HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW
DEATH IN THE HEART OF TEXAS
GRASSROOTS COUNTERTERRORISM
VOLUME XLI NO. 4, WINTER 2014 HARVARDPOLITICS.COM
STATE OF THE NEWS
INTERVIEW: DR. SANJAY GUPTA
THE NEW HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW. ON SCREENS NEAR YOU. HARVARDPOLITICS.COM
STATE OF THE NEWS
6 Exclusive Look Valentina Perez
12 Organized to Polarize Mark Bode
9 Writing Pakistan Aisha Bhoori
15 It’s Not Fox’s Fault Vincent Monti
20 A Greener GOP? Gil Highet
FUNNY PAGES
WORLD
3 Wanted: Graphic Designer Joel Kwartler
26 Grassroots Counterterrorism Ali Hakim
CAMPUS
28 South Africa’s “Corrective Rape” Problem Farris Peale
4 Sexitas Samarth Gupta
UNITED STATES 17 Food Safety in Numbers Advik Shreekumar 23 Death in the Heart of Texas Zoë Hitzig
30 Toward a More Perfect Union Henry Dornier
ENDPAPER 44 Building Bridges Daniel Draper Lynch
32 Fed Up in Africa Derek Choi
BOOKS & ARTS 34 Silence and Solidarity Alicia Juang 36 The Object of the Game Anita Lo
INTERVIEWS 41 Dr. Sanjay Gupta Gal Koplewitz 42 Bret Stephens Rachael Hanna
38 How John Oliver Usurped a Genre Daniel Kenny Email: president@harvardpolitics.com. ISSN 0090-1032. Copyright 2014 Harvard Political Review. All rights reserved. Image credits: Photographer: 4- Harvard Sex Week. Wikimedia Commons: 15 - Tommy Gilligan; 17- Mtaylor444; 22 - Jmcdaid; 26 - Staff Sgt. Adam Mancini, U.S. Army; 28 - Happenstance; 40 - Official GDC. Flickr: 20/21- Agustín Ruiz; 23 - Ken Yuel.
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FROM THE PRESIDENT
HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW A Nonpartisan Undergraduate Journal of Politics, Est. 1969—Vol. XLI, No. 4
EDITORIAL BOARD PRESIDENT: Daniel Backman PUBLISHER: Olivia Zhu MANAGING EDITOR: Matt Shuham ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR: Daniel Draper Lynch ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR: Gram Slattery STAFF DIRECTOR: Holly Flynn CAMPUS SENIOR EDITOR: Jenny Choi CAMPUS ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Taonga Leslie COVERS SENIOR EDITOR: Priyanka Menon COVERS ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Brooke Kantor U.S. SENIOR EDITOR: Colin Diersing U.S. ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Harry Hild U.S. ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Emily Wang WORLD SENIOR EDITOR: Matthew Disler WORLD ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Rachael Hanna WORLD ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Pooja Podugu B&A SENIOR EDITOR: Rachel Wong B&A ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Samir Durrani B&A ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Nancy Ko INTERVIEWS EDITOR: Gavin Sullivan HUMOR EDITOR: Jay Alver BUSINESS MANAGER: John Acton CIRCULATION MANAGER: Colin Criss DESIGN EDITOR: Ashley Chen MULTIMEDIA EDITOR: Johanna Lee ASSOCIATE MULTIMEDIA EDITOR: Joe Choe ASSOCIATE MULTIMEDIA EDITOR: Avika Dua WEBMASTER: Tom Silver WEBMASTER: Kim Soffen
SENIOR WRITERS Sam Finegold, Zeenia Framroze, Krister Koskelo, Paul Lisker, Zak Lutz, Ben Shyrock, Ross Svenson
STAFF Nicholas Bonstow, Olivia Campbell, Jaime Cobham, Hana Connelly, Sarah Coughlon, Tim Devine, Kate Donahue, Jacob Drucker, David Freed, Pietro Galeone, Jenny Gao, Jonah Hahn, Richard He, Aliya Itzkowitz, Sarani Jayawardena, Jonathan Jeffrey, Kaitlyn Jeong, Arjun Kapur, Shahrukh Khan, Andrew Ma, Blake McGhghy, Clara McNulty-Finn, Jacob Meisel, Osaremen Okolo, Andrea Ortiz, Meg Panetta, Valentina Perez, Neil Purdy, John Pulice, Ellen Robo, Nicolas Rossenblum, Zack Royle, Herny Shah, Aizhan Shorman, Erin Shortell, Advik Shreekumar, Wright Smith, Austin Tymins, Alec Villalpando, Celena Wang, Selina Wang, Carlos Xu, Carolyn Ye, Amy Zhan, Danny Zhuang
ADVISORY BOARD Jonathan Alter Richard L. Berke Carl Cannon E.J. Dionne, Jr.
Walter Isaacson Whitney Patton Maralee Schwartz
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State of the HPR After a midterm election turnout of abysmal proportions, amid grinding government gridlock, it may seem strange to say that this moment feels like an especially exciting time to be covering politics. Two well-known trends—disengagement and disappointment with politics and other traditional institutions, in the United States at least, along with rapid changes in the news industry—mean more voices are contributing in more ways to conversations that established actors have failed to address. “State of the News” provides a snapshot of the news today. Its focus, however, sidesteps the well-worn discussions of how we consume news, asking instead about what we consume, why we consume it, and to what effect. Mark Bode explores the varied organizational structures that underlie ideological polarization of the three major cable news networks. Vincent Monti argues that this media polarization matters less for democracy than the conventional wisdom might hold. Valentina Perez then turns our attention to one of America’s most popular forms of media—tabloids—arguing that seeming contradictions within tabloid culture mirror fundamental inconsistencies in the American Dream itself. And Aisha Bhoori explores an unintended consequence of limits on press freedom in Pakistan: Western journalism filling the void left by a lack of local reporting. But as the Harvard Political Review dives into underexplored aspects of the wider news landscape—and the 46th Masthead’s last issue goes to print—I wanted to dedicate this page to taking the reader inside some of our publication’s changes over the past year. As regular HPR readers will know, our magazine redesign two years ago changed the print face of this publication, displaying articles more readably and beautifully than ever. The quarterly magazine has established a brand on campus and beyond, with a recognizable aesthetic in addition to its high-quality content. And just as our print presence has flourished, the HPR’s place in the everchanging online media landscape has reached new heights. Over the past year alone, readership of harvardpolitics.com has nearly tripled. HPR content has been featured on outlets from “Good Morning
America” and TIME Magazine to the Times of India. Every day, a greater number of readers from a wider array of backgrounds are clicking, reading, sharing, and discussing the HPR’s unique brand of undergraduate political analysis and commentary, giving our writers more impact than ever on the national and international debate. In recognition of this solidifying position as a go-to web media source, the HPR embarked this year on a full redesign of its website. The new site, launched in October and entirely designed and implemented by HPR members Andrew Seo, Ashley Chen, Kim Soffen, Tom Silver, and Olivia Zhu, incorporates the magazine’s fonts, colorschemes, and many other design elements, universalizing the print magazine’s high standards of aesthetic quality across every platform. It creates an easier reader experience, with more ways to navigate the HPR’s breadth of content. It allows for greater multimedia functionality, including a new platform for long-form articles. Most importantly, the site forms a solid foundation for further web innovation for years to come. All the while, the magazine has challenged itself to further expand its breadth of style and inquiry. From Gram Slattery’s deep dive into climate activism on Harvard’s campus to Zoë Hitzig’s reflections on state-sanctioned execution from America’s death penalty capital—not to mention the eclectic mix of narrative, creative nonfiction, and visual art found in the HPR’s first printed Literary Supplement, “The Politics of Memory”—HPR writers today are exploring fresher topics with greater stylistic variety than ever. For these and many other reasons, I have never been more excited about the state and future of the HPR. As Masthead 46 passes to 47, led by the indomitable PresidentElect Priyanka Menon, the HPR’s place as the center of political writing on Harvard’s campus and an indispensable source for readers around the world is strong.
Daniel Backman President
FUNNY PAGES
WANTED: GRAPHIC DESIGNER Joel Kwartler
H
ey there! NNC Network News (motto: “Rite Now Tonite!”) is looking to hire a senior graphic designer for our news station. A LITTLE ABOUT US We’ve tried just about everything to get people to still watch televised news, and we found that using an obscene number of graphics—around three per second—holds the viewer’s attention longest. That, or the strobe-like flashing of the rapidly changing diagrams causes the viewer to have a seizure. In either case, they don’t change the channel.
A LITTLE ABOUT YOU, IDEALLY You’ve worked as a senior graphic designer at a Fortune 500 company but want to do something that has a real impact, especially on upper-middle-class suburban stay-at-home parents. You’re sick of the corporate life, the numerous benefits, and the health insurance coverage. You would prefer to work for free, but you will (reluctantly) accept your payment in Chuck E. Cheese’s tokens if we have to pay you for legal reasons.
A LITTLE ABOUT THE JOB Above all, you need to be fast to survive in the high-pressure environment of television news. Speed is the name of the game. Speed is also the name of the drug in our executive producer. You should know when it’s okay to cut corners, like when drawing a map of Kazakhstan (nobody knows what it looks like, so we just use an old map of Ohio), and when it’s not okay to cut corners, like when drawing a map of Colorado.
OTHER DESIGN TASKS MIGHT INCLUDE Making text subtitles like “County Commissioner Gives Remarks on Land Use Permit Reapplication Denial Appeal Extension Decision” sexy, inviting, sexy, accessible, sexy, and sexually attractive. Creating exciting eye-catching animated maps for coverage of wars, revolts, and overcast weather. Turning our average poll results pie chart graphics into actual pies we can eat afterwards, while still maintaining factual integrity down to the individual pecan. Redesigning our title sequence to include more explosions, things on fire, and scantily clad women without offending any single demographic. Overlaying photorealistic hair in real time over our midday anchor’s balding spots. Coming up with graphics so attention demanding that they snap any viewers that might hypothetically be having seizures out of their seizures.
OTHER QUALIFICATIONS Communication skills. Familiarity with Mac Computers. Rabies vaccine (our executive producer can get intense, haha!*). Sense of humor. Sense of smell. Bulletproof vest. If this sounds like Fun!, please send your cover letter and résumé to hr@nnc.com. *As per Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations, we are required to note this is not actually a joke.
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CAMPUS
SEXITAS
Samarth Gupta
W
ith thousands of young adults suddenly free of the parental yoke, it is no surprise that sex plays a large role in college. And with sex comes the necessity for colleges to engage students in sexual health conversations that encourage and support safe and healthy sexual decisions. These conversations are especially pertinent given that students come with different levels of knowledge about the matter: college may be the first time many students experience sex at all. Currently, such dialogue is lacking on Harvard’s campus. During the freshman class’s Opening Days, the college traditionally holds mandatory workshops on important topics including sexual assault, alcohol safety, and diversity. However, this year the college provided no workshops on sexual health. This lack of sexual health education and support pervades life at Harvard even after freshman year. Condom availability on campus is spotty, particularly in Harvard Yard. Furthermore, condom dispensers are rare, often empty, and stationed in buildings that may cause students discomfort.
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While Harvard does not need to go as far as the College of New Jersey and drive a condom ambulance around campus, it can improve through initiating a dialogue with students on sexual health and better encouraging healthy decisions.
CONDOM USAGE Increasing the use of condoms on campus has long been regarded as a matter of public health. In 2013, the Centers for Disease Control found that nearly half of the 20 million sexually transmitted infections contracted each year affect young people ages 15 to 24. Reportedly, by the age of 25, one in two sexually active people will have contracted a sexually transmitted infection. The spread of STIs may be increasing in colleges today because of the prevalence of so-called “hookup culture,” on display at weekend parties and on social media apps like Tinder. This high rate of STIs among young people coincides with a recent decrease in condom usage. During the AIDS epidemic of the 1990s, condom usage on college campuses reached its peak, when about
60 percent of students told CDC researchers that they used condoms. However, in a more recent survey by the American College Health Association, less than 50 percent of college students answered that they “always or mostly” use condoms. A recent study published by the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada supported the ACHA findings, showing that nearly 50 percent of sexually active college students are not using condoms. And researchers from the Miriam Hospital’s Centers for Behavioral and Preventative Medicine found that “women gradually use condoms less frequently during their first year of college.”
SEXUAL HEALTH DIALOGUE In spite of these startling statistics, there is minimal dialogue around sexual health on Harvard’s campus. While countless student groups crowd Opening Days eager to give workshops or lead discussions for freshmen, little is said about sexual health. Harvard Dean of Freshmen Thomas Dingman told the HPR that Opening Days does not feature a “conver-
CAMPUS
WILL HARVARD LEAD ON SEXUAL HEALTH? sation that’s particularly robust about sexual health and sexually transmitted diseases. … I don’t think we do a particularly good job.” Dingman noted that numerous groups push the Freshman Dean’s Office to add more programming to the Opening Days agenda, making the choice over new additions to the schedule a yearly challenge. Regardless, the College already employs many external resources and student groups, such as the Drug and Alcohol Peer Advisors, for Opening Days workshops. Using the same strategy, the College can use student groups focused on sexual health to begin an important dialogue with freshmen from the start of college. Even after freshman orientation, any dialogue that does exist around sexual health remains insufficient. Sexual Health Education and Advocacy Throughout Harvard launched its annual Sex Week on November 2, featuring opportunities for students to attend discussions and workshops on sexual health. However, Sex Week occurs during a week when many students are burdened with midterm exams, making them less likely to attend these events than during the first several weeks of the semester. In a written statement, the Harvard University Health Services’ Department of Health Promotion and Education (HPE) announced that it is “currently working to expand the sexual health curriculum on campus” and is “working closely with [Harvard Sexual Health and Relationship Counselors, or SHARC] to develop Harvard’s first Sexual Health 101 workshop.” The HPE believes that this workshop “will be the first step in creating more open dialogue about sexual health on campus.” Charlie Lovett ’15, co-director of SHARC, believes these workshops are crucial for basic sexual health information, such as, “how to put on a condom; what is a dental dam; what is a female condom; how do I get tested at UHS; will my parents find out; if I want to get free birth control, is that an option; what about emergency contraception?” SHARC’s workshop will fill an urgent gap in sexual health education for students and, if implemented for all students, will provide the college with an avenue to begin the conversation on sexual health.
TAKING ACTION Harvard has great potential to both improve students’ knowledge about sexual health and foster an environment of safe sexual activity. The National Campaign to End Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and Advocates for Youth has shown that comprehensive sexual education can both increase condom usage and lead to a significant decline in STIs. The Sexual Health 101 workshop
can begin the conversation about sexual health on campus with freshmen, especially if the College adds it to mandatory Opening Days activities. Lovett told the HPR that this workshop is “the first workshop that talks about sexual health on campus in Harvard history” and that the historic lack of discussion is “ridiculous.” He said that it “shouldn’t be on students to actively seek out” sexual health information. Rather, this information is “something that everyone should know.” Moreover, increased accessibility of condoms has demonstrated unmistakable results in students’ sexual behavior. A Sex Information and Education Council of Canada study concludes that “making condoms accessible to young people does not result in earlier or more frequent sexual activity.” Rather, “condom distribution programs can significantly increase condom use among teens who are sexually active,” driving down the number of sexually transmitted infections. Dingman has previously expressed support for increasing condom accessibility, stating, “Whatever we can do to make it easy, we should do.” Meanwhile, many students are not even aware of those condoms that are already available on campus. When asked whether students are aware of these resources, Dingman told the HPR, “[the FDO] thinks we’ve done a good job of putting condoms out in places that people frequent and getting the word out that they’re there. And then we hear students say, ‘I don’t know anything about it.’” Another problem for condom accessibility at the College is a stigma surrounding the locations at which condoms are available. Although there are many locations providing free condoms—freshman dorms, upperclassman houses, peer counseling centers, the Center for Wellness, the Women’s Center, the Office of BGLTQ Student Life, and the Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response—there is a risk that students will feel insecure or nervous at these locations because they are uncomfortable taking condoms in the presence of others. Dingman told the HPR that if condoms are only available “in an arena [students are] unfamiliar with or [students] feel awkward in, then we are not doing a very good job.” The levels of unsafe sex and sexually transmitted infections at Harvard are “on par with national standards,” according to Lovett. He concluded, “Whether … you choose to have sex or not to have sex, it’s great to have the resources and the tools so that you can help someone else make their own decision, or so the decision you’re making is one you’re comfortable with.” Harvard should take charge in improving sexual health education and condom accessibility, setting an example for colleges across the nation.
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STATE OF THE NEWS
EXCLUSIVE LOOK
THE MOST FASCINATING PERSON YOU’VE EVER HEARD OF
YOURSELF 6 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW WINTER 2014
STATE OF THE NEWS
Valentina Perez
O
n newsstands across the United States, the faces that most often stare out at us from magazine covers are not those of political leaders or victims of war but Kim Kardashian, George Clooney, Beyoncé, and the like. Celebrities and their lives consistently prove to be fascinating and undeniably profitable. Celebrity sells. The significance of the celebrity news industry lies in its size and ability to captivate the curiosity of millions of Americans. The industry’s breadth is sizable: celebrity news consumes entire magazines, websites, and television channels, from People and Perezhilton.com to E! News and TMZ. It also plays a role in men and women’s fashion and lifestyle magazines that focus less on celebrity gossip yet rely on celebrities’ photographs, magazine spreads, and lifestyles to attract readers and generate content. The industry is worth billions of dollars. People magazine alone generated $1.1 billion in advertising revenue in 2013. But for all of their popularity tabloids are inherently contradictory: they build celebrities up at the same time that they tear them down, at once celebrating marriages, new babies, and flashy cars while scandalizing divorces and drug use. And while the prevalence of tabloids and celebrity news is not unique to the United States, their popularity has particular meaning in the American context. In reality, tabloids are just like us. The American values of meritocracy and equality clash just as readily as the topics listed on the front page of People: in all their contradiction, tabloids reflect the priorities and aspirations of the American public. Though tabloids focus intensely on the lives of celebrities, they ultimately reveal more about Americans’ fundamental desires and insecurities than they do about their actual subjects.
