Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 9

We Need Hard Decoupling

The realization is finally sinking in across the U.S. policy community: The belief in “globalization” as a sure path to modernization has been perhaps the greatest delusion to have seized American elites since the conviction that the United Nations would eliminate the problem of war from the international system. The current coronavirus crisis may have put an exclamation point on this truth by exposing key vulnerabilities caused by farming out critical elements of the U.S. supply chain to China. But the diagnosis and remedy have been clear for a much longer time: We need a hard decoupling from China.

The national security predicament the United States finds itself in has deeply entrenched ideological roots. Until the Trump Administration confronted China, multiple U.S. administrations had fundamentally misread the pathway the People’s Republic of China (PRC) would follow as it used access to Western markets and technology to modernize its economy. Today we have been forced to address the consequences of three decades of massive wealth and knowledge transfers to a power that—left unchecked—could bring about a fundamental structural shift in the international system.

Over the past three decades globalist ideology has fueled the greatest centralization of market and supply chains to date, creating a system in which a single point of failure can disrupt the manufacturing of consumer goods. Apple’s recent difficulties with Foxconn and iPhone manufacturing are just the tip of the iceberg. China accounts for the vast majority of production of rare earth elements, which are vital to consumer electronics. Eighty percent of key ingredients for U.S. brand-name and generic drugs come from abroad, mostly from India and China. But the problem goes beyond consumer goods. In the event of a military conflict—whether in the Pacific or elsewhere—a paucity of diverse supply sources and regionalized distribution chains with built-in redundancies poses an immediate challenge to planners and operators alike. Over the years, this process—which I call the “radical centralization of market networks”—has been accompanied by the seepage of Western technology to China.

While the West’s hard power margins are indeed shrinking, the focal point of the Chinese onslaught is not first and foremost the theft of our technology and know-how. Rather, the principal challenge facing the United States and its allies is one that is internal to our own polity.  It rests on our competitor’s ability to exploit our own set of legacy assumptions about the purportedly inevitable waning of the nation state and the universalization of participatory democracy as a direct consequence of globalization and market-driven modernization across the world. Even though evidence to the contrary has been piling high for the past thirty years, the globalization paradigm still dominates a large segment of U.S. policy debates.

This ideological dimension constitutes arguably the most important vulnerability of the West in its accelerating great power competition with China. During the Cold War, the ideological contest was for hearts and minds; now the struggle has shifted predominantly to our home terrain, where the idea of globalization as a panacea for the presumed systemic ills of the nation state is crowding out alternative solutions. Three decades of assurances from Washington, echoed out of Berlin and Paris, that institutions trump culture and, most importantly, that the best pathway forward for humanity lies in the formation of one global market and one set of democratic principles (notwithstanding the mundane obligatory mantra that “diversity is our strength”) have effectively disarmed our polities when it comes to confronting the reality of resurgent great power competition and predatory behavior by our adversaries. Market access-cum-export-driven modernization was supposed to bring about the eventual democratization of Russia and China; instead, the two countries have adopted revisionist-nationalist and techno-nationalist postures, respectively.

The greatest risk in the current stage of U.S.-Sino competition is not the larger structural inevitability of conflict between a rising and declining power—the much-discussed “Thucydides’s trap” from Graham Allison’s bestselling book—but rather the more urgent and potentially dangerous driver of China’s growing ability to penetrate and shape the U.S. economy, financial and digital spaces, and, by extension, political processes. Beijing’s power to compete with the United States rests on its “transformational capability” that relies on access to American society while its own remains largely contained within a Communist Party-controlled digital landscape. The risk China poses to the United States in geostrategic terms—from the Western Pacific through Eurasia, the Middle East and North Africa, and the High North—extends beyond traditional indices of hard power calculus into the digital domain, where our adversary benefits from access to our networks, and through them to our society.

In the last decade the challenge posed to our national security by communist China has morphed from now-familiar predatory market policies into a military challenge of the kind that may ultimately outstrip anything the United States has seen since the Japanese imperial project of the early 20th century. The signs that China is seriously gearing up for a confrontation with the United States are plain to see, especially in the maritime domain. Though the U.S. Navy remains dominant, Chinese shipyards nonetheless continue to churn out new vessels at an unprecedented rate, the Chinese navy’s missile arsenal is growing, and Beijing is rapidly expanding its overseas port network. The same goes for conventional, nuclear, cyber, and other realms. In short, the PRC is gearing up to launch a multi-theater, multi-domain challenge to the United States.

Chinese techno-nationalism remains largely misunderstood and, more importantly, unappreciated in the West. The society remains insulated and run by the Communist Party. In effect, a 90-million-strong Communist elite controls 1.4 billion PRC citizens, while the PRC continues to leverage the digital era to enhance its economic, political, and ultimately military reach by working through our digital infrastructure, tapping into our educational and research institutions and media—and thus increasingly also our political processes. This leaves the United States with no alternative but to make an effort to disconnect our supply chain from China’s, while at the same time developing regional networks as alternatives to the current model.

The bad news is that decoupling the U.S. economy from China’s may cause short-term pain. The good news is that the United States has alternatives when it comes to the labor market and natural resources, both domestically and across the Western hemisphere. It also has an enduring structure of alliances across the Atlantic and the Pacific that—when firmed up—will give America an unbeatable advantage in its competition with China. The key, however, is to re-examine the dogmas of the past three decades and bring a fresh set of assumptions to the task of understanding where the world is heading: not toward a “global” utopia, but to a destination chosen by self-constituting polities and in alignment with their national interests.

The post We Need Hard Decoupling appeared first on The American Interest.

The Long Ethiopian Century

The Wife’s Tale: A Personal History

Aida Edemariam

Harper, 2018, 336 pp., $26.99

 

The Shadow King: A Novel

Maaza Mengiste

W.W. Norton & Company, 2019, 448 pp., $26.95

In October 2019, Ethiopian Prime Minister and soon-to-be Nobel laureate Abiy Ahmed did something uncommon for a sitting head of state: He released a book. Abiy’s Medemer, which roughly translates to “coming together” in the Amharic language, is not a typical politician’s memoir, but rather a cross between a manifesto and a self-help book. Medemer makes the case for Abiy’s ambitious reforms as a means of modernizing Africa’s second most populous country, while positing a new national ethos for the ethnically diverse and increasingly polarized nation. In a country torn by internal conflict, Abiy is asking citizens to rediscover a sense of common heritage and destiny while embracing political compromise.

The question of history, and particularly how Ethiopians frame their history, should be at the heart of any discussion of Abiy’s agenda. As an Ethiopian friend once opined to me, “History? We have too much history. I would prefer less.” Fair. In its own way, Ethiopia experienced the characteristic upheavals of the 20th century—imperial decadence and decline, fascist invasion, communist dictatorship—as much as any country, along with an appropriately enduring affinity for the VW Bug.

At the dawn of the century, Ethiopia was a multi-ethnic empire that had been ruled for more than 600 years by a dynasty claiming descent from the biblical Solomon. On the eve of World War I, Ethiopia was one of only two African states to have avoided complete colonization by European powers, having successfully defeated an Italian invasion in 1895-96. Italy waged a second, more successful assault under Mussolini in 1935, forcing Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie into exile. The Italians could never fully pacify Ethiopia, however, and in 1941, a British-led army expelled Mussolini’s forces and restored Selassie to his throne. Selassie’s dynasty ended in 1974, when the emperor was deposed and subsequently killed by young Marxist-leaning officers amid mass protests.

Thus began the brutal dictatorship of the Soviet-backed Derg (meaning “the committee,” a fittingly Orwellian name), under which tens of thousands were executed and untold others died of famine. The leaders of the Derg were themselves toppled in 1991 by a coalition of rebel forces that has ruled ever since. And it is this regime that is now undergoing a fundamental transformation under Abiy, who took power in April 2018 on the back of massive protests. As the country approaches national elections tentatively set for August, the most optimistic commentators are hoping Abiy can solidify Ethiopia’s transition from a one-party state to a democracy, while others fear the country may be headed towards a Yugoslavia-style breakup.

Unfortunately, there are relatively few English-language histories of Ethiopia available to those looking to understand the nation’s uncertain present. But for the general reader hoping to get a glimpse of Ethiopia’s recent past, two literary works examine the country’s transformation in the 20th century through the intimate perspective of an ordinary woman.

In The Wife’s Tale, Aida Edemariam deftly melds personal history with exquisite prose to explore the 97-year life of her grandmother, Yetemegnu. An unlikely focus for a biography, Yetemegnu is illiterate for most of her life. She never holds public office. She leaves Ethiopia only once, for a pilgrimage to Jerusalem toward the end of her life. But Yetemegnu demonstrates courage and resilience in a way that only a common woman thrust into extraordinary circumstances could. She does not pause to reflect on the historical weight of revolutions or invasion, as we might expect in the memoirs of a politician or activist. In these moments, her concerns are limited to ensuring her family’s safety. Her response when informed that the Derg has appropriated some of her properties: “Let them. As long as they don’t take my children.”

Yetemegnu’s story begins on her wedding day in the early 1920s. She is eight years old, confused, and apprehensive. She is about to be married to a man two decades older who is a priest in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. She will bear him ten children, not all of whom survive childhood, and outlive her husband by several decades—but the 1,600-year-old institution of the Tewahedo church will remain central to all aspects of her life. Her status as a priest’s wife grants Yetemegnu a degree of wealth, prestige, and a sense of community for most of her life. But her husband gets caught up in bitter clerical politics that eventually land him in prison, producing severe hardship for the family. While resenting the venal priests responsible for her husband’s downfall, Yetemegnu’s veneration of the Virgin Mary never wavers.

Yetemegnu’s faith faces no shortage of trials. The war with Italy introduces her community to the horrors of modern warfare, such as aerial bombardment and chemical weapons. Yetemegnu becomes aware of the moral ambiguities inherent in war: there are brave guerrilla fighters undaunted by Haile Selassie’s flight into exile, but so too are there opportunistic collaborators, feuding rivals within the resistance camp, and lifelong brigands who rob under the guise of patriotism.

The Italian invasion is not the focus of The Wife’s Tale, however, and specific political developments are generally peripheral to the narrative. Edemariam’s strength as a writer is in capturing the ambience of an evolving society. Globalization is both a curse and a blessing: An airplane takes Yetemegnu’s son away to medical school in a distant land called Canada, but a telephone alleviates her ensuing isolation by allowing her to speak with her grown children from afar. The Cold War is never mentioned by name, but a palpable sense of suspicion, ideological division, and fear falls upon society when the Derg takes power. Amid the executions and disappearances of the “Red Terror,” one of Yetemegnu’s relatives jokes that all the foreign political terminology being thrown around—feudalism, proletariat, capitalism—might as well be describing pharmaceuticals.

The Wife’s Tale is written in a style bordering on magical realism, in which Yetemegnu’s experiences are recounted not as a clear chronology of events but rather as she might have remembered these episodes later in life: as a contortion of emotions; as inner dialogues, lucid dreams, and unsettling premonitions; and as sensory experiences like the growling of a deep-seated hunger. Edemariam forgoes some narrative clarity in her effort to transport the reader into Yetemegnu’s world. It is a risky approach, but ultimately a successful one. With the power of her description, the reader can envision the rolling hills of Ethiopia’s highlands, smell the aromas of incense and coffee beans wafting through a house mid-morning, and hear the ancient chants of priests filling a church hewn into a mountainside. Edemariam likewise brings her descriptive talents to bear with poignant effect when describing the darkest chapters in Yetemegnu’s life, such as her miscarriage or her husband’s imprisonment.

Not unlike Yetemegnu, the protagonist of Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King is based on an overlooked historical figure: the female resistance fighter in the Second Italo-Ethiopian War (1935-1937). The Shadow King is the second novel by Mengiste, who grew up in Addis Ababa immersed in stories of the war. The novel follows Hirut, an orphan and domestic servant who transcends her obscure existence to become one of the legendary arbegnoch or “patriots” who wage a guerrilla war against the Italians after Haile Selassie’s conventional armies are defeated. With a story arc similar to a Greek drama—complete with chapters narrated by a female chorus—the novel sheds light on the underexplored experiences of female arbegnoch.

