irredenta

"“Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue,” Mr. Obama said. “But..."

Thu, 23 May 2013 18:49:53 -0400

“

“Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue,” Mr. Obama said. “But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.”

Mr. Obama rejected the notion of an expansive war on terrorism and instead articulated a narrower understanding of the mission for the United States. “Beyond Afghanistan, we must define our effort not as a boundless ‘global war on terror’ but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America,” he said.

”

- NY Times

What’s truly shocking is that he didn’t make a similar argument during his first term. I don’t understand why the surge in Afghanistan was necessary if he truly understands the struggle against terrorism to be defined by targeted efforts. Why now? He offered a flimsy response, but not at all a satisfying one.

This, in a nutshell, is the incoherent core of Obama’s foreign policy. He’s very eloquent and ethically realistic about the burden of responsibility on US leadership in this area, but his refusal to introduce robust legal and ethical standards for the conduct of military operations gives the impression that he’s merely offering a personal perspective, not an official one. He is the President of the United States - not just Barack Obama. We all know who the person is and what he wishes to do, but it’d be nice if he actually wielded the powers he’s been granted by the public to implement his agenda. He can do it in foreign affairs much more effectively than in domestic affairs, and my problem with him is that he needlessly seems hesitant.

Camille Paglia Takes Down BDSM Studies... Rightfully

Tue, 21 May 2013 01:25:00 -0400

I’m not a fan of her work or particular tone and style of criticism, but her takedown of the increasingly incoherent and jargon-ridden ways of gender/sex studies amounts to an instructive and timely intervention:

It is unclear whether the grave problems with these books stemmed from the authors’ wary job maneuvering in a depressed market or were imposed by an authoritarian academic apparatus of politically correct advisers and outside readers. But the result is a deplorable waste. What could and should have been enduring contributions to both scholarship and cultural criticism have been deeply damaged by the authors’ rote recitation of theoretical clichés.

I mean, you’ve just just about lost all normal mental functions as a human being if you find even an iota of meaning, let alone insight, in the following sentence mined by Paglia from one of the books under review:

“In Butler’s work, intelligibility provides a horizon of recognition for subjectivity itself, within which all subjects are either recognizable or unrecognizable as subjects.”

Mark Blyth, for whom I was a teaching assistant at Brown, and...

Wed, 15 May 2013 19:36:00 -0400

Mark Blyth, for whom I was a teaching assistant at Brown, and with whom I’ve since become a close friend, has a wonderful new book on the history of austerity as an political-economic idea. You should read the book as soon as you wish, and here’s a characteristic look at Mark’s many charms, wit, and intellectual breadth. He is as learned as he is funny.

Paul Krugman has a great review of the book in the current issue of the New York Review of Books.

The Imperative of Change

Fri, 10 May 2013 19:31:00 -0400

Classes ended last week at the college I teach. I’ve always attached a great deal of significance to the last class of any course I’ve taught. Not only is it important that students finish the course having been reminded of the sheer significance of what they’ve learnt, but, even more so, they should also be released from one’s instruction with a sense of purpose - in search of new meanings, if you will.

One method that I’ve used over the years is to basically enlist the counsel of great minds, dead or alive. I do offer views of my own, but I always end up being embarrassed by my own sense of certainty (and even a bit of righteousness), so I needn’t share any of that here. This year, in my Introduction to International Relations course we read Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes, which confused, bored, excited, and inspired everyone in equal measure. I decided to end the course with the following words that appear near the end of the book, in which Hobsbawm nicely captures the importance of thinking about and laboring toward meaningful change. I have my own apprehensions about the endeavor, but with so many grim realities literally threatening our collective existence at this time in history, why not seek it. Here’s Hobsbawm:

… The future cannot be a continuation of the past, and there are signs, both externally, and, as it were, internally, that we have reached a point of historic crisis. The forces generated by the techno-scientific economy are now great enough to destroy the environment, that is to say, the material foundations of human life. The structures of human societies themselves, including even some of the social foundations of the capitalist economy, are on the point of being destroyed by the erosion of what we have inherited from the human past. Our world risks both explosion and implosion. It must change.

