HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW
THE ROLE OF IN THE SHADOW INTERVIEW: OMAROSA PROVOCATIVE OF CHAVISMO SPEECH
VOLUME XLIII NO. 4, WINTER 2016 HARVARDPOLITICS.COM
UNDERDOG
THE NEW HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW. ON SCREENS NEAR YOU.
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THE UNDERDOG ISSUE
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6 Trump is Not an Underdog Sunaina Danziger
10 I’m in It For You Ani Suresh
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14 The Walk Ons Marie Becker
A Tale of Two Supermen Adam Friedman
Trump is Not an Underdog Sunaina Danziger
24 The Court & The People Nicholas Yan
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CULTURE
3 The Role of Provocative Speech Katherine Ho
36 Luke Cage, Defender of Harlem David Leeds
UNITED STATES
38 From Exercise to Entertainment Cherie Hu
16 Drip Drop Nicholas Danby
INTERVIEWS
19 The Need for Police Diversity Catherine Zhang
40 Juan Pablo Escobar Humberto Juarez Rocha
21 Service for America Evan Bonsall
42 Omarosa Gavin Sullivan
24 The Court & The People Nicholas Yan
ENDPAPER
WORLD 27 Death of a Dream Nicholas Stauffer-Mason 30 In the Shadow of Chavismo Alisha Ukani
44 Moral Mindfulness Mark Bode
HUMOR 45 Trump’s First 100 Days Edgar Gonzalez
33 BMI Boom and Economic Collapse Jay Gopalan 40 In the Shadow of Chavismo Alisha Ukani
Email: president@harvardpolitics.com. ISSN 0090-1032. Harvard Political Review. All rights reserved. Image credits: Flickr: 6- Gage Skidmore, 8- Keith Allison, Erik Drost, 30- Joseph Remedor, 33- Lorrie Graham, Sean Kelleher. Netflix: 36. SoulCycle: 40. Twitter: 40- Juan Pablo Escobar, 42- Omarosa Manigault. Unsplash: 16- Quiin Stevenson. Wikimedia: 1- World Telegram staff photographer, Michael Vadon, UpstateNYer, 10- Gage Skidmore, 13- Noopy420, 14- chensiyuan, 19- Ivan Bandura, 24- Matt Popovich, 27- USAID Africa Bureau, 44- Daderot..
WINTER 2016 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 1
FROM THE PRESIDENT
HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW
The Underdog Issue
A Nonpartisan Undergraduate Journal of Politics, Est. 1969—Vol. XLIII, No. 4
EDITORIAL BOARD PRESIDENT: Joseph Choe PUBLISHER: Flavia Cuervo MANAGING EDITOR: Mark Bode ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR: Ali Hakim ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR: Perry Abdulkadir STAFF DIRECTOR: Ari Berman CAMPUS SENIOR EDITOR: Tasnim Ahmed CAMPUS ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Akash Wasil COVERS SENIOR EDITOR: Tess Saperstein COVERS ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Sam Kessler U.S. SENIOR EDITOR: Quinn Mulholland U.S. ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Carla Troconis U.S. ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Henry Brooks WORLD SENIOR EDITOR: Sam Plank WORLD ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Jack Boyd WORLD ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Jacob Link CULTURE SENIOR EDITOR: Hana Connelly CULTURE ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Emily Zauzmer INTERVIEWS EDITOR: Humberto Juarez HUMOR EDITOR: Richard Tong BUSINESS MANAGER: Enrique Rodriguez ASSOCIATE BUSINESS MANAGER: Jenny Horowitz SENIOR DESIGN EDITOR: Kyle McFadden ASSOCIATE DESIGN EDITOR: Victoria Berzin MULTIMEDIA EDITOR: Peter Wright ASSOCIATE MULTIMEDIA EDITOR: Sebastian Reyes
STAFF John Acton, Victor Agbafe, Marie Becker, Marty Berger, Devon Black, Evan Bonsall, Jiafeng Chen, Benjamin Cohen, Chris Cruz, Nathan Cummings, Justin Curtis, Sunaina Danziger, Ali Dastjerdi, Sal Defrancesco, Brandon Dixon, Avika Dua, Casey Durant, Joshua Florence, Edgar Gonzalez, Samarth Gupta, David Gutierrez, Eliot Harrison, Olivia Herrington, Thomas Huling, Minnie Jang, Cindy Jung, Daniel Kenny, Andrew Kim, Kieren Kresevic, Amelia Lamp, Ashiley Lee, Elton Lossner, Kay Lu, Ayush Midha, Malvika Menon, George Moersdorf-Schulte, Erica Newman-Corre, Derek Paulhus, Anna Raheem, Anne Raheem, Apoorva Rangan, Sebastian Reyes, Neill Reilly, Alyssa Resear, Bella Roussanov, Lizzy Schick, Soraya Shockley, Wright Smith, Sydney Steel, Nico Tuccillo, Celena Wang, Sarah Wu, Catherine Zhang, Anna Zhou, Yehong Zhu.
ADVISORY BOARD Jonathan Alter Richard L. Berke Carl Cannon E.J. Dionne, Jr.
Ron Fournier Walter Isaacson Whitney Patton Maralee Schwartz
Many of our readers may not know how the HPR selects covers topics for each magazine. This process occurs every quarter when the entire staff convenes to consider various covers topic proposals, which essentially map out a hypothetical magazine’s content (i.e., potential article topics, accompanying multimedia content, etc.). After an hour of deliberation and voting, the HPR winnows down approximately ten covers topic proposals to a single one. The covers topics you saw this past year—State of the Art, Who is Our Enemy?, and All in the Neighborhood—were the proposals that ultimately prevailed through this process. One of the main criteria the HPR considers when choosing a covers topic is its ability to be both timely and timeless: it should be both relevant today while remaining relevant in the future. The Underdog Issue perfectly encapsulates this key criterion. In fact, the Underdog Issue was proposed four times before finally being selected as the covers topic this quarter—a testament to its timely and timeless nature. Each time the HPR decided to pursue a covers topic other than the Underdog Issue, it was precisely because we knew that it would continue to be applicable at any other point, including now. Especially with recent events like the Chicago Cubs’ first World Series victory in 108 years, Donald Trump’s unexpected and unconventional path to clinching the U.S. presidency, and Yale’s first win in a football game against Harvard in nine years, the underdog narrative is very much alive today. Underdogs are essentially predicted
losers who, against the odds, prove their doubters wrong. The story of David and Goliath is frequently cited as following a quintessential underdog narrative: a young boy defeats a giant with just a sling and stone and later becomes the King of Israel. This narrative can be applied to all facets of life, which is evident in the diverse set of articles in this issue. Sunaina Danziger challenges the idea that Donald Trump overcame substantial disadvantages and instead suggests that his anti-establishment sheen is false. Adam Friedman evaluates NBA player Stephen Curry’s journey of perseverance against his seasoned rival LeBron James. Ani Suresh analyzes the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, two presidential candidates who were initially dismissed by the political establishment and only recognized much later as formidable forces. Marie Becker follows the lives of walk-on college athletes and how they deal with perceptions of inferiority compared to their recruited counterparts. This is the last issue produced by the HPR’s 48th Masthead. I have had the great fortune of leading this magazine for the past year, and I would like to thank all of Masthead 48 for their hard work in further solidifying our status as a leader in political journalism. There is no doubt in my mind that we will continue to reach even greater heights under the leadership of Masthead 49.
Joseph Choe President
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THE ROLE OF PROVOCATIVE SPEECH Katherine Ho
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ecently, there has been considerable discourse surrounding the issue of free speech on college campuses. The most vocal participants in the conversation have crystallized into two extremes. One contingent feverishly offers up shocking examples of censorship in dire-sounding Atlantic op-eds, triumphantly assailing a supposed monolith of liberal PC anti-speech millennials. The other extreme militarily and indignantly espouses values like “safety” and “comfort,” forming sanctimonious mobs upon encountering anything deemed unsafe. While there has been much thoughtful analysis on the issue of free speech, it is often drowned out by this firefight.
SAFE SPEECH VS. FREE SPEECH
Most students fall under neither of these extremes. Most agree that freedom of speech is valuable, but also feel that respect is a worthy goal. The real issue lies in determining when ensuring respect turns into censorship. For instance, a recent Crimson editorial attempted to address the University of Chicago letter on safe spaces and trigger warnings. The conclusion began confidently, “Universities should strive to strike a balance between ensuring students’ right to express dissent and combatting kind of vitriol that stifles, rather than furthers, free discussion in a free society. In their original forms, safe spaces and content warnings can help achieve this goal, but at their most extreme, they can threaten it.” The editorial successfully identified two conflicting platitudes: free speech is crucial and safe spaces can be good, but at the same time, some safe spaces can be bad, and some speech shouldn’t be allowed. However, it struggled to explain how these concerns should be reconciled (unless you see the suggestion
to “strike a balance” as substantial). And it’s easy enough to state that “vitriol” is unproductive and doesn’t have a place at a university, but what exactly falls under that category? Harassment and personal insults would definitely not be considered constructive, and certainly shouldn’t be considered acceptable discourse. But how does this standard apply to ideological arguments that are very offensive, or even disturbing to others? This vague have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too approach—and the use of agreeable banalities to discuss the issue of free speech—reflects the general confusion on campus. Students struggle to meaningfully engage with the conflict between free speech and safe spaces (which are already difficult to define). So how should we reconcile the conflict between striving for free speech and attempting to maintain respectful dialogue? I believe that there are important reasons why objectionable speech deserves to be heard, or at the very least should not be silenced. It is necessary to recognize why “ensuring respect” is an admirable objective, but also a highly broad aim that can often lead down a slippery slope of misapplication. Moreover, the term “respect” itself is unclear. Just as we have seen the requirement for emotional safety being extended to the academic sphere, we see the concomitant expansion of what is deemed “disrespectful,” from insults that do not respect individuals to arguments that do not respect certain ideas.
OFFENSIVE TO THE STATUS QUO Universities are places of intellectual exploration. Speech, dialogue, argument, and discussion are some the strongest contributors to this mission of discovery. Oftentimes, those who believe superficially in free speech will say that people should be able
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to say whatever they want, unless it’s “offensive.” But by definition, if speech is restricted based on how offensive it may seem to some, then speech isn’t free. Moreover, the use of “offensive” as a dirty label to imply that this type of speech is inherently less valuable is inaccurate. The value of speech should be judged by its intellectual rigor and thoughtfulness, not the degree to which it conforms to a set of predefined comfortable norms. However, it is not uncommon for students to hold the belief that if speech is unpalatable, it is automatically less important to hear. In an interview with the HPR, Devontae Freeland ’19 remarked, “I think the role for provocative and offensive speech is for it to be told that it is provocative and offensive … the First Amendment doesn’t prevent me from telling someone else that maybe they shouldn’t say something. They still may have the right to say it, but maybe they shouldn’t.” Freeland establishes that we should respond to offensive speech by labeling it as such and discouraging it. However, we have to recognize that unpalatable speech can have a valuable role that goes beyond simply “[being] told that it is provocative and offensive.” One of the main ways we benefit from free speech is that unconstrained dialogue gives us the power to challenge the status quo of existing ideas. The fact that speech is unpalatable only means it does not conform to the existing norms of thought in a certain time period or setting, not that it intrinsically has any less merit. Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker told the HPR, “All new ideas are offensive, provocative, and objectionable to someone. The idea that the earth goes around the sun, that African Americans should not be enslaved, that women should have the vote, that homosexuality should not be a crime—all of these were provocative and objectionable in their time.”
THE SUBJECTIVITY OF DISRESPECT The value of offensive speech becomes clearer when we ourselves aren’t offended by it. Following the shooting at Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, David Brooks wrote an article entitled “I am Not Charlie Hebdo” in the New York Times in which he pointed out the inherent hypocrisy of people “who are quick to lionize those who offend the views of Islamist terrorists in France but who are a lot less tolerant toward those who offend their own views at home.” The material published by Charlie Hebdo—with its unique radical left-wing and secular editorial stance—was undoubtedly very offensive to many people, like those who objected to the magazine’s depiction of the Prophet Muhammad in satirical cartoons. Likewise, Colin Kaepernick’s recent refusal to stand during the national anthem—a symbolic action that sparked discourse on racism, American values, and the protest itself—was surely very offensive and disrespectful in the eyes of certain individuals. But it’s hard to argue that due to their provocative natures, both the magazine and Kaepernick’s protest had no role beyond being told off simply because some people found them objectionable. These examples also shed light on the fact that assessing the “offensiveness” of a statement is a highly subjective matter. In an environment where avoiding potential emotional discomfort is the name of the game, claiming someone’s speech violates your sensibilities becomes a highly effective way to silence that person. As a result, we start to see instances in which the concept of a safe space is weaponized to serve certain political ends.
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This includes labels that are used to shut down particular unpalatable opinions. Today, words like “racist,” “bigot,” and “sexist” are hurled toward certain types of people with such frequency and zeal that these terms have lost much of their original meaning and impact. But weaponizing these phrases as buzzwords to attack others is almost never productive. Conor Healy ’19 told the HPR, “Surely our responsibility is not to degrade [people] by calling them racists—surely our responsibility is to try and convince them, and to try to be concerned for their ideological progress, rather than their supposed status as sleepwalking oppressors.” At its root, free speech is optimistic, resting on the conviction that dialogue and inquiry can always be used to grow intellectually and further understanding. Attempts to silence offensive or provocative speech often just draws attention to the speaker.
FIGHTING SPEECH WITH SPEECH So what should we do when we hear speech that offends us? Will Creeley, vice president of legal and public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, has an answer. In an interview with the HPR, Creeley stated, “The best answer to speech that offends or provokes you is more speech. I think that silencing people for their offensive or provocative positions gives them a certain type of notoriety and forecloses the possibility of answering them and discrediting them with reason or with statistics or with better arguments.” Ultimately, respectful speech should never supersede free speech. Speech that doesn’t offend us is always more pleasant, and disagreeable arguments are often hard to hear. But speech should never be censored solely because it is provocative—only then can it be truly free.
DEFENDING A CULTURE OF FREE SPEECH There is a conflict between the desire for respectful speech and free speech , and nowhere is it more clearly manifested than on college campuses. At the University of Missouri last November, student protesters physically tried to eject a student journalist from a protest area. Following the incident, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times wrote, “Moral voices can also become sanctimonious bullies.” One month earlier, the Wesleyan student government voted to cut funding for the school newspaper after it ran an op-ed criticizing Black Lives Matter. There are countless incidents in which speakers have been protested and their events cancelled on the basis of their ideas.
THE NEW CULTURE OF SELF-CENSORSHIP But do these incidents accurately reflect the views of a majority of college students? Is it fair to describe student activism as wholly intolerant? It seems more likely that the anti-speech actions of an extremely small minority are magnified by the media frenzy surrounding each incident, creating the misconception that these views are more common than they actually are. When a speaker gets cancelled or a newspaper loses funding, the short-term impact is the censoring of that particular viewpoint. But the long-term (and more significant) impact is the signal sent about what type of speech is acceptable. Free speech—in its most crucial and effective form—is not simply a constitutional
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right under the First Amendment, but a fragile culture. It means that people should feel that they can go out and argue whatever they want. Without it, even the strongest legal and institutional protections are meaningless. Culture is invaluable in determining what people feel they can and can’t do; seeing other people openly discussing controversial ideas makes people much more likely to do so themselves. Conversely, seeing others punished for airing their opinions makes people scared and reluctant to speak out. The result is self-censorship. There is the fear that one small misstep could end up on the receiving end of the “safe space” shaming bludgeon that is so prominently broadcasted nationwide. People struggle to abide by the new norm of emotional respect in an intellectual space, shying away from potentially controversial speech that might challenge cultural orthodoxies. In certain corners of thought, ideological vibrancy is eroded and replaced by a respectful staleness. Richard Wang ’20 commented, “You always run the risk. You don’t want to offend anyone, so you self-censor yourself … There’s a small group of people that is loud about being anti-free speech, which has a big role in determining the on-campus culture but isn’t representative of the opinions of the student body.”
THE ADMINISTRATIVE ROLE Surely, the Harvard administration can play an active role in fostering this delicate and essential culture of free speech. While official institutional policies can occasionally be used directly to protect speech, their primary effect is as an indirect indicator to students of what the on-campus culture should be. A bottom-up effort by students to avoid self-censorship is admirable, but it’s erroneous to put the onus on individuals to take the stance against anti-speech backlash. The words and actions of the administration are crucial in determining what type of culture develops on campus. A “top-down” approach by the administration would be more effective in correcting the root of the issue, which is the idea that we should strive to attain emotional comfort in an intellectual setting. This was the purpose of a recent University of Chicago letter in which the dean of students stated the administration’s condemnation of safe spaces—a clear reaffirmation of the value of free speech over emotional respect. The anti-speech actions of a small but vocal minority have been broadcasted so loudly that—if free speech is a culture we want to encourage—it is necessary to state pro-speech stances in a loud, direct, and unequivocal way. Statements couched in qualifiers and diplomatic phrasing just blend into the drab background noise of agreeable administrative policies. The letter was criticized for being attentionseeking, but that was its exact intent: to proudly draw attention to the idea of free inquiry as a crucial pillar of academic life. The fact that we’ve essentially devolved into a national shouting match over free speech may not make anyone particularly pleased, but it’s necessary to acknowledge that the blunt and overly simplistic characteristics of the letter were a reflection of how our dialogue on the issue looks right now.
