Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 527

The Affirmative Action Double-Bind

When the Supreme Court heard arguments last week in a case that could decide the fate of affirmative action in college admissions, there was an elephant in the (court)room. Since the 1978 decision Bakke vs. the University of California, the only legal justification for race-conscious admissions programs has been that a “diverse student body” supposedly enhances the educational experience. The more straightforward idea of affirmative action as a type of reparation program for past wrongs committed against minorities in the United States does not (formally) carry any legal weight under the Supreme Court’s precedents, so the justices and attorneys barely touched it.

In an interesting piece for the Nation, Sigal Alon argues that this framing of affirmative action could be its downfall. “Once race-conscious admissions stopped being about equity and reparation, the only argument for it was the enrichment of white students,” she writes. “That was never going to hold up.” More:

In the late 1960s, towards the end of the civil-rights era, most leading colleges and professional schools started to give black students special consideration in admissions. The obvious rationale behind affirmative-action programs was reparation for past societal discrimination and the legacy of slavery. In essence, affirmative action is a type of redistribution policy. In the case of black people in America, it can be viewed as a tool to rectify the egregious wrongs that were perpetuated in the past, including generations of slavery, discrimination, degradation, and limited opportunity. Its role was to facilitate the social and economic mobility of people of color and women and to level the playing field between blacks and whites […]

The Bakke ruling shifted the rationale for affirmative action from reparation for past discrimination to promoting diversity. This, in essence, made the discourse about affirmative action race-neutral, in that it now ignores one of the key reasons for why we need to give an edge to minorities.

Alon is clearly on to something here. There has never been solid evidence that racial diversity improves educational outcomes in any measurable way. Even if there were, the fact that college campuses only seem to value racial and ethnic diversity while neglecting or even discouraging diversity of thought calls the whole line of argument into question. Moreover, the campus diversity bureaucracies have so discredited themselves over the last generation with their adherence to extreme identity politics that many observers wonder if they are up to the task of administering a diversity policy well.

The “reparations” rationale is more straightforward, and, in the abstract, more morally compelling. America has perpetrated grave crimes against its black population for centuries; who could oppose putting a finger on the scale in the opposite direction? But this rationale, too, is riddled with inconsistencies, which Alon does not acknowledge. First, if the rationale is really “reparations”—that is, if universities should give preferences to people who are members of racial groups that were discriminated against in the United States—then shouldn’t Chinese Americans (who were subject to Jim-Crow style persecution on the West Coast in the late 19th and early 20th centuries) and Japanese Americans (who were forcibly interned during the Second World War) also get an admissions boost? If anything, the evidence suggests that these groups face a steep admissions penalty under race-conscious admissions policies. To be sure, neither group experienced violence and subjugation rivaling the historical experience of American blacks—but it did rival, in many cases, the experience of Hispanics, who are favored by affirmative action policies.Moreover, it’s not at all clear that race-based affirmative action is all that successful at achieving the “reparations” objective. Richard Kahlenberg has argued that such policies overwhelmingly help wealthy African Americans, rather than poor ones, and one study found that African American students at elite universities overwhelmingly come from families that recently immigrated to the United States, rather than families that bore the brunt of slavery, segregation, and Jim Crow.So maybe the problem with race-based affirmative action isn’t just, as Alon suggests, that it’s been couched in shallow “diversity” rhetoric. Affirmative action is caught in a type of double-bind, with both of the major arguments that might support it suffering from serious, if not fatal, flaws. We aren’t legal experts at Via Meadia, so we don’t have a strong opinion as to how the Supreme Court should decide the case it heard last week. But race-based affirmative action is morally questionable and politically tenuous. Our society should start thinking about creative ways to move past it while still righting the injustices that these programs, at their best, were designed to address.One possible first step: Lower the stakes in the affirmative action debate by convincing employers to give less weight to where students went to college and more to what they know; break the Ivy League monopoly on elite jobs and give everyone a chance to succeed.

The Next Big Health Care Debate

The ACA, we argued yesterday, has become a “political orphan.” It is the biggest loser in the spending bill agreed to in the House, as Democrats seemed to have turned against one of its key provisions, the so-called “Cadillac Tax” on expensive plans that employers offer to their employees. Yuval Levin has a smart column at National Review breaking down the health care politics and policy surrounding the spending bill (h/t Ross Douthat):

Republicans have majorities in both houses, so this bill reflects their priorities on the whole. But on health care, I think it’s actually most interesting for what it suggests about the Democrats—some meaningful number of whose votes are after all necessary for passage. I read the omnibus bill as reflecting a meaningful change of attitude among the Democrats about Obamacare. They’re no longer offering themselves up as a sacrifice to protect every last bit of the law, as they have done at enormous political cost for the last five years. Now, they’re spending their capital to protect key constituencies (and therefore themselves), even at the cost of allowing the structure of Obamacare to become even more incoherent and unsustainable.

Levin also argues that the specific concessions agreed to in the bill—especially the two-year delay of the Cadillac tax—set up the country for a big debate over health care during the next Administration. The delay means the tax is set to take effect in 2020, unless Congress takes future action to once again delay (or repeal) it. Levin thinks Congress will act again—the tax is too unpopular for it to go into effect—and that the future move against it will touch off a wider debate on health care policy.

It’s remarkable that the debate over the ACA’s full implementation has now been kicked back another two years—and that Democrats themselves seem to oppose the law’s ever going into full effect. This is not the “settled policy” that President Obama would like it to be. Rather, as time goes on, the law may be facing more serious challenges. Peter Orszag has argued that the Cadillac tax not only brings in revenue to fund the ACA, but also is crucial to the goal of bringing down health care spending. If he’s right, Democratic opposition to the tax could wind up being a far more serious threat to the law than, for example, the dispute at play in the King v. Burwell.What comes next? It seems likely that the next health care debate will focus on the question of cost, as opposed to focusing on the question of coverage. The ACA is largely, though not exclusively, a coverage expansion program (albeit one that has underperformed relative to expectations). The law does contain some cost-control measures—the Cadillac tax among them—but the central drive has been to reduce the uninsured population by extending subsidies and forbidding discrimination based on pre-existing conditions.This turned out to be an expensive project for insurers, because many of the newly insured have used a lot of health care—so much so that many insurance co-ops designed by the ACA have gone under, premiums are increasing by 7.5 percent next year, and at least one large insurer has floated the possibility of withdrawing from the exchanges. In addition, the law has contributed to higher prices by helping to incentive hospital consolidation.Whatever good the ACA may have done, and it has done some good, the choice to focus on expanding coverage as the primary objective (rather than reducing costs) always meant the ACA was never going to be anything like the final word on health care policy. It’s never been clear what will come next, but all parties now seem to agree that something must. A recent piece at The Upshot on some new research about medical prices cross-country shows some of the new rhetoric that may be at work here:

“Price has been ignored in public policy,” said Dr. Robert Berenson, a fellow at the Urban Institute, who was unconnected with the research. Dr. Berenson is a former vice chairman of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commision, which recommends policies to Congress. “That has been counterproductive.” […]

Several prominent researchers who read the paper said they had become convinced that policy makers needed to do more to address the high prices charged by some health care providers.

Many of the changes pioneered by the Affordable Care Act have been devised to reduce wasteful medical care, but few have been directly concerned about price.

If you’re on the Left, there is an obvious solution to the price problem plaguing U.S. health care: some sort of national system, whether a single-payer-type system or all-payer rate setting. The national discourse tends to lump all European health care systems together as “single-payer,” but there’s a variety of different national health care systems that exist in Europe and other industrialized countries, only some of which are actually single-payer. However, a key instinct behind the different systems, at least for Americans who advocate for them, is the same: If prices are too high, the government needs to help bring them down through one of these national system mechanisms.

Levin argues, however, that any system of this kind is unlikely to become law in America, at least in the foreseeable future. The ACA was much more modest in scope than a national system would be, and, he argues, even it only passed because of a combination of favorable political conditions that won’t exist for the next Administration, should it be a Democratic one.So if those options are of the table, both the Left and the Right will have to present other plans for tackling the cost problem. The ACA is looking more and more like a placeholder policy that’s done little more than postpone this more fundamental discussion for a few years. It’s not clear what that debate is going to look like, but it’s an urgent and crucial one. As WRM has noted, “If we get health care policy right so that over the next generation we develop a truly effective and innovative health care system that works better and costs less than what we now have, the federal government’s fiscal problems will be manageable without huge sacrifices on anybody’s part. If we fail at that task, we are in a world of ugly.”