We do not know where we are going. We only know that history has brought us to this point and - if readers share the argument of this book - why. However, one thing is plain. If humanity is to have a recognizable future, it cannot be by prolonging the past or the present. If we try to build the third millennium on that basis, we shall fail. And the price of failure, that is to say, the alternative to a changed society, is darkness.

He wrote those words in 1994 (well, they were published in 1994), and here’s the main headline in the Times today: “Carbon Dioxyde Level Is at Its Highest in Human History”.

Great minds, it seems to me, are not merely clever and discernible in their observations of the universe of data and lives before them, but above all sincere and exacting in their judgment of our common lot.

Iran's Upcoming Presidential Election

Thu, 09 May 2013 13:15:00 -0400

From Omid Memarian:

By now, two presidential candidates in the last election, Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hossein Mousavi, as well as Mousavi’s wife Zahra Rahnavard, have spent well over two years under house arrest. These two were beloved politicians in the eyes of Islamic Republic founder Ayatollah Khomeini. Even so, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei can’t tolerate them. Meanwhile, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whom Khamenei supported unconditionally in his first term, now won’t pass up any opportunity to criticize the establishment.

So if the regime can’t trust a former prime minister and a former head of parliament, or even it’s current president, then whom can they, or rather, the Supreme Leader, trust? The answer is basically no one. And if you don’t trust anyone, from veteran revolutionaries to the younger generation of political figures, then what do you do with a presidential election?

The regime’s extreme sense of suspicion and distrust, and the level of squabbling amongst the political parties, who, regardless of ideology or revolutionary ideals, are all greedy for a piece of the pie, point to an unsettling future for Iran’s political sphere in the months to come. The Supreme Leader will do whatever it takes to make sure one of his loyalists ends up in office.

As Khamenei strives to keep his stranglehold on power, we should expect intensifying censorship and control over the media, civil society and political activists in the coming months. No matter who is nominated for Iran’s presidential election in the coming days, the regime is ready to avoid any surprises, regardless of the cost.

More on Obama's Foreign Policy

Wed, 08 May 2013 19:07:48 -0400

Steve Walt has a smart, pithy explanation of Obama’s foreign policy approach, which I think gets right to the point:

After being burned by the Afghan surge (a decision I’ll bet he secretly regrets) Obama has become more and more of a buck-passer with the passage of time. He’s not an isolationist or even someone who favors drastic retrenchment; he’s just the first president in a long while who understands that the United States is already remarkably secure and just doesn’t have that much to gain by interfering in the world’s trouble spots. He’s even smart enough to recognize that having thousands of nuclear weapons isn’t necessary for the U.S. to be safe and that we might actually be safer if the number of nukes around the world were lower and better guarded. As a result, he’s happy to let local partners bear the main burden and to back them up as necessary.

The exception to the above, which still supports my main point, is his reliance on targeted assasinations of suspected terrorists. This policy is in fact consistent with Obama’s basic approach, because the short-term costs are small and it insulates him against any charge of pacifism. Moreover, to the extent that nuclear terrorism is the one scenario where U.S. security could be seriously affected, keeping a full-court press on Al Qaeda (or like-minded groups) is undoubtedly tempting.

I have my doubts about thenet benefits of the drone war and targeted assassination program, but the rest of Obama’s approach makes eminently good sense to me. Indeed, I wish he could give one of his trademark speeches explaining this logic to the American people. He probably can’t, alas, because this sort of realism cuts against the rhetoric of “global leadership” that has been part of the Establishment echo-chamber for decades, not to mention the self-conceit of American exceptionalists. So Obama will continue to sound like his predecessors when he talks about America’s global role; he just won’t do most of the foolish things that most of them would have. Good for him, and for us.

Obama is neither “Bush lite” nor a timid isolationist, as some in the media and the conservative camp have charged. He’s just a sober observer of America’s national interests. As a senator, Obama became a huge fan of the realist theologian Reinhold Neibuhr, whose views he endorsed in the following way (on the backjacket of Neibuhr’s The Irony of American History):

“[Niebuhr] is one of my favorite philosophers. I take away [from his works] the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away … the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard.”

