Hunger For Truth

Ray Gamache: Gareth Jones - Eyewitness to the Holodomor

The Weekly Standard, March 24, 2014

For decades, the notebooks of Gareth Jones (1905-35), a brilliant young Welshman murdered in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, were stashed away in his family’s house in South Wales, only to be retrieved by his niece, Siriol Colley, in the early 1990s. By that time, Jones, once a highly promising journalist and an aide to a rather better-known Welshman, David Lloyd George, had largely vanished from history.  But two books that appeared around then, Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow (1986) and Sally J. Taylor’s Stalin’s Apologist (1990), gave a hint of what was to come.

In the first, a groundbreaking account of the manufactured famine that devastated Soviet Ukraine in 1932-33, Conquest told how Jones had gotten off a Kharkov-bound train, tramped through the broken Ukrainian countryside, and, on his return to the West, sounded the alarm about what Ukrainians now call the Holodomor (literally, to “kill by hunger”). Conquest explained how Jones’s “honorable and honest reporting” was trashed not only by Soviet officialdom, but also by Western journalists in the Soviet capital, a squalid episode discussed in more depth in Stalin’s Apologist, a biography of Walter Duranty, the New York Times’s Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent in Moscow.

Duranty, whose relationship with the Stalin regime fueled a very well-paid career, took the lead in discrediting Jones. Claims of famine were “exaggeration” or, worse, “malignant propaganda.” Jones hit back, but to little avail. With just two years of life remaining to him, the path for his descent into historical oblivion was set. As for those three, four, five, maybe more, million deaths—well, so far as the West was concerned, nothing on that scale had happened. Sure, something bad had taken place, but to borrow Duranty’s term, there’s no omelet without breaking eggs; that’s how it goes.

It says something about the extent to which the Ukrainian genocide had been erased from Western memory that when Colley went through her uncle’s notebooks—the scribbled source material for the best English-language eyewitness reports of the famine—what caught her eye most (admittedly it had long been the source of family speculation) were later sections relating to what would ultimately be his murder in Manchuria. That was the topic that became the subject of Colley’s first book, Gareth Jones—A Manchukuo Incident (2001), a privately published volume in which only a page or two was reserved for Ukraine.

Times change. The reappearance of Gareth Jones was accelerated by the determination of many Ukrainians—free at last from imposed Soviet silence—to understand their own history. The investigation of a family tragedy broadened into an effort, helped by supportive members of the Ukrainian diaspora, to rediscover a journalist whose long-forgotten writing could be used to shape this newly independent nation’s sense of self and, more specifically, to help pull it away from Russia’s grip. It is no coincidence that Gareth Jones was posthumously awarded Ukraine’s Order of Merit at a time when Viktor Yushchenko, the most pro-Western of Ukraine’s presidents up until now, was in charge. 

By then, Siriol Colley had written More Than a Grain of Truth (2005), a biography (again self-published) of her uncle, offering a fuller portrait of a man who was a blend of Zelig—on a plane with Adolf Hitler, at San Simeon with William Randolph Hearst, you name it—and Cassandra, warning of nightmares to come. Meanwhile, a website (Garethjones.org) developed by Colley’s son Nigel had evolved into an invaluable online resource for anyone wanting to know more. Interest in Jones has continued to grow. A steady flow of stories in the British press, a documentary for the BBC, an exhibition at his old Cambridge college, and much else besides, were evidence that Jones was re-entering history beyond the frontiers of Ukraine—history that (as related in the West) finally had room for the Holodomor. This shift boosted interest in Jones, but was also, in a virtuous circle, partly the product of the rediscovery of his account of that hidden genocide, an account written in accessible English rather than a Slavic tongue.

But the reemergence of Jones does not diminish the darkness that accompanied his original eclipse, a darkness that runs through Gareth Jones: Eyewitness to the Holodomor. Ray Gamache’s work does not pretend to be a comprehensive biographical study, although it features enough helpful detail to act as a reasonable introduction to Jones’s extraordinary life. And it handily knocks down a few myths along the way. To name but two, the notion of a plot by the Moscow correspondents (such as it was) should not be overstated. And Jones did not sneak onto that train to Kharkov (his journey had official approval); it was where he got off—in the middle of nowhere, into the middle of hell—that was unauthorized.

That said, this fine book’s central focus is something more specific, a perceptive, methodical, and diligently forensic examination of the articles that Gareth Jones wrote about the Soviet Union, the circumstances in which they were written, the message they were designed to deliver, and, critically, their overall reliability. The reader is left in no doubt that this courageous, intensely moral man, an exemplar of the Welsh Nonconformist conscience at its best, saw the horrors he so meticulously chronicled in his notebooks and to which he then bore witness in his journalism: “This ruin I saw in its grim reality. .  .  . I saw children with swollen bellies.”

This is an academic book and thus not entirely free of jargon (“journalism texts are linguistic representations of reality”) or the contemplation of topics, such as the journalistic ethics of Jones’s giving food to the starving, likely to be of scant interest off-campus. That said, Gamache’s shrewd, careful work gives an excellent sense of Jones’s powerful analytical skills and the layers of meaning contained in his plain, unvarnished prose.

Above all, this book forcefully conveys Jones’s foreboding that something wicked was headed towards the peasantry. A leftish liberal in that early-20th-century way, he had had a degree of sympathy with the professed ideals of the Bolshevik Revolution; but then, as he wrote later, “I went to Russia.” And while he found things to admire in the Soviet Union, the underlying structure of its society appalled him. He saw a ruthless Communist party astride a hierarchy of which the peasantry—relics of the past who were of use, mainly, to feed the industrial proletariat—were at the bottom. With the dislocation, the fanaticism, and the failures of the first Five Year Plan becoming increasingly obvious, Jones knew who would pay the price. References to the danger of famine begin to surface in his reporting, and by October 1932, he was writing two pieces for Cardiff’s Western Mail under the headline “Will there be soup?” In March 1933, Jones returned to the Soviet Union to find out. The rest is history.

That it took so long to be recognized as such, however, was due to more than Soviet disinformation and Walter Duranty’s lies. For as dishonest and influential as that campaign by Duranty was, some of it, even on its face, did not ring quite true—not least the tortured circumlocutions with which he buttressed his denials of famine. Writing in theNew York Times, Duranty conceded that, yes, there had been an increase in the death rate, but “not so much from actual starvation as from manifold disease due to lowered resistance.”

Phraseology like that is only sufficient to fool those who wanted to be fooled, and there were plenty in the West ready to give the Soviet Union the benefit of the doubt. Many more simply did not care. The broad outline of what was happening, if not its details, was there for anyone prepared to look. To take just a few examples, there was the reporting of Jones and a handful of others (including Malcolm Muggeridge, whose role vis-à-vis Jones was, as Gamache reminds us, a complex one); there were the stories filtering out through the diaspora; there was the relief effort being attempted by Austria’s Cardinal Innitzer. But few took much interest. After all, said Duranty later, the dead were “only Russians,” a faraway, alien people who didn’t, apparently, count for a great deal.

And there was something else. Gamache records how the Foreign Office, which had access to good information of its own about the famine, deliberately kept quiet, worried about some British engineers then being held by the Soviets—by July 1933, all had been released—and, more broadly, about damaging Britain’s relations with the USSR, a concern sharpened, Gamache suggests (perhaps too charitably), by Hitler’s arrival in power earlier that year.

Looking across the Atlantic, Gamache notes, it has been argued that plans by the Roosevelt administration to extend diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union may well have led Washington to downplay the famine. In any event, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to establish formal diplomatic relations in November 1933, an event fêted with a lavish dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria, where Walter Duranty was a guest of honor. In a nod to the cuisine of the Soviet homeland, borscht, a traditional Ukrainian dish as it happens, was on the menu. That evening, at least, there was soup.

Through A Glass, Very Darkly

Mark Schrad : Vodka Politics - Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State.

National Review, March 24, 2014

If you cannot face going to Russia to see the real thing — in a dank Moscow underpass perhaps, or a broken attempt at a village — the best introduction to that nation’s drinking culture is to meet up with Venya, the narrator of Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow to the End of the Line, a strange, bleakly comic, forbidden masterpiece of the early Brezhnev era. In the course of its first page, he drinks four vodkas, two beers, port “straight from the bottle,” and then, more vaguely, “something else.” It’s downhill from there.

In meandering, chaotic prose, Erofeev describes a drink-sodden, phantasmagoric train journey, punctuated by depictions of decay, echoes of Russia’s past, and recipes for cocktails that would make Appalachia blanch. With luck, no Russians ever drank “The Spirit of Geneva” (White Lilac, athlete’s foot remedy, Zhiguli beer, and alcohol varnish), but, as Mark Schrad, an assistant professor at Villanova University, notes in his absorbing, no less drink-sodden, not much less meandering, and even more horrifying Vodka Politics, they came close, not least during the time when Mikhail Gorbachev was cracking down on alcohol production:

“The most hard-up drinkers turned to alcohol surrogates: from mouthwash, eau de cologne, and perfume to gasoline, cockroach poison, brake fluid, medical adhesives, and even shoe polish on a slice of bread [a recipe that requires some additional preparation]. In the city of Volgodonsk, five died from drinking ethylene glycol, which is used in antifreeze. In the military, some set their thirsty sights on the Soviet MiG-25, which — due to the large quantities of alcohol in its hydraulic systems and fuel stores — was affectionately dubbed the “flying restaurant.”

It’s difficult not to smile at that, but then thoughts turn to those five dead in Volgodonsk, just a tiny fraction of a death toll from alcohol poisoning that ran into the tens of thousands, casualties of the burgeoning zapoi (a binge that lasts days or weeks) that finally lurched out of control during the economic implosion that followed the Soviet collapse. Post-Soviet Russia had little realistic alternative to the principle of shock therapy (how it was carried out is a different matter), but Schrad is right to stress the depths to which the country sank. The bottle, often filled with dubious black-market hooch, was one of the few sources of solace left. This, rather literally, added further fuel to the fire already raging through Russia’s demographics: “Average life expectancy for men — 65 at the height of [Gorbachev’s] anti-alcohol campaign in 1987 — plummeted to only 62 in 1992. Two years later, it dipped below 58.”

According to Schrad, “the best estimates are that in the 1990s, Russians quaffed some 15 to 16 liters of pure alcohol annually,” a figure that, tellingly, does not appear to be so different today, and is well above the “eight-liter maximum the World Health Organization deems safe.” These are per capita data, kindly averages that mask the extent to which it is mainly men who are drinking to excess, a fact that helps explain why Ivan can expect to live some ten years less than Natasha.

All those liters might alarm even skeptics legitimately suspicious of the WHO’s nannyish side, but the results for other nations offer context, if not reassurance. According to the WHO, Russia’s alcohol consumption in 2011 was near the top of the international  range, but it was far from the only country to cross the eight-liter threshold (the U.S. clocked in at 9.44 liters, the U.K. at 13.37). Beyond obvious differences in standards of health care, Russia’s catastrophe was clearly due to something subtler than the overall volume of alcohol consumed. What may have mattered more is that so much (6.88 liters) of the Russian tally was accounted for by spirits (the U.K., no stranger to the binge, came in at 2.41). That suggests that what is drunk (and, more specifically, how it is drunk) counts. Schrad quotes another Erofeev, the contemporary writer Viktor: “The result, not the process, is what’s important. You might as well inject vodka into your bloodstream as drink it.”

