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#12: Richard Samuels

What It Takes to Be a Brave Scholar

Porträt von Richard Samuels

For a special episode in the wake of the US presidential elections, we spoke with Richard Samuels, Director of the Center for International Studies at MIT, about American national identity and the current role of the United States on the geopolitical stage. Find out why, according to the former Einstein Visiting Fellow, anarchy in international affairs is endlessly fascinating, and what he thinks it takes to be a “brave scholar”. Credits: Pablo Castagnola

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Intro: The American conceit is that it's the indispensable nation. It's this shining city on a hill, and it has its attractions. As a colleague of ours has said, it has soft power. People are attracted to it and for good reason because its ideals and its values are attractive. But it's fragile this democracy, this attractiveness, it's fragile. AskDifferent, der Podcast der Einstein Stiftung mit Leon Stebe.

Leon Stebe: Richard Samuels is a political scientist, author, and Japanologist. He is Ford International Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We talked about what's next in US politics. We talked about Japan and why local governments in both countries are so important for the stability of the political system. Richard Samuels has been Einstein Visiting Fellow at the Free University of Berlin. And that's why we are so honored to have him here on the show. Welcome and hello from Berlin. 

Richard Samuels: Hello. It's a great pleasure to be with you. 

Stebe: Mr. Samuels, we are talking in this special moment of time, in this special period of transition in The United States. Things are moving. From your perspective, how crucial, how critical is this moment for the US right now? 

Samuels: I think we're at a very critical moment. You know, half the American electorate won't agree with me, but I feel that we've been made to endure a great darkness for the past four years, and it's not over. So we're transitioning, but the transition will not be sudden and easy. And it won't be over soon enough for a great many people, it seems to me. I mean, for four benighted years, we've groped around in a darkness of bungled public health emergency, a period of transparent, repeated racial injustice, persistent lies from the White House. We watched cowardly and hypocritical elected officials fall into line. We've endured the president's dalliances with armed militias at home, with despots abroad. I'm just grateful that somehow, you know, for now, at least for now, their knives have missed the main artery of our body politic, which is civility itself. And I gotta say, you know, I'm also grateful that within the gloom, so many institutions distinguished themselves and kept the lights on by simply doing their jobs. You know, the doctors and the nurses and the public health officials and the grocery clerks and the teachers, the computer order fulfillment workers, the sanitation workers. These folks were doing their job, and they were heroes in the process. And too often, they became victims as well. But other bright lights were the non-violent protesters who reminded us what matters most. The media kept on keeping on with investigative reporting. I was delighted that some of the best journalism that we've had in this country was being produced during this period. And I would be remiss in talking about it if we didn't acknowledge, I should say, the Republican-never-Trumpers, those Republicans of former administrations who simply refused to play along with Donald Trump and his gang. And so those were some bright lights, but I think somehow the brightest lights, were the unsung heroes that who were hidden under bushel baskets far from Washington DC. You know, Washington with all its glitter and all its self-indulgence and so forth. These were I'm talking about the voters, our neighbors, who refused to be disenfranchised. Those who were in state and local governments who counted ballots without fear, without favor. And, they had to endure all sorts of pressures, including death threats. They were both Republican and they were both Democratic. These ballot counters, they were our neighbors. They were at the local level. They certified the results. And we learned from local officials and local judges that the only fraud to be found was residing in sort of in the efforts to nullify the election. The patient vote counters prove that they love the nation more than, more than anything else. 

Stebe: And now we have president-elect Joe Biden. The big question is how to heal the deep division in society, how to tackle the challenges ahead.

Samuels: I think that's right. I think there's nothing more important on his agenda. And it's not simply a matter of having a policy wonk, a person with policy experience and expertise come in and fix it. You don't just do that because what's been broken have been norms, the norms of civility, the belief, the trust citizens have for their government, for their media, for one another. And so he's got a very big job ahead of him, and he's gotta find a way to heal a country that was bent, but hopefully not broken. And doing that would require above all that he shows no contempt for those who were attracted to Trump's false prophecies. He has to reach out with to them, but he also has to remember who, as we say in colloquial American English, who brought him to the dance, you know, who got him elected. This was a progressive wing of the Democratic party and independence who voted against Donald Trump as much as they voted for Joe Biden. Biden was not the most attractive candidate for many, but he was the one who emerged from a difficult primary campaign and is now going to have to emerge as a healing president. I agree with you.

Stebe: You said it's not over yet, and there have been worries that potentially there's a risk of civil violence, of violent protests, of rights on the streets because of this polarization, but nothing happened in the US. That's remarkable. What exactly saved us from this?