That last portion, “… knowing they are hard,” is really the essence of Obama’s attitude to the use of force. As I mentioned in the previous post, I think Obama’s attitudes to the developments in the Arab world largely follow from this intuition.

In Praise of a Cautious Approach Toward Syria

Tue, 07 May 2013 13:29:28 -0400

The Obama administration has been roundly criticized by the media and the Republicans for its cautious approach toward the Syrian bloodbath.

In spite of the ass hysteria, however, the Times reports today that they administration is holding on firmly to this approach, which is a relief. Setting aside my McCain Test for Judging US National Interests (i.e. do the exact opposite of what John McCain recommends because he’s always wrong - always), there seems to be a great deal of consensus even among the detractors that there simply “aren’t any good options available.” And yet the same commentators (mind you, most of them are neither military nor Middle East experts) feel certain that the Obama administration is undermining “US credibility”.

So what this is really about is the time-honored tradition of American national security commentariat worrying about the power and prestige of the United States. Drop bombs and sort out the issues later because otherwise the world might think we’re weak and lack credibility. Such tired phrases as “The world needs America’s leadership” or, as McCain put it the other day, “Our values are our interests and our interests are our values,” are once again tossed about without even the slightest hint of irony. Here we are, still reeling from two catastrophic wars waged under the banner of mucho American leadership - two wars that featured clear and friendly (to us anyway) oppositions and clear (even if unstated) motives. Syria features none of that, and yet the certainty persists.

The Obama administration continues to amaze the world with its stuttering ways, which I think is the reason why people like McCain and Lindsey Graham feel justified in peddling their nonsense. I don’t understand why the President can’t get in front of this issue by laying out the complexity of US’s position in a primetime speech.

I happen to think that the administration is very correct is taking such a measured approach to this issue and the Middle East in general. Let the Israelis and the Russians set all the baits they want, but a great power such as the United States, after two costly wars and a range of domestic and international problems, need not take the responsibility for a conflict that neither itself nor its allies can see to a fruitful resolution.

Battling Misinformation About Plan B

Tue, 07 May 2013 00:31:38 -0400

There’s a lot of misinformation out there about adolescent access to emergency contraception. None are grounded in either medical or scientific truth, and most spring from a kind of perverted religious morality.

It just so happens that my darling wife, Tracey, has been at the forefront of the fight to keep the public record clean of inaccurate and indeed harmful propaganda, which are even being peddled by the Obama administration. She designed and co-authored an important study published in the respected Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) last year, which found significant obstacles to teenage access to emergency contraception (especially among lower-income teens). Her study was cited recently by the federal judge that overruled the Obama administration’s decision to not make Plan B available over the counter.

I continue to be astonished by the number of otherwise progressive-minded people who have reservations about the availability of Plan B to teenagers. As Tracey explains to the LA Times in this excellent column by Sandy Banks, 50 percent of teens are sexually active by the age of 17 - it’s not merely prudish but very much foolish to think that making Plan B available “next to chewing gum and KitKat bars” (as the stupid refrain goes) encourages and promotes sexual activity. Have you looked at the magazine stand? Or music videos? Or Tumblr?

Pergolesi's Stabat Mater

Sun, 05 May 2013 19:59:04 -0400

I pressed “publish” too soon, before I had the chance to write the following.

It’s a sad, trying Sunday, and my little toddler and I have been passing the time by listening to some beautiful arias and duets. Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater is a favorite since one can just as easily lose sight of reality and escape to safer pastures. The opening movements of the sequence (I posted the second movement) were celebrated in the 18th century (but sadly after Pergolesi’s death); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, according to Wikipedia, praised it as “the most perfect and touching duet to come from the pen of any composer”.

Hope you get some enjoyment out of it as we are!

Audio

Sun, 05 May 2013 19:23:56 -0400

Julian Barnes Interview with New Statesman

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 16:18:00 -0400

Full interview here, but here are my favorite bits:

On Hitchens:

I enjoyed his company but never entirely trusted him.

