Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 80

The Noose Tightens on Moscow

Two new sanctions initiatives are about to hammer an already battered Russian economy. The first is the bipartisan congressional momentum this fall for new Russia sanctions legislation, and the second is the State Department’s announcement this week of sanctions related to a recent Russian chemical weapons attack. These punitive measures are not only warranted but necessary, as Russia’s conduct on a range of malign activities has not abated.

Russia’s economy is already struggling. The country’s GDP is still far below 2014 pre-Crimea invasion levels, the ruble sank to a two-year low this week, and outflow of capital from Russia increased by 20 percent in the first half of 2018. Thus, it is no surprise that Russia’s leadership is upset over the prospect of facing harsher economic measures in the coming months.

While the Trump and Obama Administrations have applied financially coercive measures on the Kremlin over the past four years, measures to change President Putin’s decision-making have not had the desired impact. That is why the Senate is now seriously considering moving forward with targeting Russia’s sovereign debt.

Such a move would not punish financial institutions that currently hold Russian debt (though they would devalue the debt held), but it would stop U.S. institutions from investing in new Russian debt. Putin has historically relied on these sorts of investments in particular to bail out key sectors of his economy.

By constricting Russia’s access to foreign investments, the Kremlin’s financial flexibility is hampered. Other important steps under consideration in the Senate include cyber sanctions, deeper energy sanctions, and various other measures to enhance our ability to counter Russia’s hybrid warfare.

This will build on previous congressional measures. The April 6 sanctions targeting Russian oligarchs had a significant impact on the Russian economy with billions lost amongst Putin’s inner circle and their companies. While some derided the wide scope of the initial oligarch report mandated by the Countering American Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), it has caused the type of fear and uncertainty in the Russian market that a more constrained list likely would not have caused. Merely being on the initial list has made many of Russia’s tycoons international pariahs. Further, the oligarch report that was delivered to Congress had a classified annex. Where appropriate, Congress could seek to have names in the annex be declassified and made public. Sowing uncertainty amongst Putin’s cronies should be a bipartisan goal.

In addition to these measures on Capital Hill, the State Department announced on Thursday its imposition of sanctions in response to Russia’s use of a nerve agent against former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. The sanctions draw their authority from the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act of 1991 (CBW Act). The first round of sanctions are relatively mild; Russia won’t mind that the United States is prohibited from providing foreign assistance or selling them weapons.

But other measures are more severe. Russia will have 90 days to allow on-site inspections by the United Nations, and will need to provide reliable assurances that it will not conduct such attacks in the future and that it is no longer using chemical or biological weapons. Russia will almost certainly refuse, making it more likely that more onerous sanctions could be put into place.

Then, come November, the CBW Act calls on the President to choose three sanctions out of a list of six possibilities. This includes prohibitions on multilateral development bank assistance, prohibitions on U.S. bank loans, further restrictions on exports and imports, downgrading or suspension of diplomatic ties, and severing of ties with Russia’s state-owned airline Aeroflot. While there are certain cutouts and waiver authorities, if fully applied these sanctions would be unprecedented.

While Russia exports almost two-and-a-half times more to the United States than the United States exports to Russia, the impact of trade restrictions on certain industries such as aviation could be great. For instance, Boeing relies on Russia’s titanium producer, VSMPO-Avisma, which exports 70 percent of its products. When the Russian legislature (the Duma) proposed banning these exports earlier this year, VSMPO-Avisma revolted and warned that 20,000 Russian jobs would be in jeopardy. The Duma stood down.

U.S. exports of farm, pharmaceutical, and technology products to Russia would also likely be impacted. Severe trade restrictions would harm both nations, but for key sectors of Russia’s industrial base, the result could be catastrophic.

Meanwhile, Russia’s growing financial isolation has a political impact. Recent polls found that only 16 percent of Russians approved of Putin’s foreign policy, and Putin’s overall approval rating dropped to 67 percent. Prime Minister Medvedev’s approval rating has also dropped to a historic low of 31 percent.

Putin’s foreign policy is the reason Russia is in this predicament. Russia illegally invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea. In Syria, Putin has aided and abetted every bit of the Assad regime’s atrocities, all the while letting Iranian forces entrench themselves further in the Levant.

The Kremlin also continues to help finance North Korea, and as a recent report shows, it is doing so in part by allowing new North Korean slave labor into Russia. Just last week, the U.S. Treasury Department designated a Russian bank facilitating transactions for the Kim regime.

Closer to home, the Kremlin has been engaged in “pervasive efforts to undermine our democracy,” according to DNI Director Coats, and continues to target everything from critical infrastructure to our election systems ahead of the midterms this fall.

As Putin’s expansionist foreign policy persists a decade on, the Trump Administration continues to increase the costs. When Secretary Pompeo testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month, he indicated that the Administration was supportive of sanctions measures that would target the Russian ruling elite and the economy at large.

The White House, along with a bipartisan group of legislators, are now on a path to not only increase Putin’s pain, but hopefully elicit a change in course.

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The Triumph of the Prison Yard

In October 1921, as the Bolsheviks prepared to launch a massive social engineering project that would kill millions, Vladimir Lenin, speaking at the second All-Russian Congress of Political Education Departments, coined the bedrock principle of Marxist power politics, encapsulating in two words the binary nature of tyranny: Kto kogo? (pronounced “KTO-KahVO” in Russian, and literally translated as “Who gets whom?” in the sense of prison yard politics.) Today, more than a quarter century since the collapse of the Soviet empire, Lenin’s dictum lives on, not just in post-Soviet Russia but also in the West, where it has morphed into a modern day categorical imperative of extremist politics that has all but displaced what remains of civil discourse. Though always at home with the hard Left, the kto-kogo principle has since permeated across the political spectrum in the West. In the process, the center—once the preferred agora for democratic discourse where the citizenry would negotiate the boundaries of political compromise—has been all but hollowed out.

The neo-Marxist unmaking of Western politics and the attendant deconstruction of Western culture—both the fruits of the long-running and mutually reinforcing projects of the post-1960s left in Europe and in the United States—have reached the point where group identity politics has begun to crowd out the foundational assumptions about individual citizenship and the functioning of republican government. This is reinforced by the decomposition of discursive language across the West. The increased monopolization of Western educational systems by neo-Marxists, most prominent in higher education but also by now solidly entrenched in elementary and secondary schools’ curricula, continues to deepen the disconnect between what remains of the bourgeois culture and a utopian postmodern ideal of a borderless open society of morphing identities, relativized ethics, and fluid loyalties. The college educated are less and less willing—or even able—to speak the language of the populus, all but ensuring that intergenerational communication across the West, so vital to cultural transmission, will eventually grind to a halt. Today the foundational values of future Western elites and those of the mainstream of society have already become disconnected to the point where the most basic terminology concerning belief systems is fast becoming untranslatable.

In academia, Derridean postmodern “textuality,” which not long ago used to rule the day, has been superseded by neo-Marxism, in no small part because the former eschewed larger “social justice” issues, levitating above the here-and-now into a rarified “self-referential, recursive” space. In hindsight, Marx continues to have a much more profound effect across academia than the postwar French nihilists, as faculty hires and curricular changes in humanities departments at American colleges and universities in particular have skewed in favor of ethnic and gender studies.

The neo-Marxist ascendency is not limited to university campuses. The reluctance of a large number of politicians to explicitly tie the writings of Karl Marx and his overall legacy to the organized repression and murder perpetrated by multiple communist regimes since the beginning of the twentieth century remains puzzling to say the least. Lest you missed it, in May an 18-foot-tall mega statue of Karl Marx was donated by China to Germany and unveiled in the city of Trier to commemorate the German’s 200th birthday, occasioning laudatory comments about the man and his oeuvre from such luminaries as the head of the European Commission. It was a bizarre spectacle protested by locals in Trier, but almost uniformly praised by the commentariat.

Meanwhile, in the increasingly fragmented media, serious reporting has been overtaken by politicized editorializing. In an era when bursts of ever-coarser tweeting, the intentional over- and underreporting of events, and even outright manipulation based on the outlet’s political bias are increasingly the norm, the citizenry is left with an ever-smaller pool of usable information from which to form an opinion on the key political and cultural issues of the day. Today, the West is at a point where the systemic foundations central to democracy may soon be displaced by the triumph of a set of elite norms—norms that purport to be rationalist but are adhered to by their boosters with religious fervor—making political compromises ever-harder to reach.

To appreciate the extent to which decades of neo-Marxist dogma and practice have crept into public discourse in Western democracies, one has to factor in not just the decline of standards and manners, but the gradual disappearance of the overall sense of reciprocity that is indispensable to the functioning of a democratic society. The Leninist mindset has triumphed first and foremost at the level of elite culture in the West, where a growing coarseness and deep sense of entitlement have so completely poisoned the public discourse. As though channeling Vladimir Mayakovsky’s vision of what a revolutionary proletarian language should sound like, the public sphere has been brutalized by the mainstreaming of prison culture, and the lacing of music, movies, television and increasingly everyday conversations with expressions intended to shock rather than to communicate. The disappearance of the general acceptance of a dress code and other accoutrements of public engagement once deemed basic is further evidence of the overall deterioration of the public sphere now shaped by the post-1960s neo-Marxist revolutionary zeal.

At the core of the neo-Marxist agenda ascendant across the West is the implicit conviction that the individual, who is the building block of the modern democratic state, will eventually be displaced and supplanted by a collage of group identities, be they racial, ethnic, gender or class. Amidst uncontrolled immigration flows, the debasement of the value of citizenship is being presented as inclusivity and non-discrimination. Finally, the erstwhile commitment to free speech and open debate, with the goal of persuasion through reason and the marshalling of superior arguments—the very foundation of the Western democratic tradition—has been replaced by the Leninist desire to annihilate one’s opponent. And so amidst the deepening political chaos in the West, the kto-kogo imperative ultimately means that the outcome is not a reasoned argument but the crude binary: “we” win, “they” disappear.

There is still time for Western democratic societies to stop the neo-Marxist revolutionaries in their tracks. But this will require courage to speak plainly about the need to restore the value of citizenship, as well as a take-no-prisoners determination to preserve the centrality of the individual and the attendant primacy of mutuality in a democracy over and above claims made by any groups pleading special treatment.

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A Report From The Trade Wars

In a trade war, one folly begets the next. Take Donald Trump’s opening shot: a punitive tariff of 25 percent on steel. Alas, what is supposed to shrink an endemic trade deficit and intimidate rapacious foreigners has hit hardest at home. While U.S. steel manufacturers are gaining protection from more efficient competitors, the country as a whole is footing the bill.

The mechanics are all too familiar. When domestic steel producers like U.S. Steel and Nucor immediately raise prices to fatten up their profits, thousands of steel-using companies take a hit. Nucor has just reported its second-largest earnings in history. No wonder its CEO, John Ferriola, has clapped his hands in delight: “The tariffs are working.”

True, but only for the stockholders and 140,000 workers in the steel-making industry. The losers are the 6.5 million who turn out stuff made from steel: cars, construction machinery, farm equipment, and so all all the way down to soda cans and razor blades. As Nucor celebrates windfall gain, Ford has just reported a fall in profits by one-half. General Motors has issued a profit warning, pointing to a 33 percent surge of steel prices.

What’s next? Jobs will be cut or exported. Trade barriers invariably prompt retaliation. And American companies will leapfrog over them, setting up shop abroad.