A disaster of this magnitude — on some estimates as many as half a million Russians each year are dying as a consequence, directly or indirectly, of alcohol abuse — was not the product of economic implosion alone. Other hard-drinking countries in the former Soviet space went through comparable traumas in the 1990s. But none, with the possible exception of Ukraine, a land long exposed to the worst pathologies of Russian rule, tippled quite so far over the edge. There was something that singled Russia out, and it predated the collapse of Communism by a very long time. As early as 1967, the rapid growth of alcohol consumption in the post-war years — something helped along by growing prosperity and a state that had replaced the anti-alcohol militancy of the earlier Soviet period with a sharp appreciation for the revenues that vodka brought in — had taken annual per capita consumption of pure alcohol (exclusive of bootleg samogon) to 9.1 liters. Drinking was an accessible pleasure for a society that had cash, but — in a still-austere Soviet Union — not much to spend it on. There was also something else: Vodka may have been used to soothe the pain associated with the collapse of Communism, but it had also been a way of anaesthetizing people through the dreary decades that preceded that long-overdue change, decades in which aspiration was stifled, life was hard, and futility was the norm. Under the circumstances, why not drink up?

But boozing one’s way through Brezhnev was also a reversion to older patterns of behavior that the early Bolsheviks — in some respects a puritanical bunch — believed they had swept away for good. In 1913, the wicked old empire’s per capita consumption stood at just under that perilous eight liters, and that was less of a gulp than the swigging that had preceded it a few years before. Vodka was not only a familiar presence in the Russian troika, it had also become one of its drivers, a wild, erratic, and destructive driver, to be sure, but one so powerful that attempts to unseat it contributed to the fall of both Gorbachev and (Schrad makes the case well) quite possibly the last czar too.

How demon drink grabbed the reins is the question that lies at the heart of Vodka Politics, which comes with the subtitle “Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State.” That “secret” is something of an overstatement (as Schrad acknowledges, this is far from being the first work on this topic), but it is a claim not inconsistent with his occasionally excitable style (“While the cold wind howled beyond the Kremlin walls . . . ”). As told by a chatty and engaging author, this is Russia’s past seen, one might say, through the bottom of a glass, a perspective that is certainly skewed (sometimes too much so — the liberal Decembrist rebels of 1825 were rather more than an “inebriated Petersburg mob”) but is undeniably fascinating and often enlightening.

Schrad’s central thesis is simple enough: It is the tale of vodka as a “dramatic technological leap” (like a cannon, it has been said, compared with the “bows and arrows” of wine, beer, and more traditional drinks) that was adopted by Russia’s rulers (and how — if it’s epics of alcoholic excess that you are after, this is the book for you) and then ruthlessly exploited by them, a story that, with brief interruptions, has continued essentially unchanged for more than half a millennium.

Ivan III (reigned 1462–1505) was the first to establish a state monopoly on distillation, but Schrad prefers to credit his grandson, a rather more terrible Ivan, with “being perhaps the first to realize the tremendous potential of the liquor trade.” In between debauches and atrocities (if you are on the hunt for Grand Guignol, chronicled with faintly unseemly relish, this is also the book for you), he outlawed privately held taverns and replaced them with state-run kabaks. This was the next stage in, as Schrad describes it, the evolution of a system of “macabre beauty” under which the state built itself up by using mechanisms designed to increase the dependence of its subjects on a product — cheap to produce, profitable to sell, potent to consume — that gave them the illusion of release only to enslave them still further.

The catch was that the state itself became dependent on this dependency. At the height of the Russian empire, vodka funded a third of what became known as the state’s “drunken budget.” Toward the end of Soviet rule, vodka’s contribution was roughly a quarter. And vodka was a pleasure too tempting to be confined to those at the bottom of the heap. It seeped through all social classes, high and low, at immense cost to the country’s progress then and now, its spread facilitated by the unwillingness of the czarist and Soviet regimes to allow room for a civil society strong enough to push back, not to speak of their failure to nurture a nation in which the bottle would not seem like quite such an attractive escape.

So what now? With Russia’s economy in somewhat better shape and (thanks, primarily, to higher oil prices) vodka’s percentage contribution to the state’s income having shrunk to comparatively modest mid single digits, the chances — one might think — ought to be good that something serious could be done to address a public-health cataclysm that has not gone away. After all, the ostentatiously sober Vladimir Putin is at the helm. Some measures have indeed been taken, but this is still Russia, a top-down place where the people come last, where vodka profits accrue to the state and to the well-connected, a country where outside, maybe, some metropolitan centers, hope remains in short supply.

Moscow to the End of the Line draws to a close with the drunken Venya missing his stop and returning to the point at which he began.

And then things get worse.

Four-Ring Circus

National Review Online, February 9, 2014

Organized Fun, the Olympic Games, parades, the aesthetics of the Cirque du Soleil, fireworks (face it, they are dull), and just about anything to do with sport are about as low as it is possible to get on the list of things I enjoy. I was, therefore, a natural pick to write about the opening ceremony for the Sochi Games. Thank you, NRO!

So there I was on Friday evening, not in Sochi (thank you, NRO travel budget!), but on my sofa in New York City, watching as NBC showed America the recording of an event that everyone else had seen hours before. No matter; we had already shared in an enjoyable prelude played out through Twitter, BuzzFeed, that friend who e-mails you stupid photographs, and the rest of today’s media giants — double toilets, unfinished hotel rooms, bugged showers, the slaughter of stray dogs, epic corruption, a $51 billion price tag, and the announcement from Sochi’s mayor that there were no gays in his town — that suggested that these Olympics might be more entertaining than most. Who now remembers Albertville?

The evening began with Bob Costas chatting away in what looked like a room in a Golan-Globus Fortress of Solitude. There was an Obama interview. For those in the dark about Russia’s history, an NBC narrator described seven decades of Soviet despotism, mass murder, gulag, and evil empire as a “pivotal experiment,” a mealy-mouthed, carefully neutral description that made Walter Duranty’s infamous omelets look like a fearless exercise in speaking truth to power.

The ceremony itself opened rather nicely with a young girl running through the Cyrillic alphabet, using each letter to introduce someone or something from Russia’s past. Let’s be fair; this would not have been the moment for Russia — or any nation — to air its dirty Lenin, and Russia did not. Stalin’s C (as I said, Cyrillic) would have to wait for another night. Instead we were treated to a recital of some of the best of Russia’s heritage, including Chekhov, Malevich, Kandinsky, Nabokov (Nabokov!), and some icons of my own space-obsessed childhood, Gagarin and Lunokhod, that plucky little motorized bathtub that crawled across a small slice of the moon in 1970. More disreputably, the organizers slipped in a boast that the Russians had invented television, a claim that did not slip past half-Scottish me and would have annoyed John Logie Baird, the Scotsman whose achievement this really was.

Let Scotland’s Daily Record take up the tale:

“During a video taking viewers through Russia’s alphabet, a row of TV screens appeared next to the letter T and a picture of Russian-American inventor and engineer Vladimir Zworykin . . . Scots commentator Hazel Irvine was quick to reassure viewers that the achievement still belonged to her home country immediately after the clip finished.”

This view of history, at ease with elements of both the Soviet past and what preceded — and indeed opposed it — and happy to play fast and loose with accuracy was a foretaste of what was to come.

Yes, there were fireworks. Whatever.

The young girl was duly hoisted up for a flight across an impressive representation of Russia’s vast and varied landscape. In a remarkable display of diplomatic restraint, it did not include any stretches of landscape currently belonging to any other country.

Finally came the technical glitch (or, if you prefer, the last hurrah of determined Trotskyite wreckers) that schadenfreudians — out in force for these Olympics — had been so eagerly waiting for. One of the five giant snowflakes that were meant to flower into Olympic rings, well, flaked, although not, reportedly, on the Potemkin footage that played on Russian TV (oh come on, you knew there was going to be a reference to that village somewhere in this piece).

The athletes emerged (I think) from some underground lair into the stadium, each team led by a snow hottie topped with a kokoshnik (look it up; I did), as they sauntered in, nation after nation after nation after nation, Lithuanians in two shades of sharpie green, mighty San Marino, some euphemism for Taiwan, and, of course, USA! USA! decked out in Ralph Lauren cardigans that would have made Betsy Ross wish that she had just stuck to plain blue.

And what were the Germans wearing?

It sounded to me like the bunch from Belarus got a very big cheer and the Ukrainians, too. Russians have a very expansive definition of home team.

The centerpiece of the show was a pageant meant to represent the sweep of the latest approved version of Russian history. And some of it was very striking, even lovely, not least a giant, silvery troika, so evocative of the country’s vast, snowy landscapes, and, for that matter, the finest of all descriptions of Russia, “speeding like a troika” in Gogol’s Dead Souls, a passage that ends, a little ominously for the rest of us, like this:

Whither then, are you speeding, O Russia of mine? Whither? Answer me! But no answer comes — only the weird sound of your collar-bells. Rent into a thousand shreds, the air roars past you, for you are overtaking the whole world, and shall one day force all nations, all empires to stand aside, to give you way!

Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852), of course, was Ukrainian-born.

Nobody ever said that Russian history was uncomplicated, but the spectacle in Sochi was clearly designed to smooth things out a bit — no, a lot — something very much in keeping with the wider Putin project in which all of Russian history, Czarist, Soviet, and whatever it is now, is crammed into a single, supposedly unifying past in which all Russians, regardless of ideology, did the right, patriotic thing for a nation that was always a force for good.

Thus we witnessed onion domes, Cossacks, Peter the Great, the ballroom scene (beautifully done) from War and Peace, followed by glimpses of turn-of-the century technological progress cleverly used to pave the way for the passage dedicated to that “pivotal experiment.” This was presented primarily as an acceleration — continuity, you see — of the country’s drive to industrialization and modernity all drenched in red (light, not blood) and crowned by the shapes of constructivism’s bold geometry, including what looked like fragments of Tatlin’s Tower, the monument to the Third International that — like communism’s radiant future — never made it past a very rough draft.

And what was this? Two giant heads, an enormous hammer, a vast sickle, excerpted, as it were, from the sculptress Vera Mukhina’s massive, sinister and, in its way, magnificent, Worker and Kolkhoz Woman (1937). To look at, it was wonderful, to think about, not so much. Imagine if Germans hosting a (modern) Olympics had included some of the iconography that their countrymen had used back in Berlin the first time round. That it is unthinkable in a way that Sochi’s sexed-up Soviet design was not speaks volumes — volumes filled with nothing good.

Later there was a sequence showing the supposedly kinder, gentler, Soviet Union that evolved after the tyrant whose name was not mentioned had left the scene, a sort of Russian Graffiti with music that somehow, I suspect, was not entirely representative of the early Brezhnev years.

Speeches? Of course there were speeches. The president of the International Olympic Committee said something about the Olympics embracing diversity (well, there had already been a performance by the fake lesbian pop duo t.A.T.u.) and explained that the games were “never about erecting walls to keep people apart,” which may or may not also have been a reference to Sochi’s eccentric restroom construction. After that, some Swan Lake danced by what seemed to be electric jellyfish, and a confusing sequence involving escapees from the set of Tron.

The Olympic torch arrived on the last leg of its long relay, a tradition since, ahem, Berlin, and was handed over by Maria Sharapova to a posse that included Alina Kabaeva, holder of an Olympic gold medal in rhythmic gymnastics, holder of a Russian parliamentary seat, and, if the rumors are true, holder of Vladimir Putin too. Yes, that’s right, rhythmic gymnastics . . .

