democracy

This Week's Show •

Documenting Democracy: Fred Wiseman’s ‘City Hall’

What Fred Wiseman found in Boston City Hall is not what he was looking for.  The master of documentary film is famous for his almost innocent camera eye that unlocks visual drama in big institutions ...

What Fred Wiseman found in Boston City Hall is not what he was looking for.  The master of documentary film is famous for his almost innocent camera eye that unlocks visual drama in big institutions — the New York Public Library, the Paris Opera, or in his early days: Bridgewater State Mental Hospital in 1960s Massachusetts. So why not finally get inside the modern brick and concrete fortress of official life in his hometown, and see what’s going on in the faces, the meeting rooms, the tone of voice in local affairs.  What he found was simpler than all that.  It was the un-Trump in the un-Washington. An almost astonishing civility, good humor, what looks like good faith in the hundreds of negotiations every day that keep a community going, and growing.

  • The concrete-and-brick interior of Boston’s City Hall building

Fred Wiseman shot his film “City Hall” in Boston toward the end of 2018—before COVID, before the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, before the vote that elected Joe Biden president.  It was 10 weeks in the shooting in the nooks and crannies of city services. Then it was 10 months in the alchemy of editing and shaping what the legendary Wiseman eye has seen. It is now a four-and-a-half hour movie — between limited release in theaters and national exposure on public television.  And already it is a field day for reviewers far and wide: an artist’s impression of local politics and public conversation that seem to have turned upside down and are not settled yet.  To my eye and ear, Fred Wiseman’s “City Hall” feels like a classic that dates itself before the flood, so to speak, but is not at all frozen in time.

  • Martin Walsh, mayor of Boston
  • Lydia Edwards, Boston city councilor

This hour, we’re in conversation with Fred Wiseman, speaking to us from Paris, where he distilled hundreds of hours of film into a movie. Lydia Edwards, city councilor from East Boston, also joins us.

Featured image by Adrien Toubiana, courtesy of Zipporah Films. The full Open Source panel event at City Hall, excerpted in this hour, can be found here. Our 2018 conversation with Fred Wiseman can be found at this link.

June 30, 2016

The Great British Break-Off

This week, we’re catching up on the split heard round the world. People laughed at Tory historian Niall Ferguson for warning that Brexit—Britain’s proposed exit from Europe—would be like his own divorce: a nasty and desolating affair that ...

This week, we’re catching up on the split heard round the world.

People laughed at Tory historian Niall Ferguson for warning that Brexit—Britain’s proposed exit from Europe—would be like his own divorce: a nasty and desolating affair that left him alone with his problems.map

And yet! A week since it’s happened—52% out, 48% in—what we’re watched does resemble the bitterest of family fractures. The adults are checked out: prime minister David Cameron abruptly resigned, while Jeremy Corbyn, his Labour adversary, is himself embattled. And few of the victorious “Leave” leaders seem prepared to step in and help the process along.

Sparkling London, with its skyscrapers and trillions of dollars of daily business, was a spot of deep “Remain” yellow on the popular map. But it has been indicted by the towns and villages, even Labour strongholds, that no longer recognize themselves in the capital. Scotland and even Northern Ireland—decidedly for remaining—are threatening to go their own way. Everywhere, racial and xenophobic rhetoric—directed at Poles and Pakistanis—is, painfully, on the rise.

Our guests—many of them intelligent, cosmopolitan Brits—had nothing but distaste for the “Leave” campaign led by Nigel Farage, with his Hitlerian posters, and Boris Johnson (he of the misleading megabus). But they’d disagree on the nature of the case for remaining in a European Union: how to sell it, or whether the U.K. should do it at all.

We thought the best thing to do would be to convene our favorite Brits and Anglophiles to discuss just where this came from—and what’s next.

June 9, 2016

American Hearts and Minds

With the presidential primaries practically over, let’s take a moment on the psychiatrist’s couch, with an eye on the health of American hearts and minds. We spent months and months inside two overheated political races, ...

With the presidential primaries practically over, let’s take a moment on the psychiatrist’s couch, with an eye on the health of American hearts and minds.

We spent months and months inside two overheated political races, and nearly half of all Americans are displeased with our options.  We’re left without a feeling of confidence, let alone consensus.

But Marilynne Robinson—novelist, essayist, and friend of POTUS—declares that the political pandemonium is all to the good, if it can reintroduce us to ourselves, and to a country that many of us have ceased to understand.

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Robinson sees the world through her own Christian moral learning. So for her, America is an old and venerable civilization that has finally come to appreciate what we had in Barack Obama. We’re often saved by human ingenuity, we make a few simple requests, for solid public education and affordable healthcare, and yet we’re tempted by fear, greed and division.

Robinson recalls that we’ve been in worse scrapes before. In 1968, after the death of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., the Chicago convention that nominated Hubert Humphrey was marred by the protests of young antiwar voters.

After that, Humphrey was stranded, Richard Nixon ascended—and brought with him a period of democratic decay.

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What if we had a replay of that strange fractured moment in the 1960s and ’70s? And what if we asked the wisest Americans we know what to do in another moment of democratic uncertainty and disappointment?

With a very wise panel—of psychologist Andrew Solomon, philosopher Nancy Rosenblum, and historian Bruce Schulman—we’re talking through just what we’ve learned.

