A few months ago, you accidentally defaulted on a phone bill. The mistake affects your credit score: It’s hard to get a loan. You can no longer make jokes about Marco Rubio on Twitter; such remarks will algorithmically define you as a libertarian loon—another sort of person likely to default on social obligations. After a couple of close friends miss their student loan repayments, you can’t even travel: your social circle is now all “discredited, unable to take a single step.”
This is the incipient scenario in China, whose state-backed “social credit scheme” will become mandatory for all residents by 2020. The quoted text is from a 2014 State Council resolution which promises that every involuntary participant will be rated according to their “commercial sincerity,” “social security,” “trust breaking” and “judicial credibility.”
Some residents welcome it. Decades of political upheaval and endemic corruption has bred widespread mistrust; most still rely on close familial networks (guanxi) to get ahead, rather than public institutions. An endemic lack of trust is corroding society; frequent incidents of “bystander effect”—people refusing to help injured strangers for fear of being held responsible—have become a national embarrassment. Even the most enthusiastic middle-class supporters of the ruling Communist Party (CCP) feel perpetually insecure. “Fraud has become ever more common,” Lian Weiliang, vice chairman of the CCP’s National Development and Reform Commission, recently admitted. “Swindlers must pay a price.”
The solution, apparently, lies in a data-driven system that automatically separates the good, the bad, and the ugly. But with President Xi Jinping, China’s most authoritarian leader since Mao Zedong, at the helm, much English-language coverage of the plan so far predicts “unprecedented” levels of dictatorial surveillance.
Commercial versions of the nascent national program are already in operation. Ant Financial, the finance arm of e-commerce giant Alibaba, is piloting Sesame Credit, which offers a range of perks, such as travel upgrades and deposit-free car rentals, to top scorers. But Sesame’s system, which assigns a rating between 350 and 950, is murky and complicated. The company says even innocuous activities, like late-night web browsing or buying video games, could see one’s rank downgraded for “irresponsible” behavior. One undergraduate saw her score plummet to 350 after being named in an unresolved civil suit: Sesame had automatically listed her as a laolai, a deadbeat, “subject to enforcement for breaking trust.”
The worst-case scenario is a form of high-tech Stalinism for our brave new world, in which those who toe the line are kept doped with rewards like fast-track visas for countries with compliant customs (developing regions deeply indebted to China via its “One Belt, One Road” could end up having to align themselves with Beijing’s emigration and other policies). Meanwhile, those whom the system considers dissenters, dropouts or deadbeats would be effectively excommunicated from mainstream society. How these miscreants are defined is one of the most worrying aspects. “I have no doubt that the current efforts are intended to produce a more authoritarian state,” Stanley Lubman, a Chinese law specialist at UC Berkeley, tells me.
“Good” behavior is equally subjective. Sesame Credit automatically upgrades customers who purchase curtains or diapers, for example—items which suggest a certain middle-class stability. This is partly because Sesame “is designed to incentivize behaviors that drive profits for Alibaba,” explains Mark Natkin, managing director of Beijing-based Marbridge Consulting, such as “heavier online and offline use of Alibaba’s payment tool, Alipay, and the user’s ability to recruit more friends to join their Alipay [social] circle.” Mrs. Chu, a middle-class working mother in her early 30s, tells me she finds Sesame “very convenient… because I have a high score, I can get refunds [online] quicker, without having to wait to return the items.”
But once compulsory state “social credit” goes national in 2020, these shadowy algorithms will become even more opaque. Social credit will align with Communist Party policy to become another form of law enforcement. Since Beijing relaxed its One Child Policy to cope with an aging population (400 million seniors by 2035), the government has increasingly indulged in a form of nationalist natalism to encourage more two-child families. Will women be penalized for staying single, and rewarded for swapping their careers for childbirth? In April, one of the country’s largest social-media companies banned homosexual content from its Weibo platform in order to “create a bright and harmonious community environment” (the decision was later rescinded in favor of cracking down on all sexual content). Will people once again be forced to hide non-normative sexual orientations in order to maintain their rights? An investigation by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab also warns that social credit policies would be used to discourage protest.
State media has defended social credit against Orwellian charges, arguing that China’s maturing economy requires a “well-functioning” apparatus like the U.S.’s FICO credit score system. But, counters Lubman, “the U.S. systems, maintained by three companies, collect only financially related information.” In the UK, citizens are entitled to an Equifax report itemizing their credit status. In China, only the security services have access to an individual’s dang’an, the personal file containing every scrap of information the state keeps on them, from exam results to their religious and political views.
While outside observers agree that the situation likely bodes ill for many unwitting citizens, few have considered how vulnerable the system is to the corruption, con artistry, and incompetence that plagues much of Chinese society. Who will have access to the data, and how will they be able to use or abuse it? Will it be shared between ministries and departments, or jealously guarded? Can it be manipulated, altered, faked—or stolen?
Private data in China is already openly (and cheaply) available on eBay-like platforms such as Alibaba’s own Taobao, making the company indirectly responsible for both harvesting and selling its customers’ data. Scams and identity theft are infuriatingly common. Sesame Credit requires highly sensitive personal information, such as degree certificates and title deeds, to be uploaded to its cloud to enhance users’ credit scores—cybersecurity experts say such a centralized digital database would be a treasure trove for hackers.
Meanwhile, reports in China’s financial media suggest the commercial systems are already being abused, with micro-lenders using it to scam clients. “Sesame Credit… is still unable to control the quality of the data reported by partner lenders,” observed a Caixin article. “Information often includes errors like mistaken user identity, and some lenders deliberately misrepresent user information… they will actually put their favorite customers on their blacklist shared with other lenders, so that other platforms will reject the customer, allowing the original lender to have exclusive access.”
