Winter 2015

HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW

THE SECRET BENEFITS OF CORRUPTION

SELLING STAR WARS

INTERVIEW: BRENT COLBURN

VOLUME XLII NO. 4, WINTER 2015 HARVARDPOLITICS.COM

THE BOTTOM LINE THE POLITICS OF YOUR MONEY AND WHERE IT’S HEADED

NOW PLAYING ON HARVARDPOLITICS.COM

A Harvard Political Review Original Podcast A collection of personal narratives putting a human face to the headlines.

THE BOTTOM LINE

6

When All Politics is No Longer Local Caroline Tervo

11 Medicated Monopolies Tess Saperstein

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Money Messages Angela Yi

14 Process as Product Cherie Hu

CAMPUS

CULTURE

3

34 Selling Star Wars Nathan Cummings

Harvard on the Field Tasnim Ahmed

UNITED STATES 19 Searching for Strategy Arjun Kapur

16 Urban Sprawl’s Poster Child Grows Up Quinn Mulholland 22 Choosing Classrooms Olivia Herrington

WORLD 24 The Road Not Yet Taken Jacob Link 27 Greasing the Wheels Sebastian Reyes

30 Reformed Rhetoric Minnie Jang

38 In Defense of the Christian Right Jack Whitfield

INTERVIEWS 40 Brent Colburn Angela Yi 42 Fr. James Martin Gavin Sullivan

ENDPAPER 44 Bad Jokes Matthew Disler

36 Tonight at the Opera Daniel Kenny Email: president@harvardpolitics.com. ISSN 0090-1032. Harvard Political Review. All rights reserved. Image credits: Flickr: Cover- Kurtis Garbutt; Table of Contents- Wagner T. Cassimiro; 6- Gage Skidmore, Ben Schumin; 9- Mark Watmough; 11- R. Nial Bradshaw; 13- Army Medicine; 16- apple.white2010; 18- Lars Juhl Jensen; 19- U.S. Department of Defense; 21- U.S. Department of State; 22- Clemens v. Vogelsang, DarkEvil; 26- Bundesministerium für Europa, Integration und Äusseres; 28- Senado Federal; 30- Republic of Korea; 33- IIP Photo Archive; 36- Roger Schultz; 38- Michael D. Beckwith; 44- Matthias Rosenkranz. Photographer: 3- Kyle McFadden; 4- Kyle McFadden; 40- Brent Colburn; 42- Fr. James Martin. Unplash: 14- Kimberly Richards, 34- Gabriel Garcia Marengo. Pixabay: 24- xoracio. Wikimedia: 27; 34- Magnus Manske.

WINTER 2015 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 1

FROM THE PRESIDENT

HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW

Money, Money, Money

A Nonpartisan Undergraduate Journal of Politics, Est. 1969—Vol. XLII, No. 4

EDITORIAL BOARD PRESIDENT: Priyanka Menon PUBLISHER: Ashley Chen MANAGING EDITOR: Matthew Disler ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR: Rachael Hanna ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR: Emily Wang STAFF DIRECTOR: Harry Hild CAMPUS SENIOR EDITOR: Joe Choe CAMPUS ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Clara McNulty-Finn COVERS SENIOR EDITOR: Pooja Podugu COVERS ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Mark Bode U.S. SENIOR EDITOR: Advik Shreekumar U.S. ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Quinn Mulholland WORLD SENIOR EDITOR: Sarani Jayawardena WORLD ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Perry Abdulkadir WORLD ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Ali Hakim CULTURE SENIOR EDITOR: Hana Connelly CULTURE ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Emily Zauzmer INTERVIEWS EDITOR: Gavin Sullivan HUMOR EDITOR: Julianna Aucoin BUSINESS MANAGER: Angela Yang ASSOCIATE BUSINESS MANAGER: Enrique Rodriguez DESIGN EDITOR: Alec Villalpando ASSOCIATE DESIGN EDITOR: Celena Wang MULTIMEDIA EDITOR: Mattea Mrkusic ASSOCIATE MULTIMEDIA EDITOR: Solange Azor WEBMASTER: Vikram Sundar

SENIOR WRITERS John Acton, Jenny Choi, Colin Criss, Colin Diersing, Avika Dua, Johanna Lee, Paul Lisker, Andrew O’Donohue, Tom Silver, Kim Soffen.

STAFF Jack Boyd, Arjun Byju, Victoria Berzin, Antonia Chan, Derek Choi, Amy Chyao, Jaime Cobham, Christopher Cruz, Flavia Cuervo, Aidan Dewar, Matthew Estes, David Freed, Jenny Fung, Sam Garin, Samarth Gupta, Jonah Hahn, Olivia Herrington, Eric Hollenberg, Nian Hu, Elena Monge Imedio, Candy Janachowski, Minnie Jang, Alicia Juang, Humberto Juarez, Samuel Kaplan, Daniel Kenny, Shahrukh Khan, Gal Koplewitz, Emma Kromm, Bree Lalor, Kyle McFadden, Lauren Nicholson, Farris Peale, Samuel Plank, Tess Saperstein, Erin Shortell, Wright Smith, Julia Steigerwald-Schnall, Camille Schmidt, Melody Tong, Camila Victoriano, Anthony Volk, Lawrence Wang, Nathan Luke Williams, Carolyn Ye, Fiona Young.

ADVISORY BOARD Jonathan Alter Richard L. Berke Carl Cannon E.J. Dionne, Jr.

Ron Fournier Walter Isaacson Whitney Patton Maralee Schwartz

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I was once told that money is the root of all evil. To me, this does not seem quite right. A world without money, or one with an infinite amount of it, is not obviously without malice.

Perhaps my view of human nature is overly pessimistic; perhaps I am adverse to such a simple answer to moral philosophy’s questions. From what I can tell, the cause of those things that I would classify as evil—the lesser among them including lukewarm decaf coffee— is not money.

Regardless of the statement’s veracity, however, what it does underscore (maybe somewhat unwittingly) is the centrality of money in all aspects of human social interaction. More than anything else, money is a universal means. Basic economics teaches us that money is a means of trade, of exchange. Stepping outside the economic framework, money is a means of communication as well as a means of connection.

Upending the order of origin, the word “means” itself has come to be a synonym for money in some contexts—see the phrase “a man or woman of means.”

Certainly, this pliable means is not entirely neutral. The use of money as a means can change the valence of an interaction, altering the tone from friendly to hostile. Money’s source, form, and amount all affect its exchange.

And it is exactly this influence that the articles in this issue track, through the lens of everything from shifting models of campaign finance to the music industry. In her article on local politics, Caroline Tervo charts the

dramatic increase in political spending at the local level due to an influx of non-local donors. Moving from issues of source to those of form, Angela Yi surveys the rise of P2P, or peer-to-peer payments. And turning our attention to two very different industries dealing with issues of monetary concern, Tess Saperstein and Cherie Hu examine the business and pricing models of the pharmaceutical and music industries, respectively.

The articles in the six sections of the magazine tackle issues with farreaching consequences and of deep importance. From an investigation of Harvard’s athletic community to an eloquent defense of the American Christian Right, these pieces are among the most insightful available on these topics. As always, they represent the best in college political journalism.

I would be remiss if I did not take this opportunity to thank the entirety of the staff of Masthead 47. It has been an honor to learn from the writers, editors, and publishing associates of this magazine over the past year, and I cannot thank them enough for the opportunity. Being part of the HPR has truly been the highlight of my four years at Harvard. As I leave the magazine in the immensely capable and talented hands of Masthead 48, I am optimistic about the future of this magazine, and excited to see where the next masthead takes us.

Priyanka Menon President

CAMPUS

ARVARD ON THE FIELD

Tasnim Ahmed

C

rossing over the Charles River to the Murr Center is an unfamiliar trek for most students, but upon arrival, one suddenly becomes aware of a dynamic foreign to Harvard’s main campus. Students stroll outside athletics complexes clad in workout gear with the university’s insignia, a symbol of their belonging. The Murr Center is theirs, a campus away from campus. When they leave, crossing Anderson Memorial Bridge back into Cambridge, they also leave an aspect of their athletic identity behind.

While non-athletes can certainly identify athletes, most students only enter their world once every other year during the Harvard-Yale football game. This unfamiliarity with Harvard’s athletic department lends itself to gaps in knowledge often filled with assumptions, some of which inadvertently turn into stigmas. In this way, there is a general ignorance regarding the athletic department at Harvard despite administrative efforts to increase the student body’s participation.

Although there are few external or institutional structures that separate athletes from the remainder of the student body, there remains an unspoken disconnect between the two, which

often feeds into stereotypes about athletes’ academic abilities.

In most other schools, this distinction is rooted in the privileges athletes receive, but at Harvard these benefits are absent. The question stands: why choose Harvard?

TWO WORLDS It is not wrong to assume that the colloquial use of the term “Ivy League” has departed from its original inception as an athletic conference. Unlike big sports schools like University of Oklahoma or Texas A&M, athletics at Harvard is rarely seen as more than just another extracurricular activity. Athletes at Harvard neither have their own separate dining halls nor an unofficial athlete dorm. This difference is evidence that athlete integration is one of Harvard’s priorities; it makes the efforts many schools overlook. Yet, unless they are athletes themselves, most Harvard students pay little attention, if any, to sports.

Men’s basketball team member Nehizena Edosomwan ’17 believes that athletics will never surpass academics given

WINTER 2015 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 3

CAMPUS

Gabriella Kaplan ’18 is a member of the Harvard women’s soccer team.

Harvard’s history and legacy. However, with the men’s basketball team making it to the NCAA Division I tournament for the past four consecutive years, Edosomwan thinks the public is beginning to recognize that Harvard’s talent does extend to the court—even if it remains secondary to Harvard’s established reputation as a leader in academics.

For the most part, attending sports games and rallying for Harvard is rarely an investment students are willing to make. Total attendance for all varsity male sports at Harvard in 2014 was 75,000 people, significantly less than the 480,000 people sports at the University of Notre Dame attract, for example. Yet with over 20 percent of the freshman class on a varsity team, athletics are a significant part of the university, despite the absence of a traditional sports culture. Given the little attention Harvard’s athletic program receives both within the school and in the public eye, Harvard seems like a counterintuitive choice for varsity athletes. However, football team captain and linebacker Matt Koran ’16 described his decision to come to Harvard as being “not a four-year decision, but a 40-year decision.”

Harvard provides the best of both worlds in terms of academics and athletics. To athletes who do not see themselves pursuing athletics after college, Harvard supplies a strong academic background and provides a variety of other options at college.

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“The culture at Harvard always has you looking towards the next step. … I appreciate that because it reminds me that there’s more of the world out there than just athletics, and it gives me something to look forward to,” said Edosomwan. Though he hopes to pursue basketball after college, he also realizes that success in professional athletics is never guaranteed and thus values the emphasis Harvard places on academics, which offers an alternate career path.

THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS The decision to pursue athletics at Harvard is always twofold—student athletes come to Harvard for both its intensive athletic and academic environments. For students who choose not to pursue athletics after college, Harvard’s education provides alternative opportunities that they would not receive at the same caliber in other schools. Harvard is rarely considered a “sports school,” and not for a lack of passion or success in athletics, but because athletics is not the end goal for most student athletes. Cole Toner ’16, an offensive lineman for the Harvard football team, also aspires to play professional sports after college. Yet if given the chance to go to a bigger sports school, he would choose Harvard again. “I don’t know if I ever would have

CAMPUS

While athletes here surely have their own community, it does not exist as a segregated bubble from the rest of the school, but rather as just one of the many subcommunities within Harvard.

strayed from [Harvard], because I envisioned a future for myself that wasn’t sports-related,” he said. Like Edosomwan, Toner recognizes that there are so many external factors that affect professional athletics that he can never guarantee success in this career.

The idea of attending Harvard for its academic “safety-net” feeds into the stereotype that to many varsity athletes at Harvard, sports are either a means to an end or compensation for any academic shortcomings during the admissions process.

However, during recruitment, Harvard only offers players positions if they match the school’s academic requirements first.

Women’s crew co-captain Genevieve Mulligan ’16 made note of the fact that the team has been unable to accept talented potential team members because they did not meet Harvard’s academic criteria. Koran also emphasized the importance of academics in athletic recruitment, explaining that he did not consider Ivy teams until he learned that he had scored well on his ACTs. The level of academic performance required of Harvard’s athletes often goes unrecognized. Mulligan recalled that she has witnessed recruits’ academic capabilities being belittled. “There is absolutely a difference between how people see recruited athletes versus non-recruited athletes,” she said. As a walk-on herself, Mulligan has noticed that when people mistake her for a recruited athlete, they tend to assume that her acceptance to Harvard relied primarily on her athleticism rather than her intellect—an assumption that changes upon learning that she is a walk-on.

When other students overlook athletes for their academic achievements, they are discrediting student-athletes’ hard work, said Edosomwan. Some people think that if someone is “an athlete, it’s a lot easier ... but it’s not easier,” he asserted.

On the opposite side of the same issue, because Harvard is an elite academic institution but is not necessarily recognized as an elite athletic institution, it may seem that varsity athletes do not challenge themselves athletically by choosing Harvard.

However, Harvard’s academic expectations translate to athletics as well. Being an athlete requires both mental and physical energy, and is as much a priority as academics to many athletes.

Between practices and games, athletics can be a 20-hour per week commitment. Thus, it forces students to strike a balance between two demanding workloads. “Harvard pushes you in a different way [than other schools]. You have to learn to balance something incredible and intense and hard,” Mulligan explained.

She joined the crew team as a walk-on, having rowed in high school. She initially hesitated when making the decision due to the large commitment it entailed, but eventually realized that she “wanted that structure back in [her] life.” It is Harvard’s successful balance of academics and sports that attracts so many athletes, but the high expectations Harvard places on students to do well in the classroom and in their respective sports is also an incredible challenge.

WORLDS COLLIDING Perhaps what separates Harvard from most other schools is its ability to integrate athletes into the rest of the college community. Harvard strives toward providing non-athletes and athletes with equal facilities, therefore athletes do not have a separate dining hall or dormitory. Toner believes that it is because of this integration that Harvard athletes feel minimally isolated from the general student body; he noted that athletes are much less stigmatized at Harvard than those at bigger sports schools.

While athletes here surely have their own community, it does not exist as a segregated bubble from the rest of the school, but rather as just one of the many sub-communities within Harvard.

Despite the growing athletic culture at Harvard, it is unlikely that Harvard will ever be classified as a sports school. Furthermore, Harvard athletes are often actively encouraged by the administration and their coaches to prioritize academics over athletics. Despite the potential limitations these mindsets pose in building a successful athletic program, Harvard has no trouble attracting athletes. So what motivates students to pursue an athletic career at Harvard? Perhaps Koran put it best: Harvard athletes stay committed to their sport “for the sheer love of the game.”

WINTER 2015 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 5

MONEY

WHEN ALL POLITICS IS NO LONGER LOCAL

Caroline Tervo

W

hen Kevin Hill, a social studies teacher who spent his entire career working in Wake County, North Carolina, first ran for the county’s Board of Education in 2007, his campaign raised about $5,000. Just four years later, Hill’s campaign raised more than $70,000. One of his opponents raised more than $90,000.

Wake County is home to North Carolina’s largest school system. Boasting 171 schools and more than 155,000 students, it is the 16th-largest school system in the nation. The county had long employed a renowned policy that integrated students based on income, but newly elected school board members voted with a 5-4 new conservative majority (the election is technically nonpartisan) to change Donovan Keenethat policy in favor of “neighborhood schools.” This shift sparked national interest in the race that

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elected the majority, since the candidates who won in 2009 had all strongly opposed the county’s previous busing and integration policy and received support from special interest groups.

The election was record-breaking at the time, with the candidates raising over $155,000 and party and PAC spending totaling upwards of $340,000.

But those are paltry numbers compared to what followed.