On market-worshipping ways of the Tories:

In the short term, is anything likely to change? Not when the Conservative Party gets 51 per cent of its funding from the City. And it was always going to do what it calls “stripping the fat out of the state”; the world economic crisis merely gave it a pretext for cutting even further. But muscle and tendon are going as well, rebranded as fat. Beyond this, it dismays me what selfish and uncooperative Europeans we have been over the past years, smugly farting away in the corner. It seems perfectly possible that David Cameron will be remembered as the prime minister who “lost” Scotland and took Britain out of Europe.

But then, this is a government with rare powers: who thought you could manage to produce a fall in unemployment combined with a triple-dip recession?

On timely death:

The job of medicine, my GP quoted to me the other day, is to keep us healthy until it is time for us to die. Exactly; and the process of dying shouldn’t be artificially prolonged simply because this is technically possible.

On a possible sports-based book:

Though I’ve been toying for decades with writing about a football linesman: the idea of a bloke (these days, sometimes a woman) who is peripheral, necessary and unappreciated.

When did you last hear a chant of “Well done, the linesman”?

On Rupert Murdoch and Richard Branson:

I do believe in grudge-bearing. Also, I think his effect on public life in this country has been malign.

The other person who keeps offering me cable TV is Richard Branson, so that’s an equally sound reason for resisting. Why doesn’t a consortium of, say, the Guardian, the Co-op and the London Zoo start a cable channel and start buying sports rights? Then I’d sign up.

Reinhart-Rogoff on Debt and Growth: Fake but Accurate?

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 14:56:03 -0400

Reinhart-Rogoff on Debt and Growth: Fake but Accurate?:

Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin say that the Reinhart-Rogoff finding of sharply lower average growth in high-debt countries rests on three errors: a bad weighting method, inexplicable exclusion of data from certain countries and years, and an Excel coding error. After fixing those problems, they find that “average GDP growth at public debt/GDP ratios over 90 percent is not dramatically different than when debt/GDP ratios are lower.”

Yesterday’s defenses from Reinhart and Rogoff are most notable for what they do not contain: a defense of the methodology that Herndon and his colleagues criticize. Instead, they make two main arguments. One is that a 2012 paper, which Reinhart and Rogoff wrote with Vincent Reinhart, supports their finding that high debt is associated with low growth, as do several papers from other researchers. Their other response is that the really important matter is median performance, not the mean performance statistic that the UMass researchers are critiquing.

I’m with Paul Krugman on all this:

What the Reinhart-Rogoff affair shows is the extent to which austerity has been sold on false pretenses. For three years, the turn to austerity has been presented not as a choice but as a necessity. Economic research, austerity advocates insisted, showed that terrible things happen once debt exceeds 90 percent of G.D.P. But “economic research” showed no such thing; a couple of economists made that assertion, while many others disagreed. Policy makers abandoned the unemployed and turned to austerity because they wanted to, not because they had to.

So will toppling Reinhart-Rogoff from its pedestal change anything? I’d like to think so. But I predict that the usual suspects will just find another dubious piece of economic analysis to canonize, and the depression will go on and on.

Bullshit Excuses Behind Terrorist Attacks

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 17:00:42 -0400

The Washington Post and the Times report today that preliminary interrogations of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev reveal that US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq served as motivating factors behind acts of terrorism allegedly committed by the brothers.

To which I say: bullshit.

What’s to blame is a lazy and indifferent mind that takes little care to change the course of events through dialogue and reflective understanding. Willfully and indiscriminately murdering people just to make a political point simply means that you have neither a point nor even a most cursory understanding of politics.

There is at bottom something profoundly lazy about terrorism. At its core, terrorism is a rejection of human agency. It is an act that seeks to end all acts, but actually ends up merely pausing some. What terrorizes us about such heinous acts, I think, is the cost of someone’s sheer indolence, inflicted without any care or purpose.

collectivehistory: Colour photograph of the city of London...

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 14:00:13 -0400

collectivehistory:

Colour photograph of the city of London after a German air raid, 1940 (via Reddit)

"So long as only one ideal is the true goal, it will always seem to men that no means can be too..."

