No Hitler, No Holocaust
For some years after the Bolshevik Revolution, young people in the Soviet Union could leave school thinking that Peter the…
I
For some years after the Bolshevik Revolution, young people in the Soviet Union could leave school thinking that Peter the Great was the name given to economic modernization and political centralization in late feudal Russia. Their teachers’ insistence on impersonal historical forces had turned a person into a personification, an abstraction, a metaphor.
Hitler has been disappearing behind abstractions. If he is mentioned at all, it is likely to be as a metaphor.
In 1982 two articles with “Holocaust” in their titles appeared here, Henryk Grynberg’s “Appropriating the Holocaust” (November) and Hyam Maccoby’s “Theologian of the Holocaust” (December). Each mentions Hitler only once, and only in a quotation: Grynberg quotes the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, “. . . the Jews were Hitler’s primary victims. . . ,” and Maccoby quotes Emil Fackenheim, “Jews are forbidden to grant posthumous victories to Hitler.”
In Jacob Katz’s “Was the Holocaust Predictable?” (May 1975), on the other hand, Hitler is real. Katz says “Hitler” 28 times, “Führer” twice, “one man” once, and “this man” once. I wish he had not stopped just short of saying, explicitly, “No Hitler, no Holocaust.”
No Hitler, no Holocaust. And if there had been no Churchill?
Thoughts like these trouble us both intellectually and emotionally. Intellectually, believing that Hitler nearly destroyed our world, or that Churchill saved it, can seem close to believing with Carlyle—of whom Jews, especially, are bound to be leery—that history is but the biography of great men. It can seem close to taking literally Pascal’s meditation on Cleopatra’s nose. Many of the best historians in the past generation or two have held biography, the concern with the particulars of the life of this personage or that, to be rather quaint, a form of gossip. Nor have they a much more exalted opinion of narrative (“what happened”) history. For them what counts is geography, demography, technology, mentalités. They see great men and events affecting the human race little more decisively than Cleopatra’s unsnubby nose did.
Understanding Bishop Berkeley’s philosophy to deny that physical objects are real, Samuel Johnson said, “I refute it thus,” and kicked a stone. Did some of the new historians refute their own philosophy by taking care to vote when Mitterrand and Giscard contested the Presidency of France?
If it is wrong to hold any one man responsible for the fateful dementia of World War I, it is not wrong to hold the one man Lenin responsible for the Bolshevik Revolution. He was no more of his time and place than any other Russian, yet only he, in his particularity of heredity and environment, of constraint and freedom, did what he did. By himself he could not have made the revolution, but without him it would not have been made and we would be living in a different world entirely. Lenin was not the sufficient cause, but he was the necessary cause.
And so with Hitler. Hitler willed and ordered the Holocaust, and was obeyed. Traditions, tendencies, ideas, myths—none of these made Hitler murder the Jews. All that history, all those forces and influences, could have been the same and Hitler could as easily, more easily, not have murdered the Jews. He could more advantageously have tightened the screw of oppression. That the Jews were not being murdered, that they were only being humiliated and exploited, would not have caused his followers to grumble, let alone to rebel.
Anti-Semitism was a necessary condition for the Holocaust, it was not a sufficient condition. Hitler was needed. Hitler murdered the Jews because he wanted to murder them.
Nor does anti-Semitism explain the men who pulled the triggers or released the gas. Let us suppose that Hitler’s Viennese years had made him as anti-Slavic as anti-Semitic, or maybe even more. Or let us suppose that on account of German memory, anxiety, and ambition Hitler had decided that rather than murder the Jews, or before murdering them, he should subjugate the Slavs, starting with gas chambers and execution squads to rid himself of the educated. Would there have been any lack of men to carry out such an order? The thing would have been done, as in large part it was done.
Maccoby recalls “Himmler’s notorious speech to SS officers in which he lectured them on the moral imperative of stifling their feelings of nausea about the mass killings” of Jews. If Himmler had lectured the SS officers on the moral imperative of steeling themselves to their heroically hard duty of extirpating the Slavic peril, they would have been as dutiful about Slavs as they were about Jews. The obedience of Himmler and the SS was to Hitler, not to anti-Semitism. Himmler was anti-Russian as well as anti-Semitic, but when Hitler made his pact with Stalin the SS cooperated cheerfully with the NKVD.
That one man made so much difference may be even harder to accept emotionally than intellectually. The disproportionate frightens us. We need to believe that causes are proportionate to effects. We want to think that our world is a cosmos, and here is evidence that our world is a chaos. We feel bad enough knowing about the Holocaust, but if we have to accept that one man decreed the Holocaust we can feel still worse. We would rather talk about socioeconomic stresses and strains, political backwardness, group psychopathology, religious hatred, racism.
All those things were indeed there, and Hitler was indeed affected by them—affected, not determined. Those things necessarily meant trouble for the Jews, they did not necessarily mean Holocaust.
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II
Applauding Fackenheim’s resolve to “reject all facile deterministic explanations—such as the attempts to interpret the Holocaust in terms of economics, or xenophobia, or the vicissitudes of German history—” Maccoby nevertheless yields to his own determinism. He tells us that we must understand “the Christian background of the Holocaust.” For him anti-Semitism is inseparable, all but indistinguishable, from a timeless, unchanging Christianity: “The Jews in the [Christian] scheme are . . . the earthly agents of the cosmic powers of evil. . . . When a community [viz., Christendom] has been taught over the centuries that it is . . . virtuous to persecute them [viz., the Jews], it is only a step (albeit a large one)” to that speech of Himmler’s.
This is like saying “it is only a step (albeit a large one)” from an uncomfortable fever of 100° to a lethal fever of 107.° The step is not from less to more, it is from one kind to another kind altogether. “Only a step (albeit a large one)” papers over a chasm.
I know a man who was a young lawyer in Germany when he was forced to close his office and prepare to emigrate. When his secretary cried, he said, “Don’t worry. This sort of thing happens to us every two or three hundred years.” He meant being cast down from the heights to the depths, for which there were precedents aplenty in Jewish history. He could not imagine the Holocaust. It lacked precedent.
Maccoby knows, of course, that “the Holocaust . . . had not yet happened in world history.” Why did it finally happen, and only in the fifth decade of the 20th century? He adduces “the continuance into the post-Christian era of deeply-implanted fantasies about the Jews” and “the release afforded by Nazism from all vestiges of the restraint imposed by traditional Christian morality, which had hitherto acted as a counterweight to [anti-Jewish] Christian mythology.” But is not “the release . . . from . . . traditional Christian morality” in a “post-Christian era” only another way of saying that not Christianity but the weakening or supersession of Christianity was responsible for the Holocaust?
A further proof of Christianity’s responsibility, he says, is that “unsophisticated . . . people in Europe” later reasoned that after all, the Jews “are the Christ-killers, aren’t they?” But simple people may have said that out of a simple need for theodicy, the vindication of God’s justice. Jews call this zidduq haddin, at burials declaring with the Bible, “The Rock, His doing is perfect.” In Israel itself simple Jews from Muslim lands have been known to say that the Ashkenazim who perished in the Holocaust must have been very sinful, for God to punish them so.
When people who are not simple say such a thing we have a more serious problem. For the late Rav of Satmar and his disciples, the Holocaust was a visitation upon the whole house of Israel for the rebellion of too many of its sons and daughters against God and His commandments, and for their attaching themselves to the Devil (the “Other Side”) and his Zionism. Satmar is not simple, only implacably anti-modern. In a modern such a theodicy is particularly hard to stomach. I shall never forget my revulsion, and everyone else’s, when to a group of Jewish theologians and writers a professor of philosophy intoned, in an exaggerated East European (mis)-pronunciation of the Hebrew, his solution to reconciling Holocaust with God’s justice: the penultimate verse of the psalm that a Jew recites more often than any other, the 145th: “The Lord watches over all who love Him, but all the wicked will He destroy.”
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III
Christianity was hostile to the Jews and Judaism, but when Christianity ruled and was strong Jews knew subordination, expulsion, even massacre, not Holocaust. If one sentence can summarize Church law and practice over many centuries, it is this: the Jews are to be allowed to live, but not too well.
Obviously, this does not mean that most Jews fared worse than most Christians: think of 12th-century England or 19th-century Russia. Or take literacy. About medieval Western Europe, G.G. Coulton concluded that the average Jewish layman was more literate than not only the average Christian layman but also the average priest, the Christians’ specialist in literacy. “Not living too well” is the sort of thing implicit in Casanova’s saying that for a doctorate in law he wrote a dissertation on the prohibition of building a synagogue higher than a church. The dissertation may have been fictitious but the prohibition was real.
Muslim countries prohibited Jews from riding horseback. In Jerusalem I once asked a mounted policeman for directions. To talk to him I had to crane my neck, I had to look up to him. A pedestrian has to look up to an equestrian. For Muslims it was unnatural to look up to a Jew, and not only for Muslims. To Christians, Saladin was a foeman worthy of Richard Lion-Heart’s steel. After the eviction of the last Crusaders from the Holy Land, Christians of all sorts, Western and Eastern, Latin and Greek and Syrian and Armenian and Coptic, became used to Muslims on horseback protecting the Christian Holy Places and keeping the peace between the Christian sects. But Jews on horseback? Jewish police protecting Christian Holy Places and keeping the peace between the Christian sects? A Jewish state in the Holy Land? Unnatural. It occurred to me then that such feelings might help to explain the coldness téward Israel of Christians like the late Bible scholar Father Roland de Vaux, and maybe of the Vatican.
In general harsh in his judgment of Christianity, on one point Maccoby is too tender. It was not “traditional Christian morality” which kept Christendom from killing Jews. Charlemagne did not doubt his Christian morality when he proved the truth of Christianity to the pagan Saxons by killing them. Some centuries later, Charlemagne’s successors likewise did not doubt their Christian morality when they disproved the Albigensian heresy by killing the Albigensians. In World War II the Ustashi, Croatian Catholic Christians, murdered as many Serbian Orthodox Christians as they could, and it now appears that the Ustashi were encouraged by Franciscans, whose patron saint, they tell us, would not hurt a fly. More than “traditional Christian morality” it was “Christian mythology,” the special place of Jews and Judaism in Christian teaching, that granted the Jews a special privilege of life. In principle, at least, the Inquisition had jurisdiction not over Jews but only over Christian heretics and apostates, actual or suspected, including ex-Jewish Christians and their descendants.
In the Ashkenazi rite, Av harahamim (“Merciful Father”) memorializes the Jewish martyrs killed by Crusaders in the Rhineland. It is a prayer for divine retribution, prefiguring in sentiment, if not in art, Milton’s “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont”: “Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints” the Waldensians. Ivan G. Marcus (Prooftexts, January 1982) summarizes the 12th-century German churchman Albert of Aix’s denunciation:
. . . when the Crusader rabble was itself decimated in Hungary, that disaster was a sign of God’s judgment. The Christians who had violated Church law by forcibly converting, not to speak of murdering, Jews were themselves justly punished.
It bears repeating: the Church law that protected Jews embodied “Christian morality” less than it embodied “Christian mythology.”
In modern times, with the dethronement or mildening of Christianity in the enlightened parts of Europe, the Jews’ privilege of life was replaced by a right to citizenship. Hitler revoked both.
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IV
Was Hitler a Christian? He was an anti-Semite, and Maccoby tells us that anti-Semitism lies at the heart of Christianity.