The flame itself was lit by another parliamentarian, Irina Rodnina, three-time winner of an Olympic gold medal for figure skating and the author of a racist tweet about Barack Obama.

The gold medal for trolling was awarded to Vladimir Putin

Vlad The Conservative

National Review, January 9, 2014 (January 27, 2014 issue)

Putin Pop-Up Store, East 20th St, NYC, October, 2014 © Andrew Stuttaford

Back in the mid 1980s, Pat Buchanan was the communications director for the Reagan White House, and Vladimir Putin was a KGB officer in East Germany. Times change: The former Soviet secret policeman — if there is such a thing as a “former” Soviet secret policeman — is, after a bogus intermission, now serving a third term as Russia’s president, and the old Cold Warrior seems to have become something of a fan. Writing in his syndicated column in December, Buchanan wondered whether, “in the culture war for mankind’s future,” Putin was in fact “one of us.”

The immediate trigger for Buchanan’s comments was Putin’s state-of-the-nation address just a few days before. Stung, probably, by criticism of gay-bashing legislation in Russia, Putin had taken aim at “the destruction of traditional values” elsewhere in the world — by which he meant the West — and, just so there could be no doubt about what he was referring to, had thrown in a reference to “so-called tolerance, neutered and barren.” No stranger to chutzpah, Putin, an unlikely champion of the ballot box, noted that these changes to “moral values and ethical norms” had come “from above” and were “contrary to the will of the majority.” As such, they were “essentially anti-democratic.”

After years of aggressive judicial activism and dramatic social change at home, those were words likely to appeal to quite a few American conservatives, some of whom might perhaps already have found themselves in unexpected agreement with the Kremlin not so long ago. After all, it was only last summer when Republican congressmen Steve King and Dana Rohrabacher made it clear that Buchanan was by no means the only figure on the American right to be offended by what he has somewhat histrionically described as “half-naked” (by Iranian standards, perhaps) and “obscene” (not so much) protest in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior by the feminist punk-rock group Pussy Riot.

It is, of course, hardly surprising that a protest by an altar — even if brief, and largely mimed (a soundtrack was recorded later for a music video using footage from the protest) — would appall many, and not just the religious, in this country. But Pussy Riot’s critics should have taken a closer look before jumping onto Putin’s sleigh. America is not Russia, a country where an authoritarian regime has suborned the national church for its own purposes, and where that church, bribed with privilege (ask bullied Russian Baptists how that works), a degree of power, and no small amount of mammon, has for the most part gone along. That is why Pussy Riot was protesting in a cathedral. Theirs was an infinitely lesser blasphemy.

Putin may well be a Christian of sorts (the influence of his supposed dukhovnik — spiritual father — Archimandrite Tikhon Shevkunov is a source of much speculation), but then again so were the Borgias. Divorce and all the rest aside, Putin might even quite genuinely, if in a rather rough-and-ready fashion, be a social conservative, but his public declarations on these topics are likely more a matter of political calculation than moral conviction. Corruption, economic slowdown, and increasingly dictatorial rule have eroded Putin’s support among the intelligentsia and in the more metropolitan centers, and so, Orthodox Church in tow, he has — what’s the term these days? — “pivoted” toward Russia’s “silent majority” (Pussy Riot didn’t have too many local fans), a maneuver that the Buchanan of the Nixon White House would have both recognized and appreciated for its savvy.

It was also a move that dovetailed neatly with a longer-term theme running through the Putin years. The defining mistake of post-Communist Russia has been an unwillingness to come to terms with the reality of its Soviet past. Putin himself infamously referred to the break-up of the USSR as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. Historical truth — uncomfortable, divisive, and shameful — has been replaced with a patriotic confection designed to reconcile the irreconcilable and soothe the national ego. Some excesses and mistakes — too mild words, those — are included, but other horrors are downplayed or have simply gone missing. There is, however, room for both the preservation (or restoration) of Soviet iconography and a lavish biopic about Admiral Kolchak, one of the most prominent of the anti-Bolshevik commanders in the Russian Civil War. In a large national poll organized in 2008, Stolypin, the tough, authoritarian reformer who was the last czar’s most effective prime minister (significantly, Putin gave him a shout-out during his speech), was rated the second-greatest Russian of all time. Stalin (a Georgian and a mass murderer, but no matter) came in third.

It is a narrative intended to put together what history in reality has torn apart, a fable in which czar and commissar can coexist, united in their love for the motherland and a shared sense of the messianic destiny that Holy Russia — home of Moscow, the “Third Rome,” and also the birthplace of Lenin’s radiant future — has long felt is its due, a fantasy reinforced by physical as well as intellectual distance from the Enlightenment West. The fact that such ideas have proved most congenial to authoritarian rule has not escaped Putin’s notice.

Regardless of the nods to the country’s Soviet heritage, the Commies — fear not — will not be coming back anytime soon. Too much loot is being amassed by those in charge for that. Instead, the philosophy that underpins the current regime (an admission of crude self-interest wouldn’t really do the trick) looks more and more like an updated, more subtle, more capitalist variant of the “Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality” first devised as a Russian state ideology for Czar Nicholas I (1825–55) as a response to the liberal challenge at home and abroad.

Well, Orthodoxy is back, what’s left of Russia’s nascent democracy is under pressure, and “nationality” never went away. In his speech Putin acknowledged the multi-ethnic nature of the Russian Federation (albeit with a swipe at “rowdy, insolent people from certain southern Russian regions”), but he went on to emphasize “the all-encompassing, unifying role of Russian culture, history, and language,” terminology that harks back both to czarist-era Russification and to the brutal Soviet approach to “lesser” nationalities.

But as he hymned the rebirth of a strong Russian state, Putin was careful (as Buchanan noted approvingly) to stress that Russia “does not encroach on anyone’s interests . . . or try to teach others how to live their lives.” Unfortunately, the first of those claims is nonsense. To take just a few instances, Russia has been throwing its weight about in northeastern Europe, it has grabbed a slice of Georgia, it is bullying Moldova, and, in what may be Putin’s most impressive coup yet, it may just have “bought” Ukraine. Russia is on a roll, with sporadic humiliations of a directionless America — from Snowden to Syria — for added spice. Yes, Putin’s grip may well be more fragile than it looks, but when Forbes magazine recently designated him as the most powerful person in the world, it was not without reason. The recent release of two Pussy Rioters and Mikhail Khodorkovsky was a declaration of strength, not weakness.

For a retro great power to behave like a retro great power is not particularly shocking, but it is essential to remember that Russia (even more than the U.S.) is a nation that considers that it has the right to play by its own rules. Thus Putin’s insistence that his country is not interested in trying to “teach others how to live their lives” is not only a rebuke (as Buchanan correctly notes) to Western universalism, but also a reminder that Russia has no intention of yielding its sovereignty to the emerging supranationalist order. That’s a reasonable, even commendable, position, but it is no reason for those on the foreign-policy right to think that they have found a friend in Putin. There are areas where American and Russian interests overlap (something that Buchanan has also highlighted). The fault for not taking better advantage of them lies on both sides and so far as is possible should be remedied, but a degree of rivalry, sharpened by Russia’s refusal to accept its loss of empire, is inevitable, natural, and, if handled with an appropriate degree of realism, not particularly dangerous.

And (hesitant as I am to give advice to this constituency) social conservatives should be warier still. To Buchanan, Putin “is seeking to redefine the . . . world conflict of the future as one in which conservatives, traditionalists, and nationalists of all continents and countries stand up against the cultural and ideological imperialism of what he sees as a decadent west,” a piece of wishful thinking on Buchanan’s part that gives Putin’s pronouncements an international significance that they do not deserve and could not sustain.

History, Mark Twain is said to have observed, doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. Almost exactly two centuries ago, the devout if possibly unhinged Czar Alexander I (1801–25) was peddling the notion of a reactionary “Holy Alliance” between the nations that had seen off Napoleon. When the czar explained this idea to Lord Castlereagh, Britain’s conservative foreign minister (the no less conservative Duke of Wellington was also in the room), the meeting did not go well. “It was not without difficulty,” wrote Castlereagh later, “that we went through the interview with becoming gravity.”

Translation: It was difficult to keep a straight face.

There’s a lesson there.

Republicans Cannot Go On As 'The Party of No'

Standpoint, January 1, 2014

Times Square, New York City, October 2013 © Andrew Stuttaford

Wakes are not only for rainy days. The weather outside was glorious in that New England fall way, but the mood inside a room in Yale’s Linsly-Chittenden Hall was a touch funereal. We were a bunch of rightwingers there for a conference on the future of conservatism but, to quite a few of those attending, the past seemed altogether more promising.

The timing was not the best. Just a few days before, the ill-conceived and unpopular effort by congressional Republicans to defund Obamacare, a ploy that made the charge of the Light Brigade look well thought-out, had collapsed in an eminently predictable fiasco. This stoked fears that the 2014 midterm elections were now doomed to end in disaster. Always implausible hopes of retaking the Senate looked delusional and even GOP control of the House of Representatives appeared to be at risk.

But not long after, Republican hopes began to rise. The end of the shutdown left the Obamacare website, launched a week or two earlier amid general derision, alone in the coconut shy. As I write, healthcare.gov is a gift that is still giving. Obama’s approval ratings have sunk below 40 per cent.

But the site’s issues are being ironed out, and with the help of  supportive media, will be reclassified as teething problems to be rapidly forgotten. Nevertheless, there is a decent chance that lingering recollections of the cack-handed roll-out will poison the way in which many voters will still be viewing Obama’s signature legislation when the mid-term elections come round next November. That might give the GOP a helping hand then, but the idea that this will also be enough to propel a Republican into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in the 2016 elections is a stretch.

That said, Obamacare — never a particularly popular plan — may give Republicans something they can exploit in their campaign to retake the White House. The Obama administration shies away from the word, but the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is redistributionist, not only in the narrow sense (higher taxes on the wealthy), but in its broader operation: it directly or indirectly transfers healthcare resources away from a majority of Americans and reallocates them to the much smaller number previously shut out of the system. Crudely understood, there will be more losers than winners.

Simply undertaking to repeal Obamacare will not be enough to do the trick. The system being transformed by the ACA may have been better than usually understood in the UK, but it was nonetheless restrictive, bureaucratic and expensive and, thanks to the way it was often linked to employment, alarmingly tenuous to the millions of Americans who worry how secure their jobs really are. If Obamacare is to go, the GOP will have to explain what it will put in its place. Journalists and think-tank denizens on the Right have been offering up their suggestions for a while, but as two of the most recent to do so, Ramesh Ponnuru, a senior editor at National Review, and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and Yuwal Levin, the editor of National Affairs and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, observed in a November article in the Wall Street Journal, congressional Republicans have “with a few honourable exceptions” failed to join in.

That’s a problem. Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana and something of a Republican star, warns that the GOP cannot just be the “party of no”. Maybe, but to attempt to define what it is for is, for the Republican politician who dares to try, dangerous ground indeed.

To start with, it will involve recognising that there is rather less remaining of the America that elected Ronald Reagan than many Republicans seem prepared to accept. The US population has ballooned by more than 90 million since 1980. It has changed in ways that reflect more than the passing of the years. Usefully didactic memories of the 1970s have faded. Recollections of the Lehman collapse are all too fresh. New generations have reached voting age after a lifetime immersed in the soft-left certainties of the American education system. Meanwhile, stagnating household incomes and what look like permanently higher levels of unemployment or underemployment threaten to chip away at support for America’s free market(ish) model. Democrat Bill de Blasio’s success in winning the mayoralty of New York City was (mostly) a Gotham thing, but obvious public concern over rising inequality — the Occupy movement was an early harbinger — signals a coming shift in the ideological landscape that will not help the Republicans one bit.