For example: Harley-Davidson, hit by EU counter-duties, is planning to move the production of its “hogs” destined for Europe to Thailand. These machines would not be subject to Brussel’s double-digit tariffs on U.S.-made bikes. To shift production to Asia would be a perfectly rational move for Harley, but a deadly blow for the company’s workers in the Rust Belt who voted for Trump in 2016. The President thinks that he is “really smart.” The upcoming midterms may issue a different verdict.

That’s in part because trade wars tend to exacerbate crony capitalism or, as Trump puts it, “the swamp.” Companies hit by the steel tariffs are free to plead for exemptions, and as of now, around 20,000 appeals for relief have flooded into Commerce. But Nucor, U.S. Steel et al. know how to work the levers of political power. They are pressing the Trump Administration to deny exemptions. Having captured extra profits—unearned ones—they want to lock in the bonanza, never mind the 6.5 million workers who are staring impoverishment in the face.

There is a good chance that the steel-making behemoths will win this mano-a-mano. As the New York Times reports, Nucor and U.S. Steel “have successfully objected to hundreds of requests,” putting to use their “deep ties to administration officials.” This whole tale reads like anti-capitalist agitprop, but the evidence of influence-peddling is hard to deny. The President who pledged to “drain the swamp” is actually feeding it. This is crony capitalism à la Russia in the citadel of free markets.

Protective tariffs to serve the wellbeing of the entire nation have been the promise. Yet trade constraints only fill the coffers of privileged groups while harming the nation. Acting like a tax, duties raise the price of imported goods and lower real income for tens of millions of consumers. This is bad for the country, and a boon for those who can harness the government for their own interests.

Nor does the folly end here. To help America’s farmers hit by Chinese counter-duties on pork and soybeans, Trump is readying $12 billion in relief—welfare for America’s efficient producers who were doing just fine before Beijing’s retaliatory tariffs kicked in. Naturally, a plethora of other industries will clamor for compensation, and so the U.S. Chamber of Commerce warns that aid package may swell to $40 billion. As Forrest Gump famously put it: “Stupid is as stupid does.”

Let’s turn to the macro side of this farce. The Trump Administration has declared trade war for the express purpose of shrinking an endemic U.S. trade deficit. A trade surplus has not existed seen since 1975. Theoretically, the gap should have begun to narrow when the President hammered Europe and China with his punitive tariffs. But look again: in June, the deficit widened dramatically by 7.3 percent.

Economists are not surprised. All told, tariff walls don’t make a difference. The real drivers are macroeconomic. Deficits yawn when a country consumes more than it produces or the government spends more than it takes in—which is precisely the case for the United States. Logically, imports must make up for the difference.

Add to this logic the recent facts: a booming economy boasting 4.1 percent growth, a stronger dollar and a runaway federal deficit under Trump. In FY 2016, it was $585 billion; in FY 2018 it was $833 billion. The faster a country grows, the more it will import; the same goes for profligate government spending. Both inject more purchasing power into consumers’ wallets. Finally add a rising dollar that stimulates imports as well, because foreign goods become relatively cheaper. This is not rocket science, but Economics 101.

Economics 101 also teaches that everybody loses in a trade war. Certainly, America’s consumer and worker are not winning, as this string of follies shows. What’s in it for them as they watch the prices of cars, refrigerators, washing machines and lawn mowers rise? As those who toil in export industries look at layoffs, and farmers plow under soybean fields? It takes a “stable genius” like the 45th president to defy economic logic and kick his electorate in the shin in the name of “making America great again.”

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Train and Desist

A recent report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) took the Department of Defense to task over its poorly written project proposals for the Global Train and Equip program—basically a $4.1 billion security cooperation fund dedicated to improving our allies’ counterterrorism capabilities. Under an Obama-era directive, Defense and State Department officials are supposed to consider four distinct modules when crafting Train and Equip projects: project objectives (what security gap the project is intended to fill); absorptive capacity (the recipient country’s ability to use the training or equipment provided to it in an effective manner); baseline capabilities (to what degree the recipient country’s forces are already capable of performing the task for which they are being trained or equipped); and sustainment arrangements—that is, how the recipient country will be able to sustain that capacity through its own funds or through continued support from the U.S. government. GAO’s primary finding—or at least the one it went out of its way to highlight—was that these four elements were routinely omitted during the drafting process. While all proposals included information about project objectives and most included baseline assessments, less than half addressed absorptive capacity, and less than three quarters included complete sustainment plans.

This isn’t the first time the Defense Department has come under fire for bureaucratic laziness. In 2016 the GAO criticized the department for being chronically late—almost two years, in some cases—in delivering statutory updates to Congress on the effectiveness of its Train and Equip programs. But underneath these managerial worries is a more alarming finding: According to the new report, only eight of the 21 aid programs examined by the GAO showed any improvement in their defensive capabilities under the DoD’s own internal scale. Even in those eight, the results were modest: GAO found that on a five-point scale, six programs moved from level two to level three and just two programs moved from level one to level three.

Together, these programs cost the United States hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Many spanned half a decade or more. Yet for all that, the data is clear: Most of them do not actually work.

The New York Times justifiably homed in on the spectacular inefficiencies described in the report, but the results here are hardly surprising. U.S. security cooperation efforts have been failing to produce their intended outcomes for years, in large part because these programs seek to accomplish too much in places where the likelihood of success is slim. The important point is that despite new and concentrated efforts by the Defense Department and State to be more judicious when deciding which Train and Equip programs to fund, the vast majority still don’t deliver.

The GAO had some guesses as to why. Citing interviews with agency officials, it noted that the primary obstacles to operational effectiveness—project design weaknesses, equipment suitability and procurement issues, partner nation shortfalls, and workforce management issues—were “consistent with the challenges noted in our April 2016 report.” Each category contained several headline-grabbing examples: body armor and helmets were inconsistent with the average size of partner nation soldiers. Bright orange life jackets were procured as tactical equipment for units that required camouflage. In one particularly egregious incident, a lack of equipment maintenance had resulted in warped gun barrels.

Pat of the problem is that the Global Train and Equip program has grown too rapidly for intelligence officials to keep up. Small staff teams within the Pentagon, geographic combatant commands, embassies, and elsewhere are being asked to manage triple the number of cases as they had in previous years—not that they had been doing a flawless job before, but the added cases have made mistakes even more likely. The turnover associated with the new Administration, the civilian hiring freeze, and the mass exodus within the State Department have only made matters worse. It’s no surprise, then, that the majority of Train and Assist Programs aren’t working as advertised. What is surprising is that those with the power to change the system have largely failed to do so. While the GAO reports shows some improvements when it comes to drafting complete project proposals, this has not translated into a higher success rate for security cooperation projects. It is, I think, rather strange to be more concerned with the integrity of paperwork than the actual programs said paperwork describes.

Indeed, the fact that improvements in proposal-writing haven’t corresponded to improvements in outcomes suggests that the ineffectiveness of Train and Equip owes less to poor planning than to poor conception. After $4.1 billion in spending, we still haven’t figured out which sorts of projects work and which ones don’t—and that means even the best laid plans are likely to go awry.

I asserted last year that the security cooperation enterprise was failing to capitalize on the tremendous amount of money and energy being poured into its various programs. Since 2000, $316 billion in U.S. government funds has paid for security cooperation programs in nearly every country around the world. That includes everything from $2.5 million to improve partner nations’ legal systems to $250 million for border security in Iraq and Syria. (Good luck with that one.) The question I raised then, and the conversation I hoped to generate, was why: Why did U.S. Presidents, Congress, and the U.S. military insist on using security cooperation, a hybrid of diplomatic and military power, as the first resort when it came to applying force abroad? Why did the many architects of Train and Equip routinely fail to consider cultural factors when creating programs? Why were there so many stakeholders for security cooperation but no overarching leader?

And why did the U.S. government continue to ignore advice from dozens of experts it paid to tell it how to improve security cooperation? Certainly not for lack of feedback. In 2015, the Congressional Research Service produced an excellent report that found that success in Security Cooperation endeavors largely depended on the objectives in question. Victory in war or managing regional security, they found, was rarely achieved through security cooperation, but programs meant to build alliances or institutional linkages were reasonably effective.

Meanwhile a 2014 report by the RAND Corporation found that while there was a correlation between U.S defense aid and reductions in partner state fragility, the effect size did not increase with additional funding. In fact, the least expensive programs were often the most effective, particularly when they focused on training and educating security forces. By contrast, Foreign Military Financing (FMF), interest-free loans for the procurement of military equipment that often take up the lion’s share of security cooperation funds, had no impact on state fragility.

None of this seems to matter to Congress, which continues to fund foreign defense aid despite ample evidence of its ineffectiveness. Consider that assessments of the Global Train and Equip Fund for fiscal years 2013 and 2014 were not even submitted to Congress until September and December 2015 respectively, even though Congress had already allocated $675 million in funds for Global Train and Equip projects that year alone. This was more than double the previous year’s $302 million. Congress essentially poured money into a program no one knew would work, then poured even more in without bothering to check whether the initial investment had paid off. If DoD is the poor student who hands in incomplete assignments months after the deadline, Congress is the lackadaisical teacher who hands out A’s without ever checking the homework. Needless to say, students rarely change their ways under such an incentive structure.

It’s not all bad news, of course. As noted earlier, some progress has been made with regard to bureaucratic efficiency and internal discipline. In 2016 the GAO found that the Defense Department was rarely including required modules in its project proposals; by 2018, while still not fully compliant, DoD had made great strides in incorporating the required elements into the majority of its projects. Moreover, it is worth noting that those responsible for adjudicating the effectiveness of security cooperation efforts appear to be doing so honestly. Speaking from personal experience, there is often a desire to make excuses for foreign trainees who have improved significantly from their own particular baseline but remain operationally under snuff. Those tasked with evaluating Train and Equip programs might therefore be tempted to exaggerate the results of failed or underperforming initiatives, but that doesn’t seem to be happening thus far. Another piece of good news is DoD’s recent release of 2019’s Security Cooperation Consolidated Budget Display report. In its own words, “This inaugural budget display is DoD’s first step toward more transparently demonstrating how the Department plans, programs, and budgets for programs and activities to align with the Department’s strategic objectives.” In surprisingly dramatic language for a government report, it refers to DoD’s efforts as “once-in-a generation institutional reforms that align strategic guidance with resource allocation and a qualitative/quantitative evaluation process to maximize return on investment.”

Taken together, then, the arc of U.S. Security Cooperation efforts is bending toward greater transparency and accountability. That’s a good thing, all else equal. Significantly, however, it is does not appear to be bending toward greater effectiveness. While DoD should be applauded for taking seriously its responsibility to provide lawmakers with honest information about security cooperation, the information it’s provided thus far hardly justifies Congress’s voluminous spending on Global Train and Equip. Indeed, honest assessments of these programs don’t seem to make much difference to lawmakers one way or the other, their harsh rhetoric notwithstanding.

Perhaps this is because the U.S. military is still seeking ways to win two wars it began decades ago against poorly equipped insurgencies. Even the names of these operations—Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Inherent Resolve, and Operation Freedom’s Sentinel—hint at the fact that victory is not the goal. Rather, the goal is to stay the course, sunk cost fallacy be damned. As with warfare, so with foreign aid: A lack of success is not grounds for program termination, at least as far as the Pentagon is concerned. Simply being there, even when that’s ineffective or even pernicious, is sufficient to justify the cost.

