and belief in racial hierarchy; a love of war and violence for its own sake; and contempt for liberal democracy and preference for a ‘supreme leader’ or ‘Superman’ who acts decisively and embodies the nation.  In many instances this is linked to hostility towards the Biblical tradition based on Nietzsche’s critique of Judaism and Christianity as promoting a ‘slave morality’ that softens the human spirit.  However, I would also include under ‘fascism’ modern theocratic or fundamentalist variations that are based on enforcing adherence to rigid religious doctrines, as in today’s Iran.

Libertarianism advocates an unrestricted individualism, distrust of governments and collective decisionmaking, faith in markets, and rejection of tradition (including religion) in favor of rational self-interest.  It too has a Nietzschean side, seen clearly in the writings of Ayn Rand, another Thiel favorite.  

As we shall see, neither of these are reflected in Tolkien’s writings or his imagined world of Middle Earth.

Despite Tolkien’s deep love and intimate knowledge of Northern Europe’s mythology, the ur-perspective of Tolkien’s created universe owes more to Paradise Lost than to Beowulf or the Icelandic sagas.  The recurring message at every stage of his story, as far as I can tell, is this: every type of being is vulnerable to temptation, and all at some point fall.  The very greatest of the Valar, Morgoth, falls; so does Sméagol, from perhaps the most humble of Middle-Earth’s many peoples.  And everyone in between.  High elves. Kings of Men. Dwarves.  Wizards.  Hobbits.  (Ents? Well, they become preoccupied with their labors and lose touch with their Ent-wives.  Tom Bombadil?  He seems to belong to a race of which he is the only member.)   

To fall seems to mean, above all, to give in to pride.  The desire for rule, for power, for immortality, is the downfall of the Numenoreans and of men generally.  Frequently, especially for dwarves and certain elves, it is the love of one’s own products and genius—jewels, rings—that is their undoing.

In Lord of the Rings of course it is the One Ring that exemplifies temptation and puts almost all of its main characters to the test.  Some pass with flying colors, like Galadriel or Faramir or Bilbo.  Some fail badly, like Saruman; or like poor Gollum fail but retain flickers of goodness.  Some are battered and bend, but don’t quite break, like Boromir or Frodo himself.  

The Ring works on weaknesses present in all of us. In some better natures it is our desire to do good.  Galadriel’s love of this world, of Middle Earth itself, is a kind of temptation; her rejection of the Ring is bound up with her final willingness to leave Middle Earth—which she sought in her youth as a place to exercise her powers—and diminish and go into the West.  Boromir wants the Ring to save Minas Tirith, and please his father.  Sam, in a brief moment when the Ring is within his grasp, is seized by a vision of creating a great garden in the midst of Mordor.

Is he fascistic?

What is it that enables some to resist?  Tolkien presents us with a variety of personal and cultural strengths that come into play.  A key indicator of inner strength, perhaps the greatest of them, is the ability to transcend barriers of race.  The estrangement between elves, men, dwarves, hobbits (and Ents) has been the bane of the forces arrayed against evil since the beginning.  LOTR frequently displays the habitual suspicion and fear that members of each race (and often for different tribes or clans within the same race) typically have for the other, often based on long-ago betrayals and misunderstandings. The Fellowship is remarkable for representing all the main races of Middle-Earth; the friendship of Gimli and Legolas (and Gimli’s adoration of Galadriel) is especially notable.

Orcs are frequently shown as unable to cooperate and liable to turn on one another over internal differences, to the great benefit of hobbits and others.  The orcs of Orthanc and Mordor fall out violently on the edge of Fangorn, allowing Merry and Pippin to escape. Inside Mordor, two rival groups kill each other off over Frodo’s mithril shirt, saving Sam and Frodo.  

It is Gandalf’s life work to unite the peoples of Middle Earth against Sauron. Tolkien carefully starts the Appendices at the end of LOTR by pointing to the three historic unions of men and high elves; he ends LOTR with the wedding of Aragorn and Arwen, perhaps to show that even in today’s “Age of Men,” something of this past is still with us.  At the same time, the union of Faramir and Eowyn shows that traditional barriers between the ‘higher’ people of Gondor, proud of their Numenorean heritage, and the ‘lower’ people of Rohan, need to fall.    

Another quality Tolkien praises is compassion.  Frodo’s ultimately unsuccessful outreach to Gollum (in whom he sees his own reflection) is in some ways the heart of LOTR.  Gollum betrays Frodo’s trust, but Gollum proves necessary for success.  It is Gollum who sparks one of Tolkien’s most striking moral statements, from Gandalf to Frodo: “Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends. I have not much hope that Gollum can be cured before he dies, but there is a chance of it.”

We see the same hope when Treebeard lets Saruman out of Orthanc, and when Gandalf tries to offer Saruman help when he meets him on the road.  So just as everyone may fall, everyone equally may be saved—or at least it is right to assume so. 