And it’s not just businesses and crooks looking to game the latest gimmick: Already accustomed to having their data mined and lives surveilled, tech-savvy Chinese are wondering how they can rig their scores—and entrepreneurial hackers will be more than willing to oblige. On the popular Q&A site Zhihu, users constantly wonder how to boost the numbers: “Can I click-farm this?” many ask. The top-rated answer skewers the system mercilessly:
With my countrymen’s knowledge for seizing every opportunity, and penchant for taking shortcuts, it won’t be long before we’ll have plenty of companies willing to farm your score. What’s that? Sesame scores are connected to the frequency you use your credit cards? Simple—my company will help swipe and repay your card for a year, then charge you for how many points your score accumulates.
What? Sesame points are related to the scores of your circle of friends? Simple. I’ve got plenty of high-score friends: I’ll bring you in. What’s that? You’re afraid of bringing down everyone else’s scores? Don’t be. Using some bullshit card-swiping method, we’ll aggregate the IDs of all your parents, relatives and friends in the countryside to bring up your score, and when the time comes, divide up the points evenly. Don’t think it’s not possible.
The Zhihu user explains that he is simply applying a pattern of past behavior to the new model: “Some things that you can’t do in other countries, you can do in China, like fake divorces to get around housing purchase limits, or driving restrictions in Beijing. I’ve a friend who got a dozen buddies to help him enter the license-plate lottery… Of course I think there’s an urgent need for a credit rating system. But I really don’t have faith that they’ll do it well.”
Marbridge’s Natkin acknowledges some dangers and drawbacks, but suggests social credit ratings “will also create a greater disincentive to engage in anti-social behavior, like a landlord capriciously deciding not to return a security deposit, or a shared-bike user parking in the middle of the street.” These are everyday grievances in China’s scofflaw society that many will be glad to see gone, or at least punished.
Riding the country’s flagship high-speed rail this year, I overheard an announcement warning passengers that bad behavior on board “could affect your personal credit”—now it’s been revealed that a whole range of infractions, from smoking to having the wrong tickets, could land citizens on a “deadbeat blacklist.” (So, too, will offering “insincere” apologies for defaulting on loans; one must not only learn to grovel, but like it.)
To work effectively, social credit requires Chinese citizens to place complete trust in both their unaccountable government and vast cartel-like corporations. And therein lies the problem: A secretive scheme that proposes to (literally) codify credibility within a society that inherently lacks any is more likely to undermine public trust that instill it. Few would knowingly risk signing up for such a scheme; unfortunately, by 2020, no one living in the People’s Republic of China—foreign or Chinese—will have a choice.
This week, in an interview with TMZ, Kanye West claimed that slavery was a choice. “When you hear about slavery for 400 years … 400 years? That sounds like a choice,” he said.
Much has already been written about West’s recent exploits on and off Twitter. In the past week, he has publicly embraced Donald Trump and tweeted a picture of himself wearing the president’s signature Make America Great Again hat. He has suggested that Democrats are the real racists, citing the fact that Democrats were the party of the Confederacy and segregation (without acknowledging, or seeming to know, that the parties switched their historic roles on racial issues after passage of the Civil Rights Act). As a result, he has invited questions about his mental health and speculation that this is all a cynical performance to sell albums.
But this statement, in all of its ahistorical absurdity, was particularly unsettling. Coming from one of the country’s most famous entertainers, it legitimizes the still-pervasive belief that African Americans are somehow to blame for their condition. In this, West has become the latest in a long, unfortunate line of black people who have become mouthpieces for white supremacist ideas.
West’s apparent ignorance of this country’s past is tied, in part, to the fact that so many of our textbooks are saturated with revisionist history. According to a recent survey by the Southern Poverty Law Center, only 8 percent of U.S. high school seniors were able to identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War. This figure is distressing but it is not shocking. For the past 150 years, there has been a concerted effort to misremember what slavery was and who was responsible, not only to exonerate whites, but to also ensure that white power remains entrenched.
In many of our schools and in our public discourse there is still an inability to grapple with the ever-present threat of violence that loomed over the lives of the enslaved. The recent opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama—the country’s first memorial dedicated to lynching victims—underscores how that violence extended into the Jim Crow era and affects the criminal justice policies of the present day. While West’s comment is patently false, it demands that we counter it with fact, no matter how often those facts have already been trotted out as evidence. To take one example, consider this passage from Edward Baptist’s seminal book The Half Has Never Been Told:
Innovation in violence, in fact, was the foundation of the widely shared pushing system. Enslaved migrants in the field quickly learned what happened if they lagged or resisted. In Mississippi, Allen Sidney saw a man who had fallen behind the fore row fight back against a black driver who tried to “whip him up” to pace. The white overseer, on horseback, dropped his umbrella, spurred up, and shouted, “Take him down.” The overseer pulled out a pistol and shot the prone man dead. “None of the other slaves,” Sidney remembered, “said a word or turned their heads. They kept on hoeing as if nothing had happened.” They had learned that they had to adapt to “pushing” or face unpredictable but potentially extreme violence. Enslavers organized space so that violent supervision could extract the maximum amount of labor.
The pervasive threat of violence was predicated on the fact that enslaved black people were the single most valuable commodity in American life. As Yale historian David Blight has discussed, the four million slaves in 1860 were worth more than every bank, factory, and railroad in the country combined. The millions of enslaved Africans brought to this country in chains and under the whip and amid ubiquitous fear did not remain enslaved in the chains of its southern plantations by choice. But there was a choice that was made. It was a choice by slaveholders (and those who did not own but benefitted enormously from the existence of slavery) to make black bodies the national currency, the bedrock upon which this country would become a global economic superpower.
As W.E.B Du Bois wrote in the opening to his book Black Reconstruction: “Black labor became the foundation stone not only of the Southern social structure, but of Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system, of European commerce, of buying and selling on a world-wide scale.”
