Immigration and the New Class Divide. By Ian Buruma.

Immigration and the New Class Divide. By Ian Buruma. Project Syndicate, December 9, 2014.

Buruma:

SINGAPORE – The British shadow minister for Europe, Pat McFadden, recently warned members of his Labour Party that they should try to make the most of the global economy and not treat immigration like a disease. As he put it, “You can feed on people’s grievances or you can give people a chance. And I think our policies should be around giving people a chance.”

In a world increasingly dominated by grievances – against immigrants, bankers, Muslims, “liberal elites,” “Eurocrats,” cosmopolitans, or anything else that seems vaguely alien – such wise words are rare. Leaders worldwide should take note.

In the United States, Republicans – backed by their Tea Party activists – are threatening to close the government down just because President Barack Obama has offered undocumented immigrants who have lived and worked in the US for many years a chance to gain citizenship. The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) wants to introduce a five-year ban on immigration for permanent settlement. Russia’s deputy prime minister, Dmitry Rogozin, once released a video promising to “clean the rubbish” – meaning migrant workers, mostly from former Soviet republics – “away from Moscow.”

Even the once famously tolerant Dutch and Danes are increasingly voting for parties that fulminate against the scourge of immigration. Always keen to assert the freedom to insult Muslims, the Dutch Freedom Party wants to ban all mosques. And the tiny and much-harassed opposition parties in Singapore – a country where almost everyone is descended from immigrants – are gaining traction by appealing to popular gripes about immigrants (mostly from India and China) who are supposedly taking jobs from “natives.”

What can American Tea Party enthusiasts, Russian chauvinists, fearful Dutch and Danes, and Singaporean leftists possibly have in common that is driving this anti-immigrant sentiment?

Retaining one’s job in a tightening economy is undoubtedly a serious concern. But the livelihoods of most of the middle-aged rural white Americans who support the Tea Party are hardly threatened by poor Mexican migrants. UKIP is popular in some parts of England where immigrants are rarely seen. And many of the Dutch Freedom Party’s voters live nowhere near a mosque.

Anti-immigrant sentiment cuts across the old left-right divide. One thing Tea Party or UKIP supporters share with working-class voters who genuinely fear losing their jobs to low-paid foreigners is anxiety about being left behind in a world of easy mobility, supranational organizations, and global networking.

On the right, support for conservative parties is split between business interests that benefit from immigration or supranational institutions, and groups that feel threatened by them. That is why the British Tories are so afraid of UKIP. Nigel Farage, UKIP’s leader, is less concerned with economic growth than with pursuing his extreme conception of national independence.

On the left, opinion is split between those who oppose racism and intolerance above all and those who want to protect employment and preserve “solidarity” for what is left of the native-born working class.

It would be a mistake to dismiss anxiety about immigration as mere bigotry or apprehension about the globalized economy as simply reactionary. National, religious, and cultural identities (for lack of a better word) are being transformed, though less by immigration than by the development of globalized capitalism.

In the new global economy, there are clear winners and losers. Educated men and women who can communicate effectively in varied international contexts are benefiting. People who lack the needed education or experience – and there are many of them – are struggling.

In other words, the new class divisions run less between the rich and the poor than between educated metropolitan elites and less sophisticated, less flexible, and, in every sense, less connected provincials. It is irrelevant that the provincials’ political leaders (and their backers) are sometimes wealthier than the resented metropolitan elites. They still feel looked down upon. And so they share the bitterness of those who feel alienated in a world they find bewildering and hateful.

Populist rabble-rousers like to stir up such resentments by ranting about foreigners who work for a pittance or not at all. But it is the relative success of ethnic minorities and immigrants that is more upsetting to indigenous populations.

This explains the popular hostility toward Obama. Americans know that, before too long, whites will be just another minority, and people of color will increasingly be in positions of power. At this point, all Tea Partiers and others like them can do is declare, “We want our country back!”

Of course, this is an impossible demand. Short of unleashing massive and bloody ethnic cleansing – Bosnia, on a continental scale – Americans and others have no choice but to get used to living in increasingly diverse societies.

Likewise, economic globalization cannot be undone. But regulation can and should be improved. After all, some things are still worth protecting. There are good reasons not to leave culture, education, lifestyles, or jobs completely exposed to the creative destruction of market forces.

McFadden has pinpointed the central solution to globalization’s challenges: giving people “the tools to reap the benefits” of the globalized world, thereby making the “connected world work better for people.” The problem is that this call is more likely to appeal to the highly educated, already privileged classes than to those who feel disenfranchised in today’s global economy.