If this sounds like spending lavishly to make sure the windshield wipers work on a car that has no windshield. . .welcome to Congress.

1There was a gap of almost three years for reports to Congress on the Global Train and Equip fund. Reports for 2013, 2014, and 2015 were all turned in over a period of four months from September 2015 to January 2016.

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Suffer the Little Children: The View from El Paso

As one gazes down a thousand feet from the highest point on El Paso’s Scenic Drive, it’s almost impossible to discern any frontier separating this sprawling, dun-colored westernmost Texas city from its Mexican neighbor, Juárez. From this vantage, the two metropolises are an identical and unbroken whole, save for Juárez’s tiny, gaily painted homes and a colossal vermilion X-shaped steel sculpture by the renowned Mexican artist Sebastián that is visible for miles. But altitude and distance obscure the formidable boundary one readily apprehends from close up—a 20 foot-high steel fence version of the border wall that Donald Trump has incessantly called for is already in place here, vigilantly guarded by hundreds of border and immigration control agents.

It wasn’t always thus. Between 1902 and 1974 an electric streetcar regularly ran between El Paso and Juárez, facilitating the easy passage of workers and shoppers in both directions (so much so that beleaguered Juárez retailers, losing local customers to rival American stores across the Rio Grande, eventually pressured their city government to shut down the line). Yet even when the modern Paso del Norte border was at its most porous, it was never completely open, given the various restrictions and quotas in place throughout most of the 20th century.

To be sure, thousands of people still cross in both directions every week for commercial and personal reasons. Even with a border fence/wall whose rusted steel plates look in some places like Utah Beach on D-Day, the El Paso-Juarez-Las Cruces area is in many ways an economically, culturally, and socially integrated “Borderplex” featuring the daily movement of a huge number of goods and people every day. But as Veronica Escobar, the Democratic congressional candidate for Texas’s 16th District, observed recently in the New York Times, “[E]ven as El Pasoans and our southern neighbors have built up a vibrant economy, politicians from Washington and other places far from the border have made our region the centerpiece of their efforts to restrict immigration.” Since the militarization of the local border commenced in 1993 with “Operation Hold the Line,” the El Paso-Juárez boundary has steadily and inexorably become a moat, into which traumatized Mesoamerican children, along with the parents from whom they have been snatched, are currently tumbling.

The Museum of Immigration Restriction

After driving through the sere brown mountains that rise in the midst of El Paso, one arrives at the modest, isolated building that is the U.S. Border Patrol Museum. It is at once an informative and disquieting institution, with its uncritical placards describing and at times implicitly lauding the discriminatory immigration codes the Border Patrol has been called on to enforce over its century of existence, such as the self-explanatory 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the mid-1950s “Operation Wetback,” which saw the arrest and deportation of more than a million illegal Mexican laborers (the anti-Mexican slur for an illegal immigrant who crosses the Rio Grande is repeatedly rendered without comment).

[image error]When I visited recently, at least half of the museum’s visitors were Hispanic and conversing in Spanish among themselves. The two staff members on duty were Latina as well. They were pleasant and spoke Mexican-accented English. I wondered what they thought of a prominently displayed 1929 photograph of two armed, crisply uniformed officers triumphantly looming over a tiny, sad-faced Mexican boy perhaps six years old apprehended in El Paso, accompanied by what was meant to be a humorous caption: “The Border Patrol’s ‘smallest’ catch.” It is almost too obvious to note the continuity between this nine decade-old photo and the recent similar images of Hispanic children who have been taken from their parents to be deposited at far-flung detention centers.

As the museum proudly notes, the U.S. Bureau of Immigration established the embryonic “Mounted Guards” in 1904 to interdict illegal immigrants from China who were attempting to enter the United States at the Texas-Mexico border. Headquartered in El Paso, the Mounted Guards slowly expanded over the next two decades as additional exclusionary statutes were enacted. Congress passed a 1917 law that barred entry of virtually all Asians, a 1921 statute that capped total immigration at 350,000—the previous year the number had exceeded 800,000—and finally the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 (at which point the agency was formally dubbed the United States Border Patrol), which almost completely shut out Southern and East Europeans, who since the 1880s had been coming to America by the millions.

Summing up the eugenically inspired sense of national peril (indeed, Congressman Albert Johnson, co-sponsor of the 1924 bill, was the honorary president of the Eugenics Research Association), Calvin Coolidge warned, “There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons. Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races the outcome shows deterioration on both sides. Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.”

The Border Patrol was vigilant in stopping the newly forbidden ethnic groups, including (mostly East) European Jews. In fact, during the 1920s enough illegal Jewish immigrants came up through Mexico, sought to slip illegally past the El Paso border, and were apprehended by U.S. authorities that Rabbi Martin Zielonka of the city’s Temple Mount Sinai attempted, with only modest success, to encourage large-scale permanent Jewish settlement in Mexico. But by the end of the 1920s, the Border Patrol’s energies refocused primarily on illegal Mexican immigration as well as south-of-the-border smuggling. This focus remains to the current day, as the bulk of the museum’s exhibits emphasize—makeshift, weather-beaten ladders, rafts, motorcycles, and even gliders confiscated in various regional arrests.

The Border Patrol Museum includes a gift shop that sells insignia hats, t-shirts commemorative coins and keychains, as well as uniformed teddy bears, each adorned with an official badge. Across from the shop entrance stands a ten foot-tall replica of the Statue of Liberty, next to a poster proclaiming “Never Forget” in honor of the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. There is no reference whatsoever to “The New Colossus,” the 1883 poem Emma Lazarus dedicated to the then-uncompleted statue and to the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” But the omission is unsurprising, as the poem’s theme—certainly as it has come to be understood over the years—runs diametrically counter to the Border Patrol’s interdictory vocation.

The Internment Camp

About an hour’s drive east of the Border Patrol Museum sits the remote and expansive Tornillo Port of Entry. The crossing gets little traffic going in either direction—a source of deep disappointment after some $133 million was spent on its construction—but its isolated location adjacent to farmers’ fields, at present verdantly carpeted with alfalfa, is precisely the reason why the U.S. Department of Homeland has situated a prison-like tent city there to confine hundreds of adolescent Latino boys whom immigration agents have apprehended traveling solo or separated from their families.

It is around 100 degrees Fahrenheit and blindingly sunny, typical for this time of year, as I park my car and begin walking around the Port’s perimeter, which is demarcated by a 12 foot-high chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. Guards are not readily in evidence; indeed, much of the fenced-in expanse has an eerily deserted look from the outside. It is hardly the approximation of a “summer camp” as claimed by a high-ranking immigration official in recent congressional testimony. Rather, the overall appearance is reminiscent of a Boer War-era internment camp—what the British, like the Spanish before them in rebellious Cuba, called a “concentration camp”—and as late as 1936 President Franklin D. Roosevelt would candidly employ this term in suggesting that his staff draw up contingency plans to deal with Hawaii’s ethnic Japanese in the event of U.S.-Japanese hostilities.

FDR’s dark suggestion came to fruition six years later with Executive Order 9066. The term Konzentrationslager was by then already widely associated with Nazi Germany, so most of the Japanese residents and citizens who were rounded up were detained in what were called “internment camps.” While there were some true “enemy aliens,” most were incarcerated out of paranoia spiced liberally with racism. One of several camps was set up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in an area that today includes a pleasant residential neighborhood and a large community pool where my children learned to swim a decade ago. Only a modest marker in a nearby public park acknowledges the wartime travesty.

Among those in the Southwest who were traumatized by the Roosevelt Administration’s policy, which also touched German- and Italian-origin immigrants, was the late Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM), who grew up in Albuquerque as the son of Italians who had arrived in America decades earlier. Domenici’s mother came as a toddler but was never properly naturalized as a U.S. citizen—which made her an illegal alien and was enough to get her arrested and detained by Federal agents in front of her terrified young son. In 2006, Domenici told the story in an impassioned speech to his surprised fellow Senators, in which he advocated passage of a humane comprehensive immigration policy reform bill. The bill was ultimately defeated, with opposition pressure growing so great that Domenici and 18 other Republicans and Democrats who had initially supported the bill switched their votes at the last minute from yea to nay.

On the day I visited the Tornillo camp the temperatures were so sky-high that no amount of water consumed would adequately ameliorate the physical effects. Nonetheless, a group of boys energetically played football in a dusty field near their khaki-colored tent barracks, seemingly oblivious to the scorching heat. The scene was poignantly reminiscent of World War II photographs of British prisoners of war disporting themselves in the Stalag. Many industrial-size air-conditioning units and huge portable generators rest in the open air on wooden pallets, waiting to be deployed. They serve as silent confirmation of recent news reports that the facility, which was ostensibly slated to be closed down by July 14, is not soon going away.

The Sanctuary

Back in the heart of El Paso I paid a visit to Annunciation House, a private, Catholic-inflected non-profit refugee shelter that has been operating since 1978, located about a half-mile from the Good Neighbor International Bridge. The organization inhabits a century-old, roughly rectangular two-story brick building that, like Doctor Who’s time-traveling police callbox, seems considerably larger on the inside than on the outside. With its energetic response to the Trump Administration’s immigration crackdown, Annunciation House has of late achieved national and even international coverage of its efforts to provide food, shelter, legal aid, and other services to those who manage to make it over the border into the United States. Founding director Ruben Garcia has become an unlikely celebrity with his fearless and persistent efforts to escort on foot across the Paso del Norte bridge refugees seeking asylum who are being physically restrained by armed officers from touching U.S. soil.

I first learned of Annunciation House through a Temple Mount Sinai service project. Visitors are greeted by enthusiastic bilingual staffers, all unpaid volunteers, who bustle about in the controlled chaos of the shelter’s receiving room-cum-office and the adjoining walk-in food pantry. They efficiently organize donated goods, including at least a dozen large boxes brimming with fresh white mushrooms, to which I add a sack of potatoes and some chocolate cookies.

Volunteers reside in Annunciation House alongside the refugees who cycle through the shelter; it is integral to the organization’s philosophy of living in solidarity with those they serve. Two of them pause briefly from their work to rest and chat. Kevin is a lanky young Midwesterner who has just graduated from college and will be entering law school this coming autumn, where he intends to focus, unsurprisingly, on immigration law. He has been a full-time volunteer since May. James, a wiry, quietly intense professor of sociology at a small Catholic college in northern Kentucky, was a full-time volunteer for years but now comes down to El Paso whenever there’s a refugee crisis. They are both friendly and self-effacing, but their seemingly nonchalant talk about their strenuous daily effort hints at a deep, spiritually grounded commitment, as per Annunciation House’s mission statement, to live out “a Gospel spirit of service and solidarity,” accompanying “the migrant, homeless, and economically vulnerable peoples of the border region.”

Their credo and comportment provide a powerful echo of the American Settlement House movement more than a century ago, with its grounding in the Social Gospel’s admonition to aid the vulnerable in emulation of Jesus’ words and deeds. This call inspired Jane Addams to found Hull House in a poor Chicago neighborhood as a place of refuge, education, and counsel: “easily accessible, ample in space, hospitable and tolerant in spirit, situated in the midst of the large foreign colonies which so easily isolate themselves in American cities,” as she put it in 1892. In fact, Mexican immigrants who had taken up residence in Chicago in increasing numbers began frequenting Hull House in the aftermath of World War; by the 1930s Hull House was holding an annual “Festival of Mexican Culture.”