The 2011 Wake County school board election—in particular, the race for the fifth seat needed to constitute a majority—saw dynamics typically seen only at the state level. Wake County became the battleground for school integration issues, and the cost of the election reflected it. Eleven candidates raised more than $238,000, and in the runoff between the Democraticaligned incumbent Kevin Hill and challenger Heather Losurdo,

MONEY

INDEPENDENT EXPENDITURES AND THE RISING COSTS OF MUNICIPAL CAMPAIGNS

over $500,000 was spent attacking the candidates. Hill won the election by just 1,000 votes. “It really blew my mind,” Hill told the HPR. “I don’t know why anybody out of the state of North Carolina would want to put money into a local nonpartisan school board race.”

Undisclosed outside money distorting local politics is not isolated to Wake County. Across the nation, and especially in the last three or four election cycles, independent expenditures and “dark” money from non-profits with undisclosed donors have become increasingly prevalent in local and municipal elections.

THE (NATIONAL) PROBLEM WITH LOCAL ELECTIONS The effect of outside money in state and local politics is staggering. The Institute for Southern Studies conducted an analysis showing that outside groups, or independent organizations that are not permitted to coordinate with candidates, spent more than $10 million in North Carolina state-level races in 2014. This increasing interest in smaller elections has detrimental, compounding effects when donors exert influence at the local level in mayoral, school board, and other municipal elections.

Scott Smith, the former mayor of Mesa, Arizona and a fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, corroborates Kevin Hill’s experience. Smith experienced dark money firsthand as a candidate in the 2014 Arizona Republican gubernatorial primary. Outside groups contributed about $3.2 million into the race, in which former state treasurer Doug Ducey emerged victorious in the primary and the general election. Smith told the HPR that he thinks the trend of spending money in smaller elections coincided with the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC, which “broke the dam.”

He believes the source of increased spending on local elections is a product of political contributors figuring out how to spend their money most effectively and of candidates realizing how to best spend their time. “Rather than spend hours upon hours talking to people, if [a candidate] can get two people or two groups to invest, they can easily cut a $50,000, $100,000, $500,000 check,” he explained, pointing out that the dynamic of high incentives to spend on local races, coupled with high incentives for politicians to accept large donations and low stakes for campaign law violations (usually a fine that can be paid with campaign contributions), fosters an environment that blatantly encourages dark money.

Dark money also became a factor in the Mesa Public Schools Governing Board, with school board candidates’ positions on Common Core emerging as salient reasons for donors to contribute. From Smith’s perspective, big independent groups supported those candidates that came out strongly against Common Core, regardless of the nuance of the candidates’ beliefs. This turned the nonpartisan school board election into a hyperpolarized single-issue campaign, and it had a substantial impact: antiCommon Core groups felt the stakes were high in that election, and their involvement gave anti-Common Core candidates the advantage on Election Day. Kevin Hill and Scott Smith’s experiences are just two examples of the damaging effects of outside groups on elections. But this anecdotal evidence illuminates another problem: the dearth of data that can quantify the full extent of outside spending on local races.

BY THE (LACK OF) NUMBERS In researching this article, the HPR contacted a number of research organizations: Democracy North Carolina, Common Cause North Carolina, the Institute for Southern Studies, and the National Institute on Money in State Politics. Representatives from these organizations generally agreed that independent expenditures and outside groups might be increasingly involved in local and municipal elections, but they lamented the lack of resources to gather data on the subject. Calder Burgam of the National Institute on Money in State Politics pointed out that the decentralized and irregular system of campaign finance reporting and disclosure at the municipal level makes tracking spending at that level exceptionally difficult. Disclosure protocol is particularly lacking; apparently, some municipal boards of election do not require any disclosure, and some municipalities lack even a designated board of election.

However, the impact of the problem is even more concerning than the difficulties in measurement. Scott Smith characterizes the behavior of outside groups as mafia-like “in the sense that the penalties for violating the dark money rules are viewed as a cost of doing business.” Few public officials believe they would be thrown out of office for violating any sort of campaign finance laws, and they are undeterred by the penalty of a fine. Smith argued that mega-donors and special interest groups will always get involved when an election has high stakes, and stakes can be high even in a nonpartisan local race, depending on the issue.

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MONEY

The dynamic of high incentives to spend on local races, coupled with high incentives for politicians to accept large donations ... fosters an environment that blatantly encourages dark money.

Hill recounted one mailer that went out before Election Day, in which the 30-year registered independent was depicted wearing a tie-dye shirt while driving a bus surrounded with peace signs—a condemnation of his position on the county busing policy, despite his willingness to compromise on some parts of the new assignment plan. “I really got a hoot out of that one,” he recalled.

But he was also deeply unhappy with the things said about his opponents. “I didn’t see [ads] before they went out … so I didn’t really have a chance to approve or disapprove,” he said.

“People can sort of lose their scruples and become downright nasty. That’s part of what can happen when that kind of money comes in.” Hill felt that the involvement of outside groups was a huge detriment to the election.

The increasing cost of elections and the uncertainty over the role of outside groups has also deterred local community members from running for office. Leadership Education and Development for North Carolina (LEAD NC) candidate recruitment manager Tammy Brunner helps encourage and train leaders in communities across the state for potential careers in elected office. She told the HPR, “Potential candidates are often deterred by the amount of money it takes to be competitive. They have a hard time seeing how they can campaign, raise money, and keep their current jobs.”

This issue is also on the radar of national organizations.

Stephanie Schriock, the president of the pro-choice PAC EMILY’s List, acknowledges that public discussion often solely covers the amount of money in presidential and Senate races, but that local elections face this problem, too. She specifically pointed out her concerns about the Koch brothers and the conservative wing of the Republican Party. “[These groups] are spending more and more money not in coordination with candidates to buy seats in local elections,” she said. “What we’re doing about this is the bigger question.”

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LIGHT AT THE END OF THE (DARK MONEY) TUNNEL Unlike a constitutional amendment or massive overhaul of legislation necessary to achieve federal campaign finance reform, there are feasible solutions for expenditures in local elections that can be adopted relatively quickly. The National Institute on Money in State Politics has guidelines on best practices for local governments to adopt to achieve strong disclosure, and the organization increasingly collects data on money spent in certain municipal elections. Groups like Democracy North Carolina and Common Cause are observing this changing trend and are aware of the need for centralized and traceable data.

However, more research and transparency is necessary in order to document the full scope and impact of exploding dark money expenditures in local politics. Institute for Southern Studies research associate Alex Kotch thinks that many megadonors would not be donating to secret money groups if their names were publicly tied to their donations. Stephanie Schriock of EMILY’s List also agrees that more public disclosure can serve as a counter for outsiders buying up local elections.

Kevin Hill is now entering the end of his two terms on the Wake County School Board. Reflecting on his time in office, he does not regret his decision to run in 2007 or 2011, but he thinks the campaign finance system has to be changed. “Having taught politics in high school, it was kind of embarrassing to me to see how politics really takes place,” he admitted. “I do think campaign finance reform is a must. I just wish they would do something at least to be able to trace the money, to be able put a name to it.”

MONEY

MONEY MESSAGES THE TRANSFORMATION OF RETAIL BANKING Angela Yi

O

n March 17, 2015, Facebook Messenger announced a new feature for friends to send and receive money easily and securely.

All users have to do is start a new chat with a friend, tap the “$” icon, enter the amount they want to send, and tap “Pay” to add their debit card. Then, assuming the friend has also added her debit card information to her account, she receives the original payment in her bank account.

Steve Davis, the product manager overseeing Messenger’s new feature, said in an March 17 New York Times interview that the purpose behind the app’s new feature is to retain its users and cultivate uninterrupted conversations. Others, like Josh Constine of TechCrunch, speculate that Facebook’s goal could be to expand Messenger into becoming a centralized chat app used for numerous important day-today functionalities—something like Korea’s KakaoTalk, which includes features that allow users to purchase items, follow celebrities, and even call taxis. Regardless of its exact reasoning, Facebook’s entrance into the peer-to-peer (P2P) payments market is a reflection of the growing trend of banking going mobile and the resulting shrinkage of the market for physical, branch office-based retail banking.

A CHANGING OF TIDES Walking to the bank, talking to a teller, opening a new checking or savings account—these are all familiar services of retail banking. However, the rising smartphone market and growth of Internet usage are changing the industry’s face and functions. According to a 2015 Federal Reserve report, by 2014, 87 percent of adults in the United States had a mobile phone—71 percent of which were smartphones. As a result of the widespread use of smartphones, the number of mobile phone owners with a bank account who have used mobile banking services increased by 33 percent between 2013 and 2014.

Furthermore, the report states that since 2011, the steady increase in both the number of people with smartphones and the usage of mobile payments indicates that the two could share a strong correlation.

Smartphones increase access to the Internet and make online transactions convenient as a result. With mobile services available, people would be less likely to go to the bank or ATM to withdraw cash, or even to use their physical bankcards to purchase items.

Financial technology experts argue that the traditional retail banks are failing to compete effectively in the booming online banking mar-

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ket. Rather than adapting to fit the changing needs of consumers, some banks are instead spending millions of dollars in remodeling their branch offices to look futuristic. About five years ago, Citibank opened its “branch of the future” in New York City’s Union Square to redefine retail banking by integrating new technologies, such as walls with interactive touch screen features. However, Jay Sidhu, the chairman and CEO of Customers Bank, the company that owns the BankMobile app, said that smartphones make Citibank’s concept obsolete. Smart screens in banks cannot compete against smartphones’ convenience and accessibility.

PEER-TO-PEER The advent of smartphones and online banking services could mean that the future of banking now lies in financial technology, or “fintech.” As of July, 46 fintech startups have surpassed a valuation of $1 billion. These businesses are based on online and mobile apps with features ranging from paying bills to consulting in business and technology—services that big retail banks have traditionally given. Peter Diamandis, the co-founder and executive chairman of Singularity University, told the Exponential Finance conference in June that bank branches could disappear by 2025. Fintech companies, led by mobile banking apps, could be their replacement.

Peer-to-peer, or P2P, payments comprise yet another system that services the growing demand in mobile banking services.

P2P allows people to make financial transactions with each other through mobile devices, directly to their bank accounts, without any of the intermediate steps associated with interpersonal transactions. The concept grew after 2001, when PayPal launched its service that provided user-friendly accounts to allow sellers and buyers to make online transactions easily and instantly.

Then, in 2009, Andrew Kortina and Iqram Magdon-Ismail co-founded Venmo in order to develop a convenient way to settle accounts that avoids the hassles of writing checks or withdrawing from the ATM. From its beginning, Venmo allowed all users—not just products’ sellers and buyers—to transfer money via P2P payment systems. This feature made Venmo so popular that the large payments company Braintree acquired it for $26.2 million only five months after its public launch. About four years later, PayPal (then owned by eBay) eliminated its mobile-based competitor when it bought Braintree for $800 million.

Venmo’s social media format, as well as its free-of-charge label on most services, enhanced its popularity among users. The moment the app opens, users can see their friends’ public payments, or they can easily request money from or pay back their friends. The social aspects of the app (like the ability to share

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which restaurants users visited over the weekend) help create a sense of community that could draw people back to Venmo. And the app’s no-charge bank and debit card transfers helped make it an attractive alternative to other services like Google Wallet, which charges a 2.9 percent fee to deposit from a debit card.

However, new companies are challenging PayPal’s dominance of the P2P payments and e-commerce markets. On November 17, 2014, Snapchat partnered with Square to launch a P2P payment app, Snapcash, which is still a functionality offered by the Snapchat app despite plans for expansion. Facebook’s incorporation of P2P features into its Facebook Messenger app is yet another move to diversify a market that still largely belongs to Venmo and PayPal.

THE FUTURE OF RETAIL BANKING The rise of P2P payment systems indicates that consumers want services that go beyond client-to-bank interactions. Indeed, traditional retail banks now have online services and apps, and they are making plans to downsize their branch offices.

Bank of America, for instance, has closed hundreds of its branch offices, and JPMorgan Chase announced that it would lay off nearly 5,000 tellers by the end of next year.

However, fintech companies could soon replace even electronic banking systems put forward by traditional banks. The P2P payment system has what traditional retail banking services do not have: a social component. The system itself is reliant on personal and convenient interactions between peers. Online transfer features in electronic banking systems, on the other hand, are less personalized and can be more inconvenient when compared to P2P payment apps.

Facebook Messenger also encourages businesses to personally interact with their customers, making the app appealing not only to individual users, but also to corporations. Since its launch on March 25, Businesses on Messenger has allowed companies to interact more personally with customers through the app. Employees can now relay information, make transactions, and offer live support to their customers.

This type of instant but individualized interaction between businesses and clients appeals to younger bank-goers, a demographic which makes up 21 percent of consumer discretionary purchases. The increasing number of fintech companies that provide convenient, mobile, or more varied alternatives to the services of retail banks could be the reason why 33 percent of millennials doubt that they will need to visit a bank within the next five years. Banking could eventually go completely online.

Retail banks might no longer exist in branch offices, but rather in every 180x180 pixel icon on the screens of Apple iPhones, Samsung Notes, and HTC Ones.

MONEY

MEDICATED MONOPOLIES Price Gouging and the Health of the Drug Industry

Tess Saperstein

A

t 32 years old and with a net worth of $100 million, Martin Shkreli has become the face of corporate greed and price manipulation in the pharmaceutical industry.

Shkreli is the founder and CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals. The now-infamous young biotechnology company made headlines after it acquired a 62-year-old toxoplasmosis medication, Daraprim, and increased the drug’s price from $13.50 to $750 per tablet. The public outcry over the alleged price gouging was substantial. Turing had neither invented the drug nor improved upon it in any way that would justify the price increase; it had simply acquired the rights to manufacture it in the United States.

While citizens, presidential candidates, and medical associations alike have all decried the price increase as morally repugnant and exploitative of those who have been diagnosed with serious diseases, Turing’s actions were completely legal. Moreover, they were not an isolated incident. In recent years, several pharmaceutical companies have adopted the same business strategy of purchasing drugs that they did not develop and then significantly raising the price. Ultimately, the legality of these actions overlooks the moral implications of allowing profit-driven companies to determine prices of potentially lifesaving medications.

A BITTER PILL The pharmaceutical patent system encourages companies to invest in medication research and development. Companies receive patents of approximately 20 years for the medications they develop, and for this period of time, each company that invents a drug holds an essential monopoly over the market. “The whole point of the patent system is for there to be high prices temporarily,” MIT technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and strategic management professor Benjamin Roin told the HPR. “We have a system set up where we try to get companies to spend a lot of money to research a new drug. When a company has a really successful drug, they charge a high price.”

But Daraprim’s price increase did not represent any new contribution to medical research. Instead, according to Roin, Turing simply “bought the manufacturer, and they just raised the price and didn’t make any socially valuable investments. That’s an example of the system working in unintended and perverse ways.”

If pharmaceutical companies believe that they can increase the price of a drug without losing a significant number of customers, there is no law to prevent them from doing so.

Generally, the patent system should prevent a monopoly—

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The truly unique aspect of pharmaceuticals is that access to products is often quite literally a matter of life or death. Few other products can claim that importance.

such as the one Turing currently holds on Daraprim—from persisting for too long. Once a patent expires, other pharmaceutical companies are able to develop their own versions of the medication. With more brands of the same drug on the market, the price should fall.

But Turing has been able to avoid competing with other firms for business because of the high fixed costs for entering the market. “Even if you don’t have a patent, a new company couldn’t just enter with the drug. In theory, any company could seek that [market], but it’s not automatic,” Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health health economics and policy professor Meredith Rosenthal explained to the HPR. Only 2,000 Americans use Daraprim each year. The drug’s small market means that it is difficult to make money unless the price is set very high. Therefore, Rosenthal concluded, “there is money to be made, but there are big fixed costs even after the patent has expired.”

Additionally, by maintaining tight controls on distribution, Turing has prevented other companies from acquiring Daraprim or developing their own version of the drug. Roin explained that “generics need to purchase some amount of the brand name [medication] to run their bioequivalent studies,” therefore other companies cannot create different or improved versions of Daraprim unless they have the original medication itself. These factors keep drug prices high and give Turing even more control over the price they can charge for Daraprim or other drugs they acquire.

PROFITING OFF OF DESPERATION This example of pharmaceutical price gouging is not an isolated incident. From January 2006 to December 2013, the

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prices of 140 brand name drugs increased by an average of 113 percent in eight years, according to a study by the AARP Public Policy Institute. If the pharmaceutical market were functioning properly, we would expect that prices would gradually drop, since new companies would enter the market and compete with the name-brand companies for business. In reality, the market encountered a roadblock somewhere along the line, and competition to manufacture old medications has dwindled.