SNEAK PEEK AT THE LAVISH LIFE YOU WANT TO LIVE Tabloids are filled with conspicuous and lavish demonstrations of wealth, from pictures of celebrities going on expensive shopping sprees to “tours” of multi-million dollar homes. Take the October 30th story in Star Magazine (one of thousands similar to it) titled “EXCLUSIVE PHOTOS: Owen Wilson Buys His Baby Mama a House!” detailing actor Owen Wilson’s $1.5 million home purchase. Readers are exposed to celebrities’ wealth and to the expensive world that they inhabit. Importantly, the level of conspicuous consumption depicted in most celebrity news outlets is unachievable by any but the richest Americans. Such fascination with wealth and luxury, some say, may be due to a natural curiosity with things that we can’t have. In an interview with the HPR, Ellis Cashmore, author of Celebrity/Culture and a professor at Staffordshire University, expressed his belief that tabloids “helped cultivate a taste among
us consumers for following the lives of others” in a form of acceptable and respectable voyeurism. In America, this voyeuristic taste must be contextualized within the prevalent ideal of the American Dream, the belief that “anyone can make it in America” with hard work and dedication: our version of meritocracy. This depiction of meritocracy, and the fruits of hard work, has been consistent in American public life in the 20th century. Jazz Age advertisements sold cigarettes and washing machines with images of smiling, middle class families displaying their wealth and happiness for consumers to see, and this trend continued for decades. Americans saw in the newspaper, on the radio, and on television that version of themselves that they aspired to be—secure, comfortable members of the upper class. The natural human desire to improve one’s condition and life is magnified in America, where our meritocratic values and systems perpetuate the belief that hard work and drive can help anyone “make it.” And when tabloids rose to popularity in the ’50s and ’60s, detailing the lives of Elvis Presley or Jackie Kennedy, readers saw their own lives in the glossy pages. In many ways, tabloids narrate this step in the American Dream, too: the process by which celebrities—standing in for normal Americans—use their agency to secure their hold on success.The amorphous, unpredictable nature of celebrity, in which public opinion decides who is a celebrity and for how long they remain famous, means that celebrities must create and maintain their own fame. In the same way that Americans start companies or engage in civic leadership, for example, to create success for themselves, celebrities maneuver fame and the media to remain relevant. Becoming a celebrity represents an increase in status, wealth, and fame that aligns with the upward social mobility which most Americans strive for. In an interview with the HPR, Susan Drucker, a professor of media studies at Hofstra University, elaborated on how the accessibility of celebrity has made it more desirable: “The whole ‘celebrification’ process I think is a much more open, democratic process ... I think that becoming famous has become much more part of, in a sense, the American Dream. That, because it seems achievable, I think it becomes much more of the dream of more people.”
“STARS: THEY’RE JUST LIKE US!” Open any tabloid magazine today and you will find a section with a variation of this title. These sections show celebrities doing things that “regular people” do, like going to the supermarket, walking their dogs, carrying their own shopping bags, and applying sunscreen. They focus on trivial matters but reflect readers’ desires to know that celebrities are similar to them in some ways. In many ways, they also reflect an equalizing impulse.
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STATE OF THE NEWS
Tabloids expose the lives of the rich and famous in both adoring and unflattering ways, but ultimately they are more a mirror of the values and priorities already existing in American life.
Another manifestation of this desire in tabloids is nastier and far more pervasive: negative coverage and speculation about private aspects of celebrities’ lives. In the same magazine in which a celebrity like Kim Kardashian is admired for her wealth and luxury, she is heavily criticized and even ridiculed, as when her 2013 Met Gala dress was compared to a couch. Celebrity news feeds off the private details of celebrities’ lives, and the more dramatic the news, the better (and the more profitable). Few things are off limits: breakups, divorce, financial and legal struggles, weight fluctuation, adultery, and professional failure are all consistent topics of tabloid stories. Tabloids also cover more serious situations like criminal actions and jail time; notable examples include TMZ’s exclusive breaks on Rihanna’s domestic abuse by Chris Brown and videos of Ray Rice beating his fiancée along with, more recently, “Real Housewives of New Jersey” star Teresa Guidice’s 15 month-long jail sentence due to tax evasion. This harsh, negative coverage paints a stark contrast to the positive adoration of celebrities’ lifestyles in the same outlets (and often in the same edition of a magazine). Because they embody so much of the American Dream, we view celebrities with the same democratic principles that underlie that dream, namely the equality of all people. Tabloids’ ability and willingness to criticize celebrities embodies these democratic principles because they engage not only in adoration of celebrities, but in criticism and ridicule as well. By focusing on the negative aspects of celebrities’ lives that are often the exact opposite of the seemingly perfect lifestyles they lead, tabloids equalize celebrities by demonstrating that they encounter the same challenges that other Americans do. Celebrity status in America is earned, not inherited, meaning that it is easy to imagine celebrities as ordinary citizens because Americans know that, no so long ago, they were just as ordinary. As celebrity status arguably becomes easier to achieve, the equalizing impulse of celebrity news and tabloids becomes stronger. Publicly discussing how celebrities experience heart-
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break, betrayal, financial loss, and other negative situations demonstrates that we all share something very human: a life that is never perfect.
BEYOND THE GLITTER AND GOLD: THE LARGER RELEVANCE OF CELEBRITY NEWS Tabloids’ reflections of Americans’ desire for the American Dream and for affirmation of a basic level of equality are related but paradoxical. Just as these foundational American values are central to our national identity yet often coexist uncomfortably, these principles are reflected in tabloids in a paradoxical way. Nicolas Cage is a useful example of this contrast: while he was originally celebrated for his lavish lifestyle and early talent, his bankruptcy declaration in 2009 as a result of his over-spending garnered scathing coverage from sources as varied as US Weekly and CNN. Celebrity news is often dismissed as frivolous, wasteful, and unworthy of attention. However, the size, profit, and mass appeal of celebrity news cannot be ignored. As Cashmore wrote in his 2006 book, “Like it or loathe it, celebrity culture is with us: it surrounds us and even invades us. It shapes our thought and conduct, style, and manner. It affects and is affected not just by hardcore fans but by entire populations.” Tabloids expose the lives of the rich and famous in both adoring and unflattering ways, but ultimately they are more a mirror of the values and priorities already existing in American life: the deep-seated, irreconcilable conflicts between leveling the playing field and celebrating success. These values drive not only what we want to know about celebrities but also what we expect from other news, and what we expect from American life. As a mirror into the American psyche, understanding celebrity news and tabloids as legitimate media is critical in allowing deeper insight into the changing media landscape we see today.
STATE OF THE NEWS
WRITING PAKISTAN Aisha Bhoori
THE EAST-WEST DICHOTOMY IN PAKISTANI JOURNALISM Aisha Bhoori JUNE 17, 2006 NORTH WAZIRISTAN (FEDERALLY ADMINISTERED TRIBAL AREAS) A body, handcuffed and shot in the head from behind, is found in a Miranshah marketplace. It belongs to freelance journalist Hayatullah Khan. Six months prior, Khan had been abducted by five armed men after publishing a photo essay that implicated Americans in the death of senior Al-Qaeda official Abu Hamza Rabia. Whereas the Musharraf government asserted that Rabia blew himself up while experimenting with explosives, Khan’s essay revealed pieces of shrapnel bearing a CIAcontrolled Predator drone’s designation “AGM-114,” the words “guided missile,” and the initials “U.S.” at the blast site. MAY 30, 2011 ISLAMABAD A victim of torture, still wearing a suit, a tie, and shoes, lies mangled in the Upper Jhelum Canal. Saleem Shahzad had vanished two days earlier after disseminating a scathing criticism of alleged connections between Al-Qaeda and Pakistani naval officers. During a press conference two months later, Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, states that Shahzad’s detention and murder were “sanctioned by the [Pakistani] government.”
APRIL 19, 2014 KARACHI Members of the Karachi police force patrol the street in front of Aga Khan Hospital, ensuring that only governmentsanctioned individuals can enter the city’s most exclusive health clinic. Wearing bulletproof vests and armed with automatic weapons, they remain vigilant for signs of suspicious activity. Inside, hundreds of bouquets decorate the lobby of the hospital’s private ward. The largest bouquet is from the police. A placard on it reads, “Get Well, Hamid Mir.” Mir, Pakistan’s top-rated TV journalist and one of the most vocal critics of the nation’s intelligence agencies, recuperates upstairs. Hours earlier, he was shot six times—through the ribs, thigh, stomach and hand—in an attempt on his life. Pakistan’s largest news channel and Mir’s employer, Geo News, took an unprecedented move in solidifying the contention between the holders of power and those who critique the system. Just after the attack, the channel flashed a picture of the accused on screen: Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence chief, Lieutenant General Zaheer ul-Islam. The national broadcasting of this allegation prompted a three-page petition from the Ministry of Defense, accusing Geo of launching a “vicious campaign” against the ISI and demanding that its operating license be revoked. “The telecast in question was aimed at undermining the integrity and tarnishing the
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STATE OF THE NEWS
image of [a] state institution and its officers and falsely linking it with terrorist outfits.” Geo’s president, Imran Aslam, defended his channel’s stance on Mir’s attack in an interview with The Guardian. “There was a time that if [the government] didn’t like what you wrote they censored you. They cut out a word or a line. If they got really angry they got your editor fired. Now they just shoot you.” Aslam’s observation of his government’s transition from censorship to the bullet as its preferred defense mechanism underscores a compromised freedom of the press that began during the rise of “Westernized” Pakistani reporting in the latter half of the 1980s.
“THE THREE MOST BEAUTIFUL WORDS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE” Najam Sethi conceived the idea for Pakistan’s first independent newspaper while behind bars. Imprisoned in 1984 for writing From Jinnah to Zia, a scathing portrayal of General Zia-ul-Haq as a dictator, Sethi lamented the lack of protest from Pakistani publications regarding the trumped-up preventive law charges he faced. As a result, he sought to create a written medium free from socially induced fear of political retaliation. The first issue of The Friday Times was distributed in May 1989, and the newspaper soon emerged as an institutionalized platform for dissent for Pakistani activists who previously self-published. Five months earlier, Pakistan, a nation founded on Islamic principles, experienced a threat to fundamentalism with the ascent of its first female prime minister, Benazir Bhutto. In her acceptance speech, Bhutto implicitly associated her platform with a Western mode of communication. “We gather together to celebrate freedom, to celebrate democracy, to celebrate the three most beautiful words in the English language: ‘We the People.’” A Harvard graduate and proponent of social-capitalist policies that strived for a “synthesis between adherence to the faith and adjustment to the modern age,” Bhutto distinguished herself as a politician committed to loosening theological constraints on the interpretation of law enforcement. The Friday Times soon began publishing editorials that espoused Bhutto’s emphasis on deregulation of the financial sector, flexible labor markets, and more importantly, association with the West. Its editorials, revered by Pakistani intellectuals for their eloquent English prose and controversial stances, seemed to embody Bhutto’s reverence for “the three most beautiful words in the English language.” Consequently, even when Bhutto was dismissed by conservative Nawaz Sharif in 1990, her ideals were not. Sharif’s government attempted to counter Bhutto’s Westernization campaign with one of Islamization. It authorized the Ministry of Religion to prepare reports on subversive activity and to establish the Nifaz-e-Shariat Committee (Sharia Establishment Committee). The Friday Times responded by launching an investigation into the government’s disposal of billions of rupees to the Ittefaq Group of Industries—Sharif’s personal steel mill. On May 8, 1999, hours before distributing a report on this corrupt allocation of money, Sethi was taken from his
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home by Punjab Police personnel. Charged with “Condemnation of the Creation of the State and Advocacy of Abolition of its Sovereignty,” Sethi was held in a detention center in Lahore for over a month and was released only upon the request of Amnesty International. The Sharif administration’s targeting of Sethi signaled Pakistani journalists’ status as a dying breed. Since 1992, the year the Committee to Protect Journalists first began compiling data, 56 journalists have been killed in Pakistan. While this number underscores Pakistan’s broader transgressions of human rights statutes, it also catapults the issue of freedom of the press in Pakistan to the forefront of international politics. By silencing the journalists who attempt to expose the government’s hypocrisy, Pakistani politicians have given themselves unfettered autonomy to construct the image they desire of Pakistan, free from the challenge of dissenting voices. This is perhaps best expressed by a 1995 editorial in The Friday Times: “[Religious extremists] do not care about minority rights, they do not care about the disastrous consequences of the immoderate image Pakistan presents to the world outside.” The dearth of Pakistani journalists able to safely report on their nation has shifted the duty of investigative reporting onto those across the ocean. Unobstructed by nationalistic restraints, American journalists are neither actors nor subjects in Pakistan’s political sphere. Rather, from their place in the periphery, they can craft and publish microcosmic observations on the Pakistani people, thereby shaping Pakistan’s macroscopic world image.
NEWTON’S THIRD LAW: A WESTERN CONSTRUCTION OF AN EASTERN NARRATIVE Ethan Casey landed on Kashmiri soil under the impression that he would leave in a manner of weeks after covering the explosion of a local mosque for Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post. Instead, his 1995 visit to the disputed Pakistani valley became the first of three. Casey, an American born and raised in Wisconsin, began his career as a journalist by working in Bangkok. “Reporting for newspapers with limited space and attention spans, I learned the discipline and value of explaining something irreducibly complex to uninformed readers far away, in chunks of digestible size,” he remarked to the HPR. Yet, his brief immersion in Kashmiri culture prompted the realization that “to understand [the world] is a more urgent task than to judge or change it.” Casey returned to Pakistan eight years later to gain this understanding. In 2003, he began teaching journalism at Beaconhouse National University in Lahore. Through a blog-based curriculum in which students wrote articles on Pakistani policy issues for his online discussion forum, Blue Ear, Casey hoped to connect Pakistani students to Western readers, debunking the stereotypes prevalent in both hemispheres. He recalled the catalyst for his interest in the intersection between journalism and Pakistani politics: a man from the Balochistan province who observed, “‘Politics is a dangerous field. There must be a response. Newton’s third law.’” Casey’s equal and opposite reaction materialized in the
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form of Alive and Well in Pakistan, a memoir that purported to “humanize Pakistanis for a global audience and give Pakistanis worldwide an honest, sympathetic portrayal of their situation in the contemporary world.” In contrast to the explicit anti-government critiques circulated by The Friday Times, Casey’s memoir offered an alternative, more innocuous subversion of Pakistan’s political hegemony. In disclosing to us student Zunera Khalid’s views of the Islamic principle of feminine modesty and acquaintance Ahmed Rashid’s concerns about the Taliban’s influence on Peshawar, the narrative offered an intimate portrayal of the Pakistani populous itself. The exhaustive account of dialogues with locals concerning issues such as local cricket matches and the Monica Lewinsky scandal undermined the perception of the Pakistani government as a direct representation of its constituents. U.S. Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) praised Alive and Well in Pakistan for its reminder that “whatever the political situation or the state of relations between governments [American and Pakistani], most Pakistanis ... live and suffer on the front lines of terrorism.” By integrating the life experiences of various Pakistanis into a coherent story that places himself, a Westerner, as an agent, Casey formed his version of a Pakistani national identity, independent of the government and accessible to Western audiences. The Western construction of an Eastern people’s narrative, while not a replacement for the exposés conducted by the likes of The Friday Times, can achieve a commendable end: demonstrating the antithesis between big P and little p politics while propelling the creation of a nuanced national identity.
A FORM BY ANY OTHER NAME Casey’s memoir, drafted from the subjective, self-proclaimed role as the Pakistanis’ “friend,” is one form of Western journalistic construction. Another exists in the detached analysis generated by publications such as Foreign Affairs. A vehicle for debates over the direction of U.S. international policy among members of the American establishment, the journal embodies
the politics of reporting on Pakistani politics. Take, for example, Stephen Krasner’s assertion of an “obvious conclusion: Pakistan should be treated as a hostile power.” The statement, which appeared in the January/February 2012 issue, delineates a clear foreign relations paradigm. Given its publication at the beginning of an election year in which President Obama was seeking reelection—and given Krasner’s status as a senior fellow at the Republican-associated Hoover Institute and former director of policy planning at the State Department under the Bush administration—the statement may be more reflective of American politics than it is of Pakistan. The article, “Talking Tough to Pakistan,” urges antagonistic treatment to induce Islamabad to comply with American demands. By observing that, “for decades, the United States has sought to buy Pakistani cooperation with aid: $20 billion worth since 9/11 alone,” Krasner commoditizes the two countries’ relationship, concocting a transactional evaluation of Pakistan as an entity rather than a composite of individuals. Proposing a “combination of credible threats and future promises,” including the provision of military assistance programs and “political arrangements in Kabul that would reduce Islamabad’s fear of India’s influence,” Krasner engages in a cost-benefit reductionism of Pakistani politics. While the article’s disappointment with governmental inefficiency parallels the sentiments expressed in The Friday Times and Casey’s memoir, it is also distinctly different. It leaves no room for Pakistani voices. Krasner’s piece offers a pertinent, if unintended, view of the American government’s self-interest. Yet it also further reiterates the danger in leaving the void in independent Pakistani journalism unfilled. Constricted freedom of the Pakistani press has forcibly relegated Pakistani journalists to the periphery of politics. Ironically, the Pakistani government’s targeting of Westernized Pakistani publications has prompted American journalists to fill the void themselves. Ultimately, Pakistan’s national impression, whether through the individual narrative or social scientific examination, has become an increasingly Westernmolded narrative.
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ORGANIZED TO POLARIZE HOW BUSINESS SHAPES POLITICS ON THE AIRWAVES Mark Bode
“MIXED MESSAGE? Obama strikes bipartisan tone — but vows exec action” — Fox News “OBAMA REACHES OUT” — MSNBC “Obama to Voters: ‘I hear you.’” — CNN The night after the 2014 midterm elections, the big three cable news networks headlined their websites with stories of President Obama’s speech concerning the previous night’s events. The headlines were a perfect reflection of the current state of the leading cable news networks. Out of one event, three distinct takes had emerged: one conservative, one liberal, and one toeing the line in between. The sentiments of the three stories were products of each network’s well-defined brand. These brands have been entrenched within the networks over the past decade, each shaped by some degree of profit seeking and some degree of ideology. These ideologically opposed channels have contributed to the well-recognized trend of media polarization. Republicans and Democrats alike trade barbs over who is to blame for the trend, with books and articles from each side outlining the trespasses of the other. Such a toxic environment has led public trust in the media to fall to 40 percent, down from 85 percent in 1973. Notably, the polarization of cable news channels occurred independently of the traditional major media companies. A 2013 Princeton study, “Media and Political Polarization,” found that longtime media outlets like NBC experienced little or no
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polarization in the cable news era, despite the polarization of cable news. Clearly, the sources of cable news polarization merit further investigation.