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 01:33:00 -0400

“So long as only one ideal is the true goal, it will always seem to men that no means can be too difficult, no price too high, to do whatever is required to realize the ultimate goal. Such certainty is one of the great justifications of fanaticism, compulsion, persecution.”

- Isaiah Berlin, “The Question of Machiavelli,” NYRB, November 4, 1971.

Berlin is easily one of the most influential liberal political philosophers of the last century. He is familiar to most for his famous essay “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in which his championing of negative liberty (i.e. freedom from arbitrary interference) became the cause celebre of the so-called Cold War liberals.

But for many political philosophers it is actually his insights on the moral doctrine of pluralism that really mark him as both a pioneering liberal and historian of ideas.

In any event, in light of the events of the past week, I thought the next best thing to sheer speculation about just about everything is to begin the task of reflection on what undoubtedly were a series of fanatical acts by the Tsarnaev brothers.

David Remnick: The Brothers Tsarnaev : The New...

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 21:22:05 -0400

David Remnick: The Brothers Tsarnaev : The New Yorker

“The greatest sympathy is reserved for the families of those who were killed by the bombing and in the violent pursuit that followed—and for the dozens who were severely injured in the blasts. Even the most ardent New Yorkers felt a profound allegiance to, and love for, the people of Boston. But, as the day was coming to an end, you could not help but feel something, too, for the parents of the perpetrators, neither of whom could fathom the possibility of their sons’ guilt, much less their cruelty and evil. Interviewed at their apartment in Makhachkala, the capital city of Dagestan, they spoke of a “setup,” an F.B.I. plot. The mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, told the television station Russia Today, “Every single day, my son used to call me and ask me, ‘How are you, Mama?’ Both of them. ‘Mama, we love you.’ … My son never would keep a secret.” The father described Dzhokhar as an “angel.” By the end of Friday (Saturday morning in Dagestan) their sons were gone—one dead, the other wounded, hospitalized, and under arrest.

The Tsarnaev family had been battered by history before—by empire and the strife of displacement, by exile and emigration. Asylum in a bright new land proved little comfort. When Anzor fell sick, a few years ago, he resolved to return to the Caucasus; he could not imagine dying in America. He had travelled halfway around the world from the harrowed land of his ancestors, but something had drawn him back. The American dream wasn’t for everyone. What they could not anticipate was the abysmal fate of their sons, lives destroyed in a terror of their own making. The digital era allows no asylum from extremism, let alone from the toxic combination of high-minded zealotry and the curdled disappointments of young men. A decade in America already, I want out.”

evanfleischer: via. Really not sure why waving the American...

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 01:27:49 -0400

evanfleischer:

via.

Really not sure why waving the American flag and chanting “USA, USA” is necessary here. I personally thought the “Boston, Boston” chants more appropriate.

These murderers were members of American society (the younger a naturalized citizen, the older a permanent resident), so I have no idea why the American identity is in need of assertion here.

I also heard a most disturbing speculation on CNN about the possible burdens placed on the killers by… wait for it… their names! A law enforcement expert I’ve never heard of before told Anderson Cooper that the older brother’s name was in honor of Tamerlane, “the great Muslim warrior that killed millions of people - perhaps it placed high expectations on him. It would be interesting to see what FBI profilers think of that.”

Yes, I’d also like to know what they might think of the name Alexander?

In times like these, we are glued to the news because we just don’t know how we might react.

"If it is examined closely, the standard practice makes little sense. Coherent, durable,..."

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 00:55:20 -0400

“If it is examined closely, the standard practice makes little sense. Coherent, durable, self-propelling social units―monads―occupy a great deal of political theory but none of political reality. Ostensible general conditions such as revolution, nationalism, or war always turn out to fall not at a single point but to stretch along a whole range of positions on some intersecting set of continua. The employment of invariant models, furthermore, assumes a political world in which whole structures and sequences repeat themselves time after time in essentially the same form. That would be a convenient world for theorists, but it does not exist.”

- Charles Tilly. 1995. ‘To Explain Political Processes.’ American Journal of Sociology. 100 (6): 1596.

