When I read Paul Starobin’s recent article “Why Russia’s Post-Putin Future May Not Be Democratic”, I couldn’t help but disagree with his skeptical assessment of the political inclinations of the Russian people. Indeed, having just recently returned from that country, where I was working as a long-term elections observer for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), I can attest that Russians are far more interested in liberal democracy than Mr. Starobin suggests.

Mr. Starobin’s mistaken conclusions are derived from a common mistake: In using the Russian election results as the basis of his analysis, he takes them at face value. The OSCE has already detailed the many problems we found in the elections process. An election is supposed to represent the political will of a public that has been fully exposed to the views of differing political factions. By that measure, the Russian elections fell far short.

The most important statistic to look at in assessing the legitimacy of an election is the turn-out figure. Officially, 60 percent of eligible Russians turned out to vote. I personally believe that there is good reason to be skeptical of that number, but even if it’s accurate, that means that at least 40 percent of the voters stayed home in spite of constant exhortations from the government to exercise their sacred duty as citizens to vote. Why were so many Russians so unenthusiastic about voting? My observations suggest only one answer: Voters didn't like their choices. Many people told me that they hated the ruling United Russia, which they viewed as corrupt. But they disliked the Communist party even more, and, meanwhile, parties like Just Russia were viewed as nothing more than arms of United Russia. There was a campaign to encourage people to vote for the Communists as a protest against United Russia. But many more people voted by not voting at all. Still others submitted unmarked ballots, which were tallied as spoiled and never counted.

Mr. Starobin also points to the weak support for Russia’s liberal party, Yabloko. Isn't their miniscule vote proof that “western liberalism” has no appeal in Russia? No, not really. That is like saying a boxer's failure to knock-out his opponent with one arm tied behind his back is proof that he can't box. On the surface, Yabloko appears to be a normal political party, one free to compete for power: After all, they have advertisements all over the place, on billboards, on television, and on the sides of buses.

But from my conversations with people in Russia, I learned that Yabloko is burdened by constant harassment. Indeed, its supporters take real risks in backing the party. This may explain why you will never find a Yabloko poster in a store or kiosk window (or any party's besides United Russia for that matter). One interlocutor told me that Yabloko is left alone when it is doing poorly in the polls, but that trouble begins once it starts to gain in popularity. Needless to say, the party has difficulty raising money under these circumstances. (For proof of that, one need only compare Yabloko's simple TV ads with United Russia's professionally-produced commercials.) Furthermore, under Russian elections law the votes of parties that fail to cross the 7 percent threshold are automatically given to the party that finishes first in the voting. Given that there were rumors that Yabloko wasn't going to make the 7 percent mark, many Russians calculated that a vote Yabloko was liable to become a vote for United Russia. Some observers of Russian politics suspect that the Kremlin allows Yabloko to survive as a weak party precisely so that it can cite it as "proof" of the Russian people's lack of interest in "western democracy." Interestingly, about a third of Russian nationals living in the U.S. voted for Yabloko, which I think is some indication of how well Yabloko would do under less constrained circumstances.

Yabloko, however, is not the only democratically oriented political party in Russia. The People's Freedom Party (PARNAS) led by former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov and former Prime Minister Vladimir Ryzhkov tried to register for the election with a list of 46,000 party members, but its application was denied. We have no way of knowing how well PARNAS would have done, but Nemtsov is widely considered a more charismatic and popular figure that Yabloko's leader Grigory Yavlinsky. (It’s no accident that Nemtsov is hardly ever allowed to appear on Russian television: The only time I saw him on Russian TV as was on a youth oriented game show on a music video channel. The kids correctly identified a very unflattering picture of him as belonging to a Russian politician.)

Furthermore, who says an opposition leader or party is needed in order to bring about democratic change? The Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt was not led by an “opposition leader.” They were led by ordinary citizens organizing online and taking to the streets. Similar things are happening now in Russia. Many of the demonstrators in Moscow last weekend did not belong to an organized party or movement. They were just ticked-off citizens who decided on their own to turn-out. Given how tech savvy Russia has become, I wouldn't be surprised to see more of that.

Another factor in these elections that Mr. Starobin does not account for are the laws governing political debate. In Russia, it is illegal to criticize one's electoral opponent. Americans bombarded with negative campaigning may think that sounds appealing, but they should think twice. The upshot of the law is that the incumbent ruling party as well as parties with extreme political views have a structural advantage. Since they are essentially immune from criticism, they can say whatever they want, no matter how crudely populist or blatantly untrue, without fear of being called out. Voters in general and impressionable young voters in particular are thus not forced to think too hard about what exactly it is that they are supporting.

Mr. Starobin also trots out the very tired cliché about how Russians were supposedly turned-off to democracy in the 1990s. This is a claim repeated so often by the Kremlin and its defenders that people seem to assume that it is true, but I’ve never seen evidence for it. I don't doubt that the Russian public wanted greater order in the 1990s, but when did they ever express their wish that the entire democratic process be ditched? I don't recall the Russian public being consulted on such things. Moreover, young Russians today were small children in the 1990s and are far more focused on the future than the past. The Kremlin is not going to be able to keep singing its song about the chaotic 1990s much longer. Russians are quickly getting tired of it.

Finally, Mr. Starobin resorts to what I refer to as “cultural determinism,” which is a popular sport where Russia is concerned. He’s not the first to suggest that Russians just aren't culturally capable of sustaining a democracy. But, historically, this is a claim that’s also been made of many other nations—from the Spanish and Italians to Latin Americans to Africans to Koreans and Japanese—that we now accept as naturally democratic. The fact is that the Russia of today is not the Russia of the czars and commissars. If you step into any Russian café you will see young people glued to their laptops and iPads; even in small rundown cities you can see billboards advertising tourist destinations like Thailand, Turkey, and Israel. Can anyone have imagined in Soviet days that provincial Russians would be taking beach trips to Israel? The fact is that Russians are more comfortable dealing with foreigners and more knowledgeable about the world than they used to be. This is why the Kremlin's more recent attempts to stir up anti-Western sentiment are falling flat: more and more Russians are coming to see themselves as part of the West. Russians are also more self-aware about the weaknesses of their own society: There is even a serious public discussion taking place about curbing sales of alcohol and tobacco.

I do agree with Mr. Starobin that the gains made by the Communists and the far-right LDPR are a cause for concern. However, I don't think that they are an indication that Russians are not interested in democracy. What they are is an indication that the Kremlin's political machinations have completely backfired. The Kremlin thought that they could control the Communists and the LDPR while shutting-out democratic opposition (who, weirdly, they brand as “extremists”). It is a strategy that has mostly been to the benefit of the Communists and the LDPR, spurring alarmed Russians to take to the streets. Emigration is also no longer the effective safety valve it once was: An increasing number of middle class Russians are asking why they should have to leave Russia to fulfill their goals is life.

The Kremlin itself seems to be realizing that its strategy is crumbling. In an interview this week Putin's political strategist Vladislav Surkov spoke of the need for a political party for what he called “irritated urban communities”. The Kremlin is now acting the part of a teenage boy that is coming to realize that he has been hanging out with the wrong crowd. Does he continue to align himself with radical parties and pray that they play nice with him, or does he make new friends?

Russia’s liberals may no longer be interested in playing nice. Prominent political figures, like billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov and former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, are now actively challenging the status quo. Prokhorov has already announced he is running against Putin. Kudrin, who is a very popular figure both in Russia and abroad is forming a new party. Kudrin is especially difficult for the Kremlin because he is a mentor of Putin’s, not an oligarch who can be attacked as a criminal in the pay of westerners. In my opinion, Prokhorov and Kudrin are the faces that are more likely to represent Russia’s political future.

In short, I think there are plenty of reasons to be hopeful about the prospects for a true Russian democracy. But I will readily admit that neither I nor Mr. Starobin can say for sure. That is the problem with holding flawed elections. The results don't really tell you all that is going on.

Mitchell Polman has participated in ten OSCE elections observation missions. His views are strictly his own and do not represent those of the OSCE mission as a whole.

This article is a contribution to ‘What Should the United States Do About Syria?: A TNR Symposium.’

The ongoing crisis in Syria is that rare international issue that should unite both humanitarians and foreign policy realists. Intervening to terminate the Assad regime is the only way to end the Middle East’s bloodiest humanitarian tragedy in decades. It’s also the most effective way to get rid of the most anti-American regime in the Levante, a strategic area for U.S. interests. That’s not to say that intervention will be simple. Ill-conceived action could escalate the conflict. That’s why the intervention in Syria needs to be velveteen in nature, soft to the touch and woven patiently over time.

The U.S.-led intervention in Bosnia in the 1990s is instructive. During the Bosnian War, the United Nations Security Council designated areas liberated by Bosnian civilian-defense units as “safe havens.” The Bosnian defense units faced the risk of being outgunned by the superior Yugoslav National Army (J.N.A.) and Serb paramilitaries, so the U.N. then mandated peacekeepers to protect these areas. There was one problem though: In 1995, J.N.A. forces overran the “safe haven” of Srebrenica, and peacekeepers with a limited U.N. mandate could only watch as thousands of Bosnians were executed.

As in Bosnia, forces composed of civilian-defense units are liberating areas of Syria while continuing to be outgunned by the superior Syrian Army. The good news offered by the Bosnian precedent: Give the Syrians well-protected safe havens, and they will likely finish off Assad. But Bosnia also offers another lesson—don’t send in peacekeepers with a limited U.N. mandate. They can’t stop the conflict. Intervention needs to be soft in nature and smart, involving not ground troops, but air power to protect the designated safe havens.

Still, a question looms: With little American appetite for overseas warfare whose air force would protect the safe havens? In fact, Washington’s reluctance to lead an operation may prove a blessing, leaving space for Turkey to take the reins. Over the past decade, Turkey has built a new policy in the Middle East, casting itself as a regional power whose identity transcends Ankara’s traditional Western alliances. As a result, Ankara views taking part in any U.S.-led intervention in a Muslim country to be against Turkey’s new role in the Middle East.

But Turkey would support an air-based intervention to protect U.N. designated safe havens—as long as the mission is led by a “regional force,” composed of both Turkish and Arab militaries. Qatar and Saudi Arabia, who are funding the opposition, should be happy to work with their new ally in Ankara to protect the safe havens; Washington and European powers could then remotely back the operation, facilitating its success. This might be just what the war-weary United States needs: a military victory in the Middle East without the American military.

There is one more barrier, of course: Russia’s veto in the U.N. Security Council. As long as Russia continues to block a U.N. resolution, there won’t be any internationally-recognized “safe havens,” which means no Turkish-led coalition to protect them. But this is where active U.S. diplomacy, guided by historically-informed sympathy, can make a difference. Moscow’s obstructionism isn’t because it likes the Assad regime. Rather, Russia fears that by losing Assad, it will also lose its only Mediterranean maritime base, located in the Syrian coastal town of Tartus.

Since the eighteenth century, Moscow has controlled a vast land-based empire. This territory, however, is locked in by frozen seas for much of the year. To tackle this problem, Moscow has always kept a foothold in the Mediterranean, gaining access to “warm” seas. Losing Tartus would usher in a historic Russian lockout of the Mediterranean and the warm seas—this would be a strategic disaster for Russia. Washington must assure Russia that it will have access to Tartus after Assad leaves. Give Russia their warm water port, and they will not veto the resolution.

Washington needs to devise a well-planned, delicate intervention strategy in Syria: supported by the Russians, executed by the Turks and Arabs, and remotely backed by the U.S. and its European allies—and last but not least, one involving no ground troops.

Soner Cagaptay is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a regular contributor on CNN’s Global Public Square.

