Uncertain times

What would President Trump do? The new nationalism in Eastern Europe Has economic growth stalled? After the Paris attacks America’s race problem Hillary’s game A social revolution in Ireland 2 PROSPECT

Foreword by Sameer Rahim

ver the last year, Prospect has tracked the big ideas Lee’s great 1960 novel , and its challenging changing our world. In recent months, some of alternative version released last year , tell us these have been distinctly worrying. The rise of about race relations in ’s America. in the United States is challenging Hillary Clinton kept close to Obama while she was Secre- long-cherished assumptions about what is accept- tary of State, never displaying in public her frustration with Oable to say in a western democratic election. Trump’s populist his hands-off attitude to Syria. But now she is the Democratic campaign has targeted immigrants—especially Mexicans and nominee, Clinton is being notably more hawkish, writes Mark Muslims—and challenged China in language more suitable to a Landler on p16. One of her worries, if she becomes president, barroom brawl than a diplomatic overture. will be the right-wing turn in Eastern Europe, as described by In “Trump Force One,” Sam Tanenhaus profiles the man Peter Pomerantsev and Anton Shekhovtsov (p20). Poland, Hun- who is now the presumptive Republican presidential candi- gary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic are, in different ways, date (p3). He argues that although Trump’s politics are nasty, rejecting the liberalism of the post-Cold War era. his supporters should not be casually dismissed. Often they are The November attacks in Paris left the population “reeling in Americans who have been left behind by the free market, and horror,” says Lucy Wadham (p25). The terrorists targeted the feel like the political consensus does nothing for them. Bataclan music venue, where young people socialised in har- Economist Robert J Gordon and former US Treasury Sec- mony. Wadham writes that the liberal resolve of the “Bataclan retary Lawrence Summers identify economic stagnation as a generation” is more resilient than the attackers think. worrying problem. Gordon argues that technological advances We also looked at the remarkable social change in Ireland. A such as computing have not led to substantial growth; Sum- once conservative country has embraced gay marriage. What is mers, though, is more optimistic about the future (p8). strange, says Gerry Lynch (p33), is that many of its supporters Trump’s rise comes at the same time as increasing racial ten- describe themselves as “passionately Catholic.” sion in the US. On p29, Diane Roberts looks at what Harper Sameer Rahim is Prospect’s Arts & Books editor

Contents

03 Trump Force One 16 Hillary’s game 25 “This is our struggle, 33 The strange death of sam tanenhaus mark landler not yours” Catholic Ireland lucy wadham gerry lynch

08 Growing pains 20 Rolling back freedom 29 The war’s not over yet robert j gordon and peter pomerantsev and diane roberts lawrence summers anton shekhovtsov

Follow twitter.com/prospect_uk www.facebook.com/ Prospect.Mag PROSPECT 3 Trump Force One Donald Trump’s vows of vengeance against America’s enemies could propel him to the White House. What would he do there? sam tanenhaus

fter the latest round of United States primaries and ignore these mounting affronts or act as though ordinary Ameri- caucuses, more than half of the 50 states had cho- cans are to blame. sen their preferred candidate—and Donald J Trump That Trump should be the voice of this protest is unusual, had galloped far ahead of the Republican field. He given his own wealth and opulent lifestyle—part Medici, part has kept winning, all over the map, some of the victo- Kardashian. But revolts are commonly led from above. It may be Aries strikingly large, 19 states so far, from Alabama (rural, evangel- true that amounts to little more than “a smelly soup ical, low-income Deep South) to Massachusetts (urban, secular, of billionaire populism and yahoo nationalism—all flavoured prosperous New England), and Michigan (industrial, working- with a tangy dollop of old-timey racism,” as David Remnick, class) to Florida (urban and rural, ethnically diverse). The only Editor of the New Yorker, put it in July last year. But Trump’s question now is whether Trump’s two remaining opponents, Texas supporters have been hearing such insults for many years now, Senator Ted Cruz and Ohio Governor John Kasich, can deny him directed at themselves. And nothing so unites rich and poor, the the nomination outright before the party’s delegates convene in favoured and the unlucky, as the feeling that they are being rid- Cleveland, Ohio, in mid-July. iculed by the same people. No matter the outcome, Trump already seems to be remak- What provokes Remnick, and others, is Trump’s long history ing the Republican Party, if not in his garish image, then along as one of Manhattan’s glitziest presences. He has owned a sports the lines of his fixations and enthusiasms. It is fast becoming “the team—the New Jersey Generals, an American Football team that party of Trump,” as the New York Times has declared, in mingled played three seasons in the now defunct United States Football horror and amusement. League, a competitor of the established National Football League But what is this new Republican Party? Who belongs to it? (NFL). He owns exclusive golf courses with exorbitant member- What do they want? What do they see in Trump? And what does ship fees. His name is affixed in giant gold letters on some of New he see in his own presidency? What would he do if he does get York’s most expensive apartment buildings. For many years, he to the Oval Office? has been flattered by maître d’s at the 21 Club and other dens of No one, least of all Trump, can really say. His ideas, or effu- the rich and famous. But with this comes something else, often sions, on policy—domestic and foreign—come in soundbites, emo- overlooked—a wider orbit of experience than the typical novice tionally vivid, but frustratingly devoid of nutriment. His slogan, politician travels in, and far greater freedom of speech and act. “!” emblazoned on the caps he sells, His approach to the presidency as a form of “brand extension”— is borrowed directly from Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign. Like a prize to be annexed to his personal empire rather than a semi- Reagan, Trump combines nostalgia for simpler, happier times priestly office—seems to desecrate the holy legacies of George along with the promise that even simpler and happier times are Washington and Abraham Lincoln. But it also gives Trump an just around the corner, if only we’ll stride forth to meet them. But authority and pomp mere politicians lack. His campaign visits there are differences, and they reflect changing times. Reagan was often begin in airport hangars, where he descends from his Boe- a cheerful salesman of the Cold War dogma when America saw ing 757, “Trump Force One,” as some call it. After closely compar- itself as the beacon of the “Free World.” Trump speaks of a nation ing the two planes, concluded that it’s more that keeps “losing” and promises lewd vengeance on an array of luxurious than the original. When Trump was weighing his pres- villains, real and inflated. Abroad there are swindling trade part- idential run back in 2013, local Republican leaders in New York, ners (China, Japan, Mexico); leering Islamic State terrorists who suggested he begin one rung below. “Our pitch was, if he runs for torture Americans and get away with it; slippery allies and client governor and makes it, he would be the presumptive front run- states that feast on American “loans” and drag us into their wars. ner,” one of the group recently told the New York Times. At home, things are no less bleak: stagnant wages and mounting There is one practical reason for Trump’s grand sweep towards debt for the middle class, even as the “one per cent” grow richer, the nomination. He knows more about television than any other and surging tides of immigrants, legal and undocumented alike, presidential candidate ever has. At its peak, his reality show steal jobs and soak up welfare benefits. Worse are the elites in both The Apprentice, first broadcast in 2004, drew 20m viewers a week, parties—multiculturalist snobs on the Democratic left, plutocrats exceeding all but the first two Republican debates in this (or any and “hedge fund guys” on the Republican right, who together previous) season. Time and again he has demonstrated mastery of the news cycle. First, he did the unthinkable, picking a fight with the right-leaning cable giant Fox News, the most potent force in

conservative media, after clashing with its popular host Megyn Sam Tanenhaus is an American writer. His next book Kelly in the first televised debate. Trump got the better of her and will be a biography of William F Buckley Jr her boss, Fox’s mogul Roger Ailes. Next he boycotted a debate 4 PROSPECT © TY WRIGHT/GETTY IMAGES © TY WRIGHT/GETTY

“Make America Great Again”: Trump’s slogan echoes Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign PROSPECT 5 © JOE MCNALLY/GETTY IMAGES © JOE MCNALLY/GETTY “Part Medici, part Kardashian”: Donald Trump relaxes at his home in Greenwich, Connecticut in August 1987

held just before the Iowa primary, which took place on 1st Febru- rivals were left gasping for minutes of it here and there. It’s all part ary, calculating that the network needs him at least as much as he of Trump’s invented but very American culture of “winning,” the needs it. Again, he was right. A Trump-less Fox would lose stand- bullying “art” of the deal he has promised to bring to high govern- ing with its audience. But Trump can take his act elsewhere— ance—whether in tough negotiations with Iran over the nuclear indeed anywhere he likes. All the networks covet the minutes he deal or with China over currency manipulation—and is now sharp- grants them—even letting him phone in “remotely,” though this violates long-standing practice. Trump’s Twitter provocations (one was a quotation from Mussolini) become news events. These “What is so crucial to improvisations have exposed the pretences of the traditional cam- paign, with its “high command” of consultants, pollsters and pol- Trump’s success, even icy advisors fussing over “battle plans” and “ground games.” within the Republican Party In Trumpworld, all flows directly from Trump himself, his impulses, his moods, his appetites, his ill-concealed grievances. is his almost total ditching He thrives in an atmosphere of permanent virality, of “pseudo- events” contrived to turn “boring” politics into “fun” spectacle, of conservatism as a though the fun lately has spilled over into danger. Trump lust- governing philosophy” ily taunts protestors at his large rallies, and has threatened them with beatings. The Friday before the most recent primaries, an advance contingent of Trump “fans” began trading punches with ening into a new style of campaign theatre. demonstrators at a large rally on the campus of a Chicago univer- And this clarifies Trump’s largest contribution in this election. sity. At the last minute the event was cancelled. Trump wouldn’t More than any other figure, including President Barack Obama, appear, the bewildered spectators were told—a decision reached Trump has liberated American politics from its stale ideologies. after conferring with Chicago police, Trump explained. But the He speaks of terrible problems that need to be fixed, of policy “dis- police said no such conversation took place. No matter. Images of asters” made by blundering, “stupid” leaders. But he never sounds the “riot” streamed on screens all weekend long, and Trump made like a politician. He has taken lately to calling himself a conserv- the rounds of talk shows congratulating himself on his statesman- ative, but says the word haltingly. His natural idiom is politics- like restraint, with the result that he gobbled up air time, while his neutral salesmanship—the “terrific” replacement he’ll devise for 6 PROSPECT

Obamacare, the landmark plan that guaranteed health benefits to to hope Trump might also break with Republican doctrine on previously uninsured people (“I want everyone to have coverage,” taxes and government spending. he has said); the colossal thousand-mile-long wall he says will seal But his policies, or the sketchy versions of them he has thus far off the Mexican border (and keep out immigrants) and which he presented, offer only tiny wrinkles of difference. Trump’s tax plan describes in luxury real-estate terms (“classy and beautiful too”). is a supply-side economist’s dream. It reduces federal revenue by almost $9.5 trillion over a decade and fattens the after-tax incomes t is silly but oddly liberating, or at least disinhibiting. Many of the super-rich by more than $1.3m per year. “Merry Christmas, have noted that Trump’s harshest blurtings are only more billionaires!” wrote Kevin Drum, a politics professor and blogger. extreme versions of the messages other Republicans have Trump’s healthcare “plan” is even flimsier. Pivoting from his been sending for years, though without their sanctimony— vow of universal coverage, he now would eliminate Obamacare Iwhether it is Cruz savouring the epithet “radical Islamic terror- without offering a plausible alternative for poorer familes apart ism” and then unctuously defending “religious liberty”; Senator from meaningless tax credits. When pressed by Rubio in a debate Marco Rubio (who has since ended his candidacy) changing his in March, Trump was unable to describe its main features. position on Syrian refugees with each new ripple of the political But most presidents—including the best of them—pin their winds, while also making sure to insert references to his immi- hopes, and invest their political capital, in a few big items, espe- grant grandparents; or the scout-masterish Kasich telling audi- cially in times, like these, of ideological stalemate. Obama’s ences “You’re made special. Did you know that?” Against all healthcare reform—his major achievement, despite the noises this, Trump’s coarse directness—his open contempt for immi- Trump and other Republicans make about reversing it—came grants and Muslims, his incredulous reaction to the Syrian crisis in his first term. Trump’s big themes, all related to his populist (“What’s our President doing? Is he insane?”)—offers the fresh- nationalism, are trade, immigration and an “” for- ness of emotional candour. When his fans praise him for speaking eign policy. the truth, they mean the truth they would speak if they could. He The US trade deficit with China reached almost $365bn in 2015. has given them a voice. And its rasp can be frightening. In this century, America has also lost three million jobs to China, The accusation made by Trump’s conservative rivals and three quarters of them in manufacturing—at the expense of the detractors—that he isn’t really one of them—is true. But he has working-class voters, long ignored by the Republican Party, but a recent Republican forebear, Patrick Buchanan, a speechwriter, now flocking to Trump (in some cases quitting the Democratic political strategist and television analyst, who twice ran for Pres- Party to do it). His case against China is aggressive. He says it ident, though again Trump has updated his model. Buchanan is manipulates its currency to improve trade and should be threat- best remembered for a martial oration at the 1992 Republican ened with a steep tariff of as much as 45 per cent. In 2010, Paul convention in which he called for a religious and cultural “war” Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York against modernity and its many evils: “abortion on demand... Times columnist, said much the same thing when he wrote urging homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, a “hardball policy” with China, including a 25 per cent “across- women in combat units.” The pestilences, with small adjustments, the-board” tariff. Since then China’s economy has been much have since become Republican orthodoxy. It is Cruz, not Trump, weakened. Current policy there, as in other countries, is to prop up who recites it, in a direct appeal to evangelicals. Yet—in perhaps its currency, not devalue it. Capital is now flowing into, not away the biggest surprise this season—those voters are now congregat- from, US markets. ing behind Trump, who is reaching them with a different religious Nevertheless, Trump’s pursuit of “fair trade”—with its enthusi- message, of faith in America as God’s country. asm for tariffs—is the same case the “democratic socialist” Bernie “What is so crucial to Trump’s success, even within the Repub- Sanders is making, and it’s taboo in a party that still reveres Mil- lican Party,” the columnist Michael Brendan Dougherty has writ- ton Friedman. It is also thoroughly consistent with Trump’s ten, “is his almost total ditching of conservatism as a governing promise to deport more than 11m undocumented immigrants philosophy.” The political theorist Michael Lind detects in Trump and seal off the border and with his approach to foreign policy, a “a classic populist of the right,” who has bottled the energies of nearly archaic “America First” nationalism, which emphasises a the Tea Party, that much-misunderstood movement. Contrary to strong military, distrust of alliances, and reluctance to intervene many accounts, “Tea Partiers are less upset about the size of gov- in foreign wars. For Trump, the businessman and deal-maker, the ernment,” Lind argues, than about its being used to help “other foreign threat is economic, not military. He seems to have thought people, especially immigrants and non-whites. They are for gov- this even at the peak of the Cold War. In September 1987, three ernment for them and against government for Not-Them.” months after Reagan challenged Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear Not-Them includes not only “illegals” and “welfare cheats” down this wall” in Berlin, Trump paid nearly $100,000 to have an but also the idle rich. Trump shares the populist loathing of advertising letter published in three newspapers, identifying the “Wall Street socialism” and of fortunes built on financial instru- true adversary: allies living on the American dole. “It’s time for ments. “The hedge fund guys didn’t build this country,” he has us to end our vast deficits by making Japan and others who can said. “These are guys that shift paper around... they are paper- afford it pay,” Trump wrote. “Our world protection is worth hun- pushers. They make a fortune. They pay no tax. It’s ridiculous, dreds of billions of dollars to these countries and their stake in ok?” This heresy, together with Trump’s initial defences of the their protection is far greater than ours.” “safety net” of Social Security and Medicare (a programme that Nearly 30 years later, his foreign policy arguments still centre gives almost 50m Americans health insurance), his support for on money. China is one example. Another is his vociferous criti- Planned Parenthood (a non-profit organisation dedicated to cism of Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. What most galls Trump reproductive health services, including abortion), and his praise is not the possibility that Tehran will secretly build weapons but for “single payer” healthcare systems—where the state pays for all rather the $150bn in frozen assets released to Iran. Trump’s for- healthcare costs rather than private insurers—encouraged some eign policy, Thomas Wright pointed out in an article for Politico, PROSPECT 7 ©SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES OLSON/GETTY ©SCOTT A worker sweeps discarded Trump posters after a rally in Warren, Michigan, on 4th March

