PAGE 12 | SEPTEMBER 15 - 21, 2016
NATI O NA L
FALLS CHURCH NEWS-PRESS | FCNP.COM
The Avalanche of Distrust I’m beginning to think this whole sordid campaign is being blown along by an acrid gust of distrust. The two main candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, are remarkably distrustful. They have set the modern standards for withholding information – his not releasing tax and health records, her not holding regular news conferences or quickly disclosing her pneumonia diagnosis. Both have a problem with spontaneous, reciprocal communication with a hint of vulnerability. Both ultimately hew to a distrustful, stark, combative, zero-sum view of life – the idea that making it in this world is an unforgiving slog and that, given other people’s selfish natures, vulnerability is dangerous. Trump’s convention speech was the perfect embodiment of the politics of distrust. American families, he argued, are under NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE threat from foreigners who are as violent and menacing as they are insidious. Clinton’s “Basket of Deplorables” riff comes from the same spiritual place. We have in our country, she jibed, millions of bigots, racists, xenophobes and haters – people who are so blackhearted that they are, as she put it, “irredeemable.” The parishioners at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, felt that even the man who murdered their close friends was redeemable, but Clinton has written off vast chunks of her fellow citizens as beyond hope and redemption. But these nominees didn’t emerge in a vacuum. Distrustful politicians were nominated by an increasingly distrustful nation. A generation ago about half of all Americans felt they could trust the people around them, but now less than a third think other people are trustworthy. Young people are the most distrustful of all; only about 19 percent of millennials believe other people can be trusted. But across all age groups there is a rising culture of paranoia and conspiracy-mongering. We set out a decade ago to democratize the Middle East, but we’ve ended up Middle Easternizing our democracy. The true thing about distrust, in politics and in life generally, is that it is self-destructive. Distrustful people end up isolating themselves, alienating others and corroding their inner natures. Over the past few decades, the decline in social trust has correlated to an epidemic of loneliness. In 1985, 10 percent of Americans said they had no close friend with whom they could discuss important matters. By 2004, 25 percent had no such friend. When you refuse to lay yourself before others, others won’t lay themselves before you. An AARP study of Americans ages 45 and up found that 35 percent suffer from chronic loneliness, compared with 20 percent in a similar survey a decade ago. Suicide rates, which closely correlate with loneliness, have been spiking since 1999. The culture of distrust isn’t the only isolating factor, but it plays a role. The rise of distrust correlates with a decline in community bonds and a surge of unmerited cynicism. Only 31 percent of millennials say there is a great deal of difference between the two political parties. Only 52 percent of adults say they are extremely proud to be Americans, down from 70 percent in 2003. The rise of distrust has corroded intimacy. When you go on social media you see people who long for friendship. People are posting and liking private photos on public places like Snapchat and Facebook. But the pervasive atmosphere of distrust undermines actual intimacy, which involves progressive self-disclosure, vulnerability, emotional risk and spontaneous and unpredictable face-to-face conversations. Instead, what you see in social media is often the illusion of intimacy. The sharing is tightly curated – in a way carefully designed to mitigate actual intimacy. There is, as Stephen Marche once put it, “a phony nonchalance.” It’s possible to have weeks of affirming online banter without ever doing a trust-fall into another’s arms. As Garry Shandling once joked, “My friends tell me I have an intimacy problem, but they don’t really know me.” Distrust leads to these self-reinforcing spirals. As Alex Tabarrok of George Mason University observed recently, in distrustful societies parents are less likely to teach their children about tolerance and respect for others. More distrust leads to tighter regulations, which leads to slower growth, which leads to sour mentalities and more distrust. Furthermore, fear is the great enemy of intimacy. But the loss of intimacy makes society more isolated. Isolation leads to more fear. More fear leads to fear-mongering leaders. And before long you wind up in this death spiral. The great religions and the wisest political philosophies have always counseled going the other way. They’ve always advised that real strength is found in comradeship, and there’s no possibility of that if you are building walls. They have generally believed that even in the midst of an avalanche of calumny, somebody’s got to greet distrust with vulnerability, skepticism with innocence, cynicism with faith and hostility with affection. Our candidates aren’t doing it, but that really is the realistic path to strength.