Above all, decades of mass immigration have transformed the country’s ethnic, cultural and political make-up in ways that pose an enormous challenge to the GOP. It says something that if the America of 2012 had had the demographics of 1980, Mitt Romney would have won by a wider margin than did Ronald Reagan back then.

What to do? To begin with, the conventional wisdom is that Republicans need to scale back their opposition (much of it driven by the Right) to current efforts to “regularise” the position of the nearly 12 million illegal immigrants now thought to be present in the country. The argument — made with varying degrees of enthusiasm and cynicism both by the party establishment and erstwhile Tea Party darlings such as freshman Florida senator (and possible presidential candidate) Marco Rubio — is that an anti-immigration stance makes it easy for the GOP’s opponents to caricature the Republicans as a “white” party hostile to minorities. With Democrats and the media trumpeting just that tune, it’s an argument that has some weight.

Throw in some of the more inflammatory talk sometimes heard from the Tea Party and other sections of the “nativist” Right, as well as the clumsy language of Republicans often tone-deaf to ethnic sensitivities (Mitt Romney’s 2012 reference to “self-deportation” for one) and it’s easy to understand why the Republican share of the growing Latino vote fell from some 40 per cent in 2004 to 27 per cent in 2012 (Asian-Americans were even less enthusiastic: only 26 per cent voted for Romney). That minorities are more sceptical about immigration than often assumed only reinforces the point that what matters is not the policy itself, but the message that it is believed to deliver.

Yet the electoral mathematics will deteriorate still further if anti-immigration Republican congressmen who, for now, are holding the line, agree to an amnesty for illegals. For all the talk about Latinos’ attachment to enterprise and family values (more nuanced than the stereotype would suggest), their votes will tilt heavily Democratic for decades, just as did those of the Italian-Americans with whom they are so often compared. The same is true of the other immigrant groups now reshaping America, a disturbing prospect for the GOP given that the country is accepting something like one million new legal immigrants a year. That’s an inflow that the Democrats have every reason to welcome, but there is little sign that many Republicans will be prepared to stand in the way of those arriving legally, quite possibly even if that total is — as is also being proposed — significantly bumped up. The idea of the nation of immigrants has an emotional appeal that stretches across America’s ideological divide. More prosaically, there is also a bipartisan understanding that business donors appreciate the cheaper workers and increased demand that immigration brings in its wake.

Republicans are thus running up an escalator that is moving down. Resisting amnesty will slow the pace somewhat, but the longer-term trend is clear: to win, the party will have to win over more minority voters. Quite how to do so remains a mystery. The greater number of high-profile GOP leaders (Jindal, Texas senator Ted Cruz, Rubio, South Carolina governor Nikki Haley and New Mexico’s promising Susanna Martinez, to name a few) drawn from ethnic minorities is a start, but no more than that.

To be sure, the Taft-sized Chris Christie — in the derogatory sense of the word — secured re-election as Republican governor of strongly Democratic New Jersey with some 60 per cent of the vote in November, a tally boosted by his success in attracting the support of over 50 per cent of Hispanic and (it’s sad that this counts as an achievement) around 20 per cent of African-American voters.

This was a feat that owed as much to his refreshingly blunt persona as to his attempt to steer his state in a more frugal direction. For while there is still a very distinctively American constituency for smaller government — check out the “don’t tread on me” flags brandished at any Tea Party rally — it is unlikely to be enough to return the White House to Republican management. In part, this reflects the fact that the country’s finances have deteriorated to a point that leaves little room to make a good case for Reagan-style tax cuts. The number is distorted by a sluggish economy, but federal tax receipts as a percentage of GDP (approaching 17 per cent) are lower than when the Gipper left office. Meanwhile publicly- held federal debt as a percentage of GDP has risen from 26 per cent in 1980 to around 73 per cent today, nearly half of which is now held by intrinsically more jittery international investors.

Total federal debt (roughly $17 trillion) is calculated before factoring in the contingent liabilities arising out of underfunded entitlement programmes such as Social Security and Medicare that, according to Republican deficit hawks such as Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn or former vice-presidential candidate Congressman Paul Ryan, could amount to four, five or more times that figure. To be fair, those estimates are hotly disputed, but still . . .

On the other side of the ledger, that the sequester (a crude budget-bludgeoning device triggered by the current impasse in Washington) has so far not proved anything like as damaging as the Obama administration originally predicted should not be allowed to conceal the fact that any attempts to take America back to fiscal respectability on the back of expenditure cuts alone would involve taking a chainsaw to entitlements. According to a Bloomberg News poll last February, most Americans accept (or claim to accept) that Medicare and Social Security must be overhauled, but they view tax increases as part of the solution.

That’s anathema to many on the Right, an attitude enshrined in, and enforced through, the “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” designed by Americans for Tax Reform, a pressure group formed by the influential libertarian-leaning Republican activist Grover Norquist. The pledge is essentially an undertaking to reject any net increases in tax, and it has been signed by the overwhelming majority of Republicans in the Senate and House. Sadly, even if the pledge has sometimes been interpreted more sinuously than its stern wording might suggest, it no longer is in tune with economic reality, but the political reality is that declining to sign it (let alone reneging on it) is likely to cause trouble for any Republican at primary time. That will change, probably at about the time that seniors (56 per cent of the over-65s voted for Romney in 2012) realise that their benefits are in jeopardy, but that moment has not arrived.

All this almost certainly dooms the faint chances of a bipartisan grand bargain over the federal budget at least for now. Given the current balance of political forces, this may not be such a bad thing. But it also discourages Republicans from mounting any serious effort to redesign America’s archaic and destructive tax system in ways that would make it generate more revenues while inflicting, at least in some respects, less pain. In that connection, one avenue worth exploring is the introduction of some sort of federal consumption tax, partially offset by a lower, flatter, simpler income tax. From time to time, some Republican leaders have floated variants of this, including Ryan and former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels (one of the more disappointing absentees from the 2012 race). Even Mitt Romney refused to rule out the introduction of a value added tax, a position that led a staffer from the reliably shrill Newt Gingrich campaign to snipe that Romney had been looking at “European socialist ideas”. A somewhat more subtle critique has come from Norquist, long suspicious of a tax that he believes to be too efficient a money-raising machine to be trusted.

So what else is there? Republican Senator Mike Lee (Utah), cheered on by the likes of Ponnuru and the AEI’s James Pethokoukis (someone, incidentally, open to a consumption tax) is arguing for a redrawing of the tax system that incorporates a very substantial expansion of child tax credit. This family-friendly move, part of a broader drive in, to quote Ponnuru, a more “communitarian” direction, is unlikely to fly this time round, but it points to a possible future for the GOP as something closer to Western Europe’s Christian Democrats. Such an evolution in my view is not particularly desirable, but given America’s changing political environment, may be wise.

A better guide to what may come next comes from Pethokoukis’s observation in National Review Online that the 2012 campaign saw a plethora of tax-cutting proposals by Republican hopefuls seemingly “more interested in signalling their supply-side bona fides to primary voters than in offering realistic blueprints for governance”.

Ah yes, the primaries: the road to the nomination runs, of course, right through them, and I mean Right. White evangelicals and Tea Party supporters (they are not always the same people) represent a very large percentage — well over a half — of the primary vote. They are not in the mood for compromise. According to a July 2013 Pew Center survey, 69 per cent of Tea Partiers believe that the best course of action for the GOP is to move in an even more conservative direction. To design an alternative to Obamacare and a plausible budgetary fix that both manage to appeal to those voters and have a chance of convincing the wider national electorate is a very tall order, and that’s before we have begun to look at the question of the so-called “social issues” (primarily abortion and same-sex marriage) that weigh so heavily in Republican primaries.

The rise of the Tea Party was a classic populist insurgency, a revolt of country against court, propelled by disgust over the bailouts that followed the financial crisis, anxiety over the state of America’s finances, contempt for the Republican establishment and fear of what Obama might be planning. It revitalised a party sunk in deep depression after Obama’s trouncing of John McCain, and made an enormous contribution to the GOP’s bounce in the 2010 midterms. The contrast with the not entirely dissimilar folk at UKIP “pissing into” (to borrow LBJ’s entertaining terminology) the Tory tent is one that British Conservatives tut-tutting over the Tea Party would do well to note. As revolts tend to do, however, the Tea Party has not infrequently overshot, most notably by promoting candidates more on the basis of their ideological purity than their ability to win.

In doing so, they were encouraged by a segment of the conservative hierarchy already, ironically, well entrenched in Washington. To a degree unimaginable in the UK, the Right in America has a lively, powerful and well-financed intellectual, media and political infrastructure. That’s generally to the good, but it has come at a price. One or two speakers at the Yale conference complained about conservative neglect of that most essential of political skills — persuasion. Instead of reaching out to the unconvinced, conservatives have primarily been pursuing a conversation with themselves. Such conversations have a way of degenerating into a contest designed primarily to show who can be more pur and who more dur.

There was no better example of this than conservative (and famously socially conservative) South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint’s comment in early 2009 that he “would rather have 30 Republicans in the [100-strong] Senate who really believe in principles of limited government, free markets, free people, than to have 60 that don’t have a set of beliefs”, an expression not of conviction, but of a fanaticism unmoored to any realistic plan for winning back power. When the Tea Party moment dawned, DeMint and others like him jumped in front of the parade, reinforcing the revolutionaries’ zeal to purge so-called RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) and throwing some money their way too. To be sure, this has led to the injection of useful new blood into the party’s ranks, but it has also led to the selection of some candidates so inept, unsuitable or outright strange that the GOP threw away hopes of winning or retaining a series of crucial senate seats — from Nevada to Delaware to Indiana and beyond — that could have transformed the political calculus of recent years. Regrettably, there are signs — not least in the aftermath of DeMint’s move to the Heritage Foundation, formerly the most influential of all the conservative think-tanks — that excesses are not yet through.

No less destructively, some of the more outlandish candidates on the Right have tarnished the broader Republican image, especially when they have sounded off on social issues. Would-be senator Todd Akin blew his chances of winning a Missouri seat in 2012 when, in defending his opposition to abortion in cases of rape, he explained that victims of “legitimate rape” rarely became pregnant, a view that held some sway in the Middle Ages, but is today something, shall we say, of an outlier in obstetric circles.

Social issues have for years been essential to the Republican party’s ability to compete (there is no majority for the socially liberal, economically conservative programme favoured by libertarian-leaning or many moderate Republicans) but they have come with costs, hitting the party’s capacity to attract elite support and its appeal to women (particularly single women), the young and voters in the north-east and west. These costs are likely to rise. Same-sex marriage has won the acceptance of roughly half of all voters, and in another reminder of how the country is changing, roughly a third of all under-30s describe themselves as “religiously unaffiliated” (Pew Research, October 2012), the highest total ever. On the other hand, roughly 50 per cent of Americans now claim to be “pro-life” (Gallup, May 2012), although that’s a stance that comes with plenty of loopholes: more than half of these pro-lifers believe that abortion is acceptable under certain circumstances.

What seems to matter to centrist voters is how social issues are framed. They are prepared to vote for anti-abortion candidates, say, but not for those who push the issue beyond what is rather mistily defined as reasonable, or if they detect a wider agenda at work, such as the distaste for contraception displayed by former senator Rick Santorum, an oddball Beltway Savonarola who enjoyed a brief and alarming surge in the 2012 primaries. When they notice executive competence, as so often they do in the ranks of the GOP’s expanding tally of governors (30 in all, close to the record set in the 1920s), they appear to be willing to live with a conservative social agenda so long as it is not pushed à l’outrance.

