Hoover Digest, 2018, No. 3, Summer
Hoover Digest, 2018, No. 3, Summer
Hoover Digest, 2018, No. 3, Summer
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T HE ECONOM Y
9 How to Fend Off Collapse
The federal budget’s chilling forecast: annual deficits of
a trillion dollars or more. By Michael J. Boskin, John H.
Cochrane, John F. Cogan, George P. Shultz, and John B.
Taylor
15 Toxic Tariffs
Tariffs impede trade and help only the privileged few, while
raising prices for everybody else. What’s not to like? By John
H. Cochrane
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 3
P O L IT IC S
31 Irrational Numbers
Sweet reason? Not in contemporary American politics. By
James W. Ceaser
T HE L AW
36 Fidelity to the Constitution
Textualism holds that judges enforce the Constitution and not
their own preferences. It may seem a mere legal theory, but
our freedoms depend on it. By Clint Bolick
DE F E N S E
48 Rightsize the Navy
If we continue to build ships that cost too much and do too
little, we’ll be sunk. By James O. Ellis Jr.
E DUCAT ION
69 Brushing Up on “Truth Decay”
Separating fact from fiction is an elementary skill. So why
don’t we teach it in elementary school? By Chester E. Finn Jr.
S C IENC E A N D M E DIC IN E
75 Bottling Up Drug Prices
Medicine will just keep getting more expensive until we do
something obvious: introduce price competition. By Scott W.
Atlas
SY R IA
85 Where the Great Powers Collide
Syria is a historical “roundabout” around which religions,
civilizations, and nations flow—and clash. By Charles Hill
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 5
89 Elegy for the Arab Spring
Seven years on, those who hoped for a modern, humane Syria
have few illusions left—Syrians fewest of all. By Samuel
Tadros
IS RA EL
101 Israel at Seventy
A nation that “encourages its citizens to challenge authority,
ask the next question, and defy the obvious.” By Peter
Berkowitz
C H IN A
107 Turning Scholars into Unpersons
China is determined to tell its story on its own highly selective
terms. How the People’s Republic has updated Orwell’s
“memory hole” by making it electronic. By Glenn D. Tiffert
VA LU E S
137 Speaking Freely
Lose free speech, and lose our political freedom too. By Bruce
S. Thornton
R E L IG ION
143 Never Cry “Islamophobia”
Societies learn and grow when they question, challenge—even
offend. Islamists are pressuring free people to give up their
most basic rights. By Ayaan Hirsi Ali
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 7
HOOV E R A R C HIVE S
157 A Window on the Soviet Breakup
It was the biggest purge, and the last, in post-Stalin Russia.
The “Cotton Affair” was a tale of corruption and frustrated
power that preoccupied the dying Soviet Union and presaged
its end. By Riccardo Mario Cucciolla
TH E ECONOMY
W
e live in a time of extraordinary promise. Breakthroughs in
artificial intelligence, 3D manufacturing, medical science,
and other areas have the potential to dramatically raise
living standards in coming decades. But a major obstacle
stands squarely in the way of this promise: high and sharply rising govern-
ment debt.
President Trump’s recently released budget is a wake-up call. It projects
that this year, a year of relatively strong economic growth, low unemploy-
ment, and continued historically low interest rates, the deficit will reach $870
billion, 30 percent greater than last year.
For years, economists have warned of major increases in future public
debt burdens. That future is on our doorstep. From this point forward,
even if economic growth continues uninterrupted, current tax and spend-
ing patterns imply that annual deficits will steadily increase, approaching
the $1 trillion mark in two years and steadily rising thereafter as far as the
eye can see.
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 9
Unless Congress acts to reduce federal budget deficits, the outstanding
public debt will reach $20 trillion a scant five years from now, up from its
current level of $15 trillion. That amounts to almost a quarter of a million dol-
lars for a family of four, more than twice the median household wealth.
This string of perpetually rising trillion-dollar-plus deficits is unprecedent-
ed in US history.
In recent months, we have seen an inevitable rise in interest rates from their
low levels of recent years. Rising interest rates and increasing deficits threaten
to build upon each other to send public debt spiraling upward even faster.
When treasury debt holders start to doubt our government’s ability to repay
or to attract future lenders, they will demand higher interest rates to compen-
sate for the risk. If current spending and tax policy continue unaltered, higher
interest costs will have to be financed by even more debt. More borrowing puts
more upward pressure on interest rates, and the spiral continues.
If, for example, interest rates were to rise to 5 percent, instead of the
Trump administration’s prediction of just under 3.5 percent, the interest
cost alone on the projected $20 trillion of public debt would total $1 trillion
per year. More than half of all personal income taxes would be needed to
pay bondholders. Such high interest payments would crowd out financing
of needed expenditures to restore our depleted national defense budget, our
domestic infrastructure, and other critical government activities.
Unchecked, such a debt spiral raises the specter of a crisis. Some may think
that such concerns are overblown, as there is no current evidence in financial
futures markets that a crisis is on the horizon. But a debt crisis does not come
slowly and visibly like a rising tide.
It comes without warning, like an
Outstanding public debt will earthquake, as short-term bondhold-
reach $20 trillion a scant five ers attempt to escape fiscal carnage.
years from now. Only in hindsight are we able to see
the stresses building and bemoan
that we did not act. While some insulation flows from the dollar’s role as the
global reserve currency, that is neither sufficient nor immutable, and relies on
faith in the United States’ eventual fiscal probity.
As is well-known, our deficit and debt problems stem from sharply rising
entitlement spending. Without congressional action, the combination of the
automatic spending increase per beneficiary provisions of these programs
and the growth in entitlement program recipients as the population ages will
cause entitlement spending to continue to rise far faster than US national
income and tax revenue.
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 11
T H E ECONOMY
T H E ECONOMY
The Taming of
the Debt
How to contain the growth of Medicare and Social
Security without cutting benefits.
By Martin Feldstein
T
he federal government’s most urgent domestic challenge is the
exploding debt and deficit. America’s debt nearly doubled during
the Obama years, reaching 76 percent of gross domestic prod-
uct in 2017. If nothing is done it will surpass 100 percent of GDP
within a decade. The United States will then have one of the highest debt
ratios in the industrial world—topped only by countries like Greece, Italy,
and Japan.
Most of the projected debt increase over the next ten years is a result of
the recent cuts to the personal income tax, including the lower rates, the big
increase in the child credit, and the doubling of the standard deduction. The
personal tax cuts were included in the legislation to get the congressional
votes necessary to enact corporate tax reform, which was economically more
important.
Those corporate provisions, including cutting the rate from 35 percent to
21 percent and changing the tax treatment of profits earned by foreign sub-
sidiaries of US companies, will spur higher productivity and raise real wages.
Martin Feldstein is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the George F. Baker
Professor of Economics at Harvard University, and president emeritus of the Na-
tional Bureau of Economic Research.
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 13
better to pass a law that automatically raises the age for full benefits as life
expectancy improves. Exceptions could be made for people in strenuous
occupations or for those whose Social Security records show low lifetime
earnings.
President Trump has already shown a willingness to act on Medicare.
The White House’s fiscal 2019 budget called explicitly for slowing the rise
in Medicare outlays by $500 billion over ten years, or about 5 percent of the
program’s budget. Much more is needed.
Medicare receives a portion of the payroll tax, as well as premiums that
patients are charged for outpatient and drug coverage. But these funds cover
only about half of Medicare’s total outlays. Beneficiaries pay no premiums for
inpatient coverage under Medicare Part A, regardless of their incomes. Why
should I receive Medicare hospital benefits without paying any premium if I
am still working and well-paid?
Under current law, about 95 percent of enrollees in Medicare’s outpatient
and drug coverage pay a “standard” premium that covers only about 25
percent of the cost of their benefits. Starting in 2019, those with incomes of
$500,000 or higher will be required to pay premiums that cover 85 percent of
their costs. But that affects fewer than 1 percent of enrollees.
The premiums most Medicare enrollees pay for outpatient coverage could
be gradually increased. At the same time, premiums could be extended to
cover inpatient coverage. Low-income retirees could be exempted, or the
premium increases could be scaled to income.
There are many other options for slowing the rise in government outlays
for Social Security and Medicare. Congress and the Trump administration
must develop a plan to reduce the long-run cost of these programs before the
national debt threatens the stability of the economy.
Reprinted by permission of the Wall Street Journal. © 2018 Dow Jones &
Co. All rights reserved.
TH E ECONOMY
Toxic Tariffs
Tariffs impede trade and help only the privileged
few, while raising prices for everybody else. What’s
not to like?
By John H. Cochrane
I
n a remarkable achievement, President
Trump has united the nation’s econo- Key points
mists by proposing tariffs on imported »» There is only one thing
to do with dollars: buy
steel and aluminum, tariffs designed to
American goods, invest
reduce imports of those goods. The consensus in America, or buy our
opinion is this: tariffs are bad for the economy. government debt. Dol-
lars sent abroad always
Tariffs on raw materials, produced by machine- come home to roost.
intensive, dirty, declining industries, are worse. »» If it were good for each
Trade is good. country to protect its
businesses with tariffs, it
Why? Follow the money. If China sells us, say,
would be good for each
a solar panel, what does it do with the dollars? state to do the same.
There is only one thing to do with dollars: buy »» The larger pain from
American goods, invest in America, or buy our tariffs is spread through-
out the economy, and it
government debt. Oh, and we also get a nice adds up.
cheap solar panel.
China might use the dollars to buy, say, wheat
from Australia, so it looks as if the Chinese sell us more than we sell them.
But then Australia must use the dollars here in America. Dollars always
John H. Cochrane is the Jack and Rose-Marie Anderson Senior Fellow at the
Hoover Institution.
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 15
come home to roost. So how much more one country sells us than we sell in
return—the “bilateral trade deficit”—really is pretty meaningless.
The rest of the world sells us more than we sell them. But the rest of the
world uses every cent of the extra dollars it gets from that trade to invest
in the United States and
to buy our government
Think of it this way: you run a huge bonds. If we sell the whole
“trade deficit” with the grocery store. world exactly as much as
they sell us every year—in
other words, if there were no overall US trade deficit—we’re the ones who
would have to start saving much larger amounts of our incomes in order to
invest in US companies, offer mortgages to people to buy houses, and to fund
the government’s trillion-dollar deficits.
Think of it this way: you run a huge “trade deficit” with the grocery store.
Why not grow your own food? Well, you’re not very good at growing food.
And if you do, the grocer will not have money to buy what you make, or to
give to the bank to fund your mortgage.
So, trade is good. And tariffs? Tariffs are not good. Tariffs on steel hurt
businesses that use steel, especially those that compete with imported
products made of steel. Tariffs hurt consumers, who pay more for steel-using
products. But perhaps the greatest damage is to the steel industry itself. Tar-
iffs, like all protection, shield the industry from competition. And industries
shielded from competition do not innovate, do not cut costs, and do not make
better products. Only when the Big Three automakers faced import competi-
tion did they start to make better cars, and to cut costs.
If it’s good for each country to protect its businesses with tariffs, then it’s
good for each state to do the same. California, for example, should keep out
those cheap Arizona surfboards. A key to US prosperity is precisely our
Constitution’s firm ban on state politicians’ desire to please local industries
with protection. Until the European Union came along, the United States was
the world’s largest free trade area. Hint: bigger is better.
Why is this so hard to understand? Tariffs, like all protection from com-
petition, are great for the protected business and its workers, at least for
a while. If you’re a practical businessperson, you think the way to get the
FAIR TRADE: A container ship (opposite) sails out of San Francisco Bay. Tar-
iffs on imported products shield industries from competition, and industries
shielded from competition do not innovate, do not cut costs, and do not make
better products. [Daniel Ramirez—Creative Commons]
TH E ECONOMY
By David R. Henderson
E
conomic inequality is a hot topic, and some people believe that
alleviating poverty requires a substantial reduction in inequality.
For example, Thomas Piketty, the French economist whose book
Capital in the Twenty-First Century became a bestseller, under-
stands the distinction between income inequality and poverty but sometimes
uses the terms interchangeably, as if one necessarily begets the other. But
inequality of income and wealth can remain high or even increase while pov-
erty is decreasing.
To understand economic inequality, we need to ask a few questions. Are
there good kinds of economic inequality and bad kinds? Is it a good idea, as
many policy makers and even some economists insist, to reduce inequality by
taxing those at the top end more heavily? Has poverty been increasing, and
has economic inequality been increasing?
To answer the first question, let us consider two figures of twentieth-
century American history. The first came to prominence in the late 1940s,
when he invented a light, one-man chainsaw, and sold more than a hundred
thousand of them at a price that made him quite rich. That added slightly
to wealth inequality. But although the wealth gap between this man, inven-
tor Robert McCulloch, and his customers was higher than it was before,
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 19
the customers got a product they valued that made their lives easier. In
economists’ terms, the wealth of these customers increased slightly. Is that
increase in wealth inequality a problem? When I’ve asked college students
this question, the vast majority say no—and I agree.
Now let’s consider the second figure. In the early 1940s, as a congressman
from Texas, this man defended the budget of the Federal Communications
Commission when a more senior
member of the House of Repre-
sentatives was trying to cut it.
So the FCC owed him a favor.
One FCC official suggested
the politician have his wife
apply for a license for a
radio station in the under-
served Austin market.
She did so, and within
a few weeks, the FCC
granted her permission
to buy the license from
the current owners. She
then applied for per-
mission to increase its
time of operation from
daylight-only to twenty-
four hours a day and at a
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 21
the FCC restrictions on further radio stations, were slightly less well off than
if more stations had been allowed.
When I tell this story to college audiences and ask them if they think
there’s an important difference between McCulloch’s and Johnson’s methods
of increasing wealth inequality, virtually all of them do, and few will defend
the latter way.
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 23
We know from basic economics that incentives affect behavior. Tax high
incomes or wealth heavily and you will have fewer people trying to make high
incomes and get wealthy. Moreover, even if the incentive effect were slight,
high taxes on highly productive people take wealth out of their hands, where
much of it probably would have been used to finance more pro-consumer
innovation and productivity, and instead put it in the hands of government
bureaucracies. That simple transfer of wealth, independent of the effect on
incentives, makes a society worse off.
Third, has poverty been increasing? No. In fact, what economists call
extreme poverty—living on an income of less than $1.90 a day—has fallen
dramatically over the past three decades. This is all the more striking when
you remember that the world population, at 7.6 billion people, is at an all-time
high. Why has this happened? Because of increased international trade and
economic growth—which have made some people extremely wealthy while
also lifting more than one billion others out of crippling destitution. The
argument that economic
inequality somehow
If we care about poverty, then the exacerbates poverty is
calls to tax the rich and reduce specious.
income inequality are misguided. Finally, has economic
inequality been increas-
ing or decreasing? The wrong way to answer that question is by comparing
the wealth of billionaires to the wealth of the poorest people on earth. The
correct way is to compute something called the Gini coefficient. This coef-
ficient, which can range from zero to 1, measures income inequality. With
total income equality, the Gini would be zero; with total inequality, which
would mean one person having all the world’s income, the Gini would be 1.
So what has happened to the Gini coefficient over time? Economists Tomas
Hellebrandt and Paolo Mauro reported the answer in a 2015 study for the
Peterson Institute for International Economics. They found that between
2003 and 2013, the worldwide Gini coefficient fell from 0.69 to 0.65, indicat-
ing reduced income inequality. Moreover, the two economists predict that by
2035, income inequality will decline further, with the Gini coefficient falling
to 0.61. The reason is not that higher-income people will do worse but that
lower-income people in some of the poorest countries, such as India and
China, will do much better because of economic growth.
If the problem we care about is poverty, then the calls to tax the rich and
reduce income inequality are misguided. Instead, we should be cheering for
policies that lead to higher economic growth.
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 25
T H E ECONOMY
T H E ECONOMY
No Teens Need
Apply
A high minimum wage keeps teenagers out of the
job market, robbing them of crucial experience and
lowering their future earnings.
By Charles Blahous
T
he persistent decline in workforce participation among working-
age Americans is among the leading economic policy challenges
of our time. Economists from left to right have cited this decline
as one of the principal barriers to our economic growth, and
thus to prosperity. It’s important to understand the causes of declining work-
force participation if we are to take effective action against it. Unfortunately,
economists still struggle to fully understand—let alone offer consensus solu-
tions to—this problem.
A recent study for the Mercatus Center by renowned labor economist
David Neumark and Cortnie Shupe explores an especially illustrative
trend: declining work by teens aged sixteen to nineteen. While workforce
participation by young US adults has been in general decline for the past
few decades, the decline among teenagers has been especially steep. In
1994, the labor force participation rate of all those aged sixteen to twenty-
four stood at over 66 percent. By 2014, it had dropped to 55 percent. This
decline was sharpest among individuals aged sixteen to nineteen: their
Charles Blahous is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and the J. Fish
and Lillian F. Smith Chair at the Mercatus Center.
Let’s discuss education first. It’s true that since 2000, more teens have
been enrolled in school, and that this has coincided with the decline in their
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 27
paid employment. There has also been an increase in the returns to
education, meaning that each additional year of schooling adds more
to one’s expected income than was formerly the case. But educational
returns actually grew faster in the years before 2000, whereas the
decline in teenage work has been most pronounced in the years
since then. More telling, Neumark and Shupe found that the
post-2000 drop in teen employment barely
diverges from expectations if there had
been no changes at all in the returns
to education, all other observed
variables being equal. In
other words,
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 29
to a higher minimum wage as a teenager is associated with lower wages or
earnings as an adult.” In other words, teens whose employment has been dis-
placed by higher minimum wage laws are not, on average, reaping compen-
sating income benefits from extended schooling; instead they experience less
income as adults as well. For these teenagers, the income losses arising from
delayed entry to the workforce are not being made up by spending more time
in school.
The purpose of minimum wage laws is generally to increase vulnerable
Americans’ income security. But this tactic comes with a price—specifically,
to reduce the opportunities of inexperienced, low-skill workers, such as many
American teenagers, to
hold jobs. It appears that
Minimum wage laws come at a price: higher minimum wage
reducing the opportunities of inex- laws not only deprive
perienced, low-skill workers, such as many young Americans
many American teenagers. of opportunities to earn
wages as teenagers but
may even lower their expected income over the rest of their lives. Lawmakers
should acquaint themselves with the Neumark-Shupe findings and recon-
sider whether recent minimum wage increases are hurting the very people
they are intended to help.
