American Republic, Now Available from Amazon

I’m pleased to announce that my book, American Republic: Essays on the Nature of Politics, is now available in Kindle and paperback from Amazon.com.

American Republic includes the original book, plus three essays that first appeared on this site: “The Plastics and the Political,” “Faith, Politics and ‘The West Wing,'” and “Democracy and Political Language”. 

The Kindle format retails at $6.95 and the paperback is also available for $12.99.

The paperback is also available direct through the publisher, and we hope to have it available through Barnes and Noble and in other book stores soon.

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In Egypt, Force v. Power (II)

(KHALED DESOUKI AFP/Getty Images via Globalpost.com)

It’s been sickening listening to usually sensible and decent people try to justify the ugly ouster of Egypt’s first democratically elected head of state. Watch David Brooks, for example, speaking on PBS’ Newshour, contort himself into a principle for the outcome of a wholly unprincipled thing happening to somebody he hates:

I used to think, if we just have elections, that the elections will have a moderating effect on governments.

Even if you take radicals, especially throughout the Middle East, you take radicals, they have to pay attention to public opinion. They have to pick up the trash. They have to fix the potholes. The act of governing will moderate them. And, therefore, we just should insist on election after election and we should respect the results of every election.

I think the evidence from the Muslim Brotherhood, at least, is that if you have got a group which is really a radical, almost religious totalitarian group, the elections will not have a moderating influence. They will take advantage of elections in essence to end democracy.

And I think that is what they were slowly doing. They were undermining democracy to make democracy impossible. It was a self-negating election. And so I think what the coup people did was legitimate. And what all those millions of people on the street did is legitimate.

A friend of mine, Jeffrey Goldberg, had a good line. May be bad short term for democracy, good long term for progress.

I quote him at length to avoid any reductionism. Brooks sounds peculiarly like an early agitator for Communism, from which many of his friends on the neoconservative right crawled, placing any violent or repressive means at the disposition of the all-important End. Who cares if democracy is harmed, when progress – Communism’s ultimate end for all humanity! – is achieved? (To make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs!) And what good is democracy, anyway, if elections are “self-negating”? (Can’t we just throw the people out and elect a new one?)

It only gets worse. Jeremy Pressman writes that a military government may be better at “protecting minority rights, creating space for genuine and lasting political competition, and, more broadly, helping Egypt move forward.” Progress again! Couldn’t the army and police do that under a democratically elected president? Never mind that the army ultimately chooses whose rights, whose space, and which direction forward, because it controls the state. There is no real politics without moral choice, because there is no real choice out of the barrel of a gun. The concept of the benign dictatorship is a venal lie that refuses to die in the craniums of people smart enough to know better.

Joshua Keating and Ozan Varol seriously consider a “democratic coup d’etat,” as if that makes a lick of sense. Can you have an “authoritarian election”? “Totalitarian freedoms”? “Transparent censorship”?

It doesn’t take much to see all these observers’ frightening lack of faith in, and understanding of, politics and political process independent of democratic mechanisms. Even taking Brooks’ argument at face value – that Morsi was dismantling the very democracy that had elevated him to power – the protests against his rule indicated Egypt was a midpoint of the drama, not at its climax. And for anyone who would argue against this point, and to say that Egypt is better off now under military rule, we need look no farther than Turkey, where a political opposition movement has flourished against a similarly pugnacious president. The difference there is the army has, after 100 years, finally removed itself to the sidelines. While contentious and occasionally violent, Turkey’s protests have left far fewer people dead as a result. And Turkey’s democracy is still intact.

It is incredible that Brooks failed to acknowledge the inseparable actions of the Egyptian army in the coup. It was not the “people” who deposed the president, but the armed forces. Morsi is still being held incommunicado, now charged with espionage and murder. It is compelling indeed that hundreds of thousands of people took to Tahrir Square in Cairo and elsewhere to protest against the President and the ruling Muslim Brotherhood. This is as it should be in an open, free and political society. Of course we and President Morsi should take a petition signed by 22 million seriously. But now that movement and those millions have been denied their right to rein in the president on their own, by their own power, because the army has subsumed them by brute force.

