RUTHFULLY YOURS

Bruce Chadwick begins his fascinating, data-packed history of “law and disorder” in mid-nineteenth century New York City with a gripping account of the anti-abolitionist riot of 1834. A mix-up over the use of a chapel on Chatham Street for a gathering of black leaders and abolitionists led to an all-out attack by several hundred anti-abolitionists. Slavery was legal in New York State until 1827, and thousands of city residents had been sorry to see it go. The abolitionists, however, gave no ground.

For four days, rioters swept back and forth across the city, which at that time stretched from the Battery to 14th Street. Seven churches and a school for black children were burned. The Bowery Theater was heavily damaged. Businesses and houses went up in flames, and the homes of prominent abolitionist leaders were sacked and looted.

In the midst of the furious mob, vainly attempting to bring the rampage under control, was the city’s feeble company of constables. Untrained, unarmed, and unpaid, these political appointees in plainclothes worked for rewards and bonuses, and for the bribes they received from the city’s underworld; some constables even served as procurers in the city’s flesh trade. These amateur officers were good at making money and many lived in style, but they were not good at enforcing the law. Mayor Cornelius Lawrence summoned the state militia, which arrived on horseback. The militiamen warned the mob to disperse, then opened fire: several people were killed and dozens wounded, ending the riot.

For the City of New York, however, an unprecedented wave of crime and chaos had just begun. In 1835, a close mayoral election sent political gangs storming down Broadway. In 1837, a mob protesting reports of profiteering threw 500 barrels of flour into the street. Almost any rabble-rousing tale of injustice could bring hordes of irate “rogues and rascals” streaming through Manhattan. Rumors that an English actor had insulted America filled the streets with incensed New Yorkers, for whom rioting had become a patriotic duty.

In the 1820s, New York’s newspapers turned up their noses at graphic stories of crime, sin, and degradation. All that changed with the arrival of Scottish immigrant James Gordon Bennett and his penny newspaper, the New York Herald. Bennett seized on the gruesome ax murder of a prostitute to introduce a new form of crusading journalism. Instead of brief news items, Bennett published lengthy interviews with hookers and madams, scandalizing respectable New Yorkers—and tripling the Herald’s circulation. Following Bennet’s lead, Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune and nine other dailies joined the battle for newsstand dominance. Not unlike their modern tabloid descendants, they all claimed to be shocked by the lurid crime stories of rape and robbery that were making them rich, and they all called for a larger, better-trained police force.

But the need for cops outpaced the supply. About 70 percent of immigrants to America landed in New York. Some 30,000 a year were arriving from Ireland alone, causing a dramatic shift in religious and cultural demographics that soon raised Catholic-Protestant tensions to a boiling point. Churches were burned, and the home of Bishop John Hughes was partly destroyed by an anti-Catholic mob. Ethnic and religious firebrands egged the rioters on.

The new immigrants crowded into squalid and dangerous wards like Five Points, a notorious intersection of five streets where Columbus Park stands in Chinatown today. So infamous was this warren of alleys and passageways that, in 1842, a darkly curious Charles Dickens insisted on seeing the wicked slum for himself.

More police, better training, better weapons (such as Samuel Colt’s new revolver), and putting the cops into uniform had little effect on the crime rate. Rioters continued to rule the streets and murders went unsolved. Hotheads and agitators still found it easy to manipulate volatile crowds, and the state militia still replied in kind. When a longstanding feud between two actors brought 10,000 demonstrators to the area around the old Astor Opera House at Lafayette and East 8th Streets, the police lost control. The militia was called. Warning shots were fired. Rocks and bottles flew. A volley was then aimed directly into the crowd. At least 25 people were killed, and a hundred injured. When the anti-draft riots swept the city 14 years later, President Lincoln had to order federal troops to quell the violence.

The blurb of Destroying a Nation: The Civil War in Syria presents the author, Nikolas Van Dam, as an experienced Dutch diplomat with a direct knowledge of the Middle East.

Having served as Holland’s Ambassador to Egypt, Turkey and Iraq, Van Dam also had a stint (in 2015-16) as his country’s Special Envoy for Syria. In that last assignment Van Dam monitored the situation from a base in neighboring Turkey.

Van Dam’s diplomatic background is clear throughout his book as he desperately tries, not always with success, to be fair to “all sides” which means taking no sides, while weaving arguments around the old cliché of “the only way out is through dialogue”.

Thus he is critical of Western democracies, which according to him, deceived the Syrian opposition by making promises to it, including military intervention, which they had no intention of delivering. He is especially critical of former US President Barack Obama who launched the mantra “Assad must go” and set “red line” which the Syrian despot ended up by crossing with impunity.

The first half of the book consists of a fast-paced narrative of Syrian history before the popular uprising started in the spring of 2011. The picture that emerges is that of a Syria in the throes of instability and frequent outburst of violence including sectarian conflict. Van Dam then juxtaposes that with Syria as it was reshaped under President Hafez al-Assad, who seized power in 1970, and his son and successor Bashar al-Assad.

“Under Hafez and Bashar, Syria experienced more internal security and stability than ever before since independence,” Van Dam asserts.

But isn’t Van Dam confusing terror with security and stagnation with stability?