This is a serious problem for political parties on the left, which increasingly seem to be speaking for the metropolitan elites, while provincial populists are pushing traditional conservatives further to the right by fishing in the dark waters of popular resentment.

America Continues to Thrive. By Victor Davis Hanson.

America Continues to Thrive. By Victor Davis Hanson. National Review Online, December 11, 2014.

Hanson:

Even in its current malaise, the U.S. still soars above the global competition.

Germany’s first chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, supposedly once said that there was “a special providence for drunkards, fools, and the United States of America.”

Apparently, late 19th-century observers could not quite explain how the U.S. thrived when by logic it should not. That paradox has never been more true than today.

The U.S. government now owes more than $18 trillion in long-term debt. Even after recent income-tax hikes for the very wealthy and huge cuts in the defense budget, the Obama administration will still run an annual budget deficit of nearly $500 billion.

No government official dares to trim Social Security or Medicare. Everyone knows that both programs are fiscally unsustainable.

More than 11 million undocumented immigrants are residing in the U.S. as federal immigration law is reduced to a bothersome irritant. A record 92 million American citizens 16 and older are not working.

Red-state and blue-state animosities reveal a nation more divided than at any time since the 1960s — or perhaps the pre–Civil War 1850s.

The permanent bureaucracy is awash in serial scandals. The IRS, VA, GSA, NSA, ICE, and Secret Service have all deservedly lost the public trust.

Congress suffers from overwhelming public disapproval. President Obama’s approval rating hovers just above 40 percent.

Our new foreign policy could be characterized as managed decline. Three defense secretaries have retired or resigned under Obama. Two of them, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, wrote memoirs in which they blasted the administration. From Russia to the Pacific to the Middle East, the world seems to be descending into the law of the jungle as the U.S. withdraws from its traditional role as a global overseer of the postwar order.

The Michael Brown shooting illustrates seemingly irreconcilable racial divides not seen in 50 years. Al Sharpton once was seen as a social arsonist and tax delinquent. Now he appears to be the White House’s most influential advisor on racial matters.

Student-loan debt has surpassed $1 trillion. Six years of college has become the new normal. Even then, more than a third of the students who enter college never graduate.

In such a depressing American landscape, why is the United States doing pretty well?

Put simply, millions of quiet, determined Americans get up every morning and tune out the incompetence and corruption of their government. They simply ignore destructive fads of popular culture. They have no time for the demagoguery of their politicians and the divisive rhetoric of social activists. Instead, these quiet Americans simply go to work, pursue their own talents, excel at what they do, and seek to take care of their families.

The result of their singular expertise is that even in America’s current illness, the nation still soars above the global competition.

Only in America can you find the sort of innovation, talent, legal framework, and can-do attitude needed to invent and refine hydraulic fracking and horizontal drilling. Just a few hundred thousand scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, oil riggers, and skilled craftsman have revived the once-ossified oil industry for 320 million Americans.

The United States is not running out of fuels — as was predicted over the last 20 years. It instead has become the largest gas-and-oil producer in the world.

The epitaph for Silicon Valley is written each year. Its tech industry is copied the world over. Yet seemingly each year a new American technical innovation — the laptop, Google, Facebook, the iPad, the iPhone — sweeps the world. Apparently, American informality, meritocracy, and top-flight engineering still draw global talent into Northern California, which sends back out the latest gadgets to be gobbled up by billions.

Neither drought, nor needlessly cumbersome regulations, nor unfair trade practices have stalled American agriculture. The farms of the United States — where less than 2 percent of the population resides — have never turned out so much safe, nutritious, and cheap food that is feeding the world and earning America hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign exchange.

The U.S. military — in which fewer than 1 in 100 Americans serve — is facing record cuts. The Navy will have fewer ships than the American fleet of World War I. The Air Force and the Marine Corps are shrinking. Yet superb American forces continue to ensure that the United States and its allies remain safe. Neither Vladimir Putin’s Russia, nor the Communist Chinese hierarchy, nor the Iranian theocrats are quite ready to take the on the U.S. military. All are rightly worried that to do so would be suicidal.

America is not saved by our elected officials, bureaucrats, celebrities, and partisan activists. Instead, just a few million hardworking Americans in key areas — a natural meritocracy of all races, classes, and backgrounds — ignore the daily hype and chaos, remain innovative and productive, and dazzle the world.