Samuels: Well, I mean, it certainly wasn't the pandemic. You know, even COVID couldn't contain the enormous energy of the movements, both on the left and on the right. In fact, I guess I would put it this way. I don't think we were saved at all. I think we were awakened. We were confronted by how ordinary and how fragile democracy is. This is something I don't have to tell my German friends. This is your lived experience or at least your parents and grandparents lived experience. For Americans, it's a first, and we lose bragging rights now. We lose the right we arrogate it to ourselves to tell the world how democracy should work. And it's a humbling and ought to be a humbling experience for most Americans. 

Stebe: And this is an indication as well how important local government is for democracy.

Samuels: I think that's exactly right. The local vote counters are neighbors who were brave enough to withstand the pressures that were coming at them to nullify the votes of some 70, 75 million Americans. Now, we have to remember one other thing is that our neighbors, there are also 70 million of our neighbors who voted for Donald Trump. And if we forget that, if elites continue to show contempt for that half, nearly half of our population, we're not going to fix what's wrong and what's broken. But it's about, I think it is about starting at the local level. And that and as I thought about that a bit, you know, that sort of transported me back to my original the first research I did, on Japan. 

Stebe: So in times of crisis, in times of disasters, local governments become crucial for the stability of a system. You saw that. You analyzed that in Japan, for example. Could you elaborate a little bit?

Samuels: Sure. You know, this transported me back to the very first work I did as an undergraduate writing about Japanese politics. It was an undergraduate paper. I was in Japan for the first time. And what was going on there was that half the population of Japan was governed at the local level by socialist and communist coalitions in a country that had a persistent conservative center. And the question was, you know, how does that work? And one of the ways in which it worked, for a time, at least until the conservative center saw the benefits of the policies that the socialists were producing. The way it worked was they shared policy innovations. They made innovations and they shared it. Even in a hierarchical system like Japan, they were sharing their policy innovations with one another. And it was a reminder of how local governments are essential, as you said, essential for the preservation of democracy. Even when you have stove pipes and silos and so forth, policy innovation starts at the bottom, and it moves laterally across local governments. And that undergraduate paper became my doctoral dissertation. And that doctoral dissertation became my first book. I was really riveted by the dynamics of innovation at the local level and how much it mattered. 

Then you fast forward, at least I did. It happened in a flash about three decades, when I was back in Japan to write another book, this time on the catastrophe in Northeastern Japan. And I was up in that region called Tohoku near Fukushima, the famous Fukushima, and talking to prefectural officials, local government officials. And we were chatting, and I said, so what was your greatest lesson from all of this? And they said, how important it is to rely upon our sister and brother local governments. While I was in Japan to do research on the what was called the three eleven catastrophes, March 11th 2011, I visited local volunteer centers and local government centers that were makeshift because it was an area where the tsunami had wiped out all the buildings. I asked people if I may interview them and talk to them about what their work was. And one of them said, well, you shouldn't ask me, I'm from Yokohama. I was up in Tohoku, this is very far away. It's sort of like being in in Baden Wurttemberg and talking about Brandenburg. You know? It was far away. And so, I asked them, who should I talk to? We said, well, there's nobody here in this office who's from Tohoku. He's from Nagoya, and she's from Tokyo, and I'm from Yokohama. And I said, why are you here? And they said, well, because our mayors sent us here to help. And so what are you doing? Well, we're learning about how to deal with emergencies cause the next emergency may be ours, but we're also sharing our policy ideas and trying to help the people of Tohoku get back on their feet. So this dynamic that, you know, that first attracted me to the study of Japan 30 years earlier was in full blossom, in the context of a of a the most terrible catastrophe in postwar Japanese history. So, there was a lot to learn and remains a lot to learn from localities. 

Stebe: So sharing and caring on local level, that's fascinating. 

Samuels: And let me just say one other thing. It's not just sharing and caring. It's also learning. I went back to Nagoya to interview the mayor there, and I said, that was very altruistic of you to send your senior staffers up to Tohoku to help. And he said, Professor, I'm delighted to be described as an altruist. But in fact, I was also making sure that they were well-trained because the next disaster, I fear, might be ours. 

Stebe: What is the reason that Japan plays such a role in your academic life? 

Samuels: Well, that's a good question. It just seemed to me that that there's so much that goes on in Japan. There's so much in the way in which Japan is organized that is contrary to the way in which social science says things should be done. You know, it seems to me that the best thing a social scientist can be is contrarian, is be attracted to things that are puzzling. And so, where we learn that, for example, companies shouldn't be collaborating with one another upstream in research, they should be competing vigorously with one another so they could control the fruits of their investments in research and development. In Japan, they cooperate. Why is that? What does that mean?  Or where you have hyper competition, you have industrial in Japan, when there's too much competition, the state traditionally had stepped in to reduce the competition, which is, again, contrary to what you'd expect. There are many, many examples of this sort of thing. And the point is that it always fascinated me that Japanese politics and the Japanese political economy would operate according to its own logic. Perfectly reasonable logic, but it's one that's different than what's in the textbooks, at least in The United States.