This war is probably better known in the West than any other period in Ethiopian history, though for reasons that have little to do with Africa. Western coverage of the war has tended to focus on its implications for European geopolitics. Seven years after Kellogg and Briand had deemed war démodé, Italy’s aggression made a mockery of the effete League of Nations, and this at a time when its future already appeared in doubt following Japan’s 1931 annexation of Manchuria. The League authorized ineffective sanctions against Italy in November 1935, a month after the invasion, but abandoned them eight months later, by which point Italy’s conquest was a fait accompli. By 1937 all but six countries had recognized Italy’s occupation of Ethiopia. France and Britain were sympathetic to Selassie but feared that a forceful response to the invasion would drive Italy into the arms of Nazi Germany at a time when a Rome-Berlin axis was not yet certain.

While many in the West were indignant at Mussolini’s invasion, few were anything but condescending towards the Ethiopians. In the eyes of the Western press, the Ethiopians were alternatively docile victims or disorderly and incompetent bandits. The implicit message seemed to be that Ethiopia’s domination, while perhaps tragic, was unavoidable. Indeed, the Italians themselves framed the war as an historical inevitably rooted in their natural superiority. An Italian soldier in Mengiste’s novel is tasked with photographing Ethiopian prisoners of war for propaganda, the subtext of which is clear: Ethiopians are a ferocious people, but they will ultimately end up in Italian chains.

Mengiste’s novel is an effort to correct this narrative. She is not the first to attempt this, but none have done so with such poetic vigor. Mengiste’s Ethiopian soldiers are David to the industrial Goliath of Fascist Italy. At one point, two Ethiopians armed only with a rifle and a sword disable a tank as the Soldati stand stunned. But it is not simply their underdog status that defines the Ethiopians’ fight in Mengiste’s telling—it is also their outrage. Outrage over Italian atrocities, naturally, but also over something greater: A sense of indignation that arises when a nation with an unwavering sense of its own exceptionalism is on the brink of losing its sovereignty. Ethiopia was a civilization at a time when the Romans were mere peasants, as one of Mengiste’s characters boasts. In another instance, a commander asks his troops on the eve of battle if they will die for Ethiopia. A peasant soldier responds with an answer reminiscent of George Patton: “First I’ll kill.”

For its patriotic message, The Shadow King does not whitewash Ethiopian history. The social inequality of the time is ever-present in its pages. Hirut’s employer, Kidane, is the well-respected son of a legendary warrior of the first Italian war, but to Hirut he is patronizing and abusive. Kidane’s wife, Aster, is yet crueler, though she grows more sympathetic as we learn in graphic detail about her ordeal as a child bride and the death of her only child. And if Mengiste seeks to present Ethiopian women as the unsung heroes of the war, she is honest about the class divisions among them. When Aster defies her husband to raise a unit of female fighters (Kidane insists that the women tend to camp per tradition), one of the women assembled scoffs at Aster’s notion that there is any patriotic solidarity among them. The Asters of the world do nothing but take from hard-working peasant women, she insists.

The shortcomings of Ethiopia’s imperial state are most clearly embodied in the character of Haile Selassie, with whom Mengiste takes some artistic liberties while remaining fundamentally faithful to the historical record. The emperor is distant and indecisive at crucial moments in the war. In several scenes, he sits frozen in front of a projector as Italian newsreels of the invasion flicker across the screen. The novel’s plot hinges on Selassie’s decision to flee into exile while his armies are still attempting to hold the Italians at bay, a decision that would come to haunt him. The novel opens and closes in 1974 amid massive protests against the ailing emperor, perhaps Mengiste’s way of reminding us that Selassie’s aloofness would contribute to his demise.

The 1974 revolution, which is the focus of Mengiste’s previous novel, lies at the heart of a crisis of Ethiopian identity that persists to this day. The 1960s and 70s saw a notable awakening of ethnic consciousness in Ethiopia, first in opposition to Selassie’s regime and later against the Derg and its Marxist-infused Ethiopian nationalism. This sentiment was particularly acute among ethnic groups that felt historically marginalized or had been on the periphery of the imperial state.

All of Ethiopia’s emperors hailed from the country’s northern highlands—the predominant setting of both The Wife’s Tale and The Shadow King—and all but one was ethnic Amhara. The imperial state tended to elevate Amhara culture as the culture par excellence and made efforts to promote Amharic as the nation’s lingua franca. To many of the ethnonationalist movements that gained prominence beginning in the late 1960s, Ethiopia’s emperors were not so much noble state-builders as conquerors and despots. The modern Ethiopian state, in this view, was a product of African settler colonialism of which non-Amhara were the victims. These narratives are themselves simplistic and deserve scrutiny to be sure, but their salience is undeniable.

After the Derg’s demise in 1991, the tension inherent in reconciling such ethnonationalist narratives came to the fore. Most of the ethnic-based guerrilla forces that toppled the Derg had their roots in the student protest movements of the preceding decades. Influenced by Lenin and Stalin’s theories of ethnicity, they considered “the national question” to be the defining issue for Ethiopia and consequently implemented a controversial system of ethnic federalism that persists to this day. As the American historian Harold G. Marcus noted at the time:

Ethiopia will have to create a new official culture reflecting the nation’s diversity. In recent history, the state has been identified with the Semitic-speaking, Christian population, and since World War II, specifically the dominant Amhara culture. For the non-Christian, non-northerner, the cost was assimilation into an alien culture.

Nearly three decades later, developing this official culture remains a central challenge for Ethiopia. Under the current regime, politics is largely a competition between the elites of various ethnic-based factions. As the historian Bahru Zewde puts it somewhat counterintuitively, the “stresses and strains of [the] contradictory postures” of these elites “were to form the political bedrock of post-1991 Ethiopia.” Since coming to power in 2018, Prime Minister Abiy has stressed the need to rekindle a pan-Ethiopian nationalism, hence Medemer. However, his liberalization efforts have also exacerbated ethnic divides, in no small part because many elites see stoking ethnic tension as a way to secure or increase their influence in an uncertain new political landscape. Last year alone more than 1.5 million Ethiopians were internally displaced as a result of ethnic-based conflict.

The thorny issue of ethnic representation is particularly salient as Ethiopia prepares for this summer’s elections, which international observers consider a key bellwether of Ethiopia’s transition under Abiy. But the tension between ethnic self-determination and national unity will not be resolved with one poll. As Ethiopian human rights activist Yoseph Badwaza recently told me, “Ethnicity will be the defining issue in Ethiopian politics for the foreseeable future.”

It would seem intuitive that ethnonationalist grievances and aspirations anywhere are rooted in complex and controversial histories. Few would analyze the 2017 Catalan independence referendum or the rise of AfD without considering the legacies of Francisco Franco or the post-war division of Germany. Yet Western commentary on Africa can be disappointingly ahistorical. When ethnicity is discussed, it is often in crude terms that reduce Africans to caricatures of inscrutably and implacably hostile tribes. Alternatively, African political issues are frequently framed through a reductive economic lens that would suggest that reaching certain development benchmarks is the panacea to a society’s ills. These approaches are short-sighted if not patronizing, insofar as they presume that historical debates do not underpin politics in Africa.

Edemariam and Mengiste’s works were not written to explain Ethiopia’s current political crisis. But anyone seeking to understand its roots would do well to read both. Each work introduces the reader to a compelling and overlooked history that evokes both pride and contention among Ethiopians, recalling the pithy remark of historian Gebru Tareke: “There are few countries in Africa that are as enriched and burdened by the past as Ethiopia.”

Last March, Abiy delivered an address during celebrations for the anniversary of the Battle of Adwa, the decisive triumph over Italy in 1896 that made Ethiopia a symbol of anti-colonial resistance across Africa. “The young generation of today should repeat the victory of Adwa by defeating current challenges and barriers,” Abiy remarked.

It was no accident that Abiy singled out this generation. Much like the members of the student movement who helped topple Selassie before turning on the Derg, many of the younger Ethiopians whose protests helped propel Abiy to power now challenge his authority. Ethiopia’s youth population, which is under-employed and expanding, expects its government to provide better economic opportunities. Ethiopian youths, like those anywhere, are also keen to address injustices real or perceived. Unsurprisingly then, many of them have found a voice for their frustrations in ethnonationalism. Reports of ethnic violence in Ethiopia these days often implicate roving bands of disaffected young men, perhaps the most combustible demographic throughout history.

The situation in Ethiopia is precarious, and it’s anyone’s guess as to where the country is headed from here. Looking ahead, Abiy and his coterie, or perhaps an entirely new generation of leadership, may yet find a way to channel the most inspiring elements of Ethiopia’s heritage into a sort of Medemer that binds together the country’s diverse elements without erasing their unique identities. Unlike the Battle of Adwa, which was over by noon the day it began, such a transformation would be gradual, undramatic, even quotidian. But it would be just as crucial to the nation’s future as any battlefield victory ever was.

The post The Long Ethiopian Century appeared first on The American Interest.

The Tragedy of Revolution: Lessons from the Past

The major violent revolutions of the 20th century were not anticipated. When they did happen, the outcomes were very different than what most early supporters had expected. Almost all major modern political revolutions ended in terrible tragedies that cost hundreds of thousands or, in the most extreme cases, many millions of unnecessary deaths. And yet, somehow, the idea of revolutions as necessary and largely beneficial persists. So why have so many turned out badly?

In 1913 Lenin despaired of ever having a revolution in Russia unless, as he put it in a letter, the Tsar of Russia and the Emperor of Austria-Hungary were stupid enough to get into a war with each other, which he thought unlikely. In retrospect the Russian revolution had so many plausible causes that it seems to have been almost inevitable. Still, it’s a combination of mistakes, bad judgement, and political naïveté by moderates who first took power that ultimately led to Leninism’s triumph in 1917, and the following years of terrible civil war and terror.

In revealing interviews in the mid-1970s, the Shah of Iran self-confidently predicted that soon he was going to make Iran one of the five great powers of the world, and that his people loved him like a benevolent father. In 1979, after a year of growing violent protests, he was overthrown and Iran began its march toward brutal clerical autocracy.

These are hardly unique examples. In 1931, France held an enormous, costly, and well attended exposition of its colonial empire, extolling the French civilizing mission and the beneficial relationship it had with its African, Middle Eastern, and Asian subjects. Few who attended expected that within three decades, as a result of France’s persistent refusal to give in to moderate demands for greater self-rule, this empire would finally collapse after two costly, bloody anti-colonial revolutionary wars in Indochina and Algeria.

Few foreign investors in Mexico’s growing economy in 1908 foresaw how Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship would end. And fewer still would predict the extraordinary bloodshed that would follow over the next decade, after moderate, democratic reformers took power in 1911.

By 1910 it may have been obvious that China’s Qing dynasty would fall, but there was as yet no Communist Party of China, and its rise to power by 1949 could not have been foretold by anyone. Even in 1937, before Japan invaded Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist state, it appeared likely that the communists would not survive.

In an example of an event that was genuinely revolutionary (though is rarely analyzed as such), when German conservatives put Hitler in power in early 1933 they were certain they could manipulate and contain this ranting Austrian extremist. Hitler’s oratorical skills would be put to use to crush the German left, the thinking went, and then the conservative establishment would dismiss him.

The first modern revolutions—the American one of 1775 and the French one 1789—could have been avoided with some liberalization that had been obviously necessary for some time. This was particularly true of the French Revolution, as France easily had the wealth to solve its fiscal crisis and had the cadres of Enlightenment thinkers and officials necessary to carry out reforms. But stubborn resistance to change by royal and aristocratic forces provoked more change that might earlier have been sufficient. In France, as in so many 20th century revolutions, the first wave of liberal, moderate revolutionaries were quickly overwhelmed by extremists who led the nation into civil war, terror, and eventually a Napoleonic military dictatorship whose constant wars ruined the country.

What can we learn from these and many analogous cases? For one, it’s that revolutionary outcomes only seem pre-ordained in hindsight. Once the violence begins, events can quickly spin out of control as counterrevolutionary forces fight back and revolutionary extremists take control. Foreign intervention against the revolution makes that even more likely. Of the great modern revolutions, the American one stands out as an exception because ruling domestic elites never lost control and limited their revolution to political rather than social and economic changes. (To be sure, that had its own costs, as the issue of slavery was left unaddressed and has haunted the United States ever since.)