There is a lot of violence and warfare in LOTR and in Tolkien’s larger history.  And great warriors are certainly honored.  Gimli and Legolas compete on the battlefield, like little boys, to see who can kill the most of the enemy (killing orcs lacks the moral ambivalence that might be connected with killing men or elves).   Hobbits are presented as possibly too peaceable and in need of toughening, something Strider tries to provide on the road to Rivendell.   But no major figure, as far as I can tell, loves fighting and killing for its own sake.  None seek warfare primarily for their own glory or for dominion over others.  There are no ‘supermen,’ no infallible leaders requiring worship and blind obedience—other than the Sarumans and Saurons. 

Hobbits seem to be a special case in their resistance to the Ring and what it offers.  There are many references to the inner strength of Bilbo, Frodo, Sam and hobbits generally.  Bilbo is unique in his willingness to voluntarily give up the Ring (though with much prodding from Gandalf).  This may be because Hobbits are little attracted to power, conquest, glory, war, and riches, the main temptations the Ring offers its possessors.  Hobbits are ‘simple’ folk, given to farming and gardening (like Sam, the prototypical Hobbit), family life, and the honest pleasures of a good glass of ale and a pipe of fine weed.  Tolkien greatly admires these traits.  It is Sam and Frodo’s memory and love of ordinary life in the Shire that sustains them in the darkest times of their quest.  

However, Tolkien makes it clear in his ending of LOTR that hobbits are not immune to a desire to boss people around and act like bigshots; there are Sackville-Bagginses everywhere.  Saruman is able to mislead and corrupt the Shire, which is only saved by hobbits who have acquired some un-hobbit-like skills and habits.  

Tolkien is partial to those strong souls who dedicate themselves to protecting ordinary people, without thought of reward or recognition.  Happiness for most may depend in part on not being fully aware of how precarious their safety is.  Strider is compelled to enlighten his Hobbit companions, after rescuing them in Bree, that he and his fellow Rangers have long protected them from enemies who would “freeze their blood.”  

To sum up then, there is no support in Tolkien for the core tenets of fascism and the right.  Racism is clearly and categorically rejected.  There is no worship of a great leader, and no excessive praise of war or violence.  Weakness is to be pitied and helped, when possible, not scorned.  The qualities Tolkien most admires seem to be quiet tenacity, friendship and loyalty, and a love of poetry and song.  

Is he ‘anti-modern’? 

Where Tolkien and some neo-fascist sensibilities do intersect is in ‘traditionalism’, a respect and love for past (and lost) ways of life that can surface in an intense hatred for modernity.  In Italy LOTR was published in 1970 with an influential introduction by the writer Elemire Zolla.  Zolla connects Tolkien with a hodge-podge of modern thinkers and writers who look back nostalgically to pre-modern thought, to fairy stories, Celtic mythology, etc. 

Another point of reference for Italian fascism is Julius Evola, an extreme thinker immersed in mysticism and Naziism who is beloved by contemporary neo-fascists like Alexander Dugin in Russia and Steve Bannon in the US.  Evola’s traditionalism “viewed humanism, the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution all as historical disasters that took man further away from a transcendental perennial truth…Evola’s ideal order was based on hierarchy, caste, monarchy, race, myth, religion and ritual.”

The underlying proposition for reactionary traditionalists is that in the past we lived harmonious, organic lives nested in an accepted hierarchy of classes and peoples, usually organized around a common religion endorsed by the state.  If your touchstone for this way of life is Medieval Europe, you tend to be a conservative Catholic, or Orthodox.  If it is pagan Europe, you may be a neo-Nazi.  In either case you are deeply unhappy with modernity and in particular trends towards class, racial and gender equality and separation of church and state.  (Evola was, unsurprisingly, strongly influenced by Nietzsche).  If you believe in taking action to restore some version of this past, it is easy for traditionalism to morph into a reactionary movement, no longer conservative but radical and open to violence and extremism.  

Tolkien certainly presents a vivid picture of a pre-modern world that has been attractive both on the left and the right.  In the US, unlike Italy, Tolkien is usually associated with ‘the 60s’, environmentalism, and a rejection of materialism and capitalism.  Like other fantasies, because it is not set in our real past it is easy to avoid controversial issues of equity and oppression. 

Tolkien’s appeal is, I think, strongly linked to his dislike of today’s industrialization and its handmaiden, capitalism.  The hellish works in which Saruman burns the forest and creates the Uruk-Hai and their weapons, and their small-scale imitation in the Shire, earn Tolkien’s unmitigated scorn.  He hates the  destruction of the natural world and the support for war that accompanies this sort of industry.

