Apotheosis in Washington

The Apotheosis of Washington, U.S. Capitol

 

 Fellow Citizens: I am again called upon by the voice of my country to execute the functions of its Chief Magistrate. When the occasion proper for it shall arrive, I shall endeavor to express the high sense I entertain of this distinguished honor, and of the confidence which has been reposed in me by the people of united America.

Previous to the execution of any official act of the President the Constitution requires an oath of office. This oath I am now about to take, and in your presence: That if it shall be found during my administration of the Government I have in any instance violated willingly or knowingly the injunctions thereof, I may (besides incurring constitutional punishment) be subject to the upbraidings of all who are now witnesses of the present solemn ceremony. 

—George Washington’s second inaugural address, 1793

Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

—Article Two, Section One, Constitution of the United States

Thirty-five words in front of a judge or a notary public. This is the pomp of presidential inauguration, and everything else is circumstance.

I will not watch the presidential inauguration Tuesday. I have no disrespect for the man who will be our new executive, but I refuse to glorify the office he will assume.  The president is a citizen, a magistrate, and nothing more, and his assumption of office is a thing we ought not observe.  

No man, no matter how high his office, how strong his mandate, how historic his victory, deserves the exaltation our new president will receive this week. No matter, though, for today’s president is no longer a man: he is hope bringer, protector, decider, curator and Commander-in-Chief of our National Destiny. The celebration surrounding the modern inauguration is as fit for our Imperial President as it is for caesars and kings and rulers by divine right. For the religious, this sort of adulation is an affront to God; for Americans, it is an affront to our republic. 

Once, presidents shunned ceremony, and took care to avoid ostentation. George Washington’s second inaugural address was just 140 words, delivered before a small assembly of judges, cabinet officers, and members of the Continental Congress. It was shorter even than the speech he delivered in 1789, and for good reason: Washington was careful with the precedents he set as the first president of a new republic. He rejected “your Majesty” in favor of “Mr. President.” He resisted a second term and ardently refused a third. His modest inaugural was designed to promote government of laws over men.

Thomas Jefferson was even more humble—and more determined to reject the trappings of kings. In 1801, he walked from his D.C. boarding house to the Capitol, gave a quiet address, and walked back home. That night, the third President of the United States declined a seat at the head of the dinner table.

Today, a presidential inauguration is train rides, black ties, dinners, concert balls, Marine Bands, motorcades, balloons, parades, speeches and invocations and benedictions and ceremony and celebrity—first $33 then $44 now $150 million worth. It is a spectacle built out of lego, made into holograms, broadcast to rapt millions watching Jumbotrons on the national mall. 

There is a fresco painted in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol titled “The Apotheosis of Washington.” There, the president sits in purple robes alongside Victory and War and Science and looks down on men.  The tourists shuffle through and look up and take pictures. After all, it looks beautiful.

(photo via flickr user H4NUM4N)

Breakfast

Fresh orange juice, cheese omelettes, home fries, grilled tomatoes. After twelve hours spent guzzling fake suspense, shiny hyperbole, and black coffee, a few of the survivors seriously considered skipping the beginning of Obama’s victory speech to hit up the buffet. But as the crowd in Chicago started screaming and the Kenyans started dancing and the Americans around me started crying, I couldn’t help but get caught up too. That’s right: even I was teary and proud and full of hope, and I kind of liked it. I’m still cynical about an Obama presidency, but tonight (today, tomorrow? I have lost my sense of time) the Senator earned the election and accomplished something great.

We watched both McCain’s concession and Obama’s victory address in sleep-deprived silence. Both were elegant, fitting bits of rhetoric. Both were also foreboding. Watching McCain choke back emotion and exit gracefully among the jeers of a hateful crowd was painful and frightening. So were Obama’s words about a “new spirit of service” and “new spirit of sacrifice”—and the sight of my friends and colleagues eagerly cheering them on. But all this was outweighed by the joy of knowing that this endless election is over.

At 7am, I headed back to the auditorium for a conference call with former Ambassador Marc Grossman. I managed to spew up an incoherent question on the magnitude of Obama’s soft power bump in Turkey, and got an interesting answer: “I don’t really like the term ’soft power.’ I prefer smart power.” He defused another question, regarding a potential Armenian resolution, with diplomatic delicacy: Turks, Grossman argued, should accept that Obama’s support for a resolution as fact, and work on improving relations with modern Armenia. Fair enough—but he downplayed the destructive impact of such a measure.