It’s not constructive to impose normative statements as incontrovertible truths that must be accepted by students without debate. Unfortunately, a fair amount of free speech defense today takes the form of aggrieved op-eds penned by writers who are quite fond of lamenting the current state of young people or complaining loudly about “coddled millennials.” Unfortunately, these statements are often counterproductive. Will Creeley, vice president of legal and public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, elaborated in an interview with the HPR, “I get nervous about the steady drumbeat of ‘kids these days’ articles where there’s some kind of imagined tension between ‘millennials’ and freedom of expression. I mean, I’m not that old. I remember that it’s not pleasant or interesting to be lectured by one’s elders. And I think that if we get to a position where free speech is older telling younger people to eat your vegetables, it becomes less useful.” There is inherent hypocrisy in some parts of the free speech movement. The same individuals who believe that it’s not constructive to dismiss people as racists readily dismiss young people as infantilized crybabies who cannot possibly comprehend why free speech is important. But to do so reveals an underlying intellectual smugness, insularity, and close-mindedness, a belief that vast swaths of people who have different opinions from theirs are simply not worth their time. It’s a refusal to consider why people believe certain things or feel the way they do. This approach is unlikely to lead to the productive dialogue and engagement that advocates of free speech claim to value. Instead, it is crucial to characterize student activists fairly and attempt to understand their motivations. Conor Healy ’19 reflects, “I just think I’ve had more time to grow and understand exactly why people want to limit speech. I don’t think that these are necessarily bad people. I think they have noble intentions, and I have made a conscious effort to understand why there is so much emotion in this sphere and why people are so fervent about their beliefs on this issue.” The focus must be on engaging with and not berating students—the next generation—and striving to convince them why allowing for all types of speech is tremendously crucial. Because despite the occasional shocking examples of censorship that are feverishly offered up in sensational Atlantic articles, most students do agree that free speech is important and should be protected. “I have read survey results showing that today’s students don’t appreciate the principles of free speech,” said Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker. “But I have never witnessed it at Harvard. I’ve found that the students in my classes, my lab, and my office visits are completely reasonable and clear-thinking.” It’s true that free speech is threatened on college campuses. Too often, free inquiry is sacrificed as we grow increasingly reluctant to poke the bear of cultural orthodoxy. But to properly defend free speech, we must return to its fundamental principles. We must engage with those we vehemently disagree with instead of continuing to shout past each other. Ultimately, free speech is an enormously important but fragile social practice, and everyone—students and administrators, liberals and conservatives, young and old—should strive to protect and cherish it.
“KIDS THESE DAYS” But we must avoid devolving into a situation where administrators are just dictating pro-speech policy down to students.
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TRUMP IS NOT AN
UNDERDOG Sunaina Danziger
B
eginning around 8 p.m. the evening of election night, President-Elect Donald Trump captured the lead in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, and Florida. Some of these states were considered contentious battleground states. Others were states that Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton had long been projected to win, and by a considerable margin. Spectators looked on as statistician Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight projection for a Trump victory surpassed 50 percent, and as a New York Times projection poll flipped on a dime to project Trump over Clinton. Unassuming onlookers could certainly frame the unanticipated events of election night as an underdog success story: at no point in the lead-up to the election did Trump appear to hold the winning hand. At the same time, Trump’s success could be attributed to a
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perceived underdog status with which his supporters—particularly his white working class base—identified. Yet depicting Trump as an underdog holds dangerous implications for his presidency and de-emphasizes the hateful and divisive rhetoric that propelled him to the Oval Office. Trump’s campaign was anti-establishment and perhaps even apolitical, a status that innately benefitted him and negatively affected Clinton, the epitome of the Democratic political establishment. But by the very nature of his background, the president-elect cannot be seen as an underdog. The gold-plated “Trump” logo attached to every business event and at every campaign stop is reflective of the enormous privilege and “success” that facilitated his ascendance to Republican nominee for President.
UNDERDOG
A PRIVILEGED BILLIONAIRE Clinton structured her campaign around a set of actionable policy proposals and told a narrative of success built over a lifetime of work in the public and private spheres. Candidate Trump, in contrast, was the first to flout the financial “success” of his business and real-estate ventures, underlining them, and his multi-billion-dollar organization, as his principal qualifications for the Oval Office. The Trump Organization, based out of Trump Tower in New York, is responsible for overseeing all of Donald Trump’s global business ventures and investments. It specifically focuses on real estate development, investment, sales and marketing, and property management. Over the course of the campaign, his leaked tax returns and the failure of a number of real estate projects put into question the extent of his wealth. There is little doubt, however, that Trump is at the absolute least a billionaire. This personal wealth enabled Trump to finance his own campaign for a prolonged period of time. Decades of assiduously pursuing celebrity also inevitably granted him name recognition to people otherwise disengaged from the political arena. Many of Trump’s supporters imagined themselves in his image, although Trump was born into a wealthy family and built his real estate empire on the foundation of his father. Trump’s position at the onset of his campaign thus inevitably advantaged him. Although he sparked enthusiasm within a white, lower-middle class population across the country, it largely stemmed from his own position as a successful businessman.
AN OPPRESSION-BASED APPEAL Yet another narrative paints Trump as an underdog hero willing to defend the common American against the forces of globalization and multiculturalism. The rhetoric driving Trump’s campaign centered on a hostile anti-immigrant, nativist platform that reflected a disregard for the United States’ espoused values and its increasingly internationalist approach to political affairs. Moreover, Trump’s campaign was overtly racist, and has led to a resurgence and mainstreaming of the Klu Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups who actively endorsed Trump in the lead-up to election day. His opening comments on illegal immigration were false and explicitly offensive to millions of Hispanic Americans and recent immigrants. Trump also attacked Judge Gonzalo Curiel’s credibility in overseeing a lawsuit against Trump University on the basis of his Hispanic heritage. In the wake of November 2015 terror attacks in Paris, he equated the actions of a handful of violent extremists with those of the 1.6 billion peaceful followers of Islam around the world, in calling for a “temporary ban” on Muslims entering the United States. And on August 16, Steven Bannon, executive chairman of controversial alternative right-wing outlet Breitbart News became the chief executive officer of the Trump Campaign. Bannon and Breitbart received widespread criticism for publicizing statements and opinions that were racist or anti-Semitic. No other mainstream candidate in recent memory has so actively and vo-
cally fanned the flames of racism in the country. The president-elect’s inflammatory, vulgar, and ultimately offensive vocabulary solidifies a racially and religiously defined sense of status in the United States. Striking fear into the hearts of ethnic, racial, and religious minorities, insulting women, and fanning the flames of popular prejudices certainly breaks the mold of the past several decades of presidential campaigns. It harkens back to the overtly pro-segregation, populist message that drove Southern Democrat George Wallace’s primary bid in 1964. Segregationists were not perceived as “underdogs” throughout the 1960s in the same way Trump is not and must not be perceived as the 2016 underdog. The racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic drivers of Trump’s campaign play into a far larger narrative of otherization and construction of “difference” along racial or gender lines. Beginning with an influx of immigrants, particularly from Ireland and China, in the mid-19th century, white working-class individuals in the United States attempted to secure a higher status than their immigrant counterparts by means of race and external difference. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment and its equal protection clause threatened the higher standing of poor white laborers in the South, which led many to join the Klan throughout the subsequent period of Reconstruction. These individuals attempted to better themselves by constructing “inferiority,” orchestrating violent hate crimes, and propagating racist sentiments. In 2016, Trump’s campaign has uncovered the extent to which the same prejudices and artificial differences continue to govern our contemporary livelihoods. The white, lower and middle-class workers who voted en masse for Donald Trump have been hit hard by globalization and multiculturalism, as manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas. Factories throughout the Midwest, in the Rust Belt cities that secured the presidency for Trump, have declined in favor of coastal startup and technology companies that hire the college-educated. Working-class white America felt as though it had fallen by the wayside, abandoned in the face of trade deals, loose immigration laws, and urbanization. “Make America Great Again” provided to these voters a return to a status quo in which they held some degree of upper hand. A vote for Trump indicated a passive tolerance for xenophobia, racism, and sexism. Although many willingly overlooked Trump’s offensive comments and policies in favor of his perceived ability to provide job security and shake up Washington, others wanted to hear their own xenophobic and isolationist tendencies articulated to a national audience. Certainly, a candidate who spoke for these values was an underdog candidate just as they, his supporters, saw themselves to be abandoned, underdog citizens. This argument fails to consider how attempted “otherization” for one’s own personal gain is not a worthy, respectable, or effective “rags-to-riches” story. Donald Trump’s campaign slogan, his rallying cries, and his reactionary vocabulary directly exploited a vulnerable white working and middle class that felt it needed a champion. The inaugural year of Trump’s presidency is likely to dismantle the falsely perceived anti-establishment, “underdog” status that may nonetheless have propelled his electoral victory.
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A Tale of Two
SUPERMEN Adam Friedman
P
itted against each other in the last two NBA Finals, Stephen Curry and LeBron James have developed a personal rivalry without equal in today’s league. Called the world’s two best basketball players by both Slam magazine and ESPN, these two champions join the long NBA tradition of rival superstars—following rivalries like Wilt Chamberlain versus Bill Russell and Larry Bird versus Magic Johnson. That being said, the narrative between James and Curry has developed differently from that of their predecessors. From the time they were drafted, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson were paraded as equals; Chamberlain and Russell experienced a similar phenomenon. The basketball world has never treated James and Curry equally. By the age of 15, James looked destined to succeed. However, for Curry, an undersized and unheralded college prospect, failure seemed inevitable. To basketball fans, their rivalry has become emblematic of the underdog versus the favorite—two opposite champions, ironically born in the same hospital, clashing at the end of each NBA season. However, this is not the full story. On the surface, James and Curry’s rivalry might seem the prototypical David and Goliath story, but a deeper look will show that both players have an equally compelling case for the underdog label. Ultimately, the case of James and Curry exposes a broader trend. The narrative linking these two superstars, along with many other narratives in the athletic world, has been edited and simplified in an attempt to fit its events to a more convenient story.
THE LITTLE GUY AND THE GIANT Standing 6 feet 3 inches and weighing 190 pounds, Curry’s normalness is somewhat extraordinary. In a league where most players can’t fit through a door without ducking, Curry’s prepubescent looks and stature are exceptional in their own right. Over the past two years, the “baby-faced assassin” experienced an enormous upsurge in popularity. In fact, he might very well have supplanted James as basketball’s most popular player—he became the first player to be unanimously named NBA MVP, and for the second straight season his was the league’s highest selling jersey. Curry’s meteoric rise in popularity can best be explained by once again considering the differences between him and James. Basketball fans are used to watching athletic feats they themselves could never hope to equal. Whether it is a chase-down block to clinch the NBA Finals or a jaw-dropping dunk, James’ athleticism allows him to play in a way the average person couldn’t even attempt. Curry, by contrast, is a shooter. While it is true Curry’s shooting prowess is in some ways as extraordinary as James’ athletic ability, Curry’s game resonates with fans because, as he himself said, “everybody can take a ball and shoot.” Furthermore, Curry has won supporters with his perseverance. College basketball’s major programs declared Curry too small and too slow to compete, leaving him to play for the unheralded Davidson College. And despite a phenomenal college career, he found himself nagged by the same criticisms on draft night. So the story goes: from the time he was in high school,
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UNDERDOG
Curry’s talent was underappreciated by scouts and recruiters alike; however, through grit and hard work he has refined his abilities and is now running circles around competition one could call more naturally gifted than he. James, by contrast, never worried which college he would attend; instead, he worried which NBA team would he join. When he was only a 17-year-old high school junior, Sports Illustrated dubbed James the “Chosen One” and described him as “so good that he’s already being mentioned as the heir to Air Jordan.” Standing six feet eight inches, weighing 250 pounds, and possessing unbelievable athletic ability, James stands in stark contrast to Curry’s underdog story.
THE STORY RETOLD Although this is the story the world knows, it lacks the depth afforded by a different perspective. After all, when James and Curry were born in that same hospital on the edge of Akron, Ohio, they were in very different positions. Curry was born into wealth, privilege, and a loving home; LeBron found himself familiar with “drugs, guns, killing,” but not his father. Curry was coached by his dad, 16-year NBA veteran Dell Curry. James lived with his coach as well, but only because often he had nowhere else to stay. While Curry shot hoops with his father’s NBA teammates, James practiced at an old Salvation Army gym. For both men, success was overwhelmingly unlikely. However, only for Curry was failure survivable. To LeBron, fatherless with hardly a cent to his name, failure meant succumbing to the cycle of urban poverty. Curry quickly left Akron while LeBron stayed behind to become Akron’s champion. Perhaps Curry is the underdog on the basketball court, but LeBron was the underdog in pretty much everything else. Even Curry’s role as the basketball underdog is to some degree exaggerated. While Curry may be skinnier and slower than most of his competition, he was born so genetically inclined towards the game of basketball that all three male members of his immediate family play or have played in the NBA. Indeed, it’s possible that Curry’s shooting ability is as genetically determined as LeBron’s ability to dunk—his skills so far exceed that of any shooter in history that extra practice can hardly explain the difference. While he may appear scrawny, Curry is remarkably strong—his 400-pound maximum deadlift is more than any player on last year’s Warriors team besides the 6-feet-11-inch, 255-pound Festus Ezeli.
NARRATIVES IN THE SPORTS WORLD If the narrative of James and Curry is deceptively complex, one has to wonder why it has been simplified to the point of cutting half the tale. Ultimately, this phenomenon points to a larger trend. Perhaps the reason people are so captivated by athletic contests is because events in sports are often married to simple, archetypal narratives that are uncommon in the real world. However, true athletic narratives are rarely so simple. NFL fans will always remember Peyton Manning retiring as a champion,
but few will mention Manning throwing 17 interceptions and only nine touchdowns in his final season. Fans will readily recall Michael Jordan’s unblemished NBA Finals record, but few will mention Jordan falling short time and time again in the Eastern Conference Finals against the “Bad Boy” Pistons. Perhaps this phenomenon is the fault of the sports media as a whole. To outlets like ESPN and Sports Illustrated, there is an obvious incentive to peddling a simple story. When vital details are omitted, the resulting plot often takes on a storybook character. Individuals find themselves resembling archetypes and the narrative as a whole becomes more poetic. In search of mass-market appeal, movie and television directors often omit complexity from their scripts—it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume the sports media exhibits the same logic. Or perhaps fans themselves are the guilty party. In a world where negativity sometimes prevails, it is easy to see the comfort a simple story can bring. Every day, news outlets overflow with reports on terrorism, homegrown protests, and political divisions. Sports, by contrast, can offer an uncomplicated and uplifting outlook. When Curry crosses over a bigger competitor, the American public sees an underdog making an indelible mark on the world around him. When Kobe Bryant scored 60 points in his final game, the fans that followed him for two decades could wistfully declare that the “black mamba” still had a little venom left in him. At some level, such incredible athletic exploits have a reassuring quality. Fans may be inclined to ignore certain details in order to assure themselves that black and white heroics exist in the real world. For an instant, fans are given the chance to escape life’s confusion and blissfully return to naiveté.
TODAY’S TRUE UNDERDOG Ultimately, branding one of these two men as the real underdog isn’t important. The important thing is recognizing that even this little guy narrative—which has enveloped Curry and allowed him to be paraded as the quintessential underdog—is, in fact, far too one-dimensional to do justice to his story. The claim that success was gifted to James in the form of tremendous athletic ability is equally flawed. While it is unclear exactly who is pushing for simpler narratives in sports, the phenomenon implies is that such stories have value. Whether it is a comforting nature or a broad appeal, something has allowed these stories to cut through the truth and plant themselves firmly at the forefront of the discussion. However, while it might be tempting for fans or the media to embrace a catchy story, doing so undervalues the rich literature dwelling in the truth. LeBron and Steph are two of the most dominant basketball players the world has ever seen—it is unfair to both men that their stories be misrepresented. The odds are substantial that the Warriors and Cavaliers will meet once again in the NBA Finals—the two teams ranked first and second on Las Vegas’ opening championship odds sheet. If and when that day comes, the collision of basketball’s two greatest stars won’t be the collision of David and Goliath. Instead, it will be the collision of two very different, but equal men.
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WHO IS OUR ENEMY? WHO IS OUR ENEMY?
I’M IN IT FOR
YOU Ani Suresh
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UNDERDOG
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n September 26, Monday Night Football viewership was at its lowest in the last quarter-century as the eyes of the nation were tuned into another entertaining contest on most national news networks. In the last few months, phrases such as “braggadocious” and “big league” have experienced multifold increases in the number of online dictionary searches. And over the course of the past year, a good portion of the American population has been joking nervously about the possibility of a mass exodus. See a trend? Hopefully so—across the globe, people had their eyes and ears affixed to the 17-candidate hodgepodge, the revolutionary “Bern,” and the historic nature of this “absolutely yuuuuuuge” American presidential election cycle that seemed to start before the results of the last election had even set in. Now, with the election done, we’re at a point of reflection about how, in this campaign, several candidates, not given much of a shot by most pundits, managed to capture so many disenfranchised and downtrodden voters. What was it about their candidacies and messages that inspired millions and revolutionized the way we think about presidential politics?
A NEW INSURGENT POPULISM “We’ve seen strains of [the type of appeals in this election] before, but 2016 takes it to a whole new level,” said Ann Compton, former ABC News White House correspondent, to the HPR before the election. “This year, American voters who are following Donald Trump don’t care about [policy or implementation] details. They are inspired and encouraged by his broad promise to make the country great, to bring jobs home, and to make the future full of hope.” In an interview with the HPR, David Kochel, senior strategist to the Jeb Bush campaign, elaborated: “Trump approached this campaign like it was a television market that he could dominate with his particular skill at creating controversy … and fifth-grade taunting. If you’re in reality TV, you understand that you get your show renewed next year by dumping over the dining room table and throwing a beer in somebody’s face.” On the other side of the aisle, Bernie Sanders carried a vision of a more egalitarian America that gained him the support of millions of voters. Sanders’ message of radical change to a system he described as broken and corrupt rallied people to the left of the spectrum who desperately wanted to see change. As a result of his uniquely uncompromising nature as well as the fact that until the election cycle, he had never been affiliated with the Democratic Party, Sanders was pegged as a newcomer to establishment politics from the very beginning. In this way, despite their many other differences, both Trump and Sanders were alike. Both were deemed inspirational outsiders by their supporters, populist parvenus by their enemies. Both appealed to their growing rallies with messages of promise for a better America that represented fresh alternatives to what establishment candidates had been spouting for years. And when Sanders conceded the Democratic nomination, a considerable portion of his voters pledged their allegiance to Trump, a man who seem-
ingly stood for everything Sanders was fighting against.