May 26, 2016

Democracy In The Dumps

In 1989, the political theorist Francis Fukuyama pronounced that liberal democracy, on the American model, as the inevitable finish line of political evolution around the world: What we may be witnessing is not just the ...

In 1989, the political theorist Francis Fukuyama pronounced that liberal democracy, on the American model, as the inevitable finish line of political evolution around the world:

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

And millions of people agreed: that our own relatively free, fair, stable, and accountable model was the political wonder of the world. (Or we told ourselves more cynically that it was the worst system of all, “except all those other forms that have been tried.”)

Would it surprise you to find out that—through the years of Bush, Obama, and now Trump—Americans have begun to lose confidence in democracy?

According to new research by political scientists Yascha Mounk and Roberto Foa, one in six Americans would approve of the military takeover of government. More than 40 percent of the wealthiest Americans would opt for a strong, competent leader who was not accountable to voters. And only 30% of Americans born after 1980 consider it “essential” that they live in a democracy.

Even Fukuyama—one of our guests this week—has had to reevaluate his optimism about the Western model’s world-conquering prospects:

What I understand now much more clearly is that it’s much harder to get there than I had anticipated in terms of [building ] the necessary institutions. The other thing that I didn’t fully appreciate was how easy it was to backslide.

You can hear that backsliding—the disenchantment, the decay of trust—in the voices of Trump voters from Scott Carrier‘s wonderful podcast, Home of the Brave: people like Jimmy Lee, a skilled construction worker who can’t find work for more than $8.50 an hour. He’s voting for Trump as an entrepreneur who’ll “shake up the White House.”

With Jimmy Lee in mind, we’re staging an intervention in a roaring debate—political thinkers with very different readings of what Donald Trump says about people power in America.

Commentator Andrew Sullivan came out of retirement this month to declare, in New York magazine, that we’re witnessing too much democracy—a chaotic uprising of people power, almost a French revolution at the ballot box—and that tyranny could be near at hand. For example, as

the unstable chaos of Russian democracy yielded to Vladimir Putin, and the most recent burst of Egyptian democracy set the conditions for General el-Sisi’s coup, so our paralyzed, emotional hyperdemocracy leads the stumbling, frustrated, angry voter toward the chimerical panacea of Trump.

In Dissent, Jedediah Purdy argued that Sullivan has the case exactly upside-down. Trump is a symptom of too little democracy; his voters, starved for power and economic prospects, are enraged and beset by a feckless government controlled by wealthy interests and unresponsive elites:

Far from living in a carnival of equality, they get pushed out of jobs because they are not productive enough, denied health care because they are not wealthy enough, denied good schools because they cannot afford to live in the best neighborhoods.

Sullivan and Purdy will provide their separate diagnoses on our air—and Orlando Patterson and Gordon Wood are on hand to hold this moment up to history.

March 24, 2016

Weimar America?

Pundits from Glenn Beck to Roger Cohen and Chris Hedges have one other discouraged democracy on their minds this election year. They’re thinking of the German government that rose as a fresh democracy in 1919 but failed — amid economic frailty and an uninspiring ...

Pundits from Glenn Beck to Roger Cohen and Chris Hedges have one other discouraged democracy on their minds this election year.

They’re thinking of the German government that rose as a fresh democracy in 1919 but failed — amid economic frailty and an uninspiring mainstream — to resist the rise of radical new politics, and specifically of Adolf Hitler, by 1933.

So we’re spending this week on the lost world of Weimar Republic, and its lessons for today.

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You learn right away that that Berlin was an incredible place: home to Albert Einstein playing violin in the synagogue, Marlene Dietrich singing in The Blue Angel, Paul Klee painting, Walter Gropius designing, George Grosz (above) painting, and Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt thinking over power, technology, and truth. 

The present-day German flag flew over all of it, and there was indeed much of 21st-century Berlin present in the Weimar ’20s: a burgeoning gay scene, emancipated women dancing in late-night clubs packed with fashionable emigrés.

But Stefan Zweig, he of neighboring Vienna, reminds us not to take the present-day comparisons too far. All the “steeds of the Apocalypse” marched through his German-speaking world in those years: hyperinflation, the Great Depression, Communists and fascists killing each other in the street, and a rising tide of ridiculous anti-Semitism and almost-nihilistic dreams of smashing it all up.

Berlin, Tanztee im "Esplanade", 1926

One lesson, for starters: a republic is a fragile thing, as Benjamin Franklin warned all those years ago. And the Weimar example lets you know, at once, the great possibilities and the terrible perils that await the republic that fails.

Podcast • July 29, 2015

New Ireland Says “Yes”

In today’s Ireland, yes means no. A democratic yes to same-sex marriage signaled no! to patriarchal priests and cane-wielding nuns; no to the bankers who led the country into a devastating crash; and no to the supposed ...

In today’s Ireland, yes means no. A democratic yes to same-sex marriage signaled no! to patriarchal priests and cane-wielding nuns; no to the bankers who led the country into a devastating crash; and no to the supposed glamour of “showband” music, the goofy rock soundtrack of all old Ireland.

The country’s young artists, of all gender and sexual identities, have set themselves James Joyce’s task. They’re casting off the old and saying yes — Joyce called it “that female word” — to the new. And they’re forging new selves, a new national conscience, along the way.

You can see the change in Irish writing, vibrant again: from the traumatized modernism of Eimear McBride and the expressive, depressive stories of Colin Barrett. And in music with Snowpoet’s accompanied spoken word and the haunting harmonies of Twin Headed Wolf drawing on Gaelic roots without the traditional styles’ limited worldview.