The Jews are old, Christianity is old, hatred of the Jews is old. “Anti-Semitism, -ic, -ite” are so new that they do not appear as entries on their own in the Oxford English Dictionary. “Anti-Semite,” undefined and dated 1881, only illustrates “anti-.” (“Semite” mentions “Hebrews, Arabs, Assyrians, and Aramaeans,” not Jews in the present.) “Semitic” includes a parenthesis: “(In recent use often spec. = Jewish).” For “Semitism” one definition, illustrated by something written in 1885, is “In recent use, Jewish ideas or Jewish influence in politics and society.” “Anti-Semitism,” therefore, is only a hundred years old in England and only slightly older on the Continent, where the word originated Why the new name for an old thing?
The thing was not altogether old.
In World War I some German had the bad idea of saying that the British soldiers were militarily contemptible, so they promptly called themselves the Old Contemptibles That is not how it was with the anti-Semites. They coined the name for themselves, and “anti-Semitism” for what they believed and propagandized. They needed a new name to distinguish their enmity to the Jews from the older, religious kind. They did not believe that Christianity was truer and better than Judaism, or that Jews were to be guarded against because of their Judaism: “Say this for the old-fashioned Jews, they are easier to recognize and guard against than the modern kind, who are abandoning their Judaism.” Those who used the new name believed something new, that the uncreative, parasitic Semitic race endangered the creative, productive Aryan race. The neologism took root and spread, displacing the older “Jew-hatred.” Soon people were also using it anachronistically, so to speak, as by applying it to antiquity.
Aside from the troubling anomaly of the New Christians in Spain, tainted indelibly by their Jewish blood, the rule in Christendom was that baptism, which Christians were exhorted to promote zealously, made a Jew into a Christian; but a Nazi ditty went: “Ob Jud, ob Christ, ist einerlei,/In der Rasse liegt die Schweinerei” (“Whether the man’s a Jew or a Christian makes no difference, it’s his race that’s filthy”). Many anti-Semites hated Christianity itself as Jewish. Ludendorff, second only to Hindenburg among the Kaiser’s war lords, wanted Germans to throw off Semitic Christianity and return as good Teutons to Woden and his pantheon. Neal Ascherson reports (New York Review, November 24, 1983) that Klaus Barbie the boy had been a Catholic but that Barbie the member of the Hitler Youth was “committed to anticlerical neopaganism.”
Anti-Christian anti-Semites could play down their anti-Christianity in order to make a united front with Christian anti-Semites, and Christian anti-Semites could contrive not to notice the anti-Christianity of people otherwise estimable for their anti-Semitism. The Christian and anti-Christian anti-Semites agreed that the Jews, having by a swindle acquired French/German/etc. citizenship, were now swindling, corrupting, and lording it over the true Frenchmen/Germans/etc.
Hitler the boy was Christian but Hitler the man was anti-Christian. (Remarkably, this enemy of the liberal Enlightenment scorned Judaism and Christianity not like Ludendorff the Teutonizer but like Voltaire the Enlightener.) Hitler was about as Christian as Stalin, the ex-seminarian.
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V
Grynberg agrees with Maccoby: “. . . the Holocaust was prepared and caused by Christian anti-Semitism. . . .”
Grynberg “left Poland in 1967.” The late Sam Levenson used to say that Jewish kids don’t go to summer camp, they’re sent. That is funny. What is less funny is that in 1967, the year when Israel had the impudence to win the Six-Day War, Jews did not leave Poland, they were pushed out. Gentile Poles were happy with Israel’s victory because it was a black eye for Moscow and Moscow’s puppets in Warsaw: “Our Jews beat their Arabs.” Jews were happy because—well, because they found to their surprise that they were still Jews, a little. The Polish government could not banish all those Poles, but it could banish nearly all the Jews.
Between the two world wars the ratio of Jews to the total population was higher in Poland than anywhere else except Palestine. Jews were Polish in citizenship, but for the most part not in language or culture. Governments were Christian and nationalist. They were also anti-Semitic, some more than others. In a notorious incident in the 30’s a Polish government did not readmit Polish Jews whom the Nazis had expelled from Germany, but no Christian Polish government ever expelled Polish Jews.
In 1967 no more than one or two Jews were left in Poland for every hundred in 1937. This remnant was Polish in language, culture, and national feeling. The government was Marxist, anti-Christian. Christian Polish governments had not expelled un-Polish Polish Jews, but an anti-Christian government expelled Polish Polish, Marxist, anti-Zionist Jews—as “Zionists.”
Grynberg reminds us that the Pope visiting Auschwitz repeatedly apostrophized the slain as Jews. In the Soviet Union the anti-Christian authorities have never consented to recognize the slain of Babi Yar as Jews.
In 1968 the Polish army’s journal based a good part of its case against “Zionism” on a denial of the Bible’s account of the Israelites’ sojourn in Egypt and their exodus under Moses. Even if we concede the relevance of such antiquarianism, the argument remains odd. Marxists pride themselves on being wissenschaftlich, scientific, and modern Wissenschaft of the Bible and the ancient Near East, whether practiced by believers or by unbelievers, Jews or Christians, is skeptical of what the Bible says about Egypt and exodus. Marxists might therefore be expected to crow that even believers, so long as they make any claim to Wissenschaft, must pooh-pooh the Bible as history. Instead those Polish Marxists chose to put forth a bit of anti-Semitica situated not in any pretense to modern scholarship, nor in any Christian tradition however anti-Jewish, but in a pagan tradition stretching back to Tacitus and finally to Manetho, an Egyptian priest who lived some centuries before Christianity. Countering the Jews’ version of their history with his anti-Jewish version, Manetho said that a thousand years earlier the Israelites had left Egypt not triumphantly but shamefully, expelled as lepers.
The main reason why the Polish Marxists repeated this ancient nonsense, preferring it to traditional Christian anti-Judaism and to modern Bible scholarship, must be that Marx himself had repeated it. Only that tradition about Egypt and exodus derides the Israelites. Both in antiquity and in modern times it has been used to legitimate enlightened distaste for the Jews.
Just a few intellectual generations before Marx, mediated to him by the French Enlightenment of the 18th century and radical German Protestant theology of the early 19th, were the English deists, of whom Thomas Morgan was particularly nasty. On one of the Ten Plagues he wrote:
And perhaps, one Reason why the Egyptian Sorcerers could not create Lice, might be because they had none about them, and the Israelites were better stock’d; for according to all Antiquity, Leprosy, Scabs, and Lice, were some of the Plagues with which these Shepherds, before their Expulsion had infested the Egyptians.
Traditionalist Christians might hate Jews and Judaism, but none ever jeered at Israelite sacred history and especially its core, the exodus. They believed that that history now belonged to them, the new Israel of the spirit, having passed to them from the Jews, the old, disinherited Israel of the flesh. Only an anti-Christian could laugh about “Scabs, and Lice” and “Expulsion,” and only in reliance upon the anti-Jewish pagans of “all Antiquity.”
Having suffered from anti-Christian anti-Semitism, Grynberg condemns Christian anti-Semitism. And though, like Maccoby, Grynberg denounces abstractions, for him too Hitler is hardly more than an abstraction.
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VI
In a way, it is easier to understand the Christians who blame Christianity for the Holocaust than the Jews who blame it. Historian or theologian, a Christian can feel that for Christians it is morally insufficient to strike the balance dispassionately and judge that Christianity in the 20th century is not primarily responsible for the Holocaust. But there is more. Perhaps without being aware of it, Christians may be moved to say that Christianity is responsible because responsibility implies power, and they would rather think Christianity guilty and still powerful than guiltless and powerless. Be that as it may, such people recognize an obligation of Christian teachers to lead their fellow Christians in contrition and in confession of sin.
One-sidedness in preaching need not be a vice, and historically Christians have had less cause than Jews to fear being overheard by the Others, the unfriendly majority. When the Israeli commission of inquiry found Israel’s government and army indirectly responsible for the killings by Lebanese Christians in Shatila and Sabra, many Jews outside Israel were upset. They thought, “That may be all very well to say in Israel, it’s a Jewish state. But here, what will the Gentiles think? Won’t they just love hearing Jews say that Jews are murderers!” Catholics amid Protestants may have corresponding reticences, and Protestants amid Catholics, but seldom Christians as such. If Christians overemphasize the guilt of Christianity, that does them honor. Let them by all means continue—provided, however, that in emphasizing how anti-Semitic Christianity was in the past they do not deny how anti-Semitic neopaganism can be in the present. Chastising what is left of Christendom, some Christians now tend to be if not pro-neopagan then at least anti-anti-neopagan.
So, precisely because Christians, or most of them, would rather not hear about Christian anti-Semitism, their teachers ought to tell them about it. Applying the principle of telling people what they would rather not hear, what should Jewish teachers tell Jews? But first, what do we like and what do we dislike to hear?
John G. Gager’s Origins of Anti-Semitism1 is an impressive addition to scholarship. The book’s substantive findings are evenhanded:
Only in a highly restricted sense can Western anti-Semitism be said to originate in pagan and Christian antiquity. The presumption of a universal anti-Semitism in antiquity, pagan or Christian, has been made possible only by suppressing, ignoring, or misinterpreting the mass of nonconforming evidence.
That is Gager the scholar, the authority on early Christian society. Gager the citizen says that as a concerned but disinterested outsider to the Jewish-Christian debate—doubtless meaning that he is not a Jew and no longer is a Christian—he thinks it necessary to restore balance by emphasizing the good in pagan antiquity, on acount of the prevalent “belief in a uniformly anti-Semitic pagan antiquity . . . [which] has in different ways served the interests of both Christians and Jews.”
It is Gager the citizen that I am not sure I agree with fully. The reason he suggests for Christians’ belief in a uniformly anti-Semitic pagan antiquity is plausible: “It has served to absolve Christianity of full responsibility for anti-Semitism in the West.” Less plausible are his finding that Jews share the belief and the reason he suggests for it: “Pagan persecution is held to have greatly strengthened the cohesiveness which has enabled Judaism to survive.”
A priori, Gager should be right. The Jews’ three pilgrimage festivals celebrate redemption from Egyptian bondage and triumph over that primordial, archetypal pagan oppressor, Pharaoh. Moses’ Song at the Sea is part of the Jewish prayer book, to be recited every morning of the year. In Exodus we are commanded to remember the Sabbath because of Creation, in Deuteronomy to keep the Sabbath because of our bondage in Egypt. Accordingly, our Sabbath benediction is in commemoration—zikkaron, zekher—of both. Purim celebrates victory over the pagan enemy Haman, and Hanukkah over the pagan enemy Antiochus. So much for our celebrations. Our mournings—primarily Tish’ah be’Av—recall the destruction of the First Temple by the pagan Nebuchadnezzar and of the Second by the pagan Titus.
What an outsider can miss is that the very Jews who rejoice on the feasts and mourn on the fasts can be taken aback when asked to remember that all these enemies were pagan, and that all but Titus were pre-Christian. The unstated assumption, by no means limited to the ignorant and unsophisticated, is that Gentiles = Christians. (I had to keep reminding myself that a Baghdadi Jew’s reminiscences about Gentiles were about Muslims.)
Maccoby says that behind “the world’s” transparently anti-Jewish denunciation of Israel for killings perpetrated by Christians is, again, Christianity. But even better than Americans he as a European should know that that denunciatory world was mostly the world of leftist parties and journalists, nearly all Gentile but few Christian. After terrorists attacked a Roman synagogue, wounding many and killing a little boy, a remorseful Italian journalist cried out that the media, slipping from anti-Israel to anti-Jewish, had in effect incited the attack. I do not think he was referring chiefly to l’Osservatore Romano.
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VII
Once, speaking in Israel to mostly Modern Orthodox Jews, I said: If the Church had wished, no more Jews than Albigensians would have survived in Christendom. The Church did not want us to live well, but it let us live. In the Hitler years, who would not have welcomed back the rule of the Church? Then I used the Polish example to make the point that anti-Christian anti-Semitism continues to be worse than the Christian kind.