In the past three years alone, there have been several cases in which pharmaceutical companies acquired the rights to a drug from another company and almost instantly increased its retail price. In November 2013, Horizon Pharmaceuticals purchased the rights to sell Vimovo, a medication that treats osteoarthritis.

Two months later, on the day that Horizon began selling Vimovo, the company increased its price by 597 percent to $959.04 for 60 tablets. After purchasing Isuprel and Nitropress, drugs that lower blood pressure, Valeant Pharmaceuticals increased their prices by 525 percent and 212 percent, respectively.

Drug acquisition and price gouging have become fundamental parts of Valeant’s business strategy, in particular. An analysis by Deutsche Bank found that in 2015 alone, Valeant raised the price of 81 percent of its drugs by an average of 66 percent (Valeant has disputed these findings). Some of the steepest price increases were for Glumetza, a diabetes pill whose price shot up 800 percent, and Zegerid, a drug that treats gastrointestinal problems, which increased 550 percent from its original price.

As Valeant has profited from these acquisitions, it has steadily become one of the largest drug companies in the world.

The typical argument in defense of companies that pursue these pricing strategies is that they will use the profits for the research and development of future medications. However, pric-

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Prices for 140 brand name drugs increased by an average of 113 percent in eight years, according to the AARP.

ing strategy consultant and Harvard Business Review contributor Rafi Mohammed believes that defending exorbitant price increases on the grounds of research and development is a scare tactic that pharmaceutical companies use to prevent regulation.

“The minute you start talking about regulation, drug companies say, ‘That’s going to reduce our research and development.’

Saying this is akin to yelling fire in a theater,” Mohammed told the HPR. “In an ideal world, we’d love unlimited research and development, but there are costs and benefits.” Furthermore, Valeant—which has pursued an aggressive drug acquisition strategy—spends significantly less than its counterparts on research and development. Over the past year, the company spent just three percent of its total sales on research and development, while one of its competitors, Bristol-Myers Squibb, spent over 30 percent.

CREATING A MORAL MARKET Turing’s response to the intense public backlash over Daraprim suggests that pharmaceutical companies could be pressured into controlling their prices, even without legal regulation.

The day after Turing announced Daraprim’s new price, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform sent a letter to Shkreli requesting some of Turing’s financial information as part of its ongoing investigation into a series of pharmaceutical price increases. Even after Shkreli had initially defended the company’s price increase, he later acquiesced to the public outcry, stating that “it is absolutely a reaction. I think it makes sense to lower the price in response to the anger that was felt by people.” More recently, the company announced that it would lower the drug’s price by the end of 2015, although by the writ-

ing of this article it has yet to release details on its plan.

But even these kinds of public pressures and non-obligatory government requests are usually ineffective in changing pharmaceutical companies’ actions. Under the current system, corporate and public goals are severely misaligned. While it is in the public’s interest to have the most advanced medicine for the lowest price, Rosenthal noted, “Corporate strategies must be driven by profit due to their fiduciary duties to their investors.” This misalignment between the needs of consumers and the desires of suppliers is neither surprising nor confined to the pharmaceutical industry. Rather, the truly unique aspect of pharmaceuticals is that access to products is often quite literally a matter of life or death. Few other products can claim that importance. It follows that moral considerations ought to be necessary in the pharmaceutical industry when corporations make pricing decisions on their products.

Yet in lieu of any moral decision-making or legal regulation, the industry still seems ruled entirely by market principles.

Since 2013, Valeant’s revenue increased 43 percent, with its stock prices falling comparatively little—at least until September, when some of the company’s inflated pricing techniques and accounting inconsistencies came to light. Current laws give “companies carte blanche to charge what they market will bear, and now we’re getting upset because they are charging what the market will bear,” Mohammed said. As long as it remains in the pharmaceutical companies’ financial interest to continue a strategy of drug acquisition and subsequent price gouging, they will continue engaging in this strategy.

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PROCESS AS PRODUCT CREATIVITY IN THE MUSIC BUSINESS MODEL Cherie Hu

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n 2008, rapper Lushlife created a website featuring an interactive, evolving version of his album Cassette City. In partnership with CASH Music, a non-profit that provides open-source tools for artists to sell, share, and promote music directly to their fans, Lushlife provided regular streams of the developing album and presented a unique picture of the iterative, time-intensive process of recording and songwriting. He openly discussed how he planned to finish a certain track, which songs he thought needed additional instrumentation, or which songs were finished but would be performed differently live. By including these notes, he increased transparency not only for his vision for the album, but also for how he wanted his work to be presented and marketed during his tour. Ultimately, Lushlife’s efforts landed him a lucrative deal with the independent record label Studio !K7.

Lushlife’s story is emblematic of the music industry’s growing interest in commemorating and showcasing the creative processes behind an album. As piracy, streaming, and other free or low-cost forms of music consumption persist, artists and labels are continually searching for innovative sources of revenue and audience, and therefore they are embracing this shifting emphasis on process over product.

FREEING MUSIC Although the industry consensus seems to be that fewer people are paying for access to music, the term “free music” is somewhat flawed. “Free” implies a lack of monetary exchange, yet billions of dollars are flowing into the music industry each year. In 2014, the music industry pulled in nearly $15 billion in total revenues, $6.9 billion of which came from digital sources.

However, this amount has decreased from 2013’s total of $15.6

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billion, and artists continue to face dire financial circumstances.

Many musicians and music executives are attributing their financial difficulties to the proliferation of free streaming options, such as those on Spotify, Pandora, and YouTube. Marty Bandier, the CEO of the music publishing group Sony/ATV, reported in a 2014 email leaked to Digital Music News that one million plays on Pandora amounted to only $60 of royalties for songwriters. More recently, at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit in San Francisco in October, Beats Electronics founder Jimmy Iovine claimed that streaming services comprised 40 percent of music consumption but only four percent of the industry’s revenue.

A possible solution for combating this financial complexity lies in economist Paul Krugman’s 1996 New York Times essay “White Collars Turn Blue,” a thorough and telling prediction of significant economic developments in the 21st century. Noting the difficulty for creators to profit from their work due to the prevalence of piracy and bootlegging, Krugman asserted that “creations must make money indirectly by promoting sales of something else.” He argued that through advertising and corporate partnerships, artists could look beyond their strictly creative work and capitalize on what he called the “celebrity economy.”

Nearly 20 years later, the music industry is embracing the celebrity economy in full force. Record labels make a continual effort to roll out albums with expensive and often non-musical marketing campaigns, frequently partnering with the fash-

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ion, TV, and technology industries to develop an attractive visual brand for their artists. A prime example is Apple’s partnership with U2, which has yielded ambitious projects, from a free, surprise copy of U2’s album Songs of Innocence in the libraries of 500 million iTunes subscribers to a music video using virtual reality technology. Another potential indication of Krugman’s framework could be the connection between the parallel rises in free music consumption services and sales of live concerts.

Indeed, the decrease in overall industry revenue over the past few decades has been correlated with an increase in live concert revenue, from $1.1 billion in 1990 to $6.2 billion in 2014.

MONEY’S MELODY Until recently, strides in artist branding have emphasized the product or experience that comes after, not before, the creation has finished. Executives and artists have historically hidden the creative process to avoid controversy over credit allegations and to maintain an aura of mystique. In response to this void, a new wave of music startups and corporate ventures has turned this emphasis on its head by transferring attention from post-production celebrity to pre-production artistic development.

In an interview with the HPR, CASH Music cofounder Jesse von Doom explained that economic changes in the music industry made this process-over-product mindset more attractive. “Monetizing on the process is happening by necessity, not by choice,” he says. “The decrease in overall revenues has caused labels to shift a lot of their money away from A&R [Artist & Repertoire, or the artist development division] in order to break even.” Labels’ relative neglect of in-house A&R has made the creative process an opportunity for artists to raise their profiles.

Startups in this space provide infrastructure that empowers artists to engage audiences more directly in the making of an album. PledgeMusic, a for-profit website similar to CASH Music that allows artists to pre-sell, market, and distribute music projects directly to their fans, is one example of this kind of startup. An individual artist’s campaign on PledgeMusic tends to span the entire life cycle of an album, from the recording process to music videos and concerts. Furthermore, fans can contribute to artists either through a regular online market interface or through a crowdfunding platform similar to Kickstarter. In fact, PledgeMusic crowdfunding campaigns boast a success rate of over 90 percent, which exceeds those of popular platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo.

Beyond the startup world, a handful of corporations are more openly giving financial support to independent artists recording albums. The Red Bull Music Academy helps to build state-of-the-art recording studios around the world and fosters collaborations between emerging international artists and established industry professionals. Converse Rubber Tracks is a similar initiative that provides independent artists with the opportunity to record at renowned studios such as Abbey Road Studios in London and Warehouse Studio in Vancouver.

Perhaps these programs are attempts to mitigate criticisms that corporate partnerships in music deteriorate

the quality of the music itself by prioritizing money over art. A recent example of that clash occurred at the Doritos stage at the South by Southwest independent music and film festival in 2014.

Made to look like a five-story-tall vending machine, the stage was ridiculed by critics like Esquire’s Andy Langer as reflective of the festival’s commercialization. On the other hand, investing more resources in helping emerging artists succeed and increasing transparency in the creative development process can put these corporations in a more positive light.

Despite its growing popularity, the process-over-product approach will not work for all artists or all players in the music business. PledgeMusic campaigns, for example, tend to work only for artists who already have an established fan base. Moreover, although direct-to-fan engagement is an attractive business model for independent artists, it will not translate easily to the mainstream music industry, which thrives on the success of the very intermediaries—like labels, agents, managers, publishing companies, and performance rights organizations—that directto-fan platforms seek to circumvent.

However, some major labels and mainstream artists are still finding ways to capitalize on their celebrity in order to monetize and sell their pre-production processes to established fan bases without infringing on the roles of intermediaries. The past two years alone have seen documentaries of pop stars such as Beyoncé, Justin Bieber and One Direction that showcase behindthe-scenes footage from recording sessions, concert tours, and even the artists’ early childhoods. The Target deluxe edition of Taylor Swift’s 2014 album 1989 features voice memos recorded on Swift’s phone during the beginning stages of a song, giving fans a glimpse into her songwriting process.

A CHANGE OF KEY Today’s music ecosystem is much more fragmented than it was two decades ago. In the 1990s, writes Stephen Witt in his 2015 book How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy, consumers bought a CD, listened to the radio, or attended a live concert without many alternative options, which made it easier for albums to become hits and proliferate among listeners. Now, access to technology (in addition to new genres) has allowed listening habits to be compartmentalized into several smaller subcultures.

Furthermore, musicians of different genres and career stages have vastly different revenue sources, making it difficult to generalize career strategies in the industry.

“It’s a complicated landscape, and every band has to find a unique model that works for them,” von Doom said. “If giving viewers a look behind the curtain works for you, and if your fans support you directly that way, that’s awesome. If not, you can find something else that works.”

Although the success of the process-over-product approach is highly contextual, the trend is promising in that it capitalizes on the more organic and previously untapped means by which listeners learn about and come to love a musician’s work. The hope is that more mainstream labels will realize the importance of sharing this process and will encourage a more nuanced culture when it comes to appreciating and ultimately paying for music.

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Urban Sprawl’s Poster Child Grows Up Quinn Mulholland

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n the 1990s, urban development expert Christopher Leinberger dubbed Atlanta the poster child for urban sprawl, and, he said, “the name kind of stuck.” The city’s suburbs were growing at a rapid pace, adding over a million people between 1990 and 2000. With MARTA, the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, confined within city limits because of worries of the crime it would bring, massive freeways and wide parkways provided the only connections to the wider metropolitan area. Gas-guzzling cars filled the roads, ferrying suburbanites to and from their homes on quiet cul-de-sacs, past big box stores and strip malls, and through open countryside.

Atlanta’s sprawl fueled a booming economy but also isolated its poorest residents in pockets of poverty. Those without cars faced long commutes on MARTA’s underfunded, limited bus and rail service to get to their job or the grocery store. The interstate highways that suburbanites relied upon to commute to the city demarcated racial boundaries and gutted black neighborhoods.

Yet since the 1990s, the city has begun to change. “The image of Atlanta is one thing, and the reality is becoming just the opposite,” Leinberger, a Brookings Institution non-resident senior fellow and George Washington University School of Business professor, told the HPR. “And it’s happening very quickly.” New housing developments are increasingly walkable, making cars less necessary. MARTA has proposed a significant $8 billion expansion, which would be its first in decades. And Atlanta is in the midst of implementing a transformative project that, when complete, will convert a set of unused railroad tracks circling the city into a two-mile corridor of parks, trails, and light rail. These changes could not only help Atlanta become a 21st-century city, but also could improve the mobility of those historically disadvantaged by Atlanta’s lack of transit infrastructure.

RACE AND MARTA Atlanta’s history is fraught with racial tension. During the ’60s and ’70s, school integration caused massive white flight out of the city proper and into the northern suburbs of Cobb and Gwinnett Counties. When MARTA was proposed in 1965, it was to encompass DeKalb, Fulton, and Clayton Counties, which contain Atlanta and its inner suburbs, in addition to Cobb and Gwinnett. Residents of Cobb and Gwinnett, however, refused to allow MARTA into their communities.

“The white people in the suburbs saw MARTA as a way for black people to come to their counties, and they didn’t want it,” Atlanta magazine writer Doug Monroe told the HPR. He added that the common refrain among suburbanites was that MARTA stood for “Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta.”

Georgia Tech history professor Ronald Bayor explained to the HPR that in addition to hostility from suburbanites, MARTA also faced opposition from Republican representatives in the state legislature: due to a combination of racism and Atlanta’s black-majority population, lawmakers “from all these rural counties [had] hostility towards Atlanta, generally.” As a result, MARTA is one of the few transportation systems in the country that do not receive state funding. MARTA’s financial reliance on cash-strapped counties and lack of state support prevented it from expanding like other cities’ transit systems.

There are some signs that popular opinion is shifting, even in the northern suburbs. A poll conducted this year showed that 63 percent of likely Gwinnett voters support a MARTA expansion

into their county. And a January poll conducted by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that a similarly large statewide majority supported improving and expanding public transportation, although little more than a third were willing to pay higher taxes to fund transportation projects.

DRIVING MARGINALIZATION Underinvestment in public transportation in Atlanta went hand in hand with huge interstates whose construction specifically harmed black communities. The city “tore down the black neighborhoods in those areas that the highways were coming through,” Bayor noted. “In some ways, it would have made more sense to move the highway west into desolate areas, but they preferred to go through black neighborhoods, for that purpose of getting rid of them.”

In a Vox article published this May, reporter Joseph Stromberg expands Bayor’s premise, arguing that beginning in the 1950s a big part of the push for new highways was “the federally supported program of ‘urban renewal,’ in which lower-income urban communities—mostly African-American—were targeted for removal.” Even relatively vibrant black neighborhoods were considered “blighted” and paved over to make way for urban freeways. In fact, one of the areas most devastated by the construction of the highways, according to Bayor, was the neighborhood around Auburn Avenue, which Fortune magazine had described as the “richest Negro street in the world” in 1956.

In addition to drawing racial boundaries and damaging black neighborhoods, these interstates also facilitated white flight by enabling many Atlantans to live in the suburbs and commute to work downtown. But as the city grew and sprawl expanded, so did traffic and congestion. A 2011 Brookings Institution report showed that almost four-fifths of jobs in Atlanta require a public transit commute lasting over 90 minutes, ranking the city 91st out of 100 large metro areas. And a Texas A&M study from this year found that Atlantans lose $1,100 in wasted fuel and productivity every year.

Effectively, increasing sprawl and reliance on cars formed a positive feedback loop. The rise of interstates and automobiles as a primary means of transportation necessitated thousands of parking lots and decks, which pushed stores and housing farther away from each other. This, in turn, required more cars, feeding back into the sprawl.