Leaving aside the past six years that, according to Van Dam, have claimed almost half a million Syrian lives, the previous four decades of rule by the two Assads were anything but a model of security and stability. In all those years, Syria lived under Emergency Rules while thousands were imprisoned and/or tortured and executed. The absence of genuine security and stability meant that the Ba’athist regime was unable to build the durable institutions of a modern state. That’s why Syrian society at large saw its creative energies stifled, something that none of the previous dictators, from Hosni a-Zaim onwards, had managed or, perhaps, even intended to do.

In other words, contrary to Van Dam’s assertion, the two Assads destroyed chances of Syria building the political, not to mention the ethical, infrastructure of genuine security and stability.

Van Dam tries to portray Syria as a society that had always been ridden by sectarian violence, and frequently refers to “the killing of Alawites” by Arab Sunni Muslims. However, the only example he cites is that of the mass murder of Alawite military cadets in Aleppo which took place during Hafez al-Assad’s rule. The biggest “mass killing” of that epoch was the week-long carnage of unarmed civilians by Assad’s troops in Hama in 1982 which, according to Van Dam, claimed up to 25,000 lives, almost all of them Arab Sunni Muslims.

The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics, by Mark Lilla (Harper, 160 pp., $24.99)

In his new book, Columbia University humanities professor Mark Lilla laments the phrase “speaking as an X.” Ubiquitous in academia for years, but now increasingly prevalent in general discourse, it is an introductory clause that

sets up a wall against questions, which by definition come from a non-X perspective. And it turns the encounter into a power relation: the winner of the argument will be whoever has invoked the morally superior identity and expressed the most outrage at being questioned. So classroom conversations that once might have begun, I think A, and here is my argument, now take the form, Speaking as an X, I am offended that you claim B. This makes perfect sense if you believe that identity determines everything. It means there is no impartial space for dialogue.

The passage makes plain what Lilla is up to—and up against. He wants the Democratic Party to abandon identity politics for the sake of its electoral viability. Effecting beneficial changes requires wielding power, he argues, and in democracies, securing power requires winning elections. In America—vast, diverse, and unruly—such victories can be secured only through “the hard and unglamorous task of persuading people very different from [oneself] to join a common effort.” Lilla thus finds it necessary to instruct fellow Democrats that elections are neither prayer meetings nor therapy sessions nor seminars nor “teaching moments.”

What is identity politics? As a chapter epigraph, Lilla cites a statement from the Combahee River Collective, a 1970s group whose raison d’etre—black lesbians’ issues and perspectives were getting short shrift from existing civil rights, gay rights, and feminist organizations—sounds like a parody of the problem Lilla describes. “This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics,” the statement said. “We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.”

This rejection of the very idea of an impartial dialogue is, Lilla believes, how the noble legacy of “large classes of people—African-Americans, women—seeking to redress major historical wrongs by mobilizing and then working through our political institutions” gave way, by the 1980s, to “a pseudo-politics of self-regard and increasingly narrow and exclusionary self-definition.” Inherent in it is identitarians’ “disdain” for the “ordinary democratic politics” of “engaging with and persuading people unlike themselves” in favor of “delivering sermons to the unwashed from a raised pulpit.”

Rather than gratefully accept this enlightenment and path to redemption, however, the unwashed are likely to demand an identity politics of their own. “As soon as you cast an issue exclusively in terms of identity,” Lilla warns, “you invite your adversary to do the same.” Thus, Donald Trump’s victory and Lilla’s book, which grew out of a New York Times op-ed he wrote the week after the 2016 election. He was “sick and tired of noble defeats,” Lilla told interviewers then. Lilla’s article prompted many denunciations, the most venomous coming from a Columbia law professor who compared him, unfavorably, with David Duke.

Such reactions give strong reason to doubt that we will soon see a post- or anti-identity politics emerging the Democratic Party. And yet, an even stronger reason exists. The feasibility of Lilla’s project depends on the plausibility of his analysis. If identity politics is an affliction that happened to liberalism, as he sees it, then it’s realistic to activate Democratic antibodies to reject the pathogen. If, however, identity politics is a condition to which liberalism is inherently susceptible, or even disposed, then identity politics is not the Democrats’ problem but their destiny. Unfortunately for Lilla, the evidence points in this direction.

Something came between the New Deal Democratic Party, summoned to pride and patriotism by Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, and today’s Democratic Party, micro-targeting so many distinct constituencies that, to Lilla, it seems better prepared to govern Lebanon than America. In between came McGovernism—not just George McGovern’s 1972 campaign but also the whole style and substance of 1960s and 1970s liberalism: from John F. Kennedy’s cool to Robert Kennedy’s zeal; from civil rights to Black Power; from the counterculture, New Left, and antiwar movements to feminism and environmentalism. The result, says Lilla, turned Joe Sixpack’s Democratic Party into Jessica Yogamat’s. Democrats uncritically embraced the constituencies and passions brought to the fore in the 1960s—often at the expense of common sense, political and governmental. In these years, Lilla writes, “liberals, fearful of ‘blaming the victim,’ refused to speak about the new culture of dependency, or about the tremendous rise in violent crime in the 1960s.”