Robert Putnam with Shaylyn Romney Garrett, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020. 480 pages.

By remaining merely pessimistic, not necessarily catastrophist, I have become a relative optimist.
— New York Times columnist Ross Douthat

There is a profound contradiction in this otherwise valuable book. This contradiction is reflected in the cover, in which the cheeriness of WE in bold red is belied by the downward-facing curve. If readers are to be persuaded that America can “come together” as it did in the early 20th century, they would at least expect to find a “how to” section at the end, with insight from current manifestations about how to “do it again.” But it is only in more recent short writing and public lectures that Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett try – unconvincingly, in my view – to have us believe that Americans have good reason to be optimistic about a coming “upswing.”

Going deeper

I am a few years younger than Robert Putnam, and, though not an American, I have spent much time in the United States over the years and continue to follow developments there closely. I have been impressed by Putnam’s work since first encountering his development of the concept of social capital to explain deep and lasting economic differences between northern Italy, with its guilds, clubs and choral societies, and the south, where such social capital – networks and norms of civic engagement on which trust is built – was absent. I attended the ceremony in Uppsala, Sweden, at which he was awarded the Skytte Prize (political science’s “Nobel” prize) in 2007.

The prize was richly deserved. Putnam has been a rarity among social scientists: taking on important issues (rather than just ones to which you can apply state-of-the-art statistical analysis that will get you published in academic journals), painstakingly gathering and applying the fullest relevant data and secondary source material available to address those issues, and writing in clear, nonacademic prose. In addition, while careful to be as objective as he can be, he never loses his perspective as what Americans call a liberal in the best sense of the word.

It was when Putnam, now at Harvard, turned his attention to his own country and began portraying how American life had been steadily unravelling that he became known outside of academic circles. In Bowling Alone (2002), he documented the decline of social capital, for which he used as proxies membership in bowling leagues (he was an avid bowler growing up), Rotary Clubs, churches and other local associations. As the social bonds created by these groups frayed, life satisfaction went down. Declining social capital, he showed, brought rising crime rates and other indicators of deteriorating neighbourhood quality of life. More recently, in Our Kids (2015), he described the new inequality – the precipitous fall in social mobility – in numbers and stories from his hometown of Port Clinton, Ohio, and other communities.

For much of his career, his focus has been on exploring what went wrong and why. Bowling Alone made Putnam and social capital household words. In the process, he challenged his compatriots to address what was going on around them. He didn’t always have comprehensive explanations for what he described, something unavoidable if you are prepared to take on hard issues in a changing context. This is especially the case with his latest book, which is also his most ambitious – though it has received only a fraction of the attention that Bowling Alone did. The Upswing is a sweeping analysis of 125 years of American history, highly readable and full of interesting insights. His brief conclusion, however, which he has followed up with shorter recent contributions, has more than a whiff of wishful thinking.

It is understandable that, after having written highly influential books that told Americans to be very concerned, indeed depressed, about the developments taking place in their country, on turning 80 he would be reflecting on his legacy, looking for a perspective on the future of his country that could coat the bleak portrait associated with his work with a silver lining. This presented a real challenge since he could not, as comparativists can and do, look to improvements elsewhere, in developing countries in particular, to compensate for the bleakness of the contemporary picture back home. So if he could not go wider, then he would go deeper than in his earlier work: into the long historical trends – the “arc of history” – of the United States over 125 years.

Writing a book about the United States with Trump in the White House and entitling it The Upswing was, as Jim Hacker in Yes Prime Minister would say, “courageous.” Still, in the months following publication, Putnam could see Biden’s election (despite Trump and his allies trying to block it) and the Democrats taking over Congress as confirmation that things were getting better. This perspective is harder to maintain as the pandemic enters its third year, with a likely coming congressional victory by Trumpite Republicans. Consider this excerpt from a January 14 column in the New York Times by the moderately conservative and generally not pessimistic David Brooks:

In 2020, the number of miles Americans drove fell 13 percent because of the pandemic, but the number of traffic deaths rose 7 percent … In 2021 motor vehicle deaths were up 18.4 percent even over 2020 … The number of altercations on airplanes has exploded, the murder rate is surging in cities, drug overdoses are increasing, Americans are drinking more, nurses say patients are getting more abusive … Schools have seen an increase in both minor incidents, like students talking in class, and more serious issues, such as fights and gun possession … Drug deaths had risen almost continuously for more than 20 years, but overdoses shot up especially during the pandemic … In October, CNN ran a story titled, “Hate Crime Reports in U.S. Surge to the Highest Level in 12 Years, F.B.I. Says.” … The number of gun purchases has soared …

