The Best American Essays 2018

by Hilton Als

  George Kennan and other senior statesmen had warned early on that NATO expansion would prove to be a “tragic mistake, [a] policy error of historic proportions.” It is now leading to rising tensions along the traditional invasion route, through which Russia was virtually destroyed twice during the past century by Germany alone. To make matters worse, in 2008 NATO membership was offered to Ukraine, the Russian geostrategic heartland, efforts later pursued by Obama and Hillary Clinton.

  Let’s return finally to the main line of defense: functioning democracy. We can begin with the leader of the free world, the model of democracy for centuries.

  In a democracy, the voice of the people is heard. Let’s ask what might happen in the United States if this principle were upheld. One consequence would be that the most popular and respected political figure in the country would have an influential role, maybe even be president. That’s Bernie Sanders, by a very large margin.

  The Sanders campaign was the most remarkable feature of the 2016 elections. It broke the prevailing pattern of over a century of US political history. A substantial body of academic political science research establishes very convincingly that elections are pretty much bought: campaign funding alone is a remarkably good predictor of electability, for Congress as well, and also for decisions of elected officials. Research also shows that a considerable majority of the electorate, those lower on the income scale, are effectively disenfranchised, in that their representatives pay no attention to their preferences. As wealth increases, political representation does too, though only slightly—until you arrive at the very top, a fraction of 1 percent, where our policies are pretty much set.

  The Sanders campaign broke sharply from that well-established model. Sanders was scarcely known. He had virtually no support from the main funding sources, the corporate sector and private wealth, was derided by the media, and he even dared to use the scare word “socialist.” Yet he probably would have won the Democratic nomination had it not been for shenanigans of the Obama-Clinton party managers.

  Suppose he had won, or even that he had a major public platform today. We might then hear statements like this concerning labor rights: “I have no use for those—regardless of their political party—who hold some foolish dream of spinning the clock back to days when unorganized labor was a huddled, almost helpless mass . . . Only a handful of unreconstructed reactionaries harbor the ugly thought of breaking unions. Only a fool would try to deprive working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice.”

  That’s not Sanders, however. The candidate who said that was Dwight Eisenhower, when he was running for president in 1952. Such was the voice of conservatism during the days of the great growth period of regulated state capitalism, often called the economic “golden age.”

  We’ve come a long way since then. Now we are on the verge of seeing the demise of even public unions, about the only sort that remains in the United States. Real democracy would be quite different, so public opinion studies show. Much the same holds for a host of other issues as both parties have shifted well to the right during the neoliberal period, with the Republicans now at a point where respected conservative political scientists describe them as a “radical insurgency” that has abandoned parliamentary politics.

  One consequence is anger, frustration, and contempt for the formal institutions of democracy, reactions that often take ominous forms.

  The basic fact is that a true majority of the population would never vote for the policies designed by elites. Some simple figures give a good indication why.

  In 2007, before the crash, at the height of euphoria about the Great Moderation and the grand triumphs of neoliberalism and neoclassical economics, real wages of American workers were lower than they had been in 1979, when the neoliberal experiment was just taking off. One important reason was explained by Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan when he testified to Congress on the wondrous economy he was managing. He informed Congress that “greater worker insecurity” was keeping wages and inflation low. Workers are too intimidated to ask for decent wages, benefits, and working conditions, even in the late 1990s when unemployment was low—by neoliberal standards a sign of health of the economy.

  Social justice measures also deteriorated through this period—the United States, in fact, ranks at the very bottom of the developed countries of the OECD in such measures, alongside of Greece, Mexico, and Turkey. But profits are booming, particularly in the largely predatory financial industry, which exploded during the neoliberal period, accounting for 40 percent of corporate profit right before the crash (for which they were, once again, largely responsible). One motive for the so-called reforms of neoliberalism was to reverse the falling rate of profit that was largely a consequence of popular activism and worker militancy in the 1960s. That was achieved, so in that sense the reforms were a success—for corporations, not for the population as a whole. Under such conditions, democracy can hardly be tolerated.

  Much the same has been true in Europe under the lash of neoliberal austerity programs, which even IMF economists recognize to be unwarranted. But IMF bureaucrats listen to different voices—mostly those of the rich northern banks. Those are the voices that control the unelected troika that determines policy in Europe: the IMF, the European Central Bank, the European Commission.

  In his important critical analysis of neoliberalism, Failed, economist Mark Weisbrot has carried out a careful and revealing investigation of the political agenda guiding the destructive economic policies. He studied the reports of the regular IMF consultations with member governments of the EU, and discovered “a remarkably consistent and disturbing pattern.” The financial crisis was exploited as an opportunity to lock in the neoliberal reforms: spending cuts in the public sector rather than tax increases, reduced benefits and public services, cuts in health care, undermining of collective bargaining, and in general moves to create a society “with less bargaining power for labor and lower wages, more inequality and poverty, a smaller government and social safety nets, and measures that reduce growth and employment.” “The IMF papers,” Weisbrot concludes, “detail the agenda of Europe’s decision-makers, and they have accomplished quite a bit of it over the past five years.” An agenda that is quite familiar where the neoliberal assault has proceeded.