TRUMP’S ISSUE HIERARCHY This raises the question: which types of voters were willing to go so far as to leave the safety of traditional party lines in order to choose between the two extremes of the charming revolutionary man of the people and the elite, masculine Wall Street mogul? Trump and Sanders’ messages attracted voters from a variety of backgrounds, including a few surprising groups. For example, the LGBTQ community has constituted an important minority voter base for many years, and considering last year’s national ruling to legalize gay marriage, no election cycle has seen a greater emphasis on attracting voters from the LGBTQ community than the current one. “Even though we are [between] 4 [and] 10 percent of the population,” prominent AIDS and LGBTQ rights activist Peter Staley told the HPR, “we had an outsized sway over both Hillary and Bernie’s campaigns as far as how they competed for our votes and how we could … play them off each other in exchange for our community’s support.” This information by itself may not be all that surprising; every election, it is almost inevitable that the Democratic Party wins the LGBTQ vote and therefore not shocking to see two candidates in the Democratic primaries fight for the backing of LGBTQ voters. However, Staley’s pre-election prediction was startling. “We even saw attempts by the Trump campaign to appeal to LGBTQ voters, with modest success. It won’t surprise me if Trump ends up with 20 percent of the LGBTQ vote.” Indeed, a New York Times exit poll revealed that Trump won 14 percent of the LGBTQ vote. How could Trump draw so many from this community when he has openly claimed to not “feel right about” marriage equality? Staley attributes this to Trump’s tendency to waver on a variety of political issues and make seemingly self-contradictory statements. For example, Staley brought up Trump’s reference to the LGBTQ community at the Republican National Convention. “Trump thanked the convention hall for applauding the reference … He also let billionaire gay supporter [Peter Thiel] announce from the stage that he was a proud gay American— first time that’s happened at a Republican Convention. But if you examine his policies and his vice presidential candidate, he would be a disaster for LGBTQ Americans.” It is apparent, then, that Trump’s appeal to LGBTQ voters does not relate to how he might make this country great again for them. His convention speech was, as Staley put it, “tokenish” and not representative of how his administration would actually treat the LGBTQ community. When asked why they support Trump, especially in the face of his anti-marriage equality comments, LGBTQ supporters have tended to cite what they consider greater threats—such as Islamic terrorism and the increasingly hyper-liberal nature of young America—that only Trump can resolve. This suggests that LGBTQ Trump voters are supporting him for his personal characteristics and his response
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to particular issues while rationalizing the parts of his candidacy that seem to contradict some of their ideals.
SANDERS AND THE YOUTH Meanwhile, Sanders benefitted greatly from the support of millennial Americans. The very fact that the oldest candidate in the nomination process had the strongest appeal to the youngest voters is an accomplishment. Though his policy proposals, particularly his plan to make college debt-free, connected with younger voters, they alone did not carry him to such a landslide victory among millennials. Indeed, it was Sanders’ online presence that helped earn his campaign a mass Internet following and popularity among young people across the country. “[Sanders’] message had an echo effect across cyberspace,” explained Compton. “He made good advantage of the tools that allow an underdog to seize a national megaphone.” Though this election cycle featured a woman as the favorite to win the Democratic nomination, a surprisingly high proportion of Sanders’ young voters were female. In fact, while women of every age group other than millennials preferred Clinton to Sanders, among women between 18 and 29, Sanders had more than twice as much support as the eventual nominee. Striking at first, this dichotomy makes sense in the context of millennial women’s independent attitudes regarding feminism and female representation. “Hillary and Democrats for years tried to weaponize feminism as a way to score political points,” Sarah Isgur Flores, deputy campaign manager of the Carly for President campaign, told the HPR. “It backfired in a big way [during the primaries] and more than two-thirds of young women ended up rejecting the label in favor of a more individualized idea of female empowerment.” Sanders also gathered mass youth support through his extremely optimistic messages and promises for a better future. Though many pundits criticized his campaign as idyllic and impractical, his message certainly roused millions of young voters. “Bernie Sanders is promising free college, free healthcare, free puppies on every corner,” said Isgur Flores. “Clinton had
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always beaten Republicans by promising more than they did, and then, when she got into this race, she got outflanked by someone on the left overpromising her.” The popularity of Sanders’ message of hope and reform can be explained by the results of the Harvard Public Opinion Project’s fall 2016 survey of young Americans. Forty-nine percent of survey respondents thought that the country was headed in the wrong direction, and 53 percent held an unfavorable view of Hillary Clinton. Fifty-three percent disapproved of the Democrats’ recent performance in Congress, and 51 percent reported being more fearful than hopeful about the future of America. This data indicates a demoralized American youth and furthers the argument that young liberals in the United States feel pessimistic about establishment politics, shedding light on the popularity of Senator Sanders’s outsider message. “Sanders got a group of voters who felt left behind by the political system,” said Isgur Flores, “regardless of whether the economy had left them behind or something else. Bernie did a very good job of creating that movement feeling for them that they clearly rallied around.”
THE OPPOSITION CANDIDATES This contingent of voters supported candidates like Trump or Sanders not necessarily because they were on the same part of the ideological spectrum but rather because they wished to protest against establishment politics. Many Trump votes in the primaries were likely cast more against Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio than for Trump. Often, supporters of Sanders and Trump were more anti-Hillary than pro-Bernie or pro-Donald. “It’s not that I love Trump,” Brett Grommesh, a Trump voter at North Dakota State University, told the HPR. “But [he was] definitely the lesser of two evils.” In an interview with the HPR, Harrison Hawes, a student at Baylor University, presented a similar frustration with Clinton. “At first, I was a Sanders supporter mostly because of my friends and the Internet movement. The more I think about it, the election was stolen from Bernie by Hillary. Hillary doesn’t seem to care about the issues, and she seems to say whatever will get her
UNDERDOG WHO IS OUR ENEMY?
Donald Trump’s personal campaign captured the news cycle and potential voters.
elected.” With Sanders out of the race, Hawes began to hope for a Trump victory. “I like the fact that Trump is … not a career politician,” said Hawes. “He definitely was an underdog in this election, and I think the system seemed to be against him in the same way that it was against Bernie.” Clearly, millions of Americans agreed with Grommesh and Hawes. In a stunning outcome, Trump decisively won the electoral college and became the nation’s 45th president-elect. The upset came as a blindside to many in the country and around the world and reaffirmed their conviction that these results were part of a trend toward favoring outsider candidates in office. Yet perhaps the profound question to answer from this election cycle is whether Sanders and Trump really were outsiders. Of course, both were strangers to the realm of establishment politics, but in reality, neither was at much of a political disadvantage in the context of this election. In fact, these candidates understood what people wanted more than establishment candidates did. As a result, they effectively appealed to potential voter bases and gained more undecided voters than did any establish-
ment candidate. “[Trump] was a master at hoarding the attention and the cameras,” said Kochel. “His experience in television and selfpromotion gave him a very good understanding of how to manipulate the media and keep the focus on him.” Isgur Flores pointed out how this aspect of these non-establishment candidates strengthened their ability to empathize with the common man. “[Trump and Sanders] voters felt like their candidates were vehicles for their respective movements. [Winning votes] often comes down to who you want to get a beer with. In the exit polls for 2012, Romney won ‘Who is going to be better for the economy?’ by 20 points but lost ‘Who cares about people like me?’ by 20 points, and he lost the election. So what matters more: the policy proposals or the emotional appeal?” Trump will not be a one-hit wonder, and by following his model, future candidates will likely come down from their ivory towers and develop stronger emotional appeals off of the struggles and desires of the American people. Through whatever means, voters will be shown that it isn’t just candidates’ policies that are in it for them—it’s the candidates themselves.
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WHO IS OUR ENEMY?
THE WALK ONS
Marie Becker
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hen Cage Reeder was accepted to Harvard, he knew his next step. He had played football throughout high school and hoped to continue participating in the game he loved. The fact that he had not been recruited for the Harvard team was not going to keep him from pursuing his passion. He contacted the coaches, proved himself at tryouts, and was ultimately granted a spot on the roster. Cage walked onto the team the second week of his freshman year, along with two other freshmen, one of whom quit a couple of days into the season. Although Cage was happy with his decision to stay, his experience at Harvard is not typical of most walk-on athletes at Division 1 programs. Rather, there seems to be an unspoken understanding that in D1 athletic programs, especially in popular sports like football and basketball, walk-on athletes are often treated as secondclass athletes. At schools across the country there are commonly three ways through which a student can become a varsity athlete. At the top of the hierarchy are scholarship athletes who are contacted by the college coaches, encouraged to apply, and provided with an athletic scholarship to cover their tuition. The second category is most commonly called preferred walk-ons. Those athletes go through a very similar recruiting process as the scholarship athletes, but without the scholarship. Finally, there are those athletes that are admitted into a school without any support from the athletic department, and get to try out only during the school year. Differences in the ways athletes join teams result not only in different statuses under NCAA regulations, but often in different strata on teams’ the social hierarchies.
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A prominent example of this phenomenon is the personal experience of Tim Lavin. Lavin is a former walk-on to the USC football team who later wrote a book about his experiences as a walk-on, including “the injustices, the inequalities, the discrimination, the demoralization and the preconceived mindsets.” In Lavin’s opinion, NCAA regulations contribute substantially to the unfair conditions for walk-ons, which he describes as ranging “from the completely absurd to downright segregation and safety hazards.” In order to promote change, Lavin founded the initiative Inclusion Petition in 2014, which he now uses to push the NCAA towards more egalitarian regulations. At Florida Atlantic University, a D1 school, walk-ons have reported feeling treated differently from their recruited peers. In an interview with the Owl Observer, former FAU football player and walk-on Kris Bartels said “There were times I may have asked for a pair of shorts, and maybe I had a response with an attitude,” Bartels said. “But if a starter had asked, it might be a little different.” Even the NCAA, which tends to emphasize the bright side of student athlete life under its regulations, acknowledges on its website that occasionally walk-ons “are relegated to substandard locker-room annexes or denied access to the main training table,” even though the situation in general is said to have improved over recent years.
THE IVY EXCEPTION The situation at Harvard is different, not so much because of the way Harvard operates specifically, but because of its membership in the Ivy League. To be sure, Ivy League schools also
UNDERDOG WHO IS OUR ENEMY?
offer different paths athletes may take to get on varsity teams. Recruited athletes receive formal support for their college application by the coaches, go on official visits during which they meet their future team in advance, and arrive to their first day of school knowing with certainty that they have a spot on the roster. Walk-ons enjoy none of these privileges. However, the moment a walk-on joins a team, the formal differences disappear entirely. In fact, every single varsity athlete competing for an Ivy school would technically be regarded as a walk-on at any other school. This is because of the Ivy League’s unique standing as the only D1 conference that does not allow its members to offer any athletic scholarships to their athletes. Those who are called recruits at Harvard would merely be preferred walk-ons at a non-Ivy-League college. At first glance, Harvard’s decisive dedication to academics may be frustrating for its athletic teams, which are poorly positioned to attract high-profile athletes due to their inability to offer financial scholarships. From a different angle, however, the complete absence of merit-based scholarships may play a central role in promoting an inclusive atmosphere on sports teams. Across sports, the vast majority of interviewed walk-on athletes reported high levels of satisfaction with their athletic experience. “I was treated completely fairly by my teammates and coaches, both of whom seemed to sincerely respect my commitment to the team,” Harvard alumnus and former walkon to the fencing team, Duncan O’Brien, told the HPR. Walk-on athletes at Harvard generally encounter welcoming teams and fair coaches and hold leadership positions. In fact, O’Brien was elected captain of the team during his sophomore year. Current co-chair of the Student Athlete Advisory Committee Maile Sapp ’17, a senior on the Nordic skiing team, described the situation: “Once everyone is on the team, they are a Harvard Skier. We don’t put tons of attention on backgrounds—who was recruited and who wasn’t. We just focus on working together to become the best we can be and learning from each other. Coming from various backgrounds and experiences each and every one of us contributes so many unique and valuable things that really enable us all to grow as athletes and individuals.” Her co-chair, Max Yakubovich, is a walk-on on the swimming team and agrees that “there has never been any difference in treatment [between recruits and walk-ons]. This feeling of camaraderie spans across teams. “My teammates have been incredibly supportive,” soccer walk-on Lauren Spohn ’20, said. “I feel like walk-ons aren’t treated any differently from recruits.”
ATHLETIC ADVERSITY There are exceptions to the narrative of the welcoming Harvard team. One such case is that of a student manager who is hoping to walk onto the varsity squad. “When I walked onto the team as a manager my freshman year I never felt fully accepted,” said one interviewee, who preferred to remain anonymous. In combination with the heavy time commitment that varsity teams demand of their athletes, this feeling of ostracization led him to quit the team his sophomore year. Team policies for walk-ons differ across sports, but for some teams, athletes who are considered to not yet be ready are offered to stick around the team as a manager. Those students then help out with setting up practice,
taking stats, and similar tasks. When needed, they get to jump into practice, but they never compete. Naturally, such a situation where walk-ons are encouraged to serve the team as a manager until they get their chance to play is less conducive to equality and integration in a team than if a walk-on immediately becomes a full team member. But while there may be a need for further investigation into the integration of student managers, it is the norm for someone who successfully made the roster to be treated similarly to recruits. Because of the lack of scholarships, Harvard is investing exactly the same amount into each individual athlete across a team; therefore, coaches have no reason to differentiate between them on grounds other than their athletic performance. The heavy emphasis on academics at Harvard that rejects this concept of the athletic scholarship therefore helps eliminate inequalities between recruits and walk-ons. At the same time, ironically, it constitutes a major deterrence for students considering walking on. At Harvard, there is little room for neglecting academic work, but being a student athlete comes with a huge time commitment. In accordance with Ivy League and NCAA rules, “athletics related activities” can take up to 20 hours per week, which do not include travel time, captains’ practices, and other “optional” events. Classes missed because of in-season competitions are counted as unexcused absences. “Walking on to the team has definitely limited my free time outside of school and soccer,” Spohn told the HPR. Sometimes she wishes that she “could be more involved in other extracurricular activities.” While club sports offer an attractive alternative, it isn’t always an option. Some sports such as crew, wrestling, or football don’t have club teams. Other athletes desire higher levels of competitiveness and commitment than what club teams usually offer. “I did consider joining club soccer instead,” said men’s soccer walk-on Nathan Goldberg ’18, “but I really wanted to be in an environment where soccer was regarded to be as important as academics.” The special value that the Ivy League’s regulations assign to the first part of the term “student-athlete” and the corresponding absence of scholarship athletes in the conference plays an important role in creating an inclusive environment for walk-on athletes. However, the results cannot be exclusively attributed to institutional factors—culture is also important. After all, athletes do not usually apply to Harvard with the plan in mind of pursuing their sport professionally long after college. Instead, they are looking at the university’s academic reputation and the paths it opens into the labor market. The sense of being in constant competition with each other is thus more likely to be present in the context of academics at Harvard, rather than within sports teams. Overall it seems like this particular challenge of integration and equality is being handled well by Harvard’s varsity teams. One of the best illustrations of this impression may be the experience of Candy Janachowski, who was recruited for the women’s soccer team but also walked onto the track team her freshman fall. Even though the heavy time commitment made her eventually prioritize soccer, she speaks of her time on the track in the highest notes. “Walking onto the track team was a great experience,” she told the HPR. “The girls and coaching staff were all super welcoming and made me feel like part of the team immediately.”
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WHO IS OUR ENEMY? WHO IS OUR ENEMY?
DRIP DROP America’s Crumbling Water Infrastructure
Nick J. Danby 16 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW WINTER 2016
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“O
h my god … this is horrible.” Those aren’t the words of a baritone announcer for a dystopian movie trailer. Those were the words of David Coppes, Director of Water Works at the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, responding to the alarming 2010 Boston water emergency. The emergency, which was called by MWRA’s executive editor Frederick Laskey as “everyone’s worst nightmare in the water industry,” started when a water pipe in Weston, Massachusetts, broke and began flooding into the Charles River—thus contaminating water sources throughout the state. Coppes told the HPR “I don’t know how to explain the feeling when you see something like that. Your heart drops. Suddenly all of the training and planning that you do kicks in.” For Coppes and his extensive team of personnel who worked hour after hour trying to mitigate the effects of the crisis and ensure public safety, it was their duty; however, the efforts of these men and women shouldn’t go forgotten. Every day water workers walk into a line of work that is unpredictable, fastpaced, and essential to the well-being of the community. Coppes admitted to the HPR that his job has become more difficult as pipes have gotten older and funding has decreased for water infrastructure. While the 2010 emergency wasn’t directly linked to old pipes, Coppes explained that many of the MWRA’s pipes date back to the 1800s, and while the authority is undergoing a massive expansion to upgrade those pipes, it’s a slow and costly process. Unfortunately, the repercussions of having old pipes are much costlier then fixing them. Since a lot of the older pipes in Boston (and across the country) are made out of metal and have begun to rust, contaminating the water supply and making pipes smaller, which restricts water flow. Rarely do the media or public speak about, or even know about, the crumbling state of our water infrastructure. Coppes says that public awareness is one of the major problems when dealing with water main breaks because “people just come to expect [water] to be there, and they don’t realize how important it is until it’s not there … Any time you have to shut a main down in an emergency, in an unplanned manner, there are impacts to the customers. Think of how reliant people are on their water. To have it shut off suddenly is a jarring impact on people’s daily lives.” While the 2010 emergency allowed people to realize how valuable a good, reliable, continuous supply of clean water is, it’s unlikely that people still remember or understand—and that’s the problem.
WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE Water isn’t sexy. Sure, it’s necessary for life, and sometimes threatens life, but there’s no political appeal. Unemployment, terrorism, unions, taxes—those are just a small smorgasbord of hot-button issues that make our partisan and politically-charged brains tingle, while water’s controversies merely bore us. The problem, however, is that if our ignorance of water’s perilous situation continues, the four aforementioned political topics will be rendered inconsequential. Like the typical common commodity, water has been largely taken for granted in the developed world, especially in the Unit-
ed States. One study found that the average American family of four uses roughly 400 gallons of water a day, and that roughly 17 percent of the total freshwater used in the United States is used by vital industries that rely on public water for their operations. However, despite water’s absolute necessity for both people and business, few care to discover how their clean water comes to its final state. Across the country, nearly 153,000 drinkingwater systems collect billions of gallons of water daily from a variety of sources, using an estimated 700,000 to 800,000 miles of public sewer mains. Many of these pipes and networks, however, have existed long past their operational life, and are now deteriorating. The results of this degeneration could be catastrophic. For our country’s 1.5 million miles of water-related pipes—some of which were created more than 120 years ago—there are an estimated 240,000 water main breaks a year, which equals about 27 every hour. Approximately 2.1 trillion gallons of water a year are wasted due to old and leaky pipes, meters, and water mains, which account for about 14 to 18 percent of the water our nation treats. That amount of water would submerge the entire state of Rhode Island under six feet of water.
