Reflecting What They Were?

National Review Online, January 12, 2019

The Velvet Underground Experience, New York City, December 2018 © Andrew Stuttaford

If you can remember the 1960s, goes that quote with many authors, you really weren’t there. I was about six when the Sixties properly got going and living somewhere where the last person to truly swing had botched a rebellion against a Tudor. So sadly, I remember those Sixties pretty well, a distant party glimpsed mainly on the telly, colorful, whimsical, and saturated with bright, shiny music — coffee-flavored kisses at Clarksville station, love is all you need, gentle people with flowers in their hair.

What I never heard was this:

Cut mouth bleeding razor’s

Forgetting the pain

Antiseptic remains cool goodbye

So you fly

To the cozy brown snow of the east

That was the Velvet Underground doing their best worst in The Black Angel’s Death Song, a torrent of words, melody, and screeching electric viola that, played once too often before puzzled audiences in Greenwich Village’s Café Bizarre, brought an abrupt end to their stint there in December of 1965. The Velvets had started taking shape the year before, but after the departure of their first drummer, an eccentric who later came to an unsatisfactory end in Nepal, assumed the form (Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Moe Tucker) in which, with one brief, spectacular addition, they ultimately entered rock legend. The band’s name was stolen from the title of an, uh, investigativepaperback (“a documentary on the sexual corruption of our age”) found on the sidewalk or — pick your myth — the gutter. Another early song, inspired by a book by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (yes, that Masoch), was a further sign that the Velvets were not headed for Main Street, Pleasant Valley, or Penny Lane.

Given the time, the place — New York City — and the Velvets’ direction, it is not so surprising they spun into Andy Warhol’s orbit. He became their ringmaster, handing them a chanteuse — the German-born Nico, who had trouble holding a tune — and the role as the band in a series of multi-media events known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. It was a chance, said Warhol, “to combine music and art and films,” a Gesamtkunstwerk of a kind, if not one that Wagner would have appreciated.

The collaboration lasted longer than Warhol’s “15 minutes” (about 18 months), and — despite some entertaining reviews (Cher grumbled that their gigs would “replace nothing, except maybe suicide”); The Velvet Underground & Nico, their astonishing debut LP; some media attention; and even the approval of Marshall McLuhan — it didn’t leave the Velvets particularly famous, at least then. The album flopped.

But more than anything else, those 18 months explain why, after more than half a century, The Velvet Underground Experience, a sprawling, “immersive” exhibition, opened, after a run in Paris, in New York City this fall (it closed in December) not so far from the location of the long-vanished Café Bizarre. There are reportedly plans for it to reappear in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

Most exhibitions dedicated to a band struggle to offer a new perspective on what is, primarily, an aural experience. Ancient guitars and fading posters will please only the saddest of fanboys. But when the music was part of a broader cultural moment, there are possibilities for something better, an opportunity that the curators of this show (backed by Citi, among others, a sponsor that Warhol, no foe of the dollar, would have relished) grabbed and then fumbled.

The first hint of trouble was lurking on the placard — “Welcome to America” — by the entrance to the main hall, a dreary proclamation enlivened only by a three-way fight between banality, cliché, and groupthink:

In the aftermath of World War II, America’s consumerism spread more than ever, often carrying with itself conformist and family-centered values as broadcast in the image of the Good American in the newly-booming media.

This gave rise to a provocative counter-culture of artists and thinkers, who rejected the era’s fake smiles and condemned the rigidity of a supposedly liberal society in which non-conformity was thought to be deviant and dangerous. These individuals . . . defended radically different ways of life, took alternative paths and questioned prevailing rules and taboos. All of this was embodied in the life and work of the indefatigable figurehead of the Beat Generation poets, Allen Ginsberg.

Allen Ginsberg. Not again. On one side, the sound of the sage of the East Village reading America, and on the other, a selection of film footage designed to contrast vintage blandness with uncomfortable truth and vintage woke. That the consumer society was infinitely more revolutionary than some bearded “prophet” bemoaning materialism (a commonplace nuisance for thousands of years) went unnoticed, an error Warhol never made.

But that “provocative counter-culture” was indeed flourishing — and self-aware. One reason the Velvets took their name was the “underground” in the book’s title. They also defined themselves by reference to where they were — downtown Manhattan. Rifling through a pile of words that someone had left on a laptop, the writers of the “about” section on the exhibition’s website expanded on the latter:

This was where experimental musicians, underground filmmakers, taboo-busting poets and young people challenging the diktats of the heterosexual norm all converged. In this unique context, the verses of the Beat poets the audacious harmonics of La Monte Young and the experimentation of underground cinema would rub off on Lou Reed and John Cale before they brought the Velvet Underground to life. At the intersection of pop culture and the avant-garde, conceptual art and tribal beats, juvenile shenanigans and the most sophisticated of theories.

Juvenile shenanigans! The most sophisticated of theories!

The convergence was real enough. Classically trained John Cale, the band’s viola player (and much, much more), was involved with New York’s avant-garde music scene. It was an experimental filmmaker, Barbara Rubin, who introduced the Velvets to Warhol. The exhibition managed to convey an impression of this world with photographs of a grubby East Village, the band, their associates, and long-forgotten happenings — among them an 18-hour piano recital and a performance featuring wet paint, sausages, raw fish, and writhing. For all the typos, overwriting (“music that was both schizophrenic and fluid”), hyperbole, malapropisms, chaotic grammar, and, on at least one occasion, chaotic chronology, the various displays gave a useful sense of who was doing what. Some films from that milieu were on continuous loop. Watching Peyote Queen with only Anacin to hand is, I now know, a mistake. Behind a closed door promising X-rated material was Rubin’s Christmas on Earth, a movie (filmed in Cale’s apartment) that used to bear a less misleading title. Step away from Google, people.

The Velvet Underground Experience, both conceptually and literally, revolved around the band’s Warhol connection. Visitors could lie back on silvery cushions, a nod to the décor of Warhol’s studio, the Factory, in a wood-framed central space and stare at multi-screen projections — another mid-Sixties fad — of mini-documentaries made for the exhibition as well as of original footage of the Velvets and other Factory denizens. The band was shown performing or (filmed with the paradoxically passive voyeurism the Factory had made its own) just doing not so very much. Other spots elsewhere were dedicated to the band and its individual members. But gazing up at those images was the best way to understand the magic — often a dark magic — of Warhol’s universe and the role that the Velvets filled within it.

In another room, more footage, this time dedicated to Nico (Christa Päffgen), tall and blonde with a Warholian remoteness. Nico had been an actress, a model, and a Marianne Faithfull in more ways than one, and had previously recorded a bouncy pop song on which a friendly Rolling Stone had played. Warhol calculated that she would add glamor to a foursome that rarely looked better than down at heel. He was right. Her contributions — including three deceptively dulcet counterpoints to some of the more obviously harsher moments on an album where her apartness was underlined in its title — The Velvet Underground & Nico — were some of the most memorable in the band’s history. But clashing egos and Nico’s uncertain relationship with the clock ensured that her history with the Velvets didn’t last long.

The other members of the band received their due too, and so did the albums that followed the break with Warhol and their breaks with each other. There were fewer artifacts than might have been expected, although this sad boy enjoyed seeing two copies of the first album’s original cover — one signed by the band and another where some wicked soul had peeled the notorious banana. This shortfall was in line with this exhibition’s somewhat slapdash quality, which extended beyond carelessly written materials to encompass a gift shop that combined a scarcity of anything that anyone might want to buy (Edie Sedgwick iPhone covers, anyone?) with prices ensuring that they would not even be tempted. Maybe the organizers thought that the Velvets’ brand was enough of a lure, and maybe they were right.

That said, there was just enough, other than nostalgia, to merit a visit by more dedicated fans, notably those films from the Factory. And there was one marvel: a short, animated documentary in which Tony Jannelli (one of the two directors) recalled the bewildered and appalled reaction when the Velvets played at his New Jersey high school. Any visitors unfamiliar with the Velvets’ music (not many, I reckon: Most attendees I saw were north of forty) might have wondered what all the fuss was about. But not only newbies would have been taken aback by the claim, made in a section dedicated to the band’s ‘legacy’, that the “spirit and range of their New York City rock” eventually “won over the entire planet”. They talk of nothing else in Pyongyang.

How much the Velvets influenced the way things were going and how much they merely anticipated what was already on the way is impossible to know. Where they were, perhaps, at their most innovative was lyrically. This was not so much for their matter-of-act descriptions of drug use. There had been popular songs on that topic (sometimes camouflaged) decades back. So, in I’m Waiting for The Man the Velvets sang of a junkie (“sick and dirty, more dead than alive”) traveling “up to Lexington, one, two, five” to meet a (heroin) dealer, but thirty years before there was this about a weed, er, retailer from Stuff Smith And His Onyx Club Boys:

Where’s the man with the jive?

There is a man from way up town

Who will take away your blues

And any time the man comes round we like to spread the news

What was new was the Velvet Underground’s treatment of characters from subcultures that had been largely invisible in pop music, such as the transvestites whose orgy goes so wrong in Sister Ray (sailors, a murder, heroin, the police at the door, could happen to anyone), subcultures they simultaneously mythologized and helped usher into some sort of mainstream.

Musically, the Velvet Underground may have been at the cutting edge, but other bands were also beginning to blend pop, rock, and avant-garde. The Exploding Plastic Inevitable was not the first light show. What distinguished the Velvets was not their sales (lamentable at the time) but that they were, if only briefly, very, very good. People in the next city this exhibition is destined to visit who don’t know much about the band but are curious about their work should give The Velvet Underground Experience a miss. They should immerse themselves instead in the first three albums (forget the fourth, Loaded, whatever critics may say): The Velvet Underground & Nico, its successor, White Light/White Heat, with its madcap amphetamine rush, and finally the quieter and strangely unsettling The Velvet Underground. Then they should scour YouTube for footage of the Factory at its peak. If they do all that, they will learn more and spend less.

Jean-Claude Juncker’s boast about the euro is an insulting fantasy

CapX, January 4, 2019

History may or may not repeat itself, but hubris certainly does. In April 2008, as the euro approached its tenth birthday, Joaquín Almunia, the EU’s then Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs, recalled how its construction had been accompanied by “dissenting voices”. “One economist” had jeered that it was “at best, an act of uncertain merit”. Another had denounced it as a “great mistake”. Fools! Almunia bragged that “the euro [had] proved an economic success”.  Within 18 months Greece was in crisis.

Earlier this week Jean-Claude Juncker marked the euro’s 20th anniversary of with words seemingly so far removed from reality that not even sciatica could explain them away: “The euro has become a symbol of unity, sovereignty and stability. It has delivered prosperity and protection to our citizens…”

Goebbels once wrote that “the English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous”. However, he would not have expected the English to mock those who they were trying to convince.

Juncker, no Englishman, but known to some as “the master of lies”, has rarely shown much concern about appearing ridiculous. Nevertheless, boasting that that the euro has delivered prosperity insults almost every member state other than Germany, particularly those hit hardest by the bursting of bubbles wholly or partly inflated by the single currency. Most may have crawled out of the A&E (or in Ireland’s case done rather more than that), but memories of what they went through are fresh. And in some instances, they aren’t even memories. Youth unemployment in Greece has only recently fallen below 40 per cent. GDP per capita in Italy (where the euro’s corrosive effect is real, but more difficult to assess) stands roughly where it did in 1999.

On the other hand, Juncker’s claim that a currency which has brought chaos and division in its wake is a symbol of “unity” and “stability” may seem equally absurd, but seen from Brussels, it makes good sense. To appreciate why, note the reference to “sovereignty” as another of the qualities symbolised by the euro. A country that relinquishes its own currency gives up some of its sovereignty, but Juncker was focused on where that sovereignty had been transferred. And that was to “Europe”. Having its own currency represented a major advance in the EU’s step-by-step assumption of sovereignty, and with it, the attributes of a state.

