Week 7: The Values and the Stakes
Week 7: The Values and the Stakes
The Republican Party is a now a new beast, not isolationist, but "fellow travellers" – housing transnational authoritarian sympathies.
This week there were a pair of articles in the New York Times that quite starkly failed to understand what is going on within the Republican Party. Part of the criticism of the American press since Donald Trump emerged as a political candidate is that journalists have continued to cover politics as if there are two normal political parties within the country. Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University, has described this as continuing to “call the odds, not the stakes.”
This is the persistence of horse-race journalism – habits of the industry that haven’t adjusted to the realities of the era. Yet this failure to grasp the current nature of the Republican Party also includes trying to fit the party into some kind of recognisable framework from America’s past.
This week there were two articles in the New York Times that succumbed to this line of thinking. There was a piece of news analysis titled Trump’s NATO Threat Reflects a Wider Shift on America’s Place in the World by Peter Barker, and an opinion piece by Bret Stephens titled The Isolationist G.O.P., Again.
Both pieces argue that the Republican Party, and in particular its MAGA majority, is seeking to retreat from the world, framing this as part of an isolationist tradition in American politics. There is, of course, a failure to understand the role that Washington plays in defending global norms (albeit imperfectly and occasionally with great stupidity). But there is something else going on, something that is tied to a new set of values.
This set of values can be witnessed in a response to a tweet from Senator Thom Tillis, who pointed out the obvious that Tucker Carlson has became a useful idiot for Russia and Vladimir Putin (although useful idiot implies some naïvety, Carlson is more of an enthusiast and active propagandist). This particular response called Tillis “a traitor” (many other responses were actively hostile to him, and Twitter is filled with similar sentiments around Russian behaviour especially after Alexei Navalny’s death).
It’s worth pondering this for a minute and thinking about how extraordinary this perspective is. A senator pointing out that a journalist (using the term loosely) is promoting the interests of an American adversary and a brutal belligerent is the person considered to be traitorous. Although this person making the accusation may consider themselves patriotic, they have a set of values that are highly distinct from what could traditionally be understood as American patriotism.
Of course, we can distinguish between patriotism and nationalism, however, this is clearly not even nationalism as we would usually identify it. It is set of authoritarian values that these people identify with – values represented by Putin and Trump – and these values take precedence over America’s interests (and the values advocated in the country’s founding documents). This is another way that the left-right spectrum obscures more than it illuminates. This values system is the same as Western sympathisers with communist regimes during to the Cold War. We used to call these people “fellow travellers”.
This sentiment bubbling up within the Republican Party and its supporters is therefore not “isolationist”. It’s a transnational authoritarian sympathy – highly engaged with the world (or at least the worst elements within it). While these people may wrap themselves in the American flag, this is a visual ruse. A way of disguising their true intent. Or a tool they use in their quest to fully capture the U.S state.
This capturing would create a new set of structures and behaviours that flow from them. These would undoubtedly shift U.S alignment away from the West and towards authoritarian states like Russia and China. Strategic competition between the U.S and China may make the latter difficult to see, but Trump’s values and the Republican Party’s values are now far more closely aligned to the Chinese Communist Party’s mode of operation than to the democratic, constitutional, and broader enlightenment values that have previously guided the country.
Understanding these new values within the Republican Party is what it means to consider the stakes of the forthcoming presidential election.
This Week’s Reading
Indian Ocean Leaders Warn of Threats to Shipping, Stability
Grant Wyeth – The Diplomat
“This freedom of navigation exists because states have agreed that it is in everyone’s interest. It was notable that smaller states at the conference – including landlocked ones like Nepal and Bhutan, which also rely on the Indian Ocean – were keen to emphasize their own concerns about challenges to UNCLOS. It is smaller states that benefit the most from mutually beneficial rules and norms, as they often lack the muscle to protect their own interests.
This was a point acknowledged by Wong, who stressed the desire for a “region that is peaceful and predictable…Where a larger country does not determine the fate of a smaller country.” Such a region relies on a “credible military capability” that can make the risks of challenging these norms far too great.
Which leads to the other elephant in the conference room – the United States. We have all been fortunate to live during a period where the world’s most powerful state has acted as a guarantor of freedom of navigation. This has enabled a period of extraordinary prosperity for many, and a reduction in extreme poverty for others. Yet a burgeoning disinterest in being such a guarantor – especially within the Republican Party – is the other major threat to stability in the Indo-Pacific. This trend makes the concerns about China expressed at the Indian Ocean Conference all the more nerve-wracking.”