Secondly, moderate liberal reformers have repeatedly failed to grasp how dangerous radicals really are. Leaders like Lafayette or Condorcet in France only belatedly found out that they were as much the target of extremists on their left as were the counterrevolutionary aristocrats on their right. Lafayette fled into exile and Condorcet was murdered despite his long-standing support for a liberal revolution. The same fate befell Kerensky and other moderates in Russia, and also to a series of relative moderates in Mexico. Shapour Bakhtiar, a liberal opponent of royal dictatorship in Iran was repeatedly jailed by the Shah, and only brought to power in 1978, too late to save the situation. He eased the transition to democracy but was forced to flee by Khomeini, and he was eventually murdered by Iranian agents in Paris.

The same lack of foresight can be seen in relatively more moderate conservatives who oppose revolutionary change and are more willing to seek allies on the far right than to compromise with moderate leftist reformers. That leads to the kind of alliance that put Mussolini in power in Italy in 1922 and Hitler in Germany in 1933.

The great historian Crane Brinton postulated that every revolution would eventually have a “Thermidorian reaction,” named after the month in the French revolutionary calendar when, in 1794, the murderous leader of the terror, Robespierre, was overthrown and guillotined. The lesson of twentieth century revolutions is that indeed Thermidorian reactions happen, but they can take much longer to occur than in France when the radicals were in power a mere two years. In Russia it was only after Stalin’s death in 1953, and even more in the 1970s and 1980s, that the revolution abandoned its radical ideals. Something like that happened with Deng Xiaoping in China, but only incompletely, and in a way that still has to be played out. In Iran the struggle between radical and more centrist revolutionaries continues to this day.

A third general lesson that can be drawn from modern revolutions is that they are all eventually corrupted. After radicals have established a dictatorship, the means of exposing and controlling corruption cease to be available to these regimes. That is what has happened to the majority of anti-colonial “Third World” revolutionary regimes like those of Angola and Algeria, or the Baathist ones in Syria and Iraq (before it was overthrown by the Americans). It is what Xi Jinping fears in China, and what had happened to European communism by the 1980s. That this is the ultimate fate of radical revolutions should be no comfort: The most prevalent regime type to follow failed revolutions is the kind of authoritarian kleptocracy best exemplified by Vladimir Putin.

Finally, the fourth conclusion is that reform can take place without revolution as long as political elites understand the need for gradual change and compromise. In many cases repression of liberal moderation can last a long time, but eventually some unforeseen event—a war, a pandemic, an economic depression—coupled with overreactions by the forces of repression, and creeping cynicism within the elite, will trigger more drastic revolutionary activity. From there, it is all too easy to fall into destructive extremism. Only after years of tragedy does it become clear that all this was in vain, and that better solutions were available.

How many on both left and the right fail to appreciate how relevant these lessons remain today?

The post The Tragedy of Revolution: Lessons from the Past appeared first on The American Interest.

Could Iran Democratize?

Democracy in Iran: Why It Failed and How It Might Succeed

Misagh Parsa

Harvard University Press, 2016, 416 pp., $46.50

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” — John F. Kennedy

Democracy in Iran, by Misagh Parsa, is the most authoritative book on the state of dissent inside Iran. Originally published on November 7th, 2016, the book—reviewed by Iran experts including Haleh Esfandiari for Foreign Affairs and Abbas Milani for Stanford’s Program for Iranian Studies—was otherwise lost in the news cycle of the 2016 elections. It argues that another “disruptive revolution” in Iran is inevitable, even if in 2016, when the book came out, the prospects of a mass movement for change in Iran were dimming. President Hassan Rouhani had delivered on his election mandate to reach a nuclear deal with the P5+1. Relief from sanctions promised foreign investment. Foreign Minister Javad Zarif was becoming the most popular figure in Iran, and Rouhani would wind up winning re-election in a landslide that spring.

In the West, frustrated with the hardline politics of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, policymakers and commentators were encouraged by the more moderate Rouhani Administration and the potential for Iran’s opening to the West and normalizing relations with the United States. The Obama Administration’s ambitions for Iran certainly went beyond a nuclear agreement. It aspired to bring change through reform and engagement. Secretary of State John Kerry had become close with Zarif, a diplomat who had received his Ph.D. under Joseph Medill Patterson Albright, the father of Madeleine Albright, Kerry’s predecessor in the Clinton Administration. Zarif spoke fluent English. He also spoke fluent Western; he knew how to charm and deceive Western media and elites.

By 2017, the new U.S. President Donald Trump was attacking Iran rhetorically, threatening new sanctions and withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action). New York Times Tehran Bureau Chief Thomas Erdbrink reported that Trump’s tough rhetoric was uniting the people—in support of the regime. There were reasons for believing Erdbrink: By some measures, things looked like they had been improving inside Iran. This made Parsa’s book look foolish.

A month after Erdbrink’s reporting, violent and widespread protests erupted.

The jury is still out—the jury is always still out in considering the exact timing and terms of political change in Iran—but it is time to revisit Parsa’s book for a compass as we navigate the way ahead.

Parsa is an immigrant from Iran and a professor of sociology at Dartmouth College. He began the book as a survey of democratization in South Korea, but, after the 2009 Green Movement, his project became about Iran. He spent the next seven years working on this book (though his research was primarily conducted from afar).

His inspiration was the regime’s suppression of the Green Movement, the democracy movement that began in 2009 and died in 2011. A book that began as the study of the movement’s failure ended in a survey of the state of dissent in Iran. Parsa’s research discovered two inconvenient truths for those who still hoped for change through reform: First, there is a wide gap on every level—economic, social, political, and religious—between the people and the regime. Second, these differences are irreconcilable since neither the regime nor the people are willing to compromise on their demands and interests.

To prove this, Parsa examines the behavior of the Iranian people and how they defy regime orthodoxies. Using government surveys and public statements by the regime’s leaders, Parsa finds that the vast majority of Iranians have satellite TV, which is against the law. Similarly, the vast majority of unmarried Iranians engage in sexual activity—a form of what Parsa calls “passive defiance.” A small portion of the Shi’a population observes religious practices, and conversion out of Islam is very common, despite the threat of the death penalty. Parsa also explains how the politicization of the economy—in particular the regime’s increasing share of the economy—has led to an increase in corruption and diminished trust in the regime, never mind to economic decline. Politically, as the increasing number of protests shows, people have directed their anger away from the hardliners and towards the entirety of the regime. The 1999 protests, the first serious political protests since the revolution of 1979, began in support of the reformist President Mohammad Khatami and against the hardliners. The 2009 protests began with chants of “where is my vote?” but ended in chants of “death to the dictator” and “death to Khamenei.”

Parsa begins by examining two forms of democratization: Reform and revolution. His two case studies are Indonesia and South Korea. South Korea, Parsa argues, was able to democratize through reform because it was not an ideological dictatorship. The regime controlled power but had mostly left the South Korean people alone in religious, economic, and social matters. Accordingly, the dictatorship had not anathematized itself to the South Korean people. Parsa cites an example of how restrained the security forces were in restraining students who protested for democracy in the 1980s during Ronald Reagan’s presidential visit to South Korea.

Indonesia, by contrast, was an extremely oppressive dictatorship under Suharto, despised by Indonesians who eventually felt compelled to violently rebel. Iran looks like the latter case, a pressure cooker ever closer to boiling over. Historically, some ideological states have shown capacity for reform. These states, like Yugoslavia and Hungary, are usually clients of a greater power that guarantees their security, which is not the case for Iran. Furthermore, the Islamic Republic has had several opportunities for reform, especially under Khatami but also under Rouhani and former President Ali-Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, but, every time, the regime created guardrails against such reforms, which led to the reform movement’s eroding legitimacy.

Perhaps the key to Parsa’s work is the idea that the nature of the regime matters. This recalls Jeane Kirkpatrick’s famous 1979 essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” in which she characterized traditional autocracies as often less oppressive, always less intrusive, and frequently more capable of reform and change than their ideological counterparts.

The Islamic Republic is in essence an oppressive theocracy, deriving legitimacy from ideology. To reform itself toward liberalism and democracy, for the regime, would constitute on more than one level a complete unraveling.

During the Green Movement, someone inside Iran observed that this was not the existential crisis that would bring down the regime. It was a movement of intellectuals and students. The existential crisis, rather, would happen when barefooted, starving Iranians overtook the streets out of desperation. That’s exactly what began in 2017—and as things keep getting worse, those Iranians grow in number and desperation. Many inside Iran who participated in the November 2019 protests believe that if the government had not shut down the internet, the regime might have collapsed. Without the capacity to organize, protesters still managed to attack and, in some occasions, seize key government buildings, police stations, and even military bases. This was an unprecedented move, and there was a possibility that, if they were able to organize, they could have outmaneuvered security forces at police stations and military bases to arm themselves. What would come next is unclear, but there is a high likelihood that, in that case, Artesh, the regular and secular military which is still revered by the people and itself sympathetic to the democracy movement, would have joined the protesters.

There is reason to believe that the regime has lost what was once its traditional base of support. The term “mostazafin” means the weak and needy. Khomeini used the term for the first time the day that the Islamic Republic was announced in a 1979 referendum. Mostazafin quickly entered the regime’s political lexicon. Beyond its literal meaning, the term comes from the Quran and refers to the faithful who stand up to tyrants. Mostazafin were the revolutionaries and the regime’s base. They were religious, poor, rural, and inner-city Iranians. This meant that the regime was going to be populist. It made sense. The regime’s intellectual father was Ali Shariati. An intellectual at the University of Mashhad, Shariati was a Marxist who had replaced Marxism’s anti-theism with Shi’i Islamism. Regime security during the time of the Shah had never been threatened by the educated middle and upper-middle class. It was threatened by those who sparked change in 1979. Forty-one years later, the base—joining the intellectuals and middle and upper classes—has turned against the regime.

Parsa accounts for the different frictions between the regime and the people, and varying methods of civil disobedience. Drinking, premarital sex, and the use of banned satellite TV are the most visible ones. But what is missing is how fast Iranians of Shi’a lineage are turning away from Islam. Atheism is the most popular destination, but Christianity is also growing to the point that regime officials, including the Minister of Intelligence, have declared it a national crisis. Estimates suggest that between half a million to three million Iranians are secret converts to Christianity, mostly evangelicals. They have established secret churches in their homes, which are subject to regular raids by the security forces. Religious Iranian Shi’a make frequent donations to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, a secular Iranian cleric in Najaf, Iraq, loathed by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Sistani rejects the notion of velayat-e faqih (rule by the jurist), a doctrine which the Islamic Republic is founded upon. Mosques are empty. Random clerics are regularly assaulted by millennials on the streets. Women are now campaigning against the compulsory hijab and fight with men and women who tell them to properly cover their hair. Only ten years ago, authorities would confiscate a pet dog—dogs are considered “najis” (dirty by nature) in Islam—on religious grounds. Today, nearly everybody owns a dog, making confiscation impossible. The regime’s single most important point of legitimacy, Islam and the rule of God, is vanishing.

Even within the government’s own institutions, including the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps), dissent seems to be rising. Following the suppressions of 2009-11, the regime was faced with the reality that many rank-and-file forces refused to carry out orders to attack compatriots. Even senior leadership and generals publicly criticized the suppressions. Those generals were either pushed out of the forces or executed.

A large portion of the clergy has also grown resentful of the regime. Again, mosques are empty, and donations are declining. Additionally, velayat-e faqih, in the regime’s absolutist interpretation that entails rule of a singular supreme leader, is a niche and controversial reading of Shi’i doctrine. Many clerics have always rejected the doctrine on religious and intellectual grounds. During the Green Movement, a majority of grand ayatollahs sided with the people. Some remained silent. Only one defended the regime.

Bazari merchants, another force for the 1979 revolution, also expressed support for the people in 2009, and that support has only increased during the recent protests. The economic downfall has hit them as hard as anybody.