reproduces in almost every detail “19th-century high-tariff pro- ince then Trump has won time and again, in state upon tectionism and every-country-for-itself mercantilism.” state, in region after region. His nearest competitor, And it infuriates Trump’s most vehement conservative detrac- Cruz, has won just seven states. He could be denied the tors, the crusading hawks (neoconservatives) identified with the nomination, of course, but it will require a revolution Bush administration and its world-democratising dreams buried Sfrom above, his defeated rivals colluding with party chieftains, in the abattoirs of the Iraq war. In March, more than 100 members and it might offer the fascinating drama of a “brokered con- of the “Republican national security community” signed an “open vention” (see below)—machinations that the “direct primary” letter on Donald Trump,” declaring him unfit for the presidency. system was created to eliminate a century ago, when elections One of the signatories, Max Boot, the foreign policy journalist and had degenerated into backstairs conspiracy. Reviving that Dark adviser to Rubio, has said: “I would sooner vote for Joseph Stalin Age would kindle new accusations—fodder for Trump’s Twitter than Donald Trump.” He has instead said he’ll vote for Hillary feed, for his speeches and many television appearances—that Clinton. Not quite a vote for Stalin, but pretty close, in the eyes “his people” have been betrayed once more by “establishment” of today’s Republicans. Neoconservatives dislike Trump for many bosses who had been ignoring them for years until at last he led reasons, but especially for his 2008 assertion that George W Bush them in a peasants’ revolt in primaries and caucuses, in open-air should have been impeached for leading the nation into the Iraq rallies, not to mention in the campaign offices where they have war. Trump elaborated on this during the South Carolina pri- volunteered their time, with a devotion to democracy the party’s mary. “They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruc- “wise men” seem not to share. “We know who Donald Trump is,” tion. There were none, and they knew there were none.” Many a Trump supporter told Rush Limbaugh, the king of conserva- Americans agree. But it was a reckless charge in a state that has a tive talk radio king, “and we’re going to use Donald Trump to handful of military bases, a large boon to its economy—$19bn and either take over the GOP or blow it up.” With each passing day, 150,000 jobs—and remains a bastion of Bush-love. Yet Trump eas- and every new attempt to stop him, the strange crusade contin- ily won the South Carolina primary a week later, finishing off the ues. The television showman stands, improbably, on the thresh- candidacy of Bush’s brother, Jeb. old of history. 8 PROSPECT Growing pains The extraordinary technical innovations of the past century are unlikely to be repeated robert j gordon

n the century after the end of the Civil War, life in the goes against the theory of economic growth as it has evolved over United States changed beyond recognition. There was the last 60 years. Growth theory features an economy operating a revolution—an economic, rather than a political one— in a “steady state” in which a continuing inflow of new ideas and which freed people from an unremitting daily grind technologies creates opportunities for investment. of manual labour and household drudgery and a life of But this model does not apply to most of human history. darkness,I isolation and early death. By the 1970s, many manual, According to Angus Maddison, the great historian of economic outdoor jobs had been replaced by work in air-conditioned envi- growth, the annual rate of growth in the western world from AD ronments, housework was increasingly performed by machines, 1 to AD 1820 was a mere 0.06 per cent per year, or 6 per cent per darkness was replaced by electric light, and isolation was replaced century. Or, as summed up by the economic commentator Steven not only by travel, but also by colour television, which brought the Landsburg: “Modern humans first emerged about 100,000 years world into the living room. Most importantly, a newborn infant ago. For the next 99,800 years or so, nothing happened. Well, not could expect to live not to the age of 45, but to 72. This economic quite nothing. There were wars, political intrigue, the invention of revolution was unique—and unrepeatable, because so many of its agriculture—but none of that stuff had much effect on the quality achievements could happen only once. of people’s lives. Almost everyone lived on the modern equivalent Economic growth is not a steady process that occurs at a reg- of $400 to $600 a year, just above the subsistence level… Then— ular pace. Instead, progress is much more rapid at certain times. just a couple of hundred years ago—people started getting richer. There was virtually no economic growth for millennia until 1770, And richer and richer still.” only slow growth in the transitional century before 1870, remar The designation of a “special century” applies only to the US, kably rapid growth in the century ending in 1970, and slower which has carved out the technological frontier for developed growth since then. My thesis is that some inventions are more nations since the Civil War. However, other countries have also important than others, and America’s growth in the century after made stupendous progress. Western Europe and Japan largely the Civil War was made possible by a clustering, in the late 19th caught up to the US in the second half of the 20th century, and century, of what I call the “Great Inventions.” China and other emerging nations are well on their way. Since 1970, economic growth has been dazzling and disappoint- Progress did not suddenly begin in 1870, but the US Civil War ing. This apparent paradox is resolved when we recognise that (1861-65) provides a sharp historical marker. The first Census of recent advances have mostly occurred in a narrow sphere of activ- Manufacturing was carried out in 1869; coincidentally, that year ity having to do with entertainment, communications and the col- brought the nation together in a real sense, when the transconti- lection and processing of information. For the rest of what humans nental railroad was joined at Promontory Summit in Utah. care about—food, clothing, shelter, transportation, health and Our starting point of 1870 should not be taken to diminish the working conditions both inside and outside the home—progress progress made in the previous half century. A child born in 1820 has slowed since 1970, both qualitatively and quantitatively. entered a world that was almost medieval: lit by candlelight, in Our best guide to the pace of innovation and technological pro- which folk remedies treated health problems and travel was no gress is total factor productivity, a measure of how quickly out- faster than hoof or sail. Three great inventions of that half cen- put is growing relative to the growth of labour and capital inputs. tury—the railroad, steamship, and telegraph—set the stage for Since 1970, that has grown at barely a third the rate achieved more rapid progress. The Civil War showcased these advances between 1920 and 1970. My chronicle of the American standard when northern trains sped Yankee troops to the front and steam- of living rests heavily on the history of innovations. But any con- ships blockaded supplies to the South. During the War of 1812, sideration of the future must look beyond innovation to contem- news still travelled so slowly that the Battle of New Orleans was plate the headwinds that are slowing the vessel of progress. Chief fought three weeks after a treaty had been signed to end that war. among these is the rise of inequality, which since 1970 has steadily But by the time of the Civil War, daily newspapers published the directed an ever larger share of the spoils of the growth machine outcomes of battles mere hours after they occurred. to the top of the income distribution. Let’s identify those aspects of the post-1870 economic revolu- The idea that a single 100-year period, the “special century,” tion that make it impossible to repeat. We are so used to our crea- was more important to economic progress than any other so far, ture comforts that we forget how recently they were achieved. In 1870, rural and urban working-class Americans bathed in a large tub in the kitchen after carrying water from outside in pails and Robert J Gordon is the Stanley G Harris Professor warming it over an open hearth. All this was such a nuisance that in the Social Sciences at Northwestern University. This article is an edited extract from “The Rise and some people bathed once a month. Similarly, heating in every Fall of American Growth: The US Standard of Living room was once a distant dream—yet it became a daily reality in since the Civil War” (Princeton University Press) the decades between 1890 and 1940. PROSPECT 9 © RADIUS IMAGES / ALAMY© RADIUS IMAGES STOCK PHOTO

Silicon Valley, where many believe that “software is eating the world.” But have we, as Robert Gordon argues, already had the best of the revolution? 10 PROSPECT

The flood of inventions that followed the Civil War transformed that were barely known a century earlier, including the two-day life. When electricity made illumination possible with the flick of weekend and retirement. a switch, the process of creating light was changed forever. When Thanks to these irreversible changes, in the half century after lifts allowed buildings to extend vertically instead of horizontally, the Civil War America changed from an agrarian society of loosely the nature of land use was changed, and urban density was cre- linked small towns to an increasingly urban and industrial soci- ated. When small electric machines replaced huge, heavy steam ety with stronger private and governmental institutions and an boilers, the scope for replacing human labour with machines increasingly diverse population. The urban percentage of the pop- broadened beyond recognition. ulation, defined as those living in organised governmental units So it was with transport. When cars and other motorised vehi- with a population of 2,500 or more, grew from 24.9 per cent in cles replaced horses, the quarter of agricultural land devoted to 1870 to 73.7 per cent in 1970. feeding those animals was freed up. Progress in transport has The importance of the Great Inventions was on display in the been stunning; it took little more than a century from the first aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, a freakishly powerful storm that primitive railroads which began replacing the stagecoach in the devastated much of New York City and the coast of New Jersey in 1830s to the Boeing 707 flying near the speed of sound in 1958. October 2012. Sandy pushed many of its victims back to the 19th The transition of the food supply from medieval to modern also century. Residents of New York City below 34th Street learned occurred during this century. The Mason jar, invented in 1859, what it was like to lose the lifts that carried them to and from their made it possible to preserve food at home. The first canned meats apartments. Not only was vertical movement impeded, but the were fed to Northern troops in the Civil War, and during the late flooding of the subways, along with the blackout, eliminated the 19th century a vast array of processed foods, from Kellogg’s corn- primary means of horizontal movement as well. Anyone without flakes and Borden’s condensed milk to Jell-O, entered American electricity also lost such modern inventions as lighting, air-condi- homes. Clarence Birdseye invented a method for freezing food in tioning and fans for ventilation, and refrigerators and freezers to 1916, although it took until the 1950s before people had domes- keep food from spoiling. Many residents had no heat, no hot food, tic freezers. In 1870, shoes and men’s clothing were bought from and no running water. Those living in New Jersey were often una- shops but women’s clothing was made at home, and the sewing ble to drive as petrol station pumps could not function without machine had only recently reached the mass market. By the 1920s, electricity. Moreover, communication was shut off after batteries most women’s clothing was bought from retail outlets that did not were drained on laptops and mobile phones. exist in 1870—namely, the great urban department stores and, for rural customers, mail-order catalogues. o, what has happened since the special century ended Some measures of progress are subjective, but life expectancy in 1970? First, with a few notable exceptions, the and the conquest of infant mortality are quantitative indicators of pace of innovation has slowed. Second, rising ine- the advances made in medicine and public health. Public water- quality meant that the fruits of innovation are no works not only revolutionised the daily routine of the housewife Slonger shared equally: those at the top of the income distri- but also protected every family against waterborne diseases. The bution continue to prosper, but a shrinking share of the eco- development of anaesthetics in the late 19th century made the nomic pie makes its way to the Americans in the middle and gruesome pain of surgery a thing of the past, and the invention of bottom of the income distribution. antiseptics cleaned up the squalor of hospitals. Progress has been focused more narrowly in the areas of enter- This century was unique not only in the magnitude of its tran- tainment, communications and information technology. In these sitions but also the speed with which they were completed. Not a areas, change does not arrive in a great and sudden burst, as it did single American household was wired for electricity in 1880. By with the by-products of the Great Inventions, but it is evolutionary 1940, nearly 100 per cent of US urban homes were wired, and 94 and continuous. For instance, the advent of television in the late per cent had water and sewer pipes, more than 80 per cent had 1940s and early 1950s caused attendance in cinemas to plummet— interior flush toilets, 73 per cent had gas for heating and cooking, but movies did not disappear. Instead, they increasingly became 58 per cent had central heating, and 56 per cent had refrigerators. a central element of television programming, especially with the In short, the 1870 house was isolated from the rest of the world, advent of cable television. Similarly, television did not make radio but most 1940 houses were “networked,” having the five connec- obsolete but rather shifted the radio from being the centrepiece tions of electricity, gas, telephone, water and sewage. of living room furniture into a small and portable device, most The “networked” house, together with modern appliances, often listened to in the car. Nothing has appeared to make tele changed the nature of housework. Women no longer had to devote vision obsolete; instead, its technical aspects have become ever long hours to doing laundry on a scrub board, making and mend- better, with huge, flat, high-definition screens becoming standard. ing clothing, and baking and preserving food, paving the way for Landline telephones dominated communications from their their participation in the workforce. The improvement in work- invention in 1876 to the breakup of the Bell telephone monopoly ing conditions for men was even more profound. In 1870, more in 1983. Since then, mobile phones have prompted an increasing than half of men were engaged in farming, either as proprietors share of households to abandon landlines. Information technol- or as farm labourers. Their hours were long and hard; they were ogy and the communication it enables have seen much faster pro- exposed to heat in the summer and cold in the winter, and the gress since 1970. The transition from the mainframe computer fruits of their labour were at the mercy of droughts, floods and of the 1960s and 1970s to the personal computer of the 1980s to insect infestations. Working-class jobs in cities required 10 hours the web-enabled PC of the 1990s to smartphones and tablets of of work per day, including Saturdays. More than half of teenage recent years represents the fastest transition of all—but, again, boys were in work, and male heads of households worked until this applies to a limited sphere of experience. Total business and they were disabled or dead. But by 1970, the whole concept of household spending on all electronic entertainment, communica- time had changed, including the introduction of blocks of time tions and IT (including purchases of TV and audio equipment PROSPECT 11 and mobile phone service plans) amounted to only about 7 per for the standard of living, productivity, and hours worked per per- cent of US gross domestic product in 2014. son from 1870, divided at 1920 and 1970. For each of the three peri- Outside the spheres of entertainment, communications and ods there are three bars, each depicting the average annual growth IT, progress was much slower after 1970. The major changes in rate over the respective interval. The left (orange) bar in each food have involved much greater variety, especially of ethnic food group shows the growth rate of per-person real GDP, the middle specialties and out-of-season and organic produce. There has been (blue) bar growth in real GDP per hour (that is, labour productiv- no appreciable change in clothing other than in styles and coun- ity), and the third (red) bar growth in hours worked per person. There are two striking aspects to this data. The first is the symmetry of the graph: the first and last periods are almost “Air travel is less comfortable identical in the height of each bar, but the middle period (1920– than before, making the 70) is quite different. Output per person growth is substantially higher in the middle period, and productivity growth is much experience more time- higher—2.8 per cent per year compared to 1.8 per cent in the first period and 1.7 per cent in the last period. The much greater consuming and stressful” excess of productivity growth over output per person in the mid- dle period, compared to that in the first and last periods, reflects tries of origin; imports of clothing have caused an almost complete the sharp decline in hours worked per person between 1920 and shutdown of the domestic US apparel industry. The microwave 1970. This raises two questions: why did hours worked per per- oven has been the only post-1970 kitchen appliance to have a sig- son decline so rapidly in the middle interval? And, did rapid pro- nificant impact. Cars and trucks accomplish the same role of ductivity growth cause hours to decline, or did the decline in transporting people and cargo as they did, albeit with greater con- hours worked per person in some way contribute to relatively venience and safety. Air travel is less comfortable than before, with rapid productivity growth? seating configurations and increased security making the experi- The decline in hours worked per person from 1920 to 1970 ence more time-consuming and stressful. reflects numerous factors that all point in the same direction. First America’s achievements since 1970 have been matched by was the long-run decline in hours of work per week for production most developed nations, but in one important regard the US fell workers, which by 1920 had already declined from 60 to 52 hours behind, struggling with its healthcare system. Compared to Can- per week. Second was the influence of New Deal legislation, both ada, Japan, or western Europe, the US combines by far the most in reducing hours directly and also in empowering labour unions expensive system with the shortest life expectancy. Progress in that fought for and achieved the eight-hour workday and 40-hour medicine has also slowed compared to the great advances made work week by the end of the 1930s. between 1940 and 1970, which witnessed the invention of antibi- An unrelated factor was the baby boom of 1947 to 1964, otics, the development of procedures for treating and preventing coronary artery disease, and the discovery of radiation and chem- otherapy, still used as standard treatments for cancer. Can we quantitatively measure the changes in American soci- ety since the special century began? Shown in figure 1 are the data Phones for all—the revolution in our hands © TIM ROOKE/REX SHUTTERSTOCK © TIM ROOKE/REX 12 PROSPECT