So what now? More budget fights in 2014 will enable the Democrats to rekindle memories of this past autumn’s shutdown and, with them, images of the Republicans as mad, bad and dangerous to vote for. A dose of class warfare is sure to be on the agenda too. Against that, the fallout from Obamacare’s uncertain launch may still be reverberating and the programme’s deeper problems may be coming into sharper focus. The economy is likely to be walking rather than running-the labour force participation rate is the number to watch-and a foreign policy foul-up cannot be eliminated. The best guess at the moment is that the midterms will leave matters pretty much as they are now.

The ideological divisions between and within the Right and the remaining “moderates” in the Republican Party, stirred up further by would-be presidential candidates out for primary votes, will mean that a credible alternative to Obamacare and a sound fiscal plan will both remain elusive even after the midterms. Being the “party of no” may well have to do. The longer-term outlook for the GOP will continue to deteriorate, but if “events” co-operate, nay-saying buttressed by at least some ideas on what might replace the ACA could, fingers-crossed, just possibly be enough to do the trick in 2016 if the primary process can avoid the own goals of 2010 and 2012. At the presidential level, the primaries need to avoid attracting the clown posse that we saw last time (Santorum is said to be contemplating another run), or selecting a candidate (Cruz, say, or Kentucky’s Senator Paul) too hardline to have any prospect of winning back the White House, a temptation made more difficult to resist (what’s to lose?) by the failures of establishment Romney and establishment McCain. Even a more conventionally viable candidate will have to avoid being dragged into unelectability by the positions he has to take to prevail at the primaries. Despite conservative suspicion, some baggage from his past, and an occasionally spiky and difficult personality, Chris Christie might just be tough enough to pull it off.

But 2016 is a long way off. And then there is Hillary.

 Note: Bridgegate broke about two days after this article went to press in late December, but before the issue appeared on newsstands. Them’s the breaks.

Wilkommen, Bienvenue

The Weekly Standard, December 30, 2013

Riga, Latvia, November 2013 © Andrew Stuttaford

They take austerity seriously in Latvia. After each meeting with a government official he or she would turn off the lights as we walked out of the room. More than five years after the global financial crisis finally burst Latvia’s fragile economic bubble, scrimping is second nature. Given the direction this small, resilient Baltic country took after Lehman fell, that’s no surprise. The usual prescription for cleaning up the mess that overheating leaves behind, particularly in an export-oriented economy (exports amount to some 60 percent of Latvian GDP), centers around a sharp devaluation of the currency to restore international competitiveness. There were quite a few (including within the IMF) who suggested that Latvia should break the peg fixing its currency—the lats—to the euro, leaving the lats to sink to a level that more accurately reflected uncomfortable new market realities.

Riga, Latvia, November 2013 © Andrew Stuttaford

That’s not what Latvia did. The relatively low value added within Latvia to its exports, and the difficulty that it would have faced in satisfying domestic demand with domestic production, meant that a conventional devaluation would have struggled to work its naughty magic, even if the export markets had been there (by no means assured after the slump in the international economy). Tipping the scales further, local business and the nascent middle class—most of whose boom-bloated -borrowing had been in euros—would have faced catastrophe had they had to repay those debts in suddenly depreciated lati. That would have threatened both social disaster and a dangerous breach with the Nordic banks responsible for a large portion of that lending—banks that would now have a vital role to play in maintaining financial liquidity in the country (the only sizable Latvian bank had foundered).

Base of Freedom Monument, Riga, Latvia, November 2013 © Andrew Stuttaford

So Latvia stuck with the peg and opted for “internal devaluation,” shorthand for an attempt to mimic the competitive benefits of a traditional devaluation, but by squeezing costs (primarily labor costs) and excess demand out of the local economy rather than by depreciating the currency. This won Latvia financial backing from a group comprising the World Bank, the IMF, the EU, and the Nordic countries, support that had to sugar some very bitter medicine. Government expenditures were slashed (large numbers of public sector employees were fired and many of those who hung on saw their salaries cut by 20 percent or, indeed, much more) and, to a lesser extent, taxes increased. Between 2008 and 2012 total fiscal consolidation amounted to some 17 percent of GDP.

Most of the pain was front-loaded, both as a matter of practical politics (better to strike before austerity fatigue set in) and a matter of practical economics: Latvian interest rates had soared to damaging heights and confidence had to be rebuilt.

Central Market, Riga, Latvia, November 2013 © Andrew Stuttaford

Seen in that context, the 2009 declaration by Valdis Dombrovskis, the dourly impressive center-right prime minister, that Latvia would continue to seek membership in the eurozone (and, more specifically, get there by 2014) made sense. Whatever the mounting problems in the EU’s gimcrack currency union, it appeared to offer a comparatively safe haven from the Baltic storm. For investors and lenders, the obvious seriousness of this commitment, together with the external support that the government had won, significantly reduced the exchange-rate risk associated with doing business in Latvia. It was no coincidence that with the “devaluation ghost” (as the central bank delightfully puts it) held at bay, lats-denominated interest rates started to tumble.

On top of that, targeting eurozone membership provided a benchmark against which the performance of the Latvian economy could be measured. The country would only be eligible to switch over to the euro if it met the currency union’s “Maastricht criteria.” Its budgetary position would have to be on a sound footing, its inflation subdued, and so on.

Perhaps most important, the march towards the single currency signaled to Latvians that their reconnection with Europe would not be derailed by the economic crisis. Austerity was a means to an end, not just an end in itself. Many Latvians had (and have) their doubts about the wisdom of adopting the single currency (over half are still—to a greater or lesser extent—opposed), but the broader aim of anchoring their state more firmly in the West helped them to stay the course through the brutally tough times that followed the financial collapse.

Central Market, Riga, Latvia, November 2013 © Andrew Stuttaford

There are plenty of dismal statistics to choose from, but unemployment stood at over 20 percent in early 2010 (compared with an average of 6.5 percent in 2007), and GDP shriveled by 18 percent in 2009, after a 4.2 percent decline the previous year. Despite this, Dombrovskis was able to prevail in the October 2010 general election and then weather (albeit precariously) a snap election called in slightly murky circumstances the following September. The fragmented and incomplete development of political parties in Latvia means that general elections are not the best gauge of public opinion, but Dombrovskis’s survival (he went on to become Latvia’s longest-serving democratically elected prime minister) says something. He resigned only in late November, after the deadly collapse of the roof of a Riga supermarket, a tragedy for which he took “moral and political responsibility.”

But by then the economy was well on the mend, bolstered by a revival in global demand partly stimulated, of course, by less austere policies elsewhere. Quite why Latvia was able to resume its pre-boom trajectory as quickly as it did remains the subject of lively academic debate, but a low level of public debt was one crucial advantage: Latvia could persist with its tough approach without falling into the debt-deflationary trap that is crippling recovery in Greece and other grisly corners of the eurozone’s ER.

Latvia’s GDP growth began to turn positive during 2010, coming in at a total nicely above 5 percent for both 2011 and 2012, and is on schedule to be comfortably over 4 percent in 2013, the fastest growth in the EU. The current account deficit is again at a manageable level, the unemployment rate has shrunk to a number marginally below 12 percent, inflation is running at less than 1 percent (as opposed to nearly 18 percent in May 2008), and the budget deficit has returned to respectability after coming close to 10 percent of GDP in 2009. In 2012 it was only a little above 1 percent, while government debt stood at around a modest 40 percent of GDP, easily below the Maastricht requirement of 60 percent.

It is no surprise that Latvia’s formal application to join the euro in March was approved by the relevant EU authorities within a few months. Ordinary Latvians were not given an equivalent say. Calls for a referendum were rejected, not least on the grounds that the matter had long been decided. Any country joining the EU after the Maastricht Treaty came into force in 1993 (Latvia became a member in 2004 after—it is fair to note—a referendum) is obliged to sign up for the euro as soon as it meets the Maastricht tests, a proviso that the Swedes (joined 1995)—who wisely retain their krona—have ignored. Some seats at the EU’s table are more equal than others.

Central Market, Riga, Latvia, November 2013 © Andrew Stuttaford

In any event, Latvia will swap the lats for the euro on January 1 at the rate, to be precise about it, of 0.702804 lati per euro, although it will still be possible to pay for goods and services in lati for another two weeks thereafter. The conversion process within the public and private sector is well under way, as is an extensive program of public education (meetings, leaflets, advertising). Most visibly to the visitor, all prices now have to be given in both lati and euros, and from what I could see in Riga, that was happening everywhere. Even in the converted zeppelin hangars (history here is complicated) of the capital’s picturesque (and somewhat law-unto-itself) central market, everything was properly priced: I had been issued a nifty lenticular currency conversion card and could check that that was so. Watchdogs are in place to stop the changeover being used to hike prices (a common, if exaggerated, fear that has accompanied the introduction of the euro in other countries). To reinforce this, dual pricing will be mandatory until the end of June.

After the changeover, lati will be convertible into euros (at the fixed rate) at rural post offices for three months, at commercial banks for six months, and at the central bank in perpetuity. This matters. Ask officials why there is still so much opposition to the switch, and—perhaps a little condescendingly—they cite folk-memories of the damage caused by previous currency conversions, especially the abrupt introduction of a “new ruble” in 1961 during the Soviet era.

But there is more to it than that. Geopolitical realities (yes, we are talking about Russia), the size—and open nature—of the Latvian economy, and inadequate domestic capital formation all make a decent, if downbeat, case for Latvia to enter the eurozone, despite that currency union’s profound problems. Its flaws (to use a gentle word) have not escaped the attention of the man in the Latvian street. He also does not appreciate the fact that if there is another eurozone bailout (Greece, yet again?), frugal, hardscrabble, post-Soviet Latvia, one of the poorest countries in the EU, will have to chip in.

For a country to abandon its own money is to throw away an essential attribute of sovereignty. In a lovely but manipulative gesture, Latvian 1 and 2 euro coins will bear the image of Milda, the “Latvian maiden” who adorned prewar Latvia’s gorgeous—and emotionally resonant—5 lati piece. This time she is decorating a symbol not of hard-won independence but of a sadly withered autonomy.

And the eurozone’s long agony may bring with it another twist of the knife. The convenient fiction that made it politically possible to establish the euro in the first place was that this was a shared currency that could work with a minimum of pooled sovereignty, a stretch at the best of times, an impossibility in the case of a monetary union that is very far from being an optimal currency area; Germany is not Greece, Finland is not Portugal. If the euro is to survive in its current form, the eurozone will require much deeper fiscal and budgetary integration. Quite what will be left of Latvia’s low tax, fiscally responsible regime or, in any real sense, its self-determination, by the time this process is finished is anyone’s guess.

And what is to remain of Latvia itself? It emerged from nearly half a century of cruel Soviet occupation with its identity savagely battered—not least by the presence of a large Russian settler population (even today ethnic Latvians account for only some 62 percent of the country’s two million inhabitants)—but its heart intact. Membership in the EU has represented a kinder, subtler challenge. The opportunities it has brought to live in lusher lands to the west has led to a steady stream of emigration, a stream that became a torrent during the slump before dwindling again today. All told, the population has shrunk by over 10 percent since 2000. Exporting surplus labor helped Latvia manage the crisis, but at what longer-term cost?