On my way out of the auditorium, I grabbed a quick cup of coffee before running out the door. After 25 wakeful hours of incessant election coverage, I had to get to class. An hour ago, I turned in my Turkish final.

The view from Turkey

Obama on the left, McCain on the right.

It’s currently 2:20 AM in Turkey, and I’m watching election results from a party sponsored by the U.S. embassy and the Turkish-American Association. There’s free coffee, reliable internet, and a big screen streaming CNN, so I’ll be spasmodically blogging into the wee hours.

With a full zero percent of precints reporting, I’m calling Turkey and awarding its zero electoral votes to Barack Obama. The crowd here is about 60 strong, split between Turks of all sorts, Anglophile expats, and college kids, huddled like Wright’s philosophers around a projector throwing the fleeting, frantic visage of Wolf Blitzer up on a big screen. Everyone cheered moments ago when the networks called Vermont for Obama, but for a better barometer of the mood here, see the above image. John McCain buttons have gone untouched all night, save for a few foreign service officers wearing one of each in the spirit of professional nonpartisanship. As for the Obama buttons, a staffer just refilled the basket and folks are passing them around for the second time.

Of course, there’s no Barr, Nader, or McKinney schwag, but I did get a chance to stuff a Bob Barr ballot into the party’s mock election box. I am much more likely to cast the marginal vote, but in the end, my fake vote will doubtless have as much significance as my real one.

I voted early in Pima County

Look, Mom! I voted!

I did it. It took two trips to the consular section and a couple months of apprehensive faith in the Pima County Recorder and the Turkish postal system, but this morning, I irrationaly exercised my “most important right” as an American citizen by voting in my first presidential election.

I try to take seriously the economic and mathematical reality of voting, and moral and philosophical arguments for not voting, not voting badly, and voluntarily voting. Although this year’s Presidential election is a Crest-Colgate matchup as usual, several Arizona initiatives persuaded me to participate. I find this interesting: ballot initiatives are essentially an unbundled set of policies, which, at least in this case, increased my perceived utility from voting because I could more precisely express my preferences. But they are also the sort of direct democracy our constitution was rightly designed to curtail.

I don’t find the argument that voting legitimizes the rules of an unfair game very persuasive, but neither do I see it as a civic duty. I try not to vote strategically, or for lesser evils, but simply to reflect my policy preferences as accurately as possible. Admittedly, this left a quite a few blank spots on the ballot this year. I’ll echo my friend Evan’s praise for absentee ballots, which allow for informed consideration and lower the opportunity cost of casting a vote (at least, if you don’t have to drag it down to the U.S. embassy and wait in line for an hour to mail it). Plus, even though my brain is pickled in the dismal truths of public choice, I still kind of like filling in the bubbles. I even put on the little sticker in the privacy of my own room.

What about Turkey? According to Gallup, 70 percent of Turks are indifferent regarding the Presidential election, but those who have a preference favor Obama by almost three to one. As far as I can tell, this is pretty accurate, though I think the Turkish threshold for rational ignorance is much higher than the American one. Few Turks are aware of Obama’s position on the issue they euphemistically call “the Armenian question,” and I’ve twice been asked to explain Obama’s religious beliefs. My summaries left both interlocutors puzzled and frustrated, but I think it’s very probable that this is just because my Turkish is hopeless, especially when it comes to theology.^[1]

Among American students abroad, the question is not whether one will vote for Obama, but how emphatically one will. When I let slip to one friend that my Presidential vote was a toss-up between Bob Barr, “lumberjacks,” and Paris-Rihanna, I got the kind of concerned-and-horrified look a mother gives when her son tells her he has “something very important” to share. To refuse to pick a side, especially this year, is to sit out a great momentous Miltonian War in Heaven, doomed to suffer all the eternal bummers of the neutral angels.^[2]

Well, suffer I will. But I plan to minimize it by spending the next week with a bottle of rakı and a copy of “Calculus of Consent,” as far from the last few days of delirious campaign coverage as possible. I’ll see you on November 5th.