When I went to college … I never worried that I might say something in class that would get me ostracized. But now the college students I know fear that one errant sentence could lead to social death … This is what it feels like to live in a society that is dissolving from the bottom up as much as from the top down.¹

Yet, dissolving from bottom up is the opposite of what Putnam, in his most recent interventions, suggests. I return to his contention that things are on the verge of getting better after summarizing the argument in The Upswing, which is full of rich material giving flesh to the curve depicted on the cover. It says very little about America today, arguing instead by analogy: the same things that were wrong and made improvement seem hopeless before the first upswing began are once again present now. Readers who are unconvinced by this argument, as I am, will nonetheless learn much from the historical analysis presented in clear, nonacademic form by Putnam and his coauthor, Shaylyn Romney Garrett.

To summarize, The Upswing sets out “a long arc of increasing solidarity” beginning early in the 20th century, and then increasing individualism beginning in the early 1960s, affecting economic equality, politics, social capital and culture. The authors see the urban riots, assassinations and campus violence, as well as the Vietnam quagmire, as putting an end to that solidarity. This was the beginning of a downswing toward an increasingly zero-sum view of society, with a depletion of social capital in the form of bitter partisanship, deep inequality and isolation, leading eventually to Trumpism.

Here The Upswing builds on Bowling Alone, with a depressing portrait through the second decade of this century. But by showing that this depressing description of America over these past 50 years also applies unexpectedly closely to the America of 1900, the authors arrive at a positive conclusion. It didn’t stay that way back then: early in the century there came an upswing of “mutualism and solidarity,” depicted in numerous charts setting out such indicators as rates of unionization, voter turnout and membership in churches and community clubs. The new ethos was expressed in the emerging communitarianism of the Progressive era, in reformers like Jane Addams and John Dewey and muckraking journalists like Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell. In portraying the trajectory of American society since 1900 in their four curves – economic inequality, political partisanship, social capital and cultural narcissism – they see “an unexpected and remarkable synchronicity in trends in four very different spheres.”

Through painstakingly researched and presented data, every gauge turns out to take the form of an inverted U- or V-shaped curve; from very low rates of all of these (let’s simplify by referring to the sum total as social capital) at the turn of the century to a high point around the beginning of the 1960s and then down to levels similar to 1900 as we get into the 21st century. At the high point of the curve, we find the lowest gap between rich and poor, the most favourable health indicators, the highest social spending to help the poor, the lowest political polarization and the strongest feeling that Americans were moving forward together.

Apart from the standard statistical indicators, the authors make use of an innovative measure to track social capital in the form of “cultural narcissism”: the “Ngram” database from Google’s digitalization of millions of books since 1880, which makes it possible to measure the use of particular words and phrases over time. They are thus able to track the rate of usage of terms reflecting “we” compared to “I,” showing the rise of the “selfie culture” emerging in the late 1950s. They use such Ngram data for terms like survival of the fittest, which faded through most of the 20th century “only to win a new lease on life in the twenty-first century.” Usage of association, cooperation and socialism rose steadily for 75 years following 1880 and then declined. The path of the term common man began its decline sooner, in the early 1950s.

In a parallel analysis published since, in the December 2021 Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Marten Scheffer and his coauthors report on the rise of fact-free argumentation. Use of sentiment-laden words such as feel and believe declined systematically while the use of words associated with fact-based argumentation such as determine and conclusion rose steadily until the 1980s, when emotion-laden language again surged in both nonfiction and fiction, as well as in New York Times articles.²

Overall Putnam and Garrett paint a convincing portrait of an America that was broadly improving, when children could expect to earn more than their parents, when politics was not purely partisan, when hope of a “Great Society” seemed realizable. This was the time when Putnam – and Joe Biden – were embarking on their careers. I frequently visited the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s when still a teenager.

I came back generally hopeful about the openness to improvement and optimism about future possibilities of my American neighbours (something I later learned was shared by the Swedes and Europeans generally). While Putnam admits that the rosy picture applies especially to Whites, he presents data showing that the real conditions of Blacks were improving significantly even before the Supreme Court ruled against segregated schooling in Brown, mainly as a result of economic conditions that favoured Blacks moving to the industrial north, and that despite the consolidation of the civil rights movement, progress toward equality slowed by the latter 1960s.

