Fall 2020: Isolation

HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW

THE THE NEUROLOGY QUARANTINE LONELY OD OF LONELINESS CLASSROOMS

VOLUME LI NO. 3, FALL 2020 HARVARDPOLITICS.COM

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FALL 2020 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 1

HARVARDPOLITICS.COM/REDLINE

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ISOLATION This issue’s cover topic was proposed by Kelsey Chen, Ruhi Nayak, and Ajay Sarma.

3 Kids, COVID-19 and Preschool Over Zoom Sruthi Palanippan

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The Lonely OD Alexander Chen

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Neurology of Loneliness Karina Ascunce

CAMPUS 14 Essentializing Essential Workers Ria Modak

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A Global Crisis Needs a Global Response Sethu Odayappan

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Casteism, Orientalism, and Tokenism Ria Modak

16 We Were Already Isolated Martin Bernstein 14 Essentializing Essential Workers Ria Modak

19 Games Without Frontiers Kendrick Foster

UNITED STATES 19

Games Without Frontiers Kendrick Foster

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For the Most Vulnerable, Space is a Scarce Resource in the Age of COVID-19 Annie Miall

24 A People’s History of Looting Ria Modak 26 Wisconsin as a Microcosm of Democratic Decline Jack Silvers

CULTURE 37

Y yo no me voy a quedar callado Sofia Andrade

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Welcome to the #Markeyverse Allison J. Scharmann

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TikTok: The Summation of 2020’s Duality and Chaos Simone Chu

INTERVIEWS 46

WORLD 29

29 Conservation as Public Health Policy Joy Ding

Conservation as Public Health Policy Joy Ding

Hasty Hookups Christine Mui

Mobilizing Young Voters with Andy Roo Forrest and Genessa Krasnow Duncan Glew

ENDPAPER 48

Lonely Together Ilana Cohen

Email: president@harvardpolitics.com. ISSN 0090-1032. Harvard Political Review. All rights reserved. Image Credits: Creative Commons: 16-CthulhuWho1 (Will Hart); Flickr: 29-Richard; The Noun Project: 8-artworkbean; 8-Blaise Sewell; 9-Meaghan Hendricks; 11-Gan Khoon Lay; 11-Med Marki; 11-Adrien Coquet; 16-Anthony Ledoux, CA; 19,21-tulpahn; 26-Andrejs Kirma; 35-designer expert; Unsplash: Cover-Max Bender; Cover-Kyle Cottrell; 1-visuals; 11-James Barr; 11-Pars Sahin; 14-United Nations COVID-19 Response; 16-Aleksei Ieshkin; 19-Andy Holmes; 22-United Nations COVID-19 Response; 22-United Nations COVID-19 Response; 22-Karl Magnuson; 24-Aaron Burden; 24-Sash Margrie Hunt; 29-adrian; 32-Charles Deluvio; 32-Brian McGowan; 32-fotografierende; 35-Pablo Heimplatz; 37-Mike Von; 43-Hello I’m Nik; 46-Tiffany Tertipes; 48-Matteo Di Iorio; Design by: Swathi Kella, Trina Lilja, Madison Shirazi, and Fatima Taj.

FALL 2020 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 1

HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW

FROM THE PRESIDENT Isolation

A Nonpartisan Undergraduate Journal of Politics, Est. 1969—Vol. LI, No. 3

EDITORIAL BOARD PRESIDENT: Alexis Mealey PUBLISHER: Wyatt Hurt MANAGING EDITOR: Marian Bothner ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR (interim): Jessica Boutchie ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR (on leave): Ilana Cohen ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR (on leave): Clay Oxford STAFF DIRECTOR: Cate Brock SENIOR COVERS EDITOR: Kendrick Foster ASSOCIATE COVERS EDITOR: Kate Gundersen SENIOR U.S. EDITOR (on leave): Joseph Winters ASSOCIATE U.S. EDITOR: Swathi Kella ASSOCIATE U.S. EDITOR: Chloe Levine SENIOR WORLD EDITOR: Kelsey Chen ASSOCIATE WORLD EDITOR: Ruhi Nayak ASSOCIATE WORLD EDITOR: Ajay Sarma SENIOR CULTURE EDITOR: Jacob Blair ASSOCIATE CULTURE EDITOR: Christine Mui SENIOR CAMPUS EDITOR: Winona Guo ASSOCIATE CAMPUS EDITOR: Jaden Deal INTERVIEWS EDITOR: George Dalianis BUSINESS MANAGER: Duncan Glew ASSOCIATE BUSINESS MANAGER (on leave): Victoria Verna ASSOCIATE BUSINESS MANAGER (interim): Arpit Bhate SENIOR DESIGN EDITOR: Trina Lilja ASSOCIATE DESIGN EDITOR (interim): Austin Taylor SENIOR MULTIMEDIA EDITOR: Jacob Heberle ASSOCIATE MULTIMEDIA EDITOR (on leave): Nicolas Medrano ASSOCIATE MULTIMEDIA EDITOR (on leave): Annelisa Kingsbury Lee ASSOCIATE MULTIMEDIA EDITOR (interim): Ryan Golemme ASSOCIATE MULTIMEDIA EDITOR (interim): Meimei Xu SENIOR TECH DIRECTOR: Kodi Obika ASSOCIATE TECH DIRECTOR: Yaodong Yu ASSOCIATE TECH DIRECTOR: David Hacker COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT DIRECTOR: Alexandra Diggs

STAFF Alex Tam, Alienor Manteau, Alisha Ukani, Alison Chen, Allison Piper, Amy Danoff, Amy Wang, Annelisa Kingsbury Lee, Audrey Sheehy, Ava Salzman, Ben Roberts, Benjamin Firester, Brammy Rajakumar, Bridger Gordon, Byron Hurlbut, Campbell Erickson, Caroline Yun, Carter Nakamoto, Charles Xu, Chloe Lemmel-Hay, Chris Sun, Christian Browder, Clara Bates, Clara Nevins, Colton Carpenter, Connor Brown, Connor Schoen, Daniel Friedman, David Hacker, DJ Kranchalk, Eleonore Evans, Eli Berlin, Emily Malpass, Emily Moss, Emmet Halm, Enrique Sanchez, Esha Chaudhuri, Ethan Schultz, Fatima Taj, Gabrielle Landry, Garrett O’Brien, Graham Walter, Hadley DeBello, Hafsa Muse, Hope Kudo, Isabel Cole, Isabel Isselbacher, Jacob Kern, Jake McIntyre, Jamal Nimer, James Blanchfield, James Coleman, Jamie Bikales, Jamie Weisenberg, Jay Gopalan, Jerrica Li, Jerry Huang, Johannes Lang, John Ball, Jon Riege, Jordan Barton, Jose Larios, Joseph Minatel, Josh Berry, Katharine Heintz, Katherine Ho, Katie Miao, Kevin Bi, Lainey Newman, Lauren Baehr, Lauren Fadiman, Leila Wass, Libby Palanza, Lindsey Bouldin, Lu Shao, Manuel Abecasis, Marcus Trenfield, Matthew Hatfield, Matthew Shaw, Max Snyder, Maya Bharara, Meena Venkataramanan, Melissa Kwan, Mfundo Radebe, Michael Montella, Michael Wornow, Mikael Tessema, Mimi Alphonsus, Miyu Imai, Mustafa Ansari, Natalie Dabkowski, Nicholas Sleeper, Nick Danby, Nidal Morrison, Nikole Naloy, Noah Knopf, Noah Redlich, Otto Barenberg, Pawel Rybacki, Peyton Dunham, Roger Cawdette, Rumi Khan, Ryan Chung, Ryan Golemme, Sam Meyerson, Samantha FrenkelPopell, Sandy Koenig, Sanika Mahajan, Sarah Deonarain, Sarah Tisdall, Satish Wasti, Sophie Dicara, Tamara Shamir, Tom Slack, Vanessa Ruales, Will Finigan, Will Polster, William Boggs, Yash Kumbhat, Yashaar Hafizka, Yuri-Grace Ohashi, Zachary Buttenwieser, Zehan Zhou SENIOR WRITERS: Amir Siraj, Jessica Boutchie, Alicia Zhang, Sarah Shamoon, Keshav Rastogi, Will Imbrie-Moore, Lauren Anderson, Hank Sparks, Matthew Rossi, Meena Venkataramanan, Corbin Duncan, Gordon Kamer, Sarah Deonarain, Anirudh Suresh, Darwin Peng, Andrew Zucker

ADVISORY BOARD Jonathan Alter Richard L. Berke E.J. Dionne, Jr. Ron Fournier

Walter Isaacson Whitney Patton Maralee Schwartz

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As I write this letter, I am, for once, at a loss for words. When I wrote the last President’s Note in January, the world looked radically different from that which we see today. We looked forward with hope for a new decade, only to be faced immediately with immense hardship. Societies across the world have been turned upside down, and we have all struggled to adapt. More than six months after the initial American outbreak of COVID-19, we continue to weather this storm in solidarity with the many whose lives have been lost and the countless others whose lives will never be the same.

Yet in the wake of this pandemic, one fact remains apparent: life moves forward. We struggle onwards, negotiating our global grief within the simultaneously harsh and hopeful reality that life must continue. We find new ways to connect, new ways to laugh, and new ways to exist.

This issue of the Harvard Political Review is no exception. Compiled from within our homes all over the world, rather than in the basement of Harvard’s Lamont Library, “Isolation” reflects on these new normals and serves as a written testimony to our continued existence as a publication.

First, Sruthi Palanippan explores how COVID-19 has changed children’s access to early educational opportunities and exacerbated existing, lasting inequalities in “Kids, COVID-19 and Preschool over Zoom.” Writer Alexander Chen then moves to discussing the impact of COVID-19 on the opioid epidemic, arguing that the measures taken to halt the spread of the pandemic have exacerbated the opioid epidemic by contributing to crippling loneliness in “The Lonely OD.” Karina Ascunce continues this examination of loneliness in “Neurology of Loneliness,” diving into the impacts of prolonged isolation on long-term mental health while also considering the ways in which individuals have found connection in spite of the pandemic. Finally, in “Hasty Hookups,” Christine Mui moves beyond the COVID-19 pandemic to explore the feelings of isolation associated with hookup culture on college

campuses.

Each of these pieces is filled with top-notch analysis from some of our most talented staff, but to our publication, this magazine represents something greater.

This magazine was written and produced during the summer after we were evacuated from campus with just five days to pack our belongings, say goodbye to friends, and return to homes that many of us no longer recognized in all corners of the world. This magazine is not just a collection of articles. It is evidence of our grit, our resilience and our commitment to good journalism and to one another.

Over the past seven months, we have lived at home, continued on with our classes and dealt with the uncertainty of this pandemic. Nevertheless, we at the HPR have still hit milestones we never dreamed could be possible, breaking alltime viewership records on our website and publishing almost daily throughout the spring. In all of this uncertainty, the HPR has served as a point of light and solace in my life and in the lives of so many of our staff. We have you, our readers, to thank for allowing us to continue to share our thoughts and stories with you, and we will be forever grateful. We hope that you enjoy this magazine that, to us at the HPR, represents so much more.

Alexis Mealey President

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Kids, COVID-19 and Preschool over Zoom Sruthi Palanippan

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he start of quarantine was rocky for Masada Siegel, a freelance journalist with a 4-year-old son. Writing for CNN, Siegel shared that although she initially strived to complete schoolwork and play with her son during the day, those activities became impossible as household and work responsibilities piled up around her. Instead of teaching out of workbooks, she and her husband taught their son life skills via household chores. While this kept their son learning and engaged, it did not match his preschool experience. At home, there was no socialization with peers or group play, nor activities like art and writing — activities aimed at building academic and social foundations.

Across the United States, millions of children and parents are facing the same struggles as the Siegel family in the wake of COVID-19 related school closings — struggles that have the potential to cause consequential backslides as students and their parents attempt to adjust to remote learning. A survey conducted by the Bipartisan Policy Center found that 60% of all child care providers were fully closed as of April 2020, requiring many young children to stay within their parents’ care and without inperson interaction with teachers, child care providers or peers.

This heightened isolation and its consequences loom particularly large for our nation’s youngest children, as receiving continuous care and learning remotely can be particularly challenging — in some cases infeasible — and may lead to severe educational and developmental gaps in both the short- and long-term.

What makes these youngsters especially vulnerable to these educational ramifications of COVID-19? The first five years are critical to a child’s intellectual and social development. By age five, the brain is already 90% developed and is rapidly absorbing new information. Furthermore, crucial social and emotional skills are formed during those early years. According to Harvard researcher Dr. Dana Charles McCoy, these skills “support children’s ability to continuously engage in learning environments, manage their own behaviors, and get along well with others.”

Thus, it is unsurprising that researchers have repeatedly found numerous long-term benefits stemming from high-quality child care and early childhood education, including better educational outcomes (such as reduced need for special education and higher high school and college graduation rates), lower rates of delinquency and crime, higher earnings later in life, and improved adult health outcomes.

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Given the significance of holistic early childhood development, the consequences of the current vastly altered learning environment will likely follow these children as they progress in their educational careers and beyond. To make matters worse, while all young children will be affected by the move to remote learning, the shift will only continue to heighten levels of existing educational inequalities for young children of color and young children from low-income households, disproportionately exposing these children to the negative, long-lasting externalities of COVID-19.

PRE-COVID-19 DISPARITIES IN QUALITY AND ACCESS TO EARLY LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES Even before the onset of the pandemic, the early childhood education landscape was rife with inequities due to high costs and insufficient public funding. Thus, considering all the important skills children develop during that time of their lives, it is no surprise that by the time a child enters kindergarten, variation in children’s ability to access early educational and developmental services already results in achievement gaps along the lines of race, income and home environment.

To begin, child care has consistently come at a hefty price, with the average annual cost of center-based child care about $16,000, surpassing the cost of in-state college tuition in several states. With public investments in child care consistently falling short, many families are unable to afford standard child care services. For example, preschool enrollment is practically universal for children in high-income families. However, in 2018, only 45% of 3- to 4-year-olds from families earning under $30,000 a year attended preschool. Thus, when children from low-income backgrounds start kindergarten, they are 12 or more months behind their more well-off peers, according to a 2015 report by the U.S. Department of Education.

Furthermore, there are glaring disparities in kindergarten readiness when comparing White children to Black and Hispanic children. While Black and Hispanic children were enrolled in preschool at rates only slightly below their White peers in 2018, they did not have similar access to high-quality programs. When asked about the quality of such programs, Steven Barnett, the director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, told the HPR that “it’s lower for African American kids, [but] it’s not good for anybody.” A 2016 report by the Center for American Progress and NIEER noted that “African American and Hispanic children are anywhere from 9 to 10 months behind in math and 7 to 12 months behind in reading when they enter kindergarten.” Critically, research shows that these gaps are not irreparable; higher-quality early learning programs have been proven to close the school readiness gap between disadvantaged and advantaged students. But, that gap won’t be closed anytime soon due to COVID-19.

QUARANTINE AND ITS COSTS: CHILD CARE CENTERS UNDER FINANCIAL DURESS Due to the current pressures of COVID-19 and the resulting closure of many child care facilities, access to quality child care has severely declined. In April, an overwhelming 61% of parents reported that their child care providers had shut their doors

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because of COVID-19. While the percentage of child care centers remaining closed has declined to 18% as of July, many centers that decided to reopen are hanging by a thread as enrollment numbers have drastically decreased and federal funding has dwindled.

Cindy Lehnhoff, the executive director of the National Child Care Association, spoke with the HPR about the struggles childcare providers have been facing from Teddy Bear Day Care in Alexandria, Virginia, where she helps the owner on a coaching and consulting basis. Pre-COVID-19, she said about 30 children attended the daycare per day, but following the lockdown order in the state, most days saw only three children. While the number of children attending is slowly rising as the state loosens social distancing guidelines, according to Lehnhoff, Teddy Bear Day Care has only been able to remain open thanks to a loan from the federal CARES Act. But, the looming depletion of the funds will soon leave the center without financial support.

In addition to losing federal funding, these facilities face the risk of collapsing as more families withdraw their enrollment for a variety of reasons. While some families have continued to pay daycare centers full tuition in order to help the centers survive, paying hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars a month has become increasingly difficult to justify — especially given that virtual learning services provided by centers can be insufficient. In predominantly low-income neighborhoods where the pandemic has worsened financial situations, more families are unable to pay for child care services, which could cause a higher proportion of centers in those areas to permanently shut down.

Without the stability that child care centers often provide children and their families, Lehnhoff worries not only about the educational development of young children, but about their emotional and overall well-being. She said that when families are struggling to make ends meet and survive, they are “not really attentive to their children,” which she said “takes its toll on a child’s self confidence and on their opportunities to learn and just be loved.” Lehnhoff additionally expressed concern for children in families receiving extensive financial assistance to enroll in child care. “When they’re not in care, we have to worry about [if ] they are getting enough to eat,” Lehnhoff told the HPR. Thus, without the safety net that many child care centers provide, the most vulnerable children will suffer greatly.

PARENTS AS TEACHERS AND CHILD CARE PROFESSIONALS: THE CHALLENGES OF LEARNING AT HOME As child care centers and preschools have largely closed, many parents have been forced to juggle their full-time jobs with caregiving responsibilities. As noted in a Bipartisan Policy Center survey, nearly two thirds of parents have had difficulty finding child care options during the pandemic. For parents at the top of the economic ladder, children interrupting Zoom calls with urgent needs or endless other distractions make child care and work a hard mix. This juggling act is even more difficult for those parents who have lost their jobs during the pandemic, struggling to pay their bills and find employment while simultaneously providing for and taking care of their children.

For any parent with young children, this new, strained reality is infeasible given that educating young children requires much greater support and instruction, making independent online

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learning seemingly difficult, or even entirely impractical. Steven Barnett noted that it is particularly challenging to remotely educate “any child under age eight,” adding that “the challenges get more difficult the younger the child.”

Though all face these challenges, the combination of different at-home stressors and the difficulty of teaching young students remotely has led to drastic variance in the educational experiences of young children over the last six months, with some receiving more attention and instruction and others receiving very minimal support. For example, more well-resourced schools and care providers have been able to supply families with more robust remote programming and educational tools, furthering divides between children in low- and high-income neighborhoods. Barnett elaborated that the quality of experiences is “highly variable, and for many kids a complete disaster,” adding that about 50% of kids whose classrooms closed were not receiving any instruction by May. Still, more often than not, Lehnhoff says that parents are unable to execute these at-home developmental and educational activities. Compared with licensed child care professionals and early childhood educators, parents are often not as knowledgeable about or skilled at the developmentally appropriate methods to teach their children at home, often mistakenly employing the teaching methods used by their own elementary teachers when teaching their toddlers at home.

Additionally, the increased reliance on digital media as a teaching tool that has accompanied the pandemic is drastically different from what young kids are used to in their classrooms.

Quality preschool programs instead emphasize the importance of traditional play, which supports cognitive development, emotional self-regulation and peer group interaction. A Zoom call is no substitute for in-person socialization. While Brett Castro, Lehnhoff’s daughter and mom to a preschooler and kindergartener in Ormond Beach, Florida, shared with the HPR that she and her husband have been able to provide their son with toys like Legos and magnet tiles, the peer engagement aspect is still missing. At-home experiences are inherently devalued as kids can no longer interact and engage with their peers through talk and play.

Furthermore, while no children are immune to the issues discussed, young children of color and young children from low-income households will again be disproportionately disadvantaged as their home environments are more likely to have been disrupted by this pandemic than others. The very families that were struggling before the pandemic now feel even greater pressure to maintain healthy home environments for their young kids. Black, Hispanic, and low-income communities have experienced the highest rates of COVID-19-related deaths and job losses, causing further strain on their families. “Home environments are much more unequal than school environments,” said Barnett. “To the extent that disruptions due to COVID-19 shift things back to the home, that means children’s experiences will be more unequal.”

tion of Young Children surveyed child care programs across the nation, of which only 11% said they can withstand an indefinite closure without significant public investment. The Center for American Progress estimated that without sufficient federal funding, approximately 4.5 million child care slots could be eliminated — nearly 50% of those existing now, also eliminating countless jobs in the childcare sector. Consequently, investments in child care and early learning are essential to the survival and continued success of quality programs that remain vital to the development of our nation’s youngest children.

The economic crisis plaguing the country will not make it easy to invest in early childhood — a space that has been undersupported for decades. Barnett stated that “the way you address the crisis is more access and higher quality,” but that those areas are “already an issue.” Since public investment in early childhood has been a persistent issue even before COVID-19, it will require a large acceleration of efforts and substantial funding to reach optimal levels of access and quality in early learning programs. Without such investments, inequities in the already precarious system will only further deepen as more families are pushed into economic distress.

There is, however, a source of optimism for public investment in early childhood education: a growing consensus from people on both sides of the aisle that investing in our nation’s youngest children is crucial to the future success of our nation. Although that consensus guarantees no change, without it, reform is especially unlikely. Still, with competing budget priorities, lawmakers will need to wholeheartedly prioritize early childhood education to witness any marked advancement in alleviating educational disparities amongst the nation’s children. 

EQUALIZING THE PLAYING FIELD Amidst the massive challenges posed to early childhood education by COVID-19, calls to invest in high-quality early childhood education and child care ring louder now than ever before.

Looking to the future, the National Association for the Educa-

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THE POLITICS OF PROTEST

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V E RICA’S OPIOID CRISIS MEETS CO

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Alexander Chen

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hey are found in suburban bedrooms and urban sublets.

They are found in college dorms and motel parking lots.

They are found in settings that are completely different from each other in every way, save for one depressing similarity: They are found alone. These are the casualties of America’s opioid epidemic, numbering almost half a million since the turn of the century and nearly 50,000 in just 2018. Many succumb in solitude.

Loneliness has long been known to promote the development of substance use disorders, and especially opioid abuse. Like many other substances, opioids act as temporary chemical comrades for those lacking human companionship, their tantalizing reward of brief bliss and euphoria trapping victims in a cruel feedback loop of increasing dependence and isolation. However, unlike alcohol or nicotine, opioids are much more easily consumed in lethal doses, and relapsing individuals whose tolerance to such drugs disappeared as they tried to become “clean” are often the most vulnerable to suffering a fatal overdose.

Though the COVID-19 pandemic has overshadowed the opioid epidemic in recent months, opioids have not disappeared. Instead, with mandatory lockdowns and social distanc-

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ing measures preventing many struggling with addiction from accessing resources critical to their well-being, the need to tackle the opioid crisis has only become more dire. Indeed, many individuals suffering from substance use disorders now face a distressing Catch-22 in the COVID-19 era. For those who are still employed or defy public health orders to socialize, the constant risk of catching the virus looms, while those who abide by social distancing orders and stay home alone must deal with another menace that can be just as deadly: isolation.