Annunciation House has traditionally kept a low public profile while carrying out its work, which enables the organization to operate without sparking political controversy. As a result, over the decades U.S. immigration authorities have quietly reached out to the shelter and transferred immigrants whom they have detained and preliminarily processed, since it’s far less costly to house them there than in official facilities while they are being prepared to be sent off to sponsoring families around America. To the staff’s relief, the current rash of unsought publicity has not caused any political blowback, so far. It has greatly increased donations of food, clothes, hygiene supplies, and money.

Ordinarily, many families with children make their way through the facility, but this came to a virtual halt when the Trump Administration began carrying out its child-separation policy. Now that a combination of political pressure and judicial rulings have ended the separations (for the time being), the staff are expecting at least 500 people to arrive at Annunciation House via ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) in the near future, as immigration officers complete the process of transporting children from their detention sites all around the United States, save for the several hundred families dubiously declared ineligible.

During my early afternoon visit there were about a dozen refugees, a mix of neatly if unassumingly dressed men and women in their mid-30s, conversing in Spanish in low voices as they sit on sagging couches in the common room. They responded with understandably weary smiles when I bid them “buenas tardes.” It was the proverbial calm before the storm, as James and Kevin expected a substantial influx of guests within the hour, with more slated to arrive during the night. This pattern became routine at Annunciation House for the next several weeks.

Let me be clear: Every state has the right to control its borders and to decide who, how many, and on what schedule they should be admitted. This is as true for the United States as it is for any other country. At the same time, America’s history as a land of opportunity and a haven for refugees puts it on a different moral-historical plane than other states, at least for those of us who still embrace the notion of American exceptionalism and Ronald Reagan’s vision of “a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace.” But the basic, indeed defining, concept of a viable state having the capacity to maintain secure borders and exercise discretion over entrants is incontrovertible.

The central question is: How do we decide what constitutes how many, and on what schedule? And then how should we carry out that policy? It is here that things get particularly sticky, given the noxious molasses of racism and xenophobia coursing throughout American history and the difficulty of separating it out, both intellectually and instrumentally, from the necessary task of making and enforcing rational immigration policies.

I have always maintained, including in classrooms full of Hispanic immigrants and their children at New Mexico State University where I teach, that completely defensible arguments concerning the devising and implementation of immigration quotas—including reducing as necessary the number of legally admitted immigrants per year—can be made on the basis of economics, costs of social service provision, infrastructure and environmental stresses, preservation of respect for the rule of law, and national security. Furthermore, circumstances change so that potential immigrant cohorts who are an asset at one juncture can legitimately be perceived as a liability at another. The devil is in the criteria, the fraught historical context, and, crucially, the tone.

Moreover, cavils aside, George Borjas makes a serious, micro-economics-based argument that a constant, unregulated influx of unskilled, low-skilled, and even skilled workers willing to accept rock-bottom wages hurts the job prospects and salaries of unskilled, low-skilled, and skilled blue-collar U.S. citizens and permanent residents. We can argue numbers and weigh macro- versus micro-economic benefits and liabilities to various constituencies, but a good-faith immigration policy debate must be conducted with a maximum of analytical rigor, humility, and mutual respect on all sides: It is not a morality play with only saints and devils.

Borjas isn’t the only one to have made this argument. For example, American Federation of Labor founder Samuel Gompers, himself an Austrian-Jewish immigrant, inveighed against Chinese immigration to the United States on precisely these grounds: “[I]t is of the utmost importance that the American workman,” he declared, “should do all in his power to prohibit the importation of those who would still further press him down.”

But Gompers also illustrates the perils of blending the rational with the xenophobic. He added in the same presentation—a spirited debate with Harvard president Charles Eliot in early December 1905 at Madison Square Garden—that he favored the exclusion of the Chinese because “his ideas and his civilization are absolutely opposed to the ideals and civilization of the American people. Never in the history of the world have the Chinese been admitted into a land save to dominate or to be driven out. The Chinaman is a cheap man.” Gompers underlined the vehemence of his Sino-xenophobia on another occasion, averring that “[r]acial differences between American whites and Asiatics would never be overcome. The superior whites had to exclude the inferior Asiatics, by law, or if necessary, by force of arms.” There is, of course, an obvious irony in the Jewish Gompers proffering a racist anti-Chinese immigration argument that is essentially identical to that made against Jews by Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard just a few years later (not to mention Henry Ford as well as Hitler, a fan of both American writers—Godwin’s Law does not always apply).

The rational-xenophobic intermixing that vitiated Gompers’ immigration restriction arguments still occurs in our own time, as demonstrated by the imbroglio several years back over right-wing political economist Jason Richwine’s tendentious assertions in his doctoral dissertation that non-Caucasian (except Asian) immigrants’ average IQs are “substantially lower than that of the white native population” in the United States, and that “the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.” Adverse publicity over Richwine’s questionable scholarship ultimately led to his resignation from the Heritage Foundation, which pointedly disavowed his ideas. George Borjas, it must be noted, was on Richwine’s Ph.D. committee at the Kennedy School of Government (my former employer), although he dismissively stated after the fact that his advisee’s “focus on IQ is a bit misguided.”

The bottom line is that there has been and continues to be a segment of the population—today especially it is white, working-class, less-educated, and older—that has been driven into the waiting arms of Donald Trump over, at least in part, an overpowering sense of encroachment and even existential threat over the arrival of new cohorts of immigrants, whether economic migrants or refugees. It didn’t have to be that way, but, unfortunately, as Thomas Edsall puts it, quoting pollster Stanley Greenberg, “The Democrats have moved from seeking to manage and champion the nation’s growing immigrant diversity to seeming to champion immigrant rights over those of American citizens.” Trump moved opportunistically and ruthlessly to fill the vacuum of responsible policymaking that this has created.

I have severely limited sympathy with the cultural displacement anxieties of the cohort that conservative writer Kevin Williamson has taxonomically described as the latter-day version of peasants (to be sure, he used the same term, in a less flattering context, in relation to Mexican immigrants). One can be deeply sympathetic over the dreadful state into which much of rural as well as urban blue-collar America has collapsed without indulging the prejudices that many of its residents hold.

Again, tone matters greatly. President Obama’s immigration and expulsion enforcement policies were vigorous to the point that liberal immigration advocates denounced even him. But even as they did so, no one believed that the President of the United States harbored racial animosity toward Mesoamericans or countenanced it in others, much less that he had made it a central plank in his appeal for support. But from the moment Donald Trump rode down the escalator of Trump Tower in June 2015 to vilify Mexicans coming illegally into America as “people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists,” he drew a blood-red line between his predecessor’s policy and his own.

The fact that so many of Trump’s assertions are easily proved to be factually wrong and are, from the vantage point of almost any longtime resident of the Southwest, risibly preposterous underscores the racism and xenophobia underlying Trump’s appeal for votes. Once in office, his repetition of these lies became a core element of ginning up support from his political base and so have continued to do even more harm as time has passed. It has clearly energized and, at least up to a point, legitimized some of the most vicious historic tendencies in American politics, society, and culture. A pitch-black straight line runs from Trump Tower in June 2015 through Charlottesville in August 2017 and back to the White House thereafter.

Pope Francis’s emissary from the Vatican’s Migrant and Refugees Section, visiting El Paso as I composed this brief eyes-on account, declared in the Pontiff’s name that it is “immoral to criminalize people seeking refuge and asylum and separate their families.” His message found a welcome audience, as did a video message from Pope Francis to El Paso that is prominently posted on the website of the city’s main newspaper: “A responsible and dignified welcome of our brothers and sisters begins by offering them decent and appropriate shelter. . . . Defending their inalienable rights, ensuring their fundamental freedoms, and respecting their dignity are duties which compel one and all.”

Almost 70 percent of Americans agree with the Pope’s admonition, including of course most El Pasoans (immigrants make up one fourth of the city’s population, which in turn is some 80 percent Hispanic). The problem for El Paso, for America, and of course for the immigrants themselves, is two-fold. The first problem is the simplistic “Passion Play” depiction of a complex issue amenable to reasoned if vigorous debate by analysts of good will, which has encouraged more than a few people to fall in line behind blatant bigots. But the second, considerably greater problem is that the most prominent and vociferous member of the minority that disagrees with the Pope’s exhortation happens to be a blatant bigot: the current President of the United States.

When Emma Lazarus wrote The New Colossus, about eighteen months after the anti-Semitic May Laws were promulgated in Russia, she specifically had Jewish refugees in mind. However, as Esther Schor points out in her biography of Lazarus, her poem’s original meaning eventually migrated in the hands of others. Schor along with Paul Auster notes that the placement in 1903 of a plaque bearing the sonnet on the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal enlarged and universalized the scope of the “huddled masses” to encompass all immigrants. The result was to reframe and generalize both the Statue—which had originally been intended to symbolize shared American and French republicanism—and Lazarus’s subtly ethnically particularist poem. Another three decades on, The New Colossus reverted back toward its original Jewish-centric theme, as “a Slovenian-American immigrant named Louis Adamic….seized upon the sonnet” as well as Lady Liberty to serve as an exhortation to an American “generation poised to receive thousands of refugees from Hitler’s Europe”. After World War II, the context changed yet again. Schor notes that the plaque bearing the sonnet was given a more prominent place at the entrance to the Statue; and then a series of shifts, marked by the 1949 Broadway debut of Miss Liberty, with music composed by Irving Berlin, re-generalized the meaning of both poem and statue, thus blurring the distinction between refugees and economic migrants simply seeking the American Dream. That blurring remains today. See Schor, Emma Lazarus (Knopf, 2017 [orig. ed. 2006]), pp. IX-XI, 186, 254–5.

The post Suffer the Little Children: The View from El Paso appeared first on The American Interest.

Left Rule or Mob Rule?

With its hire of Sarah Jeong, a plucky, own-the-trads style leftist whose tweets range from irreverent (“#CancelWhitePeople”) to misandrist (“kill more men”) to downright anarchic (“why don’t we ever talk about banning the police?”), the New York Times has taken us one step closer to a dark future, where racial tribalism is the norm and racial liberalism the exception. Polarization has been hastened— identity politics, intensified—but the most important point is that both forces have now been institutionalized by the nation’s premier editorial page. It’s not clear yet what happens next, or, frankly, what should; what is clear is that the damage is cutting ever deeper, and recovery, if possible, will not be coming anytime soon.

For its part, the Right is up in arms about yet another case of double standards. Meanwhile, the Left is rolling its eyes and trying to convince us that Jeong’s tweets are just satire—a way of parodying white ignorance. In the middle are voices like Reason Magazine’s Robby Soave, who seconds the double standard complaint while also chastising the mob looking to get Jeong fired. “A culture in which people are allowed to seek forgiveness, grow, and go on with their lives without losing their jobs is vastly preferable to one in which armies of trolls are constantly hunting for that one career-ending tweet, statement, or association,” he writes, no doubt speaking for many on the political center.

Rage against the outrage machine is good advice, agreed. And it’s true that if the Times caves now it will set a terrible precedent, for itself as well as for the public square. But it’s equally true that not caving in this case will do its own damage, at least as bad and maybe worse than anything we’d be likely to suffer from Jeong’s ouster. That’s because Jeong’s ascendance to the Times does not represent a double standard so much as a triple one, which will undermine the media, exacerbate cultural malfunction, and, yes, harm free speech.