This is a contribution to ‘What Should the United States Do About Syria?: A TNR Symposium.’

It is a testimony to the relative powerlessness of American policymakers that much of what has already been accomplished to force the end of Bashar al-Assad’s autocratic rule in Syria—ongoing demonstrations; the growing defections within the ranks of a Syrian army that has already killed at least 5,000 protesters; the punishing international sanctions against Damascus; the Arab League’s expelling of Syria from its ranks, and its subsequent call for international intervention; powerful economic sanctions implemented by European Union, Turkey and the Arab League—has been in the absence of any significant U.S. action. Indeed, the current consensus among both diplomats in Damascus and intelligence officials in Washington is that, while he will not go easily, Bashar al-Assad’s regime cannot stay in power indefinitely.

But even if American policy can only act on the margins of the ongoing crisis in Syria, it is imperative that Washington get involved. The status quo is bad enough that when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was asked to speculate on a best-case scenario, she responded with … Yemen. The problem is that even if Assad’s days are numbered, that number might still be unacceptably high (say, in the triple-digits). Within the borders of Syria, the humanitarian catastrophe is worsening: Over the weekend Assad’s forces amped up the violence on Homs, thirty years after the infamous 1982 Hama massacre by his father. The deteriorating situation has ramifications across the region as well. The combination of sanctions against Syria and Iran threaten to turn Iraq into an economy that specializes in corruption and sanctions-busting, and as Assad’s grip on power grows more fragile, he will become even more reliant upon Iran’s resources.

The New Republic wouldn’t be soliciting my take if there was an easy solution to this policy conundrum. Indeed, Syria is such a tough nut to crack that I fear the best approach to the problem is to apply a Sherlock Holmes-style logic to it. When all of the impossible policy choices have been eliminated, only the improbable ones—however unpalatable they might be—are left to mull over.

Some options are easy to eliminate: After the weekend, a United Nations-approved intervention is not in the cards. The Obama administration did better than in October’s vote, getting 13 yeas, but Russia and China both vetoed the fairly milquetoast resolution. That they did so the day after the escalation of violence in Homs suggests that no level of atrocities will shame Moscow or Beijing away from their protection of Syrian sovereignty. Russia and China will also likely block any effort to refer Assad to the International Criminal Court.

For the Obama administration, negotiating with Assad or doing nothing are no longer options—not after what’s been said publicly. Both the violence in Homs and the failure at the Security Council prompted some harsh rhetoric from American policy principals. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice stated that she was “disgusted” by the Russian and Chinese vetoes and that they would “have blood on their hands” for opposing action. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “The Syrian Government has shown its contempt for the international community, for its Arab neighbors, and most of all for its own citizens.” President Obama issued a statement calling again for Assad to step aside now and saying that “cruelty must be confronted for the sake of justice and human dignity.” The Obama administration can’t make these statements and then not doing anything further—well, it can, but not without looking foolish in the region and developing a reputation for cheap talk. Moreover, it’s not clear what dividends patience will pay in the current situation. There are ways in which time will work against Assad—sanctions-induced economic hardship is now penetrating Aleppo and Damascus, for example. Still, on their own, sanctions almost never topple a regime as entrenched and ruthless as Assad’s.

Finally, neither a no-fly zone nor a U.S.-led ground campaign are feasible options. Assad’s crackdown does not rely on air power, so any restriction by air would have a minimal effect. As Marc Lynch pointed out in Foreign Policy, “Air strikes and no-fly zones can not tip the balance in a civil war environment fought in densely populated urban areas where the U.S. lacks reliable human intelligence.” Having extricated U.S. forces from Iraq and facing a brewing confrontation with Iran, the last thing the Obama administration wants to do is get sidetracked by another kinetic military operation with boots on the ground. If a coalition of the willing existed for the U.S. to “lead from behind,” that might be promising. There is zero evidence, however, that European, Turkish, or Arab League forces are prepared for such a step.

With the easy options eliminated, I can think of two unpalatable but workable paths forward. The first option is to split off Russia—the Assad regime’s most public defender—from the coalition of outside actors offering aid and comfort to Assad. The Financial Times suggests that for Moscow, the primary issue is not the economic benefits from arms shipments to Damascus or worries about the Arab Spring spreading to Moscow. What matters to Russia is preserving its naval base at Tartus, its sole such installation in the Mediterranean for the Black Sea Fleet. So, one option is to suggest that Tartus become the Middle East equivalent of Guantanamo Bay—a military base that survived a dramatic regime chance. If the Syrian National Council were to make such a commitment to Moscow, it could leave Assad without his great power patron. This would deal a psychological blow to the Assad regime and potentially flip Russia from preserving the current regime to facilitating as fast a transition as possible. If Russia rebuffs this offer—not an unlikely scenario, since Moscow has other reasons for wanting Assad to stay around—then the only viable option left is also the nastiest: aiding and arming the Syrian opposition.

Arming the opposition will have costs: The loss of life will escalate; the uprising against Assad could turn into a sectarian conflict; Iran might retaliate by fomenting armed resistance in Bahrain; and the result might simply be an arms race-by-proxy inside Syrian borders. And for the United States, the Syrian crisis matters, but is nevertheless a distraction from the Obama administration’s highest stated priority in the region: getting a handle on Iran’s nuclear program.

That said, the Syrian population wants regime change. What’s going on inside of Syria is a civil war, and the government is clearly receiving ample support from both Russia and Iran. Arming the opposition at least evens the odds on the battlefield. The sad truth is that there is no good outcome, only different shades of terrible. Arming the Syrian resolution won’t bring a speedy, peaceful resolution, but it will make it harder for Assad’s military to systematically annihilate the opposition. In the short term, that appears to be the best one can hope for inside of Syria’s borders.

Daniel W. Drezner is professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and blogs for Foreign Policy magazine.

This article is a contribution to ‘What Should the United States Do About Syria?: A TNR Symposium.’

Just hours after the government of Bashar al-Assad launched its most murderous assault to date, massacring more than 200 men, women, and children in the city of Homs, the peace plan backed by the Arab League met its ignominious end in the U.N. Security Council. This was an abject diplomatic failure. The lesson to be drawn, however, is not that diplomacy is hopeless. Indeed, if many more thousands—and possibly tens of thousands—of Syrian deaths are to be avoided, the solution we seek needs to be a political agreement, not a military campaign. Military intervention on the model of Libya is simply not feasible—logistically it would be far too difficult, and politically it could backfire, generating massive civilian casualties and unifying key sectors of Syrian society behind the very regime that needs to be ousted.

That’s not to say that Washington’s leadership isn’t needed. Quite the opposite. Any effective solution will be the product of skillful and high-stakes diplomacy that’s highly attuned to the political dynamics both in Syria and on the international stage—and the United States can and should play a leading role in forging it.

Of course, all of this is easier said than done. The Arab League deserves credit for trying a diplomatic approach to stop the violence, but its plan was deeply flawed in both substance and process. It was developed without consultation among different Syrian groups. Whether Assad would be forced to relinquish power was left disastrously ambiguous (especially in the Arabic text). And the plan’s call for elections within six months was unrealistic and ill-advised in a country that hadn’t had anything close to free elections in decades. (One clear lesson from previous post-conflict international efforts to rebuild political order is that rushed elections can be worse than none at all.)

It’s clear that any refashioned diplomatic effort must find a way to usher Assad and other key Baath Party regime stalwarts from power. Syria cannot achieve peace without moving toward a more just and representative government. At the same time, it can not neglect providing a credible guarantee for the collective security of the Alawite minority (about 12 percent of Syria’s population) that has controlled the state and the army since Hafez al-Assad seized power in a 1970 coup. And it must ultimately provide a safe exit and exile for key regime leaders, beginning with President Assad himself.

That means that the United States, together with the U.N., the European Union, the Arab League, and Turkey, will need to engage directly with Syria’s rulers in intensive diplomacy. Of course, this should be backed up by intensified targeted sanctions. But the goal should be to induce the Assad regime to accept a negotiated exit and transition, as is unfolding in Yemen, or to fracture the regime over time and peel away its pillars of support.

Targeted sanctions should zero in on a sizable number of specific regime leaders in the government, military, state security apparatus, and economic support structure of the regime, freezing assets and banning travel by them and their families. The patchwork of partial and individual country sanctions should be enlarged and systematized. An international envoy or diplomatic team should then go to Damascus and make clear to Assad and his key allies that their time is running out. The message should be: “You can leave now, keep your money, and live in exile in an agreed destination, or you will ultimately lose everything. If you hang on and compel your people to remove you by force, you will have no safe exit, and you may face an International Criminal Court indictment, since Russia and China will have little remaining incentive to veto a U.N. Security Council resolution to that effect once you fall from power.”

By then, a growing number of regime elites would face the prospect of being trapped in a bleeding and decimated country, with a noose of international financial and judicial pressure around each of them personally, and dwindling prospects for exile if things fall apart. Faced with this choice, there may still be only a modest prospect that the top elements of the regime would opt to negotiate. But others just below them might well see the writing on the wall and leave, or push Assad aside and seek to make a deal. 

At the same time, it is important for the international community to recognize that the element of collective fear and insecurity currently felt among the Alawite ruling minority would magnify exponentially if the Assad regime continues to buckle. Some leaders may go into exile, but what will be the fate of the more than two million Alawites who remain in Syria after a deal is reached and a transition of power begins? They have no doubt looked over the border at the harsh fate of the Sunni minority in Iraq and shuddered with fear at the prospect of their own Sunni majority (about three-quarters of Syria’s population) turning the tables on them.

In that way, as soon as the regime has been adequately weakened, international mediators should broadly and intensively consult among Syrians inside and outside the country, with a view to seeking protections for Syrian minorities. This should involve: an immediate and internationally monitored halt to the violence by all sides (including the resistance of the Free Syrian Army); an immediate transition to a broad-based interim government (as in the Arab League plan); and agreement on a set of core constitutional principles, recognized as legitimate by both Syrians and the international community, that would ensure the security of the Alawites and other minority groups. Then a process of political transition could unfold that would eventually lead to a free election for a new representative government, with guarantees for the interests and autonomy of Syrian minorities.

International mediation to end the violence in Syria would be complex and challenging. It would require the designation by the U.N. of an experienced and indefatigable international diplomat (ideally Arab), like the U.N. special envoy to Yemen, Jamal Benomar. If we want the mission to succeed, the mediator would have to be able to work not just with the Syrian opposition and the Arab League but also with the Russians, who believe that they have vital interests in Syria.

If muscular diplomacy fails, we may have no choice but to help arm and train the Syrian rebels. But that would be to resign ourselves to a ghastly civil war. Yes, negotiating with people who are responsible for crimes against humanity will be morally distasteful. But the alternative is to stand aside and content ourselves with the prospect of a decisive military intervention that will not come. That would be the greater moral and political disaster.

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.

It has been nearly a year since Syrians took to the streets en masse to protest the rule of Bashar al-Assad. In that time, government forces have responded brutally, killing some 6,000 people, but the response by the international community has been relatively muted. Over the next several days, we’ll be publishing a symposium at TNR Online that asks what the United States should do to put a stop to the conflict.

Dan Drezner on why we should arm the opposition.

Larry Diamond on how we should engage with Assad in order to oust him.

Soner Cagaptay on why we should organize a military force from Muslim countries.

Return here in coming days for contributions from Anne-Marie Slaughter, James Traub, Walter Laqueur, and others.

Maybe Republicans in their anti-Romney desperation have inadvertently stumbled on an artful new way to fuse religion and politics—every presidential long-shot gets not one but two resurrections. Rick Santorum is officially back from the crypt, and his period in limbo has done him well. For the first time during the 2012 campaign cycle, it actually seems sensible to take Santorum seriously for the long haul.