THAT’S ONE LEAKY FAUCET With such disastrous and costly repercussions, it is worth considering how we got into such an egregious situation. Despite struggles to maintain roads, bridges, and other infrastructure, it seems that water has been neglected to an even further degree. The problem isn’t a lack of knowledge, but a difference in visibility. People see the state of decay on roads and bridges directly, and enough complaints from citizens spark the appropriate budget allocation and construction. The same isn’t the case for water. Since our water systems mostly exist underground, most Americans will never get to see this infrastructure, let alone its decay. These problems didn’t appear overnight. The decay is attributable to decades—even centuries—of inadequate and largely mismanaged infrastructure investments. The ignorance leading to this is two-fold: first, while many of the networks for pipes often date as far back as the 19th century, unless a water main breaks or something disastrous occurs, the public will never see it; and second, the government has downplayed many of the reported problems. Consequently, a significant number of our water systems are reaching, or have reached, their operational lifespan. These disruptions aren’t just hypothetical—they’ve already happened in practice. In Los Angeles last July, a water main estimated to be 93 years old broke open, flooding the campus of UCLA. In the Chicago area, 22 billion gallons of treated water per year escapes through leaky pipes and mains, many of which are more than 100 years old. Bursting pipes means more than dumping billions of gallons of untreated sewage into water sources. It also slows down commercial investment, further hampers water service, increases disruptions, damages roadways and structures, and hinders fire control. These consequences came to fruition in Miami, where 70-year-old pipes have ruptured about 65 times in the past two years, discharging more than 47 million gallons of untreated
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sewage into waterways and streets. Our crumbling water infrastructure system also has a harmful impact on public health. In March, USA Today reported that more than 2,000 water systems in all 50 states have lead levels in excess of federal limits. Such levels can—on a smaller scale—mirror the events in Flint, Michigan, which have long-term, detrimental impacts on many residents, especially children. It’s clear that the longer the government waits to take decisive action to alleviate the crisis, the more amplified the health and environmental problems will become.
DOLLARS IN WATER It isn’t enough to simply repair our water systems—we must prepare for their future use. Such a need is underscored by a 2010 United Nations report anticipating America’s population to grow by 15 percent by the year 2050. This increase means that the strain on our water systems will only intensify, and the results of their disrepair amplified. Fortunately, there are many possible reforms to restore and update our water systems. Enacting these reforms, however, requires a significant amount of public and private investment along with the political capital to implement the needed developments. The question of allocating more money to fix the problem seems simple enough, but it’s not. State and local governments could fund the destitute systems if water was charged at a reasonable rate not based on just volumetric usage, but usage in conjunction with the fixed costs of people’s respective water systems. Unfortunately, due to the unpopularity of raising water rates, the cost of residential usage is enormously cheap, thus resulting in a system that is underfunded. There are huge fixed costs involved with clean water, like pumps, pipes, reservoirs, metering, and monitoring. For the success of a revamped water infrastructure system, investment is key. David LaFrance, CEO of the American Water Works Association, told NPR that such an investment will cost approximately $1 trillion—half of which will replace and upgrade current infrastructure, the other half which will go towards building new infrastructure for areas without property water systems. The Congressional Budget Office, in conjunction with the EPA, estimated that it would also take more than $300 billion to address just the nation’s sewage and collection infrastructure needs over 20 years. This investment is worth pursuing—a report by the American Society of Civil Engineers found that a modest increase in investment can protect $416 billion in GDP, prevent 700,000 job losses, and avoid personal income losses of $541 billion. While the price tag on a massive restoration and upgrade of our water systems is no doubt intimidating, it pales in comparison to the existing loss of job and revenues, along with the massive threat to public health and the daily operation of businesses. While not all of this infrastructure money is needed at this moment, governments should prepare sooner rather than later, because delaying such an investment would just make it more expensive. Delaying investment would double the cost from roughly $13 billion a year today to almost $30 billion—or $1.7
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trillion total—by the 2040s. Foregoing water investment will increase not only water bills but also local fees, in return for worse maintenance and water quality. The steep cost of kicking the can down the road is due to two factors. First, the more we postpone, the further current water systems deteriorate, and the harder it is to prevent future deterioration. Second, the interest rate for infrastructure investment is at a record-low, and there is no better time to borrow money. Opponents of such a massive initiative argue that the impacts are hypothetical, and the funding too extensive. Yet we’ve seen firsthand the devastating effect of decreasing water costs in conjunction with stripped-back regulations in places like Flint, Michigan, where government agencies have to maintain the same level of infrastructure with less money. While Flint was an operation issue, not an infrastructure issue, its situation no doubt highlights the flawed, bureaucratic oversight by the state government.
POWER OF THE PEOPLE While substantial reform of our water infrastructure must came at the directive of our government, regular citizens can take action politically or environmentally to begin to rectify this problem. Tracy Mehan is the executive director of government relations for the American Water Works Association, which is dedicated to educating Congress and the public about the need to accept higher water rates. Mehan told the HPR the first thing the average person can do “is to be informed and understand what’s going on.” There are many ways to take action, according to Mehan. At the federal level, you can tell your congressmen and senators that you support The Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act and the Clean Water State Revolving Fund, along with supporting increased funding courtesy of higher water rates. At the state level, you can express support for similar water infrastructure legislation. At the municipal level—perhaps the most important level, since many water systems are controlled by municipal administration—you can communicate to the mayor and city government that it’s important to invest in water, and support elected officials who promise to follow through on that investment. From an environmental standpoint, Mehan advises people to do several things. First, use water more efficiently because it not only saves water, but also saves chemicals, materials, and machines that work to make sure your water is clean. Second, curb common water-wasting activities. Third, encourage a green infrastructure system with regard to storm water and other environmental systems. While government inefficiency and partisan bickering will pose obstacles to reforming water infrastructure, the first step is to be aware of the problem. Simultaneously, as we configure and evaluate, one’s leaky faucet won’t be the only thing going “drip drop.” Our entire old and crumbling water infrastructure will be making that noise as well—except on a much larger and more dangerous scale.
WHO IS OUR ENEMY?
THE NEED FOR POLICE DIVERSITY
Catherine Zhang
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oday, the proportion of white officers in American police forces tends to be 30 percentage points higher than that of the communities they serve, meaning officers often don’t even come close to resembling their communities. Underrepresentation of minority groups plagues most if not all of our institutions—big business, Congress, and the media, to name a few—but the lack of racial diversity in police forces has greater consequences. Increasing opportunities for marginalized racial groups across society have yielded unquestionable benefits. However, our institutions of criminal justice are a still salient example of how a lack of racial diversity can perpetuate injustice. Empirical research finds that racial diversity improves the judgments of our juries and appellate court judges. Police departments, which have even more regular and high-stakes contact with communi-
ties, likewise stand to benefit from the presence of more racial groups. While increased diversity is by no means a panacea for issues in policing, it can certainly bring about improvements.
WHY DIVERSITY In a nation whose history is steeped in bad blood between communities of color and law enforcement, the racial makeup of police has implications for whether officers can gain a community’s trust. As of last year, a Gallup poll found that American trust in police was at an all-time low since the beginning of data collection in 1991, with 52 percent of all respondents and 30 percent of black respondents expressing confidence in the police today. Dr. Tracie Keesee, the current Deputy Commissioner of Training for the New York Police Department, explained to the
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HPR that diversity can facilitate more genuine interactions between police and communities, but cautioned against viewing diversity as the sole solution to a lack of trust in law enforcement. More diverse police forces will not suddenly resolve the longstanding racial tensions underlying police-community interactions. Rather the process may occur in reverse: pursuing police forces that better represent and identify with the communities they serve will naturally rely on changing the racial makeup of police departments. Both local governments and their communities want more representative police forces. A public opinion survey consisting of interviews with residents of Washington, D.C. found that black and white individuals from different neighborhoods supported more diverse and integrated police forces rather than ones only of their own race. If an area as racially segregated and ridden with violence as Washington, D.C. wants a diverse, integrated police department, surely residents in places with less racial tension would share this goal. City governments also recognize the value of diversity as a component of improving policing. As part of the response to the brutal shooting of Laquan McDonald by a Chicago police officer, Mayor Rahm Emanuel pushed for an increase in the racial diversity of the city’s officers, among other reforms. Although Emanuel may have simply seen increased diversity as a quick, visible fix, the results still show the city’s desire to improve community-police relations.
FINDING OFFICERS OF COLOR Increasing the diversity of a police department requires more than political will. Law enforcement as it is currently structured contains numerous barriers in recruiting, hiring, and retaining members of color. The most recent data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that people of color comprised only one in three recruits for state and local police forces. These low numbers at a recruitment level indicate the presence of some deterrent for potential officers of color. The high racial tensions resulting from recent police shootings, in addition to historical race relations, likely lie at the root of the problem. “The situations in our communities of color and their relationship with law enforcement have an impact on whether or not certain communities will see this job as a viable one,” Keesee told the HPR. Individuals whose experiences with police involve excessive force and civilian shootings would have little motivation to join a profession associated with misconduct and brutality. Today, even
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those who have had no personal contact with law enforcement see the tragic shootings dominating social media. This recruitment issue demonstrates the importance of forming trusting relationships between communities and their police. After recruitment, another problem arises: retention. Other BJS data on state and local police department makeup found that only 27 percent of local police officers were people of color, less than the 33 percent of recruits. Keesee emphasized to the HPR the importance of the culture of a police department in its ability to retain officers of minority groups, such as women and people of color. The indivisible nature of culture and diversity, each informing the other, means we are unlikely to improve police department’s culture unless we pay attention to the demographics of their officers.
LOOKING FORWARD The issue of diversity in police forces has recently garnered more significant political impetus. The Center for Policing Equity—which Keesee co-founded—partnered with Department of Justice to write an October 2016 report called “Advancing Diversity in Law Enforcement.” The report, a result of President Obama’s December 2014 executive order establishing the Task Force on 21st Century Policing, found that increased diversity improves law enforcement agencies’ responsiveness and willingness to reform. The report also recognized the importance of diversity in building community trust. We have yet to see if the report’s findings will substantially affect policy. Such policy is critical even as we measure our historical progress in increasing diversity. Today, 27 percent of local police officers are people of color, up from 15 percent in 1987, according to the BJS. Still, if we designate 1987 as a benchmark for improvements to the criminal justice system, we are holding ourselves to a low standard. A telling example: only since 1972 have female police officers been able to go on patrol, make arrests, and serve as their male colleagues equal, or at least have the legal right to do so. In measuring the success of the criminal justice system, looking forward is more useful than drawing comparisons to the past. Increasing police forces’ racial diversity will not neatly resolve police biases and abuses of power, but having more officers of color will maintain and strengthen community trust. Many Americans are simply waiting for politicians to fully realize the significance of racially diverse police forces.
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SERVICE FOR AMERICA How a National Service Initiative for Millennials Can Reunite America Evan Bonsall
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merica has become a house divided. The electorate is more polarized along partisan and ideological lines than ever before, a sad fact which has been reflected in the divisive public discourse and unprecedented ideological radicalism of this year’s presidential election. From 2011-2015, Congress was less productive than at any other point in American history, and partisan gridlock and political brinksmanship were at an all-time high. For a brief moment, things were looking up. In 2008 Barack Obama promised to bring the country closer together. Instead, the past eight years have borne witness to the reopening of racial, socioeconomic, and generational fissures on a scale not seen since the 1960s, when the Vietnam War, rapid social change, and disputes over racial justice divided the nation along similar fault lines. This schism within American society is not merely the product of pundits and politicians trying to “slice and dice” the country to boost ratings and win votes. It stems from a much more fundamental problem—Americans are leading increasingly
separate lives. Public schools today are more racially segregated than they were 40 years ago. De facto urban housing segregation has also gotten much worse. Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. are some of the most diverse cities in America, but they are also the most racially and economically segregated. The generational political divide has also widened significantly. From 1976-2000, there was virtually no gap in partisan identification between 18-29 year-old voters and voters older than 65, but today Millennials are 36 percent more likely to vote Democratic than voters over 65. It is imperative that we begin to reunite America, and the Millennial generation must be the leaders in this effort. After all, it is the Millennials who will have to confront the great problems we face in this century: rekindling robust economic growth, lifting more Americans out of poverty, controlling the national debt, preserving Social Security and Medicare, and preventing catastrophic climate change. This will require the kind of mutual understanding and willingness to compromise that seems impossible in today’s hyper-partisan state of political malaise. The
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Millennials will need to learn to empathize, to compromise, and to find common ground in a way which the Baby Boomers and Generation X never did.
A MILLENNIAL STRUGGLE What America needs is a robust new initiative to encourage young Americans to engage in at least one year of full-time service before turning thirty. In 1961, John F. Kennedy encouraged young Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” He also asked them to join a “historic struggle” against “the common enemies of man—tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself,” through service and servant leadership. We must issue a similar call to service to the Millennial generation, asking more young people to engage in public service and making sure that everyone who wants to serve is able to do so. A robust new national service initiative will help bring young Americans back together in three important ways. First, it will provide young Americans with an ability to empathize with others and appreciate different viewpoints—the worldviews of young people from every neighborhood in America will be enriched through national service, whether they’re volunteering with VISTA to reduce poverty in inner-city Detroit, working in the Peace Corps teaching children to read and write in the Dominican Republic, or serving in their local National Guard unit. This real-world experience with service will improve Millennials’ ability to empathize with others, making it much easier for them to find common ground with opponents and craft compromises to solve important problems in the future. By engaging the next generation of Americans in service from a young age, a national service initiative will also make it much more likely that Millennials will choose to actively fulfill the responsibilities of citizenship. A recent study at the University of Nevada found that young people who do regular volunteer work or complete public sector internships are far more likely to vote and be engaged in their communities later in life. A national service initiative would inspire young Americans to be active citizens for the rest of their lives. Given the current gridlock in Washington and many state legislatures across the country, and the incompetent and irresponsible local leadership in places like Detroit and San Bernardino, America clearly needs a new generation of thoughtful and dedicated political leaders. In the coming years the federal government will also need to hire 200,000 new employees to replace the retiring Baby Boomer generation. Considering these sobering facts, inspiring more young people to run for office and pursue public interest careers must be a top national priority. A study by New York University and the Brookings Institution found that young people who complete a full-time internship with a federal, state, or local government body or a nonprofit organization are far more likely to pursue a public-interest career. A national service initiative could help inspire the new generation of public servants America needs. Finally, a national service initiative would be a shared experience, encouraging Millennials to respect people of different
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convictions and different backgrounds. In his book The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama recounts a conversation he had with an old Washington staffer who had been involved in national politics since the 1960s. “Back (in the ’60s), almost anyone with any power in Washington had served in World War II,” the veteran staffer explained. “We might’ve fought like cats and dogs on issues. A lot of us came from different backgrounds, different neighborhoods, different political philosophies. But with the war, we all had something in common. That shared experience developed a certain truth and respect. It helped to work through our differences and get things done.” Military service is courageous and patriotic, but it is not the only shared experience which can form powerful bonds of mutual respect. If we can encourage a cultural shift in which a year of national service becomes more the rule than the exception, perhaps we can also form mutual bonds between Millennials of differing backgrounds and political convictions which can serve as a starting point for finding common ground and mutual respect in the future. In the ’60s a Democrat and a Republican from the Greatest Generation could have found common ground in their shared military service during World War II. Years from now, perhaps a Democrat and a Republican from the Millennial generation can find common ground in their shared service in AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps, the National Guard, or a full-time public sector internship, all made possible by a new national service initiative.
AMBITIOUS AND AFFORDABLE A national service initiative would expand federal funding for service programs to make it possible for every young American who wants to serve to do so. The evidence clearly suggests that millions of Millennials want to devote part of their lives to service. The Peace Corps received more than 23,000 applications in 2015, the highest number in forty years and double the number of applications from just two years earlier. Sadly, only 4,000 new Peace Corps assignments were made available in 2015, for an effective acceptance rate of just 17 percent. Similarly, AmeriCorps received a record 582,000 applications in 2012, but only 82,000 applicants were offered positions in an AmeriCorps program—an acceptance rate of barely 14 percent. The 2016 Harvard Youth Poll and a similar AP-GfK poll in 2014 both found that although trust in public institutions is at an all-time low among 18-29 year-olds, Millennials are actually more likely to volunteer and to be interested in community service than any other generation, and 69 percent say that community and national service is an honorable thing to do. Yet federal funding for national service programs has been under attack in recent years. For the sixth year in a row, the House Budget Committee has proposed cutting all funding for the Corporation for National and Community Service, which would have eliminated programs like AmeriCorps and VISTA. The Senate and the White House prevented this provision from being included in this year’s federal budget, but they also failed to pass any sort of funding increase for the CNCS or the Peace Corps for fiscal 2017, despite the fact that 83 percent of voters
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A national service initiative would expand federal funding for service programs to make it possible for every young American who wants to serve to do so.
favor increased federal investment in national service, and 61 percent believe that every qualified applicant to such programs should be given a service position. A national service initiative should also expand incentives to participate in national service. AmeriCorps participants who complete a year of full-time service currently receive a Segal AmeriCorps Education Award of only $5,750 to help pay for college, despite the fact that the average in-state cost of attendance at public universities is $9,410 per year and rising, and the average student loan debt at graduation is $30,100. We should expand existing education awards for both service in the military and civilian service in AmeriCorps programs while also offering new scholarships to those who participate in other forms of fulltime civilian service, from government programs like the Peace Corps and the Youth Conservation Corps, to public-interest nonprofits like Teach For America, Habitat for Humanity, City Year, and Big Brothers Big Sisters, to full-time internships in federal, state, and local government offices. Of course, there’s one big question: how do we pay for it? In considering this question, it’s important to realize that the current budgets for the CNCS and the Peace Corps add up to about $1.5 billion. That might sound like a lot, but even if federal expenditures on the CNCS and the Peace Corps were quadrupled next year, they would still represent only 0.15 percent of the federal budget. These organizations are also very effective at private fundraising as well—the CNCS independently raises at least $800 million each year, almost as much as it receives from the federal government. Some legislators are also working to form cost-saving publicprivate partnerships to provide national service opportunities for young Americans. Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) have introduced legislation to form a
public-private partnership between the federal government and the nonprofit 21st Century Conservation Service Corps to engage 100,000 young people in service on American public lands and waters over the next two years. Alumni of the Conservation Service Corps would enjoy preference in federal hiring, and would prioritize applications from veterans and disadvantaged youth. According to the McCain-Bennet bill, this Conservation Service Corps would also be deficit-neutral.
