GOP becoming a cult of know-nothings

November 28, 2021·

Supporters of former President Trump are seen the North Carolina Republican Party Convention on June 5

The Republican Party is becoming a cult. Its leaders are in thrall to Donald Trump, a defeated former president who refuses to acknowledge defeat. Its ideology is MAGA, Trump's deeply divisive take on what Republicans assume to be unifying American values.

The party is now in the process of carrying out purges of heretics who do not worship Trump or accept all the tenets of MAGA. Conformity is enforced by social media, a relatively new institution with the power to marshal populist energy against critics and opponents.


What's happening on the right in American politics is not exactly new. To understand it, you need to read a book published 50 years ago by Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, "The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790-1970." Right-wing extremism, now embodied in Trump's MAGA movement, dates back to the earliest days of the country.

The title of Lipset and Raab's book was chosen carefully. Right-wing extremism is not about the rational calculation of interests. It's about irrational impulses, which the authors identify as "status frustrations." They write that "the political movements which have successfully appealed to status resentments have been irrational in character. [The movements] focus on attacking a scapegoat, which conveniently symbolizes the threat perceived by their supporters."

The most common scapegoats have been minority ethnic or religious groups. In the 19th century, that meant Catholics, immigrants and even Freemasons. The Anti-Masonic Party, the Know Nothing Party and later the American Protective Association were major political forces. In the 20th century, the U.S. experienced waves of anti-immigrant sentiment. After World War II, anti-communism became the driving force behind McCarthyism in the 1950s and the Goldwater movement in the early 1960s ("Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice").

The roots of the current right-wing extremism lie in the late 1960s and 1970s, when Americans began to be polarized over values (race, ethnicity, sex, military intervention). Conflicts of interest (such as business versus labor) can be negotiated and compromised. Conflicts of values cannot.

You see "the politics of unreason" in today's right-wing extremism. While it remains true, as it has been for decades, that the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to vote Republican (that's interests), what's new today is that the better educated you are, the more likely you are to vote Democratic, at least among whites (that's values, and it's been driving white suburban voters with college degrees away from Trump's "know-nothing" brand of Republicanism).

Oddly, religion has become a major force driving the current wave of right-wing extremism. Not religious affiliation (Protestant versus Catholic) but religiosity (regular churchgoers versus non-churchgoers). That's not because of Trump's religious appeal (he has none) but because of the Democratic Party's embrace of secularism and the resulting estrangement of fundamentalist Protestants, observant Catholics and even orthodox Jews.

The Democratic Party today is defined by its commitment to diversity and inclusion. The party celebrates diversity in all its forms - racial, ethnic, religious and sexual. To Democrats, that's the tradition of American pluralism - "E pluribus unum." Republicans celebrate the "unum" more than the "pluribus" - we may come from diverse backgrounds, but we should all share the same "American values."

One reason right-wing extremism is thriving in the Republican Party is that there is no figure in the party willing to lead the opposition to it. Polls of Republican voters show no other GOP figure even close to Trump's level of support for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. The only other Republican who seems interested in running is Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, who recently criticized "Trump cancel culture."

If Trump does run in 2024, as he seems inclined to do, can he win?

It all depends on President Biden's record. Right now, Biden's popularity is not very high. In fact, Biden and Trump are about equally unpopular (Biden's job approval is 52 to 43 percent negative, while Trump's favorability is 54 to 41.5 percent negative). Biden will be 82 years old in 2024. If he doesn't run, the Democrats will very likely nominate Vice President Harris. When a president doesn't run for reelection, his party almost always nominates its most recent vice president, assuming they run (Richard Nixon in 1960, Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Walter Mondale in 1984, George H.W. Bush in 1988, Al Gore in 2000, Joe Biden in 2020). Democrats would be unlikely to deny a black woman the nomination. There is also some talk of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg running if Biden doesn't.

The 2024 election could be a rematch between Trump and Biden. Or a race between Trump and a black woman. Or between Trump and a gay man with a husband and children. Lee Drutman, a political scientist at the New America think tank, recently told The New York Times, "I have a hard time seeing how we have a peaceful 2024 election after everything that's happened now. I don't see the rhetoric turning down. I don't see the conflicts going away. ... It's hard to see how it gets better before it gets worse."

Bill Schneider is an emeritus professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University and author of "Standoff: How America Became Ungovernable" (Simon & Schuster).

How the 19th-Century Know Nothing Party Reshaped American Politics

From xenophobia to conspiracy theories, the Know Nothing party launched a nativist movement whose effects are still felt today

Lorraine Boissoneault

January 26, 2017

Anti-immigrant cartoon showing two men labeled "Irish Wiskey" and "Lager Bier," carrying a ballot box. Everett Collection Historical / Alamy Stock Photo

Like Fight Club, there were rules about joining the secret society known as the Order of the Star Spangled Banner (OSSB). An initiation rite called “Seeing Sam.” The memorization of passwords and hand signs. A solemn pledge never to betray the order. A pureblooded pedigree of Protestant Anglo-Saxon stock and the rejection of all Catholics. And above all, members of the secret society weren’t allowed to talk about the secret society. If asked anything by outsiders, they would respond with, “I know nothing.”

So went the rules of this secret fraternity that rose to prominence in 1853 and transformed into the powerful political party known as the Know Nothings. At its height in the 1850s, the Know Nothing party, originally called the American Party, included more than 100 elected congressmen, eight governors, a controlling share of half-a-dozen state legislatures from Massachusetts to California, and thousands of local politicians. Party members supported deportation of foreign beggars and criminals; a 21-year naturalization period for immigrants; mandatory Bible reading in schools; and the elimination of all Catholics from public office. They wanted to restore their vision of what America should look like with temperance, Protestantism, self-reliance, with American nationality and work ethic enshrined as the nation's highest values.

Know Nothings were the American political system’s first major third party. Early in the 19th century, two parties leftover from the birth of the United States were the Federalists (who advocated for a strong central government) and the Democratic-Republicans (formed by Thomas Jefferson). Following the earliest parties came the National Republicans, created to oppose Andrew Jackson. That group eventually transformed into the Whigs as Jackson’s party became known as the Democrats. The Whig party sent presidents William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor and others to the White House during its brief existence. But the party splintered and then disintegrated over the politics of slavery. The Know Nothings filled the power void before the Whigs had even ceased to exist, choosing to ignore slavery and focus all their energy on the immigrant question. They were the first party to leverage economic concerns over immigration as a major part of their platform. Though short-lived, the values and positions of the Know Nothings ultimately contributed to the two-party system we have today.

Paving the way for the Know Nothing movement were two men from New York City. Thomas R. Whitney, the son of a silversmith who opened his own shop, wrote the magnum opus of the Know Nothings, A Defense of the American Policy. William “Bill the Butcher” Poole was a gang leader, prizefighter and butcher in the Bowery (and would later be used as inspiration for the main character in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York). Whitney and Poole were from different social classes, but both had an enormous impact on their chosen party—and their paths crossed at a pivotal moment in the rise of nativism.

In addition to being a successful engraver, Whitney was an avid reader of philosophy, history and classics. He moved from reading to writing poetry and, eventually, political tracts. “What is equality but stagnation?” Whitney wrote in one of them. Preceded in nativist circles by such elites as author James Fenimore Cooper, Alexander Hamilton, Jr. and James Monroe (nephew of the former president), Whitney had a knack for rising quickly to the top of whichever group he belonged to. He became a charter member of the Order of United Americans (the precursor to the OSSB) and used his own printing press to publish many of the group’s pamphlets.

Whitney believed in government action, but not in service of reducing social inequality. Rather, he believed, all people “are entitled to such privileges, social and political, as they are capable of employing and enjoying rationally.” In other words, only those with the proper qualifications deserved full rights. Women’s suffrage was abhorrent and unnatural, Catholics were a threat to the stability of the nation, and German and Irish immigrants undermined the old order established by the Founding Fathers.

From 1820 to 1845, anywhere from 10,000 to 1000,000 immigrants entered the U.S. each year. Then, as a consequence of economic instability in Germany and a potato famine in Ireland, those figures turned from a trickle into a tsunami. Between 1845 and 1854, 2.9 million immigrants poured into the country, and many of them were of Catholic faith. Suddenly, more than half the residents of New York City were born abroad, and Irish immigrants comprised 70 percent of charity recipients.

As cultures clashed, fear exploded and conspiracies abounded. Posters around Boston proclaimed, “All Catholics and all persons who favor the Catholic Church are…vile imposters, liars, villains, and cowardly cutthroats.” Convents were said to hold young women against their will. An “exposé” published by Maria Monk, who claimed to have gone undercover in one such convent, accused priests of raping nuns and then strangling the babies that resulted. It didn’t matter that Monk was discovered as a fraud; her book sold hundreds of thousands of copies. The conspiracies were so virulent that churches were burned, and Know Nothing gangs spread from New York and Boston to Philadelphia, Baltimore, Louisville, Cincinnati, New Orleans, St. Louis and San Francisco.

At the same time as this influx of immigrants reshaped the makeup of the American populace, the old political parties seemed poised to fall apart.

“The Know Nothings came out of what seemed to be a vacuum,” says Christopher Phillips, professor of history at University of Cincinnati. “It’s the failing Whig party and the faltering Democratic party and their inability to articulate, to the satisfaction of the great percentage of their electorate, answers to the problems that were associated with everyday life.”