Putting “Australia” At The Centre Of The Country’s Foreign Policy
Melissa Conley Tyler & Grant Wyeth – The Interpreter
“It is helpful for Canberra to comprehend just how much international engagement occurs outside of the federal government. Feeding into this would be a greater awareness of future industries and the educational pathways that lead to them. There is an opportunity to identify the industries that Australia will require for the future, how these industries relate to the country’s economic and security interests – as well as environmental responsibilities – and how Australia’s education systems can best facilitate these desired outcomes.
In another example, Australia’s education systems should have the ambition for the country to be a leader, not a follower, in many areas of science and technology. There is a disconnect between Australia’s research capabilities and what it is commercialising. A whole-of-nation approach can better understand why the country’s research capabilities aren’t being utilised effectively, with the intention of building an innovation economy that matches – or exceeds – Australia’s peers in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.”
Andrew S. Erickson, Gabriel B. Collins, & Matt Pottinger
“Taiwan is a democratic standout in another important respect: its faith in democracy is growing at a time when many democracies are doubting their system of government. A Taiwan Foundation for Democracy poll in 2023 found that three-quarters of Taiwanese believe that although there are problems with democracy, it remains the best system. And in a refreshing contrast with the United States, younger people were especially likely to hold that view.
It is difficult to overstate the significance of Taiwan’s strong democracy, given the political realities just across the Taiwan Strait, where more than 1.4 billion people sharing many linguistic and cultural traditions are subject to totalitarian rule. Numerous Chinese citizens draw inspiration from Taiwan’s political transition from martial law to democracy, which offers a model for what China could become. Fearing precisely such a result, officials in Beijing have long tried to caricature Taiwan as slavishly imitating Western forms of governance. But it is actually the Chinese Communist Party that is doing so by clinging to its Marxist-Leninist system, a discredited political model imported from Europe. A Chinese street protester caught on video in late 2022 highlighted the absurdity of the accusation that he was manipulated by foreign forces. “What ‘foreign forces’ are you referring to?” he asked. “Is it Marx and Engels? Is it Stalin? Is it Lenin?”
The loss of Taiwan as a democratic alternative would end the experiment with popular, multiparty self-governance by a society with significant Chinese heritage, with bad tidings for the possibility of democracy in China and far beyond.”
Aluf Benn – Foreign Policy
“The trauma of October 7 has forced Israelis, once again, to realize that the conflict with the Palestinians is central to their national identity and a threat to their well-being. It cannot be overlooked or sidestepped, and continuing the occupation, expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank, laying siege to Gaza, and refusing to make any territorial compromise (or even recognize Palestinian rights) will not bring the country lasting security. Yet recovering from this war and changing course is bound to be extremely difficult, and not just because Netanyahu does not want to resolve the Palestinian conflict. The war has caught Israel at perhaps its most divided moment in history. In the years leading up to the attack, the country was fractured by Netanyahu’s effort to undermine its democratic institutions and turn it into a theocratic, nationalist autocracy. His bills and reforms provoked widespread protests and dissension that threatened to tear the country apart before the war and will haunt it once the conflict ends. In fact, the fight over Netanyahu’s political survival will become even more intense than it was before October 7, making it hard for the country to pursue peace.”
Isaiah Berlin and the Tragedy of Pluralism
Damon Linker – Persuasion
“But Berlin doesn’t just highlight the tensions within liberty for its own sake. He does so because he means to draw our attention to the tensions within and among many other moral ideals (or “values,” as he calls them). Consider the following moral clashes: Negative liberty v. positive liberty; liberty of the individual v. the safety and security of the community, group, or nation; deference to authority v. individual autonomy; sanctity and piety v. skepticism, curiosity, and irony.
Berlin maintained that every ideal listed above, on either side of each clash, is worthwhile. He then divided the human world into two broad human types—those who recognise these clashes and accept the need for trade-offs to negotiate them, and those who refuse either to recognise or accept the need for such choices. In an essay written a few years before “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Berlin adapted a saying by the Greek poet Archilochus—“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”—in order to flesh out the contrast.
