The Inflection Point

On April 26, Glenn Loury interviewed Daniel Bessner on The Glenn Show. Following is an edited transcript of the podcast, which is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rabz9_YgwH8&t=28s

Daniel Bessner: It’s a transitional moment. It’s difficult to know where things are going. There’s obviously a crisis within the Democratic Party, and within modern American liberal ideology writ large. The Right, itself, is also in a bit of a crisis, with the strange use of tariffs, the anti-free speech approaches, the attack on universities, a lot of which seem to emerge from cable news interests, as opposed to any real interest in addressing the problems of the country. It doesn’t seem to be a vibrant political movement, and also seems just strange.

There haven’t been limitations on international capital flows. It’s mostly tariffs on goods and services. The neoliberal overlay of the financial markets and international capital flows, and then you have this Neo-mercantile, 19th-century tariff strategy on goods. A real tariff strategy would have to attack international capital, as many conservatives said in the 19th and 20th centuries. Neither party looks set to put together a winning coalition, so we’re likely to get a ping-pong politics going back and forth between the parties.

Glenn Loury: The culture-warrior Right have been complaining about wokeness and political correctness for generations—since the 1980s—and yet, as they seize control of institutions, it looks like a kind of wokeness playing itself out on the right, suggesting that they are opportunistic and without principle. There’s a conflict between real politics, where you talk about interest, material goods, taxes, who owns what; and symbolic politics, where you talk about whose god is being worshipped and what transgender issue is the topic of the day, whether diversity, equity and inclusion is anti-semitic or whatever. There’s a seductive lure of the phony issues crowding out discussion of the real issues. Maybe the powers that be are controlling the agenda and spoon-feeding pablum to the masses to keep them entertained. 

Daniel Bessner: To me, it’s a reflection that so much of our political discourse takes place in the realm of culture war. Ironically, the American State since the New Deal, and through the Cold War, has institutionally separated itself from actual politics, in terms of the masses’ influence. If you think of the National Security Act of 1947, the creation of the National Security Council, the appointment of the National Security Advisor who is not confirmed by the Senate…that’s how you get someone like Henry Kissinger or, more recently, Jake Sullivan (2021-25 US National Security Advisor under President Biden); Zbigniew Brzezinski; the creation of the CIA, the creation of what eventually becomes the Department of Defence—these are institutions that are specifically designed to ensure that  ordinary people do not affect foreign policy. 

Beyond that, you have the government supporting this parastatal apparatus of think tanks and academic research centres that essentially serve as the brains of the national security state, again totally separate from democratic will. That’s in foreign policy and national security. You can see it in the effect of most mass protests over the history of the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st. That is true in other issue areas with regard to the American state.

If you have a moment where many people begin to identify themselves politically, they identify as left liberal or right, but they’re not able to affect the core issues of politics…so you have a lot of politics discussing culture— culture war bullshit. When the Right gets in power, they just do their version of it. This is a reflection of the lack of ordinary people influence on politics, which has been confirmed by the well-known Gillans & Paige paper from 2014, which essentially argues that an organised business shapes politics, but organised mass constituencies actually don’t. That’s a real source of our problems, which no party, no one, is even talking about, politically, in public.

On the one hand, you need expertise, a general understanding of the context of the situation. The second half of the 20th century has proven how many times the experts get it wrong. Just look at the big ones: Vietnam and Iraq—expert-driven foreign policies. On the other hand—this is Walter Lippmann’s criticism that he wrote in his famous book, Public Opinion c.1922, essentially arguing that ordinary people don’t have the omni-competence (deep learning in a variety of issue areas, enabling one to make wise decisions about foreign policy, economics, etc). There isn’t an easy mechanism by which citizens come up with their own solutions to foreign policy problems. 