This was received without enthusiasm. “How about Pobedonostsev?” someone asked. Pobedonostsev, the lay procurator of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church in the reigns of Alexander II and Nicholas II, believed that the best solution to “the Jewish problem” in Russia would be for a third of the Jews to emigrate, a third to be baptized, and a third to starve to death. (He also despised the West and Catholicism, prizing autocracy and caesaropapism in state and church.)
I answered: Practically every Jew in the world longed for an end to the czarist regime. With the revolution of 1905 Pobedonostsev was dismissed. He died soon afterward. A few years later still, anti-Semites brought Mendl Beylis to trial on a charge of killing a child for the Christian blood that they said Jews use in preparing matzot for Passover. The jury in the czarist court exonerated Beylis and set him free.
After forty years and two world wars, in Communist Czechoslovakia, Rudolf Slansky and seven others officially identified as “of Jewish origin,” fervent Communists and anti-Zionists, were charged with treason in the service of Zionism, declared guilty, and hanged. Then, in Russia proper, came the Doctors’ Affair, in which Jewish doctors were accused of having conspired, in the service of Zionism, Wall Street, and the CIA, to poison the leaders of the Soviet state and the Communist party. The Jews of the Soviet Union are convinced that only Stalin’s providential death spared them to live their wonted life of anxious inferiority.
In the old Russia the czar and his entourage abetted the Black Hundreds and the other pogromchiks, and the Okhrana, the secret police, concocted the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, still potent for evil. But in that Russia the Jews, beset by hostility and hardship, doubt and division, were nevertheless not kept from living a communal and cultural life unsurpassed anywhere, before or since, for variety, intensity, and achievement, from the most traditional to the most revolutionary, in Yiddish, Russian, and Hebrew. And the Jews of the czar’s empire could leave. In their many hundreds of thousands they did leave, a few to prepare the way for the state of Israel and more to become the parents and grandparents of most Jews in the English-speaking countries and Latin America today. The anti-Christian Russia of Stalin and his legatees almost makes the czar’s Christian Russia look good.
Later on a man told me that I had persuaded some minds but no hearts, because people are not stirred by a demonstration that something is less bad than something else. Besides, he said, the new, anti-Christian anti-Semites are hypocritical. They denounce their quarry not as Jews but as Zionists or rootless cosmopolitans, and somehow they benefit from their hypocrisy. Not so the old, Christian ones. Remember Admiral Horthy, regent of Hun-gar) between the wars, unfriendly to the Nazis. After World War I, when the Young Men’s Christian Association sent a relief mission from America to Hungary, Horthy shook the YMCA representative’s hand and said, “Glad to meet a fellow anti-Semite.” More often than not the word Christian—christlich, chrétien—in the name of a European movement or party meant anti-Semitic.
The man speaking to me had been young in Poland in the 30’s. He said that while he could not deny anti-Christian anti-Semitism, for him only Christian anti-Semitism was real: Jewish benches in the universities, and assaults by the student anti-Semites, and frightened alertness in the Easter season. He was a teacher and did not fail to tell his students what he had seen and experienced.
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VIII
Loyal children of the Enlightenment think that irreligion’s ideas are good, so they are slow to admit that its deeds can be bad. As Marxists and marxisants can say that the Soviet Union is not truly socialist, so they will say that true Marxism/socialism cannot be anti-Semitic, that it has not failed but has never been tried. (G.K. Chesterton said that Christianity had not failed, it had never been tried) Do Marx’s own words convict him of being a foul-mouthed anti-Semite and racist? Ignore it, deny it, explain it away. (“Newton may have been loony about the numbers in the Book of Daniel, but he was a great genius anyway.”) Does George L. Mosse’s meticulous examination of the evidence prove that “revolutionary socialism desired to put an end to Jews and Judaism”? Ignore it, deny it, explain it away. Do leftists, in pain, report anti-Semitism on the Left? Forget it. By definition, enemies must be on the Right, the political and above all the religious Right.
Liberals can exhibit a similar tropism. For many American Jews the enemy is the Moral Majority, never mind that it is pro-Israel and that its morality is close to traditional Jewish morality. Though some may have a less than unshakable faith in prayer—or, for that matter, in God—few things give them greater pleasure than the chance to express righteous indignation when an old-fashioned fundamentalist blurts out that God does not listen to the prayer of a Jew. Probably that fundamentalist is an unreconstructed upholder of a classical Christian doctrine, no salvation outside the Church (or Matthew’s “. . . no one knows the Father except the Son, and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him”). Probably he would say about the prayer of a Muslim—or a Catholic?—what he said about the prayer of a Jew. That does not matter. He has furnished an excuse for continuing to locate danger in Christianity, especially the Christian Right.
Devotees of “liberation” theology, and most conspicuously the World Council of Churches, are pro-Third World (except Afghanistan), pro-PLO, anti-West, anti-Israel. In France the esteemed Catholic journal Esprit, highbrow and leftist, faults Rome for being backward about pretty nearly everything, with one exception. Because Esprit hates Israel, it faults Vatican II for being soft on Judaism. About Shatila and Sabra the prevailing tone was, “What can you expect of people whose religion is Judaism?” We are not to suppose that Esprit is bigoted, or anti-Semitic. It has great respect for Islam, and Arabs are Semites too, aren’t they?
Perhaps we should think of such people rather as Christian leftists than as leftist Christians, because the common element in anti-Israel/anti-Jewish animus has long been not Christianity but leftism. As in the 30’s, when the farcical Red Dean of Canterbury flabbergasted even the cynic who was the Soviet ambassador in London by asking him to convey to Moscow the Dean’s felicitations on Stalin’s splendid victory at the polls, so today, Christian leftists—and Jewish ones—are fellow-travelers of anti-Christian leftists, far more powerful and numerous.
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IX
Let me summarize, fill in some lacunae, and draw some conclusions.
- Hitler made the Holocaust because he wanted to make it. Anti-Semitism did not make him make it.
- Hitler was ex-Christian and anti-Christian.
- There was much and there remains some Christian anti-Semitism. Hitler’s anti-Semitism was anti-Christian.
- Marxist anti-Semitism also is anti-Christian.
- Anti-Christian anti-Semitism is descended ideologically from pagan disdain for Judaism and the Jews, and emotionally from Christian hatred of Judaism and the Jews.
- In Hitler’s time the world capital of anti-Semitism was Berlin. Since then it has been Moscow.
- Jews now have more to fear from anti-Christians than from Christians, and from the Christian Left than from the Christian Right.
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1 Oxford University Press, 312 pp, $24.95.
No Hitler, No Holocaust
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From the Editor
n mid-October, after the revelation that Donald Trump had bragged about his compulsion to make unwanted physical advances on women, a Wisconsinite named Marybeth Glenn took to social media and published a “tweetstorm,” a series of 17 Twitter entries, that encapsulate and personify a little-noted aspect of the existential crisis into which the Donald Trump candidacy has plunged the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
“I, a conservative female, have spent years defending the Republican Party against claims of sexism,” she wrote. “When I saw Republican men getting attacked I stood up for them. I came to their defense. I fought on their behalf. I fought on behalf of a movement I believed in. I fought on behalf of my principles while other women told me I hated my own sex.”
Glenn specifically mentions having worked to help her governor, Scott Walker, survive a recall and having labored for Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign. Then came 2016: “Now some Trojan horse nationalist sexual predator invades the GOP, eating it alive, and you cowards sit this one out? He treats women like dogs, and you go against everything I—and other female conservatives—said you were and back down like cowards.”
Because she does not want this to be a victim’s manifesto, Glenn instantly turns the tables on the politicians she’s attacking for failing to protect her and people like her: “We don’t need you to stand up for us, you needed to stand up for us for you. For your dignity. For your reputation. [Senator] Jeff Sessions says that he wouldn’t ‘characterize’ Trump’s unauthorized groping of women as ‘assault.’ Are you kidding me?! Others try to rebuke his comments, yet still choose to vote for a sexual predator—because let’s be honest, that’s what he is.”
And then she exits the Republican Party, or at least any kind of grassroots activism on its behalf: “I’m just one woman, you won’t even notice my lack of presence at rallies, fair booths, etc. You won’t really care that I’m offended by your silence, and your inability to take a stand. But one by one you’ll watch more women like me go, and you’ll watch men of actual character follow us out the door. And what you’ll be left with are the corrupt masses that foam at the mouth every time you step outside the lines. Men who truly see women as lesser beings, and women without self-respect. And your ‘guiding faith’ and ‘principles’ will be attached to them as well.”
It is not just the Republican Party but the conservative movement that has alienated her: “Various men in the movement are writing it off as normal, confirming every stereotype the left has thrown at them. So I’m done…. And when it’s all said and done, all you’ll have left is the party The Left always accused you of being.”
Glenn’s astonishing essay in Tweet form, some of which I’ve compressed and rearranged here, was read by more than 3 million people over the space of three days. It’s impossible to know how many of them share her ideological perspective. Plenty didn’t, of course, and were just hitting the “like” button as their way of dancing merrily around the right-wing funeral pyre (which would account for the praise Glenn received from the leftish J.K. Rowling, among others). But certainly enough of Glenn’s true compatriots liked these Tweets and shared them to suggest she was speaking for this year’s truly forgotten voter: the Republicans and conservatives who are dismayed, horrified, dispirited, and devastated by Trump’s hostile takeover of the GOP.
From the moment Trump came gliding down that gilded escalator in June 2015, we’ve been told that he was harnessing a forgotten voter—the white, male working-class voter and the many millions like them who had long ago ceased to vote or who had never started. This voter has been the subject of passionate discussion in and about the Republican Party. The attempt to understand this forgotten voter has become the year’s most pressing sociological challenge. If he had been “forgotten,” he is no longer.
Two of the year’s most provocative books, J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and Nicholas Eberstadt’s Men Without Work, are efforts to summarize and crystallize the social and moral dislocation that appears to be afflicting the worst-off of these men. We have learned their incomes have stagnated, they no longer believe they have agency to affect their own circumstances for the better, and that they lose themselves in video gaming and opiates. We are told they feel that Mexicans are taking their jobs, that free trade destroyed their livelihoods, and that the social changes over the past four decades have made them feel like outcasts in their own country.
Campus social-justice warriors may fret over “male privilege,” but the political story of 2016, we’ve been told, is the story of the rise of the disempowered male—the new populist force that must be reckoned with, whether Trump wins or loses, whether it’s close or whether it’s a blowout. The idea of “the forgotten man” is nothing new in American life. It was, of course, a trope of the Great Depression, the subject of the great final number of The Golddiggers of 1933, whose lyrics (by the Communist songwriters E.Y. Harburg and Jay Gorney) condemned the powers-that-be for leaving him out to dry:
You had him cultivate the land
He walked behind the plow
The sweat fell from his brow
But look at him right now
Change “cultivate the land” to “you had him forge your steel,” and you have today’s “forgotten man” updated perfectly.
Well, just as the forgotten man wasn’t forgotten when the song was performed in 1933—indeed, the entirety of the New Deal passed that year, the largest public-works and economic-stimulus program in American history, was designed to aid him—he is far from forgotten in 2016. His presence not only galvanized the primary race, he has served to terrify the Republican Party with his power ever since. Efforts to challenge Trump in the run-up to the Republican convention, to create a delegate fight, to recruit a serious third-party challenger to give Republicans two options on the ballot and thus save down-ticket GOP office-seekers—all these died aborning because of the threat that the “forgotten Trump voter” would take his revenge in some unknown but enduring form.
Even now, we are told that the issues that have motivated the Trump voter must be integrated into the Republican Party agenda even if Trump crashes and burns. The most obvious of these issues involves immigration and border control, which Trump crystallized into his Great Wall of America idea (which, when you come right down to it, is basically just a real-estate developer’s gloss on John McCain’s 2008 demand to “build the dang fence”).