“ASK NOT” Despite Congress’ reticence to increase funding for organizations like the CNCS and the Peace Corps, bipartisan support certainly exists in Washington for an ambitious new call to service. Before his death, the late Senator Ted Kennedy sponsored the Serve America Act, which proposed expanding the number of AmeriCorps positions from 75,000 to 250,000. The Serve America Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama in 2009, and the House Budget Committee should honor both Senator Kennedy and young Americans’ dedication to public service by fully funding this law starting next year. To borrow from President Kennedy, America must soon pass the torch to a new generation. A new call to service for the Millennial generation, paired with robust but cost-effective increases in federal funding for national service programs, will help prepare our generation to shoulder the awesome burden of guiding our country and our communities through the turbulent years to come. National service, and the empathy, experience, and common bonds which it has the capacity to form, may be our best hope for a more positive and productive public discourse, a kinder, gentler politics, and a more united America.
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THE COURT & THE PEOPLE Nicholas Yan
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o matter whether the country follows the flag or not, the Supreme Court follows the election returns,” wrote the Chicago humorist and author Finley Peter Dunne in 1901. More than a century later, many legal scholars and historians take Dunne’s famous quip—which identified a relationship between Supreme Court decisions and popular opinion—as gospel. There has been no shortage of literature in recent years arguing that Supreme Court justices are swayed by political trends and prevailing public sentiment when deciding cases, sometimes at the expense of the constitutional text. Moreover, despite common conceptions of judicial independence, the Court rarely advances beyond the bounds of popular opinion. In landmark cases, such as Brown v. Board of Education and Obergefell v. Hodges, the Court’s rulings have consistently been preceded by widespread shifts in social and political attitudes. On the other hand, many scholars have argued that the Court has the ability to effect meaningful change. So what exactly is the nature of the relationship between the Supreme Court and public opinion?
THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE One theory is that Supreme Court decisions closely align with public opinion because the Court requires popular support in order to function. In his book The Will of the People, Barry Friedman, a professor at the New York University School of Law, argues that when the Supreme Court invalidates actions of other branches of government, it is in fact “enforcing the will of the American people.” Friedman argues that the justices and the public are partners in a “marriage” that justifies judi-
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cial review—a marriage that persists “so long as the justices’ decisions [remain] within the mainstream of popular understanding.” And since the Court is accountable to the will of the majority, the justices for at least the last 70 years have made sure that their decisions have been more or less in tune with public opinion. Friedman points out that for the Court to be aligned with public opinion does not necessarily require that every Justice be so aligned—he told the HPR that “at some level, it’s only the median justice that’s required if the Court is split.” Similarly, Matthew Hall, a professor at the University of Notre Dame, has suggested that the Supreme Court is constrained by public opinion insofar as it fears that non-judicial actors, such as schools or government agencies, will refuse to implement unpopular decisions. Hall argues that without the ability to enforce its decisions, the Court is reluctant to alter policy in areas of public interest contrary to popular opinion. It is certainly true that the Court’s power is limited. Justices cannot implement their own decisions, and in all instances, the Court must rely on other institutional actors to enforce its rulings. In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton predicted that the judicial branch would be “beyond comparison the weakest of the three departments” of the federal government, with “no influence over either the sword or the purse.” And while the Court’s power today far exceeds what Hamilton would have envisioned, the Court remains vulnerable to political retaliation, whether in the form of jurisdiction-stripping (Congress’ power to regulate the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction), impeachment of justices, or Court-packing. Both Hall and Friedman note that how much external pressure influences the Court depends largely upon case salience.
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After all, it is remarkable how invisible Supreme Court decisions can be. As Friedman has written in the New York Times, “most cases get decided with little fanfare” and “deal with mundane issues that, whatever their legal interest, hardly gain a toehold in the public’s short attention span.” Only high-profile cases—ones that tend to deal with volatile civil rights and social issues, such as abortion—attract the attention of the general public. And in these cases, the Justices’ concerns about the Court’s image and its legitimacy render them reluctant to challenge popular opinion too directly. This is nothing new. Over 200 years ago, in Marbury v. Madison, Chief Justice John Marshall was exceedingly careful to ensure that his opinion did not issue orders that the losing party (Secretary of State James Madison and President Thomas Jefferson) would have been able to defy, thus defending the stature of his nascent Court. In the landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, in which the Court ruled that racial segregation in public education was unconstitutional (and then again in Brown II, which imposed its remedial decree), the Justices’ internal deliberations reveal their preoccupation with avoiding a ruling that could not be enforced. As Hall explained in an interview with the HPR, “a consistent failure of the Court to implement its decisions would undermine [its legitimacy] in the long run, which would reduce its ability to function.”
THE WILL OF THE JUSTICES However, it may be important to distinguish between the ability and the willingness of justices to make sweeping decisions that challenge the status quo. Michael Klarman, a legal historian and professor at Harvard Law School, told the HPR
that in a majority of cases, “[ justices] have a lack of inclination to do things that are dramatically contrary to public opinion.” Klarman attributes this reluctance to a variety of reasons. For one, Supreme Court justices are still a part of the greater society and are influenced by the same cultural biases and trends that affect all Americans. As the great Supreme Court justice Benjamin Cardozo put it, “the great tides and currents which engulf the rest of men do not turn aside in their course and pass the judges by.” In addition, the justices belong to the same historical moment as their fellow Americans, which makes it unlikely that their rulings will deviate substantially from the moral standards of their era. Therefore, in a case such as Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), in which the Court upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation mandated by state law, Klarman argues that the Justices had no inclination to invalidate the law, rather than suggesting that they declined to do so out of concern about implementing such a decision. By the 1890s, racial attitudes and practices in the United States had drastically regressed, eliminating the progress that had been made during Reconstruction. And among the eight justices deciding Plessy (one of the Justices did not participate) were a Confederate soldier who may have belonged to Klan-like organizations, a prominent opponent of black suffrage during the Civil War, and a former slave owner who had opposed emancipation after the war. In this context, most Justices probably regarded segregation as morally and legally permissible, and had no inclination to end the practice. Korematsu v. United States (1944), where the Court upheld the constitutionality of an executive order excluding 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry (two-thirds of whom were citizens
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of the United States) from their homes and ordering them into internment camps during World War II, illustrates the same point. Today, the decision is rightfully seen as one of the Court’s greatest historical blunders, but at the time public opinion was overwhelmingly in favor of the internment. A Japanese invasion of the West Coast was widely viewed as imminent, and the outcome of the war was very much in doubt. The justices who upheld the internment, just like the American population at large, were mindful of the attack on Pearl Harbor that preceded the exclusion order, and the nation had a long history of discrimination against Asians. Consequently, the exclusion and internment order elicited virtually no protest, either by public figures, the press, or traditional rights-protecting organizations. The justices may well have doubted that an order invalidating the internment would have been complied with at the time, but there is also no evidence to suggest that they had any desire to contravene popular opinion. On other issues, however, especially regarding social reform, the personal predilections of the justices do not always line up precisely with contemporary public opinion. For example, the justices were troubled by racial segregation before most Americans, leading them to overrule Plessy in Brown, even though public opinion was still very much split on the issue. And the Court ruled in Engel v. Vitale (1962) that even voluntary, nondenominational prayer in public schools was unconstitutional, although most Americans at the time disagreed. Klarman explains this phenomenon by noting that Supreme Court justices constitute an “elite subgroup of very well-educated, relatively affluent people”—a subgroup that tends to be more liberal on many issues of social reform.
THE BACKLASH THESIS In such cases, the justices’ culturally elite status may lead them to deviate from popular opinion. Yet such decisions can sometimes harm, rather than help, the causes that they ostensibly seek to advance. Throughout history, controversial Court decisions have often mobilized opponents of the rulings, generating powerful backlashes that retard the causes at issue. As Klarman explained, “there’s a limit to how much courts might be able to push the country further in the direction it’s already moving.” This “backlash” phenomenon has played out in many cases, such as Roe v. Wade and Brown, but is perhaps most graphically illustrated by Furman v. Georgia, in which the Court invalidated all of the nation’s existing capital punishment schemes. This 1972 ruling threatened to permanently bar the death penalty because of the apparent arbitrariness with which it was being applied, (rather than ruling that capital punishment was in itself necessarily a “cruel and unusual punishment”). The backlash to this decision was immediate and enormous. Support for capital punishment increased from 50 percent to 62 percent in just two years, and 35 state legislatures hurriedly reformed their death penalty statutes in an effort to satisfy the Court’s new requirements. Just four years later, the Court seemed to completely reverse course, approving the new generation of death penalty statutes. Klarman argues it was the Court’s “failure to arrive at a compromise position that would have appealed to the median voter” (for example, invalidating the death penalty only for certain crimes, such as those in which nobody
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was killed) that generated this backlash. Essentially, when the Court outstrips public opinion, it risks significantly retarding the movement the justices may ostensibly be trying to advance. To be sure, positive results can also emerge from controversial judicial decisions. Thomas Keck, a professor at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School, pointed out in an interview with the HPR that while “controversial rights-protecting judicial decisions can provoke increased mobilization by opponents of the judicial decision,” they can also “provoke increased mobilization by supporters”; both sides of the ledger deserve attention. Keck argues that over time, advocates of social change have often been successful at using litigation, among other tools, to accomplish their objectives. This litigation need not commence with a Supreme Court victory, as in Brown v. Board of Education. For example, on the issue of marriage equality, the Supreme Court did not enter the fray until the reform movement was well on its way to success. By the time the Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage equality in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, victories had already been achieved in 37 states, through lower court rulings, state legislation, and referenda. Keck concedes that litigation does not always work, and even when it succeeds it may not be the main causal force leading to policy change, but he insists that courts can represent a promising forum for those unable to effect change through the political process.
THE COURT TODAY At a time when many believe that picking Supreme Court justices is the most important task of the President, and that one of the most consequential issues at stake in this year’s presidential election was the future of the Supreme Court, one might easily argue that the power of the justices has become excessive. Moreover, at a time when the Court seems to divide five to four across consistent ideological lines on nearly every important constitutional law issue, Senate Republicans refused to even hold a hearing on President Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, and the Republican Party was temporarily contemplating blocking any future nominations indefinitely, one might easily conclude that the Court has become too politicized. So precisely what purpose does the Supreme Court serve today? Friedman, the NYU law professor, maintains that the Court, and judicial review, “serves an incredibly important separating function in society—to help us keep clear the difference between our deeper, more fundamental constitutional values, and our everyday political preferences.” By deciding constitutional questions, the Court raises their salience in public debate and forces the nation to consider its deepest commitments on issues such as abortion rights, the influence of money in politics, and same-sex marriage. Sometimes, the Court’s ruling may mobilize opponents, resulting in counter-legislation or other forms of backlash. Other times, supporters may coalesce around the decision and foster its acceptance by society. Yet whatever the future political composition of the Supreme Court, history tells us that its rulings will remain more or less in step with the evolving views of America. Almost two hundred years ago, the keen French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the power of Supreme Court justices is “immense, but it is power springing from opinion.” And perhaps that’s not such a bad thing.
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DEATH OF A DREAM The Lost Hope of South Sudanse Development Nicholas Stauffer-Mason
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he world’s youngest nation was born on July 9, 2011. On this day, the Republic of South Sudan formally gained its independence from Sudan. Independence Day was greeted with effusive joy and optimism in the new country and across the world. South Sudanese residents (now citizens) streamed into the streets, shedding tears of happiness. The new flag was hoisted over the capital, Juba. A parade of heads of state and diplomats from across Africa and the world officially recognized and extended heartfelt congratulations to the new state. At an official ceremony, the new president, Salva Kiir, articulated the visceral joy that his fellow countrymen and -women were feeling. “We have waited 56 years for this,” President Kiir said in his speech. “It is a dream come true.”
“A DREAM COME TRUE” South Sudan’s road to statehood was long and bloody. Longstanding tension between Arab-dominated, largely Muslim northern Sudan and the overwhelmingly black, Christian South boiled over into civil war in the 1980s that claimed two million lives. The fighting was finally brought to an uneasy interregnum peace by a 2005 agreement, negotiated under intense international pressure, that provided for an eventual referendum on independence. In January 2011, 98.8 percent of South Sudanese voted in that referendum to secede from the North. Independence was heralded as a fresh start for the long-troubled region. Democratic exercise, rather than violent conflict, took South Sudan over the threshold of nationhood. As the president of the now-smaller Sudan himself remarked on Independence Day, “This moment came through peace.” Even so, the nation of South Sudan, scarred by war and the legacy of colonialism, was born facing low human development and a crippling lack of infrastructure. As of October 2011, 73 percent of the population was illiterate. The country had only 60 miles of paved roads and 155 miles of railroad tracks. The World Bank estimated its infrastructure funding gap to be $879 million per year, or 15 percent of GDP. Yet the excitement and embrace of the possibilities engendered by the country’s liberation story translated into a frenzied push for growth and development. At a December 2011 investment showcase in Washington, President Kiir laid out a bold dream of progress. “With your support, ideas, and funds,” he said, “we will begin to grow faster to build more roads and create real economic growth.” Seeing independence as the opening of a new frontier, the international community exhibited intense interest in investing in South Sudan. Many around the world hoped that, as then-World Bank President Robert Zoelick phrased it, South Sudan could “transform a day of independence into a decade of development.” By far the most promising of South Sudan’s resources was oil—it currently controls the third-largest reserves in Africa. 98 percent of government revenues were derived from the oil industry in 2011, making it an economic lifeline for the government. The oil was also a magnet for foreign investment. As the
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realized dream of independence transformed into a new dream of economic development, the country’s autochthonous wealth stood out as one of its greatest assets.
A DREAM TURNED DARK Fast forward to the present, five years after independence. The nation’s victorious new beginning has given way to old patterns of violence. Optimism about the young nation’s development potential faded as the country descended into war and its economic foundation crumbled. South Sudan’s dream has become a nightmare. In 2013, the fledgling nation was plunged into an on-againoff-again civil war between factions controlled by President Kiir and Vice President Riek Machar. Kiir is a Dinka, the largest ethnic group in the country, while Vice President Machar is a Nuer, the second-largest group; the conflict thus plays into South Sudan’s seemingly intractable ethnic tension. The state also ranks as the fourth-most corrupt country on the planet. According to a non-governmental watchdog’s report, Kiir, Machar and many of their allies amassed huge fortunes as their state slid into chaos, turning the political class into a “violent kleptocracy.” This ongoing turmoil has all but precluded the investment and growth that many hoped for after independence. Fighting has hurt investment, particularly in the oil sector, by reducing returns and increasing risk. Rather than focusing on roadbuilding and bridge-building, deep-pocketed Western nations have shifted their attention to saving people from violence and famine—the United States alone has allocated $1.5 billion for humanitarian relief since the war broke out, even as it has cut back its economic relationship in other ways. South Sudan’s oil wealth is not helping the beleaguered nation weather the storm. Fighting has caused rigs to shut down and forced the company that operates many of the country’s oil fields to evacuate large numbers of staff, further limiting production. South Sudan now extracts as little as 120,000 barrels per day, half of its previous high. In large part due to the civil war, South Sudan has failed to make meaningful development progress since its independence. It continues to score low on measures of human development and has done little to close its severe infrastructure deficit. Per capita GDP is at an all-time low of $718. By most metrics, the dream of investment-driven development remains just as distant as it was in 2011.
WAKING UP South Sudan’s current plight is the product of myriad factors—governmental, economic, and cultural—the sum of past mistakes and present misfortune. No single factor was dispositive in putting its dream of prosperity out of reach, but, taken together, they constitute an autopsy of why that dream has all but died. One possible answer lies in South Sudan’s lack of state capac-
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ity. Lant Pritchett, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, told the HPR that South Sudan fell into what he terms a “capability trap”: the ambition of the state’s regulatory scheme outpaced its ability to actually “implement the law.” The nation lacked the capacity to maintain a “plausibly stable regulatory [and] legal … environment,” Pritchett said, and therefore failed “to create an investment climate where people could come and take advantage of [the country’s] opportunities.” Only the “worst investors in the world,” Pritchett said, were willing to operate in such a “quasi-legal environment.” In other words, the young nation’s inability to enforce its laws impeded the very investment those laws anticipated. Robust state capacity building—arming the state with the ability to effectively operate and regulate—is a prerequisite for a successful investment climate, a concern not sufficiently addressed in South Sudan’s post-independence euphoria. The beleaguered nation’s economic plight also exhibits the dangers of extreme reliance on a single resource, even in the early stages of national development. The production disruption caused by the conflict is only one aspect of this hazard. A precipitous drop in the global price of oil has contributed to a skyrocketing deficit and drastically reduced the country’s economic output. Moreover, the country’s oil fields have been a flashpoint in the military conflict, host to violent clashes between government and rebel forces vying for control. The assumption was that oil wealth would provide a cushion or even a springboard for the infant nation. Tragically, the resource that purported to be South Sudan’s economic salvation has instead become a primary cause of the nation’s fiscal and military woes. But an examination of South Sudan’s institutional and economic climate is not sufficient to explain the collapse of its development prospects. The eruption of civil conflict has been central to the country’s decline, and so understanding the drivers of said conflict are key to any diagnosis. In retrospect, the necessity of security sector reform is apparent. South Sudan’s current conflict is fueled by its military’s awkward transition from revolutionary force to governing body. As Matt Wells, a peacekeeping expert at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, told the HPR, “the creation of South Sudan was through … the linking of a political party and an armed actor.” According to him, “they’ve never really broken out of that … armed actors are really at every level of the state.” After independence the military remained large—more than 210,000 personnel as of 2014—but fragmented along ethnic lines. Addressing this challenge would require an aggressive focus on disarmament and reintegration of former soldiers—what Wells calls “right-sizing” the force. Yet South Sudan’s progress toward its demobilization targets was halting even before independence. The result? “In South Sudan,” Wells says, “a military has a country.” Perhaps the most insurmountable obstacle that South Sudan faced—and continues to face—is a lack of coherent national identity. For decades, the region’s cohesion was largely a product of opposition to the North. An interview-based report released by the U.S. Institute for Peace soon after independence revealed fear of resurgent ethnic division following independence; the
breakout of the ethnically charged civil war has given life to those fears. Overcoming the existential challenge of identitybuilding would have required the nation to govern inclusively and peacefully, a goal that the political conflict has all but precluded. Perhaps South Sudan could have supplanted revolutionary struggle with a unifying national push for infrastructure and investment, for economic revival to match its political revival. The post-independence investment frenzy suggests this was possible. Yet the civil war has rendered this, too a far-off dream.