As my friend and teacher Mark Lilla put it in an essay for the Wall Street Journal about Berlin written a year after his death in 1997: “Hedgehogs believe that all truths—scientific, moral, political, religious—are compatible, and indeed ultimately one. In politics, these are the most dangerous of men.” Berlin called their outlook “monism” (or one-ism). Totalitarianism of the far right and far left were expressions of monistic ideology, which meant that the charnel house of World War II, no less than the liberal West’s high-stakes standoff with Soviet communism in the early years of the Cold War, was a function of people in positions of power in totalitarian governments (and their propagandistic apologists elsewhere in the world) thinking like hedgehogs.
Foxes, by contrast, “see the complications of living in a world of many truths and are less quick to judge,” according to Lilla. “They do not deny the notion of truth; they simply see that we cannot always reconcile all things that are truly good and thus must make compromises among them.”
Matt Johnson – Quillette
“For many, peace and prosperity aren’t enough. The citizens of liberal democracies today are among the most fortunate human beings who have ever lived. Their societies are stable, rich, and free. They have access to technology and resources that would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago. While it’s true that inequality is rising, social spending as a share of GDP has increased dramatically since the 1960s. Life expectancy, GDP per capita, and leisure time have all risen, while pollution, warfare, and violent crime have fallen. Yet it’s difficult to remember a time—particularly in the United States—when politics was more deranged by tribal hatred, conspiracism, and cynicism.
Fukuyama is right that there’s no viable ideological challenger to liberal democracy. But he had a suspicion in 1989 that liberal democracy wouldn’t be enough for many of its beneficiaries. They would crave conflict and destabilisation; they would exchange the stability and prosperity of democracy for the thrill of ideological combat and blind partisan loyalty; they would search for new ways to get history started again. Even if these people ultimately fail to dislodge the democratic institutions that have held strong for so long—which is still the likeliest outcome—they will create a lot of chaos and misery along the way.”
Anne Applebaum – The Atlantic
“The enormous contrast between Navalny’s civic courage and the corruption of Putin’s regime will remain. Putin is fighting a bloody, lawless, unnecessary war, in which hundreds of thousands of ordinary Russians have been killed or wounded, for no reason other than to serve his own egotistical vision. He is running a cowardly, micromanaged reelection campaign, one in which all real opponents are eliminated and the only candidate who gets airtime is himself. Instead of facing real questions or challenges, he meets tame propagandists such as Tucker Carlson, to whom he offers nothing more than lengthy, circular, and completely false versions of history.
Even behind bars Navalny was a real threat to Putin, because he was living proof that courage is possible, that truth exists, that Russia could be a different kind of country. For a dictator who survives thanks to lies and violence, that kind of challenge was intolerable. Now Putin will be forced to fight against Navalny’s memory, and that is a battle he will never win.”
Ritual Humiliation: The Favourite Sport of Autocrats
Ruth Ben-Ghiat – Lucid
“Autocrats are fragile and insecure creatures who are always looking over their shoulder to see who is after them. To build themselves up and deter others from challenging their power, they take others down in public, letting them know exactly where they stand and how much they scorn them.
Ritual humiliation also translates into governmental practices which create an environment in which no one feels safe, no matter how much of the leader’s dirty work they do and how many compliments they bestow on him. And yet these leaders never lack a steady supply of opportunists and profiteers who are all too willing to play his game to the detriment of their dignity. The GOP is the latest example.”
Trump’s Awful Truth: The US Can Go It Alone
Simon Kuper – Financial Times
”He intuits something fundamental about Americans: their scariest enemies are within. That’s why every foreign war gets converted into an American culture war. In the 1950s, the belief that the Soviets were going to attack was transmuted into the McCarthyite hunt for mostly imaginary American communists. Today, Israel’s war in Gaza morphs into a Republican crusade against university presidents, while Ukraine’s fight for survival becomes a Trumpian weapon to bash the Democrats.
Trump’s political genius lies in expressing aspects of the American id that were taboo in Washington. Insofar as he thinks about the world beyond the US, he wants to hurt it. Nationalists elsewhere fantasise about ditching alliances and acting alone. Britain has tried this with Brexit, Russia with various invasions and Israel in Gaza. Trump realises that the impregnable US actually could go it alone. It can downgrade allies to clients. In his long-standing vision of Nato as a US-run protection scheme, he sees Russia as the “muscle”, scaring Europeans into paying up.”
Earlier this week I was rewatching the San Junipero episode of Black Mirror (one of the truly great episodes from a hit or miss series) – an episode with an amazing 80s soundtrack – and was reminded of Robbie Nevil’s C’est La Vie. An amazing pop song worthy of continued exposure and respect.