Unlike Putnam, I am a boomer, and like many of my generation, I identified with the North American New Left movement in the 1960s. Hence, like many, I look at that decade from a different perspective than he does. What Putnam portrays as the high point of America living up to its goals as the 1960s began was for us, a few years later, a “one-dimensional” society to be rejected. In my commune in Washington, D.C., in the late 1960s, we read Herbert Marcuse and agreed with him that the “advanced industrial society” around us created false needs to tie us into the “system” of production and consumption via the mass media and advertising. We sought to escape a technology-based totalitarian rationality that permeated the culture and public life and to oppose in words and deeds the hyperconsumption, waste and environmental damage it caused. And since the industrial working class – and thus the trade union movement – was now integrated into capitalism, and state socialism in the East failed to inspire us, we looked, with Franz Fanon, to decolonization movements in the developing world as the harbingers of change.

Hence, while I find persuasive the data presented by Putnam and Garrett showing that by the late 1960s the curve had begun to swing downward away from involvement in community associations, I do not see this merely as a reflection of a new self-centredness but rather of our having measured the accomplishments of previous generations against an unattainable standard. I could see this as, writing in 1969, I reflected on my generation’s experience:

The American New Left is … groping, it seems, more than ever. It is learning that its “holy” alliance with the Black Power movement is little more than a treaty to cover dirty linen. It is finding that the people it appeals to in its theory of participatory democracy are being mobilized all right – but against it. It is finding that it is more capable of seizing university buildings than of knowing what to do … after the inevitable restoration of stability.

It is turning, quite understandably, to questions of the whole person – of how to live as a radical person in the society; thus the emphasis of radicalism in the professions, and on the building and maintenance of community; from sensitivity groups to urban co-ops, to rustic communitarian retreats …

The division between … the wheelies and the feelies is far deeper than factional … The wheelies … concentrate on direct action and look upon the entire attempt to build new ways of life as self-indulgence … The feelies … answer that there’s no use trying to bring change and organize others when you’re uptight yourself … In an underground newspaper, a free school, or a commune, the feelies demand that all the structures be simply eliminated … The wheelies say that all this is well and good, but the paper won’t get out.

Putnam’s depiction of the emergence of advanced industrial society in the United States is the other side of Marcuse’s coin. A key case in point is that for Putnam support for trade unions is a positive indicator of social capital. He draws from Gallup polling data to show how popular (after the red scare of the late forties and early fifties) unions became, and how they fell to their lowest level in the 21st century (figure 1). That they are now apparently making a comeback suggests that in this one area, perhaps, Putnam’s optimism may be warranted.

Another positive measure is that in recent years a similar curve shows emerging generations to be especially open to racial and religious intermarriage – as opposed, we should add, to marriage between partners of different partisan political affiliations. Indeed, one of the starkest contrasts between 1960 and 2020 is the attitude toward a Republican marrying into a Democratic family and vice versa.

Putnam’s bet

Though I have only skimmed the surface of, and thus not done justice to, this important book, I turn to the claim in the title that the low point has been reached and that there are signs of an upswing, signs mostly identified elsewhere than in the book itself. For example, Putnam and Garrett cite a journal article written by Putnam’s daughter Lara along with Theda Skocpol and published in February 2018 in the dark early days of Trump in power:

The new upsurge is not centered in the progressive urban enclaves where most national pundits live … About half the country lives in the suburbs, twice the number who live in either fully urban or rural settings. More than half of Americans are also women – and of those, half are in their thirties to sixties. It is in this Middle America, and among these Middle Americans, that political developments since the November 2016 election have moved fastest and farthest … At the current pace, it seems likely that the pop-up leaders and grassroots groups will, by 2019, have repopulated the local layer of the Democratic Party in much of the country … It will look like retired librarians rolling their eyes at the present state of affairs, and then taking charge.

This change will come smoothly and cooperatively in some places and through conflict and displacement in others. The change will move farthest and fastest outside of the metropolitan cores where local Democratic Party patronage structures still persist. Purple suburbs, mid-size cities, big towns in red regions – these are the unexpected epicenters of the quake underway. The cumulative result will be local Democratic Party leadership across much of America that is slightly more progressive and much more female than it was, although not much more socio-economically diverse. Everywhere, the renovated party locals will be passionate about procedural democracy: determined to fight gerrymandering, regulate campaign activities and finance, and expand and guarantee voting rights for all.³

It is impossible to quantify this upsurge. But I am sceptical. So far, the only evidence of its effect on politics was the mobilization of parents seeking to take power over the schools that allowed GOP candidate Glenn Youngkin to be elected Governor of Virginia in 2021 over his Democratic opponent, former Governor Terry McAuliffe – a mobilization that apparently is spreading.

One aspect of Putnam’s hopes for an upswing lies in technology. In the afterword (written with Jonah C. Hahn) to the 2020 update of Bowling Alone, he declares that he is open to a positive response to the question of whether the internet has reversed the decline of social capital. Social media, which had not yet really emerged when the book was first published in 2002, carry implications for social engagement: they both enable and deform.