Final Warning

The day after the first round of the French regional elections, the center-right daily Figaro and communist L’Humanite managed for once to agree on a same headline: “Le choc.” With 29 percent of the vote, ahead of Sarkozy’s Les Republicains and Hollande’s Parti Socialiste, the far-right National Front (FN) arrived first, only the second time in a national ballot after 2014’s European elections. Worse, the FN was close to winning up to four regional executives out of 13, with figures like Marine Le Pen in the North and her niece Marion Marechal Le Pen in the southeast boasting wide leads. But apparently, everything went back to normal. Voters were summoned between the two rounds to, once again, bail out their leaders and bar the road to the FN. Socialists lists that placed third withdrew and threw their support behind Republican candidates, and voter turnout jumped 10 points. The “republican front” held firm: the National Front eventually didn’t win any region.

Barring the National Front’s achieving an absolute majority, a Le Pen presidency remains a distant prospect for now. But this tactical victory can’t hide the utter failure of the French political establishment to stem the National Front’s rise. That Le Pen’s first round showing could still be considered a “shock” for observers is stupefying. On the contrary, poll after poll continue to show her populist message gaining sway over a disillusioned electorate. Simply asserting that the National Front is a “threat to the Republic” or shaming those who vote for it don’t cut it, because both of the mainstream parties have failed to adapt the country to its current challenges. Besides, while the “republican front” has managed to bar the way for the National Front in the short term, the establishment’s ganging up on Le Pen will certainly play into her party’s victimization narrative. French political leaders now have to reckon with a three-party system, as well as Marine Le Pen, who seems poised to reach the second round in the coming presidential elections in 2017.Both parties confront challenges in addressing the rise of the National Front. First, given that Marine Le Pen leads current polls for the first round of the 2017 presidential election, both Hollande and the eventual Republican candidate face the risk of elimination before the run-off. Though Hollande’s popularity rebounded somewhat after his swift reaction, both domestic and international, to the terrorist attacks of November 13, the French public hasn’t forgotten his poor economic performance. However, the National Front represents a deeper challenge for a French right, which now occupies an awkward centrist position.A long-term reconfiguring of French politics toward the right could lead to a confrontation between, on the one hand, the market friendly, pro-European left embodied by figures like Prime Minister Manuel Valls or the youthful Economics Minister Emmanuel Macron, and, on the other, the National Front; such a confrontation could leave the Republicans with less room for political maneuver. While the Republican candidate would win a second-round bout against Marine Le Pen, the porosity of Republican and FN voters, especially in the southeast, represents a long term challenge to the right’s electoral base.Alliance is impossible: the FN is still toxic to many voters, and its views on Europe and economics don’t make it a serious partner. The possibility of alliance is taboo for Republican leaders, who fear that the mere mention of it would break down the last barrier for voters; even mentioning the possibility publicly has led to the expulsion of party members (including an MP). But if alliance is out, what are the other options? Confronting the FN head on? Co-opt its message to attract its voters (thus running the risk of letting the FN shape the conversation)? Much as U.S. Republicans with Donald Trump, French strategists are at loss. The diverse philosophical families constituting the French right makes this task even harder. In his seminal study of the French right in 1954, historian Rene Remond distinguished three traditions: legitimism, the reactionary counter-Republican tradition; orleanism, a more liberal parliamentarian current (inspired by the short Orleanist constitutional monarchist experience between 1830 and 1848, close to the British tradition), and bonapartism which focuses on the defense of a strong executive leader, national sovereignty, and a direct relation between the sovereign and the people (which clearly transformed into Gaullism). How to deal with the National Front has become the major internal debate within Les Republicains, mixing philosophical traditions with tactical considerations.In 2005, a few months before the referendum on the European constitution, Nicolas Sarkozy received a visit from Patrick Buisson, a mysterious right-wing pundit and polling expert. Buisson, a former editor for Minute, an extreme-right magazine known for its racist and anti-Semitic rants, had been close to Jean-Marie Le Pen and had even written a book praising him in the 1980s. Given that these offenses were committed in an era before social media, Buisson’s troubled past didn’t haunt him much. Buisson had switched his allegiance away from Le Pen the father and believed Sarkozy, the Interior Minister and leader of the UMP, had a chance to break with the inaction and softness of the Chirac years and set in motion a shift to the right. The “yes”, largely backed by all major leaders of both political parties and favorable media coverage, was comfortably dominating in the polls. Nothing to worry about.Buisson wanted to meet Sarkozy to tell him of his unorthodox vision. Backed by qualitative studies, the Euroskeptic pollster gave Sarkozy an expose on the disconnection between the population and the elites, which would inevitably lead to a victory for the “no.” Sarkozy was impressed with the talk but unconvinced. “I think you’re wrong. But if you’re right, we’ll see each other again.” In May 2005, to the dismay of the French establishment, the “no” won the referendum with 55 percent of the vote. Sarkozy started discreetly consulting the controversial Buisson and adopted his strategy, focusing much of his discourse on identity and security. A popular law and order Interior Minister, he seemed not to shy away from addressing the previously taboo issues of immigration, insecurity, and Islam. In 2007, Sarkozy was elected President after gathering a strong 30 percent in the first round; Le Pen senior, for his last campaign, finished with a disappointing 11 percent. Ever since, Sarkozy’s formula has been to address the concerns of National Front voters on identity and security while rejecting any form of alliance. The right had finally found the answer to the question that had haunted it since the rise of the FN in the 1980s. (That rise, not incidentally, was largely encouraged behind the scenes by a cynical Mitterrand, the socialist President from 1981 and 1995, who was only too happy to divide the right.)The Buisson formula has now shown its limits: it worked with a new and dynamic candidate like Sarkozy in 2007. But despite a sharp right turn on issues like immigration, Schengen, and social values, Sarkozy failed to win reelection in 2012, and Marine Le Pen rallied for 18 percent in the first round. In the same vein, since coming out of retirement in 2014 to lead the party again, Sarkozy has upped the ante on issues like halal food in schools or the Islamic veil, hoping to tap in to National Front voters, to little avail so far. Worse, center-right leaders now wonder aloud if this strategy hasn’t actually reinforced the National Front by letting it shape the agenda and legitimizing its discourse. In a telling about-face, Christian Estrosi, the right-wing Mayor of Nice and a former Sarkozy ally who beat Marion Marechal Le Pen in the regional elections by a whisker, admitted on Tuesday: “The more we go right, the more we strengthen the FN.” Yet Sarkozy’s first decisions (notably firing the moderate Nathalie Koscisuko Morizet from the second-ranking post in the party) after the recent elections point to a doubling down in this direction. While Sarkozy’s tough talk will play well in the November 2016 Republican primary, his rival (and so far the favorite), former Prime Minister Alain Juppe, has tried to develop an alternative message appealing to moderate voters with a message focused on economic reform and alliance with the center: confront the FN head on with an alternative liberal vision, at the risk of alienating some of the Republican base in the process. But can a former, unpopular President (Sarkozy) or a man who was Prime Minister in 1995 (Juppe) really convince the electorate that they’re for real? The truth is, this debate won’t matter much if voters see it as one more electoral ploy by the same leaders who helped create this mess in the first place.Beyond ideological choices, French leaders have to address the growing gap voters perceive between political word and deed. The vote in the first round of the recent regional elections was more a result of the voters’ rejection of traditional parties than it was a sudden turn to the FN. In terms of raw number of votes, the FN actually did not advance much since 2002. As the commentator Frederic Gilli wrote in Le Monde: “The strong progress of the FN in the proportion of expressed ballots is more linked to the collapse of traditional parties than to a strong rise on its part.” Gilli shows a threefold phenomenon: an anchoring vote in favor of the National Front, a rise in abstentions, and increasing votes for independent candidates in local elections. Pointing to voter turnout is a way people often minimize the extent of a calamity; in this case, it’s the opposite: “The problem is that we prefer to be horrified by the FN results rather than confront the extent of the political disaster we face.” After all, voters ponder, if this set has failed, why not give someone else a chance?Elected on the basis of sweeping rhetoric for change, the last two Presidents have underwhelmed in office, making grand declarations but doing little to address the structural challenges facing France: a rigid labor market, complex tax system, an uncompetitive higher education system, and a broken integration model. With a 10.5 percent unemployment rate, 23 percent for youth under 25 and anemic economic growth, a distressed electorate is losing belief in the major parties’ ability to live up to their promises. Worst of all, people have lost all faith in what their leaders say. Just after the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Casher terrorist attacks this past January, for example, Prime Minister Manuel Valls denounced a “territorial, social, and ethnic apartheid” in France. Whatever the relevance of the comparison, you would expect groundbreaking measures to follow such strong words, yet nothing happened. To many, the French political elite appears remote and much more conservative than the electorate, which is clamoring for change. Politics has turned into a profession, with most leaders entering at a young age, often with similar academic backgrounds, and showing little drive to innovate in ideas, methods, or personnel. The President, his Chief of Staff, Economics Minister, Finance Minister, Foreign Minister, and Environment Minister all graduated from the same public affairs school—four of them in the same year.Naturally the National Front, with its mix of toxic xenophobic rhetoric (Marion Marechal did not hesitate to question the compatibility of Muslim and French identities) and retrograde economic proposals (a mix of statist interventionism and Europhobia), has little to offer. Worse, it would be a mistake to believe that its basic operating software has really changed. Ever since Marine Le Pen took over from her father as the head of the National Front, she has embarked on a strategy of “de-demonization” to make her movement respectable, away from the controversies of a party that was founded in 1972 as a refuge for Vichy apologists, French Algeria nostalgics, and other far-right ideologues. A series of controversial statements on the Holocaust, the German occupation, and democracy made Jean-Marie Le Pen a pariah. Marine Le Pen has stayed clear of such utterances (and has even gone as far as expelling her father from the party) and focused on Europe and immigration. But make no mistake: the National Front still deals in xenophobia, putinism, and preposterous rhetoric. Marine Le Pen differs with her father merely on communication strategy. Her father’s Holocaust revisionism did not prevent her from walking in his footsteps. The mayor of Beziers, Robert Menard, who was supposed to embody the new generation of leaders promoted by Marine Le Pen, recently took issue with the kebab joints in his town. This is hardly the stuff of a government party.In the absence of a real political alternative, the FN did manage, however, to capture a national angst over decline, lack of opportunities, and middle-class insecurity. It was helped in this by a wave of writers like the right-wing polemicist Eric Zemmour, whose bestselling essay, “The French Suicide,” pointed to the ones who deserve blame: liberal elites who have given in to the forces of globalization, Europe, the United States, and rabid feminists (Zemmour is awkwardly obsessed with the decline in manliness, which he links to most of our woes). Zemmour and his kind have dominated the public space crusading against political correctness and “bien-pensance.” As the Italian anarchist Antonio Gramsci put it, ideological victory precedes electoral victory.It is reassuring to assume voters have just become racist or xenophobic, to complain that they watch too much television or don’t have the right diplomas. The truth is that both parties have abandoned the field of politics to demagogues who hijacked a legitimate frustration at elites with a dangerous illiberal discourse. (Hey America, sound familiar?) There will be no quick fix. Perhaps Sarkozy or Juppe will manage, each in his own way, to slow Le Pen’s progress and bring the right back to power in 2017, especially if the left doesn’t qualify for the second round. Perhaps Hollande will win back the electorate and the Republican candidate will be squeezed out of the second round. But if France’s political leaders don’t address the public’s disaffection, the voters will do it for them.

