GREATEST WAR EVER:

A Salafist imam was shot dead by gunmen early on Saturday in Aden, southern Yemen, witnesses and local officials said, the third killing of a Salafist imam this month.

WELCOME, MASTER:

Wal-Mart Stores Inc is rolling out shelf-scanning robots in more than 50 U.S. stores to replenish inventory faster and save employees time when products run out. [...]

"If you are running up and down the aisle and you want to decide if we are out of Cheerios or not, a human doesn't do that job very well, and they don't like it," Jeremy King, chief technology officer for Walmart U.S. and e-commerce, told Reuters.

THANKS, DONALD!:

THE PROBLEM WITH PRETENDING THAT THE ISMs ARE A SERIOUS THREAT:

In 1997, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, the Clinton administration's lead official on all matters Russia, gave a speech at Stanford University on American policy toward Moscow. He admitted, in not so many words, that persuading the erratic President Boris Yeltsin to keep on course with economic reform and progress toward democracy was a daunting task. But Talbott declared himself optimistic nonetheless. His main reason, he said, was "generational,"

or to be even more blunt, biological. The dynamic of what is happening in Russia today is not just Westernizers versus Slavophiles; it is also young versus old--and the young have a certain advantage in at least that dimension of the larger struggle.

I was a correspondent in Moscow at the time I read Talbott's speech, and I remember being struck by its obtuseness--a feeling that has remained with me since. I wondered how younger Russians would react to a U.S. diplomat openly expressing the hope that their grandparents and parents would die off as quickly as possible and so open the path to an American vision of progress.

There was nothing especially original about my question. Communists and ultranationalists were already trading widely in conspiracy theories that the country's startling demographic collapse, unprecedented in peacetime, was the direct result of American-engineered plots "to weaken Russia." In reality, of course, a "weakened Russia" was much more likely to lose effective control over its vast arsenals of weapons of mass destruction, drastically increasing the possibility that some might fall into terrorist hands. Such an outcome hardly seemed to be in the interests of the West or anyone else. A stable Russia, prosperous and democratic, made for a much better bet--assuming, of course, that someone had a viable plan for bringing it about.

By the time of Talbott's speech, such a scenario was looking distinctly improbable. During my years in Moscow, I did meet quite a few Russians who placed their faith in the principles of political and economic freedom, though they were clearly members of a small minority. Strikingly little evidence, however, supported the notion that young people were the self-evident constituency for a liberal future. Most of the 20-somethings I met--and especially those from outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg--expressed strongly nationalist views. Though they welcomed the freedom to travel and consume, they just as often mourned the collapse of the Soviet Union. For those with little memory of the privations of the socialist system, and who had experienced the Gorbachev and Yeltsin period primarily as a time of political chaos and economic upheaval, such seemingly paradoxical positions made perfect sense. [...]

The government of Boris Yeltsin, while genuinely progressive in some ways, was hamstrung from its beginning by a failure to solve the lingering economic catastrophe it inherited from Soviet times. Aware of his ebbing popularity, Yeltsin ultimately eschewed putting the Soviet Communist Party on trial; efforts to engage in a meaningful truth and reconciliation program, which might have helped to make Russians more aware of the grim realities of the past, were deferred. As Gorbachev's attempt to create a more humane (but still Communist) Soviet Union foundered on the two-pronged resistance of conservatives and Yeltsinite liberals, Alexander Yakovlev, Seryozha's grandfather, was appointed chair of a Rehabilitation Commission, devoted to documenting the horrors of the Stalinist era and helping its victims. But by 1991 the Commission lost its funding and, over time, it became clear that Yeltsin no longer intended to expend the political capital needed to reckon with a painful history.

The economic disruptions of the 1990s harmed the prospect of democracy in a second important way. Between the hyperinflation of 1991 to '93 (which destroyed the savings of many citizens, especially the elderly) and the devaluation and financial crisis of 1998 (which devastated the green shoots of the nascent market economy), many ordinary Russians began to identify "democracy" with impoverishment and rank injustice. The irony, as Gessen shows, is that this "democracy" was never especially liberal to begin with--certainly not after 1993, when Yeltsin was forced to turn tanks and artillery on conservative rebels in the same Russian parliament building where he had defied the coup attempt of 1991.