Now adopt that same Brussels perspective to understand what Juncker meant by unity. Despite sharp disagreements, those running the Eurozone stuck together through the crisis, trashing treaty obligations, promises to voters, a referendum result, the integrity of the European Central Bank, economic logic and basic democratic norms to keep the currency union intact. They succeeded in a display of unity that also delivered Juncker’s notion of stability — a Eurozone that weathered the storm — as well as a strong indication that it will continue to overcome the challenges that come its way.

Part of the reason for that, is that once in the euro, there is no easy exit. “Ever closer union” are perhaps the three most important words in the EU’s definition of itself: They imply that there is no reverse gear. Nowhere is this more the case than, as its creators intended, with the single currency, described in 2012 by one top German civil servant as “a machine from hell that we cannot turn off” — words to remember amid current talk of widespread support for the euro.

But back to hubris. Like so much central planning, the euro was born of arrogance, over-confidence, conceit and ideological obsession. Cramming a large number of diverse economies into a necessarily Procrustean currency union made little economic sense—the savings flowing from the removal of foreign exchange risk were somewhere between minimal and illusory. It was also an invitation to disaster, made riskier still by the absence of any degree of fiscal union, something which might have provided a safety net, but would not have been politically acceptable in many of the countries signing up for the new currency.

One example of hubris overlapped with another. Some of those in charge of putting the euro together were aware of its innate flaws but expected that they would eventually lead to—as the phrase in Brussels goes— a “beneficial crisis”. This would be the catalyst for forcing through the fiscal union that had always been the logical counterpoint of monetary union and would also constitute a giant leap forward towards ever closer union. The hubris lay in believing that such a crisis would be manageable in the manner that Brussels hoped.

It wasn’t. Even allowing for its starting point, Juncker’s perception of unity is based on turning a blind eye to some highly inconvenient truths. Made even more destructive by its intertwining with the financial crisis, the storm that tore into the Eurozone essentially divided the currency union’s member states into two antagonistic camps, creditor nations in the north and debtor nations in the south.

The north’s distrust of the south, and the south’s resentment of the north, along with economic distress and the realisation that Brussels and its allies bore much of the blame for this mess (but had no interest in changing direction) also boosted political parties once confined to the fringe or triggered the formation of new parties that would once have found a home there. Those forces were given additional impetus by an unrelated issue— mounting unease over immigration and its longer-term implications. What’s more, many continental eurosceptics have been transformed from naysayers opposed to further integration into a force that actively wants to reverse the direction of ‘ever closer union’. Populist governments (of very different hues) have come to power in Greece and Italy.

Germany and other ‘northern’ states are now even more firmly set against fiscal union, rightly regarded as a device to milk their taxpayers in perpetuity. In the Eurozone’s south, meanwhile, there is increased resistance to Germany’s insistence on enforcing its sometimes counter-productive brand of fiscal discipline on everyone else. It’s significant that, with Emmanuel Macron’s own plans for fiscal union floating face-down in the Spree and gilets jaunes roaming France’s streets, his government will now be breaching (just a one-off, of course) the EU’s budgetary rules.

All that said, betting against the survival of the euro is unwise. The political will to keep this vampire currency going should, as the last ten years have shown, not be underestimated and populist parties are just as conscious as their more orthodox rivals of the general public’s fear of ‘something worse’.

But European growth prospects are deteriorating despite years of the ECB doing “what it takes”. The economies (and balance sheets) of many of the Eurozone’s weaker member-states continue to suffer from the after-effects of the last crisis and remain confined to the straitjacket of a one-size-fits-all currency:  They will not be well placed to cope with a fresh slowdown. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that another Eurozone drama may well be approaching, with political consequences that are likely to be much trickier than last time around.

One way to head off some of the worse of what might lie ahead would be by splitting the single currency into ‘northern’ and ‘southern’ euros which would better reflect the economic realities of the domestic economies they serve. This would be far from straightforward, but it beats sticking with a status quo that offers much of the Eurozone little more than stagnation at best, and catastrophe at worst.

But such a split runs against the idea of the irreversibility of ever closer union. It’s never going to happen.

Dat's Capital

Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge - Capitalism in America: A History

National Review, December 20, 2018 (December 31, 2018 issue)

New York City, March 1989 © Andrew Stuttaford

With 29-year-old “democratic socialist” and imminent congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez widely seen as the harbinger of a future that, with luck, I may be too aged to see through to Caracas, Capitalism in America may come to be regarded as an obituary as much as a history. Not that its two authors, Adrian Wooldridge, political editor of The Economist — a magazine now closer to Davos liberalism than to the classical kind — and Alan Greenspan, who needs no introduction, would see it that way. Capitalism in America is a celebration — some of it should be read to music, Sousa, say, when the narrative reaches the Gilded Age — of the economic system that took the U.S. to the top of the world and could, maintain Greenspan and Wooldridge, still keep it there. They may warn of “America’s fading dynamism,” but they conclude that the country “is trapped in an iron cage of its own making,” to which it “has all the keys that it needs.” The question is whether it has the “political will” to use them. Indeed.

Messrs. Wooldridge and Greenspan possess a sharp understanding of the political foundations of American growth — as they must. There were, after all, other large countries blessed with rich resources and abundant land, and, as the 19th century drew on, the ability to exploit them. Argentina’s great liberal president, Domingo Sarmiento (1811–88), dreamt of emulating the developing colossus to the north. By the 1890s, Argentina was among the wealthiest places on earth (on one measure, briefly the richest), and European immigrants were pouring in. And yet the U.S. now stands where it now does, and Argentina is, well, Argentina.

“Anyone who regards economic history,” caution Greenspan and Wooldridge, “as history with the politics left out is reading the wrong book.” America’s economics would have been impossible without its politics, and the latter were, the authors emphasize, profoundly shaped by the happy timing of the country’s founding, born in the age of enlightenment. Although they do not explicitly say so, the variant of the Enlightenment that weighed most on the Founding Fathers, for ancestral as well as intellectual reasons, was British, the fruit of an incremental process dating back to (at least) 1688, rather than its more radical French alternative. Moreover, it was buttressed by having inherited what Greenspan and Wooldridge refer to as “many of Britain’s best traditions,” from the common law to a certain respect for individual rights. In that sense, “the American Revolution was only a half revolution.” The nascent republic was marked by a suspicion of both monarchical rule and unrestrained popular government. Commerce was able to slip through the gaps, helped by, as the authors explain, the insights of Adam Smith, the prohibition of internal trade barriers, and — a critical incentive for the enterprising — the strong defense of property (including intellectual-property) rights enshrined in the new Constitution.

This settlement was made easier to sustain by the United States’ birth in “an age of growth — an age when the essential economic problem was to promote the forces of change rather than to divvy up a fixed set of resources,” a summary that is on the crude side — fighting over the proceeds of growth can be ugly enough — but works well enough for a country that, more than anywhere else at that epoch, was a land of opportunity.

And what allowed America’s inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs to make so much of this opportunity was the extent to which creative destruction (to Greenspan and Wooldridge, “the ‘perennial gale’ that uproots businesses — and lives — but that, in the process, creates a more productive economy”) was allowed free rein. In this heroic retelling — Howard Zinn, avert your eyes — of America’s expansion (the Gilded Age is rechristened “the Age of Giants”), creative destruction — the hammer in the invisible hand — is the mightiest hero of all, “the principal driving force of economic progress.” The government’s job, the authors note approvingly (did I mention that Alan Greenspan was a part of Ayn Rand’s circle?), was to protect property rights and the sanctity of contracts and then, rather than “tame” creative destruction, enable it and get out of the way. Less was more: “The old nations creep on at a snail’s pace,” wrote Andrew Carnegie. “The Republic thunders past with the rush of an express.”

While praising America “as a huge positive” not only for itself, but for what it has given the wider world, the authors don’t gloss over the darker side of “numerous disgraces” that have marred its rise. Slavery was a system resting “on foundations of unfathomable cruelty” that brought riches to the South but condemned it to economic backwardness as well as moral squalor. They also acknowledge that the state played a more active role in America’s economic explosion than it might be polite to mention in Galt’s Gulch. Railways, in many respects the Internet of the era (though, in a testimony to a time of remarkable innovation, there’s also the telegraph to think of), benefited — as, subsequently, did the Internet itself — from Uncle Sam’s largesse. Vast land grants offered railway companies the chance to risk a fortune building rails “in the middle of nowhere” in the hope of making a fortune by turning a “piece of nowhere into a part of the global economy.”

The authors write snappily and memorably, but not at the expense of subtlety. Thomas Edison’s “greatest claim to fame is arguably not as an inventor but as a systematizer of invention.” He created the first industrial laboratory and staffed it with “German PhDs, skilled craftsmen, and ‘absolutely insane men,’” the last category a preview, perhaps, of the pizza-munching Asperger’s army taking a (silicon) valley to fresh peaks.

By outlining the backgrounds of these economic pioneers, an impressively recurrent tale of creativity, social mobility, and sometimes uncontainable energy (Isaac Singer, of sewing-machine fame, sowed very widely, fathering at least 24 children, and, at one point, ran three households simultaneously), Greenspan and Wooldridge highlight the extent to which the American story was one of individual achievement. Those individuals did, Mr. Obama, build this.

But as the country grew richer, its politics changed, reflecting the growing electoral clout of those at the rough end of creative destruction, mounting alarm at escalating oligarchic and corporate power and its abuse (Teddy Roosevelt’s “malefactors of great wealth”), and a broader shift in opinion away from laissez-faire. This transformation in sentiment was accelerated by the Depression and two world wars but was well under way from the beginning of the 20th century, not least due to the size, complexity, and problems — “pollution,” relate Greenspan and Wooldridge, “on a terrifying scale” — of a country growing at an astonishing rate, a new kind of society that, it seemed self-evident, required steering by more than an invisible hand. There was also an early flowering of what has become an endemic phenomenon: “By producing prosperity, capitalism creates its own gravediggers in the form of a comfortable class of intellectuals and politicians” able to use the negative side of creative destruction to sell their own agenda.

The final two-thirds of the book details the evolution of American capitalism since the assault on laissez-faire first gathered speed. Adaptive, protean, and endlessly inventive, capitalism has proved to be more resilient than its early-20th-century champions might have expected. Government activism may have ebbed and flowed (this is not, incidentally, a book for FDR fans), but even if the Constitution acted as a restraint on the state’s encroachments, it never returned to low tide. Nevertheless, America’s private sector remained re­markably productive, famously through the 1920s, but again in the long post-WWII boom. Revived by Ronald Reagan after the stagflation of the 1970s, it flourished during what Greenspan and Wooldridge dub “the age of optimism” until the arrival of lean years marked by the dotcom bust, the runaway spending of the George W. Bush years, and the financial crisis, a catastrophe about which these authors have disappointingly (considering the identity of one of them) little that is novel to say.

Looking, however, beyond the proximate causes of the Great Recession, the authors are right to see signs of a deeper malaise in the economy, a creeping sickness that shows up in many ways, including lower productivity, declining social mobility, and unhealthy concentration in many industries. They attribute much of this to a decline in American exceptionalism. Creative destruction’s wild ride is being replaced by excessive risk aversion and overregulation. And they fret about swelling entitlements, both for their ultimate unaffordability and for the way they encourage consumption over the saving that is essential to fund productivity growth.

In an attempt to bring back a little cheer as their book draws to a close, Greenspan and Wooldridge observe that “America leads in all the industries that are inventing the future,” including artificial intelligence and robotics. But that future comes with a catch that they may have missed. Neither those industries nor their immediate digital predecessors, prime examples of creative destruction, are replacing the jobs or the wage rates to which they are laying waste. That could well account for more of America’s malaise than Greenspan and Wooldridge would care to admit, and may — Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, or even Ocasio-Cortez could all be straws in a very different gale — herald an era of destruction with nothing creative about it.