Argentina’s New President Begins Reforms

Argentina’s new President, Mauricio Macri, lifted some currency controls and eliminated export duties yesterday in a move he argues will provide a much-needed shot in the arm to the country’s moribund economy. The Buenos Aires Herald:

Most of the restrictions on the dollar trade no longer exist, and the peso is likely to lose at least 40 percent of its official value as a result.

Starting today, companies and individuals will be able to buy foreign currency for up to two million dollars per month each and there will be no limits for importers. But the Central Bank will only sell them dollar reserves at a much higher price than it currently does, resulting in a devaluation.Finance Minister Alfonso Prat-Gay refused to say yesterday at which “magic number” he expected the dollar to be traded today, but hinted that the equilibrium rate he foresaw was similar to the blue-chip-swap rate, where dollars are currently sold for 14.26 pesos each.

The early days of reforms are likely to be tough. The artificially overvalued peso and a mare’s nest of controls created distortions. As the restrictions are lifted, the peso (as the piece notes) will likely fall dramatically, raising the price of imported goods and increasing an already high inflation rate. Reform during this time won’t be popular, but it needs to be done. Argentina’s Leftist government left the economy in deep trouble, just as happened in Brazil and Venezuela as well, and painful changes are needed to rescue its economy.

It’s a good sign that Macri isn’t shying away from tough reforms. But winning the election was only stage one for him, and his tenure isn’t going to be easy. From the powerful labor unions to the bureaucrats and judges appointed by the old government, Argentina is full of powerful forces that will seek to undermine the new President wherever possible and blame him for any trouble. When you factor in the shaky fundamentals of the world economy, it’s clear that Argentina has a tough road ahead.

Turkey Isn’t Stopping Migrant Flows to the EU

Ahead of a high-level EU summit in Brussels today and tomorrow, at which the issue of migrants will be atop the agenda, two reports by the government of Luxembourg have concluded that migrant flows remain “practically unchanged” or only a little lowered since the EU and Turkey announced a landmark, $3.3 billion action plan on November 29. Reuters reports:

The report by the Luxembourg government, in its current capacity as president of EU ministerial councils, said about 4,000 people a day arrived from Turkey since the accord on Nov. 29, a “slight reduction” from the 5,000-6,000 seen earlier in that month. But this was not necessarily due to Turkish action.

“This decrease may, however, also be attributed to other factors,” said the report, seen by Reuters and sent to EU leaders ahead of a summit on Thursday in Brussels at which they will discuss efforts to stem the migration crisis.A separate report on the functioning of the EU-Turkey action plan agreed with Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu in Brussels has concluded that migrant arrivals from Turkey were “practically unchanged” in the two weeks after the signing from the two weeks preceding it, an EU official said.

At the time the action plan was announced, WRM noted that “Unfortunately, however, the chances are high that the agreement will not succeed in stopping the flow. Turkey has never been entirely in control of its southern border, where Kurdish militants have been active for many years. If the U.S. cannot control the Rio Grande, Turkey will have even greater difficulty with the wild and unsettled border it shares with Syria and Iraq.” So far, this seems to be holding up.

And meanwhile, the EU is rewarding the actions of the increasingly autocratic President Erdogan. It’s one thing to sell your soul for an end to the refugee crisis. But for a “slight reduction?”

EU Wrangles with Lax Car Emissions Testing

EU policymakers are slowly realizing the bloc’s car emissions regulations aren’t good enough. The Volkswagen scandal brought global attention to carmakers’ ability effectively to game emissions testing, and perhaps as a result the EU’s environment committee is taking the problem more seriously. As Reuters reports, members of that committee have overwhelmingly opposed a new slate of testing rules they deemed too lenient:

The new rules agreed in a closed-door committee in October would allow vehicles to carry on spewing out more than twice official pollution limits, after many of the 28 member states demanded leeway to protect their car industries.

The committee’s vote of 40 to 9 against them sets the stage for a plenary ballot next month that could send the legislation back to the drawing board, but where cross-party support would be more difficult to achieve.

While Volkswagen circumvented rules by installing sophisticated software that could detect when one of its cars was being tested and drive accordingly, the EU has a longer history with lower-tech testing techniques that, if not outright cheating, certainly blur the line. Carmakers are allowed to prepare their vehicles for testing, and do they ever prepare them. Companies have done everything from removing side mirrors and radios from cars to save weight, to using specialized lubricants and test-specific tires to make vehicles run more efficiently, to taping up cracks between panels to reduce drag, to running the tests at specific temperatures to make engines more efficient.

EU members have to balance what’s best for their auto industries (lax testing) against the negative PR of being exposed as naked green hypocrites whose regulations allow companies to claim their products are much more eco-friendly than they actually are. This is, unsurprisingly, a contentious issue for the bloc.Growing environmental awareness has created a cottage industry for unscrupulous companies willing to take advantage of customers’ desire to feel good about buying “green” without actually putting out eco-friendly products. There’s an incentive to spend enormous amounts of cash on eco-marketing, and, as we saw with Volkswagen, to find ways to rig testing. Without stringent regulations, we’re only going to see more scandals in the vein of VW’s brazen cheating.

