Spring 2011

HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW

VOLUME XXXVIII NUMBER 1 SPRING 2011 WWW.HARVARDPOLITICALREVIEW.COM

WOMEN IN THE WORLD THE GLOBAL STRUGGLE FOR WOMEN’S EQUALITY

Inside: Women’s access to political power, birth control in Mexico, American inequality, and Jeb Bush

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Harvard Political Review

VOLUME XXXVIII NUMBER 1 SPRING 2011

UNITED STATES 17 The Never-Ending Dispute paul schied

19 Search for the American Socialist sandra korn

21 The Politics of Inequality Beatrice Walton

WORLD 23 Losing Control Arjun Mody

25 Kurzarbeit

martin steinbauer

27 Risking Change matt bewley

29 The New Horsemen of Secession Joshua Lipson

BOOKS & ARTS 31 Kabuki Democracy simon thompson

33 The Neoconservative Persuasion eli kozminsky

35 Silver Screens and Blackboards alec barrett

WOMEN IN THE WORLD 6 Birthing a Revolution Female participation gave the Egyptian revolution momentum caitria o’neill 9 A Balancing Act Creating gender equality in American politics will not be easy caroline cox 11 Hitting the Glass Ceiling In the corporate world, are quotas the answer? elvira e.m. sihvola 13 The Academic Gender Gap Women still lag behind in math and science pragya kakani 15 Birth Control in Mexico Female activism brings emergency contraception denisse garcia & angela primbas

INTERVIEWS 38 Jeb Bush Florida governor reflects on politics, educa-

tion, and service

rajiv tarigopula

39 Swanee Hunt Ambassador to Austria and lecturer at

Harvard cares about women in politics

simon thompson

ENDPAPER 40 My Country, Right or Left? alexander sherbany

Volume XXXVIII, No. 1, 2011. The HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW, a nonpartisan journal of politics, is published quarterly through the Institute of Politics at Harvard University, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138. Annual subscription: $25.00. Email: editor@hpronline.org. ISSN 0090-1030. Copyright 2011 Harvard Political Review. All rights reserved. Image Credits: US Federal Government: 1-Dept. of Defense; 4-Dept. of State, Office of Speaker Boehner, Supreme Court; 6,7-Sarah Carr; 40-Federal Emergency Management Agency. Flickr: 2-Susan Corpuz; 3-Sean O’Leary; 4-Brett Woodvine, Bradley Buhro; 9-Leader Nancy Pelosi; 13-Sanofi Pasteur; 15,16-arribalasqueluchan; 19-Ari Moore; 20-Lena Arvola; 23-rickz. Free-Widescreen-Wallpaper: 4. Wikimedia: 5-Gilbert Stuart; 17-Sage Ross; 24-Simon Sanett. Fotopedia: 10. Newscom: 11, 25. piqs.de: 12. Pragya Kakani: 14, 18, 21, 26, 28. Agência Brasil: 27. Henry Shull: 30. American Enterprise Institute: 33. State of Florida Government: 38. Courtesy of Swanee Hunt: 39.

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Harvard Political Review A Nonpartisan Journal of Politics Established 1969—Vol. XXXVIII, No. 1

EDITORIAL BOARD Editor-in-Chief Max Novendstern PUBLISHER katherine lee Managing Editor christopher danello ONLINE EDITOR jeffrey kalmus Covers Editor neil patel United States editor alexander chen World Editor james l. wu Books & Arts Editor paul mathis Interviews Editor simon thompson Business Manager HENRY SHULL ass’t business manager andrew bocskocsky Circulation Manager thomas gaudett DESIGN EDITOR andrew j. seo Graphics Editor pragya kakani Staff Director joshua lipson WEBMASTER eric hendey campus blog editor caroline cox u.s. blog editor paul schied world blog editor beatrice walton books & Arts Blog editor raÚl quintana humor editor jeremy patashnik

senior writers daniel barbero, Alec Barrett, kenzie bok, CARLOS BORTONI, Anthony Dedousis, Victoria Hargis, sarah j. johnson

STAFF Peter Bacon, matt bewley, Elizabeth Bloom, Peter Bozzo, Gabby Bryant, Rachel Burns, ioana calcev, Richard Coffin, Catherine Cook, tyler cusick, Ivana Djak, Ray Duer, Sarah Esty, Farha Faisal, Medhya Gargeya, Aditi Ghai, Skyler Hicks, Kaiyang Huang, Candice Kountz, Michael Lai, Taylor Lane, Elise Liu, Eli Martin, Peyton Miller, Laura Mirviss, Arjun Mody, Caitria O’Neill, Brad Paraszczak, Samir Patel, Mason Pesek, John prince, Ashley Robinson, Ashin Shah, Alastair Su, Allison Swidriski, Lucas Swisher, Rajiv Tarigopula, Nicholas Tatsis, Gabriel Unger, Pooja Venkatraman, Daniel Wallach, Tiffany Wen, Alethia Williams, Danny Wilson

ADVISORY BOARD Jonathan Alter Richard L. Berke Carl Cannon E.J. Dionne, Jr. Walter Isaacson Whitney Patton Maralee SChwartz

Take a look at the magazine in your hands. Ask yourself: Why bother?

What can “student journalists,” those youthful folks who put this magazine together, hope to offer our world?

I suspect that most campus publications, emulating their counterparts in the world of professional publishing, would prefer that this question never be asked. They might prefer that the “student” part of the phrase “student journalism” be surreptitiously removed, ignored like an open secret we’re all too polite to acknowledge.

We totally disagree. For more than forty years, the Harvard Political Review has explored the boundaries of what is possible in the area of serious student political journalism. In our recent large-scale shift of content production online (to our fabulous new website, HPROnline.org), we’ve brought on a bevy of new columnists, political cartoonists, photographers, and even fiction writers. Our record has proven-if there ever was a doubt-that a student-run forum for serious discussion of the world’s most important political issues can yield writing and thinking that’s truly worth engaging with. The issue in your hands is no exception.

Some have called the early 21st century “The Age of Facebook.” (On behalf of 20-somethings everywhere, you’re welcome!) The tools for creating and disseminating culture have been distributed to nearly every person on the planet. The existential questions that we face as a student publication are thus the same questions that all producers

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everywhere must face: why should our voices, in a world that’s already overfull with people talking, be listened to at all?

I’ll admit: the Harvard Political Review won’t give you any breaking news, and if you’re looking for insider political gossip, or the most gorgeous prose, or the best Freudian psychoanalysis of Charlie Sheen’s phenomenal id, you might consider any of the other dozen magazines on the rack.

What the Harvard Political Review can do, I believe—and what it does do, again and again, better than almost any other publication around—is speak to the conditions of our world from our unique position as students within it. What we offer our readers is our honest attempt at grappling with the biggest issues of our time. We’re not alone in doing this, of course.

Our writers are representative of an entire generation of coolly rational and sometimes astoundingly hopeful young Americans who are attempting to answer the same big questions.

War, depression, higher education, gender equality-this magazine is a record of our hopes. It’s a testament to what we, the future inheritors of the federal debt, the future leaders of this country with all its problems and promise, believe matters most.

So make no mistake: we wear the term “student journalism” as a badge of pride.

Max Novendstern Editor-in-Chief

THE FUNNY PAGES

Candidate Haley Barbour

Newt Gingrich

Mike Huckabee

Sarah Palin

Mitt Romney

John Thune

Donald Trump

Greatest Asset

Greatest Weakness

The Mississippi The Mississippi governor is incredibly governor is a little too popular in the South. popular in the South.

Has extensive legisla- Spent most of those tive experience, havfour years accruing ing served as Speaker political enemies, just of the House for four for the fun of it. years.

His Natalie Portman remarks will cost him Plays in a rock band the Harvard undercalled Capitol Offense. graduates, a demographic that is crucial for GOP candidates. can’t vote She has a lock on the inCanadians American presidenHockey-mom vote. tial elections.

Plays to the center: Served a successHe passed Obamacare ful term as governor in Massachusetts beof one of the bluest fore it was uncool. states in the Union.

All four presidents on Crazy Horse is supMt. Rushmore have porting Romney. endorsed him.

Has been explicitly Has plenty experience prohibited from plugwith both hiring and ging The Apprentice firing. during GOP debates.

Potential Campaign Slogan Kindness, Konservative, Karisma Let’s Turn the Country Into a Newt

I Like Mike

Yes We Canada When the Economy’s in Free Fall, You Need a Mitt to Catch It The Thuner, the Better!

This November, Play the Trump Card

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THE FUNNY PAGES

Opening Day!

Baseball is America’s pastime, and Opening Day 2011 is just around the corner. Though Major League Baseball, of course, gets the most press coverage of any baseball league in the world, politicians like to get in on the action, too. Every spring and summer policymakers, lobbyists, justices, interns, and bureaucrats from all corners of the Beltway play in a league of their own. Here are some of the most significant moments of the last decade from the world of political baseball.

October 19, 2004: Secretary of State Colin Powell pitches on a badly injured ankle and gives up only four hits in seven innings, earning the State Department a pivotal win in Game 6 of their playoff series against the Federal Reserve. Powell’s injury was so severe that his right sock was soaked in blood by the game’s end. Shortly after the State Department’s championship season, Powell publicly endorsed George W. Bush in his reelection campaign, a decision he says he later regretted.

March 18, 2005: An obviously nervous Senator Joe Biden testifies before a special congressional hearing regarding his alleged use of performanceenhancing substances during his record-breaking, 70-home run season for the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1998. Biden repeatedly says he is “not here to talk about the past,” despite his many lengthy anecdotes about growing up in Scranton.

May 2, 2008: Rep. John Boehner breaks baseball’s other color barrier when the orange Republican pinch hits for Ohio’s congressional delegation in a game against the Department of Defense. After hitting a routine fly ball to center field in his first at bat, the rarely emotional Boehner tips his hat to the crowd and breaks down into tears. He later called it the “proudest moment of his life.”

June 2, 2010: Umpire Antonin Scalia blows an easy call at first base, thus breaking up Ken Salazar’s perfect game with two outs in the ninth inning.

The Department of the Interior holds on to beat the Federal Bureau of Investigation, 3-0, and Scalia and Salazar share a touching, reconciliatory moment at home plate the following day. Salazar later said of the incident, “I’m used to Scalia making bad decisions from the bench … but he was on the field for this one!”

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COVERS

S

“Remember the ladies!” neil patel

In a letter to her husband on March 31, 1776, Abigail Adams urged John Adams to “remember the ladies” as he and his fellow founding fathers created a new nation.

Unfortunately for Mrs. Adams, her pleas were dismissed by Mr. Adams, who accused her of being “saucy.” It would take the new nation 144 years to grant women the right to vote.

Even though Abigail Adams managed the family’s farm and finances while John Adams was away practicing politics, she struggled for a public role in a patriarchal society that emphasized the domestic nature of its female citizens. Women’s rights have improved since 1776, but there are still important limits to the agency of women, both in the United States and abroad. Women remain underrepresented in mathematics and the sciences (p. 13) and hold relatively few elected seats of power (p. 9). Access to reproductive health services remains a political minefield (HPROnline.org), and political instability has allowed sex traffickers to profit from the exploitation of women and girls (HPROnline.org). Millions of girls throughout the world lack basic education because their families find more economic returns in educating their sons instead (HPROnline. org). These challenges exist as the feminist movement struggles to find its voice (HPROnline.org).

The solutions to the inequality and oppression that women face are not always clear. What is apparent, however, is the need for women

to become active participants in the fight for their own rights.

Women’s groups led the fight for improved access to reproductive health services in Mexico (p. 15). Women in Egypt stood united with their male counterparts to oust the decades-old regime of Hosni Mubarak (p. 6).

The four women that have graced the bench of the Supreme Court have inspired many girls to study the law (HPR Online.org).

Corporations are beginning to realize the economic potential that women in developing countries enjoy (HPROnline. org). Several countries have adopted quotas to improve the representation of women in legislatures (HPROnline. org) and on corporate boards (p. 11).

These examples of the progress that women have made demonstrate the need for women to be advocates of their own cause. Society’s perceptions of what jobs a woman can hold, of the degree to which a woman should be involved with politics, and the extent to which a girl can get an education and change her community are all mutable.

These created paradigms can only be altered if and when women and girls are willing to stand up for what

is important to them and to fight against any outside force which limits their agency. Abigail Adams warned her husband “that arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken; and, notwithstanding all your wise laws and maxims, we have it in our power, not only to free ourselves, but to subdue our masters, and without violence, throw both your natural and legal authority at our feet.”

Neil Patel ‘13 is the Covers Editor

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BIRTHING A REVOLUTION

Female participation gave the Egyptian revolution momentum Caitria O’Neill Between January 25 and February 11, millions of Egyptian women from every social class, profession, and creed took part in mass demonstrations against the Egyptian government. The Egyptian Revolution stands near unprecedented in the nation’s history, but the female role within the struggle even more so. Beyond participating, women took an active role in organizing, demonstrating, and supporting the successful revolutionary movement. Pictures of the rallies throughout Egypt show men and women standing shoulder-to-shoulder, calling for the departure of President

an interim council deliberates on constitutional amendments, the women of Egypt return home from the protests and consider what will come next. The regime change at hand presents a unique opportunity to fight for and improve women’s status and political representation.

If their role in the uprisings offers any suggestion the women of Egypt appear ready to seize their moment.