COLD LIGHT OF DAY Largely due to increased recognition of South Sudan’s bleak predicament, international peace-building efforts are on the rise. In September, the United States won approval to vastly expand the number of UN Peacekeepers in South Sudan to 16,000, a move that signals growing pressure for peace. A “troika” of three invested countries—the United States, the United Kingdom, and Norway—continues to attempt to broker a lasting truce between the clashing parties. Yet the ultimate effectiveness of international peace building remains uncertain. The internationally mediated ceasefire that brought the military conflict to an uneasy halt in August 2015 did not hold; future peace deals may not either. Peacekeepers’ ability to actually keep the peace on the ground is limited by stringent restrictions on use of force and by the South Sudanese government’s obstructionism. Samantha Power, the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, seemed to herself acknowledge the limitations of top-down peace after winning expansion of the UN mission: “A peacekeeping mission alone cannot solve” the intense “ethnic, tribal, political conflicts that are plaguing th[e] country,” she said. Growing pressure to impose an arms embargo on South Sudan also illustrates the potential weakness of the international response to this conflict. Given that both sides are still buying weapons, an arms embargo is widely seen as a measure necessary to limit violence against civilians and deescalate the conflict. Yet the policy is not yet in effect and appears in a UN resolution only as an authorized response to future obstructionism. Strangely ambivalent, the United States and its allies appear to recognize the necessity of stopping the flow of weapons into South Sudan but do not seem ready to act on that necessity. Examined in the cold, hard light of day, the future of South Sudan remains far from certain. The problems that killed the country’s dream of political and economic rebirth before it became reality do not have easy solutions. The international community’s response—increasingly aggressive yet still indecisive—is not a panacea. Ultimately, it is “skeptical that anything particularly useful can be done by the international community,” Professor Pritchett said. Often, “internationally brokered peace treaties really are just seen by both sides as a way of postponing the conflict while you rearm and set yourself up for a later conflict.” In other words, “it’s a vicious circle.”
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cross Venezuela, delivery trucks are protected by armed guards ready to defend them from civilian looting. The food they carry is extremely precious to the Venezuelan people, especially during the current economic hard times. From January to May 2016, Venezuelans attempted to raid at least 254 businesses in search of food and other scarce supplies. These raids are the result of the high costs of basic necessities in the country. According to recent data, 87 percent of Venezuelans don’t have money to buy enough food for their families. Those who do spend an average of 72 percent of their monthly wages on nutrition. Supermarkets, struggling to replenish shelves after being ransacked, now lack 80 to 85 percent of their usual stock. Public outcry has rung loudly, to the tune of 2,138 protests between January and April 2016. With the recent decline of global oil prices, Venezuela has plunged into a severe economic and humanitarian crisis, suffering the world’s largest economic contraction in 2015. However, rather than addressing an economy in freefall, the government is instead focused on quelling discontent, including protests related to the food crisis and efforts to oust the current president. Ultimately, the Venezuelan government’s inability to address economic and political instabilities may force the regime to col-
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lapse before it can provide adequate support for its people.
A LEGACY OF CRISIS Venezuela’s severe shortages and resulting protests are reminiscent of the Caracazo, a series of riots that engulfed the country in 1989. At the time, the government was burdened with $33 billion in foreign debt and was struggling with its own economic sluggishness. The charismatic Hugo Chavez gained prominence promising to fix the dismal situation, and working class citizens supported him, forming the Chavismo movement. He was elected president in 1999, and an economic rebound followed. Oil is the lifeblood of the Venezuelan economy, accounting for 25 percent of the country’s GDP. So, when oil prices surged in the early 2000s, the country experienced an influx of wealth. The National Assembly, Venezuela’s legislative body, granted Chavez the power to rule by decree. He used this power to direct the influx of oil revenues toward social programs, increasing the public debt fivefold and making the economy even more dependent on crude exports. During Chavez’s presidency, oil rose from 80 percent of total exports to 95 percent. Chavez also reduced the domestic price of gasoline drastically to reduce costs for Venezuelans: official prices were $0.05/gallon, with black mar-
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ket prices lower than $0.01/gallon. Chavez’s policies to strengthen the economy backfired, especially as oil prices declined in 2014. He restricted access to dollars by fixing the exchange rate, which resulted in an extensive black market. Today, the official exchange rate is 10 bolivars per dollar, but on the black market, it is more than 1,000 bolivars per dollar. He also prohibited raising prices of food and other essentials. This made the production of basic goods unprofitable, creating extreme food shortages. What little food could be bought is now sold in the shadow economy for exorbitant prices: $150 for a dozen eggs, for example. Finally, Chavez protected workers by making them hard to fire. To promote economic stability, the country has passed firing freezes, where public and private sector employees cannot lose their jobs. Companies must now get special government permission to fire workers, even if they do not show up for work. However, Venezuelans can make more money by selling goods in the black market or selling their cheap oil in neighboring countries than they can by working at their jobs. As a result, employee absenteeism is 46 percent in some sectors. Having become accustomed to expensive foreign products during times of plenty, the country is now dependent on imports it cannot afford. By increasing his control over the economy, Chavez also created an overbearing regulatory environment that adds to the difficulty of doing business: Venezuela is now ranked 176th of 178 countries by the Heritage Foundation’s Freedom Index, just beating Cuba and North Korea. The president’s shortsighted economic policy, largely meant to maintain his own popularity, has resulted in a nation unable to function in a world of low commodity prices. By Chavez’s death in 2013, the national external debt had reached $90 billion, and inflation averaged 22 percent. In early 2014, inflation reached 56 percent. In January 2013, the central bank’s scarcity index—meant to measure the availability of consumer goods—reached 16.3 percent, indicating “critical” or “serious” scarcity in 17 basic food products. In February 2014, the index had increased to 28 percent of all basic food product—then described as a record level—and has now reached 80 percent. Though inflation is officially measured at 180 percent, the IMF estimates it to be nearly 700 percent. But although Chavez’s policies proved short-sighted, his personality kept him afloat. His successor, Nicolás Maduro, has had trouble meeting the public’s expectations for a charismatic and revolutionary leader. Riordan Roett, director of the Latin American Studies Program at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, explained in an interview with the HPR that Maduro, a former bus driver, is “not particularly policy-oriented, and [from] the impression we get from what he says, not particularly intelligent. So the Chavista movement is now led by a president who has very little popular support.” The Venezuelan government’s popularity has plummeted
even among loyal Chavistas. According to Roett, “from interviews of the man on the street, for example, it appears as though a number of Chavistas are fed up with Chavismo and really would like a different government.” He went on that “one rumor is if things get any worse … the Chavista movement may find an excuse to get rid of Maduro and move the vice president up.” The lack of support within the party is notable because Chavez was popular even when the economy had begun to turn, with approval ratings as high as 61 percent; Maduro’s approval rating is now 11.6 percent. Opposition groups have called for a referendum to remove Maduro from office, garnering at least 1.85 million votes of support. This has created a political crisis that has captured the government’s attention.
A RESISTING GOVERNMENT The Venezuelan government has used state resources to block the referendum from passing—the National Electoral Council announced that more than 600,000 signatures on a petition supporting the referendum were invalid. The person in charge of validating the referendum process, Jorge Rodriguez, is one of Maduro’s allies and has initiated a lawsuit against the opposition in the Supreme Court. Although the petition still has more than enough signatures needed to initiate the referendum, the lawsuit could hurt the movement chances of success in future stages by bringing into question its legitimacy and setting the precedent for government invalidation. The Venezuelan government has also stifled the opposition by arresting its leaders. In February 2014, for example, Leopoldo Lopez was arrested and put in solitary confinement for encouraging protests that later became violent. According to Franklin Nieves, one of Lopez’s prosecutors, the government fabricated charges to satisfy Maduro’s demand for an arrest. The trial itself was criticized for not hearing the defense’s witnesses or evidence, and the United States and United Nations have since called for Lopez’s release. This arrest of a prominent opposition leader showed the lengths to which Maduro was willing to go in order to stay in power. Furthermore, even though the opposition now controls the majority of seats in the National Assembly, their influence has been limited bypro-government justices appointed by Maduro. Last December, various opposition groups, collectively called the Democratic Unity Roundtable, won 112 out of 167 seats in the legislative election. The outcome gave them a supermajority, but the Supreme Court withheld three delegates from serving in the National Assembly because of alleged irregularities in the election. This suspension has prevented the Roundtable from actually achieving supermajority status. In addition, the courts have overturned many new laws passed by the Assembly, some of which were aimed at stabilizing the economy, allowing for removal of judges, and freeing 120 imprisoned activists and
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Opposition groups have called for a referendum to remove Maduro from office, garnering at least 1.85 million votes of support.
politicians. Thus even the great success of winning control of the Assembly has not freed the opposition from Maduro’s grasp. Maduro has been forced to find short-term political solutions to his unpopularity, partially because his hands have been tied economically by Chavez’s legacy. The government is attempting to gradually reverse Chavez’s previous policy of unsustainably low gas prices but fears protests over increased gas prices like those in 1989 could erupt once more.
A FAILED STATE Some people predict the referendum will pass and oust Maduro, but it’s also possible that referendum will only cause further conflict. The various groups that comprise the opposition coalition differ vastly in goals and ideology, and their differences are “currently being papered over by the fact that there is coherence around the referendum strategy,” according to Alejandro Velasco, associate professor at New York University. The groups’ post-referendum strategies are so different that if the referendum passes, a power struggle could erupt in Venezuela. The current inefficiency and unrest could therefore continue beyond Maduro. Roett believes that international interventions, like domestic reform efforts, will also be unable to help the country in the short term. Latin American countries are wary of getting
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involved because they worry that Venezuela would “turn around and try influencing their politics.” Although Roett admits that “it’s a facetious argument,” it’s still widely believed in a region where countries are highly protective of their sovereignty. The combination of governance issues and other countries’ unwillingness or inability to help has resulted in Venezuela becoming “a failed state” that, according to Roett, “could break out into an open civil war.” Matthew Taylor, a senior fellow in Latin American studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, believes that “the current crisis may only reach lasting resolution when it becomes so unbearable that the regime breaks apart from within.” Venezuela has “unprecedented” levels of poverty, he told the HPR, and there is limited progress in the standoff between the opposition and Maduro, who “shows no signs of backing down.” As the government continues to struggle to pay debts, an economic default seems likely. Ultimately, Taylor concluded, “things are probably going to have to get worse before they get better.” Certain elements of the current crisis, like riots over the weak economy and food shortages, are reminiscent of the crisis that enveloped Venezuela as Chavez rose to power. Chavez won votes with his promise of economic stability and a corruption-free government, but Venezuelans now find themselves in a situation eerily similar to that of 1989. However, this crisis may not be able to find as peaceful an ending.
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BMI BOOM AND ECONOMIC COLLAPSE How Obesity Spread in Nauru as the Economy Thinned Jay Gopalan
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n detailing his travels across the Pacific islands in 1521, Magellan described the men as “well formed,” and the women as “slender and beautiful.” Five hundred year later, the top seven most obese countries, as well as eight of the top 10, are all Pacific islands. At the top of this list is the Republic of Nauru, with an overall obesity rate of 71.7 percent for its 10,000 residents and a staggering average BMI of 34-35. 40 percent of the adult population is diabetic, dragging the life expectancy down to 63. The obesity crisis in Nauru stems from the intersection of numerous unique historical, economic, and cultural factors. Although the government and various interest groups have taken measures to address the issue, their efforts have, thus far, been largely ineffective. Despite its relatively small size, influence, and population, Nauru presents one of the most concerning public health cases anywhere in the world.
THE TAKEOFF For many years, the economy of Nauru was driven by exports of phosphate, the product of thousands of years of accumulated bird droppings. First discovered in the early days of European colonialism, the mineral became the most significant revenue source for the nation following its independence in 1968, eventually leading to an enormous economic boom that lasted throughout the ’80s. At one point, Nauru had the second highest GDP per capita of any country in the world, second only to the United Arab Emirates. This allowed the government to develop a vast welfare state, including universal health care and compulsory education, without imposing any taxes on its citizens. Knowing that the phosphate supplies would eventually run out, the government initially placed profits from the industry into the Nauru Phosphate Royalties Trust, which sought to in-
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vest the commodities earnings in order to provide a sustainable source of income for the growing nation. While a sound premise, the money was sapped away by a number of poor investments, including an international airline, so-called “prime banknotes,” and a London-based musical about the romantic affairs of Leonardo da Vinci. Left with few other options, the nation transformed itself into a tax haven for illicit banking activities. At one point, any individual could start a bank in Nauru with a one-time investment of $25,000. Although this initially brought modest economic success to the island, the country was eventually labeled by the G7 as one of the world’s “uncooperative nations” in the fight against money laundering. This led many of the country’s investors to pull out and crippled the island’s economy until the policies were reversed in 2004. Today, Nauru is a poster child for economic dysfunction: its unemployment rate stands at 90 percent, with 95 percent of workers employed by the government. The country still maintains the welfare state established during times of prosperity yet has virtually no domestic industry to sustain it. Only 5 percent of Nauruans have a college degree. The country depends heavily on foreign aid from Australia, and avenues for future growth are few. Staggering levels of obesity are just one of the concrete implications of this economic paralysis. Phosphate mining stripped Naura of all arable land, destroying virtually all domestic agriculture on the island. This has eliminated traditional diets of coconuts and other fresh vegetables, leaving fishing as one of the island’s only methods of food production. As a result, the country now depends almost entirely on food imports for sustenance. The foods coming into Nauru tend not to be particularly favorable to public health. According to MIT’s Observatory for Economic Complexity, only about 5 percent of Nauru’s food imports are “vegetable products,” while 12 percent are “other foodstuff,” consisting of artificial, sugary foods. In other words, Nauru imports almost twice as much artificial foodstuff as it does healthy vegetables, to replace food that can no longer grow on the island. Furthermore, the plurality of this foodstuff are categorized as “other edible preparations,” a euphemism for processed foods, fatty sauces, seasonings, and other flavorings. This is followed by “baked goods,” referring primarily to sugary desserts. Nauru faces two economic trends that have converged to the current obesity crisis. Environmental degradation, as a result of
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earlier resource exploitation, has forced the country to import the majority of its food, and economic stagnation has required it to buy the cheapest food available—which is inevitably unhealthy.
OBESITY AS TRADITION Nauruan cultural tendencies serve to further compound the island’s weight problem. Attitudes towards obesity are colored by the interplay between Nauru’s economic history and the emergence of a post-tribal and postcolonial national identity. In general, as the economy of the island has grown in its ability to provide adequate calories to each individual, traditional culture has been slow to reflect this change, resulting in a general public health imbalance. In the Western world, body image is one of the most salient expressions of an individual’s identity, more or less distinct from society at large. Nauruan culture, however, views obesity in a vastly different light. Instead of a reflection of the individual, body image is viewed as a reflection of the society within which the individual resides. This phenomenon is described by Alexandra Brewis, an anthropologist at Arizona State University, in her book Obesity: Cultural and Biocultural Perspectives. She argues that “the body is seen as an expression of how the community is faring, and hence as a collective achievement or failure.” A plump community, then, is a successful one, able to provide for all of its members. To the extent that individuals’ body images do reflect their own identities, weight is seen as a status symbol, instead of a source of shame. This trend is historically common in societies that find themselves struggling to provide adequate nutrition— even when calories are readily available, rotundness remains symbolic of prosperity. Nauru’s economic development has further exacerbated the country’s weight issue by contributing to the creation of a markedly sedentary lifestyle. Calories once burned through farming and fishing now go unused, as both arable land and jobs have disappeared. A mantra of consumerism, developed in times of plenty, means that sports and fishing have been replaced by drinking and watching television as the nation’s most common pastimes. Colonialism and its lingering effects may also shoulder some responsibility for the island’s problems. Some believe that the introduction of market concepts to the island has helped develop
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materialistic values, along with an expectation of immediate gratification. According to this line of reasoning, commercial forces create a culture that values quick, easy goods throughout society—whether those take the form of unhealthy snack foods, a mediocre education system, or short-term fulfillment. This postcolonial glitch helps explain both the skyrocketing obesity and economic stagnation that has accompanied dwindling industry. There is perhaps no better example of the confluence of these factors than the islanders’ reverence of Spam. With its high sodium and saturated fat content, Spam today serves as one of the primary symbols of wealth in many of the Pacific islands, including Nauru. Pork has traditionally been considered a delicacy in the region—so when Spam was first introduced during the colonial era, it was hailed as a cheap alternative that tasted almost the same, and was occasionally brought as a delicacy by cargo cults. Today, shelves in Nauru are filled with rows and rows of Spam—an emblem of cultural and material prosperity.