In lectures and interviews along with his coauthor in 2021,⁴ he was somewhat more positive, stressing that the internet has greatly increased the possibilities for real-time communications which can merge with actual direct human face-to-face encounters in what he calls an “alloy” between virtual and real, as in a neighbourhood book club. While suggesting that on balance the internet may actually be reversing the decline in social capital, introducing previously unthinkable opportunities for social connection, it can also bring unprecedented levels of alienation and isolation. Putnam and Hahn noted in the afterword to the updated Bowling Alone that “social media seem to foster political disagreement, amplify polarizing content, and suppress constructive discourse.” The internet also contributes to inequality between white collar workers who can work from home and blue collar workers who cannot.

Still, Putnam is hopeful, in part reflecting his experience during the pandemic: “Emerging digital technology like Papa … can hook you up with companions of different ages, arrange for grocery delivery and many other activities we took for granted when we were younger. Along with the necessities of life, Papa brings members and Pals (younger folks who assist older adults) together with a mobile app that makes lasting connections easy.” Putnam, who was at Harvard when Mark Zuckerberg was there initiating Facebook, insists that many Facebook friends are real friends and that such networks proved their worth as people like himself were isolated by the pandemic. Hence, in response to a question at one of his lectures, Putnam said that he is willing to give favourable odds that the upswing is on its way. I personally would take that bet.

If it were up to him, Putnam would restore some form of national service, rallying youth around “the moral equivalent of war.” In earlier years the draft constituted a kind of “bridging” program that promoted social capital. He admits that young people have been very much against restoring the draft, but he finds hope in recent signs among the young of a decrease in cynicism and increase in idealism: support for environmental causes, Black Lives Matter. I would like to believe that he is right, that he could call on young people the way JFK did when he said “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country” and founded the Peace Corps. But that was in 1961 and, as Putnam tells it so well, all things considered, it was a downswing from there.

Trumpism unshaken

As I write in early March, the Ukranians are heroically standing up to the Russian invaders. At the same time I read that Russian President Vladimir Putin would not have invaded Ukraine had President Trump still been in office, a majority of Americans said according to the results of a new poll. The survey released Friday from the Harvard Center for American Political Studies (CAPS)–Harris Poll found that 62% of Americans believed Putin would not have pulled the trigger if Trump were still president.

Unquestionably, Putin’s gambit brought a missing sense of common purpose to the democratic world. Yet it does not seek to have shaken Trumpism in the United States. In the first days of the Russian invasion Donald Trump, at a Conservative Political Action Conference event, told his audience of high-profile Republicans that if Democrats want to fight for democracy abroad, “they should start with the democracy that is under threat right next door, a place called Canada.”

I wonder if today Putnam would still tell his American readers that that the upswing is on its way.

Continue reading “Is the United States Ripe for an Upswing?” →

Henry Milner’s review of Michael Ignatieff, Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2013) and Tom Flanagan, Persona Non Grata: The Death of Free Speech in the Internet Age (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2014) appeared in Inroads 36 (Winter/Spring 2015).

In my review of books by Michael Ignatieff (PhD history, Harvard) and Tom Flanagan (PhD political science, Duke), I described them as “intellectuals who entered the Canadian political arena, paid the price, and lived to tell the tale.” I sympathized with Ignatieff’s admission that politics took someone tougher and more experienced than he was and that he was clearly unprepared for its underside. Ignatieff acknowledged that the enterprise had been doomed from the outset: as he put it, his campaign as Liberal leader ended up preaching to the converted. He naively took the warm reception from people he addressed to mean that his message was being heard. In fact, the people he needed to reach had stopped listening long before.

I was more critical of Flanagan’s book, not persuaded that his political role should not have affected how he was treated by the media once he returned to academia. I am more impressed by a thoughtful article I recently came upon in which he insightfully addresses the role of academics in politics. Writing in the University of Calgary’s Academic Matters in 2009, he notes that intellectuals who enter politics have an especially hard time accepting that they cannot control the results of their actions:

Some academics may also have political ability and may choose to enter politics; but if they succeed there, it will not be because of, and may in fact be in spite of, their academic achievements. I had to learn all these lessons through practical experience in my own involvement in politics … If you want to control the results of what you do, you can go paint a picture, compose music, or write a poem … You can make permanent contributions to intellectual life. You can prove a mathematical theorem, or discover a new species in the jungle, or edit the papers of a famous poet. The value of your work will remain, even if others build on it.