Amid the incessant violence that fueled the U.S. economy, what is perhaps most remarkable is that enslaved black people continued to resist anyway. There are famous examples like Frederick Douglass, who both physically fought his slave master and also learned how to read and write in spite of attempts to keep him from doing so. There is Harriett Tubman, who helped dozens of slaves escape bondage despite the risk of coming back into slaveholding territory time and time again. (West, true to form, tweeted a fake quote attributed to Tubman that read, “I freed a thousand slaves I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.”) And there is Nat Turner, who led an insurrection that forever changed American slavery, by reinstilling a sense of fear in slaveholders that their slaves might rebel at any moment.
But there are incalculable other ways that enslaved people rebelled, subverted, and fought back, ways both subtle and unsubtle. Some stole food or livestock or other valuable materials from their masters. Some purposefully disabled the machinery that made their work possible. Some plotted together to collectively do their work at a slower pace, impeding the production of the plantation’s goods and thus affecting their masters’ bottom lines.
Some resisted by taking their own lives before they arrived on this country’s shores so that they would never be someone else’s property, and some resisted by committing themselves to life, to perpetuating future generations. There is no right or wrong way for slaves to have resisted, but the suggestion that they simply accepted their conditions is historically inaccurate and demeaning.
It is tempting to ignore West’s remarks—to see them as so obviously misguided and inaccurate that they are unworthy of being addressed. The problem is that West is far from the only person espousing such views, and his unique position and platform threaten to lend credence to ideas that are not only erroneous, but dangerous. West’s rhetoric is a microcosm for a much larger phenomenon in America’s historical imagination, in which black people are blamed for their own oppression. There are many different iterations of this notion. Ideas like slavery was a choice, or that black people just don’t want jobs, or that black people are disproportionately in prison simply because they’re more likely to be criminals. These are all extensions of the same project.
What is insidious about such a project, and what is insidious about racism generally, is that it can make certain black people believe in it and maintain it. When the language is coming from the mouths of people who are part of an oppressed group, people holding those views will use the oppressed to veil their own bigotry. How can it be racist if Kayne West is saying it? How can I be prejudiced if Candace Owens believes the same thing?
White supremacists have always used black faces to propagate their message. The message isn’t new, it’s just that this time the messenger is.
Let me tell you about my selfie face. I like my head to be at a slight angle, one cheek turned to the lens so my eyes are looking at the camera sideways and never straight on. This is best for hiding the fact that my eyes are not symmetrical—a result of being born with ptosis, a drooping eyelid, and many operations to correct it. From the side and with a bit of a squint, it’s not that prominent. I also like to shoot the picture from below so it catches my jaw, which has a sharp angle, the jaw of a serious man. And then there’s my smile. My lips pursed look funny. So I keep them apart a bit, but not too much or my big teeth dominate and look goofy. I go for a wry thing, just a small lift at the corners of my mouth, slightly bemused, the look of someone who is maybe a little bit better than you.
SELFIE: HOW WE BECAME SO SELF-OBSESSED AND WHAT IT’S DOING TO US by Will Storr Overlook, 403 pp., $29.95
Don’t judge. I know I’m not the only one. I walk through Times Square every day to work, and nearly knock into at least a dozen of these selfie faces each way—lips unnaturally puckered, eyes wide and chins thrust out. So here’s a chicken-and-egg question: Where does this urge to capture and project perfect selves come from? Are the supercomputers in our pockets to blame, offering an irresistible pull, shaping the desire itself? Or did this narcissistic drive exist before the technology, an instinct of the modern self that smartphones have simply allowed us to indulge?
Ours is a boom time for technological determinism, of constant worry about how Siri or Instagram or YouTube is changing the way our brains and society and politics works. A long line of polemical books now form a techno-pessimist canon of sorts: from way back in 1993 when Neil Postman warned in Technopoly about how culture was becoming a slave to technology to Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows and its vision of the distracted, dumbed-down human beings the Internet was producing. And on and on. It would be easy to suggest, likewise, that today much self-obsession is also a function of the ever-present gadget. But consider this cute counterfactual from W. Keith Campbell, the social psychologist best known for diagnosing a “narcissism epidemic”: “We could have filled the Internet with ‘Mom-ies,’ taking pictures of our mom every day and saying how great our mom is. But we didn’t do that.” No, we certainly did not. As soon as phones with cameras appeared, almost everyone took the opportunity to turn them on themselves.
Campbell is among the many experts the British journalist and novelist Will Storr interviewed for Selfie, his free ranging account of the modern, ego-driven Western self. Despite the digital wink of the title, this is a story that arrives at Silicon Valley only in its second to last chapter. As he sets out to reverse engineer that ridiculous face I make into my phone, he finds it to be the result of a long historical process. It is 2,500 years of culture layered on top of biology that have determined this need to selfie. Aristotle, Jesus, Freud, Ayn Rand and the Esalen Institute are to blame—much more than Steve Jobs.
Storr’s starting point is his own self-loathing. Why does he feel so doomed never to measure up? He diagnoses himself—and many of the rest of us—with neurotic perfectionism, oppressed by an ideal of the self as “an extroverted, slim, beautiful, individualistic, optimistic, hard-working, socially aware yet high-self-esteeming global citizen with entrepreneurial guile and a selfie camera.” This ideal should be familiar from our Facebook feeds—that distant friend who can be seen vacationing on a beautiful beach with his loving family. But this unrealistic self is more than just an annoyance. For Storr, the delusions it inspires of possible, achievable perfection can be fatal. He even cites suicide statistics.