Citizen Know Nothing. Wikimedia Commons

Phillips says the Know Nothings displayed three patterns common to all other nativist movements. First is the embrace of nationalism—as seen in the writings of the OSSB. Second is religious discrimination: in this case, Protestants against Catholics rather than the more modern day squaring-off of Judeo-Christians against Muslims. Lastly, a working-class identity exerts itself in conjunction with the rhetoric of upper-class political leaders. As historian Elliott J. Gorn writes, “Appeals to ethnic hatreds allowed men whose livelihoods depended on winning elections to sidestep the more complex and politically dangerous divisions of class.”

No person exemplified this veneration of the working class more than Poole. Despite gambling extravagantly and regularly brawling in bars, Poole was a revered party insider, leading a gang that terrorized voters at polling places in such a violent fashion that one victim was later reported to have a bite on his arm and a severe eye injury. Poole was also the Know Nothings’ first martyr.

On February 24, 1855, Poole was drinking at a New York City saloon when he came face to face with John Morrissey, an Irish boxer. The two exchanged insults and both pulled out guns. But before the fight could turn violent, police arrived to break it up. Later that night, though, Poole returned to the hall and grappled with Morrissey's men, including Lewis Baker, a Welsh-born immigrant, who shot Poole in the chest at close range. Although Poole survived for nearly two weeks, he died on March 8. The last words he uttered pierced the hearts of the country’s Know Nothings: “Goodbye boys, I die a true American.”

Approximately 250,000 people flooded lower Manhattan to pay their respects to the great American. Dramas performed across the country changed their narratives to end with actors wrapping themselves in an American flag and quoting Poole’s last words. An anonymous pamphlet titled The Life of William Poole claimed that the shooting wasn’t a simple barroom scuffle, but an assassination organized by the Irish. The facts didn’t matter; that Poole had been carrying a gun the night of the shooting, or that his assailant took shots to the head and abdomen, was irrelevant. Nor did admirers care that Poole had a prior case against him for assault with intent to kill. He was an American hero, “battling for freedom’s cause,” who sacrificed his life to protect people from dangerous Catholic immigrants.

COUNT THE STEREOTYPES

On the day of Poole’s funeral, a procession of 6,000 mourners trailed through the streets of New York. Included in their number were local politicians, volunteer firemen, a 52-piece band, members of the OSSB—and Thomas R. Whitney, about to take his place in the House of Representatives as a member of the Know Nothing Caucus.

Judging by the size of Poole’s funeral and the Know Nothing party’s ability to penetrate all levels of government, it seemed the third party was poised to topple the Whigs and take its place in the two-party system. But instead of continuing to grow, the Know Nothings collapsed under the pressure of having to take a firm position on the issue the slavery. By the late 1850s, the case of Dred Scott (who sued for his freedom and was denied it) and the raids led by abolitionist John Brown proved that slavery was a more explosive and urgent issue than immigration.

America fought the Civil War over slavery, and the devastation of that conflict pushed nativist concerns to the back of the American psyche. But nativism never left, and the legacy of the Know Nothings has been apparent in policies aimed at each new wave of immigrants. In 1912, the House Committee on Immigration debated over whether Italians could be considered “full-blooded Caucasians” and immigrants coming from southern and eastern Europe were considered "biologically and culturally less intelligent."

From the end of the 19th century to the first third of the 20th, Asian immigrants were excluded from naturalization based on their non-white status. “People from a variety of groups and affiliations, ranging from the Ku Klux Klan to the Progressive movement, old-line New England aristocrats and the eugenics movement, were among the strange bedfellows in the campaign to stop immigration that was deemed undesirable by old-stock white Americans,” writes sociologist Charles Hirschman of the early 20th century. “The passage of immigration restrictions in the early 1920s ended virtually all immigration except from northwestern Europe.”

Those debates and regulations continue today, over refugees from the Middle East and immigrants from Latin America.

Phillips’s conclusion is that those bewildered by current political affairs simply haven’t looked far enough back into history. “One can’t possibly make sense of [current events] unless you know something about nativism,” he says. “That requires you to go back in time to the Know Nothings. You have to realize the context is different, but the themes are consistent. The actors are still the same, but with different names.”

Lorraine Boissoneault | | READ MORE

Lorraine Boissoneault is a contributing writer to SmithsonianMag.com covering history and archaeology. She has previously written for The Atlantic, Salon, Nautilus and others. She is also the author of The Last Voyageurs: Retracing La Salle's Journey Across America. Website: http://www.lboissoneault.com/

The Deep State: the Conspiratorial Turn in America

The phrase actually referred to a real and shadowy power in Turkey. In America, it’s the preserve of those harboring extreme and unfounded theories

Josef Burton

May 16, 2022

Jake Angeli, known as the “QAnon Shaman” / Olivier Touron / AFP via Getty Images


In politics, fantasies can be a central motivator for taking action. Such was the case on Jan. 6, 2021, when the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol was animated by fantasy. The motley crew shared a belief that the 2020 election was stolen and could be overturned via obscure constitutional procedure if only a few patriots could take action. Beyond this immediate goal most shared some degree of belief in QAnon — an amorphous set of pseudo-prophetic political beliefs that hold Donald Trump to be a crusader against a satanic, child-sacrificing “Deep State” made up of media elites, Washington insiders and bureaucrats.

Based on anonymous 4Chan posts from a purported administration insider who is codenamed “Q,” QAnon adherents believe that John McCain did not actually die of natural causes but was secretly executed for treason. Some believe that President Kennedy’s son JFK Jr. is still alive, is a covert political operative and will reveal himself as Trump’s new vice president. Others maintain that Robert Mueller was a secret Trump ally investigating the president as a decoy operation. The phantasms that the rioters were fighting had fuzzy edges and definitions as ludicrous and shifting as the rioters themselves. The picturesque blue-painted and fur clad “QAnon Shaman” — Jake Angeli — was better known before Jan. 6 for live-streaming himself entering shopping malls wearing a horned headdress and screaming about how decorative tiles outside bathrooms were coded signals for secret gangs of Deep State child-trafficking pedophiles to abduct children into a cave network to harvest the chemical adrenochrome from their brains. A subset of QAnon followers believes in the existence of the “frazzledrip tape,” a purported video of Hillary Clinton and her assistant Huma Abedin ritually sacrificing and then eating a baby. This chaotic fever dream of demonic imagery is mixed with more prosaic enemies — elitist diplomats, complacent Washington insiders and Trump’s personal enemies list — to make up the shifting cloud of what is called the Deep State, the hidden enemy. The paranoid rage is all-American, but the term is imported.

The Deep State is the Turkish language’s great contribution to political science. The translation from Turkish — “derin devlet” — is literal and direct. A state that exists below and within. The Turkish term, however, doesn’t imply any outside-the-mainstream milieu of ideas, nor does it serve the same role as the American term “conspiracy theory” in describing a way of seeing the political world. “Deep State” in Turkish is not a flight of fancy or an alternative belief; rather, it describes a very specific set of historical actors in a specific time and place. Who is included within the bounds of the term is of course up for debate, because the Deep State is secretive by definition, but the term describes unauthorized and unknown networks of power operating independently of official political leadership. The Turkish Deep State has imprecise boundaries and includes state-aligned mafia figures as well as industrialists and conservative economic elites, but it is not a catchall term for status quo power structures or hegemonic institutions. The Deep State is a shadowy parallel system of power, not the power structure that you can openly see.

There is credible evidence that some of these covert power networks in Turkey have lineages that go back to the 19th century, to secret political organizations among modernizing Turkish nationalist army officers in the last days of the Ottoman Empire. This history does not mean that the Deep State has been the secret hand behind Turkey’s national destiny from the dawn of time but points to the more reasonable fact that parallel power structures form during times of crisis. It is precisely during these crises in Turkey that the Deep State became something named and observed in political life. The left-right political violence of the 1970s and ’80s that resulted in a series of brutal military coups was a time of pervasive covert state violence and Deep State activity. Leftists and students were disappeared, and in 1977 dozens of trade unionists in Istanbul’s Taksim Square were mowed down by gunmen whose identities and motivations remain unknown to this day. In the 1990s, during the Turkish state’s struggle against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) — a fight that broadened into a state assault on Kurdish civil society — the Deep State once again slithered out of the depths and onto the streets. The jarring 1996 “Susurluk incident” was a freak car accident involving a BMW full of cash, guns, drugs, and a notorious mafia drug baron and police general somehow driving together. Susurluk revealed the depths of the connection between the Turkish security services and right-wing organized crime elements in their mutual war against the PKK.

The Deep State is not a fantastic conspiracy but something tangible and real. Parliamentary investigations in Turkey in the early 2000s confirmed the existence of whole military units and intelligence bureaus whose very existence was unknown to the elected government. Some Deep State structures, like the national gendarmarie’s secret intelligence unit JİTEM, have been fully exposed. For others, mystery remains. Turkey’s U.S.-trained counter-guerrilla unit, known variously as the Special Warfare Department or Tactical Mobilization Group, was instrumental to Turkey’s Cold War anticommunist violence. It remains unclear whether that unit operated under Turkish government authority, with some anonymous former members claiming that they answered only to NATO while also readily confessing to involvement in torture and instigating Istanbul’s 1955 anti-Greek pogroms.

