Almost all political experts and pundits underestimated the support that Donald Trump could attract within the Republican Party. But years ago, a small group of political scientists studying authoritarianism published research that forecast the rise of a candidate just like Trump.
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The Republican party, for the past several months, has been struggling with an increasingly urgent disaster.
Its presidential primary has been hijacked by a bellowing, marmalade-toned demagogue who, despite his electrifying effect on a large swathe of Republican primary voters, has the worst favorability ratings ever measured for a national political candidate: Donald J. Trump.
Trump’s abysmal national polling will probably ensure a crushing defeat for the GOP in November. But the voters who have thrilled to his candidacy aren’t going away, and they will continue to shape the Republican party for years to come. They are the American authoritarians, a newly coalesced Republican constituency. And this primary has shown that they are now too powerful for the party to manage — and too significant for it to ignore.
Donald Trump’s bewildering rise offers a hint of the ways in which authoritarianism could reshape American politics. The party’s failed attempts to stop Trump have revealed that he is just a particularly telegenic manifestation of a divide within the party that is far deeper and more complex than anyone realized. It is a problem that, if left unsolved, could keep the Republican party out of the White House for a generation or more — and dramatically affect American politics.
The party has known for years that it needs to change, but it was wrong about the scope of its problems. In 2012, the Republican National Committee commissioned a “postmortem” of the party’s failure in that year’s election. Its findings were stark. If the party wanted to remain nationally viable, it had to improve its outreach to minorities and women.
“Unless the RNC gets serious about tackling this problem,” the report warned, “we will lose future elections.”
Now, four years later, the rise of Donald Trump has revealed that the challenge the GOP is facing is far, far worse than it had feared. The party is so alienated from its voters that it has lost control of its own presidential primary. A broad swathe of those voters are drawn to positions that make the party unable to form a broader national coalition. Their hostility toward Latino immigration, for instance, repulses Latino voters — the largest minority group in America.
The Republican electorate is deeply divided, riven by a fault line that neither party elites nor outside observers saw until Trump exposed it. That fault line, little-noticed until now, is the emerging divide between Republican voters as we traditionally understand them and a class of voters that political scientists describe as “authoritarians.”
Trump supporters are typically portrayed in the media as a kind of intra-GOP, anti-establishment revolt, or perhaps just people in thrall to a charismatic television star — a Trump personality cult rather than a genuine political constituency. But authoritarians are more than that: a distinct and newly coalesced class of voters who share a particular set of motivations, preoccupations, and policy preferences.
Their numbers have been growing within the GOP for decades. Until Trump, no candidate has run a campaign so perfectly designed to cater to authoritarians’ concerns. But his campaign has offered them the prospect of a new kind of politics, tailored directly to their concerns, and taught them that they can demand as much from other candidates in the future. And it has also given ambitious politicians a blueprint for successfully tapping into the authoritarian electorate.
That is a problem for the GOP, because success with authoritarians will likely mean failure elsewhere. Authoritarians are drawn to harsh, punitive policies like border walls and religious tests for immigration, and to strongmen leaders like Trump that alienate more moderate voters. And so if the party cannot find a way to overcome the authoritarians’ influence, the White House will remain a lost cause for the GOP.
Their impact is likely to extend well beyond just the 2016 candidacy of Donald Trump, changing American politics in ways we are only beginning to feel.
The Republican party thought, in 2012, that its challenge would be to expand its coalition of voters enough to make the party nationally viable again. But it turns out to be facing an even worse and more urgent problem: the coalition it already has.
That coalition is dividing in two, split between Republicans as we typically know them — social conservatives who believe in small government, low taxes, and limited regulation — and a newly active block of voters known as authoritarians, defined not by demographics but by psychological profile. Authoritarians are hostile to outgroups and embrace aggressive, punitive policies toward them, including harsh anti-immigration laws and aggressive, militaristic foreign policy. But they aren’t particularly interested in the traditional Republican economic agenda. Indeed, they’re uninterested in tax cuts, protective of entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, and skeptical of foreign trade.
The GOP is essentially now two parties in a shaky, contentious coalition. These two factions want different policies and different kinds of politics. Their split has made the 2016 GOP primary one of the strangest and most shocking political developments in a generation, but there is more to come.
The authoritarians, in the coming years, will not break the GOP, but they will deeply alter its electoral politics. They will likely put the White House out of Republicans’ reach. In Congress and in state legislatures, they will make GOP caucuses more unruly and more extreme, worsening polarization and gridlock. They will weaken the party as an institution, opening up more right-wing primary challenges and an even greater role for outside donors.
They could bring, in other words, an era of Republican politics that combines the disruption and chaos of the Tea Party with the divisive, xenophobic policies and politics of Donald Trump playing out across the electoral map.
“Authoritarian,” to be clear, does not refer to actual dictatorships. Nor is it implying that Trump’s supporters are the ideological kin of people who supported the likes of Hitler or Stalin.
Rather, political scientists use this term to describe a psychological profile of individual voters who are characterized by a desire for order and a fear of outsiders or other unfamiliar groups.
Authoritarians are socially rigid and prize order and hierarchies. And when they feel threatened — “activated” in political science parlance — they look for strongmen-style leaders who promise to take whatever action necessary to protect them from outsiders and prevent the changes they fear.
Political scientists have only arrived at this theory relatively recently, but have found a stunningly strong correlation between Americans who score highly on authoritarianism — it is measured using a simple, non-political survey — and who support Donald Trump.
A recent survey by Matthew MacWilliams, a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who studies authoritarianism, for example, found that authoritarianism predicts an individual’s support for Trump more reliably than virtually any other indicator, including income, education, or age:
Other data points to the same conclusion.
Authoritarians, after quietly coalescing within the GOP for decades, are now revealing themselves as numerous and influential enough to hijack the party’s presidential primary — but as too few to carry the GOP to a national victory.
The authoritarians aren’t a traditional interest group. Their politics is driven by their psychological profile and the worldview it engenders, not by professional organizers or political consultants. But now they are nevertheless a large and influential constituency.
“The traditional part of the party never worried too much about the authoritarian part of the party, because they always been firmly in control,” Vanderbilt political scientist Marc Hetherington, who has spent years studying authoritarians’ role within the Republican party, told me.
But now that has changed. Partisan sorting over the years has given the GOP authoritarians a “critical mass” within the party.
“This is a big group of people now, and it’s not going away,” Hetherington said.
In 2009, the biggest problem in American politics seemed to be partisan polarization, which had grown to alarming heights. That year, Hetherington and his colleague Jonathan Weiler published a book, Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics, arguing something surprising.
Much of the polarization dividing American politics, they wrote, was fueled not just by gerrymandering or money in politics or the other oft-cited variables, but by a little-understood class of voters they called authoritarians.
For decades, authoritarian voters had been divided across both parties, too widely diffused to make themselves felt. They have only recently coalesced within the GOP — and thus become large and united enough to directly shape national politics.
This process started in the mid-1960s, when the GOP began remaking itself as the party of law and order and of traditional values. Under the so-called “Southern strategy,” the party positioned itself against civil rights in order to woo disaffected white voters.
The party couldn’t have known it at the time, but one of the groups it reached was a demographically and geographically dispersed faction of voters who would only be identified many years later as sharing a psychological profile now called authoritarianism.
People who score highly for authoritarianism, Hetherington explained to me, tend to be very concerned with differences between them and other people whom they see as outgroups. And they’re very skeptical of changes to the social order. By opposing civil rights, the Republican party was essentially promising to preserve difference and prevent change — a message that resonated with authoritarians.
The same dynamic played out several times over the coming decades. As the Republican party repeatedly positioned itself against movements calling for social change — women’s rights, gay rights, immigration liberalization — they attracted authoritarian voters who found that change threatening.
The result was that, by the 1990s, authoritarian voters had shifted heavily into the Republican party. The GOP had already become the party of American authoritarianism — but it would be another 20 years before this phenomenon would become obvious.
An important thing to understand about authoritarianism is that it can be latent. People who score highly for it will often only behave as authoritarians when they are “activated” by some outside stimulus. Once activated, they will go beyond simply supporting the GOP’s quest for “traditional values,” instead seeking extreme policies and strongmen leaders — such as Trump and his pledges of vast border walls, mass deportations, and state-sanctioned torture.
That stimulus is typically some combination of perceived threats: either physical threats such as terrorism or, perhaps more powerfully, social threats. That latter category might include demographic change (note the rise of anti-immigration sentiment and rhetoric about “losing our country”) or other societal changes that upset existing hierarchies or “traditional” social norms.
This helps explain why authoritarians are emerging now. It is a time of tremendous social change in America: immigration, racial justice movements, evolving norms around gender and sexuality. It is also a time of rising economic pressures, and of heightened fears of terrorism.
These social changes and perceived physical threats are frightening, and likely activating, authoritarian voters — who are overwhelmingly supporting Trump, dividing the GOP, and throwing American politics into chaos.
The forces activating American authoritarians are likely here to stay. Demographic trends indicate that whites will continue shrinking as a portion of the US population, eventually becoming a minority in the 2040s. Immigrant communities are expanding across the country. Gender norms will continue changing, LGBTQ rights will continue expanding, and so on.