This summer Chris went to Dublin’s National College of Art and Design for a lunchroom chat with the painters, chefs, and musicians leading the charge. He was wondering what the “Yes” vote to marriage equality meant, really, and what’s next for Ireland.

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All music used in this piece is composed, performed, or produced by Irish artists. 

July 8, 2015

Oxi Means… “Maybe”: The Vote in Greece

On Sunday, 62% of Greek votes, encouraged by their radical-left prime minister, Alexis Tsipras and his Syriza party, registered a desperation “no” vote to a swap of further fiscal tightening at home for debt relief from its ...

On Sunday, 62% of Greek votes, encouraged by their radical-left prime minister, Alexis Tsipras and his Syriza party, registered a desperation “no” vote to a swap of further fiscal tightening at home for debt relief from its European creditors. The night of the vote ended in celebrations in Athens’ central Syntagma Square.

But just before showtime on Thursday night, the story shifted with a jolt: after much posturing, Tsipras and the Greek delegation capitulated to many of their creditors’ demands in hopes of staying in the Euro. Syriza’s turn from defiance to compliance may leave the millions of “no” voters — part of what our guest Richard Parker calls a global “neglectorate” — feeling more discouraged than ever before. But it remains to be seen how the Greece situation will shake out.

Mark Blyth wasn’t so convinced that what looked like a final surrender of the radical left in Greece was anything more than one more kick of the can down the road of untenable austerity economics in Europe — one headed for a ‘breakdown’:

I think I recall looking at the BBC website yesterday and happening upon a link that said, “June 23: Greeks at final last stop.” And here we are again. So a proposal has been submitted, which seems to be a bit of capitulation, but it hasn’t been accepted yet. And there has to be the other side of that trade: are they going to get anything back? Because if not, we’re simply doing a rerun of where we were before we had the referendum. And if that’s the case, then there’s going to be a breakdown. We’ve had a situation where the European Central Bank has been squeezing the Greek banks to make sure that by Friday, everyone’s sufficiently freaked out to have them sign whatever they want. But that’s exactly the type of tactics that backfired and brought 61% of people out to vote no. So I’m far from convinced that we’re at the end of the road…

It’s very similar to the Scottish independence referendum. Let me tell you why. If you break this down, the really dramatic thing is the way the different age groups voted. So I saw a poll for Greece, 12 hours before they actually took the vote. 71% of people under 35 were going to vote no. So all the older people are gonna vote yes. The exact same thing happened when they took the Scottish referendum — why? If you’re old, and you’ve got a lot of assets, you don’t want uncertainty over those assets. You don’t want your nice Euro-denominated house to suddenly be new drachmas. If, however, you’ve been through hell and back over the past five years — you’re asset-negative, you’re up to your eyes in debt, and you’re unemployed — asset uncertainty is somebody else’s problem. I’m going to vote no. You have this generational split on top of lots of different asset splits, and that’s the way this worked out.

We do know that those young Greeks are the ones want out of an economic dive as long and painful as our Great Depression. Watch the six-year change in unemployment: in America, 1929 to 1934, versus Greece, 2009 – 2015.

Screenshot 2015-07-08 15.30.37

In March 1933, four years into the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt signed the first unemployment relief legislation through “useful public work.” No such luck in Greece: in the poorest Athenian neighborhoods, joblessness has topped 60% this year, and last year at least 1 in 10 Greek children was suffering food insecurity. Hundreds of thousands of well-educated Greeks have left the country, and the future seems to hold only more misery.

Our guest Mark Blyth declared in January that we’re watching the all-but-Homeric battle of austerity and democracy on the southern edge of the Eurozone, where deep budget cuts have become the only possible solution to economic shock. Blyth and our guest, the translator and Europe-watcher Arthur Goldhammer, are concerned about the blowback of EU overreach — not on the left but on the right:

For those who fear Syriza and its left-wing counterparts, it is worth looking at the alternatives on the radical right. From Britain to Hungary, political parties—whose ideology spans the spectrum from the explicitly Nazi (the Golden Dawn in Greece) to the nationalist–populist (the United Kingdom Independence Party and the French National Front)—are busy working to channel public anger in a different direction. Harkening back to Europe’s darkest days, they translate negotiable conflicts over economic policy into non-negotiable conflicts over ethnic identity. They attack European integration even more than the left-wing parties, question the democratic rights of existing citizens, and fan the flames of xenophobia toward ethnic minorities and immigrants. If Europe’s ruling elites want to save the European project, and the Euro at the heart of it, they need to start actively engaging with democratic left-wing parties such as Syriza and Podemos rather than shunning them. If they don’t, they will drive some of these parties into volatile left–right alliances, or, if they fail in their mandates, leave the stage open to political forces whose goals will be far more radical than mere debt restructuring and opposition to austerity.

And Richard Parker— a sage of politics at home and abroad, who once advised George Papandreou and his PASOK party — offers a diagnosis of global democracy: big, bruising institutions, public and private, have created an international “neglectorate” that’s mad as hell and in resistance. Parker hears that voice in on the left and the right, in the Greek no! and the Irish yes! to same-sex marriage, and in the rise of political outsiders sounding the alarm here in America — from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to Ted Cruz and Rand Paul.