Stebe: And what could we learn from Japan? Do they ask different? 

Samuels: Well, you know, it's the right question, and it was the question in the 1980s. It was really a growth industry. The learn from Japan movement, was textbook after textbook, article in the newspaper after newspaper article, one after the other. But the question of what do we have to learn from Japan turned out not to have legs. The answers we were getting back at least back in the nineteen eighties were fairly superficial. After all, the Japanese bubble burst in the early 1990s. And after that, those lessons from Japan ideas sort of have been forgotten. For a time, you know, Japanese industrial policy, its education system, its research consortia, all of these things were to be emulated, to be copied until suddenly they were not. So I think perhaps the biggest lesson I learned from Japan is the same lesson that I have finally learned from The United States. And this gets us back to the earlier conversation about the darkness. The lesson is just how normal Japan is. Just how normal The United States is. You know, the American conceit is that it's the indispensable nation. It's this shining city on a hill. And, you know, it has its attractions. As a colleague of ours has said, it has soft power. People are attracted to it and for good reason because its ideals and its values are attractive. But it's fragile, this democracy, this attractiveness, it's fragile. Likewise, the Japanese conceit has always been that it's a unique small island trading nation precariously dependent upon imported raw materials, cut adrift on a hostile world. Some, some piece of that mantra is invoked by Japanese all the time. And the word unique is the first part that we are unique because we're a small island trading nation and so forth. But, you know, just like we're learning just in the same way that we're learning just how indispensable The United States is or is not, we've learned that every country is unique in its own way, and that it's really the claim of uniqueness that's ubiquitous. It's not unique. It's always, you know, sort of a tiresome and trivial claim, and we have a lot to learn from every country, not just from Japan. 

Stebe: And you said that democracy is fragile. And how you would describe the relationship between Japan and the US right now? Is it fragile as well?

Samuels: No. I don't think the relationship between The United States and Japan, at least at the popular level, is fragile. There's very strong popular support in each country for the other, and survey after survey confirms that. And that's the good thing. And it's really quite remarkable. I mean, I think it's at least as remarkable as the affinities that emerged across the rhyme in the German and French experience. You know? But the biggest boost to solidify the relationship at the popular level came in the wake of three eleven, the catastrophe and the mobilization of American troops, 20,000 who came to the rescue in what was called Operation Friendship In Japanese, it was Tomodachi Sakusa, Operation Tomodachi, Operation Friendship. This was a huge boost for the alliance and for the friendship between The United States and Japan. And it's been sustained. 

Stebe: I'm asking that because some say that The United States is I'm asking that because some say that The United States, it's losing its ties to the Asian Pacific region. You won't agree with that. 

Samuels: Well, no. I don't think we've lost our ties there. I think our ties have been diluted, and I do think it doesn't hurt to reinforce them. But, you know, we're reminded that the interests of even the closest allies are never fully aligned. And that when the strategic environment changes, allies will reach out for reassurances. And I think The United States is going to do that as the administration change, provide to its allies in the Indo-Pacific region and in Europe as well, the kinds of reassurances that were that were pulled out from under the alliances during the past four years. 

Stebe: You have been a soccer referee for fifteen years. Back then, you had to deal with very different players on the soccer fields. Do you see any similarities between players on the soccer field and players in international relations on the global stage? 

Samuels: That's such a good question. You know, I think there are similarities, but there's also one very important difference. The similarities are that the soccer players and the diplomats and the military officers train hard to pursue goals, national goals, or individual goals in the case of soccer players or team goals. They practice creative ways to attack, to defend. We use the language of war when we talk about soccer. We talk about their battles, right? So the outcomes of their battles are often zero sum, but there are draws in both cases, you know, so you can get one point. So there are these similarities, but in soccer and you know, I was a referee. And in soccer, there's a central authority. That's the person in the center of the pitch. In fact, he's called he or she is called the center ref. And there is no such thing in international politics. I mean, we have international organizations and we have rules and we have norms, but some countries sign the treaties. Some countries don't sign the treaties. Some people have great faith in organizations like the United Nations, but there is no world government. And so in international relations, we study the impact of anarchy. And that is the central fact, it's anarchy in international affairs. And that's not the case on a soccer pitch. 

Stebe: You talk about the anarchy and the international relations. What is the main thing which is so fascinating when it comes to international relations? What drives you as a professor for international studies?

Samuels: Oh, well, I think it's the same thing that's always driven me, which is an insatiable curiosity about how the world works. I, you know, there's that now kind of hackneyed phrase where they say, you know, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. And, you know, the whole notion that, you know, you study history to understand possibilities. You may not be able to predict very accurately, but you can understand the possibilities and try to understand why some might be exercised and others not. But international relations is an anarchical, anarchical system that is endlessly fascinating.