As long as these forces prevail in American life, it seems likely that authoritarians and their political preferences are here to stay. The 2016 election, in other words, is not a one-off incident, but the beginning of a new era. And it’s an era that looks very difficult for the GOP.
The Republican party might simply be incapable of winning the presidency, according to every expert I spoke to, as long as the split between authoritarians and the rest of the party persists.
“I do think that there’s this fundamental math problem that they have, that in presidential elections is only going to get worse,” Weiler told me. “I don’t think it can be particularly overstated in presidential election years.”
Train-wreck Republican presidential primaries, like that of 2016, might simply be the party’s fate. The specifics will vary, but enough GOP voters are authoritarian that they will likely continue to support strongmen-style candidates who favor extreme policies, but are nationally unelectable.
As long as the authoritarians remain activated and concentrated in the Republican party, in other words, the national Republican electorate will remain split between authoritarian voters who badly want a Trump-style candidate and more traditional Republican voters who favor more traditional candidates.
The core problem is one of coalitions. Political parties win by drawing together a coalition of supporters. And the Republican party coalition is now dividing so starkly between those two groups — authoritarians on one side, non-authoritarian Republicans on the other — that it is practically two parties.
Politicians who decide to follow Trump’s lead and appeal to authoritarians will have a large base in the Republican party, maybe large enough to keep winning Republican presidential primaries. But it won’t be large enough to unite the party or to win the general election.
The same could be said of establishment-backed candidates, whose constituency among non-authoritarian Republicans is not necessarily large or unified enough to decisively win their own primary. They might fare better in a national election than a divisive authoritarian candidate could, but the problem is getting the nomination — and then winning the general election if disaffected authoritarian voters decide to stay home.
In this way, in terms of national electoral coalitions, there is not a unified Republican party, not anymore. There is the party of authoritarian voters and the party of non-authoritarians. And, as the 2016 GOP primary shows, when it comes to national elections, those two groups are no longer able or willing to function as a unified party.
In the long term, the rise of authoritarianism is going to make the GOP’s coalition problem — its struggle to attract enough demographic groups to be nationally viable — worse, and will make it even harder for the party to solve. The authoritarians are pushing the party toward a smaller coalition just as the GOP needs that coalition to grow.
The 2012 autopsy, for example, was crystal clear that the GOP needs Latino voters to remain nationally viable, and that to attract Latino voters it needs immigration reform.
Not only do authoritarian voters oppose immigration reform, but as they’ve shown in flocking to Trump, authoritarian voters want the exact opposite of immigration reform: harsher policies toward immigrants.
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This is about more than just standard anti-immigration politics. Authoritarians are, at a much deeper level, alarmed by difference and by outsiders, and especially by social change — all of which are triggered by the prospect of large numbers of immigrants settling permanently in the United States.
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Authoritarians are also deeply concerned with rules, stability, and hierarchies, which makes illegal immigration, with its connotations of uncontrolled unlawful behavior, even more unsettling to them.
Hetherington and Weiler’s 2009 research found a tremendous difference between authoritarian voters’ and non-authoritarian voters’ views on immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants. And that relationship held true even after they controlled for partisanship, ideology, and a host of demographic factors.
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So the Republican party is seemingly trapped: To build a successful long-term coalition, it needs Latino voters; to win Latino voters, it needs immigration reform. But authoritarians are pushing the party in the exact opposite direction.
This same dynamic plays out on other issues. Authoritarians tend to be more hostile to expanding LGBTQ rights, for example, potentially worsening the GOP’s already-poor standing with another demographic group.
Unless they can “change their image among certain segments of the population,” Weiler said of the GOP, “they’re not going to win presidential elections going forward.”
In races for Congress, authoritarianism will hurt the GOP in some ways and help in others, but the end result is going to be pulling the party toward more extreme candidates and policies, dividing the caucus between authoritarians and non-authoritarians, and making it more difficult to govern and organize internally.
The party’s internal problems will get worse, in other words, even as its legislative majorities could hold. And that has implications for all of American politics.
“It is clear that there is the authoritarian base that a talented candidate can always tap into and drag the party in a more authoritarian direction,” Hetherington said. “That’s bad for business.”
During presidential election years, Republican candidates will likely suffer in down-ballot races. A split GOP electorate could depress turnout within the party, and a Trump-style extreme GOP candidate could excite Democratic turnout. Everything from House and Senate races to governor’s races could become tougher for the GOP.
A study by the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia found that the correlation between presidential and Senate election results is the strongest it has been in nearly half a century — meaning a weak GOP presidential candidate could especially hurt down-ballot races.
The GOP’s own organizing ability could suffer as well. A party’s get out the vote effort tends to rely on presidential campaigns in presidential election years, Republican strategist Rob Jesmer pointed out recently on NPR.
But during midterms, the party will likely do better, giving it a chance to recover from defeats during presidential years.
The people who vote in midterms tend to be whiter and older — demographics that favor the GOP generally and authoritarians particularly. Turnout also tends to be lower, benefiting traditional party constituencies such as conservative Christian groups, which are well-organized at getting their members to the polls.
“They’re completely different electorates,” Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol said. This means the GOP could alternate every two years between gaining and losing. Skocpol warned that midterm successes would give GOP leaders a false sense of security, making them less likely to confront the party’s structural problems.
But even if the net result is that the GOP maintains large caucuses and possibly even majorities in Congress and in state legislatures, those caucuses will likely shift gradually more toward Trump-style authoritarianism.
Republican members of Congress could face more primary challenges, now from authoritarian candidates who speak to the constituency that has gathered around Trump, Hetherington told me. In fact, he believes that primary challenges are already pushing the party in that direction.
“To the extent that these primary challenges are taking place, on the right at least, they are providing people with this choice,” he said. “Are the candidates sufficiently nativist? Are you sufficiently anti-transgender? This is the stuff of primary challenges.”
A generation of gerrymandering, which has delineated many congressional districts as overwhelmingly Republican or Democratic, means that more ideologically extreme candidates can still do well in House races. Even if authoritarian candidates can’t win nationally, they can actually be more viable in smaller races.
As long as the party is out of the White House — which seems likely to become the new norm — it will play the role of opposition party. That dynamic could favor more extreme authoritarian candidates as well.
But getting elected is one thing, and actually governing is another. And governing will become harder as the GOP’s de facto division between authoritarians and non-authoritarians plays out in Congress, where we may see an even more extreme and disruptive version of what we saw with the Tea Party insurrections.
The dynamic of the 2016 GOP primary, with authoritarians pitted against establishment-inclined Republicans, could play out first in Congressional elections, and then in the halls of Congress.
Congressional intra-GOP fights will probably not have the pyrotechnics of the 2016 GOP primary, but it will be that same divide, because it is a divide created not by individual candidates but rather by the Republican voters who have split in two.
The consequences go far beyond elections. The gridlock and polarization of the past few years seems likely to get worse, making governance even more difficult.
The party’s caucus, whatever its size, seems likely to become more ideologically extreme, more internally disunited, more difficult for the party to manage, and more hostile to compromise with the Democrats, who will likely hold the White House.
Democratic agendas, which often involve expanding programs or imposing new regulations, Skocpol pointed out, are more likely to require new laws. Republicans, on the other hand, can count inaction as a win when they manage to block that kind of expansion. Worsening polarization will exacerbate this.
Republican lawmakers, even if they are inclined to bipartisan cooperation, will likely learn to resist it for their own self-preservation. No GOP politician who values her job will want to come anywhere near an issue that could anger authoritarian voters, such as immigration reform.
“There can be a certain amount of glee on the left about the Republican party’s dysfunction,” the Brookings Institution’s Vanessa Williamson, whose research focuses on the dynamics within the Republican party, told me, “but I think that’s misplaced. The problems in the Republican party aren’t just problems in the Republican party. They’re problems for all Americans, and for the Democratic party.”
These same forces could play out within state legislatures, Hetherington warned. It is difficult to say whether or not that would jeopardize GOP control; it will both excite authoritarian voters and alienate others.
But given how many state legislatures are presently dominated by Republicans — one of the party’s biggest political accomplishments of the Obama era — authoritarian lawmakers could have the opportunity to exercise an unusual degree of influence there.
In some state legislatures, GOP control has become so total that they function as something like single-party systems, as American University law professor Herman Schwartz has written, giving the GOP much greater control there.
But this could provide an opening to authoritarian candidates. By rising within state-level party structures, authoritarians can also gain power within state legislatures, either by succeeding incumbents when they retire or via primary challenges. We may see the first hints of an authoritarian policy agenda playing out in these bodies.
The implications in statewide races — for governor or for the Senate — are more difficult to predict, and will likely vary from state to state.
In so-called “purple states,” where voters are split between the Republican and Democratic party, the effect could look similar to what we’re seeing in presidential elections: a GOP electorate that divides between two factions, one of them too extreme to win state-wide, thus allowing Democrats to more easily win.
But in GOP-dominated “red states,” the outcome is more uncertain.
Perhaps GOP voters in those states will divide, or perhaps authoritarian-minded voters will nominate Trump-style candidates who alienate the rest of the state, thus allowing Democrats a shot at winning otherwise unwinnable races.
Or perhaps authoritarian voters in those states will be numerous enough to carry a gubernatorial or senatorial primary, Democrats will be too few or too disorganized to defeat them, and we will see a Trump-style senator or governor emerge in the next few years.
