Sexual Assault In Cologne: A Failure by Germany’s Elite. By Nicholas M. Gallagher.

“Anna”, a victim of the mass sexual assault on New Year’s Eve in Cologne, Germany.

A Failure by Germany’s Elite. By Nicholas M. Gallagher. The American Interest, January 6, 2016.

Groped between the legs and a firework thrown into a hoodie: Brave female victims reveal the horrifying details after attacks by sex mob of 2,000 “North African and Arab” men in Cologne. By Corey Charlton and Imogen Calderwood. Daily Mail, January 6, 2016. See also here, here, here.

Refugee chaos in Germany. By Bill O’Reilly and Ralph Peters. Video. The O’Reilly Factor, January 6, 2016. YouTube.

Dana Loesch Slams Political Correctness Following Mass Sexual Assault in Germany. Video. Fox News Insider, January 6, 2016. YouTube.

A “new dimension” of sexual assault in Cologne. DW, January 5, 2016.

Cologne Assault Victim: “I Was Touched Under My Skirt.” By John Sexton. Breitbart, January 6, 2016. YouTube. See also here, here, here.

Mayor of Cologne: If Women Don’t Want to Be Raped, They Should Stay Away From Strangers. By Siobhán O’Grady. Foreign Policy, January 6, 2016.

Germany, Migrant Rape Gangs? Refugee Culture War? Katharine Gorka interviewed by Stuart Varney. Video. Varney and Company. Fox Business, January 8, 2016. YouTube.

















Gallagher:

One day after the news broke that a crowd of about a thousand men of Middle Eastern and North African appearance had molested women in central Cologne on New Year’s Eve, German authorities are in hot water. First there’s the Mayor, Henriette Reker, who at a press conference today appeared to be blaming the victim. As the Guardian reports:

Asked by a journalist how women could protect themselves, Henriette Reker said: “There’s always the possibility of keeping a certain distance of more than an arm’s length – that is to say to make sure yourself you don’t look to be too close to people who are not known to you, and to whom you don’t have a trusting relationship”.[..]

Reker also advised women to “stick together in groups, don’t get split up, even if you’re in a party mood”.[..]

Reker’s comments triggered outrage on social media. Reaction was trending under #einarmlaenge (an arm’s length).

This press conference came one day after another Reker comment about Cologne’s upcoming Fasching (Carnival) season, which features heavy revelry. Via the NYT:

“We will explain our Carnival much better to people who come from other cultures,” she said, “so there won’t be any confusion about what constitutes celebratory behavior in Cologne, which has nothing to do with a sexual frankness.”

Then there’s the question of why the police didn’t do more to prevent the assaults from occurring during the New Year’s Eve celebrations. The Atlantic:

The attacks—and robberies—allegedly occurred in the city’s historic square, which lies between the main train station and the cathedral. About 1,000 men, whom witnesses described to police as Arab or North African, had gathered outside the station and were letting off fireworks. Some were drunk and aggressive, news reports say. Police cleared the square because they feared injuries from the fireworks. But the men soon returned and carried out the attacks with reportedly little to no response from the local police.

Thomas de Maiziere, the German interior minister, the BBC reports, said it shouldn’t be the case the area was first cleared “and then later these events take place and they wait for complaints. The police shouldn’t work like this.”

On top of all this, there’s the failure of the German media to report on the events for several days. Once more, the Guardian:

The German public broadcaster, ZDF, on Wednesday apologised for delays in reporting on the wave of sexual assaults and deciding to postpone a news segment until Tuesday. “The news situation was clear enough. It was a mistake of the 7pm ‘heute’ show not to at least report the incidents,” wrote deputy chief editor Elmar Thevessen on the show’s Facebook page.

Much about the New Year’s Eve attacks is still unclear, including whether the attackers were migrants or second generation (which would represent its own set of problems), how much of the crowd was involved in the assaults, and whether or how they were coordinated (was there, for instance, a social media component). What is apparent is that, during and since, there has been a widespread failure on the part of German authorities and elite institutions. The police failed to protect its citizens, the press dawdled in holding anyone to account (and see, too, those unanswered questions just above), and at least one politician even now seems to struggle to address the issue without suggesting that young women must somehow accommodate the possibility of assaults and “confusion.”

This all carries echoes of the Rotherham scandal, in which British authorities had for years turned a blind eye to a child abuse ring among Pakistani men in the north of England, seemingly at least in part for fear of looking racist. By the time anyone put a stop to it, an estimated 1,400 kids had been abused, often horrifically. Like the German police and politicians in this case—albeit on a much longer and larger scale—the British authorities may have put the need to appear sensitive over the need to enforce core values and basic human rights.

Western liberal elites see themselves both as feminists and as advocates for refugees, immigrants, and minorities. (As a sign at a protest in Cologne on Wednesday, photographed by Reuters, read, “Gegen Sexismus, Gegen Rassismus”—or, “Against Sexism, Against Racism.”) As principles, all of those are fine sentiments. But in the real world, Europe has just admitted large numbers of young men from cultures with aggressively different attitudes towards women. Authorities in Germany and elsewhere, as well as politicians, feminists, and other elites, are going to have to figure out, fast, how to talk and act about the clash of Western absolutes (the ability of women, dressed as they wish, to walk wherever they wish without fear is not up for debate) with immigrant cultures, or many more problems may lie ahead.