This triple standard inheres in the fact that Jeong has said more outrageous things about more people, and with much more consistency than a host of censured right-leaning pundits, most of whom rate orders of magnitude higher on the civility scale than, say, Ann Coulter or Milo Yiannapolous. Whereas The Atlantic fired Kevin Williamson for having once floated capital punishment as an acceptable penalty for abortion—a view he later walked back, or at least qualified, in spite of its resonance with several conservative premises—the Times has stood by a woman whose tweets, taken literally, called for white genocide on not one but three occasions; encouraged abolishing the police and assaulting them to boot; and compared the opinions of white men—all white people, in fact—to dogs urinating on fire hydrants.

Should she be “taken literally?” That presents another set of challenges. Jeong’s explanation that, no, she doesn’t really think every white person in America is trash, that her tweets were at worse a form of “counter-trolling,” is a Trumpian response in our Trumpian times. “Do we think Sarah Jeong actually enjoys chasing down and bullying white men for fun?” asks Libby Watson over at Splinter News; “Jeong’s tweets were clearly jokes, not policy proposals,” asserts Slate‘s Inkoo Kan. Fair enough. People say things they don’t mean, and our online panopticon is notoriously bad at spotting context. Still, the sense of bigotry-for-me-but-not-for-thee is hard to ignore.

According to Jeong’s defenders, however, all this is beside the point. “What makes these quasi-satirical generalizations about ‘white people’ different from actual racism,” Zach Beauchamp writes, is “the underlying power structure in American society.” Even if Jeong did want whites to be rounded up, beaten, and exterminated, that wouldn’t constitute racism under his logic, because racism equals prejudice plus power—something which Jeong, as an Asian-American woman, supposedly lacks.

The irony, of course, is that in her new role at the Times, Jeong will have plenty of power. She will have the power to recruit writers she likes, and to discourage ones she doesn’t. She’ll have the power to craft op-eds that inform public policy and shape public opinion. And she’ll have the power to express her views—her prejudices—in the nation’s most read editorial page, provided she’s a bit more polite about them.

Those powers add up to something of which most Americans can only dream: a controlling hand in the culture industry. Here the hypocrisy kicks into overdrive. For years progressives have argued that it is precisely this industry that needs, in their words, “decolonizing,” insofar as it produces the social and ideational conditions for racism. But if that’s right, the question of whether Jeong “really” wants to cancel white people is irrelevant: because intent isn’t necessary for oppression. All that’s needed is a discourse that delegitimizes legitimate complaints and shunts aside pressing concerns, allowing them to go untreated, out of sight and out of mind, by the ruling class.

That would make tweets like the following somewhat problematic:

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Here is Sarah Jeong, Harvard Law graduate and soon-to-be New York Times opinion editor, insinuating that the problems of the white working class don’t matter as long as there are any white supremacists in the world, period. If you’re a caucasian thirtysomething guy from the Rust Belt, this ought to scare you: A publication that has establishment liberalism on speed dial just hired somebody who believes that your day-to-day struggles should command zero public attention at best, that job loss and drug abuse and suicide are only of interest when they affect people who don’t look like you, and that your complaints about these things must reflect your insufficient hatred for Nazism.

If that’s not power plus prejudice I don’t know what is. Nor, it would seem, do most progressives, who spent much of last weekend attempting to explain away Jeong’s statements with increasingly elaborate contortions. “When she writes ‘dumbass f***ing white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants,’ she is not ‘equat[ing whites] with animals,’” assures Beauchamp. “Rather, she is commenting on the ubiquity of (often uniformed) white opinion on social media.” No caveats. No calls for civility. Here we have a textbook case of the Left being racist by its own self-constructed standards, but as soon as this is pointed out, we’re told the tweets have somehow been misunderstood, the trolling taken deliberately out of context.

Yes, whites do enjoy a certain kind of privilege most blacks, Asians, and Latinos don’t. Yes, real bigots exist: the Richard Spencers and the cross-burners. And yes, we should be worried about them. But the wisest thinkers on the Left have always understood that power operates in different ways across different networks—and hence, that a group’s domination in one sphere does not necessarily entail its domination in the others. Who rules Wall Street may not rule Congress, who rules Congress may not rule culture.

Or, as the broadway musical Avenue Q once put it, “the Jews have all the money and the whites have all the [political] power.”

But journalism? That belongs to the Left, which means keeping Jeong at the Times can only be Pyrrhic victory. The decision may rebuke the heckler’s veto, it may please some free speech absolutists, but it will also make right-wing conspiracy theories more believable, strain the media’s credibility, and deepen our nation’s most polarizing divides. It will validate the existence of what some less-than-savory folks on the internet call “The Cathedral”—folks who really don’t like liberalism— while confirming the suspicion, more and more widespread, that democracy is indeed dead, and the people filing the police report have killed it.

Progressives, meanwhile, will lose an important incentive for defending free speech, because the usual quid pro quo argument—we get Krugman, you get Stevens—no longer applies. “Who decides what’s too far” used to be a rhetorical question, its indeterminacy a powerful reason for supporting speakers with whom you disagreed. To shut down dissent was to run the risk that you yourself could be shut down once the other guy was in charge, and so Left and Right could achieve a kind of detente, held together by—what shall we call it?—“mutually assured deplatforming.” Post-Jeong, however, the logic underpinning that consensus has weakened. Both sides now know who draws the line, in nearly every case, and, spoiler alert, it ain’t sensible centrists.

By all means denounce censorship on procedural grounds. Call out illiberalism where you see it, on campus or in Breitbart or in the “Failing” New York Times. But don’t imagine that it will make much difference, or that a few civil libertarians are going to somehow save the day through sheer force of principle. More and more, the choice is between Sarah Jeong and mob rule. Which, really, is no choice at all.

The post Left Rule or Mob Rule? appeared first on The American Interest.

Social Media and Censorship

This week’s decision by Facebook, Spotify, Apple, and YouTube to take down material posted by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and remove his Infowars channel points to an acute dilemma faced by all of the social media platforms today in reconciling their commitments to both freedom of speech and to social responsibility toward the democracies that shelter them. They can reconcile these objectives over the long term if they (and we) do two things: first, accept the fact that they are media companies with an obligation to curate information on their platforms, and second, accept the fact that they need to get smaller.

The large internet companies have maintained that they are simply neutral platforms on which their users can exchange information freely with one another. As such, they do not have an obligation to filter that content for accuracy, social consequences, and the like. They are supported in this position by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which exempts these companies from liability for what appears on their sites provided they do not play the role of traditional media companies like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, or Fox News. Section 230 was put in place both to protect freedom of speech and to promote growth and innovation in the tech sector.

Both users and general publics were happy with this outcome for the next couple of decades, as social media appeared and masses of people gravitated to platforms like Facebook and Twitter for information and communication. But these views began to change dramatically following the 2016 elections in the United States and Britain, and subsequent revelations both of Russian meddling in the United States and other countries, and of the weaponization of social media by far-Right actors like Alex Jones.

The idea that the big internet platforms are not media companies has never really been tenable, and the contradictions in their public protestations of neutrality have become ever more apparent over time. From the beginning the platforms realized they had to filter out certain kinds of content, like terrorist propaganda and child pornography, and did this by way of changes to their terms of use.

But there was a much bigger problem that they themselves were responsible for. Their business model was built on clicks and virality, which led them to tune their algorithms in ways that actively encouraged conspiracy theories, personal abuse, and other content that was most likely to generate user interaction. This was the opposite of the public broadcasting ideal, which (as defined, for example, by the Council of Europe) privileged material deemed in the broad public interest. User attention is the most precious commodity on the internet, and platform algorithms increasingly determined what users were likely to see or hear.

Traditional media companies curate the material they publish. They do this by setting certain standards for fact-checking and journalistic quality. But some of the most important decisions they make regard what information they deem fit to publish in the first place. They can decide to place stories about desperate Syrian refugees, transgender discrimination, or the travails of Central American mothers above the fold, or alternatively they can emphasize crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, Hillary Clinton’s email server, or political correctness on university campuses. Indeed, conservative complaints about bias in the mainstream media are less about deliberately faked news than about selective reporting that reflects the ideological preferences of media companies like the New York Times.

This is the most important sense in which the big internet platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have become media companies: They craft algorithms that determine what their users’ limited attention will focus on, driven (at least up to now) not by any broad vision of public responsibility but rather by profit maximization, which leads them to privilege virality. This has produced a huge backlash that came to a head this spring after the revelations of the role that Facebook played in allowing Cambridge Analytica to access its data to help the Trump campaign. By the time Mark Zuckerberg testified to Congress in April, there had been a dramatic shift in public approval of his company and of the broader industry. The most visible consequence of this shift in political climate has been this week’s banning of Alex Jones.

Jones and his supporters have immediately responded to the ban by charging the platforms with censorship. In one sense this charge is misplaced: We worry most about censorship when it is done by powerful, centralized states. Private actors can and do censor material all the time, and the platforms in question are not acting on behalf of the U.S. government.

But Jones has a point with regard to scale. Facebook is not just another social media company; it has become a worldwide behemoth that in many countries (including the United States) has become something like a monopoly supplier of social media services. There are many countries in which Facebook has displaced email as the central channel of communication, and where it functions much like a public utility. Jones will not be able to reach nearly as wide an audience moving to different platforms as he can on YouTube and Facebook.

This then points directly to the other big problem with today’s social media universe, which is the size of the dominant platforms. Facebook today exercises government-like powers of censorship despite the fact that it is a private company. The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal can in effect censor Alex Jones by refusing to carry his content. But because there is a pluralistic and competitive market in traditional print media, this doesn’t matter; Jones’s followers can simply choose different media outlets. The same is not true in today’s social media space. I personally find Alex Jones completely toxic and am not unhappy to see his visibility reduced; that will be good for our democracy. But I am also very uncomfortable with a private quasi-monopoly like Facebook making this kind of decision.

Hence, it seems to me, public policy ought to encourage two parallel developments. First, the large internet platforms have to openly acknowledge that they are indeed media companies whose decisions can have major consequences for the health of American democracy. This will necessarily entail changes to the legal regime surrounding them, particularly Section 230 of the CDA.

But this acceptance of social responsibility will necessarily entail a second consequence: The platforms need to get smaller. Put another way, today’s internet needs to get more diverse, decentralized, and competitive so that people have an alternative to Facebook and YouTube. In a different political culture and climate, one could imagine state regulation of Facebook as a kind of public utility, but this will simply not be possible in the America of 2018 for reasons of political polarization and our anti-statist proclivities. So the real alternative is to promote a more decentralized social media market that more closely resembles the existing legacy media markets of newspapers and television. Whatever you think of them, Alex Jones’s followers should have a place to go.

To some extent this decentralization is already happening. The number of users of Facebook and Twitter are either leveling off or declining, and in certain markets they have been deserting to other encrypted platforms like Telegram or WhatsApp. I suspect that much of the future content that will be scrubbed from the big platforms will not be evenly balanced between Left and Right, since in my view much of the most toxic material has been generated by conservatives. So the platforms will be in the crosshairs of the conservative media, and they are likely to lose users from this quarter. This will not be a good thing from the standpoint of their shareholders, but it will be a good thing for American democracy.

It is also clear that our anti-trust laws need to be updated for the social media age. There has been a relentless growth in the size of the large platforms due to network externalities: that is, networks become more valuable to their users the larger they are. Even if the U.S. government were to decide to try to break up Facebook, it is not clear how it would do so. At in the case of the AT&T breakup, it is likely that a baby Facebook would eventually grow to occupy the same space as its parent.

