A Tale of Two Democracies: The United States and Norway

 When the US Constitution was written, the people responsible had constituencies among themselves who greatly feared what a majority might do to a minority.  Major among these were the slave states who feared the institution of slavery could be legislated away, and the small (low population) states who feared loss of influence to the larger (higher population) states.  The Constitution tried to alleviate these concerns by creating a legislative arena, the Senate, where each state was equally represented, while slave states were granted an increased number of seats in the House of Representatives by allowing slaves to be considered three-fifths of a resident even though they had no voting rights.  These acts were coupled with the creation of the Electoral College as a naïve compromise between those who wished to have the Legislative branch select the head of the Executive branch and those who wished for the two branches to be independent.  None of these compromises are consistent with democracy conceived as governance by representatives of the majority.  The fear of what a majority might do to a minority seems the most likely explanation for why the Constitution made amending itself so difficult, bordering now on the impossible.

The authors, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, have produced a book, Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point, in which they argue that democracy works better when the majority is allowed to conduct business, and democracies can fall into autocratic states if minorities have too much power.  In the process of making their argument they provided a fascinating chapter titled “America the Outlier.”  The point they make is that the US started out as an inspiring example of what a people could create for themselves in building an independent nation, but over time those who had forged constitutions with similar features to those of the US Constitution had the wisdom—and the ability—to amend the constitutions as circumstances evolved over the centuries.  The United States is now an outlier because it is the only democracy trying to govern with ineffective constraints that it is unable to change.

The authors present an interesting comparison of histories of the US and of Norway as constitutional democracies. 

“In the spring of 1814, twenty-five years after the ratification of America’s Constitution, a group of 112 Norwegian men—civil servants, lawyers, military officials, business leaders, theologians, and even a sailor—gathered in Eidsvoll, a rural village forty miles north of Oslo.  For five weeks, while meeting at the manor home of the businessman Carsten Anker, the men debated and drafted what is today the world’s second oldest written constitution.”

Both the US and Norway, on emerging from monarch-dominated systems, were leery of unleashing majority rule.

“So, Norway’s 1814 constitution, like America’s in 1789, included a range of undemocratic features.  In fact, early nineteenth-century Norway was considerably less democratic than the United States.”

“Over the next two centuries, however, Norway underwent a series of far-reaching democratic reforms—all under its original constitution.  Parliamentary sovereignty was established in the late nineteenth century, and Norway became a genuine constitutional democracy.  A 1905 constitutional reform eliminated regional electoral colleges and established direct elections for parliament.  Property restrictions on voting were eliminated in 1898, and universal (male and female) suffrage was established in 1913.”

The constitution continued to be modified as necessary up to present times.

“A 1992 constitutional amendment guaranteed Norwegians the right to a healthy environment.  In 2012, the constitution was amended once again, this time to abolish Norway’s official religion and guarantee equal rights to all ‘religious and philosophical communities.’  And in 2014, Norway adopted a set of sweeping constitutional human and social rights protections, including for children to be granted ‘respect for their human dignity,’ the right to education, and the right to subsistence (through work or, for those who could not support themselves, government assistance).”

“In total, Norway’s constitution was amended 316 times between 1814 and 2014.”

Norway’s experience in democratic governance is representative of how democracies in general have evolved over time.

“In sum, the twentieth century ushered in the modern democratic era—an age in which many of the institutional fetters on popular majorities that were designed by pre-democratic monarchies and aristocracies were dismantled.  Democracies all over the world abolished or weakened their most egregiously counter-majoritarian institutions.  Conservative defenders of these institutions anxiously warned of impending instability, chaos, or tyranny.  But that has rarely ensued since World War II.  Indeed, countries like Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the U.K. were both more stable and more democratic at the close of the twentieth century than they were at the beginning.  Eliminating counter-majoritarianism helped give rise to modern democracy.”

The stage would seem to be set for the conclusion that the US must amend its constitution and follow the path of these “modern democracies.”  Levitsky and Ziblatt close with a chapter dedicated to identifying the appropriate amendments that should be made, but all that was accomplished was to convince this reader that none of what was suggested could possibly happen.

Perhaps it is time to realize that the United States is a different country from Norway and other European nations.  It is unique because it was formed at a time when the nation was bifurcating into slave and non-slave regions.  It is not possible to enslave black-skinned people without falling victim to the allure of white supremacy and the need to create a form of religion that supports that belief.  It would take a Civil War and a century later a Civil Rights Revolution to fully eliminate the legal residue of slavery.  However, the socialization of white supremacy and far-right versions of Christianity still exist.  Our two-party political system once worked reasonably well because there was political diversity within each party with enough overlap to make progress on compelling problems.  Now, the two parties have perfectly aligned themselves into a configuration that recasts the long simmering slave versus non-slave state conflict into a modern form.

Each political party sees the other as an existential threat.  Fear of what an untethered majority party might do is the crux of our political dilemma.  Proposals to amend the Constitution to make majoritarian decisions easier to implement will always be viewed as benefiting one party over the other.  The unhappy party can always veto any such notion.  Instead, we are in a legal and political war with one side seeing majoritarianism as the key to its future while the other sees anti-majoritarianism as its path to power.  It is democracy versus autocracy.  Wars end when one side becomes unable to fight on.  Who knows when or if that will ever happen.

 

Why We Have Been Stuck with the Electoral College

 The Presidential election of 2024 is near upon us and we are once again wondering how our nation managed to stumble into the Electoral College as a means for selecting a President.  How could such a bizarre and complicated approach have been arrived at, and what did the Electoral College have to do with democracy?  In his book, Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?,

Alexander Keyssar provides an explanation for why it was chosen and why it has survived all these years even though everyone seems to agree that it was a dumb idea.

One must recall the constraints faced by those tasked with writing a constitution for the intended United States.  They had to come up with a document that would gain the approval of all the states while each state had its own desires and concerns.  Of most significance were the small states whose influence might be totally lost to those much more highly populated.  Also, the slave states had to be convinced that slavery would continue unhindered under any constitution.  In addition, each state was hesitant to give up too much of their power to a federal government.  If there was to be an executive branch led by a president, then the simplest approach would be for the members of the legislative branch to make the selection.  Keyssar tells the reader that this was the first plan considered and the one the convention returned to after every failure to find an alternative.  However, there were influential people who believed the two branches should be independent.  A second option that drew considerable interest was selection of the president by a national election.  Such a path would produce significant logistical difficulties, but none that could not be overcome.  However, the southern slave states were not in favor of any process in which their influence depended on the number of votes cast.  Much of their population consisted of nonvoting slaves.  The smaller states were bought off by creating an upper legislative body, the Senate, where all states had equal representation.  The slave states were bought off by allowing each slave to be counted as three-fifths of a resident.  The slaves would thus be included in the population used for allocating seats in the lower legislative body, the House. 

Discussions continued but time was running out.

“It was against this backdrop—months of indecision, disagreement, and ‘reiterated discussions’—that the weary delegates, at the end of August, finally turned the issue over to a committee on ‘postponed parts’…chaired by David Brearly of New Jersey.  In less than a week, that committee, which counted Madison and Morris among its members, returned with a proposal for the institutional configuration that, with a slight revision, would come to be called ‘the Electoral College.’  Each state would be entitled to a number of electors equivalent to its total membership in Congress…and the legislature of each state would determine the manner in which those electors would be chosen (giving state governments significant influence in the process while allowing for the possibility of a popular vote to choose electors.)”