You couldn’t say that after his narrow victory in Iowa. They say the curse of insurgent campaigns is that they never have the resources to plan how to exploit victories, and Santorum proved that adage true, squandering the opportunity with ill-designed and off-message appearances in New Hampshire. But the clock was working against him, too. With just one week to pivot from rural Iowa to primary day in secular New Hampshire, the under-funded Santorum was doomed. After collecting a pathetic 9 percent of the vote in New Hampshire, Santorum faded from view except as the butt of sweater-vest jokes.

But now Santorum has the campaign schedule on his side. A three-week pause until the February 28 Michigan and Arizona primaries gives Republicans plenty of time to wonder about nominating Mitt Romney, a candidate who arouses all the passions of a dead flashlight battery. This week’s Conservative Political Action Committee convention, where the three leading GOP contenders will speak Friday, is as congenial a venue for Santorum as he could hope for. And the Michigan Republican primary, where Santorum will concentrate his time and sparse campaign funds, tilts towards voters who reflect his blue-collar sensibility and strident social conservatism.

Of course, every TV pundit will feel compelled for the next three weeks to describe Michigan as Romney’s home turf, since the candidate’s father, George, was a two-term governor during the 1960s. But one should take such pronouncements with a grain of salt. Yes, Romney’s family connection helped him win the 2008 Michigan primary, but this isn’t the Kennedys of Massachusetts we’re talking about. In fact, aside from that 2008 primary, I have been on the Michigan ballot more recently than any member of the Romney family: In 1972, I ran a youthful antiwar race for the congressional seat from Ann Arbor—two years after Romney’s mother Lenore was defeated by a two-to-one margin in her bid to challenge Democratic Senator Phil Hart. (I, for one, am under no illusion that today’s Michigan voters nostalgically long for the days when they could vote for Shapiro.)

It’s fair to point out that Santorum’s trio of symbolic victories Tuesday night did not produce a single delegate (Minnesota and Colorado choose their conventioneers later and the Missouri primary was a glorified straw poll). But it may have done something more important for his presidential prospects: kindle serious interest in the nation’s newsrooms and cable TV green rooms. The press pack, invariably cynical about losing presidential candidates who resist the verdict of the voters, was all set to declare Romney the de facto nominee. But suddenly it is no longer fashionable to pronounce the GOP race over or to brood over being the last political commentator with a kind word for Newt Gingrich.

What this means is that Santorum—and to a lesser degree Gingrich—will now benefit from far more press coverage in the weeks leading up to Super Tuesday (March 6) than they otherwise could have expected just a couple of days ago. And all this free media will at least somewhat dampen the many negative ads that Romney’s campaign is surely planning on raining down on Gingrich and Santorum.

Heightened press attention and scrutiny will, of course, be a mixed blessing for Santorum. I have wondered whether Santorum’s months in media purgatory had more to do with the ferocity of the former Pennsylvania senator’s attacks on gay marriage than his 700,000-vote loss for reelection in 2006. In retrospect, why was the ludicrously ill-informed Herman Cain taken more seriously from the outset of the campaign than a former two-term senator from a major state? The truth is, as soon as you scratch Santorum’s earnest, accessible, Dad-on-a-TV-sitcom persona, you find a man with a long record of “man on dog”-type comments.

In that way, it could prove that this is all a blip, that these down days of February won’t even warrant a rueful chapter in the Romney campaign autobiographies. But I doubt it. The man from Bain Capital has always been vulnerable to what Tim Pawlenty long ago called a “Sam’s Club Republican.” What is fascinating is that Rick Santorum, the candidate who may well prove to be Romney’s most lasting foe, has been hiding in plain sight all along.

Walter Shapiro is a special correspondent for The New Republic. He also writes the “Character Sketch” column for Yahoo News. Follow him on twitter @waltershapiroPD.

The knee-boy

bent to his daddy’s shoes

spit-gobbetting and rag-shammying

 

hard for shine.

This poem appeared in the March 1, 2012 issue of the magazine.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

By Katherine Boo

(Random House, 256 pp., $27)

Early in Katherine Boo’s unforgettable book, a boy from Annawadi, a Mumbai slum, rushes into his makeshift school, bleeding. The classroom is nothing more than a single room in a neighbor’s hut, but it is the only place he can go for medical attention after being hit by a car. No sooner has the teacher begun treating his wound than his mother surges into the hut, wielding a large piece of scrap metal and screaming: “No car will kill you! No god will save you! You went in the road, roaming loose like that, and now you will die at my hands!” After receiving a beating, the boy is rescued by his teacher. Prior to departing, his mother threatens to “break his legs and pour kerosene on his face.” For this boy, an injury could mean financial catastrophe. “If the driver had hurt you worse, how would I have paid the doctor?” the mother asks her son while striking him. “Do I have one rupee to spend to save your life?”

More than one hundred pages later, a Mumbai garbage-sorter takes the witness stand to defend the honor of his dead wife. A trial is being held to determine whether the defendant beat, and drove to suicide by self-immolation, the woman everyone in Annawadi calls The One Leg. After an argument with her neighbors, she poured cooking fuel over her head and lit a match; her face and hair exploded in flames. The reader has long since known that the deceased—a vindictive woman whose life was full of pathos and bitterness—performed this act for other reasons. But her widowed husband is desperate to deny the idea that his wife had been depressed, let alone suicidal. As proof, he offers up the observation that when their two-year-old daughter drowned in a pail, her death did nothing to shake his wife’s composure.

Boo’s book, which traces the lives of a dozen or so characters in Annawadi between 2007 and 2010, so accustoms the reader to scenes such as this that the widower’s testimony does not quite register, at least initially. None of the witnesses at the trial are reported as reacting to what would generally be considered a damning appraisal of a dead woman’s character. (Unlike those in the court, we have reason to suspect that The One Leg killed her own daughter.) But what does it mean for a husband to state proudly that his wife had not been affected by the death of their child? What does it mean, in a separate incident, for a boy to lose his hand in a plastic shredder and shed tears not from the pain but from the fear of losing his job?

As these unspeakable incidents pile up and feed off one another, Boo, who spent significant time in Annawadi, makes no effort to assist her readers in making judgments. Characters drift in and out of the book, only gradually revealing themselves. Their actions, however vicious or shortsighted, are rendered comprehensible by the wellsprings of motivation to be found within their own words, and by the depth of Boo’s descriptions. Although she never precisely explains how people could reach a state where the death of a child is neither noteworthy nor tragic, her reporting allows for us to reach our own conclusions. Boo’s presence is skillfully invisible, so that the reader recalls her only when wondering, admiringly, how she was able to document the extraordinary story that she tells.

That story is cinematic in its scope, and in the manner by which it builds to several hinge moments while moving back and forward in time. But that is where any similarity between Beyond the Beautiful Forevers and Slumdog Millionaire, the most famous depiction of Indian slum existence, ends. Danny Boyle’s movie extravagantly presented the “slumdog” life of its central character as frequently horrific but ultimately (and literally) rewarding: his terrible experiences allowed him to prosper on a game show. It was a kind of television theodicy. Despite its subtitle, by contrast, Beyond the Beautiful Forevers is not a hopeful book, and its despair is anything but cathartic. “Among the poor, there was no doubt that instability fostered ingenuity,” Boo writes, “but over time the lack of a link between effort and result could become debilitating. ‘We try so many things,’ as one Annawadian girl put it, ‘but the world doesn’t move in our favor.’”

The fates of the Annawadians are shaped by their relationships and ambition and fortitude; but these people have no prospects, and only the most narrow and local and difficult horizons. They cannot, in the girl’s words, make the world move. The independence of their actions and the sharpness of their personalities do not amount to anything like historical agency. And their vitality never distracts the reader from the crushing sense that poverty has prevented them from becoming independent actors.

IN THE IDEA OF POVERTY, Gertrude Himmelfarb divided writing about her subject into two categories. There were works about “solutions”: “policies, reforms, laws, institutions, administrative agencies”; and works about “problems.” “The emphasis here,” Himmelfarb wrote, “is on the economic, technological, social, demographic, urban, and other conditions which helped determine the nature and incidence of poverty at any particular time and place.” Himmelfarb’s sections on Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham highlighted ameliorative measures and institutional reform. But she also spent considerable time exploring writers such as Charles Booth and Henry Mayhew, who wrote about English poverty with a focus on the realities of an impoverished existence.

Booth began his seventeen-volume effort, Life and Labour of the People in London, in 1889. His work is studded with facts and figures—some of them controversial and disputed—that aimed to identify and to classify those living in poverty. Booth’s account suffered from a particularly Victorian condescension, but his aim was noble: he wanted to focus attention on the needy, the helpless, those who required assistance, and he was an inspiration to, among others, Clement Attlee, the British prime minister most responsible for implementing a welfare state after World War II. Mayhew’s book, London Labour and the London Poor, was written several decades before Booth’s study; it is teeming with categorizations and lists (on the first page, street people are placed into one of six groups), and there is an almost scientific focus on the details of daily life. Mayhew charts the different ways thieves break into houses, and he provides a glossary of terms used by “costermongers” (fruit-sellers). No tidbit is too small or uninteresting.

Indian depictions of poverty (at least those available in English) tend to conform to Himmelfarb’s paradigm. On the problem side, Arundhati Roy and P. Sainath are more concerned with who is to blame for poverty or how existing power structures cause or entrench misery. Both are opinionated and sometimes angry, and both tend to focus more on rural areas, where most Indians live, which is generally the norm in Indian studies. Sainath’s ire rarely obscures his reporting, but it is difficult to ignore his presence.

The exception is Amartya Sen, who has broken new ground in the analysis of poverty, and in lucid social-scientific prose. His writing on famines, for example, demonstrated how institutional mechanisms can distort the distribution of food supplies. At the same time, his analysis of welfare and poverty has combined economics and philosophy in the service of evaluating the individual “capabilities” of human beings. It is largely due to his efforts, to his “capabilities approach,” that we now have the United Nations’ Human Development Index, which carries the measure of human “development” beyond simple utilitarian calculations and into the realm of the freedom to function in society. In his work with Jean Drèze, Sen has stressed the importance of education and health outcomes—rather than simply GDP—in the evaluation of a country’s progress.

Katherine Boo departs from these forebears. Her book certainly belongs in the “problems” literature—solutions are not really canvassed. But this is not a book about what causes poverty or social ruin; it is a book about poverty and social ruin. Boo wants to know, and to convey, how poverty is lived. She uses almost no statistics; nor are there lists or categorizations. The history of Mumbai is barely sketched at all. Where Mayhew would frequently define things as odd or disturbing, Boo rarely makes judgments about her characters. Years ago she did distinguished work at The Washington Post, where she expertly detailed the frightening conditions in the capital’s group homes for the mentally ill. But in that series, and in other recent American works on poverty (Jason DeParle’s splendid book on welfare reform, for example), statistics tend to mix with observation and reportage, and history and politics and social policy tend to play a role in the story. The great American exception to these trends was certainly James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which might be the closest comparison to what Boo is attempting, although Agee inserted himself into the book and showed an interest in classification.

Boo’s crucial strength is an empathetic imagination. Her book has the closely observed and artfully constructed quality of high fiction and film. (There were pages that reminded me of Satyajit Ray.) It is worth recalling that Mayhew wrote many scenes that mirrored Dickens’s stories, and showed an interest in character that would not have embarrassed Thackeray or George Eliot. In this way he was Boo’s precursor in the “problems” tradition: sometimes journalism succeeds by reading like a novel.