The silent few of a forgotten America have given the entire country an astonishing standard of living that is quite inexplicable.

Jonathan Gruber Reveals the Arrogance of Liberals. By Michael Gerson.

Jonathan Gruber reveals the arrogance of liberals. By Michael Gerson. Washington Post, December 11, 2014.

Gerson:

Jonathan Gruber — the source of more smoking guns than the battle of Gettysburg — recently appeared before a hostile House committee. The good professor, you might recall, is an MIT economist who played a significant (and paid) role in producing and defending the Affordable Care Act. He also later admitted, in an astonishing variety of settings, that the law was written in a “tortured way” to hide tax increases and other flaws. “Lack of transparency,” he cheerfully conceded, “is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.”

At the hearing, some Republicans seemed oddly focused on Gruber’s profit motive, as though a real scandal must involve venality. Democrats attempted to salvage the credibility of Obamacare by throwing the witness to the wolves. Rep. Elijah Cummings declared Gruber’s past statements “disrespectful,” “insulting, “stupid” and “absolutely stupid.”

But the problem for Democrats is that Gruber is not stupid. By all accounts, he is knowledgeable, candid and willing, on occasion, to criticize the Obama administration — an advocate for Obamacare without being a shill. But he is perfectly representative of a certain approach to politics that is common in academic circles, influential in modern liberalism and destructive to the Democratic Party.

“My own inexcusable arrogance,” Gruber told the committee, “is not a flaw in the Affordable Care Act.” Oh, yes it is.

Many academic liberals have fully internalized the “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” theory, given vivid expression by Thomas Frank. In its simplified version (and there is seldom any other kind), this is the argument that people who are suffering from economic inequality should naturally vote Democratic. But they often get distracted by the shiny objects of the culture war and tricked into resentment against liberal elites.

It’s a very short step from this belief to its more muscular corollary: Liberal elites (through liberal politicians) should constructively mislead Americans. The task of persuasion is pretty nigh hopeless, given the unfortunate “stupidity of the American voter or whatever.” So the people must be given what they need, even if they don’t want it.

This involves a very high regard for policy experts and a very low opinion of the political profession. Gruber clearly views his own world of policy as a place of idealism and integrity. Politics, in contrast, is a realm where “lack of transparency” and “mislabeling” are sad necessities to persuade low-information voters to pursue their own interests. Purposely employing such tactics in an academic paper, for example, would be a scandal (and presumably a firing offense) at Gruber’s Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But liberal academics expect politicians to have greater cunning and lower standards. In fact, academics depend upon the rougher talents of politicians to turn their ideas into reality.

Politics, in this view, is the grubby business of winning in order to put the proper technocrats in charge of large, complex systems. This assumes that academic and bureaucratic elites know how to run the world. It also relegates politicians to the job of doing their blocking and tackling, even if involves deception. The moral goal justifies it all. “Look,” said Gruber, “I wish . . . we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.”

This reflects a deeper tension within progressivism — working itself out for more than a century — between a belief in democracy and a faith in expertise. Progressives originally assumed the people would choose to be ruled by experts — that more direct democracy would lead to more professional administration. But that now seems politically naive. So progressive elites are left believing that the people are stupid and must be managed, like everything else, in the public interest.

The success of this kind of progressivism depends on not being too obvious about it. Which is where Obamacare has utterly failed. With its self-evidently false promises — you can keep your current health-care plan — and its public displays of incompetence, the system has become a symbol of progressive arrogance. This perception has helped spark a massive, sustained populist reaction, contributing to dramatic GOP gains in Congress and state legislatures.

This does not mean that Obamacare will be easily undone. But it does provide conservatives an opportunity to present a different, more idealistic vision of government: one that enables and empowers, not misleads and controls.

Achieving the American Dream. By Bill O’Reilly.

Achieving the American Dream. By Bill O’Reilly. Video. Talking Points Memo. The O’Reilly Factor. Fox News, December 11, 2014. YouTube. Also here, here, here.

Transcript:

When I was a kid growing up in modest circumstances, my parents told me that I could succeed in life.

They didn’t say much more than that, only that I could be successful.

From my vantage point, the American dream meant that I would lead a happy life and contribute to society, but each one of us has our own definition of the dream.

A recent New York Times poll asked, “Do you think it is still possible to start out poor in this country, work hard, and become rich?”

Sixty-four percent of Americans say it is possible.

Thirty-three percent say it is not.

Three percent don’t know.