Worse for the future of Egypt, this establishes a very ominous precedent, one Turkey took nearly a century to overcome: the ultimate arbiter of political rule is now the army. Having sat out the 2011 revolution and then forcefully deposed Morsi early this month, the army is effectively Egypt’s Pharaoh-maker. This is indisputably bad for Egyptian democracy and Egyptian politics, because the army may always have its metal-jacketed finger on the country’s political balance.

And it demonstrates to the Muslim Brotherhood – those whom Brooks despises so much – what they and their allies must do now. No longer content to build a true political power base in Egypt’s neighborhoods and quartiers and mosques and prisons and schools, they realize they must infiltrate the army, too. All over the Middle East, the like-minded are taking their lesson.

This is a terrible development. Because after decades of preaching the benefits of democracy, which includes the rule of law and democratic control of the armed forces, Egypt – with the tacit consent of the West – has cynically conceded that force can trump power. But that only means as long as those men with guns hold the future of political control in their hands along with their weapons, politics will be inseparably defined with violence, and bloodshed, and heartache.

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Along the 30th Parallel: What NPR Gets Wrong about Public Opinion and Foreign Aid

NPR’s new headquarters (NPR)

A recent blog post by Greg Myre on NPR’s web site (“Which Nations Hate the U.S.? Often Those Receiving the Most Aid,” July 23) is a typical example of reporting on international public opinion. Myre attempts to correlate a Pew Research Center report on foreign opinion of the United States and a U.S. government site listing our foreign assistance contributions. It’s amisleading piece of work, although not immediately clear on its face, inclined to do more harm than good, more obscuring than illuminating. Myre is an established reporter with Middle East bona fides and should know better.

To give an example of why Myre’s argument is so farcical, I’ll demonstrate how an analogous argument has a higher rate of correlation yet proves exactly nothing – which is only slightly better than I can say for Myre. Myre correlates the “high” U.S. foreign assistance rates for a series of countries, in particular Egypt and Pakistan, with our abysmal public approval ratings in those countries (in the case of the Pew report contrasting to China). So far, so good – we gave Egypt about $1.5 billion mostly in military aid and have a 15 percent approval rating to show for it. Similarly, our public approval ratings in contrast to China don’t show so well for foreign assistance above $1 billion in countries like Pakistan. The only country that has a high approval rating of the United States, and received $3 billion, is Israel.

But my equally arbitrary measure has a higher rate of correlation: every country that receives more than $1 billion in U.S. assistance – and includes Myre’s Jordan and Palestine, which receive around a half-billion dollars – falls along the 30thparallel, including Israel. Clearly, the United States has some sort of vital interest along this region of the world and is willing to spend whatever it takes to secure it. In the politics of international aid, the 30th parallel could be called the One Billion Dollar Parallel.

My correlation is absurd, of course. But so is Myre’s. Because correlating real dollars against public opinion percentages is ridiculous when we are measuring 1) vastly different economies and populations as well as 2) greatly different political contexts. For example, Israel and the United States are close allies. Public opinion of the United States is strong in Israel. In the case of Pakistan and the United States, China is considered by Pakistan as a bulwark against the latter’s primary enemy, India. Myre cited aid to and abysmal approval ratings in Egypt, the Palestinian territories and Jordan, all of which have very specific histories with our ally Israel which must surely outweigh a few billion dollars – never mind the fact that when the Egyptian army arrested President Muhammad Morsi, American-built M-1 tanks and M-113 APCs rolled through city streets to assert control. Egyptians know very well what $1.5 billion in U.S. aid buys them.

And these numbers look very different in Africa, where the United States is popular. Former President George W. Bush poured billions of dollars into AIDS/HIV relief on the continent, and the public opinion in those countries reflect that. Look at South Africa, Ghana and Uganda in the Pew poll. Both Uganda and South Africa received more than $400 million from the United States, but they don’t quite fit Myre’s thesis.

At the same time, Myre doesn’t even try to examine what China gives to any of these countries – probably because China gives hardly anything. China is exploiting many of the countries in Africa for raw materials, and delivering shoddy infrastructure in return.

