Latin Lover

Daisy Dunn: Catullus’ Bedspread -The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet

The New Criterion, February 1, 2017

Sandroyd School, August 1990 © Andrew Stuttaford

It was, subversively enough, a Latin teacher who was the first to hint to us that the Romans were not quite the Englishmen-in-training that we had been led to believe. Eleven or twelve years old and enrolled in a Wiltshire boarding school that the 1960s were, most disappointingly, passing by, we’d been brought up on tales of heroic Horatius at the bridge, of steadfast Scaevola at the fire, of legions on the march, of a great empire, if not quite so great as the one on which the sun, until very recently, had never set. In a break from the usual fare—a maneuver by Caesar, more boredom from Livy—Mr. Chips (not his real name, and not his style either: he drove a Rover 2000, a surprisingly chic car for that time and place and, more thrillingly still, was rumored to be a member of London’s Playboy Club) introduced us to something, he said, that was a little different, a poem by one Gaius Valerius Catullus:

Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus . . .

Crikey.

Catullus’s Poem 5, perhaps his most famous, is an ode to his love and an ode to the intoxication of love.

Just a little later, “Da mi basia mille”:

Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred.

Then another thousand, then a second hundred.

Then—don’t stop—another thousand, then a hundred . . .

The translation is by the British writer and classicist Daisy Dunn, the author of Catullus’ Bedspread. The book’s suggestive (if slightly deceptively so) title is given an extra boost by its sub, the promise that within its sheets readers will discover The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet. Somewhere in the Elysian Fields Ovid raises an eyebrow. Somewhere at HarperCollins a clever mercenary chortles.

Ms. Dunn has set herself a tough task. “Of Catullus,” wrote Charles Stuttaford (my paternal grandfather’s cousin, since you ask) in his 1912 edition of the poet’s works, “we know very little.” Dunn agrees: “Practically everything that can be known about him must be extracted from his . . . poetry,” a technique, warned the American classicist Peter Green, that was “risky,” and “nowadays” (he was writing about a decade ago) has “the full weight of critical opinion against it,” although “there are signs of change in the air.”

I don’t know if critical opinion has lightened up since then, but when Dunn leaves off her occasionally clunky re-imagining of the poet’s daily life (“having wolfed down eggs and bread at some miserable inn”) and focuses her attention and considerable erudition on the barely over a hundred poems that survive—poems without title, put in sequence (most likely) long after their author’s death—to reconstruct Catullus’s biography, the man replaces the shade and the millennia dissolve.

Born into a wealthy family in Verona, then a part of Gaul (Cis, not Trans), Catullus, who died aged around thirty, in, probably, 53 B.C., spent much of his adult life amid Rome’s hipster priviligentsia. He was a prominent member of a circle of poets hacking away—somewhat subversively, griped Cicero—at the staid conventions governing poetry in that era. In a turbulent time in the history of the republic (complicated, but well described by Dunn), Catullus loitered on the fringes of politics, insulted the, ahem, “penetrated” Julius Caesar in Poem 57, briefly took a financially unrewarding government job in Bithynia, and mourned a lost brother. Crowning (albeit, in the end, with thorns) a busy sex life, there was his passionate, but doomed, affair with “Lesbia” (almost certainly Clodia Metelli, the wife of an aristocratic politician), a relationship—and its sour aftermath—he chronicled in some of his best-known poems. Metelli was, scolded Stuttaford, “a woman entirely without moral sense,” a description that may not have been entirely unfair, even by relaxed Roman standards.

Much of the delight in this book lies in the details—not all of them scandalous—of Roman life that Dunn provides: the recipe for garum, a “coveted” fish sauce that could also, it was said, “heal a crocodile bite;” the aristocrats plebbing down their accents two thousand years before Tony Blair’s glottal stops started; the appeal of nearly transparent Coan silk, “a favorite among the less virtuous.”

In Catullus, Dunn has a caustic and gossipy accomplice:

I was idling in the Forum when my friend Varus

Saw me and led me off to the home of his lover,

A little tart (as she immediately struck me),

Though not obviously inelegant or lacking in charm.

Yes, much of Poem 64, Catullus’s longest surviving and, to Dunn, “most accomplished” work, dwells on the old myths, myths of a type thought to be more proper fare for the verse of the time, but they were woven into the bedspread that inspired her book’s title. It was a mildly meta conceit (even if that bedspread belonged to one of the Argonauts), a nod, perhaps, to the interest that Catullus and his circle found in describing the everyday. Discussing Poem 27, Dunn tells how the Romans drank their wine watered down, something, she relates, that appalled Catullus the Gaul. Thus the sly anachronism in Dunn’s rendering (in her The Poems of Catullus: A New Translation) of the poem’s final lines:

And you, water, spoiler of wine, away from here

S’il vous plaît. Off you pop to the dour kind.

Here is Bacchus’ wine, neat.

S’il vous plaît.

Gauls talked in a different way too, Dunn writes, tending “to keep their mouths open more often than the Romans as they spoke, causing one word to leak into another like a loudly dripping tap. Gaping vowels gave rise to strange inflections and distinctive dialogue, which was exceedingly difficult to lose. And Catullus was not minded to do so. The sheer languidness of the elided vowel lent itself perfectly to love.”

Reviewer mops brow.

But Catullus was a more sophisticated poet than his naughty reputation might suggest, technically highly accomplished in ways that Dunn makes accessible to the layman, sometimes beautifully so: “[T]hese lines begin so abruptly—da, dein, deinde—it as if we hear them with Catullus’ quickening heartbeat.” He was an innovator, a writer about writing (in Poem 50 Catullus recalls “playing now with this metre and now with that”), the member of a literary set, a magpie, this from the street, that from the Greeks. Catullus’s Poem 51, in which he describes how he feels—not great—watching Clodia being watched by her husband, was inspired by a poem written by Sappho some six centuries before. It’s a reminder of the remarkable continuity of culture in the classical world, and it was a challenge of a sort. Catullus wanted his verse, he humblebragged in Poem 1, to “survive . . . for over a hundred years.”

And here we are.

But more recent generations have not always found it easy to deal with Catullus. His preference for the quotidian over the epic brought, as Dunn notes, “the corporeal and the earthy” in its wake. In Poem 32, he asks his sweet Ipsitilla, “meae deliciae,” to invite him round for “nine consecutive,” well, “fututiones,” the thought of which already excites him as he lies back after a good meal: “I poke through my tunic and cloak.”

Reviewer worries how his editor will deal with that.