Hosni Mubarak and the arrival of democratic reform. Eighteen days of continuous demonstration for democracy and freedom proved enough to bring down the longtime authoritarian president. While

to the HPR that women of different social classes have participated in numerous protests since the last century. Political activism has helped Egyptian women win basic freedoms, such as the right to unilateral

Old Fight, New Fighters Egyptian women have a rich history of political activism and participation. Beth Baron, editor of the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, explained

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divorce, the right of suffrage, quota-protected representation in parliament, and the criminalization of female genital mutilation.

The protests in 2011 nonetheless represent a new depth, breadth, and blending of participation.

Previous protests generally involved homogeneous age groups or classes.

As Deena Kahlil, Cairo resident and participant in the protests told the HPR, “Women’s activism in Egypt is nothing new. What wasn’t expected, though, was that you didn’t see the same faces that you see at every protest. Instead, you saw a much wider spectrum of women. You saw young girls and mothers of all socioeconomic classes.”

Another important difference in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution was the equal treatment of female protesters by their male counterparts. With no law under the old regime prohibiting gropings, catcalls, or other advances, sexual harassment has run rampant in Egypt. A 2008 survey by the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights in Cairo found that 83 percent of Egyptian women and 98 percent of foreign women in Egypt had been harassed at some point. Yousra Aboustait, a young Cairo woman, spoke about the difference in treatment in Tahrir Square: “[Women] feel like they can be around and involved without any fear of being bothered or abused. It is like they have finally been given the way to be an equal, effective, and important part of society with no constraints or barriers.”

The new respect extended to both living and dead. One of the casualties of the first days of protest in Cairo’s Tahrir Square was a young woman named Sally Zahran.

Said Aboustait, “You could find her picture in different areas of Tahrir Square, signed by different people: ‘Sally, the martyr that taught men how men should be.’ I guess this statement summarizes it all.” As such, women not only participated in the protest, but also became a source of inspiration. One such woman was Asmaa Mahfouz, a 26-year-old woman whose passionate YouTube video encouraging others to join the demonstrations was a catalyst for many Egyptians tired of a corrupt regime.

Finding Their Voice Egyptian women are by no means obvious revolutionaries. Though some of the women who helped organize and lead the movement had been politically involved for years, most were just beginning to test the waters of activism. As Kahlil told the HPR, “A large majority of the millions of Egyptians that turned out are not political activists. Many of them are not even into politics at all.

They showed up out of love for their country and a desire for freedom.”

Roger Owen, professor of Middle East history at Harvard, said that the feeling of empowerment following the success of the revolution would likely contribute to a change in women’s political representation in Egypt. This is certainly true for Cairo resident Daria Salama, who spoke about her decision to become involved in the demonstrations, saying, “I have to stress that I was never involved in any political or equal rights movement prior to these events. This will definitely change, as I myself have changed as a result.

I am just an Egyptian who was enjoying a stable and average life.

But like millions of others, I wanted to see life change for the better.”

Reading through Daria’s Facebook page is akin to watching a political coming of age. Her posts were largely quotes from famous poets and authors, until January 25:

the “Day of Revolt.” Then she began urging friends and neighbors to attend the protests, posting political articles, videos, and statements and sharing her own opinion. In a one post, Daria wrote, “Two weeks ago, I only had the right to ask questions about my own salary and that of my husband. Now I have the right to ask about the president’s and that of the ministers. How’s that for change?”

Impetus for Change?

The legacy of the awakening of political voices will be seen in the months and years to come. Women in Egypt gained the right to vote 34 years after the first Egyptian revolution. In Iran, however, despite their part in bringing down the Shah, after the revolution in 1979, women faced massive steps backwards for equal rights. Likewise, it is important to note that suffrage, while important, is not the only right worth fighting for. Women in Egypt constitute roughly 22 percent of the workforce and 29 percent of private sector jobs, according to a 2007 government report. Women make up a large percentage of university students and work as doctors,

judges, and professors. Rather than fearing Islamism or writing off differences as purely cultural or purely political, the West may find that seeking concrete actions can empower women economically and politically. Encouragement of women in business and higher education, reform of family law, and creation of laws against sexual harassment are all realizable steps along this path.

Rather than asking their husbands politely to “remember the ladies,” as Abigail Adams did after the American Revolution, Egyptian women can take steps to ensure they are not forgotten. They have experienced both uncertainty and success in demonstrating for what they believe in. They have organized, blogged, tweeted, and posted videos. More important, they have been treated as equals during a defining moment in Egyptian history. Egyptian women are full partners in society, and the revolution has awoken the political voices that can secure more equal conditions in the period of transition to come.

Caitria O’Neill ‘11 is a Staff Writer

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a balancing act

Creating gender equality in American politics will not be easy

caroline cox Although Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann shone bright in the political spotlight during the fall campaign, the American midterm elections proved a generally disappointing cycle for female candidates.

Despite promises of a new “year of the woman,” many of the most prominent females running lost their races.

Perhaps more troubling, the results were no deviation from a longstanding trend. According to the Center for American Women and Politics, women hold only 17 percent of the seats in Congress. On the global scale, the United States ranks 90th in the world in terms of the number of women in the main legislative body. These statistics are even more striking given that more women than men voted in the 2008 election, yet 50 percent fewer women than men choose to run for elected office.

Lack of gender equality in politics is a systemic problem, and it is one that the United States alone may not solve.

Nonetheless, greater public attention and concern to the perception and value of women involved in politics can perhaps increase female participation.

Walking the Political Tightrope While women face many barriers to attaining political power, one of the most critical factors remains the cultural norms of American society, which include the perceived notions of what makes an effective leader.

As several observers have described, women navigating politics must walk a tightrope of diverse challenges. In particular, female politicos must find a careful balance between maintaining their femininity and proving themselves capable in a male-dominated profession.

Professor Barbara Kellerman of the Harvard Kennedy School suggests that women bear the challenge of pairing their femininity with the expected masculine toughness required of a politician. “Generally, positions of leadership are not on the extremely feminine side.

You see power suits for a reason,” said Kellerman. “Most women across sectors are not extremely or overtly sexy, but they aren’t supposed terribly homely. How they look, how they speak, how they sound is generally considered to be much more important than [for] men.”

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This undue amount of attention paid to how females present themselves illustrates the barriers present for women seeking any form of leadership. Cultural norms within the United States typically dictate that women are more empathetic, humble, and focused on communal issues than the aggressive male prototype. “Women and the Labyrinth of Leadership,” a paper by Alice H. Eagly and Linda L. Carli, suggests that it is almost impossible for women to succeed in the complicated game of leadership, given all their handicaps. The authors assert that Americans for the most part “like men with more of the traits that connote leadership,” and women who attempt to emulate their male counterparts often face negative reactions. The path to leadership, therefore, offers few clear advantages and many difficulties for women.

A Problem at All Levels The underrepresentation of women in American politics may nonetheless harm the body politic, particularly with regard to the political debates that directly impact women. Research suggests that women elected to political office devote more time to issues that are important to women voters, including domestic violence, sexual harassment, child care, and reproductive rights, regardless of party affiliation. With so few women in elected positions, then, legislators are more likely to put these major issues aside or ignore their female constituents’ perspectives.

Complicating the problem, the lack of political gender equality is not limited to the national level.

Within Massachusetts, the representation of women in elected office dropped from 28 to 23 percent in the last election cycle, indicating that moderate gains for women can be just as easily erased. In fact, women running as incumbents are some of the most vulnerable candidates at the municipal level and often face greater difficulties than their male counterparts in raising the funds necessary to wage a successful campaign.

Yet there are those who argue that the gender disparity at all political levels simply reflects women’s disinterest in running for political office. In an interview

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The Facebook Effect Despite these persistent challenges to women interested in political careers, social media may offer cause for some hope. Politicians such as Sarah Palin, Claire McCaskill, and Michele Bachmann have found enormous amount success in connecting with voters through websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. These social networking sites reach a disproportionate number of women worldwide, a valuable property, given that women voters are the greatest supporters of women candidates.

Of course, there are other reasons that social network sites provide such immense support to female candidates. Marie Danziger, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, argues that social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter “will make it easier for women since they don’t always have to appear in public and worry about what they are wearing. They can develop a voice: an aggressive, colorful, and charismatic online voice.” The ability to reach voters without facing direct media scrutiny is an obvious advantage of using social media for women.

As such, political insiders following this link between women in politics and social media assert that the combination may yet prove a powerful one. Alexis Gelber, a Goldsmith Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, is currently researching the link between

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with the HPR, Priti Rao, executive director of the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus, conceded that this might be part of the problem. “Women in particular tend to be less likely to be self-promoters,” explained Rao. “In order to get a woman to agree and to run for office she has to be asked seven times by seven different people.” This reluctance stems not just from a general distaste for politics, but also from the difficulties that women must face when entering the political theater. Nonetheless, Rao contends that other difficulties, particularly the significant need to balance roles, remains the preeminent challenge for female candidates.

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women politicians and social media.

In some preliminary notes, she focuses on how prominent female politicians have gained recognition and votes through their use of this new technology. Michele Bachmann, for example, managed to revitalize her political career and attain a prominent role within the Tea Party due to heavy social networking.

Looking to the Future Advocates of women in political power are likely to look more closely at the possibilities of social media, but the path to leadership for women is still rocky. While organizations such the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus can offer potential candidates support in the election process, there is little hope of gender

equity until there is a major shift in the American perception of women and their value in the political process. Until voters care more about the way their politicians vote than how they dress, then, women politicians will continue to face handicaps.

Caroline Cox ‘14 is the Campus Blog Editor

Hitting the Glass Ceiling In the corporate world, are quotas the answer?

Elvira A. M. Sihvola A girl born in Norway today has a free and fair path ahead of her, at least in comparison to the majority of her foreign sisters. Her educational prospects are stellar, with women comprising over 65 percent of the students in tertiary education in the country. Like other Nordic nations, Norway routinely places in the top five for gender equity, according to the Global Gender Gap Report.

Nonetheless, in 2004, the Norwegian government deemed it necessary to pass legislation requiring a 40 percent female representation on corporate boards.

The legislation might seem to enjoy some rational basis. Since the passage of the law, women now take up over 34 percent of Norwegian corporate board positions, with the number growing fast. By contrast, in America only about three percent of the corporate officers and less than 16 percent of the board members of Fortune 500 companies are female.

Norway’s quotas have eased women’s access to positions of power and substantially increased the presence of women in both boardrooms and corporate officer positions.

The need for legislated corporate gender quotas even in progressive Norway would seem to prove that the professional world still remains

characterized by persistent gender inequality. Though support for gender quotas in the corporate world has grown, however, it is questionable whether they are an effective or justified antidote to corporate gender inequality.

QUOTAS AS SOLUTION In many developed countries, women obtain higher education in numbers equal to or greater than men. The larger number of women in higher education, however, has not translated into equal Justice Comissioner Viviane Reding says the representation in leading E.U. may consider corporate quotas for women corporate positions. Laura of women on boards, Liswood argues, Liswood, secretary general of the quotas provide an opportunity Council of Women World Leaders, for women to demonstrate their described the situation to the HPR competence and, in the long run, as an “upgrade problem.” Women’s potentially have a positive impact on careers advance more slowly improving attitudes towards female due to obstacles of “unconscious professionals. perceptions and stereotypes about Corporate quotas also have the leaders” and the “assumption potential to increase the visibility of of incompetence.” Unlike men, women in business. In an interview the dominant group for whom with the HPR, Christl Kvam, a competence is assumed, women director of the Confederation of have to disprove an assumption of Norwegian Enterprise, noted the their inability in the workplace. By gender segregation present in the requiring increasing representation Norwegian workforce. According

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to Kvam, “two-thirds of men with higher education work in the private sector and two-thirds of women with higher education work in the public sector.” Kvam suggests that increasing the visibility and number of female role models in positions of power could encourage young women to pursue similar career paths, steering more females into the business sector.

Some skeptics note that the implementation of quotas undermines the credibility of the females on corporate boards by reducing them to “quota fillers.”

A key argument for increasing the presence of women in organizational and executive positions is the concept of the diversity premium, namely the understanding that diverse teams perform better than homogenous ones. Quotas have also forced companies to extend the pool of possible board candidates to include previously neglected women and have also increased the overall quality of candidates. As Kvam asserts, the implementation of the quotas has induced Norwegian board election committees to begin “specifying what kind of qualifications are needed for board positions more systematically.”

THE TROUBLE WITH SET-ASIDES The debate about corporate gender quotas has expanded beyond Norway. Viviane Reding, the European Commissioner for

Justice, recently suggested that the European Union could consider instating union-wide corporate quotas in 2011. In the United States, however, the idea of quotas is far less welcome. Liswood explains, “The United States has shown a remarkable resistance to quotas, believing it unlevels the playing field.” She asserts that there is a widespread reluctance to admit that the playing field was never fair to begin with, since those with successful careers are often subtly advantaged, but unwilling to admit it. A strong argument against gender quotas, particularly in the United States, thus relies on the notion that governments should not interfere in corporate decisions.

For some, corporate quotas also represent a contradiction in terms.

While the corporate quota attempts to reduce the importance of gender in the advancement of an individual’s career, the quota advantages women precisely because of their gender. In the United States, there persists a greater number of men considered to be qualified for management positions because of the overrepresentation of men in most MBA programs. If corporations seek the most qualified candidates, quotas may force corporations to select women that may be less credentialed relative to men and disadvantage more qualified men in the process.

FUTURE PROGRESS While there is still a need to improve the status of women, the professional prospects for women have improved in the past few decades. Still, according to

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Iris Bonhet, professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, “the fraction of women in senior management, tenured professors in academia, women parliamentarians, etc., seems to be stagnating around or slightly below 20 percent.” Nevertheless, Bonhet believes that we can expect progress in the near future due to five major developments: wider recognition of the economic benefits of gender equality, employers’ legal and reputational concerns, changes in the values of both young men and women, wider academic and political attention given to the topic, and the successes of gender quotas in Norway and in certain European companies.

