The New York Times has a column by one of their regular conservative voices, Christopher Caldwell. So, where is he coming from?
(For those who want to skip past this part as TL;DR, go down to the next section. But, I’m putting in this long preface because it’s necessary to understand what you won’t get from simply seeing his name in The NY Times on an opinion piece without this background.)
Caldwell has gotten attention for two books: Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West, and The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties as well as his other writings.
In the first he argued in 2009 that the increasing number of immigrants to Europe who belong to the Islamic faith is going to be destabilizing because they are reluctant to assimilate — and that it’s impossible to address it dispassionately because any debate is drowned out by liberal cries of Islamophobia.
The New York Times summarizes Caldwell as follows: "When an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture [Europe's] meets a culture that is anchored, confident, and strengthened by common doctrines [Islam's], it is generally the former that changes to suit the latter."
Caldwell, in my opinion, is revealing more about his own perceptions of Islam than of the actual situation. Islam is diverse, crossing multiple sects, countries, languages, traditions, and cultures. It is hardly anchored, confident, or monolithic.
As for his take on Europe, given the vast conflicts and reshaping of the continent from the Napoleonic Wars through both World Wars and the Cold War, it would be remarkable if Europe did not continue to change.
His 2020 book also is problematic.
The book has received considerable attention for its chapters addressing the consequences of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Although originally conceived as a one-time corrective to end segregation and racial discrimination, Caldwell argues that the Act created an endless imperative for social reengineering, at great cost and at the expense of liberty and social cohesion.
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Sounds rather like the GOP argument that talking about (or addressing) racism is the real racism — and sets the stage for replacement theory. The review at wikipedia quoted above has this from Jonathan Rausch at the Brookings Institution:
..."[p]erhaps the author should have come up for oxygen when he found himself suggesting that the Southern segregationists were right all along". Describing Caldwell's account as "pessimistic", Rausch says that its "one-eyed moral bookkeeping" offers no constructive alternative to endless cultural warfare, while noting that this "seems to be where American conservatism is going".[2]
The NY Times descriptor for Caldwell notes he is “a contributing editor at The Claremont Review of Books,” a part of the Claremont Institute, yet one more conservative think tank.
The institute was an early defender of Donald Trump.[3] After Joe Biden won the 2020 election and Donald Trump refused to concede while making claims of fraud, Claremont Institute senior fellow John Eastman aided Trump in his failed attempts to overturn the election results.[4][5] In 2021, the Claremont Institute published an essay written by one of its senior fellows which called for a "counter-revolution" against the "majority of people living in the United States today [who] can no longer be considered fellow citizens".
Not to put too fine a point on it, the devolution of the Republican Party into the party of school massacres, replacement theory, white christian nationalism, suppression of women, and Covid mass casualties has been facilitated by the intellectual underpinnings supplied by Caldwell, those like him, and the think tanks that support them.
So, here’s the latest from Caldwell.
The link should penetrate The NY Times paywall. It’s a journey into an alternate universe, which is pretty much where conservatism is to be found these days. The entire piece reads as though it was written in Moscow.
For example, the invasion is all NATO’s fault.
...It was Russia that massed its troops on the frontier last fall and winter and — having demanded from NATO a number of Ukraine-related security guarantees that NATO rejected — began the shelling and killing on Feb. 24.
America interfered by backing the rejection of Putin’s hand picked president, and history is on the side of Russia:
In 2014 the United States backed an uprising — in its final stages a violent uprising — against the legitimately elected Ukrainian government of Viktor Yanukovych, which was pro-Russian. (The corruption of Mr. Yanukovych’s government has been much adduced by the rebellion’s defenders, but corruption is a perennial Ukrainian problem, even today.) Russia, in turn, annexed Crimea, a historically Russian-speaking part of Ukraine that since the 18th century had been home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.
And besides, the Russian annexation of Crimea was a good thing.
...In recent years, Russian control of Crimea has seemed to provide a stable regional arrangement: Russia’s European neighbors, at least, have let sleeping dogs lie.
But the United States never accepted the arrangement. On Nov. 10, 2021, the United States and Ukraine signed a “charter on strategic partnership” that called for Ukraine to join NATO, condemned “ongoing Russian aggression” and affirmed an “unwavering commitment” to the reintegration of Crimea into Ukraine.
That charter “convinced Russia that it must attack or be attacked,” Mr. Guaino wrote. “It is the ineluctable process of 1914 in all its terrifying purity.”
I’ll spare you the rest of it, though it’s worth reading because if nothing else it demonstrates how media like The NY Times mainstreams rightwing talking points. Caldwell cites the cost of the aid to date: “the newly authorized $40 billion allocation, could take the war to a different level.”