He traces the origins of this perfectionism to the tribal nature of the earliest human societies, in which individuals became super attuned to social hierarchy and status—all the better to survive. This, Storr believes, encoded humans with a genetic predisposition to “get along and get ahead.” From there, culture took over. The physical landscape of Ancient Greece, jagged mountains, islands and inlets, not particularly well suited to agriculture, pushed individuals and communities there toward market-based economies, competing with one another to excel at whatever it is they produced or sold. “Potter resents potter and carpenter resents carpenter, and beggar is jealous of beggar and poet of poet,” wrote Hesiod in the 7th or 8th Century BC. What emerged from all this jealousy and jostling was an ethos of self-improvement. As the Stanford historian Adrienne Mayor has written, Aristotle believed that “all things in nature”—including human beings—“moved towards achieving perfection of their potentials.”
What had been, for the Greeks, a desire for ostentatious success became in medieval Europe a struggle to control the self through prayer and flagellation—to battle inner badness and become pure. The focus became the soul, but the notion of an ideal persisted and that an individual has the capacity, on their own and through enough individual will and work, to arrive at perfection. Storr hopscotches over the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to arrive at Freud. But he sees little that is new in the theory of a battling id and superego, which he contends is simply a secular version of the Christian notion of reforming the bad self. The real change—the big one when it comes to the self, and most responsible for the current craziness—comes a little later in the 20th century, according to Storr, in California, to which his whole book shifts in its second half.
On the Pacific Coast, where Storr arrives like a Brit out of water, he makes his way to the Esalen Institute, which in the 1960s and 70s “helped rewrite our sense of who we are,” he grandly claims. In the encounter groups that took place here (and still do, in a different form, an experience to which Storr subjects himself), people were provoked, often harshly, into screaming at imaginary parents and usually ended up berating each other. Sobbing breakdowns were common. It turned the work of psychotherapy, of dredging up desires out of the muck of social expectation, from the practice of gaining mastery over these suppressed feelings into one in which they were given freedom to roam—as many a liberated former Freudian analyst did at Esalen, wandering the grounds naked and erect. The assumption underlying all of it was that, unfettered, each one of us is actually perfect, lovable, and god-like, and that all we want is within our grasp if we just reach out, ignore others, and take it.
All this me-first-ism coincided with the apotheosis of the no-holds-barred version of postwar capitalism, a world of individuals judged by their achievement of wealth and fame.
This is where the idea of “self-esteem” exploded. Storr tells the story (in a long, slightly digressive section) of John “Vasco” Vasconcellos, a California assemblyman, who soaked in Esalen’s famous springs and managed to secure funding for a state task force on the cure-all benefits of self-esteem as a “vaccine” for any social disease. It’s in the controversy around the creation of this task force and its positive findings, endorsed by Oprah, that Storr locates a patient zero in the spread of this epidemic. It wasn’t long before children were being given participation trophies: One Massachusetts school district ordered gym classes to allow students to jump rope without actual rope—the better to avoid the damage to their self-esteem that tripping might cause.
All this me-first-ism coincided with the apotheosis of a no-holds-barred version of capitalism—a world of competitive individuals, judged by their achievement of wealth and fame, and economies (the new “terroir of the self,” Storr writes) that privileged the narcissist. Margaret Thatcher said of her free market policies in 1981 that “Economics are the method, but the object is to change the soul.” Storr places Nathaniel Branden at the intersection of Esalen’s cult of self-esteem and a “greed is good” cult of success. A psychotherapist and Ayn Rand’s lover (and junior by 25 years), he became a mentor to Vasconcellos, the California assemblyman. The child, Branden wrote in his notes for Vasconcellos’s task force, should be “in love with his/her own existence,” able to “practice selfishness in the highest, noblest and least understood sense of this word.”
After all this, the rise of social media, offering everyone an Instagram account and an iPhone, only exacerbated this pathological self-love. That the idea of an eminently elastic and ultimately optimal self is a fiction—a “cultural lie,” Storr angrily calls it—is not exactly news. Far more interesting is the way Storr frames social media as an enabler of this fiction, but not as its creator. In the dead eyes of CJ, a 20-year-old who takes selfies almost every hour of the day (“I’ve genuinely taken selfies at a funeral”), Storr sees an entrenched culture of self-esteem and an economy that has taught her that she should always be selling herself. The phone is secondary.
Storr wants to tell a clean story. His claims can, as a result, often feel overblown. It’s just as reductionist to state that individualism can be traced back to the craggy geography of Greece or that the notion of self-esteem originated from wacky happenings at an institute sitting on the cliffs of Big Sur as it is to blame Facebook for a chronic lack of empathy in young people. His historical tour is pretty loosey goosey, skipping over, for example, the Enlightenment, the scientific and industrial revolutions, the rise of democracy, and, yes, the impact of technology on communication from the telegraph until today. All this too helped chisel the contours of the modern self. But for Storr the story comes down to a few cherry-picked facts from biology, culture and economics. It seems possible to say on every page, “yes, but.”
His book is a prod toward the study of the humanities—the very subjects that have dimmed next to the bright light of the screen.
Selfie is best approached as a corrective, and a much needed one, to a moment fixated on its own particularity. I’m not as concerned as Storr about the state of the modern self. There are even good arguments for the selfie—like the feminist one made by Rachel Syme that turning the camera on one’s self, becoming subject and object, is an empowering act. I think that most people, when they’ve shut off their phones at night, know their own finitude and, even if they are a little too enthralled by the idea of endless possibility and the prospect of perfection, find this fiction more comforting than harmful. Until Google or Amazon invents an app for solving the problem of mortality, I think we’ll all remain humbled enough.
But we should let go of the idea that our technologies are us, that we are somehow the sum total of the platforms we use. Storr is helpful here, if only to point out that the modern self is, as he nicely puts it, a “sack of noisy ghosts.” And there are many more rattling inside that sack alongside Aristotle and Esalen. His book is, in this way, a prod toward the study of the humanities—toward history, literature, philosophy, religion—the very subjects that have dimmed next to the bright light of the screen. Just maybe, if more people can be convinced that this wealth of culture offers them a mirror to themselves, they might be willing to put down the phone for a few minutes and gaze inside.