Stebe: What role should political science play in our societies in these times right now? 

Samuels: Well, you know, you're asking a political scientist who actually practices history without a license. You know, I wasn't trained in history, but I just think it’s terribly important. There are those who believe that political science ought to be predicted, that there is a science in political science. I think that's a conceit. I don't think we do very well at it. In international relations, we did very poorly. We didn't predict the end of the cold war with any clarity. We didn't predict the fall of the wall in Berlin. We didn't predict the unification of Germany. We didn't predict the failure of the Soviet Union. We weren't very good at that. And in domestic American politics, colleagues who do work on public opinion have a lot to answer for having misunderstood, misjudged public opinion into successive presidential elections. So, I don't think prediction is what political science ought to be putting all its … you know, it shouldn't be doubling down all its resources on. But I think explanation is the more appropriate role for us as scholars. We can look. We can measure. We should, you know, stare facts directly and judge how each contributed to an outcome. I think we can do that, and we can develop scenarios. But I think being able to predict with certainty is not something that political science ought to pretend it's able to do. 

Stebe: In the light of this what you said already, how important is it for an academic or a political scientist to get new perspectives, to ask new questions, to ask different? 

Samuels: Oh, I think it's, asking difference is exactly the role of any scholars, of all scholars, not just political science. You know, research projects, at least in my experience, but I think in the experience of most scholars, they always have an organic quality to them. You know, you head off in one direction on a topic, and then it yanks you back or diverts you into different wholly unanticipated spaces. And that's the process that makes the effort worthwhile. It makes discoveries possible. And it's all about asking, asking different kinds of questions and being open to the possibility of hearing different answers. You know, I remember reading something when I was a graduate student by a very famous sociologist named Barrington Moore. And he talked about hypotheses being blinders. Because if you have strict hypotheses, you're not going to recognize data that don't conform to your expectations. And you'll they're they act like blinders as much as shining bright lights. And I think that we have to be alert to the possibility that we're missing a lot when we're too rigid methodologically, or ideologically. 

Stebe: With your experience, what would be your advice for young students or young scientists in these times?

Samuels: Well, I'm reminded of … I'm laughing because … I’m thinking back. Yeah. I'm thinking back to my mentor. He was a China scholar and a comparativist named Lucien Pai. He was very distinguished and a wonderful, wonderful teacher. And when I think about giving advice to students, I think of him giving advice to me and to my cohort of graduate students at MIT many, many decades, several decades ago, more than several. And he would pass us in the hall, you know, and he would invariably ask, you know, are you being brave, scholar? Are you being a brave scholar? And, you know, it was a non-sequitur, and it was a rhetorical question. We weren't sure how to respond. So we smiled, you know, and we walked on. Now that our heads didn't know what to make of that. But while the question was rhetorical, I've never forgotten it. And over the course of my career, writing and teaching, it's been very clear to me that he was never really joking. He was not joking. We smiled, but it wasn't a joke because it takes boldness. It takes bravery in a sense. I don't wanna overstate it, but it takes boldness anyway to select a topic that attacks conventional wisdom and nothing less than attacking conventional wisdom is worth it. If you want to really do serious scholarship. And it's something we were chatting about a moment ago, you know. And methodologically while there's plenty of sort of plug-and-play approaches to any topic, you know, only the brave scholar is gonna be able to hack through the undergrowth of difficult problems with new tools. So my advice for young scholars would be to remind them that conventional wisdom may be conventional for any number of reasons. Only one of which may be because it's true. Conventional wisdom may be true, but it may be conventional because, like, bureaucrats and politicians and activists and everyone else. You know, scholars have an agenda. We all have an agenda. I'd advise them to interrogate the agenda and not just for the sake of interrogating it, because I think that by doing that, you know, a healthy and civil commitment to questioning what we think we know is the only sure way to improve upon what we actually do know. That's what leads us to generate a better knowledge. I think after all, it's the business to which scholars have to commit and then seriously recommit themselves. And that would be my advice. 

Stebe: So be brave and ask different.

Samuels: Be brave. Be brave. 

Great closing remarks. Thank you so much for your time and your insights from The United States in this special moment of time. It has been an honor. Thank you very much, Richard Samuels. 

Samuels: It's been a great pleasure. Thanks so much for asking me to do this. 

Stebe: Former Einstein visiting fellow Richard Samuels, Ford International Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And this was this episode of AskDifferent, the podcast from the Einstein Foundation. My name is Leon Stebe. Thank you for listening. Please subscribe this podcast and please tune in next time. Till then. Tschüss and bye bye.