Not by coincidence, that number is out there in the wild now. I was looking at a post on the Book of Face showing Ukrainian troops using one of the new artillery pieces that the U.S. provided. The comments were full of what looked like obvious Russian bot entries — but it was difficult to tell them from home-grown right wingers. The $40 billion was a sore point for many who thought their tax dollars were being wasted “to support a corrupt government.” “That Russia was fully justified in cleaning out those Nazis.” And so on.
There was one especially egregious line being repeated which is now apparently a response to Texas as well. “Why are we arming another country when we can’t even defend our schools?”
If conservatism in this county is not effectively a fifth column for authoritarianism around the world, well I am Tsar of all the Russias to steal a line from Charlie Pierce.
What Caldwell is oblivious to is that Ukraine’s current government was democratically elected, and had been doing a damn good job stopping Russia on its own before aid started coming in. This is naked aggression on Putin’s part; Russia has been targeting civilian populations, engaging in war crimes, and worse.
Caldwell wants to reward bad behavior, but does not expect more of the same? Seriously? What Caldwell’s message amounts to is submit to force. Do not resist — or you’ll be sorry. He assures us this will somehow lead to peace or something. Caldwell is providing intellectual cover for right wing authoritarianism, aka Fascism.
Caldwell offers this up near the bottom of his opinion piece:
But if the war does not end soon, its dangers will increase. “Negotiations need to begin in the next two months,” the former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger warned last week, “before it creates upheavals and tensions that will not be easily overcome.” Calling for a return to the status quo ante bellum, he added, “Pursuing the war beyond that point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine but a new war against Russia itself.”
Quoting Kissinger is never a good sign, and as noted above, ignores that Russia has been engaged in hostilities targeting the U.S. for some time now above and beyond what is happening in Ukraine. Expecting Putin to retreat in Ukraine is blithering nonsense — and the Ukrainian people have their own views on that. But what does that matter to Caldwell?
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Which gets us right to the 2018 book The Road to Unfreedom by Timothy Snyder.
Historian Margaret MacMillan writing for The New York Times calls the book a "good wake up call",[4] while Tim Adams in a review for The Guardian describes the book as "persuasive", "chilling and unignorable"[5] and a review in Fair Observer calls it an "important addition to the literature explaining current events" and rising authoritarianism.[6]
Perhaps as strong a recommendation is the number of conservative critics who reject the book.
Snyder’s background stands in contrast to Caldwell:
Timothy David Snyder (born August 18, 1969) is an American historian specializing in the modern history of Central and Eastern Europe, who is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.[2][3] He has written several books, including the best-sellers Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin and On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.[4] An expert on the Holocaust, Snyder is on the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
The Road to Unfreedom has a lot of currency because Snyder examines the historic/philosophical underpinnings of Putin’s world view and puts them in context with two factors leading to “unfreedom”: inevitability and eternity. To quote from an earlier diary:
The politics of inevitability is the idea that there are no ideas. Those in its thrall deny that ideas matter, proving only that they are in the grip of a powerful one. The cliché of the politics of inevitability is that “there are no alternatives.” To accept this is to deny individual responsibility for seeing history and making change. Life becomes a sleepwalk to a premarked grave in a prepurchased plot.
Eternity arises from inevitability like a ghost from a corpse. The capitalist version of the politics of inevitability, the market as a substitute for policy, generates economic inequality that undermines belief in progress. As social mobility halts, inevitability gives way to eternity, and democracy gives way to oligarchy. An oligarch spinning a tale of an innocent past, perhaps with the help of fascist ideas, offers fake protection to people with real pain. Faith that technology serves freedom opens the way to his spectacle. As distraction replaces concentration, the future dissolves in the frustrations of the present, and eternity becomes daily life. The oligarch crosses into real politics from a world of fiction, and governs by invoking myth and manufacturing crisis. In the 2010s, one such person, Vladimir Putin, escorted another, Donald Trump, from fiction to power.
More to the point re Caldwell is something Snyder just wrote recently, The Folly of Off Ramps. (Hat tip to Digby for pointing to it.) Here’s how it starts:
Some observers of the Russo-Ukrainian war seem to think that its greatest danger is that Ukraine will win, or win too quickly, and that this will be uncomfortable for Putin, and that we should care.
This is a deeply perverse way of seeing things. Putin has chosen to fight a war of aggression and destruction in Ukraine. Wherever Russia controls Ukrainian territory, Russians commit genocidal crimes against citizens of Ukraine, including mass rape, mass killing, and mass deportation. A democracy is defending itself against an autocracy, and the fate of democracies hangs in the balance. The Russian hydrocarbon oligarchy is giving us a foretaste of cataclysm that awaits if we do not free ourselves from oil and gas. Russia blockades the Black Sea and halts food exports, threatening to spread death by starvation to tens of millions of people this year. Those are the kinds of things we should be worrying about, not Putin's self-image.