Her Inner Brezhnev

National Review, November 15, 2018

There was a time when Angela Merkel, like many young East Germans, would don a special shirt (blue rather than brown; different dictatorship) and parade for the Party, sometimes (not everything had changed) by torchlight. On occasion, she and her Free German Youth comrades would have marched behind banners carrying the portrait of Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader whose extended (1964–82) rule has more than longevity in common with her own.

No, no, Merkel is not a Communist. Nor does she order the invasion of other countries; she merely bullies them. She may have participated in the overthrow of Italy’s unruly and unacceptably euroskeptic Silvio Berlusconi, but no tanks were deployed, just “suggestions” made menacing by Italian fears of what the bond-market vigilantes might do.

Look deeper, however, and unsettling similarities come into view. That Brezhnev was no democrat is hardly a surprise. That Merkel, the bien-pensant “leader of the free world,” has repeatedly demonstrated her disdain for democratic propriety is, by contrast, disappointing. Perhaps it is a legacy of her East German upbringing, but, whatever the cause, it has poisoned both the politics of the country she leads and those of the EU, the misbegotten union that Germany dominates with a mixture of passive aggression, money, and size.

In the early 2000s, Brussels, compelled as always by the imperative of “ever closer union,” midwifed an ambitious draft constitution only to see it felled by French and Dutch referendums. When voters get a direct say on deeper European integration, they have a way of saying no.

That should have been the end of the matter, but Merkel used Germany’s tenure of the EU’s rotating presidency (it’s complicated) to cobble together the Lisbon Treaty, a sly pact that reproduced the spurned constitution in every material respect but was structured in such a way that pesky referendums could be dodged everywhere other than reliably awkward Ireland. No matter: The Irish rejected the treaty in one referendum but, engulfed by the financial crisis, were cajoled into changing their minds.

The treaty became law, but, not for the last time, Merkel had underestimated the consequences of paying so little attention to popular feeling. Lisbon, which helped pave the way for Brexit, reinforced many Europeans’ anxiety that the EU was slipping into post-democracy, a perception later bolstered by Merkel’s role in the euro’s long ordeal and, more recently, by her efforts to bludgeon other EU countries into accepting more of the migrants and refugees she so carelessly welcomed in 2015.

Some of Merkel’s actions in the latter two instances were a straightforward defense of German national interests. But her insistence on Lisbon was another reminder that, at some level, this supposedly pragmatic politician clearly believes that European integration is on the right side of history, a phrase, Robert Conquest wrote, with “a Marxist twang.” If so, she is not alone, but it is reasonable to ask whether in Merkel’s case this dubious proposition has been made easier to swallow by formative years spent in a land where Marxism was a part of the ideology of the state.

Merkel’s authoritarianism has taken an even more disturbing turn at home. Her instinctive dislike of dissent — the dark side of consensus politicians — curdled into something more sinister in the wake of that 2015 decision to throw open Germany’s doors. With mainstream media hymning the chancellor’s Wilkommenskultur, Germans uneasy about the influx into their country had nowhere to go but online, sometimes via the gutter, often not.

Infuriated, Merkel began by bullying social-media companies to clamp down on what she regarded as hate speech. When they did not, in her view, do enough, she looked to her parliamentary colleagues for assistance. The result, prompted also by scaremongering over “fake news,” the switched-on censor’s excuse du jour, was Germany’s social-media law — the notorious Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz. It represents an attack on free speech so draconian (for example, if a social-media company fails to take down “manifestly unlawful . . . hate speech” or “fake news” within 24 hours of a complaint, it can be fined up to 50 million euros) that it has provided useful cover for Russian legislators looking to shut down undesirable talk online, a development that would have amused old Leonid.

When Mikhail Gorbachev launched his program to overhaul the Soviet Union, he attacked Brezhnev’s “era of stagnation,” a label encompassing political as well as economic inertia. While Brezhnev was appealing to a far smaller “electorate” — the party elite — than Merkel has done, the key to the length of their tenures was (obvious differences aside) sticking with consensus and maintaining stability. As a strategy, it worked, but the stagnation that ensued contributed to the Soviet collapse. As for Germany, it is too soon to say.

By ending the experimentation of the Khrushchev years, Brezhnev shrank the political and intellectual space within which the regime could safely operate. When his moment came, Gorbachev saw a relaxation of party control as inseparable from a desperately needed economic reset, but, after Brezhnev, it was too late to change direction. If the opening for reform within the system had ever existed, it had closed.

Germany is not, of course, lurching toward a Soviet-style implosion. That said, Merkel’s capture of the middle ground, inspired by both personal conviction and strategic savvy, is showing signs of backfiring in ways that, if events oblige, as they well may, will undermine the centrist order over which she has presided for so long. The middle ground ought to be a battlefield of ideas. That is not how it has been under Merkel. By moving her center-right CDU so far leftward, Merkel has occupied much of the territory that the SPD, the leading party of the center Left, once called its own. The SPD’s displacement was accelerated by its participation in coalition governments with Merkel between 2005 and 2009, as well as since 2013. As partners go, she has proved to be something of a black widow. Between 2013 and 2017, the SPD’s support fell by over a fifth, to 20.2 percent, half its level in 1999, and it is still falling. The SPD now trails the Greens, who are hipper, socially liberal, migrant-friendly, NATO-not-so-friendly, eurofundamentalist, but — and this is a major but — environmental issues apart, relatively centrist on economics.

Upheaval has come to the Right, too. Merkel’s agreement to the bailout of the euro zone’s casualties drove some classical liberals, skeptical about both the single currency and the steps being taken to preserve it, to set up “the professors’ party,” the Alternative for Germany (AfD) — its very name a protest against Merkel’s stifling consensus — in 2013. The AfD saw some early success but shifted into a higher gear, losing much of its former leadership in the process, when it also became a vehicle for social conservatives and immigration skeptics who felt that there was no longer a place for them in the CDU or the CSU (the CDU’s considerably more conservative Bavarian counterpart). This was particularly so after Merkel flung open those doors — and clamped down on those who dared to demur.

The AfD’s transformation has given it a rougher-edged nationalist following. After a string of provincial successes, the party made it into the federal parliament in 2017, cutting into the vote won by the CDU and the CSU. In this October’s elections in Bavaria, home of the CSU, it took 10.6 percent. When consensus hardens into an orthodoxy enforced by establishment parties, voters, when worried enough, ignored enough, and silenced enough, look elsewhere.

Brezhnev’s era of stagnation was also an era of squandered opportunity. The USSR’s vast oil reserves could have made a substantial contribution to funding the reorganization of its economy. But, isolated within an increasingly archaic consensus, the Soviet leadership renounced even modest reform, preferring to anesthetize the population with (very) modest prosperity. The windfall was frittered away on massive defense spending, hugely generous subsidies of allies and satrapies, and a futile attempt to prop up a command-and-control system that could not meet the demands of a modern economy. The reckoning was not long in coming.

Whatever the criticisms that can be made of Merkel, splurging on the defense budget is not one of them. Her slide to the left may not have involved an embrace of the neutralism that runs through so much of German politics (Merkel is no fan of Putin and pushed for sanctions in 2014), but she has been reluctant to challenge either neutralism’s consequences — the armed forces have been so badly neglected that their combat-readiness has been called into question — or its assumptions. To be sure, Merkel has undertaken to increase defense spending (currently 1.2 percent of GDP), but only to 1.5 percent of GDP (still far below NATO’s 2 percent target) and only by 2024. Throw in the prospect of increased dependence on Russian gas once the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is operational, and after 13 years of governments headed by the alleged leader of the free world, it is uncertain how effective and reliable an ally Germany really can be.

On a brighter note, the German economy is booming, rich, and the envy of most of the world. Nevertheless, it’s worth remembering that in the 1990s Germany was, by its standards, struggling. Quite what changed is fiercely debated. Explanations include labor-market reforms and tax cuts (the latter, tellingly, opposed by Angela Merkel, then the CDU’s new leader) introduced by the Social Democrats under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in the early 2000s; the boost to Germany’s crucial export sector from a concealed devaluation (the switch from the deutsche mark to the euro); the easing of some of the strains associated with German unification; and, since the 1990s, the manner in which more-decentralized wage-bargaining has increased flexibility (and, with it, restraint) over pay. This turnaround gave Merkel the latitude to coast, but, given her own less-than-market-friendly views and her determination to command the center ground, she was never likely to build on the Schröder reforms. And she has not. Sometimes, such as by the introduction (in 2015) of a uniform minimum wage across the country, she has even subverted them. Business remains heavily regulated, a hurdle that goes some way toward explaining the relatively low levels of capital investment by German companies in their own country. That investment shortfall has, in turn, contributed to faltering productivity growth.

High taxation is another disincentive, and not only to investment. The writer of a recent article for the business daily Handelsblatt detailed how Germany had failed to keep pace with corporate tax cuts elsewhere. He blamed the complacency bred by the economy’s current strength, but that is only part of the story. Germany’s prevailing consensus has scant room for aggressive tax-cutting, something that Merkel has done nothing to change.

Meanwhile, a blend of panic after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan (which triggered a German decision to speed up the planned phase-out of nuclear power) and an enormous and hugely expensive program of investment in renewable energy prompted by panic over climate change (another critical element in the politics of Germany’s middle ground) has meant a dramatic hike in energy costs for industry and, even more so, consumers, while — central planning being what it is — failing to yield the promised environmental return.

So long as Germany prospers, none of this may matter, but a cyclical downturn, perhaps exacerbated by trade tensions, could well be approaching. That may cause difficulty in the immediate future — and it will not help the absorption of all those migrants into the work force — but longer-term concerns are beginning to surface, too. The old Soviet economic model was unable to cope with the changed world of the second half of the 20th century, and there are signs that its (admittedly immeasurably more flexible) German counterpart might not be doing what it takes to keep up with the evolving digital economy. This is so with basic infrastructure — according to a 2016 OECD report, under 2 percent of German broadband connections were fiber-optic — but also, more subtly, with the adaptation of business practices or, for that matter, products that lie ahead: With autonomous vehicles coming down the pike, will Germany’s automakers soon be facing off against Google?

That will be a problem for someone other than Merkel to contemplate. After the disappointing general election was followed by setbacks for the CSU in Bavaria and the CDU in Hesse, Merkel stepped down as the CDU’s leader. She will continue, she says, as chancellor until the next election. Maybe, maybe not — but there’s a suspicion that she sees hanging on in office as the best way of securing the CDU leadership for Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the party’s general secretary, a Merkel 2.0.

If “AKK” should win, the CDU will show that it has learned nothing from the failures of the Merkel years. Stagnation is like that.

Blue wave? More like a blue trickle

TheArticle, November 7, 2018

New York City, July 2018 © Andrew Stuttaford

“Treason,” it has been famously said, “is a matter of dates”. The same, rather more obviously, is true of political surprises. At the beginning of the year, there was excited talk of “a blue wave” that would sweep the Democrats into power in the House of Representatives and, despite unfavourable political geography (Democrats were defending many more Senate seats than Republicans, including a good number in states won by Trump in 2016), quite possibly the Senate too. A new president’s party typically struggles in the first Midterm elections held after his victory. And when that president was polling so poorly as Donald Trump, well…

By October, those hopes had largely evaporated. The prevailing conventional wisdom was that the Republicans would hold the Senate and lose the House, but not dramatically so. As it was, the GOP has actually managed to add to its current 51-49 majority, an impressive achievement under the circumstances. To be sure, Republicans have lost the House by a little more than the most recent expectations, but by quite a bit less than the carnage of Democrats’ January dreams or, say, the humiliation inflicted on the Democrats in 2010, two years after Obama first took up residence in the White House.

Even a blue trickle will prove sufficient to bring down that non-existent wall. However, the President will, come 2020, be able to blame the failure to fortify the border on Democratic obstruction rather than Republican hesitation, one element in a wider perk of defeat that Trump, better at running against than for, will exploit to the full. A Democratic House will make for a tremendous target, especially if, as seems likely, the Democrats continue to swing to the left. Making Trump’s task easier still will be the fact that this iteration of the left is driven more by the politics of identity—terrain where Trump has considerable skills of his own— than by those of economic grievance.