How Liberals Are the New Autocrats. By Joel Kotkin.

How Liberals Are the New Autocrats. By Joel Kotkin. The Daily Beast, January 3, 2016.

Kotkin:

Progressives may preach the joys of localism, but the trend in government is all the other way in everything from climate change to the economic complexion of your neighborhood.

The End of Localism

This could be how our experiment with grassroots democracy finally ends. World leaders—the super-rich, their pet nonprofits, their media boosters, and their allies in the global apparat—gather in Paris to hammer out a deal to transform the planet, and our lives. No one asks much about what the states and the communities, the electorate, or even Congress, thinks of the arrangement. The executive now presumes to rule on these issues.

For many of the world’s leading countries—China, Russia, Saudi Arabia—such top-down edicts are fine and dandy, particularly since their supreme leaders won’t have to adhere to them if inconvenienced. But the desire for centralized control is also spreading among the shrinking remnant of actual democracies, where political give and take is baked into the system.

The will to power is unmistakable. California Gov. Jerry Brown, now posturing as the aged philosopher-prince fresh from Paris, hails the “coercive power of the state” to make people live properly by his lights. California’s high electricity prices, regulation-driven spikes in home values, and the highest energy prices in the continental United States, may be a bane for middle- and working-class families, but are sold as a wonderful achievement among our presumptive masters.

The Authoritarian Impulse

Under President Obama, rule by decree has become commonplace, with federal edicts dictating policies on everything from immigration and labor laws to climate change. No modern leader since Nixon has been so bold in trying to consolidate power. But the current president is also building on a trend: Since 1910 the federal government has doubled its share of government spending to 60 percent. Its share of GDP has now grown to the highest level since World War II.

Today climate change has become the killer app for expanding state control, for example, helping Jerry Brown find his inner Duce. But the authoritarian urge is hardly limited to climate-related issues. It can be seen on college campuses, where uniformity of belief is increasingly mandated. In Europe, the other democratic bastion, the continental bureaucracy now controls ever more of daily life on the continent. You don’t want thousands of Syrian refugees in your town, but the EU knows better. You will take them and like it, or be labeled a racist.

Already the disconnect between the hoi polloi and the new bureaucratic master race has spawned a powerful blowback, as evidenced by the rise of rightist, even quasi-fascist parties throughout the old continent. The people at the top—including much of the business leadership—may like the idea of a central European master-state, but support for the EU is at record low. Increasingly Europeans want, at the very least, to dial down the centralization and bring back some control to the local level, and something of the primacy of traditional cultures and what are still perceived  as “European values.”

In some ways, the extreme discontent in America—epitomized by the xenophobic Trump campaign—reflects a similar opposition to bureaucratic overreach. This conflict can be expected to grow as new federal initiatives—initiatives that seek, among other things, to enforce racial and class “balance” in neighborhoods and high-density housing in low-density suburbs—stomp on even the pretense that cities might have any control over their immediate environment. This policy is being adopted already in some regions, notably Minnesota, where planners now seek to change communities that are too white and affluent populations need to meet new goals of class and economic diversity.

The Rule of the Wise-people

Historically, advocacy for the rule of “betters” has been largely a prerogative of the right. Indeed the very basis of traditional conservativism—epitomized by the Tory ideal—was that society is best run by those with the greatest stake in its success, and by those who have been educated, nurtured, and otherwise prepared to rule over others with a sense of justice and enlightenment. In this century, the idea of handing power to a properly indoctrinated cadre also found radical expression in totalitarian ideologies such as communism, fascism, and national socialism.

In contemporary North American and the EU, the ascendant controlling power comes from a new configuration of the cognitively superior, i.e., the academy, the mainstream media, and the entertainment and technology communities. This new centralist ruling class, unlike the Tories, relies not on tradition, Christianity, or social hierarchy to justify its actions, but worships instead at the altar of expertise and political correctness.

Ironically this is occurring at a time when many progressives celebrate localism in terms of food and culture. Some even embrace localism as an economic development tool, an environmental win, and a form of resistance to ever greater centralized big-business control.

Yet some of the same progressives who promote localism often simultaneously favor centralized control of everything from planning and zoning to education. They may want local music, wine, or song, but all communities then must conform in how they operate, are run, and developed. Advocates of strict land-use policies claim that traditional architecture and increased densities will enable us to once again enjoy the kind of “meaningful community” that supposedly cannot be achieved in conventional suburbs.

In the process, long-standing local control is being squeezed out of existence. Ontario, California, Mayor pro-tem Alan Wapner notes that powers once reserved for localities, such as zoning and planning, are being systematically usurped by regulators from Sacramento and Washington. “They are basically dictating land use,” he says. “We just don’t matter that much.”

The Road to Imperium

As the Obama era grinds to its denouement, grassroots democracy, once favored by liberals, is losing its historic appeal to the left. Important progressive voices like Matt Yglesias now suggest that “democracy is doomed.” Other prominent progressives, such as American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner, see the more authoritarian model of China as successful while the U.S. and European political systems seem tired.

Increasingly the call is not so much for a benevolent and charismatic dictator, but for an impaneled committee of experts to rule over our lives. Former Obama budget adviser Peter Orszag and Thomas Friedman argue openly that power should shift from naturally contentious elected bodies—subject to pressure from the lower orders—to credentialed “experts” operating in Washington, Brussels, or the United Nations.