To read Catullus is to be offered a glimpse of a sexual morality so alien to Christian tradition that generations of translators, particularly in the more Puritan corners of Christendom (not least those rainy islands inhabited, according to Poem 11, by horribiles uitro ultimosque Britannos), have tried to consign a good number of Catullus’s poems to the Memory Hole. When, in the preface to his Catullus: A Commentary, published by Oxford University Press in 1961, the Scottish classicist C. J. Fordyce admitted that he had omitted “a few poems [actually nearly thirty percent of the total] which do not lend themselves to comment in English,” he was just the latest in a long line of embarrassed Brits to do so. In the preface to his 1912 work, poor Charles Stuttaford stated that he had previously come under fire for annotating poems that some critics carped would have “been better to have left unexplained,” and, so, in 1912, that’s what he did. No less cautiously, some poems, including Poem 32, were included, but only in Latin: A reader able to translate fututiones (a word invented by Catullus) could cope with its shocking implications.

Stuttaford also did his best to haul Catullus back in the direction of respectability, in essence claiming that much of his poetry was, to borrow a fashionable phrase, no more than locker-room talk. Maybe. More plausibly, he argued that some of Catullus’s outrageous—and often outrageously entertaining—invective, including the notorious first two lines of Poem 16, was no more than “vulgar abuse” (to see just how vulgar, check out the 1990 translation by the British poet and classicist Guy Lee). What provoked them was the suggestion by two other poets that Catullus’s love poems were a touch effeminate. Catullus’s response was, as Dunn, delicately describing the indelicate, indicates, to assert “his masculinity once and for all.”

If that doesn’t make you turn to Mr. Lee, I don’t know what will.

Trump’s Taiwan call: I wonder what he meant by that

Prospect, December 7, 2016

East 52nd Street, NYC, January 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

When Metternich heard the news that Talleyrand, the legendarily devious French diplomat and statesman, had died he is said to have asked “I wonder what he meant by that?” While the connection between Metternich, Talleyrand and Donald Trump is not obvious, China’s leaders may now be asking themselves a similar question about a series of tweets by America’s next president—and the phone call that set them off.

Let’s start with the phone call. On Friday, Trump’s staff announced that The Donald had had a telephone conversation with Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen, effectively, and publicly, ignoring a long-standing taboo. Officially at least, no American president (or, it is thought, president-elect) has talked to his Taiwanese counterpart since the 1970s, the decade in which the US recognized the People’s Republic as the sole legal government of a China that included Taiwan. Unsurprisingly, those in charge in Beijing were less than thrilled to hear about Trump’s chat with the head of what they see as a fugitive province.  “Solemn representations” were lodged with the US.

On the other hand, Beijing initially also seemed willing to put the whole incident down to inexperience and widespread suspicions that Trump simply did not know what he was doing were reinforced by a tweet he sent the same day:

“The President of Taiwan CALLED ME today to wish me congratulations on winning the Presidency. Thank you!”

The caps looked defensive: the president-elect had merely taken a call from a president. Polite! Important! And the sense of defensiveness was underlined by the tweet that came next:

“Interesting how the US sells Taiwan billions of dollars of military equipment but I should not accept a congratulatory call.”

Trump was still stressing that Tsai had called him and that the call was about him (congratulations!). But the would-be dealmaker-president also took the time to point out that Taiwan is a good customer of USA, Inc. and, while he was at it, undiplomatically highlighted the extent to which America’s “one China” policy is a convenient fiction.

Over the next day or so, The Donald’s tweetflow moved onto more familiar territory: domestic politics, an attack on Saturday Night Live (“unwatchable! Totally biased, not funny and the Baldwin impersonation just can’t get any worse”), support for an errant golfer (“Great to have you back Tiger – Special!”) and a spot of mercantilist menace (“Rexnord of Indiana is moving to Mexico and rather viciously firing all of its 300 workers. This is happening all over our country. No more!”), but concern over the call continued to bubble away. Grumbling that through ignorance, recklessness or bravado, the president-elect had done real damage to relations with China, America’s chatterati appeared as upset as the apparatchiks in Beijing.

So on Sunday Trump tweeted again on China:

“Did China ask us if it was OK to devalue their currency (making it hard for our companies to compete), heavily tax our products going into their country (the US doesn’t tax them) or to build a massive military complex in the middle of the South China Sea? I don’t think so!”

If the call, which lasted for about ten minutes, had not originally been thought through, it was now being defended in terms that looked a lot like policy. There were hints of the trade fight to come, including over the yuan (formally designating China a “currency manipulator” could pave the way for retaliatory action) as well as more conventional strategic concerns over Beijing’s ambitions in the South China Sea. And note the implication contained in the tweet’s opening few words: The president who is going to make America great again is not going to ask any third country for permission to make a phone call or, for that matter, for permission to do quite a bit more besides.

Whether or not it was a blunder, the best guess is that the call was not an accident. It followed months of cultivating Team Trump on Taiwan’s behalf by former Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, who now works as a lobbyist in Washington. As for Trump himself, well, five years ago he tweeted this:

“Why is @BarackObama delaying the sale of F-16 aircraft to Taiwan? Wrong message to send to China. #TimeToGetTough”

Team Trump may be downplaying the significance of the call with Tsai (Vice President-elect Pence has referred to it as a “courtesy call”) and Taiwan’s president, acutely aware of the perils of her neighborhood, has said that it should not be taken as an indication of a “policy shift.” “We all,” she told USA Today, “see the value of stability in the region.”

Nevertheless, despite the characteristic confusion and bluster, Trump was almost certainly sending a signal by taking Tsai’s call. The US has neglected the art of great power politics since the fall of the Soviet Union, firstly because it could (for quite a while it had no serious rivals) and secondly, after chastening in Iraq and the election of Obama, because it preferred to put its faith in an internationalist order—from the European Union to the United Nations and beyond—that allowed it to pretend that such selfish maneuvering could safely be consigned, as the lofty phrase went, to the nineteenth century.

Trump is clearly under no such illusion. He believes that America is number one, but he also appears willing to accept that there are other big kids on the block with interests of their own and little intention of playing by the globalist equivalent of the Queensberry rules. Put another way, he is comfortable with a traditional idea of great power rivalry, and engaging in the jostling that comes with it.

If reordering America’s trading relationship with China is high on Trump’s agenda—and it is—then he will be looking for leverage, and that may include the threat to cozy up to Taiwan. It’s a threat that comes with the added advantage that it is likely to please a Republican Party that Trump still needs to reassure. Taiwan, after all, is a friendly democracy, the People’s Republic not so much.

But diplomacy by tweet comes with hazards, particularly when those tweets are being generated by someone with remarkably poor impulse control. There’s a difference between what China can accept and what it can be seen to accept. Push too much and too publicly and Beijing might take a far harder line—be it on trade or be it on Taiwan—than might otherwise be the case. Calculating the right balance is a tricky task—but American voters have been led to think Trump can handle it. He is the self-proclaimed maestro of the deal, after all.

Whether he will succeed in doing so is an entirely different question. Chinese criticism of the call sharpened after Trump declined to back down.

That said, as I write, it’s being reported that Trump’s nominee as US ambassador to China will be Iowa Governor Terry Branstad, who has got on well with Chinese president Xi Jinping since the 1980s.

That’s a signal too.