I put it somewhat differently in my review: “Both Ignatieff and Flanagan are public intellectuals.” The term intellectual “assume(s) a willingness to – indeed an insistence on — uncovering and disseminating the truth however unpopular it might be.” But partisan politics is quite the opposite. Because of this, intellectual politicians like Flanagan, Ignatieff and Ignatieff’s predecessor Stéphane Dion have to deny the calling of their profession in hewing to a partisan line. This, I suggested, made them appear inauthentic and, thus, less effective.

Can we generalize from these cases? What do we know about the backgrounds of those who succeeded and failed at winning and carrying out the job of head of government in Canada and other modern democracies? If our criterion for considering someone an intellectual is being employed in an institution of higher education before entering politics, a quick glance tells us that there have been relatively few such cases overall. While one might expect that putting our knowledge into practice would naturally appeal to those of us trained in the social, political and administrative sciences, that turns out not to be the case.

Of course there are exceptions, but they are hard to find. One exception in Canada brings us back to the 1960s: Lester Pearson had a master’s degree in history and taught at the University of Toronto in the 1920s before entering the civil service and, later, the political arena. At the provincial level, Stuart Smith went from professor of medicine to an unsuccessful career as Ontario Liberal leader. In the United States, we need to go back a century to Woodrow Wilson, a political science professor and president of Princeton University before going into politics. Beyond North America, I found an exception in Helen Clark, who lectured in political science before entering New Zealand politics and becoming Prime Minister (1999–2008).

A European exception, one who qualifies as an intellectual, is the current Prime Minister of Italy, Mario Draghi, who has a PhD in economics from Princeton and had been an effective head of the European Central Bank. In office for less than a year, from all reports he is doing well by Italian standards. Draghi, in power in a country in which party politicians are so discredited and divided that they have no choice but to make way for nonpartisan technocrats, is the exception that proves the rule.

I have not looked at the background of European politicians in any systematic way, but my sense is that Stefan Löfven, who is stepping down as Swedish Social Democratic leader and Prime Minister, is representative of successful democratic politicians under increasingly adverse circumstances. A union negotiator and in no sense an intellectual, Löfven has recently been praised on all sides as someone who managed for almost a decade to effectively steer a very divided country, in which an anti-immigrant populist party has almost 20 per cent support.

The most successful politician in recent years has been German Chancellor Angela Merkel who, though based at an institution of higher learning, has never been accused of being an intellectual. Before entering politics she worked at the physical chemistry faculty of the national Academy of Sciences, a gloomy concrete box on the southeastern outskirts of Berlin surrounded by barbed wire, where she spent her days punching calculations for the decomposition of hydrocarbons into a 20-year-old windup computer from Hewlett-Packard.

In Britain, the most successful recent leader was Tony Blair, who studied law and immediately entered politics. His successor was more of an intellectual: Gordon Brown lectured in politics at Glasgow College of Technology and tutored for the Open University before joining Scottish Television. Elected to Parliament in 1983, he became Prime Minister when Blair resigned in 2007. Brown’s tenure was short-lived, ending when he lost to David Cameron in the 2010 election.

Readers will note that I have left out two high-profile exceptions: Pierre Trudeau, former Canadian Prime Minister and father of the current Prime Minister, and former U.S. President Barack Obama. They qualify as intellectuals, but they differ from the others discussed here in that their training was in law – both taught constitutional law before entering politics. This brings them closer to the group most overrepresented among successful politicians: lawyers like Jean Chrétien and Jean Charest.

So why are academic politicians rare and unsuccessful as compared to lawyer politicians? Going in and out of practising law facilitates getting into electoral politics, but then leaves of absence from educational institutions are not hard to come by. The fact that lawyers benefit more from the notoriety of public life explains why there are so many lawyer politicians, but not why they are more successful. What does?

The answer, as I suggested above, lies in authenticity. Lawyers’ profession and training makes them well suited to be politicians; not so for academics. Lawyers naturally and convincingly argue one side of a case, and are capable – when they get a different client – of arguing the other side equally well. No one asks: do they really believe this?

It’s not that intellectuals who become politicians are more honest in their new role than are former lawyers. Eschewing the calling of their former profession, intellectual politicians have no choice but to hew to a partisan line. My point is that they are not as good at this as are lawyers. To simplify, when they enter the political arena lawyers are applying their professional training and experience; intellectuals are doing the opposite. This inauthenticity is what makes them less credible.

Here I want to draw on my own personal experience as – as I term it in the title of my recently published political memoir – Participant Observer: An Unconventional Life in Politics and Academia.¹ Three chapters tell the story of what I learned from my unique vantage point close to leading Quebec politicians for more than a decade. Two others set out how I later applied the lessons of that experience to a close observation of Swedish and Scandinavian politics.