As former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once remarked, states can be as laboratories of democracy. That could include, it now seems, the practice of authoritarian politics.
The experts I spoke to agreed that the Republican party, whatever its problems, has one powerful asset on its side: partisanship.
This will likely keep the party together, at least nominally, allowing it to avoid either collapsing or officially dividing, no matter how bad its internal fissures become.
Party affiliation, Democrat and Republican, has increasingly become a matter of personal identity in this country. And, crucially, it seems to be driven by antipathy toward the opposing party much more than loyalty toward the one people support.
That level of partisan bias gives the GOP a great deal of protection against its voters defecting to the Democrats. In other words, there is something that still unites Republican voters in both the authoritarian and non-authoritarian camps: They really, really don’t like Democrats.
As Ezra Klein wrote last year, the National Election Study uses a “feelings thermometer” to measure people’s attitudes about their own party and about the opposing party. The results are striking. People’s opinions of their own party have remained roughly similar since the 1970s. But their opinions of the opposing party have plummeted in recent years.
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And that effect seems to be especially strong for Republicans. A 2014 Pew survey found that 43 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents held “very unfavorable” views of the Democrats, whereas only 38 percent of Democrats held the same view of Republicans.
As bitter as the 2016 GOP primary has been, and as deep as the divisions are likely to remain, this partisan feeling is likely to keep the two very different Republican factions unified under one party.
Of course, even if the GOP authoritarians and the GOP traditionalists agree about what the party isn’t — the Democrats, blech — that doesn’t bring them any closer to agreeing on what the party is. Partisan loyalty can mitigate the consequences of that problem, but it’s not a solution.
The full impact of authoritarianism on American politics will be amplified by the Republican party’s other big problem: the weakness of the party itself as an institution.
What matters is not just that authoritarians’ influence within the party is rising, but when it is happening: at a moment when the party is institutionally far weaker than it has been in the past. Its leadership is less in control of rank-and-file, less able to steer voters, and often contradicted or undermined by party elites, such as donors, who have a growing ability to push their own agendas.
These two problems are not just coinciding: They are exacerbating one another.
Trump has been able to exploit party institutional weakness to the advantage of his own campaign. But he is not just benefiting from that institutional weakness, he is also reinforcing it — meaning that his success today may make it more difficult for the party to stop other Trumps in the future.
This GOP institutional crisis began in 2008, when the party suffered a sweeping electoral defeat, losing the White House and, in both houses of Congress, seeing its minorities shrink further.
“There was an intellectual vacuum in the Republican party,” Williamson explained, that left it ill-equipped to recover. “George Bush left office with very, very low approval. And then the McCain campaign collapsed, leaving very little behind in terms of institutions.”
Instead of rebuilding or reinventing itself, the party elected Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele, who spent the next two years mismanaging the party, spending it into debt, and watching the caucus riven by the rise of the Tea Party.
In 2010, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision transformed the way elections were financed. Donors could spend unlimited amounts of money through Super PACs, with no need to channel contributions through the party apparatus.
The result was that private money started to circumvent — thus undermine — the already-weak party institutions.
As of 2001, Republican party committees controlled about 50 percent of all money spent on conservative-aligned campaigns, issue advertising, and related expenditures, according to Skocpol’s research with Alexander Hertel-Fernandez. Today, the GOP’s share has fallen to about 30 percent, meaning its direct financial role has shrunk almost by half.
The party has been partially displaced by private conservative groups funded by wealthy individuals, such as the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity.
The donor class is now so powerful that it can direct its money toward specific causes and candidates, as it did with the Tea Party. When donors and party leaders have different agendas and work at cross purposes, this weakens the party as a whole.
At the same time, the donor class tried to impose orthodoxy on candidates and party officials — for example, opposition to social programs — in a way that put too much strain on the coalition.
“The more they try to enforce an orthodoxy, the more they suppress elements in that coalition that then get angry,” Lee Drutman, a political scientist who studies intra-party conflict and a contributor to Vox’s Polyarchy blog, told me. “Fundamentally, it’s a managerial challenge: How do you accommodate a large diversity of opinions? And if you can’t do that, then you lose.”
The Republican establishment, less able to control a party that is increasingly driven by donors acting on their own agendas, has grown weak and fractured. The scale of the authoritarian movement would have shaken any party, but today’s GOP is especially unable to resist or control it.
“I’m not sure what Republican party establishment there is any more,” Skocpol said. “In many ways, the Republican party committees have been hollowed out. They don’t control very many resources any more.”
“Their ‘establishment’ consists of Mitch McConnell and, I guess, Paul Ryan to some degree,” she went on. “And John Boehner before him, although he was a pretty weak establishment. He couldn’t even hold on.”
And so, when the party needed to put some sort of voice of authority up against Donald Trump, Williamson said, it had few options. “You’ve got some Fox News anchors you can choose from, or you’ve got Mitt Romney.”
The party is stuck, lacking the strength to pull itself out of this problem.
If nothing else changes, it’s only going to get more stuck: The GOP coalition now consists heavily of demographic groups, particularly whites, whose share of the population is slowly shrinking. As that continues, the party will have to increasingly cater to a coalition that is only getting smaller, and with policies that further alienate the rest of the electorate.
“Whether the change is demographic or generational, or a combination of the two, that day of reckoning is coming,” Hetherington said, referring to a possible day when the GOP is truly nationally non-viable.
“The way this came into being was through strategic political choices to attract voters,” he went on. “And when that ceases to work any longer, the party gets killed, a new set of leaders comes in, and they do something different.”
Every week, Todd VanDerWerff, Caroline Framke, and Libby Nelson gather to talk about the latest episode of The Americans. This week, they’re joined by Amanda Taub. Read our complete coverage of the show here. Spoilers, needless to say, follow.
Todd VanDerWerff: “Travel Agents” is the shortest episode of The Americans so far this season, and possibly not coincidentally the most nauseating. Martha, on the run, must choose the best of two terrible options, while everybody else hunts for her. In the end, she winds up in the arms of “Clark,” again, but he can’t lie to her: He won’t be joining her in Moscow.
And … Jesus. This is some bleak stuff. Even as the episode is a master class in tension and suspense, it’s telling a parallel story about marriage and infidelity.
Of course you can read Philip’s relationship with Martha as an affair, even if his wife knows, approves, and understands it as part of their overall mission.
But on some level, The Americans grasps that you can love multiple people at the same time, that it’s possible to get different things from vastly different people, even if they’re not sexual. But you can only build your life with one of them. And the moment when you’re forced to choose between two possible futures is always wrenching.
All evidence to the contrary, did you hope Philip would get on the plane that Tatiana and Oleg commissioned, if only so that Tatiana and Oleg would have something to do in this episode?
Libby Nelson: To quote Elizabeth in a scene that absolutely wrung me out emotionally: Are you crazy? I’ve found Philip and Elizabeth’s relationship ridiculously compelling since the first episode, and even though I shouldn’t, I still root for them, despite everything; their conversation, when he chose Elizabeth, felt cathartic.
But that the moment felt like a choice at all speaks to how much Clark/Philip and Martha’s relationship has deepened and developed. Consider that he told her his real, real name, for example — that’s something that took Elizabeth much longer to learn. I didn’t think he’d get on that plane. But I wasn’t sure he wouldn’t.
Do we think, by the way, that Martha is going to make it to the glorious motherland? Tatiana’s dialogue was cryptic enough to make me think the “sample” being transported might be the rat. My guess is the KGB don’t intend to keep Martha safe, but that Philip isn’t going to let her die.
Caroline Framke: I don’t see how this ends with Martha alive, to be honest.
Many people have been expecting Martha to die since before the end of the first season, with The Americans‘ showrunners insisting that her demise was never their plan for just about as long. But we’re in the middle of season four now, everything is falling apart, and it’s hard not to feel like Martha has been backed into her last corner.
Also, as Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields have said before (and told me in person last November, when I interviewed them for this piece), the real-life inspirations for Martha’s character met awful ends. High-ranking secretaries with lackluster personal lives were frequent targets of KGB espionage. The three examples Weisberg and Fields mentioned to me all died. When one was told that her husband was actually a KGB operative, she walked out a window.
Amanda Taub: Todd, I’m glad you brought up the fact that “Clark” wouldn’t lie to Martha. For me, it was really telling that Elizabeth told Philip he should lie to Martha right after asking him if he wanted to go to Moscow with Martha — if, had their children been grown and Philip’s responsibilities been different, he would have chosen Martha over Elizabeth.
Philip said he wouldn’t, and his shock at being asked seemed so palpable that it was easy for me to believe him. But I wonder if Elizabeth believes he was telling the truth — or if he was just giving her a version of the lie she had suggested he tell Martha.
Even if she thinks it was a lie, it seems like one she appreciates. The Americans has returned time and again to Philip and Elizabeth’s struggle to “make it real” when seducing or manipulating their marks and sources — to believe so much in the lies they tell that those lies become powerful enough to support the mission. But, as Philip admitted to Elizabeth last season, sometimes that means “making it real” with each other, too.
Viewed in that light, Elizabeth isn’t just telling Philip to lie to Martha to get her on the plane. She’s telling him to preserve his relationship with Martha until the last possible second.
But Philip doesn’t do that. He refuses to lie to Martha. We could read that as a sign of their relationship being different from his relationship with Elizabeth or with other sources — that telling the truth means it is real, not that it has been made real.