Today, of course, marks both of the start of the 2020 election season and a surge in complaints that it is too early to start discussing 2020. All I will say for now is that the GOP will, absent “events”, be fighting the 2020 election as unambiguously the party of Trump. The President’s appeal to a changing base both saved yesterday (more or less) for the Republicans, but his spiel –and the baggage that comes with it—drove yet more moderate voters on the coasts and in the more affluent suburbs into the Democratic camp. This is a self-reinforcing process. As ‘purple’ parts of the country turn blue, they throw out the GOP lawmakers most likely to push back against the President, leaving the remainder even more closely bound to the man from Trump Tower. There is a great deal of division in this nation, and it is not going to narrow.

Nevertheless, part of Trump’s persona is as a deal-maker. As he contemplates a newly hostile House of Representatives, he may well try to see if he can win its agreement to the increased infrastructure spending he has always wanted, but without the tax increases that would infuriate the Congressional GOP. He might get that—even if, with government debt coming into ever more uncomfortable focus, another splurge would not delight the bond market—but it won’t buy him enough Democratic goodwill to head off the flurry of investigations that will be coming his way from congressional committees now under Democratic control. Trump’s reactions to siege by subpoena will not be edifying, and they won’t help either him or his party. And if those investigations come up with anything, well…

Meanwhile Special Counsel Mueller plods on, gathering evidence, securing pleas, and, doubtless, fully aware that the decision to impeach is ultimately political, not legal. With the Democrats in charge of the House (the institution that would initiate impeachment) the politics have just changed, and not to Trump’s advantage.

No one ever said his presidency would be dull.

Will the Blue Wave hit a red wall in New Mexico?

Spectator USA, November 5, 2018

Cuba, New Mexico, October, 2018 © Andrew Stuttaford

The only (future) presidential candidate I have ever encountered in a burlesque club – Manhattan’s The Box, if you must know – is Gary Johnson, a former two-term Republican governor of New Mexico, a slice of the Southwest that is like nowhere else in the US. We were attending an event organized by the publishers of the libertarian Reason magazine to celebrate the dismissal of obscenity charges against one of their donors, a pornographer.

If New Mexico is a state like no other, its former governor, socially liberal, a deficit hawk, and deeply suspicious of both income tax and military entanglements abroad, is a senior Republican politician like almost no other. Or was. Johnson began his 2012 run for the White House as a Republican and ended it as a Libertarian, winning just under 1 percent of the vote; not exactly a triumph, but the best Libertarian result since Ed Clark, 1980’s Mr. 1.06 percent.

Johnson tried again in 2016, taking over 3 percent of the vote (and 100 percent of mine), a feat that would have been impressive in any year in which Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were not the opposition. Sadly, Johnson was not always on top form during the campaign, as when he asked, ‘What is Aleppo?’

Last year, one of his supporters, making a possibly unfair connection between that moment and Johnson’s performance at a town hall meeting in Santa Fe, remarked to me that Johnson might not be an ideal advertisement for a cause he has long endorsed, the legalization of marijuana.

Undaunted and unchanged – ‘young people,’ he has argued, are ‘getting fucked’ by rocketing government debt – Johnson made a late entry into this year’s Senate race. Pitching himself as ‘fiscally conservative and socially cool,’ and, conceivably, a swing vote in Washington, he has at times polled ahead of the Republican, ‘Hard Hat’ Mick Rich, a political novice who has built up a successful construction business.

There’s a case to be made that if Rich, who has never looked like a winner, had dropped out, then Johnson, a figure with some cross-party appeal, might have had a chance against incumbent Democrat Sen. Martin Heinrich.  As it is, the sharpened polarization of recent weeks appears to have left Johnson trailing Rich. Heinrich, a clear favorite even before Johnson entered the ring, will benefit from a split vote to romp home.

This shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. Historically, New Mexico, which is 49 percent Latino, has been more politically mixed than a crude reading of its demographics might suggest, but seems to be becoming a more reliably blue state, not least because of the increasing dominance of Albuquerque. With a population of around 560,000 – and the entire state has a little more than two million inhabitants – the Duke City is easily New Mexico’s largest.

Alberquerque’s most famous, if fictional, resident is Breaking Bad’s Walter White. A smart ‘left behind’, White might, if not for his unfortunate end, have been a MAGA man. But Albuquerque has been trending left for some years now. Deb Haaland, a ‘progressive’ candidate who stresses her Native American rather than her Norwegian-American heritage, looks set to succeed fellow Democrat Michelle Lujan Grisham as representative for New Mexico’s 1st Congressional District, which includes most of Albuquerque and its surrounds. Unusually for a state where Democrats tend to be moderate, Haaland promises to be ‘fierce.’

New Mexico has voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1992, other than in 2004, and it hasn’t had a GOP senator since 2009. Democrats control the state’s House of Representatives and Senate. On Tuesday, the Governor’s Mansion will fall into their hands too. Once, the term-limited Mexican-American Republican governor Susana Martinez was seen as the potential national ‘ethnic’ female candidate of GOP dreams; this was before the Nikki Haley ascendancy. Now, Martinez is leaving office with an approval rating in the mid-thirties. If polls and fundraising are any indication, she will be replaced by Michelle Lujan Grisham. The likely new governor’s extended Lujan family has played a prominent role in New Mexico politics, and on both sides of the aisle. For a large state, New Mexico is also a small state.

Lujan Grisham’s Republican opponent is Steve Pearce, currently the congressman for New Mexico’s 2nd Congressional district. This stretches across the state’s south, and includes a segment of Albuquerque and Democratic-leaning Las Cruces on the Mexican border. Pearce’s conservatism, including a birther moment, hasn’t hurt him in a district with a sizable Anglo majority and a south-eastern portion that’s close to Texas in more ways than one; many of the counties that opted for Trump are located in this corner of New Mexico. But that won’t help in a statewide campaign which, given Pearce’s lack of traction in Albuquerque, looks doomed.

Adding insult to injury, Pearce’s former district, despite voting for Trump in 2016, may now switch sides.  With a moderate Democrat posing a strong challenge, the outcome appears to be a toss-up. Both sides have poured in money from out-of-state and, following the alien lead – UFO, that is, not caravan – Vice-President Pence recently showed up in Roswell, in the 2nd district’s east. Pence called for two walls, one on the border – ‘Oh, we’re building it’ – and one against the Democrats: ‘Lets make sure [the blue wave] hits a red wall in New Mexico.’

The state’s other Congressional district, the 3rd, includes a significant Native American population; brainy Los Alamos; Taos, counter-cultural even before the hippies descended; and Santa Fe, a city offering a touch of Marin County amid the adobe. The 3rd district will return a Democrat as it has, with one slightly freakish exception, since its creation in 1983.  The district’s ‘deplorables’ are clustered around Farmington in northern, high-desert San Juan county. In 2016, this county went for Trump. Farmington remains a town where, one of Santa Fe’s few conservatives somewhat wistfully told me, it is possible to wear a Trump T-shirt in public. But Farmington will not be enough to make a difference.

With a Johnson miracle now beyond reach, the New Mexico result to look out for on Tuesday night will be the 2nd District. If the Democrats win that, the House could well be theirs by Wednesday morning.

Three dystopias and A disappearance

Joyce Carol Oates - Hazards of Time Travel

Varlam Shalamov - Kolyma Stories

Curzio Malaparte  - The Kremlin Ball

Peter Stamm - To The Back of Beyond

The New Criterion, November 1, 2018

One of the symptoms of the hysteria surrounding Donald Trump’s election (a candidate, incidentally, for whom I did not vote) was the conviction that democracy was in danger—“dying in darkness,” the #Resistance, and all that. This led to a revival of interest in the imaginary totalitarian futures of the past, mobilized now against the imaginary Trump terror to come.

Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935) was adapted for the stage in Berkeley, edgy as ever, even before that dread November 2016 night; its title has been looted by countless headline writers and the book itself has appeared on Amazon’s bestseller lists. Nineteen Eighty-Four did its bit for Jeff Bezos, too, and a theatrical version (from 2013) of Orwell’s bleak warning opened not in Berkeley but on Broadway. Elections have consequences. There was also a mass screening of Michael Radford’s 1984, “a thirty-year-old film that suddenly feels new again,” marveled Time magazine. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) has been made into a hit TV series, inspiring pink ladies in red to show up at various protests. It hasn’t hurt that, unlike Lewis and Orwell, Atwood is still around, and able to talk up supposed Trump parallels. Gilead is on the way!

All this must have been galling to Joyce Carol Oates, a noisy member of the #Resistance, but a dystopia short. She has now remedied that with Hazards of Time Travel. She previewed the book in this tweet from January:

If this novel—“Hazards of Time Travel”—had been published before 2016 would seem like dystopian future/ sci-fi; now, a just slightly distorted mirroring of actual T***p US sliding, we hope not inexorably, into totalitarianism & white apartheid.

“Just slightly distorted”? As claims go, that tips over from hype into psychosis, but, as a “mirroring” of the prejudices and paranoia of a segment of today’s Left, this book is of some value. Well, there’s also an intriguing, skillfully implied—no more than that—twist in the plot, which it would be bad manners to reveal.

After a brief prelude, the story moves to the 2030s. Seventeen-year-old Adriane Strohl (much of the book is written in her voice—and convincingly so) is about to graduate from a high school in the “Reconstituted North American States,” a far-from-perfect union. It’s repressive (check), stratified by race (check) and class (check). Health benefits are bad (check), and the postal service has been privatized (reviewer perks up). Most of the national parks have been sold, closed off to the plebs, but opened up to fracking (check) and other outrages. History has been rewritten, scientific inquiry is suspect (check), and it’s unwise to stand out as too smart. Unfortunately, Adriane is smart and has a way of asking the wrong sort of questions. She is arrested by “Homeland Security” (check), just after making a valedictorian speech composed of the wrong sort of questions, and found guilty of “Treason-Speech [no dystopia would be complete without ugly neologisms] and Questioning of Authority.”

What happened to the poor old USA is not set out in detail, but the rot set in with the abuse of executive powers after “The Great Terrorist Attacks of 9/11” (check) and was helped along by environmental devastation (check) partly attributable to climate change (check). The Patriot Party (check) “funded by NAS’s wealthiest individuals, which appointed all political leaders as well as the judiciary” (check) is now running the country. Presidents are thought to be “multi-billionaires” (check) or their associates—their names often invented—that citizens are conditioned by the media to “like.” All citizens are “Christian” (check), ethically a meaningless term (fist thrown at hypocritical Trump-voting evangelicals—check) and “no one ever spoke of . . . doing good, helping the less fortunate, being selfless.” Dystopic fiction often contains a satirical strain, but the dagger is generally more effective than the club.

Adriane is handed a lighter sentence than some. Rather than being “deleted” (nasty), she is exiled back in time; and rather than being sent, like the dissidents in Robert Silverberg’s Hawksbill Station (1968), to the Precambrian era, she is allocated a new identity and transported back to a mediocre Wisconsin university in 1959. Her studies at this “excellent” campus will, she is told, be an opportunity to re-educate herself in preparation for a return to nas, an extension, by implication, of the 1950s (check).

Oates uses Wainscotia State University to trash the nostalgic appeal of the “again,” in “Make America Great Again,” taking aim at oafish frat boys, Cold Warriors, the subordination of women, and a certain mid-century American intellectual parochialism (her portrayal of the local poet in residence, a Robert Frost wannabe, is a delight). Then there is the absence of “diversity.”

However gloomy her overall premise, Oates has fun with the idea of someone from the twenty-first century finding herself in Ike’s America. Adriane is shocked by such primitive horrors as smoking—some of our nanny state has evidently hung on into NAS—cyclists without safety helmets, and questionable food (a roommate notices how Adriane won’t touch “glazed doughnuts [or] Cheez-bits”). Then there’s the ancient technology, televisions with their pictures “in tremulous shades of grey,” typewriters, books.