The 2009 Green Movement failed because the leadership was always a step behind the people. The movement’s leaders were Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi. Both were reformist candidates who had been cheated out of their votes. More importantly, they were both revolutionary figures with deep roots in the regime and trusted—especially Mousavi—by the late Ayatollah Khomeini. Karoubi was a former speaker of the house, and Mousavi was Khomeini’s lieutenant during the Iran-Iraq War as the Prime Minister (a position abolished after Khomeini’s death). Mousavi has in fact campaigned on having been “Imam Khomeini’s prime minister.” Both men, especially Mousavi, were wary of the protests, and their initial instinct was to limit the unrest. They were, after all, elements of the regime and did not want to see it collapse. Ten years of house arrest and declining health with no proper treatment might have changed their minds about that. Outside Iran, Alireza Nourizadeh and Mohsen Sazegara were the leading voices who used their platforms at Voice of American to caution against violence when there was momentum for the movement to succeed.

Equally as important, the 2009 protests were not representative of society. The working class and the poor mostly stayed at home. It was a movement of intellectuals, students, professionals, and educated women. After the protests died, the regime decided to contain those forces. Khamenei declared that the equality of the sexes was a Western concept, and that the role of the woman is being a housemaker. The regime’s influence over universities increased. Hardliners pushed Abdollah Jasbi, a figure close to former President Rafsanjani, out of his position of chancellor of the Islamic Azad University network, thus ending his three-decade tenure as its co-founder.

Such repressions and retaliations seem to have backfired. Not only have the targeted demographics not been contained, but their grievances have grown more acute. Worse for the regime, demographics that represented the regime’s base of support have overwhelmingly joined the protests.

Inequality has grown. According to the regime’s own figures and officials, a small portion of the society holds an amount of wealth that Western tycoons can only dream of, while holders of graduate degrees are homeless, and the country’s wealth is rapidly declining. To make things worse, these wealthy few show off their wealth through their luxury cars—cars in Iran are indicators of social status—large houses, and social media posts, and are all connected with the regime, having accumulated their wealth through corruption. There are no reliable data on inequality inside Iran, but it is something easily felt by ordinary people. They see their incomes failing to keep pace with the inflation rate, which ranges from the mid-20s to mid-50s at any given time. Their educated children remain unemployed. Yet, in the street and on social media, they observe the luxurious lives of the regime’s cronies in their mansions and villas. As inequality grows, so does resentment of the regime.

But those who are still hoping for reform within the regime are misguided. Throughout the tenures of the reformist Mohammad Khatami and the moderate Rouhani, there was a lack of resolve on the part of Khatami and Rouhani to bring meaningful reform. Parsa notes that the power disparity between the IRGC and the hardline camp on the one hand, and the Rouhani Administration on the other, effectively meant that the latter was powerless. Add to this the judiciary branch, the Supreme Leader, and the Council of Guardians, all unelected positions, which have been always controlled by the hardliner camp.

Reading through the book, a question keeps popping up: Is the Islamic Republic a theocracy, led by Khamenei, or a military dictatorship, led by the IRGC? It is a common mistake in the West to take the Islamic Republic at its word that Khamenei is the most powerful man inside Iran. Yet many of his decrees, some of which Parsa cites, have gone unattended after many years and are now forgotten because they were against the interest of the IRGC. For instance, Khamenei’s decree more than ten years ago to privatize a large bulk of the economy resulted only in an increase in the IRGC’s share of the economy. After all, the Islamic Republic is not obsessed with following the orders of its constitution and frequently ignores it, and the IRGC has more men, more bullets, and more money than the Supreme Leader, while Khamenei still has a cult following.

Parsa has provided us with a compelling account of Iran’s irreconcilable divisions. In 2009, the Greens were divided between those who were protesting against Ahmadinejad and those who were protesting against the regime. The reformist camp still had popularity and legitimacy. Today, they are as illegitimate as the hardliners, and the clergy is divided, as are the armed forces. The regime is not just facing a revolt from the people but also from within its own ranks. As time moves forward, one should expect the popular push for change in Iran to mount, and perhaps even explode.

The post Could Iran Democratize? appeared first on The American Interest.

Balancing the Climate Equation

President Trump told a crowd at the recent Davos World Economic Forum that the United States would join 1t.org, an initiative to plant or conserve one trillion trees in the next decade—and then he proceeded once again to dismiss the threat of climate change, slamming activists as “prophets of doom” who would “wreck our country.” Climate crusader Greta Thunberg subsequently slammed Trump and other leaders for inaction, dismissing the reforestation initiative as a distraction that “cannot replace real mitigation.”

They were both wrong. The climate crisis is upon us; one need only look to episodes like the apocalyptic wildfires that ravaged Australia while leaders debated in Davos. And reforestation and other nature-based solutions are crucial to keeping warming below dangerous levels. In fact, because these solutions yield benefits that are widely shared, they can help bridge the partisan divide that has stymied U.S. action on climate change, with 84 percent of Democrats viewing it as a “major threat,” versus only 27 percent of Republicans.

Having served as President of Conservation International, and Deputy National Security Advisor to President George W. Bush, I know first-hand how the climate divide has impeded bipartisan action on a win-win environmental agenda. But I also know that nature-based solutions can form the core of a “natural” security strategy on which disparate groups can find common ground.

The major parties have polarized the climate debate as a binary choice between opposing formulations—emissions reduction versus energy production, voluntary versus mandatory, deniers versus liars. In contrast, a natural security strategy frames the challenge we face as balancing both sides of an existential equation: How do we meet today’s needs for food, water, energy, and economic opportunity without sacrificing our ability, and the planet’s capacity, to meet these same, or even increased, needs tomorrow?

We cannot solve this equation by choosing either to conserve nature or to live better. We must do both.

This will require expanding today’s notion of sustainability to account not only for our stock of forests, land, animals, and other natural resources, but also for the services these resources provide, and on which lives and livelihoods depend, such as flood protection, carbon sequestration, and crop pollination. While nations and companies have often ignored these so-called ecosystem services as an off-balance-sheet asset, it is only by valuing this flow of services, and limiting adverse impacts on the resources that produce them, that decision makers—from farmers to Finance Ministers—can sustain both economic growth and the natural capital on which it depends.

The UN and the World Bank are helping some developing countries to do just that by fully valuing their natural capital. While most nations track only Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which is a measure of income, natural capital accounting values the resources that support that income.

In Uganda, this methodology has helped identify and protect areas needed to expand eco-tourism, while in Botswana it is being used to allocate scarce water resources between the mining, agriculture, and service sectors. Since the depletion of natural capital is a threat to long-term growth, nations that incorporate the full value of nature into key economic decisions—where to build new infrastructure, whether to grant a mining concession, when to intensify crop production—can ensure that prosperity today does not undermine prosperity tomorrow.

The private sector Natural Capital Coalition is helping businesses to do the same thing by calculating their true cost of production. This true cost can be substantially greater than the traditional GAAP cost of goods sold because it includes environmental dependencies, as well as adverse impacts, such as carbon and water footprints. Indeed, if water were priced to reflect its true cost across production sites, it is estimated that more than a quarter of the profits of the world’s biggest businesses would be wiped out.

The implication is clear: Water scarcity and other natural capital constraints will increasingly create winners and losers. But businesses that optimize production to reflect the availability of, and reduce their impact on, natural resources, will gain a competitive edge from lower input costs and a more secure supply. In short, companies can be assured of future profits—and customers of a sustainable future—by lowering the true costs of production.

Unfortunately, efforts to promote sustainability through natural capital or true cost accounting have received neither the funding nor the political attention they deserve, because the clash over the climate divide has monopolized both.

The same is true for nature-based solutions to climate change. These solutions—which mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, sequester carbon, and promote adaptation—include: reforesting up to two billion acres of restorable land, including 250 million acres in the United States; reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation; improving land and soil management to enhance carbon capture and storage; using climate smart agriculture to increase yields with fewer emissions; and securing “blue carbon”—the vast mangroves, salt marshes, and sea grasses that store carbon safely in our oceans.

These nature-based solutions are a powerful force for combating climate change. Reforestation on the order of 1t.org would negate up to 20 years of human produced CO2 emissions at the current rate. Mangroves, in turn, store up to four times more carbon per acre than forests, capturing as much carbon annually as that emitted by 26 million passenger cars. And the “sleeping giants of global carbon sequestration”—the world’s wetlands—hold up to 30 percent of terrestrial carbon, while occupying only about 3 percent of the earth’s land surface.

Not only do these nature-based solutions aggressively mitigate emissions, they are significantly more cost-effective in doing so than many technology-based ones. Reforestation, for example, can avert CO2 emissions for less than $10 per ton, compared with $140 to $2,100 per ton for subsidized solar photovoltaic panels. Similarly, better soil management can avert CO2 emissions for $57 per ton, versus $350 to $640 per ton for electric vehicle subsidies.

Natural solutions also provide other benefits that are widely shared across rural, urban, and coastal communities. Reforestation protects watersheds, restores wildlife habitats, and filters pollutants from the air; wetlands act as natural sponges, preventing flooding and erosion; and mangrove belts reduce tsunami heights and storm surges. These benefits are extremely valuable: Mexico’s mangrove forests provide $70 billion to the economy annually through storm protection, fisheries support, and ecotourism, while California’s street trees provide $1 billion per year in air filtration, flood prevention, and other services.

Despite, or perhaps because of, their effectiveness, there is a danger that nature-based solutions could be used merely to off-set emissions elsewhere—or, worse, as a fig leaf for inaction, as Trump did by endorsing the one trillion tree initiative. This would be particularly tragic, since nature-based solutions by themselves will not obviate the need for aggressive fossil fuel emissions reductions.

But nature-based solutions are absolutely crucial in the near term, since new carbon-free and negative emissions technologies could be decades from deployment. Indeed, nature-based solutions can provide an astonishing 37 percent of the emissions reductions needed by 2030 to hold warming below the Paris target of 2°C. The world would have to stop burning oil completely—today—to achieve the same result. Yet, nature-based solutions receive only 3 percent of global public funding for climate action.

Worse, the resources that provide these solutions are rapidly disappearing. Agriculture, livestock, and logging are driving the loss of 18.7 million acres of forest annually—equivalent to 27 soccer fields every minute. This accounts for about 15 percent of global emissions. Wetlands, in turn, are disappearing at a rate three times faster than forests, releasing greenhouse gases that equate to 10 percent of fossil fuel emissions. And coastal development, aquaculture, and over-harvesting are causing blue carbon to be lost even faster than wetlands, spewing into the atmosphere one billion tons of carbon dioxide annually.

This destruction of natural capital is also taking a human toll. In the Lower Mekong River Basin, for example, vast swaths of life-giving and climate-mitigating wetlands are being destroyed by the impact of Chinese-funded hydropower dams, pollution, and illegal logging and fishing. Working with Conservation International, I have seen how the resulting changes in water levels and river flows are threatening to strangle Cambodia’s immense Tonle Sap, Southeast Asia’s largest fresh water lake. In what has long been a natural fish factory, dwindling fish stocks now imperil the livelihoods of the more than one million people crowded onto the picturesque but impoverished floating villages that dot its shores.

We can reverse this destructive dynamic by pursuing an innovative and cost-effective natural security strategy that would restore U.S. leadership on climate change and ensure sustainable prosperity at home and abroad.

This strategy would mainstream nature-based solutions into national development and climate action plans globally; enhance incentives for reforestation; leverage trade agreements and the G20 to halt the $50-$150 billion annual trade in illegal logging; increase public and private funding—and strengthen corporate commitments—to prevent deforestation; promote duty-free trade in climate smart agriculture technology; and conserve blue carbon by establishing common standards to ensure that all forms of it are eligible for climate finance and carbon credits worldwide.

This natural security strategy would prioritize other solutions that yield substantial climate bang for the buck, such as implementing the landmark global agreement to phase out heat-trapping hydrofluorocarbons in refrigerants, which could reduce warming by up to 0.5°C; reversing the Administration’s plan to roll back limits on methane emissions, which are over 25 times more potent than CO2; decarbonizing the building sector, which accounts for 40 percent of global emissions; and phasing out U.S. coal-fired plants, the great majority of which are more expensive to operate than simply building new renewable energy capacity.