I don’t think I really believe that, though. I think Philip’s refusal to lie to Martha is his way of ending things with her — his way of putting a stop to making it real. And it’s not real. “Clark” doesn’t exist. A moment of honesty might as well be a divorce.
Libby: I’ve started mentally calling this the “honesty season,” and I can see Philip’s refusal to lie as a part of that.
Caroline: Every time Philip told Martha a new truth — his face, his job, his name — I was stunned.
But I shouldn’t have been, really. He made a very conscious, brazen decision to tell the truth in all instances with Martha, like that could help ease his guilt. But I agree with Amanda: that last truth was his way of ending it. Refusing to massage her expectations anymore — to purposely avoid telling her that he’d join her in Moscow for a lifetime of evening tea and sweaty Kama Sutra sex — was him letting her go.
Of course, their apparent “split” is still entirely on Philip’s terms. Martha, despite trying to take matters into her own hands, has never had a say in their relationship, and that didn’t change by the end of this episode.
For what it’s worth: I felt Philip’s sincerity when he told Elizabeth he loved her. Now, Philip is very good at making women believe he’s sincere (see: Poor Martha), but the sheer bewilderment on his face when he realized how hurt Elizabeth was by his affection for Martha was really compelling. Like Libby said, Philip’s all about honesty this season, for better and for worse.
Libby: I don’t think he doesn’t love Martha! I just believe he does deeply love Elizabeth — which makes me better understand how pivotal her illness in “Chloramphenicol” was in a season that’s mostly put their relationship as a married couple on the back burner.
Todd: I mentally squirmed a little when Philip told Martha his name was “Philip.” If she is somehow apprehended by the FBI, I can’t imagine that little detail won’t come out.
Caroline: I hadn’t thought nearly at all about what would happen with the FBI once it cracked the Martha/Clark situation. As always, Stan has the right instincts — and is closer to Philip than he’s ever been — but is still two steps behind.
Is Gaad done for? It feels like he is (and probably should be).
Amanda: The poor FBI counter-terrorism office is starting to seem like the hospital on Grey’s Anatomy. One disaster after another keeps befalling the same small department.
Libby: We talk a lot about how the KGB seems doomed to fail right now, but “Travel Agents” was a good reminder that the FBI hasn’t been doing a great job, either.
One scene that jumped out at me, though, was the agency’s thorough search of Martha’s apartment. There’s nothing like having law enforcement examine every single tampon to drive home the point that nothing about Martha’s intimate life is her own anymore.
Amanda: Yes, and it is that much worse because some of the agents unrolling every tampon and flipping through the Kama Sutra were her colleagues. That search would be invasive no matter what, but these are people Martha knows. She liked them, and valued their opinion of her. And now her sex life has become a matter of professional concern for them.
Todd: Watching that search — and later, seeing Stan look over Martha’s photos — made me realize how intelligently the show built to this point all those years ago. Philip always insisted there could be no evidence of his presence in Martha’s life, and we’re now seeing his precautions bear fruit.
Amanda: Except for that fingerprint.
Libby: And they have a sketch that looks slightly more like him than the earlier one did. And if they catch Martha, crucially, they have his name. I feel like this season is building to Stan catching on before the finale, something I didn’t think would happen until much later in the show’s run.
Todd: I’ve been quietly blown away by Richard Thomas’s performance as Gaad in these last couple of episodes. His “That’s crazy” in “The Rat” is already legendary, and his disbelief at the fact that Martha was married all this time was similarly good. Gaad’s carefully constructed image of himself is completely disintegrating.
And let’s be fair to Stan — he knew something was up with Philip and Elizabeth way back in episode one. One of the show’s unremarked upon seductions has been Philip turning his neighbor into his best pal, the better to keep his guard down.
That fingerprint also reminds me of how The Americans‘ first season really played up the irony that Philip and Elizabeth had to be model citizens, because they couldn’t have their fingerprints on file or anything like that. They had to be invisible by conforming.
Caroline: Stan’s always been so close to catching them, and not just because he lives across the street. He’s a really fucking good FBI agent with killer instincts, but Philip and Elizabeth have always been ready for him. I’m just not sure how much longer that will (or can?) — remain true.
Amanda: One thing I found particularly poignant about the FBI’s pursuit of Martha, at least before they realized she had married a KGB officer, was that they seemed to think they were trying to save her, not just arrest her.
They were worried that the KGB had her. When she called her parents, their relief that she must have escaped the KGB’s clutches seemed like it went much beyond the hope of catching and interrogating her. That’s the flip side of their search of her apartment: To them, Martha marrying into the KGB isn’t just a professional betrayal, it’s a personal one, and a personal loss. They’re worried about her, not just angry at her.
That’s something The Americans does extremely well — it adds a personal dimension to every moral decision.
Libby: Stan trying to make excuses for how Martha could have just happened to fall in love with a KGB agent — maybe they just met somewhere, who knows! — really stuck out there. And it makes me wonder how his history with Nina affected him.
Todd: Amanda: I must hear your theory that Arkady is the only moral person on this show.
Amanda: ARKADY IS THE BEST!
He is the only person on this show who has always, consistently aligned his actions with his relationships, his country, his colleagues, and his conscience.
One thing The Americans has told us over and over is that one tiny compromise in any of those categories can set in motion a cascade of devastating consequences. When we originally met Nina, for instance, she was prioritizing her relationship with her family over her relationship with her country, by engaging in petty smuggling of goods from America so that her family back in Russia could have a little extra money.
The betrayal of her country and her morals in that act of stealing started out so slight — would anyone argue that the rules she broke were actually that important, or that her family should have stayed in poverty? — but she did it, and Stan caught her, and then she had no choice but to carry on with her betrayals.
Arkady, by contrast, has always stayed within the lines. He protected Oleg’s job even though it meant angering his powerful father and potentially suffering the consequences, and we never saw him demand any favors in response. He granted Nina mercy when she came to him and confessed her betrayal after Vlad was killed.
But even though he clearly cared about Nina, he wouldn’t cross any lines to protect her. When she was finally sent to prison, Arkady quietly told Oleg that the KGB bugs of the safe house had revealed that she gave more information to Stan than she had admitted. She really was a traitor, and Arkady wouldn’t sacrifice his relationship with his country to protect her.
On a different show, that might make him a boring paper pusher, the bureaucrat everyone rolls their eyes about. But not on The Americans. Instead, he offers a symbol of the ideals that the directorate S agents think they’re fighting for.
Todd: I mentioned above that one of the reasons this episode was so good was that it was so tight, focused entirely on the hunt for Martha.
But right there in the middle is that scene where Matthew, Paige, and Henry crack open some of Stan’s beer, and it seems like it should Mean Something.
Caroline: Sorry, Henry detractors: the kid’s gonna be around a little while longer, I think. If nothing else, he and Matthew keep providing little pockets of the mundane reality that marches on almost in spite of all the high-stakes espionage swirling around them.
There was something touching and almost eerie about seeing Henry, Paige, and Matthew sitting on the couch together, splitting two beers between them, playing at being adults — though really, all of them have been taking care of themselves for a while now.
I was surprised at how seeing Paige on that couch — sitting between two bored, clueless boys play-acting as men — made me sad. But that’s Paige’s state right now: She isn’t working with her parents, but she can’t go back to oblivion with Henry.
If there were someone to challenge Arkady’s role as The Americans‘ most moral character, I’d venture to say it’s Paige. She’s always made her decisions based on her own loyal and altruistic moral compass, and now, she has no idea what to do. I don’t blame her for having a beer.
Paige is trying so desperately hard to be a good and moral person, but knowing even just a fraction of the truth has thrown her entire existence out of whack — a feeling that I suspect Martha could understand.
Libby: Henry saying he’d never drank beer before reminded me of the plot line where he and Paige met the scary hitchhiker guy in season one’s “Trust Me,” and the hitchhiker offered Paige a beer.
Even if neither of the kids drank then, that’s another way that “Travel Agents” rhymed with long-ago plot lines: Both episodes underscore that Philip and Elizabeth’s kids are basically good, even when no one is watching. Their daring teenage rebellion is … a few beers on Stan Beeman’s couch on a weeknight.
But they’re also pretty good at taking care of themselves. Paige’s plot line has obligingly been toned down a bit as first glanders, and then Martha, provided more urgent crises to be dealt with. But real life means multiple terrible things can happen at once, and I suspect that Paige’s crisis of faith — and its implications for her parents — are far from over.
Programming note: Comments are open below! I (Todd) will be dropping in throughout the day to chat about this episode with you. Please join our fun!
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Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II is many things: corgi owner, eager participant in Olympic stunts, the UK’s longest-reigning monarch.
And as this story from a former British ambassador to Saudi Arabia makes clear, she is also a stone-cold badass.
Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles was given a private audience with the queen when he was appointed ambassador to Saudi Arabia in 2003. At the time, Abdullah was technically still the crown prince, though he’d been de facto ruler for several years. During their meeting, the queen gleefully recounted the story of Abdullah’s first visit to Balmoral, her castle in Scotland. It all started innocently enough, with an offer to tour the estate:
After lunch, the Queen had asked her royal guest whether he would like a tour of the estate. Prompted by his foreign minister the urbane Prince Saud, an initially hesitant Abdullah had agreed. The royal Land Rovers were drawn up in front of the castle. As instructed, the Crown Prince climbed into the front seat of the front Land Rover, his interpreter in the seat behind.