Although the Deep State in Turkey refers to a secret network, it is actually very well documented and proven. The term Deep State has left Turkish history and entered into global political discourse because it is a useful and accurate tool to describe specific forms of state and para-state violence that actually happen. The concept is not specific to Turkey or the Middle East. Criminal investigations in Italy and Belgium have uncovered similar Cold War-era networks in Europe under the codename Operation Gladio.

I was very much surprised, then, to see “Deep State” emerge in post-2016 American politics as an explicitly Trumpist term. Devoid of context, Trump administration figures used the phrase initially in much the same way that Barack Obama coined the phrase “the blob” — as shorthand for the Washington establishment consensus. Google searches for “Deep State” spike in April 2017 shortly after Trump’s administration started. In October 2017, posts from “Q Clearance Patriot” appeared for the first time on 4chan, setting the QAnon mythos into motion. Searches for Deep State spiked again and, with time, the phrase has become more sinister and accusatory.

It would be easy enough to write a taxonomy of the term “Deep State,” tracing how it entered into Trumpworld and shifted its meaning therein. There is even a prime candidate for who brought the phrase into the White House: Gen. Mike Flynn, who lasted as Trump’s national security adviser for all of 22 days and who had deep and possibly illegal connections to Turkish politics.

Flynn initially made a name for himself within the U.S. military and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) as a hawk’s hawk, fixated on the threat of militant Islamism. Before he was forced out of the DIA in 2014 for his chaotic and abusive management style, Flynn frequently accused Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of being a crypto-jihadist and a threat to the West. In 2016 Flynn initially hailed the abortive Turkish coup d’état as an attempt (he assumed) to defend secularism.

Mike Flynn’s tune quickly changed when he launched his consulting company and quickly became one of the most ardent pro-Turkish government lobbyists in Washington. Flynn published editorials denouncing cleric and Erdoğan rival Fethullah Gülen as the puppet master of dark and shadowy forces. Flynn’s reversal was as adamant as it was sudden. The Turkish government would eventually offer the general $15 million cash to kidnap Gülen (a U.S. permanent resident) and transport the cultish and reclusive cleric to Turkey to stand trial for instigating that same coup attempt Flynn once praised. Unbelievably, accepting cash from a foreign government to stage a kidnapping on U.S. soil was not actually the reason Flynn eventually had to resign. His time in the Trump White House was short, but it was only after this brief stint that the administration began to use the phrase Deep State.

This could be a tidy and convenient story: A conspiracy-minded operative falls into the orbit of Erdoğan and picks up a very politically useful narrative of a shadowy conspiracy by hidden establishment actors against democracy. But Flynn was not young and innocent, and his hobnobbing with Turkish government bigwigs was not his introduction to the idea of a Deep State. Before he was a “consultant,” and before he was assistant director of the DIA, Flynn made a career as a young staff officer in the then-small and close-knit U.S. special warfare community. He trained and made plans at Fort Bragg’s John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center in the 1980s. The center was previously known as the U.S. Army Institute for Military Assistance, and the generation of men who trained the young Flynn were veterans of dozens of American covert efforts to fight communism — the men who ran the Phoenix Project death squads in South Vietnam and trained anticommunist secret police and commandos in Thailand, Iran, Italy, Greece, Guatemala and a dozen other countries, including Turkey.

The Turkish Special Warfare Department and its larger counter-guerrilla program, when they functioned openly in the ’50s and ’60s, were supported and organized directly by the American special warfare community via the U.S. military assistance mission. The Green Berets who trained the Turkish operatives who instigated the Istanbul pogroms and tortured dissidents at the Zivirbey Villa in 1971 would, in the twilight of their careers, rotate back to the Kennedy Special Warfare Center to train the next generation of American covert warriors — men like Flynn. The mania for conspiracy and Deep State suspicion is not something Flynn contracted from Turkey like some Oriental disease, but he was shaped and molded within real existing conspiracies. Deep states are not fantastic when they are something you have been trained to construct and support.

In American and Turkish conversations about the Deep State, everything is reversed. In America real and specific Deep State agents — celebrities, politicians, institutions — purportedly commit horrific torture on abstract categories of victims (patriots, children, etc.) who can never be specifically named or seen. Nobody has successfully proved voter fraud in the 2020 election. No child survivor of the elite Soros adrenochrome harvest has come forward.

The victims of the Turkish Deep State, on the other hand, are not hypothetical or mythical. From the 1970s hundreds of people, mostly leftists and minorities, were murdered by state or para-state gangs. When encountering a real Deep State the question is never if what is happening is real, but to what degree it will do harm. Were the masked men who threw grenades into a Kurdish bookstore undercover military, or were they a far-right mafia gang? Or were they from a conservative Kurdish clan given money and arms to suppress separatists? The fear and doubt that an unknown perpetrator provokes is a key part of Deep State violence. Only the victims are real: A comrade’s body is dumped outside the union office; protesters die after being gunned down in a rainy square; a reporter simply never comes home one day. You do not have to posit the existence of underground child-abuse tunnel networks when there are funerals to go to.

Almost as if they have become sensitive to the absurdity and implausibility of many contemporary conspiracy theories, there is a strain within the Jan. 6/QAnon world who are much less prone to the fantastic and make more concrete (although still totally baseless) claims. The events that they claim happened, the jargon they use to impart verisimilitude to their stories, and frequently the conspiracy theorists themselves are linked to the U.S. military or security services.

A month before Jan. 6, rumors swirled among the Telegram channels and yet-unbanned Facebook groups where the Capitol rioters mobilized. For example, a specific military unit, the 305th Military Intelligence Battalion, was reported as having raided a secret underground server farm in Frankfurt, Germany. It was there, the story went, that the CIA had secreted away a server farm full of voting data with incontrovertible proof that the 2020 election had been stolen from Donald Trump. There had been casualties, but the raid was a success. The 305th had captured CIA Director Gina Haspell, and she had already been flown to Guantánamo Bay and been executed for high treason. While the real public affairs officer for the actual battalion was busy drafting a statement explaining that no, the Arizona-based unit of analysts was not a secret shock troop tasked with overturning the 2020 election and had not been engaged in a subterranean battle with the CIA in Germany, a retired lieutenant general, Thomas McInerney, was solemnly intoning that the 305th had taken heavy casualties. A month later, while the QAnon Shaman stood shirtless on the Speaker’s rostrum in the House of Representatives chamber in a horned headdress and howled about impending doom for traitors, Larry Rendall Brock stood on the House floor in a tactical plate carrier and helmet giving instructions to other rioters. A former Air Force lieutenant colonel, Brock had tucked into his vest a bundle of zip ties meant to restrain detainees. (After his arrest, he claimed he actually had no targets for detention in mind but wanted to give the zip ties to the police.)

Seven percent of Americans are veterans, but almost 20 percent of the Jan. 6 rioters had served in the military. A midlevel State Department official who covered South American affairs has now been charged with assaulting a police officer during the riot. This strike against the American Deep State on Jan. 6 was therefore demographically closer to any putative Deep State than to the general public. Not all American security institutions are bad in this fantasy world.

Guantánamo Bay looms especially large in the fantasies of QAnon. It will be the site of execution, trials, extrajudicial torture and retribution visited on the Deep State child abuse mainstream media globalist sickos. Hillary Clinton and George Soros will be hanged there. There is a good reason that the lurid fantasies of revenge and torture in “The Storm” — the QAnon day of judgment when Trump and his patriotic allies defeat the Deep State — all take place at Gitmo: Everybody in America knows that Gitmo is where the United States actually sends people to be extra-judicially tortured. Men held there are fed out of dog bowls. They are hooded and kept in sensory deprivation. They are subject to sexualized abuse and kept in solitary confinement for years at a time and detained for decades without trial. The place of Guantánamo Bay in QAnon mythos tells us something very important about the actual American Deep State, the one that ran a torture camp outside Kabul, the ruins of which you can now find on Google maps (it has a one-star review), and the actual secret intelligence services that are probably skimming metadata off the device you are using to read this article. Indeed, since 9/11, what would amount to a Deep State in the U.S. is no longer deep. It functions brazenly, right in the open, without any conspiracy or concealment, in places you can find on Google maps. Former Army officers Brock and McInerney want to send their enemies there.

In the days after Jan. 6, the entire U.S. military was tasked with addressing extremist infiltration within their ranks. The Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon met behind closed doors to privately reaffirm their commitment to a constitutional transfer of power. It has become clear that conspiracy theories like QAnon and militias like the Oath Keepers that participated in the Jan. 6 insurrection have found fertile recruiting ground within the ranks of law enforcement and the military. Indeed, when investigating far-right domestic terrorism, the FBI no longer shares suspect information with local police departments, assuming a level of sympathy among local cops. U.S. President Joe Biden took the oath of office surrounded by tens of thousands of troops, the individual loyalties of whom were not entirely certain.

When I was serving at the U.S. Embassy in Ankara, my job was mostly administering the Trump-era Muslim ban as it applied to thousands of would-be immigrants from Iran. It was a disgusting, bigoted policy I made no secret of opposing. My newly arrived boss, who I forgot also spoke Farsi, overheard me being too sympathetic to a family I had just banned. My supervisor took me aside. “No trash-talking policy in front of applicants.” He also hated the ban. “If you are going to be a Deep Stater, do it in private.” Outside of the conspiratorial fringe, this is what we mean when we say Deep State in America. Obstructionist insiders. Two multilingual bureaucrats from “The Blob” in J. Crew suits trying to pull a little polite veneer over their opposition to Trump.