which increased the child population Figure . Annalised growth rate of ott (those aged 0 to 16) relative to the work- ing-age population (16 to 64) and thus 2.82 Per person reduced the ratio of hours worked to the Per hour total population. The reverse feedback 2.41 from productivity growth to shrinking Hours per person hours reflects the standard view in labour 1.84 1.79 1.77 economics that as real income rises, indi- 1.62 viduals choose not to spend their extra income on goods and services, but rather opt for extra leisure—that is, by working fewer hours. The change in hours worked per per- 0.15 son in the first period (1870–1920) was 0.05 negligible and presumably reflects mod- est declines in the working week for urban manual workers, offset by the effects of –0.41 shifting employment from farms to cit- ies, where working hours were longer and more regimented. The slight increase in The Rise and Fall of American Growth: hours worked per person after 1970 mixes The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War two quite different trends. In the first por- tion of the interval, roughly between 1970 and 1995, hours worked ductivity growth in the early 1920s associated with the electrifica- per person rose as a reflection of the movement of women from tion of manufacturing. He attributed the delayed impact not just housework into market employment. Then, after 1996, hours to the time needed to invent and perfect the machinery, but also worked per person fell as a result of a steady decline in the labour to a sharp decline in the price of electricity itself. force participation rate of prime-age males and of young people. David’s analogy turned out to be prophetic, for only a few years After 2008, these labour force dropouts were joined by the retire- after his 1990 article, the growth rate of aggregate US productiv- ment of the older members of the baby boom generation. ity soared from 1996 to 2004 to roughly double the rate it had been Why did labour productivity grow so much more quickly from 1972 to 1996. However, after 2004, when growth in labour between 1920 and 1970 than before or after? We can divide the productivity stopped its eight-year surge, despite the proliferation sources of the growth in labour productivity into three compo- of flat-screen desktop computers, laptops, and smartphones in the nents, as shown in figure 2. The time intervals are the same as decade after 2004. By way of contrast, in the 1920s, electricity’s before, except that the absence of some data requires us to start stimulation of industrial efficiency lasted much longer than eight at 1890 rather than 1870. Each bar is divided into three parts. The years. Productivity growth soared in the late 1930s and into the top section, displayed in red, is the contribution to productivity 1940s, creating the remarkable average 1920-70 growth rate dis- growth of rising educational attainment; these are the widely played in figure 2. accepted estimates of Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz. The We might conclude that the electricity revolution was more middle section, shaded in blue, displays the effect of the stead- important than the computer revolution. Moreover, the produc- ily rising amount of capital input per worker hour; a continu- tivity upsurge after 1920 did not rely only on electricity, but also ing source of rising labour productivity is the larger quantity of on the internal combustion engine. It is not surprising that motor capital, of increasingly better quality, with which each worker is vehicles had little impact on labour productivity or total factor equipped. The effect of a rising ratio of capital input to labour productivity growth before 1920, for they had come into existence hours is usually called “capital deepening.” only a short time before. There were only 8,000 registered motor vehicles in 1900, yet there were 26.8m just three decades later, ur designation of the “special century” appears to con- when the ratio of motor vehicles to the number of US households flict with the behaviour of total factor productivity reached 89.2 per cent. Productivity in the aggregate economy growth as summarised in figure 1. Apparently only the depends in part on how quickly workers, including truck drivers second half of that period exhibited growth that was and delivery personnel, can move from place to place. Just as the Osubstantially above average. We can state this puzzle in two sym- thousands of lifts installed in the building boom of the 1920s facil- metric ways: why was total factor productivity growth so slow itated vertical travel and urban density, so the growing number before 1920? Why was it so fast during the 50 years after 1920? of cars and trucks speeded horizontal movement on farms and in The leading hypothesis was put forward by Paul David, who the city. provided an analogy between the evolution of electric machinery Knowing what we do about the past, what can we extrapolate and of the electronic computer. In 1987, Robert Solow quipped, to the future? We cannot predict every new invention; indeed, “We can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity even for those on the horizon, such as driverless cars and legions statistics.” David responded, in effect: “Just wait,” implying there of small robots, their likely effect and importance is a matter for could be a long gestation period between a major invention and debate. But there is much that we can predict. For instance, the its payoff in productivity growth. David counted almost four dec- baby boom generation is currently aged between 50 and 68, so ades between Thomas Edison’s opening of the Pearl Street power we can predict with reasonable accuracy the effect of its mem- plant in Manhattan in 1882 and the subsequent upsurge of pro- bers’ retirement within a percentage point or two, depending on PROSPECT 13

Figure 2. Average annal growth of ott er hor and its comonents ately to the top income brackets. My predictions that future growth will 2.82 be slower than in the past are strongly resisted by a group of commentators whom I call the “techno-optimists.” They tend to ignore the slow productivity growth of the past decade. Instead, they 1.62 1.5 predict a future of spectacularly faster productivity growth based on an expo- nential increase in the capabilities of arti- ficial intelligence.

ome economists dismiss pessi- mism out of hand. The economic historian Deirdre McCloskey writes that “pessimism has con- Education Capital deepening Capital deepening Ssistently been a poor guide to the mod- ern economic world. We are gigantically richer in body and spirit than we were two centuries ago.” Whereas McCloskey has room in her toolkit for only one rate of growth spanning the past two centuries, I how long many of them choose to work. If American high school put forward three separate growth rates over the past 150 years. students regularly rank poorly in international tests of reading, Yes, we are “gigantically” ahead of where our counterparts were maths, and science, then a sudden spike in scores is improbable. in 1870, but our progress has slowed, and we face stronger barri- If the stock market continues to advance, we know that inequality ers to continued growth than were faced by our ancestors a cen- will increase, for capital gains on equities accrue disproportion- tury or two ago.

Not so fast It’s a mistake to think our children are condemned to economic stasis lawrence summers

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: It has been said that the further forward you want to fore- The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War cast, the further back you have to look. Gordon’s interest in this Robert J Gordon (Princeton University Press, £27.95) volume transcends the business cycle and even momentous fluctuations like the Great Recession that followed the 2008 obert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of Ameri- financial crisis. His interest is in what kind of growth in living can Growth is an extraordinary work of eco- standards average people entering the labour force are likely to nomic scholarship. At a time when too much see during their working lives. of the economics profession prioritises theoris- Gordon lines up with Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Thiel, ing about small issues, Gordon provides new who has said that, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 Rdata bearing on what may be the most important economic characters.” Despite all the hype coming out of Silicon Valley, question of all—what will economic growth be like over the next Gordon believes we are in a period of modest progress. Whereas couple of generations? Moreover, this is one of the rare econom- many observers worry that because of technology there will no ics books that is on the one hand deeply analytical, with over 100 longer be work for an increasing share of able-bodied adults, figures and tables, and on the other a pleasure to read: it is chock he thinks there will be work for all, but very little increase in full of anecdotes about everything from flying out of Chicago’s productivity. Disturbingly, his reading of history and his assess- O’Hare airport in the 1970s to the spread of radio in the 1920s to ment of a variety of factors in the current environment that the travails of pharmaceutical research. Pick any random page he calls “headwinds” lead him to the judgement that, “head- and you will learn something interesting about American life. winds are sufficiently strong to leave virtually no room for growth over the next 25 years in median disposable real income per person.” The strongest part of Gordon’s book is his evocation of the remarkable 50-year period between 1920 and 1970. My grand- Lawrence Summers is Charles W Eliot University Professor of Harvard University, and a former US mother was born around the turn of the century and died in the Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton mid-1970s. Reading Gordon’s chapters, I was reminded that 14 PROSPECT

Annal growth in total factor rodctivity suddenly placed in the home I grew up in. It takes longer and is less comforta- Ten-year average, rate over ten years prior to year shown ble to fly from Boston to Washington or London than it was 40 years ago. There are more highways now but much more traffic congestion as well. Life expec- tancy has continued to increase, though at about half the pace it did during my grandmother’s day. But the most impor- tant transformation—child death being an extraordinary event—had already happened by the time I was born.

ordon’s most compelling argument (although this is not how he puts it) is that the greatest generation is in Gsome ways also the luckiest generation. He provides an onslaught of statisti- cal evidence and carefully considered anecdote in support of the idea that the 1920-1970 period stands out as a period of extraordinary progress in the annals

of economic history. While Gordon pro- The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War vides rich discussions of the impact of the Depression, the Second World War and much else, his basic explana- over her adult lifetime she saw the flush toilet, electricity for tion for the remarkable character of the 1920-1970 period is lighting and central heating go from being luxuries enjoyed by simple. Certain kinds of progress can happen only once. Liv- a quarter or less of the population to becoming universal. She ing in a controlled climate, having access to indoor plumb- saw radio come into being and then be supplanted by black-and- ing, largely eliminating child mortality, controlling infectious white and ultimately colour television. She saw air-conditioning, disease, and being able to communicate immediately in the washing machines, dryers and refrigerators go from non-exist- absence of physical presence are all examples of transfor- ent to universal. Over her lifetime, transportation went from mations that can be built on and improved but seem hard meaning walking, riding a horse or taking some kind of train to to replicate. being primarily based on cars and aeroplanes. When she had Of Gordon’s many charts and graphs the one that impressed my mother in 1922, infant mortality was 75 per 1000 and large me most shows the growth in officially measured total factor pro- families could expect to suffer an infant or childhood death. ductivity by decade from 1900 to the present, pictured above. It When her youngest grandchild was born in the 1960s, infant steadily escalates from 1900 to 1950 when productivity grew at mortality was below 20 per 1000 and life expectancy had risen almost 3.5 per cent and then unsteadily declines to the point where by more than a decade. it has averaged well under 1 per cent in the generation since 1990. It is striking to contrast the changes during my grand- Many rightly wonder about mis-measurement of productiv- mother’s lifetime with those during mine. I have seen the ity as new products become available and quality improves. Gor- microwave become universal in American kitchens. Auto- don is compelling in arguing that productivity growth is indeed motive air-conditioning has gone from common to universal. significantly underestimated. He is also more persuasive than I expected in arguing that, if anything, this understatement was greater decades ago than it has been recently. In part this is “Gordon’s most compelling because there were more of these transformational changes that argument is that the greatest are inherently hard to assimilate in standard frameworks. In part it is because the statisticians do a much better job than they generation was also the once did of taking account of quality change. Gordon’s aspirations go far beyond writing history. He also luckiest generation” seeks to describe the current epoch and to forecast the future. Gordon confronts and largely rejects the views of those he A much wider range of TV programmes are now available and calls the techno-optimists like MIT scholars Erik Brynjolfs- with a much sharper picture. There is a wider array of healthy son and Andrew McAfee and most of Silicon Valley where Marc foods. And, of course, I carry a smartphone that keeps me more Andreessen’s view that “software is eating the world” is widely connected to information sources, friends and colleagues than shared. This optimistic view points to the internet and develop- was imaginable 50 years ago. ments like driverless cars, robotics, 3D printing, and artificial But whereas my grandmother would have been at sea if intelligence to argue that we are in the midst of a vast economic returned to her girlhood home, I would miss relatively little if transformation in which much of the work currently being PROSPECT 15 done by people will be mechanised leading, presumably, to huge tially when it is first introduced all the other shops remain in busi- gains in output per worker while raising profound questions of ness with reduced volumes. Measured productivity—defined as job availability and inequity. total sales per retail worker—go down as employment in retail- Gordon acknowledges a “third industrial revolution” built ing rises and total sales remain roughly constant. Only with the around software and IT but argues that it is much less signifi- passage of time and the closing of traditional shops will meas- cant than the “second industrial revolution” of the mid-century ured retail productivity increase. If this story is playing out in because its impacts are largely confined to telecommunications many different sectors on different rhythms, overall productiv- and entertainment. He further argues that it may already be ity growth could be relatively slow even as there is substantial job largely played out, and that in any event concerns of technol- losses in sectors further along in the adjustment process. ogy replacing jobs are not new; workers displaced by new tech- The question of how to square developments that are large nologies tend to find new jobs, often in sectors created by those enough to have a major impact on wage and employment pat- new technologies. terns with the paucity of measured productivity growth looms Gordon is right in pointing to the huge disjunction between for future research. But it is not only the expectation of slow the techno-optimist narrative and the productivity statistics. It total factor productivity growth that informs Gordon’s pessimis- is hard to see how technology could be displacing huge num- tic belief that median incomes will be stagnant over the next bers of workers without raising measured productivity. And if generation. He points to reduced growth in average educational its effects are so pervasive as to lead to large shifts in the distri- attainment, rising inequality, an ageing population, a growing bution of income with innovators capturing huge rents, why do national debt and breakdowns in family structure as headwinds we not see more evidence of increased output? that will further slow growth. I do not have compelling answers to these questions. Yet it is hard to shake the sense that something unusual and important wish that I could convincingly rebut his claims. While and job threatening is going on. The share of men between the there is room for argument—for example, with his anal- age of 25 and 54 who are out of work has risen from about 5 per ysis of fiscal policy (which gives too little weight to the substantial reduction in debt carrying costs) or his con- Ifidence that inequality will continue to rise—his broad point “Quality improvements seems likely valid. While as already noted, I find Gordon persuasive in his claim and new products are that the slowdown in productivity growth is not a figment of improving life in ways mis-measurement, the fact that measured median incomes will be stagnant does not mean that most people will not see rising that do not show up in standards of living over time. Incomes rise as people get further into their careers. And quality improvements and new products economic statistics” are improving life in ways that do not show up in economic sta- tistics, though possibly less so than in the past. So it would be a cent in the 1960s to about 15 per cent today as it appears that mistake to regard our children as condemned to economic sta- many who lose jobs in recessions never come back. Perhaps, as sis even before considering Gordon’s various ideas for acceler- Gordon seems to suggest, this is a sociological phenomenon or ating growth. a reflection of increasing problems in education. But I suspect Economic frustration is a central challenge of our time. It is technology along with trade have played an important role. surely intimately connected with political dysfunction, loss of Economic historians like Paul David have long noted that it faith in institutions and much else. Like most things, it is best took surprisingly long for the benefits of electricity to show up in viewed with historical perspective. There is no better way to the economic statistics. Creative destruction takes time. Think get that perspective than by reading Robert Gordon’s landmark about a canonical major innovation like the supermarket. Ini- work. 16 PROSPECT

Commander-in-chief in waiting? Hillary Clinton is optimistic about America’s ability to defend its interests abroad

Hillary’s game Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy is more a set of impulses than a doctrine, but she would be more prepared than Obama to use force mark landler

hen Hillary Clinton eviscerated Donald a farrago of contradictions and provocations—“not even really Trump in a speech in June, she did so on the ideas,” she said, “just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds, grounds that he was hopelessly unprepared and outright lies.” and temperamentally unsuited to be com- What Clinton didn’t do was to lay out her own foreign-pol- mander-in-chief. She derided the foreign- icy agenda. Her implication was that Trump was so manifestly Wpolicy positions of her Republican rival for the presidency as unqualified for the Oval Office that her prescriptions for how to end the civil war in Syria or counter the predations of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine were almost beside the point. The reaction Mark Landler has covered American foreign policy for from the cheering crowd in San Diego, California suggested that The New York Times since the inauguration of Barack Clinton was right: she didn’t yet need to offer a lengthy list of Obama. His new book is “Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle over American policy alternatives to Trump. Her record—as First Lady to Pres- Power” (WH Allen) ident Bill Clinton, Senator from New York, and above all, as PROSPECT 17