CONDITIONS FOR POLARIZATION The modern era of cable news began with the deregulation of the media industry. Heidi Tworek, a history professor at Harvard who studies the media and the news, observed that “there’s a regulatory environment that allows this kind of business model to emerge.” Tworek pointed to the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which made it possible for more cable operators to distribute their products, as a key turning point in the development of the current polarized culture. Gabriel Sherman, who covers the media for New York Magazine, told the HPR that the FCC’s repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, which required a balance of opinion during broadcasts, opened the door for programs and networks to choose more explicit ideological stances, governed only by the market. At the time of the decision in 1987, FCC Chair Dennis Patrick claimed that the doctrine had stifled democratic debate by pushing channels away from controversial topics. After the doctrine’s repeal, channels had no qualms about taking up such controversial topics, often in strikingly partisan ways. Sherman also pointed to another, more technical factor as a key element in the rise of polarized media: the switch from analog to digital channels. This development sidestepped the prohibitively expensive process of physically laying wires for
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However, Fox’s partisan content cannot be attributed exclusively to its administrative structure. There is a distinct right-leaning ideology that provides the power behind the network’s success.
new channels. The combination of taking away both physical and regulatory limits on channels lowered the entry barriers in the cable television market. Once these barriers fell, the rise of partisan news was fueled by long-simmering complaints of bias, usually aimed at the three major networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC. Many conservatives saw a distinctly liberal bent in these supposedly “objective” stations and were eager to switch when Fox News began its ascent in the mid-’90s. Enabled by these lowered barriers and powered by the bitter criticisms of “objective” journalism, the polarization of cable television became possible. CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC then grew their shares of the television market, each with their own sources and motivations for polarization.
A POLITICAL OPERATION In the opinion of many who have studied the history of Fox News, founder Rupert Murdoch’s interest in the network goes only as far as his bottom line. From this perspective, the conservative leanings of Fox News are less a reflection of Murdoch’s own views than they are a savvy way to make money. (In college, he kept a bust of Marx in his dorm room—hardly the mark of a staunch conservative). The source of the network’s conservatism can be traced to Murdoch’s hiring of Roger Ailes, a highly successful television producer and former Republican operative. According to Sherman, the arrival of Ailes fundamentally changed the organization structure of Fox News in a way that separates it from its peers. “Fox News runs as a political opera-
tion that masks itself as a news channel,” he told the HPR. Ailes had originally conceived the idea of a conservative network during his time in the Nixon administration, in the form of a memo called: “A Plan for Putting the GOP on TV News.” Acknowledging at the time that such a channel would create a “flap about news management,” Ailes finally found his opportunity 20 years later in the form of Fox News. Murdoch’s permissive, profit-oriented mandate allowed Ailes to organize Fox News to produce partisan content within a framework unlike any other network. In addition to Fox’s administrative structure, there is a distinct right-leaning ideology underlying the network’s success. From Sean Hannity to Bill O’Reilly to Megyn Kelly, the network’s pundits consistently deliver a right-leaning perspective on current events. However, though each individual brings their personal ideological perspective to the issues, they all represent, to some degree, an extension of Ailes. Rush Limbaugh summed up Ailes’s role in Fox’s overriding ideology at a 2009 dinner: “One man has established a culture for 1,700 people who believe in it, who follow it, who execute it. Roger Ailes cannot do everything. Roger Ailes is not on the air. Roger Ailes does not ever show up on camera, and yet everybody who does is a reflection of him.”
CALCULATED LIBERALISM MSNBC does not share the “political operative” structure of its conservative sister station, despite its equally partisan content. The channel began without the intention of becoming
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the liberal counterpart to Fox News. Instead, Sherman says, the network stumbled into its current role when it found liberal content highly profitable. He traces the pivot toward liberal content to George W. Bush’s second term, when Keith Olbermann’s partisan diatribes against the president garnered ratings previously unseen for the network. Executives then moved to hire proudly liberal talent like Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes in order to build upon the higher ratings created by Olbermann. The decision paid off, but it also symbolized a deeper realization about the nature of contemporary news television decision-making. Recognizing this, Politico’s Dylan Byers wrote in a 2013 opinion piece: “The effort to defend MSNBC against comparisons to Fox News is always telling, because there was a time before MSNBC when liberals recoiled at the notion of agenda-driven programming in general. The acceptance of MSNBC was, like the acceptance of Super PACs, an acknowledgement that the rules on the ground had changed.” MSNBC has been running partisan programming ever since. Because MSNBC existed as a channel for several years before its leftward leap, comparisons to Fox fall apart in discussions of organizational structure. The opinions of MSNBC’s pundits are not extensions of a liberal equivalent to Ailes. Instead, they are consistent with a business strategy. With that in mind, the programming is unabashedly opinionated—85 percent of MSNBC’s programming is devoted to opinion content, compared to 55 percent for Fox News and 46 percent for CNN. MSNBC is liberal, and it caters to those individuals whose frustration with the formerly dominant news networks mirrors Fox’s current audience.
A NONPARTISAN ALTERNATIVE CNN differs from each of these networks in that it is set up chiefly to be a source of breaking news and boots-on-the-ground reporting, rather than commentary. As a result, it has avoided the stark, open partisanship of both Fox News and MSNBC. Billing itself as an unbiased news source is profitable for CNN; according to the American Journalism Review, “Advertisers like CNN’s reputation, and are willing to pay handsomely to be associated with it.” However, there are drawbacks to this hard news model. Because more of its content is based outside the studio, the network must bankroll dozens more production teams in the field than its competitors. The success of CNN’s business model is therefore mitigated by the costs of running a breaking news enterprise. Yet the network essentially has no other option—if it chose to revert to more opinion content to lower costs, CNN would lose its brand and its accompanying advertising dollars. The question of which, if any, ideology pervades CNN is highly contested. Among many conservatives and some nonconservatives, CNN is considered to have a liberal bias, although less so than MSNBC. In his 2013 book Partisan Journalism, Jim Kuypers asserts that, in response to competition from Fox News, “CNN soon adopted the leftward bias of the established mainstream media.” However, proof of this leftward bias is not clear.
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A 2008 Shorenstein Center study found that Republicans and Democrats were equally criticized by CNN during the presidential primaries, with the exception of then-Sen. Barack Obama. From inside the organization, the network lays claim to a nonpartisan journalistic ideology for its content. This claim is aided by the fact that CNN does plenty of reporting on news outside the political sphere, which largely avoids questions of slant or spin. Since fervent conservatives opt for Fox News and fervent liberals opt for MSNBC, CNN doesn’t pull as strong an audience when it chooses to report on politics. Therefore, regardless of conservative or liberal assertions about the ideological leanings of CNN, those hypothetical leanings do not garner partisan viewers for the network.
OVERSTATED CONSEQUENCES What does the polarization of cable news television mean? The answer is unclear. Tworek acknowledges that a significant causation-correlation problem exists. Many individuals watch Fox News or MSNBC in order to reinforce their conservative or liberal opinions. Thus, rather than serving to polarize moderates, the networks may largely be drawing a self-selecting partisan audience. The Princeton study found that “Ideologically one-sided news exposure may be largely confined to a small, activist segment of the population.” However, “this segment has disproportionate political influence. Activists shape the political choices of the American public.” In other words, fervently partisan media consumers often affect public political debate in dramatic ways. However, the degree to which media polarization actually changes opinions is unclear. Many studies claim that media polarization has no effect on individuals, yet other studies insist that media polarization changes personal ideology. Tworek blames this on the staggering number of factors that go into voting patterns, emphasizing that “it’s very difficult to disaggregate” each of those factors from one another. In an interview with the HPR, former Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), who left Congress in 2010 due to the domination of “party and self-interest” in government, concurred: “Our electorate is polarized for a whole number of reasons. [The polarization of news] is only one element, and I don’t even think it is the most prominent.” Many argue that, in fact, this current trend is actually a return to an earlier time. According to Partisan Journalism, “Throughout American history reporters and editors have ranged the spectrum of left and right. During partisan periods these political tendencies showed, but during the objective turn the profession of journalism operated under a set of practices that attenuated the bias of most journalists.” This period of greater objectivity was “a postwar American anomaly,” according to Sherman. Partisan journalism has a rich history in America, from H.L. Mencken to William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. It was only after the Second World War that the notion of objectivity arose. And with the growing partisanship of Fox News and MSNBC, Sherman concludes, “We are reverting to the historical norm.”
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IT’S NOT FOX’S FAULT Why ESPN and HBO, Not Fox and MSNBC, Might Be to Blame for Polarization Vincent Monti
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n 2009, when Dick Cheney left office with a robust approval rating of 13 percent, it seemed nothing united Americans more than a good joke at his expense. Association with the outgoing vice president meant political suicide, a fate John McCain desperately tried to avoid when his campaign politely requested that Cheney skip the 2008 Republican National Convention. Yet for all this derision, Americans by and large seem to have conformed to at least one of Cheney’s proclivities. Wherever he traveled, Cheney required that his staff preset all televisions to Fox News. With the massive growth of partisan news media and political punditry, many now assume that all Americans are like Cheney—that we live in self-reinforcing echo chambers and only engage with media that reinforces our own point of view. But the alarmist warnings of the rise of partisan news organizations and their effect on American political discourse exaggerate the negative effects of partisan news selection. In reality, increased choice may increase partisanship not through the explosion of partisan media and the acceptance of partisan thinking, but rather through the growth of apolitical programming like ESPN and HBO. By giving viewers alternatives to traditional evening news sources, such programming has reduced political participation among traditional moderates and less partisan voters.
RUSH LIMBAUGH AND THE NEW YORK TIMES ARE NOT MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE The first half of the traditional narrative is based on the premise that people naturally like to have their beliefs reinforced. Thus, when given a wide swath of news outlets to choose from, most people prefer the more partisan narrative that more closely resembles their views. In an interview with the HPR, Nicholas DiFonzo, a professor of psychology at the Rochester Institute of Technology, explained, “The Internet, [for example], is highly clustered with networks of like minded people. And when people are clustered together in a like-minded network, there tends to be an echo-chamber effect.” If this theory holds true, the implications of the growth in punditry and news polarization for American democracy and political discourse are enormous. Herein lies the second half of the narrative: by ignoring opposing views and having one’s partisan views validated, one gets more polarized as the marketplace of ideas ceases to function. However, recent research casts doubt on the extent to which people are really visiting these partisan news sites and locking themselves in self-reinforcing echo chambers. In an interview with the HPR, R. Kelly Garret, an assistant professor at Ohio State’s School of Communication, explained, “85 percent of
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Americans rely only on the mainstream media. A very small percentage of Americans actively seek out these very partisan news outlets as a primary source of news, and the people who do that also generally look at the mainstream outlets.” This inclination toward traditional media appears to apply to both the Internet and television. According to research by Sharad Goel, an assistant professor in Stanford’s Management Science & Engineering Department, polarizing articles from social media and web searches only account for 2 percent of total news consumption. Meanwhile, surveys from the Pew Research Center have found that, even though 55 percent of Americans listed television as their main source of news, only a combined 9 percent listed Fox or MSNBC as their specific television news source. As Goel explained in an interview with the HPR, “The level of offline ideological segregation is equal to that ... online.” That level, at best, is pretty minimal. As such, while the ideological spectrum of news media has widened in recent years, most Americans remain near the middle. As Markus Prior, a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton, has noted, “Most of the largest news websites attract a similar amount of traffic from conservative, moderate, and liberal users.” And even the most partisan websites still maintain some audience diversity. Fifty percent of visitors to Rush Limbaugh’s website had also visited Yahoo! News in the same month, and 30 percent had ventured as far as the New York Times. Meanwhile, 30 percent of visitors to the New York Times’ website identify as conservative; similarly, around a fourth of Dailykos.com readers also read Foxnews.com. As Garrett explained, “People have a preference for seeing their views reinforced, without having an aversion to encountering the other side.” In other words, the walls of the echo chamber may not be so impenetrable after all.
THE BREAKDOWN OF THE SILENT MAJORITY Increased choice has, however, had a slightly polarizing effect in another way—not by changing attitudes, but by allowing politically apathetic citizens, who tend to be moderate, to disengage from the political system and drop out of the body politic. Before the growth in cable television and the Internet, mainstream evening news broadcasts took up the dinner hour. Even those who lacked a specific interest in politics would stay in touch with the news and gather knowledge about politics via these traditional news broadcasts. As a result, they were more likely to vote and participate politically. With the growth in choice between so many apolitical, entertainment-oriented shows and sites, fewer apathetic citizens remain politically active. “Because there are more non-political
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choices now that did not exist before, like HBO or ESPN, you can spend a lot of time following good entertainment … and you don’t have to pick the news,” Prior explained in an interview with the HPR. “The result is that there are fewer non-partisan people watching the news, [since] they would rather watch some other form of entertainment.” Empirically, several studies have confirmed these links between increased cable television penetration and decreased voter turnout. For example, Professor Matthew Gentzkow of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business has found that up to half of the aggregate decline in voter turnout since the 1950s can be explained by increased television choice. As Prior summarized, “If you take [nonpartisan] people out of the news audience who would otherwise would have watched [the news] without caring too much about it … you are left with more partisan people who are going to the polls.” The change is thus not an increase in the polarization of the American public, but diminishing engagement among the politically moderate or apathetic.
THE POLARIZED ARE SPEAKING UP Unsurprisingly, the polarized disproportionately dominate the political debate. A series of Pew reports on polarization found that “those at both the left and right ends of the spectrum, who together comprise about 20 percent of the public overall, have a greater impact on the political process than do those with more mixed ideological views.” Specifically, roughly 40 percent of ideologically consistent conservatives and 30 percent of ideologically consistent liberals “tend to drive political discussion.” These polarized citizens “talk about politics often, say others tend to turn to them for information rather than the reverse, and describe themselves as leaders rather than listeners in these kinds of conversations.” People with ideologically mixed views, however, act this way only 12 percent of the time. According to the report, these consistent conservatives and liberals impact the political system in a variety of ways according to the report, from voting and donating more to maintaining greater levels of participation in politics overall. The explosion in entertainment television and the removal of apathetic moderate voters likely compounds this effect. With more and more moderate Americans simply not partaking in political discourse as a result of greater choice, polarized citizens make up a greater share of the debate and gain an even more disproportionate voice. And as television continues to develop and innovate, an even more polarized political status quo may emerge. Thus, Dick Cheney and Fox are not really the problem behind political gridlock. Rather, it may be time to start blaming “Game of Thrones.”
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FOOD SAFETY IN NUMBERS Advik Shreekumar
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n March 23, 2013, the civic organization Smart Chicago launched an ambitious program to enhance the city’s food safety efforts: Foodborne Chicago. Using a mix of statistical techniques and computer science, Foodborne searches Twitter for complaints of food poisoning, then follows up with users and generates formal investigations. Chicago is not alone in these efforts; San Francisco, Boston, and New York City are all in the process of implementing similar initiatives to better enforce their health codes. Foodborne Chicago and its sibling programs are bold attempts to modernize governance, harnessing the massive streams of information on social media sites. However, while these initiatives have the potential to dramatically improve public health, they also grant additional power to the companies holding
the data. This, in turn, will challenge traditional notions of privacy and property. City health departments have historically played two roles in maintaining food safety: they coordinate with the Centers for Disease Control to manage foodborne outbreaks as they arise, and they work to prevent future outbreaks through inspections of food retail locations, including restaurants. Traditionally, these departments have relied on reporting from clinics and consumers to gather information. The Chicago Department of Public Health, for example, performs annual inspections of all restaurants, but it can also perform additional announced or unannounced investigations based on complaints it receives. Foodborne’s innovation is in its use of data to cast a wider net than traditional efforts have, reaching people who may not know that they can report food poisoning cases to the city.
UNDER THE HOOD At the core of Foodborne is a technique called machine learning, the use of computers to comb through large datasets and discover deep patterns that human analysts would likely miss. Broadly, the computer’s task is to develop a model that can correctly place observations into categories of interest—say, identifying tweets as complaints or ordinary chatter. Researchers start by feeding the machine a training dataset containing pre-classified data. Using this information as a springboard, the machine tests a series of models, eventually converging on an equation it can use to classify future observations. The training data serve as a cheat sheet, allowing the machine to check its guesses throughout the model-building process. Despite their sophistication, these machines do not run on their own. As
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Brian Richardson, director of public affairs for the Chicago Department of Public Health, explained to the HPR, Foodborne Chicago depends on human judgment in addition to computerized predictions. First, the algorithm “surfaces tweets that are related to foodborne illnesses.” Next, “a human classifier goes through those complaints that the machine classifies,” determining “what is really about food poisoning and what may be other noise.” The Foodborne team then tweets back at the likely cases, providing a link for users to file an official complaint. In short, computers deal with the massive quantity of Twitter data, and humans ensure the quality of the result. According to its website, between its launch on March 23, 2013 and November 10, 2014, the Foodborne algorithm flagged 3,594 tweets as potential food poisoning cases. Of these tweets, human coders have identified 419, roughly 12 percent, as likely cases meriting a reply on Twitter. At first glance, an algorithm that has only 12 percent accuracy in spotting cases of food poisoning may seem highly inefficient. However, Foodborne has proven a valuable tool for the Chicago Department of Public Health. In its first nine months of operation, Foodborne initiated 133 health inspections. Approximately 40 percent of these investigations uncovered critical or severe violations of the health code—the kinds of violations that force restaurants to shut down or to remain open only under strict conditions. As Richardson noted, “that percentage is equivalent to the … percentage of violations we find based on reports we get from 311”—the phone number citizens can call to report food poisoning to their city’s municipal services. Though its program is not as expansive as Chicago’s, the City of New York has found that Yelp data can also be a useful tool, uncovering three previously undiscovered outbreaks after sifting through the restaurant reviews. At Harvard Business School, Dr. Michael Luca has proposed an even more ambitious project: to use Yelp review data to target future restaurant investigations. In an interview with the HPR, Luca explained that in addition to following up on complaints, city health departments also perform periodic investigations of restaurants. However, due to limited personnel and resources, health departments are often forced to select restaurants at random, hoping that the risk of investigation will be enough to cause all restaurants to comply. By combining Yelp review data with previous investigation results, Luca’s team has been able to develop an algorithm that correctly identified 80 percent of restaurants with egregious health code violations in the previous year. Armed with this model, city health departments could target their investigations more finely, tailoring inspections to match Yelp complaints about restaurants.