“Indeed, as historian Jack Rakove has pointed out, the key to the outcome in the Convention was not that the Electoral College had great and unmistakable virtues but that it had fewer perceived disadvantages than the leading alternatives.  It was, in effect, a consensus second choice, made acceptable, in part, by the remarkably complex details that themselves constituted compromises among, or gestures towards, particular constituencies and convictions.”

“At heart, the architecture of the electoral system represented a compromise between those who favored a selection by Congress and those who insisted that such a process had fatal flaws.  In its composition, the Electoral college was (and is) a temporary replica of Congress populated by ‘electors’ (chosen by the states) who would assemble only once (in their home states) and who would have no ongoing dealings with the national government.  It was, in effect, a temporary legislature, an assembly that could not legislate and thus could not wield ongoing influence or be corrupted.  It also would disband after carrying out its one function.”

These electors were assumed to be selections of the best and brightest men who would make choices not tainted by partisan politics but rather only focused on what was best for the nation.  But with the states in control of the selection process, the electors quickly became mere tools of those in control of the state government.  And since there were multiple options for selecting electors, the exact process utilized was often the one that produced the greatest partisan advantage.  It was not long before the shortcomings of the system became obvious. 

“The first three presidential elections, conducted in accordance with the constitutional blueprint, proceeded fairly smoothly, although they revealed some wrinkles in the electoral process, suggesting a potential lack of alignment between the Constitution’s directives and the emerging practice of presidential politics.  The fourth contest between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in 1800, precipitated a severe and messy electoral crisis that was resolved in the House of Representatives only after prolonged public and behind-the-scenes drama.”

There were immediate calls for changes to the presidential election process.  Over the years, there would be hundreds of attempts to introduce changes that would make the process more consistent with the assumption that the United States was a democracy, but little was accomplished.  The Constitution made it too easy for minorities to stymy the will of the majority.  The original compromises made to protect the power of slave-states and that of low-population states provided benefits that are not likely to ever be given up.

“The proposal adopted by the Convention carried over into presidential selection the advantages that had been granted to small and slave states with respect to representation in Congress; in so doing, it gave both groups influence in presidential elections disproportionate to their free (or voting) populations.  This disproportionate power could affect the outcome of elections, as would soon become clear when electoral votes attributed to slaves provided Thomas Jefferson’s margin of victory over John Adams in 1800; it remained clear in 2000 when George W. Bush became president despite losing the popular vote, thanks to his having won most of the smallest states in the nation.”

“Another significant consequence of this design—unforeseen and probably unforeseeable at the time—was that it laid the groundwork for an alliance between small states and the South that would, in future decades and centuries, be a potential source of resistance to reforms of the electoral system.”

The three-fifths valuation of nonvoting slaves became a five-fifths advantage when Jim Crow took over after the Civil War increasing the extra representation of the former slave states relative to their voting population.

“As Washington Post columnist Drew Pearson observed in 1944, the ‘Southern States now have 25.2 percent of the nation’s vote in the Electoral College’ while casting ‘only 12 percent of the popular vote.’  This was an advantage that white southerners welcomed and fought to keep; they also knew that a national vote would create pressures to broaden the franchise in their states.  The design of the Electoral College was such that states did not lose any influence by imposing restrictions on the right to vote.”

We have now come to the point where the Republican Party is mainly composed of former slave states and low-population states.  Neither of which has ever seen any advantage to majority rule inherent in a democracy.  There is no future for that party in a democracy; therefore, democracy must be inhibited.

 

Politics and Religion: Christian Nationalism Is Christian Fascism

 Politics and religion are two arenas where people tend to categorize others as either “them” or “us,” tribal behavior in other words.  Depending on what is at stake, these intergroup interactions can become nasty and even lead to violence.  Political contentions can lead to compromises providing a state of truce between the various parties.  Religious contentions tend to be more difficult to resolve since they can include issues of salvation and perhaps a perception of the will of God.  The most incendiary situations are those in which groups have aligned their religious motivations with political goals.  A belief that the hand of God is at work makes compromise all but impossible and can justify any means to attain a political goal.  The result is often death and destruction.

Tim Alberta spends much of his book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, considering the intersection of politics and religion among his class of white American evangelicals.  This is a religious category dedicated to promoting right-wing Republican candidates.  It is common for these people to support a Christian-based society influenced by specific biblical interpretations.  This development has been referred to as Christian nationalism, but since the movement is inherently undemocratic and encourages autocracy, Christian fascism is the more appropriate label. 

Alberta presents Russia under Vladimir Putin as an example of a Christian fascist state.  He provides the viewpoint of Cyril Hovorun in describing how secular political goals were advanced by collaboration with a power-hungry religious leadership.

“An Orthodox monk, Hovorun spent a decade in Moscow as the theological aide-de-camp to Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church and the second most powerful man in Russia.”

The secular political goal of Putin was to begin by reestablishing the former Soviet Union and become the dominant political and military power in Eurasia.  In so doing, he would make the world safe for fascism, which he believed to be the natural order of the human species.

“As the historian Mara Kozelsky observed, ‘Orthodox Christian nationalism has been on the rise in Russia from the collapse of the Soviet Union,’ the by-product of a state desperate to rediscover legitimacy in the eyes of a chastened and aimless populace.  Hovorun remembers being alarmed in 2007 when Vladimir Putin announced at a global security forum his desire to recreate the old Soviet empire.  What concerned him even more was how, around that same time, the Kremlin began deploying obtrusive language around the restoration of ‘traditional values.’  It seemed clear that the strategy of Russia’s government—in partnership, Hovorun began to suspect, with Patriarch Kirill and the Orthodox Church—was to create a spiritual rationale for policies that might otherwise prove unpopular.”

“When Russia passed a 2013 law banning ‘propaganda of nontraditional sexual relationships,’ it was evident that Putin, in contrast to leaders of the liberalizing and secularizing West, was successfully depicting himself as a global champion of religious and cultural fundamentalism.”

This invoking of protections for “traditional values” made Putin popular with conservative religious groups, particularly those in the US.  Hovorun would leave Russia before the inevitable steps of Putin’s plan could be implemented.  It would begin with the invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014.

“This blatant violation of international law—as well as the bloody campaign that ensued in the Donbas, a disputed region of eastern Ukraine—was made palatable to the Russian people thanks to Moscow’s rhetoric of divine destiny.  Gone was any pretense of institutional independence for the Orthodox Church.  Vladimir Putin and Patriarch Kirill were now operating in tandem.”

“By the time Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Kremlin had perfected a propaganda that casts nationalistic aggression in terms of cultural defense, geopolitical conquest in terms of religious obligation…The Russian people were convinced, Hovorun said, that they were fighting a ‘sacred war’ to liberate Ukraine from secularists, apostates, even Nazis.  And though much of the heavy lifting was done by Patriarch Kirill—who told Russian troops mobilizing toward Ukraine to ‘remember that if you lay down your life for your country, you will be with God’—history would record a new canon being authored by Russia’s president.”