SLIMMING NAURU Efforts to curb obesity on the island have, as of yet, been largely ineffective. In 2005, the Pacific Obesity Prevention in Communities Project provided a number of direct action plans to curb obesity throughout Oceania. For islands comparable to Nauru, these recommendations included regular breakfasts and meals throughout the day, along with increased physical activity. These action plans have formed the basis for the response by the Nauruan government to the growing epidemic. Interestingly, beyond promoting healthy eating and exercise, the OPIC also recommended that efforts to curb obesity in the Pacific islands focus on building on existing religious groups in the region. The motivation behind this is to directly address the cultural factors currently creating a Nauru conducive to an obese population and to build a new health culture from the ground up. By appealing to existing institutions with meaningful social heft, the program has substantial potential in a country of Nauru’s size. The Nauruan government itself has attempted to encourage healthier lifestyles through a variety of methods. In the late 2000s, the president implemented a national walk every Friday around Nauru’s International Airport. Perhaps more significant than any tangible effect on obesity in the nation—round-trip, the walk is a total of five kilometers—is the deep symbolic value that the walks have had as concrete steps taken by the government
geared toward public health. Indeed, the first taxes ever implemented by the Nauruan government were more a mechanism of fighting obesity than of filling public coffers. In 2014, the nation implemented a sugar tax of 30 percent on imported sugar, confectionaries, carbonated soft drinks, cordials, flavored milk, and drink mixes. It also lifted the levy on bottled water, making it almost as cheap as soda. However, every few steps forward are accompanied by one in the other direction. Nauru’s Olympic Day Run, another attempt to promote fitness, was sponsored by Coca-Cola. Potential solutions to curb obesity in Nauru might follow existing protocols established in the United States—a country with an obesity epidemic of its own. In an interview with the HPR, Jenna Seymour, a senior scientist at the Center for Disease Control, spoke of her efforts working on the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act with First Lady Michelle Obama. When asked about the hallmarks of effective measures to curb obesity, she gave two primary answers: comprehensive research and sufficient funding. The Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act implements this by increasing the federal reimbursement rate for some school lunch programs. The Pacific Obesity Prevention in Communities project provides Nauru with the research to put the wheels for this in motion. The lack of adequate funds due to a decaying economy (and thus dwindling tax base), however, leaves Nauru unable to implement virtually any lasting obesity legislation. It seems, therefore, that the country is stuck within a Catch-22—a sedentary culture precludes it from growing an economy, and a failed economy further stops the nation from taking tangible actions towards lasting change. Recently, there have been proposals on the island to recommence mining of a previously unreachable secondary phosphate layer. Initial efforts seem promising and may provide the funding necessary to implement lasting change. This would allow Nauru to reinvigorate its sclerotic economy and, by proxy, begin to address its obesity problem. However, as things stand, the prospects of a reinvigorated Nauruan economy are distant at best. For now, the combined weight of Nauru’s colonial history, cultural habits, and economic malaise continue to undermine the health of its citizens and their long-term economic prospects.
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LUKE CAGE DEFENDER OF HARLEM David Leeds
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or black lives to matter,” proclaims the character of Mariah Dillard in the premiere episode of Marvel’s Luke Cage, “black history and black ownership must also matter.” Mariah’s choice of words in this scene serves two purposes. It demonstrates how she, a corrupt Harlem politician and one of the main antagonists, is willing and able to deal deceptively in the vocabulary of social activism. Simultaneously, this scene provides insight into the politics of Luke Cage, establishing the values that will determine the series’ depiction of Harlem as a location, a community, and an ideal. Much of what has been written about the 13-part superhero saga since it was released in late September has focused on how the show engages with issues currently at the center of public debates regarding race: mass incarceration, black artists’ role in pop culture, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Not nearly enough has been said, however, about Luke Cage’s brilliantly executed portrayal of Harlem. On one level, Luke Cage relies on its setting in Harlem as a means of addressing topics related to race in America. Mike Hale of the New York Times has pointed out that the show’s Harlem setting is a major factor that allows it to put race “at the center of the story.” The famous neighborhood is inseparable from its legacy as the capital of African American culture, so there could hardly be a more appropriate setting for a television series of this nature. However, to assess that Harlem’s only purpose in Luke Cage is to facilitate these discussions of race would be reductive. Over the course of the series, Luke Cage proves itself to be well versed in Harlem’s role in the history of black politics and culture. Its sentimental depiction of the neighborhood serves as both a response to today’s political moment and a tribute to the Harlem literary tradition.
A CHANGING HARLEM Marvel’s Luke Cage comes at a moment when the real-life Harlem is undergoing enormous transformations. Changes in New York City’s zoning laws, offerings of city tax abatements, and a host of other factors have led to an influx of new, white, middle-class residents, attracted to high-end housing and hip new businesses. This wave of gentrification, combined with New York’s ongoing affordable housing crisis, has displaced many
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long-time residents and led to a demographic shift in the district. As Harlem’s economy becomes increasingly corporate, small businesses are finding it difficult to compete, and the neighborhood is losing its status as a haven for minority-owned local enterprises. This phenomenon is already having a major impact on Harlem’s cultural landscape. Discussing the threat of gentrification in a New York Times piece earlier this year, historian Michael Henry Adams warned, “In fact, it’s already happening. Rents are rising; historic buildings are coming down. The Renaissance, where Duke Ellington performed, and the Childs Memorial Temple Church of God in Christ, where Malcolm X’s funeral was held, have all been demolished. Night life fixtures like Smalls’ Paradise and Lenox Lounge are gone.” Many of the key institutions that, a few decades ago, were thought of as sacred are now either in jeopardy of being priced out of Harlem or are already gone. Harlem’s political landscape is changing as well. This year, state senator Adriano Espaillat scored a historic victory in the Democratic primary to replace Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.), an icon in his own right, in the U.S. House of Representatives. He will be the first Dominican American elected to Congress. While Espaillat’s win will be a great symbolic victory for Latinos in New York and across the country, to many black Harlemites it signals the end of an important chapter in their neighborhood’s history. It brings to a close decades of African-American political control that have helped to make the neighborhood into the intellectual home base for thought leaders like Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X. “The rise of Latino political power,” writes local news anchor Errol Louis, “comes at the same time an influx of white residents is transforming a place once considered the capital of black America. That makes the new changes all the more jarring to many black residents.” Put together, all of these factors have put Harlem’s black community in a position where its residents fear for the future of the neighborhood. Between these remarkable changes in Harlem’s demographic, political, and economic character, more and more people are warning of the “end of Black Harlem.”
HARLEM, CAGE-STYLE It is in this political context that Marvel released Luke Cage, which writes a love letter to Harlem’s culture and history in content as well as in visual style.
CULTURE
The eponymous hero is written as a thoughtful and well-read figure who is initially uneasy about the prospect of stepping into the role of superhero. His literary prowess comes across in his dialogue, as he often namedrops authors from the Harlem Renaissance, like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. As the show progresses, Luke’s literary repertoire proves to be quite expansive. It includes Chester Himes, a novelist who broke new ground in the pulp genre by setting his hard-boiled detective stories—notably including the Harlem Detective series—in communities of color. As is par the course for a superhero origin story, Luke is inspired to realize his full potential in part by the memory of a deceased loved one—in this case, his wife Reva. The keepsake that he holds onto to remind himself of her is a copy of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, which explores the many complicated nuances of race in America as its protagonist migrates from the South to Harlem. These numerous literary allusions, peppered throughout the 13 episodes, demonstrate that the show’s writers know Harlem’s cultural tradition well. They serve as a celebration of that tradition and thus as a reminder of why Harlem, as a cultural site, is worth preserving. The show’s very portrayal of the streets of Harlem is yet another means of paying homage to the neighborhood’s cultural legacy, primarily through its many tips of the hat to Blaxploitation films of the 1970s. A scene in Luke Cage’s second episode, for example, shows Luke trying to track down a young man that his mentor, Pop, has taken under his wing. Luke checks out neighborhood haunts and asks passersby if they can identify an image of his friend. The editing and funky score in this scene are reminiscent of similar montages of detective work in Shaft, the definitive Harlem Blaxploitation flick. Luke Cage looks to the Blaxploitation genre for its musical cues as well. As Jack Hamilton argued in a recent review of the show for Slate, “One of Luke Cage’s greatest triumphs is its use of music, which resonates more prominently and energetically than in any previous Marvel screen property. The show’s score is crafted by Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad and evokes the greatest scores of classic Blaxploitation while still managing to sound current and fresh.” The parallels between the Harlem of Luke Cage and classics like Shaft and Super Fly firmly establish the show within Harlem’s cinematic tradition. Allusions to the literature of the Harlem Renaissance and films of the Blaxploitation era are far from the only ways that Luke Cage pays homage to the neighborhood’s history. Many of the locales featured on the show, ranging from neighborhood barbershops to sports memorabilia stores, evoke the ideal of Harlem as a haven for black-owned businesses that double as social gathering spots. Because institutions like these are becoming scarcer by the day, this portrait is primarily a nostalgic one. This reverence for Harlem’s culture is equally visible in Luke Cage’s treatment of local institutions that date back to the district’s heyday. A scene early in the series features a black gospel church overflowing with people attending a funeral. The camera captures the location bathed in golden light from a low angle, endowing it with a certain benevolent monumentalism. This framing allows the viewer to truly appreciate the importance of this place to its community. The same care is taken in a later episode when Luke walks into the legendary Apollo Theater and takes a moment to soak in its glory. Luke Cage employs such awe and respect for Harlem’s hallowed spaces that it becomes
impossible for viewers to overlook the neighborhood’s role as a cultural capital.
FITTING HARLEM INTO THE SUPERHERO WORLD In spite of the fact that the Marvel Cinematic Universe—the multi-franchise superhero continuity in which Luke Cage takes place—is now comprised of 13 feature-length films and four television shows, Luke Cage is the first Marvel property with a non-white lead, and only the third whose protagonist is not a white male. While superhero comics have been becoming more inclusive in recent years—in terms of both the array of talent who writes and illustrates them and the characters themselves— their onscreen counterparts have been very slow to catch up. Hollywood’s issue with diversity is far from limited to superhero films, but the MCU’s unprecedented scope and popularity as a franchise has made its homogeneous casting choices, not to mention its overwhelmingly white roster of directors and writers, all the more glaring and subject to criticism. Producing a show like Luke Cage does not atone for all of Marvel’s sins, but it is a progressive step. The series’ cast is predominantly black, as is its showrunner, Cheo Hodari Coker. In an interview with The Daily Beast in September, Coker explained in depth how he understands his role as an African-American creator bringing a new perspective to the mostly white genre. “All black art is always judged to illuminate our experience and prove that our stories and our history and our lives matter,” he stated. “It was important to me that we have a hero that was black—and he didn’t just happen to be black: his identity is a part of him.” Coker’s vision of the series as “a deep dive into black culture” shines through in every episode. Not only does this mission help to diversify the cultural experiences portrayed onscreen in the Marvel world, but it also enables Coker to focus on the major social and political issues facing Harlem today. “When Marvel suggested Harlem, I knew right then I could tell a story with deep cultural resonance,” he told The Guardian. “By setting the story there you can include music, history, gentrification, and do it in a way that makes the show feel like it’s taking place in the real world.” Through his affectionate rendering of Harlem, a historic neighborhood with an uncertain future, Coker has created a show that truly stands out in the field of modern superhero properties. Luke Cage draws upon rich literary and cinematic traditions to present a compelling reminder of why Harlem is so important to the history and culture of America. Additionally, it provides a response to Mariah’s claim: Not only do black lives matter to the creators of Luke Cage, but black history and black cultural agency matter, too. The show uses its portrait of Harlem and its residents as a jumping-off point to honor a century of black art and literature. Through its reverent depictions of the cultural sites that still make up the neighborhood’s social fabric—like gospel churches and the Apollo—the series also emphasizes the centrality of Harlem to Manhattan’s black community. Essentially, Luke Cage makes the case for fighting to preserve Black Harlem. It reminds us of the ongoing threat of gentrification and it demonstrates what is at stake. For black lives to matter, black history and black ownership must also matter.
WINTER 2016 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 37
CULTURE
FROM EXERCISE TO ENTERTAINMENT THE CULT OF SOULCYCLE
Cherie Hu
S
undays at 7:30 a.m. are usually not a peak hour for the nation’s noisy nightclubs. SoulCycle, which combines indoor cycling and high-energy music into arguably the world’s most notorious fitness brand, is a different story. One dreary October Sunday, nearly 50 riders and I rose with the sun and clocked in at SoulCycle’s Union Street studio in San Francisco. The studio’s aesthetic combines a clean, calm concierge and signature white and yellow hues on the outside with a rumbling rager on the inside. It’s designed to make you pedal, dance, and sweat to the beat. The morning’s instructor, athlete and dancer Bea del Rosario, kept the studio lights dim with the exception of two grapefruit-scented, Jonathan Adler-designed candles—meditative, perhaps, if it weren’t for the music, which leaned heavily toward bass-heavy EDM (del Rosario curated it herself ). “Is this person you are right now, at this very moment, the best version of yourself?” she would yell periodically to the crowd. No faking was permitted; she would occasionally step down from her front-and-center pedestal, approach each rider individually, shake her head in disappointment and turn up the resistance on their bike. By the time the cathartic class ended at 8:15 a.m., the California sky was blindingly bright, sweat rendered everyone’s clothes a different color from when they came in, and 50 new riders were waiting eagerly outside the studio for their turn.
FROM CRAMPED STUDIO TO CELEBRITY STATUS This year marks the one-decade anniversary of these rituals, whose blend of cycling, candlelight, and clubbing has taken the boutique fitness world by storm. Since its founding in 2006 in a former funeral home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the SoulCycle network has relied primarily on a grassroots, word-ofmouth marketing strategy to grow its network. Now the company has 66 studios, nearly 25 percent of which were opened this year alone. According to its most recent filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the franchise plans to
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expand this number in the long term by nearly fourfold, to 250 studios. SoulCycle’s unforgiving intensity has even forged new popculture personalities, from BroCyclers (male riders) to front-row nerds (only the most experienced riders can sit in the front row), all of whom fit under what SoulCycle itself has dubbed “Soul evangelists.” Beyond the studios, the brand’s tight-knit community spans more than 383,000 unique riders and nearly 500,000 fans combined across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and has featured in parodies by the likes of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Such over-the-top personas and parodies reaffirm the paradigm shift that SoulCycle has carved into the fitness world, intentionally or otherwise: one that is less concerned with actual fitness and more interested in social capital, celebrity appeal, and experiential glamor. The class experience itself is a hybrid of groupthink (everyone cycling to the beat in sync), exhibitionism (instructors and front-row riders showcasing their abilities to the rest of the room), and financial exclusivity (paying a heavy price tag for classes—$30 on average per ride, and up to $70 for priority booking in New York City). This culture has given rise to nicknames such as “the Valentino of exercise” that stand in contrast to its modest upbringing.
MOTION-PICTURE FITNESS But in fact, entertainment lies at the heart of SoulCycle’s roots. One of its three co-founders, Julie Rice, worked previously as a talent manager at Handprint Entertainment, a management and production company whose first client was Will Smith. SoulCycle’s instructors—many of whom, like del Rosario, have a dance background—go through a competitive, American Idolinspired audition process, bolstered by an internal scouting and training team in a model that starkly resembles recruitment for Hollywood films. “Every time you come in, it’s a mini-production,” Rice explained at South by Southwest earlier this year. “It’s curtain-up, curtain-down. That’s what you get for your $30.” Over the past
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few years, the SoulCycle team’s sharp eye for entertaining content has attracted dozens of celebrities, including Hilary Duff, David Beckham, Chelsea Clinton, and Michelle Obama, who have leveraged the upbeat classes for everything from brand sponsorships to political fundraisers. SoulCycle’s most vocal critics have argued that this warped priority structure, elevating fame and appearance over individuals’ fitness goals, makes some of its competitors more attractive. For instance, unlike its biggest indoor cycling rivals Peloton and Flywheel (the latter of which SoulCycle co-founder Ruth Zukerman started independently in 2009), SoulCycle provides no real-time rider statistics or other methods to track individual performance over time. Several certified cycling instructors and exercise scientists have also outlined in painstaking detail how some of SoulCycle’s signature moves (handlebar push-ups, free weight exercises and “tap-backs”) actually have detrimental effects on calorie burn, posture, and other aspects of health.
STAYING POSITIVE Nonetheless, SoulCycle transcends its critics because it understands, and to an extent controls, the rapidly shifting demands of fitness marketing. Around the time of SoulCycle’s founding, health and lifestyle magazines from SELF to Shape were publishing headlines such as “Go From Heavy To Hot!” and “5 Minutes to Flawless Skin” that propelled accusatory subtext toward its readers while proposing more or less ephemeral remedies to these self-perceived problems. “Today’s consumers have different expectations for what fitness can be,” explained Carolyn Tisch Blodgett, VP of brand marketing at Peloton, in an interview with the HPR. “People don’t just want to run on an elliptical while watching CNN and counting the minutes until it’s over. We’re helping them realize that a 45-minute morning workout can be the best part of their day.” This transition in fitness marketing from amplifying insecurities to preaching confidence and body-positive thinking has extended to technology and fashion as well. Fitbit, Garmin and other fitness trackers have driven the rise of the “quantified self,” a concept that demands every movement and heartbeat be recorded as a concrete, analyzable, and reportable data point (a philosophy from which SoulCycle interestingly deviates). The “athleisure” clothing market, meanwhile, has seen unprecedented growth as a complementary good to fitness classes. The sports apparel and footwear market grew by 42 percent to $270 billion over the past seven years and is projected to grow by another 30 percent by 2020, according to Morgan Stanley.
Research by the NPD Group suggests that the U.S. women’s activewear market alone represents more than $18 billion in annual sales, up 21 percent from a year ago. SoulCycle itself designs 12 collections a year.