Like Tom Flanagan, I never sought elected office; unlike him, I never crossed the line to take a paid top executive position in a political party. But I was deeply involved in the Parti Québécois, and I learned much from my Quebec experience about why lawyers make successful politicians and intellectuals do not. Among those I came to know were two natural Quebec politicians, René Lévesque and Lucien Bouchard, and two intellectuals who proved to be relatively unsuccessful politicians (at least as party leaders), Jacques Parizeau and Claude Ryan.

Ryan’s failure as leader of the Quebec Liberal Party compared to the relative success of two lawyer politicians who led the same party, Robert Bourassa and Jean Charest, is suggestive. But I would like to focus on the comparison between Lucien Bouchard and Jacques Parizeau. Bouchard succeeded Parizeau as Premier of Quebec in 1996. Parizeau had served one year and 125 days when he resigned. Bouchard served five years and 38 days before he resigned in 2001.

I was able to observe Parizeau closely when he was an effective minister of finance in Lévesque’s PQ government.² Parizeau was acclaimed as party leader in 1988, replacing Pierre Marc Johnson, who had lost the 1985 election. Johnson had favoured constitutional compromise, like Lévesque, while Parizeau was identified with the “pur et dur” wing of the party. Parizeau improved the PQ’s showing only marginally in 1989, but five years later won a majority of seats. He then lived up to his promise to hold a referendum on Quebec sovereignty early in his term, despite support for sovereignty being at around 40 per cent in the polls.

It soon became clear to the Yes forces that Parizeau was a liability, and Parizeau allowed himself to be replaced as key spokesman by Lucien Bouchard, leader of the Bloc Québécois, who took a much softer line and proved to be very effective. The vote was very close as the Yes side lost by only 55,000 votes, and Parizeau ended his political career that night when he blamed money and the ethnic vote for the defeat. The Yes might have won had Parizeau not told a group of foreign diplomats, as reported by Chantal Hébert in La Presse, that the guarantee of an offer of partnership with the rest of Canada following a Yes vote meant little since Quebecers would be trapped like “lobsters in a pot,” unable to escape the consequences of a vote for independence once it was cast.

After Parizeau resigned, Bouchard took over as leader of the Parti Québécois and became Premier. Bouchard led the PQ into the 1998 provincial election, defeating the new Liberal leader, Jean Charest. But disillusioned with his experience, he chose not to run again, instead returning to practising law as a partner at a prestigious Montreal firm. He was replaced in 2001 by Bernard Landry, another unsuccessful economist politician, who was defeated by Jean Charest’s Liberals two years later.

Of course times are different now, and other factors are involved. But it’s worth noting that current Premier François Legault, who came to politics from business, in facing the pandemic has been able to persuade Quebecers that he placed their interests above his own partisan ones. This is something economists Parizeau and Landry could not do, not because they were necessarily more partisan but because, as intellectuals, they sounded more insincere when associating the positions of their party with the public good.

In ending I want to insist that my claim is a modest one. Other factors beyond authenticity contribute to determining a politician’s fate. Timing and context matter. For example, I worked closely with Pierre Marc Johnson, in every way a natural politician. And while he brought the Parti Québécois back into contention when he succeeded René Lévesque, the party was so divided and discredited by then that he ended up resigning, opening the door to his rival Parizeau after losing the 1985 election.

Finally, as a rule, authenticity is depleted by the exercise of power. Coming from well behind, the new Liberal leader, Justin Trudeau, led his party to a majority of seats in the 2015 election. But he could not do the same in 2019, or again this past September.

Continue reading “Why Intellectuals Make Bad Politicians” →

Photo: Red Square, Moscow. By Vicente Villamón, via Flickr.

Gordon Corera, Russians Among Us: Sleeper Cells, Ghost Stories and the Hunt for Putin’s Spies. New York: William Morrow, 2020. 444 pages.

This book tells the story of a ring of deep-cover Russian agents in North America – the sleeper cells, or illegals – uncovered by the FBI and expelled in 2011. It is the story of young Russians selected and rigorously trained to take up lives as middle-class Americans (and Canadians) – but it is also far more. Indeed, it offers real insight into the man who runs Russia. To understand Vladimir Putin and Russia’s meddling in elections in the United States and elsewhere, one needs to begin at the time the Soviet Union was teetering, and Putin was a KGB agent based in East Germany. Gordon Corera, the BBC’s security editor, who has reported on intelligence agencies for two decades, suggests that the United States and United Kingdom have failed for too long to appreciate that Putin’s understanding of the world has been that of an intelligence officer in a polarized world. Hence, to understand Putin and his associates, you must understand the KGB and its domestic successor agency, the FSB.