This strategy would also step up efforts to protect the water we drink and the air we breathe, yielding climate benefits and health savings that far outstrip the mitigation costs. More vigorous action on air pollution alone can improve the health of four in ten Americans, and prevent up to seven million premature deaths worldwide—more than twice as many annually as from HIV, Malaria, and TB combined.

To promote sustainable prosperity, this strategy would scale up natural capital accounting and provide tax incentives for companies to disclose their true costs of production—empowering producers and consumers alike to make decisions that are both profitable and sustainable. And to ensure implementation, this strategy would replace the anemic Council on Environmental Quality with a new Cabinet-level Environmental Security Council to coordinate government-wide action on the environment and climate change at home and abroad.

While this natural security strategy would not by itself get us to a carbon neutral economy, it would represent a significant down payment toward it, and mobilize a bipartisan coalition of strange bedfellows to achieve it.

The military and national security community would see it as a means of addressing key environmental threats: destabilizing flows of climate refugees fleeing drought and famine; conflicts over water and other scarce resources; flooding of strategic bases and port facilities; and environmental crimes, such as illegal logging, that fund terrorist enterprises. Environmentalists would see this natural security strategy as the first line of defense against environmental degradation, and the first line of offense against climate change. Corporations would see it as a way to implement the Business Roundtable’s commitment to conscious capitalism, putting responsibility to the environment on a par with responsibility to shareholders. The faith-based community would see it as a way of fulfilling “our vocation to be protectors of God’s handiwork,” as Pope Francis urged in his encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si’. And voters who call for climate action but balk at the price tag would see this natural security strategy as a way to buy down the cost of emissions reductions, ensuring that the proceeds from any future carbon tax or pricing scheme are pocketed by taxpayers, not squandered by government bureaucrats.

In short, everyone—from activists like Greta Thunberg to deniers like Donald Trump—would have a stake in a natural security strategy that harnesses nature-based solutions to climate change. And while it is true, as Thunberg decried at Davos, that “no political ideology . . . has been able to tackle” the climate crisis, such a strategy could be exactly what is needed to bring left and right together to extinguish the fire that threatens our common home.

The post Balancing the Climate Equation appeared first on The American Interest.

Two Friends of TAI on Campaigning in Slovakia

As Slovaks finish counting votes from this weekend’s elections, two friends of The American Interest have a direct stake in the final tally. Contributing editor Dalibor Rohac is running for Parliament on a joint list with Together—Civic Democracy, a center-right party he helped found, and the left-liberal Progressive Slovakia (Renew). Miriam Lexmann, an elected Member of the European Parliament, is actively supporting the Slovak Christian Democratic Movement (KDH). Just before the election, TAI asked Dalibor and Miriam for their thoughts on the race and why they decided to get involved in politics back home.

TAI: What issues are driving voters in Slovakia right now?

Dalibor Rohac: Slovakia has seen a lot of economic progress since 1989 but alas, the state remains largely unreformed—the quality of some basic government services such as healthcare and education has seen a decline in recent years. Furthermore, there is a palpable sense of unfairness, connected to the system of patronage created by political parties that have been running Slovakia for the better part of the past 15 years. The murder of journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kusnirova by a mobster with far-reaching political connections has added a sense of urgency not seen since 1998—the election that ended Vladimir Meciar’s semi-authoritarian rule.

Miriam Lexmann: Slovakia has been dominated for the past 12 years by a left-wing populist party, SMER-SD, whose main political capital was built on fragmentation and the spreading of fear, on issues such as migration. For example, although Slovakia is currently not facing any risks of illegal migration, SMER-SD is constantly bringing this issue into the political debate, proclaiming that SMER-SD is the only party that can guarantee the management of Slovak borders. It seems that with these narratives SMER-SD is trying to create a new coalition potential with the far-right extremists, as its current coalition partners seem unlikely to pass the 5 percent threshold to enter the next Parliament.

Ironically, the party (which is made up of a bizarre mixture of new-age Marxists, former communists, and current oligarchs) has also been stoking social and identity issues by claiming to be a representative of traditional Christian values.

Another dominant issue is corruption. The last few months uncovered unprecedented levels of corruption involving top political leaders, judges, prosecutors, and the business sector. SMER-SD has been trying to cover up these scandals by pushing through Parliament (with support from extremists) a highly populist reform of social welfare that has put our state budget into deeper risk.

This campaign has been dominated by fear and populism, on the one hand, and people’s disgust and disillusionment with the political culture and establishment, on the other.

TAI: What’s the focus of your campaign? Say a word about your political party and how it fits into the landscape.

DR: I’m on the joint list of the center-right Together—Civic Democracy (EPP), of which I’m a founding member, and the left-liberal Progressive Slovakia (Renew). Both arose a few years ago in response to a perceived stasis and ineffectiveness of the existing pro-Western opposition parties. In contrast to the simple slogans offered by others, we have a detailed manifesto, the preparation of which involved the crème de la crème of Slovakia’s policy world. All of our tax and spending proposals have been scored; in short, we are trying to offer a credible, thoughtful path forward. Whether that’s also effective politics remains to be seen. My personal campaign has revolved around making the case for Slovakia’s place in the European Union and NATO and for a circumspect attitude toward authoritarian regimes such as Russia and China.

ML: My political party, the Slovak Christian Democratic Movement (KDH), is the only one to survive since 1989, and has recently celebrated its 30th anniversary. Although I am not standing for office in this campaign myself, as I am an elected member of the European Parliament, I’m actively supporting the party’s campaign efforts across Slovakia. It was very difficult to find the right approach in a highly fragmented environment and among disillusioned voters. For this reason the core message of our campaign was trying to bring hope and responsibility into political life. Despite the fact that we have been facing many dirty attacks we did our best to remain positive and professional, and retain our integrity.

We have been advocating new schemes to tackle corruption, reform the education sector, tackle environmental challenges, address regional development across Slovakia, and offer centered social policies. In terms of foreign policy, we want to tackle global security threats and challenges through tried and tested Transatlantic approaches and principles.

TAI: Are Slovak politics all local? In the election—or beyond—what matters for Slovaks beyond their border?

DR: Whether it’s bailouts on the Eurozone’s periphery, questions of migration, or the various pan-European “culture wars” surrounding gay marriage and access to abortions, European topics have been a part of the political conversation in Slovakia. Oftentimes, such topics have been used by extremists and pro-Russian forces to drive a wedge between conservatives and liberals supporting Slovakia’s place in Europe and in the Western world.

ML: As mentioned, the current government is trying to use the migration issue to gain political capital. Among other issues, questions of terrorism and how to deal with Russia are dividing the electorate. For example, parties such as SMER-SD and their coalition partner, the Slovak National Party (SNS), but also the extremist parties, have close relations with Moscow. More importantly, the fascist party Our Slovakia (LSNS), which is currently polling in third place, is actively calling for a referendum on Slovak membership of the EU and NATO. It is known that Moscow is supporting these extremists, who are using anti-EU and anti-NATO rhetoric and the call for Slovak neutrality to advocate Russian interests. The outcome of this election, therefore, could have a major impact on Slovakia’s geopolitical orientation.

TAI: Populism seems to remain on everybody’s mind—in the political and intellectual class, in any case. What should we make of the green shoots of liberalism in Slovakia (Zuzana Čaputova) and in Budapest (Gergely Karacsony) that seem to have surfaced among the gloom? What are the lessons from their victories? Is their approach in any notable way different from that of the liberals who have failed in recent years?

DR: It’s an interesting fact that the capitals of all Visegrad countries have Mayors who are out of sync with the largely illiberal governments in those countries. As in the United States, there is a story to be told about urbanization and polarization and the conflict between dynamic and liberal cities and the increasingly depopulated and reactionary countryside. That seems to be a challenge for democracy, which does need agreement on core principles and procedures. Now, Caputova comes into this in an interesting way because she was able to make the liberal argument—including on migration, gay rights, and so on—in a way that did not come across as threatening or condescending to those who disagreed. That seems key in a world in which such conflicts are perceived as completely zero-sum.

ML: In the recent years centrist parties have become increasingly ideologically hollowed out. Even more worryingly, they stopped addressing complex issues, which have become increasingly taken over by the populists. They may not provide the right answers but, as the Dutch scholar Cas Mudde puts it, they ask the right questions, which the centrist parties have been afraid to do. The victory of Caputova and Karacsony is not the victory of liberals but the consequence of a complex sequence of events. The meaning of their victory will depend on how they will manage their elected offices.

TAI: The United States has elections this year. How important is the outcome for Europeans?

DR: Hugely important. The four years of Trump has led to a dramatic accumulation of anti-American sentiments in Europe, on a scale not seen even during the Iraq War. Simultaneously, Europe is in no way ready or willing to navigate the world on its own, without U.S. security guarantees and strategic nudging from Washington. That leaves the continent in a very dangerous spot.

ML: The United States remains the most powerful country on earth and is European countries’ most important ally. The elections are very important, not least because of current tensions in the Transatlantic community and its future. The current Administration, frustrated by France, Germany, and some other West European capitals, has been paying increasing attention to Central and Eastern Europe. This is important, not least because of the current Administration’s commitments to democracy support, its defense posture on NATO’s eastern flank, but also investments in the region.

However, irrespective of who is the new President, there is an urgent need to improve the tone and quality of dialogue on both sides of the Atlantic—and, in the case of some countries, words need to be followed by deeds on issues such as defense spending. Given the threats faced by the Transatlantic community of democratic nations, it is important to resolve our differences in a constructive manner in order to safeguard our shared values and way of life against undemocratic actors seeking to divide us.

TAI: Is democracy secure in Europe? In Slovakia?

DR: My expectation is that most established democracies have a sufficient degree of adaptability and resilience to get through the current period of political realignments, fragmentation, and populism. I have no idea what political landscapes will look like ten years from now but I’m reasonably confident that the British, the Germans, or the Danes won’t be governed by autocrats. The picture is more complicated in Central Europe—there, one can find examples in which one party has colonized the entire government, including its supposedly independent institutions, in ways that might be difficult to reverse.

ML: The killing of Jan Kuciak and his fiancée highlighted that the hard-won freedoms in 1989 are far from secure. Before taking up my office in the European Parliament, I worked as a director of EU regional programs at the International Republican Institute. Through my work I have seen just how fragile our democracies are, and how important it is to continue working hard to maintain democracy. As President Reagan rightly said, freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. Today our societies are divided, our citizens are disillusioned, and we must find a way to re-engage our citizens in decision-making processes so that they become more active participants rather than observers of the processes that impact their daily lives. In the age of disinformation, and given the subversive methods employed by our adversaries, this is a major challenge of today’s democracies.

The post Two Friends of TAI on Campaigning in Slovakia appeared first on The American Interest.

Grassroots Reforms Around The Country

This November, avert your eyes for a moment from the horserace. As the partisan pendulum swings wider with each Presidential election, a grounding force is growing throughout the country.

In 2018, 50 million citizens wielded this power in a diverse set of states across the nation. Together, they voted to end gerrymandering in Michigan, Missouri, Colorado, Utah, and Ohio. They restored the right to vote to the 1.4 million citizens in Florida who have completed felony sentences, and finalized a historic win for ranked choice voting in Maine—a commonsense voting reform known to increase voter choice and incentivize campaign civility. They passed secure automatic voter registration in Nevada and Michigan, and they voted for new ethics commissions in New Mexico and North Dakota. Across the nation, there was a resounding call for structural reform. Add to 2018’s count the millions more who voted “yes” to fight the corrupting influence of money in politics in cities like Baltimore, Denver, Tempe, and Phoenix. Then, in 2019, voters in New York City approved a measure to bring ranked choice voting to the city of nearly 9 million.

Now, in 2020, a different set of voters hold the key. As of this writing, 60 million eligible voters live in 13 states where campaigns have formed to pass structural election reform, and more will soon come online. Together, they have the opportunity to begin repairing elections covering 75 million Americans, or roughly 25 percent of the nation.

Put differently, there are two separate elections taking place this year. Which one you believe has a greater impact on the direction of the country is ultimately a matter of perspective. The importance of this year’s Presidential race and its down-ballot coattail contests is immediate, undeniable, and in many ways existential. But the 30,000-foot view of Washington’s perennial gridlock gives that election a tinge of trench warfare that disappoints and exhausts Americans. On the other hand, the opportunity to fix a broken system is only growing every year, with a broad appeal that stretches across party lines. And it is on the verge of a tipping point nationwide.