But taking a hard line on immigration had already become GOP gospel before Trump came down the escalator. Marco Rubio, who had sought immigration reform in 2013, declared his own effort a failure, said he had learned from it, and laid out an immigration agenda that would have horrified George W. Bush had it been presented to him as president. After two decades in which immigration hardliners had failed to demonstrate their issue had deep popular support within the party, they finally got the upper hand. The party learned that a more liberal immigration policy was hugely alienating to its base and was going to conduct the 2016 presidential contest with that as a centerpiece no matter who the nominee was—including self-evident immigration softies like Jeb Bush.
So then we get to Trump’s more, shall we say, innovative issues in a Republican context—his attack on free trade and his neo-isolationism. Here the only evidence that the GOP has moved in these directions is Trump’s rise, and you would therefore have to believe Trump captured his voters’ enthusiasm because of his issue set. And to believe that you would have to believe that the single most incoherent presidential candidate in American history had an issue set comprehensible to his voters. When he says he wants no troops on the ground in the Middle East but he wants to seize the oil, is he George Washington saving America from foreign entanglements or Douglas MacArthur seeking to cross into China? Or both? Or neither? When he says he wants a trade war with China that would raise the prices of the daily goods his working-class supporters live on by 45 percent, is that a serious proposition or merely a guy sucking air out of a balloon and speaking in a helium voice?
When Marybeth Glenn refers to Trump in her tweetstorm as a “Trojan Horse nationalist,” this is what she means—the Trump who effectively staged a hostile takeover of the Republican primary process by denying his own history of social liberalism and pretending to be the possessor of a true conservatism that apparently only just came to him midway through the seventh decade of his life.
But is this Trumpian pseudo-conservatism the reason for his rise, the cause of his takeover of the party, the animating force behind his rally crowds? Of course not. He donned conservative garb to further his own quest for power. It is an eerie echo of Richard III’s glee at his own seductive skill: “Thus I clothe my naked villainy with odd old ends stolen out of holy writ / And seem a saint…Then I sigh, and with a piece of Scripture / Tell them that God bids us to do evil for good.”
But the truly forgotten Republican voter never bought Trump’s new outfit. I mean the Republican person who believes in limited government and a strong national defense and some kind of a moral frame for our politics—a moral frame she shares with Democrats and liberals in the sense that she believes the causes and candidates for whom she has worked and voted are engaged in the act of doing good for the country, doing good for others, and representing a positive understanding of humanity.
Many Democrats and liberals, and most activist Democrats and liberals, do not understand this about Republicans and conservatives and do not accept it. They have always seen conservatism as “naked villainy with odd old ends stolen out of holy writ.”
They believe that if you believe differently from them, you are seeking to do active harm to the country and to others and to humanity, because the policies you support are solely to your benefit. They believe you only want tax cuts and deregulation to enrich yourself, not because you want to free the economy from the government’s heavy and confiscatory hand. They believe you support efforts to prevent voter fraud not because you believe organized efforts have been made to steal elections but because you want to steal elections. And, most important, they believe you support a traditionalist view of life not because you believe it is the deepest reflection of natural law or God’s truth but because you want to privilege males and heterosexuals and seek to disempower women and those who pursue what used to be called “alternative lifestyles.”
And now what are we to say to them? The writer Heather Wilhelm spoke for many of us who were horrified by the October revelations of Trump’s Rat Packish morality and Cosbyish conduct, the excuses made for it by Republican elders, and the silence of many Republican politicians when she tweeted: “I’ve critiqued the left’s ‘pervasive rape culture’ narrative for years. Stunning to see the Trump GOP do its best to convince me it’s true.” (One of those critiques, “The ‘Rape Culture’ Lie,” appeared in our March 2015 issue.)
In the wake of these exposures, Trump has marshaled his “forgotten voter” to ballast him. And still the fear of that voter’s wrath has frozen most of the Republican Party’s officials into place. They are under no illusions, by the way, as they are frozen as well in fear of the judgment of the larger electorate in November. But it seems not to have occurred to them that their paralytic non-response to Trump’s personal barbarity would threaten the party’s future with the truly forgotten Republican voter—the one who worked tirelessly for the common good through the Republican Party until she was told she had to make common cause with those who would elevate a sociopathic misogynist to the presidency of the United States.
Cleaning Up Obama’s Foreign Policy Mess
Our national purpose will be found in defeating the enemies of liberty.
In our democratic republic, we choose presidents who reflect the national mood, and they in turn lead a nation that becomes a reflection of them. In 2008, Americans were tired of the war in Iraq and elected Barack Obama on his promise to end that war—but he had a far larger retreat in mind. Pursuing a staunchly progressive worldview, Obama would oversee the withdrawal of American power around the globe. Yet as his vision of a better world lost out to the reality of a much more treacherous one, he refused to change course. Responding to the new threats would have distilled for the country a new sense of national purpose—something Obama expressly feared. In exacerbating and then downplaying a rising global wave of theocratic and secular tyranny, the president has left our sense of national purpose in a shambles. And having done so, he will depart the White House with the free world at great risk.
Obama was, in some sense, the right man at the right time. Opposed to the Iraq war from the start, he could claim credibly to have seen well in advance the hardships that would follow from George W. Bush’s post-9/11 foreign policy. After witnessing five years of brutal fighting without a clear pronouncement of American victory, the country had come around to Obama’s anti-war view.
In his election, however, Obama saw the opportunity to chase a more ambitious goal. “This was the moment,” he had said upon receiving the Democratic nomination for president, “when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves, and our highest ideals.” For Obama, those were progressive ideals, and they would guide him in revolutionizing American foreign policy. As he stated on the eve of his election: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”
In addition to pulling out of Iraq, he would attempt to draw down American forces in Afghanistan. But his transformative project would go beyond wrapping up active wars; it stretched to the ends of the earth, replacing established American policy in country after country with the preferred progressive alternative. Progressives believe that the projection of American power is the problem, in which case the solution is, or at least involves, American retrenchment. The plan was to deliver us into an enlightened future, where a newly humbled America would inspire cooperation from former antagonists, soothe our own national conscience, and eventually allow for the meaningful work of building a fairer and more equal republic. This, as far as Obama was concerned, was America’s national purpose.
The new agenda included conciliatory overtures to a variety of America’s adversaries. The most important of these were Russia, Iran, and Syria. Obama offered Vladimir Putin’s revanchist Russia a diplomatic “reset” in the belief that Russian–American relations had grown too hostile during Bush’s presidency. The reset policy included canceling promised missile-defense assets for Poland and the Czech Republic, signing a New START treaty to reduce Russian and American nuclear arsenals in unison, and courting Russia’s then-President Dmitry Medvedev in hopes that he was a moderate who would take the reins of power from Putin.
Where Russia enjoyed a reset, Iran was offered Obama’s “open hand.” This included unprecedented high-level talks between American and Iranian officials, a secret letter-writing campaign in which Obama appealed to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei for cooperation in various endeavors, and back-channel diplomatic outreach that came to fruition in a deal ostensibly intended to constrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Obama also sought to reestablish diplomatic ties with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. The president nominated Robert Ford to be the first U.S. ambassador to Syria since 2005. He also eased trade restrictions, tried to gain Syria acceptance in international trade bodies, and worked to improve American ties with the Syrian foreign minister. All this was done in an attempt both to bring out Assad’s much-discussed “reformer” side and to peel Syria away from its ally, Iran.
These policies do not make up the totality of Obama’s effort to ingratiate himself with unfree regimes. There was also, for example, his unwillingness to pressure China about its belligerence in the South China Sea, his hard line against Israeli settlements in deference to Palestinian claims, his warm relationship with Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and his restoration of full relations with Communist Cuba. But, for reasons that will soon become clear, Obama’s core Axis of Accommodation went through Syria, Russia, and Iran—a collective of bad actors who would turn American retreat into global catastrophe and leave us without a unified foreign-policy calling.
S o certain was Barack Obama in the soundness of these efforts that he thought of them as existing beyond the disputed realms of ideology. He was just doing what works. His guiding dictum, so he told a group of reporters, was, plainly, “don’t do stupid shit.” Of course, once a man sees his ideology only as pragmatism, he’s become an intractable ideologue. Obama simply defined stupid as that which isn’t progressive. As a senior official in the Obama administration told the New York Times’s David Samuels of the president: “He regards everyone on the other side at this point as being a bunch of bloodthirsty know-nothings from a different era who play by the old book.” Obama put it more diplomatically before the UN General Assembly in September 2009: “The time has come to realize that the old habits, the old arguments, are irrelevant to the challenges faced by our people.”The old, irrelevant book of blood and ignorance held that bad actors would exploit signs of American weakness to further their own aims. But according to Obama the pragmatist, in that same UN speech, “in an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero-sum game.” The old book had Vladimir Putin down as a fierce Soviet-nostalgic nationalist still smarting from Russia’s defeat in the Cold War. As Obama saw it, however, “alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War,” in fact, “make no sense in an interconnected world.” Where the old book maintained that theocratic Iran was a sworn enemy of the United States, Obama understood that “we must embrace a new era of engagement based on mutual interest and mutual respect, and our work must begin now.”
But a funny thing happened on the way to the next epoch. Sadly for us all, the old book was proven right. Obama’s transformative plans failed spectacularly—and in combination. In withdrawing hastily from Iraq, the United States allowed for the reconstitution of an al-Qaeda offshoot that would go on to become ISIS, the largest and most vicious jihadist organization we’ve ever faced. ISIS would cross into Syria and capitalize on an uprising against Assad. For his part, Assad never came around to reforming or breaking from Iran’s orbit. In fact, he has waged a war on the Syrian people that has included the deployment of chemical weapons on civilians. And Iran—enjoying its new freedom of action—has come to his aid.
The war in Syria has produced, in turn, a global flood of some 5 million refugees, destabilizing politics well beyond the Middle East. In time, Obama handed the whole Syrian portfolio to Vladimir Putin by agreeing to a deal to put Russia in charge of removing Assad’s proscribed weapons. Putin soon put Russia’s military at Assad’s disposal, cementing an active Russian-Iranian-Syrian alliance.1 That anti-freedom triumvirate has not only collaborated to kill nearly half a million people; it has deliberately kept ISIS in play in order to use it as a foil for its own depredations.
Then there was the Iran nuclear deal. The Obama administration touts it as a success. But they’re the only ones doing so. To critics and former supporters alike, it’s become clear that the “agreement” reached with Tehran is little more than a fog of shifting claims, hidden payments, secret side deals, and an endless public-relations campaign. Indeed, it has become increasingly hard to criticize the specific failings of the agreement precisely because so few people concur on what the deal’s terms actually are. But neither the deal’s original limits on enriched uranium nor the required international inspections regime—both inadequate to begin with—are still in place. What’s more, the administration has smoothed Iran’s path to international markets and given the regime a direct infusion of as much as $1.3 billion, much of it likely allocated for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps and assorted terrorist parties.
I t was the rise of ISIS, above all else, that should have disabused Obama of his progressive scheme. But while the pseudo-caliphate expanded throughout Syria and Iraq, established a multibillion-dollar economy, seized chemical weapons, and mobilized a worldwide terrorist network, the president refused to take action. “Instead of adjusting his policies to the reality, and adjusting his perception of reality to the changing realities on the ground,” the above-quoted official told Samuels, “the conclusions [Obama] draws are exactly the same, no matter what the costs have been to our strategic interests.”He had many options, all endorsed by one or more members of his administration. The United States could have established no-fly zones to protect the Syrian people and deprive ISIS of its status as the sole hope for defeating Assad. Washington could have trained an army of non-radical Syrian rebels to fight both Assad and ISIS. We could have established safe havens on Syria’s borders. The least Obama could have done was to make good on his 2012 vow to take action against Assad if the dictator deployed chemical weapons. But that would have jeopardized his rapprochement with Iran, Assad’s closest ally. In the end, he did nothing.