The new progressive mindset was laid out recently in an article in The Atlantic that openly called for the creation of a “technocracy” to determine energy, economic, and land-use policies. According to this article, mechanisms like the market or even technological change are simply not up to the challenge. Instead the entire world needs to be put on a “war footing” that forces compliance with the technocracy’s edicts. This includes a drive to impose energy austerity on an already fading middle class, limiting mundane pleasures like cheap air travel, cars, freeways, suburbs, and single-family housing.

The vagaries of America’s political system have contributed to the left’s growing embrace of centralism. The Republican ascendency in virtually all states away from the coasts all but guarantees their control of most legislative branches. In contrast, the Democrat control of major cities, particularly along the coasts, and their ability to woo voters who come out only every four years, gives them a tremendous advantage on the presidential level.

This creates the ideal preconditions for  what Ross Douthat accurately notes is a rising “Caesarism of the left” since the 2010 Republican congressional sweep. There is broad backing among liberals for President Obama’s tack of avoiding Congress through presidential decrees. Nor is this tendency likely to end soon. Hillary Clinton, whose husband’s success was in part derived from working with Republicans, is already stating her intention to go over Congress if they don’t go along with her ideas.

My word to liberal friends: Think a bit about this embrace of imperial presidential power if the person ruling from above was, say, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, or, worst of all, Donald Trump.

Slouching towards Imperium

The centralization of power reflects disturbing tendencies in our economic life. Despite all the hopes for a more distributed, less concentrated “new economy,” we appear to be moving ever more toward economic centralization on a massive scale. Indeed, after decades of losing market share to smaller firms, the share of GDP controlled by the Fortune 500 has risen from 58 percent of nominal GDP in 1994 to 73 percent in 2013.

Part of this is driven by the relentless growth of large financial institutions, the very folks who precipitated the financial crisis with their ill-advised speculations. They have taken advantage of new regulations to greatly increase their share of the financial market to an unprecedented 44 percent.

This economic consolidation, and how it plays into centralization, is rarely recognized by Republicans, living in mortal fear of offending their cherished K Street collaborators. A powerful central state often rains money on well-connected capitalists who have flourished under state-dominated systems in places as varied as Venezuela and Iran. Similarly, a draconian climate regime certainly enhances the fortunes of capitalists such as Elon Musk as well as other Silicon Valley and Wall Street supporters who seek to force consumers and businesses into purchasing expensive, often unreliable renewable power from favored wind and solar projects.

The increasing power of the central state, in contrast, is the bane of small companies, who are far less well-positioned to deal with ever-increasingly regulation. Washington’s efforts to control financial activities proved a disaster for the country’s entrepreneurial economy, long dependent on small community banks for loans. Overall for the first time in recent memory (PDF), more businesses are being destroyed than created. Concurrently, if unsurprisingly, the middle class is shrinking, and seeing its share of the economy steadily diminish.

There are some alarming parallels between these developments and the last days of the Roman Republic. There, too, developed a similar tendency toward vicious partisanship and a growing concentration of wealth in a few hands. In Rome’s case, the old middle classes and yeoman farmers were gradually replaced by patricians with access to slave labor; in our society, cheap foreign labor has been perceived as doing much the same for our oligarchs. Much as in Rome, our republican virtues are also fading. Instead, society seems to require a sure hand, particularly if the central authorities decide to transform society in ways that the vast majority might not like (for example, essentially banning suburban development or gas-powered cars). It may take a strict nanny state, to paraphrase Mary Poppins, to make the bitter medicine go down.

The Coming Conflict

Yet there’s a problem with centralization: People don’t trust the very institutions that would be charged with carrying out their policies. Levels of trust for the dominant institutions like the federal government, Congress, the courts, big banks, media, and the academy are at historically low levels.

Roughly half of all Americans, according to Gallup, now consider the federal government “an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.” In 2003 only 30 percent of Americans felt that way. Even in my home state of California—now a mecca for ever-expanding government—large majorities favor transferring tax dollars out of Sacramento to the localities, according to a December Public Policy Institute of California poll.

Critically this blowback is not among conservatives or exurbanites. Much of the strongest opposition to the federal and state planning regimes are in areas such as California’s Marin County, north of San Francisco, where residents have objected to densification schemes that, they maintain, would undermine the “the small-town, semi-rural, and rural character of their neighborhoods”—the very qualities that attracted them there in the first place.

Similar attempts to enforce density on suburban population have also led to uproars in  blue bastions such as the northern Virgina suburbs, the famously progressive University of California at Davis, and hip Boulder, Colorado. The New York Times’s Tom Edsall notes that the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s dictates may have already shifted politics in affluent Westchester County, an early target of the social engineers seeking to enforce HUD policies, to the right.

Some leading progressives, like Nation contributor and Bay Area activist Zelda Bronstein, attack the growth of regional governments, designated to force compliance with state and federal mandates, as fundamentally undemocratic, embracing “insular, peremptory style of decision making.” Even millennials, who have tended to the left, are skeptical about over-centralized government. A recent National Journal poll showed that they, like most Americans, are not enamored of top-down solutions: Less than a third favor federal over locally-based solutions.