Nonetheless, there are other decisions that could be made to limit platform size. I do not think it was a good idea for Facebook to have been allowed to buy Instagram and WhatsApp, or for Google to have acquired YouTube. These acquisitions seem to have been made as much to forestall potential competition as to profit for network economies, and they could be legislatively reversed. We need to have much more attention focused on modernizing our anti-trust laws in light of the challenges of the internet age. Then too there is the international dimension. Facebook’s monopoly power extends across many different countries, a challenge that has been met in authoritarian countries like China by simply banning it. That is obviously not a good outcome either, but the way forward is at this juncture far from clear.

Social media and the internet platforms have been a great source of free expression, debate, and political participation, as well as being the leading edge of an innovative American economy. But private sector actors can flourish only within the context of a broader democratic polity, and as such they have a responsibility to help maintain the health of that political system. This was something well understood by traditional media companies, and is a lesson to be re-learned today.

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Ranked Choice Voting: “As Maine Goes…”

Two weeks before Maine’s June primary—the first statewide election held using ranked choice voting (RCV)—David Brooks penned an opinion column in The New York Times headlined, “One Reform to Save America.” Brooks argued that ranked choice voting, particularly in multi-member districts, could cure the evils that have led to a polarized two-party system in America. Beware a reform that promises too much.

At least since French political scientist Maurice Duverger published Political Parties more than seventy-five years ago, political scientists have preached that single member districts lead to two-party systems. My own research with John Bibby, exploring why the United States maintains a two-party system despite widespread dissatisfaction with the choices it presents, similarly emphasizes institutional factors as the driving force behind two-party competition.

But would altering election rules really encourage minor party candidacies or end the polarization in our current two-party system? Is ranked choice voting—in which candidates are incentivized to compete for second and third-choice support from a politically diverse electorate—the best way to achieve these ends? And would the end result be worth it?

Who came up with ranked choice voting—and why

The English pamphleteer Thomas Hare first proposed ranked choice voting in the mid-19th century as a way to accommodate minority interests while guaranteeing majority rule. The single transferable vote (STV) system used in Ireland and other countries is essentially an RCV system used for districts with multiple seats. To be elected, candidates must reach a minimum number of votes known as a quota. Voters cast an initial ballot for their first-choice candidate, then, once one candidate has achieved the specified minimum, any surplus votes that candidate received are transferred to each voter’s second-favorite candidate, then third-favorite, and so on. The process continues like that until all the seats have been filled; if no single candidate reaches their quota, the least popular candidate is eliminated and their votes are again redistributed to each voter’s second-choice candidate. Many argue that STV is preferable to straight proportional representation in parliamentary systems, because citizens can choose individual candidates as well as their party preference.

A number of U.S cities instituted similar schemes during the Progressive Era. RCV was implemented for municipal elections in communities as small as Ashtabula, Ohio and Norris, Tennessee, as well as large metropolises like New York City and Cincinnati. In each case, reformers pushed for the change to encourage broader representation, particularly of immigrants, and in each case the establishment fought back. During the Red Scare in the aftermath of World War I and again in the McCarthy era, establishment politicians raised fears about the sorts of extreme parties that might gain seats under RCV. By the end of the Eisenhower Administration, of the 24 cites that had once chosen city council members by ranked choice voting, only Cambridge, Massachusetts continued choosing city officials via an ordinal ranking scheme.

Starting in 1992, a group of scholars, reform activists, and public officials came together, first as the Center for Voting and Democracy and now under the name FairVote, to push for electoral reforms of various types, including Electoral College reform, implementation of proportional representation, and ranked choice voting in multi-member or single-member districts. The stated mission of FairVote is to promote fair elections, defined as elections in which every vote counts and all voters are represented. They seek alternatives to winner-take-all elections and instant run-off voting as an alternative to plurality and traditional run-off elections. Since 2000, RCV has been adopted in about a dozen, mostly liberal cities, including San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Portland. 

Ranked Choice Voting in Maine

Despite this grassroots popularity, however, there had not been a single statewide experiment with RCV until Maine’s gubernatorial elections this year. Maine has a long history of electing governors with a plurality of the vote but not a majority. In nine of the 11 gubernatorial elections since Maine elected independent James Longley in 1974, the winner has lacked a majority; in five of those elections, the winner polled less than 40 percent of the vote.

Ranked choice voting advocates have been introducing RCV bills to the Maine legislature ever since 2001, none of which has made it out of committee. However, after Governor Paul LePage won election to the Blaine House by fewer than 10,000 votes over Democrat-turned-independent Eliot Cutler and Democrat Libby Mitchell in 2010, earning fewer than 38 percent of the votes cast, RCV advocates decided to bypass the legislature and change the process through referendum. Thus began a soap opera in which reformers tried to circumvent the establishment and the establishment—especially the Republicans—fought back.

RCV activists began circulating petitions to get the reform on the ballot prior to the 2014 election, which LePage won, again without a majority. In November 2015, Maine’s Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap certified that the petitioners had enough signatures to place their referendum on the November 2016 ballot. Voters approved the reform by over 30,000 votes, 52 percent to 48 percent, in that election.

But that was hardly the end of the story. In February 2017 the Maine State Senate (controlled by the Republicans) asked the Maine Supreme Judicial Court for an opinion on the constitutionality of RCV as it applied to general elections for State Representative, State Senate, and Governor. In May the Justices unanimously ruled in an advisory opinion that using RCV in those elections violated the Maine constitution, which specifically calls for election by plurality. That provision had been inserted in the Maine constitution, first for the House, then the Senate, and eventually for Governor, after a series of elections in the late 19th century in which a majority was not achieved; one, in 1878, nearly led to bloodshed, and allowing plurality winners was a compromise to avoid catastrophe.

Chastened by the court’s ruling, Maine’s state legislature passed a bill that put off implementation of ranked choice voting until 2021. But the RCV activists did not accept that solution. The Maine constitution contains a people’s veto provision that permits citizens to petition to veto a law passed by the legislature. If the petition is certified, the law does not take effect until after citizens have the opportunity to vote on the veto. In March of this year, Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap certified that the petitioners had been successful in collecting enough signatures; and, therefore, the legislation postponing the implementation of ranked choice voting until 2021 would be on the June ballot. Until that vote, the original referendum was law—and thus the 2018 primaries (which had not been considered by the Supreme Judicial Court) would be run under RCV.

The Republican majority leadership in the State Senate challenged this outcome in both state and Federal courts, and in each case, the jurists ruled that the vote should go forward. Thus the June 12th primary was the first statewide election held under ranked choice voting. This meant Maine had to come up with a plan for implementing RCV in very short order, a thankless task made all the more difficult by the legislature’s refusal to appropriate funds to help facilitate the transition. So the first statewide experiment with RCV took place under less than ideal conditions, to put it mildly.

What does RCV purport to do? What problems exist?

Proponents of ranked choice voting say the system advances basic democratic values. Seven arguments are especially popular:

Winners under an RCV system have majority support. While the winner might not have achieved a majority on the first round of voting, after successive candidates are dropped from the counting, the eventual winner does have a majority on the last round.
Voters are given more choices, and they can support these choices without the fear of wasted votes. Under a plurality system, voters fear that votes for their “real” first choice would be wasted and might even help the candidate they favor least. Think of the votes for Ralph Nader in Florida in 2000, votes that otherwise might have gone to Al Gore. Under RCV, if no one achieves a majority in the first round, a vote for the candidate with the fewest votes is redistributed to the candidate the voter would have favored had his or her first choice not been on the ballot. Thus, the voter cast his or her vote for his or her preferred candidate, but the vote was not wasted even though it did not help what turned out to be the least preferred candidate.
RCV minimizes strategic voting. Because there is less potential for wasted votes, voters do not have to vote for the “lesser of two evils” as their first choice. For this reason, RCV arguably enhances freedom of conscience during contentious elections (a freedom quite a few voters might have appreciated in 2016).
Negative campaigning is discouraged. The logic here is that candidates will not want to attack their rivals, because people are unlikely to cast their second-choice vote for the candidate who has has attacked their first choice. In other words, civility becomes a rational political tactic, whereas name-calling and attack ads are penalized.
RCV should lead to more moderate candidates. Under a plurality winner system, candidates on the ideological fringe have the advantage because they can win by attracting only a relative small subset of the total electorate. Under RCV, by contrast, second and third choice votes can swing the election, so candidates are rewarded for courting voters outside their immediate base. This would be especially welcome in primary elections, where voter turnout tends to be more partisan and ideological than in general elections.
RCV should lessen the impact of money in politics. The argument here is that too much money is now spent on negative advertising. Under RCV, the emphasis should be on positive campaigning, especially grassroots campaigning, reducing overall costs and limiting the role of lobbyists in elections.
RCV saves money over traditional run–off primaries. If citizens vote only once, elections need be run only once. Thus, if a state or community has a system of run-off primaries in place, as do many southern locales, RCV would save money.

All these claims are hotly contested by opponents of ranked choice voting, who adduce a number of counterarguments:

Under RCV, the winner does not necessarily poll a majority of the votes cast. Because of voter fatigue, voters do not always rank all of the candidates in a race. Therefore the “majority” winner on the last round of counting might not have had a true majority of all of the votes cast; the denominator used to reach 50 percent +1 has been reduced in order to reach a majority winner. (There is also a mathematically esoteric possibility that the true choice of a majority of the voters does not emerge as the winner under RCV.)
Negative campaigning will not be reduced. Much of the negative campaigning in American politics is done by independently funded organizations, not by the candidates. These organizations do not have the same incentives as the candidates to avoid alienating their competitors’ supporters. This also refutes the claim that campaigns will cost less, since most of the money spent on ads is raised by independent organizations.
Fringe candidates will be encouraged to run, further splintering the electorate and polarizing our polity. This argument is often made regarding multi-member districts, such as those that led to Communist Party winners in New York City in the post-World War I era, though single-member districts aren’t immune either. Even if fringe candidates don’t win, they will likely receive more support under RCV than under a plurality system, precisely because RCV mitigates the traditional concerns about wasted votes. Fringe candidates may therefore achieve greater cultural visibility, reinforcing polarization and crowding out moderate voices.
The system is expensive to administer. While it is undoubtedly true that RCV elections are less expensive than traditional run-off elections, it is also true that they are more expensive than plurality winner elections. The debate is over how much more expensive they are.
RCV has perhaps worked in small locales, but it has never been tried in larger constituencies. Even Ireland and Australian states are small in terms of population by American standards, as are most of the cities in which RCV is currently in use. Opponents in Maine argued that statewide implementation expanded the size of the electorate too much; others would argue that Maine is too small a state to use as a model.
Voters will be confused and therefore not turn out to vote. Turnout, particularly in primaries and midterm elections, is already disappointingly low. If voters are confused by the system of voting, they will be even less likely to vote.

The Evidence from Maine

The experience in Maine resolved some of these debates but left others open. First, it should be recognized that the Maine experiment was with ranked choice voting in single-winner primary elections. It tells us very little about how RCV would function in primaries with multiple winners, let alone in a U.S. general election. Second, none of the candidates in the June election were particularly extreme, so the RCV-favors-moderates hypothesis remains untested.