The last piece of tape we have to Ingrid Rowland, an American art historian based in Rome and a prolific contributor to The New York Review of Books. She told us of a striking performance of Aeschylus’ early drama, The Suppliants, in the ancient Greek theater at Syracuse in Sicily. It seemed to speak to every corner of the European questions at issue: migration, debt, welcome and power. Here’s a trailer for that play:

Tell us: what do you make of the Greek decision to vote “no”? Were you surprised at the decision to sign on to the austerity package after all? what’s up ahead for embattled Europe? Do you feel neglected, and what referendum would you have us all vote yes/no on: bank bailouts, fossil fuels, drones, etc.? 

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This Week's Show •

Can China Lead?

The People’s Republic has arrived and is applying for co-trusteeship of the globe. We got a good look at the co-trustee, China’s enigmatic president Xi Jinping, through the deep sourcing of The New Yorker’s Evan ...

The People’s Republic has arrived and is applying for co-trusteeship of the globe. We got a good look at the co-trustee, China’s enigmatic president Xi Jinping, through the deep sourcing of The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos and from Professor William Kirby, who says that China’s prosperity (and Mr. Xi’s headaches) are a hundred years in the making. We are looking at a “conquest regime,” in Kirby’s phrase, a government ruled by “princelings” of the Communist Party that won the civil war in 1950. Through thick and thin the party line and party practice have been chameleonic marvels of adaptation, but the clock is running on the old elite from which Xi Jinping springs. The Kirby picture is of a mighty state now strangely insecure; he gives no simple answer to the question posed by his new book: Can China Lead? He raises a new thought here: Maybe China cannot be ruled from horseback.

[Xi’s] political toolbox–that of the Chinese Communist Party, it’s ideological toolbox–is so old and so weak… He lives in world in which the people, what they know to be true and what they are told to be true, the distance between these two things, gets larger every day. And so it is a heroic, but in my view ultimately hopeless, effort to think of how one convinces people to study again dialectical materialism again, to study Marxism and Leninism… and the glorious history of the Chinese Communist Party.

The challenge for Xi Jinping, Kirby told us, goes back to the under-credited founder of China’s revolutionary century, Sun Yat-Sen, who set in motion the deep and continuous drives to rebuild the country’s enterprise, infrastructure, and mass education. “Sun Yat-sen once said, ‘The mandate of heaven does not last forever.’ The question that must worry Mr. Xi is when and how there is a political transition in China, how and what his position will be when that challenge comes?”

The premise this week was simple. If the 19th century belonged to the Europeans and the 20th century was America’s, then the 21st century belongs to China. The question is: what will China — and the rest of us — do with this moment?

Professor William Kirby, the Harvard Sino-guru who just tossed a big online China course over the Great Firewall, is fond of ticking off the titles of nervous Western books: The Dragon Awakes, The Ascent of China, and (his favorite) The Rise of China: An Unwelcome If Inevitable Occurrence. Then he reveals that those titles, which seem at home in any airport bookshop, were all published at the turn of the twentieth century.

That’s the key perspective, says Kirby: this China moment was in the works decades before Deng, and it belongs just as much to the people and the culture as it does to the Party. So, we’ll take a hundred-year view in the hope of understanding 1.5 billion people building, working, and learning toward what President Xi Jinping has called “the Chinese Dream.”

On the Ground in China

By Max Larkin
Chris went to China last year, and we played three of our favorite clips on the show last night. You can hear much-extended versions of Chris’s conversations with Ai Weiwei and the internet hero and rockstar Kaiser Kuo below:

But there was a lot more to the tour than that — Chris spoke to authors, students, scholars, and street-vendors. So we’ve put them together in one big playlist and put in on iTunes, too. We hope you’ll tell us when your ears perk up, and take it as a whirlwind tour through a complex nation.

This Week's Show •

The Big-Money Midterm

The news from the big-money midterm is: meh! Democrats are out, the Republicans are in, and the country’s feeling bluer than ever. Six years after the rise of Obama, we are coming together as a country: not around the ‘hopey, ...

The news from the big-money midterm is: meh!

Democrats are out, the Republicans are in, and the country’s feeling bluer than ever. Six years after the rise of Obama, we are coming together as a country: not around the ‘hopey, changey stuff’, but around the same grim view of the future. Coming out of the polls the pessimists outnumbered the optimists two to one — and pessimists voted Republican.

There’s good reason for the crisis of confidence in the political leadership of the country: a report by Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern published earlier this year found that American democracy may not be worthy of the name. Since 1980, at least, we’ve watched our government respond right quickly to the wishes of wealthy elites, at the expense of the rest of us. So what do you say when government of the people stops working for the people?

Are we ready to be small-d democrats? According to the ballot questions the citizenry wants higher wages for all, even in Republican strongholds, and to free up the criminal culture around marijuana. Do we wish we did more legislating by popular vote?  A recent article by Thomas Meaney and Yascha Mounk in The Nation poses the hypothetical. If the Congress were sent home tomorrow, and all 315 million of us were given the power to pass the laws, enact the taxes, build the bridges and start (or stop) the wars, by simple majority, over our smartphones or using our clickers — how long would it take before we were begging John Boehner or Harry Reid to go back to work?

We put it to you: after midterm Tuesday, has anything changed? Do you see anything exciting out there in the post-midterm haze?

Martin Gilens on “Affluence and Influence”

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We’re so thankful for the years of academic work from Martin Gilens, a political scientist at Princeton. For years he has analyzed how popular and elite will has translated into policy. That work bore fruit in his book, Affluence and Influence, a blockbuster academic paper, and a star turn with his co-author, Benjamin Page, on The Daily Show.