President Barack Obama’s secretary of state—spoke for itself. Nor was she inclined to do so. She came out against his ambi- Still, as American voters pivot this summer from the prima- tious Asian trade pact, after having been one of its most enthu- ries to the general election, Clinton’s foreign policy will come siastic advocates. She began to etch clear policy differences with under greater scrutiny. When it does, people might be surprised Obama on Syria and Russia, a distancing his aides found oppor- by the extent to which she parts company with her former boss. tunistic, if unsurprising. In August 2014, Clinton said Oba- A fervent believer in the concept of “American exceptionalism,” ma’s refusal to arm the rebels in Syria left a security vacuum Clinton is more open than Obama to the calculated use of mil- there and in Iraq, which had been filled by the brutal warriors itary force to defend national interests. She is more optimistic of Islamic State (IS). Her criticism antagonised a president who than he is about American intervention, believing that it does already felt embattled. more good than harm. She believes the writ of the United States Clinton’s break with Obama over Russia played out similarly. properly reaches, as George W Bush once declared, into “any She had long been more suspicious of Putin than the president. dark corner of the world.” At a Democratic fundraiser in California in March 2014, she lik- Clinton and Obama, one could argue, have come to embody ened his annexation of Crimea to Hitler’s conquest of the Sude- competing visions of America’s role in the world: his vision is tenland in the 1930s. Eighteen months later, she said Obama’s restrained, inward-looking, radical in its acknowledgment of lim- restrained response to Putin’s bullying of Ukraine was inade- its; hers is hard-edged, pragmatic, unabashedly old fashioned. quate. And when Putin intervened in Syria on behalf of Assad, Those long-held principles will also put her at odds with Clinton sounded the trumpet of a new Cold War. “All the Rus- Donald Trump. If one picks through the bluster and contra- sian experts that thought that their work was done after the fall dictions in his statements, there are some clear warnings. He of the Berlin Wall,” she said, “I hope that they will be dusting has threatened to withdraw American support for NATO, pull off their materials.” the US nuclear security umbrella from over East Asia and shun Their differences surfaced again during the bloody months the nation-building of the Bush years. Indeed, the 2016 elec- at the end of 2015, when Islamist militants carried out killing tion could scramble the traditional dynamic between hawkish sprees in Paris and California. The carnage propelled terrorism Republicans and dovish Democrats. This time, it is the Dem- to the forefront of yet another presidential campaign. Suddenly, ocrat whose foreign policy could reassure mainstream Repub- the tangled conflict in the Levant was no longer just a riddle licans—at least when compared to the neo-isolationism and for foreign-policy experts; it posed a direct threat to the home- “America First” rhetoric of Trump. land, throwing Obama on the back foot and playing out in the To understand Clinton’s foreign policy, it helps to study her crude appeals to nativism and nationalism by Trump and other four years as a member of Obama’s cabinet. Loyal, disciplined Republican candidates. Syria was where Clinton had first split and determined to be a team player, she rarely, if ever, showed with him over supplying arms to the rebels; now they split again that there was daylight between her and the president. For jour- over her call to impose a no-fly zone over northern Syria, as her nalists such as me, who expected the kind of withering sniper husband had done in Iraq in the 1990s to protect the Kurds. fire between the US Department of State and the Oval Office “Look,” she said at the Council on Foreign Relations a few that Clinton and Obama had exchanged during their 2008 pri- days after the Paris attacks, “I have made clear that I have dif- mary battle, the display of unity was stifling. ferences, as I think any two people do.” But to travel with the Secretary of State as I did as a corre- Clinton still embraced central tenets of Obama’s foreign pol- spondent, to 43 countries on five continents, was to witness a icy; it was, after all, her foreign policy, too. In the autumn of woman completing a decade-long metamorphosis, one that wid- 2015, she articulated the case for his much-disputed nuclear ened, rather than narrowed, her differences with the president agreement with Tehran to an audience at the Brookings Insti- she had agreed to serve. Clinton was shedding the last vestiges tution. But their public remarks only underscored how differ- of her image as a polarising, left-wing social engineer in favour ently Clinton viewed the achievement than Obama. He called of a new role as a commanding figure on the global stage, some- it “the strongest nonproliferation agreement ever negotiated.” one who could go toe-to-toe with the mullahs in Tehran or the She called it a flawed deal worth supporting only if it was linked cold warriors in Moscow. A loyal lieutenant, yes, but a general to relentless enforcement, a concerted effort to thwart Iranian in waiting. malfeasance in the Middle East, and an unwavering threat to Under the surface, Clinton’s Manichean world view was use military force to prevent Iran from ever getting a bomb. “My always there. It turned up early, in her blunt prediction to an starting point will be one of distrust,” she said. Arab foreign minister that the Iranians would spurn Obama’s Dennis Ross, a former aide to Clinton and Obama who played offer of an olive branch. Later, one could see it in her support a role in the secret negotiations with Iran, said: “It’s not that of military commanders in their request for a larger American she’s quick to use force, but her basic instincts are governed troop deployment to Afghanistan than even the Republican more by the uses of hard power.” defence secretary wanted. Or in her support of the Pentagon’s The differences between Clinton and Obama are not ideo- recommendation to leave 10,000 to 20,000 troops behind in logical as much as generational, cultural, even temperamental. Iraq. It surfaced in her campaign for air strikes in Libya to pre- She is a Midwesterner, a product of the Cold War who came of vent a slaughter by Muammar Gaddafi, and it fuelled her case, age during the Vietnam era and watched as her husband articu- the summer before she left the State Department, for funnelling lated a new rationale for humanitarian intervention in the Bal- weapons to the rebels fighting Bashar al-Assad in Syria. kans in the 1990s. She is a woman aspiring to a job that has been Avidly, if discreetly, Clinton played the house hawk in Oba- held only by men. Obama is a child of the Pacific Rim who came ma’s war cabinet. of age after Vietnam and had no first-hand exposure to the Bal- Once she was a private citizen, with the presidency again in kans campaigns. The formative foreign-policy event of his life- her sights, the fissures between them became harder to conceal. time was the American misadventure in Iraq. 18 PROSPECT © LARRYIMAGES DOWNING/AFP/GETTY While Secretary of State, Clinton stuck close to Obama but she has since distanced herself from him on Russia and Syria

bama came into office as a counter-revolutionary, instead of him. Obama’s statesmanship flowed from a very differ- seeking to end Bush’s wars and restore America’s ent source than Clinton’s: he tended to view adversaries in terms moral standing. But his ambitions were even larger of their grievances towards the US; Clinton views them more tra- than that: he set out to reconcile Americans to a world ditionally, in terms of their interests. “It leads you in a different Oin which the US was no longer the undisputed hegemon. He direction,” Dennis Ross said. shunned the triumphalist language of American exceptional- Predicting how a secretary of state would act as commander- ism, declaring that the nation’s unique character lay not in its in-chief is, at some level, a fool’s errand. The last person to make perfection but in its unending struggle to live up to its ideals. He the transition was James Buchanan in 1857; his presidency, refused to be drawn into distant conflicts, with the much-regret- which accelerated the slide towards the Civil War, was widely ted exception of Libya. judged the greatest failure in the history of the Republic. Clinton Clinton is more conventional and more political. Her foreign might view the diplomatic stakes differently as president than policy is less a doctrine than a set of impulses, grounded in cold she did as secretary of state. Militarily, she would face the same calculation and what one aide calls “a textbook view of Ameri- constraints Obama did, not just at home but abroad. The break- can exceptionalism.” She is at heart a “situationalist,” somebody down of the 20th-century American order, Obama’s defenders who reacts to problems piecemeal rather than fitting them into note, has made the world less amenable to any president’s efforts a larger doctrine. Her flexibility has led people to read different to control it. things into her foreign policy: Republicans accuse her of being “If you look at Obama and his rhetoric in 2008, you would an Obama retread; Obama loyalists grouse that she dramatised have expected a transformational and maximalist president,” her divisions with the president on Syria and Russia for political said Joseph Nye, the Harvard political scientist. “He was going reasons; Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations warns to ban nuclear weapons. He was going to repair relations with the that she could end up in thrall to the neo-conservatives who led Muslim world. We were going to have a reset with Russia. These the US into Iraq. “She takes the position that leaves her the least were ambitious goals, but he turned out to be a rather prudent vulnerable,” he said. retrencher. The pendulum is going to swing back somewhat now, Those characteristics make her a ready warrior but a cautious and Hillary Clinton is probably going to be less of a retrencher. diplomat. Unlike most modern-day secretaries of state, Clinton The question is how much leeway she’ll have.” kept her distance from peace negotiations between the Israelis It was the second Thursday in December 2015, 53 days before and Palestinians, judging them to be an uphill climb and not the Iowa caucuses, and Jake Sullivan, her top policy adviser, was worth the risk of alienating Jewish voters at home. Obama made sitting down with me in Clinton’s headquarters in , to daring overtures to Iran and Cuba; it’s not clear the US would explain how she was shaping her message for a campaign sud- have achieved either, had Clinton been elected president in 2008 denly dominated by concerns about national security. Clinton’s PROSPECT 19 strategy, he said, was two-fold: first explain to voters that she had showed that a majority, 53 per cent, favoured sending ground a clear plan for confronting the threat posed by Islamist terror- troops to Iraq or Syria, a remarkable shift from the war-weary ism; and second, expose the Republicans as utterly lacking in sentiment that prevailed during most of Obama’s presidency. experience or credibility on national security. Republican candidates reached for apocalyptic metaphors to “There’s no doubt that Hillary Clinton’s more muscular brand demonstrate their resolve. Trump called for the US to ban all of American foreign policy is better matched to 2016 than it was Muslims from entering the country “until we are able to deter- to 2008,” said Sullivan, who had been at her side in all 112 coun- mine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it tries she visited as secretary of state. poses.” In a series of policy speeches last autumn, Clinton had reas- Yet such spikes in the public appetite for military action tend serted her hawkish credentials. She said the US should consider to be transitory. Three weeks later, the same CNN poll showed an even split, at 49 per cent, on whether to deploy troops. Trump does not favour major new deployments of American soldiers “Obama views adversaries in to Iraq and Syria. If anything, he is more sceptical than Clin- terms of their grievances; ton about intervention and more circumspect than she is about maintaining the nation’s post-war military commitments. He Clinton views them in terms loudly proclaims his opposition to the Iraq War, for example, even if he once expressed support for it. of their interests” In showing her stripes as a prospective commander-in-chief, Clinton will no doubt draw heavily on her State Department sending more Special Operations troops to Iraq than Obama had experience, filtering the lessons she learned in Libya, Syria and committed to help the Iraqis and Kurds fight the jihadi warri- Iraq into the sinewy worldview she has held since childhood. ors of IS. She came out in favour of imposing a partial no-fly How well Clinton’s hawkish instincts match the country zone over Syria, which he opposed. And she described the threat remains an open question. Americans are weary of war and are posed by IS to Americans in starker terms than he did. As was now suspicious of foreign entanglements. And yet, after the often the case with Clinton and Obama, the differences were less retrenchment of the Obama years, there is evidence they are about direction than degree. She wasn’t calling for ground troops equally dissatisfied with a portrait of their country as a spent in the Middle East, any more than he was. She insisted her plan force, managing its decline amid a world of rising powers, resur- was not a break with his, merely an “intensification and accel- gent empires and lethal new forces such as IS. If Obama’s mini- eration” of it. malist approach was a necessary reaction to the maximalist style There were good reasons for Clinton to let her inner hawk fly. of his predecessor, then perhaps what Americans yearn for is Americans were more worried about an attack on the homeland something in between—the kind of steely pragmatism that Clin- than at any time since 9/11. A CNN/ORC poll taken after Paris ton has spent a lifetime honing. 20 PROSPECT Rolling back freedom The young democracies of Central Europe are threatened by their leaders peter pomerantsev and anton shekhovtsov

ne after another the narratives that prop up belief who also chairs a Media Council with the power to fine television in western liberal democracy have fallen. Ideal and radio stations for allegedly unbalanced coverage. In 2013, financial system? Not after the 2008 crisis and the parliament adopted an amendment banning political adverts in euro. Military superiority? Iraq and Afghanistan commercial media during election campaigns. Parties are left to have put an end to that. Effective politics? See grid- campaign through the public media—which, of course, is heavily Olock in Washington DC and arm-twisting in Brussels. influenced by Fidesz. The government stopped placing adverts Now the final, perhaps most fundamental, narrative risks in the independent media and private companies, fearing loss of unravelling. The supremacy of liberal democracy is rooted in government contracts, also decreased their advertising spend. the triumph of 1989: the liberation of Central Europe from Currently, 80 per cent of the population can only access Fidesz- the Kremlin’s authoritarianism; Václav Havel emerging from dominated press and broadcasting. prison to become President in Prague Castle; the successful Orbán’s policies led the NGO Freedom House to downgrade transition to democracy via European Union membership and the country’s rating from “free” to “partly free” in 2012. The the security blanket of Nato. Central Europe is the beacon for Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe criti- aspiring reformers across the world. In 2008, the World Bank cised the 2014 parliamentary elections, arguing Fidesz enjoyed published a report, “Unleashing Prosperity,” which concluded “an undue advantage because of biased media coverage and that the “Visegrád Four”—Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the campaign activities that blurred the separation between polit- Czech Republic—had created “stable institutions guaranteeing ical party and the State.” This “undue advantage” didn’t stop democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and Fidesz’s vote declining. In response, Orbán added ideology to his protection of minorities,” “functioning market economies” and institutional measures. Speaking at a party gathering in 2014, had “the ability to take on and implement effectively the obliga- Orbán announced: “The new state that we are constructing in tions of (EU) membership.” Hungary is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state. It does not reject Yet today we are faced with a Hungary whose Prime Minis- the fundamental principles of liberalism such as freedom… ter says he intends to build an “illiberal state,” a Czech President but it does not make this ideology the central element of state who attends anti-Muslim rallies with the far right and a Polish organisation, but instead includes a different, special, national leadership that declares the media should do the government’s approach.” Russia and China are two of his models. bidding. Throughout the region, the judiciary, media and civil In practice, illiberal democracy has meant Orbán claiming society are under attack, while a newly belligerent Russia is look- that Hungary is threatened by enemies such as foreign NGOs ing to re-impose itself. and “national traitors.” In spring 2015, the government launched What has gone wrong? What does it mean for the future of the a national consultation on immigration, which included a ques- EU and the continent’s security? What can and should be done? tionnaire sent to eight million Hungarians. After raising con- One sign of the extent of the reversal is that the country cerns about terrorism, the questionnaire asked: “There are some leading the rollback is Hungary, whose “goulash communism” who think that mismanagement of the immigration question by was the most ideologically and economically lax in the Soviet Brussels may have something to do with increased terrorism. Do bloc. Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister, was a high-profile, pro- you agree with this view?” Other questions canvassed support for western, pro-democracy dissident back in Soviet times. Some “stricter immigration regulations,” and claimed that the number thought him another Havel, but since coming to power in 2010, of economic immigrants had increased twentyfold. Meanwhile Orbán has acted to ensure that he will always have it. other policies have combined nationalist rhetoric with socialist First, Orbán rushed through changes in the constitution ena- economics: nationalising banks and raising corporate taxes. bling him to place loyalists in the Constitutional Court. Since What Orbán has achieved in half a decade, Poland’s new then, 11 out of the 15 judges have been appointed by his party, government is trying to pull off in months. In the October 2015 Fidesz, without any consultation with the opposition, opening elections, the Law and Justice Party ran on a platform of eco- the way to place Fidesz members at all levels of the judiciary. nomic redistribution, paranoia about non-existent immigration Then Orbán came for the media. Public service broadcasters and Catholic conservatism. Despite presiding over the strongest were restructured under the control of a Fidesz-appointed head, economy in Europe, the incumbents were beset with problems— a scandal in which ministers were secretly recorded making Peter Pomerantsev is a senior fellow at the damaging statements, allegations of petty corruption and inter- Legatum Institute and author of “Nothing is True nal divisions. Law and Justice managed to squeak a majority. Its and Everything is Possible” (Faber) campaign, however, made no mention of the undemocratic poli- Anton Shekhovstov is the author of the Legatum Institute report “Is Transition Reversible? cies it has adopted since victory. The Case of Central Europe” Poland’s new President Andrzej Duda refused to swear in PROSPECT 21 © JANEK SKARZYNSKI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES SKARZYNSKI/AFP/GETTY © JANEK