(via inspector-minerva)

From the late Charles Tilly’s mouth to the contemporary rational choice-obsessed social scientists’ ears.

The Senate Condoned and Further Enabled Domestic Terrorism Today

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 01:44:52 -0400

President Obama called the Senate’s blockage of moderate gun control “shameful” earlier today. He was too measured and diplomatic by calling it that. In reality, the blockage is akin to enabling domestic terrorism.

The unwillingness of lawmakers to put themselves in the shoes of defenseless, terrorized children and innocent victims who are arbitrarily taken from their loved ones is not merely “shameful” but morally reprehensible. If this doesn’t make your blood boil I don’t know what will:

More than 50 senators — including a few Republicans, but lacking a handful of Democrats from more conservative states — had signaled their support for the gun bill, not enough to reach the 60-vote threshold to overcome a filibuster.

Democratic leadership aides said the effort could be revived if a public groundswell demanded it. “The world is watching the United States Senate, and we will be held accountable,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, who helped lead the gun control effort.

But with the families of Sandy Hook students in the Senate gallery and a flurry of gun rights phone calls flooding Senate offices, it was hard to imagine how much more emotion could be brought to bear. Aides to senators supporting the bill said that only outside circumstances, like another mass shooting, might cause those who voted “no” to reconsider their positions.

“It’s almost like you can see the finish line, but you just can’t get there,” said Andrew Goddard, whose son, Colin, was hurt but survived the shooting at Virginia Tech. “It’s more annoying to be able to see it and not get to it.”

Mr. Obama — who avoided the gun issue in his first term and focused on proposals he thought had a better chance of passing, only to seize on expansive measures after the Newtown shootings — made last-ditch appeals to senators, including Dean Heller, Republican of Nevada, and Kelly Ayotte, Republican of New Hampshire. Both rejected his entreaties.

Write these senators’ names down. They’ve earned their defeat, especially those spineless conservatives who have the audacity to call themselves Democrats. Here are their names:

Max Baucus (D-Mont.)
Mark Begich (D-Alaska)
Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.)
Mark Pryor (D-Ark.)

The Most Peculiar Democracy in World History

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 00:45:00 -0400

I’m late to this, but I just finished reading the very excellent article by David Runciman on American democracy in the previous issue of the London Review Books (delivered as part of the LRB’s wonderful Winter Lecture Series). As has become customary with Runciman, the essay (which is behind a paywall, but you can listen to him delivering it in the podcast that’s made available at the top of the page) is part political history, part political philosophy, part political economy, and part intellectual history, with the final result being an exemplary model in political commentary. Runciman, for the unacquainted, teaches political theory at the University of Cambridge, but is much more than that. While his familial and intellectual pedigree speak for themselves, his eclectic curiosities are very rarely left unaccompanied by extraordinary erudition of the kind befitting a most learned of Renaissance men.

Case in point, his latest LRB essay, in which he seamlessly moves from Carter and Nixon to Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Paul Kennedy to Tocqueville and Mill to Paul Krugman, Lincoln, and Obama. Here are my two favorite bits (but you must read the whole thing, if nothing to just marvel at how it’s done!):

On Tocqueville’s prophetic reputation:

Tocqueville wasn’t a prophet – there are no prophets, least of all in politics. Instead, Tocqueville stumbled across a simple truth that helps explain the difficulty of knowing how much trouble American democracy is in. His fundamental insight comes from the first-hand experiences he gained travelling in America as a young man in 1831 (the journey that formed the basis of Democracy in America). Tocqueville was an aristocrat and a bit of a snob. He shared the common European prejudice that American democracy was an implausible project – hence his desire to see it for himself. He got off the boat in New York, and like many first-time visitors was overwhelmed by what he found. His first impression was that it was a mess: stupid, chaotic, haphazard, impatient, relentless. He didn’t see how it could possibly work. But after he had been in the country for a while and travelled outside New York, he decided that American democracy was not nearly as bad as it looked. It does work, despite appearances. It has an underlying stability and adaptability that is not visible on the surface of events. Tocqueville concluded that American democracy has something curiously opaque about it: the underlying story never quite reaches the surface in time for anyone to recognise what’s going on. That’s why democracy requires faith: not just religious faith (though Americans have plenty of that), but also faith in democracy, a confidence born of the belief that things are never as bad as they appear. Tocqueville said of American democracy that more goes wrong, but more gets done as well, which means nothing bad lasts for long. Or as he put it elsewhere: more fires get started, but more fires get put out.