LIMITS OF THE MACHINE The main limitation of data mining approaches is that they rely on the consumer. Tweets and Yelp reviews are based entirely on the experiences of average people, who are good at noticing traits like food quality and restaurant cleanliness but will almost never notice technical mistakes, like improper food labeling, or see breaches of the health code behind kitchen doors. No matter how promising machine learning techniques are for identifying front-of-shop violations, they will tend to miss these more hid-
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den violations. In a statement to the HPR, the Illinois Restaurant Association, an advocacy group for restaurateurs, declared itself supportive of Chicago’s efforts to improve food safety but cautioned the Department of Public Health “to be as vigilant as possible when it comes to assessing the validity of claims submitted via this public forum.” The Restaurant Association’s reaction strikes at an unease surrounding crowdsourced solutions and the herd mentality of the Internet. It isn’t hard to imagine unscrupulous customers or managers tweeting out false complaints in the hope of targeting investigations to tarnish a restaurant’s reputation. Foodborne’s use of human analysts and integration into the broader investigative process is one check against abuse of the system. A false tweet would have to undergo the same scrutiny as a complaint received by phone. In that respect, Foodborne’s system is no more vulnerable than traditional means of reporting. Whether complaints come from phone calls or Twitter, the same human team evaluates their legitimacy. More broadly, the vast amount of data that machine learning algorithms process is another bulwark against abuse, particularly in the case of Yelp reviews. Writing a single false negative review on Yelp carries very little weight when placed among the pool of dozens, if not hundreds, of legitimate reviews. Furthermore, machine learning algorithms can zero in on completely unexpected trends; Luca explained that “it’s easy to guess the intuition of an inspector who is picking five words that are triggering [an investigation]. It’s not clear to me that it’s easier to game an algorithm. There are so many words that go into this that it would be a pretty complicated game.” For example, his research has shown that reviews mentioning basic ingredients tend to be more negative than reviews mentioning preparations like grilling and toasting. As long as the inner workings of a food safety algorithm stay under wraps, the complexity of its methods will be a defense against misuse.
A SHIFT IN POWER The Illinois Restaurant Association’s concern reveals a deeper problem than simple misuse of the system, one centered on the nature of human error and machine error. By shifting humans out of the picture and trusting machines to do our analysis, we cede power to computers and equations that cannot fully understand the world. Any model is an approximation of reality at best, and the predictions machines make will inevitably be a mixture of success and failure, depending on how well reality and the model match. However, machine learning algorithms aren’t competing against a perfect system; human analysis in the status quo comes with its own set of biases and misconceptions that can lead it astray. Just as replacing humans with machines increases the risk of mechanical error, continuing to rely on human judgment will leave us liable to human error. Society will have to decide what mix of human and machine error it prefers. Yet machine learning does more than empower machines. An expansion of such programs would also vest more power in Yelp and Twitter, the holders of these datasets. Dr. Elaine Nsoesie, a member of the team developing Boston’s program, explained to
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The Chicago Department of Public Health is using social media to monitor public health concerns.
the HPR that the project is “very dependent on [Yelp and Twitter]. If they [were] not willing to provide the data, we wouldn’t have the data to use.” To its credit, Yelp has been very cooperative with New York City and San Francisco; in addition to providing New York with a daily data feed, Luca noted that the review website sat down with his team to match its database of reviews with San Francisco’s database of restaurants. Similarly, Twitter has a general policy of providing interested groups with open access to tweets and encouraging innovative use of its data, including providing a data grant to the Boston team. Cooperation aside, the fact remains that these companies now own and curate datasets that are increasingly valuable to the public and are becoming integrated into the government’s function. At the same time, the government does not have a right to these datasets in the current legal framework, nor are companies required to provide information to the extent that Yelp and Twitter have. As machine learning becomes a standard aspect of public life, we may see a reconceptualization of company property rights to data that would guarantee society continued access to information for the social good. Especially in the case of foodborne disease, the state could make a strong claim that it needs access to these datasets in order to carry out its duty to protect the lives and health of its citizens. In all likelihood, these arguments will never need to be made in courtrooms, and cities and companies will continue to collaborate on projects like Foodborne. Still, we are moving toward a status quo in which we expect companies like Yelp and Twitter to cooperate with the government, even in the absence of a legal requirement to do so.
RETHINKING PRIVACY At a time when the NSA’s use of metadata has received heavy criticism, Foodborne and its sibling programs represent a
constructive use of the public’s data, one with popular support and minimal privacy concerns. However, not all extensions of machine learning will be as palatable to the public. For example, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have recently turned their attention toward cyberbullying, developing algorithms that can identify victims and perpetrators based on the content of their tweets. A second initiative is Flu Trends, an effort by Google to track flu infections by monitoring people’s search queries. Supplementing Google’s model with data from Twitter may give city health departments a better grasp of outbreaks in their city than conventional methods have. Given access to these datasets, cities could certainly improve social outcomes. The issue lies in entrusting such information to the state, which would require us to loosen the right to information privacy. Although Chicagoans have taken well to their city’s use of public Twitter data through Foodborne, citizens may not be as receptive to governments looking through private search queries or monitoring children’s online activity outside of school, even if it is for the social good. Our notions of privacy and property do not have much time to catch up; data-driven techniques are poised to spread rapidly across the nation. In just over a year, four of America’s largest cities have created their own prototypes for data-driven governance, and more cities are on the horizon. Luca told the HPR that his team has already reached out to several cities to develop specialized versions of the San Francisco algorithm that will allow health departments to target their inspections. The Foodborne group has been just as active, collaborating with Boston’s team to modify Chicago’s approach to work in a new city. Together, these early adopters have laid the groundwork for health departments nationwide, and their successes are the first step toward smarter and more responsive cities.
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A GREENER GOP? TOWARD A CONSERVATIVE ENVIRONMENTAL AGENDA
Gil Highet
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n August 1, 2013, four former Republican administrators of the Environmental Protection Agency published an op-ed in the New York Times, in a last-ditch effort to save their party and the environment. In “A Republican Case for Climate Action,” the four proposed one of two options: adopt a market-based solution such as a carbon tax or, “rather than argue against [President Obama’s] proposals … endorse them and start the overdue debate about what bigger steps are needed and how to achieve them.” However, this appeal fell on deaf ears among House Republicans. Indeed, the next day, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) introduced an amendment to H.R. 367 that “require[s] the Administration to receive approval from Congress before implementing a carbon tax.” Aside from the fact that Congress—not the president—approves new taxes, President Obama’s recent EPA proposal is based purely on regulations, not taxes. In fact, it falls directly in line with the traditional, regulatory-based environmental policy the United States has espoused for the last 40 years. Scalise’s reflexive opposition is indicative of a broader problem: the GOP lacks serious policy proposals to combat environmental crises. For the good of the party and the country, Republicans need to offer substantive
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proposals that address climate change.
THE STATE OF THE DEBATE At present, Republicans tend to fall into two distinct groups in terms of their environmental views: either they reject the evidence for global warming entirely or they opt for a moderated version of the Democratic policy of legislative coercion. Among 2016 presidential hopefuls, Rick Perry, Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, Rand Paul, and Mike Huckabee represent the former category; Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, and Bobby Jindal fall into the latter. Both the deniers and the moderates hurt the Republican Party. Perhaps most obviously, having two competing approaches divides the party. Moreover, the non-believers put themselves at odds with 97 percent of scientists, as well as the majority of Americans, who, according to a recent New York Times poll, believe in human-induced global warming. Environmental moderates within the GOP do not fare much better. By advocating for lenient versions of Democrats’ regulatory proposals, they accept the assumption that prescriptive regulation is the best way to protect the environment. In oth-
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er words, moderates implicitly accept that one’s commitment to the environment is tied to the size of regulation proposed. While Republicans are split as to their own policy, conservative leaders do agree that a new proposal by the EPA must be stopped. Earlier this year, the EPA released a program that aims to cap carbon dioxide emissions in the United States for the first time. This initiative, called the Clean Power Program, relies on the old technique of regulation to decrease the prevalence of harmful gases. Republicans argue that the new agenda constitutes government overreach and that the program will kill jobs. This claim is all well and good, but without a substantive counterproposal to address climate change, Republican leaders run the risk of appearing reactionary and unoriginal.
THE CONSERVATIVE TAX HIKE: A REVENUENEUTRAL CARBON TAX Instead of hindering environmental policy, conservatives should champion an agenda focused on implementing free market solutions and streamlining regulations. As it stands, a carbon tax represents the only viable environmental policy that can be reconciled with conservative principles. Significantly for conservatives, a carbon tax offers a market-based solution to climate change. In an interview with the HPR, former EPA Administrator and Governor of New Jersey Christine Todd Whitman argued in support of a carbon tax: “One of the things that most affects people’s behavior is cost. [Companies] respond to that.” In other words, industry responds to economic incentives better than regulation. In fact, Whitman contends, “Companies hate what regulation implies: you’ve got to have inspections, and that takes time and money to prepare for. There are a whole lot of understandable reasons … they would rather do anything than have more regulation.” A carbon tax imposes a tax on each unit of greenhouse gas emissions and gives firms an incentive to reduce pollution whenever doing so would cost less than paying the tax. By contrast, a cap-and-trade system, such as the one proposed by Obama this year, sets a maximum level of pollution—a cap—and distributes emissions permits among firms that produce emissions. A carbon tax sets a price; cap-and-trade sets an emissions limit. Both policies achieve similar ends, but a carbon tax does so without the heavy hand of regulation associated with a cap. Implementing a carbon tax may not be as hard as imagined. In an email correspondence with the HPR, Gilbert Metcalf, professor of economics at Tufts and a research associate
at the National Bureau of Economic Research, explains both the premise and the genius of a carbon tax: “For competitive markets to operate efficiently, all goods and services should have prices that fully reflect their total cost of production or use.” Metcalf adds that “A [revenue-neutral] carbon tax could provide the fiscal flexibility to help finance real tax reform,” since it “would [help us] move from taxing things we like (capital formation and labor supply) to things we don’t like (pollution).” Moreover, a carbon tax is economically sound, as evidenced by two recent proposals. In 2013, the Brookings Institution proposed a carbon tax-based environmental policy. This plan set the cost per ton of CO2 at $16 and pegged the growth rate of the tax at four percent plus inflation. The Brookings report found that the United States would receive an extra $2.7 trillion and that carbon output would be reduced by 12 percent over the next 20 years. A second proposal comes from the Massachusetts State House in the form of H.2532. This bill suggests an initial rate of $10 per ton of CO2, rising by $5 a year. More importantly, the legislation is revenue neutral. Whatever the state collects, it offsets with cuts to other taxes: 50 percent of the profits go to a lower corporate tax, 25 percent to a lower income tax, and 25 percent to a lower sales tax. Economists at Regional Economic Models, Inc. (REMI) found that Massachusetts’ GDP would be $10 billion higher in 2035 if the proposal were enacted. REMI also explains that the state would see 11,000 new jobs, because “A relatively high cost of fuel also gives an advantage to industries that tend to rely on labor, such as healthcare or business services. Those industries tend to generate a high level of jobs for their output.” Massachusetts state senators Michael Barrett (D-Lexington) and Thomas Conroy (D-Wayland) proposed the bill. When asked about the likelihood of obtaining Republican votes, Barrett told the HPR, “We stand a decent chance at [bipartisan support]. [A carbon tax is] an alternative to topdown government regulation. Republicans prefer marketbased legislation that preserves individual choice, and that’s what a carbon tax does.” Nonetheless, “Even a neo-pseudoquasi-tax like this one is going to encounter the resistance that all taxes encounter.” Barrett expects a new version of the bill slated for release in January 2015 to pass in six to eight years, the traditional length of time for legislation. As he observed, “It’s going to take a lot of education and a lot of discussion, but we’re looking forward to it.” As H.2532 demonstrates, the carbon tax is not a tax increase, but rather a tax swap. The state or federal government can use the additional revenue to decrease taxes across
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Protesters call for a regulatory cap on carbon emissions.
the board and to offset the increased prices of fossil fuels for low-income families. This realization has significant political ramifications in light of the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, a document that 238 U.S. House members and 41 senators have signed promising never to raise taxes. The pledge has hindered discussion of carbon taxes in the past. As Whitman explains, “Most [House Republicans] signed the no-new-taxes pledge. [Rejecting a carbon tax] is reflexive: they don’t have to reflect, they don’t have to think.” However, Whitman argues that proposing a revenue-neutral tax swap “would be in everyone’s best interest … businesses would come along with that.”
RETHINKING REGULATION The second component of a new Republican policy must be regulatory reform. Republican leaders argue for simpler regulation of the oil and natural gas industries; they can easily extend that logic to reviews of infrastructure projects. The environmental review process as it stands in the United States is a bureaucratic mess because no agency is responsible for a whole project. For every major infrastructure project, the federal government must conduct an Environmental Impact Statement. According to Common Good, a non-partisan, reform-minded advocacy group, an EIS takes 3.4 years on average. With highway projects, this number more than doubles to eight years. This timeframe is especially troubling given that the United States’ infrastructure received a rating of D+ from the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2013. Obama’s 2009 stimulus package offers a striking example of how environmental reviews can hamstring needed infrastructure projects. As Philip Howard, head of Common Good and a former advisor to Al Gore, told the HPR: “Barely three percent of the 2009 stimulus got spent on infrastructure because the president of the United States—duly elected by a majority of the people—lacked the authority to say ‘go.’” In fact, Common Good
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found that only $20 billion had been spent on infrastructure as of 2011 because of review-related delays. As the president himself commented, “Shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected.” Other notorious examples of delayed infrastructure projects include the Cape Wind Project (12 years and counting), the Gateway West Power line (eight years), and the dredging of the Savannah River (14 years). Moreover, the duration of a review does not necessarily relate to its thoroughness. Much greener countries like Germany and Canada set caps of less than two years on their environmental reviews yet still maintain a cleaner outlook. According to Howard, “The system of environmental review can be best described as near paralysis. The flaw in the system is that no official can say ‘enough is enough.’” He likens the situation to “open season on endless bureaucracy.” In light of this problem, Howard noted that Common Good plans to propose regulatory reforms to the president later this year that will allow EPA officials to expedite EIS studies. It is unclear whether this will actually solve the problem of bureaucracy or just enable select projects to skirt years of review. Still, executive action is certainly a start. Republicans should advocate for a common sense approach to environmental review by supporting simplified, expedient regulation. This reform, combined with a carbon tax, could jolt Republicans back into a position of leadership on an issue they started championing over 100 years ago: conservation. As Whitman noted, inaction on climate change has dire consequences. Last year, the United States spent $100 billion on natural disasters—real money out of the economy. Asthma attacks are the single largest cause of missed school days among children, and emissions cause hospitalization and premature death of the elderly. If we can slow climate change down so that we can better adapt to and anticipate these and other challenges, we will all be better off.
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DEATH IN THE HEART OF TEXAS
REFLECTIONS FROM AMERICA’S DEATH PENALTY CAPITAL Zoë Hitzig
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round 6:35 p.m. on September 10, 2014, the loud group of 30 or so protesters fell silent. They represented the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, and they had gathered near the northwest corner of the Huntsville Unit—home to Texas’ execution facility. One protestor rang a hand bell 20 times, in time with what felt like collective exhales of the group. Each note symbolized a year that Willie Tyrone Trottie had spent on death row. In those 20 long breaths my picture of the death penalty in the United States crystallized. The slipshod implementation of the death penalty—as evidenced especially this year by botched executions and death row exonerations via DNA testing—has begun to make clear the dire disconnect between its supposed and actual intent. Trottie was convicted in May 1993 for the murder of his former common-law wife, Barbara Canada, and her brother, Titus Canada. Trottie had threatened to kill Canada if she did not come back to him. He arrived at the Canadas’ house that day and, after being shot by Titus upon entering the house, shot Barbara and Titus multiple times and wounded other members of
the Canada family. His and Barbara’s son was also present. After the bloodbath, Trottie drove himself to the hospital to seek treatment for his wounds and was promptly arrested upon release. The crime was brutal, and Trottie’s role in it was never in question. In other words, the conviction portion of the trial was fairly straightforward. But far less straightforward was the punishment phase. In this phase, the Texas courts—as in most states—considered possible mitigating circumstances and decided whether Trottie posed a future threat to society. Resolving that he did, the courts accordingly decided he must be put to death by the state of Texas. Yet the statute underlying this punishment is far less straightforward than it might appear. When the Texas death penalty statute was written, there was no sentence to life without parole. Today, with this alternative available, the only consequentialist justification—moral reasoning based on an action’s consequences—for the death penalty is that the condemned poses a threat to other prisoners. Therefore, in sentencing Trottie to death, the courts found that he was likely to engage in another act of violence within the walls of the
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I asked the desk attendant what he thought about the upcoming execution. He said, without missing a beat, “That man deserves to die.”