Tolkien’s dislike of industrialization goes beyond its ugliness and greed; there is a suspicion of human creativity itself.  Even the ingenuity of the dwarves in Moria, and Elves such as Celeborn who make the great rings of power, is viewed with ambivalence.  Tolkien loves to describe beautiful works of art and craft and tell us about their creators, but there is a risk.  In Moria the dwarves “delved too deep” and roused a Balrog.  Elves aim higher but their efforts are also suspect.  Celeborn, and Feanor before him, love their creations more than they should.  By taking advantage of their excessive pride, Sauron was able to influence Celeborn, and Morgoth fatally corrupted Feanor. 

Nevertheless, while Tolkien is no believer in progress, neither is he a believer in decline.  I don’t think his work supports the view that we should look to restore some past ‘golden age.’  Unlike many other fantasy writers, Tolkien carefully fleshed out his pre-history.  There is no resting place, no perfect harmonious organic society—not for any of Middle-Earth’s peoples, nor for the whole.  Each of the Three Ages has its heights, but these do not last.  Each Age is characterized by terrible wars and civilization-ending failures, necessitating the gradual and permanent sundering between this world and the more perfect (but still imperfect) world of the Valar.  One learns from the past not to learn too much from the past.   

Living in the past or basing present worth on these connections is a sign of decadence.  The line of kings of Gondor, for instance, fails when, as Faramir says:  “Kings made tombs more splendid than houses of the living, and counted old names in the rolls of their descent dearer than the names of sons”.

A central theme of LOTR is, in fact, that great deeds are just as possible now as in any earlier time.  Those alive today are in no way inferior to those who came before.   Sam, who loves the old Elvish stories, weeps with joy when, waking up after his rescue from Mt. Doom, he hears a minstrel recite his new lay of “Frodo of the Nine Fingers and the Ring of Doom.”

Moreover, great deeds are not done only by the Great.  Tolkien in a 1964 interview says that the wisest words in LOTR are Elrond’s at the Council where it is decided that Frodo will carry the ring to Mt. Doom: “This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.”

Tolkien’s traditionalism is not the reactionary version that says everything was better in the ‘old days’ and seeks simply to go backwards.  It might better be described as a love of the particular.  He values a world with a variety of races, places, languages, and traditions.  Like some nationalists on the right, this would place him firmly against globalization and the erasing of national and cultural boundaries.  But he values tolerance and peaceful relations between the peoples of the earth.  And opportunities for greatness are just as abundant now as in the past. 

Is he anti-democracy? 

Tolkien in his writings is studiously uninterested in politics, in the sense of examining different political systems.  Most well-ordered peoples have kings, and the frequent failures of kings do not lead to consideration of democracy or some other type of rule.  This should not, in my view, be interpreted as a rejection of democracy or an endorsement of monarchy or aristocracy.  I do not think the books are meant to urge us to work towards recreating the political structures of the early Ages.  There is a clear line drawn between the New Age of men and the Three Ages that preceded it.  This is a different world.  

In practice Tolkien holds up reasoned deliberation among the wise, not top-down kingly dictates, as the best kind of political decision making.  This is how the Council operates in Rivendell when considering what to do with the Ring.  It is apparently how the Ents decide to fight Saruman at the Entmoot (the exact method of deciding is not explained, other than to say it takes a very long time).  

The Shire is a partial exception to the monarchical model.  There is no ‘king of the hobbits’ and though the Hobbits have a ‘thain’ responsible for defense, he has little day to day power.  The most important Shire official is an elected mayor, so hobbits appear to be one of the few communities of Middle Earth where some form of democracy prevails (in The Hobbit, Laketown is said to be ruled by an elected Master, though the electors appear to be limited to the town’s wealthy merchants).  Given the centrality Tolkien gives to ordinary people and the life of the Shire, he might arguably be partial to a democratic or at least pluralistic political order.   

Nevertheless, there is a deep dislike of democracy in many parts of today’s right-wing ecosystem, and LOTR’s world where all will seemingly be made well by restoring the rightful king is an attractive symbol of the alternative.  The Italian right’s nostalgia for Mussolini is matched in the US by libertarians who reject liberal democracy as inefficient and long for an American ruler able to ‘get things done.’  Peter Thiel is foremost in their ranks.  I suspect Thiel’s Tolkien enthusiasm is connected with this project, which involves the violent sweeping away of most of America’s current institutions and traditions.  This is, in my view, a terrible perversion of what Tolkien’s writings envision or call for. 

Is he simplistic?  

A characteristic of Tolkien’s that is often said to appeal to conservatives is that his world is black and white, good vs. evil.  The evil actors are painted in particularly stark terms:  Sauron is not a complicated character with a good side and a bad side.  He engages in no internal struggles about his goals or the means to achieve them (though Elrond says at one point that nothing was evil in the beginning, even Sauron; and some of Tolkien’s writings suggest Sauron at one or more past moments might have wavered in his commitment to evil).  No orc is ever tempted to change sides.  