A distinctly less predictable topic covered (at considerable length) in the description of Adriane’s studies at Wainscotia is behaviorism (she is attending psychology classes), and, more specifically, her distaste for its “mechanical, soulless view of consciousness.” Presumably Wainscotia’s fondness for B. F. Skinner is intended by Oates as a proxy for mid-century regimentation, but Adriane’s reaction seems excessive. For all its many flaws, behaviorism suggests some useful, if uncomfortable, truths about human nature, truths that Adriane may or may not recognize, but would, in any case, be unwilling—and this may be what Oates is driving at—to accept (despite or even because of the ability of the NAS regime to condition those who live under it). Adriane is also, tellingly, somewhat skeptical about the influence of genetics on behavior. Oates’s heroine (again, perhaps tellingly) prefers the defiance encapsulated in her truth: “My parents taught me there is free will. There is a soul within.”

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh.

Varlam Shalamov (1907–82), a clearer-eyed observer of our species and a survivor (more or less) of almost the worst an all-too-real dystopia could do to him, would, I reckon, have permitted himself a wintry smile. In 1961 he compiled a list of what he “saw and understood” in the Gulag. It included the observation that people there could not survive by means of free will: “They live by instinct, a feeling of self-preservation, on the same basis as a tree, a stone, an animal.”

Then again, Shalamov was proud he had “never betrayed anyone in the camps, never ratted anyone out.”

Then again, in his introduction to Kolyma Stories, a new and extended English-language edition of Shalamov’s great Gulag story cycle, the stories’ translator Donald Rayfield relates how in “Permafrost” (a story I have yet to read; it will be included in a companion volume), Shalamov is shown to be “responsible for the suicide of a young man whom he refused to allow to go on washing floors in the hospital and dispatched to hard labor back in the mines.”

“The camp,” wrote Shalamov elsewhere, “was a great test of our moral strength . . . and 99 percent of us failed it.”

Rayfield also notes Shalamov’s seeming approval of revolutionary violence—if the motives were idealistic and the perpetrators prepared to die for their cause. In that connection, he refers to Shalamov’s “almost deif[ying]” of Nadia [Natalya] Klimova, a pre-revolutionary terrorist, in “The Gold Medal,” another story to be included in the second volume.

Then again, Klimova’s daughter, Natalia Stolyarova (whom Shalamov knew well), helped smuggle The Gulag Archipelago out of the Soviet Union. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn praised mother and daughter as representatives of “all the forces of a healthy Russia united.”

Shalamov’s work has been trickling west for years, with the first reliable collection (only a small selection) appearing in English in 1980 as Kolyma Tales. A larger compilation was released in the 1990s under the same title. Now, Kolyma Stories will, with its companion volume, double the amount of Shalamov’s work available in English, going a good way to remedying a gap that should have been filled decades ago.

Shalamov, a priest’s son who had soured on religion (although he maintained that “the only group of people able to preserve a minimum of humanity” in the camps were religious believers), was initially sympathetic to the young Soviet state despite facing discrimination for his “incorrect” social origins. Trouble and his first stint (three years) in a labor camp came with his involvement in the publication of Lenin’s testament, a document containing some unflattering comments about the now-ascendant Stalin. His descent into hell’s lowest circles came with re-arrest in 1937 (for “counterrevolutionary Trotskyist activities”), and years in the Gulag, including long stretches in the mines in the Kolyma region—a territory in Siberia’s far east so remote and inhospitable that it was in itself one of the most formidable of all the Gulag’s many jailers.

Shalamov’s life was saved by a doctor, who arranged for him to be trained as a paramedic. He spent his last few years in the camps as a medical assistant, a relatively soft job. Released in 1951, Shalamov eventually arrived back on “the mainland” in 1953.

Partly autobiographical, partly built on observation and extrapolation, these stories are the product of a specific time, place, and experience, but they also transcend them. They stand at the pinnacle of the literature of the long Soviet night, but to describe them solely in those terms would be akin to labeling the short stories of Chekhov—a writer to whom Shalamov is often compared—as nothing more than superbly taken snapshots of late-Czarist Russia.

The stories are concise, spare, dark, matter-of-fact, and unadorned. “There is no polishing them,” Shalamov explained, “but there is completeness.”

Shalamov was also a poet, and he had a poet’s eye for the right word in the right place, but those looking for lyricism, let alone consciously “fine writing,” will almost invariably be disappointed. The power of these stories comes from something else. It is, maybe, a mark of their exceptional quality that it is hard to identify just what. I do know, however, that even some of their shortest of passages can stay with you for a long, long time:

A whole brigade of one-armed men, who’d mutilated themselves, washed gold in winter and in summer. Then they handed over the specks of metal, the gold grains, to the mine’s till. That’s what the one-armed men were fed for.

The life that Shalamov describes is nastier, more brutish, and far shorter than anything that even Hobbes could have dreamt up. These are not tales of redemption or inspiration, nor do they make any claims about the nobility of suffering. Decency (such as the life-saving act of kindness in the haunting “Handwriting”), or, at least, an unexpected absence of cruelty, occasionally lightens the darkness, but these are exceptions, as are flickers of bone-dry humor: “A Dr. Krasinsky, an old military doctor, a lover of Jules Verne (why?), took over his case.”

Unadorned prose offers up humanity unadorned, refined most frequently in its savagery, whether from guards or “ordinary” criminals, “friends of the people” allowed and encouraged to prey on the lowest of the low, the “politicals” who had incurred the rage of the state.

Survival was a matter not of heroism, but of keeping one’s head down:

We had learned to be meek . . . . We had no pride; no self-esteem or self-respect . . . . It was far more important to learn the skills needed to button up your trousers in sub-zero winter temperatures. Grown men would weep when they found they could not do that.

Survival was a matter of grabbing every chance that came a prisoner’s way. In “Cherry Brandy,” the inmates of a transit camp take two days to disclose that a famous poet (unnamed, but clearly Osip Mandelstam, one of the best known of Stalin’s literary victims) has died in his bunk:

His enterprising neighbors managed to get a dead man’s bread for two days; when it was distributed the dead man’s hand rose up like a puppet’s. Therefore he died earlier than the date of his death, quite an important detail for his future biographers.

In another story, Andreyev (sometimes one of Shalamov’s fictional alter egos) muses that he was “kept alive by indifference and resentment.” Each of his tales, Shalamov wrote, was “a slap in the face to Stalinism.”

Kolyma Stories lacks the grand sweep of The Gulag Archipelago (Shalamov declined Solzhenitsyn’s invitation to co-write the latter). Shalamov did not appreciate the epic style (he was no fan of Tolstoy), or even what he dubbed the “narrative genre.” His stories do not attempt to decipher the Gulag’s origins. Nor, except in echoes, do they track its development: new waves of prisoners, new types of prisoners—Balts, a Hungarian doctor, Russian émigrés caught in Manchuria, Red Army soldiers repatriated after the war—tumble into its maw. Henry Wallace—yes, Vice President Wallace—pays a visit.

In “On Lend-Lease,” a parricide, a respectable, “ordinary” criminal, uses a bulldozer supplied by America to its Soviet ally against Hitler to create a new mass grave—up to then almost an impossibility in the permafrost—for the undecomposed bodies of (to quote from one of Shalamov’s poems) some of his “unrotting brothers.” Previously they had been packed in a stone pit that had, most indecorously, spilled over:

Corpses were crawling across the hillside, exposing a Kolyma secret . . . . Every one of those close to us who perished in Kolyma . . . can still be identified, even after decades. There were no gas ovens in Kolyma. The corpses wait in the stones, in the permafrost.

But not, as Shalamov recounts in another story, before their gold teeth had been knocked out. In Kolyma, it wasn’t only the rock that was mined.

Taken together, these tales, each a small shard in which a glimpse of a greater nightmare is caught, form a pointillist portrait of the worst of the Gulag at the worst of times: “Shalamov’s experience in the camps was,” said Solzhenitsyn, “longer and more bitter than my own . . . to him and not me was it given to touch those depths of bestiality and despair toward which life in the camps dragged us all.”

Some of the stories overlap and collide in ways that do not quite make sense, a reminder that in Kolyma what we fondly imagine to be universal rules counted for nothing:

Any human concept, while still keeping its spelling, its pronunciation, and its usual set of letters and sounds, now meant something different, for which the mainland had no name.

The first volume of Kolyma Stories ends with the freed narrator in Moscow: he “had come back from hell.” He had, but its demons hadn’t finished with him. Shalamov’s poetry was published, but only one of his least-controversial Gulag stories appeared in print in the USSR during his lifetime, and even that led to the dismissal of the editorial board that had approved it. When copies of the Kolyma Tales were published in the West, Shalamov publicly objected, “evidently,” writes Rayfield, “under compulsion.” As a reward, possibly the greatest of all the giants of Russia’s twentieth-century literature was finally admitted to the USSR’s Union of Writers, a necessity if he was to make a living selling the few permissible scraps of his craft.

Shalamov—like his narrator—had emerged from hell, but brought some of it back with him. His health never fully recovered. His memories drove his writing but left him forever an ex-prisoner, cautious, distrustful, and “difficult.” “All my skin has been renewed,” he told a friend, “my soul has not.” By the end of the 1970s, Rayfield writes that Shalamov was “homeless.” That might be an overstatement, but Shalamov was certainly in a very poor way. He was placed into an old people’s home. Conditions were appalling, and he reportedly lost much of his vision and most of what was left of his hearing. In 1982, Shalamov was diagnosed with dementia, and transferred, Rayfield writes, “almost naked [and] in the freezing cold” into a psychiatric hospital where he died a few days later.

Shalamov’s tales about Kolyma began appearing in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, but, Rayfield relates, it was only in 2013 that a “reasonably complete” collection became available in Russia. Part of Shalamov’s childhood home now houses a museum dedicated to him, and some memorials are scattered across his homeland, including one in the central Russian town of Krasnovishersk on Dzerzhinsky Street, a street still named after the founder of the Bolsheviks’ Secret Police (why?).

Shalamov was trapped in hell for nearly two decades. The Italian writer Curzio Malaparte (1898–1957), best known for Kaputt (1944) and its sequel, The Skin (1949), dropped by there from time to time, sometimes as an observer, sometimes in his imagination. The (in Malaparte’s words) “horribly gay and gruesome” Kaputt is a frolic through the horrors of Nazi-occupied Europe and the war on the Eastern Front. Brilliantly written and strikingly original, it combines a superb evocation of evil with interludes of disturbing frivolity. In The Skin, the narrative resumes in liberated Naples. Like its predecessor, it slips without warning from autobiography to embellishment to outright fiction—a process that Malaparte, a former fascist with much to explain away, also applied to his endlessly rewritten résumé—but this time the confection, even allowing for some remarkable sequences, came across as a little stale.

The sense that the well was running dry is even stronger in The Kremlin Ball. This unfinished work, regardless of chronology (the book is set in Moscow in 1929, a city Malaparte had visited at that time), was intended to conclude the exploration of European catastrophe begun with Kaputt. Malaparte apparently put it to one side to work on cinema and theater projects in 1950, and that is where it stayed. Malaparte being Malaparte, it’s tempting to wonder whether his complicated relationship with the Italian Communist Party influenced his decision not to proceed any further—the book contains largely matter-of-fact references to Stalin’s great purges to come, but plenty of opprobrium for those beyond-the-red-pale Trotskyists. Or maybe Malaparte realized that The Kremlin Ball’s central conceit—a reimagining of the Soviet elite as the beau monde of Belle Époque Paris—was better as political punchline than book.