prison. In the final week before Trottie’s execution—20 years after the sentence was handed down—his attorneys filed two separate last-minute appeals for a stay of execution. One appeal argued that Trottie had not received adequate legal counsel at his 1993 trial. Trottie maintained that the lawyers assigned to him did not investigate the possible mitigating circumstances surrounding his abusive and painful childhood. In the second appeal, Trottie’s attorneys filed a motion with the Supreme Court claiming that the pentobarbital that Texas had secured for his lethal injection was past its expiration date and might cause Trottie excruciating pain, in violation of the Eighth Amendment. This appeal was no doubt influenced by the three botched executions that occurred earlier this year. The strongest arguments against the death penalty can be extracted from these desperate last minute appeals, which point to today’s haphazard implementation of the death penalty and the confused principles upon which it is built. Officially, Trottie was not executed in the name of retribution, so often invoked by deontologist death penalty supporters—those who base morality on other tenets beyond an action’s consequences. Furthermore, the consequentialist reasons for his execution were muddled at best. And while Huntsville locals talked about just deserts, retribution, and justice, few talked about his threat to society at large. Not one alluded to the threat Trottie posed within the Harris County Prison, where the courts might have sent him for a life sentence without parole. *** Executions in Texas take place at 6:00 p.m. at the Huntsville Unit, which lies 70 miles north of Houston in an otherwise quiet town. Since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1982, Huntsville has seen nearly five times more executions than any other American city. The afternoon that I arrived, I visited the Texas Prison Museum, a highly fascinating and tonally confused museum run by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. The museum
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holds the electric chair formerly used for executions, commonly referred to as “Old Sparky,” as well as one of Bonnie and Clyde’s handguns. Near the end of the exhibit, you can pay $3 to put on official TDCJ prison garb and have your photo taken in a mock prison cell. On the wall near Old Sparky was a quotation that neatly summarized the clash of tones. Warden R.F. Coleman, on the day of the first execution by electric chair in 1924, stated, “A warden can’t be a warden and a killer too. The penitentiary is a place to reform a man, not to kill him.” Before leaving the museum, I asked the desk attendant what he thought about the upcoming execution. He said, without missing a beat, “That man deserves to die.” *** About a mile south of the prison museum sits the Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery, where bodies unclaimed from the Texas prison system are laid to rest. The cemetery was very quiet and unwatched. The 3,000 tombstones—some concrete crosses and others plain rectangular headstones—are neatly kept and organized into clean lines. Each headstone bears the inmate’s name, the date of his death, and his TDCJ identification number. If the deceased was executed, an “X” is placed in front of the TCDJ number. After the cemetery, I stopped in a café on 11th street for a coffee. A chime on the door signaled the entry of a round middleaged man wearing suspenders, round glasses, and a bowler hat. After he had ordered, I asked to join him at his table. All I had to say was, “Do you know that there’s an execution happening a few blocks from here, in just a few hours?” He unleashed, in a Texan drawl, his inner conflict about the death penalty. He felt that some people deserved to die, but he then admitted that he didn’t see how a life sentence without possibility of parole was any different from a legal standpoint. As we were the only two patrons that late afternoon, the waitress joined our conversation and echoed the gentleman’s view. She remarked, “The crimes are in the past; does that mean the criminal doesn’t deserve
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any future at all?” She handed me a bag of potato chips on my way out. The man and the waitress asked not to be identified by name. I walked about a half-block to the First United Methodist Church on 11th street to meet with the senior pastor, Reverend Scott Dornbush. The reverend welcomed me into his spacious office. The walls were the same color as the carpet, very beige, and were punctuated by framed accolades and icons. Sitting down across from the reverend—a hardy, smiling, bald man in glasses and a suit—I asked him what we are to make of the death penalty as it is practiced today. He smiled sympathetically and asked, “Can I show you something?” Walking around his desk to the wall behind me, he wrestled a big frame off the wall and handed it to me. It was a letter the reverend had written to George W. Bush, then governor of Texas, and the governor’s semi-automated response to it, both in a frame three times their collective size. In the letter, the reverend implored the governor to abolish the death penalty. His argument was thus: Perhaps some people deserve to die, but the state of Texas lacks the power to discern and the uniform metric of justice to approximate who those people are. Leaving Dornbush and the church around 4:00, I made my way to the nearby Huntsville Unit. There, I was to meet Michael Graczyk, a reporter for the Associated Press who has witnessed over 300 executions. Graczyk was a big man with a gentle demeanor. I asked him for all the detail he could afford me of the execution chamber. It all sounded very medical: a gurney, straps, aquamarine walls. The executioner administering the drugs stands behind a two-way mirror, unseen by the witnesses or the condemned inmate. The medicalization of executions is arguably part of a broader trend of confusing punishment and treatment. The incarceration rate in the United States is five to 10 times that of other democracies—our nation’s harsh sentences are dealt largely without first considering more rehabilitative modes of punishment. In fact, a report by Human Rights Watch noted that, where prison was once seen as the final recourse, it has come to be “treated as the medicine that cures all ills.” After Graczyk retreated into the administration building, I joined the media section, a growing group gathering in a shady area with a 10-meter radius between the TDCJ administrative building and the 30-or-so protesters rallying further down 12th street. I noted such a difference in attitudes that it was difficult to imagine that everyone there was gathered around the same event. While protesters shouted over a loudspeaker (“You say death row, we say hell no!”), members of the media seemed to speak without moving their jaws, as if to avoid any facial movement that might resemble expression. The result was an uncertain hush, which served as a neutral barrier between the shouts of the protesters to my right and the pin-drop silence of the TDCJ officials to my left. I spoke softly with a group of reporters from the BBC and with the cameraman for a Norwegian documentary film on the death penalty. ***
fled—emerged from the media’s silence. The voice belonged to New York University law professor Robert Blecker, a notorious retributivist defender of the death penalty, who was answering interview questions on camera for the Norwegian documentary. Blecker’s defense of the death penalty rests on his belief that retribution is the only way to restore a moral balance in the aftermath of a crime. For the “worst of the worst” criminals, the death penalty is the only form of retribution commensurate with the crime. When asked about Trottie’s imminent execution, however, Blecker admitted that he was “slightly conflicted.” His uncertainty about the case at hand arose from two distinct concerns: one more philosophical and the other primarily legal. Philosophically, Blecker was unsure whether Trottie could be classified as “the worst of the worst.” Legally, Blecker asked, “What is the evidence that Trottie would kill again within the walls of the prison?” Shocked by the fact that Blecker, one of the most famous legal supporters of the death penalty, does not support the death penalty statute in Texas, I walked down 12th street to join the protesters. Trottie’s aunt Cynthia, standing with the TCADP, read into the loudspeaker a poem written by Eugene Broxton, one of Trottie’s fellow death row inmates. The poem was called “Judge Ye Not” and began, “Have you walked in the shoes / Of the person you judge / Have you shared their most / Intimate thoughts.” Another protester took over after Cynthia, who rang the bell 20 times. As the demonstration concluded, Cynthia read another poem, written by death row inmate Ker’Sean Ramey and entitled, “Stand Up to Injustice.” Willie Tyrone Trottie was pronounced dead at 6:35 p.m. On my drive back to Houston, I listened to KPFT’s radio show “Execution Watch,” which airs every time an inmate is executed in Texas. This was the eighth time the show had aired in 2014. One of the hosts noted that Trottie’s trial was never about guilt or innocence—it was clear that he had committed the crime of which he was convicted—but rather about punishment. He added that Trottie’s lawyers were tasked with “build[ing] up a predicate for punishment that might have saved his life.” This particular phrasing resonated with me. The idea that a definition of punishment is rebuilt at every capital trial perfectly captures the grave extent to which governments’ chaotic implementation of the death penalty reflects its obfuscated intent. Without a clear conception of punishment understood by the people and the courts, defense lawyers are forced to build their own each time. If it doesn’t match up with the jury’s, a life is on the line. What became clear to me from my time in Huntsville is that America is far from a coherent understanding of justice, without which it is impossible to have a coherent notion of punishment. I hope that we can see recent events as visceral illustrations that capital punishment, as it is currently practiced, is incoherent under any ethical orientation. The government is supposedly executing in the name of its people, but its people do not know the real reason for the executions. The obfuscation of both intent and implementation makes the death penalty a systemic failure: a flouting of the government’s most basic duty to represent the will of its people.
At around 5:15, one man’s voice—expressive and unmuf-
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GRASSROOTS COUNTERTERRORISM Ali Hakim
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t was about six years ago that I first realized I was a Muslim living in the West. My seventh grade class was embarking on the standard American pilgrimage to Disney World from the Detroit Metropolitan Airport. I was among the last to pass through the metal detector. As I crossed the threshold, not having heard an alarm, I instinctively continued walking toward my peers. “Not so fast,” said a security officer standing a few feet away. He grabbed my arm and yanked me to the side, his other hand fastened firmly to his Taser. “You’re not done yet.” Over the next 10 minutes I was questioned on everything from my birthday to my occupation (I was 12) to my plans for the summer, before being allowed to continue to the Magic Kingdom. The questions were straightforward, yet I was still utterly perplexed as to why I, a middle school student from West Bloomfield, Michigan, had to answer them. After some cursory online research, I came to a simple conclusion: I was pulled aside because I was Muslim. At first, the supposed arbitrariness of my selection upset me; after all, I knew I wasn’t a terrorist. Nevertheless, as I grew older, read more of the news and sat through more questioning, anger gave way to understanding. Western states are faced with the frightening and very real prospect of their own citizens becoming violent Islamists and jeopardizing national security. As of June 17, an estimated 2,000 Europeans were bearing arms for militant Islamist groups abroad. Yet, though this threat is widely recognized, even experienced counterterrorism officials struggle to find a solution. How can a government effectively combat extremism at home without making Muslim citizens feel arbitrarily targeted? This question has become even more pressing with the emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria as a global terrorist network with perhaps the most effective recruitment campaign of any radical Islamist organization to date. An examination of the counterter-
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rorism strategy enacted by the United Kingdom, which is largely similar to but more clearly outlined than those of other Western states, reveals that locally oriented campaigns against radicalism are the key to fighting homegrown extremism in Europe and the United States.
THE ENGLISH DILEMMA England is no stranger to seeing its own people join terrorist groups. The country estimated earlier this year that 400 Britons had aligned with ISIS, a number that has probably grown. In 2007 the United Kingdom’s National Counter Terrorism Security Office announced an overarching strategy named CONTEST to protect the nation against what it called a “severe” threat from international terrorism. The plan broadened the government’s power to engage in antiterrorism efforts both abroad and at home. The “Prevent” section of the initiative, which addresses the need to fight radicalization within the nation’s borders, has two major components: restricting the flow of individuals and material promoting extremism into Britain, and challenging the radical messages of those who nevertheless manage to infiltrate the country. Both are important tasks, but the latter is inevitably more critical than the former. Terrorist organizations, which typically have extensive experience operating covertly, can often easily sneak affiliates past international borders despite immigration regulation. In an interview with the HPR, Bruce Hoffman, director of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown, also pointed toward “ISIS’s well-orchestrated use of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, WhatsApp, and other social media [platforms], which has made them much more effective in spreading their messages.” ISIS has been successful on this front even though many govern-
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ments, including that of Great Britain, have designated special police forces to track and remove such web-based propaganda. Therefore, the focus for Western states must rest on countering, as opposed to seeking to eliminate, extremist ideology.
ADDRESSING INEFFICIENCY Governments have two available avenues when it comes to pushing back against extremist ideology: they can either directly engage in ideological counterterrorism campaigns themselves or aid community organizations in initiating their own localized efforts. The United Kingdom, under CONTEST, has experimented with both approaches and has thoroughly investigated the relative efficiencies of each. Nevertheless, national officials have failed to recognize the superiority of the latter over the former. The more direct approach to fighting radicalization involves the Channel program, a subset of CONTEST through which the national government corresponds with local law enforcement to identify those supposedly vulnerable to radicalization. Once these vulnerable individuals are found, neighborhood police, schools, health services, and other institutions establish support networks for them in order to prevent future extremism. Ultimately, however, both the processes of identification and of establishing support networks seem overly tedious. The Dutch Institute for Safety, Security, and Crisis Management has isolated certain factors that can make an individual prone to Islamist radicalization: attendance at certain mosques, socioeconomic background, and spiritual upbringing, to name a few. Nevertheless, it is virtually impossible to distinguish between those who will actually turn toward extremism and those who will not. Hoffman explained why it is becoming increasingly difficult to pinpoint future radicals. “There is no one parallel between the people who are going to join these groups,” he said. “They aren’t from any one community. They aren’t from any specific demographic.” Thus many of the people that Channel identifies as “at risk” will probably never turn toward extremism, whether they received government support or not. In other words, focusing on such individuals would be a waste of taxpayer money. Moreover, the strategy is by nature inefficient when it comes to accessing existing extremists. Potential radicals have to agree to meet with representatives of support systems, but those who have already begun the shift toward extremism will naturally be resistant to deliberately anti-radical messages and therefore won’t participate in Channel. This means that the program can do little to reverse preexisting fundamentalist sentiment, even if it does manage to target the right participants. In order to avoid the shortcomings of these governmentdirected strategies, countries like the United Kingdom must turn to community organizations to spread anti-radical messages. Mosques, schools, and other local establishments are intimately familiar with their surrounding communities. They can easily investigate the grievances of the area’s youth and can subsequently determine and address factors that might lead to radicalization. Eleven people convicted on terrorist charges in England have been under 20 years old, and dozens of others convicted on such charges had first come into contact with extremist groups in their late teenage years. Counterterrorism efforts should operate through the institutions that shape the way young people think every day. Instead of wasting time trying to pinpoint at-risk indi-
viduals and tailoring specific programs to their needs, community-based strategies focus more efficiently on making the general local climate more resistant to extremism.
A MORE ACCESSIBLE SYSTEM Even putting aside Channel’s specific strategic problems, there are fundamental drawbacks to any direct government activity in anti-radicalization efforts. Many Muslims living in Europe and America harbor deep-seated mistrust of Western government and society. A 2008 Gallup poll showed that more than 50 percent of Muslims worldwide believed that Muslims in the West were not treated as equal citizens. In 2011, another survey revealed that almost 40 percent of British citizens felt that their communities did not respect Islam. Western states cannot expect Muslim citizens to respond positively to anti-radical messages coming from governments that they believe see them as the enemy. Farah Pandith, a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and former special representative to Muslim communities in the U.S. State Department, explained why it is easier for citizens to trust community-oriented counterterrorism efforts. “Governments cannot speak with the credibility and authenticity needed to persuade a young person away from going in a certain direction,” she said. “But local, organic voices can speak credibly and in an informed way to the ecosystem in a given place.” Small-scale anti-extremist campaigns are much more accessible to young Muslims than impersonal, large-scale programs launched by state authorities. Individuals at risk of radicalization trust the advice of their imams and teachers over that of nameless government officials whom they’ve never met. Agents of radicalization in Western states, according to Hoffman, “are often people whom [the targets] know from their own backyards.” Thus, agents of counter-radicalization should be familiar faces as well.
TIME FOR A CHANGE In recent years, the British government has, to its credit, increasingly prioritized funding of locally based campaigns against radicalism. Nevertheless, it persists with more direct approaches as well. Perhaps the reason the United Kingdom has failed to commit to the former over the latter is based on its desire to make executive decisions grounded in hard data. Hoffman explains why trying to measure the effectiveness of antiradicalization efforts is so difficult. “The problem with these programs,” he explains, “is that they’re not amenable to metrics. How do you measure if you’ve prevented someone from becoming a terrorist?” Nonetheless, according to Pandith, the time is ripe for a shift in policy toward supporting grassroots counterterrorism efforts. “We are in a new phase of a public awareness of the seriousness of this extremist ideology,” she says. “I absolutely think this is the moment in time to build the types of preventative measures born and bred by communities like no others we have seen before.” Without considering community-based campaigns that counter radical ideology, Western states’ counterterrorism policies risk inefficiency and ineffectiveness, and their citizens will remain vulnerable to the ever-increasing threat of radicalization.
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SOUTH AFRICA’S “CORRECTIVE RAPE” PROBLEM LESBIANS FIGHT HATE CRIMES IN THE TOWNSHIPS Farris Peale
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n Johannesburg in April 2008, Eudy Simelane’s naked body was found face-down in a ditch. She had been stabbed nine times. She had been raped. Eudy had also been one of South Africa’s foremost female soccer players. She had dreamed of becoming the first female World Cup referee, and through her successes on the field, had lifted up her entire community. That day, those dreams died with her. Neither violent crime nor rape is uncommon in South Africa. In fact, Eudy was one of more than 18,000 murder victims in South Africa in 2008. However, what happened to Eudy was not random. Rather, Eudy’s attackers shouted, “We will teach you [that] you are not a man, we will show you, you are a woman!” Eudy died because she was a lesbian. In South Africa, the horrendous hate crime of “corrective rape”—in which a gay woman is raped to change her sexuality— is destroying the lives of lesbian women in the townships. Their attackers believe that if lesbian women are raped they will learn to be straight or “normal” again. These rapes, often committed by gangs, involve savage beatings and torture that the prey may not survive. Many victims contract AIDS and other debilitating diseases. They suffer post-traumatic depression and often attempt suicide. Some women and girls are married away either to hide their sexuality or their rape. Perhaps the most significant aspect of these cases of violence is where they occur. South Africa has some of the most progressive LGBTQ rights laws in the world, with equal employment protections and legally recognized same-sex marriage. However, in practice, such laws mean little, particularly for women in the
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poorer and generally non-white townships. Already affected by poverty and racism, the lesbian occupants of these townships live in constant fear. With little chance of being protected by a corrupt and bigoted police force, they are often left at the hands of their attackers. In Cape Town alone more than 500 cases of corrective rape are reported each year. In the last ten years 31 women later died from the injuries they sustained while being raped. Countless more were deliberately murdered.
THE STORY OF LULEKI SIZWE Despite these dark circumstances, some lesbian women in the country’s townships are willing to fight. Ndumie Funda, raised in the Xhosa townships outside of Cape Town and still a resident of them, started Luleki Sizwe, an organization to help her community fight the epidemic of corrective rape. According to Funda, the name Luleki Sizwe is derived from two sources: the name of Funda’s close friend and the name of her former fiancée. Both were killed after being correctively raped, one from the diseases she contracted, the other in the murderous hands of her attackers. Spurred on by this personal suffering, Funda started Luleki Sizwe and committed herself to fighting the corrective rape epidemic. In an interview with the HPR, Funda described how she has been chased from house to house, tormented by those who want to kill her since she has become an outspoken and recognized activist for the cause. Her home has been repeatedly robbed, her car has been stoned, and her neighbors constantly yell threats at
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her. In fact, a man who raped a lesbian lives next door to her. On the day of the interview, one of her puppies was in the hospital instead of at home, because her neighbors had beaten him for being a “lesbian” dog. Stories like the ones that are affecting Ndumie, and that affected Eudy before her, abound. Funda told the stories of many more women. “I had a friend … she went to the toilet and apparently when she came back this guy had put something, a drug, in her drink. And then he raped her, and she went unconscious. The following day the very same guy showed her the video … of him raping her, so she was scared to tell her girlfriend. Now she is two months pregnant.” In a different interview, Funda translated for a father. She pointed to a patch of earth between a house and a chain link fence. There, just a few meters away from their house, was where they finally caught his 19-year-old daughter. She was raped and killed just moments before reaching the safety of her home. Nothing was there to memorialize her, and Funda warned that such events could only be talked about in whispers. Funda also showed the HPR the grave of another woman who lost her life to a similar hate crime: Sihle Sikoji, a teenage member of Luleki Sizwe. “She was very active … she helped us big time in the organization. She got killed by gangsters.” Sikoji knew they were coming for her because of her openness about her sexuality. After Sikoji’s death, much of the lesbian community was driven underground. Sikoji, according to Funda, has been symbolic of the community’s flourishing—and then of its destruction.