Second question, “Do you think the economic system in the U.S. is basically fair?”

Fifty-two percent say it is.

Forty-five percent say it is unfair.

Four percent have no opinion.

For this poll, money was the basic theme, and for this memo we will stay on that subject.

As someone who started out with little – I was flat broke when I began my first broadcast job in Scranton, Pennsylvania – I know that you can become wealthy in America.

So the 33% who say it's not possible are wrong.  You are looking at the proof.

But there are things that you have to do to succeed economically.

Number one, you must get educated unless your athletic or music skills are so enormous that you can make a living that way.

Number two, you must be willing to work hard and conform to levels of performance.

That means you have to learn how to speak properly, you have to learn how to groom yourself ... you can’t have a face covered with tattoos unless you can punch like Mike Tyson.

Basically, succeeding economically is about being smart, working hard, and presenting yourself in a way that leads to making money.

That’s it.

Now some Americans work very hard, are smart, and don’t succeed economically.

That’s why life is not fair; you never know how it’s going to shake down.

But remember the poll question was, is it possible to start out poor and become wealthy?

Now here are some things that you cannot do.

First, if you feel America is a rotten, awful country, you will not succeed.

And that is what is being peddled by the far left:

On MSNBC on Dec. 10:

MICHAEL ERIC DYSON, MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR: “What’s the next institution that you think needs to be isolated and then challenged?”

ROSA CLEMENTE, HIP HOP ACTIVIST: “The economy.  Capitalism, I think that’s the institution that’s all over this country, right?  It is really what is the oppressive force.  And the police are actually, we have a lot of theory I think that proves this, are that force that are keeping us, as particularly working class people, from achieving this idea of, you know, economic justice.”

Ms. Clemente will never succeed in this country because her concept of economic justice is basically communism, and we are not going to convert to that.

If you want communism Ms. Clemente, Fidel and Raul Castro are just 90 miles from Florida.

Two, you cannot walk around with a sense of entitlement, that people owe you things.

In our system, nobody owes you anything.

Three, if you want to succeed, you cannot portray yourself as a victim of white privilege, of slavery, or of any other historical injustice.

It may be wrong, but the free market place doesn’t want to hear it.

And finally, if you behave badly; if you are disrespectful; if you act foolishly on a consistent basis; if you refuse to develop your talent; if you have three children by the time you are 20; if you abuse drugs and alcohol or do other self-destructive things, you will never succeed.

Talking Points laments that our leaders will not tell you the things I am saying right now.

Our political parties do not level with the folks; instead both Democrats and Republicans pander to them.

Capitalism is tough, very competitive, but the American dream is still achievable.

And I know what I’m talking about.

And that’s the memo.

The Democrats Lost the South Through Culture War and Elitism. By Timothy P. Carney.

Democrats lost the South through culture war and elitism. By Timothy P. Carney. Washington Examiner, December 9, 2014.

It’s Not Sour Grapes, Michael Tomasky Just Hates the South. By Charles C. W. Cooke. National Review Online, December 8, 2014.

Have Democrats Failed the White Working Class? By Thomas P. Edsall. New York Times, December 9, 2014.

Carney:

Fritz Hollings, John Edwards, Zell Miller, Blanche Lincoln, John Breaux, Kay Hagan, Mark Pryor and Mary Landrieu. These eight Democrats have been senators from the South in the past decade.

If not for Southern Democrats, Republicans would have nearly had a filibuster-proof Senate supermajority after the 2002 elections, giving George W. Bush some real clout. Without Southern senators, Democrats wouldn’t have taken over the Senate with Jim Jeffords’ party switch in 2001. If not for Southern Democrats, Obamacare wouldn’t have become law.

For the foreseeable future, though, Democrats will have make do without Southern senators.

With Mary Landrieu’s gigantic loss on Saturday, following Hagan’s surprise loss and Pryor’s thumping, the Southern Democratic senator is officially extinct. In the House, there are no White Democrats from the South.

Why did it happen?

In short: Democrats waged a culture war against the South, trying to force Southerners to stop “clinging” to their guns and to God. When you try to make it illegal for people to conduct their own affairs according to their conscience, you tend to lose their votes.

The self-soothing story the Left tells itself is that it’s all racism, that Democrats have lost the Southern vote because they’re not as willing to be racist as the Republicans are. Liberal columnist Michael Tomasky cheered the Democrats’ loss of the South, which he lovingly called “one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment.”