Below is an overview of just some of the opportunities in front of voters in 2020.

Alaska

Voters in the nation’s Last Frontier state are moving to become the first to chart a new course for functional politics. The Alaskans for Better Elections campaign recently submitted the signatures required for a ballot initiative that combines two of the most powerful reforms for combatting polarization and gridlocked two-party politics—open nonpartisan primaries and ranked choice voting—into one simplified package. Open nonpartisan primaries are used in various forms in Washington State, California, Louisiana, and Nebraska, and allow all registered electors, regardless of party, to vote on all candidates in the primary election. In Alaska, the four candidates with the most votes for each office, regardless of party affiliation, would advance to the general election. Voters would rank them in order of preference (1, 2, 3, 4), and an instant runoff sequentially eliminates the least popular candidates until one candidate wins with a majority. To boot, the Alaskans for Better Elections also includes tough dark money disclosure requirements for donors over $10,000, promising an end to Alaska’s long struggle with secretive spending—often from the Lower 48 looking to capitalize on the state’s natural resources.

Florida

Florida joins Alaska in its effort to open up the primaries to voters of all stripes. The All Voters Vote campaign in Florida recently submitted nearly 800,000 signatures to qualify a ballot measure for open nonpartisan primaries. Here—like in Washington State, California, and some races in Nebraska—the two candidates with the most votes for state office, regardless of party, would proceed to the general election. A full 25 percent of registered Florida voters have no party affiliation, and are barred from participating in the state’s publicly-funded yet private party primaries. If the measure is successful, these 3.6 million voters will become full participants in the political process.

Massachusetts

Massachusetts is on track to become one of the next states to pass ranked choice voting. The ballot question presented by Voter Choice Massachusetts, 111,000 signatures strong, would give voters the option to rank candidates in both primary and general state elections for state office and the United States Congress. Under Massachusetts law, the legislature can now pass the law or defer to the voters in November. Political movements are built on cornerstone victories, and statewide passage of ranked choice voting in the second consecutive election cycle would mark its real, undeniable arrival.

Michigan

Michigan’s Voters Not Politicians anti-gerrymandering campaign in 2018 was inspiring people well before it won over 61 percent of the vote. The campaign grabbed headlines when its 100 percent volunteer team turned in over 450,000 signatures to secure a spot on the ballot. Not long after, the campaign was at the center of a flashpoint in the dispute over special-interest influence when the state’s chamber of commerce filed suit to block the measure from going to the voters. The lawsuit prompted massive public support for the campaign and was turned down by the Michigan Supreme Court.

This year, the campaign is again fending off efforts to dislodge its victory, despite clear support from the public. Since 2018, Voters Not Politicians has been engaging in a grassroots public education campaign and implementation effort to make sure that the new independent redistricting commission gets the best possible start. Over 1,000 Michigan citizens have applied to serve on the 13-member commission, with applications expected to continue in the coming months.

Missouri

In 2018, voters overwhelmingly approved the Clean Missouri Amendment, a reform bill that took state redistricting out of the hands of partisan legislators, cracked down on special interest lobbying, and increased government transparency. The effort was direct democracy at its most essential: a bipartisan group of citizens banding together to tackle the problems Jefferson City lawmakers had, for years, chosen to ignore.

This year, the Missouri legislature is trying to undo the will of the voters by referring a partial repeal measure to the ballot. This attempt would put redistricting power back in the hands of the legislature and remove critical protections for underrepresented communities. The Clean Missouri campaign is rallying again to defend its hard-won reform, which may face another vote at the ballot box in November.

Nevada

Nevada is one of several states leading the way on redistricting reform in the wake of 2019’s Supreme Court decision that took relief from the scourge of partisan gerrymandering out of the hands of the courts—and placed it squarely with the voters. Currently, the lines for Nevada’s congressional and state legislative districts are drawn by the state legislature, and subject to veto by the governor. The process takes place out of sight of the public, and without state guidelines around compactness, protection for communities of interest, or partisan fairness. All of this makes the process especially vulnerable to partisan manipulation.

A cross-partisan coalition of grassroots groups has formed to support Nevada’s Fair Maps Amendment, a law that would create an independent, bipartisan, citizen-led redistricting commission, and institute strong criteria to ensure that the process is fair. Volunteers across the state are gathering signatures to put it on the November ballot. To become law in Nevada, the Amendment will need to be approved by the voters in both 2020 and 2022.

Ohio

The Buckeye State may become the latest to update and secure its voter registration system. A proposed ballot initiative would automatically register Ohioans to vote when they apply for or renew a driver’s license or other state-issued ID. The process simplifies registration for voters, and helps the state keep its voter rolls up to date. This initiative would also allow people to register to vote at their polling place before they vote during an extended early voting period. In a state defined by voter purges and high stakes presidential races, this measure would help protect voters’ opportunity to participate.

Oklahoma

People Not Politicians Oklahoma is a campaign to end gerrymandering in the Sooner State, led by Let’s Fix This and the League of Women Voters. This proposal would end the practice of partisan gerrymandering by establishing an independent commission of Oklahoma citizens to draw boundaries for state legislative and congressional districts in a fair, open, and transparent manner—instead of letting politicians draw their own districts behind closed doors. The campaign needs to collect 177,958 signatures to be put on the November ballot.

Oregon

Oregon may not be one of the first states that comes to mind when you think about gerrymandering, but the Oregon legislature regularly struggles to complete the process effectively, and has repeatedly required the courts to intervene in the process. In fact, there have been only two cycles of redistricting in the past century that didn’t require intervention from either the courts or the secretary of state. It’s especially important to get redistricting right this time around, as Oregon may be apportioned an additional representative after the next census.

The People Not Politicians Oregon campaign is working to vest the power to draw district lines in the hands of an independent, citizen-led redistricting commission. The campaign would also increase transparency, allowing every Oregonian insight and a voice into the redistricting process.

Virginia

Eyes have been on Virginia in the past few months, as its odd-year state elections in 2019 cemented a Democratic trifecta for the first time in over 25 years. Scrutiny has rightfully narrowed in the past few weeks to what the new Democratic majority will do about gerrymandering. Early last year, 89 percent of Democrat and Republican legislators came together to pass an anti-gerrymandering constitutional amendment that would create a bipartisan redistricting commission. Unfortunately, the quirks of Virginia’s constitutional amendment process require the bill to pass again this legislative session before voters then can approve the commonsense change on the November 2020 ballot.

Will Democrats, who in 2019’s state elections cemented full control of the government, fulfill a core campaign promise to end gerrymandering, or will they seek retribution for the Republicans’ 2010 gerrymander and—like their Democratic colleagues nearby in Maryland have done in the past—rig the lines in their interest? At the time of this writing, despite grassroots pressure from both sides, the majority has not yet decided to pass the second bill and give voters a chance to end gerrymandering for good in Virginia.

This year, all eyes will likely be glued to the Presidential race, but an alternative storyline runs alongside it that grows more compelling each year: Americans, banding together across party lines, are leading innovative campaigns that restore integrity and accountability to our elections.

In these turbulent times, nothing can be taken for granted, of course. As several of the examples above illustrate, even resounding reform wins face stiff follow-on challenges from deep-pocketed and resourceful opponents. But there are millions of green democratic shoots sprouting up all across our country. This is surely cause for hope.

The post Grassroots Reforms Around The Country appeared first on The American Interest.

Is the Constitution the Problem?

Condemnations of our Constitution as undemocratic or evil are almost as old as the Republic. Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison condemned the deal as a “pact with the devil”; President Woodrow Wilson slighted it as a barrier to modern administration; and historian Charles Beard painted it as a naked power grab by landed elites. The chorus of protest has not abated. Frequent targets of criticism in recent decades include the anti-majoritarian Senate wherein California and Wyoming have equal influence on national policy; an electoral college that has twice in the last five elections selected a “winner” who lost the popular vote; and the influence of the federal courts, where judges serve for life, and seem to have free-wheeling discretion to interpret vague constitutional text in light of their own policy preferences.

Today, a new global era of democratic backsliding has brought a more nefarious concern to the fore. This is the way in which our founding document may facilitate action by a president or party intended to undermine the integrity of democratic elections. It is not obvious from the text of the Constitution, for example, that a president could not pardon himself, perhaps even prospectively. Nor would anything prevent a president from pardoning his subordinates who engaged in willful criminal action at his behest, including violence or subterfuge aimed at disabling political opponents. According to the current status quo, as put forward in a memo from the Office of Legal Counsel, the President cannot be indicted for crimes while in office. So the only remedy for an anti-democratic presidential agenda is impeachment. But whatever one thinks of the Trump impeachment trial of 2020, it exposed arguments that presidents have unfettered power to resist any oversight. Most notorious—and rightly vilified—was Alan Dershowitz’s assertion in the course of the impeachment trial that “if a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.” Come back Richard Nixon—all is forgiven!

All this bodes ill for our democracy. Further facilitating its decay is the theory of the “unitary executive.” This elusive and somewhat multifarious term has in the last two decades migrated from being an obscure academic idea of relatively modest scope to a reading of the Constitution preferred by the President himself, and perhaps many of his judicial appointees. Although the theory has different forms in the scholarly and the public debate, at its core is the Constitution’s assertion that executive power “shall be vested in a President.” In some scholarly treatments, this simply means that the president must be able to fire subordinates. More ambitiously, it can be taken to mean that the President must retain ultimate power over any executive action. Advocates of this theory have long drawn on Justice Scalia’s dissent in Morrison v. Olson, a 1988 challenge to the independent counsel statute. Today, Morrison can be wielded to the sinister conclusion that the president has unfettered control of all federal investigations and prosecutions—including those into his own malfeasance. Were this theory to be adopted, the President could openly and notoriously mandate criminal indictments of his political opponents, while immunizing his supporters from prosecution for interfering with elections.

If this possibility seems a touch dystopic, ask yourself what forces in the United States stand against it. Normally, we think of political parties as restraining forces, playing a central role in extending political time-horizons past the life of current officeholders. But in the United States, as in many countries, partisans seem increasingly willing to tolerate undemocratic action so long as it helps their co-partisans. Another constraint might be the judiciary, which would presumably refuse to uphold spurious prosecutions. But the Supreme Court has crafted rules that make it very difficult to challenge prosecutions as politically biased. In any event, investigations and prosecutions are themselves a punishment of sorts, and can be used to harass the opposition. The increasingly partisan character of judicial appointments also means that judges may turn a blind eye, even to cases of naked political interference. Indeed, the recent closely divided opinion on the addition of a citizenship question to the census is a master class in turning a blind eye to self-evident partisan impropriety.

In response to various nightmare scenarios, we might propose reforms at the federal level. But here we quickly run into the Constitution itself. The notoriously difficult amendment rule in Article V effectively insulates it from reform. The amendment rule is so onerous that we likely will never clarify the pardon power’s scope, let alone establish the constitutionalized accountability machinery that many other countries have. The Constitution also seems to doom us, for the foreseeable future, to a system in which Supreme Court justices will only be appointed when the Senate and Presidency are of the same party, and where lower court judges will be drawn from ever-younger cohorts so they can serve for many decades.

There is, however, one constitutional feature which gives some comfort: federalism. The presence of state governments with vast reserves of legal and practical power remains a robust check in certain parts of the country, even though the balance between states and the center has shrunk over time in favor of the latter. The American federal scheme provides states with resources for resistance, and forces the possibility of negotiation between different governments over core policies.

In the 19th century, resistance was embodied in the idea of nullification—the doctrine celebrated by John Calhoun and others that states had the right to nullify even valid federal laws—and ultimately secession. In our own era, less extreme measures are available. Consider marijuana policy, in which a decision by the Attorney General to classify the drug at the highest level of restriction has been effectively nullified by the 33 states that have legalized some form of use. (An amusing by-product we observed recently at O’Hare Airport is the installation of large, public bins, where one can deposit one’s excess cannabis before entering federal airspace.) Although the ensuing legal limbo remains a nuisance for those in the industry, there is no chance that the federal government will effectively reverse the policy of the states—it simply lacks the coercive resources to do so.