PLATEAU PERFORMANCE? Perhaps SoulCycle’s biggest challenge is growing a boutique fitness brand for a specialized clientele on a national scale without losing sight of its niche origins. Riding on a bicycle is not a “boutique” act, but rather a universal phenomenon that crosses demographic and geographic boundaries. “To me, it’s a human experience,” SoulCycle co-founder and co-chief creative officer Elizabeth Cutler explained during a talk at Google. “Fitness is our core business, but what’s really going on in that room has a lot to do with where you are in your life. It doesn’t matter where you live.” To an extent, however, it does matter. Inferring from its SEC filing, SoulCycle as a business remains hyper-localized: only three of SoulCycle’s vendors accounted for 49 percent of the company’s retail sales from January to September 2015, and its cycling studios in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco alone generated 84 percent of its revenues over the same time period. At the same time, the company has been trying to break free from its local molds with a more global strategy and in turn has been accused of abandoning its cult following for a mass-market approach. In addition to pursuing high-profile partnerships with the likes of Target, Spotify, and Netflix for complementary classes and pop-up experiences, SoulCycle has sacrificed its boutique business model, operating instead under a larger fitness chain Equinox Holdings Inc., to which it sold a majority stake in 2011. Perhaps to expand its clientele, SoulCycle has also established a College Ambassador program to target younger crowds and has developed a mobile app to compete with Peloton and Flywheel’s more technological, performance-driven approach to cycling. As SoulCycle’s growth pedals toward Hollywood proportions—the company is preparing cautiously for an IPO—it is in danger of forgetting why its riders are willing to show up before sunrise for class. They don’t want just any typical blockbuster movie; they want to get drenched in private, candlelit, instructor-led evangelism that discards the boundaries between fitness, entertainment, and religion. If the cult of SoulCycle is to preserve its authenticity and original appeal, it would somehow have to continue sharpening and cultivating its unique voice without losing grip on the noisy, pricy, and fashionable workout trail in its wake.
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INTERVIEW: JUAN PABLO ESCOBAR
with Humberto Juárez Rocha
Sebastian Marroquin, born Juan Pablo Escobar, is the son of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar and at one time was heir to the largest drug trafficking empire in history. He has been featured in one documentary, Sins of My Father (2009), and has written one book, “Pablo Escobar: My Father” which was published in 2014.
From reading your book, I read that when you are only 7 years old you realize what your father truly did for a living. How does one react to that when one is 7 years old? When I was seven years old and my father tells me “my profession is that of a bandido (a bandit) that is what I do” - these are the words he tells me after the assassination of the Minister of Justice ordered by my father himself in 1984 – it’s very difficult to react to that when you are only seven years old because you don’t realize the significance of the word bandido. Sure, at that age you may have seen movies with guns and crime but by then I also knew something strange was happening in my family because it all changed drastically after the killing of Rodrigo Lara. Clearly, something I am grateful for today is that my father had the strength to recognize and tell me about his activities instead of selling me a fabricated story. I think that helped us build a relationship based on trust. I think it also helped him to talk about his activities, almost in a confessionary manner, when he talked to the press about the bombs he had placed, the people he had kidnapped, or other activities of that type. So, in a way, my father reached a certain degree of sincerity that I became to know and I would even say appreciate because I would have rather had my father treat me like this rather than as an idiot that would never have any idea about what was happening around us. No one prepares you at seven years of age to have
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your father tell you he is a criminal – you are still a kid and you are thinking about playing and having fun, things that have little to do with reality. This forces you to grow and mature before due time.
Do you think your father ever had an opportunity, or a moment, in which you could have told him or he himself may have stopped his ways? Well, I think he wasted an incredibly opportunity which was when he stayed at the prison he made, La Catedral. It was the one chance that the government and the people of Colombia gave him to confess his illicit activities and to remain in one place with very favorable conditions. Sadly, he ended up throwing away the one opportunity he had. I naively thought, as a son and as many other Colombians, that he would take this opportunity to make amends with the country. Regrettably, to deactivate an entire cartel also proved to be a difficult task for my father and with all the enemies he had, even more. I am not saying this to serve as a justification for the things he did, but rather to demonstrate the context of his situation and the reason for his actions, for which only he is responsible for. I think it was very difficult for him to try to bring down the very criminal organization that he had created and by the time he wanted to stop, he was unable to.
On that note, do you think that once one has entered the drug trade, can one get out? I believe so. I am convinced that we all have the decision to act on a daily basis. I am a good man and I behave well on an everyday basis. It was not a decision of waking up one day and saying “I will be a good person today, problem solved”, no, it has
INTERVIEWS
to be an everyday thing. I think it’s a myth that one cannot leave any organization once you’ve entered one. I think one has to be aware that a change needs to be made to improve one’s life and then there will always be alternatives and choices that can lead you away from a life of violence. It’s important to learn from the past and people’s experiences, not only from my father’s as a drug dealer, but from others that have ended just the way he did. I am surprised that many people disregard the fact that the end for almost all drug dealers ends up being the cemetery or the jail cell, we do not know of any case where a drug dealer has “retired”.
Do you feel free today or do you feel that you are under your father’s shadow? I would tell you that I am a free man but only partially so relative to other people in society. Why do I say “partially free”? Because there is only one country in the world that denies me entrance because of who my father was and that is the United States. I am not allowed to enter American territory simply because I was born the son of Pablo Escobar and apparently that implies that I inherit my father’s crimes. Not that I want a visa now, I don’t care anymore, I have been to the United States before. But what I criticize is the message that the United States is sending to the youth of the world – to those of us who invite people to leave the ways of violence and the drug trade, we are not given a visa but those that sell drugs and weapons, yes. It’s a shame to see drug dealers enter and leave the United States as if nothing in addition to those that purchase weapons and firearms.
You often tell the story of when your father called you the day he was killed. Once you learn he has been killed, you tell the press that you would “avenge” your father and 10 minutes later, you take this back. What happened in those 10 minutes? I was talking to my father via phone from my hotel room when he said “I will call you right back” before he hung up. 10 minutes pass and the phone rings again. I thought it was him but it was a journalist telling me my father had died. I knew something was wrong that day, he made the mistakes he had never committed throughout the last 10 years as the most wanted man in the world in one day. He never used the phone, he only did the day he was killed. He always told me that the day he used the phone would be his last day, something I had very clear while I was talking to him. I reacted violently, the journalist did not tell me she was recording me, an underage kid, and I told her that I would “kill every single one of you sons of bitches”, forgive the words, but these were the exact words I told her. I was only 16 years old and I was still the son of the most wanted, dangerous and feared drug kingpin of all time. My whole life I had seen my father solve every problem he had through the use of violence. Those 10 minutes of reflection made me think about all those times I had argued with my father, all those times I had asked him to stop the violence. And when I started thinking about plans to avenge him, I realized I was only going to become someone worse than him, someone worse than the person I had
so often criticized. I was going against my own principles. And yes, people tell me that it was a tremendous life decision in the span of 10 minutes but I just say, what else was there to think of? My whole life I saw how the violence my father created had come back to my family and I thought that I would only make things worse for my mother and my sister if I sought to avenge my father. I had to dare to take a path of peace.tap into for future contributions. But now we’re making up for it, since the debate which was just, what, 48 hours ago. We raised $18 million.
How is the relationship between you and the rest of your family? My sister, my mother and I are great friends. We have always valued our immediate family immensely, something we learned from my father. Unfortunately, on my father’s side we have a nonexistent relationship. But my mother and sister and I live very closely, we remain in the same city and we see each other every day. We love our father’s image because the only thing we received from him was love and affection. We recognize that our father made incredible damage outside of the home but we ask for reciprocity because the only thing he ever gave us within the household was love. It’s very difficult to resort to hating [Pablo Escobar] when all he gave you his entire life was love and all the best he ever had.
Is returning to Colombia an option? I am in Colombia at the moment. But I know what you mean by returning, by staying and to be quite honest my country still shows that it can be intolerant especially with the victory of the NO in the last peace plebiscite last week. I really wonder what is happening to us as a country and as a society. Do we want a future where we are constantly at war with each other? That’s what Colombians voted for last week and it worries me a lot. We approved vengeance and violence and said no to peace and reconciliation. What we experience in Colombia is fratricide, we fight ourselves and it demonstrates the priority of hatred over peace and reconciliation. If people in Colombia despise the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), then I can understand how people would despise my image and my father’s persona. My father’s image amongst the poorest of people, those forgotten by the state, still remains a respected image. Whether we like it or not, my father was an important figure who filled a vacuum left by the state amongst the lower social classes. Yes, of course my father harmed and caused a lot of damage but both stories are true. He did things to help and destroy Colombia, both are true.
What would you think your father would say about what you’re doing now? He would be proud, he would hug me and he would be sitting front-row at all the events where I talk to the youth about not repeating [Pablo Escobar’s] story because I am a consequence of what he did and I have not changed my stance on violence since we talked about it.
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INTERVIEWS
INTERVIEW: OMAROSA with Gavin Sullivan
Omarosa Manigault is best known for her appearances on Donald Trump’s reality television show, The Apprentice. She has taught at Howard University School of Business and appears as a political commentator on CNN. During the 2016 presidential election, Omarosa served as Donald Trump’s Director of African-American Outreach.
You’ve known Donald Trump for over a decade now. What’s surprised you the most about him? What surprises me? Nothing after 13 years.
I want to talk about what you feel is at stake here. Mr. Trump has asked rhetorically to black voters, “What do you have to lose?” What do you think African Americans would lose under a Hillary Clinton presidency? Let’s start with your first question, what’s at stake. For the first time, the status quo is at stake. Donald Trump is not your traditional candidate. He doesn’t come from the establishment. He’s not a career politician. He is an independently wealthy businessman who is not indebted to any special interest and he is not controlled by any lobbyist. He truly is probably one of the most free candidates to run for president ever. When I say free, I mean that he is able to create his own vision that is not influenced by someone else’s agenda. And he is able to advance that agenda and his passion, which as we know very well is to make
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America great again. So what’s at stake is the status quo. There are people who hope to maintain it. There are people who want to destroy it. There are people who don’t understand it. But one of the things that Mr. Trump thinks is unacceptable is for children living in abject poverty, for mothers having to bury their children in the streets of Chicago, for hardworking Americans not to be able to even find jobs in communities where they were thriving eight years ago. That’s what’s at stake. For African American voters, what do you have to lose—seven years ago, we were made some promises. This theme of hope resonated for African Americans, for several reasons. We wanted to believe that things would change, that things would improve, that we would be a priority for once. There was someone who looked like us in the White House, someone who could relate to our issues and our conditions and our sufferings and our circumstances in this country. And so we were sold on the theme of hope. And then you fast forward and you have to look and you ask yourself, “Are African Americans better off now than they were seven years ago?” Well, the data says no. No matter what side you’re on, when you look at the numbers, unemployment up, home ownership down, the number of African American men who are incarcerated, the number of African American men who have dropped out of school, the number of African American youth who are out of school, unemployed—the data doesn’t look good. And so the question “what do you have to lose,” after trusting, putting your faith in and supporting someone who made promises to the community to deliver, it’s a big gamble for a community who traditionally votes 90 plus percent for the Dem-
INTERVIEWS
ocratic Party. It’s a risk, but any great game requires a great risk. But with our current situation being as dire as it is, when you’re at the bottom, where do you go but up? And I like that he is challenging African Americans to look at what thirty, forty years of loyalty to the Democratic Party which has not been to them has done. Has it changed anything? Has it improved your life? I grew up in a small town called Youngstown, Ohio. It was a big steel mill town, and my family is still there. The average income in Youngstown is $13,700, right above the poverty level. Sixty, seventy percent of my family, hard-working Americans, still live at or a little above the poverty line. Someone has to come in who’s willing to fight for them, to fight for us. Who’s going to be that person? It’s going to require us—and when I say us I mean African Americans, and we’re not a monolith but I’m going to paint with a really broad brush—it’s going to require us to do something we’ve never done.
What would you say are the biggest differences you’ve found working on a team with Donald Trump and with Hillary Clinton? I worked with her husband, out of fairness, and I had the opportunity to do events with her. I’d like to share with you a picture from my own commencement, to which she was my commencement speaker. Since I was working at the White House at the time I got to actually advance her for my own commencement. I want to share a picture with you of the first lady who I knew. This picture was taken at Howard University, and I was graduating with my master’s degree. That’s in the president’s office prior to commencement. So that’s the first lady I knew. The interesting thing about the first lady then, the first lady I knew, and the first lady now, is that the first lady who I knew back then, her complete and total commitment was to helping advance others. And I find that her complete and total commitment now is to advance herself and her husband and her interests. When I listen to themes—and I don’t have any metadata, I haven’t done some analysis of her speeches—but if I was just to do qualitative analysis of her speeches, what jumps out at me often is this “me, me, me.” Whereas if you did a casual, qualitative analysis of Donald Trump, he’s talking about fighting for you, you, you, whereas it seems that [Clinton] is fighting for herself and her interests, [saying] “they’re attacking me, they’re bringing me down, they’re getting in my way, they’re stopping me, me, me” as opposed to us, us, us. That’s the big difference, a shift from fighting for us to fighting for just herself.
When you look at Donald Trump’s campaign for president, going back to June 2015, are there any moments, any decisions, that you disagreed with?
Where you perhaps would have done something differently, said something differently? I think us not fundraising early on was. We’re making up for it now, because fundraising isn’t just about money. It’s building a database of people you can get $25 from them now, and you can get another $25 down, and you can get another $25 in the primary, and you can get another $100 in the general. So really it was just not having that apparatus in place. Of course [Clinton] had that apparatus in place because she ran for president in 2008. She could just continue a database from when [Bill Clinton] ran for the governor’s office, when he ran for president in 1992 and then again in 1996, and then her race...so they had a fundraising apparatus with a database that was quite extensive. Mr. Trump didn’t have that, which meant that on the day he announced, there should have been a fundraising mechanism in place. But a big part of his messaging and branding was that he was financing his own campaign, which he did. But in doing that, we didn’t have an extensive database of folks who we could go back to, depend on, get messaging to, and tap into for future contributions. But now we’re making up for it, since the debate which was just, what, 48 hours ago. We raised $18 million.
How do you respond when someone calls the campaign, calls Trump, racist? I don’t respond anymore. When you hear something that’s untrue, over and over again, you just become immune to it. At first, back in last June, when I first heard it, I was so taken aback. I was just like, the idea that [I was] powwowing and hanging out and working with a man that didn’t like black people, I was just like, this is just a newsflash to me! [laughs] Could you imagine? That here we are, particularly the African American cast members of the three seasons [of The Apprentice] that I appeared on, the production staff, the network folks, just could you imagine that all of us had been duped? And all of a sudden you wake up in June of 2015 and discover that the person you’ve known and worked with didn’t like you? I mean, it was just at first really shocking. But I’ve been in politics long enough to realize that people ultimately can decide between what’s truth and what’s not true. Between what is fact and what is not factual. And clearly, clearly, that’s not factual. I guess the Clinton campaign believes that if you say something long enough that people will believe it. And so any opportunity they get they throw that title at him. But as an African American woman who has stood with him for many years, I can tell you that the definition of a racist is a person who does not like African Americans, does not want to work with them, does not want to be around them, does not want to advance them. That has not been my experience.
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ENDPAPER
MORAL MINDFULNESS
Mark Bode
C
ollege campuses across the nation are increasingly focused on dismantling unfair and unethical structures— on Harvard’s campus, this has played out in the dining workers’ strike, the push to divest from fossil fuels, and local participation in the Black Lives Matter movement. If students aren’t protesting, they’re at the very least talking about the issues, as they very well should, as a way of discerning the most ethical way to improve institutions. Administrations have also newly focused their energies on ensuring the health of their students. Harvard offers a plethora of programs on fitness, sexual health, and especially mental health. These offerings are important in cultivating a healthy student body able to thrive in academic settings. Yet in all of this talk about improving unfair structures and individual health, discussions of personal morality are absent at Harvard. Such discussion is not mutually exclusive with these other focuses. Rather, it is part of a wider approach to reaching a community’s full potential. You can work to assure equal standing and good health for members, but without morality, a community is weakened. The self-censorship of moral dialogue robs students of the opportunity to sharpen their individual moral codes and set community moral norms. Colleges often celebrate the diversity of their student bodies. In their brochures, they boast about the number of states and countries from which they attract learners. They offer Hillels and black students’ associations and cultural fairs. College Democrat and Republican and Libertarian groups serve as a testament to the diversity of political perspectives. All of these institutions are deserving of celebration, but students generally neglect discussion of the diversity of moral codes. The multitude of backgrounds at Harvard contains a rich body of moral influences, ones that can inject energy and nuance into values instead of reinforcing previous opinions or letting values stagnate and weaken. Yet many universities suffer under the current status quo. Under the guise of “no judgment,” students are given a blank check by their peers, leaving little focus on the moral consequences of their actions. Friends let friends partake in all manner of activities that could be considered as vices, whether they be binge drinking, unsafe sex, or smoking. Those who partake don’t want to feel like what they’re doing is wrong, and those who say nothing self-censor to preserve the relationship. The
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question then arises: is allowing immoral behavior to preserve comfort the correct choice? Many have said that college is the time when one can afford to make mistakes. But should we stand idly by when our compatriots leap headfirst into those mistakes? Immorality hurts more than just those who are making immoral decisions. Vicious activities normalize vice for the community—those who would not normally succumb to immoral impulses are instead pressured to do so. They can condone behaviors that start without physical consequence but swiftly endanger individuals’ health, such as alcohol poisoning or the increased risk of sexual assault. In such an environment, we stop seeking to be the best versions of ourselves. This is not to advocate for a single individual’s morality forced upon other members of the community. It is not a call for college administrators to enforce a moral code on their students through sanctions and regulations. Moral relativism exists, and its existence offers all the more reason to discuss moral codes on campus. There are bound to be overlapping values in an environment of individual relativity; it is in this overlap that moral norms can be forged by the students, a process vastly more powerful than administrative action. Through this process, we can reexamine campus habits and align them with this new set of shared norms. Do we want to have a community that condones binge drinking and drunkenness, and accepts the behaviors that stem from it? Are we okay with the recreational consumption of illegal substances? Should we accept greed under the principle of personal freedom when consulting and finance companies come calling? The answer to these questions may very well be yes, and community norms should then reflect that. But without moral discussion, we are left to only guess. Values-based dialogue should join the already rich campus discussion. By examining and advocating for our values, we can sharpen our individual moral codes and set a baseline for moral behavior in our communities. Will people be made uncomfortable? Absolutely. They can still seek to adjust the norms; if they fail to do so, they are still free to pursue that which is acceptable to their conscience. Campuses stand to gain much more than they lose with a stronger dialogue of values. With it, campus communities can bring morals in line with their mission of developing minds.
HUMOR
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