The Kremlin Ball was published in Italy in 1971 as part of a complete edition of Malaparte’s works. It was released in English for the first time earlier this year, with a foreword by Jenny McPhee, its (excellent) translator who, however, sporadically bends the knee to contemporary pieties with an assiduity that Malaparte would have applauded and a sincerity that he would have mocked. While Malaparte was repelled by Nazi anti-Semitism, his writings are not those of an author preoccupied by Europe’s “toxic misogyny, racism and homophobia,” nor, despite some admiration for Soviet steeliness, was he ever seriously tempted by communism, except as a device to save his skin after Italy had surrendered to, and signed up with, the Allies in 1943.

McPhee is on safer ground when she highlights the way Malaparte used what he called his “novels of biographical reportage” to play games with reality. As she says, he took “the unreliable narrator to a new level.” And by this time in his career he was doing so with teasing, exuberant brio, beginning The Kremlin Ball with the manifestly ludicrous assertion that “everything” in this novel “is true: the people, the events, the things, the places.” Just how ludicrous will rapidly become obvious to Russian history buffs (to take just one example, Prince Lvov, the first head of the provisional government assembled after the fall of the Czar, had died in France four years before Malaparte supposedly encounters him, uh, selling an “enormous” armchair on a Moscow sidewalk). But even those who are not so familiar with the byways of the Soviet past will have their doubts about the accuracy of Malaparte’s account of a meeting with Olga Kameneva (Trotsky’s sister and the ex-wife of a Bolshevik leader who had fallen foul of Stalin—two strikes): “She was a woman who was already dead. A subtle odor of dead flesh spread through the room.”

Yet Malaparte’s greater truth holds. Kameneva was doomed, and she knew it, although she outlived her former husband and their two sons. They were shot before her.

It may be unfair to be too harsh a critic of an unfinished work, but The Kremlin Ball has its longueurs, and they are not confined to Malaparte’s attempt to fashion a Potemkin Belle Époque on the unpromising territory of early Soviet Russia. In particular, the philosophizing (disappointing in such a detached writer), whether it is on Christianity, suffering, Europe, death, whatever, is all too often jejune, wrong-headed, and, most unforgivably, dull.

Nevertheless, sifting through the dross is rewarded by flashes of something that, despite Malaparte’s love of illusion, is more than just gilt:

It was, at the time, Easter week in Russia. But the bells were silent. At the tops of the bell towers of Moscow’s thousands of churches, the church bells hung silently, their thick clappers dangling like tongues from the heads of cows hung out to dry in the sun.

Thousands of churches? No, there were not, not even in Moscow, the “Third Rome” of wishful Russian thinking, but the way that Malaparte (an atheist, as it happens) brackets that exaggeration—a depiction of a stifled Easter reinforced by an image of death rather than of resurrection—points to a more important truth.

Malaparte travels around Moscow, fraternizing with writers, Soviet prominenti, diplomats, and remnants of the past: Prince Lvov and other “well-bred, miserable ghosts,” “former people” in the terminology of the time, a description that became a proscription. As he moves from strange meeting to strange meeting or even indulges in a little macabre tourism—he visits the room where the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky has just committed suicide—Malaparte is often accompanied by his secretary. Marika is a dark-eyed, sixteen-year-old Georgian, an (unrequited?) love interest, echo or preview, perhaps, of the dark-eyed, sixteen-year-old Romanian waitress Marioara from Kaputt, another not-quite dalliance (a pogrom intervenes) in the disintegrating world that Malaparte made his own.

After three dystopias, Switzerland comes as a relief, but in To the Back of Beyond, Thomas decides to cast himself out of Schwiizertüütsch Eden. Modestly prosperous with a wife and two kids in a pleasant, orderly town, he marks his family’s homecoming from a Spanish vacation by sneaking out on them that night without warning, explanation, or any obvious reason. He hesitates momentarily, then, “with a bewildered smile he was only half aware of,” heads for the garden gate. Then he is gone—for good, it seems.

The only hint—maybe not even that—of trouble ahead had been Thomas’s suggestion that the family stay on in Spain for a year, an idea his wife, Astrid, “the voice of reason in the relationship,” rejects. Later, after Thomas has vanished, Astrid uploads their vacation pictures. The best shot of Thomas is “of the bottom half of [his] face with a rather strange half smile,” an absence repeated in photographs taken on other, recent trips.

First published in German in 2016 and then released in this country (in a fine translation by Michael Hoffman) late last year, this book, by the Swiss writer Peter Stamm, is short, spare, and haunting; it lingers, unsettlingly, in the memory. To return to Shalamov’s adjective, Stamm’s prose is “unadorned,” and yet, even in the book’s first lines, he manages, without any drama, to convey a sense of unease, a sense of waiting, a sense of a coming storm:

By day, you hardly noticed the hedge that separated the yard from that of the neighbors, it just seemed to merge into the general greenness, but once the sun went down and the shadows started to lengthen, it loomed there like an insuperable wall, until all light was gone from the garden and the lawn lay in shadow, an area of darkness from which there was no escape.

Escape.

Sometimes Astrid “asks herself if Thomas would have chosen a different sort of life if they hadn’t been a couple.”

Stamm alternates descriptions of Thomas’s hike towards the mountains and depictions of the reactions and actions of the family that he has left behind. To begin with (later, it’s not so straightforward), it is Thomas’s journey that draws the attention. There at least, there is movement. Back at home, Astrid begins by doing her best to preserve a status quo that has vanished beyond recall. Meanwhile, the farther Thomas trudges from home, the further he breaks, in a mild Swiss way—Apocalypse Now this is not—from the constraints of his old life, accidentally stumbling into a brothel (a first, even if nothing much happens there, although he does steal a coat as he leaves, another first), sleeping rough, scavenging some food. And the further Thomas goes, the greater his sense of distance from where he has been and, even, where he is:

Thomas had the disquieting feeling that all this had been laid on for him, that the people in the village were actors who were merely waiting for him to come by, to assume their roles and speak their lines. It was an artificial world, a model construction under an expansive blue sky.

There is something of the waking dream about both Stamm’s prose and a storyline dominated in its early stages by a pilgrimage with no discernible end in sight. Thomas is a man driven—and his determination to avoid detection indicates that he is driven—but it is unclear by what. Perhaps the answer is buried within Thomas’s observation that none of his clients ever ask, “What was it all for?” The obvious and perfectly satisfactory answer—nothing—will clearly not do.

But To The Back of Beyond goes far beyond being a beautifully written account of yet another middle-aged man’s existential crisis. I won’t say what takes place in the mountains, partly because it would be a spoiler, and partly because I’m not so sure I’ve fully understood it myself, but it is the hinge on which the story—or stories—turns. The pace picks up, but Stamm finds the time to deepen his touching, if still economically drawn, portrait of Thomas and Astrid’s marriage before bringing Thomas’s odyssey to a conclusion that can be taken in different ways but is, I have found, impossible to forget.

Midterm madness — or Trump’s last stand?

standpoint, October 29, 2018 (November Issue)

La Guardia Airport, New York City, May 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

There are journalistic assignments that should be refused, not as a matter of principle but out of basic common sense. Making predictions about American politics in the age of Trump is one of them. That Donald Trump won the Republican nomination was surprising. That he ended up in the White House was — well, a strong enough what-the-hell adjective does not exist (I did not expect Trump to prevail and nor, quite possibly, did he). However, the chequered nature of that win, a two per cent loss in the popular vote (the widest margin of “defeat” for a victorious candidate since 1876) but a passable, if far from overwhelming, majority in the only vote that counts — the Electoral College — was a necessary reminder that federalism matters more and elite opinion less than is sometimes assumed.

Remembering that is a good beginning to understanding why, despite Trump ratcheting up a record of gaffes, blunders and peculiarity unthinkable in any other president, earlier talk of a Democratic “wave” in the   midterm elections on November 6 has evaporated.

While that might merit a celebratory presidential Diet Coke, the Republicans still face a tricky day on the sixth. Despite a healthy economy (GDP grew at an annualised 4.2 per cent in the second quarter, the unemployment rate dropped to 3.7 per cent in September and in the same month consumer confidence reached an 18-year high), almost all the “generic” polling has the generic Democrat comfortably ahead of the generic Republican. Even without Trump in the Oval Office this was coming. An incumbent president’s party almost always struggles in the midterms. Like a British by-election, except for far higher stakes (all the seats in the House of Representatives will be up for grabs, as will 35 Senate seats and numerous state-level offices), midterms are often used by the voters who show up (turnout is typically around 40 per cent, compared with 60 per cent in a presidential election year) to shake a fist at those in charge.

There are incumbent presidents, and then there is Donald J. Trump, whose approval rating has been dismal for most of his time in office. As I write (late October) it is ticking up and now stands somewhere in the mid-40s, weak for a strong economy and at a roughly similar level to Barack Obama’s polling eight years ago. But that was in the aftermath of the financial crisis and shortly before game-changing midterms in which the Democrats suffered a loss of more than 60 seats and control of the House, as well as a brutal reduction in their Senate majority. The Republicans’ chances will be hurt by too much Trump in some areas — upscale suburbs and their remaining redoubts on the east and west coasts in particular — but they could, in a paradox that may mean trouble for them beyond 2018, be hurt by not enough Trump elsewhere, specifically in the rust belt, where voters who moved from Obama (or no vote) to Trump made enough of a difference in their states to tip the 2016 election the GOP’s way.

The Great Revolt  by journalist Salena Zito and Republican strategist Brad Todd may be something of a rose-tinted (although fascinating) study of some of those who switched sides, but the results cited in the book are what they are. Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, a traditionally coal-mining area, gave Obama (also its choice in 2008) a 5-percentage point edge in 2012, but went to Trump by 20 points four years later. Tiny Lake County, Michigan is the poorest county in that state. It preferred Obama in 2008 and 2012 (on the latter occasion by five points), but handed Trump a 23-point lead in 2016. There were plenty more swings like that, and they were enough — just — to deliver Pennsylvania (by a little over 40,000 votes) and Michigan (by a little under 12,000 votes) to Trump in 2016.

At their heart, those swings to Trump were a protest by embattled “left-behinds” trying to preserve what was left of their status in a rapidly changing nation led by a political and media class that insulted, demeaned and demonised them. The pushback was not confined to the rust belt. The New York Times’s Nate Cohn noted last year, “Almost one in four of President Obama’s 2012 white working-class supporters defected from the Democrats in 2016, either supporting Mr Trump or voting for a third-party candidate.” These voters saw themselves at the wrong end of globalisation (they were), on the wrong side of the many-layered social, cultural and economic revolution being pushed by America’s coastal elites (they are), and they really, really did not like Hillary Clinton (who in turn dubbed them “deplorable”). But however much they had fallen out with the Democrats, they suspected that the Republicans were just a different side of a corrupt Washington establishment with no interest in their plight. To them, Trump was an outsider, a disruptor. Billionaire or not, he appeared to sympathise and they heard his dog-whistle too. They handed him a mandate to try something different (and they were prepared to lend some votes to those riding on his coattails as well).

Those new voters ought to be pleased enough with their choice. No small part of Trump’s appeal was his pledge to fix the bad trade deals that had supposedly cost so many American jobs. Since taking office, he has revised the free trade agreement with South Korea, and secured Canada and Mexico’s agreement to replace Nafta with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), in each case in ways designed to boost American manufacturing employment. As it is, some 400,000 new manufacturing jobs were created in the first 21 months of the Trump administration, far ahead of the pace in the last Obama years. Trump has also taken the tariff fight to the EU (for now there is a ceasefire), and, much more significantly, China. And when it comes to the red, white and blue, these voters should appreciate the difference between an Obama too ready to apologise for his country and a Trump rarely prepared to apologise for anything. Trump’s tough stance on immigration will not hurt him with this constituency either.

For all that, the polls suggest that quite a few rust belt bolters will return to the Democratic fold. Unions, determined to bring their numbers back in line, have stepped up their campaigning. Much of the economic recovery is still passing the left-behind by. Trump may be on the stump, but he is not on the ballot. Voting for just another Republican stiff does not deliver that same insurgent thrill.