Simply put, there is no huge appetite for ever expanding federal power among the majority of the populace. What is missing, outside of nihilistic opposition to all government, is a strong movement advocating for more authority in the hands of local communities, families, and volunteer organization. This does not necessarily mean a decline in environmental standards, since most people care most about the places where they and their families reside. Even with climate change, a carbon tax could be approved without adopting the California formula of ever more mega-regulations covering virtually every aspect of life.

As Alexis de Tocqueville noted in the 1830s, the genius of this republic lies not in its central state, but in its dispersion, voluntary association, and ideological diversity. If we undermine the legacy of our federal structure to something more akin to that, say, of France or Russia, the United States could no longer play its historic role as a rare beacon of independence and self-government in a world increasingly dominated by various manifestations of centralized tyranny.

Elites Have Failed the Western World. By Pankaj Mishra

The historian Tony Judt described his generation – as epitomised by Bush and Blair – as “crappy”. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian.

A generation of failed politicians has trapped the west in a tawdry nightmare. By Pankaj Mishra. The Guardian, January 1, 2016.

Mishra:

In one of his last interviews, the historian Tony Judt lamented his “catastrophic” Anglo-American generation, whose cossetted members included George W Bush and Tony Blair. Having grown up after the defining wars and hatreds of the west’s 20th century, “in a world of no hard choices, neither economic nor political”, these historically weightless elites believed that “no matter what choice they made, there would be no disastrous consequences”.

A member of the Bush administration brashly affirmed its arrogance of power in 2004 after what then seemed a successful invasion of Iraq: “When we act,” he boasted, “we create our own reality.” A “pretty crappy generation”, Judt concluded, “when you come to think of it.”

One cannot but think of the reality it made as mayhem in Asia and Africa reaches European and North American cities. But those of us from countries where many Anglo-American institutions were once admirable models have their own melancholy reasons to reflect on their swift decay.

As another annus horribilis lurched to a close, the evidence of moral and intellectual sloth seemed unavoidable. In the Christmas issue of the Spectator, Rod Liddle described Calais as “a jungle of largely Muslim asylum seekers aching to get into Britain – presumably to be hugged” by “the liberals”. In an interview in the same issue, the prime minister confessed that Liddle “does make me laugh”. The chumminess seemed to confirm Amit Chaudhuri’s strong recent “impression”, acquired from BBC documentaries about India, that Britain comprises “male buddies”, whose “capacity for spontaneous insight isn’t that far away from that of Jeremy Clarkson”.

It was still hard not to be puzzled by the casual malevolence of the lead headline in the Times on Boxing Day: “Muslims ‘silent on terror’”. A few days earlier, candidates in the Republican presidential primaries, aspiring leaders of the free world, had offered the following modest proposals: ban Muslims from travel, kill families of terrorists, shoot down Russian planes, close down parts of the internet, carpet-bomb Syria.

Power, it seems, does a lot more than corrupt; it also coarsens and stultifies. Judt’s diagnosis of an unbearable lightness of being also applies to many younger people exalted into positions of influence by the accident of their birth in rich and powerful countries – members of ruling classes who assumed that history ended in 1989 with the fall of communism and their unchallenged supremacy.

It is possible to feel slight relief that at least the current chief operator of America’s war machine was originally formed, intellectually and emotionally, by an experience of the world common to most of humanity: one of powerlessness and marginality. As his approval ratings sank last month, Barack Obama exasperatedly insisted that American leadership “is not just a matter of us bombing somebody”. He is worldly enough to realise that, as his hero James Baldwin wrote during the futile American bombing of Indochina: “Force does not work the way its advocates seem to think it does.” Instead of impressing its victim, it reveals to him “the weakness, even the panic of his adversary and this revelation invests the victim with patience”.

Thus al-Qaida assumed its most vicious form where it had never existed, and then morphed into Daesh and me-too franchises in numerous countries. The auto-intoxicated teenage murderer now confounds the leaden cold war holdovers stalking “extremist ideology”. “It is ultimately fatal,” Baldwin warned, “to create too many victims.” For then, “however long the battle may go on” the wielder of superior firepower “can never be the victor; on the contrary, all his energies, his life, are bound up in a terror he cannot articulate, a mystery he cannot read, a battle he cannot win”.

This is the treacherous impasse to which 14 years of escalating wars and bombing campaigns have brought us. The refusal to learn from their failures should have broadly suggested that “the establishment”, as a secret Pentagon memo in 1967 to President Lyndon Johnson suggested, “is out of its mind”. But such brutal self-assessments belong to another time of shame, guilt and responsibility, when tainted public figures tended to slink, or be pushed, into obscurity.

The modern west has been admirably different from other civilisations in its ability to counterbalance the arrogance of power with recognition of its excesses. Now, however, it is not only the bankers who radically expand our notion of impunity. Their chums in politics and the media coax, with criminal irresponsibility, the public into deeper fear and insecurity – and into blaming their overall plight on various enemies (immigrants, budding terrorists in Calais’s jungle, an un-American alien in the White House, Muslims and darkies in general).

Racism, a beast cornered if not tamed after much struggle, has lumbered back to civil society in the solemn guise of “reforming” Islam. Tony Blair summons us to worldwide battle on behalf of western values while embodying, with his central Asian clients, their comprehensive negation. The handful of media institutions and individuals that are not obliged to flesh out Rupert Murdoch’s tweets on Muslims seem to be struggling to remain viable in an increasingly retrogressive political culture. Even the BBC seems determined not to stray far from the Daily Mail’s editorial line.