Obama, having planned to deliver the United States into a new and pacified world of global interdependence, instead inflamed and compounded the worst threat the United States faced when he came into office: Islamic terrorism. Unable to acknowledge the perilous state of affairs to which he contributed, he systematically ignored it and thus missed the moment that would have defined our national purpose. For surely if our national purpose after 9/11 was to stamp out jihad and, specifically, al-Qaeda, then the threat posed by ISIS requires an even greater American response.
In his effort to minimize this challenge, Obama said of ISIS: “They do not threaten our national existence.” For a war-averse nation of despairing liberals and dispirited conservatives, this has sufficed.
But is it true? Can it be that the world’s most bloodthirsty opponents of human liberty—having gone from near nonexistence to virtual statehood in less than five years and having acquired chemical weapons and inspired or trained terrorists inside the United States—do not threaten our national existence? As a matter of our immediate reality, the answer is yes; ISIS is not poised to topple the republic. But as a long-term matter, the answer is undoubtedly no. ISIS and its related groups, if not forcefully opposed, will threaten the United States as a whole.
This could happen in one of two ways. In one, small terrorist attacks will continue or even multiply in the United States. As attacks increase, it will matter less and less whether the perpetrators are officially sanctioned ISIS members or whether the number of innocents killed falls short of those killed in proper wars. In actual fact, as Americans, (and other free peoples), acclimate to the new insecurity caused by further attacks, they will impose upon themselves ever more restrictions on their own freedom. This could take the form of new laws and prohibitions designed to keep people safe, or it could come from the accretion of personal choices about where not to go and what not to do in order to avoid harm. Either way, ISIS or its successor will have fundamentally changed the free and open nature of history’s singular beacon of human liberty.
In the other scenario, ISIS could begin carrying out spectacular terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. By spectacular, I mean something on the order of 9/11. This is not hard to envision, as ISIS already has the money, the manpower, and in some cases the advantage of American citizenship to facilitate a coordinated, high-casualty domestic attack. Should this come to pass, then we would inevitably be in an active state of war with another “country,” entailing all the sorrows and upheavals that come with it. Once again, the United States would suffer as a whole.
A lthough Barack Obama does not say so in plain terms, he seems to believe that occasional terrorist attacks are something that the United States can, in the long run, simply live with; that the American people could absorb terrorism, in Secretary of State John Kerry words, as a mere “nuisance” of modern life. This gets things exactly wrong. The question is not whether we could live with occasional terrorist attacks but whether our terrorist enemies can live with attacking us only occasionally. According to the “old book” that Obama thinks so little of, the answer is no. The U.S. has always done well to take its enemies at their word.National purpose is forged in response to a specific challenge—and, then, only when our political leaders recognize that the challenge is so great as to require the galvanization of the country. This is how the United States found its purpose in defeating Nazism and fascism in World War II, found it again in wiping out the threat of Communism during the Cold War, and found it once more in (nearly) destroying al-Qaeda during the War on Terror.
The United States will reclaim its national purpose when the continued threat of Islamic terrorism becomes too great for another American president to ignore. And when that moment comes to pass, the American people, enervated as they now seem, will shake off their doubts and divisions. Even now, liberals know there is no pride in letting ISIS carry on, and conservatives understand that the country they knew wouldn’t blink in the face of barbarians. They only need a president to articulate the truth. In time, Americans will recover their pride and affinity for the only country that, again and again, has proved capable of standing between liberty and bondage in all its forms.
Cleaning Up Obama’s Syria Mess
An ambitious plan to fight both Bashar al-Assad and ISIS is now our best hope.
n September 10, in Geneva, Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced a cease-fire agreement in Syria—the second one this year. It was supposed to be a breakthrough for diplomacy, but within the hour of its implementation, the ceasefire began collapsing. The predictable failure of this “peace plan” offers yet more evidence of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the Obama administration’s approach to this conflict, which has become the greatest strategic and humanitarian disaster of the 21st century.
Since the start of the Syrian civil war in March 2011, more than 400,000 people have been killed and a greater if unknown number injured. Another 11 million people have been driven out of their homes, including 4.8 million who have been forced to flee the country. The war has turned more than half of Syria’s prewar population of 22 million people into fatalities or refugees. That mass migration has severely affected not just neighboring countries but Europe as well; the influx of refugees is sparking fears of terrorism and leading to a right-wing backlash across the Continent that may have helped convince British voters to leave the European Union.
Those fears are rooted in the fact that the Syrian war has created a breeding ground for extremist organizations, the two most notorious being ISIS and the Syria Conquest Front (formerly the Al Nusra Front, the official al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria). ISIS has become a magnet for jihadists from all over the world, some of whom have already returned to their countries of origin to commit acts of terrorism. The group’s propaganda and its aura of success have inspired another breed of terrorists in such places as St. Cloud, Minnesota, and Orlando, Florida. And Syria has attracted not only Sunni extremists but their Shiite counterparts as well. The Bashar al-Assad regime has been able to hold on to power only with the help of Hezbollah and other Iranian-controlled Shiite militias that play an increasingly prominent role in government-held areas. Moreover, with its actions in Syria, Russia has now assumed its largest role in the Middle East since the height of the Cold War.
Former CIA Director David Petraeus has aptly dubbed Syria a “geopolitical Chernobyl.” The Kerry-Lavrov plan adopted on September 10 was supposed to cap the toxins spewing out of Syria and begin the cleanup process. It stipulated that if there was a significant reduction in violence for seven days and if humanitarian relief supplies were allowed to reach the besieged city of Aleppo, Russia and the United States would work together to target Islamic State and Syria Conquest Front extremists. Seven days without violence didn’t seem a lot to ask, but then, those involved in the negotiation had wildly different purposes for pursuing it.
As soon as the cease-fire began on Monday, September 12, there were reports of violations, primarily by Syrian government forces. Five days later, on Saturday, September 17, U.S. warplanes accidentally bombed Syrian government forces in Deir al-Zour province. The pilots apparently mistook the soldiers for Islamist militants. As soon as the U.S. command center realized its mistake, it stopped the bombing. The U.S. then issued a craven apology to the Russian government: “The United States has relayed our regret through the Russian Federation for the unintentional loss of life of Syrian forces.” Thus it was that Barack Obama’s administration openly apologized for bombing Assad’s forces, which have become notorious for dropping “barrel bombs” on civilian neighborhoods, torturing prisoners, and starving rebel-held towns.
The situation turned from farce to tragedy two days later, on September 19, when a humanitarian aid convoy heading from the Turkish border to the besieged city of Aleppo was repeatedly bombed by marauding aircraft. At least 18 trucks with large “UN” markings on them, carrying tons of flour, medicine, and other relief supplies, were destroyed and more than 30 people killed, including at least a dozen aid workers. A nearby hospital was also struck. It did not take U.S. intelligence long to conclude that the strikes were most likely carried out by two Russian Su-24 jets based in Latakia, Syria.
The Russian and Syrian governments had been fully informed of the route and location of the aid convoy, yet one of them bombed it anyway, whether by accident or design. Even in a conflict known for shocking atrocities, the destruction of aid supplies and the murder of aid workers stood out for its inhumanity. To add insult to injury, neither Assad nor Putin owned up to what their aircraft had done, with the Russians preferring to deflect blame with a variety of unbelievable and ever-shifting cover stories, including unfounded allegations that an American drone had destroyed the convoy.
And how did Secretary of State Kerry react to this outrage on the part of his negotiating partners? By clinging to the hope that the cease-fire was “not dead,” even as Syrian government forces were resuming their full-scale assault on Aleppo. Not until October 3—two weeks after the destruction of the aid convoy—did Kerry finally concede the obvious and call off his ill-fated talks with Lavrov. By that point, the Assad regime and its Russian enablers were pulverizing the rebel-held section of Aleppo, notwithstanding the fact that 250,000 civilians, including 100,000 children, remain trapped there. Russia aircraft dropped incendiaries, cluster munitions, and even giant “bunker buster” bombs on homes and hospitals, killing and maiming at random. “What Russia is sponsoring and doing is not counter-terrorism, it is barbarism,” the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, charged.
She’s right, but Power’s condemnation only underlined the yawning chasm between the administration’s tough talk and its ineffectual actions. It would not be hard for the U.S. to act to impede, and even stop, the Assad war machine at scant risk to American lives. U.S. aircraft, which are already flying over Syria, could ground Assad’s air force by threatening to destroy any Syrian airplanes that take off or by destroying them on the ground. Grounding the Russian air force, which has been operating in Syria since September 2015, would be trickier without running the risk of a major power conflict, but it could be done by providing Syrian rebels with anti-aircraft missiles such as the Stingers that the U.S. supplied to the Afghan mujahedeen in the 1980s. (Electronic safeguards could be added to these missile systems to prevent them from being used outside of Syria.)
Why hasn’t the U.S. taken such steps? The responsibility for this inaction rests with one man—Barack Obama. It will forever mar his legacy. And it has created a vastly greater mess for his successor than George W. Bush left him with Iraq—which had been a mess until Petraeus under Bush’s guidance turned the war around with the “surge” and all but won it.
In August 2011, President Obama said: “For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside.” But the president rejected suggestions early on to impose a no-fly zone to ground Assad’s air force and to set up “safe zones” where rebels could organize and civilians could live without the fear of attack. He also rejected suggestions, including a detailed plan put forward by Petraeus in the summer of 2012, to train and arm the Syrian opposition to overthrow Assad. If such action had been taken, there likely would have been no outflow of refugees to destabilize neighboring states—and extremist organizations such as ISIS might never have come into existence.
Rather than trying to address the underlying cause of the conflict—the determination of Assad to hang on to power at all costs—Obama dithered and acted around the edges. In August 2012, he announced that the U.S. would not take any military action unless “we start seeing movement on the chemical-weapons front or the use of chemical weapons.” That, he said, in words that would come back to haunt him, would be a “red line for us.”
A year later, copious evidence had accumulated of the Assad regime using sarin gas on defenseless civilians. In early September 2013, Obama appeared to be days away from ordering air strikes. But then he blinked. Rather than bomb Assad, he reached a deal with him and his Russian sponsors: Assad would agree to voluntarily give up his chemical weapons in return for a promise from the U.S. not to attack him. Assad did—but not all of them. As recently as September 2016, there have been reports of the regime attacking civilians with poison gas. (ISIS also continues to use chemical weapons, including against U.S. troops, although it’s unclear whether the poisons come from an Assad stockpile or are newly manufactured.)
“I’m very proud of this moment,” Obama later told Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic. He’s the only one. To the rest of the world this was a devastating demonstration of irresolution that empowered the Assad killing machine and did incalculable harm to American credibility in ways that echo far beyond the Levant. The prime minister of France, Manuel Valls, told Goldberg: “By not intervening early, we have created a monster. We were absolutely certain that the U.S. administration would say yes. Working with the Americans, we had already seen the targets. It was a great surprise. If we had bombed as was planned, I think things would be different today.” Bashar Assad himself testified, inadvertently, to how much damage was caused by Obama’s refusal to act when he explained to the Associated Press on September 22 why he was resuming his offensive against Aleppo despite Kerry’s calls for a cease-fire: “American officials—they say something in the morning and they do the opposite in the evening,” he said. “You cannot take them at their word, to be frank. We don’t listen to their statements, we don’t care about it, we don’t believe it.”