Riga Castle, Latvia, November 2013 © Andrew Stuttaford

I spent the evening of November 11 down by Riga Castle. It was Lacplesis Day, the anniversary of the victory in 1919 by freshly cobbled-together Latvian forces (helped by Royal Navy guns) over a Russo-German army (as I said, history is complicated here) in the battle that effectively secured the new state’s independence after centuries of foreign rule. An ever-swelling crowd, talking quietly, proud to be there, had gathered, lighting row upon row of candles that flickered against the old castle walls, a tribute to the men who had fought so courageously for their country’s right to be. Bonfires did their best against the cold, clear northern night; once-banned flags—carmine and white like the ribbons everyone seemed to be wearing—waved in the chill breeze. A group of children sang folk songs of simple, crystalline beauty.

Behind us a series of tiny vessels had been launched into the River Daugava. Each bore a candle and some a miniature flag, too. They formed a brave, bright, glowing flotilla that sailed off into the dark, its destination unknown.

A Case Of The Vapers

National Review Online, December 26, 2013

What was it again that Mencken once wrote? Google, enter, click. Ah yes, it was this: “Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

On Thursday, the New York City Council made room in its legislative agenda — it was also busy commissioning a study on polystyrene foam — to pass by a vote of 43–8 (that lopsided majority an indicator of idiocy afoot) a measure that will, once Mayor Bloomberg signs it (oh, he will) shortly prohibit the vaping (that’s the word) of e-cigarettes anyplace where smoking is now banned in Gotham, bars, restaurants, offices, parks, the beach, you name it. Technically speaking, the ban will take effect as an amendment to the city’s Smoke-Free Air Act. That e-cigarettes do not emit any smoke was an irrelevance.

To vape is to inhale a vapor from a plastic facsimile of a cigarette, battery-powered, bought for $10 at a local store, and good, it is claimed, for 400 puffs. The business end is fashioned to look like a filter. In another nod to nostalgia, the tip typically glows as the user inhales. It’s not the real thing, nothing like. Plastic is neither leaf nor paper. It holds no memories of that old bar down on the Lower East Side, that conversation once upon when. There’s no tobacco, no combustion, none of the warmth, none of the evocative transience, none of the mouth-feel of cigarette or cigar, and it looks just a bit dumb. Walk into Rick’s with an e-cigarette and Rick would laugh. Then again, Bogie died at 57.

Whatever the aesthetics of e-cigarettes, as nicotine-delivery systems go, they are a lot safer than the cancer sticks of old. There’s no carbon monoxide, no tar, very little, in fact, of tobacco smoking’s carcinogenic stew. To be sure, the Food and Drug Administration has detected tobacco-specific nitrosamines (a carcinogen) in the e-cigarette cartridges that contain the treats to come. A 2009 study revealed about the same quantity of TSNAs in cartridges as might be found in a nicotine patch, a total about one-nine-hundredth of the level found inside Joe Camel. The vaper (I know, I know) will inhale an even smaller portion, a tiny fraction of a minuscule amount. Furthermore, TSNAs were the only carcinogens detected in this study. Boston University’s Dr. Michael Siegel, a 25-year veteran of tobacco-control work (and a Centers for Disease Control alumnus), has noted that smokers of conventional cigarettes may inhale maybe 40 other carcinogens, not to speak of “thousands of [other] chemicals.”

It is true that at the end of November a study by Holland’s National Institute for National Health (RIVM) triggered a few headlines like “Dutch sound alarm about possible risks of e-cigarettes” (Reuters), but within the body of that Reuters story there was this: “The institute said it was concerned about a lack of evidence on the possible health effects of e-cigarettes…”

As a reminder: Don’t know is not the same as know.

The RIVM did note that the dread nicotine was involved and referred to reports of nausea and throat irritation by some users. Indeed, it recommended (Reuters writes) that “as a precaution [e-cigarettes] should not be used by pregnant women or in the vicinity of children.” For a health warning nowadays, this is on the mild side. The scientific concerns it reflects are not enough to justify a heavy-handed ban of the type now headed New York City’s way.

But what about the antifreeze? This substance, more happily associated with autos than lungs, has seeped into the e-cigarette debate, setting up a scare or 50. The truth is that the FDA found some diethylene glycol — an important ingredient in antifreeze — in just one of the cartridges surveyed in the 2009 study, a dismaying result but almost certainly a rogue finding. E-cigarettes generally do contain, however, a base of propylene glycol to “hold” the nicotine and any added flavoring. Propylene glycol is used in antifreeze, but as a kinder, gentler alternative to its rough diethylene cousin, particularly when there is any danger of contact with food. As is explained in the compound’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry toxicological profile (September 1997), “the [FDA] has classified propylene glycol as ‘generally recognized as safe,’ which means that it is acceptable for use in flavorings, drugs, and cosmetics, and as a direct food additive.” Move along, there’s nothing to see here.

As an alternative to propylene glycol, some e-cigarettes use vegetable glycerin as their base. This common food additive will affect their taste, but not your health.

And so far as the ingredients lurking in an e-cigarette are concerned, that ought to be about it. This is not, of course, a reason for arguing that research on these products should cease, or that stricter quality control should be opposed. Nor is it a claim that e-cigarettes are risk-free. They may, for example, inhibit lung capacity, at least temporarily. Beyond that and those pesky TSNAs, there is also the matter that most e-cigarettes will (as the astute folk at the RIVM had noticed) be used to deliver nicotine, a potentially addictive substance — albeit one that has been given up by tens of millions. Then again, much of nicotine’s famously powerful addictiveness can be attributed to the fact that it is being delivered via tobacco, a medium with naturally occurring monoamine oxidase inhibitors that seem to have a great deal to do (it’s a long story) with the difficulty of quitting smoking. Divorced from its leafy accomplice, nicotine is not that addictive, nor under those circumstances is it, to quote John Britton, who leads the tobacco advisory group for Britain’s Royal College of Physicians, even a “particularly hazardous” drug.

What about secondhand smoke, butcher of innocents, enricher of laundries? E-cigarettes give off little or no odor, and, although the research is still at an early stage, the health risks of secondhand vaping likely rest somewhere between zero and infinitesimal.

Considering all this (Dr. Britton has been quoted as saying that if everyone switched over to e-cigarettes it could save “millions” of lives), the medical world ought to be cheering the swift rise of a hugely safer alternative to demon tobacco. E-cigarettes are, so to speak, catching fire. In the U.S., sales are expected to hit $1 billion in 2013, twice the total of a year ago. That’s still only about 1 percent of the total spent on tobacco products, but it says something that Altria Group Inc. (parent company of Philip Morris USA), Reynolds American Inc., and Lorillard Inc. (which paid $135 million for blu eCigs in 2012) have all entered this market. Non-U.S. e-cigarette sales have been expanding rapidly too, reaching an estimated $2 billion in 2012.

But e-cigarettes have given tobacco’s fiercer foes, well, the vapors. Brazil, Norway, and Singapore have banned them. Others have imposed strict controls, including the prohibition of vaping in public places. Some British railway companies have exiled vapers from their carriages on the carefully considered grounds that they make other passengers “uneasy.” Such stupidities are not, as New Yorkers now know, confined to abroad. Their city is by no means alone. A growing number of America’s politicians, bureaucrats, and other nuisances are on the offensive against e-cigarettes. Thus bans similar to that now looming over New York City have already been introduced in New Jersey and Utah, states that would not normally agree on very much.

There are some legitimate concerns. There is a wide range of e-flavors, some of which, cherry crush, say, or chocolate (I’m not sure — on many grounds — about maple bacon), might appeal to a younger set. Meanwhile the anxious RIVM frets (according to Reuters) that e-cigarettes “might be attractive to young people because of bright colors, flashing lights and jewelry-like appearance.” Dutch e-cigarette design must have taken an exotic turn.

Such worries could be addressed by prohibiting the sale of e-cigarettes to minors, but that would not have been enough for New York councilman James Gennaro, a key promoter of the ban (and also a sponsor of legislation that recently increased the minimum age for buying tobacco in New York City to 21), who wants us all — of course he does — to think of the children. He worried (the New York Times reported) “that children who could not differentiate between regular and electronic smoking were getting the message that smoking is socially acceptable.” Combine the RIVM with Gennaro and the message is clear. E-cigarettes are a menace when they look like cigarettes. And they are a menace when they do not.

Other objections — that e-cigarettes might act as a gateway to the real thing (in reality, they are more likely to represent an exit from it) or that they might reglamorize smoking — are feeble stuff. This suggests that the real agenda is driven by the precautionary principle run amok, or, ominously, by something darker still.

And that something is not the prospect of the loss of valuable tobacco tax revenues (although that will not have gone unnoticed by some of those looking to bring vaping to heel). What is at work here is, at least in part, altogether more profound, and more disturbing, than that. The campaign against tobacco began with the best of intentions, but it has long since degenerated into an instrument for its activists both to order others around and to display their own virtue. And with that comes an insistence on a rejection of tobacco so absolute, so pure, that it has become detached from any logic other than the logic of control, the classic hallmark of a cult. So mighty is the supposed power of this anathematized leaf that anything — even when tobacco-free — that looks like a cigarette or provides any approximation of its pleasures is suspect.

It’s too much, of course, to expect any respect these days for the principle that adults should be left to decide such things for themselves, but the chance that the e-cigarette could save an impressive number of lives should count for something. Europe’s sad snus saga suggests that that might not necessarily be so. For generations Swedes have taken a form of oral tobacco, a snuff known as “snus,” cured in a way that sharply reduces its TSNA content. Snus is available in the U.S., land of dip and chaw, but, within the EU, where no such tradition exists, it can be sold only in Sweden. Taking snus is not without risk, but it’s far less harmful than smoking. Its popularity in Sweden, especially with the guys, goes a long way to explaining why that country has Europe’s lowest incidence of lung cancer among men. It has been estimated that introducing snus elsewhere in the EU could save some 90,000 lives a year, but the EU’s capnophobic leadership has rejected the idea. Anti-tobacco jihadists are quite content, you see, to accept that the perfect can be the enemy of the good.

As America’s vapers are now finding out.

Note: This article updates “Vaper Strain,” an article that appeared in the September 2, 2013 issue of National Review.

Yes, Conservatives Can Be Godless Too

Politix, December 8, 2013

Reading the jubilant response on the left to the news that Pope Francis appears to be one of them (the truth is much more complicated than that, but the lefty label will do for now), it’s easy to detect a strong note of Schadenfreude: God bites (conservative) man.

The argument runs like this: Right-wingers are forever proclaiming how devout they are, so how awkward for them that the leader of the largest Christian denomination has been badmouthing the free market.

Yes, that’s snarky, simplistic, and there are plenty of rebuttals available (for example, Christianity is an exuberantly syncretic faith, with room for multiple interpretations of its founder’s reported teachings). But judging by what some of my fellow rightists have been saying there is undeniably some – how shall I put this – discomfort on display.

Not where I’m concerned. My lack of any religious conviction – not a scrap, since you asked – may make for trouble with St. Peter at some future date, but, as the punch-up over the pope continues, it’s a plus. I don’t have a god in this fight.

And that surprises people. To be sure, it’s well-known that the Ayn Rand crowd casts a cold eye on the idea of a deity, and there’s a widespread suspicion that those wacky libertarians will believe in anything or nothing, but, as for the rest, well, religious right. There’s something to that, of course: Many conservatives are indeed religious, but this is frequently as much a matter of culture as it is of ideology.