Conservatives sometimes scorn what they see as the reluctance of liberals to take a clear moral stand.  Certainly fascist ideology and messaging tends to paint the world in absolute terms:  superior and inferior races, strong peoples who do as they please vs. weak ones who suffer what they must. LOTR is admired as a straightforward story of Good triumphing over Evil.

We have seen already that Tolkien does not accept this world view.  No race, people, or individual is always strong and right; they are always flawed and always liable to failure and collapse.  LOTR is triumphant but also melancholy, because there is no way to save Middle-Earth without in some sense destroying it.  The destruction of the One Ring takes with it the power of the others, and signals the final retreat of the elves and the beginning of a world dominated by men.  (A melancholy, I suspect, produced by Tolkien’s awareness that Christianity has led to the ‘disenchantment’ of the world and the loss of the old powers and gods and beliefs that Tolkien himself loves).  

 Tolkien himself was categorical about this, in his own statements and interviews.  LOTR is in his eyes a type of tragedy.  His central figure, Frodo, in some sense fails in his task; and in carrying it out, he is  hollowed out (by a kind of PTSD) and is unable to be happy in this world.  And there is no assurance whatever that the defeat of Sauron will usher in a permanent Golden Age; it is certain that the Fourth Age and all further Ages will see their share of terrors and failures (as Tolkien said in one speech, Sauron is no more but plenty of Sarumans are still with us).

Does he support libertarianism? 

Amassing great wealth is nowhere seen as praiseworthy, though a well-run kingdom will naturally accumulate riches.  The dangers of greed are shown more vividly in The Hobbit than in LOTR.  Dwarves are particularly susceptible, with the Arkenstone as a kind of symbol.  Dragons are however at the top of the food chain when it comes to accumulating wealth, which they have no use for other than to lie on mountains of stolen gold and riches.  This shows clearly how Tolkien views a life devoted to getting rich.                                                            

We can see from this that Tolkien in no way celebrates the kind of ferocious, unchecked combination of greed, self-promotion, and invention we see in today’s libertarian capitalism.  Individual effort and ingenuity are valuable, but have to be checked by wisdom and humility.  The inventions of Peter Thiel and today’s Silicon Valley titans would be, for Tolkien, ugly in themselves and frightening in their implications for ordinary life.  

IN SUM

We might therefore sum up Tolkien’s ‘teaching’ thus:  the good life for most men would be something like life in the Shire.  It would be peaceful, close to the natural world, where people enjoy simple pleasures in the close company of family and community.  Poetry and song would be plentiful.  Squabbles and disagreements would not disappear but would be dealt with via input and participation from everyone, leavened by abundant tolerance for quirks and eccentricities.  Social and economic differences would be relatively small, no one would be impoverished and no one would be so rich as to lord it over others.  

However, the world is not constituted to allow such a life for most.  There are great threats and dangers, both external and internal.  Most peoples must be organized to defend themselves from outside aggression, and from the ambition and greed in their own souls.  They must structure their political and ruling institutions around these necessities.  Kings and nobles and knights and rangers are needed, creating a clear social hierarchy.  This world of danger and strife calls forth great deeds and achievements which in some ways enrich all of us.  But it also frequently calls forth the worst in all the peoples of Middle Earth.  

Under some circumstances, Shires flourish under the protection of powerful but benevolent rulers.  Those in positions of authority have a duty to nurture and protect the Shire.  But it is hard to see this as a permanent or stable state of affairs.  Enlightened rule by great kings is the exception, not the rule. 

Just as the Shire requires the help of the great powers of the world, the success of the kings and powers requires the help of the Shire.  Hobbits have a quiet strength that turns out to be necessary to destroy the Ring.  The Great of the world, by their natures and upbringings, are proud and liable to temptation.  The wise among them know that creating and protecting the Shire-life is not a useless endeavour but is essential to their own long term success and the success of the whole.    

The Shire for its part needs to avoid the danger of becoming too parochial and self-satisfied.  The Shire-life is attractive but some within it chafe at its limitations; whether through curiosity or love of adventure or the intrusion of threats that cannot be wholly held at bay, they will be dissatisfied and seek the wider world.  The Shire has to tolerate if not encourage some engagement with the world outside, and not come down too hard on its own more adventurous and curious children.

 Some of them need to leave the nest, in hopes they will return with a wider perspective and become leaders—like Sam and Frodo, Merry and Pippin—who are aware of the frailty and limitations, as well as the strengths, of the Shire-life.  But maintaining a successful balance is difficult; too many ambitious and adventurous souls will destroy the Shire’s essential characteristics.  Too few leave it vulnerable to decay or attack. 

Different peoples and communities should be free to develop their distinctive ways of life, expressed in language, poetry, and song.  They should be proud of their achievements and celebrate their traditions.  But they should also be open to the achievements of other peoples, welcome outsiders, and work together against common enemies.  