When asked what we should call our lumbering democracy, he said not “plutocratic” — there are too many riches and distinct wills: Tom Steyer and George Soros versus the Koch Brothers and Paul Singer. He says it’s simple: we were dysfunctional, we’re still dysfunctional, and we have to work to purify our politics.

August 31, 2014

Hacking Democracy

Do we dare look under the hood of American democracy? Or do we have the suspicion that Supreme Court decisions and political battles conceal a drift into corruption? This week we're asking our panel of estimable guests where the problems lie with our government, and how to go about fixing it.

Do we dare look under the hood of American democracy? Or do we have the suspicion that Supreme Court decisions and political battles conceal a drift into disfunction, decay and corruption, too? This week we’re asking our panel of estimable guests where the problems lie with our government, and how to go about fixing it.

Podcast • May 12, 2011

Steven Heydemann on the “Family Business” in Syria

Steven Heydemann is picking apart my metaphor of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad as Michael Corleone – the Godfather’s gentler son from Francis Ford Coppola’s classic mob film, who took a sudden turn towards violence and thuggery ...

Steven Heydemann at the “Engaging Afghanistan” conference at Brown

Steven Heydemann is picking apart my metaphor of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad as Michael Corleone – the Godfather’s gentler son from Francis Ford Coppola’s classic mob film, who took a sudden turn towards violence and thuggery when confronted with the pressures of a kingdom under siege. In Michael’s line from the movie: “If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it is that you can kill anyone.” Bashar al-Assad is an eye doctor by training – in London, no less – who came home to pick up the reins when his father passed away in 2000. Ten years later, his security forces are cracking down Gotti-style on a small but spirited group of pro-democracy protestors, and no one on our side seems to want to do much about it. I’m asking: will the democratic wave that seems to be sweeping the region finally run aground in Syria?

Now a vice president at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Steven Heydemann is the original Syria expert. He started studying the country in the eighties, he says, when all his colleagues were preoccupied with Egypt and Lebanon. His book, Authoritarianism in Syria, Institutions and Social Conflict, 1946 – 1960, is a classic guide to the ways of non-democratic governments, not just the family rule but the state- and service-building too, the ways in which despots build constituencies. In Syria it’s a story, in short of how the Assad family built a ruthless state, and made a lot of people like it.

The last few weeks in Syria has been a story of how conditions endemic to the Arab world – youth unemployment, corruption, distrust – mingle with the freedom aspirations blowing in from Egypt and a whole lot of malaise about what comes after Assad if the regime should fall. We should hope for the best, Steven Heydemann says – democracy, secularism, maybe even peace with Israel – but not rule out the worst.

Let’s also be aware that what happens when we think about politics in Syria through the lens of this Mafia metaphor is that we imagine that what we’re dealing with is not an authoritarian system of rule, with institutions and processes and procedures, and a ruling party, and an infrastructure that extends across the entire country, and the capacity to manage problems of governance in ways that are bureaucratic, not simply patronage-based; it’s not simply as if he sits in his office and gives orders to his Consigliere and they get carried out. There’s an enormously simplifying effect that happens when we think about Syria in terms of the Corleones that I think does a disservice. Why? Because it suggests on one hand that if we got rid of this family we could solve Syria’s problems. We ran into that in Iraq. Getting rid of the guy at the top did not solve Iraq’s problems. When we dismantled one of the critical institutions in Iraq, the Baath party and the military, we found ourselves facing a power vacuum and had to reconstruct a system of governance that was, as it turns out, both sectarian and extraordinarily violent in its own right.

Steven Heydemann with Chris Lydon at the Watson Institute, May 7, 2011.

Podcast • August 24, 2010

Real India: Shashi Tharoor, the ‘NRI’ who came home

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Shashi Tharoor (41 minutes, 20 mb mp3) NEW DELHI — Shashi Tharoor is the global Indian who came home — who scored a thundering victory in his first ...

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Shashi Tharoor (41 minutes, 20 mb mp3)

NEW DELHI — Shashi Tharoor is the global Indian who came home — who scored a thundering victory in his first run for office, and has been paying the price ever since.

Bounced in April from P. M. Manmohan Singh’s Cabinet but still a honeyed voice in the Indian Parliament, Shahshi Tharoor is the politician people talk about in India, the one that 800,000 follow on Twitter.

Married for the third time this past weekend, at age 54, his life appears to unfold as in a 19th Century novel by George Eliot or Anthony Trollope. Bollywood-handsome and a moon-light novelist himself, Shashi Tharoor could be living a version of the triumphs and trials of Phineas Finn, The Irish Member in Trollope’s Parliamentary series of Palliser novels.

The best of Shashi Tharoor’s story is that though several long plot lines are clear, the outcomes are not.

Born in London, he is a child of privilege who marked himself, with a certain theatrical flair, for public service — first at St. Stephen’s College in Delhi and then at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where he was the youngest ever (22) to take a doctoral degree.

After a meaty 20-year career at the United Nations in peacekeeping and refugee crises, he became Kofi Annan’s Under-Secretary-General and spokesman. When Kofi Annan stepped down, Tharoor made a creditable run in 2006 for the Secretary General’s job. When that failed (on the nod of the Bush White House) he made an unconventional choice in middle age: to develop his own political base in India.