POL I TI CS
Irrational
Numbers
Sweet reason? Not in contemporary American
politics.
By James W. Ceaser
I
t has been more than a half century since the heralded British politi-
cal theorist Michael Oakeshott published his most acclaimed work,
Rationalism in Politics. Oakeshott put forward the thesis that since the
eighteenth century the culture and politics of the West have come to
operate under the sway of a rational mode of thinking, one in which people
think of themselves as the “enemy of authority, of prejudice, of the merely
traditional.” Not old parchments or myth or the supposed wisdom of ances-
tors supplies the foundation of rule, but a modern understanding of reason.
To Oakeshott, this modern view of reason was unreasonable, promoting an
ideological approach to the political world rather than a sensible immersion
in a nation’s own practices. Reason’s growing authority was nevertheless the
cardinal fact of our age.
At the forefront in embracing reason were the Americans, who drew their
thinking from the realm of philosophy in the form of natural rights and who,
perhaps for the first time, brought theory openly into the political realm as
the basis of a new nation. None of this meant, however, that the rise of reason
James W. Ceaser is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Harry F.
Byrd Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia and director of the Program
for Constitutionalism and Democracy.
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 31
would go unchallenged. In America, after the acceptance of the Declaration
of Independence, the authors of The Federalist were already worried during
the debate over ratifying the Constitution about “passions and prejudices
little favorable to the discovery of truth.” In the Jacksonian era, observers
such as Alexis de Tocqueville charged that the new mass presidential cam-
paigns brought rabble-rousing and demagogy into presidential politics and
encouraged an incumbent to “prostrate himself before the majority and . . .
run to meet its caprices.”
All of the new communications technologies that came along were greeted
with expectations that they would boost rational discussion, only to be sub-
sequently condemned for corrupting the public mind. Newspapers, which
Thomas Jefferson initially lauded and helped to fund, came eventually under
his attack: “the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed
than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to
truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.”
Film then entered the scene, enabling average Americans for the first time
to see their leaders, but this medium, as its use during World War I showed,
could be an instrument of mass government propaganda. Electronic media
followed, first radio and then television. TV allowed people to see and hear
their leaders in real time, which promised to favor reasonable dialogue. Yet it
produced three network news giants that pompously celebrated themselves
as representatives of an objective “fourth estate,” which often subtly sup-
ported one side.
UNWILLING TO BUDGE
It is a mistake, however, to think that this new stage means that people have
lost all capacity to act, after a fashion, in a rational way. Political adversaries
are rational when they consider their own interests even after having lost
faith in the authority of reason in society at large.
Most Trump supporters have one or two big reasons for backing the
president, which may be their economic plight, their opposition to politi-
cal correctness, or their opposition to illegal immigration. Some approve of
his behavior as a fighter willing to take on the enemy, or see it as a form of
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 35
T H E L AW
T H E L AW
Fidelity to the
Constitution
Textualism holds that judges enforce the
Constitution and not their own preferences. It may
seem a mere legal theory, but our freedoms depend
on it.
By Clint Bolick
H
aving spent the past two years as a justice on the Arizona
Supreme Court after thirty-three as a litigator, I’ve gained
unexpected insights into judicial decision making. Most cases
involve judges rolling up their sleeves and combining their
talent and expertise to reach the right outcome. But cases involving consti-
tutional or statutory issues demand something more: a philosophy of legal
interpretation. And what that philosophy is matters a great deal.
All judges have a philosophy of legal interpretation, even if they don’t think
much about it. For many, particularly at the trial court level, it is often a mat-
ter of simply trying to get it right; that is, reading the law and higher court
precedents and trying to make sense of them. Others place a high priority on
their notions of fairness, justice, or efficiency. Even going along to get along is
a type of judicial philosophy, though not exactly what most of us might expect
from our judges.
Clint Bolick is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and also serves as an
associate justice of the Supreme Court of Arizona. Previously he was the director
of the Goldwater Institute Center for Constitutional Litigation in Phoenix.
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 37
SOUND REASONING: Clint Bolick, associate justice of the Arizona Supreme
Court and a Hoover research fellow, speaks to an audience last year. To Bolick,
textualist judges provide the greatest possible guarantee that the judiciary will
safeguard the Constitution and rule of law. [Gage Skidmore—Creative Commons]
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 39
RULE OF LAW: The late Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, shown in 2011, was
the leading modern proponent of the legal outlook called textualism. In his
book Reading Law, co-written with legal scholar Bryan Garner, he wrote that
“textualism will not relieve judges of all doubts and misgivings about their
interpretations. But textualism will provide greater certainty in the law, and
hence greater predictability and greater respect for the rule of law.” [Eric
Bridiers—US Mission Geneva]
who likes every result he reaches is very likely a bad judge, reaching for
results he prefers rather than those the law compels.” On three instances, for
example, I have voted against various legal challenges to an Arizona ballot
measure that increased the minimum wage, although I repeatedly criticized
such efforts as a policy advocate. Personal policy preferences must yield to
the rule of law or we have no rule of law. Similarly, although Justice Scalia
was considered a conservative judge, he often quipped that he should be the
darling of the criminal defense bar because he enforced the Bill of Rights
guarantees protecting the rights of criminal defendants just as vigorously
as protections such as the First and Second Amendments. And so a true
textualist should.
The famously liberal Warren Court of the 1950s and 1960s considered itself
unbound by such constraints, applying an elastic interpretation of constitu-
tional provisions and often assuming legislative and judicial powers. Even
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 41
the form of US Supreme Court jurisprudence that judges like me are bound
to implement. Examples abound, but one that my colleagues and I had to
confront in a recent case was especially vexing. We had before us the ques-
tion of police-installed GPS devices on vehicles without a warrant. We had to
determine whether the driver had a reasonable expectation of privacy under
the Fourth Amendment. To do so, we are instructed by a 1967 Supreme
Court decision to
ascertain whether it
Our job is not to conform the Constitu- is “one that society is
tion to our precedents, it is to conform our prepared to recog-
nize as reasonable.”
precedents to the Constitution.
That measure
deeply offends a textualist for two reasons. First, how is a court equipped
to determine what “society is prepared to recognize” as reasonable? Do we
take a poll? Form a focus group? Second, it hitches constitutional interpreta-
tion not to constitutional text but to evolving social consensus, and invites
the court to rewrite the Constitution to reflect the consensus it subjectively
perceives.
The principal safeguard against judicial excesses is the appointment of
judges who consider themselves genuinely bound to the important yet lim-
ited powers assigned to them. That in turn requires citizens who care about
our freedoms and the rule of law to be informed and vigilant about who is
appointed to federal and state judgeships, especially at the appellate levels.
A professed and manifest devotion to textualism is a good proxy for fidelity
to the rule of law—and a good insurance policy to perpetuate the precious
freedoms we inherited.
TH E L AW
Textualism? It
Has Its Limits
Even the most faithful judges sometimes have to
read between the lines.
By Richard A. Epstein
M
y Hoover colleague Clint Bolick, an associate justice of the
Arizona Supreme Court, addresses the central question of
modern constitutional jurisprudence: what is the proper way
to interpret the Constitution? Bolick casts his lot with the
late justice Antonin Scalia and his many followers, who endorse textualism as
the one proper method. The argument goes as follows: textualism—the effort
to find the accurate meaning of every word of the relevant provision—helps
prevent activist judges from undermining the rule of law by creating new
rights under the guise of a “living Constitution” on such key issues as abor-
tion, the death penalty, and gay rights, even when there is no basis for such
rights in the Constitution or the laws as written.
Bolick’s strict textualist approach is a needed antidote to unduly adventur-
ous constitutional interpretations. But however necessary the careful read-
ing of text is to constitutional deliberation, it is not the full story. Sometimes,
the courts must overturn erroneous precedents—and other times, they must,
Richard A. Epstein is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover
Institution and a member of the steering committee for Hoover’s Working Group
on Intellectual Property, Innovation, and Prosperity. He is also the Laurence A.
Tisch Professor of Law at New York University Law School and a senior lecturer
at the University of Chicago.
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 43
by “necessary implication,” read terms into the Constitution for its prohibi-
tions to make sense. In such cases, the text alone is not a large enough toolkit
to do the job.
Let’s consider an issue that shows both the power and the limits of textual-
ism. The commerce clause reads: “Congress shall have power . . . to regulate
Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with
the Indian tribes.” In the 1824 case of Gibbons v. Ogden, Chief Justice John
Marshall construed the middle phrase dealing with interstate commerce in
harmony with the text’s treatment of commerce with foreign nations and the
Indian tribes. His interpretation consciously covered all forms of communi-
cation and transportation across state lines, but it also excluded agriculture,
manufacturing, and mining, in large measure to ensure, sadly, that slavery
was immune to regulation or abolition by Congress.
Marshall’s interpretation was, however, rudely upended in the New Deal
decision of Wickard v. Filburn, which in 1942 let Congress escape the earlier
restraints on its power by regulating activities like agriculture, mining, and
manufacturing that were entirely local because of their “indirect effects” on
interstate commerce. By that one stroke, Congress could now regulate all
economic affairs, national or local. The motivation for this radical expansion
of government power could not have been more unwise: cartelization. Justice
Robert Jackson wanted to allow the federal government to regulate the
output and price of all agricultural crops, which could not be done under the
original meaning of “commerce.”
Congress quickly filled the space created by Wickard by enacting major
pieces of legislation such as the civil rights laws of 1964, the Environmental
Protection Act of 1970, and the Affordable Care Act of 2010. But these statu-
tory programs lie on a rickety constitutional foundation. So what should be
done? Do we strike them down, in whole or part, or let them stand? Textual-
ism requires us to upend long precedents notwithstanding the huge reliance
interests that rest on decisions such as Wickard. Yet it offers no guidance for
whether or how that monumental task should be undertaken.
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 45
be first interpreted and then applied to the myriad of federal and state gun
regulations.
This point about the police power has far broader implications. The substan-
tive provisions of the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment are all stated
in absolute form. The First Amendment, for example, holds that Congress shall
pass no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press. But the vast body of
pre-existing common-law
rules governing defama-
A phrase such as “police power” may tion, misrepresentation,
be found nowhere in the Constitution, picketing, intentional
but it must be interpreted and then infliction of emotional
applied to myriad regulations. distress, and invasion of
privacy were not thereby
rendered unconstitutional. Not all forms of speech are protected. The idea of
“freedom of speech” can only be rendered intelligible if federal and state govern-
ments may enact laws that regulate impermissible speech forms. Fraud, for
instance, is not constitutionally protected. And if the common-law damage action
after the fact is insufficient to protect against these abuses, it is perfectly proper
for either or both levels of government to strengthen their protections.
But the text of the First Amendment offers no textual guidance. Thus it is
necessary by nontextual means to identify the permissible ends of govern-
ment power, and decide which means are appropriate to achieve them.
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 47
D EFENS E
D EFENS E
Rightsize the
Navy
If we continue to build ships that cost too much
and do too little, we’ll be sunk.
T
he main street of Washington, Georgia, is called Toombs Avenue
in honor of the Georgia senator and Civil War general who was
born nearby. In promoting the South’s secession as the war
approached, Toombs reportedly claimed, “We can beat those
Yankees with cornstalks!” After fleeing to Paris after the South’s defeat,
Toombs later returned, only to be reminded of his prewar claim. Unrepen-
tant to the end, Toombs replied, “Well, they wouldn’t fight with cornstalks!”
This story has been used for years in national security debates by those
advocating for ever-advancing technologies, even at the expense of a larger
force structure.
The capability vs. numbers debate is certainly not new to the Navy; over
centuries, optimization of the “high-low mix” of very large and/or power-
ful ships versus those that are smaller, cheaper, and often built for a single
mission, has raged. The combatants in this operational and budgetary battle
included battleships vs. submarines, aircraft carriers vs. amphibious ships,
Aegis air- and missile-defense ships vs. small combatants, and minesweepers
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 49
skills such as anti-submarine warfare, surface combat, and fleet air defense
have declined over decades of sailing in a largely tranquil sea. At the same
time, the recent years of focused regional conflict have generated stresses. In
congressional testimony on readiness last year, the vice chief of naval opera-
tions said, “We have not yet recovered from the readiness impacts result-
ing from a decade of combat operations. The cumulative effect of budget
reductions, complicated by four consecutive years of continuing resolutions,
continues to impact maintenance, afloat
and ashore. The secondary effects of
these challenges impact material readi-
ness of the force, and the quality of life
of our sailors and their families.” Recent
data from the Congressional Budget
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 51
to find that they may be dramatically less relevant to tomorrow’s threats? In
a different national security context, Ben Buchanan, a Harvard postdoctoral
fellow, worries that we, like the old generals (and admirals), may be prepar-
ing for the last war. He sees far too much unconventional thought and focus
on budgets, programs, and regions. And he wonders whether we realize that
“America’s adversaries
are playing ‘Calvinball’
The more technologically advanced [a game from the comic
a system is, the higher its cost, com- strip Calvin and Hobbes in
plexity, and skill and training levels. which there are no rules]
while the United States is
still playing a regimented and well-defined game of chess?”
How do we counter threats to the homeland from depressed-trajectory
submarine-launched ballistic missiles or submarine-launched cruise mis-
siles? How do we operate in a far more hostile sea where the apparent civil-
ian container ship may, harking back to the Q-ships of World War II, carry
antiship cruise missiles, and every merchant ship or fishing boat with a very
small aperture terminal (VSAT) antenna can be configured to jam commu-
nications or GPS? How does one deal with the purported Russian nuclear-
powered and nuclear-armed submarine drone with a 6,200-mile range? The
list of possibilities is nearly endless, but the resources and time are not.
Navy leadership is increasingly aware of the need to break the cycle of pur-
suing increasingly exquisite capabilities in ever fewer platforms. According
to a recent Financial Times article addressing the needs of the US Navy,
three-quarters of the planet’s surface and disappear into the “trackless sea”
will always offer an advantage.
The challenge is not so much change as it is the rate and acceleration of
that change. In Lincoln’s words, “The dogmas of the quiet past are inad-
equate to the stormy present.” But it is also true that technology is rarely
the exclusive answer; that courage, leadership, and innovative tactics count;
and that, as former senator Sam Nunn said many years ago, “At some point,
numbers matter.”
There is a saying: “If you want a new idea, read an old book.” One of my
favorites is James Michener’s The Bridges at Toko-Ri, his classic 1953 novel
of American naval aviation in the Korean War. In it, his fictional admiral,
in addition to wondering “Where do we get such men?” presciently muses
about the role of technology in future conflict:
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 53
Long ago, he had begun to argue that some new weapon—rockets
perhaps or pilotless planes of vast speed—would inevitably con-
stitute the task force of the future. He had seen so much change,
indeed had spurred it on, that he could not rely perpetually on
ships or airplanes or any one device. But until America was secure
behind the protection of some new agency that could move about
the earth with security and apply pressure wherever the enemy
chose to assault us, it would be wise to have young officers trained
to command a sea burdened with ships and speckled with the
shadows of a thousand planes.
DEFENS E
By Williamson Murray
D
uring the past half century, American political and military
leaders have attempted to make war less costly in human terms.
Lowering American casualties in combat is a wholly worthwhile
endeavor. But that effort has carried over into the creation of
unrealistic rules of engagement governing the use of weapons and represent-
ing efforts to reduce civilian casualties.
To a certain extent, this has driven the revolution in precision munitions.
In the Gulf War of 1991, interviews with Iraqi prisoners indicated that the
coalition aircraft they most feared was the ancient—even at that time—B-52
bomber. Above all, they emphasized the terrifying shock that strikes carried
out miles away had on their perspective of the war and morale. Ironically,
because the B-52 computers were misaligned, the heavy bombers never hit
the targets they were aiming for. It did not matter, because the impact of the
B-52 strikes was largely on the morale of Iraqi soldiers hunkered down in the
deserts of Kuwait and southern Iraq.
Yet today’s military and political leaders have been unwilling to use the
B-52 to attack ISIS’s military forces and encampments. The reason lies in
a belief among the political leadership in Washington that precision strikes
prevent all collateral damage, which they do not. Such beliefs entirely miss
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 55
the purpose of the use of military force and air power in particular, which is
to wreck the enemy’s morale as much as to achieve physical damage and kill
his soldiers.
The emphasis on technology is not surprising, given that it has been one
of the strengths of American society for more than a century, yet there are
limits to what technology can achieve by itself. The enemy will always get a
vote, as the saying goes,
and the more sophisti-
The futuristic weapons now being cated and competent he
designed may never be used in the is, the more likely that he
fashion for which they were created. will seek out and discover
means to disrupt and
distort our technological capabilities. In the conflicts that spun out of the
global war on terrorism, the United States has enjoyed a massive superiority
in weapons and the technology of those systems over the capabilities of its
opponents. Nevertheless, one should not forget that even with the Ameri-
cans’ technological superiority, the ragged guerrillas of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and
the Taliban in Afghanistan have caused US and coalition ground forces no
end of trouble since 2003.
DIFFERENT FUTURES
The world is going through a technological and scientific revolution that in
every respect rivals the great “military-social revolutions” of the past. But
unlike the period from 1914 through 1990, where the military organizations
were the primary drivers behind revolutionary changes in technology, the
current period resembles the period before 1914, when developments outside
the military were largely responsible for the technological revolution. On the
Western front, the murderous process of adaptation to those technological
and scientific changes led to a bloodbath, which destroyed the comfortable
assumptions on which European and American progress rested.
The impact of the computer-driven technological revolution on military
capabilities and future potential is clear. The British military thinker and
professor Christopher Coker notes the rapid pace of technological develop-
ment in military capabilities over the past two decades:
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 57
buildup, a potential American victory may not be the case a decade from now
unless US leaders make a significant military investment in the near future.