There are lessons to be learned from this intersection of politics and religion.

“Russia wasn’t merely using Christianity to endorse its ambitions.  Russia was using Christianity to define its enemies.  It was the kind of identitarian programming that presaged some of history’s greatest crimes—and, in the case of Russia’s butchery in Ukraine, it would not have been possible without the blessing of the Church.”

The butchery includes, among other things, torture, rape, mass murder of civilians, and cultural genocide; such is the involvement of Christianity in politics.

“When you have a special mission from God, then you are not bound by moral norms,’ Hovorun said.  ‘You are free to do whatever your mission requires you to do’.”

Alberta’s ultimate interest was in the future of Christian nationalism within his evangelical community.  Discussions led to this comment.

“Hovorun fought a smirk while describing how Putin manipulated his countrymen into buying a revisionist ‘founding myth’ of their nation, his goal being to ‘Make Russia Great Again’.” 

The American white evangelicals have long followed Putin’s progress and have set the stage for a similar move.  The myth of America as being formed as a Christian nation has long been accepted by many.  That theme has even been expanded to include a presumed covenant between God and America, similar to that God had with the ancient Israelites.  Alberta provides the perspective of Chris Winans, a pastor friend.

“’At its root, we’re talking about idolatry.  America has become an idol to some of these people,’ Winans said.  ‘If you believe that God is in covenant with America, then you believe—and I’ve heard lots of people say this explicitly—that we’re a new Israel.  You believe that the sorts of promises made to Israel are applicable to this country; you view America as a covenant that needs to be protected.  You have to fight for America as if salvation itself hangs in the balance.  At that point, you understand yourself as an American first and most fundamentally.  And that is a terrible misunderstanding of who we’re called to be’.”

When Putin began his full invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the religious right demonstrated that their allegiance was more with Putin than with their own country.

“…Tucker Carlson, at the time still the top-rated Fox News personality, spent the first year of the war defending Putin’s honor, downplaying his savagery, and describing America’s aid to Ukraine as a secular ‘jihad’ aimed at toppling ‘an orthodox Christian country with traditional values.’  (He was joined in this effort by far-right American lawmakers, such as Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who ranted on Carlson’s show about ‘this war against Russia in Ukraine.’)  Carlson’s program was played in a loop on Russian state television to reinforce the Kremlin’s talking points.”

The situation in the United States is quite different from that in Russia.  The desire for religious involvement, and hopefully control, in political matters is already strong.  There is a significant body of religious fascists in the United States just waiting for a messiah-like figure, another Putin perhaps, to arrive and lead them in forming the Christian fascist nation they believe is their God-given destiny.  The person who showed up was Donald Trump.

Fortunately for the world, Donald Trump was incompetent and more interested in frequent adulation sessions than revolution.  But now he is surrounded by a host of ambitious revolutionaries who think they can use Trump to gain power and then maintain it.  Alberta provides a warning about the no-longer-Christian religious right, a major component of those power seekers.

“Something was happening on the religious right, something more menacing and extreme than anything that preceded it.  This was no longer about winning elections and preserving the culture.  This was about destroying enemies and dominating the country by any means necessary.  There was no rhetoric too appalling, no alliance too shady, no biblical application too sacrilegious.”

Trump did send out a message assuring these people that if elected he would see they got what they want and they wouldn’t have to bother voting ever again.  Hopefully, he will not have the opportunity to produce this revolution.

Eventually, a competent demagogue may appear and then we are in real trouble.

White American Evangelicals: Redefining Christianity

 Tim Alberta is an experienced journalist covering politics in America.  He is also a Christian son of a pastor with access to ministers and theologians in the evangelical arena.  He attempts to combine those backgrounds to provide a look at the state of evangelical Christianity and explain how it arrived at that state.  He provides his reporting in the book The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.  The “American” modifier is important because evangelicals in our country are somewhat unique and other claimants to that label are likely to behave quite differently.  He would also agree the filter “white” should be included to limit who is under consideration in his work.  The fact that white American evangelicals are separate from non-white American evangelicals is something he should have spent more time considering.

Alberta’s first task is to define exactly what an evangelical is.  He saves the reader much obscure and irrelevant history and provides a direct and useful definition.

“By the 1980s, with the rise of the Moral Majority, a religious marker was transforming into a partisan movement.  ‘Evangelical’ soon became synonymous with ‘conservative Christian,’ and eventually with ‘white conservative Republican’.”

The author describes white evangelicals as a group beset by religious operators who spread the fear that secular liberals were intent on destroying them and their religion.  That group was after the peoples’ money.  They would eventually be joined by another group that was after their votes.  Alberta includes quotes from Russell Moore, a Southern Baptist leader.

“Evangelicals should have seen this coming—not because of the right-wing-media-induced freakouts over immigration patterns or Obama’s birth certificate, but because of the for-profit propagandizing of Christians that had been successful for decades.  Long before your average churchgoer was addicted to Fox News prime time ‘these same people were listening to four or five hours of fundamentalist, prophecy-charting, conspiracy preachers on the radio and TV every single day,’ Moore said.  ‘So, it’s not all that different.  There’s just a lot more of it now, and its more explicitly political in its aims’.”

As to why evangelicals are so easily manipulated and taken advantage of, Alberta provides the following as a partial explanation.

“American evangelicalism has long been plagued by a certain pedagogical insecurity.  Whatever their collective influence amassed in certain arenas—politics and business certainly—evangelicals have chafed at their seeming exclusion from elite social, academic, and intellectual circles.  This hunger for relevance can result in the lionizing of men who infiltrate society’s innermost sanctums, seemingly on their behalf, representing their views and validating their beliefs and giving them a metaphorical seat at the table.  Simply put, evangelicals hate feeling like outcasts, and are quick to uncritically follow those who make them feel accepted, relevant, and enlightened.”

The pastors and theologians that Alberta spends so much time with might be concerned about being viewed as enlightened, but what about the foot soldiers of this Republican religious movement?  What is driving those millions of voters?

Alberta also noted a disturbing trend for religious issues to seek resolution in the Old Testament rather than the New Testament where Jesus’s teachings are described.  The right-wing religious refer to Jesus constantly, but rarely behave according to his teachings.

“…the great majority of what voters would hear from GOP politicians, came from the Old Testament.  That never struck me as a coincidence.  Jesus, in his three years of teaching, talked mostly about helping the poor, humbling oneself, and having no earthly ambition but to gain eternal life.  Suffice it to say, the beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount (‘Blessed are the meek…Blessed are the merciful…Blessed are the peacemakers’) were never conducive to a stump speech.  This isn’t to suggest that Old Testament passages are somehow backward or illegitimate; many of these writings, timeless in their wisdom, have shaped my own views of the world.  I just always found it strange that these Christians relied so infrequently on the words of Christ.”

This focus on the Old Testament has taken the evangelical movement in a dangerous direction.  If one believes that the economic and military might of one’s country makes it the greatest nation on Earth, and one believes that God is behind the Earth’s happenings, then it is a short stretch to assume that God has chosen to bless this country.  One has the example of the covenant between God and the ancient Hebrews to spark the imagination and suggest that God has a covenant with our people.