Further, it is likely that many of the arguments against quotas will continue to diminish over the coming decades. In 2010, substantially more women than men graduated from college, and the gap between number of men and women enrolled in business schools was smaller than ever before. Should the trend of female equality, or even female overrepresentation, in higher education persist, the dilemma between a qualified man and a less credentialed woman may prove a debate of the past.

Gender equality will require eliminating the obstacles that prevent women from advancing their careers while ensuring that both genders have equal opportunities for professional success. While there are some limitations, corporate gender quotas increase the visibility of women in leadership positions and empower younger girls to overcome the obstacles that their male counterparts may create.

Liswood believes that “there is no glass ceiling, just a thick layer of men.”

Elvira A. M. Sihvola ‘14 is a Contributing Writer

The Academic Gender Gap

Women still lag in math and science pragya kakani Improving the quality of education in mathematics and science has become a serious concern for the United States over the past several decades. A recent study by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) ranked America 21st in science and 24th in mathematics in the world. Moreover, as Stanford University researcher Erik Hanushek notes, “An increase of 25 points (five percent) on the PISA would boost the U.S. GDP by $41 trillion over 20 years.” As such, experts have offered a plethora of school reforms, ranging from vouchers to magnet schools.

While the United States is constantly looking for ways to improve education across the board, however, less attention has been given to the significant gender disparities in math and science.

These divergences if diminished would virtually eliminate the United States’ overall educational gap.

Today, fewer than one-third of all doctoral degrees granted in math, physics, chemistry, engineering, or computer science are granted to women, and less than 10 percent of math-intensive research positions are held by women. Only 16 women have received Nobel Prizes in the natural sciences, and a woman has yet to receive a Fields Medal, colloquially known as the “Nobel Prize in Mathematics.”

The disparity between men and women in mathematics and science, however, is a multi-dimensional problem with few easy solutions.

Because there are few physical barriers to entry for women into

these fields, it is harder to target the causes of the problem. It is more likely that women are being deterred from the natural sciences and mathematics as a result of social and psychological factors rather than over-discrimination. To increase the proportion of women in scientific fields, then, both academia and society would be well served by adjustments in education, as well as reconsiderations of social norms.

score differently on tests, much of the difference can be explained by societal causes, such as young boys being more likely than young girls to play with blocks. Newcombe notes, “We can train and nurture spatialization. Studies show women who are trained can perform as well as their male counterparts.”

Ultimately, a difference in ability between women and men is far from fully explicative.

THE NATURAL FACTOR? Ever since Lawrence Summers suggested that women may lack the ability to succeed at the highest levels of math and science, the issue of natural differences in scientific ability between men and women has received an increased amount of attention. Dr. Nora Newcombe, the chair of the American Psychological Association Task Force on Psychology’s Role in Math and Science Education, told the HPR, “Cognitive abilities [between men and women] don’t differ in many of the ways people think they do.

There are a few differences though, especially in mental rotation.”

Indeed, though women and men

CHOOSING THE CAREER In addition to natural ability, women in the sciences may prove more affected by their own preferences about their careers.

Several studies, including one performed at Vanderbilt University

by Camillia Benbow and David Lubinksi, have suggested that, even when controlling for natural mathematical ability, men are more likely to prefer working with inorganic materials while women are more likely to prefer the life sciences. Though it remains unclear whether these differences are social constructions or more fundamental, Joshua Rosenbloom, a researcher at the University of Kansas, notes that

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“these stereotypes do have a germ of truth.”

However, even women who do have a personal interest in math and science are often deterred from these fields later in their career. There is significant disparity between the percentage of science undergraduate degrees offered to women and the percentage of graduate degrees and career positions offered to women. Newcombe explains, “The sciences are extremely demanding in bench time, and it’s easy to fall by the wayside if one is trying to manage a family.” The desire that some women have to balance work and family life has led some women to other, more flexible careers within the sciences. For example, the number of men and women training in medicine has equalized over the past several decades.

According to Newcombe, “once the training period is complete, medicine is more amenable to part time schedules.”

Finally, worries about inherent prejudice against women in a male-dominated field cannot be ignored.

Inherent biases may be potent in the opportunities they afford women and in their psychological effect. Many studies have confirmed that women, affected by the stereotypes against them, will perform worse on exams if forced to take them with males than with women.

Furthermore, informal networking through socializing with colleagues becomes more difficult for women in environments dominated by men. Nonetheless, it would be wrong to blame these factors as the sole cause of female underrepresentation. Newcombe notes, “The problem of hostility in the workplace was more prevalent a few decades ago and has since waned in importance.”

REVERSING THE TREND While more women are choosing careers in science and technology, there is still a significant gender gap that must be addressed. In addressing the differences between

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men and women in the sciences, one must consider the variety of social, psychological, and political variables involved. Moreover, correcting for these differences requires a diversified approach. It is important to implement educational practices that perhaps target disparities between men and women. According to the National Center for Education Research, these may include “teaching students that academic abilities are expendable and improvable” to prevent girls from being discouraged from math and science and “exposing girls to female role models” in math and science to begin invalidating stereotypes. These forms of encouragement can be coupled with classes focusing on specifically improving students’ spatial abilities. In several studies, these practices have been shown to have impacts on girls’ performance on math and science assessments.

Addressing the gap in women’s achievement in the sciences would require institutional changes extending beyond education and into the professional realm.

Professional institutions can help women manage the work-family balance by implementing flexible career policies to ensure that parents are not at a disadvantage should they decide to take time off for children. This would make it easier for women to pursue tenure tracks at universities and continue advancing in their careers. There may also be a role for the government in providing grants specified for women pursuing the natural sciences. Programs such as the ADVANCE grant from the National Sscience Foundation have already been working to support women in math and science by offering universities over $135 million in funding to increase opportunities for women and to promote equitable policies. While the trend of fewer women in the sciences won’t be reversed overnight, neither is the struggle a lost cause.

Pragya Kakani ‘14 is the Graphics Editor

BIRTH CONTROL IN MEXICO

Female activism brings emergency contraception denisse garcia and angela primbas Shortly after the news that emergency contraception was to be allowed in Mexico’s public health services, a predicted cry of opposition arose from one of the most influential entities in Mexico: the Catholic Church.

As the government and Church battled over the issue, however, women, the group directly affected by the debate, proved to be the deciding voice. Not only did women support the measure, but many had fought for its inclusion, with women’s health organizations conducting reproductive health educational programs years before emergency contraception became a national issue. The expansion of reproductive health education to women in Mexico proves a substantial victory, then, and not least in that it illustrates the rising power of female activists across the globe.

How Women Took Charge By 2003, a large majority of Latin American countries had included emergency contraception in their government’s family planning programs. In 2004, the Mexican Ministry of Health announced the addition of emergency contraception, or “EC,” to reproductive health services as part of a national healthcare reform.

“There was a special priority given to women’s health because we realized that women were at a special disadvantage in obtaining health services,” Julio Frenk, dean of the Harvard School of Public Health and Mexico’s Minister of Health at the time of the reform, explained to the HPR. “Within that, reproductive health was equally important, and within that emergency contraception emerged as one of the areas of vital concerns in family services.”

Well before Frenk’s decision, however, women had been campaigning for EC. Frenk pointed out that “the whole emergency contraception initiative to expand family planning services that were being offered was actually started by folks in general society groups, mostly women’s groups that were demanding that service.” During the previous decade, groups including CDD, GIRE, and Equidad de Género, along with other NGOs, had begun an educational campaign to raise awareness among potential users of EC, the general public, and other stakeholder groups such as doctors and schools. Sandra García, director of the Population Council in Mexico, pointed out that during the late 1990s, the Population Council and other organizations came together to “sponsor a free informational hotline and post-card campaign.” An article in Global Public Health by Raffaela Schiavon and Elizabeth Westley details the effort, noting that “the partners [Mexican Emergency Contraception Consortium] worked with an advertising agency to develop a humorous series of [emergency contraception] postcards, distributed for free through racks in restaurants, bars, gyms, and so on.” This proactive educational campaign by women’s organizations and research facilities provided women a foundation with which to demand the addition of emergency contraception into public health services.

Between Devotion and Reproduction The group that presented a major challenge to expanding emergency contraception was the Catholic Church. Reproductive health education might have proved a wedge that steered women away from the religious beliefs of their community. The Church asserted the connection between emergency contraception and abortion, but Frenk described a Ministry of Health educational campaign to explain that “even though the church’s position was very respectable, scientific evidence indicated the opposite because this was a method that interfered with conception.” The public effort helped override the influence of the Catholic Church on personal reproductive decisions.

Assisting the effort, many women seemed to frame emergency contraception as an issue of women’s rights rather than a religious issue. Maria Consuelo Mejia, executive director of Mexico’s Catholic Women for the Right to Choose, told the HPR that “more than 90 percent of Catholics, according to a survey we made, think that EC must be provided to women who had an

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of strategies that are useful for different people, like the Internet, paper materials, hotlines, and programs that focus on getting parents to talk to their children.” urthermore, future campaigns might model themselves after emergency contraception’s appeal to a wide audience.

unprotected sexual relationship and to women subject to sexual violence.”

The Women Left Behind Even though the introduction of emergency contraception to national family planning services has expanded access, there remains work ahead. To start, some groups of women, especially adolescent girls, still have an unmet need for contraceptive education. To remedy this problem, Carlos Indacochea, a professor at George Washington University, calls for an “abundance of services and a lot of education, and not only through the form of the educational system.

You really have to go where adolescents are at the margins and communicate with them there. Peer education is very effective.” Kelly Blanchard, president of Ibis Reproductive Health, echoes this view, indicating that significant portions of at-risk women are not in the education system, meaning, “we need a range

The Road Ahead The knowledge fostered by the government, NGOs, and women’s health organizations during the campaign to include emergency contraception in public health services will have a permanent impact on the future of reproductive health services in Mexico. “I think it is irreversible,” commented Frenk. Indacochea offered a similar opinion, arguing that “once women know [about contraception] and know they can have access to it, it is very difficult to deny it to them.” Nonetheless, Indacochea warns that the future of reproductive health services in Mexico are by no means certain, and urges that funding for reproductive health services, currently done by the states, should go back into the hands of the federal government. Both Frenk and Indacochea voiced concerns that conservative state governments may attempt to restrict access to emergency contraception.

Garcia concurred that, though she has faith for the future of reproductive health services, she fears that Mexico may get in a complacent position with the work done so far and shift focus to other national issues.

While the political fights to be fought in the future are unclear, it is certain that access to reproductive health education will continue to shape the way Mexican women utilize and access reproductive health services.

“The knowledge fostered by the government, NGOs, and women’s health organizations during the campaign to include emergency contraception in public health services will have a permanent impact on the future of reproductive health services in Mexico.”

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Denisse Garcia ‘14 is a Contributing Writer Angela Primbas ‘12 is a Contributing Writer

UNITED STATES The Never-ending Dispute

As health care reform heads to the courts, the debate continues Paul SCHIED It isn’t over yet. With legal challenges from 26 states en route to the Supreme Court, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) remains a subject of political, legal, and constitutional dispute. The case may well prove important legal precedent. “This will be the most important Commerce Clause case since cases upholding the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” Harvard Law School professor Richard Fallon told the HPR. Even if the constitutionality of the law is upheld, as seems likely, health care reform will continue to impact the 2012 presidential campaign. Moreover, the legal challenges highlight the transformative nature of PPACA and raise larger questions about the powers of the federal government. Just as President Obama’s signature piece of legislation dominated the President’s first term, then, health care reform will continue to preoccupy America through 2012.

The Case of the Mandate The major points of contention in the health care case center on the Constitution’s Interstate Commerce Clause, which grants Congress the power to regulate commerce between states. The Obama administration argues that PPACA is constitutional because health care is a complex interstate industry, and the provision, along with the Necessary and Proper Clause, grants Congress the power to oversee the industry. Supporters of PPACA point to broad readings of the commerce clause in prior cases, such as Gonzales v. Raich, in which the Supreme Court held that Congress can criminalize the growth and use of homegrown marijuana, even in areas where medical marijuana is legal.

The 26 states suing the government respond that Congress overstepped the limitations of the clause and point to the individual mandate as a distinguishing factor. Opponents of PPACA argue that the mandate regulates inactivity, rather than activity, and is thus unconstitutional. Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli told the HPR that the mandate proves plainly burdensome to individual liberty. “This is

an unprecedented exercise of congressional power,” Cuccinelli contends. “A compulsion to buy a product under the commerce clause has never happened before.

The offending circumstance is not doing something: just sitting on the couch!”

A Constitutional Conundrum Over the past months, opponents of the mandate have gained ground. Ilya Shapiro of the Cato Institute characterizes the government’s taxation argument as “an end run around the Constitution.” Shapiro, who has filed amicus curiae briefs in support of the states, says that the conventional view that the challenges are “political sour grapes” has shifted, and the states’ arguments have come to be perceived as legitimate. For his part, Cuccinelli rejects the government’s fallback argument that the Act is supported by Congress’s powers of taxation, as the Court has held that there is a justiciable difference

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between a tax, which is broadly applied and designed to generate revenue, and a regulatory penalty, like the one the Act imposes on those who fail to purchase health insurance.