LEAVING THE STATION Leinberger does see development in the city beginning to change, however. He estimated that about half of new developments, both in the suburbs and the city, are walkable and highdensity, and that proportion is growing. “Looking at the future indicators [and] this real estate cycle that we’re currently in, you seem to have a U-turn,” he said.

Part of the reason for the uptick in walkable, high-density development is increased economic growth in areas with access to public transit. Charlie Harper, a Republican strategist and transit proponent, pointed to companies like State Farm and NCR Corporation that are relocating offices from the suburbs to areas in the city near MARTA stations. “Access to transit was a huge part of their decision to leave Gwinnett County,” Harper told the HPR.

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This year, MARTA proposed an $8 billion expansion for its rail services.

Companies value transit for many reasons. One, according to Harper, is to attract talented young professionals: “Folks who are in the tech industry generally tend to be younger, and millennials very much favor transit.” Another, according to Leinberger, is their image: companies want “to make a statement that they’re progressive, they’re forward-looking, and their location needs to reflect that. If they’re in a business park, they’re viewed as stodgy and out-of-date.”

MARTA chairman Robbie Ashe agrees with Harper and Leinberger. “There is a growing recognition that a robust public transit network helps attract new companies to Georgia,” Ashe told the HPR. “It helps folks who are looking for jobs, and looking to commute and transport themselves without everybody driving in single-passenger vehicles.”

Ashe said MARTA is also pursuing transit-oriented development, whereby housing units, office buildings, grocery stores, and recreational centers are built around MARTA stations.

“We’re never going to be as dense as New York City. And I don’t think people down here want to be as dense as Manhattan,” he said. “But transit and dense development feed off of each other, and they create a mutually reinforcing cycle.” In fact, according to an op-ed by Brian Lombardozzi in the Atlanta JournalConstitution, “every $10 million invested in public transportation results in a $30 million gain in sales for local businesses due to increased foot traffic and decreased congestion on roadways.”

POLITICAL TRACKS Despite this growth around MARTA stations, Georgia Republicans have historically opposed public transit expansion, but this is beginning to change. Prominent Republicans from Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle to State Sen. Brandon Beach have voiced support for boosting funding for public transportation, making the group of proponents increasingly bipartisan.

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Harper said Republicans are getting behind transit as a tool for economic development. He argues that transit proponents should market it as a boon for everyone. “Yes, poor people will have a probably heavier reliance on transit than other people that probably have other options,” he said, “but if you’re going to build a true backbone of a system that’s going to service this region, the fact is, it can’t be looked at as a way to move poor people. It’s got to be a way to move all people.”

Georgia House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams (D) agrees.

“At the initial phases of rapid transit in the metro Atlanta area, [public transit] was seen as an option for those who couldn’t afford cars, as opposed to what it should be, which is a way to move people around and get them to their work as quickly as possible,” Abrams told the HPR. She was encouraged by the passage of House Bill 170 in the most recent legislative session. Although it didn’t explicitly allocate any state funding for mass transit, the bill allowed individual counties to put the question to their voters of whether to increase the sales tax to fund MARTA expansion. “The willingness of the legislature, led by a Republican majority in the House and a supermajority in the Senate, to embed into legislation funds for bond capacity for transit—funds that would allow counties to work together to fund transit—is a far cry from where we were in 1972, when there was a wholesale rejection of not only transit, but any state governmental obligation for transit,” Abrams said.

Ashe is confident that MARTA’s strong financial footing—the agency just finished its third consecutive year with a budget surplus—will make state legislators more receptive to plans for expansion. Embracing these policies could mark a significant turning point in Atlanta’s ongoing effort to bring its transit infrastructure up to par with other cities, not only spur economic growth, but also connect long-isolated communities to new jobs and opportunities.

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SEARCHING FOR STRATEGY U.S. FOREIGN POLICY IN A FRAGILE WORLD Arjun Kapur

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troubling tectonic shift is taking place in Middle Eastern politics, one in which regional order has fractured.

As the Syrian civil war worsens, Vladimir Putin leads a reassertive Russian presence in Syria while President Obama implements an American retrenchment from the region. Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass has argued that the Middle East has the potential to descend into a “New Thirty Years’ War.” With violence and disorder increasing, the United States needs to affirm its role as the principle guarantor of international stability by devising a coherent strategy to guide and overhaul its foreign policy. But while Washington has achieved some accomplishments elsewhere in the world, the ongoing crises in the Middle East point to an incoherent American policy.

SYRIAN STRATEGIES Syria has been a major obstacle to Obama’s goal of avoiding entanglements in messy Middle Eastern conflicts. Conditions have deteriorated as the United States gradually disengages from

the region in the hope of promoting “nation-building at home” rather than abroad. In the process, it has become clear that Obama overlearned the lesson of Iraq. Unilateral and preemptive interventions aimed at regime change often disastrously destabilize societies and create power vacuums filled by vicious groups such as the Islamic State. Yet the Syrian civil war and refugee crisis show that inaction can contribute to calamity as well.

The Islamic State is not the only actor intent on filling vacuums of power. Putin has seized upon the strategic void left by the United States in the Middle East by decisively intervening in the Syrian civil war. The Russians had been irrelevant in the region since former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger spearheaded the Nixon administration’s negotiation of a settlement to the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which Egypt ended its military ties with the Soviet Union. “That geopolitical pattern is now in shambles,” Kissinger himself wrote this October in the Wall Street Journal. Putin’s foray into Syria turns the notion of a declining and inconsequential Russia on its head.

On October 2 Obama maintained that Putin’s actions represent a “recipe for disaster,” but from Russia’s perspective the

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intervention makes sense. Putin’s goal is clear: Russia will shore up the position of its struggling ally, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, in order to sustain regional Russian military presence and to prevent a destabilizing takeover of Syria by jihadist forces. “The Assad regime is really Russia’s last remaining toehold in the Middle East,” Harvard Kennedy School international relations professor Stephen Walt explained to the HPR. “[It represents] the last relationship that gives them an active voice in what’s happening in key parts of the region.” Moscow’s protection of Assad serves a purpose in bolstering Russia’s claims to great power status.

Syria presents other security concerns for Russia. Walt added that “Russia worries even more than we do about the growth, spread, and expansion of radical Islamic groups … [since] there are already connections between groups like Al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists and the Chechen independence movement,” composed of Russian Muslims stirring domestic instability. The Russians struck their alliance with the Assad regime back in 1970, and, as Walt noted, “they have an important if not vital stake in trying to keep the Assad regime, if not Assad himself, in power at least in part of Syria.”

Putin has defined limited and easily accomplished objectives more effectively than the United States. Unlike America in the Iraq War, Russia is neither unilaterally governing foreign territory nor attempting to foment transformative regime change. According to Walt, their mission comprises “a very clear and simple set of objectives: prop up Assad and weaken all of Assad’s opponents if possible.” Russian troop deployments and airstrikes in Syria back up the achievement of those goals.

AMERICAN INCOHERENCE IN SYRIA Comparing Putin’s approach with Obama’s illustrates how American policy goals in Syria have not aligned with the resources spent to achieve them. Obama has outlined bold objectives such as

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removing Assad from power and defeating the Islamic State, yet the United States has devoted meager resources. Consider the $500 million American program to equip and train thousands of moderate Syrian rebels, which ended up only producing a handful of trained rebels who are not currently dead or missing. In late October the Obama administration sent about 50 special operations forces to serve in an advisory role in the fight against the Islamic State, hardly enough to halt the group.

The inconsistency of its stated strategic goals and its methods exacerbates the misalignment of American policy and resource allocation. “The central problem with our approach toward Syria is we’ve been trying to pursue a series of incompatible objectives,” Walt said. The United States has simultaneously declared that Assad must go, that it will work with partners like Turkey to “degrade and destroy” the Islamic State, that it opposes terrorist groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra, and that it supports moderate Syrian and Kurdish groups. The dilemma is that the Islamic State is fighting the Assad regime, Turkey is attacking Kurds who have been the most effective fighters against the Islamic State, and the radical Islamic groups that America denounces would be the most likely to gain power were Assad to fall.

The United States failed to empower a moderate third party, and with no credible alternative in sight, it now faces a choice between the two evils of the Islamic State and the Assad regime. With its current resources, if the United States were absolutely committed to destroying the Islamic State, it would have to accept the survival of the Assad regime and forgo a partnership with Turkey, which is attacking America’s anti-IS Kurdish allies.

On the other hand, if taking out Assad is the priority, the United States would essentially have to curtail its war against the Islamic State and allow for other jihadist groups to remain active. Put simply, the kaleidoscope of actors vying for power in Syria presents the United States with no easy or productive strategic option.

THE LIBERAL ORDER While the strategic disarray of American policy in Syria is apparent, inaction in Syria is not a definite sign that the United States is abdicating its role in the international system. In an interview with the HPR, Foreign Affairs editor Gideon Rose argued that the United States is still the leader of a “liberal international order” in which it must “protect the global commons,” “maintain the balance of power in various key areas of the world,” and “create the conditions in which progress can move forward in a whole variety of ways.”

In advancing this order, Rose made it clear that American policymakers must distinguish between a core and periphery of U.S. strategic interests. Regarding the ongoing crisis in Syria, he claimed, “I don’t see how that threatens the whole liberal order, because it’s still happening in the periphery.” Instead, he framed the current Asia-Pacific rebalance as an opportunity to protect the core of the liberal international order. For example, Rose suggested that the agreement reached on the Trans-Pacific Partnership in October “helps lock in and integrate the Pacific order … [and is] very good both for economic advancement but also for political and general institutional health.”

Brent Colburn, a former Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs and a fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, agreed, telling the HPR, “It’s overly simplistic to say that we’re stepping back from the world. … As we have tried to responsibly wind down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s been easy for people to see that as a pulling back of military presence, but the reality is that we’re still in over a hundred countries.” Moreover, considering the American-led air strikes against the Islamic State, the negotiation of the Iran nuclear deal, the opening of relations with Cuba, the assembly of a coalition to impose sanctions on Russia over the Ukraine crisis, and the finalization of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Colburn asserted that “it’s impossible to argue that this president hasn’t been very engaged in

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Secretary of State John Kerry tours the Mrajeeb al-Fhood Syrian refugee camp from a helicopter.

the world through all of our various channels.” Like Rose, Colburn sees an array of critically important issues in which the United States still displays international leadership.

IN SEARCH OF LOST COHERENCE The United States must avoid creating strategic voids for forces such as the Islamic State and Putin’s Russia to fill. It must also avoid overextending into unwinnable interventions that hamper the ability to sustain core American interests and international order. During a period of significant geopolitical change in the Middle East, American leaders must think

critically about how to better align policy objectives with resources while making hard choices between multiple evils.

Indeed, Colburn warned that the biggest threat to our military presence around the world is sequestration, or the U.S. government’s automatic spending cuts. “The immediate impacts of sequestration are incredibly negative for our fighting force, and it’s also really undercutting our ability to do long-term strategy and long-term budgeting,” Colburn said. Effective foreign policy requires domestic policymakers to administer the nation’s finances well, and without a serious plan for structuring the federal budget, the United States will have fewer strategic tools to work with. As Colburn put it, nei-

ther “the wolves closest to the door” such as the Islamic State nor the “long-term investments” the United States must manage can be dealt with successfully without domestic fiscal responsibility and vitality.

While crises like the Syrian civil war may occur in the periphery of American foreign policy interests, we should still practice strategic coherence in both the core and periphery of the international system. The next president must develop a foreign policy strategy capable of progress and provide for the security of allies, partners, and those in desperate conditions. American leadership remains indispensable, and no less than the preservation of innocent lives and world order are in the balance.

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CHOOSING CLASSROOMS CONTROLLED CHOICE POLICIES IN NYC SCHOOLS Olivia Herrington

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n 2006, Leslie Seifert, a white father in New York City, was torn between seeking the best possible education for his five-year-old daughter and sending her to a lower-performing neighborhood school that had a predominantly minority student body in the interest of further integrating it. He chose the higher-performing school outside of the neighborhood, as he wrote in an article for The Atlantic. School choice is already an option for parents like him. But he believes that changing school choice policies for kindergarten could begin to mend the inequities in the city’s education system, sparing parents the choice between maximizing their children’s education and trying to improve others’. Increased choice, he argues, would raise the stunningly low number of black and Hispanic students at New York’s most selective public high schools.

Tiers have long characterized American education system.

The continued division is made stark in divergent AP test scores and graduation rates for students from different racial backgrounds. In the wake of Michael Brown’s death, media scrutiny

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has exposed Ferguson, Missouri’s severely segregated education system. But according to the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, the state with the greatest racial and economic segregation in its school systems is New York.

SEEKING SELECTIVE SCHOOLS New York City’s eight most selective public high schools remain a prominent example of segregation. While 68 percent of the city’s public school students are black or Hispanic, only 12 percent of eighth graders accepted to these schools are. Citing this discrepancy, the NAACP and other organizations lodged a complaint against the city in September 2012 for violating the Civil Rights Act. Specialized high school admissions need not function so rigidly. Chicago, for instance, takes socioeconomic status into account in admissions at its 10 selective high schools. Century Foundation senior fellow Richard Kahlenberg explained to

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the HPR that when he worked with Chicago Public Schools, “they were able to diversify racially and ethnically by looking at socioeconomic status and giving economically disadvantaged students a better chance of being admitted. That’s the type of program that I would recommend for New York City, because the students who did pretty well despite facing socioeconomic obstacles … have a lot of potential and deserve to be at these selective schools.”

The issue, however, originates long before high school. Of students admitted to the specialized high schools in New York City, over half come from just five percent of the city’s middle schools, largely “Gifted & Talented” schools and other academic institutions that offer a rigorous curriculum to capable students.

Problematically, quality schools are less common in economically disadvantaged districts. School quality varies widely by borough and district—in the Bronx, there are no Gifted & Talented elementary schools. Manhattan, by contrast, has three.

And the geographic discrepancy is correlated with a racial discrepancy: just 11 percent of Gifted & Talented schools’ students are black. Studies show that families are more likely to select schools requiring shorter commutes, even when presented with academically superior alternatives. They also tend to prefer schools racially and socioeconomically similar to their own backgrounds. As Seifert wrote in his Atlantic article, the scarcity of quality schools compounds other factors to produce harmful consequences for minority students.

THE CAMBRIDGE MODEL Adjusting school zones to increase diversity may cut across demographic divides, but it also carries great political risk. New Yorkers who are satisfied with their local schools—often those with financial means to contribute to political campaigns—want to maintain access to those institutions.

Cambridge, Massachusetts has succeeded where New York City has failed and avoided the thorny issue of rezoning with the model of “controlled choice.” Despite the city’s smaller size, its mechanism might be transferrable. As of 1981, no Cambridge elementary school is zoned by residential address. Instead, parents select their top choices, and these preferences, along with the city’s socioeconomic breakdown, play a role in admissions decisions. Until 2001—six years before the Supreme Court ruled against race-based public school admissions—every elementary school’s population also had to match the city’s racial demographics. Now Cambridge’s deciding factor is the percentage of students eligible for free or reduced lunch.

Between 85 and 90 percent of students attend their parents’ first-choice school. In terms of racial and gender breakdowns, the policy is not a perfect fix: while almost 90 percent of Cambridge teenagers graduate from high school, only 60 percent of black males do. Still, controlled choice has been far more successful than Boston’s busing system, which prompted white families to move outside the city or send their children to private school.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, when school choice is available, 20 percent of white families, 26 percent of Hispanic families, and 36 percent of black families take part. When families are not satisfied, they sometimes move to the districts they prefer: 29 percent of white families, 25 percent of Hispanic families, and 18 percent of black families have

chosen their current neighborhood of residence because of the quality of its schools.

Controlled choice also can be a powerful way to ensure socioeconomic integration. Kahlenberg argued that such a goal is a compelling reason to pursue the policy. Similarly, Cambridge Public Schools chief operating officer James Maloney told the HPR that controlled choice is achieving its goal of economic diversity in classrooms. “We [have] more children in more schools that [are] economically balanced than we had 10 years ago,” he said. “Coincidentally, we have kids in more racially diverse schools now.”

BRINGING CONTROLLED CHOICE TO NEW YORK Controlled choice has some precedent in New York City.