Political upheaval produces strange bedfellows. In periods of crisis, liberals and conservatives, who might be bitter foes in normal times, find they have a shared set of predispositions against radicals. During the 1960s, many liberals and even socialists found themselves making common cause with conservatives in fending off the New Left. Cold War liberals like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz turned to the right, and even stalwart social democrats like Irving Howe expended most of their energy criticizing the alleged excesses of the anti-war, Black Power and feminist movements.
The ideological earthquake of the Trump era, when both the white nationalist right and the socialist left are enjoying a prominence in national politics they haven’t seen in decades, is producing a similar fluidity of political alliances. The eagerness of reputedly liberal publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post to showcase Never Trump voices, and the recent vogue of writers’ extolling classical liberalism or Enlightenment values, is symptomatic of a wider tendency of elite institutions and thinkers to seek a new centrism bringing together the center-right and center-left against supposedly destabilizing forces in politics.
As new ad hoc alliances form between conservatives and liberals, one area of shared disgust is victim politics, especially as practiced by campus agitators. Jonathan Chait, for instance, is a liberal technocrat, nostalgic for the certitude of Cold War liberalism and adept at writing forcefully wonkish briefs for Democratic Party policies on health care and economic policy. Michael Brendan Dougherty is a Catholic traditionalist with paleo-conservative leanings, but appalled by the personal degeneracy of President Donald Trump. Yet this unlikely odd couple both bemoan the putatively dire impact of left-wing victim politics.
“On the left, victimhood is a prime source of authority, and discourse revolves around establishing one’s intersectional credentials and detailing stories of mistreatment that reinforce them,” Chait wrote last month in New York magazine. “Within the ecosystem of the left, demonstrating that you have suffered harassment or microaggressions is a big win.” Chait’s main worry was that these leftist narratives of victimhood would hinder female Democratic politicians, who would be regarded as weak by voters.
In a recent cover story in National Review, Dougherty makes a much more far-reaching claim that a victim mentality fostered by the radical left creates utopian longings that threaten to upend the political system. Acknowledging that victim politics has been around for a long time, and is also sometimes practiced by the right (as with the Trump administration’s trumpeting of the victims of immigrant crime), Dougherty still finds something uniquely dangerous about contemporary identity politics as found among college students.
“The young activists whom conservatives call ‘social-justice warriors’ practice politics in a form that looks spiritual, and their Marxoid political theories are effulgent with longings and aspirations that point far beyond what we normally think of as politics,” Dougherty wrote.
Chait and Dougherty make valuable observations about the danger of overemphasizing victimhood, but ultimately misdiagnose the problem. Victim politics is neither primarily a force on the left, nor is it pernicious. In fact, victim politics has always been an inescapable part of democratic politics—a way for oppressed groups not only to be recognized for their suffering, but also to gain the agency needed to overcome that suffering.
Where does victim politics come from? At various points in his essay, Dougherty traces it back to a secularization of the Christian ethos of extolling suffering and sacrifice, to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s political theory, to the utilitarian priority given to pain, to the alleged search by cultural Marxism for a new agent of revolution to replace the proletariat. This is a motley list of parents, some of which are mutually exclusive or at least very hard to square. The utilitarian impulse to minimize pain, for example, is very much at odds with the Christian conviction that suffering brings nobility.
Moreover, these sources are too large to explain modern victim politics. After all, Christian exaltation of the suffering of Christ and the martyrs has permeated Western culture for nearly two thousand years, long before the latest campus dust-ups about no-platforming conservative speakers.
Victim politics is coterminous with the rise of democracy in the eighteenth century. What is the Declaration of Independence but a document where the embryonic American polity casts itself as a victim of George III, listing grievances that can only be satisfied by the formation of a new state? Subsequently, in both the United States and in other emerging democracies, political agitation took the form of activists crafting narratives designed to make long-tolerated victimhood visible and worthy of challenge. Abolitionism, woman’s suffrage, anti-colonialism, and labor rights were all, in essence, calls for attention to suffering.
The arts played a major role making private suffering political. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, along with numerous autobiographical accounts by former slaves like Frederick Douglass were instrumental in mobilizing abolitionist sentiments. Charles Dickens’s Hard Times and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle had the same effect in awakening knowledge of industrial unrest and dangerous workplace conditions. The Civil Rights movement gained recruits and moral authority from shocking photos of lynchings and its aftermath, such as the famous tableau of Emmett Till’s mother gazing at his defaced body.
The case against this type of agitation is the same as the arguments now made against victim politics. In his 1855 novel The Warden, Anthony Trollope mocked Dickens as “Mr. Popular Sentiment,” a demagogic novelist whose melodramas featured villains who victimized the innocent. In today’s parlance, Trollope saw Dickens as a Social Justice Warrior.
Chait warns that if we talk about a female politician suffering from sexism and harassment, then we run the risk of destroying her “agency” and reducing “her to the status of victim.” But seeing agency and victimhood as antithetical is a false dichotomy.
In political activism, victimhood and agency reinforce each other: Someone becomes aware of their suffering, articulates it, then works with others to overcome it. Did Frederick Douglass become disempowered by discussing his suffering as a slave? No, that suffering was the root of his activism, both as a motive and a source of his authenticity. Similarly, Gloria Steinem was not disempowered by talking about the sexism she experienced by going undercover as a Playboy Bunny in her famous 1963 article. Rather, by describing the experience of victimhood, Steinem energized countless other women who had similar experiences. The current #MeToo movement also shows how speaking out about victimhood brings people together and creates the conditions for political change.
The dynamic between victimhood and agency can be seen in less overtly political activities. The organization Mother’s Against Drunk Driving was formed by women who had experienced trauma and used it as the basis for activism. Similarly, the Brady Campaign to End Gun Violence was started by White House Press Secretary Jim Brady after he was wounded in the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan, and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America began after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. In such cases, taking on the overt identity of victimhood is a way to gain power over trauma, to fight back against the cause of suffering.