59 Percent of Young Americans Oppose Assault Weapons Ban

It was clear to many of us that the terrorist shooting at San Bernardino would not persuade the public to support additional gun control measures. Americans have historically regarded private gun ownership as a last-ditch defense against political movements that would undermine democratic government. The sense that the United States was under attack from ISIS, therefore, seemed likely to make Americans more protective of gun rights, not less.

To many liberals, however, this understanding of the Second Amendment is simply incomprehensible. Opposition to gun control must flow out of ignorance, prejudice, and bitterness. Vox‘s David Roberts, in a particularly vivid demonstration of this view, explained to his readers that “over the past few decades, gun ownership in the US has evolved from a practical issue for rural homeowners and hunters to a kind of gesture of tribal solidarity, an act of defiance toward Obama, the left, and all the changes they represent.” He continued:

Let us imagine, then, a conservative gun owner — an older white gentleman, let’s say, in his 50s, living in the Rust Belt somewhere. When he was growing up, there was living memory of a familiar order: men working in honorable trade or manufacturing jobs, women tending home and children, Sundays at church, hard work yielding a steady rise up the ladder to a well-earned house, yard, and car.

That order was crumbling just as our gun owner inherited it. The honorable jobs are gone, or going. It’s hell to find work, benefits are for shit, and there isn’t much put aside for retirement. The kids are struggling with debt and low-paying jobs. They know, and our gun owner knows, that they probably aren’t going to have a better life than he did — that the very core of the American promise has proven false for them, for the first time in generations.It’s a bitter, helpless feeling. And for someone naturally attuned to “order, structure, closure, certainty, consistency, simplicity, and familiarity,” it’s scary. The role he thought he was meant to play in the world, the privileges and respect that came along with it, have been thrown into doubt.

Putting aside the cringeworthy condescension (masquerading, as it so often does at Vox, as neutral “explanation”), a new ABC News/Washington Post poll suggests that Roberts’ understanding is, quite simply, wrong. Support for gun rights is not confined to a declining cadre of “bitter” old white men. Rather, it is widespread and growing in the general population. According to the poll, more Americans (53 percent) oppose an assault weapons ban than ever before. Millennials—the most liberal, diverse, and tolerant generation in American history—are even more strongly opposed, at 59 percent. And contrary to Roberts’ narrative of the gun fight as an expression of white resentment, there is not even majority support for an assault weapons ban among non-whites.

The truth is that support for gun rights is the product of rising individualism and a declining faith in the government to solve problems. After the attacks in San Bernardino, Americans’ Jacksonian impulses were amplified further—not because of the decline of “manufacturing jobs” or “familiar order”—but because they felt that their country was under attack by jihadists. Contrary to Roberts, gun rights have never simply been “a practical issue for rural homeowners and hunters.” Since the founding, the idea of an armed citizenry as a safeguard against tyranny has been hardwired into our national character. And that is precisely the impulse that appears to be animating such strong opposition to gun control in the wake of San Bernardino: According to the poll, those Americans who are most worried about terrorism are also most opposed to gun control.Gun controllers will never be able to convince America to cut back gun ownership if they don’t understand why Americans want to own guns in the first place.

Shi’a Sect Alleges Military Massacre in Nigeria

The Nigerian Army has reportedly slaughtered hundreds of members of Nigeria’s Shi’a religious minority in the northern town of Zaria. Quartz reports:

According to the official accounts of the military, members of the Shiite group blocked the route of the army chief’s motorcade thus prompting a confrontation. The army claims that the group attacked with ‘crude weapons’ and fearing that the life of the army chief may have been in danger, lethal force was used to clear a route of escape for the army chief. But that was not the height of the violence as the military claims that in a bid to maintain peace, soldiers went to known Shiite bases in the city where it claimed the members of group were ‘mobilizing and attacking security forces’. The army reported the incident as an attempt to assassinate the army chief.

However, accounts by members of the Shia group paint a different picture. They claim they were attacked by the Nigerian army who killed hundreds in what has been called a massacre. The army says the group’s main base was destroyed by the military while the leader of the group, Ibrahim El-Zakzaky, is in custody of the military. While the military claims El-Zakzaky is safe, pictures have emerged showing the leader bloodied and with visible evidence of bodily harm. It is not the first time the army has clashed with the Shiite group as three sons of the group’s leader were killed by soldiers in bloody protests last year.

This comes as another sign of the deepening crisis in Nigeria. The nation is already struggling with Sunni-Christian tensions, the Boko Haram insurgency, and a resurgent Igbo independence movement. Now the—at a minimum—trigger-happy Army may have inflamed yet another internecine problem. We don’t know the ethnic or religious composition of these soldiers, and it’s a sign of just how poor Africa coverage is in the mainstream press that there are no reliable reports giving us that information. But it’s possible the killing reflects tensions between the country’s Shi’a minority and some other religious, political, or ethnic group—or, at the least, between the Shi’a and the country as a whole.

The incident may also reflect the increased globalization of religious conflicts. Boko Haram, a Sunni insurgency, already claims allegiance to ISIS, the global leader of radical Sunni Islam. Nigeria may also now have a problem with internationalized Shi’a tensions, as Iran has intervened in the wake of these killings to call for an explanation, asserting its role as the worldwide head of Shi’ism. As the Telegraph reports:

The Iranian President, Hassan Rouhani, has demanded an explanation by the Nigerian government for its crackdown on the Shia Muslim sect led by Ibrahim Zakzaky, a Nigerian preacher who is a devoted follower of Iran’s late Ayatollah Khomeini.

Something to keep an eye on: How long before the increasingly activist Christians in the “God belt” across Africa’s center also start looking to forge international links as they fight sectarian wars? If this should happen, the risks of a regional sectarian conflict would grow significantly.

The Texas State Bar and the Ambiguities of Secularity

As reported in Catholic Education Daily on December 7, 2015, there is a dispute between the School of Law at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio and the Texas State Bar, which is in charge of accrediting institutions of legal education in the state. The School of Law has a program of Continuing Legal Education (CLE) which serves attorneys at any stage of their lifelong career. The State Bar has a committee which oversees all CLE programs; it had preciously accredited the one at St. Mary’s. The committee has decided that in future the St. Mary’s program would be denied accreditation (as put by the Catholic source) “for being too religious”.