Trump is a one-off. He was able to break through because he had the bucks, dreary competition and a powerful place in popular culture. However, he could not have managed it without an audience ready for the message that, thanks to the internet, he was able to communicate directly — with sly skill and without the intermediation of America’s nauseatingly pharisaical media. Say what you will about former Trump consigliere Steve Bannon, he grasped that the “three-legged stool” — strong defence, social conservatism and free market economics — that Ronald Reagan saw as essential for a GOP victory, was broken.

Republicans will not go as far down the populist and nationalist route as Bannon (who was also keen to defy the GOP’s tax taboo by raising taxes on the very richest) would advocate, but as former Trump speechwriter and transition adviser Frank Buckley pointed out his recent book, The Republican Workers Party, most Americans skew further to the left economically than many Republicans realised. Buckley maintains there is a “sweet spot” for the candidate “who won’t touch Social Security and who promises to nominate a judge in the mould of [the late conservative Supreme Court Justice] Antonin Scalia. Donald Trump, in other words”. Trade apart, the more “leftist” side to Trump (which has, to be fair, always been there) has not been, to put it mildly, very visible since he took office. However, regardless of the direction in which Trump may turn in the next two years, the best shot at a successful GOP future lies not with a Reagan 2.0, but in a formula that blends patriotic populism with, economically and socially, a robust American variant of Christian Democracy. It will not be a smooth ride.

Republican failure to repeat Trump’s rust belt miracle will not mean a Democratic landslide: Trump’s appeal to blue-collar whites has not disappeared, and his wider base within the GOP has remained remarkably resilient through the tweetstorms. While Trump’s approval ratings are low, and have always been low, they come with a very sturdy floor, albeit one that rests, to make a nonsense of architectural metaphors, on just one column — Republican voters. America’s political divisions have sharpened. The once respectable degree of approval a president could expect from supporters of the other party has been shrinking since the Eisenhower era. According to Gallup, both Ike and JFK enjoyed approval ratings from across the aisle averaging a little under 50 per cent. Bill Clinton, by contrast, could (the Pew Research Center found) only manage 27 per cent, a figure of which Obama (14 per cent) could only dream. Trump? Seven per cent.

Republicans, however, have stood by their man. On average, 84 per cent of them approve of the job Trump is doing, a rating roughly in line with that received by earlier presidents from their own team. Even if we ignore the effect of a strong economy (and we should not), and even if we ignore the way that America’s growing political polarisation is pushing Republicans to downplay or turn a blind eye to their leader’s obvious flaws (we should not), this is less surprising than it may seem. Stylistically Trump may have next to nothing in common with previous Republican presidents (or presidents full stop), but this former Democrat’s administration has broken with his (current) party’s orthodoxy by less than some imagined.

This year saw a massive tax cut (that it ignored the concerns of budget hawks was not, sadly, anything new). There has been significant regulatory rollback, both by repealing existing regulations and, no less importantly, by not introducing new ones. According to calculations by the Brookings Institution, 69 “major rules” (as defined by the Office of Management and Budget) were introduced in the first year of the Obama administration, but only 30 in Trump’s initial 12 months, a slowdown that should continue regardless of the midterm results. Sometimes it takes a crony capitalist to understand the value of getting government out of the way.

Then there are the courts. With the law increasingly politicised, the appointment of judges — as the fight over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court demonstrates — has become an increasingly bitter battlefield. Trump has placed two conservative judges onto the Supreme Court, offering Republicans the prospect of the clear right-of-centre tilt that they have been awaiting for years. He has also pushed through a record number of appointments further down the judicial pecking order. Neither achievement would have been possible without GOP control of the Senate. The Kavanaugh collision will have reminded any GOP voters who needed reminding that there is a lot at stake on November 6.

While Trump’s views on trade make some Republicans wince, there has been little (overall — as always with this president there have been some alarming moments) in his broader foreign policy to disturb them. Abandoning both the neocons’ expensive (in many senses) universalism and the ostentatious humility and “leading from behind” of the Obama years, in favour of a colder “Jacksonian” calculation of the national interest, has played well with the GOP’s rank-and-file. Trump has eased off his nuttier talk about Nato, and he appears to have bullied some of the Atlantic Alliance’s deadbeats into agreeing to cough up a bit more. Meanwhile, the US is boosting its own military budget, much of it with an eye on deterring China and, yes, Russia. For all Trump’s unsettling, even flirtatious attitudes to some of the world’s hard men, an America that is “great again” is not going to be pushed around, a theme that rarely plays poorly on the right.

When it comes to policy, the greatest difference between the Trump administration and its GOP predecessors may be over immigration. Divisions within the Congressional Republican party over this topic have meant that the only route to tighter control has been through administrative action. Bureaucracies — consider the Home Office — are not known for their light touch. The harshest aspects of the administration’s approach (most notably the deservedly notorious and highly unpopular “family separation” policy at the border) — have proved highly contentious. But the Democrats’ increasingly sharp shift on immigration (as in so many other matters, ever further to the left) has meant that those favouring a tougher approach to immigration — and that is most rank and file Republicans, even before a several-thousand-strong “caravan” of migrants started to move north from Central America in mid-October — have nowhere else to turn.

But will they turn out to vote? Traditionally Republicans have been more willing to make their way to midterm voting stations than have their opponents. For a while, it had looked as if this would not be the case in 2018. Enraged by Trump, Democrats have been turning out in more force than usual for “off-year” (elections held in an odd-numbered year) and “special” (by) elections. In themselves the results, whether slimmer victory margins or outright losses, particularly at the state level, do not make pleasant reading for the Republicans, but the pickup in Democratic turnout may be a dark omen, made darker still by signs that fewer Republicans were bothering to vote.

It may be, however, that the brawl over the Kavanaugh nomination — a brawl so nasty that, even despite America’s short attention span, it is unlikely to have been forgotten by election day — has brightened the picture for the GOP. Although the Kavanaugh drama widened a huge gender gap even further in the Democrats’ direction (according to a mid-October NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll of likely voters, women favoured the Democrats by a 57-32 margin, while the GOP’s lead with men was 52-38), it seemed to have energised some previously somnolent Republicans.

A mid-October CBS survey of “battleground states” revealed a jump in the number of Republicans who were “very enthusiastic” about voting to 62 per cent (compared to 51 per cent the month before). This trend was backed by a poll revealing that roughly equal numbers (80 per cent or so) of Republicans and Democrats considered that the midterms were “very important”. In earlier surveys this year, considerably more Democrats than Republicans had felt that way. The National Republican Congressional Committee reported that low-dollar giving, a characteristic sign of grassroots enthusiasm, has also perked up. It may be telling that, in eight key states, early voting (something permitted to varying degrees in 38 states and the District of Columbia) appeared to show the Republicans ahead in seven.

The bad news for the GOP is that six out of ten Democrats were already enthused about voting (more evidence that the Republicans will not see any turnout advantage this time round). Democratic fundraising, including those weathervane low-donations, has also been running strongly all year — and still is. In the third quarter, Democrats raised more than three times as much (in total) for their campaigns in the 30 “toss-up” states than Republicans could drum up, something that could easily tip a number of those seats the Democrats’ way, and is clearly a concern for the White House.

The even worse news for the party of Trump? It looks from a CNN poll, released on October 10, as if women will turn out to vote in just as large numbers as men. That is not normally the case. It is no coincidence that there has been a surge in the number of women running for office this year, a surge, for the most part, accounted for by, you guessed it, Democrats. Then again, 53 per cent of white women — including 45 per cent of white women with college degrees — voted for Trump in 2016, suggesting that some of the gender gap may be exaggerated. Perhaps there is a reason to believe (largely) anecdotal evidence that the onslaught on Kavanaugh may have persuaded some Republican women to (once again) overcome their doubts about the pussy-grabber and stick with their party.

Latinos may also fail the Democrats. They constitute just under 13 per cent of the electorate, and heavily favour the Democrats (a widely-quoted national exit poll showing that 29 per cent of Hispanics opted for Trump in 2016 looks to have been a substantial overestimate that — familiar story — failed to reflect regional disparities). It is striking then that, despite (if that’s the right word — feelings on this issue are more nuanced than often assumed) all the controversies over immigration, a late September poll showed that 41 per cent of Latinos “approved” of Trump’s job performance (and that was not so much of an outlier as might be thought). That does not necessarily mean that they will vote for him, but it may make them less determined to come out to vote against him. With Latino turnout customarily low (27 per cent in the 2014 midterms), that matters. One of the explanations for that reluctance to vote, incidentally, is that over 40 per cent of eligible Latino voters are under 35, an age range in which far fewer Americans of any kind are interested in voting. The data miners at FiveThirtyEight, a website known for its polling analysis, have found signs, including relatively high turnout by younger voters in 2017’s off-year elections, that hint that in 2018 this will be different.

So what is going to happen? In the absence of — and with this president this is a big “absence” — some new scandal catching fire (currently the New York Times is doing its best to create some kindling out of the Trump family’s tax “planning”), an unusually unfortunate tweet, a major development in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation or, to steal Harold Macmillan’s useful word, “events” (I am writing this a few hours after news broke that pipe bombs had been sent to some leading Democrats), there’s a chance that Republicans may actually increase their 51-49 Senate majority. They start with a strong defensive position. Only 9 of the 35 contested seats are currently in GOP hands. Moreover, thanks to Vice President Pence having a casting vote, they only need to hang on to 50 seats to keep control.

What’s more, Democratic hopes that a would-be Obama 2.0, Robert “Beto” O’Rourke, a likeable and extraordinarily well-funded Irish-American congressman from El Paso with a handy Latino nickname, might defeat Texas’s Rafael “Ted” Cruz, a pantomime villain Latino senator with a handy Anglo middle name, look likely to be disappointed. So does Phil Bredesen, Taylor Swift’s pick to upset the Republicans in Tennessee. The GOP is still on the defensive in Nevada and, particularly, Arizona, but there are signs that the tide is turning its way in both states. Republicans, meanwhile, are greedily eyeing a handful of possible gains too, including Florida, Indiana, Missouri and North Dakota, the latter two both states where the Kavanaugh wars may have helped the GOP.

It looks, however, as if Republicans will lose the House. The scale of defeat will probably be modest (perhaps very modest), a good way short of those more than 60 seats lost by the Democrats in 2010, not least because any sort of landslide would need Democrats to win a lot of Republican or Republican-leaning seats, not easy at the best of times, and these are not the best of times.

But any Democratic majority, however slim, will be enough to enable the party to launch the investigations that it hopes will enmesh and eventually strangle Trump. To win control of the House the Democrats will need 218 seats. They currently have a little under 200. If they reach the magic 218, the rules of the game will change in a way that is likely to influence politics more than policy. Democrats will have proper cards of their own — rather than those that chance or the cackhandedness of the president sling their way — to play. And, in the shape of investigations (directly or indirectly) of the president launched by congressional committees they would then control, they will play them aggressively.

Quite what these investigations will turn up is anyone’s guess, as is the way in which Trump, not always at his best under pressure, will react to their mere existence, let alone to any adverse conclusions they may draw. Meanwhile Mueller’s probe drags menacingly on. He has already gathered an impressive collection of scalps, and there will be more. Whether, by encouraging a Democratic House to try its luck with impeachment, one might eventually come with orange hair may define the next two years.

In the unlikely event that the Republicans lose the Senate as well as the House, their leaders’ most likely response will be to try to distance the GOP from the president who led them to disaster. That will be no easy task with so many of the party faithful on the Trump train. And it was not just the GOPeons. A good number of the GOP elite also hitched a ride: To take one example among many, just this past summer, former Trump foe, Senator “little Marco” Rubio was proclaiming the need for “a new nationalism”. “Make America Great Again” had, I suppose, been taken.

And if Republicans hold both Senate and House, the film director Rob Reiner, one of the most vocal of Hollywood’s maddened liberal herd, has tweeted a warning of what to expect: “A fascist autocracy.”

Oh.