But can a Non-Resident Indian go home again? Can a smooth-as-silk diplomat from the East Side of Manhattan put down roots in Trivandrum, the capital of famously leftist Kerala? With strong support from President Sonia Gandhi and the Congress Party, the popular vote last year was overwhelmingly: Yes.

But could Shashi Tharoor, a voluminous commentator on Indian history and politics, and a biographer of Jawarhalal Nehru, learn the hard way how the inside game gets played?

Could a master of public-speak and digital media cope with newspaper headline writers who seemed suddenly out nail him — for referring on Twitter, for example, to economy air-line seats (in the land of the sacred cow) as “cattle class”?

And then, crucially, in the gold-rush of professional made-for-TV cricket, did Shashi Tharoor blur public and private interests when he advocated for a Kerala franchise in which his fiancee had a sweat-equity interest of nearly 5 percent? This was the question — about judgment and appearances, not wrong-doing or financial gain — that cost Shashi Tharoor his plum seat in the Cabinet as Minister of State for External Affairs.

Will he be invited back, after a decent interval, into the government? And will he yet emerge as a talking embodiment of a New India still more seen and admired than it is heard?

ST: I think India stands for an astonishingly important experiment in the world, of trying to pursue development and overcome huge problems of poverty and internal social divisions, violence and so on, through democracy. And that is its most important contribution to the world of today. Secondly, it’s been an astonishing advertisement for the management of pluralism of a diversity that rarely can be found anywhere in the world and that yet is being managed without tyranny, and indeed with a startling insight that people are free to be themselves, including fully covered Muslim women and Turbaned Sikh men and people in a wide variety of clothes and so on, because the whole logic is that you can be divided by caste, creed, color, culture, cuisine, custom and costume, and even conviction, but still rally around a consensus. And that consensus is around the sort of Indian idea that it doesn’t really matter whether you agree all the time or not, as long as you agree on how to disagree. We’ve managed to sustain that effectively, and it’s a very different example from that of China, which is rightly being admired around the world for what it’s been able to accomplish, but which functions as a society and as a player on the world stage very differently from India. And I think that the world should have room for both styles and both ways of doing things. Both are ancient civilizations with their own cultural underpinnings that give us the contemporary reality of today.

CL: There is something in this moment, I sense, that is calling for India. It has something to do with India’s post-imperial recovery and its growth, its emotional groove, and a connection with so many other parts of the world that are struggling with these same transitions. Africa first, but Latin America too; the South, the poor, the post-colonial. Would you draw a little bit on your own dealings in Africa, with Rwanda for example, and elsewhere where you sense some sort of potency in the Indian idea?

ST: It’s been very, very striking. First of all, Africa represents a continent of enormous need and enormous potential. But there is a global perception of this kind of scramble for Africa in which China is beating all comers. I would just say with all respect that we are not China. I mean, we’re not there to scavenge for resources. We are certainly not doing anything as India to either directly influence African governments or to tell them what to do. Our approach is very much, “Tell us what your needs are, and let’s see if we can help you” sort of thing. And it’s been working very well. We don’t have the kinds of resources that others do to give large grants, but we do do a lot of very soft loans, practically with no interest, which are being snapped up. We do have one intriguing advantage that I’ve discovered from talking to a very large number of African leaders, which is that when Africans look at the Western model or the Chinese, they are very impressed. They look with awe and admiration. But they don’t actually see any affinity there, whereas when they look at India, they see a country which seems to be facing many of the kinds of problems they face, and seems nonetheless, through all the chaos and difficulties, to have overcome some of them. And they feel, “Hey, if India can do that, maybe we can learn from them, maybe we can overcome some of our problems too, because they’re so much like us.” That affinity is a huge advantage to us, and it helps that India has been on the side of African freedom from the colonial era onwards, and there are lots of longstanding relationships between India and Africa.

CL: But then what? What does India do with it?

ST: What India does with it is we offer them our expertise, we encourage our private sector to go in again. And another way that India is different from China is that most of India’s current engagement in Africa is through facilitating the work of our private sector. It’s Indian companies going in and building the presidential palace in Ghana or building a railway line in Ethiopia or constructing factories like many, many countries in the world. An Indian entrepreneur has bought large chunks of land in Ethiopia to grow flowers to export to Europe. Now that’s the sort of thing that would never occur to an Indian government organization, but it’s part of the sort of newly liberalized economic thrust of today’s India that we’re seeing. And I must say that it’s a way in which India can contribute to Africa without being part of … allegations of either government corruption or statism, or any of the problems that have bedeviled previous international economic engagement on that continent.

Shashi Tharoor in conversation with Chris Lydon in New Delhi. July, 2010

Podcast • September 4, 2008

What’s So Great About Us

Which words and ideas in the definition of exceptional America do you underline? It is bit odd for any nation to be deeply divided, witlessly vulgar, religiously orthodox, militarily aggressive, economically savage, and ungenerous to those ...

Which words and ideas in the definition of exceptional America do you underline?

It is bit odd for any nation to be deeply divided, witlessly vulgar, religiously orthodox, militarily aggressive, economically savage, and ungenerous to those in need, while maintaining a political stability, a standard of living, and a love of country that are the envy of the world — all at the same time. To do all these things at once, America must indeed be unusual. Or even, as Alexis de Tocqueville said a century and a half ago, exceptional.

Peter H. Schuck and James Q. Wilson, in their Preface to Understanding America: The Anatomy of an Exceptional Nation.