Congress hasn’t declared war since 1942. There have been various authorisations to use military force—the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, the post-9/11 resolutions and PATRIOT Act, etc. In fact, the American Congress has only declared war 11 times, I think, in five different conflicts. We’ve actually been in a low-level constitutional crisis since the early 1940s. Congress’ ability to declare war was meant to limit the executive’s ability to send troops abroad. This hasn’t been more of an issue is we got rid of the draft in the early 1970s, so the bourgeoisie no longer fights America’s wars. 

Presidential systems tend to centralize authority. We’ve seen this over the last couple of centuries, mostly in Latin America, but it has happened in the United States. The Left institutionalised with FDR in the 1930s. He passed about 3,721, orders of magnitude higher than what the president is supposed to do. Trump emerges from that. This is the classic argument about why you need to arrogate to the executive emergency authority. The problem is that a “moment of crisis” very rapidly turns into an institutional crisis, then an era of crisis—emergency politics effectively become institutionalized. In real history, once the Soviet Union collapses, you have the National Security State—both parties, bipartisan—essentially search for a new Soviet Union. In the 1990s it was the responsibility to protect and, obviously, after 9/11 it was international terrorism. There’s a problem with the “terrorist” category, because they will be able to apply it to anyone—you see it happening right now. Today you have China. Systems tend to centralize. They very rarely give up their power.

Jake Sullivan, with no democratic mandate—not even confirmed by the Senate—was running US foreign policy, because President Biden was senile for his last two years, if not longer. I think time has proven me correct that the Biden administration’s foreign policy was terrible in Ukraine, and terrible vis-a-vis Israel’s war on Gaza. It was not in the country’s interests, ultimately. Speaking as a Jew, I don’t think it was in the Jewish people’s interests to give Israel carte blanche in Gaza. It is shameful, and it is shameful that Jake Sullivan is at Harvard now. It’s shameful that our elite institutions “wash” these people of their literal war crimes, which is a problem of elite institutions in the United States. That reflects a moral rot at the heart of our every system. 

John Mearsheimer is right about a lot of things, and wrong about China. Regarding Ukraine, the situation has a lot to do with post-Soviet society, a lot to do with Putin personally, and a lot to do with NATO. He is correct that NATO expansion into Eastern Europe made a Russian leader like Putin, like every Russian/Soviet leader before him, worry about Russian security. It was not a surprise that Putin would view that as an aggressive act by the West and the US, broadly defined. It’s probably one of the three or four key reasons that Putin invaded Ukraine.

The interesting question is: Why did the West do it, against the advice of someone like George Kennan, the father of “containment” (who argued in his famous telegram of 1946-47 that Russia would view the expansion of the West into Eastern Europe as aggressive). Well, the 1990s were a period of incredible imperial arrogance and imperial hubris. The US really thought it had the winds of history behind it. Madelains Albright said in that 1990 interview with Matt Lauer how the US was the indispensable nation, that it “sees further into the future” and, if you have to kill some children along the way in order to achieve American greatness, that is what you need to do. So I think the main reason was this post-Cold War imperial hubris. Then there’s the classic argument that it’s always good for defence contractors to have military expansion around the world. There was a genuine interest to make the world democratic. I think that people really though that liberal democratic capitalism had proven itself to be the only viable political system, and that NATO expansion would help Eastern Europe and, perhaps, eventually, Russia to enter into that world, even as, obviously, western capital flowed into Russia in the 1990s. I don’t think those capitalists were that concerned with crating a stable liberal democratic  Russia, but there was some genuine interest. But NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe certainly wasn’t necessary for American security, which wasn’t even discussed at the time. 

There are really big questions about what the United States’ role in the world should be, that haven’t really been asked since 1989 or, to some degree, truly asked since 1945, when the United States decided to become a global hegemon. Now it’s a question of how the United States is going to leave East Asia, not whether it’s going to leave East Asia. The idea that the US was going to pivot to East Asia is absurd, obviously not a long-term strategy, just  based on geography and demography, which goes back to Thucydites. Also, the relative power position of the United States and the G7 has been in steady decline for years. China is a gigantic powerful state; India is a gigantic powerful state. They had a strange modernity for various contingent, historical reasons, but they’re going to reassert and reaffirm themselves in their region. And there’s also just the problem of power-projection thousands of miles away—it’s just not possible. It’s materially not possible over time. The fact that that is even a controversial statement suggests that there is an intellectual deficit at the heart of our foreign policy discourse. 