The only thing that separates the new surge in left-wing activism from these earlier social movements is their novelty. But in terms of tactics, they are doing exactly what activists of all stripe have been doing for the last two centuries: using narratives of suffering to create new political identities that can effect material change.
To be sure, like all forms of political activism, victim politics can succumb to excess from time to time. But some of the starkest examples are found among conservatives, who often portray socially powerful groups as besieged even as they deny the suffering of the genuinely marginalized:
If you live in America you are not oppressed, a victim, or owed anything
You are part of a group of the luckiest humans ever to live
Be thankful, work your ass off, honor god, improve yourself, be better tomorrow than today, and give back
Embrace American privilege
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) April 25, 2018
One of the chief goals of democratic politics is to achieve justice, restituting wrongs not just for particular people but also injured groups and classes. Victim politics are thus not an incidental byproduct of a cultural awakening in the country today, but an essential feature of U.S. democracy. Rather than fretting about victim politics, Chait and Dougherty could more usefully focus on a pernicious phenomenon: the self-pity of some of the most privileged members of society, and the cottage industry of performative suffering it fosters.
Bill Otis doesn’t think too highly of the criminal justice reform movement in America today. Last year, the Georgetown University law professor told NPR that mandatory-minimum sentences were a “big success,” citing the drop-off in crime since the 1980s. In blog posts, he’s even more blunt: “Q: Where do the ideas behind sentencing reform lead?” he asked last February. “A: To the morgue.”
And don’t get him started on racial disparities in imprisonment.
“They are NOT caused by racism,” he wrote in a 2013 blog post. “They are caused by making choices. Of course the question is then asked: Well, why do blacks make, proportionately speaking, more criminal choices than whites? Isn’t that because of the damaging effects of white people’s racial bigotry? And the answer, which we must not hesitate to give, is ‘no.’”
These views, though increasingly unpopular with criminal justice policymakers, are not anathema to the current administration. In March, Otis was among four people President Donald Trump nominated to fill vacancies on the U.S. Sentencing Commission.
The commission isn’t typically prone to partisan warfare. In fact, Congress created the seven-member body in 1984 precisely so it could avoid politicized battles when crafting federal sentencing guidelines. Otis’s nomination could upset that balance.
“He’s been the arch-nemesis of criminal-justice reform at the federal level for a decade at least,” Kevin Ring, the president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM), told me. “He’s opposed basically every legislative reform, every reform the Sentencing Commission has passed, and just seems to enjoy that curmudgeonly position of saying no.”
FAMM, which advocates for sentencing reform through Congress and before the Sentencing Commission, has never endorsed or opposed a commission nominee before, preferring instead to work with those commissioners once they’re in office. But Otis’s nomination changed that. “He’s an ideologue in a position that is supposed to be driven by evidence and data,” Ring said.
The seven-member commission’s main function is to draft and revise federal sentencing guidelines, which aim to impose a degree of uniformity on federal criminal sentences nationwide. In practice, it’s been able to reduce thousands of sentences for non-violent federal prisoners. The commission also functions as a clearinghouse of sorts for criminal-justice data and statistical reports.
Thanks to a 2005 Supreme Court decision, the guidelines are no longer mandatory for federal sentencing. But they still carry plenty of weight within the judiciary. “Every sentence that isn’t governed by a mandatory minimum is governed by the guidelines,” Ring explained. “They have a gravitational pull on judges. Whoever is part of the team that makes those guidelines has influence.”
If confirmed by the Senate, Otis would bring first-hand experience with the federal criminal-justice system under both Democratic and Republican presidents. Among the posts he held during three decades in the government are stints as a legal advisor to the Drug Enforcement Agency’s administrator, as a special counsel in the George W. Bush White House, and as a federal prosecutor in the eastern district of Virginia, where he led the office’s appellate division.
Otis’s nomination has raised alarm among pro-reform groups that see the commission as a key ally in reining in mass incarceration in America, and it’s at odds with the reformist zeitgeist that’s swept D.C. think tanks and advocacy groups on the left, right, and center. Organizations ranging from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Koch brothers’ political network have put muscle behind the effort to reduce over-incarceration in recent years. Lower crime rates also helped spur state and federal lawmakers to rethink harsh policies from a bygone era.
Not everyone is on board with the shift away from tough-on-crime politics, including Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. But few are more vocal about it than Otis. “Although I am decidedly out-of-step with my learned colleagues inside the Beltway, and despite all the puff pieces in the press running in the other direction, I don’t feel lonely in opposing the more-crime-faster proposals marketing themselves as ‘sentencing reform,’” he wrote in 2014.
Otis declined to comment for this article, citing standard practices for pending judicial-branch nominees. Those who’ve worked with him say his appointment would bring a much-needed alternative perspective to the Sentencing Commission’s work. Kent Scheidegger, a California-based attorney and legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, told me that he thinks it’s important to avoid a “uniformity of viewpoint” on the commission.
“[Otis] has a view that the rush to lessen sentences, particularly for serious crimes, is a mistake, that it’s going too far too fast, and that people who have the contrary view necessarily are opposed to that,” he said. Scheidegger shares that skepticism of reformers’ efforts, telling me, “I think they’re largely forgetting history and condemning us to repeat it.”
The two men are regular contributors to Crime and Consequences, a blog that discusses criminal-justice issues from a conservative perspective. Otis’s posts there offer brief but illuminating glimpses into how he approaches the subject. His central theme is straightforward and often bluntly expressed: that tough-on-crime policies helped bring down crime over the past 25 years, and scaling them back will cause crime to surge upwards once more.
In an address to the Tea Party Patriots in 2016, Otis cast the push for sentencing reform as part of a national malaise.