Those caveats aside, we can still draw some important conclusions from the Maine elections. One key takeaway is that second- and third-choice votes may not matter quite as much as some reformers seem to think. In the GOP primary, Shawn Moody, a businessman supported by Governor LePage’s followers, won nearly 57 percent of the first-choice votes on June 12. Thus, while Republicans noted their second, third, and fourth choices, these votes were never tabulated; Moody won on the first round. In the Second Congressional District Democratic primary, Jared Golden won over 49 percent of the first-choice votes; his major opponent, Lucas St. Clair, won 41 percent, and Craig Olson won under 10 percent. Golden was not declared the winner on election night, but St. Clair all but conceded, noting that he would have to have been the second choice of virtually all of Olson’s voters in order to overcome Golden’s lead. When the second round of votes was tallied, Golden won with more than 54 percent of the vote.

The most interesting race was for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. Four candidates were considered to be the pack leaders: Attorney General Janet Mills was considered the favorite throughout the campaign, but she was challenged by former Speaker of the Maine House Mark Eves, businessman and Iraq War veteran Adam Cote, and by the liberal lobbyist Betsy Sweet, who ran as a Clean Elections candidate and thus qualified for public funding. In addition, there were three other names on the ballot, though none of them received much attention. Mills led Cote by about 6000 first choice votes but was well shy of a 50 percent majority. Four rounds of counting were needed to determine the winner, but despite Cote’s hopes that he would gain votes from lower ranking candidates after they’d been eliminated, Mills held onto her lead and won the nomination.

This brings us to the second takeaway from Maine, which is that RCV is not too complicated for voters to understand. If ranked choice voting were more confusing than plurality voting, we would expect the confusion to show up here, in a crowded, seven-person race, with a higher than normal number of “overvotes”—ballots that are filled out incorrectly and thus discounted. But there does not appear to have been any more overvotes in the gubernatorial primary than in previous elections, meaning most voters understood how the ballots worked. Consistent with that data, a Chamberlain Foundation exit poll found that four out of five surveyed were familiar with ranked choice voting before primary day; 69 percent said they found the process easy to use. Finally, the Maine Secretary of State’s office reported that turnout for the 2018 primary exceeded that of 2010, the last primary in which both parties had contested gubernatorial nominations. Even if RCV is more complicated than a plurality system, that complexity does not appear to deter people from voting.

What about the administrative concerns? Dunlap made a presentation to the National Association of Secretaries of State on Maine’s experience. He said that despite the rushed timetable and lack of resources, the overall process ran amazingly smoothly, though the final tabulations were delayed about a week while ballots were collected from around the state and paper ballots were integrated with those cast electronically. The increased scale did not dramatically decrease RCV’s efficiency.

When it comes to negative advertising and reduced campaign costs, however, the results are mixed. Candidate fundraising was fast and furious right up to primary day. In the gubernatorial primaries Cote raised and spent about $1 million; Mills and Moody each spent around $700,000, and Betsy Sweet spent more than that in public money. These are large totals for Maine races. In addition, EMILY’s List spent $300,000 in the last two weeks of the campaign, much of it in anti-Cote advertising aimed at helping Mills, whom they endorsed early in the race. In the Second Congressional District race, Golden raised over a million dollars and St. Clair about $700,000; St. Clair also benefited from independent expenditures supporting his candidacy. It is hard to argue that RCV reduced the costs of these campaigns.

However, there is some evidence that negative campaigning was less prevalent than normal. Of course, how one evaluates that depends on how one perceives the various campaign ads. Cote ran two ads that he characterized as “contrast” ads, noting differences between his positions and Mills’s record; she countered with an attack ad clearly aimed at him. More significantly, $200,000 was spent by an outside group, reportedly EMILY’s List, which specifically attacked Cote. But virtually all that money was spent in the waning days of the campaign, less a calculated political strategy than a last-minute Hail Mary. On the Republican side, candidates did go after Moody, but not with the rancor one often sees in campaigns like this one.

In the last weeks of the campaign Democrats Eves and Sweet campaigned together, asking voters to vote for them but give the other their second place vote. The Chamberlain Project poll reveals that one in five Democrats was asked by a candidate for a second choice vote if not a first choice vote. That is exactly the sort of positive campaigning RCV was designed to promote.

Were the gains worth the cost?

How one evaluates ranked choice voting depends on your goal. Republicans in Maine oppose RCV not because the system is flawed, but because they do not think that they can elect a true conservative candidate under that system. And they’re not entirely wrong. Ideologically pure candidates facing a group of more moderate candidates are more likely to win in a plurality system than an RCV system, although that’s true on the Left as well.

RCV in multi-member districts would benefit minority groups—racial, ideological, or otherwise—by assisting their path to representation in a legislature; in the same way, it would favor third, fourth, or other minor parties. RCV in single-winner races favors moderates over those at the ideological extremes. Whether one thinks this is a good or a bad thing depends on one’s political preferences; it’s a pragmatic question, not an ideological one.

As noted earlier, RCV in Maine will not be in effect for state elections in the fall; the procedure violates the Maine constitution’s procedures for elections for governor or state legislature. Two independents, one publicly funded and one with personal means to run an effective campaign, have qualified for the Maine gubernatorial ballot in November. The result in November is very likely to be a plurality winner with far fewer votes than needed for a majority. The same dissatisfaction that followed Governor LePage’s original election in 2010 is likely to reappear after this one—no matter who wins.

At the same time, however, Maine’s Federal elections—to Congress and the Senate—will be run under RCV (because the Maine constitution is silent on those races). Independent Senator Angus King is opposed by a Democrat and a Republican; First Congressional District Democratic Congresswoman Chellie Pingree is opposed by an independent as well as a Republican. Most observers predict that the two incumbents will win handily, but what is certain is that the voters will have a choice to cast a ballot without fear of wasting it.

What remains to be seen is how Maine’s citizens will respond to these very different experiences and whether they can mount a campaign to allow RCV for all elections. Then of course there’s the question of how the nation will respond to Maine’s example. For many years a common political adage held, “as Maine goes, so goes the nation,” because Maine voted early in presidential elections and usually ended up supporting the eventual winner. But in 1936, the adage was changed to “As Maine goes, so goes Vermont,” because Maine’s early vote for Alf Landon was copied only by its New England neighbor.

And for decades now Maine has eschewed a winner-take-all vote for the Electoral College, opting instead for a system in which the winner of each congressional district receives one vote, and the statewide winner two votes. Only Nebraska has adopted a similar plan—and so it may well be with ranked choice voting. David Brooks believes that RCV is the reform to save America. Maine has led the way in this experiment, ensuring that ranked choice voting will continue to be used there for some time. But still, the question remains: “As Maine goes,” will others follow?

1Maurice Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activities in the Modern State (Methuen and Co., 1964; original French edition, 1951).

2John F. Bibby and L. Sandy Maisel, Two Parties—or More? The American Party System, Second Edition (Westview Press, 2002).

3Thomas Hare, A treatise on election of representatives, parliamentary and municipal (1859).

4Committee for Ranked Choice Voting, “Maine’s History of Majority Rule and the Adoption of Plurality Provisions.” See also, Michael Shepard, “How an 1880 Maine Insurrection Could Sink Ranked-Choice Voting,” Bangor Daily News, January 21, 2016.

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Putin’s Pension Headache

“I do not like any of the options for raising the retirement age,” commented Vladimir Putin, breaking his conspicuous silence on pension reform. “I assure you,” he told volunteers at an event in Kaliningrad on July 20, “in the government there are few who do.” While Russia has made news in the West of late with its malicious acts in cyberspace and machinations in the Middle East, the singular domestic issue of the day is pension reform. The issue has fomented mass protests in Russia—an outpouring of anger which is the largest Putin has faced over an economic issue since taking power.

So why have Russian authorities embarked on pension reform now, what does it entail, and what does it mean for domestic politics? No, Putin is not about to be toppled. But pension reform is a critical issue for Russia, and one that may have meaning closer to home than meets the eye.

Pensioners and Policies 

There are currently 46.5 million pensioners in Russia, roughly a third of the country’s population. Annual expenditures on pensions this year are set to total 7.35 billion rubles ($120 billion) compared to 16.5 trillion in budget spending. Suffice it to say, this is a large and expensive system. The key problem is a demographic one: Russia’s working-age population, the tax base for the pension system, is decreasing as a proportion of the overall population. In 2010 working-age Russians made up 62 percent of the population. This year the figure is only 58 percent, and that number will only shrink over the next decade. This is not a case of Russia the “dying bear,” as a familiar trope goes; the trend is occurring across Europe as a whole. But it nonetheless poses a particular problem for Putin.

When the Pension Fund of Russia (PFR) operates at a deficit, as it has in recent years, the federal government must transfer funds out of the budget to close the gap. That reduces the fiscal space available for key items such as Putin’s bold spending plans for his current term. It is also a political legitimacy problem: Part of the social contract in Putin’s Russia, at the very least until the economic crisis, was the exchange of political freedoms for prosperity.

There are two components of the pension reform, one of which has received significantly more news play than the other. First is a gradual hike in the retirement age: from 60 to 65 for men and from 55 to 63 for women. It bears note that the current retirement age was stipulated in 1932 and by modern standards is very generous, despite the actual pension benefits being fairly meagre.

Second is a change to the mandatory savings component of Russia’s pension system—roughly equivalent to a 401(k). Under the most recent edits to Russia’s pension code, workers could elect to divert up to 6 percent of the 22 percent payroll tax they face into individual savings accounts, the sort of “nest egg” concept that has been floated in the United States on occasion. The issue with this system was that these accounts were technically property of the state, and contributions to them were “frozen” starting in 2013: The government used these contributions to cover present pension needs instead. Under the new system, with a roadmap expected in the coming weeks, workers will contribute the whole 22 percent payroll tax to present pension needs and be able to save an additional 6 percent—likely on an opt-out basis, to the alarm of some. It is an unofficial mantra for local economy officials that if a policy can’t be made to work on a market basis, rigid laws often do the trick.

A Look at the Numbers

A slew of public polling since pension reform was announced—particularly following the closing of the World Cup—shows warning signs for the Kremlin. According to the independent Levada Center, approval of the Duma sits at 33 percent, approval of the government sits at 37 percent, and approval of Prime Minister Medvedev is at 31 percent. Putin’s approval rating is at 67 percent, low by his standards. Measures of protest potential—a gauge of how liable Russians are to take to the street—should worry the Kremlin as well. Pollster VTsIOM’s protest index is presently at 43, the highest it has been since 2005 (more on that year shortly). Its accompanying measure of personal protest potential recently reached 36, a high since the mass protests that rocked Russia in 2011 and 2012. Another measure by Levada finds 41 percent of Russians believe protests over economic issues are “entirely possible” while 28 percent would personally take part: the highest level these figures have reached since Russia defaulted on its debt in 1998. It can be said that the current reform project has firmly put to rest the Crimean consensus, the massive boost in popularity enjoyed by officials after the annexation of Crimea. We’re back to 2013.

This current reform episode most closely mirrors another, earlier social security push by Putin and his economic team. In 2004 and 2005, they moved to monetize benefits for a number of protected classes. In simpler terms, the aim was to convert non-tangible benefits (cheaper bus tickets, for instance) into direct payouts for veterans, the emergency responders at Chernobyl, and others. The idea was ultimately to save money on administrative costs while also reducing corruption (and allowing the reform and privatization of other utilities). Recipients of these benefits felt aggrieved, and that the new payouts would be of less value than the benefits they had enjoyed. The ensuing protests, largely by elderly Russians, were the largest Putin had faced to date. Then too, his approval figures shrunk, but only temporarily.