The New Deal “going global” in the second half of the 1940s, imagining that the US would be able to manage international affairs—the history of the 20th and 21st centuries doesn’t suggest that. Look at Iraq and Afghanistan, Libya, etc.—disaster after disaster. 

China wants to be the co-equal power with the US. I don’t think it wants to live in a world where the US is the first among equals. I don’t think that China has global security ambitions in the way that the US did during the Cold War. China obviously wants to be economically powerful, but I don’t think it wants to dominate the security regime of the Western Hemisphere like the US has dominated, and wants to dominate the security regime of East Asia. So I think it’s a different approach. 

I don’t think the language of whether or not a regime is “evil” is a useful one to adopt in international relations thinking whatsoever. I think it perverted US foreign policy—this mannequin perspective that became de rigour in the late 1940s and continues to shape the sort of moralistic Protestantism of American foreign policy. I think we would do well to move beyond that language. 

Former director of the Earth Institute Jeffrey Sachs’ foreign policy book End Poverty. I’m in favour of his “restrainer” position. He says that a great moment--an opportunity for a much different kind of post-Cold War world—was lost when Gorbachev and Yeltsin managed the transition from Soviet Union to Russia and independent countries. The US could have restrained itself, according to international law, and it just didn’t. It was a missed opportunity, not only to reshape US-Russia relations, but to reshape the international order to actually make a liberal international order, as opposed to construct a liberal international order in which the US determines, a la Carl Schmitt (an authoritarian conservative theorist, noted as a critic of parliamentary democracy, liberalism and cosmopolitanism), when it’s allowed to ignore it, in its own state of exception. Now we’re reckoning with another “plastic” moment in history, but it’s about managed American decline, as opposed to creating something new. That’s a big shift from what could have happened in 1989. Now the 21st century looks like it’s going to be China’s century. Anything could happen, lots of caveats, but now China’s obviously a more vibrant society. I think being a (Han) Chinese today feels like what it must have felt like to be a white American in the 1950s and ‘60s, to have hope in your future, and believe in your future, which I think almost no one does now. 

Many Third World countries today have better airports than we do. There’s so obviously a crisis here—a social crisis, thanks to Trump, also an economic crisis, a crisis of liberalism, a crisis of conservatism… It’s difficult for me to find someone under 40 who doesn’t believe that their life isn’t going to get shittier, and that sucks. It would be much more fun to be an intellectual in an era of ascent, as opposed to an era of decline. 

Regarding Iran, it seems like we’re heading for a deal, not a war, as Trump said to Netanyahu, when the latter was at the White House (in April). Why continue to play out this psycho-drama from 1979, so many years later? If the US wants a stable Middle East, it has to come to some sort of concord with Iran. The Middle East is still working out its post-Ottoman era, just like it took Eastern Europe quite a while to work out its post-Austro-Hungarian situation (to some degree, it hasn’t yet). To some extent, the great empires that were multinational is still happening in the Middle East, as empires were replaced by a world of nation-states. 

Israel is on the verge of occupying Gaza and annexing large portions of the West Bank. It seems like the Trump administration has allowed them to do that. Since the 19th century, Israel’s colonization really got going. Theodore Herzl explicitly talked about Israel as a settler-colonial project, emergent from the Austro-Hungarian empire. It was imagined from the start as a settlement project—it is not controversial. 

It’s a catastrophe for the diasporic, humanistic, intellectual Jewish culture, for cosmopolitan humanism. One might argue that, once you have an ethno-nationalist state, it’s going to be a likely, or overdetermined if not necessary outcome. 