I once thought the ideas behind sentencing reform took root merely in forgetfulness about our past blunders; complacency about our success in correcting them; and, more recently, a refusal to look honestly at the surge in murder and heroin use we see in cities from coast to coast.
But now I think there’s something more ominous afoot: It’s part of our country’s recent pattern of decline and retreat, of settling for lower standards in the name of a toxic brand of equality. Increasingly, we have turned away from America’s strength and resolve, and have discounted the interests of those who lead peaceable and productive lives in order to cut breaks to those who don’t.
Reformers say the evidence doesn’t support Otis’s view. “We have reams and reams of data to show that that sort of thing is outdated and objectively wrong,” Jonathan Blanks, a criminal-justice researcher at the Cato Institute, told me. While Cato doesn’t take positions on nominations, Blanks described Otis’s record as “very concerning” on sentencing matters. “You want someone who is invested in the data, in shaping the best policy, not being a political actor who doesn’t pay attention to what the data says,” he said.
There is data, for example, indicating that black Americans are far more likely to be arrested for marijuana-related offenses (even though their usage rates are roughly equal to white Americans) and that they are twice as likely to be searched during traffic stops than other Americans. Prosecutors’ offices are statistical voids compared to prisons and police departments, but what’s available is troubling: A 2014 study of the Manhattan district attorney’s office found significant racial gaps at virtually every step of the process there. How much of the incarceration gap can be attributed to these disparities is unclear, but it seems unlikely that it’s minimal.
These questions often fall within the Sentencing Commission’s purview. In 2017, for instance, it released a report that found that black men received roughly 20 percent longer sentences between 2012 and 2016 than white men who committed the same crimes, even when accounting for past criminal histories and the shrinking crack-cocaine disparity. Those findings not only echoed the commission’s past surveys on the subject, but indicated that the gap between black and white men is increasing.
In his writings, Otis places far more weight on individual decisions than systemic factors like racism. “I don’t care a whit about what the prison population looks like,” he wrote last year when discussing racial disparities in incarceration. “I also don’t care about whether they’re young or old, and I don’t care if they’re male or female. I care about what their behavior is, period…. If blacks (or young people or men) want to appear less in the prison population, it’s easy: Abide by the law. If you do, have a nice day. If you don’t, you’ve assumed the risk.”
His analyses don’t reject systemic effects out of hand, though. A key social factor in predicting criminality is “a stable, disciplined, employed, two-parent family life,” he argued in 2013, and that lower crime correlates with this factor “more than with anything else—race, religion, income, you name it.”
“This is the reason that, for example, Orientals have less incidence of crime than whites,” he went on. “Orientals were unquestionably the victims of long and rancid racial bigotry; coolie labor was little more than slave labor. And Yick Wo v. Hopkins is one of the most famous civil rights cases of all time. The reason Orientals stay out of jail more than either whites or blacks is that family life, work, education and tradition are honored more in Oriental culture than in others.”
But Otis does sometimes see racial bias—against whites. In 2014, he took umbrage to a rhetorical comparison drawn by President Barack Obama at the United Nations between instability in Middle Eastern regimes and the abusive tactics of American police departments like that of Ferguson, Missouri. “The anti-white bigotry, and specifically the anti-white cop bigotry, of this administration is appalling, and the responsibility for it rests less with Eric Holder (although there too) than with his boss,” he wrote, referring to the first black attorney general and Obama.
Otis occasionally takes aim at perceived elites whom he casts as insulated from the consequences of their policy decisions. “When early release goes wrong, as it so often does, who pays the price?” he wrote in 2016. “The sentencing reform crowd at their posh, self-congratulatory, ‘we-are-so-humane’ parties in Manhattan and Hollywood, or the next unsuspecting victim they helped set up?”
But Otis’s views are also out of sync with a growing number of conservatives. Republican leaders in red states like Georgia and Texas have adopted measures aimed at reducing recidivism and lowering excessive prison populations. “Someone who doesn’t adapt to new ways of thinking that have actually proven to be a lot more effective than simply warehousing people for years on end—someone who can’t accept that reality—doesn’t really need to be on the Sentencing Commission,” Jason Pye, the vice president for legislative affairs at FreedomWorks, told me.
Scheidegger said the debate over Otis’s positions would be a net positive for the commission. “I think it’s a good nomination, and I think it’s important to keep it in the context of the whole panel, including representation on the other side of the aisle as well,” he told me. “That’s an important aspect of the nomination. Diversity of viewpoint on this subject is a good thing.”
Trump’s nominees to the commission are still awaiting Senate confirmation. The other three are William Pryor, a Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals judge, as well as Third Circuit judge Luis Restrepo and federal district-court judge Henry Hudson. Reform advocates told me they also had concerns about Hudson, who once went by the sobriquet “Hang ’em High Harry” as a prosecutor in the 1980s, but acknowledged he has plenty of practical experience as a sentencing jurist.
But Otis is still a bridge too far, they told me, even though many of them said they like him personally.
“Part of the commission’s job is to take some of the politics away from the politicians,” Ring said. “You want sentencing to be driven by this commission as some insulation from Congress. And that’s the worst place for an ideologue from either side.”
As the sun set over the Armenian capital of Yerevan on May 2nd, opposition leader Nikol Pashinyan made his way into the city’s central Republic Square to address a crowd of some 150,000 people. For almost three weeks, many of them had served alongside Pashinyan in a unprecedented and peaceful campaign of civil disobedience against the sitting government.
Their new marching orders? Stand down.
“We will now stop our actions for a while and rest,” Pashinyan told his diverse, but largely youthful congregation of supporters. Their “velvet revolution,” as the movement came to be known, seemed to be over. The ruling Republican Party agreed to meet the opposition’s final demands: Pashinyan’s path to the premiership would not be obstructed.
Armenia, it appears, accomplished something remarkable—though not unheard of—in the former Soviet Union: the peaceful removal of a long-sitting leader.