Going back to the 1990s, Corera recounts how the new leadership of the KGB appointed by Boris Yeltsin apparently decided to end its sophisticated surveillance of Westerners in what had been the Soviet Bloc. In response MI6, Britain’s international spy organization, stopped monitoring the London branch of the SVR, the former “First Directorate” of Russian foreign intelligence. This, he argues, was shortsighted. Beneath the changes, the Soviet intelligence infrastructure remained, to be reinstituted by Putin who

believed in the cult of the spy and understood its power among the public. The new leader breathed life into his own decaying spy services, turbocharging them with more resources and a renewed sense of purpose. Just as he would build a cult of personality around himself, so he built one around his spies. They would once again become heroes and the source of pride – and that particularly applied to illegals.

At the core of the book is the story, based on interviews and other first-hand information, of the 11 illegals. It begins with their recruitment and the efforts invested in preparing them for their task. Especially interesting to readers of Inroads is the detailed narrative, evidently based on long discussions with the author, of Andrez Bezrukov, born in 1960, and Elena Vavilova, born in 1962, a couple who had met as students at Tomsk State University where they were recruited. They were given their new identities as Donald Heathfield and Ann Foley (the names of two deceased Canadians) and were trained for four years before arriving in Canada in 1987, working first in Montreal and then moving to Toronto three years later.

The plan was to send them to the United States at the appropriate time. In the meantime, two sons were born, and from Toronto they watched mystified as the old Soviet Union was replaced by the new Russia. But despite a period of some uncertainty, there was no question of ending their mission. In 1999 they moved to Massachusetts where Donald had been accepted into Harvard’s Kennedy School, considered a ticket into a world of leaders in business and government. He soon took a position in high tech business in Cambridge, all the while carrying out his basic function, that of a “talent spotter” identifying possible recruits who would spy for Russia. In fact, we find out, almost from the start their true identity was known to the CIA, but Heathfield and Foley were not arrested. Instead the FBI placed them under surveillance. It was only in 2011 that they were two of the exposed Russian spies traded for four jailed Russians who had spied for the West in the famous swap on the tarmac of Vienna airport.

This swap came at the culmination of almost a decade of observation of the illegals by the FBI. We learn of this in Corero’s recounting of the role of Alexander Poteyev, one of 60 spies in New York based at the UN. During the Yeltsin period, the FBI recruited Poteyev as a counterspy. After returning to Moscow, Poteyev joined the senior ranks of “Directorate S,” the secret unit inside the KGB which ran the operation, in 2000. He was thus in a position to learn the identities of the illegals, and it was he who exposed Heathfield and Foley along with the others. Poteyev’s appointment thus turned out to be “a godsend.” Now the United States “had its window into the illegals program.” It was only a decade later, when Poteyev realized that the FSB was closing in on him, that the window was closed and the spies exchanged.

Corera describes how what to do with the illegals was placed before President Obama and his top aides. They had only a brief window once Poteyev was pulled out of Russia before Putin would realize that the illegals had been exposed. In the meeting the heads of the FBI and CIA, supported notably by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, sought to immediately arrest the spies and expel the diplomats who had facilitated their efforts. They did not believe that the new Russian President, Dimitri Medvedev, about to arrive in the United States to sign a new START nuclear treaty, was any different from then Prime Minister Putin. But Obama, Vice President Biden and key advisers disagreed. The resolution was that the spies would be quietly arrested but, rather than tried, they would be swapped. The arrests took place on June 27, 2011, just after Medvedev left. To be swapped, the illegals were required to first plead guilty before a New York court, which they did 10 days later. Putin, Corera reports, was furious and “drew a lesson he would not forget. Medvedev had been played. Russia had been humiliated.”

According to Corera, the Obama Administration treated the whole incident as a throwback initiated because of “some old-fashioned Russian spying, and it was time to put the whole thing behind them.” From his description of this decision and what came afterward, it is clear that he sympathizes with the dismay expressed by the American intelligence officers. Misjudging Putin, he concludes, would have consequences.

At the time of the swap, Heathfield and Foley’s two sons were on what they thought would only be a short visit to a foreign country, Russia, apparently still unaware that this was the native land of their parents. Knowing no one and not understanding the language, they found it hard to become Russians (Alex, born four years after Timothy, chose to go to court to try to regain his Canadian status, and in 2018, at age 23, he succeeded).