The historical context between the 2010s-20s US are vastly different from the context that gave rise to Italian and German fascism in 1920s-30s Europe. We are not in the wake of a world war, the ending of governments like the Kaiser’s Germany or the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires; a mass war in which hundreds of thousands of people who experienced combat come home with combat experience. We don’t have gangs fo violent young men with combat experience roaming the streets, attached to political organizations, that think that any form of democracy is politically illegitimate. Our economic travails do not relate to the hyperinflation experienced in somewhere like post-WWI Germany. We don’t have a state that is relatively immature and able to be taken over by an outside political organisation like the Italian fascists or Nazis. We don’t have a powerful Left, a Communist party, let alone a Social Democratic Party that actually ruled in Germany as part of the Weimar coalition, necessitating an alliance between capital and extraordinarily far-right ideologies, as occurred in Germany. The context is incredibly different. 

Liberalism became hegemonic in the US in the middle of the 20th century, and we had the creation of the American political spectrum. In the 1940s, liberalism defined itself as the moderate center, having defeated fascism on the right, and communism on the left. This is one of the major claims among the Democratic Party and American liberals to governance. Trump is, to some degree, a reflection of the rise of the far-right, but going back to the post-Cold War era, he’s ultimately a reflection of the fact that, in this moment of liberal hegemony, liberals weren’t able to create the type of technocratic “utopia” that Fukuyama was a bit ambivalent about. It has failed to solve a lot of the social problems that were supposed to be solved in the wake of the Cold War. 

So it’s not surprising that, in this moment of crisis, it returns to the ultimate legitimising claim that it has: there’s no communism anymore, and it defeated fascism. That’s why I think the appellation was applied to Trump, by so many people, even Kamala Harris. There’s also psychological reasons, because people want to believe that they’re part of some grand resistance, when ordinary people have less and less ability to affect politics. Imagining yourself as a French resister is emotionally appealing. And there are other reasons.

The Indian Removal Act of 1930; chattel slavery; Jim Crow; redlining; the incarceration of Japanese-Americans; the Alien and Sedition Acts of the late 18th century; the Alien Enemies Act; the late World War I Sedition Act, which allowed for the arrest and deportation of someone like Emma Goldman; the Internal Security Act of the early 1950s; the Alien Registration Act of 1940; the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which allowed for the arrest and sometimes deportation of communists; you have, between 1929 and 1936 the “repatriation” of Mexicans, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, 60% of whom were citizens. Then you have, in the 1970s, these “street sweeps” which—surprise, surprise—oftentimes entangled citizens and legal residents. 

Trump is authoritarian, and is trying authoritarian moves, based—here’s another one—on the unitary executive theory advanced during the George W. Bush administration, which argues that the executive has the right to determine what Congress means and what the Judiciary means in its orders. 

This is all to say that you don’t need fascism, or the framework of fascism, to understand Trump. I would say that the framework of fascism winds up “othering” Trump, and will prevent us from preventing the rise of another authoritarian president because, ultimately, the problem is not in fascism, but in the American presidency, which has become incredibly powerful, the equivalent of an elected monarch, which is not what the Founders intended. Look at Obama’s “kill list,” at the killing of American citizens without due process. It’s a problematic institution. 

In the 1770s-80s, the big fear was of the legislature becoming too powerful, based on the English experience, but it turns out that the president tends to centralize, and so calling it fascist does not highlight the problems of the American presidency or the structure of the American institutional system, which I think is actually the cause of Trump. At the very least, our constitutional crisis has been happening since the 1940s. It is so blatant in the area of war. You’ve heard about the boomerang effect, or blowback—this is why John Quincy Adams gave his famous July 4, 1821 speech where he says, “We go not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” He was worried about empire coming home. All the police now using war-on-terror gear to arrest and incarcerate people is an example of the empire coming home.  What we’re seeing with Trump is that the imperial management abroad, which has always been a Schmittian state of exception, is coming home to the United States.