A middle road exists. It is perfectly feasible to provide resources that help reduce the loneliness of those suffering from opioid addiction while respecting social distancing mandates.

The solution lies in expanding empirically proven harm reduction strategies that ensure that all individuals who use drugs do so safely and responsibly.

THE BACKSTORY Addiction and loneliness feeding into one another is nothing new, but certain characteristics of the American opioid crisis have brought the relationship to an unprecedented, even more

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menacing level. The first factor to consider is the distinctive genesis of the opioid epidemic. While drugs such as crack cocaine first emerged in impoverished urban neighborhoods, the communities initially hit hardest by opioids tended to be mid-sized Rust Belt towns experiencing a painful decline from their manufacturing heyday. With a significant portion of male residents in these areas newly unemployed and anxious to stave off boredom and despair, opioid abuse quickly exploded. The resulting deaths of many family breadwinners from overdoses, along with the migration of many others in search of employment elsewhere, soon sparked a pernicious cycle of ever-worsening loneliness and addiction in these declining industrial centers.

However, while former industrial boomtowns and their surrounding rural regions remain hotspots of opioid addiction, the epidemic has become far more than a localized problem.

Rather, its explosion across the nation illuminates the second factor behind the unprecedented effects of the opioid crisis: the War on Drugs, a decades-long campaign of punitive enforcement that has only worsened the opioid crisis on multiple levels.

For instance, militarized crackdowns on drug trafficking have encouraged smugglers to supply increasingly potent opioids that are smaller and harder to detect. This has resulted in a “wave phenomenon” as deadlier drugs such as heroin and synthetic analogs, most infamously fentanyl, have gradually replaced the prescription opioids that were the most common culprits of addiction in previous decades.

Most critically, the zero tolerance attitude of the War on Drugs has dramatically exacerbated the stigma associated with drug addiction and deepened the relationship between substance use and loneliness. By characterizing victims of addiction as social menaces and encouraging their families to give “tough love” in all cases of addiction instead of only extreme ones, America’s narrow-minded approach in the past half-century has created an underclass of isolated individuals with limited social prospects.

A TWO-EPIDEMIC FORTE COVID-19 has helped put the many failures of the War on Drugs on full display. The pandemic has “amplified issues at every level of the addiction spectrum,” Samantha Arsenault, the vice president of national treatment quality initiatives at Shatterproof, an addiction awareness nonprofit, told the HPR. “Whether it’s people engaging in risky behaviors as a coping mechanism, people with substance use disorders trying to seek treatment or maintain treatment regimens,” there is no question that the two crises have fundamentally intersected.

Nationwide, individuals struggling with addiction whose families believed that completely shunning them was the best option for recovery are now truly alone. For those who were in the midst of “rehab” before the pandemic hit, the paucity of remote treatment options is now openly obvious. Faced with safety concerns and receiving little to no support from public authorities in creating emergency accessibility plans, dozens of needle exchange centers have had no choice but to reduce hours, or even close completely, as the virus continues to spread. While some clinics have organized “to-go” bags of clean needles and other supplies for their clients, this Band-Aid solution is not only unable to provide the same quality of care but also cannot reach vulnerable individuals who may have stopped travelling to the

clinic altogether due to barriers created by COVID-19.

In any case, individual organizations’ efforts to adjust as best they can to the new global situation are laudable, but only a concentrated national effort can truly slow down the revolving door between addiction and loneliness. Yet across the nation, millions still subscribe to ingrained myths that portray addiction as a “moral failing” instead of the brain disorder that it unquestionably is. And while these widespread misconceptions have marginalized victims of addiction for decades, COVID-19 has further exacerbated the situation. As Dr. Rebecca Baker, executive director of the National Institutes of Health’s Helping to End Addiction Long-Term initiative, puts it in an interview with the HPR, the “most significant barrier” to implementing solutions that are empirically effective in helping victims of addiction survive, recover and reintegrate into society is the deeply rooted stigma associated with addiction in America.

THE OPPOSITE OF ADDICTION: NOT SOBRIETY, BUT CONNECTION Clearly, the COVID-19 epidemic has highlighted the need for new strategies for tackling the opioid crisis that particularly focus on confronting the toxic stigmatization of its victims. The most promising solutions are the ones that adopt a harm reduction approach and focus on tackling both the physiological and psychological aspects of addiction. While skeptics of harm reduction often point to it as an example of excessive government intervention and the promotion of illicit drug use, it is simply an evidence-based approach that is proven to work. As Monique Tula, executive director of the Harm Reduction Coalition told the HPR, those who use drugs “need positive connections with other people who won’t judge them for their behavior.” For the best chance at recovery, feelings of “purpose and belonging” are essential.

The first step to fighting the stigma of addiction that has left many of its victims helpless in quarantine is “educating the public,” declared Arsenault. Without efforts to dissuade fears that opioid medications such as methadone and buprenorphine perpetuate dependence and promote drug use, social pressure will continue to prompt those struggling with addiction to stay home and use in solitude. To change this status quo, Shatterproof has launched a special education module aiming to reconcile families of those struggling with addiction with the exigencies of the pandemic. Meanwhile, Baker believes that there also needs to be an emphasis on educating primary care physicians on the benefits of medication-based treatment, as many of them are still hesitant on having such conversations with patients who may be struggling with addiction.

The coronavirus-induced national economic crisis, meanwhile, has also affected addiction treatment centers, as many have become financially insolvent. And as many of these rehabilitation facility networks have attracted significant controversy over their practices, a direct bailout to save them is certainly not the only solution on the table. Instead, in order to promote best practices and improve oversight, it may be necessary for regulatory authorities to reconsider the entire business model of a rehabilitation industry that has constantly been criticized for deceptive marketing methods, patient manipulation and even insurance fraud. In addition to exercising their enforcement obligations, governmental authorities should not only continue

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encouraging the distribution of opioid substitutes and overdose reversal drugs but also lead the charge in launching home delivery services and other experimental programs that act as adaptations to the COVID-19 situation.

However, the most important step to reducing the loneliness of at-risk individuals is ensuring that those who are home aren’t really alone. Telemedicine might offer a chance to do just that.

As an opportunity to use innovations in technology to directly connect healthcare providers with individuals struggling with addiction, telemedicine offers not only the lucrative promise of cheaper and more time-efficient physician-patient interactions but also a chance to directly connect with patients in quarantine alone. Dr. Travis Rieder, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, told the HPR that he is “not worried at all” about implementing telemedicine on a larger scale. Though some critics have suggested that reduced physical physician-patient contacts may translate into a repeat of painkiller over-prescriptions like in decades past, Rieder points out that no one is “seeking out methadone to get high” and that telemedicine is the most effective medium to continue harm reduction interventions in a socially distanced world.

Meanwhile, organizations such as Never Use Alone, a nonprofit that connects volunteers with substance users who lack others nearby, are dedicated to ensuring substance users never use alone. In an interview with the HPR, Never Use Alone founder Mike Brown said that their “call volume has doubled at least” since the beginning of the pandemic, as staying home is often “a dangerous place” for at-risk individuals whose few remaining connections to society have now been permanently severed by social distancing measures.

Nevertheless, Brown believes that ultimately changing the widespread belief that families should “kick out of their lives” relatives suffering from addiction would do more good than any harm reduction effort, as family members living in the same residence would be best equipped to immediately contact emergency services after an overdose and administer life-saving reversal drugs. Indeed, as families are still the largest social units allowed to congregate by many states, a campaign to reconnect those estranged by addiction would be incredibly beneficial to mitigating loneliness.

WHAT’S NEXT? Although the novel coronavirus has wrought havoc on a global scale, it has also become a real opportunity for Americans to catalyze reform on existing national ills, including the opioid crisis. Dr. Peter Grinspoon, an internist at Massachusetts General Hospital who has written extensively about his past struggles with opioid addiction, agrees. As he points out in a recent Harvard Health Blog article, while the COVID-19 and opioid epidemics have become “additively deadly” together, they have also shined a revealing spotlight on the common “underlying fault lines” exacerbating them both. In an interview with the HPR, Grinspoon contended that “reconnecting is critical” to any odyssey of recovery, meaning that these two national crises are fundamentally interconnected.

This is a both daunting and hopeful insight. Perhaps as we continue to bake bread with family members, organize Zoom calls with friends and search for other activities to alleviate our boredom in quarantine, we should better appreciate how much

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we take for granted the fact that we still have people in our lives that care for our well-being. While confined, we should also better inform ourselves of the plight of the millions struggling with opioid addiction who lack companionship. If we join the national crusade to reduce their social stigmatization and isolation, we just might be able to prevent yet another lonely OD. 

Neurology of Loneliness Karina Ascunce

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n 1842, famed writer Charles Dickens visited a prison in Philadelphia, and he did not like what he saw. “The system here is rigid, strict, and hopeless solitary confinement,” he wrote. “I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.” Unfortunately, solitary confinement continues to this day, and its psychological harms have not diminished: It drives incarcerated people to extreme instability and loss of function, and the American Civil Liberties Union cites solitary confinement in prisons as “fundamentally inhumane.”

Solitary confinement is an extreme and torturous variation of social isolation. Nonetheless, it still demonstrates how strongly social isolation and loneliness can impact mental health, quality of life and even life span. Even without the extreme scenario of solitary confinement, loneliness and social isolation can be detrimental to an individual’s well-being.

Loneliness may be increasing with forced lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, and exacerbated isolation has severely impacted mental health across the world, with experts rushing to understand the potential effects of prolonged isolation. In spite of, or perhaps because of, loneliness’s inextricable ties with depression and other mental illnesses, millennials and Generation Z’ers have become resourceful, coming up with innovative solutions such as creativity circles for bonding and sharing personal stories help to dispel perceived isolation.

LONELINESS DEFINED The most widely-accepted definition of loneliness is “a unique condition in which individuals perceive themselves to be socially isolated even when among other people.” Social isolation is different from loneliness — it is defined as the “absence of social interactions, contacts, and relationships with family and friends, with neighbors on an individual level, and with ‘society at large’ on a broader level.” While these two terms are different, they are not mutually exclusive. Loneliness is the perception of social isolation; therefore, it is categorically influenced by actual social isolation and the disparity between expectation and reality.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, one in five Americans reported feeling lonely or socially isolated, which is partially why experts use the term “loneliness epidemic” to describe the prevalence of this condition. The prevalence of loneliness is as concerning as the magnitude of its effects. The feeling of loneliness is not only uncomfortable and deemed undesirable by society; it can also affect health outcomes, with one study putting individuals with loneliness at a higher risk for premature mortality.

Loneliness is also associated with depression, generalized anxiety and suicidal ideation, in addition to an increased risk of late-life dementia. Dr. Carla Perissinotto, associate professor in

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the Geriatrics Division at the Department of Medicine at UCSF, described the relationship between loneliness and mental health as “bidirectional” in an interview with the HPR. In other words, loneliness can lead to or contribute to psychiatric disorders, and vice versa. Literature on the “disease” of loneliness indicates that, like opioid use disorder or obesity, it is an epidemic and therefore should be treated as such. While there is no current biomarker for loneliness, there is an association between the neurological basis for loneliness and Alzheimer’s disease, as Dr. Nancy Donovan, the chief of the division of geriatric psychiatry at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, told the HPR. Beyond the neurological and individual bases for loneliness, societal and cultural shifts have also shaped social isolation and loneliness. In the past few decades alone, single-person households have become increasingly popular; while this increase is not necessarily indicative of social isolation or loneliness, it is possible that it represents a cultural or societal shift toward more isolated lifestyles. On the flip side, loneliness, given its status as a feeling tangential to and interwoven with mental health, faces similar stigma as mental health. In just a decade, antidepressant use has skyrocketed, with over 61 million prescriptions in 2015, for a variety of reasons. Most importantly, however, depression is not going undertreated now in the same way that it was just a couple of decades ago. Still, stigma is a challenge to recognition and treatment of depression and loneliness. There is a paradoxical relationship between the way our society moves toward a future of virtual individuality while simultaneously viewing loneliness as an undesirable character flaw.

Beyond the household, communities are one of the most important contributors to social fulfillment and interconnectedness; many find their communities through religion or other organized groups. Indeed, women who frequently attend religious services are five times less likely to die by suicide. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has severely limited these group gatherings and opportunities for social interaction, which may contribute to increased feelings of loneliness. While this does not mean that reports of loneliness will increase proportionately, it does imply that loneliness, as a function of perceived social isolation, may increase with increased social isolation.

For instance, suicide increases during COVID-19, while not necessarily a cause of loneliness or isolation, may be related to the enforced measures related to social isolation. Suicidal thoughts are associated with loneliness and social isolation, and the almost complete loss of social and community-based interaction driven by the pandemic more specifically may exacerbate the risk of suicide.

COMBATING THE EPIDEMIC Loneliness seems to be a stable trait, but that does not mean there are not potential avenues for addressing and dispelling it.

Indeed, there are many creative and effective ways to address and reduce loneliness, and there have been many campaigns in the US and abroad to decrease the subjective feeling of loneliness among the populations that experience it.

One of these campaigns is the UnLonely Project, led by Dr. Jeremy Nobel. In an interview with the HPR, Nobel detailed the aim and inspiration that drives the UnLonely Project, which includes sharing personal experiences in a way that lets you “tolerate the discomfort of disclosure.” Through sessions con-

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stituted of creative expression, mindfulness and reflection, the UnLonely Project aims to dispel feelings of loneliness and leave participants feeling socially connected and understood. These “creativity circles” can take on many different forms; they can be individual or multiple sessions, they can be in-person or online, and they can serve essentially any age or demographic that experiences loneliness. Ultimately, they serve the purpose of encouraging people to share and create meaningful social interaction to reduce loneliness, and by consequence, associated conditions.

Of course, there are also many unconventional forms of combating loneliness, in particular during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In one Reddit thread from 2018, some claimed that weighted blankets mimic the hug of another human and reduce loneliness-induced anxiety. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many different dating apps and relationship-related solutions surged, with the Dutch government making headlines for providing advice and guidelines for having sex while adhering to COVID-19 distancing mandates. At Harvard, the Datamatch team created Quarantine Datamatch, an algorithm for college students from all over the country to be randomly “matched” with another student based on answers to a jovial and quirky survey. The need for social connectedness and interaction is evident when use of dating apps and social media for meeting and talking to others is surging.

By way of the aforementioned apps and websites (and many more), technology plays a big role in pandemic-adapted social connectedness. Perissinotto claims it “enhances” rather than replaces actual social interaction; nontechnological interactions are still necessary for building meaningful connections. During this pandemic, however, platforms such as Zoom and FaceTime allow family, friends and social networks to keep in touch with each other. In an interview with the HPR, UnLonely Project representative Bradley Riew ’18 also mentioned how technology has its limitations in dispelling loneliness, noting the different outcomes between passively (e.g. mindlessly scrolling) and actively (e.g. messaging and engaging) using social media. Whereas passive active use of social media is associated with depressive symptoms, active use is not, pointing to a broader role in reducing loneliness than previously thought.

However, technology cannot entirely solve this mental health crisis. Donovan underscored the importance of physical presence in social interactions, with a “sensory experience” being necessary for meaningful connections. While there are many temporary, and perhaps ineffective, solutions to loneliness and social isolation, it seems that the most sustainable are the community-based, connection-building ones, with the quintessential example being creativity circles.

Unfortunately, though, it is almost difficult to imagine a future of more interconnectedness after the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the moment, even reintegrating to society is anxiety-provoking and may need time and adjustment. Social distancing is not nearly the same as prison, but lessons can be learned from the U.S. prison system’s harmful reduction of social interconnectedness, furthering the point that social interaction and community support are essential to reducing the feelings of isolation and loneliness that drive certain actions and behaviors. Until communities begin to address this need for connection across all of their populations, loneliness will continue to be an epidemic. 

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Christine Mui

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hen reading the media’s countless horror stories about youth hookups, you may be led to believe that Gen-Z has single-handedly squashed any chance of having long-term relationships with its propensity for casual sex. If only we could stop picking up those 3 a.m. calls to “come over … ”. Yet this is not the case; our newsfeed often oversimplifies the reality of hookups while in college to two extremes.

More commonly, hookups and the culture surrounding them are painted as the catalyst for the “dating apocalypse,” or the end of traditional young love. In this portrayal, today’s youth are part of a generation of instant gratification, uninterested or unable to form meaningful relationships, cycling through emotionless onenight stands instead. At the opposite extreme, others dismiss hookup culture as a myth, citing statistics from the Journal of Sex Research that “less than 15% of college students hook up more than twice per year” to show society greatly overestimates the number of hookups occurring.

However, both of these arguments fail to distinguish the singular act of a hookup from hookup culture, defined as an environment that “accepts and encourages casual sex encounters … without necessarily including emotional intimacy, bonding or a committed relationship.” What media narratives get wrong is that partaking in hookup behavior is not inherently harmful in

and of itself. Its harm is indirect and stems from the labels-free approach that hookup culture dictates into a campus’s social scene, creating an environment where even communicating the want of something else requires actively pushing against that preconceived norm.

Such an environment pressures all young people, from those who frequently have hookups to those who have never had one, and the dabblers in between — something that the commonly proposed solution of simply telling those individuals who find navigating hook up culture emotionally tolling, isolating or toxic to just “stop hooking up” fails to consider. Instead, moving past the hindrance of emotional progress that is behind much of this toxicity lies in a collective solution: rethinking the elements of American culture that shape hookup behavior’s cultural “norm.”

GENERATION LONELY Hookup culture affects the lives of all college students, whether hooking up or not, because of the now-widespread expectation that students hook up. Lisa Wade, a professor of sociology at Tulane University, described this process of institutionalization to the HPR as when campuses became environments “in which hooking up is not just something that you can

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do. It’s something that people think you should do.” This is to say, hookup culture permeates all aspects of college life.

In popular culture and the media, hookups are painted as a weekend-only occurrence, likely the result of a night of partying, and ending the next morning, a narrative that ignores the countless aspects of student life that hookup culture touches. Though hookups themselves often occur on the weekends, talking and hearing about them fill the next weeks’ conversations. Whether sharing negative experiences, such as being sexiled by a roommate or seeing an ex on Tinder, conversing about hookup culture is a way in which many students bond with others. Because of this ubiquity, students who do not actively participate in hookup culture may find it challenging to contribute to these conversations, creating a sense of isolation from their peers. And this feeling of social isolation can be augmented by the notion that those choosing to abstain risk coming across as closed-minded because of hookup culture’s association with sexual liberation and female progress.

However, contrary to popular belief of students and outside observers, it is rare for a student to have a new hookup every weekend. A survey of 14,000 students at 19 universities revealed that by the end of their four years, the average number of hookups for students is eight — roughly one per semester — effectively destroying the notion that students are constantly hooking up.

This fact does not by itself diminish the prevalence of hookup culture on campus, as this culture is also propagated by a phenomenon called dabbling — ways to participate in hookup culture without actively hooking up. Dabbling can range from browsing profiles on dating apps to switching off between periods of multiple hookups and abstinence. Often, the few studies that do acknowledge this gray area between actively participating in and indirectly being affected by hookup culture merely calculate the percentage of dabblers as the remaining participants that do not fall in the category of never having experienced a hookup or having had regular hookups. This method, however, only measures one of the numerous dabbling behaviors — having a hookup once, deciding it is not for you, then never having one again — when in actuality, dabbling does not correlate with one’s number of past hookup experiences.

More often, dabbling behaviors center around the planning of hookups rather than the act of hooking up itself. A commonly used method in planning hookups is priming through flirtation on dating apps. With features like Tinder University and matches based on location proximity, the majority of a student’s matches will be with other students from their university. Even if two individuals don’t talk on the app, their match provides an opportunity for hooking up later if they happen to meet — a likely occurrence at parties, as hookup culture and the college party scene are often intertwined. Social media can be used in a similar way, by sliding into a classmate’s DMs or exchanging Snapchats during the week with the assumption you’ll meet up sometime that weekend. In this way, these apps feed real-life hookup behavior, allowing one to easily “schedule” a hookup in advance.

These apps also offer a middle ground alternative where one can engage in the emotional lead-up to a hookup without following through, temporarily alleviating the feeling of social isolation that those not actively hooking up may feel. To this point, Julie Spira, an online dating expert and coach as well as founder of Cyber-Dating Expert, told the HPR, “When you’re feeling

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isolated, and you’re feeling lonely, the easiest thing to do is open a dating app and start chatting with someone.”

However, on the flip side, Spira warns that online dating can also be demoralizing, such as in the case of online dating fatigue: when we become overwhelmed with too many choices.

She elaborates that “if you’re presented with 20, 30, 40, 50 options, your finger is going to get tired from swiping, and you’re probably not going to be organized [enough] to even remember who you actually matched with.” Thus, the apps quickly turn into a crutch rather than a solution for loneliness — especially as people who fall into this cycle are more reluctant to follow through with in-person hookup culture.

NO LABELS, NO PROBLEMS? Though dabbling can take shape in many different forms, this underreported gray area still adheres to hookup culture’s most defining characteristic: the lack of labels. In fact, dabbling creates the perfect environment for pushing “no labels” since it is the form of hookup behavior that most college students’ experiences will manifest under, and it comes with the implication of being more short-term and less of a commitment than even a friends with benefits scenario.

“No labels” is commonly portrayed in friends with benefits scenarios, but it also applies to relationships still in the “talking” phase because an implied end result of future casual sex is still there. While it is key to stress that hookup culture does not mean long-term relationships don’t exist in college, the default is a no-labels relationship. Without making the want of a long-term relationship explicitly clear from the start, students get stuck in the labels-free zone, where the relationship is just a “thing” or a situationship.

The problem is that no labels does not mean no emotions, or no interest in a long-term relationship; it just means the expectation is to pretend like that is the case, in turn making college relationships a competition of “who cares the least?” In theory, the labels-free approach does not result in problems if that is what both individuals want, but that is rarely the case: a study of 500 students at Binghamton University found that around 50% of them were hoping for their hookup to result in a relationship while acknowledging that was unlikely — implying 50% of the respondents were unhappy with their situationship status.

We may naturally anticipate that the solution to problems arising from miscommunication in the labeling of any relationship is to manage our expectations and not assume that everybody wants a hookup-based relationship. In practice, this could mean that before the first hookup or in the opening line of communication on a dating app, both parties flat out express what they are looking for. But that’s easier said than done, and in real life, there is often a blurred line between our spoken labels and the mental labels we do not share.