ABDUL HAKIM HUSAIN, who lives with his Muslim family in an Annawadi hut along with an ailing father, eight siblings, and a pragmatic and strong-willed mother, is the book’s central character. Abdul is not sure of his exact age, although it is safe to guess that he is in his mid-to-late teens, and when the story begins he is providing support for his family by buying and selling trash. After the burning, which exerts a centrifugal force on the slum, and which Abdul and other members of his family are accused of inciting, Boo explores the relationships between Abdul and other slum kids, and between his mother and The One Leg. The other family that we come to know intimately is headed by Asha, a proud and extremely ambitious mother in her early forties who—thanks to her connections to a local political party—is in a position of relative power in Annawadi. Her daughter Manju, who has reached a marriageable age and teaches a school class from their home, functions occasionally as her mother’s conscience, and frequently as the voice of self-reflective decency and goodness.

Nowhere is Boo’s prose stronger than in her physical descriptions of Annawadi, which lies next to Mumbai’s airport and houses—if that word can be allowed—3,000 or so people. The slum is not just a metaphorical jail that its inhabitants want to escape, it also takes on the actual dimensions of a prison:

June, the beginning of the four-month monsoon season, made every Annawadian pensive. The slum was a floodbowl, surrounded as it was by high walls and mounds of illegally dumped construction rubble. In a 2005 deluge that brought the whole city to a standstill, [The One Leg’s] family had lost most of what they owned, as had the Husains and many other Annawadians. Two residents had drowned, and more would have, had not a construction crew building an addition to the Intercontinental hotel supplied ropes and pulled slumdwellers through the floodwaters to safety.

Boo’s observations often focus on trash and its importance in the lives of every Annawadian. Of Abdul’s trash shed, she notes:

Inside was carbon-black, frantic with rats, and yet relieving. His storeroom—20 square feet, piled high to a leaky roof with the things in this world Abdul knew how to handle. Empty water and whisky bottles, mildewed newspapers, used tampon applicators, wadded aluminum foil, umbrellas stripped to the ribs by monsoons, broken shoelaces, yellowed Q-tips, snarled cassette tape, torn plastic casing that once held imitation Barbies. Somewhere in the darkness, there was a Berbee or Barblie itself, maimed in one of the experiments to which children who had many toys seemed to subject those toys no longer favored. Abdul had become expert, over the years, at minimizing distraction. He placed all such dolls in his trash pile tits-down.

This is more than well-written: its comment on “children who had many toys” is an apt symbol of India’s inequalities, and even the standard phrase “over the years” gains added potency when the reader remembers that Abdul is only a teenager.

Boo’s language, and her remarkable powers of observation, keep subtly reflecting the perspective of her characters: cargo shorts are described as being held up by “a shiny oval belt buckle of promising recyclable weight.” A twelve-year-old slum dweller sees well-dressed women “carrying handbags as big as household shrines.” (It is a cognitive accomplishment for a Westerner to see that there are circumstances in which a handbag may be compared in its size to a household shrine.) In what must be a direct translation of a Hindi phrase, a character who is ignoring his sister to watch television is described as having eyes “inside the TV.”

The drawback of such a perspective is that it prohibits the reader from understanding the full dimensions of Indian poverty. Statistics are not people, but numbers can tell a different kind of truth; and the local character of Boo’s powerful narrative may leave too many readers ignorant of the problem’s staggering magnitude. Despite progress, India has more people living in poverty than the entire continent of Africa. Approximately one-third of the country’s population—more than 400 million people—are impoverished, and the rates of malnutrition among children are comparable to those of sub-Saharan Africa. It is true that poverty is significantly worse in rural areas than in large cities, but in those cities, especially Mumbai, overcrowding has reached dismaying levels and slums take up much of the land.

THE BACKDROP of Boo’s book is the vertiginous change that Indian society has experienced over the past two decades. (Boo’s title comes from the slogan—“Beautiful Forever”—of an Italian floor tile company whose ads cover the airport walls and block the view of Annawadi.) After years of centralized planning and a relatively closed economy, the floodgates were opened in the early 1990s. Development schemes were given brisk approval, agriculture was downgraded in importance, and the stream of people moving from rural to urban areas turned into a flood. The productivity of an enlarged middle class has not sufficiently affected the living standards of the Indian majority. The epidemic of corruption, which has recently galvanized those middle classes, is given a twist in Boo’s pages. As she notes, “for the poor of a country where corruption thieved a great deal of opportunity, corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained.” Of course, if the country were less corrupt, there might also be fewer poor Indians.

Boo’s sketch of this metamorphosis is too, well, sketchy, but she does a fine job of displaying how her characters cope with what they know is a “new” India: “Everyone, everywhere, complained about their neighbors. But in the twenty-first-century city, fewer people joined up to take their disputes to the streets. As group identities based on caste, ethnicity, and religion gradually attenuated, anger and hope were being privatized, like so much else in Mumbai. This development increased the demand for canny mediators—human shock absorbers for the colliding, narrowly construed interests of one of the world’s largest cities.” This idea keeps recurring, as when an Annawadian reflects on transitioning from rural life to urban life: “He wasn’t sentimental about that village, in a district where there was little work except in sugarcane fields and children died at one of the highest rates in India. But he felt that urban slums surrounded by affluence turned children contemptuous of their parents—‘because we can’t give brand-name clothes, the car.’”

The larger theme also asserts itself in the political and religious spheres. Boo goes into very little detail on Shiv Sena, the Hindu extremist political party that has spent years controlling the city (and had the city’s name changed from Bombay to reflect what Shiv Sena’s leaders believe should be its Hindu character). Asha is herself a party member, and derives what power she has from the affiliation. Shiv Sena and its Hitler-admiring leader Bal Thackeray were behind much of the violence against Muslims that has occurred in the city over the past twenty years. The terrorist attacks in 2008, this time perpetrated by Islamic jihadists, intersect only tangentially with Boo’s narrative, but the lack of anti-Muslim violence in response to the atrocities fits into Boo’s larger picture of a society with its focus elsewhere: “The popular rage ... didn’t seem to transfer to other Muslims in Mumbai. Abdul was relieved to find ... in the clammy, crowded train cars, he was no one’s proxy. The Hindus were just going where they had to go, as he was. Like him, they were coughing, eating lunch, looking out windows at billboards on which Bollywood heroes hawked cement and Coca-Cola. They were bent protectively over prized documents in prized plastic bags like his own, which said, TAKE A BREAK, HAVE A KIT KAT.”

As Boo juggles India’s changing fortunes and the squalor of Annawadi, the story keeps returning to the slum’s children. Abdul is an astonishingly resourceful and humane teenager with practical intelligence and impressive levels of common sense. He cannot quite get himself to feel God’s presence, but after he is accused of a crime he does come to see it as part of a divine plan, if only because many people smarter than himself believe in God. In juvenile lock-up, however, he doesn’t fear the ghosts of former prisoners: in Boo’s elegant formulation, “being terrorized by living people seemed to have diminished his fear of the dead.”

Even when Abdul cannot explain his emotions, he is smart enough to recognize their power. He is not sentimental, except when it comes to his two-year-old brother, whom he can barely look at without tearing up. Somehow he knows that this feeling speaks to his larger situation. His more existential reflections, too, register strongly in his mind, even if he never evaluates them with any rigor: “Once my mother was beating me, and that thought came to me. I said, ‘If what is happening now, you beating me, is to keep happening for the rest of my life, it would be a bad life, but it would be a life, too.’ And my mother was so shocked when I said that. She said, ‘Don’t confuse yourself by thinking about such terrible lives.’” In one section, Abdul is given the chance to have a sort of mentor, and it is no surprise that the opportunity invigorates the boy. He hears his mentor speak of respectability and honor, and Boo describes his response: “It was not too late, at seventeen or whatever age he was, to resist the corrupting influences of the world and his nature. An awkward, uneducated boy might still be capable of righteousness. He intended to remember this.”

This experience, which occurs while Abdul makes his way through India’s criminal justice labyrinth, may have been intended by Boo to show the human potential within her wretched subjects. But these pages are also a haunting picture of a legal system rife with brutality and capriciousness, although the power of certain democratic institutions makes itself (eventually) felt. The police exist to be bought, and Abdul’s treatment at the hands of the authorities is terrifying. (Boo provides very little background on the operations of the country’s legal system, but very few experts would quibble with the implication that Abdul’s case does not depart from the norm.)

The occasional glimmers of hope on offer cannot do much to dispel the overwhelming climate of gloom. Boo notes that rather than organize a response to the many indignities that they face, Annawadians generally turn on each other. “Powerless individuals blamed other powerless individuals for what they lacked,” she writes. “Sometimes they tried to destroy one another. Sometimes, like [The One Leg], they destroyed themselves in the process. When they were fortunate, like Asha, they improved their lots by beggaring the life chances of other poor people.” Boo ascribes this phenomenon to global capitalism and the obsessive focus on individualism, which has blunted an appeal to the common interest. There may be some truth to this, but the phenomenon of the oppressed being cruel to the oppressed is an old one and reformers have faced it, in every country, for centuries. “The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained unbreached,” she writes of Annawadi’s troubles. “The poor took down one another.” It turns out that the poor are as imperfect as everybody else, and adversity is not a school for angels and saints.

“ABOVE ALL ELSE: in God’s name don’t think of it as Art,” Agee instructed his readers in the preamble to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. He seemed to fear that the beauty of his book would blunt its social impact. To grasp his work, he added, the reader should listen to Beethoven and turn up the volume: “You won’t hear it nicely. If it hurts you, be glad of it. As near as you will ever get, you are inside the music; not only inside it, you are it; your body is no longer your shape and substance, it is the shape and substance of the music.” If this was how Agee wanted us to experience Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, he sold his book short. He was underestimating the power of his own work.

When she finally emerges in her own voice in the author’s note at the end of the book, Boo reflects that “When I settle into a place, listening and watching, I don’t try to fool myself that the stories of individuals are themselves arguments. I just believe that better arguments, maybe even better policies, get formulated when we know more about ordinary lives.” This true and decent and sanguine thought is quite distinct from what interested her after first arriving in India. Presumably influenced by Sen’s encompassing approach, she had first asked, “Whose capabilities are given wing by the market and a government’s economic and social policy? Whose capabilities are squandered? By what means might that ribby child grow up to be less poor?” But Boo has chosen not to answer these questions. What she has done, instead, by raising her journalism to the level of literature, is make us want to press the questions along with her.

Isaac Chotiner is the executive editor of The Book at TNR.com. This article appeared in the March 1, 2012 issue of the magazine.

Clyfford Still Museum

Denver, Colorado

I have never been strongly attracted to the feverish visionary heights that can be reached by a prophetic voice. Of course I feel the power of the Book of Lamentations, and Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, and Wagner’s Ring, and Blake’s apocalyptic extravaganzas. But there are other registers that touch me more deeply, or at least more directly. I think a convincing argument can be made that the prophetic mode does not come naturally to the visual artist, surely not to the visual artist in the modern world. I say this in a speculative spirit, by way of explaining a certain hesitation with which I approach the achievement of Clyfford Still. He was one of that obstreperous band of artists who became famous in New York in the years around 1950, known to one and all as the Abstract Expressionists, although the name made an uneasy fit with much of their work and did not really please them. Clyfford Still, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Ad Reinhardt, and Barnett Newman were surely the last painters who believed that a work of art could strike with a force akin to the power of prophecy. Were they right? Could a painting exhibited in a gallery or a museum in New York City in 1950 have the impact of an epochal proclamation? And even if it had an Earth-shattering impact then, can it have such a power now?