At issue is a CLE program on “Christian Ethical Perspectives: Faith and Law Today”. Both sides stipulate that “legal ethics” is regularly part of CLE. Presumably the committee assumes that this program would involve some sort religious indoctrination. Professor Bill Piatt of the Law School, which he represents, proposes that the decision violates First Amendment rights of the attorneys enrolled in the CLE program by prohibiting them from discussing any moral issues beyond the narrowly defined scope of legal ethics. [I have not delved into the full exchanges in this case, so I don’t know whether Piatt also mentioned the First Amendment rights of St. Mary’s University which should be free to give its programs a Catholic orientation.] In any case, Nancy Smith, speaking for the State Bar committee, asserted that its decision “had nothing to do with the program having a Catholic orientation.” Piatt also made the wider point that the committee assumed a sharp distinction between law and morality. [That may be true, but there is the view making just this distinction in the widely accepted school of “legal positivism” founded by Hans Kelsen. I am told that law school professors like to shock their students by advising them to give up the notion that the law has anything to do with justice.] Since this case has wide implications for legal education in this country, one may safely predict that the courts will sooner or later get involved.Using the legal language that fits the present topic, let me stipulate that I lack the competence to understand all the nuances. It may well be that Nancy Smith is right that the Texas regulations on how “legal ethics” is to be taught, either to idealistic incoming students or to possibly cynical veterans of many court battles, define this field in very narrow terms—what does “full disclosure” mean for either prosecutors or defense attorneys, when may a judge “recuse” himself from a case, and the like. But it seems to me that Smith’s allegation that her committee’s decision to discredit (literally) St.Mary’s program had “nothing to do” with its Catholic orientation is thunderously implausible; on the face of it, it had everything to do with its Catholic orientation. In that case, she and the group she speaks for provide a useful occasion to counter a very common confusion—that between secularity and secularism.[In my youth, when I was a newcomer to America and was amazed by so many things, I occasionally saw this sign in barbershops: “If you are good for nothing else, you can always serve as a bad example.” Was this the time when barbers like bartenders were presumed to be sources of folk wisdom? Could this be related to the now, as far as I know waning, popularity of barbershop quartets? But let me not digress. Rather, let me make another stipulation: that Ms. Nancy Smith is an intelligent and well-meaning representative of Texan jurisprudence at its best. If so, in the unlikely case that she gets to read my blog, she will forgive me for using her argument as a bad example.]Secularity describes the discourse which necessarily dominates large areas of modern life. It is a discourse which brackets any religious definitions of reality in its proper space. Secularity thus defined became indispensable for the achievements of science and technology in modern times, and contemporary societies would be intolerable without these achievements. However, one must not therefore conclude that the secular discourse has completely pushed out all religious discourses. In the lives of individuals and in entire societies modern secularity and religion co-exist side by side. Law is a very important area of such co-existence. Of course there have been projects of restoring the hegemony of this or that religion (today the most blatant project is that of fundamentalist Islam) and projects of eliminating religion altogether (as in the heyday of Communist societies). I tend to think that the opening up of a secular legal space occurred first in the area of modern international law. One of its founders was the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), who insisted that the new discipline should proceed etsi Deus non daretur/ “as if God did not exist”. In other words, it should be religiously neutral. He had little choice if international law should apply to the Europe of his time, which had states defined as Protestant or Catholic, as Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, as well as Eastern Orthodox Russia and the Muslim Ottoman Empire. (It is important to remember that Grotius was anything but an atheist; he was a pious Protestant.) Religiously neutral law spread to domestic law as well. The newly independent Netherlands had two urgent dangers to fight—Spain reconquering it, and the sea flooding its low-lying areas (hence its name). Protestant and Catholic segments of the citizenry had to cooperate on both problems in a religiously neutral way.The separation of religion and the state in Western democracies (whether formally in the U.S. and in France, or de facto in Britain) is a very practical way of managing the co-existence of secularity and religion. On the whole, the U.S. version, with the First Amendment at its core, has worked remarkably well in managing what I have called the two pluralisms: that of different religions co-existing, and of these different religious discourses co-existing with the secular discourse. Of course there are always border negotiations between religious and secular spaces, as in the case discussed here. And Americans being the most litigation-prone people in the world, the courts are frequently asked to intervene. They are not very well equipped to deal with religious issues—as lawyers are trained to do, they tend to fall back on abstract principles that are typically far removed from the empirical realities, Note: Secularity is not an ideology but a fact, like it or not. Much of the time there is no choice: You cannot operate in a modern economy by following the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount, and you fly an airplane on instructions from the Talmud.By contrast, secularism is an ideology (as the suffix indicates). It celebrates secularity and seeks to enlarge its space at the expense of religion. It comes in different versions. Its extreme version, from the Jacobin cult of reason to the “scientific atheism” of the Soviet Union, has become quite rare. Certainly in the U.S. it usually takes the form of a program to confine religion in private spaces—churches or other overtly religious institutions—and keep it out of public spaces, especially when these are supported by tax funds. Probably there have always been tensions between the “no establishment” and “free exercise” phrases of the First Amendment. Secularists rank the first over the second. As in this case: the Texas State Bar committee is offended by the intrusion, however academic, of a “Catholic orientation” into a program of necessarily secular legal education. The spokesman of a Catholic institution regards its religious orientation as the right to free exercise. If (as I do) one regards religious freedom as a fundamental (perhaps even the fundamental) human right, one will favor “free exercise” over “no establishment”—indeed will regard the latter as having the main purpose of protecting the former. But even if I were a committed secularist, as a sociologist I would observe that a broad understanding of religious freedom is conducive to civic peace (especially in a democracy).I would not suggest any kind of moral equivalence between our American secularists and the anti-religious fanaticisms of 18th-century Jacobins and Soviet commissars. But I think it is plausible to say that the approach of our American (relatively mild) secularists is essentially one of disease control. They cannot (and I daresay would not want to) eradicate religion; but they regard its public manifestation as dangerous; therefore, religion must be contained, put in quarantine.As I get older, outlandish but illuminating analogies occur to me. Our twenty-first secularists are late descendants of the Enlightenment. The Emperor Joseph II of was an Enlightened despot. I give him a lot of credit for abolishing the death penalty and easing the restrictions on Jews. He also issued a decree on tolerance to benefit Protestants—within limits, but in sharp discontinuity with the traditionally ferocious anti-Protestantism of the Habsburgs. He authorized the construction of two Protestant churches in Vienna, within spitting distance of the imperial palace. One was Lutheran (in Austrian diction, “A.B.”, of the Augsburg Confession), the other Reformed (“H.B.”, of the Helvetian Confession). There they still are, next to each other, actually touching: A perfect embodiment of quarantine, where the Emperor and his police could keep an eye on them.

A Conversation with Jon Huntsman

Adam Garfinkle sat down with Jon Huntsman in the office of the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC, on October 19. Here is, more or less, how the conversation went:

TAI: I’d like to start, Mr. Ambassador, by noting that we have something in common: We have both run unsuccessfully for President. There was a folk singer named U. Utah Phillips who used to claim he was running for President on the Sloth and Indolence ticket. He was a latter-day Wobbly as opposed to a latter-day saint—kind of an anarchist, but not the violent sort—and his platform was, basically, “If you want to get something done, do it yourself, because as President I’m just going to sit around the Oval Office and shoot pool. Solve your own problems.” It was, of course, meant to be funny, just to go along with his songs. But it wasn’t just funny, it seems to me. Anyway, after he died, I picked up the Sloth and Indolence label and ran for President, except that, as the label suggests, my campaign was not very energetic. I didn’t win. So I know how you feel about that escapade of yours four years ago.Which brings me to my first question. Looking back four years ago today, you were in the thick of the politics stuff, and you’ve made some comments about what you think went wrong. What did you learn from your experience? How does that lesson strike you now, looking at the primary season this time around?JMH: I’d have to say that what struck me about this time four years ago is how show business has infiltrated politics. And I don’t totally say that tongue-in-cheek. It’s very real. It’s the politics of entertainment as opposed to substance. I got into the race thinking I could do as a candidate for President what I did as candidate for Governor of a state—where you draw a roadmap for your state, create a vision, and then you break out its component parts, you articulate those to the people, you bring in a team to fashion policy positions that will bring you there, and you say, “If elected, here’s what I’m going to do!” And they elect you and re-elect you because you actually found a way to do a lot of the stuff you promised them you’d do. And I thought, “Gee, it worked pretty well as Governor out in Utah: We left with an 80 percent approval rating, we got 78 percent of the vote for reelection, we carried every county (first time a Republican had carried every county in the state), and it couldn’t be that terribly different running for President.Well, of course, in the interregnum we went over to China, a slight detour—and I’ve lived in Asia four times, so it was kind of like going home, in a sense, to a region we were familiar with. But things changed here in the United States while we were in China. And the change that was most pronounced was the transition from what I would call the “pre-Lehman Brothers Collapse Republican Party” to the “post-Lehman Brothers Collapse Republican Party.” The pre-Lehman Collapse Republican Party was bold, innovative, risk-taking, a little more inclusive, broader, more expansive in terms of policy considerations; and the post-Lehman Party became angry, a little frightened, narrower in its worldview—for reasons that are all totally understandable. People had lost their savings, jobs were being totally disrupted, we were staring down a fundamentally new economic reality that we didn’t fully understand. Who should we blame for this debacle? The party turned inward, and in a way I think it’s still fighting itself over what it needs to do next.What will the party be on the world stage? Will it be the party of Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan: big, inclusive, optimistic, and growing from our best frontier instincts as a free people? Or will it be what it has now become: a kind of perpetual opposition party—not a governing party, not a leadership party.TAI: There’s an analogue of sorts in the Labour Party on the other side of the Atlantic, in Britain. This happens all the time: parties that lose big elections often become more counterproductively radical before they come back to the center.But something you just said intrigues me. You speak as though the Lehman Brothers collapse was a key tipping point, followed by a gradual realization that the Recession of 2007–09 was an “L” rather than a “U”-shaped recession—in other words, that it represented a structural change in the character of the American economy and of the labor profile. You seem to be suggesting that something about that realization is what changed the tone and temper of the Republican Party. Could you just elaborate a little bit on what you mean by that? Was this a case of Republican politicians tactically trying to tap into the anger and frustration of the population? Or was this something deeper, an intellectual shift that led them to a different tone?JMH: I would term it “the ultimate attention-getter by the voters.” Politicians are generally pretty good at trying to stay ahead of the sentiments of the voters, because when they subsume you, you’re in deep trouble. But I think it was the ultimate attention-getter that turned into something more mere political tactics. We faced a collapsed economy, a world we no longer felt in control of, and people who had just had enough emotionally. So we saw the rise of the Tea Party, the divisions within the Republican Party, and the “enough’s enough” mentality. We’ve been bailing out industries, we’ve been breaking budgets forever—whenever we can come up with one on time at all—and we can’t seem to bring anything into balance, and look where we are.The Great Recession ignited something that was very real. I was in China watching all this from 10,000 miles away. Among those who would filter through the embassy were those who were involved in partisan politics, and some of those people said to me, “You wouldn’t believe what’s happening to the party.” It had dramatically changed.TAI: China itself was not totally divorced from the analysis, too, and I want to come back to that. But before we do that I want to ask about the No Labels political movement. If you think back, say, two or three administrations, and you were to put your optimistic hat on and point out to some foreigner three or four really positive policy innovations the United States has undertaken in the last Democratic and Republican administrations, could you think of any? It seems to me that over time the number of achievements one can cite has diminished, and I suspect that one of the reasons is that that we’re at a point in American history where, really for the first time, there’s no obvious consensus as to what we’re doing together as a political community. In the very beginning, of course, it was religious freedom and then continental expansion and developmentalism. And even before the Civil War, there was consensus—it was just the consensus had a positive and a negative valence. But now we’ve got a lot of people who want to do this or want to do that, but there’s no consensus as to what we’re doing together as a political community.JMH: Yes, certainly. We wouldn’t have NASA but for both parties coming together. We wouldn’t have the Human Genome Project but for both parties coming together, which is unleashing advancements in science that I think are going to change the very fabric of health care as we know it, how it’s delivered, how we analyze disease, and how we deal with it. A balanced budget in the 1990s, welfare reform in the 1980s, tax reform 1986—there are examples along life’s pathway of both parties actually setting a goal and going for it. We don’t set goals anymore; that’s one of the big problems. There are no consensus American goals, no national goals right now. And that’s a problem because the articulation of goals is an extension of our basic interests. How do you define an “American interest?” Well I think we could all come around to those things that speak to our institutions of governance and our values. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat; there are just some things that are American.So what do we have to do to build those traditions and keep them strong? Well, we must have a robust economy, must have good schools, must have continuous and effective investment in infrastructure, must have people who understand and respect the rule of law, and are respectful of one another. There’re a lot of things that can be an outgrowth of American values and interests.And since you raised it—one of the reasons I’m drawn to No Labels is that I have a firm belief, having lived overseas, that unless and until we strengthen our fundamentals here in this country, we’re weakened abroad. The messages that we articulate fall on deaf ears. They’re mere words to everyone else abroad until we can practice them here with greater perfection. And it’s of real concern to me that our democratic institutions are being weakened by people who appear to be abusing them for political purpose. The last election cycle, 2014, witnessed the lowest voter turnout of any cycle in 75 years—you have to go all the way back to World War II. Young kids are becoming unaffiliated, and feeling disenfranchised. And it’s because our fundamentals are weakening. We haven’t put points on the board—as Americans! Not as Republicans and Democrats, but as Americans. So the thing that attracts me here is the same thing that gave me such great joy serving as a Governor: You’re everyone’s Governor. You’re not a Republican Governor, not a Democratic Governor; you’re there for Utahans. You set goals that are Utah goals, and you bring Republicans and Democrats and independents together to make them happen. Most states are a microcosm of how the country’s supposed to work, but our country just doesn’t seem to function like that anymore.TAI: I certainly agree. If you don’t have stretch goals, the founding virtues can’t really find ways to express themselves. That’s very troubling.JMH: At the moment, we don’t so much need stretch goals; we don’t need a new eco-boost engine. We’ve got a solid old V-8 engine and we can continue using that for a while. It would be nice to create a new eco-boost engine, and maybe we can in time, but let’s attend to the fundamentals of the V-8 or else it’s going to stop running. And that’s where No Labels and its four big pillars of deliverables are so salient in today’s political conversation: because these are just the basics. It’s the carburetor, it’s the spark plugs, it’s the crankshaft—it’s the basics for any engine to keep it going.The thing about No Labels is: I’m a practitioner, not a theorist. I do the jobs; I don’t think overly much about them. You bring in people who have given it deep thought and they can help craft the pathway forward for you. But if you sit here as a practitioner—both of domestic politics and of international politics that you know well—you know that in order to get some things done in this country, you’ve got to have a few things present. You have to have an army of the likeminded on Capitol Hill. So we’ve constructed the Problem Solvers Caucus: 70-80 strong, half R’s, half D’s, who really are into this stuff. We get them in a room, and they’re speaking the lingo. They’re saying “we need to build trust across the impenetrable divide.” We need to get some things done. So that’s number one. Two, you need to have a strategy. Where are you going? And what are the elements of that journey? And how do you measure progress? We’ve got that in the National Strategic Agenda, which we didn’t have before. And third, what took us a week ago today to New Hampshire, is to infuse this concept into presidential politics, so you can get people thinking about the same thing.And just imagine a world—I know it might seem to be a long shot right now—but just imagine a new President who says, “Okay, I want to get something big done. And I’m going to need Congress to help me do it. And I’m going to call the leadership of both houses and both parties together, and we’re going to set a goal, or two. And we’re going to take different pathways, but we’re going to wind up in a common American destiny.” And I think it’s doable. But it’s not going to happen unless we build the foundation, take it to New Hampshire as we did, get 2,000 citizens there and all the candidates who were willing to come.TAI: I certainly hope it works. In the beginning, what worried me about the No Labels philosophy was that it seemed to say nothing more than, “If we could be more civil, if we