Furthermore, these mental labels may continue to change throughout the relationship, even as the spoken one does not.

We naturally anticipate for our relationships to move forward; Psychology Today listed “room for growth” as a key component of a healthy relationship. Even with friendships, there is an innate drive to become closer and better friends. But hookupbased relationships do not fit into this mold; they appear unnatural in that they represent a standstill in our emotions and sometimes even regression in cases of complete emotional isola-

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tion like ghosting.

If room for growth goes against the premise for a hookupbased relationship, can they be healthy? For one, the healthiness of a hookup-based relationship does not seem to be measured by the room for growth within it, but rather the option for growth out of or past its norms and unspoken “rules.” A hookup-based relationship is unhealthy when the pressures of hookup culture are so all-consuming that either party cannot leave or express their desire for change.

Wade exemplifies this point by sharing the story of Sarah, which she heard while following the lives of 110 students through their diary entries in writing her book “American Hookup.” Sarah develops a crush on someone she has repeatedly hooked up with, but she has been so conditioned in how to act according to hookup culture that she pretends she does not, even when he blurts out, “Do you high school like like me?”

Although she very much “high school liked liked him,” she could not say yes given how unaccustomed she was to the risk of being open like that.

HOOKUP CULTURE VS. AMERICAN CULTURE Given the emotional tolls of hookup culture (whether hooking up, dabbling, or doing neither), clearly something has to change. However, there is no easy individualized solution for reforming the expectations that pressure people toward the norm of a no-labels, emotionless approach to hookup culture. Why? Because these pressures and approaches are rooted in larger cultural and societal issues. Like American culture, hookup culture is dictated by the privileged: In hookups as in society, toxic masculinity, sexual assault and harassment, and racial discrimination run rampant.

Toxic masculinity in particular is a significant driver behind hookup culture’s lack of labels; it is the reason why in our media, hookup culture is portrayed as simultaneously liberating and oppressive for women. The context behind that contradiction can be found in the women’s movement and the sexual revolution of the 1970s, as both movements were important precursors to hookup culture.

Wade explains that in the ’70s, women wanted two things for themselves: “access to the male or masculine spheres of life and the right to embody the masculine coded personality traits” along with recognition “that the feminine coded personality traits and females spheres of life were also valuable.” To this day, the latter still has not been achieved in our society.

Further, there is a misconception that when women have bad experiences with hookup culture, it is because they are always the ones pushing for labels, as desire for commitment is considered a stereotypically feminine coded trait. But with casual sex being historically regarded as an activity for men, it is no surprise that although women have the freedom to participate, they are expected to feel and act the same way men do in a culture that has not been adapted to prioritize them.

At its extreme, this lack of prioritization is behind the phenomenon where any connection between sexual assault and hookup culture is misconstrued to insinuate that women are to blame for the sexual harassment or assault they experience when hooking up because they should have been aware of the risks associated with it. Because the pressures of hooking up are more severe and difficult to navigate for certain groups, until we

untangle its rules from American cultural values, hookup culture will continue isolating the very people it is meant to “liberate”.

LOVE AFTER LOCKDOWN Recently, there has been a lot of speculation about the state of hookup culture post-COVID. With the quarantine and campuses shutting down in the spring, hookup culture seems to have paused, with some even arguing that COVID-19 has caused its death. A representative from Tinder told the HPR that since March, “U.S conversations have been up an average of 19%, and the average length of conversations is 8% longer.” This is good news, as conversation length is more indicative than a general uptick in usage that these apps are being used for human connection rather than merely out of boredom. On Bumble, the difference is even greater, with a representative sharing that the app saw “a nearly 70% increase in video calls during the week ending May 1” when compared with video calls during the week ending March 13. “This only further validates that when physical connection is limited, humans will seek out other means to interact and engage.”

But, do these longer and seemingly more meaningful communications indicate anything new? After all, if those conversations still dodge labels, they will likely result in more situationships.

Hookup culture will only end when a permanent realignment of desires and cultural expectations occurs. To this end, Spira has found that physical isolation has possibly made people value relationships more. She is currently polling about the pandemic’s effects on dating, and previously, the number of individuals wanting a long term relationship was “never over 50%.” However, as of early June, “77% want a long term relationship, 4.5% can’t wait to get back to hooking up and 18% put dating on hold.”

Thus, one might wonder if, counterintuitively, physical isolation may have led to the realignment of values needed to end the emotional isolation many endure under hookup culture. Still, one cannot get too confident — the true end of hookup culture will only happen when communicating our true desires becomes part of the new normal. 

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Essentializing Essential Wo r ke r s A Ria Modak

s the coronavirus ravages communities around the world, essential workers continue risking their lives to perform the services that sustain our very lives. They clean our streets, keep us fed, and nurse us back to health. Praised by politicians, glorified by CEOs, and celebrated by celebrities and consumers alike, essential workers have been likened to heroes throughout the pandemic. Such recognition is rhetoric alone. Institutions have flouted guidelines set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention even as workers demand reasonable protections that are in line with those very guidelines. Essential workers, and particularly low-wage workers, continue to be exploited by an extractive capitalist system that prioritizes profits over health and safety.

At Harvard, this hypocrisy becomes exceptionally clear.

While Harvard administrators have publicly lauded the efforts of its essential workers — custodians, dining workers, and clerical and technical staff — they have continually and systematically undermined workers’ rights, putting them at disproportionate risk for contracting the coronavirus. By romanticizing its essential workers while refusing to ensure their safety or provide benefits, Harvard is engaging in a dangerous and irresponsible deflecting tactic to divert attention from its own failures. Its actions serve as an example of a larger phenomenon involving corporate hypocrisy and government inadequacy.

HARVARD’S HYPOCRISY Throughout the pandemic, official communications from university administrators have praised the dedication of essential workers. In an email to the Harvard community, President Lawrence Bacow wrote, “To our staff, I understand that we are expecting you to go above and beyond in your efforts to support our important mission of teaching and scholarship. We do this because we know we can rely on your creativity, flexibility, and judgment through these challenging times.” Various administrators have commented on Harvard’s “talented staff” and their role in “keeping the University up and running.”

Despite these proclamations, Harvard has treated its workers poorly. At the onset of the pandemic, university administrators proposed just 30 days of paid leave for dining hall staff and custodians whose facilities had closed. Afterward, they would be forced to file for unemployment or find another source of income. For a workforce whose labor and pay already diminish significantly during summer break, 30 days of paid leave is simply not enough for workers to support themselves and their families. This proposal only marked the beginning of Harvard’s anti-labor attitude; in the following weeks, university adminis-

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trators continued to prioritize their budget over their employees.

One striking example was Harvard’s failure to provide workers, and especially custodians, with adequate personal protective equipment. Doris Reina-Landaverde, a custodian, shop steward for SEIU 32BJ, the union that represents custodial workers, and organizer with the Harvard Temporary Protected Status Coalition, contracted COVID-19 on the job. In an interview with the HPR, she spoke to Harvard’s initial reluctance to provide workers with sufficient PPE: “The job we do is hard. We need masks to protect us from the virus and from the chemicals we use [to clean]. Sometimes more than 10 workers are working on the same floor. In the beginning, when we asked for masks, [management] wouldn’t give them to us. There are maybe 380400 custodial workers at Harvard, and out of those, 50-60 got sick [with COVID-19].” Other custodians reported that managers gave them just “one disinfectant wipe” and “one disposable mask” to do their job.

Importantly, custodial staff were not the only workers to be adversely affected by Harvard’s actions. Management left many of Harvard’s workers in the dark about the full impact of the coronavirus. Edward Childs, a labor organizer with UNITE HERE Local 26, the union that represents dining workers, spoke of Harvard’s lack of transparency: “In Quincy Hall, we had two [workers] and one student get [COVID-19], but management didn’t tell us. We were never notified. Then we found out that management was walking around from hall to hall spreading the virus.” Soon after, Quincy House dining employees stopped reporting to work in protest.

These instances of university neglect are not anecdotal. They affect all of Harvard’s essential workers and were compounded by compensation policies instituted by the Office of Campus Services throughout the evolution of the pandemic. One such policy placed high-risk workers — those with underlying conditions or those who had dependents with underlying conditions — into sick-time debt by forcing them to use their own sick-time or personal leave. Once that time ran out, they would go unpaid until the end of the semester. Genevieve Lechat, a member of the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers, voiced her concerns in an interview with the HPR: “[The COVID-19 pandemic] has been a time of uncertainty and sacrifice for all workers. It seems completely unsympathetic for Harvard to make its Black and Brown workers pick up the slack, especially in the aftermath of the recent police killings.” The majority of Harvard’s custodial and dining workers are Black and Brown.

The culmination of these blatantly anti-labor practices came in the form of layoff threats. According to Reina-Landaverde, management “threatened to layoff 60% of our workers because they think everything will be online in the fall. We don’t

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know what the future will look like. As a shop steward, it really hurts to tell people to go home. They have families to take care of. Some don’t have savings.” Although these layoffs were not ultimately implemented due to the organizing efforts of a cross-union coalition, it is clear that despite Harvard’s praise of essential workers, the university failed its community in a time of crisis.

THE ILLUSION OF HEROISM Worker exploitation extends beyond Harvard. In New York City, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Pat Foye, has repeatedly praised the agency’s “brave employees who are moving New York’s medical professionals, childcare workers, first responders and essential personnel during this challenging time.” Yet, more than 100 transit workers have died from the coronavirus. Workers are given cheaply made masks and an insufficient number of sanitizing wipes. Some have literally stumbled over dead bodies on the subway.

In addition to government agencies, corporations across the country have adopted a similar approach. Walmart, for example, voiced its appreciation for its workers, referring to its associates as “#TeamWalmart” in an attempt to cultivate an perception of unity among workers and management. Despite this posturing, the climbing rate of infections and deaths at Walmart, as well as the corporation’s lack of transparency, prompted workers to launch their own COVID-19 tracker. These trackers are meant to track infections and monitor store conditions to assure the safety of employees, customers and the community. Workers are taking matters into their own hands to keep themselves safe.

What do these institutions have in common? They are using romanticization as a diversionary tactic, praising essential workers to distract from the denial of their rights and benefits. This strategy is not limited to rhetorical moves: The federal government has spent excessive amounts of money to demonstrate its goodwill instead of mandating hazard pay or better distributing PPE. In late April, for example, two teams of fighter jets belonging to the Air Force and Navy aerial demonstration teams, the Thunderbirds and the Blue Angels, flew over New York and Philadelphia. According to Brian Kesselring, the commander of the Blue Angels, the flights were meant to “salute those working on the frontline of the COVID-19 response.” Instead of a raise or benefits, the Trump administration has prioritized grandiose, but ultimately meaningless, symbolic gestures to appease our essential workers.

Ultimately, the rhetoric of governments and corporations affects the general public’s view of essential workers, from the daily 7 p.m. rounds of applause for essential workers in New York City to historical plaques commemorating their service.

Of course, these workers deserve all our praise, especially since their jobs have traditionally been undervalued. However, calling them heroes without fully understanding their struggles allows those of us who are privileged enough to stay at home to imagine their work as a noble choice rather than a brutal reality. Harvard custodians, Walmart associates and MTA transit workers did not sign up to sacrifice themselves. They were forced into this choice by the conceits of capitalism and an inept federal government that does not protect them.

Calling workers heroes renders them invisible and justifies their exploitation. Heroes are supposed to die for the public,

their deaths akin to martyrdom. Heroism, then, erases the humanity and vulnerability of essential workers. It draws attention away from the reality that many essential workers are not paid a living wage, do not have access to affordable healthcare, and work in industries that deny them meaningful rights and protections. Heroism is a convenient illusion.

REAL PROBLEMS REQUIRE REAL SOLUTIONS At Harvard, a coalition of custodial workers, dining hall workers, and clerical and technical workers have articulated a set of demands that include adequate PPE and hazard pay for all essential workers, “extra sick time off to all who need it,” an end to sick-time debt, a fair contract with the Harvard Graduate Students Union and a promise not to layoff workers. Community organizers have rallied around them, and as a result, some have been partially met by administration.

Early on in the crisis, for example, the Labor and Employment Action Project at Harvard Law School and the Student Labor Action Movement circulated a petition that gained close to 8,000 signatures calling on Harvard to extend the amount of paid leave for all workers to the end of the semester. Ultimately, Harvard acceded to this demand. Similarly, administrators retracted their threats of laying off custodial workers after students, workers and supporters gathered in protest. In an interview with the HPR, Jeremy Stepansky ’23, an organizer with SLAM, spoke of the power of solidarity: “Student-worker solidarity and recognition of the indispensable leadership of especially Black, Brown and undocumented workers is essential for building collective power against institutions that value profits over the well-being of our communities.”

Essential workers around the country share similar demands to those of our own university community. Employee activism at corporations like Amazon, Target and InstaCart are on the rise; workers from these companies, among others, organized a strike on May Day to call on their employers to meet their demands for safety and security. Instead of well-meaning platitudes, institutions should take these demands seriously and ensure the health and well-being of their employees.

As for the people who have the privilege to avoid the frontlines, it is crucial that we understand the reality that essential workers face and our responsibility to confront it. We should recognize that essential workers have kept us healthy and safe.

However, we must also realize the dangers of calling essential workers heroes, while their demands for justice remain unmet.

We must hold our own institutions accountable for their harm by standing in solidarity with their workers. 

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WE WERE ALREADY

ISOLATED Penelope Alegria

“H

arvard was built for connection, not isolation,” wrote Harvard University’s president in a July email to students, announcing that the fall 2020 semester would be online. Instead of joining him in mourning the loss of our campus community, we should think carefully about what exactly Harvard’s campus was built for. Whom does it connect, and from whom does it isolate?

Living on campus, students develop daily habits that promote specific ways of thinking about the world. These habits work to consolidate students into an elite class — a social group that controls a disproportionate amount of society’s wealth and power — keeping us isolated from other classes and their interests. Who joins these elites, what they control, and how or whether they act as a cohesive class all depend on history and geography. But if we pay attention to the habits private university campuses have encouraged over time, we will see that the isolation of American elites is exactly what Harvard was built to do.

DINING HALLS The experience of on-campus dining is one way Harvard encourages isolation: dining halls work to entrench elite classes’ relationship to domestic service. In the 1700s, Harvard’s role shifted from training religious leaders to educating colonial governors. This meant forming White elites to oversee the enslavement of Black workers.

As Harvard history professor Sven Beckert notes, in the 18th century “Harvard’s chief accomplishment was the training of colonial leaders whose stout legal institutions and cultural dominance ensured that slave disobedience never seriously threatened the social order.” Campus dining played an important role in teaching these leaders how to think about slavery. Students dined together in “commons” for all meals, and a Harvard

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“steward” oversaw enslaved workers who prepared meals and made beds for students. Future governors, lawyers, and judges were taught to see this as a natural and beneficial social order.

Upon graduating, they reliably upheld it: In one instance, three Harvard-trained judges and a Harvard-trained prosecuting attorney — all fed by slave labor on campus — decreed and oversaw the public execution of Mark and Phillis, two enslaved workers who had rebelled against their master in 1755.

Today’s dining halls no longer feed colonial magistrates and slaveowners. But they do shape the way 21st-century elites see the world. Living at Harvard, students become accustomed to the convenience of constant service provided by workers whose employer repeatedly tries to reduce their pay, benefits and influence. When dining hall workers were forced to strike in 2016, Harvard officials mobilized students’ habits to turn them against workers. Administrators repeatedly sent emails to students portraying striking workers as unreasonable. They discouraged supporting the strike and even asked other employees to serve students meals for free in order to undermine the strike. And though Harvard and its administrators lost the strike, they might have won the battle for some students’ minds. At the time, a firstyear student complained to the Washington Post: “I’m worrying about midterms right now. I don’t need to worry about where my food is coming from.” Thanks to the habits of campus living, many students saw the strike primarily as a disruption in convenient domestic service, an inconvenience rather than a necessity for workers.

The experience of campus dining can follow students into their professional lives. As Harvard students graduate into today’s elite professions, dining halls have trained us to see our daily job-tasks as so important and time-consuming that we cannot cook or clean for ourselves. Many of us will instead become heavy users of Uber Eats, fast-casual chains or other service providers with similarly destructive labor practices and supply chains. How many students who open Amazon student accounts on campus will continue to rely heavily on Amazon deliveries post-graduation?

SOCIAL CLUBS Harvard’s clubs further demonstrate how elite class formation on campus intimately works through students’ daily lives.

In the late 1800s, Harvard’s function became to train new classes of merchant, and later industrial, elites. As Beckert recounts in “Monied Metropolis,” after the Civil War, investors specializing in different sectors and living in different regions began pooling their resources to form new “joint-stock” companies. In order to work, this new way of making money needed to unify its investors to act as a single elite social class with common ties and interests. 1870s industrialists from different cities built class unity through their children: They founded fancy boarding schools, and for the first time elites in New York and Philadelphia began sending their kids to Harvard. While they shared drinks and cigars at the newly formed Union, Calumet and Tuxedo Clubs in New York, their sons learned to imitate them at Harvard. Following their fathers’ project, from 1865 to 1900 boys founded the A.D., Fly, Phoenix, Owl, Fox and Delphic social clubs.

As industrialists’ influence waned, Harvard clubs shifted focus, too. Increasingly throughout the 20th century, the ownership of rich businesses became separated from their manage-

ment. Elites were now needed to manage corporations, and Harvard’s postwar role became to train these white-collar managers.

New types of clubs stepped in: founded in 1957, Harvard Student Agencies is an excellent example. Jullian Duran, who graduated in 2017 and worked as an HSA cleaners operations manager, recalled being trained to manage other students working below him. “When your employees see that you’re developing a relationship with them, you’re more likely to have a better team,” he told the Crimson. Graduate James Graham also recalled creating employee-satisfaction surveys and using other strategies of labor discipline to make sure managers could “rely on someone to motivate themselves when they weren’t being watched.” At HSA, future corporate managers learn to oversee their workers.

Pre-professional clubs like HSA also train students to see corporate managerialism as harmless and even meritocratic.

HSA’s 2016 president, Patrick F. Scott, proudly recounted that he “worked as a delivery associate before applying for a management position.” At Harvard, students learn that the corporate hierarchy is fair: Students can move up from lowly part-time hourly positions into the highest executive roles. Many HSA alumni will go on to take high-powered roles in firms where similarly euphemistically-named “delivery associates” are mercilessly exploited and have no chance of becoming CEOs, even if their HSA counterparts might. Not only does the campus experience of running HSA encourage future corporate managers to find ways to compel workers to produce more efficiently, but it also encourages them to overlook the exploitation built into the real world’s corporate system.

Even newer types of elites now co-exist on campus. Since the late 1970s, financial profits have risen in importance: More companies make more of their money buying and selling credit. And since 2002, harvesting and selling information and predictions about digital platform users has become increasingly profitable as well. Harvard’s clubs now train the financial and digital elites who run the infrastructures behind these transactions.

As Goldsmiths University of London professor William Davies points out, “the rise of decentralized, highly mediated, technical networks in the financial economy” has meant that today’s elites primarily act as intermediaries, ensuring that these technical infrastructures continue to churn out profits for their owners. 21st century elites can thus run the world, notes Davies, “without the trappings of authority or public status.” Even without consciously recognizing their common interests, future elites at Harvard just need to get plugged into positions running these infrastructures. So while 19th century social clubs still exist — though their events now look like bar nights with Goldman employees, involving some mix of immature binge drinking and dangerous sexual predation, more than they resemble industrial-era swank — pre-professional campus organizations have replaced social clubs as the primary engines forming elites.

One effect remains similar: Because many students socialize almost entirely through Harvard’s campus, today’s preprofessional campus groups can still use students’ social lives to encourage them to serve as elite intermediaries. On the Harvard College Consulting Group’s website, one member fondly proclaimed: “I applied to this group to expose myself to business, but stayed because of the people in it.” Another parroted that “even more important” than the professional training HCCG provides is that “it’s a thriving community.” Pre-professional campus culture mobilizes 18-year-olds’ social needs and inse-

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CAMPUS

curities, encouraging students to learn to run profitable infrastructures in order to make friends. Graduates of HCCG will continue translating data for the rich companies that can pay for their services. Students who spend nights team-solving problem sets in the new Cabot Science Library will go on to work for tech companies running profitable platform infrastructures, in airy offices for which Harvard’s campus workspace will have well prepared them. Campus organizations now use students’ social lives to encourage them to make and share in the elites’ digital and financial profits.

CAMPUS AND CAMBRIDGE Throughout, the physical features of Harvard’s campus play a crucial role. In shaping how students experience urban space, Harvard’s campus environment encourages us to ignore intertwined racial and economic inequality. Especially after World War II, the rising class of white-collar corporate managers were encouraged to live in racially and economically homogeneous suburbs. 1950s projects of “urban renewal” across the nation demolished and built over poor and Black communities, building middle class homes instead of public housing in their place and systematically denying poor Black residents access to the credit they needed to buy houses. (The hypocrisy of using credit to replace welfare runs even deeper.) At the same time, planning projects promoted White suburbanization, giving even middleclass managers their own lawns, highways to commute to corporate offices, and separation from urban inequality.

Harvard actively participated in this project. In 1957, Harvard and 14 other rich universities built a coalition in order to secure a “homogeneous, economic, middle class or better level within the communities” that surrounded them. Each university lobbied its alumni senators to include Section 418 in the 1959 Housing Act: The section stated that if a private university gave money to a city’s urban renewal plan, the federal government would give them back twice as much money to use however they wanted. Harvard successfully convinced alumnus Senator Joe Kennedy, and once the bill passed, the university got to work homogenizing Cambridge and isolating its students from urban poverty with government funds. Charles M. Strauss, class of 1960, recalled “what Cambridge was like” before Housing Act-enabled destruction: “It was really decayed, basically like Pittsburgh.” As Harvard helped destroy and rebuild Cambridge, campus life also began to resemble the homogenous suburbs where students would move after graduation. Richard P. Dober, an alumnus of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design class of 1957 and a prominent campus designer, described the goal of campus planning in the 1960s: to offer students a “removal from the stress of the general conditions of modern society.” In other words, to get used to suburban isolation.

Harvard students are no longer predominantly moving to suburbs, but Harvard campus life encourages today’s students to be similarly secluded in relation to the urban environment.

Living on Harvard’s campus, students stroll through beautifully greened urban space with homogeneously wealthy surroundings. Parks that are functionally reserved for the rich and massive corporation-owned buildings that sit empty for at least four months out of the year become natural facts of life. The poor and homeless that threaten to encroach on student isolation are kept out by force: We have already seen the violent racial policing

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that tries to keep poor people out of our shiny new Smith Center.