Unsurprisingly, we witness, as Judt pointed out, “no external inputs, no new kinds of people, only the political class breeding itself”. “The old ways of mass movements, communities organised around an ideology, even religious or political ideas, trade unions and political parties to leverage public opinion into political influence” have disappeared. Indeed, the slightest reminder of this democratic past incites the technocrats of politics, business and the media into paroxysms of scorn.

Having acted recklessly to create their own reality, they have managed to trap all of us in a tawdry nightmare – a male buddy film of singular fatuousness. At the same time, reality-making has ceased to be the prerogative of the American imperium or of the French and British chumocrats, who lost their empires long ago and are still trying to find a role for themselves.

Some random fanatic, it turns out, can make their reality far more quickly, coercing the world’s oldest democracies into endless war, racial-religious hatred and paranoia. Such is the great power surrendered by the crappy generation and its epigones. The generations to come will scarcely believe it.

I Underestimated Trump. By Ross Douthat.

Confessions of a Columnist. By Ross Douthat. New York Times, January 2, 2016.

Trump:

EVERY New Year’s, in a spirit of self-examination, I try to catalog my worst blunders from the preceding year. But this year, like almost every pundit in America, I have one mistake that overshadows all the others, one confession that makes my other faults seem venial by comparison.

I underestimated Donald Trump.

To really make a clean breast on this issue, I have to reach back earlier than 2015 (some forecasts take more than a year to be disproven), to a column I wrote in the far-off days of the 2012 campaign, when Mitt Romney flew to Vegas, baby, to accept an endorsement from the Donald.

This struck me, at the time, as a needless move by Mitt, because it left him sticky with the tar of Trump’s birther nonsense while delivering little in return. The idea that Romney needed the kind of voters excited by Trump’s flamethrower style, I wrote, confused “the existence of a fan base (which Trump certainly has) with the existence of a meaningful constituency (which he almost certainly does not).” And even if there were real Trumpistas, Romney would win their allegiance eventually: “Anyone who thrills to Trump’s slashing attacks on the president probably isn’t sitting this election out.”

As a third-party candidate, I went on, Trump might pose some danger to Romney’s general-election chances. But Trump’s “third party rumblings are like his birther bluster — sound and fury, signifying only ego.” And Romney would risk little with conservatives by giving him the stiff arm. “Trump isn’t Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin: His conservatism is feigned, his right-wing fans are temporary admirers with no deep commitment to his brand or cause, and hardly anyone in the conservative media is likely to rise to his defense.”

Now, if I were the sort to engage in special pleading, I would note that this may not have been technically wrong as an analysis of the status quo in 2012. I still don’t think Trump would have run third party if Romney had stiffed him, for instance, and I’m quite sure that right-wing talk radio wouldn’t have backed him if he had.

But don’t let the technicalities fool you: I sold Trump wildly short, and his entire campaign to date has proven it.

First, Trump has had a very easy time turning his celebrity fan base into a meaningful constituency. Exactly how meaningful remains to be seen, but for months far more Republicans have told pollsters that they intend to vote for him than have rallied to any other banner. They may not all be Trump voters in the end, but that there is a significant Trump faction in our politics no sane observer can deny.

Second, that faction has turned out to include precisely the kind of voters Romney needed in 2012 and who stayed home instead: Blue-collar whites with moderate views on economics and a weak attachment to the institutional G.O.P. (So weak, a recent New York Times analysis makes clear, that many are still registered Democrats.) These “missing white voters” might not have put Romney over the top, but they certainly would have helped his chances in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan — all places where Trump is running strongly at the moment.

Third, even as he’s wooed the disaffected and non-ideological, Trump has also won over or at least neutralized an important segment of the conservative media. He isn’t Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin, sure, but they’ve both been covering for him, as have a raft of performers who like to portray themselves as keepers of True Conservatism’s flame. And this cover has enabled Trump — no True Conservative himself, to put it mildly — to put together an unusual coalition, a mix of hard-right and radical-center voters, that’s unlike anything in recent politics.

Now if I wanted to avoid giving Trump his due, I could claim that I didn’t underestimate him, I misread everyone else — from the voters supporting him despite his demagoguery to the right-wing entertainers willing to forgive his ideological deviations.

I certainly overestimated poor Jeb Bush, whom I wrongly predicted would profit from Trump’s rise. But for the rest — no, I had a pretty low opinion of the right-wing entertainment complex to begin with, and I’m not remotely surprised that the white working class would rally to a candidate running on populist and nationalist themes.

I am very surprised, though, that Trump himself would have the political savvy, the (relative) discipline and yes, the stamina required to exploit that opening and become that populist. And for that failure of imagination, I humbly repent.

Of course I’m not completely humbled. Indeed, I’m still proud enough to continue predicting, in defiance of national polling, that there’s still no way that Trump will actually be the 2016 Republican nominee.

Trust me: I’m a pundit.

(And I’ll see you in the confessional next year.)

The Tragic Failure of the Arab World, and Why It’s Bad for Israel. By Shimon Shamir.

The Tragic Failure of the Arab World, and Why It’s Bad for Israel. By Shimon Shamir. Haaretz, January 2, 2016.