Trump Is No Loser, But Government Will Be Harder

You know the shot: “We finally really did it,” Charlton Heston contemplating the ruins of the Statue of Liberty. Well, the Statue and what she symbolises will survive the Trump presidency but that scene from Planet of the Apes leapt into my mind as I sat in a Manhattan restaurant on election night with a crowd of startled Republicans, some pleased, some not, watching another compelling drama lurch to a conclusion that most of those there, including me, had not anticipated.

So, what had “we” done? Well, by voting for Trump, or hazy Gary Johnson, the Libertarian (as I did), or crazy Jill Stein (the Green) or, in many cases, by not voting at all, Americans had rejected Hillary Clinton, the direction the country was going, or both. But it was not that much of an endorsement of The Donald. Trump has his fans, to be sure, but, even allowing for the polarisation that such figures generate, he proved to be a most unpopular populist, the most unpopular major party presidential candidate in American electoral history. He was, however, the handiest brick to throw through the establishment’s window.

What we can now expect, absent some last astounding scandal, is that Donald Trump, bully, braggart, billionaire (presumed), and defendant (currently) in some 75 lawsuits, will soon take up residence in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the first president never to have held earlier elective office or served in the military. But that won’t stop him benefiting from the way that the legislative branch — and this is a bipartisan offence — has acquiesced for some time now in the transfer of power to the executive.

Barack Obama: “We’re not just going to be waiting for legislation . . . I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone.”

Trump will also have Congress — and a Supreme Court nomination — in his pocket.

Working out what Trump will do with the power heading his way is not made easier by his pronouncements over the years.  The Donald is always sure, but in sometimes inconsistent ways. In 1999 he was sure about a one-time “net worth” tax on the very rich to wipe out the national debt. He was also sure that the Republicans were “just too crazy right” for him to remain in the party. He was “very pro-choice” then; now he is “very, very proud to say that [he is] pro-life”.

Looked at kindly, this shows a willingness to change his mind; looked at less benignly, it shows a willingness to play to whoever is in the room, but running through it all is his conviction that he has the answers.  “Nobody knows the system better than me,” Trump told the Republican convention, “which is why I alone can fix it.” I alone: what’s right is what Trump says it is — I, I, I.

Party affiliation provides less of a clue than it might. Trump, a former member of the Democratic, Reform and Independence parties, enjoys an equivocal relationship with a GOP that he has hijacked, or at the very least exploited, taking advantage of its resources, its people and its brand when it suited him, bypassing them when it did not, helped by his money, social media, the power of celebrity — and the fact that his revolt against the GOP’s establishment actually increased his appeal to many Republican voters.

In an attempt to reconcile these contradictions he hired Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, as his chief of staff on the same day as he picked Steve Bannon as chief strategist and senior adviser. Chalk meet cheese:  Priebus is establishment, Bannon is a bomb-thrower (there are harsher words), the executive chairman of the hard-right, sometimes dog-whistling Breitbart News and the former CEO of the Trump campaign. Bannon’s appointment announced that the revolution continues; choosing Preibus was a signal that members of the old regime were welcome to help ensure that it would be professionally run and, whisper it discreetly, be less of a breach with the past than some feared. As the old saying goes, people are policy. And, as I write these words, the news flashes across the screen that former Goldman Sachs partner Steven Mnuchin “has been recommended by Donald Trump’s transition team to serve as Treasury Secretary”.

Whether such recruits will be able to steady the controls on the Trump train must, however, remain an open question for now, dependent on who else is along for the ride, and who, beyond his immediate family, Trump will listen to. The operation of his fractious and chaotic campaign is not an encouraging precedent.

And how, once in the Oval Office, will Trump run his team?  One guess — the reassuring guess — is that he will set a general course and then delegate much of the day-to-day business to, maybe, his Vice-President, Mike Pence, a former congressman and current governor of Indiana, and, therefore, someone with both legislative and executive experience and good connections in Washington. He is someone who could, presumably, work well with Priebus.

Backing that up is the idea that The Donald is the dog that caught the car. In all probability, Trump never thought he’d be the Republican nominee (and nor, it’s credibly suggested, did he want to be). He almost certainly never thought that he’d end up in the White House, a job that promises the pomp he relishes, but circumstances that are a lot less fun than the billionaire frolics he has enjoyed for decades.

“If Donald,” wrote Colin Powell (no fan) last June, “were to somehow win, by the end of the first week in office he’d be saying ‘What the hell did I get myself into?’” On the other hand, Trump has sold himself — and quite genuinely sees himself — as the master of the deal. Thus he claims to favour free or, more accurately, freer trade, but not “stupid trade”, and stupid trade is, he jeered in 2015, the result of deals negotiated by “political hacks and diplomats”. The US has, he reckons, “the greatest negotiators in the world, but we don’t use them”. Something tells me that he considers Donald J. Trump to be one of those world-beaters, and that, when it comes to rewriting America’s trade deals, he plans on being very much involved. He has boasted of hiring the best and then letting them get on with it, “but I always watch over them”.

To be fair, this is what many Trump voters want him to do. The Donald has, for decades, marketed himself with remarkable success and occasional accuracy as mogul and wheeler-dealer. He has been hired as a businessman, to do for his country what politicians could not.

Trump the dealmaker will see politics as transactional and turn his talents to diplomacy, trying to rework Nato, say, or America’s poisonous relationship with Putin (“I think I’d be able to get along with him”) or with China, the last a relationship where trade disputes and great power rivalry could intersect in dangerous ways.

The greatest negotiators in the world are going to be busy, and if they apply the brinkmanship, bad faith and histrionics that typically come with big-ticket real estate transactions, the world will be in for sleepless nights, nights made more fraught still by Trump’s long-held belief that negotiation is a zero-sum game. There are only winners and losers, and Donald Trump is not a loser. 

But, for all this uncertainty, there are themes certain to be reflected in the policies that will be pursued by a Trump administration. Pre-eminent among them is his suspicion — shared by many Americans — that the US is being ripped off by its partners, whether in trade or in defence. As far back as 1987, Trump spent nearly $100,000 on full-page newspaper ads in which he maintained that Japan (then regarded as America’s main economic challenger) was free-riding off America’s willingness to pick up the tab for the country’s defence. He argued for a different approach: “Make Japan, Saudi Arabia, and others pay for the protection we extend our allies . . . ‘Tax’ these wealthy nations, not America . . . Let America’s economy grow unencumbered by the cost of defending those who can easily afford to pay us for the defence of their freedom. Let’s not let our great country be laughed at any more.” 

Nearly 30 years later, Trump was making a similar case to the New York Times (and not only the New York Times), except that the list of freeloaders now included most of Nato, run on a basis that he described as “unfair”, an adjective that, with its synonyms, has long been a bad, bad word in the Trump lexicon. In keeping with The Donald’s paranoid style, it hints at hostile conspiracy. Remember all that talk of a “rigged” election? But back to Nato: the US, Trump complained, was paying a “disproportionate share” of the freight.