How much policing in the past three decades has worked to do the same with Harvard Yard? Campus life gets Harvard students ready to join today’s elites in gentrifying cities around the country. The “Harvard bubble” to which students jokingly refer does not just mean that we do not often Uber over to Boston’s fine arts museum. We live in a bubble of class isolation.

CULTURE WAR, CLASS WAR At Harvard, we risk being formed into members of an elite class — not only through academic work in classrooms, but also as campus teaches us how to consume, live and socialize. Of course, these mechanisms work differently on different students; many of us find ourselves completely out of place or at a severe disadvantage in Harvard’s campus institutions. But campus life seeks to “include” these students, welcoming them to “belong” to a ruling class alongside the others. Instead of accepting Harvard’s siren song, we all should seek to resist Harvard’s campus’s strategies of class formation.

Many students are already doing so, and one example is students involved in real community organizing. Listed in an “Office of Student Life” brochure, a club like the “Student Labor Action Movement” may look like one of the many pre-professional clubs. This appearance allows the group access to Harvard-owned meeting space, and it might make “joining SLAM” as viable an option for undergraduates as joining any other club.

But unlike in other groups, students who come to meetings organize alongside workers living across the Boston area. They may find themselves joining picket lines in East Boston, or learning to loudly occupy Harvard’s labor relations in solidarity with workers against the university and its campus institutions. Resisting campus isolation is entirely possible, but for many of us, it will require noticing the ways campus class isolation works. If we take stock of the concrete habits that campus life installs in our daily lives, and find communities that resist them, we can begin to break from these influences.

Regardless, the revolution probably will not start in Harvard Yard — even well-meaning future governing elites are more likely to run well-funded liberal nonprofits and give TED Talks than engage in the struggle for justice. Yet criticizing campus isolation does provide an important way to reframe the public conversation about private universities. In recent decades, following a strategy initiated by Ronald Reagan in 1966, conservative commentators have taken to lambasting university students, combining criticism of elite privilege with racist, sexist, or xenophobic claims. Many cosmopolitan liberals have taken the bait: In seeking to combat the latter, they end up becoming associated with the former. Allowing these “Culture Wars” to continue lets right-wing commentators win undeserved support for their bigotry while disguising their pro-elite policy as antielitism. If we focus not on defending liberal college students but on criticizing the way private college campuses isolate and form the ruling elite, we can uncouple justified anti-rich sentiment from right-wing rhetoric. Moving from the culture war to a class war can unify all of us who hate the ways that Harvard graduates govern the world.. 

Games Without Frontiers Kendrick Foster

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n February 2020, Russia launched a nuclear attack on U.S. forces in Europe, and the United States responded with tactical nuclear weapons of its own. Fortunately, this did not happen in real life; the events in question instead took place during a simulation, a military war game used to model a potential future interaction with Russia.

For a casual observer, the words “war game” evoke a game of Risk, a way to idly pass the time. In this context, the fate of Kamchatka or Siam could not matter less, and life returns to normal once the dice and plastic armies are packed up. For the military, though, war games play an important role across multiple sectors. “I have an entire report on that,” joked Yuna Wong, the co-director of the RAND Center for Gaming, in an interview with the HPR. On one level, the military uses war games for training and educational purposes. On another level, the military uses them to define broader aspects of strategy. “They use them to refine operational plans, to explore concepts and to look at different capabilities [they] want to develop,” she explained.

And military war-gaming can be a lot more complicated than board games. In a modern war game, officers on separate teams

— often divided into “Blue” to represent the United States and “Red” to represent its adversaries — head into different rooms to make their moves. A “control cell” feeds those moves into a computer and informs the teams of the results. These simulations can be complicated: One wargame, Millennium Challenge 2002, cost $250 million, took two years to prepare and eventually involved more than 13,500 personnel.

When done right, these massive investments in money, time and personnel can pay off. As strategy pioneer Thomas Schelling once put it, “One thing a person cannot do, no matter how rigorous his analysis or heroic his imagination, is to draw up a list of things that would never occur to him.” However, as history demonstrates, if the military launches war games only to validate predetermined strategies, then it loses out on the manifold benefits that war games bring.

WAR-GAMING YESTERDAY After World War I, the Naval War College had cemented itself as the Navy’s intellectual hub, and it soon turned its attention to

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playing war games to simulate the next armed conflict. Although naval war games initially designated Great Britain as the main adversary, gamers soon focused on War Plan Orange, which foresaw Japan as the next war’s main enemy. Smaller games and tactical exercises in each course for naval officers culminated in a “Big Game,” always fought against Japan; this compartmentalized approach allowed strategy to evolve over time. These games were procedurally similar to today’s games, except the control cell plotted each move by hand, rather than by computer.

Initially, the tactics in these games followed great naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan, who had proposed a scheme that Naval War College officers had nicknamed the “steamroller” strategy: While the U.S. Navy steamed out to meet the Japanese navy head-on and defeat it in a major fleet engagement, land forces in the Philippines would fight a delaying action to prevent defeat. However, that strategy failed repeatedly, as Japanese fleets routinely destroyed U.S. warships, far from bases for repair and reliant on an increasingly strained logistics network. In addition, the Japanese routinely took Manila before naval reinforcements could arrive.

Even though those shortcomings became evident by 1933, war games that tested the steamroller strategy still continued. At the same time, naval aviation, amphibious warfare and expeditionary logistics — tactics previously relegated to the sidelines of the steamroller strategy — came to the fore; all three would prove key in the U.S. military’s success in the Pacific during World War II. By the middle of the decade, the Navy had shifted its strategy to a more cautionary one that did not rush a naval force across the Pacific to defend Manila. In the end, these Naval War College simulations demonstrated the effectiveness of war games: They allowed military planners to test new technologies and realize the error of previous strategies without having to suffer massive casualties in real war.

However, in practice, the steamroller strategy took a long time to change, in part because policymakers with a vested interest in it would oppose the changes the war games recommended, as Reed Pauly, a professor of political science at Brown University, told the HPR. “If you change the strategy, people like Leonard Wood come out and say, ‘No, no, no, you can’t get rid of the defense of Manila. I’m the governor-general of the Philippines, and I’m not going to go tell the Philippine people that we’re not going to defend them,’” he said. “There are plenty of other variables that will affect what the strategy is, some of which will be organizational bias.”

The military next embarked on a major series of war games in the Vietnam War’s first stages. Doubting the Johnson administration’s decision to mount a graduated escalation in Vietnam, the military organized a game dubbed “Sigma I-64” to test that strategy. It eventually concluded that such graduated escalation would lead to increased North Vietnamese raids on South Vietnam, that a sustained bombing campaign would have little effect, and that public opinion would react violently against an ongoing campaign in the country. After the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution only ensured U.S. escalation, the military ran another game, Sigma II-64. Again, the game forewarned of the plight in which the United States would later find itself in Vietnam. As the author Jonathan Keats wrote in Nautilus, “After ruling out an American nuclear attack, the teams role-played their way to a quagmire, in which the North Vietnamese countered every U.S. move in spite of lives lost and ruined infrastructure. The games

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forecast political crisis in the U.S., with no plausible path to American military victory.”

However, those insights did not reach the administration, largely due to organizational bias. “Lyndon Johnson didn’t really use the National Security Council bureaucracy the way that other presidents have,” Pauly explained. Johnson tuned out the Joint Chiefs of Staff, relying on more informal Tuesday lunches with close friends and confidants. As the Joint Wargames Agency relied on the Joint Chiefs of Staff to communicate its evaluation of American policy to the president, Pauly concluded, “It’s not clear, then, that those recommendations make it to the White House.” That institutional disconnect worsened as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who controlled information flow between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the White House, resolved to keep any negative policy assessments out of Johnson’s ears.

Finally, the Millennium Challenge 2002 war games, which simulated an attack against an unnamed Middle Eastern country, presented an insight into the military’s thinking on the eve of the Iraq War. In line with President Bush’s military doctrine at the time, the blue team (the United States) launched a preemptive invasion, but Gen. Paul van Riper, in charge of the red team (the Middle Eastern country), refused to sit still. His forces launched a surprise attack on the blue team’s invading navy, using a signal from a minaret instead of a conventional one. Speedboats loaded with explosives performed kamikaze attacks, and van Riper’s forces launched missiles from low-flying planes to avoid the blue team’s radar. The red team had inflicted a humiliating defeat on the blue team at a moment when it was least expected. However, the blue team had other ideas in mind. The control cell refloated the sunken Navy ships, prohibited the red team from firing at landing C-130 cargo planes and gave control of the red team’s chemical weapons to the blue team, even though the red team had successfully hidden them. Unsurprisingly, the blue team won the new simulation.

Although the exercise demonstrated to military officials that they could not rely on advanced technology to defeat a Middle Eastern enemy, civilian decision-makers such as then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had expected the exercise to validate their strategies, and the contrived victory gave these policymakers a false sense of security. That sense ruptured when Iraq turned into a mare’s nest and Iran used fast speedboats to attack the U.S. Navy in the Persian Gulf. Jacquelyn Schneider, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, blames situations like Millennium Challenge on the prevailing sponsorship system, in which the Department of Defense will fund a game “with a prior [idea] about what they want the outcome of the game to be,” as she told the HPR. “Sponsors like to use wargames as evidence to justify new authorities or to justify new doctrine,” and war game designers often craft war games to fit those needs.

WAR-GAMING TODAY Sponsored or not, war games lost much of their luster for the decade following Millennium Challenge. Indeed, Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work reviewed the Department of Defense’s war-gaming procedures in 2015 and found the “absence of any direct link between the insights gained from war-gaming and the department’s programmatic action,” among other problems. That year, the military created a national repository of war

games and the Wargaming Incentive Fund, which devotes $10 million per year to war games to rectify these problems.

Today’s war games largely fall in two categories. First, many war games have focused on two powers challenging the United States in the great power arena: Russia and China. On that front, the U.S. military has not fared well. As one headline put it, the United States “gets its ass handed to it” in war games. U.S. military bases and aircraft carriers are perfect targets for Russian and Chinese smart missiles, meaning that advanced warplanes such as the F-35 (and U.S. command and control infrastructure) are sitting ducks. To respond to this mismatch, the Rand Corp. proposed a $24 billion budget that would focus on U.S. missile inventories rather than expensive hardware.

New technologies have also figured heavily in this new era of war-gaming. Wong helped to evaluate one of Rand’s recent war games surrounding the impact of unmanned systems in a potential conflict with China. As she told the HPR, three major insights from that game emerged. First, allies often did not perceive unmanned systems as major assets in this game. Second, artificial intelligence often led to significant escalation as machines made quicker and quicker moves. Finally, autonomous systems did not send clear signals, partially because so much more happens in a “black box.”

“We might want to evaluate the escalatory potential of new systems and new operating concepts with AI and autonomous systems,” Wong recommended. “It could be the case that even though a new concept could give you a lot of operational advantages, you might not actually want everyone to use it in real life because of the potential escalatory effects.”

The military has also explored the cyberspace realm in war games. Like artificial intelligence, cyber tools largely did not achieve their strategic ends. For instance, one set of games concluded that cyberattacks are not very appealing because once the military uses a cyber tool, the enemy will be able to patch its vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, in a separate series of war games meant to investigate the impact of cyber tools on deterrence, Schneider observed that the players actually did not use those capabilities very often, especially when they wanted to avoid escalation.

“Sometimes we’re trying to avoid war just by picking weapons that we think provide the most calibrated response,” she said.

“Cyber, in that regard, was not a very effective signalling tool.”

game only represented “one potential future,” said Wong, and war gamers investigating cybersecurity should continue wargaming potential scenarios. Again, current policymakers should look to the Naval War College games, which gave the Navy insights that one game alone could not. In short, the military should not rest on its laurels or rely on existing war games; it must continue to use war games as tools for playing out the future. Otherwise, the future might play out in a way the military does not particularly like. 

WAR-GAMING TOMORROW In all, the growing importance of cybersecurity and artificial intelligence in military conflict will make war games an even more critical component of military strategy. After all, the Naval War College’s war games successfully allowed the military to realize the benefits of aircraft carriers in naval strategy, as Pauly noted. However, Schneider argued that gaining new insights around new technology will prove difficult if the Department of Defense continues to inject its bias into war games. “I’m pessimistic that the DOD will be able to do good work on this unless they take their hands off it,” she said. “I think the sponsorfocused games create a strong bias, and it’s hard to get to a place where you can just ignore something long enough for people to do good work.”

Additionally, both Wong and Pauly emphasized the importance of seeking patterns in a series of war games instead of drawing insights from only one game. Rand’s cyberdeterrence

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For the Most Vulnerable, Space is a Scarce Resource in the Age of COVID-19 Annie Miall

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oilet paper, hand sanitizer, tissues. These items were the first to be frantically bought out from local supermarkets as the coronavirus started to ravage the nation, leaving empty shelves staring back at unlucky shoppers. However, their absence was temporary. As the pandemic rages on, many are finding that one commodity remains a scarce resource: space.

In order to slow the spread of COVID-19, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has urged the public to practice “social distancing,” a term now ingrained into our everyday vernacular. This directive states that people should stay at least six feet apart from one another while outside of their homes, since keeping one’s distance from others is the most basic way to avoid exposure to the virus. However, this poses difficult challenges for many of society’s most vulnerable members, whose circumstances make social distancing guidelines hard to follow.

For domestic violence survivors, the homeless population, and essential workers in particular, COVID-19 has reminded us that something as simple as space is a privilege.

TRAPPED WITH NO ESCAPE For those who suffer from intimate partner violence, staying at home is often a less than desirable option. By forcing large swaths of the population to work from home, COVID-19 has provided an opportunity for abusers to take advantage of their partners’ captivity.

“Abuse is about power and control,” the National Domestic Violence Hotline wrote in a press release in mid-March. “When survivors are forced to stay in the home or in close proximity to their abuser more frequently, an abuser can use any tool to exert control over their victim.” These issues have only been exacerbated by the pandemic, when abusers may purposefully

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share misinformation about the pandemic to frighten survivors, threaten to cancel medical insurance to prevent survivors from seeking medical care, or withhold essential items such as hand sanitizer. Isolation becomes a weapon and is wielded against those unable to escape.

In an interview with the HPR, Jacquelyn Campbell, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, noted that pandemic-caused unemployment may have forced many abusers and survivors into closer contact with each other. Unemployment has skyrocketed across the country since the start of 2020, leaving 21 million people unemployed as of May. In addition to an increased risk of compromised safety for survivors, being confined within such close quarters with an abuser makes them further isolated from support networks and limits their privacy. Many victims of abuse fear they will be caught and face retribution if they seek help. In March, phone calls to the National Domestic Violence Hotline were down 6% relative to March 2019, but as the stay-at-home orders began to lift in April, contact volume increased 15% compared to April of the previous year. Text messages to the hotline have also surged, indicating that texting might be a safer form of communication.

When living at home is no longer viable, limited shelter availability poses another difficult problem. As Campbell pointed out, shelters have lost some of their capacity to ensure adequate social distancing measures. Even those that remain open can quickly become a breeding ground for the virus. It is an unforgiving situation that denies those most vulnerable a safe space.

In response, cities have taken unprecedented measures.

Houston partnered with Uber and Lyft to provide free rides to those escaping abuse. Chicago has established a partnership with Airbnb so that callers to the Illinois Domestic Violence Hotline looking to flee a violent situation will be connected with

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a hotel reservation. Other cities have launched public safety campaigns including free hotlines, shelters and legal resources available to domestic violence victims.

PUSHED OUT OF PUBLIC SPACES As stay-at-home orders were issued this spring, the closure of many local parks and outdoor areas had an outsize effect on those experiencing homelessness, many of whom may depend on these public spaces. “Self-quarantine, social isolation, and stay-at-home orders are difficult, if not impossible, to follow when you do not have a home,” read a recent report from the National Alliance to End Homelessness. In addition, homeless shelters have had to operate at reduced capacity, exacerbating problems for the homeless population, who may not have reliable access to a safe space during the pandemic. This vulnerable community is already under-resourced in normal circumstances, and the pandemic is making that worse.

It is estimated that more than half a million people experience homelessness every year, many of whom may seek refuge in a communal facility. However, these homeless shelters are not conducive to maintaining distance and can rapidly become the epicenters of outbreaks — as a result, the coronavirus has swept through homeless populations with alarming speed. In a CDC study from this spring, 25% of residents across 19 homeless shelters in Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, and Atlanta, tested positive for COVID-19.

These high rates of infection have the potential to heighten many of the difficult conditions under which homeless people already live, including high rates of serious underlying health problems, unequal access to quality health care, and inadequate sanitation resources. Compared to the general population, homeless individuals who are infected with the virus are twice as likely to be hospitalized, two to four times as likely to require critical care, and two to three times as likely to die.

In an interview with the HPR, Avik Chatterjee, a physician with the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, said that in an effort to provide housing to more people, the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency had to open up alternative, temporary shelter spaces. Regardless, the virus still spread like wildfire. “By the time America got ramped up to be able to test people ... we were already too late,” Chatterjee said. “One of the reasons that it had spread so much, and people didn’t know it, is because so many of our patients were asymptomatic with it.” As those in shelters leave during the daytime and return to confined quarters, the virus is easily and unknowingly transmitted.

While homeless shelters have faced multiple challenges in recent times, COVID-19 has also amplified the burdens placed on the unsheltered community living in street encampments.

Whether they are tent cities or skid rows, space is a luxury for those living in homeless encampments. As shelters become overcrowded, there is no guaranteed bed for people to return to at the end of the day. Those experiencing unsheltered homelessness face even more severe health and safety concerns. They have insufficient access to hygiene and sanitation facilities, connection to services, and health care, and furthermore, there has been a halt in food pantry and soup kitchen operations.

If individual housing options are not available, the CDC has urged local governments not to clear homeless encampments, since doing so may increase the spread of the coronavirus and

break contact with health service providers. Instead, the agency recommends that governments allow people who are living unsheltered to remain where they are. In response, cities like Las Vegas have controversially sanctioned some areas as temporary encampments for people experiencing unsheltered homelessness, including by painting designated sleeping areas in parking lots. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority has opened up community centers where people can sleep and has provided buses to take them there. And in New York City, the Department of Homeless Services reserved hotel rooms to provide a safer alternative for homeless people, many of whom had been sleeping in subway cars.

OBLIGATED TO GIVE UP SPACE Sometimes, space is not affordable. During the pandemic, America’s essential workers — farmers, grocery store workers, warehouse workers, bus drivers, and others — have often had to choose between their livelihood and their health. In an interview with the HPR, Harvard sociology professor Jason Beckfield noted that many workers in the lower wage service sector have been disproportionately impacted by the spatial dynamics of the pandemic.

“People who do essential jobs don’t really have the luxury to not do them ... they basically have to,” Beckfield said. “It just seems like a really grotesque irony that at the same time, the same workers are both essential and disposable in the way that they are compensated.”

Despite some safety measures, essential workers face an elevated risk of contracting the virus compared to those who are able to stay home, in part due to the naturally close conditions of their workplaces. The working conditions within grocery stores, for example, are not conducive to physical distancing — workers often share break rooms, bathrooms, and devices for clocking in and out of their shifts. Furthermore, Beckfield worries that essential workers in these conditions could accidentally bring the virus home, exposing their communities to COVID-19.

He also notes the coronavirus’ potential to magnify inequalities that already impact essential workers and their households.

More than one-third of workers in many frontline industries live in low-income families, and essential workers are disproportionately women, immigrants, or people of color — groups that are already marginalized. As essential workers find themselves forced to give up their space, they are unable to choose which spaces to work or live in, exacerbating their disadvantages and putting themselves and their family’s health at risk.

Beckfield says that this unfortunate reality illustrates the need for a public safety net. “This kind of pandemic is simply too large of a scale for the Swiss cheese welfare state we have,” he told the HPR. According to him, the United States should be more proactive in its response to the coronavirus, using the crisis to address long-standing structural inequalities.

Social distancing is unfeasible without physical space. Yet, those who have been living on the periphery of society are now bearing the brunt of this disease due to unrealistic assumptions about people’s universal access to space. For marginalized populations, it has always been hard to come by, but now the spatial dynamics of COVID-19 have pushed it even farther out of reach. This virus has pushed the United States toward greater inequity — now, as the nation emerges from the pandemic, it is imperative to address the systematic disparities that plague the nation’s most vulnerable communities. 

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A People’s History of Looting Ria Modak

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n May 29, in response to escalating protests in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, President Trump tweeted, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Invoking the rhetoric of White supremacists and segregationists from George Wallace to Walter E. Headley, Trump asserted that the theft and destruction of private property was punishable by violence. In doing so, he laid bare his ideological commitments: Private property matters more than Black lives. However, this sentiment is not limited to right-wing leaders. Even those sympathetic to anti-racist mobilization have criticized looting, some going so far as to brand it as “domestic terrorism.”

While both liberal and conservative critics have denounced looting as ineffective and unnecessarily antagonistic, looting has long remained an act of resistance in movements for racial justice in America, from the abolition of slavery to the civil rights movement to our contemporary political moment.

It has been continually reimagined, recast, and reinvented by Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities in their struggle for equality. In addition to embodying the anger and frustration of centuries of oppression, looting is a radical challenge to capitalism and its conceits.

HISTORY FROM BELOW In the American context, property has always been racialized. As slavery replaced indentured servitude as the primary system of labor in America by the late 17th century, racial categories emerged as a way to differentiate between those who could be enslaved and those who could not. Black slaves were considered property because they were Black. According to Harvard professor of African and African American studies Brandon M. Terry, abolition under this conceptualization of

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property could be considered its own form of looting.

“One of the earliest forms of American looting is runaway slaves,” Terry told the HPR. “You are literally stealing your own person and transforming yourself from property into a fuller sense of personhood. In that historical continuum, looting constitutes an important repertoire of actions in the struggle.”

According to this definition, Terry added, surely anti-racist revolutionaries like John Brown or Nat Turner would be considered looters.

More recently, looting played an important role in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. Of course, nonviolent civil disobedience was also vital to the civil rights movement, and its legacy of peaceful protests continues to inspire activists across the world. However, threats of looting helped force the hand of politicians. In the summer of 1963, for example, protesters rioted in Birmingham, provoking immediate action on the part of the president. The riots prompted Attorney General Robert Kennedy to convince John F. Kennedy to deliver his Civil Rights Address and move towards civil rights legislation. Looting, then, played a key role in accelerating the rate of change.