---

[Back] ¹Although one evening at the dinner table, I did manage to explain the Great Schism via the art of mime.

[Back] ²Okay, fine. Milton doesn’t have neutral angels, but “The Inferno” does, and boy howdy did Virgil make their fate sound sucky: “they have no hope of death / and so abject is their blind life / that they are envious of every other lot. / The world suffers no report of them to live. / Pity and justice despise them” (III: 46-50).

AK party survives court ruling

Well, scratch that last post of mine. Against all expectations, Turkey’s Constitutional Court ruled today not to disband the AK party, but instead to cut its public funding in half.  Democracy has won — but by a  thin margin. Six judges ruled in favor of a full ban, four for financial penalty, and only one against any punishment at all. Just one more in favor of a ban would have dissolved the party.

Despite the scary-close final decision, a stern sanction may be the best outcome. If AK’s leaders are smart politicians and not insidious Islamists (evidence certainly points towards the former), they will pick up on the court’s signal and recalibrate towards their first-term agenda of growth and liberalization. Meanwhile, AK’s fate is back in the hands of voters, where it belongs.

Today’s ruling ought to be good for markets paralyzed by uncertainty, good for the peace process that now pivots around Ankara, and most important, good for democracy and rule of law in Turkey.

Turkey’s AK party ban: breaking a window of opportunity

(STR/AFP/Getty Images)

“It isn’t exactly pretty — and certainly isn’t tidy — but peace really does appear to be breaking out in the Middle East.”

That’s the thesis of an odd, unnervingly optimistic Stratfor analysis by Peter Zeihan, published earlier this month. Just how optimistic? Consider this:

“One gets the feeling that if the progress could hold up for just a touch longer, not only would there be an Israeli-Syrian deal and a U.S.-Iranian understanding, the world itself would change. Those of us here who are old enough to remember haven’t sensed such a fateful moment since the weeks before the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989.”

Amid the choreographed snubs, rattling sabers, and wacky slowdowns of late, that may sound insane. But a comprehensive peace deal could well be in the offing, thanks to one important player omitted by Stratfor’s analysis: Turkey.

Over the last five years, the leaders of Turkey’s center-right AK party, including Prime Minister Recep Tayyep Erdoğan, President and former Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül, and current Foreign Minister Ali Babacan, have forged a newly assertive foreign policy. Their new doctrine of “strategic depth” is based on the ideas of Ahmet Davutoğlu, an international relations professor who serves as chief foreign policy adviser to the AK government. Davutoğlu’s influence on Turkish foreign policy is huge — according to The Economist, both Erdoğan and Gül address him as hoca, the Turkish term for a wise mentor.

The theory of strategic depth calls for Turkey to be “a country that is always at the epicenter of events, whatever they may be.” In practice, that has meant not just continuing to make reforms with an eye towards joining the European Union, but also engaging with Turkey’s regional neighbors through both diplomacy and trade. The approach has had its hang-ups — most notably when Gül invited Khaled Mashaal, leader of Hamas, for an official visit after his party’s win in the 2006 Palestinian elections. But on balance, the new ambition in Ankara is perhaps the most important accomplishment of the AK government. The share of trade with Turkey’s neighbors has increased from 6 percent of all trade volume in 2000 to 35 percent in 2007. Relations with neighbors Bulgaria and Georgia have significantly improved. Most important, Turkey is on friendly terms with nearly everyone in the Middle East — including Israel.

Avni Doğru describes Turkey’s quiet involvement all over the region quite well:

Turkey has been playing a key mediating role in several conflicts, including those between Syria and Israel, between Palestine and Israel, and in Lebanon. Syria and Israel just had their third round of indirect talks under Turkey’s mediation in Istanbul. Similarly, the Ankara Forum had several meetings so far and brought the private sectors of Israel and Palestine together to work on possible rapprochement. The Ankara Forum also hosted a meeting between the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli President Shimon Peres before the Annapolis summit in November 2007. After the 2006 Lebanon war, the AKP government decided to send 1,000 troops – one of the largest contributions – to the UN Interim Force in Lebanon despite harsh domestic opposition. Also, during the recent Lebanon crisis in May 2008, Turkey played the mediator role between the Shia opposition and the Sunni establishment thanks to its good relations with both parties. Its balanced policy toward each group also secured Turkey an active role in bridging the Sunni-Shia divide in Iraq in 2007. It has similarly worked behind the scenes in Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan on peace-building efforts. In fact, Turkey is now the only country that enjoys good relations with every country in the Middle East.