Nonetheless, legal action is unlikely to reverse PPACA. Fallon labels the states’ claims that the act invades the reserved powers of the states as “legally frivolous.” More broadly, Fallon acknowledges the unique nature of the individual mandate, but maintains that no prohibition prevents the government from regulating individual activity per se. Nonetheless, Fallon recognizes, the fate of PPACA may yet lie in the hands of one judge: Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Handicapping the Court Speculation on the potential votes of the various justices runs the gamut. “I could imagine it being upheld by as large a margin of eight to one,” said Fallon, “but it could be as close as five to four to uphold, or it could go down five to four [overturning].” The eventual decision is difficult to predict because of the unique nature of the case, and because the backgrounds of the individual justices can prove misleading. Justice Kennedy, as usual, is the most difficult to predict. As such, Shapiro puts the chances of the court upholding the law at even odds, with Kennedy casting the deciding vote, though Fallon is more confident.

Yet the greatest impact of the various PPACA lawsuits may lie in policy. Henry Aaron of the Brookings Institution stresses that the uncertainty created by the legal challenges might retard implementation of the act.

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Aaron points to the fact that the various mandates of the law have proceeded rapidly in some states and slowly in others. This uncertainty and the obvious economic implications of PPACA may explain why Cuccinelli and others want the challenges resolved quickly. In the meantime, however, some state governors have suggested that they have no intention of rushing to implement a law that may be void in a year and have hesitated in setting up insurance exchanges.

Political Fallout and 2012 Yet even if the Court upholds the law by a five-four margin, the stench from the legal battle could linger into November. A five-four decision striking down the law would be damaging, although probably not debilitating, to Obama’s reelection campaign. Regardless, the fact that PPACA was cobbled together on a strictly partisan vote may prove a potent line of attack. As Aaron puts it, “there are a lot of fingerprints on the knife.” The Republicans continue to deride the verbosity of the law and are sure to seek to press the issue which so mobilizes the base. Regardless of how the legal challenges play out, however, Democrats will face close races in many districts in 2012, and a hotly contested ruling may make it difficult to avoid “refighting the battles of the last two years,” as President Obama often states. Republicans meanwhile must battle the conception that they are the party of “no” and convince independent voters that they have an alternative to PPACA. Front-runner Mitt Romney offers a model in his implementation of health care reform as the governor of Massachusetts;

unfortunately, his plan stands virtually identical to that of PPACA. While the Supreme Court will likely resolve the legality of the President’s health care plan through broad reading of the Commerce Clause, the issue of health care reform will play a large role in the 2012 elections and beyond. Whatever the outcome of the court cases, PPACA will continue to stir debates about the proper role of federalism and the powers of the federal

government. In the political arena, then, Republicans will keep pressure on the Democrats both in the courts and in Congress. Whether the GOP can convince the nation that they possess viable alternatives to PPACA may well determine if the party can retake power next year.

Paul Schied ‘13 is the U.S. Blog Editor

The Search for the American Socialist Socialists can’t get elected, but they do influence politics

Sandra Korn In February 2011, tens of thousands of protestors took to the streets of Madison and occupied the Wisconsin State Capitol. In demonstrations modeled after those which took Egypt by storm, activists protested a proposed bill by Governor Scott Walker which would curtail the collective bargaining rights of state and municipal employees. Although the Wisconsin protestors rallied in defense of workers’ rights, however, most would shudder at being labeled “socialist.” Indeed, since the dissolution of the Socialist Party of America in the 1950s, socialist political parties have achieved little success.

In part, electoral failure owes to institutional biases against third parties, a fragmented working class, and a lingering stigma against leftism. Yet, despite the lack of an American socialist movement, socialists continue to work within the existing political system and still shape the progressive movement.

Whither the Socialist Party During the late 19th century, socialism arrived in America. In the early 20th century, political parties like the Socialist Party of America and leaders like Eugene Debs gained recognition and established strong connections with labor unions. Harvard Kennedy School professor Alex Keyssar notes that as late as the 1920s “there was a socialist political presence, and there were a lot of socialists in the labor movement.” However, the Red Scares of the 1920s and 1950s and Cold War tensions contributed to a widespread distrust of socialism. Even today, Americans use the term “socialist” as a pejorative label for union organizers or leftist politicians.

Today there exist fifteen registered political parties with explicit socialist platforms, ranging from the Socialist Party USA to the Democratic Socialists of

America. These parties have achieved little success in political campaigns, which Keyssar attributes to “a number of institutional features of American political life that hinder third parties.” Procedural laws like ballot access rules, single-member districts, and anti-fusion laws discourage leftist parties from running candidates, either for fear of stealing votes from Democrats or by impeding them from getting on the ballot altogether.

Johanna Brenner, professor emerita of sociology at Portland State University, maintains that America has marginalized leftist parties. If the U.S. implemented instant runoff voting, a system in which voters can rank candidates, Brenner states, “Then the Green party...and the alternative left parties would do better.”

There are some success stories in American socialism.

Certain socialists, most notably Bernie Sanders, an independent democratic socialist senator from Vermont, have won political office. Meanwhile, the New York Working Families Party remains a powerful force in state politics, with a platform highlighting socialist issues including wages, public-option health care,

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in voting preferences, stating, “One of the central facts about the working class in the U.S. is that it has always been fragmented.”

Although the working class has tended to vote Democratic through the 20th century, divergences tend to fall around racial or ethnic lines. Likewise, although they may sympathize with socialist parties, lack of knowledge, confidence, or citizenship impedes immigrants’ political participation. Today, Campante says, “the poor have become relatively disenfranchised because more of them are immigrants.” This combination of institutional difficulties and a fragmented electorate makes it nearly impossible for socialist political candidates to win public office.

and affordable housing. Crucially, the WFP utilizes fusion voting to endorse candidates also running on major party ballot lines, which allows voters to express their support for the smaller party’s platform without “throwing away” their votes.

Defining the Electorate Beyond the political system, however, socialist parties face an unenthusiastic constituency.

Although the effects of increasing income inequality would seem to encourage stronger support for socialist parties, such has not been the case. Harvard Kennedy School professor Felipe Campante told the HPR, “Poor people vote Democratic, that’s a fact. But it’s not clear that inequality leads to greater redistribution in practice.” As Campante argues, the influence of money in the political system often means that greater inequality has no net effect on wealth redistribution.

Further, changing demographics of the American poor have led to less socialist representation. Keyssar believes that race remains a factor

“For the good of the working class!”

Since socialists retain very little political representation, activists seek other ways to organize for workers’ rights. Leslie Cagan, the former national coordinator of United for Peace and Justice, says no true “socialist movement” exists in America today. However, Cagan asserts that there are still organizations and, more importantly, many individuals who are socialist activists. Brenner agrees, explaining, “There are a number of groups...that socialists look to for interesting ideas or work with. But is it a movement?

Not at all.” According to Cagan, the lack of organization and power stems from “a very long history of anti-socialist, anti-communist, anti-left of any sort, campaign.”

She contends, “Powerful sectors of American life have waged very strong anti-left-wing campaigns, not just rhetorical campaigns.”

Nonetheless, socialists advance their cause by bringing their worldviews into other progressive campaigns. Cagan explains that socialists “are often the backbone of everything from…social justice at

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home… to the struggle for health care.” Indeed, building coalitions between leftist groups may be the only hope for socialists to accomplish political change. Joshua Koritz, a member of the Boston Socialist Alternative, does just that.

Koritz is part of Reform HUCTW, a radical branch of Harvard’s clerical workers’ union. He says that although the socialist alternative has the ultimate goal of establishing a worker-controlled government, the socialist movement itself is of secondary importance. Koritz states, “The primary concern is the good of the working class. Our goal is to be part of that. We’re seeing it in Wisconsin. We’re seeing it in budget protests.” The socialist alternative is small, then, but it works with other groups to gain influence beyond its numbers.

Looking Forward The future of American socialism could be in political parties, the work of individual activists, union mobilization, or protests like those that shook the Egyptian political structure. Cagan, however, does not foresee major changes in the near future. She comments, “Socialists that are grounded in reality understand that we are in a contract defined and shaped by the right wing… When and how do we begin to move beyond that? I don’t know the answer to that.”

Regardless, Brenner thinks that America will experience a true paradigm shift in the coming years.

“People are going to be pushed to the wall,” she says. “The left needs to find better ways to unite our struggles and have more of a presence.” Ultimately, their numbers may not constitute a movement, but while they organize, American socialists are determined to advocate for their beliefs through political organization and grassroots operations.

Sandra Korn ‘14 is a Contributing Writer

The Politics of Inequality Is income inequality self-reinforcing? beatrice walton During the late 1920s, as the American stock market was growing rapidly, prospects for economic growth could hardly have seemed brighter. President Hoover remarked in August 1928 that “in America [we] are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poorhouse is vanishing from among us.” Hoover and his contemporaries were ultimately mistaken, however.

Today, many historians fault the stratification of wealth during the 1920s for the depth and duration of the subsequent crash.

According to the Institute for Policy Studies, in 1928 the top 0.01 percent of U.S. families averaged 892 times more income than families in the bottom 90 percent. Yet, striking as that may seem, by 2006 the U.S. had already long surpassed the level of income inequality in 1928. While changes in tax policies have often been blamed for the steady rise in income inequality over the past three decades, public opinion of

inequality and the feedback cycles generated by political ideology are of greater significance than previously believed.

THE PIVOTAL YEARS While often blamed on current economic difficulties, income inequality was on the rise in America well before the current recession began. Indeed, the divergence between rich and poor has increased substantially since the 1970s. “When you graph it, 1970-1973 marks the low point in income [inequality],” says William Beach, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis. “There’s been a huge debate among professional economists to try to explain this phenomenon.” Many scholars label the era from the end of the Second World War to the 1970s as the “Great Compression,” a time when the wage gap narrowed. Nonetheless, economists continue to debate the extent to which the era represents any repeatable outcome.

Whatever the causes of the postwar compression, however, facts show that income inequality has steadily risen since. A 2007 MIT study pointed out that between 1980 and 2005 more than 80 percent of the total income increase in America was attributed to the top one percent of Americans. Similarly, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, the percentage of U.S. total income that went to the top one percent of American households in 1976 was 8.9 percent. By 2007, that same figure had ballooned to 23.5 percent. As a consequence, the Gini coefficient for the United States, an economic index used to calculate income inequality, stands at about 47, among the highest in the developed world.

POLITICAL FORCE BEHIND INEQUALITY Despite its economic implications, inequality may spring from political choices. According to Nathan Kelly, professor of political science at the University of Tennessee, inequality may owe in part to a political feedback cycle driven by public opinion. Kelly argues, “When public opinion shifts in a liberal direction, we’re more likely to see Democrats elected to office and we’re more likely to see

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liberal policies enacted. When [this happens], we’re more likely to see declines in inequality,” due to liberal support for wealth redistribution through social policies. However, when inequality rises, public support for socially driven policies does not increase. In fact, Kelly’s research shows just the opposite: “We found… that as inequality increases, the public actually becomes more conservative. It’s actually the case that the rich, those with middle incomes, and the poor all become more conservative at the same time.” Kelly describes his process as a self-reinforcing linkage between inequality and public opinion.

Similarly, back in 2007, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman noted the paradox that has existed throughout the Great Divergence, the name given to the period since the early 1970s when inequality has consistently risen.

“You might have expected rising inequality to produce a populist backlash,” Krugman wrote on his blog. “Instead, however, the era of rising inequality has also been the era of ‘movement conservatism.’” Krugman faults American fiscal policy for exacerbating wage inequality and argues for measures to arrest the decline.

FIGHTING INEQUALITY TODAY In particular, Krugman argues for an expansion of government welfare programs, asserting that expanding the social safety net reduces inequality. Nonetheless, as concerns about America’s expanding deficit take a more prominent role in political debates, it is likely that few sectors of the federal budget will escape untouched. For low-income families who rely on government assistance, there remains real worry about how political decisions may worsen their situation if entitlement programs are cut.

“Everyone acknowledges that we need to do something about our long-term deficits,” commented Melissa Boteach, manager of the Center for American Progress Action Fund’s Campaign to Cut Poverty in Half in Ten Years. “One of our biggest concerns,” Boteach continued, “is that this isn’t done on the backs of low-income families and in a way that exacerbates poverty and inequality.” According to Boteach, Congress is trying “to accomplish large amounts of deficit reductions in a very small amount of the budget, domestic

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discretionary spending, which is about one-eighth of our total federal spending.” This inflicts “enormous pain for [relatively] little deficit reduction and really harms lowincome families in the process.”

However, as American University professor Robert Lerman suggests, legislators may need to focus their attention on reigning in the costs of the largest entitlement programs in order to save the smallest. He added, “The proposed budget cuts…to programs like the Home Energy Assistance Program illustrate the U.S.’s failure to deal with Medicare and Social Security, which are crowding out lots of other programs—a big portion of [which] assist low income people.” Ultimately, a period of reduced social spending may well exacerbate current increase of income inequality.

WHAT’S NEXT? While the debate over the causes of increased income inequality will continue, a major aspect of the discussion, the significance of public opinion, remains more concrete.

The future of income disparity will largely depend on how Americans view that inequity and whether they view society as fundamentally fair. The failure of the presidential campaign of John Edwards in 2008, which focused extensively on issues of poverty and inequality, may illustrate that the American public proves entirely unreceptive to such discussion.

However, frequent media coverage of the lavish expenditures of the very top tier of Americans may suggest otherwise. Though stories concerning the working poor are not common, the fact that Americans stay tuned-in to the relative contrasts between super-rich and average families shows that Americans are more aware of inequality than ever before. Indeed, Kelly concludes, “The discussion about the super rich getting so far ahead actually suggests that [we’re] concerned more than ever about inequality.