Understanding America: The Anatomy of an Exceptional Nation is the book that the Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson said all the presidential candidates had to read. “What is unique about America?” Patterson asked in the New York Times Book Review this summer. “What drives its vitality in economic, cultural and social affairs? Why is it so envied and reviled in the rest of the world? Why are its politics so peculiar? Why is it so culturally fraught?”

There are giant gaps in this big book, it turns out, starting with the Iraq War as an expression of how Americans think and act outside the neighborhood. Editors James Q. Wilson and Peter H. Schuck decided to duck foreign policy altogether. It’s an odd omission especially because the unilateralism inside George Bush’s “coalition of the willing” is so clearly an extension of an “exceptionalist” premise — that old alliances, United Nations rules, even Geneva Conventions do not restrain the United States of America.

The mood of the book tends toward the celebratory. Most of the score of contributing scholars seem to agree we’re more unlike the rest of the world than like it, and better off for the difference. But counter-indications are also spelled out — on the matter of inequality and upward mobility, for example — and some gravely worrisome trends. A rising tide lifts all yachts in our economy today. “The evidence for increased inequality since the 1970s is overwhelming,” write Gary Burtless and Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution. “The top of the distribution is pulling away from average and below-average earners, and until the early 1990s there was evidence that the bottom was falling further behind the middle of the distribution.” The gift of upward mobility in the U.S. is bestowed mainly on immigrants, the day they get here. “People born in the U.S. do not enjoy exceptional opportunities for upward mobility compared with people born in other rich countries.”

In our conversation, panjandrum James Q. Wilson voices the dismay of his generation at the corruption and commercialization of American culture for export — which in another day meant gems like Walt Whitman, Jerome Kern and Gene Kelly. In our own era it’s a long way from Louis Armstrong to the knock-offs, far and wide, of “American Idol.” This is a subject we take up next with the insatiably curious and critical Martha Bayles, a contributor to Understanding America.

Podcast • December 14, 2007

Juan Cole: from Bonaparte to Bush

Behind a facade of lawmaking and reasonableness visible in Bonaparte’s correspondence crouched the grim realities of corruption, power, and terror. When Bonaparte ordered General Menou to the key port city of Rosetta near Alexandria to ...

Behind a facade of lawmaking and reasonableness visible in Bonaparte’s correspondence crouched the grim realities of corruption, power, and terror. When Bonaparte ordered General Menou to the key port city of Rosetta near Alexandria to organize that province, he wrote with unusual candor, “The Turks can only be led by the greatest severity. Every day I cut off five or six heads in the streets of Cairo. We had to manage them up to the present in such a way as to erase that reputation for terror that preceded us. Today, on the contrary, it is necessary to take a tone that will cause them to obey, and to obey, for them, is to fear.” He meant by “Turks” all Muslims, of course.

Juan Cole, Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East , pages 104-5.

The resonances and repetitions in history never come as much of a surprise. The shocking part is just that we so studiously ignore the pattern in what we’re doing, and the warnings.

The indispensable blogger-scholar on Iraq, Juan Cole of Michigan, had the idea of rethinking Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in the mid-nineties when it seemed a nicely academic project. On completion today after five years of the war in Iraq, Cole’s historical reconstruction, Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East , reads like the map of folly we never consulted, an ugly walk through history we were determined not to know.

Whimsical arrogance in a war of choice is the start of the links. When General Bonaparte (then 28!) gathered his expeditionary force at Toulon in May, 1798, not even his war minister knew where Napoleon was headed — for a round-about attack on England, perhaps, or eastward somehow to disrupt England’s commerce with India. Napoleon’s version of “Bring ’em on!” was the promise to his troops about the slave soldiers of the Ottoman Empire in Egypt, the mamluk. “A few days after we arrive,” Napoleon vowed, “they will no longer exist.”

How do you say “fubar” in French? Napoleon had provided heavy woolen uniforms, and no water canteens, for troops who were prostrated by heat and thirst, and killed themselves in substantial numbers. They were also confronted and killed by an “insurgency” that kept building toward the Cairo revolt in late October, 1798 — a broad uprising with a “nativist dimension,” of merchants and guildsmen, Bedouin and peasants from the Cairo hinterlands. The French response was a draconian spectacle of mass executions, in the spirit of Napoleon’s order: “Burn that village. Make a terrifying example of it.”

By then, however, Britain’s Admiral Nelson, in alliance with the Ottomans, had destroyed Napoleon’s fleet in the Battle of the Nile. French forces in Egypt were cut off (eventually to be ferried home on English ships) and the mission was effectively doomed. Not that the cheering ever stopped, or the pretense of a mission civilisatrice, a project of liberty and modernity constructing a “French Republic of Egypt,” was ever abandoned by those who believed it in the first place. Cole’s history quotes a familiar-sounding Captain Say in Napoleon’s engineering corps: “The people of Egypt were most wretched,” Say wrote. “How will they not cherish the liberty that we are bringing them?”

Napoleon in Egypt and George Bush in Iraq were book-end fiascos, Juan Cole argues in our conversation — for neatly opposite reasons. Napoleon was too early in Egypt — before the Ottoman sick-man was ripe for dismemberment, before European arms could overwhelm native resistance; but in fact he set the course of French imperial expansion in North Africa and also Southeast Asia. George Bush hit Iraq too late, Cole says, long after bullying colonialism’s day was done.