But then, a surprising twist! The queen herself was Abdullah’s driver:
To his surprise, the Queen climbed into the driving seat, turned the ignition and drove off. Women are not — yet — allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia, and Abdullah was not used to being driven by a woman, let alone a queen.
And she wasn’t just driving, she was DRIVING, leaving Abdullah a quivering wreck:
His nervousness only increased as the Queen, an Army driver in wartime, accelerated the Land Rover along the narrow Scottish estate roads, talking all the time. Through his interpreter, the Crown Prince implored the Queen to slow down and concentrate on the road ahead.
That’s right: Queen Elizabeth basically spent an afternoon using her military-grade driving skills to haze the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.
Result: Elizabeth 1, Abdullah 0.
Hat tip to Peter W. Singer.
Vox doesn’t have comments. So when I read the Guardian’s article yesterday about its study of abuse in its own comments section, I wasn’t expecting to find a concise summation of my own situation vis-à-vis online trolls.
But there it was, my problem in a nutshell:
Conversations about crosswords, cricket, horse racing and jazz were respectful; discussions about the Israel/Palestine conflict were not. Articles about feminism attracted very high levels of blocked comments. And so did rape.
I write about the Israel-Palestine conflict. I write about feminism. I write about rape. I do not write about horse racing.
And so I periodically experience torrents of online abuse that take a real toll on my happiness. Usually they come in response to articles about those topics and others that are similarly controversial, such as the unrest in Ferguson in 2014, the Charlie Hebdo attacks in 2015, and Islamophobia on US cable news. (And, somewhat mysteriously, the Oscar-nominated film American Sniper.)
The most disturbing ones are the elaborate fantasies for how I should be raped or maimed or killed in order to “teach me a lesson” about why whatever I’ve written is so wrong. I’ve received recommendations that I should be sodomized with a gun, that I should be raped by a thousand men, that I should be raped and murdered by terrorists, and that I should be handed over to ISIS to become another journalist murdered on camera — and those are just the ones I happen to remember off the top of my head, not a complete list.
And then there are the creative suggestions as to how I might be silenced as a writer: One reader, for instance, wrote hoping that my hands would be crushed so that I wouldn’t be able to type any more.
I do what I can to ignore it. I block people on Twitter. I close my mentions column on TweetDeck. When things are particularly bad, I take my email address off my Vox author profile — it’s still easy to guess, but that extra bit of effort seems to deter most of the trolls.
But the Guardian study offers a depressing reminder that I could do a much more thorough job of avoiding abuse by changing what I write about entirely. If I just limited my coverage to, say, jazz-enthusiast racehorses, I might be able to check my Twitter mentions without trepidation.
But there would be a real cost to that. There would certainly be a cost to me: I love my job, and I wouldn’t be able to do it without writing about those contentious issues. To stop, I would likely need to change jobs — and I haven’t seen any openings for jazz-cricket correspondents lately. And if I did change my coverage, that would impose a cost on Vox, too — Vox hired me to do this job, not a different one that won’t piss off trolls. It doesn’t seem reasonable for me or my employer to bear those costs because of other people’s abusive behavior.
I don’t kid myself that my career choices rise to the level of public concern. If this were just about my individual experience, it wouldn’t be that big a deal in the grand scheme of things.
However, this isn’t actually just about me, because I’m not the only one making that calculation. Online harassment of women is so widespread that one study recently warned it risks becoming an “established norm” of online behavior. And the Guardian study published yesterday found that abusive comments were disproportionately directed at women and minorities. Articles written by white men were far less likely to incur abuse.
That means it is disproportionately women and minorities who must weigh whether covering controversial topics is worth the abuse it provokes. As I wrote with Max Fisher in 2015, that arithmetic is painful and damaging:
Receiving threats of any kind forces journalists to go through the calculation of whether it’s likely that they could lead to real harm, and weigh that against the value of writing more on the subject in question. Any journalist or activist who has written or spoken publicly about a controversial subject will be familiar with the arithmetic of threats and fear. Add the value of speaking out, subtract the costs of silence. Multiply by the likelihood that the threats are empty, divide by the chance that they are not.
That matters, because if it is disproportionately women and minority writers who must do that arithmetic over and over, it is disproportionately women and minorities who will decide, eventually, that the math does not work out. That they won’t write that story or won’t cover that issue. That what their lives need is more cricket, less intifada.
And as that happens, over time coverage of those topics is going to become more male and more white. That’s a cost to readers, and to journalism as a whole, which loses depth and detail when only a few perspectives are represented.
This is also a reminder of what we’re really doing when we ask women or other vulnerable people to protect themselves from danger or abuse by changing their own behavior. Don’t walk down the dark alley alone at night. Don’t get drunk. Don’t feed the trolls.
It’s not about victim blaming, we assure them; it’s just about “personal responsibility.” But the “responsibility” calculus is essentially the same as the one journalists make when covering controversial topics: How much safety and peace am I willing to give up for this activity? And the benefit for the rest of society is the same, too: We don’t have to make any collective changes or sacrifices to solve the problem, because we’ve pushed the burden of doing so onto the individual victims who are already bearing its harm.
That’s especially difficult when it comes to issues like online abuse, where the collective solution isn’t obvious. To truly address the problem will require technological changes as well as social ones. It will require us to make decisions about how much flexibility and freedom we’re all willing to give up in order to protect people from abuse, and how many resources we’re willing to expend to give up those rules. There is no question that that will be difficult.
But the fact that the solution isn’t obvious or simple doesn’t mean that progress is impossible. We know there are things that make a difference. Vox, for instance, has no comments at all on most articles. That obviously doesn’t protect me from all abuse, but it does mean that my employer isn’t hosting my harassers, and that my friends and family don’t have to choose between reading my work and avoiding abusive comments about me. That matters.
And then there’s the system adopted by the Guardian, which moderates its comments and deletes those that don’t meet its community guidelines. That system requires resources and expertise but preserves the comments sections as places for discussion rather than cruelty. Efforts like those are steps in the right direction, and show that a solution to this is possible.
Without similar efforts from other sites and platforms — especially Twitter, which offers an especially easy and compelling platform for harassers — this problem will continue. And that will essentially push the burden of self-protection onto the victims of harassment. They will be left as they are now, with the choice of bearing the abuse or changing their own behavior to avoid it.
That choice carries costs. And those costs don’t fall on all people equally: Women and minorities bear them more heavily. The result is that men, especially white men, will get to enjoy freedom that other people do not. They can write about the controversial topic without doing the arithmetic of threats and fear, or at least without doing it as often and without such serious threats on the negative side of the equation. Just as they can go to the frat party without a second thought, get drunk with their friends, walk home alone.
Over time, that freedom translates into opportunities, and those opportunities into success and power. And conversely, not having that freedom translates into opportunities lost, and success and power that flow to the same people who have always enjoyed it.
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South Africa is facing its most severe political crisis since the fall of apartheid.
On the surface, this crisis is about corruption. Starting in 2009, South Africa spent more than $16 million of public funds to renovate Nkandla, President Jacob Zuma’s private residence. South Africa’s constitutional court ruled on April 3 that Zuma had violated the constitution by ignoring an order to repay the money, and criticized parliament for failing to hold Zuma to his obligations.
The main opposition parties pressed for impeachment, arguing that Zuma’s corruption and his violation of the country’s constitution had rendered him unfit for office. South Africans rallied in protests. And a host of senior political figures, including five of the top six leaders of Zuma’s political party, have called on him to resign.
Thus far Zuma has refused, and the rank and file of his party still backs him, allowing him to survive a parliamentary impeachment vote last week. But the crisis seems far from over.
As public opposition to Zuma grows, his party’s loyalty seems less assured. And if it falters, that could spell the end not only of Zuma’s presidency but of the unity of his party, the African National Congress (ANC), which has ruled South Africa since the end of apartheid.
"Essentially, this is a moment of reckoning for the ANC. If they continue to support Jacob Zuma, we may see another breaking. But if they put Jacob Zuma out, Jacob Zuma may then mobilize his own independent party."
This is much more than a corruption scandal. It is part of a larger struggle over what kind of nation South Africa is going to be. Will it follow the example of some of its African neighbors, where liberation parties became autocratic and corrupt single-party governments? Or will the country’s institutions and opposition parties fight back, ensuring that South Africa remains truly democratic?
To understand what this crisis tells us about South Africa, I spoke with professor William Gumede, the author of Thabo Mbeki: The Battle for the Soul of the ANC and the chair of the Democracy Works Foundation, which promotes democracy and the rule of law in South Africa. What follows is a transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Amanda Taub: What is likely to happen next? Do you think this crisis will continue? Or will Zuma be able to defuse it?
WG: It is unlikely Zuma will be able to diffuse this crisis. Today, for example, civil society groups in South Africa that are aligned to the ANC, churches, community groups and so on launched a campaign calling for Jacob Zuma to resign. Which means that while Zuma is in power, we can just have almost daily mass protest against Zuma from within the ANC itself, and within the wider society.
The opposition parties tried to impeach Zuma in parliament, but they failed. They are not going to give up. They are going to continue to agitate for Zuma’s removal.
