Dear Friends,
I’m sharing a ‘Commentator’ post. These are riffs on the news. The idea is to read widely — both internationally and across partisan lines — and to really learn as I go, writing with an intention of thinking things through as opposed to with any particular ‘slant.’
Best,
Sam
NAVALNY AND THE-END-JUSTIFIES-THE-MEANS ‘FINE PRINT’
Earlier this month, Alexei Navalny received a fresh 19-year-sentence, adding on to a nine-year-sentence he’s already serving and possibly to a ten-year-sentence that he expects to be handed down soon, although, as he puts it, “The number doesn’t matter. I understand very well that, like many political prisoners, I am serving a life sentence. Where life is measured by the duration of my life or the life span of this regime.”
Navalny posted his first piece of extended writing since the sentence and, if only out of deference to him, it’s worth digging into what he says — which is, somehow, not what one would expect to be on his mind. To a great extent he seems to have moved past Putin and to have bigger fish to fry, which is the “democratic society” and “independent media” of the 1990s. “You’ll be surprised but I don’t hate even Putin,” he writes. “But I fiercely hate those who sold, drank, and wasted the historical chance that our country had in the early 90s. I hate Yeltsin and ‘Tanya and Valya,’ Chubais, and the rest of the corrupt family who put Putin in power.”
Or, as he more folklorically puts it, “We let the goat in the cabbage warehouse, and then we wonder why it ate all the cabbage. I can’t stand the goat, but I hate those who let it in the cabbage warehouse.”
What is uppermost in his mind is the fraudulent election of 1996 and the willingness of liberals to condone it. “Now we are paying for the fact that in 1996 we thought that election fraud was not always a bad thing. The end justified the means,” he writes. That election was the capstone of the policies of the ‘90s — the First Chechen War, the wholesale looting of industries, the endless bolstering of a regime that, once securely in power, “did not even try to make obvious democratic reforms.” For Navalny, reflecting from his cell, it was that mixing-up of the name of democracy from the practice of it — a mix-up blithely propounded by Western reformers and by “liberal” media, who should have known better — that really was the original sin leading to Putin and to the collapse of all democratic norms in Russia.
Navalny writes:
There was no creeping or overt coup in our country led by people from the special services. They did not come to power by pushing the democrat reformers out of power. The [democratic reformers] did it themselves. They called them themselves. They invited them themselves. They taught them how to fake elections. How to steal property from entire industries. How to lie to the media. How to change laws to suit themselves. How to suppress opposition by force. Even how to organize idiotic, stupid, talentless wars.
And continues:
In horror and cold sweat, I jump up in my bunk at night, when I think that [in the future] we will have a chance again, but again go the same way as in the ‘90s. Following the ‘ends justify the means’ sign. Where it is written in small letters: ‘faking elections is not always a bad thing,’ ‘look at these people, what kind of juries are they?,’ ‘it doesn’t matter that he is a thief, but he is a technocrat and stands up for bicycle lanes,’….and other wisdom of enlightened authoritarianism.
Navalny happens to be uniquely situated at this moment in his life to get in a lot of reading and to think about history, but that shouldn’t stop the rest of us from going on similar intellectual journeys. And Navalny’s writing does help me to get a certain framing for the very chaotic political landscape we’re in at the moment — in which I really find myself having a great deal of difficulty getting my own bearings.
Navalny is, in a sense, repeating the thesis of Giorgio Agamben that democracies more and more push the narrative of a ‘state of exception’ — an emergency, of which Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union was understood to be a case in point, in which a ‘crisis management’ mindset was called for utterly removed from democratic standards. Extend those ‘states of exception’ for longer periods of time, and for ever-more self-serving aims, and they become the system of government.
Navalny — who follows the dictates of his conscience more rigorously than probably anybody else in the world right now — recommends as an antidote an absolutely impartial, fair-minded fidelity to democratic norms. If the Communists win in ’96, so be it; if a populist wave appears to chase out the ‘enlightened technocrats’ in our era, then that must be accepted as well. That’s an unsavory doctrine for those who are in power, or fighting for power, but for those of us on the outside, it may not be a bad moral anchor — and ever more important to hold to as the will-of-the-majority comes to seem increasingly unacceptable. As Navalny writes, imagining the moment when Putin falls and Russia is once more “at the crossroads”: “I am very afraid that the battle for principles may be lost again under the slogans of ‘realpolitik.’”
THE TECHNOCRACY-POPULISM CLASH
That sentiment is echoed by David Brooks in a thought-provoking op-ed called ‘What If We’re The Bad Guys Here’ and laying out what he views as a widening schism between populist democracy and liberal technocracy.