The question is, though, What are we willing to do about it?” The federal budget and future political battles that will be fought over it might just provide those answers.

Beatrice Walton ‘14 is the World Blog Editor

WORLD LOSING CONTROL

International energy disputes and geopolitics shape Central Asia’s future ARJUN MODY Throughout the 19th century, the United Kingdom and Russia engaged in the so-called “Great Game,” a strategic rivalry for influence over Central Asia. Today, the region’s location at the crossroads of two emerging superpowers, Russia and China, along with vast natural gas reserves, places the land west of the Caspian at the center of international competition once more. This round, though less visible, is no less significant. Indeed, the conflict’s outcome hinges upon some of the world’s defining geopolitical trends: Russia’s newfound boldness in its international relations and the rise of China. At stake is the development of Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan, countries whose dependence on Russia has largely resulted in authoritarian regimes and stagnant economies. As such, these Central Asian nations may find these geopolitical trends will affect their economic and political futures more than their own actions will.

Central Asia: Russia’s Backyard Though much has changed since the original Great Game, Russia continues to hold a dominant

position in Central Asia. The nation enjoys a near monopoly over the flow of Central Asian energy and controls the pipelines directed towards Europe. According to Radu Dudau, a visiting Black Sea Security Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, “the primary dimension of the game is the export of Caspian resources westwards to Europe.” As Dudau explained, Europe remains the destination for almost all the natural gas produced by Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan because nations in the E.U. are willing to pay the highest prices. As the link between Asia and Europe, Russia has enjoyed the position of the single buyer, until very recently, of Central Asian gas, and has used its monopsony to its advantage.

Russia’s influence also bases on key geographic and historical advantages. Not only does the nation control the territory between Central Asia to Europe, but its hegemony in the Caspian Sea, a vestige of the Cold War era, allows it to prevent the construction of a trans-Caspian pipeline from Turkmenistan to Azerbaijan, which would bypass Russian territory.

According to a report by Martha Olcott, senior associate at the Carnegie

Endowment, the additional threat of a “Russian boycott of Turkmen gas, should that government sign on to shipping gas in an undersea pipeline,” remains a strong barrier to the extension of the Nabucco pipeline across the Caspian Sea, which would make Turkmenistan a principal European gas supplier.

With Russia dominating the pipelines, Central Asian nations largely remain in the orbit of their former rulers.

Russia and China: Cautious Partners In this climate, China, with its enormous appetite for cheap fossil fuels, has emerged as a transformative force. In particular, the completion of the recent Turkmenistan-China pipeline through Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan represents a major breakthrough for Central Asian countries in their push for independence from Russia.

While Russia and China may appear natural competitors, however, a showdown over natural resources seems unlikely. According to Edward Chow, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “Russia is primarily concerned with gas in Central Asia competing

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with Russian gas in Europe” and even played a role in constructing a recent pipeline which ships Turkmen gas to China. Because Russia would rather see Central Asian gas being sold at lower rates to China than competing with more highly priced Russian gas in Europe, both nations appear satisfied with present arrangements.

In the long run, however, China represents Russia’s most relevant strategic adversary. Just as Beijing’s sphere of influence now encompasses oil suppliers in Africa, China could very well begin to exercise political and economic muscle in Central Asia. Dudau cited northward population pressure in Siberia as just one of the many long-term issues that will inevitably complicate the relationship between these two Eastern powers. The time frame for these issues remains significant, but such is no guarantee of stability down the road. As Johannes Linn of the Brookings Institution noted in an interview, “For the foreseeable future, the base load of existing infrastructure…goes through Russia, but the margin will go increasingly to China.”

U.S. Influence?

While half a world away, China’s ascendance and Russia’s resurgence affects the United States. As Harvard Kennedy School professor Meghan O’Sullivan told the HPR, the U.S. is particularly “interested in seeing that Europe’s dependence on Russia is diminished so that Russia is not in a position to use its energy resources to influence the politics of Europe or European nations.”

Crises such as the 2009 Russia-Ukraine dispute over natural gas prices, which lasted over two weeks, have given both Europe and the United States reason to pause.

Further, as a large natural gas consumer, the United States benefits from an increase in the global supply of energy.

Nonetheless, Dudau asserts that the United States is beginning to back away from the region as part of its

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new approach to Russian relations. In accordance with Obama’s “reset policy,” Dudau argues that “the current policy of the White House is to accommodate Russia more in its own vicinity,” such as in the former Soviet satellites, in exchange for support for the U.S.’s more important foreign policy objectives in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran. American non-intervention may still come at a significant cost. Without the U.S. to serve as a fair arbiter in the region, it will be difficult for Central Asian nations to break away from their Russian dependence on gas pipelines for revenue.

Authoritarian Capitalism: A Regional Governmental Model If only for geographic reasons, Russia’s ties to the region—economic, political, and military—will likely continue for the foreseeable future. This has political, as well as economic, implications. Russia has long provided military support to friendly authoritarian regimes in the region. Many experts believe that diversification away from Russian pipelines holds the key to both economic and political freedom. “Energy here becomes a means to Central Asian political independence, as it can provide some of the economic security these countries need,” stated O’Sullivan. Yet China and Russia have both demonstrated that market-based economic success and political authoritarianism are not wholly incompatible.

Dudau argues, “there is this sort of authoritarian capitalism that is quite a model in the region that gives [Central Asian leaders] hope that there is not much to be changed.” With the U.S. likely backing out of the region, and Russia and China interested in preserving the status quo, at least politically, it is likely that there will be no force for change in Central Asia. The old Great Game may be over, but the new era looks very much the same.

Arjun Mody ‘14 is a Staff Writer

How Do You Say Kurzarbeit In English?

Germany’s innovative labor scheme has helped it weather the recession

Martin Steinbauer For a nation often referred to as the economic powerhouse of Europe, Germany has dealt with the global economic recession characteristically well. The nation currently boasts unemployment of just 6.6 percent, compared to 9.6 percent in the rest of the E.U. Further, Germany’s GDP growth of 3.6 percent remains substantially higher than any other developed economy.

The country’s rebound is all the more interesting for its rapidity. At the onset of the recession, Germany faced the second sharpest decrease its in real GDP since World War II, leading few economists to anticipate a swift recovery.

The credit may owe as much to Germany’s politicians as to its industrialists. Despite some gloomy predictions of German labor market inflexibility, the key to cushioning the economy’s cyclical unemployment may lie in the German labor market’s short-term work schemes. Kurzarbeit, as the

system is called, has been a valuable tool for businesses responding to the labor downturn, while preserving worker employment. As other developed countries, particularly the United States, still struggle with stubbornly high unemployment, there may be lessons to learn from Germany’s success.

The Kurzarbeit Factor At its base, Kurzarbeit entails a series of understandings between worker, firm, and government.

According to Bernd Fitzenberger, professor at the University of Freiburg, Kurzarbeit involves an agreement in which companies promise not to lay off their employees if the employees accept a reduction in compensated work hours. In return, the German government reimburses a large portion of the reduced compensation directly to the worker.

For instance, if employees work half of their original hours, the employer pays them for the hours worked,

German Chancellor Angela Merkel looks at vehicle production during a tour of the BMW factory in Leipzig

and the government agency pays a large portion of the remaining base wages, often under the condition of requiring employees to enter training or development programs.

As Fitzenberger argues, the system offers substantial benefits.

“Kurzarbeit involves some form of ‘cost sharing’ between the firm, the employee, and the Bundesagentur [Ministry of Economics and Labor]. Earnings are reduced, the firm has lower labor costs, and the Bundesagentur subsidizes Kurzarbeit. This allows for labor hoarding when a firm faces a temporary reduction in the demand for its goods and the firm expects demand to pick up again in the near future,” Fitzenberger told the HPR. Adding to the success, working hour accounts created during the previous decade allowed employees to accrue overtime pay during boom years, and then collect on those hours during the recession. These credit balances from overtime working during prosperous times have been quickly reimbursed, contributing to sustained levels of income.

Skeptics Become Supporters The Kurzarbeit’s structure springs from the composition of Germany’s economy. “The bottomline explanation of German success is its strong export performance,” asserted Peter Taylor-Gooby, professor of social policy at the University of Kent. Indeed, the German labor market benefited from two concurrent developments: the increased implementation of innovative contract schemes between the government and corporations and the quick rebound of international demand for German

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export goods. Because the export sector is highly skill-intensive, the government’s Kurzarbeit scheme has allowed companies to engage in labor hoarding by reducing the hours of their employees, thus cutting expenditures, while still retaining their skills.

Beyond the vagaries of the international markets, however, these programs have garnered substantial praise. Argues Philippe Aghion, professor of economics at Harvard, “instead of doing oldfashioned Keynesian policy, the legislature did a supply-side policy and targeted the difficult sectors: a targeted intervention of the labor market.” Kurzarbeit not only prevented massive layoffs but also grew popular with firms as a way to employ workers with adequate training, albeit in a reduced form.

When the economy improves, companies may terminate the Kurzarbeit agreement and replace with full-time employment. The delayed process of hiring and training new employees would certainly be more costly and inefficient. A part of Germany’s economic recovery seems to stem from inventories produced under the parttime work schemes of the past years. “It is probably rational to have a Kurzarbeit scheme...in particular industries which ...recover rapidly after

recession and where skill is vital and there is a real fear of losing workers.

It should be combined with benefit/ retraining schemes for other groups too,” says Professor Taylor-Gooby.

The U.S. Question Translating Kurzarbeit to the United States would seem a difficult task. While Germany’s economy revolves around a technologically advanced export economy, the U.S. economy is much more based on service and domestic consumption.

Nonetheless, there may be benefits to implementation of the program in the U.S. economy. Companies rarely feel the need to maintain lower skilled service workers during an economic downturn, because they can be rehired and retrained in a short time. As such, economists argue, the U.S. would not be a good fit for the Kurzarbeit model. Aghion contests this notion because “the externality argument of violence and crime that coincide with high unemployment is independent whether the U.S. exports as much as Germany or not, also disregarding skill intensity.” Other American objections to Kurzarbeit derive from the fear that state aid that is given to uncompetitive firms may result in an excess number of them and a higher price level in the economy.

Germany has dodged the bullet for two reasons: the Kurzarbeit scheme is only a short-term program that can be terminated easily, and the subsidized sectors have already displayed growing independence and abandonment of these programs. Without direct adverse consequences resulting from the program, fears would seem allayed.

Yet, not everyone is convinced that the U.S. would be interested in or benefit from taking on the Kurzabeit scheme. Says Fitzenberger, “I am not convinced to take one piece of labor market policy from one country and ‘export’ it to another country. Kurzarbeit is one piece of hours flexibility in Germany, like working time accounts or overtime regulations, which is much more needed in ‘normal’ times because of high employment protection.”

Fundamentally, the U.S. views the role of the welfare state differently than Germany does, suggesting that Kurzarbeit may not be compatible with the U.S. market system. Adds Fitzenberg, “I am not sure that the U.S. would want to install such a labor agency and to introduce employment protection to the same degree as in Germany.”

Kurzarbeit certainly poses a powerful model of smoothing the business cycle and has demonstrated strong results in the wake of Germany’s recovery from the Great Recession. Despite concerns, United States economists should evaluate the feasibility of introducing a similar scheme to the American labor market as well. Though there will be tradeoffs between an efficient labor market system and strong labor protections, Kurzarbeit seems to have managed to serve in both roles well, a rare but promising industrial policy success.

Martin Steinbauer ‘14 is a Contributing Writer

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RISKING CHANGE

Santos tackles issues predecessor Uribe ignored matt bewley At first glance, the Colombian presidential election of 2010 seemed a great deal like a turning point in the nation’s politics. The election featured new issues, new parties, and, most important, a field of candidates that did not include Álvaro Uribe. Without the presence of the country’s extremely popular president, debates were contentions and the election hard fought, concluding only after two rounds of voting. The differences nonetheless belie important similarities. In particular, the winning party, informally labeled the “Party of the U,” dedicated itself to electing a chief executive sympathetic to the policies of the outgoing President Uribe. This newly elected president, Juan Manuel Santos, executed Uribe’s effective and controversial security policy as Defense Minister, announcing his candidacy only after Uribe’s failed bid to change Colombia’s constitution to allow him to serve a third consecutive term.

Despite his status as the natural successor to Uribe, Santos has been more surprising and far less conventional than had been expected. Through the first eight months of his presidency, Santos seems to have been willing to break from the approach of his predecessor to combat Colombia’s most pressing problems. While elected as a warrior, Santos’ approach has been as much domestic as it has been militaristic.

On security, drug trade, and human rights President Santos appears ready to sound a new tone.

Down the Same Path?

During the campaign of 2010, both supporters and opponents labeled

Santos the candidate of the establishment and an Uribista dedicated to his predecessor’s strategy of “democratic security.”

An Uribista watchword, “democratic security” means encouraging all parts of Colombian society to help address internal violence, one of the country’s most intractable problems.

As Garry Leech, author of Beyond Bogotá: Diary of a Drug War Journalist in Colombia and professor of international politics at Cape Breton University, told the HPR, however, security has its drawbacks. Leech describes democratic security as a militant policy, involving expansion of “the presence and operations of the military…throughout the country.” Although successful at improving certain indicators of violence, the vastly expanded police force and government presence have done little to combat poverty and inequality, Leech asserts.