Already, P.S. 133 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, allots 35 percent of its spots to English-language learners and free- or reduced-lunch students, a response to the neighborhood’s worsening housing segregation. Charter schools also are permitted to establish similar arrangements.

“Communities are becoming whiter and [more] affluent, especially in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and anything that they can do to balance that would be a good thing,” Teachers College, Columbia University sociology and education professor Amy Stuart Wells explained in an interview with the HPR. “Something like controlled choice would be able to do that. … [Schools] won’t be [diverse] in the long run if something isn’t done … to stabilize these populations and to make sure that the enrollment policy has diversity as a goal.”

These objectives seem to require government action. Leonie Haimson, the executive director of Class Size Matters and the editor of the blog NYC Public School Parents, told the HPR, “Most parents want a quality education for their child, and diversity does not come up on the top of that list.” Wells agrees, arguing against the idea that “families or the Department of Education can do it on their own. I think there needs to be cooperation.” The policy could also remove much of parents’ concern about school demographics: if implemented effectively, every school’s demographics would more closely reflect the city’s.

The change would meet a demand that has been essentially ignored for 14 years. Though infamous for its reliance on standardized test scores, 2001’s No Child Left Behind Act also set a goal of “closing the achievement gap between … minority and non-minority students, and between disadvantaged children and their more advantaged peers.” In particular, NCLB demands that states protect minority and low-income students from classrooms led by less qualified teachers. The design of controlled choice achieves this goal: Kahlenberg found that low-income students in classrooms with higher-income peers are often taught by more qualified teachers than they otherwise would be.

Citing a New York Appleseed study, Kahlenberg told the HPR that controlled choice could successfully integrate about 16 of New York’s 32 school districts—not a complete fix, but a good start. “In half of them, it wouldn’t be possible: there are such overwhelming numbers of low-income students [that] it would be very difficult to integrate those schools,” Kahlenberg said.

“But there’s so much more that we could be doing in half of the community school districts. This wouldn’t work everywhere, but it would work in a lot of important places within New York City.”

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THE ROAD NOT YET TAKEN AN ASSESSMENT OF ALEKSANDAR VUCIC

Jacob Link

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alk the streets of downtown Belgrade, and it is not hard to spot the scars of Serbia’s conflict with NATO a decade and a half ago. Bombed-out shells of buildings, partially but not entirely destroyed, remain standing as silent testaments to the alliance’s air campaign. Near the city’s center, in Belgrade Fortress, an exhibit shows a piece of wreckage from a downed American Nighthawk fighter along with the uniform of a captured American soldier. Though the bombings helped bring to an end the brutal regime of Slobodan Miloševic, they continue to have powerful residual affects on Serbian opinions of the West.

However, a new wave of political progress holds promise for the country’s future in thoroughly Western institutions like the European Union. Serbia recently negotiated a landmark agreement on power-sharing in Kosovo, the Albanian-majority breakaway republic that has hampered Serbia’s accession to the EU for so long. The overt xenophobia that once characterized the nation’s politics has almost disappeared; Serbia’s relations are warming with Albania, and it has been broadly humane in its recent treatment of asylum-seeking refugees. A new chapter might be opening for Serbia under the leadership of Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic, a former Miloševic-era official.

SERBIA’S NEW BALANCE After Miloševic’s regime was overthrown in October 2000, his erstwhile allies in the Serbian Radical Party and the Socialist

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Party of Serbia experienced an understandable drop in popularity. For the following decade, the country was governed by an array of former members of the anti-Miloševic camp, and politicians like Vucic, Miloševic’s former Minister of Information, were largely regarded as nationalist pariahs, unfit for anything but surly invective-slinging as members of the opposition.

That began to change in 2008, with the formation of the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). The SNS was sleek, modern, and most importantly, pro-European, which gave it some ideological distance from the nationalist rhetoric that had characterized its forebears. The party’s updated form of conservatism has proven quite appealing to the Serbian public, who gave the SNS control of the National Assembly in 2012. Vucic, then party leader, officially took over as prime minister in 2014 with an absolute legislative majority, a first in Serbia since the Miloševic era.

Thus far, Vucic’s tenure as prime minister has largely been a muddled and often contradictory balancing act struck between his country’s warring liberal and conservative impulses. He has rid the country’s right wing of its resentful attitude towards the West and pushed for a new consensus in favor of European integration and pragmatism on Kosovo. However, in broadcasting Serbia’s ties to Russia and undermining newly-developed aspects of Serbian free society, he has tightened his grip on power and shown reluctance to fully recant the authoritarian populism upon which Serbia has historically relied. Seemingly concerned for his country but also obsessed with control, Vucic seems equally well placed to bring Serbia into a peaceful, prosperous future or drag it back into its corrupt, authoritarian past.

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TRADING PRIŠTINA FOR BRUSSELS

CUDDLING WITH THE BEAR

For the past 26 years, since Miloševic launched his political career on a promise to defend Kosovo’s Serb minority, the territory has stood center stage in Serbian political discourse. The site of an important battle for the medieval Serb state and home to several historically significant Orthodox churches, Kosovo has often been used as an important rallying point for the Serb nationalist cause. While often claimed as the “Cradle of the Serb Nation,” today only one-tenth of the territory’s population is ethnically Serb, and the historical case for Serb control over Kosovo is far from straightforward.

Partial resolution of the Kosovo issue is a prerequisite for any further progress in Serbia’s EU application, and Vucic has promised to make membership in the bloc a priority. Many Serbians, including Vucic himself, oppose diplomatic recognition of Kosovo, but he has maintained that accepting Kosovo’s independence is not a requirement for accession to the EU. Nevertheless, he has agreed to a more limited normalization of relations, leaving President Tomislav Nikolic to make stridently nationalist claims in favor of Serb sovereignty over the area. Though opinion polls show that almost two-thirds of Serbians prioritize making Kosovo part of Serbia over joining the EU, a similar number of Serbians in the same survey admit that Kosovo is a de facto independent state. Other polls show a solid majority of Serbians in favor of EU membership.

At this point, the Serbian public seems to implicitly recognize Kosovo as a lost cause, and while it remains an important issue, reunification has become more an object of yearning than a tangible political goal. Goran Miletic, a human rights campaigner in Serbia working with the Swedish NGO Civil Rights Defenders, explained in an interview with the HPR that Serbians “know Kosovo will never be part of Serbia. They accept it, but they do not want to say that publicly.”

There are no openly anti-EU parties currently in the Serbian National Assembly, a situation that can be largely attributed to Vucic. After cleaning house in the 2014 elections, the SNS consolidated the conservative vote into one pro-European camp, pushing smaller anti-European factions like the Radical Party out of the National Assembly entirely. Vucic’s popularity has further spread a pro-EU sentiment throughout the country.

University of Messina economic policy professor Bruno Sergi, who specializes in emerging Balkan economies, told the HPR that Vucic has “established consensus that for Serbia, membership in the EU and normalization of policies with Kosovo [are] a must.” Thus, with an occasional growl at the West or display of Orthodox piety, Vucic can both proceed with European integration and avoid being labeled a sellout.

Since the birth of the Serbian state in the 19th century, Serbia and Russia have traditionally had a special relationship, and despite warming relations with the EU, Serbia frequently aligns its foreign policy with Moscow. Belgrade’s biggest policy break with the West lies in its refusal to join Western sanctions on Russia in response to the annexation of Crimea. Serbia has also agreed to joint military drills with Russia, invited Putin to Serbia for several high-profile visits, and was a ready partner in Russia’s planned South Stream gas pipeline before it was scrapped at the end of 2014.

However, the relationship is not nearly as robust as it seems.

Serbians collectively grimaced last year at Putin’s comparison of the Crimean annexation to Kosovar independence, and while Russia is an important trade partner, commerce between the two is dwarfed by Serbia’s trade with the EU. Russia is ultimately no substitute for Europe, which Vucic has repeatedly acknowledged. Though he values cordial relations with Russia, he prioritizes Serbian membership in the EU first.

Russia’s value to Vucic does not lie in the relationship’s strategic value but as a tool of domestic politicking. Because of the country’s conflict with NATO in the 1990s (along with Russia’s pro-Serbian response), the Serbian public is generally more receptive to Russia than to the West. Of all the former Yugoslav republics, Yugo-nostalgia is the most prevalent in Serbia. The memory of Josip Tito’s “Third Way,” by which Serbia committed neither to a Russian East or European West but played them both for their advantages, still holds significant electoral sway. Miletic told the HPR that when it comes to foreign affairs, “citizens like the policy of the present government,” and cordial relations with Russia, in addition to more desperate efforts at courtship from the EU, shore up Vucic’s domestic political support from Russophiles and Titophiles alike. Rather than stemming from any deep convictions about Slavic brotherhood, it is likely that his foreign policy is a calculated political move. Media portrayals of a Serbia “torn” between East and West only reinforce this false premise, and fail to recognize Vucic’s strategic maneuvering.

AN AUTHORITARIAN STREAK If a summary of Vucic’s political career were to end here, his image as a committed and pragmatic democratic reformer might be justified. However, Vucic (and a sizable plurality of the country he governs) has not fully abandoned another, older model of governance in Serbia—one which involves autocratic leadership and a civil society beaten into submission.

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Vucic with then-Austrian Vice Chancellor and Minister of Foreign Affairs Michael Spindelegger in June 2013.

Whereas coverage of Vucic’s deceptive drift towards Russia has been excessively shrill, outside reporting of his crackdown on independent Serbian journalism appears regrettably inadequate. As the former Minister of Information during the Miloševic era, Vucic is no stranger to media censorship, and indices of freedom of the press in Serbia have declined precipitously since he took power. Miletic told the HPR that Vucic is “obsessed” with his image in media—often working to influence it in Western interviews and op-eds—and regularly clamps down on writers and publications that critique his leadership.

While Serbia does not, as Miletic noted, have “open censorship like in Belarus,” Vucic still controls media through “soft” devices, like intimidation and harassment of journalists, selfcensorship, and accusations of foreign espionage. Advertising, which Miletic says Vucic also controls, provides another method of managing political discourse, allowing him to push the message of the SNS with a flood of ads while leaving little airtime for opposition parties. Journalists in the country say the environment is the most repressive it has been since Miloševic.

In other areas, too, Vucic demonstrates a hunger for power and a willingness to use illiberal methods to accumulate it. His much-touted anticorruption efforts, while generating some success, seem to largely target his political adversaries. Within his own party, there are reports that Vucic has worked to consolidate power and erode support for his rival, President Nikolic.

However, instead of being punished for this obsessive accumulation of power, Vucic continues to enjoy sky-high popularity.

In fact, like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Vucic has deftly employed a model of authoritarian populism, using popular support to weaken institutional checks on power and increase his personal authority. Miletic noted that many Serbians still favor the idea of a “strong hand” that brings stability to

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the government. With his opposition in tatters, it is likely that Vucic will continue to enjoy popular support despite, or perhaps because of, his authoritarian streak.

Nevertheless, Vucic’s Serbia is in a distinctly different geopolitical position than Orbán’s Hungary, and the country’s love affair with autocracy could potentially undermine its EU aspirations. Membership for Serbia is still a ways off, but as it begins to take a more defined shape—the country’s candidacy was officially declared in 2014—undemocratic tendencies provide an easy excuse for European leaders still suffering from expansion fatigue to turn Serbia away. Though respect of “democratic values,” a criterion for EU membership, is notoriously difficult to quantify, its absence is easy to spot; few would argue that Vucic’s intimidation of journalists constitutes an effort to “promote and encourage … civil rights and freedoms.” Ignoring both the letter and spirit of the organization’s law does not appear an effective strategy for Vucic to prove his personal commitment to freedom of the press and, more broadly, EU membership.

Vucic seems to want to have it both ways: liberal policies under a repressive government. While he has pushed aside strident nationalist voices and begun the long journey toward resolving the Kosovo issue, he has also silenced the independent Serbian media, and the threat of Serbia’s young democratic institutions collapsing is all too real. These conflicting political strategies may have served him well thus far, but they are ultimately irreconcilable. European Union membership will eventually require real democratic progress, and the course Vucic has charted in that regard is diametrically opposed to one that can ready Serbia for EU accession. In the meantime, Serbian progress will likely stall, with the country precariously on the verge of authoritarian relapse.

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GREASING THE WHEELS THE SECRET BENEFITS OF CORRUPTION Sebastian Reyes

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fter coming to power in 2012, Chinese President Xi Jinping began an anticorruption campaign that has been unparalleled in recent Chinese history. Xi has achieved a number of successes, cracking down on officials ranging from local government employees to generals in the People’s Liberation Army. In light of the widespread frustration around high levels of perceived corruption in the bureaucracy, Xi’s campaign is just one of many factors contributing to the president’s image as a strongman who won’t tolerate undisciplined party members.

But in trying to discipline the CCP bureaucracy, Xi may misunderstand the economic implications of corruption in China. Considering his country’s slowing economy, the president appears to be fighting corruption in the belief that it is a hindrance to economic growth. This

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view, the so-called “sanding-the-wheels” theory, has long been the mainstream in academia. Nevertheless, a notable faction of economists and political scientists have alternatively suggested that corruption can, at least in some cases, work in favor of economic growth. They make the case that corruption actually “greases the wheels” of economic growth by allowing people to circumvent the impediments imposed by an ineffectual or otherwise obstructive bureaucracy.

As China’s political and economic landscapes have changed over recent decades, the nature and impacts of corruption in the country have evolved as well.

Although corruption may have had net positive effects some thirty years ago, Xi’s present-day campaign may be the right economic move after all.

CORRUPTION IN 1980S CHINA In a 2007 paper, University of Kansas School of Business professor Douglas Houston developed an economic model that supports the “greasing-the-wheels” hypothesis. Houston found 12 countries in which the expansionary effects of corruption on an economy outweighed other harmful, restrictive effects. Speaking with the HPR, Houston explained that these states were very impoverished and had little social and political capital, low trust levels, and weak legal frameworks. He posited that in countries with such institutions, “it is very improbable that one can make any kind of economic transaction work unless one can get to the resources one needs, whatever they may

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be. The way to do that in such economies is what many might deem as corrupt behavior, because in some instances [entrepreneurs] must find a way through a nasty, corrupt bureaucracy that might otherwise foil one’s efforts.” In short, Houston believes that for entrepreneurs in such countries, “desperate times call for desperate measures.”

China was not among the 12 countries in which Houston found that corruption had net positive effects on economic development. But the China of the late 1970s and 1980s was much more similar to those countries than the China of 2007.

Indeed, Yan Sun, a City University of New York political science professor and author of Corruption and Market in Contemporary China, suggested in an interview with the HPR that corruption bore fruit for Chinese economic growth in the 1980s. This expansion primarily occurred at the local level in township and village enterprises, commonly referred to as TVEs, which are market-based ventures collectively owned by rural agricultural communities. Sun argued that TVEs utilized bribery because they were largely left out of the government’s central economic planning. Even when Deng Xiaoping led the CCP to legalize the enterprises in 1984 as part of his economic reform regime, TVEs remained excluded from both market access and the allocation of state resources. As a result, bribery served as one of the only means by which TVEs were able to procure capital.

“Profiteering activities, which were also prevalent in the 1980s, could also be considered somewhat positive,” Sun further explained. “Under central planning, businesses could only sell or buy according to the plan. [But] because of the incentives of bribery, businesses were selling outside the market and outside the plan. In that way they expanded the range of economic activities [in the country].” Essentially, corruption opened the doors for non-state actors on both the supply and demand sides, thereby helping spur rapid growth and diversify the Chinese economy.

SANDING THE WHEELS While corruption in China has significantly diminished in recent years, the country’s politics are still far from clean. In 2014 the watchdog agency Transparency International ranked China the 100th most corrupt state out of 175 on its Corruption Perceptions Index. Two decades ago, by contrast, the group labeled China the second worst in the world. But despite this substantial improvement, corruption remains integral to various sectors of the Chinese economy and a cultural norm that most Chinese see as an opportunity to get ahead.