A right-wing nationalist protester walks with a Polish flag during a far-right annual march that coincides with Poland’s National Independence Day in Warsaw on 11th November, 2014 22 PROSPECT five judges chosen by the previous parliament on to the 15-mem- ber Constitutional Tribunal. Five Law and Justice judges were sworn in instead and the government controversially reformed the court. Law and Justice also nullified civil service regula- tions that guaranteed competition for key posts, allowing them to appoint loyalists with no qualifications as CEOs of state com- panies. Media laws have been changed to put party loyalists in control of public broadcasting, prompting senior journal- ists to resign. The party’s leader Jarosław Kaczyn´ski, a former Prime Minister, has no official government role but wields power behind the scenes. In Slovakia and the Czech Republic the changes are subtler. Political institutions have not been dismantled, but there has been an upswing in xenophobic rhetoric, and oligarchs are cap- turing politics and media. Robert Fico, Slovakia’s Prime Minister, leads a social demo- cratic party, but his first term (2006-10), saw him ally with Ján Slota’s far-right Slovak National Party. Slota has called Hun- garians “a cancer in the body of the Slovak nation” and “ugly, bow-legged, Mongoloid characters on disgusting horses.” Since 2012, Fico’s second term has been marked by tactical resistance to reforms, such as the persistent reluctance to reform the judici- ary. Fico simply refuses to talk to independent broadcasters and only communicates via government-friendly station TA3. In the Czech Republic, Havel’s successors have not shared his dedication to liberal democracy. Václav Klaus, who replaced Havel as President in 2003, has been an outspoken, conten- tious figure. Just before the end of his second consecutive term in 2013, he granted amnesty to more than 6,000 prisoners, cit- ing the slowness of the legal system. But as well as putting some petty criminals back on the streets, the amnesty stopped ongo- ing criminal proceedings against people associated with several notorious embezzlement cases. The Czech Senate impeached Klaus, but it was a symbolic gesture as he had already left office. Klaus’s successor, Miloš Zeman, has turned up the nationalist rhetoric. During the 2015 refugee crisis, Zeman said: “Islamic ref- ugees will not respect Czech laws and habits, they will apply sha- ria law so unfaithful women will be stoned to death and thieves will have their hands cut off.” In November 2015, President Zeman attended an anti-Muslim rally organised by the far-right Bloc Against Islam group, standing next to its leader, Martin Konvicˇka. Konvicˇka faces up to three years in prison for inciting hatred against Muslims by, among other things, writing on Face- book that Muslims should be put into concentration camps. Another eyebrow-raising development in Czech politics is the rise of Andrej Babiš, the second richest man in the coun- try. He founded his own political party ANO in 2011, “to fight corruption and other ills in the country’s political system.” He is now Finance Minister in the coalition government. In 2013, Babiš’s company Agrofert bought the Mafra media group, giv- ing him a significant percentage of Czech media—a development which led some observers to speak of the “Berlusconisation” of the Czech political space. The purchase of Mafra by Babiš prompted resignations from senior journalists. One of them, Daniel Kaiser, went to work for Echo24.cz, a new website which has been critical of Babiš. At one point, Babiš menacingly stated that he “hoped the investor of Echo24.cz had completed his tax returns.” Adam Cˇerný, president of the Czech journalists

association, fears for the media’s independence: “The legal IMAGES DIVIZNA/GETTY © MATEJ framework has not changed, but the system has. This will have Czech President Milos Zeman at an anti-Islam rally on the 26th an impact on press freedom.” anniversary of the Velvet Revolution on 17th November, 2015 PROSPECT 23

All over Central Europe, as the established independent garian opposition party, the ultra-right Jobbik. In 2008, Béla media is squeezed, there has been an explosion in far-right and Kovács, a member of Jobbik who studied in Soviet Russia, far-left media. These outlets regularly promote conspiracy the- arranged a trip for the party’s leader, Gábor Vona, to Moscow. ories, attack western liberal democracies, spread anti-Muslim Since then, Jobbik’s leaders have regularly attended events and rhetoric, and deplore the alleged loss of sovereignty to the EU. conferences in Russia and promoted rapprochement between What makes the region susceptible to such illiberal or undem- the two countries: several were observers in elections in Rus- ocratic tendencies? In some ways, it is unfair to single out Cen- sian-occupied Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014. Currently, tral Europe. Globalisation has produced both winners and losers, Kovács is being investigated in Hungary on charges of espionage and nationalist and populist appeals to voters are being success- for Russia against EU institutions. fully made by Marine Le Pen in France and Donald Trump in the United States, for example. The fact that Babiš is compared o far, Orbán’s relationship with Moscow appears to be to Silvio Berlusconi shows how much the Italian leader did to driven by pragmatism rather than ideology. In 2014, normalise conflicts of interest. And, when it comes to corruption, Hungary imported 89 per cent of its oil and 57 per cent Greece is in another league. of its gas from Russia. Orbán has promised voters that he There are worrying trends in Germany too. Launched at the Swill cut gas prices, for which he needs the help of Russian com- panies, in particular Gazprom. “There has been an explosion Orbán also struck a nuclear energy deal with Russia that is cloaked in secrecy. In 2015, Orbán accepted the first tranche of in far-right and far-left €10bn loan from Moscow for the expansion of the Paks nuclear power plant. Fidesz kept the exact nature of the contract secret media. They regularly and has classified all material related to the deal for 30 years. promote conspiracies and When Czech President Zeman established his Party of Civil Rights in 2009 he did so with Martin Nejedlý, managing direc- spread anti-Muslim rhetoric” tor of Lukoil Aviation Czech—a subsidiary of the giant Russian Lukoil oil company. Riikka Nisonen, a researcher at the Alek- end of 2014, the social movement “Patriotic Europeans against santeri Institute at the University of Helsinki, argued that Zem- the Islamisation of the West” (Pegida), quickly gained momen- an’s presidential campaign “received money from the head of tum, especially in its birthplace of Dresden and other east Ger- Lukoil’s Czech office,” though Zeman claimed that the money man cities such as Leipzig. Pegida’s demonstrations against the was “a personal donation.” perceived Islamisation of Germany (and, more recently, a call Once in office, President Zeman adopted vigorously anti- for “peace with Russia”), have attracted tens of thousands of pro- western, anti-European, and pro-Russian language policies. In testors. Pegida especially benefited from the refugee crisis, but 2014, he condemned the western sanctions imposed on Russia wasn’t the only far-right movement to do so: the right-wing pop- for the annexation of Crimea and its war against Ukraine, a posi- ulist “Alternative for Germany” has now become the third most tion echoed by former President Klaus. A series of public pro- popular party in the country, and will likely enter the Bundestag tests followed, but they had little impact on the president. after the federal elections in 2017. In 2014, the Czech-language website AE News published a A few features of Central Europe, however, are unique. Slovak series of articles alleging that anti-Zeman protests earlier that dissident Milan Šimecˇka once described life under communism year had been sponsored by the same American “puppet mas- as “that comfortable unfreedom where those in power know how ters” who orchestrated the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine. AE to stop time and maintain stasis.” Illiberalism, then, is merely a News portrayed an epic struggle between foreign plotters and reversion to the recent past for these young democracies. heroic, “lion-like” President Zeman, “the only European poli- The past hangs over the present in other ways. That Orbán tician who defends the national interests of his country.” These was a Soviet dissident, as was Poland’s Kaczyn´ski, is less surpris- articles caused a sensation in the Czech public sphere, and the ing when one considers that “freedom” and “rights” meant dif- Security Information Service (BIS) publicly stated that it con- ferent things to different people: liberals like Havel were fighting sidered AE News “a source of dangerous Russian propaganda.” for political freedom and human rights; others for national free- Around 80 websites in Slovakia and the Czech Republic have dom and national rights. Thus Orbán can transmute “freedom” sprung up over the last few years, peddling conspiracy theories into xenophobia and authoritarianism. that repeat Russian propaganda. When journalists look into Polish sociologist Sławomir Sierakowski offers another expla- their backers, the trail leads to opaque shell companies. nation. He argues that post 1989, when left-wing politics were What are Putin’s ultimate aims in Central Europe? It’s hard considered discredited, “liberal” politics and the “open society” to imagine Russian tanks on the streets of Prague. But Putin can became the only viable political philosophy. When liberal parties undermine EU unity on a host of issues, from sanctions against slip up, as is inevitable, the alternative becomes “illiberal” forces Russia for its war in Ukraine, through to the EU’s joint energy who promote a “closed” society. “Instead of right and left we only package, which promises to wean Europe off Russian energy. have right and wrong,” quips Sierakowski. From this point of view, the new Polish government, which is both The illiberal turn has a geopolitical angle too: Vladimir Putin anti-Brussels and anti-Russian, plays into the Kremlin’s hands. has been working to influence both elites and anti-western move- It was Poland who led the EU campaign to extend the Associa- ments in the region through money, energy and propaganda. tion Agreement to Ukraine. While Poland was a model European, Many of Orbán’s “illiberal” policies are echoes of “conservative” other EU states went along. Now it is becoming a concern there policies adopted by the Putin regime in Russia. is less of an imperative to listen to its calls to be tough on Russia. There are direct links between Russia and the main Hun- On the level of narrative, the more the idea of liberal 24 PROSPECT democracy is undermined, the better it is for Putin. Domesti- sands have come out to protest against the ruling party, and its cally, Putin’s power rests on the idea that there is no alternative: polls have sunk. he may be corrupt, but there is no viable European model for Russia. Thus the Kremlin’s domestic propaganda loves to show s the EU moves forward, however, it is essential to talk Central European leaders cosying up to Moscow and rejecting above the heads of the Polish government to its popu- the west. The story of the “failure” of 1989 also adds to the argu- lation, something it has always been reluctant to do. ment of Putin’s regime that western-style democracy might not It needs to lose its image of a bureaucratic monster, be compatible with political culture of non-western European Aand show it can genuinely respond to the needs of citizens. In societies, that the west has had its day, and that emerging coun- the longer term, the EU needs to find a way to support inde- tries should ally with Russia. pendent, fact-based broadcasting in the region. European lead- All this leaves the EU in a quandary. ers will have to show principled leadership too. While countries are seeking EU membership they have strong When it comes to the challenge of Russia the EU is more incentives to live up to its values. Once inside, it becomes harder to confounded. Lacking any common security or foreign pol- ensure good behaviour. The EU’s approach is to enshrine democ- icy on Russia it falls, for better or worse, to the US to help deal racy in the minutiae of regulations. But countries such as Hungary with the problem. In 2009, leading Central European lead- ers and intellectuals, including Havel, wrote an open letter to President Barack Obama thanking the US for its “support of “In a nightmare scenario, liberal democracy and liberal values in the past,” but expressing illiberal states could gang their concern that the US thinks “our region is one part of the world that Americans have largely stopped worrying about… together, encouraging similar That view is premature. All is not well either in our region or in the transatlantic relationship.” They warned of “stormclouds” trends throughout Europe” on the foreign policy horizon and called for a renaissance of Nato. have learned to game this system. “Illiberalism is like pornogra- Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the US has restated its phy,” says Jeremy Shapiro, director of research at the European commitment to supporting Nato and defending against Russian Council on Foreign Relations, “you know what it is when you see military aggression. But that does little for the postmodern war- it, but it’s very hard to define. Hungary’s media law was definitely fare Russia now prefers. To undermine Nato’s credibility, Rus- pornography in this sense: but every line was taken from some sia doesn’t need to invade, only to discredit confidence in the media law in another EU state.” Orbán has also learned to play a US. For Nato to be truly relevant, corruption and propaganda cat-and-mouse game with the EU: making bold moves to under- have to be seen as security issues. The US needs to engage in mine democratic institutions, waiting for criticism, repealing a energy security too. One of Orbán’s arguments is that the US small number of measures, then moving forward again. abandoned him when he tried to develop liquefied natural gas To stop another Hungarian-style reversal from happening the terminals that would make Hungary more energy independent, EU adopted a new mechanism in 2014 to tackle “systemic threats forcing him to search for an accommodation with Russia. to the rule of law.” If a country is found guilty, it can be stripped Action can’t come too soon. Kaczyn´ski’s first foreign visit of its voting rights in the EU. The first phase of this mechanism, after Law and Justice came to power in October 2015 was to collecting information on whether there is a systemic threat, has meet with Orbán, pledging mutual support against EU meas- been launched against Poland. Law and Justice responded with a ures. In a nightmare scenario, illiberal states could gang rash of anti-EU statements, including comparing German calls to together, encouraging similar trends throughout Europe. For place Warsaw under supervision to the Nazi occupation of Poland. the past 20 years the Visegrád Four have been an example for This rhetoric may backfire for Law and Order: Poles trust EU transition to democracy across the world. They could become institutions more than their own politicians. Hundreds of thou- the example for a transition away from it. PROSPECT 25 “This is our struggle, not yours” The “Bataclan Generation” were the target of the Paris attacks. Their response has shown how different they are lucy wadham

have not, until now, tried to describe how it has felt to ing the streets and cafés where the gunmen opened fire to be the live in Paris since the evening of 13th November, when very places where my children tend to go out, people close to me a group of young men erupted on to its unseasonably sent frantic emails to make sure they were safe. I wrote back: balmy streets and began a killing spree that left 130 peo- “Thank you, they’re shaken but they’re ok.” ple dead, another 100 seriously injured and an entire gen- At the time, “ok” seemed to be the right euphemism for the Ieration reeling in horror. strange half-state which Jack, Ella and their friends have been To my family and friends in England I said it felt as though in since the massacres, a state of psychological “containment” this violence had been moving towards us, slowly and inelucta- somewhere between mortal fear and the intense relief of being bly, for decades (ever since the 1990s when Khaled Kelkal, one of alive. I hear people referring now to “Black Friday,” attempting, France’s immigrant children, planted bombs in Paris and Lyon perhaps, to objectify this atrocity and to signify their sense of a in support of the Islamist militias in Algeria). This time, however, before and after 13th November 2015. it felt much, much closer, as though, in striking at the heart of Only hours after the attacks, both my children made it clear Paris’s boho youth, “they”—whoever this shape-shifting enemy to me that for them nothing would ever be the same again: “Don’t is—had got right under our skin. cry, Mum,” Ella said in a voice that was unsettlingly calm. “This Like a lot of my Parisian friends, I felt that the attackers’ appar- is our struggle (notre combat). Not yours. And we accept it.” ently obscure targets in the 10th and 11th arrondissements—four The word “combat”—in the mouth of this epicurean, pleasure- unassuming cafés near the Canal Saint-Martin, two cheap res- loving young person wedded, like her brother, to the philosophy taurants and a smallish concert venue called the Bataclan—must of nonviolence—saddened me. On the Saturday evening after the have been known to them, that they may even have rubbed shoul- attacks, despite the state of emergency and the government’s ban ders with the young, open-hearted, multicultural hipsters they on gatherings and demonstrations, Jack walked over to the Place would end up murdering. Perhaps they’d once wanted to belong de la République. (If I’d known, I would have tried to stop him.) to this glittering group, before their longing mutated into the urge When he got home he sent me an email describing the experience. to destroy it. “It’s incredible what human beings can transmit to each other This atrocity, carried out in the name of Islamic State or without realising it,” he wrote. “We all wanted to communicate, Daesh, as its Muslim opponents prefer to call it, was aimed at, not necessarily with words.” He described the square, filled with and carried out by, a particular generation. The majority of its people from different nationalities and ethnic groups, and the victims were in their twenties and thirties, as were its perpetra- police, making gentle entreaties to disperse but unable to bring tors—who were, we’re told, mostly French nationals ranging themselves to interfere with all these “beautiful human beings. between the ages of 20 and 31. It’s the generation to which my It felt as if the whole world was there, present and in harmony, two eldest children, Ella (27) and Jack (29), also belong, a gener- wondering what to build and how to connect... I saw an Arab man ation of well-travelled “digital natives,” citizens of the world with sobbing in the arms of an old, slightly bemused, Parisian couple... a taste for adventure, blessed with the gift of adaptability, a gen- Suddenly someone put John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ on their shonky eration, as the TripAdvisor website will bear out, whose warmth laptop and soon it began to ring through the square. The calm, the and openness has drastically improved the experience of holi- particularly gentle energy, was indescribable. I’ve never experi- daying in Paris. enced anything like it.” This was the kind of phenomenon Jeremy Two weeks after the attacks, death is still all around my chil- Rifkin, the American social theorist and one of the great gurus of dren, having touched their circle of friends. They both live in the Jack’s generation, had written about in his book The Empathic Civ- area—Jack near the Place de la République and Ella within sight ilization. Jack had believed in, but never before experienced, this of the Bataclan, where 83 people were killed that night. Know- kind of empathy: “Our fear of each other,” he concluded, “and of death, felt completely surpassed, annihilated.” What has struck me most about the post-traumatic reac-

tions of Ella, Jack and their friends has been this powerful Lucy Wadham is a British novelist and journalist upsurge of moral courage and a deep faith in humanity. It leads based in Paris. She is the author of “The Secret Life of me to wonder if this section of Parisian youth, so long accused France,” a study of the French mindset of superficiality, will now be able to teach the true nature of 26 PROSPECT © LUDOVIC MARIN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES MARIN/AFP/GETTY © LUDOVIC “Citizens of the world with a taste for adventure”: young people drinking by the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris’s 10th arrondissement