Within the ANC, they are fighting. [Because of the political crisis] they are not going to have time to govern properly; they are not going to have time to focus on reforming the economy and so on. If the economy gets worse, more and more former supporters of the ANC will start to get disillusioned, and they will start to take the anger out against Jacob Zuma.
The ANC at some point will then have to confront the issue: Will they keep on carrying Jacob Zuma, and lose more voters and supporters for the sake of Zuma?
If the ANC leaders still support him, in my sense we may see another split in the ANC [like the one in 2013 that saw former ANC youth leader Julius Malema leave to form a new opposition party]. The other alternative that if Zuma is forced out eventually, he may also form his own party outside the ANC.
Essentially, this is a moment of reckoning for the ANC. If they continue to support Jacob Zuma, we may see another breaking. But if they put Jacob Zuma out, Jacob Zuma may then mobilize his own independent party.
A new break might be even bigger, the biggest split in the ANC — and the ANC will lose its majority.
All of these things could have turned out so much different if the ANC had many years before cleaned up its house internally. But it has been in power; it hasn’t done this self-inspection that it should have done.
AT: When you say because the ANC has been in power it hasn’t done the self-inspection that it could have done, do you mean that if there had been stronger opposition parties the ANC might have been pressured to deal with these problems sooner?
WG: Yes. The problem in the past has been that the ANC became arrogant; it became complacent. It didn’t listen to critics whether internal or external, because it argued, “Why should we listen? Because we got the votes.”
But now we have more competition to the ANC. The Democratic Alliance, the largest opposition party, has been reinvigorated with a new black leader called Mmusi Maimane.
Secondly, there has been a new popular black political party called the Economic Freedom Fighters, which was formed by Julius Malema, who was the former president of the ANC youth league. Julius Malema used to be a very strong ally of Jacob Zuma, but now he is outside [of the ANC]. The party seems to be very attractive to young black youth, especially those who are unhappy with the ANC — who are unemployed, who are struggling.
Some of the other smaller opposition parties are also starting to get more attraction. We’ve finally got more competition in the system, and they are putting pressure on the ANC now.
We also have something … let’s call it non-political opposition. New, non-political opposition from union groups that split from the Congress of South African Unions, which are the alliance of the ANC. We’ve had a couple of unions that broke away from the ANC. Although they are not a political party, they’re also a new opposition in civil society.
AT: Why did they break with the ANC?
WG: They broke with ANC because they disagreed with Jacob Zuma’s leadership, all of the allegations of corruption, inefficiency, arrogance, and because Jacob Zuma’s government has been unable to deliver.
AT: To take a very, very cynical view of how this kind of politics sometimes works out, you might expect a leader like Zuma to try to buy off the unions and the opposition with patronage; to try to keep Malema in by giving him more power and more patronage so that he can benefit personally, and to do the same with union leaders. But it seems like that didn’t happen here.
WG: No, no. Jacob Zuma has done all of those.
AT: In that case, why didn’t it work?
WG: Zuma has extended the patronage to leaders, but the problem is the members and the ordinary citizens who are actually feeling the pain. The “patronage” that they need is the patronage of effective public services, jobs, and so on. They are not getting that.
So even if the leaders get the patronage, things are not working for ordinary supporters and members. And they are starting to walk away from their own leaders.
"In other African countries historically since the Second World War, this has never been the case. That is why countries just collapse."
The biggest example is the National Union of Mine Workers. That was South Africa’s largest union, and it was a very important union during the anti-apartheid struggle.
That union was very close to Jacob Zuma, supporting him. Zuma managed to keep the union leaders on board through patronage. He appointed couple of former presidents of the union to the cabinet, and a former general secretary for the union to the cabinet, and so on. But the ANC government did not deliver on the economy. The mining sector contracted, and mine workers lost their jobs.
Some union members broke away and they formed a different union called AMCU, the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union of South Africa. That union is now almost bigger than the actual National Union of Mine Workers. And the National Union of Mine Workers is not the largest union in South Africa anymore.
AT: Even though these are stories about crises and turmoil, in a lot of ways that seems like a very positive story. It suggests that these institutions in South Africa were strong enough to resist this kind of patronage and push back against Zuma’s corruption. A lot of countries just don’t have institutions that can do that.
WG: Yes, that’s good news for us in South Africa. The democratic institutions in South Africa are now being proven under massive pressure. And they are fighting back.
Individual activists within the ANC and outside the ANC are also fighting back. Opposition is fighting back. Ordinary citizens are fighting back now. In other African countries, historically since the Second World War this has never been the case. That is why countries just collapse.
What it is saying about South Africa is that the foundations of the country’s democracy were vulnerable, but as we’ve seen it is actually responding to the challenge.
In South Africa, we repeated some of the mistakes that other African countries made. The fact is that because the ANC was so popular, members and supporters of the ANC have been very forgiving in the way the ANC has governed. They haven’t been critical enough. It’s only now that they are becoming critical.
"It's too big to die down. There has to be a resolution to the scandal."
People in Zimbabwe, people in Tanzania, people in Ghana — they all made the same mistakes. There is too much leeway. When the former liberation movements and independence movements came to power, they failed in power and they became corrupt. “Oh, no, they are just making mistakes. Oh, no, they are having a difficult time. We are going to give them another chance.”
Until it’s too late. Until you can’t reverse the problems anymore.
We in South Africa almost made the same mistakes, but fortunately for us, now it seems that people are starting to see that they better hold the leaders much more strongly accountable.
AT: Why do you think South Africa has been able to avoid those mistakes when other countries fall victim to them?
WG: Because the anti-apartheid struggle was much more diverse than other [African countries’ liberation] struggles.
The liberation struggle in South Africa was fought by many different independent movements and groups, not just one like, say, [Zimbabwe’s] ZANU PF, where one party was the independence party. In South Africa there was the ANC, but there were the unions, there was the Communist Party, and then there were other groups like the Pan-African Congress and the Black Consciousness Movement. There were different types of groups independent from each other.
AT: We’re definitely seeing strong opposition today. But do you think there is a chance that the scandal could just die down?
WG: No, no. It’s too big to die down. There has to be a resolution to the scandal. There has to be a resolution, and the resolution is either Jacob Zuma goes or he stays. If he goes, we will have a split; if he stays, we may also have a split.
But it’s going to take several months. We are now in the runup to the local elections [that will be held on August 3]. Which just means from a South African point of view, and from an observer point of view, we are now entering a moment of uncertainty. It’s one of the biggest uncertain periods in the post-apartheid era, and it’s going to go on for quite a while.
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What follows is an open letter from Diana Prince, a.k.a. Wonder Woman, to billionaire businessman and bat enthusiast Bruce Wayne. It contains many spoilers regarding the events of the movie Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, so if you have not seen the movie and do not wish to learn what happens in it, you should stop reading now.
Seriously.
If you keep reading, you will see spoilers.
It’s going to happen.
Don’t say you weren’t warned.
You were.
Dear Mr. Wayne,
While I appreciate your invitation to join the “Justice League,” your new club for superheroes and also yourself, I am afraid I must decline.
Don’t get me wrong; I certainly applaud your gumption. It’s rather sweet that you seem to think saving the world requires me to join a club run by you. I am a literal ageless goddess with more than a century of knowledge of the world who can fly and use an arsenal of magical weapons. You’re a rich orphan with a trick jalopy who can’t tell the difference between a supervillain and a boat. Yes, of course, it’s only natural that you should be in charge and I should do the grunt work of recruiting “others like me.”
Right.
Seriously, your pal Alfred should write a parenting book about whatever he did to build up your self-esteem during childhood. I was raised by a group of actual deities, and I don’t have half your sense of entitlement.
But even if there were not such a glaringly, laughably obvious gap between your abilities and my own, which of our past encounters should give me confidence in your leadership abilities?
That time when I noticed you lurking obviously inside Lex Luthor’s mysteriously unlocked server room and managed to steal your own stolen data out from under you while you were distracted by the shiny, shiny party?
That time when you decided that the way to introduce yourself was by emailing me a file full of my enemy’s creepshots of me? Yeah, Bruce, women love it when you tell them you’ve carefully perused a hard drive containing their private photos and videos their stalker secretly shot. It’s a perfect way to build trust.
Oh, and of course there was that especially A+ moment when you fell blindly for Lex Luthor’s transparent trickery and nearly murdered Superman. That certainly showed excellent judgment.
Maybe I’m being unfair. After all, Lex managed to tap into your deeply rooted concerns about the vision of American power that our pal Superman represented. You don’t like the idea of trusting that an all-powerful, unlimited force will stay loyal to your interests. You doubt whether anything that powerful can ever truly be good. Those are all reasonable concerns. I’m with you so far.
But you also think that wealthy vigilantes with a penchant for branding irons are the best form of law enforcement. And you’re so easy to manipulate that Lex Luthor barely had to stretch in order to send you into a murderous rage.
And while I’m glad you failed in your murder mission, I can’t say I feel much confidence in your crime-fighting abilities now that I know that all a villain needs to do to stop you in your tracks is mention your mom. How long is it going to take before every hood in Gotham knows that shouting “MARTHAAAAAA” will make you suddenly become their best pal? I’m sure Martha Wayne was a lovely woman, but as battle flaws go, that one’s worse than kryptonite.