At the Clyfford Still Museum, which opened in Denver in November, there should be a banner above the front door announcing, “THUS SPAKE STILL.” The strongest of the paintings in this museum dedicated solely to his work—they date from a ten-year period beginning in the early 1940s—are visions of a sort, sphinx-like and thunderous, as much Attic as Hebraic in their celebration of enigma. We are confronted with walls hewn of paint, the surfaces unsettled, scabrous in places, ranging in one composition from stretches of bare canvas to volcanic buildups of pigment. The colors, whether feverishly bright or burned to brown and black, coalesce into a hyperbolic chromatic poetry. There are fragments of imagery: veins of bright pigment running through dark masses that evoke rock formations, floating bits of flotsam and jetsam with rough-torn edges, shards pulled from the traceries of some shattered Gothic cathedral. The interlocking shapes are puzzle-like, jostling against one another, pushing forward and backward, stony substances submitting to the pressure of geological time. And the narrow rivers of paint in certain canvases can suggest rope tricks or a wooden staff becoming a serpent, the inanimate animated. The paintings exude a glowering lyricism.

And how do these canvases—thunderbolts to which there still clings some of the Romantic heat of the nineteenth century—look more than a decade after the close of what was a determinedly anti-Romantic century? The impact of Still’s rhetoric has cooled, and the visionary strangeness of his paintings has become familiar; the spectacle we are invited to contemplate takes on a retrospective cast. The idea of an abstract painting as a spiritual experience nowadays meets with resistance, the dreams of an alternative reality inaugurated by Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian having dwindled to something more like the promise of an atmospheric interlude, a moment’s respite. In Denver, where the natural beauty of the Rockies is never out of reach and the druggy mysticism that touched American life in the 1960s remains alive, people are ready to bliss out in front of one of Still’s enigmatic mindscapes. I saw more than one person contemplating a Still canvas with the same rapt attention they would bring to one of Colorado’s splendid sunsets. Such an approach is not entirely misguided. After all, didn’t Still want his paintings to be experienced as forces of nature?

Still had a good deal to say about what he wanted, and not only in paint; I hope the Clyfford Still Museum will someday make his collected writings available. The challenge posed by the powerful prose that he published in his lifetime has everything to do with his accentuation of the negative. He eagerly explains the many ways in which his paintings can be misunderstood, always highlighting the extent to which curators, dealers, and critics have muddled the meaning of the work. Like some of the artists who were for a time his friends, Still took upon himself a task he regarded as something like cleaning the Augean stables. He was going to purge the art world of all preconceptions, thereby preparing the groundwork for the entirely new kind of art that he and his contemporaries were creating. Reinhardt wanted “no illusions, no representations, no associations, no distortions.” Newman complained of the “confusion” in Kant’s and Hegel’s theories of beauty. De Kooning said that although he had learned a great deal from the European abstractionists, he was “completely weary of their ideas now.” And Still complained about the “self-appointed spokesmen and self-styled intellectuals with the lust of immaturity for leadership.” The dealer Betty Parsons, who represented Still, Rothko, Newman, and Pollock when they were at the height of their powers, called them the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. No doubt she was kidding—but only up to a point. That image of eschatological warriors helps to explain the fire and brimstone in Still’s strongest paintings.

WHAT STILL would have thought of the design of the Clyfford Still Museum is impossible to say. But I can report that it is everything a museumgoer could hope for. The men and women involved in this enterprise—beginning with Dean Sobel, the museum’s director—have honored the artist’s spirit. The building, designed by Brad Cloepfil and his firm, Allied Works Architecture, is human-scaled and finely detailed, a compact rectangular structure enlivened with passages of wood screening and rough-hewn concrete. Although entirely autonomous, the Still Museum is set right next to the Denver Art Museum, and nothing could be further from Cloepfil’s exquisite restraint than the gonzo angularity of Daniel Libeskind’s 2006 addition to the DAM, which is about as audience-unfriendly a museum as I have ever seen. The Denver Art Museum deserves better: its collections are engaging, with strong holdings in the art of the Americas. Visitors will discover, among Denver’s Northwest Coast and Mesoamerican material, suggestive parallels with Still’s images and themes.

Cloepfil’s refusal to grandstand puts him firmly in the humanistic tradition of Alvar Aalto and Louis Kahn. The felicities of the Clyfford Still Museum work on us gradually, refinements both visual and tactile to be discovered over repeated visits. The first floor of the two-story structure is devoted to biographical material, including audiovisual aids and vitrines containing catalogues, letters, and books from Still’s library. (There are also administrative offices and storage and conservation facilities.) Upstairs, Still’s tamped-down, belligerently murky abstract dramas come into focus in galleries that exude a monastic calm. Daylight is filtered through the ceiling’s open-work concrete panels. Some of the canvases are beautifully hung on concrete walls with striated surfaces that bear the impress of the wood molds in which they were cast. There could be no better setting for Still’s coruscated poetry.

The museum’s existence will be regarded as something of a miracle by those who know anything about its long, tortuous gestation. By the time Still died in Baltimore in 1980, at the age of seventy-five, he had been a longtime resident of rural Maryland and had spent at least a quarter of a century backing away from nearly everybody who took an interest in his work. As best he could, he rigorously controlled the dissemination of his paintings. He was reluctant to part with much of his work, and he often made near-replicas of paintings that were in other hands. An exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1979-1980, although Philippe de Montebello was the curator of record, was for all intents and purposes organized by Still and his second wife, Patricia. He left her with the responsibility of finding a permanent setting for the approximately eight hundred paintings in his possession. What he demanded was a freestanding museum where nothing but his own work would ever be exhibited.

For years there was something close to a total embargo even on information about what the estate contained. When the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden mounted a Still show in 2001, Patricia Still was thanked for her help, but the curators responsible for the catalogue appear to have been unable to say with any confidence what paintings were or were not in the estate. Reports have it that at one time or another nearly twenty cities vied for the chance to build a Still museum. Denver, where a nephew of Patricia Still lived, has been in the running twice. Their second bid—in 2003—came while Patricia Still was in discussions with Baltimore, which had a certain logic as being in the state where Still spent much of his later life, but Denver apparently came closest to fulfilling her understanding of her husband’s wishes.

Although Denver is not a city with which Still had any personal connection, the time I spent at the museum left me feeling that this is indeed the right place for his work. Still had deep roots in the West. He was born in North Dakota and grew up in Washington state and in Canada. Some of his first important canvases were painted while he lived in the Bay Area in the 1940s, where for a few years an abstract art with its own idiosyncratic rhythms flourished, in part under the aegis of Douglas MacAgy, a man too little remembered, who was director of the California School of Fine Arts in its heyday, when Still, Rothko, and Edward Corbett taught there. Still always wanted to be seen as a solitary visionary—a man unto himself, silhouetted against the vast American horizon—so it makes sense that a museum honoring him would be set at some distance from the maintraveled roads of modern art. He was also a highly cultivated man, and was surely aware that the audience for his work would have to be attuned to all that was sensuous and spirited in life; and Denver is a lively, sophisticated city. In Denver I felt flashes of the independent intellectual swagger that I have always associated with Northern California. At its best, at least in the mid-twentieth century, cultural life did have a different cast in the West, where academic ideas and ideals, for better and for worse, were easier to slough off or to ignore. Despite all the years Still spent back East, there is a West Coast insouciance about his work that I think Denver understands.

The opening selection from the roughly eight hundred paintings in the museum’s collection is a survey of Still’s entire career, covering some fifty years, from a very early landscape with deep perspectives and delicate Whistlerian brushwork to the late mural-scale canvases with their by then all-too-predictable ragged-edged forms. There is also a selection of works on paper as well as a couple of attempts at sculpture. The early galleries are fairly alarming, with canvases from the 1930s in which farmers and their families are turned into rustic grotesques, with terrifyingly deformed limbs and heads that make Daumier’s cruelest caricatures seem kind. Whatever Still had in mind, the results are catastrophic. Perhaps he meant to channel American Regionalism through the dark Northern sensibility of Hieronymus Bosch. Perhaps he meant to heroicize American agriculture by giving his farmers the grimaces of Mesoamerican idols. Who cares? These may well be the most repellent works done in America in a decade that saw more than its fair share of oil-cloth horrors. Even the art historian David Anfam, a sympathetic and subtle commentator and the adjunct curator at the museum, has referred to the “nightmarish distortion” in these works.

By the end of the 1930s, Still was beginning to disassemble his horrific pastorals, replacing his caricatures with inscrutable totems. While this was progress of some sort, the shift strikes me as uncomfortably abrupt, even though it took place over a period of years. For all that Still’s abstractions evoke the look and feel of the natural world, they may be insufficiently rooted in some deep-seated sense of natural forms and forces. What we observe as Still moves into his strongest work is not so much a formal evolution as a change of allegiance that has some of the bulldozer vehemence that I associate with the ideological fervor of political argument in those years. What remains constant from the 1930s to the 1940s is the self-consciously turgid palette and paint-handling, which Still may regard as a show of stand-alone masculine power, no matter that his allusions to the art of Miró and Native Americans put him squarely in line with the Surrealist tastes of the period. Certainly the blunt force of Still’s canvases does not invite art historical exegesis. His references to Miró’s cosmologies or to Northwest Coast art are carried off with a bravado that may be designed to dull the associations. Can a painting that is designed as an object of contemplation register simultaneously as an act of aggression? After spending some time with Still’s paintings, I believe that the answer is yes.

Still certainly knew how to make a painting that had an impact, and he never lost that ability. The presentation in this inaugural exhibition bids us think in chronological or biographical or evolutionary terms, but the work, the best and the worst of it, is so hellbent on striking us as timeless that the idea of development begins to seem beside the point. This may help us understand what is wrong with the work that began to come out of Still’s studio in the mid-1950s. Those canvases feel like counterfeit Stills, though sometimes they are very good fakes. They lack the tension of the finest work. Could it be that for Still, who was determined to give his paintings the aspect of eternity, real change became anathema? Although the color lightens and brightens in some of the work of the 1960s and the jagged shapes are at moments almost jaunty, Still never moves beyond the configurations he had arrived at before 1950. And as time goes on those configurations lose their saving ambiguity. They become flatter and flimsier, overly literal and too insistently allegorical. Whereas in the work of the late 1940s the geological allusions feel ambiguous and intuitive, a 113-inch-high painting in blacks and browns from 1957 might almost be a rendering of a cliff in the Grand Canyon. The sense of the magic as being in the making is leached out of the work. The size of the canvases becomes blandly aggressive, a giant paint-by-number that Still fills in by rote. Still seems to have known where he was going to arrive before he began the journey.

There are those who will rate Still’s work of the later decades more highly than I do, but I am fairly certain that nobody would argue that he ever painted more strongly than he did in the late 1940s. There is an intensification in the work of those years, a sense of arduous discovery, before which the later achievements, even if one experiences them as confident and expansive, inevitably pale. It is the same intensification that we witness in the work of so many of Still’s contemporaries in the years before 1950—in de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko, Reinhardt, and Newman—and it must have something to do with the artists’ suddenly experiencing the extent of their powers, now released from the straitened circumstances of the Depression and the war. Whatever the particular situation of each artist, the sense of expansiveness in their paintings of the late 1940s and early 1950s reflects the turbulent movements of American history.

WHY DID THE Abstract Expressionists fail to sustain the energy of the late 1940s and early 1950s? There are many answers to this question. Some will say that the question is not even worth asking, except to point out that a great many artists rapidly lose the focus and the intensity that characterize their early or middle years. But in Still’s case—and he may not be unique—I believe that the growing achievements of American art precipitated a personal crisis. For Still, the experience of taking his place in the history of twentiethcentury American art raised a host of problems. To become a part of history meant becoming a part of a tradition, which did not sit easily with Still’s sense of himself as a solitary explorer.