In our own political moment, looting has drawn critical attention to racial justice movements that otherwise might have gone unnoticed by the media. The looting and burning of a QuikTrip in Ferguson became a focal point after the murder of Michael Brown; the gas station lot was quickly transformed into the staging ground for protests. In New York City, it was the looting of a bodega and a Rite Aid store after a vigil that brought attention to the murder of Kimani Gray. From Minneapolis to Los Angeles to St. Louis, looting has captured the attention of mainstream media and redirected it to the murders of Black people and the broader injustices of racial oppression.

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Looting, then, has taken on a variety of political meanings: a challenge to the violence of racial capitalism, an alternative and accelerated path to justice, and a way to call attention to the reality of racial violence that is often ignored by the media, to name a few. Importantly, these political meanings cannot be severed from the violence that looting entails. Terry spoke of the importance of redefining what we see as violence in the context of revolutionary movements: “Even if the participants are making their claims explicitly, there are underlying justice claims within their actions.” In other words, the explicitly violent act of looting is inextricably tied up with political aspirations for justice.

WHOSE WINDOWS? Because so much of the discourse around looting is determined by the media, it is important to think critically about the aims and consequences of looting. Who is doing the looting? Whose property is being damaged? What communities are being hurt? In the most recent wave of protests, looters have targeted chains like Whole Foods and Target which have been criticized for intensifying existing problems of inequality in low-income and majority-Black neighborhoods, suggesting that poor communities of color loot as a way to redistribute the wealth in gentrified neighborhoods. The conspicuous lack of Black business ownership in these communities, which has been exacerbated by COVID-19, poses the question: How can a community loot or destroy a neighborhood that it does not own?

This question becomes even more complicated when we account for the successes of recent immigrant entrepreneurs who benefit from significant advantages compared to their generational African American and Native American counterparts.

According to Terry, systemic racism has made it extremely difficult for Generational African American entrepreneurs to thrive: Loan discrimination, lack of access to capital, insurance premium discrimination, competition at scale and social stigma are only some of the challenges to Generational African American business ownership. Immigrant business owners from various countries face fewer of these barriers, he said, and the challenges they do face are less extreme.

As a result, Terry said “the competition between Generational African American and immigrant business owners can be narrated in a way that provokes a lot of resentment.” This resentment is often drawn out and made explicit through instances of looting. From the tensions that emerged between Jewish entrepreneurs and protesters in the Crown Heights riot to the underlying anti-Asian sentiment in the Rodney King riots, Terry said looting has escalated racial and ethnic conflict.

However, some immigrant small business owners have stood in solidarity with anti-racist struggle, even at significant sacrifice. After Gandhi Mahal, a Bangladeshi-owned restaurant in Minneapolis, was burned down by looters, its owner Ruhel Islam told the HPR he was supportive of the protests.

“We don’t walk with their shoes, so we don’t know,” Islam said. “But we’re learning every day about the hundreds of years of problems and discrimination that Black people have faced.

The problems are very deep and people are angry. Sometimes in the revolution, freedom comes through protests, through rioting.”

Islam also pointed to his upbringing in Bangladesh as one reason he has been supportive of the movement. The Bangladeshi liberation movement of the 1990s had a strong impact on him. “I saw how a government regime can change and fall when people protest,” he said. “Parliamentary and democratic government came to Bangladesh because people fought for it.

Here I see people of all races participating in the movement. I participate in the movement because it is my right.”

DISCOURSES OF CRIMINALITY Although police chiefs and political commentators have argued that the protests have given criminals a cover for looting, this discourse of criminality can only be rationalized by capitalism. The foundational organizing principles of the United States rest on the right to private property, a right which is constitutive of liberty itself, according to the Bill of Rights.

Under capitalism, the right to private property is transformed into a property regime in which private property is the basis of power for the ruling class. The elite ruling class, which is mostly White and wealthy, ensures the maintenance of private property through violence. The property regime, in other words, values profits over people. In the context of American White supremacy, this means that Black lives are collectively found less valuable than property. The logic of a capitalist and White supremacist state dictates that the punishment for stealing bread is far more severe than the punishment for murdering a Black person.

The discourse of criminality also creates a division between “good” and “bad” protesters. “Good” protesters, who are peaceful, do not explicitly challenge the property regime through their actions, while bad protesters engage in criminal behavior and confront the violence of capitalism through looting.

The dichotomy between “good” and “bad” protesters, and by extension peaceful protests and riots, is abused by the police.

Throughout the protests, the police have justified their disproportionate use of force against protesters by claiming they were responding to violence on the part of protesters even if those claims are inaccurate.

Selective police violence indicates another consequence of the distinction between “good” and “bad” protesters: the reproduction of racist stereotypes of Black people as aggressive or violent. Once the media shifts its attention to looting as a violent counterpart to peaceful protest, crime itself becomes the story and looting becomes a racialized act. This interplay was made clear in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when White subjects were described as “finding” supplies while Black subjects were described as “looting.”

Abbie Zamcheck, an organizer involved with the Occupy City Hall movement in New York City, thinks that this dichotomy distracts from the broader goals of anti-racist struggle. “The whole effort to divide ‘good’ and ‘bad’ protesters comes from the perspective of the state,” he told the HPR, “which claims that the only correct and proper way to fix the system is through peaceful protest. When communities in the United States do not have power, the better question to ask is, ‘What tactics and strategies can we use to win power for ourselves?’” Looting offers one powerful response to his question. 

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WISCONSIN AS A MICROCOSM OF DEMOCRATIC DECLINE Jack Silvers

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n Election Day this April, Wisconsin Assembly Republican Speaker Robin Vos told reporters they were “incredibly safe to go out.” Sporting a pin that read “election observer,” he spoke with conviction, yet his surgical mask, rubber gloves, and protective smock rendered his assurances a bit ironic. The disconnect between Vos’ calm demeanor and his dystopian outfit mirrors the two-faced politics of his home state, where a rich history of bipartisanship has given way to partisan sniping.

This spring, the state’s troubling new trend was in full view.

As confirmed COVID-19 cases began to rise, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers moved to follow other states’ lead by delaying Wisconsin’s presidential primary and a concurrent State Supreme Court election. However, the Republican-dominated state legislature refused to move the election and appealed to the state Supreme Court, who overturned Evers’ executive order pushing the vote to June. On April 7, thousands of masked voters trekked to polling locations that were so understaffed Evers had to call in National Guard members to serve as poll workers. It was a thoroughly bizarre election cycle.

Like many festering problems in American society, Wisconsin’s political dysfunction is not a symptom of the pandemic but rather a chronic condition of the state’s government. Though other state governments, such as Michigan’s, have been mired in similar disputes, the Badger State sticks out for its remarkable

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political vitriol. Likewise, partisan standoffs in Wisconsin carry especially high stakes because of the state’s bona fide purple state status: Republican President Donald Trump won by 23,000 votes in 2016 while Democratic challenger Joe Biden currently leads in 2020 polls.

The state’s toxic political environment reflects larger threats to American democracy, as the politicization of the judiciary and the erosion of institutional norms seen in Wisconsin have both shaped and been shaped by similar trends at the national level.

Wisconsin’s politics offer a cautionary lesson for the rest of the country on how political partisanship can infect key institutions, but also provide a potential blueprint to purge the infection from government.

WISCONSIN UNDER WALKER Wisconsin has long been known for two exports: dairy and good government. Since the days of “Fighting Bob” La Follette, a progressive Republican governor in the early 20th century, the state has prized its unique brand of Midwestern progressivism.

By implementing primary elections and workers’ compensation, La Follette began a hallowed tradition of integrity in the state’s government. Jay Heck, the director of the pro-democracy watchdog Common Cause Wisconsin, told the HPR, “Wisconsin has always wanted bipartisanship; it has always prized ethical,

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good government as opposed to the machine-type politics that we would see in Illinois, for example.” Heck also fondly recalled Wisconsin’s clean elections: “Elections were open and competitive and we made it relatively simple and easy for people to vote.

And as a result, Wisconsin … led the country regularly in voter turnout.”

In 2010, Scott Walker, a former Republican Milwaukee County executive, swept into power as governor with a strong red majority in the state assembly and senate. The next year, Walker introduced Act 10, which thoroughly gutted public sector unions, amid a moment of bipartisan euphoria: the Green Bay Packers’ Super Bowl win. That year, Walker cut public financing for political candidates and overhauled the state’s Government Accountability Board. Soon, “Wisconsin was the canary in the coal mine,” Heck said. “Republicans realized that if you could bring conservative change to Wisconsin, the state that had always been very progressive, then you could certainly accomplish it almost anywhere in the country.”

Walker earned pushback for his offensives, including an unsuccessful recall election in 2012. Still, he battled his way to reelection in 2014 before narrowly losing to Evers in 2018. In that election, the electoral reforms that he presided over in 2011 helped preserve the GOP’s majority: In part due to partisan gerrymandering and a strict voter ID law that he approved, Democrats garnered 200,000 more votes for the state assembly and only gained one seat.

Marcus Knoke, a Madison native and first-year at Harvard, told the HPR that the 2018 election was a catalyst for his involvement in politics. Still, he added, “I think that [Madison’s] youth feel very disillusioned; they feel kind of lied to considering that not much has really changed because of the legislature that pretty much refuses to budge.” Feeding into this disillusionment, a series of laws that Walker signed during his last days of office curtailed Evers’ ability to craft rules without the legislature’s approval.

The Republican-led legislature largely stymied Evers’ agenda in 2019, rejecting his proposals to spend more on schools and expand Medicaid. In May, Evers’ extension to a statewide stayat-home order was overturned by the state Supreme Court at the behest of a Republican majority eager to jumpstart the economy.

During Walker’s terms, the court upheld divisive legislation such as Act 10 and, since his defeat, has often sided with the legislature over Evers. Consequently, the court has faced accusations of political meddling that some suggest merit further investigation and/or legislative changes.

A TROUBLED ARBITER Despite structural objectivity, Wisconsin’s judicial elections have become just as rancorous as other races, turning the high court into a political football. The state is one of 13 to hold nonpartisan elections for state Supreme Courts seats. Though these contests aim to limit the interest-group spending that partisan elections attract, numerous judicial candidates over the last decade have relied on such spending to win. With hot-button issues like redistricting looming, the court will continue to shape the state’s political landscape, even as it is shaped by political forces itself.

The first in a string of expensive state Supreme Court campaigns came in 2008, when conservative candidate Michael

Gableman thwarted liberal incumbent Louis Butler. Gableman’s victory created a 4-3 conservative majority, one that would persist throughout the Walker era. As outside political groups and state political parties began to endorse and bankroll candidates, each successive contest grew in acrimony. One incumbent justice faced the airing of sordid details from her personal life.

Toxicity on the campaign trail extended into the courthouse: In 2011, an argument between two ideologically opposed justices turned physical.

Wisconsin’s judiciary might not have stumbled so deeply into partisanship without national political figures who fanned the flames. In 2018, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts fiercely defended judicial independence by stating that there are no “Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges.” Biden’s and Trump’s dueling endorsements in the April court race seem to challenge this statement. A 2018 paper published in the New York University Journal of Legislation and Public Policy also diagnosed numerous examples of politicization in the judiciary process, including politically polarized Supreme Court confirmation votes and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s criticism of Trump in 2016. These examples suggest a broader failure of federal government leadership when it comes to judicial nonpartisanship and furthered politicization through state court endorsements.

Such actions make the judiciary, an institution that is ostensibly above the fray of party politics, resemble inherently political bodies. Both in Wisconsin and federally, gaining control of the courts is of paramount importance to both parties. The Wisconsin Democratic Party chipped in $1.3 million to support the liberal candidate in April’s court race, which seems to validate the strategy of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s, R-Ky., who told Politico that court picks “are the way you have the longest lasting impact on the country.” In 2016, McConnell acted on this philosophy by ignoring Merrick Garland, Barack Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court. This decision, which flew in the face of a century and a half of precedent, reflects a troubling erasure of the unwritten rules that underpin democratic governments and have withered in Madison.

REWRITING THE UNWRITTEN RULES After the Garland snafu, two Harvard University professors, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, wrote “How Democracies Die,” a treatise on how democracies unravel from within.

Levitsky and Ziblatt identified two essential norms in American democracy: “mutual toleration,” meaning that political parties accept their opposition, and “institutional forbearance,” meaning that the opposition exercises restraint in using checks and balances. When toleration and forbearance are abandoned, Levitsky and Ziblatt write, the result is “constitutional hardball.” This term reflects behavior that is technically legal, but undermines the spirit of the law; McConnell’s Garland gambit is a prime example.

This anything-goes political style was normalized in American politics by Rep. Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., who rejected mutual toleration by attacking his opponents’ patriotism and eschewing compromise. These tactics reached the Wisconsin State Assembly in the late 90s under speaker Scott Jensen, who Heck said, “was a disciple of Gingrich and was of the opinion that Republicans should adopt a more hardball policy against Democrats.”

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Jensen’s hardball politics weaponized patriotism and were matched by Democrats in the assembly, signifying that Gingrich’s “politics as warfare” mantra had taken hold.

Gingrich and Jensen show that national politicians take cues on style and strategy from state politicians and vice versa. In the early 20th century, La Follette’s progressive reforms were imitated in statehouses around the country, and his emphasis on government corruption changed the national discourse. Gingrich created an aggressive style of politics in the U.S. House of Representatives that trickled down to the states, including Wisconsin. Scott Walker may have failed to take his small-government conservatism nationwide, but he still transformed Wisconsin, said Ben Wikler, chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, to the HPR. In Wikler’s words, Walker “took a sledgehammer to the norms and basic structures of democracy in Wisconsin.”

The sledgehammer fell in late 2018, when Walker ignored institutional forbearance and deliberately strengthened the legislature to weaken the incoming governor, foreshadowing the obstructionist style Republicans would adopt after he left office.

The special legislative session that Evers called before April’s election, which Vos adjourned after 17 seconds, stood out for the fact that Republicans showed up at all; GOP legislators stood the governor up last year at sessions on homelessness and gun violence. The unwillingness of Wisconsin’s Republicans to engage in debate demonstrates that institutional forbearance can still fail under an executive who tries to foster bipartisanship in the wake of one-party dominance.

Evers’ experience could exemplify potential pitfalls for national Democrats if Trump loses in November but Republicans hold their Senate majority. The president has resorted to norm-breaking by subverting Congress’s power of the purse to build a wall on the southern border and firing inspector generals who have raised concerns with his administration. Biden’s government ethics plan suggests that he might embrace norms, but Democrats deserve to be viewed skeptically as well in light of recent history. Even if a Biden victory does represent a change of course, Evers’ experience in Wisconsin demonstrates that in order to truly revitalize norms, voters must seek accountability in each branch of government. In Wisconsin, frustration with the system may be pushing voters to do so.

THE NEXT BATTLE In Wisconsin’s next election, it seems that voters may reach their breaking point with politicians who disregard democratic norms. In the April court race, robust turnout fueled a surprise victory for liberal Jill Karofsy. Still, many in-person voters were disgruntled; Jennifer Taff told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel she was disgusted that she had to risk both her and her dying father’s life to exercise her right to vote. Others, including Marcus Knoke’s roommate, waited for absentee ballots that never came.

This November, the Wisconsin Election Commission will send absentee ballots applications to most registered voters, but voting barriers, including an overwhelmed postal service, remain. The 2011 voter ID law depresses turnout among minorities and college students, two demographics that lean blue, while gerrymandering makes a Democratic majority in the assembly historically improbable. Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center, told the HPR that there is a chance Evers and the state legislature reach a compromise regarding redistricting,

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but the tenor of the debate makes that outcome seem unlikely.

This type of fighting costs voters dearly. Since 2018, taxpayers have been left on the hook for $6 million in attorney fees stemming from partisan court fights.

If Karofsky’s win is any indication, Wisconsin Republicans could soon weather a large backlash. If Trump’s approval ratings continue to sink and drag down Senate Republicans by association, Republicans on Capitol Hill will be in the hot seat as well. In a 2019 op-ed, Levitsky and Ziblatt claimed that an electoral thrashing might force the GOP to rethink its reliance on old White voters and voter suppression. In both Wisconsin and around the country, this strategy is running its course as young people and people of color reject a system too embroiled in partisan bickering to serve them. That trend may put Robin Vos in an awkward position. If voters truly are “incredibly safe to go out,” the future of his party’s obstructionist agenda seems anything but safe. 

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Conservation as Public Health Policy Joy Ding

The legacy of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic leaves behind an urgent question: How do we prevent history from repeating itself? Far from a doomsday conjecture, our shared history with pathogens shows that outbreaks will happen again. Soon. But to forestall the next pandemic, we must first understand how outbreaks begin.

“Zoonosis”— a disease that can be passed from animals to humans. That clinical definition belies the tragedy and familiarity of outbreaks in human history, including the Black Death, HIV/ AIDS crisis, and COVID-19 pandemic, to name a few. For the public, the narrative around zoonosis is largely distorted by fear, and it fixates on the horrifying outcomes of transmission. There is, after all, something horrifyingly enthralling about macabre diseases. Consider the trending pandemic thriller, “Contagion,” in which viewers witness the skin-crawling outbreak of an invisible contagion that knows no boundaries. The sensationalization of infectious diseases obscures our understanding of the far less insidious root cause of zoonosis: human interactions with the natural world.

One interaction could be as simple and commonplace as a farmer clearing land. Combined, though, these inane interactions have formed an ecological footprint significant enough to launch a new geological epoch — the Anthropocene — characterized by humanity’s influence on Earth’s ecological foundation.

What are the implications for zoonotic disease transmission?

When the actions of that farmer clearing land is multiplied a thousand-fold by those like him, how many animals are displaced? Where do they go as the wilderness thins? The increased frequency of contact with human population complements the

increased risk of spillover infection. It’s a game of chance, and we are tipping the odds, as of now, against our species.

As humans increasingly encroach upon natural habitats, destroying upwards of half the Earth’s total biomass, it is hardly surprising that upwards of 60% of emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic. The grim future forecasted by these statistics, though, obscures the fact that change is possible. Instead of accepting pandemics as an inevitability, we must redefine the unchallenged narrative of the anthropocene by setting new norms for interactions between humans and nature.

LESSONS FROM THE PAST For the most part, humanity’s approach to zoonotic diseases has been reactive rather than preventative. As illustrated by the recent crisis, governments have scrambled to contain — often unsuccessfully — rather than prevent an outbreak. According to Ellen Carlin, an assistant professor at the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University, the “vast majority of [the U.S. federal budget] goes into response or preparedness for response,” with little investment in preventative methods involving “multi-sectoral” teams of environmental health and public health specialists. Despite the catastrophic failures of the COVID-19 response, there is still no change in sight. As Colin Chapman, a conservation scientist and professor at George Washington University put it, habit trumps rationality: Governments will “respond to the immediate human factors… rather than dealing with the original cause, which is basically zoonotic disease transmission.” If a disruptive global pandemic

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is not enough to change public health policy by integrating it with environmental health, what is?

Without a change in outlook and mindset, reactionary responses are virtually useless. The Ebola epidemic is just one cautionary example. Aaron Berstein, the interim director of the Center of Climate, Health, and the Global Environment for the Harvard School of Public Health, identified rampant deforestation as a major culprit. One factor was that the destruction of the natural habitats of bats — Ebola virus carriers — pushed them towards human populations. Still, after the Ebola crisis there was no effort to strengthen regulations on deforestation, said Berstein. In fact, the exact opposite has occurred.

Granted, there are a few exceptions, like China, where strict enforcement by the government, aided by its authoritarian reach, supports proactive environmental regulations — most recently, a ban on the wildlife trade. Overall, significant progress is largely curbed due to the attitude that “a lack of compliance [with environmental law] is fine” at the highest level of governance in countries including Brazil and the United States, according to Eric Lambin, a professor at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University.

Complacency and indifference can undermine the potential of any good policy. As a result, regulation is not equivalent to enforcement. When we rely too much on policy to drive change, we forget the human factor. Consider the recent backlash against bushmeat in wet markets — places that sell produce and fresh meat — for potentially spreading COVID-19. Outrage over the recklessness of wet markets, which has captured popular imagination as breeding grounds of disease, fuels the call for bans: If this “backwards” system were outlawed, wouldn’t tragedies be prevented? Our disgust at bushmeat — implicitly thinking of wet markets as “backwards”— disrespects and throws aside the communities that participate in and rely on the bushmeat trade.

It is rarely broadcasted, but spillover often occurs in communities that interact with the environment extensively out of necessity, and regulations will not fix that. Chapman points out that in countries like Uganda, bushmeat transactions are mainly neighbor to neighbor, and hunting is part of the social, cultural, and economic structure. It is not that regulations do not exist, but as Hongying Li, a research scientist at EcoHealth Alliance, aptly remarked, “we have to change the culture, change human behavior” around interactions with the ecosystem. Change starts small, and change begins locally. Catherine Machalaba, a policy advisor with EcoHealth Alliance, expressed surprise that “communities are often overlooked in global health” when they are in fact critical to the global conservation effort. There is no global policy and no “simple fix,” added Bernstein. “Success lies in a real understanding of the needs of the people who live in these communities and figuring out how that can be.”

A QUESTION OF MONEY? There is no doubt that one of these needs is economic. To make a living, people hunt and clear land, whether to raise livestock or for timber. If conservation is contrary to basic monetary needs, then conservation is not possible. As a result, many successful conservation strategies look for ways to meet economic needs while promoting safe and sustainable practices. Payments for ecosystem services, which subsidize farmers for conservation services, are one example, and ecotourism, where revenue

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from sustainable nature tourism goes towards both conservation and supporting local communities, is another. But are monetary benefits alone enough to stop unsafe and unsustainable interactions between humans and the environment?

There is an unspoken agreement that increasing individual and communal wealth will eliminate the need for unsafe practices. But this assumes that everyone resorts to unsafe and unsustainable practices only out of need or desperation. Chapman inadvertently put this to the test by running a mobile clinic that provides free health care services communities living near the Kibale National Park in Uganda. He noticed that, surprisingly, “as we increase the wealth of our particular community, poaching goes up.” Locals he questioned have told him, “why do you have more money? [So] you can buy bushmeat.” Choice, which is shaped by culture, attitudes, and behaviour beyond direct economic motivations, plays an important and often underrated role.