One of the incalculables in thinking about future wars lies in the techno-
logical systems that midrank powers or groups such as ISIS might gain. The
most frightening would be the possession of a nuclear weapon by groups that
have no sense of responsibility for the long-term effects of detonating such
weapons. That, of course, is why the collapse of Pakistan into a failed state
would be so dangerous for the world. Moreover, a war between Pakistan and
India would carry the dangerous possibility of going nuclear, which would
create an unbelievable humanitarian crisis and nuclear fallout.
BATTLES IN SPACE
Although the United States military enjoys extraordinary advantages at
present, there are danger signs. The military services and their capabilities
rest on a robust communications network as well as cyber and electronic
systems. Especially important are the space-based systems for a vast array
of intelligence functions, communications, the accuracy of munitions, target-
ing, and even the movement of US combat vehicles on the battlefield. As one
Army officer noted to the author, “we can’t (and won’t) go to war without
SATCOM, GPS, or space-based imagery.” As one briefing recently noted,
the Army has evolved over the past decade “from a space-enabled Army to
a fully space-dependent Army.” Virtually all US military operations rely on
links to and through space-based systems, on which ground forces depend
to execute even their most basic battlefield tasks. This is true to an even
greater extent for the Navy and the Air Force.
“Capabilities create dependencies, and dependencies create vulnerabili-
ties,” according to an Army official. Both computer-based and space-based
systems are vulnerable to being hacked by an enemy. Fred Kaplan, a national
security reporter, recently noted the vulnerability of the Defense Depart-
ment’s sophisticated communications network: “In several recent exer-
cises and war games that [a defense science board] reviewed, Red Teams,
using exploits that any skilled hacker could download from the Internet,
LOOK OUT BELOW: A British soldier watches a Tarantula Hawk drone (fac-
ing page) as it hovers over the desert in Afghanistan. The drone gives ground
troops a clear view of the terrain ahead. As one military official says, “we can’t
(and won’t) go to war without SATCOM, GPS, or space-based imagery.” At the
same time, high-tech weapons and surveillance systems may be vulnerable
to hackers. [Captain Dave Scammell—Royal Navy]
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 59
‘invariably’ penetrated the Defense Department’s networks, ‘disrupting or
completely beating’ the Blue Team.”
What makes this so astonishing is that in 1997 the National Security Agen-
cy’s Red Team, in an exercise with the title “Eligible Receiver,” broke into virtu-
ally every system the Department of Defense possessed. During that exercise,
only one Marine officer recognized something was wrong and disconnected his
system. One would have thought that in the intervening decades there would
have been significant improvement in the ability of the Defense Department
and the services to protect their communication and computer systems from
hackers or simple incompetence. But it is well to remember how easily Edward
Snowden downloaded the masses of highly classified material that he then
uploaded to the Internet. In his case, gross security breaches by the contract-
ing firms working for the National Security Agency were to blame.
I remember a briefing I received from a British army brigadier in 2000 that
examined the nature of special-operations forces thirty years into the future.
The officer posited that 70 percent of the force would look much as it did in
the past. However, the remaining 30 percent would look very different. It
would include women, because they could go places where men could not, par-
ticularly in the Middle East. But the key new group in British special forces
would be twenty years old or younger, personnel who would hardly fit into the
military culture of the Special Air Service or the Special Boat Service but who
would possess extraordinary capabilities as hackers. There lies the problem
with the hierarchical nature of the American military and the nation’s intel-
ligence agencies. One can hardly imagine the use of such individuals or a
willingness to reach out
to them or, for that mat-
Any war between sophisticated pow- ter, other subject-matter
ers will, to a considerable extent, take experts in most of the
part in the dark. intelligence community.
The continued inability of
US intelligence agencies and military organizations to close the gaps in their
electronic systems suggests deeply troubling bureaucratic malaise, a refusal
to judge individuals by competence rather than by age and seniority.
America’s opponents in future wars will target the extensive space-based
communications systems upon which the military depends to conduct its
global operations. The simplest way to disrupt the satellites upon which
those systems depend would be to explode a relatively low-yield nuclear
device in lower orbit. The resulting electromagnetic pulse would render
useless virtually all the satellites in low orbit. It is unlikely that either the
Excerpted from America and the Future of War: The Past as Prologue, by
Williamson Murray (Hoover Institution Press, 2017). © 2017 The Board of
Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 61
N ATURAL RESO UR CE S
N ATURAL RESO UR CE S
Flow West
A brisk trade in water rights would send supplies
where they’re most needed.
C
ape Town, South Africa, a city of
450,000 in a metropolitan area Key points
of 3.7 million, is experiencing a »» When prices signal the
catastrophic drought. Capetonians real value of water, agri-
cultural users switch to
dread the arrival of “Day Zero,” when taps in
water-saving irrigation
private homes will be switched off and resi- technologies or crops.
dents will have to go to collection points for »» Organic farming,
rationed allotments of water. which yields less than
conventional agriculture,
Some version of Day Zero could one day uses more than its share
come to parts of California, where water woes of low-cost, high-value
water.
continue to bedevil government officials and
»» Taxing the most
citizens. From 2011 to 2015, the state experi-
wasteful uses of water
enced the driest four-year period in recorded would ease the pressure
history (though geologic evidence indicates on California’s water
supplies.
there have been worse droughts in the past). A
robust rainy season in 2017 replenished many
reservoirs, but the winter of 2018 was disap-
pointing. On February 1, the snowpack, which provides much of California’s
water during the dry months, was only 21 percent of its normal size. The
Terry L. Anderson is the John and Jean De Nault Senior Fellow at the Hoover
Institution and past president of the Property and Environment Research Center
in Bozeman, Montana. Henry I. Miller, MD, is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Sci-
entific Philosophy and Public Policy at the Hoover Institution.
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 63
THIRSTING FOR SOLUTIONS: Because of a severe drought and poor policy
decisions, the reservoir held back by the Theewaterskloof Dam in South
Africa is perilously close to empty. Earlier this year, the nearly four million
residents of Cape Town were living in dread of “Day Zero,” the day the res-
ervoir would run dry. Extreme conservation measures and borrowing from
other water sources staved off Day Zero, at least for a while. [Zaian—Creative
Commons]
One reason that inefficient organic agriculture uses more water is that
it excludes the cultivation of crop varieties crafted with molecular genetic-
modification techniques—so-called GMOs—that can be made to withstand
droughts and to be irrigable with brackish water. For example, more than
a decade ago, Egyptian researchers showed that transferring a single gene
from barley to wheat allows the wheat to grow with far less irrigation than
conventional wheat; it can survive on meager rainfall alone. Similar genetic
modification has created drought-tolerant corn varieties, and more such
crops are in the works.
Genetically engineered crops also conserve water by allowing cultivation
in salty soils. Fully one-third of irrigated land worldwide, including much
of California, is unsuitable for growing crops; every year, nearly five hun-
dred thousand acres of irrigated land are lost for cultivation because of salt
accumulation. Scientists have enhanced the salt tolerance in crops as diverse
as tomatoes and canola, and made them irrigable with brackish water, thus
conserving fresh water for other uses. Another innovation: by making no-till
cultivation possible, the genetic engineering of crops for herbicide tolerance
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 65
N ATURAL RESO UR CE S
N ATURAL RESO UR CE S
I
n fifty years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet
of manure.” With this 1894 prediction, the Times of London warned
that the era’s primary source of transportation energy—the horse—
would soon create an environmental crisis. In New York City, about a
hundred thousand working horses produced roughly 2.5 million pounds of
manure a day. Residents were exposed not only to the stench but to biohaz-
ards like anthrax. One commentator estimated in 1908 that roughly twenty
thousand New Yorkers died each year from diseases related to horse waste.
But the deluge of dung predicted by the Times never arrived. Instead the
free market solved the problem in roughly twenty-five years, while creating
new goods and industries that transformed society.
The enormous demand for a cleaner and more efficient source of energy
led to remarkable innovations in the internal-combustion engine. By 1920,
horses in cities had been almost entirely replaced by affordable autos and
trucks.
Lee E. Ohanian is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of eco-
nomics and director of the Ettinger Family Program in Macroeconomic Research
at UCLA. Ted Temzelides is a professor of economics at Rice University and a
scholar at Rice’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.
The revolution was not driven by government. In fact, the transition away
from horses would have taken longer if states had followed today’s policy of
subsidizing specific energy sources.
Since the 1970s, politicians have artificially pushed resources into renew-
able energy. Today the solar industry employs nearly four hundred thou-
sand workers. That sounds impressive, but it accounts for only 1 percent of
America’s electricity production.
Suppose governments in the 1890s, desperate to replace the horse, had
jumped on the first available alternative, the steam engine. Heavy subsidies
would have produced more steam engines and more research on steam
technology. This would only have waylaid the development of the far superior
internal-combustion engine.
The lesson is that governments are in no position to predict technologi-
cal breakthroughs, and their attempts to do so can delay innovations by
entrenching inferior technologies.
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m er 2018 67
Diesel cars are another example. European states have been subsidizing
them for decades, but diesel engines create considerably more noxious gases
and particulates. Now Britain and Germany are reversing their policies and
trying to phase out diesel.
Or take the attempts to push renewable energy into poor countries. About
1.3 billion people, many in sub-Saharan Africa, lack electricity, making it
incredibly difficult to
purify water or preserve
Suppose governments in the 1890s, food and medications.
desperate to replace the horse, had Worldwide subsidies for
jumped on the first available alterna- renewables total more
tive: the steam engine. than $100 billion a year,
according to the Interna-
tional Energy Agency. But scientists still haven’t solved their core problem:
peak electricity demand comes early in the morning and at night, when the
sun isn’t shining and the wind may not be blowing.
Nearly a half century of subsidies has not delivered the next energy revolu-
tion. The great manure crisis of 1894 suggests a far better way to advance
clean, affordable, and safe energy: open competition on a level playing field.
Reprinted by permission of the Wall Street Journal. © 2018 Dow Jones &
Co. All rights reserved.
EDU CATI O N
Brushing Up on
“Truth Decay”
Separating fact from fiction is an elementary skill.
So why don’t we teach it in elementary school?
T
he RAND Corporation’s provocative policy brief on “truth
decay”—defined as the blurring of the “line between fact and
fiction in American public life”—identifies four major sources
of this degradation: changes in how we get information, includ-
ing the rise of social media and the twenty-four-hour news cycle; cognitive
biases such as the human tendency to “seek out information that confirms
pre-existing beliefs and reject information that challenges those beliefs”; the
general polarization of contemporary politics and society; and “competing
demands on the educational system.”
As a habitué of the education policy world, I paid attention to that last
point. RAND president Michael Rich and political scientist Jennifer Kava
naugh, the authors of the report, suggest that demands and constraints
on K–12 schooling have “reduced the emphasis on civic education, media
literacy, and critical thinking.” They add: “Without proper training, many
students do not learn how to identify disinformation and misleading informa-
tion and are susceptible to disseminating it themselves.”
Chester E. Finn Jr. is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, former chair
of Hoover’s Koret Task Force on K–12 Education, and president emeritus of the
Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 69
Such training is indeed vital. Kids will believe almost anything unless and
until adults help them learn how to distinguish fact from fiction. They can
see for themselves that the sky is (usually) blue but they won’t know which
hand is right and which is left without explicit instruction; they won’t grasp
“trial by jury” until it’s taught to them; and they surely won’t intuit the blurry
but crucial line between freedom of speech and shouting “fire” in a crowded
theater.
That truth matters should be obvious, and any obscuring of the boundaries
between truth and falsehood, fact and fiction, news and “fake news,” should
alarm us all. “Where basic facts and well-supported analyses of these facts
were once generally accepted,” the RAND duo soberly declare, “disagree-
ment about even objective facts and well-supported analyses has swelled in
recent years.”
It’s hard to disagree with that—and impossible not to lament the change.
I well recall the much-quoted aphorism of my mentor, the late Daniel P.
Moynihan, that “Every-
one is entitled to his own
What holds us together as a society is opinion, but not to his
a shared body of knowledge, without own facts.”
which shared values, principles, and When there’s no agree-
practices are impossible. ment on the facts, we’re
left only with opinion—
spin, if you will—and that opinion often masquerades as information. That’s
what President Trump terms “fake news,” of course, and he’s not entirely
wrong—nor is he entirely innocent of perpetrating it: the “fact checker” in
the Washington Post reported in January that he had tabulated 2,140 “false or
misleading claims” made by Trump during his first year in office.
As would-be suppliers of news fill their pages and our screens with opinion
and cater more and more to their own echo chamber of subscribers and
viewers, it becomes ever harder to get the straight story.
When it becomes difficult to know what’s real and what’s fantasy, what’s
information and what’s opinion, what’s scientific and what’s unproven (and
perhaps unprovable), people become both cynical and gullible. Kids worry
about a mythical “endangered tree octopus” (https://zapatopi.net/treeoc-
topus). Grown-ups get nervous about UFOs. Hoaxes become credible—as
Orson Welles famously demonstrated when he terrified the nation with his
“War of the Worlds” radio broadcast in 1938. This unmooring of credibility
is then compounded by actual errors that yield frightening misinformation,
as happened recently in Hawaii when an employee of the state’s Emergency
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 71
What’s more, as veteran education thinker and curriculum designer E. D.
Hirsch has been writing for years, the vitality and viability of our democracy
itself depend on “shared knowledge.” What holds us together as a society and
polity are the things we understand in common, a shared body of knowledge,
without which it’s impossible to have shared values, principles, and practices,
much less informed citizenship. As Hirsch writes:
POSTMODERNIST PLAGUE
The second way that our notions of critical thinking go off track was
bequeathed to primary-secondary schooling (and many other realms of
our society) by postmodernism, particularly as it—over the past several
decades—has infected higher education, which is where our educators and
education thinkers learned what they are now putting into practice with
their K–12 pupils. Postmodernism, according to a helpful definition provided
by PBS, is
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 73
knowledge army still consists of just a few platoons while the critical thinkers
field many divisions.
I’m not sure what can be done at the macro level, beyond recognizing the
challenge and applauding those willing to tackle it. State academic stan-
dards, properly framed and applied, would help. A more immediate and vivid,
if partial, solution is for
concerned parents to
It’s impossible to teach critical think- choose schools that buck
ing in the abstract. One must have the truth-decay trend—
information to think about. and for policy makers to
enable more such schools
to come into existence, through mechanisms like chartering and vouchers,
so that more families can make such choices. There are great schools—such
as those affiliated with Hirsch’s own Core Knowledge Foundation, and others
that use its curriculum—that strive to impart both essential information and
critical thinking to their pupils. Creating more such places of learning won’t
eradicate the problem of truth decay—too many other forces are advanc-
ing it—but it would at least offer a refuge for those who want to shield their
children from it, and for educators who know better.
S CI ENCE A ND ME D ICIN E
Bottling Up Drug
Prices
Medicine will just keep getting more expensive
until we do something obvious: introduce price
competition.
By Scott W. Atlas
H
ealth and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar has identified
his main priorities. At the top of his list is lowering prescription
drug prices.
Even though prescription drugs constitute only 11 percent
of US health expenditures, according to the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and US drug
spending ranks in the bottom one-third of comparison lists with other devel-
oped nations, prices continue to increase rapidly, with a year-over-year rise of
almost 10 percent for drug list prices, according to a 2017 Credit Suisse report.
Controlling drug prices through government action, though, is fraught with
peril, because it could also slow the process of making new drugs available
to Americans. A much smarter way to go is to make drug prices—which
can vary dramatically from one pharmacy to another—readily apparent to
patients and equip them with the incentives to shop around.
Scott W. Atlas, MD, is the David and Joan Traitel Senior Fellow at the Hoover
Institution. He is the author of Restoring Quality Health Care: A Six-Point
Plan for Comprehensive Reform at Lower Cost (Hoover Institution Press,
2016).
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 75
Drugs are the most significant reason for the past half century of gains
against both chronic and life-ending disease. Policies aimed at reducing drug
costs must not restrict their supply, jeopardize their quality, or inhibit essen-
tial drug innovation that will effect tomorrow’s cures.
American patients, in particular, have benefited more than others from
drugs. For decades, the United States has been the most frequent country,
by far, where new drugs
are first available. Life-
One study showed that price regula- saving cancer drugs, to
tion strongly delayed launches of 642 offer one critical example,
new drugs. are at least four times as
likely to be made available
first in the United States as in any other country, including Germany, Japan,
Switzerland, France, Canada, Italy, or Britain, as reported in the Annals of
Oncology in 2007.
Similarly, two-thirds of the novel drugs approved in 2015 were approved in
the United States before any other country. In a 2017 study, of forty-five new
cancer drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2009–14,
all of which were covered by Medicare in the United States, only twenty-
six were approved and covered in Britain, nineteen in France, thirteen in
Canada, and eleven in Australia.
This early and broad drug access is key to delivering America’s better
treatment results than nationalized systems elsewhere, where drug prices
are strictly regulated by government, for virtually all serious diseases reliant
on drugs, including cancer, heart disease, stroke, and the most important
chronic disorders, including high blood pressure and diabetes.
NO TRANSPARENCY
Patients are not in a position, nor do they have incentives, to exert pressure
on drug prices directly. In the United States, many different parties pay
directly for drugs—employers, government, and insurers—but the end user,
the patient, is not one of them. Patients are sheltered from any incentive to
shop for lower prices by
insurance that minimizes
out-of-pocket costs. Drugs are the most significant rea-
Adding to that is an son for the past half century of gains
extraordinary lack of against serious disease.
price transparency,
fueled by complex behind-the-scenes rebates totaling $179 billion (in 2016) from
companies to pharmacy benefit managers, the government, and insurers that
pervert incentives and prevent any possible price consideration by patients.
Worse, many pharmacy benefit managers contractually prohibit pharma-
cists from volunteering that a medication may be less expensive if purchased
at the “cash price,” according to a 2016 survey of more than six hundred
community pharmacies. And newly published data reveal that well over 20
percent of patient co-pays using insurance actually exceeded total drug costs
if patients had paid cash.
Some have proposed that Medicare provide even more coverage for drugs,
but further reducing out-of-pocket payment would only prop up prices. It
would eliminate incentives for patients to consider price and prevent the
very competition necessary to lower prices while enhancing quality.