Brooks traces the decline of the America-of-shared-purpose to the Vietnam era and sees a general bifurcation between a lower-class majority and an educated class that espouses an in-practice utterly self-serving gospel of ‘meritocracy.’
Brooks writes:
The ideal that we’re all in this together was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here and everybody else is forced into a world down there. Members of our [educated] class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.
With an essay like this one — Brooks is positing it more as a ‘thought-experiment’ than a statement of belief — Brooks brings himself closer to the camp of people like Michael Lind and Sohrab Ahmari, who, I must say, have succeeded in scrambling my thinking as well. Lind advocates an ‘economic nationalism’ that offers a path out of what he calls the “doom loop between technocracy and populism.” Ahmari positions himself as a ‘post-liberal,’ arguing that liberalism is an ideology aiming at autonomy that has overstayed its purpose in history and become disconnected from the common welfare. From their somewhat bewildering vantage-points, Lind, Ahmari, and Brooks seem to congregate on a position of reviving a New Deal sensibility in politics: a hyper-muscular government dedicated to public works, anti-monopoly, genuine meritocracy, the fostering of economic equality.
Trump has grabbed a piece of the puzzle — the populist critique of ‘Washington’ — and it is up to his political opponents to avoid the temptation to retreat behind barricades, to develop a populism of their own that counteracts Trump’s.
Brooks cites a staggering statistic — that “in 2020, Biden won only 500 or so counties, but together they are responsible for 71 percent of the American economy. Trump won over 2,500 counties, responsible for only 29 percent.” If that trend holds, it’s the death knell for the Democratic Party as on electoral force — it becomes the party of affluence, insiderism, technocracy, and very far removed, incidentally, from the Democrats’ modern-day origins as the party of labor.
On the playing fields of intellectual discourse, it seems as if it should be possible to reverse course, get back to something like the Democratic Party’s roots, but so far as I can tell only Lina Khan is actively working in that direction. The tendency within the Biden administration has been to throw up as many barricades as possible, to distance itself from unsavory public discourse. The Hill has a reveal — no surprise at this stage but discomfiting nonetheless — that, at the height of Covid censorship, the administration via the FBI actively reviewed and deamplified “worrisome jokes” that seemed to question Covid policy. And the Democratic primary now looks to be the party establishment, and the liberal media, holding up its nose at Bobby Kennedy while finding itself — without any viable challenge from within the party — tethered to Biden and to mounting evidence of corruption.
What seems to be actually at stake in 2024 is revealed in part by a New York Times piece on the intellectual architecture of the Trump campaign. Frustrated during the first term by independent agencies within the government — the ‘deep state’ — the Trumpies are espousing what they call “unitary executive theory,” by which, through a highly self-serving reading of the Constitution, the president has no limits on control over the executive branch and can fire agency heads at all.
“The notion of independent federal agencies or federal employees who don’t answer to the president violates the very foundation of our democratic republic,” said Kevin D. Roberts, the Heritage Foundations’ president. “What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” said Russell T. Vought, who ran the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump White House.
For neither the first nor the last time I refer the reader to Martin Gurri and his yet-to-be-bettered analysis of our era in The Revolt of the Public — in which older categories like ‘left’ and ‘right’ prove to be meaningless and the guiding political conflict is between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’: ‘authority’ versus ‘the public’; ‘the center’ versus ‘the border.’ This casting of the 2024 election as a dispute basically about the ability of an insurgent executive to gain control over federal agencies and career civil servants — exactly the same stakes, incidentally, as in the Jackson-Adams elections in the 1820s — is an almost pitch-perfect elucidation of Gurri’s thesis.
For the Democrats, revulsion towards Trump seems to inevitably mean embracing the standard of ‘insiderism’ — the courts as an obstacle for him, the manipulation of social media companies as a sort of secret weapon, the entrenched bureaucracy as a last line of defense. That’s an understandable impulse, but, unfortunately, as per Brooks’ critique, the result is that Democrats paint themselves into a corner electorally. Maybe Biden squeaks through again, but the Democratic Party finds itself adopting an avowedly patrician perspective.
There’s an alternative — which is to recognize that Trump has opened the gates to a different era in electoral politics. The populist critique is valid and effective. It also, from a historical point-of-view, should be the Democrats’ set of talking-points. If the Dems are going to win they need to talk like outsiders and think like outsiders. The language of technocracy will always be a loser in a popular election.