I walked away from my desk into the old embassy grounds, shrugging off the incident in the same cafeteria garden in which generations of American officials had sat while mulling over their own pet issues in Turkish-American relations. It was the same garden where U.S. officials celebrated after the 1980 Turkish coup d’état — the height of Deep State power in Turkey — which arrested tens of thousands overnight and crushed the left in that country for a generation. It was where the legendary Radio Free Europe psychological operations expert and self-identified CIA official Paul Henze had probably sat to relax during his own Cold War assignment in Ankara. After his work in Ankara was done, Henze would be the man who would lean over to Jimmy Carter and gleefully proclaim that “the boys in Ankara have done it!” as they watched American-trained officers overthrow an elected government in 1980.

The situation in which I found myself exemplifies the exact problem with translating the idea of Deep State between the U.S. and Turkey. There are two versions of this term now: a Turkish one that describes something horrifyingly real and an American one that stands for either stodgy bureaucratic annoyance or lurid fantasy. This gap in translation is not a linguistic inadequacy. Rather it masks a central truth: that the Turkish Deep State was an American-backed project. The most dangerous, capable and avid adherents of Deep State conspiracies in the U.S. are themselves products of the same military and security institutions that supported the Deep State in Turkey. The targets of the real existing Turkish Deep State and the Americans who regard themselves as fighting against a fictional Deep State are the same. They are democracy, minority rights and the left.

Standing in the U.S. Embassy in Ankara, a place as tied to the Turkish Deep State as any American building can be, while being half-scolded by a supervisor who calls us Deep Staters with a hint of pride, illustrates the poverty of American understanding of this term, which should be taken seriously. As it meanders in translation, Deep State loses useful meaning and becomes the territory of wingnuts and cranks. If this continues to happen, we will lose sight of one last terrifying irony: that with their infiltration of the military and the security services, contempt for democratic processes and willingness to use political violence, the anti-Deep State conspiracists in the United States are well on their way to creating the unauthorized and unknown networks of power that the term Deep State was coined to describe.

Years after Ankara, on my way to work at another diplomatic post, I watched Jan. 6 unfold on my phone. The rioters stormed up the steps of the Capitol with the same vigor any U.S. trained officer might have displayed while overturning a Cold War-era election in some foreign country. America’s support for anti-democratic violence has finally come home. I think of Paul Henze as the rioters breach the Capitol doors. The boys have indeed done it.

Josef Burton is a former American diplomat. He worked on Iranian and Afghan immigration issues during the Trump presidency

 New Lines Magazine

ESSAY

The Paranoid Style: Rereading Richard Hofstadter in the Aftermath of January 6

 By Bennett Parten

IT ISN’T ALL that hard to explain what happened on January 6. The proof reads right off the page. At a rally with thousands of his supporters, President Donald Trump told his people to march to the Capitol; his people went to the Capitol. His son and campaign surrogate Donald Trump Jr. told them to fight; they fought. The case for incitement is on record; or as Trump adherents repeated ad nauseam during the last impeachment: “Read the Transcript!” Yet what is much harder to explain and what future historians are likely to puzzle over is exactly how we got here — how so many Americans could not only believe conspiracies as loony as #StopTheSteal and QAnon, but could also believe them so fervently that they stormed the Capitol, ransacked the halls of our highest offices, and carried out acts of hooliganism that killed five Americans and injured countless more.

Richard Hofstadter, a midcentury American historian and public intellectual, gives us a place to start. In his “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (1964) — the lead essay in a book by the same name — Hofstadter offered an early diagnosis of the type of conspiratorial politics that exploded on the steps of the United States Capitol. He called it a “paranoid style,” and in naming it, began the process of trying to understand it — of putting it under historical scrutiny and identifying its root causes and consequences. But to be clear, the paranoid part was not a clinical pathology. Rather, what mattered most was the style part. He likened it to something being described as “baroque” or “mannerist.” The paranoid style reflected a way of seeing and doing politics, which meant that it was capable of being studied and eventually understood.

Hofstadter felt compelled to write because he saw a version of the paranoid style rising in his own time; if January 6 has taught us anything, it’s that we are now living in the long arc of its creation

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Hofstadter tells us that, at its core, the paranoid style uses conspiracy to engage in subversion. The political paranoiac can’t stomach society as it is and thus seeks to destroy it under the guise of some looming threat: a deep state, antifa, migrant caravans, transgender bathrooms, an international pedophile ring. Perceived persecution runs deep, and those taken with the paranoid style channel their victimhood by believing the world is one vast conspiracy. But here is the key idea: it is not just personal grievance. The paranoid style is the paranoid style because it manages to take victimhood and transmit those feelings of personal injury onto the nation’s fate. One person’s paranoia thus becomes an attack on a culture or a way of life, turning a lone loony into a proud member of a “silent majority” — a collective firewall against something that needs no firewall.

Why? Hofstadter had a couple ideas. For one, he believed that American society was increasingly rootless. Homogeneous communities were becoming more heterodox, especially as the nation grew more ethnically diverse; people picked up and moved, leaving old communities behind; and the country was — and still is — massive, with different regions and localities maturing with their own values and beliefs. As important, the national standard of living had risen rapidly. In just a few generations, people had gone from eking out an existence off the land to microwaving dinners in manicured middle-class homes, which redefined what politics was all about.

This last part is the most important. According to Hofstadter, the paranoid style possessed a particular staying power because by the mid-20th century, politics had shifted from a matter of competing interests — “Who gets what, when, how?” — to a matter of one’s own self-definition. He believed that people now saw themselves in politics, which turned the political field into a great “sounding board” for one’s “identities, values, fears, and aspirations.” The personal had become political; the political was now personal.

Hofstadter is perhaps his most prescient in his use of the term status. In a way, the term is a holdover from his Pulitzer Prize–winning The Age of Reform (1955). In it, he argued that, as an impulse, turn-of-the-century progressivism ran through WASPy, old-stock Americans who claimed the mantle of reform as a way to assuage their “status anxiety” — their fear of falling behind in a new and modernizing United States awash with an ever-expanding professional class. In a book chock-full of provocative and field-defining claims — including an argument that 1890s Populists were nothing but a bunch of hayseed antisemites drunk on their own misguided dream of an agrarian past — his point about status anxiety became one of his most widely debated and well-remembered ideas.

Hofstadter struck a similar chord in reference to the paranoid style, except in this work he drew on a slightly different meaning of status. Remember, he was writing at a time when our political language didn’t include things like “identity politics” or the “culture wars.” Yet he wrote that status could very well be replaced by terms such as “cultural politics” or “symbolic politics.” Still, regardless of terminology, what he considers status politics is a particular type of politics whereby groups find prestige in publicly rallying behind their values through efforts like the Thin Blue Line flag and Blue Lives Matter, bathroom bills, the 1776 Commission, and anthem protests. It’s a politics of projection, and to Hofstadter’s main point, it turns politics into a place where people find self-worth.

One of the most debilitating elements of status politics, as Hofstadter saw it, is that it trades political interest for pure emotion, which makes it almost impervious to policy and reduces serious questions of political difference to guttural reactions: “Owning the libs.” “Fuck your feelings.” “Fake news!” “Lock her up!” Even worse, because such a politics avoids policy, its most adroit spokesmen have little incentive to effecting positive change. Instead, they pride themselves on negating incursions and focus their political goals on acts of prohibition, effectively limiting the range of political possibility. This style of politics, if allowed to fester, destroys society as we know it — not in a clap of smoke or a blaze of bullets but by letting it slowly wither on the vine.

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Born in 1916, Richard Hofstadter was one of the foremost historians of his generation. A Columbia PhD and later a member of the school’s history faculty for over 20 years, he thrived at untangling political ideas; his writing — sharp, incisive, and accessible to a broad audience — brought him fame. Perhaps his best-known work is The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1948), a synthetic and largely biographical account of the shared ideas underlying American politics. The book won him a wide following and established his central place in the consensus school of American historical writing.

To be clear, Hofstadter never saw the paranoid style as an exclusively right-wing phenomenon. It applied to both sides of the political spectrum, and in both the essay and the larger book, he drew historical parallels with a number of American movements. There was the Anti-Masonic Movement in 1820s, which believed that secret societies (the Masons in particular) sought to control the United States government. In the 1930s, Father Coughlin, a priest from Detroit, spewed antisemitic conspiracies through the airwaves of his nationally syndicated radio show. And lest we forget, anti-Catholicism, or fears of a vast papist conspiracy, had always existed in American politics. The point, for Hofstadter, was that elements of the paranoid style had been a recurring theme throughout American history, and he expected it would remain a constant force in political life.

Still, he recognized that, as of the 1950s and ’60s, things had clearly changed. Whereas those earlier movements had all been mediated or controlled and eventually dealt with by the existing party structure, conspiratorial forces on the right threatened an internal takeover of the Republican Party. He called them “pseudo-conservatives.” These were not conservatives in the traditional sense of the term, nor were they your typical business-minded Republicans. Instead, these were members of a new conservative movement that didn’t want to conserve American society so much as undermine it. As these new conservatives saw the country, the entire postwar order had been built in the image of the New Deal, which they regarded as little more than a liberal exercise in state-planning. If allowed to persist, this new order, they believed, would fall down the slippery slope and arrive at its destined end point — state-sponsored socialism, if not one-party totalitarianism.