“…given the miraculous nature of America’s defeat of Great Britain, its rise to superpower status, and its legacy of spreading freedom and democracy (and yes, Christianity) across the globe—it’s easy to see why so many evangelicals believe that our country is divinely blessed.  The problem is, blessings often become indistinguishable from entitlements.  Once we become convinced that God has blessed something, that something can become an object of jealousy, obsession—even worship.”

Alberta provides the perspective of Chris Winans, a pastor friend.

“’At its root, we’re talking about idolatry.  America has become an idol to some of these people,’ Winans said.  ‘If you believe that God is in covenant with America, then you believe—and I’ve heard lots of people say this explicitly—that we’re a new Israel.  You believe that the sorts of promises made to Israel are applicable to this country; you view America as a covenant that needs to be protected.  You have to fight for America as if salvation itself hangs in the balance.  At that point, you understand yourself as an American first and most fundamentally.  And that is a terrible misunderstanding of who we’re called to be’.”

Given a belief in this new covenant, are the traditional teachings of Jesus in the New Testament superseded?  Some behave as if they are.  In any event, the recognition of this view helps explain why Trump’s “Make America Great Again” resonates so strongly with the religious right.

This trend towards the Old Testament is not a new phenomenon.  It is as old as the existence of slavery in our nation.  If one wishes to believe that their Christian religion allows the buying, selling, and killing of a specific group of people, one will not find support in the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament; but in the Old Testament almost anything is possible.  The heart of the evangelical movement has always been in the South where the abuse of black people has been part of the culture and part of the white Christian religion.  In the first half of the twentieth century many millions of black people would flee the South looking for relief from Jim Crow in northern and western cities.  In numbers many millions more than that, Whites would escape from the South looking for better economic conditions.  They would bring their culture with them in what has been referred to as the “Southernization of America.”

Alberta recognizes that racism is a part of the evangelical community, but he does not pursue that lead.  Anthea Butler is a black professor of religion whose experiences with white evangelicals led her to produce the book White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America.  She provides the following perspective.

“It was evangelically sanctioned racism that motivated believers to separate and sell families during slavery and to march with the Klan.  Racist evangelicals shielded cross burners, protected church burners, and participated in lynchings.  Racism is a feature, not a bug of American evangelicalism.”

“It is racism that binds and blinds many white American evangelicals to the vilification of Muslims, Latinos, and African Americans.  It is racism that impels many evangelicals to oppose immigration and turn a blind eye to children in cages at the border.  It is racism that fuels evangelical Islamophobia.”

If Alberta had spent more time talking with what he considered a minority of troublemakers in the evangelical world, he might have better understood who and what he was dealing with.

Arlie Russell Hochschild is a sociology professor at the University of California at Berkeley who wished to understand what drove the Tea Party movement that arose after the election of Barack Obama as President.  She resolved to spend time in what she considered the heart of Tea Party support.  She would end up spending several years in communication with the residents of a town in Louisiana trying to understand why the people of that location did what they did and voted the way they voted.  She produced the fascinating book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016).  Hochschild was thinking in terms of the Tea Party, not evangelicals, at the time, but those she dealt with satisfied Alberta’s definition of an evangelical as Christian and a white conservative Republican.

Hochschild digested what she was learning and managed to assemble a description that captures and illustrates the perspective shared by those she encountered in Louisiana.  She refers to it as a “deep story,” a concept that is a bit hard to describe but is clear once an example is provided.

This is Hochschild’s deep story.

“You are patiently standing in a long line leading up a hill, as in a pilgrimage.  You are situated in the middle of this line, along with others who are also white, older, Christian, and predominately male, some with college degrees, some not.”

“Just over the brow of the hill is the American Dream, the goal of everyone waiting in line.  Many in the back of the line are people of color—poor, young and old, mainly without college degrees.  It’s scary to look back; there are so many behind you, and in principle you wish them well.  Still, you’ve waited a long time, worked hard, and the line is barely moving.  You deserve to move forward a little faster.  You’re patient but weary.  You focus ahead, especially on those at the very top of the hill.”

“The sun is hot and the line unmoving.  In fact, is it moving backward?”

“Look!  You see people cutting in line ahead of you!  You’re following the rules.  They aren’t.  As they cut in, it feels like you are being moved back.  How can they just do that?  Who are they?  Some are black.  Through affirmative action plans, pushed by the federal government, they are being given preference for places in colleges and universities, apprenticeships, jobs, welfare payments, and free lunches, and they hold a certain secret place in people’s minds…Women, immigrants, refugees, public sector workers—where will it end?”

“Then you become suspicious.  If people are cutting in line ahead of you, someone must be helping them.  Who?  A man is monitoring the line, walking up and down it, ensuring that the line is orderly and that access to the Dream is fair.  His name is President Barack Hussein Obama.  But—hey—you see him waving to the line cutters.  He’s helping them.  He feels extra sympathy for them that he does not feel for you.  He’s on their side.  He’s telling you that these line cutters deserve special treatment and that they’ve had a harder time than you’ve had.”

“You resent them, and you feel that it’s right that you do.  So do your friends.  Fox commentators reflect your feelings, for your deep story is also the Fox News deep story.”

When Hochschild communicated her “deep story” to the people she met in Louisiana, they generally agreed that it was an accurate representation.

Racism is a feature, not a bug, in the Christian right wing.

For completeness Hochschild also produced a deep story for the liberal left.

“In it, people stand around a large public square inside of which are creative science museums for kids, public art and theater programs, libraries, schools—a state-of-the-art public infrastructure available for use by all.  They are fiercely proud of it.  Some of them built it.  Outsiders can join those standing around the square, since a lot of people who are insiders now were outsiders in the past; incorporation and acceptance of difference feel like American values represented in the Statue of Liberty.  But in the liberal deep story, an alarming event occurs; marauders invade the public square, recklessly dismantle it, and selfishly steal away bricks and concrete chunks from the public buildings at its center.  Seeing insult added to injury, those guarding the public square watch helplessly as those who’ve dismantled it construct private McMansions with the same bricks and pieces of concrete, privatizing the public realm.  That’s the gist of the liberal deep story, and the right can’t understand the deep pride liberals take in their creatively designed, hard-won public sphere as a powerful integrative force in American life.”

If one is searching for evidence of Christian behavior, one is more likely to find it in the activities of secular liberals than in those of the religious right.

 

China and Russia: An Intriguing Friendship

 Just prior to the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia acquired from China an expression of “unlimited friendship.”  That certainly could be interpreted as China not disapproving of Russia’s invasion, but it is not necessarily an expression of support.  Both nations have explicitly expressed the intention to end the domination of the international scene by the US-led bloc of democracies.  The impression is conveyed that the two nations are pursuing a common agenda.  In the spirit of “there is no honor among thieves,” one has to wonder.

Both nations have immense ambitions.  Russia (Putin) believes itself the center of Eurasian civilization, with the expressed goal of leading a new political entity that would extend from Eastern Russia to Portugal.  China believes itself the center of all human civilization, providing it the right to be the world’s dominant political and military power.  Given these viewpoints, a naïve Russia could perceive an alliance with China as something beneficial, but China might view such an alliance as an opportunity to use an ally to help defeat a third-party enemy.  Consider this comment by Michael Pillsbury in The Hundred-Year Marathon: China's Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower.