That’s the historian’s Two Centuries in Review. Juan Cole, the impassioned real-time observer of Iraq, also gives us a Five Years in Review, on the war, and a Surge in Review, on 2007.

November 2, 2006

A Micro-Targeted Democracy

We’ve seen a lot of talk recently about the GOP’s “Voter Vault” system, a huge database of, apparently, every registered voter in the U.S. It’s been collated with consumer records, public information, and basically any ...

BullseyeWe’ve seen a lot of talk recently about the GOP’s “Voter Vault” system, a huge database of, apparently, every registered voter in the U.S. It’s been collated with consumer records, public information, and basically any shred of personal data that can be mined, bought, borrowed, rented, or tracked. (The Dems, playing catch-up and perhaps wanting to shed their soft image, christened their response — or, rather, one of their competing responses — Demzilla.)

Gone are the days when party, ethnic, and religious affiliations were all that mattered. Do you drink bourbon or gin, drive a Mercury Sable or a Toyota Prius? Do you live in a condo or an apartment? How big was the recent addition to your house? Do you have call waiting? Did you sign a petition to keep Terry Schiavo alive? Do you send your kids to a parochial school? Do you own a snowmobile? Have a hunting license? What magazines do you subscribe to? Did you send in the warranty card for your new washing machine? Kenmore or Whirlpool? What was your response to the call you received from the DNC last year? Last month? To the door knocker yesterday? It’s all there.

At a certain point, the theory of “micro-targeting” goes, with enough data points and a big enough computer to crunch them, political operatives can assign a likelihood — an actual percentage — that you’ll want to vote for a particular candidate. And they can identify the tailored message — like a bespoke suit, made to your measurements! — that will get you to the polls on election day. So, for example, even though we’re neighbors, you might get calls and visitors extolling the virtues of Candidate X’s record on abortion and gay marriage; I’m getting a barrage of literature about her green conservationist stance. We’d both hear, theoretically, just what what we “wanted” to hear.

We’re wondering: Is micro-targeting is a worrisome (if inevitable) embrace by the parties and K street of one of the shinier arrows in Madison Avenue’s quiver? Or a positive step towards more “personalized” campaigning? Will this encourage — and eventually engage — more voters or simply divide an already (and at least) bifurcated nation? Is there a difference between politics and marketing? Should there be a difference? In short, is this a good development in American democracy — in any democracy — or the back swing of its death knell?

Update, 11/2/06 12:40pm

Paul Voice, a philosophy professor at Bennington College, chimes in that this is closer to death knell:

Treating the political arena as a market, with voters understood as consumers and political platforms as products, debases democracy and the idea of democratic citizenship for a number of reasons. Firstly, the legitimacy of the government rests on the free consent of citizens in a democracy. There is a real question of whether the political marketers are seeking the consent of citizens or simply attempting to manipulate them. Secondly, the more segmented the marketing, the narrower the range of views and ideas voters will be exposed to. This divides the public sphere and assumes that voters’ preferences are set in advance of political discussion. Thirdly, the ideal of democratic citizenship is a concern with the general good and what is right for the political body as a whole – we (ideally) leave our particular interests aside when we enter the political sphere – the parliament and the market are different places. If voters are treated as consumers then the distinction collapses and we act on our narrow personal interests rather than as citizens.

Paul Voice, in an e-mail to Open Source

Philip Howard

Professor of Communication, University of Washington

Author, New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen

Alexander Gage

Founder and President, TargetPoint Consulting

Bruce Gronbeck

Professor of Public Address, University of Iowa

Author, The Repersonalization of Presidential Campaigning in 2004 in American Behavioral Scientist (Reg. required)

Paul Voice

Professor of Philosophy, Bennington College

Author, Morality and Agreement

Extra Credit Reading
Don’t Mention the War, To: Maelstrom, Free Republic, November 4, 2006: “It’s only 12:30 here and I’ve already gotten three phone calls reminding me that it’s the last day of early voting (one from the GOP and two from candidates’ campaigns offering rides), and two in-person visits. There’s not going to be a single registered Republican in the entire United States that is going to make it to Tuesday evening without being contacted at least once or twice. The Voter Vault is a Godsend.”

Thomas B. Edsall, Democrats’ Data Mining Stirs an Interparty Battle, The Washington Post, March 8, 2006: “A group of well-connected Democrats led by a former top aide to Bill Clinton is raising millions of dollars to start a private firm that plans to compile huge amounts of data on Americans to identify Democratic voters and blunt what has been a clear Republican lead in using technology for political advantage.”

Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten, GOP Mines Data for Every Tiny Bloc, Los Angeles Times, September 24, 2006: “In Michigan, for example, the GOP contacted snowmobilers by mail, telephone or other personal communication suggesting that Democrats’ environmental views stood in the way of greater opportunities for snowmobiling.”

clintonfan42, 2006 Will Be A Test For GOP GOTV Machine, TPMCafe, June 28, 2006: “Whether or not there is such a GOP GOTV machine may well be discovered after the 2006 elections — which could be the its biggest test yet.”

Dave Weissman, You’re Being Microtargeted, TomPaine, October 30, 2006: “I may find it a little creepy that Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman know what magazines I subscribe to, what kind of car I drive and how many TVs I own, but does that make it bad for democracy? I don’t think so.”

Ron Fournier, Applebee’s America, Simon & Schuster, September 2006.

Hat tip to emmetoconnell for suggesting Applebee’s America.