In 1952, Still published a startling and to my mind deeply disturbing statement about the nature of tradition. He referred to “the totalitarian hegemony of this tradition I despise.” He wrote that a “body of history matured into dogma, authority, tradition” had grown up around the act of painting. This statement, excerpted from a letter to the curator Dorothy Miller, was published in the catalogue of “Fifteen Americans,” an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that burnished the reputations not only of Still but also of Pollock and Rothko. Perhaps I am making too much of Still’s association of tradition and “totalitarian hegemony”—he liked to speak in riddles, and his statement may be hard to parse. But “totalitarian” is a very strong word to use, especially less than a decade after the defeat of Hitler. And Still’s meaning strikes me as fairly clear. “We all bear the burden of this tradition on our backs,” he writes, “but I cannot hold it a privilege to be a pallbearer of my spirit in its name.” Still’s words go well beyond even the most hostile views of tradition that had been voiced by painters earlier in the modern century. He is not so much suggesting that the artist must start anew—a perfectly understandable impulse—as he is saying that the past offers nothing of any value from which to begin. But can an artist really function without some belief in tradition? What tradition teaches is that art’s present is continuous with art’s past and art’s future.

There are certainly nuances to Still’s thinking. In the striking text that he published in the catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum of Art retrospective, which draws on letters and texts written much earlier, Still’s cussedness is engaging, and his resistance to orthodoxies—especially the orthodoxies of the avant-garde—can be very appealing. Like many of his friends, he had no patience with the teachings of the Bauhaus, which by the end of World War II were embraced by art schools and universities all across the United States, and offered a unified approach to the study of painting, sculpture, architecture, and the decorative and graphic arts—an approach that Still was not wrong to find in some ways dehumanizing. I take great pleasure in Still’s takedown of Buckminster Fuller, whose visit to a college where Still was teaching he describes as a “foxy-grandpa farce. The intellectuals, so-called, of the campus and platform, fearful of freedom and guilty unto rottenness for the price they have paid for their slippery security, fall on their knees before him.” It is naughty fun to read Still on his colleagues, who “moan for the condition of the Congolese and clutch their pale martinis on moonlit terraces. They are convinced Adlai [Stevenson] will take care of them, which he will, but not, in the end, to the end in the way they hope for.”

There is a great deal to celebrate in Still’s brilliant diatribes, even if he is sometimes involved with his own kind of “foxy-grandpa farce.” The Clyfford Still Museum could only have been conceived by a man who refused to accept the comfortable assumptions of the art world that was coming of age as he became famous. Even as he was bombarded by curators, critics, dealers, and collectors who wanted to help him cash in on his soaring reputation, he retreated—only (one assumes) selling enough to assure himself a comfortable life. The Still Museum has opened at a time when there is hardly any development relating to twentieth-century art, whether in the museums or the universities, that does not involve some market calculation, some cash nexus. Would the Arshile Gorky retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art a couple of years ago have ever seen the light of day if the Gagosian Gallery were not taking an interest in the artist’s work? And could it be that the white-hot market in de Kooning’s late canvases was a factor in the Museum of Modern Art’s decision to mount its retrospective? The city of Denver, in the process of setting up the Clyfford Still Museum, has itself entered the market. Four paintings from the estate of the artist’s widow—as distinct from the artist’s own estate—were sold last November at Sotheby’s for a total of $114 million, with the proceeds going to the museum’s endowment. But at least for now the museum’s quality of otherworldliness has been sustained. No matter what the pressures of the marketplace—and there are no future plans to sell works from the collection—visitors to these galleries will feel that they are in the presence of an American artist who refused to play the game.

While Still is by no means the only insider in twentieth-century art who wanted to become an outsider, his story is fairly astonishing. Still’s work was embraced by Peggy Guggenheim and Betty Parsons, the two most adventuresome art dealers of the years during and immediately after World War II. And Clement Greenberg, by many estimates the foremost critic of the time, made Still’s work a centerpiece of what is often regarded as his most important essay, “‘American-Type’ Painting,” in 1955. But Still would have none of it. In 1951, he explained in a letter to Betty Parsons that he no longer wanted to exhibit in public. Although that was not quite the end of his involvement with the New York galleries, there was no question that he was in retreat. And after reading Greenberg’s “‘American-Type’ Painting,” Still wrote to the critic to set him straight, voicing considerable discomfort with the way his work had been represented. Even the most congenial attempt to present or explicate his work struck Still as constraining. I don’t know quite what to make of all this. Still’s resistance to the machinations of the art world was admirable. At the same time, his skepticism was so pervasive as to signal a rejection of the warp and woof of culture—and if one rejects culture entirely, what is left?

In Denver, Clyfford Still’s dreams have been fulfilled. He is at last presented in splendid isolation—as the painter who stepped out of the history of painting. Say what you will, he is certainly the most sophisticated outsider artist who ever lived. He holds his prophetic images aloft, and we are left to wonder whether his shreds of brilliant yellow, red, and orange pigment are the embers of a spent conflagration or the sparks of conflagrations to come.

Jed Perl is The New Republic’s art critic. This article appeared in the March 1, 2012 issue of the magazine.

Crazy Horse

Return

The Hunter



Where is Frederick Wiseman taking us now? Beginning in 1967, when our pre-eminent maker of documentaries brought us into a hospital for the criminally insane in Titicut Follies, Wiseman has shown us American lives in—among many other places—high schools, a hospital, a monastery, a welfare agency. Lately he has been drawn to France, to some Parisian institutions: the Comédie-Française and the ballet of the Paris Opera. Now, he visits a prominent Paris cabaret, Le Crazy Horse, renowned for its spiffy nude shows.



The film begins mildly enough, with some hands-aspuppets tricks in shadows behind a sheet. Soon these shadows are replaced by outlines of the main subject: women’s bodies. Even after the sheet goes, the subject really remains women’s bodies—not women, not individuals. Most of the time the showgirls, whether onstage or off, wear nothing but shoes and the smallest possible G-strings. Bosoms and behinds are the currency of the place. In fact, in many of the show numbers that follow, Wiseman even frames his shots to leave out the girls’ heads. This seems about right for a place whose professed aim is to present the best chic nude show in the world.

My heart sogged through

the days in a Stygian fog.

I drove around at night

naked full of agonized

silences and dwindling

abdications until there

was not much left to give

up but my camouflaged

wrath which I had vowed

to maintain to the end so

bitter was the taste of my

Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, 1750-1790

By Jonathan I. Israel

(Oxford University Press, 1,066 pp., $45)

I.

There’s something about the Enlightenment. Today, few educated men and women spend much time debating whether Western civilization took a disastrously wrong turn in the High Middle Ages. They do not blame all manner of political ills on Romanticism, or insist that non-Western immigrants adopt Renaissance values. But the Enlightenment is different. It has been held responsible for everything from the American Constitution to the Holocaust. It has been defended as the birthplace of human rights and condemned as intolerant, cold, abstract, imperialist, racist, misogynist, and anti-religious. Edmund Burke, in one of the most eloquent early attacks, excoriated “this new conquering empire of light and reason.” One hundred fifty years later, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno declared bluntly that “enlightenment is totalitarian.” It remains very hard to shake the sense that something fundamental about the modern world owes its form to the intellectual revolutions of eighteenth-century Europe—and that to repair the world, we may need to start by identifying what those revolutions got wrong.

As in all such intellectual controversies, misunderstandings abound, for no one can even agree on what is being argued about. Everything about “the Enlightenment”—its unity, its goals, its methods, its chronological and geographical boundaries—remains in dispute, providing activity, if not always gainful employment, for a sizeable academic industry. While some scholars limit the Enlightenment to a small cadre of eighteenth-century philosophes, others identify it with tendencies in Western thought that may stretch all the way back to classical antiquity. The title phrase of Kant’s famous essay “What Is Enlightenment?” is a question that has launched a thousand—ten thousand!--dissertations.

When Americans express indifference about the problem of unequal incomes, it’s usually because they see the United States as a land of boundless opportunity. Sure, you’ll hear it said, our country has pretty big income disparities compared with Western Europe. And sure, those disparities have been widening in recent decades. But stark economic inequality is the price we pay for living in a dynamic economy with avenues to advancement that the class-bound Old World can only dream about. We may have less equality of economic outcomes, but we have a lot more equality of economic opportunity.

The problem is, this isn’t true. Most of Western Europe today is both more equal in incomes and more economically mobile than the United States. And it isn’t just Western Europe. Countries as varied as Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, and Pakistan all have higher degrees of income mobility than we do. A nation that prides itself on its lack of class rigidity has, in short, become significantly more economically rigid than many other developed countries. How did our perception of ourselves end up so far out of sync with reality?

It’s Mitt Romney’s misfortune as a presidential candidate that his greatest administrative accomplishment—indeed, the centerpiece of his four-year Massachusetts governorship—was a health care reform plan that most of his fellow Republicans despise, because it provided the blueprint for President Obama’s 2010 health reform law. Rather than boast that he helped build the most significant domestic legislation to clear Congress in four decades, Romney must revile Obamacare, pledge to repeal it, and pretend that it bears little resemblance to Romneycare.

The Bay State itself is another liability for Romney. It’s viewed by conservatives as so unforgivably liberal that a 2006 PowerPoint briefing prepared by campaign strategists before Romney’s first presidential run actually recommended that he lump “Massachusetts” in with “taxes,” “Hollywood values,” “jihadism,” and other campaign “bogeymen.”

Last week’s by-now-infamous comment by Mitt Romney—“I’m not concerned about the very poor”—has led the media to ask just how much personal sympathy he has for those less fortunate than himself. But in a sense, that’s the wrong question: Romney has spent a significant amount time and energy as both a politician and a lay leader in his church seeking to better the lot of poor Americans. That probably says more about his personal levels of compassion than an awkward off-the-cuff statement. The pertinent question is not whether Mitt Romney thinks about the poor, it’s how he thinks about their plight.

Of course, it’s one of the more awkward tactics of the media this political cycle to go prospecting for Mormonism in Romney’s every policy suggestion and offhand comment. But to understand his attitude towards the poor, it may be necessary to look at the interesting—though unsystematized—tradition of Mormon economics. Romney is certainly aware of the tradition—in fact, as a local leader of congregations, he helped administer it—and there’s little doubt that it has informed the way he thinks about poverty, wealth, and the dynamics of government assistance.

Mormonism has from the beginning thought of itself as less a church than a community, a place where, as Mormon scripture states: "They had all things common among them; therefore there were not rich and poor, bond and free,” and “there were no poor among them.” The Book of Mormon states quite flatly that there is no such thing as undeserving poor: It is the obligation of any Christian to offer aid whenever it is requested, no questions asked. And so it’s not surprising that, during the nineteenth century, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young repeatedly tried to implement a form of Christian socialism, asking their followers to deed all their property to the church and redistributing it as need might demand.

These attempts rarely worked: Joseph Smith complained that greed sabotaged what he called “the law of consecration.” Still, the church went on to establish a rather extensive internal welfare system. Members are regularly asked to contribute money to assist the poor of their own congregation, and the Church Welfare Program, run largely by volunteers, produces food and clothing in farms, canneries, and factories for distribution—both to those inside and outside the church.

As much as these social service programs express Mormon scriptural teachings, they also reflect the Church’s historical skepticism towards the government. In the 1830s, the governor of Missouri sent the state militia to drive the Mormons out of the state, and Martin van Buren, then the president, declined to intervene. For nearly the entire decade of the 1880s, federal marshals systematically worked their way through Utah in pursuit of polygamists. This history has left the Mormons with a persistent distrust of the federal government. Church leaders during the Great Depression warned their co-religionists against becoming dependent on the government, believing that it was far better to confront problems of poverty in their community internally. The Mormon Welfare Program was erected at that time as an explicit alternative to government aid programs.