Before his election, however, Santos enjoyed more experience directing military strikes against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the most notorious anti-government guerrilla group, than he did implementing social policy. As Cynthia Arnson, director of the Latin American Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, told the HPR, “[Santos] was Minister of Defense at the time of [Operación Jaque and Operación Fénix], two of the most spectacular successes against the FARC.” Both operations, a hostage rescue and

an airstrike, respectively, exemplify the Uribe administration’s daring, aggressive military approach to addressing internal violence. Thus, in Colombia’s 2010 presidential election, according to Dr. Arnson, “Santos was seen as a candidate of continuity with regards to security policy.”

A Surprising Shift Santos campaigned relatively little during the election, asserting his credentials as an Uribista and attempting to capitalize on his predecessor’s enormous popularity.

Since his inauguration, however, Santos has begun to depart from the mold he fit so well as Defense Minister. “President Santos,” said Aldo Civico, professor of anthropology at Rutgers University and director of the Center for International Conflict Resolution at Columbia University, “marks a change from Uribe, and he was a surprise to many.” Civico praises Santos for adopting a different tone,

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avoiding the divisive language used by his predecessor.

Beyond rhetoric, noted Civico, Santos is also “trying to tackle some very important issues that address the underlying causes of the conflict in Colombia, one being land reform, and another the law for the rights of victims.”

Amanda Lyons, legal adviser and researcher at the International Center for Transitional Justice in Colombia lauds Santos’ efforts, asserting that the measures will reduce income inequality in one of the most economically stratified countries in the region. As Lyons explains, land reform would address Colombia’s inequality by providing land titles to previously deedless peasants, who have often been forced off their land by armed groups. Victims’ rights legislation would aid internally displaced peasants by offering governmental benefits, regardless of the group by which they were targeted. Lyons called previous Uribe administration attempts at such legislation “slaps on the wrist.” In particular, Uribe’s proposals placed undue weight on extradition of criminals to the United States for trial and comparatively less emphasis on assisting victims, Civico maintained. By contrast, Santos’ stated dedication to land reform and victims’ rights legislation, said Civico, indicates that “Santos understands the kind of structural change that is needed to move Colombia into the 21st century.”

Change in Colombia Santos’ apparent shift in strategy may also be due in part to a realization of some of the failures of the old, military-focused approach. The success of the Uribe administration’s policies in addressing internal violence and the intimately associated drug trade have been far from total, despite Uribe’s consistently high approval ratings and congressional support. Arlene Tickner, professor of political science at the University of the Andes in Bogotá, told the HPR how certain “indicators of security,” most notably the homicide and kidnapping rates, have improved substantially under Uribe, although

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she also acknowledged that “undoubtedly the FARC has been weakened.” Nonetheless, Tickner points to mixed results from Uribe’s attempts to demobilize the equally problematic paramilitaries. These groups emerged in the 1960s to fight leftist guerrilla groups like the FARC and today remain major forces in the Colombian drug trade. Tickner blames paramilitaries for the fact that Colombia is now the country with the world’s highest number of internally displaced people, and primary target of victims’ rights laws. In the past, politicians had ignored the atrocities of paramilitary organizations as they provided support against FARC. However, victims’ rights laws would ensure that there is equal protection regardless of perpetrator.

As such, Santos’ shift is apparently meant to address the full scope of Colombia’s problems of internal violence and human rights. While the Santos administration is less than a year old, many believe that Santos understands that change cannot be accomplished with rhetoric alone. Although Santos remains closely associated with controversial actions of the Colombian military during the Uribe administration, it appears he is willing to look beyond the strategy that inspired them for new ways of dealing with internal violence, the drug trade, and the social conditions that create both. President Santos may have inherited a winnable war from his predecessor. Yet it is the president’s choice, and the president’s duty, to win the peace.

Matt Bewley ‘14 is a Staff Writer

the new horsemen of secession Breaking up in the new global century joshua lipson One of the most common motifs in world politics has been fragmentation along sectarian lines. Since the Biblical breakup of Solomon’s kingdom to now in South Somalia, nationalistic, ethnic, and cultural divisions express themselves through movements for secession: the breaking off of one part from a sovereign, whole state entity.

In 1900, there were 57 nations, about 30 percent of the present-day total. Although much of the subsequent growth came through decolonization and international mandate, secession has also played a significant role.

Secession movements created Croatia, Slovenia, Namibia, Eritrea, East Timor, Montenegro, and Kosovo, among others, over the course of the last two decades.

Currently independent republics, these products of secession owe their success both to the resolve of local ethnic nationalists and the graces of countries that let them go.

In a global system where borders rarely change in delineation, parsing the role of secession is no simple feat. Although the nation-state remains the fundamental unit of international relations, the importance of regional integration on one hand and devolved local autonomy on the other has complicated the conventional view of how political power is distributed. While we may not be seeing a rush of international recognitions of new states, local autonomy and other measures have created opportunities for self-rule at unparalleled levels.

and international systems of governance has created a climate favorable to secession. Until the mid-twentieth century, geopolitical power belonged almost exclusively to states or, later, Cold War alliances, oftentimes driven by coercion. Since the evolution of the European Economic Community into the formidable European Union, such regional associations as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the African Union have taken up the cause of collective sovereignty on the continental level.

Decentralization is the Name In parallel, new expectations of governance have encouraged a wave of devolutionary processes across the developed world. In the wake of Spain’s 1978 constitutional transition, a gradual process has moved the Iberian nation from a centralized autocracy to a federal democracy. In Catalonia and the Basque Country, home to robust separatist movements, Madrid dictates little civil authority. Likewise, within the United Kingdom, a Welsh Assembly and Scottish Parliament mete out legislation in the constituent nations they nominally govern.

According to Parag Khanna, director of the Global Governance Initiative at the New America Foundation, this shift in the arrangement of power proves a catalyst for secession. Citing historical examples, he asserts that “the formal achievement of secession, and then self-determination, usually follows from policies of decentralization.” Although he cautions against the uncritical assumption that ethnic federalism must necessarily lead to secession, Khanna argues that the new paradigm of devolution has served to enable the possibility. In cases like Kurdistan, where an ethnic minority is “not too keen to remain within the federal unit,” regional autonomy appears to prefigure the arrival of full national sovereignty.

“The creation of multi-national alliances and international systems of governance has created a climate favorable to secession.”

Birth of the International System Today, across Europe, Africa, and Asia, the push for separation by groups continues to prevail. Despite only cursory changes to the arrangement of the United Nations General Assembly since the early 1990s, wide arrays of entities continue to agitate for self-determination and separation from existing states. Accordingly, the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization, an NGO based in The Hague, lists 53 members, representing a broad range of ethnic separatists from Abkhazia, in the Caucasus, to the Chittagong Hill Tracts, in the Ganges River basin.

A prominent argument in favor of secession remains that the creation of multi-national alliances

Forces that Stop Change More skeptical observers maintain that measures of local autonomy and regional integration successfully quell calls for separation. Since the onset of local autonomy in Spain’s Basque Country, the mass movement for secession led by ETA, the armed Basque separatist

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movement, has slowed to a trickle. Khanna explains that, counter-intuitively, “[concessions of autonomy] are often used as mechanisms to ensure some kind of federal union,” exemplified by the cases of Quebec and the Basque Country.

Furthermore, integrating forces might overwhelm the interests of local and ethnic separatists. Jerry Muller, professor of history at Catholic University, contends that “insofar as the European Union takes over the function of the traditional nation-state, it diminishes the ongoing attraction of separating from the nation-state.” To the credit of his argument, not a single state has seceded from an E.U. member nation since the organization’s inception.

of various revenue streams.” The critical importance of resource sharing in the mediation of secessionist conflicts rings truest in the developing world. In newly minted South Sudan, set to declare official independence in July, secession has succeeded “on the understanding that [petroleum] revenue streams to the South will continue to flow to the North,” Mueller claims. In the case of Iraqi Kurdistan, a lack of consensus over the sharing of oil revenues has hamstrung efforts toward full sovereignty.

In the developed world, the economics of secession tends to follow a regular and static pattern. Muller contends, “areas attracted to secessionism are the wealthier regions of a larger nationstate that regard the rest of the state as an economic drag.”

Accordingly, poorer regions of a state are unlikely to agitate for separation from the system upon which they depend. As such, contemporary European secessionist movements prevail in comparatively wealthy regions like Scotland (rich in offshore petroleum), Catalonia, Basque Country, Bavaria, and Northern Italy. Despite the attraction of shedding the baggage of the poorer regions, the benefits of total separation are difficult to parse. Muller insists that while these movements “will be an ongoing specter, [secession is] unlikely to become a reality.” In real terms, the benefits of belonging to the seamless market of a large nation-state outweigh the principle of moving from extended autonomy into outright independence.

While there may be general trends in secessionism towards increasing local autonomy, the future for political movements remains unclear. The very forces impelling Greenland to independence appear to be limiting the Basques to federal autonomy. For the new proliferation of secessionist movements, only a few potential states appear on the horizon, and unlikely ones at that. Parag Khanna argues in Foreign Policy, “The way to create a peaceful and borderless world is, ironically, by allowing ever more nations to define themselves and their borders.” Whether or not policymakers will take him up on that claim, however, seems increasingly unclear.

“The benefits of belonging to the seamless market of a large nation-state outweigh the principle of moving from extended autonomy into outright independence.”

Economics of Change Beyond the role of power in secession debates, the issue of economics looms large. In a financial sense, the separation of a polity into two amounts to the separation of one market into two. Indeed, Muller notes that “many issues of ethnic tension,” the raison d’être of most secessionist movements, “have to do with the flow

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Joshua Lipson ‘14 is the Staff Director

BOOKS & ARTS Quixotic liberalism simon thompson

kabuki democracy: the system vs. barack obama, by Eric Alterman. Nation Books, 2011. Paperback: $14.99, 224 pp.

Eric Alterman, like many Americans on the far left, is frustrated.

Despite Barack Obama’s bold and inspiring campaign rhetoric, the president, even with supermajorities in both houses, “wasn’t able to deliver on the bulk of his promises,” said Alterman in an interview with the HPR. In fact, Alterman’s Kabuki Democracy is so-named because, he asserts, our political democracy has become a “Kabuki exercise” that “resembles a democratic process...but mocks its genuine intentions in substance.”

Alterman’s arguments center on a depiction of the American political system as vulnerable to a handful of maladaptive influences, including special interest lobbying, right-wing media propaganda, and obstructionist Republicans. These impediments, combined with Obama having “lost his vision...[and] his voice,” have caused the president’s accomplishments to appear far more spectacular on paper than in substance and have left the American people without an inspirational leader.

While Kabuki Democracy captures the frustration of today’s progressives, Alterman falls short in casting a new light on Obama’s struggles in Washington. Alterman, whose expectations of Obama seem unrealistically optimistic, blames too many of the president’s short-comings on staples of the D.C. political system, including lobbyists and invasive media, and not enough on the structural roadblocks to real progress. It is these structural roadblocks that have made modern Washington perpetually hostile to game-changing politicians, the type of politician Alterman wants Obama to be.

Unrealistic Expectations or Unrealistic Orator?

Alterman begins his depiction of Obama’s struggles against “the system” by describing the lousy circumstances he inherited from his predecessor. He offers a series of facts that made yesterday’s headlines. Even President Bush in his memoir, Decision Points, concedes that he did not leave Obama with an economy on “firm footing.” However, Alterman explains the failings of the Bush administration at length, to the degree that the first twenty pages of Kabuki Democracy reads like a rebuke of Bush’s entire presidency.

Moreover, in the process of accrediting blame to the Bush administration for the multitude of “time bombs” inherited by Obama, Alterman fails to appropriately fault Obama for his own actions. For example, Alterman demonizes the Bush presidency on the BP oil spill, which he describes as a crisis “waiting to happen” following Bush’s “malign neglect,” whereas he only mentions twice Obama’s pre-spill decision to allow the expansion of drilling in coastal areas. Already in these early stages of

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Alterman’s account, he appears to occlude some truth.

Of course, Alterman agrees that Bush’s failings do not render Obama blameless. In fact, it was the president’s failure to transform both his “strategic vision” and “inspiring rhetoric” into action, reversing the political patterns established by Bush, that especially agitated Alterman, as he told the HPR. However, Alterman juxtaposes this disappointment against the system Obama was up against: although Alterman faults Obama for losing his vision, he also admits that “[f ]or genuine change of the kind Obama promised and so many progressives imagined, we need to elect politicians willing to challenge” various institutional flaws. Therefore, Alterman turns his attention to the structural faults of Washington that impede would-be revolutionaries.

The Blame Game Throughout his book, Alterman focuses on three regressive elements of the D.C. political system in rationalizing Obama’s failure to deliver substantive change: Washington lobbyists, rightwing media, and obstructionist Republicans. Unafraid of expressing his ideological views, which Alterman bluntly asserts early on in the book (he concludes that Republicans are “happy to see government programs fail”), the author overlooks a similar Democratic devotion throughout Bush’s presidency to stalling his progress.

In fact, Middlebury professor of political science Matthew Dickinson notes in his essay “The President and Congress” that the political polarization Obama encountered in his first year was a “mirror image of the political polarization...of the previous eight years” when “Democrats often voted along party lines.” In terms of lobbyists, whose work Alterman is quick to discredit, it is no secret that such

powerbrokers work both sides of the government. As Ellen Qualls, a former senior advisor for Speaker Nancy Pelosi, noted in response to Alterman’s assertions about the role special interests played in health care legislation, the Democratic staffs spearheaded the legislation, and they were often open to the prodding of insurance companies.

In this light, Alterman’s critique of Obama’s inability to deliver on the “bulk of his promises” appears true only because the author takes Obama’s wildly transformative campaign views to heart. However, most political strategists would claim that these calls for progress are realizable only in theory and that most issues in Washington are addressed incrementally, not through monumental changes, an idea promoted by the well-known political theorist Charles Lindblom.