Eschewing serious military action, Obama opted for a low-level program to train Syrian rebel forces—but only to fight ISIS. Rebels were told they would be supplied with American arms but could not use them against the Assad regime, which was bombarding their homes and killing their families. Few volunteers were willing to sign up under those conditions. In September 2015, General Lloyd Austin, then head of Central Command, had to admit to Congress that a $500 million train-and-equip program had resulted in only “four or five” rebels actually fighting ISIS.
Since then, the administration has all but given up training Arab fighters, preferring to lavish its largesse on the Kurds, who have the considerable appeal of being secularists. The U.S. has provided air cover and Special Forces advisers to assist the People’s Protection Units (YPG), a Kurdish militia that has liberated part of northern Syria from ISIS’s grip. But the YPG is more interested in establishing its own Kurdish state, known as Rojava, than in defeating ISIS. And U.S. support for this group has badly strained relations with Ankara, because the YPG is affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a Marxist terrorist group that is waging war on Turkey (and that has close ties to Iran). This is a major problem because it will be difficult to bring about any lasting resolution of the Syrian crisis without the active support of Turkey. Yet the U.S. and Turkey are now operating at cross-purposes. In late August 2016, the conflict reached another level of absurdity when the troops of one U.S. ally, Turkey, were fighting another U.S. ally, the YPG, in northern Syria.
Why hasn’t Obama been willing to do more? When asked that question, he always derides the possibility of effective action. As he recently told Doris Kearns Goodwin in an interview for Vanity Fair: “The conventional arguments about what could have been done are wrong. The notion that if we had provided some more modest arms to Syrian rebels—that somehow that would have led to Assad’s overthrow more decisively. The notion that if I had taken a pinprick strike when the chemical-weapons issue came out, as opposed to negotiating and getting all those chemical weapons out—that that would have been decisive. All those things I tend to be skeptical about.” These are straw men that Obama is knocking down—no one ever suggested “modest arms” or “pinprick strikes” as the solution to the conflict. A full-blown “train-and-equip program” combined with airpower to enforce a “no-fly” zone and “safe zones,” on the other hand, could have made a significant difference.
The flimsiness of Obama’s arguments suggests that something deeper is going on. What could it be? In the first place, he came to office determined to reverse his predecessor’s interventions in the Middle East. In pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq in 2011, Obama claimed, “The tide of war is receding.” That’s not true as a statement of fact—the U.S. pullout predictably restarted a war in Iraq. But it is an accurate depiction of the aspirations of this president who won a Nobel Peace Prize simply for being elected. Doing more in Syria would have shattered his self-image as a man of peace who never wanted to be a wartime president like George W. Bush.
Obama is risk-averse and inclined to believe that American action creates more problems than it solves. The risk he has been most concerned about was obviously American casualties. But three other risks have also guided his thinking: first, the risk of Sunni extremist groups taking over after Assad’s overthrow, a danger reinforced by the chaos that engulfed Libya after Muammar Qaddafi’s ouster. Second, the risk of alienating Assad’s supporters in Tehran. Obama saw a nuclear accord with Iran as his most cherished goal and he feared that action against Assad would make it impossible to reach a deal—or, now, to maintain a deal. The Wall Street Journal’s Jay Solomon reports in his book The Iran Wars that Iran explicitly threatened to pull out of the nuclear talks if Obama bombed Assad. Since 2015, a third risk has been added to the mix: the danger of confrontation with Russia, which has injected its forces into the conflict in a successful attempt to reverse an erosion of Assad’s power.
All of these risks are real and need to be managed, but what Obama never recognized is the risk of inaction—the greatest danger of all. If the U.S. continues to do little, the conflict will continue to spiral out of control, destroying more lives inside Syria and spewing conflict and instability far beyond its frontiers.
The policy that the Obama administration is pursuing—of bombing ISIS and supporting Kurdish militias to fight it while engaging in on-and-off negotiations with Vladimir Putin and Bashar Assad—is a recipe for futility. Even if ISIS is defeated, other extremist groups such as the Syria Conquest Front will simply expand into the resulting vacuum as long as the civil war continues and large swathes of the Syrian countryside remain ungoverned. The only way to defeat the extremists is to end the civil war and create a moderate state, or possibly multiple states if the existing state can’t be reassembled, capable of effectively policing Syria’s territory.
The most credible path forward has been offered by Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst and NSC staffer who now works at the Brookings Institution. He argues that “the United States could create a new Syrian military with a conventional structure and doctrine, one capable of defeating both the regime and the extremists. A decisive victory by this U.S.-backed army would force all parties to the negotiating table and give the United States the leverage to broker a power-sharing arrangement among the competing factions. This outcome would create the most favorable conditions for the emergence of a new Syrian state: one that is peaceful, pluralistic, inclusive, and capable of governing the entire country.”
Ah, a skeptic may reply, but hasn’t the U.S. already tried to train and arm the Syrian opposition? Not in a serious way. The requirement that U.S.-backed rebels battle only ISIS, not the Assad regime, has kept away most potential recruits. And even those who have signed up have gotten only a few weeks of training in weapons handling and small-unit skills and then been sent back to fight as part of ill-organized militias.
Pollack is proposing something much more ambitious: to build a conventional Syrian military force in Turkey and Jordan that would receive at least a year of training in combined-arms warfare. He writes: “Washington would need to provide the new army with heavy weapons, including tanks, armored personnel carriers, artillery, and surface-to-air missiles—vital tools for eliminating the regime’s current advantage in firepower. The new army would also need logistical support, communications equipment, transport, and medical gear to mount sustained offensive and defensive operations against the regime.”
The members of this new army, who could be recruited from among Syrians both inside and outside the country, would “have to be willing to leave their existing militias and become reassigned to new units without regard for religion, ethnicity, or geographic origin. Loyalty to the new army and to the vision of a democratic postwar Syria for which it would stand must supersede all other competing identities.” Because American trainers would work with this force on a daily basis, they would be able to root out extremists far more effectively than the current screening procedures that have made it all but impossible to approve recruits for training.
Once this force reaches critical mass, it can surge out of its bases in Jordan and Turkey, and, with American air support and American advisers, begin to take back ground from both the pro-Assad and anti-Assad militias. If this army shows that it is capable of winning military victories and of bringing law and order to the territory under its control, it will see a flood of new recruits. It can then grow to become the most potent military force in Syria—one that eventually will be capable of threatening the other factions with defeat and thus compelling them to reach a settlement.
This may sound like a far-fetched notion, but there is a precedent: In the 1990s, U.S. equipment and training for the Croatian army, along with American airpower, threatened the Serbs with defeat and made possible the success of the Dayton Peace Accords.
Russia and Iran will be tempted to play spoilers’ roles, just as Russia tried to do in the former Yugoslavia, but if the balance of power shifts against them on the ground, they will have no choice but to join in serious negotiations. The U.S. can make the process, which will involve ousting Assad, less painful for Moscow and Tehran by promising to look after their legitimate interest—for example, by safeguarding the rights of the Alawite minority (who belong to a Shiite-like sect), preventing a takeover by Sunni extremists, and allowing Russia to maintain a naval base at Tartus.
Moscow ultimately acquiesced in the Dayton Accords, and it likely would acquiesce in a settlement in Syria if the U.S. shows that it is serious about ending the war and ousting Assad. So far it hasn’t. All that Obama and Kerry have offered is a lot of empty verbiage without doing the hard work of laying the foundations for a durable peace. That task will await their successors.
Cleaning Up Obama’s Health-Care Mess
The unfulfilled promises of the Affordable Care Act will leave a tangle of crises for the next president.
s President Barack Obama leaves office, he is bequeathing his successor a colossal mess in the form of his signature legislative achievement—both from the active effort to change the American health-care system through the Affordable Care Act and from the failure to address the budgetary crisis that will overwhelm the system over the next two decades unless radical changes are made. Indeed, the extent of the health-care problems facing the next president will be far greater than we have seen previously—and vastly more difficult to fix than was the case when Obama became president in 2009.
Obama failed to address the long-term crisis in funding Medicare even as he layered an expensive and severely flawed new benefit for all Americans on top of it. And as he fiddled, the overall national debt significantly incurred by increases in health-care spending grew without letup by about $11 trillion. That is more than the accumulated total debt that had accrued in the administration of every previous U.S. president in our history combined.
The looming budgetary tsunami that will follow from this level of indebtedness will make landfall during the years from 2025 to 2035. In 2025, Medicaid spending will go above $1 trillion for the first time. By 2026, all of the baby boomers will have retired and will no longer be in the labor force. In 2028, the Medicare hospital trust fund will be rendered insolvent. If the predictions of the Obama team are accurate, far more Americans will then be in health plans largely managed and run by the public sector—just as the public sector’s spending on health care will overwhelm the federal government.
The responsibility for all this belongs to both parties, across multiple administrations and Congresses. But our outgoing president had a unique opportunity to deal with many of these problems and either ignored them or made them worse. He entered office with a mandate to do something about health care, and a readiness on the part of the American people to look at a reasonable option for getting that done. Unfortunately, the plan he did pursue, known now and forever as Obamacare, was not only costly, clunky, and complicated; it has also proved corrosive. The partisan way in which he passed it exacerbated tensions in Washington, made it less likely that the American people would accept it, and poisoned bipartisan relations so profoundly that it will now be harder to undertake the repairs that are needed both in the near and immediate future.
Obamacare was predicated on three main promises: that it would solve the problem of the 47 million uninsured; that it would bend the cost curve down; and that if you liked your health care you could keep it. In reality, the law was really focused on only the first one of those things: reducing the number of the uninsured.
And in fact, there are now fewer uninsured Americans as a result of the Affordable Care Act. That’s not much of an accomplishment, really. If the government is going to subsidize the purchase of insurance and make it illegal not to possess insurance, the obvious end result will be fewer people lacking insurance. According to Obama-administration numbers, about 20 million people have been covered as a result of the ACA. But this is a far cry from covering the entirety of the 47 million uninsured, which Obama called for as he sought to sell the law to the American people. And it’s far fewer even than the 32 million people the Congressional Budget Office initially predicted that the law would cover. In addition, the law did lead to large numbers of plan cancellations, generally estimated to be in the 2 to 7 million range. So the number of the newly covered is significantly lower than expected. And the administration also miscalculated how people would secure coverage. The law established, and sought to compel states to establish, so-called exchanges—publicly managed marketplaces for the purchase of medical plans from private insurers. But things didn’t go as planned and aren’t going as we were promised they would.
For one thing, even the 20 million number might be inflated by as much as 10 percent. It includes not only those in the exchanges but also those between the ages of 18 and 26 who must now be covered under their parents’ medical plans. There are somewhere between 2 and 3 million people in this category, and it’s not at all clear that without this new benefit they wouldn’t themselves have secured private-sector coverage from their own employers.
What’s more, a great many of the 20 million among the newly covered are there because of Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid—government-provided health care for the very poor. Medicaid is an extraordinarily costly and deeply flawed program whose tangible benefits are not always apparent. One study in Oregon even went so far as to suggest that those covered under Medicaid “generated no significant improvement in measured physical health outcomes” compared with those who had no coverage. A voter hearing of the great promise of the Affordable Care Act would have been very disappointed indeed to discover that all it brought with it was a Medicaid-eligibility designation.
Furthermore, 19 states did not even accept the Medicaid expansion because of entirely rational fears about its long-term fiscal implications. The bill for Medicaid is typically shared by the states and the federal government; the federal government picked up about 57 percent of costs before Obamacare went into effect. Such costs are a real burden for states. Indeed, Medicaid is the largest aggregate expense in most state budgets; about one-quarter of all state spending is on Medicaid. The federal government agreed to pick up 100 percent of the costs of the Medicaid expansion for the first few years before reducing its share to 90 percent and then lowering it still more by some undetermined number in the future. It is not surprising that some considerable number of governors feared that the indeterminate figure would in the future add considerable burden to the Medicaid costs that their states already bear.