“The Chinese planned to use the Americans as they had used the Soviets—as tools for their own advancement, all the while pledging cooperation against a third rival power.  This is how the marathon was conducted throughout most of the cold war—China using the Soviet Union’s rivalry with America to extract Soviet aid and then, when that faltered, shifting to the Americans by offering to help against the Soviets.  In doing so, the Chinese were reflecting another ancient stratagem—‘kill with a borrowed sword’—or, in other words, attack using the strength of another.”

In Ukraine, is China assisting an ally, or using Russia to weaken itself along with the US and Europe?

Geographically, Russia is a huge country with a sparse population.  It is wealthy in natural resources and earns its income from exporting them but has few exports of developed products other than weapons.  Except for grain, natural resources came under sanctions after the invasion of Ukraine.  China came to Russia’s aid by buying energy products, but at a discount.  China is providing Russia with dual-use goods that are difficult to obtain because of the wartime sanctions.  That is helping Russia continue its war in Ukraine, but, thus far, resisted providing weaponry that might allow it to win the war.  And why would it?  A victorious Russia is an ascendent nation and competition for China.  Wouldn’t it be far better to let Russia and the US and its allies fight on until they are all weakened to the point that China’s dominance is enhanced?   China might dream of a day when Russia is so diminished that it would effectively become a vassal to China, providing it with unlimited access to all those natural resources.

Stay tuned!  There will be many episodes in this drama.

 

Taiwan, Semiconductor Chip Production, and International Tensions

 The United States has accumulated many responsibilities across the globe requiring them to come to the aid of various countries should they be attacked.  The biggest commitment is to NATO to protect its member nations in case of a military assault.  The Russian invasion of Ukraine was deemed of sufficient threat to NATO countries that Ukraine is supported by NATO nations as it fights to maintain its existence.  This is a proxy war for the US, providing monetary and military resources, along with other nations, to keep Ukraine’s hopes alive.  Putin has already let Europe know that Ukraine is not its only target.  The US was also drawn into the Israeli conflict with Hamas, with Israel receiving military and economic aid, as well as occasional US battlefield assistance.  This activity is also seen as a proxy war between Iran and Israel (and Israel’s allies).  The US has a long-standing commitment to come to the aid of South Korea if the North decides to provoke military action.  North Korea is constantly reminding the world of its growing military capabilities.  The least understood commitment is the one the US has for the island nation of Taiwan.  The potential opponent related to that nation is China.  Interestingly, China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea act as if they have a formal alliance to wrest world domination from the US and its allied democracies.  They support each other militarily and economically.  Two of the four members have fomented serious military conflict in different parts of the globe.  Could there be a third coming…or a fourth?

When Chaing Kai-shek lost the civil war with the communists after World War II, he, his army, and supporters withdrew to the island of Formosa.  His hope was always to reconquer the mainland.  The US became involved when Mao threatened military action.  Eisenhower came to Chiang’s support because foiling the assault of a noncommunist country by a communist country is what the US did in that era.  Nixon and Kissinger, in the 1970s wanted to establish relations with China and signed documentation stating that there was only one China and that included Taiwan.  At the time Chaing was still alive and continued to believe that he deserved to be the leader of that one China.  The One China Policy became more convoluted when Taiwan, relieved finally from Chaing’s rule, became a democracy and began claiming its right to independence.

The US was in the position of needing to protect a noncommunist country from a communist country while still claiming it adhered to the One China Policy.  This awkward stance continued for some time as Mao’s successors seemed to have other things to worry about.  That changed when Xi Jinping came to power.  He made “unification” with Taiwan critical to his China and has threatened to use force to make it happen.  President Biden has also changed policy by claiming that the US would come to Taiwan’s aid if it was attacked. 

Why have China and the US both drastically altered their policies toward Taiwan?  Little Taiwan is big Taiwan when it comes to economic prowess.  It developed unmatched capabilities at producing advanced semiconductor chips.  It became China’s leading trading partner and has world economies trembling should its chip fabrication assets be threatened by anything.  Chris Miller provides a highly interesting history in his book Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology, explaining how Taiwan attained such economic power.

The development of semiconductor chips that could replace bulky and power-hungry electrical circuits provided a turning point in human civilization.  At first, the defense industries jumped at the opportunity to combine explosive power with computing power great enough to provide guidance for more precise targeting.  The race was on to produce integrated circuits that could provide complex calculations with minimum space, weight, and power demands.  As these complex circuits became smaller and cheaper the market drivers became consumer products.

“…semiconductors are embedded in every device that requires computing power—and in the age of the Internet of Things, this means pretty much every device.  Even hundred-year-old products like automobiles now often include a thousand dollars worth of chips.  Most of the world’s GDP is produced with devices that rely on semiconductors.  For a product that didn’t exist seventy-five years ago, this is an extraordinary ascent.”

The desire for smaller and more powerful chips drove more complex and expensive technology development.  Early companies tried to control the entire process: designing chips and fabricating them.  Soon the expense of new developments became so great that only a few large companies could maintain this model, while others settled into niches that could continue to be profitable.  The extreme expense of technology development led to a necessary monopolization of capabilities.

“In the age of AI (artificial intelligence), it’s often said that data is the new oil.  Yet the real limitation we face isn’t the availability of data but of processing power.  There’s a finite number of semiconductors that can store and process data.  Producing them is mind-bogglingly complex and horrendously expensive.  Unlike oil, which can be bought from many countries, our production of computing power depends fundamentally on a series of choke points: tools, chemicals, and software that often are produced by a handful of companies—and sometimes only by one.  No other facet of the economy is so dependent on so few firms.  Chips from Taiwan provide 37 percent of the world’s new computing power each year.  Two Korean companies produce 44 percent of the world’s memory chips.  The Dutch company ASML builds 100 percent of the world’s extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, without which cutting-edge chips are simply impossible to make.  OPEC’s 40 percent share of world oil production looks unimpressive by comparison.”

A paucity of sources for cutting-edge products puts supply chains for major goods at risk.  Consider Apple and its iPhone suppliers and understand why Taiwan is so important to the global economy.

“For the past decade, each generation of iPhone has been powered by one of the world’s most advanced processor chips.  In total, it takes over a dozen semiconductors to make a smartphone work, with different chips managing the battery, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, cellular network connections, audio, the camera, and more.”

“Apple makes precisely none of these chips.  It buys most off-the-shelf: memory chips from Japan’s Kioxia, radio frequency chips from California’s Skyworks, audio chips from Cirrus Logic, based in Austin, Texas.  Apple designs in-house the ultra-complex processors that run an iPhone’s operating system.  But the Cupertino, California’s colossus can’t manufacture these chips.  Nor can any company in the United States, Europe, Japan, or China.  Today, Apple’s most advanced processors—which are arguably the world’s most advanced semiconductors—can only be produced by a single company in a single building, the most expensive factory in human history…” 

“Today, no firm fabricates chips with more precision than the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, better known as TSMC.”