After Putin assumed the presidency in 2000, he moved slowly and methodically to consolidate his position, gradually stripping rival oligarchs of their media properties and their political power. He placed his allies--his longtime friends from St. Petersburg as well as his associates from the Soviet-era secret police--in crucial spots in the bureaucracy, where they often wielded huge sway over large sections of the economy. Aside from a few vague allusions to Soviet and Russian greatness, Putin made little reference to ideology along the way.

It was Alexander Dugin, a once-marginal nerd, who provided the necessary intellectual underpinning for this old-new system. Spurred on by his study of Heidegger and European identitarians, Dugin rediscovered and celebrated the radically anti-Western strain in Russian intellectual history. He embraced the "ethnogenetic" theories of Lev Gumilev, the former dissident who viewed Russia as a sort of mystical hybrid of the most powerful cultural traits of Europe and Asia. Dugin celebrated the presumed superiority of what he began to call the "Russian World" (a phrase now widely used by the Putin regime) and bitterly denounced the United States and other western democracies for their diabolical plans to impose their allegedly "alien" values on a "traditional values civilization."

IT DOESN'T NEED TO MAKE SENSE, JUST NOISE:

The question that the Times failed to raise, let alone answer, is why anyone interested in the Russian uranium deal would have sought to influence the secretary of state--when her department had only one vote out of nine on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States that had to approve the deal.

While Clinton Cash attributed a "central role" to Hillary, she hadn't participated at all in the Uranium One deliberations. According to the assistant secretary of state who represented her on the panel, "Mrs. Clinton never intervened with me on any CFIUS matter." Knowledgeable observers of CFIUS believe its decisions are dominated by the Pentagon and the Treasury Department, which chairs the committee, not State. And the nine agencies on CFIUS had unanimously approved the sale of the remainder of Uranium One to the Russians in 2013, several months after Hillary had left the government. That sale also required additional approvals from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Canadian regulators.

In short, cultivating the Clintons would have guaranteed nothing for the Uranium One investors. They had given well over $2 million during a period of several years, but a foundation spokesman--and Giustra--insisted that Canadian and provincial tax laws forbade disclosure of their names without their specific consent.

As for Giustra, the Uranium One investors were his friends and former partners, and he was assuredly a very big Clinton donor. But he had divested all of his Uranium One stock almost three years before the Russian sale went through.

MAYBE THAT'S WHAT IT ALL TRACES BACK TO?

Flush with prosperity and unprecedented new freedoms, we moderns, Lilla believes, went on to atomize ourselves: "Personal choice. Individual rights. Self-definition. We speak these words as if a wedding vow." By the 1980s, such hyperindividualism coalesced into what he calls the "Reagan Dispensation," which prized self-reliance and small government over the collective--thus marking a radical break from the preceding "Roosevelt Dispensation" emphasizing more communal attachments, including duty and solidarity.

By embracing the politics of identity, Lilla says, liberals and progressives have unwittingly contaminated their politics with a "Reaganism for lefties," resulting in the toxic consequences visible today: shutdowns of free speech on campuses, out-of-touch urban and globalized elites, and a political order deformed into a "victimhood Olympics."

In effect, his is a supply-side answer to the "why" question: Identity politics became the order of the day because it could. What's lacking from this analysis--as from other critiques, right as well as left--is what might be called the demand-side answer: Why have so many people found in identity politics the very center of their political being?

After all: That identitarianism is now the heart and soul of politics for many is a visceral truth--as raw as the footage of violent political clashes making headlines with a frequency that would have shocked most citizens only a decade ago. What's singular about such politics is exactly its profound and immediate emotivism, its frightening volatility, its instantaneous ignition into unreasoned violence. Lilla acknowledges this reality obliquely in describing "a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity"--all true, as far as it goes. But the problem is that it doesn't go nearly far enough. [...]