Shamir:

Following the collapse of “Arab socialism” and demise of the “Arab Spring,” is there any hope that the cradle of civilization will become a superpower once more?

The 21st century is becoming increasingly characterized by the tragedies befalling the Arab world. Tribal, ethnic, regional, religious and other forces are fighting each other for power, while Arab states seem to be coming apart at the seams or even completely crumbling. The historic rift between Sunni and Shi’ite Islam remains as divisive as ever, and jihadists are gaining footholds throughout Arab lands. They give rise to questions about their implications for Arab states in the modern age.

Ever since the Western world first burst into the Arab-Islamist sphere, more than 200 years ago, Arabs have been tormented by the question of why they – the bearers of such a magnificent cultural heritage – now find themselves at such a disadvantage. They have struggled to understand how they could possibly compete with more developed nations.

To hope to achieve this goal, they needed to address four challenges: First, to create sovereign states with functioning national institutions that depend upon cooperative citizens. Second, to develop the capacity to produce technology, which would secure them a competitive position in the world economy. Third, to handle Islam in a way that would instill values to bring society together – like common identity and solidarity – but also neutralize the violent elements that look to restore the ways of the past. Fourth, to shake off the neocolonialist influence and involvement of superpowers, and act independently in the international arena.

These tasks became relevant when the Arab states gained independence, about midway through the 20th century – or, at least, it seemed that they had started to confront these challenges then. In some of the Arab states, revolutionary Nasserist-Ba’athist regimes came to power, and they assumed these burdens. They founded national institutions and created educational systems to indoctrinate the people and enhance the individual’s affinity to the state. They nationalized production, built industrial plants and sent the people to universities, in the hope of advancing their country’s scientific and technological capabilities. They called it “Arab socialism.”

Islam was cultivated as a symbol, but the regimes themselves were secular and kept the Islamic movement subdued. They dismantled the foreign military bases and scrapped foreign military strategies like 1955’s Baghdad Pact, which established METO – a treaty organization (modeled after NATO) that included Britain and Middle Eastern states, but which was dissolved in 1979. The newly independent Arab states sought to establish themselves collectively as a world power and aligned with the African-Asian bloc; they labeled it a kind of “positive neutrality.”

Knowledge deficit

The Arab reality today is very different. The leaders’ glaring mistake was they believed that in this region, “the societies might be weak, but the states are strong.” It transpired that the systems of intimidation and enforcement did not reflect strength, but instead weakness. When the upheavals began, and the non-state factions became more powerful and began preaching a new reality, some of the states collapsed, while others are struggling to maintain their stability.

From today’s perspective, it isn’t hard to explain the phenomenon. It seems that the Arab states, to varying degrees, were hollow entities; their conceptual frameworks were weak. They were created during the modern age and had no names – because such entities did not exist prior to their establishment. The classical Arabic lexicon did not include a word for “state” or “nation.” In its place, the word meaning “dynasty,” or ruling family, was adapted for the purpose. The concept of a nation became synonymous with the idea of a dynasty that rises and falls. Thus, large swaths of the population backed the idea that when the regime falls, the state is no more.

In the West, the thinking tends to be that the toppling of an authoritarian regime might lead to the establishment of a democracy. However, bitter experience has shown that overthrowing the rulers prompts the whole system to collapse, and then the alternative is chaos. This is also the root cause of the failure of the youth that led the Arab Spring. It turned out that while it’s possible to topple a dictator, the proper foundations for fostering democracy in the aftermath – both conceptually and institutionally – were lacking.

There is no escaping the conclusion that, at this stage, most Arab states can only function with some level of stability under authoritarian regimes or traditional monarchies. The challenge of creating nations similar to those in the modern West has yet to be fulfilled.

Similar failures have occurred on the economic front, too. True, there was economic development in some Arab nations that led to prosperity and in some cases even great wealth (Qatar, for example, is the richest country in the world in terms of GDP per capita, while Kuwait is ranked fourth). Arab states need foreign currency to import essential food items, but they don’t receive enough from the selling of natural resources, tourism, people working overseas and, for Egypt, from the Suez Canal.

Arab products are barely represented in the global marketplace. Compare Egypt and South Korea, where the economic conditions were similar when both nations achieved independence. South Korea currently exports everything from high-tech electronics to cars and boats: as a result, its economy is five times the size of Egypt’s.

The dizzying growth of the global economy is based primarily on knowledge, and countries that cannot match the rate of development get left behind. In most Arab countries, the level of scientific and technological know-how does not meet the levels required to support advanced, innovative means of production. A United Nations report in 2002, “Arab Human Development,” called this the “knowledge deficit,” and determined that this was one of three factors hindering development in the Arab nations. Knowledge in the Arab world is not up to par because their schools and universities place too great an emphasis on memorization and rote learning.

The knowledge deficit stems from the fact that openness to the world is low among Arab states. For example, the number of translated books in the Arab world is exceedingly low: A 2003 UN report, “Building a Knowledge Society,” found that, on average, only 4.4 translated books were published per million people between 1981 and 1985 in the Arab states, while the corresponding rate in Hungary was 519 books, and in Spain 920.