Any full accounting of Southern politics has to involve race and racism, but it isn’t a top reason for the realignment.

Tomasky and other liberals may not have heard of Sen. Tim Scott, the first black Southerner elected to the U.S. Senate since reconstruction. South Carolina not only elected Scott to the Senate in a special election this fall, it gave him 757,000 votes — 85,000 more votes than his South Carolina colleague Lindsey Graham received the same day.

South Carolina’s voters re-elected their Republican Governor, Nikki Haley, nee Nimrata Nikki Randhawa. The state that defeated Mary Landrieu has had an Indian-American governor since the 2007 elections.

White racism can’t explain the GOP takeover of the South.

The best explanation comes from the mouth of President Obama himself. Speaking to San Francisco donors in 2008 about white voters in the Midwest, Obama lucidly expressed his low opinion of all non-rich voters in flyover country: “they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion.”

Naturally, Democrats and the Left have tried to pry Southerners away from their guns and religion. Gun control has largely been a culture war effort for Democrats. “Some of the southern areas have cultures that we have to overcome,” was Congressman Charles Rangel’s explanation for why gun control was both needed and difficult.

The Washington Post’s Gene Weingarten cursed the Second Amendment as “the refuge of bumpkins and yeehaws who like to think they are protecting their homes against imagined swarthy marauders desperate to steal their flea-bitten sofas from their rotting front porches.”

Obama and his party waged this culture-war crusade with glee — and failed, but not before making it clear that they disapproved of the way Southerners live.

And the Democrats have made it clear that they are willing to use government to impose their morality on others. Through the courts, the Left has banned prayers at high school football games and forced states to remove the Ten Commandments from public grounds.

The Obama administration, through its birth-control mandate that includes abortifacient drugs, has told Christian employers that they can’t run their businesses as Christians.

There’s no mystery here, and no need to assign widespread racism to why Southerners have rejected Democrats. It’s simple: Democrats and the Left have tried to outlaw Southerners’ way of life.

Here’s a related factor in the realignment: Democrats have given up on being the populist party, and — as they have increasingly won over the wealthy suburbs and the college-educated — have embraced their status as the party of the economic elite.

As crony capitalism and corporate welfare have grown, and as the Washington region has sucked in more and more of the nation’s wealth, Republicans have started to take up the populist mantle.

Alabama’s Jeff Sessions, whose populism flares up in many ways, joined Louisiana’s David Vitter in co-sponsoring a bill to break up the big banks. Sens. Landrieu, Hagan and Pryor all campaigned unsuccessfully on their support for the Export-Import Bank (a federal agency that subsidizes U.S. manufacturers and the banks that finance them).

Democrats have become the party of Hyde Park and Chevy Chase — elitist on culture and economics. It’s no wonder they can’t also be the party of Charleston and Shreveport.

Let Russia Be Russia. By Shlomo Ben-Ami.

Let Russia Be Russia. By Shlomo Ben-Ami. Project Syndicate, December 9, 2014.

Ben-Ami:

TEL AVIV – In his famous “X” article, published in 1947, George F. Kennan argued that the Soviet Union’s hostility toward the United States was virtually inexorable, given that it was rooted not in a classic conflict of interest between great powers, but in a deep-seated nationalism and insecurity. The same could be said of the current conflict between Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the West: It is, at root, a collision between the West’s supposedly universal values and Russia’s quest for a distinct identity.

A country’s struggle for identity can shape its strategic behavior. The missionary ethos of American civilization helps to explain its conduct as a global power. The resurgence of Islamism is essentially a quest for a fulfilling identity by an ancient civilization overwhelmed by the challenges of modernity. And Israel’s emphasis on its Jewish identity has become a formidable obstacle to peace with the Palestinians.

Putin’s defiant foreign policy is a response – mediated by an authoritarian political tradition, the reactionary tenets of Orthodox Christianity, and pride in Russia’s vast geography and natural wealth – to the humiliating loss of an empire. Seeing in Russia’s Cold War defeat the need to extol the non-Western roots of Russian history and tradition, Putin has fallen back on the same conservative values that emerged in response to the Napoleonic invasion of 1812, frustrating Peter the Great’s modernization efforts.

When the deputy head of the presidential administration, Vyacheslav Volodin, said during a recent Valdai Discussion Club meeting in Sochi that “Putin is Russia and Russia is Putin,” he was expressing a profound Russian reality. In no other country has the ruler’s persona – from Catherine the Great and Ivan the Terrible to Lenin and Stalin – made such a deep mark on national history.