He has a point. Currently America pays a little over 20 per cent of Nato’s direct costs, a number which is adjusted regularly and based on a percentage of its share of the alliance’s collective GNP. That seems reasonable enough (and, as these things go, the number is not huge), but the real problem concerns something far larger. The US effectively accounts for more than 70 per cent of all defence spending by Nato members. Some of that mismatch reflects the global reach of American power, not all of which is of much benefit to other Nato states either directly or indirectly, but even so.

More damaging still is the fact that so few Nato states meet the organisation’s decade-old commitment to spending at least 2 per cent of GDP on defence, a commitment only satisfied by five out of the Nato 28, something that also led Barack Obama to talk of “free-riders”, and he was far from the first American president to grumble. The US shells out some 3.6 per cent, mighty Greece comes next with 2.4 per cent and the only other countries to hit the target are the UK, Estonia and Poland.  France comes close with 1.8 per cent, and the other Baltic States are, wisely, scrambling to catch up. The rest of Nato falls far short: Angela Merkel may be being hailed by some as the leader of the free world in the wake of Trump’s triumph, but her country only spends 1.2 per cent. Others are even stingier: Canada, home of Justin Trudeau, hero of Davos, coughs up just 0.99 per cent.

Trump has hinted that Nato countries that don’t pay their way might not be able to count on the US coming to their aid as required by the mutual defence obligations that underpin the alliance. He has since backtracked somewhat, and the optimistic take is that those remarks were simply an example of Trump the negotiator at work, putting pressure on partners in breach of their part of a deal. Maybe, but Trump is playing a dangerous game. Deterrence must be credible. Any suggestion that America would not protect a vulnerable Nato ally increases the chance that Putin might be tempted to try his luck. This only underlines the importance of Trump’s security and diplomatic hires. For Trump to pick hawks, like, say, John Bolton, a former US ambassador to the UN, or former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, would send one message; recruiting former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (who has described Estonia as “a place in the suburbs of St Petersburg”) quite another.

But Russia’s leader is more cautious than often understood. Much has, rightly, been made both of Trump’s need to win and — how shall I put this — poor anger management skills. Putin is unlikely to want to provoke The Donald, and, contrary to the fears of some critics, he can only go so far in wooing him. Yes, both men have strong authoritarian streaks (under Trump, America will be grateful for the checks and balances still built into its system), both see themselves as tough guys and both reject the attempt to create a supranationalist world order — in Putin’s case, by word and deed; in Trump’s, so far, only by word. “Americanism”, he has declared, “not globalism, will be our credo.” But these similarities will not be enough to transform Trump into Putin’s patsy. Trump evidently (and not unreasonably) doubts that Russia poses an existential threat to the US — he seems ready to co-operate with Moscow in Syria — but if Putin pushes Trump in ways that Trump thinks matter, Trump will push back.

But what Trump thinks matters will differ from what the US has thought mattered in the past. There is some point, he has said, beyond which America “cannot be the policeman of the world”, a line that resonates with those communities, many of them in regions that voted for Trump, who have lost so many of their own in wars where the US was doing just that. 

One corollary of Trump’s more modest view of America’s role is that US allies will — if they are serious about it — have to assume more responsibility for their own defence than in the past. Another is the implicit recognition that the global political system is multi-polar, something that Putin has long claimed and the Chinese have not even had to bother mentioning. That, in turn, may well imply a return to realpolitik that is closer to Nixon/Kissinger than Reagan’s loftier vision, let alone George H.W. Bush’s nutty “new world order”. The debate — and the pushing — will not be over the existence of spheres of interest, but over the location of their boundaries, something that may have grim implications for borderlands such as Ukraine.

Trump insists he is not an isolationist, and I don’t think that he is. He is planning a major increase in defence spending. Where he sees threats, whether it’s the Iran deal or IS, he does not wish them away. That said, he does not appear to have learned enough from seeing what Obama’s leading from behind has led to. When the US withdraws, the vacuum can be filled in dangerous ways. Trump is correct that America’s allies ought to pay more for their own defence, but an overly forceful insistence on this will lead to a fraying of both the transatlantic alliance and America’s partnerships in Asia. The consequences are hard to predict, but will inevitably involve a dilution of America’s ability to control what happens next.  That’s unlikely to end happily.

These consequences will be worsened by the new administration’s policies on trade and the environment, which, whatever their merits, will be seen as further evidence that the US is going its own way. And in Europe, at least, the more hard-edged side of Trump’s domestic agenda, not to speak of the spectacle of, to some, an ugly American beyond all caricature taking up residence in the White House, will do even more to stoke up the anti-Americanism forever soiling the continent’s intellectual and political life.

That won’t deter Trump. The president-elect has already appointed Myron Ebell, a leading climate change sceptic from the Competitive Enterprise Institute think tank, to oversee his environmental transition team. Reversing Obama’s climate change regulation, much of which he introduced by executive order (and what was brought to life by the pen can be killed by the pen) while initiating America’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord (legally, a more complex process) are obviously, so to speak, in the pipeline. It’ll mean  yet more international opprobrium, so add it to the pile. Domestically it will enrage those who are already enraged by the prospect of a Trump presidency, but it will reassure many of his supporters — who are in for quite a few let-downs in the years to come — and, as a gesture of support to Team Trump’s symbolically important coal miners, will go down well with the Donald’s crucial blue-collar supporters. 

When in 2012 Trump tweeted that global warming was, in essence, a hoax (he later said that he was joking), he blamed the Chinese: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.” Conspiracies, always conspiracies, trade, always trade: when, 30 years ago, Trump was attacking the way the US paid so much towards the defence of its allies in the Far East, much of his focus was on the way that the money saved had helped build up economies that, he implied, had got too strong for America’s good. Asked in 2016 by the New York Times for his view on previous presidents, he replied that one he “really liked” was Ronald Reagan but  he had “never felt on trade we did great” in the Reagan era. 

Reagan was neither a purist nor naive (he believed in trade that was free and fair). He was not above pushing “voluntary” restraint on importers and imposing tariffs when he felt had to, but protectionism, he argued, was “almost always self-destructive”. He proposed a free trade pact with Mexico  in 1980, a forerunner of sorts for the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) passed a decade and a half later. Trump recently described Nafta as “the worst trade deal maybe ever signed  anywhere”. He had opposed it even before it was approved, reportedly on the grounds that US negotiators had cut a bad deal. What Trump actually meant was that he could have handled everything so much better. 

Trump has been harping on about trade for a long time and often in a way that, reflecting his zero-sum approach to negotiation, focuses on the failure to cut a better deal. This approach slips easily into a preference for mercantilism over free trade, a choice that fits neatly under the umbrella of America First, and helped deliver the voters who had found themselves on the wrong side of globalisation, voters, particularly in the Midwest, who took Trump over the top on election day.