America is a religious country, and so traditionalists (and conservatives are by definition traditionalists) tend to be religious, a tendency that has been sharpened – and made much more visible – by the way society has been changing since the 1960s. Half a century ago you would not have noticed the religious believer who was opposed to same-sex marriage, because back then “everyone” was (if they thought about it at all).

But the idea that it is essential philosophically for conservatives to be religious believers is nonsense. Dig around a bit, and you will discover quite a few here in America who have declared that they are not (although none of them – how odd – hold significant elective office). Look across the Atlantic (I am British-born) and you will find many, many more.

Godless conservatives however are rarely anti-religious. They often appreciate religion as a force for social cohesion and as a link to a nation’s past. They may push back hard against religious extremism, but, unlike today’s “new atheists” they are most unlikely to be found railing against “sky fairies.” Mankind has evolved in a way that makes it strongly disposed towards religious belief, and conservatism is based on recognizing human nature for what it is.

That means facing the fact that gods will, one way or another, always be with us. They may not be real, but their followers will be. What they believe matters.

And how they treat those who don’t matters even more.

Looking On The Bright Side

Josef Joffe: The Myth of America’s Decline - Politics, Economics, and a Half Century of False Prophecies

National Review, November 26, 2013 (December 16, 2013 Issue)

Statue of Liberty, June 2009 © Andrew Stuttaford

There is usually a moment in the course of a typical English picnic of drizzle, hard-boiled eggs, and chill, when someone looks up at the gray, unyielding sky and brightly announces that the weather is “clearing up.” If Josef Joffe attends English picnics, he would be that someone.

In this cheery take on America’s prospects, Joffe, the editor of Die Zeit, looks around and ahead and decides that, for all its problems, the U.S. will do just fine. He reminds us that pundits and politicians have been awaiting the end of America since its beginning. In itself, of course, this proves nothing: Time passes, facts change; what once was set in stone ends up slithering on sand. Joffe takes care to say that the failure to come true of previous prophecies of America’s decline “does not mean that [one] never will,” but, given the broader themes of this book, those words — and a handful of others like them — are the equivalent of the quick-fire muttering that accompanies some car commercials, caveats that no one is meant to notice.

Joffe, a shrewd and subtle analyst, is on firmer ground when he turns his attention to the nature, origins, and history of “declinism.” Predictions of an American tumble, he argues, frequently owe more to the dreams, fears, or ambitions of those who made them than to any reasonable calculation of what the future might hold. There have always been those, abroad, who have taken comfort in the thought that this over-mighty giant — and dangerous inspiration — might be faltering. Here at home, however, prophecies of doom are often intended to be self-defeating, designed to change behavior — enough already with the twerking, enough already with the neglect of missile defense — that would otherwise lead to catastrophe.

And declinism is a powerful political tool (fear sells) that has long been used and abused. Joffe relates how insurgent presidential candidates have a habit of basing their campaigns on existential threats that have a way of disappearing by the time, four years later, that the insurgent-turned-incumbent, “first Jeremiah, now redeemer,” is seeking reelection by a country where it is, again, morning. This record of apocalyptic bunkum does not mean that every politician’s prediction of approaching Armageddon can safely be ignored, but skepticism is generally a better response than panic.

Next, Joffe asks if there is any country in a position to topple America from its “towering perch,” a perch that is, he shows, far loftier than widely imagined. By contrast, Britain, even at its imperial peak, was merely first among some fairly grand equals. Joffe again buttresses his argument with the wreckage of earlier predictions — that Japan would overtake America, that Europe (Europe!) would fly by, that the Soviets would bury us — before turning a bracingly cold eye on China. The starting point of his enjoyably iconoclastic take on this latest contender is a blend of math and history — “as the baseline goes higher, as economies mature, growth slows” — but it quickly evolves into a perceptive critique of authoritarian modernization (and particularly its Chinese variant) that would make Thomas Friedman very unhappy indeed. Imagining a Chinese Sorpasso any time soon is, maintains Joffe, an extrapolation too far.

What is true of the economic contest is, broadly, true of the military race too. Joffe acknowledges, as he must in the wake of 9/11, “the power of the weak,” but concludes — too sanguine, perhaps, about the equalizing effects of technology — that America is so far ahead of its rivals “that it plays in a league of its own,” and it does so more cannily (“on top, not in control”) and, if not exactly on the cheap, more frugally (amazing, but true, despite those famous Pentagon toilet seats) than the alpha nations that preceded it. America may one day abdicate (Joffe highlights Obama’s combination of “reticence” abroad with “nation-building” at home), but it is unlikely to be imperial overstretch that brings it down.

A drawback of Joffe’s focus on the competition is that it allows relative strength to obscure absolute decay, an error avoided by Alan Simpson when the former senator compared the fiscal condition of the U.S. with that of some European nations. America was, he said, the “healthiest horse in the glue factory,” an ugly truth not inconsistent with the broader observation by Joffe (who, we should note, also frets about deficits) that “only the United States can bring down the United States.”

But an even more profound menace to this country’s future may come from a transformation that owes little to foreign plotting or domestic excess and quite a bit to free trade, free enterprise, and technological progress, features — rightly applauded by Joffe — of the American system that have done so much to make the country what it is today. That America’s generosity and optimism, in the form of an immigration policy — nuttily cheered on by a Joffe still in thrall to ancient Ellis Island myth — may make things even worse only sharpens the irony still further.

The exceptional nation has undeniably been exceptionally successful. Yes, America is an idea and a dream and all that, but above all, it has worked. As Joffe recounts, there have been busts, panics, and slumps, but overall this has truly been a land of opportunity. The result has been a nation held together in no small part by the shared belief that a better life is there for the taking by those who work hard, a belief fed by the fact that it was true enough for enough people for enough of the time, a belief that may now be becoming a delusion.

Inflation-adjusted household median income has yet to return to its 1999 peak — 14 years ago, in case anyone is counting — and now stands at only a fraction more than the level a decade before that, a stagnation that cannot (despite some wishful thinking to the contrary) be explained away by changes in household size. It is no coincidence that the percentage of Americans in work also peaked around the turn of the century, before going into a decline that the Great Recession has only intensified: Work-force participation is back to levels last seen in the disco era, a regression with ominous ramifications for the sustainability of Social Security, Medicare, and all the rest.

The tentative nature of the current recovery, and its particular shape — hiring at the top and bottom of the wage scale has picked up, in the middle not so much — looks a lot like yet more evidence that happy days will not be here again for the American middle class anytime soon. Its labor is simply not as valuable as it was. As technology gets ever smarter, and as workers in lower-cost emerging markets upgrade their skills, opportunities will narrow in the office suite as well as on the factory floor, squeezing cleverer, well-educated Americans of a type who have only rarely been squeezed before. And they won’t like it one bit.

In his fascinating and, in its implications, terrifying new book, Average Is Over, economist Tyler Cowen surveys this scene and predicts the arrival of a “hyper-meritocracy” in which a comparatively small segment (maybe 10 to 15 percent) of the population does extremely well, most people eke their way along, and there are few in the middle: a vision that may be exaggerated, but not by enough to save what’s left of Bedford Falls.

Unlike many apocalypticians, Cowen has room for a little relief (of sorts). He accepts that there will be “some outbursts of trouble” but anticipates a future that is “downright orderly.” The country will be older, and shared pride in America’s leading position in the world (Joffe would not disagree) will throw additional social cement into the mix, while “cheap fun” distracts the potentially restless.

“Revolts,” writes Joffe, “are the hardest part of the soothsaying business.” I’m not so sure. Smashed expectations, a large cohort of well-educated (and often young) underemployed, high numbers of unemployed men looking for work in factories that no longer exist, ethnic and cultural fragmentation (the last apparently not a concern to Joffe or Cowen, immigration enthusiasts both), and the window that the Internet provides into the lives of the rich are a recipe for disorder that it will take more than Grand Theft Auto to head off.

And the increasing emphasis on growing inequality (the inequality is real enough, but it is a symptom, not a cause, of middle-class woes) in today’s political debate — from Occupy to Obama — is characteristic of a society in which the focus has shifted away from growing the pie to slicing it up. That’s a harbinger of a crisis within the American model, and, I suspect, an early taste of an Argentinian future to come.

Joffe dismisses a mid-’90s prediction of a coming automated dystopia as “a stew of Malthus and Marx.” He would be unlikely to be much kinder about Cowen’s Skynet lite. That’s a mistake. The clouds aren’t clearing. They are getting darker.

Himself Alone

Curzio Malaparte: The Skin

The New Criterion, October 1, 2013

Navigating the first half of Italy’s twentieth century took elasticity. There were few more elastic than Curzio Malaparte (1898–1957), author of The Skin (La Pelle, 1949), a novel of which the first English-language “unexpurgated” version is being released by New York Review Books this autumn. Malaparte was a fascist, and then he was not. He flirted with Communism, and then he did not. A protestant by baptism, an atheist by choice, he converted to Catholicism on his deathbed, but in his will left the house he had built on Capri, the most beautiful in the world some said—his “Casa Come Me”—to the Chinese Communist Party. He was a writer of great, if unreliable, talent. He was a soldier, diplomat, moviemaker, duelist, agitator, provocateur, and dandy. A famously successful Romeo, his only true loves were his dog Febo and, above all, himself.

The Skin is a strange, uneven, and baroque creation, a fabulist memoir, a surrealist fiction based on fact and anything but. It is a terrifying, occasionally hallucinatory and weirdly arch depiction of an Italy devastated by war and moral catastrophe. Added by the Vatican—no mean judge of a good read—to its Index Librorum Prohibitorum, The Skin works well enough on its own merits, but to accept it at face value is to be beguiled by a mask.

To hazard a guess at what lies beneath involves peering into the evasive Malaparte’s bewildering, and frequently rewritten, career, and being prepared to risk being led hopelessly astray. Bear with me, this is going to take a while.

Born Kurt Erich Suckert, to a German father and Italian mother, he changed his name in 1925 to something more in keeping with Mussolini-era Italianizzazione. It was one of the more straightforward maneuvers in a life of transformation and disguise, but it came with a characteristically perverse wrinkle, with Malaparte (“bad side”) a spin on the Bonaparte already taken by another, more illustrious, narcissist.

We catch our first glimpses of him: a precocious schoolboy, some early writings, and what the British once called a “good war,” enlisting with the French in 1914 and then, after Italy signed up for Armageddon, joining his (maternal) home team. Next came stints as a diplomat, at the Versailles Conference and in Warsaw. But it was his first book, La Rivolta dei Santi Maledetti (1921), a sympathetic account of the mutiny that followed the Italian defeat at Caporetto (1917), that, in its rage at the old order, paved the way for what was to come. While Malaparte was—to the extent that any ideological labels apply (“anarcho-fascist” has been one brave shot)—a man of the “right,” it was the drama of revolution that appealed to him more.

And that’s what Mussolini appeared to offer. With the help of some fiery books, energetic journalism, and a spot of more sinister activity, Malaparte worked his way into a leading role among Italy’s fascist intelligentsia. Then the story starts to cloud. Malaparte was drawn to power, but he was too restless, too self-involved to play its games with the discipline that they require. Frustrated by Mussolini’s failure to unleash the social upheaval that had once seemed possible (and making no secret of that frustration), Malaparte drifted away from the regime’s center, but not too far: He was appointed editor-in-chief of La Stampa in 1929, only to lose the job a year or so later, for reasons that remain unclear. But the myth—assiduously promoted by Malaparte in the postwar years—that he was already slipping into outright opposition to fascism is nonsense, brutally debunked by Maurizio Serra, author of the invaluable and sternly forensic Malaparte, Vies et Légendes (2011), the finest biography of the writer to date.