Embedded in all this activity was an implicit critique of state assistance. Indeed, Mormons thought of their own systems not only as an alternative to government programs, but an improvement on them: They believed that they were not merely alleviating poverty, but also encouraging the cultivation of character and moral fiber among the poor—by requiring, for example, people who receive food from church pantries to contribute volunteer hours canning vegetables.

These ideas were further bolstered in the mid-twentieth century with the rise of a particularly Mormon, moralistic form of libertarianism, which intensified the Church’s historically-grounded suspicion of government. Vocal leaders, like the apostle Ezra Taft Benson (who later became president of the church) and the BYU professor Cleon Skousen enunciated the ideology most clearly. They vigorously rejected the application of words like “socialism” or “communalism” to Joseph Smith’s nineteenth-century economic experiments, and warned that government programs robbed human beings of their God-given free agency. Rather, all aid to the poor must be voluntarily given, which made legally mandated systems, like Social Security or other government programs, morally suspect.

The Romneys have never seemed much sympathetic to this libertarian form of Mormon political thought. (Other well-known Mormons, most prominently Glenn Beck, have been vocal advocates.) But a combination of intense communalism, suspicion of government, and a certainty that aid must not merely alleviate poverty but encourage virtue rests deep in the Mormon tradition. We can see a bit of that influence in Romney’s actions as governor of Massachusetts: While working to revamp the state’s welfare system by promoting easier access, he asked recipients to offer a bit of volunteer work. In that way, the state could discourage welfare recipients—not unlike the Mormon poor who volunteer in church canneries—from acquiring an enfeebling “dependence” on the government.

Mormons are great givers of charity—as is Romney—but it’s no accident that much of their generosity falls within the boundaries of their faith. The competence and reach of Mormon welfare has left many Mormons convinced that problems of poverty are best confronted through community institutions like their church. Of course, this does not mean that a President Romney would try to dismantle Social Security; it just means he may worry as much about the poor's virtue as their empty stomachs. 

Matthew Bowman teaches the history of American religion at Hampden-Sydney College.  He is the author of The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith.

Another week, another set of primaries—and soon enough, undoubtedly, another cascade of speculations about the prospect of a brokered convention. Predictions of an unpredictable fight-to-the-finish have become an unfortunate refrain—not to say, cliché—of our presidential election campaigns.

Enough! I hate to be the one to have to break it to my fellow political junkies, but the truth must be told: Not only isn’t there going to be no brokered convention this year—there probably isn’t going to be a brokered convention ever again.

For starters, there’s a reason it hasn’t happened in either party since the advent of the modern nomination system in 1972. With virtually all delegates being selected in scheduled primaries and caucuses, there are no longer any blocs of uncommitted or “favorite-son,” or machine-controlled delegates who can prevent a front-runner from accumulating a majority well before the convention. All the great “smoke-filled room” conventions—including the classic 1920 GOP session in Chicago which gave America a Harding administration, and the 1924 Democratic convention that required 103 ballots—occurred when primaries were marginal events that mainly consisted in influencing the party bosses who controlled a sizable majority of delegates.

The only way to produce a “deliberative” convention now—barring some cataclysmic event like the death, disability, or disqualification of the putative nominee—is via an extended primary season in which multiple candidates remain viable to the bitter end. Sure, it could happen, but only theoretically. Candidates on the edge of elimination often say they will stay in the contest until the bitter end (as noted in my last column on Gingrich’s actual odds of victory), but they typically don’t, because they quickly realize they’ve lost the media attention and the financial donors that they need to win primaries and delegates in significant numbers.

One element of confusion that has entered the conversation this year is the supposed adoption of “proportionality” in Republican delegate allocation rules, which, it is argued, will make it harder for front-runners to lock down a majority of delegates. As Davidson College’s Josh Putnam has explained repeatedly, while the first-ever intervention in state delegate selection systems by the RNC this cycle is a big deal, the actual changes in these systems required in 2012 are actually pretty small: states holding binding primaries and caucuses prior to April 1 cannot award delegates according to statewide winner-take-all procedures. But they can award (and one state, South Carolina, has already awarded) delegates by congressional district winner-take-all rules, which are a long way from “proportional” representation at the convention. Moreover, after April 1, the rules are exactly the same as before. In short, there hasn’t been any procedural revolution that has made a “brokered convention” more likely.

Another largely false issue is the scenario whereby a “late entry” candidate jumps into the primaries and hoovers up delegates in sufficient numbers to deny Romney a majority. Primary filing deadlines have now passed for nearly all the primaries before mid-April, with new deadlines popping up every week. As the failure of Newt Gingrich to get on the ballot in Virginia has shown, even well-established candidates often struggle to meet complex filing conditions. There is nobody out there who is going to jump in late and have enough general support to leap the barriers to entry; all the “white knights” usually mentioned—Jeb Bush, Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie, etc.—didn’t run for very good reasons (Bush’s surname; Daniels’ “truce” insult to social conservatives; Christie’s various ideological heresies, from abortion to gun rights).

Finally, it’s worth examining the actual resistance to Mitt Romney’s nomination that is the essential premise for most of the “brokered convention” scenarios. Certainly he is not the ideal candidate for most conservative activists. But it is remarkable how few of them have failed to pledge allegiance to him if he does win the nomination. And he remains relatively popular among GOP voters: a NBC-Wall Street Journal survey of Republican voters taken well before the Florida primary, showing Gingrich leading Romney nationally, also showed Mitt with a better favorable/unfavorable ratio than Newt.   

And even if you buy my learned TNR colleague Walter Shapiro’s idea that Gingrich could yet make a comeback and smite Romney in later primaries, that’s not the same as suggesting a “brokered convention” is likely. Should Newt somehow romp in February, March and April, then he might well romp all the way to the nomination, leaving Romney in the dust.

As still another TNR regular, Jonathan Bernstein, has noted, a “brokered convention” depends on “brokers.” Party leaders have a lot of ways to influence the selection of delegates in the primaries, but beyond that, their powers are limited. In the extremely unlikely event no winner heads to Tampa with a majority of delegates, we are looking not at a “brokered” convention, but a “deadlock” where the actual delegates, once their legal and moral commitments are discharged, can do what they want. “Brokering” is much too tame a metaphor for what would take place in that scenario. It would be a lot more like herding feral cats. Fortunately, it probably won't—no, it definitely won't—come to that.

Ed Kilgore is a special correspondent for The New Republic, a blogger for The Washington Monthly, and managing editor of The Democratic Strategist.

When the sordid Sergey Lavrov demanded to know “the endgame” of the Security Council’s attempt to interfere with Bashar Assad’s atrocities against his people, Hillary Clinton replied that “the endgame in the absence of us acting together as the international community, I fear, is civil war.” According to many press accounts, there is already a civil war in Syria. Lavrov later remarked about the Security Council resolution that he and his Chinese colleague had villainously gutted and then scuttled that it would have meant “taking sides in a civil war.” In Washington, “Syria experts” told The New York Times that the absence of unified international action at the United Nations might “provid[e] a recipe for all-out civil war,” and that the arming of the Syrian opposition “could lead to civil war.” It is important to note, in the light of all this, that there are things more dire than civil war—the massacre of a population by a government, for example. If a civil war is taking place in Syria, then a substantial part of the Syrian population is opposed to the Syrian regime, and Assad’s interpretation of the freedom movement as a terrorist conspiracy hatched by Syria’s enemies is exposed as a lie. And if a civil war is taking place in Syria, it is a sign of the moral and psychological soundness of the Syrian resistance, which has recognized that there are types of violence against which non-violence will avail nothing. Their peaceful demonstrations were met by wanton force, and it is proper that they should defend themselves and their better conception of their country. Civil wars are regular crucibles in the formation of nations, which sooner or later must decide how they wish to be governed and why. (Our civil war was the deferred war of our constitution.) Of course the civil war in Syria is also a tribal war, but the blame for the ethnic explosiveness of Syria rests with its dictator, who rules tribally. As for Lavrov’s warning about taking sides in a civil war, it is a vile hypocrisy. His government has already taken sides in this civil war, along with the government of Iran. Outside powers have already intervened in Syria, and on the side of the killers. It is only the civilians in the streets who are friendless.

THE ANXIETY ABOUT civil war is not the only fallacy that mars the discussion of what must be done in and for Syria. There is also the view that the failure at the Security Council was, as Clinton said, “tragic.” A sense of tragedy is not what is needed now. The indifference of Russia and China to human rights and the moral analysis of state policy is no surprise. We must be clear about what an international consensus establishes and what it does not. It was useful that the Security Council and the Arab League and certain Arab states endorsed military action against Qaddafi in Libya, but the justice of the Libyan operation was not proved by its popularity. The whole world may support something wrong. And even if the Western powers had chosen to go it alone in Libya, they would have been right. The Libyan precedent may have an unfortunate consequence for the consideration of intervention in moral emergencies, rather like the precedent of the first Gulf war: it confers upon “the international community” more authority than it deserves, and by creating an unrealistic expectation of broad unanimity about the extreme cruelties of certain regimes it makes action by limited coalitions and alliances, not to mention unilateral action by (perish the thought!) the United States, seem unlikely and even illegitimate. Yet it is one of the historical responsibilities of the United States to be, as Pat Moynihan used to say, “in opposition,” even if it is wise, on practical grounds, to act in concert rather than alone. In recent days President Obama has spoken ringingly about “the Syrian government’s unspeakable assault against the people of Homs,” and declared that Assad “has no right to lead Syria”; but the rhetorical escalation aside, the administration seems at a loss about what to do in the absence of the Security Council’s cover. “Look, don’t expect another Libya,” an American official dogmatically told the Times. Why not? Consistency in matters of first principles is not too much to ask. How can the president dine out on Libya if he is not prepared to do the same for Syria? Assad is perpetrating in Homs, Hama, Dara’a, and elsewhere what Qaddafi only threatened to perpetrate in Benghazi. Stability—tyranny’s only allure—is over. And the strategic prize is significant: the fall of Assad would damage Hezbollah and Hamas, and hobble the Iranian position in the region. In the case of Syria, our interests accord with our values. Lead again from behind!

JUST WHEN HE THOUGHT he was out they pull him back in. The Syrian crisis comes at an inconvenient time for Obama. He is presiding over a momentous transition in foreign policy and security policy. We are done with the wars, and with military interventions in places with Muslims and sand, and with ambitious counterinsurgency strategies (what Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense, the strategy document released by the administration a few weeks ago, calls “large-scale, prolonged stability operations”), and we will rely on dazzling drones and stirring SEALS to rid ourselves of persons who imperil us. We are leaving the Middle East (except for Israel and the Iranian nuclear nightmare) and Central Asia for Asia-Pacific: Af-Pak is out, As-Pac is in. I am overstating it, but not altogether. There is much to be said for and against these various changes in plans and doctrines, and if Obama’s eastward turn denotes a more sober apprehension of China as a nasty power and a global rival, it will be for the good; but a fierce American response to Assad’s savagery is certainly not in the spirit of what the new security document calls “small-footprint approaches.” An American official remarked that “there is a growing danger that if the slaughter which Assad has been engaging in continues, others might step forward to aid the opposition.” That is the danger? We should be those others. We should aid and arm the Free Syrian Army, perhaps with the Saudis and the Qataris and Obama’s regional idol Erdogan, and offer protection to the parts of the country that they control. We should immiserate the Assad regime economically and banish it to a North Korean purgatory diplomatically. Like the army proposed by the Pentagon, we must be “agile, flexible and ready for the full range of contingencies.”

Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New Republic. This article appeared in the March 1, 2012 issue of the magazine. 