The great risk facing modern man is perhaps the love of his own works, a danger that runs through Tolkien’s writings.  The success of our technology and industry leads to an unfounded confidence that perennial dangers and temptations no longer threaten.  It alienates us from the natural world, which we come to see as nothing but a resource to be consumed.  When we can seemingly satisfy all our desires with ease, the Shire-life seems too modest and dull to be attractive.          

CODA: Tolkien and Plato 

Many readers and commentators have noticed the similarities between Tolkien’s One Ring, and a story told in Plato’s Republic about the Ring of Gyges.  The Gyges story is used in the Republic by one of the characters, Glaucon, to try and show that morality is based only on fear of punishment.  The Ring of Gyges makes its wearer invisible, and Glaucon describes how a shepherd, finding the ring, uses his new-found immunity to kill a king, marry his widow, and become king himself.  The ring’s power allows ‘real’ human nature to reveal itself.  

Tolkien, a well-educated Englishman who studied classics at Oxford, certainly was familiar with the Republic, one of the most famous philosophical texts in the Western tradition.  His One Ring is also a ‘revealer’ that highlights existing weaknesses.  (While I think it likely that the Ring of LOTR was influenced by the Gyges story, there were also rings of power in the Norse tradition).  

In any case, I want to pursue a different possible connection.  The Shire bears a resemblance to another well-known story in the Republic, Socrates’ description of the “City of Pigs.” The City of Pigs is Socrates’ attempt to describe the most natural or primitive life for man.  It is a life without wars, without riches, without jealousy, where everyone enjoys a sufficiency of food and shelter.  All are equal and satisfied with simple pleasures: singing, dancing, story-telling, the charms of their wives and husbands.  

In the Republic, this way of life is criticized as being not entirely human; in particular, it is attacked as a life without ‘relishes,’ meaning what goes beyond the bare necessities.  When Socrates spells out the implications, it turns out that life that incorporates luxuries and satisfies a range of human desires leads inevitably to a city that goes to war and has sharp divides between rich and poor, powerful and weak.

The key human characteristic that is absent in the City of Pigs is thumos or spiritedness, which manifests itself in a desire for honors, rule, power, and recognition.  Some people are not satisfied with equality, but want to be distinguished.  The desire to be distinguished brings forth tremendous human energies and accomplishments in the arts and sciences, but is also at the root of competition, envy, violence, and war. (Socrates’ suggested solution, later in the Republic, is the institution of the Guardians—citizens with an abundance of thumos who are carefully educated to protect the city and never seek to dominate it.  How realistic this is is open to question.)

The City of Pigs, like the Shire, is made possible by the weakness of thumos.  Tolkien makes clear that it is not entirely absent and Hobbits too can become proud and envious.  But it is held in check for the most part by some combination of nature and nurture.  

I have no idea whether the Republic influenced Tolkien’s thinking or his conception of hobbits and the Shire-life.  It is more likely that he had in mind the centrality of pride in the Biblical tradition; perhaps both lines of thought converged.  What does seem clear to me is that in inventing Hobbits (a race which he created from scratch, without drawing on well-established sagas and stories), Tolkien was seeking to include in his imagined universe a people less susceptible to thumos, to pride, and show how such people contribute to a good world.     

I have always thought of myself as a Constitution lover.  When the country seemed to veer off-track, when difficult hurdles seemed too high to overcome, when blatant injustices blocked my sight, it never occurred to me to abandon the Constitution.  This was our rock, our North Star.  Work within it, I thought.  Understand it rightly, dig deep, attend closely to what the Founders thought and said and wanted.  

I’m not there anymore.  The Constitutional structure has a number of terrible flaws.

• It imposes a Presidential system with a powerful executive separate from the legislature, a structure that experience around the world shows is prone to gridlock and tyranny.  Parliamentary systems are better. 

• It has two co-equal legislative branches, one of which—the Senate—is ridiculously un-democratic, complicating and slowing government action.  The lopsided influence of small rural states exercised via the Senate is a great cause of our polarization. One dominant branch close to the people is better.

• It has a Supreme Court with lifetime appointments and a monopoly on Constitutional interpretation, an invitation to arrogance and politicization.  Judges with limited tenures and powers are better. 

• It has the Electoral College, a relic of slavery and an open invitation to gaining political power without majority approval.  Direct election of the executive is better.

• It has an ambiguous and poorly constructed Bill of Rights that has hardened into a jackhammer used to thwart the will of the people and, in the case of the 2^nd Amendment, to undermine the government’s most fundamental obligation, providing for peace and security.  A more flexible understanding of rights would be better.

Further, it has become almost impossible to fix . Clever, power-hungry people have learned to exploit the flaws.  They don’t want changes, so they have built barriers to prevent amendments or interpretations that might make this old document workable.  To make their schemes palatable, they have fostered a cult—originalism and its brethren—around this document that would amaze and terrify its authors.  

I am tired of debating vital issues like abortion, or gerrymandering, or guns, not on their merits, but on whether some direction can be deciphered from ambiguous old words designed to fit a world that no longer exists.  Supreme Court originalists make vital decisions affecting millions of people’s lives and the health of American democracy based on their interpretation of 18^th century dictionaries.  Enough. 

The Constitution as we all know was designed to create a strong central government and rectify the fatal weakness of the Articles of Confederation.  Partly for this reason it was skeptical of simple majoritarianism.  State governments under the Articles had often come under the sway of populists advancing the interests of the poor.  Too much popular power seemed dangerous, it had (sometimes) historically been a source of radicalism or anarchy, and there were few good examples of success.  Federalist #9, written by Alexander Hamilton, is scathing about the shortcomings of past republics: “It is impossible to read the history of the petty Republics of Greece and Italy, without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the distractions with which they were continually agitated, and at the rapid succession of revolutions, by which they were kept in a state of perpetual vibration, between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy.” This is the dystopia Hamilton and his colleagues wanted to avoid.  Better to err on the side of caution.   

The innovation that allowed America to have popular input, without the risks of too much say by the people, was representation via election.  The framers of the Constitution famously argued that the right rules governing elections would lead to choosing the right kind of people, with more education and good sense and public-spiritedness.  

The best argument in favor of the current system is that it has worked well enough for 240 years.  We have had a long lasting country with some great successes.  We have become very rich and very strong.  We have moved to include many more as citizens and tried, if with only partial success, to rectify terrible historic wrongs.  

A second argument is that whatever flaws the Constitution has, it provides an agreed framework for all Americans of whatever political or ideological stripe.  Better to have something that unites us, even if imperfect.  Americans are not one people because of common blood, soil, and religion, but because of commitment to a set of ideas and institutions, the Constitution first and foremost.   

But turning the Constitution into a secular version of the Bible, an inerrant document that cannot be questioned, only genuflected before, gives excessive power to conservatives and those who oppose change.  The Constitutional processes designed to elect the “best and brightest” have brought us Civil War, inequality, monopoly, Jim Crow, the military-industrial complex, a ravaged environment, Vietnam, Iraq, financial crises and Donald Trump.  We have managed to work around the flaws, but our luck is running out.

Americans are understandably tired of their elected officials.  We are tired of the clever ways they come up with to do the bidding of special interests, tired of mindless partisanship, tired of insulting appeals to our worst passions and fears, and tired of listening to explanations of why the things the majority clearly wants can’t be done, or will take years to accomplish, or can only be implemented in some watered down version.  A recent New York Times/Siena poll found that 50% of Americans think the country’s system of government should have “major reforms.”   

There are two ways we might think about improving our system. One is to keep elections but make them better.  The other, more radical, is to scrap elections as our main method of choosing decisionmakers, and instead use groups of citizens chosen by lot.  

Better Elections.  We could certainly make improvements to the way we elect people. Some of them can be done without amending or scrapping the Constitution.  The most immediately valuable would probably be to implement ranked-choice-voting and open top 4 primaries, like Alaska did in 2020.  Other steps would be to make voting mandatory, adopt the National Popular Vote proposal to sidestep the Electoral College, expand the size of the House of Representatives, require non-partisan commissions for redistricting, and create multi-member districts for the US House and state legislatures.  Restrictions on political donations and funding, reversing Citizen’s United and related decisions, would also make a huge difference. 

These changes might well lead to electing better representatives and greater trust in those elected.   But it is hard to see how many of these could be implemented in our current condition, even short of changing the Constitution.  They would require action in many states that have no interest in making elections more open and fair, a large Democratic majority in both houses of Congress to either abolish or overcome the filibuster, and a radically different Supreme Court.

Lottocracy.  Representation via election is, for most of us, synonymous with democracy and good government.  It is pretty much the only way we think modern mass societies, in large countries with millions or hundreds of millions of citizens, can be democratic.  We assume only very small polities, like ancient Athens or New England towns, can try to have direct democracy where every citizen rules and is ruled in turn. 

But elections are not the the only way for all citizens to be represented.  In fact, it is clear that elections do a rather poor job of reflecting the views of all citizens.  The people we end up electing via our systems of primaries and campaigns and elections are not very representative.  They don’t mirror the population in terms of gender or race—they are much more white and male.  They don’t mirror it in terms of class—they are much richer.  There are far more lawyers and millionaires and children of politicians, and far fewer small businessmen and laborers and schoolteachers and baristas than in the actual population.  

Now, some would say this is the point, that we don’t want average people, we want above-average ones, people with exceptional talents and virtues.  This was a key Madisonian argument for the Constitution.  Elections, with the appropriate filters—the Electoral College and property requirements— would attract the wiser, more sober, more educated class rather than the lower-class types that Madison and other founders thought were having their way in the new independent states after the Revolution.