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 77
Instead, patients should be positioned to pay directly for more of their
drugs with cheaper, higher-deductible drug coverage, coupled with larger,
liberalized health savings accounts, including specifically for seniors, the big-
gest consumers.
Senior citizens make up about 12 percent of the population but account for
more than 34 percent of medication use. More than fifteen million seniors
take five or more medica-
tions, and that number
Elderly patients have massive market has tripled from 1988 to
power. This argues for letting Medi- 2010, according to a 2015
care beneficiaries hold health savings study. Health savings
accounts. accounts are prohibited
for seniors, but longer
lives require medical care for decades after Medicare eligibility. Moreover,
the massive market power of the elderly argues for permitting Medicare
beneficiaries to hold such accounts.
Reducing regulatory barriers to the supply of new drugs and generics also
would leverage the power of competition. Under Food and Drug Administra-
tion chief Scott Gottlieb, the FDA has dramatically reversed the downward
trend in drug approvals, with sixty-eight new drugs and biologics approved
in 2017 (including those by the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and
Research), the highest in decades. Gottlieb’s FDA also increased generic-
drug approvals 60 percent in 2017 over the previous year. More work is
needed, including considering selective importation of generics.
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 79
S C I ENCE AND ME D ICIN E
By Henry I. Miller
S
easonal outbreaks of flu kill many thousands of Americans even in
a good year, and the most recent flu season was a bad one.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC), each year since 2010 flu has caused “between 9.2 million
and 35.6 million illnesses, between 140,000 and 710,000 hospitalizations,
and between 12,000 and 56,000 deaths.” This past winter, influenza inflicted
misery and debility on much of the country: emergency rooms and isola-
tion wards filled up with flu sufferers, reports of illness were “widespread”
throughout the country, and pharmacies reported shortages of the most com-
mon oral anti-flu medication—oseltamivir, or Tamiflu—and also of intrave-
nous solutions needed to keep hospitalized patients hydrated.
Vaccination, as always, is the key to prevention. According to estimates
from the CDC, in six flu seasons, starting in 2005–6, flu vaccination against a
variety of strains prevented almost fourteen million cases. That might seem
impressive, but our current vaccines often are barely adequate. Too many
Henry I. Miller, MD, is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy and
Public Policy at the Hoover Institution.
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 81
Institutes of Health (NIH), after reviewing thirty-one vaccine response
studies comparing groups of different ages, called for more potent formula-
tions for the elderly.
But exactly how strong the shot should be, and whether additional injec-
tions would boost immunity, requires more study. There is currently a flu
vaccine for people over sixty-five that contains four times as much antigen as
regular flu shots, and one that contains an adjuvant, but they have improved
the shot’s effectiveness only marginally. These epidemiological and biochemi-
cal findings indicate a need to systematically study ways to increase the
effectiveness of flu vaccination in the elderly.
The NIH researchers offered several suggestions for future clinical trials of
vaccine efficacy:
»» Stratify subjects older than sixty-five into five- to ten-year age groups.
»» Gather data on whether subjects had been vaccinated during the previ-
ous flu season.
»» Ascertain whether subjects live in an institution (such as a nursing
home) or independently.
»» Measure all of the three standard blood tests that quantify the response
to vaccines.
To those, I would add several more:
»» Include vaccines of two types—one with virus that is inactivated and
another with live but weakened virus—in separate groups in the study.
»» Include vaccines with and without adjuvants.
»» Study the effects of increased amounts of vaccine and more doses.
Several different approaches to a universal vaccine are being pursued, but
significant challenges remain. The difficulty is that the most immunogenic
part of the flu virus—protein spikes on the surface of the virion—is the part
that mutates, or drifts, from year to year, which is why vaccines need to
be constantly updated.
(That contrasts with the
Regulators should encourage manu- vaccines for other viral
facturers to prepare vaccines in diseases such as measles
“cultured cells”—animal cells grown and mumps, which confer
under controlled conditions. long-standing immunity.)
There is a portion of
the flu virion that is stable, but it is not very immunogenic, so for it to be an
effective vaccine, researchers will need to find a way to make it stimulate the
immune system sufficiently after it’s injected.
Another approach, reported only last January in the journal Science, uses
genetic engineering techniques to construct a live but low-virulence virus
that has been crafted in such a way that when tested in mice and ferrets
it elicits both an antibody response and immunity mediated by a subset of
white blood cells called T-cells. This dual response of antibodies and cell-
based immunity is promising because T-cell-mediated immunity tends to be
long-lasting.
In spite of the importance of research on universal vaccines, there is
surprisingly meager federal research funding in this area. A recent New
York Times article by Michael T. Osterholm, director of the University of
Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, and writer
Mark Olshaker tracked the government’s investment in universal flu vaccine
research: “The National Institutes of Health has publicly declared developing
a [universal] vaccine a priority, [but] it has only about $32 million this year
specifically for such research.”
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 83
Another federal agency, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Devel-
opment Authority, is spending $43 million on a single project in pursuit of
“game-changing influenza vaccines.”
These are puny efforts when compared to the roughly $1 billion spent
annually on developing an HIV vaccine and the many billions that have
been spent on vaccines
for the Zika and Ebola
We need to accelerate research into viruses, which have little
the holy grail of flu prevention: a uni- relevance to Americans.
versal vaccine. An increase in research
funding into adjuvants,
more effective dosing regimens (especially for seniors), and better produc-
tion methods would lead to achievable changes that would better prepare us
to face flu outbreaks.
In the meantime, an easy and often-neglected intervention would be for
public health officials and the media to make the public more aware of the
currently available anti-flu medications, Tamiflu and Relenza, which can not
only often prevent the flu but also shorten the duration and severity of the
illness.
The recent fearsome flu season should serve as a reminder: on several
research and public health fronts, we need to redouble our efforts to prevent
and treat the flu, especially the development of improved vaccines that pre-
vent infections as we’ve done for many childhood viral illnesses.
SYRI A
By Charles Hill
O
n Time magazine’s cover in 1947 was Arnold Toynbee, the world’s
most renowned scholar at the time, author of the monumental,
ten-volume Study of History. “Taking all the knowable human
past as his province, he has found rhythms and patterns which
any less panoramic view could scarcely have detected,” wrote the editors.
Toynbee’s reputation soon plummeted when historians turned away from
big ideas to nibble at small-scale trends. But Toynbee’s unique perceptions
still leap to mind. Today, we recall his remarkable recognition of historic
geostrategy: that “two relatively small patches of geography”—one in “the
Oxus-Jaxartes basin,” that is, Afghanistan, and the other in Syria—have been
“roundabouts” where traffic from any point of the compass can be switched
to any other point in alternative combinations and permutations as civiliza-
tions and religions jostle and collide at exceptionally close quarters.
Simply to list the disruptive forces—the “traffic,” in Toynbee’s term—now
jostling one another in the greater Syrian space is to know how each holds
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 85
potential for shoring up or battering down one or another of the elements of
international order. Three categories stand out:
»» The state as the fundamental unit of world affairs. With the collapse
of the Ottoman empire and caliphate after the First World War, the entire
Middle East region was brought on course to enter the modern international
state system. If that structure is collapsing, world order as a whole is jeop-
ardized. The possibilities reveal the stakes: what of America’s long com-
mitment to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Lebanon? Can Saudi
Arabia define itself as a true state rather than a tribal royal family? Iran’s
double game of playing a legitimate state role while pursuing its revolu-
tionary ideology has been exposed, but not repulsed, even as it accelerates
preparations to attack Israel from Lebanon. Can Iraq be guided to relative
stability as a reformed state encompassing Shia and Sunni and protective of
minorities? Should the Kurdish people establish a state? Autonomy short of
statehood has served the Kurds well; declaration of a Kurdistan could arouse
the dogs of war on every border of such a new state.
The maelstrom of these forces is Syria: even if the state borders of Syria
are re-affirmed, the likelihood of even more horrific layers of war with big-
power involvement is mounting.
»» International conventions. The roundabout exercises a centripetal
pull, drawing violations of major international agreements toward it, then
spinning them out to infect other parts of the region and beyond. Iran’s 2015
“deal” with the United States made Tehran a de facto threshold nuclear
weapons state while failing to constrain its advances in ballistic missile tech-
nology or its omnidirectional undermining of regional order. Iran has used
the Syrian roundabout to extend a form of neo-imperial sphere of influence
in a corridor to the Mediterranean, further enhancing its profile as a nuclear
weapons power. Other regimes in the region now must consider whether to
match Iran’s nuclear breakout.
If left unaddressed,
Iran’s nuclear program
North Korea’s link to the Assad regime will mean the end of the
shows that the roundabout’s spinoff Non-Proliferation Treaty,
effect can reach around the world. one of the pillars of the
international system. Is
the idea of a nuclear-free zone for the Middle East, on the order of the 1967
Latin American Treaty of Tlatelolco, an utter impossibility?
The Assad regime’s repeated use of chemical weapons and its continuing
possession of a variety of chemical and biological weapons—after the US “red
line” went unenforced and Russia stepped in to claim that all such weapons
had been located and collected—demonstrates that the Chemical Weapons
Convention of 1993 is being rendered nugatory by the Syrian war. Evidence
that North Korea is linked to the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons
reveals that the roundabout’s spinoff effect can reach around the world.
The Genocide Convention also has been mocked by the course of seven-
plus years of conflict in Syria. The number of dead exceeds a half million,
with several million people displaced or in refugee flight throughout the
region and beyond. This amounts to the most extensive human disaster since
the Second World War. The language of the Genocide Convention was so spe-
cifically drawn as to make it easy for governing authorities to conclude that
virtually no major human cataclysm precisely falls under the convention’s
terms. Now, when international commitments so evidently require renova-
tion and enforcement, they instead are circumvented and openly defied.
And the fundamental principle of the laws of war—that states must field
professional militaries—already repudiated by Russia in Ukraine, was even
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 87
more blatantly violated by Russia’s battalion-sized, unmarked attack on the
US base at Deir Azzor in early February.
»» Alliances. The roundabout war that began in 2011 has drawn in Russia,
Iran, Turkey, Iraq, the Kurds, and an array of factions. A second roundabout
war is in the offing and is likely to add Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, the Gulf Arab
states, and others. As dangers gather and threats expand, the question of
alliances is paramount.
There is no current alliance-category relationship of the United States in
the Middle East that does not urgently call for restrengthening, reappraisal,
revival, or revision. If the very concept of America’s alliances is not shored
up, deterrence will fade, partners and friends will make new accommoda-
tions, and the chances
of avoiding a new, wider
Iran has used the Syrian roundabout war will vanish. Turkey,
to extend a neo-imperial sphere of for instance, remains in
influence toward the Mediterranean. NATO, but President
Erdogan is shaping new
quasi-alliance relationships with Russia and Iran. The possibility of a “great
alliance shift,” with grave consequences for Asia as well as the Middle East,
will worsen.
Turbulence from the current Syrian roundabout has pulled outside powers
into the region’s conflicts and made power rivalries with wider war a danger-
ous likelihood. The United States, for its own national interest as well as the
survival of the modern international state system, must take on this primary
responsibility.
SYRI A
By Samuel Tadros
G
reetings, softer than the breeze of Barada. . . . I send my tears,
which will never dry, O Damascus.” The opening line of Ahmed
Shawqi’s famous poem was written as news of the Syrian defeat
by the French in 1920 reached Egypt. Less than two years
earlier, Faisal I had entered Damascus and raised the flag of Arab national-
ism. The jubilation was felt across the Levant. Egypt, confident in its own
newly discovered national identity, had little appetite for the illusions of Arab
nationalism, but the pain of Damascus could not be ignored. Euphoria would
visit the city again in 1958 as the Damascene crowd crowned Gamel Abdel
Nasser the region’s indisputable king, but those moments were few and
short-lived, and soon gave way to disappointment. That city would know little
but pain as coup gave way to coup, before the specter of Hafez al-Assad rose
to torment its inhabitants.
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 89
Seven years have passed since the outbreak of protests in Syria calling for
change. By now, many illusions have been shattered. First was the illusion
of the “reformer son” of the late strongman. The shy eye doctor was surely
different from his father. John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi had fallen for his
charm during the Bush years, and the Obama administration still held the
same hope. It was not to be. Syria’s great poet Nezar Qabbani had described
the breed well in his Autobiography of an Arab Man of the Sword: “I decided
to ride this people from now until Judgment Day.” The son of the butcher of
Hama would outshine his father, adding the names of Aleppo, Homs, Daraa,
and countless others to his list of butchery. Next was the illusion of a regional
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 91
“Men are not angels,” Fouad Ajami once wrote of Libya’s descent into car-
nage, “these were the hatreds and the wrath that the ruler himself had sown;
he had reaped what he had planted.” The sectarian divides had been too large
to overcome and the wounds too deep to heal.
Then there was the illusion of the Syrian conflict remaining within the
country’s borders, but as Charles Hill has written, “Syria is the roundabout
in which all the forces face one another and spin off consequences, for good
or ill, around the compass.” What happens in Syria can never remain just in
Syria, as the Iraqis soon discovered. We turn to Ajami again; “If the Sunni
Arabs had lost Baghdad to the Shia, there was suddenly within grasp the
prospect of restoring Damascus.”
Most painful was the illusion of a world consciousness that would be
moved by atrocities and an American president who had drawn a red line.
Barack Obama, once described by Ajami as a man who had “made a fetish
of caution,” had little interest or sympathy for the children of the Levant.
An accommodation with Iran would be signed in Vienna with the blood of
Syrians.
ENSNARED IN ILLUSIONS
A year and a half ago, Donald Trump came into office riding a wave of
discontent, not just of economic frustrations but also of disillusionment with
America’s adventure in the Middle East. Long gone were the days of enthu-
siasm for the fall of Saddam’s statue. Candidate Trump had made his skepti-
cism of nation building in the Middle East known, and his skepticism was
warranted. America had visited the region once already and had no appetite
for another try. Between George W. Bush’s adventure and Obama’s inaction,
the administration has
chosen a middle course:
Seven years have passed since pro- bombing Assad for his
tests erupted in Syria. Many illusions use of chemical weapons,
have been shattered. allowing the Pentagon to
send more troops and to
keep them there, and drawing a red line east of the Euphrates. But troops
and firepower are no political strategy, let alone a political solution and
settlement.
If America has lost its excitement for adventure and Obama’s abandon-
ment has been exposed for its hollowness, neither are current measures
equipped to achieve a much better result. Islamic State may be defeated for
now, but a fire smolders under the ashes. Assad continues his savagery, aided
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 93
intervention and have a spillover effect on neighboring countries, destabiliz-
ing them further. While a military confrontation with Russia is to be avoided,
a Russian victory has to be denied. A Putin victory in Syria would embolden
him further in expanding his influence in the Middle East, undermining US
interests and sending a clear message that he is the new sheriff in the region.
And while stopping Iranian involvement in the Levant is a long-term proj-
ect, checking Iranian moves and containing those remains within immediate
US interests. Most important in this regard is reinforcing the Israeli red line
in the southern part of Syria, ensuring that no Iranian expansion takes place
in the area. Instead of hoping for a permanent solution to the Syrian civil
war, the United States should aim for an equilibrium. America is incapable
of stopping Syrians and their neighbors from killing each other, but it can
surely remove their ability to inflict so much death and increase their costs of
doing so.
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 95
SY RI A
SY RI A
Target Assad’s
Enablers
The Syrian civil war teems with outside actors.
American strategy must reckon with their
ambitions—and check them.
By Russell A. Berman
W
ith all the optimism of the Arab Spring, the Syrian rebel-
lion began with the belief that the people of Syria deserve
better than the cruelty meted out by Assad family rule.
That aspiration alone ought to be sufficient grounds to
stand with the democratic forces pursuing self-determination. Yet the United
States has been hesitating, a legacy of the Obama administration’s preference
for tyranny in Tehran over freedom in Damascus. We should reject that sort
of cynicism: not only because it is wrong to abandon the rebels pursuing a
noble cause, but also because of the moral corruption we ourselves face when
we dismiss even the possibility of genuine principles and bona fide ideals.
There is reason aplenty to recoil on humanitarian grounds at the brute vio-
lence that Bashar al-Assad, backed by Tehran and Moscow, heaps on belea-
guered civilians. If we no longer embrace the idealistic “democracy agenda”
of the Bush administration, we might still evaluate Syria in terms of basic
human charity and a responsibility to protect. The leveling of Aleppo and the
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 97
Nor was it only Washington that behaved deplorably: the Europeans, sup-
porters of the nuclear deal, were delighted to overlook the crimes in Syria,
bedazzled as they were by the prospect of commercial gain in Iran. How else
can one explain their reluctance to raise human rights concerns there, while
they do so with such moralism elsewhere? For the West, Syria was only a
means to an end, the pot of gold imagined in Tehran.
It was that deal-making that transformed Syria from one more chance for
an Arab Spring—full of hope, perhaps naive at times, but certainly deserv-
ing of at least moral support and solidarity—into a tool for other powers to
pursue their competing goals. This is how the Syrian rebellion, an indigenous
uprising against a dicta-
tor, has been replaced by
If the United States were to walk a confrontation among
away from the Syria conflict, it would outside actors, testing,
be interpreted as a rout. probing, and challenging
each other. A historical
comparison (with all the limits of any such comparison) would be the Spanish
Civil War where, on the terrain of a local conflict, the great powers of the era
tested each other’s mettle. That Spain was a gateway to a much larger war is
not necessarily predictive here, but the example shows how much might be
at stake, and why the United States has an interest in its outcome.
As the threat of ISIS subsides, Washington must recognize that it is effec-
tively engaged in a barely camouflaged war with Iran and Russia, and US
strategy has to factor that international aspect into its calculations.
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 99
damaging its adversaries in Syria and, in turn, weakening them at home.
Any blow against Assad degrades his defenders in ways that will echo in
their distant capitals. Putin and the mullahs came to support Assad, but now
undermining Assad can weaken Putin and the mullahs.
While a realist American agenda should include ending the Assad regime
to damage its patrons, it would simultaneously achieve the goal of the origi-
nal rebellion, a Syria that provides for dignified lives for all its people.