But Putinism cannot be reduced to sheer lust for power. Putin knows that Russia’s reemergence on the global stage must be underpinned by a counterpoint to American exceptionalism, a national identity based on a distinct conception of history and distinct ideals.

As Putin declared last year, the Soviet Union’s collapse dealt a “devastating blow” to Russia’s “cultural and spiritual codes,” and subsequent “attempts to civilize Russia from abroad” amounted to “primitive borrowing.” Instead of expecting a new national ideology to emerge on its own, Russia must pursue and develop its unique identity – with Putin leading the way.

Securing a place for Russia in a new world order is integral to establishing such an identity. To this end, Putin has maximized the foreign-policy value of Russia’s vast oil and gas reserves, enabling the Kremlin to build partnerships with rising Asian powers, especially China. If, as some Russian officials have proposed, Russia begins an identity-defining large-scale project to develop its immense territory east of the Ural Mountains, including Siberia and the Far East, it would have a unique opportunity to deepen these connections further.

More broadly, Putin’s defiance of US hegemony could attract support from countries and peoples worldwide that resent American-imposed values and norms. Indeed, for many international actors, Western notions of tolerance and political correctness – for example, acceptance of “non-traditional lifestyles,” such as homosexuality – are, in Putin’s words, an affront to the world’s “God-given diversity.”

But Putin is not merely preaching values. The annexation of Crimea and continuing destabilization of Ukraine advance his broader ambition of resurrecting Russia’s cultural and political dominance in Eurasia and much of the former Soviet space. In Putin’s view, the 1945 Yalta Agreement, which divided Europe into Soviet and Western spheres of influence, did not die; its borders simply moved eastward.

Tellingly, following a discussion of numerous global challenges at the recent Valdai meeting, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov identified a demonstration by ethnic Russians in Chișinău (Kishinev), Moldova’s capital, as the “most important question” to be addressed. Putin’s Russia is anything but shy when it comes to ethnic unity.

Of course, the West – particularly the US – bears its share of responsibility for the failure to find a diplomatic solution to the current showdown with Russia. Before a lasting peace can be achieved, the US will need to reflect on the mistakes that characterized its post-Cold War period of hegemony, when its unilateral military adventures and neo-imperial ambitions left it overstretched, highly indebted, and locked in perpetual war.

Without such introspection, the US and its European allies will probably continue to depend on economic sanctions to deter Russian aggression. But, though this approach could weaken Putin’s legitimacy by limiting his ability to deliver economic prosperity, it could also result in an anti-Western nationalist backlash. Moreover, as Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov has shown, sanctions can be presented as a blessing, forcing the Kremlin to diversify Russia’s commodities-based economy.

National identities cannot be negotiated away; but diplomacy can dilute their aggressive manifestations. It is time for Russian and Western leaders to devise a grand bargain for peace in eastern Ukraine, one that goes beyond the Minsk Protocol to address the questions of global security and arms control that have impeded cooperation on issues like Syria’s civil war and Iran’s nuclear program.

Russia does not need to upend the existing global order; it simply needs to find its place. And the US must let it.

Suki Kim on the View From Inside North Korea.

The view from inside North Korea. Video. Suki Kim interviewed by Fareed Zakaria. Fareed Zakaria GPS. CNN, December 6, 2014. Also here with full interview transcript.



Transcript: 

ZAKARIA: The sense one gets from the outside looking at North Korea is, honestly, it’s the weirdest country in the world. It is the most strange social experiment. And the puzzle is how does it survive?

How does it – how is that people just docilely accept this incredibly authoritarian regime that’s not just authoritarian, but, you know, totalitarian, really kind of tries to shape how you think, feel, breathe?

What’s your answer to that?

KIM: Well, I think it’s a combination of many things. It’s sort of this perfect storm of, you know, you have, first of all, this cult, serious personality cult. It’s religious, really. Absolute belief in the great leader, where, you know, this generation – three generations of these men who, these hugely narcissistic men basically wiped everything out of their culture except themselves.

So every North Korean wears the badge of the great leader. Their only holidays are the great leader holidays. Every books, every articles, every television, every song, I mean you name it, there is some – there’s not a single thing – every building has a great leader slogan.

So I think when you have that kind of a personality cult, that’s an incredibly powerful thing to be doing it for three generations.

You also have a very brutal military dictatorship that's been in place for a long time, and also to wipe out every communication method, you know, there’s no Internet. The phone calls are tapped or, you know, it’s a small country. You can’t travel within the country without a permission.