So, China is threatening an invasion of Taiwan.  Is that because it yearns for a single China or is it because it covets Taiwan’s assets?  Whatever the reason, it is unlikely that China would risk destroying TSMC’s facilities.

“After a disaster in Taiwan, in other words, the total costs would be measured in the trillions.  Losing 37 percent of our production of computing power each year could well be more costly than the COVID pandemic and its economically disastrous lockdowns.  It would take at least half a decade to rebuild the lost chipmaking capacity.  These days when we look five years out we hope to be building 5G networks and metaverses, but if Taiwan were taken offline we might find ourselves struggling to acquire dishwashers.”

Given its avowed goal of becoming the dominant economic power in the world, China would certainly wish to have control of Taiwan’s chip fabrication capabilities.  Meanwhile the US and other nations would be willing to take drastic steps to see that does not happen.

“If China were to succeed in pressuring Taiwan into giving Beijing equal access—or even preferential access—to TSMC’s fabs, the U.S. and Japan would surely respond by placing new limits on the export of advanced machinery and materials, which largely come from these two countries and their European allies.  But it would take years to replicate Taiwan’s chip making capacity in other countries, and in the meantime we’d still depend on Taiwan.  If so, we would find ourselves not only reliant on China to assemble our iPhones.  Beijing could conceivably gain influence over the only fabs with the technological capability and production capacity to churn out the chips we depend on.”

This discussion should provoke some thoughts about how far nations like the US should go in discouraging any attempt by China to control Taiwan.  The US and the world have an economic interest at stake.

The world’s dependence on Taiwan justifies the legislation passed by the US, “Chips for America.”  This is a collection of programs designed to move some of the chip fabrication capability of Samsung and TSMC to plants in the US.  It would also support Intel in competing with Samsung and TSMC as a foundry making the next generation of advanced chips for other users.  Let us thank good old Joe for that one.

To those with an interest in chip technology and the history of the industry, I heartily recommend “Chip War” by Chris Miller.  He has an exciting story to tell, and he tells it well.  I felt like I was reading downhill, faster and faster.

 

China’s Plan for the World’s Future

 China is a powerhouse.  It is a major contributor to the world economy, it is politically active across the globe, and it continues to grow its military capabilities.  Many nations worry about its short-term objectives as well as its long-term goals.  China has made it clear that they deserve to be the example for other countries, and they wish to be a major influence in world affairs.  The issue is the role other countries might play in a China-dominated world.  Elizabeth Economy takes a shot at addressing these concerns in a Foreign Affairs article: China’s Alternative Order: And What America Should Learn From It.

“By now, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s ambition to remake the world is undeniable. He wants to dissolve Washington’s network of alliances and purge what he dismisses as ‘Western’ values from international bodies. He wants to knock the U.S. dollar off its pedestal and eliminate Washington’s chokehold over critical technology. In his new multipolar order, global institutions and norms will be underpinned by Chinese notions of common security and economic development, Chinese values of state-determined political rights, and Chinese technology. China will no longer have to fight for leadership. Its centrality will be guaranteed.”

Many of the alliances Xi is disturbed by are alliances that are formed to protect members from Xi’s goals.  And the “Western” values include basic human rights and democracy.  His goal is to make the international community more welcoming to autocrats, dictators, and fascists.  Apparently, “Chinese” values will be propagated by military and economic dominance.

“To hear Xi tell it, this world is within reach. At the Central Conference on Work Relating to Foreign Affairs last December, he boasted that Beijing was (in the words of a government press release) a ‘confident, self-reliant, open and inclusive major country,’ one that had created the world’s ‘largest platform for international cooperation’ and led the way in ‘reforming the international system.’ He asserted that his conception for the global order—a ‘community with a shared future for mankind’—had evolved from a ‘Chinese initiative’ to an ‘international consensus,’ to be realized through the implementation of four Chinese programs: the Belt and Road Initiative, the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, and the Global Civilization Initiative.”

This statement seriously overhypes Xi’s successes, but he has had some.  Those who are in favor of the status quo or who feel threatened by China are forming collaborations to protect themselves.  Those who are dissatisfied with the status quo or who favor nondemocratic governance have begun to express interest in China’s initiatives.

The author warns the US and its allies that China must be taken seriously, and its activities should be countered by constructive initiatives. 

“Rather than dismissing Beijing’s playbook, U.S. policymakers should learn from it. To win what will be a long-term competition, the United States must seize the mantle of change that China has claimed. Washington needs to articulate and push forward its own vision for a transformed international system and the U.S. role within that system—one that is inclusive of countries at different economic levels and with different political systems.”

There are two ways to approach China and its activities.  China is either a competitor who plays according to international norms, or it is an enemy who feels no need to play by any rules but its own.  Economy seems to believe competition with China can be conducted safely and productively.  There are others who view China as a potential existential threat.  Consider the views expressed by Michael Pillsbury in his book The Hundred-Year Marathon: China's Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower.

Pillsbury has had long experience in dealing with the Chinese.  He also has the ability to read the things they write to each other, rather than just what gets translated for international discussion.  China’s hundred-year plan is driven by the desire for revenge against those who mistreated it during the colonial era, and the desire to regain its position as the center of civilization on Earth.

“…they see a multipolar world as merely a strategic waypoint en route to a new global hierarchy in which China is alone at the top.  The Chinese term for this new order is da tong, often mistranslated by Western scholars as ‘commonwealth,’ or ‘an era of harmony.’  However, da tong is better translated as ‘an era of unipolar dominance.’  Since 2005, Chinese leaders have spoken at the United Nations and other public forums of their supposed vision of this kind of harmonious world.”

“For example, Zhao Tingyang’s The Under-Heaven System: The Philosophy of World Institution was published in 2005 and is gaining increasing currency in mainline Chinese thought today.  Zhao’s ‘system’ redesigns global structures based on traditional Chinese ideals.  That new world is called tianxia, which in Mandarin can be translated as ‘under-heaven,’ ‘empire,’ and ‘China.’  The China scholar William A. Callahan translates tianxia as a unified global system with China’s ‘superior’ civilization at the top.  Other civilizations, such as the United States, are part of the ‘barbarian wilderness.’  As the center of the civilized world, China would have the responsibility to ‘improve’ all the nations and peoples of the world by ‘harmonizing’ them—spreading Chinese values, language, and culture so they can better fit into under-heaven.  This empire ‘values order over freedom, ethics over law, and elite governance over democracy and human rights’.”

That author made it clear to Pillsbury that to sustain such a system, China would have to possess overwhelming military might such that there could be no possibility of contesting China’s mandates.

If one wishes to compete with someone, one had better understand who one is dealing with, and what the real rules of competition are going to be.  With China, we are not there yet.

 

The Axis of Upheaval: The Overturning of the Global Order

Here, we have been referring to the increasing levels of contention between the so-called alliance of autocrats and the alliance of democracies as the initiation of World War III.  The grouping of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea is combating the alliance of US and its various allies in NATO and the EU along with a few Eastern countries such as Japan, South Korea, and Australia.  This conflict is occurring on military, economic, political, and moral battlefields.  It is not clear who is winning at this point, and even less clear where the future might take us.  But history informs us that the side that underestimates the capabilities of its adversary or fails to even recognize its intentions is at a severe disadvantage.