Trump’s victory will finish off the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the EU, a deal already struggling even to be stillborn. The Trans-Pacific Partnership seems set for the knacker’s yard too. No new free-trade deals can be expected soon — even, I suspect with Brexit Britain. Reversing those large agreements that are already in place will be more difficult, however. Trump’s talk of imposing a 45 per cent tariff on Chinese imports if the People’s Republic doesn’t ease up on subsidies and other practices he views as unfair, would lead to higher prices in America and, eventually, slower growth, something he must understand. That 45 per cent should be seen as an opening bid in a long negotiation.

Similarly, Trump’s threat to pull the US out of Nafta (a move a president could make on his own) and impose a 35 per cent tariff on some Mexican imports risks major disruption to the supply chains of American companies, and could trigger a trade war, higher prices in the US, and, if the Mexican economy falters, a fresh surge of illegal immigration into a certain country to the north with an as yet unbuilt wall. Once again, sabre-rattling today is likely to be no more than the beginning of a negotiation that may be noisy, but will change relatively little.

But trying to rein in globalisation is to fight a war that is largely lost and, so far as the workplace is concerned, increasingly irrelevant. US manufacturing output stands at an all-time high, but manufacturing employment has declined to levels last seen in the late 1940s. Quite a number of Trump’s “forgotten men and women” (a phrase with Depression era echoes) lost good jobs and good pay, not to the Chinese, but to automation — to the robots. Many, many others will suffer the same fate, and no politician, left or right, establishment or populist, really knows what to do about it. This time round, Trump benefited from these fresh additions to the ranks of the early 21st-century’s left-behinds, but if he cannot come to their rescue (he can’t) they will look for help elsewhere, quite possibly to a Democratic party shifting rapidly to the Left.

Meanwhile, Trump’s answer to the economy’s woes is to propose what chancellors of the exchequer once called a dash for growth, combining Reagan-style tax-cutting and deregulation with a $1 trillion infrastructure package, much of which would be financed by the private sector, incentivised in turn by tax credits. As with a great deal of Trump’s programme the details are vague, but it’s a reminder that, even if Trump is again a Republican, he is attached to no one wing of the party. If tax-cutting and deregulation is Reaganesque, upgrading the country’s dilapidated infrastructure harks back to Eisenhower, architect, among other grands projets, of the Interstate Highway System and, as National Review’s Reihan Salam has argued, to Nixon, who (unlike Eisenhower) posed as an opponent of the elite, but, like the general, saw a role for big government. Similarly, Trump will defend the big entitlement programmes — from Social Security (pensions), to Medicare (health care for the elderly) to, perhaps with some tweaks, Medicaid (healthcare for the poor). He knows what his voters want, which is why he is already signalling that his repeal of Obamacare may not be quite as comprehensive as he has promised in the past. The way that Obamacare is structured may be unloved, and the way that it functions is flawed (sharp increases in Obamacare premiums probably played a part in Clinton’s defeat), but chipping away at its benefits will be a hard sell, unless the GOP can find a more credible replacement than it has managed to so far.  

How will all this be paid for? Trump is hoping for a supply-side miracle, with another boost coming, fingers crossed, from the repatriation of corporate funds stashed overseas after the sharp cuts in America’s corporate tax rate (on some measures amongst the highest in the world) that he has in mind. On the other hand, the GOP’s green eyeshade wing, headed by House Speaker Paul Ryan, will be less than convinced by Trump’s maths and with worries over the federal government’s nearly $20 trillion debt likely to increase as interest rates move up, there will be battles to come, battles that will be a reminder of deeper fractures that Trump has opened up on the right, battles in which Democrats, at least on the infrastructure plan, may find themselves in a very strange place, by Trump’s side.

That won’t be the case on immigration. Even if Trump is already backtracking on that wall of his (some of it will be fence, apparently), a much tougher immigration regime will be put in place. The president-elect has already announced that he would like to see the deportation of 2-3 million illegal aliens with “criminal records”, an exaggerated number, which also makes no distinction between different types of criminal past. Americans are uncomfortable with the thought of mass deportations and they are unlikely to approve of breaking up a family over a minor conviction from decades ago. If Trump’s immigration plans are not to be swept away by a tide of revulsion, he may have to go more carefully than he thinks, and not just in this respect.

Nevertheless, immigration, both in its own right and as a proxy for wider ethnic and demographic unease, goes a long way to explaining why The Donald will be moving into the White House. If the country can finally assert control over its borders (and the wall is not the best way of doing so), it can regularise the position of those illegals who remain (there are currently estimated to be a little over 11 million of them in the US). Then a long-overdue serious debate over immigration can begin.

November’s election result would only have been possible in a troubled, deeply-divided nation. Time will tell whether Trump’s victory is another symptom of what ails the country, or the beginning of a cure. I’m not optimistic. Then again, Newt Gingrich (after a job?) exults that “a Trump administration is going to be among the most extraordinary, creative, inventive, exciting periods in all of American political history.”

It’s going to have to be.

British libel laws: No model for the United States

Daily News, November 3, 2016

Union Station, Washington DC, August 2016 ©  Andrew Stuttaford

Even though Princess Diana is no longer with us, there is still quite a lot that Donald Trump appreciates from across the pond. There's that Scottish golf course of his, there's Brexit, and, judging by a recent interview he gave to Miami's CBS 4, there are England's libel laws.

Trump, claiming to be a "tremendous believer (in) the freedom of the press," is significantly less enthusiastic about the news media's ability, as he sees it, to get away with "terrible, terrible mistakes," mistakes made "on purpose" and intended to "injure people." If he's been wronged, he said, he should be able to sue and so should "anyone else."

In England, maintained Trump, "they have a system where you can actually sue if someone says something wrong." And: "You have a good chance of winning. And deals are made and apologies are made," deals (with Trump it's always deals) and apologies that the U.S. media do not have to make.

I'm British-born and usually pretty chuffed when I hear my native land praised for the way that it manages its affairs, but this time not so much. To be clear about one thing first: Trump is not really talking about "anyone" being able to win damages for defamation by the media. What's bugging him is that in America it's very difficult for a "public figure" (and, trust me, Donald Trump counts as a public figure) to do so.

Under U.S. law and well-established precedent affirmed by the Supreme Court, where public figures are concerned, it's not enough to show carelessness, inaccuracy and damage.

Public figures also have to prove that "actual malice" was involved. That means that the statement was either published by someone who knew it was false or, assuming it turned out to be false, didn't care one way or the other. That can be tough to prove.

Over in England, public figures have it quite a bit easier, although not quite as much easier as Trump, not always known for keeping up with what goes on in the world, may think. In fact, a year or so back, English defamation law, which can be rougher on the press than on those complaining about it, was modified in ways that will make it harder for plaintiffs to use litigation or the threat of litigation to muzzle the media.