More pertinent here, the collective power of state-level law enforcement has emerged as a key feature of accountability in the Trump era. As conventionally understood, the federal pardon power does not extend to state crimes, and the Double Jeopardy Clause does not preclude a president from being investigated or prosecuted after being pardoned for a federal offense. Although the supremacy clause might prevent a criminal prosecution of the president from proceeding while he is in office, that proposition has not been tested. Further, the ongoing lawsuit about whether the President can be forced to turn over his tax returns to New York state authorities is relevant toward ensuring accountability. State Attorney Generals, then, could be important checks on executive lawlessness.

More broadly, federalism enables policy variance. Decentralization promises greater alignment between preferences and policies, and allows for local experiments—captured in Brandeis’ famous phrase, “laboratories of democracy.” Many innovations of American democracy originated in states and spread among them, especially during the progressive era. Some of these are well known: nonpartisan electoral commissions; direct or primary elections; special councils or commissions for judicial appointments; referendums and initiatives. Direct election of senators and female suffrage started at the state level. Only later was it adopted by the Federal government. Another one, not copied at the federal level, is the plural executive. Many U.S. states have rejected the unitary executive, providing separate elections for Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, and Secretary of State. And today, good government reforms continue: In 2020, for example, Maine will be the first U.S. state to use ranked-choice voting in a presidential election.

To be sure, federalism is no panacea. For a century it facilitated what scholars call “subnational authoritarianism” in the Jim Crow South. Even as Brandeis was celebrating the states as laboratories of democracy, they were experimenting with new forms of repression, and this is a concern today as well: Many states are exploring ways of suppressing the vote and restricting political speech. Call them the “laboratories of anti-democracy.”

One important innovation was the decision by North Carolina Republicans, after losing the state governorship to Roy Cooper in 2016, to try to strip the office of many powers before he could take office. (To be fair, this move had been tried before outside the United States: Hugo Chavez had pulled the same move over the mayoralty of Caracas in 2008.) This innovation was partly successful, though other parts were struck down by courts. The technique was then borrowed in Wisconsin and Michigan in 2018. It is one of the tragedies of our highly partisan era that outgoing Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, who vetoed the bill proposed by his co-partisans, was not celebrated as a hero of democracy.

The problem is especially acute given political sorting. At this writing, 36 state governments are in the hands of a single party—more than has been the case in many decades. Single-party government provides a greater incentive to lock in power and also fewer constraints on doing so.

What can we do to encourage states to adopt pro-democratic reforms rather than anti-democratic reforms? One useful wrinkle is that state constitutions are slightly different creatures than their federal counterparts. Their subject matter is limited, precisely because the federal government takes care of many things that a constitution would normally include. They tend to be much more detailed, easier to amend, and so much less enduring: The average state has had several different constitutions in its lifetime. They have many more rights, and much more variety in institutions.

For the foreseeable future, state constitutions may thus offer a promising arena for pro-democratic reforms. We focus on one feature in particular: the management of elections and the role of secretaries of state.

There is a great deal that can be done at the state level to keep democracy competitive in ways that have spillover effects beyond a state’s border. An obvious thing is non-partisan or bipartisan redistricting process, now adopted in some form in 19 states. These reforms are often adopted through initiative and referendum, themselves governance innovations. These institutions have received a good deal of attention: Their example may well prove contagious—seeding a beneficial form of policy contagion.

Less well considered is the management of elections. The office of Secretary of State is in many U.S. states a partisan, elected office. But most of its responsibilities are hardly partisan. In most states these include managing driver’s licenses, chartering businesses, and overseeing elections. So why in 36 states, is the Secretary elected by the public in a partisan election? And why in four more is she appointed by a partisan legislature? Treating this office as inherently partisan is anachronistic, something like the elected coroner running on a party ticket.

It is also hazardous to democracy. In the 2018 election cycle, two secretaries of state ran for offices in elections they were responsible for running. This is compatible with no definition of democracy with which we are familiar. To the contrary, it violates the common law idea of “natural justice”, namely that no person should be judge of her own case. In the end, Kansas Secretary of State Chris Kobach lost his bid for the Governorship, while Georgia’s Brian Kemp won his. Neither recused themselves from overseeing the counting of ballots, which the most basic rules of political morality would seem to require. And both had long records of vote suppression.

Democracy needs neutral referees, and it is a mistake to consider that it can operate without them. In many countries, the Speaker of the parliament resigns his or her party affiliation upon election; the Senate parliamentarian in the United States is the keeper of norms and traditions, and routinely makes rulings that are followed by the parties in politics. The Secretary of State, like these other offices, ought to be a nonpartisan one, or have its powers over elections shifted elsewhere.

One might object that these reforms are hardly likely to be incentive-compatible in a landscape of increasingly one-party states, and a polarized national environment. And yet we have been here before. The Progressives in the 19th century arose against a corrupt gilded age background, in which parties were seen as hotbeds of corruption. If we did it then, we can do it now. No doubt, reform efforts will be bitterly opposed, and sometimes rolled back. But this is no reason to give up on the grand experiment of American democracy. Indeed, state-level reform may be the best and perhaps only response available to the skepticism of the Garrisons, the Wilsons, and the Beards.

The post Is the Constitution the Problem? appeared first on The American Interest.

Is The Constitution The Problem?

Condemnations of our Constitution as undemocratic or evil are almost as old as the Republic. Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison condemned the deal as a “pact with the devil”; President Woodrow Wilson slighted it as a barrier to modern administration; and historian Charles Beard painted it as a naked power grab by landed elites. The chorus of protest has not abated. Frequent targets of criticism in recent decades include the anti-majoritarian Senate wherein California and Wyoming have equal influence on national policy; an electoral college that has twice in the last five elections selected a “winner” who lost the popular vote; and the influence of the federal courts, where judges serve for life, and seem to have free-wheeling discretion to interpret vague constitutional text in light of their own policy preferences.

Today, a new global era of democratic backsliding has brought a more nefarious concern to the fore. This is the way in which our founding document may facilitate action by a president or party intended to undermine the integrity of democratic elections. It is not obvious from the text of the Constitution, for example, that a president could not pardon himself, perhaps even prospectively. Nor would anything prevent a president from pardoning his subordinates who engaged in willful criminal action at his behest, including violence or subterfuge aimed at disabling political opponents. According to the current status quo, as put forward in a memo from the Office of Legal Counsel, the President cannot be indicted for crimes while in office. So the only remedy for an anti-democratic presidential agenda is impeachment. But whatever one thinks of the Trump impeachment trial of 2020, it exposed arguments that presidents have unfettered power to resist any oversight. Most notorious—and rightly vilified—was Alan Dershowitz’s assertion in the course of the impeachment trial that “if a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.” Come back Richard Nixon—all is forgiven!

All this bodes ill for our democracy. Further facilitating its decay is the theory of the “unitary executive.” This elusive and somewhat multifarious term has in the last two decades migrated from being an obscure academic idea of relatively modest scope to a reading of the Constitution preferred by the President himself, and perhaps many of his judicial appointees. Although the theory has different forms in the scholarly and the public debate, at its core is the Constitution’s assertion that executive power “shall be vested in a President.” In some scholarly treatments, this simply means that the president must be able to fire subordinates. More ambitiously, it can be taken to mean that the President must retain ultimate power over any executive action. Advocates of this theory have long drawn on Justice Scalia’s dissent in Morrison v. Olson, a 1988 challenge to the independent counsel statute. Today, Morrison can be wielded to the sinister conclusion that the president has unfettered control of all federal investigations and prosecutions—including those into his own malfeasance. Were this theory to be adopted, the President could openly and notoriously mandate criminal indictments of his political opponents, while immunizing his supporters from prosecution for interfering with elections.

If this possibility seems a touch dystopic, ask yourself what forces in the United States stand against it. Normally, we think of political parties as restraining forces, playing a central role in extending political time-horizons past the life of current officeholders. But in the United States, as in many countries, partisans seem increasingly willing to tolerate undemocratic action so long as it helps their co-partisans. Another constraint might be the judiciary, which would presumably refuse to uphold spurious prosecutions. But the Supreme Court has crafted rules that make it very difficult to challenge prosecutions as politically biased. In any event, investigations and prosecutions are themselves a punishment of sorts, and can be used to harass the opposition. The increasingly partisan character of judicial appointments also means that judges may turn a blind eye, even to cases of naked political interference. Indeed, the recent closely divided opinion on the addition of a citizenship question to the census is a master class in turning a blind eye to self-evident partisan impropriety.

In response to various nightmare scenarios, we might propose reforms at the federal level. But here we quickly run into the Constitution itself. The notoriously difficult amendment rule in Article V effectively insulates it from reform. The amendment rule is so onerous that we likely will never clarify the pardon power’s scope, let alone establish the constitutionalized accountability machinery that many other countries have. The Constitution also seems to doom us, for the foreseeable future, to a system in which Supreme Court justices will only be appointed when the Senate and Presidency are of the same party, and where lower court judges will be drawn from ever-younger cohorts so they can serve for many decades.

There is, however, one constitutional feature which gives some comfort: federalism. The presence of state governments with vast reserves of legal and practical power remains a robust check in certain parts of the country, even though the balance between states and the center has shrunk over time in favor of the latter. The American federal scheme provides states with resources for resistance, and forces the possibility of negotiation between different governments over core policies.

In the 19th century, resistance was embodied in the idea of nullification—the doctrine celebrated by John Calhoun and others that states had the right to nullify even valid federal laws—and ultimately secession. In our own era, less extreme measures are available. Consider marijuana policy, in which a decision by the Attorney General to classify the drug at the highest level of restriction has been effectively nullified by the 33 states that have legalized some form of use. (An amusing by-product we observed recently at O’Hare Airport is the installation of large, public bins, where one can deposit one’s excess cannabis before entering federal airspace.) Although the ensuing legal limbo remains a nuisance for those in the industry, there is no chance that the federal government will effectively reverse the policy of the states—it simply lacks the coercive resources to do so.

More pertinent here, the collective power of state-level law enforcement has emerged as a key feature of accountability in the Trump era. As conventionally understood, the federal pardon power does not extend to state crimes, and the Double Jeopardy Clause does not preclude a president from being investigated or prosecuted after being pardoned for a federal offense. Although the supremacy clause might prevent a criminal prosecution of the president from proceeding while he is in office, that proposition has not been tested. Further, the ongoing lawsuit about whether the President can be forced to turn over his tax returns to New York state authorities is relevant toward ensuring accountability. State Attorney Generals, then, could be important checks on executive lawlessness.

More broadly, federalism enables policy variance. Decentralization promises greater alignment between preferences and policies, and allows for local experiments—captured in Brandeis’ famous phrase, “laboratories of democracy.” Many innovations of American democracy originated in states and spread among them, especially during the progressive era. Some of these are well known: nonpartisan electoral commissions; direct or primary elections; special councils or commissions for judicial appointments; referendums and initiatives. Direct election of senators and female suffrage started at the state level. Only later was it adopted by the Federal government. Another one, not copied at the federal level, is the plural executive. Many U.S. states have rejected the unitary executive, providing separate elections for Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, and Secretary of State. And today, good government reforms continue: In 2020, for example, Maine will be the first U.S. state to use ranked-choice voting in a presidential election.

To be sure, federalism is no panacea. For a century it facilitated what scholars call “subnational authoritarianism” in the Jim Crow South. Even as Brandeis was celebrating the states as laboratories of democracy, they were experimenting with new forms of repression, and this is a concern today as well: Many states are exploring ways of suppressing the vote and restricting political speech. Call them the “laboratories of anti-democracy.”

One important innovation was the decision by North Carolina Republicans, after losing the state governorship to Roy Cooper in 2016, to try to strip the office of many powers before he could take office. (To be fair, this move had been tried before outside the United States: Hugo Chavez had pulled the same move over the mayoralty of Caracas in 2008.) This innovation was partly successful, though other parts were struck down by courts. The technique was then borrowed in Wisconsin and Michigan in 2018. It is one of the tragedies of our highly partisan era that outgoing Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, who vetoed the bill proposed by his co-partisans, was not celebrated as a hero of democracy.