Add to that already exhaustive list Erdoğan’s recent trip as the second head of state to visit post-invasion Iraq (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the first), and Turkey’s help “consolidating and facilitating” U.S.-Iranian nuclear negotiations, and it’s clear that Turkey has a crucial role in every current conflict in the Middle East. And on top of all this, they are likely to win a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council. Some strategic depth, indeed.

Their importance in U.S.-Iranian negotiations is certainly underestimated. The Turkish government, officially opposed to an Iranian nuclear program, is in frequent diplomatic contact with Iranian officials. U.S. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley met with Ali Babacan in Ankara last week. So did Saeed Jalili, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, on his way back from talks in Geneva. If there have not already been formal backchannel negotiations between Iran and the United States facilitated by Turkey, Babacan has certainly been acting as a de facto intermediary.

Understanding Turkey’s role clears up some of the tense signaling of recent weeks. If the real negotiations are quietly underway with the help of Turkey, officials in Israel and the United States are free to play hardball in public, and Iranian negotiators have an incentive to act defiant with goofy stunts like the “none paper” they presented in Geneva. Meanwhile, mediated negotiations between Israeli and Syrian diplomats continue to make public progress. Suddenly, a peace breakout doesn’t seem so implausible.

However, there is one major complication. Although Erdoğan’s government is playing an increasingly crucial international role, his domestic house is in disorder. On Monday, Turkey’s Constitutional Court will begin final deliberations on whether or not to disband the AK party for anti-secular activities. It is almost certain that they will shut down the party and ban its leaders from politics.

Staunch secularists, including the military, many judges, and Turkey’s elite Kemalist establishment, see AK’s brand of Islamism as a creeping threat to Turkey’s long-established secular order, and AK’s leaders as agents of a plot to impose sharia law on the Turkish Republic. The truth is more complicated.

There is no doubt that AK is an Islamist party. Their political strength comes both from a “silent majority” voter base of conservative and religious Turks, especially outside Turkey’s urban centers, and a spectacular track record of economic growth. The party was formed by a faction of politicians from the Welfare Party, itself banned as anti-secular in 1998. And although the leaders of AK have done much for liberalism in Turkey — abolished the death penalty, promoted legal equality, opened the economy and tamed inflation — they have also done their share of dumb, illiberal things, including a 2004 attempt to criminalize adultery, local bans and regulation on alcohol consumption, a crackdown on pork butchers and pig farms, and a famous attempt to lift the prohibition on headscarves at university. All these policies are rooted in conservative, traditional belief, and few of them have been reported by those in the West with a simple view of the troubles. AK have also been keen practitioners of kadrolaşma, the Turkish tradition of stuffing bureaucracies and government offices full of sympathetic appointees. But none of their actions are a threat to secularism or democracy any more than, say, the Bush administration’s attempts to push abstinence-only sex ed and appoint Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court threatened the American way. The argument against AK is reductio ad sharium.

The secularists are also more complex. Although often portrayed simply as a “hard-line Kemalist elite” out of touch with the wishes of the people, they are more than just military brass eager for an antidemocratic coup. Historically, the military, which sees itself as part of a long tradition started by Atatürk, himself a military commander, has been an important defender of secularism. Past coups have been no victory for democracy, but they have established crucial “red lines” for Turkish civil society and helped stabilize the political arena by preventing the undue influence of both statist and Islamic extremists. However, their time has passed, and the generals ought to recognize rule of law as the real protector of the secular state.

Last time his party was challenged, during protests over the headscarf ban, Erdoğan called a snap election that handed AK a renewed mandate and a bigger share of parliament. Whether he will do so again remains to be seen. A snap election before the ruling would not be a surprise. However, over the course of their second term in power, AK has lost some support in the Kurdish southeast by allowing the military to crack down on the PKK. AK also faces a vocal, mobilized secular opposition. Considering this, a preemptive election would be a strategic mistake. A post-ban election would be more prudent, since the court ruling will solidify the party base. Rebuliding after a ban is also a well-established process in Turkish politics: If banned, AK’s representatives will stand for election as independents, preserve their majority, and form up as a new party with a different name. Although their leaders will ostensibly be banned from politics for five years, it would be a victory for secularism in name only, leaving the most extreme secularists “stuck between a coup and a hard place,” as one diplomat recently told The Economist.