In hindsight, it is unclear how much was hyperbole and how much the pseudo-conservatives actually believed their own Stalin-inspired fever dreams. Nonetheless, these new pseudo-conservatives used the looming socialist menace as a pretense for waging an all-out war on the liberal consensus at the heart of midcentury United States. They hated Eisenhower, largely because despite being a Republican and a “small-c” conservative to boot, Ike kept much of the New Deal order intact, thus dividing the party. Old-time Republicans like Robert A. Taft and Nelson Rockefeller attempted to hold the line. Meanwhile, movement conservatives, led by the eventual kingmaker William F. Buckley Jr., editor of the National Review, sought to take over the party, purge it of its most flaccid members, and recreate it as an avowedly conservative party. The result was Barry Goldwater’s campaign in 1964, a loss that history tells us wasn’t a defeat as much as a preview. The big breakout came with the Reagan Revolution in 1980. Then the Tea Party in 2010. So on and so forth. The conservative insurgency continues to evolve.

Yet, even as it evolves, it retains its central calculus. As Hofstadter identified way back in 1964, the modern right has conspiratorial thinking coded into its DNA. Fear of a permanent liberal order has since turned into fears that any federal program aimed at bettering the welfare of its citizens constitutes a step toward state control. So it was then, and so it is today. The only difference is that in Hofstadter’s time, this nascent conservative movement failed to control the party. It hadn’t yet defined the parameters of our politics, and it hadn’t yet cannibalized the Republican Party and all its more liberal members. The movement was still young — so young, in fact, that though Hofstadter expected the new conservatism to become what he described as one of the “long-waves of the twentieth century,” and he believed that it, too, could be mediated and controlled. January 6 proved otherwise.


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The Paranoid Style in American Politics isn’t an It Can’t Happen Here or a Nineteen Eighty-Four — it’s not a book that ominously warns of potential peril. It’s especially not one of those works presaging the possibility of an American demagogue. It’s a learned study. Some of Hofstadter’s claims don’t hold up. Most do. And his fundamental description of the paranoid style reads as prescient and as relevant today as ever. As he wrote, the paranoid style casts conspiracy not as a singular plot or occurrence, but as “the motive force” in history, which makes history and conspiracy indistinguishable. When this happens, elections won’t do, town council meetings don’t matter, and only something as drastic as overthrowing a sitting government can stop the conspiracy, or conspiracies, that surround us. Someone has to be there forever “manning the barricades of civilization,” to quote one of his more memorable lines.

It’s easy to see those who stormed the Capitol on January 6 as fringe members of the Republican Party, as Trump voters but not representative of the Republican Party as a whole. Yet doing so misses the conspiratorial thinking that binds them both. In 2016, Michael Anton, a former Bush official, published an essay he called “The Flight 93 Election,” which made the case for a Trump presidency by equating a Clinton win to al-Qaeda hijacking the fourth plane that crashed in Pennsylvania on 9/11. Conservatives had a choice, he argued. They could either storm the cockpit (that is, vote for Trump) or not vote and ensure a Clinton win, which would ruin the country beyond repair. To up the ante, Anton acknowledged that “[y]ou may die anyway” — meaning the Republican Party may lose or destroy itself — but “if you don’t try, death is certain.” Someone must man the barricades, or else a President Clinton may bring the socialist menace through the White House door. We all know what they chose.

For his part, Trump operated with such political force within the party because he commanded Anton’s fear, amplified it, and browbeat fellow Republicans with it, all while perfecting another of the paranoid style’s characteristic traits: as Hofstadter pointed out, the paranoid style concocts its own base fabrications, but it works best by taking some defensible claim and making profound leaps in logic. Yes, mail-in ballots pose some security risk, but that doesn’t mean the election was fraudulent. Yes, there is a robust government bureaucracy, but it hardly amounts to a nefarious deep state out to do the president in. These massive leaps in logic are just the kinds of things that led to January 6. No, supposed “irregularities” do not equal fraud. And no, Mike Pence can’t stop a procedural vote from happening, even if it is technically a vote. By helping his supporters make these leaps from the defensible to the absurd, Trump parroted the paranoid style from the bully pulpit of the oval office.


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If only Hofstadter had forewarned us of potential doom. As it is, he offers no way to avoid the collapse into paranoia — no prediction, no solution, no guidebook back to sanity. If anything, history gives us the answer we don’t want — that paranoia is an American fact, and that we must try to rein it in. After January 6, it’s obvious that we’re failing, that too many of our elected officials aren’t responsible leaders, that our parties can’t mitigate the problem, and that our politics have regressed to the point that so many Americans can no longer distinguish what’s real and what’s not.

Hofstadter published “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” in 1964. Television news was in its infancy, the internet was years from even being an idea, and no one could have imagined a thing called “social media.” Moreover, the conservative insurgency had yet to fully rise. Reagan performed in Westerns, the Tea Party meant Boston in 1773, and Trump was but a rich kid piling up Vietnam deferments while still a freshman at Fordham. In other words, the paranoid style was still only a style. You could still distinguish the cooks and cranks from the responsible politicians and old-time patricians. Hofstadter reads so dissatisfying now in the aftermath of January 6 because we’ve seen how far we’ve come and are left with a chilling thought: if this isn’t the bottom, what is?


July 13, 2021 •

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Bennett Parten is a PhD candidate in History at Yale University. His writing has appeared in We’re History, The History New Network, and The Washington Post.

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Featured image: "Stop The Steal" by Chad Davis is licensed under CC BY 2.0. Image has been cropped.

Banner image: "Stop The Steal" by Tyler Merbler is licensed under CC BY 2.0. Image has been cropped.

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Altercation: AIPAC Goes Full Trump

It endorses most of the GOP representatives who voted to overturn the Electoral College results—but not pro-Israel hawk Liz Cheney.

BY ERIC ALTERMAN
APRIL 29, 2022

EVAN VUCCI/AP PHOTO
Then–Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at the 2016 AIPAC Policy Conference at the Verizon Center, March 21, 2016, in Washington.

AIPAC has been in the news lately, and not in a good way. After decades of pretending that it would not know a political contribution if it bumped into one and broke its nose, it ended the charade and announced in December 2021 that it would be creating a super PAC to donate directly to congressional candidates. Having raised nearly $16 million in its first quarter of existence, it has now endorsed 109 of the 147 Republican congressmen who supported Donald Trump’s campaign to try to overturn the Electoral College’s results on January 6th, along with a few Democrats. “Our goal is to make America’s friendship with Israel so robust, so certain, so broadly based, and so dependable that even the deep divisions of American politics can never imperil that relationship and the ability of the Jewish state to defend itself,” it explains.

In a Boston Globe op-ed by Alan Solomont and Nancy Buck (both associated with J Street), however, we learn that “AIPAC’s new endorsees include such allies of Donald Trump as Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, who refuses to cooperate with the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol; Representative Pete Sessions of Texas, who met with ‘Stop the Steal’ leaders just days before the insurrection; and Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, who has echoed white nationalist conspiracies about ‘replacement theory’ and compared Democratic leaders to the Nazis.”

Read more Altercation

And guess which Republican AIPAC apparently forgot to include? That’s right. The rather crazily “pro-Israel” Lynn Cheney is being blackballed. In the past, Cheney has taken the AIPAC line down the line. Even before she was in Congress, she represented the Republican Party at an AIPAC Policy Conference panel and (falsely) complained of Obama: “There is no president who has done more to delegitimize and destabilize the State of Israel in recent history than President Obama.” She also attacked Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, in a manner consistent with AIPAC’s attacks on them. But now, apparently because she’s become persona non grata with the people out to destroy American democracy, she’s getting stiffed.

Cheney is understandably pissed, accusing AIPAC’s leadership of “playing a dangerous game of politics.” AIPAC’s behavior has also angered many people who would normally be inclined to march in step with it. Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, termed AIPAC’s list “morally bankrupt and short-sighted.” Even former Anti-Defamation League leader Abe Foxman could not stomach it, calling the endorsements a “sad mistake.”

Given that a mere 4 percent of American Jews, in 2022, put Israel at the top of their list of concerns (and they are divided on the issue), and that the vast majority voted for Joe Biden and oppose Trump and the Republicans, what AIPAC shamelessly calls its “United Democracy Project” is clearly not only undermining its bona fides as a supporter of American democracy; it is also renouncing whatever claim it had to represent the values, and interests, of American Jewry.

Then again, it’s not as if AIPAC, its allies in Congress, and the rest of the world of establishment Jewish organizations can claim to care about democracy inside Israel, either. After all, there can be no argument that the laws under which the Palestinians are forced to live in the West Bank are even remotely subject to democratic rule. Did you know, for instance, that if a West Bank Palestinian marries an Israeli Arab citizen, they are not allowed to move in with their spouse inside the Green Line? And did you also know that at Palestinian universities faculty are not allowed to invite speakers to their classes who are not preapproved by Israel’s minister of defense? This past February, the Israeli occupation authorities quietly issued a new 97-page ordinance called “Procedure for Entry and Residence for Foreigners in Judea and Samaria Area,” (which is what Israel calls the West Bank) demanding that “Foreign-passport holding Palestinians must provide information—for visa purposes—on an application for approval prior to travel, which includes the names and national ID numbers of “first-degree” relatives, or other non-relatives with whom they may stay or visit.” This article notes that the rules also “complicate and formalise written and unwritten entry restrictions for foreigners wishing to visit, do business, reunite and reside with their Palestinian families, work or volunteer in the West Bank, or study or teach at Palestinian academic institutions.” These are actually relatively minor examples recently in the news. One could list the hundreds of ways in which Palestinians are not allowed to exercise the same rights that extend not only to Israelis but also to settlers.