Still doubtful? Consider bushmeat hunting in the United States. If this is new or surprising, it may be because bushmeat is commonly referred to as a “Third-world problem.” It is not: bushmeat is not exclusive to the meat of exotic animals. Common wildlife, like deer, also fits under the umbrella term. Bushmeat hunting in the U.S. is, for the most part, recreational and determined by personal choice. As illustrated above, soft features and other qualitative factors like culture and behavior are, unlike economic incentives, unquantifiable. Regardless, these are the critical considerations that must shape conservation. If conservation aims can be neatly divided into three components, they would be education, incentives, and capacity building, according to Lambin. For each of these categories, economic considerations are only a piece of the puzzle.

CHANGING THE STORY What are the intangibles that motivate conservation? Let’s examine a conservation experiment to answer this question.

Lambin recounts a study on local, eco-certified coffee plantations in Colombia where the direct economic benefits were almost negligible: To meet the eco-certification standards, local farmers “had to comply to more than 90 criteria” but were only “paid about two percent above market price.” There are long term benefits like improved drought resilience due to increased tree coverage, explained Lambin, but in the absence of a direct economic incentive, he wondered what could be motivating them to stay or become eco-certified. From interviewing the farmers, Lambin sensed that a key motivator was their “pride [in] having a sustainable farming system.” Their pride came from being able to “[do]the right thing” after “hearing about climate change” and being pushed by their children to be eco-certified.

The key takeaway is that providing the practical means through which communities can change lifestyle or behavior must be supplemented by a change in attitude first. Here, moral pride cemented a shift in perception of what Berstein calls the value of the environment “beyond the commodities that can be extracted from it.” Simply put, people both want and choose practices that break from familiar habits and even culture.

Looking back at different conservation projects, a pattern emerges where the aim is really to change how communities and individuals perceive the environment rather than simply conserving it. To Chapman, the value in the mobile clinic, which is

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sponsored by the nearby Kibale national park, is that it “show[s] that [the park] cares for [the local’s] needs, ... respects them and respects what they want” so that they ideally “will respect the forest more” and act accordingly. Similarly the real value of ecotourism, Chapman continues, is not necessarily the revenue it generates for local communities, but how it compounds the value of the local environment to individuals as an unmatched national and international beauty to be treasured.

By changing perceptions and attitudes towards our relationship with the environment, we are changing the narrative of the Anthropocene. Attitudes are the building blocks for lasting change. It will not happen quickly, but it will happen. The presentation of environmental issues in popular media makes it easy to adopt a fatalistic perspective — climate change fatigue. But forecasts aside, we are far from the end of the story. The good news is that there are already so many successful conservation methods and stories. The hope is that the individual contributions will cascade over time to create lasting change — a new direction for the anthropogenic narrative. Twenty years ago in Kibale, Chapman recalls a woman doing educational outreach, teaching children slogans about conservation and the forest.

Twenty years later when Chapman returned, he saw the children — now adults — again and asked their children about their views of the forest. They earnestly “gave [him] back [the same] slogans.”

ROLE OF INSTITUTIONS The much-needed change in attitudes is not exclusive to local communities. This also needs to happen at an institutional level before policies can truly be effective. The first step is recognizing that public health, environmental health, and animal health are inseparable — this is what the concept of One Health advocates for, the integration of conservation as part of public health. In most countries including the U.S., Carlin says, “politically, there is no connection between animal, environment, and human health.” Even now during the pandemic, OneHealth is still not a priority. Although we have seen effective conservation efforts juxtaposed against policy failures, “it’s not local conservation effort or regulation,” emphasizes Lambin, “we need local, regional, national or international efforts also to reinforce each other.” Successful conservation projects exist, but most are small-scale. From providing funds to giving direction to these projects, institutional involvement, whether with private or public entities, is required. According to Lambin, “It’s only when there’s some minimum level of alignment between [public, private, local, national, and international] that we could achieve long term a transition to sustainability.”

On the national front, it may come as a surprise that smaller countries are setting the example. Machalaba gives the example of Liberia, a severely “resource limited” country that was at the epicenter of the Ebola epidemic. The disadvantage in resources did not discourage them from committing to a “One Health coordination platform [that is] chaired by the vice president of the country.” To Machalaba, Liberia’s commitment far outshines that of most other countries, and she is “always inspired” by their effort. What sets Liberia apart from other countries?

Machalaba thinks that it is largely attitude which drives their “genuine interest and genuine commitment.” Although Liberia has made significant progress in a short time, they still face mas-

sive challenges. The question is, will they, and other countries, ever meet their conservation target?

The answer is yes, they can. It is a monumental challenge that should not invite intimidation, but rather encourage creativity in the solution. And it has been done before. Lambin recalls that before the 1980s, “Costa Rica was always identified as the worst country in terms of deforestation.” In just a few decades, “they lost about 80% of their forest covers,” and the “beautiful national capital of Costa Rica was completely destroyed by deforestation.” This “created a kind of mental shock” that permeated the entire population. Fortunately, “at the highest level of the political power, with the president, they turn things around in a matter of a couple of years” through massive conservation programs.

Now, the rainforests of Costa Rica are a national treasure, and the complementary “economic payoff came very quickly” with a booming ecotourism industry. Most importantly, though, these changes have continued to this day.

THE HUMAN PARASITE When pandemics are discussed, they are spoken of in fear and horror. Outbreaks as described in Richard Preston’s popular science book, “The Hot Zone,” which traces the emergence of Ebola, represent “the earth ... attempting to rid itself of an infection by the human parasite.” This antagonistic view of our relationship with nature not only distorts the facts, but also promotes the destructive narrative of the Anthropocene, where humans only do harm. Nature is not launching an offensive; rather, these outbreaks occur because of human actions. We are so used to viewing the environment as a resource to be fully exploited that we even consider ourselves to be the “parasite.”

But it does not have to be that way, and in reality, it has never been that way. The Anthropocene simply describes the profound ability of mankind to shape and direct the natural world through our combined actions, for better or for worse.

As conservation experiments have shown, human-nature relations are not limited to one of extraction and destruction: They can be one of coexistence and mutual respect. Look at the successful conservation projects mentioned in Uganda, Colombia, Costa Rica; weren’t they all trying to change how humans understand and view the natural world? We do not even know the full value of nature, so discovering that value is the first step towards a safer future. Moving forward, we must be honest with ourselves and first recognize that our fate is linked with that of the planet. In the age of COVID-19, there is no better time to address the root cause of pandemics — the way in which human interact with the environment — and change our legacy from that of “parasite” to nature’s advocate. 

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A Global Crisis Sethu Odayappan

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n an ideal world, a global pandemic would lead to unprecedented international cooperation. Similar to the unity of citizens following a domestic terrorist attack or natural disaster, countries would join hands to develop a global response to a pandemic using shared resources and knowledge. In a fight for humanity, enemies would become allies and borders would become temporarily obsolete.

Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic shows us that the world we live in is far from ideal. In the face of crisis, countries are abandoning the pre-existing neoliberal international order.

As the death toll increases and unemployment rises, COVID-19 has silently taken on a new victim: globalization.

LEARNING FROM THE PAST However, this is not the norm. In times of global crises, international cooperation does not usually break down—in fact, it often strengthens. During the 2008 financial crisis, countries banded together to prevent another great depression. Global governance and cooperation defied expectations as the inter-

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national community launched a worldwide stimulus program, strengthened global standards for banks, and discouraged protectionist trade policies.

In fact, 2008 was the peak of globalization, when crossborder financial flows were at their highest. At the time, people believed that globalization was an unstoppable force. Pundits even talked of a future in which the importance of nation states would fade, international organizations would gain power, and capital flows would be frictionless. However, just a decade later, the conversation has completely changed. Political discourse today consists of travel bans and trade wars.

GLOBALIZATION UNDER TRUMP Globalization was on the decline well before the COVID-19 pandemic. In Trump’s America, international cooperation and free trade is painted as a threat to American exceptionalism. In his speech to the United Nations, an institution that prides itself in global governance and cooperation, President Trump said, “We reject globalism and embrace the doctrine of patriotism.”

Needs A Global Response In order to build walls, enforce tariffs, and reduce foreign aid, Trump is exploiting fears of xenophobia and nationalistic sentiments while claiming to be fighting for “the doctrine of patriotism.”

Devin Pendas, a professor of world history at Boston College and Co-chair of the Contemporary Europe Study Group at Harvard University, discussed the Trump Administration’s disregard for multilateralism in an interview with the HPR. Pendas fears that the America First nationalistic agenda “will get hard-wired into the structure of American foreign policy” if Trump wins a second term. According to Pendas, these fears also extend beyond the United States. He believes that multilateralism “is starting to break down during the pandemic due partly to the rise of populist nationalism in a number of places.”

Trump and champions of isolationism are trying to convince the common man that globalization leads to a loss of jobs, increase in crime, and dilution of a white America. Losers of globalization, such as manufacturing workers, have found recourse in this populist message. However, even a cursory look at macroeconomic trends overwhelmingly shows that economic

interconnectedness has risen millions out of poverty, increased gross domestic product, and dramatically improved living standards while simultaneously bonding the fate of nations and thereby reducing threats of war.

A GLOBAL TREND TOWARDS ISOLATION Trump has been spreading isolationist rhetoric since the beginning of his campaign, and now, during a global pandemic, a time when international cooperation is truly vital, most countries seem to be adopting Trump’s message. Stuck in a classic prisoner’s dilemma, every country has chosen to defect from cooperation even though it would have led to undeniably better outcomes. Countries have cut themselves off from international supply chains and have begun to hoard resources, while nations that were dependent on these foreign producers are scrambling to find life-saving supplies. Shutting down the global market of goods and capital flows will hurt all countries — but resourceheavy nations will be able to hold out longer than poorer nations.

Even the European Union, an emblem of global governance,

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one another. At the onset of the pandemic, Germany, France, and the Czech Republic all announced export bans of protective medical equipment. At a time when Italy, another member of the EU, was struggling to handle an outbreak that no other country had experienced, allies cut off life-saving supplies. On the day the export ban was implemented, Germany had only 240 cases while Italy had 4,000. Janez Lenaric, the EU crisis management commissioner, argued that such bans “risk undermining our collective approach to handle this crisis.” Unfortunately, these pleas for international cooperation were ignored.

In Asia, protectionism is also making a valiant return. Extending beyond medical equipment, Asian countries are starting to cut off international supply chains of an even more essential good: food. Major producers of wheat like Russia and Kazakhstan limited exports. Vietnam, the world’s third-largest exporter of rice, set strict export quotas and India was quick to follow suit. Cambodia restricted fish and rice exports, Turkey restricted lemons, and Serbia stopped exports of sunflower oil. Relatively wealthy countries who rely on these resources such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt are buying up supplies and raising prices while less well-endowed countries are left out to dry. Critics of globalization argue that globalization exacerbates inequities among nations, which in some cases, is a valid concern. However, so far, the abandonment of globalization has dramatically affected poorer nations more than rich nations.

AMERICA’S RETREAT FROM THE GLOBAL STAGE The response in the United States has been no better, and arguably worse, than it has been abroad. In addition to its own flurry of tariffs and export restrictions, the U.S. announced its intentions to withdraw from the World Health Organization. The United States is currently the largest contributor to the WHO and has historically placed itself at the forefront of global public health crises. In the 1960s and 1970s, the United States and the Soviet Union gave the WHO resources to eradicate smallpox.

The U.S. was also a major contributor to humanity’s fight against AIDS and Ebola, yet now, in the face of an even greater threat, the United States has selfishly retreated from the global stage.

Not only are we not helping other nations, but we are also actively fighting against them. A scathing report in Die Welt, a German national newspaper, found that the Trump Administration offered “large sums of money” to buy a CureVac, a German vaccine company, and move its research to the United States.

The United States wanted the company to develop the vaccine “for the U.S. only.” The deal fell through, but the protectionist sentiment reverberated throughout the world as the story made international headlines. While the Trump Administration denies the report, Germany’s Health Ministry has confirmed its validity.

Charles Derber, a sociology professor at Boston College, pointed out a contradiction in the Trump Administration’s response to the pandemic in an interview with the HPR. Derber argues that Trump is trying to persuade the American public that “the virus is not important and that they got it all solved” while on the other hand, Trump “wants to use [the virus] to bash other countries and build up his nationalistic theme.” Derber went on to discuss the importance of handling global issues through international mechanisms rather than individual actions.

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PREPARING FOR THE CRISES OF TOMORROW Even as it becomes exceedingly obvious that a failure to cooperate on an international scale has worsened the effects of the pandemic, leaders are trying to blame their problems on globalization — and people are buying it. The Washington Times published an article titled “COVID-19 exposes terrible dangers of globalization,” and a recent Foreign Policy article claims that “globalization is heading for the ICU.” Globalization is not to blame for the pandemic and could actually be a large part of the solution.

If we fall victim to populist arguments against globalization, we will put our country down a treacherous path that will be even less prepared for future crises. The COVID-19 pandemic has taught us a lesson on the importance of international cooperation — a lesson that cost us many lives to learn, and a lesson that we must not forget. If we leverage global manufacturing power and distribute medical equipment based on need and not borders, we can save lives. If we dramatically increase funding to the global scientific community and organizations like the WHO, we can save lives. If we have open international communication with genuine empathy between governments and share best practices, we can save lives.

In January, when the virus had only affected China, U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross stated that he thinks COVID-19 “will help accelerate the return of jobs to North America.”

The U.S. jobs report currently shows that the pandemic has led to over 30 million lost jobs in the United States. If we approach human progress as a zero-sum game, one country’s loss must be another country’s gain. This type of mentality can only lead to isolation and competition. Through the pandemic, we have learned that countries can in fact win and lose together. Whether we like it or not, years of globalization have tied economies together forming an unbreakable bond, and trying to sever this bond will only lead to mutual destruction. The fate of our economies are linked together, so nations must cooperate in order to be better prepared for the crises of tomorrow.

The severity of the pandemic will depend on the presence of global governance. Will nations fight this virus in isolation exploiting nationalism and fears of xenophobia or will they join hands and pool global resources and knowledge to defeat their shared enemy? 

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Casteism, Orientalism, & Tokenism Ria Modak

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y parents’ marriage is straight out of a Bollywood movie. My father, who would skip school to watch art cinema and perform radical street theater, fell in love with my mother, a studious medical student who graduated at the top of her university. A player and a know-it-all, a film buff and a talented artist, a Muslim and a Hindu. Falling in love was a decision, and a risky one. Interfaith Hindu-Muslim marriages in India are inherently political, and often provoke communal conflict and violence. Now in their 28th year of marriage, my parents recount the trauma and obstacles they faced from friends, family, and the state, as though they were living a rom-com.

In all likelihood, my parents’ marriage would have given Sima Taparia, the Mumbai-based matchmaker and star of the hit Netflix series “Indian Matchmaking,” a heart attack. In the show, Taparia traverses continents and oceans from Mumbai to San Diego to find the “perfect match” for each of her clients. Using “biodata,” a rigorous list of characteristics and qualifications ranging from height to eye color to caste, from numerous eligible (i.e. upper-class, upper-caste and conventionally attractive) South Asians, she promises relationships that will last forever to satisfy her clients, and more importantly, their parents. The show’s promise, perhaps, lies in its dual appeal: It at once joins the canon of guilty-pleasure reality dating shows, like “Love is Blind” and “Dating Around,” as well as a growing repertoire of South Asian American media representation, like “Family Karma” and “Never Have I Ever.”

As an Indian American woman and secret lover of reality dating shows, “Indian Matchmaking” should have ticked all the boxes. Instead, I found myself disturbed by the show’s unconcealed casteism, classism, and colorism. By the end of the first episode, I, like many other queer, anti-caste, feminist South Asians, could only move forward by hate-watching the rest of show. As many critics have pointed out, the show reifies, invisibilizes, and normalizes casteism and classism for South Asians, South Asian Americans, and those unfamiliar with the institution of arranged marriage. Even more pernicious, however, is its flirtation with orientalist self-exotification and its implications for the future of minority media representation.

“SLIM, TRIM, AND EDUCATED” By commercializing the institution of arranged marriage, “Indian Matchmaking” is fundamentally complicit in upholding caste supremacy. Arranged marriage within the same caste and community, according to the noted Indian politician and caste abolitionist B.R. Ambedkar, is the primary reason for the perpetuation of caste. It consolidates and preserves uppercaste power. Disrupting these boundaries of power has deadly consequences; dozens of Indians are killed each year, usually by family members or in-laws, for marrying outside their caste.

Last year, a father allegedly doused his daughter and her Dalit husband in kerosene and lit them on fire to protest their marriage in Maharashtra. Caste supremacy exists in America as well; in June, California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing regulators sued Cisco Systems Inc. on the basis of caste discrimination, accusing the corporation of denying an engineer professional opportunities, a raise, and promotions because of his Dalit background.

The show obscures the brutally violent reality of caste in India and America with seemingly innocuous marital preferences, including “slim, trim, and educated,” one of Taparia’s iconic catchphrases. Taparia does not hide her preoccupation with caste; within the first few minutes of the first episode, she explicitly calls attention to caste, height, and age as among the most important characteristics in arranging the perfect match.

According to Suraj Yengde, scholar-activist and author of “Caste Matters,” “desirable qualities like ‘similar values’ or ‘good family background’ are actually caste markers. They are euphemisms for caste. Their purpose is to differentiate upper caste people from lower caste people, and in that sense they are the pinnacle of the caste system. Because Sima herself is not thinking actively about caste, the world that the show captures maintains and invisibilizes caste. Every Otherizing metaphor, reference, and gesture is about caste, and that’s how it operates on such a deep level.”

The problematics of the show, unsurprisingly, are not limited to caste supremacy. Taparia’s use of biodata is also used to match clients based on their religious background. Hindus are paired

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almost exclusively with Hindus, Sikhs with Sikhs. There are no Muslims, Christians, or Dalits. In addition to entirely erasing these marginalized communities, which in total constitute more than 40% of India’s population, Taparia’s insistence on religious endogamy has dangerous implications in an Indian political climate that encourages anti-Muslim hatred and genocide.

Beyond the particularities of the Indian political context, the show reinforces oppressive systems for South Asian Americans by reinforcing the model minority myth. From Aparna, the Houston-based attorney and general counsel whose incisive one-liner roasts have spawned countless memes, to Nadia, the New Jersey-based event planner and marketer whose GuyaneseAmerican background brought much-needed attention to the reality of South Asian indentured labor in the Caribbean, “Indian Matchmaking” showcases only the experiences of upperclass, highly-educated South Asian Americans. When talking to Taparia about how she raised her children, Aparna’s mother reifies the model minority myth: “I don’t ever want to see a B on a report card. I don’t want two degrees. I want three. Nothing less than three degrees.” This emphasis on ambition, financial stability and education perpetuates the false stereotype that the diaspora is successful because of its adherence to traditional cultural values, including hard work and family loyalty; this logic in turn is often wielded to justify the marginalization of Black, Latinx and Indigenous Americans.

ORIENTALISM REVISITED Despite the overtly problematic nature of the show, “Indian Matchmaking” has captured the imagination of South Asians, South Asian Americans, and non-South Asians alike. After its release, it remained on the Netflix Top 10 list for more than two weeks in both the United States and India. Despite its mixed reception, the one thing critics and consumers can agree on is its highly addictive quality. Importantly, the show functions differently for each of these groups.

For South Asians and South Asian Americans, the show, according to Yengde, does not provide any new information; rather, it simply mirrors the injustices that exist within our reality: “Ask any Indian auntie or any desi kid what the show is about and they’ll know it’s about caste. Indians know how caste is everywhere, yet not seen by the naked eye. The diaspora has long maintained a conspicuous silence on caste, and yet Indian American kids have been educated about caste in its internalized forms. It is the north star for every desi kid’s sense of identity.”

But for non-South Asians, the show has a dangerous effect: It reinscribes an Orientalist view of South Asia and naturalizes the caste system. Orientalism, a term conceptualized by Edward Said, refers to the cultural representations produced by the West about the Orient. Said, a seminal figure in postcolonial studies, argues that the West’s construction of the Orient is one of perpetual backwardness, barbarism, and eroticism while the West itself emerges as rational and superior. From “Indiana Jones” to “Aladdin,” Orientalism manifests most readily in pop culture for our consumption.

“Indian Matchmaking” is an Orientalist fantasy. Even though the show’s co-executive producer Smriti Mundhra claimed the show was not made for the white gaze, in reality “Indian Matchmaking” exoticizes elements of Indian culture for the white gaze. One particularly notable example of the show’s harmful

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Orientalizing quality lies in Taparia’s consultation of Janardhan Dhurbe, the face-reading astrologer who predicts the strength of her arranged matches from photographs of her clients’ faces.

After taking one look at Aparna’s photo, Dhurbe discerns that she is “obstinate and stubborn,” and divines that “her husband will be subservient to her and absolutely devoted.” By emphasizing Taparia’s reliance on Indian astrology, the show constructs Indian culture as superstitious and backwards.

For casual, non-South Asian viewers who have little knowledge of the caste system or Indian ethno religious politics, the show propagates an image of Indian society deeply rooted in casteism, classism, colorism, and sexism without critiquing it.

Arranged marriage is transformed into a cultural artifact immune to criticism because it is normalized for a global audience.

The caste system, in turn, is transformed into an inevitable and integral part of Indian society.

NOT THE REPRESENTATION WE NEED It is important to situate “Indian Matchmaking” within the larger context of South Asian media representation, and more specifically within a growing canon of South Asian American television and movies. According to professor Vivek Bald, who teaches in MIT’s Department of Comparative Media Studies, the show is representative of the fraught history of South Asian American representation more broadly: “At every moment there have simultaneously existed both an acceptable version of South Asianness and an unacceptable version, one that was celebrated and desired, and one that was denigrated. In the late 19th and early 20th century, there was a widespread craze for Oriental consumer goods while Asian laborers were kept out of the United States by immigration laws.” In our current historical moment, according to Bald, the system is “set up to reward us for seeking to be model minorities and punish members of our communities who will not or cannot do so. To put the recent changes in representation in that context is important to understand the types of South Asian representations that doors open for in the industry and what types of representations are not.”

While Mundhra claims that one of the goals of the show was to start difficult conversations in the South Asian community about caste, colorism and sexism, this goal is not radical enough when the stakes of arranged marriage itself can literally be life and death. An institution as inherently oppressive as arranged marriage does not need media representation, according to artist and co-founder of Bombay-based “Not Your Newspaper” Sarah Modak: “I don’t think arranged marriages require a narrative at all unless it is criticism. I don’t really see a way of making content about arranged marriage that’s caste-sensitive, not sexist, and unproblematic and still making it a light, bingeable Netflix show.”