And so you take away education tool. You take away any way of critical thinking, and you literally take away the tools where people can communicate each other, then I think that you have a nation where they just basically have the most abusive nation in the world. There – these men just own their people. It’s the most horrific place to me in the world.

The Unbelievable Story of a Woman Who Taught North Korea’s Elite Undercover. By Kira Brekke and Milos Balac. The Huffington Post, October 30, 2014.

Without You, There Is No Us: Book Talk with Suki Kim. Video. TheKoreaSociety, November 19, 2014. YouTube.




Suki Kim: Without You, There Is No Us. Video. BookTV, June 17, 2014. YouTube.

Evan Osnos on the Age of Ambition in the New China.

Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China. By Evan Osnos. Video. WoodrowWilsonCenter, June 23, 2014. YouTube.




Evan Osnos: Individualism and Ambition in the New China. Video. World Affairs Council, May 30, 2014. YouTube.




Evan Osnos: Age of Ambition. Video. Politics and Prose, May 21, 2014. YouTube.




Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China. By Evan Osnos. Video. The University of Chicago, July 1, 2014. YouTube.




Q&A: Evan Osnos. Video. C-Span, May 4, 2009. YouTube.




Evan Osnos Discusses His New Book on China: Age of Ambition. Video. TheNCUSCR, June 16, 2014. YouTube.




Ai Weiwei talks with Evan Osnos: The New Yorker Festival. Video. The New Yorker, October 29, 2014. YouTube.

The CIA and the “Arab Mind.” By Dina Rezk.

The CIA and the “Arab Mind.” By Dina Rezk. War on the Rocks, November 21, 2014.

Orientalism and Intelligence Analysis: Deconstructing Anglo-American Notions of the “Arab.” By Dina Rezk. Intelligence and National Security, published online September 3, 2014.

“Face” Among the Arabs. By Peter A. Naffsinger. Studies in Intelligence, Summer 1964. PDF.


Rezk [CIA]:

From the Iranian revolution to the Arab Spring, the United States has consistently been accused of misunderstanding the politics and culture of the Middle East. The Intelligence Community has come under especially strong fire for its Western-centric mindset in its analysis of players as diverse as al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Amongst a long list of analytical misdemeanors, the problem of “mirror imaging” (using one’s own rationale to interpret the actions or intentions of one’s opponent) is undoubtedly the most common.

It was, for example, regarded as common sense that Saddam Hussein would deny possessing WMD if Iraq was not in fact procuring such controversial weaponry. The possibility that Saddam was being intentionally elusive about Iraq’s capabilities in order to maintain “face” against its regional rival, Iran, went entirely unconsidered. It was a classic failure to enter the psyche of one’s adversary. Endless commentaries plastered across newspapers and blogs chastise the CIA for failing to learn languages and familiarize itself with other cultures, power structures, customs and mentalities.

What few people realize, however, is that the CIA recognized and sought to remedy this pitfall exactly half a century ago. A once-classified article from its in-house journal Studies in Intelligence written in 1964 and now available at the Agency’s Freedom of Information Act website reveals an early, and remarkably frank attempt to pin down the significance of “Arab culture.” The author, Peter Naffsinger, surely never anticipated that the document would one day be made available for public scrutiny. It is a predictably controversial read.

In 1964 the Arab World was still a relatively new and unfamiliar battleground in the Cold War. Soviet penetration of the Middle East began with the signing of an arms deal between Czechoslovakia and President Nasser of Egypt in 1955, forcing the United States to engage its analytical prowess in territories where it had little prior experience. The now declassified article, entitled “’Face’ among the Arabs,” reflects the challenges analysts perceived themselves to face and their prescriptions for dealing with Arab “otherness.”

As the title suggests, the overall message of the intelligence assessment was that “face,” or honor, was the predominant cultural imperative in the region, a value to which all other values were subordinated. The introduction to the piece immediately evokes the patronizing Orientalism that Edward Said famously brought to our attention in his groundbreaking book some 40 years ago. Naffsinger’s assessment begins:

George Washington, American children are told, having cut down his father’s favourite cherry tree, showed his sterling character by confessing to the deed. An Arab hearing this story not only fails to see the moral beauty of such behaviour but wonders why anyone would ever compromise his integrity by admitting thus his guilt.