  In Europe, too, populations would not vote for these measures, so democracy must be sacrificed on the altar of locking in neoliberal reforms. The device in Europe is straightforward: transfer decision making to unelected bodies: the troika. The public response in Europe resembles what has been happening in the United States. Centrist political institutions are discredited, public disillusionment, fear, and anger are running high, sometimes taking quite ominous forms. Those old enough to remember the 1930s, as I do, cannot fail to be alarmed at the rise of neofascist parties, even in Austria and Germany, of all places, and not only there. And bitter memories are not easy to suppress when a majority of Europeans call for banning all Muslims from Europe, and many want to reverse the real achievements of the European Union, such as free movement of populations and erosion of national borders—which would be quite consistent with strengthening of cultural diversity in liberal and humane societies.

  We cannot attribute all of these developments across the West to the neoliberal assault, but it is a common and significant factor.

  Neoliberal policies are specifically directed toward undermining the regulatory power of the government, hence undermining the capacity to avert the blows of the sledgehammers. But the effects are more far-reaching. In our state capitalist societies, the power of the government is the power of the population, to the extent that the society is democratic. Neoliberal programs, by their very nature, tend to concentrate wealth in few hands while the majority stagnates or declines. Functioning democracy erodes as the natural effect of the concentration of economic power, which translates at once to political power, by familiar means but also for deeper and principled reasons. The doctrinal pretense is that transfer of
decision making from the public sector to the “market” contributes to individual freedom, but reality is quite different. The transfer is from public institutions in which people have some say (insofar as democracy is functioning) to private tyrannies in which the public has no say at all: the corporations that dominate the global economy.

  The policies are dedicated to making sure that “society no longer exists.” Such was Margaret Thatcher’s famous description of the world she perceived, or, more precisely, hoped to create. With these words, Thatcher unwittingly paraphrased Marx’s bitter condemnation of repression in France, which had left society as a “sack of potatoes,” an amorphous mass that cannot function. In the contemporary case, the tyrant is no longer an autocratic ruler, in the West at least, but instead concentrations of private power and bureaucracies that are free from public control.

  There is also no guarantee that functioning democracy, with an informed and engaged population, would lead to policies that address human needs and concerns, including the concern for survival. But that remains our only hope.

  All of which brings us back to Ernst Mayr’s question: Is it better to be smart than stupid? A question for you to ponder, and like it or not, for you to answer.

  Without too much of a delay.

  From a talk delivered in Montevideo, Uruguay, on July 17, 2017

  Bibliography

  Bundy, McGeorge. Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years. New York: Random House, 1988.

  Gardiner, Harris. “Borrowed Time on Disappearing Land.” New York Times, March 28, 2014.

  Kristensen, Hans, Matthew McKinzie, and Theodore Postol. “How US Nuclear Force Modernization Is Undermining Strategic Stability.” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, March 1, 2017. http://thebulletin.org/how-us-nuclear-force-modernization-underminingstrategic-stability-burst-height-compensating-super10578.

  Leffler, Melvyn P. “Inside Enemy Archives: The Cold War Reopened.” Foreign Affairs, July/August 1996.

  Mayr, Ernst. “Can SETI Succeed? Not Likely.” Bioastronomy News 7, no. 3, 1995.

  Osborne, Samuel. “Most Europeans Want Immigration Ban from Muslim-Majority Countries, Poll Reveals.” Independent, February 7, 2017. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/most-europeans-want-muslim-ban-immigration-control-middleeast-countries-syria-iran-iraq-poll-a7567301.html.

  Ulam, Adam. “A Few Unresolved Mysteries About Stalin and the Cold War in Europe.” Journal of Cold War Studies 1, no. 1, Winter 1999.

  Waltz, Kenneth. “America as a Model for the World?: A Foreign Policy Perspective.” PS: Political Science & Politics, December 1991.

  Warburg, James P. Germany: Key to Peace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953.

  Weisbrot, Mark. Failed: What the “Experts” Got Wrong About the Global Economy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

  WMO Statement on the State of the Global Climate in 2016. https://public.wmo.int/en/resources/library/wmo-statement-state-of-global-climate-2016.

  Paul Crenshaw

  Cadence

  from Hotel Amerika

  Each morning began with music, military speakers mounted from flagpoles playing reveille, and from a deep sleep of dreams not about this place, we heard the horns. Then came the quick switch of lights, and fluorescents flickering overhead, accompanied by the crash of something thrown, a trash can or gas canister. The voices of the drill sergeants rose out of the chaos, and we fell out of bed to the floor and tried to sleep for another two seconds under our bunks until the black boots came crushing down the aisles and forced us to rise.