It’s not as if AIPAC, its allies in Congress, and the rest of the world of establishment Jewish organizations can claim to care about democracy inside Israel, either.

Yet the vast majority of establishment Jewish organizations in the United States, including but hardly limited to AIPAC, are spearheading legislation to demand that both the federal government and state authorities treat the West Bank as indistinguishable from Israel. For instance, last month Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) introduced legislation prohibiting participation in boycotts or requests for boycotts of “a country which is friendly to the United States” that are “enforced by foreign governments or international organizations.” It includes a section to prevent “U.S. citizens and companies and federal and state governments from providing information to foreign governments and international organizations that assist boycotts of friendly countries.”

OK, that’s anti–free speech and all, but it also insists that the legislation label the U.N. Human Rights Council’s creation of a database of companies doing business in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights as an act of BDS. “Too many, even in the halls of Congress, have emboldened antisemitic and anti-Israel rhetoric by accepting the BDS movement,” Zeldin said. “This legislation not only reinforces congressional opposition to the BDS movement but protects American companies from being forced to provide information to international organizations that peddle this hate-filled movement and holds those who attempt to violate that protection accountable.” (Much the same law was introduced in 2018 by Sens. Ben Cardin (D-MD) and Rob Portman (R-OH), and earned 58 Senate co-sponsors—42 Republicans, 15 Democrats, and one independent—and 292 House co-sponsors—216 Republicans and 76 Democrats. Another earlier version was introduced by Zeldin in 2020, when it enjoyed 63 Republican co-sponsors and one Democrat, and died in committee. I wrote of my opposition to both BDS as well as these laws here.)

Recall that last year, the liberal ice cream impresarios Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield announced that they would no longer allow their ice cream to be sold in the occupied territories, though it remained widely available across Israel itself. In doing so, they spoke in the traditional terms of American liberal Zionists. Describing themselves as “proud Jews” and “supporters of the State of Israel,” they said they simply wished to voice their opposition both to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which targets all of Israel, and to an Israeli policy that “perpetuates an illegal occupation that is a barrier to peace and violates the basic human rights of the Palestinian people who live under the occupation.”

And yet in his recent book, It Could Happen Here, Jonathan Greenblatt, who replaced Foxman as the ADL’s CEO, termed Cohen and Greenfield’s decision “an insidious effort to delegitimize the Jewish state.” Pro-Israel lobbyists have demanded—and won—divestment from whatever investments countless states hold in their pension funds in the ice cream company’s parent company, Unilever. These and other punitive actions were taken because the two men took a position that Israel and the occupied territories should be treated as separate entities—that the West Bank was not “Israel,” and vice versa. They did so, moreover, at a moment when most Americans, including 58 percent of American Jews, wanted the United States to restrict its aid to Israel to prevent it from being spent on settlements.

Never mind that, though, according to William Daroff, CEO of the 53-member Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the umbrella group for mainstream Jewish leaders. “With Ben & Jerry’s, it’s not just about Unilever,” he explained in a February interview. “It’s about every other multinational company that may come under pressure from fringe elements. And we want them to see the tsuris … that’s the technical term—that has been caused for Unilever in state capitals, where 33 states have effected some sort of action to push back against boycott, divestment and sanctions.”

In other words, their purpose was clear: intimidation.

Never mind, also, that you can still buy Ben & Jerry’s pretty much everywhere in Israel today. It is only in the West Bank where it has been withdrawn. So the only way you can complain about a boycott of “Israel”—much less bigotry, etc.—is if you believe there is no distinction to be made between Israel and its occupied territories. And if you believe that, well, you can’t possibly argue that Israel is a democracy. In fact, there’s a word defined in the 1988 Rome Statute that created the International Criminal Court that defines “inhumane acts” undertaken “in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” Want to guess what that word is?

USSA

The Kremlin’s Strange Victory

How Putin Exploits American Dysfunction and Fuels American Decline

By Fiona Hill

November/December 2021

Benedetto Cristofani

LONG READ

Donald Trump wanted his July 2018 meeting in Helsinki with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to evoke memories of the momentous encounters that took place in the 1980s between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Those arms control summits had yielded the kind of iconic imagery that Trump loved: strong, serious men meeting in distant places to hash out the great issues of the day. What better way, in Trump’s view, to showcase his prowess at the art of the deal?

That was the kind of show Trump wanted to put on in Helsinki. What emerged instead was an altogether different sort of spectacle.

By the time of the meeting, I had spent just over a year serving in the Trump administration as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council. Like everyone else who worked in the White House, I had, by then, learned a great deal about Trump’s idiosyncrasies. We all knew, for instance, that Trump rarely read the detailed briefing materials his staff prepared for him and that in meetings or calls with other leaders, he could never stick to an agreed-on script or his cabinet members’ recommendations. This had proved to be a major liability during those conversations, since it often seemed to his foreign counterparts as though Trump was hearing about the issues on the agenda for the first time.

When Trump was winging it, he could be persuaded of all kinds of things. If a foreign visitor or caller was one of his favored strongmen, Trump would always give the strongman’s views and version of events the benefit of the doubt over those of his own advisers. During a cabinet meeting with a visiting Hungarian delegation in May 2019, for example, Trump cut off acting U.S. Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, who was trying to make a point about a critical European security issue. In front of everyone, Trump told Shanahan that the autocratic Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, had already explained it all to him when they had met in the Oval Office moments earlier—and that Orban knew the issue better than Shanahan did, anyway. In Trump’s mind, the Hungarian strongman simply had more authority than the American officials who worked for Trump himself. The other leader was his equal, and his staff members were not. For Trump, all pertinent information trickled down from him, not up to him. This tendency of Trump’s was lamentable when it played out behind closed doors, but it was inexcusable (and indeed impossible to explain or justify) when it spilled out into public view—which is precisely what happened during the now legendarily disastrous press conference after Trump’s meeting with Putin in Helsinki.

Before the press conference, Trump was pleased with how things had gone in his one-on-one meeting with Putin. The optics in Finland’s presidential palace were to Trump’s liking. The two men had agreed to get U.S.-Russian arms control negotiations going again and to convene meetings between their countries’ respective national security councils. Trump was keen to show that he and Putin could have a productive, normal relationship, partly to dispel the prevailing notion that there was something perverse about his ties to the Russian president. Trump was eager to brush away allegations that he had conspired with the Kremlin in its interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election or that the Russians had somehow compromised him—matters that at the time of the meeting, Special Counsel Robert Mueller was actively investigating.

Things went wrong as soon as the press conference began. Trump expected public praise for meeting with Putin and tackling the nuclear threat. But the U.S. journalists in attendance were not interested in arms control. They wanted to know about the one-on-one meeting and what Putin might have said or not said regarding 2016 and election interference. Jonathan Lemire of the Associated Press asked Trump whether he believed Putin, who had repeatedly denied that his country had done anything to meddle in the election, or the U.S. intelligence agencies, which had concluded the opposite. Lemire pressed Trump: “Would you now, with the whole world watching, tell President Putin—would you denounce what happened in 2016 and would you warn him to never do it again?”

Trump balked. He really didn’t want to answer. The only way that Trump could view Russia’s broad-based attack on the U.S. democratic system was through the lens of his own ego and image. In my interactions with Trump and his closest staff in the White House, it had become clear to me that endorsing the conclusions of the U.S. intelligence agencies would be tantamount to admitting that Trump had not won the 2016 election. The questions got right to the heart of his insecurities. If Trump said, “Yes, the Russians interfered on my behalf,” then he might as well have said outright, “I am illegitimate.”

So as he often did in such situations, Trump tried to divert attention elsewhere. He went off on a tangent about a convoluted conspiracy theory involving Ukraine and the emails of his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, and then produced a muddled, rambling answer to Lemire’s question, the crux of which was this:

My people came to me. . . . They said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this. I don’t see any reason why it would be. . . . But I have confidence in both parties. . . . I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.

The outcome of the Helsinki press conference was entirely predictable, which was why I and others had counseled against holding it at all. But it was still agonizing to watch. I was sitting in front of the podium as Trump spoke, immediately behind the U.S. national security adviser and the secretary of state. I saw them stiffen slightly, and I contemplated throwing a fit or faking a seizure and hurling myself backward into the row of journalists behind me. I just wanted to end the whole thing. Perhaps contrary to the expectations of many American observers, even Putin was somewhat dismayed. He reveled in the national and personal humiliation that Trump was courting, but he also knew that Trump’s careless remarks would provoke a backlash in the United States and thus further constrain the U.S. president’s already limited room to maneuver on Russia policy. The modest agreements for further high-level meetings were already out the window. As he exited the room, Putin told his press secretary, within earshot of our interpreter, that the press conference had been “bullshit.”