However, the turmoil caused by a party ban would throw the government into disarray for a bit, and the hassle of forming a new party and parliamentary coalition would certainly put a halt to the negotiations sponsored Erdoğan’s government and close the window of opportunity for an international agreement. If the potential for a broad Mideast peace negotiated via Turkey is true, an AK ban will be a very bad thing.

U.S. officials are hesitant to comment on the ban for fear of alienating the Turkish military, the institution where our strategic interests currently lie. As long as a quarter of the fuel consumed by coalition forces in Iraq enters through the Habur gate, and 70 percent of air cargo is flown in from the U.S. air force base in Incırlık, this will probably remain the case. However, next week will be a crucial time, not just for the future of democracy and secularism in Turkey, but for the prospects of peace in the Middle East. Losing AK means losing the crucial peace negotiations they are helping to mediate, which mean losing our last best hope for a grand agreement. We can only hope someone in our government finds the courage to speak up.

Towards a new balance in Russia?

Henry Kissinger offers an optimistic outlook on Dmitri Medvedev and Russian democracy in a recent Washington Post op-ed:

Whatever the ultimate outcome, the last Russian election marks a transition from a phase of consolidation to a period of modernization. The ceding of power by a ruler at the height of his influence is unprecedented in Russian history. The growing complexity of the economy has generated the need for predictable legal procedures, as already foreshadowed by Medvedev. The government’s operation — at least initially — with two centers of power may, in retrospect, appear to be the beginning of an evolution toward a form of checks and balances.

A Russian democracy is not foreordained, of course. But neither was the democratic evolution in the West.

Medvedev’s words more than foreshadow the fundamentals of liberalism. Earlier this year, he pledged respect for the rule of law and “freedom in all its forms.” Last week, he said “we should fight neglect of the law and legal nihilism; the economy should be based on market values, and property rights should always be protected.” Plus, his career as a law professor and detachment from the state security apparatus suggest that he comes from a culture of deference to law before state power.

But it’s hard to see that deference in action with Khodorkovsky still in jail, Lugovoi happily serving in the Duma, and nasty grumbles in Abkhazia and the Czech Republic. Moreover, as chairman of Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned gas behemoth, Medvedev wasn’t exactly a champion of the market, and Putin’s undemocratic turnover of the government was far from a Washingtonian succession.

I’m more inclined to see Medvedev as a Tom Hagen to Putin’s circle of siloviki — a public face who keeps his hands clean but stays loyal to the leader he’s advised for 17 years. As nicely as that analogy may fit, however, it seems a bit too simple. This article on Putin’s government, published well before the Medvedev transition, identified three factions in the Kremlin: liberals (then marginalized, now extinct), technocrats, and siloviki. Medvedev has something for everyone — a liberal education, a technocratic career, and years of proximity to Putin. Combined with the wide swath of constitutional powers afforded the President and Putin’s attempts to keep each faction under his own control, it’s clear that two centers of power have emerged, as Kissinger notes. But whether or not they will check and balance or defer and divide remains unseen.

Regardless, one thing is clear:

Ever since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, a succession of U.S. administrations has acted as if the creation of Russian democracy were a principal American task. Speeches denouncing Russian shortcomings and gestures drawn from the Cold War have occurred frequently. Proponents of such policies assert that the transformation of Russian society is the precondition of a more harmonious international order. They argue that if pressure is maintained on the current Russia, it, too, will eventually implode. Yet assertive intrusion into what Russians consider their own sense of self runs the risk of thwarting both geopolitical and moral goals.

If two decades of nagging haven’t transformed Russian democracy, it’s time to give it up. That doesn’t mean giving up on democracy — foreign policymakers ought to be clear that we support real independence for Georgia and Ukraine. But easing up on the rhetoric and cooperating without co-opting when our interests run parallel may well be the best way to let true Russian liberalism emerge.