Recently, Foster Friess, a 71-year-old billionaire, was on a hunting trip in Tanzania when he heard that there was a 14-foot crocodile in the vicinity. “The natives had told us where it was,” Friess recounted to me over the phone. He and his party set out to track it down, but, when they approached the giant reptile on a sandbar, it caught their scent and slid into the water.

Friess and company piled into a tiny boat and searched the river. Hours later, they found the crocodile sunning himself on a bank. Friess aimed, fired, and killed it. A few days after we spoke, he sent me a picture of himself with the crocodile. It shows a white-haired man dwarfed by the massive animal, which is sprawled out on the dusty bank, its jaw propped open with a stick to reveal its jagged white teeth.

Poland in the postwar era was a supremely unlucky nation, but in one respect (and perhaps one only) it was among the world’s luckiest. This unassuming country, generally admired not for its scenery nor its cuisine nor its architecture, produced three of the greatest European poets of the last half-century. The first was Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), born in Lithuania to a Polish family, who defected to France in 1951 and emigrated to the United States in 1960; he was Poland’s geopolitical poet, befitting his perch in exile, and its first poet Nobelist. The second was Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998), Poland’s philosophical poet, who refused to collaborate with the Communist regime and wrote his highly intellectual, abstract lyrics in penury for much of his life.

The last was Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012). Though she was Herbert’s contemporary, I place her last not only because she outlived both him and Milosz, but also because her death last week, at the age of eighty-eight, definitively brings to an end the latest brilliant age of Polish poetry. If there were any reason to feel grateful for four-and-a-half decades of Communist rule in Poland, it might be that these three poets emerged from its highly pressurized constraints like diamonds forced from carbon. Although censors would strike any work construed as political or otherwise subversive, writers could defeat them by ingeniously addressing forbidden subjects allegorically or metaphorically—a prime task of poetry under any circumstances. Add to this an adoring public whose appetite for literature was stoked by its unavailability—new poems were distributed in samizdat editions passed eagerly from hand to hand—and you have conditions perhaps ripe for creation.

But communism alone cannot explain this poetic flowering. With the possible exception of the Soviet Union (with a population at least five times greater than Poland’s), no other Eastern bloc country produced a similar body of literature. Assuming that there weren’t any mind-altering chemicals in the run-off from Nowa Huta, the notoriously polluted steelworks outside Krakow (where Szymborska spent nearly her entire life), we can only conclude that Poland’s postwar poetic greatness was largely a historical accident—the collision of a deep and enduring literary culture with Europe’s ghastliest battleground.

The poets were on the ground from the start. Milosz wrote “Campo dei Fiori,” one of his greatest early poems, in Warsaw in 1943, noticing how people went about their business beyond the ghetto walls—flying kites, riding the carousel—while Jews were dying on the other side. It must have been the same when Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake, he imagines, with fruit-sellers peddling their wares and taverns filling up again “before the flames had died.” Is it our resilience that allows us to return so quickly to our baskets of olives and lemons—or our ignorance, our lack of empathy for the “loneliness of the dying”? The poet takes the side of those “forgotten by the world”: “Our tongue becomes for them / The language of an ancient planet.” Someday, he hopes, “Rage will kindle at a poet’s word.”

With her characteristic succinctness, Szymborska began one of her most famous poems with the lines, “After every war / someone has to tidy up.” After the war of the century took place in their backyard, the task of tidying up was largely left to Poland’s poets. The Soviet regime often obscured the truth about the events of the war, downplaying the Jewish element of the tragedy and stoking Polish martyrological tendencies. But the real history could be found in the poems. In “Still,” from the 1957 collection Calling Out to Yeti, Szymborska wrote of “sealed boxcars” carrying “names” across the country. The names are all Jewish ones: Nathan, Isaac, Aaron, Sarah, David. “Clouds of people passed over this plain. / Vast clouds, but they held little rain,” the poet reports. Both train and people have long disappeared, but still their “silence … drums on my silent door.” For both Milosz and Szymborska, their own silence in the face of the catastrophe haunts them as much as the silence of the dead.

Szymborska often said that her poems were “strictly not political … more about people and life.” She earned the epithet “the Mozart of poetry” for brief, playful poems that take the quotidian and spin it in an unexpected direction: “Cat in an Empty Apartment” (in which the death of the cat’s owner is experienced from the perspective of his adored pet), “Love at First Sight” (a poem about missed connections that apparently inspired Krzysztof Kieslowski’s film Red), “The Onion” (this one can’t be described; it must simply be read). These poems are the reason why even people who otherwise know little about either poetry or Poland often know Szymborska’s poetry, if not how to pronounce her name. “Her poems may not save the world, but that world never looks quite the same after encountering [her] work,” the American poet Edward Hirsch (who has dedicated at least one poem to Szymborska) has written.

But “people and life” are also political subjects, especially in postwar Poland. And when Szymborska turns her playful intelligence on the disasters of the twentieth century, the resulting defamiliarization is profoundly chilling. “Hitler’s First Photograph” imagines the adorable infant Adolf—“who’s this little fellow in his itty-bitty robe?”—and what he might grow up to be: “a tenor in Vienna’s Opera House,” or perhaps he’ll marry the mayor’s daughter. In “Starvation Camp near Jaslo,” the speaker wonders how to write about mass death: “History rounds off skeletons to zero. / A thousand and one is still only a thousand. / That one seems never to have existed …” Of course, in a society dedicated to the collective, in which individuality was devalued, to seek the “one” is an inherently political act.

“In daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, we all use phrases such as ‘the ordinary world,’ ‘ordinary life,’ ‘the ordinary course of events,’” Szymborska said in her Nobel Prize speech, in 1996. “But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.” If that’s not enough to save the world, the fault is the world’s, not the poet’s.

Ruth Franklin is a senior editor at The New Republic. Follow her on Twitter: @ruth_franklin.

Commentators were right to point out that Mitt Romney committed a flagrant gaffe last week. Unfortunately, they were only half-correct in identifying the offense. Yes, Romney was impressively inartful in announcing that he was “not concerned about the very poor” because “we have a safety net there,” managing to upset both liberals (for his apparent insensitivity) and conservatives (for his apparent satisfaction with a welfare state they believe promotes dependency). But another objectionable part of Romney’s statement went mostly unremarked upon—namely, his declaration that his paramount concern was the economic circumstances of the middle class.

The idea that 90 or 95 percent of Americans are struggling may have achieved the status of conventional wisdom, but that doesn’t mean it’s correct. Indeed, it ultimately functions as a distraction: The attention we insist on paying to the overstated problems of the middle class come at the expense of the more critical challenges facing the poor.

Certainly a great number of Americans are in the throes of economic hardship and anxiety, and we should not be cavalier about the real crises they face: Things are significantly worse than they were before the Great Recession. But conventional accounts of how the broad middle is doing systematically overstate economic insecurity. For example, over 40 percent of those who were unemployed at the end of 2011 had been jobless for 27 weeks or more, a fraction unseen between the Great Depression and the Great Recession. But this figure is based on a statistical snapshot taken during one week. The long-term unemployed are captured in these snapshots month after month, the equivalent to churchgoers who never miss service.

In contrast, those with brief spells of joblessness cycle into and out of unemployment. They constitute a relatively small share of the unemployed at any point in time but a large share of all of those experiencing unemployment over longer periods. The briefly jobless are like occasional churchgoers who might attend a wedding here or a funeral there or who faithfully show up at Christmas and Easter. On any given Sunday, committed churchgoers dominate, but considering everyone who attended service during some year, they may be swamped by infrequent attendees. Reflecting these dynamics, over the past four years, no more than one in ten workers has experienced a spell of unemployment lasting 27 weeks. Similar claims about middle class families struggling with retirement security, debt problems, and other economic troubles are also overstated, as I’ve described in National Affairs.

Accounts of income stagnation or decline are likewise flawed. Income growth has slowed, but research by Richard Burkhauser and his colleagues and by Bruce Meyer and James Sullivan has shown that median household income still rose by as much as 35 or even 55 percent over the last 30 years. There were even small gains during the “lost decade” of the 2000s, prior to the Great Recession. While the gains since 2000 have more or less evaporated, that the typical household is—at worst—at the same level as in the boom years of the late 1990s is disappointing but hardly alarming. Accordingly, statistics show that middle class anxiety, contrary to many press reports, has been relatively muted: In mid-2010, half of Americans said their financial situation was better or no worse than before the recession, while just 16 percent said they were in “much worse shape”. These are not numbers to inspire cheers, but they do not paint a picture of a drowning middle class. Instead, they suggest focusing on a small minority who could use some help.

Meyer and Sullivan’s research also shows that incomes at the bottom have increased robustly over the past 30 years, contrary to what official income trends show. By 2009, the household income at the 10th percentile—the household poorer than 90 percent of the others—was only about a third lower than that of the median household in 1980, after adjusting for inflation. The increase was due to expanded generosity of federal cash and noncash benefits—the safety net that Romney trumpeted. Burkhauser’s research, too, shows that the federal safety net has effectively raised the living standards of the poor over time.

But there are two good reasons for focusing on the economic problems of the poor. First, just because living standards have improved does not mean that the lives of the poor are comfortable. Meyer and Sullivan find (roughly) that the household at the 10th percentile gets by on $20,000 a year, or under $1,700 a month. That is hardly luxurious. If you want a working definition of “struggle” or “insecurity,” consider for a moment the one in five household heads who reported that sometime in 2010 they worried about whether they would run out of food before they could afford to buy more.

A second reason for worrying about the poor is the restricted opportunities of low-income children. As I have argued in the pages of National Review, the U.S. is singularly ineffective at lifting poor children into the middle class as adults (poor boys, actually—we are as effective as other nations at lifting up poor girls). If you are reading this, chances are good that you are in the top two-fifths of the income distribution or can expect to be there at age forty. Just 17 percent of kids raised in the bottom fifth will make it there. Based on historical patterns, your own kids will have a 60 percent chance of doing so if they start out in the top two fifths.

Here the concern of conservatives about complacent satisfaction with the safety net—Romney’s included—is relevant. Our safety nets might simultaneously lift the poor out of destitution yet discourage the upward mobility of poor children. They may provide a floor but impose a ceiling, through inefficient incentives related to work, marriage, and saving. Furthermore, much of the left does not want to confront the important issues of family instability, criminality, and personal responsibility in limiting life chances.

At the same time, much of the right is reluctant to acknowledge the role of luck in determining one’s economic fate. Many conservatives are too ready to accept inequalities in adulthood that reflect decisions kids’ parents made and the decisions of kids themselves during the notorious period of irrationality that we call “adolescence.” We need more conservatives willing to experiment—using federal dollars—to figure out how to get more poor kids the greater skills that are prerequisites to economic independence and comfort in today’s economy.

Whether politicians ignore the poor and pander to the middle class or scare the middle class into thinking they are as bad off as the poor, the result is likely to be the same. Most of our policies will continue to be mis-targeted, as analyses by the Pew Economic Mobility Project and CFED have demonstrated. In turn, they will explode the deficit, leaving less money to promote upward mobility among the poor. And those policies that take the form of tax breaks for investing in savings or education will further price the poor out of markets for mobility-promoting assets—whether higher education or homes—by subsidizing investment the non-poor would have made even without tax incentives. Think “mortgage interest deduction”.

In fact, complacency about how well the poor are doing and scare-mongering targeted at the middle class both have the potential to reduce support for policies that would disproportionately help the poor, which would be a tragic irony for liberals who think they are promoting class solidarity by playing up the woes of middle-income Americans. Let us hope that 2012 might feature a real debate—and not only among the presidential candidates—over which economic problems merit the most attention in a nation that cannot afford to help everyone.

Scott Winship is a fellow in the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution.