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Culture Springsteen—and America—Have Lost the Spirit of Unifying Rebellion Privileged celebrities exploit partisan outrage and pose as martyrs. (Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images) Stephen Colbert is off the air. I waited to write this to make sure that our democracy, despite warnings from Colbert and his regular guest Bruce Springsteen, remains intact. It does. Colbert is widely pitied, and Springsteen widely celebrated as a hero, because the two seized a chance to make a very large amount of money telling people already predisposed to believe them that the sky was falling. They are the living embodiment of the blurring of lines between entertainment, righteous protest, and partisan outrage. Their audiences increasingly just want confirmation of their own biases. Springsteen in particular often sounds like he’s browbeating half the country to make the other half feel righteously superior; the kind of stirring rhetoric, found in historic speeches and in documents like the Declaration of Independence, which once reached across barriers to unite our nation, seems lost. They are men of their times. We live in a world of constant media stimulation, and Americans have convinced themselves they are living through a uniquely apocalyptic moment for freedom in general and the First Amendment in particular. Every unpleasant event becomes evidence of democracy dying. Social media posts become the Reichstag Fire. A conservative commencement speaker becomes the death of free inquiry. A canceled TV show, like Colbert’s, becomes political persecution. It’s all about as deep as a puddle in the late afternoon sun. Nothing can simply happen anymore. Not sure? One of the supposedly most critical issues facing our government today is whether to build a ballroom next to the White House. If every Trump-driven event is an existential threat, then every change he orders, however minor and cosmetic in the grand scheme of things, must also be existential. Something as transient as a TV show can’t simply have become old or irrelevant like I Love Lucy. No, fascist, anti-democratic forces must be silencing truth-tellers. We’ll soon be passing video loops of Colbert hand-to-hand like Soviet-era dissidents shuffling mimeographed manifestos around smoky coffee shops. It’s funny that “the Resistance” chose as its spokesman Colbert, hardly a courageous rebel broadcasting via pirate radio. He hosted one of the most expensive network television programs in the country. He operated with corporate backing and fawning celebrity access. This is a wealthy comic employed by a multibillion-dollar corporation. Springsteen is reputed to be a billionaire himself, and he plays to audiences who can swing thousands of dollars for a ticket. I’m not suggesting that only poor artists can discover truth, but observing that Colbert and his supporting acts are part of a system of money and influence and corporate greed as big or bigger than MAGA. Their comedy/commentary is no longer sharp or clever. It is simply mocking, often crude, as when Colbert called Trump “Putin’s c*ckholster,” and almost always sanctimonious, as when Springsteen claimed (on Colbert’s show) that those who supported Trump were “small-minded people who got no idea what the freedoms of this beautiful country are supposed to be about.” Colbert could probably stand in front of an audience and just say “Trump sucks” over and over to applause. That takes no courage. Our American political culture is exhausted, and the progressive electorate is now dependent on such one-sided narration to tell it what to believe. That cheapens us. I’ve never met Springsteen, whose music I’ve enjoyed since I was 17, but I suspect if we ever found ourselves in the same room, he would not be interested in talking with a guy like me. In songs like Born in the USA or The Ghost of Tom Joad, Bruce was angry, yes, but also an inclusive populist, talking about the hardships we all shared in one form or another as Americans no matter how we voted. In his blistering song about the death of industrialization in the Midwest, Youngstown, Springsteen does not ask if the forgotten steel workers are Republicans or Democrats. What if, in the aftermath of 9/11, Springsteen had written a song condemning Muslims instead of the prayer that became The Rising? Left-wingers wouldn’t have liked that, but it would have been consistent, in essence, with his current divisiveness. In his very best music, Springsteen retains hope—at the end of every hard day, working people can find some reason to believe and to come together to make the world better. Artists who once, like his own hero Woody Guthrie, translated shared American pain into art now too often exploit partisan outrage. Not too long ago, Bruce still believed that what we shared as Americans mattered more than how we differed. He professed that we need a conscience, not a party affiliation, to make America great. I am mourning here something larger than just celebrity political disagreement. I mourn the loss of a shared American vocabulary, and of a great American icon whose old music still inspires me. Et tu, Bruce? The post Springsteen—and America—Have Lost the Spirit of Unifying Rebellion appeared first on The American Conservative.

Culture Among the Moguls VMFA’s finest display on one of the most elite empires.  (Photo by Pallava Bagla/Getty Images) “India’s Great Mughals: Art, Power, and Opulence,” currently showing at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, is a great and rare exhibition that will be hard to replicate in the near future for various sociological reasons.  In the greater Anglosphere and America, the decolonial left are a far cry from the empire-builders (and museum curators) of JP Morgan’s days. The know-nothing nativists of the right, on the other hand, do not know or care about anything foreign, much less about anything Indian, the current antagoniste social, and much, much less about anything Islamic, the ur-villain of our still young crusading century. In the land of the Mughals, ethnonationalists are on a mission to erase every trace of the dynasty from Indian history. The ideas of both a mass-consumption public museum and neutral non-ideological history will be increasingly rare in the darker ages fueled by permanently social media–addled brains.  It’s a tragedy all around. There is a lot to learn from a young martial empire that settled and intermixed with the local elite, imposed a coherent legal and administrative polity on a whole region, that then grew to be simultaneously the richest, most powerful, and arguably the most cosmopolitan empire of the world of its day—which then, over time, overstretched and turned inward, simultaneously into a fanatical, ethno-religious, and decadent entity, before rebellions, collapse, and conquest. The exhibition deals with the three Great Mughals born within the subcontinent, Akbar, Jehangir, and Shah Jahan, and their near century-long rule, often considered India’s most prosperous days. The Mughal Empire was established exactly 500 years back in 1526, when a Timurid warlord from Central Asia named Babur lost his fief and found himself wandering with his ragtag army in medieval northwestern Hindustan, where he introduced the concept of flanking and firearms to the hapless Indians—brave and skilled with swords but without any sense of cavalry tactics or modern weaponry, according to Baburnama. He thereby established a northern Indian stronghold. By the time of the third emperor, Akbar, the imperial line was already indigenous and intermarried with the local elite. This exhibition deals with the wealth and cosmopolitanism of the empire, from Akbar onwards, to his illustrious grandson, the builder of the Taj Mahal.  Akbar was the first and possibly only true pan-Indian emperor of modern times, as noted by Sir Jadunath Sarkar in his definitive work on the Mughals. He established an ethno-neutral elite and instituted administrative reforms that contributed significantly to the prosperity and stability of the Mughal Empire. From the 1580s onward, Mughal artistic traditions were enriched by European influences introduced by Jesuit missionaries arriving from the Portuguese territory of Goa, resulting in a dynamic and innovative cultural synthesis at the Mughal court. Akbar, who was illiterate himself, established imperial workshops known as karkhanas, where painters, calligraphers, weavers, architects, and other craftsmen worked collectively to produce objects for both ceremonial and private use, as well as kitabkhanas, or houses of books, which served as the center for the production and preservation of manuscripts. Akbar’s courtiers were economists and historians, some of the most enlightened of his days, including Todar Mal, Birbal, Tansen, and Man Singh, who were upper-class Hindus or converts to Sufism, and Abul Fazl and Faizi, who were both Muslims who translated Sanskrit to Persian.  The reign of the Great Mughals coincided with the ascent of Elizabeth I, the late Renaissance, and the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the Americas. The art displayed reflects that. Famous Mughal-school painters such as Basawan, Manohar, Kanha, Jagannath, Govardhan, and Abu’l Hasan worked side by side in imperial workshops, translating Indian epics such as the Mahabharata into Persian (Razmnama), and depicting events from Indian mythology, such as the arrival of Nanda into Vrindavan, taken from Harivamsha. Christian subjects such as the Descent from the Cross were copied and adapted in Mughal workshops, while European engravings by artists such as Adriaen Collaert inspired Mughal botanical studies, manuscript illumination, and architectural decoration.  Objects in display include a bronze celestial seamless globe engraved with over 1,000 stars and 48 constellations inherited from Greek and Roman astronomy; nephrite jade cups from western China; and Renaissance-style iconography of the emperor towering over poverty itself, inspired by European imperial divinity of the era.  Under Jehangir, Mughal learning expanded into the realms of natural science when the emperor commissioned detailed studies of exotic animals arriving through global trade networks, including a North American turkey brought from Portuguese Goa. Jehangir’s knowledge of animals was tested in 1624 during a hunt, when Imam Vardi, the imperial hunt-beater, challenged him to guess the gender of a captured francolin. The emperor unhesitatingly identified it as female, which was confirmed when the francolin was dissected and eggs were found inside it. Jehangir described the event in his memoirs and probably gave a European-made, francolin-shaped incense burner to the imam, whose name was inscribed on the bird’s breast.  In The Fate of Empires, Sir John Glubb argued that empires tend to follow a recurring historical life cycle, regardless of geography, lasting roughly 200 years, and they always end, more often than not, in a self-created implosion rather than an outright conquest. 1526 was an interesting year. The Ottomans reached their imperial peak, defeating the Hungarians in a divided Europe, and the Mughals established the richest of early modern empires in Asia. By the time of the death of Shah Jahan in 1666, however, the rot was setting in.  