engagement to its elders, in particular the soixante-huitards, the will be short-lived. I know that she will be with us every day and generation of May 1968, still stolidly defending the moral high that we will find ourselves again in this paradise of free love to ground. which you have no access... We are just two, my son and me, but Amid multiple apologies for her privileged background, Ella we are stronger than all the armies in the world.” wrote to her English relatives to try and explain what she meant This generation, frequently called spoilt and idealistic by its by the word combat: “Beyond the fear and sadness, I need hope. supposedly realistic elders, has been displaying an unassuming We all feel first the shock, the anger, the sadness but I hope we’ll heroism that has taken the government of François Hollande by overcome it by just looking at the people around us and loving surprise. I became aware of the particular quality of this her- them. It starts now. The war starts now. In the street I tell myself, oism on the night of the attacks when Jack sent me a link to while getting your bio-juice, look at people. While sitting in a bar Reddit, the online bulletin board. One young survivor of the eating your seeds, look at your waitress, ask her how her day is Bataclan siege described, with heart-wrenching simplicity, the going instead of looking at your Mac. Talk to the driver of your horror of his ordeal. He ended with these words: “I’m not adding Uber instead of looking at your iPhone. Ask the guy in the épicerie any essential info with this message, but writing it helps me. It’s down the street how he feels, actually hear his sadness when he frustrating to be at the heart of the event and be of no use, lying says ‘Islam, my Islam is not that,’ and his voice tremble with emo- face down against the floor/a leg/an arm/ for two or three hours tion at what the coming days might bring for him. But also give without helping.” him the opportunity to tell you how he felt yesterday when some- “Since that night, the number of young people seeking to join one said, full of fear: ‘I’m Jewish. Can I buy from your shop?’” the French military has tripled,” says Pierre Servent, a colonel in This urgent quest for community, far beyond the lures of the Army Reserve. His book Extension de domaine de la guerre (a consumerism, that is blossoming in this hitherto easeful gen- play on the title of nihilist French author Michel Houellebecq’s eration, was best expressed in the much circulated open let- first novel) goes to press as I write. A project he would have sold ter written by Antoine Leiris to the “dead souls” who killed to his publishers as a prediction has, he said, become a survival his 35-year-old wife, Hélène, at the Bataclan: “On Friday night manual for a “cancer which attacks the soft tissue of our world.” you stole the life of an exceptional being, the love of my life, the When we spoke, Servent had just been through his manuscript mother of my son, but you won’t have my hatred... Of course I am changing all the tenses. Two of his daughters, in the same age devastated by this pain, I give you this little victory, but the pain bracket as Jack and Ella, live in the area and, like my own chil PROSPECT 27 dren, escaped the attacks. “I have confidence in this generation,” he said. “They don’t have the anti-mili- tarist prejudices of the old French left... They’re hip, open, international, collab- orative, but they’re not weighed down by the post-colonial guilt that has prevented such a large portion of my own genera- tion from seeing the growing threat that is salafi-jihadism.” Servent invoked the unexpected suc- cess, among the young, of Hollande’s idea of a National Guard of Reservists, which the President talked about in his speech to the Congress of Versailles three days after the attacks. “Designed,” he explained, “to cope with a natural catas- trophe or a terrorist attack,” the National Guard—the anti-terrorist aspect of it, that is—is also dear to Marine Le Pen’s National Front, and as a result is unpop- ular with France’s left-leaning media. The day after the Versailles congress, Le Monde deplored the idea: “[Hollande’s] overzealous security-minded discourse has rather killed the spirit of Charlie Hebdo (l’esprit Charlie).” Earlier this year, the same newspaper

definedl’esprit Charlie as “a liberated tone, IMAGES © MIGUEL MEDINA/AFP/GETTY a satirical humour, an irreverence and The Bataclan concert hall in Paris, where 89 people were murdered by terrorists on pride built around solid left-wing values 13th November where the defence of secularism (laïcité) often comes first.” I’m pretty sure that this is not the definition my Finkielkraut howl in the wilderness that is the past, still railing children’s generation would give of l’esprit Charlie. For them the against an enemy that no longer has any teeth: the third-worldist whole point about the extraordinary show of national unity in the leftists of the same generation. As Servent pointed out, Genera- aftermath of the 7th January attacks, and the thing that made the tion Y is not anti-militarist and does not suffer from post-colo- million-strong marches across the country that followed so unique nial guilt. They’re a generation of pragmatic humanists who can and uplifting, was their apolitical nature and the spirit of tolerance see the world around them for what it is—multi-cultural, multi- towards France’s religious minorities, a tolerance that had been ethnic and multifarious—and they have a deep mistrust of grand absent from mainstream public discourse. ideas and highfalutin’ rhetoric. When the Dalai Lama suggested That someone like Servent is saying he has faith in France’s that the solution to the problems that led to the attacks on Paris next generation should be cause for celebration. Until now, no lay in a lot more than just prayers, I noticed how often his quote one has been listening to them. France’s “Generation Y,” or the was posted on the walls of my young French Facebook friends: “millennials” as they’re sometimes called, are far better equipped “We need a systematic approach to foster humanistic values, of for the modern world than the generation that clings to the reins oneness and harmony. If we start doing it now, there is hope that of power. Unlike their elders, these well-travelled young people this century will be different from the previous one. It is in every- —who have studied abroad on Erasmus programmes and have body’s interest.” grown up watching HBO in the original English—are unafraid of globalisation. They embrace the digital culture and believe in pro- t’s a measure of how keenly the ruling generation feels gress. Sadly, however, they still have no voice in France. the millennials snapping at their heels that Hollande and Who does? Members of the ’68 generation such as France’s Manuel Valls, the French Prime Minister, feel the need to principal bird of ill omen, Alain Finkielkraut, a philosopher. muzzle Emmanuel Macron, their very pragmatic 37-year- Finkielkraut was interviewed in the wake of the attacks by Iold Economy Minister. Grudgingly accepted for his undeniable the right-leaning newspaper Le Figaro, under the headline talent as an economist, he is constantly being slapped back into “We’re living the end of the end of History.” His harrowed face, line by both his President and the rank and file of the Socialist gazing out at us from the pages of France’s biggest-selling broad- Party (as he was when he suggested abolishing the 35-hour week sheet, said everything about the paralysing neophobia of the or called into question the feasibility of jobs for life in the pub- generation to which he belongs. “His rigorous words,” Le Figaro lic sector). After the latest attacks, he went to Place de la Répub- declared by way of solemn preamble, “find a deep echo in the col- lique with Sigmar Gabriel, the German Economy Minister, and lective unconscious. How he is listened to. How he is read.” called for “concrete proposals” to tackle inequality, announcing, Not by the next generation he isn’t. For them, thinkers like much to the outrage of people like Finkielkraut, that France 28 PROSPECT is “in part responsible” for what happened on 13th November. erhaps one of the things the two sides of this millen- “The soil on which the terrorists managed to nourish this vio- nial generation have in common is their radical diver- lence, and recruit certain individuals, is that of defiance,” he gence from the mindset and values of their parents. For said. “I believe that it’s the rigidities in our economy, in our soci- how different could the handful of French Arabs who ety, the lost opportunities, the glass ceilings, the interest groups Pbrought death and destruction to the streets of Paris have been that have grown up and which both nourish frustration on an from their gentle, submissive, browbeaten parents who struggled individual level and lead to inefficiency on an economic level.” fruitlessly to fit in? What is certain is this: if there’s no political Macron is in the Socialist Party simply because there’s no other space in France to accommodate them, then its poor, ill-educated place for him. His belief in new economic models does not make Muslims have not a chance in hell. As Ella put it after the attacks: him the kind of conservative who might be at home with Nico- “Islam has been attacked by Daesh, which is using it as a mask, las Sarkozy’s Republicans. The measures he has taken to help so Islam must ask itself why. I, a privileged Parisian boho who has digital start-ups have gone against the grain of French attitudes been attacked by my own generation, must also ask myself why.” towards the internet. In 2004, French Muslims were told that they were not the tar- Thirty-year-old Adrien Aumont is co-founder of KissKiss get of the laws that banned the wearing of religious symbols in BankBank, a successful crowd-funding platform which he set up state schools, but few believed the denial. They knew that the vast with two friends in 2009 and which has, since its creation, given majority of French people viewed the headscarf or hijab as a sym- more than €41m to projects ranging from films to music to baker- bol of cultural backwardness and oppression, which had no place ies and restaurants. Their tagline, “Libérons la créativité!” (“Let’s in French society. Needless to say, the ban has backfired. Having free creativity!”), expresses a very French belief in culture, but lived in Paris since before 1989, when the idea of the ban was first Aumont, who left school at 14 and is a fierce critic of the educa- mooted, I have seen a very noticeable increase in the number of tion system, is also highly critical of its ruling elite. “France is women wearing hijabs both in this city and its suburbs. basically healthy,” he told me. “The only people who are not are The millennials tend to feel uncomfortable with this kind of its mainstream politicians and journalists.” Despite them, and cultural hegemony. Take Léa Frédéval, the 25-year-old author thanks to people like Macron, there’s an extraordinary dynamism of a controversial book entitled Les Affamés (“The Hungry”). in his world. “There are so many structures in place now to help Frédéval’s book was born, she says, out of a desire to explain her- startup companies like mine, so much good will.” self and her generation to her parents. I first saw her interviewed You won’t hear Aumont and his friends in the mainstream on cable TV the week her book was published and was struck by press. Their forum is YouTube, where you’ll hear people like Elo- the fact that she was speaking a completely different language to die Vialle, another 30-something “digital native” who defines her- the smooth, Agnès B-suited baby-boomers who were interview- self on Twitter as “journalist / teacher / media consultant.” She ing her. They seemed genuinely shocked by her apparent lack of extols the virtues of “participatory” economics and refers to the idealism and kept asking her to justify her pessimism. She said “quête de sens” (quest for meaning) that lies behind successful she preferred the word “realism” to “pessimism,” saying that French companies such as BlaBlaCar, a site that puts anyone with she was fed up with hearing platitudes about “les jeunes” from a car going from A to B in touch with those who don’t have trans- people who had no insight into how she lived. When I went to see port and want to travel the same route. Her generation, which her after the attacks in her tiny flat in the 18th arrondissement, came of age during the worst financial crisis since the Depression, she was as indignant as ever about those making decisions on her have at least as much a sense of social responsibility as their elders. behalf: “Our politicians need to start coming from civil society,” The difference is that they’re pragmatists looking for feasible ways she said. “We need people of all ages, races, religions and sensi- of paying for it. For Vialle, the “économie positive” that blossomed bilities... They need to look at the country they’re living in, a coun- in France in the shadows of financial collapse was an attempt to try of blacks, Muslims, Jews, transsexuals and women with balls. link social responsibility and economic realism. These young peo- How can you theorise about a country when you don’t even know ple have travelled abroad and can see that the French social model what it looks like?” is unsustainable. They’re looking for ways to replace it. Is there something in this quest for meaning common to young people like Adrien, Elodie, Ella and Jack that is shared by the “dead souls” who murdered their friends? In an age in which, according to some, monotheism is in its death-throes, is the thirst for transcendence something that those who were attacked on 13th November might have in common with those who mur- dered them? If you look closely at videos of 28-year-old Abdelha- mid Abaaoud, the Belgian leader of the attacks, with his go-pro strapped to his chest, his endless selfies, his childish delight in the four-wheel drive he’s driving, can you not see, behind the monster he has become, an ugly parody of the millennial child? He, surely, is the uneducated version who found no traction in the culture in which he was raised, in whose “void of thought” evil fit so easily. I became convinced of this when I heard that the last words yelled out by 26-year-old Hasna Aït Boulahcen, the female member of the Paris commando, before she was shot dead by French special forces were not “Allahu Akbar,” but “He’s not my boyfriend!” “He’s not really cut out for this sort of thing” PROSPECT 29 WORLD HISTORY ARCHIVE/TOPFOTO © WORLD HISTORY A scene from the 1962 film version of To Kill a Mockingbird, with Gregory Peck as (front left) and Brock Peters as Tom Robinson (front right) The war’s not over yet In Go Set a Watchman, has told the truth—America is still wrestling with racism diane roberts

arper Lee has broken our hearts. For more than Atticus as we picture him: Gregory Peck, stern and beautiful in half a century, Atticus Finch has been everyone’s that immaculate linen suit as he speaks out against hatred and hero, a white man who puts his reputation, even prejudice. This Atticus is a racist. his life, on the line, defending a black man and fac- In Go Set a Watchman, Scout Finch (these days known by ing down a lynch mob in the Jim Crow south. The her baptismal name Jean Louise) is now 26 years old and liv- HAtticus we’ve always known valiantly tries to prove Tom Robin- ing in New York City. Home for a visit, she begins to realise that son never raped Mayella Ewell, angering the good white people her adored father, a man she sees as an exemplar of all that is of Maycomb, Alabama, risking everything to uphold the rule of good and decent, actually believes in white supremacy. He lik- law. He fails; Tom Robinson is killed. Still we love him for fight- ens “Negroes” to children and calls them “backward,” unfit to ing the good fight. “share fully in the responsibilities of citizenship.” He joins the But the Atticus of Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee’s mysteri- local White Citizens’ Council to suppress the burgeoning civil ously recovered, newly published, novel, is not the legal Galahad rights movement. He despises the National Association for the of To Kill a Mockingbird, not a crusader for the downtrodden, not Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) for giving black peo- ple ideas above their station: “The NAACP doesn’t care whether a Negro man owns or rents his land, how well he can farm, or whether or not he tries to learn a trade and stand on his own two