OH, AND SPEAKING OF KRYPTONITE.
We need to talk about what happened during our battle against Doomsday. As you may recall, when the going got rough, we found ourselves with one (1) hybrid supermonster, bred by Lex Luthor to be killable only with kryptonite, and one (1) spear made of the aforementioned space mineral, which is lethally crippling to Superman but just a glowy rock as far as I’m concerned.
And I guess it escaped your notice, Trumpy McBatface, but I’m an ACTUAL AMAZON. Check my résumé: I have spear experience. Enough experience to know, for instance, that spears are meant to be thrown. That is, in fact, one of the key selling points of spears: that you can use them as projectiles and thus avoid coming within a radius of your enemy that would allow him to, say, run you through the heart with one of his fearsome bone spikes. You know, if you happened to find yourself in a situation where that might be a concern.
So obviously the thing to do was … not even consider handing me the space weapon, and instead have Superman heroically sacrifice himself in order to take down the monster with his incompetent spearing technique. Great leadership and decision-making there. Really. Definitely makes me want to go into battle with you again.
Why do you think I was shouting, “Nooooooo!” at the top of my metahuman lungs? It wasn’t despair at the thought of losing our helmet-haired superfriend, as you seem to have concluded. I was screaming, “Nooooooo, you incompetent morons, let me handle this!”
But you didn’t listen.
I’m not saying you didn’t listen because you’re a man and I’m a woman. (Although that does remind me — at a later date I would like to discuss the matter of the gender pay gap at Wayne Industries. Lexcorp isn’t the only company whose servers can get hacked, and I’m not at all pleased about a few things I noticed while rifling through yours.)
I’m not even saying you didn’t listen because your pathetically weak human ears cannot comprehend the true majesty of my Amazonian voice.
Rather, I believe that sometimes a working relationship just doesn’t quite come together, and it would be best for us to remain professional acquaintances rather than colleagues.
I wish you the best in all of your crime-fighting endeavors.
Yours sincerely,
Diana Prince, a.k.a. Wonder Woman
P.S. I do like the car, though. If you’re ever interested in selling, my sisters and I would be willing to offer you at least two of our tribe’s rejected male infants for it.
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President Barack Obama visited a memorial to victims of Argentina’s “dirty war” on Thursday, where he gave a speech that expressed regret for the role the US played in that country’s period of dictatorship and repression.
“The United States, when it reflects on what happened here, has to examine its own policies as well, and its own past,” Obama said during the speech he delivered today at Parque de la Memoria, a monument honoring the tens of thousands of people who died during conflict in the 1970s and ’80s, in which the Argentine military regime waged a campaign of repression, torture, and terror against its own people in an effort to crush a communist guerrilla movement.
Obama was, unsurprisingly, pretty vague on what role the US played in that conflict. So it’s worth revisiting some declassified documents (he promised that the US would declassify more) from that era, which help show what happened: The US actively encouraged and supported Argentina’s brutal junta, even going so far as to give it the green light to commit atrocities against its own people.
Forty years to the day before Obama’s speech, on March 24, 1976, a group of right-wing military officers overthrew Argentina’s democratically elected government and installed a military junta led by General Jorge Videla.
Within days of the coup, then-US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and his staff discussed how they could organize “a sensible program of international assistance” for the new regime even though, a Kissinger adviser warned, they should “expect a fair amount of repression, probably a good deal of blood, in Argentina.” To Kissinger, however, supporting the junta was a necessary evil — a way to counter the spread of communism in Latin America.
Only months after the coup, with the expected repression — including executions, forced disappearances, and torture — well underway, Kissinger met with Argentina’s foreign minister, Admiral César Augusto Guzzetti, to express support for the new government.
“We have followed events in Argentina closely,” Kissinger told Guzzetti. “We wish the new government well. We wish it will succeed. We will do what we can to help it succeed.”
Kissinger, as part of this, gave Guzzetti tacit support for atrocities the government planned to carry out in its war on “terrorists” — a term the military regime used to describe not only actual Marxist guerrillas but also anyone suspected of supporting them or having leftist sympathies.
To be clear, the regime was, by that point, already killing people, already torturing people, and already forcibly disappearing those whom it believed to be subversives. Kissinger was aware of this, and indeed, the US ambassador to Argentina, Robert Hill, had been putting pressure on the regime to halt its human rights abuses. But when Kissinger met with Guzzetti, his message was the opposite of Hill’s.
“If there are things that have to be done,” he told Guzzetti, “you should do them quickly. But you should get back quickly to normal procedures.”
In other words, the US secretary of state sat down with the representative of a military government that had just stolen power in a coup d’état and told him that if he and his compatriots planned to commit mass atrocities against their own people, they should get right down to it without delay.
A later State Department memo, released by journalist Martin Edwin Andersen, reveals that the junta received that message clearly: They interpreted Kissinger’s statement as a “green light” for their campaign of terror against their own people.
Within weeks of the meeting, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Harry Shlaudeman briefed Kissinger that Argentine security forces were “totally out of control” and committing “daily waves of murders.”
The junta, Shlaudeman said, was planning “to terrorize the opposition — even by killing priests and nuns and others “in order to crush the country’s leftist guerrilla movement and those whom it considered leftist sympathizers and supporters.”
The military regime applied itself with vigor to executing that plan. It forcibly disappeared or assassinated tens of thousands of people, and made widespread use of torture. A common method of mass execution were the so-called “death flights,” in which dozens of prisoners at a time were dragged onto planes, sedated, stripped, and then dropped into the open ocean while still alive.
One of the regime’s most notoriously cruel policies was to steal the babies of pregnant women they arrested and executed, allowing regime sympathizers to adopt the children as their own.
And though Argentinians obviously bore the brunt of the regime’s crimes, US citizens fell victim to the violence as well. According to analysis by the US National Security Archive, at least six US citizens were murdered by the regime, and others were tortured.
Among the declassified documents is a statement from a US citizen who was arrested and brutally tortured by the regime in October 1976, after being found carrying leftist pamphlets. Her captors beat her severely, sexually assaulted her with an electric prod, and told her that “they’d fix me so I couldn’t have children.”
But even as all this was happening in the world’s full view, the United States did not withdraw its support for the regime. Despite that clear record of appalling human rights abuses, the strategic considerations of opposing the spread of communism during the Cold War won out over human rights concerns.
That did eventually change. When the Carter administration took office, it made human rights more of a priority in foreign policy, including in its relations with Argentina. But by then the damage was done: The regime had taken Kissinger’s “green light” as a license to kill tens of thousands of people, and the repressive regime had a firm grip on power. Argentina remained under a military government until 1983.
In his speech in the Parque de la Memoria, Obama stood before a wall that bears the names of thousands of people murdered by the government we supported, and said that we cannot forget the past, but that by confronting it we will build a better future.
And he’s right, but it’s a lesson that doesn’t just apply to regimes and atrocities that are safely in the past. The United States has still not come to terms with the real lesson of its support for Argentina’s military junta, which is that when the US sacrifices human rights in order to further other foreign policy objectives, it eventually ends up on the wrong side of history.
Last year, Vox’s Matt Yglesias asked Obama whether he was concerned about the human rights records of US allies such as Egypt, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia. The president’s answer was an unsatisfying dodge. Obama hedged, saying that the US has to press for human rights improvements while also pursuing other national security objectives — to “do both things.”
Doing “both things” sure sounds nice. But, as I wrote at the time, that doesn’t answer the real question of when it is worthwhile for the US to pursue improvements in human rights at the expense of other objectives.
It seems that it is easier to make speeches apologizing for our failures to live up to our values in the past than it is to make the hard choices to live up to them now, today.
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In the wake of Tuesday’s terrorist attack in Brussels, Ted Cruz has called for police to “patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods” in order to prevent future attacks.
“If you have a neighborhood where there’s a high level of gang activity, the way to prevent it is you increase the law enforcement presence there and you target the gang members to get them off the streets,” the GOP presidential candidate told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “I’m talking about any area where there is a higher incidence of radical Islamic terrorism.” Donald Trump, unsurprisingly, came out in support of Cruz’s plan, praising it as a “good idea” that he “supports 100 percent.”
Let’s start by acknowledging the obvious: Cruz’s statement was appalling. His logic is that all Muslims everywhere are so dangerous that they need to be monitored, simply because of their religion. That is pretty much the definition of bigotry. So is his suggestion that law enforcement treat neighborhoods home to Muslims the same way it treats those beset by criminal gangs, which implies that simply being a Muslim is comparable to being a member of a criminal organization.
But in making these statements, Cruz isn’t just revealing his own bias. The truth is that there’s something much bigger going on, and it’s actually much more disturbing than one politician’s personal animus.
The real issue here is why this strategy works for Cruz and other politicians like him — why it resonates with voters. And the answer, at least in part, is that this is a perfect example of the kind of authoritarian leadership that a large constituency of American voters craves.
That’s frightening, because it speaks to a much scarier truth behind Cruz’s scary statement: that this kind of demonizing of American Muslims isn’t just a problem with specific American politicians like Cruz or Trump. Rather, it’s a problem with American politics — and that means that it will stay with us long after this election is over.
Cruz likes to frame his statements demonizing Muslims as an example of his brave willingness to stand up to “political correctness.” But he’s running for president right now: He wouldn’t make statements like this unless he thought they were going to help him win votes.