can take the edge off the partisanship, then somehow it’ll all work out”—and that struck me as naïve because the problems are not just ones of tone but rather ones of fundamental disagreement, different core perspectives. But you guys are beyond that now, I think.JMH: Yes, you’re right, that’s totally naive, and in fact I’ve said “No Labels” probably isn’t the best title for this movement. The No Labels label can suggest the proverbial kumbaya moment—but that doesn’t exist in politics. Whatever it’s called, what matters is that we’re problem-solvers. We’re looking not just for more civility in politics but we’re looking to focus on the problems we need to solve and that we can solve.TAI: I want to talk about China. A couple of months ago, the Chinese stock market developed a bit of a case of indigestion trying to digest a real estate bubble, and economists and others were heatedly debating whether this was just a correction, or maybe that the Chinese were at the end of their post-Mao developmental model—the same way the Japanese had a somewhat similar export model, then came to the end of their frontier and then had to figure out a way to restage a growth model.In our group here at The American Interest, we have tended toward the latter interpretation—that this is a much more serious challenge for the Chinese leadership, not just a business-cycle correction. They are up against the outer frontier of the old growth model, and they have to convince a whole lot of Chinese to consume a whole lot more than they have been. This is already a process in motion for a few years now, but given the political environment in China today, it’s not obvious how this will all turn out.But between those who think China is on an inexorable rise and those who worry more about an implosion being the problem—and I don’t see the two possibilities as necessarily being mutually exclusive—how do you handicap the future?JMH: I think the first place to focus is on Xi Jinping as a leader. I think he’s fundamentally a different kind of leader. He has a vision, he has a sense of direction, very much unlike Hu Jintao, who presided over a lost decade. Hu Jintao was a consensus manager, he had a larger standing committee than the Politburo, he had personalities within the Politburo, like Zhou Yongkang, who was more powerful as a political figure than even Hu Jintao. So it was therefore no surprise that you would see rogue military operations from time to time. There was a disconnect between the central military commission and key members of the Standing Committee.Those days are gone. There is now have a central figure who has, I think, the respect and command of the Central Military Commission (the Chinese version of our Joint Chiefs, in other words), the Party apparatus, and the princeling population, which, whether you like it or not, is central to power in China. The grandsons and granddaughters of the revolutionary elite now populate the state-owned enterprises and many of the ministries. Xi Jinping is one of them, so he can speak their lingo and tell them where to go. Hu Jintao could never do that.I think there are two fundamentally important transitions underway that are quite historic, one economic—as you pointed out—and one political that is epitomized by a new leadership style. And I think that the very fact of these simultaneous transitions has resulted in a profound sense of insecurity among many of the Chinese leaders. You layer on top of that transitional insecurity spawned by the anti-corruption campaign, and everything is frozen, nobody wants to make a decision.TAI: Anti-corruption campaign, party purge—it’s a little bit hard to figure out where one starts and the other one ends. Some people don’t take the anti-corruption label seriously because the analysis is, if you have a government that’s effectively featuring rule by law but not rule of law in a regime that’s essentially illegitimate, you can’t mount a real anti-corruption campaign because you can’t just draw a line and say, “It stops below me.” A true anti-corruption campaign would implicate the party itself, and the party can’t let that happen. So there’s kind of a logical contradiction here, isn’t there?JMH: What we’re seeing is a bit of triaging by Xi Jinping, so the anti-corruption effort is real, even though it’s limited. He’s simply got to stem the flow of corruption before people completely lose their faith in the party, because he knows that there’s no alternative governing structure. A party collapse means a governance collapse, not a substitution into power by some other coherent political force-in-waiting. In away they face something similar to what we’ve had here: a trust deficit. People just don’t believe that their institutions of power and government are serving the national interest any longer. It’s corrupt, there’s deadwood within, lack of transparency, nobody knows what’s going on, nobody has a say in terms of the affairs of state, and it’s reaching the 212-degree boiling point. And so Xi is saying, “I’m with the people. I’m going to clean out the deadwood”, or at least I’m going to get enough of the visible corruption out of the system to the point where people will say, “he’s on our side.”I live in Asia during the summer months, and I spent a lot of time in China this past summer, in Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, and Guangzhou. And I always do the taxicab test: I just jump in cabs in these cities and talk to the drivers. And I always ask about Xi Jinping: “What do you think about Xi Jinping? How’s he doing?” I have yet to find a taxi driver who does not say, “He’s one of us. He’s on our side.” He’s captured the imagination of the people. They feel he’s really on their side—which is a good place for a politician to be, even in China.TAI: Yes, but he’s still got some serious problems. When I think of the dilemmas of the Chinese Communist Party right now, it kind of reminds me of the military bureaucracy in Egypt. In order for the economy to be truly reformed, it needs to be preceded by political reform, because the Egyptian military bureaucracy has its hand in everything that makes money in Egypt. China, with the state-owned enterprises and with the neo-patrimonialism you describe among the princelings, it’s similar in a way. In order to get the economy really moving ahead again, and to keep it moving at the kind of level that can meet heightened expectations, the state-owned enterprises have to be fundamentally reformed. But if you try to reform them, then you undercut the political basis of the regime. So there’s a kind of double bind at work here, isn’t there?JMH: That’s why Xi is such an important and consequential leader at this point in history, because he’s the only one who can open up the hood of the car, the state-owned enterprise, and say, “The old rules are gone. We’ve got new rules of the road, and they’re going to include the following.” And if you look at the 18th Party Congress, and what came out of that two and a half years ago, followed up by the Third Plenum, and the Fourth Plenum (which was less about economic reform), just take that and read it again. That is a road map. It hasn’t been instituted or pursued with any real ambition at this point, because Xi Jinping is probably going to wait and do it after the 19th Party Congress in 2017, when he’s really got a firm base of power. But it really is a roadmap directed at reform, mostly of the state-owned enterprises, of which there are maybe 110 big ones and five mega, mega big ones, (like China Telecom, CNOOC, and SinoPec, the latter of which is probably the largest company in the world today in terms of market capitalization). I just met with the new head of SinoPec when I was last in China; we’re doing a joint venture with them in Nanjing. So I’ve gotten to know their bureaucracy quite well, and they’re old and they’re stale. They’ve got no board of directors, no transparency, no corporate governance that’s worth a damn. They get discounted raw materials and preferential costs of capital. All that has to end.TAI: It’s really important that it end, because as much savings as China has, the financial system is not efficient. China wastes enormous amounts of capital because of the political cronyism that goes on, and if they’re ever really going to get the whole economy macro-economically sound, they need a financial system that isn’t corrupt.JMH: Yes; they must have an efficient financial system, and really deal with the state-owned enterprises, which are in every major sector of the economy. And if you can’t change that, you’re never going to be able to level the playing field for real competition. I think Xi gets that, and I certainly know Wang Qishan and certain others in government who are way up truly understand why this is important.TAI: You were Ambassador to Singapore before you were Ambassador to China. Have the Chinese ever looked to the Singaporeans and said, “Hmm, how did those guys do it?” People talk about the China-Singapore model as the authoritarian-capitalist model, but there’s another kind of model. The Singaporeans actually have a pretty sleek, well-oiled machine when it comes to connecting their industrial capacities and their service industries to their financial system. Maybe the Chinese could learn something from the Singaporeans…JMH: And I think they will—beyond the trip the Deng Xiaoping took in 1978 to see Harry Lee. It was as though Deng imitated Brigham Young when he said in Utah, “This is the place!”TAI: That’s ancient history now, isn’t it?JMH: Well, that inspiration from Singapore was more the combination of the GLCs—the government-linked corporations—in Singapore with the more authoritarian one-party dominance, “This is our future”, in China. But I do think if you want to extrapolate China fifty years into the future and ask, “What is it going to look like? Will there be a collapse of the party?”, I’m not sure that there’ll be a collapse of the party. I think it’ll look much different than it does today. There will be more elements of democracy, and it’ll look more like a People’s Action Party kind of thing. It will be more of a parliamentary system with a dominant party—the Communist Party, or whatever they choose to call it fifty years from now. And it will have an economy that’s freed up well beyond what we see today.So there’s the economic transition. I think you’re quite right: It is a fundamentally different economy, moving from the middle-income trap to a consumption model, moving away from investment-led exports; those days are gone. And India and Vietnam and others will pick up the pace. Many industries are already moving out of China to new locations. And in order to get to the promised land, the Chinese need to have things like business rules of the road, business adjudication, a greater sense of commercial law, and all of this sort of stuff is knocking on the door of rule of law. And they know that. They’re getting closer and closer to a stronger foundation of rule of law to guide their future, which then, heaven forbid, might give rise to some aspects of a robust civil society. I think this is around the bend, and it’s almost unavoidable. It all plays back to the economic reforms that will give rise to a sturdy, modern, 21st-century China.TAI: I hope they get there. If there are too many bumps in the road, too much creative destruction in the meantime, then the only thing that the party has left to appeal to is nationalism—which it is doing already, of course, to some extent—and that can certainly derail the train.JMH: This is the part that bothers me, or concerns me, rather, about an insecure China. An insecure China that is doing all it can on the economic side and not succeeding terribly well then has only nationalism to fall back on. And then the South China Sea and other issues become the only levers they have to show that they’re still in control.TAI: That, and the fact that they spend more money on their internal security than they do on their foreign policy, right?JMH: Yes, indeed. Look at the Ministry of State Security, the Ministry of Public Security. And they’re funding probably $120 billion, $130 billion a year, versus national defense. That tells you everything you need to