The ultimate goal of ethnic representation must transcend the limitations of acceptability. As producers and consumers of media and culture, we have the opportunity to redirect our attention to a vision of justice and equality. It is time for South Asians, and particularly those from oppressed caste, religious minority, and queer backgrounds, to reclaim our creative agency and tell our own stories from a place of radical honesty. 

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Y yo no me voy a quedar callado: Sofia Andrade

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espite the fact that Latinx communities also suffer disproportionate levels of violence and arrests at the hands of the police, their silence and lack of staunch support for the Black Lives Matter movement is deafening.

“And to all the racist Latinos: eso no se hace, eso no se hace, y yo no me voy a quedar callado,” read a sign at a recent Black Lives Matter protest against racism and anti-Blackness in Miami. Translated from Spanish, it reads, “You can’t do that, you can’t do that, and I’m not going to stay silent.” “Where are my Latinos?” read another amidst the sea of protesters and posters — a sea lacking in Latinx individuals.

For Afro-Latinx individuals in Miami, the lack of support for Black Lives Matter was no surprise. In many ways, antiBlackness in Miami is just as prominent and widespread as it is in other areas with much smaller minority communities. North Carolina native Omilani Alcarón, an Afro-Latinx filmmaker and director of “Latinegras,” points out that Miamians often try to separate themselves from the stereotypical ideologies of the South when they are not all that different. “Growing up in the ‘South South,’ you know, you’d see people who have Confederate flags and all of these kinds of things. And honestly, even my experience with that kind of people who wear red [MAGA] shirts and everything, it wasn’t as racist as the humans I encountered here in Miami,” she said.

In a city like Miami, where Latinx communities comprise the majority of the population, their absence from large-scale pro-

Anti-Blackness and Colorism in Miami’s Latinx Community tests is especially noticeable. Thus, the absence of these communities from the protests that shook Miami in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was palpable.

These protests were against the history of police violence in the United States, violence that Miami is in no way exempt from with its long history of police violence against Black communities. For example, President Trump’s now-infamous “When the looting starts, the shooting starts” tweet is a direct quote from Miami’s police chief in 1967, Walter Headley. Known for his “get tough” crime policy — one which disproportionately affected Black and Brown communities — he used the phrase to describe his message to Black criminals and was sharply criticized by civil rights activists of the time.

Despite the fact that Latinx communities also suffer disproportionate levels of violence and arrests at the hands of the police, their silence and lack of staunch support for the Black Lives Matter movement is deafening. While Black people, both Latinx and non-Latinx, are vastly overrepresented in MiamiDade County’s criminal justice system, Black Latinx Miamians suffer the largest disparity. Compared to White Miamians, they experience a four times greater arrest rate, a 5.5 times higher conviction rate, and a six times greater incarceration rate. Latinx communities failing to support Black Lives Matter is not just a lack of solidarity with another community. It is evidence of the denial of Afro-Latinx individuals and the racism they face within

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the Latinx community. This racism is a result of Whiteness being viewed as the norm so Afro-Latinx individuals are cast aside.

Alcarón sees the problem in Miami as one of deeply entrenched anti-Blackness. “I was so excited to be coming to a town that is known as ‘America’s Latin City,’” she said. “They use these terms like ‘diversity’ and talk about how Latinidad flourishes here. But then I was in all these spaces, and people would act like they saw an anomaly. Like ‘What? A black person speaking Spanish? Where did you learn it? Oh, how come you can say your last name?’” In many Latinx communities, a history of colorism and anti-Blackness within Latinx homes and Latinx culture, stemming from Latin America’s colonization, has led to the erasure of the Afro-Latinx identity that people like Alcarón claim. It also underlies the now-monumental lack of support for Black Lives Matter.

ANTI-BLACKNESS IN THE HOME “Tenemos que mejorar la raza,” my aunt explained to me from across the crowded dining room table as she sketched out the ideal mate for my 10-year old self: tall, blonde, blue-eyed, White. Growing up, I would find myself at the center of these conversations at countless family gatherings. The setting and family member in question would vary, but the underlying message of anti-Blackness, and the idea that White beauty standards were ideal, was always the same.

As is true in many Latinx families, many older members of my family celebrate Whiteness openly, even if unintentionally.

They praise Eurocentric beauty standards, while casting aside those with darker skin and African or Indigenous ancestry.

They maintain a hyper-awareness of skin color that has existed for centuries. Armed with the countless terms used to describe dozens of multiracial identities and fluctuations in skin tone — mulato(a), moreno(a), negrito(a), indio(a), mestizo(a), prieto(a), zambo(a), to name a few — they hold up the vestiges of a deeply entrenched system of race inequality and White supremacy.

Jokes about marrying a gringo for the “betterment of the family line” were often touted as just that, innocent jokes, but underlying the old-fashioned quips is the insidious reality of a deeprooted colorism — one that finds dangerous manifestations in the home and greater Latinx culture.

At present, amidst widespread mobilization for the Black Lives Matter movement, the deep-rooted anti-Blackness of Latinx communities drives feelings that this is not our fight to take part in. The desire to distance ourselves from our origins — something that goes hand in hand with the desire to be White or, at the very least, Whiter — allows many to wrongfully disengage with the demands of Black Lives Matter, relegating the issue to the side as something that does not affect Latinx individuals.

The pervasiveness of anti-Black attitudes in Latinx communities is such that it affects Afro-Latinx individuals’ perceptions of their identity. According to a 2016 study, 25% of U.S. Latinx individuals identify as Afro-Latino or Afro-Caribbean with Latin American roots. However, these individuals are more likely to identify as White or Hispanic (the latter of which is an ethnicity, not a race) than Black when asked about their race. Even among Afro-Latinx individuals alone, only 18% report their race as Black, with 39% reporting their race as White and 24% as Hispanic. This desire by certain Latinx individuals to be seen as more White — sometimes regardless of racial background — is

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rooted in a long history of colorism and anti-Blackness in Latin America.

THE HISTORIC ROOTS OF COLORISM Leading up to and following Latin American independence, mestizaje, or racial mixing, was celebrated as a method for remedying racial inequality. In reality, it was a front for colorblindness. As multiracial individuals often enjoyed privileges previously afforded exclusively to White colonizers, their very existence was touted as a testament to racial harmony in Latin American communities. Latin American leaders often pushed the narrative that if multiracial individuals with Black or Indigenous ancestry were treated as well as White individuals, then surely there was something to be said about the progressivity of racial politics in Latin America. This gave rise to the flawed belief that Latin America had successfully solved racism.

After independence, mestizaje would be encouraged for the sake of ‘Whitening’ the population and blurring ethnic lines, as evidenced by the practice of branqueamento in Brazil during the early 20th century. According to Deborah J. Yashar in her piece “Does Race Matter in Latin America?: How Racial and Ethnic Identities Shape the Region’s Politics,” Latin American leaders believed that White genes were stronger than those of other races, so multiracial individuals would be a step towards the greater ‘Whitening’ of the population. This ideology made multiracial individuals the national ideal merely because of their perceived proximity to Whiteness.

Later on in the 20th century, Latin American governments implemented policies that ignored race as a political distinction, instead focusing on the institutionalization of economic status as the primary identifier in order to consolidate support from the working class. Indigenous communities and Black communities, for example, lost the ability to use their race and ethnicity as a distinction in many countries and were instead lumped into the category of “peasants.” This created an incentive for governments to ignore the racial inequities that were prevalent in Latin America, serving to further perpetuate Latin America’s antiBlackness and the false idea that Latin American countries had solved the problem of racism. It left Blackness to be ignored and therefore continually oppressed despite it being at the base of Latinx culture. Much of Latinx popular culture — from bachata to reggaeton — finds its origins in Black culture, but because of this history of colorblindness and colorism, the realities of AfroLatinx identity are often erased.

The anti-Blackness in Miami’s Latinx communities comes from a history of anti-Blackness in our countries of origin and the colorblindness instilled in us from youth. While this history is not an excuse it offers context to the widely-held belief in Latinx communities that their home countries have solved racism, that the racism they experience or perpetuate upon immigrating is not one that is native to their home countries but one that is distinctly American. For example, in Cuban American communities it is common to hear people say, “‘Well in Cuba we all got along. We didn’t have the race problem like we do in the United States, so how can you accuse us of being racist? We’re not racist,’” said Michael Bustamante, an assistant professor of Latin American History at Florida International University in an interview. “And yet, you can be around a family of Cuban people and you can hear things that are blatantly racist.” It is this very

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belief in the lack of racism within Latinx communities that is at play when we see the lack of fervent support for Black Lives Matter coming from our communities here in Miami. For Latin American individuals such as myself to believe this and ignore the complex histories of anti-Blackness and colorism of our own patrias, and the ways they manifest within our homes and community spaces, is tantamount to complicity. We cannot excuse ourselves from our own racism.

THE MIAMI BUBBLE Many Latinx Miamians, like myself, benefit from the color of our skin in Miami’s bubble. Because of the city’s insular nature, its distinction as a hub for immigrants, and the fact that 70% of its population is Hispanic or Latinx, White-passing Latinx individuals make up much of the elite of Miami society. According to Bustamante, this comes from “a tendency to equate Cuban or Latino or Hispanic with Whiteness, especially in a place in Miami where Hispanic and Latinos are the dominant force and have the luxury of defining themselves as white.” Like the propensity of colorism in Latinx communities, this, too, has historical precedent.

When what is often considered to be the first big wave of Cuban immigrants came to the United States in the 1960s, they were mostly welcomed with preferential immigration status into Miami, a city of the Jim Crow South which was at the time still in the midst of desegregation. This “red carpet” entry — in the words of Bustamante — coupled with the fact that many of the people fleeing Cuba were light-skinned individuals from the upper and middle classes, meant that Cuban Americans were able to replace White Miamians in positions of power. While Cuba was more racially integrated than the U.S. at the time, it was not less racist or less anti-Black, according to Bustamante. He said that this, coupled with the labor displacement going on in Miami in the 1960s when Cuban Americans started to work in jobs usually worked by Black people, “sets the ground for a really long history of tension between the African American community in Miami and the Cuban American community.”

In many White-passing Latinx communities of Miami, antiBlack sentiments persist. This is true of more recent Cuban immigrants, who, according to Bustamante, are some of the most vocal in using extreme rhetoric against Black Lives Matter and the surrounding protests. The case of the Proud Boys, a far-right, White supremacist hate group and its chairman serves as a clear example of this. Though the group is one which would target Latinx communities otherwise due to its connection to White supremacy, its chairman, Enrique Tarrio, is a first-generation Miami-born Cuban-American. “From the vantage point of the Miami bubble, people can delusion themselves into thinking that they are as White as everyone else,” Bustamante said. This phenomenon only adds to the anti-Blackness in Latinx communities.

At its core, anti-Black racism in Latinx communities stems from and feeds into a system of White supremacy. This dangerous ideology oppresses Latinx people. Collective organizing and allyship amongst Latinx and Black communities — and all their intersections — are crucial in the fight against White supremacy and anti-Blackness. “No one will experience true liberation unless we are all free,” said Jasmine Haywood, an Afro-Latinx researcher on anti-Black racism. “Unless White-presenting Latinos join in solidarity with Afro-descendent Latinos and Black

folks, no one is going to win and no one is going to experience liberation. All the struggles they both experience are intertwined and intermingled, the common denominator is racism and white supremacy.”

White-passing and lighter skinned Latinx Miamians must join the fight against anti-Black racism, not just in solidarity with the outward Black Lives Matter movement, but within their own communities as well. We must break down the internalized anti-Blackness instilled in us from youth, an anti-Blackness with deep-seated roots in our own cultures that we must recognize in order to take down, to stand with those oppressed within our own Latinx communities and in the greater Miami community. We, the Latinx community, are set to become the most influential minority voting bloc in the United States for the 2020 election. We must support policies that combat systemic racism and anti-Blackness. And just as we must take the fight to the polls, we must also bring it to our streets, to our social media platforms, and especially to our once-complicit family conversations around the dinner table. 

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WELCOME TO THE #MARKEYVERSE Allison J. Scharmann This article was published on July 31, 2020, ahead of the September 1 Democratic Senate primary election in Massachusetts.

I

t began with a bang — or rather, a bomber jacket.

On April 12, Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts tweeted a photo of himself decked out in a slick green jacket, Boston Red Sox facemask, and Nike high top sneakers captioned: “If you have to go outside, wear a mask.” The photo went viral, amassing over 13,000 likes and fashioning the senator into an unlikely style icon. Young people flooded the replies with comments like “When’s this album dropping??,” “the fit slaps ed,” and “ADOPT ME PLEASE.” Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz, writing for The Cut, dubbed the outfit “a sick fit.”

40 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW FALL 2020

But the outfit itself is less important than what its popularity signifies. Markey, a 73-year-old incumbent, is in the thick of a high-profile, hotly contested Democratic senate primary.

His opponent? 39-year-old Massachusetts Rep. Joe Kennedy III. In a sea of young, progressive Democrats and Democratic Socialists launching primary challenges against establishment incumbents across the U.S., this particular race is a bit of an anomaly. While both candidates have laid claim to the mantle of progressivism, Markey is widely considered to be one of the most progressive members of the U.S. Senate.

Young people are paying attention.

MEET THE MARKEY STANS

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Enter: The Markey Stans. Over the past months,while the rest of us stared in horror at cake videos and downloaded, deleted, and re-downloaded TikTok, a different social media subculture began taking shape.

It started with just a few accounts: Ed Markey’s Reply Guys (@edsreplyguys) and Students For Markey (@students4markey), populated by high school and college-aged organizers invested in both Massachusetts state politics and memes. As time went on, the number of Markey-related accounts grew in number while also narrowing in scope. The accounts “Gingers for Markey” (@gingers4markey), “MA-04 for Markey” ( @ma04for), and “Has Joe Kennedy Given a Good Reason for Running?” (@whyisjoerunning) gained prominence over time, and the various accounts grew their audience by interacting with one another.

And then, in the words of @gingers4markey, came “the second Cambrian explosion.”

Theater kids for markey. Hot girls for markey. Dogs for Ed Markey. Moms4Markey. Bisexuals for ed markey. Astrology girls 4 ed. Cowboys for ed markey. PupsForEd. Indie Girls For Markey. Barbz for ed markey. Lesbians for Markey. Clowns for ed markey. Ed markey for ed markey. Joe kennedy for ed markey. The accounts, with varying norms of capitalization in their titles, multiply with each passing day.

With each new account comes a new set of niche memes fine-tuned to its title. “Plants for Ed Markey” tweets support from the perspective of “photosynthetic eukaryotes.” “Quabbin Reservoir residents for Ed Markey” does so from the perspective of the fish that live in the Quabbin Reservoir. Thanks to “Bald Gingers for Markey,” there are now two separate accounts for redheads at varying stages of hair growth or loss. One account is just a sentient bottle of ketchup tweeting in support of Ed Markey. Welcome to the #markeyverse.

GRASSROOTS BEGINNINGS When Emerson Toomey created the “Ed Markey’s Reply Guys,” she did not expect it to blow up the way it did.

“I initially made a tweet back in — oh my gosh, when was it? Maybe in March?” she said. “I made a joke tweet about the ‘Ed Markey Reply Guys Caucus’ and 20 people liked it almost immediately, and I was kind of like: ‘What, is this a thing that I should actually do?’”

In a matter of months, the self-described group of “guys, gals, & non-binary pals hyping up @edmarkey one tweet at a time,” amassed over 2,000 followers. Toomey, who is a thirdyear political science major at Northeastern University, became familiar with Ed Markey while working with Sunrise Boston and Boston City Councilor Michelle Wu. She runs the account (which is not affiliated with the Markey campaign) with five other college students and recent graduates, posting dozens of tweets a day that run the gamut from straightforward to celebratory to a little bit bizarre.

“Most of the tweets that we’ve been making are very stream of consciousness,” she said. “Whatever we think of we just tweet it.” The account is popular for its around-the-clock delivery of memes, jokes, and sincere words of encouragement directed at Ed Markey, Markey supporters, and others who pop up on its radar. One Reply Guy tweeted “Good Night

@EdMarkey” throughout the months of April and May. Another Reply Guy penned a parody of Wheatus’ “Teenage Dirtbag” that inspired the band Wheatus to perform at a virtual event in support of Ed Markey. Most recently, the Reply Guys collaborated with Gracie’s Ice Cream in Somerville, MA to create the flavor “Ed Markey’s Green New Deal With It Mint Chip.”

“Our stuff that does the best is typically the [Tweets] that don’t make a lot of sense,” said Toomey. “One time, I think someone tweeted ‘ed markey is ed markey, and it got, like, 50 likes.”

“It’s like the Virginia Woolf of the modern political world,” said Jenny Chen, referring to the Reply Guys’ stream of consciousness style. Chen, a sophomore at Providence College, is well acquainted with the ins and outs of the Ed Markey Twittersphere. She could not vote in 2016, but still felt like the presidential election was a wake-up call, and she got to work.

Today, she is the youth vote strategist for the grassroots group Students For Markey. Her responsibilities as a member of the group’s leadership team include editing its blog, The Markey Times. In her previous role, which focused on digital outreach, she produced a policy-themed podcast,The Markey, and organized content for the group’s Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tik-Tok accounts. Another early player in the Ed Markey Twitter game, Students For Markey tweets more than its fair share of memes while also recruiting volunteers and organizing phonebanks.

“It’s a universal language because it’s humorous, it’s uplifting, it’s funny, it’s wholesome, and it gets people’s attention,” Chen said of Markey-themed memes. “We draw them in and we tell them about all the things behind the candidate that’s on the meme, and it’s a really good way to build community at a time when that’s really hard.” Chen likens “campaign Twitter” to “a giant Slack” where kids on the internet who are passionate about progressive politics are able to share jokes and information rapidly. She says that this encourages people not only to laugh, but to connect with candidates and learn more about the issues they care about.

“We want to create the space for people to tell their stories and I think, as leaders, we recognize that this was never about us or about Ed Markey,” she said. “It was about the hopes, the dreams and aspirations of people across the country and their personal stories of why they’re here at all.”

“A PERFECT STORM” It was on a Students for Markey organizing call that Chloe, a resident of Brookline, got the idea for her account: “MA-04 for Markey” (@ma04for). Someone mentioned that Ed Markey was popular in Brookline, which is part of Massachusetts’ Fourth Congressional District, represented by none other than Joe Kennedy III. Chloe thought: “There should be somewhere for Massachusetts’ Fourth for Markey. And I was like, well, this doesn’t exist. Why don’t I do it?”

Her account is in keeping with a format popularized by @gingers4markey, an account that purports to advocate on behalf of redheads who support the “non-redheaded junior senator for Massachusetts.” The accounts are two of several that highlight support for Markey from those who, for reasons both satirical and serious, may otherwise be compelled to vote for Kennedy. One of the Gingers “4” Markey account’s earliest

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tweets reads: “it’s so easy to be a redhead and *not* run a reactionary pro-establishment primary campaign against one of the strongest progressives in the senate. the owners of this account are doing it right now!”

“Has Joe Kennedy given a good reason for running?” ( @whyisjoerunning) draws attention to a different question at the center of this congressional primary: Why is Kennedy primarying Markey in the first place? Most days, the account tweets an update (i.e. “July 29 Update: no.”). The answer has yet to change.

“On Twitter, there are accounts called, like: ‘Has Jeff Bezos Solved World Hunger Yet?’ and it’s one of those things where it just tweets every day: ‘No,’” said the Boston-area college student who runs the @whyisjoerunning account. “Its kind of a bot, almost, but I didn’t want to just be a bot in that way. I want to be interactive with the whole Kennedy-Markey senate race.

So I thought it would be fun.”

While not initially familiar with the accounts that had already formed around the race, @whyisjoerunning was quickly indoctrinated into the fast-growing community. The Markey stans were not the only ones who noticed. The account, which is a bit more snarky than many of its counterparts, has gotten the attention of none other than Joe Kennedy III’s communications director Emily Kaufman. The two had a brief back-and-forth on May 21 regarding Ed Markey’s voting history on reproductive freedom.

“I actually got [Kaufman] to respond to me, which I think is funny because you would think that a communications director would have more things to do,” they said. “I have no leverage.

I’m just a Twitter account.”

While this may have been true at one point, things have changed. On July 16, Playbill’s announcement of a Joe Kennedy III fundraiser featuring Sara Bareilles, Rita Moreno, and a slate of other Broadway stars provoked a massive social media response from a litany of Markey supporters, fan accounts, and some celebrities, too.

“If you live in MA please vote for Ed Markey, please,” tweeted comedian Joel Kim in response to the event. Others flooded the announced participants’ replies, after which artists Kelli O’Hara, Solea Pfeiffer, Andrew Barth Feldman, and more chose to pull out of the line-up. O’Hara and Pfeiffer tweeted out their appreciation for the young people that reached out to challenge them on their choice to participate. On July 19, Playbill announced that the fundraiser would be postponed indefinitely.

“We are heartbroken by the cyber-bullying so many of our event participants were subjected to,” reads a statement from the Kennedy campaign. “The toxic nature of political Twitter is nothing new, but the level of vitriol Senator Markey and his supporters have unleashed during this campaign is unprecedented.” Many Markey supporters shrugged off the accusation.

That the Kennedy campaign acknowledged them at all suggests that the influence of the Markey fan accounts extends far beyond their timelines. When the COVID-19 pandemic put a stop to traditional, door-to-door campaigning, it made online organizing more important than ever before, and Markey campaign fever is catching the attention of more than just young people on Twitter.

“It’s attracted a lot of attention from people in D.C. and people who work on campaigns,” said Toomey of the Reply Guys

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account. She is not convinced, however, that the atmosphere of the Markey accounts is transferrable.

“I think people are looking for ways to replicate it,” she said.

“But also I think that it’s something that was more of a perfect storm of events and of conditions than anything else.”

THE [GREEN NEW] DEAL Memes aside, many are still wondering why all of these young people are so excited about re-electing 73-year-old Markey in the first place. If you ask them, it has less to do with the memes and more to do with Markey’s legislative contributions.

“Yeah, he has the coolest sneakers and is great at basketball, but also he wants us to be able to live on a planet without Massachusetts falling into the water. He wants us to have breathable air and drinkable water,” said Chen. “And he’s not going to be here a hundred years, but some of us might be and our children will be.”

Chen is referring to the Green New Deal, a proposed package of climate legislation Markey co-authored with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Of the five students interviewed for this piece, each one cited climate change as a major issue compelling themselves and other young people to support Markey.

“I’m not a single issue voter,” said the person behind @whyisjoerunning. “But one of the most important issues to me is climate change.” Chloe of “MA-04 for Markey” called him the “Father of the Green New Deal,” and Toomey, along with another Reply Guy, shouted-out his commitment to climate legislation. One of the more recent, absurdist Twitter accounts made is titled “Emissions for Ed Markey,” in which greenhouse gases pledge their support for Ed Markey in the hopes that the Green New Deal will give them a break.