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This is something that completely escapes Caldwell in his ‘concern’ that what is happening in Ukraine is all the fault of the U.S. and that it’s something out of which we should have stayed.
Snyder continues:
Yet there is an even more basic problem with this reasoning, which arises from a false understanding of how power in Russia works.
The Russian media and political system is designed to keep Putin in power regardless of what happens in the outside world. Russian politics takes place within a closed information environment which Putin himself designed and which Putin himself runs. He does not need our help in the real world to craft reassuring fictions for Russians. He has been doing this for twenty years without our help.
Ukrainians understand this, which is one reason that they become irritated when we suggest that they concede territory or victory to Russia because of a concern about Putin's internal state. They know that this is not only unjust but pointless. What matters in Russian politics is not Putin's feelings nor battlefield realities but the ability of the Putin regime to change the story for Russian media consumers. It is senseless, as the Ukrainians understand, to sentence real people of real territories to suffer and die for the sake of Russian narratives that do not even depend upon the real world.
What happens if Putin decides that he is losing in Ukraine? He will act to protect himself by declaring victory and changing the subject. He does not need an off ramp in the real world, because that is not where his power rests. All he needs to do is change the story in Russia's virtual world, as he has been doing for decades. This is just a matter of setting the agenda in a meeting. In virtual reality there is always an escape route, and for this reason Putin cannot be "cornered." (Neither, for that matter, can the actual Russian army in actual Ukraine. When Russian units are defeated, they just cross back into Russia).
Putin's power is coterminous with his ability to change the subject on Russian television. He does this all the time. Think about how the war began. Until late February of this year, the entire Russian media was clamoring that an invasion of Ukraine was unthinkable and that all the evidence was just warmongering by the CIA. Russians believed that, or pretended to. Then, once Russia did in fact invade Ukraine, war was presented as inevitable and righteous. Now Russians believe this, or pretend to. In 2015, when Russia's last invasion of Ukraine failed to meet all of its objectives, the Russian media changed the subject from one day to the next from Ukraine to Syria. This is simply how Russia is ruled: invasions and storytelling about invasions. If the invasion doesn't work out, the story changes.
If defeated in reality, Putin will declare victory on television, and Russians will believe him, or pretend that they believe him. He will find a new subject on which to fasten their attention. This is the Kremlin's problem, not ours. These are internal Russian mechanisms in which outside actors are essentially irrelevant. It makes no sense to create an "off-ramp" in the real world, when all Putin needs is an "off-ramp" in his virtual world. It will be built by propagandists from pixels, and we are not needed for that. Indeed, there is something more than a little humiliating in Western leaders offering themselves as unpaid and unneeded interns for Russian television channels.
The odd thing is that Western leaders know all of this, or should. Given plenty of time to reflect after Russia's last invasion of Ukraine in 2014, we have become aware of the primary role that political fiction plays in Russian life. Everyone who matters in public discussions ought to be aware that Putin governs in media rather than reality. Just three months ago, we all just watched as Putin changed the story from "war unthinkable" to "war inevitable." And yet, for some reason, some Western leaders ignore this basic structural fact of Russian politics when they advocate appeasement...
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Here’s how it concludes:
Appeasement of Russia distracts us from the people who really are cornered: the Ukrainians. They are facing extermination as a people, and that is why they fight. President Volodymyr Zelensky actually does need a way to end this war, because he does not govern by fiction, because he is an elected leader, and because he feels responsible for his people. Unlike Putin, Zelensky cannot simply change the subject. He has to bring his people along. At this point, Ukrainians by huge majorities believe that the war has to be won, and are unwilling to concede territory. Unlike Putin, Zelensky will have to make a case, referring to what is actually happening on the ground. He therefore really does need help, both to win the war as quickly as possible, and in giving Ukrainians a sense of a post-war future.
All reasonable people want this war to end. That means thinking more about the Ukrainian people, and worrying less about problems that Putin does not in fact have.
READ THE WHOLE THING — and maybe think about subscribing to Snyder. It’s not likely you’ll find Snyder in The NY Times any time soon and why the tragic death of Eric Boehlert is such a loss.
[My Bad — samanthab points out in a comment that Snyder does appear in The NY Times on a regular basis, and links to a number of his recent contributions. That being said, it is still not a bad idea to subscribe to his feed and support him directly.]
The parallels between how Putin manages reality in Russia and how Republicans/Fox have created their own world of constantly changing alternative facts are chilling. Caldwell is just one of many actors on the right pushing dangerous nonsense that’s superficially reasonable enough to get retransmitted by conventional media.
So here we are.