However, the question remains whether corruption in China brings the same benefits today as it once did. Sun argued emphatically that it does not. She noted the rise of what she calls

“princeling capitalism,” in which the heads of state-owned companies, many of whom are the children of high-level government officials, utilize their unique status and connections to reinforce their monopolies. There are many examples of this phenomenon, but Sun gave the example of former president Hu Jintao’s son, Hu Haifeng, whose company, Nuctech, was awarded a contract to install airport security implements throughout the country. Although these connections might have helped overcome bureaucratic red tape, Sun believes that this and similar cases are ultimately harmful. As the government awards deals to the children of its elite, it prevents other, less connected businesses from competing. These nepotistic forms of corruption entrench income inequality, thereby producing results that are antithetical to those of the 1980s, when corruption served to diversify economic activities and allow new players to enter the market.

THE GOOD AND THE BAD As the natures of both corruption and the economy in China have changed, the benefits of skirting regulations have likely evaporated. Xi’s anticorruption efforts, therefore, may be a boon after all. His campaign seems in congruity with the “sandingthe-wheels” theory held by the vast majority of political scientists and economists. Indeed, even those academics who recognize that corruption may have potential benefits are hesitant to defend such a proposition absolutely. Houston was quick to clarify the implications of his article noting, “I never meant that the conclusion ... is that you should encourage, as a policy, corruption in very poor countries.”

Houston went on to say that “the title of the paper [“Can Corruption Ever Improve an Economy?”] is provocative and immediately can create a knockdown response that ‘this is just ridiculous’. [But] if you get at the things underneath, it seems more reasonable.” The story of corruption in China certainly affirms that corruption could improve an economy, if only in situations where economic actors have little legal access to resources.

Professors Jac Heckleman of Wake Forest University and Benjamin Powell of Suffolk University perhaps summarized it best in their 2008 working paper: “corruption is growth enhancing when economic freedom is most limited.”

There is no doubt corruption has myriad harmful effects. But the widespread view that corruption is always bad is likely inaccurate. The Chinese case, which has featured different flavors of corruption over time, demonstrates that both the “sandingthe-wheels” and “greasing-the-wheels” propositions have their merits. This validation of both theories brings more complexity to assessments of corruption and the already gray area of government interactions with the private economy.

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REFORMED RHETORIC Priming the Catholic Church for long-term change Minnie Jang

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ver seven million followers on Twitter. Time’s 2013 “Person of the Year.” Hundreds of thousands of people lined up in the streets to see him during his recent visit to the United States.

Since his election in April 2013, Pope Francis has garnered unparalleled media attention. With nearly 50,000 media mentions in his first year as pontiff alone and tourism in Vatican City tripling since the beginning of his tenure, he has brought increased attention to the papacy and gained a celebrity-like status.

Media outlets are fond of calling him “the people’s pope.” This label draws attention to Pope Francis’s message of compassion for marginalized populations. Through rhetoric of openness and compassion, he has shifted the conversation away from traditionally controversial social issues, such as homosexuality and divorce, to that of building “a church that is poor and is for the poor.”

In evaluating the pope and his refocused rhetoric, the natural inclination is to look for tangible results. How many people has he lifted out of poverty?

How much have Church expenditures changed? Yet these quantitative mea-

sures are the wrong frame of analysis.

Harvard Divinity School assistant dean for ministry studies and field education Emily Click explained to the HPR that Pope Francis is not trying to control outcomes, and that “we often discount a shift in conversation as a powerful move.”

While attempting to measure “the Francis effect” has value in ensuring that rhetoric does not wholly replace action, it should not substitute or devalue the importance of conversational change.

During the first two and a half years of his papacy, Pope Francis has initiated this complex process of change, looking outward toward the global Church’s varying priorities and looking inward toward reforming the discourse of the Church itself. These rhetoric-based reforms have sown the seeds of long-term change, which is just beginning to be defined in concrete terms.

THE PAST AND PRESENT OF A GLOBAL CHURCH As one of the oldest religious institutions in existence, the Vatican has accumulated a significant amount of historical baggage, from sexual abuse scandals to

financial corruption, along the way. Although attempts have been made to modernize the Church’s practices, most notably during the Second Vatican Council 50 years ago, change is slow at St. Peter’s Basilica. In the United States, that process has been frustrating for Catholics whose views align with those of John Gehring, author of The Francis Effect: A Radical Pope’s Challenge to the American Catholic Church. He describes how a church that was “once known as a towering force for social justice became known for a narrow agenda most closely aligned with one political party.” Modern-day perception commonly links the Catholic Church to inflexible moral beliefs regarding social issues and associates it with conservative parties in the United States.

However, in the Western world, the Catholic Church’s global reach is often forgotten. Pope Francis’s message reaches beyond American Catholics and their familiarity with issues of abortion, marriage, and divorce to Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, which account for the bulk of the Church’s growth in followers over the past century.

A lamentation from Ugandan bishop Joseph Anthony Zziwa, a participant

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Pope Francis’s actions intersect with the most radical aspect of his rhetoric, which is his admittance of weakness and imperfection.

in the Vatican’s synod this fall, illuminates this dichotomy. He indignantly said, “You keep asking someone from Nigeria to tell me about homosexuality, to tell me about divorce, when five of his children have been abducted by Boko Haram? You think that person has time to talk about that?” Representing a country in which homosexuality is criminalized and family structures are non-nuclear, Bishop Zziwa shines light on the stark contrast between the dominant themes of Catholic debate in America and the priorities of countries facing far more urgent challenges.

As the first pope from Latin America, Pope Francis is sensitive to the needs of the global Church, having made serving the poor a priority when in his home country of Argentina. Now his rhetorical commitment is directed towards ushering in a new era of inclusivity for non-Western Catholics, as changing demographics move the Church’s population center further south.

RE-FORM A poverty-centric, compassionate discourse, however, is not foundationally different from what the Catholic Church has always advocated as its mission. Previous popes have berated capitalism in its unregulated form, and “a preferential option for the poor,” a doctrinal mandate to aid those in need, has long been ingrained in Catholic social teaching. If Pope Francis is not fundamentally changing any doctrines, can he truly be called a reformer?

Harvard Divinity School professor Francis Clooney, S.J. would argue that he is. In an interview with the HPR, he stated, “Reform is quite often a return to the basics; it is re-form, removing errant bad habits, unnecessary cultural and clerical baggage.”

By adopting a tone that is welcoming and forgiving with regard to contentious social issues while simultaneously refocusing attention toward service, Pope Francis is returning the Church to one of its central missions in caring for the poor.

As Clooney puts it, by introducing “a breath of fresh air, a redirection of the Church from self-protectiveness to engaging the real needs of real people,” Pope Francis bridges the gap between doctrine and lived experience. From his unadorned frock to his decision to live in the Vatican guesthouse rather than the papal palace, his personal example underscores his connection with real people and communities. Moreover, his humility is symbolic. After delivering a historic address to Congress this past September, he went to bless a meal with the homeless of Washington, D.C., sending a clear message about the nature of

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his constituency.

Pope Francis’s actions intersect with the most radical aspect of his rhetoric, which is his admittance of weakness and imperfection. When asked point-blank the question, “Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?” the pope reflected and responded, “I am a sinner whom the Lord has looked upon.” Rather than have the people come to him, Pope Francis goes to the people, and in doing so, he challenges others to do the same.

PRACTICE WHAT YOU PREACH While Pope Francis has reinvigorated the Church’s emphasis on poverty, it is less clear whether any action has accompanied this rhetoric. Catholic organizations make up a bulk of Forbes’s most recent list of the 50 largest charities in America, including Catholic Charities USA at number 13, Catholic Medical Mission Board at number 18, and Catholic Relief Services at number 45.

Similarly, there are thousands of Catholic parishes serving their local communities in every region of the world.

Due to the magnitude of the Catholic Church’s charitable reach, it is difficult to measure the extent to which Pope Francis’s arrival in the Vatican has had an effect on the giving of Catholic charities. However, on an individual level, there has been a marked change. A study conducted by Foundations and Donors Interested in Catholic Activities in March 2014 found that one in four U.S. Catholics polled had increased their charitable giving in the year following Pope Francis’s election.

Notably, 77 percent of those Catholics attributed their increased donations to the new pope, while remarking that they are likely to give more to Catholic organizations in the future as well.

Although such evidence is beginning to show concrete results of “the Francis effect,” many Catholic leaders would argue that it is too soon to feel the full benefits. In an interview with the HPR, Msgr. John Enzler, the president and CEO of Catholic Charities in Washington, D.C., explained how he expects to see a significant increase in giving around the holiday season, especially after the publicity garnered by Pope Francis’s recent visit.

However, he notes that the pope’s greatest impact thus far has been in garnering more interest in Catholic Charities. The pope’s social media outreach and large-scale engagement have compelled Catholics and non-Catholics alike to pledge themselves to service. More than 100,000 individuals signed up for Walk with Francis, a campaign that included a pledge to “serve by reaching out and caring for those in need and supporting charitable

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Pope Francis used the papal office to urge action on political issues during his recent visit to the United States.

efforts in our communities and beyond.”

Weighing the benefits of this increased attention, Click stressed that Pope Francis’s conversational change is a significant and powerful action in and of itself. “The very first step has to be getting people to look at things differently,” she said.

“It’s not sufficient, but it’s also not sufficient to try and jump to the change. People just won’t get there.” While there have been concrete effects on charitable giving because of Pope Francis’s rhetoric, these positive changes pale in comparison to the good done by his changing tone. Rhetorical change may be difficult to quantify and measure, but it is integral to creating long-lasting effects.

POPE OF THE PEOPLE In the context of the Catholic Church’s long and complicated history, Pope Francis is opening the page to a new chapter, implementing incremental changes with effects that may not be evident in their early stages but will hold major implications for the future. Shifting papal conversation to focus on the immediate needs of lived experiences and highlighting humanity’s ob-

ligation to care for the poor are his first steps to actually ending those inequalities and uplifting marginalized populations.

Thus, his rhetoric and refocusing are just the start of his long-term goals. He is presenting Catholics with an opportunity to look outward and inward; to welcome and forgive; to recommit to compassion and service.

For leaders like Msgr. Enzler, Francis’s message has given great “impetus, inspiration, and challenge to be more and more respondent to his example.” Drawing less from Francis’s celebrity and more from his leadership as a pope of the people, Msgr.

Enzler explained, “The pope has just reaffirmed what I had believed. His message makes me more anxious to fulfill his dream and my dream as well, walking down in tandem with him trying to do work for the poor.”

Leaders of the Catholic Church like Msgr. Enzler are taking seeds of the pope’s reformed rhetoric and planting them in different pockets of the world. The full “Francis effect” has yet to take hold, but it is clear that Pope Francis is spreading hope by his own example, rebranding and reaffirming Catholicism to meet the challenges of a changing world.

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CULTURE

SELLING ON CULTURAL UBIQUITY, IMAGINED WORLDS, AND ACTION FIGURES Nathan Cummings

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’ve wanted to pilot an X-wing starfighter since I was four years old. Some of my earliest memories consist of flying LEGO spaceships around my house for attack runs on the Death Star, leaping over my parents’ feet and terrifying my cats.

My room was filled with Star Wars merchandise, from the aforementioned LEGO sets to stacks of battered, sticky picture books and novels. Although I hadn’t watched the actual movies, and wouldn’t for years, I could quote any line or name any character on sight.

My lifelong relationship with the Star Wars universe is a matter of timing. I turned four in 1999, the year Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace was released amidst enormous cultural hype. Star Wars and its merchandise reached me, along with countless other children my age, before I ever set foot in a theatre. Now, 16 years later, the cycle is repeating. The December release of Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens is projected to be one of the biggest movie premieres of all time, and Star Wars merchandise has once again taken over toy stores across America. As we prepare to inculcate a third generation of Star Wars fans—from my parents, to me, to the children of 2015—it’s worth taking a look at this series’ unrivalled ubiquity. Star Wars and its galaxy of products represent escapism by way of commercialism, allowing us to pay our way into an all-consuming world of imagination. *** If you were born any time after 1970 in America, chances are you’ve witnessed the rise and fall of at least one intensively mar-

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keted media franchise. For my generation, it’s part and parcel of the culture in which we’ve been raised. The past few decades have been dominated by successive waves of franchised properties, each bigger than the last: Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

These franchises aren’t just works of popular culture—they’re a business model. “For the studios,” writes Barry Langford in his book Post-Classical Hollywood: Film Industry, Style and Ideology since 1945, “a home run is a film from which a multimedia ‘franchise’ can be generated; the colossally expensive creation of cross-media conglomerates predicated on synergistic rewards provides an obvious imperative to develop such products.” High demand for popular properties allows franchises to adapt their narrative or set of narratives across various media forms, from books to films to tie-in products.

Franchises have thus become a study in inescapability, as studios spend millions of dollars to ensure that audiences continue to inhabit their blockbuster films even after leaving theatres.

Children buy Avengers backpacks, dress up as Iron Man and Captain America for Halloween, and watch the films over and over on DVD. And sufficiently popular franchises can continue to yield dividends indefinitely, as Harry Potter’s upcoming theater adaptation proves.

While this style of merchandising is not unique to Star Wars, it is a creation of the series in many ways. Since the first film’s release in 1977, George Lucas’s works have become the archetypal example of a ubiquitous brand. “Star Wars has generated more collectible paraphernalia than any other franchise on the planet,” claims Chris Taylor in his book How Star Wars Con-

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quered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise. Star Wars-themed action figures have flown off toy store shelves since the first film’s premiere; their first manufacturer, Kenner Products, was forced to ship empty boxes with redeemable vouchers to keep up with initial holiday demand. And the merchandise keeps getting stranger: examples of Star Wars-branded memorabilia over the years range from a breakfast cereal (“C-3PO’s”) to stormtrooper oven mitts.

The financial dividends of this merchandise are both staggering and unprecedented. “Before Star Wars,” writes Taylor, “no one had ever made a dime out of toy merchandising associated with a movie.” Lucas famously turned down a large salary to direct the film but retained ownership of its merchandising rights. His subsequent profit—per Taylor’s estimate, the films have generated over $20 billion in merchandising revenue since their release—changed studios’ conceptions of movie publicity forever. Since the original trilogy’s phenomenal success, franchises have increasingly expanded out of movie theatres and into the commercial realm.

This expansion has always been geared towards the films’ youngest fans. Langford explains that “SF-fantasy and superhero franchises, replete with eye-catching artifacts (monsters, spaceships, lightsabers, ‘technical manuals,’ and the like) are ... especially suitable for tie-in promotions and licensing activities targeted at children.” Ever since Kenner ran out of action figures in 1977, toy manufacturers have recognized—and capitalized upon—kids’ insatiable demand for all things Star Wars.

This year, as anticipation builds for The Force Awakens, history may repeat itself. In a recent Walmart advertisement for Star Wars products, adults explain concepts from the films to children. “They’re like knights in space,” says a father to his son in a scene, holding a plastic lightsaber and describing the fictional Jedi Knights. The ad campaign’s message is obvious: parents and relatives should buy their children the same toys and products that they had once enjoyed.

By commercializing adults’ nostalgia, the franchise thus makes Star Wars consumption a generational habit. And given the new movie’s exhaustively coordinated merchandising campaign—the Walt Disney Company organized an entire day-long premiere, “Force Friday,” to promote upcoming Force Awakens products—this pattern shows no sign of changing. Star Wars is an unstoppable moneymaking machine, and sales to children are its bread and butter.

It’s difficult not to see this financial model as exploitative.

Star Wars products have never been marketed as cheap, but several of this year’s toys are particularly pricey: a LEGO Millenium Falcon retails for $149.99, while a model TIE fighter spaceship will set parents back $169.99. Retailers are banking on the enormous hype surrounding the film to justify these similarly enormous prices, as well as the vast amount of merchandise currently being sold. In an interview with USA Today, Joel Bines, a managing director at the consulting firm AlixPartners, called the launch a “blockbuster merchandise event.” He elaborated: “You will not be able to avoid Star Wars merchandise. It will be impossible this holiday season.”

To market these products to children—and, vicariously, the parents and relatives who finance their purchases—invites accusations of excessive commercialism. Star Wars, after all, is one of the most beloved properties of all time. Is it justifiable to manipulate this enthusiasm for financial benefit?