Western news and opinion media have begun to awaken to the realization that world events are rapidly moving in dangerous directions.  A Foreign Affairs article by Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Richard Fontaine, The Axis of Upheaval, provides an example of current discourse.  It provides this lede.

“How America’s Adversaries Are Uniting to Overturn the Global Order”

“The growing cooperation among China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia is fueled by their shared opposition to the Western-dominated global order, an antagonism rooted in their belief that that system does not accord them the status or freedom of action they deserve. Each country claims a sphere of influence: China’s ‘core interests,’ which extend to Taiwan and the South China Sea; Iran’s ‘axis of resistance,’ the set of proxy groups that give Tehran leverage in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere; North Korea’s claim to the entire Korean Peninsula; and Russia’s ‘near abroad,’ which for the Kremlin includes, at a minimum, the countries that composed its historic empire. All four countries see the United States as the primary obstacle to establishing these spheres of influence, and they want Washington’s presence in their respective regions reduced.”

The authors dismiss the idea that the four autocratic nations should be considered an alliance and then proceed to list multiple examples of the autocratic group performing as if it were an alliance.  Perhaps they believe an alliance exists only after communicating a mutually signed document revealing its intentions.

“The group is not an exclusive bloc and certainly not an alliance. It is, instead, a collection of dissatisfied states converging on a shared purpose of overturning the principles, rules, and institutions that underlie the prevailing international system.” 

The fact that the countries were collaborating on a shared agenda became unavoidable when Russia invaded Ukraine.  The potential consequences of the collaboration became frightening as Iranian-backed groups attacked Israel.  Initiating a third concurrent conflict might leave the US-backed international system overextended and ineffective.

“Collaboration among axis members is not new. China and Russia have been strengthening their partnership since the end of the Cold War—a trend that accelerated rapidly after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. China’s share of Russian external trade doubled from ten to 20 percent between 2013 and 2021, and between 2018 and 2022 Russia supplied a combined total of 83 percent of China’s arms imports. Russian technology has helped the Chinese military enhance its air defense, antiship, and submarine capabilities, making China a more formidable force in a potential naval conflict. Beijing and Moscow have also expressed a shared vision. In early 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping signed a joint manifesto pledging a ‘no limits’ partnership between their two countries and calling for ‘international relations of a new type’—in other words, a multipolar system that is no longer dominated by the United States.”

 “Iran has strengthened its ties with other axis members as well. Iran and Russia worked together to keep Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in power after the onset of civil war in 2011. Joining Russia’s efforts, which include major energy agreements with Iran to shield Tehran from the effects of U.S. sanctions, China has purchased large quantities of Iranian oil since 2020. North Korea, for its part, has counted China as its primary ally and trade partner for decades, and North Korea and Russia have maintained warm, if not particularly substantive, ties. Iran has purchased North Korean missiles since the 1980s, and more recently, North Korea is thought to have supplied weapons to Iranian proxy groups, including Hezbollah and possibly Hamas.”

“But the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 hastened the convergence among these four countries in ways that transcend their historical ties. Moscow has been among Tehran’s top suppliers of weapons over the past two decades and is now its largest source of foreign investment; Russian exports to Iran rose by 27 percent in the first ten months of 2022. Over the past two years, according to the White House, Russia has been sharing more intelligence with and providing more weapons to Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies, and Moscow has defended those proxies in debates at the UN Security Council. Last year, Russia displaced Saudi Arabia as China’s largest source of crude oil and trade between the two countries topped $240 billion, a record high. Moscow has also released millions of dollars in North Korean assets that previously sat frozen in Russian banks in compliance with Security Council sanctions. China, Iran, and Russia have held joint naval exercises in the Gulf of Oman three years in a row, most recently in March 2024. Russia has also proposed trilateral naval drills with China and North Korea.”

The authors correctly argue that the four autocratic allies form an organization designed to be disruptive worldwide, whether politically, economically, or militarily.  They are geographically contiguous, allowing transfer of resources with little interference from other nations, an advantage that Russia has taken advantage of in its aggression against Europe.  Russia is wealthy in raw materials, China is dominant in fabricating products, North Korea and Iran both have demonstrated a willingness to cause conflict and regional instability to support the group’s initiatives.  Russia is actively switching to a wartime economy and bolstering its military resources as if in preparation far a wider war.  China is pleased to demonstrate its offensive military might whenever the opportunity presents itself.  Several important nations such as Turkey, India, and Brazil, are important in world affairs but have not chosen sides. 

Biden has referred to the present situation as an historical “inflection” point.  The authors refer to it as a “generational challenge.”  How should the alliance of democracies respond to this situation?

“Their combined economic and military capacity, together with their determination to change the way the world has worked since the end of the Cold War, make for a dangerous mix. This is a group bent on upheaval, and the United States and its partners must treat the axis as the generational challenge it is. They must reinforce the foundations of the international order and push back against those who act most vigorously to undermine it. It is likely impossible to arrest the emergence of this new axis, but keeping it from upending the current system is an achievable goal.” 

Saving Ukraine from Russian domination is the most important task facing the alliance of democracies. It would demonstrate that democracy remains a viable form of government, as opposed to Putin’s contention that fascism is the natural form of governance

“Confronting the axis will be expensive. A new strategy will require the United States to bolster its spending on defense, foreign aid, diplomacy, and strategic communications. Washington must direct aid to the frontlines of conflict between the axis and the West—including assistance to Israel, Taiwan, and Ukraine, all of which face encroachment by axis members. Revisionists are emboldened by the sense that political divisions at home or exhaustion with international engagement will keep the United States on the sidelines of this competition; a comprehensive, well-resourced U.S. strategy with bipartisan support would help counter that impression. The alternative—a reduction in the U.S. global presence—would leave the fate of crucial regions in the hands not of friendly local powers but of axis members seeking to impose their revisionist and illiberal preferences.”

In spite of little supporting evidence, the authors claim the democracies have the advantage in this conflict.

“The West has everything it needs to triumph in this contest. Its combined economy is far larger, its militaries are significantly more powerful, its geography is more advantageous, its values are more attractive, and its democratic system is more stable. The United States and its partners should be confident in their own strengths, even as they appreciate the scale of effort necessary to compete with this budding anti-Western coalition. The new axis has already changed the picture of geopolitics—but Washington and its partners can still prevent the world of upheaval the axis hopes to usher in.”

All the points the authors make in the above paragraph are debatable.  Let us hope they are correct.

  

World War III: Israel Is a Burden on the West

World War III is underway.  It is being waged on military, economic, political, and moral battlefields.  On one side are the autocratic nations of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.  On the other are the mostly Western democracies with distant allies such as Japan, South Korea, and Australia.  Each alliance is firming up its terms of collaboration and planning for a dire future.  Each seeks more collaborating nations or at least firmly neutral ones.  And each wishes to prove to the wider world that it provides the best, and most efficient form of governance.