Even when Arab states open up to the world and import technologies, the benefits are limited. Global technologies become obsolete very quickly, so those not participating in their production can’t develop effective alternatives. Creativity and ingenuity are so critical these days, but these qualities are lacking in the Arab world. And despite their extremely modern image, even the Gulf states import technology from around the world and the locals have no stake in production.

According to the same 2003 UN report, all of the Arab states combined registered only 370 patents in the United States between 1980 and 2000, while Israel alone registered more than 7,000 and South Korea registered over 16,000. The number of researchers per million people in the Arab world sits at 300, while the global average is 900. The result of all of this is that unemployment rates among young people in the Arab world are among the highest on the planet – between 30 to 50 percent.

Failure to tackle radical Islam

Even the clampdown on Islam in Arab countries did not work so well. Islamist factions weren’t eliminated, despite numerous efforts to that end. Gamal Abdel Nasser sent thousands of Muslim Brotherhood members to jail, as did other nations. Yet comparing the demographics of Islamists at the end of the 20th century and today shows a staggering rate of growth: In 2000, Islamist groups were small, underground factions with limited capabilities; by 2015, they had become large forces with military capabilities and cutting-edge weaponry, and were firmly established throughout Arab lands. They challenge not only local governments, but also the foreign regimes that support those governments. The last 15 years have seen a series of mega-terrorist attacks throughout the world – from the September 11 attacks in the United States to the recent massacre in Paris. During the last five years alone, there has been a stark increase in the number of casualties from Islamic terrorism in various nations – in some cases up more than tenfold in comparison to previous years.

It’s possible that the failure to deal with radical Islam also stems from the fact that attempts to do so were always brutal. Not enough attention was paid to the fact that Islamism (also known as Political Islam) is not only terrorism, but that it represents first and foremost an idea – an idea that is very attractive to many Muslims, especially during times of regional conflict and strife. Many nations failed because they did not see the need to pose an alternative idea, despite the fact that such an idea existed.

During the first half of the 20th century, liberal, humanist and rational streams appeared within Islam – streams that separated religion and state, and found their own intellectual expression. Unfortunately, most Arab state regimes rejected these ideas, choosing instead to embrace a combination that had the worst of all options. The Arab nations could not find a courageous leader capable of sparking the necessary transformation for repelling brutal Islamism and creating a new order that marched with the times.

Also, the aspirations of the first generations to achieve independence went unrealized, and they were unable to prevent a situation in which the end of colonialism would create a vacuum and space for foreign influence. The first sign of this failure was already evident in the days of Nasser: He became the hero of the Arab world when he expelled 10,000 British soldiers from their bases in Egypt, but then quickly brought in 20,000 Soviet “military advisers” (who Anwar Sadat later expelled, in 1972).

The clear turning point was the Gulf War in 1991, when Arab armies fought as part of a coalition commanded and led mostly by Americans, against an Arab leader who was the “Arab bulwark” against Iran. And that’s how it continued: NATO forces were employed against Muammar Gadhafi in Libya; the Iranians are making excursions into Iraq and Syria, as are the Turks; the Russians are intervening in the Syrian civil war on President Bashar Assad’s side; France is asking fellow European Union states to aid in the fight against the Islamic State; and the United States, which had seemingly retreated from the arena, is being pulled back into the fray in both Iraq and Syria.

In Arab states, the regional wars are fierce and the number of casualties over recent decades has reached the millions. Huge waves of refugees are abandoning their countries, fleeing from death and destruction. The refugees mostly express utter despair for life in their homeland.

In a bleak leader article regarding the state of the Arab world published in The Economist (“The Tragedy of the Arabs,” July 5, 2014) , the writer laments the fact that a “civilization that used to lead the world is in ruins,” and declared that the Arab peoples are “in a wretched state.” The remarks call to mind Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, who was one of the first in Egypt to express support for reconciliation with Israel. He said that peace was justified because of the “need to rebuild civilization.”

Mahfouz knew what he was talking about. There’s no doubt that developments in the region affect Israel. It is a mistake to rejoice in the misfortunes of our neighbors, and praise ourselves for being “the villa in the jungle,” as former Prime Minister Ehud Barak once said. Our borders are not immune to the threats of violence raging around us, and we can get involved in our neighbors’ well-being.

The author is a professor emeritus of Middle Eastern History and former Israeli ambassador to both Egypt and Jordan.

The Tragedy of the Arabs. The Economist, July 5, 2014.

A civilisation that used to lead the world is in ruins—and only the locals can rebuild it.

A THOUSAND years ago, the great cities of Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo took turns to race ahead of the Western world. Islam and innovation were twins. The various Arab caliphates were dynamic superpowers—beacons of learning, tolerance and trade. Yet today the Arabs are in a wretched state. Even as Asia, Latin America and Africa advance, the Middle East is held back by despotism and convulsed by war.

Hopes soared three years ago, when a wave of unrest across the region led to the overthrow of four dictators—in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen—and to a clamour for change elsewhere, notably in Syria. But the Arab spring’s fruit has rotted into renewed autocracy and war. Both engender misery and fanaticism that today threaten the wider world.

Why Arab countries have so miserably failed to create democracy, happiness or (aside from the windfall of oil) wealth for their 350m people is one of the great questions of our time. What makes Arab society susceptible to vile regimes and fanatics bent on destroying them (and their perceived allies in the West)? No one suggests that the Arabs as a people lack talent or suffer from some pathological antipathy to democracy. But for the Arabs to wake from their nightmare, and for the world to feel safe, a great deal needs to change.