*** I experienced the Star Wars franchise’s commercialism firsthand at age four. As toy stores flooded with products from The Phantom Menace, I begged my parents to buy me anything and everything with a Star Wars logo on it—and they shamelessly indulged me. I owned plastic lightsabers, Wookiee masks, and countless Happy Meal spaceships. For years, I was the Star Wars poster child: eager to buy anything and everything that the franchise could offer me.

Yet in remembering Star Wars, I don’t recall receiving any of these products. My happy memories aren’t focused on collecting full sets of action figures, or unwrapping elaborate LEGO sets. I remember swinging through the hallways of my house, homemade spaceship in hand, constructing my own fantasy version of scenes I had read about in my books. For a while, I was so enthralled with Star Wars that I wanted to live every waking moment in a universe based on films I had never seen at the time.

Tom Shone describes his similar experiences in the introduction to his book Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer. “It was what you did with Star Wars,” he remembers. “You turned it into a toy, so you could keep playing with the movie in your head.” In short, Shone agrees that Star Wars’ imaginative power was a worthy justification for its commercialism. The toys and products were a financial windfall for its creators, but they were not objects of manufactured demand—they filled a void created by its fans’ desperate desire to inhabit the world of Star Wars.

Does this excuse the franchise’s unabashed commercialism?

There will always be an aspect of financial profit to Star Wars that pollutes its otherwise idealistic vision of a galaxy far, far away. At its best, the franchise represents a shared universe that continues to captivate generation after generation of fans. It has the potential to unite parents and children through a shared sense of excitement—there’s a reason why Walmart’s ads are likely to be so successful. At its worst, it marshals the affections of these fans to sell increasingly expensive and outlandish merchandise with no motivation beyond sheer financial profit.

Ultimately, all of these qualities define Star Wars. It is—and remains—a franchise devoted to its viewers’ enjoyment above all else. Film critic Roger Ebert described the first film as “entertainment so direct and simple that all of the complications of the modern movie seem to vaporize.” This ethos of entertainment pervades all subsequent movies in the series, as well as the vast field of tie-in products, games, and merchandise that has grown up around them. Star Wars’ greatest accomplishment lies in its ability to hook us from an early age, to provide an addictive form of escape from everyday life. It allows us to inhabit a common fictional universe, to revel in the same cultural tropes, and to share a sense of adventure. In return, it demands nothing less than our utter obsession—and, on some level, our financial investment.

For many viewers, the decision to make such an investment is not set in stone. For me, it is a foregone conclusion. I’ve been a willing subject of Star Wars’ media empire for 16 years and counting. In December, I’ll be front and center at my local movie theatre, patiently waiting for John Williams’s epic theme to boom over the movie screen for the seventh time. Maybe I’ll bring a plastic lightsaber, for old times’ sake.

WINTER 2015 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 35

CULTURE

TONIGHT AT THE OPERA Daniel Kenny

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n August, the Metropolitan Opera announced that the 20152016 season performances of Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello would not feature the traditional presentation of the lead tenor in blackface. New York Times reporter Michael Cooper called the announcement a “seismic shift” and wrote that opera houses’ continual use of blackface is likely “more surprising to many people than that the practice is now being ended by the Met.” Yet seemingly without regard for cultural backlash, the Met’s 2013 Otello revival featured blackface. For an audience of modern sensibilities, Cooper claimed that “an Otello in blackface is likely to register somewhere on a scale of awkward to offensive.”

That Otello is far from the only offender, and that blackface is far from the only race-related complaint, speaks to opera’s status in modern society. For more than a century, opera has remained under the purview of the rich. Its elitist underpinnings, coupled with the irrealist nature of the art itself, perpetuate the posh stigma that guards it against adapting to contemporary sensibilities. Today, even to remark that you have gone “to the opera” is to shoulder an albatross of pretension regardless of your socioeconomic status. In the era of salient inequality and identity politics, the opera must adapt in order to attract new fans that appreciate its content as opposed to its status.

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OPERA’S SPECIAL STATUS At least part of opera’s unique status—in which it is excused from the political standards of other performance arts like musical theatre, drama, and cinema—stems from its designation as a “highbrow” cultural artform. Contemporary scholars agree that opera was a popular art form in the United States until the mid- to late-19th century. After that time, social elites “classified” opera through practices like preventing English translations, building extravagant opera houses, and instituting lavish dress codes.

History aside, the nature of operatic performance does little to distance the audience from the performance. The malformed realism of the opera—what writer Will Self describes as “irrealism”—encourages viewers to engage with the content complacently and uncritically, with little concern for its relevance to real life. On the whole, such an audience demands little change, which provides little incentive for opera to reevaluate racially insensitive traditions and to attract a new audience. In a Guardian review of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny’s 2015 run at the Royal Opera House, Self

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IDENTITY POLITICS, INEQUALITY AND OPERA reconciled that opera’s Marxist social commentary with the wealthy “apparatus” that Brecht himself claimed had turned opera into a commodity for the moneyed. Mahagonny satirizes consumerism, yet operagoers consume it without self-awareness. Self claims that “it’s precisely because of opera’s incredible form that [Brecht] can relax into its irrealism—whereas other dramatic modes trouble [him] with their malformed naturalism.

Brecht seemed to understand this when he wrote: ‘A dying man is real. But if he sings at the same time the sphere of irrationality is attained.’”

Opera, so performed, distracts but does not provoke, and that could be its downfall. According to Self, no Brechtian innovations, outreach programs, live transmissions at the multiplex, education about the art, or other attempts at population can rescue opera from “the preserve of the rich.”

But mere discourse does not lie at the heart of the matter: real issues of inequality and access persist. At the Met’s opening night, lavishly attired celebrities prance down a red carpet and disappear into Lincoln Center for the evening. Although the Met has begun simulcasting its opening night performance in Times Square and sometimes outside Lincoln Center, the contrast between the two gatherings exacerbates opera’s classist undertones. The Met, not the media, controls this part of public perception. Moreover, the experience of those outside Lincoln Center is far removed from the experience of those inside.

Instead of expanding the purview of opera appreciation, the company’s efforts further reinforce boundaries between those who can afford a ticket and those who cannot.

THE OPERA FIGHTS BACK

Opera can determine its own fate, and it might have already. Writing for The Guardian, disillusioned opera fan Robert Thickness dismisses the claim that opera was intended as mass entertainment and argues instead that opera “was created in the late 16th century as entertainment for the rich, and for most of its history has remained just that.” Like Self, Thickness vividly condemns opera as “an affair where the supposed main event is actually a sideshow to a rigmarole of Issey Miyake shawls, mudcaked mules, champagne and salmon on the lawn.” But the most poignant thing Thickness says about the art is this: “The worst advertisement for opera, the worst publicity for opera, is opera.”

As long as opera carries an elitist stigma, it will struggle to find new fans. The special treatment it has received regarding race is a quickly expiring privilege. The opera has tried and mostly failed to adapt.

Although it is tempting to blame the fundamental lack of critical distance between the audience and the performance for opera’s inability to shake its stigma, this explanation does not account for opera’s middle- and lower-class fans. Many devoted fans do not watch and listen to opera to accumulate social capital, but rather because they love bel canto. Opera must offer more avenues of access for these fans by lowering ticket prices, ending unnecessary extravagances like opening night fashion shows, and reforming age-old but offensive traditions. Attracting a new, diverse group of fans of the art itself, rather than the experience of consuming it, is the only way the opera can survive in the modern age.

The Met is fighting to survive the wounds this stigma has inflicted, and in some ways it is succeeding. However, the Met’s prospects of long-term success are more questionable, and unless it adapts, it could deplete its already dying fan base. Local opera houses have shut down, ticket sales have dropped, and the Met is running a multimillion-dollar deficit. As Anthony Tomassini writes in a 2013 New York Times article, most people who attend the Met’s HD live-streamed performances in movie theaters are already opera fans.

Although the success of HD streaming could mitigate the drop in attendance, whether it can attract new fans is unclear.

Tomassini argues that opera broadcast in a movie theater is an “alternative opera experience” because camerawork and directing is impossible on the stage and a film’s acoustics are manufactured. Although more people are experiencing opera than ever before, they do not experience the art as it was meant to be experienced originally. The Met’s success in attracting crowds— at least to the multiplex—is a kind of victory for opera houses like the Met, but certainly not for opera.

Meanwhile, in cultural discourse, perceptions of the opera as posh remain, despite industry efforts to overcome the stigma. In a Guardian article, Alexandra Wilson blames media rhetoric for opera’s elitist stigma, which she claims is far removed from the audience’s experience at the opera. Wilson argues that “changing the conversation” about opera is necessary.

A WAY FORWARD?

WINTER 2015 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 37

CULTURE

IN DEFENSE OF THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT

A

s a proud Christian man hailing from Bardstown, Kentucky, I feel compelled to come to the defense of the Christian Right in light of the Kim Davis situation.

Although the circumstance of the Rowan County clerk is the first of its kind in the post-Obergefell v. Hodges world, wherein gay marriage is now the law of the land, I fear that her debacle will become the new norm unless Washington and the rest of the United States recognize the serious predicament the Christian Right has now entered.

For the first time in the history of this country, the institution of marriage, described by the Supreme Court as “fundamental to our very existence and survival,” has been altered for the inclusion of gay men and women. Regardless of one’s position on same-sex marriage, all of us must recognize that this is a monumental step away from traditional American society.

Consequently, it is essential that people view this transformation through the lens of an increasingly chastised section of the population, the Christian Right. In doing so, the Kim Davis saga becomes both understandable and fixable. *** Admittedly, it is impossible to describe the Christian Right without generalizing to some extent. The title is not always helpful, because it encompasses a wide variety of individuals that tend to have conflicting opinions on political issues, and because some of its leaders are increasingly partisan. But in order to fully understand Kim Davis and other Christian objectors to same-sex marriage, a limited definition of Christian Right is beneficial.

When I refer to this group, I do not include the bigots and racists who falsely claim to espouse Christian values. Nor do I refer to those who hide behind the mask of Christianity to advance segregationist or sectarian policies—see racial discrimination at Bob Jones University, the subject of a 1983 Supreme Court case. Explicitly, I use the term Christian Right to denote all biblically informed, conservative-minded Americans who

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Jack Whitfield

profess to practice some form of Christianity—usually Evangelical Protestantism or Roman Catholicism—and have a faith-driven interest in the political process.

When I think of the Christian Right, I never think of the fringe groups portrayed in much of the media. I think about my papaw, incidentally the best man I know. I think about my pastor, a decent, honest man attempting to lead his congregation in an admirable way. I think about all those rural Kentuckians so far away from the worlds of Washington and Harvard. I consider these men and women my own, and I sincerely look up to them.

Indeed, I believe the Christian Right to be composed of honest, hard-working, and God-fearing people who have long held beliefs that are now being overruled in the courts of law and public opinion. Though the group maintains strong unity on most social issues, it remains diverse regarding other issues, like education, economics, and the environment. Geographically, the majority of the Christian Right lies beneath the Mason-Dixon line, but its strands are present in every state.

Nevertheless—and herein lies the challenge for the Christian Right—America is becoming increasingly socially liberal.

Over the last decade, both support for same-sex marriages and the moral acceptability of having a child out of wedlock have increased sharply, and more and more people identify as socially liberal. While opposition to abortion and support of the death penalty remains fairly high among Americans, the simple truth is that America is changing. Our politics, our culture, our society, and our values seem to be evolving dramatically.

In response to these changes, the Christian Right has failed to articulate a culturally relevant, biblically based position. Instead of unequivocal condemnation of gay marriage, for example, the Christian Right’s response should have carefully delineated why the opposition to gay marriage is fundamentally rooted in the biblical definition of marriage as covenant. As the country evolved, however, the Christian Right neglected to formulate a sound reply.

Historically, change in America brought much-needed

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reform and prosperity to a society that had long neglected Lincoln’s vision of equality and Jefferson’s dream of liberty and justice for all. Contemporarily, much work remains to honor those visions.

But when the Supreme Court overturned a long-standing cultural precedent, this change abruptly forced the Christian Right into a position it had never before occupied. To a group that valued limited self-government and the right of democratically elected officials to enact legislation, this fundamental change of a sacred institution—not by the passage of a federal law but by unelected judges—appeared to be an illegitimate form of change. *** In his dissenting opinion from the Obergefell majority, Chief Justice John Roberts states: “The fundamental right to marry does not include a right to make a State change its definition of marriage. And a State’s decision to maintain the meaning of marriage that has persisted in every culture throughout human history can hardly be called irrational.”

Accordingly, when the Supreme Court declared my state’s democratically enacted gay marriage ban unconstitutional in Obergefell, a bit of rationality was lost. Suddenly, history was turned upside down for many in rural Kentucky who had neglected keeping up with the debate over gay marriage and for the 75 percent of voters who had approved a state constitutional amendment affirming traditional marriage. In a state where states’ rights matter, the judiciary became a symbol of unbalanced federalism and encroachment.

The Supreme Court’s ruling on gay marriage was never going to be just a legal decision on the constitutionality of marriage.

It represented that fundamental change in America that has been decades in the making. While public opinion converted Joe Biden, President Obama, and most recently Hillary Clinton, the Christian Right refused to capitulate.

And so, when Kim Davis declined to issue same-sex marriage licenses and subsequently defied numerous court orders, she did more than defiantly break the law. She symbolized the fight of those within the Christian Right who are tired of losing. She embodied the feeling among many Americans that there exists a blatant double standard in this country.

However, Kim Davis is not the concern here. I have questions myself about the particulars of her case. But she has become a case study on how the Christian Right will be treated in the months and years ahead. Numerous other county clerks have since followed suit. These cases were bound to happen with or without Kim Davis, as Chief Justice Roberts’s prescient dissent foretold: “There will be consequences to shutting down the political process on an issue of such profound public significance ...

People denied a voice are less likely to accept the ruling of a court on an issue that does not seem to be the sort of thing courts usually decide.”

*** Going forward, the Kim Davis saga will not be the last of its kind unless the Christian Right and the rest of the country reach an understanding.

First, it should be clear that public officials have a duty to follow the written law, and that gay marriage is now the law of the land. United States District Judge David Bunning is correct in stating that his court “cannot condone the willful disobedience of its lawfully issued order.” Were he not to feel this way, then our government loses its legitimacy, and we reverse hard-fought gains in areas that have historically plagued our society (see the Jim Crow era). Kim Davis broke the law, and I think it is fair to say that she understood what she was doing.

The crucial point, though, is that the situation did not have to have this result. Davis did not have to be forced into the decision to either do her job or go to jail. Our government historically has made accommodations for conscientious objectors, and due to the historic nature of the Supreme Court’s ruling, it seems improbable that she could not have been accommodated in this instance.

It is therefore inexcusable that Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear refused to call an immediate special legislative session to address same-sex marriage issues. While Beshear lectures Kentuckians on the responsibility Davis and other elected officials have to uniformly fulfill their constitutional duties, his own attorney general—the state’s chief law enforcement officer—refused to defend Kentucky’s ban on gay marriage in 2014. In response to that abdication, however, the governor’s castigation was conspicuously missing.

In the case of Kim Davis, Beshear should have assembled a special legislative meeting to pass a simple law that accommodates conscientious objectors. For example, legislation could strip the clerk’s affiliation from marriage licenses entirely. Such a law is palatable to everyone, and it is no wonder that governorelect Matt Bevin has promised to implement this reform. While the dilemma epitomized by Kim Davis certainly will not end with county clerks, state legislatures can set a precedent that demonstrates how to compromise with Christian objectors. We should look to North Carolina as a model, where the state legislature overrode the governor’s veto to pass a law allowing clerks to forgo performing marriages for both gay and straight couples if they have a religious objection to same-sex marriage.

Last, Americans must understand that the Christian Right will not forsake core beliefs due to pressure to conform. We were taught that persecution for fidelity to our beliefs is inevitable (2 Timothy 3:12). Davis is certainly not the first Christian willing to go to jail on behalf of her beliefs, nor will she be the last. But it should be noted that Kim Davis was not trying to stop same-sex couples from obtaining a marriage license; she just didn’t want her name on their paperwork.

This should be an easy fix. We merely need leaders with courage and common sense to find the solutions. I refuse to accept that we cannot find such leaders, and thus I refuse to accept that our society cannot find solutions that satisfy Christian objectors while conforming to the law. But if we remain inactive, then there will needlessly be more Kim Davises, and we will have no one to blame but ourselves.