know about where their perception of threat lies.TAI: I want to ask you about the TPP and the politics of trade here in the United States, as well as the somewhat surprising decision by Hillary Clinton to oppose the pact that was negotiated while she was Secretary of State. You were Deputy Trade Representative once, so you know plenty about this business. How does all this look to you right now? What are the prospects for ratification?I guess it’s kind of a two-part question. Some people are arguing that these trade fora, the TPP in the Pacific and the TTIP with the Europeans, is really a kind of second-best deal because the Doha Round never really got legs—and that, in a sense, these kinds of deals undermine attempts to free up trade on a global scale. Several observers have characterized them as the rich countries getting together and having a good time while leaving everybody else hung out to dry. And then there’s the sort of internal political argument, that this is really just a kind of fix for already well-placed corporations. It’s why the unions oppose it, that it’s another bone thrown to capital as opposed to labor. And the argument is made that it’s a race to the bottom when it comes to environmental standards and labor standards.These two arguments—one about the global effects of this, and one about the internal effects—come around in a horseshoe shape and connect. How do you assess the arguments being made right now about these trade agreements?JMH: I think generally they’re a net plus for the U.S. economy. They allow economic lifelines to the major markets of the world, which we wouldn’t have otherwise. It’s a shame that the Doha Round didn’t do what it was built to do, but that’s a function of the World Trade Organization and its governance system. If every one of the one 150 member countries has veto rights, how can you expect to get anything done?And again, it always hits agriculture reform, because you’ve got farmers in France and Japan—and in the United States, by the way, where they get $18 billion in subsidies every year—that have tremendous political clout. So then you have to ask: Do we then stop trade altogether? Do we use the WTO as a sort of dispute-settlement mechanism body and use it for other means by which we can pontificate about the future of trade?Maybe. But that shouldn’t be the end of the trade discussion. We should move on, and we should do trade in a way that rewards those who want to liberalize, who want to move toward greater openness, greater transparency, and better rules of the road. I think TPP is an example of that American tradition. My party has moved a little bit away from their support of trade, more to a populist line, and again, I think that is part of the post-Lehman Collapse worldview. And you know, if the employment picture were something different than it is today, people would have more confidence about venturing out into the world.So I think it’s a net plus for the United States; it will engage the countries of the Pacific, 12 of them (11, if you don’t include the United States) with 40 percent of the world’s GDP. It will take us to a new gold standard for trade, which will include environment and labor. Today, you can’t get a deal done without including environment and labor, and that’s good and fair. We dealt with that 12, 15 years ago with the Singapore Free Trade Agreement, the Australia Free Trade Agreement, and various trade-investment frameworks we did in different regions of the world.I’ve always thought that the United States being aggressive in the area of trade is an extension of our domestic interests, our economic interests, because we are global players and by engaging others we up the game substantially. We don’t go down, we always go up. And if we’re not there, you have less benevolent players who generally fill that void, and I’ve seen China very aggressively in the past 10–15 years, while we’ve virtually been out of the trade game, who have struck up a lot of FTAs. But then you look at these FTAs, and they’re not much. They’re a real poor substitute for what we would be negotiating.So you’ve got the RCEP agreement that China has fashioned, which is sort of their own version of TPP with most of their partners in the region. And it isn’t a gold standard agreement; it is more of a race to the bottom. And many people are bullied or intimidated into doing something with China just to show that they’re doing something with China, to keep the largesse coming in. So when the United States steps in, we generally do a pretty good job of upping the trade game globally: higher standards, greater transparency, and more voices who are part of fashioning trade agreements. I think that’s a good thing.TAI: But on the domestic side it’s not easy to make these arguments persuasively. The way I like to explain this to students is that, if you’re talking about national security, you can make the argument that everyone has the same percentage share of an effective national security policy, even if someone lives in the middle of the country as opposed to the coasts. It’s equal. But with international trade policy, it’s not equal, because people have different interests internally. Those whose jobs are dependent on exports are liable to do better thanks to trade deals than those whose jobs aren’t. People’s oxen get gored asymmetrically when it comes to trade agreements, and I think that’s what engenders some of the political pushback against them. And more pushback comes from the Democratic side, obviously, because of the role of labor unions—and I think it’s true that free trade agreements tend to advantage capital over labor.Now the argument that economists make—and it’s logical, but it’s politically hard to sell—is that when we trade with other countries, they’re going to get richer, their middle classes are going to grow, and these new middle classes are going to want to buy stuff from us. So when we empower their spending power, that helps jobs in the United States, it helps everybody, raises all boats. But the practical question is: How many decades do we have to wait until their middle classes are wealthy enough to buy our stuff? So the theories don’t fare so well down in political trenches, do they?JMH: That’s right. We haven’t done a sizable trade agreement in quite a long time, which proves your point. One of our first free trade agreements was with Canada. We export a lot to Canada; we make a lot of money that way. The traditional markets in Europe we generally do pretty well in (when their economy is working, which was a long time ago). But when was the last time we did a big trade agreement where exports were a real possibility? You look at most of the FTAs of recent years, and they’re with smaller economies. And we just don’t export that much anyways, so people are saying, where’s the return? It seems that we’re just throwing things away without any real return. The big markets are going to be China and India, ultimately. But I think the waiting is about over; with China now moving toward the largest middle class the world has ever seen, they will be consuming a lot more of our goods. They like American goods, we generally lead the way in terms of innovation, and when they have more buying power (which they will) they’re going to buy more of our products. So I think trade, and exports specifically, will be one of our most important engines of growth in the years ahead.TAI: Tyler Cowen makes the same argument, and he’s made it persuasively in our pages. It’s just hard to sell politically, because you’re frontloading the pain and the benefits only come down the road.JMH: It is a tough sell politically, no doubt about that. But if I were Governor or Mayor of a big city, I would be working with Washington to try and fashion some kind of export policy that would ensure that we had an edge in the export game with the rise of China and their consumption model, which will begin playing out with cars and consumer electronics. Again, they like our products; they’re just harder to get in because of market access issues, and because consumers just haven’t had the wherewithal to buy. That’s going to change.TAI: We may have an even harder time getting into India. The Indians are changing their way of thinking about economics, too; they’re not pure London School of Economics anymore, but it’s still a very protected economy.JMH: With India, as you know, we’ll see what Prime Minister Modi is able to do. He was a strong Governor of Gujarat, and he did a lot of good things there. But the states are so much more powerful in India than the provinces are in China, who all have to report up through the party line. The Indian states are really powerful: Maharashtra is a state, Gujarat is a state, these are powerful players. The center-periphery balance is almost the opposite of what you find in China.TAI: It’s an interesting comparison, absolutely.Last question for now, please. You said you were a practitioner and not a theorist, but I wanted to ask you a general theoretical question anyway. Let’s talk about federalism. When you look at the history and the current structure of American federalism, do you think it’s overbalanced toward the center? And if so, what kinds of practical things would make sense in rebalancing it, in keeping more resources and problem-solving authority at the state level?JMH: You can’t govern a state without reflecting the view that we’re way too centralized and overbalanced toward the Federal government at the expense of the states. Each state has own constitution, and is its own sovereign entity in theory, but the long arm of Washington seems to be in every one of your cookie jars.A healthy federal arrangement enables the competition of states; if you’re a Governor, you’re always looking around to find best practices. You’re looking at those in your own neighborhood and beyond for best practice in education, in land-use management, in tax policy, in infrastructure innovations, you name it. You’re looking not at Washington. “If only I had” what such-and-such a state had, you would say as Governor; “If only I had the freedom or flexibility to do this in education policy or this in land use policy, we would be a better state, in terms of our ability to make the economy really soar.” But Federal centralization puts a lot of things out of reach just because of how the money flows to and back from Washington. So I am certainly in favor of greater autonomy for the states in certain policy areas where Washington has achieved greater reach than anyone envisioned.TAI: There’s even a philosophical advantage to thinking that way, it seems to me, beyond the merely theoretical. We have this blue vs. red problem, as we all know. But if states did more than the Federal government de facto allows them to do today, then we could be both blue and red at the same time. People in Rhode Island could have the blue-style government they seem tom prefer, and people in Nebraska could have their red-style. The health care needs of a community in some rural place in Wyoming are not going to be the same as they are in Boston, so trying, for example, to create a national health care policy is, it has always seemed to me, just a bad idea in principle. It’s a straightjacket that depresses policy experimentation and innovation; it’s a way of thinking the flies in the face of rational subsidiarity.JMH: It’s a bad idea, I agree. And it’s now just about health care. How you manage land and schools and energy issue; the one-size-fits-all approach just doesn’t work very well. It does take the element of competition out of public policy, as you suggested. Because if you don’t have to compete, if everything major aspect of domestic policy becomes wedded to a one-size-fits-all model, who cares about coming up with better ideas? I love the notion of the competition of the states, the incubators of democracy. It’s very real when you’re a Governor, and it’s a race to the top, not a race to the bottom. And that’s how it should be, but you’ve got to have the flexibility from Washington to make that race a successful one.TAI: Thank you so much, and I’ll say both “Mr. Ambassador” and “Governor”—since you’ve done both.JMH: You’re most welcome; it’s been a pleasure.