Why the Anger? Political Implications

The difference between this protest episode and others is that pension reform is an issue that touches everybody. Protests by independent long-haul truckers in recent years over per-kilometer tolls drew attention, but they represent only a tiny fraction of Russians, who were necessarily spread—and moving—around the country at all times. Election falsification in 2011 angered a then-burgeoning urban middle class, predominantly in Saint Petersburg and Moscow, but anger failed to take root more broadly. In contrast, every Russian expects a pension. For older Russians, steeped in the values of Soviet times, the reform push represents an abdication by the state of something it ought to provide. Said one commentator, the reform push is a “neoliberal coming out” by the authorities. Meanwhile, younger Russians fear paying for benefits they themselves will never receive.

What’s more, all of this follows years of economic stagnation. Though Russia’s economy has begun to recover from a recent low, the benefits of this recovery have been uneven at best. Certain sectors and regions are doing considerably better than others, and consumers, who took the brunt of the crisis in higher prices, have struggled to find their footing: Real wages have continue to flounder and households are increasingly turning to borrowing to maintain their lifestyle. Cuts to benefits enjoyed for several generations are coming at a difficult period for many. Moreover, unlike prior hardships, a pension reform push can’t be pinned on a malicious West seeking to surround Russia. The considerations here are entirely domestic, and the optics are entirely poor. That was no secret to many officials, Putin included, who refused for years to even talk about the possibility of such a policy adjustment.

Despite the anger being directed towards the Kremlin, it is difficult to see how the current protests could spell serious trouble for Putin. For one, they are likely to die down with time, due to the difficulties of persistent mobilization and upcoming August holidays. Second, despite some chants calling for Putin to resign, most anger has been directed towards the policy itself or lower-ranking officials (TV stations and “opposition” politicians have dutifully followed instructions not to mention Putin or Medvedev by name). “Putin, save us from this policy” is just as common a slogan as “Putin is a thief!” Thirdly, Putin has political capital to spend after his recent electoral win. Though his popularity has suffered a blow (for now), Putin remains the most popular politician in a country with no visible alternative. Still, the protests are large, and it is dubious that the current delineation between economic and political grievances can remain clear forever. The buck ultimately stops with the Kremlin.

There and Here

The struggles of an autocrat to keep his people happy while balancing economic realities may seem foreign. So too do angry pensioners turning out to protest the erosion of socialist values in a capitalist modern Russia.

But these concerns may not be as far away as they first appear. The United States, too, is a country with an increasingly large elderly cohort. Though demographic trends in the two countries are for different reasons—America had a baby boom in the 1950s, Russia had a baby bust in the 1990s—the net result is much the same. And like Putin now, though with much more democratic accountability, American politicians will have to make a number of difficult, highly unpopular policy decisions in the years to come. Meanwhile, Russia is contending with the political impact of an economy that has not recovered evenly, particularly in industrial towns and outside major cities.

Russia’s pension issues, in other words, ought to ring a bell. Though the headache is Putin’s today—and tempting as it may be to derive some schadenfreude from his travails—the problem of pension reform will be at our doorstep soon enough.

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No News Is Bad News

Since gaining independence from Britain in 1960, Nigeria has struggled with regional and ethnic conflict. This is hardly surprising, given its origin as a patchwork of smaller kingdoms and tribal states stitched together by British colonial rulers. Over time, that patchwork evolved into three distinct regions, each dominated by a major ethnic group. In the landlocked, largely agricultural north, the dominant group is the majority-Muslim Hausa and Fulani; in the oil-rich, commercially developed southwest, it is the majority-Christian Yoruba; and in the fertile, mineral-rich, yet economically depressed southeast, it is the majority-Christian Igbo.

For most of their history, these three regions had been separated not only by the natural barriers of the Niger and Benue Rivers but also by barriers of culture, religion, language, and loyalty. These were hardly erased with independence. On the contrary, the early 1960s brought coups, assassinations, and counter-coups, resulting in a series of highly unstable dictatorships. In 1967 the conflict grew deadlier when three Igbo-majority states attempted to secede and create their own independent republic, called Biafra. The government in Lagos responded with a brutal crackdown, including forced starvation, and in 1970 the Biafrans surrendered.

In the aftermath of the Biafran War (also called the Nigerian Civil War), the capital was moved from Lagos to Abuja, a planned city in the middle of the country, surrounded by a 2,800-sq-mi swath of savannah called the Federal Capital Territory. The idea was to affirm the government’s impartiality, and perhaps it did. The coups and dictatorships continued, but in the late 1990s Nigeria began the difficult transition to democracy. The present century has seen marginally greater stability, despite pendulum swings between polarized parties and the harsh suppression of recurrent revolts.

The highest-profile revolt (if you can call it that) is of Boko Haram, the radical jihadist group that viciously attacks fellow Muslims in northeastern Nigeria, as well as in the adjoining states of Chad, Niger, and Cameroon. Now split into two factions, each claiming allegiance to ISIS, Boko Haram is only one of many such groups operating in the Sahel, or belt of semi-arid land just south of the Sahara, which stretches from Senegal in the west to Somalia in the east. But Boko Haram may be the most important such group, because as noted by a retired senior commander at AFRICOM, “If Nigeria goes down it would make a giant sinkhole that would suck in six or seven other countries.”

In 2017 nearly 10,000 civilians were killed by Boko Haram, five times as many as were killed by ISIS in Iraq and Syria. And despite the Nigerian government’s rhetorical claims of victory, its efforts to crush Boko Haram have arguably made things worse. For example, the army, reinforced by foreign mercenaries, has driven almost 2.4 million rural farmers from their villages, razed their homes, and placed them in camps guarded by soldiers who extort favors and bribes from anyone attempting to enter or leave. Conditions in the camps are horrific, with frequent rapes of women and children, and thousands of deaths from starvation, thirst, and disease. A recent UN study reports that 71 percent of African jihadists say that their main reason for joining the radicals is corruption and brutality by government authorities. As an aid worker in the region put it to the Economist, the behavior of the military “feeds right into the recruitment strategy [of Boko Haram], which is that the Nigerian government doesn’t give a shit about them. It is like a factory for jihadis.”

Nor is radical jihadism the only form of revolt in contemporary Nigeria. Activists among the Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa-Fulani, Ijaw, and other ethnic groups are demanding changes ranging from greater local control of resources to outright secession. According to political scientist Jideofor Adibe, some Nigerian leaders have been calling for “a Sovereign National Conference to decide if the federating units of the country still want to continue to live together, and, if so, under what arrangements.”

In Adibe’s view, this approach is too top-down; what’s needed is a serious effort to resolve the issues democratically. As he writes: “There has never been a referendum in any of the areas agitating for separation, [so] it is difficult to know whether the leaders of the various separatist groups actually reflect the wishes of the people of those areas or whether the agitations are mere masks for pursuing other agendas.”

Many Nigerians would agree that the best way to deal with separatist demands is to put them to a vote. But there is a problem here, one all too familiar to the world’s liberal democracies. Extreme political fragmentation and polarization are hard to mitigate democratically, because they have such a corrosive effect on the very institutions that make democratic decision-making possible. One such institution is the media. When a country’s sources of information are themselves fragmented and polarized, its political divisions get worse. This is the situation now facing Nigeria.

In its 2017 report on press freedom, Freedom House gave Nigeria a score of just 50 percent. The reasons for this are not self-evident to the Western observer. Nigeria has no Ministry of Information dictating a party line and telling journalists what they can and cannot cover. Nor does it have an overweening state broadcaster ruling the airwaves and policing the internet. Its public broadcasting system, modeled on the BBC, is decentralized and hardly a monopoly. And in general, the media in Nigeria appear quite similar to their Western counterparts: privately owned, commercially competitive, politically diverse. Even Reporters Without Borders (RSF) declares on its website that “Nigeria has more than 100 independent media outlets.”

But appearances can be deceptive. The RSF website also states that “in Nigeria, it is difficult to cover stories involving politics, terrorism, and financial embezzlement by the powerful. Journalists are often threatened, subjected to physical violence, or denied access to information by government officials, police, and sometimes the public itself.” Curiously, RSF offers no explanation of how both statements can be true—that is, how “more than 100 independent media outlets” can exist in a country where journalists are intimidated, attacked, and otherwise prevented from doing their job.

The explanation lies hidden in the wording. Note that the report says “independent media outlets,” not “independent news outlets.” The distinction is crucial to understanding the challenges facing press freedom in the 21st century. The memory of 20th-century totalitarianism causes many Western observers to be especially wary of state-run media using heavy-handed propaganda to indoctrinate the masses in a particular ideology. This still occurs in a few countries, North Korea being the most notable. But it is no longer the main threat.

Instead, the main threat is of powerful officials and wealthy oligarchs using media to entertain, distract, and confuse the public, while at the same time suppressing any news and information that might impinge on their power. In authoritarian regimes such as Russia, China, and Iran, this is done in a planned and deliberate way, through a media system owned and controlled by the state. In a struggling democracy like Nigeria, the process is more haphazard, as corrupt elites—typically politicians and their private-sector cronies—acquire commercial media outlets and through bribery and intimidation strive to turn them into personal mouthpieces.

From the point of view of the average consumer, this new use of media is doubtless an improvement over the old totalitarian diet of mind-numbing propaganda. Just as the Roman emperors provided circuses, so, too, do today’s authoritarian rulers and corrupt elites provide the masses with movies, TV series, reality shows, and “infotainment” about sports, weather, fashion, and celebrity gossip. The masses are also regaled with an entertaining simulacrum of TV news that copies the worst practices of U.S. cable channels: female hosts chosen for their sex appeal; politically slanted coverage accompanied by editorial heavy breathing; “debates” that consist of shouting matches; and endless nitpicking chatter that serves mainly to obfuscate the issues.

American observers, especially those who came of age after the media deregulation of the 1980s, have trouble seeing what is wrong with the media in a partly free country like Nigeria. All the distractions filling the airwaves in these foreign settings is hard to get any distance on, because they look so much like the clutter we have here. But there is a difference. In the West, even in Trump’s America, the clutter still exists alongside fair, accurate, responsible journalism.

Unfortunately, the American people’s access to quality journalism is subject to the same growing inequality that exists in income, education, family life, and all the other indicators of the good life in America. For the literate online news-seeker striving to hear all sides of a story, the digital age is a goldmine. But for the everyday citizen who used to rely on mass-market magazines and network news, access to quality journalism is harder than it once was. Indeed, the lower you are on the socioeconomic scale, the more in thrall you are likely to be to the worst practices noted above.

The tipping point comes not when large numbers of people decide that the existing media are corrupt and biased, but when they decide that there is no such thing as honest, fair-minded journalism. There is such a thing, and it is easy to identify. Just ask a serious reporter in an authoritarian regime or struggling democracy what he or she is not allowed to do. The answer will be clear. Reporters in such places are not allowed to do factually based, dispassionate stories about politics. Nor are they allowed to engage in the sort of investigative journalism that in the West still manages to expose high-level corruption and malfeasance.

These are, of course, the essential functions of a free press as defined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But to perform them, the media require two things: resources and political cover. Resources are needed because quality journalism almost never makes money. And political cover is needed because powerful malefactors will always try to suppress the truth. Something to keep in mind when considering the similarities between the Nigerian media and our own.

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