Trump’s critics immediately pounced on his bizarre conduct in Helsinki. It was more evidence that Trump was in league with Putin and that the Kremlin held sway over the American president. The following year, Mueller’s final investigative report determined that during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the Trump campaign had in fact been willing to exploit any derogatory information about Clinton that came its way from whatever source, including Russia. In seeking to thwart Clinton’s bid to become the first female American president, the Trump campaign and the Kremlin had been acting in parallel; their goals had aligned. Mueller concluded that although this did not amount to a criminal conspiracy, there was plenty of evidence of an extensive and sophisticated Russian political influence operation against the United States.

Russia and the United States were not so different—and Putin, for one, knew it.

The Mueller report also sketched the contours of a different, arguably more pernicious kind of “Russian connection.” In some crucial ways, Russia and the United States were not so different—and Putin, for one, knew it. In the very early years of the post–Cold War era, many analysts and observers had hoped that Russia would slowly but surely converge in some ways with the United States. They predicted that once the Soviet Union and communism had fallen away, Russia would move toward a form of liberal democracy. By the late 1990s, it was clear that such an outcome was not on the horizon. And in more recent years, quite the opposite has happened: the United States has begun to move closer to Russia, as populism, cronyism, and corruption have sapped the strength of American democracy. This is a development that few would have foreseen 20 years ago, but one that American leaders should be doing everything in their power to halt and reverse.

Indeed, over time, the United States and Russia have become subject to the same economic and social forces. Their populations have proved equally susceptible to political manipulation. Prior to the 2016 U.S. election, Putin recognized that the United States was on a path similar to the one that Russia took in the 1990s, when economic dislocation and political upheaval after the collapse of the Soviet Union had left the Russian state weak and insolvent. In the United States, decades of fast-paced social and demographic changes and the Great Recession of 2008–9 had weakened the country and increased its vulnerability to subversion. Putin realized that despite the lofty rhetoric that flowed from Washington about democratic values and liberal norms, beneath the surface, the United States was beginning to resemble his own country: a place where self-dealing elites had hollowed out vital institutions and where alienated, frustrated people were increasingly open to populist and authoritarian appeals. The fire was already burning; all Putin had to do was pour on some gasoline.

A SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP

When Trump was elected, Putin and the Kremlin made no attempt to conceal their glee. They had thought that Clinton would become president and that she would focus on criticizing Putin’s style of governance and constraining Russia. They had steeled themselves and prepared for the worst. Instead, they got the best possible outcome from their perspective—a populist, nativistic president with no prior experience in foreign policy and a huge, fragile ego. Putin recognized Trump as a type and grasped his political predilections immediately: Trump, after all, fit a mold that Putin himself had helped forge as the first populist leader to take power in a major country in the twenty-first century. Putin had blazed the trail that Trump would follow during his four years in office.

The essence of populism is creating a direct link with “the people” or with specific groups within a population, then offering them quick fixes for complex problems and bypassing or eliminating intermediaries such as political parties, parliamentary representatives, and established institutions. Referendums, plebiscites, and executive orders are the preferred tools of the populist leader, and Putin has used them all over the past 20 years. When he came to power on December 31, 1999, at the end of a decade of crisis and strife in Russia, Putin promised to fix everything. Unlike his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, Putin did not belong to a formal political party. He was the champion of a looser, personalized movement. After 2000, Putin turned Russian presidential elections into national referendums on himself by making sure his rivals were obscure (or wholly manufactured) opposition candidates. And at every critical juncture during his time in power, Putin has adjusted Russia’s political system to entrench himself in the Kremlin. Finally, in 2020, he formally amended the constitution so that in theory (and health permitting), he can run for reelection and stay in power until 2036.

Putin blazed the trail that Trump would follow during his four years in office.

All of Putin’s machinations greatly impressed Trump. He wanted to “get along” with Russia and with Putin personally. Practically the only thing Trump ever said to me during my time in his administration was to ask, in reference to Putin, “Am I going to like him?” Before I could answer, the other officials in the room got up to leave, and the president’s attention shifted; such was life as a female adviser in the Trump White House.

Trump took at face value rumors that Putin was the richest man in the world and told close associates that he admired Putin for his presumed wealth and for the way he ran Russia as if it were his own private company. As Trump freely admitted, he wanted to do the same thing. He saw the United States as an extension of his other private enterprises: the Trump Organization, but with the world’s largest military at its disposal. This was a troubling perspective for a U.S. president, and indeed, over the course of his time in office, Trump came to more closely resemble Putin in political practice than he resembled any of his American predecessors.

At times, the similarities between Trump and Putin were glaringly obvious: their shared manipulation and exploitation of the domestic media, their appeals to their own versions of their countries’ “golden age,” their compilation of personal lists of “national heroes” to appeal to their voters’ nostalgia and conservatism—and their attendant compilation of personal lists of enemies to do the same for their voters’ darker sides. Putin put statues of Soviet-era figures back on their pedestals and restored Soviet memorials that had been toppled under Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Trump tried to prevent the removal of statues of Confederate leaders and the renaming of American military bases honoring Confederate generals. The two men also shared many of the same enemies: cosmopolitan, liberal elites; the American financier, philanthropist, and open society promoter George Soros; and anyone trying to expand voting rights, improve electoral systems, or cast a harsh light on corruption in their countries’ respective executive branches.

Trump also aped Putin’s willingness to abuse his executive power by going after his political adversaries; Trump’s first impeachment was provoked in part by his attempt to coerce the government of Ukraine into smearing one of his most formidable opponents, Joe Biden, ahead of the 2020 presidential election. And Trump imported Putin’s style of personalist rule, bypassing the professional civil servants in the federal government—a nefarious “deep state,” in Trump’s eyes—to rely instead on the counsel and interventions of cronies. Foreign politicians called in chits with celebrities who had personal connections to the president and his family, avoiding their own embassies in the process. Lobbyists complained to whomever they could reach in the West Wing or the Trump family circle. They were quick to set attack dogs on anyone perceived as an obstacle and to rile up pro-Trump trolls on the Internet, because this always seemed to work. Influence peddlers both domestic and foreign courted the president to pursue their own priorities; the policymaking process became, in essence, privatized.


Trump and Putin shake hands in Helsinki, Finland, July 2018Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

The event that most clearly revealed the convergence of politics in the United States and Russia during Trump’s term was his disorganized but deadly serious attempt to stage a self-coup and halt the peaceful transfer of executive power after he lost the 2020 election to Biden. Russia, after all, has a long history of coups and succession crises, dating back to the tsarist era, including three during the past 30 years. In August 1991, hard-liners opposed to Gorbachev’s reforms staged a brief putsch, declaring a state of emergency and placing Gorbachev under house arrest at his vacation home. The effort fizzled, and the coup was a debacle, but it helped bring down the Soviet Union. Two years later, violence erupted from a bitter dispute between the Russian parliament and Yeltsin over the respective powers of the legislature and the president in competing drafts of a new constitution. Yeltsin moved to dissolve parliament after it refused to confirm his choice for prime minister. His vice president and the Speaker of the parliament, in response, sought to impeach him. In the end, Yeltsin invoked “extraordinary powers” and called out the Russian army to shell the parliament building, thus settling the argument with brute force.

The next coup was a legal one and came in 2020, when Putin wanted to amend Yeltsin’s version of the constitution to beef up his presidential powers—and, more important, to remove the existing term limits so that he could potentially stay on as president until 2036. As a proxy to propose the necessary constitutional amendments, Putin tapped Valentina Tereshkova, a loyal supporter in parliament and, as a cosmonaut and the first woman to travel to outer space, an iconic figure in Russian society. Putin’s means were subtler than Yeltsin’s in 1993, but his methods were no less effective.

It would have been impossible for any close observer of recent Russian history to not recall those episodes on January 6, when a mob whipped up by Trump and his allies—who had spent weeks claiming that the 2020 election had been stolen from him—stormed the U.S. Capitol and tried to stop the formal certification of the election results. The attack on the Capitol was the culmination of four years of conspiracies and lies that Trump and his allies had fed to his supporters on social media platforms, in speeches, and on television. The “Big Lie” that Trump had won the election was built on the backs of the thousands of little lies that Trump uttered nearly every time he spoke and that were then nurtured within the dense ecosystem of Trumpist media outlets. This was yet one more way in which, under Trump, the United States came to resemble Russia, where Putin has long solidified his grip on power by manipulating the Russian media, fueling nationalist grievances, and peddling conspiracy theories.

I ALONE

Trump put the United States on a path to autocracy, all the while promising to “make America great again.” Likewise, Putin took Russia back toward the authoritarianism of the Soviet Union under the guise of strengthening the state and restoring the country’s global position. This striking convergence casts U.S.-Russian relations and the exigencies of Washington’s approach to Moscow in a new light.

Historically, U.S. policies toward Russia have been premised on the idea that the two countries’ paths and expectations diverged at the end of the Cold War. In the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Western analysts had initially thought that Russia might embrace some of the international institutional arrangements that Washington and its allies had long championed. That, of course, did not happen. And under Putin, U.S.-Russian relations have become more frazzled and fraught than at any point in the 1990s.