Diane Roberts is a professor of English at Florida State feet—oh, no, all the NAACP cares about is that man’s vote.” A University and a commentator on America’s National vote Atticus Finch doesn’t think “Negroes” are entitled to. Public Radio How can it be that one of the most cherished characters 30 PROSPECT in one of the most cherished novels of all time, a secular saint and irredeemably evil. Boo Radley is misunderstood, not sinis- of American justice cited by the likes of Shami Chakrabarti of ter; Tom Robinson is innocent; Atticus is a hero; and most peo- Liberty and Morris Dees, founder of the Southern Poverty Law ple are decent. Mark Twain’s radically incorruptible Huck vows Center, as their reason for becoming lawyers, could say to his to “light out for the Territory,” disappear into the Edenic wilder- horrified daughter, “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our ness where Nature might be red in tooth and claw, but he’ll be schools and churches and theatres? Do you want them in our free of depraved social institutions such as class, organised reli- world?” Readers, nearly as appalled as Jean Louise Finch, may gion and slavery. In Go Down, Moses, Ike McCaslin thinks the only well ask if we really need to know this Atticus. way to atone for the sins of his white family against his black fam- To Kill a Mockingbird is the quintessential southern story, ily is to abjure the realm, renounce his property and retreat to decanting all the big southern themes—the legacy of slavery, the the healing bosom of the wilderness. But in Harper Lee’s slice loss of innocence, cruelty, conformity, unexpected grace—into a of the south, running away isn’t an option. Everyone, even the few years in the life of Jean Louise “Scout” Finch, the tomboy- recluse Boo, belongs to society; everyone is responsible for soci- ish despair of every high-toned Christian lady in Maycomb, Ala- ety, too. Atticus Finch doesn’t fall into a resigned melancholy, bama. Mockingbird isn’t the greatest novel by a southerner. That unlike Faulkner’s Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom!, whose title surely belongs to Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner’s response to the horrors of history is to cry vainly about the south, spectacular demolition of racial difference, Civil War pieties “I don’t hate it! I don’t!” and drown himself. Atticus turns and and the whole edifice of white supremacy that ordered south- fights. Hope lives on. ern society. Mockingbird lacks the Faustian menace of another great southern novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in ince 1964, when she gave her last interview, Lee has been which Huck chooses to violate his culture’s standards of morality an American enigma, a one-novel wonder like Ralph Elli- and see his friend Jim not as a piece of property but as a human son (Invisible Man) or Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind). She’s not been a recluse like JD Salinger or a ghost Slike Thomas Pynchon. In 1961, she happily collected her Pulitzer “To Kill a Mockingbird is the Prize and in 1962, attended the première of the film based on quintessential southern her novel. Later in life she accepted a Medal of Freedom from President George W Bush, and a National Medal of the Arts story, decanting all the big from President Barack Obama. She said yes to several honorary degrees and until she became frail three or four years ago, she’d southern themes” appear at the University of Alabama to shake hands with the win- ner of an annual high school essay contest in honour of To Kill a being, declaring he’s ready to “go to hell” for it if necessary. Mock- Mockingbird. Nevertheless, as she said to her cousin Dickie Wil- ingbird cannot match the moral complexity of Faulkner’s Go liams, “When you’re at the top, there is only one way to go.” She Down, Moses, with its pained confrontation of southern history never wanted to talk about her writing. When asked in the early and the “Peculiar Institution” that allows a father to rape his own 1960s if she planned a “Mockingbird 2” or some other novel, she’d daughter because she is also his slave. simply say “no.” Sometimes it was “hell, no.” On one occasion she Harper Lee read her southern writers. You can hear Huck added: “I wouldn’t go through the pressure and publicity I went Finn’s guileless voice in the Finch children, and detect the influ- through with To Kill a Mockingbird for any amount of money. I ence of Faulkner’s crime solving lawyer Gavin Stevens in Atti- have said what I wanted to say and I will not say it again.” cus. The inhabitants of Maycomb owe something to the chatty Unlike her childhood friend Truman Capote, she had no eccentrics of Eudora Welty’s Morgana, Mississippi, as well, and desire to shine in New York café society—much as she loved New Carson McCullers didn’t miss the similarities between Scout and York. Capote’s 1948 bestseller Other Voices, Other Rooms, a tale Frankie in The Member of the Wedding, sniffing to a cousin after of southern decadence complete with rotting plantation house, Mockingbird became a hit: “Well, honey, one thing we know is cross-dressing uncle, mad aunts, guns and dark family secrets, that she’s been poaching on my literary preserves.” made him a literary star. He encouraged Lee, maintaining a But Mockingbird was never fenced off from ordinary readers, close friendship with her during the 1950s and 1960s. She worked put out of reach on the “high art” book shelf, unlike the works of with Capote in late 1959 as his “researcher and bodyguard,” Faulkner, the über Modernist, or O’Connor and McCullers, the helping with his groundbreaking “nonfiction novel” about the connoisseurs of the grotesque. Mockingbird sold like crazy when murders of a well-off family in Holcomb, Kansas, and the two it appeared in 1960 and has never stopped selling: more than 40m ex-convicts eventually executed for the crime. Some, notably copies to date. In contrast to Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and Norman Mailer, wondered if Lee actually wrote parts of In Cold others of the southern literary pantheon, Lee’s narrator is a child, Blood and—perhaps to equalise the unlikeliness—suggested that but not unreliable; linear time in her novel is not in a state of col- Capote was the real author of To Kill a Mockingbird. Everybody lapse; characters don’t shift races or genders. Maycomb’s problem loves literary conspiracy theories: Shakespeare didn’t really write is that everyone is stuck in the station to which he or she was born: Shakespeare, and Branwell Brontë, Emily’s brother, is the “real” gentry, “white trash,” Negro, acting out a narrative which never author of Wuthering Heights. allows for deviation. Published six years after the US Supreme Which brings us to Go Set a Watchman, controversial before Court outlawed segregation, five years after Rosa Parks refused it ever hit print. Did Harper Lee’s lawyer Tonja Carter “find” to give up her bus seat to a white man, and the same year as white- the typescript in the summer of 2014, as she has said, or was it only lunch counter sit-ins began and the Student Non-Violent really unearthed in 2011 when an expert from Sotheby’s exam- Coordinating Committee was founded, Mockingbird refuses to ined the contents of Harper Lee’s safe deposit box? Did Harper give into either rage or despair. The south is not fundamentally Lee truly want this uneven, often funny, often inartful, first PROSPECT 31 © RETUERS Bree Newsome tears down the Confederate flag from outside the South Carolina state capitol on 27th June 2015 draft of the beloved Mockingbird to see the light of day? It’s hard of “mongrelisation” and rails against the Supreme Court’s rul- to ignore the staggering amount of money involved: royalties for ing declaring that separate is never equal, was either an offence To Kill a Mockingbird top $63,000 a week. Conspiracy theories to Yankee progressivism or out of date. In the 1930s, Faulkner abound: perhaps Lee, aged 89, is too infirm to have consented in exposed segregation as a vicious crime against humanity; in the a meaningful way? Alice Lee, known around Monroeville, Ala- 1940s and 1950s, Richard Wright and James Baldwin gave voice bama as “Atticus in a skirt,” died in 2014, and could no longer to the fury and pain of racism in their fiction and essays, while protect her baby sister from publishers, editors, agents and Ralph Ellison, in Invisible Man, took on America’s myriad race advisors intent on maximizing a huge publishing opportunity. myths and shot them down one by one, brilliantly, if sardonically, A columnist for the New York Times pointed darkly to the “syn- demanding full humanity for every American of every shade. A ergy” of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal getting novel in which the supposedly wise father and the supposedly rebellious daughter both seem to feel that states’ rights should trump the human rights of African-Americans would surely have “When asked in the early struck many readers, becoming aware of the struggle for civil 1960s if she planned a rights in the south, as retrograde. ‘Mockingbird 2’ or some other n that last interview 51 years ago, Lee said she wanted to be “the Jane Austen of South Alabama,” chronicler of a novel, she said ‘hell, no’” way of life in small southern towns she feared was on the decline. On the one hand, she loathed publicity and swore “scoops,” including the first chapter, from the Rupert Murdoch- Ishe’d never publish anything again; yet she also clearly intended owned Harper Collins, which published the book. A reviewer on to produce more than Mockingbird. National Public Radio said she didn’t think Watchman was a first Writers are no more consistent than anyone else. In the 1970s, draft ofMockingbird after all, asserting “this troubling confusion Lee seemed to be planning a true-crime novel called “The Rev- of a novel” reads like “a failed sequel.” The New Republic did a erend,” based on a series of sensational homicides in Alexan- three-part series called “The Suspicious Story Behind Harper der City, Alabama. A self-proclaimed preacher was suspected Lee’s Go Set a Watchman.” The publisher insists that Lee gave of murdering his first and second wives, his brother, and various full consent to the book’s publication. other family members. Alice Lee would tell people, “Nelle Lee Watchman is certainly the first draft of Mockingbird. Records is always writing stories”—Nelle being Lee’s actual first name. kept by Lee’s agent in the late 1950s corroborate this. It reads The hype for Go Set a Watchman was positively epic. Book- like a first draft: rough and often angry. Tay Hohoff, Lee’s editor stores from Boston to Los Angeles held celebrations the evening at Lippincott, counselled the young writer to abandon the con- before the novel officially came out on 14th July. Square Books in temporary story set in the 1950s and concentrate on Scout as a Oxford, Mississippi (home of Faulkner), held a marathon read- child in the south of the 1930s. If there is a “secret” here, I sus- ing of To Kill a Mockingbird, while in Monroeville, where Lee still pect it’s that Hohoff and Lippincott thought perhaps a novel in lives, now in a care home, a local café served “Boo Burgers” and which every white character, however charming, embodies some “Finch Fries.” Monroeville’s Ole Curiosities and Book Shoppe aspect of racism from paternalism (at best) to an irrational fear opened at midnight on 13th July to begin selling 10,000 cop- 32 PROSPECT ies of Watchman (Monroeville’s pop- itage or hate? After the massacre of ulation is only 6,300) to people nine worshippers at Emanuel AME who’d been queueing for hours, some Church in Charleston, South Caro- dressed as Atticus or Scout or other lina, the state legislature (finally, and characters from the Mockingbird uni- not unanimously) voted to remove it verse. Harper Collins, the novel’s US from the capitol grounds. Alabama publisher, says the novel broke all pre- followed suit. But Mississippi contin- vious records for pre-sales. On pub- ues to cling to the battle flag, incorpo- lication day, the Guardian’s website rating it into their state banner. A new offered “Live Updates” from New book by David Theo Goldberg, Are We York, the United Kingdom and Ala- All Postracial Yet? argues that, if any- bama, as if this were some natural dis- thing, race informs American society aster, an election or the cup final. more than ever. Our attempts at col- A wily public relations firm could our-blindness have only made us more not have designed this “publishing aware racialists. Barack Obama did event of the year” any better. But now not, after all, usher in the new era when that the noise has settled down, we can race is finally irrelevant. Race is—as it think a little harder about the novel. always has been—life and death. As the And Lee’s legacy. And our shock that writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his searing Atticus could hold such racist atti- Between the World and Me, says, “race tudes. This Atticus, this first charac- is the child of racism, not the father.” terisation of him, is much more of a This isn’t about “hue and hair,” it’s product of his time than the Atticus about power. America, a nation con- of Mockingbird. Consider: he would stantly telling itself the future is have been born in the 1880s (he’s 72 what matters, is mired in history. As in Watchman), and grew up in an Ala- Faulkner said, “the past is never dead; bama still traumatised by the Civil it’s not even past.” DDP USA/REX SHUTTERSTOCK DDP USA/REX

War and Reconstruction. He flirts So should we shun this lesser, this © with the Ku Klux Klan as a young man; To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee in 2011 limited, Atticus Finch of Watchman, joins the White Citizens’ Council as an holding onto his more heroic, later- older man; and makes a distinction between “good Negroes”—the draft self? On the contrary. Lee’s rough draft brings us closer to deferential domestics, preachers and tenant farmers who call him the reality of 21st-century America than the hopeful lessons of “sir”—and “outside agitators,” civil rights activists, the NAACP, To Kill a Mockingbird. Jean Louise’s Uncle Jack, trying to explain trying to destroy the “Southern Way of Life.” how the south got that way, says to her, “Not much more than “The Southern Way of Life” was white folks’ genteel euphe- 5 per cent of the south’s population ever saw a slave, much less mism for apartheid. Jim Crow. Segregation. The laws that for- owned one.” In 2015, the Texas Board of Education continues to bade blacks and whites to marry, to use the same entrance to deny that slavery was the main cause of the American Civil War. movie theatres or eat in the same parts of a restaurant, the poll It was really cotton tariffs. Or states’ rights. Uncle Jack would be taxes and “literacy” tests that stopped black people voting, the proud. In Watchman, Lee coolly dissects the class system Ameri- laws that made it almost impossible for the children and grand- cans insist doesn’t exist: Hank, Jean Louise’s sometime boyfriend, children of freed slaves to be full citizens of the United States. is white but working class. He can’t afford patrician tolerance for Atticus is similar to historical figures eventually regarded as black people, who are, he thinks, primitive and largely ineducable. civil rights advocates: the Supreme Court justice Hugo Black You can hear the same sentiments, slightly more veiled, in con- of Alabama, and the late Senator Robert Byrd of West Vir- servative justifications for the killings of Trayvon Martin in San- ginia. Both joined the Klan as young men; Byrd filibustered the ford, Michael Brown in Ferguson, and Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Civil Rights Act of 1964; Black spoke against an anti-lynching unarmed boys who are called “thugs,” boys taunted with “Pants law in the 1930s. Both later embraced the cause of social jus- up, don’t loot!” mocking the “Hands up, don’t shoot!” of the pro- tice. Faulkner, who in book after book undermined every sacred testors. Atticus Finch condemns government intervention in the tenet of white supremacy and showed how the south, despite 300 economy and what he sees as the “right” of Alabama to frustrate years of trying to separate black from white, derives its culture the dreams of anyone who happens to be a descendant of slaves; and identity from the rich mix of the two, cautioned black civil he castigates the Supreme Court for its “activism” (by which he rights activists to “go slow, now” and don’t push for integration. means its decision to end American apartheid) and wishes that He went on to say “if I have to make the same choice as Robert E only certain people—you can guess what kind of people—be Lee then I’ll make it,” and added that if the federal government allowed to vote. He’d be right at home in the Tea Party. interfered with Mississippi, he’d resist, “even if it meant going out In Go Set a Watchman we see a writer struggling with her peo- into the street and shooting Negroes.” ple and her history and finding no place of comfort. Whether One hundred and fifty years after the surrender at Appomat- 1957 or 2015, slavery haunts us still; the Civil War isn’t quite fin- tox, it’s still not over. Some white southerners, terrified of immi- ished; and, much as we congratulate ourselves on how far we’ve grants, terrified of social change and the astonishing fact that a come, Atticus, speaking from the scared, entitled subconscious black man lives in the White House, still talk about secession. of the America that desperately wants to see itself as a “white The whole country still debates the Confederate battle flag—her- man’s country,” shows us how far we have to go. PROSPECT 33 © CLODAGH KILCOYNE/GETTY IMAGES KILCOYNE/GETTY © CLODAGH Sinn Féin’s Gerry Adams, left, and drag artist Panti Bliss celebrate a Yes victory in the same-sex marriage referendum in May The strange death of Catholic Ireland The referendum legalising same-sex marriage capped an astonishing 50-year social revolution gerry lynch

n the referendum held in Ireland on 22nd May, voters such a power in the land, had urged its flock to reject the pro- chose overwhelmingly—by 62 per cent to 38 per cent—to posal. Many of the Church hierarchy did so only half-heartedly, endorse a proposal to amend the country’s constitution however, and in rural Ireland, where for decades the writ of the in order that “marriage may be contracted in accordance Church had run unchallenged, there were reports of walkouts at with law by two persons without distinction as to their mass when priests called for a No vote from the pulpit. Isex.” All the major political parties had supported a Yes vote A couple of days after the referendum, Cardinal Pietro Paro- on same-sex marriage. Predictably, the Catholic Church, once lin, a senior Vatican official, described the result as not just a “defeat for Christian principle, but… a defeat for humanity.” But Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin said that the crush-

ing popular vote in favour of same-sex marriage was a “reality Gerry Lynch was born in Belfast and is a former check” for the Church. It was more than that: it was confirma- Executive Director of the Alliance Party. He writes tion of the strange, slow death of Catholic Ireland. on religion, history and politics The story of its demise can be told be told in four acts. 34 PROSPECT