It was a thrilling conclusion to a protest movement that began in mid-April, when the business and oligarch-linked Republican Party—which has ruled parliament since 1998 and has ties to Russia’s Gazprom state gas company—moved to elect former president Serzh Sargsyan to serve as prime minister.
Sargsyan had ruled the country for the previous 10 years as president, and had reached his term limit. His nomination for prime minister—an empowered position after recent constitutional forms began to shift Armenia toward parliamentary rule—was seen as a classic post-Soviet move to ensure a leader can stay in power while appearing constitutionally-minded.
But Armenia managed to re-write the script.
Ironically, Armenia’s protest movement may have lessons to teach recent analogues in the West.
Almost immediately, Armenians from all walks of life—though, it must be said, as with many protest movements, students played a large role — took to the streets in an ad-hoc, grassroots movement calling for Sargsyan to vacate his post. A week later, on April 23rd, Sargsyan capitulated. “Pashinyan was right, I was wrong,” he said. “The movement on the streets is against my rule, I will comply.”
Armenia’s protest movement succeeded where others failed because of smart tactics inspired by the likes of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, says Richard Giragosian, head of the Yerevan-based Regional Studies Center, a think tank. A campaign of civil disobedience and nonviolence, but particularly with clear, limited goals—resignation of a leader—was the winning strategy.
Ironically, Armenia’s protest movement may have lessons to teach recent analogues in the West. Despite massive movements in the United States in past years, they’ve often struggled to present clear, achievable goals around which to build a sustained campaign. And the fact that the goals were clear and limited to the resignation of a leader, rather than the overthrow of a system, may have played a role in Russia’s relative silence on the Armenian protest movement. When faced with large scale political revolution in Ukraine in 2014, for exampgreatle, Russia had a lot to say about it.
The Armenian protests came in many forms. Parties in the streets, labor strikes, and road closures.
“The idea was to demonstrate the ineptitude of the government in terms of delivering basic services,” Giragosian says, “and embarrass the government into provoking an over the top response. The campaign was also designed to be fun, to keep the youth engaged. So it was a rare example of a peaceful, non-violent overthrow in the post-Soviet space.”
The movement continued in the week following Sargsyan’s resignation, as the ruling Republican Party scrambled to plan its next moves and Pashinyan — a former journalist and, more recently, a member of parliament — consolidated his support among parliamentary opposition factions ahead of a May 1 vote on an interim prime minister.
The Republicans ultimately chose not to nominate a candidate for the post, despite their parliamentary majority, but they did not appear ready to concede to Pashinyan’s unchallenged bid. He lost the vote 45 to 56. Triggering a new round of demonstrations with renewed intensity. Rather than mourn their defeat, protestors viewed the move as a sign of looming victory.
Yet, even as the Republicans demonstrated a hard-nosed reticence to dispense with the old, they—perhaps unintentionally—showed a flash of the new. Before obstinately obstructing Pashinyan first attempt to secure the premiership, Republican MPs subjected him to a lively and detailed eight hour interrogation on a variety of issues, a rare sight in this part of the world.
“We saw, for the first time, a positive demonstration of a parliament acting like a parliament in terms of policy related questions, almost like the British PMQs sessions,” Giragosian says. “But there was also the negative aspect of a parliament acting like a parliament: partisan posturing.”
But after tens of thousands of protesters responded to Pashinyan’s calls for more strikes, more road blockages, and general acts of civil disobedience across Yerevan the next day, the Republicans appeared to cave. By nightfall, the head of the party appeared to signal they would vote for Pashinyan on May 8.
Armenia’s unprecedented non-violent revolution, it seams, is a success. It is also an unlikely one, given the nation’s dependence on Russia and the general political trends driving politics in the former Soviet Union.
Many of the Soviet Union’s former satellite states in Eastern Europe managed to change tack and embrace democratic norms following their master’s collapse in 1991. But those nations that were members of that union proper have, for various reasons, largely struggled to break free of Russia’s orbit and have followed similar paths of political development over the past 25 years.
To be sure—many of the former Soviet states have deep historical, cultural and economic ties to Russia and want to maintain them. Armenia is no exception. The small nation of 3 million people is part of a Moscow-led economic union, and hosts two Russian military bases. Moscow also acts as a security guarantor in a long-running standoff with neighboring Azerbaijan.
Outside observers, noting these relations, expressed some concern that Moscow may intervene on behalf of the Republican Party if things got too far—as they had attempted to do in Ukraine and Georgia. But Pashinyan’s campaign went to great lengths to avoid getting tied up in geopolitical games between Russia and the West. This was all about Armenia, he insisted.
Pashinyan’s challenge will be to maintain his momentum as he, presumably, assumes office and forms a new government. But Pashinyan has rode to victory while saying very little about his own political platform. His popularity was built on general populist sound bites. He assured Russia and other concerned powers that Armenian foreign policy would remain unchanged, and that his movement’s concerns were purely internal.
The people will expect change, but it is still unclear what form that will take and how long it will take to enact. The patience of the people will be a major factor in Pashinyan’s success. That said, one of his major policy objectives will likely be holding a new general election to ensure Armenia’s political changes are reflected in parliament.
But he would also do well to engage the younger, more open minded and talented technocrats in the Republican Party to form a broad coalition, Giragosian argues. Although Pashinyan has demonstrated the mettle for leadership, he lacks the depth in personnel around him to staff a government. Some Republicans, like the minister of finance, are simply technocrats with valuable skill in managing problems like the economy.
Whether or not Pashinyan, assuming he secures the premiership on May 8, can govern effectively and deliver a platform that suits both his opponents and supporters, Armenia has already shown that grassroots movements have a role to play in the former Soviet Union. It is a message that the Kremlin, wary of its own people getting ideas in the wake of yet another Putin election, will certainly be keeping an eye on.
— source newrepublic.com by Robert Foyle Hunwick