Changes included adding the requirement that a statement is not defamatory unless plaintiffs can show "serious harm" (or the danger of serious harm) to their reputations. For businesses, that now means demonstrating that they have suffered, or face the prospect of, "serious financial loss." Additionally, most cases will now be decided by a judge rather than a jury, which ought to reduce costs and, probably, damages.

The press should also benefit from the fact that a still somewhat hazy "public interest" defense has been given statutory force (thereby reinforcing the principle that it's OK to publish something that is — or might reasonably be thought to be — a matter of public interest). But a public interest defense would be far less of an obstacle to litigation by public figures in England than they could, to Trump's obvious irritation, expect to face in the U.S.

Despite these reforms, England's new law retains one key difference with American practice that will appeal to The Donald. In the U.S., it's the plaintiff who has to demonstrate that he or she has been defamed. But in England, it's the defendant who has to prove that what was published isn't defamatory, an obligation that comes with a degree of risk that some editors, journalists and publishers won't relish taking, a risk that helps explain, to take one notorious example, why the sex crimes — crimes that stretched over decades — of the disk jockey Jimmy Savile, a major celebrity in the U.K., went unreported until after his death in 2011.

This chilling effect on what will be published has, as a more recent controversy over a book on Vladimir Putin's finances shows, survived the new law, at least to a certain extent. It's an effect that, I suspect, Trump would be delighted to see spread to the U.S., a country blessed — up to now — with far greater protections for free speech than my homeland.

That mustn't happen. The case can be made that public figures in the U.S. are forced to climb too high a hurdle to defend their reputations, but that is a part of the price that preserving free expression demands.

Donald Trump: always crashing in the same car

Prospect, October 20, 2016

Trump Tower, New York City, September 2016 © Andrew Stuttaford

Hillary and Donald didn’t shake hands. And nor did Melania and Bill. Expectations of a mudfight had been whipped up by Team Trump’s decision to bring along a number of guests designed to spook Team Clinton. These included four mothers of people killed by illegal aliens, the former fiancée (from the 1990s) of the US ambassador butchered in Libya, the (allegedly estranged) mother of another of the Benghazi victims, the wholly estranged half-brother of the current president of the United States, and a former TV reporter from Arkansas who has emerged in recent days to assert that she was sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton in the 1980s. Adding to the goodwill in the air, Trump had suggested last weekend that the two candidates should submit to a drug test beforehand. Hillary, he maintained, had been “all pumped up” at the beginning of the previous debate, but had appeared curiously drained by the end of it (“She could barely reach her car”).

But (slightly) less mud flew than anticipated last night and it was The Donald who did not seem quite himself. And this was not just because he came across as somewhat more prepared than usual. Uncharacteristically sotto, he gave an impression of being gently sedated, or at least of having listened to his more sensible advisers, except, of course, when he didn’t. He made the moderator (Fox News’ Chris Wallace, unquestionably the most accomplished performer of the evening) look like an accomplice by thanking him for asking Clinton a tough question. He probably irritated yet more of the female voters he desperately needs—against all the odds—to win over by referring to his opponent as “such a nasty woman.” He won’t have made a lot of new friends with his remark that there were “some bad hombres” among the illegal alien population. Mathematically (“some”) that must, I suppose, be an accurate enough observation, but, in just the latest of countless own goals, Trump managed to phrase it in a way that hinted at a racial animus not only disturbing to Latinos (like just about every minority group a largely lost constituency by now) but to many whites too. On some calculations, Trump will need the support of nearly two-thirds of white voters to win (compared with Romney’s 59 per cent in 2012). Good luck with that.

And then there was the way he dealt with questioning over his willingness to accept the result in November. Lest we forget, he has been complaining that the election is being rigged. After some toing and froing with Trump on this topic, Wallace asked this:

“There is a tradition in this country—in fact, one of the prides of this country—is the peaceful transition of power and that no matter how hard-fought a campaign…that at [its] end… the loser concedes to the winner. Not saying that you’re necessarily going to be the loser or the winner, but that the loser concedes to the winner and that the country comes together in part for the good of the country. Are you saying you’re not prepared now to commit to that principle?”

Trump: “What I’m saying is that I will tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense. OK?”

That answer (“horrifying”, declared Clinton) became the talking point of the night among the commentariat, and, I suspect, not just among the commentariat. It was, to put it mildly, a remarkable thing for a major party nominee to say ahead of the election. Voting fraud is not exactly unknown in the US, and some grumbling by the unsuccessful candidate—even after a presidential vote— about dodgy doings at the polls, sometimes legitimately (Nixon in 1960), sometimes rather less so (Kerry and those Ohio voting machines in 2004) is another American tradition, but a formal challenge by the loser to the result is not: The Florida debacle in 2000 was a genuinely exceptional state of affairs.

Clinton: “You know, President Obama said the other day when you’re whining before the game is even finished…”

Looked at one way, Trump’s allegation that the election might be rigged (a term he has defined in different ways: it has, for example, included his argument that media bias has distorted the process) against him fits neatly into his outsider narrative and adds to his outsider appeal. Looked at another way, it will have reinforced the impression of many Americans that (as Clinton was not slow to argue) Trump is “not up to doing the job.” It also sounded like the prexcuse of a man who cannot cope with defeat. As Clinton jeered, “There was even a time when he didn’t get an Emmy for his TV program three years in a row and he started tweeting that the Emmys were rigged.”

Trump couldn’t contain himself: “Should have gotten it!”

“Always crashing in the same car,” as someone once sang.

To be fair, Trump acquitted himself better in this debate than in the first two—low bar—but he did little to avert what looks like a clobbering next month. According to a CNN/ORC poll, 52 per cent of viewers thought that Clinton prevailed, as opposed to the 39 per cent who judged Trump the victor. It says something for the debating skills of a man who prides himself on his ability to close a deal that that was his highest score so far. The best that he can hope for is that his performance will not have cost him too many votes. Best guess: It didn’t. Between them, both Trump and Clinton said enough last night on a wide range of issues including immigration, gun rights, trade, terrorism and abortion to assure Trump’s core supporters that they were in the right place. His problem is that those core supporters are not numerous enough to propel him to the White House.

To attract additional voters last night, Trump needed either to clean up his own image or to make more of a mess of Hillary’s. He didn’t try too hard at the former. Judging by the laughter that greeted his claim that “nobody has more respect for women,” that was, in all probability, wise. Instead he concentrated on trying to drag Clinton down, something that would be very much easier were he not Trump. He attacked the Clinton Foundation (“a criminal enterprise”). She countered with the Trump Foundation (“bought a six-foot portrait of Donald”). He raised sleaze. She talked about his taxes. He complained about the foreign policy fiascoes of recent years. She brought up Putin. He threw in Bill Clinton. She threw back Donald Trump. Yes, Trump landed some blows (those errant emails, allegedly evidence of dirty tricks) but not enough, judging by that poll, to make much of a difference.