Don’t all regimes rest on this sort of faith? Tocqueville said not. He spotted the irony that it’s the openness of democracy that produces the opacity, because the excess of surface activity makes it hard to know what’s really going on. Authoritarian regimes, which run on secrecy, are not difficult to read: their secrecy is visible for all to see. The rulers of present-day China or Russia try to hide a lot about their activities, but you’d have to be very blinkered not to notice how much is being hidden. American democracy, by contrast, is mysterious because it is never clear just how much is being hidden (this is one reason conspiracy theories continue to flourish there). In a vibrant democracy the dissent, the noise, the anger, the incompetence are all readily apparent, yet out of this, over time, come stability and progress. It is hard to fathom. There is nothing cyclical about it. The active and the passive co-exist at every moment, frenetic activity going along with blind faith.

The problem is knowing how much to take on trust at those moments when things really do seem to be going badly. The opacity of democratic life makes it tempting to think the most important thing is not to overreact. If you lose faith during the rocky times, there is a risk you will stifle the restless adaptability that enables the system to correct itself over time. But of course there is also the risk that this time things really are as bad as they look – that something has gone fundamentally wrong – and if you keep waiting, you will end up standing by as the ship goes down. This is the dilemma facing American democracy now: how can anyone know how bad things are, given that they are rarely as bad as they seem?

On the false promise of using history as a guide:

Behind these questions lurks the basic reason we don’t know anything: history provides no sort of guide. There is, in fact, nothing to go on. America is still a fantastically rich, prosperous, dynamic society. Its military remains unmatched, its universities the envy of the world, its culture voraciously consumed, its currency the bedrock of global finance. We don’t know what happens when such a society goes into decline because it has never happened before. America is not Rome (or rather, Rome was never anything like America). Is it, as people sometimes say, Japan? No. American democracy is nothing like Japanese democracy. But more important, no one knows what Japan is, because there has never been a society in history that has combined such prosperity with such a low birth rate. Who knows what will happen there. Is America Greece? No. But more important we don’t know what Greece is, because no society in history has ever gone from being relatively poor (by European standards) to seriously rich (by any standards) and then back to being relatively poor. Will democracy survive? Will military dictatorship make a return? Anyone who says history provides a guide is lying. American democracy has proved far more adaptable in the past than the Greek or the Japanese versions. To rely unthinkingly on its unique adaptability to meet present and future challenges would be crazy. Yet confronting that record of adaptability with calls to seize the moment is fearsomely difficult. The adaptability makes it harder to act decisively, and more likely that the moment will be missed. American democracy may be trapped by its record of success.

It would be just as crazy to try to predict what will happen in the long run. What will the world be like in twenty, forty, sixty years’ time? God alone knows. But there’s one thing I would bet on. The United States will continue to hold its presidential elections on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November. In 2072 that will be on Tuesday, 8 November. Nothing else can even remotely be guessed about that year, but in an uncertain world US election day is perhaps the only thing you can set your political watch by. What will that election be like? Again, it’s hard to imagine. Voting will presumably be electronic: perhaps people will blink at a screen. Maybe Texans won’t be able to vote, if the state has seceded. (There is a hope in some quarters that Texas might secede from the Union, and then Austin might secede from Texas, making it the West Berlin of the South, sustained by airlifts of information from the cloud; though West Berlin had the big cars in a sea of tiny East German cars, whereas in Texas it would presumably be the other way round.) Perhaps, instead of Texas leaving, Mexico will have joined. Whatever happens, since this is a US presidential election it is bound to be attended with all the usual hoopla, and the rest of the world will look on with its usual fascination. But it’s possible that by 2072 a new emotion will be part of the mix too: pity, at the self-evident implausibility of it all.