But it is hard to look at today’s political class and agree that we are getting wise and public-spirited people.  We are instead getting people with exceptional ambition and wealth and hunger for publicity.  In fact, it seems to me that for the most part the people most likely to seek high office are exactly the sort of people who should be kept as far away from power as possible.  

Most of us have the intuition that if, somehow, we could get citizens to interact without the intervention of elections, however reformed, we might be better off.  What we need are ways to hear directly from the people. 

The possible solution is to pick representatives randomly, by lot.  This has been tried with Citizen Assemblies.  A Citizen’s Assembly is a representative group of citizens tasked with considering an issue of public policy and making recommendations.  It is chosen to reflect the composition of the city, state, or country in question—the same ethnic, religious, regional, economic, gender balance as the whole.  The members are picked via lot, a process called sortition, similarly to the way we pick juries.

Assemblies can be constituted from above, by legislatures or executives; or from below, by citizen’s groups or referenda.  Assemblies in current conditions work with and alongside elected bodies, which have the final say on legislation.  

An Assembly is not a group of ‘volunteers,’ because the people who volunteer for these kinds of commissions are not your average citizen; they are always older and better-educated and often strongly opinionated. Instead, a Citizen’s Assembly includes minorities and youth and all those quiet, I-don’t-care-about-politics people who need to be heard from.  

Successful Assemblies are supported by moderators and facilitators with experience at running open discussions, and by a team that helps the Assembly get expert advice from a variety of sources on their chosen topic.  Say the Assembly is tasked with considering “What should our state do to deal with a warming climate?”  It might have a number of sessions with experts on different issues related to the task: scientists, economists, businesspeople, sociologists, political scientists.  It might hear from people and communities impacted by climate change:  farmers, sportsmen, tribes, immigrants, minorities, investors.  Once the Assembly gathers and discusses information, it deliberates about what to do and makes recommendations by a voting process designed to make sure only the proposals with strong support get approved. 

So what, you might be thinking.  There are endless commissions and study groups that don’t make any difference.  Of course that might happen.  But a Citizen’s Assembly has legitimacy because it mirrors the actual population.  It turns passive citizens into informed, active citizens and makes them listen to one another.  It gives cover to cautious political leaders to take action.  Where this has been done, in the US and around the world, the results can be dramatic.  A Citizen’s Assembly in Ireland in 2017 met for over a year and was key to liberalizing laws on abortion.  One in Washington State in 2020 helped push new legislation on climate change.  

Even where the recommendations don’t make it into law, they galvanize public discussion and push change that reflects what the people want.  Participants and observers inevitably discover that people with very different backgrounds and opinions are able to work together constructively, and come up with sensible proposals, given the right conditions.  

Other, similar efforts can move us in the same direction. The “America in One Room” project in 2019/20 brought a group of representative Americans together for four days to deliberate on big issues facing the country.  It didn’t make policy recommendations, but before and after surveys showed major shifts in opinion, mostly towards more moderation and realism.  

The United States is suffering from extreme lack of trust in its government and elected officials.  We won’t turn this around with business-as-usual politics.  Serious reforms to make elections fairer and more likely to reflect the will of the majority would help.  But these will be stopped and slowed by the forces that already are gnawing at our body politic.  Citizen’s Assemblies have the potential to catalyze action and give citizens a sense that what they think matters, by offering examples of serious, thoughtful participation in democratic decision making.

Lottocracy can be instituted in many organizations and at any level of government—from your church board or high school student government, right up to cities and states.  The next time you have a chance to suggest it, at whatever level, try it.  Most will find the idea odd or scary.  But some will be intrigued.  (As an introduction, you can recommend Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast about sortition, The Powerball Revolution.) Let’s start in our towns and cities and states.  Once Americans get used to the idea of getting useful and meaningful input outside the election system, once hundreds of examples are available, it will be time to scale up to the national level.

Citizen’s Assemblies can for now only complement, not replace, elected bodies.  That would indeed take a new Constitution and a radical rethinking of what we mean by ‘democracy.’  Helene Landemore raises the question in her book, Open Democracy:  Rethinking Popular Rule for the 21^st Century:  “It is puzzling to consider why, in the eighteenth century, the original non-electoral model of Classical Athens was not taken up again when democracy was reinvented in the eighteenth century in the West, especially given the concerns over “factions” held by theorists like Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France or the American Founding Fathers…” One reason was perhaps that the necessary tools had not yet been discovered: “In particular, the idea of a “random sample” was not available just yet (it would become available only in the late nineteenth century, with the rise of statistics as a science) and, as a result, the polling techniques that would have rendered selection based on sortition feasible were also unavailable.”

But more widespread use could widen the aperture for citizen participation and put helpful pressure on elected officials.  Perhaps the realization that there is an alternative would force them to shape up.