A Huckster at the Mic

Mark Jacobson - Pale Horse Rider: William Cooper, the Rise of Conspiracy, and the fall of Trust in America

The Wall Street Journal, September 19, 2018

‘Nonsense,” said the Talmudic scholar Saul Lieberman, referring to the Kabbalah long before its celebrity moment, “is nonsense, but the history of nonsense is scholarship.” In the intriguing if uneven “Pale Horse Rider,” writer and journalist Mark Jacobson takes a primarily biographical approach to the strange, sad tale of the turn-of-the-millennium conspiracy theorist Milton William “Bill” Cooper (1943-2001). In doing so, he has missed an opportunity to take a deeper look at how, what and why we believe.

Cooper’s best-known work, “Behold a Pale Horse” (1991), is a dense, meandering and bewildering compendium of conspiracy theories. These include the allegation that JFK was murdered by his driver, the discovery of a plan to blow up Jupiter and the revelation of a treaty between Ike and space aliens. Yet there is also the suggestion that “the whole alien scenario is the greatest hoax in history,” a trick to frighten the “sheeple” (a favorite Cooper term) into submission to a “one-world government” controlled by . . . the Illuminati. Choose your own truth. After all, Cooper himself concedes that “one or more conclusions may be wrong.” This Bedlam medley has sold almost 300,000 copies. Why?

Readers wanting to find out are mainly left to navigate their own way through the fever swamps: Mr. Jacobson describes more than he explains, a flaw mitigated by his sharp eye and keen ear. Scattered through his account are stepping-stones to a partial understanding of Cooper’s appeal. A rapper from the Wu-Tang Clan tells Mr. Jacobson that “everybody gets f— [but] William Cooper tells you who’s f— you,” a near-perfect, if NSFW, summary of conspiracism’s attraction to the powerless or paranoid. It offers a structure for rage, an excuse for failure, a flattering fantasy of being in the know.

Mr. Jacobson dubs Cooper a “P.T. Barnum of dread.” (“The Hour of the Time,” his long-running shortwave-radio show, opened with wailing sirens, a sinister distorted voice, barking dogs, shrieking people and the sound of “tramping . . . feet, growing louder, closing in.”) But Cooper was a huckster who took more than a swig of his own Kool-Aid. The origins of his dreamscape—born at the intersection of creativity and psychiatric disorder, and reinforced by post-Vietnam, post-Watergate disillusionment and the need to make a buck—are easier to understand than its evolution. A saga in perpetual flux (Knights Templar! Freemasons! The aliens really were a hoax!), its backstory stretched across millennia.

Cooper was obsessed with the New World Order and the actions of jackbooted government enforcers against the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, and white separatist Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. He became a part of the “patriot” fringe (Timothy McVeigh was an admirer). But, while his views often inspired theirs (the Clinton administration labeled him America’s “most dangerous” radio host), they did not always coincide. Cooper’s following among some African-Americans, a community targeted in conspiracies he claimed to have uncovered, does not fit the militia mold. On the other hand, Cooper reproduced the notorious anti-Semitic forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” within “Behold a Pale Horse.” The deception, he maintained, was not that the “Protocols” were a fake, but something else: The plotters were not Jews, but Illuminati. Oh.

Conspiracism seeps through many cultures, nations and eras. It isn’t uniquely American, but it can take distinctively American forms. For example, Americans’ traditional distrust of government can mutate from a sign of rude civic health into a pathology. Cooper, as Mr. Jacobson relates it, tapped into a feeling of alienation fueled (often) by mourning for a vanished, if frequently imagined, past—white picket fences and all that—which he turned into a very American narrative about the betrayal of the promise of liberty contained in the Constitution, a sacred text now disdained.

Mr. Jacobson is not entirely unsympathetic to his subject’s point of view, commenting that there’s “no arguing [Cooper’s] basic insight: that something wasn’t right, that there was something you couldn’t quite put your finger on except . . . that you were a little less free than . . . yesterday.” That’s an extremely generous interpretation of Cooper’s “insight.” In any case, it’s no secret that we live in an ever more controlled, ever more controlling society.

Mr. Jacobson accepts that Cooper said “some of the nuttiest things” yet asserts that what counted was “the journey, the relentless search for truths.” But that was not what Cooper sought. He replaced truths he didn’t like with stories that he did. In June 2001 Cooper discussed threats made against the U.S. by Osama bin Laden. There would indeed, predicted Cooper, be a “major attack.” Bin Laden would be blamed, but “don’t you even believe it.” Within hours of the 9/11 attacks, Cooper was telling listeners that the two jets could not have felled the Twin Towers any more than a truck filled with fertilizer could have brought down Oklahoma City’s Alfred P. Murrah building. He was the first Truther.

Mr. Jacobson attributes the spread of the Truther virus to the need for “explanation . . . [and] something that made sense”—as if, according to its brutal logic, the 9/11 massacre did not. Yet those words work well as a general description of conspiracism’s allure: Unwilling to face life’s arbitrariness, we make connections where none exist.

Cooper ended his days “a madman,” writes Mr. Jacobson, “holed up in his [Arizona] hilltop home.” There was a federal warrant out for his arrest (for tax evasion and bank fraud) but after an altercation with a neighbor, local police took action. An attempted arrest in November 2001 ended with a scramble in the dark. Cooper shot first, leaving a cop paralyzed. A deputy returned fire, handing Cooper a death he had forecast on air—gunned down on his doorstep in the middle of the night, a Truther martyr, some argued.

The most in-depth coverage of Cooper’s death, notes Mr. Jacobson, may have come from “a then relatively unknown twenty-seven-year-old shortwave broadcaster from Austin, Texas: Alex Jones.”

Don’t believe the EU – Greece’s crisis is nowhere near over

CapX, August 17, 2018

With Nemesis dodged, however ruinously, it has not taken too long for Hubris to reemerge from under the rubble.

“The Greek crisis ends here tonight,” declared the EU commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs within minutes of the conclusion of the June meeting at which it was agreed that Greece would receive the final slice (€15 billion) of its third Eurozone bailout this August.

Even though Greece’s graduation from rehab had been sweetened by its Eurozone creditors extending the repayment date of almost €100 billion of debt (about a third of the total) by ten years, this claim of victory was both tasteless (youth unemployment currently stands at nearly 40 per cent) and premature. Greece will be left with a cash cushion of €24 billion, which should enable it to avoid having to approach the financial markets for around two years — a handy breathing space, to be sure, but one that is more likely to be a respite than the preamble to a cure.

The country’s GDP expanded by 1.35 per cent in 2017, after almost a decade of annual declines interrupted only by the annus mirabilis of 2014, the one year when it eked out a positive return, a miserly 0.74 per cent. The IMF reckons that the pace will pick up to 2 per cent in 2018 and 2.4 per cent in 2019, which is at least something, if less than hoped earlier.

Perhaps that might happen — if the global economy keeps ticking over (and the neighbourhood remains calm: let’s not talk about Turkey and Italy) — but it’s impossible to miss the subtext lurking within the IMF’s recent report on Greece. Has a slump as deep as America’s Great Depression, but more prolonged, left behind enough of a country to make its own way? And will, as the IMF clearly worries, the continued policing of Greece’s finances by its reluctant rescuers be so severe that it shrinks the scale of a desperately needed recovery?

Formal exit from the bailout regime will mean an end to the harshest of the austerity measures that went with it, but Athens will still be required to maintain an annual “primary” (i.e. before debt servicing) budgetary surplus of 3.5 per cent until 2022. The straitjacket will then be loosened — somewhat. The government will be expected to achieve an average annual primary surplus of 2.2 per cent until, well, 2060.

Adding a culturally appropriate touch of Sisyphus to this already implausible undertaking (the IMF diplomatically talks of “very optimistic assumptions”), any new funding from the markets will be priced on far less generous terms than Greece’s rescuers have been charging.

And there’s no reason to be sanguine about that existing debt. It may be cheap and the timetable for its repayment leisurely, but its sheer size (some 180 per cent of GDP) means trouble ahead. After all, this is not a drachma-denominated liability that Greece once might have printed away. And it wouldn’t be a drachma-denominated liability even if Greece readopted the currency it should never have abandoned. A reborn drachma would plummet so far that the dream of repayment would quickly be replaced with the reality of default.

Brussels’ convenient conceit is that the EU’s new and improved Greece will grow out from under this burden, an unlikely prospect made more unlikely still by overly onerous budgetary constraints and the structural problems that should have made the country ineligible for the euro in the first place.

To start with, there is the matter of ensuring the economy can keep up with the rest of the Eurozone, not easy given the country’s persistently low productivity. Back in the days of the drachma, Greece could at least devalue its way into some approximation of competitiveness. With that option off the table, the conventional alternative, a domestic squeeze — an “internal devaluation”, to use the jargon — has been tried since the early stages of Greece’s long Calvary, and it is still being tried. But whatever its merits as a device to eliminate some of the worst aspects of the Augean state, there is scant evidence that it has done very much to sharpen the country’s competitiveness.

Indeed, in some respects it may have made things worse. Destruction can be creative, but sometimes it is just destructive. GDP stands at 2003 levels and at less than 60 per cent of its 2008 peak. Disposable income has fallen by about a third since 2010 and the private sector has been devastated. The banking sector is under-capitalised (credit is still contracting).

In short, so much has been smashed up that it is difficult to see where the type of turnaround Greece needs can come from. Three hundred thousand Greeks, including many of the nation’s best and the brightest, have emigrated in the last eight years, a move made easier by their right to settle anywhere within the EU. How many will come home?

A similar question can be asked about capital, which also moves freely throughout the EU and, as between the different countries of the Eurozone, with (the danger of eurogeddon apart) no currency risk: A French euro is a Finnish euro is a Greek euro. If a euro invested in Greece cannot offer the returns available from a euro invested elsewhere in the Eurozone, the country will struggle to attract investment, whether domestically or from abroad.

Rather than promote the economic convergence of its constituent parts, a currency union could well have the opposite effect. Capital will tend to flow to its winners and away from its laggards, a process that could doom Greece to ever more peripheral status. This slide will be accelerated by the unwillingness of the Eurozone’s member-states to agree to supplement their monetary union with a fiscal union that would, as in the US, establish the automatic transfer of resources from richer to poorer states that operates as a brake on a currency union’s natural centripetal pull.    

The task of modernising the Greek economy is, to put it mildly, incomplete, and there must be some doubt as to how much further its government is prepared to go down that route. The authors of the IMF report refer politely to “reform fatigue”. “Political pressures,” it warns, “to roll back reforms may intensify ahead of the 2019 elections”. Indeed they may, not only because of the agony associated with these reforms (made even more painful by outcomes with a tendency to disappoint), but also because of the largely accurate perception that they have been imposed from outside.

A good number of the real culprits — most notably those who took Greece into a currency union for which it was not ready and then squandered the opportunity it might have represented— are home-grown, but that’s not how it appears to many voters. Under the circumstances, it will not be surprising if some politicians are tempted to suggest to them that Sisyphus should shrug.

But even if Greeks do vote to stay the course — and the best guess is that they will, if only, in many cases, because they fear the alternatives —  and even if Italy’s new government does not trigger a broader Eurozone fracas, economics will eventually reignite the Greek crisis and, probably, sooner rather than later.

One of the rare, if partial, concessions to reality in the arrangements negotiated in June was that the Eurozone’s leadership will take another look at Greece’s situation in 2032 (2032!) to see if further debt relief is required. Well, it will be — and quite some time before then, because, in the end, nothing has really changed. Greece will continue to pay a terrible price for membership in a currency union for which it was, is and will be completely unsuited, but is understandably terrified to leave.

Its creditors, meanwhile, particularly in the Eurozone’s richer north, are terrified about the damage a Grexit could do to a Eurozone built on unstable foundations that they don’t want to complete, demolish or remodel. And so, after a re-run of a drama that will be stale before it has begun, there will be a fourth Greek bailout – and that won’t change much either.