Medicaid and the under-26 expansion, though, do not constitute the heart of the Affordable Care Act. The highly touted exchanges are the true center of Obamacare, and the picture they present is not a pretty one. The opening of the exchanges in the fall of 2013 proved that the warnings conservatives have long issued about the incompetence and ineptness of government were, if anything, an understatement. The sign-up mechanisms did not work, the waits were lengthy, and the inability to just check prices without disclosing one’s personal financial situation made one wonder if the geniuses behind the system had ever even heard of Amazon.com.
The reaction across the board to the rollout of the exchanges was brutal, and deserved. While no one talks about the disastrous rollout three years later, it did have real and long-lasting effects. First, to the extent that the buy-in on the exchanges is lower than the administration anticipated, that surely stems in some measure from their awful launch. In addition, one has to wonder if the disaster cemented an already extant sense in the American consciousness that government is just not capable of taking on and solving the complex problems of 21st-century America. To the extent that future presidents come up against a wave of skepticism regarding ambitious plans for new government initiatives, the Obamacare rollout will bear much of the blame.
The administration did sort out some of those initial technical glitches. But technical glitches were the easiest part of the problem to fix. Better engineering can fix a software problem, but it cannot solve the problem of skewed incentives and a flawed understanding of behavioral economics. The heart of the problem with the exchanges is that they feature poor risk pools. What this means in layman’s terms is that the exchanges include more sick people, and fewer healthy people, than are needed to make insurance plans break even. Healthy people pay in far more in premiums than they take out from an insurance plan, while sick people get more in benefits than they pay in premiums, co-pays, and deductibles. For that reason, a workable insurance plan must have many more healthy people than it does sick people, and the Obamacare exchanges do not have the proper ratio of healthy to sick. Most of the problems of the exchanges stem from this simple fact. In 2016, 28 percent of exchange customers are in the 18-to-35 age range. For the risk pools to be properly balanced, the exchanges need 35 percent of their customers to be 18 to 35.
The problem is easy to explain; it’s far harder to solve. A senior hospital official in Maryland described the situation to me in the following way: On the Maryland exchanges, it takes eight hours to sign up for an Obamacare exchange plan. If you are young and healthy, those eight hours sound interminable and like a waste of time and effort. If you are sick, those eight hours are an essential investment in making sure that you or a dependent receive the coverage needed to overcome serious health challenges. The sick make the investment; the healthy people go rock climbing or skateboarding or do whatever it is young and healthy people do.
This is not to suggest that simply reducing the amount of time it takes to sign up would miraculously heal the ills of the exchanges. The sickness is far deeper than that. The incentives in the exchanges are askew, as many healthy people just do not want to buy the plans, regardless of wait times, while sick people both want to and need to buy them. The Maryland example is a stark illustration of the problem, but it is not the totality of the problem.
One of the manifestations of the flawed risk pool is that premiums are rising, and rising quickly. Despite promises that the ACA would “bend the cost curve down,” the average premium hike sought by insurance companies for 2017 is a whopping 24 percent. These increases come on top of earlier premium spikes in 2014. In President Obama’s home state of Illinois, insurers are seeking to increase premiums of Obamacare exchange plans by up to 45 percent.
When confronted with evidence of premium hikes on the exchanges, the Obama administration response is oddly off point. Its spokesmen consistently reiterate that poor customers do not pay those rates because the subsidies provided by Obamacare cover much of the cost. This is certainly true for some of the customers, but this argument neglects two key points. First, only certain people are receiving the subsidies. The rest do have to pay the full freight, calling into question whether the exchanges are supposed to be a viable health exchange, or just a vehicle for costly subsidies for low-income Americans. Second, the fact that these miraculous subsidies cover part of the costs conveniently neglects to note that someone is paying for said subsidies. That said someone is you, dear reader, in the form of taxes and future debt obligations of the United States government. To say that rate hikes don’t matter because subsidies pay the cost is like saying that tuition prices don’t matter because some people get financial aid.
A second manifestation of the central Obamacare problem is that insurers are leaving the Obamacare exchange business. They are losing money on the exchanges, which leaves them with only two options: either raise rates sufficiently to cover the costs, which would spark the ire of both the Obama administration and the American people; or leave the exchanges, raising the ire of the Obama administration but not the American people. Some insurers, like Aetna and United (which lost more than $1 billion in its exchange plans) have largely pulled out. Blue Cross, in contrast, is staying in, but at a cost. Blue Cross plans saw their profits reduced by 75 percent from 2013 to 2015. So it is asking for large and unpopular premium hikes: That requested premium increase in Illinois of 45 percent was for a Blue Cross plan.
The ACA had hoped to solve the problem of having insufficient numbers of insurers participating by the creation of something called co-ops. Co-ops were intended to provide an alternative to the private insurance plans; they were nonprofit plans subsidized by government that would lack the supposedly rapacious features of profit-seeking insurance companies. In fact, one of the rules of these co-ops (23 were established) was that their boards of directors could not include anyone with previous ties to any of the existing carriers. As these newfangled plans lacked any kind of institutional knowledge of the workings of the health-care markets, unsurprisingly, most of the co-ops have collapsed at a cost of well over a billion dollars. They also left 250,000 people stranded and needing to look elsewhere for insurance coverage.
Without the co-ops, and with many insurers leaving, those who remain on the Obamacare exchanges have precious few choices. This means costs will continue to rise, and remaining plans, facing little competition, will have precious little incentive to improve their products. All of this—the poor risk pools, the rate hikes, the failure of subsidized entities, the lack of competition on the exchanges—was not only predictable to those with an understanding of market economics, but was widely predicted before the passage of the law in 2010.
So the next president will inherit a large, expensive, and costly subsidy program that does nothing to improve the overall cost and quality challenges of our health system. More Americans are now covered than was the case at the start of the Obama administration, but at great cost. Those costs include the more than $1 trillion spent on the programs already, Medicare cuts that can now no longer be applied to improving that program’s failing finances, the creation of a new program that will be expensive to amend or politically costly to eliminate, and a marked increase in the skepticism of the American people in government’s ability to accomplish much of anything.
In addition, and this is no a small thing, Obama handled both the health reform and our related fiscal challenge in such a heavy-handed way that it will be hard for the next president to build bipartisan coalitions with Congress to address thorny problems. Obama’s heavy-handedness started early in his tenure and continued throughout. A few stories illustrate the marked rudeness of his approach. Early on, when challenged at a Potemkin-like forum for addressing his stimulus package, Obama told then–House Minority Whip Eric Cantor and other GOP leaders, “I won.” During complex negotiations over the budget in 2012, Obama told Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell that “Rohit is being a real jerk about the spending offsets,” referring to McConnell Deputy Chief of Staff Rohit Kumar. “Personally criticizing a member of my staff hardly seemed like the way to negotiate a deal,” McConnell observed in his recent book, The Long Game. Obama also insulted Paul Ryan, then the chairman of the House Budget Committee, by inviting him to a presidential speech on the budget and then using the speech as an opportunity to criticize Ryan, to his face, for his budgetary approach. All this revealed a consistent unwillingness to work in a bipartisan way to make compromises with Congress and get things done. He initially got his flawed health-care bill through with no GOP votes, and he refused to make adjustments as circumstances changed.
All presidents face crises. They cannot know what those crises will be, but they do know that they will face them, and that they will be judged on how they respond. In this case, the new president will face a predictable crisis: the possibility of economic collapse in the immediate aftermath of his (possible) second term due to an unsustainable debt of $19 trillion and counting. President Obama has made his successor’s challenges infinitely more difficult.
We’re Only Human
Review of 'The Kingdom of Speech,' by Tom Wolfe
W
hen The Kingdom of Speech, Tom Wolfe’s new book-length essay, was published in late summer, it received generally respectful reviews in the popular press, fitting for the Grand Old Man of Letters that Wolfe, through no fault of his own, has become. Those of us who are longtime fanboys of America’s greatest living essayist, social observer, and satirist were especially pleased to see that the reviewers managed to resist the temptation to use their reviews to release their long-stifled desire to imitate Wolfe’s highly imitable style: “Tom . . . believe it . . . Wolfe . . . watch out . . . delivers the GOODS!::: tttttthhhwwwack!!!” for example, or worse.
I think the first time a reviewer tried this was in 1965, more than half a century ago. And reviewers haven’t stopped trying, even though, as a teenager I know once said in another context, it has become increasingly less funny ever since.
This time around the notable exception was found in a ferociously negative review in the Washington Post. The reviewer was Jerry Coyne, a biologist from the University of Chicago and a volunteer border cop who patrols the perimeter where science and popular culture meet, making sure that scientists are accorded the proper deference. The Kingdom of Speech is deeply transgressive in this way. Wolfe makes sport of scientific pretensions generally and neo-Darwinian pretensions specifically, and Coyne, a neo-Darwinist to the soles of his Birkenstocks, isn’t going to let a mere journalist, or even a Grand Old Man of Letters, get away with it. And so:
Where did language come from? Wolfe has an answer! White suit unsullied by any real research, he proposes . . . yes . . . his own theory of language. And it’s a doozy! Language arose as . . . wait for it . . . a MNEMONIC DEVICE! Yes, that’s right: We devised words to help us remember objects and facts and then—poof! —we had language!!
In hands less skilled than Tom Wolfe’s, a little of this can go a long way, and Coyne spends the rest of his review insulting Wolfe in a more straightforward manner. He charges him with ignorance and unreason and, above all, presumption. Among scientists, this is a common reaction to an uppity layman. In their better moods, even scientific fundamentalists will tell you the glory of science lies in the endless empirical testing and revision of theories, the back-and-forth of assertion and rebuttal, the stuttering, incremental advance toward truth, the openness to dissent and new ideas. And most often that’s what science is. Let an uncredentialed outsider sneak into the lab, however, asking rude questions about one theory or another, and—wham!—the back-and-forth is shut down and something called “settled science” rises in its place to keep the amateurs at bay.
In neo-Darwinism, the “settled science” has spread like kudzu, as more and more areas of human life, from morality to music, are recast as nothing more than the consequence of natural selection. Charles Darwin, Wolfe points out, proposed his version of evolution with an adventurer named Alfred Wallace, who had separately arrived at the same theory at roughly the same time. Wallace eventually went nuts, but before he did, he parted ways with Darwin over the question of how much of human—as opposed to animal—life the theory could explain.
At first, Darwin timidly asserted that his grand theory described only the evolution of the animal kingdom. “But his real dream,” writes Wolfe, “was of being the genius who showed the world that man was just an animal himself, evolved from other animals—and that his mighty mental abilities had evolved the same way.”
Wallace wasn’t willing to go so far. Human beings, Wallace wrote, possessed powers that were radically discontinuous with the kinds of adaptations that natural selection could account for. Abstract thought, the use of language, the creation of music and art, and consciousness as we know it are absent from even the highest primates. More, Darwinian theory couldn’t show how these distinctively human attributes might have evolved step by step from lower species, through a steady series of environmental adaptations, to their present advanced state. Wallace concluded that some process must be operating in nature in addition to the materialist machinery of natural selection.
We might call this view—though Wolfe doesn’t use the term—“human exceptionalism.” Among scientists in good standing, Wallace wasn’t alone in advocating it. Max Muller, a pioneering 19th-century linguist at Oxford, read Darwin’s work and declared that the use of language was the gift that definitively separated human beings from the animal kingdom. It was, Muller said, “our Rubicon, and no brute will dare to cross it.” Nowadays, neo-Darwinians would dismiss mulish Muller as a “speciesist.”