Aurangzeb, the third son of Shah Jahan, was an intellectual troglodyte, a religious fanatic and a bigot, and won a blistering civil war defeating his more moderate and liberal brothers, Darah Shikoh and Shah Shuja, who both favoured a continuity of Mughal cosmopolitanism mixed with Brahmin and Rajput courtiers. Instead, he reinstated religious taxes and filled his court with religious fanatics. It resulted in disaffected local Hindu elites (Rajputana), open rebellions in various provinces in the north (Punjab) and west (Marathas), and a quasi-independent feudatory in the richest province of them all (Bengal). By 1757, as Robert Clive marched into Bengal, the writ of the Mughals ran no further than the outskirts of Delhi, and the subcontinent was ripe for war and conquest. There is a lesson there for keen historians to perceive.  And yet there is no India without the Mughals. Current ethnonationalist attempts try to portray Mughals as Islamist bigots, but no true historian should humiliate himself by engaging with such revisionism. From architecture to art to sartorial choices, from elite customs to cuisine, the Mughals enriched India beyond any measure; unlike the British, they kept their wealth mostly within the land and gentry. The empire was neither uniform nor unique, but its peak coincided with a certain refined cultural cosmopolitanism that is now despised by both green and saffron subalterns.  Our memory of the three greatest Islamic empires is tainted, but there is a reason why the Gilded Age in America saw an increased interest in the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires, and that the J.P. Morgan Library in New York houses some of the finest Mughal paintings and calligraphy, purchased by Morgan himself from Sir Charles Hercules Read. Or why anyone obscenely successful and pioneering is still called a mogul, a word almost synonymous with elite. The post Among the Moguls appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs The Recipe for an Iran Nuclear Deal Hasn’t Changed Keeping negotiations narrowly on the nuclear file is the best way to secure success. (Wikimedia Commons) Recent reporting from Axios suggests that President Donald Trump is considering a new nuclear deal with Iran as a way to turn the temporary ceasefire into something longer-term and more sustainable. It also suggests that the Iranian regime is interested in playing ball. The reporting is light on details, but suggests that the deal will have the same core ingredients as the one negotiated by President Barack Obama and signed in 2015 that the U.S. later left—some kind of financial/sanctions relief in exchange for verification of promises not to pursue a weapons program. These two ingredients are critical to any deal, but what is also critical is what is left off of the negotiating table. The president needs to remain vigilant and recall that the point of a nuclear deal is the nuclear weapons program and the nuclear weapons program alone. If we assume that the goal is preventing the Iranians from getting a nuclear weapon, any deal around this must remain narrowly focused to give it the highest odds of success. If, however, the goal is to fail to reach an agreement, then it also makes sense to require that the deal address the activity of proxies in the region and deal with missile systems. The Axios reporting suggests that some are pushing to do just that.  This was exactly what helped nearly sink the original JCPOA in Congress—there was significant opposition to all the things the deal didn’t do. There was also much opposition to what it actually did—contempt for sunset clauses, for the fact that the deal would require some level of trust in addition to verification, and for arguments against any kind of financial relief for a regime some saw as illegitimate.  Nearly a decade later, with oil prices sky-high, it is beyond parody that we are back to where this all began, except this time with a massive war as a kickoff rather than negotiations in Oman (as was the case back in 2013, when the JCPOA was first discussed between the Obama administration and Javad Zarif of the Iranian Foreign Ministry).  This is by no means to say that the current negotiations aren’t worth pursuing; they absolutely are. The goal remains a quick end to the war before it has a chance to become another quagmire and cause sustained economic damage, although that window closes more with each passing day. It is for this reason that the president must guard very strongly against those who are unwilling to comprehend the basic reality of what a nuclear agreement needs to include and what can be left for another day. There is no time for an everything-bagel agreement. The administration must be willing to ruthlessly prioritize between nice-to-have and must-have, between things that can be negotiated in later agreements and what has to be part of any Phase 1 deal.  The United States is negotiating from a position of strength, so it is likely that any negotiation will be more favorable to the Americans than to the Iranians when compared to the negotiations a decade ago. That said, the country is still not in a position to impose its will on the Iranian government, and any kind of agreement will need to be give-and-take. As a function of that, it will contain the same key ingredients as the JCPOA with differences of degree far more than differences of type. There has been no unconditional surrender, and as such it is effectively impossible to impose unilateral terms, especially when the Iranians have shown what they’re capable of doing to maritime passage through the Strait of Hormuz.  Iranian nuclear weapons, despite being two weeks away for the better part of the last two decades, do represent a serious threat to America in a way that standard Middle Eastern saber-rattling does not; those seriously concerned about nuclear proliferation ought to guard against those with more expansive agendas. If the government is serious about a deal, it will require disappointing hawkish supporters, and the administration should steel itself for that sooner rather than later.  The post The Recipe for an Iran Nuclear Deal Hasn’t Changed appeared first on The American Conservative.