I S RAEL
Israel at Seventy
A nation that “encourages its citizens to challenge
authority, ask the next question, and defy the
obvious.”
By Peter Berkowitz
E
ven beyond its extraordinary success in launching high-tech
companies chronicled nine years ago in the bestselling Start-up
Nation, Israel is an innovation capital of the world. But the inspir-
ing story of its inventors and entrepreneurs and their discover-
ies, devices, and services that have benefited the Jewish state and people
around the globe has not been fully told. Nor have the cultural, religious, and
political roots of Israeli exceptionalism been sufficiently explored.
Israel’s security threats and political challenges understandably preoccupy
the media. Newspaper headlines and TV news coverage give the impression
that the country exists in an all-consuming state of crisis. The press duly
reports that the country has been subject to international opprobrium owing
to its control since the 1967 Six-Day War of the West Bank, or Judea and
Samaria; for decades it has been mired in a battle on several fronts against
Islamists; and its political leaders seem to operate amid perennial charges of
corruption and government investigations.
Feature articles examining the discord within Israel only bolster the sense
of crisis. Much has been written about the obstacles to full integration into
the country’s society and economy faced by Israel’s Arab minority—slightly
Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Insti-
tution and a member of Hoover’s Working Group on the Role of Military History in
Contemporary Conflict.
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 101
more than 20 percent of the citizenry. Alarming stories report the high birth
rate among Israel’s ultra-Orthodox—about 11 percent of the population—and
describe how the community, by shielding its children from nonreligious
education, produces young men and women ill-prepared to participate in the
nation’s defense and join the labor force. And plenty of pieces examine the
bitter divide between the intellectual and cultural elites who live in the great-
er Tel Aviv municipal area and vehemently oppose Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, and the working class, many of whom reside on the periphery of
large-city centers and consistently support him.
H O O V ER D IG E S T • S u m m er 2018 103
EYES ON THE FUTURE: A woman tries out a virtual-reality headset in Jerusa-
lem’s Old City. The Tower of David Museum hosts its Innovation Lab in a site
two thousand years old. Its goal is to use tech opportunities to enhance the
visitor experience. [Debbie Hill—Newscom]
burgeoning wine industry has given rise to more than two hundred wineries
in a country that, though the size of New Jersey, boasts an amazing variety of
soils and microclimates.
In the book Thou Shalt Innovate: How Israeli Ingenuity Repairs the World, my
friend Avi Jorisch argues that Israel’s “remarkable culture of innovation” fur-
ther testifies to Israeli dynamism. It also reflects, he stresses, the influence of
“the Jewish prophetic tradition.” Israel, he suggests, “is a nation with the soul
of a synagogue.” The country’s stunning advances in agriculture, water, medi-
cine, and defense have been fostered “consciously or unconsciously,” Jorisch
argues, by the divine imperative “to make the world a better place.”
American born, Jorisch spent many of his formative childhood years in
Israel and returned for graduate school, which led to studies in Arabic and
Islamic philosophy in Egypt. Now residing in the United States and active as
an entrepreneur, a Middle East expert who has served in the departments
A UNIQUE SYNTHESIS
It is not Judaism’s prophetic tradition alone to which Jorisch attributes the
amazing outpouring of innovation in Israel. He recognizes as well the linger-
ing effects of the Talmudic tradition—which cherishes education, authorizes
dissent, and celebrates mastery of opposing viewpoints—on a “culture that
encourages its citizens to challenge authority, ask the next question, and
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 105
defy the obvious.” Charity and service to the community, he notes, have been
long-standing Jewish teachings. And he credits Israel’s mandatory military
service, which simultaneously imposes discipline and encourages young
officers with big responsibilities to improvise, and well-designed government
programs that fund inventions and entrepreneurship.
Jorisch mentions but understates the political dimension. A commitment
to a more just world, he observes, is inscribed in Israel’s declaration of inde-
pendence. In May 1948, as five Arab armies sought to destroy the new Jewish
state, Israel’s founding
fathers proclaimed, “We
Newspapers, TV, radio, and social extend our hand to all
media crackle around the clock with neighboring states and
raucous political debate. their peoples in an offer
of peace and good neigh-
borliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual
help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land.” It should be
emphasized also that the declaration emphatically guaranteed equality of
rights to all Israel’s inhabitants regardless of religion, race, or sex, and, over
the seventy years since its birth, Israel has, good to its promise, cultivated
the Middle East’s first and only liberal democracy.
A distinctive synthesis of liberty, equality, and nationhood provides the
conditions in which an ancient religious spirit has entwined with a distinc-
tive contemporary culture to produce in Israel technological innovations that
continue to better the world. The prospering of this political synthesis in an
uncommonly tough neighborhood is a crucial and still-to-be-fully-told part of
Israel’s exceptional story.
CH I NA
Turning Scholars
into Unpersons
China is determined to tell its story on its own
highly selective terms. How the People’s Republic
has updated Orwell’s “memory hole” by making it
electronic.
By Glenn D. Tiffert
I
n recent years, technology has supercharged the dark art of agitprop,
that potent portmanteau of political agitation and propaganda Russian
revolutionaries gave to the world a century ago. While attention now
centers on how its current devotees are exploiting social media to sow
mistrust, intimidate, provoke, and polarize, for China such chicanery is but
one facet of a much more ambitious suite of influence operations designed to
shape discourse and achieve policy objectives.
True to its Leninist roots, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) depicts
public opinion as a battlefield upon which a highly disciplined political strug-
gle must be waged and won. This battlefield knows no borders; it encompass-
es the full panoply of domestic actors as well as foreign universities, busi-
ness and policy elites, and the media, among others. Abroad, the struggle is
often waged covertly, through proxies such as private firms, businesspeople,
Glenn D. Tiffert is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. He was the distin-
guished postdoctoral fellow in residence at the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese
Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, from 2015 to 2017. His forth-
coming book, Judging Revolution, examines the birth of the legal system of the
Peoples Republic of China and draws on sources from the Hoover Archives.
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 107
and social or educational organizations. Its tactics range from cooperative
ventures that foster goodwill, quietly build leverage over foreign partners,
and establish asymmetric conduits for wielding sharp power and managing
or exfiltrating knowledge, to coercive measures such as express or implied
economic threats, bureaucratic reprisals, and physical arrest.
History is a fiercely contested part of this battlefield. As Orwell once
observed, “who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present
controls the past.” Cognizant of this, the CCP is shrewdly leveraging its econom-
ic muscle and the technologies of the information age to globalize its domestic
censorship regime, enlisting observers everywhere, often without their knowl-
edge or consent, in an alarming effort to sanitize the historical record and
propagate its own competing narratives. It is, in short, honoring Mao’s dictum
to “use the past to serve the present, and make the foreign serve China.”
Its timing is impeccable. Economic and technological disruptions to
our information ecosystem are eroding our capacity to detect, much less
combat, this information war. For example, motivated by thrift and effi-
ciency, many academic libraries are shedding old volumes and outsourc-
ing growing parts of their collections to online providers, trusting these
providers to supply full replacement value and to guarantee the integrity of
their products. But much can go wrong with that bargain, especially since
many of these providers are market-driven ventures subject to commercial
pressures. They may adhere to values, priorities, and standards of steward-
ship different from those of traditional libraries, and may be accountable
to different constituencies, such as shareholders. Furthermore, things can
go spectacularly wrong when they confront the demands of a mercurial
censorship regime and the authoritarian government behind it, as with the
People’s Republic of China (PRC).
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 109
Not long ago, such post-publication censorship was toilsome. Tearing out
passages, or seizing and destroying entire volumes, demanded physical control
of the relevant texts, and there was always the possibility that some would
slip through the net to bear future witness. That has changed. Increasingly,
our knowledge resides not in tangible objects dispersed redundantly among
libraries and collectors, but in evanescent bitstreams delivered from distant
servers along a centralized distribution chain. As the CUP and Springer epi-
sodes illustrate, the providers who control those servers can silently alter our
knowledge base without ever leaving their back offices, making one alteration
after another, each with the potential to propagate instantaneously around the
globe.
For censors, the possibilities are mouthwatering. Digital databases offer
them dynamic, fine-grained mastery over memory and identity and, in the
case of China, they are
capitalizing on this to
To the Communist Party, public opin- engineer a pliable version
ion is a battlefield on which a highly of the past that can be
disciplined political struggle must be tuned algorithmically to
waged and won. always serve the party’s
present. Yet, dazzled by
the abundance of sources on these databases, we have failed to grasp this
Potemkin-like project, much less its epistemological implications.
Consider, for instance, the PRC’s dominant academic law journals from
the 1950s, Political-Legal Research and Law Science. The original print edi-
tions of these journals document the emergence of China’s post-1949 legal
system, and the often-savage debates that seized it. Few libraries outside
China possess complete, original print runs of these journals, and with the
advent of convenient digital editions, those that do have them have typically
relegated the paper volumes to offsite storage. For most users, online access
is now the norm.
The online editions of Political-Legal Research and Law Science have been
redacted in ways that materially distort the historical record but are invis-
ible to the end user. The consequences are as unsettling as they are deliber-
ate: the more faithful scholars are to this adulterated source base and the
sanitized reality it projects, the more they may unwittingly “serve China” by
promoting the agendas of the censors.
Take the issues originally published in China from 1956 through 1958.
These chronicle how budding debates over matters such as judicial inde-
pendence, the transcendence of law over politics and class, the presumption
AN INCONVENIENT HISTORY
Likewise, consider “Yang Zhaolong” (1904–79), the term most highly corre-
lated with censorship in Law Science. Yang was one of the most accomplished
Chinese jurists of his generation, but in late 1956 and early 1957 he had the
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 111
temerity to publicly challenge the legal orthodoxy of the Communist Party
and point out flaws in the young PRC legal system. This ultimately led to his
twelve-year incarceration as a rightist and counterrevolutionary.
The original paper issues of Law Science document the virulent backlash
against Yang and his ideas, but the online editions omit the lion’s share of
this content, as if it had never happened. Moreover, my analysis reveals that
much the same can be said for others who, like Yang, promoted a raft of
concepts connected to the rule of law, or greater separation between party
and state. Today, the record of their arguments and persecutions sticks like
a thorn in the side of a regime that has since not only written the rule of law
into its constitution but also presented its current policy of “socialist rule of
law with Chinese characteristics” as the culmination of a proud originalist
vision.
It falls to the censors to resolve such inconsistencies, and they have been
busy. Other journals hosted on these databases are missing not just discrete
articles but also entire issues. Given the breadth of the CCP’s insecurities,
arguably no historical period or topic is safe from such manipulation. Fur-
thermore, the complicity of the database providers in hosting this sanitized
content raises grave doubts about their good faith. They are violating the
trust of users everywhere, and contaminating research based on their hold-
ings. Worst of all, by tendentiously distorting consciousness of China’s past,
they are prejudicing its possible futures.
It is worth noting that the computational techniques I employed are dou-
ble-edged weapons; they can also be repurposed to automate and enhance
the work of the censors. Simply by manipulating any of the 30,000-plus
parameters in my sample,
an enterprising censor (or
Thanks to new technology, it’s a very hacker) could fabricate
short hop to Orwell’s memory hole, bespoke versions of the
where reality is continuously rein- historical record, each
vented by the powerful. exquisitely tuned to the
shifting ideological or
political requirements of the present. It is a very short hop indeed from the
technologies that already dynamically filter and sort our newsfeeds to the
nightmare of Orwell’s memory hole, where reality is continuously reinvented
by the powerful at will.
We must not suppose that these dangers are limited to China. They are, in
fact, illustrative of the broader ramifications of our deepening digital depen-
dence and the redistribution of power it entails. As knowledge transcends its
WHAT WE CAN DO
The digital turn is undoubtedly here to stay. If we are to prevent the practic-
es described above from proliferating, then we must confront them head on,
lest growing distrust about the authenticity of the knowledge we consume
and produce metastasize. A subscription to an online commercial database
can cost a research university tens of thousands of dollars annually, and it
has a powerful interest in ensuring that it gets what it is paying for. Collective
action by a group of universities to raise awareness of what is happening, and
to demand redress from the vendors, is a necessary first step. Collaborative
ventures to conserve legacy media and to reinvest in the institutions that
preserve it, such as libraries and archives, are also essential.
Beyond that, knowledge creators, professional societies, rights holders,
content providers, and the institutions that subscribe to their products must
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 113
also design and implement a set of industrywide best practices to uphold
the integrity of our digital collections, transparently log omissions and
modifications, and defend against tampering at the levels of the individual
character, document, and corpus. Such standards must apply not only to the
digitization of legacy analog sources (which are, after all, not eternal), but
also to those “born” digital, and it is imperative that commercial providers in
particular adopt them.
In short, we are well past the point when we can naively trust; we must
now also verify. A variety of solutions, such as digital signatures, blockchain
certification, or ISO 16363 certification, with logos signifying validated
standards compliance, are potentially available to meet those needs. We
absolutely must engineer such technical safeguards into the foundations
of our knowledge infrastructure and back them up with mutually reinforc-
ing statements of principle and firm contractual obligations. The menace is
real and already among us. Never before has knowledge been prone to such
sweeping and supple manipulation. Our understanding of ourselves and our
future, as well as the continued vitality of the ideas and practices that define
a free society, depend on it.
CH I NA
Goodnight Mao
To the monitors of China’s “Great Firewall,” even
storybook characters can be subversive.
By Markos Kounalakis
D
ictators hate a challenge to their rule. That’s why China uses
its vast policing and advanced technological resources both to
arrest individuals and to remove from public view any pro-
test words, phrases, images, or symbols that might be seen as
threatening the state. The kinds of things that, if unchecked, can potentially
overthrow a regime.
One of the high-priority targets of China’s security systems today? Winnie
the Pooh.
Yes, Pooh Bear is a danger to the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese
state, and, most important, President Xi Jinping.
Xi should be feeling pretty confident these days, as China changes its
constitution to rid it of presidential term limits. Not since Chairman Mao
Zedong will China have had a more powerful and unchallenged leader. But
the power of Pooh must not be underestimated.
Why Pooh and his media parent company, Disney? Popular protest in
countries where speech is controlled often finds expression in seemingly
innocent ways as well as through symbols loaded with hidden or ironic mean-
ing. From blue Smurfs in Poland in the late 1980s to yellow rubber duckies in
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 115
[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]
contemporary Russia, Serbia, and Brazil, the absurd directly challenges the
entrenched.
In China, an inspired citizen saw a resemblance between Xi Jinping and
the cuddly, befuddled Pooh and posted it on Weibo, a Chinese version of Twit-
ter. The picture of an oversized Pooh benevolently sitting in a car instantly
ricocheted around social media in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). It
was quickly interpreted by the Chinese public as mocking an official image of
Xi Jinping in a car reviewing a People’s Liberation Army formation.
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 117
censors subversive words from being searched on the carefully controlled
and firewall-protected Internet. The China Digital Times dynamically crowd-
sources phrases that are blocked online, an ever-changing list that recently
included the following:
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 119
I N TERVI EW
I N TERVI EW
“What Do You Do
with Freedom?”
Black Americans would do better to stand than
to kneel. An interview with Hoover fellow Shelby
Steele.
By Peter Robinson
Shelby Steele is the Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow at the Hoover
Institution. His latest book is Shame: How America’s Past Sins Have Polar-
ized Our Country (Basic Books, 2015). Peter Robinson is the editor of the
Hoover Digest, the host of Uncommon Knowledge, and a research fellow at the
Hoover Institution.
Steele: Blacks, obviously, have undergone over the centuries slavery and
segregation and victimization, all those things we’re all very much aware of.
My point is that out of that came an identity, a group identity, that has been,
for better and worse, grounded in the idea of blacks as victims, and black vic-
timization has become the sort of centerpiece of that identity. That identity, I
think, in the case of the NFL protesters, is sort of dislodged from reality and
functions pretty much on its own. Once they felt called upon to make some
symbolic protest against American racism, they sort of mindlessly went
along with that without ever stopping to investigate whether there really was
oppression—what degree of oppression is involved in American life today
for blacks. My argument is “not very much.” There was an incongruence in
refusing to stand for the national anthem when this country, despite its sins,
also was a country that, for the past sixty years, has truly transformed itself
morally, and Americans today are a different people in regard to all these
issues. I thought the protest was an obsolescent gesture that no one found
much meaning in.
Steele: That school was an elementary school in a district where there were
only two schools. One was all white, and one was all black. We would see the
white kids drive to school in the school bus in the wintertime, while we had to
walk. We got their textbooks when they were worn out. We got their teachers
when the teachers began to have problems, a nervous breakdown or some-
thing. They’d be transferred to our school.
It was abusive. There’s no doubt about it. It was a horror, and even among
segregated schools, this one was particularly bad. My parents actually led the
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 121
protest. My mother and father organized the parents and boycotted that school,
and so there were no students going to it. Eventually, they prevailed. The teach-
ers were fired, the principal was fired, and a new school was started up.
Robinson: Beginning when you were a little boy, you saw real segregation
and real abuse.
Steele: Well, that’s the point. I think of 1964 and the Civil Rights Act as the
point at which America capitulated and apologized: “We were wrong. Here’s
a huge piece of legislation affirming our commitment to not do this anymore.”
Now, that bill has a lot of problems that have subsequently come to hurt us,
but as a historical gesture,
it was one of the great
“Black victimization has become the moral acknowledgements
sort of centerpiece of that identity.” of any society, ever. It was
a really remarkable event,
and blacks deserve an enormous amount of credit for protesting in that era,
because there was no debate in America about whether or not there was
racial discrimination. Everybody knew there was. The question was what
we’re going to do about it, and blacks’ protest pushed that all the way to the
point where America finally did capitulate.
Steele: Genuinely. These people sacrificed enormously. They took every kind
of risk imaginable. They achieved something truly great. It was a moment
when black America touched greatness. We extended democracy past the
barrier of race, so historically that was, in a sense, our gift to America.
Robinson: Now, you write in Shame about a trip that you took to Africa at the
age of twenty-three. You write, “This entire trip was organized around visits
to cities like Algiers, cities associated with independence movements and
revolutions that had swept the Third World in the 1950s and ’60s. I wanted
to see if there was some counterpoint to the American way of life that was
better.” What did you see?