Act 1: July 1949 In Ireland, as elsewhere in the Catholic world, the disagree- Soldiers lined the route and bowed as the funeral cortège of ments fomented by Vatican II were still rumbling on. John Paul Douglas Hyde, first President of the Irish Republic, founder of appealed to those on both sides of these debates. His personal the Gaelic League and campaigner for the cultural “de-Angli- warmth and popular touch captivated radicals, while his doctri- cisation of Ireland,” passed through the streets of Dublin to St nal orthodoxy and robust anti-communism enthralled conserv- Patrick’s Cathedral. The surrounding streets were packed with atives and reactionaries. well-wishers, but as Hyde’s coffin, draped in the tricolour, was At Phoenix Park in Dublin, 1.25m people, an astonishing quar- carried inside, few of the mourners followed. ter of the population of the divided island, attended the Pope’s Hyde was a Protestant, and St Patrick’s the cathedral of the opening mass, with young people particularly in evidence. Crowds Anglican Church of Ireland. In those days, before the Second of hundreds of thousands attended subsequent services in towns Vatican Council (or “Vatican II”) began the process of ecu- and cities across the country. Over the course of the following year, menical outreach to other denominations in the early 1960s, a tenth of the boys born in Ireland were named John Paul. Roman Catholics were forbidden from attending services of The violent guerrilla conflict then taking place in Northern worship held by other Christians. Only two Catholics attended Ireland cast a long shadow over the visit. Fears of an assassi- the funeral itself: the poet Austin Clarke and the French nation attempt by loyalist paramilitaries and threatened mass Ambassador. protests led by the Protestant demagogue Ian Paisley meant Three months before, Ireland had formally declared itself that the Pope did not cross the border. His response to the Irish a republic, concluding the process of constitutional divorce Republican Army’s campaign against British rule—“Murder is from Britain that had begun with the establishment of the murder no matter what the cause or end”—which he made at Irish Free State 27 years earlier. The state that emerged was Knock, the centre of the Irish cult of devotion to the Virgin Mary unambiguously Catholic. Article 44 of the constitution recog- (a shrine in the village commemorates a supposed apparition of nised “the special position of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and the Blessed Virgin), chimed with the public mood in the Repub- Roman Church.” John A Costello, the Prime Minister, would lic. Catholics in the Republic sympathised with the grievances of later announce: “I am an Irishman second, a Catholic first, and their co-religionists in Ulster, but were weary after a decade of I accept without qualification in all respects the teaching of the bloodletting there. hierarchy and the Church to which I belong.” The papal visit crowned an optimistic period in modern Irish The power of the Church was nearing its zenith during this history. From the late 1950s on, Irish society and the country’s period. In an egregiously shameful episode, tens of thousands economy began to open up to the rest of the world. Ireland, of orphans or otherwise “undesirable” children, as well as along with Britain, had joined the European Economic Com- unmarried mothers, were placed in institutions run by religious munity (EEC) in 1973. A few months before the Pope said mass orders where wilful malnutrition, violent punishment and sex- in Phoenix Park, the Irish currency, the punt, joined the Euro- ual abuse were endemic. (In June 2014, the full horror of this pean Exchange Rate Mechanism. A modest economic boom system of incarceration was brought home when a researcher coincided with a brief reversal in the flow of people out of Ire- found records for 796 babies and toddlers believed to have been land. Highly educated, successful emigrants returned from Brit- buried in a mass grave beside a former orphanage for the chil- ain and the United States. Irish diplomats played leading roles dren of unwed mothers.) in European institutions and at the United Nations. Ireland While the Church was cementing its dominance, Ireland was becoming more integrated into the cultural life of the west, was haemorrhaging its population. Irish men and women trav- too—Dublin bands like the Boomtown Rats and Thin Lizzy had elled in their thousands across the Irish sea to find work in the legions of fans across Europe and North America. Ireland’s baby old imperial power. Irish labourers powered Britain’s postwar boom topped out in the year of the Pope’s visit. Its progeny would council house-building programme and Irish nurses formed the rewrite the meaning of Irishness. backbone of the new National Health Service. If those who came of age in Britain in the 1980s Britain were Ireland may have been Catholic, Gaelic and free, but it was “Thatcher’s children,” their counterparts in Ireland are John bleeding to death. Before the Famine, which began in 1845, its Paul’s. Ironically, they are the generation that has abandoned population peaked at around 8.5m. Immediately after that cat- the Church. They didn’t rebel or convert; they just stopped car- aclysm ended in 1851, it stood at 6.5m. By 1961, the population ing. Mostly, they didn’t even think about it; they simply stopped of the Irish Republic was just 2.8m, despite it having one of the going to mass or listening to the priest once they left the family highest birth rates in Europe. (The population of the entire home. They were part of a tide that would drown not just Catho- island of Ireland, including the six counties in the north belong- lic Ireland, but the Catholic west as a whole. ing to Britain, was 4.2m.) Already in 1979, in societies long defined by an “ultramon- tane” Catholicism that stressed the supreme authority of the Act 2: September 1979 Pope, clerical power was beginning to wane. In Quebec, for For the first time ever, a Pope, John Paul II, visited Ireland. And example, the so-called “Quiet Revolution” was well underway. In for the first time since 1523, the Pope was not an Italian (John Belgium, the once powerful Christian Democrats, now riven by Paul was born Karol Wojtyla in Poland). Setting foot on Irish linguistic differences (Flemish speakers against Francophones), soil, he received the kind of reception usually reserved for rock increasingly defined themselves as secular humanist moderates. stars. An Italian campaign to liberalise abortion laws was gathering Perhaps because of the parallels between Ireland and momentum, while in Holland, “the rich Roman life” of proces- Poland—Poland was the only country in Europe whose loyalty sions and social clubs that sustained the Roman Catholic State to the Catholic Church and fidelity to Our Lady rivalled Ire- Party was dying—a process exemplified by the once devout city land’s—the Irish found what they were looking for in this Pope. of Nijmegen earning a reputation as the gay-friendly, pot- PROSPECT 35 © MAGNUM/PETER MARLOW © MAGNUM/PETER Crowds gather to hear Pope John Paul II’s mass given in Phoenix Park, Dublin, 1979—a quarter of the island’s population turned out smoking “Stalingrad on the River Waal.” was clear that the polls had been way off. Across the Catholic west, attendance at mass was going into Ireland’s army of “tallymen” are known for their ability to call steep decline, and Ireland was no exception. The decline was the result of an election from watching a handful of ballot boxes particularly dramatic among the working classes of Dublin, being opened and sorted. This time, however, tallymen from both though the crowds greeting the Pope in Phoenix Park meant no camps agreed that the referendum result was too close to call. one was paying attention. One ballot box from inner-city Dublin contained an unusual bal- lot paper. As well as a cross placed in the No box, it had attached Act 3: November 1995 to it a miraculous medal of Mary, a prayer for divine assistance for In a referendum in 1986, voters rejected a proposal to legalise a cause that had seemed to be lost on polling day. It symbolised a divorce in Ireland by a margin of 63.5 per cent to 36.5. The ques- clash between two understandings of modern Ireland. tion was posed again in another referendum nine years later. For those opposed to legal divorce, Ireland, though poor, was Although the polls narrowed in the final few weeks of an increas- an unusually stable and secure country in which families mat- ingly divisive campaign, the Yes side appeared to be ahead. But tered and stayed together. Its vocation was to stand proudly within a quarter of an hour of the first ballot boxes opening, it apart, holding true to faith, independence and tradition. 36 PROSPECT

For supporters of legalisation, the ban on divorce didn’t just to end in divorce. In a country where family had often been the leave tens of thousands of formally separated people in a legal most effective social safety net, billboards emblazoned with the limbo; it was also one of the things that locked Ireland in isola- message “Hello divorce, bye bye Daddy” struck a chord. tion and poverty, and drove the young and talented to emigrate. But for all the effectiveness of the No campaign, the consensus After the optimism of the 1970s, which peaked with John on polling day was that there would be a clear majority in favour Paul’s visit in 1979, the 1980s were something of a lost decade for of reform. In the event, turnout was high and the No side suc- Ireland. The economy crashed in the global recession in the early ceeded in getting its core voters out in droves. Rural constitu- part of the decade and government debt accrued at an alarming encies produced majorities of up to two to one against divorce, rate. In an era of sovereign debt crises, many worried that Ireland while major provincial cities returned only the barest of majori- would go the way of Mexico or Argentina. ties in favour. For much of the day, it looked as if the referendum Emigrants poured out of the country as unemployment would be lost, until Dublin, declaring its results late in the after- peaked close to 20 per cent. Mile-long queues at the American noon, produced a heavy majority in favour. In the end, divorce embassy in Dublin were not an unusual sight. Many made the was legalised by just 9,000 votes out of 1.6m cast. journey to the US without work permits, and the regularisation In hindsight, change was inevitable. The “Celtic Tiger” was of their status became a major political issue in American cities about to roar and dizzying rates of economic growth would bring with large Irish populations. Britain, which had no entry require- hundreds of thousands of emigrants home, while many young people would never leave at all. Secularisation gathered pace, while clerical sex scandals continued with dreary regularity. Ire- “After the optimism of the land’s liberal citizenship laws would see yet more hundreds of 1970s, which peaked with thousands of “New Irish” come on to the voter rolls, many com- ing from places where divorce was normal. Pope John Paul’s visit, the But on the day the votes were counted, it seemed to the No side’s supporters that they had come within an ace of preserving 1980s were a lost decade” all they held to be beautiful and special about their country. Most No voters were philosophical about their narrow defeat, but Úna ments for Irish workers, received them in large numbers, with Bean Mhic Mhathúna, one of their side’s most abrasive and effec- the educated pouring into the City of London, attracted by the tive television performers, gave voice to the despair that many of Big Bang deregulation and the money that followed. Others took them had suppressed. Encountering Yes campaigners celebrat- advantage of the new freedoms offered by the EEC to head to the ing at the capital’s vote-counting centre, she was unable to con- building sites of Denmark and West Germany, or to Amsterdam, tain herself. “G’way ye wife-swapping sodomites,” she shouted. where English-speaking office workers were in demand. Others She knew that the defeat was bigger than the narrow referendum headed for the oil rich states of the Middle East. majority suggested. For liberals, the lost opportunities of the 1980s were symbol- ised by a series of referendum defeats which culminated in the Act 4: May 2015 1986 No vote on divorce. That result provoked the collapse of the In the little town of Bandon in County Cork, Kitty Cotter went nearest thing Ireland had had to a liberal-left government since out to vote wearing a rainbow-coloured coat. A devoutly Catho- independence. lic retired schoolmistress, at 101 years old, Kitty was older than In 1995, they were sure things would be different. Another the Irish state itself. As a child she lived through the Irish war of broadly liberal-left government was in office, led by the Prime independence and civil war, which were particularly rough in the Minister John Bruton. Even the leader of the socially conserv- Bandon valley. She was 80 years old by the time homosexuality ative opposition was a legally separated man prevented by the was decriminalised in Ireland. divorce laws from marrying his new partner. The secularisation Shortly before polling day on the same-sex marriage refer- that had been barely discernible in 1979 was now firmly estab- endum, she recorded, with the assistance of her granddaugh- lished, especially in the cities. Meanwhile, over the previous three ter, a YouTube video in which she said: “I believe in equal rights years, a series of clerical sex scandals, involving both consenting for all our citizens. Therefore I will be voting Yes in the coming adults and the abuse of children, had eroded the moral author- referendum.” ity of the Church. Bandon is the quintessential small Irish town. In the 1995 The economy had picked up in the early 1990s, as Ireland divorce referendum, the Cork South West constituency in reinvented itself as the perfect jurisdiction for multinational cor- which it sits voted No by a three to two margin. BBC TV come- porations. Ireland became a land of low tax and minimal regula- dian Graham Norton, who is gay, grew up here in the 1970s and tion—the ideal home for companies seeking access to European remembers a miserably homophobic time. But by the end of ref- markets in an English-speaking country with deep links to the erendum day, a majority of Kitty’s neighbours had joined her in US. The population was young and many had lived abroad before voting to legalise same-sex marriage. Cork South West recorded returning home with world-class skills and CVs to match. With a 56 per cent Yes vote. polls early in the year recording majorities for legal divorce Young Irish emigrants returned home in huge numbers to of three to one, it was easy to see why the Yes campaign was vote, and overwhelmingly to vote Yes, perhaps as many as 70,000 confident. coming back to a country with little over three million registered The No side, however, benefited from not being backed by any voters. In Ireland itself, 100,000 people registered to vote for the of the major political parties, and ran an effective insurgent cam- first time. It is estimated that over 80 per cent of these voted paign, making much of the impact of divorce on the Irish dias- in the referendum. Yes campaigners went to bed confident after pora. One in three marriages among the Irish in Britain was said the polls closed: the young had turned out heavily and those in PROSPECT 37 the cities had voted in greater numbers than in the countryside. men who supported the No campaign, only Diarmuid Martin In parts of working-class Dublin, where political disaffection is seemed capable of understanding the scale of what had hap- deep, 15 per cent more people went out to vote than is usual in a pened. But his analysis still missed the mark—the defeat of the general election. Church hierarchy was sealed not just by the enormous turnout The economic boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s had among the normally politically disaffected young, which Martin produced the biggest wave of immigration into Ireland since the noted, but also by the tens of thousands of elderly rural church- plantations of the 17th and 18th centuries. As much as 15 per cent goers who joined Kitty Cotter in voting Yes. of the population is now foreign-born. It was a sign of the times If in 1995 the miraculous medal was the symbol of the Chris- that, in the last few days of the referendum campaign, liberals tian contribution to the referendum, then perhaps a woman feared traditional Catholic Ireland much less than they did nat- known as “Yvonne,” a recovering heroin addict who came to the uralised citizens from Poland and the Philippines, who, it was attention of the media during the campaign, was the symbol of thought, were much more likely to obey the teachings of the 2015. “Yvonne” had become a born again Christian. Although she Church. The booming evangelical conventicles of the Nigerian was baptised a Catholic, she now attended an independent evan- diaspora also frantically emailed their faithful insisting that only gelical church. She had been told to vote No in her Bible class, but a No vote could uphold God’s plan, as did the mosques. wanting to support her daughter, who recently came out as bisex- In the inner cities of this new Ireland, immigrants outnumber ual, she voted Yes. the increasingly unobservant Irish at masses in many churches, Maeve Calahan, a 64-year-old from Tipperary, was another while urban Anglican parishes report congregations that are example. Leaving Sunday mass shortly before referendum day, about a third “from the cradle” Church of Ireland, a third con- she told a reporter: “I have a brother who is in a civil partnership verts from Catholicism and a third immigrant. In the country- and he certainly wants to have a full marriage. I’m not concerned side, things have also changed, but less dramatically. It was in the about the Church’s thinking, I have my own opinions.” Rural Ireland was full of people like Maeve, churchgoing Cath- olics, middle-aged or elderly, who at some point in recent decades “Rural Ireland was full of found they had a gay brother or a lesbian niece, whom they loved dearly. Former President Mary McAleese, another devout Cath- people who found they had a olic, was perhaps the Yes campaign’s most effective voice. She gay brother or a lesbian niece, began making equality a political priority several decades ago whom they loved dearly” when her gay son came out and was bullied in school as a result. ver the past 30 years, Ireland’s closet doors have been rural areas that conservatives hoped for at least a moral victory opening little by little. At first they were nudged ajar, in the referendum, a string of No votes that would show that some at a time when homosexuality was still criminalised, corners of the country, at least, would forever be loyally Catholic by the brave or the foolish or the handful whose jobs and traditionally Irish. Oweren’t at risk. Then from the mid-1990s, after decriminalisa- Polls narrowed in the final fortnight of the campaign, but tion, the young started coming out as a matter of course, a pro- much less dramatically than in the divorce referendum 20 years cess hastened as TV soaps worked actively to normalise same-sex before. And unlike 1995, there was no shock when the ballot boxes relationships. As older gay men and women started to find they were opened at 9am on 23rd May. By 9.15 the tallymen, these days had gay nieces, nephews and workmates, they began to follow tweeting live from the counts, were predicting a landslide for the suit. Even deep in rural Ireland, nearly everybody had a gay Yes side. Conservative rural counties like Mayo and Donegal were friend or family member. The deeply macho and largely rural said to be voting narrowly Yes. Ballot boxes in the poorest parts Gaelic Athletic Association now boasts a number of openly gay of Dublin recorded margins of up to seven to one for marriage stars. equality. The Ireland of 2015 would have amazed and probably horri- By 10am, the No campaign organisations began to concede fied most of the citizens who lined the streets for Douglas Hyde defeat and congratulate the victors. If there was one surprise, it back in 1949. It is globalised, multi-ethnic, multi-faith, heavily was that the gap between urban and rural Ireland was much nar- secular and proudly liberal. Most citizens of traditional Irish rower than in previous referendums. Dublin, although record- Catholic heritage are nominally religious, and many of those ing the highest margins of Yes support, didn’t quite deliver the who are religious have explored other alternatives, from the knockout punch Yes campaigners had hoped for. Rural Ireland, bourgeois formality of choral High Church Anglicanism to the however, voted consistently, if narrowly, in favour of same-sex exuberance of working-class pentecostalism. marriage. Out of the country’s 43 constituencies, 42 voted Yes. This Ireland is, at first glance, one where Catholicism is dying The lonely holdout, Roscommon-South Leitrim, only voted nar- as a social force. But we should remember that many whose rowly against. Little Ireland, for so long an emblem of rigidly Catholicism is central to their life also voted Yes: the campaign loyal Catholicism, became the first country in the world to legal- boasted the support of numerous monks and nuns. Perhaps a ise gay marriage by popular vote, doing so by a margin of five to third of Catholic priests voted Yes, and probably an outright three. majority of Anglican clergy. The Catholic Church had attempted a bellow from the pulpit Catholic Ireland of 1949 has died a death; the rigid mores during the campaign, but the bishops who called for a No vote and rules of that time have given way to a surprising liberal- most vocally did so clumsily and offensively. And their case was ism. But it is a strange death, in which many of those who still undermined by a substantial minority of clergy and countless describe themselves as passionately Catholic have joined in Ire- laity who made it clear they would be voting Yes. Among church- land’s astonishing half-century of social revolution.