Writing in New York magazine in September, Andrew Sullivan delivered an insight in the direction of the why question. American politics, he wrote, has become a war between "two tribes": "Over the past couple of decades in America, the enduring, complicated divides of ideology, geography, party, class, religion, and race have mutated into something deeper, simpler to map, and therefore much more ominous."

Yet what, exactly, has caused so many Americans to want to join one of these tribes in the first place? Sullivan advanced a list of many "accelerants" from the past few decades: the failed nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, mass illegal Latino immigration, Newt Gingrich's GOP revolution, talk radio, Fox News, MSNBC, partisan gerrymandering, the absence of compulsory military service, multiculturalism, declining Christianity, the rural brain drain, and more.

No doubt, taken together, these disparate events explain something about the political trajectory now behind us. But does one really become part of a horde, defined in opposition to other hordes, over relatively quotidian prompts like these? Doesn't the very word "tribal" suggest that something more primal may be in the mix too?

Of course it does.

Just as "tribe" is antecedent to the state, something else is antecedent to the tribe--something missing from all the high-profile talk, pro and con, about how American and other Western societies have become mired in identitarianism.

In laying out the particulars of today's "tribes," Sullivan wrote of "unconditional pride, in our neighborhood and community; in our ethnic and social identities and their rituals; among our fellow enthusiasts. There are hip-hop and country-music tribes; bros; nerds; Wasps; Dead Heads and Packers fans; Facebook groups. . . . And then, most critically, there is the Uber-tribe that constitutes the nation-state, a megatribe that unites a country around shared national rituals, symbols, music, history, mythology, and events." And here we reach a turning point, not just in this essay but also in the widening argument, because that list omits what the majority of humanity would call the most important "tribe" of all.

It's not that "America Wasn't Built for Humans," as the title of Sullivan's piece has it. It's rather that America, like other civilizations, was built for humans who learned community not from roving bands of unrelated nomads, but from those around them--beginning in the small civilization of the family.

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of how democratic governance shapes familial relations, rendering fathers and sons more equal and closer and less hierarchical than they are in its aristocratic counterparts. If it's obvious that a form of government can shape the family, isn't it even more obvious that the first polity to which future citizens belong--the family--will shape the kind of citizens they become?

Our macro-politics have gone tribal because our micro-politics are no longer familial. This, above all, is what's happened during the five decades in which identity politics went from being unheard of to ubiquitous.

OR, WHAT IF THE SYSTEM WAS NEVER BROKEN?:

Twenty years on, my optimism seems to have been far too exuberant. Some studies suggest that voucher programs do modest good; others suggest that they do very little; and a few suggest that the impacts are actually negative. My overall takeaway from the literature is that voucher programs probably do a little bit of good. But the emphasis is on the word "little"; they are not a cure-all, or even much of a cure for anything. It was reasonable to think, in 1997, that voucher programs could change the world. Now we have two decades of evidence.

How did we get it so wrong? Many explanations have been proffered, starting with "You libertarians were getting high on your own supply." Maybe markets just aren't that great.

That explanation would be more convincing if non-market attempts at school reform had gone better. But during the same period, vast sums were poured into liberal projects like smaller class sizes, and the results have been entirely uninspiring. Now the mania is for universal pre-K, not so much because there's compelling evidence for great outcomes, but because at least we haven't tried it yet, and therefore don't know that it won't work.

Plausible candidates for the lackluster performance of voucher programs are legion: during the same period, charter schools provided public school choice, and perhaps the quality of public schools improved enough to make private vouchers unnecessary; perhaps it takes the market a while to respond to a voucher system by producing excellent schools; and (depressingly) perhaps it doesn't make much difference what we do in the schools, because most educational effects are driven by a combination of genetics and home environment.

But there's another possibility, suggested recently in an NBER working paper: Maybe vouchers don't improve school quality too much because quality is not what parents look for when they're choosing their children's schools.