It is the existence of Israel and its recent actions that have incited activities on the moral battlefield.  Pankaj Mishra produced an interesting article, The Shoah after Gaza, for the London Review of Books.  He provides a timeline for the utilization of the Shoah (the Hebrew word used for the Holocaust) as a cudgel to keep the US and most European nations in line supporting Israel as a politically necessary democracy, and a nation whose security is owed to the Jewish people.  Israel’s strategy has been to instill guilt in the nations that are willing to believe that they allowed it to occur, and to remind everyone that it could happen again.  This strategy has required that all opponents of Israel policy and actions be compared to Nazis, and labeled as antisemites who might generate another Shoah.  Mishra concludes that this Shoah strategy is proving foolish in light of the constant reminders of the violence Israel is willing to unleash in an attempt to eliminate Palestinians in what it, and it alone, thinks of as “its land.”

Mishra points out that Israel never intended for it to be a haven, nor a beacon of hope, for Shoah survivors.

“In its early years the state of Israel had an ambivalent relationship with the Shoah and its victims. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, initially saw Shoah survivors as ‘human debris’, claiming that they had survived only because they had been ‘bad, harsh, egotistic’. It was Ben-Gurion’s rival Begin, a demagogue from Poland, who turned the murder of six million Jews into an intense national preoccupation, and a new basis for Israel’s identity. The Israeli establishment began to produce and disseminate a very particular version of the Shoah that could be used to legitimise a militant and expansionist Zionism.”

It would be prominent Shoah survivors who would recognize that Israel was not what they would have wanted it to be.  Jean Améry was an Auschwitz survivor who, having been tortured by the Nazis, was troubled by the reports of systematic torture of Arab prisoners in Israeli prisons.

“In one of the last essays he published, he wrote: ‘I urgently call on all Jews who want to be human beings to join me in the radical condemnation of systematic torture. Where barbarism begins, even existential commitments must end’.”

Primo Levi was also an Auschwitz survivor.

“Primo Levi, who had known the horrors of Auschwitz at the same time as Améry and also felt an emotional affinity to the new Jewish state, quickly organised an open letter of protest and gave an interview in which he said that ‘Israel is rapidly falling into total isolation ... We must choke off the impulses towards emotional solidarity with Israel to reason coldly on the mistakes of Israel’s current ruling class. Get rid of that ruling class.’ In several works of fiction and non-fiction, Levi had meditated not only on his time in the death camp and its anguished and insoluble legacy, but also on the ever present threats to human decency and dignity. He was especially incensed by Begin’s exploitation of the Shoah. Two years later, he argued that ‘the centre of gravity of the Jewish world must turn back, must move out of Israel and back into the diaspora’.”

“Misgivings of the kind expressed by Améry and Levi are condemned as grossly antisemitic today. It’s worth remembering that many such re-examinations of Zionism and anxieties about the perception of Jews in the world were incited among survivors and witnesses of the Shoah by Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory and its manipulative new mythology. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a theologian who won the Israel Prize in 1993, was already warning in 1969 against the ‘Nazification’ of Israel. In 1980, the Israeli columnist Boaz Evron carefully described the stages of this moral corrosion: the tactic of conflating Palestinians with Nazis and shouting that another Shoah is imminent was, he feared, liberating ordinary Israelis from ‘any moral restrictions, since one who is in danger of annihilation sees himself exempted from any moral considerations which might restrict his efforts to save himself’. Jews, Evron wrote, could end up treating ‘non-Jews as subhuman’ and replicating ‘racist Nazi attitudes’.”

On the moral battlefield, the autocratic alliance has sided with the Palestinians while the US and most European leaders are unwilling, or politically unable, to be sufficiently critical of Israel and its leaders.  The autocrats have taken the moral high ground and are busy using it to turn world opinion against the alliance of democracies.  Much of the neutral world consists of former European colonies, peopled by persons of darker skin than Europeans with memories of genocidal actions inflicted on them by white colonial powers.  To them, it can be argued that Israel is just another white colonial power taking land and freedom from darker skinned people.

“The answers for many people around the world cannot but be tainted by a long-simmering racial bitterness. Palestine, as George Orwell pointed out in 1945, is a ‘colour issue’, and this is the way it was inevitably seen by Gandhi, who pleaded with Zionist leaders not to resort to terrorism against Arabs using Western arms, and the postcolonial nations, which almost all refused to recognise the state of Israel. What W.E.B. Du Bois called the central problem of international politics – the ‘colour line’ – motivated Nelson Mandela when he said that South Africa’s freedom from apartheid is ‘incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians’. James Baldwin sought to profane what he termed a ‘pious silence’ around Israel’s behaviour when he claimed that the Jewish state, which sold arms to the apartheid regime in South Africa, embodied white supremacy not democracy. Muhammad Ali saw Palestine as an instance of gross racial injustice. So, today, do the leaders of the United States’s oldest and most prominent Black Christian denominations, who have accused Israel of genocide and asked Biden to end all financial as well as military aid to the country.”

“In 1967, Baldwin was tactless enough to say that the suffering of Jewish people ‘is recognised as part of the moral history of the world’ and ‘this is not true for the blacks.’ In 2024, many more people can see that, when compared with the Jewish victims of Nazism, the countless millions consumed by slavery, the numerous late Victorian holocausts in Asia and Africa, and the nuclear assaults on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are barely remembered. Billions of non-Westerners have been furiously politicised in recent years by the West’s calamitous war on terror, ‘vaccine apartheid’ during the pandemic, and the barefaced hypocrisy over the plight of Ukrainians and Palestinians; they can hardly fail to notice a belligerent version of ‘Holocaust denial’ among the elites of former imperialist countries, who refuse to address their countries’ past of genocidal brutality and plunder and try hard to delegitimise any discussion of this as unhinged ‘wokeness’. Popular West-is-best accounts of totalitarianism continue to ignore the acute descriptions of Nazism (by Jawaharlal Nehru and Aimé Césaire, among other imperial subjects) as the radical ‘twin’ of Western imperialism; they shy away from exploring the obvious connection between the imperial slaughter of natives in the colonies and the genocidal terrors perpetrated against Jews inside Europe.”

The Western democracies like to think of themselves as “the good guys.”  But much of the world remembers when they were the “bad guys.”  The insistence in granting Israel license to commit crimes suggests that the good guys are not as trustworthy as they think.

“For most people outside the West, whose primordial experience of European civilisation was to be brutally colonised by its representatives, the Shoah did not appear as an unprecedented atrocity. Recovering from the ravages of imperialism in their own countries, most non-Western people were in no position to appreciate the magnitude of the horror the radical twin of that imperialism inflicted on Jews in Europe. So when Israel’s leaders compare Hamas to Nazis, and Israeli diplomats wear yellow stars at the UN, their audience is almost exclusively Western. Most of the world doesn’t carry the burden of Christian European guilt over the Shoah, and does not regard the creation of Israel as a moral necessity to absolve the sins of 20th-century Europeans. For more than seven decades now, the argument among the ‘darker peoples’ has remained the same: why should Palestinians be dispossessed and punished for crimes in which only Europeans were complicit? And they can only recoil with disgust from the implicit claim that Israel has the right to slaughter 13,000 children not only as a matter of self-defence but because it is a state born out of the Shoah.”

In the conflict with the autocratic alliance, the moral battlefield is as important as any other.