“IT ISN’T SAFE HERE” In 2006, Zoliswa Nkonyana was stabbed to death and raped. Ultimately, five of her attackers were found innocent. When the rest of her attackers came to court, protesters organized by Luleki Sizwe awaited them. In a rare victory, that set of attackers received 18 years in prison. Still, that brief success is the exception, not the rule. Most men are never even arrested, much less prosecuted. Of those men who are prosecuted, very few are convicted. The bigotry of police forces and jurists either prevents conviction or results in a short sentence, as was the case in the death of Nkonyana. Women’s attempts to fight back against these abuses have proven extremely difficult. For instance, one organization attempted to organize a protest on National Mandela Day, a time of service throughout the country. A gathering of approximately
20 women stood in the center of a local market area, singing protest songs with signs memorializing friends who had died. Still, upon leaving the protest Funda warned, “This is making them recognizable. It isn’t safe here, and we can’t be sure they will be safe tonight.” Similarly, a group of lesbians in Cape Town’s townships tried to create a lesbian soccer team, but it was dissolved after the star and most beloved player died. Funda tries to provide medical services to women, but she herself is at constant threat and so finds it difficult to provide safety or anonymity to these women. Still, many local priests, religious organizations, and other small community councils have helped find women places to stay or provided them with some counseling services after they are victimized.
A GOVERNMENT RESPONSE? These community organizations, including Luleki Sizwe, also garnered national attention by creating a Change.org petition urging the South African government to take action on the issue. The petition received more than 175,000 signatures and has drawn increasing national attention to the issue. Finally, last September, the South African government announced that they would introduce hate crimes legislation and for the first time actively spoke out against corrective rape. In February they released a policy framework to start to study and eventually pass these laws. Still, it is unclear to what extent such legislation will help, or if the current African National Congress government will actually pass said laws. Real change will require both community action and strengthening of the checks on police forces, not just symbolic statements. After all, Funda, and others in her community who choose to remain anonymous, described how the police often ignore their claims or even help perpetrate acts of violence. While Funda said there were one or two police officers who they could trust to help them, the larger institution was completely unreliable. With the long delay in action on the government’s part coupled with the inefficacy of enforcement, it is clear that more than a mere symbolic gesture is required to effect real change in this issue. Solving this problem requires a serious campaign, not just to pass hate crimes legislation, but also to educate juries so that these men can be prosecuted. Most of all, it will require greater equality throughout all South African society, so that laws do not just apply to a few.
South Africa has some of the most progressive LGBTQ rights laws in the world ... However, in practice, such laws mean little, particularly for women in the poorer and generally non-white townships.
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TOWARD A MORE PERFECT UNION THE PURSUIT OF DEMOCRACY IN HONG KONG Henry Dornier
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hile working in Hong Kong over the past summer, I took the same route back from my office every day except one. On July 1, I reached Hennessy Road and was met with the sight of thousands marching for democracy. As the anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong from the British to the Chinese, July 1 has since been a day of activism for Hong Kongers, but this most recent march took on special significance in the context of the infamous white paper that outlined Beijing’s “comprehensive jurisdiction” over the island. Following the demonstration through the areas of Wan Chai, Admiralty, and into Central, I witnessed firsthand the sort of idealistic, liberal aspirations of Hong Kong’s Generation Y that I had found suppressed during my travels in mainland China. Walking to my office the next morning, however, it felt as if nothing had happened. A few arrests had been made in Central, but otherwise a remarkable sense of calm pervaded the streets that mere hours ago had been lined with tense policeman and overflowing with eager supporters. Hong Kong was once again the image of order, productivity, and efficiency. Nothing, it seemed, had changed. The pro-democracy “Umbrella Revolution” that has been active since September 22 hopes to break from this precedent. Three primary groups—the Hong Kong Federation of Students, Scholarism, and Occupy Central—have captured the attention of media across the globe in their demonstrations against the Chinese government’s filtering of candidates for elections of Hong Kong’s chief executive. Where Western sources have been
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largely sympathetic, mainland outlets have been decisively opposed. In either case, however, fundamental biases have simplified the debate and crowded out more thorough analyses of what is best for Hong Kong.
TROUBLE WITHIN The debate in Hong Kong is not one that can be reduced to Hong Kong versus Beijing. A recent Economist cover page ran the headline “The Party v the people,” but the reality is far more complicated. In fact, the debate is less between Hong Kong and the mainland than it is between different groups within Hong Kong itself. The attention that student activists have recently garnered has made them appear disproportionately representative of Hong Kong as a whole. Public opinion is decisively mixed. After a popular poll this past summer in support of the Occupy movement garnered 800,000 signatures, an anti-Occupy poll managed to reach 1.3 million signatures (though some question its legitimacy). The most recent poll by the Chinese University of Hong Kong shows 37.8 percent of respondents in support of the Occupy movement, 35.5 percent against, and 23.2 percent undecided. In an HPR interview, Hong Kong native Jeffrey Ngo explained his experience speaking with activists on the ground and organizing support for the protests in the United States. Ngo described the age gap of the protests as stemming from two primary sources. Firstly, in practical terms, the fact that most adults
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have full-time responsibilities such as work and family has excluded them from the non-stop occupations and protests that the students have engaged in. Although that does not necessarily exclude them from supporting the efforts, it does mean that the face of the protests is unquestionably Hong Kong’s youth. Middle-aged and elderly citizens are generally far less disposed to support the protests than their younger counterparts. As Ngo noted, “If you are a businessman and already have a car or an apartment, you are far less likely to call for change because you identify with the status quo.” The average adult Hong Konger is unlikely to risk the value of their home or the steady job they have at, say, a Chinese corporation in pursuit of true democracy. The status quo remains in their interest. In contrast, Ngo described what Hong Kong’s younger generation sees as a situation that provides them few opportunities for their futures. Jobs, cars, and apartments are only getting more expensive. In the past five years alone, the average price of a house in Hong Kong has surged 84.2 percent, all while people “already work their entire lives just to get a small apartment.” To some, therefore, change is welcome. It is hardly surprising that 62.1 percent of the respondents to the Chinese University poll age 15-24 supported the Occupy Movement, compared to 28.4 percent of respondents age 40-59. This dichotomy is perhaps best illustrated by the stark contrast between C. Y. Leung, Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing incumbent chief executive, and eighteen-year-old Joshua Wong, leader of the student group Scholarism. They represent two poles of the current debate: on the one side, there is Hong Kong’s political and business elite, and on the other stands its idealistic, outward-looking younger generation. The past months have only exacerbated tensions and mistrust between the two, but they have also created an important opportunity for compromise and genuine discourse. After the miscalculated use of tear gas and pepper spray on protestors that further damaged the government’s image, police have been far more restrained, following Leung’s lead in waiting out the protests without inflaming the situation further. This is no Tiananmen—the People’s Liberation Army is not about to descend on Central. Neither side wants to aggravate existing tensions between Hong Kongers and mainlanders, which have already erupted in isolated incidents in Mong Kok, where mainland Chinese compose large portions of the community.
A “HARMONIOUS” UNION? At the heart of this diversity of perspectives are Hong Kong’s fundamental ties to the mainland, which have long been a source of debate. The relationship between Hong Kong and China is perhaps one of the most mutually beneficial of its kind in the world, but it also compromises the bargaining position of the protestors. Hong Kong’s dependence on China cannot be overstated. Its status as an access point to China for international investors and to international markets for mainlanders has endowed it with a robust financial services industry and enormous amounts of cash and capital. The reliance extends well beyond finance, however. In 2013, 75 percent of Hong Kong’s fifty-four million tourists were Chinese, contributing the lion’s share of the HK$343.1 billion in tourism revenue for the year. Rich
mainland consumers have attracted the world’s top retail brands, and nearly 40 percent of Hong Kong’s 2013 foreign direct investment came from China. Upwards of 90 percent of Hong Kong’s meats and vegetables and about 70 percent of its water supply is sourced from the mainland. Nonetheless, Hong Kong is arguably as indispensible to China as China is to Hong Kong. In an interview with the HPR, Tom Holland, a research editor at the Hong Kong-based financial research firm Gavekal, described the economics at play in the current debate. Holland outlined “free capital flows, freedom of information, the rule of law, credible institutions, transparent regulation, and the depth of its know-how” as qualities that make Hong Kong the financial powerhouse it is, adding that mainland cities like Shanghai “don’t come close.” Beyond its exceptionalism in this regard, Holland also stressed Hong Kong’s unique ability to achieve Beijing’s two primary financial objectives: “keeping a grip on capital flows and promoting the RMB [Renminbi, the currency system which uses yen] as a trade currency.” These two mutually exclusive goals require an “offshore financial center with a pool of yuan liquidity that foreigners trust, but that ultimately Beijing can control.” Thus, despite speculation that cities like Shanghai or Shenzhen may soon replace it, Hong Kong will remain instrumental in mainland China’s growth for decades to come.
LOOKING FORWARD All this raises the stakes of the pro-democracy demonstrations but also makes their success less likely. There is too much at play for Hong Kong’s elite, not to mention China as a whole, to ever risk letting Hong Kong slip out Beijing’s firm grasp. Although this effectively rules out the democratic nomination of candidates that protestors have been clamoring for, it does leave room for certain concessions. Stability has always been a priority for Xi Jinping’s Communist Party, and the continued occupation of Hong Kong’s streets presents the risk of igniting domestic powder kegs in Tibet and Xinjiang, two areas where Chinese control has been met with even more indignation. So although Leung has demonstrated a willingness to wait out the protests, officials in Hong Kong and Beijing are seeking ways to bring the ordeal to a swifter conclusion. Minor concessions have already been offered, including sending Beijing a report on the status of the protests and making changes to the candidate selection committee, but both have been rejected by activists struggling to coordinate on strategy. Now more than two months into the protests, the priority for the three activist groups should be to overcome their lack of unity in order to pry meaningful concessions from the government as soon as possible. They cannot afford to let their bargaining position erode further, as popular opposition mounts to the continued disruption of life in Hong Kong. A hardline pursuit of full-fledged democracy will ultimately be a losing battle. Given the diversity of political opinion within Hong Kong, compromise stands as the most logical outcome—one that will ensure that protestor’s efforts will not have been in vain while allowing Beijing to save face through a firm stance against removing the screening committee. Through compromise, a better Hong Kong can emerge from the trials of the past months.
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FED UP IN AFRICA Are African Economies Victims of U.S. Monetary Policy? Derek Choi
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hat do Ron Paul and the President of Ghana have in common? One is a former libertarian congressional representative from Texas and perpetual presidential candidate; the other is the reformist leader of a sub-Saharan African nation with a GDP per capita nearly one-twelfth that of Texas. Yet both, separated by an ocean of differences, could find common ground over one issue: dislike of the United States Federal Reserve. In 2011, then-Rep. Paul alleged that the Federal Reserve “will eventually destroy our currency” through overprinting and inflation. African leaders might well be muttering the same thing. Yet unlike Paul, they have not been derided and written off by mainstream economists. Instead, this logic has become so engrained in economists’ minds that it has become the 21st century version of the time-tested excuse of “foreign meddling” straight out of many leaders’ playbooks. This is not just an African story: from India to China to Brazil to South Korea, economic policymakers have taken to pointing fingers at Washington. Ghana’s example is particularly ripe, however; upon the receipt of poor economic news, President John Dramani Mahama simply blamed the Federal Reserve for his country’s economic woes. The real explanation, however, may not be so simple. In 2008, the U.S. Federal Reserve started to purchase tens of billions of dollars of debt each month in a bid to stimulate the economy. Two years later, the bank upped monthly purchases, and they were increased yet again in 2012. By that time, the Fed was purchasing $85 billion of U.S. government debt and “mortgage backed securities” per month. It was an effort at monetary
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stimulus unprecedented in modern economic history. As America’s economic policymakers pumped money into the economy, some of this cash began to reach emerging markets. From India to Argentina to Russia, cheap money propelled huge growth. Credit was inexpensive and interest rates were low, so money flowed from the developed world into more risky investments in the developing world. The logic was simple: investors were more willing to take the risks inherent in emerging markets because interest rates had been driven so low in the West. Fast forward three years, and now the Fed is attempting to unwind its massive purchases. Then-Chairman Ben Bernanke and Vice Chair Janet Yellen spent much of late 2012 and early 2013 equivocating on how and when they might go about ending their massive doses of economic steroids. In May of last year, the Fed announced it would finally start tapering its purchases. The reaction was quick and severe. Developed markets plunged; developing markets plunged even more. The reaction was branded the “taper tantrum,” as stock indices in Turkey, Indonesia, Poland, Brazil, Hungary, South Africa, Nigeria, and more took a nose-dive. What went wrong? As the Federal Reserve began to pair back the life support it had been providing to the American recovery, investors panicked, sensing an end to near-zero interest rates in the West. The result was a dramatic outflow of capital from the emerging markets back to the developed world. Growth in these peripheral countries, powered for the past several years by cheap credit provided indirectly by the U.S. government, began to stall. Now, as the Federal Reserve has cut off bond buying entirely, emerg-
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ing markets fear that their prospects of growth will suffer even more. Or so the story goes. Africa presents a broad spectrum of economies to evaluate the effects of Federal Reserve policy, with impoverished states, middle-income nations, emerging markets, and commodity exporters. This brings us to the case of Ghana, where President Mahama has been blaming the Fed for the country’s plummeting growth, charging that its policies have skewed the Ghanaian economy by devaluing its currency and making it harder to refinance its debt. In reality, American monetary policy is far from the cause of its woes. In some sense, Ghana is a canary-in-the-coal-mine case for weaker African economies. Amadou Sy, a senior fellow in the Africa Growth Initiative at the Brookings Institution and former senior official in the IMF’s Monetary and Capital Markets Department, stated in a conversation with the HPR that Ghana is “the key country to look at” in Africa, as it illustrates how fundamentals can affect sensitivity to Federal Reserve policy. Basic economic conditions in Ghana have deteriorated in the past several years, and Sy argued, “Ghana was very fragile because Ghana has a twin deficit … a current accounts deficit and a fiscal deficit.” The fiscal deficit, or budget deficit, has doubled over the past three years. The current accounts deficit—a lower-is-better measure of the stability of the country’s trade with the world— has also ballooned. Meanwhile, the African Development Bank has reported the existence of severe infrastructure problems, the already-double-digit inflation rate hit a four-year high in August, and the prices of major export commodities have fallen nearly 40 percent since 2011. Robert Bates, professor of government and African and African American studies at Harvard University, added in an interview that Ghana is “wounded, and these wounds are all political.” The current government, he noted, had borrowed more than all the previous governments combined. The result has been a fall in growth rates from 7.1 percent last year to a projected 4.5 percent this year along with a 40 percent devaluation in the Ghanaian cedi. Federal Reserve policy undoubtedly played a role in the current economic problems, but it was Ghanian policymakers themselves that fueled this vulnerability. “It depends on how these countries have relied a lot on foreign money,” Sy stated. “Take the local bond market in Ghana: more than one investor out of five in the local bond market is a foreigner, so you are going to be more vulnerable to changes in sentiment.” An even more extreme case is South Africa, a country more deeply enmeshed in global financial markets. The argument for Fed-blaming is admittedly much stronger there. The South African rand is one the world’s most liquid currencies; it is incredibly easy to move money in and out of South African-denominated investments. As a result, the country is extraordinarily vulnerable to any shifts in global capital and investment flows. Indeed, the rand has fallen nearly 20 percent against the dollar since the Fed announced the details of its taper. Yet even South Africa is not a model country dastardly sabotaged by a foreign central bank. Its current accounts deficit has grown substantially, which caused credit agency Moody’s to downgrade South Africa’s debt. Systemic problems with infrastructure, education, and political infighting have dogged the country for years. Indeed, Morgan Stanley branded South Africa one of the “Fragile Five” countries that are over-reliant on foreign investment, a
systemic problem that the Federal Reserve did not create. Nigeria provides an even starker example of the relative unimportance of Federal Reserve policy on African nations. While some effects of the Fed’s taper are being felt, Sy explained that Nigeria’s oil has helped buffer the changes in the global economic winds. This year, Nigeria’s economic fluctuations have been correlated not with Federal Reserve decisions but rather falling oil prices. Indeed, Bates remarked that in times of high oil prices, the Nigerian economy experiences a “vitality that eludes the current government’s [mismanagement].” This does not demonstrate the unimportance of good governance but rather the importance of the country’s domestic economic and political conditions. What about more stable countries? Kenya, for example, has maintained steady growth over the past year. Sy noted that Kenya serves as a stark contrast to Ghana in how to manage capital flows properly. While some sectors of the economy are exposed to the volatility of global capital flows, it is in “the bond market where they’ve been very careful in the government itself and its regulation.” In fact, the IMF recently lauded Kenya for governmental and financial sector reforms that, especially when combined with investments in key sectors like infrastructure and communications, seem poised to accelerate growth. These sort of policies can radically change the impact of capital flows. In São Tomé and Príncipe, Bates lauded politicians for having “gotten their act together to manage their economy in a way that sterilizes the impact of the inflow of foreign dollars.” Widespread citizen education campaigns created what Bates described as “a very great deal of citizen awareness and organization” that helped ensure that trade revenues and investment wouldn’t be squandered. Though this situation is slightly different from that of other countries—São Tomé had oil money while South Africa and Ghana had foreign investment—the message is that policy decisions matter a lot more than the actual capital flows themselves. This is not to say that Federal Reserve policy, or global macroeconomic conditions writ large, is irrelevant. It is important, but mostly at the margins. The effects that do exist are, to a large degree, the result of domestic decisions. “Investors are discriminating more in looking at countries’ fundamentals,” Sy stated, so ultimately, taper or no taper, “if your country is growing well, [if ] it has healthy growth with good fundamentals, you are going to attract foreign investment.” The marginal effects of Federal Reserve policy are rarely strong enough to upset an otherwise healthy economy. Without a doubt, the massive and unprecedented monetary policies adopted by American, and to a lesser extent, European policymakers in response to the 2008 financial crisis have had and continue to have serious implications for emerging markets, particularly smaller ones. But while these policies can rock the boat, it is unlikely that they alone could capsize whole nations. Those with strong structural foundations will weather the taper and continue to attract foreign investment. It is a tempting story to see these developing economies solely as victims of self-interested American decisions, but that picture is far too simple. As Sy put it, “the U.S. Fed is one factor—an important factor—but it is only one factor.” In reality, Ghana, South Africa, and other similar countries must look inwards before they can look outwards.