In this sense, even if every piece of Obama’s legislation wasn’t finetuned, that’s permissible because, as Qualls said in an interview with the HPR, “the amount of things that got done that were of enormous scope and lasting significance in an eighteen-month period of time was amazing.”

Onward to 2012 As would any Democrat supportive of the president’s agenda, Alterman writes his book with the ultimate purpose of altering political discourse to make it more favorable to Obama’s re-election campaign.

In doing so, he acutely points out systematic flaws in Washington that are too often ignored. However, his conviction that Obama could singlehandedly change the overall D.C. political system is ultimately unrealistic.

A point Alterman does not address, for instance, is that the partisan structure of American politics is one of the greatest inhibitors to radical change.

Although Alterman discusses the

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Republican obstructionism that has beleaguered Obama’s plans, he does not give similar acknowledgment to the fact that both parties, Democrats and Republicans alike, often act as unified bodies. Before Alterman’s radical change can be realized, he must accept that many Americans hold differing views on how best to solve the country’s problems.

Still, Alterman makes certain valuable points. For instance, he asserts that the “relentless trivialization” of the news and the media’s obsession with such characters as recent senatorial candidate Christine O’Donnell must change to allow for a more serious political discussion. Of course, Alterman’s lengthy discussion about such characters as Glenn Beck and Christine O’Donnell seems to contradict his point.

In his interview with the HPR, Alterman spoke of how he envisioned that the best strategy for Obama to win re-election would be for him to “talk about his values” and inspire the people once again. Recognizing the vast accomplishments of the president already and their significance for years to come, Obama already has demonstrated his values in practice.

Now it’s just time for him to speak.

Simon Thompson ‘14 is the Interviews Editor

Special thanks to the following HPR alumni for their generous donations: James Hamilton Mike Lubrano Jonathan Miller Roderick Thaler Kent Walker Thomas Ward

the neoconservative instinct eli kozminsky

Irving Kristol may have passed away in 2009, but his spirit lives on in the latest collection of his writings, The Neoconservative Persuasion: Selected Essays, 19422009. As a founder of such magazines as The Public Interest, The National Interest, and Encounter, as well as a frequent contributor to publications like the Partisan Review, Commentary, and The Wall Street Journal, Kristol’s legendary life of letters is amply documented in the anthology’s many biographical and autobiographical sketches. However, between the book’s opening eulogy by his son, writer William Kristol, and the concluding “Memoirs” section, lies perhaps his most indelible legacy: a long and multi-sourced anthology of neoconservatism, a political philosophy of both historical and presentday import, made famous for its adoption by George W. Bush’s administration.

These essays, carefully assembled by his widow, historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, trace Kristol’s odyssey from a radical leftist to a student of Lionel Trilling and Leo Strauss, culminating in the birth of Kristol’s neoconservative ideology. Along the way, the book covers his views on everything from W.H. Auden to Judaism, but its salient subject is clearly politics. Drawing on what he calls “the wisdom of the past,” Kristol constructs an outlook conservative in its staunch opposition to liberalism but divergent from what he calls “traditional” free-market, isolationist conservatism. The essays call for the return of virtue as the end of politics, a vision which, though seemingly having gone awry in the last decade of American foreign policy, nonetheless remains immensely compelling.

A Liberal Education Kristol graduated from the City College of New York in 1940 during a golden era for many academically minded New York City leftists, comprising a group later dubbed the New York Intellectuals. Many of these Intellectuals, including a young Kristol, immersed themselves in the writings of Leon Trotsky and professed a steadfast opposition to both Stalinism and what they viewed as American imperialism. Interestingly, the author attempts to downplay his association with the radical left in The Neoconservative Persuasion as “brief” and nothing more than “an accident.” Regardless, as the Soviet Union steadily crumbled—and with it the ideal of communism—the New York Intellectuals began to

the neoconservative persuasion: Selected essays, 1942-2009, by Irving Kristol.

Basic Books, 2011. Hardcover: $29.95, 416 pp. fragment, some joining the burgeoning counterculture movement, and others gravitating towards a more tempered, conservative posture, based on support for America in the rapidly escalating Cold War. It was during this period of intellectual transition that Kristol discovered the writings of literary critic Lionel Trilling. Whereas Marxism focused on the material benefit of society, Trilling, as Kristol quotes in his essay “The Moral Critic,” believed that “[politics] is to be judged by what it does for the moral perfection rather than the physical easement of man.” This view hit Kristol with what he later described as “the force of a revelation.” He eventually came to the conclusion that “the materialistic view of life was wrong, it was simply false,” according to Ruth Wisse, a professor of literature at Harvard and interlocutor with Kristol.

Trilling reframed Kristol’s concerns to promoting the moral good and combating the specter of evil. On this subsequent view, however, Wisse contends that “Kristol and his thinking went far beyond Trilling.”

Foundations of a Theory If it was Trilling who transformed Kristol into a moral critic, it was philosopher Leo Strauss who made him the “godfather” of neoconservatism. According to Kristol,

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Strauss “trained his students to look at modernity through the eyes of the ‘ancients’ and the premoderns, accepting the premise that they were and are more insightful than we are” and believed that society needs an underlying moral code, not just pure reason alone, if it seeks stability and progress. For Kristol, this idea “turned one’s intellectual universe upside down.”

What follows in Kristol’s essay “Republican Virtue versus Servile Institutions” proves a powerful case for reviving what he calls “republican virtue,” a culturally Western, distinctively American ideal. Kristol believes this virtue, with its origins in the Roman Republic, is best personified in whom the Founding Fathers labeled “the noblest Roman of them all”: George Washington.

The Washingtonian model, according to Kristol, is that of a citizen exuding “probity, truthfulness, self-reliance, diligence, prudence, and a disinterested concern for the welfare of the republic.” The Neoconservative Persuasion asserts that it is also this phalanx of attributes, ultimately comprising republican virtue, which good government should foster among its citizenry.

Kristol’s Great Society While the nomenclature may seem vague at first, Kristol’s project quickly becomes coherent against the backdrop of policy and ideological debates addressed in

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these essays. To start, Kristol’s label of neoconservatism proves a curious appellation. A critic might be tempted to point out that there is little new about Plato or Caesar.

But compared to the free-market fundamentalism of right-wing publications like the contemporary National Review, Kristol’s moral critique of unfettered capitalism in essays like “No Cheers for the Profit Motive” seems especially novel. Indeed, in “The Two Welfare States,” Kristol even defends Roosevelt’s New Deal as conforming to the virtue of “manly” social policy. Although the argument is part of a larger attack on what he views as the “womanly” programs of continental Europe, an unacceptably “feminine-materialistic conception of the welfare state,” the essays show Kristol at his most intellectually versatile.

Culturally, Kristol mounts a blistering assault on the rising “counterculture” of the 1960s, and defends the cultivation of a “high-brow” education consisting of Strauss’ ancients and premoderns. He laments that “the gradual dissolution and abandonment of the study of the classics as the core of the school curriculum” will undermine our unifying values.

To be sure, this account is not without its shortcomings. Kristol’s critique of Johnson’s “maternal” Great Society program rests upon a comparison to the successfully “paternal” New Deal. But the former program sought to quell the birth pangs of a newly desegregated nation, while FDR sought to stimulate full employment; analogizing between the two misleads more than it illustrates. As for the Classics, while Aristotle and Aeschylus remain enlightening reads, one ought to be skeptical that American schools can regain their global competitiveness by returning to the masterworks of ancient Greece and not through the promotion of math and science skills. And though George Washington may be the archetype of American virtue, we cannot wistfully ignore the fact that he was a slave-owner. In some ways, Kristol’s views seem as politically dated as the ancients themselves.

Retrospect The title of this anthology comes from Kristol’s review of historian and friend Marvin Meyers’ book The Jacksonian Persuasion. Meyers defines a political “persuasion” as “a half-formulated moral perspective involving emotional commitment,” one whose meaning, according to Kristol, “we clearly glimpse only in retrospect.”

Yet this last decade, with the attendant rise of the “neocons” in the Bush Administration, paints a troubling picture of neoconservatism. While Bush’s domestic policy initiatives seems generally in line with Kristol’s vision (a “manly” social safety net is, for the most part, here to stay), neoconservative foreign policy

appears to have all but disowned its godfather. In fact, one could describe much of the right-wing American interventionism in the post-Cold War world as “at odds” with Kristol’s philosophy, as Peter Beinart does in his book The Icarus Syndrome. While Kristol believed in democracy, he proved ultimately skeptical of taking virtuous democracy global.

Justin Vaisse, author of Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement, reduces Kristol’s take on foreign policy to “plain realpolitik,” looking out for America’s interests globally, rather than being a military evangelist for its virtues. Moreover, Kristol believed that any assertion of “an ‘American Mission’ actively to promote democracy all over the world” proved utterly “full of presumption” and ignorant of foreign cultures entirely alien to any tradition of republican virtue. Not surprisingly, Kristol vocally opposed ousting Saddam Hussein in the wake of the dictator’s disastrous defeat in the Gulf War, which may explain Kristol’s conspicuous silence on the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, or the book’s absence of any essays pertaining to the topic. “This doesn’t mean Kristol...wasn’t a neoconservative,” Vaisse points out. “Rather,” she argues, “it shows how much Kristol’s neoconservatism...differed from its descendants today.”

Ruth Wisse nonetheless feels just the opposite: George W. Bush was a bona fide neoconservative mostly because of his foreign policy. “Bush really took evil

seriously,” she says, “that you can use the word, that you must use the word, that in fact morality has as much to do with the recognition of evil as the performance of good. And I think that’s one of the crucial things that separate liberals in generals from neoconservatives. It has to do with your attitude towards evil.”

Wisse’s argument may shed some light on the “emotional commitment” Kristol has to neoconservatism; it is an instinct, not strictly a rational belief, that there is evil in the world, and that in promoting the good we must battle darkness. Many commentators hailed the 2008 presidential election as a realignment of American politics away from the Bush era and, consequently, a distancing from the neoconservative worldview.

Yet others, Kristol included, would argue that evil still exists just as much in today’s world as it did on 9/11 or during the Cold War. The Neoconservative Persuasion’s arguments may yet win out. Though the Bush Administration, its guiding philosophy, and its intellectual godfather have weathered serious criticisms in the wake of the War on Terror, it would be difficult to assert that evil does not exist in the world today. Kristol may be gone, but neoconservatism and his seminal works still remain persuasive.

“While Kristol believed in democracy, he proved ultimately skeptical of taking virtuous democracy global.”

silver screens and blackboards

Documentaries capture the education debate alec barrett In the summer of 2010, USA Today’s Greg Toppo asked, “Is 2010 the year of the education documentary?” The article seized on a striking trend: the sudden emergence of films examining the problem of public education in the United States. Three of these, 2010’s highly acclaimed Waiting for

Eli Kozminsky ‘14 is a Contributing Writer

Waiting for “Superman” Davis Guggenheim The Cartel Bob Bowdon TEACHED Kelly Amis

“Superman,” the lesser-known 2009 film The Cartel, and the soon-tobe-released TEACHED come from different political perspectives and focus on different aspects of educational reform. They even use some of the same footage, including a rather jarring clip of New York mayor Michael Bloomberg saying,

“A parent says to me, ‘Oh, my kid goes to a great school,’ and I said, “Lady, your kid can’t read or add two and two. What do you mean it’s a good school?’” Yet the fact that three such different filmmakers have created films around the theme not only demonstrates Hollywood’s interest in educational films like

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Bob Bowdon, producer/director of The Cartel, interviews a woman about education in New Jersey

these but also a widespread, national interest in seeing them.

The education films signify a newfound interest in the country’s education problems, but they still have a tremendous role to play in taking that interest and galvanizing it into action. Films enjoy the potential to take nuanced policy debates to the public level in the way that An Inconvenient Truth, the last film by “Superman” director David Guggenheim, did for the climate change debate. USA Today speculated that the arrival of Michelle Rhee on the national stage brought other education reformers out of their shells. The existence of the documentaries show that the educational reform movement enjoys tremendous potential, but like its filmmakers, the movement’s leaders are still trying to figuring out how to convert the momentum they build into electoral and policy reform at both the local and national level.

Waiting for Change One signal of the broad attention that education reform enjoys remains the diversity of these filmmakers.

Guggenheim is a professional filmmaker, and his film benefits from a highly professional level of production. “Superman” follows much more of a plotline than the other films, centering on the stories of several young children entering lotteries for their charter schools, to

make clear that lotteries for charter schools are not the answer to our country’s education problems. The film gives history lessons, using old footage of public schools in the postwar era. The film also explains why unions came to be while suggesting that their original purpose is no longer relevant. Guggenheim also uses heavy-hitting public figures— experts like Geoffrey Canada, Bill Gates, and Michelle Rhee—to give their expert testimony throughout the film; their strongest points are about the difficulty of eliminating bad teachers and administrators, and the need for great ones.

Attacking the Cartel Bob Bowdon, the director of The Cartel, is a journalist by training, and it shows. His entire documentary has the feel of a prolonged Dateline special. Most notable about Cartel is that it focuses entirely on Bob Bowdon’s home state of New Jersey, though many of the local issues in Camden, Trenton, and Jersey City are identical to those in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., or the Bronx discussed by “Superman”: bloated

bureaucracy, unresponsive school boards, and hegemonic teachers’ unions.