“My hope is that this doesn’t sound like ‘I’m so smart,’ but I wasn’t surprised,” said Paul Bologna, digital and creative director for the Ed Markey campaign. “I was familiar with the fact that Ed was leading on the issues that matter most to young people.”

While he is only affiliated with Ed Markey’s official accounts, Bologna considers it part of his job to interact with Markey’s growing online fan base. “Ed twitter is completely out of control,” Bologna tweeted on July 29, when over 15 Markeythemed accounts were created in a single 24-hour period. With so much frenzy surrounding the memes and the accounts, it is easy to forget about the person who inspires them.

That first viral photo of Markey, the “sick fit,” feels lightyears away from what exists now. “Nobody asked him to wear that jacket, right? Nobody asked him to wear those sneakers,” said Bologna. “It’s just who he is. He’s just a regular person who lives in Malden.”

And perhaps it is this air of authenticity that, alongside the sneakers, the memes, and the legislative record, is drawing young people to campaign for Markey with a never-before-seen level of enthusiasm and creativity.

The Markey stans gave campaigning a 21st century makeover that will be difficult to forget. 

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TikTok:

The Summation of 2020’s Duality and Chaos Simone Chu

T

ikTok perfectly encapsulates the zeitgeist of 2020. The video-sharing social network from Beijing-based ByteDance is the perfected form of previous social media trends: Vine’s snappiness, Instagram’s infinite scroll, and Reddit’s niche subsets. Now that quarantine has locked us away with phones as our constant companions, we suddenly have extra free hours that TikTok, like a gas, has expanded to fill. Since the start of 2020, Tiktok has surged in popularity, receiving 52.2 million unique American users, 12 million from March alone. It now sits as the most downloaded app in the world at more than 2 billion downloads.

TikTok’s growth points to a new form of digital identity that is both personal and public: a new norm for the 2020s that has evolved over the past few years. Thanks to the app’s video-editing capabilities, the skill needed to make a TikTok is less than on other platforms, lending TikToks a homemade air. But the massive audience that TikTok videos can reach presents these casual clips to a very public eye. All kinds of content exist on the app; still, the carefully-curated “For You” page that greets every user ensures a finely tailored experience from the vast chaos. And, though the platform has been dismissed as a time-waster for teens, it has successfully capitalized on broader trends in how we consume social media and grown into a new behemoth for

the decade. Though TikTok trends themselves tend to be shortlived, the app’s duality may be the key to its longevity.

THE HOMEMADE FILM FESTIVAL TikTok’s user base skews young. Reuters reported in 2019 that about 60%of the platform’s users in the U.S. are between the ages of 16 and 24. TikTok shares similarities with other apps targeted toward a young user base, like Snapchat, which is used by 69% of U.S. teens. Both Snapchat and TikTok have a more informal culture, where the self-consciousness of more public social media platforms, like Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, is nowhere to be found. While platforms like Facebook — which seven in 10 U.S. adults use — see a broader range of ages among their users, TikTok is undeniably one for the first generation of true digital natives who have grown up alongside social media.

After tiring of the perfect presence one is pressured to curate on Instagram — and the insecurities the platform tends to exacerbate — it seemed only natural that apps where imperfection and casual communication reigned would gain traction. TikTok’s popularity points to a reaction to that image-consciousness, according to Karen North, a professor of communication at the University of Southern California specializing in social media

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and psychology. “TikTok made everything extremely easy and really fun,” North told the HPR. “The whole culture of it is not to judge.” For the uninitiated, TikTok is best known for its viral dance challenges, which users of all skill levels can participate in. “It doesn’t matter if you do it well or exceedingly poorly,” North said, adding that TikTok’s algorithm and huge audience make it possible for anyone who participates in a challenge to get lots of views.

Beyond viral challenges that make it easy and appealing to jump in, TikTok also makes it easy for users to edit their own videos through the app. This, coupled with the overall flexibility for format on the platform, has brewed a perfect environment for encouraging users to experiment with their videos, which range from personal stories to comedy sketches to tutorials. And with stay-at-home advisories encouraging everyone to keep indoors, people have more free time to spend on their phones. The extra time has invited even adults and college students to join the TikTok craze, and with more users comes more content.

“It’s like a bunch of sixth graders hosted a film festival and didn’t give you a program beforehand,” said Eli Russell ’20, who started making TikTok videos (@notchrissyteigen) after returning home in March when students left campus because of concerns about the coronavirus. Russell said that a combination of more time, more of his friends getting on the app, and the convenience of making videos on TikTok all factored into his start on the platform. Tyler Sanok ’22 (@ksanok10) also cited extra time and the platform’s convenience as the reasons he and his brother started posting TikTok videos during quarantine.

Because the amount of time and effort needed to make a TikTok video isn’t as much as that required for, say, a YouTube video, he said, “there’s no consequence for not shooting your shot.”

It is also not surprising that for Generation Z users — who grew up in the era of internet stardom, thanks to YouTube — the prospect of TikTok celebrity is also an appealing motivator to produce videos. TikTok’s most popular creator, 16-year-old Charli D’Amelio, gained more than 66 million followers in the span of a year, mainly for her dance videos and relatability, despite being an ordinary person without a large internet following before her start on the platform. Through some combination of luck, timing, and the omnipotent TikTok algorithm, TikTok fame could be within reach for any user.

THE ALGORITHM On any platform made for sharing content, there is potential for spreading messages. TikToks are punchy and to-the-point due to an upper time limit of 60 seconds. Its estimated audience of 800 million active users provides enormous potential for content of any agenda to go viral. In recent weeks, TikTok has been increasingly used for political organizing and educational efforts, though those efforts still stick to the pace of the app’s other snappy videos. “When you use any platform [for promoting causes] it’s important to do it so that it fits the culture of that platform,” North said. TikTok videos often have background music or are filmed casually with a single person speaking directly to a camera. A scroll through the array of videos tagged with “police brutality” shows that many of these videos still maintain the same format.

Claira Janover ’21 (@cjanover) said that when she first started making TikTok videos during quarantine, her videos

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focused more on humor. Since then, her channel has started to tackle topics like racism, sexism, and police brutality — a gradual change prompted by comments she has received on her TikToks and her own changing focus. “If I believe something, I’m going to articulate it,” Janover said. She added that she thought TikTok lends itself well to sharing information of substance because “it adheres to the narrowing American attention span, but also has the power to influence.”

Still, though, TikTok’s algorithm prevents it from being a completely effective means of communicating information to diverse audiences. TikTok’s impeccably-curated “For You” page — an infinite scroll of videos — presents each user with a feedback loop based on the content they have interacted positively with in the past. Sanok said that while it is beneficial for TikTok’s algorithm to help videos gain traction by presenting them to users with similar interests as the creator, when it comes to sharing political ideas in a productive way, the resulting echo chamber may fall flat. “The people seeing this are not the people that you need to change their minds. You need to send it off to the people who don’t necessarily agree with this or are not informed,” he said.

Because of this, despite how quickly users can share content on TikTok, it is difficult to tell how broadly any given video spreads. “It’s not like Twitter, where you know what’s trending globally,” Russell said. “It’s a very tailored experience.” He added that this aspect makes it difficult to make generalizations about the platform. Since every individual’s experience is engineered to be specific to their interests, everyone is likely to find their niche, but breaking out of that niche requires actively searching for different content so that the algorithm can adjust. “I think if I spent one day liking random dancing videos, then tomorrow, I wouldn’t have any activist videos. I would just have those dance videos,” Russell said.

Still, though, videos can make it outside of circles of likeminded users. “Going into more of a political atmosphere of content, there’s obviously a lot of conservative and a lot of libertarian pushback,” Janover explained. She added that other TikTokers have put in the effort to make videos rebutting her videos, with some of those rebuttal videos receiving the same amount of attention as the original video — evidence that TikTok has a pocket of like-minded users for nearly every possible perspective.

In July, one of Janover’s videos went viral after conservative commentators shared it, sparking a wave of backlash that she said targeted not only her but also friends and supporters. In the satirical TikTok, Janover likened saying “All Lives Matter” in response to “Black Lives Matter” to claiming that a papercut matters just as much as a stab wound. Janover subsequently received death threats and lost an internship at Deloitte. Janover did not anticipate the video receiving so much attention. “I posted that video almost a month ago. It’s not new,” Janover told the HPR. She added that she had seen progressive activist TikToks use extreme analogies before, and did not think her video was extraordinary.

“It would be one thing to have had a conservative say, like, ‘This type of demeanor isn’t respected. This anger, this displacement — even if it is an analogy — is not appropriate or professional.’ I would have been able to see the validity in that,” Janover explained, adding that it surprises her that so many people interpreted the TikTok video as a serious threat. But

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people of all political stances and age groups are paying attention to TikTokers, it seems. “The fact that I even say, ‘Oh, my TikTok is what caused this’ is very odd for me to think about,” Janover said.

private as fixtures in our daily lives. We will need to examine whether we want the perfected convenience of algorithmicallycurated content, or whether it’s possible to reward breaking out of our bubbles. 

TIKTOK’S FUTURE TikTok’s short-lived predecessor, Vine, graced the Internet with its presence for just four years. Vine’s demise is primarily credited to rival apps adding improved versions of its features and an inability to adapt quickly enough to keep its users. TikTok, however, has steadily grown since its initial 2016 launch in China by demonstrating deft adaptability. When allegations that TikTok was censoring the Black Lives Matter movement tag drew attention, TikTok responded just days later with an apology, creation of a diversity council, and commitment to donating $3 million to nonprofits that help the Black communities hard-hit by COVID-19 as well as an additional $1 million toward fighting racial injustice in the U.S. The speed of the move demonstrated a close attunement to TikTok’s user base, which could protect TikTok from potentially being blindsided if any strong challengers to the video-streaming app market ever arise.

TikTok’s popularity in the U.S. comes amid deepening political partisanship. The video streaming app is not the only social media platform to use confirmation bias as a tactic to hook users on its content. However, the fact that doing so has only boosted TikTok’s popularity signals that perpetuating confirmation bias is profitable. Therefore, there is little incentive for social media platforms to move away from using confirmation bias. This tactic is especially troubling given that social media now outpaces newspapers as a go-to news source for Americans, according to the Pew Research Center. Social media incentivized in this way for functioning as an echo chamber will only further entrench polarization.

There is also, of course, the matter of privacy and security concerns. ByteDance, as a Chinese company, is subject not to privacy laws in the United States, but those in China. TikTok has faced several controversies over security in recent months.

Most recently, the app came under scrutiny for reading text left on users’ pasteboards whenever TikTok was opened. It is no surprise that the app collects more information than users might anticipate; thousands of apps have been found to do so, either directly or by piggybacking on permissions given to other apps.

But TikTok’s concerns over data privacy will likely persist in the public consciousness for years to come, as lawmakers struggle to keep pace with technological advancements.

Still, TikTok appears to have solidified its place among the most-used social media platforms and seems to be here to stay for better or worse. Its blend of private and public reflects a continuing trend of blending our personal and digital lives.

Furthermore, the fact that, despite a history of security scandals, so many people continue to use TikTok, calls into question how much digital privacy invasion we are willing to tolerate from tech companies. And, despite the massive amount of content available on the app, the fact that users can find themselves in smaller echo chambers points to a growing trend of polarization; TikTok’s success only shows other tech companies that vindicating users by showing them personalized content will be rewarded. TikTok is fun, but the fun veneers deeper considerations we’ll have to make as we accept that blend of public and

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INTERVIEWS

Mobilizing Young Voters with

ANDY ROO FORREST AND

GENESSA KRASNOW with Duncan Glew

A

ndy Roo Forrest is the executive director of Feel Good Voting, an issues-based media initiative dedicated to the advancement of social justice and environmental action. Genessa Krasnow is the creative director and head of brand and content for Feeling Good Voting. She specializes in designing and implementing leading-edge campaigns in technology, entertainment, and activism.

Harvard Political Review: What led you both to start Feel Good Voting? When did you found the organization, and how has it evolved since then?

Genessa Krasnow: Andy was working with a behavioral change media company called Population Media Center, which focused on women’s reproductive rights and well-being throughout the world. Andy and I started talking about creating a values-based media company, and as we were doing this, we were playing with a lot of different ideas. Around the same time, he looked at me and said, “We should do something around getting out the vote.”

That was back [in] January and early February, and that led to us launching Feel Good Voting.

Andy Forrest: I think that, as an activist, one might always think, “How can I have the biggest impact on the issues? How can I just take what’s inside of me and make the biggest contribution to the common good?” So I’m very obsessed with mass media.

I think it’s the most powerful and underused tool to create positive change. And Genessa completely sees that because she’s [been] a storyteller — both when she was at Microsoft and other companies that she started as well — and so we are really centered around [asking], “How do we use media to build social justice and environmental sustainability?” That is why we are really focused on the November election.

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HPR: Different campaigns and non-profit groups have tried a multitude of methods to mobilize disenchanted young voters. What inspired you to work with influencers on social media to turn out the youth vote?

AF: There are a lot of groups that are working to get out the vote. Any of these groups — like many people in politics — are obsessed with the issues. They feel like, “If we could just explain the issues to you clearly, you would agree with us and then you would take action by voting or some other action.” But that’s not actually the way that people make decisions. And if you look at the behavioral science data, people make decisions based on their peer group and based on the influencers or the role models that they follow. We’re so polarized in this country because people tend to think like those around them. So we use behavioral science principles on social media. And one of the key pieces of behavioral science media, as shown by Albert Bandura of Stanford University and all those folks who came after him, is that the messenger is more important than the message. And so micro-influencers, which we define as figures with 10,000 to 200,000 followers, have a more loyal, trusted type of follower community than mega-influencers or celebrities. We partner with micro-influencers to weave a voting message into their programming. The most successful piece of media we’ve had to date is a dancing video on TikTok that has voting captions on it.

This is what behavioral scientists would call indirect messaging.

We’re going after people so they can bond with an influencer and then bring voting into the conversation.

GK: What we are discovering is that there are so many people hungering to help advance progressive causes in our country.

We have tapped into people who are just eager to participate

INTERVIEWS

and didn’t know exactly what they could do. So there’s a deep enthusiasm [among] the micro-influencers. They are overjoyed at the opportunity to create messages to help inspire people who follow them to vote.

HPR: There is a common refrain that young people use social media to escape from reality. In your collaborations with “micro-influencers,” have you encountered any unexpected hurdles in this strategy, such as young people reacting negatively to seeing a political message even from a trusted source?

GK: I know a young person in my life who’s a stand-up comedian. Her messages would be perfect because they’re irreverent and kind of sardonic. And when we asked her if she wanted to participate in our initiative, she said, “Most of my followers are non-voters, and I don’t want to risk offending them.” So we were like “That’s perfect! They’re our target demographic!” And she was really afraid of upsetting her audience and losing fans.

It’s understandable: She hasn’t exploded in popularity yet and wants to be smart and savvy about what she’s doing, but I think she would’ve done really well with us. So, like Andy said, there are some people that don’t fit the mold. But I’m not sure it’s true that teenagers are using social media to escape from reality. I think social media is reality for people, especially in the time of COVID-19. Andy and I founded this company before the COVID-19 pandemic. We knew we were going to do an all-digital engagement, but we didn’t know how important digital interaction was going to become because of the virus. And what we’re discovering is that a lot of people want to do something to make the world better. What we know is that, if a message doesn’t ring authentic, it’s not going to work with the demographic of under-30 non-voters or potential voters. So authenticity is the main thing we’re running up against. If an influencer [says], “This isn’t authentic to me. I can’t do this,” then they’re not the right influencer for us to work with.

None of us expected there to be a social uprising in the middle of this pandemic either. Social media has allowed for a number of things. We know the depth and intensity of Black Lives Matter because we are seeing what is happening to Black lives on social media. Social media has organized protests around the country, around the world actually, where people have been able to tap in because of their social media channels. It is where people are getting their source of information, and we can tap into creating a sense of consciousness and a sense of solidarity. It feels good to participate. It feels good to make your voice heard.

HPR: What is your target demographic and why did you choose that group? Within that group, are there any specific sub-groups that you’re pursuing with this strategy?

AF: We were very influenced by a Knight Foundation report called the 100 Million Project, which mapped 12,000 non-voters across the country and showed, particularly, that the majority of those non-voters were 18 to 30 years old. But when you look at the demographics of that group, you see that, if they do vote, communities of color, young people, and women vote overwhelmingly for social justice and environmental sustainability

policies. We go after those communities and try to engage and energize them because they have the greatest odds of voting towards those issues which are important to us.

GK: For some reason, in some sort of propaganda machine, the act of voting has become the status quo. Actually, the act of voting is the biggest form of revolution. That’s where change happens. We recently lost a great leader in John Lewis, and he fought his entire life to secure the right to vote for African Americans. And when we tap into the fact that there’s voter suppression and obstacles that are preventing people from exercising their right as citizens, it’s really frightening. It’s becoming more important for the young people of our country, who are creating our future, to understand that when they vote, they get to have a voice in the change they want to see. Since young people outnumber older voters, young people could really be setting the course. We need the majority to show up, and the majority is in that youth vote.

HPR: Come November, how will you quantify the impact of Feel Good Voting’s efforts to mobilize youth voters?

How do you plan to evaluate the success of the microinfluencer strategy?

AF: We put links on all of the media. We put unique URL codes to track the actual message of both the media and the influencer, so we can tell which influencers and messages are effective. We want to evaluate as we go, and we’re doing that on a daily basis.

There are really three ways that we can evaluate our impact in the long run. We can look at KPIs [key performance indicators] on the internet, which tell us whether we’re winning a popularity contest, which is important in our model because we’re not doing paid campaign ads but viral-type videos. Popularity does correspond to our reach. But all of our links that we put next to the media allow people to effortlessly slide right into our voting tools. You can register to vote, request a ballot by mail, [and] find your nearest polling place by clicking on the link. We hope, further down the road, to do randomized control trials because we believe we are creating the most cost-effective means of engaging a voter who’s interested in social justice and environmental policy. We would look at a treatment group of people who saw the messages and a control group of people who didn’t see messages, and then compare that to the actual voting rolls of those who showed up and voted after the election. In this country, we don’t know who you voted for, but we can tell if you voted, so we can compare that to people who saw our messages and people who didn’t see our messages.

GK: I would just add a heartfelt component to that which isn’t measured by data. It’s measured in the enthusiasm of the people that we work with and the people we’re partnering with and their continued desire to work with us. We’ve just started seeing content this month and we’re seeing some of those KPIs coming back and showing us how we’re doing. I think at the end of this, come November 3, we’re going to have an entire team of hundreds of people who have worked with us. My guess is that they’re going to continue wanting to work with us because what we do matters. 

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ENDPAPER

Lonely Together Ilana Cohen

M

y first semester at Harvard was characterized by the most profound sense of loneliness I had ever experienced. Even as I spent my days traipsing across trim green laws from one illuminating class to another and my nights enjoying the illicit freedom of a college campus with new friends, as I let myself flirt with the first tastes of adulthood, I felt a deep pit form in my stomach every time my head finally hit the pillow and let sleep overcome me. How, in this place where I was surrounded by people, can I feel so utterly alone? I wondered.

Today, I know that brand of loneliness, a sense of isolation even in the most physically dense environments, is more common than I had realized. When I returned home from Harvard due to the COVID-19 pandemic last spring, I found my city of New York filled with a heavy silence punctuated only by the sound of sirens. Once again, I was surrounded by people, but the need to socially distance kept us at least six feet apart. The sense of isolation that overcame me in the first few weeks felt strangely familiar. Although I yearned, like many, for physical intimacy with loved ones outside of my household, I realized soon enough that to some extent, such intimacy made no difference without its emotional complement. While I had been practically living on top of my peers in our crowded first-year suite when I came to Harvard and presented myself to the outside world as a social butterfly — always ready to meet new people, to party, to adapt to the crowd — I had also emotionally walled myself off. To some extent, the move was unconscious, an instinctual form of self-defense leftover from years of compartmentalizing struggles with mental health and navigating a conventionally stable but emotionally turbulent home life. But to some extent, I knew, the move was deliberate. My guardedness made the external sociability so much easier to maintain. Extroversion was like an outfit I knew I could wear and toss in the laundry as often as I pleased and without consequences, I thought — except that in the end, there were consequences. I had shared so little about the anxiety, fear, and sadness welling up inside of me that even when I was surrounded by friends, when my roommate wrapped her arms around my trembling body as I sobbed myself to sleep, I knew no one could be there for me in the way I needed because I hadn’t let them in — not really.

So whenever I feel that sense of isolation creeping in during

48 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW FALL 2020

this prolonged state of quarantine, I try to react to it differently.

Instead of retreating in, I reach out, and it makes all the difference.

Somewhat ironically, I have actually found a sense of isolation quite unifying in the time of COVID-19. Whereas before it often felt like declaring loneliness invited stigmatization, perceived as a deficiency in oneself, now expressing loneliness seems to invite a sense of togetherness. “I totally feel you” or “I know exactly what you mean,” friends and family members respond.

I know I’m not alone here, no pun intended. Over FaceTime calls to long-lost friends or even Tinder messages with complete strangers, many of us at Harvard and beyond are finding ways to connect and reconnect, to fill the void. We are learning to be present with others even as we are physically apart, awaiting the sweetness of our next embrace while treasuring the simple joy of hearing our best friend’s voice on the other end of the telephone.

Recognizing our isolation as a collective enterprise in this way, at least for me, makes it less daunting. When I most miss the days roaming Harvard’s green lawns and nights stowing myself away on the top floor of Lamont library, I take comfort in knowing that so many of my peers are closing their eyes and imagining those same spaces as I do. They are also scrolling through their Instagram feeds and rehashing old memories — texting, “Remember that time when we …” And I’ve learned to be more straightforward with people when I have the chance to connect with them over any medium, whether virtual or inperson and socially distanced, to be open about all of my experiences from remote work to mental health, and to lean on them for support.

Of the many lessons we take away from this pandemic, I think this one is key: There’s no replacement for physical touch, but there’s also no substitute for letting people know you, in the deeper and evermore vulnerable sense, or for knowing them in turn. We can’t control the world being a messed up and chaotic place, but we can control how we react to it. Whether it’s in how we engage with our lifelong friends, our neighbors, or people across the country from us with opposite politics and disparate worldviews, we can choose togetherness even in isolation.

So at this moment, ask yourself: What will you choose? 

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