When I was a college freshman in 1970 I took an introductory class in American government at Claremont Men’s College.  The textbook we used was The Democratic Republic, written by a trio of fairly conservative, somewhat Straussian professors:  Martin Diamond, Winston Fisk, and Herbert Garfinkle.  The title sums up their view of the American system, which is a republic—a type of government where some important part of those ruled chooses representatives to govern—with democratic characteristics.  When the US was founded, ‘republic’ in most people’s minds meant first and foremost Rome in its early days  (‘republic’ is the Latin for ‘the public thing’) in which Senators were appointed by magistrates (Consuls or Censors) elected from a narrow group of aristocrats, and Tribunes with important but limited powers were elected by the plebs or ordinary citizens.  

What makes us democratic is that in America ‘those ruled’ means a majority of the citizens, or as Madison puts it in Federalist 39:  “It is ESSENTIAL to such a government that it be derived from the great body of the society, not from an inconsiderable proportion, or a favored class of it; otherwise a handful of tyrannical nobles, exercising their oppressions by a delegation of their powers, might aspire to the rank of republicans, and claim for their government the honorable title of republic.”  How we have defined ‘the great body of citizens’ has of course changed and expanded since the US began, but the essential principle hasn’t changed.

That the US was both democracy and republic was not seen as something particularly controversial at the time, as far as I can recall.  Neither the US (or any other modern country) is a pure or direct democracy, where every citizen takes part in voting on legislation or deciding court cases, as in some  periods in ancient Athens, or in some small New England towns.  The constitution lays out a process of electing representatives who make decisions in the name of the voters.  There are important checks on what those representatives can do to avoid the infamous ‘tyranny of the majority’ feared by Madison.  Representation, separation of powers, constitutional protection of certain rights, and a large and diverse population: these were the key improvements in ‘the science of politics’ that Hamilton praised in Federalist 9.  It was hoped—no one at the beginning was entirely sure it would work—that together these would make democracy for the first time in history a stable, energetic, longlasting form of government. 

If this all sounds like pretty basic stuff that you learn in high school and no American could question, you haven’t been paying attention.  Conservatives for a number of years now, with increasing vehemence, have been declaring that the US is ‘A republic, not a democracy!”  They shouted this slogan at the capitol on January 6.  Perhaps the most extreme, Trumpist political figure in the US, Republican candidate for Pennsylvania governor Doug Mastriano, is prone to screaming it regularly at rallies, to get the conservative faithful worked up. 

The operational reason for this is quite clear; it is an attempt to seem like a true-blue American while denigrating democracy and rule of the majority.  This would have seemed insane to Americans of almost any earlier time.  The only exceptions of course would have been southern separatists and racists, who denied human equality and hence the principle at the heart of our democratic experiment.  

Suspicion and dislike of democracy is now embedded in American conservatism and in the Republican Party, mostly because the majority of Americans don’t want what conservatism is selling:  economic inequality, privileges for the wealthy, government gridlock, religious zealotry, white supremacy, guns for everyone, and rule by a carefully engineered majority of black-robed unelected justices.  Conservatives, rather than adjusting their policies to appeal to the majority, are instead trying to keep the policies and rule as a minority by taking over key state offices that control voting results, and (they hope) soon reinterpreting the Constitution to allow state legislators to decide the composition of the electoral college. 

This effort is directed and powered by moneyed interests who want a weak state that doesn’t interfere in the accumulation and passing on of wealth—people who in effect want to become the ‘tyrannical nobles’ Madison warned us against.  It is producing a cascade of demagoguery, deception, intimidation, and manipulation of the American political system the likes of which we have never seen.

The ‘republic not a democracy’ slogan is part of an ideological campaign to give conservative voters an excuse for rejecting what a majority of fellow citizens prefer, as expressed by their vote.  It is the underpinning for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election and supporting the January 6 insurrection.  It gives a false sense of gravitas to “Great Replacement” and other conspiracy theories according to which today’s American majority, the diverse and increasingly non-white population living in big cities, shouldn’t be allowed to pick our country’s leaders because they are not ‘real Americans.’ 

I cannot improve on this explanation by Ryan McMaken some years ago:  

“The claim that the United States political system is “a republic, not a democracy” is often heard in libertarian and conservative circles, and is typically invoked whenever the term “democracy” is used in any favorable context. This claim is generally invoked when the user believes one of the following:

1. ‘I don’t like your idea, and since it involves aspects that are democratic or majoritarian, I’ll invoke the republic-not-a-democracy claim to discredit your idea.’
2. ‘A majority of the population appears to support this idea, so I will invoke the republic-not-a-democracy claim to illustrate that the majority should be ignored.’” 

It is a piece of demagoguery, not a serious argument.  The next time you hear someone say the US is “a republic, not a democracy,” please let whoever is spouting it know, in no uncertain terms, that it is bunk.