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SILENCE AND SOLIDARITY Reflections on the People’s Climate March Alicia Juang
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t New York’s 81st Street, it was crowded, loud, and, on this uncharacteristically hot September afternoon, muggy. Around me stood rows upon rows of people chanting, talking, beating drums, waiting to start moving. The People’s Climate March, which had started nearly two hours earlier, 17 packed blocks ahead at 65th Street, was in full swing. Organized over the course of nearly half a year, the march was billed as a moment to bring out the environmental community en masse. It was a day to show, as Bill McKibben wrote in his May Rolling Stone op-ed, that we “give a damn about the biggest crisis our civilization has ever faced.” Timed to coincide with the eve of a historic UN special summit on climate change, it was also an opportunity to press world leaders to forge real progress—in short, to prove they too give a damn. Hours into the march, word spread through the march’s line and to spectators on sidewalks that there were 310,000 of us (a number raised later to 400,000). And with our marching bands, periodic megaphone pronouncements, and rising chants of “We are unstoppable! Another world is possible!” filling the alreadyloud New York, I wondered what all the tourists and passersby—and, importantly, the world leaders we were hoping to influence—were thinking. There were a lot of superlatives that day, but what I remember most about the march, what first comes to mind when I remember that hectic, overwhelming day a month after it happened is this: That day, as my watch ticked toward 12:59, hands rose into the air in front of us, and we followed suit. Drums silenced, conversations stopped. As more hands rose and heads bowed, the noise waned. Somewhere near me, someone coughed. A distant ambulance wailed. But then, save the still-clicking news helicopters flying above us, recording and paying witness to our solidarity, silence fell.
MAKING HISTORY, REPEATING HISTORY The People’s Climate March made history as the largest climate protest to ever take place, but it was not, of course, the first to call a moment of silence. The use of silence for unification and commemoration dates back hundreds of years, and the origins of the ritual seem uncertain. But the well-known silence on Armistice Day traces its roots back to the Australian journalist Edward George Honey. A veteran of the First World War, he called in 1919 for the nation to remember those who had made the just-renewed peace possible. “Can we not spare some fragments of those hours of peace rejoicing for a silent tribute to the mighty dead?” he wrote. With Honey’s call echoed by others, later that year in England, King George V declared an annual moment of silence. “In perfect stillness,” he wrote, “the thoughts of everyone may be
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concentrated on reverent remembrance of the Glorious Dead.” Armistice remains commemorative, but silence can also be a form of protest. The Silent Parade of 1917 saw over 8,000 African Americans marching through New York City to protest discrimination, lynching, and disenfranchisement and to remember the “butchered dead, the massacre of the honest toilers.” It was, the New York Times added, “in all respects one of the most quiet and orderly demonstrations ever witnessed in Fifth Avenue.” The success of the contemporary New York Gay Pride Parade’s annual silence was an inspiration for the organizers of the People’s Climate March, said coordinator Leslie Cagan. Discussions to organize the march date back to February, but it wasn’t until early August that someone suggested a moment of silence. And the idea caught on quickly. Choosing the topic for the silence came easily despite the organizing cadre’s large numbers: it would “honor the people who have been victims of climate change already: the people whose lives have been lost, the people whose lives have been turned upside down by severe weather, drought, floods, and everything else,” according to Cagan. For many marchers, including Barnali Ghosh, co-founder of Brown and Green, a South Asian climate justice organization, the silence ranked among their most memorable moments of the day. “Being [there] with people who care is very, very hopeful,” she said. “[The silence] was a moment of hope, but it was also a moment for memory.” Stanley Sturgill, a retired coal mine inspector from Kentucky, came to the march for his children, grandchildren, and greatgrandchildren’s futures, and he found similar meaning in the moment: “It was unreal. The whole city of New York just shut down. It was just a real solemn, eerie-type feeling.”
SOUNDING THE ALARM But a crucial point that came out of planning was that silence was not enough: we “need[ed] to be sounding the alarm,” according to Cagan. Timed to coincide with church bells tolling the new hour, a whistle signaled the beginning of that alarm. From where we stood, the silence lasted just half a minute; the yells and bells at 1 p.m. rode through the human crowd much faster than the hand signal for the beginning of silence. When the roar reached us at 81st Street, the nearby drumline beat loudly. On the sidewalk, a trumpeter swooped up and down. People yelled. “Really everyone I spoke to who was there got chills,” Cagan said. “[The silence and alarm sequence] was so moving.” We were sounding the alarm, but as everyone screamed, it struck me that a lot of people were whooping and cheering. I’m not sure I could call the moment happy as we were, after all, drawing attention to a crisis, but it felt kind of warm, energizing: hopeful.
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MAKING PROGRESS Sometime after that, we finally started moving. And stopped moving, as our pace caught us up quickly to the line’s slow progression. And started and stopped over again, until finally we were able to proceed more or less continuously. Eventually, a few of us broke away from the Harvard contingent, eager to move faster and to see a fuller spectrum of marchers. I found myself talking to someone from the Chesapeake Bay area near where I grew up. My brother volleyed a globe beach ball that marchers were bouncing around in the air. Communist protesters offered us flyers. One group held up skeletons representing major oil companies. We passed other student groups calling for climate action. I think I caught a glance of Michael Brune, the Sierra Club’s executive director, as we neared the endpoint. I saw toddlers and seniors, New York City natives and (as one bus sign indicated) Kansans. The sheer diversity of people and the stories that drove them to New York astounded me. I remember thinking during the silence about how temporary everything feels, how quickly man-made climate change is destroying our ways of being. History tells me the Earth of my grandparents’ time is not the same as the Earth today; science warns me the climate will be terrifyingly different when I reach my grandparents’ age. As a young environmentalist, this saddens me. My blitz forward through all the groups at the march reminded me that we are not just fighting to save the Earth, per se. The Earth will likely survive whatever havoc we wreak; it has, after all, endured for 4.5 billion years and counting. So the
People’s Climate March was a march by the people—and very much for all people, present and future. Tackling climate change, too, will require people from all backgrounds to contribute. Terilyn Chen ’16, co-coordinator of Harvard’s Environmental Action Committee, marched for intersectionality. Discussing at several points in our conversation the need for diversity and representation in the environmental justice movement, she points to the silence as something that crossed all ideological and geographic boundaries. “Lots of people around the world actively work on environmental issues, but it’s a whole other thing when everyone is [in one place],” she said. “The moment of silence was very much something people did together. It was really exciting.” Most people I talked to were quick to say that the real work of the environmental movement will not be accomplished by marches, and that’s true. But I know from interviews that I wasn’t alone in sensing strains of hope emanating from the alarm. We’d flooded America’s largest city, supported by sister events around the world, to make climate change visible, audible, palpable. I don’t think nearly so many would’ve come if they didn’t believe that we’d make some kind of a difference. In New York that day there were 400,000 people, 400,000 stories—but ultimately one broader aim, one hope, and that was for a brighter, cleaner future like the one Sturgill imagines for his children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. In a speech he gave that morning, he exhorted marchers to keep fighting for climate justice. “Never forget,” he said. “We are our own best hope for change.”
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HOW JOHN OLIVER USURPED A GENRE Daniel Kenny
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efore taping the second-ever episode of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight,” host John Oliver implored members of the audience not to internalize their laughter like they do when watching comedy programs at home. The studio audience must laugh hard and externally, he explained, or the show will not work. He began with a quick recap of the previous week’s news, including the Ukrainian crisis and the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Then, something different happened. “I know what you’re thinking,” Oliver said. “You’re thinking, ‘Wait, you’re not going to really do a comic take on the death penalty, right? It’s your second episode—I haven’t even decided if I like this show yet.” He then ranted for 12 minutes about the death penalty, earning two million views on YouTube. And the audience laughed, externally. John Oliver commands a bully pulpit. After more than seven years as a correspondent on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” Oliver, much like fellow former correspondent Stephen Colbert, now hosts his own late night news and political satire TV show. Oliver’s eight-week, critically-praised stint as acting host of “The Daily Show” prepared him to host his own Jon Stewart-style program. But HBO’s “Last Week Tonight” is not “The Daily Show.” Oliver has found his voice and his place in political commentary, separate from Stewart and—in several respects—better. “A good satirist is someone who hits a point, cares about something, and wants you to care about it,” Jonathan Gray, professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told the HPR. A good satirist “makes a statement” about his or her subject and does not simply mock for comedy’s sake. In an interview with the HPR, Amber Day, associate professor of English and cultural studies at Bryant University and author of Satire and Dissent: Interventions in Contemporary Political Debate, described TV news satire as an “evolving genre.” According to Day, Stewart made his name by delivering insightful critiques of contemporary political issues, analyzing how the press discussed those issues, and monitoring the mass media pandemonium of the cable news era. Stewart, along with Comedy Central colleague Colbert, defined the genre. But now, Day says, just as Stewart and Colbert separated themselves from the “Saturday Night Live” model of news satire, Oliver has separated himself from the Comedy Central model. To make a statement, a TV news satirist must introduce relevant topics, satirize them with the goal of improving conditions, and both analyze and serve as a check on the mass media. Stewart, Colbert, and Oliver all do this—but Oliver does it better. He is an outsider who satirizes American politics and news, but he also satirizes international affairs. He satirizes topics that viewers of the genre have never before considered, and his presence on HBO gives him more time, more freedom, and a better schedule to do so. But it is the traits unique to Oliver himself— his format, his style, and his tone—that truly propel him past his peers. The hosts of satire news programs usually present them-
selves as outsiders, and Oliver speaks with a unique voice as a British citizen living in America. While Stewart and Colbert are “insider-outsiders,” according to Day, Oliver is better positioned to offer a true outsider’s perspective. He lives in the United States, but he is a British citizen. He alternates between addressing the audience as “we” and “you,” giving himself an advantage in comedic range over Stewart and Colbert. According to Gray, Stewart will “invoke the rest of the world” and speculate about other countries’ opinions on American domestic issues. Oliver does not have to speculate. Oliver offers a global focus previously missing in TV news satire. In his first episode, for example, he lambasted the American media’s lacking coverage of the Indian presidential election. American television viewers recognize this dance, but Oliver’s unique rants simplify and popularize complicated issues like net neutrality, corruption in FIFA, and the American prison system. His net neutrality rant crashed the FCC website when he called upon fans to bombard the site’s comments section in support of net neutrality. In his original critique of Oliver’s program, New York Times TV critic Neil Genzlinger claims that Oliver “dived into a couple of … pools already occupied” and delivered “pretty standard stuff.” But in an interview with the HPR, Genzlinger praised Oliver’s “leaps of faith” to examine rarely discussed issues as unmatched in late night TV, especially on talk shows like “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” but even on Stewart’s and Colbert’s programs. “Last Week Tonight” derives from the behind-the-desk format of “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report,” but it deviates in length and programming schedule. Stewart and Colbert air Monday through Thursday night for 22 minutes, whereas Oliver airs only on Sundays for a full half-hour on HBO. Those eight minutes make the difference. According to Day, Oliver’s lack of commercial breaks allows him to tackle issues “newsmagazine style,” unlike Stewart and Colbert who must cut to commercial two to three times per episode. HBO does not air commercials, so Oliver can discuss student debt or net neutrality at greater length. But he can also better satirize the issues because his writing staff only needs to produce one show per week. To produce four shows per week and remain relevant requires the “Daily Show” and “Colbert Report” writing staffs to sacrifice quality for quantity. “He does only one show a week,” HitFix.com TV critic Alan Sepinwall said in an interview with the HPR, “and therefore has depth where his Comedy Central pals have breadth.” According to Genzlinger, Stewart can “take the easy way out” and “bash Fox News” four times a week, a format that Oliver is rendering “predictable.” Repetition cannot discredit Oliver’s criticism of Fox News because he airs once a week and normally comments on issues rather than the media itself. HBO’s liberal censorship policy is no secret. According to Day, although advertisers do not censor Stewart and Colbert, HBO’s pay cable system frees Oliver and his writers from ever thinking twice about airing a piece on, for example, General Motors. Gray disputes Oliver’s increased freedom, but Oliver clearly has more freedom than if his show aired on Comedy Central. For example, HBO provided Oliver a space to air a piece on Ken-
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tucky’s U.S. Senate race featuring full-frontal male nudity. Oliver does not exploit his freedom; he used the male nudity once to underscore Democratic candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes’ emphasis on her Republican opponent Sen. Mitch McConnell’s old age. If Oliver maintains this methodical use of obscenity, he can deliver a truer satire that carries more comedic weight than anything his Comedy Central comrades can produce. Stewart and Colbert can explain Grimes’ ad hominem attack, but Oliver can show it. Oliver already has a recognizable format: recap, rant, and crescendo. The recap keeps the show current; it fulfills the show’s duty to its title. Then Oliver can rant about whatever issue he wants for however long he wants, although usually between 12 and 16 minutes. Finally, the show reaches a crescendo. Sometimes Oliver will issue a call to action for his audience to tweet with a certain hashtag, leave comments on the FCC’s website, or write letters to the Kremlin addressed to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Other times Oliver will invite an unexpected guest such as Steve Buscemi to tap dance or “A Great Big World” to sing a swan song for Russian space geckos. The crescendo engages the audience and plays to the show’s viral potential. This points to another advantage over Stewart and Colbert: HBO uploads Oliver’s clips to YouTube. “Last Week Tonight” has thus far prevented its format from slipping to Stewart’s and Colbert’s predictability. The audience anticipates Oliver’s extended commentary for a week. They wonder what issue Oliver will rant about this week, but they know it will be important and under-the-radar. It will engage the audience and reveal an under-covered and rarely discussed problem. Stewart and Colbert do not command this level of anticipation, not only because they only air four nights a week, but also by nature of their material. They rely on their comedic talents, rather than their shows’ substance. Simply put, viewers tune in to Stewart and Colbert to watch some timely commentary in a familiar style. But they tune in the Oliver’s program to learn something new, and new is never predictable. There are no panelists, no correspondents, and few interviews. After the recap and rant, Oliver says, “And now, this,” and the camera cuts to an unrelated segment—such as clips of “60 Minutes” reporters asking leading questions. These segments air where Stewart and Colbert air commercials, and they allow Oliver to squeeze every possible minute of satire out of the show. The brief segments often focus on the media, which helps Oliver analyze and check the big networks while cleansing the audience’s palate before the next bit. However, Oliver himself does not contribute to or comment on the segments. A disembodied voice narrates the segments, distancing Oliver from what is normally the show’s only media-bashing aspect. Oliver projects a sense of urgency to transition to the next topic, whereas Stewart obsesses over demonstrating Fox News’s conservative bias. Colbert does the same: his entire faux-conservative character is
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a Fox News satire that has spanned the entire nine-year run of his program. The critics agree that Oliver can do more with his program than Colbert or, especially, Stewart. According to Genzlinger, Oliver’s “baffled” persona remains consistent throughout the length of his program, whereas Stewart shifts personas during the three “acts” of his show. Colbert stays in character for all of his 22 minutes, but he must still pander to a guest every night— and Oliver is just not doing that. Oliver delivers 30 full minutes of material, polished and perfected by a writing staff that has had a week to prepare, unhampered by shameless plugs for Hillary Clinton’s new book or promotional movie clips. Stewart and Colbert cannot control their tones like Oliver can. Oliver, according to Genzlinger, is “incredulous at how stupid and idiotic humanity is on its face.” In fact, Oliver’s baffled tone allows him to mine humor out of simply presenting news items without even telling a joke. Colbert has to tell a joke because his humor depends on his character’s verbal reaction, and the insider Stewart cannot appear as baffled about American politics as the outsider Oliver. According to Genzlinger, “Last Week Tonight” “is much better [than ‘The Daily Show’]. It does more, it goes deeper, the writing is smarter, and the research is smarter.” And although “The Colbert Report” delivers a fresher perspective than “The Daily Show” by way of Colbert’s character, the reality is that Colbert is leaving. The faux-conservative pundit Stephen Colbert will give way to a network TV, appeal-to-the-masses Stephen Colbert, and only Stewart and Oliver will remain in the genre (until Larry Wilmore, Colbert’s Comedy Central replacement, arrives at 11:30 p.m. on weekdays). Oliver has more time and a better venue to introduce and satirize issues important to the audience. He delivers an outsider’s perspective on America’s mass media system. He starts each program with a timely recap of the week’s news, but then delivers a timeless, in-depth commentary on issues like the death penalty and native advertising. Success in late night comedy—and in this niche subcategory of political and news satire—requires originality. The genre must evolve to satisfy its viewers. It must hold up a mirror to the audience and challenge them to think critically about society. Oliver surpasses Stewart and Colbert in this respect. There is no perfect formula, and thus fans should not fear or reject Oliver’s superiority to Stewart. If Oliver better mines for societal hypocrisy through extended commentary, and if the audience invests more credence in that commentary, then he is the better host and the better satirist. His formula is better than Stewart’s, and he has demonstrated that a show in this genre can better accomplish its goals by doing what “Last Week Tonight” does. Oliver need not fear compartmentalized laughter; the audience will laugh hard and true for as long as “Last Week Tonight” is on the air—or at least until the genre evolves again.