The problem is especially acute given political sorting. At this writing, 36 state governments are in the hands of a single party—more than has been the case in many decades. Single-party government provides a greater incentive to lock in power and also fewer constraints on doing so.

What can we do to encourage states to adopt pro-democratic reforms rather than anti-democratic reforms? One useful wrinkle is that state constitutions are slightly different creatures than their federal counterparts. Their subject matter is limited, precisely because the federal government takes care of many things that a constitution would normally include. They tend to be much more detailed, easier to amend, and so much less enduring: The average state has had several different constitutions in its lifetime. They have many more rights, and much more variety in institutions.

For the foreseeable future, state constitutions may thus offer a promising arena for pro-democratic reforms. We focus on one feature in particular: the management of elections and the role of secretaries of state.

There is a great deal that can be done at the state level to keep democracy competitive in ways that have spillover effects beyond a state’s border. An obvious thing is non-partisan or bipartisan redistricting process, now adopted in some form in 19 states. These reforms are often adopted through initiative and referendum, themselves governance innovations. These institutions have received a good deal of attention: Their example may well prove contagious—seeding a beneficial form of policy contagion.

Less well considered is the management of elections. The office of Secretary of State is in many U.S. states a partisan, elected office. But most of its responsibilities are hardly partisan. In most states these include managing driver’s licenses, chartering businesses, and overseeing elections. So why in 36 states, is the Secretary elected by the public in a partisan election? And why in four more is she appointed by a partisan legislature? Treating this office as inherently partisan is anachronistic, something like the elected coroner running on a party ticket.

It is also hazardous to democracy. In the 2018 election cycle, two secretaries of state ran for offices in elections they were responsible for running. This is compatible with no definition of democracy with which we are familiar. To the contrary, it violates the common law idea of “natural justice”, namely that no person should be judge of her own case. In the end, Kansas Secretary of State Chris Kobach lost his bid for the Governorship, while Georgia’s Brian Kemp won his. Neither recused themselves from overseeing the counting of ballots, which the most basic rules of political morality would seem to require. And both had long records of vote suppression.

Democracy needs neutral referees, and it is a mistake to consider that it can operate without them. In many countries, the Speaker of the parliament resigns his or her party affiliation upon election; the Senate parliamentarian in the United States is the keeper of norms and traditions, and routinely makes rulings that are followed by the parties in politics. The Secretary of State, like these other offices, ought to be a nonpartisan one, or have its powers over elections shifted elsewhere.

One might object that these reforms are hardly likely to be incentive-compatible in a landscape of increasingly one-party states, and a polarized national environment. And yet we have been here before. The Progressives in the 19th century arose against a corrupt gilded age background, in which parties were seen as hotbeds of corruption. If we did it then, we can do it now. No doubt, reform efforts will be bitterly opposed, and sometimes rolled back. But this is no reason to give up on the grand experiment of American democracy. Indeed, state-level reform may be the best and perhaps only response available to the skepticism of the Garrisons, the Wilsons, and the Beards.

The post Is The Constitution The Problem? appeared first on The American Interest.

Political Reform and American Democracy

The 2016 election brought into sharp relief the anomalies and imperfections of our democratic institutions. Trump, beating out a crowded field of primary candidates, won the election having lost the popular vote. Despite intense media coverage, the party primaries were still low-turnout events, and party infighting undermined the legitimacy of the final candidates. Third-party candidates who stood no chance of winning nonetheless drew significant votes in swing states.

Translating frustration with the political system into an agenda for political reform is difficult in any established democracy. Americans have been fed up with gerrymandering, campaign finance, and two-party monopolies for years. But “reform” often gets a bad rap as a way to seek partisan advantage. The For the People Act 2019 (H.R. 1), the Democrats’ first agenda item after the 2018 midterms, was derided as the “Democrat Politician Protection Plan” by Mitch McConnell when it reached the Senate.

As discontent with the Trump administration grows, however, Americans across the political spectrum are taking a serious look at the vulnerabilities in our democratic institutions and asking how they might be improved. Reform, after all, is the way democratization happens. Reforms align our normative ideals of democracy with the actual practice of democracy. They are designed to make democracy safer in the long run by reestablishing the rules of the game, and by fostering competition that allows better representative outcomes.

In the United States, a serious conversation about democratic reform has begun to take shape. It is focused in particular on our electoral system and representative institutions. There is a growing sense that problems in American democracy are not just related to parties and partisanship. Instead, they are structural, built into our institutions themselves. Our winner-take-all system of electing representatives—technically known as first-past-the-post, single-member district elections—makes it hard for third parties to win. Winner-take-all also forces many voters to vote strategically or risk “wasting” their votes. Further, Congressional seats are allocated solely on the basis of geography. The party receiving the most votes does not win the most seats in Congress: All that matters is where the voters live. Taken together, it is not surprising that many voters feel inadequately represented at the national level. Our electoral system does not let voters vote their true preferences, nor does it translate the greatest vote-getters into the winners.

Reforming our electoral system is a promising way to improve American democracy. It may seem prosaic to say that if we change how people select candidates, we can alter outcomes. But in fact, it is the prosaic practices of democracy that condition all political possibilities. Successful cases of reform in other advanced democracies provide lessons on how we might actually overhaul first-past-the-post in the United States. In other countries, such as New Zealand, Japan, Taiwan, and Italy, aligning the normative values of democracy with the rules of democracy became a political priority. First, voters and politicians came to agree on the problem—on the fact that the electoral rules unfairly disadvantaged some voters and parties. Second, they agreed on finding a solution that made the electoral system more proportional and competitive.

America’s Electoral System: A Problem for Democracy?

The American electoral system includes both deeply-rooted and modern features. Debates over the Electoral College, a uniquely American institution that aggregates presidential votes by state rather than by popular vote, frequently turn on the past vs. the present. And while the Senate has always been composed of two Senators from each state, Senators were not popularly elected until the twentieth century.

The House of Representatives, which is a small legislature given the size of the United States, assigns seats to equally-proportioned districts within each state. It was not until the 1960s, however, that the House mandated single-member districts (through the Uniform Congressional District Act of 1967). This act followed a series of Supreme Court decisions in the early 1960s that created the “one man, one vote” standard, and applied it to both Congressional and state legislative districts. Unlike most other democracies, the principle of proportionality—that all votes should count the same, and that the seats in the legislature should, therefore, reflect the distribution of votes in the electorate—has never operated in Congress.

Over the past two decades, however, there has been a realization that the way we choose our elected officials may not be fair. The two-party system means that one party typically enjoys a “seat bonus” in the House of Representatives. Since 2000, this has consistently worked to the benefit of Republicans. Republicans often only need to win a plurality of the national share of the House vote (less than 50 percent) to win a decisive majority of seats. On occasion, Republicans have secured House majorities while receiving fewer votes. In 2012, for example, Democrats won 1.2 million more votes than Republicans, while Republicans retained a 33-seat advantage. (Democrats, on the other hand, must win an absolute majority of votes in order to win a majority of seats.) While some of this advantage can be attributed to gerrymandering, it is mostly due to a bias caused by geography: More seats are allocated to rural and suburban areas, while many more people live in urban, coastal areas.

The Economist recently argued that American institutions are “biased” towards Republicans, and that “American elections no longer convert the popular will into control of government.” The editorial board of the New York Times recommended significant changes to the House of Representatives, including expanding the number of members and electing multiple members from each district. In its U.S. Competitiveness Project, Harvard Business School’s Michael E. Porter and colleagues argued that the main problem with democracy today is the two-party duopoly. While calls to “abolish the Senate” remain fringe, the large-state disadvantages of the Senate have affected debates about Supreme Court nominations and impeachment. The Senate is both the most malapportioned and most powerful upper chamber in the democratic world, with no pretense that votes across states should be weighed equally.

Beyond First-Past-The-Post: Lessons from Abroad

It might be hard to distinguish the criticism of first-past-the-post in the United States from the diffuse discontent with other elements of American elections. In polls and surveys, Americans still think that gerrymandering and money in politics are more concerning than the allocation of Congressional seats. However, without structural change that reconfigures how effectively Americans are represented, it is unlikely that districting or ethics reforms make a significant impact on American democracy.

Throughout American history, we have reformed our institutions in the name of democracy. Further, other countries have successfully reformed their electoral systems in ways that both preserve their original features while also ensuring that citizens’ preferences are fairly reflected in government. In the early 1990s, during a period of jubilation about democracy and widespread adoption of democratic elections, a wave of democracies—New Zealand, Italy, Japan, and Taiwan—amended their electoral systems as well. In these countries, the electoral systems often produced results that were biased in favor of one of the parties. Therefore, legislative majorities did not reflect the popular will. These countries then moved to mixed systems that combined elements of first-past-the-post with proportional representation, which helped to correct structural biases and improve competition and representation.

New Zealand offers a particularly interesting case of electoral reform, since its parliament used to rely on first-past-the-post single-member districts to elect its members. After multiple elections through the 1970s in which the party with only a plurality of votes won decisive majorities in Parliament, the Labour party established the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Electoral System in 1981. Five nonpartisan Commission members were appointed to investigate alternatives to first-past-the-post. They undertook a multiyear investigation into electoral systems in other countries and also spent time with citizens to understand the problems that reforms ought to address.

The Royal Commission issued its report, “Towards a Better Democracy,” in 1986. The report argued that the electoral system was antiquated and unfair. It asked whether “our electoral system—in significant measure unchanged since its establishment in England long ago—now best serves different purposes in a different country, community, and century.” The Commission articulated a new set of standards by which electoral systems should be judged, writing that “the number of seats gained by a political party should be proportional to the number of voters who support that party.”

In other words, the Royal Commission did more than simply propose alternative institutional arrangements. It also established new criteria for selecting an electoral system, arguing that elections should not be based on geography or tradition, but instead should start from the principle that all votes matter equally. A concerted reform effort, combined with a public education campaign, led to a 1992 indicative referendum in which 84% of voters supported changing the electoral system. In 1993, a binding national referendum led New Zealand to adopt a mixed-member proportional system.

The countries that changed their electoral systems in the 1990s all adopted mixed systems that combine majoritarian and proportional features, allowing voters to choose both one candidate and one party. Germany’s system is mixed-member proportional, as are the Scottish and Welsh parliaments. The trend towards proportionality reflects an evolution in our conception of democratic fairness: If an electoral system consistently produces results that do not reflect the preferences of its voters, reforming it towards proportionality can make it more democratic.

Reform efforts are not always successful, though. In the 1990s, the Labour government in Britain created the Jenkins Commission to look into alternatives to first-past-the-post. In 1998, the Commission issued a report recommending a mixed system called alternative vote plus. This system allows voters to rank-order the candidates in single-member districts, and also reserves a proportion of Parliamentary seats to parties, which are selected proportionally. But the momentum for electoral reform fizzled, and a national referendum to adopt alternative vote plus failed in 2011.

There are critical lessons to draw from the reform efforts that succeeded and failed. First, voters and elites need to see electoral systems as the source of unfair or disproportionate political advantage. At the very least, voters need to realize that the two-party system is entirely a product of the electoral rules. Without changing first-past-the-post, it is very unlikely that a third party becomes competitive. Second, the reform coalition—grassroots activists, experts, and stakeholders—needs to cohere around one big reform idea for it to gain traction with the public. This is crucial to momentum, and to creating a base of support among cross-cutting constituencies. Finally, in the lead-up to reform and in the years that follow, there must be consistent voter education, and patience: Outcomes might not change overnight.

Electoral Reform in the United States?

The crisis of liberal democracy at home and abroad requires us to think critically about what exactly is wrong with our democratic institutions and practices. For decades, Americans’ trust in institutions has been on the decline. Many Americans say they are fed up with a system that feels like it is not truly representative, one in which their choices are constrained.

We must ask if an electoral system that requires voters to waste their votes, that limits politics to two parties, and that greatly enhances the power of voters in certain states or districts comports with modern conceptions of democratic fairness. Voters and politicians are increasingly receptive to calls for reform. Mobilizing for electoral reform, and building momentum for greater proportionality in our politics, will be arduous. But with sustained support, it may not be impossible

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