Nor did Malaparte’s 1933 conviction for defaming one of the fascist leadership represent a definitive break with Mussolini. The offending letters were a clumsy power play gone wrong, nothing more. Malaparte’s punishment—five years’ confino on an island just off Sicily—turned out to be rather less than he would subsequently maintain. Thanks to Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law, another of his useful friends, the sentence was eased, reduced, and, after some eighteen months, commuted. Throughout it, Malaparte wrote for the Corriere della Sera, albeit under a pseudonym—some proprieties had to be observed. A Yevtushenko (if even that) rather than a Solzhenitsyn, he resumed his career on his release. In addition to journalism, there were a number of books, and in 1937 he founded Prospettive, an initially propagandist publication that evolved into a magazine of the arts offering a modernist, outward-looking reminder that there remained some room in fascist Italy for more than jackboots and bombast. Breton, Eliot, Éluard, Garcia Lorca, Joyce, MacLeish, and Pound were amongst those who made their appearances in pages that, as Serra notes, almost never featured contemporary German writers, one of the many rebellions with which this revealingly incomplete opportunist punctuated his career.

When Europe caught fire, Malaparte was recalled to his old Alpine Division and appointed a war correspondent, in the catbird seat to view the inferno that fueled his best work. Il Sole è Cieco (1947), the first, in terms of the period it covered, of his books on World War II, is an unexpectedly lyrical piece based loosely—of course—on a couple of weeks in the mountains spent with the Alpini as they half-heartedly campaigned against the French in June 1940. Twelve months later, after travels that included a grubby detour in Athens writing articles intended to help prepare the Italian public for the invasion of Greece, Malaparte was tacking along with the Germans, reporting for the Corriere della Sera as the Wehrmacht swept out of Romania and into the Soviet Union.

Presciently—and unfashionably—enough, Malaparte described the Soviets as tough opponents, even in retreat, something that he claimed (later) had led to him being expelled from the war zone in September 1941 “by order of Goebbels” (no less!), a tale that, like so many of his confections, crumbles under closer inspection. After a break in Italy (no, not “house arrest”), he returned to what he thought would be a more congenial sector of the Eastern Front, the stretch controlled by Germany’s Finnish allies. After some rewriting to restore what had (supposedly) been lost to the censor, a selection of his dispatches from the Eastern Front were first published in book form in 1943—after the fall of Mussolini—as The Volga Rises in Europe (Il Volga nasce in Europa), a volume that is, much more so than the far better-known Kaputt (1944), his greatest work.

Vivid, haunting, and elegiac, the book ranges from descriptions of the summer Blitzkrieg pouring into the Ukraine, to the snow and silence of Karelian forests from which isolated Finnish outposts overlook besieged Leningrad, and skirmishes evoke the “primitive ferocity” of ancient war: “wholly physical, wholly instinctive, wholly ruthless.” There are also stirrings here—visiting remnants of the Czarist bourgeoisie clinging onto shreds of the old ways in Moldavia, an excursion to the deserted house in Kuokkala where the Russian painter Ilya Repin had lived—of the lament for a broken European civilization that emerged as a major theme in Kaputt and The Skin, and, difficult as it is to reconcile with his past enthusiasm for an upending of the social order, became another twist in this writer’s labyrinth of contradiction and ambiguity.

Malaparte may—true to form—have spent considerably less time at the front than he implied, but a good part of what makes The Volga Rises in Europe more compelling than Kaputt or The Skin is the debt it owes to the discipline of journalism. The prose is spare, the stories brief, telling snapshots of moments that may once have even been real. By contrast Kaputt and The Skin, bestsellers both, are sprawling, fragmented, astounding epics of hideous accuracy, exaggeration, and deception, “novels” where fact merges with fiction, and where lies tell a truth that Europe was just beginning to grasp. Recounted in the first person by a “Malaparte” who is both fictional and not, they were also designed to distance their author from his fascist past (a pressing necessity by 1944) whilst (in Kaputt) also trumpeting his presence—witty, sardonic, superior—in the center of the Axis’ nightmare world. This was a tricky maneuver, but unavoidable if he was to be able to demonstrate that he—his best, his only hero—mattered: Malaparte had peered into the abyss and found it filled with mirrors.

His “horribly gay and gruesome” Kaputt is—as Malaparte recognized—a far stronger work than The Skin. He spent 1941–43 close enough to the heart of darkness to recognize it for what it was. Based however remotely on his experiences during this time, Kaputt is savage, sensual, and brilliant, decadent, revolting, and beautiful. It is filled with black humor, narcissism, self-conscious erudition, and embarrassing snobbery. There is champagne as well as carnage, Proust as well as Goya, a jarring mix that sometimes reinforces the sense of cataclysm or is sometimes just crass. Horrors are layered upon horrors, but in a way that not infrequently suggests that they are being deployed to showcase his formidable descriptive powers, an aestheticization of barbarity that underlines Malaparte’s icy detachment, a detachment that this most flawed of chameleons does not always bother to conceal.

Asked by a delegation of Jews in the Rumanian city of Jassy (Iasi) if he can intercede with the military to head off the pogrom that they rightly fear is imminent, Malaparte (no anti-Semite in fact or fiction) starts off well into the next afternoon on what he believes to be a hopeless trudge to see the relevant officers, only to pause to inspect a statue, and then head in the direction of the local bigwigs’ club to discuss poetry. He never even manages that, but instead takes a turn towards a cemetery for a nap. He awakes at sunset, woken by the sound of a Soviet bombing raid, and heads off to see a sixteen-year old waitress, Marioara, for whom he feels, well, it’s hard to say. A few hours later the pogrom begins.

In reality, Malaparte arrived in Jassy shortly after the slaughter. That didn’t stop him painting a sickening picture of the pogrom and of an aftermath that pointed to the hecatombs to come. A writer looking to walk away from an Axis-tainted past might have been expected to take the opportunity to present himself in a nobler light. And yet Malaparte does not. It says something too that, while living in France in the, for him, not uncomplicated late 1940s, Malaparte sent a portion of his royalties from Kaputt to Céline, the collaborationist French author, and notorious anti-Semite, then living in uncomfortable exile in Denmark. Whatever one might think of that gesture, it was not the act of the shape-shifter that Malaparte was so often said to be. According to Serra the two had never even met.

Kaputt ends with Malaparte’s arrival in Naples after the fall of Mussolini in July 1943, and his own brief detention by Italy’s new government. The Skin opens some time later, with Malaparte installed (as indeed, in another impressive twist to his resume, eventually he was) as a liaison officer with the U.S. army in that same occupied, liberated, humiliated, degraded, and anarchic city. Most of the book describes “Malaparte’s” stay there before a coda tracking his journey north with the Allies to Rome and beyond.

To its detriment, The Skin is more didactic than Kaputt. Its portrait of Italy’s moral, political, and physical ruin is bloated by a blend of pacifism and high school nihilism that is crude stuff after the detachment and elegant disenchantment of the earlier book. It concludes with the muttered observation that “it is a shameful thing to win a war,” an observation that is as wrong-headed (it rather depends on who is doing the winning) as it is overwrought.

And the latter adjective will do quite well to describe much of The Skin. The bizarre, sometimes surreal, interludes dotted through Kaputt work because they are interludes, whereas in The Skin (in which the freak show includes an outlandish “Uranian” rite, talking fetuses, dead soldiers on parade, and a feast with cannibalistic and mythic elements) they come close to overwhelming the book, and somehow undercut the sense of apocalypse that the British writer Norman Lewis, who was in the same city at the same time, conveyed so calmly and so effectively in Naples ’44. Worse, they fuel the suspicion—this is a book with longueurs unimaginable in Kaputt—that Malaparte was either running out of new things to say or, more cynically, that he had not much interest in doing so. Kaputt’s sales had not been hurt, to put it mildly, by its author’s emphasis on the cruel, the macabre, and the grotesque, so why not repeat the trick, only more so? But too often more turns out to be less, too rococo, too much. That’s not to argue that The Skin is without sequences of remarkable power and extraordinary beauty. It has those, but it is telling that one of its most memorable passages (a characteristic Malaparte set-piece) describes his discovery of a Ukrainian road lined with trees on which Jews have been crucified, an out-of-place digression that, even allowing for the herky-jerky chronology of both books, reads as if it was left over from a draft of Kaputt—an atrocity surplus to requirements.

As with Kaputt, it is what The Skin adds to the understanding of its elusive author that make for some of its most intriguing moments, whether it be the mocking condescension with which he views African-American GIs, or the peculiar obsession with homosexuality, something found elsewhere in his writing, which may suggest that Malaparte wore at least one mask that he was never prepared to recognize, let alone remove.

Above all, there is a delightful scene—as so often in these books revolving around a meal (well, he was Italian)—in which the trickster plays games with his own reputation. He is eating couscous with a group of French officers just before the final advance on Rome, one of whom teasingly comments that “judging by Kaputt, Malaparte eats nothing but nightingales’ hearts . . . at the tables of Royal Highnesses, duchesses, and ambassadors.” If their “humble camp meal” is to make it into Malaparte’s next book, it will have to be reinvented into an infinitely grander occasion. That leads to a more general discussion as to the truth or otherwise of what is found in Kaputt, to which Malaparte’s American colleague, Jack, eventually responds that “It is of no importance whether what Malaparte relates is true or false . . . the question is whether or not his work is art.” Malaparte then discloses that, unwilling to break up “such a pleasant luncheon,” he had “nibbled” his way through the hand of one of the French goumiers, blown off by an earlier grenade, only to end up, he had discovered, in the couscous. The French are appalled. Malaparte subsequently explains to a delighted Jack how he had arranged some ram’s bones on his plate to look like the remnants of a hand. It was left to readers more observant than me to work out that Kaputt did not appear until several months after the liberation of Rome. Malaparte’s story about his lying could never have been other than a lie. How the ghost of Laurence Sterne must have laughed.

Perhaps it was inevitable that Malaparte’s later peacetime years were, with his war books behind him (Mamma Marcia, arguably a fifth, unfinished, was published after his death), creatively something of an anti-climax, distinguished mainly, and tellingly, by an examination of the aftermath of that conflict, Il Cristo Proibito (1951), a well-received movie that he both wrote and directed. He was, for the most part, rehabilitated, but never entirely trusted, and the perception that his charlatanry extended into his art as well as his politics meant that he was never able to regain quite the prominence he had once enjoyed. In 1956, still, despite everything, tempted by the hard men, he traveled to the China of Chairman Mao, and decided that he liked what he saw, but his Chinese doctors did not like what they saw in him: Malaparte was diagnosed with lung cancer. They did what they could (leaving his house to the Chinese Communist Party was partly Malaparte’s thanks for the care he had received), but there was nothing to be done.

He returned to Italy to choreograph the death-bed drama that was, writes Serra, his last masterpiece, wooed by right, left, and the Vatican alike, each eager to claim his scalp for its own. The Communists sent him a party card, but he neither acknowledged nor repudiated it, preferring instead to reaffirm his membership of the centrist Republican Party. And yes, he did indeed, finally, convert to Roman Catholicism, if I had to guess, a Malapartian hedge, gaming God on the basis of a hint from Pascal, but a dramatic switch nevertheless, the last, critics might jeer, in a long turncoat career.

But that’s too simplistic: The only colors he really wore were his own.