The stereotyping is obviously crude. While the American demonstrated “an uncompromising willing to face objective truth and fact,” the Arab was obliged to adhere to the “social veneer of non-guilt” in a society “which has no place or respect for one whose faults or errors come to public knowledge.” There is no denying Said’s assertion that an objective, superior Western “self” is clearly elevated above a subjective, inferior Arab “other” in this passage.

Naffsinger looked at the Arab World and saw a political culture apparently devoid of moral courage. He attributed this to an all-encompassing Islam. “All of Muslim theology conveys the feeling that God is so all pervading and at the same time so far above and removed from the individual that all human actions and their consequences are but the sequels of God’s doing.” He noted that attempts to chastise Arab trainees were more often than not met with noncommittal responses. The Arab “dismisses both blame and censure with a casual ‘min allah’ – ‘It is from God.’ To the remonstrance that it had better not happen again he answers ‘inshallah,’ ‘If God wills it,’ with exasperating nonchalance.”

But a more detailed look at the piece also reveals some important nuggets beyond merely a denigrating Orientalism. For instance, Naffsinger tells the story of an “Arab who caught another man in bed with his wife and levelled a gun at them, but instead of shooting he offered to let the man off if he would keep the affair secret.” He writes that “the double murder that might have been the outcome in Western cultures would have made newspaper headlines, a result diametrically opposed to the Arab’s priority considerations.” Whilst much of the document underlines the inferior nature of Arab political and social behavior, this example looks much more like a critique of the West’s destructive individualism.

More importantly, Naffsinger highlights the importance of cultural relativism, making the case that other cultures can only be understood according to their own contexts and value systems. This theoretical recognition of “otherness” as “different but equal” likely reflected broader intellectual currents at the time such as the civil rights movement and the dramatic expansion of the UN to incorporate new, decolonized states.

Entertaining delusions of grandeur, claiming to be persecuted, magnifying faults in others than one wants to hide in oneself, calling constantly for resurgence of past greatness – all this is behavior typical of paranoia, but it is manifested in every Arabic political newspaper and among individuals in day to day intercourse. It cannot be considered abnormal in the Arab cultural setting.…The Westerner who, recognizing in the Arab the personality traits which in Western culture signify paranoia or inferiority complex, is pleased with himself for being able to ‘see through the Arab’s attempts at deceit and trickery and his lies’ shows his lack of appreciation of the face concept in the Arab culture. [Emphasis added]

Naffsinger’s admission of relative definitions of “normal” is clear. He also warns that imposing Western cultural frameworks on Arab behavior will lead to “frustrations and impasses.” Indeed though written half a century ago, it is striking how resonant some of these ideas about “Arab culture” continue to be. In the early days of the Syrian conflict one of the most popular suggestions by seasoned observers such as Patrick Seale was that Assad be given an “honorable” exit strategy.

So what can we learn from the CIA’s early and admittedly clumsy attempts to conceptualize Arab culture? To this day there remains an overwhelming tendency to see culture as a self-evident fact: an amorphous combination of history, geography and politics that ultimately shapes, if not determines, how people will act.

What the CIA (unsurprisingly) failed to recognize is that culture is a remarkably malleable concept. Recent scholarship has shown the complex ways in which expressions of culture interact with power and human agency, reshaping that very culture in the process. Notably Patrick Porter’s definition of culture as “an ambiguous repertoire of competing ideas that can be selected, instrumentalized, and manipulated” is an excellent antidote to essentialist, static conceptualizations of otherness in any form. His book is a powerful reminder that culture is nebulous, fluid and contested — a tool frequently deployed in the service of ever-changing political goals.

It is striking, for instance, that today the most blatant examples of contemporary Orientalism stem from within the Middle East itself: the notion that the people of the region are “not ready for democracy” has been loudly propagated by Arab elites invested in the status quo, not least during the tumultuous transitions of the so-called “Arab Spring.”

Where, therefore, does the balance lie between blind universalism and stereotypical determinism? If ideas about culture are always in some way politicized constructions, is the quest for cultural understanding ultimately a waste of time? However unsophisticated the CIA’s early attempts to make sense of Arab culture appear to us today, we can be sure of one thing. It is only by bringing our assumptions about “otherness” to the surface, and articulating them explicitly that they can be subject to debate and challenge. To our politically correct ears, this document invokes the intellectual reverberations of fingernails scraping on a chalkboard. But there is surely a more worrying prospect: that implicit, unspoken assumptions about either sameness or otherness achieve the dangerous status of “common sense” in the minds of policy makers and publics alike.