It was not hard, however, for their parents to go back to being Russians. Donald Heathfield, now again Andrez Bezrukov, was soon hired as assistant to the president of the energy giant Rosneft and as a lecturer at the Moscow Institute of International Relations. When asked by students what his previous life was like, he told them to watch The Americans, the television series about an illegal family like theirs. Corera quotes from an interview with Elena Vavilova: “The producers captured well the atmosphere of the eighties … the illegals’ human side with believable emotions and problems,” though the violence, she believed, was added “to keep the attention of viewers.” Andrez and Elena did not regret their decision, except that “nobody asked my kids whether they wanted to live like that. Or the consequences of being the sons of spies.”

In the swap on the tarmac of Vienna airport, among the four exchanged Russians who had spied for the West and been caught and jailed in Russia was military intelligence (GRU) officer Sergei Skripal, who had been recruited when operating out of the Russian mission in Madrid. Years later, in 2018, Skripal and his daughter Yulia, then living peacefully in Salisbury in the U.K., were poisoned by GRU agents. These well-known events are recounted in a later chapter and needn’t be retold here, but it is useful to cite Corera’s answer to the question he poses – “why was Skripal targeted?” – since it goes well beyond this particular case.

It was about sending a message … to those within Russia … Your former colleagues would come looking for you … even after close to a decade, when you thought you were living a quiet life, they would hunt you down and try to kill you and not care about hurting those you loved as they did it.

Corera suggests that Skripal was targeted in part because the British were seen as weak. That weakness was revealed in an earlier, similar case recounted here, that of Alexander Litvinenko, who had been recruited by MI6 and poisoned in 2006 by radioactive material Russian agents had placed in his tea, “leaving tiny particles scattered across London … The British state did its best for years to block an inquiry, an inquiry that was launched only years later and whose chair, Robert Owen, reported 10 years after the murder that it had been carried out by the FSB and probably approved by President Putin.” Another case in point is that of the attempted murder of exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky: the British state turned his assassin over to be deported to Russia where he (was) disappeared.

Corera stresses that to understand Putin’s attitude, one needs to understand his basic conviction, strengthened by certain events like the revelations of Edward Snowden, that Russia is a fortress besieged by the West, and everything is legitimate in fighting back: “Because the West was trying to undermine his grip, he believed it had become … vital to keep the West off-balance and divide it.”

He is especially critical of the attitudes of his compatriots. At the time of the swap, in 2011, British Prime Minister David Cameron was visiting Russia to drum up business and invite Putin to come to the U.K. the following year. And still today, Corera notes bitterly, wealthy Russians continue to buy British soccer teams and mansions in Knightsbridge and Belgravia. They pay handsomely for the services of London professionals and their companies are listed on the London stock exchange. They open art galleries in Mayfair, attracting the attentions of diplomats and celebrities and all sorts of interesting people for spies among them to report on. Huge mansions “lie dark and dormant. No one is living there. In these places, but also in its heart, London has become a ghost town.”

The last chapter of Russians Among Us tells of cyberspies who replace and complement flesh-and-blood ones, building up “a massive machinery of disinformation.” The new illegals pretending to be U.S. grassroots activists need not physically exist; they can be “ghosts” controlled by someone at a computer in Moscow, like the spy who penetrated the Democratic National Committee computer system during the 2016 election campaign. The objective was to undermine the credibility of the DNC process that chose Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, and all was set to do so with the election results should Clinton have won. In March 2016, Clinton campaign chair John Podesta was contacted, supposedly by Google, to change his password, inadvertently giving GRU hackers access to 50,000 emails. By late August more than 100 real Americans had been contacted by fake U.S. persons to organize rallies.

But some traditions continue. I end with excerpts from Corera’s two closing paragraphs:

On the evening of June 28, 2017, Putin went to Yasenevo for a special gala to celebrate ninety-five years of illegals. Standing at a podium in the main auditorium, he paid tribute to Directorate S as a “legendary unit” and gave a roll call of its heroes … who had displayed valor and courage while fulfilling special missions in life-threatening circumstances … “They were needed more than ever.” Putin ended with a call to arms for those in front of him and for “the agents who are now serving abroad”. “I wish you good health, good luck, and new victories for the greater good of Russia.”

Make no mistake, somewhere – living in suburbia, picking up their children from parties, smiling at the neighbours as they water the hydrangeas – illegals are still out there. “We don’t consider ourselves heroes,” Elena Vavilova said looking back, nearly a decade after she had been swapped in Vienna. “We just honestly did our duty.” Her husband also plays down his role. “I am an average undercover agent. Hopefully not the worst, definitely not the very best. You have never heard about the best ones. And never will.”