Steele: I didn’t find that. You know, I was coming of age. I was just out of col-
lege. I was working in the War on Poverty programs and there was a point,
after the civil rights victories in the late ’60s, where black people began
to create this identity that we call blackness, and it was angry, and it was
resentful, and it was separatist, and it held the illusion in it that somehow
we would get farther as a separate, unified people than we would by joining
America and becoming regular citizens. I confess; I was caught up in that.
What was so seductive was that it said blackness is the answer to all your
anxieties about life, what you should do . . . if you’re just really focused on
blackness, those issues seem to go away.
So yes, my wife and I took a trip to Africa, beginning in Algeria, where
we met with the Black Panthers who were in exile. Then, we traveled
south of the Sahara and to Ghana, where Kwame Nkrumah had been the
president, to Senegal, where Léopold Senghor . . . you know, these great
romantic, anticolonialist, sort of revolutionary figures . . . and it was a
good lesson learned very quick. Those countries were not doing well. They
were disorganized. Overwhelmed with corruption. There was no sort of
common direction. They were lost. They couldn’t go back to being a colony
H O O V ER D IG E S T • S u m m er 2018 123
again, and yet they also didn’t know how to go into the future and build a
new nation.
I learned a lot there. It transformed me. It made me realize that your
racial identity is a passive thing. Your racial identity is not an agent of
change. It is not going to build a new life for you. It is not going to do all the
things that life calls upon you to do for yourself. In fact, it’s a delusion in
which you can waste an awful lot of time.
Robinson: In the Journal you wrote, “Racism is endemic to the human condi-
tion just as stupidity is. We will always have to be on guard against it, but
now, in the United States, it is recognized as a scourge. What has happened
is that black America has been confronted with a new problem, the shock of
freedom.” Explain that problem.
Steele: It’s a corruption. Who says that’s because of racism? Maybe it’s
because you haven’t yet developed the value system, the ideas with which
to thrive in freedom. Maybe you don’t know what to do with the opportuni-
ties that surround you. It’s understandable: you were oppressed, and people
have not pointed out to you the challenge of freedom. What do people do with
freedom when they don’t know how to handle it? They reinvent their oppres-
sion, even as it has faded away. They make it up in their mind all over again.
“Racism is around every corner. There is systemic racism. There is struc-
tural racism. There are microaggressions, and there’s white privilege.” All of
this, again, is the shock of freedom and not knowing.
I mean, look at today’s black leadership. They have no clue about how
to move ahead. All they can think to do is ask for more from the govern-
ment. Well, we’ve asked and the government has given us almost everything.
Nowhere in history has
a government paid off
its people more than “Your racial identity is not an agent of
America has in the past change. It is not going to build a new
sixty years, and yet we life for you.”
are, by most socioeco-
nomic measures, farther behind white America than we were in the Fifties,
when we had none of these social programs and other help.
One of my points about the NFL protest, and the same with Black Lives
Matter, is that they can’t even articulate what they’re protesting against,
when if racism is so virulent, it ought to be obvious. When I was a kid, it was
obvious. No one denied it. It was visible to everybody every day, and that
was the beginning and the end of it. Today, where is it? Where are you being
stopped? “Well, I want to rise. I want to be a politician. I want to be the presi-
dent.” OK. You want to be the CEO of such and such a corporation. OK. You
can do anything you want. The reality and the problem that occupies black
America today is the fact that we are, at last, a free people.
Robinson: Shelby, you know this well. President Johnson’s 1965 commence-
ment address at Howard University. “You do not take a person who has been
hobbled by chains and bring him up to the starting line of a race and say,
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 125
‘You’re free to compete with the others.’ Equal opportunity is essential but
not enough.” In your view, was Johnson correct in 1965 but that view is wrong
now; that affirmative action, transfer payments, all of that was necessary, but
at some point, it began to hold African-Americans back? Or was it wrong to
begin with?
Steele: That speech has been quoted . . . I’ve quoted it I don’t know how many
times. What that is really about is not black people, because black people were
in the position of coming into freedom. You can help them or not, but they’re
going to have to deal
with it in some way. That
“As blacks, we need to ask ourselves statement was about what
why we have become so dependent I’ve written a good deal
on this delusion that we live in a soci- about: white guilt. And
ety that is intent on keeping us down. it was a horrible histori-
cal mistake, as far as I’m
That’s over with.”
concerned, because what
Johnson was saying was: “We oppressed you. Now, we’re going to lift you up
and redeem you.” Your fate remains in our hands, the government’s hands,
every kind of philanthropic group’s hands, everybody’s hands but yours.
We then had to have sixty years of white guilt. White guilt is a very specific
thing. It is not a genuine feeling of guilt, nothing to do with that. It is the terror,
the literal terror, of being seen as a racist. Everybody knows in America, that’s
the bottom line. If you are seen as a racist, openly, in public, you are ruined.
You have no life. Johnson is saying, “I can’t have you call me and this country
racist, and so I’m going to give you a whole bunch of things.” I worked in those
programs, so I know them intimately. We don’t care whether it works. We had
school busing for how many decades, ruining the public school system? School
integration did absolutely nothing. Black students were still unable to compete,
because the focus was on what the government was going to do and not on
what black students do. All these bad ideas. White guilt has been a real driver
of these corruptions, and these football players down on their knees know that.
Steele: What in the world has that got to do with football? That is just a
perfect white guilt statement. He may as well just say, “I’m innocent. I’m
Robinson: All right, so what is to be done? Let’s just work our way through a
couple of the obvious problems here. We’ve got poverty. African-Americans
are disproportionately poor. Two-fifths of African-American households
receive food stamps, a much higher percentage than any other ethnic group.
And we’ve got inequality. Turns out, even if you go up the income scale,
upper-class and middle-class blacks earn about two-thirds as much as their
white counterparts, which is the same figure as half a century ago. What do
you do?
Steele: The first thing I think you do is you name the reasons why—and
certainly, racism is no longer a reason. If it is a reason, it is eighteenth or
twentieth on the list of reasons. It is not worth your time, is not worth focus-
ing on or worrying much about. There are no important forces in American
life advocating for racism. As blacks, we need to ask ourselves why we have
become so dependent on this delusion that we live in a society intent on keep-
ing us down. That’s over
with. We need to face
ourselves more frankly, “Free people are free to move from
you guys, as 75 percent one thing to another, to find them-
of all black children are selves, to find their voice, to find out
born out of wedlock. Do
what they can do in life. To me, that’s
you understand the kind
blackness.”
of dysfunction? Just that
statistic alone, that’s a problem, and who’s going to fix that? The government?
There’s no examination of how self-reliance, more personal responsibility
for one’s decisions in life, how these are the things that now determine our
fate. Again, I blame a lot of this on the original oppression. That was not an
experience that taught us these values and principles that other people take
for granted. Well, now we’ve got to take up those principles. Now we’ve got to
stop thinking of ourselves as victims and think of ourselves as free men and
women in this world with every kind of opportunity.
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 127
Life is tough for everybody, no doubt about that, but free people are free
to move from one thing to another, to find themselves, to find their voice, to
find out what they can do in life. To me, that’s blackness. That’s blackness,
or it ought to be. What passes for blackness now is just a kind of mindless
mimicry of anger and resentment that is really an instance of pathos. It’s just
sad to see these football players out there on their knee when they can’t even
articulate what they’re protesting against. I can tell you that Martin Luther
King knew what he was protesting against.
Robinson: You wrote in your column: “The oppression of black people is over
with. We blacks are, today, a free people.” What was the response among
African-Americans?
Steele: I’m sure they will be apoplectic and thus prove my point about focus-
ing on our victimization. Rather than say, “Oh my goodness. In fact, it is over.
Our oppression is over with. We really are a free people,” we scream to high
heavens that Steele is crazy, can’t you see racism everywhere? That white
supremacy is just infused into, literally, the air of America. . . . This longing
for an identity is a longing for an excuse not to accept the challenge of free-
dom. It is a way to escape that challenge.
Robinson: Last question. Let me quote Frederick Douglass, the great former
slave. This is 1863. “What I ask for the Negro is not benevolence, not pity, not
sympathy, but simply justice. The American people have always been anxious
to know what they shall do with us. Do nothing . . .
Steele: “Nothing.”
Steele: Well, I couldn’t say anything better than that. I’m a great fan of Fred-
erick Douglass. What truth. How long is it going to take us to absorb that mes-
sage? What I would say to whites is: “Have a little more faith in yourself. Do
you have ill will toward people of different races and backgrounds? Then you,
obviously, know that’s something you cannot indulge.” That’s it. That’s it.
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 129
I N TERVI EW
I N TERVI EW
Why Putin
Lashes Out
Vladimir Putin is no Josef Stalin, says Hoover
fellow Stephen Kotkin, but his regime’s weakness
poses its own kind of danger.
By Tunku Varadarajan
R
ussians participated a few months ago in a presidential elec-
tion that was, let’s agree, lacking in any competitive tension.
In fact, says Stephen Kotkin, Vladimir Putin’s re-election was
“preordained, a superfluous, if vivid, additional signal of Russia’s
debilitating stagnation.”
Few Americans understand Russia better than Kotkin, a Hoover senior
fellow who late last year published Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941, the sec-
ond of an intended three-volume biography of the Soviet dictator the author
describes as “the person in world history who accumulated more power than
anyone else.”
President Putin, by comparison, is a dictatorial lightweight. “We wouldn’t
want to equate Putin with Stalin,” Kotkin says. The Soviet Union—which
Stalin ruled for three hair-raising decades, until his death in 1953—had “one-
sixth of the world’s land mass under its control, plus satellites in Eastern
Stephen Kotkin is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the John P. Birke-
lund ’52 Professor in History and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson
School and History Department of Princeton University. His latest book is Stalin:
Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 (2017, Penguin Press). Tunku Varadarajan is
the Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 131
spurt. “I’d never seen anything
like this,” says Kotkin—his
face faintly green even in the
remembering—“and I began
to feel woozy.” The callow
Kotkin threw up and passed
out. “That ended my medical
career.”
A switch to English
literature followed, with a
minor in history, which put
Kotkin into contact with
the legendary Christo-
pher Lasch. A moralist
as well as a historian,
Lasch was writing The
Culture of Narcissism
at the time. “He was
a kind of Midwest-
ern, prairie popu-
list,” Kotkin says,
“and his critique of
American progres-
sivism was something
you cannot now hear on
American campuses.”
Attracted to history,
and away from literature,
Kotkin ended up at the
University of California,
Berkeley, for his doctor-
ate, specializing in Rus-
sia. “I started learning
the Russian language
in the third year
of my PhD,
LEADERS OF DESTINY
Kotkin was drawn to Stalin
because “the history of Stalin
was a history of the world.” He
was also “the gold standard
of dictatorship.” With Soviet
nostalgia sweeping Russia
today alongside a revival of
Stalin as a paragon, Kotkin
welcomes my asking him
how much of Stalin we
should see in Putin
today—and how much
of Stalin the current
Russian leader sees
in himself.
Old-school histo-
rian that he is, Kotkin
responds with a narrative.
“The way you have to begin
with this is with Russia’s
place in the world. How do you
get a figure like Stalin or Putin
in the first place?” The answer
lies in Russia’s aspiration “to have
a special mission in the world—
something that most people
attribute to its Byzantine heritage.”
Russia, in Russian eyes, is “not a
regular country, it’s a providen-
tial power that’s ordained
by God.”
This is where
the threat
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 133
from Putin springs. It’s very difficult to manage the proposition of Russian
power in the world, says Kotkin, when the “capacities of the Russian state
today, like the Soviet state before, are not always of the first rank.” They’re
economically modest and technologically mediocre, so they “look for ways to
compensate,” and subversion of competitors is an obvious, low-cost strategy.
Kotkin invites us to
ponder Putin’s options.
“The better they get at surveillance “We have a situation
and suppression of dissent, the less where a desire for a spe-
they know about their own society cial mission in the world
and what the people really think.” is the overriding orga-
nizational framework of
Russian national culture, and the Putin regime is the inheritor of this.” Putin
couldn’t possibly abandon Russia’s self-image and decide that his is going
to be “just another country,” the way France and Britain did, and Germany
and Japan were forced to do. Among major world powers today, Kotkin says,
“those countries that feel they’re destined under God to be special are really
only the US, China and Russia.”
Russia, it would seem, is providential yet impotent. “That’s why the Rus-
sians love the UN,” Kotkin says. “They have a veto on the Security Council.”
It is also why Russia today retains a state-led economy: “You use the state
to beat your people up, and the state also picks the winners and losers in the
marketplace.” Russia is beggaring itself, Kotkin believes, in relation to China,
but it’s staying afloat strategically “vis-à-vis the West because the West itself
is in disarray in a way that China is not. The United States is in a period you
can describe any way you wish, but it’s not one of vigorous global leadership.”
Russia appears to have
resigned itself to China’s
Russia sees itself not as “a regular inexorable rise. It has
country; it’s a providential power therefore turned its com-
that’s ordained by God.” petitive focus entirely on
the West. “Russia’s grand
strategy,” says Kotkin, “is Western collapse. Just wait it out. If the European
Union breaks up, if the US withdraws into itself and gives up all of its alli-
ances around the world, Russia has many fewer problems, and its relative-
power gap can narrow substantially.”
Putin’s modus operandi, Kotkin suggests, is to “enhance the process of
Western collapse. You can try to interfere in Western elections and support
disarray in the West, but ultimately only the West can destroy itself.”
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 135
He may not have any choice in the matter: “It’s not clear he can leave if
he wants to leave, because of the fact that he has narrowed the regime so
considerably.” Authoritarian regimes tend to become victims of their own
success. “The better they get at surveillance and suppression of dissent,”
Kotkin says, “the less they know about their own society and what the people
really think.” When authoritarian rulers first come to power, “they’re kind of
like umpires. There are many different powerful groups that have disputes
among themselves, and they turn to the leader to adjudicate.”
Entering his fourth term as president, Putin is no longer the arbiter over
a “scrum of competing interests, but is, instead, the leader of a single fac-
tion that controls all the power and all the wealth,” Kotkin says. This fac-
tion needs its protector to stick around so it can stay rich—and stay alive.
“There’s really no way for Putin to retire peacefully.”
Reprinted by permission of the Wall Street Journal. © 2018 Dow Jones &
Co. All rights reserved.
VALUES
Speaking Freely
Lose free speech, and lose our political freedom
too.
By Bruce S. Thornton
F
ree speech has come under attack on two fronts. Many unhappy
with Donald Trump’s election charge that Russia interfered on
his behalf by using social media such as Facebook and Twitter,
which should be held responsible for the content on their sites.
Meanwhile, some political activists and politicians are calling for a revision of
our free speech laws to prevent “hate speech” and “fake news” from polluting
the public square. Everybody complains about false or biased reporting that
distracts and confuses voters with disinformation and appeals to unsavory
emotions. One of the pillars of American exceptionalism, the right of citizens
to speak freely, no matter how rough or hateful their words, seems to be
tottering.
Twitter, Facebook, and Google executives have been hauled before Con-
gress to answer questions about the parts their businesses may have played
in supposed Russian electoral interference. According to the testimony of
these executives, Russian-sponsored Facebook ads reached 135 million Amer-
ican voters over thirty-two months, and the New York Times reports “more
than 126 million users potentially saw inflammatory political ads bought by
a Kremlin-linked company, the Internet Research Agency.” Many Congress
members from both parties have demanded to know what social media
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 137
companies will do to control the dissemination of questionable or hostile
information.
Similarly, even before the violent demonstrations by white supremacists
in Charlottesville, Virginia, last summer, critics were demanding a revision
of our First Amendment to make it resemble the laws in Europe that pro-
hibit “hate speech” and speech that attempts to “spread, incite, promote, or
justify hatred based on
intolerance.” The free
The founders recognized free speech marketplace of ideas,
as a natural right, not one granted by critics argue, in the age of
government. the Internet is no longer
adequate for sorting out
“legitimate” speech from hateful propaganda that, if left unchecked, could
lead to political tyranny, as happened in Germany under Nazism in the 1920s
and ’30s. The safety of the larger political community, they say, should take
precedence over the right of individual citizens to speak their minds.
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 139
Amendment often come from those on the multicultural left, who seek to
bar conservative speakers, prevent them from coming to campus, or disrupt
their speeches, often violently. As a result, the key institution of open political
deliberation is compromised, threatening the freedom of all.
Most important, the critics of democracy since the days of ancient Greece
have always used the offensiveness of free speech as a tool to restrict the
people’s right to use it. The argument is that the masses are poorly educated,
fickle, and guided by their selfish passions. Therefore, giving the power
of open deliberation to people who cannot transcend their intellectual or
moral weaknesses is dangerous, for they will be vulnerable to manipulative
demagogues.
During the presidential election, we heard a species of this argument from
both sides of the aisle. They claimed that many of Trump’s supporters, as
Hillary Clinton said frankly, are a “basket of deplorables. The racist, sexist,
homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.” Republicans opposed
to Trump were just as
dismissive. The constant
Without question, free speech has the comparisons of Trump
potential to make mischief. But it is to fascist leaders of the
also fundamental for holding elected 1930s by commentators
officials accountable to the laws and like Bret Stephens and
the people. Robert Kagan implied his
supporters were as gull-
ible, selfish, and irrational as the voters in Germany and Italy who helped put
Hitler and Mussolini into power.
The assumption behind this criticism is that the American people are not
intelligent or educated enough to use free speech properly, and so will end
up being misled by self-serving demagogues. Indeed, the current fears about
“fake news” and social media often are accompanied by a similar denigration
of the citizens.
A New York Times opinion article accuses the critics of social media
of scapegoating the tech companies for our sins: “Facebook and Twit-
ter are just a mirror, reflecting us. They reveal a society that is painfully
divided, gullible to misinformation, dazzled by sensationalism, and willing
to spread lies and promote hate. We don’t like this reflection, so we blame
the mirror, painting ourselves as victims of Silicon Valley manipulation.”
Echoing critics of democracy going back to ancient Athens, the writer
concludes, “The real crisis is Americans’ inability or unwillingness to sift
fact from fiction.”