The blame game

One problem is that the Arab countries’ troubles run so wide. Indeed, Syria and Iraq can nowadays barely be called countries at all. This week a brutal band of jihadists declared their boundaries void, heralding instead a new Islamic caliphate to embrace Iraq and Greater Syria (including Israel-Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan and bits of Turkey) and—in due course—the whole world. Its leaders seek to kill non-Muslims not just in the Middle East but also in the streets of New York, London and Paris. Egypt is back under military rule. Libya, following the violent demise of Muammar Qaddafi, is at the mercy of unruly militias. Yemen is beset by insurrection, infighting and al-Qaeda. Palestine is still far from true statehood and peace: the murders of three young Israelis and ensuing reprisals threaten to set off yet another cycle of violence (see article). Even countries such as Saudi Arabia and Algeria, whose regimes are cushioned by wealth from oil and gas and propped up by an iron-fisted apparatus of state security, are more fragile than they look. Only Tunisia, which opened the Arabs’ bid for freedom three years ago, has the makings of a real democracy.

Islam, or at least modern reinterpretations of it, is at the core of some of the Arabs’ deep troubles. The faith’s claim, promoted by many of its leading lights, to combine spiritual and earthly authority, with no separation of mosque and state, has stunted the development of independent political institutions. A militant minority of Muslims are caught up in a search for legitimacy through ever more fanatical interpretations of the Koran. Other Muslims, threatened by militia violence and civil war, have sought refuge in their sect. In Iraq and Syria plenty of Shias and Sunnis used to marry each other; too often today they resort to maiming each other. And this violent perversion of Islam has spread to places as distant as northern Nigeria and northern England.

But religious extremism is a conduit for misery, not its fundamental cause (see article). While Islamic democracies elsewhere (such as Indonesia—see article) are doing fine, in the Arab world the very fabric of the state is weak. Few Arab countries have been nations for long. The dead hand of the Turks’ declining Ottoman empire was followed after the first world war by the humiliation of British and French rule. In much of the Arab world the colonial powers continued to control or influence events until the 1960s. Arab countries have not yet succeeded in fostering the institutional prerequisites of democracy—the give-and-take of parliamentary discourse, protection for minorities, the emancipation of women, a free press, independent courts and universities and trade unions.

The absence of a liberal state has been matched by the absence of a liberal economy. After independence, the prevailing orthodoxy was central planning, often Soviet-inspired. Anti-market, anti-trade, pro-subsidy and pro-regulation, Arab governments strangled their economies. The state pulled the levers of economic power—especially where oil was involved. Where the constraints of post-colonial socialism were lifted, capitalism of the crony, rent-seeking kind took hold, as it did in the later years of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. Privatisation was for pals of the government. Virtually no markets were free, barely any world-class companies developed, and clever Arabs who wanted to excel in business or scholarship had to go to America or Europe to do so.

Economic stagnation bred dissatisfaction. Monarchs and presidents-for-life defended themselves with secret police and goons. The mosque became a source of public services and one of the few places where people could gather and hear speeches. Islam was radicalised and the angry men who loathed their rulers came to hate the Western states that backed them. Meanwhile a vast number of the young grew restless because of unemployment. Thanks to the electronic media, they were increasingly aware that the prospects of their cohort outside the Middle East were far more hopeful. The wonder is not that they took to the streets in the Arab spring, but that they did not do so sooner.

A lot of ruin

These wrongs cannot easily or rapidly be put right. Outsiders, who have often been drawn to the region as invaders and occupiers, cannot simply stamp out the jihadist cause or impose prosperity and democracy. That much, at least, should be clear after the disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. Military support—the supply of drones and of a small number of special forces—may help keep the jihadists in Iraq at bay. That help may have to be on permanent call. Even if the new caliphate is unlikely to become a recognisable state, it could for many years produce jihadists able to export terrorism.

But only the Arabs can reverse their civilisational decline, and right now there is little hope of that happening. The extremists offer none. The mantra of the monarchs and the military men is “stability”. In a time of chaos, its appeal is understandable, but repression and stagnation are not the solution. They did not work before; indeed they were at the root of the problem. Even if the Arab awakening is over for the moment, the powerful forces that gave rise to it are still present. The social media which stirred up a revolution in attitudes cannot be uninvented. The men in their palaces and their Western backers need to understand that stability requires reform.

Is that a vain hope? Today the outlook is bloody. But ultimately fanatics devour themselves. Meanwhile, wherever possible, the moderate, secular Sunnis who comprise the majority of Arab Muslims need to make their voices heard. And when their moment comes, they need to cast their minds back to the values that once made the Arab world great. Education underpinned its primacy in medicine, mathematics, architecture and astronomy. Trade paid for its fabulous metropolises and their spices and silks. And, at its best, the Arab world was a cosmopolitan haven for Jews, Christians and Muslims of many sects, where tolerance fostered creativity and invention.

Pluralism, education, open markets: these were once Arab values and they could be so again. Today, as Sunnis and Shias tear out each others’ throats in Iraq and Syria and a former general settles onto his new throne in Egypt, they are tragically distant prospects. But for a people for whom so much has gone so wrong, such values still make up a vision of a better future.