The arrest and detention of Kim Davis has thereby established a worrisome precedent.

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INTERVIEWS

INTERVIEW: BRENT COLBURN

with Angela Yi

towards one central goal. Once you get elected, you have competing priorities across the entire government, so the time that you spend on foreign policy is going to take away time that you spend on domestic policy. A jobs crisis can interrupt your desire to get things done on the social side of the ledger, say, criminal justice reform or environmental issues. So there’s a lot of tradeoffs in terms of resource and time allocation when you’re governing.

There’s also a difference in the size and scope. The campaign in 2012 was the most expensive campaign to date—we spent about $750 million total to get the president reelected.

That’s a lot of money, but if you compare that to the budget of the federal government, which is trillions of dollars, you’re talking a totally different scale. I think we had about 4,000 paid employees in the Obama campaign and about 32,000 volunteers. I think there are nearly 5 million employees in the federal government. So they’re very, very different in terms of their scope.

You mentioned that your leadership was seen as somewhat temporary. How did that affect the work dynamics?

Brent Colburn has served as the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs and the Chief of Staff of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He was the National Communications Director for President Obama’s 2012 campaign.

Colburn is currently a fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University.

Your previous experiences heavily involved the media and public opinion. How is campaigning different from governing?

Campaigns in many ways are pretty straightforward. And what I mean by that is that you have a single, unifying goal.

Everything that you’re doing on a campaign is focused on one day, the election day, and having one outcome, and that’s to get more votes than your opponent does. So it simplifies the work, and it makes it much easier to make decisions about allocation of resources and emphasis points: everything’s

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When you’re a political appointee, you have a very limited amount of time that you would be in that position. So folks that are in those jobs today know the longest they’ll most likely serve is through January 20, 2017. And [on Inauguration Day] at noon, and a new group of folks will come in, and they’ll kind of hand the keys over. So it creates a real sense of urgency around trying to get things done.

And it also means that you need to get by with some folks who may not have come in with the same passion for the president that you may have. They may have competing agendas of their own in terms of what they think is best for the department, or what they think is best for policy perspectives, so it puts a much larger premium on teambuilding and on bringing a lot of voices to the process.

There’s also just a much larger bureaucracy to deal with, so you have a sense of urgency, but things inherently go slower.

And that tension can get very hard to navigate, but it’s incredibly rewarding once you’re able to actually get through those few hoops.

INTERVIEWS

So what would make a communication or public affairs strategy successful?

You have to have a clearly defined goal. Planning is an incredibly important part. Most of the plans will get interrupted at some point by some outside factors that you’re not planning on or that you’re that expecting, but if you don’t have the plan in the first place, you don’t have any template to build off of.

And then I think that the teambuilding piece of it is crucially important, as well as making sure that you have the resources matched with the goal.

Social media has become a gigantic part of our lives. Has that been a positive or negative impact on campaigning and governing in terms of public affairs?

Well, positive or negative, it’s just reality. It’s something that you have to deal with on a daily basis. On the campaign side of things, it opens up a whole new set of avenues to talk directly to voters, which is a huge benefit. You no longer have to work just through the media to get your message out. You could do that through very defined and very focused and targeted messages to individuals that want to follow you on social media. There are people that are passionate about what you’re doing, and so you can use them as the messengers to go talk to their friends and family and really try to spread the message. So on the campaign side, it’s been a huge advantage.

On the government side, because there’s that bureaucracy in place, we have not done as good of a job of leveraging those tools to talk directly to the American people. I think it’s something that everyone in government is struggling with. The president is working hard right now with the United States Digital Service that he started about a year and a half ago to make sure that the digital tools that the government is using are as up to date as possible.

But this goes back to the management differences of the two worlds. On a campaign, it’s easy to hire the best when it comes to social media—and you know, the best at social media are maybe 23 years old, ... folks that are living it on a daily basis. They’re the ones that are inventing these tools [that are] an integrated part of their life. But because of the way that we have to hire people in the federal government, sometimes it’s very hard to get those people into the positions in government where they can change the government to really use those tools in an effective way. So that’s something that we struggled with throughout the administration. I hope that we’re getting better at it, but it remains a challenge.

There seems to be a rising support for candidates who are antiestablishment, like Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) and Donald Trump. What makes their campaign strategies successful, and how do you think that would affect the 2016 elections?

I’m actually the outlier who doesn’t think that there’s a lot of relationship between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

I’m sure some of my colleagues would disagree. But taking them separately, I’m sure you can see with Sen. Sanders, there is a left part of the Democratic Party that is constantly looking for a champion in the Democratic primary process. You can go back to every single primary that’s happened, and there’s almost always a rise from the Left. You saw Bill Bradley in 2000 rise against Al Gore in this way, you saw Howard Dean— whom I worked for in 2003 and 2004—be very successful for a while. Ironically, Gov. Dean was not particularly liberal, but took very liberal positions on the war and on civil unions, which was the precursor for the gay marriage debate.

So what I see there is really Sen. Sanders capturing the energy that always exists and doing a very good job of trying to grow that out. But that’s really a phenomenon that I think you would have seen happen regardless of what was happening in the Republican primary.

Donald Trump—you know, I think there’s a few things that are going on in the Trump phenomenon. I think some of it has to do with America’s fascination with celebrity. Some of it is, I think he’s been treated differently by the press than the other candidates have because he is not a traditional elected official or candidate. He seems to be able to get away with saying things that other people would be held accountable for in a very interesting way. He’s also willing to say whatever it takes in the moment to get people to get excited about him.

If there truly is an outsider candidate that’s tapping into a frustration with the system, I think that’s more of a Trump phenomenon than one that you’re seeing on both sides of the aisle. I think the important thing to remember is that if you look at the rhythm of presidential primaries in the United States, there is usually a settling out that happens in the fall, heading into the caucuses and the first primary in New Hampshire, where sometimes these candidates that are in the extremes or that are slightly outsider candidates start to lose support, and more conventional start to gain support as we get close to people who actually cast their votes. So time will tell—every election is different. But that would be what’s interesting to watch, to see if that happens as we move into the winter.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

WINTER 2015 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 41

INTERVIEWS

INTERVIEW: FR. JAMES MARTIN with Gavin Sullivan Initially it was the fact that Jesuits were able to do so many things—you could be a writer and a Jesuit, you could be a social activist and a Jesuit, you could be a teacher and a Jesuit—it was that hyphenated priesthood that appealed to me.

But what keeps me (in addition to my vows of course) is the distinctive Jesuit spirituality of finding God in all things.

When you ultimately realized that you wanted to join the Jesuits, how did your peers at Penn receive that news?

Fr. James Martin, S.J. is a Jesuit priest, editor-at-large of America magazine, and author of over 10 books. Before entering the Jesuits, he graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and worked for General Electric. His debut novel The Abbey was released on October 13.

Why did you feel called to join the priesthood and the Jesuits in particular?

I went to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. After graduation in 1982, I took a job with GE, first in New York City and then in Stamford, Connecticut.

Eventually, I realized that I was in the wrong place and that no one had really asked me the question that I think should be asked of all young people, which is: “What would you do if you could do anything you wanted to?”

I got more and more miserable, and then one night I turned on the TV and saw a documentary about Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk. And that documentary was sufficiently interesting to prompt me to track down and purchase his autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain, which got me thinking about entering a religious order. Eventually I entered the Jesuits, but I didn’t really know much about the Jesuits.

At the beginning, they were recommended to me by a parish priest as an aside. [Laughs.] But on such asides are lives changed.

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They were horrified, absolutely horrified. As were my parents and the rest of my family. Wharton prepares you for a certain type of life, and once you get on that treadmill, you step off that treadmill and you’re in corporate America. That’s what my friends assumed I would be doing for the rest of my life, and I had really never evinced an interest in religion, nor was I particularly religious when I was at Penn.

So it came as a shock to them that I was even thinking about doing this. And that I would leave GE and enter the Jesuits was really appalling to a lot of my friends. Interestingly, I had been seeing a psychologist [who was] helping me through some of these decisions. When I announced it to my GE friends, one of my friends said, “I think you should see a psychologist.” And I said, “I am seeing a psychologist.” And he said, “I think you should see a different psychologist!”

[Laughs.]

How did you come to the position you’re in now: an author and priest with a very wide social media presence?

I started at America magazine more than 15 years ago, right after my ordination. Part of that work was dealing with the media, which it still is. So that’s an aspect of it. But it wasn’t until Facebook really started to take off that my publisher at the time, Loyola Press, said I needed a public Facebook page.

I resisted because I thought, “Oh, one more thing to do.”

But once I got going I realized that it was a form of ministry— that you are really helping people by connecting them with interesting articles and videos and posting meditations. And then I really enjoyed it, and it became a kind of community.

It’s definitely a ministry to help people in their religious lives and to help seekers and doubters, too.

INTERVIEWS

How did your social media followers come to recognize this as more than a marketing tool and rather, like you said, as a form of ministry?

I don’t want to speak for all 350,000 of them … but the founder of the Jesuits, St. Ignatius, said the goal of the Jesuits should be to “help souls.” That’s the goal of everything we do: all the books I write, all the articles I write, all the media appearances, all the stuff I post on social media, it’s all to try to help souls. There may be some promotion when I’m about to publish a book (as I am now), but most of it’s not [promotion].

Most of the time it’s articles that don’t have anything to do with America magazine. It’s a kind of clearinghouse for a lot of Catholic information.

And I think [my social media followers] recognized that pretty quickly. And I’d also be embarrassed to have a Facebook page that’s just self-promotional. It’s not only a threat to my humility but, practically speaking, it’s a real turnoff for people.

I’d be embarrassed to have a Facebook page or Twitter account that just promoted me. I’d be mortified.

I’ve started to be careful not to post photos of myself because of that. I think it’s a very self-aggrandizing. So when I post a photo of an event I’ve been to, I usually post the crowd or another group of people, or maybe me in a group of people.

But never just selfies. It’s embarrassing.

Do you think that traditional media outlets allow you to have a similarly enriching discussion?

Both forms of conversation have their pluses and minuses.

The plus of being on television is that you can say something in a very straightforward way, and it will reach millions of people without a lot of trolls responding. If you’re with a thoughtful interviewer, you can have a good conversation. The minus is that it’s usually very short unless you’re on a long segment on a talk show.

The plus of social media is that you can post an article that’s 5,000 words and have people respond to it. You can post a 30-minute video, it can be quite in-depth, and it can also be very accessible for people at any time and they can watch it in the privacy of their own home or office. The downside is that you run the risk of starting crazy arguments in the comments section—though more so on Facebook than Twitter, I think.

But that goes with the territory.

The other thing is that you can have an influence on how people view something. With the whole Kim Davis affair after the pope, I posted a link to an article and a million people viewed it. That’s a significant amount of people that you’re at least reaching. But then again, the downside is that some of the comments can be very hateful, especially in the religious world because people think they have God on their side.

When the story of Kim Davis’s meeting with the pope first broke, did you feel frustrated or betrayed by the initial coverage it received from media outlets before the full story was clear?

No. I felt more frustrated with her and her lawyers. I thought the media did a reasonably good job of covering it.

I think [the media] gave it more importance than it had. I think both the mainstream media and the consuming public should have known better. It’s not that hard to figure out that the pope meets with dozens of people each day when he’s on these trips. He probably doesn’t know one quarter of those whom he’s meeting with. They’re donors and Catholics and all sorts of people.

That really got blown out of proportion, but frankly I blame [Davis’s] lawyer for doing that. He was really the one that made it such a big deal. But in a sense, in retrospect, it was the perfect storm, because it had religion, it had politics, it had sex because it loosely touches on same-sex marriage, it had supposed secrecy.

If you could take one common idea about the Catholic Church that you think is mistaken, what would that be, and how would you like to correct it?

Just one? [Laughs.] That everyone in the Catholic Church thinks the same way. When people say, “What does the Church think about this?” I always say, “Well who in the Church? I mean, the pope? The Synod of Bishops? Your local bishop? Your pastor? The people in the pews? Because they’re the Church. The sisters in the United States? Priests?”

That’s the problem. ... And of course there’s some fundamentals, but it always makes me laugh when people say, “What does the Church say about this?” and I say, “What part?”

And then there’s the idea that everyone in the Church is, you name it, homophobic, sexist, racist, those kinds of things.

When you meet the people who are actually working in the Church, you’re usually disavowed of that pretty quickly.

And the third thing I have to say is this: [the notion that] priests and members of religious orders, like brothers and sisters, really live these secluded, unsophisticated, almost silly lives. You meet sisters who work with immigrant populations in the slums, you meet priests who work in refugee camps, you meet brothers who work in inner-city schools. These people know a lot more about life than you would think.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

WINTER 2015 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 43

ENDPAPER

BAD JOKES Matthew Disler

T

here is nothing quite like a joke that falls flat.

I say this from experience. While in Washington, D.C. this past summer, I set a personal goal of learning stand-up comedy by performing in at least one open mic a week. I’d show up to an inexplicably sticky bar in some yuppified corner of the city and do a five-minute set in which I repeated mildly revised versions of jokes about horse racing, ambulances, and The Avengers. I also talked about HGTV’s House Hunters a lot.

I learned that comedy is about building trust as much as anything else. Comedians construct unique characters and perspectives with the goal of making the audience accept them.

This task involves some manipulation: you misdirect, exaggerate, and sometimes lie in order to get them to see the absurdity of the world that you’re painting. When things go well, everyone buys into it. With a bad joke, the whole charade falls apart: it becomes obvious that you’re just a normal person using as many tricks as you can to get laughs.

Both comedians and politicians rely on projecting identities to the public. For comedians, these identities can be irreverent, callous, or even hyperbolic—the Stephen Colbert you see on stage is different than the Colbert you bump into at Starbucks.

For politicians, the personas are patriotic, intelligent, altruistic, and genuine. They take pictures in front of American flags and give inspiring speeches in front of bleachers filled with diverse constituents.

You can sense a code of conduct, language, and doublespeak that channels political action and thought. GOP presidential candidates’ economic packages proposed at the November 10 Fox Business/Wall St. Journal debate almost uniformly invoked a repeal of Obamacare (despite receiving almost no questions regarding the issue). Around elections, parties seem to cluster around certain key terms, as a New York Times infographic of the 2012 campaigns’ national conventions shows. The Global Language Monitor, an analytics firm that tracks language usage, determined the top 53 political buzzwords for the 2012 election.

Among them: “toxic politics,” “out-of-control spending,” and “obstructionist Congress.”

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In other words, politics, like comedy, relies on the creation of a certain type of reality. The characters that are built, and their interactions with the audience or electorate, are channeled by their use of language meant to elicit emotional responses. The words comedians and politicians use needs to have a punch to it, especially since the average political sound bite now hovers around nine seconds.

Both systems rely on the audience’s trust. But when people become skeptical of the nine-second sound bite, the rapport and trust between the person on the national stage and the audience on the voter rolls breaks down. This is the bad joke moment.

There seems to be widespread cynicism about American politics today. Think about just a few of the presidential candidates who have been criticized on questions of trust or credibility: Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, and Hillary Clinton.

In each case, the curtain seems to have drawn back to reveal misrepresentation by people asking to be voters’ representatives.

This is not to say that all politicians are liars, or that the political system is broken. Rather, I want to point out the importance of trust and note that political discourse has evolved in such a way that undermines public officials’ ability to maintain that trust. There is something inherent in short sound bites, buzzwords, and a rapid news cycle that encourages politicians to say things that do not capture the entire truth, and thus these practices should make us wary.

To see what happens when trust erodes, consider an international example: Brazil. The South American country is in the midst of a corruption scandal implicating leading politicians, officials, the state-owned oil company, and private construction firms. Now, presidential approval is at historically low levels, there have been a series of massive protests against the government calling for impeachments or resignations, and the executive and Congress are caught in deadlock.

It is hard to bounce back from a bad joke, but it can be done.

For the comedian, it involves gradually building trust up again with the audience: for example, you switch to a new joke, or you acknowledge your previous mistake. For politicians, the task is probably the same.

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