And so today Trump tweeted this: “Why didn’t Hillary Clinton announce that she was inappropriately given the debate questions—she secretly used them! Crooked Hillary.”

Always crashing in the same car.

Trump has maxed out—but he will plug on nonetheless

Prospect, October 10, 2016

New York City, September 2016 ©  Andrew Stuttaford

The most significant words in last night’s US presidential debate came right towards the end, and they will have ended any hopes in what passes for the Republican leadership that Donald Trump might somehow magically, marvellously just go away.

The two candidates were asked to pick out something that they respected about the other. Hillary Clinton replied that the talents of Trump’s “incredibly able and devoted” children “[say] a lot about Donald” (implication: there was nothing she respected about The Donald himself). Trump framed his response as a compliment to Clinton, but, as usual, he was really talking about himself:

“I will say this about Hillary… she does fight hard and she doesn’t quit and she doesn’t give up and I consider that to be a very good trait.”

It was never likely that Trump, a man unable to contemplate losing at anything, would stand down and it was never certain what would happen if he did, but with that observation he made it clear that, despite the worst week or so that any Republican or Democratic nominee for the presidency has ever endured, The Donald will plug on.

Following as it did a press conference (of sorts) that Trump had arranged for a number of women who had allegedly been seriously wronged by one Clinton or the other, expectations were that the debate would be a roughhouse. And, from the moment that the two contestants declined to shake hands at the bout’s beginning, expectations were not disappointed. The commentariat, a prim lot in America, were duly appalled. I, on the other hand, enjoyed it immensely. Titus Andronicus beats Hamlet any day.

Neither candidate made any attempt to conceal their mutual disdain, but in case any viewers hadn’t got the message, Trump described Clinton as incompetent, the devil, married to a bad man, in hock to special interests and as someone with “tremendous hate in her heart,” someone—his inner authoritarian never far away—he appeared to believe should be jailed over those errant emails. And, oh yes, Clinton is a liar.

For her part, Clinton hit out at the contempt Trump has shown for women “and the very brutal kinds of comments he has made about not just women, but all Americans, all kinds of Americans.” The Donald, she said, is not fit to be president (except, we were left to assume, in the eyes of Vladimir Putin). Not only that, he was responsible for an increase in bullying in schools (“teachers and parents are calling it the Trump Effect”), a hard to verify accusation that will resonate most helpfully—and at several levels—with the distaff side of the electorate. And, oh yes, Donald is a liar.

Even the duo’s behaviour on stage showed the depth of their loathing. His jaw busily doing the Mussolini, Trump prowled around, sometimes looming up behind his opponent in a vaguely menacing manner that, along with an occasionally badgering style, won’t have done him many favours with female voters, especially with his videotaped talk (exaggerated “locker-room” bragging or otherwise) of grabbing women “by the p***y” undoubtedly still fresh on their minds. Meanwhile as The Donald spoke, the look on Clinton’s face shifted between anger, unconvincing impassivity, icy amusement and the condescension that explains why so many Americans find it impossible to warm to her. To lose to Hillary will take some doing, but in selecting Donald Trump as their champion, Republican primary voters appear to have found the right man for the job.

Last night did nothing to change that fact. Prior to the first debate on 26th September, Trump was enjoying an unexpected surge, and the first “what ifs” could be heard in the land. Then came the second self-destructive half of the first debate and, after that, a few days dominated by Miss Universe kamikaze. Clinton pulled back into a comfortable lead and that was according to polls taken before the release of one of the most politically destructive tapes since Richard Nixon’s effort way back when, a tape that was, interestingly, no less destructive for being all too predictable. Last night Clinton described the Trump campaign as “exploding.” That was a stretch, but not by too much.

Trump needed to reverse that slump, but failed. To be fair, when it came to the substance of the debate, such as it was (not much), he did better than anticipated, admittedly a low bar after the debacle first time round. The advantage of mounting an outsider challenge is that little is expected in the way of detailed policy. And indeed when it came to proposing an alternative to, say, Obamacare or the fight against ISIS, very little was all that Trump had to offer. But that won’t matter, at least to his supporters. What they want most now is an echo and an amplifier of their (not always unjustified) resentment and in Trump that is what they’ve got.

However incongruous it may be coming from the man in the penthouse apartment, Trump knows how to play the outsider very well:

“[Hillary] used the power of her office to make a lot of money… [W]hy aren’t you putting money into your own campaign? Just curious.”

Just curious. Just brilliant.

Then, of course, there are those emails. Using a private server in the way that Secretary Clinton did was irresponsible—and possibly sinister—enough, but the signs of a cover-up may prove more damaging, and, in an anti-establishment year (Trump took care to throw in a few references to Bernie Sanders), the suggestion that Clinton benefited from favourable treatment is political poison:

“33,000 e-mails deleted and now she’s saying there wasn’t anything wrong. And more importantly, that was after getting a subpoena. That wasn’t before. That was after. She got it from the United States Congress, and I will be honest. I am so disappointed in congressmen, including Republicans, for allowing this to happen. Our Justice Department where her husband goes on to the back of an airplane for 39 minutes, talks to the Attorney General days before a ruling has to be made on her case… if a member of the private sector did that, they’d be in jail. Let alone, after getting a subpoena from the United States Congress.”

It’s right to feel queasy about the seeming relish with which Trump, a vindictive man and, as I mentioned earlier, someone with obvious authoritarian tendencies, talks about Hillary in jail, but it’s also understandable why so many Americans might be angered by the notion (albeit still disputed) that this ultimate insider has benefited from far more favourable treatment from the authorities than they could ever hope for.

But Trump’s problem is that he has already riled up just about anyone he can. In delivering his best lines last night he was singing to a choir too small to take him to victory, and he didn’t make it any larger. According to a CNN poll, 57 per cent of viewers thought that Hillary won the debate. With November drawing close, the election remains hers to lose.

How Not to Fix the Euro: More Leftism

Joseph E. Stiglitz - The Euro: How A Common Currency Threatens The Future of Europe

National Review, October 10, 2016

Imagining that a large number of very different economies could be squeezed into a single poorly constructed currency was one fatal conceit. Imagining that the story of what happened next could be squeezed into one rigid “narrative” was another — but that’s what economist Joseph Stiglitz has done in The Euro, a badly flawed book about a disastrous idea.

Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and a Columbia professor, has been crusading for years now against the wickedness of “neoliberalism,” a term that, like “late capitalism,” says more about the person using it than about what it purports to describe. Check out the titles of some of his more recent books: “The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do about Them,” “The Price of Inequality,” “Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy.” The Euro is the latest installment in a long leftist tirade.

Stiglitz has valuable points to make on the EU’s dangerous monetary experiment, but it’s easy to lose sight of them amid all the pages devoted to his insistence that the devastation caused by the single currency is another example of the havoc that “market fundamentalism” has wrought.