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the object of the game authority, art, and gamergate Anita Lo
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L;DR: I dated Zoe Quinn,” begins the last section of Eron Gjoni’s blog post about breaking up with his game developer girlfriend. “I thought she was the most amazing, kind hearted person in the world.” And then: “Turns out she was bullshitting pretty much everything I fell in love with her for.” It’s difficult to reconcile the sincerely sad breakup heard ‘round the web—that reads at times like a bad fan-fiction, at times like an ill-conceived Fall Out Boy song—with the aggressive, virulent hashtag war now known as “Gamergate” that’s resulted in doxing (malicious release of personal information online) on both sides and death threats, mainly against female game critics and developers. Although Gjoni soon distanced himself from the main fray of the conflict, accusations flew that Quinn had obtained media attention via sex. Tech news outlets like Kotaku and Polygon came under scrutiny for their journalists’ relationships with developers. “Chuck” actor Adam Baldwin’s choice to name the controversy Gamergate was no accident, then, in efforts to reframe the harmful debate as one centered on the ethics of video game journalism. On the opposite side, news outlets including Jezebel and The Daily Beast condemned the movement as an excuse to harass and intimidate the female gaming community. The blogosphere
also churned out multiple think-pieces on the “death of the gamer” identity and the democratization of video games. The scandal, which broke into the mainstream media, represents a longstanding conflict in the gaming community. Many of the current Gamergate critiques are not new. Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist media critic and blogger, has previously been the subject of online harassment for her Feminist Frequency videos that pointed out degrading representations of gender in video games. Earlier this year, gamemaking company Ubisoft was roundly criticized after Alex Amancio, a creative director for “Assassin’s Creed Unity,” was quoted claiming that playable female avatars were cut from the production because of the “extra production work” that it would require to render them. Allegations that game publisher Eidos Interactive had pressured gaming website GameSpot into firing editor Jeff Gerstmann due to a negative review of Eidos’s “Kane & Lynch: Dead Men” had long ago weakened the trust in the relationship between game publishers and review publishers, and yet incited none of the violence that Gamergate has. Because the industry’s sexism and journalistic integrity has historically been a point of contention, the explosion of Gamergate today is all the more interesting, as it focuses not on the mainstream, but rather on indie game developers, as
well as certain “games” that receive allegedly undeserved attention. Indie game developers are a new demographic enabled by a technological revolution. The plummeting prices and increased capabilities of smartphones facilitated the popularity of free games like “Angry Birds,” “Candy Crush,” and “Temple Run” whose players are not overwhelmingly male. Games like “Farmville” and “Words With Friends” have changed the social networks that participate in “gaming.” The Entertainment Software Association documented an increase in digital sales of games from 29 percent of all games purchased in 2010 to 53 percent in 2013, suggesting that gaming is no longer a pastime defined by the ownership of a console but by use of the internet, lowering barriers to enter the community. But gamers are, unfortunately, not always the most welcoming group. Just as newcomers to games were once popularly labeled “n00bs,” these efforts to represent more identities in new games are often met with derision. The “most helpful” review of “Depression Quest” on game distribution site Steam comments that “Depression Quest” “shouldn’t be on steam to begin with” while a review by Necromancer calls it “barely interactive” fiction, more of a webpage than a game. On the other hand, a common thread through most of the positive testimonials is the moral value of the game: Matthew
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Anita Sarkeesian speaks at the Game Developers Choice Awards.
Jones of Gameranx claims it will “make you a better person” and Ian Mahar of Kotaku praises the game for its “stigma reduction” for those with mental illness. I try “Depression Quest” in my room on a windy, gray Wednesday morning. It’s reminiscent of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” children’s books with linked pages instead of page numbers. Written in the second person, the prose is simple, and every few pages I—the player? reader?—am asked to choose the next action in the life of a depressed person. The stated goals of the game—to “illustrate as clearly as possible what depression is like” and to help other sufferers “know that they aren’t alone”— are admittedly somewhat vague and almost didactic. Compare this to the objective of “League of Legends,” the most popular online game of 2014, which is to “destroy the enemy’s nexus while defending your own.” Clearly, definitions of gaming diverge: games might have a predefined objective, or games might simply be an array of choices the player can take. MIT associate professor of digital media Nick Montfort suggested that games cannot be conceived of simply as “cinema plus interactivity” lest this definition obscure how “player input and agency are essential qualities of videogames.” On the other hand, he emphasized that games are not necessarily about “intentional communication”—neither a specific goal nor a meaningful message is necessary for the game to be a game, or art. Developer Anna Anthropy, who also had to field accusations that she had exchanged sex for publicity, told the HPR that she tries to develop games that allow “players to engage with a work playfully” as opposed to designing ones with intimidating controls and comp, Anthropy tries to develop games that allow “players to engage with a work playfully.” This means, though, that the more traditional gamer base is not the intended audience. Indeed, she has felt the hostility of being an outsider: Anthropy explains support for her community of “women who are pushing games forward as an art form … has come from out-
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side of the video game industry.” At the same time, society has not been a particularly welcoming home for gamers. The public has blamed video games for everything from school shootings to antisocial disorders. The families of Columbine victims sued Sony America, Atari, Nintendo, and SEGA (among others) following the discovery that the school shooters had played “Doom” and “Wolfenstein 3D.” Mike Ferreira, curator of the a pro-Gamergate timeline recalls accusations that “Mass Effect” was a porn simulator, following mainstream media attention to a scene in which the protagonist has sex with an in-game character. “It wasn’t anything more than what you’d see in a James Bond movie,” said Ferreira, and indeed, it seems unfair to condemn this particular piece of reality when Quinn’s veritable depression simulator is lauded. The double standard that the mainstream media tends to hold video games to—combined with the fear of losing the only internal media allies that once stood with them—only serves to sour the tensions between the traditional gamers and the outsider indie developers. All the abuse that has resulted from Gamergate, then, while indeed misogynistic, is a symptom of a larger problem: it’s a medium whose main consumers and artists have been denied respect for their craft because of moral quibbles, a medium which is now attaining “art” status only through what feels to gamers an outsider appropriation of a medium they have mastered with for decades. Harassment along gender lines is a product of feeling backed into a corner, of feeling as if the veterans of the industry will be condemned regardless of what moves they take. This is certainly not justification for the harassment and criminal activity that has resulted. But these added dimensions of history, authority, and morality should be an added dimension of consideration for the supporters, opponents, and observers of Gamergate as much as it is for the gamers and developers themselves.
INTERVIEWS
INTERVIEW: DR. SANJAY GUPTA with Gal Koplewitz who have been traveling back and forth to Central and West Africa, there aren’t many people in this country who have had a significant amount of institutional knowledge. So you have to learn, you do a lot of homework. But the subjectivity, I think, is more on the shoulders of the viewer or reader in these cases.
Why, in your opinion, haven’t we seen significant fundraising efforts to fight Ebola thus far, especially compared to the recent success of other campaigns like the ALS challenge?
Dr. Sanjay Gupta is a neurosurgeon and CNN’s chief medical correspondent. Gupta spoke with the HPR during a visit to the Harvard Institute of Politics.
The headline “Ebola: ‘The ISIS of Biological Agents’?” appeared recently on CNN. Has the pressure to draw readership interfered with CNN’s ability to produce nuanced journalism? Is that what they wrote? One thing I’ll say, just from a pragmatic standpoint, is that that particular story wasn’t something [my team] was involved in. I think there is sometimes a disconnect between headlines that pop up on television and the voices that come behind them. It’s true, I think, in all aspects of media, that that there have been times when headlines are put on articles that really don’t reflect their content. Having said that, it’s not the sort of thing that we want to put out there, because frankly it reflects a little bit of laziness. You have two big stories in the news right now: one is Ebola, and one is ISIS, and I think someone was probably trying to be cute in connecting the two in some way. To answer the question, I think in some ways with scientific topics we are at a little bit of an advantage; ultimately, the science is what grounds the stories that we do. There’s less subjectivity in the stories, so when it comes to Ebola, we can talk about what it is, and how it’s transmitted, and mortality rates. You know, there are real things, and you want to present it in a way that is accessible to people. How they perceive it, how much they worry about it, ultimately is up to the [viewer]. But to tell them how to think about it by calling it “The ISIS of Biological Agents,” is not something that we do. I think we try to stick to the facts. [The work that we do] does require a lot of homework. You can have some amount of institutional knowledge in these areas, but with Ebola, save for a few infectious disease experts
The ALS ice bucket challenge really was an interesting movement that defied, I think, some of the “laws” of this type of fundraising, in that ALS is a rare disease—and typically, rare diseases get short shrift. I think with Ebola, up until this year, it was an “over there, different continent” disease that was the stuff of almost fiction novels, that didn’t have broad relevance. So as far as American fundraising efforts were concerned, particularly private sector fundraising, it just didn’t seem as relevant to people here. It wasn’t something that they would care about if they were asked to donate money.
Your marijuana reporting highlighted a discrepancy between how much knowledge existed on the topic and how much of it was actually available to and being used by legislators. Are there other issues where such a discrepancy exists? I think there are other treatments that fall into the same spectrum as marijuana, which I think is an issue which circles around social, political and scientific norms. You know, I think what was confusing, and what I myself fell prey to, was that when you look at the research overall you get a particular point of view—and it required more digging and looking at other studies [to see a different perspective]. I think frankly, most people who vote on these things don’t look at the science, and so they count on others summarizing it in a way that sways them one way or the other. So whether it be marijuana, or new medications for rare diseases, or even things like psychedelic drugs for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—some of the earliest studies on using ecstasy, for example, for PTSD, took place here at Harvard—I think there are a bunch of issues that fall into that category, where there is a real disconnect between what is capable of being done, and what is actually done. But a lot of times the vote is not on the science anyways, even if they do know it. This interview has been edited and condensed.
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INTERVIEWS
INTERVIEW: BRET STEPHENS with Rachael Hanna with Tim Devine
Bret Stephens is a foreign affairs columnist for The Wall Street Journal and serves as a member of the paper’s editorial board. He won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2013.
You’ve written extensively in defense of Israel. When you write your column, is it with a mind toward persuading your audience or to provide other supporters of Israel with arguments they can use? I’m a supporter of the side that is defending itself, the side that is fighting for principles worth honoring and respecting. It’s not about siding with Israel or some other adversary; it’s about siding with the country that is in the right. It’s not a question of the Packers versus the Cowboys; it’s not an arbitrary choice or dictated by the fact that I am Jewish. It’s the fact that I am arguing for a rational case, and I would like to think that if Israel did something awful I would be critical. I write my column with two audiences in mind: people who are inclined to agree with me and could use arguments and facts at their fingertips, but I don’t just want to preach to the choir, and I would like to think that readers on the other side of the aisle could say, “I see his point even if I don’t agree, and it forces me to think of smarter ways to argue my point.”
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In one of your recent columns you drew a parallel between the actions of the Pakistani government in an offensive against terrorists and the actions of Israel over the summer. In the West, we heard plenty of criticism of Israel and next to nothing about the Pakistani government. Why does this double-standard of reporting exist, and what would it take to erase it from the media? It was particularly striking because you would have thought you were reading about Gaza from the excerpt I quoted about the situation in Pakistan—the civilian evacuations, the airstrikes, and yet it received next to no coverage. People were wholly unaware of this and would never stop to condemn it because of the double standard that has been in place for so many decades. There is a temptation to treat the Jewish state in a way you don’t treat other states; sometimes it’s flat out invidious, but sometimes it’s a backhanded compliment. It’s okay for Pakistan to do that, what do you expect, but Israel is like Western civilization. But this imposes an impossibly high standard on the country. [Deputy National Security Advisor] Ben Rhodes lectures Israel about civilian casualties in comparison to how America handled casualties in Afghanistan. Yet these are not similar situations; Americans were not engaged in city combat in Afghanistan as Israel is in Gaza; and when they did engage in city combat in Fallujah, there were massive civilian causalities, and Americans didn’t drop leaflets warning Iraqis about drone strikes. Rhodes was demanding Israel abide by a standard that even the United States doesn’t uphold.
How long do you think the current state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can persist? What will it take to fundamentally change the status quo? Palestinian and Arab political culture needs to change. The conflict is not fundamentally territorial. Israel could vacate every single settlement, and it would find it had not done much to resolve the conflict. They did this in Gaza, retreating behind a largely agreed upon border, and it produced a lot more violence and war. As long as the Arab world is not reconciled to Israel’s existence, there will be no end to conflict. How long can this persist? Germany in 1938 was xenophobic with a regime that had whipped its people into anti-Semitism. Two decades later, in the West, it was a responsible member of the international community because Germans had been utterly broken and had no choice but to change. The same happened with Japan, which had the original suicide bomb-
INTERVIEWS
ers—kamikaze pilots, and now it is a passive country. It could take 10 years or 10,000 years, but you’re not going to accelerate it if you look away from the nature of the problem. If you know what is on Palestinian television, in children’s books, how they think and speak about Jews, understand that this is the center of the conflict.
You, along with many others, have been very critical of President Obama’s lack of a coherent foreign policy. Come January 2017, what could a coherent foreign policy look like? The real problem we have today is a very palpable sense that Americans just want to step back from the burdens of global responsibility that we’ve had from the beginning of the Cold War, and so it creates a world in which our adversaries think they can take aggressive steps without American retaliation and our allies are beginning to ask themselves, “What should we do if America is not going to help us?” This is the sort of thing that leads to miscalculations and war. I urge that we take seriously the idea of America as the world’s police, which is not being the world’s priest, but we can enforce certain basic expectations of global order. When Russia seizes Crimea and invades Ukraine, and we do nothing, we are inviting disorder. If we had armed the Ukrainians quickly, cut Russia out of the financial sector, and helped diminish European dependence on Russian oil, the Russians would have said, “We can’t get away with this because America is serious.” The same goes for our dealings with ISIS and Iran. The next president, whoever it is, needs to understand that being the world’s policeman is the right thing to do for our allies and us. It creates the baseline for long-term prosperity, and it requires the steady, non-utopian application of American power, including military power—but not random intervention—to make it clear to the world that we have our allies’ backs.
What do you see as the media’s role in the landscape of political discourse? There is some great, very courageous journalism being done, and let’s not forget the incredible risks reporters are taking to bring news to readers, so I don’t want to neglect the superb journalism that is out there. But there is also a lot of misinformed, lazy journalism, and that’s a problem because it’s a second rate product and leaves those who read it under the impression that they are well informed, but they haven’t read a fair sense of the story. The industry could do more to attract higher caliber people to the profession and to police against mediocre or polemical or even dishonest journalism. When I write, I try to make sure I’m not being lazy, that if I’m taking on an argument that I oppose, that I’m giving it its due and that I’m not being unfair to it, and that I’m making my case against it with real honesty and I’m not misrepresenting someone else’s view. All my opinions are my own, and I speak only for myself, but integrity is one standard I think I’ve held up faithfully. I don’t pretend to be an objective journalist. I’m a columnist, but I do try to be honest and fair. Objectivity is to arrive at neutral, even-handed reporting, which can actually distort the truth if each side is not presenting honest views. Honesty is different; it is a truer picture of what is happening than what you might get from an objective source. There’s a lot to be said for honest journalism as opposed to objective journalism. This interview has been edited and condensed.
What role do you see yourself playing as a journalist? In giving me this column, this great institution, The Wall Street Journal, has handed me a sword which is 850 words a week to speak the truth as I see it, to call out the bad guys and defend those in need of defending, so there is a moral component to writing this, to take up a pen and be a voice for the sake of great causes and in defense of the right people. It’s a great privilege to be handed this trust.
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ENDPAPER
BUILDING BRIDGES Daniel Draper Lynch
“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president” — Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), October 23, 2010 “Obama turns to McConnell to secure his legacy” — Politico, November 17, 2014 Barack Obama may have made “change” the lynchpin of his 2008 campaign, but few would have anticipated that four years could bring about a transformation so dramatic as that encapsulated in these statements. For six years, Mitch McConnell has epitomized Republican intransigence on Capitol Hill, his taciturn demeanor fitting for the leader of a party resolved to obstruct Obama at every turn. Yet now, faced for the first time with a Congress united under GOP control, Obama appears to view the frosty Kentuckian as his most promising negotiating (and bourbon-drinking) partner. If nothing else, McConnell, unlike House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), at least knows how to deliver the votes if and when an agreement is struck. To be clear, I am not naïve enough to imagine that today’s political climate augurs well for a breakthrough in bipartisanship. As the HPR went to press, House Republicans had just filed their longawaited lawsuit against the president. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) had penned an op-ed in Politico likening Obama’s executive action on immigration to the behavior of a monarch. Not to be outdone, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) had taken to the Senate floor to suggest that Obama’s despotism might surpass even that of George III. Some Republicans raised the specter of a second government shutdown in as many years. However, partisan rancor notwithstanding, I remain stubbornly hopeful that the next two years could prove a time of constructive, albeit limited, cooperation. McConnell, perhaps validating the White House’s improved assessment of him, seems determined to quell the latest shutdown fever. Meanwhile, some analysts have predicted that Obama and congressional Republicans may find common ground on issues ranging from trade deals to modest tax reform. Once the dust settles on Republicans’ millionth pro forma effort to repeal Obamacare, they might muster support among some Democrats for the consolation prize of rescinding the law’s controversial medical device tax and employer mandate. For his part, Obama may have struck a confrontational tone with
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his action on immigration, but he has shown considerable restraint in other areas. Notably, in a move that drew plaudits from McConnell, he declined to press the Senate to confirm Loretta Lynch as attorney general during the lame-duck session. At the same time, he withdrew altogether the nomination of Sharon Block—a target of Republican animosity largely due to her status as a recess appointee—for the National Labor Relations Board. Small steps, to be sure. Yet regardless whether these faint hints of compromise translate into any meaningful action, I take a broader lesson from the apparent willingness of Obama and McConnell to consider turning over a new leaf. No matter how great the differences between two individuals, groups, or parties, progress can be achieved if both sides are willing to engage in a civil dialogue based on some degree of mutual respect. One of the virtues of Harvard I appreciate most is the ability of people of all political persuasions to do just that—to, for the most part, engage in dialogue and disagree without being disagreeable. As I prepare to enter the “real world,” I shall always cherish the stimulating and thought provoking, sometimes spirited but almost invariably cordial conversations I have had with students and faculty—Republicans, libertarians, and sometimes even fellow liberals—with whom I disagree. From the common room of my dorm to the common spaces of the IOP, and everywhere in between, we have exchanged ideas and laughs on issues both weighty and light—from financial reform and health care to the Irish setter atop Mitt Romney’s car. Even beyond such conversations, I appreciate the unique opportunity the IOP offers to work with and learn from speakers and experts of all political stripes. I hope that the same spirit of friendship and mutual respect will stay with us after we leave the Harvard cocoon. I hope that the same feeling of camaraderie might follow us when we encounter one another beyond the gates of Harvard. Then Harvard would truly have done more to advance bipartisanship and public service than all the staged photo-ops and carefully orchestrated golf and bourbon summits of Washington. Then we could finally see what can be accomplished when people of diverse and differing perspectives confront common problems with a sense of mutual respect. Then, perhaps, we could live up to the admonition emblazoned above the Dexter Gate: “Depart to serve better thy country and thy kind.”
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