And the truth is that he’s probably right.
As I’ve written previously, the key to understanding why politicians like Cruz and, more notably, Donald Trump have so consistently demonized Muslims is the phenomenon that political scientists call authoritarianism.
They’re not referring to actual dictators, but rather a psychological profile of individual voters that is characterized by a desire for order and a fear of outsiders. When people who score high in authoritarianism feel threatened, they look for strong leaders who promise to take whatever action necessary to protect them from outsiders and prevent the changes they fear. And over the past several decades, authoritarian voters have been shifting into the Republican Party, making them an increasingly powerful GOP political constituency.
Authoritarian voters gravitate toward leaders who exhibit what the political scientist Stanley Feldman described to me as “the classic authoritarian leadership style: simple, powerful, and punitive.” And authoritarian voters are especially susceptible to messages that tell them to fear a specific “other” — that the source of their problems is a particular minority or other group.
That means that when Cruz calls for patrols of Muslim neighborhoods, he’s giving authoritarian voters the kind of politics they crave. He’s identifying an out-group (Muslims), sending the message that the group is scary and dangerous (if you get enough Muslims together in one place, terrorism is the likely result), and arguing for a harsh, punitive policy targeting that group (have the police treat Muslims the way they treat criminal gangs).
All of that points to the bigger, more disturbing truth here: that there is a constituency for this kind of politics in America, it is powerful, and it will continue to shape the country long after this particular news cycle and even this particular presidential election are over.
That’s because authoritarian voters aren’t rare. In a recent Vox poll of likely voters, more than 40 percent of our sample scored as “very high” or “high” in authoritarianism. Those results were consistent with what other polls typically find. And because most (though by no means all) authoritarians vote Republican, they form a powerful GOP constituency.
And that constituency is increasingly relevant in today’s politics. Academic research has found that when authoritarians feel threatened — whether because of social change that disturbs the hierarchies that are important to them, or because of economic stress that changes their communities, or because of physical threats like terrorism — they become “activated,” meaning they seek out authoritarian leaders and policies.
It is as if, the NYU professor Jonathan Haidt has written, a button is pushed that says, “In case of moral threat, lock down the borders, kick out those who are different, and punish those who are morally deviant.”
Present-day America is rife with exactly the kinds of things that authoritarians find threatening.
Authoritarians prize order, stability, and hierarchies and feel threatened by social changes that upend the status quo. But it is a time of tremendous social change in this country. Some of those changes are obvious — you may have noticed, for instance, that we presently have a black president.
But in many ways that’s actually a far less significant change than the other ways the status quo is evolving. The country is becoming more urban, less white. It is grappling with structural racism, which means questioning everything from the way our police protect our cities to the way we talk on college campuses. The manufacturing industry is declining, and the economic stability of many working-class white communities is going with it.
And authoritarians are also especially concerned about the risks of harm posed by foreigners or members of the out-groups they fear, which means that terrorist attacks like the recent ones in Brussels and Paris are especially likely to provoke authoritarian voters. (ISIS, after all, is not only a foreign terrorist organization but one that claims to act in the name of Islam.) A recent Vox/Morning Consult poll, for instance, found that authoritarians were far more likely than non-authoritarians to fear terrorist organizations and the government of Iran. As Vox’s Max Fisher wrote this week, ISIS will probably commit more attacks in Europe in the near future as it attempts to make up for its losses in the Middle East.
And so because the pace of American social change shows no sign of slowing, and terrorist attacks are unlikely to stop anytime soon, we can expect authoritarian voters to stay “activated” or become even more so. That means they will become more and more likely to support the harsh policies that they believe will keep them safe. The Vox/Morning Consult poll, for instance, found that authoritarians were much more likely to support policies like using force instead of diplomacy to confront hostile nations, and limiting civil liberties in order to prevent terrorist attacks.
That is the constituency Cruz is speaking to when he calls for patrols of Muslim neighborhoods and implies that Muslims should be treated like gang members simply on the basis of their shared religion. It is the constituency that is thrilled to hear Trump say he wants to “close the borders” and “do a lot worse than waterboarding” in response to the Brussels attacks.
But Trump and Cruz didn’t create that constituency, and that means it will also outlast them. At this stage it seems unlikely that either man will become president, but the voters they are presently pandering to won’t disappear even if both men’s political careers flame out.
Those authoritarian voters will still crave strongmen leaders. They will maintain their appetite for harsh, punitive policies that target out-groups like Muslims or immigrants. And so they will remain a ready constituency for future Trumps and Cruzes in American politics — and a significant stumbling block for Republican politicians who refuse to lean into their politics of fear.
As I’ve written before, that’s a problem for the Republican party, which faces a de facto split into two separate parties: the GOP authoritarians and the GOP establishment.
But it is a problem for the rest of the country as well. It is dangerous for American Muslims and members of other targeted out-groups, who are placed at greater risk every time a politician tells authoritarian voters that they are a threat to this country’s safety or even its civilization. And it is dangerous for the rest of us too, to our civil liberties, our values of equality, and our political culture.
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The humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders, often known by its French acronym MSF (Medecines Sans Frontières), which provides aid to some of the most vulnerable people in some of the most dangerous war zones on Earth, announced yesterday that it would shut down operations in a Greek refugee camp that is one of the front lines of the European refugee crisis.
The group is responding to a new European Union plan for dealing with the refugee crisis, under which it will forcibly send refugees who arrive in Greece back to Turkey. MSF says it considers this “unfair and inhumane” and will refuse to participate, even complicitly, by providing services at the refugee camp of Moria on the Greek island of Lesvos.
“We will not allow our assistance to be instrumentalized for a mass expulsion operation, and we refuse to be part of a system that has no regard for the humanitarian or protection needs of asylum seekers and migrants,” Marie Elisabeth Ingres, the group’s head of mission in Greece, said in a stinging press release.
That means an organization that continues to work in war zones in South Sudan, Yemen, and Syria has concluded that its position in a European refugee camp is morally untenable. And that speaks to just how desperate and reactive the European Union has become in dealing with — but not solving — the growing refugee crisis.
Under the terms of the new refugee deal, which was announced on March 18 (it’s not clear whether it’s yet been put into effect), refugees and other “irregular migrants” who arrive in Greece — tens of thousands land on Greek islands every month — will be shipped to Turkey.
That’s the “mass expulsion” MSF is warning about.
In exchange for accepting those refugees, Turkey — which is already hosting 1.9 million refugees — will get up to €6 billion in aid over the next two years, plus a promise from Europe to resettle one Syrian refugee from Turkey for each Syrian sent back from Greece, although that resettlement program is capped at 78,000 refugees.
That could provide some relief for Greece, which has struggled under the burden of hosting large refugee camps as Europe experiences its largest refugee crisis since World War II.
But as MSF and other groups point out, that relief comes at the expense of refugees, who will now face even more danger than they already do.
MSF’s decision to quit the Moria refugee camp in Greece over the new EU plan speaks to just how dangerous that plan is for refugees. And that danger comes in two forms.
The first is that Turkey simply isn’t a safe country for refugees. Turkish law forbids Iraqis and Afghans from obtaining refugee status, which means if citizens of those countries are sent to Turkey — as the terms of this deal would require — they could be deported to Iraq or Afghanistan, where they would face persecution.
In fact, Amnesty International has accused Turkey of deporting a group of approximately 30 Afghan asylum seekers to Kabul on the same day the EU-Turkey deal was announced, highlighting the degree to which Turkey is a dangerous place for refugees.
“The ink wasn’t even dry on the EU-Turkey deal when several dozen Afghans were forced back to a country where their lives could be in danger,” Amnesty’s Europe and Central Asia director John Dalhuisen said in a press statement. “This latest episode highlights the risks of returning asylum seekers to Turkey.”
While Syrians are eligible for asylum under Turkish law, that doesn’t mean Syrians are necessarily safe there: Human Rights Watch has accused Turkey of pushing refugees back into Syria.
That would seem to be a serious violation of international law, which prohibits sending refugees to any country where they would face persecution.
The second problem with the new EU policy is that because it only affects refugees who arrive in Greece, and because it’s so dangerous for refugees to remain in Turkey, the likely effect is to force refugees to take other routes to safety — almost certainly pushing many into routes they would have otherwise avoided because they are too dangerous.
Indeed, the BBC reports that after the announcement of the Greece-Turkey agreement, there has already been a spike in migrant traffic along the very dangerous sea route across the strait of Sicily. The Italian coast guard announced Saturday that it had rescued 900 people trying to make the crossing.
So perhaps you can see why MSF would decide to leave the Moria refugee camp over this policy. The camp, after all, is supposed to be a place where refugees can find protection. But this new policy turns it into a place where they will encounter new dangers of persecution and new risks to their safety. It is small wonder that MSF feels that any involvement in such a system is morally untenable. And although MSF avoids political activism, it’s hard not to read this decision as a strong protest against the new EU policy and the effect it will have on vulnerable refugees.
And the fact that MSF will remain in so many war zones but not at Moria is also perhaps a statement, whether it is meant to be or not, about how perverse European refugee policy has become; how much it is not only failing to solve the problem of one of the world’s greatest humanitarian crises but is increasingly part of the problem itself.
Aid workers in Lesvos help a group of migrants rescued at sea.