THE NIGER COUP AND THE INTERNATIONAL BLAME GAME
There’s something about Navalny’s piece and Brooks’ piece that gives me the framing I’d like to apply to the coup in Niger — a country that every op-ed writer as of this week suddenly seems to be an expert in.
Niger has now become the third Sahel country in three years to undergo a coup — and the result, as Senegalese economist Ndongo Samba Sylla puts it in UnHerd, is the collapse of French influence in Africa (“a second national liberation movement, which aims to bring to completion the decolonisation process which began in the Fifties and Sixties in Francophone Africa”) and with Russia, and specifically the Wagner Group, as the geopolitical beneficiary.
The ongoing existence of ‘Françafrique’ — a neocolonial regime featuring the extraction of mineral resources, the maintenance of a currency system monitored by France, and the discreet intervention in security crises — has long been one of the world’s dirtier secrets. The premise seemed to be that no one, exactly, would notice — international media didn’t particularly cover the Sahel; and military adventures, both by France and the U.S., were quiet enough so as not to roil waters internationally.
But hypocrisy has a way of catching up to anyone who practices it — and the deeply neocolonial practices of Françafrique (as carried out by allegedly non-colonial France) were sooner or later going to collapse.
In the articles I’m reading assigning blame for the coup, the round-up looks something like this:
Der Spiegel pins it on involvement of the Russians, with the revolutionary group M62 seen as having “played an important role” and as “having been long ago infiltrated by Wagner people and its actions supported by Russian propaganda.”
Foreign Policy views the coup as basically an internal affair, which does not necessarily mean “a breakdown of security cooperation with the West” and in which “the potential for the Wagner Group to replace Western forces should not be overstated.”
The New Statesman blames the West’s short-sighted pandemic policies “leading to a wholesale (if largely undiscussed) social and economic crisis” in the Sahel and with the West unwilling to take positive, proactive steps like forgiving African countries’ crippling external debt.
UnHerd, as mentioned, blames the legacy of colonialism, and the West’s ongoing failure to offer genuine independence for the countries in the region.
Le Monde Diplomatique, interestingly, has the most anti-French take, writing that “French politicians don’t seem to realize that times have changed,” that the French continue to fight “ill-defined enemies conveniently labelled terrorists” and to intervene aggressively in national politics when it suits them, and that their techniques have been so ham-handed and so ineffective that many in the region have concluded that the French must be working with the jihadists they claim to be fighting.
Whoever exactly is to blame it’s a particularly low moment for the West in the Sahel — possibly the end both of Françafrique and of the logic of the Global War on Terror. Russia stands to gain the most. Der Spiegel notes that “the military juntas in Mali and Burkina Faso, which are already tied to Russia announced they would interpret any intervention in Niger as a declaration of war,” concluding that, “It would appear that an alliance of the coup plotters is already forming.” The New Statesman observes that Putin has seized an opportunity handed to him by the West — offering the sort of debt write-offs that the West failed to extend.
The outcome — pretty obviously (and as it’s been for a little while) is a new Cold War, with the West competing against Russia and China for influence all over Africa, and doing so with whatever means are its disposal. In that environment — as during the first Cold War — it’s not easy to criticize regimes on moral grounds for exercises of zero-sum statecraft, but it is worth lamenting that the West didn’t do more with its period of advantage in the developing world. France never really took its hand off the tiller in its old empire. The IMF engaged in all sorts of questionable practices. The U.S. pursued its shadowy ‘war on terror’ without, as far as I can tell, earning any goodwill by doing so.
What I imagine happens now is a fairly bareknuckle fight for influence — the U.S. doing whatever it can to keep out Wagner. Since I’m American, I have to root for the U.S. side of it, but I’m doing so less than entirely sure, as Brooks might put it, that we really are the good guys here.
Just spoke with a friend yesterday whose sibling is in the army awaiting a three week deployment out to Africa. I mentioned that it seemed to be horrifically inefficient to send personnel across the globe for such a short stint. My friend noted that they are on high alert the entire time with loaded weapons in the event of an overrun of the base and of course going off base is out of the question.
I dunno what we’re doing out there but it seems hearts and minds aren’t one of the priorities,
It's not black and white, but I think the French have reduced their attempts to control their old colonies in Africa - and are spending much less money there. I'm not sure it makes sense to see the coups across the Sahel as a response to rampant neocolonialism. Given that a lot of the French money went, director or indirectly, to senior politicians and generals in these countries, they would seem more likely to be (at least in part) a response to neocolonialism's decline.