Yet the euro was, at its core, an exercise in central planning. Stiglitz concedes that it was a “political project” to accelerate the process of European integration. But more than that, it was to be a challenge to the supremacy of the dollar and a permanent brake on the unruliness of foreign-exchange markets, ambitions far removed from market fundamentalism. Indeed, one of the earlier critics of the proposed new currency was Milton Friedman, not that Stiglitz finds the room — or the grace — to mention it.

Stiglitz questions the economic rationale behind the euro (arguing, intriguingly, that, contrary to the claims of its advocates, it was always likely to operate against convergence within the bloc) and the way that it was put together: The structures needed to make it work properly weren’t there. Yet his list of those responsible for the inevitable crisis is tellingly incomplete. To be sure, he acknowledges the important (and often overlooked) fact that individual governments could — even within the constraints of the euro zone — have done more to head off disaster than conventional wisdom now suggests, but, for the most part, he blames the Left’s preferred bogeymen, greedy bubble-blowing bankers and their accomplice, light-touch regulation.

But while there were undoubtedly areas in which regulation was too lax, the greater problem was that regulators were nudging financiers in wrong directions, whether it was toward real-estate-linked lending or into the belief that Greek sovereign risk was not that much greater than German. In the early years of the euro, Greece had to pay (on average) less than 0.3 percent more to borrow than Germany. That was nuts, but those steering the euro zone had persuaded themselves that the economies of the countries now locked into the currency union had truly converged. They hadn’t. And, crucially, the warning signals that would have been sent by the currency markets of old — a drachma crash, say — had been silenced. Ideology trumped reality, politics trumped markets, and the result was catastrophe. There’s a lesson in that, but Stiglitz doesn’t appear to see it.

Stiglitz is on safer ground criticizing the steps, from bullying the Irish government to assume private bank debt to the indiscriminate emphasis on “austerity,” taken by the euro zone’s leadership after the crisis erupted. The former is very hard to defend, and the latter was, in some cases at least, overdone, poorly timed, or both: There’s a limit to the extent to which a country can be expected to deflate its way to recovery. But to attribute — as Stiglitz does — the tough love shown by the “Troika” (the European Central Bank or ECB, the European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund) responsible for the euro zone’s bailouts to market fundamentalism is, to put it at its kindest, a misreading. What drove it was the complex internal politics of the currency union.

Stiglitz rightly highlights the difficulty of reconciling the management of the single currency and basic democratic principle. As he notes, voters in the euro zone’s laggards were offered no serious alternative to the harsh and sometimes questionable treatment prescribed for their countries. Beyond that essential but unremarkable insight, he touches on a broader, somewhat neglected issue: what it means when a democracy transfers the oversight of key areas of the economy from the legislature to technocrats and, specifically, to “independent” central banks such as the ECB, a practice Stiglitz attributes to the then (supposedly) prevailing “neoliberal ascendancy.”

That’s a debatable proposition to start with and it has next to nothing to do with the independence of the ECB, which echoes (as Stiglitz recognizes) the traditions of the Bundesbank (Buba), Germany’s legendary central bank. Far from being the product of late-20th-century neoliberalism, Buba’s independence — and its inflation-fighting mandate — date back to its origins in a ruined country that believed it knew where debauching a currency could lead.

Without Germany, there would have been no euro. But, proud of their Deutschmark, German voters didn’t want to switch to a new currency. Sadly, they were never given the chance to reject it, but assurances from their government that the ECB would, for all practical purposes, be a Buba 2.0 were part of a package of promises (no bailouts was another) designed to soothe their unease. Stiglitz discusses the fact that Germany shaped the ECB but fails to give enough weight to the democratic concerns that help explain why.

In any event, those promises were broken, and not just by a series of bailouts. Whether by effectively permitting local central banks to “print” new euros, or by allowing unpaid balances to mount up in its clearing system, or, belatedly (Stiglitz would argue), by a series of increasingly elaborate market operations culminating in the European version of “quantitative easing,” the ECB has turned out to be far less stingy a central bank than German voters had been led to believe it would be.

Stiglitz does not seem too bothered by this: Some democratic failures are evidently more equal than others. He is (legitimately) angry about the way that the Troika forced out the socialist Greek premier George Papandreou (his “long-term friend”), but he has nothing to say about the not-dissimilar putsch that replaced a less ideologically sympathetic figure, Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, with an unelected, obedient proconsul.

Then again, this is the Stiglitz who claims that the objectives of European integration included “strengthening democracy” — a revealing interpretation of a project born of the notion that Europe’s voters could not be trusted to keep the peace. The idea behind what became the EU was that power should be transferred away from democratic nation-states to a supranational authority staffed by largely unaccountable technocrats. And over the decades, it was, often by the sleight of hand made necessary by European electorates’ stubborn suspicion of Brussels’ relentless drive toward ever closer union.

But a new currency was not something that could be introduced on the sly. People would notice. To a greater or lesser degree, the inhabitants of the future euro zone would have to consent to such a change, and to a greater or lesser degree they did. But they were not prepared to surrender enough sovereignty to give the euro a better chance of success. As much as Stiglitz might wish otherwise, that hasn’t changed. If there is to be any realistic prospect of keeping the current euro zone intact while restoring prosperity to its weaker brethren, it will, one way or another, involve a pooling of resources, but the richer countries won’t agree to that on terms that the poorer could accept. This impasse owes nothing to market fundamentalism and a great deal to the absence of a shared identity: Germans are Germans, Greeks are Greeks; neither are Eurozonian. They lack the needed sense of mutual obligation.

Stiglitz maintains that if the euro zone’s members won’t agree to a more comprehensive monetary union, big trouble lies ahead, threatening not only the euro but, maybe, the broader European project. I’m not convinced: “Muddling through” with what Stiglitz labels a blend of “temporary palliatives” as well as some “justly celebrated” deeper reforms has kept the currency going so far, albeit at a terrible cost. It could continue to do so for quite a while yet. And, despite the best efforts of the rebellious Brits, the EU seems set to endure too.

It’s worth adding that Stiglitz’s definition of that more comprehensive monetary union begins, understandably enough, with a credible “banking union,” debt mutualization, and the like, but then spills over into a vision of a command-and-control euro zone that — if that is what is really required to make the currency union work well — is another good argument for putting a stake through it once and for all.

A different way to go could, reckons Stiglitz, be the creation of a system under which euro-zone countries (or groups of countries) adopt “flexible euros” that trade against each other within a (much) more tightly managed version of Europe’s earlier exchange-rate regimes. He also puts forward yet another solution, some form of “amicable divorce”: Either Germany (alone or in conjunction with other northern European countries) should quit the euro zone, or the currency should be divided into new euros — northern and southern, a division that has, in my view, long been the right way to go. What unites these alternatives is the welcome recognition that one size does not fit all: A currency must reflect the realities of its home economy. Tragically, there’s no sign that the central planners in Paris, Brussels, Frankfurt, Paris, and Berlin agree. After all, they tell us, the euro-zone crisis is over.

We’ll see