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 141
Finally, for all the dangers of unregulated information on the Internet and
social media, we are better off today with our many options and variety of
voices. Our democracy has been strengthened by the breaking of the monop-
oly over political speech
exercised in the decades
Critics assume that the American after World War II, when
people are not intelligent or educated three television networks
enough to use free speech properly. and a few score national
newspapers controlled
information and decided what to talk about and how to talk about it. Today
we have a true marketplace of ideas, in which any citizen can easily access
multiple sources of information and opinions once available only to an elite
with the time and leisure to seek them out.
In the end, free people are responsible for judging the quality of informa-
tion and opinions upon which their political decisions are based and for
which they must be held accountable. Whether from good intentions or bad,
trying to shape people’s opinions by excluding or censoring information
diminishes political freedom and citizen autonomy, which has always been
the aim of despotism hard or soft.
REL I GI ON
Never Cry
“Islamophobia”
Societies learn and grow when they question,
challenge—even offend. Islamists are pressuring
free people to give up their most basic rights.
A
public event with the eminent
scientist and rationalist Rich- Key points
ard Dawkins was cancelled »» Silencing debate is not
only the pathway to censor-
late last year by a Berkeley
ship. It threatens the clos-
radio station. A representative of the station ing of the Western mind.
said Dawkins had “said things that I know »» Enlightenment thinkers
have hurt people,” a misleading allusion to wrote some of the most
pungent criticisms of Islam.
the atheist Dawkins’s forthright criticism
»» Guilty feelings and moral
of Islam, which, along with all religions, he relativism blind many in
regards as irrational. The station’s general the West from seeing why
their own values are worth
manager declared: “We believe that it is our
preserving.
free speech right not to participate with
»» Using the cry of “Islamo-
anyone who uses hateful or hurtful language phobia” to shut down dia-
against a community that is already under logue violates the interests
of Muslims themselves.
attack.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and founder of the
AHA Foundation. She is the author of The Challenge of Dawa: Political Islam
as Ideology and Movement and How to Counter It (Hoover Institution Press,
2017).
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 143
This was only one of a recent string of “disinvitations” of public figures on
North American college campuses. Since the violence at Charlottesville last
August, free speech has become a thorny subject. But all speech, no matter
how evil, is protected by the Constitution, even that of antifa activists and
white nationalists. The cliché that sunlight is the best disinfectant holds true:
by allowing such groups to express themselves in the open, we can clearly
see what they are saying, and, if we disagree, counter it.
I am among those who have been “deplatformed” for speaking critically
about the political and ideological aspects of Islam that are not compatible
with American values and human rights. The usual justification for disinvit-
ing us is that speaking critically of Islam is “hate speech” that is “hurtful” to
Muslims.
However, this use of the words “hate” and “hurt” to silence debate is con-
trary to the Western tradition of critical thinking. It is not hyperbolic to say
that this is the pathway to censorship and the closing of the Western mind.
(Admittedly, the original of this quotation does not bear Adams’s signature,
but Georgetown Professor Karine Walther, a reputable scholar, attributes it
to him, as have other scholars.)
Such ideas were commonplace at the time of the American Revolution, not
least because they originated with the Enlightenment authors the founding
fathers read. “It is a misfortune to human nature,” wrote Baron de Mon-
tesquieu, “when religion is given by a conqueror. The Mahometan religion,
which speaks only by the sword, acts still upon men with that destructive
spirit with which it was founded.”
The great Scottish
skeptic David Hume
observed caustically Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy
that the Quran “bestows Adams, and Mark Twain would all be
praise on such instances “deplatformed” on American cam-
of treachery, inhumanity, puses today.
cruelty, revenge, bigotry,
as are utterly incompatible with civilized society.” His French counterpart
Voltaire was in the same camp. “That a camel-merchant [Muhammad] . . .
delivers his country to iron and flame; that he cuts the throats of fathers and
kidnaps daughters; that he gives to the defeated the choice of his religion or
death: this is assuredly nothing any man can excuse.”
Perhaps the “no platform” movement would argue that what happened in
the eighteenth century should stay in the eighteenth century. But more-mod-
ern authors have committed the same offense of “hate speech.” Take Twain,
who is well loved today for his anti-imperialism. “When I, a thoughtful and
unblessed Presbyterian, examine the Koran,” Twain wrote in his Christian
Science, “I know that beyond any question every Mohammedan is insane; not
in all things, but in religious matters.”
Or how about George Bernard Shaw, in other respects a hero on the
left? “There was to be no nonsense about toleration” in Islam, wrote
Shaw in a 1933 letter. “You accepted Allah or you had your throat cut by
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 145
someone who did accept him, and who went to Para-
dise for having sent you to Hell.” I doubt there would
be an invitation, much less a disinvitation, for Shaw at
Berkeley today.
A Conservative for most of his career, Winston
Churchill remains the most famous British prime minister
on both sides of the Atlantic. But he, too, would surely be
deplatformed for writing this in his account of the British
campaign in Sudan in the late 1890s:
All of them are dead white males of Christian heritage, you may say. But
would you also disinvite Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey?
“Islam,” he once declared in an interview, “this theology of an immoral
Arab—is a dead thing. Possibly it might have suited tribes in the desert. It is
no good for a modern, progressive state. God’s revelation! There is no God!”
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 147
EQUAL SCRUTINY FOR ALL?
These quotations illustrate a simple point: societies since the Enlightenment
have progressed because of their willingness to question sacred cows, to
foster critical thinking and rational debate. Societies that blindly respect old
hierarchies and established ways of thinking, that privilege traditional norms
and cower from giving offense, have not produced the same intellectual dyna-
mism as Western civilization.
Innovation and progress happened precisely in those places where per-
ceived “offense” and “hurt feelings” were not regarded as sufficient to stifle
critical thinking. Deplatforming thinkers like Dawkins today is thus a betray-
al of the values of the Enlightenment.
It’s all the sadder that the censorship we are seeing on American campuses
and in the public domain is self-imposed. The latest in the growing body of
literature on this subject is Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe.
Murray chronicles Europe’s lack of civilizational self-confidence and inability
to perpetuate its core values. Murray argues that European culture cannot
survive its current bout of “civilizational tiredness” without suffering major
and permanent damage to core European values. Blinded by historical guilt
and moral relativism, Europeans are increasingly willing to elevate other
cultural values above their own, to the point of being unable to see why their
own values are worth preserving.
Perhaps the most glaring illustration of Murray’s point is the reluctance
to subject the political and religious views of immigrants to the same scru-
tiny and critical debate
applied to Western values.
The true harm comes from withdraw- This is the very point
ing the intellectual tools, such as criti- Dawkins made in his
cal thinking and rational debate, that response to the cancel-
many Muslims crave. lation of his Californian
event. “Why,” he asked,
“is it fine to criticize Christianity but not Islam? . . . I am known as a frequent
critic of Christianity and have never been deplatformed for that. Why do you
give Islam a free pass?”
In a similar way, some progressives in the United States today refuse to
acknowledge the difference between Islam as a spiritual belief system (rely-
ing on fasting, dietary restrictions, cleanliness, prayer) and the political and
repressive system of Islamism that seeks to impose sharia on society. Com-
mitted atheists and ex-Muslims like myself have no problem with the spiri-
tual belief system that Muslims choose to follow. We do, however, oppose the
INDIFFERENT CENSORS
Should these questions be postponed until everyone feels emotionally com-
fortable talking about them? Or are there reasons to hold these challenging
conversations now? I would argue that the increasing incidence of Islamist
terrorist attacks in the past couple of years means we must debate these
issues today.
Whether Islamist violence is perpetrated by new immigrants or estab-
lished citizens, the isolation and ghettoization of Muslims (and especially
Muslim women) in Europe and, increasingly, in the United States, creates an
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 149
environment where Islamist advocacy is permissible and sometimes sup-
ported by communities. And yet to point this out—to say that the rights of
Muslim women are being curtailed—is denounced as “Islamophobia” by self-
styled progressives.
Attempts to silence dissenting voices, particularly on college campuses,
have gotten so out of hand that some state legislators are developing laws
to safeguard First Amendment rights at public universities. Such laws are
already on the books in Colorado, Tennessee, Utah, and Virginia—and other
states, including California, are considering them as well. One law, passed
last year in North Carolina, prohibits college administrators from disinviting
controversial speakers. It seems almost comical, and certainly tragic, that
state governments feel the need to enshrine good manners in law.
Disinviting anyone to speak is of course bad manners, but in the Dawkins
case and so many others, it also represents a clumsy attempt at censorship.
The practice of deplatforming must end, not just for the sake of politeness
but for critical thinking. Free thought, free speech, and a free press were at
the core of Western civilization’s success.
However uncomfortable free speech about Islam may be for some people,
enforcing silence on the subject will do nothing to help those who are genu-
inely oppressed—above all the growing number of Muslim dissidents around
the world whose courageous questioning of their own faith risks death at the
hands of the very Islamists whose feelings progressives are so desperate not
to hurt.
H I STORY AN D CULT UR E
Making Countries
Great Again
What made America great in the first place, and
what threatens that greatness today.
I
s President Trump’s slogan
Key points
“make America great again”
»» Britain and America both de-
mere campaign rhetoric in the fied history’s norms of tribalism,
tradition of Barack Obama’s theocracy, and sectarianism.
“hope and change,” George H. W. »» Renewal focuses on investing
more than consuming, limiting
Bush’s “kinder, gentler nation,” and
bureaucracies and entitlements,
Ronald Reagan’s “morning in Amer- and avoiding costly optional wars.
ica”? Or do such renaissances really »» Greatness also requires pre-
occur in history? serving the rule of law, enshrin-
ing meritocracy, and nourishing
The Roman republic and empire national pride while making sure
together lasted for more than a citizens are equal under the law.
thousand years. Yet at various times »» Every generation must choose
whether to unite around an ideal
throughout this period, Rome was
that transcends class, race, and
declared finished—for example, regional divides.
Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the
Hoover Institution and the chair of Hoover’s Working Group on the Role of Military
History in Contemporary Conflict. He is the recipient of the 2018 Edmund Burke
Award, which honers those who have made major contributions to the defense of
Western civilization. His latest book is The Second World Wars: How the First
Global Conflict Was Fought and Won (Basic Books, 2017).
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 151
during the Punic Wars (264–146 BC), the civil wars of the late republic
(49–31 BC), and the coups and cruelty of the twelve caesars (49 BC–AD
96), especially during the reigns of Caligula, Nero, and Domitian. Infla-
tion, revolts, barbarian invasions, corruption, and decadence were seen
as insurmountable problems. Witnesses such as Livy, Tacitus, Petronius,
and Suetonius all recorded that the Rome of their generation was simply
too corrupt to continue. As Livy famously put it in the introduction to
his massive history of Rome, written almost five hundred years before
its eventual implosion, “We can bear neither our diseases nor their
remedies.”
In fact, throughout
the centuries of these
By late 1916, Britain seemed on the serial crises, Rome usu-
brink. The French and British armies ally found ways to bear
were being bled white at the Somme the necessary remedies.
and Verdun. Often, it was saved
through the intervention
of exceptional generals like Scipio Africanus. Sometimes, stabilizing figures
such as Augustus sought a moral revival. Effective rulers such as those
whom Niccolò Machiavelli called the “five good emperors”—Nerva, Trajan,
Hadrian, Antonius Pius, and Marcus Aurelius—gave the world a hundred
years of calm prosperity between AD 96 and 192. The magisterial Edward
Gibbon described their century as an era when “the condition of the human
race was most happy and prosperous.”
Amid radically changing times, with novel internal and external enemies,
Roman institutions and culture persisted. The rule of law, transparent
administration, and habeas corpus flourished alongside clean water, good
roads, sewage removal, and the professionalism of the Roman legions. Rome
endured for a millennium as it went through cycles of decline, recovery, and
efflorescence.
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 153
AMERICA REBOUNDS
The same holds true of the United States—another flexible republican idea
wedded to the rule of law and antithetical to history’s norms of tribalism,
theocracy, and sectarianism.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, an exhausted and dissolute America was said
to have reached “peak oil” and soon would become near bankrupt, importing
all its energy needs. Ronald Reagan, however, claimed it was actually “morn-
ing in America” after growing the economy at 7 percent between November
1983 and 1984 and facing down the “evil” Soviet empire.
During the past decade, experts have declared that the US economy will
likely never again achieve 3 percent per annum economic growth, given an
aging population,
globalization, and
National and collective decline among the rise of entitle-
constitutional societies such as ours is ments. Americans
almost always a choice, not a fate. were, instead, to
adjust to an “era of
limits” and to forget ideas that they were an “exceptional people.”
That pessimism was not new, instead echoing past existential crises such
as the Civil War, two world wars, the Great Depression, and other financial
meltdowns. Postwar Americans had been warned in the 1950s that Soviet-
style communism would sweep the Third World and bury the West. In the
1980s, Americans were to defer to the superior economic model of Japan
Inc., which soon would take over the world. Then the next colossus was said
to be the European Union’s transnational democratic socialism of the 1990s.
Now, it is the supposed fated dominance of twenty-first-century communist-
capitalist China.
In all of these cases, the flawed assumption was that the US Constitution;
a free market tradition of entrepreneurial capitalism; a multiracial people
united through the assimilative melting pot; and federalism under the banner
of e pluribus unum were either passé or ossified ideas. People thought the
days of an America with a booming stock market, an energized manufactur-
ing and industrial sector, plentiful and affordable gas and oil, and a world-
dominant tech industry were over.
Yet as 2018 began, the United States had become the largest producer
of gas, oil, and coal in history. The economy is growing at a 3 percent
rate—and unemployment may dip below 4 percent, even though some
commentators have claimed over the past decade that it likely would
never fall below 5 percent again. The auto, steel, manufacturing, financial,
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 155
state of tribal solidarities and prejudices. There is always a choice whether to
abide by the Constitution or to warp it.
We are always pondering whether to liberate the American economy or to
nationalize it, and whether to honor or be ashamed of our icons of the past.
Can an often second-guessing, apologetic, and overly litigious America still
feel confident that it can be good enough without having to be perfect?
Every nation’s next generation must decide whether to leave behind a
country better than the one it inherited. And sometimes, the resulting
choices can re-energize or squander their collective inheritance.
H OOVER A RCHIVE S
A Window on the
Soviet Breakup
It was the biggest purge, and the last, in post-
Stalin Russia. The “Cotton Affair” was a tale of
corruption and frustrated power that preoccupied
the dying Soviet Union and presaged its end.
T
he “Uzbek Cotton Affair,” the largest purge in the post-Stalinist
Soviet Union, offers a useful lens through which to interpret the
Soviet collapse and see how perestroika changed the Soviet system,
especially the relationship between the center and the periphery.
This episode during the final years of the Soviet era was a drawn-out judicial
and political imbroglio that grew out of falsified cotton production data and
corruption. It involved 58,000 party and state officials—20,000 of whom were
criminally charged—in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. This long period
(1983–89) of mass purges and criminal cases makes up a relatively obscure but
highly charged episode of historical significance in late Soviet history.
Scholars focusing on the Soviet Union and Russia lately have turned their
attention to the centenary of the 1917 October Revolution, which brought
the Bolsheviks to power. Also important to history is perestroika, the
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 157
KING COTTON: Under the Soviet system, cotton was identified as a strategic
sector in Cold War competition, crucial to building “communism in twenty
years.” Uzbekistan moved heavily into cotton monoculture, providing the
material for not only robust, cheap textiles but military products as well. [Max
Penson]
H O O V ER D IG E S T • S u m m er 2018 159
ECOCIDE: A satellite photo shows the extreme shrinkage of the Aral Sea,
which was drained amid extensive cultivation of cotton, a notoriously thirsty
crop. The dry Aral lakebed continues to be responsible for releasing salt and
pesticides into the air, causing many reports of health problems. [NASA]
being accused of colluding with the Uzbek “mafia.” Public opinion threatened
the credibility of Gorbachev, the legitimacy of the party and the state, and the
Soviet Union’s survival in a time of freedom of increasing information and
debate, important changes, and great internal challenges.
The roots of the episode reached back several decades, when, after Stalin’s
years of terror, the
Soviet system assumed
a more peaceful, decen- Eventually the Soviet demands for
tralized, and inclusive Uzbek cotton became unsustainable.
nature. Encouraged by Corruption and environmental disas-
increasing indigenization ter ensued.
of cadres, the system
began to rely on party officials (patrons) using public resources to secure the
loyalty of local elites (clients). This posture was particularly evident during
the long reign (1959–83) of Sharaf Rashidov, first secretary of the Communist
Party of Uzbekistan, who turned Uzbekistan into a “cotton republic” provid-
ing Moscow planners more than 60 percent of the total Soviet production
of “white gold.” In fact, cotton was identified as a strategic sector in Cold
War competition and for building “communism in twenty years.” It was not
only key to producing robust, cheap textiles but was largely absorbed by the
military industry to produce gunpowder and even propellant for ballistic
missiles.
Responding to increasing demand from Moscow, the Uzbek republic
improved cotton monoculture and in 1959–81 more than doubled production,
concentrating much of its budget on plans for irrigation and mechanization.
In the mid-1970s, more than twenty thousand square kilometers, an area
roughly the size of New Jersey, was under intense cotton cultivation.
The unintended consequences of cotton monoculture for society and the
environment were dramatic. Intensive production of cotton served to rural-
ize Uzbek society, separating the largely rural Uzbeks from the urban Slavic
settlers, while annually exposing millions of field workers (including thou-
sands of children) to toxic agents—fertilizers, pesticides, and defoliants—
with catastrophic consequences for public health and the environment. The
ecocide of the Aral Sea became the most dramatic and evident consequence
of the cotton fever. Yet in the tenth five-year plan (1976–81), Soviet planners
demanded an annual production of six million tons of raw cotton from Tash-
kent—a demand that seemed physically impossible. However, reaching this
target at any cost was a matter of political stability, legitimacy, and survival
for the Uzbek ruling elite at local and central levels. Thus during this period
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 161
systemic corruption spread from the collective farms to the Central Commit-
tee in an attempt to cover the inefficiencies of the planned production and
falsify production data.