It is beyond my mathematics ability, as well as my patience, to put together a complete matrix that would more accurately capture what you could expect to get in public opinion for every American aid dollar. That is clearly the implication of Myre’s article. You would have to zero out each economy and population, as well as aid and public approval rating, and compare those numbers as a common denominator or baseline measure.

Let’s try this admittedly crude measure…

(Real dollar aid / GDP ) x (population x public approval rating %) = baseline

…and compare Egypt and Israel for the sake of illustration. Just inputting the numbers into my equation demonstrates the absurdity of correlating aid spending to public opinion:

Egypt: ($1,559,300,000 / $548,800,000,000) x (85,294,388 x 16 %) = 27,294

Israel: ($3,100,000,000 / $252,800,000,000) x (7,707,042 x 83 %) = 76,762

(Population and GDP figures are taken from the CIA World Factbook. Aid figures and public opinion drawn from the sites listed above.)

In other words, using these baselines, for slightly less than double the real dollar investment in aid to Egypt, we get nearly triple the “return” per dollar in aid to Israel. But putting this into such a stark numeric contrast further heightens the outlandishness of trying to make these kinds of comparisons and correlations. We don’t really expect a “return” on aid. Assistance for disease eradication doesn’t get a “return” – it cures people. Economic aid to an emerging former communist country is entirely different from aid given to a country recovering from a natural disaster, or aid to a war-ravaged Central Asian nation. And so on.

Moreover, even with a baseline, it is ridiculous to compare these countries. Egypt is not Israel. Nigeria is not Pakistan. South Africa is not Afghanistan. We give more or less aid to some countries because the challenges or politics they present are unique or particular to them. Aid is political – what we think we should be doing – and doesn’t necessarily follow the laws of economy or business. That’s why it’s aid.

In short, we give aid to achieve specific political objectives in a specific political context. And more often than people might think, we give aid simply to do the right thing. If a billion and a half dollars buys us influence with the Egyptian army, and with that we can constrain their action and keep the country from becoming Syria, who is to say that isn’t worth the cost?

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Smith-Mundt Retool is Great News for Voice of America

Ronald Reagan spoke often through VOA during his presidency (via Alvin Snyder, no relation)

The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act recently went into effect, which has public diplomacy wonks and civil liberties experts worried about the loosening of the 1948 law that both established the Voice of America (VOA) and limited its ability to “propagandize” American citizens. (They may have forgotten for a moment that just as quietly the Defense Department began making available its own Armed Forces Network broadcasts on the Pentagon Channel, available now to most cable providers.)

But this domestic access is great news for the Voice of America, the embattled foreign broadcast arm of the U.S. government. Because now that American broadcasters, cable networks and satellite dish service providers – and who knows, Hulu? – can have access to VOA shows, the Voice will at last be able to build a domestic audience. And with that, a political constituency, which is critical to how the broadcaster survives and flourishes.

For those not familiar with the Smith-Mundt Act, the law established the Voice of America and several affiliated “grantee” entities – eventually Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Radio/TV Martí, and the Middle East Broadcasting Network – after World War II under the U.S. Information Service to broadcast news and commentary to parts of the world that either lacked a robust press or whose press was completely controlled by their governments. It is a sad state of affairs that VOA is still needed after the Cold War. But as a result it has a devoted audience of tens of millions around the world. In fact, in reach and languages, VOA and its contact affiliates, VOA rivals the BBC. The Broadcasting Board of Governors puts its audience at 203 million weekly in more than 45 languages.

But for those who know and love the BBC for its programming (I’m thinking of you, Downton Abbey fans), and were delighted to hear the BBC World Service on AM radio while abroad, there the similarities end. The BBC is virtually a media monopoly in Great Britain, and its foreign broadcasting arm takes full advantage of that position. VOA, on the other hand, is not even a foreign extension of PBS or NPR (themselves wholly independent 501(c)(3)s funded indirectly, and in part, by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting), and which hardly have the enviable position in the United States that the BBC has in the United Kingdom. But in this context, the VOA’s achievement abroad is all the more extraordinary.