  We ran to the latrine then, our new song the turn of taps and rush of running water. The fluids and flatulations, the scrubbing of teeth, the groans and grimaces as new aches arose on our beaten-down bodies. This was Basic Training, and there were always new injuries announcing themselves as we woke and prepared ourselves for the day, our bodies like tired old men, our pain another part of the song we heard each morning, whines and cries joining with the farts and shouts of “fuck” as we tried to rouse ourselves.

  We dressed staring at the darkness out the windows, silent now but for the rustle of clothing and our low curses about what was to come. When we had finished dressing, our lockers slammed closed together and our feet hammered the stairs in rhythm as we rushed down to the drill pad. The air lay thick and heavy in summer, Fort Sill, Oklahoma, 1990, just before the war began, but we didn’t know that then, only that a long day lay ahead of us and here was only the beginning.

  The streetlights were still on and the air smelled of bitterweed and heat as we stretched on the concrete, calling cadence, our voices echoing beneath the big building. Our drill sergeants’ voices hung hoarse in the hot morning, and our own voices came harsh as hounds over the hill as we finished stretching and marched to the road for our morning run. All up and down the area other batteries were doing the same, and already the voices rose like a choir, calling cadence softly into the coming morning, the fading night.

  In the early morning rain,

  in the early morning rain.

  In the early morning ra-a-a-ain,

  in the early morning rain.

  And so we sang, the sky lit up not with light but with litany, a thousand or ten thousand voices all calling cadence out of the darkness. Flashlights bobbed and weaved along the road outside the barracks buildings, vast edifices drawn into shape now by the yellow lights ringing them all around. The sun had not yet come up and the air still felt heavy and there was a pit of fear forming in our stomachs at what lay ahead, but for a time there was the song to focus on. While calling cadence we could forget about everything else: the future, friends and family, what forces were at work in the world.

  We started slow, still marching, singing about the early morning rain, about going off to fight a war, a common old cadence, one we sang every morning in the darkness before dawn drew the world into familiar forms. As we marched, the dark shapes of other batteries moved past, men just awoken from sleep now singing of cold hills in foreign countries, the desolation and destruction of war, the loneliness and despair that can creep into a soldier far from home, and Fort Sill felt like a foreign country on those hot mornings, Perez and Talley and Alvarez and Buist marching beside me, each of us looking at the other with something like kinship, or at least the common bond men in uniform share, men who are forced to suffer through such conditions.

  Already our T-shirts were soaked, sweat springing up on our shaved heads. Already the sides of the road were littered with men doing push-ups and sit-ups and jumping jacks, then sprinting to catch up with their platoons. Already the voices were deep-throated as despair, and were it not for the songs we sang we might have given in to despair.

  Just past the next barracks the call came for double-time and we took off, the cadence rising now, quicker, the flashlights passing like searchlights at sea. We did not know how far we would run each morning, whether a mile or ten miles, only that we had to keep up, to lock our bodies into the rhythm of the run, to focus on the cadence to get us through. The first gray glow lit the far horizon and a thousand voices raised themselves in song. Our feet hammered the road, creating a rhythm of its own as the day began.

  C-130 rollin’ down the strip

  Airborne ranger on a one-way trip.

  Stand up, hook up, shuffle to the door,

  Jump right out on the count of four.

  If my chute don’t open wide,

  I got another one by my side.

  And if that chute don’t open round

  I’ll be the first one on the ground.

  I forget now how far we ran on those first mornings, but by the end of Basic Training, about the time the hammer came down and Hussein invaded Kuwait and we were told we were going to war—by then we were up to six miles every morning, ending out of breath, our shaved heads steaming and slick with sweat, our shirts soaked, all the song run out of us. We gathered once again on the drill pad to stretch and steam and catch our breath, our voices go
ne now. The sun had come up sometime while we ran and gray light filtered over the drill pad, which was always a revelation because we had been running for what seemed forever and thought the night might never end. It was easy in those days to forget where you were and how long you had been there and what you were doing. Easier to put the body on autopilot, to follow only, to respond when called to. Easier to run into the morning singing.

  I’ve learned since that someone knew that, perhaps Private Willie Duckworth, who created, on one long march through swamps and rough terrain and night, the “Duckworth” chant, which raised the spirits of other soldiers during World War II. Or maybe Baron von Steuben when he brought close-order drill techniques to Revolutionary War soldiers as a way to perfect timing and to create a greater sense of camaraderie. Or even further back, to Africa, and slaves who brought call-and-response to cotton fields in order to lighten the workload, to make the day pass quicker, to give hope to those without any.

  But we knew none of that then, only that here was a way to pass the interminable mornings, the long runs on a hot base. And some mornings the world began exploding as we ran, when artillery was fired in the far distance and the ground trembled beneath us and the coming light bent at the horizon when the bombs went off. And some mornings it seemed, as we sang about soldiers on a hill or a C-130 rolling down the strip or what to do in case we die in a combat zone (box us up and ship us home) that we were in a combat zone, which was, I suppose, the point.