Unlike Guggenheim, Bowdon remains visible, conducting interviews throughout much of the film, and his frequent appearances should remind the audience that his own political views permeate his investigation. As a result, the film serves both to uncover corruption within New Jersey’s education system and to advance Bowdon’s own agenda, which is anti-union, pro-charter, and pro-voucher. At times he gets carried away with scoring political points, especially against the leader of the New Jersey Education Association union; Randi Weingarten, who appears in “Superman,” proves more adept with her talking points. While Cartel was criticized for its lack of intellectual depth, Bowdon’s film succeeds at debunking one of the most pervasive myths in education: that more money means better results.

Lessons TEACHED? TEACHED creator Kelly Amis brings her experience as a teacher to her film. In an email to the HPR, she

Kelly Amis, producer/director of TEACHED, talks to Jerone Shell, protagonist of “The Path to Prison” from the TEACHED short film series

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are not pipe dreams but promising solutions with concrete illustrations already in action, but have not yet been effectively scaled up on a statewide or national level.

These films are a part of a movement. They are both responding and contributing to a growing national discomfort with the state of public education, and their separate investigations are reaching common conclusions. What is also clear from “Superman,” Cartel, and Amis’s comments, though, is that they are not yet in dialogue with one another and that no concrete solutions From Waiting for “Superman” have yet emerged. These Directed by Davis Guggenheim three filmmakers have set up websites to compel their said, “We let teachers talk…instead of mostly talking audiences to take action, but for the time being these are about them.” Amis is the least political of the three disparate branches of what could be—and some day likely filmmakers and seeks to show as much as tell her will be—a national movement. viewers. Before the full documentary was released, she put out a series of short films online, which will target Alec Barrett ‘11 is a Senior Writer a wider audience through digital media. The first, “Path to Prison,” features a former convict who taught himself to read at age 17 after being pushed through the Los Angeles school system without so. In five minutes of one man’s experience, we hear about inept teachers, ineffective evaluations, and the socioeconomic consequences of a broken system. Amis’s project “will not necessarily follow the traditional film trajectory,” but the film strives to be both a rallying cry to galvanize those who would fight for change and a source of hope for those who have lost faith in the system.

Galvanizing a Movement Despite their differences, these three films express a number of common goals: emulating good teachers and effectively replacing bad ones; reassessing the process of school funding and budgeting; and considering the broader consequences of race relations, crime and poverty rates, and economic competitiveness in America. “Superman” and Cartel both argue that the main problem with the education system today is a lack of focus on the children, as opposed to, say, budgets, union contracts, or other institutional regulations.

They also point to the contradiction that exists between rewarding and imitating good teachers and reforming the union institutions which protect bad teachers.

Finally, they are all convinced that the solutions to the education problem do exist, that these aspirations

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INTERVIEWS

governor jeb bush

The former Florida governor reflects on politics, education, and service Rajiv Tarigopula Harvard Political Review: What do you see as the future of the GOP, especially in light of the recent midterm elections?

Gov. Jeb Bush: Success is never final. You have to review and reform regularly. The first step of renewal is humility, and I’ve sensed that the Republicans have realized the elections were more of a rejection of something, not a support of Republican values or ideas. There are two things that matter in governance.

One is the size and scope of government. Conservatives need to adhere to their beliefs that it’s limited. The second element is to take those conservative beliefs and reform what we need to work. Belief in limited government doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be advocating creative proposals to make smaller government work better. The reason why parties in general have been tarnished is because they haven’t matched their actions with rhetoric.

HPR: What’s your take on the evolution of the federal-state relationship, and do you think the federal government has too much power?

JB: I think the judiciary has too broadly interpreted, and has thus eroded, the 10th Amendment. I think most Americans would agree that Washington isn’t working. In contrast, you can point to an array of accomplishments at the state level.

The beauty of the 10th Amendment and the federalist system is that it’s competitive. As governor of Flori-

da, I would talk with governors of neighboring states. Occasionally we would steal ideas from each other, and then try to implement them and show a better result. We’ve also felt some of this erosion in the competitive spirit; if there’s no incentive to do better because Washington imposes its will, then you’re going to have a very sterile result.

HPR: Do you think the federal government should take more control over U.S. education policy in order to remain globally competitive, or would you advocate for the rights of states to serve as “laboratories of democracy” and experiment with education policy?

JB: I don’t think the federal government is capable. One of the problems with education reform today is that it’s not typically done at the state level. The federal government’s role has been to mandate certain requirements, but the changes have to happen at the state level. By federalizing education policy, you create resistance at the classroom, school, school district and even at the state level. I don’t think that’s a good organizational model. I think you’re getting more dynamic results by having the states play the policy role and holding local school districts accountable for actual learning.

HPR: What advice would you give Harvard students who are contemplating entering the field of public service but attempting to balance the prospects of a public life with

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some potentially more lucrative job opportunities in the private sector?

JB: I think you can do both. To live a purposeful life, you can be successful, because that success helps others as well. Ultimately, you’re going to find the greatest joy is to find ways to give back, to add value to somebody else’s life or community.

One of the ways that you can do that is public service. I’ve found it to be an incredibly rewarding experience.

I’ve had a blessed life. I’ve had my own failures, too, but I’ve been successful in the business sector, and the chance to be governor was such a joy. I think a hybrid model might be the way to go. You achieve some success for your own individual pursuits. You want to make sure your family is assured of a better life, but having the chance to serve in a public way is special, and it shouldn’t be ignored. The good news is that you can do all of it. It’s not like it’s a zerosum game.

Rajiv Tarigopula ‘14 is a Staff Writer

Harvard Political Review: What can we do to encourage more women to run for elected office?

ambassador Swanee hunt

Ambassador to Austria and lecturer at Harvard, Swanee Hunt cares about women in politics simon thompson

Amb. Swanee Hunt: The great diversity year of 2008 saw the number of women in Congress only increase from 16 percent to 17 percent. This past year, we went down for the first time in twenty years. If one looks at why we were at 1617 percent, it’s because of one woman, Ellen Malcolm, who started EMILY’s List. If the Republicans had had an EMILY’s List, we would probably be well above 20 percent in Congress.

It’s not because of a commitment to increase the number of women. It takes individuals to make it happen.

HPR: Do we just need more individuals like Malcolm, or are there cultural dynamics that discourage women from running in the U.S.?

SH: There are structural challenges and there are structural solutions. First of all, this difficulty is not about the U.S. However, we are now about 89th in the world for percentage of parliamentary seats held by women. It was 42nd when I started talking about this ten years ago.

We haven’t gone down, other countries know how to deal with it structurally.

There are about 100 [countries] that have a quota or set aside a number of seats. They understand that if you can get women into the 40-percent range, more funding in the budget goes toward education, health care, and the environment and less toward weapons.

HPR: Are you content with the progress the Obama administration has made in putting women in leadership positions and seeking out women to run for office?

SH: First of all, the appointment of Hillary Clinton was brilliant. Wherever the Secretary goes, she meets with groups of women, many of whom are operating in grassroots or civil society. That sends a huge message throughout the country. Whether the White House can take a lot of credit for that is another question. In general,

it is baffling to me that in a country that is 51 percent female, a president who has 100 percent of the power over his appointments doesn’t appoint women to 50 percent of his cabinet.

Why don’t we start with a 50 percent gender balance, and then inside those males and females [slots] look for racial and geographic diversity? What is the logic there that doesn’t prevail? Now, is that a women’s issue? No. It’s about whether we want a country that is representative of its people.

HPR: You have been heavily involved in the efforts to end human trafficking.

Could programs that target demand, not supply, for which you have advocated on the state level, be federalized to cut down human trafficking?

SH: That’s what they did in Sweden, largely because 47 percent of the parliament was women and they took it on as a cause. That’s the difference it makes. They passed a law saying it was illegal to buy a body, but they made it legal to sell so that a woman could receive help without going to jail…but they were determined to stamp out the prostitution business altogether.

Such a method is absolutely possible in the United States. We need to pilot such a program in several places. I’m currently working right now in Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Colorado.

HPR: You were considered a contender for the Colorado Senate seat vacated

by Ken Salazar in 2009. Are you at all considering running for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts in 2012?

SH: I think I’ve aged out. I’m spunky, but when you look at how the Senate works, I’ll be 61 in May. In the Senate, you’ve got a seniority issue. Although, when I read that Senator Bennet was ten years younger than me, I thought “Oh my gosh! He’s 50!” I just had never realized I was too old for anything.

Simon Thompson ‘14 is the Interviews Editor

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ENDPAPER my country, right or left?

ALEXander kazam SHERBANY George Orwell once wrote that “contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present.” If it seems so, it is only because events that happened years apart are “telescoped together” in hindsight, and because “very few of your memories come to you genuinely virgin.”

My generation, having been born on the cusp of what some call our “holiday from history,” does not know the meaning of this. We were born at the end of history, in 1989.

Of course we were young, and only slowly becoming aware of the world beyond the cul-desac. But I remember the bombs over Belgrade, the Lewinsky scandal (how could any appropriately inquisitive 9-year-old forget?), and the starting lineup of the ’98 Yankees.

Then everything seems to fade away until that day in September, when my middle school classmates started getting called to go home on the P.A. system. I am from Rockland County, about an hour north of New York City, but I went to a middle school with 2,400 kids, and not everyone’s parents came home that night.

My mother let me finish the day at school. On the bus ride home I was sitting next to my best friend and next-door neighbor, a devout Muslim boy from Pakistan. At that point, we still didn’t know the details. But I remember him sighing and saying to me, “It was probably Arabs.” I shrugged it off, but he was right. My family met me at the top of the driveway. History had returned.

Like everyone else, I wanted to know why this had happened. Why “they” hated us. But I had a special interest in the Middle East.

Baghdadi Days My grandmother had come to the United States from Iraq in the 1950s. During her childhood, she says, the Jews and Arabs of Baghdad were “like brothers,” but in 1941, a pro-Nazi coup overthrew the British-backed monarchy and initiated a pogrom that killed hundreds of Jews. Some years later, her father was arrested and thrown in jail by the new authorities. He had received a letter from a family member in Tel Aviv, and he was accused of spying for the new Jewish state. To buy his freedom and his family’s safety, he had to give up his hundreds of acres of land, mostly farmland, and leave Iraq.

My grandparents and two uncles came to the United States, and my mother was born. Twentyfive years later she met my father, an immigrant from Israel with Iraqi parents, through a connection in the then large Iraqi community in New York.

After 9/11 and the War on Terror, politics became too interesting to ignore. And I had an interest, if only because the United States was the kind of country where the son of a kibbutznik and the daughter of an Iraqi exile could work hard, start a family, and, maybe, get a house out in Hackensack.

I hadn’t learned to be cynical yet. I didn’t have a bohemian bone in my body.

My interest in world affairs might have stemmed in part from a typical teenage boy’s fascination with war, but I also felt a genuine sense of patriotism. I began subscribing to The New Republic when I was 15, along with Military History. I read the Koran and wrote a term paper senior year on Islam and the Crusades.

maybe the Right was right.

When I came back to Harvard junior year, I resolved to take more classes in political philosophy.

I had never learned Arabic anyway, so my plans to become the next Kissinger now looked poorly laid.

I took a seminar on conservative political thought in the spring. There I learned that “conservative political thought” was not necessarily an oxymoron, as liberals since John Stuart Mill have branded it. A putatively open-minded moderate like me at least had to grapple with it.

This past summer, I tried to decide whether I would write my thesis on neoconservative political thought or Tocqueville. I read Irving Kristol’s Autobiography of an Idea, and began to uncover the world of the New York Intellectuals, which eventually led me back to Tocqueville. Now I found that I really was just as interested in “domestic issues” as foreign policy. And most of all I began to see how they might be connected.

What Went Wrong

Boiled Little Rabbits

When I came to Harvard, I was sure I would study international relations and figure everything out. What Went Wrong? was the title of a book I read the summer before matriculating. I took courses in political Islam, American foreign policy, and a seminar on 9/11. I did what most Harvard students do when they aren’t sure what to make of the 3,000 courses in the catalogue: I took whatever seemed “relevant” to current events.

For the most part, that was not really a bad decision. I did figure a lot out. The conclusion I came to was that “they” really did “hate us for our freedom,” as our cowboy-in-chief had so crudely put it in the aftermath of the attacks. They were enemies of liberalism. And most liberals I met didn’t seem to care.

Even so, I found myself at a well-known liberal think tank the summer after sophomore year of college. I thought of myself as a “moderate,” and I didn’t really care much for “domestic issues” anyway. I researched foreign aid in fragile states.

It was a good internship and a good summer. But I determined that perhaps I was not as “moderate” as I thought I was. If that was the Left, poring over survey results and sighing that Americans still liked the “free market” after the financial crisis, then

Orwell, the democratic socialist, tried to reconcile his patriotism with his left-wing views.

But I am not sure that he succeeded. He ended his essay by calling the intellectuals of the Left “boiled little rabbits” who could not understand the “spiritual need for patriotism and the military virtues,” for which “no substitute has been found.”

Although I cannot endorse such incivility, I cannot help but think that as long our rallying cry is race, class, and gender instead of God, family, and country, we will always see the essential public virtues through a distorted prism. From the vaunted viewpoint of the asocial socialist-with his peculiar mix of condescension and self-righteous compassion-religion, love, and patriotism will ever appear to be low superstition, selfishness, and chauvinism.

I met a lot of smart left-wingers at Harvard, but I think none as wise as Orwell, who saw some value in the traditional trifecta. If I may quote my favorite left-winger once more: “I would sooner have had that kind of upbringing” than be like “the leftwing intellectuals who are so ‘enlightened’ that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions.”

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Alexander Sherbany ‘11 is a former Managing Editor