Unfortunately, because it has no domestic presence, the Voice has virtually no public exposure – and as a result, no one willing to fight for it – in the United States. As an example, when I visited VOA headquarters in Washington as a tourist last year, I joined a group that included an American family from New England – NPR affiliate broadcasters, no less – and an Iranian-American couple who brought their in-laws from Tehran to visit. The New Englanders were hazily familiar with the Voice. The Iranian/American family were huge fans, particularly of VOA’s “Daily Show”-like weekly broadcast “Parazit”. This was the young couple’s third visit to the headquarters. If anyone would go to the mat for VOA, it would be the visitors from Iran. But they don’t have a vote in Congress.

State-side broadcasting could build that kind of fan base – a domestic, voting constituency – for the Voice in the United States. With more people watching and invested in VOA’s mission and programming, more resources will be in the offing. And with that, any concern about “propagandizing” will evaporate as well. The Voice has never been a propaganda outlet – it hires the best journalists in the world, and its reportorial mandate is above reproach – and it couldn’t give the BBC such a run for its money if it were. Anyway, an American audience would sniff out propaganda right away. But especially for the growing immigrant communities in the United States, who crave news from the old country, the Voice will provide them information they have a hard time coming by. That investment will help keep the Voice relevant and strong amid the increasing din of rumor and hearsay that constitutes international news coverage.

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Politics, Propaganda and Pornography on the Web in China

China Daily front from May 2012

A recent New York Review of Books post by Perry Link is worth reading to learn the lengths and depths to which the Chinese government will go to control content and opinion on the Internet in that country.  China has learned to embrace the Internet in some ways, recognizing that the government in some sense can’t live without it and can’t deprive the people of it. But the central authorities view the Internet in much the same way that the Nazis and Soviets viewed the emerging art and technology of the movies in the 1930s: as a powerful tool to augment propaganda, which is, in the mordant definition of Hitler message man Joseph Goebbels, “a means to state control”.

Link is drawing attention to the work of his colleague Xiao Qing at the University of California, who has received, archived and catalogued thousands of “directives” from China’s propaganda officials to central and regional news and Internet officials to play up, play down, censor, muzzle, close comment, applaud or condemn various bits of information that are vacuumed up in the social space of the Chinese Intranet. It is impossible to read these directives and not think of Winston Smith, alone at his cubicle next to the memory hole, carrying out similar directives in the Ministry of Truth. Indeed, Xiao calls his unofficial repository the Ministry of Truth. He provides an extraordinary glimpse inside perhaps the largest and most sophisticated propaganda machinery in the world.

Link, an academic and translator of Charter 08 into English, provides some additional insights based on a conference that Xiao hosted last month in Berkeley that included several additional scholars who helped analyze his archives. The insights they brought are additionally worth reading, if for no other reason than it is an additional reminder that we do not bring every perspective required to this material. Perhaps the most important insight rendered is this:

“One of the principal aims of the government directives is to prevent unapproved groups from organizing through the Internet (noted as “incitement,” “gatherings,” etc.); some of the scholars argued that this goal is even more fundamental than prevention of negative comment about the Party.”

That is, among the government’s top priorities in Internet control is not censorship for its own sake but to break up any nascent attempts at independent organization, which is the true and ultimate threat to the government’s control. Information, opinion and communication do not undermine the government on their own, but by how they help individuals understand, come together, and take collective action. No wonder, as Link notes, the government has lumped “political speech” in the same web category as pornography as “unhealthful to society”.

Another chilling observation in the age of the NSA revelations relates to the activity of Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency. In a country where all media is state-controlled, Xinhua is effectively an open-source intelligence agency. The Internet has changed that, Link notes. Ten years ago, Xinhua’s mission, in part, was to report to China’s leadership on its own population. In the Internet era, it no longer needs to do that – the people are in effect reporting on themselves through social media, chat rooms, comment boxes and microblogs. The government only needs to read them to understand their subjects.

That’s a Thought Police even Orwell didn’t imagine.

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