David Brooks
Thugs & Kisses First of all, let’s get this straight: The Russian Federation of 2016 is not the Soviet Union of 1986. True, it covers most of the same territory and is run by some of the same thugs. But the Marxist ideology is gone, and so is the superpower status. We’re talking about a more or less ordinary corrupt petrostate here, although admittedly a big one that happens to have nukes. I mention all of this because Donald Trump’s effusive praise for Vladimir Putin – which actually reflects a fairly common sentiment on the right – seems to have confused some people. On one side, some express puzzlement over the spectacle of right-wingers – the kind of people who NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE used to yell “America, love it or leave it!” – praising a Russian regime. On the other side, a few people on the left are anti-antiPutinists, denouncing criticism of Trump’s Putin-love as “red-baiting.” But today’s Russia isn’t communist, or even leftist; it’s just an authoritarian state, with a cult of personality around its strongman, that showers benefits on an immensely wealthy oligarchy while brutally suppressing opposition and criticism. And that, of course, is what many on the right admire. Am I being unfair? Could praise for Russia’s de facto dictator reflect appreciation of his substantive achievements? Well, let’s talk about what the Putin regime has, in fact, accomplished, starting with economics. Putin came to power at the end of 1999, as Russia was recovering from a severe financial crisis, and his first eight years were marked by rapid economic growth. This growth can, however, be explained with just one word: oil. For Russia is, as I said, a petrostate: Fuels account for more than two-thirds of its exports, manufactures barely a fifth. And oil prices more than tripled between early 1999 and 2000; a few years later they more than tripled again. Then they plunged, and so did the Russian economy, which has done very badly in the past few years. Putin would actually have something to boast about if he had managed to diversify Russia’s exports. And this should have been possible: The old regime left behind a large cadre of highly skilled workers. In fact, Russian émigrés have been a key force behind Israel’s remarkable technology boom – and the Putin government appears to have no trouble recruit-
Paul Krugman
ing talented hackers to break into Democratic National Committee files. But Russia wasn’t going to realize its technology potential under a regime where business success depends mainly on political connections. So Putin’s economic management is nothing to write home about. What about other aspects of his leadership? Russia does, of course, have a big military, which it has used to annex Crimea and support rebels in eastern Ukraine. But this muscle-flexing has made Russia weaker, not stronger. Crimea, in particular, isn’t much of a conquest: it’s a territory with fewer people than either Queens or Brooklyn, and in economic terms it’s a liability rather than an asset, since the Russian takeover has undermined tourism, its previous mainstay. An aside: Weirdly, some people think there’s a contradiction between Democratic mocking of the Trump/ Putin bromance and President Barack Obama’s mocking of Mitt Romney, four years ago, for calling Russia our “No. 1 geopolitical foe.” But there isn’t: Russia has a horrible regime, but as Obama said, it’s a “regional power,” not a superpower like the old Soviet Union. Finally, what about soft power, the ability to persuade through the attractiveness of one’s culture and values? Russia has very little – except, maybe, among right-wingers who find Putin’s macho posturing and ruthlessness attractive. Which brings us back to the significance of the Putin cult, and the way this cult has been eagerly joined by the Republican nominee for president. There are good reasons to worry about Trump’s personal connections to the Putin regime (or to oligarchs close to that regime, which is effectively the same thing.) How crucial has Russian money been in sustaining Trump’s ramshackle business empire? There are hints that it may have been very important indeed, but given Trump’s secretiveness and his refusal to release his taxes, nobody really knows. Beyond that, however, admiring Putin means admiring someone who has contempt for democracy and civil liberties. Or more accurately, it means admiring someone precisely because of that contempt. When Trump and others praise Putin as a “strong leader,” they don’t mean that he has made Russia great again, because he hasn’t. He has accomplished little on the economic front, and his conquests, such as they are, are fairly pitiful. What he has done, however, is crush his domestic rivals: Oppose the Putin regime, and you’re likely to end up imprisoned or dead. Strong!