There is something confounding about the ongoing confrontation between the two countries, which seems like an artifact from another era. During the Cold War, the stakes of the conflict were undeniable. The Soviet Union posed an existential threat to the United States and its allies, and vice versa. The two superpowers faced off in an ideological clash between capitalism and communism and a geopolitical tussle over spheres of influence in Europe. Today, Russia maintains the capacity to obliterate the United States, but the Soviet Union and the communist system are gone. And even though foreign policy circles in Washington and Moscow still view U.S.-Russian relations through the lens of great-power competition, the struggle for Europe is over. For the United States, China, not Russia, poses the greatest foreign policy challenge of the twenty-first century, along with the urgent existential threats of climate change and global pandemics.

The ongoing confrontation between the two countries seems like an artifact from another era.

Yet a sense of confrontation and competition persists. Americans point to a pattern of Russian aggression and provocation: Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008, its annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its subsequent assaults on Ukraine’s territory and sovereignty, its intervention in Syria in 2015, the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and the frequent ransomware attacks and email hacks attributed to Russian actors. Russians, for their part, point to the expansion of NATO into eastern Europe and the Baltic states, the U.S. bombing of Belgrade during the Kosovo war in 1999, Washington’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003, U.S. support for the “color revolutions” that took place in post-Soviet states such as Georgia and Ukraine in the first decade of this century, and the uprisings in the Middle East during the Arab Spring. In Moscow, all of these serve as proof that Washington is hell-bent on invasion and regime change and also has Russia and Putin in its cross hairs.

In truth, most American policymakers simply wish that Russia would just go away so they can refocus their attention on what really matters. For their Russian counterparts, however, the United States still represents the main opponent. That is because, as a populist leader, Putin sees the United States not just as a geopolitical threat to Russia but also as a personal threat to himself. For Putin, foreign policy and domestic policy have fused. His attempt to retain Russia’s grip on the independent countries that were once part of the Soviet Union and to reassert Moscow’s influence in other global arenas is inseparable from his effort to consolidate and expand his authority at home.

Putin sits at the apex of a personalized and semi-privatized kleptocratic system that straddles the Russian state and its institutions and population. He has embedded loyalists in every important Russian institution, enterprise, and industry. If Putin wants to retain the presidency until 2036—by which time he will be 84 years old and will have become the longest-serving modern Russian ruler—he will have to maintain this level of control or even increase it, since any slippage might be perceived as weakness. To do so, Putin has to deter or defeat any opponents, foreign or domestic, who have the capacity to undermine his regime. His hope is that leaders in the United States will get so bogged down with problems at home that they will cease criticizing his personalization of power and will eschew any efforts to transform Russia similar to those the U.S. government carried out in the 1990s.


Putin observing Russian military exercises in the Nizhny Novgorod region, Russia, September 2021Sputnik Photo Agency / Reuters

Putin also blurs the line between domestic and foreign policy to distract the Russian population from the distortions and deficiencies of his rule. On the one hand, he stresses how decadent and dissolute the United States has become and how ill suited its leaders are to teach anyone a lesson on how to run a country. On the other hand, he stresses that the United States still poses a military threat and that it aims to bring Russia to its knees. Putin’s constant refrain is that the contest between Russia and the United States is a perpetual Darwinian struggle and that without his leadership, Russia will not survive. Without Putin, there is no Russia. He does not want things to get completely out of hand and lead to war. But he also does not want the standoff to fade away or get resolved. As the sole true champion of his country and his people, he can never be seen to stand down or compromise when it comes to the Americans.

Similarly, Putin must intimidate, marginalize, defuse, or defeat any opposition to his rule. Anyone who might stand in his way must be crushed. In this sense, the jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and Clinton fall into the same category. In Putin’s view, if Clinton had become U.S. president, she would have continued to hound him and hold him to task, just as she did when she served as secretary of state in the Obama administration, by promoting democracy and civil society to root out corruption in Russia.

Of course, Navalny is far more dangerous to Putin than Clinton would have been. Navalny is a Russian, not a foreigner. He is a next-generation alternative to Putin: young, handsome, charismatic, patriotic, and defiant. He poses a threat to Putin not only owing to their differences but also because of a few key similarities: like Putin, Navalny is a populist who heads a movement rather than a party, and he has not been averse to playing on nationalist sentiments to appeal to the same Russian voters who form Putin’s base. Navalny has survived an audacious assassination attempt and has humiliated Putin on numerous occasions. By skillfully using digital media and slick video skills to highlight the excesses of the Russian leader’s kleptocratic system, Navalny has gotten under Putin’s skin. He has forced the Kremlin to pay attention to him. This is why Navalny is in jail and why Putin has moved swiftly to roll up his movement, forestalling any chance that Navalny might compete for the presidency in 2024.

THE TASK AT HAND

The current U.S.-Russian relationship no longer mirrors the Cold War challenge, even if some geopolitical contours and antagonisms persist. The old U.S. foreign policy approach of balancing deterrence with limited engagement is ill suited to the present task of dealing with Putin’s insecurities. And after Trump’s disastrous performance at Helsinki, it is also clear that the arms control summitry that took the edge off the acute phase of the Cold War and nuclear confrontation can provide little guidance for how to anchor the future relationship. The primary problem for the Biden administration in dealing with Russia is rooted in the domestic politics of the United States and Russia rather than their foreign policies. The two countries have been heading in the same political direction for some of the same reasons over the last several years. They have similar political susceptibilities. The United States will never change Putin and his threat perceptions, because they are deeply personal. Americans will have to change themselves to blunt the effects of Russian political interference campaigns for the foreseeable future. Achieving that goal will require Biden and his team to integrate their approach to Russia with their efforts to shore up American democracy, tackle inequality and racism, and lead the country out of a period of intense division.

The polarization of American society has become a national security threat, acting as a barrier to the collective action necessary for combating catastrophes and thwarting external dangers. Partisan spectacles during the global covid-19 pandemic have undermined the country’s international standing as a model of liberal democracy and eroded its authority on public health. The United States’ inability to get its act together has hindered the projection of American soft power, or what Biden has called “the power of our example.” During my time in the Trump administration, I watched as every peril was politicized and turned into fodder for personal gain and partisan games. Successive national security advisers, cabinet members, and their professional staffs were unable to mount coherent responses or defenses to security issues in the face of personalized, chaotic, and opportunistic conduct at the top.

In this regard, Putin actually offers an instructive contrast. Trump railed against a mythological American deep state, whereas Putin—who spent decades as an intelligence operative before ascending to office—is a product of Russia’s very real deep state. Unlike Trump, who saw the U.S. state apparatus as his enemy and wanted to rule the country as an outsider, Putin rules Russia as a state insider. Also unlike Trump, Putin rarely dives into Russia’s social, class, racial, or religious divisions to gain political traction. Instead, although he targets individuals and social groups that enjoy little popular support, Putin tends to promote a single, synthetic Russian culture and identity to overcome the domestic conflicts of the past that destabilized and helped bring down both the Russian empire and the Soviet Union. That Putin seeks one Russia while Trump wanted many Americas during his time in office is more than just a difference in political styles: it is a critical data point. It highlights the fact that a successful U.S. policy approach to Russia will rest in part on denying Putin and Russian operatives the possibility to exploit divisions in American society.

The Biden administration must integrate its approach to Russia with its efforts to shore up American democracy.

The United States’ vulnerability to the Kremlin’s subversion has been amplified by social media. American-made technology has magnified the impact of once fringe ideas and subversive actors around the world and become a tool in the hands of hostile states and criminal groups. Extremists can network and reach audiences as never before on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, which are designed to attract people’s attention and divide them into affinity groups. Putin has weaponized this technology against the United States, taking advantage of the ways that social media undermines social cohesion and erodes Americans’ sense of a shared purpose. Policymakers should step up their cooperation with the private sector in order to cast light on and deter Russian intelligence operations and other efforts to exploit social media platforms. They also need to figure out ways to educate the American public about the perils of posting personal and political information online.

Making the United States and its society more resilient and less vulnerable to manipulation by tackling inequality, corruption, and polarization will require innovative policies across a huge range of issues. Perhaps the highest priority should be given to investing in people where they reside, particularly through education. Education can lower the barriers to opportunity and accurate information in a way that nothing else can. It can help people recognize the difference between fact and fiction. And it offers all people the chance not only to develop knowledge and learn skills but also to continue to transform themselves and their communities.

One thing U.S. leaders should avoid in seeking to foster domestic unity is attempting to mobilize Americans around the idea of a common enemy, such as China. Doing so risks backfiring by stirring up xenophobic anger toward Americans and immigrants of Asian heritage and thus fueling more divisions at home. Instead of trying to rally Americans against China, Biden should rally them in support of the democratic U.S. allies that Trump spurned and derided. Many of those countries, especially in Europe, find themselves in the same political predicament as the United States, as authoritarian leaders and powers seek to exploit socioeconomic strife and populist proclivities among their citizens. Biden should base a new transatlantic agenda on the mutual fight against populism at home and authoritarianism abroad through economic rebuilding and democratic renewal.

Most important, Biden must do everything in his power to restore trust in government and to promote fairness, equity, and justice. As many Americans learned during Trump’s presidency, no country, no matter how advanced, is immune to flawed leadership, the erosion of political checks and balances, and the degradation of its institutions. Democracy is not self-repairing. It requires constant attention

FIONA HILL is Robert Bosch Senior Fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe in the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution and the author of There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-first Century (Mariner Books, 2021), from which this essay is adapted.