H O O V ER D IG E S T • S u m m er 2018 163
A REDEFINITION: Uzbek President Islam Karimov dances alongside then–
prime minister Shavkat Mirziyoyev (the current Uzbek president) during
independence day celebrations in August 2007. Karimov (1938–2016) ini-
tially appeared on the scene as a peacemaker, a go-between to balance Uzbek
interests and Moscow’s demands. Eventually he characterized Moscow’s
prosecution of the Cotton Affair as “colonial,” “repression,” “terror,” and even
“genocide.” [Shamil Zhumatov—Reuters]
the purges to the whole party nomenklatura and the state apparatus and
posthumously condemning Rashidov as the main culprit of the affair. The
former leader—previously a symbol of integration within the Soviet sys-
tem—was now considered a mobster and the main scapegoat of the stagna-
tion, corruption, and economic and political failure of the republic, and his
memory condemned.
The process of “de-Rashidovization” was not merely symbolic. It affected
all the power structures that in previous decades had dominated the repub-
lican political scenario. Afterward, the Central Committee of the Soviet
Communist Party advanced the krasnyi desant (red paratroopers) campaign.
These “party reinforcements” led by Moscow consisted of several hundred
Slavic officials “exported” to Uzbekistan to heal the corrupted situation and
directly govern the republic, replacing local cadres in key posts. The reversal
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 165
THE NATIONALIST CARD: A soldier stands guard in front of a portrait of Islam
Karimov after the Uzbek leader died in September 2016. Karimov’s view of
Uzbek identity became an ideological pillar of the post-Soviet state, compar-
ing the nation to other newly independent states in the nonaligned move-
ment. In fact, Karimov reiterated the old Soviet system, preserving its authori-
tarian and centralist characteristics. [Alexei Druzhinin—TASS]
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 167
old regime in a renewed style to justify an ornamental transition to a post-
Soviet republic—and to consolidate his power.
The self-serving narrative gave Karimov the chance to renegotiate the role,
rights, and redistributive quotas of Uzbekistan within the Soviet system in
1989–91, to justify secession in 1991, and finally after independence to create
a solid basis of identity.
It became an ideological
As the affair unfolded, leaders fell all pillar that represented
across Central Asia. post-Soviet Uzbekistan
as a postcolonial entity
comparable with other newly independent states in the nonaligned move-
ment. In the following decades, the Uzbek president and his Mustaqillik
ideology reiterated the old Soviet system, preserving the same authoritarian
and centralist characteristics, while the republic still struggles to find its own
national and post-Soviet identity.
It is necessary when reconstructing the political history of the late Soviet
era to go beyond party-oriented perspectives. The collections of the Hoover
Institution Library & Archives make it possible to study sensitive issues of
the late Soviet era—such as NGOs, civil society organizations, and Uzbek
opposition groups during the late 1980s and early 1990s—in a free, safe, and
challenging environment. They also offer myriad documents, papers, news-
paper articles, and reports on the transitions of Uzbekistan and other former
Soviet republics, offering a more comprehensive picture of the role and
perception of civil society in the late Soviet era.
The next challenge for historians is overcoming such divergences between
evidence, official storytelling, and popular perceptions of perestroika—and
even of the Soviet experience in general—while trying to find firm facts. The
Cotton Affair remains a good starting point for further research into the
Soviet collapse.
H OOVER A RCHIVE S
Empire on Trial
Seventy years ago in Tokyo, Foreign Minister
Mamoru Shigemitsu stood accused of “waging
aggressive war.” His documents and sketches
enhance a Hoover collection that gives historians
a seat in that courtroom.
M
amoru Shigemitsu (1887–1957), a career diplomat who rose
to top positions in the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
during the Asia-Pacific War (1931–45), appears in one of
the most famous images of the Second World War. Attired
in formal dark suit, white gloves, top hat, and cane, he leads a delegation of
defeated Japanese officials and signs the Instrument of Surrender on the
deck of the battleship Missouri, moored in Tokyo Bay, on September 2, 1945.
Shigemitsu also was among the wartime Japanese leaders whom the Inter-
national Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE, 1946–48) found guilty
of aggression and atrocities. The Hoover Institution Library & Archives has
long been home to a vast collection of IMTFE materials, which include a
complete set of the transcripts of court proceedings, court exhibits, and volu-
minous internal records of the International Prosecution Section. Shigemitsu
becomes more prominent in the Hoover holdings this year with the digitiza-
tion of the newly acquired “Shigemitsu Mamoru Sketch Books,” which join
the existing IMTFE collections.
David Cohen is the director of the WSD Handa Center for Human Rights and In-
ternational Justice, WSD Handa Professor in Human Rights and International Jus-
tice, and professor of classics at Stanford University. Yuma Totani, a visiting fellow
at the Hoover Institution, is a professor of history at the University of Hawaii.
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 169
DEFEAT IN TOKYO: The Japanese delegation, led by Foreign Minister
Mamoru Shigemitsu, in formal suit, top hat, and white gloves, prepares for the
surrender ceremony aboard the battleship Missouri on September 2, 1945.
(Shigemitsu walked with a cane and an artificial leg after being wounded in a
1932 bomb attack by a Korean independence activist.) Shigemitsu, who had
filled many top posts in the imperial Japanese government, including ambas-
sador to the Soviet Union and Great Britain, was put on trial the year after
Japan surrendered. He would keep a diary and draw sketches of the historic
tribunal that was convened to try him and Japan’s other top wartime leaders.
[US National Archives and Records Administration, Army Signal Corps Collection]
The new digital collection hosts some one hundred and fifty pages of
sketches that Shigemitsu drew while observing the two-year court proceedings
from the defendants’ dock at the IMTFE courtroom in Tokyo. He depicts in his
small sketchbooks, in quick pencil work, his impressions of witnesses, judges,
members of the prosecution, defense attorneys, and other court personnel. He
portrays some individuals in a comical manner, others with realism, suggesting
varying states of mind as he rendered his impressions of courtroom events.
For instance, Shigemitsu developed the habit of depicting Sir William F.
Webb, the member from Australia and the president of the Tokyo tribunal, as
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 171
the surrender. It remains a matter of controversy whether the Allied powers
should have put Hirohito on trial.
SHARED GUILT
Shigemitsu and his co-accused faced as many as fifty-five counts of various
offenses, but Shigemitsu appears to have been relatively unconcerned, at
least at first, about the gravity of the case against him. Three circumstances
may explain his seeming lack of concern.
First, he knew he had not been in the initial list of defendants. His name
was added at the last minute, upon urging of the Soviet prosecution team.
This knowledge appears to have given Shigemitsu a measure of confidence
that the prosecution had named him hastily and might not have a well-devel-
oped case against him.
Second, Shigemitsu had a fair number of friends and sympathizers in the
West, some of whom offered favorable evidence concerning his wartime
diplomatic service. For instance, John Powell, formerly a news correspondent
reporting from Shanghai, offered extensive testimony on brutality of the
Japanese military police but singled out Shigemitsu (who was ambassador to
China in 1930–32) as a committed pacifist who did not belong in the dock.
Third, Shigemitsu appeared confident about his innocence not only of
“aggressive war” charges but also of war crimes. In a diary he kept dur-
ing the Tokyo Trial, he recorded that as the prosecution showed, he had
the capacity as foreign minister (1943–45) to receive inquiries and protests
regarding Japanese mistreatment of Allied prisoners of war. He put the army
authorities on inquiry notice on such occasions, only to receive in reply a flat
denial that prisoners of war were being abused. “This did not satisfy me,”
Shigemitsu wrote. “At last, I appealed directly to His Majesty the Emperor,
who admonished the army strictly.” Shigemitsu’s thinking appears to be that
he could not be held liable, given that he did everything in his power to rec-
tify the situation, including seeking the emperor’s intervention.
H O O V ER D IG E S T • S u m m er 2018 173
BENIGN JUSTICE: A comical, smiling face floats at the top of a page from one
of Shigemitsu’s sketch books. It represents Sir William F. Webb, the member
from Australia and the president of the Tokyo tribunal, and appeared often
among the defendant’s sketches. Oddly, Webb is often characterized in histor-
ical accounts as ill-tempered and contrarian. Moreover, his conclusions about
Shigemitsu’s culpability were less than favorable to the defendant. [Hoover
Institution Archives, Shigemitsu Mamoru Sketch Books]
Shigemitsu appears to have felt less sure about the strength of his case over
time, however, especially with regard to charges of war crimes. On February
10, 1948, the tribunal received oral evidence from Tadakatsu Suzuki, a defense
witness and Shigemitsu’s wartime subordinate. This witness attested that
prisoner-of-war affairs fell outside the jurisdiction of the Foreign Ministry but
that, deeply concerned about the protests, Foreign Minister Shigemitsu had
taken steps to verify facts and put pressure on the government and military
colleagues. Suzuki also testified that Shigemitsu took up the matter with the
Supreme Council for the Direction of the War, the highest-level policy mak-
ing body of the Japanese government during the Koiso cabinet (1944–45). He
stated that as a result, there was a degree of improvement in prisoner-of-war
H O O V ER D IG E S T • S u m m e r 2018 175
KEY FIGURE: Among the most well-known defendants in the Tokyo trial was
General Hideki Tojo, prime minister and army minister for much of the 1941–
44 period. Tojo (center, wearing headphones) was prime minister when Japan
attacked the US fleet at Pearl Harbor, triggering the American entry into the
war, and was deeply involved in Japanese actions for the duration of the war.
He tried to kill himself after Japan surrendered, but his wound was not fatal;
as he was being treated, he told reporters, “I wait for the righteous judgment
of history.” After he recovered, he too was put on trial. The military tribunal
sentenced Tojo to hang, and executed him on December 23, 1948. [US National
Archives and Records Administration]
CROSS-EXAMINED: Tadakatsu Suzuki, sketched at right, was formerly chief
of the Bureau in Charge of Japanese Nationals in Enemy Nations and reported
to Shigemitsu during the latter’s tenure as foreign minister. His testimony first
supported his former boss’s account but then undermined it. Shigemitsu wrote
in his diary, “Truth be told, the one who struggled the most on prisoner-of-war
affairs was myself.” [Hoover Institution Archives, Shigemitsu Mamoru Sketch Books]
With a tone of regret, Shigemitsu wrote in his diary that, “Truth be told, the
one who struggled the most on prisoner-of-war affairs was myself,” and that, as
a matter of fact, he did bring up the matter to the cabinet repeatedly. Suzuki,
however, was uninformed of this fact. Shigemitsu had bypassed him by not
ordering him to prepare a written brief, and instead raised the issue with the
cabinet directly and orally. Suzuki’s testimony was left to stand nonetheless, as
Shigemitsu did not take the stand himself. Nor did the defense call any further
witnesses on his behalf. It is hardly surprising, then, that Suzuki’s testimony
materially affected the verdict of the Tokyo Tribunal, to which we now turn.
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 177
opinion of the Dutch judge, B. V. A. Roeling, for example, portrays Shigemitsu
as a diplomat who worked for peace and hence should have been acquitted.
In light of Shigemitsu’s own account of his role, how did the majority judg-
ment justify conviction on these charges?
Unfortunately, the majority judgment did not extensively review the evidence
on which it based its legal conclusions and verdicts. This was particularly the
case in regard to war crimes charges as opposed to crimes against peace. The
tribunal found that Shigemitsu, as foreign minister, had received continuous
information from foreign governments from 1943 to 1945 about the mistreatment
of prisoners and civilian internees. The majority also found that Shigemitsu
The majority thus convicted Shigemitsu for war crimes on the basis of what
he failed to do, a culpable omission, rather than for any actual conduct.
Shigemitsu claimed that he had, in fact, acted affirmatively, but because he
refused to testify on his own behalf this evidence never came before the court.
Now we return to the unpublished draft judgment of the president of the
IMTFE, Sir William F. Webb, which cast a different light on Shigemitsu’s
liability for war crimes. Webb had prepared the draft as a majority judgment,
but it was rejected, certainly in part because of Webb’s uncompromising
stance on the responsibility of Emperor Hirohito as the ultimate source of
actual authority in wartime Japan. Webb focused in greater depth on the
actual conduct of the accused, the nature of the information available to
them, and the evidence of what they must have known.
In regard to Shigemitsu, Webb examined the evidence that he both had
knowledge and also participated in some affirmative way. Webb provided a much
fuller analysis than did the majority. He noted that Shigemitsu as foreign minister
received repeated protests about the treatment of POWs. Webb documented how
Shigemitsu not only had knowledge of mistreatment (or at the very least sufficient
information to put him on inquiry notice) but also responded to Allied queries
and protests with false information and refusals to allow visits to relevant camps.
Webb gave multiple examples of such conduct and adduced Japanese government
documents that clearly demonstrated the falsehood of Shigemitsu’s replies.
Webb concluded that Shigemitsu’s knowing provision of false information
involved more than a failure to prevent—it inferred an acquiescence in the
criminal activities. It was on this basis that Webb justified the conviction on
war crimes charges.
The majority acquitted Shigemitsu on the first count, conspiracy to wage
aggressive war, because by the time he became foreign minister in 1943 “the
policy of the conspirators to wage certain wars of aggression had been settled
and was in the course of execution. Thereafter there was no further formula-
tion of that policy.” This conclusion was puzzling. The judgment indicated
Shigemitsu was aware of the aggressive policies—he advised against some of
them—but he nonetheless accepted the position of foreign minister, for which
the majority convicted him of waging wars of aggression starting in 1943. That
would seem to compel a conviction on the conspiracy charge as well. Indeed,
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m er 2018 179
WAS HE RESPONSIBLE?: A snapshot shows Shigemitsu around 1946. Con-
victed in 1948 by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, he was
sentenced to seven years in prison but was paroled in 1950. Soon he returned
to politics and government. He was foreign minister again in 1956 when Japan
formally applied for membership in the United Nations. Shigemitsu died in
1957 at the age of sixty-nine. [Copyright unknown, Harry S. Truman Library & Museum]
the court’s findings spelled out that “all of those who at any time were parties
to the conspiracy or who at any time played a part in its execution are guilty
of the charge contained in Count 1.” It is difficult to see how the majority, using
this definition, could find him not guilty under the conspiracy count.
Webb’s draft, again, cast a different light on Shigemitsu’s role through its much
more thorough examination of the evidence. For instance, as ambassador to
Great Britain, Shigemitsu sent telegrams after the outbreak of war in Europe,
advising Tokyo on how to take advantage of the German conquest of European
colonial powers. Shigemitsu’s telegram of August 5, 1940, cited in Webb’s draft,
conveys the importance of such evidence in assessing Shigemitsu’s liability:
Special to the Hoover Digest. The Hoover Institution Library & Archives
extends its gratitude to the Shigemitsu Mamoru Memorial Museum and
the Shigemitsu family for making the sketch books available to the public.
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 181
On the Cover
T
his 1918 recruiting poster from the Hoover Archives touches on
a turning point in the history of the United States Marine Corps.
While reminding the potential recruit that the Corps is “first to
fight,” it gives no hint of the baptism of fire the Marines expe-
rienced in June of that year. That was when elements of the Fourth Marine
Brigade, attached to the American Expeditionary Force and fighting in sup-
port of British and French troops, entered a thicket called Belleau Wood.
The battle came after the Spring Offensive, the last great German cam-
paign of World War I, had sputtered to a halt. General Erich Ludendorff
tried to force the Allies into an armistice. Newly freed of its second front by
Russia’s withdrawal from the war, Germany finally saw its chance to pour
significant forces into the stagnant Western Front. Seasoned troops surged
ahead against the exhausted Allies. The Germans did gain significant terri-
tory, which ultimately they could not hold, but Ludendorff failed to compel
the Allies to offer terms. Meanwhile, American troops were arriving in
significant numbers at last. The Allies would counterattack.
It was June 6 when Marine infantry advanced on German lines, exhibit-
ing fearsome discipline and marksmanship. Nonetheless, the Marine Corps
suffered more casualties at Belleau Wood than it had in its entire previous
history—some 1,100 dead or wounded on the first day. Three weeks of vicious
fighting ensued: bayonets, knives, hand-to-hand combat. But the German
road to Paris was blocked.
Fast-talking Chicago newsman Floyd Gibbons, whose left eye was shot out
during the battle, sent back a colorful account that helped cement the legend
of Belleau Wood. His dispatch also let slip that he was with the Marines—
a breach of wartime censorship that only added to the Corps’ luster back
home. The fighting was so fierce that even Gibbons earned an award for
valor, France’s Croix de Guerre.
Belleau Wood made several pithy contributions to Marine lore. There
was Captain Lloyd Williams, warned by the French to turn back, replying,
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2018 183
Board of Overseers
Chair Arthur E. Hall
Joel C. Peterson Everett J. Hauck
W. Kurt Hauser
Vice Chairs Warner W. Henry
Paul Lewis “Lew” Davies III Kenneth A. Hersh
Mary Myers Kauppila Heather R. Higgins
Hank J. Holland
Members Allan Hoover III
Katherine H. Alden Margaret Hoover
Neil R. Anderson Philip Hudner
Barbara Barrett Gail A. Jaquish
John F. Barrett William E. Jenkins
Robert G. Barrett Charles B. Johnson
Donald R. Beall Franklin P. Johnson Jr.
Peter B. Bedford Mark Chapin Johnson
Peter S. Bing John Jordan
Walter E. Blessey Jr. Steve Kahng
Joanne Whittier Blokker Richard Kovacevich
William K. Blount Allen J. Lauer
James J. Bochnowski Howard H. Leach
Jerome V. “Jerry” Bruni Walter Loewenstern Jr.
James J. Carroll III Howard W. Lutnick
Robert H. Castellini Hamid Mani
James W. Davidson Frank B. Mapel
Herbert M. Dwight James D. Marver
Jeffrey A. Farber Craig O. McCaw
Henry A. Fernandez David McDonald
Carly Fiorina Harold “Terry” McGraw III
James E. Forrest Mary G. Meeker
Stephen B. Gaddis Roger S. Mertz
Samuel L. Ginn Harold M. “Max” Messmer Jr.
Michael W. Gleba Jeremiah Milbank III
Cynthia Fry Gunn Mitchell J. Milias
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