Wolfe illustrates Darwin’s frustration at these dissents with his usual novelistic vividness. Here he imagines the great theorist reading Wallace’s work, which he took as a personal betrayal.
In a regular frenzy Charlie began scrawling NO! – NO! – NO! – NO! – in the margins of his copy and then hurling spears in the form of exclamation points. Only a few wound up immediately following the NOs. The rest of them hit the page in the form of . . . take that, Wallace! . . . right through your temporal fossa and your little fifty-cubic-inch brain cavity! . . . and this one! . . . right through your bowels! . . . and this one . . . a regular crotch crusher! . . . ” [ellipses, duh, in the original].
You don’t hear much about Wallace anymore, and you hear even less about Muller, while their contemporary Darwin became, of course, one of the most famous men who ever lived. Human exceptionalism has a lot to do with their relative reputations. Wallace embraced it and so did Muller; indeed, they thought it was self-evident. Darwin didn’t. And most scientists, especially fundamentalists like Jerry Coyne, have inherited Darwin’s materialism as dogma. It’s a good deal for scientists. After all, if everything we consider uniquely human is a consequence of purely materialistic processes, then the guys who study materialistic processes for a living hold the key to every human question. It’s nice work if you can get it.
There’s a problem, though. Evolutionary theory is no closer than it was in Darwin’s day to explaining in materialist terms how traits like self-consciousness and language came to be. The scientists keep trying, of course, as scientists should. One of the most advanced efforts to explain language as an evolutionary adaptation has been undertaken by the linguist Noam Chomsky of MIT. After 80 pages chaffing Darwin, Wolfe turns his attention Chomsky-ward, and the result is brutal.
For Wolfe, Chomsky is a made-to-order figure of fun. He trails all the red banners of respectability that amuse Wolfe even as they cow the rest of us. Chomsky is wildly overpraised; Wolfe notes that in a 1986 survey of influential thinkers, “Chomsky came in eighth . . . in very fast company . . . the first seven were Marx, Lenin, Shakespeare, Aristotle, the Bible, Plato, and Freud.” Chomsky’s dour look and his soul-deep humorlessness are easy to mistake for the gravitas of genius. As a scientist, he is averse to meat-and-potatoes field research, preferring to weave abstract theories of ever greater complexity. He has the careerist’s eerie ability to walk away from disasters of his own making, intellectual or otherwise, with scarcely a scratch and nary a dent to his public reputation, which in any case rests less on his scientific achievement than on his pristinely left-wing politics. His fellow academics revered him for his brave opposition to any assertion of American power in the world, from Vietnam to Grenada to Iraq.
With such a character, Wolfe finds himself on well-grooved ground. Chomsky, he writes, “marched in the most publicized demonstration of all, the March on the Pentagon in 1967. He proved he was the real thing. He got himself arrested and wound up in the same cell with Norman Mailer, who was an ‘activist’ of what was known as the Radical Chic variety. A Radical Chic protester got himself arrested in the late morning or early afternoon, in mild weather. He was booked and released in time to make it to the Electric Circus, that year’s New York nightspot of the century, and tell war stories.” That last phrase marks the master’s touch.
Chomsky’s effort to explain human language in evolutionary terms, and thus reinforce the case against human exceptionalism, has largely failed. Wolfe outlines the reasons in jaunty style, but there are others he doesn’t get to. “Evidence Rebuts Chomsky’s Theory of Language Learning,” read the headline in the September Scientific American. “Recently,” write the two authors, both linguists, “cognitive scientists and linguists have abandoned Chomsky’s ‘universal grammar’ theory in droves because of new research examining many different languages—and the way young children learn to understand and speak the tongues of their communities. That work fails to support Chomsky’s assertions.” Chomsky’s armchair theorizing is being dismantled by the accumulation of empirical evidence, which is how scientists told us science works all along.
The Kingdom of Speech is popular intellectual history of the most exhilarating kind. Its closest antecedents came along nearly 40 years ago, both of them also by Wolfe. The Painted Word laid waste the world of abstract art, and From Bauhaus to Our House attacked the absurdities of modernist architecture. In all three of these books, Wolfe lampoons the reigning orthodoxy of our intellectual elites—specialists, critics, experts, publicists, academics, nearly everyone who has an interest, professional or rooting, in the status quo, even as they try to persuade the rest of us of notions that we know are crazy. We’re supposed to think that the buildings of Bauhaus are lovely and functional and humane? That nonrepresentational painting is an aesthetic advance over traditional art? As smart as the smart guys and much more amiable, Wolfe has made himself the popularizer of common sense.
Those earlier books provoked outrage from the specialists, and The Kingdom of Speech has inspired the same reaction from the same quarters. Coyne is not the only scientist who rushed to the blogs and manned the message boards to post dozens of objections to the book and its argument. Wolfe is simply in over his head, they say. A recurring charge is that he never takes care to define his terms—using, for example, the words “speech” and “language” interchangeably, which a specialist would never do.
The particular criticism has merit, but it doesn’t travel very far. As a journalist and entertainer, Wolfe has an obligation to avoid the tedium that makes scientific publications interesting to scientists and nobody else. That obligation doesn’t relieve him of the obligation to be accurate; the two demands live side by side. But it does require him to shun pedantry, to keep his readers away from thickets of technical arguments and counterarguments that will leave them half-dead. The trick for the popularizer is to write both generally and vividly, skirting complicating niceties here and there, while never failing to steer the reader toward the truth.
The alternative is grim indeed. Clearing the popularizers from the field, as many specialists would like to do, would cede all scientific argument to scientists, who in many notable cases have not earned the deference they demand. The danger is doubled when scientists use science to draw metaphysical lessons—when, that is, they assert that human beings and primates are in essence the same kind of creature. A flurry of data and polysyllabic detail shouldn’t obscure the fact that such a thesis defies human experience and devalues the noblest human endeavors (including science, by the way).
Wolfe joins a small and hardy band of writers and other high-brows who take joy in staring down the bullies of scientism: Marilynne Robinson, David Berlinski, Wendell Berry, Thomas Nagel, a few others. But Wolfe is the best of them. And, listen, he does it . . . somehow . . . I mean, really!!!! – at the (((HEE_YAH!))) mother-lovin’ age of eighty-freakin’-six!!!!
(Sorry.)
Donald Trump, Media Darling
Mediacracy
ow did the Republican Party reach this pass? What led the GOP to nominate to the highest office in the land an intemperate political neophyte who is almost certain to lose? Could the election have gone differently if Republicans had chosen another candidate?
Important questions. No doubt you already have read plenty of answers to them. Culprits have been identified, causes traced, theories proffered. There are few innocent parties. But let us not forget, as we read the postmortems and autopsies and think pieces, that Donald Trump is a creation of the American media and entertainment industry.
For decades, that industry publicized him, coddled him, mocked him, profited from him. It built him up. Allowed him to spread the myth of Trump, of the strong, successful, decisive, take-no-prisoners business tycoon. And then, once Trump approached the Oval Office, once he was the sole obstacle between Hillary Clinton and the White House, these same networks and outlets turned on him. Abandoned him. Revealed to the world what they had known about Trump all along. It wasn’t Trump who changed over the course of this election. It was the media.
This is not my opinion. Thomas E. Patterson, a professor at Harvard, is an expert on media and politics. He has been analyzing coverage of the 2016 primary and general election. In a series of reports, he has revealed how the media have shaped the flow of the race through their preference for news values over political values—love of sensation, of conflict, of novelty, of character and story. His conclusion: “Trump is arguably the first bona fide media-created presidential nominee.”
Yes, ultimately the political parties themselves are responsible for the individuals they nominate. What Patterson’s research tells us, however, is that the parties do not choose these nominees in a vacuum. They operate within a context. A context generated by media.
Patterson says poll numbers and fundraising typically determine the amount of coverage a candidate receives before the primaries begin. Trump is the exception: “When his news coverage began to shoot up, he was not high in the trial-heat polls and had raised almost no money.”
What Trump had was a reputation based on his books, television programs, talk-show appearances, apparel, and properties. He also had a talent for delivering ratings and buzz. He knew when to play to type and when not, when to escalate his attacks and when to switch topics. Gross, brash, polarizing, unpredictable, he was above all interesting.
Patterson examined Fox, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, CBS, NBC, the Washington Post, and the New York Times during 2015. Not only did Trump dominate coverage—“across all the outlets, Trump’s coverage was roughly 2-to-1 favorable.” Why? Because coverage of Trump during this period focused on poll numbers and campaign process rather than public policy and character. The details of Trump’s positions—there are no details—were less important than the fact that he was “gaining ground” and overtaking his rivals in the horse race.
What counted were the crowds, the polls, and the enthusiasm. A majority of Trump coverage was about exactly these topics. Just 12 percent was devoted to his issues and ideology. A piddling 6 percent was about his personal qualities, such as they are. As Republican voters learned of how well Trump was doing, they became more open to supporting him. The storyline of the “Trump phenomenon” was more than captivating. It was self-fulfilling.
The story continued as the primary season began. Patterson found that, between January 1 and June 7, 2016, the Republicans received two-thirds of total coverage. The bulk of this coverage went to Trump: “There was not a single week when Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, or John Kasich topped Trump’s level of coverage.” Indeed, Trump’s media advantage was so overwhelming that he earned more headlines than either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders even after he was the only Republican left.
One analytics firm pegs the value of Trump’s free media during the primary at more than $2 billion. The messages broadcast about Trump continued to be positive as electoral victories for the most part crowded out stories of his extremism and ill temper. “Trump’s coverage during the primary period was almost evenly balanced,” writes Patterson, “with positive statements about his candidacy (49 percent) nearly equal to negative ones (51 percent).” Contrast those numbers with Rubio’s, whose coverage was 56 percent negative and 44 percent positive.
Then the turn happened. By May 2016, Trump was unopposed. “Victories in the absence of competitors are less newsworthy,” Patterson says, “opening up news time and space for other subjects.” That was a problem. Coverage of Trump soured: “Over the final five weeks of the primary season, 61 percent of news statements about Trump were negative and only 39 percent were positive.”
The media obsession with celebrity and the horse race, along with its titillation at a Republican who embodied the worst stereotypes of his party, helped Donald Trump win the GOP nomination. It was only after he got his prize that the media saw fit to go after his tax returns, his phony university, his foundation, his tenuous grasp of facts, and his connections to Russia. By the end of the Republican convention, negative Trump stories outnumbered positive ones by three to one.
Much of this coverage was self-inflicted and well deserved. Presidential nominees should be scrutinized. The things Donald Trump has said and done throw into question his suitability for any office, much less the presidency of the United States. But one cannot help wondering what the outcome of the Republican primary might have been if the media had made an issue of Trump’s personality and history at any point before he defeated his internal opposition.
The billions in free media during the primary amounted to positive advertising for Trump. When the general election began, however, that same free media became the most expensive negative advertisement of all time. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton was closing the attention deficit. “Clinton’s post-convention bounce brought her media coverage even with Trump’s,” reported mediaQuant, “breaking the $500 million mark for monthly earned media value.” By this point, her coverage, needless to say, had turned positive.
“Trump has freed journalists from the handcuffs of false equivalence,” CNN’s Brian Stelter told Ezra Klein. But this unshackling occurred only at the most convenient moment for the candidate the media overwhelmingly supports. Funny it did not happen during the 30 years when the New York–based media slapped Trump on newspaper and magazine covers, invited him to Stern and Letterman and Today, paid him millions to burnish his celebrity on reality television, reveled in his vulgarity and standoffishness, snickered at him behind the scenes even as audiences across the country fell for his con game. These supposedly reputable media institutions turned Donald Trump into a star long before Roger Ailes had him on Fox News Channel. And they, too, deserve some of the blame.